path: root/69201-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69201 ***

                          Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and
punctuation remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_, bold thus bold.




                           YIEGER’S CABINET.

                         SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM:

                              THE HISTORY

                                  OF

                          ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN,

                                  AND

                    Her Friends of the “New Light.”


                           BY C. W. WEBBER,

                               AUTHOR OF

         “OLD HICKS THE GUIDE,” “CHARLES WINTERFIELD PAPERS,”
     “THE HUNTER-NATURALIST,” “TALES OF THE SOUTHERN BORDER,” ETC.


             A heavy, hell-like paleness loads her cheeks,
                      Unknown to a clear heaven.
                                             JOHN MARSTON.

              O vulture-witch, hast never heard of mercy?
                                                ENDYMION.


                             PHILADELPHIA:
                       LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.
                                 1853.




      Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by
                       LIPPINCOTT, GRAMBO & CO.,
   in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States,
           in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

  STEREOTYPED BY J. FAGAN.         T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS.




                             INTRODUCTION.


On page 392 of the concluding sketch of a late series, the “Tales of
the Southern Border,” occurs the following passage:—


                           “THE ESCRITOIRE.

 “The author, being a resident of New York during the period of the
 leading incidents narrated as occurring in that city, had formed the
 acquaintance of the principal personage. Himself a Southerner, he
 had, from the natural affinities of origin, inevitably been attracted
 toward Carter. The intercourse between them, at first reserved, had
 imperceptibly warmed into a degree of intimacy, which, however, had
 by no means been such as to render him at all cognisant, beyond
 the merest generalities, of the progress of his private affairs.
 He was not a little surprised, therefore, at finding, one day, an
 elegant escritoire or cabinet, of dark, rich wood, heavily banded in
 the old-fashioned style with silver, which had been placed, in his
 absence, on the table of his sanctum. A note, in a sealed envelope,
 lay upon it. He instantly recognised the handwriting of the address as
 that of Mr. Carter, and broke the seal.

 “It was evidently written in great haste, but without any sign of
 trepidation. It ran thus:—

  “MY DEAR FRIEND:

 “I have no time for explanations, as I am in the midst of hurried
 preparations for an unexpected yacht-voyage—upon which I set sail in a
 few minutes. I send you an escritoire, which was left in my charge by
 a highly valued friend. He was an extraordinary man; and its contents
 will be, I doubt not, of great value to the world.

 “It was given me, with the injunction that it should not be opened
 until six months after his death. The six months were up some weeks
 since, but I have lately been too much otherwise absorbed to think of
 making use of the privilege of the key. I now therefore transfer to
 you this bequest in full, with the proviso that you will not open it
 for six months. If at the end of that time I have not been heard from,
 please open, and without reserve make what use of it your excellent
 sense may justify. Please take charge of whatever correspondence may
 arrive to my address for the same length of time, at the expiration of
 which you will also please to consider yourself as my executor—open
 my correspondence and proceed as you may think best. Pardon this
 unceremonious intrusion of responsibilities upon an intimacy, the
 terms of which I hardly feel would strictly justify me; but the plea
 that I know no one else whom I can trust, and have no time for further
 explanation, will I am sure justify me in the eyes of a brother
 Southron.

  “Yours truly,
  “FRANK CARTER.


“Six months having elapsed, and still no news of my singular friend
Carter, the fulfilment of the important duties of executor, thus
unexpectedly devolved upon him, were deferred by the narrator as long
as his sense of duty would possibly admit. At last, when longer delay
would have seemed to assume almost the aspect of criminality, the duty
of opening the cabinet was unwillingly entered upon.”

       *       *       *       *       *

On my next meeting with my friend Carter, who proved still to be in the
land of the living, I spoke to him of the cabinet and its remarkable
contents, which had so unexpectedly been left in my charge; offering to
resign to him my trusteeship. To this, however, he would by no means
consent, but continued to insist, as in his original letter, that I
should without reserve make what use of it my sense of propriety might
dictate. I was finally overruled into undertaking the mere arrangement
and editorship of its contents—for the revelations there made are
in many respects so strangely horrifying and unusual, that I fear
the world will be little disposed to pardon my agency in giving them
publicity. However, as I believe them to be, in every respect, genuine
life-experiences, I have determined to make the venture, come what will
of it. We shall therefore give, as proper introduction to the singular
narrative which we have selected from beneath the blood-stained seals
of the cabinet it has been our fate to open, the following singular
paper, which we found lying separately above the folds of the MS. which
constitutes the History of Etherial Softdown.


                THE PHILOSOPHY OF MESMERIC IMPOSITION.

                  TO BE READ BY PHILOSOPHERS ONLY.[1]

The existence of what may be called the nervous or Odic fluid—the
sympathetic element—has been partially known to all ages. The knowledge
of this powerful secret, in moving and controlling mankind, has been
professionally and almost exclusively confined to the adepts of all
sects, religions, and periods; though it has occasionally, in various
ways, leaked out of the penetralia, principally through its forms,
accompanied with little or no apprehension of their vital meaning. It
is in this way that a series of scientific phenomena, the discovery of
which probably originated with a remote priestcraft, and had been made
to subserve exclusive ends, has gradually been fragmented among the
people, and in many imperfect, ignorant, and vitiated forms has now
become the common property of science.

   [1] The Story begins at Chapter I.—ED.

When it is understood that this nervous fluid is nothing more nor
less than that force—whether electrical, magnetic, odic, or otherwise
named—which, lubricating the nervous system in man, produces all vital
phenomena—is, in a word, the vital force—the active principle of
life—it will not be difficult to comprehend how important a knowledge
of its laws may be rendered to even those relations of life not
exclusively physical.

Mesmer promulgated, under his own name, as a new and astounding
discovery in science, something of the sympathetic laws to which
this nervous or Odic fluid is subject, and by which the vital and
spiritual relations of man to the external universe are in a great
measure modified, and even controlled. This was no discovery of his,
but had been the mainly exclusive secret of the ancient priesthood;
employed alike in the ceremonies of the novitiate in the Thibetian
temples of Buddha, in the Egyptian Initiation, and in Grecian Pythism.
But the particular reason why his announcements caused such prodigious
excitement, in 1784, as to run all Paris mad, even including the
court of the wary Louis XVI., and still continue to excite and
madden mankind, is, that, as the sympathetic ecstacies and furors,
superinduced by the mummeries of his famous “vat,” were called by a
new name, the people failed to recognise them, although they had been
familiarised with, and even acting habitually under their influence,
while surrounded by accessories of a more sacred character. The
immediate success of Mesmer’s experiments amazed men. He, in fact,
little knew what he was doing himself; the effects he understood how to
produce, because accident had furnished him with the formulas. Having
gone through these, which, though most grotesque and preposterous,
later experience has shown, really included all the “passes” and other
conditions necessary to establish sympathy through the nervous fluid
with the victims of his delusion, he proceeded to produce exhibitions
the most extraordinary the world ever saw, except in the hideous and
frantic orgies of some wild, barbaric creed, and the parallels to
which, in this country, are to be found in the shrieks and bellowings
of a fanatic camp-meeting, Miller ascension-tent, Mormon rite, or
hard-cider political mass-meeting.

Beginning with the postulate that “Nature abhors a vacuum,” it does not
seem difficult to understand something, at least, of the rationale
of this sympathetic influence of one man over another. The laws of
the distribution of this Odic force seem to bear a somewhat general
affinity to those of electricity. The surcharged cloud discharges
its superfluous fluid into the cloud more negatively charged. The
man holding a superfluous amount of vital or Odic force, can dismiss
a portion of this—along the course of its proper lightning-rods, or
conveyers, the nerves—into the organisation of a being more negatively
charged, or, in other words, of a weaker man. As electricity can only
act upon inert matter through its proper media, the elements, so
the Odic fluid can only act upon organised matter normally through
its proper medium, the nerves of vitality. This communication of
the Odic fluid, by which sympathy between the two beings has been
established, can be, to a certain degree, regulated and controlled by
manipulations which bring the thumbs and fingers of the hand, which are
properly Odic poles, in contact with certain great nerves, or centres
of nerves, along which the influence can be readily communicated.
These manipulations, the vital and original meanings of which these
Mesmer agitators have betrayed, may be traced very clearly through
the most important ceremonies of religion, and the secret orders of
fraternisation in the world. From this point of view, how significant
the “laying-on of hands” in ordination, the “joining of hands” in the
marriage ceremony, &c.

Here let us remark, that we would no more be understood as accusing
a Christian Priesthood, in modern times, of having made an improper
use, either inside or out of their profession, of the manipulations
mentioned above, than we would think of accusing them of having, as
a class, any special knowledge of their significance beyond that of
ceremonial forms, set down in the discipline. It has been to the
Heathen Priesthood that we have consistently attributed a knowledge of
the psychological meaning of these ceremonials, which have descended
through the Hebrew and Christian churches as avowedly divested of vital
significance, and intended, in their arbitrary exaction, as, to a
certain degree, ordained tests of Christian faith and obedience.

But it is by no means indispensable to the exhibition of the Odic
phenomena, that the processes of manipulation should have been
literally gone through with in all cases—nor, indeed, in the majority
even—for some of the most apparently inexplicable and extraordinary
of them all are brought about without such intervention. Take, as
comparatively “modern instances,” such effects as those produced by
the preaching of Peter the Hermit, when not only vast armies of men
were moved like flights of locusts toward the Desert, on the breeze of
his fiery breath, to disappear, too, as they, within its bosom, and
never be heard from again, but even great armies of children rushed
in migratory hordes to the sea-ports, to ship for the Holy Land!—and
those produced by the crusade of Father Mathew against intemperance, in
our time, when all Ireland lay wailing at his feet. These great furors
were precisely identical with those already enumerated, so far as the
sympathetic or motive power went. So with the story of the rise of
Mahomet, Joe Smith, Miller, and all such agitators. They are usually
men of prodigious vital power, and of course surcharged with the Odic
fluid, who begin these great movements; and they possess, beside,
vast patience and endurance. They begin by filling the individuals in
immediate contact with them, as Mahomet did his own family, with the
superfluity of the Odic force in themselves, and having thus obtained
a single medium by this immediate contact—which, although it may not
imply the formal manipulations with preconceived design, implies the
accidental equivalents—the circle gradually enlarges through each
fresh accession, in much the same way that it began, until, after a
few patient years of unshaken endurance, the apostle finds himself
surrounded by thousands and thousands of human beings, whose volition
is swayed through this Odic force—this sympathetic medium—by his own
central, resolute, and self-poised will, as if they were but one man.
His moveless volition has been, from the beginning, the base and axis
of the vast sympathetic movement going on around him, and upon the
single strength of the Odic force within him, all depends, until,
through a thorough organisation of ceremonial laws and observances, the
system of which he was the vital centre assumes a corporate existence,
and can stand alone.

This is about the method in which all such organisations, radiating
from the _one man_ power or centre, widen their circles to an extreme
circumference, until the force of the pebble thrown into the great
lake is exhausted. So it is with all sympathetic excitements—from
the Dancing Dervishes, the Shaking Quakers, or the Barking Brothers,
to the vast Empire of France, led frenzied over the world in the
will-o’-the-wisp chase of universal sovereignty, by the fantastic will
of a Napoleon. These are some of the general phenomena of sympathy,
and there are many quite as extraordinary, if not as broad in what
are called atmospheric or epidemic conditions, which go to prove the
universality of this sympathetic law.

The distinctions between Od and Heat, Od and Electricity, as well as Od
and Magnetism, have been so clearly demonstrated by the investigations
of Baron Reichenbach as to leave at present no choice between the
terms. Od expresses that force which, differing in many essential
properties from the other two, can alone through its phenomena be
reconciled with what we know of the Sympathetic or Nervous Fluid.
It is therefore used as a synonym of this mysterious agency, and as
conveying a far higher definition and significance than either the term
Electricity or Mesmerism.

The worst and the best that the agitation begun by Mesmer has
accomplished, is, to have stripped old Necromancy of its mysterious
spells, by revealing something of the rationale of them, while at the
same time, in unveiling its processes to the sharp eyes of modern
knaves, they have been enabled to appropriate and practise them again
with even more than the old success, under the new christening of
“scientific experiment.” It is, I think, easily enough shown, by a
minute and circumstantial comparison of the cotemporary history of
the dark age of black art ascendancy in Europe, which was literally
the dark age of chivalry, with that of Cotton Mather witch-burning
enlightenment in New England, that the arts practised by the accused
in both these countries, and at all other such periods in all
other countries, were nearly identical with each other; and those
familiarised to us through the doings of mesmeric manipulation,
revelation, clairvoyance, spiritual knockings, &c., &c., are generally
the very same, though assuming slight shades of difference, indicating
some progressive development. A partial knowledge of psychological
laws, which was formerly, and with great plausibility, considered
altogether too dangerous pabulum for the vulgar mind, has been sown
broadcast by the empiricism of this mesmeric movement, the principal
oracles and expounders of which have been clearly as ignorant of the
causes with which they agitated, as ever wrinkled crone of peat-smoked
hovel was of the true laws of that occult palmistry, through the
practice, or vague traditions of which, she finally prophesied
herself into the martyrdom of the “red-hot ploughshares,” or the warm
resting-place of the pot of boiling pitch. They only know that certain
formulas produce certain results, and as they are blundering entirely
in the dark, they mix those which have a basis in science with the
crude and meaningless forms which ignorance, with its abject cunning,
easily supplies. From such amalgamations have arisen the mummeries of
conjuration in whatever form, and by the imprudent use of which, the
credulous, simple and superstitious, are so easily “frightened from
their propriety,” and thus made easy victims of more dangerous arts.

But it is a study of the fearful uses which have been made by the
evil-disposed, of this _partial_ knowledge of the laws of relation
of soul to the body, that is more interesting now than these olden
disguises of the same evil in more helpless forms; as now, through
the mesmeric agitation, it has really attained to some gleam of
causes—has now something of scientific illumination to steady and
give direction to its reckless and deadly aim. In the radius of its
hurtful circumference, the vicious power of the witch, fortune-teller
or conjuror, was as much more circumscribed than that of the
semi-scientific charlatan of clairvoyance, as the vision of the mole
is less than that of the viper, which, at least, looks out into the
sunshine though every cloud may impede its malignant gaze.

The relative degrees in which the Odic or sympathetic fluid may be
found exhibited in the different individuals of our race, have been
previously remarked in general terms. In the sexes, we most usually
find the positive pole in man, who gives out, and the negative in
woman, who receives and absorbs from him, the dispenser. Though this
be the general rule so far as the sexes are concerned, it is by no
means the universal rule for the race—since there are among men but
few positive poles, or fixed centres of Odic radiation; and where such
are found, they are observed to possess much of what we commonly call
“influence” with or upon others. All the parties, therefore, within the
circle of this sympathetic radiation, or “magnetic attraction,” as it
is popularly termed, must necessarily be, relatively to this positive
pole, negative poles, without regard to sex—while each of these
comparatively negative poles may in turn be a positive pole, or Odic
centre, to those below or of weaker nature than himself.

Those men who have been known to all humanity as prophets, poets,
law-givers, discoverers, reformers, &c., are, and have been, what we
mean by positive Odic poles; for while they have seemed to stand in
immediate and direct communion with the spiritual source of all wisdom,
they have at the same time given out the impulse thus granted, to the
people by whom they are surrounded, thus acting as the chosen media of
divine revelation, and from the cloudy summits of Sinais handing down
the tables of the law to all the tribes.

Now there is a mighty radiation of the Odic force from these men,
through which the love, wisdom, or rather will in them—or sent through
them—is made operative upon the great masses of mankind; and this
same radiation, in the greater or less degrees, is found emanating
from a thousand different sources at the same time, affecting man
for evil as well as for good; for, when we comprehend that this
Odic or sympathetic force is the sole medium of communication with
the spiritual and invisible world, as well as with the visible and
material world, it can then be easily understood how what are called
“evil” and “good spirits” should through it affect mankind. This will
be fully illustrated when we observe the common conditions of health
and disease. Health is good and disease is evil; and these are the
two eternally antagonistic chemical forces in the universe. Health is
that normal condition of the body which enables it to resist evil and
maintain the proper balance of the spiritual and material elements.
Disease is that abnormal condition of the body in which the integrity
of the spiritual and organic functions has been destroyed through the
sympathetic media by evil, and good overcome.

In either case, the balance is destroyed, and the immediate consequence
may be, in the one, sudden paroxysms of fearful insanity, or in the
other, sudden death, as in common apoplexy.

Thus the popular fallacy, that all things having a source in the
spiritual, or rather the invisible, must of necessity be good, is
in a very simple way exposed. We see there may be what are called
evil, as well as good spirits, which hold communion with us; and the
safest and only true general rule with regard to such matters is,
that, while the good spirits are those propitious chemical forces
which make themselves known to us in love, and joy, and peace, through
the unbounded happiness of the normal conditions of health, the evil
spirits are those vicious chemical forces, morbid delusions, and
malign revelations, which are made known to us through all other
diseased conditions as well as that of Clairvoyance. Remember that no
such being has yet been known throughout the whole range of Mesmeric
experiment as a healthy Clairvoyant, or a “subject” who has attained to
the super-eminence of Clairvoyance, who was not what they fancifully
term “delicate”—that is, liable to those diseases which are well known
to supervene upon nervous weakness, exhaustion, or emasculation.
This condition of nervous exhaustion renders them, of course, the
very negation of the negative pole of sympathy, and the first person
approaching them, who possesses the ordinary Odic conditions of health,
is clutched hold of by their famine-struck vitality, in the agonised
plea for life! life!

“Give! give!” is still the insatiable cry. They must have the Odic
fluid restored, and that, in taking from your “enough,” they exhaust
and undermine the holy purposes of your life to make up that deficit
in their own—which loathsome vice has brought about—the “hideous
selfishness of weakness” rather rejoices. The sympathetic _rapporte_
being once established, they can at least, through this dangerous
medium, live in the integrities of your life, and enjoy, both
physically and spiritually, a surreptitious vitality, which, while it
reflects the prevailing phenomena of your own mind and spiritual being,
has, in addition, some approximation even to the physical exaltation of
your higher health.

These human vampires or sponges may be, therefore, as well absorbents
of the spiritual as animal vitality. Their parasitical roots may strike
into the very centres of life, and their hungry suckers remorselessly
draw away the virility of manhood, or the spiritual strength.

They seem to be mainly divided into two classes, one of which, born,
seemingly, with but a rudimentary soul, attains to its apparent
spiritual though merely mental development, by absorption of the
spiritual life in others, through the Odic medium. Another class,
born with a predominating spirituality based upon a feeble physique,
is ravenous of animal strength, and can only live by its sympathetic
absorption of the same from others, through the same pervading medium.
Of the two, the first is the evil type; for, born in the gross sphere
of the passions, with a vigorous organisation, but faintly illuminated
at the beginning with that golden light of love which is spiritual
life, the fierce half-monkey being is propelled onwards, and even
upwards, by the basest of the purely animal instincts, appetites, and
lusts. If such beings strive towards the light of the harmonious and
the beautiful, it is not because they yearn for either the holy or the
good, but because it lends a lurid charm to appetite and glorifies a
lust.

The other character, in whom the spiritual predominates, whether
from a natal inequality, as is very frequently the case, or from the
sheer exhaustion of the physical powers, through emasculating vices,
is yet, in itself, good, so far as its morbid conditions leave it an
unaccountable being; but, as its revelations and utterings depend
entirely upon the Odic characters and will of those from whom its
strength may be derived, it can only be regarded, whether used for
evil or good, as a medium. This character is the common Clairvoyant,
to whom we are indebted for those strangely-mingled gleams of remote
truth, with errors the most grave and injurious, which have so
tended to confuse the judgment of mankind in regard to the phenomena
of Clairvoyance. Such persons can be made as readily the medium of
any falsehood which the knavish passions of their “Mesmerisers” may
dictate, as they can be caused to announce, by a will as strong, but
soul more pure, the disconnected myths of science and of history, which
have so surprised the world in what are called the “Revelations” of
Andrew Jackson Davis. This man belongs to our second class, and is
purely “a medium” of the sympathetic fluid. His organisation is most
sensibly sympathetic and delicately responsive, but is too feeble
to balance his spiritual development. His case stands, therefore,
as the most remarkable modern instance of what the ancients termed
“_vaticination_;” but, as has been the case with other false prophets,
his “gifts” have proved of no value, except to knaves. He was
undoubtedly practised upon by a choice set of such characters; and, now
that he has found in marriage a sympathetic restoration, through the
physical, of its needed balance with the spiritual, he has lost his
“lying gift” of prophecy.

       *       *       *       *       *

We have examined this man carefully, and are convinced that the
whole mystery of his revelations and character may be contained in a
nut-shell. He is to the sphere of intellectual and spiritual sympathy,
and in a lower sense, precisely an analogous case with that of Mozart
in the sphere of the musical and spiritual. When the great soul of
humanity has been long—say one generation—in travail with a great
thought in art, science, music, or mechanics, there is sure to be
somebody born in the succeeding generation who is physically, mentally,
and spiritually, the impersonation and embodiment of this thought, of
which the age is in labor, and who must of necessity become, solely and
singly, the expression and embodiment thereof. Thus Mozart, the infant
prodigy in music, who at five years old was the pet of monarchs and
the miracle of his age, continued, with no signs of precociousness, a
steady and consistent development, which showed him to be indeed the
embodiment of the musical inspirations of his age. His revelations in
music were just as prodigious as even the rabid worshippers of the
Davis revelations would imagine those to be; yet there are some most
essential differences between the results of the two.

Davis, born amidst the travail of this new Mesmeric agitation, became
the most sensitive organ of the sympathetic fluid in intellect, as the
other had been in music; but as, in the case of Mozart, the exciting
cause came from Nature, and constituted her purest and most sacred
inspirations, so the inspiration of Davis came from man, with all his
imperfections and subjective tendencies. The sequel has been, the
inspirations of Mozart are considered now by mankind as only second
to the Divine, while those of Davis are justly regarded as morbid,
fragmentary, incomplete, and worthless.

The organisation of Mozart was equally sympathetic with that of Davis;
but it was of that healthy tone which could only respond to nature
and the natural; while the organisation of Davis belongs to that much
inferior type, which, from its morbid and unbalanced conditions,
can respond only to the human as the representative of nature. Such
persons receive nothing direct from nature, but only through its
representative, man.

It would seem as if the world were absolutely divided into two
classes—the radiating and the absorbing; the first receiving from
nature, and the second from man. In the first, are the holy brotherhood
of prophets and the poets, and in the second, the poor slaves of
sympathy—the knaves and fools—the impostors who play upon its
well-known laws, and, deceiving themselves as well as others, may well
be said to “know not what they do.”

We are convinced that no man, who has kept himself informed of the
psychological history and progress of his race, can by any means fail
to recognise at once, in the pretended “Revelations” of Davis, the
mere _disjecta membra_ of the systems so extensively promulgated by
Fourier and Swedenborg. When you come to compare this fact with the
additional one, that Davis, during the whole period of his “utterings,”
was surrounded by groups, consisting of the disciples of Fourier and
Swedenborg; as, for instance, the leading Fourierite of America was,
for a time, a constant attendant upon those mysterious meetings, at
which the myths of innocent Davis were formally announced from the
condition of Clairvoyance, and transcribed by his _keeper_ for the
press, while the chief exponent and minister of Swedenborgianism in New
York was often seated side by side with him.

Can it be possible that these men failed to comprehend, as thought
after thought, principle after principle, was enunciated in their
presence, which they had previously supposed to belong exclusively
to their own schools, that the “revelation” was merely a sympathetic
reflex of their own derived systems? It was no accident; for, as often
as Fourierism predominated in “the evening lecture,” it was sure
that the prime representative of Fourier was present; and when the
peculiar views of Swedenborg prevailed, it was equally certain that
he was forcibly represented in the conclave. Sometimes both schools
were present; and on that identical occasion we have a composite
metaphysics promulgated, which exhibited, most consistently, doctrines
of Swedenborg and Fourier, jumbled in liberal and extraordinary
confusion. This is, in epitome, about the whole history of such
agitations. The weak Clairvoyant falls naturally into the hands of
knaves who are superior to him in physical vitality. He becomes,
first, the medium of their vague and feeble intellection; and then, as
attention is attracted by the notoriety they know well how to produce,
the “_medium_” becomes gradually surrounded by the enthusiasts of
every school; and as he is brought into their various Odic spheres, he
pronounces the creed of each in his morbidly illuminated language, and
it sounds to the mob like inspiration.

There is no greater nonsense; men are inspired through natural laws.
But this comparatively innocuous character, which we have thus far
stepped aside to indicate, is nothing compared to the first specimen
of this Clairvoyant type which we have classified. This, it will be
remembered, is the animal born with feeble spirituality, but vigorous
physique, which is, at the same time, intensely sympathetic. These, as
we have said, are the infernal natures; for, possessing no life outside
the lower animal passions, self is to them the close centre of all
being, and their Odic sensitiveness a vampire-absorption, the horrible
craving of which, not content with the mere exhaustion of the animal
life of the victim, by wanton provocations, drinks up soul and mind to
fill the beastly void of their own. These worse than ghouls, that live
upon the dying rather than the dead, possess some fearfully dangerous
and extraordinary powers.

Vampirism, as a superstition, prevailed, not many years ago, like a
general pestilence, throughout the countries of Servia and Wallachia.
Whole districts, infected by this horrible disease, were desolated;
people grew wild with terror, and, in their savage ignorance, committed
monstrous sacrilege upon the sanctities of burial. Bodies that had
rested quietly in their graves for ten, twenty, and even eighty days,
were dragged forth, to have stakes driven through their chests; and if
any blood was found, they were burned to ashes.

The belief was, that the deceased, when living, had been bitten by a
human vampire, which, coming forth from its grave by night, had sunk
its white teeth in his throat, and drunk his blood, thereby causing a
lingering death; in which he was also doomed to the hideous fate of
becoming a vampire, after his burial.

The bodies of vampires, when dug up, presented a perfectly natural
appearance; and, even in those cases where the scarfskin peeled off,
a new skin was found underneath, and new nails formed on the fingers.
The vital blood was found in the heart, lungs, and viscera, exhibiting
the conditions of perfect health. How the vampire got out of his grave,
without scratching a hole, does not appear.

Thus we find, in modern vampirism, a strange compound of ancient
superstition with well-known scientific truths. The vampire is the
counterpart of the ancient ghoul, with the simple transfer of the
habits of the vampire-bat to its identity. These are then connected
with the fact, well known to the medical profession, that persons have
been buried, supposed to be dead, who, in reality, had only fallen into
what is called the death-trance; and who, had they been left above
ground for a sufficient period, would have probably resuscitated of
themselves. That they have done so after burial, is a familiar fact;
since bodies exhumed, long after, have been found to have changed their
position in the coffin. How long bodies, thus inconsiderately buried,
retain a resemblance to the normal conditions of life, has not been
fully ascertained.

We have here the historical origin of what is called vampirism; but
there are certain phenomena of this fearful infection, closely
resembling those which we have attributed to the Spiritual Vampire.

Vampirism is clearly a disease of the nervous system; it being first
excited through the imagination of ignorance and superstition. The
nerves, then affected through the odic medium, lose their balance, and
the mind constantly playing within the circle of the one thought of
horror, a rapid and premature decline is the immediate consequence.

The infection of which the victim died remaining still within the odic
medium of the sphere it occupied, passes into the nerves of others, who
die also; and thus the disease spreads like any other epidemic. But
mark—whence the true origin of this superstition of the ghoul and the
vampire, so universal in the world? Is it not that mankind, everywhere,
has felt, with an unconscious shuddering, the presence of the spiritual
vampire? The instincts of the masses have, in their superstitions,
foreshadowed all the great discoveries of science. Has it not been,
that they have felt the hideous incubus always; but not being able,
through any connected series of observations, to discover the real
cause of their dread and suffering, have given its nearly identical
attributes a “local habitation and a name” among their superstitions?

What we have termed the Spiritual Vampire, is a scientific fact—we
believe as much so as the bat-vampire; and that it feeds, not alone
upon the living, but upon the spiritually dead; that originally, so
far as its spiritual entity is concerned, it too comes forth from its
sensual charnal to feed upon the soul-blood of mankind. This may seem a
horrible picture, but we cannot consent to withdraw it. These records
were made under a sense of duty to mankind; and if they should ever see
the light, it must be as they have been written. We dare not reveal
all that we know of this thing—we can only venture to say enough to
arouse men in amazement, at the realisation of what they have always
known and felt to exist, without having expressed it. No mortal mind
could have conceived such possibilities, even in hell, much less in
actual life.

Amidst the profound securities of the best-ordered households in the
world, unless a strict eye be had to such facts and phenomena as we
have adverted to and shall describe, the most insidious and fatal
corruptions of the bodies and souls of your children, your wives, and
your sisters, may creep in, while there is no dream of wrong or danger.
If we shock you, it is to put you somewhat upon your guard against the
many evils, concealed under the apparent harmless approaches of the
viciously-purposed manipulator, or the covert practiser upon the odic
or sympathetic vitality of the pure and unsuspecting.—We will abide the
issue.

Milton clearly had vampirism in his thought when he wrote—

                  “Clotted by contagion,
  Imbodied and imbruited, till quite lost
  The divine property of their first being—
  Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,
  Oft seen, in charnal-vaults and sepulchres,
  Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave.”




                         SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM;

                                  OR,

                   THE HISTORY OF ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN.




                              CHAPTER I.

                       THE GIRLHOOD OF ETHERIAL.

            “Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned?”


In a mean and sterile district of Vermont, which shall be nameless,
but which exhibits on every side stretches of bare land, with here
and there the variety of clumps of gnarled and stunted oaks, Etherial
Softdown was born. If mountains give birth to heroes, what ought to
have been the product of a low-lying land like this, on whose dreary
basins the summer’s sun wilted the feeble vegetation, and the bleak
winds of winter wrestled fiercely with the scrubby oaks, whose crooked
and claw-like limbs seemed talons of some hideous, gaunt and reptile
growth?

On the edge of one of the most desolate of these stretches, and beneath
the shelter of the most ugly of these demonised oaks, were scattered
the storm-blackened sheds of a miserable hamlet, in one of which, for
there were no degrees in their comfortless dilapidation, the family
of our heroine, the Softdowns, resided, and another yet smaller and
at some distance apart from the rest, was occupied by her father,
who was a shoemaker, as a workshop. This was one of those strange,
out-of-the-way, starved and dismal looking places that you sometimes
stumble upon in our prosperous land—which ought long since to have been
deserted with the vanished cause of the temporary prosperity which had
given it birth—but in which the people seem to be petrified into a
morbid serenity of endurance, and look as if under the spell of some
great Enchanter they awaited his awakening touch.

The child, which was the birth of a coarsely organised mother, was as
drolly deformed with its squint eye and stooping shoulders as fancy
could depict the elfin genius of such a scene. Dirty, bedraggled and
neglected, with unkempt locks tangled and writhing like snakes about
her face, and sharp, gray animal eyes gleaming from beneath, the
ill-conditioned creature darted impishly hither and yon amidst the
hamlet hovels, or peering from some thicket of weird oaks, started the
stolid neighbors with the dread that apparitions bring.

Indeed, so wilful, unexpected and eccentric were her movements, that
the people, in addition to regarding the oaf-like child with a half
feeling of dread, gave her the credit of being half-witted as well.
There was a hungry sharpness in her eye that made them shrink; a
furious, raging, craving lust for something, they could not understand
what, which startled them beyond measure; for, as in their stagnant
lives, they had never been much troubled with souls themselves, they
could not understand this soul-famine that so whetted those fierce
eager eyes.

The father, Softdown, who appears to have been something more developed
than the mother, and to have possessed a grotesque and rugged wit,
more remarkable for its directness than its delicacy, became the sole
instructor and companion of the distraught child, who readily acquired
from him an uncouth method of enouncing trite truisms unexpectedly,
which was to constitute in after life one of her chief, because most
successful weapons.

Etherial early displayed a passion for acquiring not knowledge, but a
facility of gibberish, which proved exhausting enough to the shallow
receptacles around her, especially as her mode of getting at the names
and properties of things so closely resembled the monkey’s method of
studying physical laws. She had first to burn her fingers before she
could be made to comprehend that fire was hot, but that was enough
about fire for this wise child; she remembered it ever after as a
physical sensation, and therefore it had ever after a name for her;
and so with all other experiences, they were to her sensational, not
spiritual or intellectual. The name of a truth could come to her with
great vividness through a blow or pain of whatever character that might
be purely physical, but through no higher senses, for these she did
not yet possess. Of a moral sense she seemed now to develop no more
consciousness than any other wild animal, but in her the _memory of
sensation_ took the place of mind and soul.

Thus passed the girlhood of our slattern oaf—shy and sullen—avoiding
others herself, and gladly avoided by them, with the single exception
of her father, from whom her strong imitative or sympathetic faculty
was daily acquiring a rough, keen readiness of repartee, in the use of
which she found abundant home-practice in defending herself against the
smarting malignity of the matron Softdown, who charmingly combined in
her person and habits all and singly the cleanly graces of the fishwife.

At sixteen, with no advance in personal loveliness, with passions
fiercely developed, a mind nearly utterly blank, a taste for tawdry
finery quite as drolly crude as that displayed by the plantation
negresses of the South, and manners so fantastically awkward and
eccentric as to leave the general impression that she was underwitted,
Etherial suddenly married a lusty and good-looking young Quaker, threw
off her bedraggled plumes, and became a member of that prim order.

Now her career commences in earnest, for this was the first great
step in her life in which she seems to have attained to some gleams
of the knowledge of that extraordinary power of Odic irradiation and
absorption which was afterwards to be exercised with such remarkable
results.

She did not make her great discovery without comprehending its meaning
quickly. She first perceived that, day by day, she grew more comely
to look upon—that her figure was becoming erect, and losing its harsh
angularities—the pitiless obliquity of her features growing more
reconciled to harmonious lines—and last, and most astounding, that the
immediate result of the contact of marriage had been a rapid increase
of her own spiritual and mental illumination, accompanied as well by a
corresponding decline on the part of the husband in both these respects.

Here was a secret for you with a vengeance! Like an electric flash,
a new light burst upon Etherial; and, as there was only one feeling
of which her being was capable towards man, she chuckled over the
delicious secret which now opened out before her with a terrible
gloating.

Glorious discovery! Hah! the spiritual vampire might feed on his
strength—might grow strong on this cannibalism of the soul! and what
of him if she dragged him down into idiocy? Served him right! Did
Etherial care that his spiritual death must be her life? She laughed
and screamed with the joy of unutterable ferocity! Eureka! Eureka! They
shall all be my slaves! They taunt me with being born without a soul,
with being underwitted! I shall devour souls hereafter by the hundreds!
I shall grow fat upon them! We shall see who has the wit! Their
thoughts shall be my thoughts, their brains shall work for me, their
spirits shall inform my frame! Ah, glorious! glorious! I shall live on
souls hereafter! I shall go up and down in the land, seeking whom I may
devour! Delicious! Delectable Etherial!




                              CHAPTER II.

                  SCENES IN THE GOTHAM CARAVANSARIE.

  And all around her, shapes, wizard and brute,
  Laughing and wailing, grovelling, serpentine,
  Showing tooth, tusk, and venom-bag, and sting!
  O, such deformities!
                                       ENDYMION.


In Barclay Street, New York, years ago, flourished, at No. 63,
that famous caravansarie of all the most rabid wild animals on the
Continent, who styled themselves Reformers and New-light People,
Come-outers, Vegetarians, Abolitionists, Amalgamationists, &c. &c.,
well known to fame as the “Graham House.” Here, any fine morning,
at the breakfast-table, you might meet a dozen or so of the most
boisterous of the then existing or embryo Reform notorieties of the
day. Mark, we say _notorieties_, for that is the word.

From the Meglatherium Oracle, whose monstrous head, covered with
a mouldy excrescence, answering for hair, which gave it most the
seeming of a huge swamp-born fungus of a night—who sat bolting his
hard-boiled eggs by the dozen, with bran-bread in proportion, washing
them down with pints of diluted parched-corn coffee—even to the
most meagre, hungry-eyed, and talon-fingered of the soul-starved
World-Reformers, that stooped forward amidst the babble, and, between
huge gulps of hot meal mush, croaked forth his orphic words—they were
all one and alike—the mutterers of myths made yet more misty by their
parrot-mouthings of them!

Here every crude, ungainly crotchet that ever possessed ignorant
and presumptuous brains; here every wild and unbroken hobby that
ever driveller or madman rode, was urged together, pell-mell, in a
loud-voiced gabbling chaos. Here the negro squared his uncouth and
musky-ebon personalities beside the fair, frail form of some lean,
rectangular-figured spinster-devotee of amalgamation from New England.

Here the hollow-eyed bony spectre of an old bran-bread disciple stared,
in the grim ecstacy of anticipation, at the ruddy cheeks of the new
convert opposite, whose lymphatic, well-conditioned corporation
shivered with affright, as he met those ravin-lit eyes, and a vague
sense of their awful meaning first possessed him, as his furtive glance
took in the sterile “spread” upon the table, to which he had been
ostentatiously summoned for “a feast.”

Here some Come-outer Quaker, with what had been, at best, cropped
hair, might be seen with the crop now shaven yet more close to his
bullet-head, in sign of his greater accession in spiritual strength
beyond the heathen he had left behind, sitting side by side with some
New-light or Phalanxterian apostle, with his long, sandy, carroty, or
rather _golden_ locks, as he chooses to style them, cultivated down his
back in a ludicrously impious emulation of the revered “Christ Head” of
the old Italian painters.

Here the blustering peace-man and professed non-resistant, railed
with a noisy insolence, rendered more insufferably insulting in the
precise ratio of exemption from personal accountability claimed by his
pusillanimous doctrines. Here too, a notorious Abolitionist, with his
tallow-skinned and generally-disgusting face, roared through gross lips
his vulgar anathemas against the South, which had foolishly canonised
this soulless and meddlesome _non-resistant_ ruffian, in expressing
their readiness to hang him, should he be caught within their territory.

Here the weak and puling sectary of some milk-and-water creed rolled up
his rheumy eyes amidst the din, and sighed for horror of a “sad, wicked
world.” Here the sharp animal eyes, the cool effrontery and hard-faced
impudence of ignoramus Professors of all sorts of occult sciences,
ologies, and isms, met you, with hungry glances that seemed searching
for “the green” in your eye; and mingled with the whole, a sufficiently
spicy sprinkle of feminine “Professors,” of the same class, whose bold
looks and sensual faces were quite sufficient offsets to the extreme
etherialisation of their spiritualized doctrines.

Here, in a word, the blank and ever-shocking glare of harmless and
positive idiocy absolutely would escape notice at all, or be mistaken
for the solid repose of common sense, in contrast with the unnatural
sultry wildness of the prevailing and predominating expression!

But this menagerie of mad people held caged, in one of its upper rooms,
the object of immediate interest. On entering the apartment, which
was an ordinary boarding-house bedchamber, a scene at once shocking
and startling was presented. A female, seemingly about thirty-three,
was stretched upon a low cot-bed, near the middle of the floor, while
on the bed and upon the floor were scattered napkins, which appeared
deeply saturated with blood, with which the pillow-case and sheet were
also stained. A napkin was pressed with a convulsive clutch of the
hands to her mouth, into which, with a low, suffocating cough, which
now and then broke the silence, she seemed to be throwing up quantities
of blood from what appeared an alarming hemorrhage.

A gentleman, whose neat apparel and fresh benevolent face somehow spoke
“physician!” leaned over the woman, with an expression of anxiety,
which appeared to be subdued by great effort of a trained will. He bent
lower, and in an almost whispered voice, said:

“My dear madam, you _must_ restrain yourself. This hemorrhage continues
beyond the reach of any remedies, so long as you permit this violent
excitement of your maternal feelings to continue. Let me exhort you to
patience—to bear the necessary evils of your unfortunate condition with
more patience!”

The only answer was a slow despairing shake of the head, accompanied
by a deep hysterical groan, which seemed to flood the napkin at her
mouth with a fresh effusion of blood, which now trickled between her
fingers and down upon her breast. The humane physician turned, with
an uncontrollable expression of horrified sympathy and alarm upon his
face, and snatching a clean napkin from the table, gently removed
the saturated cloth from the clutching pressure of her fingers, and
tenderly wiping the blood from her mouth and person, left the clean one
in her grasp.

“Be calm! be calm—I pray you! you must some day escape his
persecutions. You have friends; they will assist you to obtain a
divorce yet, and rescue your child from his clutches. Do, pray now, be
calm!” The voice of the good man trembled with emotion while he spoke,
and the perspiration started from his forehead.

At this instant the door was suddenly thrown open, and a tall, gaunt
man, with a very small round head, leaden eyes, and a wide ungainly
mouth, with a projecting under jaw, singularly expressive of animal
stolidity, paused on the threshold and coolly looked around the room.
The woman sprang forward at the sight, as if to rise, while a fresh
gush of blood poured from her mouth, bedabbling her fingers and the
sheet. The physician instinctively seized her to prevent her rising,
but, resisting the pressure by which he gently strove to restore her
head to the pillow, she retained her half-erect position, and with eyes
that had suddenly become strangely distorted, or awry in their sockets,
she glared towards the intruder for an instant, and then slowly raising
her flickering hand, which dripped with her own blood, she pointed at
him, and muttered, in a sepulchral voice, that, besides, seemed choking:

“That is he! see him! see him! There stands the monster who would rob
me of my babe, as he daily robs me of money.” Here the blood gushed up
again, and she was for a moment suffocated into silence, as the object
of her denunciation stood perfectly unmoved, while a cold smile half
lit his leaden eyes. This seemed to fill the apparently dying woman
with renewed and hysterical life. She raised herself yet more erect,
and still pointing with her bloody, quivering finger, while her head
tossed to and fro, and the distorted eyes glared staringly out before
her, she spoke in a gasping, uncertain way, as if communing with
herself. “The wretch taunts me! my murderer dares to sneer! O God!
must this always continue? must that brute always follow me up and
down in the land, to rob me of the money that I earn—to be my tyrant,
my jailor! He will not give me money to pay postage even, out of that
I earn abundantly, while he is earning nothing. He will not give me
clothes to keep me decent, while I earn enough. He will not give my
child shoes to wear, though he is trying to take her from me!”

“That is a lie, Etherial! you know I gave the child a new pair
yesterday!” gruffly interposed the man at this stage of the deeply
tragic soliloquy, while he stepped forward towards the bed. A choking
scream followed, and the blood was spattered over the spread as she
fell back screaming—

“Take him away! take him away! He is killing me with his brutality!”
and then her head sank in sudden collapse upon the pillow, and the
face, which had heretofore looked singularly natural in color, for one
in such a dreadful strait from hemorrhage, turned livid pale, while the
blood continued to pour upon the pillow from the corners of the relaxed
mouth.

The poor physician, whose frame had been shivering with intense
excitement during this interview, sprang erect, as the form of what
he supposed to be a corpse fell heavily from his arms, and with
the natural indignation of a feeling man, fully roused at what he
considered the murderous brutality of the husband, rushed forward, and
seizing him furiously by the collar, shook and choked him in a perfect
ecstacy of rage, shouting, at the same time—

“Unnatural beast! monster! You have killed that poor child at last!
murdered your own wife, whom you swore to nourish and protect! Infernal
villain! you ought to be drawn and quartered—hanging is too good
for you! You saw the terrible condition of the poor victim of your
brutalities when you came, yet you persisted! In the name of humanity,
I send you hence! Death is too light punishment for you!” and he
hurled the unresisting wretch—who, by this time, had grown perfectly
black in the face under the rough handling of this roused and indeed
infuriate humanity—staggering out of the door—and closing it upon him,
he proceeded to apply such restoratives as on an examination the real
condition of the patient suggested.

A short and anxious investigation proved it to be rather a state
of syncope than actual death; and, with a full return of all his
professional caution, skill and coolness, he applied himself to the
restoration of his patient, with a heart greatly relieved by the
discovery that the result he so much dreaded was not yet, and hugging
to his kindly breast the consolation “while there is life there is
hope!” He paid no attention to clamorous knocks for admission and
loud-talking excitement, which the violence of the preceding scene had
no doubt caused in alarming the house. In a short time the good doctor
cautiously unbolted the door and came forth from the room, treading
as though on egg-shells. After leaving careful instructions with the
landlady that his patient, who now slept, should under no pretence be
disturbed, most especially by the husband, until his return, as her
present repose might prove a matter of life and death, he left the
house, promising to call again in two hours.

For one hour the woman lay calm and motionless on her gory bed, as if
in catalepsy, when to a low, peculiar knock at the door, she sprang up,
wide awake, and in the apparent full possession of her faculties.

“Who?” she asked, in a quick, firm tone, as she threw the hair back
from her eyes.

To the low response, “I, love!” she stepped quickly from the bed and
snatched a shawl from the back of a chair, and by several rapid sideway
movements of her feet at the same time, thrust the bloody napkins which
strewed the floor beneath the bed, where they would be out of sight,
and by a movement almost as swift, threw a clean “spread” over the
blood-stained pillows and sheet, then drawing her large shawl closely
over the stained dressing-gown in which she had risen, she rushed
first to the glass, and smoothed her hair with an activity that was
positively amazing, and then to the door, which she unbolted on the
inside—showing that she must have risen to bolt it immediately as the
doctor passed out—and admitted a man who was in waiting.

“Ah, my soul’s sister! my Heaven-bride! how is thy spiritual strength
this evening?” and at the same time, as her yielding form sank into his
outspread arms, he pressed her lips with his, adding, “I salute thy
chaste spirit!”

“Brother of my soul, I was weary, but now I am at rest. I was wounded
and fainting by the way, but the good Samaritan has come!” and she
turned her eyes upward to his with a melting expression of confiding
abandon.

“Angel!” accompanied by a closer and convulsive clasp, was the response.

“What do they say of poor me again, to-day, those cruel wicked people
outside?” she asked, with eyes still reverentially upraised to his, as
they moved slowly with clasped arms towards the cot, on the side of
which they sat, she still leaning against his bosom.

“My good sister, they say what evil spirits always prompt men to say of
the good, who, like the Prophets, are sent to be stoned and persecuted
on earth. You should not regard such. There are those who know you in
the spirit, to whom it has been revealed through the spiritual sense,
that you are good and true, as well as in the right, and through such,
you will find strength of the Father.”

“Oh, you are so strong in spiritual mightiness that you do not
sympathise with the weaknesses of we humbler mortals! I wonder, indeed,
how you can forgive them?” and her downcast eyes were furtively raised
to his. The man wore his hair thrown back over his head and behind his
ears. He drew himself up slightly at this, and stroked back his locks,
then placing his hand with patriarchal solemnity upon her bowed head,
proceeded in a somewhat louder tone. “My simple child—my soul-sister, I
should say, you are hardly upon the threshold of the true wisdom. Your
knowledge of the law of spiritual correspondence is yet too incomplete
for you to understand how entirely good has been mistaken for evil, and
evil confounded with good in the world. For instance—it is called evil
by the ignorant world, for a brother man to caress thee in the spirit
as I have caressed thee but now. The imaginations of a world that lieth
in evil are impure. ‘Evil to him who evil thinks!’ The great doctrine
of correspondence teaches that there are two lives—the spiritual and
the animal. The passions of the animal are in the fleshly lusts; those
of the spiritual are in no wise such, they are in the Heavenly sphere,
they are of love and wisdom. Thus, my caress in this Heavenly sphere is
of no sin to thee, for by and through it I convey to you, my spiritual
sister, the strength of love and wisdom for which your heart yearns.
Thus—”

As he stooped his head to renew the unresisted caress, the door flew
open again, and the man with the wide mouth, the hideous chin and the
leaden eye, stood again upon the threshold, and as the affrighted pair
looked up they saw he was backed by the curious faces of half-a-dozen
chambermaids, jealous of the honor of the _house_, flanked by the
indignant landlady and a score of prying, curious, sharp-eyed faces,
which might be recognised at a glance as belonging to those pickled
seraphs of reform, known as “free-spoken” spinsters in New England.

“There, they are at it!” shouted the man with the gaping mouth. “I told
you so! I told you that Professor was always kissing her!”

“Yes!”

“There they are, sure enough!”

“I always thought so!”

“The honor of my house!” bristled the landlady, striding forward. “I
did not expect this of you, Professor!”

“Madam!” said the gentleman with his hair behind his ears, striding
forward as he released the suddenly collapsed and seemingly lifeless
form he had just held within his embrace, and which fell back now
heavily upon the pillow-spread, which was instantly discolored by a new
gush of blood from the mouth. “I was administering, with all my zeal,
spiritual comfort to this poor, sick and dying sister, when you burst
in! See her condition now!”

He waved his hand towards the tragic figure. “The Professor” occupied
a parlor on the first floor, beside two bed-rooms adjoining this, and
being on the palmy heights of his renown and plenitude of purse, it was
not convenient for the landlady to quarrel with him at present. “Ah,
if that is the case, Professor, I beg you to pardon us. The husband
of this woman has misrepresented you and your beneficent motives, and
accuses you of all sorts of improprieties. We came up, at his urgency,
to see for ourselves, and the shocking condition in which we find her
now, proves that the ravings of the husband are, as she has always
represented them, insane.”

“I’ve seen you kissing her before!” roared the husband, advancing
threateningly upon the Professor, who, however spiritual in creed, did
not now appear particularly spirited, as he turned very pale, retreated
backwards, and holding up his two trembling hands imploringly,
exclaimed—“Hold! hold! my dear brother! It was a spiritual kiss! I
meant you no harm, nor that angel who lies there dying! Our kiss was
pure and holy as the new snow. Hold him! hold him! Don’t let him hurt
me! I am a non-resistant! I am for peace!”

“Your holy kisses! I don’t believe in your holy kisses!” gnashed the
enraged husband, still following him up with warlike demonstrations;
but here the easily appeased landlady interposed once more, to save the
honor of her house in preventing a fight.

“No blows in my house!” she shrieked, as she threw herself between
the parties. “The Professor is a man of God, and shall not be abused
here; shame on you, Aminadab, with your poor, persecuted wife there,
dying before your face! Everybody will believe what she says about your
persecutions now!”

“Bah, you don’t know that woman! she’s no more dying than you are!”
grunted the fellow, whose wrath fortunately seemed to be of that kind
that a straw might turn it aside. All the women rolled up their eyes
and lifted their two hands at this speech.

“What a brute!”

“The horrid, murdering wretch! and she bleeding at the mouth, and from
the lungs, too!”

“Lord save the poor woman’s soul, with a husband like that!”

And other speeches of like character were ejaculated by all the women
present.

At this moment a fresh effusion of blood, accompanied by a low groan,
from the mouth of the suffering patient, flooded the clean spread with
its purple current, and the horrified females rushed from the room,
screaming—

“He’s killed her at last, poor thing!”

“Where’s the doctor?”

“She’s dying of his brutality—run for the doctor!” At this moment,
with a hasty and heavy step, that gentleman was heard advancing along
the passage, followed by a crowd of pale, frightened-looking women. He
strode into the room.

“What now?—what’s to pay?” and his eye fell on the trembling form of
the brutal husband, who had by no means forgotten the rough handling he
had received, and now skulked and quailed like a whipped cur, as his
eye saw the instant thunder darken on the brow of the doughty doctor.

“You here again—you brutal fellow? I shall instantly bind you over to
keep the peace toward this unfortunate woman, whose life you are daily
endangering by your brutalities. Take yourself off, sir!” Aminadab
waited for no second invitation, but availed himself of the open
doorway.

Without noticing the spiritual professor, who had drawn himself into
as small space as possible in one corner, the good man advanced to the
side of his patient with an anxious, flurried manner.

“What can that besotted wretch have been doing to her again?” and he
gently placed his fingers upon her pulse, and shook his head gravely as
he did so.

“Very low! very low, indeed!—nearly absolute syncope again! This is
horrible! How sorry I am that I was compelled to leave her for a
moment.”

“Is she really in danger, doctor?” asked the spiritual professor,
advancing with recovered assurance.

“Who are you, sir?” he said, looking up sharply. “One of these
officious fools, I suppose?” Then glancing his eye around at the
crowded doorway, he straightened himself hastily, and exclaimed—

“Leave the room, all of you—she must be quiet—I wish to be alone with
my patient! Leave the room, sir, I say!” in a sterner voice, as the
spiritual professor hesitated on his backward retreat.

“I—I—I p-pro-test against the impropriety!” he stammered forth, looking
back at the women, with a very pale face, as he accelerated his
backward movement before the steady stride of the resolute doctor.

“Out with you, sir—I will answer for the proprieties in this case!”

The door was slammed in the ashy face of the spiritual professor, and
securely doubled-locked before the doctor returned to the bedside of
his patient.

The bleeding from the mouth had now ceased. All the usual remedies
in such cases having so far entirely failed, the puzzled doctor had
come to the final conclusion that the hemorrhage—be its seat where it
might—was only to be subdued by a restoration of the patient to the
most perfect repose. Sleep, calm, unbroken sleep, to his sagacious
judgment and sensibilities, seemed to offer the sole alternative to
death. He had been impressed by his patient that her constitutional
tendencies were, by a sad inheritance, towards consumption, and the
loss from the lungs, of such quantities of blood as he had witnessed,
was well calculated to fill his professional mind with horror and
dread. The case had thus appeared to him a fearfully uncertain and
delicate one, and this sense may fully account for the stern and
unusual procedure of turning even the husband out of the room on the
two occasions we have mentioned.

As her physician, he felt himself bound to protect his helpless
patient against those moral causes of irritation which he had been
led to believe existed, not only from her reluctant disclosures,
but from what he had himself witnessed. Believing that her beastly
husband was the chief and immediate cause of this fatal irritation,
he had felt himself justified in his rough course towards him, and
was now fully and resolutely determined to protect what he considered
a death-bed—providentially thrown into his charge—inviolate from
farther annoyance, from whatever quarter, at least so long as he held
the professional responsibility. In this resolute feeling, and as the
day was warm, he threw off his coat, raised all the windows, and sat
himself quietly down beside his patient to watch for results.

The eyes of the kind man very naturally rested upon the object of his
solicitude, and after the first excitement of anxiety was over, and he
had settled calmly into a contemplative mood, he first became conscious
that there was something strangely fascinating in the position of the
nearly inanimate figure. He had never before thought of the being
before him as other than a very plain, but much-afflicted woman, by
whose evident physical calamities, no less than her private sufferings,
he had been strongly interested.

She had told him her own story, and he had believed her, thinking
he saw confirmation enough in the conduct of those she accused of
ill-treatment; but the idea of regarding her as attractive in any
material sense, had never for an instant crossed his pure soul. Now
there was an indescribable something in her attitude, so expressive of
passion, that, in the pulseless silence, he felt himself blush to have
recognised it.

Her arms, which he now remembered to have been _bare_ in all his late
interviews with her, were exquisitely rounded and beautifully white,
and he could not but wonder that he had not before observed the strange
contrast between them and the plain weather-beaten face. They looked
startlingly voluptuous now, contrasted with the pallid cheek which
rested on them, and the glossy folds of dark hair in which they were
entangled. So strikingly indeed was this expression conveyed, that even
the purple stains of blood upon the spread beneath would not divest him
of the dangerous illusion. The good doctor felt the blood mount to his
forehead in the shame of deep humiliation as he recognised in himself
this wandering of thought.

What! could it be that one so habitually pure in feeling as he, could
permit the intrusion at such an hour of impure associations? Such
things were unknown to his life, so disinterested, so spotless, so
humane. What could it be that had caused such feelings to possess him
thus unusually? It could not be possible she was conscious of the
position in which her body was thrown. Was there some strange spell
about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that
still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of
these unnatural fires?

The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with
a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove
to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other
objects in the busy street.

The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to
beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. He
felt alarmed, nay, even guilty. He knew not why. We shall see!




                             CHAPTER III.

                        THE SYREN AND THE MOB.

  And after all the raskal many ran,
  Heaped together in rude rabblement.
                                 SPENSER.

  What intricate impeach is this?—
  I think you all have drunk of Circe’s cup!
                                   SHAKSPEARE.


The woman continued, with calm, regular breathings, to sleep for
several hours. The dusk of evening had now closed in, and yet her
patient guardian sat silently watching her motionless figure. A long
and serene self-communion had gradually restored the excellent doctor
to his ordinary equanimity, and he now, with untiring vigilance,
awaited the changes that might supervene in the condition of the
patient.

After all his thinking on the subject, he found himself now no
nearer comprehending the cause of the late unwonted disturbance of
his habitual serenity than at the beginning. He had dealt harshly
with himself, in endeavoring to account for it, and never dreamed of
reproaching the feeble and wretched being before him, as in any degree
the conscious agent of what he considered a weakness unpardonable in
himself.

With the natural proclivity of generous souls towards the extremes,
he had, in the plenitude of his self-reproach, proceeded to exalt the
sleeping woman into an earth-visiting angel with wounded wings, the
spotless purity of which the breath of his darkened thought had soiled.
The poor, good-hearted doctor!

The silence of the room was now broken by a low exclamation of fright,
accompanied by a slight movement of the patient. The doctor sprang
forward softly to the bedside.

“Who?—what?—where am I? What has been happening?” asked the woman,
with an expression of bewilderment and alarm.

“Nothing! nothing, my dear madam! I am here—you are safe—but you must
not talk.”

“Where is he? is he gone?” she persisted in a wild, terrified manner.

“Yes, he is gone. He shall not come back to disturb you again. You must
be quiet now, and get well. Please be calm, and trust in me.”

“Trust in thee?” said the patient, in a voice which had instantly lost
its vague tone. “Trust in thee, thou minister of light, who hast come
to my darkened pillow, to my bloody death-bed, to console me!” and here
she clutched his hand. “Trust thee—I would trust thee as I trust God!”
and she pressed his hand to her heart.

“You must be silent, madam,” urged the physician, endeavoring to
extricate his imprisoned hand, for he felt strange tinglings along his
veins, which alarmed his now penitent and vigilant spirit. She only
shook her head, and clung with yet greater tenacity to his hand, and
then, first raising it to her lips with a reverential kiss, she placed
it upon the top of her head, with the palm outstretched, and signified
her desire that he should keep it there, with a smile of entire
beatitude. The doctor barely knew enough of mesmeric manipulations,
to understand that this laying-on of hands was commonly resorted to
among the believers in the science, as a remedy for nervous headache.
He could see no harm in the innocent formula, if it assisted the
imagination in throwing off pain, and he very willingly humored his
poor patient, in permitting his hand to remain there.

In a moment or two a singular change came over the face and general
physical expression of the woman, and the doctor, who had witnessed
something of mesmeric phenomena, instantly recognised this as clearly
presenting all the symptoms of such a case. He had mesmerised her by a
touch, and it was not without a thrill of vague wonder that he awaited
further developments.

There was a perfect silence of ten minutes’ duration, when the
mesmerised patient began moving her lips as if in the effort to
articulate. The curiosity of the doctor was now fully aroused—his
_will_ became concentrated—he desired to hear her speak; in his
unconscious eagerness, he _willed_ that she should do so with all the
energy of his firm nature; and speak she did.

“Happy! happy! Ah, I am content in this pure sphere! My soul can rest
here!” a long pause, then suddenly a shudder vibrated through her
frame, and she shrank back as one appalled by some spectral horror.

“Ha! it is all dark now! I see! I see! his hand is red! red! red! red!
There is murder on this soul!”

The doctor sprang up and back as if he had been shot. His face grew
livid pale, and he trembled in every joint, while with chattering teeth
he stammered—

“Woman! Woman, how know you this?”

“I see it there—that huge red hand! Now all is red! There! there!
I felt it must be so! The pale and golden light breaks through! It
spreads! It fills and covers everything! His heart did no murder—it was
his hand! He can be redeemed! This soul is pure!”

The poor doctor sank upon his chair and groaned heavily, while he
covered his face with his hands. He spoke, in a few moments, in an
almost inaudible tone, to himself, while the woman, who had suddenly
opened her eyes, turned her head slightly, and watched him with a sharp
attention.

“Alas! alas! how came this strange being in possession of the fatal
secret of my life? I believed it buried in the oblivion of thirty
years. My life of dedication to humanity, since, I thought might have
atoned for that quick sad deed! Yes! I struck him! O, my God—I struck
him! but the provocation was most fearful! Woman, who and what are
you, that you should know this thing?” and with a vehement gesture
he jerked his hands from before his eyes, and turning swiftly upon
her, he met the keen, still glance of those watchful eyes, which shone
through the subdued light of the room, steadily upon him. The doctor
was astounded! He sprang to his feet again, exclaiming angrily—

“What shallow trick is this? You seemed but now in the mesmeric sleep,
and mouthed to me concerning my past life, and here you are, wide
awake! How came you with the secrets of my life?”

The woman answered feebly, and with a sob that at once touched the
gentle-hearted doctor, and turned aside his wrath—

“You took your hand away—you would not let me speak. Place your hand
upon my head again, and I will tell you all.”

The troubled doctor re-seated himself with a shuddering reluctance, and
renewed the manipulation.

In a few moments she appeared again to have sank into the sleep, and
commenced in that slow, fragmentary manner supposed to be peculiar to
such conditions:

“I see! The dark shadow is on this soul again! It is of anger and
suspicion—they are both evil spirits! They strive to make it wrong the
innocent! It is too holy and pure to yield! I see the golden light
fill all again! The bloody hand is gone. No stain of crime remains
upon this soul. It will be pardoned of God. This soul needs only human
love. Through love it can be made free before God! All the past will
be forgiven then—the red stains will fade! A sudden anger made it sin.
Love can only intercede for this sin. Love will intercede! It will be
saved!”

Here her voice became subdued into indistinct mutterings, and the
doctor drew a long breath as he withdrew his hand—

“Singular woman! How could all this have been revealed to her? She
must commune with spirits in this state. My story is not known to any
here. I never saw or heard of her, until sent for as a physician, to
visit her in this house. Strange that this fearfully passionate and
repented deed should thus rise up in my path, thousands of miles away,
amidst strangers, who can know nothing of me! Oh, my God! my God!
Thou art indeed vengeful and just!” and the miserable man clasped his
hands before his eyes and moaned. “It was my first draught of love and
life. He dashed it! I was delirious in my joy, while the beams rained
from her eyes into my hungry soul—hungry of beauty and of bliss. He
dashed it all, and in the hot blood of my darkened madness I slew him!
Oh, I slew him! His shadow, that can never be appeased, though I have
given body, and soul, and substance, to relieving the sufferings of
my race since that unhappy hour—it rises here again! It haunts me!
Yes! yes! I feel that love alone can make me strong once more, to bear
such tortures! But have I not denied myself such dreams? Have I not
with dedicated heart walked humbly since in self-denying ways? Have I
not clothed the orphan, fed the poor and nursed the sick? Have I not
ministered amidst pestilence, and held my life as of none account that
I might bring good to others? Can I be forgiven? No! no! The Pharisee
recounts his holy deeds and thanks God that his life is not sinful as
another man! I am not to be forgiven! I shall never know those dreams
of love!”

The strong man bowed his frame and shook with agony. Could he but have
looked up, a keen, quick gleam from the eyes which had been so steadily
fixed upon him during this painful soliloquy, would have struck him as
conveying the ecstacy of a sainted spirit over a soul repentant—or of
some other feeling quite as exultant.

This curious scene was, however, most unexpectedly interrupted at this
moment, by a loud yelling from the street below. The clamor was so
sudden, and yet so angrily harsh, that both parties sprang forward in
the alarm it caused—the woman, springing up into a sitting posture on
the bed, and the doctor to go to the window.

“What is it?” she exclaimed wildly, as she tossed back her hair. “What
do these cruel people want to do to me now?”

The doctor, who saw at a glance the meaning of what was going on below,
and the necessity of keeping his patient cool, turned to her, with a
very quiet expression—

“Do not be alarmed, madam. It is merely some disorderly gathering of
rowdies, in the street below. There is no danger to you—only do not get
excited, or you will bleed again. I am here to protect you.”

“Then I am safe!” was the fervid response, which, however, was followed
by a roar so sullen and portentous, from the infuriated mob underneath,
as to leave some doubt of its truth even upon the mind of the doctor.

“Down with the amalgamation den!”

“Down with the saw-dust palace!”

“Tear it down!”

“Let’s lynch the wretches!”

The response to speeches of this sort, from single voices, would be a
simultaneous burst of approbation from the great crowd, and a trampling
and rush to get nearer the building. It seemed a formidable sight,
indeed, to the doctor, as he looked down upon this living mass of men,
surging like huge waves tossed against some cliff, while the torches,
that many of them bore, glared fitfully upon the upturned, angry faces.

A powerful voice, which rose above all the tumult, exclaimed with a
hoarse oath, as the speaker turned for an instant towards the crowd,
from the top of the front steps—

“Let us burst open the door and lynch every white person found with a
negro. Here goes for the door!” and he threw himself furiously against
it, while a perfect thunder-crash of roars attested the approbation of
the dangerous mob. The door resisted for a moment, when there was a
sudden yell from the outside of the mob, nearly a square distant—

“Here! here’s what’ll do it! pass ’em on!” and the alarmed doctor saw
immediately the portentous gleam of fire-axes, which were being passed
over the heads of the crowd towards the door, and in another instant
the crash of the cutting would commence. The doctor, as we have seen,
was a very prompt man. He thrust his head out of the window, and in a
loud, commanding voice, shouted—

“Stop!”

The man at the door, who had just received the axe, and was in the act
of wielding it, paused for an instant, to look up, while the whole sea
of faces was raised toward the window, amidst a moment’s silence, of
which the doctor instantly availed himself—

“Gentlemen, do you war upon women? I have a female patient here, in
this room, at the point of death! If you proceed, you will kill her!”

“Who is she?” shouted some one, while another voice, in a derisive
tone, yelled out amidst screams of laughter—

“Is she Rose? Rose? de coal-brack Rose? I wish I may be shot if I don’t
lub Rose!”

Amidst the thunders which followed, some one shouted from a distant
part of the mob, to the man with the axe—

“Go on, Jim! It’s all pretence with their sick women!”

“Down with the door—they don’t escape us that way! Look out for your
bones, old covey, when we catch you!”

The axe was again swung back, but the doughty doctor still persisted—

“Stop!” he shouted again, in a tone so startling for energy of command,
that the axe was again lowered.

“Are you Americans? Have you mothers and sisters?”

“Yes, but they ain’t black gals!” gibed one of the mob, and set the
rest into a roar once again.

“I appeal to you as men—as brothers and fathers, do not murder my poor
patient!”

“Who is that noisy fellow?” bellowed a brutal voice below.

“I am a physician! I have nothing to do with this house or its
principles; I only beg to be permitted to save my patient!”

“What is your name, I say?” bellowed the hoarse man again. “Out with
it! We’ll know you—some of us!”

The name was mentioned. There was a momentary pause, and a low murmur
ran through the crowd; then shout after shout of applauding huzzas.

“We know you!”

“Just like him!”

“Noble fellow!”

“The good doctor! Huzza! huzza!”

And so the cry went up on all sides, for the doctor’s reputation for
benevolence was as wide as that of John Jacob Astor for the opposite
trait.

There seemed to be a vehement consultation among what appeared the
leaders of the mob, which lasted but for a moment or two, when one who
stood upon the top step looked up, and in a firm, respectful voice,
said to the doctor—

“It’s all right, sir, about you! We shall let the women pass out! But
you must clear the house of them!”

“But it is dangerous to move my patient.”

“We cannot help that, doctor; we do this for your sake, not theirs, for
they ought every one of them to be burned, and we are determined to
abate the nuisance of this house. So hurry them along here quick, for
the boys will not keep quiet long.”

“Yes, hurry them women along; we’ll let them go this time.”

“All but that lecturing _lady_ (?), who says that she would as soon
marry a negro as a white man!”

“Yes, all but her; we want to be rid of such creatures; let’s duck her
in the Hudson.”

“No, boys, we will make no distinction. We have promised—let the woman
go.”

“Down with the lecturing women and their black lovers!”

“Duck the hag! we’ll wash off the scent for her!”

Cries such as these convinced the doctor that indeed no time was to be
lost, particularly as the sound of the axe was now heard below in good
earnest. Approaching the bed hastily, he took the shivering form of
the panic-stricken woman, who had heard distinctly these last ominous
cries, into his arms. She clutched him with a desperate grip, while he
hurried down the stairs.

On the way, he met the Spiritual Professor in the passage, surrounded
by the women of the house, who were clustered about him, in the
seemingly vain hope of obtaining from him something of that ethereal
consolation and strength, of which he was the so much vaunted
Professor. Indeed, he himself now seemed the most woful, of all the
whimpering, terrified group, in want of any kind of strength, whether
spiritual or otherwise; and his teeth literally chattered, as he
clutched at the doctor’s passing arm.

“Wh—wh—what shall we do? They mean to burn the house, don’t they?”

“Do?” said the doctor, sternly, shaking off his grasp. “Try and be a
man, if you’ve got it in you! Get these women out of the house, and
take yourself off on your spiritual legs as fast as you can, or you may
make some ugly acquaintances.”

The Professor still clung to his skirts.

“Oh Lord! the doctrine of correspondences does not sanction—”

“Go to the devil, with your correspondence, or I shall kick you out of
my path!” roared the angry doctor, while the snivelling Professor, more
alarmed than ever, slunk aside to let him pass. The crash and clatter
from below now announced that the mob had effected an entrance from the
street, and leaving the women, all screaming at the top of their lungs,
around their doughty spiritual guide, he rushed on with his burden
towards the front entrance, which had thus been taken by storm, and was
now rapidly filling with excited men. Some were seizing the furniture,
which they began to demolish, while others hurried forward to intercept
him.

“It is the sick woman. Remember your promise; let me pass.”

“Yes, that’s the good doctor; let him pass, boys.”

“No, not yet!” roared a burly-looking ruffian, pressing through the
throng. “We must see who it is he has got there. Who is she?” and he
roughly dragged aside the shawl that partially covered her face.

“Monster!” shouted the excited doctor, “the woman is dying! Make way!
Let me pass!”

“Not so fast!” said the ruffian, resisting his forward rush. “I
shall see! I shall see! Boys, here she is! By G—d, this is she, that
lecture-woman; she wants to marry a nigger, hah! We won’t let her go.”

“But you will!” said the doctor, releasing one arm, with which he
struck the ruffian directly in the mouth, and with a force that sent
him reeling backwards.

“Good! good!” shouted twenty voices; “served him right, doctor.”

The fellow had rallied instantly, and was rushing, like a wild bull,
headlong upon the doctor, when several powerful men threw themselves
between the two, seizing the ruffian at the same time.

“No, Jim, you stand back!” said one of them, brandishing a heavy axe
before his eyes. “You touch that gentleman again, and I’ll brain you!”

“It’s a shame!” interposed others. “It’s the good doctor who nurses the
poor for nothing. Doubt if he gets a cent for that creature.”

“Yes, if she was the devil’s dam herself, we promised the good man to
let her go. Stand back, boys, and let the doctor pass.”

An opening was accordingly formed, through which the doctor hastened to
make his way. When he made his appearance at the door, he was greeted
with three wild, hearty cheers for himself, and as many groans and
hisses for the character of the woman whom he bore, the news of the
identification of whom had instantly found its way to the outside.

Regardless of all this, and only congratulating himself upon the
prospect of getting his patient off alive, he pressed rapidly through
the crowd, with the purpose of bearing her to the shelter of his own
bachelor home.

The mob now instantly occupied the building, which was gutted by them,
and the shattered contents, along with its occupants, men and women,
roughly hurled into the street. Some of the former were very severely
handled, and among the rest, the Spiritual Professor had his share of
_material_ chastening. The mob found him under a cot-bed, with three
or four feminine disciples of his spiritual correspondences piled over
him, or clinging distractedly to his nerveless limbs.

They dragged him out by the heels, with his squalling cortege trailing
after him, and finding that the occult professor of spiritualities had
gone into a state of obliviousness, or rather fainted, they proceeded,
in their solicitude for his recovery, to deluge his person with sundry
convenient slops, which shall be nameless, and afterwards kicked him
headlong into the street below, where the screaming boys pelted him
with gutter-mud and rotten eggs, until, finding his _spiritual_ legs,
as he had been advised—it is to be supposed—of a sudden, he made
himself scarce, down Barclay Street, in an inappreciable twinkle.

In a word, the people, in this instance, as in many others, when they
have found it necessary to take the laws of decency and common sense
into their own sovereign hands, did the work of ridding themselves
of this most detestable nuisance effectually. The Graham House was
broken up, and although the pestilent nest of knaves and fools who most
delighted there to congregate, have endeavored, in subsequent years,
to reassemble, and renew the ancient character of the place as their
head-quarters, yet the attempt has only been attended with partial
success.

The blow was too decisive on this night; for, although the walls were
left standing, the proprietor was given clearly to understand, that the
unnatural orgies of amalgamation would not be tolerated again by the
community, under the decisive penalty of no one stone left standing
upon the other, of the building.

He took the hint, and it was about time! It has been fairly conjectured
by this time, from the glimpses we have taken of the interior, that the
house was the scene of other vices than those implied in amalgamation
merely. It will be seen in yet other words and years how much there was
of real danger to the well-being of society, in the doctrines taught
and practised within its unhallowed walls. No one lesson could ever
prove sufficient for these people; they enjoy a fatal impunity even
now, and we shall endeavor that men shall know them as they are!




                              CHAPTER IV.

             BOANERGES PHOSPHER, THE SPIRITUAL PROFESSOR.

  He strikes no coin, ’tis true, but coins new phrases,
  And vends them forth as knaves vend gilded counters,
  Which wise men scorn, and fools accept in payment.
                                             SHAKESPEARE.

  None of these rogues and cowards, but Ajax is their fool!
                                                    _Idem._

That the world has dealt hardly by its heroes, is a truism we need
not insist upon at this late day. But whether the world knows who its
heroes are, is another question, and one more open to controversy. Now
I insist that the world does not know, or else Boanerges Phospher, the
Spiritual Professor, would long since have been stoned and persecuted
into one of the holy company of saints and martyrs!

There are several kinds of heroism heretofore known among men. There
is the fierce, aggressive heroism of the soldier and conqueror—there
is the “glib and oily” heroism of the politician—the calm, enduring
heroism of the saint—the lofty, death-defying heroism of the patriot;
but it remains for modern times to record the brazen heroism of
impudence. Impudence, too, has its grades and degrees—its ancient types
and its more modern ones—but as they all veil their brassy splendors,
merging their separate rays in the central effulgence of our spiritual
Colossus, we shall waive their particular enumeration in favor of the
individualised impersonation of them all.

Ah, verily—and this is he!—our Spiritual Professor! Born
in Yankee-land, of course, the earliest feat of Boanerges
Phospher—literally, according to his own account of it—was to pry up a
huge stone upon one of the sterile paternal acres: for what purpose,
would you suppose? To place his feet upon the soil beneath, because the
foot of no other man could have pressed it!

A laudable ambition, truly, but one which, somehow, unluckily, suggests
that

  “Fools may walk where angels fear to tread!”

It was a necessary sequence to the career of this modern Columbus
of untrodden discovery, that we find his “first appearance upon any
stage” to have been, while so pitiably ignorant as to be barely able
to read his own language by spelling the words, and write his own name
execrably, as PROFESSOR OF ELOCUTION!

Admirable! admirable! Why make two bites of a cherry? Why not step at
once where no foot of _such_ man ever trod before?

Shade of Blair! Look ye not askance at this daring intruder upon your
classic company! He intends you no harm; he only means to re-fuse his
brass back into copper s!

In lecturing on Elocution, our _Professor_, of necessity, gradually
learned to read—with fluency, we mean—that is, he could “talk right
eout,” like the head boy in a class, though it was in a nasal
sing-song, more remarkable for its pietistic intonation than its
rhythm. This was, no doubt, in a great measure owing to the facility
of whining he had acquired, in his more juvenile experience, as a
preacher of some three or four different _liberal_ sects. We class
these as mere experiments, as purely preliminary trials of strength,
before he entered the true arena of his professorship.

The professorship, to be sure, was self-instituted—self-ordained—and
why not self-asserted? There were professors of hair-invigorating
oils, professors of dancing, professors of rat-catching, professors of
hair-eradication, professors of cough-candy, professors of commercial
book-keeping and running-hand writing, professors of flea-powder and
bug-extermination—and why not a professor of elocution? The very
gutter-mud germinates professors in this free country! They grow like
fungi out of wallowing reptiles’ heads; and who need be surprised, in
America, at receiving the card of his boot-black, inscribed Professor
Brush; his chimney-sweep, Professor Soot; or be appalled by the bloody
apparition of a missive from his butcher, emblazoned, “Professor
Keyser, Killer!”

No disrespect, mark you, is intended to be either understood or
implied, for the gentlemen of the various professions above enumerated,
for they are all respectable in their way, and to be respected, outside
of their professorships. But that is rather a serious name, as we
understand it—one that the world has been accustomed to look up to with
veneration—proportioned, until these “modern instances,” to the vast
and profound learning which had made it, in the old world, the synonyme
of almost patriarchal inspiration—the grand, firm, and stable bulwark
of human progress, and its lofty future; of infinite science, and its
clear, glorious myths!

This thing of learning seems so easy, that your starveling Yankee
perceives no difficulties in the way, and glides into its penetralia
“like a book,”—only that he never reads it! He is at once at home in
all topography, as much as if he were in Kamtschatka, or the “Tropic
Isles.” Furred cloaks or breadfruit leaves are all the same to him;
he was born knowing, and of course could not do less than know a
great deal more about Kamtschatka and the “Tropic Isles” than their
furred and fig-leaved denizens. Brass is the Yankee’s capital, and no
wonder they made the great discoveries of copper on Lake Superior,
so extensively patronised by New-light sages. It is the offset to
California gold; for, while one promises an infinite supply of the
substantial basis of commerce and all trade, the other promises to
furnish, in perpetuity, the crude material of impudence.

We mean no insinuation in regard to the Spiritual Professor, however
much he may have had to do, by “spherical influence,” in precipitating
the discovery of this great mine of the metal so much in favor with
the sages above mentioned—and the remainder of the sect to which the
Professor belonged—the motto of which is, that, “Out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings shall ye be confounded.” Yet we can freely venture
to assert, that he had no connection whatever with those unfortunate
commercial results, which, in the first place, nearly, if not entirely,
swamped the great Patron of the enterprise. The mind of our Professor
was necessarily not of that vast reach and generalising comprehension,
which could lead to the Behemoth stride and wizard calculation of
results, which had enabled his master thus confidently to speculate in
so subtle a material.

The operations of our Professor were essentially minified; that is,
their sphere and scope had been particularly narrow. He was heroic
enough, Heaven knows; but then his heroism was of that dashing
character which only required a patron to illustrate and make it known.

Having published a book upon this occult (in his hands) science of
elocution, which was, of course, written for him by another party, he
suddenly felt himself inspired with a new inspiration.

He had already taught men how to talk, and it now became necessary,
and indeed spiritually incumbent upon him, to teach them how to live.
He accordingly announced himself, forthwith, as Revelator-in-Chief of
the spiritual mysteries of the universe. Every reader will probably
remember those flaming programmes of lectures which appeared, by the
half column, in a New York paper, for a long period, daily, between
’43 and ’45. Mendacious impudence never vaulted higher! Our Spiritual
Professor was in his glory now.

An illustrious man lived once in Sweden. He was humble, pure and firm.
His astonishing works on scientific subjects left the mind of his
period far behind him, utterly confounded by his direct and stringent
elucidation of the most subtle of the purely physical laws. It seemed
a miracle to them; they found their professional accuracy so far
surpassed, that they durst not do more than wonder. Work after work
of this amazing intellect came forth, dressed in a language, while
handling such themes, common to the world of science.

Then came a sudden change, and this vast mind, which heretofore had
dealt in simple _demonstration_ with mankind, threw down its compass
and its squares, and, in the language of humility, proclaimed itself
a Medium. The God of Jacob and humanity had revealed himself to him,
not in the burning bush of mystery, but in the lustrous quiet of a
calm repose. He had talked scientific truth before, but now he spoke
of spiritual things—a chosen Medium between God and man! His theme was
far beyond all science. We have nothing to do with his wide postulate;
his name was too sublime and venerable among the patriarchs of mankind,
for me to speak of it otherwise in this connection, than in disgust
and loathing of the profanation to which it has been subjected, in our
country, by monkeyish and parrot-tongued ignoramuses.

Our learned and sagacious Professor of Elocution, happening to stumble
upon some of the earlier translations of the works of Swedenborg,
seized upon them with great avidity, and, as he had now learned to read
without spelling the words out loud, he managed to get them by heart
with most surprising facility, and, to the astonishment of Jew and
Gentile, suddenly proclaimed himself an apostle of the new church.

To be sure, when one considers this undertaking in the abstract, it
was rather a serious one; one indeed that would have appalled most
men, as the works of Swedenborg really consisted of some forty-odd
huge volumes, written in Latin, not a line of which the Professor
could translate; and the hand-books he had fallen upon were merely
translations of introductory compends. What though the field was
one of the most prodigious in human learning—what though the themes
were the highest that could occupy mortal contemplation—what though
the patient diligence of an ordinary lifetime would scarce suffice
intelligent persons for the studious comprehension of the truths taught
by this wonderful man? it was all the same to the Professor; and,
indeed, instead of being discouraged, he was rather encouraged, by the
magnitude of the undertaking! An exponent of Swedenborg! Well, why not?
He could spell words in three syllables!

Big with the prodigious discovery of his own capabilities and the new
mine of doctrinal science, the learned Professor rushed precipitately
into the ever-extended arms of his Patron saint, the nourisher and
cherisher of empirics and empiricism. And why should he not be so,
forsooth? It was _cheap_, not “too much learning,” that had made _him_
“mad” as well! _He_ too had found it to his account to scorn the
decencies of a thorough education, and from a printer’s devil, with
a mind that had fed upon scraps and paragraphs, had doggedly risen,
through the help of the familiar demon of labor, which possessed him,
into this position of Patron to all new-comers—provided they bore
“new-lights” and _coppers_!

It mattered little to this self-constituted and unscrupulous dignitary
whether the theme was new to the world, or only to himself; the latter
was most likely to be the case with one who had probably never read
a dozen books consecutively through in his life, and who, from gross
physique, dress, habits, and mental idiosyncrasies, was necessarily
incapacitated for comprehending the fine and subtle relations of truth;
who, even with the sovereign aid of the new-light Panacea, bran-bread,
had seemed to be capable of digesting but a fragment of truth at a
time, and that fragment, too, gobbled without the slightest regard for
its relations to other truths.

Here was a happy appreciation with a vengeance!—was it knave of fool,
or fool of knave—which? The question is interesting! At all events,
the results were the same, so far as the public were concerned. It
was forthwith announced that the Patron Saint, like some patient
and watchful astronomer, sweeping the blue abyss of heaven with
ever-constant glass, had suddenly discovered a new luminary—it
certainly had a fiery tail, but whether it was going to prove a genuine
comet or not, let the following announcement bear witness:

“Professor Boanerges Phospher lectures to-night in the Tabernacle,
which it is thought may possibly contain some small portion, at least,
of the enormous crowd which will of course assemble to hear his
profound and luminous exposition of the mysteries of the universe. The
doctrine of correspondences, as propounded by the learned Professor,
reveals the true solution of all problems which affect the relations
of mankind to the spiritual world. Indeed, his enormous research
and unappreciable profundity have at length enabled him to _solve
the problem of the universe_, which he, with the most luminous
demonstration, will educate even the infant mind to comprehend with
sufficient clearness, in five easy lessons, or lectures on every other
night, at one dollar each. The whole subject of man, in his eternal
relations to God, to the spiritual world, and to the earth, will be
mathematically expounded to the full comprehension of all.”

Here follows the programme:

“Professor Boanerges Phospher undertakes to show in the lecture of
to-night, That in the universe there are these three things: end,
cause, and effect; that infinite things in the infinite are one; that
they constitute a triune existence—they are three in one; that the
universe is a work cohering from firsts to lasts.

“That _Good_ is from a twofold origin, and thence adscititious. That
celestial good is good in essence, and spiritual good is good in form.
That the good of the inmost Heaven is called celestial; of the middle
Heaven, spiritual; and of the ultimate Heaven, spiritual, natural. That
good is called lord, and truth servant, before they are conjoined, but
afterwards they are called brethren. That he who is good is in the
faculty of seeing truth, which flows from general truths, and this in
a continual series. That good is actually spiritual fire, from which
spiritual heat, which makes alone, is derived.

“That all _Evil_ has its rise from the sensual principle, and also from
the scientific. There is an evil derived from the false, and a false
from evil.

“That gold sig. the good of love. When twice mentioned, sig. the good
of love, and the good of faith originating in love.

“That influx from the Lord is through the internal into the external.
Spiritual influx is founded on the nature of things, which is spirit
acting on matter.

“That physical influx, or natural, originates from the fallacy of the
senses that the body acts on spirit.

“That harmonious influx is founded on a false conclusion, viz.: that
the soul acts jointly and at the same instant with the body. That there
is a common influx; and this influx passes into the life of animals,
and also into the subjects of the vegetable kingdom. That influx passes
from the Lord to man through the forehead—for the forehead corresponds
to love, and the face to the interior of the mind.”

To be followed by questions in the correspondences by any of
the audience who may choose to ask them, such as, To what does
“horse” correspond?—To what does “table,” “chair,” or “soap-stone”
correspond?—To what does “hog,” “goose,” “butter-milk,” or “jackass”
correspond? &c., &c. To all of which questions the learned lecturer
will give edifying answers from the stand. Admittance, one
dollar—Children, half-price.

This is a long programme, to be sure, and somewhat overwhelming to
we common people, who have been in the habit of regarding certain
subjects with the profoundest veneration, and our modest and capable
teachers with reverence. But the very length of this programme, and
the enormous stretch of the themes, only go, I suppose, to illustrate
the hardihood of our “admirable Crichton,” the professor of the
occult—and the genial and the generous—to call it by its lightest
name—gullibility, of his gaping audience.

Forth went these flaming announcements day by day, on thousand
hot-pressed sheets, until New York became all agog, and the great mass
conceived that they had found a new prophet. All its spectacled and
thin-bearded women forthwith were in arms; the Professor wore his hair
behind his ears, and, of course, was the soft and honey-sucking seraph
of their dreams.

He could be indeed nothing short of seraphim-revealed, for he
discoursed with them in winning tones of mists and mysteries. He
told them bald tales of angels with whom he had been on terms of
intimacy; for he sagaciously kept his master, Swedenborg, mainly in the
background throughout.

Representing himself as the individual recipient of these revelations,
from the spherical ladies who wear wings, and who are habitually
designated as angels by both the sexes, on our little clod of earth,
our champion became, of course, the hero of all such semi-whiskered
maidens or matrons, who, though essentially “pard-like spirits,” were
yet, to reverse the words of Shelley, more “swift,” alias “fast,”
than “beautiful!” It is, of course, to be comprehended that beauty
is comparative as well as wit, and we would no more be understood
as insinuating that these thinly-hirsute virgins and dames, who at
once constituted the principal audience of the mighty Professor, were
themselves in any degree deficient in sympathy either with the man and
his profound doctrines, or the man _per se_, than that we would assert
they understood one word of what he mouthed to them, with his hair
behind his ears.

Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, was successful, and never
was there anything so professionally brilliant as the crowded houses
that he nightly drew. The immense Tabernacle seemed a mere nut-shell;
he could have filled half-a-dozen such houses nightly. The mob had
grown excited by the novelty. The paper of the Patron Saint, at so many
pennies a line, day by day, continued to prostitute its columns to this
vulgar trap of silly servant-maids and profound clerks.

The Professor’s lectures were attended by countless swarms of inquirers
after truth, who, as they were willing to accept a spoken for a written
language of which they knew nothing, permitted him to stumble through
propositions, which, in themselves, were so ridiculously absurd as
even to disarm contempt in the wise, and make denunciation harmless as
superfluous.




                              CHAPTER V.

                BOANERGES AND THE YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN.

              Famine is in thy cheeks,
  Need and oppression stareth in thy eyes,
  Upon thy back hangs ragged misery.
                               SHAKSPEARE.

                        There’s no more
  Mercy in him than there’s milk in the male tiger.
                                            _Idem._


The bowels of Boanerges Phospher, the Spiritual Professor, were
possessed of such extraordinary capacity for yearning over the fallen
and lost condition of his brothers of mankind, that, not content
with saving them by wholesale, and nightly, in those marvellously
spiritualized lectures, his indomitable energies took up the trade of
“_saving_” men individually and by detail.

This, let it be understood, was done between times, by way of
recreation, just to keep his hand in. Let us follow him on one of these
errands of mercy.

In a poor garret of Ann Street, New York, might have been seen, about
these days, a young man, seated in a rickety chair, beside a dirty pine
table, which was plentifully strewn with manuscripts covered with many
a tedious column of figures and mysterious-looking diagrams.

You saw at once, from the disproportionate size of the broad, white,
bulging brow, which brooded heavily over large mournful eyes, and
thin, emaciated features, that he was a mathematician; possessing
one of those precocious and enormous developments of the organs of
calculation, which are so apt, when not diverted by other occupations
and excitements, to consume rapidly the feeble fuel of life in their
consecrated fires.

A wretched cot-bed occupied one corner of the room, which was likewise
strewn with papers and books on mathematical subjects, while on the
mantel lay scattered little heaps of dried cheese and crusts, which
seemed so hardened, that no tooth of predatory mouse had left its mark
thereon.

The young man was dressed in entire conformity with the miserable
appearance of the room. His thin and silky hair hung in lank, clammy
locks about his shockingly pallid features, as he leaned forward on his
elbow, his forehead resting heavily on his thin hand, as he pored over
the papers before him.

“Ah me,” muttered he, “this horrid poverty!” and he threw down his pen
and sank back with a faint, despairing movement.

“My brain is giddy with this dizzy round of figures, figures. My weary
calculation is nearly done, but my over-tasked brain sickens. Ah, but
for just one good meal, to strengthen me for a few hours, and I could
finish it—finish my glorious work!”

At this moment a rapid step was heard ascending the creaking stairs;
the door flew open rudely, and, without any announcement, the Spiritual
Professor, with his hair all nice behind his ears, came bustling
forward toward the table, beside the fainting young student. Rubbing
his hands at the same time in prodigious glee of anticipation, he
exclaimed—

“Ha! my son! my spiritual child! how is it with you? Have you finished?
Is it done?”

The poor student shook his head slightly, and muttered feebly—

“No, no; I cannot finish it.”

The eager face of the Professor turned suddenly very blank and very
white at the same time, as, straightening himself, he stammered out—

“Wh-what! c-cannot finish it! You _must_ finish it! you _shall_ finish
it!” and then continuing with greater vehemence, without apparently
noticing that the weary head of the poor being before him was slowly
drooping yet lower—

“Here’s a pretty business, to be sure! This is the reward I am to get
for all I have done for you—for all my efforts to advance you in the
world—for all the heavy expenses I have incurred in bringing you on
from Cincinnati, and supporting you here! The evil spirits must have
re-entered the boy! Have I not striven for these six months faithfully,
with all my spiritual strength, to drive them forth, that I might
_save_ him? The boy must be born again—he must be regenerated once
more. _Cannot_ finish it! He must be chastened, to rebuke this evil
spirit in him; he must be reduced to bread and water. I must recall
my liberal allowance for his food; he has been living too high. The
evil demon has probably entered him through a meal of fat pork!” and
the spiritually outraged Professor sniffed with an indignant and eager
sniffle, that he might detect the presence of the forbidden food.

The poor youth, in the mean time, had been slowly sliding from his
chair, and, as the Professor turned aside with the air of an injured
cherub, the body lost its balance, and the fainting youth fell to the
floor.

“Ha! what now?” shouted our cherub with the hair behind his ears,
springing into the air with a nervous agility, as if he in reality
wore wings. He placed himself on the opposite side of the room in a
twinkling, and then turning his face, ghastly with fright, exclaimed,
“I thought the house was coming down!” and seeing the prostrate body,
he walked around it as cautiously as a cat crouches, and, with a
stealthy inspection, peered into the half-open eyelids, at the upturned
eyes, but without touching the body.

“Wh-why, the fellow’s gone and died! There goes my great speculation!”
and springing back suddenly, he rushed towards the table, and seizing
convulsively the papers, ran his eye eagerly over them, while his
hands trembled violently; and his lips turned as ashy blue as those
of the poor victim at his feet, while, with an expression of despair,
too unutterable for words to paint, he groaned out in frantic
exclamations—“No, no, no, it is not finished; nobody else can do it
but him! I’m ruined! I’m ruined! Oh, my money’s gone—my money’s gone!
To think that he should die, after all I’ve done for him—after all my
liberality! O! O! O! booh! booh! hoo!”

At this melting crisis, a slight noise caused him to turn his head; the
apparent corpse was drawing up one foot, and making some other feeble
movements, which showed that life was not entirely extinct.

At this sight the eyes of Boanerges flew open as wide, in a stare of
ecstacy, as they had before been stretched in horror, until their
suffusion “with the briny,” as Mr. Richard Swiveller would say, had
caused them to momentarily wink.

“Why, he ain’t dead yet! my speculation is safe. Some water! Where’s
some water? Get some water!” and he ran peering and dodging around the
room with an uncertain air, as if the new influx of joy had bewildered
his seraphic mind. After some little delay he found the pitcher, which
had been standing all the time in full view, within three feet of him;
he wildly dashed more than half the contents into the face of the
victim, who instantly drew a long sobbing breath, and in a moment or
two opened his eyes.

This so increased the ecstacy of the Professor, that he now ventured to
kneel beside him, and, in his eagerness, forgetting to use the tumbler
that was standing near, he nearly crushed the poor student’s teeth down
his throat, in his awkward endeavors to administer drink to him from
the heavy pitcher—exclaiming, during the process, “Drink! drink! my
son. Don’t die, for Heaven’s sake! Remember my liberality—my generous
sacrifices to advance you in the world. Remember our almanac—your great
work, that is to make your fortune. Remember how you have been saved!”

“Starved, you mean,” feebly whispered the young man, whom a few
draughts of the precious fluid had rapidly revived.

“St-a-a-r-r-ved! does he say?” yelled Boanerges, shrinking back as if
horrified, and nearly dropping the body he was supporting from his
arms. Then, suddenly releasing one arm, he smoothed back his hair
gently; that radiant, angelic expression of sweet humility, for which
it was so famous among the female part of his select and nightly
audiences, overcame his face as with a halo, and leaning down, so as to
look into the eyes of his victim, he asked, in a liquid voice, “My son,
have I—have I—thy spiritual father, starved thee?” and then tenderly
he gazed into his eyes. With a look of assured self-satisfaction that
those siren tones had done the business, he silently awaited the
answer to the gentle and rebukeful question. But no answer came to the
sweet, lingering look; the young man only closed his eyes heavily, and
shuddered.

“My son, my son!” continued the Professor, in yet more grieved and
meek, and dulcet tones. “My spiritual son, have I starved thee? have I
not been generous to a fault, and even to wronging the beloved child
of my own loins? This room, these writing materials, this tumbler,
this pitcher, that delightful bed, are they not all my free-will gifts
to thee for thy own advancement, to enable thee to glorify God in thy
works? Have I not rather saved thee from starving? You had nothing
when I took you up, to patronise your genius, and bring you before the
world; and now you have plenty! See, see, your mantel is even now
crowded with bread and cheese, that you are wasting here in the midst
of such superlative abundance.”

The young man, at the mention of the bread and cheese, turned his head
aside with an expression of bitter loathing and disgust.

“Pah!” he muttered; “the very name of it makes me sick; I have tasted
nothing else for the last six months. That is what is killing me; my
stomach can retain it no longer! Who can keep body and soul together on
thirty cents a week?”

“Horror!” exclaimed the Professor, rolling up his eyes meekly. “To
think of such frantic extravagance! And besides, my son, your spiritual
strength should have sustained you—the success of your great work, the
prospect of future glory! A _man_ starve on bread and cheese! Why, who
ever heard of such a thing? Why, when I was a boy of ten years of age,
I started alone, on foot, to cross the Alleghanies, to make my way to
the North to school. My father had moved West when I was very young. I
started with only one loaf of white bread in my bundle, when the whole
country was wild and full of bears and wolves. The wolves chased me,
and I climbed a tree; they surrounded it, barking and gnashing their
teeth, to get at me; there were five hundred wolves at least, but I in
my faith kept my strength, and remained cool as Daniel in the lion’s
den, until at last they kept me there so long, I fell asleep, when the
limb broke, and I fell down into the midst of them; the wolves were so
frightened, that they all took to their heels and ran away, leaving me
safe. _There_ is a specimen of the spiritual strength that faith gives,
and should encourage you never to give up and faint by the way. Had
you possessed more of such faith, my son, you would never have been
stretched here, upon this floor, in such a condition, and talking about
starving on bread and cheese. It is the soul, my son, the regenerate
soul, that sustains the heroic man on earth, as I have so often
endeavored to teach you.”

“Yes,” groaned the poor youth, with a gesture of impatience. “The body
must live too, and life cannot be sustained so long upon unvaried food.”

“Listen, my son!” said the patient saint at his head—“listen, and
you shall hear what I accomplished on that single loaf of bread. I
travelled on with my little bundle on my shoulder, containing the
home-spun suit I was to wear when I arrived at school, and my loaf
of bread. I travelled on till my clothes were all worn out, and my
shoes full of holes, and my feet were so sore and swollen that I was
afraid to pull off my shoes, for fear I should not be able to get them
on again. So I waded across all the brooks and mountain streams with
my clothes on, until, at last, one afternoon, when high up in the
mountains, my strength gave out, and I laid me down in the howling
wilderness, thinking I must die. The weather was very cold, and my
clothes, all wet from crossing the streams, were freezing, and the
dreaded sleepiness was coming over me, when a good widow woman, who
lived with her children on the mountains, and was out gathering wood,
accidentally found me. She took me up in her arms, and carried me
to her hut, and laid me on her bed, where I slept all night. In the
morning, when I opened my eyes, I saw her breaking the hot Indian-corn
bread, and giving it to her children. I told her if she would give me
some of her corn bread, I would divide my loaf of white bread with her
and her children. She eagerly accepted the offer, for such a luxury
as white bread had been long unknown to them, and that was my first
speculation! While they ravenously devoured my loaf, I feasted upon her
rich hot bread. My soul overflowed with delight as I witnessed their
intense enjoyment of the meal I had been thus instrumental in bringing
them, and I felt as if the Lord had thus enabled me to fully repay them
for their kindness. I rose to depart, and the good woman, filling my
bundle with a large piece of her hot bread, sent me, with her blessing,
on my way rejoicing. Thus, you see, my dear son, how, through the
spiritual strength which faith imparts, and which you so much need,
I was enabled to cross the Alleghany mountains alone, at ten years of
age, with nothing but my loaf of white bread, and without so much as a
bit of cheese, or a cent in my pocket, and attained to the great goal
of my ambition, the school; and from whence, by the aid of selling
an occasional button from my jacket, I have been able to rise to my
present position as professor and patron of struggling genius.”[2]

“Ah!” said the young man, “words, words! Give me to eat—I am starving!”
and his head sank back once more.

The Professor again deluged him with water, and, profoundly surprised
and alarmed that the honeyed eloquence of his sagacious narrative had
proved unavailing in convincing his victim that he could and ought to
live upon faith, came to the desperate resolution of being guilty of
the extravagance, for once, of a _small_ bowl of soup to resuscitate
his victim, and depositing his head upon some books, though the pillow
was equally convenient, he hurried off to the nearest eating-house,
with his hands upon his pockets, which were overflowing with gold, as
he was then in the meridian height of his prosperity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sequel to this particular story is a short one. The young man
revived with the change of a single nutritious meal, and with it
returned the courage of even the trodden worm; for he now stoutly told
the Spiritual Professor that, unless he furnished him with ample means
to support life, he would not touch an another figure of the immense
and complicated calculations on which he had been so long engaged.

   [2] Incredible as it may seem, we pledge our personal veracity that
   this bald and silly narration, which appears to be merely a foolish
   burlesque, is a _bona fide_, _et literatim_, _et punctuatim_,
   transcript, as close as it is possible for memory to furnish, of
   stories that were, at least as often as five days out of the seven,
   related at the dinner-table at which Boanerges presided, to long
   double lines of gaping women, who, obedient to the irresistible
   spell he bore, had followed up this maudlin Proteus of Professors,
   as disciples of water-cure, through his latest metamorphoses, into
   physician of such an establishment in Boston. It was _thus_ he
   exhorted them to faith, and encouraged his backsliders.

The Professor, of course, resisted to the last, and quoted the
correspondences upon him, with desperate fluency. But when the young
man coolly seized the manuscript on the table before him, and held it
over the flickering flame of the miserable dip candle, which had now
been of necessity lighted, the Professor sprang forward to arrest his
hand, shrieking—

“I will! I will! for God’s sake, stop!—how much do you want?”

“Five dollars a week!” was the cold response, as the flame caught the
edges of the paper.

“I’ll give it! I’ll give it! What fearful extravagance! My God! put it
out!”

“Pay me five dollars at once,” said the other.

“Here it is—here it is!” and he jerked, in his excitement, from his
pocket, a dozen gold-pieces of that value, and dashed them upon the
table.

“Take your five dollars! put it out!”

The young man quietly swept the pieces within his reach into a drawer,
which he at the same moment opened; and, extinguishing the margin of
the manuscript, which had burned slowly from its thickness, he replied
deliberately to the Professor, who had shrieked out—

“Do you mean to rob me?”

“No, sir! but I mean to keep this money, and if you approach me, I
shall destroy this manuscript if it cost me my life. You have starved
and outraged me long enough; you expect to make a fortune off my
labors, and kill me with famine just as my work is done. But with all
my humility, abstraction and patience, this is too much! I am roused at
last, in self-defence, and you shall find it so!”

The Professor sank into a chair as if fainting, and for some moments
continued to mutter, with more than the magnanimity of a sick kitten—

“To think! Robbed! All my generosity! The ruffian! Here, to my very
face! What have I gained by saving him?”

This last expression was gasped out, as if the vital breath of the
speaker was passing in the final spasm.

The scene need not be prolonged. The valorous Professor crept away,
cowed beneath the cold, firm, lustrous eye of the now aggressive
victim, whose enthusiasm for science and earnest self-dedication, had
heretofore kept him blinded to a full realisation of all the monstrous
iniquity which had so long been practised upon his abstracted, meek,
and uncomplaining nature. He now determined to take his life into his
own hands, and saw clearly through all the shallow and ridiculous
pretence of patronage and “saving,” by which his single-hearted fervor
had been beguiled.

In a few days it was announced to the Professor, whose faith and
spiritual strength—the same that had scared off the wolves when he fell
among them—had in the interval been restored to their equilibrium, that
the great work was now completed, and the announcement was accompanied
by a proposition on the part of the young mathematician to sell out
to him entire his copyright share in the whole enterprise, at a price
so comparatively insignificant, when the Professor’s own florid
anticipations of future results were considered, that he sprang at the
offer eagerly, and thus possessed himself at once of the “golden goose.”

The young mathematician disappeared, and the Professor was left
exulting in the sole possession of what seemed to him, in vision, the
nearest representative of the gold of Ophir, not to speak of California.

The idea of the young mathematician was, in itself, a practical one,
and seemed rationally conceived.

We have used the word almanac, by which it was designated, but in
reality it very poorly conveys the subtle and singular combinations
which were here brought to bear upon a circular, rotary surface, the
aim of which was, to so far simplify the calculations of interest,
wages, discounts, and a hundred other tedious and difficult problems
occurring in complicated business affairs, that the merchant or banker
had only to glance his eye down a line of figures, to ascertain in
a moment results which would take him, by all the ordinary aids and
processes, a long calculation to arrive at.

It was a brilliant conception, which must prove ultimately a most
successful discovery of the young mathematician, and one which had
cost him many years of careful analysis and profound observation. But
as he handed over the perfected copyright to our astute Professor,
who had just enough of button-trading cunning to perceive the immense
practical results of the enterprise, without the slightest knowledge
of the processes by which it had been perfected, there might have been
noticed upon the face of his former victim, as he pocketed his paltry
bonus, a slight sneer, which would have alarmed any one less gifted
with occasional short-sightedness than our Professor has shown himself
to be.

He made off with the documents in an ecstacy of triumph, and forthwith
began making round purchases of paper, pasteboard, and other mechanical
appliances necessary to his success, to the amount of thousands of his
easily-got gains; and then as heavy sums were as rapidly expended upon
the costly and difficult copper-plate engraving, which was to set forth
in full the triumph, the undivided honors of which he now claimed, to
the world.

There are few of the main printing-offices in the country that had
not, or have not, that famous circular almanac hanging upon their
walls. Unfortunately the Professor had been too eager to promulgate
his triumph, and powerfully illustrated in this experiment the truth
of the old aphorism, “The greater haste the less speed;” for it turned
out, upon a close examination of the long and intricate series of
calculations, by scientific men, that the fatal error of a single
numeral ran throughout its complex demonstration, and rendered
its whole results utterly futile, without the enormous expense of
cancelling the costly copper-plate, and the tremendous edition which
had been already issued. The incorrigible ignorance of the Spiritual
Professor had rendered him incapable of detecting the error himself,
and he had thereby swamped effectually not only his magnanimous
speculation in this particular case, but thoroughly dissipated the
abundant proceeds of his more successful speculation in the spiritual
correspondences.

This little accident threw him upon his shifts, but we shall surely
find him upon his feet again hereafter.

Had not his starving victim subtly worked out a sublime revenge, in
spite of the fact that he had been over and over again so thoroughly
_saved_? So much for Boanerges and the young mathematician.




                              CHAPTER VI.

                        THE NEW “SAVING GRACE.”

                        Thou hast thews
  Immortal, for thou art of heavenly race;
  But such a love is mine, that here I chase
  Eternally away from thee all bloom
  Of youth, and destine thee towards a tomb.
                                    ENDYMION.

                            Fierce, wan,
  And tyrranizing was the lady’s look.
                                 _Idem._


A year, in the life of man, is a long time. Alas! what changes may it
not bring about to any, the strongest of us, the most secure—those
weary, dragging twelve months! Such a period has elapsed in the
chronology of our narrative, since the scenes described as occurring at
the Graham House.

It is late, on a dark stormy evening, and we will look into the
well-stocked half library and half office of a handsome private
residence in Beekman Street, New York.

The cushioned appliances of the most fastidious luxury of repose were
strewed about the room in the strangest disorder of heaped cushions,
fallen chairs, and out-of-place lounges; while books, surgical
instruments, vials, dusty, crusty, broken, and corkless, all mingled in
the desolate confusion which seemed to have usurped the place.

A shaded lamp stood upon the table in the centre of this chaos, and
threw its light upon a large decanter of brandy and a glass beneath.
A deep-drawn moaning sigh disturbs the deathlike silence of the room;
and a broad, stout figure, which had leaned back within the shadow
of a huge cushioned chair beside the table, reached suddenly forward
and clutched the brandy-bottle convulsively. He dashed a great gulp
into the glass, and then, with trembling hand, attempted to carry it
to his lips. After two or three efforts, which proved unavailing from
his excessive nervousness, he replaced the glass, muttering, “Curse
this nervousness! It will not even let me drink my poison any more!”
He shuddered as he turned his head away. “No wonder! how horribly the
hell-broth smells!” He fell back into the deep chair again and was
silent for some time, when, uttering from the depths of his chest that
strange moan, he sprang to his feet.

“I must drink!” he gnashed, as, seizing the decanter again, he filled
the tumbler to overflowing, splashing the dark fluid over everything on
the table. “I shall die if I do not drink! I shall go crazy! I will not
be baffled!”

Without attempting to raise it again to his lips, he bowed them to
the brimming glass, and as the beast drinks, so drank he. Oh, fearful
degradation! Where now is the strong man? that powerful frame would
speak. After leaning the tumbler with his lips and trembling hands in
a long, deep draught, he straightened himself with an expression of
loathing that distorted his face hideously.

“Paugh! Hell should mix more nectar with its chiefest physic! This
stuff is loathsome, and my revolting nerves seem with a separate life
to shudder as the new babe does to hear the asp hiss amidst the flowers
where it sports! Paugh! infernal! that it should come to me in this
short time, even as a second nature, to learn to feed on poisons! It
was not so once; nature was sufficient, aye, sufficient, when the skies
rained glory out of day, and the stars came down in beamy strength
through night! But then! but then! Ah, yes! it had not become necessary
then, that I should be s-a-v-e-d by human love!” and his features
writhed as he prolonged the word.—“S-a-v-e-d! no! no! no heavenly guise
of horrid lust to s-a-v-e me! The chaste and blushing spring came to
the early winter of my sterile life that bloomed beneath its radiant
warmth, and gladdened to grow green and odor-breathed and soft, and
then! oh, horror! horror! I am strong enough to drink again. My nerves
are numbed now; they dare not tremble.”

He seized the decanter once more, and then, with unshaking hand,
conveyed the brimming glass to his lips, and after a deep draught threw
himself upon the chair again, and drawing at the same time a glittering
object from his breast, he leaned forward within the circle of the
lamp-light to regard it as it lay open upon the table before him. This
is the first time we have seen that face clearly—that haggard, pallid
face. Ha! can it be? Those sunken, bloated cheeks! Those dimmed, hollow
eyes, with leaden, drooping lids! O, can it be? Have we known that face
before? God help us! The good Doctor! and only one year!

But see the change! His eye has rested upon that face before him. A
miniature, beautifully executed. In it a charmed art has presided at a
miracle! an arch seraphic brow all “sunnied o’er” by the golden reflex
from its tangled curls, broken in beam and shadow, gracefully glanced a
gay defiance in his eyes, from eyes—so lustrous innocent! You dare not
say they could be less than all divine, but that the sweet mouth spoke
of earth, and every weakness of it, “earthy.”

See how the face of that sad and broken man is changing! those shrunk
and heavy features are re-lit with life, as some dead waste with
sunshine, suddenly. The bright, the tender past; the mellowed, mournful
past, have mounted to the eyes and flushed those massive features once
again. He seems as one transfigured for a moment, while he gazes. The
glory of old innocence has compassed him about, alas! but for a moment!
The tears pour flooding from his eyes, and blot the face whereon he
gazes. A sob—that wild and piteous moan again—and the palsied wreck of
the strong man falls back once more into his cushioned chair. A horrid,
stertorous breathing, most like that of a dying man, fills the gloomy
air of that dim room, and with ashy lips and fallen jaw, he sleeps! Ah,
that seems a fearful sleep, with the tears, warm tears, still pouring,
pouring down the rigid cheek!

The shaded lamp burns on, and fitfully the chaos of that room, here and
there, is touched by its faint light. A slight sound, a rustling tread
is heard, and in a moment, a woman, dressed in black, with a black veil
about her face, and the umbrella which had protected her from the storm
in her hand, stood beside the sleeper. She evidently had a pass-key,
for she walked forward as one accustomed to use it at all hours and
confidently.

“The beast! Drunk, dead drunk again!” she muttered. “I shan’t get the
money I wanted to-night, that is plain! Curse his obstinacy! After all
my trouble to save him, this is my reward! Worse and worse!”

She sprang forward eagerly as her eye fell upon the jewelled miniature
that lay before him on the table, and snatched it up. “Ha! this will
save me some trouble!” She turned it eagerly over in her hands,
throwing back her veil at the same time, to examine the valuable case
with vivid glistening eyes, that did not seem to notice in the least
degree the exquisite painting within.

“Ah, yes, this is great! Wonder the fool never let me know of it
before! I should have had it in Chatham Street before this! Never mind,
‘never too late,’ I see! It saves me the trouble of exploring his
pockets and table-drawers to-night, for what is getting to be a scarce
commodity. Bah! what silly school-girl face is this? He is falling back
to whine about the past. O, that’s all right. I’ll fill his decanter
for him! He has done enough. He has fed me for a year. I’ll let the
poor wretch off! Yes, I’ve _saved_ him! _I have feasted on him!_” And
she drew herself erect with a triumphant swelling of the whole frame,
which seemed to emit, for the moment, from its outline, a keen quick
exhalation most like the heat-lightning of a sultry summer sky.

She fills the decanter rapidly from a demijohn she drags from a closet
in the room, and places it by his side. She pushes the water-pitcher
far beyond his reach, and then steps forward for a moment into the
light.

Have we ever seen that face before? No! no! It might have been—there
is some resemblance—but this form and face are too full of arrogant
abounding strength to be the same faint bleeding victim of ruthless
persecution that we saw at first! No! no! It cannot be she! Ha! as
she thrusts that jewelled miniature into her bosom and turns to glide
away, I can detect that infernal obliquity of the left eye! O, dainty
Etherial!




                             CHAPTER VII.

                 THE CONVENTICLE OF THE STRONG-MINDED.

                      Her strong toils of grace.
                                            SHAKSPEARE.


Take we a glimpse now of another interior scene in the strange,
mingled life of the great metropolis. In a bare and meanly-furnished
but roomy parlor of a house in Tenth Street, near Tompkins Square, we
find assembled, on one summer’s afternoon, a group of females. There
are perhaps ten of them in all. The characteristic which first strikes
the eye, on glancing around this group, is the strange angularity of
lines presented everywhere, in faces, figures, and attitudes, except
when contrasted with an uncouth and squabby _embonpoint_, which
seemed equally at variance with the physical harmonies, supposed to
be characteristic of the sex. What all this meant, you could not
comprehend at first glance; but the impression was, of something “out
of joint.” Where, or what, it was impossible to conjecture. Some sat
with their bonnets on, which had a Quakerish cut about them, though
not strictly orthodox. Some, conscious of fine hair, had tossed their
bonnets on the floor or chairs, as the case might be. There was,
in a word, a prevailing atmosphere of steadfast and devil-may-care
belligerence—a seeming, on brow, in hand, and foot, that, demurely
restrained, as it certainly was, unconsciously led you to feel that a
slow and simultaneous unbuttoning of the cuffs of sleeves, a deliberate
rolling up of the same, and a dazzling development of lean, taut
tendons, corrugated muscles, and swollen veins, would be the most
natural movement conceivable. Not that this bellicose sentiment, by
any means, seemed to have found its proper antagonism in the forms
and personalities then and there presented; but that you felt, in
the vacant reach and persistent abstraction of the expression, that
the foe, at whom they gazed through the infinite of space, was not an
Individuality, but an Essence,—a world-devouring element of Evil, with
which they warred.

And warriors indeed they seemed—we should say Amazons—wielding, not the
weapons of carnal strife, but those mightier arms with which the Spirit
doth, at times, endow our race. As for the war they waged, whatever
might be the power with whom they were engaged, it seemed to have been
a protracted and a desperate one; for, verily, judging from the harsh
lines that seamed the faces of those present, one would imagine them to
be “rich only in large hurts!”

There were young women present who were clearly under twenty; whose
foreheads, when they elevated their eyebrows, were wrinkled and
parchment-like as any

  “Painful warrior famoused for fight.”

Why this unnatural wilting? would be the certain question of the
cool observer. What fearful wrongs have these women suffered? What
“contagious blastments?” Is the wicked world arraigned against them for
no just cause? Has it combined its respiring masses into one large,
simultaneous breath of volcanic cursings, to be wreaked upon their
unoffending heads alone? To be sure,

  “Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt;”

and can it be that these, too, are “innocents?” It is true, physiology
teaches that, when women wither prematurely, acquire an unnatural
sharpness of feature, become

  “Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity,”

before they have seen years enough for the bloom of the life of true
maturity to have freshened on their cheeks and foreheads, there must be
some cause for it. Common sense teaches, too, that that cause is most
likely to be, originally, rather a physical than a spiritual one—that
mental aberration, dogged and sullen moods, one-ideaed abstractions, a
general peevishness and fretful discontent, a suspicious unbelief in
the warm-blooded genialities, and much enduring sympathies of those
around them, whose lives are intact—or, in other words, who have held
themselves, in health, through nature, near to God—must have its source
in some evil not entirely foreign to themselves.

Ask the wise physician why are these things so? He will answer, God has
so ordered this material universe, that, while we live in it, we must
conform to its laws; that, however powerful our spiritual entity, our
relations to this life must, to be happy, be normal.

But this is prosing. It may, or it may not, account, in part, for the
combative and generally corrugated aspect of this conventicle of the
“strong-minded,” to which we have been introduced. Now let us listen!

She to whom the place of presiding Pythoness seemed to have been, by
general understanding, assigned, now solemnly arose, amidst a sudden
pause of shrill-tongued clatter. She was very tall—nearly six feet.
Her straight figure would have seemed voluptuously rounded, but that
the loose-folded and wilted oval of her face suggested that the plump
bust, with its close, manly jacket of black velvet, buttoned down in
front, might owe something of its elastic seeming roundness to those
conventionalities, _à la modiste_, and otherwise, against which her
principles most vehemently protested. Her flaxen hair emulated the
classic tie of any Venus of them all, on the back part of the head;
while the effulgence of sunny curls flooded the very crow’s-feet in the
corners of her great, cold, dead, grey eyes.

She shook her curls slightly, and spoke:—

“My sisters, we have come together this afternoon, not to talk about
abstractions of right and wrong to our sex; for, upon all these
elementary subjects, our minds are fully made up—all those inductive
processes of which the human intellect is capable, our minds have
already passed through. Our opinions are irrevocably formed, our
conclusions absolute! Woman is oppressed by man. She is denied her
just rights. She is taxed, yet denied the privilege of representation.
She is a slave, without the privileges of slavery! for, in the old
slave-states, the possession of twenty, or thirty, or forty slaves
gives to their master the faintly-representative privilege of an
additional vote, while, to our tyrants, though each may hold, in
reality, a dozen wives, the law grants nothing! Leaving us, in fact,
not even the ‘shadow of a shade’ of a social or civil existence! We
are thus reduced to a condition of insignificance, in relation to the
active affairs of life and the world, that we have determined to be,
both incongruous and insufferable.

“Man, our time-out-of-mind despot, has determined to reduce us to,
and hold us within, the sphere of mere wet-nurses to his insolent
and bifurcate progeny;—we must, forsooth, spawn for him, and then
dedicate our lives to educating his procreative vices into what he
calls manhood! We are wearied with the dull, stale, commonplace of
nursery-slops, and of the fractious squallings of our embryo tyrants!
Man must learn to nurse his own monsters, and we will nurse ours! We
have declared our independence of his tyranny; our great object is to
displace him from his seat of power! For six thousand years he has been
our despot—our ruthless and unscrupulous tyrant! We have therefore a
settlement to make with him—a long arrearage of accounts to be rendered.

“But we are weak, while he is strong! He possesses the physical force,
and all the guarantees of precedence since time began, while we have
only our own weaknesses to fall back upon—what they, in their surfeited
rhythm, style ‘witching graces,’ and ‘nameless charms!’

“Well, we must use these against our obese foe as best we may. We
must clip the claws and teeth of the lion, at any rate; and, in
consideration that the whole World of Past and Present is arraigned
against us, we must accept as our motto, that of the only man who ever
deserved to be a woman, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits,

  “‘The end justifies the means.’”

A small noise—a scarcely sensible “teetering” of pedal extremities
upon the thin carpet, followed this “stern demonstration” of “woman’s
rights,” from the accepted Priestess of the conventicle; when various
exclamations arose from different parts of the room, such as—

“Right! right! End justifies the means, in dealing with the brutes!”

“They give us no quarter, and we will give them none!”

“Nurse their brats, forsooth!”

“We must circumvent them as we can, to obtain our ‘rights!’”

“Yes! yes! All stratagems are fair in love and war!”

Suddenly sprang to her feet a very emphatic, stout woman, straight
and thick-set, with soiled cap, coarse, stubby, grayish hair, sparse,
silvery bristles on her chin, gray, savage eyes, and large fists,
which she brought down with a crash upon the frail chair-back which
constituted the bulwark of her position. In a voice of creaking bass,
she exclaimed—

“The sister is right—they are our oppressors; but it is because we have
been cowards enough to yield them the supremacy; it is nothing but our
own cowardice that is to blame. Man knows, as well as any other animal,
on which side his bread is buttered; we have only got to learn him what
and where his place is, and he will keep it. When I first married,
I had some trouble with my Jonas; but I soon taught him that he had
better be back again in the whale’s belly, than employed in trenching
upon my ‘woman’s rights!’ (A general disposition to laugh, which was,
however, frowned down by the dignified Priestess.)

“It is true, my sisters; we have only to assert our rights, and take
them! Man will never dare to rebel, if we are resolute. Overwhelm
him with our strength—make him feel his littleness beside us,
and he will slink into any hole to hide. I am myself in creed a
non-resistant—(suppressed laughter.) I do not believe in pummelling
truth into man; forced conversions do not last, and should not. But
I will tell you what sort of conversions I do believe in; they are
spiritual. Bow, bend, aye, break his spirit to your will, and then he
is yours; instead of being slave to him, he is your slave. This is what
we want. When he can be reduced to obedience, then he will be happy;
for when he has accepted us as his spiritual guides, and no longer
dreams of lifting his thoughts in rebellion, then will he always go
right. They themselves are for ever confessing, that without us, as
mothers, they would never—the greatest of them—arrive at any thing;
that they owe it all to us—all their greatness, all their goodness. Let
us take the hint, and hold the spiritual birch over them always, and
they will ever remain obedient, for their own good.”

This speech was received with very general approbation; though,
that all did not recognise it as orthodox, became immediately
apparent. A tall, thin, cadaverous-looking lady, with excessively
black hair, and eyes that literally glistered as she rose—the huge
ear-rings and multifarious trinkets about her person quivering with
excitement—exclaimed, in a shrill voice—

“It is false! it is not true that we desire to make slaves of man.
We are opposed to slavery—to slavery of all sorts; and, although man
deserves, on account of his oppressions of the poor negro, to be made a
slave of, if human slavery were to be tolerated, yet we desire rather
to return good for evil; and all we ask is equality in the Senate, in
the Presidential chair, on the bench of justice, in the counting-house
and workshop. We want our rights; our right to marriage as a mere
civil contract—our right to choose with whom we shall enter into that
contract, whether colored or white man, and our right to annul that
contract when it pleases us. What kind of freedom is it, when, if I
choose to marry a man of color, no matter how noble he may be, I am
to be mobbed and driven out of the society of my race; while, if I am
so unfortunate as to marry a white man, who turns out to be a brute
and tyrant, as he is most like to do, and attempt to rid myself of
the horrid incubus, by leaving him, or by suing him for a divorce, I
am equally mobbed by the hue-and-cry, and banished from society as an
outlaw? We want our rights in marriage—we want equality. I can—”

Here the speaker was interrupted by a voice marvellously flute-like and
lingering in its intonations:

  “‘At which, like unbacked colts, they pricked their ears,
  Advanced their eyelids, lifted up their noses,
  As they smelt music.’”

And cold shoulders were simultaneously turned upon the dark-haired and
be-jewelled orator of amalgamation.

The dulcet-toned interrogator, who, to the surprise of all eyes,
appeared a squabby, cottony, pale-eyed, thick-lipped, lymphatic-looking
personage, who wore a wig clumsily, and had no vestige of hair upon
brow or violet eyelids, proceeded, in mellifluous phrase—

“We did not come here to talk about private grievances. The sister who
speaks so fiercely of our rights, in regard to marriage, had better
have had a little experience on the subject. She is, I should judge,
considerably the rise of forty, and has never yet been married; not
even to one of the dark-browed children of Ham, towards whom she
exhibits so decided a leaning. Now, I have been married six times
already—(great sensation,)—and to white men, and gentlemen, at that;
and consider myself, therefore, qualified to speak of marriage.
Marriage is a great blessing; let her try it when she gets a chance,
and she will find it so! (much bristling and fidgeting, the dark-haired
woman looking daggers.) It isn’t marriage that is the great evil,
against which we have to fight—nor it isn’t the slavery of the colored
race, either. It is the slavery of our own race, of our own kith and
kin, of our own blood and complexion. It is the emancipation of our
own fathers, sons, and brothers, from the barbarous penalties of
the penal code. Our erring fathers, sons, and brothers; it is their
cause, my sisters, it is their cause we are called upon to vindicate.
According to our brutal laws, one little frailty, to which we all
may be subject,—one little slip, which any, the purest of us may
make—subjects man to solitary incarceration for life, in which he is
cut off from all loving communion with our sex; or to the horrible
penalty of death by the rope! This, my beloved sisters, is the crying
evil of the day; and man, cruel man, is in favor of such inflictions.
We must soften his flinty heart, through our charms. It is our duty, it
is our mission, to effect amelioration in favor of the erring classes.
We are all erring; and in how much are we better than they?—except,
that through our cunning, and in our cowardice, we have as yet escaped
penalties which, under the same measure of justice, might as well have
been visited upon us. I have visited the penitentiaries and prisons of
many States, that I might carry consolation to the shorn and manacled
children of oppression. I tell you that I have seen among them gods,
whose shattered armor gleamed in light! I have seen Apollo, with his
winged heel chained to a round-shot! I have witnessed more glorious
effulg—”

“Hiss-s-s-s!” “Nonsense!”

“It was Mercury, the god of thieves, you saw with the round-shot at his
heels!” said an oily voice; and, as all eyes turned in that direction,
the forehead of the speaker flushed crimson while she proceeded—

“It is not man at all; it is we who shut ourselves up in tight frocks,
who make hooks-and-eyes our jailors, and ribs of whalebone our
strait-jackets! Let us first free ourselves physically, give our lungs
and hearts room to play, and then we may talk about open battle with
man for our rights. But, as it is, to speak thus, is nonsense. We are
weak, while man is strong; we must fight him with other weapons than
open force. While he laughs at our pretensions, let us, too, laugh
at his foibles, and govern him through them. It was to consult, as
to some consistent and uniform system, by which we should be enabled
to accomplish this result, that we came together this afternoon. It
has been well said, that our motto should be, ‘The end justifies the
means.’ To the weak and the determined, this is a sacred creed, and
we should go forth with it in our hearts, and act upon it in all our
relations towards men. It should be our business to get possession of
them, body and soul. We need their influence, to advance our views, to
obtain our rights. We should be all things to all men; should believe
in the Bible, in Fourier, in Swedenborg, in Joe Smith, or Mahomet,
if necessary, so that the influence be gained. We must seek out
everywhere men who hold places of power and public influence, and win
them—not to our cause, for that would be hopeless—but to ourselves;
and through ourselves to our cause. We must not scruple as to the
means; for ‘the end justifies the means.’ We must find, by whatever
stratagem, art, or intrigue, that may be available, the assailable
points in the characters of those who may be of use to us, and secure
them, at whatever risk of reputation; for, as we will secretly sustain
each other, we will at once dignify ourselves and our cause into
the position of martyrdom, and be able to take shelter behind the
omnipotent cry of persecution. There we are safe.”

“Good!” “Good!” “Right!” “Right!” “Just the thing!” burst from all
sides of the room; while the weather-beaten face,—that is, the
forehead,—of the lithe, glib speaker flushed with momentary exultation,
while she continued, with still greater emphasis—

“Thus banded, my sisters, if we are firm, faithful, and enduring, we
may conquer the world. There is never a period when there is more than
a dozen men who wield its destinies. There are nearly a dozen of us
here present, and there are other spirits that I know, resolute and
strong enough, to be our associates; let us resolve, then, to govern
those who govern; and the romantic fragments of the life of a Lola
Montes will have been firmly conjoined in the fact of a governing
dynasty, the sceptre of which shall be upheld by woman.”

Storms of applause, during which the plain, Quakerish-looking speaker
subsided into her seat. As she did so, there might have been observed,
under the flush of exultation which mantled her brow, a singular
obliquity of the left eye! Ha! Etherial!




                             CHAPTER VIII.

                              INTRUSION.

  ’Tis he! I ken the manner of his gait—
  He rises on the toe; that spirit of his
  In aspiration lifts him from the earth.
                                SHAKSPEARE.

  A barren-spirited fellow! one that feeds
  On objects, arts, and imitations.
                              _Idem._

  This is a slight, unmeritable man,
  Meet to be sent on errands.
                              _Idem._


We will now enter one of the upper rooms of the notorious Graham House,
with the interior of which we have before been familiarised, and which
had been reopened, on a modified basis. A single glance at the confused
piles of manuscripts, books, and papers, scattered about the room and
on the table, mingled with stumps of pens and cigars, and a long-tubed
meerschaum, showed that it could be no other than the characteristic
den of a literary bachelor, who, with chair and table drawn close to
the stove, sat there to show for himself, earnestly engaged in what
seemed to be the business of his life—writing.

You saw in a moment that this was not a Northern man, for in
addition to the long, black, and wavy hair, the dark, bronzed,
and vaulting features indicated clearly a Southern origin. He was
evidently young—certainly not more than twenty-seven, judging, as one
instinctively does, by contour of person and features, and not by the
expression of the face. But that expression, when you saw it, as he
lifted his head, at once left you in doubt whether it could possibly
belong to so immature a period of life. Although the brow was broad,
and mild as that of a child, yet there was a solemn and unnatural
fixedness in the whole face, which, united with the cold stillness of
the great, gray, hollow eyes, told at once a dreary tale of suffering,
which sent an involuntary shudder through your soul. Where the
expression rested most, it was impossible for you to tell; but the
feeling it conveyed was one of absolute horror. That a face, which
seemed so young, should be one that never smiled!—And could the story
that it told be true? Could it be that for years that face had never
smiled?

A light tap was heard at the door, and, with a momentary frown of
vexation at the interruption, he turned his head, and a young man
entered the room, with somewhat hesitating step, which showed that he
was by no means certain of his ground.

He was slight and thin, something below the average height, with even
a darker complexion than that of the face we have just described; his
black hair, and preternaturally black and vivid eyes, glittered beneath
straight, heavy brows, which nearly met. His nose was prominent and
partly arched; and there was, in the whole bowed bearing and cat-like
gait of this person, an inexplicably strange and foreign look, which,
alike in all countries, characterises that fated race which is yet an
outcast among the nations.

His greeting was singularly expressive of eager appreciation, while
that of his host to him was cold, distant, and merely polite. Pushing
aside his writing materials, as he handed him a chair, Manton—for such
was the name of our young writer—turned upon his visitor a frigid look
of inquiry, and said, with a formality almost drawling—

“Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, I hope it is well with you this evening?”

His visitor, in rather a confused manner, commenced—“Ye-es, yes—I—I
fear I am intruding on your seclusion; but p-pardon me, I cannot bear
any longer to see you thus seclude yourself from all the amenities of
social life. You need relaxation; your stern isolation here with the
pen, and pen alone, is playing wild work with your fine faculties.
Pardon me, if I insist upon it, that you must and should accept
the sympathies of the men and women around you. In the doctrine of
unity in diversity, Fourier demonstrates that there is nothing more
fatal to consistent development of both body and mind, than entire
pre-occupation in a single object or pursuit.”

Detecting a shade of vexation, at this juncture, crossing the open
brow of Manton, Doctor Ebenezer Willamot Weasel hastily reiterated his
apologies.

“I beg of you not to mistake my zeal for impertinence. I have already
received much good and many valuable truths from conversation with you,
and I conceive myself under strong personal obligations of gratitude
to you, that I hope may plead for me in extenuation of what you, no
doubt, consider an impertinent intrusion. I would, as some measure of
acknowledgment for such obligations, beg to be permitted to protest
with you against this dangerous and obstinate isolation from all human
sympathies, in which your life, dedicated to literary ambition, seems
to be here fixed.”

“My good friend, Doctor Weasel, my life is my own, and my purposes are
fixed. I need no sympathisers, since I am sufficient unto myself. They
would only distract and minify the higher aims of my life. You may
call it literary ambition, but I call it a settled and sacred purpose
to achieve good in my day and generation. I am content, sir! Do not
attempt to disturb that contentment!”

This reply was somewhat curtly delivered, and seemed to discompose the
Doctor, who, however, hesitatingly persisted—

“Ah! ah! ah! yes! I expected to hear something of the sort from you,
of course, but I beg you to consider that, under the harmonic law of
reciprocation or mutual support and benefits, discovered by Fourier,
and which lies at the base of all true organisation, you have no more
right, as an individual, to hold yourself aloof, intellectually and
socially, from the great body of mankind who are working for your
benefit as well as for their own, than a rich man has to lock up his
hoards of gold, and bury it where future generations may not reach it!
The social state can only exist by individual concessions in favour of
the whole.”

“Your argument,” was the cold response, “like all generalising
postulates aimed at particular cases, overleaps its mark. I consider
that I shall effect more earnest good by persisting in this isolation
against which you protest. For as I do not ask or require the
individual sympathies of my race, but rather choose the still-life of
undisturbed sympathy and communion with nature, I feel that I shall
accomplish more, far more, for humanity, in thus dedicating myself
to her interpretation. Through me, as a medium, my fellow men may
thus learn far loftier truths than they themselves might ever impart
reciprocally amidst the babble of what you call social intercourse.”

“But you do not exclude women, surely? That would be unnatural; for
you know that the life of man cannot be completely balanced, without
the ameliorating presence and subduing contact of woman. He becomes
a savage without her; his passions are brutalised, and the man is
spiritually and socially degraded.”

“An admirable truism, Doctor! I honor and revere woman; in her high
place she is to us, emphatically—angel! But this very reverence in
which I hold her, prompts me to avoid contacts that may despoil me of
my ideal. I am prepared to worship her, but not to degrade or look upon
her degraded. There is nothing, in the range of human possibilities, so
hideous to me as such contact—for I would hold my mother’s image always
uncontaminated. I am a stranger, sir. I make no female acquaintances at
present here.”

“Sorry,” said the Doctor, “very sorry, sir; for my special mission in
this case was to persuade you to give up your isolation, in favor of an
acquaintance with a most noble and charming woman, a friend of mine,
who, having met with your papers in the journal you are now editing,
is exceedingly anxious for an introduction, which I, in plain terms,
have come to request. She is a woman of masculine and daring mind, and
is taking the initial in most of the reform movements of the day, and
particularly the most important of them all, the science of physiology
as applicable to her own sex. She has taken the lead as the first
lecturer on such subjects, and is accomplishing a vast amount of good.
I am sure you will be much struck with her, and I never met two people
whom I was more anxious to see brought together. You will appreciate
each other, as physiology is one of your favorite subjects.”

“Bah! a lecture-woman! But I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Doctor.
You could have told me nothing that would have more firmly fixed my
resolution neither to be introduced to or know the person of whom
you speak, on any terms whatever! Your manly-minded women are both
my disgust and abhorrence!—as what they choose to call manliness
is most usually a coarse and sensual impudence, based on inherent
immodesty, which renders them incapable of recognising the delicate
unities of propriety, either in thought or deed. I fully concede a
woman’s capacity for displaying the great and even loftier processes of
intellection; but the moment she unsexes herself, she and her thoughts
become vulgarised. Such people are universally adventuresses, and of
the most unscrupulous sort. I, as a stranger here, wish to run no risk
of becoming entangled in their plausibilities. I am working for a full,
free and frank recognition, by the social world, of my right to choose
the place, the social circle rather, that I shall enter and become a
part of. I do not wish to be dragged into such contacts, but to command
them at my will!”

“But, sir,” persisted the Doctor, “she admires your papers so
fervently, and pities the cruel and self-inflicted isolation in which
you live, with such ardent, disinterested and motherly warmth, that you
can scarcely, in your heart, be so obdurate as to reject her genial
overture—the sole object of which is, to draw you forth into some
participation with the milder humanities—to make you feel that New York
is not really the savage, base and flowerless waste which we are led to
presume you consider it, from the attitude you have assumed toward its
social conditions. You are killing yourself here with tobacco, wine and
labour, while she would show that even self-immolated genius may find a
warm place to nestle, in distant lands, and near the matronly bosom, in
spite of cold and sullen self-reliance!”

“The fact of her being a matron,” frigidly responded Manton,
“considerably modifies the general character of the proposition which
she has done me the honor, through you, to communicate. But, Doctor, I
must finally and definitively state to you that I do not, at present,
wish to cultivate any female acquaintance whatever in the city of New
York. I propose to wait until I can select instead of being selected.”
And rising at the same time with an impatient movement, which might
or might not, be mistaken for a desire to be left alone, Mr. Manton
politely showed Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, who had now taken the hint,
to the door.

       *       *       *       *       *

Almost the same moment after his discomfited visitor left, Manton
hastily gathered up the scattered leaves of manuscript on his table,
and muttering, as he thrust the roll into his pocket, “Curse the
intrusion! this ought to have been in the printers’ hands an hour ago,
and yet it is not finished!” and snatching up his cap, he passed from
the room, and left the house.

Not long after, there came a sharp ring at the door of the Graham
House, and the female servant, who hurriedly hastened to open it,
was quite as sharply interrogated by a woman on the outside, who was
closely veiled, and wore a sort of Quaker garb—

“Is Mr. Manton in?”

“No, ma’am, he has just gone out.”

“Where is his room? I have a letter for him, which I wish to deposit in
a safe place with my own hands. What is the _number_ of his room?” she
asked, in an imperative manner.

“Ma’am, the gentleman is out. Can’t you leave the letter with me or the
mistress? We will give it to him when he comes.”

“No, I choose to place it myself. What is his _number_?” And as she
spoke, she slightly unveiled herself. The servant seemed to recognise
her face even through the dusk, and said, though rather sullenly, as
she gave way for her to pass—

“Yes, ma’am, walk in. His room is No. 26, on the third floor.” The
female glided rapidly past, and as the servant attempted to follow her,
exclaiming, “Ma’am, I will show you the number,” she answered hastily,
“Never mind, I know where the room is now!” and darted up the stairs.

The servant muttered some droll commentaries on this procedure, which
it is not necessary to repeat, and seeming to be afraid to complain to
her superiors, dragged herself surlily back towards her subterranean
home.

In the meantime our light-footed and unceremonious caller had reached
the third floor, and walked straight forward to the door of the room
just left by Manton. She troubled herself with no idle ceremony of
knocking, but walked confidently in.




                              CHAPTER IX.

                               BESIEGED.

  Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp,
  When Agrican, with all his northern powers,
  Besieged Albracca, as romances tell.
                          PARADISE REGAINED.


An hour after the last scene, Manton returned to his room, and, seeming
greatly hurried, lit his lamp, and throwing himself into a chair,
seized his pen, muttering between his teeth, “It must be finished
to-night! a _man_ has no right to be tired!” He was drawing his writing
materials towards him, to proceed with his work, when a something of
strange disorder among his papers caught his quick eye.

“Ah! who has been disturbing my papers?” and as a flash of suspicion
shot through him, he sprang to his feet, exclaiming, “my trunks, no
doubt, have shared the inquisition!” and stepping quickly to them, he
threw up the lids.

“By Heaven, it is so! what accursed carelessness this is of mine,
leaving everything unlocked in this fashion!”

His first glance had shown him that the trunks had been disturbed,
and a cautious effort been made to replace the contents as they were
before. Uttering some energetic expletives of wrath, he knelt beside
one to ascertain how far the examination had been carried, when,
reaching the packages of letters and papers at the bottom, he saw
there, too, unmistakable evidence of a pretty thorough examination
having been held of their contents.

If he had been enraged before, this filled him with uncontrollable
fury. He stamped his foot heavily upon the floor, and his whole frame
shook violently, while with gnashing teeth he called down a fearful
imprecation upon the head of this wretched violator, whoever it might
be, of the sad and mournful secrets of his past life, which he had held
sealed in his own bosom, so sternly, so long, and, alas! so vainly.
Those letters revealed all. Some prying reptile had thus slimed the
holy penetralia of his proud life!

The very thought was horror—loathing! A shudder of unutterable disgust
crept through him; an uncontrollable fury blazed through his soul;
his eyes glittered with almost demoniac fire; his face turned deathly
white, and his teeth ground and clattered like the clamp of a wild
boar’s tusks, and yet he made no tragic start; he stood still, with his
arms clutching each other across his breast, and his eyes looking out
into the blank distance, through which their concentrated light seemed
to pierce to some far object. He at length pronounced slowly—

“Yes, my curse shall follow you; be you man or woman, it shall overtake
you in terror! I feel the prophecy in me! The wretch who has thus
contaminated those chaste and loved mementoes, shall yet feel my curse!
My consciousness is filled with it! I know not how, or when, or where!
my curse shall reach and blast the author of this sacrilege!—bah!” and
his face writhed into the devilish mockery of a smile; “it is almost
sufficient vengeance, one would think, that the wretch found no money!”

Starting suddenly forward, he commenced pacing to and fro with long
strides, with knitted brows, compressed lips, and eyes bent upon the
floor.—For more than an hour he thus silently communed with himself,
without the change of a muscle in expression, when drawing a long sigh,
he threw off this frigid look in a degree, merely saying in a low
voice, “My curse is good!” and returned to the table to resume his seat
and his labors.

As he did so, his eye fell upon a note directed to himself, which, as
it had been placed in no very conspicuous position among the objects on
the table, had, till now, escaped his attention. He reached it, and the
dainty crow-quilled hand of the superscription, the snowy envelope,
and the pure white seal, disclosed at once the woman.—He regarded
it for a moment, coldly, and without any expression of interest or
surprise, and with a slight sneer upon his face, broke the seal, when
out slipped a gilt-edged note, which he opened and read aloud with a
jeering tone:

 FRIEND—May I not claim to be thy friend in common with the whole
 world, who have learned to love thee, through thy beautiful thoughts?
 Stricken, sad, and suicidal child of genius, may I not steal into
 the tiger’s lair of thy savage isolation, to bring one single ray of
 blessing, to tell thee how, at least, one human soul has throbbed
 to the seraphic eloquence of powers, that, alas!—I appeal to your
 inmost consciousness!—are being rapidly destroyed by your obstinate
 seclusion in labor, and by the vices of wine and tobacco, which
 are its necessary attendants. You have it in you to be saved; your
 soul is tall and strong as an archangel; your vices are the withes
 of grass that bind you; and love, social love, the calm and genial
 reciprocation of domestic sympathies, can alone redeem you.

 You are proud—I know it! but pride will yield to gentleness, and in
 a distant land among strangers, the tearless, motherless boy, will
 not reject a mother’s proffer of a mother’s yearnings. You naughty,
 haughty child, we must save you from yourself, in spite of yourself!

                                       Yours spiritually,
                                                      MARIE.

Manton, whose face had, during this reading, writhed with almost every
conceivable expression, tossed the letter from him as he finished it,
with the exclamation—“Pah! this must be Doctor E. Willamot Weasel’s
lecture-woman! Impudent adventuress in every line, as I expected!” And
he resumed his pen and his labors, continuing in a low voice as he
commenced his writing—“Unfortunate allusion, by the way, to the withes
of grass—we cannot help being reminded of a certain Mr. Samson, and a
Miss or Mrs. Delilah. Curse her! how came she to speak of my mother?”
and grinding his teeth heavily, he proceeded with the work before him,
without paying any further attention to the circumstance.

The greater portion of the night was spent in intense labor; but, when,
after a very late bath and breakfast, the next morning, Manton went
out to the office of the Journal for an hour, and returned, he was not
a little surprised to find another missive, as neat and snowy as the
first, awaiting him, on the table.

He thought it must surely be the first, that he had, in some
unconscious mood, re-enclosed in the envelope; but, glancing around, he
saw it lying open, where he had tossed it.

“Gramercy! but she fires fast!” he said, with a droll look passing
across his features, as he stooped down, his hands cautiously
clasped behind his back, to survey more closely the delicate
superscription—_Mr. Stewart Manton, Graham House, Present_.

“Present! present! but this sounds rather ominous! Can it be that
my spiritual correspondent of last night is an inmate too? My
correspondent is evidently both in earnest and in a hurry! What shall I
do? By my faith, I have a great mind to throw it upon the centre-table
of the common parlor below, and let this benevolent lady reclaim her
own, or else leave it to the irresistible access of curiosity, common
to the sex, and peculiar to this queer house, to explore its unclaimed
sweets. The first taste has quite sickened me. I have something other
to do than listen to such inane twattle.”

He continued for some moments to gaze upon the letter, while a
half-sneering smile played upon his grave and melancholy features.
“Well, but this must be a quaint specimen of a feminine, to say the
least of it! I have heard of these spiritual ladies before! The
character must be worth studying, though it seems to be transparent
enough, too. Well! we’ll see what she has to say this time, at any
rate! It can hardly be richer than the first! Here it is!”

 FRIEND—I know your heart. That proud heart of yours is at this moment
 filled with scorn for my poor words and humble proffers. But it does
 not affect me much, for well I know that this pride is the evil which
 ever strives in the unregenerate soul, to fence against the approaches
 of good. As yet this demon possesses thee, and, until conquered
 and humbled by love, you can never be saved. Thy physical life is
 poisoned—is poisoned with tobacco—and it is through such poisons that
 this evil spirit of pride enters into thy soul. Thy spiritual vision
 is thus obscured, that you may not perceive the truth. I shall pray
 for you. My spirit shall wrestle with thine when you know it not, and
 God will help his humble instrument. May He soon move that obdurate
 heart of thine, proud boy!
                                                          MARIE

“Well! but this is cool! decidedly refreshing! This pertinacious
creature is surely some mad woman confessed, as she certainly is a most
raging and impertinent fanatic! Boy, forsooth! patronising. I should
almost be provoked, were not the thing so egregiously ludicrous! Well,
well! it is consoling, at least, that I have found my good Samaritan
at last. I shall preserve these precious epistles, as decidedly
curious memoranda of this original type of the Yankee adventuress,
for Yankee she must be, who has set out thus boldly on a speculation
in the spiritualities. I think I have had enough of this trash now,
as I intend to take no notice either of it or of the writer. I should
suppose she might get discouraged.”

The letters were thrown carelessly into a drawer, and Manton sat down
to his work.

The next morning, when Manton returned from the office, at the usual
hour, what should meet his eye, the first thing on entering the room,
but a _third_ snowy missive, placed now more conspicuously, on the very
centre of the table. The poor man stopped, frowned, then gradually his
eyes distended into a wild stare, and lifting his hands at the same
moment, he shouted out—

“Good God! What, another?” and then, with a sudden revulsion of
feeling, he burst into a loud, unnatural laugh. “This is patience for
you! By heaven! she dies game to the last! Well! let’s see what now,
for I am beginning to be charmed with the progress of this thing.
There’s an absolute fascination in such daring.”

He snatched up the note, and opening it, read it _sotto voce_, with an
indescribable intonation of contempt:—

 FRIEND—Ah, glorious soul, that I might call thee so indeed! I have
 just read your poem in the Journal. Read it, did I say? My soul has
 devoured it! Again and again have I returned to the feast unsated.
 Ah me, that mighty rhythm! It has filled me with new strength and
 light! On its harmonious flow the universe of beauty, love and life
 has been brought closer to me—has been revealed in splendor and
 unutterable music, until I have sobbed for joy thereof, and prayed and
 wrestled for thee, with my Father above, that thou mightest be saved.
 It is terrible to think that a soul so god-like as thine should be
 unregenerate. I bless thee! I bless thee, my son! I pray for thee!
 I am praying for thee! I shall pray for thee always, until thou art
 saved!
                                                         MARIE.

“Good! I am in a fair way for salvation now, one would think! This
seems a strange character—such a mixture of fanaticism, cant, and,
withal, appreciation! That poem of mine was certainly an extraordinary
one. I hardly expected to find any one that would appreciate it at
first. But see! she has already caught its subtle reach and meaning.
Pooh! what a fool I am! This is perfectly on a par with all the other
hysterical cant which I have received from this person. The probability
is, if the lines had been written by Mr. Julian Augustus Maximilian
Dieaway, upon whose soft sconce she desired to make an impression (in
the way of speculation), the same extravagant tropes and metaphors
would have found their way to the snowy surface of this gilt-edged
paper, through the delicately-handled crow-quill! Curse it! I shall
order the chambermaid to stop the nuisance of these missives!”

This letter was impatiently tossed into the drawer with the others, and
Manton threw himself into his chair; when, after sitting with his head
leaning on his hands, moody and motionless, for some time, he suddenly
straightened himself, and drew from the heap of magazines and books
before him a fresh-looking copy of the —— Journal. Turning over its
leaves eagerly to that which contained his new poem, he perused it and
re-perused it over and over again, with an expression of restlessness
and intense inquiry in his manner during the time. At last he drew a
long breath, and threw the book back upon the table, exclaiming in
a firm voice, “No! I am satisfied. This is no namby-pamby die-away
rhyming—there is genuine stuff there; that is true poetry, or I have
it not in my nature to produce it. That cursed meddlesome woman has
made me distrust myself for the moment; by her extravagant praises,
has made me doubt the genuineness of my own inspiration. Her letter is
so evidently disjointed ranting, that it has shaken my self-reliance
to have even read it. Curse her silly and impertinent legends, I shall
read no more of them!”

Poor Manton was evidently troubled now, at length; and can the reader
conjecture why this last letter had so excited him? Had a subtle arrow
found its mark? Was there any thing in the poem really to justify the
high-flown and ecstatic panegyrics of missive No. 3, in the snow-white
envelope? You shall see—you shall judge. Here is a true copy of the
poem:—


                 NO REST.

  O soul, dream not of rest on earth!
    On! forth on! It is thy doom!
  Too stern for pain, too high for mirth,
    On! thou must, through light and gloom.

  Would’st thou rest when thou hast strength
    Mated with the seraphim?
  Time outlasting, all whose length
    Fades, within thine ages, dim?

  O strong traveller, can’st thou tire,
    When, but touching at the grave,
  Thy worn feet, re-shod, aspire,
    Winged, to cleave as Uriel[3] clave?

      Rest! ah, rest then! be alone—
      God the Worker, thou the Drone!

  Soon yon atom, swiftly driving
    Past thee, in the upward race,
  Braver for the perfect striving,
    Shall assume the higher place.

      God, the Worker, knows no rest—
      Pause, and be of Him unblest.

  Lo! how by thee all is flying!
    Even matter outspeeds thee!
  Stronger thou, yet thou seem’st dying—
    Fading down immensity.

      Rouse the quickened life to know!
      God works subtly, work thou so!

  Thou art subtler than the wind,
    Than the waters, than the light,
  Than old Chaos, whom these bind,
    Beautiful, on axle bright.

      Yet thou sleepest, while they speed—
      God, of sleepers has no need!

  Waiteth cloud, or stream, or flower,
    Robing meadows and the wood?
  Waiteth swallow past its hour,
    Chasing spring beyond the flood?

      Yet thou waitest, weak, untrue—
      God rebuketh sloth in you!

  Sing the stars wearily,
    Old though and gray?
  Spin they not cheerily
    Cycles to-day?
  Look they like failing,
  Pause they for wailing,
    Since none may stay?
  Systems are falling—
    Autumns have they;
  Stars yet are calling
    Life from decay.
  Dead worlds but gild them
    Dusted in light;
  Dead times have filled them
    Fuller of might.
  Brightening, still brightening,
    Round, round, they go—
  Eternity lightening
    The way and the wo!
                      DE NOTO.


 [3] “Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even.”
                                        PARADISE LOST.




                              CHAPTER X.

                      “ONCE MORE TO THE BREACH.”

  ——Once more to the breach, my friends!
  Once more!
                                  OLD PLAY.


Poor Manton was not permitted to remain in peace at his labors long.
On the afternoon of the same day, Doctor E. Willamot Weasel, scarcely
taking time to announce himself by a sharp knock, bolted into the room,
exclaiming—

“Ah! my dear friend, pardon me; but the lady concerning whom I spoke
to you, is now in the parlor below, and requests the pleasure of an
interview.”

A frown instantly darkened the brow of Manton, and he answered angrily—

“Sir! you will remember that I expressed to you, most distinctly, a
disinclination for such an introduction. I told you I did not wish to
know this woman, then, and I feel still less inclination to know her
now.”

“But, a-ah! my dear sir, you would not surely be unkind enough to
refuse to see the lady now, when she waits in the parlor, in momentary
expectation of seeing you—for the servant told her you were in? It
certainly can do you no harm to be courteous.”

“That’s a strong appeal to make to a Southerner, Doctor Weasel, it must
be confessed.”

“Yes,” said he, rubbing his hands, “I thought you could not disregard
it. I am so anxious to bring you together! Do come. I shall be
delighted. Come! pray come! she is waiting.”

“Doctor Weasel, I do this thing with great reluctance,” said Manton,
rising. “I suppose I must go; but rest assured, I do not feel
particularly obliged to you for forcing me into this position.”

This was said in a very cold, measured tone; but the Doctor’s delight
at the prospect of accomplishing his favorite and benevolent scheme,
was so great, that his excitement prevented him from observing it.

“Never mind, come along; you will thank me for it, on the contrary, as
long as you live.”

Manton left the room with him, and when they reached the parlor, he was
rapidly introduced to Mrs. Orne and her daughter, who sat upon a lounge
awaiting him. The Doctor instantly darted out of the room; and Manton
was left _vis-a-vis_ with his ecstatic correspondent.

As the woman rose to meet him, the blood mounted to her very plain
face, and square, compact, masculine forehead. The child, which was
an ugly, impish-looking girl, with a mean forehead, wide mouth and
projecting chin, nevertheless arrested the eye of Manton, as he sat
down, by a mournful expression of suffering in her light gray eye.

The woman was evidently embarrassed for a moment, by the studied
coldness of Manton’s manner, whose eye continued to dwell upon the
half-quaker, and half-tawdry dress, rather than upon the face that had
at the first glance impressed him so disagreeably.

“I have found you out, at last!” said the lady visitor, in a low,
pleasing voice. “Now I have ventured into the tiger’s den, I hope he
will not eat me!”

“You are perfectly safe, madam!” was the stiff response to this sally.
“But to what may I owe the honor of this visit? Is there anything I can
do for you?”

The blood mounted quickly to the woman’s forehead as she answered
hastily, “Yes, I wanted to know if you can furnish me with a copy of
all your works! I have admired with so much intensity what I have
seen—but I am afraid you are very much of a naughty boy—you look so
cold and cross! I am almost afraid to ask you!”

“I am very sorry, madam, I have written no works, as you are pleased
to call them. What I have done is entirely fragmentary, and I have not
collected those fragments even for myself,” was the unbending reply.

“Oh, yes, you have! I have seen many of them, and you need not be
ashamed to own them, for there is nothing of the kind in literature to
surpass them. Why, there’s ——,” and she ran on with a ready list of
what she termed works, not a little to the surprise of Manton, who only
listened with a cold stare, and bowed profoundly, as she concluded with
a high-wrought panegyric.

“I am sorry I have no such _works_ in my possession, nor can I tell you
where they can be obtained!”

The woman grew very red in the face again, and bit her lips in
vexation, while Manton remained silent. She soon rallied, however,
and commenced a conversation upon the general literature of the day,
in which Manton, in spite of himself, was gradually interested, by
a certain sharp epigrammatic method of uttering heresies, and bold
paradoxes, which seemed to be peculiar to her mind, and which could not
but prove refreshing to one, who, like Manton, most heartily detested
commonplace.

He, however, did not unbend in the slightest, and the woman, who
finally, in despair of “getting at him,” rose to depart, said, yet
perseveringly, with winning badinage—

“I find you in a naughty humor to-day. You are as cold as an iceberg
and sharp as a nor’wester. When you get to be a good boy, you may come
and see me!”

“When I _do_, madam, I shall surely come!” was the response,
accompanied by a very low bow, and delivered in a tone that would have
frost-bitten the ear of a polar bear.

The discomfited woman hurried from the parlor with the blood almost
bursting from her face, while Manton, turning on his heel, muttered—

“Well! if that does not freeze her off, she ought to be canonised!”




                              CHAPTER XI.

                           CARRIED BY STORM.

  You call it an ill angel—it may be so;
  But sure am I, among the ranks that fell
  ’Tis the first _fiend_ e’er counselled man to rise!
                                                 ANON.


Manton had reckoned without his host, in supposing that his
self-constituted patroness had any idea whatever of being frozen off:
on the contrary, her benevolent ardor had been only warmed still more,
as he had abundant evidence, when, on returning from his office next
morning, he found yet another snowy missive crowning the centre of his
table.

“Monsieur Tonson, come again!” he exclaimed, as he seized the note, and
opened it this time without hesitation, “what can the incredible woman
have to say now? Well, here it is!”

 MY FRIEND—You heaped ice upon my heart yesterday. To-day, I feel
 chilled and stiffened, as if my very soul-wings had been frosted
 through your lips! Why did you do so? It was not magnanimous in you.
 _You_ are proud, and beautiful, and strong, while I am plain, and
 weak, and lowly. Was it worthy of a noble soul to treat with such
 harsh and cutting coldness a poor, feeble, and wayworn daughter of
 sorrow like myself, who had come merely in the meek and matronly
 overflow of tenderness and appreciation for a poisoned, sick and
 erring child of genius, to offer him her sympathy in his dreary and
 unrelieved immolation of glorious powers at the unholy altar of
 ambition? Was it not unkind of you? Can you suppose that had you
 not been poisoned, body and soul, the demon pride would have thus
 overruled your better and your angel nature to such harsh rejection
 of the comforter, the Father had sent you in his mercy? What have I
 asked of you, but that you should unbend this fatal pride, and accept
 of mortal genialities? That you should spare yourself from yourself,
 and give something to others. Ah! you will not always thus repulse the
 sympathies of your race—naughty, naughty boy! hasten to be good and
 come to see me!
                                                            MARIE.

“Well! well! by heaven, the audacity of this thing soars to the
sublime! and yet there is some truth as well as pathos in it, too! Now,
I come to think of it, it was unmanly of me to treat the poor woman
so, just as if I expected she carried stilettoes or revolvers under
her petticoats, or wore aromatic poison in her bosom, with a foul and
treacherous design upon my life! The fact is, I have made a bugbear of
this creature in my imagination, when she is nothing, in fact, but fool
and fanatic combined, with a little disjointed mother-wit. Curse the
whole affair! I wish she and her endless letters were in the bottom of
the sea! By these persistent impertinences she disturbs me in my work;
these distractions are unendurable! I wish she were only safe in heaven.

It is useless to give _all_ the letters which poor Manton received
within the next four or five days, but it is sufficient to say that at
last, in a fit of veritable desperation, spleen and humor, he answered
one of the last in a tone of hyperbolical exaggeration that would have
put to shame, not Mercutio only, but the veritable Bombastes Furioso
himself. The effect was coldly studied, and behold the result.

The next morning a servant informed him that a lady desired to see him
in the parlor.

Terror-stricken by the announcement, he nevertheless knew, in his
conscience, that he had brought down the judgment upon his own head. He
therefore felt it to be his duty to abide the consequences of his own
imprudence, and went down to wait upon his caller, who, of course, was
no other than his correspondent.

She received him with a flushing face, as seemed to be usual to her
shrinking nature. She was this time without her daughter. There
were other persons in the parlor, and this seemed to disconcert her
somewhat, for she had evidently come full of some important disclosure.
Although it was the latter part of winter, and a heavy snow had just
commenced breaking up, which rendered the streets of New York almost
impassable, she nevertheless proposed that they should go out for a
long walk. Manton looked through the window into the sloppy street,
opened his eyes a little, and assented.

There was something wonderfully rare in the idea of a woman’s proposing
a long walk on such a day, and Manton relished the hardiness and
originality of the thing.

“Well!” said he to himself, “I like her spunk, anyhow! She has shown
herself in every way to be in earnest in what she undertakes. Phew!
I shall enjoy it! a woman in long petticoats, wading a mile or two
through a cold slush such as this! After this, what is it that Madame
won’t do? I’ll lead her something of a round, at any rate, before she
gets back.”

These thoughts passed through his mind as he ran up-stairs for his cap.
She met him as he came down, in the passage-way, and they passed out at
the front door.

“You are a droll person,” said Manton, as they reached the street.

“Why?” asked she, with a covert gleam in her eye.

“Why? Because few women would have thought of choosing such a day as
this for a walk.”

“I care nothing for trifles! Misfortune has taught me to disregard
them. Suffering makes us hardy.”

Manton looked down at her with surprise; for, of all things on earth,
the most disagreeable to him, was that commonplace timidity, and
shrinking from trifles, which is so ludicrously characteristic of
American women. He did not wish to see woman unsexed, but contemned her
puerile and unnecessary cowardice.

His companion now proceeded with great animation to follow up the
favorable opening thus effected, with a rapid and pathetic sketch, in
outline, of her sad and suffering life.

She had been married by her parents to a sordid lout of a Quaker, in
New England, whose horrid barbarities and persecutions had finally
compelled the weak and hitherto unresisting woman to seek a separation,
the scandal of which had roused against her the relentless animosity of
the whole body of New England Quakers, who finally carried their brutal
persecution to the extreme of assisting her yet more brutal husband,
in robbing her of her dear and only child, under the plea that she was
neither a suitable nor capable person to have charge of it. That, after
a long period, spent by the distracted mother in roaming up and down
the land, in search of aid and comfort, she had at length succeeded in
enlisting some noble and benevolent souls in her cause, who finally
rescued the child, by strategy or force, and restored it to its weeping
mother’s arms.

In addition to this sad tale of suffering connected with her private
history, which was most skilfully and artistically worked up, she had
another, of public martyrdom, which was, to Manton, far more impressive.

Through obscurity and poverty, this resolute and daring woman had
dedicated herself to the amelioration of the physical evils of her
helpless sex. She had, with unflagging ardor, studied the books of
anatomical science, the diseases of her sex, and the wisest means of
cure. And thus, in addition to having been the first woman in New
England to publicly assert that there is no true marriage but in love,
she had also led the way in announcing to women their sanitary duties
to themselves; that they must learn to heal their bodies, and leave the
other sex to take care of their own diseases; that delicacy as well as
utility prompted this course.

This idea at once met the approbation of Manton, to whom its assertion
was comparatively novel, but who had always deeply felt the lamentable
helplessness of woman, and the unnatural relation of the male members
of the profession to them.

The brave and hearty manner in which this singular woman had evidently
breasted alone the popular prejudice, in a cause which he saw, at a
glance, to be so just and nobly utilitarian, for the first time moved
his sympathies somewhat in her favor, in spite of his contempt and
disgust for women who ventured beyond their sphere.

The vocation of a learned nurse to diseased persons of her own
sex, was clearly to him _not_ beyond the proper sphere of woman,
but a most important, legitimate, and—however little recognised,
conventionally—the most honorable and useful. He could not but respect
the woman, whatever her eccentricities might be, who could be brave
and true enough to assert effectively to her sex, the natural and
inevitable mandate, “Know thyself!”

There was something chivalrous in the thought—a generous daring, a
martyr spirit, that could not fail to arrest a nature in itself, rashly
scornful of all that was merely conventional, and whose untamed,
half-savage soul rejoiced in all novelties that expressed to him a
higher utility than mere forms conveyed.

The walk was continued for hours; and still further to try her nerves,
during this long conversation, Manton turned through many intricacies
into the most darkened labyrinths of the vice-profaned metropolis.

The woman never flinched; nothing seemed to appal her, and, as they
threaded rapidly the dingy alleys of the “Five Points,” she had an
acute theory or a daring speculation for each evil, the external form
of which they successively encountered.

There was a vigor and originality in all this, as coming from a woman,
that interested Manton in spite of himself. Plain, uncouth, and
eccentric as was this scorned “lecture-woman,” he could not but confess
to himself, as they returned mud-bedraggled and tired enough from that
long walk, that his respect for her had very much increased.




                             CHAPTER XII.

                        SPIRITUAL CONFIDENCES.

  And under fair pretence of friendly ends,
  And well-placed words of glozing courtesy,
  Baited with reasons not unplausible,
  Wind me into easy-hearted man,
  And hug him into snares.
                        MASK OF COMUS.


We shall follow the bedraggled heroine of the last chapter, begging
leave of the reader to “see her home.”

Mark with what an elate and vigorous step she trips it up Barclay
Street into Broadway, after taking leave of Manton at the door of the
Graham House. One would think that she should surely be tired, after
that tremendous morning’s work, trudging and splashing through the
dirtiest mire of three-fourths of the great city. But no—she springs in
her gait, and her strange, animal eye, glitters fairly with a devilish
obliquity, which has for the moment usurped its expression. She does
not mind that people turn and stare after her dragging and bespattered
skirts—not she!—her very soul is possessed with the pre-occupation of
an ecstatic gloating over some great conquest achieved, or closely
perceived already in the prospective future into which she glares.

We shall see what we shall see—only follow, still follow. She has
turned up Broadway, and threads the great throng there with rapid
glide, as street after street is passed. Ah, now we have it! She
crosses—this is Eighth Street! There, in Broadway, near the corner,
stands a great house, with wide-open door; the smeared and dirty
lintels, the greasy latch, the wide, uncarpeted hall of which, at
once reveals it to be one of those miscellaneous and incomprehensible
edifices, which are not unfrequently met with on the great
thoroughfare, and the uses of which are not generally more specifically
known, than that they are fashionable boarding-houses.

Into this ever-gaping entrance she wheeled, and darted up the broad,
uncarpeted stairway, which she continued to ascend with almost
incredible ease and swiftness to the fifth story. When near the end
of a long and narrow passage, she paused before one of the doors, and
tapping it slightly, entered without farther ceremony.

A handsome and well-dressed woman, who was engaged in writing at a
small escritoire, looked up indifferently as she entered, but the
moment she caught the expression of the newcomer’s face, she sprang
to her feet, throwing down the pen, and with a strangely shrill and
unmusical laugh, screamed out in a most inconceivably voluble style—

“Why, I declare! Marie, what’s the matter? Your eyes are almost
bursting out of your head! You look as if you had found a bag of gold,
and meant to give me half! Why, bless the woman, how she looks! Have
you caught him at last? Well, we’re in luck! I’ve caught my man for
sure! He’s been here all the morning, he’s just left! Why, how the
woman looks! She keeps staring so! You haven’t gone crazy for joy, have
you? Now, do tell! how have you managed to catch that insolent baby,
you seemed to have set your heart on so? Why, how muddy the woman is!”
she shrieked, looking down at the condition of her dress. “Ha! ha! ha!
ha! Do tell, what sort of a game have you been playing? Did you have to
hunt him through a pig-sty?”

The woman had been standing motionless, in the meantime, with distended
eyes and compressed mouth, stretched in a rigid smile of supernaturally
savage exultation. She gazed towards the face of the speaker, but
did not seem to listen to her, or see her features. She looked the
abstracted embodiment of triumphing evil. Very soon her stiffened lips
quivered slightly, while the voluble lady stepping forward, shook her
sharply by the shoulder, shrilling out again—

“Do look at the woman! Why, what can be the matter? Can’t you talk? The
cat’s got the woman’s tongue surely! I did not think you were so much
in earnest about that green boy! Why, I could twist him about my finger
like a tow-string! I have achieved something in conquering _my_ man!”

“Y-your man!” said the woman slowly, interrupting her. But these words
were accompanied by a look of such strange and taunting significance,
that the other turned instantly pale and sprang back, as if she had
received an electric shock from those singular eyes, that fell upon her
for a moment with their evil obliquity, and then returned instantly to
their natural expression. “Wh-why, what do you mean?” stammered the
other angrily.

The woman only answered with a pleasant smile—“Now don’t be a jealous
fool, Jeannette Shrewell—I shall never interfere with your schemes if
you don’t with mine.”

“Yes! but because you knew Edmond long ago,” continued the other in a
fierce and shrewish voice, “you dare to insinuate to me that he too has
passed through your hands!”

The woman broke out into a loud laugh—“Why, what a child you are! You
know what my relations to Edmond are, perfectly. Spiritual—purely
and spotlessly spiritual. I should no more think of him than of my
grandfather.”

“Spiritual!” shrieked the other, springing forward; “do you dare to
use that stupid cant to me? Keep it for the sap-headed boys and senile
drivellers that you decoy with such bait, to plunder. You shan’t insult
me to my teeth with it.”

The speaker, whose physical energies were far more vehement and
overbearing than the other, seemed to have entirely awed her. She
sank meekly into a chair, turned very pale, and lifting her eyes with
an humble look, she said, in a low imploring voice, “Now, Jeannette,
please don’t be so violent. I did not mean to taunt or insult you. You
have altogether mistaken me, dear friend. Now, please be calm.”

But the other, whose long black curls still writhed and quivered, like
the snakes of the Gorgon head, with rage, stood towering before the
suppliant, as if she meant to crush her; and as she thus stood, she
really looked superb.

Her profile was delicately chiselled and Roman, with large, dark gray
eyes, thin lips, and fine chin; and now that every feature was inspired
with anger, the eye ceased to be offended by their habitual expression
of selfish, cold, and sharp intellection. She continued, quite as
vehemently—

“You have sown the wind, and you must reap. I have heard this vile
insinuation before of something between you and Edmond at B.”

