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- 3918
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
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- start_line
- 3856
- text
- I.
It was long after midnight when Pierre returned to the house. He had
rushed forth in that complete abandonment of soul, which, in so ardent a
temperament, attends the first stages of any sudden and tremendous
affliction; but now he returned in pallid composure, for the calm spirit
of the night, and the then risen moon, and the late revealed stars, had
all at last become as a strange subduing melody to him, which, though at
first trampled and scorned, yet by degrees had stolen into the windings
of his heart, and so shed abroad its own quietude in him. Now, from his
height of composure, he firmly gazed abroad upon the charred landscape
within him; as the timber man of Canada, forced to fly from the
conflagration of his forests, comes back again when the fires have
waned, and unblinkingly eyes the immeasurable fields of fire-brands that
here and there glow beneath the wide canopy of smoke.
It has been said, that always when Pierre would seek solitude in its
material shelter and walled isolation, then the closet communicating
with his chamber was his elected haunt. So, going to his room, he took
up the now dim-burning lamp he had left there, and instinctively entered
that retreat, seating himself, with folded arms and bowed head, in the
accustomed dragon-footed old chair. With leaden feet, and heart now
changing from iciness to a strange sort of indifference, and a numbing
sensation stealing over him, he sat there awhile, till, like the resting
traveler in snows, he began to struggle against this inertness as the
most treacherous and deadliest of symptoms. He looked up, and found
himself fronted by the no longer wholly enigmatical, but still
ambiguously smiling picture of his father. Instantly all his
consciousness and his anguish returned, but still without power to shake
the grim tranquillity which possessed him. Yet endure the smiling
portrait he could not; and obeying an irresistible nameless impulse, he
rose, and without unhanging it, reversed the picture on the wall.
This brought to sight the defaced and dusty back, with some wrinkled,
tattered paper over the joints, which had become loosened from the
paste. "Oh, symbol of thy reversed idea in my soul," groaned Pierre;
"thou shalt not hang thus. Rather cast thee utterly out, than
conspicuously insult thee so. I will no more have a father." He removed
the picture wholly from the wall, and the closet; and concealed it in a
large chest, covered with blue chintz, and locked it up there. But
still, in a square space of slightly discolored wall, the picture still
left its shadowy, but vacant and desolate trace. He now strove to banish
the least trace of his altered father, as fearful that at present all
thoughts concerning him were not only entirely vain, but would prove
fatally distracting and incapacitating to a mind, which was now loudly
called upon, not only to endure a signal grief, but immediately to act
upon it. Wild and cruel case, youth ever thinks; but mistakenly; for
Experience well knows, that action, though it seems an aggravation of
woe, is really an alleviative; though permanently to alleviate pain, we
must first dart some added pangs.
Nor now, though profoundly sensible that his whole previous moral being
was overturned, and that for him the fair structure of the world must,
in some then unknown way, be entirely rebuilded again, from the
lowermost corner stone up; nor now did Pierre torment himself with the
thought of that last desolation; and how the desolate place was to be
made flourishing again. He seemed to feel that in his deepest soul,
lurked an indefinite but potential faith, which could rule in the
interregnum of all hereditary beliefs, and circumstantial persuasions;
not wholly, he felt, was his soul in anarchy. The indefinite regent had
assumed the scepter as its right; and Pierre was not entirely given up
to his grief's utter pillage and sack.
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- Chunk 1