Scarcely were these words uttered, than the languishing and tender-seeming mother hurled the child from her, backwards, upon the floor, with a violence that left her stunned and prostrate, and springing to her feet, raged round and round the room, as only a feminine demon infuriate could be imagined to do, spurning now and then with her foot, as she passed, the still senseless form of her own child!
Hell might find an equal to this whole scene, but hell has always been too civil! It is enough! This is jealousy! That woman is jealous of her own child! and she only thirteen years old!
How long she might have raged and raved, and to what consequences it might have led, heaven can only judge. Providentially, perhaps, a knock at her door announced the postman. She clutched the letter she received convulsively, and tearing it open, the instant he closed the door, read—what? The letter of Manton, which we saw in the last chapter!
She read it through, standing where she had received it—her eyes dilating, and her whole form changing. She literally screamed with joy as she finished the letter, and clapped her hands like one bewildered with a sudden triumph.
“Ah, ha! I have him! I have him! He is mine henceforth! He cannot escape me now!” and her oblique eyes fell upon the motionless child upon the floor. “The little fool!—she catches my arts too soon—she is not hurt—but I must help her.” She moved towards the child, but the demoniac triumph which possessed her seemed irrepressible. She bounded suddenly into the air, and almost shrieking aloud as she did so—
“I have conquered—I have conquered him at last!” came down like a statuesque Apollyon transfixed in exultation. It was a horrible glimpse of unnatural triumph! It lasted but for a moment; for, with a sudden drooping of the usually stooped shoulders, as she turned towards the letter again, she said, thoughtfully,
“This will not do—he perseveres even here in talking about mother! mother! and chaste! and holy! and all that sort of thing. The foolish boy is too much in earnest. I have used this stuff about long enough. I must find the means of bringing him gradually around. Such a relation as the silly fellow desires won’t do between us—we are both too full of life! Oh, I’ll write him a note at once that will prepare the way—will break up the ice, as he calls it, still more about his life!”
She raised the child, which had been stunned by the fall, and sprinkling some water upon her face, which caused the first long breathing of recovery, she laid her upon the lounge, muttering, as she did so, “The meddlesome little fool! She must do everything she sees me do! She must imagine herself in love with every one whom she sees me pretend to love. She must write love-letters when she sees me write them, and heaven only knows what she won’t do next with her monkeyish imitation! But I can’t be crossed by a child so, if she is my own. Lie there until you get over the sulks—you are not much hurt!”
She turned away from the child and seated herself at the table, exclaiming, as she seized her pen, “Ah! this letter! I feel that I shall need all my skill and wit to word this properly, so as not to alarm him. In his present excited and hysterical mood, the veriest trifle would have the effect of driving him off, at a tangent, forever beyond my reach. And yet it will not do to let things go on in this way; for I see that that idea of the motherly relation, if once permitted to become settled in his mind now, will remain a fixed barrier, which I shall never be able to pass on earth. I must see him to-night, and take advantage of his present over-wrought, ecstatic, and bewildered condition, to break down this boyish dream of his! Bah! to think that he should have taken me to be so much in earnest in all that first twattle about motherly relations, which I found necessary to use in order to get at him at all! Pity my correspondence hasn’t warmed him up a little by this time! I’ve tried hard enough, to be sure, but the queer fellow will persist in etherealising everything!”
During this soliloquy, the child, who had entirely recovered, lay perfectly still, with sharpened attention, catching every word that was spoken. There was an eagerness in her eye which showed her to be, if not an apt scholar of such teachings, at least a very attentive one. The woman wrote:—