DELECTABLE GLIMPSES BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
Now, with a bitter smile, whose light did shine
Like a fiend’s hope upon her lips and eyne.
SHELLEY
Turn we now to that large and mysterious house, to which we have before
referred, near the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street. We will pass
the greasy lintels, into the wide and dirty entry, climb those five
flights of stairs, turn down the long, dark passage, and pause before
a door, just one beyond that which we have had occasion to remember in
the course of this narrative.
We will take the liberty to enter. The scene presents the woman, Marie,
reclining on a lounge, holding a note in her hand, which she seems to
have read and re-read with a peculiar look of puzzled inquiry.
The impish-looking daughter, to whom we have before referred, was
seated in a chair, behind the woman’s head, and out of her sight. The
creature seemed to have much ado to keep from laughing outright, for
her face was screwed into all sorts of contortions in the effort to
subdue it, as she peeped over her mother’s shoulder, and watched her
puzzled looks and bewildered gestures.
“Well!” said the mother, as if speaking to herself, “if one could only
comprehend how he came to write this to me—it seems to contain a great
deal. Upon my word, it appears a beautiful snatch of rhyme, and to
convey quite a confession—only I don’t understand—it reads as if it
were an answer to something that had gone before.” She reads—
Angels a subtler _name_ may know,
But not a subtler _thought_ of joy
Could thrilling through a seraph go,
Than that your presence brought to cloy
And weigh my life down into calm,
With an unutterable sense—
Like music perfumed with the balm
Of dews star-shed—all too intense!
“Most too high-strung for my purposes, it must be confessed! He never
expresses any flesh and blood in his correspondence. Ah, well, I’ll
soon bring him out of that! But this really does puzzle me! This is all
the note contains.” She turns the note to examine it. “It is certainly
in his hand, yet he makes no explanation.”
Here the child, whose blood seemed ready to burst through her face in
the continued effort to restrain her laughter, tittered aloud. The
mother sprang erect, and, turning upon her with an expression of rage
and surprise upon her face—
“What! Why, what are you laughing about? What business is this of
yours, pray?”
The child, although evidently a little frightened, had so entirely lost
her self-control as to be unable to restrain the bursts of laughter
which now followed each other, peal upon peal, as she danced about the
room in a perfect ecstacy of glee.
The mother’s face turned first pale and then red, as she followed the
motions of the child with her eye, until at last, with the expression
of an infuriate tigress, she sprang to seize her. The child was too
quick for her, and with the agility of a monkey, darted from beneath
her grasp; and still shrieking with laughter, was pursued around the
room—leaping the furniture with an airiness that defied pursuit—which
her strange, wild laugh yet taunted.
The woman, after exhausting herself in vain attempts at catching
her, sank upon the lounge—and at once, in a whining, fretful voice,
commenced to pour upon the head of the child, the most inconceivable
and galling epithets. So long as this tone was held, the child held
out in defiant spirit, either of sulking obstinacy, or of harsh and
irritating laughter, and to every reiterated question from the angry
mother—“What are you laughing at? What do you mean?”—she only clapped
her hands and danced more wildly to her elfin mirth.
The mother now changed her tone of a sudden, in seeming hopelessness of
carrying her point by storm. She began to sob violently, and turning
with streaming eyes towards the child—
“You—you tre-treat your poor mother very cruelly to-day; I am dying
to know what it is you mean; but you will not tell me! Please, dear,
come and tell poor mother why you laugh, what it is you mean, and what
you know about this letter?—for I am sure you know something—do tell
poor mother, and she will forgive you all! Come, dear child!” and she
reached out her hand as if to clasp her to her bosom.
The child, who seemed to have no intellectual comprehension of the
meaning of all this, but to have taken a purely impish delight in
watching the confusion and puzzle of her mother, in regard to the
letter at first, and then instantly, when she flew into a rage, to
have answered in a monkeyish and hysterical rage, on her own part; now
at once, with equal promptness, and with the common instinct of young
animals, responded to the tender inflections of the maternal voice.
