On the morning of the burial, Stowell received a letter from Bessie
Collister:
"Dere Victor,
"I am sorry to here from Alick about the death of the Deemster
you must feel it verry much the loss of such a good kinde father
everrybody is talking about him and saying he was the best
gentleman that everr was thank you for the nice cloths Mrs.
Quayle bought me. Alick is very kinde--
"Bessie."
The poor, illiterate, inadequate, ill-spent message made Stowell's
heart grow cold, and with a certain shame he read it by stealth and
then smuggled it away.
The news of the Deemster's death had fallen on the Manx people like a
thunder-bolt. The one great man of Man had gone. It was almost as
if the island had lost its soul.
No work was done on the day of the funeral. At ten o'clock in the
morning the whole population seemed to be crossing the Curragh lanes
to Ballamoar. By eleven the broad lawn was covered with a vast
company of all classes, from the officials to the crofters. A long
line of carriages, cars and stiff carts, lined the roads that
surrounded the house.
The day had broken fair, with a kind of mild brightness, but out on
that sandy headland the wind had risen and white wreaths of mist were
floating over the land. It was late September and the leaves were
falling rapidly.
Nobody entered the house. According to Manx custom all stood
outside. At half-past eleven the front door was opened and the body
was brought out, under a pall, and laid on four chairs in front of
it. A moment later Victor Stowell came behind, bare-headed and very
pale. A wide space was left for him by the bier. A creeper that
covered the house was blood-red at his back.
Somebody started a hymn--"Abide with me"--and it was taken up by the
vast company in front. The rooks swirled and screamed over the heads
of the singers. The bald head of old Snaefell looked down through
the trees.
Then the procession was formed. It took the grassy lane at the back
by which the Deemster had always gone to church. Everybody walked,
and six sets of bearers claimed the right "to carry the old man home."
They sang two hymns on the way: "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Rock of
Ages." Between the verses the wind whistled through the gorse hedges
on either side. Sometimes it raised the skirt of the pall and showed
the bare oak beneath.
When they reached the cross roads in front of the church the bell
began to toll. At that moment a white mist was driving across the
church tower and almost obscuring it.
The Bishop of the island was at the gate, waiting for the procession,
but Parson Cowley, pale and trembling, was also there, and he would
have fought to the death for his right to bury the Deemster.
"I am the Resurrection and the Life," he began in his quavering
voice, as the procession came up, and at the next moment the mists
vanished. The little churchyard with its weather-beaten stones,
seemed to look up at the wonderful sky and out on the sightless sea.
The bearers had to bend their knees as they passed through the low
door.
Every seat in the body of the church was occupied, and great numbers
had to remain outside. But Victor Stowell sat alone in the pew of
the Ballamoars with the marble tablet on the wall behind him--four
hundred years of his family and he the last of them. During the
reading of the Epistle the lashing and wailing of the wind outside
almost drowned the Bishop's voice.
The service ended with the singing of another hymn, "O God our help
in ages past." Everybody knew the words, and they were taken up by
the people outside:
"_Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away._"
Thus far Victor Stowell had gone through everything in a kind of
stupor. He was conscious that the island was there to do honour to
her greatest son, but that was nothing to him now. When he came to
himself he was standing by the open vault of the Stowells. A line of
stones lay over the closed part of it, some of them old and worn and
with the lettering almost obliterated. But a cross of white marble,
which had been dislodged from its place, lay at his feet, and it bore
the words:
"_To the dear memory of Isabel, the beloved wife of Douglas
Stowell, Deemster of this Isle._"
Victor's throat was throbbing. He was losing (what no man can lose
twice) his father and greatest friend, whose slightest word and wish
should be as sacred to him as his soul.
He heard the words "dust to dust" and they were like the
reverberation of eternity. Then came a dead void, after Parson
Cowley's voice had ceased, and it was just as if the pulse of the
world had stopped.
And then, at that last moment as he stepped forward and looked down,
and everybody fell back for him, and only the sea's boom was audible
as it beat on the cliffs below, somebody (he did not turn to look,
for he knew who it was) coming up to his side, and putting her arm
through his, said in a tremulous voice,
"He is better there. In their death they are not divided."
It was Fenella.
At the next moment, something he could not resist, something
unconquerable and overwhelming, made him put his arms about her and
kiss her.