Three days later, Fenella set out for Bishop's Court in a two-horse
landau.
The island had begun to recover from its fit of moral intoxication.
Sympathy was swinging round to Stowell. The pathos of his stupendous
downfall had taken hold of the people. Taubman had been wrong.
Nobody would have known anything of Stowell's guilt if he had not
revealed it himself. There must be something great in a man who
could take up his cross like that. And as for that wonderful woman
who might be living in Government House but was living in Castle
Rushen instead....
As Fenella, in her nurse's costume, drove through the town some of
the women curtsied to her, and most of the men raised their hats.
She returned the salutations of none.
"So that's how they expect to wipe out what they did to Victor! Not
if I know it though!"
Two hours afterwards she was at the Bishop's palace--a somewhat
palatial place, partly old, partly new, sleeping in the shelter of
big trees and surrounded by a blaze of rhododendrons.
The Bishop, in his dapper black clothes, received her in a room in
the old part of the house. It had been the study of the most famous
of his predecessors, the fanatic and saint who had ordered that Kate
Kinrade, for the saving of her soul, should be dragged at the tail of
a boat. Souvenirs of the dead Bishop were on the walls and
tables--his portrait, his Bible, his short crozier, his tasselled
staff, and his horn-rimmed spectacles.
The living Bishop was suave and voluble. He congratulated Fenella on
looking so well after so much trouble.
"Such a calamity! I might almost say such a tragedy! How the island
will miss him!"
He agreed with the Attorney-General. Stowell's act had been one of
renunciation. When a man had sinned against God, and violated the
world's law, he set a great example by submitting to authority.
"God forbid that I should excuse his crime, but already his
renunciation is having a good effect throughout the island. The
rioting is over. The soldiers are being sent back, and as for the
agitators nobody listens to them any longer. Only this morning the
man Baldromma...."
Fenella, who had been beating her foot impatiently on the carpet, at
length broke into her own business.
"Bishop, you have heard that I have gone to the Castle as female
warder?"
"Yes, indeed. It's so nice of you to stay by the poor man's side
while he is in prison, to see that his bodily comforts are being
cared for."
"But more than that will have to be done for him if his soul is to be
kept alive," said Fenella.
"Really? If you think there is anything _I_ can do...."
"There is, Sir .... You know that I was to have married Mr. Stowell?"
"Indeed I do. Wasn't the marriage to have taken place before very
long in our chapel at Bishop's Court?"
"Well, I want it to take place now. Only it must be in the Chapel at
Castle Rushen instead."
"You mean .... the prison Chapel?"
"Yes."
For a moment the Bishop was speechless. Then recovering from his
astonishment, he rose and stepped to the hearthrug, and standing with
his back to the fire, he said, as if addressing an assembly,
"Beautiful and noble, dear lady! To be ready to become the wife of
the fallen man just when the whole world is hissing at him in chorus,
to inspire him day by day with the hope of a great resurrection, of
taking up manful work anew, of regaining all he has lost and
more--yes, it is beautiful and noble."
"Then you will be willing to marry us, Sir?" said Fenella.
The Bishop hesitated, and then asked Fenella what view the Governor
took of her intention.
"He disapproves of it altogether, and says no clergyman in the island
can marry us without incurring his displeasure."
"Ah!"
"But I have always understood that the Bishop is a baron in his own
right and therefore independent of the Governor."
"True! That's true! Still...."
The river of rhetoric had suddenly stopped.
"Well?"
"Mr. Stowell is a prisoner. Why marry when you can't live together?
Why not wait until he is at liberty?"
"Because he may be dead of despair before the time for that comes,"
said Fenella, "and the resurrection you speak of may never take
place. His heart is breaking. He wants something to live for now.
He wants me."
Her eyes had filled and the Bishop had to turn his own away. At
length he said, stammering painfully, that he was sorry, very sorry,
but having to live at peace with the Governor....
Fenella leapt to her feet.
"Bishop," she said, "the chaplain at Castletown is a poor man with
five young children and his living is in the gift of the Governor.
But if I can find any other clergyman who is willing to perform the
ceremony, will you permit him to do so?"
"Ye--s .... that is to say, if you tell him what you have told me,
and he is prepared to take the risk."
Within two minutes more Fenella was back in her landau, driving
towards Ballamoar across the Curragh roads, with their warm and rooty
odour of the bog.
Janet came running out of the house to meet her, and in a flash they
were crying in each other's arms. But, to Fenella's surprise, there
was a look of joy in Janet's face, and on stepping into the house she
found an explanation. An army of maidservants were in every room,
with an arsenal of brushes and mops and pails.
