 Book 2 of Pierre, or the Ambiguities, by Herman Melville. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Ndu, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Book 2 Love, Delight, and Alarm. Part 2 Chapter 4 But Love has more to do with his own possible and probable posterities than with the once living, but now impossible, ancestries in the past. So Pierre's glow of family pride quickly gave place to a deeper hue, when Lucy bade lovers banter blush out from his cheek. That morning was the choicest drop that time had in his vase. Ineffable distillations of a soft delight were wafted from the fields and hills.ional mourning that, to all lovers unbetrothed, Come to your confessional, it cried, behold our airy loves. The birds tripped from the trees, far out at sea, no more the sailors tied their bowline knots. Their hands had lost their cunning. Will they, nil they, love-tied love-naughts on every spangled spar? O praised be the beauty of this earth, the beauty and the bloom and the mirthfulness thereof. The first worlds made were winter worlds, the second made were vernal worlds, the third and last and perfectest was the summer world of ours. In the cold and nether spheres preachers preach of earth and we of paradise above. O there, my friends, they say, they have a season in their language known as summer. Then their fields spin themselves green carpets. Snow and ice are not in all the land, than a million strange, bright, fragrant things powder that swore with perfumes. And high majestic beings, dumb and grand, stand up with outstretched arms and hold these green canopies over merry angels, men and women who love and wed and sleep and dream, beneath the approving glances of their visible god and goddess, glad-hearted sun and pensive moon. O praised be the beauty of this earth, the beauty and the bloom and the mirthfulness thereof. We lived before and shall live again, and as we hope for a fairer world than this to come, so we came from one less fine. From each successive world, the demon principal is more and more dislodged. He is the accursed clog from chaos, and thither, by every new translation, we drive him further and further back again. Hassanahs to this world, so beautiful itself, and the vestibule to more. Out of some past Egypt we have come to this new kanan, and from this new kanan we press on to some, Circasia. So still the villains, want and woe, followed us out of Egypt, and now beg in kanan's streets. Yet Circasia's gates shall not admit them. They, with their sire, the demon principal, must back to chaos once they came. Love was first begot by mirth and peace, in Eden when the world was young. The man oppressed with cares, he cannot love. The man of gloom finds not the god. So as youth, for the most part, has no cares, and knows no gloom therefore. Ever since time did begin, youth belongs to love. Love may end in grief and age and pain and need, and all other modes of human mournfulness, but love begins in joy. Love's first sigh is never breathed, till after love hath laughed. Love laughs first, and then sighs after. Love has no hands but symbols. Love's mouth is chambered like a bugle, and the instinctive breathings of this life breathe jubilee notes of joy. That morning two bay horses drew two laps along the road that led to the hills from saddle meadows. At the time they kept, Pierre Glendening's young manly tenor, to Lucy Tartan's girlish treble. Wondrous fare of face, blue-eyed and golden-haired, the bright blonde Lucy was arrayed in colors harmonious with the heavens. Light blue be thy perpetual color, Lucy. Light blue becomes the best, such the repeated azure counsel of Lucy Tartan's mother. On both sides from the hedges came to Pierre the clover bloom of saddle meadows, and from Lucy's mouth and cheek came the fresh fragrance of her violent young being. Smell I the flowers, or thee cried Pierre. See I lakes or eyes cried Lucy, her own gazing down into his soul, as two stars gazed down into a tarn. No cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as love will sink beneath the floating of the eyes. Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is love's own magic glass, for all things that are not of earth glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea as there are sweet images in lover's eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye fish with wings that sometimes leap out instinct with joy. Moist fish wings wet the lover's cheek. Love's eyes are holy things, there in the mysteries of life are lodged, looking in each other's eyes. Never see the ultimate secret of the worlds, and with thrills eternally untranslatable feel that love is God of all. Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover's eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth. Love is both creators and saviours' gospel to mankind. A volume bound in rose leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of hummingbirds printed with peach juice on the leaves of lilies. Endless is the account of love. Time and space cannot contain love's story. All things that are sweet to see or taste or feel or hear, all these things were made by love, and none other things were made by love. Love made not the Arctic zones, but love is ever reclaiming them. Say are not the fierce things of this earth daily, hourly going out? Where now are your wolves of Britain? Where in Virginia now find you the panther and the pard? Oh, love is busy everywhere. Love hath Moravian missionaries. No propagandist like to love. The south wind woos the barbarous north. On many a distinct shore, the gentler west wind persuades the arid east. All this earth is loves, afiance, vainly the demon principal howls to stay the bands. Why round her middle wears this world so rich a zone of torrid murder if she be not dressing for the final rites? And why provides she orange blossoms and lilies of the valley if she would not that all men and maids should love and marry? For every wedding where true lovers wed helps on the march of the universal love. Who are brides here shall be love's bridesmaids in the marriage world to come? So on all sides love allures can contain himself. What youth who views the wonders of the beauteous women world? Where a beautiful woman is, there is all Asia and her bazaars. Italy hath not a sight before the beauty of a Yankee girl, nor heaven a blessing beyond her earthly love. Did not the angelical Lotharius come down to earth that they might taste of mortal woman's love and beauty? Even while her own silly brothers were pining after the self-same paradise they left, yes those envying angels did come down, did emigrate, and who emigrates accept to be better off? Love is this world's great redeemer and reformer. And as all beautiful women are their selectest emissaries, so hath love gifted them with a magnetical persuasiveness that no youth can possibly repel. The own heart's choice of every youth seems ever as an inscrutable witch to him, and by 10,000 concentric spells and circling incantations glides round and round him as he turns, murmuring meanings of unearthly import, and summoning up to him all the subterranean sprites and gnomes, and unpeopling all the sea for niads to swim round him, so that mysteries are evoked as in exhalations by this love. But wonder, then, that love was A. a mystic. Chapter 5 And this self-same morning Pierre was very mystical. Not continually, though, but most mystical one moment and overflowing with mad unbridled merriment the next. He seemed a youthful magian, and almost a monta-bank together. Maldic improvisations burst from him in quick golden verses on the heel of humorous retort and repartee. More especially, the bright glance of Lucy was transporting to him. Now reckless of his horses, with both arms holding Lucy in his embrace, like a Sicilian diver he dives deep down in the Adriatic of her eyes, and brings up some king's cup of joy. All the waves in Lucy's eyes seemed waves of infinite glee to him. And as if, like veritable seas, they did indeed catch the reflected irradiations of the pollucid azure morning. In Lucy's eyes there seemed to shine all the blue glory of the general day, and all the sweet inscrutableness of the sky. And certainly the blue eyes of woman, like the sea, is not uninfluenced by the atmosphere. Only in the open air of some divinest summer day will you see its ultramarine, its fluid lapis lazuli. Then would Pierre burst forth in some screaming shout of joy. On the striped tigers of his chestnut eyes leaped in their lashed cages with a fierce delight. Lucy shrank from him in extreme love, for the extremist top of love is fear and wonder. Soon the swift horses drew the spare god and goddess, neither wooded hills, whose distant blue, now changed into a variously shaded green, stood before them, like old Babylonian walls, overgrown with murder. While here and there at regular intervals the scattered peaks seemed mural towers, and the clumped pines surmounting them as lofty archers and vast outlooking watchers of the glorious Babylonian city of the day. Catching that hilly air, the prancing horses' naid, laughed on the ground with gleeful feet, felt they the gay delightsome spurrings of the day, for the day was mad with excessive joy. And high in heaven you heard the neighing of the horses of the sun, and down dropped their nostrils froth, and many a fleecy vapor from the hills. From the plains the mists row slowly, reluctant yet to quit so fair a mead. At those green slopings Pierre reigned in his steeds, and soon the twain were seated on the bank gazing far and far away over many a grove and lake, corncrested uplands and herds grass lowlands, and long stretching swales of vividest green, betokening where the greenest bounty of this earth seeks its winding channels, as ever. The most heavenly bounteousness most seeks the lowly places, making green and glad many a humble mortal's breast, and leaving to his own lonely aridness many a hilltop princess state. But grief, not joy, is a moraliser, and small moralising wisdom caught Pierre from that scene. With Lucy's hand in his, and feeling softly feeling of its soft tinglingness, he seemed as one placed in linked correspondence with the summer lightings, and by sweet shock on shock receiving intimating foretastes of the ethereal delights of earth. Now, prone on the grass he falls, with his attentive upward glance fixed on Lucy's eyes. Thou art my heaven, Lucy, and here I lie, thy shepherd king, watching for new eye stars to rise in thee. Ha! I see Venus transit now, low, a new planet there, and behind all an infinite starry nebulousness, as if thy being were backgrounded by some spangled veil of mystery. Is Lucy deaf to all these ravings of his lyric love? Why looks she down and vibrates so, and why now from her overcharged lids drops such warm drops as these? No joy now in Lucy's eyes, and seeming tremor on her lips. Ah! Thou too ardent and impetuous, Pierre, nay, Thou too moist and changeful, April! Nost thou not, that the moist and changeful April is followed by the glad, assured, and showerless joy of June? And this, Lucy, this day should be thy June, even as it is, the earth's. Ah, Pierre, not June to me, but say, are not the sweets of June made sweet by the April tears? I love, but here fall more drops, more and more, these showers are longer than be seen the April, and pertain not to the June. June, June, thou brides month of the summer, following the spring-sweet courtship of the earth. My June, my June is yet to come. Oh, yet to come, but fixedly decreed, good as come and better. Then no flower that, in the bud, the April showers have nurtured, no such flower may untimely perish, ere the June unfolds it, ye will not swear that, Pierre. The audacious immortalities of Divinus' love are in me, and I now swear to thee, all the immutable eternities of joyfulness that ever woman dreamed of in this dream-house of the earth. A God decrees to thee unchangeable felicity, and to me the unchallenged possession of thee and them, for my inalienable thief. Do I rave? Look on me, Lucy, think on me, girl. Thou art young and beautiful and strong, and a joyful manliness invests thee, Pierre, and thy intrepid heart never yet fell to the touch of fear, but, but what? Ah, my best, Pierre. With kisses I will suck my secret from thy cheek, but what? Let us hide, homeward, Pierre. Some nameless sadness, faintness strangely comes to me. Fortaste I feel of endless dreariness. Tell me once more the story of that face, Pierre, that mysterious haunting face which thou once toldst me, thou didst thrice vainly try to shun. Blue is the sky, O bland the air, Pierre, but tell me the story of the face, the dark eyed, lustrous, imploring, mournful face, that so mystically paled and shrunk at thine. Ah, Pierre, sometimes I have thought, never will I wed with my best Pierre, until the riddle of that face be known. Tell me, tell me, Pierre, as a fixed basilisk with eyes of steady, flaming mournfulness, that face this instant fastens me. Be witch'd, be witch'd, cursed be the hour I acted on the thought that love hath no reserves. Never should I have told thee the story of the face, Lucy, I have bared myself too much to thee, O never should love know all. Knows not all, then loves not all, Pierre. Never shalt thou so say again, and Pierre, listen to me, now, now in this inexplicable trepidation that I feel, I do conjure thee, that thou wilt ever continue to do as thou hast done, so that I may ever continue to know all that agitates thee. The ariest and most transient thought, that ever shall sweep into thee from the wide atmosphere of all things that hem mortality. Did I doubt thee here? Could I ever think that thy heart hath yet one private nook or corner from me? Fatal disenchanting day for me, my Pierre, would that be? I tell thee, Pierre, and his love's own self that now speaks through me. Only in unbounded confidence and interchangings of all subtlest secrets can love possibly endure. Love's self is a secret, and so feeds on secrets, Pierre, that I only know of thee, what the whole common world may know, what then were Pierre to me, thou must be wholly a declosed secret to me. Love is vain and proud, and when I walk the streets and meet thy friends, I must still be laughing and hugging to myself the thought they know him not. I only know, my Pierre, none else beneath the circuit of young son, then swear to me, dear Pierre, that that will never keep a secret from me, no, never, never, swear. One thing seizes me, thy inexplicable tears, falling, falling on my heart, have now turned it to a stone. I feel icy cold and hard, I will not swear. Pierre, Pierre, God help thee, and God help me, Lucy, I cannot think, that in this most mild and dulcet air, the invisible agencies are plotting treasons against our loves. Oh, if ye be now nigh us, ye things I have no name for, then by a name that should be a facious, by Christ's holy name, I warn ye back from her and me. Touch her not, ye airy devils, hence to your appointed hell. Why come ye prowling in these heavenly perlose? Cannot the chains of love omnipotent bind ye fiends? Place this Pierre, his eyes glare fearfully, now I see layer on layer deeper in him. He turns round and menaces the air and talks to it, as if defied by the air. Woe is me, that very love should rise this evil spell, Pierre. But now I was infinite distances from thee, oh my Lucy, wandering baffled in the choking night. But thy voice might find me, though I had wandered to the boreal realm, Lucy. Here I sit down by thee, I catch a soothing from thee. My own, own Pierre, Pierre into ten trillion pieces I could now be torn for thee. In my bosom would yet hide thee, and there keep thee warm, though I sat down on arctic ice-flows, frozen to a corpse, my own best blessed Pierre. Now could I plant some pony-yard in me, that my silly a-links should have power to move thee thus, and pain thee thus? Forgive me, Pierre, thy changed face hath chased thee other from me. The fright of thee exceeds all other frights. It does so haunt me now. Thus hard my hand, look hard on me my love, that its last trace may pass away. Now I feel almost whole again, now, it is gone. Up, my Pierre, let us up and fly these hills, whence I fear too wide a prospect meets us. Fly way to the plain. See thy steeds neigh for thee, they call thee. See the clouds fly down toward the plain. So these hills now seem all desolate to me, and the veil all verder. Thank thee, Pierre. See now I quit the hills, dry-cheeked, and leave all tears behind to be sucked in by these evergreens. Meet emblems of the unchanging love, my own sadness nourishes in me. Hard fate that love's best verder should feed so on tears. Now they rolled swiftly down the slopes, nor tempted the upper hills, but sped fast for the plain. Now the cloud hath passed from Lucy's eye. No more the lurid, slanting light forks upward from her lover's brow. In the plain they find peace and love and joy again. It was the merest idling, wanton vapor, Lucy. An empty echo, Pierre, of a sad sound, long past, bless thee, my Pierre. The great God wrap thee ever, Lucy. So now we are home. CHAPTER VI After seeing Lucy into her aunt's most cheerful parlor, and seating her by the honeysuckle that half clambered into the window there, and near to which was her easel for crayon sketching, upon part of whose frame Lucy had cunningly trained two slender vines into whose earth-filled pots two of the three legs of the easel were inserted, and sitting down himself by her, and by his pleasant lightsome chat, striving to chase the last trace of sadness from her, and not till his object seemed fully gained. Pierre rose to call her good aunt to her, and so take his leave till evening, when Lucy called him back, begging him first to bring her the blue portfolio from her chamber, for she wished to kill her last lingering melancholy, if any indeed did linger now, by diverting her thoughts in a little pencil sketch to scenes widely different from those of saddle meadows and its hills. So Pierre went upstairs, but paused on the threshold of the open door. He never had entered the chamber, but with feelings of a wonderful reverentialness. The carpet seemed as holy ground. Every chair seemed sanctified by some departed saint, there once seated long ago. Here his book of love was all of rubric, and said, Bow now, Pierre, bow! But this extreme loyalty to the piety of love, called from him by such glimpses of its most secret inner shrine, was not unreleaved the times by such quickenings of his pulses, but in fantasy he pressed the wide beauty of the world in his embracing arms. For all the world resolved itself into his heart's best love for Lucy. Now crossing the magic silence of the empty chamber, he caught the snow-white bed reflected in the toilet glass. This rooted him. For one swift instant he seemed to see in that one glance the two separate beds, the real one and the reflected one, and an unbidden, most miserable presentiment there upon stole into him. But in one breath it came and went. So he advanced, and with a fond and gentle joyfulness his eye now fell upon the spotless bed itself, and fastened on a snow-white roll that lay beside the pillow. Now he started. Lucy seemed coming in upon him, but no, it was only the foot of one of her little slippers, just peeping into view from under the narrow nether curtains of the bed. Then again his glance fixed itself upon the slender snow-white ruffled roll, and he stood as one enchanted. Never precious parchment of the Greek was half so precious in his eyes. Never trembling scholar longed more to unroll the mystic vellum than Pierre longed to unroll the sacred secrets of that snow-white ruffled thing. But his hands touched not any object in that chamber, except the one he had gone thither for. Here is the blue portfolio, Lucy. See the key hangs to its silver lock. Were you not fearful I would open it? Twist tempting, I must confess. Open it, said Lucy. Why, yes, Pierre, yes, what secret thing keep I from thee? Read me through and through, I am entirely thine, see? And tossing open the portfolio, all manner of rosy things came floating from it, and a most delicate perfume of some invisible essence. Ah, thou holy angel, Lucy. Why, Pierre, thou art transfigured, thou now loocest as one who, why, Pierre? As one who had just peeped in at paradise, Lucy, and again wandering in thy mind, Pierre. No more. Come, you must leave me now. I am quite rested again. Quick, call my aunt and leave me. Stay this evening. We are to look over the book of plates from the city. You know, be early, go now, Pierre. Well, good-bye, till evening, thou height of all delight. Chapter 7. As Pierre drove through the silent village, beneath the vertical shadows of the noonday trees, the sweet chamber scene abandoned him, and the mystical face recurred to him and kept with him. At last arrived at home he found his mother absent. So passing straight through the wide middle hall of the mansion, he descended the piazza on the other ride, and wandered away in reveries down to the river bank. Here one primeval pine tree had been luckily left standing but the otherwise unsparing woodman, who long ago had cleared that meadow. It was once crossing to this noble pine from a clump of hemlocks far across that river that Pierre had first noticed the significant fact that while the hemlock and the pine are trees of equal growth and stature, and are so similar in their general aspect, that people unused to woods sometimes confound them. And while both trees are proverbially trees of sadness, yet the dark hemlock has no music in its thoughtful boffs, but the gentle pine tree drops melodious mournfulness. At its half-bared roots of sadness Pierre sat down, and marked the mighty bulk and far outreaching length of one particular root, which, staying down the bank, the storms and rains had years ago exposed. How wide, how strong these roots must spread! Here this pine tree takes powerful hold of this fair earth. Yon bright flower hath not so deep a root. This tree hath outlived a century of that gay flower's generations, and will outlive a century of them yet to come. This is most sad. Hark! Now I hear the pure mythical and numberless flame-like complainings of this olean pine. The wind breathes now upon it, the wind that is God's breath. Is he so sad? O tree, so mighty thou, so lofty, yet so mournful. That is most strange. Hark! As I look up into thy high secrecies, O tree, the face, the face peeps down on me. Art thou Pierre? Come to me, O thou mysterious girl. What an ill-matched pendant, thou. So that other countenance of sweet Lucy, which also hangs, and first did hang within my heart, is grief a pendant, then, to pleasantness? Is grief a self-willed guest that will come in? Yet I have never known thee grief, thou art a legend to me. I have known some fiery broils of glorious frenzy. I have oft tasted of reverie, whence comes pensiveness, whence comes sadness, whence all delicious poetic presentiments, but thou grief, art still a ghost story to me. I know thee not, do have disbelief in thee. Not that I would be without my two little cherished fits of sadness now and then, that God keep me from thee, thou art other shape, a far profounder gloom. I shudder at thee. The face, the face, forth again from thy high secrecies, O tree, the face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl, who art thou? By what right snatches thou thus my deepest thoughts? Take thy thin fingers from me. I am affianced, and not to thee. Leave me. What share hast thou in me? Surely thou lovest not me? That were most miserable for thee, and me, and Lucy. It cannot be. What? Who art thou? O wretched vagueness, too familiar to me, yet inexplicable, unknown, utterly unknown. I seem to founder in this perplexity. Thou seems to know, somewhat of me, I know not of myself. What is it, then? If thou hast a secret in thy eyes, mournful mystery, out with it, Pierre demands it. What is that thou hast veiled in thee so imperfectly, that I seem to see its motion, but not its form? It visibly rustles behind the concealing screen. Now never into the soul of Pierre stole there before a muffledness like this. If art really lurks in it, ye sovereign powers that claim all my leal worshipings, I conjure ye to lift the veil. I must see it face to face. That I on a mine warn me, advance I on a precipice, hold me back, but abandon me to an unknown misery that it shall suddenly seize me, and possess me wholly, that ye will never do. Else Pierre's fond faith in ye, now clean, untouched, may clean depart, and give me up to be a railing atheist. Ah, now the face departs. Very heaven it hath not only stolen back, and hidden again in thy high secreties, O tree. But is gone, gone, entirely gone, and I thank God, and I feel joy again. Joy, which I also feel to be my bright as man, deprived of joy, I feel I should find cause for deadly feuds with things invisible. Ha, a coat of iron mail seems to grow round and husk me now, and I have heard that the bitterest winters are foretold by a thicker husk upon the Indian corn. So our old farmers say, but is a dark similitude. Quit thy analogies, sweet in the orator's mouth, bitter in the thinker's belly. Now then, I'll up with my own joyful will, and with my joy's face scare away all phantoms, so they go. And Pierre is joys, and life again. Thou pine tree, henceforth I will resist thy too treacherous persuasiveness. Thou will not so often woo me to thy airy tent, to ponder on the gloomy-rooted stakes that bind it. Since now I go, and peace be with thee, pine. That blessed sereneness which lurks ever at the heart of sadness, mere sadness, and remains when all the rest has gone. That sweet feeling is now mine, and cheaply mine. I am not sorry I was sad, I feel so blessed now, dearest Lucy. Well, well, twill be a pretty time we'll have this evening. There's the book of Flemish prints, that first we must look over, then second, in Flaxman's Homer, clear-cut outlines, yet full of unadorned barbaric nobleness. Then Flaxman's Dante, Dante, knights and hell's poet he. No, we will not open Dante. He thinks now the face. The face reminds me a little of pensive, sweet Francesca's face, or rather, as it had been Francesca's daughter's face, wafted on the sad, dark wind toward observant Virgil in the blistered Florentine. No, we will not open Flaxman's Dante. Francesca's mournful face is now ideal to me. Flaxman might evoke it wholly, make it present in lines of misery, bewitching power. No, I will not open Flaxman's Dante. Damned be the hour I read in Dante. More damned than the wherein Paolo and Francesca read in fatal Lancelot. End of Book Two, Part Two. Book Three, Part One of Pierre, or The Ambiguities by Herman Melville. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Presentament and the Verification, Chapter One. The face of which Pierre and Lucy, so strangely and fearfully hinted, was not of enchanted air, but its mortal eniments of mournfulness had been visibly beheld by Pierre, nor headed accosted him in any privacy, or in any lonely byway, or beneath the white light of the crescent moon, but in a joyous chamber, bright with candles and ringing with two-score women's gayest voices. Out of the heart of mirthfulness, this shadow had come forth to him, encircled by bandolets of light, it had still beamed upon him, vaguely historic and prophetic, backward hinting of some irrevocable sin forward pointing to some inevitable ill. One of those faces which now and then appeared to man, and without one word of speech, still reveal glimpses of some fearful gospel. In natural guise, but lit by supernatural light, palpable to the senses, but inscrutable to the soul. In their perfectest impression on us, ever hovering between tardary and misery, and para desay beauty, such faces, compounded of hell and heaven, overthrow in us all foregone persuasions and make us wandering children in this world again. The face set accosted Pierre, some weeks previous to his ride with Lucy, to the hills, beyond saddle meadows, and before her arrival for the summer at the village, moreover it had accosted him in a very common and homely scene, but this enhanced the wonder. On some distant business with a farmer tenant he had been absent from the mansion during the best part of the day, and had but just come home early of a pleasant moonlight evening when dates delivered a message to him from his mother, begging him to come for her about half past seven that night to miss Lanolin's cottage in order to accompany her thence to that of the two Miss Penny's. At the mention of that last name, Pierre well knew what he must anticipate, those elderly and truly pious spinsters gifted with the most benevolent hearts in the world, and at mid-age deprived by envious nature of their hearing, seemed to have made it a maxim of their charitable lives that since God had not given them any more the power to hear Christ's gospel preached, they would therefore thenceforth do what they could toward practicing it. Wherefore, as a matter of no possible interest to them now, they abstained from church, and while with prayer books in their hands the Reverend Mr. Falls Graves congregation were engaged in worshiping their God according to the divine behest, the two Miss Penny's with thread and needle were hard at work in serving him, making up shirts and gowns for the poor people of the parish. Pierre had heard that they had recently been at the trouble of organizing a regular society among the neighboring farmers' wives and daughters to meet twice a month at their own house, the Miss Penny's, for the purpose of sewing in concert for the benefit of various settlements of necessitous immigrants who had lately pitched their popular shanties further up the river. But though this enterprise had not been started without previously acquainting Mrs. Glandinning of it, for indeed she was much loved and honored by the pious spinsters and their promise of solid assistance from that gracious menorial lady, yet Pierre had not heard that his mother had been officially invited to preside or be at all present at the semi-monthly meetings. Though he supposed that far from having any scruples against her doing, she would be very glad to associate that way with the good people of the village. Now, Brother Pierre, said Mrs. Glandinning, rising from Miss Lennon's huge cushion chair, throw my shawl around me, and good evening to Lucy's aunt. There, we shall be late. As they walked along, she added, now, Pierre, I know you are apt to be a little impatient sometimes of these sewing scenes, but courage, I merely want to keep in on them so as to get some inkling of what they would indeed be at. And then my promised benefactions can be better selected by me. Besides Pierre, I could have had dates escort me, but I preferred you because I want you to know who they are you live among, how many really pretty and naturally refined dames and girls you shall one day be Lord of the Manor of. I anticipate a rare display, overall red and white. Cheered by such pleasant promises, Pierre soon found himself leading his mother into a room full of faces. The instant they appeared, a gratuitous old body seated with her knitting near the door squeaked out shrilly, ah, dames, dames, Madam Glandinning, Master Pierre Glandinning. Almost immediately following the sound, there came a sudden long-drawn unearthly girlish shriek from the further corner of the long double room. Never had human voice so affected Pierre before, though he saw not the person from whom it came, and though the voice was wholly strange to him, yet the sudden shriek seemed to split its way clean through his heart and leave a yawning gap there. For an instant he stood bewildered, but started at his mother's voice, her arm being still in his. Why do you clutch my arms so, Pierre? You pain me. Push off. Someone is fainted. Nothing more. Instantly Pierre recovered himself and, affecting Tumak at his own trepidation, hurried across the room to offer his services if such were needed, but dames and maidens had been all beforehand with him. The lights were wildly flickering in the air current made by the