 | Pierre, or, The ambiguities |  |
12. BOOK XII.
ISABEL: MRS. GLENDINNING: THE PORTRAIT:
AND LUCY.
I.
When on the previous night Pierre had left the farm-house
where Isabel harbored, it will be remembered that no hour,
either of night or day, no special time at all had been assigned
for a succeeding interview. It was Isabel, who for some doubtlessly
sufficient reason of her own, had, for the first meeting, assigned
the early hour of darkness.
As now, when the full sun was well up the heavens, Pierre
drew near the farm-house of the Ulvers, he described Isabel,
standing without the little dairy-wing, occupied in vertically
arranging numerous glittering shield-like milk-pans on a long
shelf, where they might purifyingly meet the sun. Her back
was toward him. As Pierre passed through the open wicket
and crossed the short soft green sward, he unconsciously muffled
his footsteps, and now standing close behind his sister, touched
her shoulder and stood still.
She started, trembled, turned upon him swiftly, made a low,
strange cry, and then gazed rivetedly and imploringly upon him.
“I look rather queerish, sweet Isabel, do I not?” said Pierre
at last with a writhed and painful smile.
“My brother, my blessed brother!—speak—tell me—what
have warned thee before, Pierre, Pierre; it is my fault—mine,
mine!”
“What is thy fault, sweet Isabel?”
“Thou hast revealed Isabel to thy mother, Pierre.”
“I have not, Isabel. Mrs. Glendinning knows not thy secret
at all.”
“Mrs. Glendinning?—that's,—that's thine own mother,
Pierre! In heaven's name, my brother, explain thyself. Knows
not my secret, and yet thou here so suddenly, and with such a
fatal aspect? Come, come with me into the house. Quick,
Pierre, why dost thou not stir? Oh, my God! if mad myself
sometimes, I am to make mad him who loves me best, and who,
I fear, has in some way ruined himself for me;—then, let me
no more stand upright on this sod, but fall prone beneath it,
that I may be hidden! Tell me!” catching Pierre's arms in
both her frantic hands—“tell me, do I blast where I look? is
my face Gorgon's?”
“Nay, sweet Isabel; but it hath a more sovereign power;
that turned to stone; thine might turn white marble into
mother's milk.”
“Come with me—come quickly.”
They passed into the dairy, and sat down on a bench by the
honey-suckled casement.
“Pierre, forever fatal and accursed be the day my longing
heart called thee to me, if now, in the very spring-time of our
related love, thou art minded to play deceivingly with me, even
though thou should'st fancy it for my good. Speak to me; oh
speak to me, my brother!”
“Thou hintest of deceiving one for one's good. Now supposing,
sweet Isabel, that in no case would I affirmatively deceive
thee;—in no case whatever;—would'st thou then be willing
for thee and me to piously deceive others, for both their
and our united good?—Thou sayest nothing. Now, then, is
me!”
“That unknown, approaching thing, seemeth ever ill, my
brother, which must have unfrank heralds to go before. Oh,
Pierre, dear, dear Pierre; be very careful with me! This
strange, mysterious, unexampled love between us, makes me all
plastic in thy hand. Be very careful with me. I know little
out of me. The world seems all one unknown India to me.
Look up, look on me, Pierre; say now, thou wilt be very careful;
say so, say so, Pierre!”
“If the most exquisite, and fragile filagree of Genoa be carefully
handled by its artisan; if sacred nature carefully folds, and
warms, and by inconceivable attentivenesses eggs round and
round her minute and marvelous embryoes; then, Isabel, do I
most carefully and most tenderly egg thee, gentlest one, and the
fate of thee! Short of the great God, Isabel, there lives none
who will be more careful with thee, more infinitely considerate
and delicate with thee.”
