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- especially your cane, and begin your own secret voyage of discovery
after it. Your cane, I say; because it will probably be a very long and
weary walk. True, just now I hinted, that she that bears it can not
dwell very remote; but then her nearness may not be at all conspicuous.
So, homeward, and put off thy hat, and let thy cane stay still, good
Pierre. Seek not to mystify the mystery so.
Thus, intermittingly, ever and anon during those sad two days of
deepest sufferance, Pierre would stand reasoning and expostulating with
himself; and by such meditative treatment, reassure his own spontaneous
impulses. Doubtless, it was wise and right that so he did; doubtless:
but in a world so full of all dubieties as this, one can never be
entirely certain whether another person, however carefully and
cautiously conscientious, has acted in all respects conceivable for the
very best.
But when the two days were gone by, and Pierre began to recognize his
former self as restored to him from its mystic exile, then the thoughts
of personally and pointedly seeking out the unknown, either
preliminarily by a call upon the sister spinsters, or generally by
performing the observant lynx-eyed circuit of the country on foot, and
as a crafty inquisitor, dissembling his cause of inquisition; these and
all similar intentions completely abandoned Pierre.
He was now diligently striving, with all his mental might, forever to
drive the phantom from him. He seemed to feel that it begat in him a
certain condition of his being, which was most painful, and every way
uncongenial to his natural, wonted self. It had a touch of he knew not
what sort of unhealthiness in it, so to speak; for, in his then
ignorance, he could find no better term; it seemed to have in it a germ
of somewhat which, if not quickly extirpated, might insidiously poison
and embitter his whole life--that choice, delicious life which he had
vowed to Lucy for his one pure and comprehensive offering--at once a
sacrifice and a delight.
Nor in these endeavorings did he entirely fail. For the most part, he
felt now that he had a power over the comings and the goings of the
face; but not on all occasions. Sometimes the old, original mystic
tyranny would steal upon him; the long, dark, locks of mournful hair
would fall upon his soul, and trail their wonderful melancholy along
with them; the two full, steady, over-brimming eyes of loveliness and
anguish would converge their magic rays, till he felt them kindling he
could not tell what mysterious fires in the heart at which they aimed.
When once this feeling had him fully, then was the perilous time for
Pierre. For supernatural as the feeling was, and appealing to all things
ultramontane to his soul; yet was it a delicious sadness to him. Some
hazy fairy swam above him in the heavenly ether, and showered down upon
him the sweetest pearls of pensiveness. Then he would be seized with a
singular impulse to reveal the secret to some one other individual in
the world. Only one, not more; he could not hold all this strange
fullness in himself. It must be shared. In such an hour it was, that
chancing to encounter Lucy (her, whom above all others, he did
confidingly adore), she heard the story of the face; nor slept at all
that night; nor for a long time freed her pillow completely from wild,
Beethoven sounds of distant, waltzing melodies, as of ambiguous fairies
dancing on the heath.
III.
This history goes forward and goes backward, as occasion calls. Nimble
center, circumference elastic you must have. Now we return to Pierre,
wending homeward from his reveries beneath the pine-tree.
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