 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
I.
Glorified be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest
gloom precedes the day. We care not whether the saying
will prove true to the utmost bounds of things; sufficient
that it sometimes does hold true within the bounds of earthly
finitude.
Next morning Pierre rose from the floor of his chamber, haggard
and tattered in body from his past night's utter misery,
but stoically serene and symmetrical in soul, with the foretaste
of what then seemed to him a planned and perfect Future.
Now he thinks he knows that the wholly unanticipated storm
which had so terribly burst upon him, had yet burst upon him
for his good; for the place, which in its undetected incipiency,
the storm had obscurely occupied in his soul, seemed now clear
sky to him; and all his horizon seemed distinctly commanded
by him.
His resolution was a strange and extraordinary one; but
therefore it only the better met a strange and extraordinary
emergency. But it was not only strange and extraordinary in
its novelty of mere aspect, but it was wonderful in its unequaled
renunciation of himself.
From the first, determined at all hazards to hold his father's
protecting Isabel, and extending to her a brother's utmost devotedness
and love; and equally determined not to shake his
mother's lasting peace by any useless exposure of unwelcome
facts; and yet vowed in his deepest soul some way to embrace
Isabel before the world, and yield to her his constant consolation
and companionship; and finding no possible mode of
unitedly compassing all these ends, without a most singular act
of pious imposture, which he thought all heaven would justify
in him, since he himself was to be the grand self-renouncing
victim; therefore, this was his settled and immovable purpose
now; namely: to assume before the world, that by secret rites,
Pierre Glendinning was already become the husband of Isabel
Banford—an assumption which would entirely warrant his
dwelling in her continual company, and upon equal terms, taking
her wherever the world admitted him; and at the same
time foreclose all sinister inquisitions bearing upon his deceased
parent's memory, or any way affecting his mother's lasting
peace, as indissolubly linked with that. True, he in embryo,
foreknew, that the extraordinary thing he had resolved, would,
in another way, indirectly though inevitably, dart a most keen
pang into his mother's heart; but this then seemed to him
part of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue;
and, thus minded, rather would he privately pain his living
mother with a wound that might be curable, than cast world-wide
and irremediable dishonor—so it seemed to him—upon
his departed father.
Probably no other being than Isabel could have produced
upon Pierre impressions powerful enough to eventuate in a final
resolution so unparalleled as the above. But the wonderful
melodiousness of her grief had touched the secret monochord
within his breast, by an apparent magic, precisely similar to
that which had moved the stringed tongue of her guitar to respond
to the heart-strings of her own melancholy plaints. The
immense distances of sky and air, and there seemed no veto of
the earth that could forbid her heavenly claim.
During the three days that he had personally known her,
and so been brought into magnetic contact with her, other persuasions
and potencies than those direct ones, involved in her
bewildering eyes and marvelous story, had unconsciously left
their ineffaceable impressions on him, and perhaps without his
privity, had mainly contributed to his resolve. She had impressed
him as the glorious child of Pride and Grief, in whose
countenance were traceable the divinest lineaments of both her
parents. Pride gave to her her nameless nobleness; Grief
touched that nobleness with an angelical softness; and again
that softness was steeped in a most charitable humility, which
was the foundation of her loftiest excellence of all.
Neither by word or letter had Isabel betrayed any spark of
those more common emotions and desires which might not unreasonably
be ascribed to an ordinary person placed in circumstances
like hers. Though almost penniless, she had not invoked
the pecuniary bounty of Pierre; and though she was
altogether silent on that subject, yet Pierre could not but be
strangely sensible of something in her which disdained to voluntarily
hang upon the mere bounty even of a brother. Nor,
though she by various nameless ways, manifested her consciousness
of being surrounded by uncongenial and inferior beings,
while yet descended from a generous stock, and personally
meriting the most refined companionships which the wide world
could yield; nevertheless, she had not demanded of Pierre
that he should array her in brocade, and lead her forth among
the rare and opulent ladies of the land. But while thus evincing
her intuitive, true lady-likeness and nobleness by this entire
freedom from all sordid motives, neither had she merged all
her feelings in any sickly sentimentalities of sisterly affection
toward her so suddenly discovered brother; which, in the case
not have been altogether alluring to Pierre. No. That intense
and indescribable longing, which her letter by its very
incoherencies had best embodied, proceeded from no base, vain,
or ordinary motive whatever; but was the unsuppressible and
unmistakable cry of the godhead through her soul, commanding
Pierre to fly to her, and do his highest and most glorious
duty in the world.
Nor now, as it changedly seemed to Pierre, did that duty
consist in stubbornly flying in the marble face of the Past, and
striving to reverse the decree which had pronounced that Isabel
could never perfectly inherit all the privileges of a legitimate
child of her father. And thoroughly now he felt, that even as
this would in the present case be both preposterous in itself
and cruel in effect to both the living and the dead, so was it
entirely undesired by Isabel, who though once yielding to a
momentary burst of aggressive enthusiasm, yet in her more
wonted mood of mournfulness and sweetness, evinced no such
lawless wandering. Thoroughly, now he felt, that Isabel was
content to live obscure in her paternal identity, so long as she
could any way appease her deep longings for the constant love
and sympathy and close domestic contact of some one of her
blood. So that Pierre had no slightest misgiving that upon
learning the character of his scheme, she would deem it to
come short of her natural expectations; while so far as its
apparent strangeness was concerned,—a strangeness, perhaps
invincible to squeamish and humdrum women—here Pierre
anticipated no obstacle in Isabel; for her whole past was
strange, and strangeness seemed best befitting to her future.
But had Pierre now reread the opening paragraph of her
letter to him, he might have very quickly derived a powerful
anticipative objection from his sister, which his own complete
disinterestedness concealed from him. Though Pierre had
every reason to believe that—owing to her secluded and humble
relation to Lucy Tartan:—an ignorance, whose first indirect
and unconscious manifestation in Isabel, had been unspeakably
welcome to him;—and though, of course, he had both wisely
and benevolently abstained from enlightening her on that
point; still, notwithstanding this, was it possible that any true-hearted,
noble girl like Isabel, would, to benefit herself, willingly
become a participator in an act, which would prospectively and
forever bar the blessed boon of marriageable love from one so
young and generous as Pierre, and eternally entangle him in
a fictitious alliance, which, though in reality but a web of air,
yet in effect would prove a wall of iron; for the same powerful
motive which induced the thought of forming such an alliance,
would always thereafter forbid that tacit exposure of its
fictitiousness, which would be consequent upon its public discontinuance,
and the real nuptials of Pierre with any other
being during the lifetime of Isabel.
But according to what view you take of it, it is either the
gracious or the malicious gift of the great gods to man, that on
the threshold of any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise,
the thousand ulterior intricacies and emperilings to which
it must conduct; these, at the outset, are mostly withheld from
sight; and so, through her ever-primeval wilderness Fortune's
Knight rides on, alike ignorant of the palaces or the pitfalls in
its heart. Surprising, and past all ordinary belief, are those
strange oversights and inconsistencies, into which the enthusiastic
meditation upon unique or extreme resolves will sometimes
beget in young and over-ardent souls. That all-comprehending
oneness, that calm representativeness, by which a steady
philosophic mind reaches forth and draws to itself, in their collective
entirety, the objects of its contemplations; that pertains
not to the young enthusiast. By his eagerness, all objects are
deceptively foreshortened; by his intensity each object is viewed
as detached; so that essentially and relatively every thing is
in Pierre, which by reason of the above-named
cause which we have endeavored to portray, induced him to
cherish for a time four unitedly impossible designs. And now
we behold this hapless youth all eager to involve himself in
such an inextricable twist of Fate, that the three dextrous
maids themselves could hardly disentangle him, if once he tie
the complicating knots about him and Isabel.
Ah, thou rash boy! are there no couriers in the air to warn
thee away from these emperilings, and point thee to those Cretan
labyrinths, to which thy life's cord is leading thee? Where
now are the high beneficences? Whither fled the sweet angels
that are alledged guardians to man?
Not that the impulsive Pierre wholly overlooked all that was
menacing to him in his future, if now he acted out his most
rare resolve; but eagerly foreshortened by him, they assumed
not their full magnitude of menacing; nor, indeed,—so riveted
now his purpese—were they pushed up to his face, would he
for that renounce his self-renunciation; while concerning all
things more immediately contingent upon his central resolution;
these were, doubtless, in a measure, foreseen and understood
by him. Perfectly, at least, he seemed to foresee and
understand, that the present hope of Lucy Tartan must be
banished from his being; that this would carry a terrible pang
to her, which in the natural recoil would but redouble his own;
that to the world all his heroicness, standing equally unexplained
and unsuspected, therefore the world would denounce
him as infamously false to his betrothed; reckless of the most
binding human vows; a secret wooer and wedder of an unknown
and enigmatic girl; a spurner of all a loving mother's
wisest counselings; a bringer down of lasting reproach upon an
honorable name; a besotted self-exile from a most prosperous
house and bounteous fortune; and lastly, that now his whole
life would, in the eyes of the wide humanity, be covered with
be removed even in the concluding hour of death.
Such, oh thou son of man! are the perils and the miseries
thou callest down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou
steppest aside from those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which
the common world, however base and dastardly, surrounds thee
for thy worldly good.
Ofttimes it is very wonderful to trace the rarest and profoundest
things, and find their probable origin in something
extremely trite or trivial. Yet so strange and complicate is the
human soul; so much is confusedly evolved from out itself,
and such vast and varied accessions come to it from abroad,
and so impossible is it always to distinguish between these two,
that the wisest man were rash, positively to assign the precise
and incipient origination of his final thoughts and acts. Far as
we blind moles can see, man's life seems but an acting upon
mysterious hints; it is somehow hinted to us, to do thus or
thus. For surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down
into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act
solely originates in his own defined identity. This preamble
seems not entirely unnecessary as usher of the strange conceit,
that possibly the latent germ of Pierre's proposed extraordinary
mode of executing his proposed extraordinary resolve—namely,
the nominal conversion of a sister into a wife—might have
been found in the previous conversational conversion of a
mother into a sister; for hereby he had habituated his voice
and manner to a certain fictitiousness in one of the closest domestic
relations of life; and since man's moral texture is very
porous, and things assumed upon the surface, at last strike in
—hence, this outward habituation to the above-named fictitiousness
had insensibly disposed his mind to it as it were; but
only innocently and pleasantly as yet. If, by any possibility,
this general conceit be so, then to Pierre the times of sportfulness
were as pregnant with the hours of earnestness; and in
sport he learnt the terms of woe.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |