Charles W. Webber

“ It was a new thing in his life, to meet with a woman, sufficiently heroic, to face the martyrdom that she was daring, for so elevated and noble an aim as the emancipation of her own sex from the conditions of utter helplessness, into which their ignorance of the laws of life had sunk them.
Besides, she had shown so much earnest patience with his rude pride, had followed up its aberrations with such a matronly tenderness, exhorting him only, and unceasingly, to be at rest—a rest, the need of which his proud and fainting soul had confessed so often to his inward consciousness. ”

“ Manton was now again a madman. In the pride of his hopeful love he had built magnificent schemes, which his singular energies had rapidly placed upon the firm basis of realisation; it only required the calm exercise of his own will to consummate all and make his name illustrious. But he had not labored for himself—and she, for whom all had been achieved, was no longer his—she was gone—utterly gone! She had sold her birthright, and was no longer his. The world became dark, its honors and its ambitions as nothing. ”

“ She will not come to kiss me, when I love her so! Moione does not understand everything she sees, or she would not have spoken thus sharply to her friend. She does not understand that I am striving to save this poor youth from his frightful vices! his wine-drinking, his tobacco, his meat-eating, and all those ugly sins which so deface, what I hope one day to see a beautiful spirit! She does not know I must endure this evil that good may come! She does not realise how much pain it costs me to have the purity of my household thus desecrated by his poisoned sphere! ”

“ Stricken, sad, and suicidal child of genius, may I not steal into the tiger’s lair of thy savage isolation, to bring one single ray of blessing, to tell thee how, at least, one human soul has throbbed to the seraphic eloquence of powers, that, alas!—I appeal to your inmost consciousness!—are being rapidly destroyed by your obstinate seclusion in labor, and by the vices of wine and tobacco, which are its necessary attendants. You have it in you to be saved; your soul is tall and strong as an archangel; your vices are the withes of grass that bind you ”

“ Among them were some, so characterised by a firm, exquisite delicacy of handling, that Manton regarded them with delighted wonder,—more especially as the defect in Elna’s pencilling, which he had always noticed and lamented, had been precisely contrasted with the excellences here displayed. Elna’s had, with all its gay and mocking eccentricity, always been trembling and uncertain. The want of smooth and poised directness in her harsh, rude handling, had often been contrasted by him in his lessons to her, upon art, with the clear, firm, and mathematical precision of the lines of Moione. ”

“ Manton watched all these phenomena with the sharpest attention, and then, as the lips began to move as if in inarticulate enunciation, he leant forward over her, and asked—
“What can you tell us of the soul, with which you are now in communication?”
After several preluding and spasmodic efforts to articulate sounds, the Clairvoyant at length said, in a voice only distinct above a whisper—
“I see light! all light!—pure, holy light. It fills the universe with a mild radiance! I can see no blurs, no clouds in the foreground. ”

“ Was there some strange spell about this woman—some mysterious power of sphere emanating from that still form, that crept into his blood and brain with the evil glow of these unnatural fires?
The poor doctor shuddered as he turned aside from the bed, and, with a soft step, glided to the window, and there seating himself, strove to recover the command of his thoughts by distracting them with other objects in the busy street.
The good man was on grievous terms with himself, as he continued to beat the devil’s tattoo on the window-sill with his heavy fingers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That proud heart of yours is at this moment filled with scorn for my poor words and humble proffers. But it does not affect me much, for well I know that this pride is the evil which ever strives in the unregenerate soul, to fence against the approaches of good. As yet this demon possesses thee, and, until conquered and humbled by love, you can never be saved. Thy physical life is poisoned—is poisoned with tobacco—and it is through such poisons that this evil spirit of pride enters into thy soul. ”

“ Like an electric flash, a new light burst upon Etherial; and, as there was only one feeling of which her being was capable towards man, she chuckled over the delicious secret which now opened out before her with a terrible gloating.
Glorious discovery! Hah! the spiritual vampire might feed on his strength—might grow strong on this cannibalism of the soul! and what of him if she dragged him down into idiocy? Served him right! Did Etherial care that his spiritual death must be her life? She laughed and screamed with the joy of unutterable ferocity! Eureka! Eureka! They shall all be my slaves! ”

“ Our erring fathers, sons, and brothers; it is their cause, my sisters, it is their cause we are called upon to vindicate. According to our brutal laws, one little frailty, to which we all may be subject,—one little slip, which any, the purest of us may make—subjects man to solitary incarceration for life, in which he is cut off from all loving communion with our sex; or to the horrible penalty of death by the rope! This, my beloved sisters, is the crying evil of the day; and man, cruel man, is in favor of such inflictions. ”

“ Being, self-fed and self-consumed, hung upon the void of midnight, hurried and driven from its own still gathering impulse through a chaos of crude matter. That green liquid of the evil one now rushed in burning currents through the veins, and it dashed away, crawling, leaping, tumbling, like a mad torrent, over piled-up rocks across the dark plains, striking against hard, formless things, and rebounding to rush on more swiftly, till it had left the fire-canoe and Yahshan all astounded, far behind, and the terror of darkness was beneath and above it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The spirit of antagonism, the love of strife and notoriety, have assumed in them the sense of duty, justice, and modesty; a spiritual diablerie has possessed itself of the emasculated remains of womanhood left in them. Only give them a chance for martyrdom—only give them an excuse for the cry of persecution, and upon whatever theme or theory, ology or ism, that may promise to afford them such healthful and natural excitements, they will at once seize, and, hugging the dear abstraction to their bosoms, do battle for the same, with a cunning and unscrupulous ferocity that has no parallel. ”

“ Once more my soul is free—once more I smile back love for love into the sunlight, and weep for joy—that God is good. Once more I feel as if the earth were a holy earth, and its flowers, too, might grow for me. Thou hast conquered! Thou hast conquered, woman! Thy pure and chastened sympathies, thy gentle and unwearied pleadings, thy meek compassion for the harsh and wayward boy, have conquered. The stiff neck is bowed even now before God, and thee, his minister of good. ”

“ I will swear, too, that at one time you did not scruple to suggest, by indirection, one much nearer to you; the true scope of which suggestion, however artfully disguised, the world will readily comprehend. Furthermore, I can now understand, perfectly, the secret of all those physiological phenomena, by which you have managed to delude and degrade Manton, not forgetting the disgusting fact, which has become too apparent to me, that you are endeavoring to play off Elna upon him, and, through his generous susceptibilities, to retain him within the reach of your damnable arts! ”

“ Why do you so constantly seek his society yourself? If he were the fiend you represented, one would think you would have reason to fear for yourself, if not for Elna. What he has done once he will do again! How do you reconcile all this?”
The flashing look and withering tone in which this unexpected outburst of indignation, on the part of the usually quiet Moione, had been delivered, cowed the craven nature to which it was addressed. It was but for an instant, though; her subtle cunning returned to the charge, in a lower tone, and on another tack. ”

“ He felt as if the sky had turned to lead, and fallen on him; and the first image recalled to his mind, was of the sick and monkey-imp, soulless and animal-eyed, that he had years ago rescued, in compassion, from the demon-talons of the mother. He clutched her desperately to his heart, endeavoring to recall the soul he missed, and that she had lost, while he had been away. He felt as if there were fire enough in his own veins to make a soul—to fill that delicate and graceful organisation with a subtler element, that might answer to the ravin of his sympathies. ”

“ I feel that love alone can make me strong once more, to bear such tortures! But have I not denied myself such dreams? Have I not with dedicated heart walked humbly since in self-denying ways? Have I not clothed the orphan, fed the poor and nursed the sick? Have I not ministered amidst pestilence, and held my life as of none account that I might bring good to others? ”

“ But I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Doctor. You could have told me nothing that would have more firmly fixed my resolution neither to be introduced to or know the person of whom you speak, on any terms whatever! Your manly-minded women are both my disgust and abhorrence!—as what they choose to call manliness is most usually a coarse and sensual impudence, based on inherent immodesty, which renders them incapable of recognising the delicate unities of propriety, either in thought or deed. I fully concede a woman’s capacity for displaying the great and even loftier processes of intellection ”

“ Deep, deep, beneath the realms of shadow—dark and deep—he had lain in long and dumb oblivion of consciousness. He knew not that he lived; it was a blank of rayless rest—a peace without sunshine. How profound! how unutterably still! What a contrast with the ceaseless, dreadful tension of the moiling chaos of past years, during which the passions had never slept, but, through his very dreams, had moaned in the weariness of strife. Alas! the rebellious heart, which struggleth in unyielding pride with life, refusing to concede to its conditions, how it must suffer? ”

“ In a mean and sterile district of Vermont, which shall be nameless, but which exhibits on every side stretches of bare land, with here and there the variety of clumps of gnarled and stunted oaks, Etherial Softdown was born. If mountains give birth to heroes, what ought to have been the product of a low-lying land like this, on whose dreary basins the summer’s sun wilted the feeble vegetation, and the bleak winds of winter wrestled fiercely with the scrubby oaks, whose crooked and claw-like limbs seemed talons of some hideous, gaunt and reptile growth? ”