 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
10. BOOK X.
THE UNPRECEDENTED FINAL RESOLUTION OF PIERRE.
I.
Glorified be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest
gloom precedes the day. We care not whether the saying
will prove true to the utmost bounds of things; sufficient
that it sometimes does hold true within the bounds of earthly
finitude.
Next morning Pierre rose from the floor of his chamber, haggard
and tattered in body from his past night's utter misery,
but stoically serene and symmetrical in soul, with the foretaste
of what then seemed to him a planned and perfect Future.
Now he thinks he knows that the wholly unanticipated storm
which had so terribly burst upon him, had yet burst upon him
for his good; for the place, which in its undetected incipiency,
the storm had obscurely occupied in his soul, seemed now clear
sky to him; and all his horizon seemed distinctly commanded
by him.
His resolution was a strange and extraordinary one; but
therefore it only the better met a strange and extraordinary
emergency. But it was not only strange and extraordinary in
its novelty of mere aspect, but it was wonderful in its unequaled
renunciation of himself.
From the first, determined at all hazards to hold his father's
protecting Isabel, and extending to her a brother's utmost devotedness
and love; and equally determined not to shake his
mother's lasting peace by any useless exposure of unwelcome
facts; and yet vowed in his deepest soul some way to embrace
Isabel before the world, and yield to her his constant consolation
and companionship; and finding no possible mode of
unitedly compassing all these ends, without a most singular act
of pious imposture, which he thought all heaven would justify
in him, since he himself was to be the grand self-renouncing
victim; therefore, this was his settled and immovable purpose
now; namely: to assume before the world, that by secret rites,
Pierre Glendinning was already become the husband of Isabel
Banford—an assumption which would entirely warrant his
dwelling in her continual company, and upon equal terms, taking
her wherever the world admitted him; and at the same
time foreclose all sinister inquisitions bearing upon his deceased
parent's memory, or any way affecting his mother's lasting
peace, as indissolubly linked with that. True, he in embryo,
foreknew, that the extraordinary thing he had resolved, would,
in another way, indirectly though inevitably, dart a most keen
pang into his mother's heart; but this then seemed to him
part of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue;
and, thus minded, rather would he privately pain his living
mother with a wound that might be curable, than cast world-wide
and irremediable dishonor—so it seemed to him—upon
his departed father.
Probably no other being than Isabel could have produced
upon Pierre impressions powerful enough to eventuate in a final
resolution so unparalleled as the above. But the wonderful
melodiousness of her grief had touched the secret monochord
within his breast, by an apparent magic, precisely similar to
that which had moved the stringed tongue of her guitar to respond
to the heart-strings of her own melancholy plaints. The
immense distances of sky and air, and there seemed no veto of
the earth that could forbid her heavenly claim.
During the three days that he had personally known her,
and so been brought into magnetic contact with her, other persuasions
and potencies than those direct ones, involved in her
bewildering eyes and marvelous story, had unconsciously left
their ineffaceable impressions on him, and perhaps without his
privity, had mainly contributed to his resolve. She had impressed
him as the glorious child of Pride and Grief, in whose
countenance were traceable the divinest lineaments of both her
parents. Pride gave to her her nameless nobleness; Grief
touched that nobleness with an angelical softness; and again
that softness was steeped in a most charitable humility, which
was the foundation of her loftiest excellence of all.
Neither by word or letter had Isabel betrayed any spark of
those more common emotions and desires which might not unreasonably
be ascribed to an ordinary person placed in circumstances
like hers. Though almost penniless, she had not invoked
the pecuniary bounty of Pierre; and though she was
altogether silent on that subject, yet Pierre could not but be
strangely sensible of something in her which disdained to voluntarily
hang upon the mere bounty even of a brother. Nor,
though she by various nameless ways, manifested her consciousness
of being surrounded by uncongenial and inferior beings,
while yet descended from a generous stock, and personally
meriting the most refined companionships which the wide world
could yield; nevertheless, she had not demanded of Pierre
that he should array her in brocade, and lead her forth among
the rare and opulent ladies of the land. But while thus evincing
her intuitive, true lady-likeness and nobleness by this entire
freedom from all sordid motives, neither had she merged all
her feelings in any sickly sentimentalities of sisterly affection
toward her so suddenly discovered brother; which, in the case
not have been altogether alluring to Pierre. No. That intense
and indescribable longing, which her letter by its very
incoherencies had best embodied, proceeded from no base, vain,
or ordinary motive whatever; but was the unsuppressible and
unmistakable cry of the godhead through her soul, commanding
Pierre to fly to her, and do his highest and most glorious
duty in the world.
