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- text
- II.
So Pierre, gladly plunging into this welcome current of talk, was
enabled to attend his mother home without furnishing further cause for
her concern or wonderment. But not by any means so readily could he
allay his own concern and wonderment. Too really true in itself, however
evasive in its effect at the time, was that earnest answer to his
mother, declaring that never in his whole existence had he been so
profoundly stirred. The face haunted him as some imploring, and
beauteous, impassioned, ideal Madonna's haunts the morbidly longing and
enthusiastic, but ever-baffled artist. And ever, as the mystic face thus
rose before his fancy's sight, another sense was touched in him; the
long-drawn, unearthly, girlish shriek pealed through and through his
soul; for now he knew the shriek came from the face--such Delphic shriek
could only come from such a source. And wherefore that shriek? thought
Pierre. Bodes it ill to the face, or me, or both? How am I changed, that
my appearance on any scene should have power to work such woe? But it
was mostly the face--the face, that wrought upon him. The shriek seemed
as incidentally embodied there.
The emotions he experienced seemed to have taken hold of the deepest
roots and subtlest fibres of his being. And so much the more that it was
so subterranean in him, so much the more did he feel its weird
inscrutableness. What was one unknown, sad-eyed, shrieking girl to him?
There must be sad-eyed girls somewhere in the world, and this was only
one of them. And what was the most beautiful sad-eyed girl to him?
Sadness might be beautiful, as well as mirth--he lost himself trying to
follow out this tangle. "I will no more of this infatuation," he would
cry; but forth from regions of irradiated air, the divine beauty and
imploring sufferings of the face, stole into his view.
Hitherto I have ever held but lightly, thought Pierre, all stories of
ghostly mysticalness in man; my creed of this world leads me to believe
in visible, beautiful flesh, and audible breath, however sweet and
scented; but only in visible flesh, and audible breath, have I hitherto
believed. But now!--now!--and again he would lose himself in the most
surprising and preternatural ponderings, which baffled all the
introspective cunning of his mind. Himself was too much for himself. He
felt that what he had always before considered the solid land of
veritable reality, was now being audaciously encroached upon by bannered
armies of hooded phantoms, disembarking in his soul, as from flotillas
of specter-boats.
The terrors of the face were not those of Gorgon; not by repelling
hideousness did it smite him so; but bewilderingly allured him, by its
nameless beauty, and its long-suffering, hopeless anguish.
But he was sensible that this general effect upon him, was also special;
the face somehow mystically appealing to his own private and individual
affections; and by a silent and tyrannic call, challenging him in his
deepest moral being, and summoning Truth, Love, Pity, Conscience, to the
stand. Apex of all wonders! thought Pierre; this indeed almost unmans me
with its wonderfulness. Escape the face he could not. Muffling his own
in his bed-clothes--that did not hide it. Flying from it by sunlight
down the meadows, was as vain.
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