"Tell me."
"Incredible! That baby with her little fingers,"--he seized
them--"with her fairy paws, she plunges boldly into my most precious
secrets, into my heart's casket, picks out the costliest jewel, and
asks for it."
"Well, do you like him? Is he an intellectual spirit?"
"Hum! If he is, we are not. He is iron, and of iron we make steel, and
of steel pretty weapons; but one can make nothing but weapons. I
prefer gold. Gold like my darling's hair"--he caressed it--"like my
own magic power over men. You shall see, darling, how your gold and
mine will triumph."
"But you also are always speaking of arms, of blood, of battles; and
Revolutions are scarcely forged without arms and iron."
"Child, child," he answered, drawing her golden locks to his lips,
"why do you wish to learn all in this beautiful starry night? The
conquests of thousands of years, the results of profound studies, you
ask for as for toys. To speak of battles, to call to arms, is by no
means the same thing as to sabre one's fellow, one's brother, with icy
heart and bloodstained hand. Don't you understand, sly little thing,
of what arms I speak, of the golden weapons of the spirit, eloquence,
the love of humanity, the effort to raise to manly dignity the poor,
the unfortunate, the workers. Above all, I mean--Will. These noble
weapons, these truly golden weapons, I count higher and more useful
than the rusted swords of Mediævalism."
Her eyes filled with tears. She felt herself upborne on waves of
religious emotion towards those shining stars. The temptation was
over.
"Good-night, my love," she said humbly.
He drew her face to his in passionate farewell, and seemed as if he
would never let her go. When her window closed he strode towards the
glaciers.
An adventure next day came to show the conquered Helena that her
spiritual giant was no less king of men physically. At the American
Consul's dinner an expedition on the Niessen had been arranged. But as
the party was returning at nightfall across the fields, and laughing
over Lassalle's sprightly anecdotes, suddenly a dozen diabolical
gnomes burst upon them with savage roars and incomprehensible
inarticulate jabberings, and began striking at hazard with their
short, solid cudgels, almost ere the startled picnickers could
recognize in these bestial creatures, with their enormously swollen
heads and horrible hanging goitres, the afflicted idiot peasants of
the valley. The gallant Frenchman and the honey-tongued Italian
screamed with the women, and made even less play with umbrellas and
straps; but Lassalle fell like a thunderbolt with his Robespierre
stick upon the whole band of cretins, and reduced them to howls and
bloodstained tears. It was only then that Lassalle was able to extract
from them that the party had trampled over the hay in their fields,
and that they demanded compensation. Being given money, they departed,
growling and waving their cudgels. When the excursionists looked at
one another they found themselves all in rags, and Lassalle's face
disfigured by two heavy blows. Helene ran to him with a cry.
"You are wounded, bruised!"
"No, only one of the towers of the Bastille," he said, ruefully
surveying the stick; "the brutes have dinted it."
"And there are people who call him coward because he won't fight
duels," thought Helene adoringly.