 Book 6 of Pierre for the Ambiguities by Herman Melville. This Libervox recording is in the public domain. Book 6, Isabel and the First Part of the Story of Isabel. Chapter 1. Ath wishful that the hour would come, hath shuddering that every moment it still came nearer and more near to him, dry eyed but wet with that dark day's rain, that fall of Eve, Pierre emerged from long wanderings in the primeval woods of saddle meadows, and for one instance stood motionless upon their sloping skirt. Where he stood was in the rude wood road only used by sledges in the time of snow, just where the outposted trees formed a narrow arch and fancied gateway leading upon the far wide pasture sweeping down toward the lake. In that wet and misty eve the scattered shivering pasture elms seemed standing in a world inhospitable, yet rooted by inscrutable sense of duty to their place. Beyond the lake lay in one sheet of blankness and of dumbness unstirred by breeze or breath. Fast bound there it lay with not life enough to reflect the smallish rub or twig, yet in that lake was seen the duplicate, storeless sky above. Only in sunshine did that lake catch gray-green images and these, but displaced the imaged muteness of the unfeatured heavens. On both sides in the remoter distance and also far beyond the mild lakes further ashore rose the long mysterious mountain masses, shaggy with pines and hemlocks mystical with nameless, vapory exhalations, and in that dim air black with dreading gloom. At their base profoundest forests lay entranced and from their far owl-haunted depths of caves and rotted leaves and unused and unregarded inland overgrowth of decaying wood, for smallest sticks of rich and other climes many a pauper was that moment perishing. From out the infinite inhumanities of those profoundest forests came a moaning, muttering, roaring, intermitted, changeful sound. Rain shakings of the palsy trees, slidings of rocks undermined, final crashings of long, riven boughs and devilish gibberish of the forest ghosts. But more near on the mild lakes hither shore where it formed a long semi-circular and scooped eclivity of cornfields there the small and low red farmhouse lay. Its ancient roof abetted brightest mosses its north front from the north the moss wind blows. Also moss encrusted like the north side of any vast trunked maple in the groves. At one gabled end a tangled arbor claimed support and paid for it by generous gratuities of broad-flung verdure, one viney shaft of which pointed itself upright against the chimney bricks as if a waving lightning rod. Against the other gable you saw the lowly dairy shed its sides close netted with traced madura vines and had you been close enough peeping through that imprisoning tracery and through the light slats barring the little embrasure of a window you might have seen the gentle and contented captives, the pans of milk and the snow-white Dutch Jesus in a row and the molds of golden butter and the jars of lily-cream. In front three straight gigantic rendents stood guardians of this verdant spot. A long way up almost to the ridge pole of the house they showed little foliage but then suddenly as three huge green balloons they poised their three vast inverted rounded cones of verdure in the air. Soon as Pierre's eyes rested on the place a tremor shook him, not alone because of Isabel as they're a harbour now but because of two dependent and most strange coincidences which that day's experience had brought to him. He had gone to breakfast with his mother, his heart charged to overflowing with presentiments of what would probably be her hearty disposition concerning such a being as Isabel, claiming her maternal love. And though the reverend Mr. Falls grave enters and Ned and Deli are discussed and that whole sympathetic matter which Pierre had dispirited bringing before his mother in all its ethic bearings so as absolutely to learn her thoughts upon it and thereby test his own conjectures, all that matter had been fully talked about so that through that strange coincidence he now perfectly knew his mother's mind and had received four warnings as if from heaven not to make any present disclosure to her. That was in the morning and now at evening catching a glimpse of the house where Isabel was harboring and once he recognized it as the rented farmhouse of old Walter Ulvert, father to the self-same Deli, forever ruined through the cruel arts of Ned. Strange as feelings almost supernatural now stole into Pierre with little power to touch with awe the souls of less susceptible, reflective and poetic beings. Such coincidences however frequently they may recur, ever fill the finer organization with sensations which transcend all verbal renderings. They take hold of life's subtlest problem. With the lightning's flash the query is spontaneously propounded, chance or God. If to the mind thus influenced be likewise a prey to any subtle grief then on all sides the query magnifies and at last takes in the all comprehending round of things. Forever is it seen that sincere souls in suffering the most ponder upon final causes. The heart stirred to its depths finds correlative sympathy in the head which likewise is profoundly moved. Before miserable men when intellectual all the ages of the world pass as in a manacold procession and all their myriad links rattle in the mournful mystery. Pacing beneath the long-skirting shadows of the elevated wood, waiting for the appointed hour to come, Pierre strangely strove to imagine to himself the scene which was destined to ensue. But imagination utterly failed him here. The reality was too real for him. Only the face, the face alone, now visited him and so accustomed had he been of late to confound it with the shapes of air that he almost trembled when he thought that face to face that face must shortly meet his own. And now the thicker shadows begin to fall, the place is lost to him, only the three dim tall lindens pilot him as he descends the hill hovering upon the house. He knows it not but his meditative root is sinuous as if that moment his thoughts stream was likewise serpentining, laterally obstructed by insinuated misgivings as to the ultimate utilitarian advisability of the enthusiast resolution that was his. His steps decrease in quickness as he comes more nigh and sees one feeble light struggling in the rustic double casement. Infallibly he knows that his own voluntary steps are taking him forever from the brilliant chandeliers of the Mansion of Saddle Meadows to join company with the wretched rushlights of poverty and woe. But his sublime intuitiveness also paints to him the sunlight glories of godlike truth and virtue, which though ever obscured by the dense fogs of earth, still jowl shine eventually in unclouded radiance casting illustrative light upon the sapphire throne of god. Chapter 2. He stands before the door, the house is steeped in silence, he knocks. The casement light flickers for a moment and then moves away. Within he hears a door creak on its hinges, then his whole heart beats wildly as the outer latch is lifted and holding the light above her supernatural head, Isabelle stands before him. It is herself. No word is spoken, no other soul is seen. They enter the room of the devil casement and Pierre sits down overpowered with bodily faintness and spiritual awe. He lifts his eyes to Isabelle's gaze of loveliness and loneliness and then a low sweet half sobbing voice of more than natural musicalness is heard. And so thou art my brother, shall I call thee Pierre, steadfastly with his one first and last fraternal inquisition of the person of the mystic girl, Pierre now for an instant eyes her, and in that one instant sees in the imploring face not only the nameless touchingness of that of the sowing girl but also the subtler expression of the portrait of his then youthful father, strangely translated and intermarryingly blended with some before unknown foreign femineness. In one breath memory and prophecy and intuition tell him, Pierre have no reserves, no minutest possible doubt, this being is thy sister, thou gazest on thy father's flesh. And so thou art my brother, shall I call thee Pierre, he sprang to his feet and caught her in his undoubting arms, thou art, thou art. He felt the faint struggling within his clasp, her head drooped against him, his whole form was bathed in the flowing glossiness of her long and unemprisoned hair, brushing the lock society now gazed upon the death-like beauty of the face and caught immortal sadness from it. She seemed as dead, as suffocated, the death that leaves most unimpaired the latent tranquilities and sweetnesses of the human countenance. He would have called aloud for succor, but the slow eyes opened upon him and slowly he felt the girl's supineness leaving her. And now she recovers herself a little, and again he feels her faintly struggling in his arms as if somehow abashed, and incredulous of mortal right to hold her so. Now Pierre repents his over-artened and in-cash his warmth and feels himself all reverence for her, tenderly he leads her to a bench within the double casement and sits beside her and waits in silence till the first shock of this encounter shall have left her more composed and more prepared to hold communion with him. How feels to thou now, my sister? Bless thee, bless thee. Again the sweet while power of the musicalness of the voice and some soft strange touch of foreignness in the accent so it fancifully seemed to Pierre thrills through and through his soul. He bent and kissed her brow and then feels her hand seeking his and then clasping it without one uttered word. All his being is now condensed in that one sensation of the clasping hand. He feels it as very small and smooth but strangely hard. Then he knew that by the lonely labor of her hands his own father's daughter had earned her living in the same world where he himself, her own brother, had so idly dwelled. Once more he reverently kissed her brow and his warm breath against it murmured with a prayer to heaven. I have no time to speak to thee, Pierre, my brother, my whole's being. All my life's thoughts and longings are in endless arrears to thee. Then how can I speak to thee? Were it God's will, Pierre, my utmost blessing now were to lie down and die. Then should I be at peace? Bear with me, Pierre. Eternally will I do that, my beloved Isabel. Speak not to me yet awhile, if that seemeth best to thee, if that only is possible to thee. This thy clasping hand, my sister, this is now thy tongue to me. I know not where to begin to speak to thee, Pierre, and yet my soul or brains in me. From my heart's depths I love and reverence thee and feel for thee backward and forward through all eternity. Oh, Pierre, canst thou not cure in me this dreaminess, this bewilderingness I feel? My poor head swims and swims and will not pause. My life cannot last long, thus I'm too full without discharge. Conjure tears from me, Pierre, that my heart may not break with the present feeling, more death like to me than all my grief gone by. E, thirst slaking evening skies, ye helly do's amiss distill your moisture here. The bolt hath passed, why comes not the following shower? Make her to weep. Then her head sought his support, and big drops fell on him, and a non-Isabel gently slid her head from him and sat a little composedly beside him. If thou feelest in endless arrears the thought to meet my sister, so do I feel toward thee. I, too, scarce know what I should speak to thee, but when thou loocest on me my sister, thy beholdest one who in his soul hath taken vows immutable to be to thee in all respects and to the uttermost bounds and possibilities of fate, thy protecting and all acknowledging brother. Not mere sounds of common words, but in most tones of my heart's deepest melodies should now be audible to thee. Thou speakest to a human thing, but something heavenly should answer thee. Some flute heard in the air should answer thee. For sure thy most undreamed of accents peer, sure they have not been unheard on high. Blessings that are imageless to all mortal fancings, thee shall be thine for this. Blessing like to thine, doth but recoil and bless homeward to the heart that uttered it. I cannot bless thee, my sister, as thou dost bless thyself in blessing my unworthiness, but, Isabel, by still keeping present the first wonder of our meeting, we shall make our hearts all feebleness. Let me then rehearse to thee what Pierre is, what life your third to he hath been leading, and what year after he shall lead. So thou wilt be prepared. Nay, Pierre, that is my office. Thou art first entitled to my tail, then. If it sooth thee, thou shalt make me the entitled gift of thine. Listen to me now. The invisible things will give me strength. It is not much, Pierre, nor art very marvelous. Listen, then. I feel soothed down to utterance now. During some brief interlooting silent pauses, in their interview thus far, Pierre had heard a soft, slow, sad, to and fro meditative stepping on the floor above. And in the frequent pauses that intermitted the strange story in the following chapter, that same soft, slow, sad, to and fro meditative and most melancholy stepping was again and again audible in the silent room. Chapter 3. I never knew a mortal mother, the farthest stretch of my life's memory cannot recall one single feature of such a face. If indeed mother of mine hath lived, she is long gone, and cast no shadow on the ground she tried. Pierre, the lips that do now speak to thee, never touched a woman's breast. I seem not of woman born, my first dim life thoughts cluster round, an old half ruinous house in some region for which I now have no chart to seek it out. If such a spot did ever really exist, that too seems to have been withdrawn from all the remainder of the earth. It was a wild, dark house planted in the midst of a round, clear, deeply sloping space scooped out of the middle of deep, stunted pine woods. Ever I shwanked evening from peeping out of my window, lest the ghostly pines should still near to me and reach out their grim arms to snatch me into their horrid shadows. In some of the forest unceasingly hummed with unconjecturable voices of unknown birds and beasts. In winter, its deep snows were traced like any paper map with dotting night tracks of four footed creatures that even to the sun were never visible and never were seen by man at all. In the round open space, the dark house stood without one single green twig or leaf to shelter it, shadeless and shelterless in the heart of shade and shelter. Some of the windows were rudely boarded up with boards nailed straight up and down and those rooms were utterly empty and never were entered, though they were doorless. But often from the echoing corridor, I gazed into them with fear for the great fireplaces were all in ruins. The lower tier of backstones were burnt into one white common crumbling and the black bricks above had fallen upon the hearths heaped here and there with the still-falling soot of long extinguished fires. Every hearth stone in that house had one long crack through it. Every floor drooped at the corners and outside the whole base of the house where it rested on the low foundation of greenish stones was strewn with dull yellow moldings of the rotting sills. No name, no scrawl or written thing, no book was in the house, no one memorial speaking of its former occupants, it was dumb as death, no gravestone or mount or any little hillock around the house betrayed any past burials of man or child and thus with no trace then to me of its past history, thus it hath now entirely departed and perished from my slightest knowledge as to where that house so stood or in what region it so stood. None other house like it have I ever seen, but once I saw plates of the outside of French chateau which powerfully recalled its dim image to me, especially the true rows of small, normal windows projecting from the inverted hopper roof. But that house was of wood and these of stone, still sometimes I think that house was not in this country, but somewhere in Europe, perhaps in France, but it is all bewildering to me and so you must not start at me for I cannot but talk wildly upon so wild a theme. In this house I never saw any living human soul, but an old man and woman. The old man's face was almost black with age and was one purse of wrinkles, his horny beard always tangled, streaked with dust and earthy crumbs. I think in summer he toiled a little in the garden or some spot like that, which lay on one side of the house. All my ideas are in uncertainty and confusion here, but the old man and the old woman seemed to have fastened themselves indelibly upon my memory. I suppose there being the only human things around me then that caused the hold they took upon me. They seldom spoke to me but would sometimes of dark gusty nights sit by the fire and stare at me and then mumble to each other and then stare at me again. They were not entirely unkind to me, but I repeat they seldom or never spoke to me. What words or language they used to each other, this it is impossible for me to recall. I've often wished to for then I might at least have some additional idea where the house was in this country or somewhere beyond the sea. And here I ought to say that sometimes I have, I know not what sort of big remembrances of it one time, shortly after the period I now speak of, chattering in two different childish languages, one of which waned in me as the other and latter grew. But more of this and on. It was the woman that gave me my meals for I did not eat with them. Once they sat by the fire with a loaf between them and a bottle of something sort of reddish wine and I went up to them and asked to eat with them and touch the loaf. But instantly the old man made a motion as if to strike me, but did not. And the woman glaring at me snapped the loaf and threw it into the fire before them. I ran frightened from the room and sought a cat which I had often tried to coax into some intimacy but for some strange cause without success. But in my frightened loneliness, then I sought the cat again and found her upstairs, softly scratching for some hidden thing among the litter of the abandoned fireplaces. I called her for I dare not go into the haunted chamber but she only gazed sideways and unintelligently toward me. And continued her noiseless searchings. I called again and then she turned round and hissed at me and I ran downstairs still stung with the thought of having been driven away there too. I now knew not where to go to rid myself of my loneliness. At last I went outside of the house and sat down on a stone, but its coldness went up to my heart and I rose and stood on my feet but my head was dizzy, I could not stand. I fell and knew no more. The next morning I found myself in bed in my un-chirrable room and some dark bread and a cup of water by me. It has only been by chance that I've told you this one particular reminiscence of my early life in that house, I could tell many more like it but this is enough to show what manner of life I led at that time every day that I then lived. I felt all visible sights and all audible sounds growing stranger and stranger and fearful and more fearful to me. To me the man and the woman were just like the cat. None of them would speak to me, none of them were comprehensible to me and the man and the woman and the cat were just like the green foundation stones of the house to me, I knew not whence they came or what cause they had for being there. I say again, no living human soul came to the house but the man and the woman. But sometimes the old man early trudged away to a road that led through the woods and would not come back till late in the evening. He brought the dark bread and the thin reddish wine with him. Though the entrance to the wood was not so very far from the door yet he came so slowly and infirmly trudging with his little load that it seemed we're hours on hours between my first describing him among the trees and his crossing the splintered threshold. Now the wide and vacant blurrings of my early life thickened in my mind all goes wholly memoryless to me now. It may have been that about that time I grew sick with some fever in which for a long interval I lost myself. Or it may be true which I've heard that after the period of our very earliest recollections then a space intervenes of entire unknowingness followed again by the first dim glimpses of the succeeding memory more or less distinctly embracing all are passed up to that one early gap in it. However this may be nothing more can I recall of the house in the wide open space nothing of how at last I came to leave it but I must have been still extremely young then but some uncertain tossing memory have I of being at last in another round open space but immensely larger than the first one and with no encircling belt of woods. It often it seems to me that there were three tall straight things like pine trees somewhere there nigh to me at times and that they fearfully shook and snapped as the old trees used to in the mountain storms and the floors seemed sometimes to droop at the corners still more steeply than the old floors did and changefully drooped to so that I would even seem to feel them drooping under me. Now too it was that as it sometimes seems to me I first and last chattered in the two childish languages I spoke of a little time ago there seemed people about me some of whom talked one and some the other but I talked both yet one not so readily as the other and but beginningly as it were still this other was the one which was gradually displacing the former. The men who as it sometimes dreamly seems to me at times often climbed the three strange tree-like things they talked I needs must think if indeed I have any real thought about so bottomless of phantom as this is they talked the language which I speak of as at this time gradually waning in me it was a bonny tongue oh seems to me so sparkling gay and lightsome just the tongue for a child like me if the child had not been so sad always it was pure children's language pure so twittering such a chirp in my own mind thou must now perceive that most of these dim remembrances in me hint vaguely of a ship at sea but all is dim and vague to me it scares no I at any time whether I tell you real things or the unrealist dreams always in me the solidest things melt into dreams and dreams into solidities never have I wholly recovered from the effects of my strange early life this it is that even now this moment surrounds thy visible form my brother with a mysterious mistiness so that a second face and a third face and a fourth face peep at me from within thy own now dim and more dim grows in me all the memory of how thou and I did come to meet I grow groping again amid all sorts of shapes which part to me so that I seem to advance through the shapes and yet the shapes of eyes that look at me I turn round and they look at me I step forward and they look at me let me be silent now do not speak to me chapter four filled with nameless wanderings at this strange being Pierre sat mute intensely regarding her half averted aspect her immense soft dresses of the jettiest hair had slantingly fallen over her as though a curtain were half drawn from before some saint enshrined to Pierre she seemed half unearthly but this unearthliness was only her mysteriousness not anything that was repelling or menacing to him and still the low melodies of her far interior voice hovered in sweet echoes in the room and were trodden upon and pressed like gushing grapes by the steady invisible pacing on the floor above she moved a little now and after some strange wanderings more coherently continued my next memory which I think I can in some degree rely upon was yet another house also situated away from human haunts in the heart of a not entirely silent country through this country and by the house wound a green and lagging river that house must have been in some low land for the first house I spoke of seems to me to have been somewhere among mountains or near two mountains the sounds of the far water falls I seem to hear them now the steady up pointed cloud shapes behind the house in the sunset sky I seem to see them now but this other house the second one or third one I know not which I say again it was in some low land there were no pines around it few trees of any sort the ground did not slope so steeply as around the first house there were cultivated fields about it and in the distance farm houses and outhouses and cattle and fowls and many objects of that familiar sort this house I am persuaded was in this country on this side of the sea it was a very large house and full of people but for the most part they lived separately there were some old people in it and there were young men and young women in it some very handsome and there were children in it it seemed a happy place to some of these people many of them were always laughing but it was not a happy place for me but here I may err because of my own consciousness I cannot identify in myself I mean in the memory of my whole foregoing life I say I cannot identify that thing which is called happiness that thing whose token is a laugh or a smile or a silent serenity on the lip I may have been happy but it is not in my conscious memory now nor do I feel the longing for it as though I had never had it my spirit seeks different food from happiness so I think I have a suspicion of what it is I've suffered wretchedness but not because of the absence of happiness and without praying for happiness I pray for peace from motionlessness for the feeling of myself as of some plant absorbing life without seeking it and existing without individual sensation I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness therefore I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things I feel I am an exile here I still go straying yes in thy speech thou smilest but let me be silent again do not answer me when I resume I will not wander so but make short end reverently resolve not to offer the slightest let or hinting hindrance to the singular tale rehearsing to him but to sit passively and receive its marvelous droppings into his soul however long the pauses and as touching less mystical considerations persuaded that by so doing he should ultimately derive the least nebulous and imperfect account of Isabel's history Pierre still sat waiting her resuming his eyes fixed upon the girl's wonderfully beautiful ear which chancing to peep forth from among her abundant tresses nestled in that blackness like a transparent sea shell of pearl she moved a little now and after some strange wanderings more coherently continued while the sound of the stepping on the floor above it seemed to cease I've spoken of the second or rather the third spot in my memory of the past as it first appeared to me I mean I've spoken of the people in the house according to my very earliest recallable impression of them but I stayed in that house for several years five six perhaps seven years and during that interval of my stay all things changed to me because I learned more though always dimly some of its occupants departed some changed from smiles to tears some went moping all the day some grew as savages and outrageous and were dragged below by dumb like men into deep places that I knew nothing of but dismal sounds came through the lower floor groans and clanking fallings as of iron and straw now and then I saw coffins silently at noon day carried into the house and in five minutes time emerged again seemingly heavier than they entered but I saw not who was in them once I saw an immense size coffin and wise pushed through a lower window by three men who did not speak and watching I saw it pushed out again and they drove off with it but the numbers of those invisible persons who thus departed from the house were made good by other invisible persons arriving in close carriages some in rags and tatters came on foot or rather were driven on foot once I heard horrible outcries and peeping from my window saw a robust but squalid and distorted man seemingly a peasant tied by cords with four long ends to them held behind by as many ignorant looking men who with a lash drove the wild squalid being that way toward the house then I heard answering hand clapping shrieks howls laugh to blessings prayers oaths hymns and all audible confusions issuing from all the chambers of the house sometimes they're entered the house though only transiently departing within the hour they came people of a then remarkable aspect to me they were very composed of countenance did not laugh did not groan did not weep did not make strange faces did not look endlessly fatigued were not strangely and fantastically dressed in short did not at all resemble any people I'd ever seen before except a little like some few of the persons of the house who seemed to have authority over the rest these people of a remarkable aspect to me I thought they were strangely demented people composed of countenance but wandering of mind so composed and bodily wandering and strangely demented people by and by the house seemed to change again or else my mind took in more and modified its first impressions I was lodged upstairs in that little room there was hardly any furniture in the room sometimes I wish to go out of it but the door was locked sometimes the people came and took me out of the room into a much larger and very long room and here I would collectively see many of the other people of the house who seemed likewise brought from distant and separate chambers in this long room they would vacantly roam about and talk vacant talk to each other some would stand in the middle of the room gazing steadily on the floor for hours together and never stirred but only breath and gazed upon the floor some would sit crouching in the corner and sit crouching there and only breathe and crouch in the corners some kept their hands tight on their hearts and went slowly promenading up and down moaning and moaning to themselves one would say to another feel of it here put that hand in the break another would mutter broken broken broken and would mutter nothing but that one word broken but most of them were dumb and could not or would not speak or had forgotten how to speak they were nearly all pale people some had hair white as snow and yet were quite young people some were always talking about hell eternity and God and some of all things as fixedly decreed others would say native this and then they would argue but without much conviction either way but once nearly all the people present even the dumb moping people and the sluggish persons crouching in the corners nearly all of them laughed once went after whole days loud babbling two of these predestinarian opponents said each to the other thou hast convinced me friend but we are quits for so also have I convinced thee the other way now then let's argue it all over again for still though mutually converted we are still at odds some harangued the wall some apostrophes the air some hissed at the air some lulled their tongues out at the air some struck the air some made motions as if wrestling with the air and fell out of the arms of the air panting from the invisible hug now as in the former thing thou must