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- 6751
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- text
- III.
Almost deprived of consciousness by the spell flung over him by the
marvelous girl, Pierre unknowingly gazed away from her, as on vacancy;
and when at last stillness had once more fallen upon the room--all
except the stepping--and he recovered his self-possession, and turned to
look where he might now be, he was surprised to see Isabel composedly,
though avertedly, seated on the bench; the longer and fuller tresses of
her now ungleaming hair flung back, and the guitar quietly leaning in
the corner.
He was about to put some unconsidered question to her, but she
half-anticipated it by bidding him, in a low, but nevertheless almost
authoritative tone, not to make any allusion to the scene he had just
beheld.
He paused, profoundly thinking to himself, and now felt certain that the
entire scene, from the first musical invocation of the guitar, must have
unpremeditatedly proceeded from a sudden impulse in the girl, inspired
by the peculiar mood into which the preceding conversation, and
especially the handling of the guitar under such circumstances, had
irresistibly thrown her.
But that certain something of the preternatural in the scene, of which
he could not rid his mind:--the, so to speak, voluntary and all but
intelligent responsiveness of the guitar--its strangely scintillating
strings--the so suddenly glorified head of Isabel; altogether, these
things seemed not at the time entirely produced by customary or natural
causes. To Pierre's dilated senses Isabel seemed to swim in an electric
fluid; the vivid buckler of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate. Now
first this night was Pierre made aware of what, in the superstitiousness
of his rapt enthusiasm, he could not help believing was an extraordinary
physical magnetism in Isabel. And--as it were derived from this
marvelous quality thus imputed to her--he now first became vaguely
sensible of a certain still more marvelous power in the girl over
himself and his most interior thoughts and motions;--a power so hovering
upon the confines of the invisible world, that it seemed more inclined
that way than this;--a power which not only seemed irresistibly to draw
him toward Isabel, but to draw him away from another quarter--wantonly
as it were, and yet quite ignorantly and unintendingly; and, besides,
without respect apparently to any thing ulterior, and yet again, only
under cover of drawing him to her. For over all these things, and
interfusing itself with the sparkling electricity in which she seemed to
swim, was an ever-creeping and condensing haze of ambiguities. Often, in
after-times with her, did he recall this first magnetic night, and would
seem to see that she then had bound him to her by an extraordinary
atmospheric spell--both physical and spiritual--which henceforth it had
become impossible for him to break, but whose full potency he never
recognized till long after he had become habituated to its sway. This
spell seemed one with that Pantheistic master-spell, which eternally
locks in mystery and in muteness the universal subject world, and the
physical electricalness of Isabel seemed reciprocal with the
heat-lightnings and the ground-lightnings nigh to which it had first
become revealed to Pierre. She seemed molded from fire and air, and
vivified at some Voltaic pile of August thunder-clouds heaped against
the sunset.
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