V.
And this self-same morning Pierre was very mystical; not
continually, though; but most mystical one moment, and overflowing
with mad, unbridled merriment, the next. He seemed
a youthful Magian, and almost a mountebank together. Chaldaic
improvisations burst from him, in quick Golden Verses,
on the heel of humorous retort and repartee. More especially,
the bright glance of Lucy was transporting to him. Now,
reckless of his horses, with both arms holding Lucy in his embrace,
like a Sicilian diver he dives deep down in the Adriatic
of her eyes, and brings up some king's-cup of joy. All the
waves in Lucy's eyes seemed waves of infinite glee to him. And
as if, like veritable seas, they did indeed catch the reflected irradiations
of that pellucid azure morning; in Lucy's eyes, there
seemed to shine all the blue glory of the general day, and all
the sweet inscrutableness of the sky. And certainly, the blue
eye of woman, like the sea, is not uninfluenced by the atmosphere.
Only in the open air of some divinest, summer day,
will you see its ultramarine,—its fluid lapis lazuli. Then would
Pierre burst forth in some screaming shout of joy; and the
striped tigers of his chestnut eyes leaped in their lashed cages
with a fierce delight. Lucy shrank from him in extreme love;
for the extremest top of love, is Fear and Wonder.
Soon the swift horses drew this fair god and goddess nigh
the wooded hills, whose distant blue, now changed into a variously-shaded
green, stood before them like old Babylonian
walls, overgrown with verdure; while here and there, at regular
intervals, the scattered peaks seemed mural towers; and
the clumped pines surmounting them, as lofty archers, and
vast, out-looking watchers of the glorious Babylonian City of
the Day. Catching that hilly air, the prancing horses neighed;
laughed on the ground with gleeful feet. Felt they the gay
delightsome spurrings of the day; for the day was mad with
excessive joy; and high in heaven you heard the neighing of
the horses of the sun; and down dropt their nostrils' froth in
many a fleecy vapor from the hills.
From the plains, the mists rose slowly; reluctant yet to quit
so fair a mead. At those green slopings, Pierre reined in his
steeds, and soon the twain were seated on the bank, gazing far,
and far away; over many a grove and lake; corn-crested uplands,
and Herd's-grass lowlands; and long-stretching swales
of vividest green, betokening where the greenest bounty of this
earth seeks its winding channels; as ever, the most heavenly
bounteousness most seeks the lowly places; making green and
glad many a humble mortal's breast, and leaving to his own
lonely aridness, many a hill-top prince's state.
But Grief, not Joy, is a moralizer; and small moralizing
wisdom caught Pierre from that scene. With Lucy's hand in
his, and feeling, softly feeling of its soft tinglingness; he seemed
as one placed in linked correspondence with the summer lightnings;
and by sweet shock on shock, receiving intimating foretastes
of the etherealest delights of earth.
Now, prone on the grass he falls, with his attentive upward
glance fixed on Lucy's eyes. “Thou art my heaven, Lucy; and
here I lie thy shepherd-king, watching for new eye-stars to rise
in thee. Ha! I see Venus' transit now;—lo! a new planet
there;—and behind all, an infinite starry nebulousness, as if
thy being were backgrounded by some spangled vail of mystery.”
Is Lucy deaf to all these ravings of his lyric love? Why
looks she down, and vibrates so; and why now from her overcharged
lids, drops such warm drops as these? No joy now
in Lucy's eyes, and seeming tremor on her lips.
“Ah! thou too ardent and impetuous Pierre!”
“Nay, thou too moist and changeful April! know'st thou
not, that the moist and changeful April is followed by the glad,
assured, and showerless joy of June? And this, Lucy, this day
should be thy June, even as it is the earth's?”
“Ah Pierre! not June to me. But say, are not the sweets
of June made sweet by the April tears?”
“Ay, love! but here fall more drops,—more and more;—
these showers are longer than beseem the April, and pertain
not to the June.”
“June! June!—thou bride's month of the summer,—following
the spring's sweet courtship of the earth,—my June,
my June is yet to come!”
“Oh! yet to come, but fixedly decreed;—good as come,
and better.”
“Then no flower that, in the bud, the April showers have
nurtured; no such flower may untimely perish, ere the June
unfolds it? Ye will not swear that, Pierre?”
“The audacious immortalities of divinest love are in me;
and I now swear to thee all the immutable eternities of joyfulness,
that ever woman dreamed of, in this dream-house of the
earth. A god decrees to thee unchangeable felicity; and to me,
the unchallenged possession of thee and them, for my inalienable
fief.—Do I rave? Look on me, Lucy; think on me,
girl.”
“Thou art young, and beautiful, and strong; and a joyful
manliness invests thee, Pierre; and thy intrepid heart never
yet felt the touch of fear;—But—”
“But what?”
“Ah, my best Pierre!”
“With kisses I will suck thy secret from thy cheek!—but
what?”
“Let us hie homeward, Pierre. Some nameless sadness,
faintness, strangely comes to me. Foretaste I feel of endless
dreariness. Tell me once more the story of that face, Pierre,—
that mysterious, haunting face, which thou once told'st me,
thou didst thrice vainly try to shun. Blue is the sky, oh,
bland the air, Pierre;—but—tell me the story of the face,—the
dark-eyed, lustrous, imploring, mournful face, that so mystically
paled, and shrunk at thine. Ah, Pierre, sometimes I have
thought,—never will I wed with my best Pierre, until the
riddle of that face be known. Tell me, tell me, Pierre;—as a
fixed basilisk, with eyes of steady, flaming mournfulness, that
face this instant fastens me.”
“Bewitched! bewitched!—Cursed be the hour I acted on
the thought, that Love hath no reserves. Never should I have
told thee the story of that face, Lucy. I have bared myself
too much to thee. Oh, never should Love know all!”
“Knows not all, then loves not all, Pierre. Never shalt
thou so say again;—and Pierre, listen to me. Now,—now, in
this inexplicable trepidation that I feel, I do conjure thee,
that thou wilt ever continue to do as thou hast done; so that
I may ever continue to know all that agitatest thee, the airiest
and most transient thought, that ever shall sweep into thee
from the wide atmosphere of all things that hem mortality.
Did I doubt thee here;—could I ever think, that thy heart hath
yet one private nook or corner from me;—fatal disenchanting day
for me, my Pierre, would that be. I tell thee, Pierre—and 'tis
Love's own self that now speaks through me—only in unbounded
confidence and interchangings of all subtlest secrets,
can Love possibly endure. Love's self is a secret, and so feeds
on secrets, Pierre. Did I only know of thee, what the whole
common world may know—what then were Pierre to me?—
Thou must be wholly a disclosed secret to me; Love is vain
and proud; and when I walk the streets, and meet thy friends,
I must still be laughing and hugging to myself the thought,—
They know him not;—I only know my Pierre;—none else beneath
the circuit of you sun. Then, swear to me, dear Pierre,
that thou wilt never keep a secret from me—no, never, never;
—swear!”
“Something seizes me. Thy inexplicable tears, falling, falling
on my heart, have now turned it to a stone. I feel icy cold
and hard; I will not swear!”
“Pierre! Pierre!”
“God help thee, and God help me, Lucy. I can not think,
that in this most mild and dulcet air, the invisible agencies are
plotting treasons against our loves. Oh! if ye be now nigh
us, ye things I have no name for; then by a name that should
be efficacious—by Christ's holy name, I warn ye back from her
and me. Touch her not, ye airy devils; hence to your appointed
hell! why come ye prowling in these heavenly perlieus?
Can not the chains of Love omnipotent bind ye, fiends?”
“Is this Pierre? His eyes glare fearfully; now I see layer
on layer deeper in him; he turns round and menaces the air
and talks to it, as if defied by the air. Woe is me, that fairy
love should raise this evil spell!—Pierre?”
“But now I was infinite distances from thee, oh my Lucy,
wandering baffled in the choking night; but thy voice might
find me, though I had wandered to the Boreal realm, Lucy.
Here I sit down by thee; I catch a soothing from thee.”
“My own, own Pierre! Pierre, into ten trillion pieces I
could now be torn for thee; in my bosom would yet hide thee,
and there keep thee warm, though I sat down on Arctic ice-floes,
frozen to a corpse. My own, best, blessed Pierre! Now,
could I plant some poinard in me, that my silly ailings should
have power to move thee thus, and pain thee thus. Forgive
me, Pierre; thy changed face hath chased the other from me;
the fright of thee exceeds all other frights. It does not so
haunt me now. Press hard my hand; look hard on me, my
love, that its last trace may pass away. Now I feel almost
whole again; now, 'tis gone. Up, my Pierre; let us up, and
fly these hills, whence, I fear, too wide a prospect meets us.
Fly we to the plain. See, thy steeds neigh for thee—they call
thee—see, the clouds fly down toward the plain—lo, these hills
now seem all desolate to me, and the vale all verdure. Thank
thee, Pierre.—See, now, I quit the hills, dry-cheeked; and
leave all tears behind to be sucked in by these evergreens,
meet emblems of the unchanging love, my own sadness nourishes
in me. Hard fate, that Love's best verdure should feed
so on tears!”
Now they rolled swiftly down the slopes; nor tempted the
upper hills; but sped fast for the plain. Now the cloud hath
passed from Lucy's eye; no more the lurid slanting light forks
upward from her lover's brow. In the plain they find peace,
and love, and joy again.
“It was the merest, idling, wanton vapor, Lucy!”
“An empty echo, Pierre, of a sad sound, long past. Bless
thee, my Pierre!”
“The great God wrap thee ever, Lucy. So, now, we are
home.”
