In the course of my speech, which was very well received, for I was still popular in the town even among the more moderate of my opponents, I dwelt upon Sir Thomas Colford's address to the electorate which had just come into my hands. In this address I was astonished to see a paragraph advocating, though in a somewhat guarded fashion, the re-enactment of the old laws of compulsory vaccination. In a draft which had reached me two days before through some underground channel, this paragraph had not appeared, thus showing that it had been added by an afterthought and quite suddenly. However, there it was, and I made great play with it.

What, I asked the electors of Dunchester, could they think of a man who in these modern and enlightened days sought to reimpose upon a free people the barbarous infamies of the Vaccination Acts? Long ago we had fought that fight, and long ago we had relegated them to _limbo_, where, with such things as instruments of torment, papal bulls and writs of attainder, they remained to excite the wonder and the horror of our own and future generations.

Well would it have been for me if I had stopped here, but, led away by the subject and by the loud cheers that my treatment of it, purposely flamboyant, never failed to evoke, forgetful too for the moment of the Red-headed Man, I pa.s.sed on to deductions. Our opponents had prophesied, I said, that within ten years of the pa.s.sing of the famous Conscience Clause smallpox would be rampant. Now what were the facts? Although almost twice that time had gone by, here in Dunchester we had suffered far less from smallpox than during the compulsory period, for at no one time during all these eighteen or twenty years had three cases been under simultaneous treatment within the confines of the city.

"Well, there are five now," called out a voice from the back of the hall.

I drew myself up and made ready to wither this untruthful brawler with my best election scorn, when, of a sudden, I remembered the Red-headed Man, and pa.s.sed on to the consideration of foreign affairs.

From that moment all life went out of my speech, and, as it seemed to me, the enthusiasm of the meeting died away. As soon as it was over I made inquiries, to find that the truth had been hidden from me--there were five, if not seven cases of smallpox in different parts of the city, and the worst feature of the facts was that three of the patients were children attending different schools. One of these children, it was ascertained, had been among those who were playing round the fountain about a fortnight since, although he was not one whom the red-haired tramp had touched, but the other two had not been near the fountain. The presumption was, therefore, that they had contracted the disease through some other source of infection, perhaps at the lodging-house where the man had spent the night after bathing in the water. Also it seemed that, drawn thither by the heat, in all two or three hundred children had visited the fountain square on this particular evening, and that many of them had drunk water out of the basin.

Never do I remember feeling more frightened than when these facts came to my knowledge, for, added to the possible terrors of the position, was my const.i.tutional fear of the disease which I have already described. On my way homewards I met a friend who told me that one of the children was dead, the malady, which was of an awful type, having done its work very swiftly.

Like a first flake from a snow-cloud, like a first leaf falling in autumn from among the myriads on some great tree, so did this little life sink from our number into the silence of the grave. Ah! how many were to follow? There is a record, I believe, but I cannot give it. In Dunchester alone, with its population of about 50,000, I know that we had over 5000 deaths, and Dunchester was a focus from which the pestilence spread through the kingdom, destroying and destroying and destroying with a fury that has not been equalled since the days of the Black Death.

But all this was still to come, for the plague did not get a grip at once. An iron system of isolation was put in force, and every possible means was adopted by the town authorities, who, for the most part, were anti-vaccinationists, to suppress the facts, a task in which they were a.s.sisted by the officials of the Local Government Board, who had their instructions on the point. As might have been expected, the party in power did not wish the political position to be complicated by an outcry for the pa.s.sing of a new smallpox law, so few returns were published, and as little information as possible was given to the papers.

For a while there was a lull; the subject of smallpox was _taboo_, and n.o.body heard much about it beyond vague and indefinite rumours. Indeed, most of us were busy with the question of the hour--the eternal question of beer, its purity and the method of its sale. For my part, I made few inquiries; like the ostrich of fable I hid my head in the sands of political excitement, hoping that the arrows of pestilence would pa.s.s us by.

And yet, although I breathed no word of my fears to a living soul, in my heart I was terribly afraid.

CHAPTER XII

THE SHADOW OF PESTILENCE

Very soon it became evident that the fight in Dunchester would be severe, for the electorate, which for so many years had been my patient servant, showed signs of rebelling against me and the principles I preached. Whether the voters were moved by a desire for change, whether they honestly disagreed with me, or whether a secret fear of the smallpox was the cause of it, I do not know, but it is certain that a large proportion of them began to look upon me and my views with distrust.

At any other time this would not have caused me great distress; indeed defeat itself would have had consolations, but now, when I appeared to be on the verge of real political distinction, the mere thought of failure struck me with dismay. To avoid it, I worked as I had not worked for years. Meetings were held nightly, leaflets were distributed by the ton, and every house in the city was industriously visited by my canva.s.sers, who were divided into bands and officers like a regiment.

The head of one of these bands was my daughter Jane, and never did a candidate have a more able or enthusiastic lieutenant. She was gifted with the true political instinct, which taught her what to say and what to leave unsaid, when to press a point home and when to abandon it for another; moreover, her personal charm and popularity fought for her cause.

One evening, as she was coming home very tired after a long day's work in the slums of the city, Jane arrived at the model cottages outside my park gates. Having half an hour to spare, she determined to visit a few of their occupants. Her second call was on the Smith family.

