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.