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

The same sultry haze the travellers had noticed in the infected regions was still hanging over the woods today as they sallied forth; and though the sun was shining in the sky, its beams were thick and blood-red instead of being clear and bright, and there was an oppression in the air which caused the birds to cease their song, and lay on the spirit like a dead weight.

"The curse of God upon the land – the curse of God!" said the Father, in a low, solemn tone, as he led the way, bearing in his hands the Holy Sacrament with which to console the dying. "Men have long been forgetting Him. But He will not alway be forgotten. He will arise in judgment and show men the error of their ways. If in their prosperity they will not remember Him, He will call Himself to their remembrance by a terrible day of adversity. And who may stand before the Lord? Who may abide the day of His visitation?"

Moving along with these and like solemn words of warning and admonition, to which his followers paid all reverent heed, the woodland path was quickly traversed, and the clearing reached which showed the near approach to the village. There was a break in the forest at this point, and some excellent pasture land and arable fields had tempted two farmers to establish themselves here, a small hamlet growing quickly up around the farmsteads. This small community supplied the Brothers with some of the necessaries of life, and every soul there was known to the Father. Some dozen persons had come to the Monastery gates during the past two days, stricken and destitute, and had been taken in there. But all these had died and no others had followed, and Father Paul was naturally anxious to know how it fared with those left behind.

Raymond and Roger both knew the villagers well. The two years spent within the walls of the Brotherhood had made them fully acquainted with the people round about. The little hamlet was a pretty spot: a number of low thatched cottages nestled together beside the stream that watered the meadows, whilst the larger farmsteads, which, however, were only modest dwelling houses with their barns and sheds forming a background to them, stood a little farther back upon a slightly-rising ground, sheltered from the colder winds by a spur of the forest.

Generally one was aware, in approaching the place, of the pleasant homely sounds of life connected with farming. Today, with the golden grain all ready for the reaper's hand, one looked to hear the sound of the sickle in the corn, and the voices of the labourers calling to each other, or singing some rustic harvest song over their task. But instead of that a deadly and death-like silence prevailed; and Raymond, who had quickened his steps as he neared the familiar spot, now involuntarily paused and hung back, as if half afraid of what he would be forced to look upon when once the last turning was passed.

But Father Paul moved steadily on, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left. There was no hesitation or faltering in his step, and the two youths pressed after him, ashamed of their moment's backwardness. The sun had managed to pierce through the haze, and was shining now with some of its wonted brilliancy. As Raymond turned the corner and saw before him the whole of the little hamlet, he almost wished the sun had ceased to shine, the contrast between the beauty and brightness of nature and the scene upon which it looked being almost too fearful for endurance.

Lying beside the river bank, in every attitude and contortion of the death agony, were some dozen prostrate forms of men, women, and children, all dead and still. It seemed as though they must have crawled forth from the houses when the terrible fever thirst was upon them, and dragging themselves down to the water's edge, had perished there. And yet if all were dead, as indeed there could be small doubt from their perfect stillness and rigidity, why did none come forth to bury them? Already the warm air was tainted and oppressive with that plague-stricken odour so unspeakably deadly to the living. Why did not the survivors come forth from their homes and bury the dead out of their sight? Had all fled and left them to their fate?

Father Paul walked calmly onwards, his eyes taking in every detail of the scene.

As he reached the dead around the margin of the stream, he paused and looked upon the faces he had known so well in life, then turning to his two followers, he said:

"I trow these be all dead corpses, but I will examine each if there be any spark of life remaining. Go ye into the houses, and if there be any sound persons within, bid them, in the name of humanity and their own safety, come forth and help to bury their brethren. If they are suffered to lie here longer, every soul in this place will perish!"

