God and the Wedding Dress Read online

  God and the Wedding Dress

  Marjorie Bowen

  © Marjorie Bowen 1938

  Marjorie Bowen has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1938 by Hutchinson & Co

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Let it suffice, at length thy fits And lusts — said He —

  Have had their wish and way;

  Press not to be

  Still thy own foe and mine; for to this day I did delay

  And would not see, but chose to wink;

  Nay, at the very brink

  And edge of all,

  When thou would’st fall,

  My love twist held thee up, my unseen link.

  I know thee well; for I have fram’d

  And hate thee not;

  Thy spirit too is mine;

  I know thy lot,

  Extent, and end, for my hand drew the line

  Assigned thine;

  If then thou wouldst unto my seat,

  ’Tis not the applause and feat

  Of dust and clay

  Leads to that way

  But from these follies a resolv’d retreat.

  HENRY VAUGHAN.

  ‘I cry’d out: Well, I know not what to do, Lord direct me! and the like…and casting my eye on the 91st Psalm, I read to 7th verse exclusive and, after that, included the 10th, as follows: “I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in Him will I trust. Surely He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A. thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold, and see the reward of the wicked. Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation. There shall no evil befall they neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling”…from that moment I resolved that I would stay in the town and, casting myself entirely upon the goodness and protection of the Almighty, would not seek any other shelter whatever. And that, as my times were in His hands, He was as able to keep me in a time of infection as in a time of health, and if He did not think fit to deliver me, still I was in His hands and it was meet He should do with me as seemed good to Him.’

  The History of the Great Plague in London in the Year 1665.

  DANIEL DEFOE. {Pages 15-16, Edition 1920.)

  FOREWORD

  THERE are so many different kinds of historical stories and this author has tried most of them, so it is as well to make clear what has been attempted in this novel. The shell of the tale is true and concerns an incident fairly well known, though perhaps better known a hundred years ago than it is to-day. It has served to illustrate many moral poems and anecdotes, which are now as forgotten as the morality they expressed.

  But the details of this episode of country life in the reign of Charles II are sparse and rest largely on legend and conjecture. The characters, too, are shadowy, mere names and labels, most of them.

  None of this matters beside the spiritual truth that emerges; in that remote Derbyshire village nearly three hundred years ago, a man did try to serve his God to the best of his belief and at a terrible cost to himself and others. This action was such as to make him a hero in the eyes of the single-minded, a fool in the opinion of those who have the knowledge he could not have possessed.

  He believed that he was following divine instructions. From a worldly point of view he was doing things as foolish as they were brave.

  Here is good matter for study, a moving, inspiring subject; can there be a more important one than a man’s sincere dealings with his God?

  The background and the details have been given as much verisimilitude in time and place as the writer could achieve; such history as is introduced would pass muster in the school books, it is hoped. But the main theme is the spiritual adventure of the young man who was convinced he knew the will of God. Some readers may detect echoes of Henry Vaughan in the story; such verses as are quoted are his, as are the very beautiful lines above. The writer felt that Vaughan was the perfect expression in poetry of the spirit that moved the hero of this tale, and the poet was but a few years earlier in date than the priest, so that they share the same contemporary colouring. The letters given in this book are from originals supposed to be genuine, but unfortunately stilted and affected as well as dubious. The writer has ventured to recast them into a more sympathetic and fluid form.

  The medical details, in this case so important, are given on medical authority; the principal book consulted being that by Dr. Charles Creighton: Epidemics in Britain. The rest of the material had to be gathered from old guide-books, magazines, and memoirs long since out of print.

  Chapter I

  ST. HELEN’S WAKE

  “If they do not know, do not inform them, but it seems incredible that they are in ignorance.”

  “Sir, I dare assure you that it is so — these people live as isolated an existence as if they resided in Muscovy.”

  “You speak in pity, Mr. Mompesson? You think them, perhaps, savages?”

  “Sir, that they are rude, wild and unlettered, there can be no doubt.”

  “They have immortal souls, Mr. Mompesson.”

  “I should have said that, my Lord,” replied the young clergyman with a look and an accent steady and quick.

  “No, it was I who was impertinent to remind you. See, your son’s craft has capsized and you must make him another —”

  “ — out of the pages of my sermons, my Lord.”

  Mr. Mompesson took a packet of manuscript from his pocket and deftly fashioned, by folding the paper, a little ship; the two men stood by the banks of a stream that eddied swiftly down a gradual hill, the clear water impeded here and there by glistening stones. Limestone rocks, thickly grown with fine ferns and glossy ivy rose on either side of the dell that was surrounded by trees that almost shut out the distant mountains that rose purple and cloud-veiled behind them.

  A child of four years of age sat on the edge of the stream and watched his father fashion his new toy; the first paper ship, water-logged, had foundered in the current.

  “I irk you, sir, with my childish occupations,” said the young clergyman. “Your Lordship will think that Eyam has gotten an idle pastor.”

  The Earl regarded the speaker shrewdly.

  “I am your friend,” he replied quietly, and watched the launching of the paper boat, on which, in a fine careful hand, the words ‘Thou hast made the desert blossom as the rose’ were clearly visible.

  The July day was warm, the hill air sweet with the pure scent of the wild thyme and mint, which showed their blue and purple flowers by the banks of the stream; a soft wind stirred the upper boughs of the crest of trees that overhung the dale; the two men and the child, as if entranced by the summer languor, watched the paper boat taken slowly, with a gallant dignity, down the current.

  The Earl, who was the elder by twenty years or more, was a man still in the prime of life, but marked by fatigue, hardship and anxiety. He had known war, exile
and poverty; but four years ago he had been living in miserable penury abroad; now he was restored to something more than his ancestral honours and he had been recently appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Derby. With little taste for Court life, the Earl of Devon resided during most of the year at Chatsworth, the antique and noble building that stood amid the dignity of the wide park through which this stream flowed; the Earl was a quiet, careful man, of whom little was known, so earnest had he been to avoid disputes or strivings with his fellows; his attire was plain, he wore his graying hair cut to the shoulders and might have been his own steward as he stood thoughtful among the knee-high flowers and grasses.

  William Mompesson, on the other hand, looked above his station; his gray cloth was of the finest make, his bands of delicate lawn, his whole air full of elegance and grace; moreover, he was brilliantly handsome, his patrician and slightly aquiline features shaded by thick auburn curls. Had not his bearing been grave and slightly aloof, he would have appeared no more than what he had hitherto been, chaplain in the household of a great gentleman.

  “Why did you enter the Church, Mr. Mompesson?” asked the Earl suddenly.

  The dell was full of echoes, and the question, asked in a slightly raised voice, was repeated in hollow tones: “ — the Church, Mr. Mompesson?”

  “You hear the echoes?” smiled the young clergyman. “How am I to answer so many at once? Surely I did not enter it for preferment — since I am sent into the wilderness.”

  “That was my thought,” said the Earl bluntly. “I should have thought, with your gifts and scholarship, family and friends, you might have hoped for a better cure than Eyam.”

  “Sir, it was in my patron’s gift, he offered it and I took it.”

  The Earl was not sure whether Mr. Mompesson spoke lightly or in rebuke.

  “And your wife, does she take kindly to this rural life?”

  “Kate is, as I think, happy.”

  “Do not then, disturb her, with talk of what is happening in London. She has no friends there?”

  “None, my Lord. Her family were at Cockpen, Durham, and her parents are dead. An uncle in York City is all she has.”

  “There is no chance that she should write to London or receive a letter from there?”

  “None, my Lord, indeed.”

  “Nor her sister?”

  “Bessie still less than Kate has any acquaintance at London. Have no fear, my Lord. I shall neither send nor receive anything for a time. Indeed, since I came to the North, I have lost my friends there.”

  “Very well. And no doubt it is fantastic that a mere letter, save that it came from an infected house…But our wise men can tell us very little of these matters.”

  “I have studied them. I thought once to be a physician,” said Mr. Mompesson unexpectedly. “It is still a foggy science. But for infection, I would not trust a scrap of rag — came it never so many miles.”

  “Some hold that opinion.” The Earl wished to probe into the character and attainments of this attractive man who deeply interested him. “I did not know, Mr. Mompesson, that you followed this modern fashion of chemical experiments and medicine.”

  “I have done very little, I assure you, sir.”

  “I rather held you to be a scholar. Sir George Savile told me you were translating Plautus.”

  “Again,” smiled the young clergyman, “I must say — I have done very little.”

  “You are, sir, over-diffident. I take my leave. Let me welcome you at my house soon. You are lucky, sir, to have your son beside you. Mine is at sea and even now engaged, maybe, with the Dutch.”

  “I will pray for him, my Lord.” Mr. Mompesson bade the little boy rise and salute the Earl, and then stood thoughtful when the boy had gone back to his play, regarding the thick-set figure of the elder man as he walked quickly down the winding path that led to Chatsworth.

  In such company the young clergyman was at home; he came from an old Nottingham family of Norman extraction and had received a liberal education. When he had left Peterhouse College, he had obtained, through influence, the post of chaplain to Sir George Savile at Rufford Park and had attended him there or at Thornhill, Yorkshire, and had lived a life of elegance, ease and refinement such as best suited his temperament. His content had been completed by his early marriage to a docile and fair young gentlewoman, Catherine Carr of Cockpen, Durham, who had given him two fine children.

