"Pierre! Pierre! what change is this? Didst thou not tell me, ere we came hither, that thy chest not only contained some silver and gold, but likewise far more precious things, readily convertible into silver and gold? Ah, Pierre, thou didst swear we had naught to fear!"
"If I have ever willfully deceived thee, Isabel, may the high gods prove Benedict Arnolds to me, and go over to the devils to reinforce them against me! But to have ignorantly deceived myself and thee together, Isabel; that is a very different thing. Oh, what a vile juggler and cheat is man! Isabel, in that chest are things which in the hour of composition, I thought the very heavens looked in from the windows in astonishment at their beauty and power. Then, afterward, when days cooled me down, and again I took them up and scanned them, some underlying suspicions intruded; but when in the open air, I recalled the fresh, unwritten images of the bunglingly written things; then I felt buoyant and triumphant again; as if by that act of ideal recalling, I had, forsooth, transferred the perfect ideal to the miserable written attempt at embodying it. This mood remained. So that afterward how I talked to thee about the wonderful things I had done; the gold and the silver mine I had long before sprung for thee and for me, who never were to come to want in body or mind. Yet all this time, there was the latent suspicion of folly; but I would not admit it; I shut my soul's door in its face. Yet now, the ten thousand universal revealings brand me on the forehead with fool! and like protested notes at the Banker's, all those written things of mine, are jaggingly cut through and through with the protesting hammer of Truth! — Oh, I am sick, sick, sick!"
"Let the arms that never were filled but by thee, lure thee back again, Pierre, to the peace of the twilight, even though it be of the dimmest!"
She blew out the light, and made Pierre sit down by her; and their hands were placed in each other's.
"Say, are not thy torments now gone, my brother?"
"But replaced by-by-by-Oh God, Isabel, unhand me!" cried Pierre, starting up. "Ye heavens, that have hidden yourselves in the black hood of the night, I call to ye! If to follow Virtue to her uttermost vista, where common souls never go; if by that I take hold on hell, and the uttermost virtue, after all, prove but a betraying pander to the monstrousest vice, — then close in and crush me, ye stony walls, and into one gulf let all things tumble together!"
"My brother! This is some incomprehensible raving," pealed Isabel, throwing both arms around him;-"my brother, my brother!"
"Hark thee to thy furthest inland soul"-thrilled Pierre in a steeled and quivering voice. "Call me brother no more! How knowest thou I am thy brother? Did thy mother tell thee? Did my father say so to me? — I am Pierre, and thou Isabel, wide brother and sister in the common humanity, — no more. For the rest, let the gods look after their own combustibles. If they have put powder-casks in me-let them look to it! let them look to it! Ah! now I catch glimpses, and seem to half see, somehow, that the uttermost ideal of moral perfection in man is wide of the mark. The demi-gods trample on trash, and Virtue and Vice are trash! Isabel, I will write such things — I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse! — I will write it, I will write it!"
"Pierre, I am a poor girl, born in the midst of a mystery, bred in mystery, and still surviving to mystery. So mysterious myself, the air and the earth are unutterable to me; no word have I to express them. But these are the circumambient mysteries; thy words, thy thoughts, open other wonder-worlds to me, whither by myself I might fear to go. But trust to me, Pierre. With thee, with thee, I would boldly swim a starless sea, and be buoy to thee, there, when thou the strong swimmer shouldst faint. Thou, Pierre, speakest of Virtue and Vice; life-secluded Isabel knows neither the one nor the other, but by hearsay. What are they, in their real selves, Pierre? Tell me first what is Virtue:-begin!"
"If on that point the gods are dumb, shall a pigmy speak? Ask the air!"
"Then Virtue is nothing."
"Not that!"
"Then Vice?"
"Look: a nothing is the substance, it casts one shadow one way, and another the other way; and these two shadows cast from one nothing; these, seems to me, are Virtue and Vice."
"Then why torment thyself so, dearest Pierre?"
"It is the law."
"What?"
"That a nothing should torment a nothing; for I am a nothing. It is all a dream-we dream that we dreamed we dream."
"Pierre, when thou just hovered on the verge, thou wert a riddle to me; but now, that thou art deep down in the gulf of the soul, — now, when thou wouldst be lunatic to wise men, perhaps-now doth poor ignorant Isabel begin to comprehend thee. Thy feeling hath long been mine, Pierre. Long loneliness and anguish have opened miracles to me. Yes, it is all a dream!"
Swiftly he caught her in his arms:-"From nothing proceeds nothing, Isabel! How can one sin in a dream?"
"First, what is sin, Pierre?"
"Another name for the other name, Isabel."
"For Virtue, Pierre?"
"No, for Vice."
"Let us sit down again, my brother."
"I am Pierre."
"Let us sit down again, Pierre; sit close; thy arm!"
And so, on the third night, when the twilight was gone, and no lamp was lit, within the lofty window of that beggarly room, sat Pierre and Isabel hushed.
BOOK XX. CHARLIE MILLTHORPE
I
PIERRE HAD been induced to take chambers at the Apostles', by one of the Apostles themselves, an old acquaintance of his, and a native of Saddle Meadows.
Millthorpe was the son of a very respectable farmer- now dead-of more than common intelligence, and whose bowed shoulders and homely garb had still been surmounted by a head fit for a Greek philosopher, and features so fine and regular that they would have well graced an opulent gentleman. The political and social levelings and confoundings of all manner of human elements in America, produce many striking individual anomalies unknown in other lands. Pierre well remembered old farmer Millthorpe:- the handsome, melancholy, calm-tempered, mute, old man; in whose countenance-refinedly ennobled by nature, and yet coarsely tanned and attenuated by many a prolonged day's work in the harvest-rusticity and classicalness were strangely united. The delicate profile of his face, bespoke the loftiest aristocracy; his knobbed and bony hands resembled a beggar's.
Though for several generations the Millthorpes had lived on the Glendinning lands, they loosely and unostentatiously traced their origin to an emigrating English Knight, who had crossed the sea in the time of the elder Charles. But that indigence which had prompted the knight to forsake his courtly country for the howling wilderness, was the only remaining hereditament left to his bedwindled descendants in the fourth and fifth remove. At the time that Pierre first recollected this interesting man, he had, a year or two previous, abandoned an ample farm on account of absolute inability to meet the manorial rent, and was become the occupant of a very poor and contracted little place, on which was-a small and half-ruinous house. There, he then harbored with his wife, — a very gentle and retiring person, — his three little daughters, and his only son, a lad of Pierre's own age. The herditary beauty and youthful bloom of this boy; his sweetness of temper, and something of natural refinement as contrasted with the unrelieved rudeness, and oftentimes sordidness, of his neighbors; these things had early attracted the sympathetic, spontaneous friendliness of Pierre. They were often wont to take their boyish rambles together; and even the severely critical Mrs. Glendinning, always fastidiously cautious as to the companions of Pierre, had never objected to his intimacy with so prepossessing and handsome a rustic as Charles.