Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!' . . .
At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked
from them, the life goes with it.
He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the
forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties
of other men.
Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant his
affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer than
she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in
the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and eyes charged
with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely all who
passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in their passage.
The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a whirring of
wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when imagination
shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the wheels be not
stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality inside him
absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving multitudinous vivid
impressions, he did not commune with one, was unaware of them. His thick
black hair waved and glistened over the fine aquiline of his face. His
throat was open to the breeze. His great breast and head were joined by
a massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood
to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it,
extinguish it. His fortieth year was written on his complexion and
presence: it was the fortieth of a giant growth that will bend at the
past eightieth as little as the rock-pine, should there come no uprooting
tempest. It said manhood, and breathed of settled strength of muscle,
nerve, and brain.
Of the people passing, many knew him not, but marked him; some knew him
by repute, one or two his person. To all of them he was a noticeable
figure; even those of sheeplike nature, having an inclination to start
upon the second impulse in the flanks of curious sheep when their first
had been arrested by the appearance of one not of their kind,
acknowledged the eminence of his bearing. There may have been a
passenger in the street who could tell the double tale of the stick he
swung in his hand, showing a gleam of metal, whereon were engraved names
of the lurid historic original owner, and of the donor and the recipient.
According to the political sentiments of the narrator would his tale be
coloured, and a simple walking-stick would be clothed in Tarquin guilt
for striking off heads of the upper ranks of Frenchmen till the blood of
them topped the handle, or else wear hues of wonder, seem very memorable;
fit at least for a museum. If the Christian aristocrat might shrink from
it in terror and loathing, the Paynim Republican of deep dye would be
ready to kiss it with veneration. But, assuming them to have a certain
bond of manliness, both agree in pronouncing the deed a right valiant and
worthy one, which caused this instrument to be presented to Alvan by a
famous doctor, who, hearing of his repudiation of the duel, and of his
gallant and triumphant defence of himself against a troop of ruffians,
enemies or scum of their city, at night, by the aid of a common stout
pedestrian stick, alone in a dark alley of the public park, sent him,
duly mounted and engraved, an illustrious fellow to the weapon of
defence, as a mode of commemorating his just abhorrence of bloodshed and
his peaceful bravery.
Observers of him would probably speculate on his features and the
carriage of his person as he went by them; with a result in their minds
that can be of no import to us, men's general speculations being directed
by their individual aims and their moods, their timidities, prejudices,
envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he was a potential figure.
If to know him the rising demagogue of the time dressed him in such
terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of the voracious hordes
which live from hand to mouth, without intervention of a banker and
property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone under a different
aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve their perplexity, had
the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific devastator swinging the
sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who staked his all upon his love,
loved up to his capacity desperately, loved a girl, and hung upon her
voice to hear whether his painful knocking at a door should gain him
admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizens of the legitimately-
satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girl annihilate him.
He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had never
ceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but with
a compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilized
man, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was the
civilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her,
with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped to
lead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman's
friend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation,
but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousin
germane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders and
main supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature of
his blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on a
damsel of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies and
governed by some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in her
reputation for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness and
her turn for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties,
put forth these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here and
there among them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorous
Clotilde. What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and the
baroness partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposing
her sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, his
wilder animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatened
with a diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned to
gratify the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will be
in danger of playing prematurely for power to seat her beside him high:
while at the same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer's
head are secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edge of
his Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwise your
half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to have
married that drab-coloured unit? Power must be grasped . . . .
His watch told him that Tresten was now beholding her, or just about to.
The stillness of the heavens was remarkable. The hour held breath. She
delayed her descent from her chamber. He saw how she touched at her
hair, more distinctly than he saw the lake before his eyes. He watched
her, and the growl of a coming roar from him rebuked her tricky
deliberateness. Deciding at last, she slips down the stairs like a
waterfall, and is in the room, erect, composed--if you do not lay ear
against her bosom. Tresten stares at her, owns she is worth a struggle.
Love does this, friend Tresten! Love, that stamps out prejudice and bids
inequality be smooth. Tresten stares and owns she is worth heavier
labours, worse than his friend has endured. Love does it! Love, that
hallows a stranger's claim to the flower of a proud garden: Love has won
her the freedom to suffer herself to be chosen by the stranger. What
matters which of them toiled to bring them to so sweet an end! It was
not either of them, but Love. By and by, after acting serenest innocent,
suddenly broken, she will be copious of sad confessions. That will be in
their secresy: in the close and boundless together of clasped hands.
Deep eyes, that give him in realms of light within light all that he has
dreamed of rapturousness and blessedness, you are threatened with a
blinding kiss if you look abashed:--if her voice shall dare repeat
another of those foolish self-reproaches, it shall be construed as a
petition for further kisses. Silence! he said to her, imagining that he
had been silent, and enjoying silence with a perfect quietude beyond the
trouble of a thought of her kisses and his happiness. His full heart
craved for the infinity of silence.
Another moment and he was counting to her the days, hours, minutes, which
had been the gulf of torture between then and now--the separation and the
reunion: he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was only for the
drawing of most blissful breath.
His watch went slowly. She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front of
Tresten. Oh! he knew her so well. He guessed the length of her acting,
and the time for her earnestness. She would have to act a coquette at
first to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girl
for putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask? But he knew her
so well: she would not trifle very long: his life on it, that she will
soon falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check: a word from Tresten
then, if he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her. Alvan heard
her saying: 'I will see him yes, to-day. Let him appoint. He may come
when he likes--come at once'
'My life on it!' he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, the certainty
that she loved him.
He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; he
had no recollection of the look of the street. A friend came up and put
him in the right way, walking back with him. This was General Leczel, a
famous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage through blood
and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they name
freedom devotedly. Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel with
continental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued the
talk on public affairs, to the note of: 'What but knocks will ever open
the Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the first
years of the eighteenth century!'
Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him before
night. Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he had
been absent fully an hour. He was not in sight right or left. Alvan
went to his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable
of imagining any event. He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick as
water were pressing round him. Unconsciously he had staked his all on
the revelation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His
intellect weighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it;
he magnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his nature
that the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, as he
could think, made the world a whirlpool till he had it. He waited,
figureable by nothing so much as a wild horse in captivity sniffing the
breeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck
barley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: he
is flame kept under and straining to rise.