The story of Clotilde's departure from the city, like that of Alvan's,
communicated to her by her maid, was an anticipation of the truth,
disseminated by her parents. She was removed when the swarm of spies and
secret letter-bearers were attaining a position of dignity through the
rumour of legal gentlemen about to direct the movements of the besieging
army.
A stir seemed to her to prognosticate a rescue and she went not
unwillingly. To be in motion, to see roadside faces, pricked her senses
with some hope. She had gained the peace she needed, and in that state
her heart began to be agitated by a fresh awakening, luxurious at first
rather than troublesome. She had sunk so low that the light of Alvan
seemed too distant for a positive expectation of him; but few approached
her whom she did not fancy under strange disguises: the gentlemen were
servants, the blouses were gentlemen; she looked wistfully at old women
bearing baskets, for the forbidden fruit to peep out in the form of an
envelope. All passed her blankly, noticing her eyes.
The journey was short; she was taken to a place a little beyond the head
of the lake, and there, though she had liberty to breathe the air, fast
fixed within the walls of a daily sameness that became gradually the hum
of voices accusing Alvan of one in excess of the many sins laid against
him by his enemies. Was he not possibly an empty pretender to power--
a mere great talker?
Her bit of liberty increased her chafing at the deadly monotony of this
existence, and envenomed the accusation by seeming to push her forth
quite half way to meet him, if he would but come or show sign! She
impetuously vindicated him from the charge of crediting the sincerity of
any words she might have committed to paper at the despotic dictation of
her father. Oh, no; Alvan could not be guilty of such folly as that; he
could not; it would be to suppose him unacquainted with her, ignorant of
the nature of women. He would know that she wrote the words--why? She
could not perfectly recollect how she had come to write them, and found
it easier to extinguish the act of having written them at all, which was
done by the angry recurrence to his failure to intervene now when the
drama cried for his godlike appearance. Perhaps he was really
unacquainted with her thought her stronger than she was! The idea
reflected a shadow on his intelligence. She was not in a situation that
could bear of her blaming herself.
While she was thus devoured by the legions of her enfeebled wits,
Clotilde was assiduously courted by her family, and her father from time
to time brought pen and paper for her to write anew from his dictation.
He was pleased to hail her as his fair secretary, and when the letters
were unimportant she wrote flowingly, happy to be praised. They were
occasionally addressed to friends; she discovered herself writing one to
the professor, in which he was about to be informed that she had resolved
to banish Alvan from her mind for ever. She stopped; her heart stopped;
the pen fell from her hand, in loathing. Her father warily bade her
proceed. She could not; she signified it choking. Only a few days
before she had written to the professor exultingly of her engagement.
She refused to belie herself in such a manner; retrospectively her rapid
contradictions appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human, and
she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat the General
was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergone by a
sudden burst of his wrath. He knew the proper physic. 'You girls want
the lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it. Write: "He
is now as nothing to me." You shall write that you hate him, if you
hesitate! Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have
told him you have given him up, and what objection can you have to
telling others now you have done it?'
'I was forced to it, body and soul!' cried Clotilde, sobbing and bursting
into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had put on to
propitiate him. 'If I have to tell, I will tell how it was. For that my
heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all the world may
see. I would rather write that I hate him.'
'You write, the man is now as nothing to me!' said her father, dashing
his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow. 'Or
else, my girl, you've been playing us a pretty farce!' He strung himself
for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed. 'No, no,
you're wiser, you're a better girl than that. Write it. I must have it
written-here, come! The worst is over; the rest is child's play. Come,
take the pen, I'll guide your hand.'
The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed. They looked
such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure
they would be discerned as the work of compulsion. So she wrote on
mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future
revolt. Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and
she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by
scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we
sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly in
the morning. She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would be
welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise of
courage. She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who did
not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of her
lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him. With these ideas
in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of lines to
Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and prostrate--
she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was aware of a
flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being deceived by
it; it was an insult to his understanding. Full surely the professor
would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to her and read
her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece of slavishness. She
was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the confession. But that
promise of courage, coming of her ownership of sense, vindicated her
prospectively; she had so little of it that she embraced it as a present
possession, and she made it Alvan's task to put it to the trial. Hence
it became Alvan's offence if, owing to his absence, she could be charged
with behaving badly. Her generosity pardoned him his inexplicable delay
to appear in his might: 'But see what your continued delay causes!' she
said, and her tone was merely sorrowful.
She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when his
answer arrived. The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover's
faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the
letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language, taking
the frosty sentences piecemeal. He begged her to be firm in her
resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents! This man of high
intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress
moralizing. Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and had
within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this man--
if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour to deserve
the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan's age and her
better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of her family,
and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any chronicled. Out
on him! She swept him from earth.
And she had built some of her hopes on the professor. 'False friend!'
she cried.
She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.
There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong
arm save the baroness. The professor's emphasized approval of her
resolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and
Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the baroness.
The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of gosling
innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph of
candour. She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring
herself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have moved
her, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: it
had been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman. The old woman
was entreated to bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia,
and let the young one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of robbing.
She could not have had the idea, else how could she have made the
petition? And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure
friendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea.
Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civility
insisted on the purity of her friendship. Nay, in mercy to the poor
gentleman, friendship it must be.
A letter of reply from that noble lady was due. Possibly she had
determined not to write, but to act. She was a lady of exalted birth,
a lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a
social and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motion
now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost
happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair. 'You have
been a little weak,' the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a
soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and
know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O that I had your
beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I could imitate.'
She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying: 'I have
seen your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air
of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features. 'For I
can't call you good looking,' she said within herself, for the
satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.
And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced
woman in confession must be:
The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with
his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash
his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul
to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'But put
this on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his box--
'I loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping
out of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she has to
hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him
she guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could you expect a
girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says. And he
answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.
In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while
gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,
where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal
river. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes
and the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she sat
and waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel!
who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan's
beloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a way
of proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so.
The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them day after
day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to
sultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee
and butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the
glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek
or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he was
useless to her, utterly.
Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her
feet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were
like hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he
seemed unaware that she was inanimate.
There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.
He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness. She had been
expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and valley-
hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.
But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his
passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up the
tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her
parents:
'Will I have you? I? You ask me what is my will? It sounds oddly from
you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and nothing
has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him is unaltered,
and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by my
unhappiness. The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.
Sigismund Alvan. To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my
soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my
parents--I hate them.'
Marko pressed her hands. If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.
The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a
heart that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you.
I know you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let me
cherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should
it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to
him, and then you may choose between us.'
The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young woman
realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of a
slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and this
she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on her, and
melting her to him.
She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew at
the throat of Marko's, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long
delays in the destroying of a weaker.
She left her chair and cried: 'As you will. What is it to me? Take me,
if you please. Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand. You have as
much of me as is there. My life is gone. You or another! But take this
warning and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I see
Sigismund Alvan I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of
you, lying dead beneath me.'
The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited her to
a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, all of
you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to
him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the lives of
any dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. I am
true to him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take this
miserable body, but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God
gives me sight of him. I am Alvan's eternally. All your laws are
mockeries. You, and my people, and your priests, and your law-makers,
are shadows, brain-vapours. Let him beckon!--So you have your warning.
Do what I may, I cannot be called untrue. And now let me be; I want
repose; my head breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!'
Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.
The hand was nerveless: it was her dear hand. Had her tongue been more
venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made
it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote. In him
there was love for two.
Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was
unconscious he did so. He brought her peace, he brought her old throning
self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her
feet.
If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned
him. The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan
beam on her guilty destiny.
She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on
the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked
and shuttered.
He went. He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely
bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned. It is difficult in
affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe a
duty. The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his
candour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his
goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to every
trial. Perhaps, for the sake of peace . . . after warning him . . .
her meditations tottered in dots.
But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking without
language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a dash
usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than the
dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the
adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two paces
to mother's lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it would
appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted if it
stood out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting our animal
do our thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeably so long
as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though we have
clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently well
understand the whither of our destination under his guidance. No counsel
can be saner than that the heart should be bidden to speak out in plain
verbal speech within us. For want of it, Clotilde's short explorations
in Dot-and-Dash land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet they seemed
not only unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable to come.
Or possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep his word, and save
her from worse by stepping to the altar between her and Marko, there
calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his presence would
breathe courage into her to go. to him. It set her looking to the altar
as a prospect of deliverance.
Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clotilde's wintry face
now that Marko was among them; her inference tallied with his report of
their interview, so she supposed the girl to have accepted more or less
heartily Marko's forgiveness. For him the girl's eyes were soft and
kind; her gaze was through the eyelashes, as one seeing a dream on a far
horizon. Marko spoke of her cheerfully, and was happy to call her his
own, but would not have her troubled by any ceremonial talk of their
engagement, so she had much to thank him for, and her consciousness of
the signal instance of ingratitude lying ahead in the darkness, like a
house mined beneath the smiling slumberer, made her eager to show the
real gratefulness and tenderness of her feelings. This had the
appearance of renewed affection; consequently her parents lost much of
their fear of the besieger outside, and she was removed to the city.
Two parties were in the city, one favouring Alvan, and one abhorring the
audacious Jew. Together they managed to spread incredible reports of his
doings, which required little exaggeration to convince an enemy that he
was a man with whom hostility could not be left to sleep. The General
heard of the man's pleading his cause in all directions to get pressure
put upon him, showing something like a devilish persuasiveness, Jew and
demagogue though he was; for there seemed to be a feeling abroad that the
interview this howling lover claimed with Clotilde ought to be granted.
The latest report spoke of him as off to the General's Court for an
audience of his official chief. General von Rudiger looked to his
defences, and he had sufficient penetration to see that the weakest point
of them might be a submissive daughter.
A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by a
messenger. The General thought over it. The letter was by no means a
seductive letter for a young lady to receive from such a person, yet he
did not anticipate the whole effect it would produce when ultimately he
decided to give it to her, being of course unaware of the noble style of
Clotilde's address to the baroness. He stipulated that there must be no
reply to it except through him, and Clotilde had the coveted letter in
her hands at last. Here was the mediatrix--the veritable goddess with
the sword to cut the knot! Here was the manifestation of Alvan!
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Above all things I detest the writing for money
Beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip
Dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position
Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity
Hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers during absences
His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability
I give my self, I do not sell
Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful
Not in a situation that could bear of her blaming herself
O for yesterday!
Professional widows
Self-consoled when they are not self-justified
Want of courage is want of sense
We shall not be rich--nor poor
Work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter
[The End]