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.