End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Science fiction; Twenty-first century -- Fiction
With sails abaft, the engine stopt, the vessel remained unwillingly
stationary, until, after an hour’s search, my poor Perdita was brought
on board. But no care could re-animate her, no medicine cause her dear
eyes to open, and the blood to flow again from her pulseless heart. One
clenched hand contained a slip of paper, on which was written, “To
Athens.” To ensure her removal thither, and prevent the irrecoverable
loss of her body in the wide sea, she had had the precaution to fasten
a long shawl round her waist, and again to the staunchions of the cabin
window. She had drifted somewhat under the keel of the vessel, and her
being out of sight occasioned the delay in finding her. And thus the
ill-starred girl died a victim to my senseless rashness. Thus, in early
day, she left us for the company of the dead, and preferred to share
the rocky grave of Raymond, before the animated scene this cheerful
earth afforded, and the society of loving friends. Thus in her
twenty-ninth year she died; having enjoyed some few years of the
happiness of paradise, and sustaining a reverse to which her impatient
spirit and affectionate disposition were unable to submit. As I marked
the placid expression that had settled on her countenance in death, I
felt, in spite of the pangs of remorse, in spite of heart-rending
regret, that it was better to die so, than to drag on long, miserable
years of repining and inconsolable grief. Stress of weather drove us up
the Adriatic Gulph; and, our vessel being hardly fitted to weather a
storm, we took refuge in the port of Ancona. Here I met Georgio Palli,
the vice-admiral of the Greek fleet, a former friend and warm partizan
of Raymond. I committed the remains of my lost Perdita to his care, for
the purpose of having them transported to Hymettus, and placed in the
cell her Raymond already occupied beneath the pyramid. This was all
accomplished even as I wished. She reposed beside her beloved, and the
tomb above was inscribed with the united names of Raymond and Perdita.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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