Three days later, Fenella set out for Bishop's Court in a two-horse landau.
The island had begun to recover from its fit of moral intoxication. Sympathy was swinging round to Stowell. The pathos of his stupendous downfall had taken hold of the people. Taubman had been wrong. Nobody would have known anything of Stowell's guilt if he had not revealed it himself. There must be something great in a man who could take up his cross like that. And as for that wonderful woman who might be living in Government House but was living in Castle Rushen instead....
As Fenella, in her nurse's costume, drove through the town some of the women curtsied to her, and most of the men raised their hats. She returned the salutations of none.
"So that's how they expect to wipe out what they did to Victor! Not if I know it though!"
Two hours afterwards she was at the Bishop's palace—a somewhat palatial place, partly old, partly new, sleeping in the shelter of big trees and surrounded by a blaze of rhododendrons.
The Bishop, in his dapper black clothes, received her in a room in the old part of the house. It had been the study of the most famous of his predecessors, the fanatic and saint who had ordered that Kate Kinrade, for the saving of her soul, should be dragged at the tail of a boat. Souvenirs of the dead Bishop were on the walls and tables—his portrait, his Bible, his short crozier, his tasselled staff, and his horn-rimmed spectacles.
The living Bishop was suave and voluble. He congratulated Fenella on looking so well after so much trouble.
"Such a calamity! I might almost say such a tragedy! How the island will miss him!"
He agreed with the Attorney-General. Stowell's act had been one of renunciation. When a man had sinned against God, and violated the world's law, he set a great example by submitting to authority.
"God forbid that I should excuse his crime, but already his renunciation is having a good effect throughout the island. The rioting is over. The soldiers are being sent back, and as for the agitators nobody listens to them any longer. Only this morning the man Baldromma...."