Stowell had been four days in prison and his depression had deepened
to despair. The sense of being buried alive was crushing. Even when
he was taken into the court-yard for exercise, and the white birds
sailed through the blue sky, he had the sensation of being in a
roofless tomb.
Yet he did not spare himself. He had a right to certain indulgences,
but asked for none. They put him into an upstairs room, which had
once been the armoury of the Castle, but he said, "Put me in the cell
that was occupied by Bessie Collister."
He might have continued to wear his own clothes, but said,
"Give me the same clothes as any other prisoner"--a rough tweed,
uncombed and undyed, just as it had come from the back of the sheep.
The silence was terrible. The first night was calm, and the only
sound that reached him through the thick walls was the monotonous
wash of the waves on the shore, which lay empty and alone under the
dark sky.
Next morning he heard the clamour of the gulls, and knew that the
boats had come in from their night's fishing and the birds were
fighting for the refuse thrown overboard. A little later he heard
the deadened sound of hammering at a distance--they were caulking the
deck of a new vessel in the shipyard across the bay. The world was
going on as usual, yet there he was in a silence like that of the
grave.
"Don't people sometimes go mad in a place like this?" he asked the
jailer.
On the second night the sea was loud, but over the wailing of the
waves he heard a raucous voice outside. It was the voice of Dan
Baldromma, who, ranging round the Castle walls like an evil spirit,
was calling up his taunting message at every lancet window, not
knowing which was the window of Stowell's cell.
"The Spaker is dead the day. That's the way they go, the big ones
that rob the people. But there's no pocket in the shroud,
Dempster--no pocket in the shroud."
On the morning of the third day Stowell received a letter from
London, telling him that His Majesty the King had withdrawn his
commission, having no longer any use for his services. This smote
him like a blow on the brain. It was an abject degradation, like
that of an officer being stripped of his decorations before the eyes
of the soldiers who had served under him.
But the worst of his pains were his thoughts about Fenella. Like a
man suddenly struck blind he was always living over again the scenes
of his past life. Sitting on his bed, with his head in his hands and
his eyes tightly closed, all the beautiful moments of their love
passed in procession before him, from the moment in the glen when he
had picked her up in his quivering arms and carried her across the
stream, to that parting in the porch at Government House, after she
had promised to marry him, and he had seized her about the waist and
fastened his lips to her mouth.
Do what he would, he could not resist the intoxication of these cruel
memories. But crueller still were his dreams of the future--the dead
dreams of their married love, when she would be wholly his, the
beautiful body as well as the beautiful soul. Nothing in the world
was to have been so lovely as her bare arms about his neck; nothing
so thrilling as the throbbing of her breasts when he told her how
much he loved her. But when he opened his eyes and saw the blank
walls of his cell about him, he felt as if some devil from hell had
been tormenting him.
Was this to be his greatest punishment--that what he had lost in
Fenella was to be for ever haunting him? Was he never to be left in
peace, now that all hope of her was gone from him for ever?
"Better die," he thought. "A thousand times better."
Several times every day the jailer had been in to talk with him. The
prison was nearly full of prisoners now, many of the rioters having
been arrested ("Not the ring-leaders, they are always too cunning"),
so that his turnkeys and lady warder had as much as they could do to
keep things going.
This, through the thick haze of his preoccupied mind, brought back to
Stowell's memory a glimpse he had got of a woman in nurse's costume
who had flashed past him when he was being hustled through that
furnace of wrathful faces at the Castle gate, and he asked who she
had been.
"Oh, that .... _that's_ our lady warder," said the jailer.
"Is Mrs. Mylrea better then?"
"No, she's dead. We have another one now, Sir."
"Who is she?"