 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
26. BOOK XXVI.
A WALK: A FOREIGN PORTRAIT: A SAIL: AND THE END.
I.
“Come, Isabel, come, Lucy; we have not had a single walk
together yet. It is cold, but clear; and once out of the city,
we shall find it sunny. Come: get ready now, and away for a
stroll down to the wharf, and then for some of the steamers on
the bay. No doubt, Lucy, you will find in the bay scenery
some hints for that secret sketch you are so busily occupied with
—ere real living sitters do come—and which you so devotedly
work at, all alone and behind closed doors.”
Upon this, Lucy's original look of pale-rippling pleasantness
and surprise—evoked by Pierre's unforeseen proposition to give
himself some relaxation—changed into one of infinite, mute,
but unrenderable meaning, while her swimming eyes gently,
yet all-bewildered, fell to the floor.
“It is finished, then,” cried Isabel,—not unmindful of this
by-scene, and passionately stepping forward so as to intercept
Pierre's momentary rapt glance at the agitated Lucy,—“That
vile book, it is finished!—Thank Heaven!”
“Not so,” said Pierre; and, displacing all disguisements, a
hectic unsummoned expression suddenly came to his face;—
“but ere that vile book be finished, I must get on some other
element than earth. I have sat on earth's saddle till I am weary;
I must now vault over to the other saddle awhile. Oh, seems
ride,—the Land and the Sea; and like circus-men we should
never dismount, but only be steadied and rested by leaping
from one to the other, while still, side by side, they both race
round the sun. I have been on the Land steed so long, oh I
am dizzy!”
“Thou wilt never listen to me, Pierre,” said Lucy lowly;
“there is no need of this incessant straining. See, Isabel and I
have both offered to be thy amanuenses;—not in mere copying,
but in the original writing; I am sure that would greatly assist
thee.”
“Impossible! I fight a duel in which all seconds are forbid.”
“Ah Pierre! Pierre!” cried Lucy, dropping the shawl in her
hand, and gazing at him with unspeakable longings of some
unfathomable emotion.
Namelessly glancing at Lucy, Isabel slid near to him, seized
his hand and spoke.
“I would go blind for thee, Pierre; here, take out these eyes,
and use them for glasses.” So saying, she looked with a
strange momentary haughtiness and defiance at Lucy.
A general half involuntary movement was now made, as if
they were about to depart.
“Ye are ready; go ye before”—said Lucy meekly; “I will
follow.”
“Nay, one on each arm”—said Pierre—“come!”
As they passed through the low arched vestibule into the
street, a cheek-burnt, gamesome sailor passing, exclaimed—
“Steer small, my lad; 'tis a narrow strait thou art in!”
“What says he?”—said Lucy gently. “Yes, it is a narrow
strait of a street indeed.”
But Pierre felt a sudden tremble transferred to him from
Isabel, who whispered something inarticulate in his ear.
Gaining one of the thoroughfares, they drew near to a conspicuous
placard over a door, announcing that above stairs was
on free exhibition preparatory to their sale by auction. Though
this encounter had been entirely unforeseen by Pierre, yet yielding
to the sudden impulse, he at once proposed their visiting the
pictures. The girls assented, and they ascended the stairs.
In the anteroom, a catalogue was put into his hand. He
paused to give one hurried, comprehensive glance at it. Among
long columns of such names as Rubens, Raphael, Angelo, Domenichino,
Da Vinci, all shamelessly prefaced with the words
“undoubted,” or “testified,” Pierre met the following brief
line:—“No. 99. A stranger's head, by an unknown hand.”
