“Get away wi’ thee, thou dummel-heed.  What fagot has got hold on thy fancy now?”

There was only the swollen gland wanted to make the dread symptoms complete.

Garth went back to the anvil once more.  His eyes rolled in his head.  They grew as red as the iron that he was welding.  He swore at the boy who helped him, and struck him fiercely.  He shouted frantically, and flung away the hammer at every third blow.  The boy slunk off, and went home affrighted.  At a sudden impulse, Garth tore away the shirt from his breast, and thrust his left hand beneath his right arm.  With that the suspense was ended.  A mood of the deepest sadness and dejection supervened.  Shuddering in every limb beneath all his perspiration, the blacksmith returned for the last time to the house.

“I wouldn’t mind the parched mouth and the throbbing brain; no, nor the galloping pulse, mother; but oh, mother, mother, the gland, it’s swelled; ey, ey, it’s swelled.  I’m doomed, I’m doomed.  No use saying no.  I’m a dead man, that’s the truth, that’s the truth, mother.”

And then the disease, whether plague or other fever, passed its fiery hand over the throbbing brain of the blacksmith, and he was put to bed raving.

Little Betsy, like the boy in the smithy, stole away to her own home with ghastly stories of the blacksmith’s illness and delirium.

At first the neighbors came to inquire, prompted partly by curiosity, but mainly by fear.  Mrs. Garth shut the door, and refused to open it to any comers.

To enforce seclusion was not long a necessity.  Desertion was soon the portion of the Garths, mother and son.  More swift than a bad name passed the terrible conviction among the people at Wythburn that at last, at long last, the plague, the plague itself, was in their midst.

The smithy cottage stood by the bridge, and to reach the market town by the road it was necessary to pass it within five yards.  Pitiful, indeed, were the artifices to escape contagion resorted to by some who professed the largest faith in the will of God.  They condemned themselves to imprisonment within their own houses, or abandoned their visits to Gaskarth, or made a circuit of a mile across the breast of a hill, in order to avoid coming within range of the proscribed dwelling.

After three days of rumor and surmise, there was not a soul in the district would go within fifty yards of the house that was believed to hold the pestilence.  No doctor approached it, for none had been summoned.  The people who brought provisions left them in the road outside, and hailed the inmates.  Mrs. Garth sat alone with her stricken son, and if there had been eyes to see her there in her solitude and desolation, perhaps the woman who seemed hard as flint to the world was softening in her sorrow.  When the delirium passed away, and Garth lay conscious, but still feverish, his mother was bewailing their desertion.

“None come nigh to us, Joey, none come nigh.  That’s what the worth of neighbors is, my lad.  They’d leave us to die, both on us; they’d leave us alone to die, and none wad come nigh.”