Spiritual vampirism: The history of Etherial Softdown, and her friends of the "New Light"

by Charles W. Webber

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.

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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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