CHAPTER XVI.REMORSE.
The evening was closing in when Manton made his way through a heavy, drifting snow-storm, to the number of the new address, near the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street, which had appeared upon the last notes of his correspondent. He was only made aware, thereby, that she had changed her residence from the rooms where he had visited her in Bond Street, and had thought no more about the matter; for it would have somewhat damped his enthusiasm, or rather have made him furiously indignant, to have been told that the woman he was visiting, with such sublimated sentiment, usually found means to adapt her rooms to the purpose and business in hand.
He was too much excited and pre-occupied to notice the significant appearance of the entry, further than to feel its dreariness, as he rang the bell and waited an unreasonable time for admission. The door was wide enough open to be sure, but he was not sufficiently initiated into the mystery of such places tounderstand the meaning of this exactly, even if it had been possible for it to have excited his attention, in the then absorbed and abstracted condition of his whole faculties.
A negro servant at length made his appearance, and approaching him closely, answered his inquiries in a tone so insolently confidential that under other circumstances he would surely have been in danger of a flooring at the hands of Manton, who, however, only passed on up the stairs with a feeling of annoyance, the cause of which he made no attempt at apprehending. He ascended three steps at a bound, and in a moment tapped lightly at the door.
A soft voice, “Come!” was the response. The door flew open.
“Yes! yes! I come! Ah, Marie, mother, it must be so!” And dropping his cloak and hat upon the floor, he sprang forward to the woman, who, with her pale face beaming with unnatural light, was seated upon a lounge, where she seemed to have been awaiting him.
“My poor friend!” and she stretched forth her arms towards him. He laid his head upon her bosom, while his whole frame shivered violently, and he sobbed forth—
“Ah, blessed mother, let me rest here! My brain is bursting! I am become as a little child again! Ah, I am so weak! A wisp of straw would bind me! My own vaunted strength is gone—all gone! I have no pride, no scorn, no defiance now! My lips are in the dust! Ah, I am humble, humble, humble, now! Do thou, incarnation of that angel mother who has passed from earth, adopt me for thine own! Thine own, poor, lost, bewildered, panting child!”
“My poor friend, be calm!” and she caressed his wet cheek lightly with her fingers. “Only be calm, and God will give you strength to pass through this valley and shadow of trial.”
“God gave me strength!” said he, with a sharp and sudden change of tone, raising his head slightly to look in her face. “Woman, he gave me strength when he gave me life! I havestrength enough, as men call it, to move the world, aye, to wield Fate itself. It was not for such strength I came to you. It was not for such strength I would condescend to plead to mortal. It is for that soft and beautiful presence that liveth in immortal freshness, the spring-flower of the heart, beneath the moveless outstretched wing of Faith. Faith in our own kind. Faith in what is true and chaste in the purposes and charities, which, widely separate from the sensuous and the passionate, constitute all the blest amenities of intercourse between the sexes. ’Tis not that I would ask you to beallmy mother, for that could not be; but that you should impersonate to me that calm joy, that serenity of repose in which I lived so long, upon a troubled earth, through her. It was she to whom I turned when the world buffeted and baffled me, to renew upon her bosom my faith in my fellows, and it was upon that sacred resting-place that I alone found soothing. She reconciled me to endure. She subdued my rebellious heart. She saved me from actual madness; aye, from the strait-waistcoat and the chain, when my brain was like to burst from throbbings that sounded like a thousand wild steeds thundering frantic over echoing plains; for the conflict was most fearful, when my young soul first arose to grapple with the world and its huge evils. In my impotent wrath I should have dashed myself to atoms against its moveless battlements of wrong, but that a low, sweet voice would quell and hold me back.
“I was the child of much travail, and years of weary and desponding watchfulness. I alone, of all her children, bore her features—she loved me unutterably, and shielded me always; it was not like the common love of mother for her child. In all things concerning me she seemed to be filled with a strange prescience—she read my inmost thought as if it were her own—as if it were a scroll made legible by illuminated letters. She seldom asked me questions, but simply told me what had happened. It was useless to attempt disguises with her; ministering in the flesh, she was my present angel, reconciling me tolife; and when she passed from me and the world, I first realised what darkness, death, and separation meant.
