God and the Wedding Dress

by Marjorie Bowen

  There were also the names of some families who dwelt in Shepherd's Flat, a little west of the village; one, a relation of Jonathan Mortin, by the name of Samuel, had lost his wife and child. Another family dwelling at Shepherd’s Flat had also all died, and this Samuel Mortin was the only human being left on the moor where, obeying the injunctions of Thomas Stanley, he lived lonely, his only companions being a greyhound, four cows and a cock. The dog fed his master by bringing in some of the game which now overran the moors and fields.

  It was many weeks now since the villagers had attended to their usual occupations, the harvest had withered in the fields, threshing barns were silent, cattle lowed in the meadows where the hay had not been cut. There were only a few stout women, like Margaret Blackwell, who had the strength or energy to milk the cows.

  The Rector made his register as complete as he could and on a rough map that Thomas Stanley, who knew the district so much better than he, had drawn, he marked, as far as his knowledge went, all the various graves, so that when the time came he might consecrate them, or at least read a prayer above them. But he did not think that God meant him to do this service, for he believed that he, as well as the entire village, was doomed, and it was not intended in this Upas vale that any should remain alive.

  He rested his head upon his hands and did not note that the wick of his lamp was sinking into the socket.

  How scorching the summer was! He had set the window open, but the air came in tipped with heat. Surely it was most unnatural that there should be this sultry heavy weather so high in the mountains. Day by day purple clouds that seemed flame-edged hung over the peaks of the encircling hills and heavy vapours rested on Sir William, the highest mountain of the district, so that the noble summit was seldom visible. Now the stars were hidden in a cloudy murk and the wind that blew the study curtains bellying out into the room was as hot as if it blew off flame.

  “I saw them move, I heard them howl. Oh, check their fury…”

  There was a scratch at the door and the Rector started, trying to compose himself: ‘Surely I have a darting conscience, full of stabs and fears.'

  It was Catherine. Without a word she came to his desk, looking so shadowy, so different from her usual self. Yes, shadowy was the word to use, she seemed so drained of life, that for a moment, drawing herself from the confusion of his inner thoughts he hardly knew her for his dear wife.

  She rolled up her sleeve and with a pallid smile showed him the wound on her arm. It had now quite healed. This meant, in her opinion, failure; the infection, should she take it, would be lodged in her body and not allowed to issue forth.

  She asked him how the wound in his leg went and he rolled down the stocking and took off the bandage and showed her. His wound had not healed, indeed, it had throbbed and had given him much pain and, when he with an end of the linen took off the ointment on it, a yellow liquid issued from the open sore.

  Catherine gave a sob of joy.

  “See! It is the infection that comes out,” she cried, and her face was flushed into a likeness of her own former loveliness. “Oh, sir,” she cried. “Oh, Mompesson, you are saved! It is as if you had the plague and it has run through you, as they say it did with Sythe Torre and Margaret Blackwell.”

  He could not daunt her joy, but he had little belief in this remedy, though he did look with a certain curiosity at the issue from his leg. Was it possible that this was the deadly pest, in this way leaving him unscathed? He had a secret and intense horror of dying of this disease, of this pain; he had seen the people scream aloud with the agony of the hard tumours that no fomentation would break on breast and thigh and groin, and the filthiness of it filled him with dread.

  Nor did he wish to die like some he had seen, running mad in the streets and dropping into the dust, blaspheming and shrieking.

  So he felt what he confessed to himself was an ignoble relief that he might be spared the plague, even though he was ready to dedicate his life to God.

  But Kate's joy was unfeigned and unsullied by selfishness. She forgot her own fatigue and apprehension in thinking her beloved husband safe. She drew him to the window and pointed out that though the night was thick and black, yet in the rift of clouds were troops of stars.

  “I believe now,” she said, “I believe! I believe in God and His miracles and in His mercy and justice, too. Yes, even though I have lived through this plague.”

  “Do you believe in God, Kate, only because you think I have been spared the pestilence?”

  “No, it is not that.”

  And he believed her, so simply and earnestly she spoke, even as she said she believed in God.

  “It has come to me lately when I have been with Bess and Ann Trickett, making bandages, scrubbing floors, preparing jellies and soups, and doing all in a haze of horror. When I have seen children die, and the women fall down in agony, and Sythe Torre dragging the dead through the streets. Even through this, somehow, there was a light like a pin-point — to-night, for instance — see the clouds, as I said, so thick, and yet the stars. I cannot use the words as you do, Mompesson, but I tell you I feel, behind it all, the hand and love of God.”

  Her resignation, her piety, shamed him. He had loved her deeply, but he had thought her shallow compared to himself, as he knew her ignorant compared to himself; she had no manner of learning, she could not join in any argument or dispute or give any reason for this or that, but in the moment of her great suffering and trouble she had found her faith.

  “It is weak of me to rejoice that you should be spared, or I either,” she said. “We should care for nothing save to wait for the sound of the trumpet that will summon us from the dust. But I am glad that we should live together for a little longer, Mompesson — only this morning I had no hope.”

  “I confess I had little myself,” He put his arm round her and she rested her head upon his shoulder. “This morning when I was preaching to them in the Dell, and saw those forlorn and scarred faces all gazing up at me, I almost lost heart and courage. I thought: ‘What can I say to these? How can I induce them to believe in God, in His justice, or His mercy?’ Yet when I told them how the great Victor fought for us, a sigh went among them like a wind going among the thistles, and I believe that they were a little comforted.”

  “They must be comforted, they must believe,” whispered Kate Mompesson, “otherwise it is to die. Tell me. I saw you making up the registers as I came in — how many have died?”

  “Of adults — two hundred,” he replied firmly. “Of children — fifty. But there are many whose deaths have not been reported and who have been buried suddenly and secretly.”

  “Well,” said Kate, stirring against him on a sigh, “our children our safe — they must nearly have forgotten us by now. Let us make up the fairy tale, Mompesson, let us think that the plagues have gone, that it is the clean winter and that we have purified the village and have the children back again and everything is as it was, and Bessie has found a new sweetheart.”

  He kissed her damp forehead.

  “We must not amuse ourselves with sickly trifles, Kate, but set ourselves to what we have in hand.”

  “I wish,” said Kate Mompesson, “we could get a breath of fresh air. Everything seems stale and infected, or is it my fancy. The flowers seem all withered this year, early. I could find nothing in the fields when I went abroad for half an hour to-day. Mompesson, do you think the infection could be in the flowers? Janet Parnley was picking the flowers on her father’s grave to make a garland of remembrance, when she fell down and died in a few hours.”

  Chapter VII

  ‘MUSIC AT MIDNIGHT’

  Thomas Stanley, riding the gray horse, Merriman, made his rounds. His duty was every third day to visit the boundaries that had been placed by agreement with himself, the Rector and the villagers round Eyam.

  This invisible cordon was marked by spots well known to all inhabitants. It was about half a mile beyond the village; stone hillocks and t
racts of moor outlined it and at several places, such as the well or rivulet to the northward, the cliff between Stony Middleton and Eyam, an ancient barrow, before which was a hollow filled with small stones, was selected for provisions to be placed upon, letters and money and other articles to be exchanged.

  The Lord-Lieutenant, his steward, the physician resident at Chatsworth and one or two other of the gentry of the neighbourhood carefully and scrupulously fulfilled the promises they had made to the Rector when he had first agreed to persuade the villagers to remain enclosed with their own pestilence.

  While several of the wealthier families who had lived either in or near the village, and who now dwelt in the houses of relatives at a good distance or in huts that they had made for themselves in the hills or on the moors, out of a shame-faced charity, left anonymous gifts on these stones for those whom they had forsaken.

