Complete works of hall c.., p.136
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 136
God’s holy grace be with her! I have not seen her. The Deemster I have seen, the Bishop I have spoken with, and a living vision of our Ewan, his sweet child-daughter, have I held to my knee. But not once these many days has she who is dearest of all to me passed before my eyes. It is better so. I shunned her. Where she was, there I would not go. Yet, through all these heavy years I have borne her upon my heart. Day and night she has been with me. Oh, Mona, Mona, my Mona, apart forever are our paths in this dim world, and my tarnished name is your reproach. My love, my lost love, as a man I yearned for you to hold you to my breast. But I was dead to you, and I would not break in with an earthly love that must be brief and might not be blessed on a memory that death has purified of its stains. Adieu, adieu, my love, my own Mona; though we are never to clasp hands again, yet do I know that you will be with me as an unseen presence when the hour comes — ah! how soon — of death’s asundering.
For the power of life is low in me. I have taken the sickness. It is from the Deemster that I have taken it. No longer do I fear death. Yet I hesitate to do with myself what I have long thought that I would do when the end should come. “To-morrow,” and “to-morrow,” and “to-morrow,” I say in my heart, and still I am here.
CHAPTER XLIV
THE SWEATING SICKNESS
I
When the sweating sickness first appeared in the island it carried off the lone body known as Auntie Nan, who had lived on the Curragh. “Death never came without an excuse — the woman was old,” the people said, and went their way. But presently a bright young girl who had taken herbs and broths and odd comforts to Auntie Nan while she lay helpless was stricken down. Then the people began to hold their heads together. Four days after the girl was laid to rest her mother died suddenly, and two or three days after the mother’s death the father was smitten. Then three other children died in quick succession, and in less than three weeks not a soul of that household was left alive. This was on the southwest of the Curragh, and on the north of it, near to the church of Andreas, a similar outbreak occurred about the same time. Two old people named Creer were the first to be taken; and a child at Cregan’s farm and a servant at the rectory of the Archdeacon followed quickly.
The truth had now dawned upon the people, and they went about with white faces. It was the time of the hay harvest, and during the two hours’ rest for the midday meal the haymakers gathered together in the fields for prayer. At night, when work was done, they met again in the streets of the villages to call on God to avert his threatened judgment. On Sundays they thronged the churches at morning and afternoon services, and in the evening they congregated on the shore to hear the Quaker preachers, who went about, under the shadow of the terror, without hindrance or prosecution. One such preacher, a town-watch at Castletown, known as Billy-by-Nite, threw up his calling, and traveled the country in the cart of a carrier, prophesying a visitation of God’s wrath, wherein the houses should be laid waste and the land be left utterly desolate.
The sickness spread rapidly, and passed from the Curraghs to the country south and east of them. Not by ones but tens were the dead now counted day after day, and the terror spread yet faster than the malady. The herring season had run a month only, and it was brought to a swift close. Men who came in from the boats after no more than a night’s absence were afraid to go up to their homes lest the sickness had gone up before them. Then they went out to sea no longer, but rambled for herbs in the rank places where herbs grew, and, finding them, good and bad, fit and unfit, they boiled and ate them.
Still the sickness spread, and the dead were now counted in hundreds. Of doctors there were but two in the island, and these two were closely engaged sitting by the bedsides of the richer folk, feeling the pulse with one hand and holding the watch with the other. Better service they did not do, for rich and poor alike fell before the sickness.
The people turned to the clergy, and got “beautiful texes,” but no cure. They went to the old Bishop, and prayed for the same help that he had given them in the old days of their great need. He tried to save them and failed. A preparation of laudanum, which had served him in good stead for the flux, produced no effect on the sweating sickness. With other and other medicines he tried and tried again. His old head was held very low. “My poor people,” he said, with a look of shame, “I fear that by reason of the sins of me and mine the Spirit of the Lord is gone from me.”
Then the people set up a cry as bitter as that which was wrung from them long before when they were in the grip of their hunger. “The Sweat is on us,” they groaned; and the old Bishop, that he might not hear their voice of reproach, shut himself up from them like a servant whom the Lord had forsaken.
Then terror spread like a fire, but terror in some minds begets a kind of courage, and soon there were those who would no longer join the prayer-meetings in the hay-fields or listen to the preaching on the shore. One of these was a woman of middle life, an idle slattern, who had for six or seven years lived a wandering life. While others prayed she laughed mockingly and protested that for the Sweat as well as for every other scare of life there was no better preventive than to think nothing about it. She carried out her precept by spending her days in the inns, and her nights on the roads, being supported in her dissolute existence by secret means, whereof gossip spoke frequently. The terrified world about her, busy with its loud prayers, took small heed of her blasphemies until the numbers of the slain had risen from hundreds to thousands. Then in their frenzy the people were carried away by superstition, and heard in the woman’s laughter the ring of the devil’s own ridicule. Somebody chanced to see her early one morning drawing water to bathe her hot forehead, and before night of that day the evil word had passed from mouth to mouth that it was she who had brought the sweating sickness by poisoning the wells.
Thereupon half a hundred lusty fellows, with fear in their wild eyes, gathered in the street, and set out to search for the woman. In her accustomed haunt, the “Three Legs of Man,” they found her, and she was heavy with drink. They hounded her out of the inn into the road, and there, amid oaths and curses, they tossed her from hand to hand until her dress was in rags, her face and arms were bleeding, and she was screaming in the great fright that had sobered her.
It was Tuesday night, and the Deemster, who had been holding court at Peeltown late that day, was riding home in the darkness, when he heard this tumult in the road in front of him. Putting spurs to his horse, he came upon the scene of it. Before he had gathered the meaning of what was proceeding in the dark road, the woman had broken from her tormentors and thrown herself before him, crawling on the ground and gripping his foot in the stirrup.
“Deemster, save me! save me, Deemster!” she cried in her frantic terror.
The men gathered round and told their story. The woman had poisoned the wells, and the bad water had brought the Sweat. She was a charmer by common report, and should be driven out of the island.
“What pedler’s French is this?” said the Deemster, turning hotly on the crowd about him. “Men, men, what forgotten age have you stepped out of that you come to me with such driveling, doddering, blank idiocy?”
But the woman, carried away by her terror, and not grasping the Deemster’s meaning, cried that if he would but save her she would confess. Yes, she had poisoned the wells. It was true she was a charmer. She acknowledged to the evil eye. But save her, save her, save her, and she would tell all.
The Deemster listened with a feverish impatience. “The woman lies,” he said under his breath, and then lifting his voice he asked if any one had a torch. “Who is the woman?” he asked; “I seem to know her voice.”
“D —— her, she’s a witch,” said one of the men, thrusting his hot face forward in the darkness over the woman’s cowering body. “Ay, and so was her mother before her,” he said again.
“Tell me, woman, what’s your name?” said the Deemster, stoutly; but this question seemed to break down as he asked it.
There was a moment’s pause.
“Mally Kerruish,” the woman answered him, slobbering at his stirrup in the dark road before him.
“Let her go,” said the Deemster in a thick underbreath. In another moment he had disengaged his foot from the woman’s grasp and was riding away.
That night Mally Kerruish died miserably of her fright in the little tool-shed of a cottage by the Cross Vein, where six years before her mother had dropped to a lingering death alone.
News of her end was taken straightway to Ballamona by one of the many tongues of evil rumor. With Jarvis Kerruish, who was in lace collar and silver-buckled shoes, the Deemster had sat down to supper. He rose, left his meat untouched, and Jarvis supped alone. Late that night he said, uneasily:
“I intend to send in my resignation to Castletown — burden of my office as Deemster is too much for my strength.”
