Twice-Told Tales (34 page)

"Pray, gentlemen, do my poor admirer no harm," said Lady Eleanore,
with a faint and weary smile. "Take him out of my sight, if such be
your pleasure, for I can find in my heart to do nothing but laugh at
him, whereas, in all decency and conscience, it would become me to
weep for the mischief I have wrought."

But while the bystanders were attempting to lead away the unfortunate
young man he broke from them and with a wild, impassioned earnestness
offered a new and equally strange petition to Lady Eleanore. It was no
other than that she should throw off the mantle, which while he
pressed the silver cup of wine upon her she had drawn more closely
around her form, so as almost to shroud herself within it.

"Cast it from you," exclaimed Jervase Helwyse, clasping his hands in
an agony of entreaty. "It may not yet be too late. Give the accursed
garment to the flames."

But Lady Eleanore, with a laugh of scorn, drew the rich folds of the
embroidered mantle over her head in such a fashion as to give a
completely new aspect to her beautiful face, which, half hidden, half
revealed, seemed to belong to some being of mysterious character and
purposes.

"Farewell, Jervase Helwyse!" said she. "Keep my image in your
remembrance as you behold it now."

"Alas, lady!" he replied, in a tone no longer wild, but sad as a
funeral-bell; "we must meet shortly when your face may wear another
aspect, and that shall be the image that must abide within me." He
made no more resistance to the violent efforts of the gentlemen and
servants who almost dragged him out of the apartment and dismissed him
roughly from the iron gate of the province-house.

Captain Langford, who had been very active in this affair, was
returning to the presence of Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe, when he
encountered the physician, Dr. Clarke, with whom he had held some
casual talk on the day of her arrival. The doctor stood apart,
separated from Lady Eleanore by the width of the room, but eying her
with such keen sagacity that Captain Langford involuntarily gave him
credit for the discovery of some deep secret.

"You appear to be smitten, after all, with the charms of this queenly
maiden," said he, hoping thus to draw forth the physician's hidden
knowledge.

"God forbid!" answered Dr. Clarke, with a grave smile; "and if you be
wise, you will put up the same prayer for yourself. Woe to those who
shall be smitten by this beautiful Lady Eleanore! But yonder stands
the governor, and I have a word or two for his private ear.
Good-night!" He accordingly advanced to Governor Shute and addressed
him in so low a tone that none of the bystanders could catch a word of
what he said, although the sudden change of His Excellency's hitherto
cheerful visage betokened that the communication could be of no
agreeable import. A very few moments afterward it was announced to the
guests that an unforeseen circumstance rendered it necessary to put a
premature close to the festival.

The ball at the province-house supplied a topic of conversation for
the colonial metropolis for some days after its occurrence, and might
still longer have been the general theme, only that a subject of
all-engrossing interest thrust it for a time from the public
recollection. This was the appearance of a dreadful epidemic which in
that age, and long before and afterward, was wont to slay its hundreds
and thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. On the occasion of which
we speak it was distinguished by a peculiar virulence, insomuch that
it has left its traces—its pitmarks, to use an appropriate figure—on
the history of the country, the affairs of which were thrown into
confusion by its ravages. At first, unlike its ordinary course, the
disease seemed to confine itself to the higher circles of society,
selecting its victims from among the proud, the well-born and the
wealthy, entering unabashed into stately chambers and lying down with
the slumberers in silken beds. Some of the most distinguished guests
of the province-house—even those whom the haughty Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe had deemed not unworthy of her favor—were stricken by this
fatal scourge. It was noticed with an ungenerous bitterness of feeling
that the four gentlemen—the Virginian, the British officer, the young
clergyman and the governor's secretary—who had been her most devoted
attendants on the evening of the ball were the foremost on whom the
plague-stroke fell. But the disease, pursuing its onward progress,
soon ceased to be exclusively a prerogative of aristocracy. Its red
brand was no longer conferred like a noble's star or an order of
knighthood. It threaded its way through the narrow and crooked
streets, and entered the low, mean, darksome dwellings and laid its
hand of death upon the artisans and laboring classes of the town. It
compelled rich and poor to feel themselves brethren then, and stalking
to and fro across the Three Hills with a fierceness which made it
almost a new pestilence, there was that mighty conqueror—that scourge
and horror of our forefathers—the small-pox.

