"What a mistake! What a hideous blunder!"
Stowell, who had slept little, was awakening as from a bad dream. A
dull lead-coloured light was filtering through the white window-blind.
He could not help seeing it--Bessie was not as pretty as he had
thought. There was something common about her beauty when she was
asleep which had been effaced by her eyes while she was awake.
Ashamed to look any longer he stepped into the sitting-room. A close
odour hung in the air. The gas fire was still burning, and Bessie's
blouse was lying, where she had flung it, on the floor. With a sense
of moral and physical suffocation, he went downstairs and out into
the streets.
The morning was fine and the dawn was breaking, but the town was
still asleep. So great was the upheaval within himself that in some
vague way he expected everything to look changed. But no, everything
was the same--the shops, the signs, the lamps, which had not yet been
put out. There was no sound except that of his own footsteps on the
pavement, and to deaden this he walked in the middle of the streets.
He wanted to be alone, to leave the town behind him. Turning
northward he crossed the harbour bridge and made for the red pier
which stood out into the bay with a light-house at the end of it.
The tide hummed far off on the shore. It was the bottom of the ebb.
Trading schooners were lying half on their sides in the mud.
Seagulls were calling over it. Sand, slime, sea-wrack and the broken
refuse of the town lay uncovered at the harbour's mouth, and the last
draught of the ebbing water was playing about them with a guttural
sound.
When he came to the light-house he saw that some fragments of stone
and glass were lying about, but his mind was too confused to ask
itself what had happened. He sat down on the light-house steps,
looked down into the harbour-basin and tried to think.
Good Lord, what a fool he had been! To ask the girl into his rooms,
being who and what she was, alone, in the middle of the night, just
after he had formed the resolution to go home and put himself out of
the reach of temptation .... what a fool!
He thought of the stories people had told of him and how he had
justified the very ugliest and worst of them .... what a fool!
He remembered what he had said to Janet, that no girl on the island
or in the world had ever come to any harm through him, or ever
should. That was only a little while ago and now .... what a fool!
He recalled the white heat of his indignation against Dan Baldromma
for what he had done to his step-daughter. That was only last night,
and now he himself .... what a fool! What a fool!
Then the sense of his folly gave way to a sense of shame. Down to
yesterday he had lived a decent life. Reckless, heedless, careless,
stupid perhaps, but decent anyway. And now .... what shame!
The light was then clearing, and raising his eyes he saw on the south
beach a one-story fisherman's cottage from which the smoke was
rising. It was Mrs. Quayle's cottage. She was making her early
breakfast, and presently she would go to his room to make his. He
shuddered at a vision of what she would find there--the close air,
the gas fire, the girl's blouse on the floor, the girl herself ....
how degrading it all was!
He saw Dan Baldromma ferreting out the facts (as of course he would,
having to find excuses for his own barbarity), and then blazoning
them abroad to his own disgrace and the discredit of his class. Or
worse--a hundredfold worse--holding them as a threat over his father.
What a disgusting bog he had strayed into!
He saw the truth leaking out one way or other and putting an end to
his career at the bar. It was not the same here as in the greater
communities, where a man might commit a fault and then submerge it in
the fathomless tide of life. In this little island, where everybody
knew everybody, it was the man himself who was submerged.
If the story of last night became known to anyone it would become
known to everyone, from the Governor himself to the meanest beggar on
the roads. No position of honour or authority would ever be possible
to him after that. The black fact would be a clanking chain which he
would have to drag after him as long as he lived.
When he thought of this--that the event of one night might alter the
whole course of his life, and bring scandal upon the Deemster, and
that it was due to a miserable accident in the first instance--the
accident of meeting Bessie on the streets after midnight--he was
filled with a fierce and consuming rage, and for one bad moment he
had an almost uncontrollable desire to return to his rooms and drive
her out of them.
That horrified him. He hated himself for it, and after a while his
self-pity gave place to pity for the girl.
"Good heavens, what are my risks compared to hers?" he asked himself.
The poor girl had so many excuses. Back in the past, before she was
born even, she had been condemned and branded, and the damned
hypocritical world had been deepening the injury every day since. If
he had found her in the streets it was only because her brutal
step-father had turned her from his door. And if she had come into
his rooms it was because she had no other shelter.
She had been a good girl too. No other man had been allowed to lead
her astray. He could hear her voice still, repeating his own words
after him: "You _will_ stand up for me, won't you?" and he had
promised that he would. He could not cast her off now without being
a scoundrel. Could the son of Deemster Stowell be a scoundrel?
"No, by God!"
A few minutes later he saw himself going back to Bessie and saying,
"Look here, my dear girl. It was neither your fault nor mine, but
take this, and this, and remember if you ever find it is not enough,
there'll be more where that comes from."
But no, he could not do that either. If he made the girl take money
he would put her in the position of a harlot; and once a woman
accepted that position there was no bottom to the unguessed depths to
which she might descend.
Bessie's future stood up before him like a spectre. Other men, each
more brutal than the last, quarrels, violence, all the miseries of
such a life--until some day, perhaps, some hideous fact with which he
had had nothing to do, would look at him with accusing eyes and say,
"You are responsible for this, because you were the first."