Dropping her whole previous manner, she instantly sprang forward and
knelt at her mother’s side. The mother did not speak for some moments,
but silently caressed her, placing her hand frequently on her head, the
top of which she fondly stroked with a tenderness that seemed to linger
there. She drew the child’s face to hers too; and although she seemed
to kiss it frequently, it might have been observed that she breathed
deep and heavy exhalations upon different portions of it, which she
only touched with her lips.
The effect was magical beyond any power of expression. The hard,
ugly, animal lines of that child’s face, which had been writhed and
curled but a few moments before, in every conceivable expression of
most ignoble passions, at once subsided into the meek and suppliant
confiding of that inexplicable and most tender of all the relations
known to the animal world, mother and child!
“Dear, why did you not tell me what you knew about this letter before?”
said the mother, in a tone as musically reproachful as if she dallied
with her suckling babe. The child buried her head in her mother’s
bosom, and after a silence of some time, during which her mother
industriously stroked the top of her head, she looked up, and in a sly,
bashful tone exclaimed—
“I did it just for fun, to try how writing love-letters went—I copied
the verses from a book, in your hand, and sent them to him as yours!”
Scarcely were these words uttered, than the languishing and
tender-seeming mother hurled the child from her, backwards, upon
the floor, with a violence that left her stunned and prostrate, and
springing to her feet, raged round and round the room, as only a
feminine demon infuriate could be imagined to do, spurning now and then
with her foot, as she passed, the still senseless form of her own child!
Hell might find an equal to this whole scene, but hell has always been
too civil! It is enough! This is jealousy! That woman is jealous of her
own child! and _she_ only thirteen years old!
How long she might have raged and raved, and to what consequences it
might have led, heaven can only judge. Providentially, perhaps, a knock
at her door announced the postman. She clutched the letter she received
convulsively, and tearing it open, the instant he closed the door,
read—what? The letter of Manton, which we saw in the last chapter!
She read it through, standing where she had received it—her eyes
dilating, and her whole form changing. She literally screamed with joy
as she finished the letter, and clapped her hands like one bewildered
with a sudden triumph.
“Ah, ha! I have him! I have him! He is mine henceforth! He cannot
escape me now!” and her oblique eyes fell upon the motionless child
upon the floor. “The little fool!—she catches my arts too soon—she is
not hurt—but I must help her.” She moved towards the child, but the
demoniac triumph which possessed her seemed irrepressible. She bounded
suddenly into the air, and almost shrieking aloud as she did so—
“I have conquered—I have conquered him at last!” came down like a
statuesque Apollyon transfixed in exultation. It was a horrible glimpse
of unnatural triumph! It lasted but for a moment; for, with a sudden
drooping of the usually stooped shoulders, as she turned towards the
letter again, she said, thoughtfully,
“This will not do—he perseveres even here in talking about mother!
mother! and chaste! and holy! and all that sort of thing. The foolish
boy is too much in earnest. I have used this stuff about long enough. I
must find the means of bringing him gradually around. Such a relation
as the silly fellow desires won’t do between _us_—we are both too
full of life! Oh, I’ll write him a note at once that will prepare the
way—will break up the ice, as he calls it, still more about his life!”
She raised the child, which had been stunned by the fall, and
sprinkling some water upon her face, which caused the first long
breathing of recovery, she laid her upon the lounge, muttering, as she
did so, “The meddlesome little fool! She must do everything she sees
me do! She must imagine herself in love with every one whom she sees
me pretend to love. She must write love-letters when she sees me write
them, and heaven only knows what she won’t do next with her monkeyish
imitation! But I can’t be crossed by a child so, if she is my own. Lie
there until you get over the sulks—you are not much hurt!”
She turned away from the child and seated herself at the table,
exclaiming, as she seized her pen, “Ah! this letter! I feel that I
shall need all my skill and wit to word this properly, so as not to
alarm him. In his present excited and hysterical mood, the veriest
trifle would have the effect of driving him off, at a tangent,
forever beyond my reach. And yet it will not do to let things go on
in this way; for I see that that idea of the motherly relation, if
once permitted to become settled in his mind now, will remain a fixed
barrier, which I shall never be able to pass on earth. I must see him
to-night, and take advantage of his present over-wrought, ecstatic, and
bewildered condition, to break down this boyish dream of his! Bah! to
think that he should have taken me to be so much in earnest in all that
first twattle about motherly relations, which I found necessary to use
in order to get at him at all! Pity my correspondence hasn’t warmed him
up a little by this time! I’ve tried hard enough, to be sure, but the
queer fellow will persist in etherealising everything!”
During this soliloquy, the child, who had entirely recovered, lay
perfectly still, with sharpened attention, catching every word that was
spoken. There was an eagerness in her eye which showed her to be, if
not an apt scholar of such teachings, at least a very attentive one.
The woman wrote:—
“’Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name! thy kingdom
come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!’ My soul is deeply
moved for thee in this thy time of trial. The good God chasteneth thee
now—now is the hour of thy great tribulation come; now thy life-demons
wrestle in thee, with the love, the good the Father has sent to redeem
thee. Be strong! Ah, be strong even now, thou child of many sorrows,
and thou shalt yet find grace and peace in acceptance with Him.
Meanwhile I can but pray for thee and with thee. I weary Heaven with
supplications, that out of this travail a great and glorious soul may
be born in the humility of love, for light, eternal light.
“Come to me this evening, that I may take that throbbing heart upon
my bosom. I may soothe and calm you, but I cannot give you rest—rest
comes only from the Father! You ask me to be for you, forever,
‘Marie, mother!’ I can be to you, forever, your _friend_
MARIE.”
“Ah! ha! that will do it!” she said in a low chuckling tone, as she
rapidly folded and directed the letter; “though he might take the
alarm at this if he were cool, yet there’s no danger now! It will no
doubt shock him a little, but he has learned to believe in me, and in
his present excited state he has deified me almost into an object of
worship; and any suspicion he might feel he would only blame himself
for. Ah! this will do! it shall go instantly! Here!” she said, turning
sharply to the child, “Here! get up there, put on your bonnet, and take
this letter! You know how to deliver it, and where! Come, up with you!”
“But, mother,” said the child, as she slowly lifted herself half-erect,
“I don’t feel like it—I’m not well! You hurt me!”
“Nonsense!” said the mother, harshly; “go take a bath, and do it
quickly too! You’ll feel well enough! This letter must go, and shall
go! Get along, I say, and do what I tell you!”
The child dragged herself slowly out of the room.
“That little wretch will torment me to death!”
The letter was despatched and reached its destination.
Manton, whose excitement had continued, without the slightest
diminution, to return upon him, in paroxysm after paroxysm, seized upon
this last letter with the famishing eagerness of a man who looks for
strength—for spiritual consoling. He read it with suffused and swollen
eyes; he scarcely saw what he read, so much had his vision been dizzied
and obscured by weeping. But those last words did indeed shock and
thrill him. He was strangely startled, and for a moment they seemed to
open to him an appalling and terrific gulf of falsehood, more hideous
than yawning hell.
We say, it was but for a moment; but in that little space the blackness
of darkness overcame his soul. A shuddering of dread, of doubt, of
fear, and all that horrid brood, the birth of rayless and unutterable
gloom, passed over him convulsively, and then the whole was gone. He
had been too intensely wrought upon by the ecstacies of Faith. He shook
off, by one great throe, the giant shadow of its natural enemy, this
Doubt, which he now conceived had so long made his life accursed; and
the rebound, by a necessary law, carried him to a yet greater and more
unreasoning extreme of trust, and unquestioning confidence in this
woman, as under God the instrument and medium for restoring him once
more to life and the world.
He at once determined to visit her, and prove to his own soul the
falsehood of these dark suspicions of the being who had thus moved and
spoken his inmost life for good.