FURTHER REVELATIONS.
Another year had now passed, which, although it found Manton not
entirely released from his thrall, had yet left him a calmer and a
stronger man. One by one the manacles had fallen off, unconsciously
to himself. Hope was slowly filling his darkened life once more with
visions of an emancipated future, and he now even dared to smile in
dreams.
Whence came these fairy visitors? Ah, he did not understand yet,
clearly, in his own heart. He only felt and welcomed them, fresh-comers
from he knew not what far Eden of God’s ministers of grace. He did
not question them—it was joy enough to have had them come down to him
in his hell. Perhaps they were but airy counterparts of those sweet
children he had watched over with such fostering tenderness.
But now at once a shadow fell upon his dream. Moione, the wise, the
resolute, and the gentle, seemed all at once to droop, to become
wavering and shy, while Elna grew more conscious in her impish
grace, and more exultant, more capriciously tender, more caressingly
electrical. Manton could not but observe that although Moione shrank
from him now, she held her pencil with a heavy hand, and worked with a
hopeless carelessness, while her lids drooped low and trembled often
with a furtive moisture.
Another might have observed what he could not see, how at such times
the eyes of Elna lit with glistening joy, and how her spirit mounted
in rollicking ecstacies; how she danced and sang like some mad elf;
or else her drawing-sheet was spoiled while her pencil went riot over
it, in all fantastic drolleries of form, mocking characters, of every
sentiment, and worst of all that she mocked Moione, too, and made him
see her heavy brow, and covertly suggested painful questions.
Manton would sometimes see enough of this to startle him gravely, and
make him question his own heart, long and painfully. Elna seemed to
watch these moods and dread them, and would break in upon them with
some wild antic or pouting caress.
Suddenly Moione went away, without any other explanation than that
she should return to her mother in New England. The thing was done in
a cold and resolute way that left no room for explanation. She had
been here—she was gone; and strangely enough it was not until now that
Manton realised how much of light there had been from her presence.
Deep shade filled the places which had known her once, and it seemed
as if his vision had been filmed—as if the shadow of that shade filled
Heaven and darkened earth before him. He could not have explained why
this was so. It was a voiceless consciousness, through which he felt a
sense most indescribable, that made him first aware of a great want. It
seemed as if the moon and stars were gone, with their calm inspirations
of repose, their pure and holy beamings, and that their place about him
had been usurped by a red and sultry light, more garish than perpetual
day, and clouded in brazen unnatural splendors, too thick for those
star-pencillings to break through, or that chaste moon to overcome.
As the weeping Elna clung about him now, he shuddered while he felt
that strange, new thrillings crept along his veins. Why had he not
felt this before, when Moione was beside them? Was he again given over
to the evil one? and had the white dove again been banished from his
bosom? These vague forebodings could never be entirely banished from
the heart of Manton, although the lavish tenderness of Elna, who, by
some strange instinct, seemed aware of the struggle, the shadow and the
cause, and wrought eagerly to dispel them.
Elna was no longer a child, if, in reality, she ever had been since
Manton had known her. She became daily more and more lovely in his
eyes, which soon grew again accustomed to the unnatural atmosphere
surrounding him, though he yearned often for the calmer and the clearer
sky he had lost; yet she gave him little time to think of the past.
The preternatural activity into which her brain had been roused gave
him full employment in guiding its eccentric energies. And then the
bud had begun to unfold its petals, as well as give out its aroma. Her
sick and wilted frame seemed to have become suddenly inspired with a
tender and voluptuous sensuousness, which filled out her graceful limbs
in rounded, bounding vigor, and swelled her fine bust with its elastic
tension, and lit and deepened her keen eyes with most lustrous and
magnetic fires.
He could not dream long among such conditions. One morning, as he sat
beside her at her drawing, she looked up suddenly into his face, and
with bewitching _naivete_ remarked—
“This is my birthday—do you know how old I am?”
“No, I never thought.”
“Well, I am seventeen to-day.”
“Seventeen! Great God! is it possible?” And Manton bowed his face,
covering it with his hands, and for a long time spoke not a word,
though his frame trembled. That magical word, “seventeen,” had
revealed every thing to himself. He had as yet always called her by
the affectionate baby-name of “Sis.” He had thought of her only as a
child; for through these four weary years he had kept no note of time.
He supposed, up to this moment, that he had been feeling towards her,
too, as towards a child—the same saddened, persecuted child which had
first attracted his sympathies by her mournful expression of constant
suffering. He had never once thought before that any change had taken
place in their relations; he had still fondled her as a spoiled and
petted playmate; he still attributed the strange thrills her touch had
lately produced in him to a thousand other and innocent causes beside
the real. He had not dreamed of passion; he had only learned to dearly
love her, as he thought, because she had been developed beneath his
hand, and seemed, in some senses, almost a creation of his own—a sort
of feminine elaboration of the thought of Frankenstein within him—the
creature of his own daring mind and indomitable will. Seventeen!
seventeen! Now the whole truth was flooded into his consciousness. She
was no longer a child—she was a woman. And he felt that he had indeed
loved her as a woman, while recognising her as a gay pet, a plaything.
He now understood how deep, how pure, was the unutterable fondness that
had grown thus unconsciously into his life, for her, and how monstrous
had been the relations into which the mother strove to drag and hold
him.
With the first flash of this conviction of his real feeling towards
Elna, came the purpose, as stern as it was irrevocable. He lifted his
head and turned towards the young girl, with moistened eyelids, and
said to her solemnly, and with trembling lips—
“Sis!—Elna, do you know that you are no longer a child? that you are
now a woman?”
The blood sprang to her forehead, and, with downcast eyes, she said, in
a faint voice—
“I know I’m seventeen to-day.”
“Do you know, too, Elna, that we cannot continue to be to each other
that we have been?”
“Why, can’t you be my brother still?” said she, looking up quickly, as
if astonished.
“Because you are a woman, dear; and I realise now, for the first time,
that I love you as a woman.”
Her dilated eyes glistened, for a moment, with a strange expression of
exultation, and, in another instant, she threw her arms about the neck
of Manton, and burst into the wildest expressions of mingled ecstacy
and grief, in the midst of which she sobbed out frequently.
“My mother! my poor mother! what will she do? She will never consent to
this—it will kill her.”
“Elna,” said Manton, calmly, disengaging her clasped hands from
about his neck, “your mother is an evil woman; I know, and you know,
something of her terrible passions. But she shall submit to this;
my will is her fate—she cannot escape me, now that it is thoroughly
aroused. She must bear it—she shall bear it, if it kills her. I shall
hold no middle ground; and she dare not stand before me, or openly
cross my track. This expiation is due from her to me. She has striven
to hideously wrong me, and wrong you, and she shall now reap the
consequences. I shall hold no terms with her; and you must make your
choice now, calmly, between us, for ever! I have not guarded you thus
for years, with sleepless vigilance, against her demonising influence,
to have you fall back at once into her talons. I know it is a fearful
thing to ask a child to do—to sunder all instinctive ties, and go apart
into the house of strangers; but where implacable evil dwells, purity
must look to be grieved in every contact, and there are no human ties
sufficiently sacred to justify pollution of soul and body in continuing
such contacts. I love you, Elna—I feel it now—I have loved you long,
unconsciously; I would make you my true and honored wife, within
another year—say the birthnight eve of eighteen. But mark me, you must
be separate from this horrid mother. Elna, which do you choose?”
She threw herself hysterically upon his breast, sobbing—
“You!—you! Ah, my poor mother! I see it all! there is no choice! Yours!
I am yours!—for ever yours! She is good to me sometimes; but I know she
is bad—you must shield me from her. But we will not go away at once—it
would kill her. Oh, my poor mother! my dear mother! this is hard!” and
she shuddered, as she clasped him more closely in her arms, and sobbed
yet more wildly still.
Manton spoke in tender soothing to the gentle trembler, who continued,
amidst bursts of hysteric laughter, and smiles of stormy joy, to
moan—“Poor mother! how will she bear it?”
Manton, at length, gently released himself from her caress, and placing
her head upon the cushion of the sofa, whispered, “Be calm, Elna! She
must bear it—she will bear it; it is a righteous retribution, that has
overtaken her at last. I go now to tell her every thing. Promise me to
be quiet, and wait till I return. She shall know her doom, in this same
sacred hour in which I have learned to know myself and you.”
She buried her face in her hands and shivered as he turned away.
He mounted the stairs with calm, unhurried step, and, tapping at the
door of the woman’s room, it was opened instantly, and she met him on
the threshold. Her eyes sought his as he entered, with a strange and
troubled glare of inquiry. His brow was fixed, and all his features
seemed just cast in iron. She reached out her hand to him, with a
vague, quick gesture; but he did not accept it. He stood up before
her, erect, rigid, and impassive. Her eye grew wilder, and a yet more
furtive and startled expression glanced across her face, as she gasped
out feebly—
“What now! has it come?”
“Yes!” answered Manton, with a cold, ringing, and metallic tone; “it
has come, woman! The same curse that your devilish arts brought upon
poor Jeannette, has now come home to roost. We are for ever severed,
and, on no pretence or artifice, shall you ever again come near me.
Know you, woman, that I love your child with an honest love—have come
to a realisation of the fact, and told her so.”
She reeled and staggered backwards, shrieking—
“Ah! ah! it has come at last! I felt it would be so!”
There was something in her gait and manner so like stunned madness,
that Manton involuntarily sprang forward, to catch her wavering form in
his arms. She thrust aside his clasp, and, staggering towards the bed,
fell across it—not in a swoon, not in a bleeding-fit, but in a paroxysm
of weeping; in which the flood-gates of long years seemed suddenly
opened. There was no word, no sob, no gesture of impatience, but her
eyes ran always a clear flood of silent tears.
Ha! ha! Etherial! has it come to thee at last? Is it thou that must
in turn be s-a-v-e-d? Where now thy disguises? Where thy unnatural
triumphs? O, woman! art thou woman, Etherial?
To Manton, the phenomenon seemed more moving and inexplicable than any
we have yet described. She did not sleep, but always the tears poured
forth; and for twenty-four hours she did not change her posture, or
utter any word, but these, which sent a chill shiver through the frame
of Manton, as he heard them—
“She will serve _you_ so, too!”
Those words he could never forget. It was a weary watching beside that
bed, that Manton had to pass through before the incessant flow of tears
began to be checked, and the woman to recover something of her power of
speech, at intervals.
The first thing now spoken was, “I must be content. It cannot be
escaped! She must be yours, if you can hold her!”
A fearful “_if_” was that suggested to Manton; but he was too happy
after all this solemn travail, to notice its significance—
“I shall try to reconcile myself to see you both made happy; while I
shall walk aside in the cold isolation of my duties to my mission among
women.”
Manton, who had expected a much more sultry and formidable climax to
this critical scene, felt his heart bound with the sense of relief, as,
when after all this exhausting watch over that dumb and sleepless flow
of tears, the calm and unexpected philosophy of this conclusion came
to his consolation. He had anticipated a frantic, obstinate collision;
perhaps as savage as it might prove tragical. And his grateful surprise
may be conceived at the result.
So soon as this result had been attained, he hastened to impart the
news to Elna, whose approach to her mother, while in this condition,
had been studiously guarded against by Manton. When he saw her, now, in
her own room, to which he eagerly hastened, she sprang about his neck,
exclaiming—
“Will she bear it? Can she live?”
“My darling, she has passed through a terrible struggle, but she has
now awakened to a recognition of what is, and has been, and must
continue to be, the falsehood of her purposed relation to me.”
“Ah!” exclaimed the young girl rapturously, clasping his neck still
closer—“Now I may dare to love you as much as I please!”