Читать книгу The Master of Man - Hall Caine - Страница 6

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Next day the Deemster drove to Douglas to meet his son coming back. The weather was cold, he had to leave home in the grey of morning, and he was driving in an open dog-cart, but the Deemster knew what he was doing. Ten minutes before the train came in from Castletown he had drawn up in the station yard. The passengers came through from the platform and saw him there, and he sainted some of them. Cæsar Qualtrough was among them, a gross-bodied and dark-faced man, darker than ever that day with a look of animosity and scorn.

When, at the tail of the crowd, Victor came, in the sour silence of the disgraced, no longer wearing his college cap, and with his discoloured college trunk being trundled behind him, the Deemster said nothing, but he indicated the seat by his side, and the boy climbed up to it. Then with his white head erect and his strong eyes shining he drove out of the station yard.

It was still early morning and he was in no hurry to return home. For half an hour he passed slowly through the principal thoroughfares of the town, bowing to everybody he knew and speaking to many. It was market day and he made for the open space about the old church on the quay, where the farmers' wives were standing in rows with their baskets of butter and eggs, the farmers' sons with their tipped-up carts of vegetables, and the smaller of the farmers themselves, from all parts of the island, with their carcases of sheep and oxen. Without leaving his seat the Deemster bought of several of them and had his purchases packed about the college trunk behind him.

It was office hours by this time and he began to call on his friends, leaving Victor outside to take care of the horse and dog-cart. His first call was on the Attorney-General, Donald Wattleworth, who had been an old school-fellow of his own at King William's, where forty odd years ago he had saved him from many troubles.

The Attorney was now a small, dapper, very correct and rather religious old gentleman (he had all his life worn a white tie and elastic side-boots), with the round and wrinkled face that is oftenest seen in a good old woman. For a quarter of an hour the Deemster talked with him on general subjects, his Courts and forthcoming cases, without saying a word about the business which had brought him to Douglas. But the Attorney divined it. From his chair at his desk on the upper story he could see Victor, with his pale face, in the dog-cart below, twiddling the slack of the reins in his nervous fingers, and when the Deemster rose to go he followed him downstairs to the street, and whispered to the boy from behind, as his father was taking his seat in front,

"Cheer up, my lad! Many a good case has a bad start, you know."

The Deemster's last call was at Government House, and again Victor, to his relief, was left outside. But when, ten minutes later, the Governor, with his briar-root pipe in his hand, came into the porch to see the Deemster off, and found Victor in the dog-cart, looking cold and miserable, with his overcoat buttoned up to his throat, he stepped out bareheaded, with the wind in his grey hair, and shook hands with him, and said,

"Glad to see you again, my boy. You remember my girl, Fenella? Yes? Well, she's at college now, but she'll be home for her holiday one of these days—and then I must bring her over to see you. Good-bye!"

The Deemster was satisfied. Not a syllable had he said from first to last about the bad story that had come from Castletown, but before he left Douglas that day, it was dead and done for.

"Now we'll go home," he said, and for two hours thereafter, father and son, sitting side by side, and never speaking except on indifferent subjects, followed the high mountain road, with its far view of Ireland and Scotland, like vanishing ghosts across a broken sea, the deep declivity of the glen, with Dan Baldromma's flour mill at the foot of it, and the turfy lanes of the Curraghs, where the curlews were crying, until they came to the big gates of Ballamoar, with the tall elms and the great silence inside of them, broken only by the loud cawing of the startled rooks, and then to Janet, in her lace cap, at the open door of the house, waiting for her boy and scarcely knowing whether to laugh or cry over him.

II

Meantime there had been another and very different homecoming. In a corner of an open third-class carriage of the train that brought Victor Stowell from Castletown there was a little servant girl with a servant's tin box, tied about with a cord, on the seat beside her. This was Bessie Collister, dismissed from the High Bailiff's service and being sent home to her people. She was very young, scarcely more than fifteen, with coal-black eyes and eyebrows and bright complexion—a bud of a girl just breaking into womanhood.

Dan Baldromma had no need to say she was not his daughter. Her fatherhood was doubtful. Rumour attributed it to a dashing young Irish Captain, who sixteen years before had put into Ramsey for repairs after his ship, a coasting schooner had run on the Carrick rock. Half the girls of "the north" had gone crazy over this intoxicating person, and in the wild conflict as to who should win him Liza Corteen had both won and lost, for as soon as his ship was ready for sea he had disappeared, and never afterwards been heard of.

Liza's baby had been born in the following spring, and two years later Dan Collister, a miller from "the south" who had not much cause to be proud of his own pedigree, had made a great virtue of marrying her, child and all, being, as he said, on "conjergal" subjects a man of liberal views and strong opinions.

In the fourteen years that followed Liza had learned the liberality of Dan's views on marriage and Bessie the strength of his hand as well as opinions. But while the mother's nerves had been broken by the reproaches about her "by-child," which had usually preceded her husband's night-long nasal slumbers, the spirits of the girl had not suffered much, except from fear of a certain strap which he had hung in the ingle.

"The world will never grow cold on that child," people used to say in her earliest days, and it seemed as if it was still true, even in the depth of her present trouble.

The open railway carriage was full of farming people going up to market, and among them were two buxom widows with their baskets of butter and eggs on their broad knees and their faces resplendent from much soap. Facing these was a tough and rough old sinner who bantered them, in language more proper to the stud and the farmyard, on their late married lives and the necessity of beginning on fresh ones. The unvarnished gibes provoked loud laughter from the other passengers, and Bessie's laugh was loudest of all. This led to the widows looking round in her direction, and presently, in the recovered consciousness of her situation, she heard whispers of "Johnny Qualtrough" and the "Dempster's son" and then turned back to her window and cried.

There was no one to help her with her luggage when she had to change at Douglas, so she carried her tin box across the platform to the Ramsey train. The north-going traffic was light at that hour, and sitting in an empty compartment she had time to think of home and what might happen when she got there. This was a vision of Dan Baldromma threatening, her mother pleading, herself screaming and all the hurly-burly she had heard so often.

But even that did not altogether frighten her now, for she had one source of solace which she had never had before. She was wearing a big hat with large red roses, a straw-coloured frock and openwork stockings, with shoes that were much too thin for the on-coming winter. And looking down at these last and remembering she had bought them out of her wages, expressly for that walk with Alick Gell, she thought of something that was immeasurably more important in her mind than the incident which had led to all the trouble—Alick had kissed her!

She was still thinking of this, and tingling with the memory of it, and telling herself how good she had been not to say who her boy was when the "big ones" questioned her, and how she would never tell that, 'deed no, never, no matter what might happen to other people, when the train drew up suddenly at the station that was her destination and she saw her mother, a weak-eyed woman, with a miserable face, standing alone on the shingly platform.

"Sakes alive, girl, what have thou been doing now?" said Mrs. Collister, as soon as the train had gone on. "Hadn't I trouble enough with thy father without this?"

But Bessie was in tears again by that time, so mother and daughter lifted the tin box into a tailless market cart that stood waiting in the road, climbed over the wheel to the plank seat across it, and turned their horse's head towards home.

Dan Baldromma's mill stood face to the high road and back to the glen and the mountains—a substantial structure with a thatched and whitewashed dwelling-house attached, a few farm buildings and a patch of garden, which, though warm and bright in summer under its mantle of gillie-flower and fuchsia, looked bleak enough now with its row of decapitated cabbage stalks and the straw roofs of its unprotected beehives.

As mother and daughter came up in their springless cart they heard the plash of the mill-wheel and the groan of the mill-stone, and by that they knew that their lord and master was at work within. So they stabled their horse for themselves, tipped up their cart and went into the kitchen—a bare yet clean and cosy place, with earthen floor, open ingle and a hearth fire, over which a kettle hung by a sooty chain.

But hardly had Bessie taken off her coat and hat and sat down to the cup of tea her mother had made her when the throb of the mill-wheel ceased, and Dan Baldromma's heavy step came over the cobbled "street" outside to the kitchen door.

He was a stoutly-built man, short and gross, with heavy black eyebrows, thick and threatening lips, a lowering expression, and a loud and growling voice. Seeing the girl at her meal he went over to the ingle and stood with his back to the fire, and his big hands behind him, while he fell on her with scorching sarcasm.

"Well! Well!" he said. "Back again, I see! And you such a grand woman grown since you were sitting and eating on that seat before. Only sixteen years for Spring, yet sooreying (sweet-hearting) already, I hear! With no wooden-spoon man neither, like your father—your stepfather, I mane! The son and heir of one of the big ones of the island, they're telling me! And yet you're not thinking mane of coming back to the house of a common man like me! Wonderful! Wonderful!"

Bessie felt as if her bread-and-butter were choking her, but Dan, whose impure mind was not satisfied with the effect of his sarcasm, began to lay out at her with a bludgeon.

"You fool!" he said. "You've been mixing yourself up with bad doings on the road, and now a dacent lad is lying at death's door through you, and the High Bailiff is after flinging you out of his house as unfit for his family—that's it, isn't it?"

Bessie had dropped her head on the table, but Mrs. Collister's frightened face was gathering a look of courage.

"Aisy, man veen, aisy," said the mother. "Take care of thy tongue, Dan."

"My tongue?" said Dan. "It's my character I have to take care of, woman. When a girl is carrying a man's name that has no legal claim to it, he has a right to do that, I'm thinking."

"But the girl's only a child—only a child itself, man."

"Maybe so, but I've known girls before now, not much older than she is, to bring disgrace into a dacent house and lave others to live under it. 'What's bred in the bone comes out in the flesh,' they're saying."

The woman flinched as if the lash of a whip had fallen on her face, and Dan turned back to the girl.

"So you're a fine lady that belaves in the aristocracks, are you? Well, I'm a plain man that doesn't, and nobody living in my house can have any truck with them."

"But goodness me, Dan, the boy is not a dale older than herself," said Mrs. Collister. "Nineteen years at the most, and a fine boy at that."

"Chut! Nineteen or ninety, it's all as one to me," said Dan, "and this island will be knowing what sort of boy he is before he has done with it."

The young cubs of the "big ones" began early. They treated the daughters of decent men as their fathers treated everybody—using them, abusing them, and then treading on them like dirt.

"But Manx girl are hot young huzzies," said Dan, "and the half of them ought to be ducked in the mill pond.... What did you expect this one would do for you, girl, after you had been colloquing and cooshing and kissing with him in the dark roads? Marry you? Make you the mistress of Ballamoar? Bessie Corteen, the by-child of Liza Collister? You toot! You booby! You boght! You damned idiot!"

Just then there was the sound of wheels on the road, and Dan walked to the door to look out. It was the Deemster's dog-cart, coming down the glen, with father and son sitting side by side. The women heard the Deemster's steady voice saluting the miller as he went by.

"Fine day, Mr. Collister!"

"Middlin', Dempster, middlin'," said Dan, in a voice that was like a growl. And then, the dog-cart being gone, he faced back to the girl and said, with a bitter snort:

"So that's your man, is it—driving with the Dempster?"

"No, no," said the girl, lifting her face from the table.

"No? Hasn't he been flung out of his college for it—for what came of it, I mane? And isn't the Dempster taking him home in disgrace?"

"It was a mistake—it wasn't the Dempster's son," said Bessie.

"Then who was it?"

There was no reply.

"Who was it?"

"I can't tell you."

"You mean you won't. We'll see about that, though," said Dan, and returning to the fireplace, he took a short, thick leather strap from a nail inside the ingle.

At sight of this the girl got up and began to scream. "Father! Father! Father!"

"Don't father me! Who was it?" said Dan.

The blood was rising in the mother's pallid face. "Collister," she cried, "if thou touch the girl again, I'll walk straight out of thy house."

"Walk, woman! Do as you plaze! But I must know who brought disgrace on my name. Who was it?"

"Don't! Don't! Don't!" cried the girl.

The mother stepped to the door. "Collister," she repeated, "for fourteen years thou's done as thou liked with me, and I've been giving thee lave to do it, but lay another hand on my child..."

"No, no, don't go, mother. I'll tell him," cried the girl. "It was .... it was Alick Gell."

"You mean the son of the Spaker?"

"Yes."

"That's good enough for me," said Dan, and then, with another snort, half bitter and half triumphant, he tossed the strap on to the table, went out of the house and into the stable.

An hour afterwards, in his billycock hat and blue suit of Manx homespun, he was driving his market-cart up the long, straight, shaded lane to the Speaker's ivy-covered mansion-house, with the gravelled courtyard in front of it, in which two or three peacocks strutted and screamed.

III

The Speaker had only just returned from Douglas. There had been a sitting of the Keys that day and he had hurried home to tell his wife an exciting story. It was about the Deemster. The big man was down—going down anyway!

Archibald Gell was a burly, full-bearded man of a high complexion. Although he belonged to what we called the "aristocracy" of the island, the plebeian lay close under his skin. Rumour said he was subject to paralysing brain-storms, and that he could be a foul-mouthed man in his drink. But he was generally calm and nearly always sober.

His ruling passion was a passion for power, and his fiercest lust was a lust of popularity. The Deemster was his only serious rival in either, and therefore the object of his deep and secret jealousy. He was jealous of the Deemster's dignity and influence, but above all (though he had hitherto hidden it even from himself) of his son.

Stooping over the fire in the drawing-room to warm his hands after his long journey, he was talking, with a certain note of self-congratulation, of what he had heard in Douglas. That ugly incident at King William's had come to a head! The Stowell boy had been expelled, and the Deemster had had to drive into town to fetch him home. He, the Speaker, had not seen him there, but Cæsar Qualtrough had. Cæsar was a nasty customer to cross (he had had experience of the man himself), and in the smoking-room at the Keys he had bragged of what he could have done. He could have put the Deemster's son in jail! Yes, ma'am, in jail! If he had had a mind for it young Stowell might have slept at Castle Rushen instead of Ballamoar to-night. And if he hadn't, why hadn't he? Cæsar wouldn't say, but everybody knew—he had a case coming on in the Courts presently!

"Think of it," said the Speaker, "the first Judge in the island in the pocket of a man like that!"

Mrs. Gell, who was a fat, easy-going, good-natured soul, with the gentle eyes of a sheep (her hair was a little disordered at the moment, for she had only just awakened from her afternoon sleep, and was still wearing her morning slippers), began to make excuses.

"But mercy me, Archie," she said, "what does it amount to after all—only a schoolboy squabble?"

"Don't talk nonsense, Bella," said the Speaker. "It may have been a little thing to begin with, but the biggest river that ever plunged into the sea could have been put into a tea-cup somewhere."

This ugly business would go on, until heaven knew what it would come to. The Deemster, who had bought his son's safety from a blackguard without bowels, would never be able to hold up his head again—he, the Speaker never would, he knew that much anyway. As for the boy himself, he was done for. Being expelled from King William's no school or university across the water would want him, and if he ever wished to be admitted to the Manx Bar it would be the duty of his own father to refuse him.

"So that's the end of the big man, Bella—the beginning of the end anyway."

Just then the peacocks screamed in the courtyard—they always screamed when visitors were approaching. Mrs. Gell looked up and the Speaker walked to the window and looked out without seeing anybody. But at the next moment the drawing-room door was thrust open and their eldest daughter, Isabella, with wide eyes and a blank expression was saying breathlessly,

"It's Alick. He has run away from school."

Alick came behind her, a pitiful sight, his college cap in his hand, his face pale, drawn and smudged with sweat, his hair disordered, his clothes covered with dust, and his boots thick with soil.

"What's this she says—that you've run away?" said the Speaker.

"Yes, I have—I told her so myself," said Alick, who was half crying.

"Did you though? And now perhaps you will tell me something—why?"

"Because Stowell had been expelled, and I couldn't stay when he was gone."

"Couldn't you now? And why couldn't you?"

"He was innocent."

"Innocent, was he? Who says he was innocent?"

"I do, Sir, because .... it was I."

It was a sickening moment for the Speaker. He gasped as if something had smitten him in the mouth, and his burly figure almost staggered.

"You did it .... what Stowell was expelled for?" he stammered.

"Yes, Sir," said Alick, and then, still with the tremor of a sob in his voice, he told his story. It was the same that he had told twice before, but with a sequel added. Although he had confessed to the Principal, they had expelled Stowell. Not publicly perhaps, but it had been expelling him all the same. Four days they had kept him in his study, without saying what they meant to do with him. Then this morning, while the boys were at prayers they had heard carriage wheels come up to the door of the Principal's house, and when they came out of Chapel the Study was empty and Stowell was gone.

"And then," said the Speaker (with a certain pomp of contempt now), "without more ado you ran away?"

"Yes, Sir," answered the boy, "by the lavatory window when we were breaking up after breakfast."

"Where did you get the money to travel with?"

"I had no money, Sir. I walked."

"Walked from Castletown? What have you eaten since breakfast?"

"Only what I got on the road, Sir."

"You mean .... begged?"

"I asked at a farm by Foxdale for a glass of milk and the farmer's wife gave me some bread as well, Sir."

"Did she know who you were?"

"She asked me—I had to answer her."

"You told her you were my son?"

"Yes, Sir."

"And perhaps—feeling yourself such a fine fellow, what you were doing there, and why you were running away from school?"

"Yes, Sir."

"You fool! You infernal fool!"

The Speaker had talked himself out of breath and for a moment his wife intervened.

"Alick," she said, "if it was you, as you say, who walked out with the girl, who was she?"

"She was .... a servant girl, mother."

"But who?"

"Tut!" said the Speaker, "what does it matter who? .... You say you confessed to the Principal?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Then if he chose to disregard your confession, and to act on his own judgment, what did it matter to you?"

"It was wrong to expel Stowell for what I had done and I couldn't stand it," said the boy.

"You couldn't stand it! You dunce! If you were younger I should take the whip to you."

The Speaker was feeling the superiority of his son's position, but that only made him the more furious.

"I suppose you know what this running away will mean when people come to hear of it?"

Alick made no answer.

"You've given the story a fine start, it seems, and it won't take long to travel."

Still Alick made no answer.

"Stowell will be the martyr and you'll be the culprit, and that ugly incident of the boy with the broken skull will wear another complexion."

"I don't care about that," cried Alick.

"You don't care!"

"I had to do my duty to my chum, Sir."

"And what about your duty to me, and to your mother and to your sisters? Was it your 'duty' to bring disgrace on all of us?"

Alick dropped his head.

"You shan't do that, though, if I can help it. Go away and wash your dirty face and get something on your stomach. You're going back to Castletown in the morning."

"I won't go back to school, Sir," said Alick.

"Won't you, though? We'll see about that. I'll take you back."

"Then I'll run away again, Sir."

"Where to, you jackass? Not to this house, I promise you."

"I'll get a ship and go to sea, Sir."

"Then get a ship and go to sea, and to hell, too, if you want to. You fool! You damned blockhead!"

After the Speaker had swept the boy from the room, his mother was crying. "Only eighteen years for harvest," she was saying, as if trying to excuse him. And then, as if seeking to fix the blame elsewhere, she added,

"Who was the girl, I wonder?"

"God's sake, woman," cried the Speaker, "what does it matter who she was? Some Castletown huzzy, I suppose."

The peacocks were screaming again; they had been screaming for some time, and the front-door bell had been ringing, but in the hubbub nobody had heard them. But now the parlour-maid came to tell the Speaker that Mr. Daniel Collister of Baldromma was in the porch and asking to see him.

IV

Dan came into the room with his rolling walk, his eyes wild and dark, his billy-cock hat in his hand and his black hair 'strooked' flat across his forehead, where a wet brush had left it.

"Good evening, Mr. Spaker! You too, Mistress Gell! It's the twelfth to-morrow, but I thought I would bring my Hollantide rent to-day."

"Sit down," said the Speaker, who had given him meagre welcome.

Dan drew a chair up to a table, took from the breast pocket of his monkey-jacket a bulging parcel in a red print handkerchief (looking Like a roadman's dinner), untied the knots of it, and disclosed a quantity of gold and silver coins, and a number of Manx bank notes creased and soiled. These he counted out with much deliberation amid a silence like that which comes between thunderclaps—the Speaker, standing by the fireplace, coughing to compose himself, his wife blowing her nose to get rid of her tears, and no other sounds being audible except the nasal breathing of Dan Baldromma, who had hair about his nostrils.

"Count it for yourself; I belave you'll find it right, Sir."

"Quite right. I suppose you'll want a receipt?"

"If you plaze."

The Speaker sat at a small desk, and, as well as he could (for his hand was trembling), he wrote the receipt and handed it across the table.

"And now about my lease," said Dan.

"What about it?" said the Speaker.

"It runs out a year to-day, Sir, and Willie Kerruish, the advocate, was telling me at the Michaelmas mart you were not for renewing it. Do you still hould to that, Mr. Spaker?"

"Certainly I do," said the Speaker. "I don't want to enter into discussions, but I think you'll be the better for another landlord and I for another tenant."

There was another moment of silence, broken only by Dan's nasal breathing, and then he said:

"Mr. Spaker, the Dempster's son has come home in disgrace, they're saying."

"What's that got to do with it?" said the Speaker.

"My daughter has come home in disgrace, too—my wife's daughter, I mane."

Mrs. Gell raised herself in her easy chair. "Was it your girl, then..." she began.

"It was, ma'am. Bessie Corteen—Collister, they're calling her."

"What's all this to me?" said the Speaker.

"She's telling me it's a mistake about the Dempster's son, Sir. It was somebody else's lad did the mischief."

"I see you are well informed," said the Speaker. "Well, what of it?"

"Cæsar Qualtrough might have prosecuted but he didn't, out of respect for the Dempster," said Dan.

"So they say," said the Speaker.

"But if somebody gave him a scute into the truth he mightn't be so lenient with another man—one other anyway."

The Speaker was silent.

"There have been bits of breezes in the Kays, they're telling me."

Still the Speaker was silent.

"Cæsar and me were middling well acquaint when I was milling at Ballabeg and he was hutching at Port St. Mary—in fact we were same as brothers."

"I see what you mean to do, Mr. Collister," said the Speaker, "but you can save yourself the trouble. My lad is in this house now if you want to know, but I'm sending him to sea, and before you can get to Castletown he will have left the island."

"And what will the island say to that, Sir?" said Dan. "That Archibald Gell, Spaker of the Kays, chairman of everything, and the biggest man going, barring the Dempster, has had to send his son away to save him from the lock-up."

The Speaker took two threatening strides forward, and Dan rose to his feet. There was silence again as the two men stood face to face, but this time it was broken by the Speaker's breathing also. Then he turned aside and said, with a shamefaced look:

"I'll hear what Kerruish has to say. I have to see him in the morning."

"I lave it with you, Sir; I lave it with you," said Dan.

"Good-day, Mr. Collister."

"Good-day to you, Mr. Spaker! And you, too, Mistress Gell!" said Dan. But having reached the door of the room he stopped and added:

"There's one thing more, though. If my girl is to live with me she must work for her meat, and there must be no more sooreying."

"That will be all right—I know my son," said the Speaker.

"And I know my step-daughter," said Dan. "These things go on. A rolling snowball doesn't get much smaller. Maybe that Captain out of Ireland isn't gone from the island yet—his spirit, I mane. Keep your lad away from Baldromma. It will be best, I promise you."

Then the peacocks in the courtyard screamed again and the jolting of a springless cart was heard going over the gravel. The two in the drawing-room listened until the sound of the wheels had died away in the lane to the high road, and then the Speaker said:

"That's what comes of having children! We thought it bad for the Deemster to be in the pocket of a man like Cæsar Qualtrough, but to be under the harrow of Dan Baldromma!"

"Aw, dear! Aw, dear!" said Mrs. Gell.

"He was right about Alick going to sea, though," said the Speaker, and, touching the bell for the parlour-maid, he told her to tell his son to come back to him.

Alick was in the dining-room by this time, washed and brushed and doing his best to drink a pot of tea and eat a plate of bread-and-butter, amid the remonstrances of his three sisters, who, seeing events from their own point of view, were rating him roundly on associating with a servant.

"I wonder you hadn't more respect for your sisters?" said Isabella.

"What are people to think of us—Fenella Stanley, for instance?" said Adelaide.

"I declare I shall be ashamed to show my face in Government House again," said Verbena.

"Oh, shut up and let a fellow eat," said Alick, and then something about "first-class flunkeys."

But at that moment the parlour-maid came with his father's message and he had to return to the drawing-room.

"On second thoughts," said the Speaker, "we have decided that you are not to go to sea. We have only one son, and I suppose we must do our best with him. You haven't brains enough for building, so, if you are not to go back to school, you must stay on the land and learn to look after these farms in Andreas."

"I'll do my best to please you, Sir," said Alick.

"But listen to this," said the Speaker, "Dan Baldromma has been here, and we know who the girl was. There is to be no more mischief in that quarter. You must never see her or hear from her again as long as you live—is it a promise?"

"Yes, Sir," said Alick, and he meant to keep it.