“Where is the Lady Eleanore?” whispered he.

“Call her,” replied the physician.

“Lady Eleanore! princess! queen of Death!” cried Jervase Helwyse, advancing three steps into the chamber.  “She is not here.  There, on yonder table, I behold the sparkle of a diamond which once she wore upon her bosom.  There”—­and he shuddered—­“there hangs her mantle, on which a dead woman embroidered a spell of dreadful potency.  But where is the Lady Eleanore?”

Something stirred within the silken curtains of a canopied bed and a low moan was uttered, which, listening intently, Jervase Helwyse began to distinguish as a woman’s voice complaining dolefully of thirst.  He fancied, even, that he recognized its tones.

“My throat!  My throat is scorched,” murmured the voice.  “A drop of water!”

“What thing art thou?” said the brain-stricken youth, drawing near the bed and tearing asunder its curtains.  “Whose voice hast thou stolen for thy murmurs and miserable petitions, as if Lady Eleanore could be conscious of mortal infirmity?  Fie!  Heap of diseased mortality, why lurkest thou in my lady’s chamber?”

“Oh, Jervase Helwyse,” said the voice—­and as it spoke the figure contorted itself, struggling to hide its blasted face—­“look not now on the woman you once loved.  The curse of Heaven hath stricken me because I would not call man my brother nor woman sister.  I wrapped myself in pride as in a mantle and scorned the sympathies of nature, and therefore has Nature made this wretched body the medium of a dreadful sympathy.  You are avenged, they are all avenged, Nature is avenged; for I am Eleanore Rochcliffe.”

The malice of his mental disease, the bitterness lurking at the bottom of his heart, mad as he was, for a blighted and ruined life and love that had been paid with cruel scorn, awoke within the breast of Jervase Helwyse.  He shook his finger at the wretched girl, and the chamber echoed, the curtains of the bed were shaken, with his outburst of insane merriment.

“Another triumph for the Lady Eleanore!” he cried.  “All have been her victims; who so worthy to be the final victim as herself?” Impelled by some new fantasy of his crazed intellect, he snatched the fatal mantle and rushed from the chamber and the house.

That night a procession passed by torchlight through the streets, bearing in the midst the figure of a woman enveloped with a richly-embroidered mantle, while in advance stalked Jervase Helwyse waving the red flag of the pestilence.  Arriving opposite the province-house, the mob burned the effigy, and a strong wind came and swept away the ashes.  It was said that from that very hour the pestilence abated, as if its sway had some mysterious connection, from the first plague-stroke to the last, with Lady Elcanore’s mantle.  A remarkable uncertainty broods over that unhappy lady’s fate.  There is a belief, however, that in a certain chamber of this mansion a female form may sometimes be duskily discerned shrinking into the darkest corner and muffling her face within an embroidered mantle.  Supposing the legend true, can this be other than the once proud Lady Eleanore?