Bessie Collister had passed through a very different winter.
When she read in the insular newspaper the long report of the trial
of the Peel fisherman she was terrified. Men did not forgive their
wives, then, in such cases? On the contrary the more they loved them
the less they forgave them.
Gell came bounding into the sitting-room while she had the newspaper
in her hand and before she had time to hide it away he saw what she
had been reading.
"Terrible, isn't it?" he said. "Poor devil, I was sorry for him.
When a woman deceives a man like that the law ought to allow him to
put her away. He did wrong, of course, but he had no legal
remedy--not an atom. Old Vic made out a magnificent case for the
woman, but she deserved all she got, I'm afraid."
Bessie gave a frightened cry, and then Gell said, as if to conciliate
her.
"I'll tell you what, though. If the woman was guilty there was
somebody else who was ten times guiltier, and that was the other man.
The scoundrel! The treacherous, deceitful scoundrel, skulking away
in the dark! I should like to choke the life out of him. That's
what I said to Stowell going up in the train. 'If I had been in the
husband's place do you know what I should have done?' I said. 'I
should have killed the other man.'"
Bessie's terror increased ten-fold. Dread of what Gell might do sat
on her like a nightmare. To marry him seemed to be impossible, yet
not to marry him, now that she loved him so much, seemed to be
impossible also.
A secret hope came to her. It was early days yet. Perhaps something
would happen to her bye-and-bye, which, being over and done with,
would leave her free to marry Alick with a clean heart and conscience.
To help it to come to pass, she stayed indoors, took no exercise, and
ate as little as possible. Her health declined, and her face in the
glass began to look peaky. She took a fierce joy in these signs of
increasing weakness. The Miss Browns kept a few chickens in their
back garden, and one morning, after the snow had begun to fall, they
found Bessie in bare feet going out to feed them.
"Bessie, what are you doing?" they cried.
"It's nothing," she said. "I'm used of it, you know. I was eight
years old before I wore shoe or stocking."
Meantime she was putting Gell off and off. "Time enough yet, boy,"
she would say as often as he asked her.
"She's thinking of me again," thought Gell, and he began on a long
series of fictions to account for his new-found prosperity. He was
getting along wonderfully in his profession, and was better off now
than he had been before he lost his allowance. But still it was
"Bye-and-bye! Time enough yet, boy!"
One day Gell came with an almost irresistible story. He had bespoken
a house in Athol Street. It was just what they wanted. Close to the
Law Library and nearly opposite the new Court House. Two rooms on
the ground floor for his offices, two on the first floor for their
living apartments, and two on the top for the kitchen and for the
maid.
It is the temptation that no woman can resist--the desire to have a
home that shall be all her own--and for a few weeks Bessie fell to
it. Evening after evening, she and Alick sat side by side in the
sitting-room making catalogues of all they would require to set up a
household. Gell took charge of the tables and chairs and
side-boards. Bessie was the authority on the blankets and linen. It
was such a delight to construct a home from memory! And then what
laughs and thrills and shamefaced looks when, in spite of all their
thinking, they remembered some intimate and essential thing which
they had hitherto forgotten.
"Sakes alive, boy, you've forgotten the bedstead."
"Lord, so I have. We shall want a bedstead, shan't we?"
But even this fierce gambling with her fate broke down at last with
Bessie. The certainty had fallen on her. The natural strength of
her constitution had withstood all the attacks she had made upon it.
Whether she married Gell, or did not marry him, there was nothing
before her except suffering and disgrace. How could she keep his
love against the shame that was striding down on her?
Christmas had come. It was Christmas Eve. The Manx people call it
Oie'l Verry (the Eve of Mary), and during the last hour before
midnight they take possession of their parish churches, over the
heads of their clergy, for the singing of their ancient Manx carvals
(carols). The old Miss Browns were to keep Oie'l Verry at their
church in Castletown. They had always done so, and this time Bessie
was to go with them.
It was a clear cold winter's night with crisp snow underfoot, and
overhead a world of piercing stars.
As the two old maids in their long black boas, and Bessie in a
fur-lined coat which Gell had sent as a Christmas present, crossed
the foot-bridge over the harbour and walked under the blind walls of
the dark castle, the great clock in the square tower was striking
eleven. But it was bright enough in the market place, with the light
from the church windows on the white ground, and people hurrying to
church at a quick trot and stamping the snow off their boots at the
door.
It was brighter still inside, for the altar and pulpit had been
decorated with ivy and holly, and, though the church was lit by gas,
most of the worshippers, according to ancient custom, had brought
candles also.
The church was very full, but the old Miss Browns, with Bessie behind
them, walked up the aisle to the pew under the reading-desk which
they had always rented. The congregation about them was a strangely
mixed one, and the atmosphere was half solemn and half hilarious.
The gallery was occupied by farm lads and fisher-lads chiefly, and
they were craning their necks to catch glimpses of the girls in the
pews below, while the girls themselves (as often as they could do so
without being observed by their elders) were glancing up with
gleaming eyes. In the body of the church there were middle-aged
folks with soberer faces, and in the front seats sat old people, with
slower and duller eyes and cheeks scored deep with wrinkles--the
mysterious hieroglyphics of life's troubled story, sickness and
death, husbands lost at half-tide and children gone before them.
An opening hymn had just been sung, the last notes of the organ were
dying down, the clergyman, in his surplice, was sitting by the side
of the altar, and the first of the carol singers had risen in his
pew, candle in hand, to sing his carval.
He was a rugged old man from the mountains of Rushen, half landsman
and half seaman, and his carol (which he sang in the Manx, while the
tallow guttered down on his discoloured fingers) was a catalogue of
all the bad women mentioned in the Bible, from Eve, the mother of
mankind, who brought evil into the world, to "that graceless wench,
Salome."
After that came similar carols, sung by similar carol-singers and
received by the boys in the gallery with gusts of laughter which the
Clerk tried in vain to suppress. But at last there came a carval
sung in chorus by twelve young girls with sweet young voices and
faces that were chaste and pure and full of joy--all carrying their
candles as they walked slowly up the aisle from the western end of
the church to the altar steps.
Their carol was an account of the Nativity, scarcely less crude than
the carols that had gone before it, though the singers seemed to know
nothing of that--how Joseph, being a just man, had espoused a virgin,
and finding she was with child before he married her, he had wished
to put her away, but the angel of the Lord had appeared to him and
told him not to, and how at last he had carried his wife and child
away into the land of Egypt, out of reach of the wrath of Herod the
King, who was trying to disgrace and destroy them.
A little before midnight the clergyman rose and asked for silence.
And then, while all heads were bowed and there was a solemn hush
within, the great clock of the Castle struck twelve in the darkness
outside. After that the organ pealed out "Hark, the herald angels
sing," and everybody who had a candle extinguished it, and all stood
up and sang.
The bells were ringing joyfully as the congregation trooped out of
the church, but for some while longer they moved about on the
crinkling snow in front of it, saluting and shaking hands, everybody
with everybody.
"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to yea."
"Same to you, and many of them."
They saluted and shook hands with Bessie also.
Then the Verger put out the lights in the church behind them, and in
the sudden darkness the crowd broke up, one more Oie'l Verry over,
and under the slow descent of the starlight the cheerful voices and
crinkling footsteps went their various ways home.
Back at Derby Haven, Bessie, who had been on the point of crying
during the latter part of the service, ran up to her room, flung
herself face down on her bed and burst into a flood of tears.
If she, too, could only fly away, and stay away, until her trouble
was over! But how could she do that? And where could she go to?