The day was drawing to a close, but sullen fires of sunset were still burning low under a leaden, cloudy sky. Beneath his feet the grass was parched, the ground everywhere leprous grey. Though it was only early July, the foliage of the trees hung limp and sick-hued; there was not a flicker of life among the branches—indeed, hardly a stir anywhere in the languid atmosphere. Sky seemed to brood over earth, earth to lie paralysed, awaiting some moment of catastrophe, and heavy vapours to be fusing them together. The heat was a palpable presence. An anguished expectation caught the throat as with an actual pressure. The plague held all London in its grip.
Men can walk with fortitude under the wings of the Angel of Destruction, when the death he brings is a clean one, honourable, seemly; but this horrible Demon of Corruption that now spread its shadow over the world made its victims loathsome in each other’s eyes and infected them with coward selfishness and panic fears.
The Court had gone at last, though Charles was no poltroon. Half the population was in flight along country roads; blind terror was upon most of those whom circumstances retained within the doomed circle. Among the well-to-do only three classes still lingered in the town: those whom a sense of duty kept at their post; those again who, with a strange but not unknown faculty of self-deception, chose to ignore the visitation rather than to face the appalling presence; and lastly, those few strong natures who, for purposes of their own, found it worth while to set danger at defiance.
To these last belonged Lionel Ratcliffe. Fully aware of the peril, he challenged it deliberately. He knew that those yellow vapours were the very breath of the pestilence; that the smell everywhere meeting his nostrils was that of death; that among yonder prostrate figures reclining beneath the trees many were doubtless stricken, dying, or dead. He kept on, nevertheless, calm if wary, at a masterful gait, across the fields.
In his hand he swung a loaded cane of such proportions as almost to rival a watchman’s staff—one which could keep at a distance or at one stroke lay low the sturdiest onslaught. For it was well known that many of the pest-stricken in their delirium rushed into the street to die; that the passer-by might at any moment be confronted by some miserable wretch who, seized with madness, would rise and clasp him in an embrace of hideous contagion.
As for the mumpers and rufflers, who were wont to emerge at the darkening hours in the Fields—like night-moths, no one knew where from—one glance of this gentleman’s eye, not to speak of the knowing gesture of the staff hand, would have sufficed to bid even the stoutest of them pause and be wiser than to meddle.
And so Lionel Ratcliffe passed on, without undue haste, leaving the closed theatre on his left, making westward toward Arch Row. And presently, as he emerged from the shadow of the trees, he sighted the mansion that was his goal, Chillingburgh House, with its sharp roof, its coping balustrade and urns rising in relief, black against the lurid orange of the sky.
As he approached the gateway a sedan chair, escorted by a couple of armed footmen, was just depositing a lady voluminously wrapped in a silk cloak before the double flight of steps. He halted for a second to watch her begin the ascent on the right. She went slowly, as one fatigued; he swiftly entered the flagged courtyard, took the opposite side of the stairs, and reached the landing just before her.