“Good,” said Jarvis; “and if, sir, you should ever think of resigning the management of your estate also, you know with how much willingness I would undertake it, solely in order that you might spend your days in rest and comfort.
“I have often thought of it latterly,” said the Deemster. Half an hour thereafter he spent in an uneasy perambulation of the dining-room while Jarvis picked his teeth and cleaned his nails.
“I think I must surely be growing old,” he said then, and, drawing a long breath, he took up his bedroom candle.
II
The sickness increased, the deaths were many in the houses about Ballamona, and in less than a week after the night of Mally Kerruish’s death, Thorkell Mylrea, a Deemster no longer, had made over to Jarvis Kerruish all absolute interest in his estates. “I shall spend my last days in the cause of religion,” he said. He had paid up his tithe in pound-notes — five years’ tithe in arrears, with interest added at the rate of six per cent. Blankets he had ordered for the poor of his own parish, a double blanket for each family, with cloaks for some of the old women.
This done, he relinquished his worldly possessions, and shut himself from the sickness in a back room of Ballamona, admitting none, and never stirring abroad except to go to church.
The Bishop had newly opened the chapel at Bishop’s Court for daily prayers, and of all constant worshipers there Thorkell was now the most constant. Every morning his little shriveled figure knelt at the form before the Communion, and from his blanched lips the prayers were mumbled audibly. Much he sought the Bishop’s society, and in every foolish trifle he tried to imitate his brother. A new canon of the Church had lately ordered that every Bishop should wear an episcopal wig, and over his flowing white hair the Bishop of Man had perforce to put the grotesque head-covering. Seeing this, Thorkell sent to England for a periwig, and perched the powdered curls on his own bald crown.
The sickness was at its worst, the terror was at its height, and men were flying from their sick families to caves in the mountains, when one day the Bishop announced in church that across in Ireland, as he had heard, there was a good man who had been blessed under God with miraculous powers of curing this awful malady.
“Send for him! send for him!” the people shouted with one voice, little heeding the place they sat in.
“But,” said the Bishop, with a failing voice, “the good man is a Roman Catholic — indeed, a Romish priest.”
At that word a groan came from the people, for they were Protestants of Protestants.
“Let us not think that no good can come out of Nazareth,” the Bishop continued. “And who shall say, though we love the Papacy not at all, but that holy men adhere to it?”
There was a murmur of disapproval.
“My good people,” the Bishop went on, falteringly, “we are in God’s hands, and his anger burns among us.”
The people broke up abruptly, and talking of what the Bishop had said, they shook their heads. But their terror continued, and before its awful power their qualms of faith went down as before a flood. Then they cried, “Send for the priest!” and the Bishop sent for him.
Seven weary days passed, and at length with a brightening countenance the Bishop announced that the priest had answered that he would come. Other three days went by, and the news passed from north to south that in the brig “Bridget of Cork,” bound for Whitehaven, with liberty to call at Peeltown, the Romish priest, Father Dalby, had sailed for the Isle of Man.
Then day after day the men went up to the hilltops to catch sight of the sail of an Irish brig. At last they sighted one from the Mull Hills, and she was five leagues south of the Calf. But the wind was high, and the brig labored hard in a heavy sea. Four hours the people watched her, and saw her bearing down into the most dangerous currents about their coast. Night closed in, and the wind rose to the strength of a gale. Next morning at early dawn the people climbed the headlands again, but no brig could they now see, and none had yet made their ports.
“She must be gone down,” they told themselves, and so saying they went home with heavy hearts.
But two days afterward there went through the island a thrilling cry, “He is here! — he has come! — the priest!” And at that word a wave of rosy health swept over a thousand haggard faces.
III
In the dark sleeping-room of a little ivy-covered cottage that stood end-on to the highroad through Michael a blind woman lay dying of the sickness. It was old Kerry; and on a three-legged stool before her bed her husband Hommy sat. Pitiful enough was Hommy’s poor ugly face. His thick lubber lips were drawn heavily downward, and under his besom brows his little eyes were red and his eyelids swollen. In his hands he held a shovel, and he was using it as a fan to puff air into Kerry’s face.
“It’s all as one, man,” the sick woman moaned. “Ye’re only keeping the breath in me. I’m bound to lave ye.”
And thereupon Hommy groaned lustily and redoubled his efforts with the shovel. There was a knock at the door, and a lady entered. It was Mona, pale of face, but very beautiful in her pallor, and with an air of restful sadness.
“And how are you now, dear Kerry?” she asked, leaning over the bed.
“Middling badly, mam,” Kerry answered feebly. “I’ll be took, sarten sure, as the saying is.”
“Don’t lose heart, Kerry. Have you not heard that the priest is coming?”
“Chut, mam! I’ll be gone, plaze God, where none of the like will follow me.”
“Hush, Kerry! He was in Patrick yesterday; he will be in German to-morrow, and the next day he will be here in Michael. He is a good man, and is doing wonders with the sick.”
Kerry turned face to the wall, and Hommy talked with Mona. What was to become of him when Kerry was gone? Who would be left to give him a bit of a tidy funeral? The Dempster? Bad cess to the like of him. What could be expected from a master who had turned his own daughter out of doors?
“I am better where I am,” Mona whispered, and that was her sole answer to the deaf man’s too audible questions. And Hommy, after a pause, assented to the statement with his familiar comment, “The Bishop’s a rael ould archangel, so he is.”
Thereupon Kerry turned her gaze from the wall and said, “Didn’t I tell ye, mam, that he wasn’t dead?”
“Who?”
“Why — him — him that we mayn’t name — him.”
“Hush, dear Kerry, he died long ago.”
“I tell ye, mam, he’s a living man, and coming back — I know it — he’s coming back immadient — I saw him.”
“Drop it, woman, it’s drames,” said Hommy.
“I saw him last night as plain as plain — wearing a long gray sack and curranes on his feet, and a queer sort of hat.”
“It must have been the priest that you saw in your dream, dear Kerry.”
The sick woman raised herself on one elbow, and answered eagerly, “I tell you no, mam, but him — him.”
“Lie still, Kerry; you will be worse if you uncover yourself to the cool air.”
There was a moment’s quiet, and then the blind woman said finally, “I’m going where I’ll have my eyes same as another body.”
At that Hommy’s rugged face broadened to a look of gruesome sorrow, and he renewed his exertions with the shovel.
IV
At seven o’clock that day the darkness had closed in. A bright turf fire burned in a room in Bishop’s Court, and the Bishop sat before it with his slippered feet on a sheepskin rug. His face was mellower than of old, and showed less of strength and more of sadness. Mona stood at a tea-table by his side, cutting slices of bread and butter.
A white face, with eyes of fear, looked in at the dark window. It was Davy Fayle. He was but little older to look upon for the seven years that had gone heavily over his troubled head. His simple look was as vacant and his lagging lip hung as low; but his sluggish intellect had that night become suddenly charged with a ready man’s swiftness.
Mona went to the door. “Come in,” she said; but Davy would not come. He must speak with her outside, and she went out to him.
He was trembling visibly.
“What is it?” she said.
“Mistress Mona,” said Davy, in a voice of great emotion, “it’s as true as the living God.”
“What?” she said.
“He’s alive — ould Kerry said true — he’s alive, and coming back.”
Mona glanced into his face by the dull light that came through the window. His eyes, usually dull and vacant, were aflame with a strange fire. She laid one hand on the door-jamb, and said, catching her breath, “Davy, remember what the men said long ago — that they saw him lying in the snow.”
“He’s alive, I’m telling you — I’ve seen him with my own eyes.”
“Where?”
“I went down to Patrick this morning to meet the priest coming up — but it’s no priest at all — it’s — it’s — it’s him.”
Again Mona drew her breath audibly.
