 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
II.
Notwithstanding the maternal visit of Mrs. Tartan, and the
peremptoriness with which it had been closed by her declared
departure never to return, and her vow to teach all Lucy's relatives
and friends, and Lucy's own brothers, and her suitor, to
disown her, and forget her; yet Pierre fancied that he knew
too much in general of the human heart, and too much in particular
of the character of both Glen and Frederic, to remain
entirely untouched by disquietude, concerning what those two
fiery youths might now be plotting against him, as the imagined
monster, by whose infernal tricks Lucy Tartan was supposed
to have been seduced from every earthly seemliness. Not
happily, but only so much the more gloomily, did he augur
from the fact, that Mrs. Tartan had come to Lucy unattended;
and that Glen and Frederic had let eight-and-forty hours and
more go by, without giving the slightest hostile or neutral sign.
At first he thought, that bridling their impulsive fierceness,
they were resolved to take the slower, but perhaps the surer
method, to wrest Lucy back to them, by instituting some legal
Not only was Frederic of that sort of temper, peculiar to
military men, which would prompt him, in so closely personal
and intensely private and family a matter, to scorn the hireling
publicity of the law's lingering arm; and impel him, as by the
furiousness of fire, to be his own righter and avenger; for, in
him, it was perhaps quite as much the feeling of an outrageous
family affront to himself, through Lucy, as her own presumed
separate wrong, however black, which stung him to the quick:
not only were these things so respecting Frederic; but concerning
Glen, Pierre well knew, that be Glen heartless as he
might, to do a deed of love, Glen was not heartless to do a deed
of hate; that though, on that memorable night of his arrival
in the city, Glen had heartlessly closed his door upon him, yet
now Glen might heartfully burst Pierre's open, if by that he
at all believed, that permanent success would crown the fray.
Besides, Pierre knew this;—that so invincible is the natural,
untamable, latent spirit of a courageous manliness in man, that
though now socially educated for thousands of years in an arbitrary
homage to the Law, as the one only appointed redress
for every injured person; yet immemorially and universally,
among all gentlemen of spirit, once to have uttered independent
personal threats of personal vengeance against your foe, and
then, after that, to fall back slinking into a court, and hire with
sops a pack of yelping pettifoggers to fight the battle so valiantly
proclaimed; this, on the surface, is ever deemed very
decorous, and very prudent—a most wise second thought; but,
at bottom, a miserably ignoble thing. Frederic was not the
watery man for that,—Glen had more grapey blood in him.
Moreover, it seemed quite clear to Pierre, that only by making
out Lucy absolutely mad, and striving to prove it by a
thousand despicable little particulars, could the law succeed in
tearing her from the refuge she had voluntarily sought; a
on either side.
What then would those two boiling bloods do? Perhaps
they would patrol the streets; and at the first glimpse of lonely
Lucy, kidnap her home. Or if Pierre were with her, then,
smite him down by hook or crook, fair play or foul; and then,
away with Lucy! Or if Lucy systematically kept her room,
then fall on Pierre in the most public way, fell him, and cover
him from all decent recognition beneath heaps on heaps of
hate and insult; so that broken on the wheel of such dishonor,
Pierre might feel himself unstrung, and basely yield the
prize.
Not the gibbering of ghosts in any old haunted house; no
sulphurous and portentous sign at night beheld in heaven, will
so make the hair to stand, as when a proud and honorable man
is revolving in his soul the possibilities of some gross public and
corporeal disgrace. It is not fear; it is a pride-horror, which is
more terrible than any fear. Then, by tremendous imagery,
the murderer's mark of Cain is felt burning on the brow, and
the already acquitted knife blood-rusts in the clutch of the anticipating
hand.
Certain that those two youths must be plotting something
furious against him; with the echoes of their scorning curses
on the stairs still ringing in his ears—curses, whose swift responses
from himself, he, at the time, had had much ado to
check;—thoroughly alive to the supernaturalism of that mad
frothing hate which a spirited brother forks forth at the insulter
of a sister's honor—beyond doubt the most uncompromising of all
the social passions known to man—and not blind to the anomalous
fact, that if such a brother stab his foe at his own mother's
table, all people and all juries would bear him out, accounting
every thing allowable to a noble soul made mad by a sweet
sister's shame caused by a damned seducer;—imagining to
himself his own feelings, if he were actually in the position
in love matters jealousy is as an adder, and that the jealousy of
Glen was double-addered by the extraordinary malice of the apparent
circumstances under which Lucy had spurned Glen's
arms, and fled to his always successful and now married rival,
as if wantonly and shamelessly to nestle there;—remembering
all these intense incitements of both those foes of his, Pierre
could not but look forward to wild work very soon to come. Nor
was the storm of passion in his soul unratified by the decision
of his coolest possible hour. Storm and calm both said to
him,—Look to thyself, oh Pierre!
Murders are done by maniacs; but the earnest thoughts of
murder, these are the collected desperadoes. Pierre was such;
fate, or what you will, had made him such. But such he was.
And when these things now swam before him; when he thought
of all the ambiguities which hemmed him in; the stony walls
all round that he could not overleap; the million aggravations
of his most malicious lot; the last lingering hope of happiness
licked up from him as by flames of fire, and his one only
prospect a black, bottomless gulf of guilt, upon whose verge he
imminently teetered every hour;—then the utmost hate of Glen
and Frederic were jubilantly welcome to him; and murder,
done in the act of warding off their ignominious public blow,
seemed the one only congenial sequel to such a desperate
career.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |