The
"Red Death" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever
been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal --the redness
and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then
profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the
body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut
him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole
seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an
hour.
But
the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions
were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and
light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with
these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was
an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own
eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall
had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy
hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress
or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey
was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance
to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it
was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of
pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were
ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All
these and security were within. Without was the "Red Death."
It
was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while
the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero
entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual
magnificence.
