Wind ye down there, ye
prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family
likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from
your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.
Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my
means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to
kill, or change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind
he did long dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of
his dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his
will determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that
dissembling, that when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no
Nantucketer thought him otherwise than but naturally grieved, and
that to the quick, with the terrible casualty which had overtaken
him.
The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness
which always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on
the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very
unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling
voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of
that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those
very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a
pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales.
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