第65章 MAURICE KIRKWOOD'S STORY OF HIS LIFE(1)

I am an American by birth,but a large part of my life has been passed in foreign lands.My father was a man of education,possessed of an ample fortune;my mother was considered,a very accomplished and amiable woman.I was their first and only child.She died while I was yet an infant.If I remember her at all it is as a vision,more like a glimpse of a pre-natal existence than as a part of my earthly life.At the death of my mother I was left in the charge of the old nurse who had enjoyed her perfect confidence.She was devoted to me,and I became absolutely dependent on her,who had for me all the love and all the care of a mother.I was naturally the object of the attentions and caresses of the family relatives.Ihave been told that I was a pleasant,smiling infant,with nothing to indicate any peculiar nervous susceptibility;not afraid of strangers,but on the contrary ready to make their acquaintance.My father was devoted to me and did all in his power to promote my health and comfort.

I was still a babe,often carried in arms,when the event happened which changed my whole future and destined me to a strange and lonely existence.I cannot relate it even now without a sense of terror.Imust force myself to recall the circumstances as told me and vaguely remembered,for I am not willing that my doomed and wholly exceptional life should pass away unrecorded,unexplained,unvindicated.My nature is,I feel sure,a kind and social one,but I have lived apart,as if my heart were filled with hatred of my fellow-creatures.If there are any readers who look without pity,without sympathy,upon those who shun the fellowship of their fellow men and women,who show by their downcast or averted eyes that they dread companionship and long for solitude,I pray them,if this paper ever reaches them,to stop at this point.Follow me no further,for you will not believe my story,nor enter into the feelings which I am about to reveal.But if there are any to whom all that is human is of interest,who have felt in their own consciousness some stirrings of invincible attraction to one individual and equally invincible repugnance to another,who know by their own experience that elective affinities have as their necessary counterpart,and,as it were,their polar opposites,currents not less strong of elective repulsions,let them read with unquestioning faith the story of a blighted life I am about to relate,much of it,of course,received from the lips of others.

My cousin Laura,a girl of seventeen,lately returned from Europe,was considered eminently beautiful.It was in my second summer that she visited my father's house,where he was living with his servants and my old nurse,my mother having but recently left him a widower.

Laura was full of vivacity,impulsive,quick in her movements,thoughtless occasionally,as it is not strange that a young girl of her age should be.It was a beautiful summer day when she saw me for the first time.My nurse had me in her arms,walking back and forward on a balcony with a low railing,upon which opened the windows of the second story of my father's house.While the nurse was thus carrying me,Laura came suddenly upon the balcony.She no sooner saw me than with all the delighted eagerness of her youthful nature she rushed toward me,and,catching me from the nurse's arms,began tossing me after the fashion of young girls who have been so lately playing with dolls that they feel as if babies were very much of the same nature.The abrupt seizure frightened me;I sprang from her arms in my terror,and fell over the railing of the balcony.Ishould probably enough have been killed on the spot but for the fact that a low thorn-bush grew just beneath the balcony,into which Ifell and thus had the violence of the shock broken.But the thorns tore my tender flesh,and I bear to this day marks of the deep wounds they inflicted.

That dreadful experience is burned deep into my memory.The sudden apparition of the girl;the sense of being torn away from the protecting arms around me;the frantic effort to escape;the shriek that accompanied my fall through what must have seemed unmeasurable space;the cruel lacerations of the piercing and rending thorns,--all these fearful impressions blended in one paralyzing terror.

When I was taken up I was thought to be dead.I was perfectly white,and the physician who first saw me said that no pulse was perceptible.But after a time consciousness returned;the wounds,though painful,were none of them dangerous,and the most alarming effects of the accident passed away.My old nurse cared for me tenderly day and night,and my father,who had been almost distracted in the first hours which followed the injury,hoped and believed that no permanent evil results would be found to result from it.My cousin Laura was of course deeply distressed to feel that her thoughtlessness had been the cause of so grave an accident.As soon as I had somewhat recovered she came to see me,very penitent,very anxious to make me forget the alarm she had caused me,with all its consequences.I was in the nursery sitting up in my bed,bandaged,but not in any pain,as it seemed,for I was quiet and to all appearance in a perfectly natural state of feeling.As Laura came near me I shrieked and instantly changed color.I put my hand upon my heart as if I had been stabbed,and fell over,unconscious.It was very much the same state as that in which I was found immediately after my fall.

The cause of this violent and appalling seizure was but too obvious.