dare this have suspected what manner of place this second or third house was that I then lived in but do not speak the word to me that word has never passed my lips even now when I hear the word I run from it when I see it printed in a book I run from the book the word is wholly unendurable to me who brought me to the house how I came there I do not know I lived a long time in the house that alone I know I say I know but still I am uncertain still Pierre still the oh the dreaminess the bewilderingness it never entirely leaves me let me be still again she leaned away from him she put her small hard hand to her forehead then moved it down very slowly but still hardly over her eyes and kept it there making no other sign and still as death then she moved and continued her big tale of terribleness I must be shorter I did not mean to turn off into the mere off shootings of my story here and there but the dreaminess I speak of leaves me sometimes and I as impotent then obey the dreamy prompting bear with me now I will be briefer it came to pass at last that there was a contention about me in the house some contention which I heard in the after rumor only not at the actual time some strangers had arrived or had come in haste being sent for to the house next day they dressed me in new and pretty but still plain clothes and they took me downstairs and out into the air and into a carriage with a pleasant looking woman a stranger to me and I was driven off a good way two days nearly we drove away stopping somewhere overnight and on the evening of the second day we came to another house and went into it and stayed there this house was a much smaller one than the other and seemed sweetly quiet to me after that there was a beautiful infant in it and this beautiful infant always archly and innocently smiling on me and strangely beckoning me to come and play with it and be glad with it and be thoughtless and be glad and gleeful with it this beautiful infant first brought me to my own mind as it were first made me sensible that I was something different from stones, trees, cats first undid in me the fancy that all people were as stones, trees, cats first filled me with the sweet idea of humanness first made me aware of the infinite mercifulness and tenderness and beautifulness of humanness and this beautiful infant first filled me with the dim thought of beauty and equally and at the same time with the feeling of the sadness of the immortalness and universalness of the sadness I now feel that I should soon have gone stop me now do not let me go that way I owe all things to that beautiful infant oh how I envied it lying in its happy mother's breast and drawing life in gladness and all its perpetual smilingness from that white and smiling breast that infant saved me but still gave me vague desirings now I first began to reflect in my mind to endeavor after the recalling past things but try as I would little could I recall but the bewilderingness and the stupor and the torpor and the blackness and the dimness and the vacant whirlingness of the bewilderingness let me be still again and the stepping on the floor above it then resumed chapter five I must have been nine or ten or eleven years old when the pleasant looking woman carried me away from the large house she was a farmer's wife and now that was my residence the farmhouse they taught me to sew and work with wool and spin the wool I was nearly always busy now this being busy to this it must have been which partly brought to me the power of being sensible of myself as something human now I began to feel strange differences when I saw a snake trailing through the grass and darting out the far fork from its mouth I said to myself that thing is not human but I am human when the lightning flashed and split some beautiful tree and left it to rot from all its green as I said that lightning is not human but I am human and so with all other things I cannot speak coherently here but somehow I felt that all good harmless men and women were human things placed at cross purposes in a world of snakes and lightnings in a world of horrible and inscrutable in humanities I've had no training of any sort all my thoughts well up in me I know not whether they pertain to the old the wilderness or not but as they are they are and I cannot alter them for I had nothing to do with putting them in my mind and I never affect any thoughts and I never adulterate any thoughts but when I speak think forth from the tongues speech being sometimes before the thought so often my own tongue teaches me new things now as yet I never had questioned the woman or her husband or the young girls their children why I had been brought to the house or how long I was to stay in the house there I was just as I found myself in the world there I was for what cause I've been brought into the world would have been no stranger question to me then for what cause I've been brought to the house I knew nothing of myself or anything pertaining to myself I felt my pulse my thought but other things I was ignorant of except the general feeling of my humanness among the inhumanities as I grew older I expanded in my mind I began to learn things out of me to see still stranger and my neuter differences I call the woman mother and so did the other girls yet the woman often kissed them but seldom me she always helped them first at table the farmer scarcely ever spoke to me now months years rolled on and the young girls began to stare at me then the bewilderingness of the old starrings of the solitary old man and old woman by the cracked hearthstone of the desolate old house and the desolate round open space the bewilderingness of those old starrings now returned to me and the green starrings and the serpent hissings of the uncompanionable cat recurred to me and the feeling of the infinite forlorness of my life rolled over me but the woman was very kind to me she taught the girls not to be cruel to me she would call me to her and speak cheerfully to me and I thanked not God for I'd been taught no God I thanked the bright human summer and the joyful human sun in the sky I thanked the human summer and the sun that they had given me the woman that would sometimes steal away into the beautiful grass and worship the kind summer and the sun and often say over to myself the soft words summer and the sun still weeks and years ran on and my hair began to veil me with its fullness and its length and now often I heard the word beautiful spoken of my hair and beautiful spoken of myself they would not say the word openly to me but I would be a chance over here then whispering it the word joyed me with the human feeling of it they were wrong not to say it openly to me my joy would have been so much the more assured for the openness of their same beautiful to me and I know it would have filled me with all conceivable kindness poured everyone now I had heard the word beautiful whispered now and then for some months when a new being came to the house they called him gentleman his face was wonderful to me something strangely like it and yet again unlike it I'd seen before but where I could not tell but one day looking into the smooth water behind the house there I saw the likeness something strangely like and yet unlike the likeness of his face this filled me with puzzling the new being the gentleman he was very gracious to me he seemed astonished confounded at me he looked at me then had a very little round picture so it seemed which he took from his pocket and yet concealed from me then he kissed me and looked with tenderness and grief upon me and I felt a tear fall on me from him then he whispered a word into my ear father was the word he whispered the same word by which the young girls called the farmer then I knew it was the word of kindness and of kisses I kissed the gentleman when he left the house I wept for him to come again and he did come again all called him my father now he came to see me once every month or two till at last he came not at all and when I wept and asked for him they said the word dead to me then the bewilderings of the comings and the goings of the coffins at the large and populous house these bewilderings came over me what was it to be dead what is it to be living wherein is the difference between the words death and life had I been ever dead was I living let me be still again do not speak to me and the stepping on the floor above again it did resume month ran on and now I somehow learned that my father had every now and then sent money to the woman to keep me with her in the house and that no more money had come to her after he was dead the last penny of the former money was now gone now the farmer's wife looked troubledly and painful at me and the farmer looked unpleasantly and impatiently at me I felt that something was miserably wrong I said to myself I am one too many I must go away from the pleasant house then the bewilderings of all the loneliness and forlornness of all my forlorn and lonely life all these bewilderings and the well-means of the bewilderings rolled over me and I sat down without the house but could not weep but I was strong and I was a grown girl now I said to the woman keep me hard at work let me work all the time but let me stay with thee but the other girls were sufficient to do the work me they wanted not the farmer looked out of his eyes at me and the outlookings of his eyes said plainly to me thee we do not want go from us thou art one too many and thou art more than one too many then I said to the woman hire me out to someone let me work for someone but I spread too wide my little story I must make an end the woman listened to me and through her means I went to live at another house and earned wages there my work was milking the cows and making butter and spinning wool and weaving carpets of thin strips of cloth one day there came to this house a peddler in his wagon he had a guitar an old guitar yet a very pretty one but with broken strings he got it slyly in part exchanged from the servants of a grand house some distance all spite of the broken strings the thing looked very graceful and beautiful to me and I knew there was melodiousness lurking in the thing though I had never seen a guitar before no heard of one but there was a strange humming in my heart that seemed to prophesy of the hummings of the guitar intuitively I knew that the strings were not as they should be I said to the man I will buy of thee the thing thou callest a guitar but thou must put new strings to it so he went to search for them and brought the strings and restringing the guitar tuned it for me so with part of my earnings I bought the guitar straightway I took it to my little chamber in the gable and softly laid it on my bed then I murmured sung and murmured to it very lowly very softly I could hardly hear myself then I changed the modulations of my singings and my murmurings and still sung and murmured lowly softly more and more and presently I heard a sudden sound sweet and low beyond all telling was the sweet and sudden sound I clapped my hands the guitar was speaking to me the dear guitar was singing to me murmuring and singing to me the guitar then I sung and murmured to it with a still different modulation and once more it answered me from a different string and once more it murmured to me and it answered to me with a different string the guitar was human the guitar taught me the secret of the guitar the guitar learned me to play on the guitar no music master have I ever had but the guitar I made a loving friend of it a heart friend of it it sings to me as I do it love is not all on one side with my guitar all the wonders that are unimaginable and unspeakable all these wonders are translated in the mysterious melodiousness of the guitar it knows all my past history sometimes it plays to me the mystic visions of the confused large house I never name sometimes it brings to me the bird twitterings in the air and sometimes it strikes up in me rapturous pulsations of legendary delights eternally unexperienced and unknown to me bring me the guitar chapter six entranced lost as one wandering bedazzled and amazed among innumerable dancing lights pier had motionlessly listened to this abundant haired and large-eyed girl of mystery bring me the guitar starting from his enchantment pier gazed round the room and saw the instrument leaning against a corner silently he brought it to the girl and silently sat down again now listen to the guitar and the guitar shall sing to thee the sequel of my story for not in words can it be spoken so listen to the guitar instantly the room was populous with sounds of elodiousness and mournfulness and wonderfulness the room swarmed with the unintelligible but delicious sounds the sounds seemed waltzing in the room the sounds hung pendulous like glittering icicles from the corners of the room and fell upon him with a ringing silveriness and were drawn up again to the ceiling and hung pendulous again and dropped down upon him again with the ringing silveriness fireflies seemed buzzing in the sounds summer lightning seemed vividly yet softly audible in the sounds and still the wild girl played on the guitar and her long dark shower of curls fell over it and veiled it and still out from the veil came those swarming sweetness and the utter unintelligibleness but the infinite significancies of the sounds of the guitar girl of all bewildering mystery quite pier speak to me sister if thou indeed can't be a thing that's mortal speak to me if thou be isabel mystery mystery mystery of isabel mystery mystery isabel and mystery among the waltzings and the droppings and the swarming of the sounds pier now heard the tones above deftly stealing and winding among the myriad serpentinings of the other melody deftly stealing and winding as respected the instrumental sounds but in themselves wonderfully and abandonedly free and bold bounding and rebounding as from multitude in its reciprocal walls while with every syllable the hair shrouded form of visible sway to and fro with a like abandonment and suddenness and wantonness then it seemed not like any song seemed not issuing from any mouth but it came forth from beneath the same veil concealing the guitar now a strange wild heat burned upon his bra he put his hand to it instantly the music changed and drooped and changed and changed and changed and lingeringly retreated as it changed and at last was wholly gone pier was the first to break the silence isabel thou hast filled me with such wonderings I'm so distraught with thee that the particular things I had to tell to thee when I hither came these things I cannot now recall to speak them to thee I feel that something is still unsaid by thee which at some other time thou wilt reveal but now I can stay no longer with thee know me eternally as thy loving revering and most marveling brother who will never desert thee isabel now let me kiss thee and depart till tomorrow night when I shall open to thee all my mind and all my plans concerning me and thee let me kiss thee and adieu as full of unquestioning and unfaltering faith in him the girl set motionless and heard him out then silently rose and turned her boundlessly confiding brow to him he kissed it thrice and without another syllable left the place end of book six book seven of pier or the ambiguities by fernan melville this librivox recording is in the public domain book seven intermediate between pier's two interviews with isabel at the farmhouse chapter one not immediately not for a long time could pier fully or by any approximation realize the scene which he had just departed but the vague revelation was now in him that the visible world some of which before had seemed but too common and prosaic to him and but too intelligible he now vaguely felt that all the world and every misconceivedly common and prosaic thing in it was steeped a million fathoms in a mysteriousness holy hopeless of solution first the enigmatic story of the girl and the profound sincerity of it and yet the ever accompanying haziness obscurity and almost miraculousness of it first this wonderful story of the girl had displaced all commonness and prosaicness from his soul and then the inexplicable spell of the guitar and the subtleness of the melodious appealings of the few brief words from isabel sung in the conclusion of the melody all this had bewitched him and enchanted him till he had sat motionless and bending over as a tree transformed and mystery laden visitant caught and fast bound in some necromancer's garden but as now burst from the sorceries he hurried along the open road he strove for the time to dispel the misty feeling or at least postpone it for a while until he should have time to rally both body and soul from the more immediate consequences of that day's long fastings and wanderings and that night's never to be forgotten seen he now endeavored to beat away all thoughts from him but of present bodily needs passing through the silent village he heard the clock tell the mid hour of night hurrying on he entered the mansion by a private door their key of which hung in a secret outer place without undressing he flung himself upon the bed but remembering himself again he rose and adjusted his alarm clock so that it would emphatically repeat the hour of five then to bed again and driving off all intrudings of thoughtfulness and resolutely bending himself to slumber he by and by fell into its at first reluctant but at last welcoming and hospitable arms at five he rose and in the east saw the first spears of the advanced guard of the day it had been his purpose to go forth at that early hour and so avoid all casual contact with any inmate of the mansion and spend the entire day in a second wandering in the woods as the only fit prelude to the society of so wild a being as his newfound sister Isabel but the familiar home sights of his chamber strangely worked upon him for an instant he almost could have preyed Isabel back into the wonder world from which he had so slidingly emerged for an instant the fond all understood blue eyes of Lucy displays the as tender but mournful and inscrutable dark glance of Isabel he seemed placed between them to choose one or the other then both seemed his but into Lucy's eyes there's still half of the mournfulness of Isabel's without diminishing hers again the faintness and the long life weariness benumbed him he left the mansion and put his bare forehead against the restoring wind he re-entered the mansion and adjusted the clock to repeat emphatically the call of seven and then lay upon his bed but now he could not sleep at seven he changed his dress and at half past eight went below to meet his mother at the breakfast table having a little before overheard her step upon the stair chapter two he saluted her but she looked gravely and yet alarmedly and then in a sudden illy repressed panic upon him then he knew he must be wonderfully changed but his mother spoke not to him only to return his good morning he saw that she was deeply offended with him on many accounts moreover that she was vaguely frightened about him and finally that not withstanding all this her stung pride conquered all apprehensiveness in her and he knew his mother well enough to be very certain that though he should unroll a magician's parchment before her now she would verbally express no interest and seek no explanation from him nevertheless he could not entirely abstain from testing the power of her reserviveness I've been quite an absentee Sister Mary said he was ill-affected pleasantness yes Pierre how does the coffee suit you this morning it is some new coffee it is very nice very rich and odorous Sister Mary I am glad you find it so Pierre why don't you call me brother Pierre have I not called you so well then brother Pierre is that better why do you look so indifferently and icily upon me Sister Mary do I look indifferently and icily then I will endeavor to look otherwise give me the toast there Pierre you are very deeply offended at me my dear mother not in the slightest degree Pierre have you seen Lucy lately I'm not my mother ah a bit of salmon Pierre you are too proud to show toward me what you are this moment feeling my mother Mrs. Glendening slowly rose to her feet and her full stature of womanly beauty and majesty stood imposingly over him tempt me no more Pierre I will ask no secret from thee all shall be voluntary between us as it ever has been until very lately for all shall be nothing between us beware of me Pierre there lives not that being in the world of whom thou hast more reason to beware so you continue but a little longer to act with us with me she receded herself and spoke no more Pierre kept silence and after snatching a few mouthfuls if he knew not what silently quitted the table and the room and the mansion Chapter 3 as the door of the breakfast room closed upon Pierre Mrs. Glendening rose her fork unconsciously retained in her hand presently as she paced the room in deep rapid thought she became conscious of something strange in her grasp and without looking at it to mark what it was impulsively flung it from her a dashing noise was heard and then equivering she turned and hanging by the side of Pierre's portrait she saw her own smiling picture pierced through and the fork whose silver tines had caught in the painted bosom vibratingly wrangled in the wound she advanced swiftly to the picture and stood intrepidly before it yes thou art stabbed but the wrong hand stabbed thee this should have been thy silver blow turning to Pierre's portrait face Pierre Pierre thou hast stabbed me with a poisoned point I feel my blood chemically changing in me I the mother of the only sir named Glendening I feel now as though I had borne the last of a swiftly to be extinguished race for swiftly to be extinguished is that race whose only air but so much as impends upon a deed of shame and some deed of shame or something most dubious and most dark is in thy soul or else some blind specter with a cloudy shame-faced front set at yon's seat but now what can it be Pierre unboussin smile not so lightly upon my heavy grief answer what is it boy can it can it no yes surely can it it cannot be but he was not at Lucie's yesterday nor was she here and she would not see me when I called what can this bode but not a mere broken match broken as lovers sometimes break to mend the break with joyful tears so soon again not a mere broken match can break my proud heart so if that indeed be part it is not all but no no no it cannot cannot be he would not could not do so mad so impious a thing it was a most surprising face though I confessed it not to him nor even hinted that I saw it but no no no it cannot be such young peerlessness in such humbleness can not have an honest origin lilies are not stalked on weeds though polluted they sometimes may stand among them she must be both poor and vile some chance blow a splendid worthless rake doomed to inherit both parts of her infecting portion wildness and beauty no I will not think it of him but what then sometimes I feared that my pride would work me some woe incurable by closing both my lips and varnishing all my front where I perhaps ought to be holy in the melted and invoking mood but who can get at one's own heart to mend it write oneself against another that one may sometimes do but when that other is one's own self these ribs forbid then I will live my nature out I will stand on pride I will not budge let come what will I shall not halfway run to meet it to beat it off shall a mother abase herself before her stripping boy let him tell me of himself or let him slide a down chapter four peer plunge deep into the woods and pause not for several miles pause not till he came to a remarkable stone or rather smooth mass of rock huge as a barn which wholly isolated horizontally was yet sweepingly over arched by beach trees and chestnuts it was shaped something like a linkedened egg but flattened more and at the ends pointed more and yet not pointed but irregularly wedge shaped somewhere near the middle of its underside there was a lateral ridge and an obscure point of this ridge rested on a second lengthwise sharpened rock slightly protruding from the ground beside that one obscure and minute point of contact the holy normers and most ponderous mass touched not another object in the wide to raqueous world it was a breathless thing to see one broad haunched and hovered within an inch of the soil all along to the point of teetering contact but yet touched not the soil many feed from that beneath one part of the opposite end which was all seemed and half-rivened the vacancy was considerably larger so as to make it not only possible but convenient to admit a crawling man yet no mortal being had ever been known to have the intrepid heart to crawl there it might well have been the wonder of all the country round but strange to tell though hundreds of cottage hearthstones were of long winter evenings both old men smoke their pipes and young men shell their corn surrounded it at no very remote distance yet had the youthful peer been the first known publishing discoverer of this stone which he had there upon fancifully christened the memnon stone possibly the reason why this singular object had so long remained unblazoned to the world was not so much because it had never before been lighted on though indeed both belted and taught by the dense deep luxuriance of the aboriginal forest it lay like capped in kids sunken hall in the gorge of the river Hudson's highlands its crown being full eight fathoms under high foliage mark during the great spring tidal foliage and besides this the cottagers had no special motive for visiting its more immediate vicinity at all their timber and fuel being obtained from more accessible woodlands as because even if any of the simple people should have chance to have beheld it they in their hoodwinked unappreciativeness would not have accounted at any very marvelous site and therefore would never have thought it worth their while to publish it abroad so that in real truth they might have seen it and yet afterward have forgotten so inconsiderable a circumstance in short this wondrous memnon stone could be no memnon stone to them nothing but a huge stumbling block deeply to be regretted as a vast perspective obstacle in the way of running a handy little cross road through that wild part of the manner now one day while reclining near its flank and intently eyeing it and thinking how surprising it was that in so long settled a country he should have been the first discerning and appreciative person to light upon such a great natural curiosity pier happened to brush aside several successive layers of old gray hair close crop nappy moss and beneath to his no small amazement he saw rudely hammered in the rock some half obliterated initials s e w then he knew that ignorant of the stone as all the simple country round might in memorial have been yet was not himself the only human being who had discovered that marvelous impending spectacle but long and long ago in quite another age the stone had been beheld and it's wonderfully appreciated as the painstaking initials seem to testify by some departed man who were he now alive might possibly wag a beard old as the most venerable oak of centuries wrote but who who in mathus this name who might have been this s e w pier pondered long but could not possibly imagine for the initials and their antiqueness seem to point to some period before the era of columbus discovery of the hemisphere happening in the end to mention the strange matter of these initials to a white haired old gentleman his city kinsmen who after a long and richly varied but unfortunate life had at last found great solace in the old testament which he was continually studying with ever increasing adoration this white haired old kinsman after having learned all that particular is about the stone its bulk its height the precise angle of its critical impending and all that and then after much prolonged cogitation upon it and several long drawn size and aged looks of horror significance and reading certain verses and ecclesiastes after all these tedious preliminaries this not at all to be hurried white haired old kinsman had laid his tremulous hand upon pier's firm young shoulder and slowly whispered boy tis Solomon the wise pier could not repress a merry laugh at this wonderfully diverted by what seemed to him so queer and crotchety a conceit which he imputed to the alleged dotage of his venerable kinsman who he well knew had once maintained that the old scriptural oefer was somewhere on our northern sea coast so no wonder the old gentleman should fancy that king Solomon might have taken a trip as a sort of amateur supercargo of some tire or siden gold ship across the water and happened to light on the memnon stone while rambling about with bow and quiver shooting partridges that merriment was by no means pier's usual movement thinking of this stone much less when seated in the woods he in the profound significance of that deep forest silence viewed its marvelous impendings a flitting conceit had often cost him that he would like nothing better for a headstone than this same imposing pile at which at times during the soft swings of the surrounding foliage there seemed to lurk some mournful and lamenting plain as for some sweet boy long since departed in the antediluvian time not only might this stone well have been the wonder of the simple country round but it might well have been its terror sometimes wrought to a mystic mood by contemplating its ponderous inscrutableness pier had called it the terror stone few could be bribed to climates giddy height and crawl out upon its more hovering end it seemed as if the dropping of one seed from the beak of the smallest blind bird would topple the immense mass over crashing against the trees it was a very familiar thing to pier he had often climbed it by placing long poles against it and so creeping up to where it sloped in little crumbling stepping places or by climbing high up the neighboring beaches and then lowering himself down upon the forehead like summit by the elastic branches but never had he been fearless enough or rather foolhardy enough it may be to crawl on the ground beneath the vacancy of the higher end that spot first menaced by the terror stone should it ever really topple chapter five yet now advancing steadily and is by some interior predetermination and dying the mass unfalteringly he then threw himself prone upon the woods last year's leaves and slid himself straight into the horrible interspace and lay there as dead he spoke not for speechless thoughts were in him these gave place at last to things less and less unspeakable till it last from beneath the very brow of the beatlings and the menacing of the terror stone came the audible words of pier if the miseries of the undisclosable things in me shall ever unhorsemeat from my manhood seat if to vow myself all virtues and all truths be but to make a trembling distressed slave of me if life is to prove a burden I cannot bear without ignominious cringing if indeed our actions are all foreordained and we are Russian serfs to fate if invisible devils do titter at us when we most nobly strive if life be a cheating dream and virtue as unmeaning and unsequeled with any blessing as the midnight mirth of wine if I sacrificing myself for duty's sake my own mother re-sacrifices me if duty's self be but a bugbear and all things are allowable and unpunishable to man then do thou mute massiveness follow me ages thou hast waited and if these things be thus then wait no more for whom better canst thou crush than him who now lies here invoking thee a down darting bird all songs swiftly lighted on the unmoved and eternally immovable balancings of the terror stone and cheerfully chirped to pier the tree bows bent and waved to the rushes of a sudden balmy wind and slowly pier called forth and stood hardly upon his feet as he owed thanks to none and went his moody way. Chapter 6. When in his imaginative ruminating moods of early youth pier had christened the wonderful stone by the old resounding name of Memnon he had done so merely from certain associative remembrances of that Egyptian marvel of which all eastern travelers speak and when the fugitive thought had long ago entered him of desiring that same stone for his headstone when he should be no more then he had only yielded to one of those innumerable fanciful notions tinged with dreamy painless melancholy which are frequently suggested to the mind of a poetic boy. But in after timesmen placed in far different circumstances from those surrounding him at the meadows pier pondered on the stone and his young thoughts concerning it and later his desperate act in crawling under it then an immense significance came to him and the long past unconscious movements of his then youthful heart seemed now prophetic to him and allegorically verified by the subsequent events for not to speak of the other and subtle meanings which lie crouching behind the colossal haunches of this stone regarded as the menacingly impending terror stone hidden to all the simple collages but revealed to pier consider its aspects as the memnon stone for memnon was that dewy royal boy son of aurora and born king of egypt who with enthusiastic rashness flinging himself on another's account into a rightful quarrel fought hand to hand with his overmatch and met his boyish and most odorous death beneath the walls of Troy. His wailing subjects built a monument in Egypt to commemorate his untimely fate touched by the breath of the bereaved aurora every sunrise that statue gave forth a mournful broken sound as of a harp string suddenly sundered being too harshly wound. Herein lies an unsummed world of grief for in this plaintive fable we find embodied the hamletism of the antique world the hamletism of three thousand years ago the flower of virtue cropped by a too rare miss chance and the english tragedy is but egyptian memnon mountainized and modernized for being but a mortal man Shakespeare had his fathers too. Now as the memnon statue survives down to this present day so does that nobly striving but ever shipwrecked character in some royal youths for both memnon and hamlet were the sons of kings of which that statue is the melancholy type but memnon's sculptured woes did once melodiously resound now always mute fit emblem that of old poetry was a consecration and an obsequie to all hapless modes of human life but in a bantering baron and prosaic heartless age aurora's music moan is lost among our drifting sands which well my like the monument and the dirge chapter seven as pier went on through the woods all thoughts now left him but those investing isabel he strove to condense her mysterious haze into some definite and comprehensible shape he could not but infer that the feeling of the wilderness which he had so often hinted of during their interview had caused her continually to go aside from the straight line of her narration and finally to end it in an abrupt and enigmatic obscurity but he also felt assured that as this was entirely unintended and now doubtless regretted by herself so their coming second interview would help to clear up much of this mysteriousness considering that the elapsing interval would do much to tranquilize her and rally her into less of wonderfulness to him he did not therefore so much accuse his unthinkingness in naming the postponing hour he had for indeed looking from the morning down the vista of the day it seemed as indefinite and interminable to him he could not bring himself to confront any face or house a plowed field any sign of tillage the rotted stump about long fell pine the slightest passing trace of man was uncongenial and repelling to him likewise in his own mind all remembrances and imaginings that had to do with the common and general humanity had become for the time in the most singular manner distasteful to him still while thus loathing all that was common in the two different worlds that without and that within nevertheless even in the most withdrawn and selfless region of his own essential spirit pier could not now find one single agreeable twig of thought wear on to perch his weary soul men in general seldom suffer from this utter pauperism of the spirit if god hath not blessed them with incurable frivolity men in general have still some secret thing of self-conceit or virtuous gratulation men in general have always done some small self-sacrificing deed for some other man and so in those now and then recurring hours of despondent lassitude which must at various undifferent intervals overtake almost every civilized human being such person straightway bethink them of their one or two or three small self-sacrificing things and suck respite consolation and more or less compensating deliciousness from it but with men of self-distainful spirits in whose chosen souls have in itself hath by a primitive persuasion un indoctrination fixed that most true christian doctrine of the other nothingness of good works the casual remembrance of their benevolent well-doings does never distill one drop of comfort for them even as in harmony with their correlative scripture doctrine the recalling of their outlived errors and mysties conveys to them no slightest pang or shadow of reproach though the cluedifying mysteriousness of isabelle's narration did now for the time in this particular mood of his put on a repelling aspect to our peer yet something must occupy the soul of man and isabelle was nearest to him then and isabelle he thought of at first with great discomfort and with pain but anon for heaven eventually rewards the resolute and dubious thinker with lessening repugnance and at last with still increasing willingness and congenialness now he recalled his first impressions here and there while she was rehearsing to him her wild tale he recalled those swift but mystical corroborations in his own mind and memory which by shedding another twinkling light upon her history had but increased its mystery while at the same time remarkably substantiating it her first recallable recollection was of an old deserted chateau-like house in a strange french-like country which she dimly imagined to be somewhere beyond the sea did not this surprisingly correspond with certain natural inferences to be drawn from his Aunt Dorothy as account of the disappearance of the french young lady yes the french young lady's disappearance on this side the water was only contingent upon her reappearance on the other then he shattered as he darkly pictured the possible sequel of her life and the resting from her of her infant and its emurement in the savage mountain wilderness but isabelle had also vague impressions of her self-crossing the sea recrossing emphatically thought pierre as he pondered on the unbidden conceit that she probably first unconsciously and smuggledly crossed it hidden beneath her sorrowing mother's heart but in attempting to draw any inferences from what he himself had ever heard for a coinciding proof or elucidation of this assumption of isabelle's actual crossing the sea at so tender an age here pierre felt all the inadequateness of both his own and isabelle's united knowledge to clear up the profound mysteriousness of her early life to the certainty of this irremovable obscurity he bowed himself and strove to dismiss it from his mind as worse than hopeless so also in a good degree did he endeavor to drive out of him isabelle's reminiscence of the to her unnameable large house from which she had been finally removed by the pleasant woman in the coach this episode in her life about all of the things was most cruelly suggestive to him as possibly involving his father in the privity to a thing at which pierre's inmost soul fainted with amazement and apporance here the helplessness of all for the light and the eternal impossibility of logically exonerating his dead father in his own mind from that liability to this and many other of the blackest self insinuated suppositions all this came over pierre with a power so infernal and intense that it could only have proceeded from the unretarded malice of the evil one himself but subtly and wantonly as the conceit stole into him pierre as subtly opposed them and with the hue and cry of his whole indignant soul pursued them forth again into the wide tartarean realm from which they had emerged the more and the more that pierre revolved the story of isabelle in his mind so much the more he amended his original idea that much of its obscurity would depart upon a second interview he saw or seemed to see that it was not so much isabelle who had by her wild idiosyncrasies mystified the narration of her history as it was the essential and unavoidable mystery of her history itself which had invested isabelle with such wonderful enigmas to him chapter eight the issue of these reconsiderings was the conviction that all he could not reasonably anticipate from isabelle in further disclosure on the subject of her life were some few additional particulars bringing it down to the present moment and also possibly filling out the latter portion of what she had already revealed to him nor here could he persuade himself that she would have much to say isabelle had not been so digressive and withholding as he had thought what more indeed could she now have to impart except by what strange means she had at last come to find her brother out and the dreary recital of how she had pecuniarily wrestled with her destitute condition how she had come to leave one place of toiling refuge for another to now he found her in humble servitude at farmer oevers is it possible then thought pierre that there lives a human creature in this common world of every days whose whole history may be told in little less than two score words and yet embody in that smallness a fathomless fountain of ever welling mystery is it possible after all that spite of bricks and shaven faces this world we live in is brimmed with wonders and I and all mankind beneath our garves of common placeness conceal enigmas that the stars themselves and perhaps the highest stare of them cannot resolve the intuitively certain however literally unproven fact of isabelle's sisterhood to him was a link that he now felt binding him to before an imagined and endless chain of wondering his very blood seemed to flow through all his arteries with unwanted subtleness when he thought that the same tide flowed through the mystic veins of isabelle all his occasional pangs of dubiousness as to the grand governing thing of all the reality of the physical relationship only recall back upon him with added tribute of both certainty and insolubleness she is my sister my own father's daughter well why do I believe it the other day I had not so much as heard the remotest rumor of her existence and what has since occurred to change me what so new and incontestable vouchers have I handled not at all but I've seen her well granted I might have seen a thousand other girls whom I had never seen before but for that I would not own any one among them for my sister but the portrait the chair portrait Pierre think of that but that was painted before isabelle was born what can that portrait have to do with isabelle it is not the portrait of isabelle it is my father's portrait and yet my mother swears it is not he now alive as he was to all the searching argumentative itemisings of the minutest known facts anyway bearing upon the subject and yet at the same time persuaded strong as debt that in spite of them is about was indeed his sister how could Pierre naturally poetic and therefore piercing as he was how could he fail to acknowledge the existence of that all controlling and all permeating wonderfulness which been imperfectly and isolatedly recognized by the generality is so significantly dominated the finger of God but it is not merely the finger it is the whole outspread hand of God for doth not scripture intimate that he holdeth all of us in the hollow of his hand a hollow truly still wandering through the forest is I pursuing its ever shifting shadowy vistas remote from all visible haunts and traces of that strangely willful race who in the sordid trafficings of clay and mud are ever seeking to denationalize the natural heavenliness of their souls there came into the mind of pure thoughts and fancies never imbibed within the gates of towns but only given forth by the atmosphere of primeval forests which with the eternal ocean are the only unchanged general objects remaining to this day from those that originally met the gaze of Adam for so it is that the apparently most inflamable or evaporable of all earthly things wood and water are in this view immensely the most indurable now all his pondrings however excursive wheeled around isabel as their center and back to her they came again from every excursion and again derive some new small germs for wonderment the question of time occurred to pierre how old was isabel according to all reasonable inferences from the presumed circumstances of her life she was his elder certainly though by uncertain years yet her whole aspect was that of more than child likeness nevertheless not only did he feel his muscular superiority to her so to speak which made him spontaneously alive to a feeling of elderly protectiveness over her not only did he experience the thoughts of superior world acquaintance and general culture knowledge but spite of reason's self and irrespective of all mere computings he was conscious of a feeling which independently pronounced him her senior endpoint of time an isabella child of everlasting youngness this strange though strong conceit of his mysterious persuasion doubtless had its untraced and but little suspected origin in his mind from ideas born of his devout meditations upon the artless impantileness of her face which though profoundly mournful in the general expression yet did not by any means for that cause lose one wit in its singular infantileness as the faces of real infants in their earliest visibleness do oftentimes wear a look of deep and endless sadness but it was not the sadness nor indeed strictly speaking the infantileness of the face of isabella which so singularly impressed him with the idea of her original and changeless youthfulness it was something else yet something which entirely eluded him imaginatively exalted by the willing suffragists of all mankind into higher and pure realms of the men themselves inhabited beautiful women those of them at least who are beautiful in soul as well as body do notwithstanding the relentless law of earthly fleetingness still seem for a long interval mysteriously exempt from the incantations of decay for as the outward loveliness touch by touch departs the interior beauty touch by touch replaces that departing bloom with charms which undarivable from earth possess the ineffacableness of stars else why at the age of 60 have some women held in the strongest bonds of love and fealty men young enough to be their grandsons and why did all seducing ninyong unintendingly break scores of hearts at 70 it is because of the perennialness of womanly sweetness out from the infantile yet eternal mournfulness of the face of isabel their look don't pier that angelic childlikeness which our savior hints is the one only investiture of translated souls for of such even of little children is the other world now unending as the wonderful rivers which once bathed the feet of the primeval generations and still remain to flow fast by the graves of all succeeding men and by the beds of all now living unending ever flowing ran through the solar pier fresh and fresher further and still further thoughts of isabel but the more his thoughtful river ran the more mysteriousness it floated to him and yet the more certainty that the mysteriousness was unchangeable in her life there was an unravel plot and he felt that unraveled it would eternally remain to him no slightest hope or dream had he that what was dark and mournful in her would ever be cleared up into some coming atmosphere of light and mirth like all youths pier had conned his novel lessons had read more novels than most persons of his years but their false inverted attempts at systemizing eternally unsystemizable elements their audacious inter meddling impotency and trying to unravel and spread out and classify the more thin than gossamer threads which make up the complex web of life these things over appear had no power now strayed through their helpless miserableness he pierced the one sensational truth in him transfixed like beetles all the speculative lies in them he saw the human life death truly come from that which all men are agreed to call by the name of god and that it partakes of the unravelable inscrutalness of god by infallible presentiment he saw that not always death life's beginning gloom it conclude in gladness that wedding bells peal not ever in the last scene of life's fifth act that while the countless tribes of common novels laboriously spin veils of mystery only to complacently clear them up at last and while the countless tribe of common dramas do but repeat the same yet the profounder emanations of the human mind intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known if human life these never unravel their own intricacies and have no proper endings but in imperfect unanticipated and disappointing sequels as mutilated stumps hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate so pierre renounced all thought of ever having isabelle's dark lantern eliminated to him her light was lit and the lid was locked nor did he feel a pang at this by posting hither and thither among the reminiscences of his family and craftily interrogating his remaining relatives on his father's side he might possibly wait for some few small grains of dubious and most unsatisfying things which were he that way strong event would only serve the more hopelessly to cripple him in his practical resolves he determined to pry not at all into this sacred problem for him now the mystery visibel possessed all the bewitchingness of the mysterious vault of night whose very darkness evokes the witchery the thoughtful river still ran on in him and now it floated still another thing to him though the letter of isabel gushed with all a sister's sacred longings to embrace her brother in the most abandoned terms painted the anguish of her life-long estrangement from him and though in effect it took bows to this that without his continual love and sympathy further life for her was only fit to be thrown into the nearest unfathomful or rushing stream yet when the brother and sister had encountered according to this set appointment none of these impassioned immense had been repeated she had more than thrice thank god and most earnestly blessed himself that now he had come near to her in her loneliness but no gesture of common and customary sisterly affection nay from his embrace had she not struggled nor kissed him once nor had he kissed her except when the salute was solely sought by him now pier began to see mysteries inter-appears with mysteries and mysteries eluding mysteries and began to seem to see the mere imaginariness of the so supposed solidest principle of human association they had done this thing for them they had separated the brother and the sister till to each other they somehow seemed so not at all sisters shrink not from their brother's kisses and pier about that never never would he be able to embrace isabel with the mere brotherly embrace while the thought of any other caress which took hold of any domesticness was entirely vacant from his uncontaminated soul for it had never consciously intruded there therefore forever unsistered for him by the stroke of fate and apparently forever and twice removed from the remotest possibility of that love which had drawn him to his lucy yet still the object of the ardentest and deepest emotions of his soul therefore to him isabel holy soared out of the realms of mortalness and for him became transfigured in the highest heaven of uncorrupted love end of book seven