It seemed plain that the whole must be a collection of those
wretched imported daubs, which with the incredible effrontery
peculiar to some of the foreign picture-dealers in America, were
christened by the loftiest names known to Art. But as the
most mutilated torsoes of the perfections of antiquity are not
unworthy the student's attention, neither are the most bungling
modern incompletenesses: for both are torsoes; one of perished
perfections in the past; the other, by anticipation, of yet
unfulfilled perfections in the future. Still, as Pierre walked
along by the thickly hung walls, and seemed to detect the infatuated
vanity which must have prompted many of these
utterly unknown artists in the attempted execution by feeble
hand of vigorous themes; he could not repress the most melancholy
foreboding concerning himself. All the walls of the
world seemed thickly hung with the empty and impotent scope
of pictures, grandly outlined, but miserably filled. The smaller
and humbler pictures, representing little familiar things, were
by far the best executed; but these, though touching him not
unpleasingly, in one restricted sense, awoke no dormant majesties
in his soul, and therefore, upon the whole, were contemptibly
inadequate and unsatisfactory.
At last Pierre and Isabel came to that painting of which
Pierre was capriciously in search—No. 99.
“My God! see! see!” cried Isabel, under strong excitement,
“only my mirror has ever shown me that look before! See!
see!”
By some mere hocus-pocus of chance, or subtly designing
knavery, a real Italian gem of art had found its way into this
most hybrid collection of impostures.
No one who has passed through the great galleries of Europe,
unbewildered by their wonderful multitudinousness of surpassing
excellence—a redundancy which neutralizes all discrimination
or individualizing capacity in most ordinary minds—no
calm, penetrative person can have victoriously run that painted
gauntlet of the gods, without certain very special emotions,
called forth by some one or more individual paintings, to which,
however, both the catalogues and the criticisms of the greatest
connoisseurs deny any all-transcending merit, at all answering
to the effect thus casually produced. There is no time now to
show fully how this is; suffice it, that in such instances, it is
not the abstract excellence always, but often the accidental congeniality,
which occasions this wonderful emotion. Still, the
individual himself is apt to impute it to a different cause; hence,
the headlong enthusiastic admiration of some one or two men
for things not at all praised by—or at most, which are indifferent
to—the rest of the world;—a matter so often considered
inexplicable.
But in this Stranger's Head by the Unknown Hand, the abstract
general excellence united with the all-surprising, accidental
congeniality in producing an accumulated impression of power
upon both Pierre and Isabel. Nor was the strangeness of this
at all impaired by the apparent uninterestedness of Lucy concerning
that very picture. Indeed, Lucy—who, owing to the
occasional jolting of the crowd, had loosened her arm from
Pierre's, and so, gradually, had gone on along the pictured hall
in advance—Lucy had thus passed the strange painting, without
the least special pause, and had now wandered round to the
she was standing motionless before a very tolerable copy (the
only other good thing in the collection) of that sweetest, most
touching, but most awful of all feminine heads—The Cenci of
Guido. The wonderfulness of which head consists chiefly, perhaps,
in a striking, suggested contrast, half-identical with, and
half-analogous to, that almost supernatural one—sometimes visible
in the maidens of tropical nations—namely, soft and light
blue eyes, with an extremely fair complexion, vailed by funereally
jetty hair. But with blue eyes and fair complexion, the
Cenci's hair is golden—physically, therefore, all is in strict, natural
keeping; which, nevertheless, still the more intensifies the
suggested fanciful anomaly of so sweetly and seraphically blonde
a being, being double-hooded, as it were, by the black crape of
the two most horrible crimes (of one of which she is the object,
and of the other the agent) possible to civilized humanity—incest
and parricide.
Now, this Cenci and “the Stranger” were hung at a good elevation
in one of the upper tiers; and, from the opposite walls,
exactly faced each other; so that in secret they seemed pantomimically
talking over and across the heads of the living spectators
below.
With the aspect of the Cenci every one is familiar. “The
Stranger” was a dark, comely, youthful man's head, portentously
looking out of a dark, shaded ground, and ambiguously smiling.
