His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the
enemy's counter-stroke. Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter
from Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him.
Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must
be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she had
left the city. She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded, but
henceforward he should know that they were strangers.
Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he smote a
forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand. That was the dumb oration
of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the state of
brute. His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shook the
reptile letter under a terrible frown.
Tresten saw that he supposed himself to be perfectly master of his acts
because he had not spoken, and had managed to preserve the ordinary
courtesies.
'You have done your commission,' the colonel said to Count Walburg, whose
companion was not disposed to go without obtaining satisfactory
assurances, and pressed for them.
Alvan fastened on him. 'You adopt the responsibility of this?' He
displayed the letter.
'I do.'
'It lies.'
Tresten remarked to Count Walburg: 'These visits are provocations.'
'They are not so intended,' said the count, bowing pacifically. His
friend was not a man of the sword, and was not under the obligation to
accept an insult. They left the letter to do its work.
Big natures in their fits of explosiveness must be taken by flying shots,
as dwarfs peep on a monster, or the Scythian attacked a phalanx. Were we
to hear all the roarings of the shirted Heracles, a world of comfortable
little ones would doubt the unselfishness of his love of Dejaneira.
Yes, really; they would think it was not a chivalrous love: they would
consider that he thought of himself too much. They would doubt, too,
of his being a gentleman! Partial glimpses of him, one may fear, will be
discomposing to simple natures. There was a short black eruption. Alvan
controlled it, to ask hastily what the baroness thought and what she had
heard of Clotilde. Tresten made sign that it was nothing of the best.
'See! my girl has hundreds of enemies, and I, only I, know her and can
defend her--weak, base shallow trickster, traitress that she is!' cried
Alvan, and came down in a thundershower upon her: 'Yesterday--the day
before--when? just now, here, in this room; gave herself--and now!'
He bent, and immediately straightening his back, addressed Colonel von
Tresten as her calumniator, 'Say your worst of her, and I say I will make
of that girl the peerless woman of earth! I! in earnest! it's no dream.
She can be made . . . . O God! the beast has turned tail! I knew she
could. There 's three of beast to one of goddess in her, and set her
alone, and let her be hunted and I not by, beast it is with her!
cowardly skulking beast--the noblest and very bravest under my wing!
Incomprehensible to you, Tresten? But who understands women! You hate
her. Do not. She 's a riddle, but no worse than the rest of the tangle.
She gives me up? Pooh! She writes it. She writes anything. And that
vilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thundered her
signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of her putting
her name to the letter. She had done that, written her name to the
renunciation of him! No individual could bear the sight of such a crime,
and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim to atone for
it. Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman; she became
that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would not distinguish
her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was his
knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the sex.
He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter
sticking in his ribs. The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped
it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it, and
was foul-mouthed. Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man
snapped in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her
fragmentarily. It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and
sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the
shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, and
though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her hand
over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the deadly-
toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it. The thing
lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them: witness it
in love murdered.
O that woman! She has murdered love. She has blotted love completely
out. She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon.
He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with a
cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one and
all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs
on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner peeped out
on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his great-
heartedness. 'For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I would have
sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my
immortality. She knew it, and she--look!' he unwrinkled the letter
carefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball.' Signs her
name, signs her name, her name!--God of heaven! it would be incredible in
a holy chronicle--signs her name to the infamous harlotry! See:
"Clotilde von Rudiger." It's her writing; that's her signature:
"Clotilde" in full. You'd hardly fancy that, now? But look!' the
colonel's eyelids were blinking, and Alvan dinted his finger-nail under
her name: 'there it is: Clotilde: signed shamelessly. Just as she might
have written to one of her friends about bonnets, and balls, and books!
Henceforward strangers, she and I?'
