Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvan
was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where three
gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours of
tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was of
good stature. One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly
Jewish. The third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter
signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done
it more effectively. The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed
by priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worship in
the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not more
loathsome. She sank on a sofa. That the man? Oh! Jew, and fifty times
over Jew! nothing but Jew!
The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably
magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.
She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the
contrast. This man's face was the born orator's, with the light-giving
eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness
and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he took the
headship of armies and marched to empire.
The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. Alas, he could
not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build! One could
vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorously
rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he
talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet
lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing
outpour. Looking on him was listening. Yes, the looking on him
sufficed. Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men,
that drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced
him to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the
contemplation of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood.
She shrank to smaller and smaller as she looked.
Be sure that she knew who he was. No, says she. But she knew. It
terrified her soul to think he was Alvan. She feared scarcely less that
it might not be he. Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played
at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased
herself, and gloated. It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly!
impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me! If another, woe me! For
she had come to see Alvan. Alvan and she shared ideas. They talked
marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposing he was
not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment. The supposition that he
was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.
Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew? She feasted. It was a
noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes. Perchance a Jew of the
Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew as
well as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a
majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his race
favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew is
grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery
eastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! a figure
of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and
be tempered by the intellect.
She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning
that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to
express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases of
very eminent surprise. Necessarily it would be the greatest of
surprises.
The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde's
attention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be other
than profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered),
dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of which
she cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin's head if her
insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker. He
pursued his talk: there was little danger of not hearing him. There was
only the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice. His voice
had the mellow fulness of the clarionet. But for the subject, she could
have fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges. She had never
heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amply
flowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent: a
perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument. He had notes less
pastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging of his
theme. The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until the
mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion
caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself,
remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society an
original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much
beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be. He kindled her thus,
and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire to breathe
out the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn.
The young flower of her sex burned to speak, to deliver an opinion. She
was unaccustomed to yield a fascinated ear. She was accustomed rather to
dictate and be the victorious performer, and though now she was not
anxious to occupy the pulpit--being too strictly bred to wish for a post
publicly in any of the rostra--and meant still less to dispossess the
present speaker of the place he filled so well, she yearned to join him:
and as that could not be done by a stranger approving, she panted to
dissent. A young lady cannot so well say to an unknown gentleman: 'You
have spoken truly, sir,' as, 'That is false!' for to speak in the former
case would be gratuitous, and in the latter she is excused by the moral
warmth provoking her. Further, dissent rings out finely, and approval is
a feeble murmur--a poor introduction of oneself. Her moral warmth was
ready and waiting for the instigating subject, but of course she was
unconscious of the goad within. Excitement wafted her out of herself, as
we say, or out of the conventional vessel into the waves of her troubled
nature. He had not yet given her an opportunity for dissenting; she was
compelled to agree, dragged at his chariot-wheels in headlong agreement.
His theme was Action; the political advantages of Action; and he
illustrated his view with historical examples, to the credit of the
French, the temporary discredit of the German and English races, who tend
to compromise instead. Of the English he spoke as of a power extinct, a
people 'gone to fat,' who have gained their end in a hoard of gold and
shut the door upon bandit ideas. Action means life to the soul as to the
body. Compromise is virtual death: it is the pact between cowardice and
comfort under the title of expediency. So do we gather dead matter about
us. So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt. The war with evil in
every form must be incessant; we cannot have peace. Let then our joy be
in war: in uncompromising Action, which need not be the less a sagacious
conduct of the war . . . . Action energizes men's brains, generates
grander capacities, provokes greatness of soul between enemies, and is
the guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit of our species. To
doubt that, is to doubt of good being to be had for the seeking. He drew
pictures of the healthy Rome when turbulent, the doomed quiescent. Rome
struggling grasped the world. Rome stagnant invited Goth and Vandal. So
forth: alliterative antitheses of the accustomed pamphleteer. At last
her chance arrived.
His opposition sketch of Inaction was refreshed by an analysis of the
character of Hamlet. Then he reverted to Hamlet's promising youth.
How brilliantly endowed was the Prince of Denmark in the beginning!
'Mad from the first!' cried Clotilde.
She produced an effect not unlike that of a sudden crack of thunder. The
three made chorus in a noise of boots on the floor.
Her hero faced about and stood up, looking at her fulgently. Their eyes
engaged without wavering on either side. Brave eyes they seemed, each
pair of them, for his were fastened on a comely girl, and she had strung
herself to her gallantest to meet the crisis.
His friends quitted him at a motion of the elbows. He knelt on the sofa,
leaning across it, with clasped hands.
'You are she!--So, then, is a contradiction of me to be the
commencement?'
'After the apparition of Hamlet's father the prince was mad,' said
Clotilde hurriedly, and she gazed for her hostess, a paroxysm of alarm
succeeding that of her boldness.
'Why should we two wait to be introduced?' said he. 'We know one
another. I am Alvan. You are she of whom I heard from Kollin: who else?
Lucretia the gold-haired; the gold-crested serpent, wise as her sire;
Aurora breaking the clouds; in short, Clotilde!'
Her heart exulted to hear him speak her name. She laughed with a radiant
face. His being Alvan, and his knowing her and speaking her name, all
was like the happy reading of a riddle. He came round to her, bowing,
and his hand out. She gave hers: she could have said, if asked, 'For
good!' And it looked as though she had given it for good.