Down to that moment he had been thinking of the event of last night
as a blunder, but now he saw it as a crime. To prevent the possible
consequences of that crime he must keep the girl with him, take care
of her, protect her as the saying was.
But no, that was impossible also. Justification for such a relation
there might be--no doubt was--where law or custom or other impediment
were keeping apart a man and woman who belonged together. But to put
a girl into the position of a mistress, because she was unworthy to
be a wife, and to hide her away behind a curtain of duplicity and
lies, was to destroy her body and soul.
Again Bessie's future stood up before him as a spectre--that
high-spirited girl who, but for him, might have married a decent man
of her own class, and held her head proud, declining, after a few
vain months of fine clothes and idleness, to the condition of a
slattern, and going down to the dirt and degeneration of drink.
And then he saw that what had happened last night was not merely a
crime--it was a sin.
But what was he to do? What? What?
Just at that moment the sun had come up out of the sea in crimsoning
clouds, and the white mist that is the shroud of night had risen
above the houses of the town, the steeples of the churches, the hills
and the mountain tops, and was vanishing away in that new birth of
morning light that is the world's daily resurrection.
"I know! I know!" he thought, and he leapt to his feet.
He had remembered something that Janet had said about the men of his
family--that it had always been a kind of religion with them to do
the right. Four hundred years of the Ballamoars and not a stain on
the name of any of them! That was something to be born to, wasn't
it? It was worth all the titles and honours the world had in it.
And then, in that moment of strange and solemn splendour, when the
things of the other world appear to be as real as the things of this
one, it seemed as if the Ballamoars were calling to him! Four
hundred years of the dead Ballamoars were calling to the last of
their sons--"_Do the right!_"
"I must marry that girl," he told himself.
But at the next moment there came, with the shock of a blow, the
memory of his mother.
Marriage had always been associated in his mind with such different
conditions. Such a different woman; somebody who would be your
equal, perhaps your superior; somebody who would sustain and inspire
you; somebody who would help you feel the throbbing pulse of life,
and listen to all the suffering hearts that beat; somebody who, if
she had to go before you, would leave behind her, for as long as your
life should last, the fragrance of flowers and the halo of a holy
saint.
That was marriage as he had always thought of it. And now this
girl--illiterate, inadequate, with that mother, that father .... in
the presence of the Deemster .... the home of Isobel Stanley .... Oh,
God!
Then a mocking voice seemed to say,
"Good Lord, what a joke! If every man who ever made a tragic blunder
(there have been hundreds of thousands of you) had acted on your
exaggerated sense of responsibility, what a mess the old world would
be in by this time! Why, there is scarcely a man alive who would not
laugh at you and call you a fool."
"Let them," he thought, for louder at that moment than any other
voice was the voice that cried,
"_Do the right!_"
The marriage need not take place immediately. Bessie could be
educated. She was bright; there was no saying how quickly she might
develop. That would soften the blow to his father, and anyhow the
Deemster would see that he was trying to be true to his blood, his
race.
"Yes, yes, I must do the right; whatever it may cost me."
But then came another chilling thought. Love! There could be no
love in such a marriage. This brought, with the pain of a bleeding
wound, the memory of Fenella.
In spite of all he had said to himself through so many years he had
never really been reconciled to the loss of her. Down in some dark
and secret chamber of his consciousness there had always been a
phantom hope that notwithstanding her devotion to her work for women,
and the dedication to celibacy (as stern as the consecration of the
veil) which she believed to be demanded by it, Fenella would return
to the island, and his great love would be rewarded.
That had been the real cause of his idleness. He had been waiting,
waiting, waiting for Fenella to come back and make it worth while
.... and now .... by his own act .... the consequences of it .... Oh,
God! Oh, God!
For the first time, save once since he was a child, he felt tears in
his eyes, but he brushed them away impatiently.
"It's too late to think of that now," he thought.
A duty claimed him. He must put such dreams away. Besides where was
the merit of doing the right if you had not to sacrifice something?
Love might be the light of life, but men and women all the world over
had for one reason or other to marry without it. Millions of hearts
in all ages were like old battlefields, with dead things, which
nobody knew of, lying about in the dark places. And yet the world
went on.
He might have struggles, heart-aches, heart-hunger, and more than he
could do to keep the pot boiling, with the fire out and the hearth
cold, but nobody need know anything about that. This girl need never
know. Fenella need never know. Nobody need know. It was a matter
for himself only.
"Yes, yes, I must do the right," he kept on saying, "whatever it may
cost me."
Having arrived at this decision he felt an immense relief and got up
to go back.
The windows of the town were reflecting the morning sun and the smoke
was rising from the chimneys. He saw an elderly woman, with a little
shawl pinned over her head and under her chin, trudging along past
the storm-cone station on the other side of the harbour. It was Mrs.
Quayle, on her way to his rooms. But he shuddered no longer at the
thought of her. She was a good creature and when she heard what he
meant to do she would help him with the care of Bessie.
As he walked towards the town he told himself he had another reason
now for setting to work in earnest--he had to justify what he was
going to do in the eyes of the island and of the Deemster. Therefore
the event of last night might be a good thing after all, little as he
had thought so.
At the mouth of the bridge he met the harbour-master, whose face wore
a look of dismay.
"This is a ter'ble shocking thing that has happened in the night, Mr.
Stowell."