CHAPTER V.
NYCTERIS.
Five or six months after the birth of Photogen, the dark lady also
gave birth to a baby: in the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the
dead of night, under the feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe,
a girl came into the darkness with a wail. And just as she was born
for the first time, Vesper was born for the second, and passed into a
world as unknown to her as this was to her child--who would have to be
born yet again before she could see her mother.
Watho called her Nycteris, and she grew as like Vesper as possible--in
all but one particular. She had the same dark skin, dark eyelashes and
brows, dark hair, and gentle sad look; but she had just the eyes of
Aurora, the mother of Photogen, and if they grew darker as she grew
older, it was only a darker blue. Watho, with the help of Falca, took
the greatest possible care of her--in every way consistent with her
plans, that is,--the main point in which was that she should never see
any light but what came from the lamp. Hence her optic nerves, and
indeed her whole apparatus for seeing, grew both larger and more
sensitive; her eyes, indeed, stopped short only of being too large.
Under her dark hair and forehead and eyebrows, they looked like two
breaks in a cloudy night-sky, through which peeped the heaven where
the stars and no clouds live. She was a sadly dainty little creature.
No one in the world except those two was aware of the being of the
little bat. Watho trained her to sleep during the day, and wake during
the night. She taught her music, in which she was herself a
proficient, and taught her scarcely anything else.
