The Master of Man: The Story of a Sin

by Sir Hall Caine

That woman, looking so much older, with pallid cheeks sucked in by suffering, could she be the same? All the barrage he had built up for the protection of his position as Judge seemed to have gone down at the first sight of the girl's face. What a scoundrel he had been!

From that moment a whirl of confused emotions had held possession of him. When the time came to charge the prisoner he had felt as if he were reading out his own indictment. And when she had looked up fearlessly into his face and pleaded Not Guilty it was the same as if she were accusing himself.

After that he had a sense of acting as a detached person. In a strange voice, which did not seem to be his own, he heard himself asking the Attorney-General which case he wished to take first. The Attorney answered, "The murder case," and after the Clerk of the Rolls had read out the names of the jurymen, and they had taken their places in the jury-box, he heard himself, in the same strange voice, swearing them on the holy evangelists to "a true verdict give, according to the evidence and the laws of this isle."

When he turned his eyes back, Bessie was alone in the dock, save for the woman warder (with blue lips and a look of suffering) who sat at the farther end of it. She was still looking fearlessly up at him, and in front of her sat two others whose eyes were also fixed on his face—Alick Gell and Fenella. At that sight a terrible feeling took hold of him—that these three were the real judges in this trial and he was the prisoner at the bar.

He did not recover from the shock of this feeling until the Attorney-General began on the prosecution.

The Attorney, usually so kindly, was bitterly severe. The time had gone by when it could be said with truth that crime was practically unknown in the Isle of Man. Here, as elsewhere, crimes of all kinds were only too common, and not least common was the crime of infanticide.

The present case was one of peculiar atrocity. The prisoner was a young woman who might be said, not uncharitably, to have inherited a lawless disposition. After a reckless girlhood she had disappeared from her home, for no apparent reason, rather less than a year ago and remained away (nobody knew where or in what company) until a few weeks ago. She had then been ill and was put to bed in a condition which gave only too much reason for the belief that she was about to become a mother. That was on the fifth of April and two days later the body of a new-born infant had been found in a remote place, wrapped up and hidden away.

It would be established by witnesses that the infant had been born alive, that it had died by suffocation, and that the prisoner (incredible as it might appear) had been seen to bury it.

"Such," said the Attorney-General, "are the facts of this most unhappy case, and though the prisoner pleads Not Guilty, the evidence which I shall now call will leave no doubt that the child was her child and that it died by her hands. Therefore I ask (as well for the sake of humanity as for the good name of this island) that the Jury shall give such a verdict against the prisoner as will act as a deterrent on the heartless women, unworthy of the name of mothers, who, to save themselves from the just consequences of their evil conduct, are taking the innocent lives which under God they gave."

There had been a tense atmosphere in the Court-house during the Attorney-General's speech, and when it was over there were half-suppressed murmurs, hostile to the prisoner.