The Midnight Queen by May Agnes Fleming (best books under 200 pages txt) 📖

had been quiet and passive, bearing her fate with a sort of dumb resignation; but now a spirit of vengeance, fiercer and more terrible than his own, began to kindle within her; and, kneeling down before the ghastly thing, she breathed a wish--a prayer--to the avenging Jehovah, so unutterably horrible, that even her husband had to fly with curdling blood from the room. That dreadful prayer was heard--that wish fulfilled in me; but long before I looked on the light of day that frantic woman had repented of the awful deed she had done. Repentance came too late the sin of the father was visited on the child, and on the mother, too, for the moment her eyes fell upon me, she became a raving maniac, and died before the first day of my life had ended.

"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 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.

"The arts used to discover the mystery and make me unmask were innumerable and almost incredible; but I baffled them all, and began, after a time, rather to enjoy the sensation I created than otherwise.

"There was one, in particular, possessed of even more devouring curiosity than the rest, a certain young countess of miraculous beauty, whom I need not describe, since you have her very image in Leoline. The Marquis de Montmorenci, of a somewhat inflammable nature, loved her almost as much as he had done my mother, and she accepted him, and they were married. She may have loved him (I see no reason why she should not), but still to this day I think it was more to discover the secret of La Masque than from any other cause. I loved my beautiful new mother too well to let her find it out; although from the day she entered our house as a bride, until that on which she lay on her deathbed, her whole aim, day and night, was its discovery. There seemed to be a fatality about my father's wives; for the beautiful Honorine lived scarcely longer than her predecessor, and she died, leaving three children--all born at one time--you know them well, and one of them you love. To my care she intrusted them on her deathbed, and she could have scarcely intrusted them to worse; for, though I liked her, I most decidedly disliked them. They were lovely children--their lovely mother's image; and they were named Hubert, Leoline, and Honorine, or, as you knew her, Miranda. Even my father did not seem to care for them much, not even as much as he cared for me; and when he lay on his deathbed, one year later, I was left, young as I was, their sole guardian, and trustee of all his wealth. That wealth was not fairly divided--one-half being left to me and the other half to be shared equally between them; but, in my wicked ambition, I was not satisfied even with that. Some of my father's fierce and cruel nature I inherited; and I resolved to be clear of these three stumbling-blocks, and recompense myself for my other misfortunes by every indulgence boundless riches could bestow. So, secretly, and in the night, I left my home, with an old and trusty servant, known to you as Prudence, and my unfortunate, little brother and sisters. Strange to say, Prudence was attached to one of them, and to neither of the rest--that one was Leoline, whom she resolved to keep and care for, and neither she nor I minded what became of the other two."

"From Paris we went to Dijon, where we dropped Hubert into the turn at the convent door, with his name attached, and left him where he would be well taken care of, and no questions asked. With the other two we started for Calais, en route for England; and there Prudence got rid of Honorine in a singular manner. A packet was about starting for the island of our destination, and she saw a strange-looking little man carrying his luggage from the wharf into a boat. She had the infant in her arms, having carried it out for the identical purpose of getting rid of it; and, without more ado, she laid it down, unseen, among boxes and bundles, and, like Hagar, stood afar off to see what became of it. That ugly little man was the dwarf; and his amazement on finding it among his goods and chattels you may imagine; but he kept it, notwithstanding, though why, is best known to himself. A few weeks after that we, too, came over, and Prudence took up her residence in a quiet village a long way from London. Thus you see, Sir Norman, how it comes about that we are so related, and the wrong I have done them all."

"You have, indeed!" said Sir Norman, gravely, having listened, much shocked and displeased, at this open confession; "and to one of them it is beyond our power to atone. Do you know the life of misery to which she has been assigned?"

"I know it all, and have repented for it in my own heart, in dust and ashes! Even I--unlike all other earthly creatures as I am--have a conscience, and it has given me no rest night or day since. From that hour I have never lost sight of them; every sorrow they have undergone has been known to me, and added to my own; and yet I could not, or would not, undo what I had done. Leoline knows all now; and she will tell Hubert, since destiny has brought them together; and whether they will forgive me I know not. But yet they might; for they have long and happy lives before them, and we can forgive everything to the dead."

"But you are not dead," said Sir Norman; "and there is repentance and pardon for all. Much as you have wronged them, they will forgive you; and Heaven is not less merciful than they!"

"They may; for I have striven to atone. In my house there are proofs and papers that will put them in possession of all, and more than all, they have lost. But life is a burden of torture I will bear no longer. The death of him who died for me this night is the crowning tragedy of my miserable life; and if my hour were not at hand, I should not have told you this."

"But you have not told me the fearful cause of no much guilt and suffering. What is behind that mask?"

"Would you, too, see?" she asked, in a terrible voice, "and die?"

"I have told you it is not in my nature to die easily, and it is something far stronger than mere curiosity makes me ask."

"Be it so! The sky is growing red with day-dawn, and I shall never see the sun rise more, for I am already plague-struck!"

That sweetest of all voices ceased. The white hands removed the mask, and the floating coils of hair, and revealed, to Sir Norman's horror-struck gaze, the grisly face and head, and the hollow eye-sockets, the grinning mouth, and fleshless cheeks of a skeleton!

He saw it but for one fearful instant--the next, she had thrown up both arms, and leaped headlong into the loathly plague-pit. He saw her for a second or two, heaving and writhing in the putrid heap; and then the strong man reeled and fell with his face on the ground, not feigning, but sick unto death. Of all the dreadful things he had witnessed that night, there was nothing so dreadful as this; of all the horror he had felt before, there was none to equal what he felt now. In his momentary delirium, it seemed to him she was reaching her arms of bone up to drag him in, and that the skeleton-face was grinning at him on the edge of the awful pit. And, covering his eyes with his hands, he sprang up, and fled away.


CHAPTER XXII. DAY-DAWN.

All this time, the attendant, George, had been sitting, very much at his ease, on horseback, looking after Sir Norman's charger and admiring the beauties of sunrise. He had seen Sir Norman in conversation with a strange female, and not much liking his near proximity to the plague-pit, was rather impatient for it to come to an end; but when he saw the tragic manner in which it did end, his consternation was beyond all bounds. Sir Norman, in his horrified flight, would have fairly passed him unnoticed,