flinging open of the casement near to where the shriek had come, but the climax of the tumour was soon passed and presently upon closing the casement it subsided almost wholly. The elder of the Spenster pennies advancing to Mrs. Glendening now gave her to understand that one of the further crowd of industrious girls present had been attacked by a sudden but fleeting fit, vaguely imputable to some constitutional disorder or other. She was now quite well again, and so the company, one in all, seemingly acting upon their natural good breeding, which in any one at bottom is but delicacy and charity, refrain from all further curiosity, reminded not the girl of what had passed, noted her scarce at all and all needles stitched away as before, leaving his mother to speak with whom she pleased and attend alone to her own affairs with the society. Pierre oblivious now in such a lively crowd of any past unpleasantness after some courtly words to the Miss Pennies insinuated into their understandings through a long quarrel trumpet, which were not in use the Spensters were hanging like a powder horn from their girdles, and likewise after manifesting the profoundest and most intelligent interest in the mystic mechanism of a huge woolen sock in course of completion by a spectacled old lady of his more particular acquaintance. After all this had been gone through and something more too tedious to detail, but which occupied him for nearly half an hour, Pierre with a slightly blushing and imperfectly balanced assurance advanced toward the further crowd of maidens, whereby the light of many outwell snuff candle they clubbed all their bright contrasting cheeks like a dense bed of garden tulips. There were the shy and pretty Marie's, Martha's, Susan's, Betty's, Jenny's, Nelly's and 40 more fair nymphs who skimmed the cream and made the butter of the fat farms of saddle meadows. Assurance is in presence of the assured, where embarrassments prevail they affect the most disembarrassed. What wonder then that gazing on such a thick array of breathing, roguish half averted blushing faces, still audacious in their bare embarrassment, Pierre too should flush a bit and stammer in his attitudes a little. Youthful love and graciousness were in his heart kindest words upon his tongue, but there he stood target for the transfixing glances of those ambushed archers of the eye. But his abashments last too long, his cheek have changed from blush to pallor. What strange thing does Pierre Glendening see? Behind the first close busy breastwork of young girls are several very little stands or circular tables where sit small groups of twos and threes sowing in small comparative solitudes as it were. They would seem to be the less notable of the rural company or else for some cause they have voluntarily retired into their humble banishment. Upon one of these persons engaged at the furthest and least conspicuous of these little stands and close by a casement Pierre's glance is palely fixed. The girl sits steadily sowing neither sheet nor heart to companion speak. Her eyes are mostly upon her work, but now and then a very close observer would notice that she furtively lifts them and moves them sideways intimately toward Pierre, and then still more furtively intimately toward his lady mother further off. All the while her preternatural calmness sometimes seems only made to cover the intense struggle in her bosom. Her unadorned and modest dress is black, fitting close up to her neck and clasping it with a plain velvet border. To a nice perception that velvet shows elastically, contracting and expanding as though some choked violent thing were risen up there within from the teeming region of her heart. But her dark olive cheek is without a blush or a sign of any disquiet too. So far as this girl lies upon the common surface ineffable composure steeps her, but still she sideways steals the furtive dimmed glance. Anon is yielding to the irresistible climax of her concealed emotion whatever that may be. She lifts her whole marvelous countenance into the radiant candlelight, and for one swift instant that face of supernaturalness unreservedly meets Pierre's. Now wonderful loveliness and still more wonderful loneliness have with inexplicable implorings looked up to him from that henceforth immemorial face. There too he seemed to see the fair ground where anguish had contended with beauty and neither being conqueror both had laid down on the field. Recovering it length from his all too obvious emotion, Pierre turned away still farther to regain the conscious possession of himself. A wild bewildering and incomprehensible curiosity had seized him to know something definite of that face. To this curiosity of the moment he entirely surrendered himself, unable as he was to combat it, or reason with it in the slightest way. So soon as he felt his outward composure return to him he proposed to chat his way behind the breastwork of bright eyes and cheeks and on some parlor pretence or other here if possible an audible syllable from one whose mere silent aspect had so potentially moved him. But at length as with this object in mind he was crossing the room again he heard his mother's voice gaily calling him away and turning saw her shod and bonneted. He could now make no plausible stay and smothering the agitation in him he bowed a general and hurried adieu to the company and went forth with his mother. They had gone some way homeward in perfect silence when his mother spoke well Pierre what can it possibly be? My god mother did you see her then? My son cried Mrs. Glendening instantly stopping in terror and withdrawing her arm from Pierre. What? What under heaven ails you? This is most strange I but playfully asked what you were so steadfastly thinking of and here you answer me by the stranger's question in a voice that seems to come from under your great grandfather's tune. What in heaven's name does this mean, Pierre, why were you so silent and why now are you so ill timed and speaking? Answer me explain all this she she what she should you be thinking of but Lucy tartan. Pierre beware beware I thought you from her in your lady's faith and such strange behavior as this would seem to hint answer me Pierre what may this mean come I hate a mystery speak my son. Fortunately this prolonged verbalized wonder in his mother afforded Pierre time to rally from his devil and aggravated astonishment brought about by first suspecting that his mother also had been struck by the strange aspect of the face and then having that suspicion so violently beaten back upon him by her apparently unaffected alarm at finding him in some region of thought wholly unshared by herself at the time. It is nothing nothing sister Mary just nothing at all in the world I believe I was dreaming sleepwalking or something of that sort they were vastly pretty girls there this evening sister Mary were they not come let us walk on do sister mine. Pierre Pierre but I will take your arm again and have you really nothing more to say were you really wandering Pierre I swear to you my dearest mother that never before in my whole existence have I so completely gone wandering in my soul as at that very moment but it is all over now then in a less earnest and somewhat playful tone he added and sister mine if you know art of the physical and sanitary authors you must be aware that the only treatment for such a case of harmless temporary aberration is for all persons to ignore it in the subject so no more of this foolishness talking about it only makes me feel very unpleasantly silly and there is no knowing that it may not bring it back upon me then by all means my dear boy not another word about it but it's passing strange very very strange indeed well about that morning business how fair do you tell me about it. Chapter two so Pierre gladly plunging into this welcome current of talk was unable to attend his mother home without furnishing further cause for her concern or wonderment but not by any means so readily could he allay his own concern and wonderment too really true in itself however evasive in its effect at the time was that earnest answer to his mother declaring that never in his whole existence had he been so profoundly stirred the face haunted him as some imploring and beautyous and passionate ideal Madonna's haunts the morbidly longing and enthusiastic but ever baffled artist and ever as the mystic face thus rose before his fancy sight another sense was touched in him the long-drawn unearthly girly shriek peeled through and through his soul for now he knew the shriek came from the face such delphic shriek could only come from such a source and wherefore that shriek thought Pierre bodes it ill to the face or me or both how am i changed that my appearance on any scene should have power to work such woe but it was mostly the face the face that wrought upon him the shriek seemed as incidentally embodied there the emotions he experienced seemed to have taken hold of the deepest roots and subtlest fibers of his being and so much the more that it was so subterranean in him so much the more did he feel it's weird inscrutableness what was one unknown sat eye shrieking girl to him there must be sat eye girl somewhere in the world and this was only one of them and what was the most beautiful sat eye girl to him sadness might be beautiful as well as mirth he lost himself trying to follow out this tangle i will know more of this infatuation he would cry but forth from regions of irradiated air the divine beauty and imploring sufferings of the face stolen into his view hitherto i've ever held but lightly thought pure all stories of ghostly mysticalness and man my creed of this world leads me to believe invisible beautiful flesh an audible breath however sweet incented but only invisible flesh an audible breath have i hear that you believed but now now and again he would lose himself in the most surprising and preternatural ponderings which baffled all the introspective coming of his mind himself was too much for himself he felt that what he had always before considered the solid land of veritable reality was now being audacious the encroached upon by banner armies of hooded phantoms disembarking in his soul as from flotillas of specter boats the terrors of the face were not those of gorgon not by repelling hideousness did it smite himself but bewilderingly allured him by its nameless beauty and his long suffering hopeless anguish but he was sensible that this general effect upon him was also special the face somehow mystically appealing to his own private and individual affections and by a silent and tyrannic call challenging him in his deepest moral being and summoning truth love pity conscience to the