Hawthorn Village tolled no bells, for to toll bells savoured of “superstitious usages.” But it looked with a clammy terror at the black finger which had touched a farmhouse midway between village and town.
The plague grew worse in the town. More and yet more houses were marked and shut. The richer sort and those who could left the place, scattered through the country, not always welcome where they appeared. The mass who must stay saw the horror increase. A pall came over the place; there grew an insistent and rapid murmur of prayers. Side by side with that occurred a relaxation and neglect of usual order. The strict rule in such cases was against people coming together in any manner of congregation whereby the infection might spread; but the watch grew sick and fear constantly sought companions. There was much drinking in alehouses and taverns, no little gathering together of one sort and another. Side by side with wild appeals and supplications to Heaven wavered a sick and wan determination to some sort of mirth. At times this spirit rose to dare-deviltry. Small crimes increased. The poor were the hardest stricken, seeing that for them starvation clanked behind disease. Theft and housebreaking grew common, while professional thieves might and did make a harvest feast. The church bells tolled. At night the death-carts increased in number, the closed houses increased in number, the juniper smoke rolled thicker and thicker.
But after one death in the farmhouse, halfway to Hawthorn, the black finger drew back. No one else at the farm was taken, the scattered houses between it and the village went unscathed; time passed and no harm came to Hawthorn. Some said the river barred the infection, others that the air was different. One or two at most called attention to the great crowding in the town, to the massed poverty and dirt,—whereas the village was open-built and reasonably clean,—and to the traffic between the town and a large seaport, whereas small was the business of Hawthorn and few the strangers. But the most part of Hawthorn Village and the country to the north of it knew otherwise and said otherwise with unction and lifted looks. Pestilence came like comets, as a visitation and a sign from on high. Jehovah launched the one and the other. Fire against the cities of the plain—plague against prelatical towns and castles, only not Popish by a narrow line, retainers of stained glass and images, organ-players and bowers of the head, waiting but their chance to reinstate a wearing of copes and lighting of candles! The wonder was not that the plague came, but that Jehovah had so long withheld his hand! In Hawthorn Church they prayed that the plague might cease from the afflicted town, but prayed knowing that the plague had been deserved. Now that the outstretched black finger had been definitely withdrawn, the analyst might have found in the prayer of some—not of all—a flavour of triumph. Was it not also Jehovah’s doing that the pure faith was so adorned with health and vindicated?
The town grew a gloomy place indeed, filled with apprehension. People viewing it from distant hills professed to see hanging over it a darkened and quivering air of its own. The streets had a deserted look, with fires burning and none around them. The death-carts went more frequently, and the bells clanged, clanged. There was a need of physicians, those in the place being overworked and one smitten. About the time that the black finger drew back from the farmhouse, Gilbert Aderhold walked to the town and offered his services. Thereafter for weeks he was busied, day and night.
Up in the castle above the town, a kinsman of the earl’s stayed on after the hurried departure of the great family to another seat in an untouched countryside. Heir to a burdened estate and courtier out of favour, not pleased for reasons of his own to remove with the earl, and liking for another set of reasons the very solitariness of the huge old abode, assured that the infection would not mount the cliff and pass the castle wood, and constitutionally careless of danger, he asked leave to stay on, keep ward with the old housekeeper, the armour in the hall, the earl’s regiment of books, and his own correspondence with foreign scholars. He stayed, and for exercise rode through the country roundabout, and now and then, to satisfy a philosophic curiosity, through the town itself. The ideas of the time as to quarantine were lax enough. The sick were shut away in the houses, purifying fires burned in the streets; if you were careful to avoid any who looked in the faintest degree as though they might be sickening, life and business might go on. The rider from the castle, when he came down into the place, carried with him and put often to his nostrils a quantity of medicated spices and perfumed grains from the Orient, carried in a small perforated silver box.
Riding so through the streets one day he came upon Aderhold, his foot upon the doorstep of a marked house. He drew rein. “Ha, the travelling scholar!—Are you physician here?”
“Until the trouble is abated.”
“Black enough trouble!” said the rider. “Toll, toll! The place is more ghastly than a row of gibbets.”