CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GREEN YULE.

The frost broke suddenly, and was succeeded by damp, close, unseasonable weather, continuing up to Christmas, and giving the "green yule" which the proverb says "makes a fat churchyard." That proverb was justified sadly enough at North Aston, for typhus set in among the low-lying cottages, and, as in olden times, when jail-fever struck the lawyer at the bar and the judge on the bench in stern protest against the foulness they fostered, so now the sins of the wealthy landlords in suffering such cottages as these in the bottom to exist reacted on their own class, and the fever entered other dwellings beside those of the peasants.

Two of the gentry were struck down by it--Alick Corfield and the new occupant of Lionnet, that Mr. Gryce who never went to church, and who was assumed in consequence to have neither a soul to be saved by God nor a heart to be touched by man. And these were just the two who, according to the theory of the good or evil of a man's deeds returned to him in kind, had the most reason to expect exemption. For Alick had spent his strength in visiting the sick as a faithful pastor should, and Mr. Gryce had taken them material help with royal abundance. Both together they had to pay the price of principle, always an expensive luxury, and never personally so safe a card to play in the game of life as selfishness. For virtue has not only to be contented with its own reward, as we constantly hear, but has to accept punishment for its good deeds, vice for the most part carrying off the blue ribbons and the gold medals, while poor virtue, shivering in the corner, gets fitted with the fool's cap or is haled into the marketplace to be pelted in the pillory. As was seen now in North Aston.

The rector, who never went into an infected cottage nor suffered a parishioner to stand between the wind and his security, kept his portly strength and handsome flesh intact, but Alick nearly lost his life as the practical comment on his faithful ministry; and Mr. Gryce, who, if he did not carry spiritual manna wherewith to feed hungry souls, did take quinine and port wine, money and comforting substances generally, for half-starved aching bodies, was also laid hold of by that inexorable law which knows nothing about providential immunities from established consequences on account of the good motives of the actors. This would have been called heresy by the North Astonian families, who professed to trust themselves to superior care, but none the less used Condy's Fluid as a means whereby the work of Providence might be rendered easier to it, nor disdained precipitate flight from the protection in which they all said dolefully they believed. But there is a wide difference between saying and doing, and men who are shocked by words of frank unbelief find faithless deeds both natural and in reason.

In spite, then, of that expressed trust in Providence which is part of the garniture of English respectability, a great fear fell on the North Aston gentry when these two of their own circle were attacked. The fever, while it had confined itself to the ill-drained, picturesque little cottages below, was lamentable enough, but not more than lamentable on the broad platform of a common humanity; and those who had lost nothing told those who had lost all that they must bear their cross with patience, seeing that it was the divine will that it should be so. Now, when the fiery epidemic had come upon the gentry face to face in their homes, it was a monster from which they must flee without delay, for no one knew whose house was safe, nor for how long his own might remain uninfected.

Mrs. Harrowby and her daughters went off to Cheltenham two days after Alick was announced as "down," to find there the security of living which had failed them here. They were people of the highest respectability--people who are the very pith and marrow of English social virtue; but they had not been touched with the divine fire of self-sacrifice for humanity, and they had no desire to hush the groans of the afflicted if they thereby ran the risk of having to gnash their own teeth. They could do no good at home. As Mrs. Harrowby said, as one propounding a self-evident paradox, how could they go and see the sick or help to nurse ploughmen and their children? They would only catch the fever themselves, and so spread it still farther. And every one knows what a wicked thing that is to do. Cook had orders to supply a certain amount of soup and wine when asked for, which was more to the purpose than any mere sentimental kindness, of no use to the one and highly dangerous to the other; and as Edgar had a great deal to do in the house and stables, it was as well, she said with the air of one undergoing something disagreeable for high principles, to get out of his way and leave him to his bricks and mortar undisturbed. Gentlemen, she said, as the clamp holding all together, do not like to be interfered with in their own domain. That fever in the bottom was such an admirable lever of womanly good sense! So they went and enjoyed themselves at Cheltenham as much as it was in the Harrowby nature to do, and even Josephine's kind heart consoled itself in the Pump-room while their miserable tenants at home sickened and died as comfortably as circumstances would allow.

The Fairbairns, too, found themselves obliged to pay a long-promised visit to London now on the instant, and swept out of the place with even more than their characteristic promptitude; and the rector would have given up his charge to a substitute if he could. But floating clerical labor was just then scarce, and he could not find any one to take his place in the Valley of the Shadow, though he offered the liberal terms which are dictated by fear. He sent away his wife and daughter, but he himself was bound to his post, and had to make the best of the bad bit of cord that held him. He used to say with his grand manner of martyrdom that, whatever he suffered, he must pull the laboring-oar to the end, and attend to the sheep committed to his charge. And he said it so often that he got at last to believe in his own devotion. All the same, that laboring-oar of his pulled nothing heavier than a cock-boat, and in waters no stormier than a duck-pond; and when his sheep had the rot he was too delicate about the hands to meddle with them. He preached to the living and he buried the dead surrounded by all the protective appliances that science has devised or money can supply. When the epidemic was over he too talked of Providence and his trust therein, and how he had been mercifully spared as his reward.

Mrs. Birkett's native indolence would have kept her at home, well fumigated and isolated, even in such a strait of fear and danger as this in which they all were, and Adelaide was racked with torment at leaving Leam unwatched and unhindered in the same place as Edgar; yet, being more afraid of the fever than even of a potential rival, she agreed with her father that in justice to themselves they ought to go now at once; and Pace, who was to remain to take care of the rector, packed up their best dresses, and sent them off with Adelaide's maid shared between them. She prophesied, however, that their things would all be spoiled before they returned, and then they would know her value. As Mr. Dundas elected to remain at home, not being afraid of infection and being tired of travel, Mrs. Birkett insisted on taking little Fina with her. This was her contribution to the sum of philanthropy and self-sacrifice in the world, and it was not despicable; for Fina was restless and only six years of age, and Mrs. Birkett was indolent and soon tired.

Thus, the whole society of the place was reduced now to the rector, Mr. Dundas and Leam, with Edgar Harrowby left alone at the Hill. The Corfields did not count, because of Alick's illness, by which they were put in quarantine; and if Mr. Gryce at Lionnet had not been the cipher he was, his illness too would have disbarred him.

There was nothing of the saint by nature nor of the instinctive philanthropist about Leam. She was too concentrated for general benevolence, and men and women whom she did not know were little more than symbols to her. When she loved it was with her whole heart, her whole being: failing this kind of love, she had but weak affections and no curiosity, in which much of our ordinary charity consists. When the servants told her of such and such distressing circumstances, she was sorry because they were sorry, not because she realized in her own emotions the troubles she did not share or see. When prompted she sent improper things in the way of diet and useless things in the way of dress for the benefit of the poor fever patients--and she sent generously--but it never occurred to her as possible that she should go to see them in their own homes. When we read of a cyclone in China which has killed half a hundred mandarins and a small army of coolies, we realize the sorrow of the survivors no more than we realize the distress of a disturbed ant-hill; and Leam's attitude of mind toward the poor of her native village was precisely the same as ours toward the Chinese killed in a cyclone or the ants murdered in their hill.

But she went daily to Steel's Corner, because she knew the Corfields and in her own way liked Alick. Mrs. Corfield assured her there was no danger, not a particle, with her free use of disinfectants and her cunning devices of ventilation. And Leam believed her, and acted on her belief, which gave her a false look of heroism and devotion that won the heart of poor Pepita's "crooked stick" for ever. She thought it so good of the girl, so brave and unselfish; and you could scarcely have expected such nice feeling from Leam, now could you? she used to ask her husband half a dozen times a day, ringing the changes on Leam's good qualities as no one in the place had ever rung them before, and disturbing the poor doctor in his calculations on the varying strength of henbane and aconite till he wished that Leam Dundas had never been born. Mrs. Corfield was just as wrong in ascribing heroic qualities to the girl for her daily visits to ask after Alick as she had been when she had credited her with moral faults because of her intellectual ignorance. She was not afraid because she knew nothing about infection, and had therefore the boldness of ignorance, and she went daily to ask after Alick because she somehow slipped into the groove of doing so; and a groove was a great thing to conservative Leam. Nevertheless, she was really concerned at the illness of her first North Astonian friend, and wished that he would soon get well. She never thought that if he died she would be rid of the only person who knew her deadly secret. Leam was not one who would care to buy her own safety at the price of another's destruction; and, more than this, she was not afraid that Alick would betray her.

This, then, was the condition of things at North Aston at this moment: the villagers dying of fever in the bottom, the families seeking safety in flight, Leam going daily to Steel's Corner to ask after Alick and sit for precisely half an hour with Mrs. Corfield, and Edgar not so much taken up with bricks and mortar as not to understand times and habits, and therefore, through that understanding, seeing her for some part of every day. And the more he saw of her the more he yearned to see, and the stronger grew her strange fascination over him. To him, at least, the fever had not been an unmitigated evil; and though he was sometimes inclined to quarrel with the fact that Leam went daily to Steel's Corner to inquire after Alick Corfield, yet, as he got the grain and Alick only the husk, he submitted to the process by which the best was winnowed to his side. As the gain of that winnowing process became more evident he grew philosophically convinced that nothing is so charming in a woman as faithful friendship for a sick man, and that sitting daily for half an hour, always at exactly the same time, with an afflicted mother is the most delightful act of charity to be imagined.