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- more. Could I, I would not now be fully told, how the guitar came to be
at Saddle Meadows, and came to be bartered away by the servants of
Saddle Meadows. Enough, that it found me out, and came to me, and spoke
and sung to me, and soothed me, and has been every thing to me."
She paused a moment; while vaguely to his secret self Pierre revolved
these strange revealings; but now he was all attention again as Isabel
resumed.
"I now held in my mind's hand the clew, my brother. But I did not
immediately follow it further up. Sufficient to me in my loneliness was
the knowledge, that I now knew where my father's family was to be found.
As yet not the slightest intention of ever disclosing myself to them,
had entered my mind. And assured as I was, that for obvious reasons,
none of his surviving relatives could possibly know me, even if they saw
me, for what I really was, I felt entire security in the event of
encountering any of them by chance. But my unavoidable displacements and
migrations from one house to another, at last brought me within twelve
miles of Saddle Meadows. I began to feel an increasing longing in me;
but side by side with it, a new-born and competing pride,--yes, pride,
Pierre. Do my eyes flash? They belie me, if they do not. But it is no
common pride, Pierre; for what has Isabel to be proud of in this world?
It is the pride of--of--a too, too longing, loving heart, Pierre--the
pride of lasting suffering and grief, my brother! Yes, I conquered the
great longing with the still more powerful pride, Pierre; and so I would
not now be here, in this room,--nor wouldst thou ever have received any
line from me; nor, in all worldly probability, ever so much as heard of
her who is called Isabel Banford, had it not been for my hearing that at
Walter Ulver's, only three miles from the mansion of Saddle Meadows,
poor Bell would find people kind enough to give her wages for her work.
Feel my hand, my brother."
"Dear divine girl, my own exalted Isabel!" cried Pierre, catching the
offered hand with ungovernable emotion, "how most unbeseeming, that this
strange hardness, and this still stranger littleness should be united in
any human hand. But hard and small, it by an opposite analogy hints of
the soft capacious heart that made the hand so hard with heavenly
submission to thy most undeserved and martyred lot. Would, Isabel, that
these my kisses on the hand, were on the heart itself, and dropt the
seeds of eternal joy and comfort there."
He leaped to his feet, and stood before her with such warm, god-like
majesty of love and tenderness, that the girl gazed up at him as though
he were the one benignant star in all her general night.
"Isabel," cried Pierre, "I stand the sweet penance in my father's stead,
thou, in thy mother's. By our earthly acts we shall redeemingly bless
both their eternal lots; we will love with the pure and perfect love of
angel to an angel. If ever I fall from thee, dear Isabel, may Pierre
fall from himself; fall back forever into vacant nothingness and night!"
"My brother, my brother, speak not so to me; it is too much; unused to
any love ere now, thine, so heavenly and immense, falls crushing on me!
Such love is almost hard to bear as hate. Be still; do not speak to me."
They were both silent for a time; when she went on.
"Yes, my brother, Fate had now brought me within three miles of thee;
and--but shall I go straight on, and tell thee all, Pierre? all? every
thing? art thou of such divineness, that I may speak straight on, in all
my thoughts, heedless whither they may flow, or what things they may
float to me?"
"Straight on, and fearlessly," said Pierre.
"By chance I saw thy mother, Pierre, and under such circumstances that I
_knew_ her to be thy mother; and--but shall I go on?"
"Straight on, my Isabel; thou didst see my mother--well?"
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