His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was not
ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not done
troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful emotions
beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding his
crust, to support life, of corporations that can be talked into admitting
the rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the
basis of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder in his
breast and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing while the
electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of Clotilde, and the
success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily many times he
reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his arms withered
with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All the evidence
opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that he had her
fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason told him by
what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battled for his
reason. Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to his book of the
Law, besieging Church and State with it, pointing to texts of the law
which proved her free to choose her lord and husband for herself,
expressing his passionate love by his precise interpretation of the law:
and still with the cold sentience gaining on him, against the current of
his tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, of her being actually
what he had named her in moments of playful vision--slippery, a serpent,
a winding hare; with the fear that she might slip from him, betray, deny
him, deliver him to ridicule, after he had won his way to her over every
barrier. During his proudest exaltations in success, when his eyes were
sparkling, there was a wry twitch inward upon his heart of hearts.
But if she was a hare, he was a hunter, little inclining to the chase now
for mere physical recreation. She had roused the sportsman's passion as
well as the man's; he meant to hunt her down, and was not more scrupulous
than our ancient hunters, who hunted for a meal and hunted to kill, with
none of the later hesitations as to circumventing, trapping, snaring by
devices, and the preservation of the animal's coat spotless. Let her
be lured from her home, or plucked from her home, and if reluctant,
disgraced, that she may be dependent utterly on the man stooping to
pick her up! He was equal to the projecting of a scheme socially
infamous, with such fanatical intensity did the thought of his losing
the woman harass him, and the torrent of his passion burst restraint
to get to her to enfold her--this in the same hour of the original wild
monster's persistent and sober exposition of the texts of the law with
the voice of a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let it be said, with a
modern gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. All means were to be
tried. His eye burned on his prize, mindless of what she was dragged
through, if there was resistance, or whether by the hair of her head or
her skirts, or how she was obtained. His interpretation of the law was
for the powers of earth, and other plans were to propitiate the powers
under the earth, and certain distempered groanings wrenched from him at
intervals he addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the
powers above, so that nothing of him should be lost which might get aid
of anything mundane, infernal, or celestial.
Thus it is when Venus bites a veritable ancient male. She puts her venom
in a magnificent beast, not a pathetic Phaedra. She does it rarely, for
though to be loved by a bitten giant is one of the dreams of woman, the
considerate Mother of Love knows how needful it is to protect the
sentiment of the passion and save them from an exhibition of the fires of
that dragon's breath. Do they not fly shrieking when they behold it?
Barely are they able to read of it. Men, too, accustomed to minor doses
of the goddess, which moderate, soften, counteract, instead of inflicting
the malady, abhor and have no brotherhood with its turbulent victim.
It was justly matter for triumph, due to an extraordinary fervour of
pleading upon a plain statement of the case, that Alvan should return
from his foray bringing with him an emissary deputed by General von
Rudiger's official chief to see that the young lady, so passionately
pursued by the foremost of his time in political genius and oratory, was
not subjected to parental tyranny, but stood free to exercise her choice.
Of the few who would ever have thought of attempting, a diminished number
would have equalled that feat. Alvan was no vain boaster; he could gain
the ears of grave men as well as mobs and women. The interview with
Clotilde was therefore assured to him, and the distracting telegrams and
letters forwarded to him by Tresten during his absence were consequently
stabs already promising to heal. They were brutal stabs--her packet of
his letters and presents on his table made them bleed afresh, and the odd
scrawl of the couple of words on the paper set him wondering at the
imbecile irony of her calling herself 'The child' in accompaniment to
such an act, for it reminded him of his epithet for her, while it dealt
him a tremendous blow; it seemed senselessly malign, perhaps flippant,
as she could be, he knew. She could be anything weak and shallow when
out of his hands; she had recently proved it still, in view of the
interview, and on the tide of his labours to come to that wished end, he
struck his breast to brave himself with a good hopeful spirit. 'Once
mine!' he said.
Moreover, to the better account, Clotilde's English friend had sent him
the lines addressed to her, in which the writer dwelt on her love of him
with a whimper of the voice of love. That was previous to her perjury by
little, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on events
by the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time between
this love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannous
intervention. One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was
being tyrannized and tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the
fields too, as the mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think.
Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General von
Rudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claim
the privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's house
with him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness.
Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a
probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of whom
offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw from the
tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to imagine
they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and charm of
aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man, pulling at
the man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities, committing a
whole sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable wall to her
maiden past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us moustached
her. She was a clear-faced girl and mother of young blushes before the
years were at their work of transformation upon her countenance and
behind her bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps she was
combative, and fought them for touching her ungallantly; and that perhaps
was her first manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth, a wife
openly maltreated, a woman of breeding, but with a man's head, capable of
inspiring man-like friendships, and of entertaining them. She was
radically-minded, strongly of the Radical profession of faith, and a
correspondent of revolutionary chiefs; both the trusted adviser and
devoted slave of him whose future glorious career she measured by his
abilities. Rumour blew out a candle and left the wick to smoke in
relation to their former intercourse. The Philistines revenged
themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew demagogue with the
weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous or nothing, and
they must show that they are so when they can; and best do they show it
by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a woman; for to be
in error in malice does not hurt them, but they profoundly feel that they
are fools if they are duped.
She was aware of the recent course of events; she had as she protested,
nothing to accuse herself of, and she could hardly part her lips without
a self-exculpation.
'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'He
will have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He will
manacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss her
chance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid for
their reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, and
I shall be condemned by the kind of court-martial which hurries over the
forms of a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like
justice. You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to
enter into her enthusiasm. She will make him believe I conspired against
her. Men in love are children with their mistresses--the greatest of
them; their heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to
aid him! At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of
the princes of the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic.
I did a ludicrous and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a
barren farce. I obeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed
him. I would not have it on my conscience that the commission of any
deed ennomic, however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan. You
are my witness, Tresten, that for a young woman of common honesty I was
ready to pack and march. Qualities of mind-mind! They were out of the
question. He had a taste for a wife. If he had hit on a girl commonly
honest, she might not have harmed him--the contrary; cut his talons.
What is this girl? Exactly what one might be sure his appreciation, in
woman-flesh, would lead him to fix on; a daughter of the Philistines,
naturally, and precisely the one of all on earth likely to confound him
after marriage as she has played fast and loose with him before it. He
has never understood women--cannot read them. Could a girl like that
keep a secret? She's a Cressida--a creature of every camp! Not an idea
of the cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment in harmony with it! She is
viler than any of those Berlin light o' loves on the eve of Jena. Stable
as a Viennese dancing slut home from Mariazell! This is the girl-
transparent to the whole world! But his heart is on her, and he must
have her, I suppose; and I shall have to bear her impertinences, or sign
my demission and cease to labour for the cause at least in conjunction
with Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of it, and I am doomed
to uselessness.'
Tresten nodded a protesting assent.
'Not quite so bad,' he said, with the encouraging smile which could
persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you two
are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she's
an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them;
but she's an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real
embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp!
as you say. She was not worth carrying off. I consented to try it to
quiet him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we
must take pattern by him. It's a mad love.'
'A Titan's love!' the baroness exclaimed, groaning. 'The woman!--no
matter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of a
great man's passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents
fraught with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it sounds
badly, but there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, for
whom no degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to him!
He--that great he--covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takes the
flame--the pure spirit of her--to himself. Were men like him!--they
would have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morally on
alpine elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his
fellows. Do not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted him
in a storm, and the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous,
cruel--yes, but she blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author of
his madness. It is the snake's nature of the girl which distracts him;
she is in his blood. Had she come to me, I would have helped her to cure
him; or had you succeeded in carrying her off, I would have stood by
their union; or were she a different creature, and not the shifty thing
she is, I could desire him to win her. A peasant girl, a workman's
daughter, a tradesman's, a professional singer, actress, artist--I would
have given my hand to one of these in good faith, thankful to her! As it
is, I have acted in obedience to his wishes, without idle remonstrances--
I know him too well; and with as much cordiality as I could put into an
evil service. She will drag him down, down, Tresten!'
'They are not joined yet,' said the colonel.
'She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me--her
letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throws a
light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her
out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to
consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through
her hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is
one of the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they
enjoy comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that
palling, they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark
before the time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though god-
like he seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in any
hands. This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'
'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.
