"I comprehend thee; lead on. Courage! what is there on earth now to fear?"
Muttering to himself—"Ay, leave me alone. I have a head worth something; I ask no gentleman to go by my word; I will make his own eyes the judge of what my trouble is worth." The grave-digger now led the way through one of the gates a little out of the city. And here under a shed sat six of his ghastly and ill-omened brethren, with spades and pick-axes at their feet.
His guide now turned round to Adrian, whose face was set and resolute in despair.
"Fair Signor," said he, with some touch of lingering compassion, "wouldst thou really convince thine own eyes and heart; the sight may appal, the contagion may destroy thee,—if, indeed, as it seems to me, Death has not already written 'mine' upon thee."
"Raven of bode and woe," answered Adrian, "seest thou not that all I shrink from is thy voice and aspect? Show me her I seek, living or dead."
"I will show her to you, then," said the Becchino, sullenly, "such as two nights since she was committed to my charge. Line and lineament may already be swept away, for the Plague hath a rapid besom; but I have left that upon her by which you will know the Becchino is no liar. Bring hither the torches, comrades, and lift the door. Never stare; it's the gentleman's whim, and he'll pay it well."
Turning to the right, while Adrian mechanically followed his conductors,—a spectacle whose dire philosophy crushes as with a wheel all the pride of mortal man—the spectacle of that vault in which earth hides all that on earth flourished, rejoiced, exulted—awaited his eye!
The Becchino lifted a ponderous grate, lowered their torches (scarcely needed, for through the aperture rushed, with a hideous glare, the light of the burning sun,) and motioned to Adrian to advance. He stood upon the summit of the abyss and gazed below.
* * * * *
* * * * *
It was a large, deep and circular space, like the bottom of an exhausted well. In niches cut into the walls of earth around, lay, duly confined, those who had been the earliest victims of the plague, when the Becchino's market was not yet glutted, and priest followed, and friend mourned, the dead. But on the floor below, there was the loathsome horror! Huddled and matted together,—some naked, some in shrouds already black and rotten,—lay the later guests, the unshriven and unblest! The torches, the sun, streamed broad and red over corruption in all its stages, from the pale blue tint and swollen shape, to the moistened undistinguishable mass, or the riddled bones, where yet clung, in strips and tatters, the black and mangled flesh. In many the face remained almost perfect, while the rest of the body was but bone; the long hair, the human face, surmounting the grisly skeleton. There, was the infant, still on the mother's breast; there, was the lover stretched across the dainty limbs of his adored! The rats (for they clustered in numbers to that feast,) disturbed, not scared, sate up from their horrid meal as the light glimmered over them, and thousands of them lay round, stark and dead, poisoned by that they fed on! There, too, the wild satire of the grave-diggers had cast, though stripped of their gold and jewels, the emblems that spoke of departed rank;—the broken wand of the Councillor; the General's baton; the Priestly Mitre! The foul and livid exhalations gathered like flesh itself, fungous and putrid, upon the walls, and the——