"I am glad to see you now as always, miss," said Mrs. Smith, "but we are in trouble here."

"What, is little Tottie ill again?" Jane asked.

"No, miss, it isn't Tottie this time, it's the baby. She's got convulsions, or something like it, and I've sent for Dr. Merchison.

Would you like to see her? She's lying in the front room."

Jane hesitated. She was tired and wanted to get home with her canva.s.s cards. But the woman looked tired too and in need of sympathy; possibly also, for nature is nature, Jane hoped that if she lingered there a little, without in any way violating her promise, she might chance to catch a brief glimpse of the man she loved.

"Yes, I will come in for a minute," she answered and followed Mrs. Smith into the room.

On a cheap cane couch in the corner, at the foot of which the child, Tottie, was playing with a doll, lay the baby, an infant of nearly three. The convulsive fit had pa.s.sed away and she was sitting up supported by a pillow, the fair hair hanging about her flushed face, and beating the blanket with her little fevered hands.

"Take me, mummy, take me, I thirsty," she moaned.

"There, that's how she goes on all day and it fairly breaks my heart to see her," said the mother, wiping away a tear with her ap.r.o.n. "If you'll be so kind as to mind her a minute, miss, I'll go and make a little lemonade. I've got a couple of oranges left, and she seems to like them best of anything."

Jane's heart was stirred, and, leaning down, she took the child in her arms. "Go and get the drink," she said, "I will look after her till you come," and she began to walk up and down the room rocking the little sufferer to and fro.

Presently she looked up to see Dr. Merchison standing in the doorway.

"Jane, you here!" he said.

"Yes, Ernest."

He stepped towards her, and, before she could turn away or remonstrate, bent down and kissed her on the lips.

"You shouldn't do that, dear," she said, "it's out of the bargain."

"Perhaps I shouldn't," he answered, "but I couldn't help it. I said that I would keep clear of you, and if I have met you by accident it is not my fault. Come, let me have a look at that child."

Taking the little girl upon his knee, he began to examine her, feeling her pulse and looking at her tongue. For a while he seemed puzzled, then Jane saw him take a little magnifying gla.s.s from his pocket and by the help of it search the skin of the patient's forehead, especially just at the roots of the hair. After this he looked at the neck and wrists, then set the child down on the couch, waving Jane back when she advanced to take it, and asked the mother, who had just entered the room with the lemonade, two or three short, quick questions.

Next he turned to Jane and said--

"I don't want to frighten you, but you will be as well out of this. It's lucky for you," he added with a little smile, "that when you were born it wasn't the fashion for doctors to be anti-vaccinationists, for, unless I am much mistaken, that child has got smallpox."

"Smallpox!" said Jane, then added aggressively, "Well, now we shall see whose theory is right, for, as you saw, I was nursing her, and I have never been vaccinated in my life. My father would not allow it, and I have been told that it won him his first election."

Ernest Merchison heard, and for a moment his face became like that of a man in a fit.

"The wicked----" he began, and stopped himself by biting his lips till the blood came. Recovering his calm with an effort, he turned to Jane and said in a hoa.r.s.e voice:--

"There is still a chance; it may be in time; yes, I am almost sure that I can save you." Then he plunged his hand into his breast pocket and drew out a little case of instruments. "Be so good as to bare your left arm," he said; "fortunately, I have the stuff with me."

"What for?" she asked.

"To be vaccinated."

"Are you mad, Ernest?" she said. "You know who I am and how I have been brought up; how, then, can you suppose that I would allow you to put that poison into my veins?"

"Look here, Jane, there isn't much time for argument, but just listen to me for one minute. You know I am a pretty good doctor, don't you? for I have that reputation, haven't I? and I am sure that you believe in me.

Well, now, just on this one point and for this one occasion I am going to ask you to give up your own opinion and to suppose that in this matter I am right and your father is wrong. I will go farther, and say that if any harm comes to you from this vaccination beyond the inconvenience of a swollen arm, you may consider all that has been between us as nothing and never speak to me again."

"That's not the point," she answered. "If you vaccinated me and my arm fell off in consequence I shouldn't care for you a bit the less, because I should know that you were the victim of a foolish superst.i.tion, and believed what you were doing to be right. No, Ernest, it is of no use; I can a.s.sure you that I know a great deal more about this subject than you do. I have read all the papers and statistics and heard the cleverest men in England lecture upon it, and nothing, nothing, _nothing_ will ever induce me to submit to that filthy, that revolting operation."

He heard and groaned, then he tried another argument.

"Listen," he said: "you have been good enough to tell me--several times--well, that you loved me, and, forgive me for alluding to it, but I think that once you were so foolish as to say that you cared for me so much that you would give your very existence if it could make me happy.

Now, I ask you for nothing half so great as that; I ask you to submit to a trifling inconvenience, and, so far as you are personally concerned, to waive a small prejudice for my sake, or, perhaps I had better say, to give in to my folly. Can't you do as much as that for me, Jane?"

"Ernest," she answered hoa.r.s.ely, "if you asked anything else of me in the world I would do it--yes, anything you can think of--but this I can't do and won't do."

"In G.o.d's name, why not?" he cried.