SELECT SCENES CONTINUED.
We have frequently mentioned the eccentric Dr. Weasel in the course
of this narrative. Another scene will enlighten the reader somewhat
in regard to the yet undefined character of his relations towards the
woman Marie. He had just entered her room; and approaching with a
quick, nervous step, he said to her in an irritated and squeaking voice—
“Marie Orne, I tell you I must have my money back again! I did not give
it to you, when I advanced it to get you started in business. You were
to have returned it to me, long since! You have been doing well now
for two years and more, and yet instead of returning the money I first
advanced to you, you have been borrowing more than double as much! At
this moment you have more than five hundred dollars belonging to me,
of which you have never returned me a cent! Yet I have been suffering
for money, for months, and you know it! You know I cannot receive
remittances now, since the death of my grandmother, till the settlement
of our estate! I am tired of this treatment, Madam! I will have my
money!”
The Doctor, who had been walking hurriedly up and down the room during
this speech, now paused abruptly before the woman, who had quietly
continued her writing—
“Do you hear me?” he said angrily, in a loud, sharp tone. “Where is the
money you have plundered me of?”
The woman now looked up, staring at him with wide-open eyes, that
expressed the most unutterable astonishment, while, at the same moment,
a bland smile broke across her face, while she exclaimed in a low,
sweet, reproachful voice—
“Why, Doctor E. Willamot Weasel! What can you mean? My dear friend—_I_
plunder you? You forget yourself! Remember what a feeble child you
were—how sad, how sick, how despairing, when I took hold of you, as the
tender nurse does the dying foundling at her door—”
“I believe you had no door, till I gave you one!” interrupted the
Doctor, while his sharp little eyes shot fire.
“This were all very fine, if it were only true: I advanced you my
money, not to pay you for curing me, which you have never accomplished,
but that you might do good with it; because I believed in your mission
to your sex! But I am not pleased with the use you—”
“Does not that mission exist still?” said the woman, with flushing
brow, quickly interrupting him. “Has not the number of my patients
increased daily?—including the first ladies of the land? Have not my
lecture-classes become more full and widely-attended every season? Have
you not a thousand evidences, in the extent of my correspondence, that
women are becoming awakened throughout the country? What more do you
ask? Do you expect me to perform miracles?”
“No! unless the expectation that you will deal honestly with those who
have befriended you, be what you call a miracle. Come, I know what all
this amounts to, perfectly! I gave you my money, as you know I dedicate
all that I have, in trust, for humanity! You seemed to be laboring
in common cause with myself, for the restoration of the Passional
Harmonies; and as you appeared to me capable of accomplishing much
for the great cause, I felt that I had no right to withhold my aid
from you when you needed it. I gave you my gold as freely as I would
have given you a drink of water, when athirst. But you have not been
just and true—you have used it selfishly—you have surrendered yourself
exclusively to the cabalistic sphere; your life is wasted in a series
of ignoble plottings; sensual intrigues merely, in utter disregard
of the harmonic relations. Do not interrupt me! I have watched you
closely; I know this to be true! Instead of elevating that noble soul,
Manton, whom I thought, through you, to rescue from the dominion of
his appetites, and see set apart, with all his glorious powers, to the
exalted priesthood of the Harmonies, you have steadily dragged him down
from the beginning until now, when he is further removed than ever
beyond our reach, and regards with contempt and disgust the very name
of the system with which I had yearned to see him identified. You have
done this, and all for your own individual and unworthy ends, and have
defeated one of my most treasured purposes!”
“This is false!” shrieked the woman, as, with flushed face, and with
the aspect of a roused tigress, she sprang to her feet, and placed
herself directly across the track of the excited Doctor.
“You lie in your teeth, you ingrate! It is not so! His own beastly
passions have degraded him, in spite of me! Just as I have failed to
make a man out of _you_, through your own weakness! For years I have
patiently wrestled with your downward tendencies, in the hope you,
too, might be redeemed—might be sa-a-ved from yourself! The money that
you have given me, I have earned twice over again, in these vain and
exhausting struggles to bring you back to the true health of unity with
God through nature! Your childish aberrations and eccentricities have
baffled all my spiritual strength! The proof of it is, that you dare
to taunt me in this way! I see that you are incorrigible! You may go!
Go from me forever! I am hopeless! I will no longer expend myself upon
you! Your money I shall keep until it is my convenience to restore it,
if ever! It is my due, and you may recover it if you can; I own nothing
here. The furniture of this house has all been loaned me. Seize it, if
you dare! Go, I say! Go! Leave my house instantly!”
And she stamped her foot, and, waving her hand in melodramatic fashion
towards the door, repeated the imperative order to “begone!”
We have mentioned, that the Doctor was a small man, and the woman was,
no doubt, fully conscious of her physical superiority over him, before
her coward and reptile nature could have dared to have assumed such a
tone. But she had mistaken the metal with which she had to deal.
The Doctor had listened to this tirade with a cold, sardonic smile upon
his face, while his keen little eyes fairly snapped with scintillating
fury.
“You are a fool!” said he, in a low, smooth tone, “as well as a
thief and an impostor! I’ll put you in the Tombs to-morrow, if you
do not at once lower your tone! And what is more, I will expose your
practices, fully and publicly. I will swear to the false pretences
by which you have swindled me out of my money. I will swear that you
have made overtures to me, time after time, as an equivalent for the
money you are dragging from me, to sell to me the chaste and gentle
Moione, whose unprotected poverty you have dared to think you could
traffic in! I will swear, too, that at one time you did not scruple
to suggest, by indirection, one much nearer to you; the true scope of
which suggestion, however artfully disguised, the world will readily
comprehend. Furthermore, I can now understand, perfectly, the secret
of all those physiological phenomena, by which you have managed to
delude and degrade Manton, not forgetting the disgusting fact, which
has become too apparent to me, that you are endeavoring to play off
Elna upon him, and, through his generous susceptibilities, to retain
him within the reach of your damnable arts! You are becoming aware
that he, too, is beginning to see through them, and through you. I have
never spoken a word, for I wished him to work out the problem himself!
I will secure even him from your clutches!”
The woman made no attempt to reply. Her face became, of a sudden, as
white and rigid as death, and, muttering a few choked and guttural
sounds, she pitched forward suddenly, like a falling statue, against
the bosom of the irritated Doctor Weasel; who, not a little shocked
by the unexpected concussion, staggered backwards, for an instant,
in the utmost confusion, while her form fell upon the shaken floor.
He recovered his coolness, however, in another moment, and merely
muttered, as he left the room—
“Pah! nonsense! The old trick—she’s purely in the subversive sphere—and
I can make nothing of her in the Passional Harmonies! We require purity
and singleness of purpose. She may go to the dogs, hereafter, for me.”