The dissenter was the least changed; his countenance, which had formerly been rude and gross, was purified in colour and sharpened in outline. His clothes hung slackly on a gaunt frame. He looked an old man of perhaps seventy years, but there was still vigour in his glance and in his movements, as after a brief salutation he continued to pile the clothes and stick them with the metal-pronged fork on the bonfire.
Jonathan Mortin was heavily scarred across the face with dry scabs of the pox. His head was tied in a woollen scarf and he sang continually to himself.
William Mompesson, without his clerical attire, his elegant, auburn curls, his look of melancholy composure, was the most changed of the three; his eyes, so bloodshot and hollowed as to have lost all their original beauty, had a glance that the Earl could not understand. It seemed quizzical, almost as if he smiled; he wore a rude garment like a smock, of a greenish colour, cotton stockings, and cobbled shoes.
He came forward, as if not much surprised, and said:
“I had not expected your Lordship so soon. Yet I do not think you run any danger, for the place is now clear of the plague.”
“I am ashamed to talk of danger, when you are present, Mr. Mompesson. How many are left?”
He glanced up the ruined street, where the windows and doors were blank in the grey afternoon.
“We count fifteen souls here,” replied the Rector, pointing to the gaunt, tattered-looking villains who were helping him. “We thought to have done with this work, but to-day there came in another cartload of furniture and clothes from a farm where they had the plague. So we are burning it. But I think this is the last of our fires.”
“How have you borne this?” said my Lord, dismounting and giving the reins to his servant. “How have you endured to stay here? What, sir, is your formula for this courage?”
To which William Mompesson replied that they should “seek the Lord, if haply they might steal 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.”
“There must,” said my Lord painfully, “have been many mists and shadows between you and this truth, Mr. Mompesson. And it is hard to understand why it should have been obeyed and why so many should have died terribly.”
And he looked at the Puritan who, leaning on his fork, asked with a grim smile:
“Sir, do you come to take me to Derby jail?”
“Thy zeal,” replied my Lord, “has earned my charity. Go in peace, Mr. Thomas Stanley.”
The dissenter did not thank him, but smiled more deeply and returned to his work, as one who had no concern with this world.
The Earl stood silent, afraid, for he felt a deep gulf between himself and these people, though he had been communicating with them intimately for so long; to him they were like strangers, stern angels clothed in the coarse habiliments of men, or supernatural creatures like those supposed to haunt the lonely moors; he knew that he had no longer anything in common with them. They were monstrous in their virtue.
Nor had they anything to say to him; nothing of what might have been expected — relief at seeing members of the outside world again, joy at feeling that the plague had gone at last, anxious enquiry after their friends or their fortunes abroad.
After the few words of greeting, spoken with quiet courtesy, they went about their work, scrupulously piling together and burning every particle of infected clothing and furniture. And my Lord almost felt foolish as he stood there with the physician muttering what sounded, in the face of this, but quackeries, by his side, and his servants staring like men ashamed.
When the task was finished, William Mompesson gathered his helpers together, altogether they were but sixteen in number and only three were women, and read them a few prayers, and gave them a short address.
“But to-day,” he said, “we will not go to Cucklett Dell, for I think it is too cold for these services under the skies. So next Sunday we will meet again in the church.”
Then he raised his hand and bade them be of good courage, since God had spared them to the last, when He had taken so many others. But they were not on that account to make any valuation of their lives, but rather to hold them cheap, and he added:
“Watch ye, therefore, for ye know not when the Master of the house cometh, at even or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning.”
Then, as they were turning away, he added:
“I give you this comfort. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of One shall many be made righteous.”
Then when the helpers were gone to their ruined homes, Mr. Mompesson asked my Lord and his attendants if they would come to the Rectory. There was something to offer them in the way of repose and refreshment, he said, though but little.
“But you have kept us bountifully supplied, sir. We have never really wanted. And I have sacrificed willingly much of my household goods, more than was necessary, to encourage the others. So you must not despise, if you find my dwelling very strict.”
They all turned towards the Rectory, but my Lord did not like to look to right and left because of the empty cottages, the dead nettles and thistles growing by the thresholds and the rude mounds that told that the owners were buried near where they had lived.
The woman followed them and my Lord asked who she was. Mr. Mompesson replied: “She is one, Janot, who was a strolling player and returned here after one she loved. She helped me in the Rectory after Kate and Bessie died, and without her I do not think I could have succeeded. She escaped the infection, but took a gross complaint in the face which I have cured. The other is Jonathan Mortin, my man — I believe your Lordship met him before. And so with Thomas Stanley we made up our little household.”
They passed the church and the Earl glanced up at the tower against a curdle of iron-grey clouds, and at the bare linden trees, a still tracery in that cold air. He could scarcely repress a groan as he saw how close-packed the graves were, as he observed that great mound which hid the pit close by the low wall.
“I have tried to keep the register complete,” said the Rector, “but it has been difficult. There were but the two of us to go the rounds of our parish boundary.”
As they entered the Rectory, my Lord noticed that it was indeed stripped, and the physician exclaimed against the extravagance of burning or destroying everything, even tapestries and chairs.
“Ay,” said Mompesson with a smile, “I did have a certain tapestry that showed Moses and the brazen serpent, which I valued somewhat. It was given me by Sir George Savile. But as I said, I did this to encourage others to bring out their treasures, which were more to them than mine were to me. This, however, I kept,” he said. And he picked up a Prayer Book bound with silver that lay on the table inside the door. “It belonged to Kate. Is it not strange that some chance should make these shreds of skin and scraps of metal outlast the pestilence, excel the fair, the young, the lovely?”
Janot had turned aside to mend the fire that burned on the wide hearth and to put over the long table a square of fresh linen. The air, scarcely warmed by the flames on the hearth of the Rectory, was sweet and pungent from aromatics that burnt continuously.
The Rector bade Janot bring what they had. Wine and brandy were gone, but there were some home-made cordials. Janot had proved a good housewife; she could make bread, and they had not yet come to the end of their preserves.
When the girl had left the room, and the men were seated round the blaze, the Rector said: “She has given all she has, like Mary Magdalen, to God — her comeliness. She will never more earn her wage as she earned it before.”
Jonathan Mortin had left the gentlemen to help in the kitchen.
“He now hardly speaks,” said the Rector. “I believe his faith is pure and steady.”
Again my Lord felt and more powerfully than before — indeed so forcibly that he was minded to get up and escape from an atmosphere that was stifling — that these people wer
e not human, but mere spectres of humanity, ghosts, phantoms, or wraiths. And he said hastily that he must not pause to eat or drink, not that he meant any slight on their hospitality, but that he was too overwhelmed by the sense of their heroism and suffering to put them to any pain on his account; rising, he asked the two clergymen what they would do now?
Mr. Mompesson made a motion of his hand, which had once been so white, elegant, and well-cared for and which was now scarred, swollen, and red, towards the dissenter, who answered, as if out of an abstraction, that he would go his ways again and travel round Derbyshire and minister to his flock till he died or was jailed.
“And I hope soon,” he added, “my gazing soul will spy some shadows of eternity.”
Then Mr. Mompesson spoke. He said that he was willing to stay in the village if Sir George Savile wished, but the task was now for a stouter man. He said that one required a great deal of energy to encourage such of the villagers as had fled back to their homes, to induce them to bring willing helpers with them to rebuild the village, to take up life again.
“But for me,” he ended, “I think I have done my work here. Each night when I lie down in my bed, it is like a curtained grave, and sleep lies on me like ashes. Yet I know,” he added sternly, “that God does shine and move beyond that misty shroud.”
He glanced at my Lord and added strangely:
“How long dost thou think it is till day, sir?”
“What day do you mean, Mr. Mompesson?”
“I think of that day when all shall arise, when the Day Star shall spring.”
My Lord knew that the stricken man thought of his wife, and he said:
“Have you arranged for the tomb of Mrs. Mompesson? I have had commands from Sir George Savile to see that all is fair set above her grave and no cost counted.”
Upon this the Rector became eager in his manner and went upstairs with a lighter step than he had used yet, and came down with a bundle of papers in his hand and pointed out with great zeal to my Lord the plans he had made for the tomb and the motto he had written out.
He expressed his hope that all his successors in the Rectory would keep a yew tree planted near her grave and never move the old Cross from which he and Thomas Stanley had preached in the early days of the desolation.
“I have, sir,” he said with enthusiasm, “one pearl — her memory — left me. And though her body is now in truth a ruined piece that the winds and rains beat through and stain, though she has taken to that senseless sleep the wages of her sin, though Time, sir, so it seems as I see him, is old and slow, with wings dull and sickly, yet the day will come when she shall rise, and I, too, from the dust and stones. And not only me but they who also have the first-fruits of the spirit. Even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption — to wit, the redemption of our bodies.”
“Amen, my Lord. “Amen,” said the physician. And the dissenter stood apart, smiling.
Then Jonathan Mortin and Janot, having tidied their garments and washed their hands yet again (the girl having put ointment on her scarred face and drawn her linen hood discreetly over it), brought in cordials that my Lord and his physician and his secretary all drank, looking the while out of the uncurtained windows at the bare orchard and the empty hives, and the grey, purple vista beyond with the dark curdle of clouds.
