The mansion house, in the Deemster's day, was a ramshackle old place which bore signs of having been altered and added to by many generations of his family. It stood back to the sea and facing a broad and undulating lawn, which was bordered by lofty elms that were inhabited by undisturbed colonies of rooks. From a terrace behind, opening out of the dining-room, there was a far view on clear days of the Mull of Galloway to the north, and of the Morne Mountains to the west. People used to say—
"The Stowells have caught a smatch of the Irish and the Scotch in their Manx blood."
The Deemster was sixty years of age at that time. A large, spare man with an almost Jovian white head, clean-shaven face, powerful yet melancholy eyes, bold yet sensitive features and long yet delicate hands—a strong, silent, dignified, rather solemn personality.
He was a man of the highest integrity. Occupying an office too often associated, in his time, with various forms of corruption, the breath of scandal never touched him. He was a legislator, as well as a Judge, being ex officio a member of the little Manx Parliament, but in his double capacity (so liable to abuse) nobody with a doubtful scheme would have dared to approach him.
"What does the old Deemster say?"—the answer to that question often settled a dispute, for nobody thought of appealing against his judgment.
"Justice is the strongest and most sacred thing on earth"—that was his motto, and he lived up to it.
His private life had been saddened by a great sorrow. He married, rather late in life, a young Englishwoman, out of Cumberland—a gentle creature with a kind of moonlight beauty. She died four or five years afterwards and the Manx people knew little about her. To the last they called her the "Stranger."
The Deemster bore his loss in characteristic silence. Nobody intruded on his sorrow, or even entered his house, but on the day of the funeral half "the north" lined the long grass-grown road from the back gates of Ballamoar to the little wind-swept churchyard over against the sea. He thanked none of them and saluted none, but his head was low as his coach passed through.
Next day he took his Court as usual, and from that day onward nobody saw any difference in him. But long afterwards, Janet Curphey, the lady housekeeper at Ballamoar, was heard to say in the village post-office, which was also the grocer's shop, that every morning after breakfast the Deemster had put a vase of fresh-cut flowers on the writing-desk in his library under his young wife's portrait, until it was now a white-haired man who was making his daily offering to the picture of a young woman.
"Aw, yes, Mrs. Clucas, yes! And what did it matter to the woman to be a stranger when she was loved like that?"