There was no discoverable drapery; the dark head, with
its crisp, curly, jetty hair, seemed just disentangling itself from
out of curtains and clouds. But to Isabel, in the eye and on
the brow, were certain shadowy traces of her own unmistakable
likeness; while to Pierre, this face was in part as the resurrection
of the one he had burnt at the Inn. Not that the separate
features were the same; but the pervading look of it,
the subtler interior keeping of the entirety, was almost identical;
still, for all this, there was an unequivocal aspect of foreignness,
general painting.
“Is it? Is it? Can it be?” whispered Isabel, intensely.
Now, Isabel knew nothing of the painting which Pierre had
destroyed. But she solely referred to the living being who—
under the designation of her father—had visited her at the cheerful
house to which she had been removed during childhood
from the large and unnamable one by the pleasant woman in
the coach. Without doubt—though indeed she might not have
been at all conscious of it in her own mystic mind—she must
have somehow vaguely fancied, that this being had always
through life worn the same aspect to every body else which he
had to her, for so very brief an interval of his possible existence.
Solely knowing him—or dreaming of him, it may have
been—under that one aspect, she could not conceive of him
under any other. Whether or not these considerations touching
Isabel's ideas occurred to Pierre at this moment is very improbable.
At any rate, he said nothing to her, either to deceive
or undeceive, either to enlighten or obscure. For, indeed,
he was too much riveted by his own far-interior emotions to
analyze now the contemporary ones of Isabel. So that there here
came to pass a not unremarkable thing: for though both were
intensely excited by one object, yet their two minds and memories
were thereby directed to entirely different contemplations;
while still each, for the time—however unreasonably—might
have vaguely supposed the other occupied by one and the same
contemplation. Pierre was thinking of the chair-portrait: Isabel,
of the living face. Yet Isabel's fervid exclamations having
reference to the living face, were now, as it were, mechanically
responded to by Pierre, in syllables having reference to the
chair-portrait. Nevertheless, so subtile and spontaneous was it
all, that neither perhaps ever afterward discovered this contradiction;
for, events whirled them so rapidly and peremptorily
reveries indispensable perhaps to such a discovery.
“Is it? is it? can it be?” was the intense whisper of Isabel.
“No, it can not be, it is not,” replied Pierre; “one of the
wonderful coincidences, nothing more.”
“Oh, by that word, Pierre, we but vainly seek to explain
the inexplicable. Tell me: it is! it must be! it is wonderful!”
“Let us begone; and let us keep eternal silence,” said
Pierre, quickly; and, seeking Lucy, they abruptly left the
place; as before, Pierre, seemingly unwilling to be accosted by
any one he knew, or who knew his companions, unconsciously
accelerating their steps while forced for a space to tread the
thoroughfares.
II.
As they hurried on, Pierre was silent; but wild thoughts were
hurrying and shouting in his heart. The most tremendous displacing
and revolutionizing thoughts were upheaving in him,
with reference to Isabel; nor—though at the time he was
hardly conscious of such a thing—were these thoughts wholly
unwelcome to him.
How did he know that Isabel was his sister? Setting aside
Aunt Dorothea's nebulous legend, to which, in some shadowy
points, here and there Isabel's still more nebulous story seemed
to fit on,—though but uncertainly enough—and both of which
thus blurredly conjoining narrations, regarded in the unscrupulous
light of real naked reason, were any thing but legitimately
conclusive; and setting aside his own dim reminiscences of his
wandering father's death-bed; (for though, in one point of
view, those reminiscences might have afforded some degree of
presumption as to his father's having been the parent of an unacknowledged
to that presumed daughter's identity; and the grand point now
with Pierre was, not the general question whether his father
had had a daughter, but whether, assuming that he had had,
Isabel, rather than any other living being, was that daughter;)
—and setting aside all his own manifold and inter-enfolding mystic
and transcendental persuasions,—originally born, as he now
seemed to feel, purely of an intense procreative enthusiasm:—
an enthusiasm no longer so all-potential with him as of yore;
setting all these aside, and coming to the plain, palpable facts,—
how did he know that Isabel was his sister? Nothing that he
saw in her face could be remember as having seen in his father's.
