In the Days of Chivalry: A Tale of the Times of the Black Prince by Everett-Green (best romantic books to read TXT) 📖

of the stream had been poisoned higher up, and the deadly malaria had reached it in that way; possibly some condition of the atmosphere predisposed living things to take the infection. But be the cause what it might, there was no gainsaying the fact. Not a living or breathing thing remained in the hamlet; and little as Raymond knew it, such wholesale destruction was only too common throughout the length and breadth of England. But such a revelation coming upon him suddenly, brought before his very eyes when he had come with the desire to help and tend the living, filled him with an awe that was almost terror, although the terror was not for himself. Personally he had no fear; he had given himself to this work, and he would hold to it be the result what it might. But the thought of the scourge sweeping down upon a peaceful hamlet, and carrying off in a few short days every breathing thing within its limits, was indeed both terrible and pitiful. He could picture only too vividly the terror, the anguish, the agony of the poor helpless people, and longed, not to escape from such scenes, but rather to go forward to other places ere the work of destruction had been accomplished, and be with the sick when the last call came. If he had been but two days earlier in coming forward, might he not have been in time to do a work of mercy and charity even here?

But it was useless musing thus. To act, and not to think, was now the order of the day. He went slowly out from the yard they had last visited, his face as pale as death, but full of courage and high purpose.

"There is nothing living here," he said, as he reached the Father, who had not left the side of the dead. "We have been into all the houses, we have looked everywhere, but there is nothing but dead corpses: man and beast have perished alike. Nothing that breathes is left alive."

The Father looked round upon the scene of smiling desolation -- the sunny harvest fields, the laughing brook, the broad meadows -- and the ghastly rows of plague-stricken corpses at his feet, and a stern, sad change passed across his face.

"It is the hand of the Lord," he said, "and perchance He smites in mercy as well as in wrath, delivering men from the evil to come. Let us arise and go hence. Our work is for the living and not the dead."

For those three to have attempted to bury all that hamlet would have been an absolute impossibility. Dreadful as was the thought of turning away and leaving the place as it was, it was hopeless to do otherwise, and possibly in the town men might be found able and willing to come out and inter the corpses in one common grave.

With hearts full of awe, the two lads followed their conductor. He had been through similar scenes in other lands. To him there was nothing new in sights such as this. Even the sense of personal peril, little as he had ever regarded it, had long since passed away. But it was something altogether new to Raymond and his companion; and though they had seen death in many terrible forms upon the battlefield, it had never inspired the same feelings of horror and awe. It was impossible to forget that they might at any moment be breathing into their lungs the same deadly poison which was carrying off multitudes on every side, and although there was no conscious fear for themselves in the thought, it could not but fill them with a quickened perception of the uncertainty of life and the unreality of things terrestrial.

In perfect silence the walk towards the little town was accomplished; and as they neared it terrible sights began to reveal themselves even along the roadside. Plainly indeed to be seen were evidences of attempted flight from the plague-stricken place; and no doubt many had made good their escape, but others had fallen down by the wayside in a dying state, and these dead or dying sufferers were the first tokens observed by the travellers of the condition of the town.

Not all were dead, though most were plainly hopeless cases. Raymond and Roger had both learned something during the hours of the previous night, when they had helped the good Brothers over their tasks; and they fearlessly knelt beside the poor creatures, moistening their parched lips, answering their feeble, moaning plaints, and summoning to the side of the dying the Father, who could hear the feeble confession of sin, and pronounce the longed-for absolution to the departing soul.

Passing still onwards -- for they could not linger long, and little enough could be done for these dying sufferers, all past hope -- they reached the streets of the town itself; and the first sight which greeted their eyes was the figure of a man stripped naked to the waist, his back bleeding from the blows he kept on inflicting upon himself with the thick, knotted cord he held in his hands, a heavy and rough piece of iron being affixed to the end to make the blows more severe. From the waist downwards he was clothed with sackcloth, and as he rushed about the streets shrieking and castigating himself, he called aloud on the people to repent of their sins, and to flee from the wrath of God that was falling upon the whole nation.

Yet, though many dead and dying were lying in the streets about him, and though cries and groans from many houses told that the destroyer was at work there, this Flagellant (as these maniacs, of which at that time there were only too many abroad, were called) never attempted to touch one of them, though he ran almost over their prostrate bodies, and had apparently no fear of the contagion. There were very few people abroad in the streets, and such as were sound kept their faces covered with cloths steeped in vinegar or some other pungent mixture, and walked gingerly in the middle of the road, as if afraid to approach either the houses on each side or the other persons walking in the streets.

