For the better prosecution of their profession, as well as to remove the sense of rivalry, they took chambers in different towns, Stowell in Old Post Office Place in Ramsey, and Gell in Preaching House Lane in Douglas—-two outer rooms each for offices and two inner ones for residential apartments.
But having ordered their furniture and desks, inscribed their names in brass on their door-posts ("VICTOR STOWELL, Advocate"), engaged junior assistants to sit on high stools and take the names of the clients who might call, and arranged for sleeping-out housekeepers to attend to their domestic necessities (Victor's was a comfortable elderly body, Mrs. Quayle, once a servant of his mother's at Ballamoar, afterwards married to a fisherman, and then left a widow, like so many of her class, when our hungry sea had claimed her man), they made no attempt to practise, being too well off to take the cases of petty larceny and minor misdemeanour which usually fall to the High Bailiff's Court, and nobody offering them the cases proper to the Deemster's.
Those were the days of Bar dinners (social functions much in favour with our unbriefed advocates), and one such function was held in honour of the returned travellers. At this dinner Stowell, being the principal speaker, gave a racy account of the worlds they had wandered through, not forgetting the world of women—the sleepy daintiness of the Japanese, the warm comeliness of the Italian, the vivacious loveliness of the French, and above all, the frank splendour of the American women, with their free step, their upturned faces and their conquering eyes.
That was felt by various young Manxmen to be a feast that could be partaken of more than once, so a club was straightway founded for the furtherance of such studies. It met once a week at Mount Murray, an old house a few miles out of Douglas, in the middle of a forest of oak and pine trees, now an inn, but formerly the home of a branch of the Athols, when they were the Lords of Man, and kept a swashbuckler court of half-pay officers who had come to end their days on the island because the living and liquor were cheap.
One room of this house, the dining-room, still remained as it used to be when the old bloods routed and shouted there, though its coat-of-arms was now discoloured by damp and its table was as worm-eaten as their coffins must have been. And here it was that the young bloods of the "Ellan Vannin" (the Isle of Man) held their weekly revel—riding out in the early evening on their hired horses, twenty or thirty together, sitting late over their cups and pipes, and (the last toast drunk and the last story told) breaking up in the dark of the morning, stumbling out to the front, where a line of lanterns would be lining the path, the horses champing the gravel and the sleepy stable-boys chewing their quids to keep themselves awake, and then leaping into their saddles, singing their last song at the full bellows of their lungs in the wide clearing of the firs to the wondering sky, and galloping home, like so many Gilpins (as many of them as were sober enough to get there at the same time as their mounts) and clattering up the steep and stony streets of Douglas to the scandal of its awakened inhabitants.
Victor Stowell was president of the "Ellan Vannin," and in that character he made one contribution to its dare-devil jollity, which terminated its existence and led to other consequences more material to this story.
II
In his heavy days at Ballamoar, before he went abroad, his father's house had been like a dam to which the troubled waters of the island flowed—the little jealousies and envies of the island community, the bickerings of church and chapel, of town and country, of town and town, not to speak of the darker maelstrom of more unworthy quarrels. While the Deemster had moved through all this with his calm dignity as the great mediator, the great pacifier, Victor with his quick brain and wounded heart had stood by, seeing all and saying nothing. But now, making a call upon his memory, for the amusement of his fellow clubmen, out of sheer high spirits and with no thought of evil, he composed a number of four-line "Limericks" on the big-wigs of the island.
Such scorching irony and biting satire had never been heard in the island before. If any pompous or hypocritical person (by preference a parson, a local preacher, a High Bailiff or a Key) had a dark secret, which he would have given his soul's salvation not to have disclosed, it was held up, under some thin disguise, to withering ridicule.
A long series of these reckless lampoons Victor fired off weekly over the worm-eaten table at Mount Murray, to the delirious delight of the clubmen, who, learning them by heart, carried them to their little world outside, with the result that they ran over the island like a fiery cross and set the Manx people aroar with laughter.