Nor now, as it changedly seemed to Pierre, did that duty
consist in stubbornly flying in the marble face of the Past, and
striving to reverse the decree which had pronounced that Isabel
could never perfectly inherit all the privileges of a legitimate
child of her father. And thoroughly now he felt, that even as
this would in the present case be both preposterous in itself
and cruel in effect to both the living and the dead, so was it
entirely undesired by Isabel, who though once yielding to a
momentary burst of aggressive enthusiasm, yet in her more
wonted mood of mournfulness and sweetness, evinced no such
lawless wandering. Thoroughly, now he felt, that Isabel was
content to live obscure in her paternal identity, so long as she
could any way appease her deep longings for the constant love
and sympathy and close domestic contact of some one of her
blood. So that Pierre had no slightest misgiving that upon
learning the character of his scheme, she would deem it to
come short of her natural expectations; while so far as its
apparent strangeness was concerned,—a strangeness, perhaps
invincible to squeamish and humdrum women—here Pierre
anticipated no obstacle in Isabel; for her whole past was
strange, and strangeness seemed best befitting to her future.
But had Pierre now reread the opening paragraph of her
letter to him, he might have very quickly derived a powerful
anticipative objection from his sister, which his own complete
disinterestedness concealed from him. Though Pierre had
every reason to believe that—owing to her secluded and humble
relation to Lucy Tartan:—an ignorance, whose first indirect
and unconscious manifestation in Isabel, had been unspeakably
welcome to him;—and though, of course, he had both wisely
and benevolently abstained from enlightening her on that
point; still, notwithstanding this, was it possible that any true-hearted,
noble girl like Isabel, would, to benefit herself, willingly
become a participator in an act, which would prospectively and
forever bar the blessed boon of marriageable love from one so
young and generous as Pierre, and eternally entangle him in
a fictitious alliance, which, though in reality but a web of air,
yet in effect would prove a wall of iron; for the same powerful
motive which induced the thought of forming such an alliance,
would always thereafter forbid that tacit exposure of its
fictitiousness, which would be consequent upon its public discontinuance,
and the real nuptials of Pierre with any other
being during the lifetime of Isabel.
But according to what view you take of it, it is either the
gracious or the malicious gift of the great gods to man, that on
the threshold of any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise,
the thousand ulterior intricacies and emperilings to which
it must conduct; these, at the outset, are mostly withheld from
sight; and so, through her ever-primeval wilderness Fortune's
Knight rides on, alike ignorant of the palaces or the pitfalls in
its heart. Surprising, and past all ordinary belief, are those
strange oversights and inconsistencies, into which the enthusiastic
meditation upon unique or extreme resolves will sometimes
beget in young and over-ardent souls. That all-comprehending
oneness, that calm representativeness, by which a steady
philosophic mind reaches forth and draws to itself, in their collective
entirety, the objects of its contemplations; that pertains
not to the young enthusiast. By his eagerness, all objects are
deceptively foreshortened; by his intensity each object is viewed
as detached; so that essentially and relatively every thing is
in Pierre, which by reason of the above-named
cause which we have endeavored to portray, induced him to
cherish for a time four unitedly impossible designs. And now
we behold this hapless youth all eager to involve himself in
such an inextricable twist of Fate, that the three dextrous
maids themselves could hardly disentangle him, if once he tie
the complicating knots about him and Isabel.
Ah, thou rash boy! are there no couriers in the air to warn
thee away from these emperilings, and point thee to those Cretan
labyrinths, to which thy life's cord is leading thee? Where
now are the high beneficences? Whither fled the sweet angels
that are alledged guardians to man?
