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- 6161
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 6108
- text
- resolute and duteous 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 Dorothea's 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 shuddered as he darkly pictured the
possible sequel of her life, and the wresting from her of her infant,
and its immurement in the savage mountain wilderness.
But Isabel had also vague impressions of herself crossing the
sea;--_re_crossing, emphatically thought Pierre, as he pondered on the
unbidden conceit, that she had 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
Isabel's actual crossing the sea at so tender an age; here Pierre felt
all the inadequateness of both his own and Isabel'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, Isabel'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,
above all other 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 abhorrence. Here the helplessness of all
further light, and the eternal impossibility of logically exonerating
his dead father, in his own mind, from the 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
subtilly and wantonly as these conceits stole into him, Pierre as
subtilly 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 now revolved the story of Isabel 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 Isabel 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 Isabel
with such wonderful enigmas to him.
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