REANIMATION.
Amidst the green and savage solitude of pine-haired hills,
wild-bounding streams, and islet-fretted lakes, asleep, ’twixt gleam
and shadow, where the bellowing moose still roused the echoes, and the
light deer whistled to the brown bear’s growl, and the trout leaped,
flashing from its clear, still home, Manton renewed his life once more,
in refreshing communion with nature.
It was not till now that he realised how terribly he had suffered
during his long and hideous bondage. His physical health had been
shockingly impaired; the elasticity of his constitution seemed to be
gone forever; but it was only in the presence of Nature, with whom
there are no disguises, that he could first comprehend, in all its
ghastliness, the mental and spiritual deterioration that had gradually
supervened. He scarcely knew himself, now that he had found his way
back to the only standard of comparison. He was profoundly humiliated,
but not utterly despairing.
He felt his chest already beginning to play more freely, and a deadly
sense, as if a thousand years of suffocating oppression had lain upon
his lungs, was beginning to be dissipated before the pure air of the
mountains, and the exciting pre-occupations of angling and the chase,
in the rough wilderness-life he now led; and beside, there was the
image of that wizard child, that had so grown in beauty beneath his
hand, that sat forever in his heart, glowing and fair, to warm it
with a new life of hope. How studiously his fancy exalted her. Each
fortnight brought him a package of her daily letters; and though in
spite of his isolation, and his idealising enthusiasm, as he eagerly
read and re-read them all a thousand times, and carried them near his
heart, to keep the glow there all alive, he could not help realising at
times, with mournful presentiment, their hollowness, the entire absence
of ingenuousness and natural dignity which mostly characterised them.
He would feel his flesh creep strangely too, as he recognised their
close resemblance in artificiality of sentiment and tone, to those
first letters he had received from her mother.
But he earnestly strove to banish all such impressions; he felt as if
they were profane, as if they were a monstrous wrong to her, as well as
to himself. That she was too young as yet to have developed into the
full faculty of expression; that she was timid, and dared not trust
herself to speak freely out; that she feared his sharp criticism, and
did not say everything that her soul moved her to speak; that she
dreaded his analysis; and, in a word, had not quite overcome, in her
feelings towards him, the instinctive apprehension of the master, the
preceptor, which so long lingers in a youthful mind; and this very
timidity, of all things, he was desirous of removing, as he felt that,
so long as it remained in her mind, the full and entire reciprocation
of confidence, which the jealous exclusiveness of passion demands,
could not take place. He felt that it was a most hazardous experiment
he had been unconsciously making, in thus attempting to develope
and educate a wife, especially under circumstances so unusual and
ill-omened. He therefore fatally persisted in blaming himself for the
self-evident shallowness of Elna’s letters; and would not hear to the
whispers of his common sense, that the child was a mere chip of the old
block.
So that still, in spite of his determined idealisation of her, while
these evidences stared him in the face with each new, yearned-for,
and eagerly-welcomed budget of letters from her, they only served
to fill him, to a more sensitive degree, with the dangers of this
excessive timidity, and the necessity of greater spiritual activity
and tenderness of treatment on his part, that might arouse her to a
more full realisation of the sacred confidences which love implies.
His letters to her overflowed with natural eloquence; and all that was
chastening, ennobling, fair and pure, in the inspirations surrounding
him, were lavished in the prodigality of an absorbing and overflowing
affection upon this fair, hollow idol, that his passion alone had
rendered all divine.
This brooding, constantly and long, upon a single image, amidst the
solemn privacies, the wild and drear solemnities of primeval nature,
was quite sufficient to give, in time, to any nature possessing
the intensity of that of Manton, a sultry tinge of monomania in
reference to it. This was clearly the case with him now. Her image,
glorified through his imagination, now filled all his life; he saw
her everywhere—where the beautiful might be, it took some shade of
semblance to her—where the wild-flowers gave out their odors to the
breeze, it was to him the aroma of her presence; when the wild berry
tingled his palate in a nameless ecstacy of flavor, the taste was of
his sense of her, when, in their last kiss, her lips were touched to
his.
But it is a strange thing that, with all the fervor of this passional
attraction, he never dreamed of her at all; she never came to his soul
when his senses were asleep. This single fact might have warned a man
of imagination less excited than Manton. This happy delusion had at
least one good effect, as it enabled him, by a single effort, to throw
off all his dangerous habits, and return from his tour, to New York,
with a freshened and invigorated frame, and a soul chastened indeed,
but filled with wild and eager hopes of the golden-hued Utopia he had
framed out in the wilderness.
Elna had returned and met him. Alas! how his heart sank as, on the
meeting, he felt the rainbow-hues all melting from out the visionary
sky, and he took into his arms a cold, overacting, artificial semblance
of his passionate ideal! He felt as if the sky had turned to lead,
and fallen on him; and the first image recalled to his mind, was of
the sick and monkey-imp, soulless and animal-eyed, that he had years
ago rescued, in compassion, from the demon-talons of the mother. He
clutched her desperately to his heart, endeavoring to recall the soul
he missed, and that she had lost, while he had been away. He felt as
if there were fire enough in his own veins to make a soul—to fill that
delicate and graceful organisation with a subtler element, that might
answer to the ravin of his sympathies.
No such response as he yearned for came; but he felt instantly, from
the contact of her hand, that fierce and sultry thrill, the memory
of which had lingered so long with him, tinging his imagination with
a lurid light amidst the white clear calm of nature’s inspirations.
He would not give up now; he had loved too long already—or, rather,
the habit of confounding passion with love, had become too confirmed
with him, for it to be readily possible that he should make the clear
distinction between images nurtured in his own mind and the objective
reality. It was his own mistake; he had expected too much of the
child—he must give her time to gain confidence and speak out herself.
Infatuated man! She only wanted a few hours’ contact to speak out
himself to himself, through the Odic medium!
And so it proved. Her organisation soon took the key-note from his,
and, in a few hours, responded as rapturously as he could desire, to
the most vehement expressions of his enthusiasm.
First and foremost, she showed to him the drawings that she had made
during their long probation. Among them were some, so characterised by
a firm, exquisite delicacy of handling, that Manton regarded them with
delighted wonder,—more especially as the defect in Elna’s pencilling,
which he had always noticed and lamented, had been precisely contrasted
with the excellences here displayed. Elna’s had, with all its gay and
mocking eccentricity, always been trembling and uncertain. The want of
smooth and poised directness in her harsh, rude handling, had often
been contrasted by him in his lessons to her, upon art, with the clear,
firm, and mathematical precision of the lines of Moione. He could not
but exclaim impulsively, on examining them curiously—
“Why, dearest, you have equalled the brightest excellence of the style
of Moione in these. Ah, how I love you for this! you are deserving of
all that I have dreamed and thought and felt of you, since I have been
away.”
The blushing girl slid into his embrace; and that moment was to
Manton a sufficient compensation for all the self-degradation and the
humiliating conditions through which he had passed. He was now to
attain the coveted crown and glory of his life, as he conceived. An
artist-wife! Capable, inspired, true, and a “help-mate” indeed, through
whose assistance and tutored skill he might embody in realisation those
fleeting and majestic creations which visited him, not alone in dreams,
but in the real impersonations of his habitual thought. It had been a
dream of such chaste beauty, that all these visionary forms might be
transfigured to him in the alembic of art, through love, and become, in
form and color, fireside realities of the canvass.
We shall see how vague and empty was this fanciful dream, as yet.