God and the Wedding Dress

by Marjorie Bowen

  Janot laughed at this rebuke. She turned to some of the shelves in the hovel and took down a pot of fennel and rue and tied this with what remained of the rosemary into a bouquet and put it in the bosom of her tattered skirt.

  “Do you think I’m really afraid? I have often been down to Eyam since the plague began, to stick flowers on Jack Corbyn’s grave. Yes,” she added with a sigh, “his was the only one that had festoons and garlands on it, though they were but of heath and ivy.”

  “Your courage should be put to better use,” said Thomas Stanley. “Leave this fond humour. Take thy bundle, say I, and follow me down to the village.” Shadows now filled the lonely hut, in which the presence of death seemed still to hover. The heather couch, stirred by the last struggles of the dead, remained in the corner with the patched coverlet awry, and on the floor was the glass of water that the cavalier had offered to the dying woman.

  The Puritan cast a shrewd glance round the accumulated rubbish. He wondered if possibly among all these potions and essences there might be something that would be useful in combating the pestilence. But he decided that all was unhallowed and best left alone.

  So again urging the girl to haste he went outside and unfastened the gray horse from the ash and turned Merriman’s head towards the village, indifferent as to whether or not the girl followed him. She might, if she would, remain behind in the hut; there were many who dwelt alone on the moors.

  She came after him and walked beside the horse’s head, her bundle on her back and a comb, coral bright, stuck in her tangled locks.

  “Make thy garlands,” said Thomas Stanley, a shadow on his face as he passed out of the high moor into the dale, “where neither wind nor rain nor time shall wither them.”

  And then he asked the girl if she could sing, and she said: “Yes,” she had been used to singing in the mumming plays in which she had acted.

  “I fear you know none but bawdy songs,” said the Puritan. “Raise thy voice in this, if thou canst.” And he began to sing in deep solemn tones:

  “Up, O my soul! and bless the Lord,

  Oh, God, my God, how great, how very great art Thou!

  Honour and majesty have their abode with Thee and crown Thy brow!

  The beams of Thy bright chambers Thou dost lay in the deep waters which no eye can find,

  The clouds Thy chariots arc, and Thy pathway the wings of the swift wind.

  When Thou dost hide Thy face, Thy face which keeps all things in being,

  They consume and mourn; when Thou withdraw’st their breath their vigour sleeps

  And they to dust return.”

  *

  Catherine Mompesson’s joy at receiving the letter that brought news of her children in York was so poignant that it seemed entirely to consume her spirit, and she almost fainted where she stood, the first time that she had shown sign of collapse since the plague began.

  Then when she and her husband and Bessie and Ann Trickett were all gathered together for the evening and had read the letter and commented upon it with loving excitement, she took it from them all and went up to her chamber.

  And when William Mompesson followed her, he found her kneeling by her bed in an attitude of prayer.

  He was touched to the heart at this proof, as he thought it, of her dutiful resignation. But he was mistaken, for when she saw him on the threshold she turned, not rising from her prayers, and her prayer was not to God but to him.

  “Let us leave the village now,” she said, in hurried tones. “Let us go away. If we dare not go to York for fear of the infection, let us go and live in a cavern in the hills as so many others do. We shall find food up there, there are still those who will supply us. You have no longer the contagion, I am sure, because of that issue in your leg. Why! I feel so well, so happy, it cannot be that I am going to sicken.”

  “Why, Kate,” asked the Rector mournfully, “what weakness is this? To retreat now, when the fight is nearly won!”

  “Death has won the fight here,” she said, still upon her knees. “Do not they die daily? How many have I seen to-day, lamenting and falling in the streets? Soon there will be not one left, the churchyard can contain no more, they are digging a pit outside the wall — I saw them from my window. We must both die if we remain. There are the children, dear, how shall they live without us? They will have no home, no money, no means of life.”