stand apex of all wonders thought pier this indeed almost amends me with its wonderfulness escaped the face he could not muffling his own in his bedclothes that did not hide it flying from it by sunlight down the meadows was as vain most miraculous of all to pier was the vague impression that somewhere he had seen traits of the likeness of that face before but where he could not say nor could he in the remotest degree imagine he was not unaware for in one or two instances he had experienced the fact that sometimes a man may see a passing countenance in the street which shall irresistibly and magnetically affect him for a moment as wholly unknown to him and yet strangely reminiscent of some vague face he has previously encountered in some fancy time too of extreme interest to his life but not so was it now with pier the face had not perplexed him for a few speculative minutes and then glided from him to return no more it stayed close by him only and not invariably could he repel it by the exertion of all his resolution and self-will besides what of general enchantment lurked in his strange sensations seemed concentringly condensed and pointed to a spearhead that pierced his heart with an inexplicable pang whenever this specializing emotion to call it so sees the possession of his thoughts and waved into his visions a thousand forms of bygone times and many an old legendary family scene which he had heard related by his elderly relations some of them now did disguising his wild reveries as best he might from the notice of his mother and all other persons of her household for two days pier wrestled with his own haunted spirit and at last so effectually purged it of all weirdnesses and so effectually regained the general mastery of himself that for a time life went with him as though he had never been stirred so strangely once more the sweet unconditional thought of lucy slid holy into his soul dislodging thence all such phantom occupants once more he rode he walked he swam he vaulted and with new zest through himself into the glowing practice of all those manly exercises he so dearly loved it almost seemed in him that air promising forever to protect as well as eternally to love his lucy he must first completely invigorate and ambron himself into the possession of such a noble muscular manliness that he might champion lucy against the whole physical world still even before the occasional reappearance of the face to him pier for all his willful ardor in his gymnasticals and other diversions whether indoors or out or whether by book or foil still pier could not but be secretly annoyed and not a little perplexed as to the motive which for the first time in his recollection had impelled him not merely to conceal from his mother a singular circumstance in his life for that he felt would have been but venial and besides as will eventually be seen he could find one particular precedent for it in his past experience but likewise and super addedly to perry nay to evade in effect to return something alarmingly like a fib to an explicit question put to him by his mother such being the guys in which part of the conversation they had had that event for night now appear to his fastidious sense he considered also that his evasive answer had not pantheistically burst from him in a momentary interregnum of self-command no his mother had made quite a lengthy speech to him during which he well remembered he had been carefully though with trepidation turning over in his mind how best he might recall her from her unwished for an untimely scent why had this been so was this his want what inscrutable thing was it that so suddenly had seized him and made him a falsifier i a falsifier nothing less to his own dearly beloved and confiding mother here indeed was something strange for him here was stuff for his utmost ethical meditations but nevertheless on strict introspection he felt that he would not willingly have it otherwise not willingly would he now undisemple himself in this matter to his mother why was this too was this his want here again was food for mysticism here in imperfect inklings tinglings presentiments pier began to feel what all the german who are magians sooner or later know and more or less assuredly that not always in our actions are we our own factors but this conceit was very dim in pier and dimness is ever suspicious and repugnant to us and so pier shrank abhorringly from the infernal catacombs of thought down into which this fetal fancy beckoned him only this though in secret did he cherish only this he felt persuaded of namely that not for both worlds would he have his mother made a partner to his sometime mystic mood but with this nameless fascination of the face upon him during those two days that it had first and fully possessed him for its own did perplexed pier refrain from that apparently most natural of all resources boldly seeking out and returning to the palpable cause and questioning her by look or voice or both together the mysterious girl herself no not entirely did pier hear refrain but his profound curiosity and interest in the matter strange as it may seem did not so much appear to be embodied in the mournful person of the olive girl as by some radiations from her embodied in the vague conceits which agitated his own soul there lurked the subtle secret that pier had striven to tear away from without no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves unless some interior responding wonder meets it that the story vault shall serve charge the heart with all rapturous marvelings is only because we ourselves are greater miracles and superb trophies than all the stars in universal space wonder interlocks with wonder and then the confounding feeling comes no cause have we to fancy that a horse a dog a fowl ever stand transfixed beneath the on-sky load of majesty but our souls arches under fit into its and so prevent the upper arch from falling on us with unsustainable inscrutableness explain ye my deeper mystery said the shepherd childee and king smiting his breast lying on his back upon the plane and then i will bestow all my wonderings upon ye ye stately stars so in some sort with pier explain thou the strange integral feeling in me myself he thought turning upon the fancy face and i will then renounce all other wonders to gaze wonderingly at thee but thou has evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one thou face for me thou hast uncovered one infinite dumb beseeching countenance of mystery underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space but during those two days of his first wild basilage to his original sensations pier had not been unvisited by less mysterious impulses two or three very plain and practical plantings of desirable procedures and reference to some possible homely explication of all this nonsense so he would momentarily denominated now and then fittingly intermitted his pervading mood of semi-madness once he had seized his hat careless of his accustomed gloves and cane and found himself in the street walking very rapidly in the direction of the miss pennies but wither now he disenchantingly interrogated himself where would you go a million to one those death old spinsters can tell you nothing you burn to know death old spinsters are not used to be the depositories of such mystical secrecy but then they may reveal her name where she dwells and something however fragmentary and unsatisfactory of who she is and whence i but then in 10 minutes after you're leaving them all the houses and saddle matters would be humming with the gossip of pier glendinning engaged to mary lucy tartan and yet running about the country in ambiguous pursuit of strange young women that will never do you remember do you not often seeing the miss pennies hatless and without a shawl herring through the village like two postmen intent on dropping some tidbit of precious gossip what a morsel for them pier have you if you now call upon them barely their trumpets are both for use and for significance they're very death the miss pennies are by no means dumb they blaze and very wide now be sure and say that it was the miss pennies who left the news be sure we the miss pennies remember say to mrs glendinning it was we such was the message that now have humorously occurred to pier as having been once confided to him by the sister spinsters one evening when they called with a choice present of some very rare chitchat for his mother but found the manorial lady out and so charged her son with it herring away to all the inferior houses so as not to be anywhere forestalled in their disclosure now i wish it had been any other house than the miss pennies any other house but theirs and on my soul i believe i should have gone but not to them no that i cannot do it would be sure to reach my mother and then she would put this and that together stir a little let it simmer and farewell forever to all her majestic notions of my immaculate integrity patience pier the population of this region is not so immense no dense mobs of neneva confound all personal identities in saddle metals patience thou shalt see it soon again catch it passing the in some green lane sacred to thy evening reveries she that bears it cannot dwell remote patience pier ever are such mysteries best and soonest unraveled by the eventual unraveling of themselves or if you will go back and get your gloves and more especially your cane and begin your own secret voyage of discovery after it your cane i say because it will probably be a very long and very walk true just now i hinted that she that bears it cannot dwell very remote but then her nearness may not be at all conspicuous so homework and put off the hat and let thy cane stay still group pier seek not to mystify the mystery so thus intermittingly ever and anon during those sad two days of deeper sufferance pier would stand reasoning and expostulating with himself and by such meditative treatment reassure zone spontaneous impulses doubtless it was wise and right that so he did doubtless but in a world so full of all dubaiities as this one can never be entirely certain whether another person however carefully and cautiously conscientious has acted in all respects conceivable for the very best but when the two days were gone by and pier began to recognize his former self as restored to him from its mystic exile then the thoughts of personally and pointedly seeking out the unknown either preliminarily by a call upon the sister of spinsters or generate by performing the observant links id circuit of the county on foot and as a crafty inquisitor dissembling his cause of inquisition these and all similar intentions completely abandoned pier he was now diligently striving with all his mental might forever to drive the phantom from him he seemed to feel that it began in him a certain condition of his being which was most painful in every way and congenial to his natural wanted self it had a touch of he knew not what sort of unhealthiness in it so to speak for in his then ignorance he could find no better turn it seemed to have in it a germ of somewhat rich if not quickly extirpated might insidiously poison and embitter his whole life that choice delitious life which he had vowed to lucy for his one pure and comprehensive offering at once a sacrifice and a delight nor in these endeavorings did he and entirely fail for the most part he felt now that he had a power over the comings and goings of the face but not on all occasions sometimes the old original mystic tyranny would steal upon him the long dark locks of mournful hair would fall upon his soul and trail their wonderful melancholy along with them the two full steady overbrimming eyes of loveliness and anguish would converge their magic rays till he felt them kindling he could not tell what mysterious fires in the heart at which they aimed when once this feeling had him fully then was the perilous time for pierre for supernatural as the feeling was and appealing to all things ultra-mountain to his soul yet was it a delicious sadness to him some hazy fairy swam above him in the heavenly ether and showered down upon him the sweetest pearls of pensiveness then he would be seized with a single impulse to reveal the secret to someone other individual in the world only one not more he could not hold all this strange fullness in himself it must be shared in such an hour it was that chanting tune counter lucy her whom above all others he did confidingly adore she heard the story of the face nor slept at all that night nor for a long time freed her pillow completely from wild Beethoven sounds of distant waltzing melodies as of ambiguous fairies dancing on the heath in the book three part one book three part two of pierre for the ambiguities by herman melville this liver vox recording is in the public domain chapter three this history goes forward and goes backward as occasion calls nimble center circumference elastic you must have now we return to pierre wending homeward from his reveries beneath the pine tree his burst of impatience against the sublime italian dante arising from that poet being the one who in a former time had first opened to his shuddering eyes the infinite cliffs and gulfs of human mystery and misery though still more in the way of experimental vision than of sensational presentiment or experience for as yet he had not seen so far and deep as dante and therefore was entirely incompetent to meet the grim bard fairly on his peculiar ground this ignorant burst of his young impatience also arising from that half contemptuous dislike and sometimes selfish loathing with which either naturally feeble or undeveloped minds regard those dark ravings of the loftier poets which are in eternal opposition to their own fine spun shallow dreams of rapturous or prudential youth this rash untutored burst of pierre's young impatience seemed to have carried off with it all the other forms of his melancholy if melancholy it had been and left him now serene again and ready for any tranquil pleasantness the gods might have in store for his indeed was true youth temperament summary with sadness with two joyfulness and long protracting and detaining with that joyfulness when once it came fully nigh to him as he entered the dining hall he saw dates retiring from another door with his tray alone and meditative by the baird half of the polish table sat his mother at her dessert fruit baskets and a decanter were before her on the other leaf of the same table still lay the cloth folded back upon itself and set out with one plate and its usual accompaniments sit down pierre when i came home i was surprised to hear that the fayton had returned so early and here i waited dinner for you until i could wait no more but go to the green pantry now and get what dates has but just put away for you there i hope to plainly i foresee it no more regular dinner hours or tea hours or supper hours and saddle meadows till its young lord is wedded and that puts me in mind of something pierre but i'll defer it to you have eaten a little do you know pierre that if you continue these irregular meals of yours and deprive me so entirely almost of your company that i shall run fearful risk of getting to be a terrible wine bibber yes could you unalarm see me sitting all alone here with this decanter like any old nurse pierre some solitary for lawn old nurse pierre deserted by her last friend and therefore forced to embrace her flask no i did not feel any great alarm sister said pierre smiling since i could not but perceive that the decanter was still full to the stopper possibly it may be only a fresh decanter pierre then changing her voice suddenly but marked me mr pierre glen dinning well mrs mary glen dinning do you know sir that you are very shortly to be married that indeed the day is all but fixed how cried pierre in real joyful astonishment both at the nature of the tidings and the earnest tones in which they were conveyed dear dear mother you have strangely changed your mind then my dear mother it is even so dear brother before this day month i hope to have a little sister tartan you talk very strangely mother rejoin pierre quickly i suppose then i have next to nothing to say in the matter next to nothing pierre what indeed could you say to the purpose what at all have you to do with it i should like to know do you so much as dream you silly boy that men are ever have them marrying of themselves juxtaposition marries men there is but one matchmaker in the world pierre and that is mrs juxtaposition a most notorious lady very peculiar disenchanting sort of talk this under the circumstances sister mary laying down his fork mrs juxtaposition ah and in your opinion mother does this fine glorious passion only amount to that only to that pierre but mark you according to my creed though this part of it is a little hazy mrs juxtaposition moves her pawns only as she herself is moved to so doing by the spirit ah that sets it all right again said pierre resuming his fourth my appetite returns but what was that about my being married so soon he added vainly striving to assume an error in credulity and unconcerned you were joking i suppose it seems to me sister either you or i was but just now wandering in the mind a little on that subject are you really thinking of any such thing and have you really vanquished your sagacious scruples by yourself after i had so long and ineffectually sought to do it for you well i am a million times delighted tell me quick i will pierre you very well know that from the first hour you apprised me or rather from a period prior to that from the moment that i by my own insight became aware of your love for lucy i've always approved it lucy is a delicious girl a vulnerable descent of fortune well bred and the very pattern of all that i think amiable and attractive in a girl of seventeen well well well quite pierre rapidly and impetuously we both knew that before well well well pierre retorted his mother mockingly it is not well well well but ill ill ill to torture me so mother go on do but not withstanding my admiring approval of your choice pierre yet as you know i have resisted your entreaties for my consent to your speedy marriage because i thought that a girl of scarcely seventeen and a boy scarcely twenty should not be in such a hurry there was plenty of time i thought which could be profitably employed by both permit me here to interrupt you mother whatever you may have seen in me she i mean lucy has never been in the slightest hurry to be married that's all but i shall regard it as a lapsis lingua in you undoubtedly a lapsis but listen to me i've been carefully observing both you and lucy of late and that has made me think further of the matter now pierre if you were in any profession or in any business at all now if i were a farmer's wife and you my child working in my fields why then you and lucy should still wait a while but as you have nothing to do but to think of lucy by day and dream of her by night and as she is in the same predicament i suppose with respect to you and as the consequence of all this begins to be discernible in a certain just perceptible and quite harmless thinness so to speak of the cheek but a very conspicuous and dangerous for brawness of the eye therefore i choose the lesser of two evils and now you have my permission to be married as soon as the thing can be done with propriety i dare say you have no objection to have the wedding take place before christmas the present month being the first of summer pierre said nothing but leaping to his feet through his two arms around his mother and kissed her repeatedly a most sweet and eloquent answer pierre but sit down again i desire now to say a little concerning less attractive but quite necessary things connected with this affair you know that by your father's will these lands and miss lucy my mistress said dates throwing open the door pierre sprang to his feet but as if suddenly mindful of his mother's presence composed himself again though he still approached the door lucy entered carrying a little basket of strawberries why how do you do my dear said mrs glendinning affectionately this is an unexpected pleasure yes and i suppose that pierre here is a little surprised too seeing that he was to call upon me this evening and not eye upon him before sundown but i took a sudden fancy for a solitary stroll the afternoon was such a delicious one and chancing it was only chancing to pass through the locust lane leading hither i met the strangest little fellow with this basket in his hand yes by the miss said he and how do you know i want to buy them returned i i don't want to buy them yes you do miss they ought to be 26 cents but i'll take 13 cents that being my shilling i always want the odd half cent i do come i can't wait i've been expecting you long enough a very sagacious little imp laughed mrs glendinning impertinent little rascal cry pierre and am i not now the silliest of all silly girls to be telling you my adventures so very frankly smile lucy no but the most celestial of all innocence cry pierre in a rhapsody of delight frankly open is the flower that has nothing but purity to show now my dear little lucy said mrs glendinning let pierre take off your shawl and come now and stay to tea with us pierre has put back the dinner so the tea hour will come now very soon thank you but i cannot stay this time look i forgot my own errand i brought these strawberries for you mrs glendinning and for pierre pierre so wonderfully fond of them i was audacious enough to think as much cry pierre for you and me you see mother for you and me you understand that i hope perfectly my dear brother lucy blushed how warm it is mrs glendinning very warm lucy so you won't stay to tea no i must go now just a little stroll that's all goodbye now don't be following me pierre mrs glendinning will you keep pierre back i know you want him you were talking over some private affair when i entered you both look so very confidential and you were not very far from right lucy said mrs glendinning making no sign to stay her departure yes business of the highest importance of pierre fixing his eyes upon lucy significantly at this moment lucy just upon the point of her departure was hovering near the door the setting sun streaming through the window bathed her whole form in golden loveliness and light that wonderful and most vivid transparency of her clear welsh complexion now fairly glowed like rosy snow her flowing white blue ribboned dress fleecely invested her pierre almost thought that she could only depart the house by floating out of the open window instead of actually stepping from the door all her aspect to him was that moment touched with an indescribable gaiety buoyancy fragility and an unearthly evanescence youth is no philosopher not into young pierre's heart did there then come the thought that as the glory of the rose endures but for a day so the full bloom of girlish airiness and bewitchingness passes from the earth almost as soon as jealousy absorbed by those frugal elements which again incorporate that translated girlish bloom into the first expanding flower bud not into young pierre did there then steal that thought of utmost sadness pondering on the inevitable evanescence of all earthly loveliness which makes the sweetest things of life only food for ever devouring an omnivorous melancholy pierre's thought was different from this and yet somehow akin to it this to be my wife i that but the other day weighed and hundred and fifty pounds of solid avois du pois i to wed this heavenly fleece me thinks one husbandly embrace would break her arizone and she exhale upward to that heaven when she hath hither come condensed to mortal sight it cannot be i am of heavy earth and she of airy light by heaven but marriage is an impious thing meanwhile as these things ran through his soul mrs glendinning also had thinkings of her own a very beautiful tableau she cried at last artistically turning her gay head a little sideways very beautiful indeed this i suppose is all premeditated for my entertainment or if he is finding his euridicee or pluto stealing proust serpony admirable it might almost stand for either no said pierre gravely it is the last now first i see a meaning there yes he added to himself inwardly i am pluto stealing proust serpony and every accepted lover is and you would be very stupid brother pierre if you did not see something there said his mother still that way pursuing her own different train of thought the meaning thereof is this lucy has commanded me to stay you but in reality she wants you to go along with her well you may go as far as the porch but then you must return for we have not concluded our little affair you know adieu little lady there was ever a slight degree of affectionate patronizing in the manner of the resplendent full-blown mrs glendoning toward the delicate and shrinking girlhood of young lucy she treated her very much as she might have treated some surpassingly beautiful and precocious child and this was precisely what lucy was looking beyond the present period mrs glendoning could not but perceive that even in lucy's womanly maturity lucy would still be a child to her because she elated felt that in a certain intellectual vigor so to speak she was the essential opposite of lucy whose sympathetic mind and person had both been cast in one mold of wondrous delicacy but here mrs glendoning was both right and wrong so far as she here saw a difference between herself and lucy tartan she did not err but so far and that was very far as she thought she saw her innate superiority to her in the absolute scale of being here she very widely and immeasurably erred for what may be artistically styled angelicalness this is the highest essence compatible with created being and angelicalness hath no vulgar vigor in it and that thing which very often prompts to the display of any vigor which thing in man or women is at bottom nothing but ambition this quality is purely earthly and not angelical it is false that any angels fail by reason of ambition angels never fall and never feel ambition therefore benevolently and affectionately and all sincerely as thy heart oh mrs glendoning now standest affected toward the fleecy lucy still lady thou dost very sadly mistake it when the proud double arches of the bright breast plate of thy bosom expand with secret triumph over one whom thou so sweetly but still so patronizingly stylists the little lucy but ignorant of these further insights that very superb looking lady now waiting pier's return from the portico door sat in a very main friendly reverie her eyes fixed upon the decanter of amber-hued wine before her whether it was that she somehow saw some lurking analogical similarity between that remarkably slender and gracefully cut little pint decanter brimful of light golden wine or not there is no absolute telling now but really the peculiarly and reminiscently and forecastingly complacent expression of her beaming and benevolent countenance seemed to tell tale of some conceit very much like the following yes she's a very pretty little pint decanter of a girl a very pretty little pale sherry pint decanter of a girl and i i'm a court decanter of of port potent port now sherry for boys and port for men so i've heard men say and pier is but a boy but when his father wedded me why his father was turned of five and thirty years after a little further waiting for him mrs glendening heard pier's voice yes before eight o'clock at least lucy no fear and then the hall door banged and pier returned to her but now she found that this unforeseen visit of lucy had completely routed all business capacity in her mercurial son barely capsizing him again into there was no telling what see of pleasant pennsiveness dear me some other time sister mary not this time that is very certain pier upon my word i shall have to get lucy kidnapped and temporarily taken out of the country and you handcuffed to the table else there will be no having a preliminary understanding with you previous to calling in the lawyers well i shall yet manage you one way or other goodbye pier i see you don't want me now i suppose i shouldn't see you till tomorrow morning luckily i have a very interesting book to read adieu but pier remained in his chair his gaze fixed upon the stilly sunset beyond the matters and far away to the now golden hills a glorious softly glorious and most gracious evening which seemed plainly a tongue to all humanity saying i go down in beauty to rise in joy love reigns throughout all worlds that sunsets visit it is a foolish ghost story there is no such thing as misery would love which is omnipotent have misery in his domain with the god of sunlight decree gloom it is a flawless speckless blacklist beautiful world throughout joy now and joy forever then the face which before had seen mournfully and reproachfully looking out upon him from the effulgent sunsets heart the face slid from him and left alone there with his soul's joy thinking that that very night he would utter the magic word of marriage to his lucy not a happier youth than pier glen dinning sat watching that day's sun go down chapter four after this morning of gaiety this noon of tragedy and this evening so full of checkered pensiveness pier now possessed his soul in joyful mildness and steadfastness feeling none of that wild anguish of anticipative rapture which in weaker minds too often dislodges love's sweet bird from her nest the early night was warm but dark for the moon was not risen yet despierre passed on beneath the pendulous canopies of the long arms of the weeping elms of the village and almost impenetrable blackness surrounded him but entered not the gently illuminated halls of his heart he'd not gone very far when in the distance beyond he noticed a light moving along the opposite side of the road and slowly approaching as it was the custom for some of the more elderly and perhaps timid inhabitants of the village to carry a lantern when going abroad of so dark a night this object conveyed no impression of novelty to pier still as it silently drew nearer and nearer the one only distinguishable thing before him he somehow felt the nameless presentiment that the light must be seeking him he had nearly gained the cottage door when the lantern crossed over toward him and as his nimble hand was laid at last upon the little wicked gate which he thought was now to admit him to so much delight a heavy hand was laid upon himself and at the same moment the lantern was lifted toward his face by a hooded and obscure looking figure whose half averted countenance he could indistinctly discern but pier's own open aspect seemed to have been quickly scrutinized by the other i have a letter for pier glendening said the stranger and i believe this is he at the same moment a letter was drawn forth and sought his hand for me exclaimed pier faintly starting at the strangeness of the encounter me thinks this is an odd time and place to deliver your mail who are you stay but without waiting in answer the messenger had already turned about and was recrossing the road in the first impulse of the moment pier stepped forward and would have pursued him but smiling at his own causeless curiosity intrepidation paused again and softly turned over the letter in his hand what mysterious correspondent is this thought he circularly moving his thumb upon the seal no one writes me but from abroad and their letters come through the office and as for lucy poo when she herself is within she would hardly have her notes delivered at her own gate strange but i'll end and read it no not that i come to read again in her own sweetheart that dear missive to me from heaven and this impertinent letter would preoccupy me i'll wait till i go home he entered the gate in latest hand upon the cottage knocker its sudden coolness caused a slight and at any other time an unaccountable sympathetic sensation in his hand to his unwanted mood the knocker seemed to say enter not be gone and first read thy note yielding now half alarmed and half bantering with himself to these shadowy interior munitions he