Читать книгу The Master of Man - Hall Sir Caine - Страница 10

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Victor Stowell spent his first two hours after Janet left him in destroying everything which might remind him of Fenella. Her picture, which Janet had framed and hung over his mantel-piece, he put face-down in a drawer. The flowers she had placed in front of it he flung out of the window. A box full of newspaper cuttings and extracts from books dealing with the hardships of the laws relating to women (the collection of five laborious years) he stuffed into the grate and set fire to.

But having done all this he found he had done nothing. Only once, since her childhood, had Fenella been to Ballamoar, yet she had left her ghost all over it. He could not sit on the piazza, or walk down the sandy road to the sea, without being ripped and raked by the thought of her. And sight of the turn of the drive at which she had waved her hand, and turned the glory of her face on him, was enough to make the bluest sky a blank.

For a long month he went about with a look too dark for so young a face and a step too heavy for so light a foot, blackening his fate and his future. He never doubted that he had lost something that could never be regained. Without blaming Fenella for so much as a moment he felt humiliated and ashamed, and like a fool who had built his house upon the sand. God, how hollow living seemed! Life had lost its savour; effort was useless and there was nothing left in the world but dead-sea fruit.

How much the Deemster had learnt of his trouble he never knew, but one night, as they drew up to the cheeks of the hearth after dinner, he said:

"Victor, how would you like to go round the world? Travel is good for a young man. It helps him to get things into proportion."

Victor leapt at the prospect of escaping from Ballamoar, but thought it seemly to say something about the expense.

"That needn't trouble you," said the Deemster, "and you wouldn't be beholden to me either, for there is something I have never told you."

His mother had had a fortune of her own, and the last act of her sweet life had been to make it over to her new-born son, at the discretion of his father, signing her dear will a few minutes before she died, against every prayer and protest, in the tragic and unrecognizable handwriting of the dying.

"It was five hundred a year then," said the Deemster, "but I've not touched it for twenty-four years, so it's nine hundred now."

"That's water enough to his wheel, I'm thinking," said Dan Baldromma, when he heard of it, and Cæsar Qualtrough was known to say:

"It's a horse that'll drive him to glory or the devil, and I belave in my heart I'm knowing which."

Two months later Victor Stowell was ready for his journey. Alick Gell was to go with him—that gentleman having scrambled through his examination and prevailed on his mother to prevail on his father to permit him to follow Stowell.

"God's sake, woman," the Speaker had said again, "let him go, and give him the allowance he asks for, and bother me no more about him."

Turning westward the young travellers crossed the Atlantic; stood in awe on the ship's deck at their first sight of the new world, with its great statue of Liberty to guard its portals; passed over the breathless American continent, where life scours and roars through Time like a Neap tide on a shingly coast, casting up its pebbles like spray; then through Japan, where it flows silent and deep, like a mill race under adumbrous overgrowth; and so on through China, India and Egypt and back through Europe.

It was a wonderful tour—to Gell like sitting in the bow of a boat where the tumult of life was for ever smiting his face in freshening waves; to Stowell (for the first months at least) like sitting miserably in the stern, with only the backwash visible that was carrying him away, with every heave of the sea, from something he had left and lost.

But before long Stowell's heavy spirit regained its wings. Although he could not have admitted it even to himself without a sense of self-betrayal, Fenella Stanley's face, in the throng of other and nearer faces, became fainter day by day. There are no more infallible physicians for the heart-wounds inflicted by women than women themselves, and when a man is young, and in the first short period of virginal manhood, the world is full of them.

So it came to pass that whatever else the young men saw that was wonderful and marvellous in the countries they passed through, they were always seeing women's eyes to light and warm them. And being handsome and winsome themselves their interest was rewarded according to the conditions—sometimes with a look, sometimes with a smile, and sometimes in the freer communities, with a handful of confetti or a bunch of spring flowers flung in their faces, or perhaps the tap of a light hand on their shoulders.

Thus the thought of Fenella Stanley, steadily worn down in Victor's mind, became more and more remote as time and distance separated them, until at length there were moments when it seemed like a shadowy memory.

