CHAPTER XXIII.
THE VAULT.
It is night, and the moon sheds a pale and sickly light over the silent streets of Stratford-upon-Avon, and the surrounding meadows and woodlands.
Is it that the idea of pestilence and death being rife in that silent town gives its streets so sickly and melancholy a look—a sort of unnatural and unwholesome glare—or is the surrounding air, impregnated as it seems with disease, of a more rarified and peculiar character?
The square, thick-ribbed, and embattled tower of the guild of the Holy Cross, with its Norman windows and grotesque ornaments, alone looks dark in shadow. The streets and windows of the various houses seem to glance white and spectral. The tower of the distant church hath a ghastly look, and the very tombstones of the dead seem also more white and ghostly; whilst a thick mist from the river rises like a cloud in the background.
Silence reigns supreme. Not a breath of wind stirs the foliage of the trees upon the margin of the river, or bends the long dank grass growing amongst the graves.
Suddenly the distant sound of a horse's hoof-tread disturbs the deep silence, and a solitary horseman, riding through the deserted streets of the town, approached the churchyard, and dismounting, after fastening his steed, entered it.
He takes his way slowly and with measured tread towards a vault attached to the church. His cheek is pale and haggard, and the large round tears course one another down it. It is Walter Arderne; he has come to spend the last hours he intends remaining in the vicinity of Stratford, beside the vault containing the remains of his beloved Charlotte.
The plague which raged in Stratford this year was now at its height. Already one-fifth of the inhabitants had fallen victims; and it was the custom, as much as possible, to bury the dead unobserved at night.
The remains of the domestic who had died at Clopton Hall were to be buried on this night after midnight; and as Walter Arderne knew the hour, he had preceded the corpse, intending to descend into the vault and gaze upon the remains of her he had so loved in life.