Glad enough to turn his eyes from the terrible sight without, Raymond hurried past to the cluster of dwelling places beyond, and entering the first of these himself, signed to Roger to go into the second. He had some slight difficulty in pushing open the door, not because it was fastened, but owing to some encumbrance behind. When, however, he succeeded in forcing his way in, he found that the encumbrance was nothing more or less than the body of a woman lying dead along the floor of the tiny room. Upon a bed in the corner two children were lying, smiling as if in sleep, but both stiff and cold, the livid tokens of the terrible malady visible upon their little bodies, though the end seemed to have been painless. No other person was in the house, and Raymond, drawing a covering over the children as they lay, turned from the house again with a shudder of compassionate sorrow. Outside he met Roger coming forth with a look of awe upon his face.

"There be five souls within you door," he said – "an old woman, her two sons and two daughters. But they are all dead and cold. I misdoubt me if we find one alive in the place."

"We must try farther and see," answered Raymond, his face full of the wondering consternation of so terrible a discovery; and by mutual consent they proceeded in their task together. There was something so unspeakably awful in going about alone in a veritable city of the dead.

And such indeed might this place be called. Roger was fearfully right in his prediction. Each house entered showed its number of victims to the destroyer, but not one of these victims was living to receive comfort or help from the ministrations of those who had come amongst them. And not man alone had suffered; upon the dumb beasts too had the scourge fallen: for when Roger suddenly bethought him that the creatures would want tendance in the absence of their owners, and had gone to the sheds to seek for them, nothing but death met his eye on all sides. Some in their stalls, some in the open fields, some, like their masters, beside the stream, lay the poor beasts all stone dead.

It seemed as if the scourge had fallen with peculiar virulence upon this little hamlet, in the warm cup-like hollow where it lay, and had smitten it root and branch. Possibly the waters of the stream had been poisoned higher up, and the deadly malaria had reached it in that way; possibly some condition of the atmosphere predisposed living things to take the infection. But be the cause what it might, there was no gainsaying the fact. Not a living or breathing thing remained in the hamlet; and little as Raymond knew it, such wholesale destruction was only too common throughout the length and breadth of England. But such a revelation coming upon him suddenly, brought before his very eyes when he had come with the desire to help and tend the living, filled him with an awe that was almost terror, although the terror was not for himself. Personally he had no fear; he had given himself to this work, and he would hold to it be the result what it might. But the thought of the scourge sweeping down upon a peaceful hamlet, and carrying off in a few short days every breathing thing within its limits, was indeed both terrible and pitiful. He could picture only too vividly the terror, the anguish, the agony of the poor helpless people, and longed, not to escape from such scenes, but rather to go forward to other places ere the work of destruction had been accomplished, and be with the sick when the last call came. If he had been but two days earlier in coming forward, might he not have been in time to do a work of mercy and charity even here?

But it was useless musing thus. To act, and not to think, was now the order of the day. He went slowly out from the yard they had last visited, his face as pale as death, but full of courage and high purpose.

"There is nothing living here," he said, as he reached the Father, who had not left the side of the dead. "We have been into all the houses, we have looked everywhere, but there is nothing but dead corpses: man and beast have perished alike. Nothing that breathes is left alive."

The Father looked round upon the scene of smiling desolation – the sunny harvest fields, the laughing brook, the broad meadows – and the ghastly rows of plague-stricken corpses at his feet, and a stern, sad change passed across his face.

"It is the hand of the Lord," he said, "and perchance He smites in mercy as well as in wrath, delivering men from the evil to come. Let us arise and go hence. Our work is for the living and not the dead."

For those three to have attempted to bury all that hamlet would have been an absolute impossibility. Dreadful as was the thought of turning away and leaving the place as it was, it was hopeless to do otherwise, and possibly in the town men might be found able and willing to come out and inter the corpses in one common grave.

With hearts full of awe, the two lads followed their conductor. He had been through similar scenes in other lands. To him there was nothing new in sights such as this. Even the sense of personal peril, little as he had ever regarded it, had long since passed away. But it was something altogether new to Raymond and his companion; and though they had seen death in many terrible forms upon the battlefield, it had never inspired the same feelings of horror and awe. It was impossible to forget that they might at any moment be breathing into their lungs the same deadly poison which was carrying off multitudes on every side, and although there was no conscious fear for themselves in the thought, it could not but fill them with a quickened perception of the uncertainty of life and the unreality of things terrestrial.

