"You wouldn't come to see me, so I've come to see you."
Stowell never knew what answer he made when he took her outstretched
hand; but after a moment he said,
"You know my friend Gell?"
"Indeed I do .... And how's Isabella? .... And Adelaide? .... And
Verbena?"
While Fenella was talking to Gell, Stowell had time to look at her.
She was the most beautiful woman in the world! Those dark eyes,
beaming with bluish opal; those lips like an opening rose; that
spacious forehead, with its brown hair shot with gold--they had not
told him the half.
Gell made shift to answer for the sisters he had not seen for months,
and then went off.
And then Fenella, taking the chair that Stowell had set for her, and
dropping her voice to a deeper note, said,
"And now to business. You know we've established on the island a
branch of the Women's Protection League?"
"I know."
"One of its objects is to protect women from the law."
"The law?"
"Yes, sir, the law," said Fenella smiling. "Your law can be very
cruel sometimes--especially to women. But our first case is not one
of that kind. It is a case in which the law, if rightly guided, can
best do justice by showing mercy."
A young wife in Castletown had killed her husband. She had already
appeared at the High Bailiff's Court and been committed for trial to
the Court of General Gaol Delivery--the Manx Court of Assize.
"There seems to be no question of her guilt," said Fenella, "so we
can neither expect nor desire that she should escape punishment
altogether. The poor thing--she's scarcely more than a girl--will
say nothing in self-defence, but when we remember how the soul of a
woman shrinks from a crime of that kind we feel that she must have
suffered some great injustice, some secret wrong, which, if it could
be brought out in Court...."
"I see," said Stowell.
Fenella paused a moment and then said, in a voice that was becoming
tremulous,
"Therefore we have thought that for this case we need an advocate who
loves women as women and can see into the heart of a woman when she's
down and done, because God has made him so. And that's why...."
"Yes?"
"That's why I've brought this first case to you."
Stowell could scarcely speak to answer her. But after a moment he
stammered that he would do his utmost; and then Fenella brought out
of her hand-bag some printed papers that were a report of the
preliminary inquiry.
"I'll read them to-night," he said, putting them into his breast
pocket.
"Of course you'll require to see the prisoner?"
"Yes."
"She hasn't opened her lips yet, but you must get her to speak."
"I'll try."
"That's all for the present," said Fenella, rising; and at the next
moment she was smiling again, and her eyes were beginning to glow.
"So this is where you live?"
"No, this is my office; I live at the other side of the house."
"Really? I wonder...."
"You would like to see my living rooms?"
"I'd love to. I've always wanted to see how young bachelors live
alone."
"Come this way then."
Stowell had not realised what he was doing for himself until he was
on the landing, with the key in the lock, and Fenella behind him, but
then came a stabbing memory of another woman in the same position.
"Come in," he cried (his voice was quivering now), and drawing up the
Venetian blind he let in a flood of sunshine and the soft song of the
sea.
"What a comfy little room!" said Fenella.
As she looked around her eyes seemed to light up everything.
"It's easy to see that you've been racing all over the earth, sir.
That Neapolitan girl on the mantelpiece came from Rome, didn't she?"
"She did."
"And that lamp from Venice, and that silver bowl from Cairo, and that
cedar-wood photograph frame from Sorrento?"
"Quite right."
"Books! Books! Books! All law books, I see. Not a human thing
among them, I'll be bound. And yet they're all terribly, fearfully,
tragically human, I suppose?"
"That's so."
"Gas fire? So you have a gas fire for the cold wet nights?"
"Yes, a bachelor has to have...." But another stabbing memory came,
and he could get no further.
"And so this is where you sit alone until all hours of the
night--reading, reading, reading?"
He tried to speak but could not. She glanced at the bedroom door
which stood open, and said, with eyes that seemed to laugh,
"Is that your....?"
He nodded, breathing deeply, and trying to turn his eyes away.
"May I perhaps....?"
"If you would like to."
"What fun!"
She stood in the doorway, looking into the room for a moment, with
the sunlight on her bronze-brown hair, and then, turning back to him
with the warmer sunshine of her smile, she said,
"Well, you young bachelors know how to make yourselves comfortable, I
must say. But I seem to scent a woman about this place."
He found himself stammering: "There's my housekeeper, Mrs. Quayle.
She comes every morning...."
"Ah, that accounts for it."
She walked downstairs by his side, and said, as he opened the
carriage door for her,
"You'll do your best for that poor girl?"
"My very best."
"And by the way, the Deemster has invited the Governor and me to
Ballamoar. We go on Monday and stay a week. Of course you'll be
there?"
"I'm afraid...."
"Oh, but you must."
"I'll .... I'll try."
"Au revoir!"
He stood, after the carriage had gone until it had crossed to the
other side of the square, where, from the shade of the inside (it had
been closed in the meantime) Fenella reached her smiling face forward
and bowed to him again. Then he went back to his room--now empty,
silent and dead.
Oh, God, why had that senseless thing been allowed to happen! Lord,
what a little step in front of him on life's highway a man was
permitted to see!
Stowell did not return to his office that afternoon. His young clerk
locked up, left the keys, went downstairs and shut the door after
him, but still he sat in the gathering darkness like a man nursing an
incurable wound. He would never forgive himself for allowing Fenella
to come into his rooms--never!
"You fool!" he thought, leaping up at last. "What's done is done,
and all you've got to do now is to stand up to it."
Then he lit the gas and taking the report out of his pocket he began
to read it. What a shock! As, little by little, through the
thick-set hedge of question and answer, the story of the wretched
young wife came out to him, he saw, to his horror, that it was the
story of Bessie Collister as he had imagined it might be if he
deserted her.
What devil out of hell had brought this case to him as a punishment?
By the hand of Fenella, too! No matter! If the unseen powers were
concerning themselves with his miserable misdoings perhaps it was
only to strengthen him in his resolution--to compel him to go on.
Suffer? Of course he would suffer! It was only right that he should
suffer. And as for the haunting presence of Fenella's face in that
room, there was a way to banish that.
So, sitting at his desk, he wrote,
"DEAR BESSIE,--Please go into Castletown to-morrow and have your
photograph taken, and send it on to me immediately."
After that he felt more at ease and sat down before the fire to study
his case.