“The white feet of angels yet upon the hills.”
Months and months had passed, and yet this wretched man was staggering on, not this time drunk, literally, but, as though blinded by red blood oozing from his brain, which had been crushed by the weight of this blow. He was wandering vaguely hither and yon, distracting his brain in ineffectual chimeras, the very impossibilities of their success affording to him their greatest attraction. But gradually all this maddened struggle had been settling down into one sultry, close, inevitable conclusion of sullen self-destruction, which must result from the continued precipitation, upon conditions that promised death in one form or other. He went to Boston while the cholera was raging there at its worst. The pretence of the visit was some wild, distracting scheme that he had seized upon, and in which he was endeavoring to secure co-operation there.
But unfortunately for his mad purpose, since that very separation from daily contact with the girl Elna, which was working so sadly upon his imagination now, his attenuated and exhausted physique had rapidly recovered all its inherent vigor, and in animal health and strength he had suddenly become, by an inexplicable reaction, more prodigally abounding than ever for many years. So that fate seemed to have closed up to him any ordinary means of getting rid of himself, except the pistol and the dagger, from the use of which his manliness unconquerably revolted.
But by a strange process of self-delusion, he had managed to confound himself into the idea that the abject cowardice of the act of suicide might be avoided by a species of half unconscious indirection. For instance, cholera was rife in the city, and he well knew that long warm baths, by relaxing the system, would lay it more open to the attacks of any epidemical tendencies that might be prevalent; and accordingly, without ever venturing to explain to himself why, he continued, day after day, to take these long hot baths, and then to eat and drink, in the quietest possible way, everything that was specially to be avoided at such a time.
While this novel process was thus coolly progressing, he one morning met, by the merest accident, on State Street, a person whom he knew to have been long and intimately the friend of the lost Moione and her family. Manton eagerly asked him if he knew where she could now be found; for, strange enough, her calm image had lately intruded often into the darkened vistas of his thought, from whence he had supposed her banished long ago.
Her address was promptly given: it was in a remote and humble district of the city; and, although Manton already felt the seeds of the disease, which he had thus pertinaciously invited, rioting within him, yet he vowed to himself that he would at once seek her. His first visit failed; but the second found her, thin and wan, stretched on a lounge, awaiting she knew not whom.
With a short cry of sudden joy, as she recognised his features, she sprang to meet him, as of old, with a childish caress. Ah, why was it that he felt such sullen cold, and yet saw light, falling like star-beams upon the midnight of his soul, as his arms met this fond and childish clasp? He did not understand it—but we shall see!
The physical results, which he had so assiduously courted, could not be avoided. As he had walked about among his friends already for several days, with the premonitory symptoms of the fatal epidemic fully developed in his system, and as fully understood by himself, yet without the adoption, on his own part, of one single precautionary step, it was now sure to wreak its worst. Some, who could not help observing his ghastly appearance, thought him monstrously reckless, and others, hopelessly insane.
Regardless of every remonstrance, he still kept his feet, until, at length, the third evening found him leaving his hotel, in a hack, which he ordered to be driven to the home of Moione; and from which he had to be carried, by the driver, into the parlor, where he sank upon what he supposed to be the last couch upon which he should recline in life. A strange, indestructible feeling, that he must die beneath her eye, had urged him to this last and desperate exertion of the feeble vitality remaining in him. He had lain himself there to die; but why the strange purpose that she should minister to his passing breath? Was it only here that peace could be found for him?
Moione was alone, with a timid, young, and undeveloped sister. Their mother was accidentally away that night; having been detained by the illness of a friend, joined with the inclemency of the night, which set in in darkness and storm, in terror, in thunder, and in blaze. In the meantime, the paroxysms of cholera had commenced upon the enfeebled frame of Manton; and the black fear of the night outside only corresponded to the convulsed and writhing agonies which now tossed him to and fro, in helpless, but most mortal agonies. The thunder crashed, and the frail house shook, and the fierce pangs shot along his quivering nerves, as vividly as any blinding burst of lightning from without. The darkness which surrounded him had been penetrated by a calm, pure light, that dimmed not nor trembled before the blinding blast. A voice, the soft, clear, cheerful tones of which vibrated not to the quick rattling of thunder-crashes from without, told him of strength and hope, of peace and a calm future, in the life yet beyond him on the earth—that he could not die now, and should not!—until his will became electrified with a new impulsion, and was roused to cope with the fell demon that had thus, of his own invitation, possessed him; and, illuminated with a sudden and rapid intellection, he directed her how to baffle every paroxysm of cramp as it rose.