God and the Wedding Dress Read online

  Then, with a smile, as it were at a tangent: “Have you still Merriman, the gray horse?”

  The Puritan replied that he had, that a friend had kept the animal for him, while he had been in prison, and it was safe now at a neighbouring farm where it was resting.

  “For since I came out a fortnight ago I have ridden him hard and far. But this afternoon, in this clean, white day, I was minded to walk across the heath.”

  “Do not come to Eyam,” warned the Rector. “Jack Corbyn has returned to the Manor and has begun again preparations for his marriage with Bessie Carr, my sister-in-law.”

  “I should care little for that,” answered the dissenter indifferently, “if I were needed in Eyam. But I was there two days ago and visited some of my old flock, although you knew nothing of it,” he added with a simplicity that made his words void of offence.

  The Rector warned him, though kindly:

  “Take care how you go about these busy restless ways administering in secret. It is still against the law and thou may’st yet visit prison again.”

  “I know it well,” replied the dissenter. He snatched off his ragged hat and let the clear breeze blow against his thick gray locks and rugged brow. “What is that to me? I am in the hands of God.”

  These words savoured much of the cant that the Puritans were accused of using, yet to the Rector they were sincere.

  The two men parted. William Mompesson was comforted by the meeting and watched with a kindly glance the sturdy figure of the dissenter disappearing across the lonely moor.

  Where did he live, the outcast? In holes and crannies like the fox or the rabbit, or in a stable or barn of some lonely farm-house, fed by charity, he and the gray horse Merriman? And Mr. Mompesson’s heart softened with tenderness for little Bessie who in her gayest, most frivolous season, had thought of the wandering preacher and his horse.

  He turned towards the village, and as the low wind blew the springing grasses around his feet, he felt an unutterable loneliness that was hardly dispersed when he beheld the light that was just lit in the Rectory window before him.

  Jack Corbyn was expected at supper that evening, but he did not come.

  “He has gone, perhaps,” said Kate, when it was hopeless to expect him any longer, “to meet his mother. He said that she, and possibly his father, would be returning this week.”

  “But it was not to have been to-day,” said the Rector, who was puzzled, for he had sent Jonathan Mortin over to the old Manor House to ask after the young squire, and the servants had told him that he had gone abroad early in the afternoon. Was it possible that the young man was setting some foolish trick upon them again? That he was really so false and unstable that he would a second time forsake Bessie?

  The Rector could not believe it, but quieting the women as well as he could, for they, though laughing, confessed to some fears as to what had happened to Jack Corbyn, he went himself to the old Manor House, where the workmen had begun again to labour on the new buildings.

  He received the same tale as that which had been given to Jonathan Mortin. The young man had been seen in the early afternoon and had seemed in high spirits, even gay. He had gone out, he had taken his horse, and they believed he was riding to Chatsworth to wait upon my Lord.

  The Rector found some discrepancy among these statements. The housekeeper thought he had returned, the men-servants thought he had not. As he had with him no body-servant, it might be just possible that he was shut in his chamber, having gone up there without anyone’s having seen him; and upon investigation his horse was found in the stable.

  “This is a household in much disorder,” said the Rector displeased. “Your master may come and go and you know not his whereabouts! I’ll go upstairs myself and see if he be in his chamber.”

  So he took a small lamp from the housekeeper and went up the fine, wide, shallow stairs of the old Manor Hall. Though his mood was distracted, he found pleasure in the handsome dwelling that seemed so spacious and noble after the mean quarters of the Rectory.

  He was ashamed at once of this reflection and felt a pang of anguish at the knowledge, how ever-present with him, even now after he had been much purged of vanity during the last winter, was the love of worldly splendour and beauty.

  The housekeeper had told him that young Mr. Corbyn’s room was that on the right when he came to the stair-head, so he knocked there, holding the lamp in his hand. And when there was no answer, opened the door.

