- end_line
- 13819
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 13733
- text
- III.
When surrounded by the base and mercenary crew, man, too long wonted to
eye his race with a suspicious disdain, suddenly is brushed by some
angelical plume of humanity, and the human accents of superhuman love,
and the human eyes of superhuman beauty and glory, suddenly burst on his
being; then how wonderful and fearful the shock! It is as if the
sky-cope were rent, and from the black valley of Jehoshaphat, he caught
upper glimpses of the seraphim in the visible act of adoring.
He held the artless, angelical letter in his unrealizing hand; he
started, and gazed round his room, and out at the window, commanding the
bare, desolate, all-forbidding quadrangle, and then asked himself
whether this was the place that an angel should choose for its visit to
earth. Then he felt a vast, out-swelling triumphantness, that the girl
whose rare merits his intuitive soul had once so clearly and
passionately discerned, should indeed, in this most tremendous of all
trials, have acquitted herself with such infinite majesty. Then again,
he sunk utterly down from her, as in a bottomless gulf, and ran
shuddering through hideous galleries of despair, in pursuit of some
vague, white shape, and lo! two unfathomable dark eyes met his, and
Isabel stood mutely and mournfully, yet all-ravishingly before him.
He started up from his plank; cast off his manifold wrappings, and
crossed the floor to remove himself from the spot, where such sweet,
such sublime, such terrific revelations had been made him.
Then a timid little rap was heard at the door.
"Pierre, Pierre; now that thou art risen, may I not come in--just for a
moment, Pierre."
"Come in, Isabel."
She was approaching him in her wonted most strange and sweetly mournful
manner, when he retreated a step from her, and held out his arm, not
seemingly to invite, but rather as if to warn.
She looked fixedly in his face, and stood rooted.
"Isabel, another is coming to me. Thou dost not speak, Isabel. She is
coming to dwell with us so long as we live, Isabel. Wilt thou not
speak?"
The girl still stood rooted; the eyes, which she had first fixed on him,
still remained wide-openly riveted.
"Wilt thou not speak, Isabel?" said Pierre, terrified at her frozen,
immovable aspect, yet too terrified to manifest his own terror to her;
and still coming slowly near her. She slightly raised one arm, as if to
grasp some support; then turned her head slowly sideways toward the door
by which she had entered; then her dry lips slowly parted--"My bed; lay
me; lay me!"
The verbal effort broke her stiffening enchantment of frost; her thawed
form sloped sidelong into the air; but Pierre caught her, and bore her
into her own chamber, and laid her there on the bed.
"Fan me; fan me!"
He fanned the fainting flame of her life; by-and-by she turned slowly
toward him.
"Oh! that feminine word from thy mouth, dear Pierre:--that _she_, that
_she_!"
Pierre sat silent, fanning her.
"Oh, I want none in the world but thee, my brother--but thee, but thee!
and, oh God! am _I_ not enough for thee? Bare earth with my brother were
all heaven for me; but all my life, all my full soul, contents not my
brother."
Pierre spoke not; he but listened; a terrible, burning curiosity was in
him, that made him as heartless. But still all that she had said thus
far was ambiguous.
"Had I known--had I but known it before! Oh bitterly cruel to reveal it
now. That _she_! That _she_!"
She raised herself suddenly, and almost fiercely confronted him.
"Either thou hast told thy secret, or she is not worthy the commonest
love of man! Speak Pierre,--which?"
"The secret is still a secret, Isabel."
- title
- Chunk 1