He snatched up his cap—a different man in a moment.
"I must get back to town now. I have the witnesses to arrange for. Not too many of them unfortunately. There's the mother, she's all right, but not likely to be good in the box. I'm not calling the step-father. It seems he's giving the case away in the glen. The damned old blackguard! I should like to break his ugly neck. I jolly well will, too, one of these days. But Bessie will clear herself. Since she's going to be my wife she must leave the Court without a stain. Good-bye and God bless you, old chap! .... No, no, don't come to the door." (Stowell was for seeing him out.) "Take care of yourself. Good men are scarce. And then you've got to be fit for the Court, you know. By-bye!"
Stowell watched him from the window as he rode down the drive on his tired horse, patting its neck and encouraging it with cheery cries.
Now he understood why Bessie had held off while Gell had wished to marry her. It had been a case of the wife of the Peel fisherman over again, with the difference that Bessie (to avoid the danger of deceiving her husband) had made away with her child before marriage instead of after it. Wild, foolish, frantic scheme! Yet what courage! What strength! What affection!
But if, under Taubman's searching questions, the conspiracy of love should fail, and Bessie's defence should collapse, and Gell should see that she had deceived him, and that he too....
No, no, that must not be! After all, what outrage on Justice would it be to keep a case like this out of the hands of a cold-blooded inhuman legal machine who would commit more crime than he punished?
Still standing by the window, Stowell heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs on the high road. Gell, in high spirits, was galloping home.
IV
Later in the day Stowell was alone in the library reading the Depositions. In his secret heart he knew that a wicked temptation had come to him—the temptation to get Bessie off, and to stop the flood of evil which would surely follow if Deemster Taubman tried her and she were condemned. But all the same he was struggling to drown his qualms in contempt of the case against her.
How little there was to it! The direct evidence was almost childish. The medical testimony was the only thing of consequence, but how sloppy, how inconclusive! Was there anything against Bessie which he, if he had been the advocate for the defence, could not have riddled with as many holes as there were in a cullender? Then why shouldn't he sit on her case?