INTERMEDIATE BETWEEN PIERRE'S TWO INTERVIEWS WITH ISABEL AT THE
FARM-HOUSE.
I.
Not immediately, not for a long time, could Pierre fully, or by any
approximation, realize the scene which he had just departed. But the
vague revelation was now in him, that the visible world, some of which
before had seemed but too common and prosaic to him; and but too
intelligible; he now vaguely felt, that all the world, and every
misconceivedly common and prosaic thing in it, was steeped a million
fathoms in a mysteriousness wholly hopeless of solution. First, the
enigmatical story of the girl, and the profound sincerity of it, and yet
the ever accompanying haziness, obscurity, and almost miraculousness of
it;--first, this wonderful story of the girl had displaced all
commonness and prosaicness from his soul; and then, the inexplicable
spell of the guitar, and the subtleness of the melodious appealings of
the few brief words from Isabel sung in the conclusion of the
melody--all this had bewitched him, and enchanted him, till he had sat
motionless and bending over, as a tree-transformed and mystery-laden
visitant, caught and fast bound in some necromancer's garden.
But as now burst from these sorceries, he hurried along the open road,
he strove for the time to dispel the mystic feeling, or at least
postpone it for a while, until he should have time to rally both body
and soul from the more immediate consequences of that day's long
fastings and wanderings, and that night's never-to-be-forgotten scene.
He now endeavored to beat away all thoughts from him, but of present
bodily needs.
Passing through the silent village, he heard the clock tell the mid hour
of night. Hurrying on, he entered the mansion by a private door, the key
of which hung in a secret outer place. Without undressing, he flung
himself upon the bed. But remembering himself again, he rose and
adjusted his alarm-clock, so that it would emphatically repeat the hour
of five. Then to bed again, and driving off all intrudings of
thoughtfulness, and resolutely bending himself to slumber, he by-and-by
fell into its at first reluctant, but at last welcoming and hospitable
arms. At five he rose; and in the east saw the first spears of the
advanced-guard of the day.
It had been his purpose to go forth at that early hour, and so avoid all
casual contact with any inmate of the mansion, and spend the entire day
in a second wandering in the woods, as the only fit prelude to the
society of so wild a being as his new-found sister Isabel. But the
familiar home-sights of his chamber strangely worked upon him. For an
instant, he almost could have prayed Isabel back into the wonder-world
from which she had so slidingly emerged. For an instant, the fond,
all-understood blue eyes of Lucy displaced the as tender, but mournful
and inscrutable dark glance of Isabel. He seemed placed between them, to
choose one or the other; then both seemed his; but into Lucy's eyes
there stole half of the mournfulness of Isabel's, without diminishing
hers.
Again the faintness, and the long life-weariness benumbed him. He left
the mansion, and put his bare forehead against the restoring wind. He
re-entered the mansion, and adjusted the clock to repeat emphatically
the call of seven; and then lay upon his bed. But now he could not
sleep. At seven he changed his dress; and at half-past eight went below
to meet his mother at the breakfast table, having a little before
overheard her step upon the stair.
II.
He saluted her; but she looked gravely and yet alarmedly, and then in a
sudden, illy-repressed panic, upon him. Then he knew he must be
wonderfully changed. But his mother spoke not to him, only to return his
good-morning. He saw that she was deeply offended with him, on many
accounts; moreover, that she was vaguely frightened about him, and
finally that notwithstanding all this, her stung pride conquered all
apprehensiveness in her; and he knew his mother well enough to be very
certain that, though he should unroll a magician's parchment before her
now, she would verbally express no interest, and seek no explanation
from him. Nevertheless, he could not entirely abstain from testing the
power of her reservedness.
"I have been quite an absentee, sister Mary," said he, with ill-affected
pleasantness.
"Yes, Pierre. How does the coffee suit you this morning? It is some new
coffee."
"It is very nice; very rich and odorous, sister Mary."
"I am glad you find it so, Pierre."
"Why don't you call me brother Pierre?"
"Have I not called you so? Well, then, brother Pierre,--is that better?"