The chair-portrait, that was the entire sum and substance
of all possible, rakable, downright presumptive evidence,
which peculiarly appealed to his own separate self. Yet here
was another portrait of a complete stranger—a European; a
portrait imported from across the seas, and to be sold at public
auction, which was just as strong an evidence as the other.
Then, the original of this second portrait was as much the father
of Isabel as the original of the chair-portrait. But perhaps
there was no original at all to this second portrait; it might
have been a pure fancy piece; to which conceit, indeed, the
uncharacterizing style of the filling-up seemed to furnish no
small testimony.
With such bewildering mediations as these in him, running
up like clasping waves upon the strand of the most latent secrecies
of his soul, and with both Isabel and Lucy bodily touching
his sides as he walked; the feelings of Pierre were entirely
untranslatable into any words that can be used.
Of late to Pierre, much more vividly than ever before, the
whole story of Isabel had seemed an enigma, a mystery, an
imaginative delirium; especially since he had got so deep into
the inventional mysteries of his book. For he who is most
practically and deeply conversant with mysticisms and mysteries;
himself; often that man, more than any body else, is disposed
to regard such things in others as very deceptively bejuggling;
and likewise is apt to be rather materialistic in all his own
merely personal notions (as in their practical lives, with priests
of Eleusinian religions), and more than any other man, is often
inclined, at the bottom of his soul, to be uncompromisingly
skeptical on all novel visionary hypotheses of any kind. It is
only the no-mystics, or the half-mystics, who, properly speaking,
are credulous. So that in Pierre, was presented the apparent
anomaly of a mind, which by becoming really profound
in itself, grew skeptical of all tendered profundities; whereas,
the contrary is generally supposed.
By some strange arts Isabel's wonderful story might have
been, someway, and for some cause, forged for her, in her childhood,
and craftily impressed upon her youthful mind; which
so—like a slight mark in a young tree—had now enlargingly
grown with her growth, till it had become this immense staring
marvel. Tested by any thing real, practical, and reasonable,
what less probable, for instance, than that fancied crossing of
the sea in her childhood, when upon Pierre's subsequent questioning
of her, she did not even know that the sea was salt.
III.
In the midst of all these mental confusions they arrived at
the wharf; and selecting the most inviting of the various boats
which lay about them in three or four adjacent ferry-slips, and
one which was bound for a half-hour's sail across the wide
beauty of that glorious bay; they soon found themselves afloat
and in swift gliding motion.
They stood leaning on the rail of the guard, as the sharp
and the tangled underbrush and cane-brakes of the
dwarfed sticks of sloops and scows. Soon, the spires of stone
on the land, blent with the masts of wood on the water; the
crotch of the twin-rivers pressed the great wedged city almost
out of sight. They swept by two little islets distant from the
shore; they wholly curved away from the domes of free-stone
and marble, and gained the great sublime dome of the bay's
wide-open waters.
Small breeze had been felt in the pent city that day, but the
fair breeze of naked nature now blew in their faces. The
waves began to gather and roll; and just as they gained a
point, where—still beyond—between high promontories of
fortresses, the wide bay visibly sluiced into the Atlantic, Isabel
convulsively grasped the arm of Pierre and convulsively spoke.
“I feel it! I feel it! It is! It is!”
“What feelest thou?—what is it?”
“The motion! the motion!”
“Dost thou not understand, Pierre?” said Lucy, eying with
concern and wonder his pale, staring aspect—“The waves: it is
the motion of the waves that Isabel speaks of. Look, they are
rolling, direct from the sea now.”
Again Pierre lapsed into a still stranger silence and revery.
It was impossible altogether to resist the force of this striking
corroboration of by far the most surprising and improbable
thing in the whole surprising and improbable story of Isabel.
Well did he remember her vague reminiscence of the teetering
sea, that did not slope exactly as the floors of the unknown,
abandoned, old house among the French-like mountains.
