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- 6215
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- 6162
- text
- VIII.
The issue of these reconsiderings was the conviction, that all he could
now reasonably anticipate from Isabel, 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. Isabel 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, till now he found her in
humble servitude at farmer Ulver's? Is it possible then, thought Pierre,
that there lives a human creature in this common world of everydays,
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 garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the
stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?
The intuitively certain, however literally unproven fact of Isabel's
sisterhood to him, was a link that he now felt binding him to a before
unimagined and endless chain of wondering. His very blood seemed to flow
through all his arteries with unwonted subtileness, when he thought that
the same tide flowed through the mystic veins of Isabel. All his
occasional pangs of dubiousness as to the grand governing thing of
all--the reality of the physical relationship--only recoiled 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? None at all. But I have seen her.
Well; grant it; 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 Isabel was born; what can that portrait have
to do with Isabel? It is not the portrait of Isabel, it is my father's
portrait; and yet my mother swears it is not he.
Now alive as he was to all these searching argumentative itemizings of
the minutest known facts any way bearing upon the subject; and yet, at
the same time, persuaded, strong as death, that in spite of them, Isabel
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, when
imperfectly and isolatedly recognized by the generality, is so
significantly denominated 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!
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