When such is the state of matters in busy, stirring districts, among shrewd artisans, and when our great seat of learning smells as it does smell under the noses of the professors, it is needless to say that the “black fever” found every household in the little village prepared to contribute to its support, and met with hardly an obstacle on its devastating path.
To comment on Master Salter’s qualifications for the post of sanitary inspector would be to insult the reader’s understanding. Of course he owned several of the picturesque little cottages where the refuse had to be pitched out at the back, and the slops chucked out in front, and where the general arrangements for health, comfort, and decency were such as one must forbear to speak of, since, on such matters, our ears—Heaven help us!—have all that delicacy which seems denied to our noses.
If the causes of the calamity were little understood, portents were plentifully noted. The previous winter had been mild. A thunderbolt fell in the autumn. There was a blight on the gooseberries, and Master Salter had a calf with two heads. As to the painter, a screech-owl had been heard to cry from his chimney-top, not three weeks before his death.
There was a pause of a day or so after Master Linseed died, and then victims fell thick and fast. Children playing happily with their mimic boats on the open drain that ran lazily under the noontide sun, by the footpath of the main street, were coffined for their hasty burial before the sun had next reached his meridian. The tears were hardly dry in their parents’ eyes before these also were closed in their last sleep. The very aged seemed to linger on, but strong men sickened and died; and at the end of the week more than one woman was left sitting by an empty hearth, a worn-out creature whom Death seemed only to have forgotten to take away.
At first there was a reckless disregard of infection among the neighbors. But, after one or two of these family desolations, this was succeeded by a panic, and even the noble charity which the poor commonly show to each other’s troubles failed, and no one could be got to nurse the sick or bury the dead.
Now the Rector was an old man. Most of the parish officers were aged, and patriarchs in white smock frocks were as plentiful as creepers at the cottage doors. The healthy breezes and the dull pace at which life passed in the district seemed to make men slow to wear out. If the Rector had profited by these features of the parish in health, it must be confessed that they had also had their influence on his career. He was a good man, and a learned one. He stuck close to his living, and he was benevolent. But he was not of those heroic natures who can resist the influence of the mental atmosphere around them; and in a dull parish, in a sleepy age, he had not been an active parson. Some men, however, who cannot make opportunities for themselves, can do nobly enough if the chance comes to them; and this chance came to the Rector in his sixty-ninth year, on the wings of the black fever. To quicken spiritual life in the soul of a Master Salter he had not the courage even to attempt; but a panic of physical cowardice had not a temptation for him. And so it came about that of four men who stayed the panic, by the example of their own courage, who went from house to house, and from sick-bed to sick-bed—who drew a cordon round the parish, and established kitchens and a temporary hospital, and nursed the sick, and encouraged the living, and buried the dead,—the most active was the old Rector.