While plunged in these mutually neutralizing thoughts of
the strange picture and the last exclamations of Isabel, the boat
arrived at its destination—a little hamlet on the beach, not
very far from the great blue sluice-way into the ocean, which
was now yet more distinctly visible than before.
“Don't let us stop here”—cried Isabel. “Look, let us go
through there! Bell must go through there! See! see! out
there upon the blue! yonder, yonder! far away—out, out!—
far, far away, and away, and away, out there! where the two
blues meet, and are nothing—Bell must go!”
“Why, Isabel,” murmured Lucy, “that would be to go to
far England or France; thou wouldst find but few friends in
far France, Isabel.”
“Friends in far France? And what friends have I here?—
Art thou my friend? In thy secret heart dost thou wish me
well? And for thee, Pierre, what am I but a vile clog to thee;
dragging thee back from all thy felicity? Yes, I will go yonder—yonder;
out there! I will, I will! Unhand me! Let
me plunge!”
For an instant, Lucy looked incoherently from one to the
other. But both she and Pierre now mechanically again
seized Isabel's frantic arms, as they were again thrown over the
outer rail of the boat. They dragged her back; they spoke to
her; they soothed her; but though less vehement, Isabel still
looked deeply distrustfully at Lucy, and deeply reproachfully
at Pierre.
They did not leave the boat as intended; too glad were
they all, when it unloosed from its fastenings, and turned about
upon the backward trip.
Stepping to shore, Pierre once more hurried his companions
through the unavoidable publicity of the thoroughfares; but
less rapidly proceeded, soon as they gained the more secluded
streets.
IV.
Gaining the Apostles', and leaving his two companions to
the privacy of their chambers, Pierre sat silent and intent
the point of entering his closet from the corridor, when Delly,
suddenly following him, said to him, that she had forgotten to
mention it before, but he would find two letters in his room,
which had been separately left at the door during the absence
of the party.
He passed into the closet, and slowly shooting the bolt—
which, for want of something better, happened to be an old
blunted dagger—walked, with his cap yet unmoved, slowly up
to the table, and beheld the letters. They were lying with
their sealed sides up; one in either hand, he lifted them; and
held them straight out sideways from him.
“I see not the writing; know not yet, by mine own eye,
that they are meant for me; yet, in these hands I feel that I
now hold the final poniards that shall stab me; and by stabbing
me, make me too a most swift stabber in the recoil.
Which point first?—this!”
He tore open the left-hand letter:—
“Sir:—You are a swindler. Upon the pretense of writing
a popular novel for us, you have been receiving cash advances
from us, while passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous
rhapsody, filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and
Voltaire. Our great press of publication has hitherto prevented
our slightest inspection of our reader's proofs of your book.
Send not another sheet to us. Our bill for printing thus far,
and also for our cash advances, swindled out of us by you, is
now in the hands of our lawyer, who is instructed to proceed
with instant rigor.
He folded the left-hand letter, and put it beneath his left
heel, and stood upon it so; and then opened the right-hand
letter.
“Thou, Pierre Glendinning, art a villainous and perjured liar.
It is the sole object of this letter imprintedly to convey the
point blank lie to thee; that taken in at thy heart, it may be
thence pulsed with thy blood, throughout thy system. We
have let some interval pass inactive, to confirm and solidify our
hate. Separately, and together, we brand thee, in thy every
lung-cell, a liar;—liar, because that is the scornfullest and loathsomest
title for a man; which in itself is the compend of all infamous
things.
Frederic Tartan.”
He folded the right-hand letter, and put it beneath his right
heel; then folding his two arms, stood upon both the letters.
