"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 reminiscence 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 daughter, yet were they entirely inconclusive as 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 he 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 meditations 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; he who professionally deals in 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, some way, 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-and 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 craft darted out from among the lofty pine-forests of ships'-masts, 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.