BOOK 3.

Produced by David Widger

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY

By George Meredith

1892

BOOK 1.

The word ‘fantastical’ is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an

utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem

an appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter

distasteful to those expository pens. Upon examination, claimants to the

epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,

Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost. Wherever she can

get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically. As

for that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and

the angry captain, called Human Nature, ‘fantastical’ fits it no less

completely than a continental baby’s skull-cap the stormy infant.

Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen

shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of

study.

The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under

this word as under their banner and motto. Their acts are incredible:

they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse

historical couples upon our planet. Yet they do belong to history, they

breathed the stouter air than fiction’s, the last chapter of them is

written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was

of a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern

brain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create

them, to set it spinning.

A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil. He was the

leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well

hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,

in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell. And why this

man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved

him have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have

to study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask if

it was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters into

the systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place

of abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the

passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes

of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature

out of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story

tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is

there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents

could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the

comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are

real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world

by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine

events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read

us no such furrowing lesson in life.

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

CHAPTER I

An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the

pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her

web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was

dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in

her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn

a lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour,

eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her

native land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime

counting among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable,

though sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known

as aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the

contrary very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for

the imbibing of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming

countenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her

choice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing

instantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of

pastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little

so is the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object

of the worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for

a nod. But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to

taste to try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled to

deliver verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that. And

as it happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste

will frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the

young coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to

escape drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple

blocks or limp festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a

knowledge of her sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.

The more imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future

days, the more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.

Clotilde’s younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in

the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites. She

was not under a French mother’s rigid supervision. In France the mother

resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that

unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory. Vigilant

foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately

comprehended. Young people of Clotilde’s upper world everywhere, and the

young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what

they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that

the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world’s elect,

getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little

dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin,

but they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had

the world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is common during

youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of

wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from

the calculations on behalf of her girl.

Say (for Diana’s mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that

Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar

trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the

Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at

all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating

threads. A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang

from his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the

arch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a

while. The music had seized him. He snatched bow and fiddle from one

of the ring, and with a few strokes kindled their faces. Then seating

himself, on a bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the

strings and flung up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous

notes when Clotilde and her cavalier, and other couples of the party,

came nigh; for he was on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved

it too well to suffer intruders to break the flow, or to think of them.

They were close by when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of

a fiery tribe) to its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and

jumped back to his carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy,

lank-locked, leather-hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and

skin of burnished walnut made him look an offshoot, but one of the

celestial branch.

He was in her father’s reception-room when she reached home: he was

paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von

Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and

also that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet. In

those very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko

had recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could

have staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her. Adieu to Count

Constantine. Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to

suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight

from her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant

which sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness. She struck,

like fate, one blow. She discovered that the prince, in addition to his

beauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love

with goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she set

her face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in

goodness. And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was to

subdue her. Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile

infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero who

would wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound? Siegfried could

not be dreamed in him, or a Siegfried’s baby son-in-arms. She caught a

glorious image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed

her that she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for

a famous conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps

unexampled, force of character. Her idea of a spiritual superiority that

could soar over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad because

of his vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her of

deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men: the best, that is,

in the woman’s view of us--the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord

of earth and air.

One who will dominate me, she thought.

Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has

brought her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she

persuades the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as

her pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her

parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid’s

presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.

Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,

disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his

vehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of the

beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through

the conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Her

brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temper

of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of

politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know

that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused

by the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar

to history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state

paralyzes his wrath.

Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and

it was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious

behaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was

because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and

tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the

bold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned original of

her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,

she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to

our loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied

Prince Marko’s title for her, was a pet, not a companion. She to him was

what she sought for in another. As much as she pitied herself for not

lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the

woman, so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm

affection, not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being.

For she could not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing

of the object we yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen.

Dressed, to delight him, in Prince Marko’s colours, the care she

bestowed on her dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer:

so she pleased the prince to be pleasing to her soul’s lord, and this,

owing to an appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to

her thinking guiltily. We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how

is he to declare his eagleship save by breaking through our mean

conventional systems, tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth

of vulgar ordinances? Clotilde’s imagination drew on her reading for the

knots it tied and untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was an

interfusion of philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded.

She tried hard, but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero’s

exhibition of flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded

woman. Further thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised

the complication, yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest

himself legitimately in a dull modern world. The rescuing her from

death would be a poor imitation of worn-out heroes. His publication of a

trumpeting book fell appallingly flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantry

done as an officer in war (defending his country too) distinguished the

soldier, but failed to add the eagle feather to the man. She had a mind

of considerable soaring scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon,

and declined the position of his empress. The man must be a gentleman.

Poets, princes, warriors, potentates, marched before her speculative

fancy unselected.

So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not

without exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn

from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so

fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the

right one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round

Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her

fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much

solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.

Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice,

the living will retain the colours of the ideal. We have it on record

that he may seem an eagle.

‘You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,’ a gentleman of her country

said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said

it musingly.

He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic.

She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing

universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an

envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the

choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she

dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her

before. She smiled musingly.

CHAPTER II

‘Who is the man they call Alvan?’ She put the question at the first

opportunity to an aunt of hers.

Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was

comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.

‘Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a

creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a

Jew!’

Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. ‘Is he clever?’

‘He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the

Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he

is.’

‘But is he clever?’

‘Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. You

could not have been curious about a worse one.’

‘Politically, you mean.’

‘Of course I do.’

The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that

station.

The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon

him. Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled

Alvan’s. He being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her

wildest, which was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she

being by no means a furious creature, though very original, she could

not meditate on him without softening the outlines given him by report;

all because of the likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had

knowingly been taken for furious by very foolish people, she settled

it that Alvan was also a victim of the prejudices he scorned. It had

pleased her at times to scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous

weight she brought on herself by the indulgence. She drew on her

recollections of the Satanic in her bosom when so situated, and never

having admired herself more ardently than when wearing that aspect, she

would have admired the man who had won the frightful title in public,

except for one thing--he was a Jew.

The Jew was to Clotilde as flesh of swine to the Jew. Her parents had

the same abhorrence of Jewry. One of the favourite similes of the family

for whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew:

and it was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was in

the veins of the latest generation and might have been traced on the

maternal side.

Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowards

is the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolent

impudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurance

repulsive. She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan. Luckily for the

gentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meet

him again in Italy.

She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; she

summoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish,

still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practice

of the art she could at any time blow up a company--scatter mature and

seasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give our

stout sex a shaking.

Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and falling

into disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancient

lady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where the

brain of her race is located. There it occurred that a dashing officer

of social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, for

a comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: ‘I

see you know Alvan.’

Alvan once more.

‘Indeed I do not,’ she said, for she was addressing an officer high

above Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she was

almost past contradiction of the charge.

‘Surely you must,’ said he; ‘where is the lady who could talk and think

as you do without knowing Alvan and sharing his views!’

Clotilde was both startled and nettled.

‘But I do not know him at all; I have never met him, never seen him.

I am unlikely to meet the kind of person,’ she protested; and she was

amazed yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle,

and a dashing officer, rejoin: ‘Come, come, let us be honest. That is

all very well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan,

but we two can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love

the man.’

‘Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a

total stranger to me,’ she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different

illumination.

‘Actually?’

‘In honour.’

‘You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?’

‘Never. I have heard his name, that is all.’

‘Then,’ the officer’s voice was earnest, ‘I pity him, and you no less,

while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another. Those

ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan’s: I have heard

him use them. He has just the same original views of society and history

as yours; they’re identical; your features are not unlike... you talk

alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous?

You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said “Plutarch’s Pompeius,” and

more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not

know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared

to have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the

greater sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a

pretty woman’s “bite.” Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper

at Alvan’s table the other night, the talk happened to be of a

modern Caesar, which led to the real one, and from him to “Plutarch’s

Pompeius,” as Alvan called him; and then he said of him what you have

just said, absolutely the same down to the allusion to the bite. I

assure you. And you have numbers of little phrases in common: you are

partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those who cannot fly: that is

Alvan’s. I could multiply them if I could remember; they struck me as

you spoke.’

‘I must be a shameless plagiarist,’ said Clotilde.

‘Or he,’ said Count Kollin.

It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in

the air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics

and pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch

and give out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was,

original to them. They were not members of a country where literature is

confined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field

(part lawn, part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in

sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in

common, ‘Plutarch’s Pompeius,’ may be traceable to a reading of some

professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of

Chaeroneia. The dainty savageness in the ‘bite’ Plutarch mentions,

evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with

others. And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she

had often wished that Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking

of him) had been endowed with the beauty of his rival: one or two of

Plutarch’s touches upon the earlier history of Pompeius had netted her

fancy, faintly (your generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her

blood; she liked the man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she

would have preferred him femininely. His name was not written Pompey to

her, as in English, to sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befitting

great and lamentable fortunes, which the young lady declined to share

solely because of her attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render

unto the victor the sunflower’s homage. She rendered it as a slave: the

splendid man beloved to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her

natural choice.

Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew. Still a Jew

of whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of

the exceptional she dreamed. He might have the head of a Caesar. She

imagined a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but

bright to the eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy,

encrusted, unkempt: the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf. Her

hungry inquiries in a city where Alvan was well known, brought her full

information of one who enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the

influence of his political leadership; but no description of his aspect

accompanied it, for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about the

city, none thought of describing him, and she did not push that question

because she had sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the more

she heard of his genius, to keep him repulsive. It appeared that his

bravery was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it

had been given in the city not long since. He had her ideas, and he won

multitudes with them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he

was learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow

of rhetoric. She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying

on her intuition to tell her more than we get from books, and on her

sweet impudence for a richer original strain. She began to appreciate

now a reputation for profound acquirements. Learned professors of

jurisprudence and history were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way as

Count Kollin. She heard things related of Alvan by the underbreath. That

circle below her own, the literary and artistic, idolized him; his

talk, his classic breakfasts and suppers, his undisguised ambition,

his indomitable energy, his dauntlessness and sway over her sex,

were subjects of eulogy all round her; and she heard of an enamoured

baroness. No one blamed Alvan. He had shown his chivalrous valour

in defending her. The baroness was not a young woman, and she was a

hardbound Blue. She had been the first to discover the prodigy, and had

pruned, corrected, and published him; he was one of her political works,

promising to be the most successful. An old affair apparently; but

the association of a woman’s name with Alvan’s, albeit the name of a

veteran, roused the girl’s curiosity, leading her to think his mental

and magnetic powers must be of the very highest, considering his

physical repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to yield him such extreme

devotion. She commissioned her princely serving-man, who had followed

and was never far away from her, to obtain precise intelligence of this

notorious Alvan.

Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the

rumours about Alvan and the baroness. But why should his lady trouble

herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be

supposed she would meet by accident? He asked her this. Clotilde said

it was common curiosity. She read him a short lecture on the dismal

narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an

interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where

ideas were current and speech was wine. The prince nodded; if she had

these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared

them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time

that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far

removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link;

he was capable of thinking all that came to him from her a

blessing--shocks, wounds and disruptions. He did not add largely to her

stock of items, nor did he fetch new colours. The telegraph wire was

his model of style. He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus,

standing for sign of the beauty and vacuity of their world: and how

dismally narrow that world was, she felt with renewed astonishment at

every dive out of her gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; so

that she was ready to scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had,

when not submitting to the smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco

smoke--the familiar incense of those homes where speech was wine.

At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city

with him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate

remarks--things homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she was

ever to meet this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse

of all others. She desired to meet him for comparison’s sake, and to

criticize a popular hero. It was inconceivable that any one popular

could approach her standard, but she was curious; flame played about

him; she had some expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by

the recent subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and

some feeling of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her

to be rid of her delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on

our earth, that she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps

compliant, and so please her parents, be good and dull, and please

everybody, and adieu to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the

beasts!...

Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she

liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in

supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: ‘Such a breakfast, my dear!’ The

costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts

of the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it? Never in

that lady’s recollection, or her husband’s either, she exclaimed. And

where was the breakfast? Why, at Alvan’s, to be sure; where else could

such a breakfast be?

‘And you know Alvan!’ cried Clotilde, catching excitement from the

lady’s flush.

‘Alvan is one of my husband’s closest friends’

Clotilde put on the playful frenzy; she made show of wringing her hands:

‘Oh! happy you! you know Alvan? And everybody is to know him except me?

why? I proclaim it unjust. Because I am unmarried? I’ll take a husband

to-morrow morning to be entitled to meet Alvan in the evening.’

The playful frenzy is accepted in its exact innocent signification of

‘this is my pretty wilful will and way,’ and the lady responded to it

cordially; for it is pleasant to have some one to show, and pleasant

to assist some one eager to see: besides, many had petitioned her for a

sight of Alvan; she was used to the request.

‘You’re not obliged to wait for to-morrow,’ she said. ‘Come to one of

our gatherings to-night. Alvan will be here.’

‘You invite me?’

‘Distinctly. Pray, come. He is sure to be here. We have his promise, and

Alvan never fails. Was it not Frau v. Crestow who did us the favour of

our introduction? She will bring you.’

The Frau v. Crestow was a cousin of Clotilde’s by marriage, sentimental,

but strict in her reading of the proprieties. She saw nothing wrong in

undertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous gatherings of

the finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband agreed to join

them after the sitting of the Chamber upon a military-budget vote.

The whole plan was nicely arranged and went well. Clotilde dressed

carefully, letting her gold-locks cloud her fine forehead carelessly,

with finishing touches to the negligence, for she might be challenged to

take part in disputations on serious themes, and a handsome young

woman who has to sustain an argument against a man does wisely when she

forearms her beauties for a reserve, to carry out flanking movements if

required. The object is to beat him.

CHAPTER III

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.

CHAPTER IV

‘Hamlet in due season,’ said he, as they sat together. ‘I shall convince

you.’

She shook her head.

‘Yes, yes, an opinion formed by a woman is inflexible; I know that:

the fact is not half so stubborn. But at present there are two more

important actors: we are not at Elsinore. You are aware that I hoped to

meet you?’

‘Is there a periodical advertisement of your hopes?--or do they come to

us by intuition?’

‘Kollin was right!--the ways of the serpent will be serpentine. I knew

we must meet. It is no true day so long as the goddess of the morning

and the sun-god are kept asunder. I speak of myself, by what I have felt

since I heard of you.’

‘You are sure of your divinity?’

‘Through my belief in yours!’

They bowed smiling at the courtly exchanges.

‘And tell me,’ said he, ‘as to meeting me...?’

She replied: ‘When we are so like the rest of the world we may confess

our weakness.’

‘Unlike! for the world and I meet and part: not we two.’

Clotilde attempted an answer: it would not come. She tried to be

revolted by his lording tone, and found it strangely inoffensive. His

lording presence and the smile that was like a waving feather on it

compelled her so strongly to submit to hear, as to put her in danger of

appearing to embrace this man’s rapid advances.

She said: ‘I first heed of you at Capri.’

‘And I was at Capri seven days after you had left.’

‘You knew my name then?’

‘Be not too curious with necromancers. Here is the date--March 15th. You

departed on the 8th.’

‘I think I did. That is a year from now.’

‘Then we missed: now we meet. It is a year lost. A year is a great age!

Reflect on it and what you owe me. How I wished for a comrade at Capri!

Not a “young lady,” and certainly no man. The understanding Feminine,

was my desire--a different thing from the feminine understanding,

usually. I wanted my comrade young and fair, necessarily of your sex,

but with heart and brain: an insane request, I fancied, until I heard

that you were the person I wanted. In default of you I paraded the

island with Tiberius, who is my favourite tyrant. We took the initiative

against the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by

a plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of

my extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic. He apologized

in turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the

misunderstanding between us was past cement: for each of us loved the

man but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his office

than he is in himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friend

that each of us loved. So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he would

have done had I been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperor

my respectful adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins.

Mademoiselle, by delaying your departure seven days you would have saved

me from death. You see, the official is the artificial man, and I ought

to have known there is no natural man left in us to weigh against the

artificial. I counted on the emperor’s personal affection, forgetting

that princes cannot be our friends.’

‘You died bravely?’

Clotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.

‘Simply, we will say. My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose,

but let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.

Sapphire sea, sapphire sky: one believes in life there, thrills with it,

when life is ebbing: ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our

sick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish! Verily the second

death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island

seven days earlier, was harder to bear. Tell me frankly--the music in

Italy?’

‘Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.’

‘Excellent!’ his eyes flashed delightedly. ‘O comrade of comrades! that

year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have

gained. Yes, brainless! There, in music, we beat them, as politically

France beats us. No life without brain! The brainless in Art and in

Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead.

It is less easy to cut a way through them. But it must be done, or the

Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green

blades of the earth. You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?’

‘I do not shudder,’ said Clotilde.

‘A diamond from the lapidary!--Your sentences have many facets. Well,

you are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and

a Jew. You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some

sparkling incredulity. The Christian is like the politician in supposing

the original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the pattern

of the monster he was originally taught to hate. But the Jew has been

a little christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian.

So with demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we grow

conservatived. Try to think individually upon what you have to learn

collectively--that is your task. You are of the few who will be equal to

it. We are not men of blood, believe me. I am not. For example, I detest

and I decline the duel. I have done it, and proved myself a man of metal

notwithstanding. To say nothing of the inhumanity, the senselessness of

duelling revolts me. ‘Tis a folly, so your nobles practise it, and

your royal wiseacre sanctions. No blood for me: and yet I tell you

that whatever opposes me, I will sweep away. How? With the brain. If we

descend to poor brute strength or brutal craft, it is from failing in

the brain: we quit the leadership of our forces, and the descent is the

beast’s confession. Do I say how? Perhaps by your aid.--You do not

start and cry: “Mine!” That is well. I have not much esteem for

non-professional actresses. They are numerous and not entertaining.--You

leave it to me to talk.’

‘Could I do better?’

‘You listen sweetly.’

‘It is because I like to hear.’

‘You have the pearly little ear of a shell on the sand.’

‘With the great sea sounding near it!’

Alvan drew closer to her.

‘I look into your eyes and perceive that one may listen to you and

speak to you. Heart to heart, then! Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to win

you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be. My prize is found!

The good friend who did the part of Iris for us came bounding to me: “I

have discovered the wife for you, Alvan.” I had previously heard of her

from another as having touched the islet of Capri. “But,” said Kollin,

“she is a gold-crested serpent--slippery!” Is she? That only tells me of

a little more to be mastered. I feel my future now. Hitherto it has been

a land without sunlight. Do you know how the look of sunlight on a

land calms one? It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the end

gained--not the end to labour, just heaven! but peace to the heart’s

craving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in the

waters of life. Conjure up your vision of Italy. Remember the meaning

of Italian light and colour: the clearness, the luminous fulness, the

thoughtful shadows. Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the

eye, spirit-speaking to the mind. They throb. You carve shapes of Gods

out of that sky, the sea, those peaks. They live with you. How they

satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its

prickly nest!--Well, and you are my sunlighted land. And you will have

to be fought for. And I see not the less repose in the prospect! Part

of you may be shifty-sand. The sands are famous for their golden

shining--as you shine. Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete.

I have a perfect faith in you, and in the winning of you. Clearly you

will have to be fought for. I should imagine it a tough battle to come.

But as I doubt neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.--We use phrases

in common, and aphorisms, it appears. Why? but that our minds act in

unison. What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?--the city

of Paris, Lutetia.’

‘Could you make it good?’ said Clotilde.

He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like

swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the

stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies,

leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that

must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind

from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.

She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the

appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and

reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything,

for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that

listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure

it was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went

speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out

of her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied

her the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it,

though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.

The world was close by and had begun to stare. She half apprehended that

fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible. In the presence

of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away

with very little creaking of its timbers on the flood. When we feel its

power we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space,

indifferent to nakedness. And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage

asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain

some day to feel. Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had won

fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and

perilously, for courage. She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herself

to meet it, and Alvan to be it. Her famous originality was a trumpet

blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly

his esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding. Each

had evoked the other. Their common anticipations differed in this, that

he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and

seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden

satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on

its divinest whirlwind.

They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before

captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive

comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,

and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple

of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and

the extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was

doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in

his looks on her. Her woman’s eyes had no guard they had scarcely

speculation. She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,

under haphazard flashes. The sight of her hand disengaged told her it

had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were

men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the

words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she

had crossed. And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press

forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness

and at least indicate her force of character. The splendour of the man

quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she

set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her

fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it,

some truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely

womanly, a poor charm of her sex. The intellectual endowment was

rarer: still rarer the moral audacity. O, to match this man’s embracing

discursiveness! his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound

he brought out of all subjects! He struck, and they rang. There was a

bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance

was on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any

afflicting lumpishness. His brain was vivifying light. And how humane

he was! how supremely tolerant! Where she had really thought instead of

flippantly tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for an

echo, his firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she had

felt deeper than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed. Strange to

consider: with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift of

life thrice dear to him, he was fearless. Less by what he said than by

divination she discerned that he knew not fear. If for only that, she

would have hung to him like his shadow. She could have detected a brazen

pretender. A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would have

written down coxcomb. Her social training and natural perception raised

her to a height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from the

eloquently lofty. He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at

a first view, bidding that which he was be known. Fearless, confident,

able, he could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable. She who

was this man’s mate would consequently wed his possessions, including

courage. Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it in

an equal degree. Was she not displaying it? The worthy people of the

company stared, as she now perceived, and she was indifferent; her

relatives were present without disturbing her exaltation. She wheeled

above their heads in the fiery chariot beside her sun-god. It could

not but be courage, active courage, superior to her previous tentative

steps--the verbal temerities she had supposed so dauntless. For now

she was in action, now she was being tried to match the preacher and

incarnation of the virtues of action!

Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--the

symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive,

eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him

to proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light

in light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore

not light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: and

oh! constantly entertaining.

The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady’s shape. Did he

think it, or a dash of something like it?

His mood was luxurious. He had found the fair and youthful original

woman of refinement and station desired by him. He had good reason

to wish to find her. Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with

promise of a great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing

party and is not yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is

iron, his youth had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor,

whom to call Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom

in conduct, but whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey. Verily

she was original; and a grey original should seem remarkable above a

blooming blonde. If originality in woman were our prime request, the

grey should bear the palm. She has gone through the battle, retaining

the standard she carried into it, which is a victory. Alas, that grey,

so spirit-touching in Art, should be so wintry in reality!

The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer

than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid

as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan. He took it luxuriously because

he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of

the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return

for energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural

longings.

Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was the

breath of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde

in the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively

assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning

her. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpable

about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which

would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the

mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior.

He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it

sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his

courage to support the originality she was famed for.

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan

for counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact

phrasing of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.

He satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace

that night. Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of

a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping

verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious

flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey. Sentiment,

cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses,

where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements

constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to

wantonness out of bravado as well as by taste. Alvan, looking

indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the

superfluousness of a faithless lady’s vowing bite:

‘The kisses were in the course of things,

The bite was a needless addition.’

Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too

much! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their

chatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him of

her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with

her blush. She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility

forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an

airy latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for

her boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he

liked also the distinction she made.

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to

his requirements in a wife. They marched to the table together, and sat

together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal. His

robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife

might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his

possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful

heavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream

of the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position of

interpreter of heaven’s benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment

of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing

it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than

he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindled

to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was not

devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her

father’s board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that

vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to

be enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from

much talking and excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaring

the wine princely. Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: ‘You are not

for the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French

Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?’

‘No, no, the grape for me!’ said she: ‘the Rhine grape with the elf in

it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!’

‘Glorious!’

He toasted the grape. ‘Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young

sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered

sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten

of gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stem

clusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her

heaven-kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the

Rhine. We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come?

we two!’ The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after

a day of savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the

incessantly verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table. Clotilde

acquiesced: she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking

faun. She was realizing fairyland.

They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them

as with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and

branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the

harmony. So ran their chirping arguments and diversions. The carrying

on of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those

undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is

in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked

hard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them.

The Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature

was generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and

reputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessed

anywhere, and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later

civilization. Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intense

divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be

perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was

visible. ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ And if nature,

character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress’s

golden hair, did prepare them for Love’s lightning-match, not the

less were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze. Likewise,

Time, imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy

reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical

fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from

night to day. He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as

long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream,

where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed

them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road

quietly out of the way. They were ungrateful, of course, when the

performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him

pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them

of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between

them ‘for ever,’ and fresh.

The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning. Alvan assisted at the

cloaking and hooding of Clotilde. Her relatives were at hand; they hung

by while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlight

that laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass and

stone.

‘A night to head the Spring!’ said Alvan. ‘Come.’

He lifted her off the steps and set her on the ground, as one who had an

established right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor did

her people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt which

had struck the pair. These things, and many things that islands know not

of, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulness

of Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an island

atmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or the

breastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or no

tropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seen

of it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there. But even where

he walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a land

bowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan’s behaviour

was passing heteroclite. He needed to be the kingly fellow he was,

crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose it

uninterruptedly. ‘She is mine; I have won her this night!’ his bearing

said; and Clotilde’s acquiesced; and the worthy couple following them

had to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering. Partly by habit, and

of his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that once

taken could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a good

tideway strong in his own passion and his lady’s up against the last

defences--her parents. A difficulty with them was foreseen. What is a

difficulty!--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: a

knot beneath a sword: the dam to waters that draw from the heavens.

Not desiring it in this case--it would have been to love the difficulty

better than the woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of a

resistance, if only because it was a portion of the dowry she brought

him. Good soldiers (who have won their grades) are often of a peaceful

temper and would not raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemy

sets their pugnacious forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins with

electrical fire, till they are as racers on the race-course.--His inmost

hearty devil was glad of a combat that pertained to his possession of

her, for battle gives the savour of the passion to win, and victory

dignifies a prize: he was, however, resolved to have it, if possible,

according to the regular arrangement of such encounters, formal, without

snatchings, without rash violence; a victory won by personal ascendancy,

reasoning eloquence.

He laughed to hear her say, in answer to a question as to her present

feelings: ‘I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!’ The comparison

had been used or implied to him before.

‘No!’ said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, ‘no

more of the quadruped man! You tempt him--may I tell you that? Why, now,

this moment, at the snap of my fingers, what is to hinder our taking the

short cut to happiness, centaur and nymph? One leap and a gallop, and we

should be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents and

friends to run about for the wits they lose in running. But no! No

more scandals. That silver moon invites us by its very spell of bright

serenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the more

prolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the end

of the draught. But no!’ his voice deepened--‘the handsome face of the

orb that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between

us two. Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken

all round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon.

I have seen the other face of it--a visage scored with regrets,

dead dreams, burnt passions, bald illusions, and the like, the

like!--sunless, waterless, without a flower! It is the old volcano land:

it grows one bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you will

know I am revolving a taste of it; and as I need the antidote you give,

I will not be the centaur to win you, for that is the land where he

stables himself; yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb he

finishes by pasturing on. You have no dislike of metaphors and parables?

We Jews are a parable people.’

‘I am sure I do understand...’ said Clotilde, catching her breath to be

conscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation.

‘Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician’s

treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!--You were going to add?’

‘I was going to say, I think I understand, but you run away with me

still.’

‘May the sensation never quit you!’

‘It will not.’

‘What a night!’ Alvan raised his head: ‘A night cast for our first

meeting and betrothing! You are near home?’

‘The third house yonder in the moonlight.’

‘The moonlight lays a white hand on it!’

‘That is my window sparkling.’

‘That is the vestal’s cresset. Shall I blow it out?’

‘You are too far. And it is a celestial flame, sir!’

‘Celestial in truth! My hope of heaven! Dian’s crescent will be ever

on that house for me, Clotilde. I would it were leagues distant, or the

door not forbidden!’

‘I could minister to a good knight humbly.’

Alvan bent to her, on a sudden prompting:

‘When do father and mother arrive?’

‘To-morrow.’

He took her hand. ‘To-morrow, then! The worst of omens is delay.’

Clotilde faintly gasped. Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her

family and circle!

Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.

‘Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive

me,’ said Alvan.

She stopped walking in sheer fright.

‘My father--my mother?’ she said, imaging within her the varied horror

of each and the commotion.

‘To-morrow or the day after--not later. No delays! You are mine, we are

one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both. If

I could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling

mischances. Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are

our gold slipping away?’

She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only

to shun the pledge it signified. He opened an abyss at her feet, and in

deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: ‘Oh! not yet; not immediately.’ She

trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.

‘There will be such... not yet! Perhaps later. They must not be troubled

yet--at present. I am... I cannot--pray, delay!’

‘But you are mine!’ said Alvan. ‘You feel it as I do. There can be no

real impediment?’

She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties. In fear

of his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their

imbecility: ‘Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may.

My father is not very well... my mother: she is not very well. They are

neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at present.’

To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur’s back

to the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit,

and beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on

this pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his

hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and

the geese of the world. She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which

imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice,

active and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be

warm.

He read something of her weakness. ‘And supposing I decide that it must

be?’

‘How can I supplicate you!’ she replied with a shiver, feeling that she

had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of

the world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical

moment: and she had lost it by being too sincere. Her cowardice appeared

to her under that aspect.

‘Now I perceive that the task is harder,’ said Alvan, seeing her huddled

in a real dismay. ‘Why will you not rise to my level and fear nothing!

The way is clear: we have only to take the step. Have you not seen

tonight that we are fated for one another? It is your destiny, and

trifling with destiny is a dark business. Look at me. Do you doubt my

having absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me to

bear, and hold firmly to my will to overcome them! Oh! no delays.’

‘Yes!’ she cried; ‘yes, there must be.’

‘You say it?’

The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.

She trembled visibly: she could more readily have bidden him bear her

hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but

desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this

of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of

facts. He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt

like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power,

and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.

‘I see!’ said he, and his breast fell. Her timid inability to join with

him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a

bad name among her people and class, and chains in private. He was old

enough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less

fiery than the junction of his passions. ‘Well, well!--but we might so

soon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad! It is but to

determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome

circuit. Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the

heart. Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls! and she is a

girl, and the task is too much for her. So, then, we are in your hands,

child! Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and

sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is

not a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world

may see; and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite before

the kisses. That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things.

Apropos, Hamlet was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.’

‘Mad, he was mad!’ said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.

‘He was born bilious; he partook of the father’s constitution, not

the mother’s. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought,

reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was

by nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that

sleeps beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry.

Before the ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action

would have whiffed away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy

moralizer, waiting for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The

apparition of his father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood,

and that venom in the blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg

philosophy. With metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the

outer world opened on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore

the semblance of madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never with

his reason dethroned.’

‘Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!’

‘Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.’

‘No!’

‘Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?’ said Alvan.

Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to

be able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells

were spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person that

Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for

him in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed

gold-crested serpent.

He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of

likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.

And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had

returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her

with were no longer imminent.

CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a

short sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to

her own sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in

her. The exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art

to frame her apology. The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan,

she saw Prince Marko. She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his

grief; she could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious

beauty, and when her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute

sensibility to the blow, honourably she inflicted it.

‘Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you

I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him,

and he may lead me whither he will.’

The burning eyes of her Indian Bacchus fixed on her till their

brightness moistened and flashed.

Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said. He knew

the man.

Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself. For the first

few days she was in dread of meeting, seeing, or hearing of Alvan.

She feared the mention of a name that rolled the world so swiftly. Her

parents had postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm;

it was his violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that she

feared, as nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting,

seeing, nor hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whose

curiosity is refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thing

which frightened it. Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courage

flooded back; she hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelled

that he did not, reproached him; she could almost have scorned him for

listening to the hesitations of the despicable girl so little resembling

what she really was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf of

her family to spare them a sudden shock. Remembering her generous

considerations in their interests, she thought he should have known that

the creature he called a child would have yielded upon supplication to

fly with him. Her considerateness for him too, it struck her next, was

the cause of her seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceived

it and put it aside. He should have seen that she could be brave, and

was a mate for him. And if his shallow experience of her wrote her down

nerveless, his love should be doing.

Was it love? Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decided

will whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, had

she the freedom of a man. She would not have listened (it was quite

true) to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed an

interval to yawn after the first wild wooing of her. Prince Marko loved.

Yes, that was love! It failed in no sign of the passion. She set herself

to study it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering among

them pity, thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between admiration

and pathetic esteem, like that the musician has for a precious

instrument giving sweet sound when shattered. He served her faithfully,

in spite of his distaste for some of his lady’s commissions. She had to

get her news of Alvan through Marko. He brought her particulars of the

old trial of Alvan, and Alvan’s oration in defence of himself for

a lawless act of devotion to the baroness; nothing less than the

successfully scheming to wrest by force from that lady’s enemy a

document precious to her lawful interests. It was one of those cases

which have a really high gallant side as well as a bad; an excellent

case for rhetoric. Marko supplied the world’s opinion of the affair,

bravely owning it to be not unfavourable. Her worthy relatives, the

Frau v. Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report to

the family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the

epithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received

on a visit to demand her in marriage. There was no chance of her being

allowed to enter houses where this ‘rageing demagogue and popular

buffoon’ was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she

was compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such services

without rewarding him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer.

Those who toss crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and then

be moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them, but the dumb

mendicant’s delight in it is winning, and a little cannot hurt. Besides,

if any one had a claim on her it was the prince; and as he was always

adoring, never importunate, he restored her to the pedestal she had been

really rudely shaken from by that other who had caught her up suddenly

into the air, and dropped her! A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded

him immeasurably. A heightening of the reward almost took his life.

In the peacefulness of dealing with a submissive love that made her

queenly, the royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool, seemed

predatory and insolent. Thus, after that scene of ‘first love,’ in which

she had been actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill or two

for the recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the noble

actor; for nothing could erase the scene--it was historic; and Alvan

would always be thought of as a delicious electricity. She and Marko

were together on the summer excursion of her people, and quite sisterly,

she could say, in her delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.

True gentlemen are imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow

of giants; but still Clotilde’s experience of a giant’s manners was

favourable to the liberty she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this

kind, rather warmer than her word for it would imply. She owned that she

could better live the poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect

on its charms in the society of Marko. He was very young, he was little

more than an adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would

string or slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of a

distant day--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he

might be made happy.

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to

anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in

her likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now

grovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject;

and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an

alteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a

picked self-knowledge, and of her saying: ‘That is like me: that is very

like me: that is terribly like’: up to the point where the comparison

wooed her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped

her so shrewdly as to force her to say: ‘That is he, not I’: and the

vivisected youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at

a touch. It was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy

is the title for the operation, because the probing of herself in

another, with the liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her,

allowed her while unhurt to feel that she prosecuted her researches in

a dead body. The moment her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank

under a stroke of pain, she abstained from carving, and simultaneously

conscious that he lived, she was kind to him.

‘This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?’

‘I love you.’

‘You think me the highest and best?’

‘You are.’

‘So deep that you could bear anything from me?’

‘Try me!’

‘Unfaithfulness?’

‘You would be you!’

‘Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?’

‘Let me only see you!’

‘You are sure that happiness would not smother it?’

‘Has it done so yet?’

‘Though you know I am a serpent to that man’s music?’

‘Ah, heaven! Oh!--do not say music. Yes! though anything!’

‘And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?’

‘I would.... Ah!’

‘What? If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of

his prelude!’

‘I would wait’

‘It might be for long.’

‘I would eat my heart.’

‘Bitter! bitter!’

‘I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.’

She had a seizure of the nerves.

The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked

at further. She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion,

and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and

softened to her victim. Clotilde opened her arms, charming away

her wound, as she soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the

reflection that she could not be so very like one whom she pitied and

consoled.

She was charitably tender. If it be thought that she was cruel to

excess, plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight of

a youth who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, and

raised out of it by a smile. This young man’s responsive spirit acted on

her as the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frame

excites the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul to

show the miracle of our revival. Worship provokes the mortal goddess to

a manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half to

blame.

She had latterly been thinking of Alvan’s rejection of the part of

centaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning. He was to

gain her lawfully after dominating her utterly. That was right, but it

levelled imagination. There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love a

form of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominated

utterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she is

moved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessity

can exist for the former: and the reverse. In the union of the two

conditions she sees herself slavishly domesticated. With her Indian

Bacchus imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, and

he was beside her.--Quick to the saddle, away! The forest of terrors

is ahead; they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on its

borders; the dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts lean

to an upright in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and women

with the voice of a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot be

worse than a world defied. They drain a cup of milk apiece and they

spur, for this is the way to the golden Indian land of the planted vine

and the lover’s godship.--Ludicrous! There is no getting farther

than the cup of milk with Marko. They curvet and caper to be forward

unavailingly. It should be Alvan to bring her through the forest to

the planted vine in sunland. Her splendid prose Alvan could do what

the sprig of poetry can but suggest. Never would malicious fairy in old

woman’s form have offered Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride’s

imagination of him confronting perils. Yet, O shameful contrariety of

the fates! he who could, will not; he who would, is incapable. Let it

not be supposed that the desire of her bosom was to be run away with

in person. Her simple human nature wished for the hero to lift her

insensibly over the difficult opening chapter of the romance--through

‘the forest,’ or half imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meet

the unimagined, which, as there was no picture of it to terrify her,

seemed an easy gallop into sunland.--Yes, but in the grasp of a great

prose giant, with the poetic departed! Naturally she turned to caress

the poetic while she had it beside her. And it was a wonder to observe

the young prince’s heavenly sensitiveness to every variation of her

moods. He knew without hearing when she had next seen Alvan, though

it had not been to speak to him. He looked, and he knew. The liquid

darkness of his large eastern eyes cast a light that brought her heart

out: she confessed it, and she comforted him. The sweetest in the woman

caused her double-dealing.

Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him. A

common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him. He was an

eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant

that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a

man as the demagogue and Jew. Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to

abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately

to allow his own house to be their place of meeting. Alvan achieved the

first of the steps unassisted. Whether or not his character stood

well with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid

attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable

citizen and erudite to support him. Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good

chances of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem

excellent to the professor when one promising fair to be the political

genius of his time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make

him believe that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation.

The second step was undesignedly Clotilde’s.

She was on the professor’s arm at one of the great winter balls of

her conductor’s brethren in the law, and he said: ‘Alvan is here.’ She

answered: ‘No, he has not yet come.’--How could she tell that he was not

present in the crowd?

‘Has he come now?’ said the professor.

‘No.’

And no Alvan was discernible.

‘Now?’

‘Not yet.’

The professor stared about. She waited.

‘Now he has come; he is in the room now,’ said Clotilde.

Alvan was perceived. He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding

him to buzz about some recent pamphlet.

She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by

degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,

it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the

physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,

Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instant

naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if

there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence

on her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professor

revealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spoke

of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in

the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbs

in his desperate poor lover’s little flitting eternity of the possession

of her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: ‘That is

he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom I

must brush away.’

‘He?’ replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional

a weight as her tone declared him. ‘Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does

not count among the dragons.’

But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark,

a manful thickness of voice in Alvan’s ‘That is he!’ The rivals had

fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the

wrestlers’ first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.

‘He does not count? With those eyes of his?’ Alvan exclaimed. He knew

something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the

character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of

rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and

made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it

that his vehemence engendered: ‘I know all--without exception;

all, everything; all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I

shall--only aid me a little.’

She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import

of the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his

penetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of

excellent substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for

themselves--the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand

accusation; and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked

over the tonic draught with such power of taking a bracing as their

constitutions could summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual history

are the sexes to be seen standing more acutely divided. Well may

the lady be silent; her little sins are magnified to herself to the

proportion of the greatness of heart forgiving her; and that, with

his mysterious penetration and a throb of her conscience, holds her

tongue-tied. She does not imagine the effect of her silence upon the

magnanimous wretch. Some of these lovers, it has to be stated in sadness

for the good name of man, have not preserved an attitude that said so

nobly, ‘Child, thou art human--thou art woman!’ They have undone it and

gone to pieces with an injured lover’s babble of persecuting inquiries

for confessions. Some, on the contrary, retaining the attitude, have

been unable to digest the tonic; they did not prepare their systems as

they did their dose, possibly thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy

thump on a trifle, the which was performed by them artfully for a means

of swallowing and getting that obnoxious trifle well down. These are

ever after love’s dyspeptics. Very few indeed continue at heart in

harmony with their opening note to the silent fair, because in truth the

general anticipation is of her proclaiming, if not angelical innocence,

a softly reddened or blush-rose of it, where the little guiltiness lies

pathetic on its bed of white.

Alvan’s robustness of temper, as a conqueror pleased with his capture,

could inspirit him to feel as he said it:

‘I know all; what matters that to me?’ Even her silence, extending the

‘all’ beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number

these indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, without

will, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him. He

would have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather

for a sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young,

graceful, comely, and a lady of station. Once in his good keeping, her

lord would answer for her. And this was a manfully generous view of the

situation. It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror’s mood. But how

of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, a

defeat? Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as a

heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself! Wise are the

mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it only

to guard them at present, from the gentleman’s condescending generosity,

until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of the

sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.

Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the

origin of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man

was frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of

madness.

After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of

the amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing

anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the

sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through

a demi-ceremony of betrothal. It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to

reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change

at home. A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan’s

pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been. She

waited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to

take; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the

old wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for

circumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and

once more the two fell asunder. She had thoughts of the cloister. Her

venerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko’s; she was

induced to think of marriage. An illness laid her prostrate; she

contemplated the peace of death.

Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father’s,

and had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate. The

grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian

Bacchus were native to him. In her convalescence, she asked herself what

more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in

return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness. For

she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the

Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently. But he was a flower

in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it. Why should she

withhold from him a thing so easily given? The convalescent is receptive

and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming into

the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it

is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud

across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.

Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter of

our island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, and

at an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air.

Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness. There came a

letter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kingly

Alpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veins

became a torrent. He there! So near! Could he not be reached?

He had a saying: Two wishes make a will.

The wishes of two lovers, he meant. A prettier sentence for lovers, and

one more intoxicating to them, was never devised. It chirrups of the

dear silly couple. Well, this was her wish. Was it his? Young health on

the flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other than

Alvan’s wish; she believed in his wishing it. Then as he wished and she

wished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her own

for being his as well. She hurried her friend and her friend’s

friends on horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodged

overlooking mountain and lake. The professor reported him outwearied

with excess of work. Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirty

were laid to his charge. Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Her

reckless defence of him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her to

comprehend his dealings with her, and how it was that he stormed her and

consented to be beaten. He had a thousand occupations, an ambition out

of the world of love, chains to break, temptations, leanings... tut,

tut! She had not lived in her circle of society, and listened to

the tales of his friends and enemies, and been the correspondent of

flattering and flattered men of learning, without understanding how

a man like Alvan found diversions when forbidden to act in a given

direction: and now that her healthful new blood inspired the courage to

turn two wishes to a will, she saw both herself and him very clearly,

enough at least to pardon the man more than she did herself. She

had perforce of her radiant new healthfulness arrived at an exact

understanding of him. Where she was deluded was in supposing that she

would no longer dread his impetuous disposition to turn rosy visions

into facts. But she had the revived convalescent’s ardour to embrace

things positive while they were not knocking at the door; dreams were

abhorrent to her, tasteless and innutritious; she cast herself on the

flood, relying on his towering strength and mastery of men and events to

bring her to some safe landing--the dream of hearts athirst for facts.

CHAPTER VI

Alvan was at his writing-table doing stout gladiator’s work on paper in

a chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death’s

Heads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss lad

entered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below had

asked for him--Dr. Alvan. Who could the lady be? He thought of too

many. The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness. Issuing and

beholding her, his face became illuminated as by a stroke of sunlight.

‘Clotilde! by all the holiest!’

She smiled demurely, and they greeted.

She admired the look of rich pleasure shining through surprise in him.

Her heart thanked him for appearing so handsome before her friends.

‘I was writing,’ said he. ‘Guess to whom?--I had just finished my

political stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another for

an immediate introduction to your father.’

‘True?’

‘The truth, as you shall see. So, you have come, you have found me! This

time if I let you slip, may I be stamped slack-fingered!’

‘“Two wishes make a will,” you say.’

He answered her with one of his bursts of brightness.

Her having sought him he read for the frank surrender which he was

ready to match with a loyal devotion to his captive. Her coming cleared

everything.

Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member

of the party. His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has

whispered. They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to

another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in

morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of

day at his birth--he them.

Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: ‘Two

wishes! Mine was in your breast. You wedded yours to it. At last!--and

we are one. Not a word more of time lost. My wish is almost a will in

itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the

sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two

wishes united dare the world to divide them. What can? My wish was your

destiny, yours is mine. We are one.’ He poetized on his passion, and

dramatized it: ‘Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man

holding your hand! There is no escape for you. Nay, into the vaults,

were you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults!

Speak--or no: look! That will do. You hold a Titan in your eyes, like

metal in the furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or

solid. You make him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but

fixed or flowing, he is lord of you. That is the universal penalty: you

must, if you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature:

if you raise him to heaven, you must be his! Ay, look! I know the eyes!

They can melt granite, they can freeze fire. Pierce me, sweet eyes! And

now flutter, for there is that in me to make them.’

‘Consider!’ Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.

‘The world? you dear heaven of me! Looking down on me does not

compromise you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions. I sat in gloom:

you came: I saw my goddess and worshipped. The world, Lutece, the world

is a variable monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false;

but those who weld strength with sincerity may practise their rites of

religion publicly, and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate. Nay, I

say that strength in love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it,

muffs it in the air about us, and so we two are privileged. Politically

also we know that strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow.

Behind the veil of our human conventions power is constant as ever, and

to perceive the fact is to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams.

He is the teacher who shows where power exists: he is the leader who

wakens and forms it. Why have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted!

The world voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly.

You--to your honour?--I won’t decide--but you have the longest in my

experience resisted. I have a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I

have a voice for ears, a net for butterflies, a hook for fish, and

desperation to plunge into marshes: but the feu follet will not be

caught. One must wait--wait till her desire to have a soul bids her come

to us. She has come! A soul is hers: and see how, instantly, the old

monster, the world, which has no soul--not yet: we are helping it to get

one--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe. For I do give you

a soul, think as you will of it. I give you strength to realize, courage

to act. It is the soul that does things in this life--the rest is

vapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do music by the pure note won

from resolute strings. The tense chord is music, and it is love. This

higher and higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like a

harp.’

‘Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!’ exclaimed

Clotilde.

‘You feel the mountain spirit?’

‘I feel that you reveal it.’

‘Tell me the books you have been reading.’

‘Oh, light literature-poor stuff.’

‘When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is

the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view;

the view within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our

history in the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view,

out or in. The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled

and sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their

pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they

shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public,

which will have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist,

essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am

neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on

the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as

much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the

pictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment of

our forefatherly heaps of bones. Shun those who cry out against fiction

and have no taste for elegant writing. For to have no sympathy with the

playful mind is not to have a mind: it is a test. But name the books.’

She named one or two.

‘And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?’

‘Clotilde!’ he turned on her.

‘My good sir?’

‘These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave

them!’

‘Leave them?’

‘You with me. No more partings. The first year, the first day shall be

dated from to-morrow. You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.

All the ceremonies to follow. We will have a reaping of them, and make a

sheaf to present to the world with compliments. To-morrow!’

‘You do not speak seriously?’

‘I jest as little as the Talmud. Decide at once, in the happy flush of

this moment.’

‘I cannot listen to you, dear sir!’

‘But your heart beats!’

‘I am not mistress of it.’

‘Call me master of it. I make ready for to-morrow.’

‘No! no! no! A thousand times no! You have been reading too much fiction

and verse. Properly I should spurn you.’

‘Will you fail me, play feu follet, ward me off again?’

‘I must be won by rules, brave knight!’

‘Will you be won?’

‘And are you he--the Alvan who would not be centaur?’

‘I am he who chased a marsh-fire, and encountered a retiarius, and the

meshes are on my head and arms. I fancied I dealt with a woman; a woman

needing protection! She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man. That

is between us two. But think of us facing the world, and trust me; take

my hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight. Trust it to

me, and all your difficulties are at an end. To fly solves the problem.’

‘Indeed, indeed, I have more courage than I had,’ said Clotilde.

His eyes dilated, steadied, speculated, weighed her.

‘Put it to proof while you can believe in it!’

‘How is it every one but you thinks me bold?’ she complained.

‘Because I carry a touchstone that brings out the truth. I am your

reality: all others are phantoms. You can impose on them, not on me.

Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be your

salvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, and

the subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it. But

the courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I am

distant and maligned--can you fancy your having that? No! be wise of

what you really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow.’

‘Then,’ said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, ‘do you doubt your ability

to win me without a scandal?’

‘Back me, and I win you!’ he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: a

sudden droop.

She let her hand fall. He grasped it.

‘Gradations appear to be unknown to you,’ she said.

He cried out: ‘Count the years of life, span them, think of the work to

be done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to waste

in retarding the inevitable? Pottering up steps that can be taken at one

bound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne,

and their kneecaps the footing stumps. But for us two life begins up

there. Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is our

shrine. I have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirst

to live.’

She murmured, in a fervour, ‘You shall!’ and slipped behind her

defences. ‘To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a little

time; all to-morrow morning we can discuss plans.’

‘You know you command me,’ said he, and gazed at her.

She was really a child compared with him in years, and if it was an

excuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting,--it was

also a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to the

step.

She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giant

at the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play of

knife and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, lively

Frenchmen and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring English

of both sexes, not encouraging to conversation in their look of pallid

disgust of the art, Alvan started general topics and led them. The lead

came to him naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind both

stored and effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growth

of life. She did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classes

and sets, or that he should be famed for charming women. Her friend was

enraptured with him. Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatter

between the ladies, and Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession.

‘But you are not engaged?’ said the blunt Englishwoman.

According to the explanation, Clotilde was hardly engaged. It was not

an easy thing to say how she stood definitely. She had obeyed her dying

relative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko’s, and

had pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentions

to the prince. It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; and

chiefly for his well-being. She had reserved her full consent: the

plighting was incomplete. Prince Marko knew that there was another, a

magical person, a genius of the ring, irresistible. He had been warned,

that should the other come forth to claim her.... And she was about to

write to him this very night to tell him... tell him fully.... In truth,

she loved both, but each so differently! And both loved her! And she had

to make her choice of one, and tell the prince she did love him, but...

Dots are the best of symbols for rendering cardisophistical subtleties

intelligible, and as they are much used in dialogue, one should have

now and then permission to print them. Especially feminine dialogue

referring to matters of the uncertain heart takes assistance from troops

of dots; and not to understand them at least as well as words, when

words have as it were conducted us to the brink of expression, and shown

us the precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the marketplace.

Sunless rose the morning. The blanketed figures went out to salute a

blanketed sky. Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness in

various forms, including laughter’s. Alvan frankly declared himself the

disappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight long

loved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and the

lakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde’s

English friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemn

reality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materially

defining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)

announce the hour for her departure. He promised her a positive sunrise

if she would delay. Her child lay recovering from an illness in the

town below, and she could not stay. But Clotilde had coughed in the damp

morning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposed

to it. Had not the lady heard her cough? She had, but personally she

was obliged to go; with her child lying ill she could not remain. ‘But,

madam, do you hear that cough again? Will you drag her out with such a

cough as that?’ The lady repeated ‘My child!’ Clotilde said it had

been agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be beside

her child. Alvan thundered an ‘Impossible!’ The child was recovering;

Clotilde was running into danger: he argued with the senseless woman,

opposing reason to the feminine sentiment of the maternal, and of course

he was beaten. He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence. Clotilde

likened his appearance to a strangled roar. ‘Mothers and their

children are too much for me!’ he said, penitent for his betrayal of

over-urgency, as he helped to wrap her warmly, and counselled her very

mode of breathing in the raw mountain atmosphere.

‘I admire you for knowing when to yield,’ said she.

He groaned, with frown and laugh: ‘You know what I would beg!’

She implored him to have some faith in her.

The missiles of the impassioned were discharged at the poor English: a

customary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting their

shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters:

but Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing

coldness in devoting herself to her child.

‘No, they attend to their duties,’ he assented generally, desperately

just.

‘And you owe it to her that you have seen me.’

‘I do,’ he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.

Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.

At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a

burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated

on the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip

pathfarers. She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram.

At night the wires flashed ‘Sleep well’ to her; on her awakening,

‘Good morning.’ A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her

amusement. Again at night there was a ‘God guard you!’

‘Who can resist him?’ sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,

happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the

excess of life that he put about her. This time there was no prospect of

his courtship relapsing.

‘He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!’ replied her friend.

‘If he were only that!’ said Clotilde, musing expressively. ‘If, dear

Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood. But Alvan mounts

high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so

generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.’

The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to

miss--more was expected to be said of him.

‘You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,’ she remarked, for she had

heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been

polite to her under vexation.

Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and

disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant.

She found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.

Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon

good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the

lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.

BOOK 2.

CHAPTER VII

He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they

met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so.

He was like summer’s morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly

through her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes

gathers during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take,

or shame at the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these

backflowings and gaps in the feelings. She had grown reconciled to

the perturbation of his messages, and would have preferred to have

him startling and thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she

welcomed him, and feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill

of the fit of shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that

she had reached his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical

measures to lead to their union. On one subject sure to be raised

against him by her parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the

baroness.

She asked to see a photograph of her.

Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in

profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman. The

eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde’s drooped

till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.

‘Think of her age,’ said Alvan, colouring. He named a grandmaternal date

for the year of the baroness’s birth.

Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting

lineaments came to an abrupt finish.

She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still

eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally. He could

not contest the woeful verdict.

‘Twenty years back!’ he murmured, writhing. The baroness was a woman

fair to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think

it incredible: she really was once.

Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed. He

shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little. For the first time

since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was

likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip. She sighed again.

He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.

‘Yes--now,’ he said, impatiently.

‘I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,’ said she, sad of voice.

The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to

defend the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.

Clotilde ‘tolled’ her naughty head.

‘But it is a strong face,’ she said, ‘a strong face--a strong jaw, by

Lavater! You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating

in her distress. Now she is old--and you are friends.’

‘Friends, yes,’ Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she

deserved to be praised for her open mind.

‘We are friends!’ he said, dropping a deep-chested breath. The title

this girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and

his burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine

the mood of the giver. She had positively humbled him so far as with a

single word to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her

look at the photograph. Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the

man’s vanity, he did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a

misconception injurious in the slightest degree to the sentiments he

entertained toward the older lady as well as the younger. ‘Friends!

you are right; good friends; only you should know that it is just a

little--a trifle different. The fact is, I cannot kill the past, and I

would not. It would try me sharply to break the tie connecting us, were

it possible to break it. I am bound to her by gratitude. She is old now;

and were she twice that age, I should retain my feeling for her. You

raise your eyes, Clotilde! Well, when I was much younger I found this

lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she honoured me with her confidence.