"Why do you look so indifferently and icily upon me, sister Mary?"
"Do I look indifferently and icily? Then I will endeavor to look
otherwise. Give me the toast there, Pierre."
"You are very deeply offended at me, my dear mother."
"Not in the slightest degree, Pierre. Have you seen Lucy lately?"
"I have not, my mother."
"Ah! A bit of salmon, Pierre."
"You are too proud to show toward me what you are this moment feeling,
my mother."
Mrs. Glendinning slowly rose to her feet, and her full stature of
womanly beauty and majesty stood imposingly over him.
"Tempt me no more, Pierre. I will ask no secret from thee; all shall be
voluntary between us, as it ever has been, until very lately, or all
shall be nothing between us. Beware of me, Pierre. There lives not that
being in the world of whom thou hast more reason to beware, so you
continue but a little longer to act thus with me."
She reseated herself, and spoke no more. Pierre kept silence; and after
snatching a few mouthfuls of he knew not what, silently quitted the
table, and the room, and the mansion.
III.
As the door of the breakfast-room closed upon Pierre, Mrs. Glendinning
rose, her fork unconsciously retained in her hand. Presently, as she
paced the room in deep, rapid thought, she became conscious of something
strange in her grasp, and without looking at it, to mark what it was,
impulsively flung it from her. A dashing noise was heard, and then a
quivering. She turned; and hanging by the side of Pierre's portrait, she
saw her own smiling picture pierced through, and the fork, whose silver
tines had caught in the painted bosom, vibratingly rankled in the wound.
She advanced swiftly to the picture, and stood intrepidly before it.
"Yes, thou art stabbed! but the wrong hand stabbed thee; this should
have been _thy_ silver blow," turning to Pierre's portrait face.
"Pierre, Pierre, thou hast stabbed me with a poisoned point. I feel my
blood chemically changing in me. I, the mother of the only surnamed
Glendinning, I feel now as though I had borne the last of a swiftly to
be extinguished race. For swiftly to be extinguished is that race, whose
only heir but so much as impends upon a deed of shame. And some deed of
shame, or something most dubious and most dark, is in thy soul, or else
some belying specter, with a cloudy, shame-faced front, sat at yon seat
but now! What can it be? Pierre, unbosom. Smile not so lightly upon my
heavy grief. Answer; what is it, boy? Can it? can it?
no--yes--surely--can it? it can not be! But he was not at Lucy's
yesterday; nor was she here; and she would not see me when I called.
What can this bode? But not a mere broken match--broken as lovers
sometimes break, to mend the break with joyful tears, so soon again--not
a mere broken match can break my proud heart so. If that indeed be part,
it is not all. But no, no, no; it can not, can not be. He would not,
could not, do so mad, so impious a thing. It was a most surprising face,
though I confessed it not to him, nor even hinted that I saw it. But no,
no, no, it can not be. Such young peerlessness in such humbleness, can
not have an honest origin. Lilies are not stalked on weeds, though
polluted, they sometimes may stand among them. She must be both poor and
vile--some chance-blow of a splendid, worthless rake, doomed to inherit
both parts of her infecting portion--vileness and beauty. No, I will not
think it of him. But what then? Sometimes I have feared that my pride
would work me some woe incurable, by closing both my lips, and
varnishing all my front, where I perhaps ought to be wholly in the
melted and invoking mood. But who can get at one's own heart, to mend
it? Right one's self against another, that, one may sometimes do; but
when that other is one's own self, these ribs forbid. Then I will live
my nature out. I will stand on pride. I will not budge. Let come what
will, I shall not half-way run to meet it, to beat it off. Shall a
mother abase herself before her stripling boy? Let him tell me of
himself, or let him slide adown!"
IV.
Pierre plunged deep into the woods, and paused not for several miles;
paused not till he came to a remarkable stone, or rather, smoothed mass
of rock, huge as a barn, which, wholly isolated horizontally, was yet
sweepingly overarched by beech-trees and chestnuts.