Not that the impulsive Pierre wholly overlooked all that was
menacing to him in his future, if now he acted out his most
rare resolve; but eagerly foreshortened by him, they assumed
not their full magnitude of menacing; nor, indeed,—so riveted
now his purpese—were they pushed up to his face, would he
for that renounce his self-renunciation; while concerning all
things more immediately contingent upon his central resolution;
these were, doubtless, in a measure, foreseen and understood
by him. Perfectly, at least, he seemed to foresee and
understand, that the present hope of Lucy Tartan must be
banished from his being; that this would carry a terrible pang
to her, which in the natural recoil would but redouble his own;
that to the world all his heroicness, standing equally unexplained
and unsuspected, therefore the world would denounce
him as infamously false to his betrothed; reckless of the most
binding human vows; a secret wooer and wedder of an unknown
and enigmatic girl; a spurner of all a loving mother's
wisest counselings; a bringer down of lasting reproach upon an
honorable name; a besotted self-exile from a most prosperous
house and bounteous fortune; and lastly, that now his whole
life would, in the eyes of the wide humanity, be covered with
be removed even in the concluding hour of death.
Such, oh thou son of man! are the perils and the miseries
thou callest down on thee, when, even in a virtuous cause, thou
steppest aside from those arbitrary lines of conduct, by which
the common world, however base and dastardly, surrounds thee
for thy worldly good.
Ofttimes it is very wonderful to trace the rarest and profoundest
things, and find their probable origin in something
extremely trite or trivial. Yet so strange and complicate is the
human soul; so much is confusedly evolved from out itself,
and such vast and varied accessions come to it from abroad,
and so impossible is it always to distinguish between these two,
that the wisest man were rash, positively to assign the precise
and incipient origination of his final thoughts and acts. Far as
we blind moles can see, man's life seems but an acting upon
mysterious hints; it is somehow hinted to us, to do thus or
thus. For surely no mere mortal who has at all gone down
into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act
solely originates in his own defined identity. This preamble
seems not entirely unnecessary as usher of the strange conceit,
that possibly the latent germ of Pierre's proposed extraordinary
mode of executing his proposed extraordinary resolve—namely,
the nominal conversion of a sister into a wife—might have
been found in the previous conversational conversion of a
mother into a sister; for hereby he had habituated his voice
and manner to a certain fictitiousness in one of the closest domestic
relations of life; and since man's moral texture is very
porous, and things assumed upon the surface, at last strike in
—hence, this outward habituation to the above-named fictitiousness
had insensibly disposed his mind to it as it were; but
only innocently and pleasantly as yet. If, by any possibility,
this general conceit be so, then to Pierre the times of sportfulness
were as pregnant with the hours of earnestness; and in
sport he learnt the terms of woe.
II.
If next to that resolve concerning his lasting fraternal succor
to Isabel, there was at this present time any determination in
Pierre absolutely inflexible, and partaking at once of the sacredness
and the indissolubleness of the most solemn oath, it was
the enthusiastic, and apparently wholly supererogatory resolution
to hold his father's memory untouched; nor to one single
being in the world reveal the paternity of Isabel. Unrecallably
dead and gone from out the living world, again returned
to utter helplessness, so far as this world went; his perished
father seemed to appeal to the dutifulness and mercifulness of
Pierre, in terms far more moving than though the accents proceeded
from his mortal mouth. And what though not through
the sin of Pierre, but through his father's sin, that father's fair
fame now lay at the mercy of the son, and could only be kept
inviolate by the son's free sacrifice of all earthly felicity;—
what if this were so? It but struck a still loftier chord in the
bosom of the son, and filled him with infinite magnanimities.
Never had the generous Pierre cherished the heathenish conceit,
that even in the general world, Sin is a fair object to be
stretched on the cruelest racks by self-complacent Virtue, that
self-complacent Virtue may feed her lily-liveredness on the
pallor of Sin's anguish. For perfect Virtue does not more
loudly claim our approbation, than repented Sin in its concludedness
does demand our utmost tenderness and concern. And
as the more immense the Virtue, so should be the more immense
our approbation; likewise the more immense the Sin,
the more infinite our pity. In some sort, Sin hath its sacredness,
not less than holiness. And great Sin calls forth more
magnanimity than small Virtue. What man, who is a man,
does not feel livelier and more generous emotions toward the
great god of Sin—Satan,—than toward yonder haberdasher,
trade?