Young man though I was, I defended her; I stopped at no measure to

defend her: against a powerful husband, remember--the most unscrupulous

of foes, who sought to rob her of every right she possessed. And what

I did then I again would do. I was vowed to her interests, to protect a

woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at trifles, as you know;

you have read my speech in defence of myself before the court. By my

interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I estranged my family

and made the world my enemy. I gave my time and money, besides the

forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably there was an

arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her, so that

the baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling herself

indebted. You will not think that out of the way: men of the world do

not. As for matters of the heart between us, we’re as far apart as the

Poles.’

He spoke hurriedly. He had said all that could be expected of him.

They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden

green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed

fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping

branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as

its shadow; a vision of blackness.

‘I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,

screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and

if you approve it, we shall despatch it,’ said Clotilde.

‘There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!’ replied Alvan.

‘And now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day. En

avant! contre les canons! A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the

afternoon. I shall see you in the evening. So our separation won’t be

for long this time. All the auspices are good. We shall not be rich--nor

poor.’

Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the

store by her.

‘We don’t count it,’ said he. ‘Not rich, certainly. And you will not

expect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writing

for money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges

of the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt! And

journalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable to

the chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me;

and I give my self, I do not sell. I write when I have matter in me and

in the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!’

‘I would never ask you to sell yourself,’ said Clotilde. ‘I would rather

be in want of common comforts.’

He squeezed her wrist. They were again in front of the black-draped

blighted tree. It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf

bearing a semblance of livid metal. They looked at it as having seen it

before, and passed on.

‘But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!’ he

resumed, radiating his full bloom on her.

‘My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan’s wife!’ she exclaimed.

To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial

chuckle. ‘Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.

Sigismund Alvan’s wife shall take the foremost place of all. Look at

me.’ He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his

eagle eyes. He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,

expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man’s vanity under

the glances of a girl. ‘Do you take me for one who could be content with

the part of second? I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will

have too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly. I was not

fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I. I carry too

decisive a weight in the balance to victory. I have a taste for fruits,

my fairest! And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid

honours.’ He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of

his eyes.

‘“Bride of the Elect of the People!” is not that as glorious a title,

think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God’s grace

on his worm-eaten throne? I win that seat by service, by the dedication

of this brain to the people’s interests. They have been ground to the

dust, and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood. I am

the soldier of justice against the army of the unjust. But I claim

my reward. If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy. I will have my

station. I win it not only because I serve, but because also I

have seen, have seen ahead, seen where all is dark, read the

unwritten--because I am soldier and prophet. The brain of man is Jove’s

eagle and his lightning on earth--the title to majesty henceforth. Ah!

my fairest; entering the city beside me, and the people shouting around,

she would not think her choice a bad one?’

Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.

‘We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that

day comes,’ he continued after a while. ‘The day is coming, but we must

wait for it, work on. I have the secret of how to head the people--to

put a head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it

will be beneficent. I set them moving on the lines of the law of things.

I am no empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of

science in politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there is

but a step to the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in my

time, or acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the path

they should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner

or later: not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is

a middle-class invention to effect a compromise. With the people the

matter rests with their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and

shines reflected.’

‘I notice,’ she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a

splendid lover could crave for, ‘that you never look down, you never

look on the ground, but always either up or straight before you.’

‘People have remarked it,’ said he, smiling. ‘Here we are at this

funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct

us perpetually to this tree. It ‘s the only dead one here.’

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches

decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the

small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.

It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

‘Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!’ said

Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. ‘This is a tree for

a melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight,

after a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the

way, my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of

garb for me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky

army below. Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not

well-mannered women, though they may be excellent professional widows,

excellent!’

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was

not sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more

impressive in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true

love’s hair. The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless

lizards: her locks were golden serpents.

‘Shall I soon see your baroness?’ Clotilde asked him.

‘Not in advance of the ceremony,’ he answered. ‘In good time. You

understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young

and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first...! But her heart is

quite sound. Have no fear! I guarantee it; I know her to the roots.

She desires my welfare, she does my behests. If I am bound to her by

gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost she

will demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me

in the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my

heart; therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.’

They left the tree behind them.

‘We will take good care not to return this way again,’ said Alvan,

without looking back. ‘That tree belongs to a plantation of the under

world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has

looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and

Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for

Death blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely

tree. Down there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air

exchanging between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it’s

on the border line. I just felt the creep. I think you did. The reason

is--there is always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of

chill breeze took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining

at that very moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and

I acknowledged that death could do the trick. But death, my love, is far

from us two!’

‘Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?’ said

Clotilde.

‘Who? the baroness?’ Alvan laughed. The baroness was not so easily

defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared. ‘She is the best

of comrades, best of friends. She has her faults; may not relish the

writ announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as

true as she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you. That I can

promise. My poor Lucie! She is winter, if you will. It is not the winter

of the steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country; a fine

landscape of winter. The outlines of her face.... She has a great brain.

How much I owe that woman for instruction! You meet now and then men

who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are the pick of

men. And the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of their

womanliness for some amount of manlike strength. And she is one; man’s

brain, woman’s heart. I thought her unique till I heard of you. And how

do I stand between you two? She has the only fault you can charge me

with; she is before me in time, as I am before you. Shall I spoil you

as she spoilt me? No, no! Obedience to a boy is the recognition of the

heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as much as I love my love.

I do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour, support. You will not

rule me, but you will invigorate, and if you are petted, you shall not

be spoilt. Do not expect me to show like that undertakerly tree till my

years are one hundred. Even then it will be dangerous to repose beneath

my branches in the belief that I am sapless because I have changed

colour. We Jews have a lusty blood. We are strong of the earth. We

serve you, but you must minister to us. Sensual? We have truly excellent

appetites. And why not? Heroical too! Soldiers, poets, musicians; the

Gentile’s masters in mental arithmetic--keenest of weapons: surpassing

him in common sense and capacity for brotherhood. Ay, and in charity; or

what stores of vengeance should we not have nourished! Already we have

the money-bags. Soon we shall hold the chief offices. And when the

popular election is as unimpeded as the coursing of the blood in

a healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and topmost, for he is

pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-day communities.

But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of the Jew. I am no

champion of a race. I am for the world, for man!’

Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a

large following among the people.

He assented: ‘Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian. Yes, if I were

other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able

lieutenants.’

‘Tell me of your interview with Ironsides,’ she said proudly and fondly.

‘Would this ambitious little head know everything?’ said Alvan, putting

his lips among the locks. ‘Well, we met: he requested it. We agreed that

we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately have

to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could compare

our plans for governing. He showed me his hand. I showed him mine. We

played open-handed, like two at whist. He did not doubt my honesty,

and I astonished him by taking him quite in earnest. He has dealt with

diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old Ironer! I love

him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean deceit. He will

outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant’s--a simple evolution rapidly

performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies! Then he has them,

bagsful of them! The world will see; and see giant meet giant, I

suspect. He and I proposed each of us in the mildest manner contrary

schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe! Enough that we parted

with mutual respect. He is a fine fellow: and so was my friend

the Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu. Napoleon was a fine

engine:--there is a difference. Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow! but he

and I may cross. His ideas are not many. The point to remember is that

he is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of

the globe. He has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up,

penetrate, and traverse complications--an enemy’s plans, all that the

enemy will be able to combine, and the likeliest that he will do. Good.

We opine that we are equal to the same. He is for kingcraft to mask his

viziercraft--and save him the labour of patiently attempting oratory

and persuasion, which accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in

iron. We think the more precious metal will beat him when the broader

conflict comes. But such an adversary is not to be underrated. I do not

underrate him: and certainly not he me. Had he been born with the gifts

of patience and a fluent tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have

been for the people, as knowing them the greater power. He sees that

their knowledge of their power must eventually come to them. In the

meantime his party is forcible enough to assure him he is not fighting

a losing game at present: and he is, no doubt, by lineage and his

traditions monarchical. He is curiously simple, not really cynical. His

apparent cynicism is sheer irritability. His contemptuous phrases are

directed against obstacles: against things, persons, nations that oppose

him or cannot serve his turn against his king, if his king is restive;

but he respects his king: against your friends’ country, because there

is no fixing it to a line of policy, and it seems to have collapsed; but

he likes that country the best in Europe after his own. He is nearest to

contempt in his treatment of his dupes and tools, who are dropped out of

his mind when he has quite squeezed them for his occasion; to be taken

up again when they are of use to him. Hence he will have no following.

But let me die to-morrow, the party I have created survives. In him

you see the dam, in me the stream. Judge, then, which of them gains

the future!--admitting that, in the present he may beat me. He is a

Prussian, stoutly defined from a German, and yet again a German stoutly

defined from our borderers: and that completes him. He has as little

the idea of humanity as the sword of our Hermann, the cannon-ball of

our Frederick. Observe him. What an eye he has! I watched it as we were

talking: and he has, I repeat, imagination; he can project his mind in

front of him as far as his reasoning on the possible allows: and that

eye of his flashes; and not only flashes, you see it hurling a bolt; it

gives me the picture of a Balearic slinger about to whizz the stone for

that eye looks far, and is hard, and is dead certain of its mark-within

his practical compass, as I have said. I see farther, and I fancy I

proved to him that I am not a dreamer. In my opinion, when we cross our

swords I stand a fair chance of not being worsted. We shall: you shrink?

Figuratively, my darling have no fear! Combative as we may be, both of

us, we are now grave seniors, we have serious business: a party looks to

him, my party looks to me. Never need you fear that I shall be at sword

or pistol with any one. I will challenge my man, whoever he as that

needs a lesson, to touch buttons on a waistcoat with the button on the

foil, or drill fiver and eights in cards at twenty paces: but I will not

fight him though he offend me, for I am stronger than my temper, and as

I do not want to take his nip of life, and judge it to be of less value

than mine, the imperilling of either is an absurdity.’

‘Oh! because I know you are incapable of craven fear,’ cried Clotilde,

answering aloud the question within herself of why she so much admired,

why she so fondly loved him. To feel his courage backing his high

good sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astute

self-control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible. It

seemed to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she saw

their triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she should

instantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his Republican

Princess. She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue of

her being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, and

she thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her on

that eminence. Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kings

can summon through the trumpet! She could surely pass through the

trial with her parents that she might step to the place beside him! She

pressed his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory. Was it love? It

was as lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to.

She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where her

parents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name the

hotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive. ‘Am I

not precise as an office clerk?’ she said, with a pleasant taste of the

reality her preciseness pictured.

‘Practical as the head of a State department,’ said he, in good faith.

‘I shall not keep you waiting,’ she resumed.

‘The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our

success, my golden crest!’

‘Have no misgivings, Sigismund. You have transformed me. A spark of you

is in my blood. Come. I shall send word to your hotel when you are to

appear. But you will come, you will be there, I know. I know you so

entirely.’

‘As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when

they have married him. At least you ought to know me. You know that if

I were to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it

forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to

go through during our interlude with papa and mama.’

‘I almost wish you would,’ said she. She looked half imploringly, biting

her lip to correct the peeping wish.

Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: ‘Be brave. Flight and

defiance are our last resource. Now that I see you resolved I shun the

scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be.

How can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into

your veins? The other day on the heights--had you consented then? Well!

it would have been very well, but not so well. We two have a future,

and are bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for

an example, if we can. I take you from your father’s house, from your

mother’s arms, from the “God speed” of your friends. That is how Alvan’s

wife should be presented to the world.’

Clotilde’s epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and

despatched. To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really

was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural

impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that

language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,

while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed

expression of the pretty impulse. But wiser is it always that the star

in the ascendant should not address the one waning. Hardly can a word

be uttered without grossly wounding. She would not do it to a younger

rival: the letter strikes on the recipient’s age! She babbles of a

friendship: she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuous

happiness causes feminine nature’s bosom to rise in surges. The

declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a

deeper, a longer-tried suffering. Actually the letter of the rising star

assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and

personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt

also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.

Among Alvan’s gifts the understanding of women did not rank high. He

was too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful hero

regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at

a peculiar poetical twist of the bowler’s wrist, one knocking down the

other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their

sisters. His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he

had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of

their sex. The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on

his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he

said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,

millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units. He would have stared

like any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a

likeness unto men in their fight with the world. Women for him were

objects to be chased, the politician’s relaxation, taken like the

sportsman’s business, with keen relish both for the pursuit and the

prey, and a view of the termination of his pastime. Their feelings he

could appreciate during the time when they flew and fell, perhaps a

little longer; but the change in his own feelings withdrew him from

the communion of sentiment. This is the state of men who frequent

the avenues of success. At present he was thinking of a wife, and he

approved the epistle to the baroness cordially.

‘I do think it a nice kind of letter, and quite humble enough,’ said

Clotilde.

He agreed, ‘Yes, yes: she knows already that this is really serious with

me.’

So much for the baroness.

Now for their parting. A parting that is no worse than the turning of a

page to a final meeting is made light of, but felt. Reason is all in our

favour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slip

between the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though it

be not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness. Clotilde

required reassuring and comforting: ‘I am certain you will prevail;

you must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact,’ she

sighed in a languor: ‘only, my people are hard to manage. I see more

clearly now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by a

sort of compact so long as I did nothing decisive. That I see. But,

then again, have I not your spirit in me now? What has ever resisted

you?--Then, as I am Alvan’s wife, I share his heart with his fortunes,

and I do not really dread the scenes from anticipating failure,

still-the truth is, I fear I am three parts an actress, and the fourth

feels itself a shivering morsel to face reality. No, I do not really

feel it, but press my hand, I shall be true--I am so utterly yours: and

because I have such faith in you. You never, yet have failed.’

‘Never: and it is impossible for me to conceive it,’ said Alvan

thoughtfully.

His last word to her on her departure was ‘Courage!’ Hers to him was

conveyed by the fondest of looks. She had previously said ‘To-morrow!’

to remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, and

herself that she would not long stand alone. She did not doubt of her

courage while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strong

men of earth. She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from the

waving fingers.

CHAPTER VIII

Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of his

tricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her. All the rest to

come was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for a

plan of action. Who can hold her back when a woman is decided to move?

Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and

the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the

same elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and

rebel daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational.

That is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and

inflamed to fly the barriers intercepting. He fancied he had achieved

it. Alvan thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents. The

consolatory sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in

the contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused

by those people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a

wife after the fashion of orderly citizens. It would be on their heads!

But why vision mischance? An old half-jesting prophecy of his among

his friends, that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his

recollection without casting a shadow. Lo, the reckless prophet about to

marry!

No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree,

was she. Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed

fortieth year! Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?

Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it

would be sunshine in the subterranean sphere. The very thinking of

her dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting

phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, ‘Come.’

To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a

celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of

mortal life in the highest. He wondered how it was that he could have

waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and

he just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the

minutes, much as she did, only more fierily. The ceaseless warfare

called politics must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of

another kind. He was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a

panorama of illimitable felicity. And there were certain things he must

overcome before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love

of contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought,

his whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much

liking it either. There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not

like the battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the big

artillery.

Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of the

trains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; he

looked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swiss

law; considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was a

lawyer bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as

pleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it

wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses,

turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed at

such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wild

man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter

the ranks of the soberly blissful. These he could imagine that he

complimented by the wish. Then why should he doubt of his fortune? He

did not.

The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey. Late

in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde’s. A letter

was handed to him. His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for

her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse. ‘And now

my turn!’ said he, not overjoyously. The words Jew and demagogue and

baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.

But Clotilde’s parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and

champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal

and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were

to know him and change their tone.

As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at

the answer to a tap. He started; his face was a shield’s welcome to the

birdlike applicant for admission. Clotilde stood hesitating.

He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, and

drew her in.

‘Alvan, I have come.’

She was like a bird in his hands, palpitating to extinction.

He bent over her: ‘What has happened?’

Trembling, and very pale, hard in her throat she said, ‘The worst.’

‘You have spoken to them both subsequent to this?’ he shook the letter.

‘It is hopeless.’

‘Both to father and mother?’

‘Both. They will not hear your name; they will not hear me speak. I

repeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them. They hate--hate

you, hate me for thinking of you. I had no choice; I wrote at once

and followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want of

breath, not want of courage. I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all I

can do.

She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids.

But he said nothing. She looked up at him. Her strained pale eyes

provoked a closer embrace.

‘This would be the home for you if we were flying,’ said he, glancing

round at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, ‘Tell me what there

is to be told.’

‘Alvan, I have; that is all. They will not listen; they loathe Oh! what

possesses them!’

‘They have not met me yet!’

‘They will not, will not ever--no!’

‘They must.’

‘They refuse. Their child, for daring to say she loves you, is detested.

Take me--take me away!’

‘Run?--facing the enemy?’ His countenance was the fiery laugh of a

thirster for strife. ‘They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is made

of!’

Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion. ‘I found

them celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the Austrian

Count Walburg; I thought it favourable for us. I spoke of you to my

mother. Oh, that scene! What she said I cannot recollect: it was a

hiss. Then my father. Your name changed his features and his voice. They

treated me as impure for mentioning it. You must have deadly enemies.

I was unable to recognize either father or mother--they have become

transformed. But you see I am here. Courage! you said; and I determined

I would show it, and be worthy of you. But I am pursued, I am sure. My

father is powerful in this place; we shall barely have time to escape.’

Alvan’s resolution was taken.

‘Some friend--a lady living in the city here--name her, quick!--one you

can trust,’ he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of

drillmaster straightens a fair pupil’s shoulders. ‘Yes, you have shown

courage. Now it must be submission to me. You shall be no runaway bride,

but honoured at the altar. Out of this hotel is the first point. You

know some such lady?’

Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest. She could have prophesied

certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so

sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost

in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a

drawing back. She could not get the word or even the look to encounter

his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where

they were together alone. She could not refuse the protection he offered

in a person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of where

they were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of

entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged

to it. She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a

Madame Emerly, living near the hotel. Her heart sank like a stone. ‘It

is for you!’ cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his generosity

in temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph. ‘But my wife

shall not be snatched by a thief in the night. Are you not my wife--my

golden bride? And you may give me this pledge of it, as if the vows had

just been uttered... and still I resign you till we speak the vows. It

shall not be said of Alvan’s wife, in the days of her glory, that she

ran to her nuptials through rat-passages.’

His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her. She was cooled by her

despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay,

but that centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her

enthusiasm, thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they

were united, her step was irrevocable. Her having entered the hotel, her

being in this room, certified to that. It seemed to her while she was

waiting for the carriage he had ordered that she was already half a

wife. She was not conscious of a blush. The sprite in the young woman’s

mind whispered of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it. And

undoubtedly, contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart

of fire. An impulse to fall on Alvan’s breast and bless him for his

chivalrousness had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing she

praised. Otherwise she was not ill at ease. Alvan summoned his gaiety,

all his homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quitting

the room she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomy

foreboding. A maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling of

devotion to her, ran up the steps of the hotel. Her tale was, that the

General had roused the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heard

whither Clotilde was going.

Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly’s drawing-room

relating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, assisted

by the lover whom she had introduced. Her hostess promised shelter and

exhibited sympathy. The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knew

Alvan by reputation. He was insurrectionally notorious in morals and

menacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowing

tongue, and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love and

deference toward her family, won her personally. She promised the best

help she could give them. They were certainly in a romantic situation,

such as few women could see and decline their aid to the lovers.

Madame Emerly proved at least her sincerity before many minutes had

passed.

Chancing to look out into the street, she saw Clotilde’s mother and her

betrothed sister stepping up to the house. What was to be done? And

was the visit accidental? She announced it, and Clotilde cried out, but

Alvan cried louder: ‘Heaven-directed! and so, let me see her and speak

to her--nothing could be better.’

Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head

premonitorily; and then she said: ‘I think indeed it will be safer, if I

am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.’

‘Yes! yes!’ Clotilde replied: ‘Oh! do that.’

She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming

voice.

‘No!’ said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity. ‘Plain-dealing;

no subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have you

burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our

account. And when it would be bad policy?... Oh, no, worse than the sin!

as the honest cynic says. We will go down to Madame von Rudiger, and she

shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter’s hand.’

Clotilde rocked in an agony. Her friend was troubled. Both ladies knew

what there would be to encounter better than he. But the man, strong in

his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.

Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame

Emerly’s reception room. She could hardly speak: ‘Do not forsake me.’

‘Is this forsaking?’ He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone

which supplies the answer.

‘Oh, Alvan!’ She would have said: ‘Be warned.’

He kissed her fingers. ‘Trust to me.’

She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter

leaning on him.

She could almost have said: ‘Know me better’; and she would, sincere as

her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a

warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning

into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly

degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being

a part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.

Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain

tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the

spirit to be a melting prize of the winner.

Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering

thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring

their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius

of Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in

whatsoever person. We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be

prey, we lose the soul of election.

Mark her as she proceeds. For should her hero fail, and she be suffering

through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will

seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable

weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength. And it will

seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just

expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it

was only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of

espousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled

when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of

putting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him,

because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she

was ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some

reason (where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude)

will it seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the

conflict, insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked. He roused

the tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason,

coldest reason, close as it ever is to the craven’s heart in its hour of

trial, whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler’s die by the

swollen conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize.

That frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions. It spies the

spot of truth. Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then,

so unerring is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform

ourselves into cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple

over the Sphinx of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious

creature in an epigram. But there was as much more in Alvan than any

faint-hearted thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more

in the world than the epigrams aimed at it contain.

‘Courage!’ said he: and she tremblingly: ‘Be careful!’ And then they

were in the presence of her mother and sister.

Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure. Her

mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a

woman’s combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.

‘Away with that man! I will not suffer him near me,’ she cried.

Alvan advanced to her: ‘Tell me, madame, in God’s name, what you have

against me.’

She swung her back on him. ‘Go, sir! my husband will know how to deal

with one like you. Out of my sight, I say!’

The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde. She went up to

him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal,

said: ‘Let us go: come. I will not bear to hear you so spoken to. No one

shall treat you like that when I am near.’

She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experience

of the commencement. He did but clasp her hand, assuring the Frau von

Rudiger that no word of hers could irritate him. ‘Nothing can make me

forget that you are Clotilde’s mother. You are the mother of the lady I

love, and may say what you will to me, madame. I bear it.’

‘A man spotted with every iniquity the world abhors, and I am to see

him holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable! And because

there is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talk

of his foul passion for my daughter. I repeat: that which you have to

do is to go. My ears are shut. You can annoy, you can insult, you cannot

move me. Go.’ She stamped: her aspect spat.

Alvan bowed. Under perfect self-command, he said: ‘I will go at once

to Clotilde’s father. I may hope, that with a reasonable man I shall

speedily come to an understanding.’

She retorted: ‘Enter his house, and he will have you driven out by his

lacqueys.’

‘Hardly: I am not of those men who are driven from houses,’ Alvan said,

smiling. ‘But, madame, I will act on your warning, and spare her father,

for all sakes, the attempt; seeing he does not yet know whom he deals

with. I will write to him.’

‘Letters from you will be flung back unopened.

‘It may, of course, be possible to destroy even my patience, madame.’

‘Mine, sir, is at an end.’

‘You reduce us to rely on ourselves; it is the sole alternative.’

‘You have not waited for that,’ rejoined Frau von Rudiger. ‘You have

already destroyed my daughter’s reputation by inducing her to leave her

father’s house and hesitate to return. Oh! you are known. You are known

for your dealings with women as well as men. We know you. We have, we

pray to God, little more to learn of you. You! ah--thief!’

‘Thief!’ Alvan’s voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it. She

had up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern that

she had struck the wound in his history; but he was terrible to look at,

so she made the charge supportable by saying:

‘You have stolen my child from me!’

Clotilde raised her throat, shrewish in excitement. ‘False! He did

not. I went to him of my own will, to run from your heartlessness,

mother--that I call mother!--and be out of hearing of my father’s curses

and threats. Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to him

than to you. And never will I return to you. You have killed my love; I

am this man’s own because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, as

his partner in life for all it may give!--as his wife! Trample on him,

you trample on me. Make black brows at your child for choosing the man,

of all men alive, to worship and follow through the world. I do. I am

his. I glory in him.’

Her gaze on Alvan said: ‘Now!’ Was she not worthy of him now? And would

they not go forth together now? Oh! now!

Her gaze was met by nothing like the brilliant counterpart she merited.

It was as if she had offered her beauty to a glass, and found a

reflection in dull metal. He smiled calmly from her to her mother. He

said:

‘You accuse me of stealing your child, madame. You shall acknowledge

that you have wronged me. Clotilde, my Clotilde! may I count on you to

do all and everything for me? Is there any sacrifice I could ask that

would be too hard for you? Will you at one sign from me go or do as I

request you?’

She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: ‘I

will,’ but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-acting

her part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension of

the part he was for playing to the same audience. ‘Yes, I will do all,

all that you command. I am yours. I will go with you. Bid me do whatever

you can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I have

hitherto called mine:--not that!’

‘And that is what I have to request of you,’ said he, with his calm

smile brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable to

her. ‘And this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are you

prepared to do it? Will you?’

She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against her

imploring eyes. ‘If you can ask me--if you can positively wish it--yes,’

she said. ‘But think of what you are doing. Oh! Alvan, not back to them!

Think!’

He smiled insufferably. He was bent on winning a parent-blest bride, an

unimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of the

world’s polished silver vessels.

‘Think that you are doing this for me!’ said he. ‘It is for my sake. And

now, madame, I give you back your daughter. You see she is mine to give,

she obeys me, and I--though it can be only for a short time--give her

back to you. She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do not

forget that. And so, madame, I have the honour,’ he bowed profoundly.

He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm. ‘What you have done

in obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten. Never can

I sufficiently thank you. I know how much it has cost you. But here is

the end of your trials. All the rest is now my task. Rely on me with

your whole heart. Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding.

Be sure of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of

injustice I shall be beside you to take you to myself. Be sure of that,

and be not unhappy. They shall not keep you from me for long. Submit

a short while to the will of your parents: mine you will find the

stronger. Resolve it in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for

it is impossible to me to waver. Consider me as the one fixed light in

your world, and look to me. Soon, then! Have patience, be true, and we

are one!’

He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand. The horribly empty

sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother’s contemptuous

face.

His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone. She seemed

a dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering

himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he

could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the

brief vision of her unfitness to be left. The compressed energy of

the man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the

claims of family ties and duties, intoxicated him. He thought but of

the present achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad

reputation among these people, from whom he was about to lead forth

a daughter for Alvan’s wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his

exhibition of generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he

delivered his retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger’s shoulder--that

the worst was over; he had to deal no more with silly women: now for

Clotilde’s father! Women were privileged to oppose their senselessness

to the divine fire: men could not retreat behind such defences; they

must meet him on the common ground of men, where this constant battler

had never yet encountered a reverse.

Clotilde’s cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to

reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the

diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;

and the lady of the house. He was going--he could actually go and leave

her! She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she

did so as much as she had force to make it visible. She saw him smiling

incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy.

She could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she

took the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.

‘You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had

the choice of you and he abjured you. He has cast you off!’

