Chapter XL.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5838, 3 April 1897, Page 1

Chapter XL.

" IP HE SLAY ME, YET WILL I TRUST HIM," The first time Reuben Clegg met Mary Talbot face to face after his return was at the height of the terror that was devastating the village. It was in the twilight of a lovely June evening. Clegg had walked from his mother's cottage, on his way to visit Radford and his wife, both of whom were sick. The long village street was still as the grave. Not a door was open. The roadway was green with weeds and grasses. Wild flowers decorated the footpaths by the roadside hedges and the walled-in gardens. It might have, been a village of" the dead. If ou any day the people were stirring, they moved about like ghosts, or they were bringing out their dead. No grim signs of black fla,gs or outward marks on door posts, signalled the infected houses. It was as if the entire street was sioklied o'er with some fatal legend of death. On this summer evening not a soul was abroad. Nor was there, anywhere, the cheeyful or solemn augury of a light in any window. Away on the side of the distant hill, where the Old Hall had been wont to show its illuminated windows, only the shadowy outlines of tho place could be seen. The Stafford-Bradshawes had left the village in the very first week of the distemper. They and their friends, and their servants, and the stranger within their gates, had fled before the pestilence, never to return ; and while the humble cottage of Vicars, where they unpacked Ziletto's fatal gift, still stands, to bear historic witness of the truth of the Martyrdom of Eyam, with other relics that need no monuments to

keep the story living, the Old Hall is a , heap of ruin and forgetfnlness. | The village forge no longer blazed upon the hillock, and even the birds were silent. Nothing lived, as it seemed to Clegg by any token that appeared, except a few weird bats that mocked the flight of the absent swallows ; for those guests of summer had, strange to say, deserted their favourite haunts in the village, as if the air no longer commended itself, nor " smelt wooingly," as it was accustomed where Banquo noted its characteristics to Duncan as they entered Macbeth's castle. There was not a single sign of health or mirth, or even peace, for the very silence was threatening. If a whisper stirred, it might have been the passing of some immortal soul to its long account. And when Clegg observed a figure coming towards him from the direction of tho Rectory, he was conscious of a strange sense of amazement. It was a hooded figure, aud it came down the road as if it glided over the grass, and brushed the wayside flowers with its trailing garments. Coming to where Clegg had paused, it pushed back its hood, and 10, it was Mary Talbot ! She crossed his path where the village street branches off to the glen whence he had carried her home oil that fatal night by My Lady's Bower. "I am glad to see you again, Master Clegg," she said, putting out her hand, "if one may say one is glad at anything in these untoward days." He took her hand with a trembling grasp, and held it for a little while, as he answered with suppressed emotion. " Thank you, madame." •, He would have said Madame Ziletto, but the name of the dead man stuck in his throat ; and despite the deadly atmosphere \ of the village and ' all its woes, his heart beat fast with the emotion of the bygone ! days when his love for the woman was beyond words. " You have often been in my thoughts, and it nigh broke my heart when they condemned you ; God and I knew that you were innocent." " Thank you Miss Talbot," he said, for the old days came back to him before the shadow of Ziletto fell upon Eyam. " I hope your father is well." It was a very commonplace remark, but he thought of nothing else to say. " Yes ; he does not complain. He would like to see you at the Manor House ; will l you not come, dear friend?" " Nay ; I fear it would be wrong to enter a non-infected house." j "We believe in the Divine Merely, and that, for some wise purpose God has made a sign upon the lintel of our doorway ; peradveuture, that we are chosen to be usefid to the stricken, we seem to have I been miraculously spared." J " I will come," said Reuben ; "it will be \ a comfort to meet folk who do not think me a murderer." *' It will help my father, and give us all fresh courage, to see you once more beneath onr roof," she answered. He made no reply, but only looked at her wonderingly and tried to keep back his tears, the first he had shed so long as he could remember. And she passed on her way, leaving him standing in the road. They met again on the next day, at the rectory, in consultation with Mr aud Mrs Mompesson, Mr Stanley, and Sir George Talbot; Mary Talbot, not the least selfpossessed of any of them, 'accepting the humblest and most trying work that could be allotted to her, Sir George permitting her to run any and every risk that she courted. Inspired by the • example and precepts of Mompesson, Sir George, had no fear. He opposed the Plague with tho sword of duty. He felt that he was the chief of the village, and that no harm could come to the captain any more than Mompesson or Stanley could be smitten while they were engaged in the absolutely necessary work of their profession. He surprised Clegg with his faith, and Mary Talbot awed him with her strange angelic beauty. The " cordon sanitaire " had been religiously maintained. At the place where in ancient days there had been an outer gate of the village, men and Avomen took their turn to stand sentry over the valley ; and food was brought to certain points of the imaginary wall, that had for landmarks certain crags and rocks and water-ways. It was now resolved to close the church and hold the service in the open air. Reuben Clegg commended this precaution ; however much they prayed, whatever their faith, it was well to avoid bringing the people together in a confined atmosphere. Both Mr Mompesson and Mr Stanley noted without comment the overt cynicism of Clegg's remark ; but Mary Talbot looked at him with beseeching eyes, and wheu he went home that day he talked a long time with his mother about her faith. She told him the story of Peter's imprisonment and release, and how, when he appeared at the house of Mary, the mother of John, they thought it was his angel ; and how Longstaffe had told her that when he, Reuben, entered Radford's house, each man thought it was his ghost; and how she was not surprised, and knew him for himself when he walked through the meadow and up the little garden-path and took her into his arms. It was wonderful how quietly Reuben sat and listened to her. He could not deny that his escape had been little less than miraculous, considering that he had literally passed through the prisonyard in presence of the sentries, who thought he was one of the officials or visitors. And was it not the hand of God, she asked, that, still holding him from arrest, had made him his agent among tho stricken of the village ? And did he not owe it to God to hxunble himself before His throne with a grateful heart ? That night' Clegg knelt beside his mother in prayer, and said Amen to her simple petition : but deep, down in his heart the motive of this complaisance was his love for Mary Talbot, and a desire to come nearer unto her iv thought; for it seemed to him that she suffered for his hardness towards the Faith. Her look of appeal hauuted him. It surely expressed more than a common interest in him. She had looked into his eyes witli a meaning that was not a rebuke bn! an appeal, and an appeal that was sympathetic, almost tender. He could see her face in his mind as he w T alked homeward, and he found himself speaking aloud as he wandered out of his right path aud climbed the higher edge of the table-land above his cottage. " Oh, God," he said, "if it might be ! " and for the first time for years his heart was in the cry. It was no mere exclamation ; it was a prayer ; but the next moment he shuddered at it, as if he had outraged the poor suffering souls in the village at his feet; as. if his thoughts of lpve, the faintest dream of happiness, were an infamy, while on every hand his fellowvillagers were passing into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. ' Nevertheless, such is the overwhelming strength of human love that he could not resist a tremor of hope that gave him in the future the companionship of the only woman who had ever stirred his heart, and who, whatever she might do, would have an everlasting abiding-place there Again ho repeated his supplication, " Oh, God, if it might be !" As his voico pierced the still air, a star came out over Froggatt's Edge, and away as far as the eye could trace an outline of hills another lamp of God, another, and another appeared. Then it came into his mind to ask himself what he could do to be worthy of such an answer to his cry as his saintly mother would ask' for him, knowing his nature and his only ambition in life. And now a darkness fell upon his soul, and the stars, as he thought, dis-

appeared. He was conscious that, if there was a God, he was trying to make a bargain with Him ; this did not appear in his spoken words, but in his thoughts. If he could be assured of the realisation of his desire, he would believe anything, be anything, accept any creed. It was as if Satan tempted him to a profanity that was devilish. He suddenly knew that his mother, at that moment, was praying for him ; and her sudden influence seemed to inspire his exclamations: "Get thee behind me, Satan !" and "Lord, forgive me, and count it to my ignorance that I am what I am." Presently tho stars came out again, and he descended the hill and made !his way to the cottage where the lamp of love and hope shone out against the whispering elm's ; and as it came in sight, lie mingled with his desire to do something that might win Mary Talbot's approval a longing to be reconciled with Mompesson and Stanley, and to come within the pale of his mother's faith, and be as worthy of his narrow escape from an infamous death as he was innocent of the crime for which he had been condemned. And as the days passed he gradually found a strange new comfort in his mother's example of fortitude, and in her perfect immunity from sickness. She vowed she had never been so strong in her life. He no longer wondered at her faith ; ho found it beautiful. Whether it was, as Mrs Clegg believed, that her son's conscious heart had been mercifully touched by the Holy Ghost, or whether it was the gentle influence of Mary Talbot and his yearning to be acceptable in her sight, it is hard to say ; but from day to day he became more and more tolerant of prayer and supplication. He no longer debated with the two clergymen, and he had secretly found solace in prayer. He did not ask anything of God, but he volunteered vows of manliness, of humility, pledges of penitence for faults of word or deed, and tendered, with humility, his gratitude that he had been permitted to live through his trouble and to come back home when he could be of use to his neighbours and by way of an answer to his mother's prayers. Then, for the first time he began to fear that he might be taken ; and lie spoke of his peril to Sir George. Strange as it may seem the chief authorities knew nothing of Clegg's return to Eyam. Tho mountain village was entirely cut-off from the world. It was a conimunity apart. Lepers, on some remote island of the sea, could not have been more alone. Death had not yet become so familiar, though it was present in almost every house, that the passing of the Rector's wife, in her twenty-seventh year, did not send a thrill of anguish through many a breast. As his servant led the widowed husband away from the couch of death, he turned and sobbed, "Farewell ! farewell ! all happy days ! " And William aud Mary Howett say there is nothing more pathetic in literature than the Rector's letters to his children, George and Elizabeth, announcing to them the doleful news of the dear mother's death, which are to be found in Mr William Wood's brief but most impressive " History of Eyam and the great Plague." With the death of Mrs Mompesson all hope went out of the heart of the mountain village. Despair made itself heard. Hitherto the people had suffered in silence, now they cried to God far mercy. Their voices were heard in the streets. The sufferers no longer endured their pain with courage. Their moans were manifest in every house upon which Death had put his silent seal. The messengers, who went out to the signal points for food, returned with sullen dejected faces. The persons of the outer' world, whose duty it was to deposit the ! village rations, hurried away from the spot, j scared and fearful. Everybody now looked for death. ■ It was the month of August, 1666. The days of the annnal Wake had j returned. ' People remembered now how I gay a time it had been the year previously ; j and there were those who saw in the j Plague a punishment for their past gaiety. But Mompesson and Stanley both presented the terror from an entirely different view, finding in it stijl reason for patience, opening heaven to the dead, and bidding the living to be of good courage. On Sunday the service was now held in a shaded glen, where Nature had provided j a pulpit as if hewn from the rock, and which to this day is called Cucklet I Church. Thither crept the attenuated flock, each man, woman and child standing and praying apart from the other ; a gaunt weird company, with Reuben Clegg and his mother among tha rest, Mary Talbot and her father conspicuous for the fearless way in which they went among the people, and Mompesson preaching as one not only having authority, but the gift of divine eloquence. But the Plague marched on with relentless tread; and all day long the leaves of autumn fell upon fresh-made graves. (To be continued.)