In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apart
from it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act of
obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a
consequence she was full of grovelling revolt.
Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this
final instance of dutifulness--one was the sight of that hateful rigid
face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for
subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger’s envoy,
Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not
mistake her meaning, and the little man’s pair of spectacles had, she
fancied, been dim. He was touched. Here was a friend! Here was the
friend she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with
Alvan! Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion.
By contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to
defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies,
and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven’s craftiness in revolt
to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse
her cause. He was to be taught to understand--nay, angelically he would
understand at once--why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily.
Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty
to her family, terrorized, a prisoner ‘beside this blue lake, in sight
of the sublimest scenery of earth,’ and hating his associate--hating
him, she repeated and underscored--she had belied herself; she was
willing to meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heart
to Alvan’s true friend--his only true friend. He would instantly discern
her unhappy plight. In the presence of his associate she could explain
nothing, do nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. She
had good reason to know that man for her enemy. She could prove him a
traitor to Alvan. Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr.
Storchel’s integrity and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified
before him, as if affected by some wicked spell. She owned she had
utterly belied herself; she protested she had been no free agent.
The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel’s
shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as
emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by.
The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself
and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of
supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the
feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a
heart, their heads being too awful.
She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outside
her door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of her
design to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would
be a waste of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike
the sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant. ‘Too late,’
he said, pointing to the letter she held. ‘Dr. Storchel has gone.’
She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would
remain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when
Marko said: ‘Alvan has challenged your father to fight him.’ With that
he turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the
family.
She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan
and a duel--Alvan challengeing her father--Alvan, the contemner of
the senseless appeal to arms for the settlement ‘of personal
disputes!--darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whom
she met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent,
her sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation
with the gentleman. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep
in peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the
city.
She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered
imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they
assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had
ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason
of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud
of her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid
figure of manhood on a madman’s conduct was the task she supposed
herself to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the
figure, abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some
great cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose
lucent reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere,
he to crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his
beloved! More unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must
know the challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde
ever again. She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of
mental drowning for a truce to the bitter riddle.
Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.
Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her
for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled
and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of
blood: he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him
under the beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could
occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in
truth been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of
him with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of
the gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back?
She inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their
separation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing
him as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracing
would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him as
he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as
he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him
to her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a
stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.
Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth
visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black
eyes bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and
farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too
much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She
listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp,
though she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding
duller than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while
she listened shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too
intelligible to be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature
is incandescent to talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in
hoping, hungering, and fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to
disown it. The tightened grasp of her hand confessed her understanding
of the thing she pressed to hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to
herself to repudiate it under an accumulating horror, at the same time
that the repetition doubly and trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate
her criminal sensations by casting the whole burden on the material
fact.
Marko, with her father’s consent and the approval of the friends of the
family, had taken up Alvan’s challenge! That was the tale. She saw him
dead in the act of telling it.
‘What?’ she cried: ‘what?’ and then: ‘You?’ and her fingers were bonier
in their clutch: ‘Let me hear. It can’t be!’ She snapped at herself for
not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot:
she her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents
opposed to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a
flood of light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed
it, but if it was to be?... ‘Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to
fight? ... they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is
abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?’
He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.
She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their
heartlessness in permitting him to fight.
‘This is positive? This is really true?’ she said, burning and dreading
to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with
her other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who
had brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer
necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was
guilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of
conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:
‘But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired
a pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for
these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you
not know?’
‘I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day,’ he said.
Compassion thrilled her. ‘A couple of hours! Unhappy boy! But do you not
know that he is a dead shot? He is famous for his aim. He never misses.
He can do all the duellist’s wonders both with sword and pistol, and
that is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he--before
these parents of mine drove him... and me! I think we are both mad--he
despised duelling. He! He! Alvan! who has challenged my father! I have
heard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he? what has he
changed to? And it would be cowardly to kill you, Marko.’
‘I take my chance,’ Marko said.
‘You have no chance. His aim is unerring.’ She insisted on the
deadliness of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that her
conscience approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatal
aim.
If you stood against him he would not spare you--perhaps not; I fear
he would not, as far as I know him now. He can be terrible in wrath.
I think he would warn you; but two men face to face! and he suspecting
that you cross his path! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreat
you. By your love of me! Oh! no blood. I do not want to lose you. I
could not bear it.’
‘Would you regret me?’ said he.
Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made her
fondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowing
him doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestined
to be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She murmured
phrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for being
speechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing at
whom a voice of no ominous empty sound was given her; and still she felt
more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a
tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterance
was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly
when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of
his withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challenge
accepted. It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed
without and within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he
left her.
