University of Virginia Library

III.

Toward sundown that evening, Pierre stood in one of the
three bespoken chambers in the Black Swan Inn; the blue
chintz-covered chest and the writing-desk before him. His
hands were eagerly searching through his pockets.

“The key! the key! Nay, then, I must force it open. It
bodes ill, too. Yet lucky is it, some bankers can break into
their own vaults, when other means do fail. Not so, ever.
Let me see:—yes, the tongs there. Now then for the sweet
sight of gold and silver. I never loved it till this day. How
long it has been hoarded;—little token pieces, of years ago,
from aunts, uncles, cousins innumerable, and from—but I won't
mention them; dead henceforth to me! Sure there'll be a
premium on such ancient gold. There's some broad bits, token
pieces to my—I name him not—more than half a century ago.
Well, well, I never thought to cast them back into the sordid
circulations whence they came. But if they must be spent,
now is the time, in this last necessity, and in this sacred cause.
'Tis a most stupid, dunderheaded crowbar. Hoy! so! ah, now
for it:—snake's nest!”

Forced suddenly back, the chest-lid had as suddenly revealed
to him the chair-portrait lying on top of all the rest, where he
had secreted it some days before. Face up, it met him with
its noiseless, ever-nameless, and ambiguous, unchanging smile.
Now his first repugnance was augmented by an emotion altogether
new. That certain lurking lineament in the portrait,
whose strange transfer blended with far other, and sweeter, and
nobler characteristics, was visible in the countenance of Isabel;
that lineament in the portrait was somehow now detestable;
nay, altogether loathsome, ineffably so, to Pierre. He argued
not with himself why this was so; he only felt it, and most
keenly.

Omitting more subtile inquisition into this deftly-winding
theme, it will be enough to hint, perhaps, that possibly one
source of this new hatefulness had its primary and unconscious
rise in one of those profound ideas, which at times atmospherically,
as it were, do insinuate themselves even into very ordinary
minds. In the strange relativeness, reciprocalness, and
transmittedness, between the long-dead father's portrait, and the
living daughter's face, Pierre might have seemed to see reflected
to him, by visible and uncontradictable symbols, the tyranny
of Time and Fate. Painted before the daughter was conceived
or born, like a dumb seer, the portrait still seemed leveling its
prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally
emerge. There seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and
vitality in the picture; because, since in his own memory of his
father, Pierre could not recall any distinct lineament transmitted
to Isabel, but vaguely saw such in the portrait; therefore,
not Pierre's parent, as any way rememberable by him, but the
portrait's painted self seemed the real father of Isabel; for, so
far as all sense went, Isabel had inherited one peculiar trait nowhither
traceable but to it.

And as his father was now sought to be banished from his
mind, as a most bitter presence there, but Isabel was become a
thing of intense and fearful love for him; therefore, it was loathsome
to him, that in the smiling and ambiguous portrait, her
sweet mournful image should be so sinisterly becrooked, bemixed,
and mutilated to him.

When the first shock, and then the pause were over, he lifted
the portrait in his two hands, and held it averted from him.

“It shall not live. Hitherto I have hoarded up mementoes
and monuments of the past; been a worshiper of all heirlooms;
a fond filer away of letters, locks of hair, bits of ribbon,
flowers, and the thousand-and-one minutenesses which love and
memory think they sanctify:—but it is forever over now! If
to me any memory shall henceforth be dear, I will not mummy

it in a visible memorial for every passing beggar's dust to
gather on. Love's museum is vain and foolish as the Catacombs,
where grinning apes and abject lizards are embalmed,
as, forsooth, significant of some imagined charm. It speaks
merely of decay and death, and nothing more; decay and
death of endless innumerable generations; it makes of earth
one mold. How can lifelessness be fit memorial of life?—So
far, for mementoes of the sweetest. As for the rest—now I
know this, that in commonest memorials, the twilight fact of
death first discloses in some secret way, all the ambiguities of
that departed thing or person; obliquely it casts hints, and insinuates
surmises base, and eternally incapable of being cleared.
Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the
last scene of the last act of man's play;—a play, which begin
how it may, in farce or comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the
curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse. Therefore, never more
will I play the vile pigmy, and by small memorials after death,
attempt to reverse the decree of death, by essaying the poor
perpetuating of the image of the original. Let all die, and mix
again! As for this—this!—why longer should I preserve it?
Why preserve that on which one can not patient look? If I
am resolved to hold his public memory inviolate,—destroy this
thing; for here is the one great, condemning, and unsuborned
proof, whose mysticalness drives me half mad.—Of old Greek
times, before man's brain went into doting bondage, and
bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs
lost their barbaric tan and beauty; when the round world was
fresh, and rosy, and spicy, as a new-plucked apple;—all's wilted
now!—in those bold times, the great dead were not, turkey-like,
dished in trenchers, and set down all garnished in the
ground, to glut the damned Cyclop like a cannibal; but nobly
envious Life cheated the glutton worm, and gloriously burned
the corpse; so that the spirit up-pointed, and visibly forked to
heaven!

“So now will I serve thee. Though that solidity of which
thou art the unsolid duplicate, hath long gone to its hideous
church-yard account;—and though, God knows! but for one
part of thee it may have been fit auditing;—yet will I now a
second time see thy obsequies performed, and by now burning
thee, urn thee in the great vase of air! Come now!”

A small wood-fire had been kindled on the hearth to purify
the long-closed room; it was now diminished to a small pointed
heap of glowing embers. Detaching and dismembering the
gilded but tarnished frame, Pierre laid the four pieces on the
coals; as their dryness soon caught the sparks, he rolled the
reversed canvas into a scroll, and tied it, and committed it
to the now crackling, clamorous flames. Steadfastly Pierre
watched the first crispings and blackenings of the painted scroll,
but started as suddenly unwinding from the burnt string that
had tied it, for one swift instant, seen through the flame and
smoke, the upwrithing portrait tormentedly stared at him in
beseeching horror, and then, wrapped in one broad sheet of oily
fire, disappeared forever.

Yielding to a sudden ungovernable impulse, Pierre darted
his hand among the flames, to rescue the imploring face; but
as swiftly drew back his scorched and bootless grasp. His
hand was burnt and blackened, but he did not heed it.

He ran back to the chest, and seizing repeated packages of
family letters, and all sorts of miscellaneous memorials in paper,
he threw them one after the other upon the fire.

“Thus, and thus, and thus! on thy manes I fling fresh
spoils; pour out all my memory in one libation!—so, so, so—
lower, lower, lower; now all is done, and all is ashes! Henceforth,
cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past; and since
the Future is one blank to all; therefore, twice-disinherited
Pierre stands untrammeledly his ever-present self!—free to do
his own self-will and present fancy to whatever end!”