God and the Wedding Dress

by Marjorie Bowen

  And the mummer seemed pleased at this, for the grim dissenter had unconsciously named her fair and her beauty had been all her trade. She smiled in high spirits, plucking a piece of heather and using it as a brush to send the buzzing flies from her face.

  And he asked her had she not more fear of the pestilence when she dwelt in the very house with it? And she replied that she had no fear of anything save Jack Corbyn’s ghost, for she had met that upon the moor often enough, sitting by a high pond and whistling into the empty air, or coming forward to their old trysting place.

  The dissenter harshly bade her cease such lewd talk. He had suspected that the young man had had this way-side mistress long upon his hands, and believed that she as well as the pest had been a reason for his sudden leaving of Eyam, and he was indignant for the sake of Bessie Carr who was grieving so profoundly for her dead lover, who had even dedicated herself to death for his sake. She had refused to take any precautions against the pestilence and valued her life, as Thomas Stanley knew, not a whit.

  They had now come in sight of the substantial hut, sheltered by a grove of ash trees, on the moor where Mother Sydall dwelt. The hut had been built in what the local folks called a daubin, perhaps a generation ago.

  It was one of the pleasanter customs of the place that when a young couple not blessed with worldly goods were about to marry, all their neighbours and friends should gather together and build them a hut, each one contributing his handful of clay, his brick or his stone. With so many eager workers the new home was usually finished in a day. It would then be furnished by homemade furniture, provided by the same helpers, food and drink carried in, and a rude festival held in the new home, wine and salt being spilled over the threshold and many curious rites, which Thomas Stanley bitterly suspected to be of pagan origin, being performed.

  The couple for whom this cottage had been thus built upon their bridal day had long since left the neighbourhood, the man being called away to his father, who lived in Sheffield. Whether they were alive or dead, they had never been heard of since, and it was nearly twenty years now since Mother Sydall, who formerly had dwelt in a cavern in the rocks, had moved into this neglected dwelling.

  Among those whom she favoured with her blessings, and those who feared her curses, she had found eager helpers to patch up and restore the hut; it stood there stoutly in the warm light of the setting sun, a patch of cultivated ground set at the back, steps cut in the heathy ground to the stream that ran at the side of the slope, a dog tied to its post at the door, and a curl of smoke rising from the one chimney. Mother Sydall’s cottage was familiar enough to Thomas Stanley, but there was one strange detail in the scene that caused him to strain his eyes and sharply question the girl.

  An elegant, dappled, purplish roan horse, splendidly trapped in polished leather plated with gleaming silver, was fastened by the bridle to one of the ash trees.

  “The old witch has a visitor,” said Thomas Stanley, pointing with his whip towards the handsome animal.

  The girl affected a complete ignorance. She said that the old woman had been alone and in deadly pain when she had left her to seek help.

  The dissenter smiled sourly.

  “There is no mystery about the case, one of the neighbouring gentlefolk, who should from his education know better, has come to consult the old witch for a love potion or a preventive against the pest. Do I not know that these impious fools come for miles to indulge gross and studied filthiness in this desolate place!”

  But the girl said shrewdly:

  “How is it he stays, sir? When he put his head in the hut and saw the old woman dying — for dying she is, I dare swear — would he not have gone again at once?”

  Thomas Stanley did not reply. He jogged up his horse and he, too, dismounted by the group of ash trees, whose leaves made a melancholy whispering in the evening breeze, and fastened the humble, roughly accoutred Merriman near the elegant horse.

  The girl had already run ahead to the cottage door and Mr. Stanley, with his long stride, was soon beside her. Together they stood in the entrance, for the door was open.

  The cottage consisted of one large room, a portion of which was screened off by blankets hanging from a rod. At the back a small door led into a penthouse where the witch kept her peculiar secrets. One end of the room was occupied by a large open fire-place on which, despite the August heat, a few embers were burning and over them on a tripod was suspended an iron pot. There were some rude pieces of furniture in the room, some female garments hanging from hooks and underneath the windows several shelves on which were jars, bottles, and boxes. Dried birds were pinned against the wall, a skull dangled by a pack-thread from one of the beams in the ceiling. A large bouquet of herbs stuck in a cracked, yellow pot gave a certain astringent freshness to the air.

  All this, however, served as but a background for the human beings within the hovel.

  The old woman lay on a blanket dragged over some heather and bracken, a shawl was pinned over a rough linen sheet, her head was tied in a kerchief. Her eyes were turned in her head, she was struggling for breath, and her crooked hands were clutching at the patched coverlet that lay over her crooked limbs.

  By her side on one knee was a handsome young man who, with an earnestness that showed he was deeply absorbed in his task, was offering a bowl of water to the old woman by gently tipping it towards her dry lips and lolling tongue.

  The appearance and actions of this stranger were both so unexpected by the clergyman and the mummer girl that they stood for a minute staring, wrapped in their own amazement.

  The strange gentleman was no more than a youth, of remarkably good looks and finely dressed in dark-blue cloth braided with silver; and embroidered baldric passed over his shoulders, which supported a costly sword. Long, thick and glossy curls, such as were worn only by the nobility, fell over his shoulders and either side his face. The lace at his wrist was, as he held the cup, touching the old woman’s dirty garments and wizened breast.

  As he heard the steps in the doorway he turned and glanced coolly at the two newcomers.

  “The old woman is dying,” he said. “I found her on the floor, and made her as comfortable as I could.”

  “How did you come to be tending her, sir?” asked the dissenter, putting down his hat and whip on the table, already loaded with a strange assortment of ugly, filthy objects.

  “I was passing across the moor,” replied the young gentleman. He was now supporting Mother Sydall with one arm, while with the other he was tilting the water that she lapped languidly into her withered mouth. “I heard her cries. I know the place well and who dwelt here, when I came in I found her writhing. She was in great pain. I have seen the marks on her breast,” he added indifferently. “It is the pest.”

  “Certainly it is the pest,” said Mr. Stanley. “This young woman came to fetch me. I must say a prayer. Stand aside, sir, and give me place.”

  But the young man did not immediately obey. When he had given the woman a drink, he wiped her lips and arranged the coverlet and the heath bracken and heather under her head, and then rose to his feet, wiping his hand on the napkin he took from his pocket.

  “The plague spreads,” he remarked gravely.

  The girl went to the side of the old woman’s bed; Mother Sydall was now unconscious, though breathing.

  The dissenter knelt down and began to pray, while the stranger watched him curiously.

  When he had finished his prayer, Thomas Stanley rose and the young gentleman was still there by the table, observing the scene from his dark, almond-shaped eyes; he had a charming face, brown, smooth and manly.

  The dissenter was, most unworthily, nettled by this display of cool courage on the part of a man whose type and class he much disliked. He said sharply:

  “You have no business here, sir. You will catch the pest yourself and you will carry it into other places. It has been our constant endeavour to remain enclosed against the world.”

>   The young man answered:

  “For myself I take no count, for I was not born fearful. For others — I ride to Buxton to-night, where the plague is already and where I stay with a family who has had it and therefore is, I think, safe. From there I am on my way to London, where God knows, there’s plague enough. And so, abroad.”

  He picked up his feathered hat and tasselled gauntlets that he had laid upon the chair beside the door and added with a slight smile:

  “You make much ado about keeping the plague in your village, sir. I have heard the tale and admired it. Those who do what they think right should be respected. But, sir, the plague is already all over Derbyshire, and if you had let some of these poor people remove themselves, they had had a better chance.

  “We have kept the plague, sir,” replied Thomas Stanley sternly, “from spreading all over the Peak district.”

  “Say you so?” asked the young man. “Well, it is in Buxton, and Bakewell, and Derby, but truly there is no spot where it rages so sorely as Eyam. And now it will be impossible for any of the villagers to leave the place. I have heard of one who tried and was stoned back. You have given Eyam a cursed name, sir — you and the Rector.”

  “You venture to talk to me as if you thought that I and William Mompesson were mistaken?” asked Mr. Stanley, flushing dully.

  “I think you are mistaken. The villagers should have been dispersed last autumn.”

  “How so, sir? How so?”

  “I believe by November only a few had died of the plague, and through the winter there were scant losses of life. It was with the heat the infection returned — cannot you, sir, draw the moral?”

  “There is none to draw,” replied the dissenter. “Sir, you speak with frivolity and lewdness, as if you doubted the judgment of God.”

  “I doubt the wisdom of men,” replied the young man. “The infection was in the churchyard and stayed only by the frost of this severe winter, and it broke out with the heat, and once you began to bury your dead without coffins you were doomed.”

  “That is a wickedness,” said the dissenter angrily. He was stung both in his spiritual and in his worldly pride, to an extent that he forgot that he had, according to his own conceit, been in communication with God on his knees in prayer but a few moments before; he laid down the law severely in the tones of a master checking a froward pupil.

  “That is a whimsy, a conceit and a folly. It is well known that as soon as a person is dead and in the grave and the earth so ever lightly laid over it, there is no more contagion. And as for the frost sealing up the infection — that, young sir, is but an idle tale. And I have known cases of the plague, when the summer was unusually cold and again in a time of ceaseless rain. Indeed, sir,” said he, warming into his subject, “I think the plague be more frequent, when the air is full of black mist and damp, with no dewdrops at night but a vaporous smoke. I have read all these things in a broadsheet called The Red Cloth, which gives many details of former plagues.”

  And so he would have run on, for he prided himself on his knowledge of this matter and also on the heroic measures that he and the Rector had taken in Eyam, and it galled him to hear both despised by this young cavalier, who continued to look at him with a touch of radiant scorn, as if he were but an ignorant quack or babbler of a charlatan’s wares in the market-place.

  But the young man interrupted and told him that this talk was wasted — “for I have been abroad, in ships, and in great cities, and heard much, especially from French physicians about the plague and the way it is treated. And I am assured that the plague increases by means of the uncoffined bodies tumbled together in pits.”

  Thomas Stanley, his face flushing, his features working with rage, asked scornfully:

  “Perhaps, sir, you can tell me — since your knowledge is so wide — some remedies against this plague? We should be glad of them in our desolate village. Though everything,” he added with heavy sarcasm, “that wise men have advised has been tried — from blood-letting to the wearing of cakes of arsenic in the armpit.”

  The stranger smiled sadly.

  “I have heard of even more fantastic remedies than those. When I was in Venice they were making medicines from Oriental pearl. But look to the old woman — I think she passes. She is more in need of your prayers than I am of your arguments.”

  With that the young man turned from the humble threshold of the hovel out upon the open moor, and the sun, just then sinking behind the purple peaks of the distant hills, gave his tine figure and authoritative profile an edging of light.

  Neither the girl, who had listened agog to the conversation between the young cavalier and the dissenter, nor Thomas Stanley himself took any heed of the old woman. Both of them had more than a touch of professional callousness, both of them had been already at many death-beds; there was nothing to be done to soothe the last moments of those who died of the plague and who usually were unconscious for some time before they drew their last breaths.

  Instead, these two ill-assorted companions stared at the young man, and both were touched with superstitious awe.

  The place was so lonely, the apparition of this radiant, splendidly dressed cavalier so unexpected. There was something so free, disdainful and bold in his demeanour that the thought came to them that perhaps he was not mortal but some devil sent in this worldly guise to deceive and mock them for their efforts.

  Stimulated by the thought that he was really in the presence of an emissary of evil, the Puritan stepped forward out of the hut and demanded, as the young man sprang into the saddle and turned his horse across the moor:

  “Who, sir, are you?”

  The cavalier laughed; he seemed to read the other’s thoughts, for he said:

  “Not the Devil, but William Cavendish.”

