The Deemster Part 58

HIS LAST WORDS

Three days have gone since last I put my hand to this writing, and now I know that though the curse has fallen from me yet must its earthly penalties be mine to the end. Sorely weary, and more sorely ashamed, I have, within these three hours past, escaped from the tumult of the people. How their wild huzzas ring in my ears! "G.o.d bless the priest!"

"Heaven save the priest!" Their loud cries of a blind grat.i.tude, how they follow me! Oh, that I could fly from the memory of them, and wipe them out of my mind! There were those that appeared to know me among the many that knew me not. The tear-stained faces, the faces hard and stony, the faces abashed and confused--how they live before my eyes! And at the Tynwald, how the children were thrust under my hand for my blessing! My blessing--mine! and at the Tynwald! Thank G.o.d, it is all over! I am away from it forever. Home I am at last, and for the last time.

Better than three weeks have pa.s.sed since the priest died in my house and I buried him on the moor. What strange events have since befallen, and in what a strange, new world! The Deemster's terrible end, and my own going with the priest's message to the Bishop, my father. But I shall not live to set it down. Nor is it needful so to do, for she whom I write for knows all that should be written henceforward. Everything she knows save one thing only, and if this writing should yet come to her hand that also she will then learn.

G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d to avert his threatened judgment. On Sundays they thronged the churches at morning and afternoon services, and in the evening they congregated on the sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d's wrath, wherein the houses should be laid waste and the land be left utterly desolate.

The sickness spread rapidly, and pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 superst.i.tion, 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 pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth that it was she who had brought the sweating sickness by poisoning the wells.

Thereupon half a hundred l.u.s.ty 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, s...o...b..ring 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 t.i.the in pound-notes--five years' t.i.the 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 wors.h.i.+pers 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d's hands, and his anger burns among us."