A WALK: A FOREIGN PORTRAIT: A SAIL: AND THE END.
I.
"Come, Isabel, come, Lucy; we have not had a single walk together yet.
It is cold, but clear; and once out of the city, we shall find it sunny.
Come: get ready now, and away for a stroll down to the wharf, and then
for some of the steamers on the bay. No doubt, Lucy, you will find in
the bay scenery some hints for that secret sketch you are so busily
occupied with--ere real living sitters do come--and which you so
devotedly work at, all alone and behind closed doors."
Upon this, Lucy's original look of pale-rippling pleasantness and
surprise--evoked by Pierre's unforeseen proposition to give himself some
relaxation--changed into one of infinite, mute, but unrenderable
meaning, while her swimming eyes gently, yet all-bewildered, fell to the
floor.
"It is finished, then," cried Isabel,--not unmindful of this by-scene,
and passionately stepping forward so as to intercept Pierre's momentary
rapt glance at the agitated Lucy,--"That vile book, it is
finished!--Thank Heaven!"
"Not so," said Pierre; and, displacing all disguisements, a hectic
unsummoned expression suddenly came to his face;--"but ere that vile
book be finished, I must get on some other element than earth. I have
sat on earth's saddle till I am weary; I must now vault over to the
other saddle awhile. Oh, seems to me, there should be two ceaseless
steeds for a bold man to ride,--the Land and the Sea; and like
circus-men we should never dismount, but only be steadied and rested by
leaping from one to the other, while still, side by side, they both race
round the sun. I have been on the Land steed so long, oh I am dizzy!"
"Thou wilt never listen to me, Pierre," said Lucy lowly; "there is no
need of this incessant straining. See, Isabel and I have both offered to
be thy amanuenses;--not in mere copying, but in the original writing; I
am sure that would greatly assist thee."
"Impossible! I fight a duel in which all seconds are forbid."
"Ah Pierre! Pierre!" cried Lucy, dropping the shawl in her hand, and
gazing at him with unspeakable longings of some unfathomable emotion.
Namelessly glancing at Lucy, Isabel slid near to him, seized his hand
and spoke.
"I would go blind for thee, Pierre; here, take out these eyes, and use
them for glasses." So saying, she looked with a strange momentary
haughtiness and defiance at Lucy.
A general half involuntary movement was now made, as if they were about
to depart.
"Ye are ready; go ye before"--said Lucy meekly; "I will follow."
"Nay, one on each arm"--said Pierre--"come!"
As they passed through the low arched vestibule into the street, a
cheek-burnt, gamesome sailor passing, exclaimed--"Steer small, my lad;
'tis a narrow strait thou art in!"
"What says he?"--said Lucy gently. "Yes, it is a narrow strait of a
street indeed."
But Pierre felt a sudden tremble transferred to him from Isabel, who
whispered something inarticulate in his ear.
Gaining one of the thoroughfares, they drew near to a conspicuous
placard over a door, announcing that above stairs was a gallery of
paintings, recently imported from Europe, and now on free exhibition
preparatory to their sale by auction. Though this encounter had been
entirely unforeseen by Pierre, yet yielding to the sudden impulse, he at
once proposed their visiting the pictures. The girls assented, and they
ascended the stairs.
In the anteroom, a catalogue was put into his hand. He paused to give
one hurried, comprehensive glance at it. Among long columns of such
names as Rubens, Raphael, Angelo, Domenichino, Da Vinci, all shamelessly
prefaced with the words "undoubted," or "testified," Pierre met the
following brief line:--"_No. 99. A stranger's head, by an unknown
hand._"
It seemed plain that the whole must be a collection of those wretched
imported daubs, which with the incredible effrontery peculiar to some of
the foreign picture-dealers in America, were christened by the loftiest
names known to Art. But as the most mutilated torsoes of the perfections
of antiquity are not unworthy the student's attention, neither are the
most bungling modern incompletenesses: for both are torsoes; one of
perished perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet
unfulfilled perfections in the future. Still, as Pierre walked along by
the thickly hung walls, and seemed to detect the infatuated vanity which
must have prompted many of these utterly unknown artists in the
attempted execution by feeble hand of vigorous themes; he could not
repress the most melancholy foreboding concerning himself. All the walls
of the world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope of
pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled. The smaller and
humbler pictures, representing little familiar things, were by far the
best executed; but these, though touching him not unpleasingly, in one
restricted sense, awoke no dormant majesties in his soul, and therefore,
upon the whole, were contemptibly inadequate and unsatisfactory.
At last Pierre and Isabel came to that painting of which Pierre was
capriciously in search--No. 99.
"My God! see! see!" cried Isabel, under strong excitement, "only my
mirror has ever shown me that look before! See! see!"
By some mere hocus-pocus of chance, or subtly designing knavery, a real
Italian gem of art had found its way into this most hybrid collection of
impostures.
No one who has passed through the great galleries of Europe,
unbewildered by their wonderful multitudinousness of surpassing
excellence--a redundancy which neutralizes all discrimination or
individualizing capacity in most ordinary minds--no calm, penetrative
person can have victoriously run that painted gauntlet of the gods,
without certain very special emotions, called forth by some one or more
individual paintings, to which, however, both the catalogues and the
criticisms of the greatest connoisseurs deny any all-transcending merit,
at all answering to the effect thus casually produced. There is no time
now to show fully how this is; suffice it, that in such instances, it is
not the abstract excellence always, but often the accidental
congeniality, which occasions this wonderful emotion. Still, the
individual himself is apt to impute it to a different cause; hence, the
headlong enthusiastic admiration of some one or two men for things not
at all praised by--or at most, which are indifferent to--the rest of the
world;--a matter so often considered inexplicable.
But in this Stranger's Head by the Unknown Hand, the abstract general
excellence united with the all-surprising, accidental congeniality in
producing an accumulated impression of power upon both Pierre and
Isabel. Nor was the strangeness of this at all impaired by the apparent
uninterestedness of Lucy concerning that very picture. Indeed,
Lucy--who, owing to the occasional jolting of the crowd, had loosened
her arm from Pierre's, and so, gradually, had gone on along the pictured
hall in advance--Lucy had thus passed the strange painting, without the
least special pause, and had now wandered round to the precisely
opposite side of the hall; where, at this present time, she was standing
motionless before a very tolerable copy (the only other good thing in
the collection) of that sweetest, most touching, but most awful of all
feminine heads--The Cenci of Guido. The wonderfulness of which head
consists chiefly, perhaps, in a striking, suggested contrast,
half-identical with, and half-analogous to, that almost supernatural
one--sometimes visible in the maidens of tropical nations--namely, soft
and light blue eyes, with an extremely fair complexion; vailed by
funereally jetty hair. But with blue eyes and fair complexion, the
Cenci's hair is golden--physically, therefore, all is in strict, natural
keeping; which, nevertheless, still the more intensifies the suggested
fanciful anomaly of so sweetly and seraphically _blonde_ a being, being
double-hooded, as it were, by the black crape of the two most horrible
crimes (of one of which she is the object, and of the other the agent)
possible to civilized humanity--incest and parricide.
Now, this Cenci and "the Stranger" were hung at a good elevation in one
of the upper tiers; and, from the opposite walls, exactly faced each
other; so that in secret they seemed pantomimically talking over and
across the heads of the living spectators below.
With the aspect of the Cenci every one is familiar. "The Stranger" was a
dark, comely, youthful man's head, portentously looking out of a dark,
shaded ground, and ambiguously smiling. There was no discoverable
drapery; the dark head, with its crisp, curly, jetty hair, seemed just
disentangling itself from out of curtains and clouds. But to Isabel, in
the eye and on the brow, were certain shadowy traces of her own
unmistakable likeness; while to Pierre, this face was in part as the
resurrection of the one he had burnt at the Inn. Not that the separate
features were the same; but the pervading look of it, the subtler
interior keeping of the entirety, was almost identical; still, for all
this, there was an unequivocal aspect of foreignness, of Europeanism,
about both the face itself and the general painting.
"Is it? Is it? Can it be?" whispered Isabel, intensely.
Now, Isabel knew nothing of the painting which Pierre had destroyed. But
she solely referred to the living being who--under the designation of
her father--had visited her at the cheerful house to which she had been
removed during childhood from the large and unnamable one by the
pleasant woman in the coach. Without doubt--though indeed she might not
have been at all conscious of it in her own mystic mind--she must have
somehow vaguely fancied, that this being had always through life worn
the same aspect to every body else which he had to her, for so very
brief an interval of his possible existence. Solely knowing him--or
dreaming of him, it may have been--under that one aspect, she could not
conceive of him under any other. Whether or not these considerations
touching Isabel's ideas occurred to Pierre at this moment is very
improbable. At any rate, he said nothing to her, either to deceive or
undeceive, either to enlighten or obscure. For, indeed, he was too much
riveted by his own far-interior emotions to analyze now the cotemporary
ones of Isabel. So that there here came to pass a not unremarkable
thing: for though both were intensely excited by one object, yet their
two minds and memories were thereby directed to entirely different
contemplations; while still each, for the time--however
unreasonably--might have vaguely supposed the other occupied by one and
the same contemplation. Pierre was thinking of the chair-portrait:
Isabel, of the living face. Yet Isabel's fervid exclamations having
reference to the living face, were now, as it were, mechanically
responded to by Pierre, in syllables having reference to the
chair-portrait. Nevertheless, so subtile and spontaneous was it all,
that neither perhaps ever afterward discovered this contradiction; for,
events whirled them so rapidly and peremptorily after this, that they
had no time for those calm retrospective reveries indispensable perhaps
to such a discovery.
"Is it? is it? can it be?" was the intense whisper of Isabel.
"No, it can not be, it is not," replied Pierre; "one of the wonderful
coincidences, nothing more."
"Oh, by that word, Pierre, we but vainly seek to explain the
inexplicable. Tell me: it is! it must be! it is wonderful!"
"Let us begone; and let us keep eternal silence," said Pierre, quickly;
and, seeking Lucy, they abruptly left the place; as before, Pierre,
seemingly unwilling to be accosted by any one he knew, or who knew his
companions, unconsciously accelerating their steps while forced for a
space to tread the thoroughfares.
II.
As they hurried on, Pierre was silent; but wild thoughts were hurrying
and shouting in his heart. The most tremendous displacing and
revolutionizing thoughts were upheaving in him, with reference to
Isabel; nor--though at the time he was hardly conscious of such a
thing--were these thoughts wholly unwelcome to him.
How did he know that Isabel was his sister? Setting aside Aunt
Dorothea's nebulous legend, to which, in some shadowy points, here and
there Isabel's still more nebulous story seemed to fit on,--though but
uncertainly enough--and both of which thus blurredly conjoining
narrations, regarded in the unscrupulous light of real naked reason,
were any thing but legitimately conclusive; and setting aside his own
dim reminiscences of his wandering father's death-bed; (for though, in
one point of view, those reminiscences might have afforded some degree
of presumption as to his father's having been the parent of an
unacknowledged daughter, yet were they entirely inconclusive as to that
presumed daughter's identity; and the grand point now with Pierre was,
not the general question whether his father had had a daughter, but
whether, assuming that he had had, _Isabel_, rather than any other
living being, _was that daughter_;)--and setting aside all his own
manifold and inter-enfolding mystic and transcendental
persuasions,--originally born, as he now seemed to feel, purely of an
intense procreative enthusiasm:--an enthusiasm no longer so
all-potential with him as of yore; setting all these aside, and coming
to the plain, palpable facts,--how did he _know_ that Isabel was his
sister? Nothing that he saw in her face could he remember as having seen
in his father's. The chair-portrait, _that_ was the entire sum and
substance of all possible, rakable, downright presumptive evidence,
which peculiarly appealed to his own separate self. Yet here was another
portrait of a complete stranger--a European; a portrait imported from
across the seas, and to be sold at public auction, which was just as
strong an evidence as the other. Then, the original of this second
portrait was as much the father of Isabel as the original of the
chair-portrait. But perhaps there was no original at all to this second
portrait; it might have been a pure fancy piece; to which conceit,
indeed, the uncharacterizing style of the filling-up seemed to furnish
no small testimony.
With such bewildering meditations as these in him, running up like
clasping waves upon the strand of the most latent secrecies of his soul,
and with both Isabel and Lucy bodily touching his sides as he walked;
the feelings of Pierre were entirely untranslatable into any words that
can be used.
Of late to Pierre, much more vividly than ever before, the whole story
of Isabel had seemed an enigma, a mystery, an imaginative delirium;
especially since he had got so deep into the inventional mysteries of
his book. For he who is most practically and deeply conversant with
mysticisms and mysteries; he who professionally deals in mysticisms and
mysteries himself; often that man, more than any body else, is disposed
to regard such things in others as very deceptively bejuggling; and
likewise is apt to be rather materialistic in all his own merely
personal notions (as in their practical lives, with priests of
Eleusinian religions), and more than any other man, is often inclined,
at the bottom of his soul, to be uncompromisingly skeptical on all novel
visionary hypotheses of any kind. It is only the no-mystics, or the
half-mystics, who, properly speaking, are credulous. So that in Pierre,
was presented the apparent anomaly of a mind, which by becoming really
profound in itself, grew skeptical of all tendered profundities;
whereas, the contrary is generally supposed.
By some strange arts Isabel's wonderful story might have been, someway,
and for some cause, forged for her, in her childhood, and craftily
impressed upon her youthful mind; which so--like a slight mark in a
young tree--had now enlargingly grown with her growth, till it had
become this immense staring marvel. Tested by any thing real, practical,
and reasonable, what less probable, for instance, than that fancied
crossing of the sea in her childhood, when upon Pierre's subsequent
questioning of her, she did not even know that the sea was salt.
III.
In the midst of all these mental confusions they arrived at the wharf;
and selecting the most inviting of the various boats which lay about
them in three or four adjacent ferry-slips, and one which was bound for
a half-hour's sail across the wide beauty of that glorious bay; they
soon found themselves afloat and in swift gliding motion.
They stood leaning on the rail of the guard, as the sharp craft darted
out from among the lofty pine-forests of ships'-masts, and the tangled
underbrush and cane-brakes of the dwarfed sticks of sloops and scows.
Soon, the spires of stone on the land, blent with the masts of wood on
the water; the crotch of the twin-rivers pressed the great wedged city
almost out of sight. They swept by two little islets distant from the
shore; they wholly curved away from the domes of free-stone and marble,
and gained the great sublime dome of the bay's wide-open waters.
Small breeze had been felt in the pent city that day, but the fair
breeze of naked nature now blew in their faces. The waves began to
gather and roll; and just as they gained a point, where--still
beyond--between high promontories of fortresses, the wide bay visibly
sluiced into the Atlantic, Isabel convulsively grasped the arm of Pierre
and convulsively spoke.
"I feel it! I feel it! It is! It is!"
"What feelest thou?--what is it?"
"The motion! the motion!"
"Dost thou not understand, Pierre?" said Lucy, eying with concern and
wonder his pale, staring aspect--"The waves: it is the motion of the
waves that Isabel speaks of. Look, they are rolling, direct from the sea
now."
Again Pierre lapsed into a still stranger silence and revery.
It was impossible altogether to resist the force of this striking
corroboration of by far the most surprising and improbable thing in the
whole surprising and improbable story of Isabel. Well did he remember
her vague reminiscence of the teetering sea, that did not slope exactly
as the floors of the unknown, abandoned, old house among the French-like
mountains.
While plunged in these mutually neutralizing thoughts of the strange
picture and the last exclamations of Isabel, the boat arrived at its
destination--a little hamlet on the beach, not very far from the great
blue sluice-way into the ocean, which was now yet more distinctly
visible than before.
"Don't let us stop here"--cried Isabel. "Look, let us go through there!
Bell must go through there! See! see! out there upon the blue! yonder,
yonder! far away--out, out!--far, far away, and away, and away, out
there! where the two blues meet, and are nothing--Bell must go!"
"Why, Isabel," murmured Lucy, "that would be to go to far England or
France; thou wouldst find but few friends in far France, Isabel."
"Friends in far France? And what friends have I here?--Art thou my
friend? In thy secret heart dost thou wish me well? And for thee,
Pierre, what am I but a vile clog to thee; dragging thee back from all
thy felicity? Yes, I will go yonder--yonder; out there! I will, I will!
Unhand me! Let me plunge!"
For an instant, Lucy looked incoherently from one to the other. But both
she and Pierre now mechanically again seized Isabel's frantic arms, as
they were again thrown over the outer rail of the boat. They dragged her
back; they spoke to her; they soothed her; but though less vehement,
Isabel still looked deeply distrustfully at Lucy, and deeply
reproachfully at Pierre.
They did not leave the boat as intended; too glad were they all, when it
unloosed from its fastenings, and turned about upon the backward trip.
Stepping to shore, Pierre once more hurried his companions through the
unavoidable publicity of the thoroughfares; but less rapidly proceeded,
soon as they gained the more secluded streets.
IV.
Gaining the Apostles', and leaving his two companions to the privacy of
their chambers, Pierre sat silent and intent by the stove in the
dining-room for a time, and then was on the point of entering his closet
from the corridor, when Delly, suddenly following him, said to him, that
she had forgotten to mention it before, but he would find two letters in
his room, which had been separately left at the door during the absence
of the party.
He passed into the closet, and slowly shooting the bolt--which, for want
of something better, happened to be an old blunted dagger--walked, with
his cap yet unmoved, slowly up to the table, and beheld the letters.
They were lying with their sealed sides up; one in either hand, he
lifted them; and held them straight out sideways from him.
"I see not the writing; know not yet, by mine own eye, that they are
meant for me; yet, in these hands I feel that I now hold the final
poniards that shall stab me; and by stabbing me, make _me_ too a most
swift stabber in the recoil. Which point first?--this!"
He tore open the left-hand letter:--
"SIR:--You are a swindler. Upon the pretense of writing a popular
novel for us, you have been receiving cash advances from us, while
passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous rhapsody,
filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire. Our great
press of publication has hitherto prevented our slightest
inspection of our reader's proofs of your book. Send not another
sheet to us. Our bill for printing thus far, and also for our cash
advances, swindled out of us by you, is now in the hands of our
lawyer, who is instructed to proceed with instant rigor.
(_Signed_) STEEL, FLINT & ASBESTOS."
He folded the left-hand letter, and put it beneath his left heel, and
stood upon it so; and then opened the right-hand letter.
"Thou, Pierre Glendinning, art a villainous and perjured liar. It
is the sole object of this letter imprintedly to convey the point
blank lie to thee; that taken in at thy heart, it may be thence
pulsed with thy blood, throughout thy system. We have let some
interval pass inactive, to confirm and solidify our hate.
Separately, and together, we brand thee, in thy every lung-cell, a
liar;--liar, because that is the scornfullest and loathsomest title
for a man; which in itself is the compend of all infamous things.
(_Signed_) GLENDINNING STANLY,
FREDERIC TARTAN."
He folded the right-hand letter, and put it beneath his right heel; then
folding his two arms, stood upon both the letters.
"These are most small circumstances; but happening just now to me,
become indices to all immensities. For now am I hate-shod! On these I
will skate to my acquittal! No longer do I hold terms with aught.
World's bread of life, and world's breath of honor, both are snatched
from me; but I defy all world's bread and breath. Here I step out before
the drawn-up worlds in widest space, and challenge one and all of them
to battle! Oh, Glen! oh, Fred! most fraternally do I leap to your
rib-crushing hugs! Oh, how I love ye two, that yet can make me lively
hate, in a world which elsewise only merits stagnant scorn!--Now, then,
where is this swindler's, this coiner's book? Here, on this vile
counter, over which the coiner thought to pass it to the world, here
will I nail it fast, for a detected cheat! And thus nailed fast now, do
I spit upon it, and so get the start of the wise world's worst abuse of
it! Now I go out to meet my fate, walking toward me in the street."
As with hat on, and Glen and Frederic's letter invisibly crumpled in his
hand, he--as it were somnambulously--passed into the room of Isabel, she
gave loose to a thin, long shriek, at his wondrous white and haggard
plight; and then, without the power to stir toward him, sat petrified
in her chair, as one embalmed and glazed with icy varnish.
He heeded her not, but passed straight on through both intervening
rooms, and without a knock unpremeditatedly entered Lucy's chamber. He
would have passed out of that, also, into the corridor, without one
word; but something stayed him.
The marble girl sat before her easel; a small box of pointed charcoal,
and some pencils by her side; her painter's wand held out against the
frame; the charcoal-pencil suspended in two fingers, while with the same
hand, holding a crust of bread, she was lightly brushing the
portrait-paper, to efface some ill-considered stroke. The floor was
scattered with the bread-crumbs and charcoal-dust; he looked behind the
easel, and saw his own portrait, in the skeleton.
At the first glimpse of him, Lucy started not, nor stirred; but as if
her own wand had there enchanted her, sat tranced.
"Dead embers of departed fires lie by thee, thou pale girl; with dead
embers thou seekest to relume the flame of all extinguished love! Waste
not so that bread; eat it--in bitterness!"
He turned, and entered the corridor, and then, with outstretched arms,
paused between the two outer doors of Isabel and Lucy.
"For ye two, my most undiluted prayer is now, that from your here unseen
and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive;--the fool of Truth, the fool
of Virtue, the fool of Fate, now quits ye forever!"
As he now sped down the long winding passage, some one eagerly hailed
him from a stair.
"What, what, my boy? where now in such a squally hurry? Hallo, I say!"
But without heeding him at all, Pierre drove on. Millthorpe looked
anxiously and alarmedly after him a moment, then made a movement in
pursuit, but paused again.
"There was ever a black vein in this Glendinning; and now that vein is
swelled, as if it were just one peg above a tourniquet drawn over-tight.
I scarce durst dog him now; yet my heart misgives me that I
should.--Shall I go to his rooms and ask what black thing this is that
hath befallen him?--No; not yet;--might be thought officious--they say
I'm given to that. I'll wait; something may turn up soon. I'll into the
front street, and saunter some; and then--we'll see."
V.
Pierre passed on to a remote quarter of the building, and abruptly
entered the room of one of the Apostles whom he knew. There was no one
in it. He hesitated an instant; then walked up to a book-case, with a
chest of drawers in the lower part.
"Here I saw him put them:--this,--no--here--ay--we'll try this."
Wrenching open the locked drawer, a brace of pistols, a powder flask, a
bullet-bag, and a round green box of percussion-caps lay before him.
"Ha! what wondrous tools Prometheus used, who knows? but more wondrous
these, that in an instant, can unmake the topmost
three-score-years-and-ten of all Prometheus' makings. Come: here's two
tubes that'll outroar the thousand pipes of Harlem.--Is the music in
'em?--No?--Well then, here's powder for the shrill treble; and wadding
for the tenor; and a lead bullet for the concluding bass!
And,--and,--and,--ay; for the top-wadding, I'll send 'em back their lie,
and plant it scorching in their brains!"
He tore off that part of Glen and Fred's letter, which more
particularly gave the lie; and halving it, rammed it home upon the
bullets.
He thrust a pistol into either breast of his coat; and taking the
rearward passages, went down into the back street; directing his rapid
steps toward the grand central thoroughfare of the city.
It was a cold, but clear, quiet, and slantingly sunny day; it was
between four and five of the afternoon; that hour, when the great
glaring avenue was most thronged with haughty-rolling carriages, and
proud-rustling promenaders, both men and women. But these last were
mostly confined to the one wide pavement to the West; the other pavement
was well nigh deserted, save by porters, waiters, and parcel-carriers of
the shops. On the west pave, up and down, for three long miles, two
streams of glossy, shawled, or broadcloth life unceasingly brushed by
each other, as long, resplendent, drooping trains of rival peacocks
brush.
Mixing with neither of these, Pierre stalked midway between. From his
wild and fatal aspect, one way the people took the wall, the other way
they took the curb. Unentangledly Pierre threaded all their host, though
in its inmost heart. Bent he was, on a straightforward, mathematical
intent. His eyes were all about him as he went; especially he glanced
over to the deserted pavement opposite; for that emptiness did not
deceive him; he himself had often walked that side, the better to scan
the pouring throng upon the other.
Just as he gained a large, open, triangular space, built round with the
stateliest public erections;--the very proscenium of the town;--he saw
Glen and Fred advancing, in the distance, on the other side. He
continued on; and soon he saw them crossing over to him obliquely, so as
to take him face-and-face. He continued on; when suddenly running ahead
of Fred, who now chafingly stood still (because Fred would not make two,
in the direct personal assault upon one) and shouting "Liar! Villain!"
Glen leaped toward Pierre from front, and with such lightning-like
ferocity, that the simultaneous blow of his cowhide smote Pierre across
the cheek, and left a half-livid and half-bloody brand.
For that one moment, the people fell back on all sides from them; and
left them--momentarily recoiled from each other--in a ring of panics.
But clapping both hands to his two breasts, Pierre, on both sides
shaking off the sudden white grasp of two rushing girls, tore out both
pistols, and rushed headlong upon Glen.
"For thy one blow, take here two deaths! 'Tis speechless sweet to murder
thee!"
Spatterings of his own kindred blood were upon the pavement; his own
hand had extinguished his house in slaughtering the only unoutlawed
human being by the name of Glendinning;--and Pierre was seized by a
hundred contending hands.
VI.
That sundown, Pierre stood solitary in a low dungeon of the city prison.
The cumbersome stone ceiling almost rested on his brow; so that the long
tiers of massive cell-galleries above seemed partly piled on him. His
immortal, immovable, bleached cheek was dry; but the stone cheeks of the
walls were trickling. The pent twilight of the contracted yard, coming
through the barred arrow-slit, fell in dim bars upon the granite floor.
"Here, then, is the untimely, timely end;--Life's last chapter well
stitched into the middle! Nor book, nor author of the book, hath any
sequel, though each hath its last lettering!--It is ambiguous still. Had
I been heartless now, disowned, and spurningly portioned off the girl
at Saddle Meadows, then had I been happy through a long life on earth,
and perchance through a long eternity in heaven! Now, 'tis merely hell
in both worlds. Well, be it hell. I will mold a trumpet of the flames,
and, with my breath of flame, breathe back my defiance! But give me
first another body! I long and long to die, to be rid of this dishonored
cheek. _Hung by the neck till thou be dead._--Not if I forestall you,
though!--Oh now to live is death, and now to die is life; now, to my
soul, were a sword my midwife!--Hark!--the hangman?--who comes?"
"Thy wife and cousin--so they say;--hope they may be; they may stay till
twelve;" wheezingly answered a turnkey, pushing the tottering girls into
the cell, and locking the door upon them.
"Ye two pale ghosts, were this the other world, ye were not welcome.
Away!--Good Angel and Bad Angel both!--For Pierre is neuter now!"
"Oh, ye stony roofs, and seven-fold stony skies!--not thou art the
murderer, but thy sister hath murdered thee, my brother, oh my brother!"
At these wailed words from Isabel, Lucy shrunk up like a scroll, and
noiselessly fell at the feet of Pierre.
He touched her heart.--"Dead!--Girl! wife or sister, saint or
fiend!"--seizing Isabel in his grasp--"in thy breasts, life for infants
lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me!--The drug!" and tearing her
bosom loose, he seized the secret vial nesting there.
VII.
At night the squat-framed, asthmatic turnkey tramped the dim-lit iron
gallery before one of the long honey-combed rows of cells.
"Mighty still there, in that hole, them two mice I let in;--humph!"
Suddenly, at the further end of the gallery, he discerned a shadowy
figure emerging from the archway there, and running on before an
officer, and impetuously approaching where the turnkey stood.
"More relations coming. These wind-broken chaps are always in before the
second death, seeing they always miss the first.--Humph! What a froth
the fellow's in?--Wheezes worse than me!"
"Where is she?" cried Fred Tartan, fiercely, to him; "she's not at the
murderer's rooms! I sought the sweet girl there, instant upon the blow;
but the lone dumb thing I found there only wrung her speechless hands
and pointed to the door;--both birds were flown! Where is she, turnkey?
I've searched all lengths and breadths but this. Hath any angel swept
adown and lighted in your granite hell?"
"Broken his wind, and broken loose, too, aint he?" wheezed the turnkey
to the officer who now came up.
"This gentleman seeks a young lady, his sister, someway innocently
connected with the prisoner last brought in. Have any females been here
to see him?"
"Oh, ay,--two of 'em in there now;" jerking his stumped thumb behind
him.
Fred darted toward the designated cell.
"Oh, easy, easy, young gentleman"--jingling at his huge bunch of
keys--"easy, easy, till I get the picks--I'm housewife here.--Hallo,
here comes another."
Hurrying through the same archway toward them, there now rapidly
advanced a second impetuous figure, running on in advance of a second
officer.
"Where is the cell?" demanded Millthorpe.
"He seeks an interview with the last prisoner," explained the second
officer.
"Kill 'em both with one stone, then," wheezed the turnkey, gratingly
throwing open the door of the cell. "There's his pretty parlor,
gentlemen; step in. Reg'lar mouse-hole, arn't it?--Might hear a rabbit
burrow on the world's t'other side;--are they all 'sleep?"
"I stumble!" cried Fred, from within; "Lucy! A light! a light!--Lucy!"
And he wildly groped about the cell, and blindly caught Millthorpe, who
was also wildly groping.
"Blister me not! take off thy bloody touch!--Ho, ho, the light!--Lucy!
Lucy!--she's fainted!"
Then both stumbled again, and fell from each other in the cell: and for
a moment all seemed still, as though all breaths were held.
As the light was now thrust in, Fred was seen on the floor holding his
sister in his arms; and Millthorpe kneeling by the side of Pierre, the
unresponsive hand in his; while Isabel, feebly moving, reclined between,
against the wall.
"Yes! Yes!--Dead! Dead! Dead!--without one visible wound--her sweet
plumage hides it.--Thou hellish carrion, this is thy hellish work! Thy
juggler's rifle brought down this heavenly bird! Oh, my God, my God!
Thou scalpest me with this sight!"
"The dark vein's burst, and here's the deluge-wreck--all stranded here!
Ah, Pierre! my old companion,
Pierre;--school-mate--play-mate--friend!--Our sweet boy's walks within
the woods!--Oh, I would have rallied thee, and banteringly warned thee
from thy too moody ways, but thou wouldst never heed! What scornful
innocence rests on thy lips, my friend!--Hand scorched with murderer's
powder, yet how woman-soft!--By heaven, these fingers move!--one
speechless clasp!--all's o'er!"
"All's o'er, and ye know him not!" came gasping from the wall; and from
the fingers of Isabel dropped an empty vial--as it had been a run-out
sand-glass--and shivered upon the floor; and her whole form sloped
sideways, and she fell upon Pierre's heart, and her long hair ran over
him, and arbored him in ebon vines.
FINIS.