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+Project Gutenberg's The Tragic Comedians, Complete, by George Meredith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Tragic Comedians, Complete
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Last Updated: March 7, 2009
+Release Date: October 13, 2006 [EBook #4464]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1892
+
+
+
+BOOK 1.
+
+The word 'fantastical' is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an
+utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem
+an appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter
+distasteful to those expository pens. Upon examination, claimants to the
+epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,
+Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost. Wherever she can
+get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically. As
+for that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and
+the angry captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no less
+completely than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant.
+
+Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen
+shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of
+study.
+
+The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under
+this word as under their banner and motto. Their acts are incredible:
+they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse
+historical couples upon our planet. Yet they do belong to history, they
+breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them is
+written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was
+of a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern
+brain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create
+them, to set it spinning.
+
+A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil. He was the
+leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
+hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
+in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell. And why this
+man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved
+him have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have
+to study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask if
+it was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters into
+the systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place
+of abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
+passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes
+of one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature
+out of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story
+tells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is
+there anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents
+could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the
+comic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are
+real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world
+by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine
+events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read
+us no such furrowing lesson in life.
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
+pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
+web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
+dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in
+her seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn
+a lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour,
+eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her
+native land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime
+counting among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable,
+though sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known
+as aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the
+contrary very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for
+the imbibing of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming
+countenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her
+choice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing
+instantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of
+pastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little
+so is the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object
+of the worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for
+a nod. But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to
+taste to try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled to
+deliver verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that. And
+as it happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste
+will frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the
+young coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to
+escape drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple
+blocks or limp festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a
+knowledge of her sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.
+The more imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future
+days, the more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.
+
+Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
+the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites. She
+was not under a French mother's rigid supervision. In France the mother
+resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that
+unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory. Vigilant
+foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately
+comprehended. Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and the
+young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what
+they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that
+the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world's elect,
+getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little
+dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin,
+but they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had
+the world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is common during
+youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of
+wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from
+the calculations on behalf of her girl.
+
+Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
+Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar
+trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the
+Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at
+all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating
+threads. A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang
+from his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the
+arch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a
+while. The music had seized him. He snatched bow and fiddle from one
+of the ring, and with a few strokes kindled their faces. Then seating
+himself, on a bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the
+strings and flung up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous
+notes when Clotilde and her cavalier, and other couples of the party,
+came nigh; for he was on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved
+it too well to suffer intruders to break the flow, or to think of them.
+They were close by when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of
+a fiery tribe) to its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and
+jumped back to his carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy,
+lank-locked, leather-hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and
+skin of burnished walnut made him look an offshoot, but one of the
+celestial branch.
+
+He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he was
+paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von
+Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and
+also that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet. In
+those very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko
+had recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could
+have staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her. Adieu to Count
+Constantine. Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to
+suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight
+from her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant
+which sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness. She struck,
+like fate, one blow. She discovered that the prince, in addition to his
+beauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love
+with goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she set
+her face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in
+goodness. And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was to
+subdue her. Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile
+infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero who
+would wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound? Siegfried could
+not be dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms. She caught a
+glorious image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed
+her that she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for
+a famous conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps
+unexampled, force of character. Her idea of a spiritual superiority that
+could soar over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad because
+of his vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her of
+deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men: the best, that is,
+in the woman's view of us--the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord
+of earth and air.
+
+One who will dominate me, she thought.
+
+Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has
+brought her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she
+persuades the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as
+her pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her
+parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid's
+presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.
+Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,
+disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his
+vehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of the
+beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through
+the conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Her
+brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temper
+of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of
+politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know
+that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused
+by the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar
+to history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state
+paralyzes his wrath.
+
+Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and
+it was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
+behaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
+because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and
+tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the
+bold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned original of
+her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,
+she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to
+our loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied
+Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion. She to him was
+what she sought for in another. As much as she pitied herself for not
+lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the
+woman, so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm
+affection, not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being.
+For she could not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing
+of the object we yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen.
+Dressed, to delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care she
+bestowed on her dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer:
+so she pleased the prince to be pleasing to her soul's lord, and this,
+owing to an appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to
+her thinking guiltily. We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how
+is he to declare his eagleship save by breaking through our mean
+conventional systems, tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth
+of vulgar ordinances? Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the
+knots it tied and untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was an
+interfusion of philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded.
+She tried hard, but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's
+exhibition of flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded
+woman. Further thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised
+the complication, yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest
+himself legitimately in a dull modern world. The rescuing her from
+death would be a poor imitation of worn-out heroes. His publication of a
+trumpeting book fell appallingly flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantry
+done as an officer in war (defending his country too) distinguished the
+soldier, but failed to add the eagle feather to the man. She had a mind
+of considerable soaring scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon,
+and declined the position of his empress. The man must be a gentleman.
+Poets, princes, warriors, potentates, marched before her speculative
+fancy unselected.
+
+So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not
+without exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn
+from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so
+fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the
+right one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round
+Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her
+fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much
+solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.
+Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice,
+the living will retain the colours of the ideal. We have it on record
+that he may seem an eagle.
+
+'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her country
+said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said
+it musingly.
+
+He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic.
+She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
+universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an
+envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the
+choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she
+dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her
+before. She smiled musingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+'Who is the man they call Alvan?' She put the question at the first
+opportunity to an aunt of hers.
+
+Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was
+comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.
+
+'Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a
+creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a
+Jew!'
+
+Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. 'Is he clever?'
+
+'He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the
+Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he
+is.'
+
+'But is he clever?'
+
+'Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. You
+could not have been curious about a worse one.'
+
+'Politically, you mean.'
+
+'Of course I do.'
+
+The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that
+station.
+
+The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon
+him. Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled
+Alvan's. He being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her
+wildest, which was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she
+being by no means a furious creature, though very original, she could
+not meditate on him without softening the outlines given him by report;
+all because of the likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had
+knowingly been taken for furious by very foolish people, she settled
+it that Alvan was also a victim of the prejudices he scorned. It had
+pleased her at times to scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous
+weight she brought on herself by the indulgence. She drew on her
+recollections of the Satanic in her bosom when so situated, and never
+having admired herself more ardently than when wearing that aspect, she
+would have admired the man who had won the frightful title in public,
+except for one thing--he was a Jew.
+
+The Jew was to Clotilde as flesh of swine to the Jew. Her parents had
+the same abhorrence of Jewry. One of the favourite similes of the family
+for whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew:
+and it was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was in
+the veins of the latest generation and might have been traced on the
+maternal side.
+
+Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowards
+is the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolent
+impudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurance
+repulsive. She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan. Luckily for the
+gentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meet
+him again in Italy.
+
+She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; she
+summoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish,
+still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practice
+of the art she could at any time blow up a company--scatter mature and
+seasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give our
+stout sex a shaking.
+
+Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and falling
+into disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancient
+lady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where the
+brain of her race is located. There it occurred that a dashing officer
+of social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, for
+a comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: 'I
+see you know Alvan.'
+
+Alvan once more.
+
+'Indeed I do not,' she said, for she was addressing an officer high
+above Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she was
+almost past contradiction of the charge.
+
+'Surely you must,' said he; 'where is the lady who could talk and think
+as you do without knowing Alvan and sharing his views!'
+
+Clotilde was both startled and nettled.
+
+'But I do not know him at all; I have never met him, never seen him.
+I am unlikely to meet the kind of person,' she protested; and she was
+amazed yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle,
+and a dashing officer, rejoin: 'Come, come, let us be honest. That is
+all very well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan,
+but we two can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love
+the man.'
+
+'Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a
+total stranger to me,' she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different
+illumination.
+
+'Actually?'
+
+'In honour.'
+
+'You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?'
+
+'Never. I have heard his name, that is all.'
+
+'Then,' the officer's voice was earnest, 'I pity him, and you no less,
+while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another. Those
+ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heard
+him use them. He has just the same original views of society and history
+as yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike... you talk
+alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous?
+You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius," and
+more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not
+know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared
+to have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the
+greater sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a
+pretty woman's "bite." Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper
+at Alvan's table the other night, the talk happened to be of a
+modern Caesar, which led to the real one, and from him to "Plutarch's
+Pompeius," as Alvan called him; and then he said of him what you have
+just said, absolutely the same down to the allusion to the bite. I
+assure you. And you have numbers of little phrases in common: you are
+partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those who cannot fly: that is
+Alvan's. I could multiply them if I could remember; they struck me as
+you spoke.'
+
+'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.
+
+'Or he,' said Count Kollin.
+
+It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in
+the air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics
+and pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch
+and give out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was,
+original to them. They were not members of a country where literature is
+confined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field
+(part lawn, part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in
+sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in
+common, 'Plutarch's Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some
+professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of
+Chaeroneia. The dainty savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions,
+evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with
+others. And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she
+had often wished that Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking
+of him) had been endowed with the beauty of his rival: one or two of
+Plutarch's touches upon the earlier history of Pompeius had netted her
+fancy, faintly (your generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her
+blood; she liked the man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she
+would have preferred him femininely. His name was not written Pompey to
+her, as in English, to sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befitting
+great and lamentable fortunes, which the young lady declined to share
+solely because of her attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render
+unto the victor the sunflower's homage. She rendered it as a slave: the
+splendid man beloved to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her
+natural choice.
+
+Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew. Still a Jew
+of whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of
+the exceptional she dreamed. He might have the head of a Caesar. She
+imagined a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but
+bright to the eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy,
+encrusted, unkempt: the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf. Her
+hungry inquiries in a city where Alvan was well known, brought her full
+information of one who enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the
+influence of his political leadership; but no description of his aspect
+accompanied it, for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about the
+city, none thought of describing him, and she did not push that question
+because she had sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the more
+she heard of his genius, to keep him repulsive. It appeared that his
+bravery was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it
+had been given in the city not long since. He had her ideas, and he won
+multitudes with them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he
+was learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow
+of rhetoric. She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying
+on her intuition to tell her more than we get from books, and on her
+sweet impudence for a richer original strain. She began to appreciate
+now a reputation for profound acquirements. Learned professors of
+jurisprudence and history were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way as
+Count Kollin. She heard things related of Alvan by the underbreath. That
+circle below her own, the literary and artistic, idolized him; his
+talk, his classic breakfasts and suppers, his undisguised ambition,
+his indomitable energy, his dauntlessness and sway over her sex,
+were subjects of eulogy all round her; and she heard of an enamoured
+baroness. No one blamed Alvan. He had shown his chivalrous valour
+in defending her. The baroness was not a young woman, and she was a
+hardbound Blue. She had been the first to discover the prodigy, and had
+pruned, corrected, and published him; he was one of her political works,
+promising to be the most successful. An old affair apparently; but
+the association of a woman's name with Alvan's, albeit the name of a
+veteran, roused the girl's curiosity, leading her to think his mental
+and magnetic powers must be of the very highest, considering his
+physical repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to yield him such extreme
+devotion. She commissioned her princely serving-man, who had followed
+and was never far away from her, to obtain precise intelligence of this
+notorious Alvan.
+
+Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the
+rumours about Alvan and the baroness. But why should his lady trouble
+herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be
+supposed she would meet by accident? He asked her this. Clotilde said
+it was common curiosity. She read him a short lecture on the dismal
+narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an
+interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where
+ideas were current and speech was wine. The prince nodded; if she had
+these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared
+them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time
+that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far
+removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link;
+he was capable of thinking all that came to him from her a
+blessing--shocks, wounds and disruptions. He did not add largely to her
+stock of items, nor did he fetch new colours. The telegraph wire was
+his model of style. He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus,
+standing for sign of the beauty and vacuity of their world: and how
+dismally narrow that world was, she felt with renewed astonishment at
+every dive out of her gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; so
+that she was ready to scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had,
+when not submitting to the smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco
+smoke--the familiar incense of those homes where speech was wine.
+
+At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city
+with him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate
+remarks--things homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she was
+ever to meet this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse
+of all others. She desired to meet him for comparison's sake, and to
+criticize a popular hero. It was inconceivable that any one popular
+could approach her standard, but she was curious; flame played about
+him; she had some expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by
+the recent subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and
+some feeling of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her
+to be rid of her delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on
+our earth, that she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps
+compliant, and so please her parents, be good and dull, and please
+everybody, and adieu to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the
+beasts!...
+
+Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she
+liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in
+supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: 'Such a breakfast, my dear!' The
+costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts
+of the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it? Never in
+that lady's recollection, or her husband's either, she exclaimed. And
+where was the breakfast? Why, at Alvan's, to be sure; where else could
+such a breakfast be?
+
+'And you know Alvan!' cried Clotilde, catching excitement from the
+lady's flush.
+
+'Alvan is one of my husband's closest friends'
+
+Clotilde put on the playful frenzy; she made show of wringing her hands:
+'Oh! happy you! you know Alvan? And everybody is to know him except me?
+why? I proclaim it unjust. Because I am unmarried? I'll take a husband
+to-morrow morning to be entitled to meet Alvan in the evening.'
+
+The playful frenzy is accepted in its exact innocent signification of
+'this is my pretty wilful will and way,' and the lady responded to it
+cordially; for it is pleasant to have some one to show, and pleasant
+to assist some one eager to see: besides, many had petitioned her for a
+sight of Alvan; she was used to the request.
+
+'You're not obliged to wait for to-morrow,' she said. 'Come to one of
+our gatherings to-night. Alvan will be here.'
+
+'You invite me?'
+
+'Distinctly. Pray, come. He is sure to be here. We have his promise, and
+Alvan never fails. Was it not Frau v. Crestow who did us the favour of
+our introduction? She will bring you.'
+
+The Frau v. Crestow was a cousin of Clotilde's by marriage, sentimental,
+but strict in her reading of the proprieties. She saw nothing wrong in
+undertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous gatherings of
+the finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband agreed to join
+them after the sitting of the Chamber upon a military-budget vote.