'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'
The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.
'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see
him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she
does.'
'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet:
I don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he
has an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as calm
as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as
unconcernedly as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel
outpost who wasn't deader on the subject in monosyllables than
mademoiselle. She has a military erectness, and answers you and looks
you straight at the eyes, perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl
she is," as you say. She looked at me downright defying me to despise
her. Alvan has been tricked by her colour: she's icy. She has no
passion. She acts up to him when they're together, and that deceives
him. I doubt her having blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'
'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!' the
baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I assure
you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to the
Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What
character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'
Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act the
part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with no
ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal,
a stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of
Storchel and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded
by the little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentler
explosions. Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut her
lips tight for a laugh of essential humour.
CHAPTER HIV
Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had overcome
Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General had not
consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror of
the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged that
Tresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hear from
her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speak with her
alone before the official interview in the presence of the notary, when
she was publicly to state her decision and freedom of choice, according
to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through his envoy.
'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan. 'But I have worked
for it--I have worked! I have been talking to-day for six hours
uninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a caged
bear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform none of
his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper touched a
particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the, winding of
a key. Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General. I could get
no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called up
Hollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear,
or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin. They have been
hard at her, the whole family! and I shall want the two hours I
stipulated for to the full. What do you say?--come, I wager I do it
within one hour! They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will be
some time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind her
defences; but an hour's an age with a woman. Clotilde? I wager I have
her on her knees in half an hour! These notions of duty, and station,
and her fiddle-de-dee betrothal to that Danube osier with Indian-idol
eyes, count for so much mist. She was and is mine. I swear to strike to
her heart in ten minutes! But, madam, if not, you may pronounce me
incapable of conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impression of
facts. I say I will do it! I am insane if I may not judge from
antecedents that my voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at one
signal--at a look! I am prepared to stake my reason on her running to me
before I speak a word:--and I will not beckon. I promise to fold my arms
and simply look.'
'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about
half a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you
alone,' said the baroness.
Alvan opened his eyes. He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at
the bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time.
She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass the
needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the
instinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I have
had three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,
curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,
baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down to
the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar degree
of earnestness. As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she, and from
spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'
'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed
the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the
condition of the man who could accept it for that.
He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste
on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,
which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him in
retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.
'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my lead!
and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction.
I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and
the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read her
flatly. I read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical
tolerance. I'm in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair
Greeks.'
'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the baroness.
'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the
small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up. It
is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired
merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men
who have given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling--the
philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun.
Horace avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine
sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver, and gave him a
jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his
philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting Horace! He is
the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty
ways: the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming
unbelievers!'
'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the
musical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. I
see her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors
which give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant,
not much bigger than a dewdrop. And so should a man's heart reflect her!
Take her on the light in it, she is perfection. We won't take her in the
shady part or on your flat looking-glasses. There never was necessity
for accuracy of line in the portraiture of women. The idea of them is
all we want: it's the best of them. You will own she's Greek; she's a
Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian. One of those
delicious girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER,
THE DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER. There you have
Clotilde: she's a TO-MORROWER. You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to
see her at all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you her
promise to hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going. Ay, so we
have patience! Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one's
fortieth year!--it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.'
Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,
when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.
'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.
'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my forty-
first a sage.'
'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'
'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide
and master.'
'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined to
come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to
rest one's faith on. Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like,
were not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of
them. Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud
career deviate.'
'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan. 'I am the wine, and she the crystal
cup. She has avowed it again and again. You read her as she is when
away from me. Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to
contend when she stands alone. But when I am beside her, when we are
together--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of me by
the magic I have seen each time we encountered. She knows it well.'
'She may know it too well.'
'For what?' He frowned.
'For the chances of your meeting.'
'You think it possible she will refuse?'
A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face. He fetched a big
breath.
'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and
everything written there is imposture! I can account for all that she
has done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me. Not that
she should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it! Refuse?
But I have done my work, done what I said I would do. I stand in my
order of battle, and she refuses? No! I stake my head on it! I have
not a clod's perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me
from a flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has
gained his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays
blind with chance.'
