THE UNPRECEDENTED FINAL RESOLUTION OF PIERRE.
I.
Glorified be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest gloom
precedes the day. We care not whether the saying will prove true to the
utmost bounds of things; sufficient that it sometimes does hold true
within the bounds of earthly finitude.
Next morning Pierre rose from the floor of his chamber, haggard and
tattered in body from his past night's utter misery, but stoically
serene and symmetrical in soul, with the foretaste of what then seemed
to him a planned and perfect Future. Now he thinks he knows that the
wholly unanticipated storm which had so terribly burst upon him, had yet
burst upon him for his good; for the place, which in its undetected
incipiency, the storm had obscurely occupied in his soul, seemed now
clear sky to him; and all his horizon seemed distinctly commanded by
him.
His resolution was a strange and extraordinary one; but therefore it
only the better met a strange and extraordinary emergency. But it was
not only strange and extraordinary in its novelty of mere aspect, but it
was wonderful in its unequaled renunciation of himself.
From the first, determined at all hazards to hold his father's fair
fame inviolate from any thing he should do in reference to protecting
Isabel, and extending to her a brother's utmost devotedness and love;
and equally determined not to shake his mother's lasting peace by any
useless exposure of unwelcome facts; and yet vowed in his deepest soul
some way to embrace Isabel before the world, and yield to her his
constant consolation and companionship; and finding no possible mode of
unitedly compassing all these ends, without a most singular act of pious
imposture, which he thought all heaven would justify in him, since he
himself was to be the grand self-renouncing victim; therefore, this was
his settled and immovable purpose now; namely: to assume before the
world, that by secret rites, Pierre Glendinning was already become the
husband of Isabel Banford--an assumption which would entirely warrant
his dwelling in her continual company, and upon equal terms, taking her
wherever the world admitted him; and at the same time foreclose all
sinister inquisitions bearing upon his deceased parent's memory, or any
way affecting his mother's lasting peace, as indissolubly linked with
that. True, he in embryo, foreknew, that the extraordinary thing he had
resolved, would, in another way, indirectly though inevitably, dart a
most keen pang into his mother's heart; but this then seemed to him part
of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue; and, thus
minded, rather would he privately pain his living mother with a wound
that might be curable, than cast world-wide and irremediable
dishonor--so it seemed to him--upon his departed father.
Probably no other being than Isabel could have produced upon Pierre
impressions powerful enough to eventuate in a final resolution so
unparalleled as the above. But the wonderful melodiousness of her grief
had touched the secret monochord within his breast, by an apparent
magic, precisely similar to that which had moved the stringed tongue of
her guitar to respond to the heart-strings of her own melancholy
plaints. The deep voice of the being of Isabel called to him from out
the immense distances of sky and air, and there seemed no veto of the
earth that could forbid her heavenly claim.
During the three days that he had personally known her, and so been
brought into magnetic contact with her, other persuasions and potencies
than those direct ones, involved in her bewildering eyes and marvelous
story, had unconsciously left their ineffaceable impressions on him, and
perhaps without his privity, had mainly contributed to his resolve. She
had impressed him as the glorious child of Pride and Grief, in whose
countenance were traceable the divinest lineaments of both her parents.
Pride gave to her her nameless nobleness; Grief touched that nobleness
with an angelical softness; and again that softness was steeped in a
most charitable humility, which was the foundation of her loftiest
excellence of all.
Neither by word or letter had Isabel betrayed any spark of those more
common emotions and desires which might not unreasonably be ascribed to
an ordinary person placed in circumstances like hers. Though almost
penniless, she had not invoked the pecuniary bounty of Pierre; and
though she was altogether silent on that subject, yet Pierre could not
but be strangely sensible of something in her which disdained to
voluntarily hang upon the mere bounty even of a brother. Nor, though she
by various nameless ways, manifested her consciousness of being
surrounded by uncongenial and inferior beings, while yet descended from
a generous stock, and personally meriting the most refined
companionships which the wide world could yield; nevertheless, she had
not demanded of Pierre that he should array her in brocade, and lead her
forth among the rare and opulent ladies of the land. But while thus
evincing her intuitive, true lady-likeness and nobleness by this entire
freedom from all sordid motives, neither had she merged all her feelings
in any sickly sentimentalities of sisterly affection toward her so
suddenly discovered brother; which, in the case of a naturally
unattractive woman in her circumstances, would not have been altogether
alluring to Pierre. No. That intense and indescribable longing, which
her letter by its very incoherencies had best embodied, proceeded from
no base, vain, or ordinary motive whatever; but was the unsuppressible
and unmistakable cry of the godhead through her soul, commanding Pierre
to fly to her, and do his highest and most glorious duty in the world.
