Page:Francesca Carrara 3.pdf/161

It was a fearful vigil that Francesca kept, for the office of watching in the chamber of death she had taken upon herself. How often, during her young life, had she looked upon the face of the dead!—it was now almost more familiar than the living. Again she marked the still repose, the calm, cold hue, the superhuman beauty, the look which is not of this world, here strongly contrasted by the troubled countenance of Lord Avonleigh. Sleep lacked the quiet of death. The veins were swollen on his temples—the dew rose on his knit brow—his cheek was livid, not pale—and the inward struggle convulsed every feature. The torches flung round their long and fantastic shadows, while the wind howled amid the battlements—a wild, shrieking wind, like a great cry of nature's agony. Yet there the young Italian waited and watched alone, dreading her ghastly solitude, but dreading still more the despair of her father's awakening. And terrible indeed was that awakening: it was the desperate grief of the prosperous, who have not dreamed that the arrows of calamity can be pointed at them—whose sky has been sunshine, and whose pathway over flowers, till the ordinary lot of mankind seems to them an injustice. They look not to drink of that cup which is measured unto all—to others they apply the