 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
III.
Almost deprived of consciousness by the spell flung over
him by the marvelous girl, Pierre unknowingly gazed away
from her, as on vacancy; and when at last stillness had once
more fallen upon the room—all except the stepping—and he
recovered his self-possession, and turned to look where he might
now be, he was surprised to see Isabel composedly, though
avertedly, seated on the bench; the longer and fuller tresses of
her now ungleaming hair flung back, and the guitar quietly
leaning in the corner.
He was about to put some unconsidered question to her, but
she half-anticipated it by bidding him, in a low, but nevertheless
almost authoritative tone, not to make any allusion to the
scene he had just beheld.
He paused, profoundly thinking to himself, and now felt certain
that the entire scene, from the first musical invocation of
the guitar, must have unpremeditatedly proceeded from a
which the preceding conversation, and especially the handling of
the guitar under such circumstances, had irresistibly thrown her.
But that certain something of the preternatural in the scene,
of which he could not rid his mind:—the, so to speak, voluntary
and all but intelligent responsiveness of the guitar—its
strangely scintillating strings—the so suddenly glorified head
of Isabel; altogether, these things seemed not at the time entirely
produced by customary or natural causes. To Pierre's
dilated senses Isabel seemed to swim in an electric fluid; the
vivid buckler of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate. Now
first this night was Pierre made aware of what, in the superstitiousness
of his rapt enthusiasm, he could not help believing
was an extraordinary physical magnetism in Isabel. And—as
it were derived from this marvelous quality thus imputed to
her—he now first became vaguely sensible of a certain still
more marvelous power in the girl over himself and his most
interior thoughts and motions;—a power so hovering upon the
confines of the invisible world, that it seemed more inclined that
way than this;—a power which not only seemed irresistibly to
draw him toward Isabel, but to draw him away from another
quarter—wantonly as it were, and yet quite ignorantly and
unintendingly; and, besides, without respect apparently to any
thing ulterior, and yet again, only under cover of drawing
him to her. For over all these things, and interfusing itself
with the sparkling electricity in which she seemed to swim,
was an ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities.
Often, in after-times with her, did he recall this first magnetic
night, and would seem to see that she then had bound
him to her by an extraordinary atmospheric spell—both physical
and spiritual—which henceforth it had become impossible
for him to break, but whose full potency he never recognized
till long after he had become habituated to its sway. This
spell seemed one with that Pantheistic master-spell, which
world, and the physical electricalness of Isabel seemed reciprocal
with the heat-lightnings and the ground-lightnings
nigh to which it had first become revealed to Pierre. She
seemed molded from fire and air, and vivified at some Voltaic
pile of August thunder-clouds heaped against the sunset.
The occasional sweet simplicity, and innocence, and humbleness
of her story; her often serene and open aspect; her deep-seated,
but mostly quiet, unobtrusive sadness, and that touchingness
of her less unwonted tone and air;—these only the more
signalized and contrastingly emphasized the profounder, subtler,
and more mystic part of her. Especially did Pierre feel this,
when after another silent interval, she now proceeded with her
story in a manner so gently confiding, so entirely artless, so almost
peasant-like in its simplicity, and dealing in some details
so little sublimated in themselves, that it seemed well nigh
impossible that this unassuming maid should be the same dark,
regal being who had but just now bade Pierre be silent in so
imperious a tone, and around whose wondrous temples the
strange electric glory had been playing. Yet not very long did
she now thus innocently proceed, ere, at times, some fainter
flashes of her electricalness came from her, but only to be followed
by such melting, human, and most feminine traits as
brought all his soft, enthusiast tears into the sympathetic but
still unshedding eyes of Pierre.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |