V.
“The name at the end of this letter will be wholly strange
to thee. Hitherto my existence has been utterly unknown
to thee. This letter will touch thee and pain thee. Willingly
would I spare thee, but I can not. My heart bears me
witness, that did I think that the suffering these lines would
give thee, would, in the faintest degree, compare with what
mine has been, I would forever withhold them.
Pierre Glendinning, thou art not the only child of thy father;
in the eye of the sun, the hand that traces this is thy sister's;
yes, Pierre, Isabel calls thee her brother—her brother! oh,
sweetest of words, which so often I have thought to myself,
and almost deemed it profanity for an outcast like me to speak
or think. Dearest Pierre, my brother, my own father's child!
art thou an angel, that thou canst overleap all the heartless
usages and fashions of a banded world, that will call thee fool,
fool, fool! and curse thee, if thou yieldest to that heavenly impulse
which alone can lead thee to respond to the long tyrannizing,
and now at last unquenchable yearnings of my bursting
heart? Oh, my brother!
But, Pierre Glendinning, I will be proud with thee. Let not
my hapless condition extinguish in me, the nobleness which I
equally inherit with thee. Thou shalt not be cozened, by my
tears and my anguish, into any thing which thy most sober hour
will repent. Read no further. It it suit thee, burn this letter;
so shalt thou escape the certainly of that knowledge, which, if
thou art now cold and selfish, may hereafter, in some maturer,
remorseful, and helpless hour, cause thee a poignant upbraiding.
No, I shall not, I will not implore thee.—Oh, my brother,
my dear, dear Pierre,—help me, fly to me; see, I perish without
thee;—pity, pity—here I freeze in the wide, wide world;
—no father, no mother, no sister, no brother, no living thing in
the fair form of humanity, that holds me dear. No more, oh
no more, dear Pierre, can I endure to be an outcast in the
world, for which the dear Savior died. Fly to me, Pierre;—
nay, I could tear what I now write,—as I have torn so many
other sheets, all written for thy eye, but which never reached
thee, because in my distraction, I knew not how to write to
thee, nor what to say to thee; and so, behold again how I
rave.
Nothing more; I will write no more;—silence becomes this
grave;—the heart-sickness steals over me, Pierre, my brother.
Scarce know I what I have written. Yet will I write thee
the fatal line, and leave all the rest to thee, Pierre, my brother.
—She that is called Isabel Banford dwells in the little red farm-house,
three miles from the village, on the slope toward the
lake. To-morrow night-fall—not before—not by day, not by
day, Pierre.
Thy Sister, Isabel.”
