CHAPTER VI.
“The tokened pestilence
Where death is sure.”
Antony and Cleopatra.
The next day—this time with a little less excitement, a quieter knowledge of what was likely to be required of her, Edith Field again went forth to her labor. In so little time as the one previous day, Dame Rogers had bewailed herself into familiarity with the danger to which the young lady was exposed, and roused to the honor of having so beneficent a visitor issuing from her humble house, by an application from Alice Saffron, pleading to be received as Mistress Edith’s attendant in her missions of charity, Dame Rogers withdrew her interdict, and falteringly bade Mercy go. So, in despite of Edith’s reluctance, Mercy Rogers accompanied her on the second day.
Master Field was preaching again in the pulpit of another over-burdened brother, whose eager people craved the word more constantly than one man’s strength could administer it. He had been already called to visit many families, still free of the infection but trembling for it, who begged his instructions and sympathy and prayers. The Puritan’s hands were full.
Edith and Mercy had gone far and seen many people—much poverty, misery, hopelessness—but nothing yet happily of the plague. Listless want and indolence ripe for it and waiting, some overborne with unmanly terror, some profanely bold, some subdued, penitent, and humble, while every where there was the same fear, every where a deadly certainty of its coming. Much, too, they heard of this stern measure for shutting up infected houses, which the people, in the selfishness of their terror, considered only as a means of safety for themselves and applauded highly, and many stories, often grotesquely horrible, of those frightful details of the pestilence, which the vulgar mind of the time delighted to dwell on.
They had reached the bounds of the city in their visitation; they were returning at last by the high road. A short time before they reached the house of the Turners, at which Edith had called the previous day, they met a singular group, about whose rear, as they proceeded with some pomp toward London, a little crowd eager and yet afraid, tremulously hovered. The two principal persons wore the garb of respectable citizens; grave, thoughtful, important men. A slight red rod was in the hand of each; and there was a subdued solemnity and pomp about their mien, the importance of office in its first novelty overcoming the fear of the terrible occasion which brought them hither.
“Who are they, Mercy?” asked Edith, anxiously, as she with difficulty kept her young companion from the crowd.
“Oh! heaven save us!—the examiners!—the examiners! it has come!” cried a woman beside them, wringing her hands.
Edith shrank back hastily to the foot-road, holding Mercy’s hand.
“Oh, what will become of us!” said Mercy, with a suppressed scream, “look, Mistress Edith, look!”