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- 7699
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 7643
- text
- I.
Glorified be his gracious memory who first said, The deepest gloom
precedes the day. We care not whether the saying will prove true to the
utmost bounds of things; sufficient that it sometimes does hold true
within the bounds of earthly finitude.
Next morning Pierre rose from the floor of his chamber, haggard and
tattered in body from his past night's utter misery, but stoically
serene and symmetrical in soul, with the foretaste of what then seemed
to him a planned and perfect Future. Now he thinks he knows that the
wholly unanticipated storm which had so terribly burst upon him, had yet
burst upon him for his good; for the place, which in its undetected
incipiency, the storm had obscurely occupied in his soul, seemed now
clear sky to him; and all his horizon seemed distinctly commanded by
him.
His resolution was a strange and extraordinary one; but therefore it
only the better met a strange and extraordinary emergency. But it was
not only strange and extraordinary in its novelty of mere aspect, but it
was wonderful in its unequaled renunciation of himself.
From the first, determined at all hazards to hold his father's fair
fame inviolate from any thing he should do in reference to protecting
Isabel, and extending to her a brother's utmost devotedness and love;
and equally determined not to shake his mother's lasting peace by any
useless exposure of unwelcome facts; and yet vowed in his deepest soul
some way to embrace Isabel before the world, and yield to her his
constant consolation and companionship; and finding no possible mode of
unitedly compassing all these ends, without a most singular act of pious
imposture, which he thought all heaven would justify in him, since he
himself was to be the grand self-renouncing victim; therefore, this was
his settled and immovable purpose now; namely: to assume before the
world, that by secret rites, Pierre Glendinning was already become the
husband of Isabel Banford--an assumption which would entirely warrant
his dwelling in her continual company, and upon equal terms, taking her
wherever the world admitted him; and at the same time foreclose all
sinister inquisitions bearing upon his deceased parent's memory, or any
way affecting his mother's lasting peace, as indissolubly linked with
that. True, he in embryo, foreknew, that the extraordinary thing he had
resolved, would, in another way, indirectly though inevitably, dart a
most keen pang into his mother's heart; but this then seemed to him part
of the unavoidable vast price of his enthusiastic virtue; and, thus
minded, rather would he privately pain his living mother with a wound
that might be curable, than cast world-wide and irremediable
dishonor--so it seemed to him--upon his departed father.
Probably no other being than Isabel could have produced upon Pierre
impressions powerful enough to eventuate in a final resolution so
unparalleled as the above. But the wonderful melodiousness of her grief
had touched the secret monochord within his breast, by an apparent
magic, precisely similar to that which had moved the stringed tongue of
her guitar to respond to the heart-strings of her own melancholy
plaints. The deep voice of the being of Isabel called to him from out
the immense distances of sky and air, and there seemed no veto of the
earth that could forbid her heavenly claim.
- title
- Chunk 1