Trades were slack, corn-grinding amongst the rest, and Master Lake did the housework, helped by Jan and Abel. He was stunned by the suddenness and the weight of the calamity which had come to him. He was very kind to Mrs. Lake, but the poor woman was almost past any feeling but that which, as a sort of instinct or inspiration, guided a constant watching and waiting on her sick children. She never slept, and would not have eaten, but that Master Lake used his authority to force some food upon her. At this time Jan’s chief occupations were cookery and dish-washing. His constant habit of observation made all the experiences of life an education for him; he had often watched his foster-mother prepare the family meals, and he prepared them now, for Abel and the windmiller could not, and she was with the sick children.
Before the second child died, two more fell ill on the same day. Only Abel and Jan were still “about.” The mother moved like an automaton, and never spoke. Now and then a deep sigh or a low moan would escape her, and the miller would move tenderly to her side, and say, “Bear up, missus; bear up, my lass,” and then go back to his pipe and his cherry-wood chair, where he seemed to grow gray as he sat.
Master Swift came from time to time to the mill. He was everywhere, helping, comforting, and exhorting. Some said his face shone with the light of another world, for which he was “marked.” Others whispered that the strain was telling on him, and that it wore the look it had had in the brief insanity which followed his child’s death. But all agreed that the very sight of him brought help and consolation. The windmiller grew to watch for him, and to lean on him in the helplessness of his despair. And he listened humbly to the old man’s fervid religious counsels. His own little threads of philosophy were all blowing loose and useless in this storm of trouble.
The evening that Master Swift came up to arrange about the burial of the second child, he found the other two just dead. The first two had suffered much and been delirious, but these two had sunk painlessly in a few hours, and had fallen asleep for the last time in each other’s arms.
It did not lessen the force of Master Swift’s somewhat stern consolations that in all good faith he conveyed in them an expectation that the Last Day was at hand. Many people thought so, and it was, perhaps, not unnatural. In these days, which were long years of suffering, they were shut off from the rest of humanity, and the village was the world to them,—a world very near its end. With Death so busy, it seemed as if Judgment could hardly linger long.
It is true that this did not form a part of the Rector’s religious exhortations. But some good people were shocked by the tea-party that he gave to the young people of the place, and the games that followed it in the Rectory meads, at the very height of the fever; though the doctor said it was better than a hogshead of medicine.
“To encourage low spirits in this panic is just to promote suicide, if ye like the responsibeelity of that,” said the doctor to Master Swift, who had confided his doubts as to the seemliness of the entertainment. “I tell ye there’s a lairge proportion of folk dies just because their neighbors have died before them, for the want of their attention being directed to something else. Away wi’ ye, schoolmaster, and take your tuning-fork to ask the blessing wi’. What says the Scripture, man? ‘The living, the living, he shall praise Thee!’”
The doctor was a Scotchman, and Master Swift always listened with sympathy to a North countryman. He was convinced, too, and took his tuning-fork to the meals, and led the grace.
Nor could his expectation of the speedy end of all things restrain his instinctive anxiety and watchfulness for Jan’s health. On the evening of that visit to the mill, he used some little manoeuvring to accomplish Jan’s being sent back with him to the village, to arrange for the burial of the three children.
A glow of satisfaction suffused his rough face as he got Jan out of the tainted house into the fresh evening air, though it paled again before that other look which was now habitual to him, as, waving his hand towards the ripening corn-fields, he quoted from one of Mr. Herbert’s loftiest hymns,—