It was shaped something like a lengthened egg, but flattened more; and,
at the ends, pointed more; and yet not pointed, but irregularly
wedge-shaped. Somewhere near the middle of its under side, there was a
lateral ridge; and an obscure point of this ridge rested on a second
lengthwise-sharpened rock, slightly protruding from the ground. Beside
that one obscure and minute point of contact, the whole enormous and
most ponderous mass touched not another object in the wide terraqueous
world. It was a breathless thing to see. One broad haunched end hovered
within an inch of the soil, all along to the point of teetering contact;
but yet touched not the soil. Many feet from that--beneath one part of
the opposite end, which was all seamed and half-riven--the vacancy was
considerably larger, so as to make it not only possible, but convenient
to admit a crawling man; yet no mortal being had ever been known to have
the intrepid heart to crawl there.
It might well have been the wonder of all the country round. But strange
to tell, though hundreds of cottage hearthstones--where, of long
winter-evenings, both old men smoked their pipes and young men shelled
their corn--surrounded it, at no very remote distance, yet had the
youthful Pierre been the first known publishing discoverer of this
stone, which he had thereupon fancifully christened the Memnon Stone.
Possibly, the reason why this singular object had so long remained
unblazoned to the world, was not so much because it had never before
been lighted on--though indeed, both belted and topped by the dense deep
luxuriance of the aboriginal forest, it lay like Captain Kidd's sunken
hull in the gorge of the river Hudson's Highlands,--its crown being full
eight fathoms under high-foliage mark during the great spring-tide of
foliage;--and besides this, the cottagers had no special motive for
visiting its more immediate vicinity at all; their timber and fuel being
obtained from more accessible woodlands--as because, even, if any of the
simple people should have chanced to have beheld it, they, in their
hoodwinked unappreciativeness, would not have accounted it any very
marvelous sight, and therefore, would never have thought it worth their
while to publish it abroad. So that in real truth, they might have seen
it, and yet afterward have forgotten so inconsiderable a circumstance.
In short, this wondrous Memnon Stone could be no Memnon Stone to them;
nothing but a huge stumbling-block, deeply to be regretted as a vast
prospective obstacle in the way of running a handy little cross-road
through that wild part of the Manor.
Now one day while reclining near its flank, and intently eying it, and
thinking how surprising it was, that in so long-settled a country he
should have been the first discerning and appreciative person to light
upon such a great natural curiosity, Pierre happened to brush aside
several successive layers of old, gray-haired, close cropped, nappy
moss, and beneath, to his no small amazement, he saw rudely hammered in
the rock some half-obliterate initials--"S. ye W." Then he knew, that
ignorant of the stone, as all the simple country round might
immemorially have been, yet was not himself the only human being who had
discovered that marvelous impending spectacle: but long and long ago, in
quite another age, the stone had been beheld, and its wonderfulness
fully appreciated--as the painstaking initials seemed to testify--by
some departed man, who, were he now alive, might possibly wag a beard
old as the most venerable oak of centuries' growth. But who,--who in
Methuselah's name,--who might have been this "S. ye W?" Pierre
pondered long, but could not possibly imagine; for the initials, in
their antiqueness, seemed to point to some period before the era of
Columbus' discovery of the hemisphere. Happening in the end to mention
the strange matter of these initials to a white-haired old gentleman,
his city kinsman, who, after a long and richly varied, but unfortunate
life, had at last found great solace in the Old Testament, which he was
continually studying with ever-increasing admiration; this white-haired
old kinsman, after having learnt all the particulars about the
stone--its bulk, its height, the precise angle of its critical
impendings, and all that,--and then, after much prolonged cogitation
upon it, and several long-drawn sighs, and aged looks of hoar
significance, and reading certain verses in Ecclesiastes; after all
these tedious preliminaries, this not-at-all-to-be-hurried white-haired
old kinsman, had laid his tremulous hand upon Pierre's firm young
shoulder, and slowly whispered--"Boy; 'tis Solomon the Wise." Pierre
could not repress a merry laugh at this; wonderfully diverted by what
seemed to him so queer and crotchety a conceit; which he imputed to the
alledged dotage of his venerable kinsman, who he well knew had once
maintained, that the old Scriptural Ophir was somewhere on our northern
sea-coast; so no wonder the old gentleman should fancy that King Solomon
might have taken a trip--as a sort of amateur supercargo--of some Tyre
or Sidon gold-ship across the water, and happened to light on the Memnon
Stone, while rambling about with bow and quiver shooting partridges.
But merriment was by no means Pierre's usual mood when thinking of this
stone; much less when seated in the woods, he, in the profound
significance of that deep forest silence, viewed its marvelous
impendings. A flitting conceit had often crossed him, that he would like
nothing better for a head-stone than this same imposing pile; in which,
at times, during the soft swayings of the surrounding foliage, there
seemed to lurk some mournful and lamenting plaint, as for some sweet boy
long since departed in the antediluvian time.
Not only might this stone well have been the wonder of the simple
country round, but it might well have been its terror. Sometimes,
wrought to a mystic mood by contemplating its ponderous inscrutableness,
Pierre had called it the Terror Stone. Few could be bribed to climb its
giddy height, and crawl out upon its more hovering end. It seemed as if
the dropping of one seed from the beak of the smallest flying bird would
topple the immense mass over, crashing against the trees.
It was a very familiar thing to Pierre; he had often climbed it, by
placing long poles against it, and so creeping up to where it sloped in
little crumbling stepping-places; or by climbing high up the neighboring
beeches, and then lowering himself down upon the forehead-like summit by
the elastic branches. But never had he been fearless enough--or rather
fool-hardy enough, it may be, to crawl on the ground beneath the vacancy
of the higher end; that spot first menaced by the Terror Stone should it
ever really topple.
V.
Yet now advancing steadily, and as if by some interior
pre-determination, and eying the mass unfalteringly; he then threw
himself prone upon the wood's last year's leaves, and slid himself
straight into the horrible interspace, and lay there as dead. He spoke
not, for speechless thoughts were in him. These gave place at last to
things less and less unspeakable; till at last, from beneath the very
brow of the beetlings and the menacings of the Terror Stone came the
audible words of Pierre:--
"If the miseries of the undisclosable things in me, shall ever unhorse
me from my manhood's seat; if to vow myself all Virtue's and all
Truth's, be but to make a trembling, distrusted slave of me; if Life is
to prove a burden I can not bear without ignominious cringings; if
indeed our actions are all fore-ordained, and we are Russian serfs to
Fate; if invisible devils do titter at us when we most nobly strive; if
Life be a cheating dream, and virtue as unmeaning and unsequeled with
any blessing as the midnight mirth of wine; if by sacrificing myself for
Duty's sake, my own mother re-sacrifices me; if Duty's self be but a
bugbear, and all things are allowable and unpunishable to man;--then do
thou, Mute Massiveness, fall on me! Ages thou hast waited; and if these
things be thus, then wait no more; for whom better canst thou crush than
him who now lies here invoking thee?"
A down-darting bird, all song, swiftly lighted on the unmoved and
eternally immovable balancings of the Terror Stone, and cheerfully
chirped to Pierre. The tree-boughs bent and waved to the rushes of a
sudden, balmy wind; and slowly Pierre crawled forth, and stood haughtily
upon his feet, as he owed thanks to none, and went his moody way.
VI.
When in his imaginative ruminating moods of early youth, Pierre had
christened the wonderful stone by the old resounding name of Memnon, he
had done so merely from certain associative remembrances of that
Egyptian marvel, of which all Eastern travelers speak. And when the
fugitive thought had long ago entered him of desiring that same stone
for his head-stone, when he should be no more; then he had only yielded
to one of those innumerable fanciful notions, tinged with dreamy
painless melancholy, which are frequently suggested to the mind of a
poetic boy. But in after-times, when placed in far different
circumstances from those surrounding him at the Meadows, Pierre pondered
on the stone, and his young thoughts concerning it, and, later, his
desperate act in crawling under it; then an immense significance came to
him, and the long-passed unconscious movements of his then youthful
heart seemed now prophetic to him, and allegorically verified by the
subsequent events.
