We shall see, perhaps. Here is the last that he received from her:—
“My poor Friend—My heart yearns over you; I am oppressed with your suffering, for I feel how you suffer yet—how you are struggling, by day and by night, with those twin fiends of Doubt and Pride. I know my letters soothe you, though they cannot heal. Had you not informed me so, in your note, I should yet have been conscious of it. Had you never written to me again, I should yet have known that the great deep of your soul had been stirred at last, and that, though pride had triumphed in the struggle, love, genial, human love, had yet found, beneath the dark shadow of his wing, a warm resting-place once more beside thy heart.
No human aid can save thee now—that stiff neck must be bowed—you must be humbled! Then will come the full influx of the light from heaven. Then you will know joy and peace again—the pure raptures of a holy rest will calm this dark, bewildering struggle. I pray for you without ceasing—weary the throne with supplication that you may be humbled! Your little sister sends you her tearful greetings—she weeps for you with me always—for she dearly loves her tiger-brother. She says that, like all terrible creatures, he is so beautiful—oh, that he were only good!
Marie.”
This letter strangely thrilled upon the already over-wrought sensibilities of Manton, whose nervous organisation had been rendered intensely susceptible by the protracted excitement under which he had been laboring. He read it over and over again, with increasing agitation, until it seemed, while his eyes suffused, as if the accusing angel of his own conscience spoke to him in mild rebuke.
Long he moaned and tossed—the dim moisture struggling all the while to brim over those parched lids, that for years before had never known a freshening. Those tearless lids—how rigid they had been! how bleak! Like some oasis fountain where the hot simoon had drank!—Dry! dry!
Suddenly, with a deep groan, the young man bowed his head upon his hands, while the tears gushed between his fingers in a flood, that seemed the more violent from its long restraint. His body shook and rocked, while he gasped aloud—
“It is true! It is true! This woman tells what is true! This sullen pride has been the cause of all—I feel its crushing judgment on my shoulders now! Great God! deliver us from this thraldom! Let me but know my race once more! let me but weep when others weep, and smile when others smile, and it will be to me for a sign that thou hast received the outcast into the family of thy love, once more! Forgive, oh, forgive me, that have so long held thy goodly gifts of earthly consolation in despite! The worm’s presumptuous arrogance has but moved thy pity, oh, thou Infinite One! Forgive! forgive! oh, let me feel that countenance reconciled once more! Give back to my weary soul the holy communion of thy creatures! Pity! Pity! Pity! Ah, there is a paradise somewhere on the earth, for the most wayworn of her darkened children—a rift in the sunless sky, a glittering point above the darkened waters! Men are not all and totally accursed by their defiant passions. Pity sends star-beams through the port-holes of the dungeon. Mercy comes down on holy light of visions, where stars cannot get in. Oh, love, Infinite Love! Thou art so powerful of penetration—come to me now!”
For a long time he sat thus, while his frame shivered in voiceless throes; when suddenly straightening himself, with a powerful effort, and while the tears yet rained like an April shower, he drew towards him his paper, and wrote—
Woman—I know not what to call you—you have strangely moved me! In my most desperate and sullen pride have I not struggled long with this great blessing, which thou hast brought me! I would have driven the good angel from me in wrath and scorn—but it would not be offended. In patience and long suffering it has abided near, hovering on white wings, until now, at last, the fountain has been troubled. Ah! woman, its depths have been broken up, indeed—and the dark, long, unnatural winter of my life, has felt the glowing breath of spring; and in one mighty crash, the hideous ice-crusts that had gathered, heaping over it, have burst away before the flashing leap of unchained waters. Once more my soul is free—once more I smile back love for love into the sunlight, and weep for joy—that God is good. Once more I feel as if the earth were a holy earth, and its flowers, too, might grow for me. Thou hast conquered! Thou hast conquered, woman! Thy pure and chastened sympathies, thy gentle and unwearied pleadings, thy meek compassion for the harsh and wayward boy, have conquered. The stiff neck is bowed even now before God, and thee, his minister of good. Ah! forgive and pity me! My eyes are raining so, I can scarcely see to write. I am shaken as in a great tempest, body and soul. I could weep at your feet in penitence, and pray to be forgiven and for pity! Ah, that, I know you have! I am blinded with these tears—I know not what I say! Oh, be to me what I have lost! I faint by the wayside; my soul dies within me for that holy rest that I have lost—for the sweet, calm and tender peace, all the holy memories your loving gentleness has thus recalled. Ah, be to me all that you have thus filled me with, anew! Receive me as your adopted child, that I may rest my throbbing head once more in peace and joy, upon a sacred bosom. Be to me, forever, “Marie, mother!”