“The day is dark and murk,” smiled the Rector, taking the glass of cordial from my Lord’s hand. “We come upon a dark Egyptian damp. My thoughts, believe me, sir, they challenge the brightest day. Sweet downy thoughts, soft lily-shades they are, fresh spicy mornings, eternal beams. These visions keep me company.”
He then, in a quiet formal tone, asked my Lord if he would come upstairs to the laboratory, where all was purged with aromatics, and see the register that had been kept carefully as might be?
And when my Lord and physician and secretary followed him up the staircase, Mr. Mompesson spoke but one sentence more of his state. And that was:
“May we not think, my Lord, that we are not all stone and earth, but shine a little and have by those weak rays some glimpse of where we come from? We see Heaven over our heads, do we not, and know from whence we come? But now, no more. Let us complete what we have set our hands to.”
Then he began to talk of his business, and when my Lord reached the laboratory, he found not only the register but other ledgers set out very plain, in which William Mompesson had entered all the goods he had received — both from my Lord and other sources — such as had been paid for and such as had been given as gifts and loans. He had also written notes of the progress of the disease, the various ways in which it attacked the various people. He had put down the names of families, their heirs and heiresses, and what property there might be to be divided in the future among various claimants.
The Earl bade his secretary note all this, and the physician was very curious, too, to hear these accounts of the pestilence and the various forms it had taken.
As they stood there thus debating the desolation of Eyam, the heavy clouds outside the window disbanded and scattered, and a few beams fell into the laboratory, glittering on the glass jars, retorts, crucibles, and giving a lustre to the pots of ointments.
My Lord chanced to glance up and he saw the Rector’s face clear in that pale though steady beam, and for the third time he had the impression that he was in the presence of someone unearthly, so drained of all sensuality was that haggard countenance from which so wild a zeal did those deep-set eyes gleam. Yet Mr. Mompesson spoke very quietly, and said that if another might take his charge, say in a year’s time, he would retire to a hut in Rufford Park that he made no doubt Sir George Savile would lend him, and there spend some time in peace. And if he was spared, seek later on, another chaplaincy. As for his children, his friends would see to them.
With that my Lord left the Rectory, promising to send some of his servants to help in the village, and some of his woodmen, masons, and tenants to look after the crops and fencing and rebuilding of the houses. He also promised to use all his influence to persuade those who had fled from the village to return, and to engage the interest of larger families, such as the Corbyns, in coming again to their homes.
So they took leave of the Rector and of the Nonconformist, who said that he was soon going again on his travels as he had no longer any work to do in Eyam, since most of those who had followed him in that village were now dead. Jonathan Mortin, it was understood, would always stay with his master, while the girl Janot would find some place as a serving-maid, if any one would take one from the infected village even now. If not, she too would return to solitude and build herself a hovel on the moors or in the rocks.
My Lord was silent for a while, only answering his secretary, who pointed out to him the cottage where the tailor, George Vickers, had lived and that would surely, he said, be ever after known as the ‘plague cottage,’ for there the plague had come into the village, as was now well ascertained on the Rector’s own admission, in the wedding dress for Bessie Carr.
When they were clear of the village, the physician spoke his mind and he said:
“That man sacrificed all those wretches to a mistaken idea. Had he let them all scatter at the first sign of the plague, they had not spread it but saved their own lives. If they had not kept together, there had been little danger. The infection was sealed up in the graves as Lord William said.”
The Earl did not reply. Here was a conundrum he was by no means disposed to answer; he left it to God, who had sent the plague to Eyam in a wedding dress.
In the Rectory the visit of my Lord was soon forgotten; when the midday meal was eaten and cleared away, they gathered for a service of praise, and Janot, who had once been a fair musician, played on Kate’s spinet an accompaniment to the hymn that the three men sang.
“King of comforts, King of life,
Thou hast cheer’d me;
And when fears and doubts were rife,
Thou hast clear’d me.
/> Not a nook in all my breast
But Thou fill’st it,
Not a thought that breaks my rest
But Thou kill’st it.
Therefore with my utmost strength
I will praise Thee.
And as Thou giv’st line and length
I will raise Thee.
Not a minute in the year
But I’ll mind Thee,
My seal and bracelet here,
I will bind Thee.
If then, dread Lord,
When to Thy board
Thy wretch comes begging,
He has a flow’r
Or to his pow’r
Some poor off’ring.
When Thou hast made
Thy beggar glad,
And fill’d his bosom,
Let him, though poor,
Strew at Thy door
That one poor blossom.”
O rosa campi! O lilium convallium! quo modo nunc facta es pabulum aprorum!
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God and the Wedding Dress Page 26