"Nurse and physician fled at the sight of me; but my father, though

thrilling with horror, bore the shock, and bowed to the retributive

justice of the angry Deity she had invoked. His whole life, his whole

nature, changed from that hour; and, kneeling beside my dead mother, as

he afterward told me, he vowed before high Heaven to cherish and love

me, even as though I had not been the ghastly creature I was. The

physician he bound by a terrible oath to silence; the nurse he forced

back, and, in spite of her disgust and abhorrence, compelled her to

nurse and care for me. The dead was buried out of sight; and we had

rooms in a distant part of the house, which no one ever entered but

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my father and the nurse. Though set apart from my birth as something

accursed, I had the intellect and capacity of--yes, far greater

intellect and capacity than, most children; and, as years passed by, my

father, true to his vow, became himself my tutor and companion. He did

not love me--that was an utter impossibility; but time so blunts the

edge of all things, that even the nurse became reconciled to me, and my

father could scarcely do less than a stranger. So I was cared for, and

instructed, and educated; and, knowing not what a monstrosity I was, I

loved them both ardently, and lived on happily enough, in my splendid

prison, for my first ten years in this world.

"Then came a change. My nurse died; and it became clear that I must quit

my solitary life, and see the sort of world I lived in. So my father,

seeing all this, sat down in the twilight one night beside me, and told

me the story of my own hideousness. I was but a child then, and it is

many and many years ago; but this gray summer morning, I feel what I

felt then, as vividly as I did at the time. I had not learned the great

lesson of life then--endurance, I have scarcely learned it yet, or I

should bear life's burden longer; but that first night's despair

has darkened my whole after-life. For weeks I would not listen to my

father's proposal, to hide what would send all the world from me in

loathing behind a mask; but I came to my senses at last, and from

that day to the present--more days than either you or I would care to

count--it has not been one hour altogether off my face."

"I was the wonder and talk of Paris, when I did appear; and most of the

surmises were wild and wide of the mark--some even going so far as to

say it was all owing to my wonderful unheard-of beauty that I was thus

mysteriously concealed from view. I had a soft voice, and a tolerable

shape; and upon this, I presume, they founded the affirmation. But my

father and I kept our own council, and let them say what they listed.

I had never been named, as other children are; but they called me

La Masque now. I had masters and professors without end, and studied

astronomy and astrology, and the mystic lore of the old Egyptians, and

became noted as a prodigy and a wonder, and a miracle of learning, far

and near.




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