For, not to speak of the other and subtler meanings which lie crouching
behind the colossal haunches of this stone, regarded as the menacingly
impending Terror Stone--hidden to all the simple cottagers, but revealed
to Pierre--consider its aspects as the Memnon Stone. For Memnon was that
dewey, royal boy, son of Aurora, and born King of Egypt, who, with
enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another's account into a
rightful quarrel, fought hand to hand with his overmatch, and met his
boyish and most dolorous death beneath the walls of Troy. His wailing
subjects built a monument in Egypt to commemorate his untimely fate.
Touched by the breath of the bereaved Aurora, every sunrise that statue
gave forth a mournful broken sound, as of a harp-string suddenly
sundered, being too harshly wound.
Herein lies an unsummed world of grief. For in this plaintive fable we
find embodied the Hamletism of the antique world; the Hamletism of three
thousand years ago: "The flower of virtue cropped by a too rare
mischance." And the English Tragedy is but Egyptian Memnon, Montaignized
and modernized; for being but a mortal man Shakspeare had his fathers
too.
Now as the Memnon Statue survives down to this present day, so does that
nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character in some royal youths (for
both Memnon and Hamlet were the sons of kings), of which that statue is
the melancholy type. But Memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously
resound; now all is mute. Fit emblem that of old, poetry was a
consecration and an obsequy to all hapless modes of human life; but in a
bantering, barren, and prosaic, heartless age, Aurora's music-moan is
lost among our drifting sands which whelm alike the monument and the
dirge.
VII.
As Pierre went on through the woods, all thoughts now left him but those
investing Isabel. He strove to condense her mysterious haze into some
definite and comprehensible shape. He could not but infer that the
feeling of bewilderment, which she had so often hinted of during their
interview, had caused her continually to go aside from the straight line
of her narration; and finally to end it in an abrupt and enigmatical
obscurity. But he also felt assured, that as this was entirely
unintended, and now, doubtless, regretted by herself, so their coming
second interview would help to clear up much of this mysteriousness;
considering that the elapsing interval would do much to tranquilize her,
and rally her into less of wonderfulness to him; he did not therefore
so much accuse his unthinkingness in naming the postponing hour he had.
For, indeed, looking from the morning down the vista of the day, it
seemed as indefinite and interminable to him. He could not bring himself
to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any sign of tillage, the
rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the slightest passing trace of man
was uncongenial and repelling to him. Likewise in his own mind all
remembrances and imaginings that had to do with the common and general
humanity had become, for the time, in the most singular manner
distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing all that was common in
the two different worlds--that without, and that within--nevertheless,
even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region of his own essential
spirit, Pierre could not now find one single agreeable twig of thought
whereon to perch his weary soul.
Men in general seldom suffer from this utter pauperism of the spirit. If
God hath not blessed them with incurable frivolity, men in general have
still some secret thing of self-conceit or virtuous gratulation; men in
general have always done some small self-sacrificing deed for some other
man; and so, in those now and then recurring hours of despondent
lassitude, which must at various and differing intervals overtake almost
every civilized human being; such persons straightway bethink them of
their one, or two, or three small self-sacrificing things, and suck
respite, consolation, and more or less compensating deliciousness from
it. But with men of self-disdainful spirits; in whose chosen souls
heaven itself hath by a primitive persuasion unindoctrinally fixed that
most true Christian doctrine of the utter nothingness of good works; the
casual remembrance of their benevolent well-doings, does never distill
one drop of comfort for them, even as (in harmony with the correlative
Scripture doctrine) the recalling of their outlived errors and
mis-deeds, conveys to them no slightest pang or shadow of reproach.
Though the clew-defying mysteriousness of Isabel's narration, did now
for the time, in this particular mood of his, put on a repelling aspect
to our Pierre; yet something must occupy the soul of man; and Isabel was
nearest to him then; and Isabel he thought of; at first, with great
discomfort and with pain, but anon (for heaven eventually rewards the
resolute and duteous thinker) with lessening repugnance, and at last
with still-increasing willingness and congenialness. Now he recalled his
first impressions, here and there, while she was rehearsing to him her
wild tale; he recalled those swift but mystical corroborations in his
own mind and memory, which by shedding another twinkling light upon her
history, had but increased its mystery, while at the same time
remarkably substantiating it.
Her first recallable recollection was of an old deserted chateau-like
house in a strange, French-like country, which she dimly imagined to be
somewhere beyond the sea. Did not this surprisingly correspond with
certain natural inferences to be drawn from his Aunt Dorothea's account
of the disappearance of the French young lady? Yes; the French young
lady's disappearance on this side the water was only contingent upon her
reappearance on the other; then he shuddered as he darkly pictured the
possible sequel of her life, and the wresting from her of her infant,
and its immurement in the savage mountain wilderness.
But Isabel had also vague impressions of herself crossing the
sea;--_re_crossing, emphatically thought Pierre, as he pondered on the
unbidden conceit, that she had probably first unconsciously and
smuggledly crossed it hidden beneath her sorrowing mother's heart. But
in attempting to draw any inferences, from what he himself had ever
heard, for a coinciding proof or elucidation of this assumption of
Isabel's actual crossing the sea at so tender an age; here Pierre felt
all the inadequateness of both his own and Isabel's united knowledge, to
clear up the profound mysteriousness of her early life. To the
certainty of this irremovable obscurity he bowed himself, and strove to
dismiss it from his mind, as worse than hopeless. So, also, in a good
degree, did he endeavor to drive out of him, Isabel's reminiscence of
the, to her, unnameable large house, from which she had been finally
removed by the pleasant woman in the coach. This episode in her life,
above all other things, was most cruelly suggestive to him, as possibly
involving his father in the privity to a thing, at which Pierre's inmost
soul fainted with amazement and abhorrence. Here the helplessness of all
further light, and the eternal impossibility of logically exonerating
his dead father, in his own mind, from the liability to this, and many
other of the blackest self-insinuated suppositions; all this came over
Pierre with a power so infernal and intense, that it could only have
proceeded from the unretarded malice of the Evil One himself. But
subtilly and wantonly as these conceits stole into him, Pierre as
subtilly opposed them; and with the hue-and-cry of his whole indignant
soul, pursued them forth again into the wide Tartarean realm from which
they had emerged.
The more and the more that Pierre now revolved the story of Isabel in
his mind, so much the more he amended his original idea, that much of
its obscurity would depart upon a second interview. He saw, or seemed to
see, that it was not so much Isabel who had by her wild idiosyncrasies
mystified the narration of her history, as it was the essential and
unavoidable mystery of her history itself, which had invested Isabel
with such wonderful enigmas to him.
VIII.
The issue of these reconsiderings was the conviction, that all he could
now reasonably anticipate from Isabel, in further disclosure on the
subject of her life, were some few additional particulars bringing it
down to the present moment; and, also, possibly filling out the latter
portion of what she had already revealed to him. Nor here, could he
persuade himself, that she would have much to say. Isabel had not been
so digressive and withholding as he had thought. What more, indeed,
could she now have to impart, except by what strange means she had at
last come to find her brother out; and the dreary recital of how she had
pecuniarily wrestled with her destitute condition; how she had come to
leave one place of toiling refuge for another, till now he found her in
humble servitude at farmer Ulver's? Is it possible then, thought Pierre,
that there lives a human creature in this common world of everydays,
whose whole history may be told in little less than two-score words, and
yet embody in that smallness a fathomless fountain of ever-welling
mystery? Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven
faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all
mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the
stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
The intuitively certain, however literally unproven fact of Isabel's
sisterhood to him, was a link that he now felt binding him to a before
unimagined and endless chain of wondering. His very blood seemed to flow
through all his arteries with unwonted subtileness, when he thought that
the same tide flowed through the mystic veins of Isabel. All his
occasional pangs of dubiousness as to the grand governing thing of
all--the reality of the physical relationship--only recoiled back upon
him with added tribute of both certainty and insolubleness.
She is my sister--my own father's daughter. Well; why do I believe it?
The other day I had not so much as heard the remotest rumor of her
existence; and what has since occurred to change me? What so new and
incontestable vouchers have I handled? None at all. But I have seen her.
Well; grant it; I might have seen a thousand other girls, whom I had
never seen before; but for that, I would not own any one among them for
my sister. But the portrait, the chair-portrait, Pierre? Think of that.
But that was painted before Isabel was born; what can that portrait have
to do with Isabel? It is not the portrait of Isabel, it is my father's
portrait; and yet my mother swears it is not he.
Now alive as he was to all these searching argumentative itemizings of
the minutest known facts any way bearing upon the subject; and yet, at
the same time, persuaded, strong as death, that in spite of them, Isabel
was indeed his sister; how could Pierre, naturally poetic, and therefore
piercing as he was; how could he fail to acknowledge the existence of
that all-controlling and all-permeating wonderfulness, which, when
imperfectly and isolatedly recognized by the generality, is so
significantly denominated The Finger of God? But it is not merely the
Finger, it is the whole outspread Hand of God; for doth not Scripture
intimate, that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand?--a
Hollow, truly!
Still wandering through the forest, his eye pursuing its ever-shifting
shadowy vistas; remote from all visible haunts and traces of that
strangely wilful race, who, in the sordid traffickings of clay and mud,
are ever seeking to denationalize the natural heavenliness of their
souls; there came into the mind of Pierre, thoughts and fancies never
imbibed within the gates of towns; but only given forth by the
atmosphere of primeval forests, which, with the eternal ocean, are the
only unchanged general objects remaining to this day, from those that
originally met the gaze of Adam. For so it is, that the apparently most
inflammable or evaporable of all earthly things, wood and water, are, in
this view, immensely the most endurable.
Now all his ponderings, however excursive, wheeled round Isabel as their
center; and back to her they came again from every excursion; and again
derived some new, small germs for wonderment.
The question of Time occurred to Pierre. How old was Isabel? According
to all reasonable inferences from the presumed circumstances of her
life, she was his elder, certainly, though by uncertain years; yet her
whole aspect was that of more than childlikeness; nevertheless, not only
did he feel his muscular superiority to her, so to speak, which made him
spontaneously alive to a feeling of elderly protectingness over her; not
only did he experience the thoughts of superior world-acquaintance, and
general cultured knowledge; but spite of reason's self, and irrespective
of all mere computings, he was conscious of a feeling which
independently pronounced him her senior in point of Time, and Isabel a
child of everlasting youngness. This strange, though strong conceit of
his mysterious persuasion, doubtless, had its untraced, and but
little-suspected origin in his mind, from ideas born of his devout
meditations upon the artless infantileness of her face; which, though
profoundly mournful in the general expression, yet did not, by any
means, for that cause, lose one whit in its singular infantileness; as
the faces of real infants, in their earliest visibleness, do oft-times
wear a look of deep and endless sadness. But it was not the sadness, nor
indeed, strictly speaking, the infantileness of the face of Isabel which
so singularly impressed him with the idea of her original and changeless
youthfulness. It was something else; yet something which entirely eluded
him.
Imaginatively exalted by the willing suffrages of all mankind into
higher and purer realms than men themselves inhabit; beautiful
women--those of them at least who are beautiful in soul as well as
body--do, notwithstanding the relentless law of earthly fleetingness,
still seem, for a long interval, mysteriously exempt from the
incantations of decay; for as the outward loveliness touch by touch
departs, the interior beauty touch by touch replaces that departing
bloom, with charms, which, underivable from earth, possess the
ineffaceableness of stars. Else, why at the age of sixty, have some
women held in the strongest bonds of love and fealty, men young enough
to be their grandsons? And why did all-seducing Ninon unintendingly
break scores of hearts at seventy? It is because of the perennialness of
womanly sweetness.
Out from the infantile, yet eternal mournfulness of the face of Isabel,
there looked on Pierre that angelic childlikeness, which our Savior
hints is the one only investiture of translated souls; for of such--even
of little children--is the other world.
Now, unending as the wonderful rivers, which once bathed the feet of the
primeval generations, and still remain to flow fast by the graves of all
succeeding men, and by the beds of all now living; unending,
ever-flowing, ran through the soul of Pierre, fresh and fresher, further
and still further, thoughts of Isabel. But the more his thoughtful river
ran, the more mysteriousness it floated to him; and yet the more
certainty that the mysteriousness was unchangeable. In her life there
was an unraveled plot; and he felt that unraveled it would eternally
remain to him. No slightest hope or dream had he, that what was dark and
mournful in her would ever be cleared up into some coming atmosphere of
light and mirth. Like all youths, Pierre had conned his novel-lessons;
had read more novels than most persons of his years; but their false,
inverted attempts at systematizing eternally unsystemizable elements;
their audacious, intermeddling impotency, in trying to unravel, and
spread out, and classify, the more thin than gossamer threads which make
up the complex web of life; these things over Pierre had no power now.
Straight through their helpless miserableness he pierced; the one
sensational truth in him transfixed like beetles all the speculative
lies in them. He saw that human life doth truly come from that, which
all men are agreed to call by the name of _God_; and that it partakes of
the unravelable inscrutableness of God. By infallible presentiment he
saw, that not always doth life's beginning gloom conclude in gladness;
that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life's fifth act;
that while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin veils
of mystery, only to complacently clear them up at last; and while the
countless tribe of common dramas do but repeat the same; yet the
profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that
can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own
intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect,
unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to
abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate.
So Pierre renounced all thought of ever having Isabel's dark lantern
illuminated to him. Her light was lidded, and the lid was locked. Nor
did he feel a pang at this. By posting hither and thither among the
reminiscences of his family, and craftily interrogating his remaining
relatives on his father's side, he might possibly rake forth some few
small grains of dubious and most unsatisfying things, which, were he
that way strongly bent, would only serve the more hopelessly to cripple
him in his practical resolves. He determined to pry not at all into this
sacred problem. For him now the mystery of Isabel possessed all the
bewitchingness of the mysterious vault of night, whose very darkness
evokes the witchery.
The thoughtful river still ran on in him, and now it floated still
another thing to him.
Though the letter of Isabel gushed with all a sister's sacred longings
to embrace her brother, and in the most abandoned terms painted the
anguish of her life-long estrangement from him; and though, in effect,
it took vows to this,--that without his continual love and sympathy,
further life for her was only fit to be thrown into the nearest
unfathomed pool, or rushing stream; yet when the brother and the sister
had encountered, according to the set appointment, none of these
impassionedments had been repeated. She had more than thrice thanked
God, and most earnestly blessed himself, that now he had come near to
her in her loneliness; but no gesture of common and customary sisterly
affection. Nay, from his embrace had she not struggled? nor kissed him
once; nor had he kissed her, except when the salute was solely sought by
him.
Now Pierre began to see mysteries interpierced with mysteries, and
mysteries eluding mysteries; and began to seem to see the mere
imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle of human
association. Fate had done this thing for them. Fate had separated the
brother and the sister, till to each other they somehow seemed so not at
all. Sisters shrink not from their brother's kisses. And Pierre felt
that never, never would he be able to embrace Isabel with the mere
brotherly embrace; while the thought of any other caress, which took
hold of any domesticness, was entirely vacant from his uncontaminated
soul, for it had never consciously intruded there.
Therefore, forever unsistered for him by the stroke of Fate, and
apparently forever, and twice removed from the remotest possibility of
that love which had drawn him to his Lucy; yet still the object of the
ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul; therefore, to him, Isabel
wholly soared out of the realms of mortalness, and for him became
transfigured in the highest heaven of uncorrupted Love.