In perfect silence the walk towards the little town was accomplished; and as they neared it terrible sights began to reveal themselves even along the roadside. Plainly indeed to be seen were evidences of attempted flight from the plague-stricken place; and no doubt many had made good their escape, but others had fallen down by the wayside in a dying state, and these dead or dying sufferers were the first tokens observed by the travellers of the condition of the town.

Not all were dead, though most were plainly hopeless cases. Raymond and Roger had both learned something during the hours of the previous night, when they had helped the good Brothers over their tasks; and they fearlessly knelt beside the poor creatures, moistening their parched lips, answering their feeble, moaning plaints, and summoning to the side of the dying the Father, who could hear the feeble confession of sin, and pronounce the longed-for absolution to the departing soul.

Passing still onwards – for they could not linger long, and little enough could be done for these dying sufferers, all past hope – they reached the streets of the town itself; and the first sight which greeted their eyes was the figure of a man stripped naked to the waist, his back bleeding from the blows he kept on inflicting upon himself with the thick, knotted cord he held in his hands, a heavy and rough piece of iron being affixed to the end to make the blows more severe. From the waist downwards he was clothed with sackcloth, and as he rushed about the streets shrieking and castigating himself, he called aloud on the people to repent of their sins, and to flee from the wrath of God that was falling upon the whole nation.

Yet, though many dead and dying were lying in the streets about him, and though cries and groans from many houses told that the destroyer was at work there, this Flagellant (as these maniacs, of which at that time there were only too many abroad, were called) never attempted to touch one of them, though he ran almost over their prostrate bodies, and had apparently no fear of the contagion. There were very few people abroad in the streets, and such as were sound kept their faces covered with cloths steeped in vinegar or some other pungent mixture, and walked gingerly in the middle of the road, as if afraid to approach either the houses on each side or the other persons walking in the streets.

A cart was going about, with two evil-looking men in it, who lifted in such of the dead as they found lying by the roadside, and coolly divested them of anything of any value which they chanced to have upon them before conveying them to the great pit just outside which had been dug to receive the victims of the plague.

A wild panic had seized upon the place. Most of the influential inhabitants had fled. There was no rule or order or oversight observed, and the priest of the church, who until this day had kept a certain watch over his flock, and had gone about encouraging and cheering the people, had himself been stricken down with the fell malady, and no one knew whether he were now living or dead.

As the Father passed by, people rushed out from many doors to implore him to come to this house or the other, to administer the last rites to some one dying within. There were other houses marked with a red cross on the doors, which had been for many days closed by the town authorities, until these had themselves fled, being assured that no person could live in that polluted air. What had become of the wretched beings thus shut up, when the watchers who were told off to guard them had fled in terror, it was hard to imagine; and whilst the Father responded to the calls of those who required spiritual assistance at the last dread hour, Raymond beckoned to Roger to follow him in his visitation to those places where the distemper had first showed itself, and where people had hoped to confine it by closing the houses and letting none go forth.

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.

It seemed to the Brothers, who had long lived beneath his austere but wise and fatherly rule, that not only did he himself bear a charmed life, but that all who worked with him felt the shelter of that charm. Raymond and Roger had returned, having suffered no ill effects from the terrible sights and scenes through which they had passed. Though the country in these almost depopulated districts literally reeked with the pestilence, owing to the effluvia from the carcasses of men and beasts which lay rotting on the ground unburied, yet they had passed unscathed through all, and were ready to go forth again upon the same errand of mercy.

Raymond was much divided in mind as to his own course of action. Much as he longed to remain with Father Paul, whom he continued to revere with a loving admiration that savoured of worship, he yet had a great desire to know how it was faring with his cousin John. He could not but be very sure that the pestilence would not pass Guildford by, and he knew that John would go forth amongst the sick and dying, and bring them into his own house for tendance, even though his own life paid the forfeit. It was therefore with no small eagerness that he longed for news of him; and when he spoke of this to the Father, the latter at once advised that they should part company – he and such of the Brethren as were fit for the journey travelling on to London, whilst the two youths took the direct road to Guildford, to see how matters fared there.

"Ye are but striplings," said the Father kindly, "and though ye be willing and devoted, ye have not the strength of men, nor are ye such seasoned vessels. In London the scenes will be terrible to look upon. It may be that they would be more than ye could well brook. Go, then, to Guildford. They will need helpers there who know how best to wrestle with the foul distemper, and ye have both learned many lessons with me. I verily believe that your work lies there, as mine lies yonder. Go then, and the Lord be with you. It may be we shall meet again in this world, but if not, in that world beyond into which our Blessed Saviour has passed, that through His intercession, offered unceasingly for us, we too may obtain an entrance through the merits of His redeeming Blood."

Then blessing both the boys and embracing them with a tenderness new in one generally so reserved and austere, he sent them away, and they set their faces steadily whence they had come, not knowing what adventures they might meet upon the way.

This return journey was by no means so rapid as the ride hither had been. Both the horses they had then ridden had perished of the sickness, and as none others were to be found, and had they been obtainable might but have fallen down by the wayside to die, the youths travelled on foot. And they did not even take the most direct route, but turned aside to this place or the other, wherever they knew of the existence of human habitations; for wherever such places were, there might there be need for human help and sympathy. And not a few acts of mercy did the boys perform as they travelled slowly onwards through an almost depopulated region.

Time fails to tell of all they saw and heard as they thus journeyed; but they found ample employment for all their skill and energy. The lives of many little children, whose parents had died or fled, were saved by them, and the neglected little orphans left in the kindly care of some devoted Sisterhood, whose inmates gladly received them, fearless of the risk they might run by so doing.

Wandering so often out of their way, they scarce knew their exact whereabouts when darkness fell upon them on the third day of their journeying; but after walking still onwards for some time in what they judged to be the right direction, they presently saw a light in a cottage window, and knocking at the door, asked shelter for the night.

Travellers at such a time as this were regarded with no small suspicion, and the youths hardly looked to get any answer to their request; but rather to their surprise, the door was quickly opened, and Roger uttered a cry of recognition as he looked in the face of the master of the house.

It was no other, in fact, than the ranger with whom as a boy he had found a temporary home, from which home he had been taken in his father's absence and sold into the slavery of Basildene. The boy's cry of astonishment was echoed by the man when once he had made sure that his senses were not deceiving him, but that it was really little Roger, whom he had long believed to be dead; and both he and his companion were eagerly welcomed in and set down to a plentiful meal of bread and venison pasty, whilst the boy told his long and adventurous story as briefly as he could, Stephen listening with parted lips and staring eyes, as if to the recital of some miraculous narrative.

And in truth the tale was strange enough, told in its main aspects: the escape from Basildene, which to himself always partook of the nature of a miracle, the conflict with the powers of darkness in the Monastery, his adventures in France, and now his marvellous escape in the midst of the plague-stricken people whom he had tended and helped. The ranger, who had lost his own wife and children in the distemper, and had himself escaped, had lost all fear of the contagion – indeed he cared little whether he lived or died; and when he heard upon what errand the youths were bent, he declared he would gladly come with them, for the solitude of his cottage was so oppressive to him that he would have welcomed even a plague-stricken guest sooner than be left much longer with only his hounds and his own thoughts for company.

"If I cannot tend the sick, I can at least bury the dead," he said, drawing his horny hand across his eyes, remembering for whom he had but lately performed that last sad office. And Raymond, to whom this offer was addressed, accepted his company gladly, for he knew by recent experience how great was the need for helpers where the sick and the dead so far outnumbered the whole and sound.

He had gone off into a reverie as he sat by the peat fire, whilst Roger and the ranger continued talking together eagerly of many matters, and he heard little of what passed until roused by the name of Basildene spoken more than once, and he commanded his drowsy and wearied faculties to listen to what the ranger was saying.