- end_line
- 6694
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 6627
- text
- She lifted her dry burning eyes of long-fringed fire to him.
"Pierre--I have no slightest proof--but the guitar was _hers_, I know, I
feel it was. Say, did I not last night tell thee, how it first sung to
me upon the bed, and answered me, without my once touching it? and how
it always sung to me and answered me, and soothed and loved me,--Hark
now; thou shalt hear my mother's spirit."
She carefully scanned the strings, and tuned them carefully; then placed
the guitar in the casement-bench, and knelt before it; and in low,
sweet, and changefully modulated notes, so barely audible, that Pierre
bent over to catch them; breathed the word _mother, mother, mother_!
There was profound silence for a time; when suddenly, to the lowest and
least audible note of all, the magical untouched guitar responded with a
quick spark of melody, which in the following hush, long vibrated and
subsidingly tingled through the room; while to his augmented wonder, he
now espied, quivering along the metallic strings of the guitar, some
minute scintillations, seemingly caught from the instrument's close
proximity to the occasionally irradiated window.
The girl still kept kneeling; but an altogether unwonted expression
suddenly overcast her whole countenance. She darted one swift glance at
Pierre; and then with a single toss of her hand tumbled her unrestrained
locks all over her, so that they tent-wise invested her whole kneeling
form close to the floor, and yet swept the floor with their wild
redundancy. Never Saya of Limeean girl, at dim mass in St. Dominic's
cathedral, so completely muffled the human figure. To Pierre, the deep
oaken recess of the double-casement, before which Isabel was kneeling,
seemed now the immediate vestibule of some awful shrine, mystically
revealed through the obscurely open window, which ever and anon was
still softly illumined by the mild heat-lightnings and
ground-lightnings, that wove their wonderfulness without, in the
unsearchable air of that ebonly warm and most noiseless summer night.
Some unsubduable word was on Pierre's lip, but a sudden voice from out
the veil bade him be silent.
"Mother--mother--mother!"
Again, after a preluding silence, the guitar as magically responded as
before; the sparks quivered along its strings; and again Pierre felt as
in the immediate presence of the spirit.
"Shall I, mother?--Art thou ready? Wilt thou tell me?--Now? Now?"
These words were lowly and sweetly murmured in the same way with the
word _mother_, being changefully varied in their modulations, till at
the last _now_, the magical guitar again responded; and the girl swiftly
drew it to her beneath her dark tent of hair. In this act, as the long
curls swept over the strings of the guitar, the strange sparks--still
quivering there--caught at those attractive curls; the entire casement
was suddenly and wovenly illumined; then waned again; while now, in the
succeeding dimness, every downward undulating wave and billow of
Isabel's tossed tresses gleamed here and there like a tract of
phosphorescent midnight sea; and, simultaneously, all the four winds of
the world of melody broke loose, and again as on the previous night,
only in a still more subtile, and wholly inexplicable way, Pierre felt
himself surrounded by ten thousand sprites and gnomes, and his whole
soul was swayed and tossed by supernatural tides; and again he heard the
wondrous, rebounding, chanted words:
"Mystery! Mystery!
Mystery of Isabel!
Mystery! Mystery!
Isabel and Mystery!
Mystery!"
- title
- Chunk 4