CHAPTER XIV.THE PROUD MAN BOWED.
Dim burns the once bright star of Avenel;There is an influence sorrowful and fearful,That dogs its downward course.Scott.
Dim burns the once bright star of Avenel;There is an influence sorrowful and fearful,That dogs its downward course.Scott.
Dim burns the once bright star of Avenel;There is an influence sorrowful and fearful,That dogs its downward course.Scott.
Dim burns the once bright star of Avenel;
There is an influence sorrowful and fearful,
That dogs its downward course.
Scott.
Transparent as is the meaning of the foregoing scene, it conveyed to Manton, who knew none of these things which have been revealed to the reader, a tremendous shock. Mind and soul were thrown into chaotic convulsions; he knew not what to think, or which way to turn for truth.
Had the incident occurred but a short time previous, before his nature had begun to be moved by generous sympathy and honest respect for this loyal, persecuted, and indomitable woman; had it occurred before that eventful walk through the slush of New York, he would have at once turned upon her in freezing wrath, with the deliberate accusation of having entered his room in his absence, and searched his private papers, or else have merely sneered at it, as the accidental hit of a reckless adventuress.
But he had admitted her to his respect as a noble and unprotected devotee. In a word, he had, as was usual with him wherever women were concerned, idealised her into a heroine. Could he suspect her after this? He rejected the weakness of such suspicion almost with terror.
Had he known any thing of New York life; had he formed any relations except those of a strictly business character; had he cultivated acquaintances at all, who belonged to the city, and knew it, a few inquiries might have settled all his doubts. But,alas! pride, pride, that fatal pride! He knew nobody, he cared not for what any one said of another.
He had heard this woman violently abused at the dinner-table below, to be sure; but then the character of the persons who had joined in this cowardly vituperation was, to his mind, evidently such as to prejudice him in her favor; for he had a proud way with him, which never permitted him to judge of the absent by what was said of them, but bywhosaid it. Taking these things together, he would have felt ashamed to have asked any questions concerning the woman, of those whose opinion and opportunities of knowledge he respected.
If she had thrown herself upon him, it had been with perfect frankness, and without any attempt at concealments. She had told him how she was persecuted and slandered by ignorant women, because she had been bold enough to tell them the truth about themselves. He had already heard something of this, and the stories told were of precisely such character as envious, vulgar, and malignant gossip circulates about females who make themselves conspicuous by their virtues or their talents. Besides, had he not, before he knew more of her, been violently prejudiced, too? What more natural than that others should be so, including these ignorant women?
And then this wonderful Clairvoyance! Who can dare to say that he believes nothing of its claims? He held its marvels and miracles in great contempt, and firmly believed, that whatever of truth there was would soon be unveiled of its apparent mystery by the close analysis of science, and shown to proceed from purely natural laws, the exact relations of which had not been heretofore understood.
And then it might have been accident. Ah! and then it might have been—what his thought had long struggled with, as the solution of all such phenomena—it might have been sympathetic! a mere result of the unconscious projection of his stronger vitality through a magnetic or odic medium of sympathy, which had been instantly established through the contactof his hand with the thin and sensitive region on the top of her head.
She might thus have been made to feel him intellectually, if not spiritually; tosee, through this sympathetic sense, those images with which his brain was most full, and thus express this startling outline of his life.
Be those things as they may, he was restless and excited; his imagination was aroused, his memory profoundly stirred. He was thus fast hurried past the point where a cool analysis could well avail to rescue him. Tossed to and fro by doubts and dark suspicions, which a generous confidence strove hard to banish with its magnanimous suggestions, backed by self-reliant pride; confounded with the fear of acting with injustice towards a helpless female; with the fear, too, of the soft pluckings at his heart, from those tender memories which she had thus aroused by her offers of maternal sympathy—together with the penetrating light and warmth of that genial and unlucky evening spent with her, amidst the quiet of domestic surroundings—he could form no conclusions, discriminate no clearly definite purpose—could only wander to and fro, restless, in troubled, sad irresolution.
A vague dread of evil in advance afforded apprehension of he knew not what, that always, when the gloaming darkened most, seemed parted to a tremulous, dim light, like summer coming through the morn, and made his pulse go quicker, while those yearning memories faintly glimmered, as if within a shaded reflex of the glowing day.
He kept himself strictly secluded; yet, day by day, those dainty missives crept in upon him by some mysterious agency. At first they were read mechanically, and, amidst his troubled doubts, produced no apparent effect; but, by and by, they grew more chaste, more delicately worded, and more sweetly toned.
Was it that they were really advanced upon the blundering specimens we have seen? or could it be that his fancy had become excited with regard to them—that he was merely idealising unconsciously? or was it that those awkward first attempts atproducing imitations of the rhapsodical style peculiar to himself, which had so excited his contempt, as obviously taken from the study of his writings, had now been cunningly improved upon, since personal intercourse had afforded his correspondent a closer insight of his purer and more simple forms of expression?
Had his haughty egotism been touched at last, by a skilful reflex of himself, thrown shrewdly into his eyes, from the dazzling surface of this snowy crow-quilled page?
We shall see, perhaps. Here is the last that he received from her:—
“My poor Friend—My heart yearns over you; I am oppressed with your suffering, for I feel how you suffer yet—how you are struggling, by day and by night, with those twin fiends of Doubt and Pride. I know my letters soothe you, though they cannot heal. Had you not informed me so, in your note, I should yet have been conscious of it. Had you never written to me again, I should yet have known that the great deep of your soul had been stirred at last, and that, though pride had triumphed in the struggle, love, genial, human love, had yet found, beneath the dark shadow of his wing, a warm resting-place once more beside thy heart.No human aid can save thee now—that stiff neck must be bowed—you must be humbled! Then will come the full influx of the light from heaven. Then you will know joy and peace again—the pure raptures of a holy rest will calm this dark, bewildering struggle. I pray for you without ceasing—weary the throne with supplication that you may be humbled! Your little sister sends you her tearful greetings—she weeps for you with me always—for she dearly loves her tiger-brother. She says that, like all terrible creatures, he issobeautiful—oh, that he were only good!Marie.”
“My poor Friend—My heart yearns over you; I am oppressed with your suffering, for I feel how you suffer yet—how you are struggling, by day and by night, with those twin fiends of Doubt and Pride. I know my letters soothe you, though they cannot heal. Had you not informed me so, in your note, I should yet have been conscious of it. Had you never written to me again, I should yet have known that the great deep of your soul had been stirred at last, and that, though pride had triumphed in the struggle, love, genial, human love, had yet found, beneath the dark shadow of his wing, a warm resting-place once more beside thy heart.
No human aid can save thee now—that stiff neck must be bowed—you must be humbled! Then will come the full influx of the light from heaven. Then you will know joy and peace again—the pure raptures of a holy rest will calm this dark, bewildering struggle. I pray for you without ceasing—weary the throne with supplication that you may be humbled! Your little sister sends you her tearful greetings—she weeps for you with me always—for she dearly loves her tiger-brother. She says that, like all terrible creatures, he issobeautiful—oh, that he were only good!
Marie.”
This letter strangely thrilled upon the already over-wrought sensibilities of Manton, whose nervous organisation had beenrendered intensely susceptible by the protracted excitement under which he had been laboring. He read it over and over again, with increasing agitation, until it seemed, while his eyes suffused, as if the accusing angel of his own conscience spoke to him in mild rebuke.
Long he moaned and tossed—the dim moisture struggling all the while to brim over those parched lids, that for years before had never known a freshening. Those tearless lids—how rigid they had been! how bleak! Like some oasis fountain where the hot simoon had drank!—Dry! dry!
Suddenly, with a deep groan, the young man bowed his head upon his hands, while the tears gushed between his fingers in a flood, that seemed the more violent from its long restraint. His body shook and rocked, while he gasped aloud—
“It is true! It is true! This woman tells what is true! This sullen pride has been the cause of all—I feel its crushing judgment on my shoulders now! Great God! deliver us from this thraldom! Let me but know my race once more! let me but weep when others weep, and smile when others smile, and it will be to me for a sign that thou hast received the outcast into the family of thy love, once more! Forgive, oh, forgive me, that have so long held thy goodly gifts of earthly consolation in despite! The worm’s presumptuous arrogance has but moved thy pity, oh, thou Infinite One! Forgive! forgive! oh, let me feel that countenance reconciled once more! Give back to my weary soul the holy communion of thy creatures! Pity! Pity! Pity! Ah, there is a paradise somewhere on the earth, for the most wayworn of her darkened children—a rift in the sunless sky, a glittering point above the darkened waters! Men are not all and totally accursed by their defiant passions. Pity sends star-beams through the port-holes of the dungeon. Mercy comes down on holy light of visions, where stars cannot get in. Oh, love, Infinite Love! Thou art so powerful of penetration—come to me now!”
For a long time he sat thus, while his frame shivered in voiceless throes; when suddenly straightening himself, with apowerful effort, and while the tears yet rained like an April shower, he drew towards him his paper, and wrote—
Woman—I know not what to call you—you have strangely moved me! In my most desperate and sullen pride have I not struggled long with this great blessing, which thou hast brought me! I would have driven the good angel from me in wrath and scorn—but it would not be offended. In patience and long suffering it has abided near, hovering on white wings, until now, at last, the fountain has been troubled. Ah! woman, its depths have been broken up, indeed—and the dark, long, unnatural winter of my life, has felt the glowing breath of spring; and in one mighty crash, the hideous ice-crusts that had gathered, heaping over it, have burst away before the flashing leap of unchained waters. Once more my soul is free—once more I smile back love for love into the sunlight, and weep for joy—that God is good. Once more I feel as if the earth were a holy earth, and its flowers, too, might grow for me. Thou hast conquered! Thou hast conquered, woman! Thy pure and chastened sympathies, thy gentle and unwearied pleadings, thy meek compassion for the harsh and wayward boy, have conquered. The stiff neck is bowed even now before God, and thee, his minister of good. Ah! forgive and pity me! My eyes are raining so, I can scarcely see to write. I am shaken as in a great tempest, body and soul. I could weep at your feet in penitence, and pray to be forgiven and for pity! Ah, that, I know you have! I am blinded with these tears—I know not what I say! Oh, be to me what I have lost! I faint by the wayside; my soul dies within me for that holy rest that I have lost—for the sweet, calm and tender peace, all the holy memories your loving gentleness has thus recalled. Ah, be to me all that you have thus filled me with, anew! Receive me as your adopted child, that I may rest my throbbing head once more in peace and joy, upon a sacred bosom. Be to me, forever, “Marie, mother!”Manton.
Woman—I know not what to call you—you have strangely moved me! In my most desperate and sullen pride have I not struggled long with this great blessing, which thou hast brought me! I would have driven the good angel from me in wrath and scorn—but it would not be offended. In patience and long suffering it has abided near, hovering on white wings, until now, at last, the fountain has been troubled. Ah! woman, its depths have been broken up, indeed—and the dark, long, unnatural winter of my life, has felt the glowing breath of spring; and in one mighty crash, the hideous ice-crusts that had gathered, heaping over it, have burst away before the flashing leap of unchained waters. Once more my soul is free—once more I smile back love for love into the sunlight, and weep for joy—that God is good. Once more I feel as if the earth were a holy earth, and its flowers, too, might grow for me. Thou hast conquered! Thou hast conquered, woman! Thy pure and chastened sympathies, thy gentle and unwearied pleadings, thy meek compassion for the harsh and wayward boy, have conquered. The stiff neck is bowed even now before God, and thee, his minister of good. Ah! forgive and pity me! My eyes are raining so, I can scarcely see to write. I am shaken as in a great tempest, body and soul. I could weep at your feet in penitence, and pray to be forgiven and for pity! Ah, that, I know you have! I am blinded with these tears—I know not what I say! Oh, be to me what I have lost! I faint by the wayside; my soul dies within me for that holy rest that I have lost—for the sweet, calm and tender peace, all the holy memories your loving gentleness has thus recalled. Ah, be to me all that you have thus filled me with, anew! Receive me as your adopted child, that I may rest my throbbing head once more in peace and joy, upon a sacred bosom. Be to me, forever, “Marie, mother!”
Manton.