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- 14962
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
- extracted_by
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- start_line
- 14911
- text
- Or if Pierre were with her, then, smite him down by hook or crook, fair
play or foul; and then, away with Lucy! Or if Lucy systematically kept
her room, then fall on Pierre in the most public way, fell him, and
cover him from all decent recognition beneath heaps on heaps of hate and
insult; so that broken on the wheel of such dishonor, Pierre might feel
himself unstrung, and basely yield the prize.
Not the gibbering of ghosts in any old haunted house; no sulphurous and
portentous sign at night beheld in heaven, will so make the hair to
stand, as when a proud and honorable man is revolving in his soul the
possibilities of some gross public and corporeal disgrace. It is not
fear; it is a pride-horror, which is more terrible than any fear. Then,
by tremendous imagery, the murderer's mark of Cain is felt burning on
the brow, and the already acquitted knife blood-rusts in the clutch of
the anticipating hand.
Certain that those two youths must be plotting something furious against
him; with the echoes of their scorning curses on the stairs still
ringing in his ears--curses, whose swift responses from himself, he, at
the time, had had much ado to check;--thoroughly alive to the
supernaturalism of that mad frothing hate which a spirited brother forks
forth at the insulter of a sister's honor--beyond doubt the most
uncompromising of all the social passions known to man--and not blind to
the anomalous fact, that if such a brother stab his foe at his own
mother's table, all people and all juries would bear him out, accounting
every thing allowable to a noble soul made mad by a sweet sister's shame
caused by a damned seducer;--imagining to himself his own feelings, if
he were actually in the position which Frederic so vividly fancied to
be his; remembering that in love matters jealousy is as an adder, and
that the jealousy of Glen was double-addered by the extraordinary malice
of the apparent circumstances under which Lucy had spurned Glen's arms,
and fled to his always successful and now married rival, as if wantonly
and shamelessly to nestle there;--remembering all these intense
incitements of both those foes of his, Pierre could not but look forward
to wild work very soon to come. Nor was the storm of passion in his soul
unratified by the decision of his coolest possible hour. Storm and calm
both said to him,--Look to thyself, oh Pierre!
Murders are done by maniacs; but the earnest thoughts of murder, these
are the collected desperadoes. Pierre was such; fate, or what you will,
had made him such. But such he was. And when these things now swam
before him; when he thought of all the ambiguities which hemmed him in;
the stony walls all round that he could not overleap; the million
aggravations of his most malicious lot; the last lingering hope of
happiness licked up from him as by flames of fire, and his one only
prospect a black, bottomless gulf of guilt, upon whose verge he
imminently teetered every hour;--then the utmost hate of Glen and
Frederic were jubilantly welcome to him; and murder, done in the act of
warding off their ignominious public blow, seemed the one only congenial
sequel to such a desperate career.
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