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.
His first sullen recourse was to the wine-cup, that he might numb the unendurable agonies. He drank to monstrous excess; but, no, it would not do; that cold burning, as of an ice-bolt through his heart and brain, lay there still, in the two centres. He sought and found men like himself, with great thoughts and stricken hearts; like himself, brain-workers; and in the fiercest orgies of desperation, hours and hours were spent without attaining to one moment of the coveted oblivion.
The evening had long set in among such scenes, when a note was suddenly thrust into his hand from behind, and as he turned his head, he saw a boy hastily making his way through the thronged room. This movement had not been observed by his noisy companions—he hastily concealed the note.
He had recognised the superscription with a feeling of deathly sickness, for which he could not clearly account. It was as if the fresh wounds were all to be torn open again.
He soon after found an opportunity to withdraw beyond observation, and opened the note, which contained only these words:—
My Friend:—why have you left me all day? come to me—I am dying.
Marie.
The sheet was bespattered with blood. Manton nearly fainted. Recovering himself in a moment, he muttered, “Infernal brute that I am! to have neglected the poor, frail creature thus—after last night, too! May God forgive me, for I shall never forgive myself!” He hurried from the room.
The scene, on reaching her apartment, was, as may by this time be expected, ghastly enough. But as we have seen a little more of these horrid bleeding scenes than Manton has, we will refrain from another description of one, since we have found that they only differed in the intensity of effect and degree in the precise ratio of the results to be attained. In this instance she had not reckoned without her host.
Manton, who never dreamed of suspecting her, and had been fully impressed with the belief that these attacks were fearfully dangerous, and that the magnetism of his touch, whether imaginary or otherwise, could alone suffice to restore her to the calmness necessary for the arrest of the hemorrhage, felt as if an awful responsibility had been suddenly devolved upon him, as he thus apparently held the very life of this singular woman in his own hands.
This impression had been consummately fixed upon the mind of Manton by her obstinate refusal to permit the presence, at their interviews, of any third person, not even that of her own child. She could thus, through his generous humanity, most effectually draw him to her side; and, when once in her reach, he was again in the power of those fearful arts, of which we have seen something.
The life of Manton became now a succession of the “to-morrows” of remorse. Each new sun arose upon its succeeding scene of wilful, self-degrading excess, such as we have witnessed. He never permitted himself to grow fully sober, but drank incessantly—morning, noon and night. But that the wines he chose were comparatively light, and less rapidly fatal than the heavier and more dangerous drinks of our country, he must have, undoubtedly, destroyed his life, as he did his business reputation.
He still wrote brilliantly—nay, even with a fierce and poetic dazzle of style that surprised men greatly, and added much to the notoriety, if not to the solidity of his reputation. But everything went wrong with him. His purse was regularly drained by a remorseless hand; his wardrobe fell into neglect, and the marks of excess upon his fine, proud features, were at once rendered conspicuous by their association with almost seedy habiliments.
Before one year had passed he had begun to exhibit himself before men, in the pitiable light of one who had more pride left than self-respect. In a word, he had fallen fully into the toils of the hellish Jezabel.
Remember, in judging of poor Manton, that while he is hoodwinked, through much that is most noble in him, we see this woman through the strong light of day. He looks upon her as a devotee of science, in the holy cause of human progress and social amelioration. A poet and enthusiast, his life is dedicate to both. He regards her as a frail being, whose life hangs by a thread, and that thread held in his own hand—degraded into a false relation to himself—a relation which he loathes, to be sure, and which he feels to be heavily and swiftly dragging him downward, every instant, while it lasts, but which he dare not utterly break, for the fear that that frail thread of life, of which he has so strangely become the holder, should be snapped. He has only seen her, through her representations of herself; and therefore, all that is chivalrous and tender in him has been aroused in her defence, as the white roe, hunted into his strong protection for defence against the demon hounds of New England bigotry, jealousy, and fear. Apart from all other considerations, these were sufficient to compel an utter negation of self, in all that related to her, as well as a hasty dismissal of those suspicions that might thrust themselves upon him.
A house, in the meantime, had been taken for her in Tenth Street, for the rent of which Manton and the benevolent Doctor Weasel were to become jointly responsible. But the woman was far too astute to permit any such entanglements as might lead, prospectively, to mutual explanations between her victims. The Doctor alone ultimately became her endorser for the rent. She had other designs upon the less plethoric purse of Manton.
In entering upon this arrangement, Manton had been induced to believe, by her own representations, that for ten years before the name of Preissnitz had been heard of on this continent, this woman had been practising water-cure among her women patients. Manton had been sufficiently educated in the profession, to understand that its general pretensions were essentially empirical. He was too much an Indian, indeed, and had lived too much among Indians, to regard anything beyond the simplest natural agents as efficiently curative. He therefore recognized what Preissnitz had discovered, as simply confirmatory of his experience of the usages of savage life, and his own observation so far as it went. It contained not to him any more than any other pathy, the essential vis medicatrix of nature; but it seemed good to him, because it was new to the popular sense, and was well worthy to be urged upon its recognition, and thus to find its proper place among the other systems.
He entered upon the project with the fullest enthusiasm, for this woman seemed to him, from her personal habits and untiring energy, to be specially set apart to preach the crusade of physical cleanliness to her sex. The house was therefore occupied by her as proprietress and female physician, while Manton, Doctor Weasel, the fiery Jeannette, and victimised Edmond, of a former scene, occupied respective chambers as boarders, and patrons of the new enterprise.