“These are most small circumstances; but happening just
now to me, become indices to all immensities. For now am I
hate-shod! On these I will skate to my acquittal! No longer
do I hold terms with aught. World's bread of life, and world's
breath of honor, both are snatched from me; but I defy all
world's bread and breath. Here I step out before the drawnup
worlds in widest space, and challenge one and all of them to
battle! Oh, Glen! oh, Fred! most fraternally do I leap to
your rib-crushing hugs! Oh, how I love ye two, that yet can
make me lively hate, in a world which elsewise only merits
stagnant scorn!—Now, then, where is this swindler's, this coiner's
book? Here, on this vile counter, over which the coiner
thought to pass it to the world, here will I nail it fast, for a
detected cheat! And thus nailed fast now, do I spit upon it,
and so get the start of the wise world's worst abuse of it! Now
I go out to meet my fate, walking toward me in the street.”
As with hat on, and Glen and Frederic's letter invisibly crumpled
in his hand, he—as it were somnambulously—passed into
the room of Isabel, she gave loose to a thin, long shriek, at his
wondrous white and haggard plight; and then, without the
and glazed with icy varnish.
He heeded her not, but passed straight on through both intervening
rooms, and without a knock unpremeditatedly entered
Lucy's chamber. He would have passed out of that, also, into
the corridor, without one word; but something stayed him.
The marble girl sat before her easel; a small box of pointed
charcoal, and some pencils by her side; her painter's wand held
out against the frame; the charcoal-pencil suspended in two
fingers, while with the same hand, holding a crust of bread, she
was lightly brushing the portrait-paper, to efface some ill-considered
stroke. The floor was scattered with the bread-crumbs
and charcoal-dust; he looked behind the easel, and saw his
own portrait, in the skeleton.
At the first glimpse of him, Lucy started not, nor stirred;
but as if her own wand had there enchanted her, sat tranced.
“Dead embers of departed fires lie by thee, thou pale girl;
with dead embers thou seekest to relume the flame of all extinguished
love! Waste not so that bread; eat it—in bitterness!”
He turned, and entered the corridor, and then, with outstretched
arms, paused between the two outer doors of Isabel
and Lucy.
“For ye two, my most undiluted prayer is now, that from
your here unseen and frozen chairs ye may never stir alive;—
the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate, now quits
ye forever!”
As he now sped down the long winding passage, some one
eagerly hailed him from a stair.
“What, what, my boy? where now in such a squally hurry?
Hallo, I say!”
But without heeding him at all, Pierre drove on. Millthorpe
looked anxiously and alarmedly after him a moment, then mad
a movement in pursuit, but paused again.
“There was ever a black vein in this Glendinning; and now
that vein is swelled, as if it were just one peg above a tournequet
drawn over-tight. I scarce durst dog him now; yet my
heart misgives me that I should.—Shall I go to his rooms and
ask what black thing this is that hath befallen him?—No; not
yet;—might be thought officious—they say I'm given to that.
I'll wait; something may turn up soon. I'll into the front
street, and saunter some; and then—we'll see.”
V.
Pierre passed on to a remote quarter of the building, and
abruptly entered the room of one of the Apostles whom he
knew. There was no one in it. He hesitated an instant; then
walked up to a book-case, with a chest of drawers in the lower
part.
“Here I saw him put them:—this,—no—here—ay—we'll
try this.”
Wrenching open the locked drawer, a brace of pistols, a
powder flask, a bullet-bag, and a round green box of percussioncaps
lay before him.
“Ha! what wondrous tools Prometheus used, who knows?
but more wondrous these, that in an instant, can unmake the
topmost three-score-years-and-ten of all Prometheus' makings.
Come: here's two tubes that'll outroar the thousand pipes of
Harlem.—Is the music in 'em?—No?—Well then, here's powder
for the shrill treble; and wadding for the tenor; and a lead
bullet for the concluding bass! And,—and,—and,—ay; for
the top-wadding, I'll send 'em back their lie, and plant it
scorching in their brains!”
He tore off that part of Glen and Fred's letter, which more
the bullets.
He thrust a pistol into either breast of his coat; and taking
the rearward passages, went down into the back street; directing
his rapid steps toward the grand central thoroughfare of
the city.
