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 be 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 mediations 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.
