Awakening in the "George" in the early hours of morning, Fenella
heard a noise outside her window that was like the running of a
shallow river over a bed of small stones. She knew what it was. It
was the sound of the feet of the people who were coming in crowds to
stand outside the Castle walls and watch the slow-moving fingers of
the clock, until the hoisting of the black flag over the tower should
tell them that the invisible presence of Death had come and gone.
When, as the clock was striking six, she crossed the market-place on
her way to the Castle, she found this crowd in great commotion,
hurrying to and fro and calling to each other in agitated voices.
"Is it true?"
"So they're saying."
"God bless my soul!"
The Castle gate was open and people had penetrated as far as the
Portcullis. An Inspector of Police, coming out hurriedly, commanded
them to go back.
"Away with you! Is it play-acting you've come to look at? Smoking
your pipes, too!"
But without waiting to see his orders obeyed he hastened away
himself, shouting to somebody that he was going to knock up the
telegraph office.
The court-yard, when Fenella reached it, though less crowded was as
full of agitation. A blear-eyed man, who looked as if he had just
awakened from a fit of intoxication, was walking aimlessly to and
fro. It was Shimmin, the turnkey, but when Fenella asked him what
had happened, he stared vacantly and made no answer. A very tall
man, wearing a cloth cap over his head and ears and carrying a
carpet-bag, was standing by the scaffold. This must be "long Duggie
Taggart" and when Fenella, shuddering at sight of the man, asked him
the same question, he shrugged his shoulders and turned away. At the
foot of the draw-bridge the High Bailiff and the jailer were in
fierce altercation.
"I know nothing about it, I tell thee, Sir."
"Then you are a blockhead and a fool!"
At length two elderly men, the Chaplain and the Doctor, came down the
Deemster's stairs, and then the truth, which Fenella had partly
surmised, became fully known to her. The condemned woman had escaped
during the night. There would be no execution that day.
Through a tumult of mixed feelings, Fenella was conscious of a sense
of immense relief. Her first thought was of Bessie's mother, and she
turned back to take the news to her.
The little house in Quay Lane had its door still closed, but through
the kitchen window, whereof the upper sash was partly down, came the
singing of a hymn in tired and husky voices,
"_Jesus, lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy bosom fly._"
It was not immediately that Fenella could get an answer to her
knocking, but at length the man of the house, in his ganzie and long
sea boots, opened the door, still singing.
The little low-ceiled kitchen was full of people, and the close air
of the place seemed to say that they had kept up their prayer-meeting
the night through.
On a chair bedstead against the opposite wall, Mrs. Collister in her
cotton nightcap, from which long thin locks of her grey hair were
escaping, was rocking her body to the tune, while fumbling with bony
fingers a Methodist hymn-book which lay open before her on the
patchwork counterpane.
Fenella, with a warm heart for the old mother in her trouble, pushed
through to the foot of the bed, but Mrs. Collister was terrified at
the sight of her, thinking she was bringing bad tidings,
"Have they deceived me?" she cried. "Seven o'clock they said. Is it
all over?"
"Be calm," said Fenella, and then she delivered her message. Bessie
had gone from Castle Rushen. She was not to die that day.
A moment of vacant silence fell upon the room, such as seems to fall
on the world when the tide is at the bottom of the ebb. With
difficulty the old woman grasped what Fenella had said. Her watery
eyes looked round at her people as if asking them to help her to
understand. At length one of these cried,
"Glory to God! It's the answer to our prayers."
And then the truth seemed to descend on the poor broken brain like a
healing breath from heaven. Stretching out her match-like arms, she
seized Fenella's hands and said,
"I know who thou art. Thou art the Governor's daughter. Is it the
truth thou'rt telling me?"
"Indeed it is."
"My Bessie is out of prison?"
"Yes, and nobody knows what has become of her."
A wild cry of joy burst from the old woman's throat.
"Liza! Liza Killey, wilt thou believe me now? Didn't I tell thee it
was the old Dempster himself that the Lord had sent to take my child
out of prison?"
A wave of new life seemed to come to her, and throwing back the
clothes she struggled out of bed (her blue-veined legs and feet
showing bare under her cotton nightdress) and went down on her knees
to pray. But her prayer was drowned by the husky voices of her
companions, who had by this time raised a hymn of thanksgiving.
Fenella turned to go, and the man and woman of the house followed her
to the door.
"What was that she said about the Deemster?"
They told her what had happened the night before--how the old woman
had escaped into the streets and the Deemster had brought her back to
the house.
"Are you sure it was the Deemster?"
"We thought so then, but she thrept us out it was his father who is
dead and buried, and now we don't know in the world if it was or
wasn't."