“Wretched lunatic, what do you seek here?” exclaimed Shute, extending his cane to guard himself from contact.  “There is nothing here but Death; back, or you will meet him.”

“Death will not touch me, the banner-bearer of the pestilence,” cried Jervase Helwyse, shaking the red flag aloft.  “Death and the pestilence, who wears the aspect of the Lady Eleanore, will walk through the streets to-night, and I must march before them with this banner.”

“Why do I waste words on the fellow?” muttered the governor, drawing his cloak across his mouth.  “What matters his miserable life, when none of us are sure of twelve hours’ breath?—­On, fool, to your own destruction!”

He made way for Jervase Helwyse, who immediately ascended the staircase, but on the first landing-place was arrested by the firm grasp of a hand upon his shoulder.  Looking fiercely up with a madman’s impulse to struggle with and rend asunder his opponent, he found himself powerless beneath a calm, stern eye which possessed the mysterious property of quelling frenzy at its height.  The person whom he had now encountered was the physician, Dr. Clarke, the duties of whose sad profession had led him to the province-house, where he was an infrequent guest in more prosperous times.

“Young man, what is your purpose?” demanded he.

“I seek the Lady Eleanore,” answered Jervase Helwyse, submissively.

“All have fled from her,” said the physician.  “Why do you seek her now?  I tell you, youth, her nurse fell death-stricken on the threshold of that fatal chamber.  Know ye not that never came such a curse to our shores as this lovely Lady Eleanore, that her breath has filled the air with poison, that she has shaken pestilence and death upon the land from the folds of her accursed mantle?”

“Let me look upon her,” rejoined the mad youth, more wildly.  “Let me behold her in her awful beauty, clad in the regal garments of the pestilence.  She and Death sit on a throne together; let me kneel down before them.”

“Poor youth!” said Dr. Clarke, and, moved by a deep sense of human weakness, a smile of caustic humor curled his lip even then.  “Wilt thou still worship the destroyer and surround her image with fantasies the more magnificent the more evil she has wrought?  Thus man doth ever to his tyrants.  Approach, then.  Madness, as I have noted, has that good efficacy that it will guard you from contagion, and perhaps its own cure may be found in yonder chamber.”  Ascending another flight of stairs, he threw open a door and signed to Jervase Helwyse that he should enter.

The poor lunatic, it seems probable, had cherished a delusion that his haughty mistress sat in state, unharmed herself by the pestilential influence which as by enchantment she scattered round about her.  He dreamed, no doubt, that her beauty was not dimmed, but brightened into superhuman splendor.  With such anticipations he stole reverentially to the door at which the physician stood, but paused upon the threshold, gazing fearfully into the gloom of the darkened chamber.