"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Lady Eleanores Mantle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)


"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.

"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