I was delirious I know not how long—for they seemed slowly tearing my heart out by the roots, chord by chord, with a heavy drag, until the last one snapped, and then I went into deep oblivion, from which I awoke a man of stone, so far as sensation went; and if stone could walk, with no more heart than it—or rather if you can imagine this walking statue moulded of the red lava, and only cooled upon the surface, you can better conceive the smouldering, heart-devouring chaos in which my life now moved among my fellows. I did not stop to curse and battle with my old foes, I only hated them with a liquid flame of scorn that found its level in me and was still. I would not harm them—no, not I—I wanted them to live for companionship in suffering. I gloried in their perversions—they filled me with ecstasy. I could not but add to them, and in ferocious delight threw myself into all the excesses and extremes that demonise the world.
“But ambition came to rescue my dignity at last, and of its iron despotism you have seen the worst. From its hard and meagre thraldom you have released me for the time, but it remains with you to hold me free. The wings that have borne me thus far on this bold upward flight must feel the soft freshening of the breeze and the glad welcoming of sunlight, to the purer realm they try, or flagging soon of the unwonted effort, they will sink again to seek the old accustomed sullen perch. The strength I need now is a subtler thing than any power of will within myself—purer than the breath of angels, it is chaste and mild as star-beams.
“It is you who have filled me with these yearnings—’tis to you that I look for their realisation, and yet you have not accepted that pure and holy relation conveyed in the ‘Marie, mother,’ I have named you, and plead with you to recognise.”
During all this time the face of the woman had been bowed so close to that of Manton that she seemed almost to touch withher lips, first his temples and then his cheek. A close observer would have perceived, in her long and deep inspirations, her slightly parted lips and the slow creeping movement of the head, that she was steadily breathing upon certain well-known and highly sensitive nerves. The brain of Manton was too full to notice this strange manœuvre; but while he talked, that hot breath had been sending soft thrillings through his frame, which, at first unobserved, had gradually grown more palpably delicious, until, as he ceased to speak, he found his whole frame literally quivering with passion.
He was silent for a moment, that he might fully realise the sensation, and then, with a shudder of horror, sprang away from contact with the woman, exclaiming—
“My God! what is this? What an unnatural monster am I! or”—as a sudden gleam of suspicion shot through his brain—“Woman, is it you who have done this?” His face darkened in an expression of rage and ferocity which was absolutely hideous, as his eye glanced coldly on her.
“I ask you, woman, was it some infernal art of yours? Answer me!—for, by the Eternal God, you shall never thus tamper with the sacrednesses of a true man’s heart again!” and, grinding his teeth, he approached her menacingly, as if, in his blind rage, he would rend her to atoms.
The woman had taken but one glimpse of the terrible face before her, and then shrunk bowed and crouching into the corner of the lounge. Her neck and forehead flushed crimson, spasmodic retchings of the throat commenced, and when Manton stretched forth his hands, as if to clutch her, there was a deep suffocating cough, and the red, warm blood gushed in an appalling current from her mouth, bedabbling his fingers and her clothing.
The man was startled from his rage into immeasurable terror, as he shrank back with upraised hands—
“My God! I have killed—I have killed her by my brutal violence! I am accursed! I am accursed for ever! I haveslain the white dove of peace they sent to me from Heaven!” Snatching a towel, he was on his knees by her side in an instant; and placing it within her bloody hands, which were clutched upon her mouth, as if to stay the fatal tide, he burst into an agony of tears, praying in frantic accents to be forgiven; for he could see nothing but immediate death in a hemorrhage so violent as this seemed, and he remembered now, but too vividly, how often she had told him of her melancholy predisposition to such attacks from the lungs, by which she was kept constantly in expectation of being carried off.
Ah, with what fierce remorse, what agonised penitence, all these things came up to him now, as gush after gush of crimson saturated the towel! In answer to his prayers for forgiveness, she at last reached one cold, bloody hand to his, pressing it gently.
And now his self-possession was immediately restored. His only thought, at first, had been forgiveness before she died; now he thought alone how to save her. Strange, he did not once think of giving the alarm, and sending for medical aid; for he instantly felt the case was one beyond the reach of ordinary remedies, and one in which the most perfect restoration of both the moral and physical natures to absolute repose could alone avail.
He reached another towel from the toilet-table, on which he found, by the way, abundant supply, which, innocently enough, seemed to him remarkablyapropos; then, seating himself by her side, he endeavored, by the use of all tender epithets which could be applied, to soothe and calm her. She suddenly seized his right hand and placed it upon the top of her head, and from that moment he thought he could faintly perceive an increase of his control over the more violent symptoms of the case.
More than half an hour of harrowing suspense had passed, before the paroxysm of bleeding had so far subsided as to enable him to breathe more freely; but even when the bleeding had at length entirely ceased, a long period of coma, or deathlike sleep,induced by exhaustion, and suspended sensation, supervened, during which he continued to watch her with the most painful anxiety, still holding his right hand upon her head, while, with the other, he clasped the fingers of her left hand as she had requested. As she immediately showed signs of restlessness on his attempting to remove either hand, he felt himself compelled to sit thus, without change of position, for several hours, awaiting whatever might occur.
And, finally, after a slight stirring of the limbs, she suddenly opened her eyes upon his, and smiled with a clear, sweet smile, rather of pity and affection than of forgiveness or reproach. He felt his heart bound within him, and he could only utter, in a low tone, “The good God be blessed! I have not killed you! Oh, I will never be ugly and cruel again! I will be your good boy now, always!”
“Yes, yes,” she said in a clear, firm voice, “you were very naughty; but I am strong again now. You will never speak harshly to me again, will you? Lean here, my beautiful tiger; let me feel that fierce cheek upon my bosom once more. You have suffered, too; I must soothe you.”
Manton, who, by this time, had become thoroughly exhausted, bowed his head lightly towards her, in obedience; but he leaned it rather upon the cushion than her person.
It was now near twelve o’clock, and the man was literally worn out by the long and violent excitements which we have traced. Body, soul, and sense, utterly collapsed, the moment his head found a resting-place, into a deep sleep.
The lamp burnt low; there was not another sound to disturb the dimmed silence of that room, but the heavy breathings of Manton. But even that murky light was sufficient to disclose the figure of the woman stooping, as before, close to the face of the sleeper. Slowly her lips crept over, without touching it, lingering here and there, while her chest heaved with deep inspirations. You could not see, had you been a looker-on, the slight parting of the lips, nor could you have felt the heatedfurnace of her breath play along the helpless surface of those prostrate nerves; but you might have seen an eager, oblique glitter in her eye, that grew the stronger while the darkness thickened, as ghouls look sharper out of graves they have uncovered. But then, had you been patient, you would have seen, as the hours went by, a gradual twitching of the nerves possess that deathlike frame—a restless motion, a moan, an all-unconscious smile of ecstatic delight; and then, if your sense was not frightened and appalled by the fierce, swift blaze from those still eyes above, a fiend’s triumph would be all familiar to you.
Alas! alas! will that young man wake sane? The owner of those glittering eyes seems to know; for hark! in her exceeding joy she whispers aloud, “He is mine now! See how his nerves vibrate. I was right in choosing this time of great prostration. I am scudding along those nerves like a sea-bird on currents of the sea; all that is animal in him is mine now. He is mine at last—the insolent tyro! I shall drag him down from his vaulting self-esteem; I shall humble him; I shall degrade him. Ah, ha! I shall feed upon him!”
There may be retribution on earth or in heaven. We will let that dark night’s history rest!