We cannot estimate the affright which this plague inspired of yore by
contemplating it as the fangless monster of the present day. We must
remember, rather, with what awe we watched the gigantic footsteps of
the Asiatic cholera striding from shore to shore of the Atlantic and
marching like Destiny upon cities far remote which flight had already
half depopulated. There is no other fear so horrible and unhumanizing
as that which makes man dread to breathe heaven's vital air lest it be
poison, or to grasp the hand of a brother or friend lest the grip of
the pestilence should clutch him. Such was the dismay that now
followed in the track of the disease or ran before it throughout the
town. Graves were hastily dug and the pestilential relics as hastily
covered, because the dead were enemies of the living and strove to
draw them headlong, as it were, into their own dismal pit. The public
councils were suspended, as if mortal wisdom might relinquish its
devices now that an unearthly usurper had found his way into the
ruler's mansion. Had an enemy's fleet been hovering on the coast or
his armies trampling on our soil, the people would probably have
committed their defence to that same direful conqueror who had wrought
their own calamity and would permit no interference with his sway.
This conqueror had a symbol of his triumphs: it was a blood-red flag
that fluttered in the tainted air over the door of every dwelling into
which the small-pox had entered.

Such a banner was long since waving over the portal of the
province-house, for thence, as was proved by tracking its footsteps
back, had all this dreadful mischief issued. It had been traced back
to a lady's luxurious chamber, to the proudest of the proud, to her
that was so delicate and hardly owned herself of earthly mould, to the
haughty one who took her stand above human sympathies—to Lady
Eleanore. There remained no room for doubt that the contagion had
lurked in that gorgeous mantle which threw so strange a grace around
her at the festival. Its fantastic splendor had been conceived in the
delirious brain of a woman on her death-bed and was the last toil of
her stiffening fingers, which had interwoven fate and misery with its
golden threads. This dark tale, whispered at first, was now bruited
far and wide. The people raved against the Lady Eleanore and cried out
that her pride and scorn had evoked a fiend, and that between them
both this monstrous evil had been born. At times their rage and
despair took the semblance of grinning mirth; and whenever the red
flag of the pestilence was hoisted over another and yet another door,
they clapped their hands and shouted through the streets in bitter
mockery: "Behold a new triumph for the Lady Eleanore!"

One day in the midst of these dismal times a wild figure approached
the portal of the province-house, and, folding his arms, stood
contemplating the scarlet banner, which a passing breeze shook
fitfully, as if to fling abroad the contagion that it typified. At
length, climbing one of the pillars by means of the iron balustrade,
he took down the flag, and entered the mansion waving it above his
head. At the foot of the staircase he met the governor, booted and
spurred, with his cloak drawn around him, evidently on the point of
setting forth upon a journey.

"Wretched lunatic, what do you seek here?" exclaimed Shute, extending
his cane to guard himself from contact. "There is nothing here but
Death; back, or you will meet him."

"Death will not touch me, the banner-bearer of the pestilence," cried
Jervase Helwyse, shaking the red flag aloft. "Death and the
pestilence, who wears the aspect of the Lady Eleanore, will walk
through the streets to-night, and I must march before them with this
banner."

"Why do I waste words on the fellow?" muttered the governor, drawing
his cloak across his mouth. "What matters his miserable life, when
none of us are sure of twelve hours' breath?—On, fool, to your own
destruction!"

He made way for Jervase Helwyse, who immediately ascended the
staircase, but on the first landing-place was arrested by the firm
grasp of a hand upon his shoulder. Looking fiercely up with a madman's
impulse to struggle with and rend asunder his opponent, he found
himself powerless beneath a calm, stern eye which possessed the
mysterious property of quelling frenzy at its height. The person whom
he had now encountered was the physician, Dr. Clarke, the duties of
whose sad profession had led him to the province-house, where he was
an infrequent guest in more prosperous times.

"Young man, what is your purpose?" demanded he.

"I seek the Lady Eleanore," answered Jervase Helwyse, submissively.