have unconsciously liquided the door repass the gate and soon found himself retracing his homeward path he equivocated with himself no more the gloom of the air had now burst into his heart and extinguished its light then first in all his life pure felt the irresistible admonitions and intuitions of fate he entered the hall unnoticed passed up to his chamber and hurriedly locking the door in the dark lit his lamp as the summoned flame illuminated the room pure standing before the round center table where the lamp was placed with his hand yet on the brass circle which regulated the wick started at a figure in the opposite mirror it bore at the outline of pure but now strangely filled with features transformed and unfamiliar to him feverish eagerness fear and nameless for bowdings of ill he threw himself into a chair and for a time vainly struggled with the income prehensible power that possessed him then as he avertedly drew the letter from his bosom he whispered to himself out on the pier how sheepish now will you feel when this tremendous note will turn out to be an invitation to a supper tomorrow night quick fool and write the stereotype reply mr pier glandening will be very happy to accept miss so and so's polite invitation still for the moment he held the letter averted the messenger had so hurriedly accosted him and delivered his duty that pier had not yet so much as gained one glance at the superscription of the note and now the wild thought passed through his mind of what would be the result should he deliberately destroy the note without so much as looking at the hand that had addressed it hardly had this half crazy conceitfully made itself legible in his soul when he was conscious of his two hands meeting in the middle of the sundered note he leaped from his chair by heaven he murmured unspeakably shocked at the intensity of that mood which had caused him unwittingly as it were to do for the first time in his whole life an act of which he was privately ashamed though the mood that was on him was none of his own willful seeking yet now he swiftly felt conscious that he had perhaps a little encouraged it through that certain strange infatuation of fondness which the human mind however vigorous sometimes feels for any emotion at once novel and mystical not willingly at such times never mind how fearful we may be do we try to dissolve the spell which seems for the time to admit us all astonished into the vague vestibule of the spiritual worlds pier now seemed distinctly to feel two antagonistic agencies within him one of which was just struggling into consciousness and each of which was striving for the mastery and between whose respective final ascendancies he thought he could perceive though but shadowy that he himself was to be the only umpire one bad him finished the selfish destruction of the note for in some dark way the reading of it would irretrievably entangle his fate the other bad him dismiss all misgivings not because there was no possible ground for them but because to dismiss them was the manly apart never mind what might be tied this good angel seemed mildly to say read pier though by reading thou mayest entangle thyself yet mayest thou thereby disentangle others read and feel that best blessedness which with the sense of all duties discharged holds happiness indifferent the bad angel insinuatingly breathe read it not dearest pier but destroy it and be happy then at the blast of his noble heart the bad angel shrunk up into nothingness and the good one defined itself clearer and more clear and came nigher and more nigh to him smiling sadly but the nignantly while forth from the infinite distance his wonderful harmony stole into his heart so that every vein in him pulsed to some heavenly swell chapter five the name at the end of this letter will be wholly strange to thee hitherto my existence has been utterly unknown to thee this letter will touch thee and pain thee willingly would i spare thee but i cannot my heart bears me witness that did i think that the suffering these lines would give thee would in the faintest degree compare with what mine has been i would forever withhold them pier glendening thou art not the only child of thy father in the eye of the sun the hand that traces this is thy sisters yes pier isville calls thee her brother her brother oh sweetest of words which so often i've thought to myself and almost deemed it profanity for an outcast like me to speak or think dearest pier my brother my own father's child art thou an angel that thou canst over leap all the heartless usages and fashions of a banded world that will call the fool fool fool and curse thee if thou yieldest to that heavenly impulse which alone can lead thee to respond to the long tyrannizing and now at last unquenchable yearnings of my bursting heart oh my brother but pier glendening i will be proud with thee that not my hapless condition extinguished in me the nobleness which i equally inherit with thee thou shall not be cousined by my tears and my anguish into anything which thy most sober hour will repent read no further if it's suitly burn this letter so shall thou escape the certainty of that knowledge which if thou art now cold and selfish may hereafter in some mature remorseful and helpless hour cause the appointment upgrading no i shall not i will not implore thee oh my brother my dear dear pier help me fly to me see i perish without the pity pity ill i freeze in the wide wide world no father no mother no sister no brother no living thing in the fair form of humanity that holds me dear no more oh no more dear pier cannot endure to be an outcast in the world for which the dear savior died fly to me pier nay i could tear what i now write as i have torn so many other sheets all written for that i but which never reached thee because in my distraction i knew not how to write to thee know what to say to thee and so behold again how i rave nothing more i will write no more silence becomes this grave the heart sickness steals over me pier my brother scarce know i what i've written yet will i write the the fatal line and leave all the rest of the pier my brother she that is called isabel banford dwells in the little red farmhouse three miles from the village on the slope toward the lake tomorrow nightfall not before not by day not by day pier thy sister isabel chapter six this letter inscribed in a feminine but irregular hand and in someplace is almost illegible plainly attesting the state of the mind which had dictated it stained two here and there with spots of tears which chemically acted upon by the ink assumed a strange and reddish hue as if blood and not tears had dropped upon the sheet and so completely torn in two by pier's own hand that it indeed seemed to fit scroll of a torn as well as bleeding heart this amazing letter deprived pier for the time of all lucid and definite thought or feeling he hung half lifeless in his chair his hand clutching the letter was pressed against his heart as if some assassin had stabbed him and fled and pier was now holding the dagger in the wound to stance the outgushing of the blood i pier now indeed art thou hurt with a wound never to be completely healed but in heaven for the before undistrusted moral beauty of the world is forever fled for thee thy sacred father is no more a saint all brightness have gone from thy heels and all peace from thy planes and now now for the first time pier truth rolls a black billow through thy soul our miserable vow to him truth in her first tides bears nothing but wrecks the perceptible forms of things the shapes of thoughts the pulses of life but slowly came back to pier and as the mariner shipwrecked and cast on the beach has much ado to escape the recoil of the wave that hurled him there so pier long struggled and struggled to escape the recoil of that anguish which had dashed him out of itself upon the beach of his swim the man was not made to succumb to the villain woe youth is not young in a wrestler in vain pier staggeringly rose to his feet his wide eyes fixed in his whole form in a tremble myself and left at least he slowly and half jokingly murmured with myself i front thee unhand me all fears and unlock me all spells henceforth i will know nothing but truth glad truth or sad truth i will know what is and do what my deepest angel dictates the letter is about sister brother me me my sacred father this is some accursed dream nay but this paper thing is forged a base and malicious forgery i swear well that's the hide thy face for me thou vile lantern messenger that dis to cost me on the threshold of joy with this lying warrant of woe death truth come in the dark and steal on us and rob us so and then depart death to all pursuing invocations if this night which now wraps my soul be genuine as that which now wraps this half of the world then fate i have a choice quarrel with thee thou art a pauper and a cheat thou hast lured me on through gay gardens to a gulf oh falsely guided in the days of my joy am i now truly led in this night of my grief i will be a raver and none shall stay me i will lift my hand in fury for am i not struck i will be bitter in my breath for is not this cup of gall thou black knight that with visor down thus come frontest me and mockest at me though i strike through thy helm and we'll see thy face be at gorgon let me go ye fond affections all piety leave me i will be impious for piety hath juggled me and taught me to revere where i should spurn from all idols i tear all veils henceforth i will see the hidden things and live right out in my own hidden life now i feel that nothing but truth can move me so this letter is not a forgery oh isabel thou art my sister and i will love thee and protect the eye and own thee through all off give me ye heavens for my ignorant ravings and accept this my vow here i swear myself isabelle's oh thou poor castaway girl that in loneliness and anguish must have long breathed that same air which i have only inhaled for delight thou who must even now be weeping and weeping cast into an ocean of uncertainty as to thy fate which heaven hath placed in my hands sweet isabel would i not be baser than brass and harder and colder than ice if i could be insensible to such claims as thine thou moveest before me in rainbow spun of thy tears i see thee long weeping and god demands me for thy comforter and comfort thee stand by thee and fight for thee will thy leapingly acknowledging brother whom thy own father named pierre he could not stay in his chamber the house contracted to a nut shell around him the walls smote his forehead bareheaded he rushed from the place and only in the infinite air found scope for that boundless expansion of his life end of book three part two