“Jeannette! Jeannette! it is false! every word of it. It is a vile
slander of my enemies. Ask Edmond himself—he will tell you it is so.”

“Yes! yes! I know it is false. But who gave circulation to these
reports? Hey? Your enemies, were they? Your enemies must have a great
deal to do, that they keep themselves busy with these manifold stories
of your adventures. Who was it aspired to the eclat of any affair with
the rich, generous, learned, and travelled Edmond? Who was it dragged
him, through his unsuspecting recklessness of conventional usages, into
conditions which rendered him liable to such an imputation? Who boasted
of it, and attempted to place him in the same category with the dupes
and gulls and fools she had already ruined and plundered? Hey? Who
was it? Marie ——, I know you,” and she stretched herself to her full
height; but, had her vision not been blinded by passion, she might have
perceived a cold and scarcely perceptible smile of scornful incredulity
pass over the face at which she pointed her sharp finger. “I know you,
woman! Beware! beware how you cross my track with Edmond! You had
better rouse the sleeping tigress with her young in your arms. He shall
be mine! I have sworn it! One year ago, when I heard of his return from
Europe, and left everything, mother, sisters, friends, and came on to
this city, a thousand miles, alone and unprotected, that I might throw
myself in his way, I swore that he should be mine. I had watched his
career for years, from a distance, and he had grown to be my ideal.
When he became, first the pupil and then the expounder of the new
philosophy in France, I too became its student; with unwearied labor I
mastered its prodigious science, for I divined the purpose of the man.
I knew he must return to his own country, and become its exponent here,
and that then my time would come.

“I studied the German, the French, and the Italian; with all which
languages I knew him to be familiar. I acquainted myself with the
literature of each, that I might be able always to speak with him in
the tongues and of the themes of which his long residence in Europe had
made the associations most pleasant. Armed thus, cap-a-pie, I have met
him at last, as I felt it was my destiny to do.

“I have attracted him; I have all but conquered him. That man shall be
my lover! Ay, woman, he shall be my lawful husband! Cross my track in
any way, if you d-a-a-r-e! I know your arts; I will render them for
ever unavailing to you; I will explain them, and expose them. Cross
my track, then, if you d-a-a-r-e!” and, as she hissed out the words
between her teeth, she stooped forward and shook her finger in the face
of the now actually trembling woman. “Remember! our compact is, you let
me alone, and I will let you alone; you help me, I’ll help you; cross
me, I destroy you!”

“Is that all?” murmured the woman, in a soft voice, opening her eyes,
which had been closed during the greater part of this tirade, while, at
the same time, the old obliquity became for a moment apparent.

“Why, Jeannette, I never dreamed of any thing else. I would sooner cut
off my right hand than interfere with you, in any respect. Our two
courses are entirely different. You have one object and one species
of game to hunt down, while I have another. We shall not clash!” and
seeing the features of the other relax from exhausted passion, she
leaned forward with a pleasing smile.

“Just to think, you stormy child! I had hastened home to tell you of my
good fortune, and you so overpower me as to make me forget all I had to
tell. You have frightened me sadly, Jeannette, and all about nothing.
But I’ve got him—I think he’s booked at last!”

“Pooh!” said the other, sinking into a chair. “Well, I asked you ever
so long ago; how did you manage it? You seem to have had a great deal
more trouble this time than usual. He does not seem to have been very
civil to you heretofore, I should think.”

“No!” said the other, in a low, hoarsened tone, while the blood mounted
in crimson flush to her _forehead_, _not_ to her cheeks. This nice
discrimination is very necessary to a true apprehension of such a
character. “No, he has acted like a sullen cub, heretofore, a perfect
young white bear, with his insolent pride, and clumsy haughtiness! He
is the most insulting and impracticable boor I ever took hold of!”

“Ah! I perceive you are splenetic!”

“No! It is simply annoying, that the insufferable fellow should give
me so much trouble. Why, only think, he positively refused to be
introduced to me—said I was a shallow adventuress, and that he did not
wish to know me—even when our Doctor Weasel went to him, with a special
request on my part for such an introduction!”

“Oh, yes! but our Doctor is proverbially awkward in such matters. No
doubt he spoiled it all in the manner of the request.”

“Well, but you know, if the Doctor is awkward, he’s got money, and as
long as he believes in Fourier and Swedenborg as devotedly as he does
now, we can use his purse. But to proceed: That sullen Southerner not
only refused to be introduced to me, in the most insulting terms, but
when I wrote him three or four of my most irresistible billet-doux,
that never failed before, he treated them with what I suppose he meant
to be silent contempt, for he did not answer one of them, though I had
taken the pains to place them all upon his table with my own hands,
during his absence, and find out all I could concerning him at the same
time.

“I found the key-note, however; the boy loved his mother, and has been
playing hyæna with the rest of the world ever since she died, and been
endeavoring to imagine himself a misanthrope, with a life dedicated
since solely to the ambition of achieving, in her name, good for
mankind. This discovery, privately made, put me fully in possession
of all I wanted to know of his weakness. I saw he was earnest and
chivalrous, as his origin implies, and proudly secretive, so far as
the privacies of his life were concerned. So I at once felt that this
incrustation of reserve with which he had fenced about his life, could
only be broken down by a _coup de main_.

“I determined to come down upon him, by surprise, in spite of
everything. I called on him, and sent our trusty Doctor up to bring him
to the parlor _per force_. The _ruse_ succeeded so far as to effect
an introduction; but, to tell you the truth,” and her forehead fairly
blazed while she spoke, “I never was treated with such insolent and
frozen hauteur in my life before! I went away with my ears tingling and
blood on fire, but I cursed him in my very heart, and swore to have a
woman’s vengeance! You remember how sick I was that night. Oh, God!
such furies as tortured me! I scarcely slept; but a happy thought came
to me just about morning.

“He was a poet—his brow revealed that—but with characteristic sternness
he had yet published nothing which could be accounted the highest
expression of his inmost life. He had made his way in literature
rapidly and brilliantly through a novel combination of style, in which
the essential elements of prose and poetry were combined; but had never
yet ventured to associate his proper name with anything bearing the
forms of poetry.

“Now, the Doctor had told me that the poem, under the soubriquet of
‘De Noto,’ in the last number of the Journal, was his, and it at once
flashed across me—appreciation! appreciation! The young poet has stolen
timidly forth, under disguise, with this myth clear from his soul! He
does not expect to be understood at once, and any prompt appreciation
will overwhelm him from the very suddenness of the thing; and in his
delighted surprise he would yearn towards the acknowledged devil
himself.

“I sent him another note expressing that intense appreciation for
which I knew he was craving. He treated it with the neglect that he
had the others; but I somehow felt that I had made my mark. I called
this morning, and as I knew his contempt for mere conventional forms, I
ventured upon a dashing _ruse de guerre_.

“I challenged him, for I knew his own personal hardiness, to take a
long walk through all the slop of the thaw. With a stare of surprise
he accepted it. I felt even then that my point was half gained. There
were people in the parlor, and my object was to get him alone with
myself. I felt that I had already touched one weakness, and my object
now was to arrest his chivalrous sympathies in behalf of my forlorn and
unprotected martyrdom to the cause of woman in her resistance to the
brutalities of the marital law, and her right of proclaiming to her
sisterhood the sanitary laws of health, in which they have been kept in
profound ignorance by the ‘profession.’

“At first, I arrested his attention by the daring of the position which
I had assumed, and then aroused his sympathies by a fervent relation
of the wrongs inflicted on me by my brutal husband. The story was old,
but I managed to throw into it a great deal of feeling, for there is
nothing like a tale of persecution to arrest chivalrous minds all over
the world. _We_ understand all these propositions as scientific! When I
parted with him he smiled upon me, for the first time, genially. I am
sure of him now!”

“I should think you might be!”




                             CHAPTER XIII.

                       CLAIRVOYANT REVELATIONS.

                        What see you there,
  That has so cowarded and chased your blood
  Out of appearance?
                                   SHAKSPEARE.


In a good-sized, neatly-furnished apartment, of a large house in Bond
Street, about two weeks after the incidents which were related in
the last chapters, a group was assembled, about nine o’clock in the
evening, which consisted of Manton, the woman Marie Orne, her daughter,
and Dr. E. Willamot Weasel, of whom we have before spoken.

The dark eye of Doctor Weasel glistened with benevolent delight as he
gazed upon the group, from which he sat somewhat apart. Manton was
seated on a chair near the glowing fire, with the mother on a low
stool on one side of him, and the daughter kneeling on the other,
while both with upturned reverential eyes drank in eagerly each word
that fell from his lips. They seemed to be enchained, enchanted, while
he spoke; and the mother, in the almost total speechlessness of her
rapt appreciation, could only venture to trust her trembling voice in
low, whispered exclamations; while the sad eyes of the impish-looking
daughter imitatively stared unutterable things.

The woman’s subtle suggestiveness had roused the brain of Manton,
and fully drawn him out on his favorite themes; whatever of natural
eloquence he possessed, and he possessed much, flowed smoothly now,
for, in spite of himself, his frozen heart had been warmed by the
unwearying deference which he met with from these people.

The lamps burned brightly, the hearth glowed, and the eyes of all were
bent upon him with genial warmth and admiring earnestness. The north
wind howled cold without, to remind him of the long, harsh “winter of
his discontent,” which had for ten weary years been unrelieved by any
approximation to a scene thus flushed with the sanctities of domestic
quiet. Manton always idealised woman—he idealised everything. He was a
poet. The very presence of woman was hallowed to his imagination. There
was a thrill of sweet fancies and gentle memories conveyed to him, in
the very rustle of a silken gown. He adored, he worshipped woman, as
she lived in his memory—the holy attributes with which he invested
her, penetrated and held him enchained in peaceful awe. He could not,
he dare not believe evil of her, if she bore the semblance of good, in
thought, or deed, or life.

He had shrunk thus long from contact with her, not because this
interval of self-inflicted separation had been other than a weary
penance of yearning, but that his fastidious nature dreaded the
common contact, which might degrade or mar that ideal of love, which
woman personated to him, and in the worship of which he had found the
strength for brave deeds.

It was the weakness, the petty flippancy, the commonplaceisms of woman,
from which he shrank. He believed that her spiritual strength should
equalise her with man’s physical strength in disregarding common fears,
paltry conventionalities, and contemptible topics. The miserable
skeleton of soul and body, which the world calls “woman of society,”
was more horrible to him, by far, than the actual contact with her
dry bones in a prepared skeleton would have been—for where one was a
comparatively pleasing object to his eye as a philosopher, the other
was but the painted, dim-eyed, ghastly spectre of a living death.

There was in this woman, at least so far as he could judge, a total
abandon to her natural impulses, which seemed to utterly repudiate
those restrictions which are merely commonplace. This was refreshing to
him, from its novelty, at any rate, in contrast with the insipidities
he so much dreaded, although his taste had from the first been
constantly offended.

Yet she seemed so utterly lawless and quietly defiant of what the
world, that works in harness, might say, he could not help respecting
her for it. It was a new thing in his life, to meet with a woman,
sufficiently heroic, to face the martyrdom that she was daring, for so
elevated and noble an aim as the emancipation of her own sex from the
conditions of utter helplessness, into which their ignorance of the
laws of life had sunk them.

Besides, she had shown so much earnest patience with his rude pride,
had followed up its aberrations with such a matronly tenderness,
exhorting him only, and unceasingly, to be at rest—a rest, the need of
which his proud and fainting soul had confessed so often to his inward
consciousness. And then this fine appreciation—ah, where is the young
poet who can withstand appreciation? And then such delicate deference
in trifles!

He had spoken incidentally of his taste in dress; and now the
mother and daughter were dressed in the most graceful and faultless
simplicity! The heart of Manton was touched. He felt grateful and
pleased with these strange Samaritans to him in a strange land.

On a slight pause in the conversation, the woman, still gazing up
timidly into the face of Manton, changed the theme suddenly, by asking
him,

“What do you think of Clairvoyance?”

“The world is not old enough yet, by twenty years, I think, to answer
that question.”

“My reason for asking the question, was, that I have some strange
premonitions myself, which I cannot explain. You will, no doubt, be
able to explain the mystery at once—”

“Yes!” interrupted Doctor Weasel, eagerly, “do let us have you
examine the matter! Facts have come within my own knowledge,
concerning revelations which have been made by her, that are the most
extraordinary I ever knew. For instance, when she has been brought into
clairvoyant rapport with individuals whom she has never seen or heard
of before, she has revealed to them the whole history of their lives.”

“This unexpected enunciation of their life-secrets to men, must of
course be productive of strange scenes occasionally,” said Manton, in a
tone which had suddenly become cold.

“Oh, very curious and interesting! very curious!” exclaimed the Doctor,
quickly. “Marie, do relate to him that incident of the bloody hand,
that you have so often told me.”

“Well,” said she, “it has been some years since that a number of my
friends, who knew of this gift of mine, were in the habit of inviting
me to their respective houses, to meet friends of distinction, who were
curious to observe the experiments, either upon themselves or upon
others.

“On one occasion I was invited to meet a celebrated physician of this
city, whose reputation for purity of character and life was very high.
There were no parties present but my friend, this physician, and
myself. Such an arrangement, I afterwards understood, had been made at
the particular request of the physician himself, who desired that there
should be no other person present but his host at the interview.

“When the physician placed his hand upon my head, as is the necessary
formula to bring me into spiritual communion with my interrogator, I
relapsed almost immediately into the syncope of the clairvoyant state,
and of course became entirely unconscious of what I uttered in that
condition. But our host, who was his most intimate friend, has given me
many times the following explanation of the scene:—

“He says that when the physician placed his hand upon my head, I first
said from the sleep, ‘I am content! All is pure here—this is a holy
soul—one that is regenerate and will be saved!’ and then that while I
was recounting his many deeds of kindness to the poor and friendless,
and the rich, I suddenly shrank back, exclaiming, ‘Blood! blood! blood!
There is blood upon this hand! This soul is darkened now with blood!
Here is some fearful crime! Murder has been committed by this hand;
everything seems red beneath it!’ My friend says the doctor staggered
back as if he had been shot, on hearing this, turned pale as death,
and swooned on the floor; and after he recovered, acknowledged that he
had committed murder and fled from the consequences; the name by which
he was now known was an assumed one, and he implored his host not to
expose him to the penalty of the gallows by revealing these terrible
facts.

“My friend, of course, did everything he could to relieve him on that
point, and assured him that he would never breathe the fact where it
could injure him; that the purity of his life for so many years had
cancelled the enormity of the crime, so far as society was concerned.

“But in spite of all this, the wretched and guilty man left the house
in overwhelming despair, and the last I have heard of him was that he
had locked himself in his own house, and was killing himself with the
most unheard-of excesses in drinking brandy, to which vice he never
before had been addicted.

“When I realised the tragic results of this fearful insight, with which
I seem to have been mysteriously endowed, my very soul was shaken with
sorrow; and since that time my spirit has wrestled in agonies of prayer
with God, that this poor child of crime and headlong vices might be
‘_saved_!’”

As the woman uttered these last words, Manton recognised, for the
first time, and with a shudder, a peculiar obliquity of the left eye.
His soul was chilled within him; and for the moment, the light of the
glowing room was darkened as if the shadow of drear winter had passed
over and through it.

Doctor Weasel exclaimed gaily, “Is not that extraordinary? I assure
you, I have myself witnessed things in connection with this power of
hers, quite as inexplicable, though happily not so tragic.”

“It sounds strangely enough,” said Manton, shortly.

“I assure you I have no means of accounting for these things,” said the
woman in a meek, deprecatory tone.

“Suppose you demonstrate it, madam, in my case;” and a slight sneer,
which crossed the face of Manton, whose manner had entirely changed,
did not escape the hawk-like quickness of the woman’s eye. “My life, I
am willing to submit to the scrutiny of your inscrutable sense.”

“Oh, by all means!” exclaimed Doctor Weasel, springing to his feet in
a paroxysm of delight. “Let us have the experiment, by all means! Do
please place your hand on the top of her head!”

Manton turned, and with a bow most studiously deferential, seemed to
ask of the lady her permission to do so.

“Oh, yes, yes,” and her head was bowed forward to meet his upraised
hand; while the daughter, who seemed to understand the thing, either
from previous experience, or from some private signal, rose from her
clinging position about his knee, and stepped back, leaving the two
alone, without other contact.

In a few moments after the hand of Manton had rested upon the meek,
submissive head of the woman before him, she commenced exhibiting the
common and preliminary attitudes, muscular retchings of the throat,
nervous twitchings of the lips and limbs, accompanied by the apparently
palpable, organic changes, which are recognised to be symptomatic with
well-known conditions of the mesmeric sleep.

Manton watched all these phenomena with the sharpest attention, and
then, as the lips began to move as if in inarticulate enunciation, he
leant forward over her, and asked—

“What can you tell us of the soul, with which you are now in
communication?”

After several preluding and spasmodic efforts to articulate sounds, the
Clairvoyant at length said, in a voice only distinct above a whisper—

“I see light! all light!—pure, holy light. It fills the universe with
a mild radiance! I can see no blurs, no clouds in the foreground. I
can see only angels, seraphs, and seraphim, and all forms of light
revolving in the sphere of this mighty soul!”

“Is there no evil there?” said Manton.

“No, I see none; I see only white light.”

“But look close—perhaps you might find something dark. Look long and
steadily into the world you visit—see if there be not clouds there.”

There was a pause. The lips moved without articulation again; and again
Manton asked—“What do you see now?”

“I see, I see, the light is parting on either side; out in the far
distance, between those walls of light, a giant form uprears itself in
shadow. Down the long vista stands this darkened giant. He is fierce
and stern, and wears a cold, hard front, with flaming eyes, that
scare the ministering angels all away. He strikes around him with the
imperious sway of his huge, knotted club, and all the bright forms
flee. He seems the savage Hercules of pride!”

There is a pause; and after a stillness of some moments, Manton asked
again—

“What now is the vision, to your sense?—is the giant gone?”

“No, he is humbled but not subdued; and from afar behind him, down this
darkened vista, a light has grown up, like a rising star. It advances
slowly, rising over his head. The splendor increases as it comes.
Now, the dark and wrathful giant has fallen on his knees—the flood of
glory overcomes him. His club is dropped. His eyes, upturned in awe,
seem dimmed by the sudden glory of an angel’s presence. Ha! I see! the
features of that angel are like his whose soul I see! The giant is
subdued! His pride has bowed its forehead in the dust, before the angel
radiance of a visiting mother!”

Manton felt his flesh creep as this was spoken, and as the Clairvoyant
paused for some moments, he asked: “What does this spirit of the mother
say?”

The slow answer was—

“She seems to rebuke this pride even more with her effulgence, and
to say, My son, I am with thee in the spirit, but I cannot be with
thee through the medium of the flesh which thou hast so poisoned and
corrupted, since I passed from thee into this higher sphere. Make
thy body clean and purify thy life, and I shall be always with thee
present, in the spirit. It is necessary for your usefulness in your
present life that you should accept of human sympathies. It is only
through such that you can establish a true community with the material
world of which you form a part. Accept human love—accept a moral
representative of myself—believe in the possibility of its chasteness
as well as utility, and you will yet be strong, powerful of good, and
happy.”

Here Manton, who had become intensely excited during the progress of
this scene, removed his hand with a vehement gesture from the head of
the woman, and springing to his feet, seized his cap, and with scarce
the ordinary adieus, hastily left the room. He rushed hurriedly through
the dark storm, which careered along the street, muttering as he went:—

“Eternal curses on this infernal woman! What can it mean? She dares
to speak of my mother again. Hah! does not this account for the
inexplicable disturbance of my papers in my trunk? Is it possible that
this can be the accursed and despicable wretch who has stolen into
the privacies of my life? But think, think! I may have been hasty.
This whole subject of Clairvoyance is an impenetrable mystery. That
strange story of the bloody hand has impressed me. For all we know, as
yet, such things may be within the possibilities of Clairvoyance. That
myth she uttered as if she were in a dream, was strangely significant
to me—supposing her to be ignorant of all my past life; and then
she seemed so patient, so disinterested, so gentle and so kind, so
matronly, so tender, and so heroic, too. I cannot altogether distrust
her, nor can I believe; I can only wait. I must see more; I must
know more; I must comprehend the whole. There is a something here I
cannot understand—a something betwixt heaven and hell, which I must
bide my time to fathom. Curses on all mysteries!” and, rushing onward
through the storm, like one hag-ridden, or pursued by stern, accusing
ghosts, the bewildered Manton soon reached his cheerless room, all
storm-drenched and depressed.




                             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.


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 by _who_ said 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 contact of 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; to _see_, 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 at producing 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 is _so_ beautiful—oh, that he were
 only good!
                                                           MARIE.”

This letter strangely thrilled upon the already over-wrought
sensibilities of Manton, whose nervous organisation had been rendered
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 a powerful 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.




                              CHAPTER XV.

                DELECTABLE GLIMPSES BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

  Now, with a bitter smile, whose light did shine
  Like a fiend’s hope upon her lips and eyne.
                                         SHELLEY


Turn we now to that large and mysterious house, to which we have before
referred, near the corner of Broadway and Eighth Street. We will pass
the greasy lintels, into the wide and dirty entry, climb those five
flights of stairs, turn down the long, dark passage, and pause before
a door, just one beyond that which we have had occasion to remember in
the course of this narrative.

We will take the liberty to enter. The scene presents the woman, Marie,
reclining on a lounge, holding a note in her hand, which she seems to
have read and re-read with a peculiar look of puzzled inquiry.

The impish-looking daughter, to whom we have before referred, was
seated in a chair, behind the woman’s head, and out of her sight. The
creature seemed to have much ado to keep from laughing outright, for
her face was screwed into all sorts of contortions in the effort to
subdue it, as she peeped over her mother’s shoulder, and watched her
puzzled looks and bewildered gestures.

“Well!” said the mother, as if speaking to herself, “if one could only
comprehend how he came to write this to me—it seems to contain a great
deal. Upon my word, it appears a beautiful snatch of rhyme, and to
convey quite a confession—only I don’t understand—it reads as if it
were an answer to something that had gone before.” She reads—

  Angels a subtler _name_ may know,
  But not a subtler _thought_ of joy
  Could thrilling through a seraph go,
  Than that your presence brought to cloy
  And weigh my life down into calm,
  With an unutterable sense—
  Like music perfumed with the balm
  Of dews star-shed—all too intense!

“Most too high-strung for my purposes, it must be confessed! He never
expresses any flesh and blood in his correspondence. Ah, well, I’ll
soon bring him out of that! But this really does puzzle me! This is all
the note contains.” She turns the note to examine it. “It is certainly
in his hand, yet he makes no explanation.”

Here the child, whose blood seemed ready to burst through her face in
the continued effort to restrain her laughter, tittered aloud. The
mother sprang erect, and, turning upon her with an expression of rage
and surprise upon her face—

“What! Why, what are you laughing about? What business is this of
yours, pray?”

The child, although evidently a little frightened, had so entirely lost
her self-control as to be unable to restrain the bursts of laughter
which now followed each other, peal upon peal, as she danced about the
room in a perfect ecstacy of glee.

The mother’s face turned first pale and then red, as she followed the
motions of the child with her eye, until at last, with the expression
of an infuriate tigress, she sprang to seize her. The child was too
quick for her, and with the agility of a monkey, darted from beneath
her grasp; and still shrieking with laughter, was pursued around the
room—leaping the furniture with an airiness that defied pursuit—which
her strange, wild laugh yet taunted.

The woman, after exhausting herself in vain attempts at catching
her, sank upon the lounge—and at once, in a whining, fretful voice,
commenced to pour upon the head of the child, the most inconceivable
and galling epithets. So long as this tone was held, the child held
out in defiant spirit, either of sulking obstinacy, or of harsh and
irritating laughter, and to every reiterated question from the angry
mother—“What are you laughing at? What do you mean?”—she only clapped
her hands and danced more wildly to her elfin mirth.

The mother now changed her tone of a sudden, in seeming hopelessness of
carrying her point by storm. She began to sob violently, and turning
with streaming eyes towards the child—

“You—you tre-treat your poor mother very cruelly to-day; I am dying
to know what it is you mean; but you will not tell me! Please, dear,
come and tell poor mother why you laugh, what it is you mean, and what
you know about this letter?—for I am sure you know something—do tell
poor mother, and she will forgive you all! Come, dear child!” and she
reached out her hand as if to clasp her to her bosom.

The child, who seemed to have no intellectual comprehension of the
meaning of all this, but to have taken a purely impish delight in
watching the confusion and puzzle of her mother, in regard to the
letter at first, and then instantly, when she flew into a rage, to
have answered in a monkeyish and hysterical rage, on her own part; now
at once, with equal promptness, and with the common instinct of young
animals, responded to the tender inflections of the maternal voice.

Dropping her whole previous manner, she instantly sprang forward and
knelt at her mother’s side. The mother did not speak for some moments,
but silently caressed her, placing her hand frequently on her head, the
top of which she fondly stroked with a tenderness that seemed to linger
there. She drew the child’s face to hers too; and although she seemed
to kiss it frequently, it might have been observed that she breathed
deep and heavy exhalations upon different portions of it, which she
only touched with her lips.

The effect was magical beyond any power of expression. The hard,
ugly, animal lines of that child’s face, which had been writhed and
curled but a few moments before, in every conceivable expression of
most ignoble passions, at once subsided into the meek and suppliant
confiding of that inexplicable and most tender of all the relations
known to the animal world, mother and child!

“Dear, why did you not tell me what you knew about this letter before?”
said the mother, in a tone as musically reproachful as if she dallied
with her suckling babe. The child buried her head in her mother’s
bosom, and after a silence of some time, during which her mother
industriously stroked the top of her head, she looked up, and in a sly,
bashful tone exclaimed—

“I did it just for fun, to try how writing love-letters went—I copied
the verses from a book, in your hand, and sent them to him as yours!”

Scarcely were these words uttered, than the languishing and
tender-seeming mother hurled the child from her, backwards, upon
the floor, with a violence that left her stunned and prostrate, and
springing to her feet, raged round and round the room, as only a
feminine demon infuriate could be imagined to do, spurning now and then
with her foot, as she passed, the still senseless form of her own child!

Hell might find an equal to this whole scene, but hell has always been
too civil! It is enough! This is jealousy! That woman is jealous of her
own child! and _she_ only thirteen years old!

How long she might have raged and raved, and to what consequences it
might have led, heaven can only judge. Providentially, perhaps, a knock
at her door announced the postman. She clutched the letter she received
convulsively, and tearing it open, the instant he closed the door,
read—what? The letter of Manton, which we saw in the last chapter!

She read it through, standing where she had received it—her eyes
dilating, and her whole form changing. She literally screamed with joy
as she finished the letter, and clapped her hands like one bewildered
with a sudden triumph.

“Ah, ha! I have him! I have him! He is mine henceforth! He cannot
escape me now!” and her oblique eyes fell upon the motionless child
upon the floor. “The little fool!—she catches my arts too soon—she is
not hurt—but I must help her.” She moved towards the child, but the
demoniac triumph which possessed her seemed irrepressible. She bounded
suddenly into the air, and almost shrieking aloud as she did so—

“I have conquered—I have conquered him at last!” came down like a
statuesque Apollyon transfixed in exultation. It was a horrible glimpse
of unnatural triumph! It lasted but for a moment; for, with a sudden
drooping of the usually stooped shoulders, as she turned towards the
letter again, she said, thoughtfully,

“This will not do—he perseveres even here in talking about mother!
mother! and chaste! and holy! and all that sort of thing. The foolish
boy is too much in earnest. I have used this stuff about long enough. I
must find the means of bringing him gradually around. Such a relation
as the silly fellow desires won’t do between _us_—we are both too
full of life! Oh, I’ll write him a note at once that will prepare the
way—will break up the ice, as he calls it, still more about his life!”

She raised the child, which had been stunned by the fall, and
sprinkling some water upon her face, which caused the first long
breathing of recovery, she laid her upon the lounge, muttering, as she
did so, “The meddlesome little fool! She must do everything she sees
me do! She must imagine herself in love with every one whom she sees
me pretend to love. She must write love-letters when she sees me write
them, and heaven only knows what she won’t do next with her monkeyish
imitation! But I can’t be crossed by a child so, if she is my own. Lie
there until you get over the sulks—you are not much hurt!”

She turned away from the child and seated herself at the table,
exclaiming, as she seized her pen, “Ah! this letter! I feel that I
shall need all my skill and wit to word this properly, so as not to
alarm him. In his present excited and hysterical mood, the veriest
trifle would have the effect of driving him off, at a tangent,
forever beyond my reach. And yet it will not do to let things go on
in this way; for I see that that idea of the motherly relation, if
once permitted to become settled in his mind now, will remain a fixed
barrier, which I shall never be able to pass on earth. I must see him
to-night, and take advantage of his present over-wrought, ecstatic, and
bewildered condition, to break down this boyish dream of his! Bah! to
think that he should have taken me to be so much in earnest in all that
first twattle about motherly relations, which I found necessary to use
in order to get at him at all! Pity my correspondence hasn’t warmed him
up a little by this time! I’ve tried hard enough, to be sure, but the
queer fellow will persist in etherealising everything!”

During this soliloquy, the child, who had entirely recovered, lay
perfectly still, with sharpened attention, catching every word that was
spoken. There was an eagerness in her eye which showed her to be, if
not an apt scholar of such teachings, at least a very attentive one.
The woman wrote:—

 “’Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name! thy kingdom
 come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!’ My soul is deeply
 moved for thee in this thy time of trial. The good God chasteneth thee
 now—now is the hour of thy great tribulation come; now thy life-demons
 wrestle in thee, with the love, the good the Father has sent to redeem
 thee. Be strong! Ah, be strong even now, thou child of many sorrows,
 and thou shalt yet find grace and peace in acceptance with Him.
 Meanwhile I can but pray for thee and with thee. I weary Heaven with
 supplications, that out of this travail a great and glorious soul may
 be born in the humility of love, for light, eternal light.

 “Come to me this evening, that I may take that throbbing heart upon
 my bosom. I may soothe and calm you, but I cannot give you rest—rest
 comes only from the Father! You ask me to be for you, forever,
 ‘Marie, mother!’ I can be to you, forever, your _friend_
                                                        MARIE.”

“Ah! ha! that will do it!” she said in a low chuckling tone, as she
rapidly folded and directed the letter; “though he might take the
alarm at this if he were cool, yet there’s no danger now! It will no
doubt shock him a little, but he has learned to believe in me, and in
his present excited state he has deified me almost into an object of
worship; and any suspicion he might feel he would only blame himself
for. Ah! this will do! it shall go instantly! Here!” she said, turning
sharply to the child, “Here! get up there, put on your bonnet, and take
this letter! You know how to deliver it, and where! Come, up with you!”

“But, mother,” said the child, as she slowly lifted herself half-erect,
“I don’t feel like it—I’m not well! You hurt me!”

“Nonsense!” said the mother, harshly; “go take a bath, and do it
quickly too! You’ll feel well enough! This letter must go, and shall
go! Get along, I say, and do what I tell you!”

The child dragged herself slowly out of the room.

“That little wretch will torment me to death!”

The letter was despatched and reached its destination.

Manton, whose excitement had continued, without the slightest
diminution, to return upon him, in paroxysm after paroxysm, seized upon
this last letter with the famishing eagerness of a man who looks for
strength—for spiritual consoling. He read it with suffused and swollen
eyes; he scarcely saw what he read, so much had his vision been dizzied
and obscured by weeping. But those last words did indeed shock and
thrill him. He was strangely startled, and for a moment they seemed to
open to him an appalling and terrific gulf of falsehood, more hideous
than yawning hell.

We say, it was but for a moment; but in that little space the blackness
of darkness overcame his soul. A shuddering of dread, of doubt, of
fear, and all that horrid brood, the birth of rayless and unutterable
gloom, passed over him convulsively, and then the whole was gone. He
had been too intensely wrought upon by the ecstacies of Faith. He shook
off, by one great throe, the giant shadow of its natural enemy, this
Doubt, which he now conceived had so long made his life accursed; and
the rebound, by a necessary law, carried him to a yet greater and more
unreasoning extreme of trust, and unquestioning confidence in this
woman, as under God the instrument and medium for restoring him once
more to life and the world.

He at once determined to visit her, and prove to his own soul the
falsehood of these dark suspicions of the being who had thus moved and
spoken his inmost life for good.




                             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 to understand 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 have strength 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 be _all_ my 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 to life; 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 with her 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 have slain 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
remarkably _apropos_; 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
heated furnace 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!




                             CHAPTER XVII.

                             “TO-MORROW.”


It would be well for sinners were there no to-morrow. At least it
would be well for them so far as impunity in the enjoyment of sin was
concerned. But it may not be; the inevitable time of reaction must
follow that of excess, the wages of which are remorse.

The effect of that to-morrow upon poor Manton was fearfully crushing.
At first he dared not think—the horrid realisation would have slain
him. He dared not look up, lest he should see the great height from
which he had fallen. He dared not hear the voices within him, or above
him, lest they should blast his sense. He shrank from the sunlight,
as though each ray were a fiery arrow, to cleave hissing through his
brain. He dared not look his fellow-man in the face, lest he should
see the mark upon his brow, call him accursed, and spit upon him. The
innocent eye of childhood was the most dreaded basilisk to him; and the
face of a pure woman made him shrink and shudder in affrighted awe. His
shadow seemed a spectral mockery to him, for it no longer glided with
him, straight and firm, but was bowed, and crept sneaking after.

The burden of a hundred years had fallen upon the young man’s shoulders
in one fatal night—a ghastly, loathsome burthen of self-contempt—his
face had grown old; his eyes lost their proud fire; his lips, their
firm expression; there was no longer any “aspiration in his heel.” The
haughty, bounding self-reliance, the unflinching, upward look, were
gone! gone! Manton had lost his self-respect.

Ah, fearful, fearful loss, that it is! There was a leaden desperation
in the man’s whole air that was shocking, even to those who had never
seen him before. There was no bravado in it—it was sultry, slow and
self-consuming—shrank from observation, and burned inward.

He neither sought nor found any palliation for himself. He blamed no
one else; his pride would not permit him to confess to himself that he
had been unduly influenced, or that any unfair advantage had or could
have been taken of him. No, it was his own fall. His own grossness had
profaned those associations which he had stupidly deluded himself, for
years, into supposing to be really sacred things in his life. He had
rendered himself, thereby, unfit for Heaven, unworthy Earth, too base
for even Hell.

His first sullen recourse was to the wine-cup, that he might numb the
unendurable agonies. He drank to monstrous excess; but, no, it would
not do; that cold burning, as of an ice-bolt through his heart and
brain, lay there still, in the two centres. He sought and found men
like himself, with great thoughts and stricken hearts; like himself,
brain-workers; and in the fiercest orgies of desperation, hours and
hours were spent without attaining to one moment of the coveted
oblivion.

The evening had long set in among such scenes, when a note was suddenly
thrust into his hand from behind, and as he turned his head, he saw a
boy hastily making his way through the thronged room. This movement had
not been observed by his noisy companions—he hastily concealed the note.

He had recognised the superscription with a feeling of deathly
sickness, for which he could not clearly account. It was as if the
fresh wounds were all to be torn open again.

He soon after found an opportunity to withdraw beyond observation, and
opened the note, which contained only these words:—

 MY FRIEND:—why have you left me all day? come to me—I am dying.
                                                           MARIE.

The sheet was bespattered with blood. Manton nearly fainted. Recovering
himself in a moment, he muttered, “Infernal brute that I am! to have
neglected the poor, frail creature thus—after last night, too! May God
forgive me, for I shall never forgive myself!” He hurried from the room.

The scene, on reaching her apartment, was, as may by this time be
expected, ghastly enough. But as we have seen a little more of these
horrid bleeding scenes than Manton has, we will refrain from another
description of one, since we have found that they only differed in the
intensity of effect and degree in the precise ratio of the results to
be attained. In this instance she had not reckoned without her host.

Manton, who never dreamed of suspecting her, and had been fully
impressed with the belief that these attacks were fearfully dangerous,
and that the magnetism of his touch, whether imaginary or otherwise,
could alone suffice to restore her to the calmness necessary for the
arrest of the hemorrhage, felt as if an awful responsibility had been
suddenly devolved upon him, as he thus apparently held the very life of
this singular woman in his own hands.

This impression had been consummately fixed upon the mind of Manton
by her obstinate refusal to permit the presence, at their interviews,
of any third person, not even that of her own child. She could thus,
through his generous humanity, most effectually draw him to her side;
and, when once in her reach, he was again in the power of those fearful
arts, of which we have seen something.

       *       *       *       *       *

The life of Manton became now a succession of the “to-morrows” of
remorse. Each new sun arose upon its succeeding scene of wilful,
self-degrading excess, such as we have witnessed. He never permitted
himself to grow fully sober, but drank incessantly—morning, noon and
night. But that the wines he chose were comparatively light, and
less rapidly fatal than the heavier and more dangerous drinks of our
country, he must have, undoubtedly, destroyed his life, as he did his
business reputation.

He still wrote brilliantly—nay, even with a fierce and poetic dazzle
of style that surprised men greatly, and added much to the notoriety,
if not to the solidity of his reputation. But everything went wrong
with him. His purse was regularly drained by a remorseless hand; his
wardrobe fell into neglect, and the marks of excess upon his fine,
proud features, were at once rendered conspicuous by their association
with almost seedy habiliments.

Before one year had passed he had begun to exhibit himself before men,
in the pitiable light of one who had more pride left than self-respect.
In a word, he had fallen fully into the toils of the hellish Jezabel.

Remember, in judging of poor Manton, that while he is hoodwinked,
through much that is most noble in him, _we_ see this woman through
the strong light of day. He looks upon her as a devotee of science,
in the holy cause of human progress and social amelioration. A poet
and enthusiast, his life is dedicate to both. He regards her as a
frail being, whose life hangs by a thread, and that thread held in his
own hand—degraded into a false relation to himself—a relation which
he loathes, to be sure, and which he feels to be heavily and swiftly
dragging him downward, every instant, while it lasts, but which he
dare not utterly break, for the fear that that frail thread of life,
of which he has so strangely become the holder, should be snapped.
He has only seen her, through her representations of herself; and
therefore, all that is chivalrous and tender in him has been aroused in
her defence, as the white roe, hunted into his strong protection for
defence against the demon hounds of New England bigotry, jealousy, and
fear. Apart from all other considerations, these were sufficient to
compel an utter negation of self, in all that related to her, as well
as a hasty dismissal of those suspicions that might thrust themselves
upon him.

A house, in the meantime, had been taken for her in Tenth Street,
for the rent of which Manton and the benevolent Doctor Weasel were
to become jointly responsible. But the woman was far too astute
to permit any such entanglements as might lead, prospectively, to
mutual explanations between her victims. The Doctor alone ultimately
became her endorser for the rent. She had other designs upon the less
plethoric purse of Manton.

In entering upon this arrangement, Manton had been induced to believe,
by her own representations, that for ten years before the name of
Preissnitz had been heard of on this continent, this woman had been
practising water-cure among her women patients. Manton had been
sufficiently educated in the profession, to understand that its general
pretensions were essentially empirical. He was too much an Indian,
indeed, and had lived too much among Indians, to regard anything beyond
the simplest natural agents as efficiently curative. He therefore
recognized what Preissnitz had discovered, as simply confirmatory of
his experience of the usages of savage life, and his own observation so
far as it went. It contained not to him any more than any other pathy,
the essential _vis medicatrix_ of nature; but it seemed good to him,
because it was new to the popular sense, and was well worthy to be
urged upon its recognition, and thus to find its proper place among the
other systems.

He entered upon the project with the fullest enthusiasm, for this woman
seemed to him, from her personal habits and untiring energy, to be
specially set apart to preach the crusade of physical cleanliness to
her sex. The house was therefore occupied by her as proprietress and
female physician, while Manton, Doctor Weasel, the fiery Jeannette, and
victimised Edmond, of a former scene, occupied respective chambers as
boarders, and patrons of the new enterprise.




                            CHAPTER XVIII.

                             A DIVERSION.

  Never did moon so ebb, or seas so wane,
  But they left Hope-seed to fill up again.
                                    HERRICK.


But even in the black abysses of the hell down which he had fallen,
a flower could grow to the eye of Manton. It was the strange birth
of a wizard evil place; yet, as it spread beneath his nourishing eye
and hand, it daily grew more beautiful to him. It may have been the
unconscious contrast of a something young, living, and blooming in
an unnatural sphere like this, where he, with the sudden weight of
centuries upon him, breathed with such heavy gasping. He could not
tell what it was that thickened this drear air; he only felt the
oppression on his lungs, and shuddered when sleep had partly sobered
him, and he could realise it for the hour. His sympathies had been
first touched for that ugly, impish, persecuted child, to which we
have frequently referred, because he saw, at once, that the mother’s
querulous jealousy was forever subjecting it to a species of covert
torture, which kept it always haggard and wretched. Had it been a
sick and neglected kitten on the hearth, he would have felt for it
the same kind of sympathy. He accordingly noticed and caressed the
child, and endeavoured to rouse its low, ignoble frontal region into
activity. The response of a hungry and vivid animality, surprised him
with its aptitude of apparent intelligence. He did not understand
that marvellous faculty of imitation which, in all the animal tribes
approximating man, or which, in other words, are born with embryo
souls, assumes the external semblances of intelligent expression. The
faculty of music is below man, and common both to bird and beast; and
he had yet to learn, to his heavy cost, how a perception and detection
of the physical harmonies of sound may be utterly distinct from the
spiritual comprehension of their meaning. He had yet to fearfully
realise how this insensate aptitude of harmony, which enables the
monkey of the organ-grinder to dance in perfect time the most wild and
rapid strathspey that ever Highland pibroch rung, or a stupid parrot
to whistle the divinest strains of Mozart, could yet bestow upon the
combined parrot and monkey of our own race that semblant mockery of the
“gift of tongues,” the use of the soul’s higher language. In a word,
he would have been greatly shocked to hear the affiliated Poll and
Jocko talk down Shelley in his own etherealisms, and appal Byron with
the mad bravado of forgotten lines from his own reckless and besotted
misanthropy.

Poll and Jocko are easy enough to detect through all the human
disguises of their combined powers, if the man of common sense and
society meets the impersonation for the first time, when developed,
or in most of the latter stages of development. But it was a very
different thing with poor Manton, who only saw an undeveloped, abject
animal, from which he expected little but the gratitude of the brute
for protection, and from which anything like a vivid response was as
surprising as it was unconsciously gratifying to his egotism, for the
reason that all that was really pleasurable in it was owing to the fact
of its constituting a close reflection of his own mind.

Gradually the feeling took possession of him, as he observed in her an
excessive sensibility, that could weep at a moment’s warning, and laugh
like April through the glistening storm in the next instant, that he
would make amends for the great sin of his life, in working upon this
sensitive organisation for good. The fine delicate chords of this frail
instrument might be made to respond to the divinest notes; and this
creature, with developed brain and expanding soul, become a medium of
the loftiest intelligence—aye, be even to him the consoler of after
years. The idea was a strange one, but it suited the intellectual
audacity of Manton for that very reason.

It seemed to his darkened hopelessness, that here, through the
innocence of childhood, he might renew that broken chain of living
light which held him in communion with the upper world, until its
blackened, severed links, falling about him, had left his manacled
soul in hopeless bondage. He dreamed that if he guarded it with holy
zeal, his prayers might rise upon the first odors that went up from
this strange young flower to Heaven, and bring its light down too, in
forgiveness, to him.

He did not know—for he had fed on poisons until it had become a kind of
second nature to him, as to that old Pontiac king—that the pure light
of spheres could never reach him through this lurid glare, which he had
now come to think the natural day—that the odor of no flower could rise
through its thickened air to meet the keen, grey stars. The man became
bewildered with the gorgeous dream he nourished; and, day by day,
without knowing why, he threw himself between the child and the baleful
shadow of its mother. He spread his hands above her in blessing; he
watched that he might shield her.

From the moment when his attention had been first attracted to her, she
seemed to become illuminated; her ungainly body appeared assuming the
lines of beauty; her mean, harsh features, softened, as the gnarled
shrub assumes, in slow unfolding, the graceful mellowed drapery of
spring. The coarse, elfin locks, grew tamed and smooth; a dark blue,
in soft and gradual displacement, entered the sharp, greenish, animal
eyes. The low, ape-like forehead, swelled above meekly-curved brows
that had lost their hirsute squareness. Indeed, so rapid was the
expansion of the frontal region, that it absolutely startled and
affrighted the devout experimenter, when he placed his hand upon it,
and felt it almost lifted by the wild throbbings beneath. The work
was progressing _too_ fast; he feared that the general health of the
subject might fail; but how to check and remedy this powerful reaction,
so as to control it from fatal results, now so fully occupied the
spiritual subtilty of the man, as to leave him little time to think of
himself.

The loathsome contact of the reptile mother daily grew more abhorrent
to him; and her characteristic cunning soon discovered that she had
no real hold upon him herself, and at once encouraged this growing
interest in the daughter, with the same assiduous art that she had
before displayed in tormenting her with jealous gibes. Through this
help she hoped he might be held within her reach. She had already, by
her malapert, silly, malignant interference, so far completed his ruin
as to have brought about a desperate, and finally fatal collision,
between himself and his business associate in the Journal, which his
genius had built up; and now he was thrown again to struggle hap-hazard
with the world, he had become more reckless and desperate than before,
so that she feared he might, at any time, break away from his bondage,
and that, too, while he was still of use to her, and before she had
gloated fully upon his ruin. She had studiously taught the child the
process of those infernal arts, of which we have seen something; and,
although the creature understood nothing of the _rationale_ involved,
yet her imitative cunning made her a most sharp pupil and practitioner.

By saying that the child did not understand, we mean to convey, that
she could not have explained to herself, or to others, what effect
certain manipulations would produce specifically; yet she had a feeling
of them, a vicious intuition, that answered with her all the purposes
of intellection. To look at her through the eyes of Manton, the uncouth
and grotesque girl had become a fond and graceful plaything, that
clung about him in soft caresses, that kept his heart warmed towards
her, and caused him to regard the mother even with a modified sense of
the growing disgust which was possessing him, and of which her shrewd
insight made her fully aware.

Her child had become necessary as a bait—and her child let it be—for,
in her hideous creed, nothing was sacred. She was filled towards her
victim with fierce yearnings, and, had she possessed the actual entity
of soul, would have loved him madly—but no, she hated him, as the slave
hates the despotic master to whom he hourly cringes for each favor. In
a word, she hated him as a man—or in his double capacity of a spiritual
being, rather; and, as even her hate was secondary, her appetites
towards him were those of the weir-wolf for mankind. She would devour
him body and soul, but she meant to feast alone.

Fearing lest the tenderness of his nature might be too strongly moved
towards the child, if not diverted in other directions, she at once
set her subtle wits to work to furnish her “Tiger,” as she called him,
with sufficient toys of the same kind to keep him quiet, and avert the
chances of his leaning more towards one than another. Some letters were
hastily despatched to New England, and the result was the appearance of
a fair and gentle child, about the age of her own.

Elna and the stranger, Moione, sprang into each other’s arms when
they met, as if their very heart were one. They were fast friends,
it seemed, and a thousand times had Elna said how dearly she loved
the gentle Moione; and so jealous were the children of their first
meeting, that Manton saw little of either for several days. A glance at
the broad, serene brow, great, clear eyes, and delicate mouth of the
new-comer, filled him with a strange, inexplicable sense of confidence,
and even relief; which he could not well explain, to be sure, because
it was too undefined to himself. He could only wonder how that
white-browed creature came in such a place. It seemed as though it were
a promise, answering to his prayer for the elfish Elna, that this calm
spirit should have descended in their midst.

The vehement and headstrong petulance of her nature promised to find
here a balance that would sober it within the bounds of reason; and
strangely, although he saw hope for her, and for his own yet undefined
purpose in her development, he saw nothing definitely in the stranger,
but a good angel sent to aid him. His soul went out to greet her, but
was it yet his heart?

These children were both dedicate to art; and Manton found it now by
far the most pleasing occupation, to watch and give direction to the
rapid unfolding of this instinct for the creative. The newly-aroused
intellect of Elna here displayed many impish and brilliant
characteristics of the imitative faculty, that might easily have been
mistaken, by a less partial observer than Manton, for genius. These
peculiarities were strikingly contrasted with the placid, but vigorous
style of Moione, to a degree that one formed the exact offset to the
other, not alone in art, but in all physical and mental, as well as
spiritual idiosyncrasies. As these children grew upon him, there
seemed something strangely familiar in them to Manton. He often tried
to account for this to himself. Had he seen them before in dreams?
Had he known them in some different world, and in a previous stage
of being? Why was it that the vehement eccentricities of temper, the
elfin wildness of motion, and light, mocking spirit of this child
Elna, all seemed to him so familiar? Why was it that the coming of the
fair-browed Moione had surprised him so little? There was that in her
pure, calm face to startle most observers; yet, from the first, he had
looked upon it as a matter of course, and as if he had unconsciously
waited for her to arrive. Why was it that he had felt comforted since
she came? What was it, in that name of hers, that sounded to him so
much like a half-forgotten music-note?

So he had questioned himself a thousand times, becoming each day more
puzzled than the last, until accident furnished him with the curious
solution of this mystery. One day, in looking over a pile of old
manuscripts, he found one, upon which he seized, with an unaccountable
thrill. In an instant the whole thing flashed upon him—

“I have it! I have it! Here the mystery is solved at last! Strange,
that I should so utterly have forgotten this manuscript! Two years ago,
before I ever saw these people, this strange foreshadowing of what
seems now a reality in my life, came to me in a summer’s day-dream; and
I wrote it off, to be thrown aside and forgotten until this moment.
It seems the most wonderful coincidence. I am no believer in miracles,
but this appears a marvellous reach of the soul into the future; I was
conscious of nothing when I wrote, but the pleasure of embodying in
words what seemed to me a beautiful thought; strange, it should have
been thus thrown aside and so utterly forgotten, until the increasing
coincidences of my present relation have gradually forced me back to
find it! What blind instinct, struggling in me, sent me here to look
through these old manuscripts, with no definite purpose? What vague
struggle of consciousness and memory is this, that has been moving me
for weeks to understand why it is those children seem so familiar to
me? Strange! strange! strange!”

Manton now proceeded to read this curious manuscript, the contents of
which we shall also place before you:—


                    THE LEGEND OF THE MOCKING-BIRD.

Friend, do you know the Mocking-Bird? I warrant, if he is a familiar
of your childhood, you have a thousand times wondered at the strange
malignant intelligence which characterises his tyrannical supremacy
over all the feathered singers. Not only is he “accepted king of song,”
but he is the pest and terror of the groves and meadows. Spiteful and
subtle, he conquers in battle, or by manœuvre, all in reach of him; and
you may easily detect his favourite haunts, by the incessant din and
clatter of wrath and fear he keeps up by his malicious mockery among
his neighbors. From my earliest childhood, I can remember having been
singularly impressed by the weird and curious humors of this creature.
Since those times of innocent wonder, I have been a wide wanderer. The
prepossessions of my fancy were irresistibly attracted by the wild
legend I give below. It was told me by an old Wako warrior.

On a hill-side, above an ancient village of his tribe, while we were
stretched upon the grass beneath a moss-hung live-oak, he related it.
The moon was out, gilding with silver alchemy the shrub-crowned crests
of prairie undulations—piled, as we may conceive the waves of the
ocean would be—stayed by a word from heaven, while on the leap before
a tempest. It was a fitting scene for such a story. Out from the dark
gorges on every side ascended the night-song of the mocking-bird. The
old man had listened to the rapid gushing symphonies for some time in
silence, then drawing a long breath he remarked—“That is an evil bird!”
I begged him for an explanation, and he proceeded.

Those peculiarities, indeed, of the Indian’s phraseology—those
broken-pointed expressions, so condensed and meaning, and eked out
continually by significant gestures, I could hardly hope to convey,
were I fully able to remember them. The wild and fanciful methods of
the Indian mind, believing what it dwells upon, yet half conscious that
it is dreaming, are difficult to remember or repeat. We can only do the
best we may to preserve the idiosyncracies.

“Yahshan, the Sun,” said the old chief, pausing reverently as he
uttered the name, “in his great wigwam beyond the big waters, made the
first Wako! He laid him in his fire-canoe and oared his way up through
the thick mists that hung everywhere. When his arm tired of pulling,
he took him out and stretched him upon his back on a wide dark bank,
and then rowed on his path and left him. The Wako lay like the stem of
an oak, still and cold. Before Yahshan entered his night-lodge in the
west, a dim hazy light had hung over the figure, but this only made
its broad couch look blacker—for nothing that had form could be seen.
Yahshau, the Moon—the pale bride of Yahshan—came forth when he had
gone in, and rowed her silver bark through the ugly shadows above the
Wako, to watch lest the spirits that hated Yahshan should do harm to
his work, which it had taken him many long ages to finish. He was very
proud of it, and the evil spirits hated him that he had made a thing so
goodly to look upon; and they drifted hideous phantom shapes across
the way of Yahshau, and tried to overwhelm her light canoe, but its
keen shining prow cut through them all, and left them torn and ragged
behind her. At last they fled, for when her eye was on the mute form
of the Wako, they feared to do it any harm. When all were gone, and
nothing that looked like mischief was to be seen, she too went in. And
then they flocked out from the deep places where they had been hid, and
gathered with hot fingers and red eyes about the quiet Wako. He did not
stir, for his senses had not yet been waked. Quick they pried open his
clenched teeth, and poured a green smoking fluid down his throat. Just
then the prow of the fire-canoe appeared parting the eastern mists, and
they all fled.

“Yahshan came on. He looked upon his work and smiled—for he did not
know that evil had been wrought—and came now in glory, riding on golden
billows, scattering the chill mists that clung around the icy form, for
it was time to waken it up with life. He rolled the yellow flood upon
it, and the figure shivered; again the glowing waves pass over it—the
figure was convulsed—tossed its limbs about, and rocked to and fro. Its
eyes were open, but it saw not; its ears were open, but it heard not;
it was tasteless and dumb; it smelt not, nor did it feel. Life had gone
into it, and the heart beat, the pulses throbbed, the blood coursed
fast, and it was monstrous strong. But what was this? Being, self-fed
and self-consumed, hung upon the void of midnight, hurried and driven
from its own still gathering impulse through a chaos of crude matter.
That green liquid of the evil one now rushed in burning currents
through the veins, and it dashed away, crawling, leaping, tumbling,
like a mad torrent, over piled-up rocks across the dark plains,
striking against hard, formless things, and rebounding to rush on more
swiftly, till it had left the fire-canoe and Yahshan all astounded, far
behind, and the terror of darkness was beneath and above it. But what
was this to it? On! on! the green fire still burned within, and it must
go—chasms and cliffs, with jagged rocks—into them, over them all. What
were rough points and bruises, and crashing down steeps, and midnight
to it? There was no feeling, yet the heart leaped, the blood careered,
the limbs must follow. Motion, blind motion—no control, no guide—but
through and over everything, move it must.

“The bad spirits thronged after it, grating and clanging their scaly
pinions against each other, and creaking their pleasant gibes, when
suddenly there was no footing, and the headlong form pitched down,
downward, whirling through the empty gloom, while all the herd of ill
things laughed and flapped themselves in the prone wake behind it.

“At once, with a sigh of wings, like a sharp moan of tree-harps, a
shape of light shot arrowy down amidst them. They scattered, howling
with affright. It bore up the falling Wako on strong, shining vans an
instant, then stretching them out, subsided slowly, and laid it on a
soft, dark couch again. This was Ah-i-wee-o, the soul of harmonies, the
good spirit of sweet sounds. She is the great queen of spirit-land.
Yahshan and Yahshau are her slaves; and all the lesser fire-canoes that
skim in Yahshau’s train obey her. She gives all life its outer being;
to know and feel beyond itself—without her, life is only motion. There
is no form, no law, no existence beside, for she holds and grants
them each sense, and in them reveals all these. Yahshan could give
life—but not content with this, he was ambitious. The formless chaos
his fire-canoe sailed over must be a world of beauty! A soul dwelt in
it, but that world was passionless and barren. Yahshan had given life
to many shapes, but the cold spirit had scorned them all; and yet she
must be wooed to wed herself to life, that, out of the glow of that
embrace, might spring the eternal round of thoughts made vital, clothed
out of shapeless matter with symmetry. He planned an impious scheme.
He would not pray the good Ah-i-wee-o for aid, but would act alone,
and be the great Medicine Spirit. He would frame a creature from out
the subtlest elements within this chaos, so exquisite that, when it
came to live, confusion would be harmonised in it, and the order of
its being go forth the law of beauty and of form to all. Then that coy
spirit of desolation would be won at last, and passing into its life, a
royal lineage would spring forth, and procreation wake insensate matter
in myriad living things, gorgeous ideals, harmoniously wrought, and
self-producing forever. All these would be his subjects, and he would
rule, with Yahshau, this most excellent show himself! So he labored on,
in the deep chambers of his night-lodge, through many cycles. The work
was finished. It lay in state, within his golden wigwam at the east,
that Yahshau and her glittering train might look upon it and wonder.
Then he carried it forth; but evil spirits are wise, and, though it was
a mighty work, they knew that it was too daring, and that Ah-i-wee-o
would punish its presumption, and would not let the senses wake with
life; so they poured that fearful fluid in, that fires the blood, and
makes life slay itself. They say the white man has dealt with them,
has learned from them the spell of that bad magic, and makes his
“fire-water” by it. So when Yahshan waked up life, its power waked too;
for he knew not of the craft, and it tore the glorious work from out
his hands, while they flew behind and mocked him.

“Ah-i-wee-o bent over the swooning Wako; for the life that had been so
tumultuous scarcely now stirred his pulse. She was a thing of beams,
silvery and clear; a warm, lustrous light clung around her limbs and
showed their delicate outline. She floated on the air, her wings and
figure waving with its eddies, like the shadows of a Lee-ka-loo bird
upon the sea. Her eyes, deep as the fathomless blue heaven, looked down
on him with pity and unutterable gentleness. It was a marvellous work
the overdaring Yahshan had accomplished. Beautiful, exceedingly, was
that mute form, and rarely exquisite its finish. Must that glorious
mechanism be destroyed, and all the noble purpose of its framing be
lost? No! She moves her tiny, flower-like hand above it, and every
blotch and all the bruises disappear, and it was fair to view, and
perfect as when Yahshan had given it the last touch. Now she stooped
beside and touched him, white sparks flew up, and she sang a low song.
At the first note, the dark, formless masses round them quivered and
rocked: the Wako smiled; for feeling now first thrilled along his
nerves. The song rose; the dumb things shook and stirred the more.
She touched his nostrils and his lips; the sparks played between her
small fingers and danced up. Yet a louder note swelled out, and the
thick mists swayed and curled, and a cool wind rushed through them,
and dashed a stream of odor on his face. He drew long breaths, and
sighed with the burden of delight, and moved his lips to inarticulate
joy; and now that wondrous song pealed out clear, ringing bursts
that shook the blue arch and swung the fire-boats, cadent with its
gushes; and through the dim mists great shapes, like rocks and trees,
leaped to the measure, marshalling in lines and order. Now she pressed
his eyelids with her fingers; the silver sparks sprung in exulting
showers, snapping and bursting with sweet smells. Once more, pealing
triumphant, a keen, shining flood, that symphony poured wilder forth;
his eyes fly open, and that heavy mist, like a great curtain, slowly
rises. First the green grass and the flowers, bending beneath the
gentle breeze, turn their deep eyes and spotted cups towards him in
salutation, and all the creeping things and birds, that love the low
herbs, dew-besprent, are there: and as the mist goes up, majestically
slow, other forms of bird and beast are seen, and dark trunks of trees,
and great stems beside them, looking like trees, until his eyes have
traced them up to the great moose, the big-horned stag, the grizzly
bear, and the vast-moving mammoth. But then it has drunk the harmony of
grades; for all are there. And, side by side, he marks how, from the
crawler, every step ascends, in beautiful gradation; the last linked
to the first in one all-perfect chain. Then came the knotted limbs,
with all their burden of green leaves; and, underneath, the round,
yellow fruits, or purple flushing of rich clusters and gay forms, that
flutter through them on wings of amethyst, or flame, or gold, their
every movement a music-note, although all was dumb to him as yet.
Still higher the mist-curtain goes; and the grey cliffs, with shining
peaks, and a proud, fierce-eyed bird perched on them, meet his gaze;
and then the mists float far away, and scatter into clouds, and all
the splendor and the pomp of the thronged earth is spread, a gorgeous,
but voiceless, revelation to his new being. With every touch of the
enchantress, Ah-i-wee-o, the soul of chaos had passed into a sense; and
all the pleasant harmonies the Wako felt, and all the scented harmonies
the Wako tasted and inhaled—all the thoughts of harmony in grand
or graceful forms the Wako saw—that blissful interpenetration gave
conception to, and the magic of that powerful song brought forth. One
more act, and his high marriage to eternity is consummated: ecstacy has
found a voice, and all these harmonies articulation, yet his ears were
sealed; and though music flowed in through every other sense, his dumb
lips strove in vain to wake its language.

“But this was the supremest gift of all. This was the charm that had
drawn beauty out of chaos—the magic by which Ah-i-wee-o ruled in
spirit-land, and chained the powers of evil. It were death to spirits
less than she, to hear the fierce crashing of those awful symphonies
she knew. His nature could not bear the revelation. Besides, what had
he to do with that celestial minstrelsy which led the heaven-fires on
their rounds? There was ambition, full enough, up there; and Yahshan
had been playing far too rashly on those burning keys. She would not
curse this perfect being with a gift too high, and add another daring
rebel to her realm! No! he must be ruler here, as she ruled everything.
From all those harmonies he must extract the tone, and on it weave his
song of power to lead them captive. This divine music is the voice of
all the beautiful, the higher language of every sense; and not until
the soul is brimmed to overflowing with sparkling thoughts of it,
drank in through each of them, will the beamy current run, as streams
do in the skies. He must lead the choir of all this being—yet, this
infinite sense would overbear his nature, if suddenly revealed; it
can only wake in other creatures, as its birth matures in him—and he
shall go forth into silence—every living thing shall be mute—and from
the low preluding of the waters and the winds the first notes of his
exulting powers shall be learned, and they shall learn of him—until all
the air is one harmony—all breath takes music on, and echoes bear the
twice-told glee—until fainter, more faint, it is gone!

“She touched his ears—the sparks leaped up—she pressed his lips with
one entrancing kiss and sprang away. The quick moan of her pinions
cleaving the air is the first sound that steals on the new sense, and
stirs the dead vast of silence that weighs upon his being. And now
myriad soft wavelets of the infinite ocean follow—breaking gently over
him—the whisper of quivering leaves to the caressing zephyr, the low
tremble of the forest-chords, and the deep booming of great waves afar
off; the ring and dash of cascades nearer, the tinkling of clear drops
in caves, the gush and ripple of cold springs, the beat of pulses,
the purr of breathings, and the hum of wings, in gentlest ravishment
possess his soul—for now is the bridal of his immortality consummate in
a delirium of bliss, and lulled upon his couch he sweetly sinks into
the first sleep.

“The Wako is roused next morning by a warm flood from the
fire-canoe—for Yahshan had come forth right royally, and though
Ah-i-wee-o had humbled his presumption and would not permit him to
be sole lord as he had hoped, yet all he had dared attempt had been
accomplished, and he believed it to be in full his own work, and thus
wore all his panoply of splendor in honor of his glorious creation. The
Wako rose, and lo! around him as far as the eye could reach, a mighty
multitude of all the animals of the earth were rising too. They waited
for their king, and it was he. They came flocking around him to caress
him in obeisance—a gentle, eager throng!

“The panther stroked his sleek glossy fur against his legs and
rolled and gambolled like a kitten at his feet. The great bear of the
north rubbed his jaws against his hand and begged to be caressed. Big
mountain (the mammoth) thrust his huge tusks in for a touch; and the
white-horned moose bowed his smooth-bristled neck and plead with meek
black eyes for notice. All the huge grotesque things pressed around,
and the smaller creatures, pied, flecked, and dotted, crowded beneath
their heavy limbs, unhurt—all, full of confidence and love, gracefully
sporting to win one glance.

“Above him the air was thick with wings, and the whirr and winnowing
of soft plumes made pleasant music, and the play of brilliant hues was
like a thousand rainbows arched and waving over him; and the little
flame-like things would flutter near his face, and gleam their sharp
brown eyes into his, and strive, in vain, to warble out their joy, for
their sweet pipes were not yet tuned.

“All were there, great and small; and the wide-winged eagle came from
its high perch and circled round his head, and brushed its strong
plumes with light caressing, through his hair. He went with them into
the forest burdened with rich fruits, and ate, then shook the heavy
clusters down for them. Then he passed forth to look upon the land, the
first shepherd, with that countless flock thronging about his steps.

“It was, indeed, a lovely land! Here a rolling meadow, there a heavy
wood; the trees all bearing fruits, or hung with vines and bloom. A
still, deep river, doubled sky and trees in its clear mirror, and he
gazed, in a half-waking wonder, when the ripples the swan-trains made,
shivered it to glancing fragments.

“But wander which way he might, he came to tall gray cliffs, with small
streams, that pitched from their cloudy summits, and bounding off from
the rough crags below, filled all the valley with cool spray.

“He found his lovely world was fenced about with square towering rocks,
that nothing without wings could scale. But there was room enough for
all, and profuse plenty the fruitful earth supplied.

“At noon, he went beneath a grove of sycamores, where a great stream
gushed out, and laid him down beside its brink, while his subjects
stretched and perched around him, in the shade, to rest. His sleep was
broken by strange new melodies that crept in. He opened his eyes; near
him were two maidens, and all the birds and beasts were gathered around
them, and they were singing gay, delicious airs, teaching the birds to
warble.

“One of them was fair—white as the milk-white fawn that licked her hand
and gazed up at her musical lips; but her hair was dark and a strong
light gleamed in her small black eye. This was Ki-ke-wee. She sung and
laughed and kissed the song-bird that perched upon her finger, and
when it tried to follow her wild carol, she mocked its blunders and
stamped her tiny foot, and frowned and laughed and warbled yet a wilder
symphony to puzzle it the more.

“The other was a darker maiden with large, gentle eyes. This was
Mnemoia; her voice was soft and low—and she sang sweet songs and looked
full of love and patience. The Wako half rose in joy and wonder. They
bounded towards him—sang a rapturous roundelay to a giddy, whirling
dance, then threw their arms about his neck and kissed him. They became
his squaws, and Yahshau smiled upon them as she sailed by that night.

“The Wako was very happy and Ki-ke-wee was his favorite. She grew very
lovely and full of curious whims that each day became more odd. She
loved the blue jay most among the birds, and taught him all his antics;
and the magpie was a pet; and the passionate, bright hummer lived about
her lips.

“As yet nothing but sounds and scenes of love were in that little
world; and the strong, terrible brutes knew not that they had fierce
passions or the taste for blood; but Ki-ke-wee would stand before the
grizzly bear and pluck his jaws and switch his fierce eyeballs until
he learned to growl with pain, and then she would mock him; and when he
growled louder she would mock him still, until at last he roared with
rage and sprang upon the panther—for he feared Ki-ke-wee’s eye!—and
the panther tasted blood and sprang to the battle fiercely. And now
the tempest broke, and everything with claws and fangs howled in the
savage discord. Ki-ke-wee clapped her hands and laughed. Mnemoia
raised the enchantment of her song above it all, and it was stilled.
Then Ki-ke-wee would tease the eagle and mock him till he screamed and
dashed at the great vulture in his rage; and she would dance and shout
for joy; and Mnemoia would quell it, then go aside and weep.

“The Wako loved the beautiful witch, and when he plead with her she
would mock even him, and every day and every hour this mocking elf
stirred some new passion, until at last even Mnemoia’s song had lost
its charm, and the bear skulked in the deep thickets and shook them
with his growl, and the panther moaned from out the forest, and the
gaunt wolves snapped their white teeth and howled, and all the timid
things fled away from these fierce voices; and battle, and blood, and
death, were rife where love and peace had been. The birds scattered
in affright and sung their new songs in snatches only; and hateful
sounds of deadly passions, and the screams and wails of fear, resounded
everywhere.

“Ki-ke-wee made a bow and poisoned the barbed arrow, and mocked the
death-bleat of the milk-white fawn when the Wako shot it at her
tempting. This was too much! Ah-i-wee-o cursed her and she fell. The
Wako knelt over her and wept; and when the dissolving spasm seemed
upon her, he covered his face with his hands and wailed aloud. A voice
just above him wailed too! He looked up surprised; a strange bird with
graceful form and sharp black spiteful eyes was mocking him! He looked
down—Ki-ke-wee was gone; and the strange bird gaped its long bill
hissing at him; and when it spread its wings to bound up from the twig
in an ecstacy of passion, he knew by the broad white stripes across
them that it was Ki-ke-wee!

“He found the neglected Mnemoia weeping in the forest; and soon after
they scaled the cliffs and fled from that fair land to hide from
Ki-ke-wee. But she has followed them and mocks their children yet, and
we dare not slay her, for the wise men think she was the daughter of
the Evil Spirit that poured the green fluid down the Wako’s throat, and
that the same bad fire burns yet in our veins. Our hunters chasing the
mountain-goat sometimes look from the bluffs into that lovely vale that
lies in the bosom of the Rocky Mountain chain, but they never venture
to go down!”




                             CHAPTER XIX.

                          SOME SELECT SCENES.


Some short glimpses of daily scenes may convey, perhaps, a clearer
idea of how life sped now with Manton, amidst the new charms which it
had gained. The whole man was rapidly changed; his habits of excess in
wine-drinking were, in a great measure, thrown aside, and the hours
he had thus wasted in stupifying madness, were given to the society
and development of these fair children, that had thus come to him in
blessing. He now knew no difference in his thought of them; they had
grown to be twin-flowers to him, transfused with a most tender light of
spring-dawn in his darkened heart. Yes, there it was—that little spot
of light—he felt it warm, and slowly spread and waken in soft beams,
tremulous and faint, along the ice-bound chaos where the life-floods
met within him.

His brow would grow serene and lose its painful tension, as, hour by
hour, he watched beside them, guiding their wayward pencils with his
sure eye, to teach their yet irresolute wills and unaccustomed fingers
to act together with that consciousness that always triumphs; and
then, with the long evenings, came lessons in botany, or the eloquent
discourse, half poetical, half rhapsodical, and all inspired, which
led their young spirits forth, amidst the mysteries and beauties of
the other kingdoms of the natural world. Or, when the stars came out,
and their calm inspiration slid into his soul, he communed with them
of higher themes—of aspirations holy, wise, and pure—of the heroic
souls of art—of their pale, unmoved dedication, through dark, saddened
years of neglect, obloquy, and want—of their glorious triumphs, their
immortal bays, that time can never wither—until, with trembling lips
and glistening eyes, they hung upon his words.

It was wonderful to see how quickly Elna wept, like an April shower, at
any tender word or thought; but the great eyes of Moione only trembled
like dark violets brimming with heavy dew. All the truth, the religion
of Manton’s soul, was poured out at such times.

The door would sharply open—“Elna! Moione! go to bed!” This would be
spoken in a low tone, evidently half-choked with rage, by the woman.
Her bent form looming within the shadow of the entry, looks ghastly
enough in her white gown, loose dark hair, and the greenish glitter
of her oblique eye. The poor children rise, with a deep sigh from
Moione over her broken dream, and a quick exclamation of petulant wrath
from Elna—while Manton mutters an involuntary curse on the unwelcome
intruder; and, as the light forms of the children recede before his
vision and disappear in the dark passage, he shudders, unconsciously,
as if a ghoul had disturbed him at a feast with angels.

Now, again, had he fallen back to hell. With a fierce outbreak of
jealous fury, she would spring into the room, as if literally to devour
him with talons and teeth; and, when but a few paces off, catching
his cold, concentrated eye, she would stagger backwards, as if shot
through the heart, toss her white arms wildly into the air, and, with
head thrown back, utter, in a strange, choking, guttural screech—

“Auh! auh! auh!—yaugh!—you kill!—you kill me!” and pitch forward
convulsively, with the blood bursting in torrents from her mouth. Then
came the long, harrowing, and oft-described scene of terror, remorse,
pity, on the part of Manton, and the plea for forgiveness, the slow
recovery, and—and so on.

Or else, with some modification of tactics, the lioness changed to the
lamb, the Gorgon-head to that of Circe, she would throw herself upon
him, with tender expostulations, call him “cherubim,” and stroke his
“hyacinthian curls;” and, when that failed, cling about his knees,
and weep and pray, and then, as the desperate resort, suddenly swoon,
with a tremendous crash, upon the floor, and lie there for an hour, if
need be, in a condition of syncope, so absolute, that Manton—who had
now witnessed this comparatively harmless phenomenon so many times, as
to be relieved from any apprehensions of immediate results—had lately
felt the curiosity of the philosopher irresistibly aroused in him, and
would frequently leave her for a considerable length of time, in order
to watch the symptoms, before he proceeded to apply the very simple
remedy for recalling her to consciousness, with which, by the way, she
had furnished him long ago, in advance, through certain adroit hints
and indirections. When he had satisfied his more analytical moods,
in this way, he would proceed with the restorative process, as _per
prescription_.

This mysterious operation consisted in placing the pillows of the sofa,
or the rounds of a chair, under her feet, so as to elevate them at a
slight angle higher than the head. As he was led to understand the
result, the blood, by the laws of capillary attraction, was instantly
carried up, from her head to her feet, thereby relieving the oppression
of the brain; when lo! to this new “open sesame,” the rigid lids flew
wide apart, disclosing eyes as vivid with life as ever.

The strangest part of this scene consisted in the fact, that while
the fit lasted, it was impossible to perceive the slightest symptoms
of breathing or pulsation, any more than in the most broadly-defined
case of catalepsy, or of absolute death itself. It was, therefore,
clear enough to his mind, that such conditions could not be entirely
counterfeit; though the suggestion had now become frequent, that they
might, after long training, become, in a great measure, voluntary.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another scene. The mother reclines upon her bed, and the child Elna by
her side, with arms around her neck and face against her bosom. Moione
stands leaning over the foot-board, with folded arms, her pale face
expressing mingled grief, anger, and pain, while she looks with a cold,
steadfast glance into the oblique eye of the woman, who addresses her
rapidly, in bitter tones—

“You love that bad man, Moione?”

“Yes, I do!” said the young girl, curtly and coldly.

“Ha! you acknowledge it, do you, ungrateful girl? Acknowledge that, at
your age, you love a profligate wretch like this? a man utterly without
principle, where our sex is concerned. A villain, who has already
attempted the ruin of my own daughter, under my very eyes!”

Moione turned paler still at this, and looked inquiringly towards her
friend Elna, who, however, gave no sign, either by word or movement,
of dissent to this vile insinuation. Instantly the blood mounted to
Moione’s brow, and her gentle eye shot fire, her thin lips curled with
scorn—

“It is false! It is false! You know it to be so! He has taught us
nothing but what is pure and high! He never breathed a thought of evil
to either of us, and Elna _dares_ not say so! I love him as our lofty,
noble brother, and shall continue to do so so long as he shows himself
only to me, and to her, as he has done! Pray, madam, why do you permit
him to remain in the house, if he be so wicked? You tell me you have
the power to turn him out at any minute. Why not do it? Why do you
trust your child with him, at all hours, and under all circumstances?
Why do you so constantly seek his society yourself? If he were the
fiend you represented, one would think you would have reason to fear
for yourself, if not for Elna. What he has done once he will do again!
How do you reconcile all this?”

The flashing look and withering tone in which this unexpected outburst
of indignation, on the part of the usually quiet Moione, had been
delivered, cowed the craven nature to which it was addressed. It was
but for an instant, though; her subtle cunning returned to the charge,
in a lower tone, and on another tack. She reached out her hand,
affectionately, towards her—

“Come, Moione, dear! come, kiss me!”

The child did not move, but merely answered in a low, contemptuous “No!”

The woman continued, in a wheedling tone, “Hear! my naughty Moione!
She will not come to kiss me, when I love her so! Moione does not
understand everything she sees, or she would not have spoken thus
sharply to her friend. She does not understand that I am striving to
save this poor youth from his frightful vices! his wine-drinking, his
tobacco, his meat-eating, and all those ugly sins which so deface, what
I hope one day to see a beautiful spirit! She does not know I must
endure this evil that good may come! She does not realise how much pain
it costs me to have the purity of my household thus desecrated by his
poisoned sphere! She does not remember that God has placed us here, on
this earth, to bear and forbear towards his erring children; that they
may, through us, become regenerate and redeemed! I know his eloquence,
I know his subtlety, therefore I have warned you against him; he cannot
be dealt with as other men, for he is but a foolish, headstrong boy,
with a great soul, if he were only free; but while his vices hold him
in bondage, he is not to be trusted. Though I have lifted him out of
the very gutters of debasement—given him a home in my house—I have no
confidence, at this moment, that he would not deliberately ruin either
you or Elna to-morrow, if he could! You should, therefore, rather pity
me than be angry with me, dearest Moione!”

“So I perceive!” said the young girl, with a cold sneer, as she turned
and walked haughtily from the room, slamming the door emphatically
behind her. The woman sprang to her feet, with an expression of
ungovernable fury in her face. “The insolent, ungrateful wretch! This
is what I get for all my trouble to make something out of her—to render
her of some value to me! To sa-a-ve her!” and she hissed out the words
with a horrible writhing of her features, while the pupil of her
oblique eye was wrung aside, until nothing but the white, ghastly blank
of the ball was to be seen.

“Yes, I’ll save you! I’ll use you, you insolent beggar! I have not
brought you here, alone, as the ant carries off the aphide, to give
spiritual milk to my own offspring! I brought you to use, too, and use
you I will! I will _coin_ you into profit! I’ll humble your insolent
airs! I’ve got a market for you already, and a bidder! Dare to cross
my path, ha?—with your supercilious insolence? I’ll bow that white
forehead! I’ll fill those blue eyes with ashes! until, bleared and
rheumy with premature decay, you crawl to kiss my foot for favors!”

During this horrid apostrophe, the woman had stood stiffened where she
had first planted her feet upon the carpet, staring blankly at the door
through which the young girl had passed, and throwing her arms out in
wild gesticulations after her.

The girl Elna lay, in the meantime, with her face half concealed
in the pillow, closely watching, with one sharp eye uncovered, the
whole scene. The woman, who had forgotten herself in her fury, turned
suddenly and saw her. Her manner instantly changed. She threw herself
by her side, took her caressingly into her arms, drew her face close to
hers, breathed upon it long and steadily, and then commenced in low,
confidential tones, a conversation between them, the purport of which
we must leave to conjecture.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another scene. About this time, Manton had effected the advantageous
sale of a new work, which placed him suddenly in the possession of a
larger sum of money than he had been able to command, at one time, for
a long period. His first thought was for his young _proteges_, and,
although his own wardrobe was sufficiently dilapidated, he expended
a portion of the sum for their comfort and gratification before he
thought at all of his own necessities. Unluckily for him, however, it
was evening when the money was received, and the purchases intended to
surprise them were the only ones made on the way to the house.

In almost boyish eagerness, and all breathless with the delight of
giving joy to these gentle ones he loved so much, he hastened home
and threw his presents down before them, to be greeted with rapturous
expressions and gleeful merriment, the silvery and most musical
clamoring of which, soon brought the woman, Marie, to the scene. Her
eyes danced and glistened as she saw them; her infallible instinct
scented the money in an instant.

“Beautiful! beautiful!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands with
childlike artlessness. “How lovely! How sweet! How noble! How generous
of you to think of these dear girls first, when you need so much
yourself!” and she looked up with bewitching candor into the face of
Manton, though it might have been noticed by more careful observers
that one eye turned obliquely towards his pockets. She sprang suddenly
to his side, and leant affectionately against his arm, which she
clasped with both her hands.

“Ah, my gentle Tiger! How shall I ever thank you for your unwearying
kindness to these my tender blossoms? My precious ‘Monies!’ You are too
good! We shall never know how to thank you enough!”

And leaning still closer and in a more confidential manner towards his
ear, while her forehead flushed and her voice sank,

“You sold the book, did you?”

“Yes.”

“For how much?”

“The receipts in my pocket will show!”

“Ah, let us see them then!” said she playfully, as she thrust her hand
into his pocket. “I want to see if those evil and stupid publishers
have understood the value of the precious genius they were purchasing!
Oh, dear, why what a treasure! Here are fifties, twenties, ever so
many!” while she, with eager and trembling hands, fumbled the notes
that she had snatched from the vest-pocket where he had, with his
characteristic carelessness of money, thrust them loosely. “Ah, I must
take time to count all this treasure for you, for I don’t believe you
know how much you’ve got, you careless boy!” And as she said this she
hastily deposited the money in the bottom of her pocket.

Manton looked at her a moment with a very hard, cold glance, while
a flush of indignation gleamed across his brow; for he had a sure
presentiment that he should never see this money again. The great
misfortune of his organisation was his recklessness in regard to money,
and the absolute inability of his nature to comprehend the sterile
meannesses of its abject worshippers. For the first time the impulse to
strike this woman to the earth came across him, but in an instant this
angry feeling was dissipated amidst the gay and laughing caresses of
his petted favorites.

When, on the next day, Manton demanded of the woman an account of
the money, she turned pale and red, looked upwards and downwards,
and finally askance, while she faintly told him that she had spent
the whole; but, for his good, as well as that of the dear girls and
herself, “for,” she said, “you know you are _so_ careless about money,
_so_ generous, _so_ liberal, that you would have thrown it all away
without accomplishing any of the good you so much desire. Pray, forgive
me, for my anxiety to do the best for us all!” and as she saw the
brow of Manton, who had not uttered a word, settling darker and darker
above his cold dilated eyes, she sank upon her knees at his feet, and
clasping his in her arms, she plaintively plead—

“Ah, forgive me! forgive me! I acted for the best! For God’s sake do
not look so, you will kill me!”

He spurned her contemptuously from him with his foot, and retreating,
as she crawled abjectly back again, he said in a measured, deliberate
tone—

“Keep away from me, woman! You may retain your ill-gotten plunder once
more, but, mark you, if ever you dare to put your hands into my pockets
again I will strike you to the earth, woman as you are, and trample
you beneath my feet, as I would another reptile! I have had enough of
this remorseless fleecing!” And spurning yet more contemptuously her
persistent attempts to clutch his knees again, he left her _swooning_
upon the floor. He went forth with the scales falling from his eyes
regarding this woman, in some particulars at least.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sequel to the last scene is too rich to be passed over. Since
that wholesale and impudent robbery, Manton had maintained his ground
firmly, in regard to money. All her arts were brought to bear, in vain;
he steadily and sternly refused to be plundered any farther; until
finally, his feminine “saviour” being driven to the extreme verge of
desperation, tried a new and dashing game.

She had just been reading Zschokke’s charming tale, “Illumination, or
the Sleep-Walker.” The reader will remember how the Sleep-Walker, the
heroine of the tale, instructs Emanuel, while in the clairvoyant state,
as to how he should proceed in her own case, which he had been elected
to restore to health again, through the nervous, or sympathetic medium,
by re-establishing the balance of the lost physical with the spiritual
life. That, in addition, the Sleep-Walker revealed to him the thoughts
of his own soul, and counselled him as an angel would have done,
against the evil she saw in him—tells him too, that he must not regard
her weakness, or the petulance of her words towards him in her waking
state.

Well, our clairvoyant, after reading this book herself, exhibited an
unusual degree of restlessness to have it read by Manton, too; nothing
would content her until he had fairly commenced it, when she knew there
was no probability of his pausing until he got through. She watched him
during the reading, with great curiosity, frequently interrupting him
to draw out his opinion as he progressed.

Everybody knows the fascination of the tale, and confesses the fine
skill with which its wonderful details are wrought up. Manton could do
no less; he was charmed, of course, as millions of other readers have
been. A few hours after finishing the book, while sitting at his table,
engaged in writing, the door, which was unbolted, flew open wide, and
there stood Madame, dressed in pure white—the eyes nearly closed,
and features pale and rigid, the outstretched hands reaching vaguely
forward, after the manner of the somnambulist.

She paused for a moment thus—while the whole meaning of the scene
flashed through the mind of Manton in an instant; and, although he
felt a very great inclination to laugh, he restrained himself, and
determined to encourage the thing, and see how far it would go. The new
Sleep-Walker now advanced slowly towards him; and as she crossed the
room, a slight movement of her fingers beat the air before her, as if
through the guidance of these magnetic poles her soul sought its centre
of attraction; with a slow, gliding movement she thus approached, until
within a few inches of him, when her hand leaped, as the magnet does
to the stone, to meet his, and then a certain painful rigidity that
had marked her brow at first, was displaced and gave way to a serene
expression of content, as if she had now found rest.

