Mine excellent friend, the landlord of the Province House, was
pleased, the other evening, to invite Mr. Tiffany and myself to
an oyster supper. This slight mark of respect and gratitude, as
he handsomely observed, was far less than the ingenious
tale-teller, and I, the humble note-taker of his narratives, had
fairly earned, by the public notice which our joint lucubrations
had attracted to his establishment. Many a cigar had been smoked
within his premises--many a glass of wine, or more potent aqua
vitae, had been quaffed--many a dinner had been eaten by curious
strangers, who, save for the fortunate conjunction of Mr. Tiffany
and me, would never have ventured through that darksome avenue
which gives access to the historic precincts of the Province
House. In short, if any credit be due to the courteous assurances
of Mr. Thomas Waite, we had brought his forgotten mansion almost
as effectually into public view as if we had thrown down the
vulgar range of shoe shops and dry goods stores, which hides its
aristocratic front from Washington Street. It may be unadvisable,
however, to speak too loudly of the increased custom of the
house, lest Mr. Waite should find it difficult to renew the lease
on so favorable terms as heretofore.
Being thus welcomed as benefactors, neither Mr. Tiffany nor
myself felt any scruple in doing full justice to the good things
that were set before us. If the feast were less magnificent than
those same panelled walls had witnessed in a by-gone century,--if
mine host presided with somewhat less of state than might have
befitted a successor of the royal Governors,--if the guests made
a less imposing show than the bewigged and powdered and
embroidered dignitaries, who erst banqueted at the gubernatorial
table, and now sleep, within their armorial tombs on Copp's Hill,
or round King's Chapel,--yet never, I may boldly say, did a more
comfortable little party assemble in the Province House, from
Queen Anne's days to the Revolution. The occasion was rendered
more interesting by the presence of a venerable personage, whose
own actual reminiscences went back to the epoch of Gage and Howe,
and even supplied him with a doubtful anecdote or two of
Hutchinson. He was one of that small, and now all but
extinguished, class, whose attachment to royalty, and to the
colonial institutions and customs that were connected with it,
had never yielded to the democratic heresies of after times. The
young queen of Britain has not a more loyal subject in her
realm--perhaps not one who would kneel before her throne with
such reverential love--as this old grandsire, whose head has
whitened beneath the mild sway of the Republic, which still, in
his mellower moments, he terms a usurpation. Yet prejudices so
obstinate have not made him an ungentle or impracticable
companion. If the truth must be told, the life of the aged
loyalist has been of such a scrambling and unsettled
character,--he has had so little choice of friends and been so
often destitute of any,--that I doubt whether he would refuse a
cup of kindness with either Oliver Cromwell or John Hancock,--to
say nothing of any democrat now upon the stage. In another paper
of this series I may perhaps give the reader a closer glimpse of
his portrait.
Our host, in due season, uncorked a bottle of Madeira, of such
exquisite perfume and admirable flavor that he surely must have
discovered it in an ancient bin, down deep beneath the deepest
cellar, where some jolly old butler stored away the Governor's
choicest wine, and forgot to reveal the secret on his death-bed.
Peace to his red-nosed ghost, and a libation to his memory! This
precious liquor was imbibed by Mr. Tiffany with peculiar zest;
and after sipping the third glass, it was his pleasure to give us
one of the oddest legends which he had yet raked from the
storehouse where he keeps such matters. With some suitable
adornments from my own fancy, it ran pretty much as follows.
Not long after Colonel Shute had assumed the
government of Massachusetts Bay, now nearly a hundred and twenty
years ago, a young lady of rank and fortune arrived from England,
to claim his protection as her guardian. He was her distant
relative, but the nearest who had survived the gradual extinction
of her family; so that no more eligible shelter could be found
for the rich and high-born Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe than within
the Province House of a transatlantic colony. The consort of
Governor Shute, moreover, had been as a mother to her childhood,
and was now anxious to receive her, in the hope that a beautiful
young woman would be exposed to infinitely less peril from the
primitive society of New England than amid the artifices and
corruptions of a court. If either the Governor or his lady had
especially consulted their own comfort, they would probably have
sought to devolve the responsibility on other hands; since, with
some noble and splendid traits of character, Lady Eleanore was
remarkable for a harsh, unyielding pride, a haughty consciousness
of her hereditary and personal advantages, which made her almost
incapable of control. Judging from many traditionary anecdotes,
this peculiar temper was hardly less than a monomania; or, if the
acts which it inspired were those of a sane person, it seemed due
from Providence that pride so sinful should be followed by as
severe a retribution. That tinge of the marvellous, which is
thrown over so many of these half-forgotten legends, has probably
imparted an additional wildness to the strange story of Lady
Eleanore Rochcliffe.