  William Mompesson had sometimes accompanied his patron to London and thus had seen something of vice, movement, and novelty of the times, and how men strove both for good and bad, and women clung to their coat skirts impeding them with clamour, or put a staff into their hands and helped them along with noble words.

  He remembered little of the Rebellion; he had been a child when the late king was beheaded, but he could recall the hurry, the anxiety, the dread of civil war; the sour clash of opinion on how God was to be served and understood. He recalled, too, the universal joy when the present Charles had returned to his own, and how the prospects for a young royalist student at Cambridge had brightened, and how soon afterwards he had come by his early living, because he was a gentleman bearing arms, well-bred and comely.

  Mr. Mompesson much admired Sir George Savile, who was brilliant, witty and wise, and who had taught him to despise the tricks and superstitions of mankind and to disdain the grossness of the self-seekers, the panders, jobbers and wittols who cluttered up all approaches to authority. Sir George had drawn his young chaplain’s attention to the delights of Attic philosophy, the exquisite pleasures of music, classical learning, chess and horsemanship.

  There were those who said that Sir George was too much of a philosopher to be a good Christian, there were those who taxed him to his face with being an utter disbeliever, but for them he always had the same reply: ‘None but a fool is an atheist,’ and reminded them of the Holy Bible, where the saying is written: ‘The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.’

  “Come home, George,” said Mr. Mompesson, rousing himself from his reverie and observing that the Earl was now out of sight. “We spend too much time idling, you and I.”

  The child raised his head and marked with delight the echo that, absorbed in his sport, he had not before observed.

  “Sir, we stay,” he protested; and cupping his fat hands round his mouth, gave stammering cries to the echoes of the glen.

  Mr. Mompesson readily lingered in this sweet solitude that had that elegant luxury (to his mind) to which he was too well used; the dell was as fine as the great music-room at Rufford Park. Only when he came upon the dwellings of his rude flock was the young clergyman offended. He did not wish to return to his own house, the meanness of which vexed him. Kate and Bessie were, moreover, distracted with the feminine business attendant on the approaching wedding and he had no part in that, nor was he much at ease about that marriage.

  While his child shouted through the trumpet of his hands, William Mompesson’s thoughts returned with pleasure to his old life at Rufford Park and with vexation to his magnificent patron, Sir George Savile. Why had that great gentleman so encouraged and flattered him, laying him, as it were, on silk and feeding him with honey for five years, only at last to say: ‘Why, Mr. Mompesson, here is the living of Eyam vacant by the death of Sherland Adams, who was a quarrelsome rogue. And it is yours.’

  It would have been to many men a sentence of banishment, for the mountain village was remote and wild, and the people had been much neglected by their late pastor, who, after being suspended by Cromwell, had returned to his charge, a bitter, broken man. But at first William Mompesson had been glad to leave his golden servitude, for he had been discontented with his fastidious sheltered life and eager to exercise his energy and his gifts.

  He smiled now as he thought of that flash of enthusiasm. There were no opportunities in Eyam for a man like himself. Though this was the country where his family had lived since the Norman Conquest, he had no knowledge of these hills, this rural life
, these people, rude, superstitious, coarse and troublesome, who neither had, nor wished to have, any connection with the outer world. People who had hardly heard of London, whose imaginations went no further than Bakewell, and to whom the Earl of Devonshire in Chatsworth was more important than the King.

  ‘What can I get into their thick heads?’ he thought. ‘What use is learning, or love of God, or holiness, or wit and enthusiasm here?’

  He frowned slightly as he pondered over the part that Sir George had taken in this; had that subtle man thought that his young chaplain was becoming effeminate and pampered? Had he, with that sparkle of delicate malice which sometimes lit his urbane detachment, decided to put William Mompesson to the proof?

  ‘Perhaps he was tired of me; perhaps he recalled that I was his dependent and might be dismissed. And took this way of doing so, courteously.’

  The young man’s sensitive mind was galled, not only because he detected a hidden rebuke in this banishment to this desolate post, but because he detected failure in himself. He had always believed that he was sincerely religious and that he longed to prove it. Now he knew that he regretted Rufford Park and Thornhill and was depressed — even disgusted — by Eyam.

  His chance meeting with the Earl of Devonshire to whom Sir George had warmly recommended him, had stabbed him with regret for the old days when he had enjoyed as of right the company of such men and the luxuries with which they surrounded themselves. True, my Lord had been gracious, but William Mompesson knew that an occasional visit to the great man’s establishment would not assuage his longing for the life that he had left.

  Other considerations crossed his mind; he was a poor man. His parents, both dead, had been ruined by the civil war and what they had left him had been almost exhausted by the expenses of his education. He had not above forty pounds a year, nor was his wife in better case; the late troubles had left her orphaned and sucked up her family’s substance, and she had no near relative beyond Mr. John Beilby, a gentleman possessing a small estate outside York.