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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4462 ***
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1892
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they
+met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so.  He
+was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly through
+her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers
+during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at
+the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these backflowings
+and gaps in the feelings.  She had grown reconciled to the perturbation
+of his messages, and would have preferred to have him startling and
+thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she welcomed him, and
+feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill of the fit of
+shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that she had reached
+his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical measures to lead
+to their union.  On one subject sure to be raised against him by her
+parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the baroness.
+
+She asked to see a photograph of her.
+
+Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in
+profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman.  The
+eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's drooped
+till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.
+
+'Think of her age,' said Alvan, colouring.  He named a grandmaternal date
+for the year of the baroness's birth.
+
+Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting
+lineaments came to an abrupt finish.
+
+She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still
+eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally.  He could
+not contest the woeful verdict.
+
+'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing.  The baroness was a woman
+fair to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think it
+incredible: she really was once.
+
+Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed.  He
+shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little.  For the first time
+since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was
+likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip.  She sighed again.
+He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.
+
+'Yes--now,' he said, impatiently.
+
+'I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,' said she, sad of voice.
+
+The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to defend
+the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.
+
+Clotilde 'tolled' her naughty head.
+
+'But it is a strong face,' she said, 'a strong face--a strong jaw, by
+Lavater!  You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating
+in her distress.  Now she is old--and you are friends.'
+
+'Friends, yes,' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she
+deserved to be praised for her open mind.
+
+'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath.  The title
+this girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and
+his burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine the
+mood of the giver.  She had positively humbled him so far as with a
+single word to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her
+look at the photograph.  Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the
+man's vanity, he did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a
+misconception injurious in the slightest degree to the sentiments he
+entertained toward the older lady as well as the younger.  'Friends!
+you are right; good friends; only you should know that it is just a
+little--a trifle different.  The fact is, I cannot kill the past, and I
+would not.  It would try me sharply to break the tie connecting us, were
+it possible to break it.  I am bound to her by gratitude.  She is old
+now; and were she twice that age, I should retain my feeling for her.
+You raise your eyes, Clotilde!  Well, when I was much younger I found
+this lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she honoured me with her
+confidence.  Young man though I was, I defended her; I stopped at no
+measure to defend her: against a powerful husband, remember--the most
+unscrupulous of foes, who sought to rob her of every right she possessed.
+And what I did then I again would do.  I was vowed to her interests, to
+protect a woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at trifles, as you
+know; you have read my speech in defence of myself before the court.  By
+my interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I estranged my family
+and made the world my enemy.  I gave my time and money, besides the
+forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably there was an
+arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her, so that the
+baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling herself indebted.
+You will not think that out of the way: men of the world do not.  As for
+matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart as the Poles.'
+
+He spoke hurriedly.  He had said all that could be expected of him.
+
+They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden
+green in the yellow beams.  One of these trees among its well-robed
+fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten.  From the low sweeping
+branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its
+shadow; a vision of blackness.
+
+'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,
+screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and
+if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.
+
+'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan.
+'And now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day.  En avant!
+contre les canons!  A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the
+afternoon.  I shall see you in the evening.  So our separation won't be
+for long this time.  All the auspices are good.  We shall not be rich--
+nor poor.'
+
+Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the
+store by her.
+
+'We don't count it,' said he.  'Not rich, certainly. And you will not
+expect me to make money by my pen.  Above all things I detest the writing
+for money.  Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of
+the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt!  And
+journalism for money is Egyptian bondage.  No slavery is comparable to
+the chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me;
+and I give my self, I do not sell.  I write when I have matter in me and
+in the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'
+
+'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde.  'I would rather
+be in want of common comforts.'
+
+He squeezed her wrist.  They were again in front of the black-draped
+blighted tree.  It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf
+bearing a semblance of livid metal.  They looked at it as having seen it
+before, and passed on.
+
+'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he resumed,
+radiating his full bloom on her.
+
+'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.
+
+To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial
+chuckle.  'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.
+Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all.  Look at
+me.'  He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his
+eagle eyes.  He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,
+expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under the
+glances of a girl.  'Do you take me for one who could be content with the
+part of second?  I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will have
+too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly.  I was not
+fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I.  I carry too
+decisive a weight in the balance to victory.  I have a taste for fruits,
+my fairest!  And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid
+honours.'  He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of
+his eyes.
+
+'"Bride of the Elect of the People!"  is not that as glorious a title,
+think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God's grace on
+his worm-eaten throne?  I win that seat by service, by the dedication of
+this brain to the people's interests.  They have been ground to the dust,
+and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood.  I am the
+soldier of justice against the army of the unjust.  But I claim my
+reward.  If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy.  I will have my
+station.  I win it not only because I serve, but because also I have
+seen, have seen ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten--
+because I am soldier and prophet.  The brain of man is Jove's eagle and
+his lightning on earth--the title to majesty henceforth.  Ah!  my
+fairest; entering the city beside me, and the people shouting around, she
+would not think her choice a bad one?'
+
+Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.
+
+'We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day
+comes,' he continued after a while.  'The day is coming, but we must wait
+for it, work on.  I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a
+head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be
+beneficent.  I set them moving on the lines of the law of things.  I am
+no empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in
+politics.  When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step
+to the realization of it.  One step.  It will be taken in my time, or
+acknowledged later.  I stand for index to the people of the path they
+should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
+not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh!  That is a middle-
+class invention to effect a compromise.  With the people the matter rests
+with their intelligence!  meanwhile my star is bright and shines
+reflected.'
+
+'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
+lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
+ground, but always either up or straight before you.'
+
+'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling.  'Here we are at this
+funereal tree again.  All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
+us perpetually to this tree.  It 's the only dead one here.'
+
+He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
+decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
+small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
+It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.
+
+'Not a single bare spot!  but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
+Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen.  'This is a tree for a
+melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
+a scene with his mistress, or tales of her!  By the way and by the way,
+my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for
+me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below.
+Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered
+women, though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'
+
+He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not
+sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive
+in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.
+The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her
+locks were golden serpents.
+
+'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.
+
+'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered.  'In good time.  You
+understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
+and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first .  .  . !  But her heart is
+quite sound.  Have no fear!  I guarantee it; I know her to the roots.
+She desires my welfare, she does my behests.  If I am bound to her by
+gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me.  The utmost she
+will demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me
+in the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my
+heart; therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'
+
+They left the tree behind them.
+
+'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,
+without looking back.  'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under
+world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has
+looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself.  Hecate and
+Hermes know about it.  Phoebus cannot light it.  That tree stands for
+Death blooming.  We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely
+tree.  Down there!  When do we go?  The shudder in that tree is the air
+exchanging between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it's on
+the border line.  I just felt the creep.  I think you did.  The reason
+is--there is always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of
+chill breeze took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at
+that very moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I
+acknowledged that death could do the trick.  But death, my love, is far
+from us two!'
+
+'Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?' said Clotilde.
+
+'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed.  The baroness was not so easily
+defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared.  'She is the best
+of comrades, best of friends.  She has her faults; may not relish the
+writ announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as true
+as she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you.  That I can
+promise.  My poor Lucie!  She is winter, if you will.  It is not the
+winter of the steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country;
+a fine landscape of winter.  The outlines of her face .  .  .  .  She has
+a great brain.  How much I owe that woman for instruction!  You meet now
+and then men who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are
+the pick of men.  And the choicest women are those who yield not a
+feather of their womanliness for some amount of manlike strength.  And
+she is one; man's brain, woman's heart.  I thought her unique till I
+heard of you.  And how do I stand between you two?  She has the only
+fault you can charge me with; she is before me in time, as I am before
+you.  Shall I spoil you as she spoilt me?  No, no!  Obedience to a boy
+is the recognition of the heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as
+much as I love my love.  I do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour,
+support.  You will not rule me, but you will invigorate, and if you are
+petted, you shall not be spoilt.  Do not expect me to show like that
+undertakerly tree till my years are one hundred.  Even then it will be
+dangerous to repose beneath my branches in the belief that I am sapless
+because I have changed colour.  We Jews have a lusty blood.  We are
+strong of the earth.  We serve you, but you must minister to us.
+Sensual?  We have truly excellent appetites.  And why not?  Heroical too!
+Soldiers, poets, musicians; the Gentile's masters in mental arithmetic--
+keenest of weapons: surpassing him in common sense and capacity for
+brotherhood.  Ay, and in charity; or what stores of vengeance should we
+not have nourished!  Already we have the money-bags.  Soon we shall hold
+the chief offices.  And when the popular election is as unimpeded as the
+coursing of the blood in a healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and
+topmost, for he is pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-
+day communities.  But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of
+the Jew.  I am no champion of a race.  I am for the world, for man!'
+
+Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a
+large following among the people.
+
+He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian.  Yes, if I were
+other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able
+lieutenants.'
+
+'Tell me of your interview with Ironsides,' she said proudly and fondly.
+
+'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, putting
+his lips among the locks.  'Well, we met: he requested it.  We agreed
+that we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately
+have to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could
+compare our plans for governing.  He showed me his hand.  I showed him
+mine.  We played open-handed, like two at whist.  He did not doubt my
+honesty, and I astonished him by taking him quite in earnest.  He has
+dealt with diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old
+Ironer!  I love him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean
+deceit.  He will outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple
+evolution rapidly performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies!
+Then he has them, bagsful of them!  The world will see; and see giant
+meet giant, I suspect.  He and I proposed each of us in the mildest
+manner contrary schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe!  Enough
+that we parted with mutual respect.  He is a fine fellow: and so was my
+friend the Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu.  Napoleon was a fine
+engine:--there is a difference.  Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow!  but he
+and I may cross.  His ideas are not many.  The point to remember is that
+he is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe.
+He has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and
+traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able
+to combine, and the likeliest that he will do.  Good.  We opine that we
+are equal to the same.  He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and
+save him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which
+accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron.  We think the
+more precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes.  But
+such an adversary is not to be underrated.  I do not underrate him: and
+certainly not he me.  Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a
+fluent tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people,
+as knowing them the greater power.  He sees that their knowledge of their
+power must eventually come to them.  In the meantime his party is
+forcible enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at
+present: and he is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical.
