University of Virginia Library

I.

It was long after midnight when Pierre returned to the
house. He had rushed forth in that complete abandonment
of soul, which, in so ardent a temperament, attends the first
stages of any sudden and tremendous affliction; but now he
returned in pallid composure, for the calm spirit of the night,
and the then risen moon, and the late revealed stars, had all at
last become as a strange subduing melody to him, which,
though at first trampled and scorned, yet by degrees had stolen
into the windings of his heart, and so shed abroad its own quietude
in him. Now, from his height of composure, he firmly
gazed abroad upon the charred landscape within him; as the
timber man of Canada, forced to fly from the conflagration of
his forests, comes back again when the fires have waned, and
unblinkingly eyes the immeasurable fields of fire-brands that
here and there glow beneath the wide canopy of smoke.

It has been said, that always when Pierre would seek solitude
in its material shelter and walled isolation, then the closet communicating
with his chamber was his elected haunt. So, going
to his room, he took up the now dim-burning lamp he had left
there, and instinctively entered that retreat, seating himself,
with folded arms and bowed head, in the accustomed dragon-footed
old chair. With leaden feet, and heart now changing

from iciness to a strange sort of indifference, and a numbing
sensation stealing over him, he sat there awhile, till, like the
resting traveler in snows, he began to struggle against this inertness
as the most treacherous and deadliest of symptoms.
He looked up, and found himself fronted by the no longer
wholly enigmatical, but still ambiguously smiling picture of his
father. Instantly all his consciousness and his anguish returned,
but still without power to shake the grim tranquillity which
possessed him. Yet endure the smiling portrait he could not;
and obeying an irresistible nameless impulse, he rose, and without
unhanging it, reversed the picture on the wall.

This brought to sight the defaced and dusty back, with some
wrinkled, tattered paper over the joints, which had become
loosened from the paste. “Oh, symbol of thy reversed idea in
my soul,” groaned Pierre; “thou shalt not hang thus. Rather
cast thee utterly out, than conspicuously insult thee so. I will
no more have a father.” He removed the picture wholly from
the wall, and the closet; and concealed it in a large chest, covered
with blue chintz, and locked it up there. But still, in a
square space of slightly discolored wall, the picture still left its
shadowy, but vacant and desolate trace. He now strove to
banish the least trace of his altered father, as fearful that at
present all thoughts concerning him were not only entirely vain,
but would prove fatally distracting and incapacitating to a mind,
which was now loudly called upon, not only to endure a signal
grief, but immediately to act upon it. Wild and cruel case,
youth ever thinks; but mistakenly; for Experience well knows,
that action, though it seems an aggravation of woe, is really an
alleviative; though permanently to alleviate pain, we must
first dart some added pangs.

Nor now, though profoundly sensible that his whole previous
moral being was overturned, and that for him the fair structure
of the world must, in some then unknown way, be entirely rebuilded
again, from the lowermost corner stone up; nor now

did Pierre torment himself with the thought of that last desoation;
and how the desolate place was to be made flourishing
again. He seemed to feel that in his deepest soul, lurked an
indefinite but potential faith, which could rule in the interregnum
of all hereditary beliefs, and circumstantial persuasions;
not wholly, he felt, was his soul in anarchy. The indefinite
regent had assumed the scepter as its right; and Pierre was not
entirely given up to his grief's utter pillage and sack.

To a less enthusiastic heart than Pierre's the foremost question
in respect to Isabel which would have presented itself,
would have been, What must I do? But such a question never
presented itself to Pierre; the spontaneous responsiveness of
his being left no shadow of dubiousness as to the direct point
he must aim at. But if the object was plain, not so the path
to it. How must I do it? was a problem for which at first
there seemed no chance of solution. But without being entirely
aware of it himself, Pierre was one of those spirits, which
not in a determinate and sordid scrutiny of small pros and cons
—but in an impulsive subservience to the god-like dictation of
events themselves, find at length the surest solution of perplexities,
and the brightest prerogative of command. And as for
him, What must I do? was a question already answered by
the inspiration of the difficulty itself; so now he, as it were, unconsciously
discharged his mind, for the present, of all distracting
considerations concerning How he should do it; assured
that the coming interview with Isabel could not but unerringly
inspire him there. Still, the inspiration which had
thus far directed him had not been entirely mute and undivulging
as to many very bitter things which Pierre foresaw in the
wide sea of trouble into which he was plunged.