A cart was going about, with two evil-looking men in it, who lifted in such of the dead as they found lying by the roadside, and coolly divested them of anything of any value which they chanced to have upon them before conveying them to the great pit just outside which had been dug to receive the victims of the plague.

A wild panic had seized upon the place. Most of the influential inhabitants had fled. There was no rule or order or oversight observed, and the priest of the church, who until this day had kept a certain watch over his flock, and had gone about encouraging and cheering the people, had himself been stricken down with the fell malady, and no one knew whether he were now living or dead.

As the Father passed by, people rushed out from many doors to implore him to come to this house or the other, to administer the last rites to some one dying within. There were other houses marked with a red cross on the doors, which had been for many days closed by the town authorities, until these had themselves fled, being assured that no person could live in that polluted air. What had become of the wretched beings thus shut up, when the watchers who were told off to guard them had fled in terror, it was hard to imagine; and whilst the Father responded to the calls of those who required spiritual assistance at the last dread hour, Raymond beckoned to Roger to follow him in his visitation to those places where the distemper had first showed itself, and where people had hoped to confine it by closing the houses and letting none go forth.

The terribly deadly nature of the malady was well exemplified by the condition of these houses. Scarce ten living souls were found in them, and of these almost all were reduced to the last extremity either by disease or hunger; for none had been nigh them, and they had no strength to try to make their wants known.

Raymond had the satisfaction of seeing some amongst these wretched beings revive somewhat under his ministrations. It was not in every case the real distemper from which they suffered; in not a few the patients had sunk only from fright and the misery of feeling themselves shut away from their fellows. Whenever any persons ailed anything in those days, it was at once supposed that the Black Death was upon them, and they were shunned and abhorred by all their friends and kindred. To these poor creatures it seemed indeed as though an angel from heaven had come down when Raymond bent over them and put food and drink to their lips. Many an office of loving mercy to the sick and dying did he and Roger perform ere daylight faded from the sky; and before night actually fell, the Father had by precept and example got together a band of helpers ready and willing to tend the sick and bury the dead, and the people felt that the terrible panic which had fallen upon them, and caused every one to flee away, had given place to something better and more humane.

Men who had fled their stricken homes and had spent their time carousing in the taverns, trying to drown their fears and their griefs, now returned home to see how it fared with those who had been left behind. Women who had been almost distracted by grief, and had been rushing into the church sobbing and crying, and neglecting the sick, that they might pour out their hearts at the shrine of their favourite saint, were admonished by the Holy Father, so well known to them, to return to their homes and their duties. As the pall of night fell over the stricken city, and the three who had entered it a few hours before still toiled on without cessation, people breathed blessings on them wherever they appeared, and Raymond felt that his work for the Lord in the midst of His stricken people had indeed begun.

CHAPTER XIX. THE STRICKEN SORCERER.

"Thou to Guildford then, my son, and I and the Brethren to London."

So said Father Paul some three weeks later, as he stood once again inside the precincts of the Monastery, with Raymond by his side, looking round the thinned circle of faces of such of the Brothers as had survived the terrible visitation which had passed over them, and now gone, as it seemed, elsewhere. Quite one-half of the inhabitants of that small retreat had fallen victims to the scourge. Scarce ten souls out of all those who had sought shelter within those walls had risen from their beds and gone forth to their desolated homes again. The great trench in the burying ground had received the rest; and of the Brothers who gathered round Father Paul to welcome him back, several showed, by their pinched and stricken appearance, how near they themselves had been to the gates of death.

Few stricken by the fatal sickness itself ever recovered; but there were many others who, falling ill of overwork or some other feverish ailment, were accounted to have caught the distemper, and many of these did amend, though all sickness at such a time seemed to get a firmer hold upon its victims. But Father Paul and both his young assistants had escaped unscathed, though they had been waging a hand-to-hand fight with the destroyer for three long weeks, that seemed years in the retrospect.

The Brothers came crowding round them as about those returned from the grave. Indeed, to them it did almost seem as though this was a resurrection from the dead; for they had long since given up all hope of seeing their beloved Superior and Father again in the flesh.

But the Father himself only accounted his work begun. Although the pestilence appeared to have passed from the immediate district, and such cases as occurred amid the few survivors of the visitation were by no means so fatal as they had been in the beginning, yet the sickness itself in its most virulent form was sweeping along northward and eastward, spreading death and desolation in its track; and Father Paul had but one purpose in his mind, which was to follow in the path of the destroyer, performing for the sufferers wherever he went the same offices of piety and mercy that he had been wont to undertake all these past days; and the Brothers, who had finished their labour of love within the walls of their home, and had grown fearless before the pestilence with that fearlessness which gradually comes to those who look long and steadily upon death, were not wanting in resolve to face it even in its most terrible shape.

So that