But we know what mourning means at Whitehall--Lady Castlemaine in black
velvet, with forty thousand pounds in diamonds to enliven it; a concert
instead of a play, perhaps; and the King sitting in a corner whispering
with Mrs. Stewart. But as for the contagion, you will see that everybody
will rush back to London, and that you and I will be laughing-stocks."
The next week justified Lady Fareham's assertion. As soon as it was known
that the King had established himself at Whitehall, the great people came
back to their London houses, and the town began to fill. It was as if a God
had smiled upon the smitten city, and that healing and happiness radiated
from the golden halo round that anointed head. Was not this the monarch of
whom the most eloquent preacher of the age had written, "In the arms of
whose justice and wisdom we lie down in safety"?
London flung off her cerements--erased her plague-marks. The dead-cart's
dreadful bell no longer sounded in the silence of an afflicted city.
Coffins no longer stood at every other door; the pits at Finsbury, in
Tothill Fields, at Islington, were all filled up and trampled down; and the
grass was beginning to grow over the forgotten dead.
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