"Ah, here you are, dear!"
It was Janet who had heard the hum of Stowell's car on the drive and
had come hurrying out to meet him.
"You've had a tiring day--I can see that," she said, as she poured
out a cup of tea for him. "Ah, these high positions! 'There's
nothing to be got without being paid for,' as your father used to
say."
To escape from Janet's solicitude and to tire himself out so that he
might have a chance of sleeping that night, he walked down to the
shore.
A storm was rising. The gulls were flying inland and their white
wings were mingling with the black ones of the rooks. The fierce sky
to the south, the cold grey of the sea to the north, the bleak church
tower on the stark headland, looking like a blinded lighthouse--they
suited better with his mood.
Fenella! She must know everything by this time. How was he to meet
her eyes in the morning?
Gell! He, too, must know everything now. How every innocent thing
he had done to help his friend would look like cunning bribery and
cruel treachery!
It was a lie to say that a sin could be concealed. An evil act once
done could never be undone; it could never be hidden away. A man
might carry his sin out to sea, and bury it in the deepest part of
the deep, but some day it would come scouring up before a storm as
the broken seaweed came, to lie open and naked on the beach.
The sky darkened and he turned back. On the way home he met Robbie
Creer, and they had to shout to each other above the fury of the
wind. The farmer had been over to the Nappin (the fields above the
Point) and found hidden fissures in the soil three feet deep. They
would lose land before morning.
At dinner Janet did her best to make things cheerful. There was the
sweet home atmosphere--the wood fire with its odour of resin and
gorse, the snow-white table-cloth, the silver candlesticks, all the
old-fashioned daintiness. But Stowell was preoccupied and hardly
listened to Janet's chattering. So she went early to her room,
saying she was sure he wished to be alone--his father always did,
during the adjournment of a serious case. His father again! How her
devotion to his father drove the iron into his soul!
It was late and the rain had begun to slash the window-panes when he
heard the front door bell ringing. After a few moments he heard it
ringing again, more loudly and insistently. Nobody answered it. The
household must be asleep.
Then came a hurried knocking at the window of the dining-room and a
voice, which was like the wind itself become articulate, crying out
of the darkness,
"Let me in!"
It was Gell. For the first time in his life Stowell felt a spasm of
physical fear. But he remembered something which Gell had said at
the door of the railway carriage in Douglas on the day of the trial
of the Peel fisherman ("I should have killed the other man"), and
that strengthened him. Anything was better than the torture of a
hidden sin--anything!
"Go back to the door--I'll open it," he called through the closed
window, and then he walked to the porch.
His heart was beating hard. He thought he knew what was coming. But
when Gell entered the house he was not the man Stowell had
expected--with flaming eyes and passionate voice--but a poor, broken,
irresolute creature. His hair was disordered, his step was weak and
shuffling, and he was stretching out his nervous hands on coming into
the light as if still walking in the darkness.
"I had to come and tell you. She's guilty. She has confessed," he
said.
And then he collapsed into a chair and broke into pitiful moaning.
It was too cruel. He could have taken the girl's word against the
world, yet she had deceived him.
"Did she say .... who...."
"No."
"No?"
"I didn't ask. Some miserable farm-hand, I suppose--some brute, some
animal. Damn him, whoever he is! Damn him! Damn him to the devil
and hell!"
Stowell felt a boundless relief, yet a sense of sickening duplicity.
"But what matter about the man?" said Gell. "It's the girl who has
deceived me. I daresay I'm not the first either. Perhaps her
step-father didn't turn her out for nothing. There may have been
something to say for the old scoundrel."
Choking with hypocrisy, Stowell found himself pleading for the girl.
Perhaps .... who could say? .... perhaps she had been more sinned
against than sinning.
"Then why didn't she tell me?" said Gell. His voice was like a wail.
"Who can say...." (Stowell felt a throb in his throat and was
speaking with difficulty), "who can say she wasn't trying to save you
pain .... knowing how you believed in her and cared for her?"
"But if she had only told me," said Gell. "If she had only been
straight with me!"
Stowell felt himself on the edge of terrible revelations. But he
controlled himself. If Bessie had concealed part of the truth what
right had he to reveal it? After a moment of silent terror he asked
Gell what he meant to do in the morning.
"Advise her to amend her plea and cast herself on the mercy of the
Court."
"Yes, that is the only proper course now," said Stowell, and then
Gell rose to go.
It was a wild night. The wind was higher than ever by this time and
the rain on the windows was rattling like hail. Stowell asked Gell
to sleep the night at Ballamoar, secretly hoping he would refuse. He
did. He had bespoken a bed at the Railway Inn near to the
station--he must go up by the first train in the morning.
Stowell saw him to the door, and held it open with his shoulder
against the wind, which swirled through the hall, making the flame of
the lamp on the landing to flame up in its funnel. Outside there was
the slashing of leaves and the crackling of boughs among the elms
around the lawn.
"Well, good-night," said Gell, and turning up the collar of his coat,
he went off in the darkness and the rain.
Stowell turned back into the house with a sense of degradation he had
never felt before. Oh, what a miserable coward a hidden sin made of
a man! Sooner or later it would be revealed and then .... what then?
Suddenly he was startled by a new thought. Bessie's confession would
give the trial an entirely different turn. If she pleaded guilty in
the morning there would be nothing for the Jury to do. Either they
would have to be dismissed or instructed to bring in a formal
verdict. The verdict against the prisoner would depend upon the
Judges. That is to say, Bessie's fate would depend upon him--upon
him alone!
The first shock of this thought was terrible, but after a while he
told himself that it came to the same thing in the end. The real
responsibility was with the law. A judge was only the law's
spokesman. For a given crime a given punishment. A judge did not
make the sentence on a prisoner--he had only to pronounce it.
Strengthening himself so, he went to bed. For a long time he lay
awake, listening to the many sounds of the storm. In the middle of
the night he was startled out of his troubled sleep by a loud crash
in the distance.
The morning broke fair, with a clear sky and the sea lying under the
sunshine like a sleeping child. But as he drove off, after a scanty
breakfast, he found the carriage-drive strewn with young leaves, the
torn bough of an old elm stretching across his path, and a number of
dead rooks lying about the lawn.
Outside the big gates he met Robbie Creer, who was riding barebacked
on a farm horse. The farmer had been over to the Nappin and seen
what he had expected. The headland was down; there was a Gob (a
mouth) where the Point had been, and the sea was flowing between two
cliffs that had been torn asunder.
Driving hard, Stowell arrived early at Castletown and found a crowd
at the Castle gate, waiting for the trial as for a show. He was
passing through the Deemster's private entrance when he had a vision
of a scene which the spectators could not be counting upon. What if
the prisoner, while making her confession, accused her Judge?
Joshua Scarff, in his coloured spectacles, was waiting at the door to
the Deemster's room.
"I'm afraid your Honour is not well this morning," said Joshua.
"A little headache, that's all," said Stowell.
But he had stumbled on the threshold (a bad omen) and was wondering
what would happen before he came out again.