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 contemporary 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.
