God and the Wedding Dress

by Marjorie Bowen

“You knitted that for me, Bessie, do you remember? And now it’s filled with my old uncle’s gold and we’ll make merry on it.”

  Remorse overcame the young girl, even in her delight. She said:

  “Jack, nothing will ever be the same as it was. It has been horrible here. You know, thirty-one people have died, and I can’t help thinking it was the plague that came in my wedding dress!”

  The young man laughed loudly.

  “Why, that’s an old wives’ tale. The plague doesn’t come like that! The physicians will tell you that one infected person must bring it. It cannot come in a box of clothes!” And he guffawed as if at a good joke. And although Bessie was not wholly reassured, she could not help being pleased and felt her spirits rise at his buoyant good-humour and easy self-confidence.

  Then he asked her about the progress of the disease and how many deaths there had been in the last month? When she said ‘none’ he laughed again and said what were thirty-one people after all? As many often died in the winter, of some wasting sickness or chills, or the pox, or the fever. And when he put the matter like that it was not such a grave thing after all, and that shut up here in Eyam they had made too much of the disaster.

  He would have kept her with him all the evening, he said he had been starved of her too long, and he wanted her to sit beside him on the settle and gaze into the flames with him and make plans and pictures for their future.

  But Bessie said no, she must return to the Rectory and let them know that he had returned. If the wedding was really to be at Easter, there were many preparations to be made.

  “Though never again, Jack, shall I have such extravagance and vanity.”

  So the two young people walked under the rising moon the short distance from the old Manor Hall to the Rectory. And there Jack Corbyn’s reception was such as greatly to satisfy his vanity. For Kate was nearly as excited and pleased to see him as Bessie had been, and if the Rector had any reproaches to make he kept them to himself and gave the young man a kindly welcome.

  They all sat down to supper together and Ann Trickett brought out some of the home-made wine, the silver fruit basket and the fine white cloth from Holland that Lady Savile had given Kate when she had been a bride. While Bessie ran up to her little room and, taking off her plain winter clothes that she had paid so little attention to for some time now, put on a dress of saffron yellow silk with a long, deep collar of falling lace.

  They all laughed and talked round the Rectory table. And the children were brought in before they went to bed, and Jack Corbyn wanted to give them a gold-piece each from the blue knitted silk purse, but the Rector interfered and said they were too young to know the value of money.

  Ann Trickett took them to their beds and the two young men and the two young women sat in the pleasant firelight talking of the future.

  And as they ran over the events that had occurred since they had last met, talking of this person and that who were common acquaintances, the name of Thomas Stanley came uppermost, and the Rector mentioned that he had not seen him since the outbreak of the plague. He added that he was truly pleased about this, because the man had interfered with his parishioners; though no doubt well-meaning, the dissenter was far too presumptuous and censorious.

  Jack Corbyn looked up quickly at this name; the Rector knew that he was thinking of the night of St. Helen’s Wake when Thomas Stanley had rebuked him so sternly. It was not out of forgetfulness or awkwardness that the Rector had brought in the dissenter’s name, but deliberately, because he wanted the young man to remember that evening. However smooth his outward demeanour, he was not wholly pleased with young Corbyn, nor wholly satisfied with his conduct. He hoped that he had not returned lightly, merely to hurt Bessie again, and he intended to have a stern conversation with him when he should get him alone.

  But Jack gave his host a straight and rather curious look as he said:

  “Of course, sir, you haven’t seen Stanley. This meddling and canting Nonconformist dog has been in Derby Gaol for the last two months. I think he only came out a few days ago.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” said the Rector, “I did my best to keep him from punishment, but he would contravene the law. Who informed against him? Who had him arrested?”

  Jack laughed.

  “How do I know. He was caught preaching. I wonder you haven’t heard of it!”

  “We have been much shut in upon ourselves,” replied Mr. Mompesson, “holding little communication with the outside world.”

  “I am sorry,” said Kate. The two women had been downcast at the news of the Nonconformist’s arrest, and Bessie said: “Do you know what happened to his gray horse, Merriman?”

  “No. I was surprised to hear he had a horse, for he had to sell it to pay his tithe last year.”

  “How did you know he had a horse, Jack?” asked Bessie.

  The young man lifted his brows as if he was surprised at the seriousness of her tone and said:

  “I don’t know. Someone told me. I suppose the horse has been sold again.”

  The Rector turned the conversation. He was more sorry than he would have believed possible that the dissenter had been imprisoned.

  He felt mysteriously humiliated. Why should a man go to prison for his honest convictions? When Thomas Stanley had been Rector at Eyam he had done his duty admirably. He had brought more people to the church, he had ensured a higher standard of conduct, he had made the name of God more feared than either his successor, Mr. Sherland Adams, or William Mompesson had been able to do.

  And thought the Rector uneasily: ‘It is but another turn of the wheel. The Church might be disestablished again and the Nonconformists in power as they were under the Lord Protector and I be in Derby Gaol and Thomas Stanley here, comfortable in this very room.’ Then he remembered with an increase of his uneasiness that Thomas Stanley had never made himself comfortable in the Rectory with pretty women and gay young men, with wine and fine napery and silver, but had lived like a recluse in one room, giving up the rest to the poor or as a hospital.

  The next day was a break of early sunshine that gave a most unexpected warmth and radiance, and Bessie, seeing from her window John approach the Rectory, went running down to meet him and they stood talking together, leaning against the churchyard wall.

  She pointed out to him the thirty-one green mounds that marked the victims of the late sickness in Eyam, and asked him to pray for their souls.

  She was too happy now to feel saddened even by this tragedy, and she had quite persuaded herself that the dress had not been the cause of the plague’s coming to Eyam, so the two young people leant on the low wall and looked at the graves with a certain tenderness, seeming to bless, by their very happiness, those who lay beneath.

  The sunshine was on the green mounds, and the winter-bitten grass seemed to take on freshness from the warmth of its rays, and the lindens above were sprinkled with golden buds.

  “How horrible,” exclaimed Jack passionately, “to die on a day like this!”

  “But most of them,” said Bessie, “were old.”

  They looked pensively at those thirty-one graves over which the linden boughs cast but a thin tracery in the pale sunshine. Some of them had rude headstones.

  The sudden transmission from sorrow to joy had made the girl’s mood exalted; she thought that she could see the thirty-one souls like thin white shapes hovering in the bright air. She pressed her lover’s hands as they lay, strong and comely in repose, on the top of the churchyard wall, placing her fingers over them with a movement that was almost convulsive.

  “I have had a strange winter, John. I have really been very lonely.”

  “Why, you’ve had Kate,” he said uneasily, “and her babies, and Ann Trickett and Mr. Mompesson,” for he always spoke in formal tones of the Rector.

  "Yes, and I have had much to do besides, going about among the sick. But I have been lonely too. I have missed Mr. Stanley. I am very sorry that he has been in pr
ison; I hope he has not been ill.”

  And she added, with what seemed to her lover a strange irrelevancy: “I hope he has his gray horse, Merriman, again.”

  “He is a rogue who should be sent to the pillory and returned to prison,” said John sternly.

  This was so painful to Bessie that she turned her head away and pretended she had not heard. Then she went along the wall and through the gate where the dead rested on their last journey into the churchyard and stood among those graves and plucked a few snowdrops that stood in the hollows between the swelling turfs.

  The sun was quite warm and there was a sickly sweet, very faint perfume, like that of almonds, in the air.

  Bessie returned to her lover, who remained leaning on the churchyard wall, and gave him the snowdrops to put into his bosom, to keep, even after they were withered, in remembrance of their coming together again.

  Then they went to the old Manor House where the servants, having had warning of the young master’s return, had come from their cottages on the estate and were putting things to rights, taking the covers off the furniture and rolling and hanging up the tapestries, returning the pictures to their places in the still habitable rooms.

  Bessie walked through the chambers with a pretty, housewifely air, leaning on her lover’s arm and laughingly, yet wisely, choosing where this and that should go.

  Mrs. Sheldon, who was the gardener’s wife, and who lived with her husband in the cottage beyond the hall yard, acted as housekeeper and was pleased and proud to show the charming young lady, who was to be her future mistress, the closets, the store-rooms, and those new apartments that were almost completed.

  “I never saw the old Manor so properly before,” laughed Bess. “When your mother was here I was a little afraid of her, John. Besides, the house was so full of people, there was no opportunity. Oh, it is a spacious and lovely dwelling.”

  And the lovers said together:

  “How happy we are going to be here!”

  When Jack Corbyn took Bessie back to the Rectory, the Rector called him into the study and there spoke to him about his strange disappearance last September and all the evil talk it had given rise to, and poor Bessie’s distress during that terrible winter when the plague had been in Eyam.

  The young man made his excuses in a frank, and as the Rector thought, engaging fashion.

  “In truth, sir,” he admitted, “it was largely my mother’s fear that kept me away. That time you visited us and asked me to go up to see my Lord, she saw some agitation in my manner and soon had out of me what the truth of the matter was.” Here the Rector remembered how he had seen mother and son, when he looked back at the window, seeming in close and distressed converse.

  “That was weak, Jack! You should not have given a woman such a secret, least of all a mother.”

  “I know, sir. But she had it out of me, and she was frightened, said that I was to take her away to my uncle in Yorkshire, to join my father who was there on business relative to my marriage and his tithe, as you know.”

  “I know, Jack, I know. Well, what further excuse have you?”

  “Well, I had to escort her there. And once we were there, it was true the old man was very ill and that I caught his complaint, and she was terrified it was the plague. You know she was in Exeter during the war and saw the soldiers dying there, and she has ever had a terror of this disease in her mind. And then we heard that the plague had really come to Eyam and that the tailor’s apprentice was dead, and other rumours and gossip. Things were much exaggerated, sir; it was at one time said that a hundred had died.”

  The Rector smiled sadly.

  “Yet your duty was to Bessie, too, as well as to your mother. Bessie might have been one of that rumoured hundred.”

  “I know, sir, yet I used to pray to God for her, and I thought somehow that she’d be protected. Besides, she was in your good care and that of Kate’s. What could I do for her? I wrote often.”

  “I think she found your letters cold.”

  “I am a poor writer,” said Jack, “but I have come to make amends. I assure you that Bessie will be happy with me, sir. And I have this little money now from my uncle and we shall finish building the old Manor Hall. Everything must be as it was to have been.”

  “We can hope so, Jack, we can hope so. I must accept your excuses, which certainly seem manly enough. If Bessie is happy, there is no more to be said.”

  And he added, with a certain pride: “There will be no more plague in Eyam, I have taken every precaution. All the infected bedding and furniture from the pest-houses have been burnt. And such vessels as we cannot burn have been purified in running water or vinegar. There can hardly be a safer place in Derbyshire than this little village now.”

  Then Jack Corbyn asked if it were true that the infection had come in poor Bessie’s wedding gown. “For she has that on her mind, I think, sir, and I should like to reassure her.”

  “I have told her that I am not certain, and you may tell her the same,” replied William Mompesson. “Let us forget that matter. Who knows what is behind it? Of those thirty-one who died, some were already doomed by age, or frail infancy, or other diseases. Let us leave the question of the wedding dress.”

  And he added his excuse, which he had given before to the women, that it might be the infection had come in to Eyam through the mummers. And he thought when he said these words, that the young man looked aside. Then he asked him abruptly if he had seen any more of these poor wretches — the drollers?

  And the young esquire answered: No, he had seen nothing of them. He believed they had travelled southwards, for they went to the larger towns during the winter.

  Leaving his books, the Rector wandered on the heath, which was now pale and bright with the sunshine of early spring. The snow had disappeared from everywhere save on the highest, most rugged peaks, where it lay in the crevices so bright in the sunshine that its crystals seemed themselves to give off light.

  In this weather, still chill, William Mompesson left the dales — his favourite haunts in the summer — and preferred the moorlands. He often went, where he was straying now, to the circle of grey monoliths and the sacrificial stone, where he had burnt the wedding dress. The spot seemed to him hallowed, sanctified by all the prayers that he had put up there during his visit, by his own passionate endeavours to please his God and save his flock, when he had made that poor sacrifice of the finery. He had never been called upon to pay for it, for Vickers was dead and had left neither kith nor kin.

  But he counted that twenty pounds as lost out of his fortune, to be appropriated when the chance should come for some godly work.

  As he stood there now, with the light breeze lifting the hair from his forehead, his thoughts went far. He no longer regarded with horror or disgust those pagans who had once worshipped in this lonely place; rather he felt a kinship with them, feeling that they, after their manner, had been reaching out after God even as he was reaching, and the words formed on his lips: ‘They should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being.’

  And he thought how unreal was this fair shell of things — the mountains, the heaths, the coloured sky, the grey stones, the dips that formed the valleys beyond, the rocks of lime and sandstone, the first budding trees. And what were all these? Naught, save that in them he might descry the symbols of better things!

  To study this world was but to travel in clouds, and all that was but allegories, to help us search to find what was beyond this show.

  As William Mompesson thus stood silent beside the monoliths, he saw someone coming up over the heath and he knew it at once to be Thomas Stanley. And he feit an odd stir of pleasure. His roving ecstasy was checked and he thought on worldly matters; about this man’s unmerited imprisonment and how glad he would be to see him, almost as if it were a friend he welcomed. Yet the dissenter had been to him more as an enem
y.

  Thomas Stanley came briskly to the spot where the Rector stood, and held out his hand.

  His once florid face was sallow and seamed, his clothes, even more than formerly, used and stained, though carefully cleaned and mended. He had a wallet at his side and carried a staff.

  “I am sorry,” said Mr. Mompesson frankly, “about your misfortune. I hope you do not think that I had any hand in your imprisonment.”

  “I know you did not,” replied the dissenter. “It was young Jack Corbyn who set the constables upon me.”

  “Jack Corbyn!” Mr. Mompesson turned aside. He wished it had not been so. Yet he had no right to blame the young man, even if he had acted over-zealously.

  “I do not regret the trial I had in Derby Gaol, and I was able to be of some service to my fellow-prisoners. Therefore, grieve not for my misfortune, I never thought much of the body’s bliss and I have always lived roughly. But I had one pain, and that was that you might think I had forsaken you when the plague broke out, for even in Derby we heard of that. There was unwonted cleanliness and fumigation in the gaol, for they said the plague had come to the country and even the mountains.”

  “It is over,” said Mompesson. “I believe that if you had been able, you would have come. I thought you had not heard. We lived much enclosed.” And he added with a sigh of relief, profound and deep, “It is over, God be praised.”

  “Why should we praise Him for that?” asked the Puritan sombrely. “Who knows His will? Why should we praise Him that more are left in tribulation? Are not those who died happier?”

  “But these are rude, savage people,” replied Mr. Mompesson, “by no means fit for Heaven. They have not repented, they do not even understand the meaning of the word. I had much ado, with those who died, to bring them to a sense of their danger. Besides, humanly speaking, I had my loved ones to think of — two young women, two children. It is human love that dim’s one’s spiritual sight.”

  “I think Heaven seems to you as far away, William Mompesson, as it does to your rude flock.”

  “I see,” smiled the Rector, “that you still think my heart hard, bound up and asleep. You still consider me a worldly man. Perhaps I was, I admit as much. But I have had my lesson this winter. I do not think so much of gauze, stars, pearls, rainbows as once I did.”