"I never saw an angel," said Ormiston, as he and his friend started
to go after the dead-cart. "And I dare say there have been scores as
beautiful as that poor girl thrown into the plague-pit before now. I
wonder why the house has been deserted, and if she was really a bride.
The bridegroom could not have loved her much, I fancy, or not even the
pestilence could have scared him away."
"But, Ormiston, what an extraordinary thing it is that it should be
precisely the same face that the fortune-teller showed me. There she
was alive, and here she is dead; so I've lost all faith in La Masque for
ever."
Ormiston looked doubtful.
"Are you quite sure it is the same, Kingsley?"
"Quite sure?" said Sir Norman, indignantly. "Of course I am! Do you
think I could be mistaken is such a case? I tell you I would know that
face at Kamschatka or, the North Pole; for I don't believe there ever
was such another created."
"So be it, then! Your object, of course, in following that cart is, to
take a last look at her?"
"Precisely so. Don't talk; I feel in no mood for it just at present."
Ormiston smiled to himself, and did not talk, accordingly; and in
silence the two friends followed the gloomy dead-cart. A faint young
moon, pale and sickly, was struggling dimly through drifts of dark
clouds, and lighted the lonesome, dreary streets with a wan, watery
glimmer. For weeks, the weather had been brilliantly fine--the days all
sunshine, the nights all moonlight; but now Ormiston, looking up at the
troubled face of the sky, concluded mentally that the Lord Mayor had
selected an unpropitious night for the grand illumination. Sir Norman,
with his eyes on the pest-cart, and the long white figure therein, took
no heed of anything in the heaven above or in the earth beneath,
and strode along in dismal silence till they reached, at last, their
journey's end.
As the cart stopped the two young men approached the edge of the
plague-pit, and looked in with a shudder. Truly it was a horrible sight,
that heaving, putrid sea of corruption; for the bodies of the miserable
victims were thrown in in cartfuls, and only covered with a handful of
earth and quicklime. Here and there, through the cracking and sinking
surface, could be seen protruding a fair white arm, or a baby face,
mingled with the long, dark tresses of maidens, the golden curls of
children, and the white hairs of old age. The pestilential effluvia
arising from the dreadful mass was so overpowering that both shrank
back, faint and sick, after a moment's survey. It was indeed as Sir
Norman had, said, a horrible grave wherein to lie.
Meantime the driver, with an eye to business, and no time for such
nonsense as melancholy moralizing, had laid the body of the young girl
on the ground, and briskly turned his cart and dumped the remainder of
his load into the pit. Then, having flung a few handfuls of clay over
it, he unwound the sheet, and kneeling beside the body, prepared to
remove the jewels. The rays of the moon and his dark lantern fell on the
lovely, snow-white face together, and Sir Norman groaned despairingly as
he saw its death-cold rigidity. The man had stripped the rings off the
fingers, the bracelets off the arms; but as he was about to perform
the same operation toward the necklace, he was stopped by a startling
interruption enough. In his haste, the clasp entered the beautiful neck,
inflicting a deep scratch, from which the blood spouted; and at the same
instant the dead girl opened her eyes with a shrill cry. Uttering a yell
of terror, as well he might, the man sprang back and gazed at her with
horror, believing that his sacrilegious robbery had brought the dead
to life. Even the two young men-albeit, neither of them given to
nervousness nor cowardice--recoiled for an instant, and stared aghast.
Then, as the whole truth struck them, that the girl had been in a deep
swoon and not dead, both simultaneously darted forward, and forgetting
all fear of infection, knelt by her side. A pair of great, lustrous
black eyes were staring wildly around, and fixed themselves first on one
face and then on the other.