The Last Man
without its pleasures. Young couples, who had loved long and
hopelessly, suddenly found every impediment removed, and wealth pour in
from the death of relatives. The very danger drew them closer. The
immediate peril urged them to seize the immediate opportunity; wildly
and passionately they sought to know what delights existence afforded,
before they yielded to death, and
Snatching their pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life,[13]
they defied the conquering pestilence to destroy what had been, or to
erase even from their death-bed thoughts the sentiment of happiness
which had been theirs.
One instance of this kind came immediately under our notice, where a
high-born girl had in early youth given her heart to one of meaner
extraction. He was a schoolfellow and friend of her brother’s, and
usually spent a part of the holidays at the mansion of the duke her
father. They had played together as children, been the confidants of
each other’s little secrets, mutual aids and consolers in difficulty
and sorrow. Love had crept in, noiseless, terrorless at first, till
each felt their life bound up in the other, and at the same time knew
that they must part. Their extreme youth, and the purity of their
attachment, made them yield with less resistance to the tyranny of
circumstances. The father of the fair Juliet separated them; but not
until the young lover had promised to remain absent only till he had
rendered himself worthy of her, and she had vowed to preserve her
virgin heart, his treasure, till he returned to claim and possess it.
Plague came, threatening to destroy at once the aim of the ambitious
and the hopes of love. Long the Duke of L——derided the idea that there
could be danger while he pursued his plans of cautious seclusion; and
he so far succeeded, that it was not till this second summer, that the
destroyer, at one fell stroke, overthrew his precautions, his security,
and his life. Poor Juliet saw one by one, father, mother, brothers, and
sisters, sicken and die. Most of the servants fled on the first
appearance of disease, those who remained were infected mortally; no
neighbour or rustic ventured within the verge of contagion. By a
strange fatality Juliet alone escaped, and she to the last waited on
her relatives, and smoothed the pillow of death. The moment at length
came, when the last blow was given to the last of the house: the
youthful survivor of her race sat alone among the dead. There was no
living being near to soothe her, or withdraw her from this hideous
company. With the declining heat of a September night, a whirlwind of
storm, thunder, and hail, rattled round the house, and with ghastly
harmony sung the dirge of her family. She sat upon the ground absorbed
in wordless despair, when through the gusty wind and bickering rain she
thought she heard her name called. Whose could that familiar voice be?
Not one of her relations, for they lay glaring on her with stony eyes.
Again her name was syllabled, and she shuddered as she asked herself,
am I becoming mad, or am I dying, that I hear the voices of the
departed? A second thought passed, swift as an arrow, into her brain;
she rushed to the window; and a flash of lightning shewed to her the
expected vision, her lover in the shrubbery beneath; joy lent her
strength to descend the stairs, to open the door, and then she fainted
in his supporting arms.
A thousand times she reproached herself, as with a crime, that she
should revive to happiness with him. The natural clinging of the human
mind to life and joy was in its full energy in her young heart; she
gave herself impetuously up to the enchantment: they were married; and
in their radiant features I saw incarnate, for the last time, the
spirit of love, of rapturous sympathy, which once had been the life of
the world.
I envied them, but felt how impossible it was to imbibe the same
feeling, now that years had multiplied my ties in the world. Above all,
the anxious mother, my own beloved and drooping Idris, claimed my
earnest care; I could not reproach the anxiety that never for a moment
slept in her heart, but I exerted myself to distract her attention from
too keen an observation of the truth of things, of the near and nearer
approaches of disease, misery, and death, of the wild look of our
attendants as intelligence of another and yet another death reached us;
for to the last something new occurred that seemed to transcend in
horror all that had gone before. Wretched beings crawled to die under
our succouring roof; the inhabitants of the Castle decreased daily,
while the survivors huddled together in fear, and, as in a
famine-struck boat, the sport of the wild, interminable waves, each
looked in the other’s face, to guess on whom the death-lot would next
fall. All this I endeavoured to veil, so that it might least impress my
Idris; yet, as I have said, my courage survived even despair: I might
be vanquished, but I would not yield.
One day, it was the ninth of September, seemed devoted to every
disaster, to every harrowing incident. Early in the day, I heard of the
arrival of the aged grandmother of one of our servants at the Castle.
This old woman had reached her hundredth year; her skin was shrivelled,
her form was bent and lost in extreme decrepitude; but as still from
year to year she continued in existence, out-living many younger and
stronger, she began to feel as if she were to live for ever. The plague
came, and the inhabitants of her village died. Clinging, with the
dastard feeling of the aged, to the remnant of her spent life, she had,
on hearing that the pestilence had come into her neighbourhood, barred
her door, and closed her casement, refusing to communicate with any.
She would wander out at night to get food, and returned home, pleased
that she had met no one, that she was in no danger from the plague. As
the earth became more desolate, her difficulty in acquiring sustenance
increased; at first, her son, who lived near, had humoured her by
placing articles of food in her way: at last he died. But, even though
threatened by famine, her fear of the plague was paramount; and her
greatest care was to avoid her fellow creatures. She grew weaker each
day, and each day she had further to go. The night before, she had
reached Datchet; and, prowling about, had found a baker’s shop open and
deserted. Laden with spoil, she hastened to return, and lost her way.
The night was windless, hot, and cloudy; her load became too heavy for
her; and one by one she threw away her loaves, still endeavouring to
get along, though her hobbling fell into lameness, and her weakness at
last into inability to move.
She lay down among the tall corn, and fell asleep. Deep in midnight,
she was awaked by a rustling near her; she would have started up, but
her stiff joints refused to obey her will. A low moan close to her ear
followed, and the rustling increased; she heard a smothered voice
breathe out, Water, Water! several times; and then again a sigh heaved
from the heart of the sufferer. The old woman shuddered, she contrived
at length to sit upright; but her teeth chattered, and her knees
knocked together—close, very close, lay a half-naked figure, just
discernible in the gloom, and the cry for water and the stifled moan
were again uttered. Her motions at length attracted the attention of
her unknown companion; her hand was seized with a convulsive violence
that made the grasp feel like iron, the fingers like the keen teeth of
a trap.—“At last you are come!” were the words given forth—but this
exertion was the last effort of the dying—the joints relaxed, the
figure fell prostrate, one low moan, the last, marked the moment of
death. Morning broke; and the old woman saw the corpse, marked with the
fatal disease, close to her; her wrist was livid with the hold loosened
by death. She felt struck by the plague; her aged frame was unable to
bear her away with sufficient speed; and now, believing herself
infected, she no longer dreaded the association of others; but, as
swiftly as she might, came to her grand-daughter, at Windsor Castle,
there to lament and die. The sight was horrible; still she clung to
life, and lamented her mischance with cries and hideous groans; while
the swift advance of the disease shewed, what proved to be the fact,
that she could not survive many hours.
While I was directing that the necessary care should be taken of her,
Clara came in; she was trembling and pale; and, when I anxiously asked
her the cause of her agitation, she threw herself into my arms weeping
and exclaiming—“Uncle, dearest uncle, do not hate me for ever! I must
tell you, for you must know, that Evelyn, poor little Evelyn”—her voice
was choked by sobs. The fear of so mighty a calamity as the loss of our
adored infant made the current of my blood pause with chilly horror;
but the remembrance of the mother restored my presence of mind. I
sought the little bed of my darling; he was oppressed by fever; but I
trusted, I fondly and fearfully trusted, that there were no symptoms of
the plague. He was not three years old, and his illness appeared only
one of those attacks incident to infancy. I watched him long—his heavy
half-closed lids, his burning cheeks and restless twining of his small
fingers—the fever was violent, the torpor complete—enough, without the
greater fear of pestilence, to awaken alarm. Idris must not see him in
this state. Clara, though only twelve years old, was rendered, through
extreme sensibility, so prudent and careful, that I felt secure in
entrusting the charge of him to her, and it was my task to prevent
Idris from observing their absence. I administered the fitting
remedies, and left my sweet niece to watch beside him, and bring me
notice of any change she should observe.
I then went to Idris, contriving in my way, plausible excuses for
remaining all day in the Castle, and endeavouring to disperse the
traces of care from my brow. Fortunately she was not alone. I found
Merrival, the astronomer, with her. He was far too long sighted in his
view of humanity to heed the casualties of the day, and lived in the
midst of contagion unconscious of its existence. This poor man, learned
as La Place, guileless and unforeseeing as a child, had often been on
the point of starvation, he, his pale wife and numerous offspring,
while he neither felt hunger, nor observed distress. His astronomical
theories absorbed him; calculations were scrawled with coal on the bare
walls of his garret: a hard-earned guinea, or an article of dress, was
exchanged for a book without remorse; he neither heard his children
cry, nor observed his companion’s emaciated form, and the excess of
calamity was merely to him as the occurrence of a cloudy night, when he
would have given his right hand to observe a celestial phenomenon. His
wife was one of those wondrous beings, to be found only among women,
with affections not to be diminished by misfortune. Her mind was
divided between boundless admiration for her husband, and tender
anxiety for her children—she waited on him, worked for them, and never
complained, though care rendered her life one long-drawn, melancholy
dream.
He had introduced himself to Adrian, by a request he made to observe
some planetary motions from his glass. His poverty was easily detected
and relieved. He often thanked us for the books we lent him, and for
the use of our instruments, but never spoke of his altered abode or
change of circumstances. His wife assured us, that he had not observed
any difference, except in the absence of the children from his study,
and to her infinite surprise he complained of this unaccustomed quiet.
He came now to announce to us the completion of his Essay on the
Pericyclical Motions of the Earth’s Axis, and the precession of the