The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: his
phantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright in
life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should
die! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterly
misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko.
Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent
youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. ‘Do not
put blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you let
that horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, and
cannot feel my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He
made me say the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko!
You have no cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do
not aim; fire in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think...’
She sank to her chair, exclaiming: ‘I am a prisoner!’ She could not
walk two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and
the paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the
result. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of
blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance
upon hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears
considerate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for what
Providence was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was!
It is the dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desires
will offer up bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with
desires expecting to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes
the direction of events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song
to that contriving agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became
practically active, darting here and there over the room, burning
letters, packing a portable bundle of clothes, in preparation for the
domestic confusion of the morrow when the body of Marko would be driven
to their door, and amid the wailing and the hubbub she would escape
unnoticed to Alvan, Providence-guided! Out of the house would then
signify assuredly to Alvan’s arms.
The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she not
been sensible of paying heavily for it; and thus, as he would wish to
be, was Marko of double service to her; for she was truly fond of the
beautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. His
blood was on the heads of those who permitted him to face the danger!
She would have felt for him still more tenderly if it were permitted to
a woman’s heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, she
cannot do: she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consent
that one of them should be swept away.
Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thought
of adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt of
the object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, and
dressed in two of certain garments which would have swollen her bundle
too much.
This was the day of Providence: she had strung herself to do her part
in it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her
bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could
speak her ‘Heaven be with you!’ unshaken, though sadly. Her father had
returned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to
her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised
from the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation
of it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if
the carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds
of the poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She could
not but apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would
probably be! Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could
not blame Alvan for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim
of it. In any case the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her
opportunity marked by the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she
sat rocking her parcel on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed with
an alluring terror of him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against
red-streaked heavens, more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness than
she had ever realized that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered,
fearing to meet him, yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes
on his breast in blindest happiness. She gave the very sob for the
occasion.
A carriage drove at full speed to the door. Full speed could not be the
pace for a funeral load. That was a visitor to her father on business.
She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and
must be ready.
Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickened
on her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be
undergoing for Marko: or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she
would certainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accumulated
enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew
to be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her required
energies for action at the approaching signal.
Feet came rushing up the stairs: her door was thrown open, and the
living Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look an
expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and
she said: ‘Oh, yes, she was glad, of course.’ She was glad that Alvan
had pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projected
confusion of the household had been thwarted: vexed, petrified with
astonishment.
‘But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?’ he almost wept to say.
Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was
unaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragic
comedian.
Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and
weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth?
‘You--him!’ she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt.
She laughed. The world is upside down--a world without light, or
pointing finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore
bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse
of a world--if this be true!
But it can still be disbelieved.
He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive,
‘Leave me!’ The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger.
His manner of going smote her brain.
Was it credible? Was it possible to think of Alvan wounded?--the giant
laid on his back and in the hands of the leech? Assuredly it was a
mockery of all calculations. She could not conjure up the picture of
him, and her emotions were merely struck and stunned. If this be true!
But it can be resolutely disbelieved.
We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or
suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship,
lose our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko’s tale
confirmed, whispers of leaden import, physicians’ rumours, and she
doubted. She clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain,
but not her belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imagine
him overthrown in a conflict--and by a hand that she had taken and
twisted in her woman’s hand subduingly! He, the unerring shot, laid low
by one who had never burnt powder till the day before the duel! It
was easier to remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational
distinctness of the whispers. She dashed her ‘Impossible!’ at
Providence, conceived the tale in wilful and almost buoyant
self-deception to be a conspiracy in the family to hide from her Alvan’s
magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from the field of strife. That was
the most evident fact. She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting
each and hugging it after the false life was out.
So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descending
to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be
rebutted by laughter: and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor
imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, ‘They
act it well!’ and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the
dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what
her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception.
Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to
silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved
them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist
the look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and
stimulate further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run
to the wounded lion’s bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheat
her heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the
imposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the
terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed
within her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her
feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned
the earth, and earth’s teachings, and the understanding of life.
Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought
that Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko
had stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing
thought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat and
a state of burning. She knew not in truth what to feel: the craven’s
dilemma when yet feeling much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. She
had so shifted and wound about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that
she could no longer sanely and with wholeness encounter a shock: she had
no sensation firm enough to be stamped by a signet.
Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded
antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word
of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought ‘Why is it not
Alvan who speaks?’ rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She
framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery
had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was
too shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the
intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love
of the dead man. Her craven’s instinct to make a sacrifice of others
flew with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and
the spirit presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper
substitutes for her conscience.