He started up in agitation. 'Lucie! I am a grinning skull without a
brain if that girl refuses! She will not.' He took his hat to leave,
adding, to seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'She
will not refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I
have done tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she--oh! she cannot,
she will not refuse. Never! I have eyes, I have wits, I am not
tottering yet on my grave--or it's blindly, if I am. I have my clear
judgement, I am not an imbecile. It seems to me a foolish suspicion that
she can possibly refuse. Her manners are generally good; freakish, but
good in the main. Perhaps she takes a sting . . . but there is no
sting here. It would be bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of . . .
she has a heart! Well, then, good manners and right feeling forbid her
to refuse. She is an exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I
have helped you to a wrong impression of her. You will really appreciate
her wit; you will indeed; believe me, you will. We pardon nonsense in a
girl. Married, she will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I
am responsible for her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her
with me I warrant her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle,
like the Cossack's horse. I fancy that at forty I am about as young as
most young men. I promise her another forty manful working years. Are
you dubious of that?'
'I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,' said the baroness.
Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism,
comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in
toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire
preparing the feast.
'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resuming
the offence on the apology for it. 'I could talk with interest of a
trousseau. I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a
choice of wedding-presents. As she is legally free to bestow her hand on
me--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide to be
married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris. She has
a turn for startling. I can imagine that if I proposed a run for it she
would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in acquiescing
in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly because, in the
first case, she would throw herself and the rest of the adventure on me,
at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her impulses; and in the
second, because she is a girl who would require a full band of the best
Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up her spirits among her
people during the preparations for espousing a democrat, demagogue, and
Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to her own. Give Momus a
sister, Clotilde is the lady! I know her. I would undertake to put a
spell on her and keep her contented on a frontier--not Russian, any
barbarous frontier where there is a sun. She must have sun. One might
wrap her in sables, but sun is best. She loves it best, though she looks
remarkably well in sables. Never shall I forget . . . she is
frileuse, and shivers into them! There are Frenchmen who could paint it
--only Frenchmen. Our artists, no. She is very French. Born in France
she would have been a matchless Parisienne. Oh! she's a riddle of
course. I don't pretend to spell every letter of her. The returning of
my presents is odd. No, I maintain that she is a coward acting under
domination, and there's no other way of explaining the puzzle. I was out
of sight, they bullied her, and she yielded--bewilderingly, past
comprehension it seems--cat!--until you remember what she's made of:
she's a reed. Now I reappear armed with powers to give her a free
course, and she, that abject whom you beheld recently renouncing me, is,
you will see, the young Aurora she was when she came striking at my door
on the upper Alp. That was a morning! That morning is Clotilde till my
eyes turn over! She is all young heaven and the mountains for me! She's
the filmy light above the mountains that weds white snow and sky. By the
way, I dreamt last night she was half a woman, half a tree, and her hair
was like a dead yewbough, which is as you know of a brown burnt-out
colour, suitable to the popular conception of widows. She stood, and
whatever turning you took, you struck back on her. Whether my widow, I
can't say: she must first be my wife. Oh, for tomorrow!'
'What sort of evening is it?' said the baroness.
'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along,' Alvan replied, and
seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again. They
touched hands. He promised to call in the forenoon next day.
'Be cool,' she counselled him.
'Oh!' He flung back his head, making light of the crisis. 'After all,
it's only a girl. But, you know, what I set myself to win! . . . The
thing's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should be
ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten. There is no other reason
for the trouble we 're at, except that, as I have said a thousand times,
she suits me. No man can be cooler than I.'
'Keep so,' said the baroness.
He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a
shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the Rhone-
stream. There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid
tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no
abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains
ahead.
His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to
mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this
one were granted him!
He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the
task; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imagination
spun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies,
though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some
noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was
infamous to thwart them. At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of
their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of
husbanding a woman. A man should have a wife and rear children, not to
be forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future
times qualities he has proved priceless: he thought of the children, and
yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.
This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses
of temper.
Was she so small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty,
vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil
beam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the
giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were
by his pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he had a
broad full heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her,
uplifting her, richly endowing her. No meanness of heart was in him. He
lay down at night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness.
'Tomorrow! you bird of to-morrow!' he let fly his good-night to her.