The ship in which she came passenger had arrived at Newport,
whence Lady Eleanore was conveyed to Boston in the Governor's
coach, attended by a small escort of gentlemen on horseback. The
ponderous equipage with its four black horses, attracted much
notice as it rumbled through Cornhill, surrounded by the prancing
steeds of half a dozen cavaliers, with swords dangling to their
stirrups and pistols at their holsters. Through the large glass
windows of the coach, as it rolled along, the people could
discern the figure of Lady Eleanore, strangely combining an
almost queenly stateliness with the grace and beauty of a maiden
in her teens. A singular tale had gone abroad among the ladies of
the province, that their fair rival was indebted for much of the
irresistible charm of her appearance to a certain article of
dress--an embroidered mantle--which had been wrought by the most
skilful artist in London, and possessed even magical properties
of adornment. On the present occasion, however, she owed nothing
to the witchery of dress, being clad in a riding habit of velvet,
which would have appeared stiff and ungraceful on any other form.
The coachman reined in his four black steeds, and the whole
cavalcade came to a pause in front of the contorted iron
balustrade that fenced the Province House from the public street.
It was an awkward coincidence that the bell of the Old South was
just then tolling for a funeral; so that, instead of a gladsome
peal with which it was customary to announce the arrival of
distinguished strangers, Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe was ushered by
a doleful clang, as if calamity had come embodied in her
beautiful person.
"A very great disrespect!" exclaimed Captain Langford, an English
officer, who had recently brought dispatches to Governor Shute.
"The funeral should have been deferred, lest Lady Eleanore's
spirits be affected by such a dismal welcome."
"With your pardon, sir," replied Doctor Clarke, a physician, and
a famous champion of the popular party, "whatever the heralds may
pretend, a dead beggar must have precedence of a living queen.
King Death confers high privileges."
These remarks were interchanged while the speakers waited a
passage through the crowd, which had gathered on each side of the
gateway, leaving an open avenue to the portal of the Province
House. A black slave in livery now leaped from behind the coach,
and threw open the door; while at the same moment Governor Shute
descended the flight of steps from his mansion, to assist Lady
Eleanore in alighting. But the Governor's stately approach was
anticipated in a manner that excited general astonishment. A pale
young man, with his black hair all in disorder, rushed from the
throng, and prostrated himself beside the coach, thus offering
his person as a footstool for Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe to tread
upon. She held back an instant, yet with an expression as if
doubting whether the young man were worthy to bear the weight of
her footstep, rather than dissatisfied to receive such awful
reverence from a fellow-mortal.
"Up, sir," said the Governor, sternly, at the same time lifting
his cane over the intruder. "What means the Bedlamite by this
freak?"
"Nay," answered Lady Eleanore playfully, but with more scorn than
pity in her tone, "your Excellency shall not strike him. When men
seek only to be trampled upon, it were a pity to deny them a
favor so easily granted--and so well deserved!"
Then, though as lightly as a sunbeam on a cloud, she placed her
foot upon the cowering form, and extended her hand to meet that
of the Governor. There was a brief interval, during which Lady
Eleanore retained this attitude; and never, surely, was there an
apter emblem of aristocracy and hereditary pride trampling on
human sympathies and the kindred of nature, than these two
figures presented at that moment. Yet the spectators were so
smitten with her beauty, and so essential did pride seem to the
existence of such a creature, that they gave a simultaneous
acclamation of applause.
"Who is this insolent young fellow?" inquired Captain Langford,
who still remained beside Doctor Clarke. "If he be in his senses,
his impertinence demands the bastinado. If mad, Lady Eleanore
should be secured from further inconvenience, by his
confinement."