  Thomas Stanley made a methodical inspection of these places, filling his pack-bag with bottles of vinegar, rolls of bandages, packets of cinnamons and mixed spices, bottles of plague-water, letters, syrups and prescriptions. He carefully read the private messages and took from his pouch the little pockets of labelled money that had been given him. They had all first been washed in vinegar or laid in the running water of one of the streams that ran through the moors.

  There was one letter that gave him great pleasure. He could tell by the superscription that it came from Mr. Beilby in York, who had the Rector’s children in his charge and had been sent to one Arthur Newlyn at Bakewell, who had taken this means of sending it into Eyam. The dissenter’s rugged face softened, he even smiled as he put the letter into his bag, thinking of the pleasure it would afford Kate Mompesson.

  He was most regular in his actions; he did not pause to meditate or speculate on this or that, but mounted his gray horse and went on across the moor towards the well where he might expect to find the messages and provisions from Chatsworth.

  Mr. Stanley could not doubt, with the contrast of this cool breeze in his face, that the air in the village was infected, and when he came to a certain point where he could look down upon it and even count the graves that marked the neglected fields about it, he thought that he saw a kind of visible miasma hovering over the village like a noisome vapour. He shaded his eyes, trying to be certain if this were a fact or his excited fancy, and his mind was divided, his thoughts partly being that this was the contagion itself borne on the winds and hovering in this one spot, and partly that this was the visible wrath of God, the angry breath from His nostrils congealing in the air.

  These thoughts were confusing and difficult to pursue; the dissenter had to fall back upon blind faith. He was not unhappy; a man who had no love, no responsibilities, and no hates, but whose mind dwelt ever beyond the judgment day when he should enjoy such a bliss as he could not imagine, he was not greatly disturbed by the scenes of horror that had shaken William Mompesson. He had seen war and endured prison, and the pest-house and the corpses and even the cries and screams of the afflicted did not greatly move him.

  But as he went along on the plodding gray horse, he began to sing in a voice that was sweet and musical:

  “Yet I have known thy slightest things,

  A feather or a shell,

  A stick or rod, which some chance brings,

  The best of us excel.

  Yea, I have known these shreds outlast A fair compacted strain,

  And, for one twenty we have passed,

  Almost outlive our name.

  Thus Thou hast placed in man outside Death to the common eye;

  That Heaven within him might abide,

  And close eternity.

  A silent tear can pierce thy throne,

  When loud joys want a-wing,

  And sweeter air stream from a groan Than any arted string.

  Thus, Lord, I see my gain is great,

  My loss but small to it;

  Yet something more I must entreat,

  And only thou canst do it.

  Oh, let me like him know my end,

  And be as glad to find it,

  That what so e’er thou shalt commend,

  Still let thy servant mind it.”

  Thomas Stanley, having relieved and cheered his soul with this hymn, turned his horse’s head towards the slope that led down into the village.

  The sun was approaching the west and his keen eyes, trained like a countryman’s to close observation of details and to recognizing objects at a distance, discerned how the little shadows were sloping from the scattered graves that were now thick round Eyam. He believed there were many more there than the numbers William Mompesson had put on the registers, and the energetic Puritan resolved that to-morrow, if he might be spared for long enough from the village, he would make his rounds and try to discover to whom all these heaps of earth belonged.

  As he remained thus, his horse reigned in at pause, a shrill long cry made him turn, and he saw some yards away a girl in a ragged dress, with her hands to her lips, trying to attract his attention.

  The dissenter guessed at once her errand. She belonged, doubtless, to one of the scattered families who had retreated to the hills or the moors from the plague, and who now, as he knew, had been visited by the pestilence. His aid was probably required — to say a prayer over a dying person, or over some shallow grave beneath the disturbed heath.

  So he turned his horse’s head and rode across the moorland path towards the girl. As soon as he was near enough to discern her clearly, he checked his progress and gazed at her with a suspicious eye, for she was no one whom he knew. His constant travels during many years over this district, his intense interest in his parishioners and his retentive memory made it impossible for him to forget any of his flock.

  This girl was in tattered garments, not the clothes worn by the village maidens, but had once been looped with gaudy braids and cords that now hung dirty and torn from the ragged folds of purple cloth.

  Her form was voluptuous and she did not scruple to show it, making no attempt to lace tightly the soiled chemise across her full bosom or to protect her plump shoulders from the August sun by means of the thin cloak of red silk that hung by tassels from her throat. Her head was bare and her hair hung in close crisp ringlets and curls over a saucy, daring face, pretty in a coarse way, though now marked by neglect and that emphatic reckless defiance that keeps fear at bay.

  “The old mother,” she said, in an accent that was not that of Derbyshire, “is ill. It is the pest, I doubt not. She told me to fetch you or Mr. Mompesson; I came out and saw you from a distance and hallo’ed to you.”

  “I will come,” said the dissenter at once. “But who are you?”

  She answered sullenly:

  “I came with the mummers who were playing at St. Helen’s Wake last year.”

  “And why did you not depart with them?” asked Thomas Stanley.

  He proceeded slowly along the moorland path that had been so little used this summer that the heath and fern had almost overgrown it. And she walked at his side, cutting a path with a strong hand through the yellowing ferns and clumps of tough, dried heather that dragged at her skirts.

  She answered readily; she seemed glad, he thought, to have someone to whom to speak.

  “I left the troop to follow Esquire Corbyn here. He made me promises, you know — there’s some say I should be his wife.”

  “These are no times to be talking of old sins,” said the dissenter, ready with his rebuke, “but of present repentances.”

  “But I talk of neither sin nor repentance, sir. It’s not for myself I’ve asked your services. I say I came up here to seek Squire Corbyn. He sent his man for me, too. He wanted me to stay with him and comfort him. He was always afraid of the pestilence, that’s why he left Eyam the first time. But when it grew near his wedding day he told me to be off, and so I went to Bakewell. But the troop of drollers had gone, so I wandered about, doing some farm work and helping the sick.”

&n
bsp; “I have not met you before,” remarked Mr. Stanley shrewdly. “Where have you been hiding?”

  “I kept out of the way, and out of that of the other rector, too. And then I went to live with old Mother Sydall, who is reputed a witch, and we did well enough.”

  Mr. Thomas Stanley was silent; he blamed himself for neglect. Mother Sydall’s hut had been unvisited, he knew, by either himself or William Mompesson, because they knew the woman to be evil. They thought they could not have their way with her and had left her alone, having other matters on their hands. But now the zealous man thought: ‘It is that very wretched creature whom I should have visited. There were two lost souls there, but may be it is not too late for their salvation.’

  And he said with a grim smile:

  “Mother Sydall has been selling charms and potions to those who are afraid of the pestilence, and no doubt making a good thing out of it. And yet when she is ill herself, she sends for me and wants to make her peace with God.”

  The girl shrugged her gleaming bare shoulders.

  “The old woman’s grown sickly,” she grinned. “She’s pining and wasted. So she begins to think of her immortal soul and the close fires of Hell. And I have my fancies too, master, out here on the moor. I was peering in the Cussy Dell and saw Sythe Torre there, dragging a dead man along by a napkin around the neck. And when he saw me he cried and said he had nodded at Old Nick looking at him from a tree.”

  “You are bold and ignorant,” replied Thomas Stanley. “If you will repent, I will pray for you. Remember that no stained or withered creature shall come near the eternal, living well.”

  The girl gave him a furtive, half-frightened look. She said:

  “I do not perceive the hand of God in this. Rather does it encourage the blasphemers. If there be a God, I think he has given his faith and given his fire into the Devil’s hands.”

  To which the dissenter answered calmly:

  “Solomon has said of a fair and foolish woman — she is like a jewel of gold in a swine’s mouth.”