  The room was in darkness and he cried out: “Jack! Jack!” holding his lamp up.

  Was it possible that the young man was ill? He had been unwell when in Yorkshire, and he might have had a recurrence of his sickness. But there was no one on the bed; the curtains were drawn back, the pillows untouched — his belt, his boots, his feathered hat, his purse and gloves, his shirt and socks were flung on the floor, and these were soiled with dust and mud. While flung over another chair was his coat of pale gold-coloured cloth laced with silver.

  ‘This was what he was going to wear to-night,’ thought the Rector. ‘He was changing his clothes when something disturbed him. He had put off one suit and not completely attired himself in another. Where is he, then?’

  As he thought this, the Rector moved round the bed and there, stretched on the floor, he saw Jack Corbyn, clad in his gold-coloured breeches and the fine shirt that was open at the neck. The cravat and the black ribbon used to tie it were undone. His eyes were half-closed, the whites alone showing, his mouth was open and from the corners blood was bubbling.

  The Rector set the lamp upon the table and went on one knee beside the young man, thinking of murder, and wondering who could have got in and slain young Corbyn.

  His greatest terror was absent from his mind at this moment, and he pulled open the shirt to put his hand on the fallen man’s heart. As he did so he saw the black plague spots on the broad, arched white bosom.

  The Rector got to his feet and recoiled as if a blow had been struck him between the eyes. All his senses were stunned at the realization of what had happened. The plague! Bessie’s bridegroom dead of the plague! He had fled from it months before, been safe in an untainted spot, and then, when the contagious disease was over, he had returned. And he was the first victim of a new epidemic.

  It was over a month since anyone had died of the plague in Eyam, and the Rector for a moment did not think even of Bessie’s tragedy, but only of the horror of the failure of his own precautions.

  The black death was, then, still in the village! Or was it possible that young Corbyn had brought it with him? He had been home about a week — the Rector made a rapid calculation. He had died very quickly, yet there had been others who had been snatched away as suddenly — laughing in the morning and dead, with the foul froth on their lips, in the evening.

  He tried to remember the young man’s demeanour yesterday; he had been a little languid, he had said that it was hot, yet it was only early April in the mountains, and the Rector had noticed nothing but a pleasant mildness in the air. Three days ago he had noticed him with Bessie under the bare linden trees, leaning over the churchyard wall, looking at those thirty-one graves. And he remembered seeing Bessie go round by the lych-gate and pluck the snowdrops and hand them to her lover.

  There was no infection possible there. No one living near the churchyard had had the plague.

  William Mompesson put his hand to his brow and a wordless prayer left him, a soundless appeal to his God.

  Then, leaning against the tapestry that Bessie had seen hung with such pleasure but a few days before, the young Rector tried to reconstruct what had happened.

  The young man had come in, not having been noticed by his servants, and gone upstairs to change his riding-clothes for those he intended to wear to the Rectory and suddenly, even as he had been changing his shirt, must have been smitten and fallen down without the power to give a cry. The infection must have been virulent, and he so young and strong…Rector heard himself sayi
ng aloud: “And so afraid…”

  Well, here was the end truly, now, of Bessie’s marriage.

  The young man took the lamp and crossed the disordered bedchamber.

  He was thinking rapidly, his whole nature seethed up to meet this crisis. There was no time for agitation or lament, little for sorrow. The servants, the housekeeper, and two others, had gathered at the foot of the stairs, apprehensive of something unusual, even dreadful, for the Rector had been some time in their master’s bedroom and there had been silence, for he had had the fortitude not to cry out.

  Standing at the top of the stairs, holding his lamp, William Mompesson said: “Your master has died of a sudden sickness.”

  He thought of saying, No doubt it is a recurrence of the attacks he had in Yorkshire, but he did not dare to lie, so he added: “It is the plague. Get out rags and vinegar and such spices as you have and burn them at the foot of the stairs.”

  The servants drew back with a little shudder, as if they had been struck, one by one. The women put their aprons to their faces, the men looked sullen. There were others in the door now and the words went from one to another: “The plague! The master, dead upstairs.”

  The Rector stood among them and gave his lamp into the hands of one of the stable-men.

  “Thirty-one people have died of the plague in this village, but you have been spared. You have no need to think that you are doomed now. I must write to the young esquire’s parents.”

  And he thought to himself: ‘They will not return.’ Aloud he said: “And as he has no near relatives here, I will order his coffin.”

  “And who’s to put him into it, sir?” asked the man who held the lamp that cast a yellow light over his sickly face.

  “I have done that work myself, so far,” replied Mr. Mompesson, “save in those cases where the relatives wished to do it. Let none go to your master’s room. I will return when I have wrought some fumigants, and wrap your master in his shroud. Get out a sheet and some candles and all the spices you have in the house.”

  “Oh, sir,” sobbed the pallid housekeeper, “the poor young mistress!”

  “Yes,” said the Rector gravely, “pray for her.” And like a dart in his mind was the thought that Bessie’s wedding dress had slain her bridegroom.

  He met her as he was returning; in her eagerness she had come from the Rectory, hoping to meet her lover and her brother-in-law on the way. Over her silvery gown she had put a dark mantle, and her small face was pale in the hood.

  “Bessie,” he said, taking her hand, “happiness is not for you, but courage may be. None can spare you this suffering, child.”

  “Happiness not for me! Suffering!” she repeated. “Jack is ill?”

  “Jack is dead, I have seen him just now. He has died of the plague, Bessie. There is no time for lamentation.”

  He caught her strongly as she cried out and seemed about to fall, and he added:

  “Bess, this is death to the common eye, but the soul that was in thy Jack is now in eternity.”

  That night Catherine Mompesson watched by Bessie, who fell into a gentle wildness and with the mounting heat in her blood spoke crazily of her wedding dress, of the decked church, the marriage morning.

  Ann Trickett kept the two children in the far part of the house, and the Rector spent the night in the old Manor Hall; Jonathan Mortin had volunteered to help him in the preparation of the body of Jack Corbyn for the grave.

  The young man was folded with sprigs of bay and rue and sorrel and rosemary into one of his mother’s finest sheets, and as there had been many coffins made of late in the village, there was one in readiness that had been waiting for five weeks or more for the next victim of the plague; this was brought down to the old Manor Hall and the young man placed in it. And before they were able to nail him in, his flesh was putrefying so that for all the fumigants the stench was almost insupportable.

  So on the next day he was buried in the churchyard near to those thirty-one graves that he and Bessie had been looking at four days before.

  The Rector read the burial service over him and afterwards went into the church to pray.

  On the afternoon of that day Bessie fell into a deep sleep and when she woke was composed and quiet, yet seemed to her anxious sister to be a different person from the girl who had fallen down when her brother-in-law met her with the news of her lover’s death.

  From her window she could see the grave, the fresh overturned sods. In burying him they had disturbed the snowdrops she had plucked to put in his bosom. But nothing had changed; there seemed no more flowerets in the grass, no more buds on the trees, it was still early spring, the season not advanced one jot. Yet to Bessie and Kate it seemed that it had been in another existence that they had helped to lay the supper table, putting in its place the great salt-cellar and standing out the wineglasses and the flagons and laying the napkins for the coming of Jack Corbyn to supper.

  Bessie had no thought save for her own infinite loss, though she said:

  “Kate, you must not think I shall hinder you with groans and sighs. I have nothing to do now but wait until I join him in Heaven, but meanwhile I must work and be of some service. Give me something to do, if it is only in the kitchen.”

  So Kate found her little tasks here and there. There were always many duties to perform in the Rectory where there were two children and the house was old and rambling.

  But Kate had other fears, though she did not voice them. She felt Bessie’s tragedy to the core of her heart, though for herself she had not much liked Jack and she had even been sorry that he had returned into her sister’s life, for she thought that if he had stayed away poor Bess would have recovered herself at last and found herself a better mate. And Kate nourished this hope even now. Bessie was very young and her grief would die, and she would find another husband.

  But Kate’s fear and grief was for the return of the plague. It had never been so near the Rectory as the old Manor House. She thought of her two children and her husband, even of kind Ann Trickett and good Jonathan Mortin, who had gone to the old Manor House to put the body into its coffin. They had believed themselves safe and here it was again. And the horror of the young man’s death clung to her like a cloud over her spirits and a veil over her eyes.

  Her husband had given her some brief particulars of how Jack must have gone upstairs and even while he was changing his clothes fallen down without a chance to make a Will, to say a word, to have his soul shriven, to say farewell. Oh, it was horrible!

  And Kate wished they had not buried him where his grave could be seen from the window. But it had chanced that that corner of the churchyard was where the other plague victims had been put. And the feeling was to put them all together and afterwards to raise some memorial to them. There was talk of taking the great ancient cross that stood the other side of the church and placing it there. But for Jack Corbyn there would, of course, be a fine altar tomb. Perhaps his parents would plant another yew tree; there was one already in the churchyard at the other side of the porch.

  But Kate knew that this fear of the graves was folly, perhaps wickedness. Neither she nor Bessie, nay, nor even her two children, should shrink from these evidences of mortality, but keep the graves before their eyes and remember their own slight tenure of years and how soon their dust would be dispersed, too.

  Kate prayed often, but into her prayers came little creeping doubts that distracted her from thoughts of Heaven.

  And three days after the death of Jack Corbyn two of the servants in the old Manor House were taken ill and four days after that, two more. And within a week there were twenty in Eyam sick of the plague. Nor did the strengthening sunshine, for the spring was early and brilliant, seem to help them.

  William Mompesson sent to Chatsworth for supplies of medicines and fumigants and went among the sick, but soon there were so many ill that he could not minister to them all and some had to die without Christian consolation.

  An
d so the quick tragedy of Jack Corbyn’s death was soon forgotten in the fierce onslaught of the return of the plague to Eyam.

  Chapter V

  ‘AN ANGEL TALKING TO A MAN’

  WILLIAM MOMPESSON had withdrawn into the dell nearest the village, where he might find some solitude for meditation and yet be near at hand, should his services be of a sudden required, as was very likely during the plague.

  In May, only three had died of the plague, and hope had revived again in Eyam, and there had been a relaxation of the strict rules that the doctor, Mr. Walbeoffe, from Chatsworth, had laid down, and Mr. Mompesson in his reports to my Lord-Lieutenant had been able to write cheerfully of the future.

  But it was now June and as uncommonly warm as the winter had been uncommonly severe, and the plague had returned with exceptional malignancy; since the death of young Fulwood, the tailor’s apprentice, seventy-four people had died of the plague or of an illness presumed to be plague; and terrible as that scourge had been, it was as nothing to the desolation that afflicted Eyam now.

  Three weeks of June had gone and in that period of time thirty had died and ten more were ill.

  The wealthier inhabitants of the village, those who dwelt about the lych-gate on the western side beyond the stream had, many of them, left the district, and all the strangers, such as the masons who had been employed upon repairing the old Manor Hall, had gone, as well as several of the miners who were not natives of Eyam, but had come to lodge there for the convenience of their work. Nor had Mr. Corbyn, the esquire, returned to look upon the grave of his only son, while there had been no word or sign from some of the other considerable families who lived a short distance from Eyam, nor had William Mompesson sent for them.

  The situation was fast becoming such as taxed all his resources, almost overcame his courage. There was scarcely labour enough to carry the dead to the churchyard. Unassisted, the Rector had to read the funeral services at the rate of one a day, comfort the sick and dying, hold services, and preach in the church that now was always full.