"His name is Jervase Helwyse," answered the Doctor; "a youth of
no birth or fortune, or other advantages, save the mind and soul
that nature gave him; and being secretary to our colonial agent
in London, it was his misfortune to meet this Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe. He loved her--and her scorn has driven him mad."
"He was mad so to aspire," observed the English officer.
"It may be so," said Doctor Clarke, frowning as he spoke. "But I
tell you, sir, I could well-nigh doubt the justice of the Heaven
above us if no signal humiliation overtake this lady, who now
treads so haughtily into yonder mansion. She seeks to place
herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelops
all human souls. See, if that nature do not assert its claim over
her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest!"
"Never!" cried Captain Langford indignantly--"neither in life,
nor when they lay her with her ancestors."
Not many days afterwards the Governor gave a ball in honor of
Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe. The principal gentry of the colony
received invitations, which were distributed to their residences,
far and near, by messengers on horseback, bearing missives sealed
with all the formality of official dispatches. In obedience to
the summons, there was a general gathering of rank, wealth, and
beauty; and the wide door of the Province House had seldom given
admittance to more numerous and honorable guests than on the
evening of Lady Eleanore's ball. Without much extravagance of
eulogy, the spectacle might even be termed splendid; for,
according to the fashion of the times, the ladies shone in rich
silks and satins, outspread over wide-projecting hoops; and the
gentlemen glittered in gold embroidery, laid unsparingly upon the
purple, or scarlet, or sky-blue velvet, which was the material of
their coats and waistcoats. The latter article of dress was of
great importance, since it enveloped the wearer's body nearly to
the knees, and was perhaps bedizened with the amount of his whole
year's income, in golden flowers and foliage. The altered taste
of the present day--a taste symbolic of a deep change in the
whole system of society--would look upon almost any of those
gorgeous figures as ridiculous; although that evening the guests
sought their reflections in the pier-glasses, and rejoiced to
catch their own glitter amid the glittering crowd. What a pity
that one of the stately mirrors has not preserved a picture of
the scene, which, by the very traits that were so transitory,
might have taught us much that would be worth knowing and
remembering!
Would, at least, that either painter or mirror could convey to us
some faint idea of a garment, already noticed in this
legend,--the Lady Eleanore's embroidered mantle,--which the
gossips whispered was invested with magic properties, so as to
lend a new and untried grace to her figure each time that she put
it on! Idle fancy as it is, this mysterious mantle has thrown an
awe around my image of her, partly from its fabled virtues, and
partly because it was the handiwork of a dying woman, and,
perchance, owed the fantastic grace of its conception to the
delirium of approaching death.
After the ceremonial greetings had been paid, Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe stood apart from the mob of guests, insulating herself
within a small and distinguished circle, to whom she accorded a
more cordial favor than to the general throng. The waxen torches
threw their radiance vividly over the scene, bringing out its
brilliant points in strong relief; but she gazed carelessly, and
with now and then an expression of weariness or scorn, tempered
with such feminine grace that her auditors scarcely perceived the
moral deformity of which it was the utterance. She beheld the
spectacle not with vulgar ridicule, as disdaining to be pleased
with the provincial mockery of a court festival, but with the
deeper scorn of one whose spirit held itself too high to
participate in the enjoyment of other human souls. Whether or no
the recollections of those who saw her that evening were
influenced by the strange events with which she was subsequently
connected, so it was that her figure ever after recurred to them
as marked by something wild and unnatural,--although, at the
time, the general whisper was of her exceeding beauty, and of the
indescribable charm which her mantle threw around her. Some close
observers, indeed, detected a feverish flush and alternate
paleness of countenance, with corresponding flow and revulsion of
spirits, and once or twice a painful and helpless betrayal of
lassitude, as if she were on the point of sinking to the ground.
