Back at Ballamoar, Stowell found the Deemster's clerk waiting for him.
It had taken Joshua three days to see Deemster Taubman, and when at length he was admitted to the big man's presence he had found him in bed, with his shaggy head and unshaven face on the pillow and his lower extremities through the legs of a cane-bottomed chair which supported his bed-clothes.
"What? What's that?" he had roared. "Sit at the General Gaol? Go back to your master and tell him I'm lying here in the tortures of the damned, not able to put a foot to the ground."
Stowell drew a long breath. Fate had spoken its last word! It was now certain that he must sit on the case of Bessie Collister.
His spirits rose and he began to see things more clearly. Had he not exaggerated his own importance in this affair? He had been thinking of his part in the forthcoming trial as if the issue of Bessie's fate depended upon him. But not so. It depended upon the Jury. Guilty or not Guilty,—he had nothing to do with that. Therefore, in the deeper sense, Bessie would not be tried by him at all. Why had he been frightening himself?
Had a Judge, then, no power, no voice, no influence? Thank God, yes! It was for the Judge to direct the jury on questions of law, to see that they had a right understanding of it and that their verdict corresponded with the evidence. What an important function—especially in a case like this! What a mercy old Taubman was unable to sit on it!
He thought again of Bessie's position. Pitiful, most pitiful! But the law was no Juggernaut, intended to crush the life out of a poor unfortunate girl. Mercifully administered it was rather her Sanctuary to which she might fly for refuge. And it should be mercifully administered.
Why not? Good heavens, why not? What wrong would it be to temper Justice with mercy—even to strain the law a little in the prisoner's favour? No one but himself would know. And if it were suspected that he was showing favour to the prisoner, people would consider him deserving of praise rather than censure for trying to snatch a young and helpless creature from the clutches of a cruel old Statute.
Besides, was it not one of the higher traditions of the bench that the Judge was first Counsel for the accused? Judges had not always acted on that principle. Some of them, in times past, had hunted their wretched prisoners gallowswards with gibes. Taubman was still like that. He thought sympathy with such women as Bessie Collister was sentimental weakness, that to deal mercifully with them was to encourage them, and thereby do a wrong to public morality.
"God bless me, yes! I know Taubman," he told himself.