  “I wish you, sir, a better heart and less froward disposition,” sneered the dissenter, and turned back into the hovel where the girl was drawing a sheet over the dead, distorted face of Mother Sydall; she then rose to take a spade from a corner of the room.

  “We kept that here,” she said, “that whoever stayed the longer should use it on the other.”

  “I will dig the grave,” replied the Puritan.

  He took the spade and went out into the twilight, for with the disappearance of the sun behind the mountains the air had become grey in colour, the shadows were thickening in the hollows, and the neighbouring woods; the cavalier, riding rapidly, was now almost out of sight.

  As his spade cut the turf a few yards from the cottage, Thomas Stanley thought upon the young man’s words, spoken with such an indifferent assurance.

  ‘He must be the son of the Lord-Lieutenant, who has lately been abroad at the wars, and travelling. He is supposed to be a reckless blade, a ruffling wanton.’

  The Puritan knew that it was likely enough that Lord William would inform against him. The young man perhaps had not his father’s toleration, and as he passed through Buxton he might tell the Constable and the law officers to be on the outlook for the dissenter when the plague should have abated in Eyam and it would be safe to approach that desolate spot.

  Thomas Stanley hoped that it might be so, for he longed to die a martyr’s death. Yet the fact that he had so far been immune from the plague swelled him with pride, for he thought he was being reserved for some more dreadful fate, and that should ensure even a brighter reward.

  The girl came out of the cottage with rosemary in her arms. She complained that a short while ago it had been possible to buy a bunch for a few pence, now twelve shillings was charged for an armful in Bakewell; but they had grown some in old Mother Sydall’s garden, though it had been difficult, the plants not doing well in that soil.

  She gave some to the dissenter and he crushed the flowers up and put them in his ears and in his mouth so that the girl, throwing back her head with a coarse laugh, said that he looked like a boar’s head ready for the Christmas festival.

  Then they went into the cottage toge
ther, and finding a napkin put it round the old woman’s feet and drew her out towards her grave and buried her there, touching neither the body nor the garments.

  Thomas Stanley having a desire to get back to Eyam and deliver his letter to Mrs. Mompesson, the grave was but shallow and portions of the old woman’s drugget skirt showed through the turf and the thinly sprinkled earth, so that they cut bracken and heather and piled it over.

  The dissenter did not lose this chance of moralizing. He pointed out to the young woman, who said her name — an outlandish one to Thomas Stanley’s ears — was Janot, though some called her Nell, how the old woman with her false arts and devilish predictions had come to die as readily as any poor Christian, her spells and her amulets and her waters and plasters and potions not having saved her at all.

  “And what shall save me?” said the girl suddenly, as if a sense of her forlorn situation had overcome her with a force she could not withstand.

  She sat down upon the sill of the forlorn cottage’s open door and, putting her elbows on her knees, hid her face in her hands and tears glittered in her eyes.

  Mr. Stanley asked her how she had lived hitherto, and she said that there was a family not far distant who still farmed a bit of ground and who had sent the two of them, the old woman and herself, vegetables and now and then a little flour and some eggs. But when they knew the old woman was dead of plague, it was likely they would be afraid to come near the place.

  The dissenter, leaning on his spade, for he was fatigued and sweating, sternly told her to leave her blubbering and to come down to Eyam and help in the pest-house with the other women “and so make a repentance for your past life, which is nothing but sin sugared and candied over with folly.”

  “It is certain death to go into the village,” murmured the girl, looking at him askance.

  “It is perilous,” he agreed. He put the spade inside the hovel and wiped his brow. “But I give you this chance as a penance, as William Mompesson gave it to Sythe Torre, who is a self-confessed murderer, having killed a man in the mines once — from jealousy.” He added, looking harshly on the girl: “Dost thou fear death? Is any plague worse than sin, or any pain more foul than a lewd life? Come, make up thy bundle and come down to the village with me.”