Nor now, as it changedly seemed to Pierre, did that duty consist in
stubbornly flying in the marble face of the Past, and striving to
reverse the decree which had pronounced that Isabel could never
perfectly inherit all the privileges of a legitimate child of her
father. And thoroughly now he felt, that even as this would in the
present case be both preposterous in itself and cruel in effect to both
the living and the dead, so was it entirely undesired by Isabel, who
though once yielding to a momentary burst of aggressive enthusiasm, yet
in her more wonted mood of mournfulness and sweetness, evinced no such
lawless wandering. Thoroughly, now he felt, that Isabel was content to
live obscure in her paternal identity, so long as she could any way
appease her deep longings for the constant love and sympathy and close
domestic contact of some one of her blood. So that Pierre had no
slightest misgiving that upon learning the character of his scheme, she
would deem it to come short of her natural expectations; while so far as
its apparent strangeness was concerned,--a strangeness, perhaps
invincible to squeamish and humdrum women--here Pierre anticipated no
obstacle in Isabel; for her whole past was strange, and strangeness
seemed best befitting to her future.
But had Pierre now reread the opening paragraph of her letter to him, he
might have very quickly derived a powerful anticipative objection from
his sister, which his own complete disinterestedness concealed from him.
Though Pierre had every reason to believe that--owing to her secluded
and humble life--Isabel was in entire ignorance of the fact of his
precise relation to Lucy Tartan:--an ignorance, whose first indirect and
unconscious manifestation in Isabel, had been unspeakably welcome to
him;--and though, of course, he had both wisely and benevolently
abstained from enlightening her on that point; still, notwithstanding
this, was it possible that any true-hearted noble girl like Isabel,
would, to benefit herself, willingly become a participator in an act,
which would prospectively and forever bar the blessed boon of
marriageable love from one so young and generous as Pierre, and
eternally entangle him in a fictitious alliance, which, though in
reality but a web of air, yet in effect would prove a wall of iron; for
the same powerful motive which induced the thought of forming such an
alliance, would always thereafter forbid that tacit exposure of its
fictitiousness, which would be consequent upon its public
discontinuance, and the real nuptials of Pierre with any other being
during the lifetime of Isabel.
But according to what view you take of it, it is either the gracious or
the malicious gift of the great gods to man, that on the threshold of
any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise, the thousand ulterior
intricacies and emperilings to which it must conduct; these, at the
outset, are mostly withheld from sight; and so, through her
ever-primeval wilderness Fortune's Knight rides on, alike ignorant of
the palaces or the pitfalls in its heart. Surprising, and past all
ordinary belief, are those strange oversights and inconsistencies, into
which the enthusiastic meditation upon unique or extreme resolves will
sometimes beget in young and over-ardent souls. That all-comprehending
oneness, that calm representativeness, by which a steady philosophic
mind reaches forth and draws to itself, in their collective entirety,
the objects of its contemplations; that pertains not to the young
enthusiast. By his eagerness, all objects are deceptively foreshortened;
by his intensity each object is viewed as detached; so that essentially
and relatively every thing is misseen by him. Already have we exposed
that passing preposterousness in Pierre, which by reason of the
above-named cause which we have endeavored to portray, induced him to
cherish for a time four unitedly impossible designs. And now we behold
this hapless youth all eager to involve himself in such an inextricable
twist of Fate, that the three dextrous maids themselves could hardly
disentangle him, if once he tie the complicating knots about him and
Isabel.
Ah, thou rash boy! are there no couriers in the air to warn thee away
from these emperilings, and point thee to those Cretan labyrinths, to
which thy life's cord is leading thee? Where now are the high
beneficences? Whither fled the sweet angels that are alledged guardians
to man?
Not that the impulsive Pierre wholly overlooked all that was menacing to
him in his future, if now he acted out his most rare resolve; but
eagerly foreshortened by him, they assumed not their full magnitude of
menacing; nor, indeed,--so riveted now his purpose--were they pushed up
to his face, would he for that renounce his self-renunciation; while
concerning all things more immediately contingent upon his central
resolution; these were, doubtless, in a measure, foreseen and understood
by him. Perfectly, at least, he seemed to foresee and understand, that
the present hope of Lucy Tartan must be banished from his being; that
this would carry a terrible pang to her, which in the natural recoil
would but redouble his own; that to the world all his heroicness,
standing equally unexplained and unsuspected, therefore the world would
denounce him as infamously false to his betrothed; reckless of the most
binding human vows; a secret wooer and wedder of an unknown and
enigmatic girl; a spurner of all a loving mother's wisest counselings; a
bringer down of lasting reproach upon an honorable name; a besotted
self-exile from a most prosperous house and bounteous fortune; and
lastly, that now his whole life would, in the eyes of the wide humanity,
be covered with an all-pervading haze of incurable sinisterness,
possibly not to be removed even in the concluding hour of death.
Such, oh thou son of man! are the perils and the miseries thou callest
down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou steppest aside from
those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which the common world, however
base and dastardly, surrounds thee for thy worldly good.
Ofttimes it is very wonderful to trace the rarest and profoundest
things, and find their probable origin in something extremely trite or
trivial. Yet so strange and complicate is the human soul; so much is
confusedly evolved from out itself, and such vast and varied accessions
come to it from abroad, and so impossible is it always to distinguish
between these two, that the wisest man were rash, positively to assign
the precise and incipient origination of his final thoughts and acts.
Far as we blind moles can see, man's life seems but an acting upon
mysterious hints; it is somehow hinted to us, to do thus or thus. For
surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down into himself will ever
pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own
defined identity. This preamble seems not entirely unnecessary as usher
of the strange conceit, that possibly the latent germ of Pierre's
proposed extraordinary mode of executing his proposed extraordinary
resolve--namely, the nominal conversion of a sister into a wife--might
have been found in the previous conversational conversion of a mother
into a sister; for hereby he had habituated his voice and manner to a
certain fictitiousness in one of the closest domestic relations of life;
and since man's moral texture is very porous, and things assumed upon
the surface, at last strike in--hence, this outward habituation to the
above-named fictitiousness had insensibly disposed his mind to it as it
were; but only innocently and pleasantly as yet. If, by any possibility,
this general conceit be so, then to Pierre the times of sportfulness
were as pregnant with the hours of earnestness; and in sport he learnt
the terms of woe.
II.
If next to that resolve concerning his lasting fraternal succor to
Isabel, there was at this present time any determination in Pierre
absolutely inflexible, and partaking at once of the sacredness and the
indissolubleness of the most solemn oath, it was the enthusiastic, and
apparently wholly supererogatory resolution to hold his father's memory
untouched; nor to one single being in the world reveal the paternity of
Isabel. Unrecallably dead and gone from out the living world, again
returned to utter helplessness, so far as this world went; his perished
father seemed to appeal to the dutifulness and mercifulness of Pierre,
in terms far more moving than though the accents proceeded from his
mortal mouth. And what though not through the sin of Pierre, but through
his father's sin, that father's fair fame now lay at the mercy of the
son, and could only be kept inviolate by the son's free sacrifice of all
earthly felicity;--what if this were so? It but struck a still loftier
chord in the bosom of the son, and filled him with infinite
magnanimities. Never had the generous Pierre cherished the heathenish
conceit, that even in the general world, Sin is a fair object to be
stretched on the cruelest racks by self-complacent Virtue, that
self-complacent Virtue may feed her lily-liveredness on the pallor of
Sin's anguish. For perfect Virtue does not more loudly claim our
approbation, than repented Sin in its concludedness does demand our
utmost tenderness and concern. And as the more immense the Virtue, so
should be the more immense our approbation; likewise the more immense
the Sin, the more infinite our pity. In some sort, Sin hath its
sacredness, not less than holiness. And great Sin calls forth more
magnanimity than small Virtue. What man, who is a man, does not feel
livelier and more generous emotions toward the great god of
Sin--Satan,--than toward yonder haberdasher, who only is a sinner in
the small and entirely honorable way of trade?
Though Pierre profoundly shuddered at that impenetrable yet blackly
significant nebulousness, which the wild story of Isabel threw around
the early life of his father; yet as he recalled the dumb anguish of the
invocation of the empty and the ashy hand uplifted from his father's
death-bed, he most keenly felt that of whatsoever unknown shade his
father's guilt might be, yet in the final hour of death it had been most
dismally repented of; by a repentance only the more full of utter
wretchedness, that it was a consuming secret in him. Mince the matter
how his family would, had not his father died a raver? Whence that
raving, following so prosperous a life? Whence, but from the cruelest
compunctions?
Touched thus, and strung in all his sinews and his nerves to the holding
of his father's memory intact,--Pierre turned his confronting and
unfrightened face toward Lucy Tartan, and stilly vowed that not even she
should know the whole; no, not know the least.
There is an inevitable keen cruelty in the loftier heroism. It is not
heroism only to stand unflinched ourselves in the hour of suffering; but
it is heroism to stand unflinched both at our own and at some loved
one's united suffering; a united suffering, which we could put an
instant period to, if we would but renounce the glorious cause for which
ourselves do bleed, and see our most loved one bleed. If he would not
reveal his father's shame to the common world, whose favorable opinion
for himself, Pierre now despised; how then reveal it to the woman he
adored? To her, above all others, would he now uncover his father's
tomb, and bid her behold from what vile attaintings he himself had
sprung? So Pierre turned round and tied Lucy to the same stake which
must hold himself, for he too plainly saw, that it could not be, but
that both their hearts must burn.
Yes, his resolve concerning his father's memory involved the necessity
of assuming even to Lucy his marriage with Isabel. Here he could not
explain himself, even to her. This would aggravate the sharp pang of
parting, by self-suggested, though wholly groundless surmising in Lucy's
mind, in the most miserable degree contaminating to her idea of him. But
on this point, he still fondly trusted that without at all marring his
filial bond, he would be enabled by some significant intimations to
arrest in Lucy's mind those darker imaginings which might find entrance
there; and if he could not set her wholly right, yet prevent her from
going wildly wrong.
For his mother Pierre was more prepared. He considered that by an
inscrutable decree, which it was but foolishness to try to evade, or
shun, or deny existence to, since he felt it so profoundly pressing on
his inmost soul; the family of the Glendinnings was imperiously called
upon to offer up a victim to the gods of woe; one grand victim at the
least; and that grand victim must be his mother, or himself. If he
disclosed his secret to the world, then his mother was made the victim;
if at all hazards he kept it to himself, then himself would be the
victim. A victim as respecting his mother, because under the peculiar
circumstances of the case, the non-disclosure of the secret involved her
entire and infamy-engendering misconception of himself. But to this he
bowed submissive.
One other thing--and the last to be here named, because the very least
in the conscious thoughts of Pierre; one other thing remained to menace
him with assured disastrousness. This thing it was, which though but
dimly hinted of as yet, still in the apprehension must have exerted a
powerful influence upon Pierre, in preparing him for the worst.
His father's last and fatal sickness had seized him suddenly. Both the
probable concealed distraction of his mind with reference to his early
life as recalled to him in an evil hour, and his consequent mental
wanderings; these, with other reasons, had prevented him from framing a
new will to supersede one made shortly after his marriage, and ere
Pierre was born. By that will which as yet had never been dragged into
the courts of law; and which, in the fancied security of her own and her
son's congenial and loving future, Mrs. Glendinning had never but once,
and then inconclusively, offered to discuss, with a view to a better and
more appropriate ordering of things to meet circumstances non-existent
at the period the testament was framed; by that will, all the
Glendinning property was declared his mother's.
Acutely sensible to those prophetic intimations in him, which painted in
advance the haughty temper of his offended mother, as all bitterness and
scorn toward a son, once the object of her proudest joy, but now become
a deep reproach, as not only rebellious to her, but glaringly
dishonorable before the world; Pierre distinctly foresaw, that as she
never would have permitted Isabel Banford in her true character to cross
her threshold; neither would she now permit Isabel Banford to cross her
threshold in any other, and disguised character; least of all, as that
unknown and insidious girl, who by some pernicious arts had lured her
only son from honor into infamy. But not to admit Isabel, was now to
exclude Pierre, if indeed on independent grounds of exasperation against
himself, his mother would not cast him out.
Nor did the same interior intimations in him which fore-painted the
above bearing of his mother, abstain to trace her whole haughty heart as
so unrelentingly set against him, that while she would close her doors
against both him and his fictitious wife, so also she would not
willingly contribute one copper to support them in a supposed union so
entirely abhorrent to her. And though Pierre was not so familiar with
the science of the law, as to be quite certain what the law, if appealed
to concerning the provisions of his father's will, would decree
concerning any possible claims of the son to share with the mother in
the property of the sire; yet he prospectively felt an invincible
repugnance to dragging his dead father's hand and seal into open Court,
and fighting over them with a base mercenary motive, and with his own
mother for the antagonist. For so thoroughly did his infallible
presentiments paint his mother's character to him, as operated upon and
disclosed in all those fiercer traits,--hitherto held in abeyance by the
mere chance and felicity of circumstances,--that he felt assured that
her exasperation against him would even meet the test of a public legal
contention concerning the Glendinning property. For indeed there was a
reserved strength and masculineness in the character of his mother, from
which on all these points Pierre had every thing to dread. Besides, will
the matter how he would, Pierre for nearly two whole years to come,
would still remain a minor, an infant in the eye of the law, incapable
of personally asserting any legal claim; and though he might sue by his
next friend, yet who would be his voluntary next friend, when the
execution of his great resolve would, for him, depopulate all the world
of friends?
Now to all these things, and many more, seemed the soul of this
infatuated young enthusiast braced.
III.
There is a dark, mad mystery in some human hearts, which, sometimes,
during the tyranny of a usurper mood, leads them to be all eagerness to
cast off the most intense beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment
of whatever transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically
suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential good;
lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale; endearments
we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the palpitating forms
of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless and the unbodied air.
We think we are not human; we become as immortal bachelors and gods; but
again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone we descend to earth; glad
to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these god-like heads within the
bosoms made of too-seducing clay.
Weary with the invariable earth, the restless sailor breaks from every
enfolding arm, and puts to sea in height of tempest that blows off
shore. But in long night-watches at the antipodes, how heavily that
ocean gloom lies in vast bales upon the deck; thinking that that very
moment in his deserted hamlet-home the household sun is high, and many a
sun-eyed maiden meridian as the sun. He curses Fate; himself he curses;
his senseless madness, which is himself. For whoso once has known this
sweet knowledge, and then fled it; in absence, to him the avenging dream
will come.
Pierre was now this vulnerable god; this self-upbraiding sailor; this
dreamer of the avenging dream. Though in some things he had unjuggled
himself, and forced himself to eye the prospect as it was; yet, so far
as Lucy was concerned, he was at bottom still a juggler. True, in his
extraordinary scheme, Lucy was so intimately interwoven, that it seemed
impossible for him at all to cast his future without some way having
that heart's love in view. But ignorant of its quantity as yet, or
fearful of ascertaining it; like an algebraist, for the real Lucy he, in
his scheming thoughts, had substituted but a sign--some empty _x_--and
in the ultimate solution of the problem, that empty _x_ still figured;
not the real Lucy.
But now, when risen from the abasement of his chamber-floor, and risen
from the still profounder prostration of his soul, Pierre had thought
that all the horizon of his dark fate was commanded by him; all his
resolutions clearly defined, and immovably decreed; now finally, to top
all, there suddenly slid into his inmost heart the living and breathing
form of Lucy. His lungs collapsed; his eyeballs glared; for the sweet
imagined form, so long buried alive in him, seemed now as gliding on
him from the grave; and her light hair swept far adown her shroud.
Then, for the time, all minor things were whelmed in him; his mother,
Isabel, the whole wide world; and one only thing remained to him;--this
all-including query--Lucy or God?
But here we draw a vail. Some nameless struggles of the soul can not be
painted, and some woes will not be told. Let the ambiguous procession of
events reveal their own ambiguousness.