But into these ulterior refinements of cool Tuscan policy, Pierre as yet had never become initiated; his experiences hitherto not having been varied and ripe enough for that; besides, he had altogether too much generous blood in his heart. Nevertheless, thereafter, in a less immature hour, though still he shall not have the heart to practice upon such maxims as the above, yet shall ye have the brain thoroughly to comprehend their practicability; which is not always the case. And generally, in worldly wisdom, men will deny to one the possession of all insight, which one does not by his every-day outward life practically reveal. It is a very common error of some unscrupulously infidel-minded, selfish, unprincipled, or downright knavish men, to suppose that believing men, or benevolent-hearted men, or good men, do not know enough to be unscrupulously selfish, do not know enough to be unscrupulous knaves. And thus-thanks to the world! — are there many spies in the world's camp, who are mistaken for strolling simpletons. And these strolling simpletons seem to act upon the principle, that in certain things, we do not so much learn, by showing that already we know a vast deal, as by negatively seeming rather ignorant. But here we press upon the frontiers of that sort of wisdom, which it is very well to possess, but not sagacious to show that you possess. Still, men there are, who having quite done with the world, all its mere worldly contents are become so far indifferent, that they care little of what mere worldly imprudence they may be guilty.
Now, if it were not conscious considerations like the really benevolent or neutral ones first mentioned above, it was certainly something akin to them, which had induced Pierre to return a straightforward, manly, and entire acceptance to his cousin of the offer of the house; thanking him, over and over, for his most supererogatory kindness concerning the pre-engagement of servants and so forth, and the setting in order of the silver and china; but reminding him, nevertheless, that he had overlooked all special mention of wines, and begged him to store the bins with a few of the very best brands. He would likewise be obliged, if he would personally purchase at a certain celebrated grocer's, a small bag of undoubted Mocha coffee; but Glen need not order it to be roasted or ground, because Pierre preferred that both those highly important and flavor-deciding operations should be performed instantaneously previous to the final boiling and serving. Nor did he say that he would pay for the wines and the Mocha; he contented himself with merely stating the remissness on the part of his cousin, and pointing out the best way of remedying it.
He concluded his letter by intimating that though the rumor of a set day, and a near one, for his nuptials, was unhappily but ill-founded, yet he would not hold Glen's generous offer as merely based upon that presumption, and consequently falling with it; but on the contrary, would consider it entirely good for whatever time it might prove available to Pierre. He was betrothed beyond a peradventure; and hoped to be married ere death. Meanwhile, Glen would further oblige him by giving the confidential clerk a standing notice to quit.
Though at first quite amazed at this letter, — for indeed, his offer might possibly have proceeded as much from ostentation as any thing else, nor had he dreamed of so unhesitating an acceptance, — Pierre's cousin was too much of a precocious young man of the world, disclosedly to take it in any other than a very friendly, and cousinly, and humorous, and yet practical way; which he plainly evinced by a reply far more sincere and every way creditable, apparently, both to his heart and head, than any letter he had written to Pierre since the days of their boyhood. And thus, by the bluffness and, in some sort, uncompunctiousness of Pierre, this very artificial youth was well betrayed into an act of effective kindness; being forced now to drop the empty mask of ostentation, and put on the solid hearty features of a genuine face. And just so, are some people in the world to be joked into occasional effective goodness, when all coyness, and coolness, all resentments, and all solemn preaching, would fail.
II
But little would we comprehend the peculiar relation between Pierre and Glen-a relation involving in the end the most serious results-were there not here thrown over the whole equivocal, preceding account of it, another and more comprehensive equivocalness, which shall absorb all minor ones in itself; and so make one pervading ambiguity the only possible explanation for all the ambiguous details.
It had long been imagined by Pierre, that prior to his own special devotion to Lucy, the splendid Glen had not been entirely insensible to her surprising charms. Yet this conceit in its incipiency, he knew not how to account for. Assuredly his cousin had never in the slightest conceivable hint betrayed it; and as for Lucy, the same intuitive delicacy which forever forbade Pierre to question her on the subject, did equally close her own voluntary lips. Between Pierre and Lucy, delicateness put her sacred signet on this chest of secrecy; which like the wax of an executor upon a desk, though capable of being melted into nothing by the smallest candle, for all this, still possesses to the reverent the prohibitive virtue of inexorable bars and bolts.
If Pierre superficially considered the deportment of Glen toward him, therein he could find no possible warrant for indulging the suspicious idea. Doth jealousy smile so benignantly and offer its house to the bride? Still, on the other hand, to quit the mere surface of the deportment of Glen, and penetrate beneath its brocaded vesture; there Pierre sometimes seemed to see the long-lurking and yet unhealed wound of all a rejected lover's most rankling detestation of a supplanting rival, only intensified by their former friendship, and the unimpairable blood-relation between them. Now, viewed by the light of this master-solution, all the singlar enigmas in Glen; his capriciousness in the matter of the epistolary- "Dear Pierres" and "Dearest Pierres"; the mercurial fall from the fever-heat of cordiality, to below the zero of indifference; then the contrary rise to fever-heat; and, above all, his emphatic redundancy of devotion so soon as the positive espousals of Pierre seemed on the point of consummation; thus read, all these riddles apparently found their cunning solution. For the deeper that some men feel a secret and poignant feeling, the higher they pile the belying surfaces. The friendly deportment of Glen then was to be considered as in direct proportion to his hoarded hate; and the climax of that hate was evinced in throwing open his house to the bride. Yet if hate was the abstract cause, hate could not be the immediate motive of the conduct of Glen. Is hate so hospitable? The immediate motive of Glen then must be the intense desire to disguise from the wide world, a fact unspeakably humiliating to his gold-laced and haughty souclass="underline" the fact that in the profoundest desire of his heart, Pierre had so victoriously supplanted bun. Yet was it that very artful deportment in Glen, which Glen profoundly assumed to this grand end; that consummately artful deportment it was, which first obtruded upon Pierre the surmise, which by that identical method his cousin was so absorbedly intent upon rendering impossible to him. Hence we here see that as in the negative way the secrecy of any strong emotion is exceedingly difficult to be kept lastingly private to one's own bosom by any human being; so it is one of the most fruitless undertakings in the world, to attempt by affirmative assumptions to tender to men, the precisely opposite emotion as yours. Therefore the final wisdom decrees, that if you have aught which you desire to keep a secret to yourself, be a Quietist there, and do and say nothing at all about it. For among all the poor chances, this is the least poor. Pretensions and substitutions are only the recourse of under-graduates in the science of the world; in which science, on his own ground, my Lord Chesterfield is the poorest possible preceptor. The earliest instinct of the child, and the ripest experience of age, unite in affirming simplicity to be the truest and profoundest part for man. Likewise this simplicity is so universal and all-containing as a rule for human life, that the subtlest bad man, and the purest good man, as well as the profoundest wise man, do all alike present it on that side which they socially turn to the inquisitive and unscrupulous world.