It was now near twelve o’clock, and the man was literally worn out by the long and violent excitements which we have traced. Body, soul, and sense, utterly collapsed, the moment his head found a resting-place, into a deep sleep.
The lamp burnt low; there was not another sound to disturb the dimmed silence of that room, but the heavy breathings of Manton. But even that murky light was sufficient to disclose the figure of the woman stooping, as before, close to the face of the sleeper. Slowly her lips crept over, without touching it, lingering here and there, while her chest heaved with deep inspirations. You could not see, had you been a looker-on, the slight parting of the lips, nor could you have felt the heated furnace of her breath play along the helpless surface of those prostrate nerves; but you might have seen an eager, oblique glitter in her eye, that grew the stronger while the darkness thickened, as ghouls look sharper out of graves they have uncovered. But then, had you been patient, you would have seen, as the hours went by, a gradual twitching of the nerves possess that deathlike frame—a restless motion, a moan, an all-unconscious smile of ecstatic delight; and then, if your sense was not frightened and appalled by the fierce, swift blaze from those still eyes above, a fiend’s triumph would be all familiar to you.
Alas! alas! will that young man wake sane? The owner of those glittering eyes seems to know; for hark! in her exceeding joy she whispers aloud, “He is mine now! See how his nerves vibrate. I was right in choosing this time of great prostration. I am scudding along those nerves like a sea-bird on currents of the sea; all that is animal in him is mine now. He is mine at last—the insolent tyro! I shall drag him down from his vaulting self-esteem; I shall humble him; I shall degrade him. Ah, ha! I shall feed upon him!”
There may be retribution on earth or in heaven. We will let that dark night’s history rest!
CHAPTER XVII.
“TO-MORROW.”
It would be well for sinners were there no to-morrow. At least it would be well for them so far as impunity in the enjoyment of sin was concerned. But it may not be; the inevitable time of reaction must follow that of excess, the wages of which are remorse.
The effect of that to-morrow upon poor Manton was fearfully crushing. At first he dared not think—the horrid realisation would have slain him. He dared not look up, lest he should see the great height from which he had fallen. He dared not hear the voices within him, or above him, lest they should blast his sense. He shrank from the sunlight, as though each ray were a fiery arrow, to cleave hissing through his brain. He dared not look his fellow-man in the face, lest he should see the mark upon his brow, call him accursed, and spit upon him. The innocent eye of childhood was the most dreaded basilisk to him; and the face of a pure woman made him shrink and shudder in affrighted awe. His shadow seemed a spectral mockery to him, for it no longer glided with him, straight and firm, but was bowed, and crept sneaking after.
The burden of a hundred years had fallen upon the young man’s shoulders in one fatal night—a ghastly, loathsome burthen of self-contempt—his face had grown old; his eyes lost their proud fire; his lips, their firm expression; there was no longer any “aspiration in his heel.” The haughty, bounding self-reliance, the unflinching, upward look, were gone! gone! Manton had lost his self-respect.
Ah, fearful, fearful loss, that it is! There was a leaden desperation in the man’s whole air that was shocking, even to those who had never seen him before. There was no bravado in it—it was sultry, slow and self-consuming—shrank from observation, and burned inward.
He neither sought nor found any palliation for himself. He blamed no one else; his pride would not permit him to confess to himself that he had been unduly influenced, or that any unfair advantage had or could have been taken of him. No, it was his own fall. His own grossness had profaned those associations which he had stupidly deluded himself, for years, into supposing to be really sacred things in his life. He had rendered himself, thereby, unfit for Heaven, unworthy Earth, too base for even Hell.