II.
Pierre was the only son of an affluent, and haughty widow;
a lady who externally furnished a singular example of the preservative
and beautifying influences of unfluctuating rank,
health, and wealth, when joined to a fine mind of medium culture,
uncankered by any inconsolable grief, and never worn by
sordid cares. In mature age, the rose still miraculously clung
to her cheek; litheness had not yet completely uncoiled itself
from her waist, nor smoothness unscrolled itself from her brow,
nor diamondness departed from her eyes. So that when lit up
and bediademed by ball-room lights, Mrs. Glendinning still
eclipsed far younger charms, and had she chosen to encourage
them, would have been followed by a train of infatuated suitors,
little less young than her own son Pierre.
But a reverential and devoted son seemed lover enough for
this widow Bloom; and besides all this, Pierre when namelessly
annoyed, and sometimes even jealously transported by
the too ardent admiration of the handsome youths, who now
and then, caught in unintended snares, seemed to entertain
some insane hopes of wedding this unattainable being; Pierre
had more than once, with a playful malice, openly sworn, that
the man—gray-beard, or beardless—who should dare to propose
marriage to his mother, that man would by some peremptory
unrevealed agency immediately disappear from the
earth.
This romantic filial love of Pierre seemed fully returned by
the triumphant maternal pride of the widow, who in the clearcut
lineaments and noble air of the son, saw her own graces
strangely translated into the opposite sex. There was a striking
personal resemblance between them; and as the mother
seemed to have long stood still in her beauty, heedless of the
passing years; so Pierre seemed to meet her half-way, and by
a splendid precocity of form and feature, almost advanced himself
to that mature stand-point in Time, where his pedestaled
mother so long had stood. In the playfulness of their unclouded
love, and with that strange license which a perfect confidence
and mutual understanding at all points, had long bred
between them, they were wont to call each other brother and
sister. Both in public and private this was their usage; nor
when thrown among strangers, was this mode of address ever
suspected for a sportful assumption; since the amaranthiness
of Mrs. Glendinning fully sustained this youthful pretension.—
Thus freely and lightsomely for mother and son flowed on the
pure joined current of life. But as yet the fair river had not
borne its waves to those side-ways repelling rocks, where it was
thenceforth destined to be forever divided into two unmixing
streams.
An excellent English author of these times enumerating the
prime advantages of his natal lot, cites foremost, that he first
saw the rural light. So with Pierre. It had been his choice
fate to have been born and nurtured in the country, surrounded
by scenery whose uncommon loveliness was the perfect mould
of a delicate and poetic mind; while the popular names of its
finest features appealed to the proudest patriotic and family associations
of the historic line of Glendinning. On the meadows
which sloped away from the shaded rear of the manorial mansion,
far to the winding river, an Indian battle had been fought,
in the earlier days of the colony, and in that battle the paternal
great-grandfather of Pierre, mortally wounded, had sat unhorsed
on his saddle in the grass, with his dying voice, still
cheering his men in the fray. This was Saddle-Meadows, a
name likewise extended to the mansion and the village. Far
beyond these plains, a day's walk for Pierre, rose the storied
heights, where in the Revolutionary War his grandfather had
for several months defended a rude but all-important stockaded
fort, against the repeated combined assaults of Indians, Tories,
and Regulars. From before that fort, the gentlemanly, but murderous
half-breed, Brandt, had fled, but had survived to dine
with General Glendinning, in the amicable times which followed
that vindictive war. All the associations of Saddle-Meadows
were full of pride to Pierre. The Glendinning deeds
by which their estate had so long been held, bore the cyphers
of three Indian kings, the aboriginal and only conveyancers of
those noble woods and plains. Thus loftily, in the days of his
circumscribed youth, did Pierre glance along the background
of his race; little recking of that maturer and larger interior
development, which should forever deprive these things of their
full power of pride in his soul.
But the breeding of Pierre would have been unwisely contracted,
had his youth been unintermittingly passed in these
rural scenes. At a very early period he had begun to accompany
his father and mother—and afterwards his mother alone
—in their annual visits to the city; where naturally mingling
in a large and polished society, Pierre had insensibly formed
himself in the airier graces of life, without enfeebling the vigor
derived from a martial race, and fostered in the country's clarion
air.
