even the courage, here and now, to throw me out.
I believe, however, that upon a confessed breach of
the law—supported by evidence, if necessary—I
can force you to try me. The Clerk will correct
me if I am wrong. . . . Apparently he assents.
Then I desire to confess to you that yesterday, at
such-and-such an hour, I broke your laws or bye-laws
of Lord’s Day Observance; by bathing in the
sea for my pleasure. I demand trial on this charge,
and, if you convict me—here you can hardly
help yourselves, since to my knowledge some of you
witnessed the offence—I demand my due punishment
of the stocks.”
“Really—really, Captain Vyell!”
hemm’d the Chief Magistrate. “Passing
over your derogatory language, I am at a loss to understand—”
“Are you? Yet it is very simple.
Since you reject my plea for this poor creature,
I desire to share her punishment.”
“Let him,” snapped the mouth of Mr. Trask
again, opening and shutting like a trap.
“You at any rate, sir, have sense,”
the Collector felicitated him and turned to the Chief
Magistrate. “And you, sir, if you will
oblige me, may rest assured that I shall bear the
magistracy of Port Nassau no grudge whatever.”
THE STOCKS.
In the end they came to a compromise. That Dame
Justice should be hustled in this fashion—taken
by the shoulders, so to speak, forced to catch up
her robe and skip—offended the Chief Magistrate’s
sense of propriety. It was unseemly in the last
degree, he protested. Nevertheless it appeared
certain that Captain Vyell had a right to be tried
and punished; and the Clerk’s threat to set down
the hearing for an adjourned sessions was promptly
countered by the culprit’s producing His Majesty’s
Commission, which enjoined upon all and sundry “to
observe the welfare of my faithful subject, Oliver
John Dinham de Courcy Vyell, now travelling on the
business of this my Realm, and to further that business
with all zeal and expedition as required by him”—a
command which might be all the more strictly construed
for being loosely worded. To be sure the Court
might by dilatory process linger out the hearing of
the Weights and Measures cases—one of which
was being scandalously interrupted at this moment—or
it might adjourn for dinner and reassemble in the
afternoon, by which time the sands of Ruth Josselin’s
five hours’ ignominy would be running out.
But here Mr. Somershall had to be reckoned with.
Mr. Somershall not only made it a practice to sit
long at dinner and sleep after it; he invariably lost
his temper if the dinner-hour were delayed; and, being
deaf as well as honest, he was capable of blurting
out his mind in a fashion to confound either of these
disingenuous courses. As for Mr. Wapshott, the
wording of the Commission had frightened him, and
he wished himself at home.
