“Like the leaves of the forest, when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen;
Like the leaves of the forest, when autumn hath blown,
That host in the morning lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still.
And there lay the steed, with his nostrils all wide,
But through them there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.”
The horrors of the plague are beyond description. The panic consequent upon the appearance of Yellow Jack in the South gives but a faint idea of it. And this very panic was a most—we had almost said the most—powerful factor in the augmentation of the plague’s fatality. It is also the case with cholera that a disturbed condition of the mind is fatal in the mildest form of the disease. Some one has thus embodied the case, though of course with exaggeration: A traveler leaving Bagdad met Cholera entering. “For what are you come?” “To slay 10,000 people.” Each went his way. On returning, the traveler met Cholera once more. “But you killed 30,000!” “Nay, friend, I killed but 10,000; scare killed the rest!”
Occasionally this panic took a terrible form; as when during a season of plague in Germany, the idea seized the people that the Jews had occasioned the plague by poisoning the wells; and Jews were murdered, tortured, and burned by the hundreds; which reminds one of a modern writer’s sarcastic definition of hydrophobia. “A peculiar periodical madness, impelling men to destroy dogs.”
Of the thousand tales of interest that have come down to us, we may give place to one, a story of Florence. This city had twenty-three visitations of the plague; the first in 1325, the last in 1630. The plague of 1338 is the noted one described by Boccaccio. The story which we condense here is an incident of the plague of 1400.
Among the noble families who were sworn foes, were those of Rondinelli and Almieri; and one might as soon have expected the lion to mate with the serpent, as to hope for an alliance between the two families. But Cupid has never bothered his meddlesome pate with politics or theology; and so it came about that, as with Montague and Capulet, Antonio Rondinelli fell in love with Ginevra Almieri, one of the most beautiful women of the time—certainly unsurpassed in Florence. Of course, Signor Almieri could not for a moment think of such a hateful match, and so Ginevra was given to Francesco Agolanti. The young wife remained faithful; but she gradually faded; and in four short years sunk into a sort of lethargic stupor, resulting in death. The plague was then at its highest, and the panic was great. Every death from uncertain cause was a source of alarm, and burials were informal and hasty. The poor young wife was promptly bundled off to the family vault beneath one of the great cathedrals.
It seems that it was merely a case of coma, or suspended animation. The lady revived, only to find herself entombed with the skeletons of her husband’s ancestors. Horrible as this would be for any one, it is a wonder that the weak nerves of Ginevra did not give way entirely under the strain. She screamed and called—only the dead heard. She groped about her tomb, and found a ladder; clambering up, she found a ray of moonlight streaming through a crevice, and learned her location. She looked abroad
“Upon the moonlight loveliness, all sunk
In one unbroken silence, save the moan
From the lone room of death, or the dull sound
Of the slow-moving hearse. The homes of men
Were now all desolate, and darkness there
And solitude and silence took their seat,
In the deserted streets: for the dark wing
Of a destroying angel had gone by
And blasted all existence, and had changed
The gay, the busy, and the crowded mart
To one cold speechless city of the dead.”
After desperate effort, and with strength astounding in a frame so weak, she forced up one of the paving stones that formed the roof of the vault, and dragged herself out. Sitting wearily down for a brief rest, a sudden shower came up and chilled her to the bone. She rose and went to her husband’s house. He, at a second story window, astounded at the ghostly figure in grave clothes that roused him in the dead hour of night, “when ghosts do mostly walk abroad,” and doubtless remembering that his treatment of the living wife had not been such as to recommend him to the favorable notice of her ghost, shut the window with alternate imprecations and invocations, and covered his head with the bedclothes—well-known in all ages to be thoroughly ghost-proof. Ginevra was similarly repulsed from the houses of her father and of various relatives. As a last resort, though exceedingly repugnant to a woman of her delicate feeling, she betook herself, almost chilled to death, to the house of Rondinelli. To his inquiry as to who was there, a weak voice responded, “Do you not know me, Signor Antonio? It is I—Ginevra. Neither my father nor my husband will receive me. Will you, too, turn me away?”