PIERRE IMMATURELY ATTEMPTS A MATURE WORK. TIDINGS FROM THE MEADOWS.
PLINLIMMON.
I.
We are now to behold Pierre permanently lodged in three lofty adjoining
chambers of the Apostles. And passing on a little further in time, and
overlooking the hundred and one domestic details, of how their internal
arrangements were finally put into steady working order; how poor Delly,
now giving over the sharper pangs of her grief, found in the lighter
occupations of a handmaid and familiar companion to Isabel, the only
practical relief from the memories of her miserable past; how Isabel
herself in the otherwise occupied hours of Pierre, passed some of her
time in mastering the chirographical incoherencies of his manuscripts,
with a view to eventually copying them out in a legible hand for the
printer; or went below stairs to the rooms of the Millthorpes, and in
the modest and amiable society of the three young ladies and their
excellent mother, found some little solace for the absence of Pierre;
or, when his day's work was done, sat by him in the twilight, and played
her mystic guitar till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its
wondrous suggestiveness; but alas! eternally incapable of being
translated into words; for where the deepest words end, there music
begins with its supersensuous and all-confounding intimations.
Disowning now all previous exertions of his mind, and burning in scorn
even those fine fruits of a care-free fancy, which, written at Saddle
Meadows in the sweet legendary time of Lucy and her love, he had
jealously kept from the publishers, as too true and good to be
published; renouncing all his foregone self, Pierre was now engaged in a
comprehensive compacted work, to whose speedy completion two tremendous
motives unitedly impelled;--the burning desire to deliver what he
thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world;
and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless, unless by the
sale of his book, he could realize money. Swayed to universality of
thought by the widely-explosive mental tendencies of the profound events
which had lately befallen him, and the unprecedented situation in which
he now found himself; and perceiving, by presentiment, that most grand
productions of the best human intellects ever are built round a circle,
as atolls (_i. e._ the primitive coral islets which, raising themselves
in the depths of profoundest seas, rise funnel-like to the surface, and
present there a hoop of white rock, which though on the outside
everywhere lashed by the ocean, yet excludes all tempests from the quiet
lagoon within), digestively including the whole range of all that can be
known or dreamed; Pierre was resolved to give the world a book, which
the world should hail with surprise and delight. A varied scope of
reading, little suspected by his friends, and randomly acquired by a
random but lynx-eyed mind, in the course of the multifarious,
incidental, bibliographic encounterings of almost any civilized young
inquirer after Truth; this poured one considerable contributary stream
into that bottomless spring of original thought which the occasion and
time had caused to burst out in himself. Now he congratulated himself
upon all his cursory acquisitions of this sort; ignorant that in reality
to a mind bent on producing some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth, all
mere reading is apt to prove but an obstacle hard to overcome; and not
an accelerator helpingly pushing him along.
While Pierre was thinking that he was entirely transplanted into a new
and wonderful element of Beauty and Power, he was, in fact, but in one
of the stages of the transition. That ultimate element once fairly
gained, then books no more are needed for buoys to our souls; our own
strong limbs support us, and we float over all bottomlessnesses with a
jeering impunity. He did not see,--or if he did, he could not yet name
the true cause for it,--that already, in the incipiency of his work, the
heavy unmalleable element of mere book-knowledge would not congenially
weld with the wide fluidness and ethereal airiness of spontaneous
creative thought. He would climb Parnassus with a pile of folios on his
back. He did not see, that it was nothing at all to him, what other men
had written; that though Plato was indeed a transcendently great man in
himself, yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him (Pierre), so
long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently
great. He did not see that there is no such thing as a standard for the
creative spirit; that no one great book must ever be separately
regarded, and permitted to domineer with its own uniqueness upon the
creative mind; but that all existing great works must be federated in
the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole; and
then,--without at all dictating to his own mind, or unduly biasing it
any way,--thus combined, they would prove simply an exhilarative and
provocative to him. He did not see, that even when thus combined, all
was but one small mite, compared to the latent infiniteness and
inexhaustibility in himself; that all the great books in the world are
but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied
images in the soul; so that they are but the mirrors, distortedly
reflecting to us our own things; and never mind what the mirror may be,
if we would see the object, we must look at the object itself, and not
at its reflection.
But, as to the resolute traveler in Switzerland, the Alps do never in
one wide and comprehensive sweep, instantaneously reveal their full
awfulness of amplitude--their overawing extent of peak crowded on peak,
and spur sloping on spur, and chain jammed behind chain, and all their
wonderful battalionings of might; so hath heaven wisely ordained, that
on first entering into the Switzerland of his soul, man shall not at
once perceive its tremendous immensity; lest illy prepared for such an
encounter, his spirit should sink and perish in the lowermost snows.
Only by judicious degrees, appointed of God, does man come at last to
gain his Mont Blanc and take an overtopping view of these Alps; and even
then, the tithe is not shown; and far over the invisible Atlantic, the
Rocky Mountains and the Andes are yet unbeheld. Appalling is the soul of
a man! Better might one be pushed off into the material spaces beyond
the uttermost orbit of our sun, than once feel himself fairly afloat in
himself!
But not now to consider these ulterior things, Pierre, though strangely
and very newly alive to many before unregarded wonders in the general
world; still, had he not as yet procured for himself that enchanter's
wand of the soul, which but touching the humblest experiences in one's
life, straightway it starts up all eyes, in every one of which are
endless significancies. Not yet had he dropped his angle into the well
of his childhood, to find what fish might be there; for who dreams to
find fish in a well? the running stream of the outer world, there
doubtless swim the golden perch and the pickerel! Ten million things
were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy lies buried in cloth on
cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth,
because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the
world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far
as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to
consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the
world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine
into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with
joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid--and no body is
there!--appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man!
II.
He had been engaged some weeks upon his book--in pursuance of his
settled plan avoiding all contact with any of his city-connections or
friends, even as in his social downfall they sedulously avoided seeking
him out--nor ever once going or sending to the post-office, though it
was but a little round the corner from where he was, since having
dispatched no letters himself, he expected none; thus isolated from the
world, and intent upon his literary enterprise, Pierre had passed some
weeks, when verbal tidings came to him, of three most momentous events.
First: his mother was dead.
Second: all Saddle Meadows was become Glen Stanly's.
Third: Glen Stanly was believed to be the suitor of Lucy; who,
convalescent from an almost mortal illness, was now dwelling at her
mother's house in town.
It was chiefly the first-mentioned of these events which darted a sharp
natural anguish into Pierre. No letter had come to him; no smallest ring
or memorial been sent him; no slightest mention made of him in the will;
and yet it was reported that an inconsolable grief had induced his
mother's mortal malady, and driven her at length into insanity, which
suddenly terminated in death; and when he first heard of that event,
she had been cold in the ground for twenty-five days.
How plainly did all this speak of the equally immense pride and grief of
his once magnificent mother; and how agonizedly now did it hint of her
mortally-wounded love for her only and best-beloved Pierre! In vain he
reasoned with himself; in vain remonstrated with himself; in vain sought
to parade all his stoic arguments to drive off the onslaught of natural
passion. Nature prevailed; and with tears that like acid burned and
scorched as they flowed, he wept, he raved, at the bitter loss of his
parent; whose eyes had been closed by unrelated hands that were hired;
but whose heart had been broken, and whose very reason been ruined, by
the related hands of her son.
For some interval it almost seemed as if his own heart would snap; his
own reason go down. Unendurable grief of a man, when Death itself gives
the stab, and then snatches all availments to solacement away. For in
the grave is no help, no prayer thither may go, no forgiveness thence
come; so that the penitent whose sad victim lies in the ground, for that
useless penitent his doom is eternal, and though it be Christmas-day
with all Christendom, with him it is Hell-day and an eaten liver
forever.
With what marvelous precision and exactitude he now went over in his
mind all the minutest details of his old joyous life with his mother at
Saddle Meadows. He began with his own toilet in the morning; then his
mild stroll into the fields; then his cheerful return to call his mother
in her chamber; then the gay breakfast--and so on, and on, all through
the sweet day, till mother and son kissed, and with light, loving hearts
separated to their beds, to prepare themselves for still another day of
affectionate delight. This recalling of innocence and joy in the hour of
remorsefulness and woe; this is as heating red-hot the pincers that tear
us. But in this delirium of his soul, Pierre could not define where
that line was, which separated the natural grief for the loss of a
parent from that other one which was born of compunction. He strove hard
to define it, but could not. He tried to cozen himself into believing
that all his grief was but natural, or if there existed any other, that
must spring--not from the consciousness of having done any possible
wrong--but from the pang at what terrible cost the more exalted virtues
are gained. Nor did he wholly fail in this endeavor. At last he
dismissed his mother's memory into that same profound vault where
hitherto had reposed the swooned form of his Lucy. But, as sometimes men
are coffined in a trance, being thereby mistaken for dead; so it is
possible to bury a tranced grief in the soul, erroneously supposing that
it hath no more vitality of suffering. Now, immortal things only can
beget immortality. It would almost seem one presumptive argument for the
endless duration of the human soul, that it is impossible in time and
space to kill any compunction arising from having cruelly injured a
departed fellow-being.
Ere he finally committed his mother to the profoundest vault of his
soul, fain would he have drawn one poor alleviation from a circumstance,
which nevertheless, impartially viewed, seemed equally capable either of
soothing or intensifying his grief. His mother's will, which without the
least mention of his own name, bequeathed several legacies to her
friends, and concluded by leaving all Saddle Meadows and its rent-rolls
to Glendinning Stanly; this will bore the date of the day immediately
succeeding his fatal announcement on the landing of the stairs, of his
assumed nuptials with Isabel. It plausibly pressed upon him, that as all
the evidences of his mother's dying unrelentingness toward him were
negative; and the only positive evidence--so to speak--of even that
negativeness, was the will which omitted all mention of Pierre;
therefore, as that will bore so significant a date, it must needs be
most reasonable to conclude, that it was dictated in the not yet
subsided transports of his mother's first indignation. But small
consolation was this, when he considered the final insanity of his
mother; for whence that insanity but from a hate-grief unrelenting, even
as his father must have become insane from a sin-grief irreparable? Nor
did this remarkable double-doom of his parents wholly fail to impress
his mind with presentiments concerning his own fate--his own hereditary
liability to madness. Presentiment, I say; but what is a presentiment?
how shall you coherently define a presentiment, or how make any thing
out of it which is at all lucid, unless you say that a presentiment is
but a judgment in disguise? And if a judgment in disguise, and yet
possessing this preternaturalness of prophecy, how then shall you escape
the fateful conclusion, that you are helplessly held in the six hands of
the Sisters? For while still dreading your doom, you foreknow it. Yet
how foreknow and dread in one breath, unless with this divine seeming
power of prescience, you blend the actual slimy powerlessness of
defense?
That his cousin, Glen Stanly, had been chosen by his mother to inherit
the domain of the Meadows, was not entirely surprising to Pierre. Not
only had Glen always been a favorite with his mother by reason of his
superb person and his congeniality of worldly views with herself, but
excepting only Pierre, he was her nearest surviving blood relation; and
moreover, in his christian name, bore the hereditary syllables,
Glendinning. So that if to any one but Pierre the Meadows must descend,
Glen, on these general grounds, seemed the appropriate heir.
But it is not natural for a man, never mind who he may be, to see a
noble patrimony, rightfully his, go over to a soul-alien, and that alien
once his rival in love, and now his heartless, sneering foe; for so
Pierre could not but now argue of Glen; it is not natural for a man to
see this without singular emotions of discomfort and hate. Nor in Pierre
were these feelings at all soothed by the report of Glen's renewed
attentions to Lucy. For there is something in the breast of almost
every man, which at bottom takes offense at the attentions of any other
man offered to a woman, the hope of whose nuptial love he himself may
have discarded. Fain would a man selfishly appropriate all the hearts
which have ever in any way confessed themselves his. Besides, in
Pierre's case, this resentment was heightened by Glen's previous
hypocritical demeanor. For now all his suspicions seemed abundantly
verified; and comparing all dates, he inferred that Glen's visit to
Europe had only been undertaken to wear off the pang of his rejection by
Lucy, a rejection tacitly consequent upon her not denying her affianced
relation to Pierre.
But now, under the mask of profound sympathy--in time, ripening into
love--for a most beautiful girl, ruffianly deserted by her betrothed,
Glen could afford to be entirely open in his new suit, without at all
exposing his old scar to the world. So at least it now seemed to Pierre.
Moreover, Glen could now approach Lucy under the most favorable possible
auspices. He could approach her as a deeply sympathizing friend, all
wishful to assuage her sorrow, but hinting nothing, at present, of any
selfish matrimonial intent; by enacting this prudent and unclamorous
part, the mere sight of such tranquil, disinterested, but indestructible
devotedness, could not but suggest in Lucy's mind, very natural
comparisons between Glen and Pierre, most deplorably abasing to the
latter. Then, no woman--as it would sometimes seem--no woman is utterly
free from the influence of a princely social position in her suitor,
especially if he be handsome and young. And Glen would come to her now
the master of two immense fortunes, and the heir, by voluntary election,
no less than by blood propinquity, to the ancestral bannered hall, and
the broad manorial meadows of the Glendinnings. And thus, too, the
spirit of Pierre's own mother would seem to press Glen's suit. Indeed,
situated now as he was Glen would seem all the finest part of Pierre,
without any of Pierre's shame; would almost seem Pierre himself--what
Pierre had once been to Lucy. And as in the case of a man who has lost a
sweet wife, and who long refuses the least consolation; as this man at
last finds a singular solace in the companionship of his wife's sister,
who happens to bear a peculiar family resemblance to the dead; and as
he, in the end, proposes marriage to this sister, merely from the force
of such magical associative influences; so it did not seem wholly out of
reason to suppose, that the great manly beauty of Glen, possessing a
strong related similitude to Pierre's, might raise in Lucy's heart
associations, which would lead her at least to seek--if she could not
find--solace for one now regarded as dead and gone to her forever, in
the devotedness of another, who would notwithstanding almost seem as
that dead one brought back to life.
Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out
the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral
stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only
concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the
shaft.
As Pierre conjured up this phantom of Glen transformed into the seeming
semblance of himself; as he figured it advancing toward Lucy and raising
her hand in devotion; an infinite quenchless rage and malice possessed
him. Many commingled emotions combined to provoke this storm. But chief
of all was something strangely akin to that indefinable detestation
which one feels for any impostor who has dared to assume one's own name
and aspect in any equivocal or dishonorable affair; an emotion greatly
intensified if this impostor be known for a mean villain at bottom, and
also, by the freak of nature to be almost the personal duplicate of the
man whose identity he assumes. All these and a host of other distressful
and resentful fancies now ran through the breast of Pierre. All his
Faith-born, enthusiastic, high-wrought, stoic, and philosophic defenses,
were now beaten down by this sudden storm of nature in his soul. For
there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man
can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real
impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him. Then all the fair
philosophic or Faith-phantoms that he raised from the mist, slide away
and disappear as ghosts at cock-crow. For Faith and philosophy are air,
but events are brass. Amidst his gray philosophizings, Life breaks upon
a man like a morning.
While this mood was on him, Pierre cursed himself for a heartless
villain and an idiot fool;--heartless villain, as the murderer of his
mother--idiot fool, because he had thrown away all his felicity; because
he had himself, as it were, resigned his noble birthright to a cunning
kinsman for a mess of pottage, which now proved all but ashes in his
mouth.
Resolved to hide these new, and--as it latently seemed to him--unworthy
pangs, from Isabel, as also their cause, he quitted his chamber,
intending a long vagabond stroll in the suburbs of the town, to wear off
his sharper grief, ere he should again return into her sight.
III.
As Pierre, now hurrying from his chamber, was rapidly passing through
one of the higher brick colonnades connecting the ancient building with
the modern, there advanced toward him from the direction of the latter,
a very plain, composed, manly figure, with a countenance rather pale if
any thing, but quite clear and without wrinkle. Though the brow and the
beard, and the steadiness of the head and settledness of the step
indicated mature age, yet the blue, bright, but still quiescent eye
offered a very striking contrast. In that eye, the gay immortal youth
Apollo, seemed enshrined; while on that ivory-throned brow, old Saturn
cross-legged sat. The whole countenance of this man, the whole air and
look of this man, expressed a cheerful content. Cheerful is the
adjective, for it was the contrary of gloom; content--perhaps
acquiescence--is the substantive, for it was not Happiness or Delight.
But while the personal look and air of this man were thus winning, there
was still something latently visible in him which repelled. That
something may best be characterized as non-Benevolence. Non-Benevolence
seems the best word, for it was neither Malice nor Ill-will; but
something passive. To crown all, a certain floating atmosphere seemed to
invest and go along with this man. That atmosphere seems only renderable
in words by the term Inscrutableness. Though the clothes worn by this
man were strictly in accordance with the general style of any
unobtrusive gentleman's dress, yet his clothes seemed to disguise this
man. One would almost have said, his very face, the apparently natural
glance of his very eye disguised this man.
Now, as this person deliberately passed by Pierre, he lifted his hat,
gracefully bowed, smiled gently, and passed on. But Pierre was all
confusion; he flushed, looked askance, stammered with his hand at his
hat to return the courtesy of the other; he seemed thoroughly upset by
the mere sight of this hat-lifting, gracefully bowing, gently-smiling,
and most miraculously self-possessed, non-benevolent man.
Now who was this man? This man was Plotinus Plinlimmon. Pierre had read
a treatise of his in a stage-coach coming to the city, and had heard him
often spoken of by Millthorpe and others as the Grand Master of a
certain mystic Society among the Apostles. Whence he came, no one could
tell. His surname was Welsh, but he was a Tennesseean by birth. He
seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort. He never was known
to work with his hands; never to write with his hands (he would not even
write a letter); he never was known to open a book. There were no books
in his chamber. Nevertheless, some day or other he must have read books,
but that time seemed gone now; as for the sleazy works that went under
his name, they were nothing more than his verbal things, taken down at
random, and bunglingly methodized by his young disciples.
Finding Plinlimmon thus unfurnished either with books or pen and paper,
and imputing it to something like indigence, a foreign scholar, a rich
nobleman, who chanced to meet him once, sent him a fine supply of
stationery, with a very fine set of volumes,--Cardan, Epictetus, the
Book of Mormon, Abraham Tucker, Condorcet and the Zenda-Vesta. But this
noble foreign scholar calling next day--perhaps in expectation of some
compliment for his great kindness--started aghast at his own package
deposited just without the door of Plinlimmon, and with all fastenings
untouched.
"Missent," said Plotinus Plinlimmon placidly: "if any thing, I looked
for some choice Curaçoa from a nobleman like you. I should be very
happy, my dear Count, to accept a few jugs of choice Curaçoa."
"I thought that the society of which you are the head, excluded all
things of that sort"--replied the Count.
"Dear Count, so they do; but Mohammed hath his own dispensation."
"Ah! I see," said the noble scholar archly.
"I am afraid you do not see, dear Count"--said Plinlimmon; and instantly
before the eyes of the Count, the inscrutable atmosphere eddied and
eddied roundabout this Plotinus Plinlimmon.
His chance brushing encounter in the corridor was the first time that
ever Pierre had without medium beheld the form or the face of
Plinlimmon. Very early after taking chambers at the Apostles', he had
been struck by a steady observant blue-eyed countenance at one of the
loftiest windows of the old gray tower, which on the opposite side of
the quadrangular space, rose prominently before his own chamber. Only
through two panes of glass--his own and the stranger's--had Pierre
hitherto beheld that remarkable face of repose,--repose neither divine
nor human, nor any thing made up of either or both--but a repose
separate and apart--a repose of a face by itself. One adequate look at
that face conveyed to most philosophical observers a notion of something
not before included in their scheme of the Universe.
Now as to the mild sun, glass is no hindrance at all, but he transmits
his light and life through the glass; even so through Pierre's panes did
the tower face transmit its strange mystery.
Becoming more and more interested in this face, he had questioned
Millthorpe concerning it "Bless your soul"--replied Millthorpe--"that is
Plotinus Plinlimmon! our Grand Master, Plotinus Plinlimmon! By gad, you
must know Plotinus thoroughly, as I have long done. Come away with me,
now, and let me introduce you instanter to Plotinus Plinlimmon."
But Pierre declined; and could not help thinking, that though in all
human probability Plotinus well understood Millthorpe, yet Millthorpe
could hardly yet have wound himself into Plotinus;--though indeed
Plotinus--who at times was capable of assuming a very off-hand,
confidential, and simple, sophomorean air--might, for reasons best known
to himself, have tacitly pretended to Millthorpe, that he (Millthorpe)
had thoroughly wriggled himself into his (Plotinus') innermost soul.
A man will be given a book, and when the donor's back is turned, will
carelessly drop it in the first corner; he is not over-anxious to be
bothered with the book. But now personally point out to him the author,
and ten to one he goes back to the corner, picks up the book, dusts the
cover, and very carefully reads that invaluable work. One does not
vitally believe in a man till one's own two eyes have beheld him. If
then, by the force of peculiar circumstances, Pierre while in the
stage, had formerly been drawn into an attentive perusal of the work on
"Chronometricals and Horologicals;" how then was his original interest
heightened by catching a subsequent glimpse of the author. But at the
first reading, not being able--as he thought--to master the pivot-idea
of the pamphlet; and as every incomprehended idea is not only a
perplexity but a taunting reproach to one's mind, Pierre had at last
ceased studying it altogether; nor consciously troubled himself further
about it during the remainder of the journey. But still thinking now it
might possibly have been mechanically retained by him, he searched all
the pockets of his clothes, but without success. He begged Millthorpe to
do his best toward procuring him another copy; but it proved impossible
to find one. Plotinus himself could not furnish it.
Among other efforts, Pierre in person had accosted a limping half-deaf
old book-stall man, not very far from the Apostles'. "Have you the
'_Chronometrics_,' my friend?" forgetting the exact title.
"Very bad, very bad!" said the old man, rubbing his back;--"has had the
_chronic-rheumatics_ ever so long; what's good for 'em?"
Perceiving his mistake, Pierre replied that he did not know what was the
infallible remedy.
"Whist! let me tell ye, then, young 'un," said the old cripple, limping
close up to him, and putting his mouth in Pierre's ear--"Never catch
'em!--now's the time, while you're young:--never catch 'em!"
By-and-by the blue-eyed, mystic-mild face in the upper window of the old
gray tower began to domineer in a very remarkable manner upon Pierre.
When in his moods of peculiar depression and despair; when dark thoughts
of his miserable condition would steal over him; and black doubts as to
the integrity of his unprecedented course in life would most
malignantly suggest themselves; when a thought of the vanity of his
deep book would glidingly intrude; if glancing at his closet-window that
mystic-mild face met Pierre's; under any of these influences the effect
was surprising, and not to be adequately detailed in any possible words.
Vain! vain! vain! said the face to him. Fool! fool! fool! said the face
to him. Quit! quit! quit! said the face to him. But when he mentally
interrogated the face as to why it thrice said Vain! Fool! Quit! to him;
here there was no response. For that face did not respond to any thing.
Did I not say before that that face was something separate, and apart; a
face by itself? Now, any thing which is thus a thing by itself never
responds to any other thing. If to affirm, be to expand one's isolated
self; and if to deny, be to contract one's isolated self; then to
respond is a suspension of all isolation. Though this face in the tower
was so clear and so mild; though the gay youth Apollo was enshrined in
that eye, and paternal old Saturn sat cross-legged on that ivory brow;
yet somehow to Pierre the face at last wore a sort of malicious leer to
him. But the Kantists might say, that this was a _subjective_ sort of
leer in Pierre. Any way, the face seemed to leer upon Pierre. And now it
said to him--_Ass! ass! ass!_ This expression was insufferable. He
procured some muslin for his closet-window; and the face became
curtained like any portrait. But this did not mend the leer. Pierre knew
that still the face leered behind the muslin. What was most terrible was
the idea that by some magical means or other the face had got hold of
his secret. "Ay," shuddered Pierre, "the face knows that Isabel is not
my wife! And that seems the reason it leers."
Then would all manner of wild fancyings float through his soul, and
detached sentences of the "Chronometrics" would vividly recur to
him--sentences before but imperfectly comprehended, but now shedding a
strange, baleful light upon his peculiar condition, and emphatically
denouncing it. Again he tried his best to procure the pamphlet, to read
it now by the commentary of the mystic-mild face; again he searched
through the pockets of his clothes for the stage-coach copy, but in
vain.
And when--at the critical moment of quitting his chambers that morning
of the receipt of the fatal tidings--the face itself--the man
himself--this inscrutable Plotinus Plinlimmon himself--did visibly brush
by him in the brick corridor, and all the trepidation he had ever before
felt at the mild-mystic aspect in the tower window, now redoubled upon
him, so that, as before said, he flushed, looked askance, and stammered
with his saluting hand to his hat;--then anew did there burn in him the
desire of procuring the pamphlet. "Cursed fate that I should have lost
it"--he cried;--"more cursed, that when I did have it, and did read it,
I was such a ninny as not to comprehend; and now it is all too late!"
Yet--to anticipate here--when years after, an old Jew Clothesman
rummaged over a surtout of Pierre's--which by some means had come into
his hands--his lynx-like fingers happened to feel something foreign
between the cloth and the heavy quilted bombazine lining. He ripped open
the skirt, and found several old pamphlet pages, soft and worn almost to
tissue, but still legible enough to reveal the title--"Chronometricals
and Horologicals." Pierre must have ignorantly thrust it into his
pocket, in the stage, and it had worked through a rent there, and worked
its way clean down into the skirt, and there helped pad the padding. So
that all the time he was hunting for this pamphlet, he himself was
wearing the pamphlet. When he brushed past Plinlimmon in the brick
corridor, and felt that renewed intense longing for the pamphlet, then
his right hand was not two inches from the pamphlet.
Possibly this curious circumstance may in some sort illustrate his
self-supposed non-understanding of the pamphlet, as first read by him
in the stage. Could he likewise have carried about with him in his mind
the thorough understanding of the book, and yet not be aware that he so
understood it? I think that--regarded in one light--the final career of
Pierre will seem to show, that he _did_ understand it. And here it may
be randomly suggested, by way of bagatelle, whether some things that men
think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by
them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a
secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.