His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a
yell beneath a cathedral dome. 'Why, the woman has been in my hands--
I released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the
code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two
strangers! Do you hear that, Tresten? Why, if you had seen her!--she
was lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under
bolt and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman's heart! that never a
breath should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or
by accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth. "I think it best for us
both." So she thinks for me! She not only decides, she thinks; she is
the active principle; 'tis mine to submit.--A certain presumption was in
that girl always. Ha! do you hear me? Her letter may sting, it shall
not dupe. Strangers? Poor fool! You see plainly she was nailed down to
write the thing. This letter is a flat lie. She can lie--Oh! born to
the art! born to it!--lies like a Saint tricking Satan! But she says she
has left the city. Now to find her!'
He began marching about the room with great strides. 'I 'll have the
whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I 'll have them by
the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force.
I have sworn it. I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than
any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it's war. I declare
war on them. They will have it! I mean to take that girl from them--
snatch or catch! The girl is my girl, and if there are laws against my
having my own, to powder with the laws! Well, and do you suppose me
likely to be beaten? Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar a people's
legend. Not if they are history, and eloquence and commandership have
power over the blood and souls of men. First, I write to her!'
His friend suggested that he knew not where she was. But already the pen
was at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher.
Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him of his
fever. As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, more
fiercely desired. The concentration of his active mind directed his
whole being on the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human.
That last day when he had seen her appeared to him as the day of days.
That day was Clotilde herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman,
and saw himself translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all
was dark, as in front. That one day was the sun of his life. It had
been a day of rain, and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with
the dark threaded air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past all
daily radiance. His letter was a burning hymn to the day. His moral
grandeur on the day made him live as part of the splendour. Was it
possible for the woman who had seen him then to be faithless to him?
The swift deduction from his own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion
to the contrary, and he became lighthearted. He hummed an air when he
had finished his letter to her.
Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some were
despatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; others
were told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde.
His gold rained into their hands with the directions.
Colonel von Tresten was the friend of his attachment to the baroness;
a friend of both, and a warm one. Men coming into contact with Alvan
took their shape of friend or enemy sharply, for he was friend or enemy.
of no dubious feature, devoted to them he loved, and a battery on them he
opposed. The colonel had been the confidant of the baroness's grief over
this love-passion of Alvan's, and her resignation. He shared her doubts
of Clotilde's nobility of character: the reports were not favourable to
the young lady. But the baroness and he were of one opinion, that Alvan
in love was not likely to be governable by prudent counsel. He dropped a
word of the whispers of Clotilde's volatility.
Alvan nodded his perfect assent. 'She is that, she is anything you like;
you cannot exaggerate her for good or evil. She is matchless, colour her
as you please.' Adopting the tone of argument, he said: 'She writes that
letter. Well? It is her writing, and the moment, I am sure of it as
hers, I would not have it unwritten. I love it!' He looked maddish with
his love of the horrible thing, and resumed soberly: 'The point is, that
she has the charm for me. She is plastic in my hands. Other men would
waste the treasure. I make of her what I will, and she knows it, and
knows that she hangs on me to flourish worthily. I breathe the very soul
of the woman into her. As for that letter of hers--' it burnt him this
time to speak of the letter: 'she may write and write! She's weak, thin,
a reed; she--let her be! Say of her when she plays beast--she is absent
from Alvan! I can forgive. The letter's nothing; it means nothing--
except "Thou fool, Alvan, to let me go." Yes, that! Her people are
acting tyrant with her--as legally they have no right to do in this
country, and I shall prove it to them. When I have gained admission to
her--and I soon shall: it can't be refused: I am off to the head of her
father's office to-morrow, and I have only to represent the state of
affairs to the Minister in my language to obtain his authority to demand
admission to her:--then, friend, you will see! I lift my finger, and you
will see! At my request she went back to her mother. I have but to
beckon.'
He had cooled to the happy assurance of his authority over her, all the
giants of his system being well in action, and when that is the case with
a big nature it is at rest, or such is the condition of repose granted it
in life.
On the morrow he was off to batter at doors which would have expected
rather the summons of an armed mob at his heels than the strange cry of
the Radical man maltreated by love.