Though Pierre profoundly shuddered at that impenetrable
yet blackly significant nebulousness, which the wild story of
Isabel threw around the early life of his father; yet as he recalled
the dumb anguish of the invocation of the empty and
the ashy hand uplifted from his father's death-bed, he most
keenly felt that of whatsoever unknown shade his father's guilt
might be, yet in the final hour of death it had been most dismally
repented of; by a repentance only the more full of utter
wretchedness, that it was a consuming secret in him. Mince
the matter how his family would, had not his father died a
raver? Whence that raving, following so prosperous a life?
Whence, but from the cruelest compunctions?
Touched thus, and strung in all his sinews and his nerves to
the holding of his father's memory intact,—Pierre turned his
confronting and unfrightened face toward Lucy Tartan, and
stilly vowed that not even she should know the whole; no, not
know the least.
There is an inevitable keen cruelty in the loftier heroism. It
is not heroism only to stand unflinched ourselves in the hour of
suffering; but it is heroism to stand unflinched both at our own
and at some loved one's united suffering; a united suffering, which
we could put an instant period to, if we would but renounce the
glorious cause for which ourselves do bleed, and see our most
loved one bleed. If he would not reveal his father's shame to
the common world, whose favorable opinion for himself, Pierre
now despised; how then reveal it to the woman he adored?
To her, above all others, would he now uncover his father's
tomb, and bid her behold from what vile attaintings he himself
had sprung? So Pierre turned round and tied Lucy to the
same stake which must hold himself, for he too plainly saw,
that it could not be, but that both their hearts must burn.
Yes, his resolve concerning his father's memory involved the
Here he could not explain himself, even to her. This would
aggravate the sharp pang of parting, by self-suggested, though
wholly groundless surmising in Lucy's mind, in the most miserable
degree contaminating to her idea of him. But on this
point, he still fondly trusted that without at all marring his
filial bond, he would be enabled by some significant intimations
to arrest in Lucy's mind those darker imaginings which might
find entrance there; and if he could not set her wholly right,
yet prevent her from going wildly wrong.
For his mother Pierre was more prepared. He considered
that by an inscrutable decree, which it was but foolishness to
try to evade, or shun, or deny existence to, since he felt it so
profoundly pressing on his inmost soul; the family of the Glendinnings
was imperiously called upon to offer up a victim to the
gods of woe; one grand victim at the least; and that grand
victim must be his mother, or himself. If he disclosed his
secret to the world, then his mother was made the victim; if at
all hazards he kept it to himself, then himself would be the victim.
A victim as respecting his mother, because under the peculiar
circumstances of the case, the non-disclosure of the secret
involved her entire and infamy-engendering misconception of
himself. But to this he bowed submissive.
One other thing—and the last to be here named, because the
very least in the conscious thoughts of Pierre; one other thing
remained to menace him with assured disastrousness. This
thing it was, which though but dimly hinted of as yet, still in
the apprehension must have exerted a powerful influence upon
Pierre, in preparing him for the worst.
His father's last and fatal sickness had seized him suddenly.
Both the probable concealed distraction of his mind with
reference to his early life as recalled to him in an evil hour,
and his consequent mental wanderings; these, with other
reasons, had prevented him from framing a new will to supersede
born. By that will which as yet had never been dragged into
the courts of law; and which, in the fancied security of her
own and her son's congenial and loving future, Mrs. Glendinning
had never but once, and then inconclusively, offered to
discuss, with a view to a better and more appropriate ordering
of things to meet circumstances non-existent at the period the
testament was framed; by that will, all the Glendinning property
was declared his mother's.
Acutely sensible to those prophetic intimations in him, which
painted in advance the haughty temper of his offended mother,
as all bitterness and scorn toward a son, once the object of her
proudest joy, but now become a deep reproach, as not only rebellious
to her, but glaringly dishonorable before the world;
Pierre distinctly foresaw, that as she never would have permitted
Isabel Banford in her true character to cross her threshold;
neither would she now permit Isabel Banford to cross her
threshold in any other, and disguised character; least of all, as
that unknown and insidious girl, who by some pernicious arts
had lured her only son from honor into infamy. But not to
admit Isabel, was now to exclude Pierre, if indeed on independent
grounds of exasperation against himself, his mother would
not cast him out.