That peculiar action of the muscles of the throat, as if in the effort
to swallow, now followed immediately, and was sufficient intimation to
Manton that she desired to speak. He accordingly asked her, solemnly—

“Why are you here?”

But there was evidently something of mockery in the tone in which
this question was asked, for the Sleep-Walker only frowned and shook
her head impatiently. Manton now changed his voice, and with real
curiosity, proceeded.

“Speak: why have you come to me thus? What would you say to me?”

After some four or five efforts to produce sound, she articulated—

“For your good.”

“Tell me then, what is for my good?”

She again frowned and shook her head and muttered—

“You are naughty.”

“Why?”

“You have no faith.”

“Faith in what?”

“Faith in me—in my mission—in my truth.”

“I have faith in you—tell me what is for my good.”

“You must be more humble; your pride and your suspicion will never let
you be saved. You must have some hard lessons yet to bring you down—to
humiliate you—to purify.”

Here there was a long pause, when Manton, growing impatient, finally
asked—

“Is this all you have to say to me? Is this all you see now?”

“No.”

“Well, what is it?”

After considerable hesitation, she at length said—

“You do not treat me right!—you hold my life in your hands—yet you are
cold—you do not come near me—you are leaving me to die!”

Here then was another long pause.

“What more is there?” at length asked Manton; “this is not all.”

This time the choking and hesitation, before pronouncing the words,
seemed greater than ever. At length, however, out they came.

“They complain of you in Heaven, that you let me suffer—that you do not
care for my necessities—that—that you do not—not—give me money now.”

This was too much—Manton literally roared with scornful laughter, as he
spurned her from him—

“Ha! ha! ha! here is illumination for you with a vengeance! Alas! poor
Zschokke! ‘to what base uses do we come!’ The divine inspiration of
the Sleep-Walker raising the wind! Vive la bagatelle! Hurrah! hurrah!”
He fairly danced about the floor, in an ecstacy of enjoyment—the scene
seemed to him so irresistibly ludicrous.

During this time, the woman, who had staggered towards the bed, and
fallen across it, lay perfectly immovable and white, without the
change of a muscle, or the quiver of a nerve. Manton, however, paid no
attention to her, and half an hour afterwards, taking his hat, left
the room, without again approaching her. But what was his astonishment
on returning, two hours afterwards, to meet the sobbing Elna, and the
pale, troubled face of Moione, in the passage. Elna, at the sight of
him, seemed wild with grief, and sprang, with her arms about his neck,
screaming—

“Oh, mother is dead! mother is dead! My dear mother is dead!”

“Why, Moione,” said Manton quickly, taking her hand, as he shook Elna
off, “what is the matter? what is all this?”

“She seems to be in a fit of some sort. We missed her, and after
looking all over the house, found her lying on the bed in your room,
without motion or breath. We have not been able to wake her since, and
did not know what to do until you came.”

“Oh, come! do come!” screamed the horrified Elna. “Save my poor mother!
save her! save her! You must save her! I shall die!”

Manton, who immediately felt his conscience sting him, assured the
girls that it was merely a mesmeric sleep, from which he would relieve
her in a few minutes. He then rushed up-stairs, accompanied by them,
and found her, indeed, in precisely the same attitude and apparent
condition in which he had left her. After a few of the usual reverse
passes for removing the magnetic influence, she slowly opened her eyes,
while the blood returned to her face. Starting up and staring about
with a bewildered look, she uttered merely an exclamation of surprise,
and then, after rubbing her eyes, quickly asked the poor child, Elna,
who had thrown herself sobbing wildly on her breast—

“Why, you foolish girl, what’s the matter now?”

“Mother, dear mother, we thought you were dead!”

And now came an explanation, so far as the thoroughly repentant Manton
was disposed to make it, of the scene we have just described; the
amount of which was, that she had come into his room in a clairvoyant
state, and, being called out suddenly, he had left it for an hour or
two, forgetting to make any explanation to the family, and without
having relieved her, as he should have done, before going, by using the
necessary reverse passes.

The incredulity of Manton had never before received so severe a shock;
and it was a long time before his conscience would forgive him, for
what now seemed his brutal suspicion. Alas, poor Manton! had he only
possessed, for a little while after he left that room, the invisible
cap of the “Devil on two sticks,” he would have been most essentially
enlightened as to something of the art and mystery of Clairvoyance.

As soon as the front-door had slammed behind him, he would have
seen that woman spring to her feet, and, with lips and whole frame
quivering with rage, glide from the room, muttering to herself; and
when she entered her own room, which could be reached through an empty
bath-room, he would have heard several low, peculiar raps upon the
partition-wall which separated her own from the room of her daughter.
These raps were repeated, at intervals, until a single tap at her door
responded, and in another moment the girl Elna glided in on tiptoe. The
conference between them was carried on in a low, rapid, business-like
tone, while every half-minute the girl thrust her head from the window,
to watch as for some one coming.

After a few moments thus spent, the child left the room, with an
intelligent nod, in answer to the repeated injunction not to leave the
window of her own room until she saw him coming, far up the street—and
then—!

After this, he would have seen the woman quietly seat herself at the
table, after locking her door, and write a long letter; when, on
hearing three low taps in succession, she sprang to her feet, rushed
through the bath-room into the room of Manton, and threw herself across
the bed, in the precise position in which he left her, and, after
three or four violent retchings of the whole muscular system, her face
collapsed—grew ashen-white—her lids drooped—her muscles became rigid,
and she exhibited all the outward resemblances of suspended vitality.
Then the wild Elna rushed in, accompanied by the deluded Moione, and,
the moment she looked at the condition of the mother, burst into the
most extravagant demonstrations of helpless grief; while Moione, with
perfect presence of mind, sprinkled water upon the face and endeavored
to restore animation. Soon the street door-bell rings with a peculiar
energetic pull, and the frantic Elna at once exclaims, “Manton! dear
Manton! he can save my mother; let us run for him.” She seizes the hand
of Moione, and—we know the rest!

Shocking, ludicrous, and monstrous as all this may appear to the
reader, from his point of view, its only effect upon Manton was
necessarily to rebuke the feeling of harsh incredulity which was
beginning to become so strong in him, with regard to this inexplicable
woman. He was now more troubled and confounded than he had ever
been; for it was impossible that a nature like his could ever have
voluntarily suspected the unimaginable trickery and collusion which
we have traced in this scene; while his common sense was too strong
to be in any degree shaken by what was simply unexplained. His
magnanimity would not permit him to suspect the full degree of knavery,
or his conscientiousness to run such risks, again, of doing grievous
injustice, as it now seemed to him he had clearly done in this case.
He felt it utterly impossible to treat these phenomena with entire
disrespect hereafter, however little influence he might permit them to
exert upon his fixed purposes and will.




                              CHAPTER XX.

                       SELECT SCENES CONTINUED.


We have lost sight of the other characters in our narrative, and it
is now time that we return to them. The reader will remember, in the
dark-eyed, sharp-tongued Jeannette of a past scene, the contrasted type
of another class of adventuress, whose schemes seemed to have been
rapidly culminating. Her success, indeed, seemed now to be absolutely
assured; the coveted conquest had been achieved—Edmond was daily at her
feet. They were, as it was understood, soon to be publicly married.
In the meanwhile, she occupied the best room in the house, and became
daily more and more imperious and overbearing towards the woman Marie,
as she believed the time to be approaching when she would no longer
need her services.

In common with her type the world over, she was incredibly selfish and
ungrateful, where she had once fawned and cringed. This little weakness
of arrogance she had begun to make some slight exhibitions of, even
towards Edmond himself; while, as for the woman Marie, she hectored her
on all occasions with the pitiless volubility of a most caustic wit.
In this, however, she made a most fatal mistake; she little dreamed of
the dark and terrible subtlety of the reptile she thus hourly trampled
with her ruthless scorn. She, too, was doomed to feel the fearful
poison of the hidden sting she carried, and writhe beneath its hideous
tortures.

There had been a more than usually bitter scene between them, in
which Jeannette had loftily taunted her with the abjectness of the
game she was now playing, in putting forward her own daughter, as the
attraction, by which to hold Manton any longer near her. It was not
that Madame Jeannette was so much shocked at any villany in the act
itself, but that her lofty pride was revolted at the inconceivable
meanness it displayed; for, as among thieves and robbers, there is
among adventuresses a certain _esprit du corps_,—and the haughty
Jeannette aspired to be a sort of banditti chieftainess in sentiment,
and was really a person of refined cultivation, so far as mere
intellect was concerned,—it is little wonder, that at such a time
of unbounded confidence in the security of her own position, and
independence, as she supposed, of any farther aid from the woman,
that she should have given way to a natural feeling of disgust and
abhorrence, in a moment of irritation. But that taunt proved to her the
most deadly error of her life.

The woman, who feared her presence mortally, left the room hurriedly
and in silence, shivering in an ague-fit of rage. In another moment
she left the house, without speaking a word to any one. Indeed, she
seemed incapable of speaking. Her eyes looked bloodshot and hideously
awry; the veins of her face swollen as if to bursting, and the skin
absolutely livid.

It was a long walk she had set out upon, and gradually the headlong
rapidity of her gait subsided into a more measured tread. Her face
became pale, as it had before suffused, and a sort of ghastly calmness
succeeded. At length, in White Street, she rang the bell of an
old-fashioned, but respectable-looking mansion, and shot past the
servant in the passage, when, instead of turning into the parlor, she
hurried up-stairs to the chamber of the lady.

A somewhat masculine voice answered her tap, and she passed in. A
woman of stout symmetrical figure, imperious bearing, whose somewhat
coarse features were relieved by the animal splendor of her large black
eyes, the luxuriance of her jetty hair, and voluptuous _embonpoint_ of
person, greeted her in a short, abrupt style, as she looked up with a
cold glance from some lacework over which she was bending.

“What is it, Marie? You look flurried.”

“No, no,” said she, throwing off her bonnet and sinking into a chair.
“I’m only tired! It’s a long walk from my place here; and then it is
very hot to-day. But, Eugenie,” she said abruptly, changing her tone,
“I came this morning to tell you about Edmond.”

“What of him?” said the other sharply, turning full upon her.

“Dear Eugenie, the fact is, I could not restrain myself longer—I should
not be acting truly by you or him, if I did so. You know you love him
still.”

The face of the French-woman flushed slightly; her head was thrown back
with a haughty curve of the neck.

“Ah, no,” said the woman, interrupting her quickly as she was about to
speak.

“No nonsense, Eugenie; you remember that proud as you are, you loved
him well enough to risk the loss of your social position for him. You
never loved any one as well since, and never will again; and _I_ know
that he loves you, and you only, to this hour. It was your pride caused
the separation, it is your pride that has reduced him so low as to
become, in sheer despair, the victim of such a sapless, bodiless, dry
and sharp-set speculator, as this Jeannette! Why, would you believe it,
she has tormented him at last into a promise to marry her!”

“What!” said the other, springing to her feet; “what! marry that
starvling! Edmond marry that pauper adventuress, after having loved
me! Pshaw! Marie, you are mistaken. He only tells her this to get rid
of her importunities. He’s trifling with her: he’s not in earnest—he
can’t be—he’s too proud: and besides, his father would disinherit him!”

“Sit down and keep cool, Eugenie. I am not mistaken; so far from it,
that every day he comes to me, grievously bewailing his hard fate, in
having so far committed himself to Jeannette, whom he curses, while he
mourns over this obdurate pride of yours, in refusing to see him again.
He says if he could only see you once more he would be strong enough
to break with Jeannette forever. I’ve shown him how he could easily
buy her off, in case of reconciliation with you—that her object, from
the first, had been simply money, and the _eclat_ of the position it
would give her abroad—and that when she had become convinced that a
separation must take place, she would soon be brought to compromise her
claims. Beside, the marriage is impossible; I have seen his father and
his brother, and have given them some seasonable hints in regard to
her; and the testy old man now swears that he will disinherit him, if
he dares to marry what he considers to be little better than a common
adventuress. And the brother, whom you know is the most influential of
the two with the old man, is equally violent about it. So you see, my
dear Eugenie, I have been working for you faithfully all the while,
while you considered me as co-operating with Jeannette.”

“Yes,” said the other, who had resumed her seat quite calmly, “I dare
say I did you injustice, for I had conceived all the time, that it
was through you that this affair, between Jeannette and Edmond, had
been brought about; that you had had some interest in it you have not
thought proper to explain to me; and an explanation of which I have not
chosen to ask of you. It is quite sufficient for me to know that you
now desire to supplant Jeannette, and thereby undo your own work. Now,
if you choose to explain to me what the object you wish to accomplish
is, so that I can understand your motive, then, perhaps, we may come
together in this matter—for I know you, Marie, that you never do things
without a motive for yourself. Come, out with it! Has Jeannette
crossed your track in any way? Has she foiled you? In a word, do you
hate her now?”

“Of course I hate her now,” said the woman, “or why this visit? Why
the deliberate care I have taken to prepare the way to foil her
dearest schemes? She has outraged me beyond endurance by her insolent
superiority. She frightens, bullies and taunts me. She has insulted me
beyond the possibility of woman’s forgiveness to another! I hate her as
deeply as I love revenge!”

“All this may be very true, Marie,” said the other, with a cool smile,
“but knowing you as I do, I should prefer to be informed specifically
in what this insult consisted. Tell me what she said and did, give
me all the circumstances in detail, and then I shall understand your
motive and know how far we can act together!”

The woman paused an instant as if in hesitation, her eye grew hideously
askance once more, her forehead blazed, and her lips quivered, as
glancing furtively around the room, with a stealthy movement, she
glided closely to the side of the French-woman, and whispered in her
ear, with purple lips, a rapid, eager communication for a few moments,
and then sank back into her chair again, pale as death and seemingly
exhausted.

The French-woman bent her ear to listen, with her needle suspended in
her hand, and as the other finished, a fierce, electric gleam darted
from her eye, and with untrembling fingers she finished her stitch,
while she said in a low tone—

“That will do, Marie; that’s enough to secure your faith. We will
punish her. Edmond shall come back to my feet!”

       *       *       *       *       *

The results of the last scene may be rapidly traced. Very soon there
commenced a series of mysterious calls by a dark-veiled lady, whom
Manton was induced to suppose was a patient who was desirous to retain
her incognito. She came and went always at unusual hours, and though a
vague suspicion once or twice forced itself upon his mind that there
was something unusual going on, yet in his pre-occupation it created
but little attention. But we, who have undertaken from the first to be
somewhat closer and more widely-awakened observers than he, can see
something more significant than met his eye in all this.

An _accidental_ meeting in one of the rooms of the house soon occurred
between Edmond and Eugenie, upon the privacy of which we are not
disposed to intrude. Let the consequences suffice.

In a few weeks the imperious tone of Jeannette, who, too, had been
kept entirely ignorant of what was going on, was lowered, though the
covert and sardonic vindictiveness of her wit had clearly lost nothing
of its directness and ferocity even; because, as she daily became less
exultant, the moroseness of her temper increased.

It would be anything but a pleasant picture to unveil the harrowing
struggles of such a woman to regain an ascendency, which she felt was
daily driven by some malign and invisible power beyond the breath of
her heretofore ascendant will. She only felt its devastation amidst
her towering hopes, and the moon-stone battlements of regal schemes
that she had nourished in daring fancies. She only felt the shadow of
desolation on her soul, but her vision was not strong enough to see the
demon wing that threw it.

She was passing through the valley and the shadow, yet knew not where
to aim the lightning of her curse. She sank at last, bewildered,
stunned, and utterly humiliated; for she had crawled upon her very
knees to Edmond to plead for mercy, but he was inexorable. The old
passion had been restored to his life, and her proud, voluptuous rival
held the sensual philosopher a prisoner, “rescue or no rescue,” once
more.

For days and days after the tremendous realisation of her loss had been
forced upon her, she lay upon her bed, tossing in dumb and tearless
torture: then her concentrated madness took a new and sudden turn; she
shrieked and wailed, she cursed heaven, and earth, and men, and even
Edmond, with the lurid curses of madness, while she kissed the hand
and blessed the ministerings of the soft-gliding genius of her ruin,
who hung with a cunning science about her suffering bed.

But Jeannette was clearly not the stuff to die of any one passion less
intense than her love of self. She came through at last, haggard and
broken, and humble enough, but she received her pension nevertheless,
and soon after sailed for England, leaving the field to her stronger
rival, to whom Edmond was soon afterwards married.




                             CHAPTER XXI.

                       SELECT SCENES CONTINUED.


We have frequently mentioned the eccentric Dr. Weasel in the course
of this narrative. Another scene will enlighten the reader somewhat
in regard to the yet undefined character of his relations towards the
woman Marie. He had just entered her room; and approaching with a
quick, nervous step, he said to her in an irritated and squeaking voice—

“Marie Orne, I tell you I must have my money back again! I did not give
it to you, when I advanced it to get you started in business. You were
to have returned it to me, long since! You have been doing well now
for two years and more, and yet instead of returning the money I first
advanced to you, you have been borrowing more than double as much! At
this moment you have more than five hundred dollars belonging to me,
of which you have never returned me a cent! Yet I have been suffering
for money, for months, and you know it! You know I cannot receive
remittances now, since the death of my grandmother, till the settlement
of our estate! I am tired of this treatment, Madam! I will have my
money!”

The Doctor, who had been walking hurriedly up and down the room during
this speech, now paused abruptly before the woman, who had quietly
continued her writing—

“Do you hear me?” he said angrily, in a loud, sharp tone. “Where is the
money you have plundered me of?”

The woman now looked up, staring at him with wide-open eyes, that
expressed the most unutterable astonishment, while, at the same moment,
a bland smile broke across her face, while she exclaimed in a low,
sweet, reproachful voice—

“Why, Doctor E. Willamot Weasel! What can you mean? My dear friend—_I_
plunder you? You forget yourself! Remember what a feeble child you
were—how sad, how sick, how despairing, when I took hold of you, as the
tender nurse does the dying foundling at her door—”

“I believe you had no door, till I gave you one!” interrupted the
Doctor, while his sharp little eyes shot fire.

“This were all very fine, if it were only true: I advanced you my
money, not to pay you for curing me, which you have never accomplished,
but that you might do good with it; because I believed in your mission
to your sex! But I am not pleased with the use you—”

“Does not that mission exist still?” said the woman, with flushing
brow, quickly interrupting him. “Has not the number of my patients
increased daily?—including the first ladies of the land? Have not my
lecture-classes become more full and widely-attended every season? Have
you not a thousand evidences, in the extent of my correspondence, that
women are becoming awakened throughout the country? What more do you
ask? Do you expect me to perform miracles?”

“No! unless the expectation that you will deal honestly with those who
have befriended you, be what you call a miracle. Come, I know what all
this amounts to, perfectly! I gave you my money, as you know I dedicate
all that I have, in trust, for humanity! You seemed to be laboring
in common cause with myself, for the restoration of the Passional
Harmonies; and as you appeared to me capable of accomplishing much
for the great cause, I felt that I had no right to withhold my aid
from you when you needed it. I gave you my gold as freely as I would
have given you a drink of water, when athirst. But you have not been
just and true—you have used it selfishly—you have surrendered yourself
exclusively to the cabalistic sphere; your life is wasted in a series
of ignoble plottings; sensual intrigues merely, in utter disregard
of the harmonic relations. Do not interrupt me! I have watched you
closely; I know this to be true! Instead of elevating that noble soul,
Manton, whom I thought, through you, to rescue from the dominion of
his appetites, and see set apart, with all his glorious powers, to the
exalted priesthood of the Harmonies, you have steadily dragged him down
from the beginning until now, when he is further removed than ever
beyond our reach, and regards with contempt and disgust the very name
of the system with which I had yearned to see him identified. You have
done this, and all for your own individual and unworthy ends, and have
defeated one of my most treasured purposes!”

“This is false!” shrieked the woman, as, with flushed face, and with
the aspect of a roused tigress, she sprang to her feet, and placed
herself directly across the track of the excited Doctor.

“You lie in your teeth, you ingrate! It is not so! His own beastly
passions have degraded him, in spite of me! Just as I have failed to
make a man out of _you_, through your own weakness! For years I have
patiently wrestled with your downward tendencies, in the hope you,
too, might be redeemed—might be sa-a-ved from yourself! The money that
you have given me, I have earned twice over again, in these vain and
exhausting struggles to bring you back to the true health of unity with
God through nature! Your childish aberrations and eccentricities have
baffled all my spiritual strength! The proof of it is, that you dare
to taunt me in this way! I see that you are incorrigible! You may go!
Go from me forever! I am hopeless! I will no longer expend myself upon
you! Your money I shall keep until it is my convenience to restore it,
if ever! It is my due, and you may recover it if you can; I own nothing
here. The furniture of this house has all been loaned me. Seize it, if
you dare! Go, I say! Go! Leave my house instantly!”

And she stamped her foot, and, waving her hand in melodramatic fashion
towards the door, repeated the imperative order to “begone!”

We have mentioned, that the Doctor was a small man, and the woman was,
no doubt, fully conscious of her physical superiority over him, before
her coward and reptile nature could have dared to have assumed such a
tone. But she had mistaken the metal with which she had to deal.

The Doctor had listened to this tirade with a cold, sardonic smile upon
his face, while his keen little eyes fairly snapped with scintillating
fury.

“You are a fool!” said he, in a low, smooth tone, “as well as a
thief and an impostor! I’ll put you in the Tombs to-morrow, if you
do not at once lower your tone! And what is more, I will expose your
practices, fully and publicly. I will swear to the false pretences
by which you have swindled me out of my money. I will swear that you
have made overtures to me, time after time, as an equivalent for the
money you are dragging from me, to sell to me the chaste and gentle
Moione, whose unprotected poverty you have dared to think you could
traffic in! I will swear, too, that at one time you did not scruple
to suggest, by indirection, one much nearer to you; the true scope of
which suggestion, however artfully disguised, the world will readily
comprehend. Furthermore, I can now understand, perfectly, the secret
of all those physiological phenomena, by which you have managed to
delude and degrade Manton, not forgetting the disgusting fact, which
has become too apparent to me, that you are endeavoring to play off
Elna upon him, and, through his generous susceptibilities, to retain
him within the reach of your damnable arts! You are becoming aware
that he, too, is beginning to see through them, and through you. I have
never spoken a word, for I wished him to work out the problem himself!
I will secure even him from your clutches!”

The woman made no attempt to reply. Her face became, of a sudden, as
white and rigid as death, and, muttering a few choked and guttural
sounds, she pitched forward suddenly, like a falling statue, against
the bosom of the irritated Doctor Weasel; who, not a little shocked
by the unexpected concussion, staggered backwards, for an instant,
in the utmost confusion, while her form fell upon the shaken floor.
He recovered his coolness, however, in another moment, and merely
muttered, as he left the room—

“Pah! nonsense! The old trick—she’s purely in the subversive sphere—and
I can make nothing of her in the Passional Harmonies! We require purity
and singleness of purpose. She may go to the dogs, hereafter, for me.”




                             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 that she 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 more and 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 bewitching _naivete_ remarked—

“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 hands from
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 serve _you_ so, 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!”




                            CHAPTER XXIII.

                           ANOTHER INTRIGUE.


With all the apparent amount of suffering which we have attempted
to describe above, Manton was no little astonished, not only at the
promptness and completeness of the recovery of the woman Marie, but at
the shortness of the time which she permitted to elapse before he found
her again engaged deep in a bold and characteristic intrigue.

He had immediately determined that Elna should be separated from him
until the time of the proposed marriage had approached. While she was
to be sent to New England to prosecute her studies under the charge of
an artist friend, he himself proposed to spend the greater part of the
year in the northern mountains, hunting, fishing and exploring.

But before this prudent and proper step could be taken, a week or so
of preparation became necessary. It was only a week since the woman
had risen from her bed, a showery Niobe, as we have seen, when Manton
entered the house one morning at an hour when he was not expected,
he met the woman gliding hastily through a passage, with one of the
sleeves of her dress gone. The meaning of this sign at once flashed
across him, for he remembered to have seen that fair and beautiful
arm, by skilful accident, exposed to his own gaze during her first
attempts at diverting and exciting his passions, and he shrewdly
conceived that there must be some new victim on hand, even already.

“Ha!” said he maliciously, as she was hurrying past. “Why, what’s
become of your sleeve this morning?”

The woman flushed very red, and her eye turned obliquely upon him as
she muttered confusedly—

“I—I’ve lost it!”

“Ah, well, come! Let us look for it! Let us find it! The morning is too
cold! I will help you! I fear you will suffer!”

“No, no, never mind! I will find it myself!”

“But I insist! We must find it at once, before you take cold! Come, we
will look in the parlor!” And he made a movement of his outstretched
hand as if to open the door.

She clutched him nervously, saying in a low whisper—

“Don’t go in there, I have a visitor!”

But as Manton only smiled at this and showed no disposition to desist,
she continued in an imploring voice—

“Don’t go in! Mr. Narcissus, the editor, is there! I will get the
sleeve and put it on immediately! Don’t disturb us now; I am just
reading to him the MS. of my new novel, which I hope he will undertake
to publish in his paper!”

“Well,” said Manton, quietly stepping back, “it must be confessed you
are prompt in finding alternatives! I wish you success in your new
publishing enterprise! And I suppose this bare arm is to have nothing
to do with his anticipated commentary upon your text!”

Manton turned away with a light laugh, but the look which was sent
after him would have chilled his very soul could he have met it. His
sneering conjecture was only too true. She had already fastened upon
a new victim. But for once it turned out that it was “file cut file.”
She had at last met her equal in all that was detestable—her peer in
baseness, and only an under-graduate to _her_ in cunning.

She had selected him as she did all her victims, with reference to
social and pecuniary position. He was at the time a co-editor and
ostensible part-owner of one of the most brilliant and successful
weekly papers of New York. She had always aspired to command
an “organ.” And anything in that line, from a review down to a
thumb-paper, to her restless ambition, was better than nothing. For by
a process more hideous to the world than anomalous in fact, she had
come to reconcile any degree of private intrigue, by balancing it with
the value of abstract teachings for the public good, under that liberal
postulate of the school to which she belonged, that the end justifies
the means.

In setting herself down for a regular siege before this newspaper
establishment, she had first in her eye, all three of the associate
owners. It was a matter of entire indifference to her, through which
she succeeded in obtaining an entrance to its columns, which might
lead to her control of the future tone of the paper. She opened the
investment in the usual form; first, by visiting them alone, in
their offices; then by bombarding them, from the distance of her own
writing-table, with a constant hail of those snow-white missives, with
the sugared contents of which we have before been made acquainted.

They were each privately and successively pronounced in their own ears,
and under seal of those crow-quilled envelopes, to be “naughty boys,”
whose proud and wilful natures were driving them headlong to ruin—to
be sons of genius, who only required to be saved from themselves and
their own vices, by her, to become the illustrious reformers of the
age! One of them smoked too much—was making a “chimney of his nose,”
through which he was exhaling spiritual mightiness, that might equalise
him with the cherubim, if only free! But this unhappily did not tell;
the shrewd and wary business-man, who knew more about coppers than
cherubim, and was by no means conscious of the spiritual prowess she so
pathetically attributed to him, “smoked” her, or her motive at least,
and threw the dainty correspondence aside, with a jeering laugh.

The other, who was really chief editor, and a handsome and talented
fellow, might not have got off so well, had he not been pre-occupied,
and predisposed to bestow the exalted attributes which she had
discovered in him, in another direction. He was duly grateful to her,
however, for the discovery that he was a child of genius; and, though
a little disposed to be suspicious, could not, for some time, restrain
the expression of his delight at having met with a lady possessing such
unquestionable and extraordinary discrimination.

He was a jovial and generous fellow, though very shrewd and suspicious
withal. She was not quite aware of the last two attributes, and
therefore expected a great deal from him, as he proverbially drank
too much. She therefore opened her batteries mercilessly upon this
weakness, which, as she affirmed, combined with the horrible practice
of chewing to excess, was demonising an “Archangel! Dragging down the
loftiest spirit of his age! A spirit that might guide the destinies
of the human race, and rule it, whether for evil or for good.” She
particularly desired his salvation. She prayed for it, day and night!
She had a spiritual monition that he could be saved; and the fact was,
he would be saved, if he would only listen to her counsel! Indeed, she
might guarantee he _should_ be saved, if he would only give up his
poisons, and dedicate the columns of his paper to the great cause of
progressive hygiene and popular physiology. In a word, the fact was, he
_must_ be saved, whether he wanted to be or not!

But the trouble was, our editor was a person who would do nothing on
compulsion. And when he found that such a powerful edict had gone
forth, that he _must_ be saved, he swore, in his benighted obstinacy,
that he would be —— if he would!

This led, through his spleen, to an explanation between himself and
the business-man of the firm, and what was their mutual astonishment,
on privately comparing “notes,” to find that one was absolutely a
“Cherubim,” and the other an “Archangel!” They looked at each other
with a blank stare of surprise. The tawney, lean, angular, iron-jawed
face of the business-man suggested anything but the plump and dimpled
outlines of that prolific progeny of winged infants, which Raphael has
rendered so illustrious. While, in contrast, the features of the young
editor were remarkable for their plump and childlike freshness.

“Why!” shouted the business-man, with a tremendous guffaw, “there’s a
great mistake here—she has clearly misdirected the notes. You should be
the cherub!”

The breath of a simultaneous roar of laughter dissipated all her
fine-spun web, in these two directions at least. She was more
successful, however, with the third party.

Manton had been deceived, egregiously, in regard to this man’s past
history, or he would never have permitted him to pass the threshold
of the house where he lived. He had known him only as ostensibly
associate editor of a highly-respectable paper, and therefore had not
felt himself called upon to interfere in any way. Although he had, as
we have perceived, early indications of his having become a frequent
visitor at the house.

To have gone any higher in her classification of him than she had
already gone in that of his associates, would have puzzled any less
versatile genius than hers. But as cherubim and archangel had already
been used up, she placed him among the “principalities and powers in
heavenly places,” and there he decided to stick. It was certainly time
for him to be pleased with elevation of some sort, for, as it turned
out afterwards, when his history became better understood by Manton,
he was one of those slugs, or barnacles of the press, that cling about
and slime the keels of every noble and thought-freighted bark. From
the precarious and eminently honourable occupation of writing obscene
books for _private_ circulation, “getting up” quack advertisements,
interpolating the pages of Paul De Kock with smearings of darker
filth than ever his mousing vision had yet discovered in the sinks
and gutters of Paris, he had gradually risen, through his facile
availability, to the _sub rosa_ respectability of a well-paid “sub” in
a respectable office—I say _sub rosa_, for it seems to have been well
understood, in New York, that the appearance of his name, at the head
of the columns of any paper, would be sufficient to damn it, outright,
so linked had it become with sneaking infamy of every sort.

However, _this_ “child of genius” and Madame progressed bravely towards
a mutual understanding; and billets-doux flew between them thick as
snow-flakes. As for their contents, the reader is, by this time, pretty
well prepared to conjecture. Interviews, from weekly to semi-weekly,
crowded fast upon each other’s heels; until, at last, Manton began to
perceive that, not only was the sleeve lost every day, but that the new
novel, like the pious labor of the needle of Penelope, “grew with its
growth.”

About this time, however, it came to his knowledge, that this highly
respectable literary personage, Mr. Narcissus, had been as notoriously
abject in his private relations as he had been in those to the press.
However, as he had determined to drag Elna from beneath the clutches
of her mother, and to sever all remote, or even possible connection
between them, he did not feel himself called upon to do more than
announce the fact to Madame that the fellow was even now an infamous
stipendiary to a party no less infamous than himself, who had privately
furnished him, out of her ill-gotten gains, the money to buy his share
in the weekly paper she was so ambitious of controlling, through him.
As he had now to expect, she received the news with the most refreshing
coolness, and merely remarked, that it was no fault of hers that this
bad woman had loved Mr. Narcissus; that he possessed great talent in
affairs; could be made of much use in the cause of human progress and
advancement—in a word, deserved to be saved, and to save him she meant.
She should rescue him from such gross and debasing associations, and
give to his astonishing energies a nobler bent; that his future life,
under her inspiration and guidance, should be made to atone for the
past.

This logic seemed so very conclusive and characteristic, that Manton
made no reply, but a shudder, at the thought of that _saving_ process,
to which, despicable as he was, a new victim was to be subjected. But
it was no part of his plan to divert her from her purpose; for he
wished, by all means, to see her active and dangerous energies employed
in any direction, save that of the subversion and counteraction of his
own design in regard to her daughter.

Elna, in a few days after, was sent to New England, with the
understanding between Manton and herself, that she would by no means
consent to return to her mother, until he himself should come back from
his tour, and should send for her. He did not dare to trust her for an
hour beneath the accursed shadow of this domestic Upas, that had given
her birth; and more particularly did he dread the hideous combination
of influences which were likely now to be brought to bear upon her,
as Madam had openly announced her intention, since she had obtained a
divorce from her former husband, to marry the delectable Narcissus.

We may as well dispose of this affair at once, by remarking, that in
a few months afterward she did marry him; that the unfortunate woman,
who had heretofore so long lived with and loved Narcissus, instantly
withdrew the support which her ill-gotten gains furnished; and that,
asserting her right to the share which he had pretended to own in the
property of the paper, and disclosing the whole of his infamy to his
former partners, the cherubim and archangel indignantly kicked him out
of doors, and at once toppled about the astonished ears of Madame all
her castles in the air reared, with regard to “controlling a powerful
organ.”

But Madame, as we have perceived, was possessed of one of those elastic
natures which always rebound from collisions, or which, in a word,
“never say die;” so that, instead of being discouraged by this untoward
conclusion of her ambitious schemes, she set herself to work forthwith
to make the best of a bad bargain; and, as she had already exhibited
her passion for professional spouses, in immediately converting her
first and dear Ebenezer, into an M. D., she could not do less than make
a Doctor out of her beloved Narcissus.

It did not matter to her that both of them were ludicrously
ignorant—that neither of them had probably ever read a book clear
through in their lives; parchments were dog-cheap in New York, and
could be had any day for an equivalent in hard coin. She accordingly
“put him through;” and in something less than three months, one more
legalised murderer was turned loose upon society, under the cabalistic
ægis of M. D.




                             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 knew himself, 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 fact might 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-note from 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.




                             CHAPTER XXV.

                            THE SEPARATION.


Had it ever occurred to Manton to reason at all upon the subject of
his passion for this girl Elna, or had it been possible for him, under
the circumstances which had lately surrounded his life, to reason
concerning her, in any sense, he must and would have felt how ominous
such a passion in reality was. To be sure, he did not feel that the
relations into which it had been attempted to drag him by the mother,
had ever been voluntary or accepted on his part; he had loathed and
rebelled against them from the first.

But this did not, in reality, make the fact of his having continued
near her—to occupy the same house—any the less offensive to the moral
sense; for, taking the best aspects of the case, the durance had not
been a physical one, and he might, if he had so willed, have walked
himself bodily off, and thus escaped this horrible entanglement; but
he had not done so. Although we have endeavored, as some extenuation,
to trace the reasons why he had not thus acted, yet we have found no
excuse sufficient, in all this, for the new sin he has committed, in
daring to love, and contemplating honorable marriage, even, with the
daughter of such a mother. But we have naught to extenuate, naught to
set down in malice, in this too fatally true narrative; we have related
it because it is true, and because we felt it to be our duty to do
so, that others might be warned of these things, which may, perhaps,
enlighten the reader somewhat, as to the character of the new thraldom
to which Manton has been subjected.

It must always be borne in mind, in speaking of Manton and measuring
his actions, that although the nervous sanguine temperament
predominated to an extraordinary degree in this man’s organisation,
the tendencies of his mind were, nevertheless, unusually conservative.
This rendered him, necessarily, a man of _habits_; and therefore, more
than usually liable to suffer from gradual and constant encroachment:
for, if his quick sense has not instantly detected the danger on its
first presentation—if his ear has not recognised the serpent’s hiss
at once among the flowers, his fearless hand would soon be caressing
the shining reptile, and bear it, it might be, even to his own bosom.
It was this tenacity of habits which had rendered him so easy to be
imposed upon. Nothing was so difficult for him to throw off as a habit;
for, from the intensity of his nature, it always cost him the suffering
of a strong excitement before its chains could be broken.

Manton found, very soon after his return, that what he most dreaded
now, was to be at once precipitated, which was a separation between
himself and Elna. Not that he did not fully concede to the general
propriety and prudence of such a step; for he remembered that he had at
once proposed the previous separation, when he came to understand the
nature of his feelings towards her; but that had been when she was to
be placed beyond the reach of her mother, and they could be both out of
town at the same time; but now that his business made it imperative for
him to remain in New York, if he dreaded before lest she be left with
the mother one day even, were not the same causes operating still, and
with redoubled force, when, in addition to her baleful contact, he had
to contemplate that of the creature she had married?

The moral and spiritual grime of such a contact was enough to blast an
angel’s bloom—to sully the purest wing that ever winnowed dream. He
must be there to shield his fair treasure always, till the time had
come when he could snatch her for ever beyond their reach. But the war
had now fairly opened.

On the very day of his return, Manton had been not a little astonished
to find the heretofore abject and cringing mother turn upon him,
suddenly, with a lofty insolence, that seemed at first incredible; but
his surprise and anger rapidly gave way to wonder and stunned amaze,
at finding her exhibiting the most unparalleled phenomena of brazen,
grave, deliberate falsehood that ever still imagination, in bottomless
conceit, had conjured as the thought of demons in dark hell. This was
yet, strange as it may seem, a most terrible realisation to have come
upon his life; though he had, up to this time, known that she was
unscrupulous, as far as the attainment of influential connexions, for
the dissemination of her theoretical views, was concerned—that she was,
in this respect, a dangerous and an evil woman—that her influence would
make her presence deadly to purity, in her own or the other sex; yet,
he had not learned to regard her as utterly God-forsaken. The veil was
now lifted. The scales that had remained fell forever from his eyes.
She now stood revealed, not as he had heretofore striven to palliate
his convictions concerning her—the ferocious fanatic of one idea—the
cunning and detestable Jesuit of a “A cause”—but as the incarnation
of unnatural passions and a demonised selfishness. He trembled to
his heart’s core at the thought of that fair young girl, whom he had
learned to love, being left to the tender mercies of a monster such as
this. He saw at once the whole nefarious scheme that had been concocted
between herself and her worthy coadjutor.

This was but the initial step. This precipitation of a quarrel with
himself, which would bring about at least a partial separation with
Elna, and then their subsequent game would slowly and surely accomplish
the rest. Was it likely that a wretch like this pink of delicacy,
Narcissus, who had before, for years, been steeped to the lips in
that monstrous traffic, the sale of bodies as well as souls, would
quietly permit to slip through his fingers a lovely and fascinating
girl as Elna had now grown to be, over who’s value, in dollars and
cents, he had gloated from the first? or was it likely that his worthy
consort, who had clearly learned to appreciate the convenience of such
speculations, would not fully coincide with him in his view of the
policy of defeating Manton, who, in the event of success, would be sure
to separate her from them as far as the poles are sundered?

We shall now see how far the young lady herself was likely to, or had
already, become a party to such utilitarian views.

Manton had left the house, and taken board elsewhere. The same evening,
he visited Elna, who received him alone, in the warm, well-lighted, and
neatly-arranged parlor. Manton had come in the most hopeless mood, for
all the results of this separation had been most fully and painfully
impressed upon him since the first indication of the rupture that had
led to his quitting the house.

The young girl sprang eagerly to meet him, and with a bounding caress
clasped his neck, exclaiming—

“Dearest one, you must not look so sad! We are to have the parlor
thus every evening, when you shall come to see me; when we shall
be very stately and proper folk. I shall play the dignified matron
in anticipation, and you shall be my very wise and solemn lord and
master. Mother is not to permit any interruption, and we shall have
such nice and easy times. Come, sit down here by my side, and let us
begin to play stately. And clear up that gloomy brow of yours, for I am
determined that we shall be happy!”

Manton could only smile faintly, as he seated himself.

“Ah, heedless child, you do not see in all this gay vision, the black
and deadly realities that couch within its shadows! I understand your
mother’s game fully. This will not last long; and you are about to be
sorely tried, my little love!”

His head fell back heavily, and his eyelids drooped with an expression
of unutterable despondency. Elna, who had been watching him eagerly,
now flew to his side, and taking his head gently on her shoulder,
commenced caressing his face in a peculiar manner. She did not
absolutely touch it, but her lips crept over certain portions with
a slow snake-like motion, while the deep heavings of her chest,
disclosed that she was breathing heavily upon them, and a certain
greenish dilation of the pupil of her eyes revealed—what? Ah, horror!
and she so young! What? what! is that the mother’s art? Let us see.

The lines of the man’s face are sunken in the expression of hopeless
prostration. Soon a slight twitching of the nerves becomes evident,
then a faint smile breaks across its pallor; the inspirations become
deeper, and she breathes with almost convulsive energy. The glowing
air lingers and burns along the sensitive temple, and now it pauses
on the cheek, close beside the ear—ha! her arm is about his neck; is
it a wonder that the blood mounts flushing to that man’s cheek and
forehead, that his eyes fly open filled with wild and vivid fires, that
a shuddering thrill is running through his frame, as he stretches forth
his arms to her, with a low, ecstatic laugh, of passionate yearning,
while she clings about him, and their lips meet, in a burning,
lingering kiss, and then, with a light laugh, she springs beyond his
reach, and dances in tantalising mockery about him, permitting him but
to touch her for a moment, eluding his grasp, with yet more subtle
sleight, until exhausted by morbid excitement the unfortunate man sinks
upon the sofa?

This picture is only but too real. But why should Manton have endured
the repetition of a scene like this? He was a man of habits, and for
years, before a thought of passion had for once intruded upon him,
this young girl, under the sacred shield of childhood, had been taught
to approach him with fondling caresses. There seemed no danger then,
but when the real time for danger came, he felt a vague and general
monition of it, yet failed to locate it where it really rested. These
caresses had become so dear and natural to him; they seemed so harmless.

He blamed only himself, cursed only the unetherialised grossness of his
own nature. There was to him far too much of affection and accustomed
tenderness in all this to arouse his suspicions for a moment. He hated
only himself, and strove on each of these now frequent occasions, to
chasten, by the severest self-inflicted penance, his own soul.

In the meanwhile, this modern Tantalus grew thinner and more pale each
day; was wasting rapidly to a shadow, beneath such scenes as we have
witnessed.

The girl, Elna, grew fairer and more strong each day—seeming to have
fed upon his slow consumption.

We will not dwell upon such pictures farther. It was enough that
all the consequences dreaded by Manton followed, in slow, but sure
progression, and that the last blow the subtle couple struck at him was
fully characteristic and consummated the separation.

Elna had seen little, as yet, of public amusements, and her strong
imitative faculty had led her to express a passion for the stage,
which Manton greatly dreaded, and had particularly wished to guard her
against, until her mind should become more fully developed, and until
he, himself, should possess the legal right to attend her, upon all
such occasions. He had, therefore, at all times resolutely opposed her
going to any public place of amusement, unless he could accompany her.
But now it happened that, being engaged in bringing out a new work,
with the press only twenty-four hours behind him, urging him inexorably
for a certain amount of daily matter, which left him no leisure
whatever, except a few moments, which he wrested from the vortex, for
the short evening re-union with her he so loved, he had, therefore, no
time left to accompany her to such places.

Here the enterprising couple saw at once their advantage; the mother
understood what Manton did not, the extreme shallowness of the
character he had thus perseveringly idealised. She at once laid siege
to her passion for dress and display, as well as novelty. They bought
her fine and showy clothes, and urged her first to accompany them to
concerts, then to theatres, and then to public balls.

When the young girl first came to Manton, all flushed with eagerness,
to show him her finery, and ask him if she might not go with her dear
mother and her new “papa,” he felt his heart sink unutterably within
him. He reasoned with her long and earnestly, endeavoring to make her
understand how impossible it was for a woman, who was to become his
wife, to appear at any public assembly in the city of New York, with a
person so notorious as this, whom she had thus, suddenly, learned to
style “papa.”

But he soon found it to be all in vain; for, when he told her if she
would only be content to wait a few weeks until his book had been
published, that he would himself dedicate any amount of time she might
require to visiting such places with her, she still urged that she
did not see why it was improper for her to accompany the man whom her
mother had married, to any public place—that her new dresses were so
beautiful—that she wished to attend this magnificent concert.

Manton sighed heavily and only answered in a mournful voice to her
repeated entreaties—

“Alas! poor child, my dream is nearly over! I see they have bought you
with the tinsel of a fine dress and new ribbons!”

The child wept and fondled and caressed; but all her arts failed
this time. His heart felt like lead within him; and he no longer had
nerves with life enough to be played upon. But she went that night,
nevertheless, and the great gulf had sunk impassably between them.

Manton was now again a madman. In the pride of his hopeful love
he had built magnificent schemes, which his singular energies had
rapidly placed upon the firm basis of realisation; it only required
the calm exercise of his own will to consummate all and make his name
illustrious. But he had not labored for himself—and she, for whom
all had been achieved, was no longer his—she was gone—utterly gone!
She had sold her birthright, and was no longer his. The world became
dark, its honors and its ambitions as nothing. To recount the wild and
desperate extravagance by which he dashed to earth all that he had
achieved, as the heartless and hideous shallowness of the phantom
soul he had been worshipping, became, with each day, more apparent,
would be only painful to the reader, who can well understand what to
expect from the recklessness of such a madman. Suffice it that the
separation was complete. He last saw her, but for an instant, on her
eighteenth birthnight, to commemorate which, the mother, in pursuance
of her schemes, had assembled a large party at her house. This was to
have been their wedding-night; and Manton, though long since hopelessly
separated from her, could not resist the passionate desire to see once
more, upon this night, to which he had so long looked forward with holy
raptures, that face and form.

He rang the bell, and, by a curious instinct, she recognised the
characteristic pull, and met him alone at the door. She was lovely,
radiant even, as she had sometimes come to him in his wild imaginings.
Dressed in pure white, with a wreath of flowering myrtle resting
lightly on her brow. There was a look of exultation on her face
which she had not been able to throw off, as she came forth from the
admiration of the crowded room. Manton took her hand—

“Ah, child, you are very lovely now—you look just as I dreamed you
would look on this night, when you were to have been my bride. My
eyes are filled with blood, now! I cannot see you any more! Farewell!
farewell!” and he rushed from the door into the dark street, while she,
who had spoken no word, made no attempt to detain him, turned coldly
back, and entered, with a beaming face, the scene of her new triumph.




                             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 he well 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 sudden and 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.”

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 feel them 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.




                            CHAPTER XXVII.

                        THE “SECRET CONCLAVE.”


The Editor finds that here the connected narrative of Etherial Softdown
breaks off. Though there are many fragmentary notes, which he found
in Yieger’s Cabinet, which bear a clear, yet somewhat disconnected
relation, to the past and future of the scenes and actors already
described; these he has thought proper to collate, and throw together
into something as nearly approaching order as their desultory character
will permit.

This man Yieger seems to have been an enthusiast of a very unusual
stamp. He has, however, left so little concerning himself, that we can
only say, he appears to have made it his business to follow up, in a
quiet and unsuspected way, a certain series of investigations, the
purport and tendency of which was to unveil a class of crimes, which,
from being secret, were enabled to work and worm their way nearest to
the core of the social state.

Thus, in addition to the monstrous and unimagined vices described by
him in the preceding chapters, he seems to have discovered secret
combinations, the possibilities of which have probably never entered
before into human brains, but the results of which were as prodigious
as the causes were unsuspected. These were composed of no mystic
demagogues of humanitarianism, who sheltered mere partisan and personal
designs, under the broad curtain of secret rituals symbolising
philanthropic aims; no bald enthusiasts, who softly sunk their
individualities in an Order, and sold their god-like birthrights of
universal benevolence, of world-wide charity, for the golden shackles
of a pretentious benevolence, the selfish code of which was, mutual
protection first, and—nobody else afterwards!

These were wise, bold, hardened men—hardened in the rough contests
by the highways of life—who had seen all, felt all, and known all,
that life could give or take. They were prepared for any of its
extremes, but had outlived its sympathies. They were incarnations
of pure intellection; the accomplishment of the object was their
conscience—they despised allegories, and they trampled upon symbols.
Nothing was mysterious to them, but an undigested purpose. For them
there was no law but that might be eluded—no sanctities, but as
they might be used—no religion but necessity, which was, to them,
achievement!

When such men organised, they merely came together,—ten or a dozen of
them,—they required no oaths, no pledges—they knew each other! “We
hold such and such opinions upon one point only; and that one point
is, mutual interest, and under that, 1st, that we can govern this
nation; 2d, that to govern it, we must subvert its institutions; and,
3d, subvert them we will! It is our interest; this is our only bond.
Capital must have expansion. This hybrid republicanism saps the power
of our great agent by its obstinate competition. We must demoralise
the republic. We must make public virtue a by-word and a mockery, and
private infamy to be honor. Beginning with the people, through our
agents, we shall corrupt the State.

“We must pamper superstition, and pension energetic fanaticism—as on
‘Change we degrade commercial honor, and make ‘success’ the idol.
We may fairly and reasonably calculate, that within a succeeding
generation, even our theoretical schemes of republican subversion may
be accomplished, and upon its ruins be erected that noble Oligarchy of
caste and wealth for which we all conspire, as affording the only true
protection to capital.

“Beside these general views, we may in a thousand other ways apply
our combined capital to immediate advantage. We may buy up, through
our agents, claims upon litigated estates, upon confiscated bonds,
mortgages upon embarrassed property, land-claims, Government contracts,
that have fallen into weak hands, and all those floating operations,
constantly within hail, in which ready-money is eagerly grasped as the
equivalent for enormous prospective gains.

“In addition, through our monopoly of the manufacturing interest,
by a rigorous and impartial system of discipline, we shall soon be
able to fill the masses of operators and producers with such distrust
of each other, and fear of us, as to disintegrate their radical
combinations, and bring them to our feet. Governing on ‘Change, we
rule in politics; governing in politics, we are the despots in trade;
ruling in trade, we subjugate production; production conquered, we
domineer over labor. This is the common-sense view of our interests—of
the interests of capital, which we represent. In the promotion of this
object, we appoint and pension our secret agents, who are everywhere
on the lookout for our interests. We arrange correspondence, in
cipher, throughout the civilized world; we pension our editors and our
reporters; we bribe our legislators, and, last of all, we establish and
pay our secret police, local, and travelling, whose business it is, not
alone to report to us the conduct of agents already employed, but to
find and report to us others, who may be useful in such capacity.

“We punish treachery by death!”

Such is a partial schedule of the terms of one of these terrible
confederacies, as furnished in a detached note by Yieger, which held
its secret sessions in New York city. He seems to have obtained a
sight of some of their records, but by what means, the most daring
could only conjecture. He appears to have regarded this particular
organisation as the most formidable of all, and to have traced many of
its ramifications, in their covert results, with a singularly dogged
tenacity.

Among the extraordinary papers contained in the Cabinet he has left,
are to be found short notes, containing what are clearly reports and
proceedings of this formidable conclave. Its mysterious signature,
Regulus, seems to have been known throughout the world; and even he,
though clearly a fierce and relentless foe, never writes it, but with
the involuntary concession of respect, which large, clear letters,
underscored, would seem to convey.

Having now presented such an outline of the character and designs of
this secret conclave, as the means of information furnished him have
enabled him to do, the Editor will proceed with the promised extracts
from its proceedings, such as relate to those in regard to whom the
reader may be supposed to have some curiosity.

First, we have here


                 “A NOTE CONCERNING ETHERIAL SOFTDOWN.

 “This woman, whose patronymic was Softdown, first married a Quaker,
 named Orne; which name, after her separation, and until after her
 divorce, she continued to bear, with the _alias_ of Marie. She
 began her public career, soon after her marriage, as a Quaker
 preacher; but the straitness of this sect not conforming at all to
 her latitudinarian principles, she recanted in disgust, and left
 the society. She now plunged at once into Physiology, and, after a
 miraculously short gestation, produced a few lectures, with which she
 went the rounds of two or three New England States, accompanied by her
 husband, whom she, _sans ceremonie_, dubbed M. D., without putting him
 to the trouble of reading, or ever having read, a book on any subject.
 He officiated as her doorkeeper, and received the ‘shillings;’ but,
 refusing to render any account of the proceeds, a furious feud grew up
 between them, and soon the war waxed hot and fierce.

 “Finding this to be poor business on the whole, she deserted him,
 taking her child with her. The next occupation in which we find her
 versatile genius engaged, was that of teaching French; a more humble
 employment, surely, but one for which she was equally well fitted.
 This, however, soon disgusted her, as her unreasonable patrons would
 insist upon the vulgar necessity of her being able to speak French,
 as well as teach it. It was at best but a tame avocation, and one
 entirely unsuited to her ambitious temper.

 “Having now fairly assayed her wings for flight, she soared aloft at
 once, in full career, through mid-air. She became first a preacher
 of Universalism; but meeting, about this time, with the celebrated
 Boanerges Phospher, she, in a few weeks, turned out full-plumed,
 as a lecturer on Elocution. To this she soon added a knowledge of
 Phrenology, which, in her active zeal, she took care to impart to the
 world, as fast as acquired, and in the same public manner.

 “Then, as a natural consequence, came Mesmerism; then Neurology. Of
 all these sciences she became the prompt expounder, after a few days’
 investigation.

 “From this point she immediately ascended a step higher, and announced
 herself as a revelator in Clairvoyance; and, by an inevitable
 progression, she at once found admission, along with Andrew Jackson
 Davis and a host of other seers, into the Swedenborgian Arcana, and
 held herself on terms of frequent intercourse and positive intimacy
 with the angel Gabriel, and, indeed, the whole heavenly host.

 “They revealed to her that the great and unpardonable sins of humanity
 were, first, eating pork; second, using tobacco, whether snuffing,
 smoking, or chewing; and, third, wine-drinking in all its forms. They
 accordingly commissioned her, formally, to go forth into the world
 as a missionary, to warn mankind against the fearful consequences of
 these vices, and to ‘save’ them therefrom.

 “The exposition of Grahamism and Bran-bread was now added to the
 enlarged circle of her enlightened Professorships; and, by this
 aid, and that of her spiritual commission, she wrought wonders, in
 assailing the camps of the great foes of humanity—Pork, Tobacco, and
 Wine!

 “Many were the brands plucked by her from the burning, or rather
 ‘saved’—preachers, lawyers, editors, artists, and watery-eyed young
 gentlemen, in particular. It was on this grand tour that she
 first assumed her most distinguished attribute, the Patroness of
 Art—particularly of the Artists.

 “Returning to civilization once more, she again assumed her cast-off
 Professorship of Physiology, and began lecturing to classes of
 her own sex. Now, with the first gleam of light from Græfenberg,
 she pronounced herself as having been, for many years before,
 a practitioner of the system; and at once proceeded to combine
 Grahamism, Mesmerism, Water-cure, and Physiology.

 “While in the vein of Physiology, she also lectured on the benefits
 of Amalgamation, Abolitionism, and Non-resistance. About this
 time, having met with one of the chief expounders of Fourierism,
 whom she also undertook to ‘save,’ she turned out in a few weeks a
 Phalanxsterian lecturer. That bubble had barely exploded, when she
 came forth a Communist. Shortly afterwards, having one or two editors
 separately undergoing the process of being ‘saved,’ she became
 authoress! She produced several physiological novels, a number of
 essays, poems, volumes of lectures, &c., &c.

 “The police which obey the mandates of the formidable Regulus, have
 kept the changes of this feminine Proteus for now upward of forty
 years, steadily in view; and the Council of Disorganisation report,
 through their committee, that they have ample reason to be pleased
 with this Etherial Softdown, as the most indefatigable, active,
 unscrupulous, and energetic of the agents of Demoralisation in the
 employment of the Secret Conclave.

 “They congratulate themselves in the belief that, with an hundred
 such employées devoted to their service, they could corrupt the
 private faith and public virtue of the whole Union so effectually, in
 a single generation, as to enable them to utterly destroy its social
 organisation and subvert its Constitution.

 “This would, of course, secure the desired Oligarchy of caste and
 wealth, and reduce the nation to serfdom.

 “She is to be encouraged, and placed upon the pension-list of the
 ‘Secret Conclave.’

 “Since this report, the latest transformations of Etherial Softdown
 have been, first, into rabid Bloomerism; in the height of which
 madness, she possessed a sufficiency of the martyr-spirit to parade
 herself, on all public occasions, though nearly fifty years of age, in
 full costume.

 “By a necessary transition, the next step was into an apostleship of
 the new school of ‘Woman’s Rights’ and Abolitionism; which openly
 rejoices in the repudiation of the Bible from among the sacred books
 of the world—accepting it merely as the text-book of popular cant, to
 be used in working upon the passions and superstitions of the mob.

 “This last metamorphosis of Etherial Softdown seems to be the most
 promising of all those through which the police of the ‘Conclave’
 have, thus far, been able to trace her.”[4]

   [4] The following note was received, in answer to one addressed to a
   distinguished surgeon of Philadelphia, in relation to the phenomenon
   of voluntary bleeding, so frequently illustrated in the History of
   Etherial Softdown.—EDITOR.

 “DEAR SIR:

 “The case which you presented to me, for an explanation of the
 causes which may have produced voluntary discharges of blood from
 the mouth, is certainly a very remarkable one, though by no means
 without parallel in the records of _feigned diseases_. The power of
 the will, in persons of peculiar formation or constitution, is seen,
 occasionally, to be extended to various organs designed by nature to
 act without awakening consciousness and in a manner altogether beyond
 the control of the individual. To say nothing of many muscles of the
 scalp, the ears, the skin of the neck, &c., which are used to great
 purpose by the inferior animals, but are totally inactive in man,
 except in a few rare instances, it is well known that many persons
 possess the power of voluntary vomiting. About forty years ago, a man
 presented himself before a celebrated surgeon of London, and proved
 that he possessed the ability to check completely the flow of blood
 through the artery at the wrist, by violently contracting a muscle
 of the arm above the elbow, which, in his case, happened to overlap
 and press upon the main trunk of the vessel. I am acquainted with a
 gentleman in this country, who can perform the same feat. There is
 on record a well-authenticated history of a man who could completely
 control, by will, the motions of his heart; and who, eventually,
 committed accidental suicide, by arresting the circulation so long
 that the heart never reacted. I am acquainted with a gentleman who
 can voluntarily contract and dilate the pupil of the eye to a certain
 extent; and have seen the same effect repeatedly, and in a far greater
 degree, among the Hindoo jugglers. This action is natural in the
 owl, but probably requires a peculiar nervous structure in man. Some
 persons have a power of so completely simulating death, that neither
 by respiration, the motion of the eye under light, nor the pulse,
 could any unprofessional observer, or even an experienced physician,
 detect the counterfeit. One of my servants in India, struck another
 Hindoo with his open hand, for some impertinence. The man instantly
 fell, apparently dead; and I happened to arrive just as the friends
 were about to remove the body, no doubt for the purpose of extorting
 money by concealment and false pretences. I could perceive no
 respiration (the glass-test was not applied), no pulse at the wrist;
 the pupil of the eye was fixed in all lights. There was, however, a
 slight thrilling in the carotid artery, and I judged the case to be
 one of admirable feigning. Severe pinching was borne without change
 of expression, as was also the deep prick of a pin. For amusement, I
 pronounced him dead, but assured the ignorant natives that I would
 bring him to life. On my calling for a little pan of coals,—always
 ready in a bachelor drawing-room in the East, for lighting
 cigars,—there came over the countenance the slightest possible shade
 of anxiety. I ordered the patient’s abdomen laid bare, and gently
 toppled a bright coal from the pan upon it. The effect was magical.
 Instantly, the fellow gave the most lively evidences of vitality;
 and, as he crossed the _Compound_ and darted through the gateway, he
 seemed solely bent upon rivalling the mysterious industry of the ‘man
 with the cork-leg.’ “By strong contraction of all the muscles of the
 chest, while those of the neck are rigid and the lungs fully inflated,
 the vessels of the head and neck can be distended almost to bursting.
 Actors sometimes use this power to produce voluntary blushing, or the
 suffusion of anger, though the practice endangers apoplexy. I take
 this to be the secret of the voluntary bleeding, in the case described
 by you.

 “The tonsils, and the membrane of the throat behind the nose and
 mouth, are full of innumerable blood-vessels, forming a net-work; and
 very slight causes often produce great enlargement of these vessels.
 By frequent temporary distension, they are not only permanently
 enlarged, but made more susceptible of additional expansion from
 trivial accidents. In this condition, they may be brought to resemble,
 in some degree, what is termed, by anatomists, _the erectile tissue_,
 which structure has sufficient contractility to prevent the admission
 of more than an ordinary amount of blood on common occasions, but when
 excited in any way, it yields with great ease, and admits of enormous
 dilatation. Erectile tumors are dangerous, from their tendency,
 ultimately, to bleed spontaneously. They are sometimes formed in the
 throat. The party referred to may have one, or she may have simply
 enlarged the vessels by habitual mechanical distension, by compressing
 the chest in the manner just described. There is such a natural
 tendency, in all parts about the throat and nose, to bleed from slight
 causes, particularly after repeated inflammation, that it strikes
 me as by no means wonderful, that a designing person should, by
 long-practised mechanical efforts, aided, perhaps, by the consequences
 of former colds, reduce these parts to a condition such that they
 would bleed from voluntary distension. The only wonder in the case
 is the _quantity_ discharged, while this person does not appear to
 be subject to involuntary hemorrhage also. This result will probably
 occur hereafter, and the impostor may share the fate of the man who
 arrested the motion of his heart.

 “These cases of feigned diseases give great vexation to army surgeons
 and almshouse physicians; and, in private life, are often resorted
 to by the cunning and unprincipled, for the purpose of harrowing the
 feelings of relatives, from some sinister intention. It might well be
 wished, that the case you describe were one of the most difficult of
 detection, but it is far from being so.

 “Believe me, my dear sir,

  “Very truly, yours,” &c.




                            CHAPTER XXVIII.

                   REPORTS OF THE “SECRET CONCLAVE.”


We continue our reports of the police of the “Conclave,” so far as we
find them relating to Etherial Softdown and her friends.

This report says of Eusedora Polypheme:—“This woman is between thirty
and thirty-five years of age. She is of New England birth, and
commenced her education at what we consider the female high-schools of
demoralisation on the Continent—’the factories.’

“These establishments are especially patronised by the ‘Council of
Disorganisation,’ who consider them of vast efficiency, on account of
the well-understood certainty with which the results we aim at are
achieved, under this system. So great is this certainty, indeed, that
we may always safely calculate that eight-tenths of the females who
seek employment in them come forth, if they ever do alive, inoculated
with just such principles and habits as we desire to have spread among
the rural population to which the majority of them return. Corrupted
themselves, they act as admirable mediums and conductors of corruption
to the class from whom they went forth innocent, and which receives
them again without suspicion.

“Besides the spinal diseases, affections of the lungs, twisted bodies,
and deformed limbs, which the greater number of these girls take home
with them, all the foolish romanticism of girlhood has been thoroughly
crushed out of them, by the _morale_ which we have promoted in these
institutions, and their minds and tastes have become even more vitiated
than their bodies.

“It will thus be seen that this factory system is our _chef-d’œuvre_ of
demoralisation of the simple agricultural classes.

“But in yet another aspect the results, it will be perceived, are
still more brilliant. We soon found the necessity of creating a
public sentiment in favor of our system, which would put a stop to
officious investigation and interference with our plans. We accordingly
established a defensive literature, in the shape of dainty serials,
announced as being edited by the factory-girls themselves. These were
filled with sentimental effusions, written principally to order,
outside the factories, the general burden of which consisted in
poetico-rural pictures of the joys brought home by the patient and
industrious factory-girl, to some hipshotten father or bedridden
grand-papa. These little incidents were studiously invested with
all that charming unexpectedness and die-away bathos, which is so
attractive to girlish imaginations, and so satisfactory to elder
philanthropists. Then there was still another class of romances,
cultivated with yet more fervid unction. These consisted in stories of
a lovely young girl, who, all for ‘love of independence,’ gave up a
home of luxury, to come to the factories and make a living for herself,
independent of her natural guardians. How this stout-hearted young
lady one day attracted, by her beauty, the attention of a handsome
young gentleman of romantic appearance, who visited the mills along
with a party of other strangers. How the romantic young gentleman
was very much struck, while the strong-minded Angelina was rendered
nervous; how the heart-stricken, after many trials, succeeded in
moving upon the heart of the ‘sleepless gryphon’ of morality with whom
Angelina boarded, to permit him to have an interview—at least in said
gryphon’s presence; how that then and there the young gentleman, in the
most ‘proper’ way declared himself, sought Angelina’s hand, and was
accepted; and how he turned out to be the son of a Southern nabob, and
Angelina, from a poor factory-girl, became one of the foremost ladies
of the land; and how, though, she never forgot her dear and happy
companions of the factory. This same susceptible young Southerner is
the standing hero of four-fifths of these girls, and, as he does not
come every year to make them all rich, we may congratulate ourselves
upon the general morals consequent upon such reasonable expectations.

“Out of one or two thousand girls, there are usually a few who exhibit
some sprightliness. In the ratio of the ductility of their characters,
are they sure to be selected, and brought forward by our managers; and
in proportion as they exhibit their availability, are they readily
promoted to editorships. They receive private salaries, and are
released from any other than nominal participation in the routine of
factory labor. From this distinguished caste of young ladies of the
factory, Eusedora Polypheme originated.

“We expect gratitude from all such favored parties; and Eusedora proved
the most grateful of the grateful. She as readily took to the shallow
limpidity of Mr. Little, _alias_ Tommy Moore, as ever did callow cygnet
to the drains of a Holland flat.

“She possessed, indeed, a marvellous gift of sentiment—a sacchariferous
faculty, that would have caused Cerberus himself to have licked his
jagged lips. She was accordingly encouraged to cultivate transcendental
tendencies, exchanged with the Dial, and, after a few months’ exercise,
she spoke like a veritable Pythoness.

“Considering that she had now made herself sufficiently familiar with

 ‘The celestial syren’s harmony,’

to make her of value to us abroad, we placed her on our pension-list,
and turned her loose upon society.

“This step the Committee have never had cause to regret. She leaped
upon the social stage, a specimen of what the factory system could
produce—achieved the lioness at once, and had the honour of being
hailed in all circles, a phenomenon, a _lusus naturæ_—the world was
undecided which, considering she was nothing but a factory-girl. They
must be eminent institutions surely, since they could turn out young
ladies who talked so ‘divinely,’ possessed ‘such’ command of language,
and were such favorites with the gentlemen!

“There was a society, too, not very far off from this, into which she
had forced her way, and which haughtily called itself ‘the best,’
that held its court in houses with dingy outsides, that lined the
back-alleys; but, amidst garish and sickening splendors within, the
‘highly intellectual’ character of the hollow-eyed and painted queens
who presided there, was equally owing to the educations they had
received at the same ‘eminent’ institutions—only they had had more soul
and less cunning than Eusedora Polypheme, and would not, therefore,
have been so available to the Committee.

“When a class is already sunk as low as it can sink, it is not our
policy to go aside to interfere with them, for they are sure to
fecundate in degradation fast enough; our sole aim is to drag the
grades above down to their level, which we consider a safe one.

“There is nothing so dangerous to the designs of the Committee of
Disorganisation, as soul—what the world calls heart. To an executive
power, these are always considered intrusive and distasteful
superfluities; and it was because Eusedora has managed, by some
surprisingly efficient process, to rid herself of both, that she is to
be so trusted.

“Besides parading her accomplishments everywhere, as merely a fair
average of the education of a factory-girl, she very soon mapped out
for herself a very peculiar field for operations. She became the leader
of a new school of Platonic Sentimentalism, in New England. This was
an achievement—a decided triumph. She soon gathered around her a host
of feminine disciples—principally young and unmarried, with premature
wrinkles on their brows.

“After years of close observation of the operations of this sect,
its police would beg to express to the Committee their unqualified
admiration of the results obtained. The increase of the number of
suicides has been gratifying. The number of young men and girls
rendered worthless for life; the number of elderly men plundered and
cajoled out of their means and driven into dotage, is only equalled by
the surprising rapidity with which the fanaticism has spread; indeed,
it would seem as if the first step towards all the popular forms of
fanaticism, is through Platonic Sentimentalism.

“It seems, that it is through the teachings of this school, of which
Eusedora Polypheme is now the acknowledged priestess, that the
hollowness and unsatisfactory character of all our natural sentiments
and passions is first perceived. This illumination achieved, it
becomes necessary that their place be supplied by what the world
would call morbid sentimentality and unnatural passions, but which
Eusedora Polypheme aptly terms, ‘spherical illuminations’ and ‘divine
ecstacies.’ But since we know, as well as Eusedora, that flesh is
flesh, and blood is blood, we can therefore calculate, with great
precision, whither such mystifications must lead.

“Hardened and sharpened in mind and temper, by a graduation in this
school, its disciples pass, not from it, but through it, into other,
and, to us, not less important fields of activity. Hence come the
fiercest and most unscrupulous partisans of Infidelity, Abolitionism,
and Woman’s Rights. Having learned both theoretically and practically
to disbelieve in themselves, by the most natural transition in the
world, they become infidel of all other truths, and scorn all other
sacrednesses alike. They are then prepared to be of use to us in
a variety of ways. The spirit of antagonism, the love of strife
and notoriety, have assumed in them the sense of duty, justice,
and modesty; a spiritual _diablerie_ has possessed itself of the
emasculated remains of womanhood left in them. Only give them a chance
for martyrdom—only give them an excuse for the cry of persecution, and
upon whatever theme or theory, ology or ism, that may promise to afford
them such healthful and natural excitements, they will at once seize,
and, hugging the dear abstraction to their bosoms, do battle for the
same, with a cunning and unscrupulous ferocity that has no parallel.

“But for their thorough training under the teaching of Eusedora
Polypheme, they might, perhaps, be sometimes disposed to pause, and
inquire if there might not be two sides to every question; whether they
might not have made some slight mistake in crying out ‘Eureka’ so soon.
But, fortunately, they are never troubled with this weakness; and, as
their capacity for mischief is not, therefore, liable to be impaired
by any maudlin conscientiousness, or feeble questioning of their own
infallibility, or that of their teachers, they are from the beginning
as valuable as trained veterans.

“The jargon of the sect, which they acquire with wonderful facility,
constitutes their logic; and their efficiency in the use of this
weapon, consists in the savage, waspish, and persevering iteration of
its phrases, at all times and on all occasions.

“It is astonishing, the ease with which the majority of mankind can be
bullied, especially from within the bulwark of petticoats. But when
at once the terrible aspect is hid behind the mask of Circe, as the
followers of Polypheme know so well to accomplish, the power becomes
resistless indeed.

“The principal weapons of offence used by the followers of Polypheme,
in all their subsequent metamorphoses, are, first and foremost, what is
technically termed the ‘electrical eye.’ This is the most brilliant and
effective of their weapons. It is not by any means necessary that the
spiritual Amazon should have been gifted by Nature, in this respect;
for the arts of Polypheme were clearly inspired from

          ‘Some other deity than Nature,
  That shapes man better.’

“After long practice, the power is acquired of dilating or straining
the eyes wide open, and suffusing them at the same time. The moisture
gives them a marvellous effect of electrical splendor. As this habitual
tension can only be sustained for a few seconds at a time, Polypheme
happily offsets it by the modest habit of dropping her eyes towards the
floor, or a flower or book in her hand; then up go the

  ‘Downy windows close,’

and out leaps another humid flash, to electrify her audience.

“Great energy and activity of gesticulation is recommended, in order
to distract attention, as much as possible, from the fact, that these
cruelly-worked eyes sometimes run over with the ‘salt-rheum’—of any
thing but ‘grief.’ A loud voice, too, is especially recommended—as,
without it, somebody else might be heard in the room.

“Secondly, a thorough knowledge of the minor dramatics of emphasis
is also suggested. Sneers should be thoroughly practised before the
glass, as well as interjections, exclamations, shrieks of wonder and
surprise. The grimaces of rage, worked up with great ferocity, without
the slightest regard to the poor victim. Scorn should be lofty and
incredibly superb; archness, irresistible, taking care not to pucker
the wrinkles in the brow too much; sentiment, nothing short of the
white rolling-up of two huge spheres in spasm. Childlike simplicity
requires great practice in the dancing-room; it is very effective, when
artistically done. Favorite poets—Petrarch, Shelley, Mrs. Elizabeth
Brownson, and her husband, ‘poor Keats.’ Gods—Tom Moore, Byron, and
Author of Festus. High-priest of the Arcana—Emerson. Priestess—Margaret
Fuller Ossoli. Apocalypse—The Dial, &c., &c.

“Travelling should be studied as an art. The many correspondences
held in different portions of the country should be made the dutiful
occasion of sentimental visits, which, as they may be protracted for a
month or two, will, no doubt, result in the effectual ‘saving’ of some
half-dozen, at the very least, of both sexes. Neither scrip nor money
need be provided for the journey; for is not the laborer worthy of his
hire? Besides, who ever heard of a lioness carrying a purse? The world
owes all its benefactors a living.

“It is necessary to be an authoress—abundantly prolific and intensely
literary: to write dashing, slashing, graceful letters, in which your
own superb horsewomanship shall always figure most prominently; next,
your own disinterestedness; next, your own amiability, and dangerous
powers of attraction; and, last, the dashing, slashing, graceful
character of your own wit; your romantic love-affairs, by brook and
meadow, on highway and in byway, by ocean-side or in greenwood.

“These, with a lofty scorn of the commonplace, a darling love of the
arts—that is, you must know the names of the pictures, and what they
are all about, but most particularly the names of the painters. And
if somebody says the picture is a good one, be on terms of intimacy
with the painter, or at least in close correspondence with him; and be
sure he is a ‘noble spirit,’ a ‘divine creature,’ one of the ‘elect of
genius,’ whose ‘eyes have been unsealed to the touch of the Promethean
fire.’

“Must know French, Italian, German, and Spanish phrases, out of the
Pronouncing Dictionary. Quote these occasionally, but very guardedly,
when you are certain there are no apeish foreigners or troublesome old
fogy scholars present.

“Thus panoplied, the novitiate will be, in every sense, the equal of
Eusedora Polypheme herself, and entitled to go upon the pension-list
of the Committee. Indeed, we are booking them rapidly, and sending out
missionaries in every direction.

“The disciples of this school are among the chief favorites of the
‘Committee of Disorganisation.’”




CHAPTER XXIX.

REPORTS CONTINUED—REGINA STRAIGHTBACK


We have already obtained a glimpse of Regina Straightback, in
character. Her tall Indian-like figure, with her picturesque and
semi-manly costume, will not be readily forgotten.

The faithful police of the ‘Committee of Disorganisation,’ in course of
a detailed report concerning this woman, says:

“Regina Straightback is nearly as unbending in temper as in figure,
which peculiarity renders her of somewhat less avail to us than such
more ductile natures as her fast friend, Etherial Softdown, and her
soul’s sister, Eusedora Polypheme.

“However, she possesses an availability of her own, which is invaluable
in its way. She is incontrovertibly the Amazonian queen of the
‘New-Lights.’ Her commanding figure and her dramatic carriage, together
with her unanswerably positive and imperious manner, have, as implying
a natural gift of command, won for her the universal suffrage of her
sisters militant. So it never fails that, by a species of spontaneous
acclaim, she is selected to preside over all convocations of the
‘faithful,’ whether held in public or in private.

“By tacit consent, she has, therefore, come to be regarded as the
actual figure-head of the bark of Progress; and, hence, there is no
movement, on the part of feminine schismatics, worthy of attention, to
which she has chosen to deny her presiding countenance.

“This renders her, of course, a very formidable and important person,
in all the ‘New-Light’ agitations of the day. Conscious of supremacy,
she exercises it without hesitation; and, with a boldness that is
startling to all parties, dares to assert outright those opinions
which, in reality, lie at the bottom of the whole agitation in which
they are engaged.

“Indeed, not only does she defiantly assert them openly on all
occasions, but openly lives up to them in the face of society. While
her followers modestly say, they want woman’s civil rights in marriage,
she courageously asserts, that there is no marriage except in love,
and that the civil contract is like any other partnership in which
equivalents are exchanged; and, by way of proof of her sincerity, she
boasts, publicly and privately, of the terms on which she married her
present husband; who, by the way, possessed considerable property. ‘I
do not love you, sir,’ said she; ‘I love another man, whom you know. If
you choose to take me on these conditions, I am ready to marry you.’

“The charming candor of this proposal won the day; and the
superannuated ‘New-Light’ was fain content to exchange his hand and
fortune for her _hand_, and to leave her heart to settle its affairs in
some other direction.

“This is the sort of frankness in which the ‘Committee of
Disorganisation’ do most rejoice. They regard it as a highly
favourable omen, when a ‘distinguished female’ can take such grounds
as this, and be publicly sustained by thousands of her sex; for with
whatever gravity they may pretend to repudiate the doings of Regina
Straightback, in this one particular, it is very certain, that they
must regard it with secret favor, and that this is the principal cause
of her universal and overwhelming popularity.

“They regard her with a species of covert adoration—as a heroine, who
has first, since Fanny Wright, dared, in living up to principle, to
do that which they are all, in reality, yearning for courage to do
themselves.

“The chaos of social licentiousness, to which the general acceptation
of such doctrine as this must lead, may be regarded, to say the least
of it, as pleasantly melodramatic. When one woman may go to the house
of another, and say, ‘Though thou hast been bound to this man, in the
holy bonds of matrimony, yet these bonds are of no moral force; though
thou hast borne to this man children from his loins, yet the fact that
thou hast suffered gives thee no claim upon him, for it is the penalty
of thy sex; and that they are bone of thy bone, and flesh of his flesh,
gives thee no just hold upon him, but rather upon the State. And if
thou hast nursed him in sickness, he has fed thee and clothed thee, in
ample equivalent; if thou hast loved him, he has loved thee; if thou
lovest him still, it is thy weakness. Get thee gone! This man no longer
loveth thee; he is mine. Thou shalt surrender to me thy nuptial couch;
there is no true marriage but in love!’

“Nor does the candor of Regina Straightback rest with practical
declarations such as these; she goes quite as far in other directions.
She does not hesitate to denounce the Bible, as sanctioning all
the oppressions of woman—as the mere tool of the priesthood, the
orthodox of whom are banded, to a man, in mortal opposition to their
rights. She recommends the use of it, as a means—to those who are
more disposed than she is to Jesuitism—of conquering by indirections.
They may influence and control the masses, by invoking its sanction,
to be sure; but she, for her own part, will have nothing to do with
subterfuges; she rejects the Bible system in toto, as false—false in
fact and tendency. God has made woman sufficient unto herself in the
universe. She can and ought to protect herself; and if she does not,
it’s her own fault.

“The Bible might do for men; but women possess a higher spirituality,
and stronger intuitions; they do not need it. Man, with his heavy
logic, never gets beyond a truism or a self-evident fact, of the mere
physical world; while woman, with her electrical inspiration, leaps
the ‘large lengths’ of universal law, and, like a conquering presence,
glides within the spiritual, supreme. It is thus that, scorning all
bonds of sense, she knoweth that she doth know!

“The announcement of these tremendous propositions would, of course, be
calculated to have an overwhelming effect upon the tender adolescence
of thousands of bright spirits—to electrify their hearts and souls with
the novel consciousness of claims and attributes, of which they had
never dreamed themselves or their sex to be possessors.

“The result has been, of necessity, the institution of a feminine order
of ‘knight-errantry,’ of which the Quixote has yet to be sung.

“The Committee do not generally employ such agents as Regina
Straightback; but as the time seems to have practically arrived, owing
to the preparatory labors of Etherial Softdown and Eusedora Polypheme,
they seem to have conceded that such pretensions may be safely risked,
though, it is well known, they usually do far more harm than good to
any cause.

“The fact that such a step may be safely ventured upon, seems to be the
most encouraging token of the progress already achieved, and of the
ultimate and triumphant success of the exertions of the ‘Committee of
Disorganisation.’”




                             CHAPTER XXX.

                       HUMILITY BAREBONES STOUT.


The report goes on to say—

“But what the circumscribed wits of Etherial Softdown, the divine
languishments of Eusedora Polypheme, the defiant unscrupulousness of
Regina Straightback, failed to accomplish, namely, the convulsing of
all Christendom, by one dexterous jugglery of cant, was left to be
achieved by our at present most honored agent, Humility Barebones Stout.

“It will be seen, by her genealogical tree, as indicated in her middle
name, that she came, as it were, prepared, through a long table
of evangelical descent, for the work before her. Nothing could be
conceived more apropos: the blood of the Covenanters in the veins of
the modern ‘New-Light.’ Sharpened in its passage through New England
Puritanism, it has now become as professionally capable of splitting
hairs, as it formerly was of splitting heads. And then there was a
time-honored nasal, in which it

  ‘Poured its dolors forth;’

the preservation of the exact intonations of which does marvellous
credit to the antiquarian proclivities of this distinguished line. Then
there is a characteristic command of doggerel snatches, confessedly
without rhythm, because they were inspired,—for which the Fathers
Barebones and Poundtext were peculiarly noted in their day,—which seems
to have been transmitted, without the slightest deterioration of manner
or emphasis. And, in addition, there was an ecstaticism of textology,
to which these revered fathers uniformly resigned themselves, about
the time they had reached their ‘sixteenthlies,’ the facilities
of which seem to have been more than improved upon by their modern
representative. In a word, no reach of nasal effect,

  ‘From coughing trombone down to hoarsened pipe’—

no fecundant sprightliness of doggerel—no illuminated aptitude of
text, betwixt Daniel in the lion’s den, and Death on the pale horse—no
syllogistic or aphoristic touch of bedridden theology that has been
in vogue since the time of Luther, but is at the tongue’s end of this
Cyclopean daughter of the ‘Fathers of the Covenant.’

“Admirable! admirable! What was to prevent Humility Barebones
Stout from using these rightfully-derived and extraordinary gifts
for the good of humanity? Not that she had thought anything more
philosophically about it, than that the good of humanity ought to
consist with the claims of her inherited renown, her caste, and her
prescriptive rights. Not that she cared particularly who suffered; but
being of a hysterical and exacting temperament, she had come to the
conclusion that her own, the white race, had conspired against her—that
they were jealous of her—would never yield to her ancestral claims a
fair precedence.

“Her pride would not permit her to cry persecution for herself and
in her own name; for she had been, lo! these many days! a tireless
scribbler and notoriety-seeker, in appeals to her own race, through the
legitimate channels of current literature, on the simple basis of her
own individual experiences and the inspirations proper to her sex and
grade. These having failed to attract any attention beyond the day’s
notoriety, and from the additional fact of the most labored of them
having been consigned to oblivion through the pages of silly annuals,
she turned herself about in wrath, to avenge her wrongs. Her heart was
filled with bitterness.

“She had known Etherial Softdown, with jealous unction; she had
communed with Eusedora Polypheme, in hopeless emulation of spirit;
she had shrunk before the lioness moods of the triumphing Regina
Straightback. She felt that she was displaced—that she had been left
behind. She saw that they were all too proud, or too far advanced,
to condescend to use the rusty weapons which had fallen to her by
inheritance; that they had set their feet above her, on the platform
of progress; that they at least called the semblances of science and
philosophy, through their terminalogies, to aid them, while they left
cant to their menials.

“She felt that she was as bold as they. In what, then, consisted her
weakness? Could the fault be in her ‘stars,’ that she was still an
‘underling’? ‘Ha! ha! ha! Cant! cant! cant!’ and she laughed out, with
the exultation of Softdown’s first ‘Eureka!’ ’Cant! cant! I have it!
It descended to me from Barebones, my illustrious ancestor. Insolent
beldames! I will show them! They affect to quote the pure strains of
philosophy—

  “To imitate the graces of the gods.”

We shall see! we shall see! I hate my own race; it has not appreciated
me. What care I for white-slavery and its abuses—for fairness, for
truth? Cant! cant! By its magic, I shall

  “Show as a snowy dove trooping with crows.”

Eureka! Eureka!’

Etherial! ah, Etherial! the race hath not been to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong—thou hast been overshadowed!


                               THE END.




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