But they left Hope-seed to fill up again.
Herrick.
But even in the black abysses of the hell down which he had fallen, a flower could grow to the eye of Manton. It was the strange birth of a wizard evil place; yet, as it spread beneath his nourishing eye and hand, it daily grew more beautiful to him. It may have been the unconscious contrast of a something young, living, and blooming in an unnatural sphere like this, where he, with the sudden weight of centuries upon him, breathed with such heavy gasping. He could not tell what it was that thickened this drear air; he only felt the oppression on his lungs, and shuddered when sleep had partly sobered him, and he could realise it for the hour. His sympathies had been first touched for that ugly, impish, persecuted child, to which we have frequently referred, because he saw, at once, that the mother’s querulous jealousy was forever subjecting it to a species of covert torture, which kept it always haggard and wretched. Had it been a sick and neglected kitten on the hearth, he would have felt for it the same kind of sympathy. He accordingly noticed and caressed the child, and endeavoured to rouse its low, ignoble frontal region into activity. The response of a hungry and vivid animality, surprised him with its aptitude of apparent intelligence. He did not understand that marvellous faculty of imitation which, in all the animal tribes approximating man, or which, in other words, are born with embryo souls, assumes the external semblances of intelligent expression. The faculty of music is below man, and common both to bird and beast; and he had yet to learn, to his heavy cost, how a perception and detection of the physical harmonies of sound may be utterly distinct from the spiritual comprehension of their meaning. He had yet to fearfully realise how this insensate aptitude of harmony, which enables the monkey of the organ-grinder to dance in perfect time the most wild and rapid strathspey that ever Highland pibroch rung, or a stupid parrot to whistle the divinest strains of Mozart, could yet bestow upon the combined parrot and monkey of our own race that semblant mockery of the “gift of tongues,” the use of the soul’s higher language. In a word, he would have been greatly shocked to hear the affiliated Poll and Jocko talk down Shelley in his own etherealisms, and appal Byron with the mad bravado of forgotten lines from his own reckless and besotted misanthropy.
Poll and Jocko are easy enough to detect through all the human disguises of their combined powers, if the man of common sense and society meets the impersonation for the first time, when developed, or in most of the latter stages of development. But it was a very different thing with poor Manton, who only saw an undeveloped, abject animal, from which he expected little but the gratitude of the brute for protection, and from which anything like a vivid response was as surprising as it was unconsciously gratifying to his egotism, for the reason that all that was really pleasurable in it was owing to the fact of its constituting a close reflection of his own mind.
Gradually the feeling took possession of him, as he observed in her an excessive sensibility, that could weep at a moment’s warning, and laugh like April through the glistening storm in the next instant, that he would make amends for the great sin of his life, in working upon this sensitive organisation for good. The fine delicate chords of this frail instrument might be made to respond to the divinest notes; and this creature, with developed brain and expanding soul, become a medium of the loftiest intelligence—aye, be even to him the consoler of after years. The idea was a strange one, but it suited the intellectual audacity of Manton for that very reason.
It seemed to his darkened hopelessness, that here, through the innocence of childhood, he might renew that broken chain of living light which held him in communion with the upper world, until its blackened, severed links, falling about him, had left his manacled soul in hopeless bondage. He dreamed that if he guarded it with holy zeal, his prayers might rise upon the first odors that went up from this strange young flower to Heaven, and bring its light down too, in forgiveness, to him.
He did not know—for he had fed on poisons until it had become a kind of second nature to him, as to that old Pontiac king—that the pure light of spheres could never reach him through this lurid glare, which he had now come to think the natural day—that the odor of no flower could rise through its thickened air to meet the keen, grey stars. The man became bewildered with the gorgeous dream he nourished; and, day by day, without knowing why, he threw himself between the child and the baleful shadow of its mother. He spread his hands above her in blessing; he watched that he might shield her.
From the moment when his attention had been first attracted to her, she seemed to become illuminated; her ungainly body appeared assuming the lines of beauty; her mean, harsh features, softened, as the gnarled shrub assumes, in slow unfolding, the graceful mellowed drapery of spring. The coarse, elfin locks, grew tamed and smooth; a dark blue, in soft and gradual displacement, entered the sharp, greenish, animal eyes. The low, ape-like forehead, swelled above meekly-curved brows that had lost their hirsute squareness. Indeed, so rapid was the expansion of the frontal region, that it absolutely startled and affrighted the devout experimenter, when he placed his hand upon it, and felt it almost lifted by the wild throbbings beneath. The work was progressing too fast; he feared that the general health of the subject might fail; but how to check and remedy this powerful reaction, so as to control it from fatal results, now so fully occupied the spiritual subtilty of the man, as to leave him little time to think of himself.
The loathsome contact of the reptile mother daily grew more abhorrent to him; and her characteristic cunning soon discovered that she had no real hold upon him herself, and at once encouraged this growing interest in the daughter, with the same assiduous art that she had before displayed in tormenting her with jealous gibes. Through this help she hoped he might be held within her reach. She had already, by her malapert, silly, malignant interference, so far completed his ruin as to have brought about a desperate, and finally fatal collision, between himself and his business associate in the Journal, which his genius had built up; and now he was thrown again to struggle hap-hazard with the world, he had become more reckless and desperate than before, so that she feared he might, at any time, break away from his bondage, and that, too, while he was still of use to her, and before she had gloated fully upon his ruin. She had studiously taught the child the process of those infernal arts, of which we have seen something; and, although the creature understood nothing of the rationale involved, yet her imitative cunning made her a most sharp pupil and practitioner.
By saying that the child did not understand, we mean to convey, that she could not have explained to herself, or to others, what effect certain manipulations would produce specifically; yet she had a feeling of them, a vicious intuition, that answered with her all the purposes of intellection. To look at her through the eyes of Manton, the uncouth and grotesque girl had become a fond and graceful plaything, that clung about him in soft caresses, that kept his heart warmed towards her, and caused him to regard the mother even with a modified sense of the growing disgust which was possessing him, and of which her shrewd insight made her fully aware.