“Ah!” he said to them in French when he knew.  “Well, signors, that noble lady has not gone alone.  I tell you that scores of whom I know are already dead in Venice, swept off by this swift and horrible plague.  Death and all his angels stalk through the city.  They say that he himself appeared last night, and this morning on the tilting ground by the quay, and by God’s mercy—­if He has any left for us—­I can well believe it.  The Doge and his Council but now have issued a decree that all who perish must be buried at once.  See to it, signors, lest the officers come and bear her away to some common grave, from which her rank will not protect her.”

Then he went to visit Sir Geoffrey.  Returning presently, he gave them some directions as to his treatment, and rushed out as he had rushed in.  They never saw him again.  Two days later they learned that he himself was dead of the pest.

That night they buried Lady Carleon in her son’s grave, which Dick had helped to prepare for her, since no sexton could be bribed to do the work.  Indeed these were all busy enough attending to the interment of the great ones of Venice.  In that churchyard alone they saw six buryings in progress.  Also after the priest had read his hurried Office, as they left the gates, whence Lady Carleon’s bearers had already fled affrighted, they met more melancholy processions heralded by a torch or two whereof the light fell upon some sheeted and uncoffined form.

“’Twixt earthquake and plague Murgh the Helper is helping very well,” said Grey Dick grimly, and Hugh only groaned in answer.

Such was the beginning of the awful plague which travelled from the East to Venice and all Europe and afterward became known by the name of the Black Death.  Day by day the number of its victims increased; the hundreds of yesterday were the thousands of the morrow.  Soon the graveyards were full, the plague pits, long and deep, were full, and the dead were taken out to sea by shiploads and there cast into the ocean.  At length even this could not be done, since none were forthcoming who would dare the task.  For it became known that those who did so themselves would surely die.

So where folk fell, there they lay.  In the houses were many of them; they cumbered and poisoned the streets and the very churches.  Even the animals sickened and perished, until that great city was turned into an open tomb.  The reek of it tainted the air for miles around, so that even those who passed it in ships far out to sea turned faint and presently themselves sickened and died.  But ere they died they bore on the fatal gift to other lands.