"All have fled from her," said the physician. "Why do you seek her
now? I tell you, youth, her nurse fell death-stricken on the threshold
of that fatal chamber. Know ye not that never came such a curse to our
shores as this lovely Lady Eleanore, that her breath has filled the
air with poison, that she has shaken pestilence and death upon the
land from the folds of her accursed mantle?"

"Let me look upon her," rejoined the mad youth, more wildly. "Let me
behold her in her awful beauty, clad in the regal garments of the
pestilence. She and Death sit on a throne together; let me kneel down
before them."

"Poor youth!" said Dr. Clarke, and, moved by a deep sense of human
weakness, a smile of caustic humor curled his lip even then. "Wilt
thou still worship the destroyer and surround her image with fantasies
the more magnificent the more evil she has wrought? Thus man doth ever
to his tyrants. Approach, then. Madness, as I have noted, has that
good efficacy that it will guard you from contagion, and perhaps its
own cure may be found in yonder chamber." Ascending another flight of
stairs, he threw open a door and signed to Jervase Helwyse that he
should enter.

The poor lunatic, it seems probable, had cherished a delusion that his
haughty mistress sat in state, unharmed herself by the pestilential
influence which as by enchantment she scattered round about her. He
dreamed, no doubt, that her beauty was not dimmed, but brightened into
superhuman splendor. With such anticipations he stole reverentially to
the door at which the physician stood, but paused upon the threshold,
gazing fearfully into the gloom of the darkened chamber.

"Where is the Lady Eleanore?" whispered he.

"Call her," replied the physician.

"Lady Eleanore! princess! queen of Death!" cried Jervase Helwyse,
advancing three steps into the chamber. "She is not here. There, on
yonder table, I behold the sparkle of a diamond which once she wore
upon her bosom. There"—and he shuddered—"there hangs her mantle, on
which a dead woman embroidered a spell of dreadful potency. But where
is the Lady Eleanore?"

Something stirred within the silken curtains of a canopied bed and a
low moan was uttered, which, listening intently, Jervase Helwyse began
to distinguish as a woman's voice complaining dolefully of thirst. He
fancied, even, that he recognized its tones.

"My throat! My throat is scorched," murmured the voice. "A drop of
water!"

"What thing art thou?" said the brain-stricken youth, drawing near the
bed and tearing asunder its curtains. "Whose voice hast thou stolen
for thy murmurs and miserable petitions, as if Lady Eleanore could be
conscious of mortal infirmity? Fie! Heap of diseased mortality, why
lurkest thou in my lady's chamber?"

"Oh, Jervase Helwyse," said the voice—and as it spoke the figure
contorted itself, struggling to hide its blasted face—"look not now
on the woman you once loved. The curse of Heaven hath stricken me
because I would not call man my brother nor woman sister. I wrapped
myself in pride as in a mantle and scorned the sympathies of nature,
and therefore has Nature made this wretched body the medium of a
dreadful sympathy. You are avenged, they are all avenged, Nature is
avenged; for I am Eleanore Rochcliffe."

The malice of his mental disease, the bitterness lurking at the bottom
of his heart, mad as he was, for a blighted and ruined life and love
that had been paid with cruel scorn, awoke within the breast of
Jervase Helwyse. He shook his finger at the wretched girl, and the
chamber echoed, the curtains of the bed were shaken, with his outburst
of insane merriment.

"Another triumph for the Lady Eleanore!" he cried. "All have been her
victims; who so worthy to be the final victim as herself?" Impelled by
some new fantasy of his crazed intellect, he snatched the fatal mantle
and rushed from the chamber and the house.

That night a procession passed by torchlight through the streets,
bearing in the midst the figure of a woman enveloped with a
richly-embroidered mantle, while in advance stalked Jervase Helwyse
waving the red flag of the pestilence. Arriving opposite the
province-house, the mob burned the effigy, and a strong wind came and
swept away the ashes. It was said that from that very hour the
pestilence abated, as if its sway had some mysterious connection, from
the first plague-stroke to the last, with Lady Elcanore's mantle. A
remarkable uncertainty broods over that unhappy lady's fate. There is
a belief, however, that in a certain chamber of this mansion a female
form may sometimes be duskily discerned shrinking into the darkest
corner and muffling her face within an embroidered mantle. Supposing
the legend true, can this be other than the once proud Lady Eleanore?