University of Virginia Library

VII.

As Pierre went on through the woods, all thoughts now
left him but those investing Isabel. He strove to condense her
mysterious haze into some definite and comprehensible shape.
He could not but infer that the feeling of bewilderment, which
she had so often hinted of during their interview, had caused
her continually to go aside from the straight line of her narration;
and finally to end it in an abrupt and enigmatical obscurity.
But he also felt assured, that as this was entirely
unintended, and now, doubtless, regretted by herself, so their
coming second interview would help to clear up much of this
mysteriousness; considering that the elapsing interval would
do much to tranquilize her, and rally her into less of wonderfulness

to him; he did not therefore so much accuse his unthinkingness
in naming the postponing hour he had. For, indeed,
looking from the morning down the vista of the day, it seemed
as indefinite and interminable to him. He could not bring
himself to confront any face or house; a plowed field, any
sign of tillage, the rotted stump of a long-felled pine, the
slightest passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling
to him. Likewise in his own mind all remembrances and
imaginings that had to do with the common and general humanity
had become, for the time, in the most singular manner
distasteful to him. Still, while thus loathing all that was common
in the two different worlds—that without, and that within
—nevertheless, even in the most withdrawn and subtlest region
of his own essential spirit, Pierre could not now find one
single agreeable twig of thought whereon to perch his weary
soul.

Men in general seldom suffer from this utter pauperism of
the spirit. If God hath not blessed them with incurable frivolity,
men in general have still some secret thing of self-conceit
or virtuous gratulation; men in general have always done some
small self-sacrificing deed for some other man; and so, in those
now and then recurring hours of despondent lassitude, which
must at various and differing intervals overtake almost every
civilized human being; such persons straightway bethink them
of their one, or two, or three small self-sacrificing things, and
suck respite, consolation, and more or less compensating deliciousness
from it. But with men of self-disdainful spirits; in
whose chosen souls heaven itself hath by a primitive persuasion
unindoctrinally fixed that most true Christian doctrine of the
utter nothingness of good works; the casual remembrance of
their benevolent well-doings, does never distill one drop of comfort
for them, even as (in harmony with the correlative Scripture
doctrine) the recalling of their outlived errors and misdeeds,
conveys to them no slightest pang or shadow of reproach.

Though the clew-defying mysteriousness of Isabel's narration,
did now for the time, in this particular mood of his, put on a
repelling aspect to our Pierre; yet something must occupy the
soul of man; and Isabel was nearest to him then; and Isabel
he thought of; at first, with great discomfort and with pain, but
anon (for heaven eventually rewards the resolute and duteous
thinker) with lessening repugnance, and at last with still-increasing
willingness and congenialness. Now he recalled his
first impressions, here and there, while she was rehearsing to
him her wild tale; he recalled those swift but mystical corroborations
in his own mind and memory, which by shedding
another twinkling light upon her history, had but increased
its mystery, while at the same time remarkably substantiating
it.

Her first recallable recollection was of an old deserted chateau-like
house in a strange, French-like country, which she dimly
imagined to be somewhere beyond the sea. Did not this surprisingly
correspond with certain natural inferences to be drawn
from his Aunt Dorothea's account of the disappearance of the
French young lady? Yes; the French young lady's disappearance
on this side the water was only contingent upon her
reappearance on the other; then he shuddered as he darkly
pictured the possible sequel of her life, and the wresting from
her of her infant, and its immurement in the savage mountain
wilderness.

But Isabel had also vague impressions of herself crossing the
sea;—recrossing, emphatically thought Pierre, as he pondered
on the unbidden conceit, that she had probably first unconsciously
and smuggledly crossed it hidden beneath her sorrowing
mother's heart. But in attempting to draw any inferences,
from what he himself had ever heard, for a coinciding proof or
elucidation of this assumption of Isabel's actual crossing the sea
at so tender an age; here Pierre felt all the inadequateness of
both his own and Isabel's united knowledge, to clear up the

profound mysteriousness of her early life. To the certainty of
this irremovable obscurity he bowed himself, and strove to dismiss
it from his mind, as worse than hopeless. So, also, in a
good degree, did he endeavor to drive out of him, Isabel's reminiscence
of the, to her, unnameable large house, from which she
had been finally removed by the pleasant woman in the coach.
This episode in her life, above all other things, was most cruelly
suggestive to him, as possibly involving his father in the
privity to a thing, at which Pierre's inmost soul fainted with
amazement and abhorrence. Here the helplessness of all further
light, and the eternal impossibility of logically exonerating
his dead father, in his own mind, from the liability to this, and
many other of the blackest self-insinuated suppositions; all this
came over Pierre with a power so infernal and intense, that it
could only have proceeded from the unretarded malice of the
Evil One himself. But subtilly and wantonly as these conceits
stole into him, Pierre as subtilly opposed them; and with the
hue-and-cry of his whole indignant soul, pursued them forth
again into the wide Tartarean realm from which they had
emerged.

The more and the more that Pierre now revolved the story
of Isabel in his mind, so much the more he amended his original
idea, that much of its obscurity would depart upon a
second interview. He saw, or seemed to see, that it was not
so much Isabel who had by her wild idiosyncrasies mystified
the narration of her history, as it was the essential and unavoidable
mystery of her history itself, which had invested
Isabel with such wonderful enigmas to him.