Then I asked myself how I was to preserve my speech, save by much and frequent speaking, and how I was to speak, having none—not even my dog now—to speak to. For, to speak constantly with myself was a practise I shrank from as leading perchance to madness, since I had noted that men of broken wit were much given to mumbling vain words to themselves. At last I concluded that there was but one way for me, and that was to pray. Having lighted on this thought I had still some misgivings, for the evil spirit within me again made a mock at me, asking why I should speak to God, being a man outside God's grace, and why I should waste myself in the misspent desire of prayer, seeing that the Heavenly Majesty had set His face from me in rejecting the atonement of my life, which I had offered for my crime. But after great inward strivings I came back to my old form of selfishness, and was convinced that, though when I prayed God would not hear me, yet that the yearning and uplooking of prayer might be a good thing for the spiritual part of my nature as a man—for when was the beast known to pray?
At this I tried to recall a few good words such as my father used, and at length, after much beating of the wings of my memory, I remembered some that were the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and did betake myself to prayer in this manner: "O most gracious God, I tremble to come into Thy presence, so polluted and dishonored as I am by my foul stain of sin which I have contracted; but I must come or I perish. I am useless to any purposes of God and man, and, like one that is dead, unconcerned in the changes and necessities of the world, living only to spend my time, and, like a vermin, eat of the fruits of the earth. O my God, I can not help it now; miserable man that I am, to reduce myself to so sad a state that I neither am worthy to come to Thee nor dare I stay from Thee. The greatness of my crime brings me to my remedy; and now I humbly pray Thee to be merciful to my sin, for it is great."
And this prayer I spoke aloud twice daily thenceforward, at the rising and the setting of the sun, going out of my house and kneeling on the turf on the top of the Black Head. And when I had prayed I sang what I could remember of the psalm that runs, "It is good for me that I have been in trouble, that I may learn Thy statutes."
In my mind's eye I see myself, a solitary man in that lone place, with the sea stretching wide below me, and only the sound of its heavy beat on the rocks rising over me in the quiet air.
Thus far have I written these four days past, amid pain and the quick lessening of the powers of life. In sleepless hours of the night I have made this writing, sitting oftenest by the light of my feeble candles until the day has been blue over the sea. And now that I glance back and see my own heart in the mirror I have made for it, I am like to one who has been brought through a fearsome sickness, that has left its marks upon him, to look for the first time at his altered face in the glass. And can it be that I, who have penned these words, am the man of seven years ago? Ah, now I see how profound has been the change that my great punishment has made in me, and perceive the end of God in refusing my poor atonement of life for life, and cutting me off from among men.
I will not say that what I have already written has not cost me some pangs, and perhaps some tears. But now I am come to that place where I must tell of the great turning-point in my sad state, and though the strength fails me wherewith I hold the pen to write of it, my spirit rises before it like as the lark awakened by the dawn.
This year—surely the darkest within the memory of our poor people of Man—began with more than its share of a winter of heavy rains. The spring that followed was also rainy, and when I looked for the summer to begin, the rains were still incessant. Heavy and sodden was the ground even of the moor whereon I lived, so that my feet sank into it as into a morass, and much of the seed I sowed was washed from it and wasted. When at length the long rains ceased to fall the year was far worn into June, and then the sun came quick and hot. My house stood on a brow descending to the cliffs of the coast, and beneath me were less than two feet of mold above the rock; but when the great heat came after the great rain, out of the ground there arose a thick miasmic mist that filled the air, obscured the light, lay heavy in sweat upon my hair and flesh, and made the walls and floor, the furniture, and the bed of my home, damp and dripping with constant dew.
Quickly I set myself to the digging of deep trenches that went vertically down the brow to the cliff head, and soon the ground about me across many acres was drained dry. But though I lived in a clear air, and could now see the sun as well as feel it, yet I perceived that the mists stood in a wide half-circle around me like walls of rain seen afar, while the spot whereon you stand is fair and in the sunshine. In my daily walks to the top of the moor I could no longer see the houses of Cregneesh for the cloud of vapor that lay over it, and when I walked to the Kallow Head for the first time since the day I lost my dog, the basin below, where Port-le-Mary stands, was even as a vast vaporous sea, without one islet of house or hill.
