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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, Doctor 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 Doctor 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 perchance 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.

“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?”

“O 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.