It was a cold, but clear, quiet, and slantingly sunny day; it
was between four and five of the afternoon; that hour, when
the great glaring avenue was most thronged with haughty-rolling
carriages, and proud-rustling promenaders, both men
and women. But these last were mostly confined to the one
wide pavement to the West; the other pavement was well
nigh deserted, save by porters, waiters, and parcel-carriers of
the shops. On the west pave, up and down, for three long
miles, two streams of glossy, shawled, or broadcloth life unceasingly
brushed by each other, as long, resplendent, drooping
trains of rival peacocks brush.
Mixing with neither of these, Pierre stalked midway between.
From his wild and fatal aspect, one way the people
took the wall, the other way they took the curb. Unentangledly
Pierre threaded all their host, though in its inmost heart.
Bent he was, on a straightforward, mathematical intent. His
eyes were all about him as he went; especially he glanced
over to the deserted pavement opposite; for that emptiness did
not deceive him; he himself had often walked that side, the
better to scan the pouring throng upon the other.
Just as he gained a large, open, triangular space, built round
with the stateliest public erections;—the very proscenium of
the town;—he saw Glen and Fred advancing, in the distance,
on the other side. He continued on; and soon he saw them
crossing over to him obliquely, so as to take him face-and-face.
He continued on; when suddenly running ahead of Fred, who
now chafingly stood still (because Fred would not make two,
in the direct personal assault upon one) and shouting “Liar!
lightning-like ferocity, that the simultaneous blow of his cowhide
smote Pierre across the cheek, and left a half-livid and
half-bloody brand.
For that one moment, the people fell back on all sides from
them; and left them—momentarily recoiled from each other—
in a ring of panics.
But clapping both hands to his two breasts, Pierre, on both
sides shaking off the sudden white grasp of two rushing girls,
tore out both pistols, and rushed headlong upon Glen.
“For thy one blow, take here two deaths! 'Tis speechless
sweet to murder thee!”
Spatterings of his own kindred blood were upon the pavement;
his own hand had extinguished his house in slaughtering
the only unoutlawed human being by the name of Glendinning;—and
Pierre was seized by a hundred contending
hands.
VI.
That sundown, Pierre stood solitary in a low dungeon of the
city prison. The cumbersome stone ceiling almost rested on
his brow; so that the long tiers of massive cell-galleries above
seemed partly piled on him. His immortal, immovable,
bleached cheek was dry; but the stone cheeks of the walls
were trickling. The pent twilight of the contracted yard, coming
through the barred arrow-slit, fell in dim bars upon the
granite floor.
“Here, then, is the untimely, timely end;—Life's last chapter
well stitched into the middle! Nor book, nor author of
the book, hath any sequel, though each hath its last lettering!
—It is ambiguous still. Had I been heartless now, disowned,
had I been happy through a long life on earth, and perchance
through a long eternity in heaven! Now, 'tis merely hell in
both worlds. Well, be it hell. I will mold a trumpet of the
flames, and, with my breath of flame, breathe back my defiance!
But give me first another body! I long and long to
die, to be rid of this dishonored cheek. Hung by the neck till
thou be dead.—Not if I forestall you, though!—Oh now to
live is death, and now to die is life; now, to my soul, were a
sword my midwife!—Hark!—the hangman?—who comes?”
“Thy wife and cousin—so they say;—hope they may be;
they may stay till twelve;” wheezingly answered a turnkey,
pushing the tottering girls into the cell, and locking the door
upon them.
“Ye two pale ghosts, were this the other world, ye were not
welcome. Away!—Good Angel and Bad Angel both!—For
Pierre is neuter now!”
“Oh, ye stony roofs, and seven-fold stony skies!—not thou
art the murderer, but thy sister hath murdered thee, my brother,
oh my brother!”
At these wailed words from Isabel, Lucy shrunk up like a
scroll, and noiselessly fell at the feet of Pierre.