My health suffered little from this unaccustomed humidity, for my bodily strength was ever wonderful; but my spirits sank to a deep depression, and oft did I wonder how the poor souls must fare who lived on the low, wet Curraghs near to where my own home once lay. From day to day, and week to week, the mist continued to rise from the dank ground under the hot sun, and still the earth came up in thick clods to the spade.
The nights alone were clear, and toward midsummer I was witness to strange sights in the heavens. Thus I saw a comet pass close across the island from coast to coast, with a visible motion as of quivering flame. What this visitation could foretell I pondered long and sadly, and much I hungered for knowledge of what was being done in the world of men. But therein it seemed to my wayward mind that I was like a man buried in the churchyard while he is yet alive, who hears the bell in the tower that peals and tolls, but has no window in his tomb from which to see who comes to rejoice, and who to mourn.
When the fleet of fishing-boats should have put out from Port Erin for the ground that lies south of the Calf, scarce a sail could I see, and not a boat had I noted coming from the Poolvash, where Port-le-Mary stands above the bay. From the top of the Mull Hills I could faintly descry the road to Castletown, but never a cart on market-day seemed to pass over it. Groups of people I vaguely saw standing together, and once, at midday, from the middle of a field of new-mown hay, there came to me the sounds of singing and prayer. Oftener than at any period during my solitary life, I saw men on the mountains or felt their presence near me, for my senses were grown very keen. Oftener, also, than ever before, the sound of church bells seemed to come through the air. And going to the beach where my shattered boat lay, I one day came upon another boat beating idly down the waters of the sound, her sails flapping in the wind, and no hand at her tiller. I stood to watch while the little craft came drifting on with the flow of the tide. She ran head on to the cliff at Fistard, and then I went down to her, and found never a living soul aboard of her.
From these and other startling occurrences that came to me vaguely, as if by the one sense of the buried man, I felt that with the poor people of this island all was not well. But nothing did I know of a certainty until a day toward the first week of September—as I have reckoned it—and then a strange thing befell.
The sun was not shining, and when there was no sun there was little mist. A strong wind, too, had got up from the northeast, and the atmosphere over land and sea grew clearer as the day wore on. The wind strengthened after the turn of the ebb, and at half-flood, which was toward three in the afternoon, it had risen to the pitch of a gale, with heavy swirling rain. The rain ceased in a few hours, and in the lift of the heavy clouds I could see from the rising ground above my house a brig with shortened sail toiling heavily to the southwest of the Calf. She was struggling in the strong currents that flow there to get into the lee of the island, but was beaten back and back, never catching the shelter of the cliffs for the rush of the wind that swept over them. The darkness was falling in while I watched her, and when she was swept back and hidden from me by the forehead of the Calf I turned my face homeward. Then I noticed that on the top of the Mull Hills a great company of people had gathered, and I thought I saw that they were watching the brig that was laboring heavily in the sea.
That night I had close employment at my fireside, for I was finishing a coat that I had someways fashioned with my undeft fingers from the best pieces of many garments that of themselves would no longer hold together. Rough as a monk's long sack it was, and all but as shapeless, but nevertheless a fit companion for the curranes on my feet, which I had made some time before from the coat of my hapless Millish-veg-veen.
While I wrought with my great sail-maker's needle and twine, the loud wind moaned about the walls of my house and whistled through its many crevices, and made the candle whereby I worked to flicker and gutter. Yet my mind was more cheerful than had lately been its wont, and I sang to myself with my face to the glow of the fire.
But when toward ten o'clock the sea below sent up a louder hiss than before, followed by a deeper undergroan, suddenly there was a clash at my window, and a poor, panting sea-mew, with open beak, came through it and fell helpless on the floor. I picked up the storm-beaten creature and calmed it, and patched with the needle the skin of the window which it had broken by its entrance.
Then all at once my mind went back to the brig laboring in the sea behind the Calf. Almost at the same moment, and for the first time these seven years, a quick knock came to my door. I was startled, and made no answer, but stood stock-still in the middle of the floor with the frightened bird in my hand. Before I was yet fully conscious of what was happening, the wooden latch of the door had been lifted, and a man had stepped across the threshold. In another moment he had closed the door behind him, and was speaking to me.
"You will never find heart to deny me shelter on such a night as this?" he said.
I answered him nothing. Surely with my mind I did not hear him, but only with mine ears. I was like the one who is awakened suddenly out of a long dream, and can scarce be sure which is the dream and which the reality, what is behind and what is before.
The man stumbled a step forward, and said, speaking falteringly, "I am faint from a blow."
He staggered another pace forward, and would have fallen, but I, recovering in some measure my self-command, caught him in my arms, and put him to sit on the settle before the hearth.
Scarce had he gained this rest when his eyelids trembled and closed, and he became insensible. He was a large, swart, and bony man, bearing in his face the marks of life's hard storms. His dress was plainly the dress of a priest, but of an order of priesthood quite unknown to me. A proud poverty sat upon the man, and before I yet knew wherefor, my heart went out to him in a strange, uncertain reverence.
Loosening the hard collar that bound his neck, I made bare his throat, and then moistened his lips with water. Some other offices I did for him, such as with difficulty removing his great boots, which were full of water, and stretching his feet toward the fire. I stirred the peats, too, and the glow was full and grateful. Then I looked for the mark of the blow he spoke of, and found it where most it was to be feared, on the hinder part of the head. Though there was no blood flowing, yet was the skull driven in upon the brain, leaving a hollow spot over a space that might have been covered by a copper token.
He did not soon return to consciousness, but toiled hard at intervals to regain it, and then lapsed back to a breathless quiet. And I, not knowing what else to do, took a basin of water, lukewarm, and bathed the wound with it, damping the forehead with water that was cold. All this time the sea-mew, which I had cast from my hand when the priest stumbled, lay in one corner panting, its head down, its tail up, and its powerless wings stretched useless on either side.
Then the man, taking a long breath, opened his eyes, and seeing me he made some tender of gratitude. He told me that in being put ashore out of the brig "Bridget," from Cork, in Ireland, he had been struck on the head by the boom as it shifted with the wind, but that heeding not his injury, and thinking he could make Port-le-Mary to lie there that night, he had set out over the moor, while his late comrades of the brig put off from our perilous coast for England, whither they were bound.
So much had he said, speaking painfully, when again he fell in unconsciousness, and this time a strong delirium took hold of him. I tried not to hear what then he said, for it seemed to me an awful thing that in such an hour of reason's vanquishment the eye of man might look into the heart, which only God's eye should see. But hear him I must, or leave him alone in his present need. And he talked loudly of some great outrage wherein helpless women were thrown on the roads without shelter, and even the dead in their graves were desecrated. When he came to himself again he knew that his mind had wandered, and he told me that four years before he had been confessor at the convent of Port Royal in France. He said that in that place they had been men and women of the Order of Jansenists, teaching simple goodness and piety. But their convent had been suppressed by commission of the Jesuits, and being banished from France, he had fled to his native country of Ireland, where now he held the place of parish priest. More in this manner he said, but my mind was sorely perplexed, and I cannot recall his words faithfully, or rightly tell of the commerce of conversation between us, save that he put to me some broken questions in his moments of ease from pain, and muttered many times to himself after I had answered him briefly, or when I had answered him not at all.
For the sense that I was a man awakening out of a dream, a long dream of seven lonesome years, grew stronger as he told of what traffic the world had lately seen, and he himself been witness to. And my old creeping terror of the judgment upon me that forbade that any man should speak with me, or that I should speak with any man, struggled hard with the necessity now before me to make a swift choice whether I should turn away and leave this man, who had sought the shelter of my house, or break through the curse that bound me.
Choice of any kind I did not make with a conscious mind, but before I was yet aware I was talking with the priest, and he with me.
The Priest: He said, I am the Catholic priest that your good Bishop sent for out of Ireland, as you have heard I doubt not?
Myself: I answered No, that I had not heard.
The Priest: He asked me, did I live alone in this house, and how long I had been here?
Myself: I said, Yes, and that I had been seven years in this place come Christmas.
The Priest: He asked, What, and do you never go up to the towns?
Myself: I answered, No.
The Priest: Then, said the priest, thinking long before he spoke, you have not heard of the great sickness that has broken out among your people.
Myself: I told him I had heard nothing.
The Priest: He said it was the sweating sickness, and that vast numbers had fallen to it and many had died. I think he said—I can not be sure—that after fruitless efforts of his own to combat the disease, the Bishop of the island had sent to Ireland a message for him, having heard that the Almighty had blessed his efforts in a like terrible scourge that broke out two years before over the bogs of Western Ireland.
I listened with fear, and began to comprehend much that had of late been a puzzle to me. But before the priest had gone far his sickness overcame him afresh, and he fell in another long unconsciousness. While he lay thus, very silent or rambling afresh through the ways of the past, I know not what feelings possessed me, for my heart was in a great turmoil. But when he opened his eyes again, very peaceful in their quiet light, but with less than before of the power of life in them, he said he perceived that his errand had been fruitless, and that he had but come to my house to die. At that word I started to my feet with a cry, but he—thinking that my thoughts were of our poor people, who would lose a deliverer by his death—told me to have patience, for that God who had smitten him down would surely raise up in his stead a far mightier savior of my afflicted countrymen.
Then in the lapses of his pain he talked of the sickness that had befallen his own people; how it was due to long rains that soaked the soil, and was followed by the hot sun that drew out of the earth its foul sweat; how the sickness fell chiefly on such as had their houses on bogs and low-lying ground; and how the cure for it was to keep the body of the sick person closely wrapped in blankets, and to dry the air about him with many fires. He told me, too, that all medicines he had yet seen given for this disease were useless, and being oftenest of a cooling nature were sometimes deadly. He said that those of his own people who had lived on the mountains had escaped the malady. Much he also said of how men had fled from their wives, and women from their children in terror of the infection, but that, save only in the worst cases, contagion from the sweating sickness there could be none. More of this sort he said than I can well set down in this writing. Often he spoke with sore labor, as though a strong impulse prompted him. And I who listened eagerly heard what he said with a mighty fear, for well I knew that if death came to him as he foretold, I had now that knowledge which it must be sin to hide.
After he had said this the lapses into unconsciousness were more frequent than before, and the intervals of cool reason and sweet respite from pain were briefer. But a short while after midnight he came to himself with a smile on his meagre face and peace in his eyes. He asked me would I promise to do one thing for him, for that he was a dying man; and I told him yes, before I had heard what it was that he wished of me. Then he asked did I know where the Bishop lived, and at first I made no answer.
Bishop's Court they call his house, he said, and it lies to the northwest of this island by the land they have named the Curraghs. Do you know it?
I bent my head by way of assent.
The Priest: I would have you to go to him, he said, and say—The Catholic priest you sent for out of Ireland, Father Dalby, fulfilled his pledge to you and came to your island, but died by the visitation of God on the night of his landing on your shores. Will you deliver me this message?
I did not make him an answer, and he put the question again. Still my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth and I could not speak.
The Priest: You need not fear, he said, to go to the Bishop, for he is a holy man, as I have heard, without pride of worldly place, and the poor and outcast are his constant guests.
Even yet I answered nothing, but only held down my head while my heart surged within me.
The Priest: The fame of him as a righteous servant of God had gone far into other lands, and therefore it was I, who love Protestantism not at all, and hold no dalliance with it, came to your island at his call.
He took my hand in his hands and asked me again if I would go to the Bishop to say the words which he had given me, and I, with swimming eyes that saw nothing of the dying face before me, bowed my head, and answered, I will go.
Near three hours longer he lived, and much of that time he passed in a feeble delirium. But just before the end came he awoke, and motioned to a small bag that hung about his waist. I guessed his meaning, and drawing out a crucifix I placed it in his hands.
Then he passed silently away, and Death, the black camel that had knelt at the gate of my lone house these seven years of death-in-life, had entered it at last to take another man than me.
When he had ceased to breathe, the air of my house became suddenly void and empty. With a great awe upon me I rose and stretched him out on the settle, and covered his white face with a cloth. Then in the silence I sat and tried to think of the strange accident that had that night befallen. One thing I saw with a fearful certainty, that a great burden of responsibility had fallen upon me. I thought of the people of this island perishing in their sickness, and I remembered that I alone of all men here knew how to succor and save them. I alone, and who was I? The one man accursed among men; the one man cut off forever from the company of the living; the man without family or kin or name among the people; whose flesh no man might touch with his flesh; whose eye no other eye might look upon.
And thus with the burden of responsibility came a yet more terrible burden of doubt. Was it for me to break through the dread judgment pronounced upon me, and go down among the people to heal them? And if I went would the people receive me, even in this their last extreme? Before the face of death would all other fears sink out of their sight? Or, fearing death itself less than the curse, would they rise up and drive me from them?
Long I sat in the anguish of black misgivings, and then rose and ranged my room from side to side, if perchance I might find some light in my darkness. And oft did the strangeness of that night's accidents so far bewilder me that for an instant it would seem that I must be in a dream. Once I lifted the face-cloth from the face on the settle that I might be sure that I was awake.
At length it fixed itself on my mind that whatsoever the judgment upon me, and whatsoever the people's terror of it, I had no choice but to bear the burden that was now mine own. Go down among my sick countrymen I should and must, let the end be what it would! Accursed man though I was, yet to fulfil the dead priest's mission was a mission wherewith God Himself seemed to charge me!
And now I scarce can say how it escaped me that my first duty was to take the body of the priest who had died in my house to one of the churchyards for Christian burial. There must have been some end of Providence in my strange forgetfulness, for if this thing had but come into my wild thoughts, and I had indeed done what it was fitting that I should do, then must certain wonderful consequences have fallen short of the blessing with which God has blessed them.
What I did, thinking no evil, was to pick up my spade and go out on the moor and delve for the dead man a shallow grave. As I turned to the door I stumbled over something that lay on the floor. Stooping to look at it, I found it to be the poor sea-mew. It was dead and stiff, and had still its wings outstretched as if in the act of flight.
I had not noted until now, when with a fearful glance backward I stepped out into the night, that the storm had gone. A thick dew-cloud lay deep over the land, and the round moon was shining through it. I chose a spot a little to the south of the stone circle on the Black Head, and there by the moon's light I howket a barrow of earth. The better part of an hour I wrought, and when my work was done I went back to my house, and then the dead man was cold. I took a piece of old canvas, and put it about the body, from head to feet, wrapping it over the clothes, and covering the face. This done, I lifted the dead in my arms and carried it out.
Very hollow and heavy was the thud of my feet on the turf in that uncertain light. As I toiled along I recalled the promise that I had given to the priest to see my father and speak with him. This memory brought me the sore pain of a wounded tenderness, but it strengthened my resolve. When I had reached the grave which I had made the night was near to morning, the dew-cloud had lifted away, and out of the unseen, murmuring sea that lay far and wide in front of me a gray streak, like an arrow's barb, was shooting up into the darkness of the sky.
One glance more I took at the dead man's face in that vague foredawn, and its swart meagreness seemed to have passed off under death's composing hand.
I covered the body with the earth, and then I said my prayer, for it was nigh to my accustomed hour. Also I sang my psalm, kneeling with my face toward the sea. And while I sang in that dank air the sky lightened and the sun rose out of the deep.
I know not what touched me then, if it was not the finger of God Himself; but suddenly a great burden seemed to fall from me, and my heart grew full of a blessed joy. And, O Father, I cried, I am delivered from the body of the death I lived in! I have lived, I have died, and I live again!
I saw apparently that the night of my long imprisonment was past, that the doors of my dungeon were broken open, and that its air was to be the breath of my nostrils no more.
Then the tears gushed from mine eyes and rained down my bony cheeks, for well I knew that God had seen that I, even I, had suffered enough.
And when I rose to my feet from beside the dead man's grave I felt of a certainty that the curse had fallen away.
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! "God bless the priest!" "Heaven save the priest!" Their loud cries of a blind gratitude, 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 God, 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 passed 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'shim."
Again Mona drew her breath audibly.
"Think what you are saying, Davy. If it should not be true! Oh, if you should be mistaken!"
"It's Bible truth, Mistress Mona—I'll go bail on it afore God A'mighty."
"The priest, you say?"
"Aw, lave it to me to know Mastha—I mean—him"
"I must go in, Davy. Good-night to you, and thank you—Good-night, and—" the plaintive tenderness of her voice broke down to a sob. "Oh, what can it all mean?" she exclaimed more vehemently.
Davy turned away. The low moan of the sea came up through the dark night.
It happened that after service the next morning the Bishop and Thorkell walked out of the chapel side by side.
"We are old men now, Gilcrist," said Thorkell, "and should be good friends together."
"That is so," the Bishop answered.
"We've both lost a son, and can feel for each other."
The Bishop made no reply.
"We're childless men, in fact."
"There's Mona, God bless her!" the Bishop said, very softly.
"True, true," said Thorkell, and there was silence for a moment.
"It was partly her fault when she left me—partly, I say;—don't you think so, Gilcrist?" said Thorkell, nervously.
"She's a dear, sweet soul," the Bishop said.
"It's true."
They stepped on a few paces, and passed by the spot whereon the two fishermen laid down their dread burden from the Mooragh seven years before. Then Thorkell spoke again and in a feverish voice.
"D'ye know, Gilcrist, I sometimes awake in the night crying 'Ewan! Ewan!'"
The Bishop did not answer, and Thorkell, in another tone, asked when the Irish priest was to reach Michael.
"He may be here to-morrow," the Bishop said.
Thorkell shuddered.
"It must be that God is revenging himself upon us with this fearful scourge."
"It dishonors God to say so," the Bishop replied. "He is calling upon us to repent."
There was another pause, and then Thorkell asked what a man should do to set things right in this world if perchance he had taken a little more in usury than was fair and honest.
"Give back whatever was more than justice," said the Bishop promptly.
"But that is often impossible, Gilcrist."
"If he has robbed the widow, and she is dead, let him repay the fatherless."
"It is impossible—I tell you, Gilcrist, it is impossible—impossible."
As they were entering the house Thorkell asked if there was truth in the rumor that the wells had been charmed.
"To believe such stories is to be drawn off from a trust in God and a dependence on his good providence," said the Bishop.
"But I must say, brother, that strange things are known to happen. Now I myself have witnessed extraordinary fulfilments."
"Superstition is a forsaking of God, whom we have most need to fly to in trouble and distress," the Bishop answered.
"True—very true—I loathe it; but still it's a sort of religion, isn't it, Gilcrist?"
"So the wise man says—as the ape is a sort of a man."
Three days later the word went round that he who had been looked for was come to Michael, and many went out to meet him. He was a stalwart man, straight and tall, bony and muscular. His dress was poverty's own livery: a gray shapeless sack-coat, reaching below his knees, curranes on his feet of untanned skin with open clocks, and a cap of cloth, half helmet and half hood, drawn closely down over his head. His cheeks were shaven and deeply bronzed. The expression of his face was of a strange commingling of strength and tenderness. His gestures were few, slow, and gentle. His measured step was a rhythmic stride—the stride of a man who has learned in the long endurance of solitude to walk alone in the ways of the world. He spoke little, and scarcely answered the questions which were put to him. "Aw, but I seem to have seen the good man in my drames," said one; and some said "Ay" to that, and some laughed at it.
Within six hours of his coming he had set the whole parish to work. Half of the men he sent up into the mountains to cut gorse and drag it down to the Curraghs in piles of ten feet high, tied about with long sheep lankets of twisted straw. The other half he set to dig trenches in the marshy places. He made the women to kindle a turf fire in every room with a chimney-flue, and when night came he had great fires of gorse, peat, withered vegetation, and dried sea-wrack built on the open spaces about the houses in which the sickness had broken out. He seemed neither to rest nor eat. From sick house to sick house, from trench to trench, and fire to fire, he moved on with his strong step. And behind him, at all times, having never a word from him and never a look, but trudging along at his heels like a dog, was the man-lad, Davy Fayle.
Many of the affrighted people who had taken refuge in the mountains returned to their homes at his coming, but others, husbands and fathers chiefly, remained on the hills, leaving their wives and families to fend for themselves. Seeing this, he went up and found some of them in their hiding-places, and shaming them out of their cowardice, brought them back behind him, more docile than sheep behind a shepherd. When the ex-town-watch, Billy-by-Nite, next appeared on the Curraghs in the round of his prophetic itineration, the strange man said not a word, but he cut short the vehement jeremiad by taking the Quaker prophet by legs and neck, and throwing him headlong into one of the drain-troughs newly dug in the dampest places.
But the strength of this silent man was no more conspicuous than his tenderness. When in the frenzy of their fever the sufferers would cast off their clothes, and try to rise from their beds and rush into the cooler air from the heat by which he had surrounded them, his big horny hands would restrain them with a great gentleness.
Before he had been five days in Michael and on the Curraghs the sickness began to abate. The deaths were fewer, and some of the sick rose from their beds. Then the people plied him with many questions, and would have overwhelmed him with their rude gratitude. To their questions he gave few answers, and when they thanked him he turned and left them.
They said that their Bishop, who was grown feeble, the good ould angel, thought it strange that he had not yet visited him. To this he answered briefly that before leaving the parish he would go to Bishop's Court.
They told him that Mistress Mona, daughter of the Deemster that was, bad cess to him, had been seeking him high and low. At this his lip trembled, and he bent his head.
"The good man's face plagues me mortal," said old Billy-the-Gawk. "Whiles I know it, and other whiles I don't."
Only another day did the stranger remain in Michael, but the brief times was full of strange events. The night closed in before seven o'clock. It was then very dark across the mountains, and the sea lay black beyond the cliffs, but the Curraghs were dotted over with the many fires which had been kindled about the infected houses.
Within one of these houses, the home of Jabez Gawne, the stranger stood beside the bed of a sick woman, the tailor's wife. Behind him there were anxious faces. Davy Fayle, always near him, leaned against the door-jamb by the porch.
And while the stranger wrapped the sweltering sufferer in hot blankets, other sufferers sent to him to pray of him to come to them. First there came an old man to tell of his grandchild, who had been smitten down that day, and she was the last of his kin whom the Sweat had left alive. Then a woman, to say that her husband, who had started again with the boats but yesterday, had been brought home to her that night with the sickness. He listened to all who came, and answered quietly, "I will go."
At length a young man ran in and said, "The Dempster's down. He's shouting for you, sir. He sent me hot-foot to fetch you."
The stranger listened as before, and seemed to think rapidly for a moment, for his under lip trembled, and was drawn painfully inward. Then he answered as briefly as ever, and with as calm a voice, "I will go."
The man ran back with his answer, but presently returned, saying, with panting breath, "He's rambling, sir; raving mad, sir; and shouting that he must be coming after you if you're not for coming to him."
"We will go together," the stranger said, and they went out immediately. Davy Fayle followed them at a few paces.
Through the darkness of that night a woman, young and beautiful, in cloak and hood like a nun's, walked from house to house of the Curraghs, where the fires showed that the sickness was still raging. It was Mona. These three days past she had gone hither and thither, partly to tend the sick people, partly in hope of meeting the strange man who had come to cure them. Again and again she had missed him, being sometimes only a few minutes before or after him.
Still she passed on from house to house, looking for him as she went in at every fresh door, yet half dreading the chance that might bring them face to face.
She entered the house where he had received her father's message almost on the instant when he left it. The three men had gone by her in the darkness.
Jabez, the tailor, who sat whimpering in the ingle, told her that the priest had that moment gone off to Ballamona, where the Dempster that was—hadn't she heard the newses?—was new down with the Sweat.
Her delicate face whitened at that, and after a pause she turned to follow. But going back to the hearth, she asked if the stranger had been told that the Bishop wanted to see him. Jabez told her yes, and that he had said he would go up to Bishop's Court before leaving the parish.
Then another question trembled on her tongue, but she could not utter it. At last she asked what manner of man the stranger was to look upon.
"Aw, big and sthraight and tall," said Jabez.
And Billy-the-Gawk, who sat at the opposite side of the ingle, being kin to Jabez's sick wife, said, "Ay, and quiet like, and solemn extraordinary."
"A wonderful man, wonderful, wonderful," said Jabez, still whimpering. "And wherever he comes the Sweat goes down before him with a flood."
"As I say," said Billy-the-Gawk, "the good man's face plagues me mortal. I can't bethink me where I've seen the like of it afore."
Mona's lips quivered at that word, and she seemed to be about to speak; but she said nothing.
"And the strong he is!" said Jabez: "I never knew but one man in the island with half the strength of arm as him."
