University of Virginia Library

V.

The swiftness and unrepellableness of the billow which, with
its first shock, had so profoundly whelmed Pierre, had not only
poured into his soul a tumult of entirely new images and emotions,
but, for the time, it almost entirely drove out of him all
previous ones. The things that any way bore directly upon the
pregnant fact of Isabel, these things were all animate and vividly
present to him; but the things which bore more upon himself,
and his own personal condition, as now forever involved
with his sister's, these things were not so animate and present
to him. The conjectured past of Isabel took mysterious hold
of his father; therefore, the idea of his father tyrannized over

his imagination; and the possible future of Isabel, as so essentially
though indirectly compromisable by whatever course
of conduct his mother might hereafter ignorantly pursue with
regard to himself, as henceforth, through Isabel, forever altered
to her; these considerations brought his mother with blazing
prominence before him.

Heaven, after all, hath been a little merciful to the miserable
man; not entirely untempered to human nature are the most
direful blasts of Fate. When on all sides assailed by prospects
of disaster, whose final ends are in terror hidden from it, the
soul of man—either, as instinctively convinced that it can not
battle with the whole host at once; or else, benevolently blinded
to the larger arc of the circle which menacingly hems it in;
—whichever be the truth, the soul of man, thus surrounded,
can not, and does never intelligently confront the totality of its
wretchedness. The bitter drug is divided into separate draughts
for him: to-day he takes one part of his woe; to-morrow he
takes more; and so on, till the last drop is drunk.

Not that in the despotism of other things, the thought of
Lucy, and the unconjecturable suffering into which she might
so soon be plunged, owing to the threatening uncertainty of the
state of his own future, as now in great part and at all hazards
dedicated to Isabel; not that this thought had thus far been
alien to him. Icy-cold, and serpent-like, it had overlayingly
crawled in upon his other shuddering imaginings; but those
other thoughts would as often upheaven again, and absorb it
into themselves, so that it would in that way soon disappear
from his contemporary apprehension. The pervailing thoughts
connected with Isabel he now could front with prepared and
open eyes; but the occasional thought of Lucy, when that
started up before him, he could only cover his bewildered eyes
with his bewildered hands. Nor was this the cowardice of
selfishness, but the infinite sensitiveness of his soul. He could
bear the agonizing thought of Isabel, because he was immediately

resolved to help her, and to assuage a fellow-being's grief;
but, as yet, he could not bear the thought of Lucy, because the
very resolution that promised balm to Isabel obscurely involved
the everlasting peace of Lucy, and therefore aggravatingly
threatened a far more than fellow-being's happiness.

Well for Pierre it was, that the penciling presentiments of
his mind concerning Lucy as quickly erased as painted their
tormenting images. Standing half-befogged upon the mountain
of his Fate, all that part of the wide panorama was
wrapped in clouds to him; but anon those concealings slid
aside, or rather, a quick rent was made in them; disclosing far
below, half-vailed in the lower mist, the winding tranquil vale
and stream of Lucy's previous happy life; through the swift cloudrent
he caught one glimpse of her expectant and angelic face peeping
from the honey-suckled window of her cottage; and the next
instant the stormy pinions of the clouds locked themselves over it
again; and all was hidden as before; and all went confused in
whirling rack and vapor as before. Only by unconscious inspiration,
caught from the agencies invisible to man, had he
been enabled to write that first obscurely announcing note to
Lucy; wherein the collectedness, and the mildness, and the
calmness, were but the natural though insidious precursors of the
stunning bolts on bolts to follow.

But, while thus, for the most part wrapped from his consciousness
and vision, still, the condition of his Lucy, as so
deeply affected now, was still more and more disentangling
and defining itself from out its nearer mist, and even beneath
the general upper fog. For when unfathomably stirred, the
subtler elements of man do not always reveal themselves in
the concocting act; but, as with all other potencies, show
themselves chiefly in their ultimate resolvings and results.
Strange wild work, and awfully symmetrical and reciprocal,
was that now going on within the self-apparently chaotic breast
of Pierre. As in his own conscious determinations, the mournful

Isabel was being snatched from her captivity of world-wide
abandonment; so, deeper down in the more secret chambers
of his unsuspecting soul, the smiling Lucy, now as dead and
ashy pale, was being bound a ransom for Isabel's salvation.
Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. Eternally inexorable and unconcerned
is Fate, a mere heartless trader in men's joys and
woes.

Nor was this general and spontaneous self-concealment of
all the most momentous interests of his love, as irretrievably
involved with Isabel and his resolution respecting her; nor was
this unbidden thing in him unseconded by the prompting of
his own conscious judgment, when in the tyranny of the masterevent
itself, that judgment was permitted some infrequent play.
He could not but be aware, that all meditation on Lucy now
was worse than useless. How could he now map out his and
her young life-chart, when all was yet misty-white with creamy
breakers! Still more: divinely dedicated as he felt himself to
be; with divine commands upon him to befriend and champion
Isabel, through all conceivable contingencies of Time and
Chance; how could he insure himself against the insidious inroads
of self-interest, and hold intact all his unselfish magnanimities,
if once he should permit the distracting thought
of Lucy to dispute with Isabel's the pervading possession of
his soul?

And if—though but unconsciously as yet—he was almost
superhumanly prepared to make a sacrifice of all objects dearest
to him, and cut himself away from his last hopes of common
happiness, should they cross his grand enthusiast resolution;—
if this was so with him; then, how light as gossamer, and
thinner and more impalpable than airiest threads of gauze, did
he hold all common conventional regardings;—his hereditary
duty to his mother, his pledged worldly faith and honor to the
hand and seal of his affiancement?

Not that at present all these things did thus present themselves

to Pierre; but these things were fœtally forming in
him. Impregnations from high enthusiasms he had received;
and the now incipient offspring which so stirred, with such
painful, vague vibrations in his soul; this, in its mature development,
when it should at last come forth in living deeds,
would scorn all personal relationship with Pierre, and hold his
heart's dearest interests for naught.

Thus, in the Enthusiast to Duty, the heaven-begotten Christ
is born; and will not own a mortal parent, and spurns and
rends all mortal bonds.