CHAPTER XXVI.DESPAIR.
“The white feet of angels yet upon the hills.”
Months and months had passed, and yet this wretched man was staggering on, not this time drunk, literally, but, as though blinded by red blood oozing from his brain, which had been crushed by the weight of this blow. He was wandering vaguely hither and yon, distracting his brain in ineffectual chimeras, the very impossibilities of their success affording to him their greatest attraction. But gradually all this maddened struggle had been settling down into one sultry, close, inevitable conclusion of sullen self-destruction, which must result from the continued precipitation, upon conditions that promised death in one form or other. He went to Boston while the cholera was raging there at its worst. The pretence of the visit was some wild, distracting scheme that he had seized upon, and in which he was endeavoring to secure co-operation there.
But unfortunately for his mad purpose, since that very separation from daily contact with the girl Elna, which was working so sadly upon his imagination now, his attenuated and exhausted physique had rapidly recovered all its inherent vigor, and in animal health and strength he had suddenly become, by an inexplicable reaction, more prodigally abounding than ever for many years. So that fate seemed to have closed up to him any ordinary means of getting rid of himself, except the pistol and the dagger, from the use of which his manliness unconquerably revolted.
But by a strange process of self-delusion, he had managed to confound himself into the idea that the abject cowardice of the act of suicide might be avoided by a species of half unconscious indirection. For instance, cholera was rife in the city, and hewell knew that long warm baths, by relaxing the system, would lay it more open to the attacks of any epidemical tendencies that might be prevalent; and accordingly, without ever venturing to explain to himself why, he continued, day after day, to take these long hot baths, and then to eat and drink, in the quietest possible way, everything that was specially to be avoided at such a time.
While this novel process was thus coolly progressing, he one morning met, by the merest accident, on State Street, a person whom he knew to have been long and intimately the friend of the lost Moione and her family. Manton eagerly asked him if he knew where she could now be found; for, strange enough, her calm image had lately intruded often into the darkened vistas of his thought, from whence he had supposed her banished long ago.
Her address was promptly given: it was in a remote and humble district of the city; and, although Manton already felt the seeds of the disease, which he had thus pertinaciously invited, rioting within him, yet he vowed to himself that he would at once seek her. His first visit failed; but the second found her, thin and wan, stretched on a lounge, awaiting she knew not whom.
With a short cry of sudden joy, as she recognised his features, she sprang to meet him, as of old, with a childish caress. Ah, why was it that he felt such sullen cold, and yet saw light, falling like star-beams upon the midnight of his soul, as his arms met this fond and childish clasp? He did not understand it—but we shall see!
The physical results, which he had so assiduously courted, could not be avoided. As he had walked about among his friends already for several days, with the premonitory symptoms of the fatal epidemic fully developed in his system, and as fully understood by himself, yet without the adoption, on his own part, of one single precautionary step, it was now sure to wreak its worst. Some, who could not help observing his ghastly appearance,thought him monstrously reckless, and others, hopelessly insane.
Regardless of every remonstrance, he still kept his feet, until, at length, the third evening found him leaving his hotel, in a hack, which he ordered to be driven to the home of Moione; and from which he had to be carried, by the driver, into the parlor, where he sank upon what he supposed to be the last couch upon which he should recline in life. A strange, indestructible feeling, that he must die beneath her eye, had urged him to this last and desperate exertion of the feeble vitality remaining in him. He had lain himself there to die; but why the strange purpose that she should minister to his passing breath? Was it only here that peace could be found for him?
Moione was alone, with a timid, young, and undeveloped sister. Their mother was accidentally away that night; having been detained by the illness of a friend, joined with the inclemency of the night, which set in in darkness and storm, in terror, in thunder, and in blaze. In the meantime, the paroxysms of cholera had commenced upon the enfeebled frame of Manton; and the black fear of the night outside only corresponded to the convulsed and writhing agonies which now tossed him to and fro, in helpless, but most mortal agonies. The thunder crashed, and the frail house shook, and the fierce pangs shot along his quivering nerves, as vividly as any blinding burst of lightning from without. The darkness which surrounded him had been penetrated by a calm, pure light, that dimmed not nor trembled before the blinding blast. A voice, the soft, clear, cheerful tones of which vibrated not to the quick rattling of thunder-crashes from without, told him of strength and hope, of peace and a calm future, in the life yet beyond him on the earth—that he could not die now, and should not!—until his will became electrified with a new impulsion, and was roused to cope with the fell demon that had thus, of his own invitation, possessed him; and, illuminated with a suddenand rapid intellection, he directed her how to baffle every paroxysm of cramp as it rose.
It is sufficient, he was thus sustained by light applications of cold-water, until the passing of the storm enabled her to summon to his aid a physician, whose skilful application of the same powerful remedy, even in the “blue-stage” of collapse into which Manton had now fallen, sufficed to relieve him from the disease, with the vital principle yet striving in his frame; though many days must elapse before those starry eyes, that held sleepless watch above him, could impart to his dimmed and incredulous consciousness sufficient strength to enable him to lift his hand, in vague and mournful wonder that he still possessed a being.
Ah, what an awakening was this! Deep, deep, beneath the realms of shadow—dark and deep—he had lain in long and dumb oblivion of consciousness. He knew not that he lived; it was a blank of rayless rest—a peace without sunshine. How profound! how unutterably still! What a contrast with the ceaseless, dreadful tension of the moiling chaos of past years, during which the passions had never slept, but, through his very dreams, had moaned in the weariness of strife. Alas! the rebellious heart, which struggleth in unyielding pride with life, refusing to concede to its conditions, how it must suffer? The world know little of the life-long horrors of that fight—the unidealizing world, the conservative, the compromising world. It little dreams what this self-immolating madman must endure—to what nights of sleepless thought, to what days of bleak and sullen isolation—walking apart from sympathies that are distrusted and scorned, yet yearned for—hating nothing, yet loving nothing which is warmed in the embrace of earth, because that earth may be accursed in his sight: its barren bosom has not yielded to his exacting soul the flowers and streams and echoing groves of the Utopia it has framed within him.
This is the unpardonable sin of pride! He dares to treat with contempt a world that will not turn to his inspired voice,and live as he has dreamed it might live. It is not to be wondered at, that the bolts fall thick and fast about him; but when we see his pale brow scathed and seamed with many a stunning stroke, while his hollow eyes yet glitter with a deathless and defiant fire—when we think of the mortal tension of his unsympathised life—oh, should we not remember, that this painful warrior has been battling, not for base lucre, not for selfish ends, but for the beautiful, as it has been revealed to him—the true, as he has felt it—for the ideal in him; and that, though wretched and suffering and wan, it is, after all,
“Of such stuff as he,The gods are made.”
“Of such stuff as he,The gods are made.”
“Of such stuff as he,The gods are made.”
“Of such stuff as he,
The gods are made.”
It is of his suffering that his prowess comes—of his experiences, his themes—of his solitude, his reach and radiance of thought—of his strong will, his conquering flight at last. Do not think to pity him; may-be he is pitying you. Do not attempt to “save” him; it may be, it is you who will be damned in the effort. Only let him alone—do not persecute him. Let his pride pass—that is what sustains him; but for that, he would be like you, a mere “compromise.” Give him the same chance that you give to others around you, and, although you may not understand him now, only give him time, he will make you understand him; it may be, in wonder and in joy.
But this waking—but this waking of the weary man! Was it a new birth—a new resurrection—or, a mere waking from a light sleep, without a dream? The world upon which his shrinking vision now opened was filled with sunshine—he was blinded with the glory thereof. He closed his thin eyelids, and the splendor came through them, all rosy-hued and dimmed, that he could bear it; but there was a starlight for him too, and he could bear its calm effulgence better.
Yes, there were two stars, and they were tempered, that they might neither freeze nor slay his feeble life. When they came over him, as he lay in a half-trance of weakness, he could feelthem through his eyelids and upon his heart; and they were warm, and he felt his heart warm, as buds to the unfolding spring. A dim-remembered music flowed into his soul, faint and dim, but oh, sweetly mellowed, that he might not die!
There was a rustling, too,—it was as of a tempered wind,—and a soft touch; it sent no thrill, but it was of healing—it sunk into his life in strength. A strange, balsamic tenderness, like a new sense of peace and joy, pervaded all his being—and a new growth set in apace, and a dim remembrance of ancient strength flitted into his thought.
Ah, ha! this wondrous presence, what was it? Moione, the ministering Moione! It was she! Ever there, sleeping and awake, she leaned over him. When he dreamed, he dreamed of a fair spirit, that hung upon the air above him, on viewless wings, and ever, with still eyes looking upon his, shedding their soft radiance deep into his soul. No wonder that life, in swift, light waves, came flooding in again; no wonder that the crushed and much-enduring man became as a child once more, and laughed out in the sunshine with a simple joy. The Present was sufficient unto him; he remembered not the Past now—the hideous, the spectre-haunted Past. What was it to him, when serene hope thus smiled? Ah, it was a happy time, that period of rapid convalescence. Yes, rapid, for his heart beat freely again. The natural sun could reach him; no lurid delusion, like miasmatic fog, hung over to intercept the rays.
