Pierre; or The Ambiguities. Melville Herman

her and me. Touch her not, ye airy devils; hence to your appointed hell! why come ye prowling in these heavenly perlieus? Can not the chains of Love omnipotent bind ye, fiends?"

      "Is 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 fairy love should raise 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-floes, frozen to a corpse. My own, best, blessed Pierre! Now, could I plant some poniard in me, that my silly ailings should have power to move thee thus, and pain thee thus. Forgive me, Pierre; thy changed face hath chased the other from me; the fright of thee exceeds all other frights. It does not so haunt me now. Press hard my hand; look hard on me, my love, that its last trace may pass away. Now I feel almost whole again; now, 'tis gone. Up, my Pierre; let us up, and fly these hills, whence, I fear, too wide a prospect meets us. Fly we to the plain. See, thy steeds neigh for thee – they call thee – see, the clouds fly down toward the plain – lo, these hills now seem all desolate to me, and the vale all verdure. 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 verdure 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."

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 up stairs, but paused on the threshold of the open door. He never had entered that 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 a 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 unrelieved betimes by such quickenings of all his pulses, that in fantasy he pressed the wide beauty of the world in his embracing arms; for all his 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 thereupon 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 – 'tis 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? – 'twas 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 lookest 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."

VII

      AS Pierre drove through the silent village, beneath the vertical shadows of the noon-day 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 by the otherwise unsparing woodmen, who long ago had cleared that meadow. It was once crossing to this noble pine, from a clump of hemlocks far across the 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 hath no music in its thoughtful boughs; 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 out-reaching length of one particular root, which, straying down the bank, the storms and rains had years ago exposed.

      "How wide, how strong these roots must spread! Sure, 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 pyramidical and numberless, flame-like complainings of this Eolean pine; – the wind breathes now upon it: – the wind, – that is God's breath! Is He so sad? Oh, tree! so mighty thou, so lofty, yet so mournful! This is most strange! Hark! as I look up into thy high secrecies, oh, tree, the face, the face, peeps down on me! – 'Art thou Pierre? Come to me' – oh, thou mysterious girl, – what an ill-matched pendant thou, to 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 revery; 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 half disbelieve in thee. Not that I would be without my too little cherished fits of sadness now and then; but God keep me from thee, thou other shape of far profounder gloom! I shudder at thee! The face! – the face! – forth again from thy high secrecies, oh, tree! the face steals down upon me. Mysterious girl! who art thou? by what right snatchest 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 can not be. What, who