CHAPTER XXII.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 thatshe 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 moreand 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 bewitchingnaiveteremarked—
“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 handsfrom 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 serveyouso, 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!”