They talked of the future, and peopled it with wild dreams, like children, until it all became as real to them as their own being.
There was a strange and mournful romance, connected with the origin of Moione’s family, that pointed at possible realizations in another country, through inheritance, that would be as gorgeous as the creations of Aladdin’s lamp. They talked of these prospects as of facts assumed, and of all the high-thoughted enterprises of the day which promised to be of true benefit to mankind, as already achieved, through their aid; and,with magnanimous simplicity, were already distributing hoarded and rusting millions to bless the world withal. These were gay day-dreams; but they were innocent, and, although they may never be realized, they gave them joy—inspired the yet feeble Manton with a future.
There could be but one result to all this. His health was rapidly restored; and when Manton married Moione, which he soon did, his soul now first found rest. The last that was spoken between them concerning Elna was in a conversation soon after, when she casually asked him—
“Did Elna show you my drawings, when you came back from the North?”
“Your drawings? your drawings? She showed me some, the delicacy and calm precision of which, I remember, vainly intoxicated me with delight. But why do you ask, dear?”
“Why, she carried off from me, about that time, certain studies of human anatomy, which I had elaborated much, and which I valued. As I have never been able to recover them, after repeatedly requesting their return, I thought, perhaps, she might have shown them to you, and then thrown them aside, through forgetfulness.”
“Ah! ha!” said Manton, “I remember now. They were assiduously paraded before me by her as her own. In spite of my recognition of the fact, that she did not possess originally, and must have very suddenly acquired, the constitutional steadiness and delicacy of touch necessary to accomplish drawings so fine and exquisitely accurate, I never dreamed of imposition, of course; and thus, with fatal credulity, set down to her credit, from what she had stolen of you, a new and infinitely significant attribute, which I had heretofore, specially and hopelessly, in spite of my passion, denied to her.”
“Let us forget it now,” was the quiet response. “She is only harmful to either of us, as you may remember morbidly the relations which have existed between you; the delusion is over.”
Such was the fact, indeed. Manton had at last found his artist-wife, and a true and wondrous artist did she prove indeed, realising his fond, high dream. Under this blessed and holy guardianship, he had returned fully to the realities of a true existence. He now saw, felt, and understood all that had occurred in that long shuddering dream; and this reality he had attained seemed only the more unutterably precious.
When the calm Moione revealed to him all the secret of the bleak and poverty-stricken desolation, in which he found her living, he was not at all astonished to find that her mother, who was a generous, trusting, noble-hearted zealot of Water-cure, had been another of the many victims of Boanerges Phospher, the “Spiritual Professor.” He had not only stripped her widowed isolation of all the appliances of household comfort, which years of devoted and self-sacrificing labor had enabled her to collect and throw together, in respectable defence between her helpless children and common want, but had absolutely turned her out of doors, without even spoon, or knife, or fork left her, of all this little property which she had thrown in rashly, perhaps, but earnestly, and with a noble dedication of her widow’s mite, towards furnishing a Water-cure establishment.
The cause was one that she revered for the good that she knew, practically, it might accomplish; and Boanerges, who was in this case, as usual, profoundly ignorant of what he had undertaken to do, had availed himself of her well-known experience and knowledge of Water-cure, just so long as sufficed to collect around him again a hirsute confederacy of faithful Amazons; the strength of which he thought would be sufficient to over-ride all opposition, and sustain him in the valorous assault upon helpless widowhood intended. He then openly claimed her property as his own, and the proud, uncomplaining mother of Moione was, of course, plundered of her all—victimised!
The sainted Boanerges soon met with a just retribution. The partner, to whom he had assigned, in trust, to stave off his creditors, all his claims upon this illustrious institution, and who,from the late chrysalis of a vulgar tailor, had suddenly been emancipated into an M. D. of Water-cure, at once sprung upon him his legal rights, under the transfer, and he was reduced again to beggary.
Some method wrested from his puerile studies of Swedenborg, has no doubt, by this time, and upon some other tack, suggested to the “Spiritual Professor” just enough of wisdom to enable him to persevere in “saving” the elderly New-Lights of the land.
We wish Boanerges happiness in his new enterprises; for, certainly, his versatility at least commands respect.