n
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