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　　CHAPTER V.

　　THE swiftness and unrepellableness of the billow which, with its first shock, had so profoundly whelmed Pierre, had not only poured into his soul a tumult of entirely new images and emotions, but, for the time, it almost entirely drove out of him all previous ones. The things that any way bore directly upon the pregnant fact of Isabel, these things were all animate and vividly present to him; but the things which bore more upon himself, and his own personal condition, as now forever involved with his sister's, these things were not so animate and present to him. The conjectured past of Isabel took mysterious hold of his father; therefore, the idea of his father tyrannized over his imagination; and the possible future of Isabel, as so essentially though indirectly compromisable by whatever course of conduct his mother might hereafter ignorantly pursue with regard to himself, as henceforth, through Isabel, forever altered to her; these considerations brought his mother with blazing prominence before him.

　　Heaven, after all, hath been a little merciful to the miserable man; not entirely untempered to human nature are the most direful blasts of Fate. When on all sides assailed by prospects of disaster, whose final ends are in terror hidden from it, the soul of man—either, as instinctively convinced that it can not battle with the whole host at once; or else, benevolently blinded to the larger arc of the circle which menacingly hems it in;—whichever be the truth, the soul of man, thus surrounded, can not, and does never intelligently confront the totality of its wretchedness. The bitter drug is divided into separate draughts for him: to-day he takes one part of his woe; to-morrow he takes more; and so on, till the last drop is drunk.

　　Not that in the despotism of other things, the thought of Lucy, and the unconjecturable suffering into which she might so soon be plunged, owing to the threatening uncertainty of the state of his own future, as now in great part and at all hazards dedicated to Isabel; not that this thought had thus far been alien to him. Icy-cold, and serpent-like, it had overlayingly crawled in upon his other shuddering imaginings; but those other thoughts would as often upheave again, and absorb it into themselves, so that it would in that way soon disappear from his cotemporary apprehension. The prevailing thoughts connected with Isabel he now could front with prepared and open eyes; but the occasional thought of Lucy, when that started up before him, he could only cover his bewildered eyes with his bewildered hands. Nor was this the cowardice of selfishness, but the infinite sensitiveness of his soul. He could bear the agonizing thought of Isabel, because he was immediately resolved to help her, and to assuage a fellow-being's grief; but, as yet, he could not bear the thought of Lucy, because the very resolution that promised balm to Isabel obscurely involved the everlasting peace of Lucy, and therefore aggravatingly threatened a far more than fellow-being's happiness.

　　Well for Pierre it was, that the penciling presentiments of his mind concerning Lucy as quickly erased as painted their tormenting images. Standing half-befogged upon the mountain of his Fate, all that part of the wide panorama was wrapped in clouds to him; but anon those concealings slid aside, or rather, a quick rent was made in them; disclosing far below, half-vailed in the lower mist, the winding tranquil vale and stream of Lucy's previous happy life; through the swift cloud-rent he caught one glimpse of her expectant and angelic face peeping from the honey-suckled window of her cottage; and the next instant the stormy pinions of the clouds locked themselves over it again; and all was hidden as before; and all went confused in whirling rack and vapor as before. Only by unconscious inspiration, caught from the agencies invisible to man, had he been enabled to write that first obscurely announcing note to Lucy; wherein the collectedness, and the mildness, and the calmness, were but the natural though insidious precursors of the stunning bolts on bolts to follow.

　　But, while thus, for the most part wrapped from his consciousness and vision, still, the condition of his Lucy, as so deeply affected now, was still more and more disentangling and defining itself from out its nearer mist, and even beneath the general upper fog. For when unfathomably stirred, the subtler elements of man do not always reveal themselves in the concocting act; but, as with all other potencies, show themselves chiefly in their ultimate resolvings and results. Strange wild work, and awfully symmetrical and reciprocal, was that now going on within the self-apparently chaotic breast of Pierre. As in his own conscious determinations, the mournful Isabel was being snatched from her captivity of world-wide abandonment; so, deeper down in the more secret chambers of his unsuspecting soul, the smiling Lucy, now as dead and ashy pale, was being bound a ransom for Isabel's salvation. Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate, a mere heartless trader in men's joys and woes.

　　Nor was this general and spontaneous self-concealment of all the most momentous interests of his love, as irretrievably involved with Isabel and his resolution respecting her; nor was this unbidden thing in him unseconded by the prompting of his own conscious judgment, when in the tyranny of the master-event itself, that judgment was permitted some infrequent play. He could not but be aware, that all meditation on Lucy now was worse than useless. How could he now map out his and her young life-chart, when all was yet misty-white with creamy breakers! Still more: divinely dedicated as he felt himself to be; with divine commands upon him to befriend and champion Isabel, through all conceivable contingencies of Time and Chance; how could he insure himself against the insidious inroads of self-interest, and hold intact all his unselfish magnanimities, if once he should permit the distracting thought of Lucy to dispute with Isabel's the pervading possession of his soul?

　　And if—though but unconsciously as yet—he was almost superhumanly prepared to make a sacrifice of all objects dearest to him, and cut himself away from his last hopes of common happiness, should they cross his grand enthusiast resolution;—if this was so with him; then, how light as gossamer, and thinner and more impalpable than airiest threads of gauze, did he hold all common conventional regardings;—his hereditary duty to his mother, his pledged worldly faith and honor to the hand and seal of his affiancement?

　　Not that at present all these things did thus present themselves to Pierre; but these things were fœtally forming in him. Impregnations from high enthusiasms he had received; and the now incipient offspring which so stirred, with such painful, vague vibrations in his soul; this, in its mature development, when it should at last come forth in living deeds, would scorn all personal relationship with Pierre, and hold his heart's dearest interests for naught.

　　Thus, in the Enthusiast to Duty, the heaven-begotten Christ is born; and will not own a mortal parent, and spurns and rends all mortal bonds. Pierre: Or， The Ambiguities