“My poor friend, be calm!” and she caressed his wet cheek lightly with her fingers. “Only be calm, and God will give you strength to pass through this valley and shadow of trial.”
“God gave me strength!” said he, with a sharp and sudden change of tone, raising his head slightly to look in her face. “Woman, he gave me strength when he gave me life! I have strength enough, as men call it, to move the world, aye, to wield Fate itself. It was not for such strength I came to you. It was not for such strength I would condescend to plead to mortal. It is for that soft and beautiful presence that liveth in immortal freshness, the spring-flower of the heart, beneath the moveless outstretched wing of Faith. Faith in our own kind. Faith in what is true and chaste in the purposes and charities, which, widely separate from the sensuous and the passionate, constitute all the blest amenities of intercourse between the sexes. ’Tis not that I would ask you to be all my mother, for that could not be; but that you should impersonate to me that calm joy, that serenity of repose in which I lived so long, upon a troubled earth, through her. It was she to whom I turned when the world buffeted and baffled me, to renew upon her bosom my faith in my fellows, and it was upon that sacred resting-place that I alone found soothing. She reconciled me to endure. She subdued my rebellious heart. She saved me from actual madness; aye, from the strait-waistcoat and the chain, when my brain was like to burst from throbbings that sounded like a thousand wild steeds thundering frantic over echoing plains; for the conflict was most fearful, when my young soul first arose to grapple with the world and its huge evils. In my impotent wrath I should have dashed myself to atoms against its moveless battlements of wrong, but that a low, sweet voice would quell and hold me back.
“I was the child of much travail, and years of weary and desponding watchfulness. I alone, of all her children, bore her features—she loved me unutterably, and shielded me always; it was not like the common love of mother for her child. In all things concerning me she seemed to be filled with a strange prescience—she read my inmost thought as if it were her own—as if it were a scroll made legible by illuminated letters. She seldom asked me questions, but simply told me what had happened. It was useless to attempt disguises with her; ministering in the flesh, she was my present angel, reconciling me to life; and when she passed from me and the world, I first realised what darkness, death, and separation meant.
I was delirious I know not how long—for they seemed slowly tearing my heart out by the roots, chord by chord, with a heavy drag, until the last one snapped, and then I went into deep oblivion, from which I awoke a man of stone, so far as sensation went; and if stone could walk, with no more heart than it—or rather if you can imagine this walking statue moulded of the red lava, and only cooled upon the surface, you can better conceive the smouldering, heart-devouring chaos in which my life now moved among my fellows. I did not stop to curse and battle with my old foes, I only hated them with a liquid flame of scorn that found its level in me and was still. I would not harm them—no, not I—I wanted them to live for companionship in suffering. I gloried in their perversions—they filled me with ecstasy. I could not but add to them, and in ferocious delight threw myself into all the excesses and extremes that demonise the world.
“But ambition came to rescue my dignity at last, and of its iron despotism you have seen the worst. From its hard and meagre thraldom you have released me for the time, but it remains with you to hold me free. The wings that have borne me thus far on this bold upward flight must feel the soft freshening of the breeze and the glad welcoming of sunlight, to the purer realm they try, or flagging soon of the unwonted effort, they will sink again to seek the old accustomed sullen perch. The strength I need now is a subtler thing than any power of will within myself—purer than the breath of angels, it is chaste and mild as star-beams.
“It is you who have filled me with these yearnings—’tis to you that I look for their realisation, and yet you have not accepted that pure and holy relation conveyed in the ‘Marie, mother,’ I have named you, and plead with you to recognise.”
During all this time the face of the woman had been bowed so close to that of Manton that she seemed almost to touch with her lips, first his temples and then his cheek. A close observer would have perceived, in her long and deep inspirations, her slightly parted lips and the slow creeping movement of the head, that she was steadily breathing upon certain well-known and highly sensitive nerves. The brain of Manton was too full to notice this strange manœuvre; but while he talked, that hot breath had been sending soft thrillings through his frame, which, at first unobserved, had gradually grown more palpably delicious, until, as he ceased to speak, he found his whole frame literally quivering with passion.
He was silent for a moment, that he might fully realise the sensation, and then, with a shudder of horror, sprang away from contact with the woman, exclaiming—
“My God! what is this? What an unnatural monster am I! or”—as a sudden gleam of suspicion shot through his brain—“Woman, is it you who have done this?” His face darkened in an expression of rage and ferocity which was absolutely hideous, as his eye glanced coldly on her.
“I ask you, woman, was it some infernal art of yours? Answer me!—for, by the Eternal God, you shall never thus tamper with the sacrednesses of a true man’s heart again!” and, grinding his teeth, he approached her menacingly, as if, in his blind rage, he would rend her to atoms.