"I have much to go through yet. You, too, Fenella."
But well she knew that the victory had been won, that the resurrection of his soul bad already begun, that he would rise again on that same soil on which he had so sadly fallen, that shining like a star before his brightening eyes was the vision of a far greater and nobler life than the one that lay in ruins behind him, and that she, she herself, would be always by his side—to "ring the morning bell for him."
The herring shoal, which in the early summer comes down from Norway to the western coast of Man, drifts eastward as the year advances, past the Calf Island, the Sound and the Spanish Head, with their deafening clamour of ten thousand sea-fowl, to where the big waves of the Atlantic roll to their organ music, and the porpoises tumble through the blue waters of the Channel on their way back to the frozen seas.
In the late autumn of the year of Victor Stowell's trial and imprisonment the fishermen from Ramsey and Douglas, going south to their fishing ground in the evening of the day, would find as they sailed past Castletown, and opened the Poolvaish, that the sun had set behind Castle Rushen and its square tower stood up black against the crimsoning sky.
Then they would go down on their knees on the decks of their boats, just as in old days they used to do after they had shot their nets at night, to acknowledge their Maker, and pray, in their Manx, to St. Bridget and St. Patrick to send them safely home in the morning with a full cargo of "the living and the dead."
But it was not the harvest of the sea they were thinking of then. It was of the two who lay interned within the walls of the grim fortress—the man who had voluntarily made the great Sacrifice for his sin, and the woman, who in the greatness of her love was living out his punishment beside him.
In my early manhood I used to hear old Methodist fishermen say that when they rose from their knees, after their rough hands had been held close over their eyes, and looked back at the Castle, they would sometimes see a golden cross plainly outlined in the sky above it.
Perhaps it was only another of their Manx superstitions, but it seemed to bring a certain inspiration to their simple hearts for all that, by reminding them of a story which resembled (very remotely and feebly) the great one which they told each other every Sunday in their little wayside chapels—the story of Him Who "gave the world away and died."
"He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty...."