She ran out to the shade of the garden walls to be by herself and in the
air, and she read; and instantly her own letter to the baroness crashed
sentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combative
instinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and deride
it. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment;
then they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill as
a glacier cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervid
respectfulness, of innocent supplication for maternal affection, for
some degree of benignant friendship!
The baroness coldly stated, that she had arrived in the city to do
her best in assisting to arrange matters which had come to a most
unfortunate and impracticable pass. She alluded to her established
friendship for Alvan, but it was chiefly in the interests of Clotilde
that the latter was requested to perceive the necessity for bringing
her relations with Dr. Alvan to an end in the discreetest manner now
possible to the circumstances. This, the baroness pursued, could only
be done by her intervention, and her friendship for Dr. Alvan had
caused her to undertake the little agreeable office. For which purpose,
promising her an exemption from anything in the nature of tragedy
scenes, the baroness desired Clotilde to call on her the following day
between certain specified hours of the afternoon.
That was all.
The girl in her letter to the baroness had constrained herself to write,
and therefore to think, in so beautiful a spirit of ignorant innocence,
that the vileness of an answer thus brutally throwing off the mask of
personal disinterestedness appeared to her both an abominable piece
of cynicism on the part of a scandalous old woman, and an insulting
rejection of the cover of decency proposed to the creature by a
daisy-minded maiden.
She scribbled a single line in receipt of the letter and signed her
initials.
‘The woman is hateful!’ she said to her father; she was ready to agree
with him about the woman and Alvan. She was ashamed to have hoped
anything of the woman, and stamped down her disappointment under a
vehement indignation, that disfigured the man as well. He had put the
matter into the hands of this most detestable of women, to settle it
as she might think best! He and she!--the miserable old thing with her
ancient arts and cajoleries had lured him back! She had him fast again,
in spite of--for who could tell? perhaps by reason of her dirty habits:
she smoked dragoon cigars! All day she was emitting tobacco-smoke; it
was notorious, Clotilde had not to learn it from her father; but now
she saw the filthy rag that standard of female independence was--that
petticoated Unfeminine, fouler than masculine! Alvan preferred the
lichen-draped tree to the sunny flower, it was evident, for never a
letter from Alvan had come to her. She thought in wrath, nothing but the
thoughts of wrath, and ran her wits through every reasonable reflection
like a lighted brand that flings its colour, if not fire, upon
surrounding images. Contempt of the square-jawed withered woman was too
great for Clotilde to have a sensation of her driving jealousy until
painful glimpses of the man made jealousy so sharp that she flew for
refuge to contempt of the pair. That beldam had him back: she had him
fast. Oh! let her keep him! Was he to be regretted who could make that
choice?
Her father did not let the occasion slip to speak insistingly as the
world opined of Alvan and his baroness. He forced her to swallow the
calumny, and draw away with her family against herself through strong
disgust.
Out of a state of fire Clotilde passed into solid frigidity. She had
neither a throb nor a passion. Wishing seemed to her senseless as life
was. She could hear without a thrill of her frame that Alvan was in the
city, without a question whether it was true. He had not written, and he
had handed her over to the baroness! She did not ask herself how it
was that she had no letter from him, being afraid to think about it,
because, if a letter had been withheld by her father, it was a part of
her whipping; if none had been written, there was nothing to hope for.
Her recent humiliation condemned him by the voice of her sufferings for
his failure to be giant, eagle, angel, or any of the prodigious things
he had taught her to expect; and as he had thus deceived her, the
glorious lover she had imaged in her mind was put aside with some of the
angry disdain she bestowed upon the woman by whom she had been wounded.
He ceased to be a visioned Alvan, and became an obscurity; her principal
sentiment in relation to him was, that he threatened her peace. But for
him she would never have been taught to hate her parents; she would have
enjoyed the quiet domestic evenings with her people, when Marko sang,
and her sisters knitted, and the betrothed sister wore a look very
enviable in the abstract; she would be seeing a future instead of a
black iron gate! But for him she certainly would never have had, that
letter from the baroness!
On the morning after the information of Alvan’s return, her father, who
deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent
to demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what her
stunned heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was
behind it, and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with
another piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters,
arranged the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet
coins, lock of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his
hand to Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with
the forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--or
of one of them--she signed inside the packet not ‘Clotilde,’ but the
gentlest title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the
word ‘child’ to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he
should be interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by having
the pathos on their side. They are consoled too.
Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! It
had been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when he
had not been feeling at all: and this marks a division.
She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his
release by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She was
personally to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party,
and who would give her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while
assuring the gentleman she was acting with perfect freedom, she was
to be under her oath not to read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her
betrothed. Her father assumed the fact of her renewed engagement to the
prince, as her whole family did; strangely, she thought: it struck her
as a fatality. He said that Alvan was working him great mischief, doing
him deadly injury in his position, and for no just reason, inasmuch as
he--a bold, bad man striving to ruin the family on a point of pride--had
declared that he simply considered himself bound in honour to her, only
a little doubtful of her independent action at present; and a release
of him, accompanied by her plain statement of her being under no
compulsion, voluntarily the betrothed of another, would solve the
difficulty. A certain old woman, it seemed, was anxious to have him
formally released.
With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, the
General begged her to comply, pulling the hands he squeezed in a way to
strongly emphasize his affectionate entreaty.
She went straight to Marko, consenting that he should have Alvan’s
letter unopened (she cared not to read it, she said), on his promise to
give it up to her within a stated period. There was a kind of prohibited
pleasure, sweet acid, catching discord, in the idea of this lover’s
keeping the forbidden thing she could ask for when she was curious about
the other, which at present she was not; dead rather; anxious to please
her parents, and determined to be no rival of the baroness. Marko
promised it readily, adding: ‘Only let the storm roll over, that we may
have more liberty, and I myself, when we two are free, will lead you
to Alvan, and leave it to you to choose between us. Your happiness,
beloved, is my sole thought. Submit for the moment.’ He spoke sweetly,
with his dearest look, touching her luxurious nature with a belief that
she could love him; untroubled by another, she could love and be true to
him: her maternal inner nature yearned to the frailbodied youth.
She made a comparison in her mind of Alvan’s love and Marko’s, and of
the lives of the two men. There was no grisly baroness attached to the
prince’s life.
She wrote the letter to Alvan, feeling in the words that said she was
plighted to Prince Marko, that she said, and clearly said, the baroness
is now relieved of a rival, and may take you! She felt it so acutely as
to feel that she said nothing else.
Severances are accomplished within the heart stroke by stroke; within
the craven’s heart each new step resulting from a blow is temporarily
an absolute severance. Her letter to Alvan written, she thought not
tenderly of him but of the prince, who had always loved a young woman,
and was unhampered by an old one. The composition of the letter, and the
sense that the thing was done, made her stony to Alvan.
On the introduction of Colonel von Tresten, whose name she knew, but
was dull to it, she delivered him her letter with unaffected composure,
received from him Alvan’s in exchange, left the room as if to read it,
and after giving it unopened to Marko, composedly reappeared before the
colonel to state, that the letter could make no difference, and all was
to be as she had written it.
The colonel bowed stiffly.
It would have comforted her to have been allowed to say: ‘I cease to be
the rival of that execrable harridan!’
The delivery of so formidable a cat-screech not being possible, she
stood in an attitude of mild resignation, revolving thoughts of her
father’s praises of his noble daughter, her mother’s kiss, the caresses
of her sisters, and the dark bright eyes of Marko, the peace of the
domestic circle. This was her happiness! And still there was time, still
hope for Alvan to descend and cut the knot. She conceived it slowly,
with some flush of the brain like a remainder of fever, but no throbs of
her pulses. She had been swayed to act against him by tales which in her
heart she did not credit exactly, therefore did not take within herself,
though she let them influence her by the goad of her fears and angers;
and these she could conjure up at will for the defence of her conduct,
aware of their shallowness, and all the while trusting him to come in
the end and hear her reproaches for his delay. He seemed to her now to
have the character of a storm outside a household wrapped in comfortable
monotony. Her natural spiritedness detested the monotony, her craven
soul fawned for the comfort. After her many recent whippings the comfort
was immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the look
of a burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonel
von Tresten’s hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvan
to come, knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scene
following his appearance. Yet she would have gone to him; without any
doubt his presence and the sense of his greater power declared by his
coming would have lifted her over to him. The part of her nature adoring
storminess wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other part
which cuddled security. Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far from
offering himself in such a shape to a girl that had jilted the friend he
loved, insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figure
of soldierly complacency in marble. Her pencilled acknowledgement of the
baroness’s letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construed
as an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was. He had
departed before Clotilde heard a step.
Immediately thereupon it came: to her mind that Tresten was one of
Alvan’s bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And her
father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely
enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound
reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright
impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said,
talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now
becoming convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate
him--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his
politics, his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly
hinted.
She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might be
strung together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baroness
gave his cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, she
remembered, used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors
dedicating their swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, she
felt sure, was an accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, she
must be hated by the man reverencing the baroness. If ever man had
executioner stamped on his face, it was he! Like the professor, nay,
like Alvan himself, he would not see that she was the victim of tyranny:
none of her signs would they see. They judged of her by her inanimate
frame in the hands of her torturers breaking her on the wheel. She
called to mind a fancy that she had looked at Tresten out of her
deadness earnestly for just one instant: more than an instant she could
not, beneath her father’s vigilant watch and into those repellant cold
blue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly have understood the fleeting
look. What were her words! what her deeds!
The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like an
infant; and the man’s face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--he
worshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde’s hatred of him that it
overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him
to act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one of
Alvan’s pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not ever
thought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but
now she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I
supposed him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for
perceiving and adding up Alvan’s faults of character, to the freezing
she had taken from that most antipathetic person. She confessed to
sensations of spite which would cause her to reject and spurn even his
pleadings for Alvan, if they were imaginable as actual. Their not being
imaginable allowed her to indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the
gratification of the idea of wounding some one, though it were her
lover, connected with this Tresten.
The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman’s admirer
had vitiated Clotilde’s blood. She was not only not mistress of her
thoughts, she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any
desires, except that the people about her should caress and warm her,
until, with no gaze backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of
meaning as a good-bye to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the
swallow quits her eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that they
were chargeable with the sequel of the history. There would be a sequel,
she was sure, if it came only to punish them for the cruelty which
thwarted her timid anticipation of it by pressing on her natural
instinct at all costs to bargain for an escape from pain, and making her
simulate contentment to cheat her muffled wound and them.