If it be the sacred province and—by the wisest, deemed—
the inestimable compensation of the heavier woes, that they
both purge the soul of gay-hearted errors and replenish it with
a saddened truth; that holy office is not so much accomplished

by any covertly inductive reasoning process, whose original
motive is received from the particular affliction; as it is the
magical effect of the admission into man's inmost spirit of a
before unexperienced and wholly inexplicable element, which
like electricity suddenly received into any sultry atmosphere of
the dark, in all directions splits itself into nimble lances of purifying
light; which at one and the same instant discharge all
the air of sluggishness and inform it with an illuminating property;
so that objects which before, in the uncertainty of the
dark, assumed shadowy and romantic outlines, now are lighted
up in their substantial realities; so that in these flashing revelations
of grief's wonderful fire, we see all things as they are;
and though, when the electric element is gone, the shadows
once more descend, and the false outlines of objects again return;
yet not with their former power to deceive; for now,
even in the presence of the falsest aspects, we still retain the
impressions of their immovable true ones, though, indeed, once
more concealed.

Thus with Pierre. In the joyous young times, ere his great
grief came upon him, all the objects which surrounded him
were concealingly deceptive. Not only was the long-cherished
image of his father now transfigured before him from a green
foliaged tree into a blasted trunk, but every other image in his
mind attested the universality of that electral light which had
darted into his soul. Not even his lovely, immaculate mother,
remained entirely untouched, unaltered by the shock. At her
changed aspect, when first revealed to him, Pierre had gazed in
a panic; and now, when the electrical storm had gone by, he
retained in his mind, that so suddenly revealed image, with an
infinite mournfulness. She, who in her less splendid but finer
and more spiritual part, had ever seemed to Pierre not only as
a beautiful saint before whom to offer up his daily orisons, but
also as a gentle lady-counsellor and confessor, and her revered
chamber as a soft satin-hung cabinet and confessional;—his

mother was no longer this all-alluring thing; no more, he too
keenly felt, could he go to his mother, as to one who entirely
sympathized with him; as to one before whom he could almost
unreservedly unbosom himself; as to one capable of pointing
out to him the true path where he seemed most beset. Wonderful,
indeed, was that electric insight which Fate had now
given him into the vital character of his mother. She well
might have stood all ordinary tests; but when Pierre thought
of the touchstone of his immense strait applied to her spirit; he
felt profoundly assured that she would crumble into nothing
before it.

She was a noble creature, but formed chiefly for the gilded
prosperities of life, and hitherto mostly used to its unruffled serenities;
bred and expanded, in all developments, under the
sole influence of hereditary forms and world-usages. Not his
refined, courtly, loving, equable mother, Pierre felt, could unreservedly,
and like a heaven's heroine, meet the shock of his extraordinary
emergency, and applaud, to his heart's echo, a sublime
resolve, whose execution should call down the astonishment
and the jeers of the world.

My mother!—dearest mother!—God hath given me a sister,
and unto thee a daughter, and covered her with the world's
extremest infamy and scorn, that so I and thou—thou, my
mother, mightest gloriously own her, and acknowledge her,
and,—Nay, nay, groaned Pierre, never, never, could such
sylables be one instant tolerated by her. Then, high-up, and
towering, and all-forbidding before Pierre grew the before unthought
of wonderful edifice of his mother's immense pride;—
her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity,
and all the pride of high-born, refined, and wealthy Life, and
all the Semiramian pride of woman. Then he staggered back
upon himself, and only found support in himself. Then Pierre
felt that deep in him lurked a divine unidentifiableness, that
owned no earthly kith or kin. Yet was this feeling entirely

lonesome, and orphan-like. Fain, then, for one moment, would
he have recalled the thousand sweet illusions of Life; tho'
purchased at the price of Life's Truth; so that once more he
might not feel himself driven out an infant Ishmael into the
desert, with no maternal Hagar to accompany and comfort
him.

Still, were these emotions without prejudice to his own love
for his mother, and without the slightest bitterness respecting
her; and, least of all, there was no shallow disdain toward
her of superior virtue. He too plainly saw, that not his mother
had made his mother; but the Infinite Haughtiness had first
fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further
molded her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her.

Wonderful, indeed, we repeat it, was the electrical insight
which Pierre now had into the character of his mother, for not
even the vivid recalling of her lavish love for him could suffice
to gainsay his sudden persuasion. Love me she doth, thought
Pierre, but how? Loveth she me with the love past all understanding?
that love, which in the loved one's behalf, would still
calmly confront all hate? whose most triumphing hymn,
triumphs only by swelling above all opposing taunts and despite?—Loving
mother, here have I a loved, but world-infamous
sister to own;—and if thou lovest me, mother, thy love will
love her, too, and in the proudest drawing-room take her so
much the more proudly by the hand.—And as Pierre thus in
fancy led Isabel before his mother; and in fancy led her away,
and felt his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth, with her
transfixing look of incredulous, scornful horror; then Pierre's
enthusiastic heart sunk in and in, and caved clean away in him,
as he so poignantly felt his first feeling of the dreary heart-vacancies
of the conventional life. Oh heartless, proud, ice-gilded
world, how I hate thee, he thought, that thy tyrannous,
insatiate grasp, thus now in my bitterest need—thus doth rob
me even of my mother; thus doth make me now doubly an

orphan, without a green grave to bedew. My tears,—could I
weep them,—must now be wept in the desolate places; now
to me is it, as though both father and mother had gone on
distant voyages, and, returning, died in unknown seas.

She loveth me, ay;—but why? Had I been cast in a
cripple's mold, how then? Now, do I remember that in her
most caressing love, there ever gleamed some scaly, glittering
folds of pride. Me she loveth with pride's love; in me she
thinks she seeth her own curled and haughty beauty; before
my glass she stands,—pride's priestess—and to her mirrored
image, not to me, she offers up her offerings of kisses. Oh,
small thanks I owe thee, Favorable Goddess, that didst clothe
this form with all the beauty of a man, that so thou mightest
hide from me all the truth of a man. Now I see that in his
beauty a man is snared, and made stone-blind, as the worm
within its silk. Welcome then be Ugliness and Poverty and
Infamy, and all ye other crafty ministers of Truth, that beneath
the hoods and rags of beggars hide yet the belts and crowns of
kings. And dimmed be all beauty that must own the clay;
and dimmed be all wealth, and all delight, and all the annual
prosperities of earth, that but gild the links, and stud with
diamonds the base rivets and the chains of Lies. Oh, now methinks
I a little see why of old the men of Truth went barefoot,
girded with a rope, and ever moving under mournfulness as
underneath a canopy. I remember now those first wise words,
wherewith our Savior Christ first spoke in his first speech to
men:—`Blessed are the poor in spirit, and blessed they that
mourn.' Oh, hitherto I have but piled up words; bought
books, and bought some small experiences, and builded me in
libraries; now I sit down and read. Oh, now I know the night,
and comprehend the sorceries of the moon, and all the dark
persuadings that have their birth in storms and winds. Oh,
not long will Joy abide, when Truth doth come; nor Grief her
laggard be. Well may this head hang on my breast,—it holds

too much; well may my heart knock at my ribs,—prisoner
impatient of his iron bars. Oh, men are jailers all; jailers of
themselves; and in Opinion's world ignorantly hold their
noblest part a captive to their vilest; as disguised royal Charles
when caught by peasants. The heart! the heart! 'tis God's
anointed; let me pursue the heart!