"Here he is, boy! What do you think of him?"
Almost before the boats could be brought to their moorings the fishermen had leapt ashore in their long boots and gone off home with their wives, laughing and talking.
Morrison had not gone. His wife had not been down to meet him. Somebody had shouted from the quay that she was still keeping her bed and was waiting at home for him. But he had been in no hurry to go to her. When everything was quiet he had shouldered his boat to the top of the harbour, unstepped her mast, and run her ashore on the dry bank above the bridge.
Then going back to the quay, which was now deserted, he had broken the padlock of an open yard for ship's stores, taken possession of a barrel of pitch, rolled it down to the bank by the bridge, fixed it under his boat, pulled out its plug, applied a match to it, and then waited until both barrel and boat were afire and burning fiercely.
After that he had walked home through the little sleeping town to his house in the middle of a cobweb of streets at the back of the beach. Opening the door (it had been left on the latch for him) he had bolted it on the inside, and then going to the bedroom and finding his young wife in bed, with a frightened look under a timid smile, he had charged her with her unchastity, compelled her to confess to it, and then strangled her to death with his big hands—the marks of his broad thumbs, black with tar, being on her throat and bosom.
In the middle of the night the fishermen who lived in the streets nearest to the harbour, awakened by a red glow in their bedrooms, had said to their wives:
"What for are they burning the gorse on Peel hill at this time of the year?"
But others, who were neighbours of Morrison's, having heard cries from his house in the night, had gathered in front of his door in the morning, and, getting no answer to their knocking, had burst it open and found the woman lying dead on the bed and the man huddled up on the floor at the foot of it. And when they had pushed him and roused him he had lifted his haggard face and said,
"I've killed my sweetheart."
Such was the fisherman's story, and when the defence had concluded their case, asking for an acquittal on the ground of unbearable moral provocation, and saying that never could there have been better grounds for the application of the unwritten law, the Jury was obviously impressed, and somebody at the back of the court was saying,