CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE TRIAL
For a good hour before the arrival of the Deemster, Castle Rushen had been full of activity. In the Court-house itself, warm with sunshine from the lantern light, Robbie Stephen, the chief Coroner of the island, who looked like a shaggy old sheep-dog, had been selecting candidates for the Jury-box.
Seventy-two of them had been summoned, six from each of twelve parishes, and now he was reducing the number to thirty-two, twelve for the Jury and twenty more to meet the contingency of arbitrary challenging.
Everybody claimed exemption, but the Coroner listened to none. Standing back to the empty bench, swelling with importance and with his seventy-two men huddled together like sheep at one side of the chamber, he called them out at his discretion and with a wave of the hand passed them over to the other side to wait for the trial.
"Now, then, Willie Kinnish, thou'rt a good man; over with thee." "No, no, Mr. Stephen, you must excuse me to-day, Sir." "Tut, tut! You Maughold men haven't served on a jury these seven years." "But I have fifty head of sheep going to Ramsey mart this morning, and what's to pay my half year's rent if I'm not there to sell them?" "Chut, man! Lave that to herself. She's thy better half, isn't she?"
Meantime, in the chill corridors underground the jailer and his turnkey were rattling their keys, opening the doors of the cells and shouting to the prisoners to make ready for the Court.
"Patrick Kelly! Charles Quiggin! Nancy Kegeen! John Corlett! Cæsar Crow! Robert Quine! Elizabeth Corteen!"
Hearing her name called, Bessie, having no fear, got up from her plank bed, and when Mrs. Mylrea, the woman warder, with her short, loud, difficult breathing, brought back her cloak and fur hat, she put them on leisurely.
"Quick, girl!" said the warder. "You don't want to keep the Dempster waiting, do you?"
Bessie laughed, but made no answer. At the next moment she was in the darkness of the corridor, walking at the end of a short procession of other prisoners, and at the next she was drawn up, with her prison companions, into the blinding sunlight of a little paved quadrangle which was surrounded by high walls and had the sound of the sea coming down into it from the free world outside.