  “For that,” replied the Rector, cheerfully, trying to raise her from her knees and control his own emotion, “I have made provision. Sir George Savile would look after our little ones, and your uncle, Beilby, too. They are in God’s hands.”

  “God’s hands!” she said wildly, allowing him to raise her to her feet. “I suppose we are all in God’s hands! And what is He doing to us — consuming us utterly.”

  She cast herself on his bosom and clung to him tightly.

  “I am young, Mompesson, I have not had my share of life. I want my children, your children, other children, too. Is it all to be cut short and for no good? We can do nothing here!”

  “Indeed we do much. Would you leave Thomas Stanley to face it all alone?”

  “He is sufficient,” she answered quietly. “They heed him more than they do you, they know him better. He has a rougher way. I think, Mompesson, he believes more steadfastly than you do. It seems as if he can see the goodness of God behind all this horror, and I cannot. Can you? Once I could. I found faith. Now it is gone again. I want to live. You cannot stay here.”

  “I do! I can! I must!” said the Rector. “I am His soldier, I cannot leave my post. Take even poor little Bessie, even Ann Trickett, who is an ignorant woman, take them. Should we forsake them?”

  “Bessie urged me to go,” sobbed Kate, limp in her husband’s arms as if all her strength had left her. “So did Ann Trickett. They said we should live for the children, and they would stay here and look after Jonathan Mortin and Thomas Stanley. Bessie has no stake in life, her heart’s in Jack’s grave. All her brave, glad hopes are gone.”

  “She’s had little to regret, Jack Corbyn was but a scoundrel,” said Mompesson. “Stanley told me how just now he met a girl, a player’s girl, who was his paramour. But leave Jack and leave Bess — think of ourselves, Kate, think of what is due to our own dignity and honour. Take your hands from my neck, it is not fair that you should thus entreat me.”

  But she clung the tighter, pleading quickly, incoherently for life, for a chance, for the future

  “We cannot fly from God,” whispered the Rector, ashy-lipped. “Were we to leave Eyam, He could set the Black Death behind us, to clutch us when He bade it.”

  The room was only lit by the small, beamy flame of one candle hastily and carelessly lit, so that shadows encroached on them on all sides.

  And Mompesson, raising his desperate eyes, saw on the other side of the bed, once so trim and now so indifferently draped, a large dusty mirror set between the windows, in which he could see his wife and himself clinging together, her head still upon his bosom. They were so disordered in their dress, so wild in their movements, her face was hid with such an excess of despair and his own visible countenance so gaunt and lined that he thought that he did not look upon himself and his Kate, but upon two lost souls, and the faint radiance of the candle reflected in the mirror seemed but a mourning light upon the dead.

  Kate raised her face pearled with tears and continued her entreaties in a thick whisper.

  But he was staunch. He had offered her a chance of leaving the desolate village once before; now it was too late. She would carry the infection wherever she went.

  “Kate, my dearest dear,” he said, “through these sick hands and high agonies your faith will break into life and death itself will die. Your good deeds shall be as music at midnight to you.”

  Kate lay asleep, her passion washed away by tears.

  Before she slept she had seemed resigned and even joyful when, to console her, the Rector had brought up the question of the issue in
his leg and showed her that the wound was still open with the thick yellow fluid flowing from it, while that she had made on her own arm had closed.

  She had folded her hands upon her breast and fallen into the deep slumber of exhaustion; he had remained by her; no other had a greater claim on him and he would watch by her that night. Too many nights they had been separate. He dared to hope that the time might come when he could have her in his arms again and they could lie cheek to cheek, heart to heart, between the curtains of her embroidering, as they had lain in those days when they had first been wed, that seemed now, in retrospect, the very ecstasy of happiness.

  With the dawn she woke and seemed revived and said no more about leaving Eyam. She got up and bathed her face in the ewer of water, which Ann Trickett kept always in the bedchamber, and asked the Rector if they might walk in the fields before they broke their fast.

  “I have not been away from the village for some time,” she urged, and he tenderly granted her request.

  They left the house together, none seeing them; Thomas Stanley was perhaps already abroad, Bess and Ann Trickett asleep. Jonathan Mortin would be working too; no one had had much sleep in the Rectory for many months now.

  Mr. Mompesson understood his wife’s wish without her expressing it. They turned abruptly away from the village and the graves, the pest-house and the cottages marked with the red and yellow cross, and turned towards the fields on the western side of Eyam.

  Even here the air seemed heavy and infected as if a miasma lay over the whole place. Nor could they entirely escape the dreadful sights to which they could never become accustomed, for as they turned through the dead heather and bracken they saw the gigantic figure of Sythe Torre dragging a yellow female corpse, unclothed, by the napkin round the neck and singing a lewd song.

  He was half-drunk and his tangled hair, with a kerchief tied round his head, ragged shirt that exposed his hairy chest, the fanatic glitter of his small eyes, gave him a dreadful appearance.

  Perceiving the Rector with his young wife hanging faintly on his arm, he shouted out his usual blasphemy — that he had seen Old Nick grinning in Cussy Dell.

  William Mompesson paused and sternly asked who it was that was being dragged out for burial. And Sythe Torre replied with an oath and a grin that it was the last of a family who dwelt just outside the western end of the village and who had hitherto buried one another in their own garden. But that being full he was forced to take this one to the heath.

  “But I am well paid for my labour,” he added, “for I have all that is in the cottage, and that includes as fine a set of pewter plates as ever I saw.”

  “When I die,” asked Kate wildly, “will they do that to me?”

  “My dearest dear,” cried the Rector, deeply shocked, “take such thoughts from your mind! Let us go away! Yes, even though I neglect everyone else, let us go from the village and walk where the air is sweeter.”

  She smiled up at him.

  “But the air is so sweet, it smells to me of almonds, of lilies, hyacinths, harebells.”

  These words struck a dismal chill into the Rector’s bosom. He thought that she was flagging, that her weight hung heavier on his arm. She still murmured that she wished to walk further and further away, but he turned her back and led her, her protests growing fainter, to the Rectory.

  And when she crossed the threshold, she stumbled and fell on her knees, and Ann Trickett came forward, crying, and they lifted her up between them and took her to her room.

  “It is nothing,” cried William Mompesson in his agony, “it is nothing! It is fatigue.”

  But as soon as Kate Mompesson was returned to the bed from which she had so lately risen, she seemed to fall into an unconsciousness that caused Ann Trickett to cry out that she had heard the white cricket last night.

  And although the Rector hushed her sternly, there was despair in his look.

  Bessie, too, came running in and stood by her sister, staring down into her face. Kate roused herself after a while and in a drowsy voice bade them all keep away from her, for she thought she had the plague. With a smile she added:

  “I have been much wasted of late, almost as if in a consumption, and I do not think I shall resist the illness long.”

  Mompesson, groaning with anguish, charged her not to speak such words of ill-omen.

  “Go,” said Bessie, “and get some cordials, Mompesson. There are those already beating at the door, but Thomas Stanley will attend to them. Go, I say!”

  The Rector left the room and stood for a while, not able to collect his wits, in his study. And when he passed into the laboratory he was again at a loss and stood there, stammering to himself half a prayer and half a protest.

  When he raised his eyes, he saw his own face reflected in the mirror between the windows, and it seemed to him it was a skull from which rusty hair hung, bitten by the infection of the grave.

  Twice he made up a cordial, but his hand shook so much that it was spilled all over the table. Then he took a pot of ointment and a roll of bandage. He had done this so often that the action came to him without his having any need of thought. And in a few minutes he was back in her chamber, yet he felt that he had travelled a long way through the dark, windy wastes of eternity, for that she had the plague and would die of it he made no doubt.

  Before that day ended, the marks of the pestilence appeared on her bosom, beginning as a purple stain and swelling to hard, dark tumours.

  She had by now fallen into a delirium and spoke at random about her children, her soul, and her terror lest that was lost for all her care. Then she seemed to recognize Ann Trickett and begged her pardon, if she had ever used unkindness to her, and stretched out her hand for Bessie, but could not find her though she stood close, so that they knew that Kate’s sight must be failing.

  Bessie and Ann Trickett between them heaved her up in bed, William Mompesson being incapable of touching her. Thomas Stanley gave her sweating antidotes such as they usually employed in the early stages of the plague; he had difficulty in making her drink them. This seemed but to inflame her more, to heat her blood and to distemper her head, which put upon her many incoherences.

  William Mompesson was greatly troubled with this; he could no longer hope to save her body, but he must do his utmost for the salvation of her soul. So he cried out to the delirious woman:

  “Kate, by whom and on what account do you expect salvation, and what assurances have you of the certainty thereof?”

  Though in other things as she had talked at random, yet to these religious questions she gave a rational answer, saying: “One drop of my Saviour’s blood to save my soul!” and cried out often, “God — God — God.”

  Thomas Stanley then offered her some more cordials and she shook her head, intimating that she could not take them, but her senses seemed to have a little returned.

  And when her husband conjured her to take these drinks in the name of her children, she said: “For their dear sakes, I will attempt it.” And she with difficulty lifted up her head and swallowed the drink.

  “You are to understand,” said Bessie, crying, “that while she has any strength left, she will embrace any opportunity of testifying to her affection for the children.” While her senses remained to her, Kate again whispered to her husband that he should leave her for fear of contagion. But he smiled; and said: “How can I leave you in your sickness who have been so tender and nursed me in your health? Blessed be God, if he enables me to be helpful and consoling to you.”

  But on these words she shook her head upon the pillow and said: “What can console me?”

  Her husband said hastily, for he feared she was disturbed by worldly matters:

  “Think of God! God!”

  And she repeated in a hollow voice:

  “God! God!”

  Her illness endured but two days. At the end of the second day she fell into a sleep and her husband slept, too, on a mattress beside her bed; Bessie and
Ann Trickett took it in turns to watch by Kate. And Thomas Stanley, coming and going on his various errands, performed the usual routine in the sick chamber of one who is dying of the pest — burning spices at the door, sprinkling vinegar upon the floor and upon the curtains, tying bunches of rue, fennel and rosemary above the bed, and renewing them as they faded.

  It was Ann Trickett’s watch, when Kate Mompesson woke and whispered that she would like her husband to pray with her. She seemed in her senses now and smiled faintly. Therefore Ann Trickett went round the bed and woke the Rector, who stumbled to his feet and cried: “My dearest wife, how do you do?”

  She could not answer, but Ann Tricket said:

  “Sir, she is looking when the good hour shall come.”

  William Mompesson turned about and took the Common Prayer Book from the side table and read the prayers. She made the responses — “Hark, as perfectly as if she were in health,” said Ann, who was on her knees at the end of the bed.

  When the prayers for the sick were ended, she still had not stirred, but she was breathing. Then her husband fetched The Whole Duty of Man and read some prayers from that treasured volume.

  When these were ended, still the sick woman was silent and pulling aside the disordered curtains, he stared down into her face, and asked:

  “My dear, dost thou understand? Dost thou mind what I say?”

  She answered: “Yes!” after struggling with the weakness of her lips.

  It was the last word she spoke.

  Ann Trickett pulled him back by the shoulders, and Bessie coming in with a bowl of water stayed herself on the threshold with a little cry, and the water spilled over her feet.

  For Kate was dead — a figure of corruption lay mute in the tumbled bed that once had been so nice and elegant.

  Catherine Mompesson was buried. They had found a space for her under the yew tree, but there was none who had the leisure to make her a tomb.