"Why, Janet, what are you doing?"
"Getting ready for my boy coming back, that's what I'm doing."
"But, dear heart, don't you know...."
"Certainly I know. But do you think they can keep a Ballamoar in
yonder place long? 'Deed they can't. He'll be coming out soon, and
then those dirts of Manx ones who have been making such a mouth will
be the first to run to meet him."
It would have been cruel to gainsay her, therefore Fenella described
the object of her journey, told of her father's threat and the
Bishop's excuses.
"So now I'm looking for a clergyman who will be brave enough to marry
us," she said.
They were in the dining-room, and through the glass door to the
piazza they could see, on the edge of the cliffs, a field's space
from the church, a lonely house without a tree or a bush about it,
looking as if it had been slashed by the rain and winds of a hundred
winters. It was the Jurby parsonage--the home of Parson Cowley.
Janet pointed to it and said,
"Have you been _there_?"
At that question Fenella remembered a story her father had told her
about something splendid that Victor had done, before she returned to
the island, to save the drunken parson of Jurby in the eyes of the
parishioners. In another minute she was back in her carriage.
"Good-bye, child, and God bless you!" said Janet by the carriage
door. "And don't forget to tell my boy that Mother will be lighting
the fire in the Deemster's room every night of life for him."
The parsonage looked yet more desolate at a nearer view than at a
distance. Sea-fowl were screaming in the sky above it and the earth
was quaking from the measured beat of the waves against the cliffs
below. A patch of garden in front was rank with long grass, and the
salt breath of the sea had encrusted the glass of the windows with a
grey scale that was like the mould on a dead face.
The door was opened by a timid, elderly woman, the parson's wife, who
was her own servant and looked as if all the pride of life had been
crushed out of her.
"Please come in, miss," she said. And when the door had been closed
from the inside and she was taking Fenella into the study, she called
at the foot of the stairs,
"John, a young lady to see you."
The dingy little room looked like an epitome of the life of the man
who lived in it. Everything was faded and worn out--books in torn
bindings on bulging shelves against the walls; a threadbare carpet
trodden thin by the fender; a handful of earthen fire; an arm-chair
upholstered in horsehair and sunk in the seat as if the springs had
broken; a table laden with loose papers and sprinkled with shreds of
tobacco, which seemed to have fallen from a shaking hand; and behind
a mirror, from which half the silvering was worn away, two objects on
the mantelpiece--a drinking glass, which had obviously contained a
frothy liquor and a photograph in a mourning frame of a young man in
sailor's costume with the fell stamp of consumption in his eyes and
cheeks.
After a moment there was an unsteady step on the stairs and the
parson came into the room, wearing a faded skull cap and a
dressing-gown much patched and stained.
Fenella told him her story, as she had told it to the Bishop, and
then said,
"So I've come to ask if you dare run the risk of marrying us?"
The old parson, who had been listening intently, seemed eager to
reply, but something checked him, and looking across at his wife, who
continued to stand timidly by the door, he said,
"What do you say, Sarah?"
The old lady did not reply immediately, and pointing to the
photograph on the mantelpiece the parson said,
"If it had been John James's case, eh?"
"Do as you think best, John."
"Then I'll do it! Certainly I'll do it! What do I care what the
Governor may do to me? Once a priest always a priest--he can't take
_that_ from me anyway."
It was just the chance he had been waiting for. Victor Stowell had
done something for him, and before he died he wanted to do something
for Victor Stowell.
"I will too! I'll give him a good wife and that's the best thing a
man gets in this world anyway. I've been publishing your banns too.
Do you know I'd been publishing your banns these three Sunday
mornings, Victor Stowell being one of my parishioners?"
Fenella, who was feeling a tightness in the throat, contrived to say,
"Then perhaps you'll drive back with me to Castletown and celebrate
the service to-morrow?"
"Why shouldn't I?" said the parson, and off he went upstairs (with a
firm step this time) to put on his clerical clothes and pack his
surplice in a hand-bag.
While his quick footsteps were shaking the ceiling above them the two
women stood together in the study, the young one and the old one,
face to face.
"It is very good of you, Mrs. Cowley, to take this risk with your
husband," said Fenella.
"But isn't that what we women have all got to do?" said Mrs. Cowley.
And then Fenella, unable to say more, put her arms about the timid
old thing, who had submerged her own life in the wrecked life of her
husband, and kissed her.