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.