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.