Stowell and Gell were two years away, and when they returned home the old island seemed to them to have dwarfed and dwindled, the very mountains looking small and squat, and the insular affairs, which had once loomed large, to have become little, mean and almost foolish.

"Now they'll get to work; you'll see they will," said Janet, and for the first weeks it looked as if they would.

For the better prosecution of their profession, as well as to remove the sense of rivalry, they took chambers in different towns, Stowell in Old Post Office Place in Ramsey, and Gell in Preaching House Lane in Douglas—-two outer rooms each for offices and two inner ones for residential apartments.

But having ordered their furniture and desks, inscribed their names in brass on their door-posts ("VICTOR STOWELL, Advocate"), engaged junior assistants to sit on high stools and take the names of the clients who might call, and arranged for sleeping-out housekeepers to attend to their domestic necessities (Victor's was a comfortable elderly body, Mrs. Quayle, once a servant of his mother's at Ballamoar, afterwards married to a fisherman, and then left a widow, like so many of her class, when our hungry sea had claimed her man), they made no attempt to practise, being too well off to take the cases of petty larceny and minor misdemeanour which usually fall to the High Bailiff's Court, and nobody offering them the cases proper to the Deemster's.

Those were the days of Bar dinners (social functions much in favour with our unbriefed advocates), and one such function was held in honour of the returned travellers. At this dinner Stowell, being the principal speaker, gave a racy account of the worlds they had wandered through, not forgetting the world of women—the sleepy daintiness of the Japanese, the warm comeliness of the Italian, the vivacious loveliness of the French, and above all, the frank splendour of the American women, with their free step, their upturned faces and their conquering eyes.

That was felt by various young Manxmen to be a feast that could be partaken of more than once, so a club was straightway founded for the furtherance of such studies. It met once a week at Mount Murray, an old house a few miles out of Douglas, in the middle of a forest of oak and pine trees, now an inn, but formerly the home of a branch of the Athols, when they were the Lords of Man, and kept a swashbuckler court of half-pay officers who had come to end their days on the island because the living and liquor were cheap.

One room of this house, the dining-room, still remained as it used to be when the old bloods routed and shouted there, though its coat-of-arms was now discoloured by damp and its table was as worm-eaten as their coffins must have been. And here it was that the young bloods of the "Ellan Vannin" (the Isle of Man) held their weekly revel—riding out in the early evening on their hired horses, twenty or thirty together, sitting late over their cups and pipes, and (the last toast drunk and the last story told) breaking up in the dark of the morning, stumbling out to the front, where a line of lanterns would be lining the path, the horses champing the gravel and the sleepy stable-boys chewing their quids to keep themselves awake, and then leaping into their saddles, singing their last song at the full bellows of their lungs in the wide clearing of the firs to the wondering sky, and galloping home, like so many Gilpins (as many of them as were sober enough to get there at the same time as their mounts) and clattering up the steep and stony streets of Douglas to the scandal of its awakened inhabitants.

Victor Stowell was president of the "Ellan Vannin," and in that character he made one contribution to its dare-devil jollity, which terminated its existence and led to other consequences more material to this story.

II

In his heavy days at Ballamoar, before he went abroad, his father's house had been like a dam to which the troubled waters of the island flowed—the little jealousies and envies of the island community, the bickerings of church and chapel, of town and country, of town and town, not to speak of the darker maelstrom of more unworthy quarrels. While the Deemster had moved through all this with his calm dignity as the great mediator, the great pacifier, Victor with his quick brain and wounded heart had stood by, seeing all and saying nothing. But now, making a call upon his memory, for the amusement of his fellow clubmen, out of sheer high spirits and with no thought of evil, he composed a number of four-line "Limericks" on the big-wigs of the island.

Such scorching irony and biting satire had never been heard in the island before. If any pompous or hypocritical person (by preference a parson, a local preacher, a High Bailiff or a Key) had a dark secret, which he would have given his soul's salvation not to have disclosed, it was held up, under some thin disguise, to withering ridicule.