Meantime there had been another and very different homecoming. In a
corner of an open third-class carriage of the train that brought
Victor Stowell from Castletown there was a little servant girl with a
servant's tin box, tied about with a cord, on the seat beside her.
This was Bessie Collister, dismissed from the High Bailiff's service
and being sent home to her people. She was very young, scarcely more
than fifteen, with coal-black eyes and eyebrows and bright
complexion--a bud of a girl just breaking into womanhood.
Dan Baldromma had no need to say she was not his daughter. Her
fatherhood was doubtful. Rumour attributed it to a dashing young
Irish Captain, who sixteen years before had put into Ramsey for
repairs after his ship, a coasting schooner had run on the Carrick
rock. Half the girls of "the north" had gone crazy over this
intoxicating person, and in the wild conflict as to who should win
him Liza Corteen had both won and lost, for as soon as his ship was
ready for sea he had disappeared, and never afterwards been heard of.
Liza's baby had been born in the following spring, and two years
later Dan Collister, a miller from "the south" who had not much cause
to be proud of his own pedigree, had made a great virtue of marrying
her, child and all, being, as he said, on "conjergal" subjects a man
of liberal views and strong opinions.
In the fourteen years that followed Liza had learned the liberality
of Dan's views on marriage and Bessie the strength of his hand as
well as opinions. But while the mother's nerves had been broken by
the reproaches about her "by-child," which had usually preceded her
husband's night-long nasal slumbers, the spirits of the girl had not
suffered much, except from fear of a certain strap which he had hung
in the ingle.
"The world will never grow cold on that child," people used to say in
her earliest days, and it seemed as if it was still true, even in the
depth of her present trouble.
The open railway carriage was full of farming people going up to
market, and among them were two buxom widows with their baskets of
butter and eggs on their broad knees and their faces resplendent from
much soap. Facing these was a tough and rough old sinner who
bantered them, in language more proper to the stud and the farmyard,
on their late married lives and the necessity of beginning on fresh
ones. The unvarnished gibes provoked loud laughter from the other
passengers, and Bessie's laugh was loudest of all. This led to the
widows looking round in her direction, and presently, in the
recovered consciousness of her situation, she heard whispers of
"Johnny Qualtrough" and the "Dempster's son" and then turned back to
her window and cried.
There was no one to help her with her luggage when she had to change
at Douglas, so she carried her tin box across the platform to the
Ramsey train. The north-going traffic was light at that hour, and
sitting in an empty compartment she had time to think of home and
what might happen when she got there. This was a vision of Dan
Baldromma threatening, her mother pleading, herself screaming and all
the hurly-burly she had heard so often.
But even that did not altogether frighten her now, for she had one
source of solace which she had never had before. She was wearing a
big hat with large red roses, a straw-coloured frock and openwork
stockings, with shoes that were much too thin for the on-coming
winter. And looking down at these last and remembering she had
bought them out of her wages, expressly for that walk with Alick
Gell, she thought of something that was immeasurably more important
in her mind than the incident which had led to all the trouble--Alick
had kissed her!
She was still thinking of this, and tingling with the memory of it,
and telling herself how good she had been not to say who her boy was
when the "big ones" questioned her, and how she would never tell
that, 'deed no, never, no matter what might happen to other people,
when the train drew up suddenly at the station that was her
destination and she saw her mother, a weak-eyed woman, with a
miserable face, standing alone on the shingly platform.
"Sakes alive, girl, what have thou been doing now?" said Mrs.
Collister, as soon as the train had gone on. "Hadn't I trouble
enough with thy father without this?"
But Bessie was in tears again by that time, so mother and daughter
lifted the tin box into a tailless market cart that stood waiting in
the road, climbed over the wheel to the plank seat across it, and
turned their horse's head towards home.
Dan Baldromma's mill stood face to the high road and back to the glen
and the mountains--a substantial structure with a thatched and
whitewashed dwelling-house attached, a few farm buildings and a patch
of garden, which, though warm and bright in summer under its mantle
of gillie-flower and fuchsia, looked bleak enough now with its row of
decapitated cabbage stalks and the straw roofs of its unprotected
beehives.
As mother and daughter came up in their springless cart they heard
the plash of the mill-wheel and the groan of the mill-stone, and by
that they knew that their lord and master was at work within. So
they stabled their horse for themselves, tipped up their cart and
went into the kitchen--a bare yet clean and cosy place, with earthen
floor, open ingle and a hearth fire, over which a kettle hung by a
sooty chain.
But hardly had Bessie taken off her coat and hat and sat down to the
cup of tea her mother had made her when the throb of the mill-wheel
ceased, and Dan Baldromma's heavy step came over the cobbled "street"
outside to the kitchen door.
He was a stoutly-built man, short and gross, with heavy black
eyebrows, thick and threatening lips, a lowering expression, and a
loud and growling voice. Seeing the girl at her meal he went over to
the ingle and stood with his back to the fire, and his big hands
behind him, while he fell on her with scorching sarcasm.
"Well! Well!" he said. "Back again, I see! And you such a grand
woman grown since you were sitting and eating on that seat before.
Only sixteen years for Spring, yet sooreying (sweet-hearting)
already, I hear! With no wooden-spoon man neither, like your
father--your stepfather, I mane! The son and heir of one of the big
ones of the island, they're telling me! And yet you're not thinking
mane of coming back to the house of a common man like me! Wonderful!
Wonderful!"
Bessie felt as if her bread-and-butter were choking her, but Dan,
whose impure mind was not satisfied with the effect of his sarcasm,
began to lay out at her with a bludgeon.
"You fool!" he said. "You've been mixing yourself up with bad doings
on the road, and now a dacent lad is lying at death's door through
you, and the High Bailiff is after flinging you out of his house as
unfit for his family--that's it, isn't it?"
Bessie had dropped her head on the table, but Mrs. Collister's
frightened face was gathering a look of courage.
"Aisy, man veen, aisy," said the mother. "Take care of thy tongue,
Dan."
"My tongue?" said Dan. "It's my character I have to take care of,
woman. When a girl is carrying a man's name that has no legal claim
to it, he has a right to do that, I'm thinking."
"But the girl's only a child--only a child itself, man."
"Maybe so, but I've known girls before now, not much older than she
is, to bring disgrace into a dacent house and lave others to live
under it. 'What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh,' they're
saying."
The woman flinched as if the lash of a whip had fallen on her face,
and Dan turned back to the girl.
"So you're a fine lady that belaves in the aristocracks, are you?
Well, I'm a plain man that doesn't, and nobody living in my house can
have any truck with them."
"But goodness me, Dan, the boy is not a dale older than herself,"
said Mrs. Collister. "Nineteen years at the most, and a fine boy at
that."
"Chut! Nineteen or ninety, it's all as one to me," said Dan, "and
this island will be knowing what sort of boy he is before he has done
with it."
The young cubs of the "big ones" began early. They treated the
daughters of decent men as their fathers treated everybody--using
them, abusing them, and then treading on them like dirt.
"But Manx girl are hot young huzzies," said Dan, "and the half of
them ought to be ducked in the mill pond.... What did you expect
this one would do for you, girl, after you had been colloquing and
cooshing and kissing with him in the dark roads? Marry you? Make
you the mistress of Ballamoar? Bessie Corteen, the by-child of Liza
Collister? You toot! You booby! You boght! You damned idiot!"
Just then there was the sound of wheels on the road, and Dan walked
to the door to look out. It was the Deemster's dog-cart, coming down
the glen, with father and son sitting side by side. The women heard
the Deemster's steady voice saluting the miller as he went by.
"Fine day, Mr. Collister!"
"Middlin', Dempster, middlin'," said Dan, in a voice that was like a
growl. And then, the dog-cart being gone, he faced back to the girl
and said, with a bitter snort:
"So that's your man, is it--driving with the Dempster?"
"No, no," said the girl, lifting her face from the table.
"No? Hasn't he been flung out of his college for it--for what came
of it, I mane? And isn't the Dempster taking him home in disgrace?"
"It was a mistake--it wasn't the Dempster's son," said Bessie.
"Then who was it?"
There was no reply.
"Who was it?"
"I can't tell you."
"You mean you won't. We'll see about that, though," said Dan, and
returning to the fireplace, he took a short, thick leather strap from
a nail inside the ingle.
At sight of this the girl got up and began to scream. "Father!
Father! Father!"
"Don't father me! Who was it?" said Dan.
The blood was rising in the mother's pallid face. "Collister," she
cried, "if thou touch the girl again, I'll walk straight out of thy
house."
"Walk, woman! Do as you plaze! But I must know who brought disgrace
on my name. Who was it?"
"Don't! Don't! Don't!" cried the girl.
The mother stepped to the door. "Collister," she repeated, "for
fourteen years thou's done as thou liked with me, and I've been
giving thee lave to do it, but lay another hand on my child..."
"No, no, don't go, mother. I'll tell him," cried the girl. "It was
.... it was Alick Gell."
"You mean the son of the Spaker?"
"Yes."
"That's good enough for me," said Dan, and then, with another snort,
half bitter and half triumphant, he tossed the strap on to the table,
went out of the house and into the stable.
An hour afterwards, in his billycock hat and blue suit of Manx
homespun, he was driving his market-cart up the long, straight,
shaded lane to the Speaker's ivy-covered mansion-house, with the
gravelled courtyard in front of it, in which two or three peacocks
strutted and screamed.