“Do you think, Elshaw, that the marks will ever go away? Oh, good heavens, I know they won’t,” he cried, as with his uninjured eye he surveyed himself in the glass over the dining-room sideboard by the light of a couple of candles. “Oh, oh, the wretch! The hag! I’ll get her six months for this!”
And the little man, trembling with rage, shook his fist and gnashed his teeth, presenting in his anger and disfigurement a hideous spectacle.
The left side of his face was already one long patch of inflammation. His left eye was shut up; the hair on that side of his head had already begun to come away in tufts from the burnt skin.
Bram was disgusted. Mr. Biron’s grief over the loss of his daughter, keen as it had been, could not be compared to that which he felt now at the loss of his remaining good looks. There was a note of absolute sincerity in his every lament which had been conspicuously lacking in his grief of the morning. The young man could scarcely listen to him with patience. He tried, however, out of humanity, to remain silent, since he could give no comfort. But silence would not do for his garrulous companion, who insisted on having an answer.
“Do you think, Elshaw, that I shall be disfigured for life?” he asked with tremulous anxiety.
“I’m afraid so,” answered Bram rather gruffly. “But I don’t think I’d worry about that when you have worse things than that to trouble you.”
Unluckily, Mr. Biron was so much absorbed in the loss of his own beauty that he fell into the mistake of being absolutely sincere for once.
“Worse troubles than that! Worse than to go about like a scarecrow, a repulsive object, all the years of one’s life! What can be worse?” groaned he.
Bram, who was standing solemnly erect, answered at once, in a deep voice, out of the fulness of his heart—
“Well, Mr. Biron, if you don’t know of anything worse, I suppose there is nothing worse—for you!”