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- 8831
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 8772
- text
- III.
Toward sundown that evening, Pierre stood in one of the three bespoken
chambers in the Black Swan Inn; the blue chintz-covered chest and the
writing-desk before him. His hands were eagerly searching through his
pockets.
"The key! the key! Nay, then, I must force it open. It bodes ill, too.
Yet lucky is it, some bankers can break into their own vaults, when
other means do fail. Not so, ever. Let me see:--yes, the tongs there.
Now then for the sweet sight of gold and silver. I never loved it till
this day. How long it has been hoarded;--little token pieces, of years
ago, from aunts, uncles, cousins innumerable, and from--but I won't
mention _them_; dead henceforth to me! Sure there'll be a premium on
such ancient gold. There's some broad bits, token pieces to my--I name
him not--more than half a century ago. Well, well, I never thought to
cast them back into the sordid circulations whence they came. But if
they must be spent, now is the time, in this last necessity, and in this
sacred cause. 'Tis a most stupid, dunderheaded crowbar. Hoy! so! ah, now
for it:--snake's nest!"
Forced suddenly back, the chest-lid had as suddenly revealed to him the
chair-portrait lying on top of all the rest, where he had secreted it
some days before. Face up, it met him with its noiseless, ever-nameless,
and ambiguous, unchanging smile. Now his first repugnance was augmented
by an emotion altogether new. That certain lurking lineament in the
portrait, whose strange transfer blended with far other, and sweeter,
and nobler characteristics, was visible in the countenance of Isabel;
that lineament in the portrait was somehow now detestable; nay,
altogether loathsome, ineffably so, to Pierre. He argued not with
himself why this was so; he only felt it, and most keenly.
Omitting more subtile inquisition into this deftly-winding theme, it
will be enough to hint, perhaps, that possibly one source of this new
hatefulness had its primary and unconscious rise in one of those
profound ideas, which at times atmospherically, as it were, do insinuate
themselves even into very ordinary minds. In the strange relativeness,
reciprocalness, and transmittedness, between the long-dead father's
portrait, and the living daughter's face, Pierre might have seemed to
see reflected to him, by visible and uncontradictable symbols, the
tyranny of Time and Fate. Painted before the daughter was conceived or
born, like a dumb seer, the portrait still seemed leveling its prophetic
finger at that empty air, from which Isabel did finally emerge. There
seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and vitality in the picture;
because, since in his own memory of his father, Pierre could not recall
any distinct lineament transmitted to Isabel, but vaguely saw such in
the portrait; therefore, not Pierre's parent, as any way rememberable by
him, but the portrait's painted _self_ seemed the real father of Isabel;
for, so far as all sense went, Isabel had inherited one peculiar trait
no-whither traceable but to it.
And as his father was now sought to be banished from his mind, as a most
bitter presence there, but Isabel was become a thing of intense and
fearful love for him; therefore, it was loathsome to him, that in the
smiling and ambiguous portrait, her sweet mournful image should be so
sinisterly becrooked, bemixed, and mutilated to him.
When, the first shock, and then the pause were over, he lifted the
portrait in his two hands, and held it averted from him.
- title
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