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.