Angela's loyal young
heart was full of faith in the King. She was ready to believe that his sins
were the sins of a man whose head had been turned by the sudden change from
exile to a throne, from poverty to wealth, from dependence upon his
Bourbon cousin and his friends in Holland to the lavish subsidies of a
too-indulgent Commons.
No words could paint the desolation which reigned between the Strand and
the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More
than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the
embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, at sight of death
lying on the threshold, stiff, stark, unheeded; more than once in her
progress from the New Exchange to St Paul's she heard the shrill wail of
women lamenting for a soul just departed. Death was about and around her.
The great bell of the cathedral tolled with an inexorable stroke in the
summer stillness, as it had tolled every day through those long months of
heat, and drought, and ever-growing fear, and ever-thickening graves.
Eastward there rose the red glare of a great fire, and she feared that some
of those old wooden houses in the narrower streets were blazing, but on
inquiry of a solitary foot passenger, she learnt that this fire was one of
many which had been burning for three days, at street corners and in open
spaces, at a great expense of sea-coal, with the hope of purifying the
atmosphere and dispersing poisonous gases--but that so far no amelioration
had followed upon this outlay and labour.
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