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.