- end_line
- 13991
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 13937
- text
- IV.
Though by the unexpected petition to enter his privacy--a petition he
could scarce ever deny to Isabel, since she so religiously abstained
from preferring it, unless for some very reasonable cause, Pierre, in
the midst of those conflicting, secondary emotions, immediately
following the first wonderful effect of Lucy's strange letter, had been
forced to put on, toward Isabel, some air of assurance and understanding
concerning its contents; yet at bottom, he was still a prey to all
manner of devouring mysteries.
Soon, now, as he left the chamber of Isabel, these mysteriousnesses
re-mastered him completely; and as he mechanically sat down in the
dining-room chair, gently offered him by Delly--for the silent girl saw
that some strangeness that sought stillness was in him;--Pierre's mind
was revolving how it was possible, or any way conceivable, that Lucy
should have been inspired with such seemingly wonderful presentiments of
something assumed, or disguising, or non-substantial, somewhere and
somehow, in his present most singular apparent position in the eye of
world. The wild words of Isabel yet rang in his ears. It were an outrage
upon all womanhood to imagine that Lucy, however yet devoted to him in
her hidden heart, should be willing to come to him, so long as she
supposed, with the rest of the world, that Pierre was an ordinarily
married man. But how--what possible reason--what possible intimation
could she have had to suspect the contrary, or to suspect any thing
unsound? For neither at this present time, nor at any subsequent period,
did Pierre, or could Pierre, possibly imagine that in her marvelous
presentiments of Love she had any definite conceit of the precise nature
of the secret which so unrevealingly and enchantedly wrapt him. But a
peculiar thought passingly recurred to him here.
Within his social recollections there was a very remarkable case of a
youth, who, while all but affianced to a beautiful girl--one returning
his own throbbings with incipient passion--became somehow casually and
momentarily betrayed into an imprudent manifested tenderness toward a
second lady; or else, that second lady's deeply-concerned friends caused
it to be made known to the poor youth, that such committal tenderness
toward her he had displayed, nor had it failed to exert its natural
effect upon her; certain it is, this second lady drooped and drooped,
and came nigh to dying, all the while raving of the cruel infidelity of
her supposed lover; so that those agonizing appeals, from so really
lovely a girl, that seemed dying of grief for him, at last so moved the
youth, that--morbidly disregardful of the fact, that inasmuch as two
ladies claimed him, the prior lady had the best title to his hand--his
conscience insanely upbraided him concerning the second lady; he thought
that eternal woe would surely overtake him both here and hereafter if he
did not renounce his first love--terrible as the effort would be both to
him and her--and wed with the second lady; which he accordingly did;
while, through his whole subsequent life, delicacy and honor toward his
thus wedded wife, forbade that by explaining to his first love how it
was with him in this matter, he should tranquilize her heart; and,
therefore, in her complete ignorance, she believed that he was willfully
and heartlessly false to her; and so came to a lunatic's death on his
account.
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