But sure am I, among the ranks that fell
’Tis the first fiend e’er counselled man to rise!
Anon.
Manton had reckoned without his host, in supposing that his self-constituted patroness had any idea whatever of being frozen off: on the contrary, her benevolent ardor had been only warmed still more, as he had abundant evidence, when, on returning from his office next morning, he found yet another snowy missive crowning the centre of his table.
“Monsieur Tonson, come again!” he exclaimed, as he seized the note, and opened it this time without hesitation, “what can the incredible woman have to say now? Well, here it is!”
My Friend—You heaped ice upon my heart yesterday. To-day, I feel chilled and stiffened, as if my very soul-wings had been frosted through your lips! Why did you do so? It was not magnanimous in you. You are proud, and beautiful, and strong, while I am plain, and weak, and lowly. Was it worthy of a noble soul to treat with such harsh and cutting coldness a poor, feeble, and wayworn daughter of sorrow like myself, who had come merely in the meek and matronly overflow of tenderness and appreciation for a poisoned, sick and erring child of genius, to offer him her sympathy in his dreary and unrelieved immolation of glorious powers at the unholy altar of ambition? Was it not unkind of you? Can you suppose that had you not been poisoned, body and soul, the demon pride would have thus overruled your better and your angel nature to such harsh rejection of the comforter, the Father had sent you in his mercy? What have I asked of you, but that you should unbend this fatal pride, and accept of mortal genialities? That you should spare yourself from yourself, and give something to others. Ah! you will not always thus repulse the sympathies of your race—naughty, naughty boy! hasten to be good and come to see me!
Marie.
“Well! well! by heaven, the audacity of this thing soars to the sublime! and yet there is some truth as well as pathos in it, too! Now, I come to think of it, it was unmanly of me to treat the poor woman so, just as if I expected she carried stilettoes or revolvers under her petticoats, or wore aromatic poison in her bosom, with a foul and treacherous design upon my life! The fact is, I have made a bugbear of this creature in my imagination, when she is nothing, in fact, but fool and fanatic combined, with a little disjointed mother-wit. Curse the whole affair! I wish she and her endless letters were in the bottom of the sea! By these persistent impertinences she disturbs me in my work; these distractions are unendurable! I wish she were only safe in heaven.
It is useless to give all the letters which poor Manton received within the next four or five days, but it is sufficient to say that at last, in a fit of veritable desperation, spleen and humor, he answered one of the last in a tone of hyperbolical exaggeration that would have put to shame, not Mercutio only, but the veritable Bombastes Furioso himself. The effect was coldly studied, and behold the result.
The next morning a servant informed him that a lady desired to see him in the parlor.