She phrased it in speech to herself. It was incredible, but it was

clear: he had gone.

The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.

‘He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily

to renounce you.’

She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother

heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at

the window.

The craven’s first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for

light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered of

quietness if she submitted.

And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been

guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to

him, the which may be love’s glory when marriage crowns it. By his

rejecting her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but

a castaway. It was not natural that he should leave her; ‘not natural in

him to act his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at

the mercy of those who might pick her up. She was, in her humiliation

and dread, all of the moment, she could see to no distance; and

judging of him, feeling for herself, within that contracted circle of

sensation--sure, from her knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done

unwisely--she became swayed about like a castaway in soul, until her

distinguishing of his mad recklessness in the challenge of a power

greater than his own grew present with her as his personal cruelty to

the woman who had flung off everything, flung herself on the tempestuous

deeps, on his behalf. And here she was, left to float or founder! Alvan

had gone. The man rageing over the room, abusing her ‘infamous lover,

the dirty Jew, the notorious thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,’ etc., etc.,

frightful epithets, not to be transcribed--was her father. He had come,

she knew not how. Alvan had tossed her to him.

Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady’s heart by the

brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the

creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel,

she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted. Her

cry to him: ‘If you had been wiser, this would not have been!’ will sink

to the inward meditation: ‘If he had been truer!’--and though she does

not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is

already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun. They

are not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of them

makes it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.

Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail

small boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious

outbreak she was exposed to. She might so far have exonerated him had

she been able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him

in blind reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising

material rigours. After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for

a young woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched

through the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by

the hair-Alvan’s beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a

huge forester’s weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his

daughter’s flight to the Jew. He seemed to have a grim indifference to

exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a

satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or

three maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly

managing them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely

cracking a whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time

by hunting her as she likes to run. Police were round his house. The

General chattered and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies

of that Jew--the things that Jew would attempt. He dragged her

indoors, muttering of his policy in treating her at last to a wholesome

despotism.

This was the medicine for her--he knew her! Whether he did or not, he

knew the potency of his physic. He knew that osiers can be made to

bend. With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the

window-shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he

left her there and roared across the household that any one holding

communication with the prisoner should be shot like a dog. This was a

manifestation of power in a form more convincing than the orator’s.

She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;

abandoned by her lover. She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving

with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of

misfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She was

isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our natural

obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to

cling to the semblance of it only. ‘I marry Alvan!’ was her iterated

answer to her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken

her; and she spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that

strive to nail themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named his

time for returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued for

about forty hours. She then thought, in an exhaustion: ‘Strange that

my father should be so fiercely excited against this man! Can he have

reasons I have not heard of?’ Her father’s unwonted harshness suggested

the question in her quailing nature, which was beginning to have a

movement to kiss the whip. The question set her thinking of the reasons

she knew. She saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and they

wore a sinister appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to

them as well as to Alvan’s fatal decision. Her misery was traceable to

his conduct and his judgement--both bad. And yet all this while he might

be working to release her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to the

side of her lover against these executioner parents, and scribbled to

him as well as she could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging

him to appear. She spent her heart on it. A note to her friend, the

English lady, protested her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment,

with a frozen resignation to the loss of him--all around her was so

dark! By-and-by there was a scratching at her door. The maid whom she

trusted brought her news of Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and

mistress knelt. Hope flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers

were exchanged through the partition.

‘Where is he?’

‘Gone.’

‘But where?’

‘He has left the city.’

Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one

for Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking

practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an

address. She did not ask herself whether the maid’s information was

honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.

She wept through the night. It was one of those nights of the torrents

of tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there be

ought of that besides the breathing structure. The reason why she wept

with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity

for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the

love whereby she was tormented. They do not weep thus who have a heart

for the struggle. In the morning she was a dried channel of tears,

no longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other

words, unable any further to contend.

Reality was too strong! This morning her sisters came to her room

imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their

prospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sister

Lotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan’s name was infamous

in society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemned

to seclusion. A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set her

tears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could he

hold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jew

democrat? He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with his

brother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wrongly

Alvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all,

perhaps to her father’s military and diplomatic career principally: the

head of their house would be ruined. She was compelled to weep again by

having no other reply. The tears were now mixed drops of pity for her

absent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when she

shed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as many

bosoms drained of self-pity will become.

Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and

had a languid willingness to gain outward comfort. To be caressed a

little by her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after

her heavy scourging. She wished for the touches of affection, knowing

them to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality

made them seem a soft reminder of what life had been. Alvan had gone.

Her natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire

relinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber. He had gone; he had

committed an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own

vain provoking, that was too severe for him: he was not the lover

he fancied himself, or not the lord of men she had fancied him. Her

excessive misery would not suffer a picture of him, not one clear

recollection of him, to stand before her. He who should have been at

hand, had gone, and she was fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being

abandoned, her blank night of imagination felt that there was nothing

left for her save to fall upon those nearest.

She gave her submission to her mother. In her mind, during the last

wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her

cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: ‘He may come, and I am his

if he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people.’ He had taught her

to rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting

herself loose from him. In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to

believe if the saint will appear. However, she submitted. Then there was

joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.

CHAPTER IX

After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight

of the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath. He

proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing

his heart’s intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path,

and was on a strange and tangled one. The sense of power in him was

leonine enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the

path: yet did that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with

searching eyes. They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not

needed to be acting his part, brilliant though it was. He crammed his

energy into his idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously.

Before the world, it would without question redound to his credit, and

he heard the world acclaiming him:

‘Alvan’s wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of

Law, from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the

old lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman! Alvan, the republican,

is eminently a citizen. Consider his past life by that test of his

character.’

He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,

through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly

slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy

to be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower. Lower, of course,

the multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod

they have in exchange for it is not an independent one. Ceasing to be

a social rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he

passed under the bondage of that position.

Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could

be trusted now. She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of

society, and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and

decide by it. The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger

was a man of the world. An honourable son-in-law could not but be

acceptable to him--now, at least. And such a son-in-law would ultimately

be the pride of his house. ‘A flower from thy garden, friend, and my

wearing it shall in good time be cause for some parental gratification.’

The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of

Clotilde. He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another

intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs. These gentlemen brought

no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to

extract a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde,

and of course he refused; they hinted that the General might have

official influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them

to the proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of

extraordinary and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of

treating his pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because

of his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on

it yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blow

startling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly

polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect

between man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, which

indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one

such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He could

not raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the

implied contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was

obliged to swallow both the history and the insult, returning them the

equivalent of their courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder

heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him

admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. The

bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoese

conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to

boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the

ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled

to lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy’s

readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he

was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of

the powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on his

career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! What

was this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no sooner

asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated

the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,

confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her. Why

had he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely

inspired. She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury,

went his way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese

going under; worse, for the drowner’s delirium swirls but a minute in

the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the

night.

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for the

self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his

error, it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and

upon that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force

opposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was

petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of

the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have

revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a

stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had

chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By

shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing

reduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;

his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole

quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of

one for a mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the

fever he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises is

not so uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.

frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting

ourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves

will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing,

they will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour

presenting them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance

upon perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must

win her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She

was his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she

would cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his

frame, bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam

to his arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the

fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly

beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies

could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they

signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as

shatters to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them,

lower than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one

like him, became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass!

tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing

suicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde!

Clotilde! Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of

jewels in his hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung

a pebble? Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday! There’s nothing but

your fool’s face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw,

fool! Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom’s

head! What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he

might have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the

ceremonies! They laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of the

gods is the lightning of death’s irony over mortals. Can they have a

finer subject than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O for

yesterday! He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,

groaned. A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,

having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand

while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his

private dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops

hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off;

he came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the

friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him,

were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all

the truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of

the woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his career

had been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but a

fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive,

yet she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be

himself once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full

tide and she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she

became a melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giant

in him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her

lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender

eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying

shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted

water, swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers

distinctly beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of

spirit in his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through a

giant’s contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse,

dreadful, likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs,

Alvan was great-hearted: he could love in his giant’s fashion, love and

lay down life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion

was not heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often;

or for the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites. He

was true man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge

personality to pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a

soul wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving

mighty sound of timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he

suffered, as he loved, to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.

Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the

hungry instrument are not all so rough that Love’s touch on them is

indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald

harmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us,

and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and

space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance

that the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is not

melodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain,

or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is not

done by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant

indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery

stedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderful

nor indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the

handsome boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her

slave, and she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she

sided to him quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the

acknowledgement of a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsed

on the occasions of his absence, and owning his power over her when they

were together again, she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her

at present, and that she was a woman only to be held at present, by the

palpable grasp of his physical influence. Partly it was correct, not

entirely, seeing that she kept the impression of a belief in him even

when she drifted away through sheer weakness, but it was the single

positive view he had of her, and it was fatal, for it begat a devil of

impatience.

‘They are undermining her now--now--now!’

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already

indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on

his agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would

have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to

nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart’s

faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his

mastery, took her for sand. Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?

The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman. But

how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without

answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to

complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant

Duplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their

favour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilled

a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the

letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.

CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the

enemy’s counter-stroke. Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter

from Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him.

Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must

be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she

had left the city. She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded,

but henceforward he should know that they were strangers.

Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he

smote a forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand. That was the dumb

oration of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the

state of brute. His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shook

the reptile letter under a terrible frown.

Tresten saw that he supposed himself to be perfectly master of his acts

because he had not spoken, and had managed to preserve the ordinary

courtesies.

‘You have done your commission,’ the colonel said to Count Walburg,

whose companion was not disposed to go without obtaining satisfactory

assurances, and pressed for them.

Alvan fastened on him. ‘You adopt the responsibility of this?’ He

displayed the letter.

‘I do.’

‘It lies.’

Tresten remarked to Count Walburg: ‘These visits are provocations.’

‘They are not so intended,’ said the count, bowing pacifically. His

friend was not a man of the sword, and was not under the obligation to

accept an insult. They left the letter to do its work.

Big natures in their fits of explosiveness must be taken by flying

shots, as dwarfs peep on a monster, or the Scythian attacked a phalanx.

Were we to hear all the roarings of the shirted Heracles, a world of

comfortable little ones would doubt the unselfishness of his love of

Dejaneira. Yes, really; they would think it was not a chivalrous love:

they would consider that he thought of himself too much. They would

doubt, too, of his being a gentleman! Partial glimpses of him, one may

fear, will be discomposing to simple natures. There was a short black

eruption. Alvan controlled it, to ask hastily what the baroness thought

and what she had heard of Clotilde. Tresten made sign that it was

nothing of the best.

‘See! my girl has hundreds of enemies, and I, only I, know her and can

defend her--weak, base shallow trickster, traitress that she is!’ cried

Alvan, and came down in a thundershower upon her: ‘Yesterday--the day

before--when? just now, here, in this room; gave herself--and now!’

He bent, and immediately straightening his back, addressed Colonel von

Tresten as her calumniator, ‘Say your worst of her, and I say I will

make of that girl the peerless woman of earth! I! in earnest! it’s no

dream. She can be made.... O God! the beast has turned tail! I knew she

could. There ‘s three of beast to one of goddess in her, and set

her alone, and let her be hunted and I not by, beast it is with her!

cowardly skulking beast--the noblest and very bravest under my wing!

Incomprehensible to you, Tresten? But who understands women! You hate

her. Do not. She ‘s a riddle, but no worse than the rest of the tangle.

She gives me up? Pooh! She writes it. She writes anything. And that

vilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thundered

her signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of her

putting her name to the letter. She had done that, written her name to

the renunciation of him! No individual could bear the sight of such

a crime, and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim to

atone for it. Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman;

she became that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would not

distinguish her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was

his knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the

sex. He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter

sticking in his ribs. The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped

it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it,

and was foul-mouthed. Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man

snapped in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her

fragmentarily. It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and

sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the

shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, and

though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her

hand over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the

deadly-toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it.

The thing lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them:

witness it in love murdered.

O that woman! She has murdered love. She has blotted love completely

out. She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon.

He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with

a cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one

and all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless,

clogs on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner

peeped out on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his

great-heartedness. ‘For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I would

have sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty,

my immortality. She knew it, and she--look!’ he unwrinkled the letter

carefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball.’ Signs her

name, signs her name, her name!--God of heaven! it would be incredible

in a holy chronicle--signs her name to the infamous harlotry! See:

“Clotilde von Rudiger.” It’s her writing; that’s her signature:

“Clotilde” in full. You’d hardly fancy that, now? But look!’ the

colonel’s eyelids were blinking, and Alvan dinted his finger-nail under

her name: ‘there it is: Clotilde: signed shamelessly. Just as she might

have written to one of her friends about bonnets, and balls, and books!

Henceforward strangers, she and I?’

His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a

yell beneath a cathedral dome. ‘Why, the woman has been in my hands--I

released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the

code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two

strangers! Do you hear that, Tresten? Why, if you had seen her!--she

was lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under

bolt and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman’s heart! that never a

breath should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or

by accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth. “I think it best for us

both.” So she thinks for me! She not only decides, she thinks; she is

the active principle; ‘tis mine to submit.--A certain presumption was in

that girl always. Ha! do you hear me? Her letter may sting, it shall not

dupe. Strangers? Poor fool! You see plainly she was nailed down to write

the thing. This letter is a flat lie. She can lie--Oh! born to the art!

born to it!--lies like a Saint tricking Satan! But she says she has left

the city. Now to find her!’

He began marching about the room with great strides. ‘I ‘ll have the

whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I ‘ll have them by

the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force.

I have sworn it. I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than

any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it’s war. I

declare war on them. They will have it! I mean to take that girl from

them--snatch or catch! The girl is my girl, and if there are laws

against my having my own, to powder with the laws! Well, and do you

suppose me likely to be beaten? Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar

a people’s legend. Not if they are history, and eloquence and

commandership have power over the blood and souls of men. First, I write

to her!’

His friend suggested that he knew not where she was. But already the pen

was at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher.

Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him of

his fever. As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, more

fiercely desired. The concentration of his active mind directed his

whole being on the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human. That

last day when he had seen her appeared to him as the day of days. That

day was Clotilde herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman, and

saw himself translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all was

dark, as in front. That one day was the sun of his life. It had been a

day of rain, and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with the

dark threaded air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past all

daily radiance. His letter was a burning hymn to the day. His moral

grandeur on the day made him live as part of the splendour. Was it

possible for the woman who had seen him then to be faithless to him? The

swift deduction from his own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion to

the contrary, and he became lighthearted. He hummed an air when he had

finished his letter to her.

Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some were

despatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; others

were told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde. His

gold rained into their hands with the directions.

Colonel von Tresten was the friend of his attachment to the baroness; a

friend of both, and a warm one. Men coming into contact with Alvan took

their shape of friend or enemy sharply, for he was friend or enemy of

no dubious feature, devoted to them he loved, and a battery on them he

opposed. The colonel had been the confidant of the baroness’s grief over

this love-passion of Alvan’s, and her resignation. He shared her doubts

of Clotilde’s nobility of character: the reports were not favourable to

the young lady. But the baroness and he were of one opinion, that Alvan

in love was not likely to be governable by prudent counsel. He dropped a

word of the whispers of Clotilde’s volatility.

Alvan nodded his perfect assent. ‘She is that, she is anything you like;

you cannot exaggerate her for good or evil. She is matchless, colour her

as you please.’ Adopting the tone of argument, he said: ‘She writes

that letter. Well? It is her writing, and the moment, I am sure of it as

hers, I would not have it unwritten. I love it!’ He looked maddish with

his love of the horrible thing, and resumed soberly: ‘The point is, that

she has the charm for me. She is plastic in my hands. Other men would

waste the treasure. I make of her what I will, and she knows it, and

knows that she hangs on me to flourish worthily. I breathe the very soul

of the woman into her. As for that letter of hers--’ it burnt him this

time to speak of the letter: ‘she may write and write! She’s weak, thin,

a reed; she--let her be! Say of her when she plays beast--she is

absent from Alvan! I can forgive. The letter’s nothing; it means

nothing--except “Thou fool, Alvan, to let me go.” Yes, that! Her people

are acting tyrant with her--as legally they have no right to do in this

country, and I shall prove it to them. When I have gained admission to

her--and I soon shall: it can’t be refused: I am off to the head of her

father’s office to-morrow, and I have only to represent the state of

affairs to the Minister in my language to obtain his authority to demand

admission to her:--then, friend, you will see! I lift my finger, and

you will see! At my request she went back to her mother. I have but to

beckon.’

He had cooled to the happy assurance of his authority over her, all the

giants of his system being well in action, and when that is the case

with a big nature it is at rest, or such is the condition of repose

granted it in life.

On the morrow he was off to batter at doors which would have expected

rather the summons of an armed mob at his heels than the strange cry of

the Radical man maltreated by love.

CHAPTER XI

The story of Clotilde’s departure from the city, like that of Alvan’s,

communicated to her by her maid, was an anticipation of the truth,

disseminated by her parents. She was removed when the swarm of spies and

secret letter-bearers were attaining a position of dignity through the

rumour of legal gentlemen about to direct the movements of the besieging

army.

A stir seemed to her to prognosticate a rescue and she went not

unwillingly. To be in motion, to see roadside faces, pricked her senses

with some hope. She had gained the peace she needed, and in that state

her heart began to be agitated by a fresh awakening, luxurious at first

rather than troublesome. She had sunk so low that the light of Alvan

seemed too distant for a positive expectation of him; but few approached

her whom she did not fancy under strange disguises: the gentlemen were

servants, the blouses were gentlemen; she looked wistfully at old women

bearing baskets, for the forbidden fruit to peep out in the form of an

envelope. All passed her blankly, noticing her eyes.

The journey was short; she was taken to a place a little beyond the head

of the lake, and there, though she had liberty to breathe the air, fast

fixed within the walls of a daily sameness that became gradually the hum

of voices accusing Alvan of one in excess of the many sins laid against

him by his enemies. Was he not possibly an empty pretender to power--a

mere great talker?

Her bit of liberty increased her chafing at the deadly monotony of this

existence, and envenomed the accusation by seeming to push her forth

quite half way to meet him, if he would but come or show sign! She

impetuously vindicated him from the charge of crediting the sincerity of

any words she might have committed to paper at the despotic dictation of

her father. Oh, no; Alvan could not be guilty of such folly as that; he

could not; it would be to suppose him unacquainted with her, ignorant

of the nature of women. He would know that she wrote the words--why? She

could not perfectly recollect how she had come to write them, and found

it easier to extinguish the act of having written them at all, which was

done by the angry recurrence to his failure to intervene now when

the drama cried for his godlike appearance. Perhaps he was really

unacquainted with her thought her stronger than she was! The idea

reflected a shadow on his intelligence. She was not in a situation that

could bear of her blaming herself.

While she was thus devoured by the legions of her enfeebled wits,

Clotilde was assiduously courted by her family, and her father from time

to time brought pen and paper for her to write anew from his dictation.

He was pleased to hail her as his fair secretary, and when the letters

were unimportant she wrote flowingly, happy to be praised. They were

occasionally addressed to friends; she discovered herself writing one

to the professor, in which he was about to be informed that she had

resolved to banish Alvan from her mind for ever. She stopped; her heart

stopped; the pen fell from her hand, in loathing. Her father warily bade

her proceed. She could not; she signified it choking. Only a few days

before she had written to the professor exultingly of her engagement.

She refused to belie herself in such a manner; retrospectively her rapid

contradictions appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human,

and she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat the

General was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergone

by a sudden burst of his wrath. He knew the proper physic. ‘You girls

want the lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it. Write:

“He is now as nothing to me.” You shall write that you hate him, if you

hesitate! Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have

told him you have given him up, and what objection can you have to

telling others now you have done it?’

‘I was forced to it, body and soul!’ cried Clotilde, sobbing and

bursting into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had

put on to propitiate him. ‘If I have to tell, I will tell how it was.

For that my heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all

the world may see. I would rather write that I hate him.’

‘You write, the man is now as nothing to me!’ said her father, dashing

his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow. ‘Or

else, my girl, you’ve been playing us a pretty farce!’ He strung himself

for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed. ‘No, no,

you’re wiser, you’re a better girl than that. Write it. I must have it

written-here, come! The worst is over; the rest is child’s play. Come,

take the pen, I’ll guide your hand.’

The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed. They looked

such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure

they would be discerned as the work of compulsion. So she wrote on

mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future

revolt. Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and

she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by

scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we

sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly

in the morning. She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would

be welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise

of courage. She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who

did not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of

her lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him. With these

ideas in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of

lines to Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and

prostrate--she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was

aware of a flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being

deceived by it; it was an insult to his understanding. Full surely the

professor would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to

her and read her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece

of slavishness. She was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the

confession. But that promise of courage, coming of her ownership of

sense, vindicated her prospectively; she had so little of it that she

embraced it as a present possession, and she made it Alvan’s task to

put it to the trial. Hence it became Alvan’s offence if, owing to

his absence, she could be charged with behaving badly. Her generosity

pardoned him his inexplicable delay to appear in his might: ‘But see

what your continued delay causes!’ she said, and her tone was merely

sorrowful.

She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when

his answer arrived. The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover’s

faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the

letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language,

taking the frosty sentences piecemeal. He begged her to be firm in

her resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents! This man of high

intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress

moralizing. Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and

had within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this

man--if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour to

deserve the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan’s age

and her better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of

her family, and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any

chronicled. Out on him! She swept him from earth.

And she had built some of her hopes on the professor. ‘False friend!’

she cried.

She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.

There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong

arm save the baroness. The professor’s emphasized approval of her

resolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy,

and Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the

baroness. The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of

gosling innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph

of candour. She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring

herself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have moved

her, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: it

had been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman. The old woman

was entreated to bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia,

and let the young one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of

robbing. She could not have had the idea, else how could she have made

the petition? And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure

friendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea.

Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civility

insisted on the purity of her friendship. Nay, in mercy to the poor

gentleman, friendship it must be.

A letter of reply from that noble lady was due. Possibly she had

determined not to write, but to act. She was a lady of exalted birth,

a lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a

social and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motion

now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness,

almost happy under the phantom’s whisper that she need not despair. ‘You

have been a little weak,’ the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced

with a soft sniffle, adding: ‘But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a

woman, and know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O that

I had your beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I could

imitate.’ She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by

saying: ‘I have seen your photograph’; implying that the inimitable, the

much coveted air of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her

features. ‘For I can’t call you good looking,’ she said within herself,

for the satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast

as well. And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a

harsh-faced woman in confession must be:

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man

with his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to

dash his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in

soul to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. ‘But

put this on the white page,’ says she to the surging father inside his

box--‘I loved Alvan!’ A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man

jumping out of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she

has to hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall

tell him she guessed him to be no other than her lover. ‘How could you

expect a girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?’ she says.

And he answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.

In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while

gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,

where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal

river. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes

and the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she sat

and waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel!

who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan’s

beloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a way

of proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them day

after day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to

sultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee

and butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on

the glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her

cheek or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he

was useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her

feet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were like

hope’s own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he

seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness. She had

been expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and

valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan’s appearance.

But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his

passionately beseeching, trembling, ‘Will you have me?’ called up the

tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her

parents:

‘Will I have you? I? You ask me what is my will? It sounds oddly from

you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and

nothing has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him is

unaltered, and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by

my unhappiness. The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.

Sigismund Alvan. To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my

soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my

parents--I hate them.’

Marko pressed her hands. If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.

The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a

heart that was gone to impulse: ‘I see it, they have martyrized you. I

know you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let me

cherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should

it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to

him, and then you may choose between us.’

The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young woman

realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of

a slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and

this she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on

her, and melting her to him.

She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew

at the throat of Marko’s, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long

delays in the destroying of a weaker.

She left her chair and cried: ‘As you will. What is it to me? Take me,

if you please. Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand. You have as

much of me as is there. My life is gone. You or another! But take

this warning and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I see

Sigismund Alvan I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of

you, lying dead beneath me.’

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko’s large black eyes excited her

to a more savage imagination: ‘Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, all

of you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get

to him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the lives

of any dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. I

am true to him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take this

miserable body, but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when

God gives me sight of him. I am Alvan’s eternally. All your laws are

mockeries. You, and my people, and your priests, and your law-makers,

are shadows, brain-vapours. Let him beckon!--So you have your warning.

Do what I may, I cannot be called untrue. And now let me be; I want

repose; my head breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!’

Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.

The hand was nerveless: it was her dear hand. Had her tongue been more

venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made

it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote. In him

there was love for two.

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was

unconscious he did so. He brought her peace, he brought her old throning

self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her

feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned

him. The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan

beam on her guilty destiny.

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on

the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked

and shuttered.

He went. He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely

bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned. It is difficult in

affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe

a duty. The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his

candour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his

goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to

every trial. Perhaps, for the sake of peace... after warning him... her

meditations tottered in dots.

But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking

without language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a

dash usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than

the dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the

adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two

paces to mother’s lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it

would appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted

if it stood out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting our

animal do our thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeably

so long as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though

we have clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently

well understand the whither of our destination under his guidance. No

counsel can be saner than that the heart should be bidden to speak

out in plain verbal speech within us. For want of it, Clotilde’s short

explorations in Dot-and-Dash land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet

they seemed not only unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable

to come. Or possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep his

word, and save her from worse by stepping to the altar between her

and Marko, there calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his

presence would breathe courage into her to go to him. It set her looking

to the altar as a prospect of deliverance.

Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clotilde’s wintry face

now that Marko was among them; her inference tallied with his report of

their interview, so she supposed the girl to have accepted more or less

heartily Marko’s forgiveness. For him the girl’s eyes were soft and

kind; her gaze was through the eyelashes, as one seeing a dream on a far

horizon. Marko spoke of her cheerfully, and was happy to call her his

own, but would not have her troubled by any ceremonial talk of their

engagement, so she had much to thank him for, and her consciousness of

the signal instance of ingratitude lying ahead in the darkness, like a

house mined beneath the smiling slumberer, made her eager to show

the real gratefulness and tenderness of her feelings. This had the

appearance of renewed affection; consequently her parents lost much of

their fear of the besieger outside, and she was removed to the city.

Two parties were in the city, one favouring Alvan, and one abhorring the

audacious Jew. Together they managed to spread incredible reports of his

doings, which required little exaggeration to convince an enemy that he

was a man with whom hostility could not be left to sleep. The General

heard of the man’s pleading his cause in all directions to get pressure

put upon him, showing something like a devilish persuasiveness, Jew and

demagogue though he was; for there seemed to be a feeling abroad that

the interview this howling lover claimed with Clotilde ought to be

granted. The latest report spoke of him as off to the General’s Court

for an audience of his official chief. General von Rudiger looked to

his defences, and he had sufficient penetration to see that the weakest

point of them might be a submissive daughter.

A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by a

messenger. The General thought over it. The letter was by no means a

seductive letter for a young lady to receive from such a person, yet he

did not anticipate the whole effect it would produce when ultimately he

decided to give it to her, being of course unaware of the noble style of

Clotilde’s address to the baroness. He stipulated that there must be no

reply to it except through him, and Clotilde had the coveted letter in

her hands at last. Here was the mediatrix--the veritable goddess with

the sword to cut the knot! Here was the manifestation of Alvan!

BOOK 3.