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Is not life real and terrible enough, he asked himself, but that brides must cast this experience also into their honeymoon? The morning light did not efface the impressions of the night, the dominating presence of a gigantic, pitiless force, a blind passion of nature, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Shut the windows and lock the door, you could not shut out the terror of it.
After him, there appeared a satirist of great talent, who waged pitiless war with its partisans and with all the powers of darkness. An infant prodigy, he spent all the years of his early childhood in the exclusive study of the Law. When he was thirteen years old, his father married him to a girl of eighteen, whom he had not set eyes upon before the day of their marriage. She did not live long.
Above the chiffonier he could see the ancient sampler. "La Nuit Porte Conseil." It was true. In the cold, pitiless light of the morning a sudden sickness of doubting seized him. She would awake and reproach him bitterly for coercing her. She had been right, the night before, it was madness. They had talked afterward so feverishly, as if to forget their situation.
The next proceedings were of a public and avowable nature, and strictly followed the customary precedents on such occasions. There was the proper and awful pause while the bridegroom was kept waiting at the church. There was the proper and pitiless staring of all the female spectators when the bride was led to the altar.
All the way home he nursed his woe and exalted it. He pictured himself as she must be picturing him: a noble, struggling young spirit persecuted by misfortune, but bravely and patiently waiting in the shadow of a dread calamity and preparing to meet the blow as became one who was all too used to hard fortune and the pitiless buffetings of fate.
"Undo his stays!" continued the pitiless old gentleman. "Fling some water in his face, Miss Sharp, or carry him upstairs: the dear creature's fainting. Poor victim! carry him up; he's as light as a feather!" "If I stand this, sir, I'm d !" roared Joseph. "Order Mr. Jos's elephant, Sambo!" cried the father.
Yet he recalled his last trip across the strait, when she had fainted with the heat fainted again and again as they had attempted, with such distress and agony, to screen her from a glare as pitiless as a furnace. He remembered dipping her, naked, all but lifeless, into the milkwarm water, till up from the transparent depths the swift, bluish glimmer of a shark warned him to snatch her in.
The prince stamped his foot impatiently, and walked hastily to and fro; his brow was clouded, his lips trembled with inward emotion. The sharp eye of the baron followed with an attentive, pitiless glance every movement of his face, noted every sigh that came from his anxious heart, that he might judge whether the seeds of mistrust that he had sown in the breast of the prince would grow.
God is set forth as if He were encompassed with human limitations the fiery imagery of the Old Testament pressed into the service of modern and western minds, until He is made to seem pitiless, revengeful, exacting, lying in wait to catch His creatures in fault, and awaiting them at death with terrible surprises.
A pitiless disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable; whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it.
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