“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.