Then, with a nervous shudder, she seemed to arouse her energies
and threw some bright and playful yet half-wicked sarcasm into
the conversation. There was so strange a characteristic in her
manners and sentiments that it astonished every right-minded
listener; till looking in her face, a lurking and
incomprehensible glance and smile perplexed them with doubts both
as to her seriousness and sanity. Gradually, Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe's circle grew smaller, till only four gentlemen
remained in it. These were Captain Langford, the English officer
before mentioned; a Virginian planter, who had come to
Massachusetts on some political errand; a young Episcopal
clergyman, the grandson of a British earl; and, lastly, the
private secretary of Governor Shute, whose obsequiousness had won
a sort of tolerance from Lady Eleanore.
At different periods of the evening the liveried servants of the
Province House passed among the guests, bearing huge trays of
refreshments and French and Spanish wines. Lady Eleanore
Rochcliffe, who refused to wet her beautiful lips even with a
bubble of Champagne, had sunk back into a large damask chair,
apparently overwearied either with the excitement of the scene or
its tedium, and while, for an instant, she was unconscious of
voices, laughter and music, a young man stole forward, and knelt
down at her feet. He bore a salver in his hand, on which was a
chased silver goblet, filled to the brim with wine, which he
offered as reverentially as to a crowned queen, or rather with
the awful devotion of a priest doing sacrifice to his idol.
Conscious that some one touched her robe, Lady Eleanore started,
and unclosed her eyes upon the pale, wild features and
dishevelled hair of Jervase Helwyse.
"Why do you haunt me thus?" said she, in a languid tone, but with
a kindlier feeling than she ordinarily permitted herself to
express. "They tell me that I have done you harm."
"Heaven knows if that be so," replied the young man solemnly.
"But, Lady Eleanore, in requital of that harm, if such there be,
and for your own earthly and heavenly welfare, I pray you to take
one sip of this holy wine, and then to pass the goblet round
among the guests. And this shall be a symbol that you have not
sought to withdraw yourself from the chain of human
sympathies--which whoso would shake off must keep company with
fallen angels."
"Where has this mad fellow stolen that sacramental vessel?"
exclaimed the Episcopal clergyman.
This question drew the notice of the guests to the silver cup,
which was recognized as appertaining to the communion plate of
the Old South Church; and, for aught that could be known, it was
brimming over with the consecrated wine.
"Perhaps it is poisoned," half whispered the Governor's
secretary.
"Pour it down the villain's throat!" cried the Virginian
fiercely.
"Turn him out of the house!" cried Captain Langford, seizing
Jervase Helwyse so roughly by the shoulder that the sacramental
cup was overturned, and its contents sprinkled upon Lady
Eleanore's mantle. "Whether knave, fool, or Bedlamite, it is
intolerable that the fellow should go at large."
"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 by-standers 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, Doctor 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 Doctor 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 by-standers 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 afterwards it was
announced to the guests that an unforeseen circumstance rendered
it necessary to put a premature close to the festival.
The hall 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 afterwards, 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 pit-marks, 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
of 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 gripe 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 conquerer 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,
Doctor 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 Doctor 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 perchance 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?"
"O 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
Eleanore'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?
Mine host and the old loyalist and I bestowed no
little warmth of applause upon this narrative, in which we had
all been deeply interested; for the reader can scarcely conceive
how unspeakably the effect of such a tale is heightened when, as
in the present case, we may repose perfect confidence in the
veracity of him who tells it. For my own part, knowing how
scrupulous is Mr. Tiffany to settle the foundation of his facts,
I could not have believed him one whit the more faithfully had he
professed himself an eye-witness of the doings and sufferings of
poor Lady Eleanore. Some sceptics, it is true, might demand
documentary evidence, or even require him to produce the
embroidered mantle, forgetting that--Heaven be praised--it was
consumed to ashes. But now the old loyalist, whose blood was
warmed by the good cheer, began to talk, in his turn, about the
traditions of the Province House, and hinted that he, if it were
agreeable, might add a few reminiscences to our legendary stock.
Mr. Tiffany, having no cause to dread a rival, immediately
besought him to favor us with a specimen; my own entreaties, of
course, were urged to the same effect; and our venerable guest,
well pleased to find willing auditors, awaited only the return of
Mr. Thomas Waite, who had been summoned forth to provide
accommodations for several new arrivals. Perchance the public-but
be this as its own caprice and ours shall settle the matter--may
read the result in another Tale of the Province House.