Nor while thus liberally developed in person and manners,
was Pierre deficient in a still better and finer culture. Not in
vain had he spent long summer afternoons in the deep recesses
of his father's fastidiously picked and decorous library; where
the Spenserian nymphs had early led him into many a maze
of all-bewildering beauty. Thus, with a graceful glow on his
limbs, and soft, imaginative flames in his heart, did this Pierre
glide toward maturity, thoughtless of that period of remorseless
insight, when all these delicate warmths should seem
frigid to him, and he should madly demand more ardent fires.
Nor had that pride and love which had so bountifully provided
for the youthful nurture of Pierre, neglected his culture
in the deepest element of all. It had been a maxim with the
father of Pierre, that all gentlemanhood was vain; all claims
to it preposterous and absurd, unless the primeval gentleness
and golden humanities of religion had been so thoroughly
wrought into the complete texture of the character, that he
who pronounced himself gentleman, could also rightfully
assume the meek, but kingly style of Christian. At the age
of sixteen, Pierre partook with his mother of the Holy Sacraments.
It were needless, and more difficult, perhaps, to trace out
precisely the absolute motives which prompted these youthful
vows. Enough, that as to Pierre had descended the numerous
other noble qualities of his ancestors; and as he now stood
heir to their forests and farms; so by the same insensible sliding
process, he seemed to have inherited their docile homage
to a venerable Faith, which the first Glendinning had brought
over sea, from beneath the shadow of an English minister.
Thus in Pierre was the complete polished steel of the gentleman,
girded with Religion's silken sash; and his great-grandfather's
soldierly fate had taught him that the generous sash
should, in the last bitter trial, furnish its wearer with Glory's
shroud; so that what through life had been worn for Grace's
sake, in death might safely hold the man. But while thus all
alive to the beauty and poesy of his father's faith, Pierre little
foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and
Life some burdens heavier than death.
So perfect to Pierre had long seemed the illuminated scroll
of his life thus far, that only one hiatus was discoverable by
him in that sweetly-writ manuscript. A sister had been omitted
from the text. He mourned that so delicious a feeling as
fraternal love had been denied him. Nor could the fictitious
title, which he so often lavished upon his mother, at all supply
the absent reality. This emotion was most natural; and the
full cause and reason of it even Pierre did not at that time entirely
appreciate. For surely a gentle sister is the second best
gift to a man; and it is first in point of occurrence; for the
wife comes after. He who is sisterless, is as a bachelor before
his time. For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of
a wife, already lies in the sister.
“Oh, had my father but had a daughter!” cried Pierre;
“some one whom I might love, and protect, and fight for, if
need be. It must be a glorious thing to engage in a mortal
quarrel on a sweet sister's behalf! Now, of all things, would
to heaven, I had a sister!”
Thus, ere entranced in the gentler bonds of a lover; thus
often would Pierre invoke heaven for a sister; but Pierre did
not then know, that if there be any thing a man might well
pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some
of the devoutest prayers of his youth.
It may have been that this strange yearning of Pierre for a sister,
had part of its origin in that still stranger feeling of loneliness
he sometimes experienced, as not only the solitary head of his
family, but the only surnamed male Glendinning extant. A
powerful and populous family had by degrees run off into the
female branches; so that Pierre found himself surrounded by
numerous kinsmen and kinswomen, yet companioned by no
surnamed male Glendinning, but the duplicate one reflected to
him in the mirror. But in his more wonted natural mood, this
thought was not wholly sad to him. Nay, sometimes it
mounted into an exultant swell. For in the ruddiness, and
flushfulness, and vaingloriousness of his youthful soul, he
fondly hoped to have a monopoly of glory in capping the
fame-column, whose tall shaft had been erected by his noble
sires.
In all this, how unadmonished was our Pierre by that foreboding
and prophetic lesson taught, not less by Palmyra's
quarries, than by Palmyra's ruins. Among those ruins is a
crumbling, uncompleted shaft, and some leagues off, ages ago
left in the quarry, is the crumbling corresponding capital, also
incomplete. These Time seized and spoiled; these Time
crushed in the egg; and the proud stone that should have
stood among the clouds, Time left abased beneath the soil.
Oh, what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons
of Men!
