The Last Man
their denunciations; men of robust form and seeming strength fell into
idiotcy and madness, racked by the dread of coming eternity. A man of
this kind was now pouring forth his eloquent despair among the
inhabitants of Windsor. The scene of the morning, and my visit to the
dead, which had been spread abroad, had alarmed the country-people, so
they had become fit instruments to be played upon by a maniac.
The poor wretch had lost his young wife and lovely infant by the
plague. He was a mechanic; and, rendered unable to attend to the
occupation which supplied his necessities, famine was added to his
other miseries. He left the chamber which contained his wife and
child—wife and child no more, but “dead earth upon the earth”—wild with
hunger, watching and grief, his diseased fancy made him believe himself
sent by heaven to preach the end of time to the world. He entered the
churches, and foretold to the congregations their speedy removal to the
vaults below. He appeared like the forgotten spirit of the time in the
theatres, and bade the spectators go home and die. He had been seized
and confined; he had escaped and wandered from London among the
neighbouring towns, and, with frantic gestures and thrilling words, he
unveiled to each their hidden fears, and gave voice to the soundless
thought they dared not syllable. He stood under the arcade of the
town-hall of Windsor, and from this elevation harangued a trembling
crowd.
“Hear, O ye inhabitants of the earth,” he cried, “hear thou, all
seeing, but most pitiless Heaven! hear thou too, O tempest-tossed
heart, which breathes out these words, yet faints beneath their
meaning! Death is among us! The earth is beautiful and flower-bedecked,
but she is our grave! The clouds of heaven weep for us—the pageantry of
the stars is but our funeral torchlight. Grey headed men, ye hoped for
yet a few years in your long-known abode—but the lease is up, you must
remove—children, ye will never reach maturity, even now the small grave
is dug for ye— mothers, clasp them in your arms, one death embraces
you!”
Shuddering, he stretched out his hands, his eyes cast up, seemed
bursting from their sockets, while he appeared to follow shapes, to us
invisible, in the yielding air—“There they are,” he cried, “the dead!
They rise in their shrouds, and pass in silent procession towards the
far land of their doom—their bloodless lips move not—their shadowy
limbs are void of motion, while still they glide onwards. We come,” he
exclaimed, springing forwards, “for what should we wait? Haste, my
friends, apparel yourselves in the court-dress of death. Pestilence
will usher you to his presence. Why thus long? they, the good, the
wise, and the beloved, are gone before. Mothers, kiss you
last—husbands, protectors no more, lead on the partners of your death!
Come, O come! while the dear ones are yet in sight, for soon they will
pass away, and we never never shall join them more.”
From such ravings as these, he would suddenly become collected, and
with unexaggerated but terrific words, paint the horrors of the time;
describe with minute detail, the effects of the plague on the human
frame, and tell heart-breaking tales of the snapping of dear
affinities—the gasping horror of despair over the death-bed of the last
beloved—so that groans and even shrieks burst from the crowd. One man
in particular stood in front, his eyes fixt on the prophet, his mouth
open, his limbs rigid, while his face changed to various colours,
yellow, blue, and green, through intense fear. The maniac caught his
glance, and turned his eye on him— one has heard of the gaze of the
rattle-snake, which allures the trembling victim till he falls within
his jaws. The maniac became composed; his person rose higher; authority
beamed from his countenance. He looked on the peasant, who began to
tremble, while he still gazed; his knees knocked together; his teeth
chattered. He at last fell down in convulsions. “That man has the
plague,” said the maniac calmly. A shriek burst from the lips of the
poor wretch; and then sudden motionlessness came over him; it was
manifest to all that he was dead.
Cries of horror filled the place—every one endeavoured to effect his
escape—in a few minutes the market place was cleared—the corpse lay on
the ground; and the maniac, subdued and exhausted, sat beside it,
leaning his gaunt cheek upon his thin hand. Soon some people, deputed
by the magistrates, came to remove the body; the unfortunate being saw
a jailor in each—he fled precipitately, while I passed onwards to the
Castle.
Death, cruel and relentless, had entered these beloved walls. An old
servant, who had nursed Idris in infancy, and who lived with us more on
the footing of a revered relative than a domestic, had gone a few days
before to visit a daughter, married, and settled in the neighbourhood
of London. On the night of her return she sickened of the plague. From
the haughty and unbending nature of the Countess of Windsor, Idris had
few tender filial associations with her. This good woman had stood in
the place of a mother, and her very deficiencies of education and
knowledge, by rendering her humble and defenceless, endeared her to
us—she was the especial favourite of the children. I found my poor
girl, there is no exaggeration in the expression, wild with grief and
dread. She hung over the patient in agony, which was not mitigated when
her thoughts wandered towards her babes, for whom she feared infection.
My arrival was like the newly discovered lamp of a lighthouse to
sailors, who are weathering some dangerous point. She deposited her
appalling doubts in my hands; she relied on my judgment, and was
comforted by my participation in her sorrow. Soon our poor nurse
expired; and the anguish of suspense was changed to deep regret, which
though at first more painful, yet yielded with greater readiness to my
consolations. Sleep, the sovereign balm, at length steeped her tearful
eyes in forgetfulness.
She slept; and quiet prevailed in the Castle, whose inhabitants were
hushed to repose. I was awake, and during the long hours of dead night,
my busy thoughts worked in my brain, like ten thousand mill-wheels,
rapid, acute, untameable. All slept—all England slept; and from my
window, commanding a wide prospect of the star-illumined country, I saw
the land stretched out in placid rest. I was awake, alive, while the
brother of death possessed my race. What, if the more potent of these
fraternal deities should obtain dominion over it? The silence of
midnight, to speak truly, though apparently a paradox, rung in my ears.
The solitude became intolerable—I placed my hand on the beating heart
of Idris, I bent my head to catch the sound of her breath, to assure
myself that she still existed—for a moment I doubted whether I should
not awake her; so effeminate an horror ran through my frame.—Great God!
would it one day be thus? One day all extinct, save myself, should I
walk the earth alone? Were these warning voices, whose inarticulate and
oracular sense forced belief upon me?
Yet I would not call _them_
Voices of warning, that announce to us
Only the inevitable. As the sun,
Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image
In the atmosphere—so often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.[9]
[8] Calderon de la Barca.
[9] Coleridge’s Translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein.
CHAPTER VIII.
After a long interval, I am again impelled by the restless spirit
within me to continue my narration; but I must alter the mode which I
have hitherto adopted. The details contained in the foregoing pages,
apparently trivial, yet each slightest one weighing like lead in the
depressed scale of human afflictions; this tedious dwelling on the
sorrows of others, while my own were only in apprehension; this slowly
laying bare of my soul’s wounds: this journal of death; this long drawn
and tortuous path, leading to the ocean of countless tears, awakens me
again to keen grief. I had used this history as an opiate; while it
described my beloved friends, fresh with life and glowing with hope,
active assistants on the scene, I was soothed; there will be a more
melancholy pleasure in painting the end of all. But the intermediate
steps, the climbing the wall, raised up between what was and is, while
I still looked back nor saw the concealed desert beyond, is a labour
past my strength. Time and experience have placed me on an height from
which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must
describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing
light and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there
will be harmony.
It would be needless to narrate those disastrous occurrences, for which
a parallel might be found in any slighter visitation of our gigantic
calamity. Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death
is the comforter—of the mournful passage of the death-cart—of the
insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart—of
harrowing shrieks and silence dire—of the variety of disease,
desertion, famine, despair, and death? There are many books which can
feed the appetite craving for these things; let them turn to the
accounts of Boccaccio, De Foe, and Browne. The vast annihilation that
has swallowed all things—the voiceless solitude of the once busy
earth—the lonely state of singleness which hems me in, has deprived
even such details of their stinging reality, and mellowing the lurid
tints of past anguish with poetic hues, I am able to escape from the
mosaic of circumstance, by perceiving and reflecting back the grouping
and combined colouring of the past.
I had returned from London possessed by the idea, with the intimate
feeling that it was my first duty to secure, as well as I was able, the
well-being of my family, and then to return and take my post beside
Adrian. The events that immediately followed on my arrival at Windsor
changed this view of things. The plague was not in London alone, it was
every where—it came on us, as Ryland had said, like a thousand packs of
wolves, howling through the winter night, gaunt and fierce. When once
disease was introduced into the rural districts, its effects appeared
more horrible, more exigent, and more difficult to cure, than in towns.
There was a companionship in suffering there, and, the neighbours
keeping constant watch on each other, and inspired by the active
benevolence of Adrian, succour was afforded, and the path of
destruction smoothed. But in the country, among the scattered
farm-houses, in lone cottages, in fields, and barns, tragedies were
acted harrowing to the soul, unseen, unheard, unnoticed. Medical aid
was less easily procured, food was more difficult to obtain, and human
beings, unwithheld by shame, for they were unbeheld of their fellows,
ventured on deeds of greater wickedness, or gave way more readily to
their abject fears.
Deeds of heroism also occurred, whose very mention swells the heart and
brings tears into the eyes. Such is human nature, that beauty and
deformity are often closely linked. In reading history we are chiefly
struck by the generosity and self-devotion that follow close on the
heels of crime, veiling with supernal flowers the stain of blood. Such
acts were not wanting to adorn the grim train that waited on the
progress of the plague.
The inhabitants of Berkshire and Bucks had been long aware that the
plague was in London, in Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, York, in
short, in all the more populous towns of England. They were not however
the less astonished and dismayed when it appeared among themselves.
They were impatient and angry in the midst of terror. They would do