In the Days of Chivalry: A Tale of the Times of the Black Prince

by Evelyn Everett-Green

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 they one and all vowed that they would go with Father Paul; and his steps were bound for the capital of the kingdom, where he knew that the need would be the sorest.