The Deemster. Hall Sir Caine
– sometimes with too great indulgence – to the weaker side, but they supposed faith in the people by allowing a voluntary oath as evidence, and this made false swearing a terror. Except in the degree of superstition, he encouraged belief in all its forms. He trusted an oath implicitly, but no man ever heard him gainsay his yea or nay.
A hoary old dog known as Billy the Gawk, who had never worked within living memory, who lived, as they said, "on the houses," and frequented the pot-house with more than the regularity of religious observance, was not long in finding out that Bishop's Court had awakened from its protracted sleep. The Bishop had been abroad for his morning's ramble, and sitting on the sunny side of a high turf hedge looking vacantly out to sea, he heard footsteps on the road behind him, and then a dialogue, of which this is a brief summary:
"Going up to the Coort, eh? Ah, well, it's plenty that's there to take the edge off your stomach; plenty, plenty, and a rael welcome too."
"Ah, it's not the stomach that's bothering me. It's the narves, boy – the narves – and a drop of the rael stuff is worth a Jew's eye for studdying a man after a night of it, as the saying is."
"Aw, Billy, Billy – aw well, well, well."
The conversation died off on the Bishop's ear in a loud roystering laugh and a low gurgle as undertone.
Half an hour later Billy the Gawk stood before the Bishop inside the gates of Bishop's Court. The old dog's head hung low, his battered hat was over his eyes, and both his trembling hands leaned heavily on his thick blackthorn stick.
"And how do you live, my man?" asked the Bishop.
"I'm getting a bite here, and a sup there, and I've had terrible little but a bit o' barley bread since yesterday morning," said the Gawk.
"Poor man, that's hard fare," said the Bishop; "but mind you call here every day for the future."
Billy got a measure of corn worth sixpence, and went straightway to the village, where he sold it at the pot-house for as much liquor as could have been bought for three-halfpence. And as Billy the Gawk drank his drop of the real stuff he laughed very loud and boasted that he could outwit the Bishop. But the liquor got into his head, and from laughing he went on to swearing, and thence to fighting, until the innkeeper turned him out into the road, where, under the weight of his measure of corn taken in solution, Billy sank into a dead slumber. The Bishop chanced to take an evening walk that day, and he found his poor penisioner, who fared hard, lodged on a harder bed, and he had him picked up and carried into the house. Next morning, when Billy awoke and found where he was, and remembered what had occurred, an unaccustomed sensation took possession of him, and he stole away unobserved. The hoary old dog was never seen again at Bishop's Court.
But if Billy never came again his kith and kin came frequently. It became a jest that the Bishop kept the beggars from every house but his own, and that no one else could get a beggar.
He had a book, which he called his "Matricula Pauperum," in which he entered the names of his pensioners with notes of their circumstances. He knew all the bits of family history – when Jemmy Corkell's wife was down with lumbago, and when Robbie Quirk was to kill his little pig.
Billy the Gawk was not alone in thinking that he could outwit the Bishop. When the Bishop wanted a new pair of boots or a new coat, the tailor or shoemaker came to Bishop's Court, and was kept there until his job of work was finished. The first winter after his arrival in his Patmos, he wanted a cloak, and sent for Jabez Gawne, the sleek little fox who had been spokesman for the conspirators against James Quirk, the schoolmaster. Jabez had cut out the cloak, and was preparing it for a truly gorgeous adornment, when the Bishop ordered him to put merely a button and a loop on it to keep it together. Jabez thereupon dropped his cloth and held up his hands where he sat cross-legged on the kitchen dresser, and exclaimed, with every accent of aggrieved surprise:
"My Lord, what would become of the poor buttonmakers and their families if every one ordered his tailor in that way?"
"How so, Jabez?"
"Why, they would be starved outright."
"Do you say so, Jabez?"
"Yes, my Lord, I do."
"Then button it all over, Jabez," said the Bishop.
The Deemster was present at that interview, and went away from it tittering audibly.
"Give to the raven and he'll come again," he muttered.
"I forgot that poor Jabez would have his buttons in his breeches-pocket," said the Bishop.
The Manxman had not yet made up his mind concerning the composite character of Bishop Mylrea, his dignity and his humility, his reserve and his simplicity, when a great event settled for the Manxman's heart the problem that had been too much for his head. This was no less a catastrophe than a general famine. It came upon the island in the second year of the Bishop's residence, and was the cause of many changes. One of the changes was that the Bishop came to be regarded by his people with the reverence of Israel for Samuel, and by his brother, the Deemster, with the distrust, envy, and, at length, mingled fear and hatred of Saul for Israel's prophet.
The land of the island had been held under a tenure of straw, known as the three-lives' tenure; the third life was everywhere running out, and the farms were reverting to the Lord of the Isle. This disheartened the farmers, who lost all interest in agriculture, let their lands lie fallow, and turned to the only other industry in which they had an interest, the herring fishing. The herrings failed this season, and without fish, with empty barns, and a scant potato crop, caused by a long summer of drought, the people were reduced to poverty.
Then the Bishop opened wider the gates of Bishop's Court, which since his coming had never been closed. Heaven seemed to have given him a special blessing. The drought had parched up the grass even of the damp Curragh, and left bleached on the whitening mold the poor, thin, dwarfed corn, that could never be reaped. But the glebe of Bishop's Court gave fair crops, and when the people cried in the grip of their necessity the Bishop sent round a pastoral letter to his clergy, saying that he had eight hundred bushels of wheat, barley, and oats more than his household required. Then there came from the north and the south, the east and the west, long, straggling troops of buyers with little or no money to buy, and Bishop's Court was turned into a public market. The Bishop sold to those who had money at the price that corn fetched before the famine, and in his barn behind the house he kept a chest for those who came in at the back with nothing but a sack in their hands. Once a day he inspected the chest, and when it was low, which was frequently, he replenished it, and when it was high, which was rarely, he smiled, and said that God was turning away his displeasure from his people.
The eight hundred bushels were at an end in a month, and still the famine continued. Then the Bishop bought eight hundred other bushels: wheat at ten shillings, barley at six shillings, and oats at four shillings, and sold them at half these prices. He gave orders that the bushel of the poor man was not to be stroked, but left in heaped-up measure.
A second month went by; the second eight hundred bushels were consumed, and the famine showed no abatement. The Bishop waited for vessels from Liverpool, but no vessels came. He was a poor priest, with a great title, and he had little money; but he wrote to England asking for a thousand bushels of grain and five hundred kischen of potatoes, and promised to pay at six days after the next annual revenue. A week of weary waiting ensued, and every day the Bishop cheered the haggard folk that came to Bishop's Court with accounts of the provisions that were coming; and every day they went up on to the head of the hill, and strained their bleared eyes seaward for the sails of an English ship. When patience was worn to despair, the old "King Orry" brought the Bishop a letter saying that the drought had been general, that the famine was felt throughout the kingdom, and that an embargo had been put on all food to forbid traders to send it from English shores. Then the voice of the hungry multitudes went up in one deep cry of pain. "The hunger is on us," they moaned. "Poor once, poor forever," they muttered; and the voice of the Bishop was silent.
Just at that moment a further disaster threatened the people. Their cattle, which they could not sell, they had grazed on the mountains, and the milk of the cows had been the chief food of the children, and the wool of the sheep the only clothing of their old men. With parched meadows and Curraghs, where the