Mona's pale face twitched visibly, and she listened as with every faculty.
"Who d'ye mane?" asked Billy-the-Gawk.
At that question there was a moment's silence between the men. Then each drew a long breath, dislodged a heavy burden from his throat, glanced significantly up at Mona, and looked into the other's face.
"Him," said Jabez, in a faint underbreath, speaking behind his hand.
"Him?"
Billy-the-Gawk straightened his crooked back, opened wide his rheumy eyes, pursed up his wizened cheeks, and emitted a low, long whistle.
"Lord A'mighty!"
For an instant Jabez looked steadily into the old mendicant's face, and then drew himself up in his seat—
"Lord a-massy!"
Mona's heart leaped to her mouth. She was almost beside herself with suspense, and felt an impulse to scream.
Within a week after old Thorkell had conversed with the Bishop about the rumor that the wells had been charmed, his terror of the sickness had grown nigh to madness. He went to church no longer, but shut himself up in his house. Night and day his restless footstep could be heard to pass from room to room, and floor to floor. He ate little, and such was his dread of the water from his well that for three days together he drank nothing. At length, burning from thirst, he went up the Dhoon Glen and drank at a pool, going down on hands and knees to lap the water like a dog. Always he seemed to be mumbling prayers, and when the bell of the church rang, no matter for what occasion, he dropped to his knees and prayed audibly. He forbade the servants of the house to bring him news of deaths, but waited and watched and listened at open doors for their conversation among themselves. At night he went to the front windows to look at the fires that were kindled about the infected houses on the Curraghs. He never failed to turn from that sight with bitter words. Such work was but the devil's play; it was making a mock of God, who had sent the sickness to revenge Himself on the island's guilty people. Thorkell told Jarvis Kerruish as much time after time. Jarvis answered contemptuously, and Thorkell retorted angrily. At length they got to high words, and Jarvis flung away.
One morning Thorkell called for Hommy-beg. They told him that Hommy had been nursing his wife. The blind woman was now dead, and Hommy was burying her. At this Thorkell's terror was appalling to look upon. All night long he had been telling himself that he despised the belief in second sight, but that he would see if Kerry pretended to know whether he himself was to outlive the scourge. No matter, the woman was dead. So much the better!
Later the same day, Thorkell remembered that somewhere on the mountains there lived an old farmer who was a seer and bard. He would go to see the old charlatan. Yes, he would amuse himself with the superstition that aped religion. Thorkell set out, and found the bard's lonely house far up above the Sherragh Vane. In a corner of the big fireplace the old man sat, with a black shawl bound about his head and tied under his chin. He was past eighty years of age, and his face was as old a face as Thorkell had ever looked upon. On his knee a young child was sitting, and two or three small boys were playing about his feet. A brisk middle-aged woman was stirring the peats and settling the kettle on the chimney-hook. She was the old man's wife, and the young brood were the old man's children.
Thorkell began to talk of carvals, and said he had come to hear some of them. The old bard's eyes brightened. He had written a carol about the sickness. From the "lath" he took a parchment pan, full of papers that were worn, thumb-marked, and greasy. From one of these papers he began to read, and Thorkell tried to listen. The poem was an account of a dream. The dreamer had dreamt that he had gone into a church. There was a congregation gathered, and a preacher was in the pulpit. But when the preacher prayed the dreamer heard nothing of God. At length he discovered that it was a congregation of the dead in the region of the damned. They had all died of the Sweat. Every man of them had been warned by wise men and women in this world. The congregation sang a joyless psalm, and when their service was done they began to break up. Then the dreamer recognized some whom he had known in the flesh. Among them was one who had killed his own son, and he was afflicted with a burning thirst. To this unhappy man the dreamer offered a basin of milk-and-water, but the damned soul could not get the basin to his parched lips, struggle as he might to lift it in his stiff arms.
At first Thorkell listened with the restless mind of a man who had come on better business, and then with a feverish interest. The sky had darkened since he entered the house, and while the old bard chanted in his sing-song voice, and the children made their clatter around his feet, a storm of heavy rain pelted against the window-pane.
The ballad ended in the grim doggerel of a harrowing appeal to the sinner to shun his evil courses: