Dan Baldromma's meeting in the market-place had not been the success
he had expected. Standing on the steps of the town lamp, between the
Saddle Inn and the Ship Store, he had discoursed on the rights of the
labourer to the land he cultivated.
The Earth was the Lord's, and the fulness thereof. Therefore it
could not belong to the big ones who were adding field to
field--least of all to their wastrels of sons who were doing nothing
but hang about the roads and the glens to ruin the daughters of
decent men. The moral of this was that the land belonged to the
people and the time was coming when they would pay no rent for it.
Dan's audience of Manx farmers had listened to this new gospel with
Manx stolidity, but a group of young English visitors, clerks from
the cotton factories, looking down from the balcony of the Saddle
Inn, had received it with open derision.
Dan had ignored their opposition as long as possible, merely saying,
when his audience laughed at their sallies,
"We must make allowance for some ones, comrades--children still,
they've not been rocked enough."
But when at length they had called him Bradlaugh Junior and Ingersoll
the Second and told him to keep his tongue off better men, Dan had
looked up at the balcony and cried,
"If you're calling me by them honoured names I'm taking my hat off to
you" (suiting the action to the word), "but if you're saying you are
better men we'll be going into a back coort somewheres and taking off
our jackets and westcots."
To preserve the peace the police had had to put an end to the
meeting, whereupon Dan, spitting contemptuously and snorting about
"The Cottonies" and "the Cotton balls," had harnessed his horse at
the Plough Inn and driven home in a dull rage.
It had been ten o'clock when he got back to Baldromma, and after
unharnessing his horse in his undrained stable, and wiping his best
boots with a wisp of straw, he had stepped round to the kitchen.
His wife was there, beating time on the hearthstone to a long-drawn
Methodist hymn while she stirred the porridge in a pot that hung over
a slow peat fire.
"_Tell me the old, old story, ....
Of Jesus and His love._"
"Your daughter isn't back then?" said Dan with a growl.
"Be raisonable, man," said Mrs. Collister. "Eleven o'clock thou
said, and it's only a piece after ten yet."
She poured out the porridge and hobbled to the dairy for a basin of
milk, and then Dan, after a sour silence, sat down to his supper.
"They were telling me in Ramsey," he said, making noises with his
spoon, "that the Spaker's son went up to Douglas to-day."
"Like enough!" said Mrs. Collister.
"I'll go bail your girl went up to meet him."
"Sakes alive, man veen, what for should thou be saying that?"
"She's fit enough for it anyway."
"But what has the girl done? Twenty-four years for Spring and not a
man at her yet."
"Chut! Once they cut the cables that sort is the worst that's going.
She'd be an angel itself though to stand up against a waistrel like
yander."
"Bessie will be home for eleven," said Mrs. Collister.
"She'd better, or she'll find Dan Baldromma a man of his word, ma'am."
After that there was another sour silence in which both watched the
open-faced clock whose pendulum swung by the wall. Tick, tick tick,
said the clock. To the man it was going slowly, to the woman it
seemed to fly. But hardly had the fingers pointed to eleven, or the
chain begun to shake for the first stroke of the hour, when Dan was
at the door, bolting and locking it.
"Will thou not give the girl a few minutes' grace, even?"
"Not half a minute."
"But the ten train hasn't whistled at the bridge yet."
"I've nothing to do with trains, Misthress Collister. Eleven
o'clock, I said, and now it's eleven and better."
"But surely thou'll never shut thy door on a poor girl in the middle
of the night?"
"There's others that's open to her--she said so herself, remember.
She's not for coming home to-night, so take your candle and get to
bed, woman."
"But the train must be late--I'll wait up myself for her."
"You might burn your candle to the snuff--she's not for coming, I
tell you."
"But she promised me--faithfully promised me...."
"Get to bed, ma'am. I wonder you're not thinking shame, making
excuses for the bad doings of your by-child, and you a Methodist."
The woman was on the verge of tears.
"Shame enough it is, Dan Collister, when a mother has to shut her
heart to her own child if she's not to show disrespect to her
husband."
In the intimacy of the bedroom Dan threw off all disguise. Winding
his silver-lever watch and hanging it with its Albert on a hook in
the bed-post, and then sitting on the side of the bed to undress, he
almost crowed over his prospects. That son of the Speaker would have
to pay for his whistle this time! Baldromma would be his by
heirship, and a father had a right to damages for the loss of the
services of his daughter.
"There'll be no more rent going paying by me, I'm thinking," said Dan.
So that was his scheme! Mrs. Collister stood long in her cotton
nightdress, fumbling with the strings of her night-cap, and wondering
if she could ever lie down with the man again.
"Are you never for putting out that candle and coming to bed, woman?"
Half-an-hour passed and the mother lay still and listened. Dan was
asleep by this time and breathing audibly, but there was no sound
outside save the slipping of the water from the fixed wheel and the
stamping of the horse in the stable. At last came the whistling of
the train, and a few minutes later, Bessie's step on the "street" and
then the rattling of the latch of the kitchen door.
Mrs. Collister tried to slip out of bed without awakening Dan, but
her sciatica had made her limbs stiff and she knocked over the
candlestick that stood on a chair beside her. This awakened her
husband, and hearing the noise downstairs, he rolled out of bed,
saying, in a threatening voice,
"Lie thou there--I'll settle her."
He went out to the stairhead, slamming the bedroom door behind him,
threw up the sash of a window on the landing, and shouted into the
darkness:
"Who's there?"
"Me, of course," cried Bessie.
A fierce altercation followed, in which Dan's voice was harsh and
coarse, and Bessie's shrill with anger.
"Then find your bed where you've found your company," shouted Dan.
And shutting down the window with a crash he returned to the bedroom.
The mother heard Bessie going off, and the fading sound of the girl's
footsteps tore her terribly. But after a few minutes more Dan was
making noise in his nostrils again and she got up and crept
downstairs to the kitchen (where the dull red of the dying turf left
just enough light to see by), slid the bolts back noiselessly, opened
the door and called in a whisper:
"Bessie!"
No answer came back to her, so she stepped out to the end of the
cobbled way, barefooted and in her nightdress and nightcap, and
called again:
"Bessie! Bessie!"
Still there was no reply; so she returned to the kitchen, leaving the
door on the latch, and sat for a long hour in a rocking chair by the
hearth (souvenir of the days when Bessie was a child, and she had
rocked her to sleep in it), fighting, in the misery of her heart,
with the black thought which Dan had put there.
At length she remembered Susie and persuaded herself that Bessie must
have gone to the Ginger Hall to sleep.
"Yes, Bessie must have gone to Susie."
Being comforted by this thought, and feeling cold, for the fire had
gone out, she crept upstairs. It was hard to go by Bessie's room on
the landing. Every night for years she had stopped there on her way
to bed. And in the winter, when the wind in the trees in the glen
made a roar like the sea, she had called through the closed door:
"Art thou warm enough, Bessie, or will I bring thee my flannel
petticoat?" And now the door was open and the room was empty!
Dan was still asleep when she got back to the bedroom and her
approach did not awaken him, so she fumbled her way to the bed
(knowing where she was when her feet touched the warm sheepskin that
lay by the side of it) and then opened the clothes and crept in.
The cold air she brought with her awakened Dan, and he turned on the
pillow and said,
"You've not been letting in that girl of yours, have you?"
"No!"
Dan made a grunt of satisfaction, and then said, with his face to the
wall,
"Remember, you'll have to be up early to milk for yourself in the
morning."
"Yes."
Then came a yawn, and then a snore, and then silence fell on the
little house.