“From my deepest heart, do I believe thee, Pierre. Yet
thou mayest be very delicate in some point, where delicateness
is not all essential, and in some quick impulsive hour, omit thy
fullest heedfulness somewhere where heedlessness were most
fatal. Nay, nay, my brother; bleach these locks snow-white,
thou sun! if I have any thought to reproach thee, Pierre, or
betray distrust of thee. But earnestness must sometimes seem
suspicious, else it is none. Pierre, Pierre, all thy aspect speaks
eloquently of some already executed resolution, born in suddenness.
Since I last saw thee, Pierre, some deed irrevocable
has been done by thee. My soul is stiff and starched to it;
now tell me what it is?”
“Thou, and I, and Delly Ulver, to-morrow morning depart
this whole neighborhood, and go to the distant city.—That is
it.”
“No more?”
“Is it not enough?”
“There is something more, Pierre.”
“Thou hast not yet answered a question I put to thee but
just now. Bethink thee, Isabel. The deceiving of others by
thee and me, in a thing wholly pertaining to ourselves, for their
and our united good. Wouldst thou?”
“I would do any thing that does not tend to the marring of
thy best lasting fortunes, Pierre. What is it thou wouldst
have thee and me to do together? I wait; I wait!”
“Let us go into the room of the double casement, my sister,”
said Pierre, rising.
“Nay, then; if it can not be said here, then can I not do it
anywhere, my brother; for it would harm thee.”
“Girl!” cried Pierre, sternly, “if for thee I have lost”—but
he checked himself.
“Lost? for me? Now does the very worst blacken on me.
Pierre! Pierre!”
“I was foolish, and sought but to frighten thee, my sister.
It was very foolish. Do thou now go on with thine innocent
work here, and I will come again a few hours hence. Let me
go now.”
He was turning from her, when Isabel sprang forward to him,
caught him with both her arms round him, and held him so
convulsively, that her hair sideways swept over him, and half
concealed him.
“Pierre, if indeed my soul hath cast on thee the same black
shadow that my hair now flings on thee; if thou hast lost
aught for me; then eternally is Isabel lost to Isabel, and Isabel
will not outlive this night. If I am indeed an accursing thing,
I will not act the given part, but cheat the air, and die from it.
See; I let thee go, lest some poison I know not of distill upon
thee from me.”
She slowly drooped, and trembled from him. But Pierre
caught her, and supported her.
“Foolish, foolish one! Behold, in the very bodily act of
loosing hold of me, thou dost reel and fall;—unanswerable
emblem of the indispensable heart-stay, I am to thee, my
sweet, sweet Isabel! Prate not then of parting.”
“What hast thou lost for me? Tell me!”
“A gainful loss, my sister!”
“'Tis mere rhetoric! What hast thou lost?”
“Nothing that my inmost heart would now recall. I have
bought inner love and glory by a price, which, large or small,
I would not now have paid me back, so I must return the
thing I bought.”
“Is love then cold, and glory white? Thy cheek is snowy,
Pierre.”
“It should be, for I believe to God that I am pure, let the
world think how it may.”
“What hast thou lost?”
“Not thee, nor the pride and glory of ever loving thee, and
being a continual brother to thee, my best sister. Nay, why
dost thou now turn thy face from me?”
“With fine words he wheedles me, and coaxes me, not to
know some secret thing. Go, go, Pierre, come to me when
thou wilt. I am steeled now to the worst, aud to the last.
Again I tell thee, I will do any thing—yes, any thing that Pierre
commands—for, though outer ill do lower upon us, still, deep
within, thou wilt be careful, very careful with me, Pierre?”
“Thou art made of that fine, unshared stuff of which God
makes his seraphim. But thy divine devotedness to me, is met
by mine to thee. Well mayest thou trust me, Isabel; and
whatever strangest thing I may yet propose to thee, thy confidence,—will
it not bear me out? Surely thou will not hesitate
to plunge, when I plunge first;—already have I plunged! now
thou canst not stay upon the bank. Hearken, hearken to me.—
I seek not now to gain thy prior assent to a thing as yet undone;
but I call to thee now, Isabel, from the depth of a foregone
hard upon me. Listen. I will tell all. Isabel, though thou
art all fearfulness to injure any living thing, least of all, thy
brother; still thy true heart foreknoweth not the myriad alliances
and criss-crossings among mankind, the infinite entanglements
of all social things, which forbids that one thread should
fly the general fabric, on some new line of duty, without tearing
itself and tearing others. Listen. All that has happened
up to this moment, and all that may be yet to happen, some
sudden inspiration now assures me, inevitably proceeded from
the first hour I saw thee. Not possibly could it, or can it, be
otherwise. Therefore feel I, that I have some patience. Listen.
Whatever outer things might possibly be mine; whatever
seeming brightest blessings; yet now to live uncomforting and
unloving to thee, Isabel; now to dwell domestically away from
thee; so that only by stealth, and base connivances of the night,
I could come to thee as thy related brother; this would be, and
is, unutterably impossible. In my bosom a secret adder of self-reproach
and self-infamy would never leave off its sting. Listen.
But without gratuitous dishonor to a memory which—for
right cause or wrong—is ever sacred and inviolate to me, I
can not be an open brother to thee, Isabel. But thou wantest
not the openness; for thou dost not pine for empty nominalness,
but for vital realness; what thou wantest, is not the occasional
openness of my brotherly love; but its continual domestic
confidence. Do I not speak thine own hidden heart to thee?
say, Isabel? Well, then, still listen to me. One only way
presents to this; a most strange way, Isabel; to the world, that
never throbbed for thee in love, a most deceitful way; but to
all a harmless way; so harmless in its essence, Isabel, that,
seems to me, Pierre hath consulted heaven itself upon it, and
heaven itself did not say Nay. Still, listen to me; mark me.
As thou knowest that thou wouldst now droop and die without
me; so would I without thee. We are equal there; mark
we both reach up alike to a glorious ideal! Now the continualness,
the secretness, yet the always present domesticness of
our love; how may we best compass that, without jeopardizing
the ever-sacred memory I hinted of? One way—one way—
only one! A strange way, but most pure. Listen. Brace
thyself: here, let me hold thee now; and then whisper it to
thee, Isabel. Come, I holding thee, thou canst not fall.”
He held her tremblingly; she bent over toward him; his
mouth wet her ear; he whispered it.
The girl moved not; was done with all her tremblings;
leaned closer to him, with an inexpressible strangeness of an
intense love, new and inexplicable. Over the face of Pierre
there shot a terrible self-revelation; he imprinted repeated
burning kisses upon her; pressed hard her hand; would not
let go her sweet and awful passiveness.
Then they changed; they coiled together, and entangledly
stood mute.
II.
Mrs. Glendinning walked her chamber; her dress loosened.
“That such accursed vileness should proceed from me!
Now will the tongued world say—See the vile boy of Mary
Glendinning!—Deceitful! thick with guilt, where I thought it
was all guilelessness and gentlest docility to me. It has not
happened! It is not day! Were this thing so, I should go
mad, and be shut up, and not walk here where every door is
open to me.—My own only son married to an unknown—
thing! My own only son, false to his holiest plighted public
vow—and the wide world knowing to it! He bears my name
—Glendinning. I will disown it; were it like this dress, I
to a crisp!—Pierre! Pierre! come back, come back, and swear
it is not so! It can not be! Wait: I will ring the bell, and
see if it be so.”
She rung the bell with violence, and soon heard a responsive
knock.
“Come in!—Nay, falter not;” (throwing a shawl over her)
“come in. Stand there and tell me if thou darest, that my
son was in this house this morning and met me on the stairs.
Darest thou say that?”
Dates looked confounded at her most unwonted aspect.
“Say it! find thy tongue! Or I will root mine out and
fling it at thee! Say it!”
“My dear mistress!”
“I am not thy mistress! but thou my master; for, if thou
sayest it, thou commandest me to madness.—Oh, vile boy!—
Begone from me!”
She locked the door upon him, and swiftly and distractedly
walked her chamber. She paused, and tossing down the curtains,
shut out the sun from the two windows.
Another, but an unsummoned knock, was at the door. She
opened it.
“My mistress, his Reverence is below. I would not call
you, but he insisted.”
“Let him come up.”
“Here? Immediately?”
“Didst thou hear me? Let Mr. Falsgrave come up.”
As if suddenly and admonishingly made aware, by Dates,
of the ungovernable mood of Mrs. Glendinning, the clergyman
entered the open door of her chamber with a most deprecating
but honest reluctance, and apprehensiveness of he knew not
what.
“Be seated, sir; stay, shut the door and lock it.”
“Madam!”
“I will do it. Be seated. Hast thou seen him?”
“Whom, Madam?—Master Pierre?”
“Him!—quick!”
“It was to speak of him I came, Madam. He made a most
extraordinary call upon me last night—midnight.”
“And thou marriedst him?—Damn thee!”
“Nay, nay, nay, Madam; there is something here I know
not of—I came to tell thee news, but thou hast some o'erwhelming
tidings to reveal to me.”
“I beg no pardons; but I may be sorry. Mr. Falsgrave,
my son, standing publicly plighted to Lucy Tartan, has privately
wedded some other girl—some slut!”
“Impossible!”
“True as thou art there. Thou knowest nothing of it then?”
“Nothing, nothing—not one grain till now. Who is it he
has wedded?”
“Some slut, I tell thee!—I am no lady now, but something
deeper,—a woman!—an outraged and pride-poisoned woman!”
She turned from him swiftly, and again paced the room, as
frantic and entirely regardless of any presence. Waiting for
her to pause, but in vain, Mr. Falsgrave advanced toward her
cautiously, and with the profoundest deference, which was almost
a cringing, spoke:—
“It is the hour of woe to thee; and I confess my cloth hath no
consolation for thee yet awhile. Permit me to withdraw from
thee, leaving my best prayers for thee, that thou mayst know
some peace, ere this now shut-out sun goes down. Send for
me whenever thou desirest me.—May I go now?”
“Begone! and let me not hear thy soft, mincing voice,
which is an infamy to a man! Begone, thou helpless, and unhelping
one!”
She swiftly paced the room again, swiftly muttering to herself.
“Now, now, now, now I see it clearer, clearer—clear now
as day! My first dim suspicions pointed right!—too right!
gazing rooted at her. He would not speak going home with
me. I charged him with his silence; he put me off with lies,
lies, lies! Ay, ay, he is married to her, to her;—to her!—
perhaps was then. And yet,—and yet,—how can it be?—
Lucy, Lucy—I saw him, after that, look on her as if he would
be glad to die for her, and go to hell for her, whither he deserves
to go!—Oh! oh! oh! Thus ruthlessly to cut off, at one
gross sensual dash, the fair succession of an honorable race!
Mixing the choicest wine with filthy water from the plebeian
pool, and so turning all to undistinguishable rankness!—Oh
viper! had I thee now in me, I would be a suicide and a murderer
with one blow!”
A third knock was at the door. She opened it.
“My mistress, I thought it would disturb you,—it is so just
overhead,—so I have not removed them yet.”
“Unravel thy gibberish!—what is it?”
“Pardon, my mistress, I somehow thought you knew it, but
you can not.”
“What is that writing crumpling in thy hand? Give it
me.”
“I have promised my young master not to, my mistress.”
“I will snatch it, then, and so leave thee blameless.—What?
what? what?—He's mad sure!—`Fine old fellow Dates'—
what? what?—mad and merry!—chest?—clothes?—trunks?
—he wants them?—Tumble them out of his window!—and if
he stand right beneath, tumble them out! Dismantle that
whole room. Tear up the carpet. I swear, he shall leave no
smallest vestige in this house.—Here! this very spot—here,
here, where I stand, he may have stood upon;—yes, he tied
my shoe-string here; it's slippery! Dates!”
“My mistress.”
“Do his bidding. By reflection he has made me infamous
to the world; and I will make him infamous to it. Listen, and
room” (pointing upward), “and remove every article in it, and
where he bid thee set down the chest and trunks, there set
down all the contents of that room.”
“'Twas before the house—this house!”
“And if it had not been there, I would not order thee to put
them there. Dunce! I would have the world know that I disown
and scorn him! Do my bidding!—Stay. Let the room
stand; but take him what he asks for.”
“I will, my mistress.”
As Dates left the chamber, Mrs. Glendinning again paced it
swiftly, and again swiftly muttered: “Now, if I were less a
strong and haughty woman, the fit would have gone by ere
now. But deep volcanoes long burn, ere they burn out.—Oh,
that the world were made of such malleable stuff, that we could
recklessly do our fieriest heart's-wish before it, and not falter.
Accursed be those four syllables of sound which make up that
vile word Propriety. It is a chain and bell to drag;—drag?
what sound is that? there's dragging—his trunks—the traveler's—dragging
out. Oh would I could so drag my heart, as
fishers for the drowned do, as that I might drag up my sunken
happiness! Boy! boy! worse than brought in dripping
drowned to me,—drowned in icy infamy! Oh! oh! oh!”
She threw herself upon the bed, covered her face, and lay
motionless. But suddenly rose again, and hurriedly rang the
bell.
“Open that desk, and draw the stand to me. Now wait and
take this to Miss Lucy.”
With a pencil she rapidly traced these lines:—
“My heart bleeds for thee, sweet Lucy. I can not speak—I
know it all. Look for me the first hour I regain myself.”
Again she threw herself upon the bed, and lay motionless.
III.
Toward sundown that evening, Pierre stood in one of the
three bespoken chambers in the Black Swan Inn; the blue
chintz-covered chest and the writing-desk before him. His
hands were eagerly searching through his pockets.
“The key! the key! Nay, then, I must force it open. It
bodes ill, too. Yet lucky is it, some bankers can break into
their own vaults, when other means do fail. Not so, ever.
Let me see:—yes, the tongs there. Now then for the sweet
sight of gold and silver. I never loved it till this day. How
long it has been hoarded;—little token pieces, of years ago,
from aunts, uncles, cousins innumerable, and from—but I won't
mention them; dead henceforth to me! Sure there'll be a
premium on such ancient gold. There's some broad bits, token
pieces to my—I name him not—more than half a century ago.
Well, well, I never thought to cast them back into the sordid
circulations whence they came. But if they must be spent,
now is the time, in this last necessity, and in this sacred cause.
'Tis a most stupid, dunderheaded crowbar. Hoy! so! ah, now
for it:—snake's nest!”
Forced suddenly back, the chest-lid had as suddenly revealed
to him the chair-portrait lying on top of all the rest, where he
had secreted it some days before. Face up, it met him with
its noiseless, ever-nameless, and ambiguous, unchanging smile.
Now his first repugnance was augmented by an emotion altogether
new. That certain lurking lineament in the portrait,
whose strange transfer blended with far other, and sweeter, and
nobler characteristics, was visible in the countenance of Isabel;
that lineament in the portrait was somehow now detestable;
nay, altogether loathsome, ineffably so, to Pierre. He argued
not with himself why this was so; he only felt it, and most
keenly.
Omitting more subtile inquisition into this deftly-winding
theme, it will be enough to hint, perhaps, that possibly one
source of this new hatefulness had its primary and unconscious
rise in one of those profound ideas, which at times atmospherically,
as it were, do insinuate themselves even into very ordinary
minds. In the strange relativeness, reciprocalness, and
transmittedness, between the long-dead father's portrait, and the
living daughter's face, Pierre might have seemed to see reflected
to him, by visible and uncontradictable symbols, the tyranny
of Time and Fate. Painted before the daughter was conceived
or born, like a dumb seer, the portrait still seemed leveling its
prophetic finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally
emerge. There seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and
vitality in the picture; because, since in his own memory of his
father, Pierre could not recall any distinct lineament transmitted
to Isabel, but vaguely saw such in the portrait; therefore,
not Pierre's parent, as any way rememberable by him, but the
portrait's painted self seemed the real father of Isabel; for, so
far as all sense went, Isabel had inherited one peculiar trait nowhither
traceable but to it.
And as his father was now sought to be banished from his
mind, as a most bitter presence there, but Isabel was become a
thing of intense and fearful love for him; therefore, it was loathsome
to him, that in the smiling and ambiguous portrait, her
sweet mournful image should be so sinisterly becrooked, bemixed,
and mutilated to him.
When the first shock, and then the pause were over, he lifted
the portrait in his two hands, and held it averted from him.
“It shall not live. Hitherto I have hoarded up mementoes
and monuments of the past; been a worshiper of all heirlooms;
a fond filer away of letters, locks of hair, bits of ribbon,
flowers, and the thousand-and-one minutenesses which love and
memory think they sanctify:—but it is forever over now! If
to me any memory shall henceforth be dear, I will not mummy
gather on. Love's museum is vain and foolish as the Catacombs,
where grinning apes and abject lizards are embalmed,
as, forsooth, significant of some imagined charm. It speaks
merely of decay and death, and nothing more; decay and
death of endless innumerable generations; it makes of earth
one mold. How can lifelessness be fit memorial of life?—So
far, for mementoes of the sweetest. As for the rest—now I
know this, that in commonest memorials, the twilight fact of
death first discloses in some secret way, all the ambiguities of
that departed thing or person; obliquely it casts hints, and insinuates
surmises base, and eternally incapable of being cleared.
Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the
last scene of the last act of man's play;—a play, which begin
how it may, in farce or comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the
curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse. Therefore, never more
will I play the vile pigmy, and by small memorials after death,
attempt to reverse the decree of death, by essaying the poor
perpetuating of the image of the original. Let all die, and mix
again! As for this—this!—why longer should I preserve it?
Why preserve that on which one can not patient look? If I
am resolved to hold his public memory inviolate,—destroy this
thing; for here is the one great, condemning, and unsuborned
proof, whose mysticalness drives me half mad.—Of old Greek
times, before man's brain went into doting bondage, and
bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs
lost their barbaric tan and beauty; when the round world was
fresh, and rosy, and spicy, as a new-plucked apple;—all's wilted
now!—in those bold times, the great dead were not, turkey-like,
dished in trenchers, and set down all garnished in the
ground, to glut the damned Cyclop like a cannibal; but nobly
envious Life cheated the glutton worm, and gloriously burned
the corpse; so that the spirit up-pointed, and visibly forked to
heaven!
“So now will I serve thee. Though that solidity of which
thou art the unsolid duplicate, hath long gone to its hideous
church-yard account;—and though, God knows! but for one
part of thee it may have been fit auditing;—yet will I now a
second time see thy obsequies performed, and by now burning
thee, urn thee in the great vase of air! Come now!”
A small wood-fire had been kindled on the hearth to purify
the long-closed room; it was now diminished to a small pointed
heap of glowing embers. Detaching and dismembering the
gilded but tarnished frame, Pierre laid the four pieces on the
coals; as their dryness soon caught the sparks, he rolled the
reversed canvas into a scroll, and tied it, and committed it
to the now crackling, clamorous flames. Steadfastly Pierre
watched the first crispings and blackenings of the painted scroll,
but started as suddenly unwinding from the burnt string that
had tied it, for one swift instant, seen through the flame and
smoke, the upwrithing portrait tormentedly stared at him in
beseeching horror, and then, wrapped in one broad sheet of oily
fire, disappeared forever.
Yielding to a sudden ungovernable impulse, Pierre darted
his hand among the flames, to rescue the imploring face; but
as swiftly drew back his scorched and bootless grasp. His
hand was burnt and blackened, but he did not heed it.
He ran back to the chest, and seizing repeated packages of
family letters, and all sorts of miscellaneous memorials in paper,
he threw them one after the other upon the fire.
“Thus, and thus, and thus! on thy manes I fling fresh
spoils; pour out all my memory in one libation!—so, so, so—
lower, lower, lower; now all is done, and all is ashes! Henceforth,
cast-out Pierre hath no paternity, and no past; and since
the Future is one blank to all; therefore, twice-disinherited
Pierre stands untrammeledly his ever-present self!—free to do
his own self-will and present fancy to whatever end!”
IV.
That same sunset Lucy lay in her chamber. A knock
was heard at its door, and the responding Martha was met by
the now self-controlled and resolute face of Mrs. Glendinning.
“How is your young mistress, Martha? May I come in?”
But waiting for no answer, with the same breath she passed
the maid, and determinately entered the room.
She sat down by the bed, and met the open eye, but closed
and pallid mouth of Lucy. She gazed rivetedly and inquisitively
a moment; then turned a quick aghast look toward
Martha, as if seeking warrant for some shuddering thought.
“Miss Lucy”—said Martha—“it is your—it is Mrs. Glendinning.
Speak to her, Miss Lucy.”
As if left in the last helpless attitude of some spent contortion
of her grief, Lucy was not lying in the ordinary posture of
one in bed, but lay half crosswise upon it, with the pale pillows
propping her hueless form, and but a single sheet thrown
over her, as though she were so heart overladen, that her white
body could not bear one added feather. And as in any snowy,
marble statue, the drapery clings to the limbs; so as one found
drowned, the thin, defining sheet invested Lucy.
“It is Mrs. Glendinning. Will you speak to her, Miss Lucy?”
The thin lips moved and trembled for a moment, and then
were still again, and augmented pallor shrouded her.
Martha brought restoratives; and when all was as before,
she made a gesture for the lady to depart, and in a whisper,
said, “She will not speak to any; she does not speak to me.
The doctor has just left—he has been here five times since
morning—and says she must be kept entirely quiet.” Then
pointing to the stand, added, “You see what he has left—mere
restoratives. Quiet is her best medicine now, he says. Quiet,
quiet, quiet! Oh, sweet quiet, wilt thou now ever come?”
“Has Mrs. Tartan been written to?” whispered the lady.
Martha nodded.
So the lady moved to quit the room, saying that once every
two hours she would send to know how Lucy fared.
“But where, where is her aunt, Martha?” she exclaimed,
lowly, pausing at the door, and glancing in sudden astonishment
about the room; “surely, surely, Mrs. Lanyllyn—”
“Poor, poor old lady,” weepingly whispered Martha, “she
hath caught infection from sweet Lucy's woe; she hurried
hither, caught one glimpse of that bed, and fell like dead upon
the floor. The Doctor hath two patients now, lady”—glancing
at the bed, and tenderly feeling Lucy's bosom, to mark if yet
it heaved; “Alack! Alack! oh, reptile! reptile! that could
sting so sweet a breast! fire would be too cold for him—accursed!”
“Thy own tongue blister the roof of thy mouth!” cried Mrs.
Glendinning, in a half-stifled, whispering scream. “'Tis not
for thee, hired one, to rail at my son, though he were Lucifer,
simmering in Hell! Mend thy manners, minx!”
And she left the chamber, dilated with her unconquerable
pride, leaving Martha aghast at such venom in such beauty.
| Pierre, or, The ambiguities | |