The baroness expected to see Alvan in the morning, for he kept
appointments, and he had said he would come. She conceived that she was
independent of personal wishes on the subject of Clotilde; the fury
of his passion prohibited her forming any of the wishes we send up to
destiny when matters interesting us are in suspense, whether we have
liberated minds or not. She thought the girl would grant the interview;
was sure the creature would yield in his presence; and then there was
an end to the shining of Alvan! Supposing the other possibility, he had
shown her such fierce illuminations of eye and speech that she foresaw
it would be a blazing of the insurrectionary beacon-fires of hell
with him. He was a man of angels and devils. The former had long been
conquering, but the latter were far from extinct. His passion for this
shallow girl had consigned him to the lower host. Let him be thwarted,
his desperation would be unlikely to stop at legal barriers. His
lawyer’s head would be up and armed astoundingly to oppose the law; he
would read, argue, and act with hot conviction upon the reverse of every
text of law. She beheld him storming the father’s house to have out
Clotilde, reluctant or conniving; and he harangued the people, he bore
off his captive, he held her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defied
authority, he was a public rebel--he with his detected little secret
aim, which he nursed like a shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraid
to be proud of it! She had seen that he aimed at standing well with the
world and being one with it honourably: holding to his principles of
course: but a disposition that way had been perceived, and the vision
of him in open rebellion because of his shy catching at the thread of an
alliance with the decorous world, carved an ironic line on her jaw.
Full surely he would not be baffled without smiting the world on the
face. And he might suffer for it; the Rudigers would suffer likewise.
She considered them very foolish people. Her survey of the little
nobility beneath her station had previously enabled her to account for
their disgust of such a suitor as Alvan, and maintain that they would
oppose him tooth and nail. Owing to his recent success, the anticipation
of a peaceful surrender to him seemed now on the whole to carry most
weight. This girl gives Alvan her hand and her family repudiate her.
Volatile, flippant, shallow as she is, she must have had some turn for
him; a physical spell was on her once, and it will be renewed when they
meet. It sometimes inspires a semblance of courage; she may determine;
she may be stedfast long enough for him to take his measures to bear her
away. And the Brocken witches congratulate him on his prize!
Almost better would it be, she thought, that circumstance should thwart
him and kindle his own demon element.
The forenoon, the noon, the afternoon, went round.
Late in the evening her door was flung wide for Colonel von Tresten.
She looked her interrogative ‘Well?’ His features were not used to
betray the course of events.
‘How has it gone?’ she said.
He replied: ‘As I told you. I fancied I gauged the hussy pretty
closely.’
‘She will not see him?’
‘Not she.’
The baroness crossed her arms.
‘And Alvan?’
The colonel shrugged. It was not done to tease a tremulous woman, for
she was calm. It painted the necessary consequence of the refusal: an
explosion of AEtna, and she saw it.
‘Where is he now?’ said she.
‘At his hotel.’
‘Alone?’
‘Leczel is with him.’
‘That looks like war.’
Tresten shrugged again. ‘It might have been foreseen by everybody
concerned in the affair. The girl does not care for him one corner of an
eye! She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore she
had never committed herself to an oath to him, sneered at him. She
positively sneered. Her manner to me assures me without question that if
he had stood in my place she would have insulted him:
‘Scarcely. She would do in his absence what she would not do under his
eyes,’ remarked the baroness. ‘It’s decided, then?’
‘Quite.’
‘Will he be here to-night?’
‘I think not.’
‘Was she really insolent?’
‘For a girl in her position, she was.’
‘Did you repeat her words to him?’
‘Some of them.’
‘What description of insolence?’
‘She spoke of his vanity....’
‘Proceed.’
‘It was more her manner to me, as the one of the two appearing as his
friend. She was tolerably civil to Storchel: and the difference of
behaviour must have been designed, for she not only looked at Storchel
in a way to mark the difference, she addressed him rather eagerly before
we turned on our heels, to tell him she would write to him, and let him
have her reply in a letter. He will get some coquettish rigmarole.’
‘That seems monstrous!--if one could be astonished by her,’ said the
baroness. ‘When is she to write?’
‘She may write: the letter will find no receiver,’ said Tresten,
significantly raising his eyebrows. ‘The legal gentleman is gone--blown
from a gun! He’s off home. He informed me that he should write to
the General, throwing up his office, and an end to his share in the
business.’
‘There was no rudeness to the poor man?’
‘Dear me, no. But imagine a quiet little advocate, very precise and
silky--you’ve had a hint of him--and all of a sudden the client he has
by the ear swells into a tremendous beast--a combination of lion and
elephant--bellows and shakes the room, stops and stamps before him,
discharging an unintelligible flood of racy vernacular punctuated in
thunder. You hear him and see him! Alvan lost his head--some of his hair
too. The girl is not worth a lock. But he’s past reason.’
‘He takes it so,’ said the baroness, musing. ‘It will be the sooner
over. She never cared for him a jot. And there’s the sting. He has
called up the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him to
scorn. Hard for any man to bear!--Alvan of all men! Why does he not come
here? He might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him to
sleep in the end. However, he has done nothing?’
That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a serious
point, and repeated the question sharply. ‘Has he been to the
house?--no?--writing?’
Tresten dropped a nod.
‘Not to the girl, I suppose. To the father?’ said she.
‘He has written to the General.’
‘You should have stopped it.’
‘Tell a vedette to stop cavalry. You’re not thinking of the man. He’s in
a white frenzy.’
‘I will go to him.’
‘You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of his
poison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti’s going to him after he had
let his men walk into a trap--and that was through a woman: and he was
quieted; and the chief overlooked it; and two days after, Nuciotti blew
his brains out. He’d have been alive now if he had been left alone.
Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women’s weeping.
He has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the
deuce with the name she deserves, and challengeing the General.’
‘That letter is despatched?’
‘Rudiger has it by this time.’
The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten: she struck her lap. ‘Alvan! Is
it he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no
fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter’s insolence to me. He
will not fight, be sure.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Tresten said.
‘As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannot
be too widely known. I could cry: “What wisdom there is in men when
they are mad!” We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary
courtesy. “With the name--she deserves,” you say?
He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she
is?’
The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror
of the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction
between camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge
of cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: ‘The bath’s a
black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no
doubt, but it ‘s probably true, and he ‘s out of his mind. It would be
dangerous to check him: he’d force his best friend to fight. Leczel is
with him and gives him head. It ‘s about time for me to go back to him,
for there may be business.’
The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan’s
eruption the drop-scene would fall.
Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter,
and knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables
expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting
for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a
promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl,
the worst must have been passed, she thought.
He had broken with the girl: she reviewed him under the light of that
sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he
would again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he had
been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of
scorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself
to entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and
dismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous
lunatic fit, that promised to release him from his fatal passion,
seemed, on the contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display.
Wives he should have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she
thought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened
pretensions to be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and
merited. The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound
beyond healing. It pronounced in a single breath the girl’s right name
and his pledge of a return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could
do; it uttered anathema on his love of her; it painted his white glow
of unreason and fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon
every part of his character that was tenderest with him. After speaking
such things a man comes to his senses or he dies. So thought the
baroness, and she was not more than commonly curious to hear how the
Rudigers had taken the insult they had brought on themselves, and
not unwilling to wait to see Alvan till he was cool. His vanity, when
threatening to bleed to the death, would not be civil to the surgeon
before the second or third dressing of his wound.