God's holy grace be with her! I have not seen her. The Deemster I have seen, the Bishop I have spoken with, and a living vision of our Ewan, his sweet child-daughter, have I held to my knee. But not once these many days has she who is dearest of all to me passed before my eyes. It is better so. I shunned her. Where she was, there I would not go. Yet, through all these heavy years I have borne her upon my heart. Day and night she has been with me. Oh, Mona, Mona, my Mona, apart forever are our paths in this dim world, and my tarnished name is your reproach. My love, my lost love, as a man I yearned for you to hold you to my breast. But I was dead to you, and I would not break in with an earthly love that must be brief and might not be blessed on a memory that death has purified of its stains. Adieu, adieu, my love, my own Mona; though we are never to clasp hands again, yet do I know that you will be with me as an unseen presence when the hour comes—ah! how soon—of death's asundering.
For the power of life is low in me. I have taken the sickness. It is from the Deemster that I have taken it. No longer do I fear death. Yet I hesitate to do with myself what I have long thought that I would do when the end should come. "To-morrow," and "to-morrow," and "to-morrow," I say in my heart, and still I am here.
CHAPTER XLIV
THE SWEATING SICKNESS
I
When the sweating sickness first appeared in the island it carried off the lone body known as Auntie Nan, who had lived on the Curragh. "Death never came without an excuse—the woman was old," the people said, and went their way. But presently a bright young girl who had taken herbs and broths and odd comforts to Auntie Nan while she lay helpless was stricken down. Then the people began to hold their heads together. Four days after the girl was laid to rest her mother died suddenly, and two or three days after the mother's death the father was smitten. Then three other children died in quick succession, and in less than three weeks not a soul of that household was left alive. This was on the southwest of the Curragh, and on the north of it, near to the church of Andreas, a similar outbreak occurred about the same time. Two old people named Creer were the first to be taken; and a child at Cregan's farm and a servant at the rectory of the Archdeacon followed quickly.
The truth had now dawned upon the people, and they went about with white faces. It was the time of the hay harvest, and during the two hours' rest for the midday meal the haymakers gathered together in the fields for prayer. At night, when work was done, they met again in the streets of the villages to call on God to avert his threatened judgment. On Sundays they thronged the churches at morning and afternoon services, and in the evening they congregated on the shore to hear the Quaker preachers, who went about, under the shadow of the terror, without hindrance or prosecution. One such preacher, a town-watch at Castletown, known as Billy-by-Nite, threw up his calling, and traveled the country in the cart of a carrier, prophesying a visitation of God's wrath, wherein the houses should be laid waste and the land be left utterly desolate.
The sickness spread rapidly, and passed from the Curraghs to the country south and east of them. Not by ones but tens were the dead now counted day after day, and the terror spread yet faster than the malady. The herring season had run a month only, and it was brought to a swift close. Men who came in from the boats after no more than a night's absence were afraid to go up to their homes lest the sickness had gone up before them. Then they went out to sea no longer, but rambled for herbs in the rank places where herbs grew, and, finding them, good and bad, fit and unfit, they boiled and ate them.
Still the sickness spread, and the dead were now counted in hundreds. Of doctors there were but two in the island, and these two were closely engaged sitting by the bedsides of the richer folk, feeling the pulse with one hand and holding the watch with the other. Better service they did not do, for rich and poor alike fell before the sickness.