He touched her heart.—“Dead!—Girl! wife or sister, saint
or fiend!”—seizing Isabel in his grasp—“in thy breasts, life for
infants lodgeth not, but death-milk for thee and me!—The
drug!” and tearing her bosom loose, he seized the secret vial
nesting there.
VII.
At night the squat-framed, asthmatic turnkey tramped the
dim-lit iron gallery before one of the long honey-combed rows
of cells.
“Mighty still there, in that hole, them two mice I let in;—
humph!”
Suddenly, at the further end of the gallery, he discerned a
shadowy figure emerging from the archway there, and running
on before an officer, and impetuously approaching where
the turnkey stood.
“More relations coming. These wind-broken chaps are
always in before the second death, seeing they always miss the
first.—Humph! What a froth the fellow's in?—Wheezes
worse than me!”
“Where is she?” cried Fred Tartan, fiercely, to him; “she's
not at the murderer's rooms! I sought the sweet girl there,
instant upon the blow; but the lone dumb thing I found there
only wrung her speechless hands and pointed to the door;—
both birds were flown! Where is she, turnkey? I've searched
all lengths and breadths but this. Hath any angel swept
adown and lighted in your granite hell?”
“Broken his wind, and broken loose, too, aint he?” wheezed
the turnkey to the officer who now came up.
“This gentleman seeks a young lady, his sister, someway
innocently connected with the prisoner last brought in. Have
any females been here to see him?”
“Oh, ay,—two of 'em in there now;” jerking his stumped
thumb behind him.
Fred darted toward the designated cell.
“Oh, easy, easy, young gentleman”—jingling at his huge
bunch of keys—“easy, easy, till I get the picks—I'm housewife
here.—Hallo, here comes another.”
Hurrying through the same archway toward them, there
now rapidly advanced a second impetuous figure, running on
in advance of a second officer.
“Where is the cell?” demanded Millthorpe.
“He seeks an interview with the last prisoner,” explained
the second officer.
“Kill 'em both with one stone, then,” wheezed the turnkey,
gratingly throwing open the door of the cell. “There's his
pretty parlor, gentlemen; step in. Reg'lar mouse-hole, arn't
it?—Might hear a rabbit burrow on the world's t'other side;—
are they all 'sleep?”
“I stumble!” cried Fred, from within; “Lucy! A light!
a light!—Lucy!” And he wildly groped about the cell, and
blindly caught Millthorpe, who was also wildly groping.
“Blister me not! take off thy bloody touch!—Ho, ho, the
light!—Lucy! Lucy!—she's fainted!”
Then both stumbled again, and fell from each other in the
cell: and for a moment all seemed still, as though all breaths
were held.
As the light was now thrust in, Fred was seen on the floor
holding his sister in his arms; and Millthorpe kneeling by the
side of Pierre, the unresponsive hand in his; while Isabel,
feebly moving, reclined between, against the wall.
“Yes! Yes!—Dead! Dead! Dead!—without one visible
wound—her sweet plumage hides it.—Thou hellish carrion,
this is thy hellish work! Thy juggler's rifle brought down this
heavenly bird! Oh, my God, my God! Thou scalpest me
with this sight!”
“The dark vein's burst, and here's the deluge-wreck—all
stranded here! Ah, Pierre! my old companion, Pierre;—
school-mate—play-mate—friend!—Our sweet boy's walks within
the woods!—Oh, I would have rallied thee, and banteringly
warned thee from thy too moody ways, but thou wouldst never
heed! What scornful innocence rests on thy lips, my friend!
heaven, these fingers move!—one speechless clasp!
—all's o'er!”
“All's o'er, and ye know him not!” came gasping from the
wall; and from the fingers of Isabel dropped an empty vial—
as it had been a run-out sand-glass—and shivered upon the
floor; and her whole form sloped sideways, and she fell upon
Pierre's heart, and her long hair ran over him, and arbored him
in ebon vines.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |