A third knock was at the door. She opened it.
"My mistress, I thought it would disturb you, — it is so just overhead, — so I have not removed them yet."
"Unravel thy gibberish! — what is it?"
"Pardon, my mistress, I somehow thought you knew it, but you can not."
"What is that writing crumpling in thy hand? Give it me."
"I have promised my young master not to, my mistress."
"I will snatch it, then, and so leave thee blameless.- What? what? what? — He's mad sure! — 'Fine old fellow Dates'-what? what? — mad and merry! — chest? — clothes? — trunks? — he wants them? — Tumble them out of his window! — and if he stand right beneath, tumble them out! Dismantle that whole room. Tear up the carpet. I swear, he shall leave no smallest vestige in this house.-Here! this very spot-here, here, where I stand, he may have stood upon;-yes, he tied my shoe-string here; it's slippery! Dates!"
"My mistress."
"Do his bidding. By reflection he has made me infamous to the world; and I will make him infamous to it. Listen, and do not delude thyself that I am crazy. Go up to yonder room" (pointing upward), "and remove every article in it, and where he bid thee set down the chest and trunks, there set down all the contents of that room."
" 'Twas before the house-this house!"
"And if it had not been there, I would not order thee to put them there. Dunce! I would have the world know that I disown and scorn him! Do my bidding! — Stay. Let the room stand; but take him what he asks for."
"I will, my mistress."
As Dates left the chamber, Mrs. Glendinning again paced it swiftly, and again swiftly muttered: "Now, if I were less a strong and haughty woman, the fit would have gone by ere now. But deep volcanoes long burn, ere they burn out.-Oh, that the world were made of such malleable stuff, that we could recklessly do our fieriest heart's-wish before it, and not falter. Accursed be those four syllables of sound which make up that vile word Propriety. It is a chain and ball to drag;- drag? what sound is that? there's dragging-his trunks-the traveler's-dragging out. Oh would I could so drag my heart, as fishers for the drowned do, as that I might drag up my sunken happiness! Boy! boy! worse than brought in dripping drowned to me, — drowned in icy infamy! Oh! oh! oh!"
She threw herself upon the bed, covered her face, and lay motionless. But suddenly rose again, and hurriedly rang the bell.
"Open that desk, and draw the stand to me. Now wait and take this to Miss Lucy."
With a pencil she rapidly traced these lines:-
"My heart bleeds for thee, sweet Lucy. I can not speak-I know it all. Look for me the first hour I regain myself."
Again she threw herself upon the bed, and lay motionless.
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 then- 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, reciprocal-ness, 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 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.
"It shall not live. Hitherto I have hoarded up mementoes and monuments of the past; been a worshiper of all heirlooms; a fond filer away of letters, locks of hair, bits of ribbon, flowers, and the thousand-and-one minutenesses which love and memory think they sanctify:-but it is forever over now! If to me any memory shall henceforth be dear, I will not mummy it in a visible memorial for every passing beggar's dust to gather on. Love's museum is vain and foolish as the Catacombs, where grinning apes and abject lizards are embalmed, as, forsooth, significant of some imagined charm. It speaks merely of decay and death, and nothing more; decay and death of endless innumerable generations; it makes of earth one mold. How can lifelessness be fit memorial of life? — So far, for mementoes of the sweetest. As for the rest-now I know this, that in commonest memorials, the twilight fact of death first discloses in some secret way, all the ambiguities of that departed thing or person; obliquely it casts hints, and insinuates surmises base, and eternally incapable of being cleared. Decreed by God Omnipotent it is, that Death should be the last scene of the last act of man's play;-a play, which begin how it may, in farce or comedy, ever hath its tragic end; the curtain inevitably falls upon a corpse. Therefore, never more will I play the vile pigmy, and by small memorials after death, attempt to reverse the decree of death, by essaying the poor perpetuating of the image of the original. Let all die, and mix again! As for this-this! — why longer should I preserve it? Why preserve that on which one can not patient look? If I am resolved to hold his public memory inviolate, — destroy this thing; for here is the one great, condemning, and unsuborned proof, whose mysticalness drives me half mad.- Of old Greek times, before man's brain went into doting bondage, and bleached and beaten in Baconian fulling-mills, his four limbs lost their barbaric tan and beauty; when the round world was fresh, and rosy, and spicy, as a new-plucked apple;-all's wilted now! — in those bold times, the great dead were not, turkey-like, dished in trenchers, and set down all garnished in the ground, to glut the damned Cyclop like a cannibal; but nobly envious Life cheated the glutton worm, and gloriously burned the corpse; so that the spirit up-pointed, and visibly forked to heaven!