Nor did the same interior intimations in him which forepainted
the above bearing of his mother, abstain to trace he
whole haughty heart as so unrelentingly set against him, that
while she would close her doors against both him and his fictitious
wife, so also she would not willingly contribute one copper
to support them in a supposed union so entirely abhorrent
to her. And though Pierre was not so familiar with the science
of the law, as to be quite certain what the law, if appealed to
concerning the provisions of his father's will, would decree concerning
any possible claims of the son to share with the mother
in the property of the sire; yet he prospectively felt an invincible
into open Court, and fighting over them with a base mercenary
motive, and with his own mother for the antagonist. For so
thoroughly did his infallible presentiments paint his mother's
character to him, as operated upon and disclosed in all those
fiercer traits,—hitherto held in abeyance by the mere chance
and felicity of circumstances,—that he felt assured that her exasperation
against him would even meet the test of a public
legal contention concerning the Glendinning property. For
indeed there was a reserved strength and masculineness in the
character of his mother, from which on all these points Pierre
had every thing to dread. Besides, will the matter how he
would, Pierre for nearly two whole years to come, would still
remain a minor, an infant in the eye of the law, incapable of
personally asserting any legal claim; and though he might sue
by his next friend, yet who would be his voluntary next friend,
when the execution of his great resolve would, for him, depopulate
all the world of friends?
Now to all these things, and many more, seemed the soul of
this infatuated young enthusiast braced.
III.
There is a dark, mad mystery in some human hearts, which,
sometimes, during the tyranny of a usurper mood, leads them
to be all eagerness to cast off the most intense beloved bond,
as a hindrance to the attainment of whatever transcendental
object that usurper mood so tyrannically suggests. Then the
beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential good; lifted to
exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale; endearments
we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the palpitating
forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless
as immortal bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek
gods themselves, prone we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious
once more; glad to hide these god-like heads within the
bosoms made of too-seducing clay.
Weary with the invariable earth, the restless sailor breaks
from every enfolding arm, and puts to sea in height of tempest
that blows off shore. But in long night-watches at the antipodes,
how heavily that ocean gloom lies in vast bales upon the
deck; thinking that that very moment in his deserted hamlet-home
the household sun is high, and many a sun-eyed maiden
meridian as the sun. He curses Fate; himself he curses; his
senseless madness, which is himself. For whoso once has
known this sweet knowledge, and then fled it; in absence, to him
the avenging dream will come.
Pierre was now this vulnerable god; this self-upbraiding
sailor; this dreamer of the avenging dream. Though in some
things he had unjuggled himself, and forced himself to eye the
prospect as it was; yet, so far as Lucy was concerned, he was
at bottom still a juggler. True, in his extraordinary scheme,
Lucy was so intimately interwoven, that it seemed impossible
for him at all to cast his future without some way having that
heart's love in view. But ignorant of its quantity as yet, or
fearful of ascertaining it; like an algebraist, for the real Lucy
he, in his scheming thoughts, had substituted but a sign—some
empty x—and in the ultimate solution of the problem, that
empty x still figured; not the real Lucy.
But now, when risen from the abasement of his chamber-floor,
and risen from the still profounder prostration of his soul,
Pierre had thought that all the horizon of his dark fate was
commanded by him; all his resolutions clearly defined, and immovably
decreed; now finally, to top all, there suddenly slid
into his inmost heart the living and breathing form of Lucy.
His lungs collapsed; his eyeballs glared; for the sweet imagined
on him from the grave; and her light hair swept far adown her
shroud.
Then, for the time, all minor things were whelmed in him;
his mother, Isabel, the whole wide world; and one only thing
remained to him;—this all-including query—Lucy or God?
But here we draw a vail. Some nameless struggles of the
soul can not be painted, and some woes will not be told. Let
the ambiguous procession of events reveal their own ambiguousness.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |