II.
But little would we comprehend the peculiar relation between
Pierre and Glen—a relation involving in the end the
most serious results—were there not here thrown over the
whole equivocal, preceding account of it, another and more
comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all minor ones
in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only possible
explanation for all the ambiguous details.
It had long been imagined by Pierre, that prior to his own
special devotion to Lucy, the splendid Glen had not been entirely
insensible to her surprising charms. Yet this conceit in
its incipiency, he knew not how to account for. Assuredly his
cousin had never in the slightest conceivable hint betrayed
it; and as for Lucy, the same intuitive delicacy which forever
forbade Pierre to question her on the subject, did equally close
her own voluntary lips. Between Pierre and Lucy, delicateness
put her sacred signet on this chest of secrecy; which like the wax
of an executor upon a desk, though capable of being melted
into nothing by the smallest candle, for all this, still possesses to
the reverent the prohibitive virtue of inexorable bars and bolts.
If Pierre superficially considered the deportment of Glen
toward him, therein he could find no possible warrant for indulging
the suspicious idea. Doth jealousy smile so benignantly
and offer its house to the bride? Still, on the other
hand, to quit the mere surface of the deportment of Glen, and
penetrate beneath its brocaded vesture; there Pierre sometimes
seemed to see the long-lurking and yet unhealed wound of all
a rejected lover's most rankling detestation of a supplanting
rival, only intensified by their former friendship, and the unimpairable
blood-relation between them. Now, viewed by the
light of this master-solution, all the singular enigmas in Glen;
his capriciousness in the matter of the epistolary—“Dear
Pierres'” and “Dearest Pierres;” the mercurial fall from the
fever-heat of cordiality, to below the Zero of indifference; then
the contrary rise to fever-heat; and, above all, his emphatic
redundancy of devotion so soon as the positive espousals of
Pierre seemed on the point of consummation; thus read, all
these riddles apparently found their cunning solution. For the
deeper that some men feel a secret and poignant feeling, the
higher they pile the belying surfaces. The friendly deportment
of Glen then was to be considered as in direct proportion
to his hoarded hate; and the climax of that hate was evinced
in throwing open his house to the bride. Yet if hate was the
abstract cause, hate could not be the immediate motive of the
conduct of Glen. Is hate so hospitable? The immediate motive
of Glen then must be the intense desire to disguise from the
wide world, a fact unspeakably humiliating to his gold-laced
and haughty soul: the fact that in the profoundest desire of
his heart, Pierre had so victoriously supplanted him. Yet was
it that very artful deportment in Glen, which Glen profoundly
assumed to this grand end; that consummately artful deportment
it was, which first obtruded upon Pierre the surmise,
which by that identical method his cousin was so absorbedly
intent upon rendering impossible to him. Hence we here see
that as in the negative way the secrecy of any strong emotion is
exceedingly difficult to be kept lastingly private to one's own
bosom by any human being; so it is one of the most fruitless
undertakings in the world, to attempt by affirmative assumptions
to tender to men, the precisely opposite emotion as
yours. Therefore the final wisdom decrees, that if you have
aught which you desire to keep a secret to yourself, be a
Quietist there, and do and say nothing at all about it. For
among all the poor chances, this is the least poor. Pretensions
and substitutions are only the recourse of under-graduates in
the science of the world; in which science, on his own ground,
my Lord Chesterfield, is the poorest possible preceptor. The
earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age,
unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest
part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing
as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man,
and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man,
do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to
the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.