+He is curiously simple, not really cynical.  His apparent cynicism is
+sheer irritability.  His contemptuous phrases are directed against
+obstacles: against things, persons, nations that oppose him or cannot
+serve his turn against his king, if his king is restive; but he respects
+his king: against your friends' country, because there is no fixing it to
+a line of policy, and it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that
+country the best in Europe after his own.  He is nearest to contempt in
+his treatment of his dupes and tools, who are dropped out of his mind
+when he has quite squeezed them for his occasion; to be taken up again
+when they are of use to him.  Hence he will have no following.  But let
+me die to-morrow, the party I have created survives.  In him you see the
+dam, in me the stream.  Judge, then, which of them gains the future!--
+admitting that, in the present he may beat me.  He is a Prussian, stoutly
+defined from a German, and yet again a German stoutly defined from our
+borderers: and that completes him.  He has as little the idea of humanity
+as the sword of our Hermann, the cannon-ball of our Frederick.  Observe
+him.  What an eye he has!  I watched it as we were talking: and he has, I
+repeat, imagination; he can project his mind in front of him as far as
+his reasoning on the possible allows: and that eye of his flashes; and
+not only flashes, you see it hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a
+Balearic slinger about to whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is
+hard, and is dead certain of its mark-within his practical compass, as I
+have said.  I see farther, and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a
+dreamer.  In my opinion, when we cross our swords I stand a fair chance
+of not being worsted. We shall: you shrink?  Figuratively, my darling
+have no fear!  Combative as we may be, both of us, we are now grave
+seniors, we have serious business: a party looks to him, my party looks
+to me.  Never need you fear that I shall be at sword or pistol with any
+one.  I will challenge my man, whoever he as that needs a lesson, to
+touch buttons on a waistcoat with the button on the foil, or drill fiver
+and eights in cards at twenty paces: but I will not fight him though he
+offend me, for I am stronger than my temper, and as I do not want to take
+his nip of life, and judge it to be of less value than mine, the
+imperilling of either is an absurdity.'
+
+'Oh!  because I know you are incapable of craven fear,' cried Clotilde,
+answering aloud the question within herself of why she so much admired,
+why she so fondly loved him.  To feel his courage backing his high good
+sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astute self-
+control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible.  It seemed
+to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she saw their
+triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she should
+instantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his Republican
+Princess.  She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue of
+her being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, and
+she thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her on
+that eminence.  Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kings
+can summon through the trumpet!  She could surely pass through the trial
+with her parents that she might step to the place beside him!  She
+pressed his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory.  Was it love?
+It was as lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to.
+
+She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where her
+parents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name the
+hotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive.  'Am I
+not precise as an office clerk?' she said, with a pleasant taste of the
+reality her preciseness pictured.
+
+'Practical as the head of a State department,' said he, in good faith.
+
+'I shall not keep you waiting,' she resumed.
+
+'The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our
+success, my golden crest!'
+
+'Have no misgivings, Sigismund.  You have transformed me.  A spark of you
+is in my blood.  Come.  I shall send word to your hotel when you are to
+appear.  But you will come, you will be there, I know.  I know you so
+entirely.'
+
+'As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when they
+have married him.  At least you ought to know me.  You know that if I
+were to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it
+forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to
+go through during our interlude with papa and mama.'
+
+'I almost wish you would,' said she.  She looked half imploringly, biting
+her lip to correct the peeping wish.
+
+Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave.  Flight and
+defiance are our last resource.  Now that I see you resolved I shun the
+scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be.
+How can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into
+your veins?  The other day on the heights--had you consented then?  Well!
+it would have been very well, but not so well.  We two have a future, and
+are bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for an
+example, if we can.  I take you from your father's house, from your
+mother's arms, from the "God speed" of your friends.  That is how Alvan's
+wife should be presented to the world.'
+
+Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and
+despatched.  To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really
+was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural
+impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that
+language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,
+while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed
+expression of the pretty impulse.  But wiser is it always that the star
+in the ascendant should not address the one waning.  Hardly can a word be
+uttered without grossly wounding.  She would not do it to a younger
+rival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age!  She babbles of a
+friendship: she plays at childish ninny!  The display of her ingenuous
+happiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges.  The
+declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a
+deeper, a longer-tried suffering.  Actually the letter of the rising star
+assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and
+personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt
+also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.
+
+Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high.
+He was too robust, he had been too successful.  Your very successful hero
+regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a
+peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the
+other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their
+sisters.  His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he
+had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of
+their sex.  The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on
+his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he
+said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,
+millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units.  He would have stared
+like any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a
+likeness unto men in their fight with the world.  Women for him were
+objects to be chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like the
+sportsman's business, with keen relish both for the pursuit and the prey,
+and a view of the termination of his pastime.  Their feelings he could
+appreciate during the time when they flew and fell, perhaps a little
+longer; but the change in his own feelings withdrew him from the
+communion of sentiment.  This is the state of men who frequent the
+avenues of success.  At present he was thinking of a wife, and he
+approved the epistle to the baroness cordially.
+
+'I do think it a nice kind of letter, and quite humble enough,' said
+Clotilde.
+
+He agreed, 'Yes, yes: she knows already that this is really serious with
+me.'
+
+So much for the baroness.
+
+Now for their parting.  A parting that is no worse than the turning of a
+page to a final meeting is made light of, but felt.  Reason is all in our
+favour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slip
+between the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though it be
+not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness.  Clotilde
+required reassuring and comforting: 'I am certain you will prevail; you
+must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact,' she sighed
+in a languor: 'only, my people are hard to manage.  I see more clearly
+now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by a sort of
+compact so long as I did nothing decisive.  That I see.  But, then again,
+have I not your spirit in me now?  What has ever resisted you?--Then,
+as I am Alvan's wife, I share his heart with his fortunes, and I do not
+really dread the scenes from anticipating failure, still-the truth is,
+I fear I am three parts an actress, and the fourth feels itself a
+shivering morsel to face reality.  No, I do not really feel it, but press
+my hand, I shall be true--I am so utterly yours: and because I have such
+faith in you.  You never, yet have failed'
+
+'Never: and it is impossible for me to conceive it,' said Alvan
+thoughtfully.
+
+His last word to her on her departure was 'Courage!'  Hers to him was
+conveyed by the fondest of looks.  She had previously said 'To-morrow!'
+to remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, and
+herself that she would not long stand alone.  She did not doubt of her
+courage while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strong
+men of earth.  She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from the
+waving fingers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of his
+tricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her.  All the rest to
+come was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for a
+plan of action.  Who can hold her back when a woman is decided to move?
+Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and
+the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the same
+elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel
+daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational.  That
+is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and inflamed
+to fly the barriers intercepting.  He fancied he had achieved it.  Alvan
+thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents.  The consolatory
+sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in the
+contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused by those
+people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a wife after
+the fashion of orderly citizens.  It would be on their heads!  But why
+vision mischance?  An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends,
+that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection
+without casting a shadow.  Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry!
+
+No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was
+she.  Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed
+fortieth year!  Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?
+Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it would
+be sunshine in the subterranean sphere.  The very thinking of her
+dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting
+phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come.'
+
+To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a
+celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of
+mortal life in the highest.  He wondered how it was that he could have
+waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and he
+just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the minutes,
+much as she did, only more fierily.  The ceaseless warfare called
+politics must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of another
+kind.  He was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a panorama
+of illimitable felicity.  And there were certain things he must overcome
+before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love of
+contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his
+whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking
+it either.  There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the
+battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the big artillery.
+
+Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of the
+trains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; he
+looked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swiss law;
+considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was a lawyer
+bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as
+pleading eloquently.  The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it
+wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses,
+turgid enough, even to his own judgement.  Poets would have failed at
+such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured.  He was a wild
+man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the
+ranks of the soberly blissful.  These he could imagine that he
+complimented by the wish.  Then why should he doubt of his fortune?
+He did not.
+
+The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey.  Late
+in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's.  A letter
+was handed to him.  His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for
+her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse.  'And now
+my turn!' said he, not overjoyously.  The words Jew and demagogue and
+baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.
+But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and
+champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal
+and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were
+to know him and change their tone.
+
+As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at
+the answer to a tap.  He started; his face was a shield's welcome to the
+birdlike applicant for admission.  Clotilde stood hesitating.
+
+He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, and
+drew her in.
+
+'Alvan, I have come.'
+
+She was like a bird in his hands, palpitating to extinction.
+
+He bent over her: 'What has happened?'
+
+Trembling, and very pale, hard in her throat she said, 'The worst.'
+
+'You have spoken to them both subsequent to this?' he shook the letter.
+
+'It is hopeless.'
+
+'Both to father and mother?'
+
+'Both.  They will not hear your name; they will not hear me speak.  I
+repeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them.  They hate--hate
+you, hate me for thinking of you.  I had no choice; I wrote at once and
+followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want of breath,
+not want of courage.  I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all I can do.
+
+She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids.
+
+But he said nothing.  She looked up at him.  Her strained pale eyes
+provoked a closer embrace.
+
+'This would be the home for you if we were flying,' said he, glancing
+round at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, 'Tell me what there
+is to be told.'
+
+'Alvan, I have; that is all.  They will not listen; they loathe Oh! what
+possesses them!'
+
+'They have not met me yet!'
+
+'They will not, will not ever--no!'
+
+'They must.'
+
+'They refuse.  Their child, for daring to say she loves you, is detested.
+Take me--take me away!'
+
+'Run?--facing the enemy?' His countenance was the fiery laugh of a
+thirster for strife.  'They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is made
+of!'
+
+Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion.  'I found
+them celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the Austrian Count
+Walburg; I thought it favourable for us.  I spoke of you to my mother.
+Oh, that scene!  What she said I cannot recollect: it was a hiss.  Then
+my father.  Your name changed his features and his voice.  They treated
+me as impure for mentioning it.  You must have deadly enemies.
+I was unable to recognize either father or mother--they have become
+transformed.  But you see I am here.  Courage!  you said; and I
+determined I would show it, and be worthy of you.  But I am pursued,
+I am sure.  My father is powerful in this place; we shall barely have
+time to escape.'
+
+Alvan's resolution was taken.
+
+'Some friend--a lady living in the city here--name her, quick!--one you
+can trust,' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of
+drillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders.  'Yes, you have shown
+courage.  Now it must be submission to me.  You shall be no runaway
+bride, but honoured at the altar.  Out of this hotel is the first point.
+You know some such lady?'
+
+Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest.  She could have prophesied
+certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so
+sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost
+in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a
+drawing back.  She could not get the word or even the look to encounter
+his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where they
+were together alone.  She could not refuse the protection he offered in a
+person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of where they
+were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of
+entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged to
+it.  She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a
+Madame Emerly, living near the hotel.  Her heart sank like a stone.
+'It is for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his
+generosity in temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph.
+'But my wife shall not be snatched by a thief in the night.  Are you not
+my wife--my golden bride?  And you may give me this pledge of it, as if
+the vows had just been uttered .  .  .  and still I resign you till we
+speak the vows.  It shall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her
+glory, that she ran to her nuptials through rat-passages.'
+
+His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her.  She was cooled by her
+despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay, but that
+centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her enthusiasm,
+thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they were united,
+her step was irrevocable.  Her having entered the hotel, her being in
+this room, certified to that.  It seemed to her while she was waiting for
+the carriage he had ordered that she was already half a wife.  She was
+not conscious of a blush.  The sprite in the young woman's mind whispered
+of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it.  And undoubtedly,
+contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart of fire.  An
+impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for his chivalrousness
+had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing she praised.
+Otherwise she was not ill at ease.  Alvan summoned his gaiety, all his
+homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quitting the room
+she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomy foreboding.
+A maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling of devotion to
+her, ran up the steps of the hotel.  Her tale was, that the General had
+roused the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heard whither
+Clotilde was going.
+
+Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly's drawing-room
+relating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, assisted by
+the lover whom she had introduced.  Her hostess promised shelter and
+exhibited sympathy.  The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knew
+Alvan by reputation.  He was insurrectionally notorious in morals and
+menacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowing tongue,
+and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love and
+deference toward her family, won her personally.  She promised the best
+help she could give them.  They were certainly in a romantic situation,
+such as few women could see and decline their aid to the lovers.
+
+Madame Emerly proved at least her sincerity before many minutes had
+passed.
+
+Chancing to look out into the street, she saw Clotilde's mother and her
+betrothed sister stepping up to the house.  What was to be done?  And was
+the visit accidental?  She announced it, and Clotilde cried out, but
+Alvan cried louder: 'Heaven-directed!  and so, let me see her and speak
+to her--nothing could be better.'
+
+Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head
+premonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer,
+if I am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.'
+
+'Yes!  yes!' Clotilde replied: 'Oh!  do that.'
+
+She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming
+voice.
+
+'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity.  'Plain-dealing; no
+subterfuge!  Begin with foul falsehood?  No.  I would not have you
+burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our
+account.  And when it would be bad policy?  .  .  .  Oh, no, worse than
+the sin! as the honest cynic says.  We will go down to Madame von
+Rudiger, and she shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her
+daughter's hand.'
+
+Clotilde rocked in an agony.  Her friend was troubled.  Both ladies knew
+what there would be to encounter better than he.  But the man, strong in
+his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.
+
+Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame
+Emerly's reception room.  She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me.'
+
+'Is this forsaking?'  He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone
+which supplies the answer.
+
+'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'
+
+He kissed her fingers.  'Trust to me.'
+
+She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter
+leaning on him.
+
+She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as
+her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a
+warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning
+into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly
+degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a
+part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.
+
+Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain
+tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the spirit
+to be a melting prize of the winner.
+
+Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering
+thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring
+their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius of
+Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in
+whatsoever person.  We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be
+prey, we lose the soul of election.
+
+Mark her as she proceeds.  For should her hero fail, and she be suffering
+through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will
+seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable
+weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength.  And it will
+seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just
+expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it was
+only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of
+espousing.  The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled
+when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of
+putting themselves in the right to themselves.  The love she bore him,
+because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was
+ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason
+(where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it
+seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict,
+insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked.  He roused the
+tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest
+reason, close as it ever is to the craven's heart in its hour of trial,
+whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by the swollen
+conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize.  That
+frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions.  It spies the spot
+of truth.  Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then, so
+unerring is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform
+ourselves into cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple
+over the Sphinx of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious
+creature in an epigram.  But there was as much more in Alvan than any
+faint-hearted thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more
+in the world than the epigrams aimed at it contain.
+
+'Courage!' said he: and she tremblingly: 'Be careful!' And then they were
+in the presence of her mother and sister.
+
+Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure.  Her
+mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a
+woman's combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.
+
+'Away with that man!  I will not suffer him near me,' she cried.
+
+Alvan advanced to her: 'Tell me, madame, in God's name, what you have
+against me.'
+
+She swung her back on him.  'Go, sir!  my husband will know how to deal
+with one like you.  Out of my sight, I say!'
+
+The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde.  She went up to
+him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal,
+said: 'Let us go: come.  I will not bear to hear you so spoken to.  No
+one shall treat you like that when I am near.'
+
+She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experience
+of the commencement.  He did but clasp her hand, assuring the Frau von
+Rudiger that no word of hers could irritate him.  'Nothing can make me
+forget that you are Clotilde's mother.  You are the mother of the lady I
+love, and may say what you will to me, madame.  I bear it.'
+
+'A man spotted with every iniquity the world abhors, and I am to see him
+holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable!  And because
+there is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talk
+of his foul passion for my daughter.  I repeat: that which you have to do
+is to go.  My ears are shut.  You can annoy, you can insult, you cannot
+move me.  Go.'  She stamped: her aspect spat.
+
+Alvan bowed.  Under perfect self-command, he said: 'I will go at once to
+Clotilde's father.  I may hope, that with a reasonable man I shall
+speedily come to an understanding.'
+
+She retorted: 'Enter his house, and he will have you driven out by his
+lacqueys.'
+
+'Hardly: I am not of those men who are driven from houses,' Alvan said,
+smiling.  'But, madame, I will act on your warning, and spare her father,
+for all sakes, the attempt; seeing he does not yet know whom he deals
+with.  I will write to him.'
+
+'Letters from you will be flung back unopened.
+
+'It may, of course, be possible to destroy even my patience, madame.'
+
+'Mine, sir, is at an end.'
+
+'You reduce us to rely on ourselves; it is the sole alternative.'
+
+'You have not waited for that,' rejoined Frau von Rudiger.  'You have
+already destroyed my daughter's reputation by inducing her to leave her
+father's house and hesitate to return.  Oh! you are known.  You are known
+for your dealings with women as well as men.  We know you.  We have, we
+pray to God, little more to learn of you.  You!  ah--thief!'
+
+'Thief!'  Alvan's voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it.  She
+had up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern that
+she had struck the wound in his history; but he was terrible to look at,
+so she made the charge supportable by saying:
+
+'You have stolen my child from me!'
+
+Clotilde raised her throat, shrewish in excitement.  'False!  He did not.
+I went to him of my own will, to run from your heartlessness, mother--
+that I call mother!--and be out of hearing of my father's curses and
+threats.  Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to him than to
+you.  And never will I return to you.  You have killed my love; I am this
+man's own because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, as his
+partner in life for all it may give!--as his wife!  Trample on him, you
+trample on me.  Make black brows at your child for choosing the man, of
+all men alive, to worship and follow through the world.  I do.  I am his.
+I glory in him.'
+
+Her gaze on Alvan said: 'Now!' Was she not worthy of him now?  And would
+they not go forth together now?  Oh!  now!
+
+Her gaze was met by nothing like the brilliant counterpart she merited.
+It was as if she had offered her beauty to a glass, and found a
+reflection in dull metal.  He smiled calmly from her to her mother.  He
+said:
+
+'You accuse me of stealing your child, madame.  You shall acknowledge
+that you have wronged me.  Clotilde, my Clotilde!  may I count on you to
+do all and everything for me?  Is there any sacrifice I could ask that
+would be too hard for you?  Will you at one sign from me go or do as I
+request you?'
+
+She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: 'I
+will,' but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-acting
+her part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension of
+the part he was for playing to the same audience.  'Yes, I will do all,
+all that you command.  I am yours.  I will go with you.  Bid me do
+whatever you can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I have
+hitherto called mine:--not that!'
+
+'And that is what I have to request of you,' said he, with his calm smile
+brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable to her.
+'And this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are you
+prepared to do it?  Will you?'
+
+She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against her
+imploring eyes.  'If you can ask me--if you can positively wish it--yes,'
+she said.  'But think of what you are doing.  Oh!  Alvan, not back to
+them!  Think!'
+
+He smiled insufferably.  He was bent on winning a parent-blest bride,
+an unimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of the
+world's polished silver vessels.
+
+'Think that you are doing this for me!' said he.  'It is for my sake.
+And now, madame, I give you back your daughter.  You see she is mine to
+give, she obeys me, and I--though it can be only for a short time--give
+her back to you.  She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do not
+forget that.  And so, madame, I have the honour,' he bowed profoundly.
+
+He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm.  'What you have done
+in obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten.  Never can
+I sufficiently thank you.  I know how much it has cost you.  But here is
+the end of your trials.  All the rest is now my task.  Rely on me with
+your whole heart.  Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding.
+Be sure of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of
+injustice I shall be beside you to take you to myself.  Be sure of that,
+and be not unhappy.  They shall not keep you from me for long.  Submit a
+short while to the will of your parents: mine you will find the stronger.
+Resolve it in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for it is
+impossible to me to waver.  Consider me as the one fixed light in your
+world, and look to me.  Soon, then!  Have patience, be true, and we are
+one!'
+
+He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand.  The horribly empty
+sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuous
+face.
+
+His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone.  She seemed
+a dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering
+himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he
+could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the
+brief vision of her unfitness to be left.  The compressed energy of the
+man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims
+of family ties and duties, intoxicated him.  He thought but of the
+present achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad
+reputation among these people, from whom he was about to lead forth a
+daughter for Alvan's wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his
+exhibition of generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he
+delivered his retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--that the
+worst was over; he had to deal no more with silly women: now for
+Clotilde's father!  Women were privileged to oppose their senselessness
+to the divine fire: men could not retreat behind such defences; they must
+meet him on the common ground of men, where this constant battler had
+never yet encountered a reverse.
+
+Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to
+reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the
+diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;
+and the lady of the house.  He was going--he could actually go and leave
+her!  She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she
+did so as much as she had force to make it visible.  She saw him smiling
+incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy.
+She could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she
+took the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.
+
+'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had
+the choice of you and he abjured you.  He has cast you off!'
+
+She phrased it in speech to herself.  It was incredible, but it was
+clear: he had gone.
+
+The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.
+
+'He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily to
+renounce you.'
+
+She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother
+heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at
+the window.
+
+The craven's first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for
+light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered of
+quietness if she submitted.
+
+And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been
+guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to him,
+the which may be love's glory when marriage crowns it.  By his rejecting
+her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but a castaway.
+It was not natural that he should leave her; 'not natural in him to act
+his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at the mercy of
+those who might pick her up.  She was, in her humiliation and dread, all
+of the moment, she could see to no distance; and judging of him, feeling
+for herself, within that contracted circle of sensation--sure, from her
+knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done unwisely--she became swayed
+about like a castaway in soul, until her distinguishing of his mad
+recklessness in the challenge of a power greater than his own grew
+present with her as his personal cruelty to the woman who had flung off
+everything, flung herself on the tempestuous deeps, on his behalf.  And
+here she was, left to float or founder!  Alvan had gone.  The man rageing
+over the room, abusing her 'infamous lover, the dirty Jew, the notorious
+thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,' etc., etc., frightful epithets, not to be
+transcribed--was her father.  He had come, she knew not how.  Alvan had
+tossed her to him.
+
+Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady's heart by the
+brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the
+creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel,
+she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted.  Her
+cry to him: 'If you had been wiser, this would not have been!' will sink
+to the inward meditation: 'If he had been truer!'--and though she does
+not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is
+already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun.  They
+are not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of them
+makes it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.
+
+Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail small
+boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious outbreak
+she was exposed to.  She might so far have exonerated him had she been
+able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him in blind
+reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising material
+rigours.  After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for a young
+woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched through
+the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by the hair-
+Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a huge
+forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his
+daughter's flight to the Jew.  He seemed to have a grim indifference to
+exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a
+satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or three
+maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly managing
+them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely cracking a
+whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time by hunting her
+as she likes to run.  Police were round his house.  The General chattered
+and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies of that Jew--the
+things that Jew would attempt.  He dragged her indoors, muttering of his
+policy in treating her at last to a wholesome despotism.
+
+This was the medicine for her--he knew her!  Whether he did or not, he
+knew the potency of his physic.  He knew that osiers can be made to bend.
+With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the window-
+shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he left her
+there and roared across the household that any one holding communication
+with the prisoner should be shot like a dog.  This was a manifestation of
+power in a form more convincing than the orator's.
+
+She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
+abandoned by her lover.  She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
+with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
+misfortune, that reality had come.  The monster had hold of her.  She was
+isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive.  She had nothing but our natural
+obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
+to the semblance of it only.  'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
+her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
+spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
+themselves to the sound of it.  He listened and named his time for
+returning.  The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about
+forty hours.  She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father
+should be so fiercely excited against this man!  Can he have reasons I
+have not heard of?'  Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the
+question in her quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement
+to kiss the whip.  The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew.
+She saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a
+sinister appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as
+well as to Alvan's fatal decision.  Her misery was traceable to his
+conduct and his judgement--both bad.  And yet all this while he might be
+working to release her, near upon rescuing!  She swung round to the side
+of her lover against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as
+well as she could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to
+appear.  She spent her heart on it.  A note to her friend, the English
+lady, protested her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a
+frozen resignation to the loss of him--all around her was so dark!  By-
+and-by there was a scratching at her door.  The maid whom she trusted
+brought her news of Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and mistress
+knelt.  Hope flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers were
+exchanged through the partition.
+
+'Where is he?'
+
+'Gone.'
+
+'But where?'
+
+'He has left the city.'
+
+Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one for
+Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking
+practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an
+address.  She did not ask herself whether the maid's information was
+honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.
+
+She wept through the night.  It was one of those nights of the torrents
+of tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there be
+ought of that besides the breathing structure.  The reason why she wept
+with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity
+for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the
+love whereby she was tormented.  They do not weep thus who have a heart
+for the struggle.  In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no
+longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other words,
+unable any further to contend.
+
+Reality was too strong!  This morning her sisters came to her room
+imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their
+prospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sister
+Lotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan's name was infamous
+in society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemned
+to seclusion.  A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set her
+tears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could he
+hold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jew
+democrat?  He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with his
+brother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wrongly
+Alvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all,
+perhaps to her father's military and diplomatic career principally: the
+head of their house would be ruined.  She was compelled to weep again by
+having no other reply.  The tears were now mixed drops of pity for her
+absent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when she
+shed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as many
+bosoms drained of self-pity will become.
+
+Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and had
+a languid willingness to gain outward comfort.  To be caressed a little
+by her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after her
+heavy scourging.  She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them
+to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made
+them seem a soft reminder of what life had been.  Alvan had gone.  Her
+natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire
+relinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber.  He had gone; he had
+committed an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain
+provoking, that was too severe for him: he was not the lover he fancied
+himself, or not the lord of men she had fancied him.  Her excessive
+misery would not suffer a picture of him, not one clear recollection of
+him, to stand before her.  He who should have been at hand, had gone, and
+she was fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being abandoned, her blank
+night of imagination felt that there was nothing left for her save to
+fall upon those nearest.
+
+She gave her submission to her mother.  In her mind, during the last
+wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her
+cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: 'He may come, and I am his
+if he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people.'  He had taught her to
+rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting
+herself loose from him.  In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to
+believe if the saint will appear.  However, she submitted.  Then there
+was joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of
+the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath.  He
+proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing
+his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and
+was on a strange and tangled one.  The sense of power in him was leonine
+enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did
+that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.
+They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be
+acting his part, brilliant though it was.  He crammed his energy into his
+idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously.  Before the world,
+it would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world
+acclaiming him:
+
+'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law,
+from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old
+lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman!  Alvan, the republican, is
+eminently a citizen.  Consider his past life by that test of his
+character.'
+
+He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,
+through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly
+slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to
+be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower.  Lower, of course,
+the multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they
+have in exchange for it is not an independent one.  Ceasing to be a
+social rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he
+passed under the bondage of that position.
+
+Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be
+trusted now.  She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society,
+and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.
+The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger was a man of
+the world.  An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to him--
+now, at least.  And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride of
+his house.  'A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall in
+good time be cause for some parental gratification.'
+
+The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of
+Clotilde.  He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another
+intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs.  These gentlemen brought
+no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to extract
+a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of
+course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official
+influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the
+proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary
+and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his
+pretensions to the hand of the lady.
+
+He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of
+his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it
+yet, being too anxious to sign the peace.  He felt as it were a blow
+startling him from sleep.  His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
+polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
+between man and man.  The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
+indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
+such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history.  He could not
+raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied
+contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow
+both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their
+courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.
+
+A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
+admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing.  The
+bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.
+
+Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance.  The fate of the noble Genoese
+conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
+boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
+ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to
+lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
+readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
+was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of
+the powers fitting him for battle.  A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
+career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it!  What
+was this girl in a life like his?  But, oh!  the question was no sooner
+asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
+the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,
+confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her.
+Why had he done it?  Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely
+inspired.  She warned him against the step.  But he, proud of his
+armoury, went his way.  He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed
+Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a
+minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy
+of the night.
+
+He was only calmer when morning came.  Night has little mercy for the
+self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,
+it has none.  The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon
+that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
+opposing him.  He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
+petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
+the position it explained.  Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
+revived him as they had always revived and fortified.  But here was a
+stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
+chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms.  By
+shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
+reduced him to hesitation.  And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;
+his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole
+quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of
+one for a mark.
+
+These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever
+he drew from his Fiesco bed.  Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so
+uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
+frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
+ourselves like madmen.  The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
+will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
+will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
+them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
+perceptibly plain matter.  The fitful colour is the fever.  He must win
+her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly!  She was
+his--she was torn from him!  She would come at his bidding--she would
+cower to her tyrants!  The thought of her was life and death in his
+frame, bright heaven and the abyss.  At one beat of the heart she swam to
+his arms, at another he was straining over darkness.  And whose the
+fault?
+
+He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
+beholding himself.  He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
+could not have been handier in using them.  From Alvan to Alvan, they
+signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
+to dust the pride of the works of men.  He was down among them, lower
+than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
+became of monstrous distortion.  O fool!  dolt!  blind ass!  tottering
+idiot!  drunken masquerader!  miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide
+with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde!  Clotilde!
+Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his
+hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble?
+Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday!  There's nothing but your
+fool's face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool!
+Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head!
+What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might
+have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the
+ceremonies!  They laugh!  By Orcus! how they laugh!  The laughter of the
+gods is the lightning of death's irony over mortals.  Can they have a
+finer subject than a giant gone fool?
+
+Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing.  O for
+yesterday!  He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
+groaned.  A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
+having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
+while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
+private dignity in order.  He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
+hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck.  Dignity was cast off;
+he came out naked.  Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the
+friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him,
+were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the
+truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the
+woman, was the ground of his anguish.  Each antecedent of his career had
+been a step of strength and success departed.  The woman was but a
+fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet
+she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself
+once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and
+she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a
+melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.
+
+The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force.  The giant
+in him loved her warmly.  Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
+lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
+eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
+shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,
+swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly
+beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in
+his passion than before this tempest.  A giant going through a giant's
+contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,
+likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was
+great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down
+life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not
+heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for
+the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites.  He was true
+man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to
+pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in
+the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of
+timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,
+to his depths.
+
+We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.
+Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry
+instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
+indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
+harmonies have been heard.  But Love, which purifies and enlarges us,
+and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
+space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that
+the man is a temple fit for the rites.  Out of romances, he is not
+melodiously composed.  And in a giant are various giants to be slain,
+or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader.  It is not
+done by miracle.
+
+As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
+indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
+stedfastness.  His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor
+indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome
+boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and
+she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him
+quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of
+a mutual fitness.  Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of
+his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,
+she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she
+was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his
+physical influence.  Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she
+kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through
+sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it
+was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.
+
+'They are undermining her now--now--now!'
+
+He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
+indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
+his agitation.  Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
+have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
+nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
+faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
+mastery, took her for sand.  Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
+The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman.  But
+how had he come to be guilty of it?  he asked himself again; and, without
+answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
+complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
+Duplicity.  He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
+favour, with another commanding her to break it.  He gathered and drilled
+a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
+letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+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]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4462 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v2,
+by George Meredith
+#68 in our series by George Meredith
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+Title: The Tragic Comedians, v2
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1892
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they
+met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so.  He
+was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly through
+her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers
+during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at
+the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these backflowings
+and gaps in the feelings.  She had grown reconciled to the perturbation
+of his messages, and would have preferred to have him startling and
+thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she welcomed him, and
+feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill of the fit of
+shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that she had reached
+his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical measures to lead
+to their union.  On one subject sure to be raised against him by her
+parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the baroness.
+
+She asked to see a photograph of her.
+
+Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in
+profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman.  The
+eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's drooped
+till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.
+
+'Think of her age,' said Alvan, colouring.  He named a grandmaternal date
+for the year of the baroness's birth.
+
+Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting
+lineaments came to an abrupt finish.
+
+She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still
+eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally.  He could
+not contest the woeful verdict.
+
+'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing.  The baroness was a woman
+fair to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think it
+incredible: she really was once.
+
+Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed.  He
+shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little.  For the first time
+since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was
+likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip.  She sighed again.
+He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.
+
+'Yes--now,' he said, impatiently.
+
+'I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,' said she, sad of voice.
+
+The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to defend
+the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.
+
+Clotilde 'tolled' her naughty head.
+
+'But it is a strong face,' she said, 'a strong face--a strong jaw, by
+Lavater!  You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating
+in her distress.  Now she is old--and you are friends.'
+
+'Friends, yes,' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she
+deserved to be praised for her open mind.
+
+'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath.  The title
+this girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and
+his burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine the
+mood of the giver.  She had positively humbled him so far as with a
+single word to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her
+look at the photograph.  Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the
+man's vanity, he did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a
+misconception injurious in the slightest degree to the sentiments he
+entertained toward the older lady as well as the younger.  'Friends!
+you are right; good friends; only you should know that it is just a
+little--a trifle different.  The fact is, I cannot kill the past, and I
+would not.  It would try me sharply to break the tie connecting us, were
+it possible to break it.  I am bound to her by gratitude.  She is old
+now; and were she twice that age, I should retain my feeling for her.
+You raise your eyes, Clotilde!  Well, when I was much younger I found
+this lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she honoured me with her
+confidence.  Young man though I was, I defended her; I stopped at no
+measure to defend her: against a powerful husband, remember--the most
+unscrupulous of foes, who sought to rob her of every right she possessed.
+And what I did then I again would do.  I was vowed to her interests, to
+protect a woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at trifles, as you
+know; you have read my speech in defence of myself before the court.  By
+my interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I estranged my family
+and made the world my enemy.  I gave my time and money, besides the
+forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably there was an
+arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her, so that the
+baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling herself indebted.
+You will not think that out of the way: men of the world do not.  As for
+matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart as the Poles.'
+
+He spoke hurriedly.  He had said all that could be expected of him.
+
+They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden
+green in the yellow beams.  One of these trees among its well-robed
+fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten.  From the low sweeping
+branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its
+shadow; a vision of blackness.
+
+'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,
+screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and
+if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.
+
+'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan.
+'And now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day.  En avant!
+contre les canons!  A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the
+afternoon.  I shall see you in the evening.  So our separation won't be
+for long this time.  All the auspices are good.  We shall not be rich--
+nor poor.'
+
+Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the
+store by her.
+
+'We don't count it,' said he.  'Not rich, certainly. And you will not
+expect me to make money by my pen.  Above all things I detest the writing
+for money.  Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of
+the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt!  And
+journalism for money is Egyptian bondage.  No slavery is comparable to
+the chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me;
+and I give my self, I do not sell.  I write when I have matter in me and
+in the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'
+
+'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde.  'I would rather
+be in want of common comforts.'
+
+He squeezed her wrist.  They were again in front of the black-draped
+blighted tree.  It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf
+bearing a semblance of livid metal.  They looked at it as having seen it
+before, and passed on.
+
+'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he resumed,
+radiating his full bloom on her.
+
+'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.
+
+To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial
+chuckle.  'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.
+Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all.  Look at
+me.'  He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his
+eagle eyes.  He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,
+expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under the
+glances of a girl.  'Do you take me for one who could be content with the
+part of second?  I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will have
+too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly.  I was not
+fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I.  I carry too
+decisive a weight in the balance to victory.  I have a taste for fruits,
+my fairest!  And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid
+honours.'  He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of
+his eyes.
+
+'"Bride of the Elect of the People!"  is not that as glorious a title,
+think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God's grace on
+his worm-eaten throne?  I win that seat by service, by the dedication of
+this brain to the people's interests.  They have been ground to the dust,
+and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood.  I am the
+soldier of justice against the army of the unjust.  But I claim my
+reward.  If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy.  I will have my
+station.  I win it not only because I serve, but because also I have
+seen, have seen ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten--
+because I am soldier and prophet.  The brain of man is Jove's eagle and
+his lightning on earth--the title to majesty henceforth.  Ah!  my
+fairest; entering the city beside me, and the people shouting around, she
+would not think her choice a bad one?'
+
+Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.
+
+'We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day
+comes,' he continued after a while.  'The day is coming, but we must wait
+for it, work on.  I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a
+head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be
+beneficent.  I set them moving on the lines of the law of things.  I am
+no empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in
+politics.  When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step
+to the realization of it.  One step.  It will be taken in my time, or
+acknowledged later.  I stand for index to the people of the path they
+should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
+not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh!  That is a middle-
+class invention to effect a compromise.  With the people the matter rests
+with their intelligence!  meanwhile my star is bright and shines
+reflected.'
+
+'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
+lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
+ground, but always either up or straight before you.'
+
+'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling.  'Here we are at this
+funereal tree again.  All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
+us perpetually to this tree.  It 's the only dead one here.'
+
+He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
+decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
+small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
+It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.
+
+'Not a single bare spot!  but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
+Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen.  'This is a tree for a
+melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
+a scene with his mistress, or tales of her!  By the way and by the way,
+my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for
+me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below.
+Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered
+women, though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'
+
+He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not
+sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive
+in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.
+The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her
+locks were golden serpents.
+
+'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.
+
+'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered.  'In good time.  You
+understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
+and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first .  .  . !  But her heart is
+quite sound.  Have no fear!  I guarantee it; I know her to the roots.
+She desires my welfare, she does my behests.  If I am bound to her by
+gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me.  The utmost she
+will demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me
+in the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my
+heart; therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'
+
+They left the tree behind them.
+
+'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,
+without looking back.  'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under
+world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has
+looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself.  Hecate and
+Hermes know about it.  Phoebus cannot light it.  That tree stands for
+Death blooming.  We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely
+tree.  Down there!  When do we go?  The shudder in that tree is the air
+exchanging between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it's on
+the border line.  I just felt the creep.  I think you did.  The reason
+is--there is always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of
+chill breeze took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at
+that very moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I
+acknowledged that death could do the trick.  But death, my love, is far
+from us two!'
+
+'Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?' said Clotilde.
+
+'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed.  The baroness was not so easily
+defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared.  'She is the best
+of comrades, best of friends.  She has her faults; may not relish the
+writ announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as true
+as she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you.  That I can
+promise.  My poor Lucie!  She is winter, if you will.  It is not the
+winter of the steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country;
+a fine landscape of winter.  The outlines of her face .  .  .  .  She has
+a great brain.  How much I owe that woman for instruction!  You meet now
+and then men who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are
+the pick of men.  And the choicest women are those who yield not a
+feather of their womanliness for some amount of manlike strength.  And
+she is one; man's brain, woman's heart.  I thought her unique till I
+heard of you.  And how do I stand between you two?  She has the only
+fault you can charge me with; she is before me in time, as I am before
+you.  Shall I spoil you as she spoilt me?  No, no!  Obedience to a boy
+is the recognition of the heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as
+much as I love my love.  I do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour,
+support.  You will not rule me, but you will invigorate, and if you are
+petted, you shall not be spoilt.  Do not expect me to show like that
+undertakerly tree till my years are one hundred.  Even then it will be
+dangerous to repose beneath my branches in the belief that I am sapless
+because I have changed colour.  We Jews have a lusty blood.  We are
+strong of the earth.  We serve you, but you must minister to us.
+Sensual?  We have truly excellent appetites.  And why not?  Heroical too!
+Soldiers, poets, musicians; the Gentile's masters in mental arithmetic--
+keenest of weapons: surpassing him in common sense and capacity for
+brotherhood.  Ay, and in charity; or what stores of vengeance should we
+not have nourished!  Already we have the money-bags.  Soon we shall hold
+the chief offices.  And when the popular election is as unimpeded as the
+coursing of the blood in a healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and
+topmost, for he is pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-
+day communities.  But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of
+the Jew.  I am no champion of a race.  I am for the world, for man!'
+
+Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a
+large following among the people.
+
+He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian.  Yes, if I were
+other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able
+lieutenants.'
+
+'Tell me of your interview with Ironsides,' she said proudly and fondly.
+
+'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, putting
+his lips among the locks.  'Well, we met: he requested it.  We agreed
+that we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately
+have to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could
+compare our plans for governing.  He showed me his hand.  I showed him
+mine.  We played open-handed, like two at whist.  He did not doubt my
+honesty, and I astonished him by taking him quite in earnest.  He has
+dealt with diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old
+Ironer!  I love him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean
+deceit.  He will outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple
+evolution rapidly performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies!
+Then he has them, bagsful of them!  The world will see; and see giant
+meet giant, I suspect.  He and I proposed each of us in the mildest
+manner contrary schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe!  Enough
+that we parted with mutual respect.  He is a fine fellow: and so was my
+friend the Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu.  Napoleon was a fine
+engine:--there is a difference.  Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow!  but he
+and I may cross.  His ideas are not many.  The point to remember is that
+he is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe.
+He has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and
+traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able
+to combine, and the likeliest that he will do.  Good.  We opine that we
+are equal to the same.  He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and
+save him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which
+accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron.  We think the
+more precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes.  But
+such an adversary is not to be underrated.  I do not underrate him: and
+certainly not he me.  Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a
+fluent tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people,
+as knowing them the greater power.  He sees that their knowledge of their
+power must eventually come to them.  In the meantime his party is
+forcible enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at
+present: and he is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical.
+He is curiously simple, not really cynical.  His apparent cynicism is
+sheer irritability.  His contemptuous phrases are directed against
+obstacles: against things, persons, nations that oppose him or cannot
+serve his turn against his king, if his king is restive; but he respects
+his king: against your friends' country, because there is no fixing it to
+a line of policy, and it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that
+country the best in Europe after his own.  He is nearest to contempt in
+his treatment of his dupes and tools, who are dropped out of his mind
+when he has quite squeezed them for his occasion; to be taken up again
+when they are of use to him.  Hence he will have no following.  But let
+me die to-morrow, the party I have created survives.  In him you see the
+dam, in me the stream.  Judge, then, which of them gains the future!--
+admitting that, in the present he may beat me.  He is a Prussian, stoutly
+defined from a German, and yet again a German stoutly defined from our
+borderers: and that completes him.  He has as little the idea of humanity
+as the sword of our Hermann, the cannon-ball of our Frederick.  Observe
+him.  What an eye he has!  I watched it as we were talking: and he has, I
+repeat, imagination; he can project his mind in front of him as far as
+his reasoning on the possible allows: and that eye of his flashes; and
+not only flashes, you see it hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a
+Balearic slinger about to whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is
+hard, and is dead certain of its mark-within his practical compass, as I
+have said.  I see farther, and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a
+dreamer.  In my opinion, when we cross our swords I stand a fair chance
+of not being worsted. We shall: you shrink?  Figuratively, my darling
+have no fear!  Combative as we may be, both of us, we are now grave
+seniors, we have serious business: a party looks to him, my party looks
+to me.  Never need you fear that I shall be at sword or pistol with any
+one.  I will challenge my man, whoever he as that needs a lesson, to
+touch buttons on a waistcoat with the button on the foil, or drill fiver
+and eights in cards at twenty paces: but I will not fight him though he
+offend me, for I am stronger than my temper, and as I do not want to take
+his nip of life, and judge it to be of less value than mine, the
+imperilling of either is an absurdity.'
+
+'Oh!  because I know you are incapable of craven fear,' cried Clotilde,
+answering aloud the question within herself of why she so much admired,
+why she so fondly loved him.  To feel his courage backing his high good
+sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astute self-
+control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible.  It seemed
+to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she saw their
+triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she should
+instantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his Republican
+Princess.  She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue of
+her being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, and
+she thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her on
+that eminence.  Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kings
+can summon through the trumpet!  She could surely pass through the trial
+with her parents that she might step to the place beside him!  She
+pressed his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory.  Was it love?
+It was as lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to.
+
+She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where her
+parents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name the
+hotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive.  'Am I
+not precise as an office clerk?' she said, with a pleasant taste of the
+reality her preciseness pictured.
+
+'Practical as the head of a State department,' said he, in good faith.
+
+'I shall not keep you waiting,' she resumed.
+
+'The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our
+success, my golden crest!'
+
+'Have no misgivings, Sigismund.  You have transformed me.  A spark of you
+is in my blood.  Come.  I shall send word to your hotel when you are to
+appear.  But you will come, you will be there, I know.  I know you so
+entirely.'
+
+'As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when they
+have married him.  At least you ought to know me.  You know that if I
+were to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it
+forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to
+go through during our interlude with papa and mama.'
+
+'I almost wish you would,' said she.  She looked half imploringly, biting
+her lip to correct the peeping wish.
+
+Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave.  Flight and
+defiance are our last resource.  Now that I see you resolved I shun the
+scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be.
+How can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into
+your veins?  The other day on the heights--had you consented then?  Well!
+it would have been very well, but not so well.  We two have a future, and
+are bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for an
+example, if we can.  I take you from your father's house, from your
+mother's arms, from the "God speed" of your friends.  That is how Alvan's
+wife should be presented to the world.'
+
+Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and
+despatched.  To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really
+was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural
+impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that
+language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,
+while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed
+expression of the pretty impulse.  But wiser is it always that the star
+in the ascendant should not address the one waning.  Hardly can a word be
+uttered without grossly wounding.  She would not do it to a younger
+rival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age!  She babbles of a
+friendship: she plays at childish ninny!  The display of her ingenuous
+happiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges.  The
+declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a
+deeper, a longer-tried suffering.  Actually the letter of the rising star
+assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and
+personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt
+also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.
+
+Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high.
+He was too robust, he had been too successful.  Your very successful hero
+regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a
+peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the
+other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their
+sisters.  His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he
+had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of
+their sex.  The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on
+his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he
+said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,
+millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units.  He would have stared
+like any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a
+likeness unto men in their fight with the world.  Women for him were
+objects to be chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like the
+sportsman's business, with keen relish both for the pursuit and the prey,
+and a view of the termination of his pastime.  Their feelings he could
+appreciate during the time when they flew and fell, perhaps a little
+longer; but the change in his own feelings withdrew him from the
+communion of sentiment.  This is the state of men who frequent the
+avenues of success.  At present he was thinking of a wife, and he
+approved the epistle to the baroness cordially.
+
+'I do think it a nice kind of letter, and quite humble enough,' said
+Clotilde.
+
+He agreed, 'Yes, yes: she knows already that this is really serious with
+me.'
+
+So much for the baroness.
+
+Now for their parting.  A parting that is no worse than the turning of a
+page to a final meeting is made light of, but felt.  Reason is all in our
+favour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slip
+between the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though it be
+not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness.  Clotilde
+required reassuring and comforting: 'I am certain you will prevail; you
+must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact,' she sighed
+in a languor: 'only, my people are hard to manage.  I see more clearly
+now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by a sort of
+compact so long as I did nothing decisive.  That I see.  But, then again,
+have I not your spirit in me now?  What has ever resisted you?--Then,
+as I am Alvan's wife, I share his heart with his fortunes, and I do not
+really dread the scenes from anticipating failure, still-the truth is,
+I fear I am three parts an actress, and the fourth feels itself a
+shivering morsel to face reality.  No, I do not really feel it, but press
+my hand, I shall be true--I am so utterly yours: and because I have such
+faith in you.  You never, yet have failed'
+
+'Never: and it is impossible for me to conceive it,' said Alvan
+thoughtfully.
+
+His last word to her on her departure was 'Courage!'  Hers to him was
+conveyed by the fondest of looks.  She had previously said 'To-morrow!'
+to remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, and
+herself that she would not long stand alone.  She did not doubt of her
+courage while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strong
+men of earth.  She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from the
+waving fingers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of his
+tricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her.  All the rest to
+come was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for a
+plan of action.  Who can hold her back when a woman is decided to move?
+Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and
+the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the same
+elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel
+daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational.  That
+is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and inflamed
+to fly the barriers intercepting.  He fancied he had achieved it.  Alvan
+thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents.  The consolatory
+sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in the
+contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused by those
+people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a wife after
+the fashion of orderly citizens.  It would be on their heads!  But why
+vision mischance?  An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends,
+that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection
+without casting a shadow.  Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry!
+
+No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was
+she.  Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed
+fortieth year!  Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?
+Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it would
+be sunshine in the subterranean sphere.  The very thinking of her
+dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting
+phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come.'
+
+To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a
+celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of
+mortal life in the highest.  He wondered how it was that he could have
+waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and he
+just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the minutes,
+much as she did, only more fierily.  The ceaseless warfare called
+politics must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of another
+kind.  He was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a panorama
+of illimitable felicity.  And there were certain things he must overcome
+before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love of
+contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his
+whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking
+it either.  There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the
+battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the big artillery.
+
+Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of the
+trains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; he
+looked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swiss law;
+considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was a lawyer
+bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as
+pleading eloquently.  The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it
+wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses,
+turgid enough, even to his own judgement.  Poets would have failed at
+such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured.  He was a wild
+man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the
+ranks of the soberly blissful.  These he could imagine that he
+complimented by the wish.  Then why should he doubt of his fortune?
+He did not.
+
+The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey.  Late
+in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's.  A letter
+was handed to him.  His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for
+her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse.  'And now
+my turn!' said he, not overjoyously.  The words Jew and demagogue and
+baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.
+But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and
+champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal
+and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were
+to know him and change their tone.
+
+As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at
+the answer to a tap.  He started; his face was a shield's welcome to the
+birdlike applicant for admission.  Clotilde stood hesitating.
+
+He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, and
+drew her in.
+
+'Alvan, I have come.'
+
+She was like a bird in his hands, palpitating to extinction.
+
+He bent over her: 'What has happened?'
+
+Trembling, and very pale, hard in her throat she said, 'The worst.'
+
+'You have spoken to them both subsequent to this?' he shook the letter.
+
+'It is hopeless.'
+
+'Both to father and mother?'
+
+'Both.  They will not hear your name; they will not hear me speak.  I
+repeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them.  They hate--hate
+you, hate me for thinking of you.  I had no choice; I wrote at once and
+followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want of breath,
+not want of courage.  I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all I can do.
+
+She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids.
+
+But he said nothing.  She looked up at him.  Her strained pale eyes
+provoked a closer embrace.
+
+'This would be the home for you if we were flying,' said he, glancing
+round at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, 'Tell me what there
+is to be told.'
+
+'Alvan, I have; that is all.  They will not listen; they loathe Oh! what
+possesses them!'
+
+'They have not met me yet!'
+
+'They will not, will not ever--no!'
+
+'They must.'
+
+'They refuse.  Their child, for daring to say she loves you, is detested.
+Take me--take me away!'
+
+'Run?--facing the enemy?' His countenance was the fiery laugh of a
+thirster for strife.  'They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is made
+of!'
+
+Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion.  'I found
+them celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the Austrian Count
+Walburg; I thought it favourable for us.  I spoke of you to my mother.
+Oh, that scene!  What she said I cannot recollect: it was a hiss.  Then
+my father.  Your name changed his features and his voice.  They treated
+me as impure for mentioning it.  You must have deadly enemies.
+I was unable to recognize either father or mother--they have become
+transformed.  But you see I am here.  Courage!  you said; and I
+determined I would show it, and be worthy of you.  But I am pursued,
+I am sure.  My father is powerful in this place; we shall barely have
+time to escape.'
+
+Alvan's resolution was taken.
+
+'Some friend--a lady living in the city here--name her, quick!--one you
+can trust,' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of
+drillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders.  'Yes, you have shown
+courage.  Now it must be submission to me.  You shall be no runaway
+bride, but honoured at the altar.  Out of this hotel is the first point.
+You know some such lady?'
+
+Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest.  She could have prophesied
+certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so
+sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost
+in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a
+drawing back.  She could not get the word or even the look to encounter
+his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where they
+were together alone.  She could not refuse the protection he offered in a
+person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of where they
+were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of
+entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged to
+it.  She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a
+Madame Emerly, living near the hotel.  Her heart sank like a stone.
+'It is for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his
+generosity in temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph.
+'But my wife shall not be snatched by a thief in the night.  Are you not
+my wife--my golden bride?  And you may give me this pledge of it, as if
+the vows had just been uttered .  .  .  and still I resign you till we
+speak the vows.  It shall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her
+glory, that she ran to her nuptials through rat-passages.'
+
+His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her.  She was cooled by her
+despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay, but that
+centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her enthusiasm,
+thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they were united,
+her step was irrevocable.  Her having entered the hotel, her being in
+this room, certified to that.  It seemed to her while she was waiting for
+the carriage he had ordered that she was already half a wife.  She was
+not conscious of a blush.  The sprite in the young woman's mind whispered
+of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it.  And undoubtedly,
+contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart of fire.  An
+impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for his chivalrousness
+had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing she praised.
+Otherwise she was not ill at ease.  Alvan summoned his gaiety, all his
+homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quitting the room
+she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomy foreboding.
+A maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling of devotion to
+her, ran up the steps of the hotel.  Her tale was, that the General had
+roused the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heard whither
+Clotilde was going.
+
+Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly's drawing-room
+relating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, assisted by
+the lover whom she had introduced.  Her hostess promised shelter and
+exhibited sympathy.  The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knew
+Alvan by reputation.  He was insurrectionally notorious in morals and
+menacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowing tongue,
+and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love and
+deference toward her family, won her personally.  She promised the best
+help she could give them.  They were certainly in a romantic situation,
+such as few women could see and decline their aid to the lovers.
+
+Madame Emerly proved at least her sincerity before many minutes had
+passed.
+
+Chancing to look out into the street, she saw Clotilde's mother and her
+betrothed sister stepping up to the house.  What was to be done?  And was
+the visit accidental?  She announced it, and Clotilde cried out, but
+Alvan cried louder: 'Heaven-directed!  and so, let me see her and speak
+to her--nothing could be better.'
+
+Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head
+premonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer,
+if I am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.'
+
+'Yes!  yes!' Clotilde replied: 'Oh!  do that.'
+
+She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming
+voice.
+
+'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity.  'Plain-dealing; no
+subterfuge!  Begin with foul falsehood?  No.  I would not have you
+burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our
+account.  And when it would be bad policy?  .  .  .  Oh, no, worse than
+the sin! as the honest cynic says.  We will go down to Madame von
+Rudiger, and she shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her
+daughter's hand.'
+
+Clotilde rocked in an agony.  Her friend was troubled.  Both ladies knew
+what there would be to encounter better than he.  But the man, strong in
+his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.
+
+Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame
+Emerly's reception room.  She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me.'
+
+'Is this forsaking?'  He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone
+which supplies the answer.
+
+'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'
+
+He kissed her fingers.  'Trust to me.'
+
+She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter
+leaning on him.
+
+She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as
+her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a
+warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning
+into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly
+degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a
+part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.
+
+Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain
+tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the spirit
+to be a melting prize of the winner.
+
+Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering
+thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring
+their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius of
+Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in
+whatsoever person.  We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be
+prey, we lose the soul of election.
+
+Mark her as she proceeds.  For should her hero fail, and she be suffering
+through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will
+seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable
+weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength.  And it will
+seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just
+expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it was
+only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of
+espousing.  The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled
+when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of
+putting themselves in the right to themselves.  The love she bore him,
+because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was
+ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason
+(where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it
+seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict,
+insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked.  He roused the
+tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest
+reason, close as it ever is to the craven's heart in its hour of trial,
+whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by the swollen
+conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize.  That
+frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions.  It spies the spot
+of truth.  Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then, so
+unerring is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform
+ourselves into cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple
+over the Sphinx of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious
+creature in an epigram.  But there was as much more in Alvan than any
+faint-hearted thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more
+in the world than the epigrams aimed at it contain.
+
+'Courage!' said he: and she tremblingly: 'Be careful!' And then they were
+in the presence of her mother and sister.
+
+Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure.  Her
+mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a
+woman's combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.
+
+'Away with that man!  I will not suffer him near me,' she cried.
+
+Alvan advanced to her: 'Tell me, madame, in God's name, what you have
+against me.'
+
+She swung her back on him.  'Go, sir!  my husband will know how to deal
+with one like you.  Out of my sight, I say!'
+
+The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde.  She went up to
+him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal,
+said: 'Let us go: come.  I will not bear to hear you so spoken to.  No
+one shall treat you like that when I am near.'
+
+She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experience
+of the commencement.  He did but clasp her hand, assuring the Frau von
+Rudiger that no word of hers could irritate him.  'Nothing can make me
+forget that you are Clotilde's mother.  You are the mother of the lady I
+love, and may say what you will to me, madame.  I bear it.'
+
+'A man spotted with every iniquity the world abhors, and I am to see him
+holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable!  And because
+there is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talk
+of his foul passion for my daughter.  I repeat: that which you have to do
+is to go.  My ears are shut.  You can annoy, you can insult, you cannot
+move me.  Go.'  She stamped: her aspect spat.
+
+Alvan bowed.  Under perfect self-command, he said: 'I will go at once to
+Clotilde's father.  I may hope, that with a reasonable man I shall
+speedily come to an understanding.'
+
+She retorted: 'Enter his house, and he will have you driven out by his
+lacqueys.'
+
+'Hardly: I am not of those men who are driven from houses,' Alvan said,
+smiling.  'But, madame, I will act on your warning, and spare her father,
+for all sakes, the attempt; seeing he does not yet know whom he deals
+with.  I will write to him.'
+
+'Letters from you will be flung back unopened.
+
+'It may, of course, be possible to destroy even my patience, madame.'
+
+'Mine, sir, is at an end.'
+
+'You reduce us to rely on ourselves; it is the sole alternative.'
+
+'You have not waited for that,' rejoined Frau von Rudiger.  'You have
+already destroyed my daughter's reputation by inducing her to leave her
+father's house and hesitate to return.  Oh! you are known.  You are known
+for your dealings with women as well as men.  We know you.  We have, we
+pray to God, little more to learn of you.  You!  ah--thief!'
+
+'Thief!'  Alvan's voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it.  She
+had up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern that
+she had struck the wound in his history; but he was terrible to look at,
+so she made the charge supportable by saying:
+
+'You have stolen my child from me!'
+
+Clotilde raised her throat, shrewish in excitement.  'False!  He did not.
+I went to him of my own will, to run from your heartlessness, mother--
+that I call mother!--and be out of hearing of my father's curses and
+threats.  Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to him than to
+you.  And never will I return to you.  You have killed my love; I am this
+man's own because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, as his
+partner in life for all it may give!--as his wife!  Trample on him, you
+trample on me.  Make black brows at your child for choosing the man, of
+all men alive, to worship and follow through the world.  I do.  I am his.
+I glory in him.'
+
+Her gaze on Alvan said: 'Now!' Was she not worthy of him now?  And would
+they not go forth together now?  Oh!  now!
+
+Her gaze was met by nothing like the brilliant counterpart she merited.
+It was as if she had offered her beauty to a glass, and found a
+reflection in dull metal.  He smiled calmly from her to her mother.  He
+said:
+
+'You accuse me of stealing your child, madame.  You shall acknowledge
+that you have wronged me.  Clotilde, my Clotilde!  may I count on you to
+do all and everything for me?  Is there any sacrifice I could ask that
+would be too hard for you?  Will you at one sign from me go or do as I
+request you?'
+
+She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: 'I
+will,' but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-acting
+her part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension of
+the part he was for playing to the same audience.  'Yes, I will do all,
+all that you command.  I am yours.  I will go with you.  Bid me do
+whatever you can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I have
+hitherto called mine:--not that!'
+
+'And that is what I have to request of you,' said he, with his calm smile
+brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable to her.
+'And this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are you
+prepared to do it?  Will you?'
+
+She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against her
+imploring eyes.  'If you can ask me--if you can positively wish it--yes,'
+she said.  'But think of what you are doing.  Oh!  Alvan, not back to
+them!  Think!'
+
+He smiled insufferably.  He was bent on winning a parent-blest bride,
+an unimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of the
+world's polished silver vessels.
+
+'Think that you are doing this for me!' said he.  'It is for my sake.
+And now, madame, I give you back your daughter.  You see she is mine to
+give, she obeys me, and I--though it can be only for a short time--give
+her back to you.  She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do not
+forget that.  And so, madame, I have the honour,' he bowed profoundly.
+
+He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm.  'What you have done
+in obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten.  Never can
+I sufficiently thank you.  I know how much it has cost you.  But here is
+the end of your trials.  All the rest is now my task.  Rely on me with
+your whole heart.  Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding.
+Be sure of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of
+injustice I shall be beside you to take you to myself.  Be sure of that,
+and be not unhappy.  They shall not keep you from me for long.  Submit a
+short while to the will of your parents: mine you will find the stronger.
+Resolve it in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for it is
+impossible to me to waver.  Consider me as the one fixed light in your
+world, and look to me.  Soon, then!  Have patience, be true, and we are
+one!'
+
+He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand.  The horribly empty
+sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuous
+face.
+
+His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone.  She seemed
+a dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering
+himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he
+could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the
+brief vision of her unfitness to be left.  The compressed energy of the
+man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims
+of family ties and duties, intoxicated him.  He thought but of the
+present achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad
+reputation among these people, from whom he was about to lead forth a
+daughter for Alvan's wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his
+exhibition of generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he
+delivered his retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--that the
+worst was over; he had to deal no more with silly women: now for
+Clotilde's father!  Women were privileged to oppose their senselessness
+to the divine fire: men could not retreat behind such defences; they must
+meet him on the common ground of men, where this constant battler had
+never yet encountered a reverse.
+
+Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to
+reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the
+diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;
+and the lady of the house.  He was going--he could actually go and leave
+her!  She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she
+did so as much as she had force to make it visible.  She saw him smiling
+incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy.
+She could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she
+took the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.
+
+'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had
+the choice of you and he abjured you.  He has cast you off!'
+
+She phrased it in speech to herself.  It was incredible, but it was
+clear: he had gone.
+
+The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.
+
+'He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily to
+renounce you.'
+
+She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother
+heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at
+the window.
+
+The craven's first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for
+light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered of
+quietness if she submitted.
+
+And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been
+guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to him,
+the which may be love's glory when marriage crowns it.  By his rejecting
+her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but a castaway.
+It was not natural that he should leave her; 'not natural in him to act
+his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at the mercy of
+those who might pick her up.  She was, in her humiliation and dread, all
+of the moment, she could see to no distance; and judging of him, feeling
+for herself, within that contracted circle of sensation--sure, from her
+knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done unwisely--she became swayed
+about like a castaway in soul, until her distinguishing of his mad
+recklessness in the challenge of a power greater than his own grew
+present with her as his personal cruelty to the woman who had flung off
+everything, flung herself on the tempestuous deeps, on his behalf.  And
+here she was, left to float or founder!  Alvan had gone.  The man rageing
+over the room, abusing her 'infamous lover, the dirty Jew, the notorious
+thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,' etc., etc., frightful epithets, not to be
+transcribed--was her father.  He had come, she knew not how.  Alvan had
+tossed her to him.
+
+Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady's heart by the
+brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the
+creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel,
+she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted.  Her
+cry to him: 'If you had been wiser, this would not have been!' will sink
+to the inward meditation: 'If he had been truer!'--and though she does
+not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is
+already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun.  They
+are not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of them
+makes it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.
+
+Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail small
+boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious outbreak
+she was exposed to.  She might so far have exonerated him had she been
+able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him in blind
+reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising material
+rigours.  After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for a young
+woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched through
+the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by the hair-
+Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a huge
+forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his
+daughter's flight to the Jew.  He seemed to have a grim indifference to
+exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a
+satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or three
+maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly managing
+them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely cracking a
+whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time by hunting her
+as she likes to run.  Police were round his house.  The General chattered
+and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies of that Jew--the
+things that Jew would attempt.  He dragged her indoors, muttering of his
+policy in treating her at last to a wholesome despotism.
+
+This was the medicine for her--he knew her!  Whether he did or not, he
+knew the potency of his physic.  He knew that osiers can be made to bend.
+With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the window-
+shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he left her
+there and roared across the household that any one holding communication
+with the prisoner should be shot like a dog.  This was a manifestation of
+power in a form more convincing than the orator's.
+
+She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
+abandoned by her lover.  She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
+with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
+misfortune, that reality had come.  The monster had hold of her.  She was
+isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive.  She had nothing but our natural
+obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
+to the semblance of it only.  'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
+her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
+spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
+themselves to the sound of it.  He listened and named his time for
+returning.  The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about
+forty hours.  She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father
+should be so fiercely excited against this man!  Can he have reasons I
+have not heard of?'  Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the
+question in her quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement
+to kiss the whip.  The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew.
+She saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a
+sinister appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as
+well as to Alvan's fatal decision.  Her misery was traceable to his
+conduct and his judgement--both bad.  And yet all this while he might be
+working to release her, near upon rescuing!  She swung round to the side
+of her lover against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as
+well as she could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to
+appear.  She spent her heart on it.  A note to her friend, the English
+lady, protested her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a
+frozen resignation to the loss of him--all around her was so dark!  By-
+and-by there was a scratching at her door.  The maid whom she trusted
+brought her news of Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and mistress
+knelt.  Hope flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers were
+exchanged through the partition.
+
+'Where is he?'
+
+'Gone.'
+
+'But where?'
+
+'He has left the city.'
+
+Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one for
+Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking
+practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an
+address.  She did not ask herself whether the maid's information was
+honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.
+
+She wept through the night.  It was one of those nights of the torrents
+of tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there be
+ought of that besides the breathing structure.  The reason why she wept
+with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity
+for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the
+love whereby she was tormented.  They do not weep thus who have a heart
+for the struggle.  In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no
+longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other words,
+unable any further to contend.
+
+Reality was too strong!  This morning her sisters came to her room
+imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their
+prospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sister
+Lotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan's name was infamous
+in society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemned
+to seclusion.  A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set her
+tears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could he
+hold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jew
+democrat?  He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with his
+brother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wrongly
+Alvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all,
+perhaps to her father's military and diplomatic career principally: the
+head of their house would be ruined.  She was compelled to weep again by
+having no other reply.  The tears were now mixed drops of pity for her
+absent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when she
+shed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as many
+bosoms drained of self-pity will become.
+
+Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and had
+a languid willingness to gain outward comfort.  To be caressed a little
+by her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after her
+heavy scourging.  She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them
+to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made
+them seem a soft reminder of what life had been.  Alvan had gone.  Her
+natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire
+relinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber.  He had gone; he had
+committed an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain
+provoking, that was too severe for him: he was not the lover he fancied
+himself, or not the lord of men she had fancied him.  Her excessive
+misery would not suffer a picture of him, not one clear recollection of
+him, to stand before her.  He who should have been at hand, had gone, and
+she was fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being abandoned, her blank
+night of imagination felt that there was nothing left for her save to
+fall upon those nearest.
+
+She gave her submission to her mother.  In her mind, during the last
+wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her
+cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: 'He may come, and I am his
+if he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people.'  He had taught her to
+rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting
+herself loose from him.  In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to
+believe if the saint will appear.  However, she submitted.  Then there
+was joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of
+the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath.  He
+proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing
+his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and
+was on a strange and tangled one.  The sense of power in him was leonine
+enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did
+that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.
+They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be
+acting his part, brilliant though it was.  He crammed his energy into his
+idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously.  Before the world,
+it would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world
+acclaiming him:
+
+'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law,
+from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old
+lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman!  Alvan, the republican, is
+eminently a citizen.  Consider his past life by that test of his
+character.'
+
+He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,
+through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly
+slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to
+be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower.  Lower, of course,
+the multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they
+have in exchange for it is not an independent one.  Ceasing to be a
+social rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he
+passed under the bondage of that position.
+
+Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be
+trusted now.  She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society,
+and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.
+The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger was a man of
+the world.  An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to him--
+now, at least.  And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride of
+his house.  'A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall in
+good time be cause for some parental gratification.'
+
+The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of
+Clotilde.  He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another
+intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs.  These gentlemen brought
+no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to extract
+a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of
+course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official
+influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the
+proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary
+and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his
+pretensions to the hand of the lady.
+
+He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of
+his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it
+yet, being too anxious to sign the peace.  He felt as it were a blow
+startling him from sleep.  His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
+polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
+between man and man.  The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
+indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
+such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history.  He could not
+raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied
+contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow
+both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their
+courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.
+
+A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
+admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing.  The
+bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.
+
+Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance.  The fate of the noble Genoese
+conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
+boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
+ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to
+lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
+readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
+was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of
+the powers fitting him for battle.  A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
+career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it!  What
+was this girl in a life like his?  But, oh!  the question was no sooner
+asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
+the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,
+confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her.
+Why had he done it?  Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely
+inspired.  She warned him against the step.  But he, proud of his
+armoury, went his way.  He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed
+Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a
+minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy
+of the night.
+
+He was only calmer when morning came.  Night has little mercy for the
+self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,
+it has none.  The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon
+that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
+opposing him.  He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
+petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
+the position it explained.  Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
+revived him as they had always revived and fortified.  But here was a
+stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
+chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms.  By
+shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
+reduced him to hesitation.  And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;
+his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole
+quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of
+one for a mark.
+
+These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever
+he drew from his Fiesco bed.  Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so
+uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
+frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
+ourselves like madmen.  The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
+will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
+will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
+them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
+perceptibly plain matter.  The fitful colour is the fever.  He must win
+her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly!  She was
+his--she was torn from him!  She would come at his bidding--she would
+cower to her tyrants!  The thought of her was life and death in his
+frame, bright heaven and the abyss.  At one beat of the heart she swam to
+his arms, at another he was straining over darkness.  And whose the
+fault?
+
+He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
+beholding himself.  He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
+could not have been handier in using them.  From Alvan to Alvan, they
+signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
+to dust the pride of the works of men.  He was down among them, lower
+than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
+became of monstrous distortion.  O fool!  dolt!  blind ass!  tottering
+idiot!  drunken masquerader!  miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide
+with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde!  Clotilde!
+Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his
+hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble?
+Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday!  There's nothing but your
+fool's face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool!
+Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head!
+What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might
+have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the
+ceremonies!  They laugh!  By Orcus! how they laugh!  The laughter of the
+gods is the lightning of death's irony over mortals.  Can they have a
+finer subject than a giant gone fool?
+
+Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing.  O for
+yesterday!  He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
+groaned.  A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
+having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
+while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
+private dignity in order.  He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
+hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck.  Dignity was cast off;
+he came out naked.  Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the
+friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him,
+were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the
+truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the
+woman, was the ground of his anguish.  Each antecedent of his career had
+been a step of strength and success departed.  The woman was but a
+fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet
+she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself
+once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and
+she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a
+melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.
+
+The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force.  The giant
+in him loved her warmly.  Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
+lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
+eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
+shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,
+swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly
+beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in
+his passion than before this tempest.  A giant going through a giant's
+contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,
+likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was
+great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down
+life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not
+heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for
+the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites.  He was true
+man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to
+pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in
+the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of
+timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,
+to his depths.
+
+We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.
+Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry
+instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
+indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
+harmonies have been heard.  But Love, which purifies and enlarges us,
+and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
+space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that
+the man is a temple fit for the rites.  Out of romances, he is not
+melodiously composed.  And in a giant are various giants to be slain,
+or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader.  It is not
+done by miracle.
+
+As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
+indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
+stedfastness.  His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor
+indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome
+boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and
+she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him
+quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of
+a mutual fitness.  Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of
+his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,
+she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she
+was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his
+physical influence.  Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she
+kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through
+sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it
+was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.
+
+'They are undermining her now--now--now!'
+
+He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
+indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
+his agitation.  Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
+have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
+nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
+faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
+mastery, took her for sand.  Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
+The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman.  But
+how had he come to be guilty of it?  he asked himself again; and, without
+answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
+complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
+Duplicity.  He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
+favour, with another commanding her to break it.  He gathered and drilled
+a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
+letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+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]
+
+
+
+
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+
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