CHAPTER XXIV.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 knewhimself, 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 factmight 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-notefrom 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.