“Are you sure?” said Ormiston, glancing again with new curiosity at the marble face. “I never saw anything half so beautiful in all my life; but you see she is dead of the plague.”
“Dead? she cannot be! Nothing so perfect could die!”
“Look there,” said Ormiston pointing to the plague-spot. “There is the fatal token! For Heaven's sake let us get out of this, or we will share the same fate before morning!”
But Sir Norman did not move—could not move; he stood there rooted to the spot by the spell of that lovely, lifeless face.
Usually the plague left its victims hideous, ghastly, discolored, and covered with blotches; but in this case then was nothing to mar the perfect beauty of the satin-smooth skin, but that one dreadful mark.
There Sir Norman stood in his trance, as motionless as if some genie out of the “Arabian Nights” had suddenly turned him into stone (a trick they were much addicted to), and destined him to remain there an ornamental fixture for ever. Ormiston looked at him distractedly, uncertain whether to try moral suasion or to take him by the collar and drag him headlong down the stairs, when a providential but rather dismal circumstance came to his relief. A cart came rattling along the street, a bell was loudly rang, and a hoarse voice arose with it: “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!”
Ormiston rushed down stair to intercept the dead-cart, already almost full on it way to the plague-pit. The driver stopped at his call, and instantly followed him up stairs, and into the room. Glancing at the body with the utmost sang-froid, he touched the dress, and indifferently remarked:
“A bride, I should say; and an uncommonly handsome one too. We'll just take her along as she is, and strip these nice things off the body when we get it to the plague-pit.”
So saying, he wrapped her in the sheet, and directing Ormiston to take hold of the two lower ends, took the upper corners himself, with the air of a man quite used to that sort of thing. Ormiston recoiled from touching it; and Sir Norman seeing what they were about to do, and knowing there was no help for it, made up his mind, like a sensible young man as he was, to conceal his feelings, and caught hold of the sheet himself. In this fashion the dead bride was carried down stairs, and laid upon a shutter on the top of a pile of bodies in the dead-cart.
It was now almost dark, and as the cart started, the great clock of St. Paul's struck eight. St. Michael's, St Alban's, and the others took up the sound; and the two young men paused to listen. For many weeks the sky had been clear, brilliant, and blue; but on this night dark clouds were scudding in wild unrest across it, and the air was oppressingly close and sultry.