III.
In the cold courts of justice the dull head demands oaths,
and holy writ proofs; but in the warm halls of the heart one
single, untestified memory's spark shall suffice to enkindle such
a blaze of evidence, that all the corners of conviction are as
suddenly lighted up as a midnight city by a burning building,
which on every side whirls its reddened brands.
In a locked, round-windowed closet connecting with the
chamber of Pierre, and whither he had always been wont to go,
in those sweetly awful hours, when the spirit crieth to the
spirit, Come into solitude with me, twin-brother; come away:
a secret have I; let me whisper it to thee aside; in this closet,
sacred to the Tadmore privacies and repose of the sometimes
solitary Pierre, there hung, by long cords from the cornice, a
small portrait in oil, before which Pierre had many a time
trancedly stood. Had this painting hung in any annual public
exhibition, and in its turn been described in print by the casual
glancing critics, they would probably have described it thus,
and truthfully: “An impromptu portrait of a fine-looking, gay-hearted,
youthful gentleman. He is lightly, and, as it were,
airily and but grazingly seated in, or rather flittingly tenanting
an old-fashioned chair of Malacca. One arm confining his hat
and came is loungingly thrown over the back of the chair, while
the fingers of the other hand play with his gold watch-seal
and key. The free-templed head is sideways turned, with a
peculiarly bright, and care-free, morning expression. He seems
as if just dropped in for a visit upon some familiar acquaintance.
Altogether, the painting is exceedingly clever and cheerful;
with a fine, off-handed expression about it. Undoubtedly
a portrait, and no fancy-piece; and, to hazard a vague conjecture,
by an amateur.”
So bright, and so cheerful then; so trim, and so young; so
singularly healthful, and handsome; what subtile element
could so steep this whole portrait, that, to the wife of the original,
it was namelessly unpleasant and repelling? The mother
of Pierre could never abide this picture which she had always
asserted did signally belie her husband. Her fond memories
of the departed refused to hang one single wreath around it.
It is not he, she would emphatically and almost indignantly
exclaim, when more urgently besought to reveal the cause for
so unreasonable a dissent from the opinion of nearly all the
other connections and relatives of the deceased. But the portrait
which she held to do justice to her husband, correctly to
convey his features in detail, and more especially their truest,
and finest, and noblest combined expression; this portrait was
a much larger one, and in the great drawing-room below occupied
the most conspicuous and honorable place on the wall.
Even to Pierre these two paintings had always seemed
strangely dissimilar. And as the larger one had been painted
many years after the other, and therefore brought the original
pretty nearly within his own childish recollections; therefore,
he himself could not but deem it by far the more truthful and
life-like presentation of his father. So that the mere preference
of his mother, however strong, was not at all surprising
to him, but rather coincided with his own conceit. Yet not
for this, must the other portrait be so decidedly rejected. Because,
in the first place, there was a difference in time, and
some difference of costume to be considered, and the wide
difference of the styles of the respective artists, and the wide
difference of those respective, semi-reflected, ideal faces, which,
even in the presence of the original, a spiritual artist will
rather choose to draw from than from the fleshy face, however
brilliant and fine. Moreover, while the larger portrait was that
of a middle-aged, married man, and seemed to possess all the
nameless and slightly portly tranquillities, incident to that condition
when a felicitous one; the smaller portrait painted a brisk,
unentangled, young bachelor, gayly ranging up and down in
the world; light-hearted, and a very little bladish perhaps;
and charged to the lips with the first uncloying morning fullness
and freshness of life. Here, certainly, large allowance was
to be made in any careful, candid estimation of these portraits.
To Pierre this conclusion had become well-nigh irresistible,
when he placed side by side two portraits of himself;
one taken in his early childhood, a frocked and belted boy of
four years old; and the other, a grown youth of sixteen. Except
an indestructible, all-surviving something in the eyes and
on the temples, Pierre could hardly recognize the loud-laughing
boy in the tall, and pensively smiling youth. If a few
years, then, can have in
me made all this difference, why not
in my father? thought Pierre.
Besides all this, Pierre considered the history, and, so to
speak, the family legend of the smaller painting. In his fifteenth
year, it was made a present to him by an old maiden
aunt, who resided in the city, and who cherished the memory
of Pierre's father, with all that wonderful amaranthine devotion
which an advanced maiden sister ever feels for the idea of a beloved
younger brother, now dead and irrevocably gone. As
the only child of that brother, Pierre was an object of the
warmest and most extravagant attachment on the part of this
lonely aunt, who seemed to see, transformed into youth once
again, the likeness, and very soul of her brother, in the fair, inheriting
brow of Pierre. Though the portrait we speak of was
inordinately prized by her, yet at length the strict canon of her
romantic and imaginative love asserted the portrait to be
Pierre's—for Pierre was not only his father's only child, but his
namesake—so soon as Pierre should be old enough to value
aright so holy and inestimable a treasure. She had accordingly
sent it to him, trebly boxed, and finally covered with a
water-proof cloth; and it was delivered at Saddle Meadows, by
an express, confidential messenger, an old gentleman of leisure,
once her forlorn, because rejected gallant, but now her contented,
and chatty neighbor. Henceforth, before a gold-framed
and gold-lidded ivory miniature,—a fraternal gift—aunt Dorothea
now offered up her morning and her evening rites, to the
memory of the noblest and handsomest of brothers. Yet an
annual visit to the far closet of Pierre—no slight undertaking
now for one so stricken in years, and every way infirm—attested
the earnestness of that strong sense of duty, that painful
renunciation of self, which had induced her voluntarily to part
with the precious memorial.