+The whole plan was nicely arranged and went well. Clotilde dressed
+carefully, letting her gold-locks cloud her fine forehead carelessly,
+with finishing touches to the negligence, for she might be challenged to
+take part in disputations on serious themes, and a handsome young
+woman who has to sustain an argument against a man does wisely when she
+forearms her beauties for a reserve, to carry out flanking movements if
+required. The object is to beat him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvan
+was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
+damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
+companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where
+three gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours
+of tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was
+of good stature. One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly
+Jewish. The third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter
+signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done
+it more effectively. The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed
+by priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worship
+in the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not more
+loathsome. She sank on a sofa. That the man? Oh! Jew, and fifty times
+over Jew! nothing but Jew!
+
+The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably
+magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.
+
+She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding
+on the contrast. This man's face was the born orator's, with the
+light-giving eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for
+speechfulness and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he
+took the headship of armies and marched to empire.
+
+The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
+and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. Alas, he could
+not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build! One could
+vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorously
+rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as
+he talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet
+lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing
+outpour. Looking on him was listening. Yes, the looking on him sufficed.
+Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men, that
+drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced
+him to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the
+contemplation of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood.
+She shrank to smaller and smaller as she looked.
+
+Be sure that she knew who he was. No, says she. But she knew. It
+terrified her soul to think he was Alvan. She feared scarcely less that
+it might not be he. Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played
+at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse,
+teased herself, and gloated. It is he! not he! he! not he! most
+certainly! impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me! If another, woe
+me! For she had come to see Alvan. Alvan and she shared ideas. They
+talked marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposing
+he was not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment. The supposition
+that he was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.
+
+Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew? She feasted. It was a
+noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes. Perchance a Jew of the
+Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew as
+well as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a
+majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his race
+favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew is
+grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery
+eastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! a
+figure of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to
+inspirit and be tempered by the intellect.
+
+She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning
+that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to
+express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases
+of very eminent surprise. Necessarily it would be the greatest of
+surprises.
+
+The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde's
+attention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be other
+than profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered),
+dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of which
+she cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin's head if
+her insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker. He
+pursued his talk: there was little danger of not hearing him. There was
+only the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice. His voice
+had the mellow fulness of the clarionet. But for the subject, she could
+have fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges. She had
+never heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amply
+flowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent:
+a perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument. He had notes less
+pastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging of
+his theme. The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until
+the mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion
+caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself,
+remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society
+an original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much
+beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be. He kindled her thus,
+and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire to breathe
+out the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn.
+
+The young flower of her sex burned to speak, to deliver an opinion. She
+was unaccustomed to yield a fascinated ear. She was accustomed rather
+to dictate and be the victorious performer, and though now she was not
+anxious to occupy the pulpit--being too strictly bred to wish for a post
+publicly in any of the rostra--and meant still less to dispossess the
+present speaker of the place he filled so well, she yearned to join him:
+and as that could not be done by a stranger approving, she panted to
+dissent. A young lady cannot so well say to an unknown gentleman: 'You
+have spoken truly, sir,' as, 'That is false!' for to speak in the former
+case would be gratuitous, and in the latter she is excused by the moral
+warmth provoking her. Further, dissent rings out finely, and approval
+is a feeble murmur--a poor introduction of oneself. Her moral warmth
+was ready and waiting for the instigating subject, but of course she was
+unconscious of the goad within. Excitement wafted her out of herself, as
+we say, or out of the conventional vessel into the waves of her troubled
+nature. He had not yet given her an opportunity for dissenting; she was
+compelled to agree, dragged at his chariot-wheels in headlong agreement.
+
+His theme was Action; the political advantages of Action; and he
+illustrated his view with historical examples, to the credit of the
+French, the temporary discredit of the German and English races, who
+tend to compromise instead. Of the English he spoke as of a power
+extinct, a people 'gone to fat,' who have gained their end in a hoard of
+gold and shut the door upon bandit ideas. Action means life to the soul
+as to the body. Compromise is virtual death: it is the pact between
+cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency. So do we gather
+dead matter about us. So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt. The
+war with evil in every form must be incessant; we cannot have peace. Let
+then our joy be in war: in uncompromising Action, which need not be the
+less a sagacious conduct of the war.... Action energizes men's brains,
+generates grander capacities, provokes greatness of soul between
+enemies, and is the guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit of
+our species. To doubt that, is to doubt of good being to be had for the
+seeking. He drew pictures of the healthy Rome when turbulent, the doomed
+quiescent. Rome struggling grasped the world. Rome stagnant invited
+Goth and Vandal. So forth: alliterative antitheses of the accustomed
+pamphleteer. At last her chance arrived.
+
+His opposition sketch of Inaction was refreshed by an analysis of the
+character of Hamlet. Then he reverted to Hamlet's promising youth. How
+brilliantly endowed was the Prince of Denmark in the beginning!
+
+'Mad from the first!' cried Clotilde.
+
+She produced an effect not unlike that of a sudden crack of thunder. The
+three made chorus in a noise of boots on the floor.
+
+Her hero faced about and stood up, looking at her fulgently. Their eyes
+engaged without wavering on either side. Brave eyes they seemed, each
+pair of them, for his were fastened on a comely girl, and she had strung
+herself to her gallantest to meet the crisis.
+
+His friends quitted him at a motion of the elbows. He knelt on the sofa,
+leaning across it, with clasped hands.
+
+'You are she!--So, then, is a contradiction of me to be the
+commencement?'
+
+'After the apparition of Hamlet's father the prince was mad,' said
+Clotilde hurriedly, and she gazed for her hostess, a paroxysm of alarm
+succeeding that of her boldness.
+
+'Why should we two wait to be introduced?' said he. 'We know one
+another. I am Alvan. You are she of whom I heard from Kollin: who else?
+Lucretia the gold-haired; the gold-crested serpent, wise as her sire;
+Aurora breaking the clouds; in short, Clotilde!'
+
+Her heart exulted to hear him speak her name. She laughed with a radiant
+face. His being Alvan, and his knowing her and speaking her name, all
+was like the happy reading of a riddle. He came round to her, bowing,
+and his hand out. She gave hers: she could have said, if asked, 'For
+good!' And it looked as though she had given it for good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+'Hamlet in due season,' said he, as they sat together. 'I shall convince
+you.'
+
+She shook her head.
+
+'Yes, yes, an opinion formed by a woman is inflexible; I know that:
+the fact is not half so stubborn. But at present there are two more
+important actors: we are not at Elsinore. You are aware that I hoped to
+meet you?'
+
+'Is there a periodical advertisement of your hopes?--or do they come to
+us by intuition?'
+
+'Kollin was right!--the ways of the serpent will be serpentine. I knew
+we must meet. It is no true day so long as the goddess of the morning
+and the sun-god are kept asunder. I speak of myself, by what I have felt
+since I heard of you.'
+
+'You are sure of your divinity?'
+
+'Through my belief in yours!'
+
+They bowed smiling at the courtly exchanges.
+
+'And tell me,' said he, 'as to meeting me...?'
+
+She replied: 'When we are so like the rest of the world we may confess
+our weakness.'
+
+'Unlike! for the world and I meet and part: not we two.'
+
+Clotilde attempted an answer: it would not come. She tried to be
+revolted by his lording tone, and found it strangely inoffensive. His
+lording presence and the smile that was like a waving feather on it
+compelled her so strongly to submit to hear, as to put her in danger of
+appearing to embrace this man's rapid advances.
+
+She said: 'I first heed of you at Capri.'
+
+'And I was at Capri seven days after you had left.'
+
+'You knew my name then?'
+
+'Be not too curious with necromancers. Here is the date--March 15th. You
+departed on the 8th.'
+
+'I think I did. That is a year from now.'
+
+'Then we missed: now we meet. It is a year lost. A year is a great age!
+Reflect on it and what you owe me. How I wished for a comrade at Capri!
+Not a "young lady," and certainly no man. The understanding Feminine,
+was my desire--a different thing from the feminine understanding,
+usually. I wanted my comrade young and fair, necessarily of your sex,
+but with heart and brain: an insane request, I fancied, until I heard
+that you were the person I wanted. In default of you I paraded the
+island with Tiberius, who is my favourite tyrant. We took the initiative
+against the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by
+a plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of
+my extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic. He apologized
+in turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the
+misunderstanding between us was past cement: for each of us loved the
+man but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his office
+than he is in himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friend
+that each of us loved. So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he would
+have done had I been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperor
+my respectful adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins.
+Mademoiselle, by delaying your departure seven days you would have saved
+me from death. You see, the official is the artificial man, and I ought
+to have known there is no natural man left in us to weigh against the
+artificial. I counted on the emperor's personal affection, forgetting
+that princes cannot be our friends.'
+
+'You died bravely?'
+
+Clotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.
+
+'Simply, we will say. My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose,
+but let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.
+Sapphire sea, sapphire sky: one believes in life there, thrills with it,
+when life is ebbing: ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our
+sick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish! Verily the second
+death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island
+seven days earlier, was harder to bear. Tell me frankly--the music in
+Italy?'
+
+'Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.'
+
+'Excellent!' his eyes flashed delightedly. 'O comrade of comrades! that
+year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have
+gained. Yes, brainless! There, in music, we beat them, as politically
+France beats us. No life without brain! The brainless in Art and in
+Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead.
+It is less easy to cut a way through them. But it must be done, or the
+Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green
+blades of the earth. You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?'
+
+'I do not shudder,' said Clotilde.
+
+'A diamond from the lapidary!--Your sentences have many facets. Well,
+you are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and
+a Jew. You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some
+sparkling incredulity. The Christian is like the politician in supposing
+the original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the pattern
+of the monster he was originally taught to hate. But the Jew has been
+a little christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian.
+So with demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we grow
+conservatived. Try to think individually upon what you have to learn
+collectively--that is your task. You are of the few who will be equal to
+it. We are not men of blood, believe me. I am not. For example, I detest
+and I decline the duel. I have done it, and proved myself a man of metal
+notwithstanding. To say nothing of the inhumanity, the senselessness of
+duelling revolts me. 'Tis a folly, so your nobles practise it, and
+your royal wiseacre sanctions. No blood for me: and yet I tell you
+that whatever opposes me, I will sweep away. How? With the brain. If we
+descend to poor brute strength or brutal craft, it is from failing in
+the brain: we quit the leadership of our forces, and the descent is the
+beast's confession. Do I say how? Perhaps by your aid.--You do not
+start and cry: "Mine!" That is well. I have not much esteem for
+non-professional actresses. They are numerous and not entertaining.--You
+leave it to me to talk.'
+
+'Could I do better?'
+
+'You listen sweetly.'
+
+'It is because I like to hear.'
+
+'You have the pearly little ear of a shell on the sand.'
+
+'With the great sea sounding near it!'
+
+Alvan drew closer to her.
+
+'I look into your eyes and perceive that one may listen to you and
+speak to you. Heart to heart, then! Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to win
+you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be. My prize is found!
+The good friend who did the part of Iris for us came bounding to me: "I
+have discovered the wife for you, Alvan." I had previously heard of her
+from another as having touched the islet of Capri. "But," said Kollin,
+"she is a gold-crested serpent--slippery!" Is she? That only tells me of
+a little more to be mastered. I feel my future now. Hitherto it has been
+a land without sunlight. Do you know how the look of sunlight on a
+land calms one? It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the end
+gained--not the end to labour, just heaven! but peace to the heart's
+craving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in the
+waters of life. Conjure up your vision of Italy. Remember the meaning
+of Italian light and colour: the clearness, the luminous fulness, the
+thoughtful shadows. Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the
+eye, spirit-speaking to the mind. They throb. You carve shapes of Gods
+out of that sky, the sea, those peaks. They live with you. How they
+satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its
+prickly nest!--Well, and you are my sunlighted land. And you will have
+to be fought for. And I see not the less repose in the prospect! Part
+of you may be shifty-sand. The sands are famous for their golden
+shining--as you shine. Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete.
+I have a perfect faith in you, and in the winning of you. Clearly you
+will have to be fought for. I should imagine it a tough battle to come.
+But as I doubt neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.--We use phrases
+in common, and aphorisms, it appears. Why? but that our minds act in
+unison. What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?--the city
+of Paris, Lutetia.'
+
+'Could you make it good?' said Clotilde.
+
+He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like
+swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the
+stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies,
+leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that
+must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind
+from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.
+
+She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the
+appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and
+reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything,
+for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that
+listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure
+it was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went
+speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out
+of her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied
+her the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it,
+though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.
+The world was close by and had begun to stare. She half apprehended that
+fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible. In the presence
+of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away
+with very little creaking of its timbers on the flood. When we feel its
+power we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space,
+indifferent to nakedness. And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage
+asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain
+some day to feel. Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had won
+fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and
+perilously, for courage. She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herself
+to meet it, and Alvan to be it. Her famous originality was a trumpet
+blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly
+his esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding. Each
+had evoked the other. Their common anticipations differed in this, that
+he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and
+seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden
+satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on
+its divinest whirlwind.
+
+They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before
+captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive
+comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,
+and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple
+of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and
+the extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was
+doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in
+his looks on her. Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcely
+speculation. She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,
+under haphazard flashes. The sight of her hand disengaged told her it
+had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were
+men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the
+words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she
+had crossed. And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press
+forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness
+and at least indicate her force of character. The splendour of the man
+quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she
+set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her
+fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it,
+some truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely
+womanly, a poor charm of her sex. The intellectual endowment was
+rarer: still rarer the moral audacity. O, to match this man's embracing
+discursiveness! his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound
+he brought out of all subjects! He struck, and they rang. There was a
+bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance
+was on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any
+afflicting lumpishness. His brain was vivifying light. And how humane
+he was! how supremely tolerant! Where she had really thought instead of
+flippantly tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for an
+echo, his firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she had
+felt deeper than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed. Strange to
+consider: with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift of
+life thrice dear to him, he was fearless. Less by what he said than by
+divination she discerned that he knew not fear. If for only that, she
+would have hung to him like his shadow. She could have detected a brazen
+pretender. A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would have
+written down coxcomb. Her social training and natural perception raised
+her to a height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from the
+eloquently lofty. He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at
+a first view, bidding that which he was be known. Fearless, confident,
+able, he could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable. She who
+was this man's mate would consequently wed his possessions, including
+courage. Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it in
+an equal degree. Was she not displaying it? The worthy people of the
+company stared, as she now perceived, and she was indifferent; her
+relatives were present without disturbing her exaltation. She wheeled
+above their heads in the fiery chariot beside her sun-god. It could
+not but be courage, active courage, superior to her previous tentative
+steps--the verbal temerities she had supposed so dauntless. For now
+she was in action, now she was being tried to match the preacher and
+incarnation of the virtues of action!
+
+Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--the
+symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive,
+eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him
+to proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light
+in light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore
+not light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: and
+oh! constantly entertaining.
+
+The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady's shape. Did he
+think it, or a dash of something like it?
+
+His mood was luxurious. He had found the fair and youthful original
+woman of refinement and station desired by him. He had good reason
+to wish to find her. Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with
+promise of a great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing
+party and is not yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is
+iron, his youth had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor,
+whom to call Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom
+in conduct, but whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey. Verily
+she was original; and a grey original should seem remarkable above a
+blooming blonde. If originality in woman were our prime request, the
+grey should bear the palm. She has gone through the battle, retaining
+the standard she carried into it, which is a victory. Alas, that grey,
+so spirit-touching in Art, should be so wintry in reality!
+
+The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer
+than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid
+as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan. He took it luxuriously because
+he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of
+the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return
+for energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural
+longings.
+
+Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was the
+breath of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde
+in the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
+assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
+her. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpable
+about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
+would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
+mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior.
+He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
+sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
+courage to support the originality she was famed for.
+
+They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan
+for counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact
+phrasing of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.
+He satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace
+that night. Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of
+a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping
+verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious
+flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey. Sentiment,
+cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses,
+where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements
+constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to
+wantonness out of bravado as well as by taste. Alvan, looking
+indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the
+superfluousness of a faithless lady's vowing bite:
+
+       'The kisses were in the course of things,
+        The bite was a needless addition.'
+
+Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
+much! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
+chatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him of
+her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with
+her blush. She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility
+forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an
+airy latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for
+her boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he
+liked also the distinction she made.
+
+The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to
+his requirements in a wife. They marched to the table together, and sat
+together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal. His
+robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife
+might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his
+possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful
+heavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream
+of the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position of
+interpreter of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment
+of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing
+it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than
+he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindled
+to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was not
+devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her
+father's board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that
+vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to
+be enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from
+much talking and excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaring
+the wine princely. Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not
+for the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French
+Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?'
+
+'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in
+it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'
+
+'Glorious!'
+
+He toasted the grape. 'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young
+sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered
+sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten
+of gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stem
+clusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her
+heaven-kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the
+Rhine. We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come?
+we two!' The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after
+a day of savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the
+incessantly verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table. Clotilde
+acquiesced: she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking
+faun. She was realizing fairyland.
+
+They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them
+as with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and
+branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the
+harmony. So ran their chirping arguments and diversions. The carrying
+on of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those
+undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is
+in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked
+hard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them.
+The Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature
+was generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and
+reputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessed
+anywhere, and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later
+civilization. Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intense
+divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be
+perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was
+visible. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' And if nature,
+character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress's
+golden hair, did prepare them for Love's lightning-match, not the
+less were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze. Likewise,
+Time, imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy
+reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical
+fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from
+night to day. He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as
+long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream,
+where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed
+them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road
+quietly out of the way. They were ungrateful, of course, when the
+performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him
+pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them
+of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between
+them 'for ever,' and fresh.
+
+The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning. Alvan assisted at the
+cloaking and hooding of Clotilde. Her relatives were at hand; they hung
+by while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlight
+that laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass and
+stone.
+
+'A night to head the Spring!' said Alvan. 'Come.'
+
+He lifted her off the steps and set her on the ground, as one who had an
+established right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor did
+her people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt which
+had struck the pair. These things, and many things that islands know not
+of, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulness
+of Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an island
+atmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or the
+breastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or no
+tropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seen
+of it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there. But even where
+he walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a land
+bowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan's behaviour
+was passing heteroclite. He needed to be the kingly fellow he was,
+crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose it
+uninterruptedly. 'She is mine; I have won her this night!' his bearing
+said; and Clotilde's acquiesced; and the worthy couple following them
+had to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering. Partly by habit, and
+of his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that once
+taken could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a good
+tideway strong in his own passion and his lady's up against the last
+defences--her parents. A difficulty with them was foreseen. What is a
+difficulty!--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: a
+knot beneath a sword: the dam to waters that draw from the heavens.
+Not desiring it in this case--it would have been to love the difficulty
+better than the woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of a
+resistance, if only because it was a portion of the dowry she brought
+him. Good soldiers (who have won their grades) are often of a peaceful
+temper and would not raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemy
+sets their pugnacious forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins with
+electrical fire, till they are as racers on the race-course.--His inmost
+hearty devil was glad of a combat that pertained to his possession of
+her, for battle gives the savour of the passion to win, and victory
+dignifies a prize: he was, however, resolved to have it, if possible,
+according to the regular arrangement of such encounters, formal, without
+snatchings, without rash violence; a victory won by personal ascendancy,
+reasoning eloquence.
+
+He laughed to hear her say, in answer to a question as to her present
+feelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!' The comparison
+had been used or implied to him before.
+
+'No!' said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, 'no
+more of the quadruped man! You tempt him--may I tell you that? Why, now,
+this moment, at the snap of my fingers, what is to hinder our taking the
+short cut to happiness, centaur and nymph? One leap and a gallop, and we
+should be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents and
+friends to run about for the wits they lose in running. But no! No
+more scandals. That silver moon invites us by its very spell of bright
+serenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the more
+prolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the end
+of the draught. But no!' his voice deepened--'the handsome face of the
+orb that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between
+us two. Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken
+all round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon.
+
+I have seen the other face of it--a visage scored with regrets,
+dead dreams, burnt passions, bald illusions, and the like, the
+like!--sunless, waterless, without a flower! It is the old volcano land:
+it grows one bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you will
+know I am revolving a taste of it; and as I need the antidote you give,
+I will not be the centaur to win you, for that is the land where he
+stables himself; yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb he
+finishes by pasturing on. You have no dislike of metaphors and parables?
+We Jews are a parable people.'
+
+'I am sure I do understand...' said Clotilde, catching her breath to be
+conscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation.
+
+'Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician's
+treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!--You were going to add?'
+
+'I was going to say, I think I understand, but you run away with me
+still.'
+
+'May the sensation never quit you!'
+
+'It will not.'
+
+'What a night!' Alvan raised his head: 'A night cast for our first
+meeting and betrothing! You are near home?'
+
+'The third house yonder in the moonlight.'
+
+'The moonlight lays a white hand on it!'
+
+'That is my window sparkling.'
+
+'That is the vestal's cresset. Shall I blow it out?'
+
+'You are too far. And it is a celestial flame, sir!'
+
+'Celestial in truth! My hope of heaven! Dian's crescent will be ever
+on that house for me, Clotilde. I would it were leagues distant, or the
+door not forbidden!'
+
+'I could minister to a good knight humbly.'
+
+Alvan bent to her, on a sudden prompting:
+
+'When do father and mother arrive?'
+
+'To-morrow.'
+
+He took her hand. 'To-morrow, then! The worst of omens is delay.'
+
+Clotilde faintly gasped. Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her
+family and circle!
+
+Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.
+
+'Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive
+me,' said Alvan.
+
+She stopped walking in sheer fright.
+
+'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horror
+of each and the commotion.
+
+'To-morrow or the day after--not later. No delays! You are mine, we are
+one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both. If
+I could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling
+mischances. Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are
+our gold slipping away?'
+
+She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only
+to shun the pledge it signified. He opened an abyss at her feet, and in
+deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh! not yet; not immediately.' She
+trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.
+'There will be such... not yet! Perhaps later. They must not be troubled
+yet--at present. I am... I cannot--pray, delay!'
+
+'But you are mine!' said Alvan. 'You feel it as I do. There can be no
+real impediment?'
+
+She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties. In fear
+of his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their
+imbecility: 'Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may.
+My father is not very well... my mother: she is not very well. They are
+neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at present.'
+
+To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's back
+to the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit,
+and beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on
+this pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his
+hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and
+the geese of the world. She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which
+imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice,
+active and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be
+warm.
+
+He read something of her weakness. 'And supposing I decide that it must
+be?'
+
+'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that she
+had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of
+the world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical
+moment: and she had lost it by being too sincere. Her cowardice appeared
+to her under that aspect.
+
+'Now I perceive that the task is harder,' said Alvan, seeing her huddled
+in a real dismay. 'Why will you not rise to my level and fear nothing!
+The way is clear: we have only to take the step. Have you not seen
+tonight that we are fated for one another? It is your destiny, and
+trifling with destiny is a dark business. Look at me. Do you doubt my
+having absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me to
+bear, and hold firmly to my will to overcome them! Oh! no delays.'
+
+'Yes!' she cried; 'yes, there must be.'
+
+'You say it?'
+
+The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.
+
+She trembled visibly: she could more readily have bidden him bear her
+hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but
+desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this
+of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of
+facts. He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt
+like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power,
+and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.
+
+'I see!' said he, and his breast fell. Her timid inability to join with
+him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a
+bad name among her people and class, and chains in private. He was old
+enough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less
+fiery than the junction of his passions. 'Well, well!--but we might so
+soon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad! It is but to
+determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome
+circuit. Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the
+heart. Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls! and she is a
+girl, and the task is too much for her. So, then, we are in your hands,
+child! Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
+sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is
+not a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world
+may see; and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite before
+the kisses. That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things.
+Apropos, Hamlet was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'
+
+'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.
+
+'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not
+the mother's. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought,
+reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was
+by nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that
+sleeps beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry.
+Before the ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action
+would have whiffed away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy
+moralizer, waiting for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The
+apparition of his father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood,
+and that venom in the blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenberg
+philosophy. With metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with the
+outer world opened on him and this world stirred to confusion, he wore
+the semblance of madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never with
+his reason dethroned.'
+
+'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'
+
+'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'
+
+'No!'
+
+'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.
+
+Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
+be able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
+were spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person that
+Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for
+him in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
+gold-crested serpent.
+
+He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
+likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.
+
+And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
+returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her
+with were no longer imminent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a
+short sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to
+her own sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in
+her. The exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art
+to frame her apology. The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan,
+she saw Prince Marko. She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his
+grief; she could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious
+beauty, and when her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute
+sensibility to the blow, honourably she inflicted it.
+
+'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you
+I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him,
+and he may lead me whither he will.'
+
+The burning eyes of her Indian Bacchus fixed on her till their
+brightness moistened and flashed.
+
+Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said. He knew
+the man.
+
+Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself. For the first
+few days she was in dread of meeting, seeing, or hearing of Alvan.
+She feared the mention of a name that rolled the world so swiftly. Her
+parents had postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm;
+it was his violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that she
+feared, as nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting,
+seeing, nor hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whose
+curiosity is refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thing
+which frightened it. Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courage
+flooded back; she hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelled
+that he did not, reproached him; she could almost have scorned him for
+listening to the hesitations of the despicable girl so little resembling
+what she really was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf of
+her family to spare them a sudden shock. Remembering her generous
+considerations in their interests, she thought he should have known that
+the creature he called a child would have yielded upon supplication to
+fly with him. Her considerateness for him too, it struck her next, was
+the cause of her seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceived
+it and put it aside. He should have seen that she could be brave, and
+was a mate for him. And if his shallow experience of her wrote her down
+nerveless, his love should be doing.
+
+Was it love? Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decided
+will whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, had
+she the freedom of a man. She would not have listened (it was quite
+true) to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed an
+interval to yawn after the first wild wooing of her. Prince Marko loved.
+Yes, that was love! It failed in no sign of the passion. She set herself
+to study it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering among
+them pity, thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between admiration
+and pathetic esteem, like that the musician has for a precious
+instrument giving sweet sound when shattered. He served her faithfully,
+in spite of his distaste for some of his lady's commissions. She had to
+get her news of Alvan through Marko. He brought her particulars of the
+old trial of Alvan, and Alvan's oration in defence of himself for
+a lawless act of devotion to the baroness; nothing less than the
+successfully scheming to wrest by force from that lady's enemy a
+document precious to her lawful interests. It was one of those cases
+which have a really high gallant side as well as a bad; an excellent
+case for rhetoric. Marko supplied the world's opinion of the affair,
+bravely owning it to be not unfavourable. Her worthy relatives, the
+Frau v. Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report to
+the family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the
+epithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received
+on a visit to demand her in marriage. There was no chance of her being
+allowed to enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and popular
+buffoon' was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she
+was compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such services
+without rewarding him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer.
+Those who toss crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and then
+be moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them, but the dumb
+mendicant's delight in it is winning, and a little cannot hurt. Besides,
+if any one had a claim on her it was the prince; and as he was always
+adoring, never importunate, he restored her to the pedestal she had been
+really rudely shaken from by that other who had caught her up suddenly
+into the air, and dropped her! A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded
+him immeasurably. A heightening of the reward almost took his life.
+In the peacefulness of dealing with a submissive love that made her
+queenly, the royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool, seemed
+predatory and insolent. Thus, after that scene of 'first love,' in which
+she had been actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill or two
+for the recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the noble
+actor; for nothing could erase the scene--it was historic; and Alvan
+would always be thought of as a delicious electricity. She and Marko
+were together on the summer excursion of her people, and quite sisterly,
+she could say, in her delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.
+True gentlemen are imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow
+of giants; but still Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was
+favourable to the liberty she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this
+kind, rather warmer than her word for it would imply. She owned that she
+could better live the poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect
+on its charms in the society of Marko. He was very young, he was little
+more than an adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would
+string or slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of a
+distant day--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he
+might be made happy.
+
+Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
+anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in
+her likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now
+grovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject;
+and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an
+alteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a
+picked self-knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very
+like me: that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison
+wooed her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped
+her so shrewdly as to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the
+vivisected youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at
+a touch. It was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy
+is the title for the operation, because the probing of herself in
+another, with the liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her,
+allowed her while unhurt to feel that she prosecuted her researches in
+a dead body. The moment her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank
+under a stroke of pain, she abstained from carving, and simultaneously
+conscious that he lived, she was kind to him.
+
+'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'
+
+'I love you.'
+
+'You think me the highest and best?'
+
+'You are.'
+
+'So deep that you could bear anything from me?'
+
+'Try me!'
+
+'Unfaithfulness?'
+
+'You would be you!'
+
+'Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?'
+
+'Let me only see you!'
+
+'You are sure that happiness would not smother it?'
+
+'Has it done so yet?'
+
+'Though you know I am a serpent to that man's music?'
+
+'Ah, heaven! Oh!--do not say music. Yes! though anything!'
+
+'And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?'
+
+'I would.... Ah!'
+
+'What? If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of
+his prelude!'
+
+'I would wait'
+
+'It might be for long.'
+
+'I would eat my heart.'
+
+'Bitter! bitter!'
+
+'I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.'
+
+She had a seizure of the nerves.
+
+The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked
+at further. She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion,
+and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and
+softened to her victim. Clotilde opened her arms, charming away
+her wound, as she soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the
+reflection that she could not be so very like one whom she pitied and
+consoled.
+
+She was charitably tender. If it be thought that she was cruel to
+excess, plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight of
+a youth who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, and
+raised out of it by a smile. This young man's responsive spirit acted on
+her as the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frame
+excites the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul to
+show the miracle of our revival. Worship provokes the mortal goddess to
+a manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half to
+blame.
+
+She had latterly been thinking of Alvan's rejection of the part of
+centaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning. He was to
+gain her lawfully after dominating her utterly. That was right, but it
+levelled imagination. There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love a
+form of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominated
+utterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she is
+moved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessity
+can exist for the former: and the reverse. In the union of the two
+conditions she sees herself slavishly domesticated. With her Indian
+Bacchus imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, and
+he was beside her.--Quick to the saddle, away! The forest of terrors
+is ahead; they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on its
+borders; the dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts lean
+to an upright in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and women
+with the voice of a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot be
+worse than a world defied. They drain a cup of milk apiece and they
+spur, for this is the way to the golden Indian land of the planted vine
+and the lover's godship.--Ludicrous! There is no getting farther
+than the cup of milk with Marko. They curvet and caper to be forward
+unavailingly. It should be Alvan to bring her through the forest to
+the planted vine in sunland. Her splendid prose Alvan could do what
+the sprig of poetry can but suggest. Never would malicious fairy in old
+woman's form have offered Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride's
+imagination of him confronting perils. Yet, O shameful contrariety of
+the fates! he who could, will not; he who would, is incapable. Let it
+not be supposed that the desire of her bosom was to be run away with
+in person. Her simple human nature wished for the hero to lift her
+insensibly over the difficult opening chapter of the romance--through
+'the forest,' or half imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meet
+the unimagined, which, as there was no picture of it to terrify her,
+seemed an easy gallop into sunland.--Yes, but in the grasp of a great
+prose giant, with the poetic departed! Naturally she turned to caress
+the poetic while she had it beside her. And it was a wonder to observe
+the young prince's heavenly sensitiveness to every variation of her
+moods. He knew without hearing when she had next seen Alvan, though
+it had not been to speak to him. He looked, and he knew. The liquid
+darkness of his large eastern eyes cast a light that brought her heart
+out: she confessed it, and she comforted him. The sweetest in the woman
+caused her double-dealing.
+
+Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him. A
+common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him. He was an
+eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant
+that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a
+man as the demagogue and Jew. Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to
+abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately
+to allow his own house to be their place of meeting. Alvan achieved the
+first of the steps unassisted. Whether or not his character stood
+well with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid
+attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable
+citizen and erudite to support him. Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good
+chances of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem
+excellent to the professor when one promising fair to be the political
+genius of his time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make
+him believe that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation.
+The second step was undesignedly Clotilde's.
+
+She was on the professor's arm at one of the great winter balls of
+her conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.' She
+answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'--How could she tell that he was not
+present in the crowd?
+
+'Has he come now?' said the professor.
+
+'No.'
+
+And no Alvan was discernible.
+
+'Now?'
+
+'Not yet.'
+
+The professor stared about. She waited.
+
+'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.
+
+Alvan was perceived. He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding
+him to buzz about some recent pamphlet.
+
+She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by
+degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,
+it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the
+physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,
+Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instant
+naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if
+there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence
+on her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professor
+revealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spoke
+of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in
+the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbs
+in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the possession
+of her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: 'That is
+he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom I
+must brush away.'
+
+'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional
+a weight as her tone declared him. 'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
+not count among the dragons.'
+
+But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark,
+a manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!' The rivals had
+fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
+wrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.
+
+'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knew
+something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
+character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
+rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
+made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it
+that his vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception;
+all, everything; all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I
+shall--only aid me a little.'
+
+She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import
+of the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
+penetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of
+excellent substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for
+themselves--the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand
+accusation; and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked
+over the tonic draught with such power of taking a bracing as their
+constitutions could summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual history
+are the sexes to be seen standing more acutely divided. Well may
+the lady be silent; her little sins are magnified to herself to the
+proportion of the greatness of heart forgiving her; and that, with
+his mysterious penetration and a throb of her conscience, holds her
+tongue-tied. She does not imagine the effect of her silence upon the
+magnanimous wretch. Some of these lovers, it has to be stated in sadness
+for the good name of man, have not preserved an attitude that said so
+nobly, 'Child, thou art human--thou art woman!' They have undone it and
+gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble of persecuting inquiries
+for confessions. Some, on the contrary, retaining the attitude, have
+been unable to digest the tonic; they did not prepare their systems as
+they did their dose, possibly thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy
+thump on a trifle, the which was performed by them artfully for a means
+of swallowing and getting that obnoxious trifle well down. These are
+ever after love's dyspeptics. Very few indeed continue at heart in
+harmony with their opening note to the silent fair, because in truth the
+general anticipation is of her proclaiming, if not angelical innocence,
+a softly reddened or blush-rose of it, where the little guiltiness lies
+pathetic on its bed of white.
+
+Alvan's robustness of temper, as a conqueror pleased with his capture,
+could inspirit him to feel as he said it:
+
+'I know all; what matters that to me?' Even her silence, extending the
+'all' beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number
+these indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, without
+will, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him. He
+would have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather
+for a sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young,
+graceful, comely, and a lady of station. Once in his good keeping, her
+lord would answer for her. And this was a manfully generous view of the
+situation. It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood. But how
+of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, a
+defeat? Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as a
+heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself! Wise are the
+mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it only
+to guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending generosity,
+until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of the
+sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.
+
+Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the
+origin of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man
+was frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of
+madness.
+
+After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of
+the amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing
+anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the
+sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through
+a demi-ceremony of betrothal. It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to
+reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change
+at home. A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan's
+pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been. She
+waited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to
+take; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the
+old wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for
+circumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and
+once more the two fell asunder. She had thoughts of the cloister. Her
+venerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she was
+induced to think of marriage. An illness laid her prostrate; she
+contemplated the peace of death.
+
+Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father's,
+and had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate. The
+grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian
+Bacchus were native to him. In her convalescence, she asked herself what
+more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in
+return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness. For
+she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the
+Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently. But he was a flower
+in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it. Why should she
+withhold from him a thing so easily given? The convalescent is receptive
+and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming into
+the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it
+is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud
+across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.
+
+Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter of
+our island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, and
+at an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air.
+Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness. There came a
+letter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kingly
+Alpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veins
+became a torrent. He there! So near! Could he not be reached?
+
+He had a saying: Two wishes make a will.
+
+The wishes of two lovers, he meant. A prettier sentence for lovers, and
+one more intoxicating to them, was never devised. It chirrups of the
+dear silly couple. Well, this was her wish. Was it his? Young health on
+the flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other than
+Alvan's wish; she believed in his wishing it. Then as he wished and she
+wished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her own
+for being his as well. She hurried her friend and her friend's
+friends on horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodged
+overlooking mountain and lake. The professor reported him outwearied
+with excess of work. Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirty
+were laid to his charge. Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Her
+reckless defence of him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her to
+comprehend his dealings with her, and how it was that he stormed her and
+consented to be beaten. He had a thousand occupations, an ambition out
+of the world of love, chains to break, temptations, leanings... tut,
+tut! She had not lived in her circle of society, and listened to
+the tales of his friends and enemies, and been the correspondent of
+flattering and flattered men of learning, without understanding how
+a man like Alvan found diversions when forbidden to act in a given
+direction: and now that her healthful new blood inspired the courage to
+turn two wishes to a will, she saw both herself and him very clearly,
+enough at least to pardon the man more than she did herself. She
+had perforce of her radiant new healthfulness arrived at an exact
+understanding of him. Where she was deluded was in supposing that she
+would no longer dread his impetuous disposition to turn rosy visions
+into facts. But she had the revived convalescent's ardour to embrace
+things positive while they were not knocking at the door; dreams were
+abhorrent to her, tasteless and innutritious; she cast herself on the
+flood, relying on his towering strength and mastery of men and events to
+bring her to some safe landing--the dream of hearts athirst for facts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Alvan was at his writing-table doing stout gladiator's work on paper in
+a chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death's
+Heads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss lad
+entered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below had
+asked for him--Dr. Alvan. Who could the lady be? He thought of too
+many. The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness. Issuing and
+beholding her, his face became illuminated as by a stroke of sunlight.
+
+'Clotilde! by all the holiest!'
+
+She smiled demurely, and they greeted.
+
+She admired the look of rich pleasure shining through surprise in him.
+Her heart thanked him for appearing so handsome before her friends.
+
+'I was writing,' said he. 'Guess to whom?--I had just finished my
+political stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another for
+an immediate introduction to your father.'
+
+'True?'
+
+'The truth, as you shall see. So, you have come, you have found me! This
+time if I let you slip, may I be stamped slack-fingered!'
+
+'"Two wishes make a will," you say.'
+
+He answered her with one of his bursts of brightness.
+
+Her having sought him he read for the frank surrender which he was
+ready to match with a loyal devotion to his captive. Her coming cleared
+everything.
+
+Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member
+of the party. His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has
+whispered. They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to
+another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in
+morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of
+day at his birth--he them.
+
+Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Two
+wishes! Mine was in your breast. You wedded yours to it. At last!--and
+we are one. Not a word more of time lost. My wish is almost a will in
+itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the
+sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two
+wishes united dare the world to divide them. What can? My wish was your
+destiny, yours is mine. We are one.' He poetized on his passion, and
+dramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man
+holding your hand! There is no escape for you. Nay, into the vaults,
+were you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults!
+Speak--or no: look! That will do. You hold a Titan in your eyes, like
+metal in the furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or
+solid. You make him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but
+fixed or flowing, he is lord of you. That is the universal penalty: you
+must, if you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature:
+if you raise him to heaven, you must be his! Ay, look! I know the eyes!
+They can melt granite, they can freeze fire. Pierce me, sweet eyes! And
+now flutter, for there is that in me to make them.'
+
+'Consider!' Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.
+
+'The world? you dear heaven of me! Looking down on me does not
+compromise you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions. I sat in gloom:
+you came: I saw my goddess and worshipped. The world, Lutece, the world
+is a variable monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false;
+but those who weld strength with sincerity may practise their rites of
+religion publicly, and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate. Nay, I
+say that strength in love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it,
+muffs it in the air about us, and so we two are privileged. Politically
+also we know that strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow.
+Behind the veil of our human conventions power is constant as ever, and
+to perceive the fact is to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams.
+He is the teacher who shows where power exists: he is the leader who
+wakens and forms it. Why have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted!
+The world voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly.
+You--to your honour?--I won't decide--but you have the longest in my
+experience resisted. I have a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I
+have a voice for ears, a net for butterflies, a hook for fish, and
+desperation to plunge into marshes: but the feu follet will not be
+caught. One must wait--wait till her desire to have a soul bids her come
+to us. She has come! A soul is hers: and see how, instantly, the old
+monster, the world, which has no soul--not yet: we are helping it to get
+one--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe. For I do give you
+a soul, think as you will of it. I give you strength to realize, courage
+to act. It is the soul that does things in this life--the rest is
+vapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do music by the pure note won
+from resolute strings. The tense chord is music, and it is love. This
+higher and higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like a
+harp.'
+
+'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!' exclaimed
+Clotilde.
+
+'You feel the mountain spirit?'
+
+'I feel that you reveal it.'
+
+'Tell me the books you have been reading.'
+
+'Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'
+
+'When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is
+the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view;
+the view within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our
+history in the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view,
+out or in. The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled
+and sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their
+pleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they
+shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public,
+which will have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist,
+essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am
+neither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on
+the road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as
+much from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from the
+pictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment of
+our forefatherly heaps of bones. Shun those who cry out against fiction
+and have no taste for elegant writing. For to have no sympathy with the
+playful mind is not to have a mind: it is a test. But name the books.'
+
+She named one or two.
+
+'And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?'
+
+'Clotilde!' he turned on her.
+
+'My good sir?'
+
+'These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave
+them!'
+
+'Leave them?'
+
+'You with me. No more partings. The first year, the first day shall be
+dated from to-morrow. You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.
+All the ceremonies to follow. We will have a reaping of them, and make a
+sheaf to present to the world with compliments. To-morrow!'
+
+'You do not speak seriously?'
+
+'I jest as little as the Talmud. Decide at once, in the happy flush of
+this moment.'
+
+'I cannot listen to you, dear sir!'
+
+'But your heart beats!'
+
+'I am not mistress of it.'
+
+'Call me master of it. I make ready for to-morrow.'
+
+'No! no! no! A thousand times no! You have been reading too much fiction
+and verse. Properly I should spurn you.'
+
+'Will you fail me, play feu follet, ward me off again?'
+
+'I must be won by rules, brave knight!'
+
+'Will you be won?'
+
+'And are you he--the Alvan who would not be centaur?'
+
+'I am he who chased a marsh-fire, and encountered a retiarius, and the
+meshes are on my head and arms. I fancied I dealt with a woman; a woman
+needing protection! She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man. That
+is between us two. But think of us facing the world, and trust me; take
+my hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight. Trust it to
+me, and all your difficulties are at an end. To fly solves the problem.'
+
+'Indeed, indeed, I have more courage than I had,' said Clotilde.
+
+His eyes dilated, steadied, speculated, weighed her.
+
+'Put it to proof while you can believe in it!'
+
+'How is it every one but you thinks me bold?' she complained.
+
+'Because I carry a touchstone that brings out the truth. I am your
+reality: all others are phantoms. You can impose on them, not on me.
+Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be your
+salvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, and
+the subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it. But
+the courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I am
+distant and maligned--can you fancy your having that? No! be wise of
+what you really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow.'
+
+'Then,' said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, 'do you doubt your ability
+to win me without a scandal?'
+
+'Back me, and I win you!' he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: a
+sudden droop.
+
+She let her hand fall. He grasped it.
+
+'Gradations appear to be unknown to you,' she said.
+
+He cried out: 'Count the years of life, span them, think of the work to
+be done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to waste
+in retarding the inevitable? Pottering up steps that can be taken at one
+bound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne,
+and their kneecaps the footing stumps. But for us two life begins up
+there. Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is our
+shrine. I have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirst
+to live.'
+
+She murmured, in a fervour, 'You shall!' and slipped behind her
+defences. 'To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a little
+time; all to-morrow morning we can discuss plans.'
+
+'You know you command me,' said he, and gazed at her.
+
+She was really a child compared with him in years, and if it was an
+excuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting,--it was
+also a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to the
+step.
+
+She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giant
+at the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play of
+knife and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, lively
+Frenchmen and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring English
+of both sexes, not encouraging to conversation in their look of pallid
+disgust of the art, Alvan started general topics and led them. The lead
+came to him naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind both
+stored and effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growth
+of life. She did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classes
+and sets, or that he should be famed for charming women. Her friend was
+enraptured with him. Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatter
+between the ladies, and Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession.
+
+'But you are not engaged?' said the blunt Englishwoman.
+
+According to the explanation, Clotilde was hardly engaged. It was not
+an easy thing to say how she stood definitely. She had obeyed her dying
+relative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko's, and
+had pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentions
+to the prince. It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; and
+chiefly for his well-being. She had reserved her full consent: the
+plighting was incomplete. Prince Marko knew that there was another, a
+magical person, a genius of the ring, irresistible. He had been warned,
+that should the other come forth to claim her.... And she was about to
+write to him this very night to tell him... tell him fully.... In truth,
+she loved both, but each so differently! And both loved her! And she had
+to make her choice of one, and tell the prince she did love him, but...
+Dots are the best of symbols for rendering cardisophistical subtleties
+intelligible, and as they are much used in dialogue, one should have
+now and then permission to print them. Especially feminine dialogue
+referring to matters of the uncertain heart takes assistance from troops
+of dots; and not to understand them at least as well as words, when
+words have as it were conducted us to the brink of expression, and shown
+us the precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the marketplace.
+
+Sunless rose the morning. The blanketed figures went out to salute a
+blanketed sky. Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness in
+various forms, including laughter's. Alvan frankly declared himself the
+disappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight long
+loved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and the
+lakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde's
+English friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemn
+reality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materially
+defining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)
+announce the hour for her departure. He promised her a positive sunrise
+if she would delay. Her child lay recovering from an illness in the
+town below, and she could not stay. But Clotilde had coughed in the damp
+morning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposed
+to it. Had not the lady heard her cough? She had, but personally she
+was obliged to go; with her child lying ill she could not remain. 'But,
+madam, do you hear that cough again? Will you drag her out with such a
+cough as that?' The lady repeated 'My child!' Clotilde said it had
+been agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be beside
+her child. Alvan thundered an 'Impossible!' The child was recovering;
+Clotilde was running into danger: he argued with the senseless woman,
+opposing reason to the feminine sentiment of the maternal, and of course
+he was beaten. He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence. Clotilde
+likened his appearance to a strangled roar. 'Mothers and their
+children are too much for me!' he said, penitent for his betrayal of
+over-urgency, as he helped to wrap her warmly, and counselled her very
+mode of breathing in the raw mountain atmosphere.
+
+'I admire you for knowing when to yield,' said she.
+
+He groaned, with frown and laugh: 'You know what I would beg!'
+
+She implored him to have some faith in her.
+
+The missiles of the impassioned were discharged at the poor English: a
+customary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting their
+shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters:
+but Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing
+coldness in devoting herself to her child.
+
+'No, they attend to their duties,' he assented generally, desperately
+just.
+
+'And you owe it to her that you have seen me.'
+
+'I do,' he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.
+
+Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.
+
+At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a
+burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated
+on the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip
+pathfarers. She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram.
+At night the wires flashed 'Sleep well' to her; on her awakening,
+'Good morning.' A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her
+amusement. Again at night there was a 'God guard you!'
+
+'Who can resist him?' sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,
+happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the
+excess of life that he put about her. This time there was no prospect of
+his courtship relapsing.
+
+'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend.
+
+'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively. 'If, dear
+Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood. But Alvan mounts
+high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so
+generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.'
+
+The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to
+miss--more was expected to be said of him.
+
+'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,' she remarked, for she had
+heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been
+polite to her under vexation.
+
+Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and
+disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant.
+She found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.
+Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon
+good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the
+lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.
+
+
+
+
+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!
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+She ran out to the shade of the garden walls to be by herself and in the
+air, and she read; and instantly her own letter to the baroness crashed
+sentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combative
+instinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and deride
+it. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment;
+then they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill as
+a glacier cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervid
+respectfulness, of innocent supplication for maternal affection, for
+some degree of benignant friendship!
+
+The baroness coldly stated, that she had arrived in the city to do
+her best in assisting to arrange matters which had come to a most
+unfortunate and impracticable pass. She alluded to her established
+friendship for Alvan, but it was chiefly in the interests of Clotilde
+that the latter was requested to perceive the necessity for bringing
+her relations with Dr. Alvan to an end in the discreetest manner now
+possible to the circumstances. This, the baroness pursued, could only
+be done by her intervention, and her friendship for Dr. Alvan had
+caused her to undertake the little agreeable office. For which purpose,
+promising her an exemption from anything in the nature of tragedy
+scenes, the baroness desired Clotilde to call on her the following day
+between certain specified hours of the afternoon.
+
+That was all.
+
+The girl in her letter to the baroness had constrained herself to write,
+and therefore to think, in so beautiful a spirit of ignorant innocence,
+that the vileness of an answer thus brutally throwing off the mask of
+personal disinterestedness appeared to her both an abominable piece
+of cynicism on the part of a scandalous old woman, and an insulting
+rejection of the cover of decency proposed to the creature by a
+daisy-minded maiden.
+
+She scribbled a single line in receipt of the letter and signed her
+initials.
+
+'The woman is hateful!' she said to her father; she was ready to agree
+with him about the woman and Alvan. She was ashamed to have hoped
+anything of the woman, and stamped down her disappointment under a
+vehement indignation, that disfigured the man as well. He had put the
+matter into the hands of this most detestable of women, to settle it
+as she might think best! He and she!--the miserable old thing with her
+ancient arts and cajoleries had lured him back! She had him fast again,
+in spite of--for who could tell? perhaps by reason of her dirty habits:
+she smoked dragoon cigars! All day she was emitting tobacco-smoke; it
+was notorious, Clotilde had not to learn it from her father; but now
+she saw the filthy rag that standard of female independence was--that
+petticoated Unfeminine, fouler than masculine! Alvan preferred the
+lichen-draped tree to the sunny flower, it was evident, for never a
+letter from Alvan had come to her. She thought in wrath, nothing but the
+thoughts of wrath, and ran her wits through every reasonable reflection
+like a lighted brand that flings its colour, if not fire, upon
+surrounding images. Contempt of the square-jawed withered woman was too
+great for Clotilde to have a sensation of her driving jealousy until
+painful glimpses of the man made jealousy so sharp that she flew for
+refuge to contempt of the pair. That beldam had him back: she had him
+fast. Oh! let her keep him! Was he to be regretted who could make that
+choice?
+
+Her father did not let the occasion slip to speak insistingly as the
+world opined of Alvan and his baroness. He forced her to swallow the
+calumny, and draw away with her family against herself through strong
+disgust.
+
+Out of a state of fire Clotilde passed into solid frigidity. She had
+neither a throb nor a passion. Wishing seemed to her senseless as life
+was. She could hear without a thrill of her frame that Alvan was in the
+city, without a question whether it was true. He had not written, and he
+had handed her over to the baroness! She did not ask herself how it
+was that she had no letter from him, being afraid to think about it,
+because, if a letter had been withheld by her father, it was a part of
+her whipping; if none had been written, there was nothing to hope for.
+Her recent humiliation condemned him by the voice of her sufferings for
+his failure to be giant, eagle, angel, or any of the prodigious things
+he had taught her to expect; and as he had thus deceived her, the
+glorious lover she had imaged in her mind was put aside with some of the
+angry disdain she bestowed upon the woman by whom she had been wounded.
+He ceased to be a visioned Alvan, and became an obscurity; her principal
+sentiment in relation to him was, that he threatened her peace. But for
+him she would never have been taught to hate her parents; she would have
+enjoyed the quiet domestic evenings with her people, when Marko sang,
+and her sisters knitted, and the betrothed sister wore a look very
+enviable in the abstract; she would be seeing a future instead of a
+black iron gate! But for him she certainly would never have had, that
+letter from the baroness!
+
+On the morning after the information of Alvan's return, her father, who
+deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent
+to demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what her
+stunned heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was
+behind it, and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with
+another piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters,
+arranged the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet
+coins, lock of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his
+hand to Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with
+the forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--or
+of one of them--she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde,' but the
+gentlest title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the
+word 'child' to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he
+should be interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by having
+the pathos on their side. They are consoled too.
+
+Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! It
+had been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when he
+had not been feeling at all: and this marks a division.
+
+She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his
+release by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She was
+personally to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party,
+and who would give her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while
+assuring the gentleman she was acting with perfect freedom, she was
+to be under her oath not to read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her
+betrothed. Her father assumed the fact of her renewed engagement to the
+prince, as her whole family did; strangely, she thought: it struck her
+as a fatality. He said that Alvan was working him great mischief, doing
+him deadly injury in his position, and for no just reason, inasmuch as
+he--a bold, bad man striving to ruin the family on a point of pride--had
+declared that he simply considered himself bound in honour to her, only
+a little doubtful of her independent action at present; and a release
+of him, accompanied by her plain statement of her being under no
+compulsion, voluntarily the betrothed of another, would solve the
+difficulty. A certain old woman, it seemed, was anxious to have him
+formally released.
+
+With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, the
+General begged her to comply, pulling the hands he squeezed in a way to
+strongly emphasize his affectionate entreaty.
+
+She went straight to Marko, consenting that he should have Alvan's
+letter unopened (she cared not to read it, she said), on his promise to
+give it up to her within a stated period. There was a kind of prohibited
+pleasure, sweet acid, catching discord, in the idea of this lover's
+keeping the forbidden thing she could ask for when she was curious about
+the other, which at present she was not; dead rather; anxious to please
+her parents, and determined to be no rival of the baroness. Marko
+promised it readily, adding: 'Only let the storm roll over, that we may
+have more liberty, and I myself, when we two are free, will lead you
+to Alvan, and leave it to you to choose between us. Your happiness,
+beloved, is my sole thought. Submit for the moment.' He spoke sweetly,
+with his dearest look, touching her luxurious nature with a belief that
+she could love him; untroubled by another, she could love and be true to
+him: her maternal inner nature yearned to the frailbodied youth.
+
+She made a comparison in her mind of Alvan's love and Marko's, and of
+the lives of the two men. There was no grisly baroness attached to the
+prince's life.
+
+She wrote the letter to Alvan, feeling in the words that said she was
+plighted to Prince Marko, that she said, and clearly said, the baroness
+is now relieved of a rival, and may take you! She felt it so acutely as
+to feel that she said nothing else.
+
+Severances are accomplished within the heart stroke by stroke; within
+the craven's heart each new step resulting from a blow is temporarily
+an absolute severance. Her letter to Alvan written, she thought not
+tenderly of him but of the prince, who had always loved a young woman,
+and was unhampered by an old one. The composition of the letter, and the
+sense that the thing was done, made her stony to Alvan.
+
+On the introduction of Colonel von Tresten, whose name she knew, but
+was dull to it, she delivered him her letter with unaffected composure,
+received from him Alvan's in exchange, left the room as if to read it,
+and after giving it unopened to Marko, composedly reappeared before the
+colonel to state, that the letter could make no difference, and all was
+to be as she had written it.
+
+The colonel bowed stiffly.
+
+It would have comforted her to have been allowed to say: 'I cease to be
+the rival of that execrable harridan!'
+
+The delivery of so formidable a cat-screech not being possible, she
+stood in an attitude of mild resignation, revolving thoughts of her
+father's praises of his noble daughter, her mother's kiss, the caresses
+of her sisters, and the dark bright eyes of Marko, the peace of the
+domestic circle. This was her happiness! And still there was time, still
+hope for Alvan to descend and cut the knot. She conceived it slowly,
+with some flush of the brain like a remainder of fever, but no throbs of
+her pulses. She had been swayed to act against him by tales which in her
+heart she did not credit exactly, therefore did not take within herself,
+though she let them influence her by the goad of her fears and angers;
+and these she could conjure up at will for the defence of her conduct,
+aware of their shallowness, and all the while trusting him to come in
+the end and hear her reproaches for his delay. He seemed to her now to
+have the character of a storm outside a household wrapped in comfortable
+monotony. Her natural spiritedness detested the monotony, her craven
+soul fawned for the comfort. After her many recent whippings the comfort
+was immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the look
+of a burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonel
+von Tresten's hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvan
+to come, knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scene
+following his appearance. Yet she would have gone to him; without any
+doubt his presence and the sense of his greater power declared by his
+coming would have lifted her over to him. The part of her nature adoring
+storminess wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other part
+which cuddled security. Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far from
+offering himself in such a shape to a girl that had jilted the friend he
+loved, insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figure
+of soldierly complacency in marble. Her pencilled acknowledgement of the
+baroness's letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construed
+as an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was. He had
+departed before Clotilde heard a step.
+
+Immediately thereupon it came: to her mind that Tresten was one of
+Alvan's bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And her
+father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely
+enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound
+reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright
+impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said,
+talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now
+becoming convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate
+him--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his
+politics, his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly
+hinted.
+
+She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might be
+strung together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baroness
+gave his cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, she
+remembered, used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors
+dedicating their swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, she
+felt sure, was an accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, she
+must be hated by the man reverencing the baroness. If ever man had
+executioner stamped on his face, it was he! Like the professor, nay,
+like Alvan himself, he would not see that she was the victim of tyranny:
+none of her signs would they see. They judged of her by her inanimate
+frame in the hands of her torturers breaking her on the wheel. She
+called to mind a fancy that she had looked at Tresten out of her
+deadness earnestly for just one instant: more than an instant she could
+not, beneath her father's vigilant watch and into those repellant cold
+blue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly have understood the fleeting
+look. What were her words! what her deeds!
+
+The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like an
+infant; and the man's face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--he
+worshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde's hatred of him that it
+overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him
+to act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one of
+Alvan's pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not ever
+thought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but
+now she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I
+supposed him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for
+perceiving and adding up Alvan's faults of character, to the freezing
+she had taken from that most antipathetic person. She confessed to
+sensations of spite which would cause her to reject and spurn even his
+pleadings for Alvan, if they were imaginable as actual. Their not being
+imaginable allowed her to indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the
+gratification of the idea of wounding some one, though it were her
+lover, connected with this Tresten.
+
+The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman's admirer
+had vitiated Clotilde's blood. She was not only not mistress of her
+thoughts, she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any
+desires, except that the people about her should caress and warm her,
+until, with no gaze backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of
+meaning as a good-bye to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the
+swallow quits her eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that they
+were chargeable with the sequel of the history. There would be a sequel,
+she was sure, if it came only to punish them for the cruelty which
+thwarted her timid anticipation of it by pressing on her natural
+instinct at all costs to bargain for an escape from pain, and making her
+simulate contentment to cheat her muffled wound and them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was
+not ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not
+done troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful
+emotions beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding
+his crust, to support life, of corporations that can be talked into
+admitting the rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation,
+on the basis of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder
+in his breast and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing
+while the electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of
+Clotilde, and the success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily
+many times he reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his
+arms withered with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All
+the evidence opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that
+he had her fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason
+told him by what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battled
+for his reason. Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to his
+book of the Law, besieging Church and State with it, pointing to texts
+of the law which proved her free to choose her lord and husband for
+herself, expressing his passionate love by his precise interpretation of
+the law: and still with the cold sentience gaining on him, against the
+current of his tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, of
+her being actually what he had named her in moments of playful
+vision--slippery, a serpent, a winding hare; with the fear that she
+might slip from him, betray, deny him, deliver him to ridicule, after
+he had won his way to her over every barrier. During his proudest
+exaltations in success, when his eyes were sparkling, there was a wry
+twitch inward upon his heart of hearts.
+
+But if she was a hare, he was a hunter, little inclining to the chase
+now for mere physical recreation. She had roused the sportsman's passion
+as well as the man's; he meant to hunt her down, and was not more
+scrupulous than our ancient hunters, who hunted for a meal and hunted to
+kill, with none of the later hesitations as to circumventing, trapping,
+snaring by devices, and the preservation of the animal's coat spotless.
+Let her be lured from her home, or plucked from her home, and if
+reluctant, disgraced, that she may be dependent utterly on the man
+stooping to pick her up! He was equal to the projecting of a scheme
+socially infamous, with such fanatical intensity did the thought of
+his losing the woman harass him, and the torrent of his passion burst
+restraint to get to her to enfold her--this in the same hour of the
+original wild monster's persistent and sober exposition of the texts of
+the law with the voice of a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let it
+be said, with a modern gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. All
+means were to be tried. His eye burned on his prize, mindless of what
+she was dragged through, if there was resistance, or whether by the hair
+of her head or her skirts, or how she was obtained. His interpretation
+of the law was for the powers of earth, and other plans were to
+propitiate the powers under the earth, and certain distempered groanings
+wrenched from him at intervals he addressed (after they were out of him,
+reflectively) to the powers above, so that nothing of him should be lost
+which might get aid of anything mundane, infernal, or celestial.
+
+Thus it is when Venus bites a veritable ancient male. She puts her venom
+in a magnificent beast, not a pathetic Phaedra. She does it rarely, for
+though to be loved by a bitten giant is one of the dreams of woman,
+the considerate Mother of Love knows how needful it is to protect the
+sentiment of the passion and save them from an exhibition of the fires
+of that dragon's breath. Do they not fly shrieking when they behold it?
+Barely are they able to read of it. Men, too, accustomed to minor
+doses of the goddess, which moderate, soften, counteract, instead of
+inflicting the malady, abhor and have no brotherhood with its turbulent
+victim.
+
+It was justly matter for triumph, due to an extraordinary fervour of
+pleading upon a plain statement of the case, that Alvan should return
+from his foray bringing with him an emissary deputed by General von
+Rudiger's official chief to see that the young lady, so passionately
+pursued by the foremost of his time in political genius and oratory,
+was not subjected to parental tyranny, but stood free to exercise
+her choice. Of the few who would ever have thought of attempting, a
+diminished number would have equalled that feat. Alvan was no vain
+boaster; he could gain the ears of grave men as well as mobs and women.
+The interview with Clotilde was therefore assured to him, and the
+distracting telegrams and letters forwarded to him by Tresten during
+his absence were consequently stabs already promising to heal. They were
+brutal stabs--her packet of his letters and presents on his table made
+them bleed afresh, and the odd scrawl of the couple of words on the
+paper set him wondering at the imbecile irony of her calling herself
+'The child' in accompaniment to such an act, for it reminded him of
+his epithet for her, while it dealt him a tremendous blow; it seemed
+senselessly malign, perhaps flippant, as she could be, he knew. She
+could be anything weak and shallow when out of his hands; she had
+recently proved it still, in view of the interview, and on the tide of
+his labours to come to that wished end, he struck his breast to brave
+himself with a good hopeful spirit. 'Once mine!' he said.
+
+Moreover, to the better account, Clotilde's English friend had sent him
+the lines addressed to her, in which the writer dwelt on her love of him
+with a whimper of the voice of love. That was previous to her perjury by
+little, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on events
+by the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time between
+this love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannous
+intervention. One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was being
+tyrannized and tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the fields
+too, as the mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think.
+
+Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General von
+Rudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claim
+the privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's house
+with him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness.
+
+Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a
+probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of
+whom offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw
+from the tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to
+imagine they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and
+charm of aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man,
+pulling at the man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities,
+committing a whole sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable
+wall to her maiden past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us
+moustached her. She was a clear-faced girl and mother of young
+blushes before the years were at their work of transformation upon her
+countenance and behind her bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps
+she was combative, and fought them for touching her ungallantly; and
+that perhaps was her first manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth,
+a wife openly maltreated, a woman of breeding, but with a man's head,
+capable of inspiring man-like friendships, and of entertaining them. She
+was radically-minded, strongly of the Radical profession of faith, and
+a correspondent of revolutionary chiefs; both the trusted adviser and
+devoted slave of him whose future glorious career she measured by
+his abilities. Rumour blew out a candle and left the wick to smoke
+in relation to their former intercourse. The Philistines revenged
+themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew demagogue with the
+weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous or nothing, and
+they must show that they are so when they can; and best do they show it
+by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a woman; for to
+be in error in malice does not hurt them, but they profoundly feel that
+they are fools if they are duped.
+
+She was aware of the recent course of events; she had as she protested,
+nothing to accuse herself of, and she could hardly part her lips without
+a self-exculpation.
+
+'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'He
+will have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He will
+manacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss her
+chance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid for
+their reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, and
+I shall be condemned by the kind of court-martial which hurries over the
+forms of a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like
+justice. You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enter
+into her enthusiasm. She will make him believe I conspired against her.
+Men in love are children with their mistresses--the greatest of them;
+their heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him!
+At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes
+of the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous
+and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I
+obeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would
+not have it on my conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic,
+however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness,
+Tresten, that for a young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack
+and march. Qualities of mind-mind! They were out of the question. He had
+a taste for a wife. If he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she might
+not have harmed him--the contrary; cut his talons. What is this girl?
+Exactly what one might be sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, would
+lead him to fix on; a daughter of the Philistines, naturally, and
+precisely the one of all on earth likely to confound him after marriage
+as she has played fast and loose with him before it. He has never
+understood women--cannot read them. Could a girl like that keep a
+secret? She's a Cressida--a creature of every camp! Not an idea of the
+cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment in harmony with it! She is viler
+than any of those Berlin light o' loves on the eve of Jena. Stable as a
+Viennese dancing slut home from Mariazell! This is the girl-transparent
+to the whole world! But his heart is on her, and he must have her,
+I suppose; and I shall have to bear her impertinences, or sign my
+demission and cease to labour for the cause at least in conjunction
+with Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of it, and I am doomed to
+uselessness.'
+
+Tresten nodded a protesting assent.
+
+'Not quite so bad,' he said, with the encouraging smile which could
+persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you two
+are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she's
+an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them;
+but she's an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real
+embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp!
+as you say. She was not worth carrying off. I consented to try it to
+quiet him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we
+must take pattern by him. It's a mad love.'
+
+'A Titan's love!' the baroness exclaimed, groaning. 'The woman!--no
+matter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of a
+great man's passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents
+fraught with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it sounds
+badly, but there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, for
+whom no degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to
+him! He--that great he--covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takes
+the flame--the pure spirit of her--to himself. Were men like him!--they
+would have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morally
+on alpine elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his
+fellows. Do not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted him
+in a storm, and the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous,
+cruel--yes, but she blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author of
+his madness. It is the snake's nature of the girl which distracts him;
+she is in his blood. Had she come to me, I would have helped her to cure
+him; or had you succeeded in carrying her off, I would have stood by
+their union; or were she a different creature, and not the shifty thing
+she is, I could desire him to win her. A peasant girl, a workman's
+daughter, a tradesman's, a professional singer, actress, artist--I would
+have given my hand to one of these in good faith, thankful to her! As
+it is, I have acted in obedience to his wishes, without idle
+remonstrances--I know him too well; and with as much cordiality as I
+could put into an evil service. She will drag him down, down, Tresten!'
+
+'They are not joined yet,' said the colonel.
+
+'She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me--her
+letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throws
+a light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick
+her out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to
+consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through
+her hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is
+one of the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they
+enjoy comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that
+palling, they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark
+before the time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though
+god-like he seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in
+any hands. This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'
+
+'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.
+
+'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'
+
+The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.
+
+'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see
+him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she
+does.'
+
+'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet:
+I don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he
+has an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as
+calm as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just
+as unconcernedly as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel
+outpost who wasn't deader on the subject in monosyllables than
+mademoiselle. She has a military erectness, and answers you and looks
+you straight at the eyes, perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl
+she is," as you say. She looked at me downright defying me to despise
+her. Alvan has been tricked by her colour: she's icy. She has no
+passion. She acts up to him when they're together, and that deceives
+him. I doubt her having blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'
+
+'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!'
+the baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I
+assure you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to
+the Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What
+character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'
+
+Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act
+the part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with
+no ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal,
+a stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of
+Storchel and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded
+by the little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentler
+explosions. Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut her
+lips tight for a laugh of essential humour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had
+overcome Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General had
+not consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror
+of the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged that
+Tresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hear
+from her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speak
+with her alone before the official interview in the presence of the
+notary, when she was publicly to state her decision and freedom of
+choice, according to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through his
+envoy.
+
+'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan. 'But I have
+worked for it--I have worked! I have been talking to-day for six hours
+uninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a caged
+bear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform none
+of his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper touched
+a particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the winding
+of a key. Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General. I could
+get no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called up
+Hollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear,
+or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin. They have
+been hard at her, the whole family! and I shall want the two hours I
+stipulated for to the full. What do you say?--come, I wager I do it
+within one hour! They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will be
+some time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind her
+defences; but an hour's an age with a woman. Clotilde? I wager I have
+her on her knees in half an hour! These notions of duty, and station,
+and her fiddle-de-dee betrothal to that Danube osier with Indian-idol
+eyes, count for so much mist. She was and is mine. I swear to strike
+to her heart in ten minutes! But, madam, if not, you may pronounce me
+incapable of conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impression
+of facts. I say I will do it! I am insane if I may not judge from
+antecedents that my voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at one
+signal--at a look! I am prepared to stake my reason on her running to me
+before I speak a word:--and I will not beckon. I promise to fold my arms
+and simply look.'
+
+'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about
+half a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you
+alone,' said the baroness.
+
+Alvan opened his eyes. He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at
+the bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time.
+She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass
+the needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the
+instinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I have
+had three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,
+curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,
+baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down
+to the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar
+degree of earnestness. As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she,
+and from spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'
+
+'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,'
+observed the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at
+the condition of the man who could accept it for that.
+
+He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste
+on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,
+which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him in
+retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.
+
+'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my
+lead! and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction.
+I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and
+the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read
+her flatly. I read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical
+tolerance. I'm in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair
+Greeks.'
+
+'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the
+baroness. 'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any;
+and the small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take
+up. It is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired
+merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape,
+old men who have given over thinking, and young men who never had
+feeling--the philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to
+fat in the sun. Horace avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote
+that unsanguine sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver,
+and gave him a jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its
+poor ghost to his philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting
+Horace! He is the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march
+along flinty ways: the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the
+conforming unbelievers!'
+
+'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the
+musical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. I
+see her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors
+which give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant,
+not much bigger than a dewdrop. And so should a man's heart reflect her!
+Take her on the light in it, she is perfection. We won't take her in the
+shady part or on your flat looking-glasses. There never was necessity
+for accuracy of line in the portraiture of women. The idea of them is
+all we want: it's the best of them. You will own she's Greek; she's
+a Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian. One of those
+delicious girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER,
+THE DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER. There you have
+Clotilde: she's a TO-MORROWER. You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to
+see her at all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you her
+promise to hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going. Ay, so we
+have patience! Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one's
+fortieth year!--it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.'
+
+Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,
+when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.
+
+'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.
+
+'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my
+forty-first a sage.'
+
+'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'
+
+'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide
+and master.'
+
+'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined
+to come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something
+to rest one's faith on. Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like,
+were not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one
+of them. Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud
+career deviate.'
+
+'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan. 'I am the wine, and she the crystal
+cup. She has avowed it again and again. You read her as she is when
+away from me. Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit
+to contend when she stands alone. But when I am beside her, when we are
+together--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of me
+by the magic I have seen each time we encountered. She knows it well.'
+
+'She may know it too well.'
+
+'For what?' He frowned.
+
+'For the chances of your meeting.'
+
+'You think it possible she will refuse?'
+
+A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face. He fetched a big
+breath.
+
+'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and
+everything written there is imposture! I can account for all that she
+has done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me. Not that
+she should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it! Refuse?
+But I have done my work, done what I said I would do. I stand in my
+order of battle, and she refuses? No! I stake my head on it! I have not
+a clod's perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me from
+a flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has gained
+his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays blind
+with chance.'
+
+He started up in agitation. 'Lucie! I am a grinning skull without a
+brain if that girl refuses! She will not.' He took his hat to leave,
+adding, to seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'She
+will not refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I
+have done tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she--oh! she cannot,
+she will not refuse. Never! I have eyes, I have wits, I am not tottering
+yet on my grave--or it's blindly, if I am. I have my clear judgement,
+I am not an imbecile. It seems to me a foolish suspicion that she can
+possibly refuse. Her manners are generally good; freakish, but good in
+the main. Perhaps she takes a sting... but there is no sting here. It
+would be bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of... she has a heart!
+Well, then, good manners and right feeling forbid her to refuse. She is
+an exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I have helped you to
+a wrong impression of her. You will really appreciate her wit; you will
+indeed; believe me, you will. We pardon nonsense in a girl. Married, she
+will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I am responsible for
+her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her with me I warrant
+her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle, like the Cossack's
+horse. I fancy that at forty I am about as young as most young men.
+I promise her another forty manful working years. Are you dubious of
+that?'
+
+'I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,' said the baroness.
+
+Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism,
+comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite
+in toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire
+preparing the feast.
+
+'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resuming
+the offence on the apology for it. 'I could talk with interest of a
+trousseau. I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a
+choice of wedding-presents. As she is legally free to bestow her hand on
+me--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide to
+be married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris. She
+has a turn for startling. I can imagine that if I proposed a run for
+it she would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in
+acquiescing in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly
+because, in the first case, she would throw herself and the rest of
+the adventure on me, at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her
+impulses; and in the second, because she is a girl who would require a
+full band of the best Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up
+her spirits among her people during the preparations for espousing a
+democrat, demagogue, and Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to
+her own. Give Momus a sister, Clotilde is the lady! I know her. I
+would undertake to put a spell on her and keep her contented on a
+frontier--not Russian, any barbarous frontier where there is a sun. She
+must have sun. One might wrap her in sables, but sun is best. She loves
+it best, though she looks remarkably well in sables. Never shall I
+forget... she is frileuse, and shivers into them! There are Frenchmen
+who could paint it--only Frenchmen. Our artists, no. She is very French.
+Born in France she would have been a matchless Parisienne. Oh! she's
+a riddle of course. I don't pretend to spell every letter of her. The
+returning of my presents is odd. No, I maintain that she is a coward
+acting under domination, and there's no other way of explaining
+the puzzle. I was out of sight, they bullied her, and she
+yielded--bewilderingly, past comprehension it seems--cat!--until you
+remember what she's made of: she's a reed. Now I reappear armed with
+powers to give her a free course, and she, that abject whom you beheld
+recently renouncing me, is, you will see, the young Aurora she was when
+she came striking at my door on the upper Alp. That was a morning! That
+morning is Clotilde till my eyes turn over! She is all young heaven and
+the mountains for me! She's the filmy light above the mountains that
+weds white snow and sky. By the way, I dreamt last night she was half a
+woman, half a tree, and her hair was like a dead yewbough, which is as
+you know of a brown burnt-out colour, suitable to the popular conception
+of widows. She stood, and whatever turning you took, you struck back on
+her. Whether my widow, I can't say: she must first be my wife. Oh, for
+tomorrow!'
+
+'What sort of evening is it?' said the baroness.
+
+'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along,' Alvan replied, and
+seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again. They
+touched hands. He promised to call in the forenoon next day.
+
+'Be cool,' she counselled him.
+
+'Oh!' He flung back his head, making light of the crisis. 'After all,
+it's only a girl. But, you know, what I set myself to win!... The
+thing's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should be
+ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten. There is no other reason
+for the trouble we 're at, except that, as I have said a thousand times,
+she suits me. No man can be cooler than I.'
+
+'Keep so,' said the baroness.
+
+He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels
+a shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the
+Rhone-stream. There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid
+liquid tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows
+no abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied
+plains ahead.
+
+His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to
+mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this
+one were granted him!
+
+He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the
+task; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imagination
+spun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of his
+frenzies, though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had
+made some noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure
+that it was infamous to thwart them. At a certain age honest men made
+sacrifice of their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform
+the duty of husbanding a woman. A man should have a wife and rear
+children, not to be forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by
+transmitting to future times qualities he has proved priceless:
+he thought of the children, and yearned to the generations of men
+physically and morally through them.
+
+This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses
+of temper.
+
+Was she so small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty,
+vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil
+beam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused
+the giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they
+were by his pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he had
+a broad full heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her,
+uplifting her, richly endowing her. No meanness of heart was in him. He
+lay down at night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness.
+'Tomorrow! you bird of to-morrow!' he let fly his good-night to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+He slept. Near upon morning he roused with his tender fit strong on him,
+but speechless in the waking as it had been dreamless in sleep. It was a
+happy load on his breast, a life about to be born, and he thought that
+a wife beside him would give it language. She should have, for she would
+call out, his thousand flitting ideas now dropped on barren ground for
+want of her fair bosom to inspire, to vivify, to receive. Poetry laid
+a hand on him: his desire of the wife, the children, the citizen's good
+name--of these our simple civilized ambitions--was lowly of the earth,
+throbbing of earth, and at the same time magnified beyond scope of
+speech in vast images and emblems resembling ranges of Olympian cloud
+round the blue above earth, all to be decipherable, all utterable, when
+she was by. What commoner word!--yet wife seemed to him the word most
+reverberating of the secret sought after by man, fullest at once of
+fruit and of mystery, or of that light in the heart of mystery which
+makes it magically fruitful.
+
+He felt the presence of Clotilde behind the word; but in truth the
+delicate sensations breeding these half-thoughts of his, as he lay
+between sleeping and waking, shrank from conjuring up the face of the
+woman who had wounded them, and a certain instinct to preserve and be
+sure of his present breathing-space of luxurious tranquillity kept her
+veiled. Soon he would see her as his wife, and then she would be she,
+unveiled ravishingly, the only she, the only wife! He knew the cloud he
+clasped for Clotilde enough to be at pains to shun a possible prospect
+of his execrating it. Oh, the only she, the only wife! the wild man's
+reclaimer! the sweet abundant valley and channel of his river of
+existence henceforward! Doubting her in the slightest was doubting her
+human. It is the brain, the satanic brain which will ever be pressing to
+cast its shadows: the heart is clearer and truer.
+
+He multiplied images, projected visions, nestled in his throbs to drug
+and dance his brain. He snatched at the beauty of a day that outrolled
+the whole Alpine hand-in-hand of radiant heaven-climbers for an
+assurance of predestined celestial beneficence; and again, shadowily
+thoughtful of the littleness of the thing he exalted and claimed,
+he staked his reason on the positive blessing to come to him before
+nightfall, telling himself calmly that he did so because there would
+be madness in expecting it otherwise: he asked for so little! Since
+he asked for so little, to suppose that it would not be granted was
+irrational. None but a very coward could hesitate to stake his all on
+the issue.
+
+Singularly small indeed the other aims in life appeared by comparison
+with this one, but his intellect, in the act of pleading excuses for his
+impatience, distinguished why it should be so. The crust, which is not
+much, is everything to the starving beggar; and he was eager for the
+crust that he might become sound and whole again, able to give their
+just proportion to things, as at present he acknowledged himself hardly
+able to do. He could not pursue two thoughts on a political question,
+or grasp the idea of a salutary energy in the hosts animated by his
+leadership. There would have to be an end of it speedily, else men might
+name him worthless dog!
+
+Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful nakedness, a wedding of white
+and blue, of purest white and bluest blue. Alvan crossed the island
+bridges when the sun had sprung on his shivering fair prey, to make
+the young fresh Morning rosy, and was glittering along the smooth
+lake-waters. Workmen only were abroad, and Alvan was glad to be out with
+them to feel with them as one of them. Close beside him the vivid genius
+of the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heaven
+in his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble. Alvan
+cherished a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him with
+the feeling of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor,
+with the knowledge of our frailty. Him, as well as the great Englishman
+and a Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied to
+that progenitor's questioning of him, but said 'You know the love of
+woman: He loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler. He too was
+a worker, a champion worker. He doated on the prospect of plunging into
+his work; the vision of jolly giant labours told of peace obtained, and
+there could be no peace without his prize.
+
+He listened to the workmen's foot-falls. The solitary sound and steady
+motion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not less
+than the changes of light in heaven above the roofs. With the golden
+light came numbers, workmen still. Their tread on the stones roused some
+of his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watched
+the scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities,
+easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered. These
+numbers are the brute force of earth, which must have the earth in time,
+as they had it in the dawn of our world, and then they entered into
+bondage for not knowing how to use it. They will have it again: they
+have it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex of
+their brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. They
+will have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the
+leadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in the
+spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice
+of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our
+column of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers'
+arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which
+will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of
+yonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guarantee
+for the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he
+apostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right,
+thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of
+the great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And right am I too, between that
+metal-rail of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete
+for want of an element of the other!' Practically and in vision right
+was Alvan, for those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former,
+he counted on the supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished
+where it lay in perpetuity.
+
+During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they
+could put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He had
+resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple
+for business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; he
+had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too short
+for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too
+valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding
+of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.
+
+He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that he
+confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging: he was therefore
+bound to endure a retort. Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he
+could be temperate. Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the
+sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of
+his being excited to betray it. Shadowily he thought of the hard words
+hurled at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde's father
+did him by plotting to rob him of his daughter. But how had an Alvan
+replied?--with the arts of peaceful fence victoriously. He conceived of
+no temptation to his repressed irascibility save the political. A day
+might come for him and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in
+a tussle. On that day he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt
+assured, he would be more master of himself than his antagonist. He was
+for the young world, in the brain of a new order of things; the other
+based his unbending system on the visions of a feudal chief, and would
+win a great step perchance, but there he would stop: he was not with the
+future!
+
+This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent
+charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come,
+which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing. He had a
+name, he had a station: he wanted power and he saw it approaching.
+
+He wanted a wife too. Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previous
+to the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger's house. Alvan
+consequently was unable any longer to think of a wife in the abstract.
+He wanted Clotilde. Here was a man going straight to her, going to see
+her, positively to see her and hear her voice!--almost instantly to hear
+her voice, and see her eyes and hair, touch her hand. Oh! and rally her,
+rouse her wit; and be able to tell him the flower she wore for the day,
+and where she wore it--at her temples, or sliding to the back hair, or
+in her bosom, or at her waist! She had innumerable tricks of indication
+in these shifty pretty ways of hers, and was full of varying speech to
+the cunning reader of her.
+
+'But keep her to seriousness,' Alvan said. 'Our meeting must be early
+to-day--early in the afternoon. She is not unlikely to pretend to
+trifle. She has not seen me for some time, and will probably enough play
+at emancipation and speak of the "singular impatience of the seigneur
+Alvan." Don't you hear her? I swear to those very words! She "loves her
+liberty," and she curves her fan and taps her foot. "The seigneur Alvan
+appears pressed for time:" She has "letters to write to friends to-day."
+Stop that! I can't join in play: to-morrow, if she likes; not to-day.
+Or not till I have her by the hand. She shall be elf and fairy, French
+coquette, whatever she pleases to-morrow, and I'll be satisfied. All
+I beg is for plain dealing on a business matter. This is a business
+matter, a business meeting. I thoroughly know the girl's heart, and know
+that in winning the interview I win her. Only'--he pressed his friend's
+arm--'but, my dear Tresten, you understand. You're a luckier fellow than
+I--for the time, at all events. Make it as short as you can. You'll find
+me here. I shall take a book--one of the Pandects. I don't suppose I
+shall work. I feel idle. Any book handy; anything will interest me. I
+should walk or row on the lake, but I would rather be sure of readiness
+for your return. You meet Storchel at the General's house?'
+
+'The appointment was at the house,' Tresten said.
+
+'I have not seen him this morning. I know of nothing to prepare him for.
+You see, it was invariable with her: as soon as she met me she had twice
+her spirit: and that she knows;--she was a new woman, ten times the
+happier for having some grains of my courage. So she'll be glad to
+come to terms and have me by to support her. Press it, if necessary;
+otherwise she might be disappointed, my dear fellow. Storchel looks on,
+and observes, and that 's about all he can do, or need do. Up Mont
+Blanc to-day, Tresten! It's the very day for an ascent:--one of the rare
+crystalline jewels coming in a Swiss August; we should see the kingdoms
+of the earth--and a Republic! But I could climb with all my heart in a
+snowstorm to-day. Andes on Himalayas! as high as you like. The Republic
+by the way, small enough in the ring of empires and monarchies, if you
+measure it geometrically! You remember the laugh at the exact elevation
+of Mount Olympus? But Zeus's eagle sat on it, and top me Olympus, after
+you have imagined the eagle aloft there! after Homer, is the meaning.
+That will be one of the lessons for our young Republicans--to teach them
+not to give themselves up to the embrace of dead materialism because,
+as they fancy, they have had to depend on material weapons for carving
+their way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidal
+delusion! The spiritual weapon has done most, and always does. They are
+sons of an idea. They deny their parentage when they scoff at idealism.
+It's a tendency we shall have to guard against; it leads back to the old
+order of things, if we do not trim our light. She is waiting for you!
+Go. You will find me here. And don't forget my instructions. Appoint
+for the afternoon--not late. Too near night will seem like Orpheus going
+below, and I hope to meet a living woman, not a ghost--ha! coloured
+like a lantern in a cavern, good Lord! Covered with lichen! Say three
+o'clock, not later. The reason is, I want to have it over early and
+be sure of what I am doing; I'm bothered by it; I shall have to make
+arrangements ... a thousand little matters... telegraph to Paris, I
+daresay; she's fond of Paris, and I must learn who's there to meet her.
+Now start. I'll walk a dozen steps with you. I think of her as if,
+since we parted, she had been sitting on a throne in Erebus, and must be
+ghastly. I had a dream of a dead tree that upset me. In fact, you see I
+must have it over. The whole affair makes me feel too young.'
+
+Tresten advised him to spend an hour with the baroness.
+
+'I can't; she makes me feel too old,' said Alvan. 'She talks. She
+listens, but I don't want to speak. Dead silence!--let it be a dash
+of the pen till you return. As for these good people hurrying to their
+traffic, and tourists and loungers, they have a trick for killing time
+without hurting him. I wish I had. I try to smother a minute, and up the
+old fellow jumps quivering all over and threatening me body and soul.
+They don't appear as if they had news on their faces this morning. I've
+not seen a newspaper and won't look at one. Here we separate. Be formal
+in mentioning me to her but be particularly civil. I know you have the
+right tone: she's a critical puss. Days like these are the days for her
+to be out. There goes a parasol like one I 've seen her carry. Stay--no!
+Don't forget my instructions. Paris for a time. It may be the Pyrenees.
+Paris on our way back. She would like the Pyrenees. It's not too late
+for society at Luchon and Cauterets. She likes mountains, she mounts
+well: in any case, plenty of mules can be had. Paris to wind up with.
+Paris will be fuller about the beginning of October.'
+
+He had quitted Tresten, and was talking to himself, cheating' himself,
+not discordantly at all. The poet of the company within him claimed the
+word and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde's likings, and
+the honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her in
+Pyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons. She was friande of
+chocolates, bon-bons: she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of good
+wine. She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of the
+very best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, and
+in millinery likewise. A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisian
+ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to
+Clotilde. He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and
+mighty men in letters. She should have the cream of Paris. Does she hint
+at rewarding him for his trouble? The thought of her indebted lips, half
+closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!'...
+
+At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked
+from them, the life goes with it.
+
+He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the
+forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties
+of other men.
+
+Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant
+his affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer
+than she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness,
+looking in the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and
+eyes charged with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely
+all who passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in
+their passage. The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a
+whirring of wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when
+imagination shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the
+wheels be not stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality
+inside him absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving
+multitudinous vivid impressions, he did not commune with one, was
+unaware of them. His thick black hair waved and glistened over the
+fine aquiline of his face. His throat was open to the breeze. His great
+breast and head were joined by a massive column of throat that gave
+volume for the coursing of the blood to fire the battery of thought,
+perchance in a tempest overflood it, extinguish it. His fortieth year
+was written on his complexion and presence: it was the fortieth of
+a giant growth that will bend at the past eightieth as little as the
+rock-pine, should there come no uprooting tempest. It said manhood, and
+breathed of settled strength of muscle, nerve, and brain.
+
+Of the people passing, many knew him not, but marked him; some knew him
+by repute, one or two his person. To all of them he was a noticeable
+figure; even those of sheeplike nature, having an inclination to start
+upon the second impulse in the flanks of curious sheep when their
+first had been arrested by the appearance of one not of their kind,
+acknowledged the eminence of his bearing. There may have been a
+passenger in the street who could tell the double tale of the stick he
+swung in his hand, showing a gleam of metal, whereon were engraved
+names of the lurid historic original owner, and of the donor and the
+recipient. According to the political sentiments of the narrator would
+his tale be coloured, and a simple walking-stick would be clothed in
+Tarquin guilt for striking off heads of the upper ranks of Frenchmen
+till the blood of them topped the handle, or else wear hues of wonder,
+seem very memorable; fit at least for a museum. If the Christian
+aristocrat might shrink from it in terror and loathing, the Paynim
+Republican of deep dye would be ready to kiss it with veneration.
+But, assuming them to have a certain bond of manliness, both agree in
+pronouncing the deed a right valiant and worthy one, which caused this
+instrument to be presented to Alvan by a famous doctor, who, hearing of
+his repudiation of the duel, and of his gallant and triumphant defence
+of himself against a troop of ruffians, enemies or scum of their city,
+at night, by the aid of a common stout pedestrian stick, alone in a
+dark alley of the public park, sent him, duly mounted and engraved, an
+illustrious fellow to the weapon of defence, as a mode of commemorating
+his just abhorrence of bloodshed and his peaceful bravery.
+
+Observers of him would probably speculate on his features and the
+carriage of his person as he went by them; with a result in their
+minds that can be of no import to us, men's general speculations being
+directed by their individual aims and their moods, their timidities,
+prejudices, envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he was
+a potential figure. If to know him the rising demagogue of the time
+dressed him in such terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of
+the voracious hordes which live from hand to mouth, without intervention
+of a banker and property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone
+under a different aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve
+their perplexity, had the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific
+devastator swinging the sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who staked
+his all upon his love, loved up to his capacity desperately, loved a
+girl, and hung upon her voice to hear whether his painful knocking at a
+door should gain him admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizens
+of the legitimately-satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girl
+annihilate him.
+
+He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had never
+ceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but with
+a compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilized
+man, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was the
+civilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her,
+with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped to
+lead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman's
+friend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation,
+but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousin
+germane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders and
+main supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature of
+his blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on a
+damsel of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies and
+governed by some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in her
+reputation for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness and
+her turn for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties,
+put forth these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here and
+there among them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorous
+Clotilde. What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and the
+baroness partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposing
+her sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, his
+wilder animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatened
+with a diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned to
+gratify the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will be
+in danger of playing prematurely for power to seat her beside him high:
+while at the same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer's
+head are secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edge
+of his Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwise
+your half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to have
+married that drab-coloured unit? Power must be grasped....
+
+His watch told him that Tresten was now beholding her, or just about to.
+The stillness of the heavens was remarkable. The hour held breath. She
+delayed her descent from her chamber. He saw how she touched at her
+hair, more distinctly than he saw the lake before his eyes. He watched
+her, and the growl of a coming roar from him rebuked her tricky
+deliberateness. Deciding at last, she slips down the stairs like a
+waterfall, and is in the room, erect, composed--if you do not lay ear
+against her bosom. Tresten stares at her, owns she is worth a struggle.
+Love does this, friend Tresten! Love, that stamps out prejudice and
+bids inequality be smooth. Tresten stares and owns she is worth heavier
+labours, worse than his friend has endured. Love does it! Love, that
+hallows a stranger's claim to the flower of a proud garden: Love has
+won her the freedom to suffer herself to be chosen by the stranger. What
+matters which of them toiled to bring them to so sweet an end! It was
+not either of them, but Love. By and by, after acting serenest innocent,
+suddenly broken, she will be copious of sad confessions. That will be
+in their secresy: in the close and boundless together of clasped hands.
+Deep eyes, that give him in realms of light within light all that he
+has dreamed of rapturousness and blessedness, you are threatened with
+a blinding kiss if you look abashed:--if her voice shall dare repeat
+another of those foolish self-reproaches, it shall be construed as a
+petition for further kisses. Silence! he said to her, imagining that he
+had been silent, and enjoying silence with a perfect quietude beyond
+the trouble of a thought of her kisses and his happiness. His full heart
+craved for the infinity of silence.
+
+Another moment and he was counting to her the days, hours, minutes,
+which had been the gulf of torture between then and now--the separation
+and the reunion: he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was only
+for the drawing of most blissful breath.
+
+His watch went slowly. She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front of
+Tresten. Oh! he knew her so well. He guessed the length of her acting,
+and the time for her earnestness. She would have to act a coquette at
+first to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girl
+for putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask? But he knew her
+so well: she would not trifle very long: his life on it, that she will
+soon falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check: a word from Tresten
+then, if he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her. Alvan heard
+her saying: 'I will see him yes, to-day. Let him appoint. He may come
+when he likes--come at once!'
+
+'My life on it!' he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, the
+certainty that she loved him.
+
+He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; he
+had no recollection of the look of the street. A friend came up and put
+him in the right way, walking back with him. This was General Leczel, a
+famous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage through
+blood and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they name
+freedom devotedly. Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel with
+continental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued the
+talk on public affairs, to the note of: 'What but knocks will ever open
+the Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the first
+years of the eighteenth century!'
+
+Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him before
+night. Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he had
+been absent fully an hour. He was not in sight right or left. Alvan went
+to his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable of
+imagining any event. He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick as
+water were pressing round him. Unconsciously he had staked his all on
+the revelation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His intellect
+weighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it; he
+magnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his nature
+that the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, as
+he could think, made the world a whirlpool till he had it. He waited,
+figureable by nothing so much as a wild horse in captivity sniffing the
+breeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck
+barley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: he
+is flame kept under and straining to rise.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+The baroness expected to see Alvan in the morning, for he kept
+appointments, and he had said he would come. She conceived that she was
+independent of personal wishes on the subject of Clotilde; the fury
+of his passion prohibited her forming any of the wishes we send up to
+destiny when matters interesting us are in suspense, whether we have
+liberated minds or not. She thought the girl would grant the interview;
+was sure the creature would yield in his presence; and then there was
+an end to the shining of Alvan! Supposing the other possibility, he had
+shown her such fierce illuminations of eye and speech that she foresaw
+it would be a blazing of the insurrectionary beacon-fires of hell
+with him. He was a man of angels and devils. The former had long been
+conquering, but the latter were far from extinct. His passion for this
+shallow girl had consigned him to the lower host. Let him be thwarted,
+his desperation would be unlikely to stop at legal barriers. His
+lawyer's head would be up and armed astoundingly to oppose the law; he
+would read, argue, and act with hot conviction upon the reverse of every
+text of law. She beheld him storming the father's house to have out
+Clotilde, reluctant or conniving; and he harangued the people, he bore
+off his captive, he held her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defied
+authority, he was a public rebel--he with his detected little secret
+aim, which he nursed like a shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraid
+to be proud of it! She had seen that he aimed at standing well with the
+world and being one with it honourably: holding to his principles of
+course: but a disposition that way had been perceived, and the vision
+of him in open rebellion because of his shy catching at the thread of an
+alliance with the decorous world, carved an ironic line on her jaw.
+
+Full surely he would not be baffled without smiting the world on the
+face. And he might suffer for it; the Rudigers would suffer likewise.
+
+She considered them very foolish people. Her survey of the little
+nobility beneath her station had previously enabled her to account for
+their disgust of such a suitor as Alvan, and maintain that they would
+oppose him tooth and nail. Owing to his recent success, the anticipation
+of a peaceful surrender to him seemed now on the whole to carry most
+weight. This girl gives Alvan her hand and her family repudiate her.
+Volatile, flippant, shallow as she is, she must have had some turn for
+him; a physical spell was on her once, and it will be renewed when they
+meet. It sometimes inspires a semblance of courage; she may determine;
+she may be stedfast long enough for him to take his measures to bear her
+away. And the Brocken witches congratulate him on his prize!
+
+Almost better would it be, she thought, that circumstance should thwart
+him and kindle his own demon element.
+
+The forenoon, the noon, the afternoon, went round.
+
+Late in the evening her door was flung wide for Colonel von Tresten.
+
+She looked her interrogative 'Well?' His features were not used to
+betray the course of events.
+
+'How has it gone?' she said.
+
+He replied: 'As I told you. I fancied I gauged the hussy pretty
+closely.'
+
+'She will not see him?'
+
+'Not she.'
+
+The baroness crossed her arms.
+
+'And Alvan?'
+
+The colonel shrugged. It was not done to tease a tremulous woman, for
+she was calm. It painted the necessary consequence of the refusal: an
+explosion of AEtna, and she saw it.
+
+'Where is he now?' said she.
+
+'At his hotel.'
+
+'Alone?'
+
+'Leczel is with him.'
+
+'That looks like war.'
+
+Tresten shrugged again. 'It might have been foreseen by everybody
+concerned in the affair. The girl does not care for him one corner of an
+eye! She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore she
+had never committed herself to an oath to him, sneered at him. She
+positively sneered. Her manner to me assures me without question that if
+he had stood in my place she would have insulted him:
+
+'Scarcely. She would do in his absence what she would not do under his
+eyes,' remarked the baroness. 'It's decided, then?'
+
+'Quite.'
+
+'Will he be here to-night?'
+
+'I think not.'
+
+'Was she really insolent?'
+
+'For a girl in her position, she was.'
+
+'Did you repeat her words to him?'
+
+'Some of them.'
+
+'What description of insolence?'
+
+'She spoke of his vanity....'
+
+'Proceed.'
+
+'It was more her manner to me, as the one of the two appearing as his
+friend. She was tolerably civil to Storchel: and the difference of
+behaviour must have been designed, for she not only looked at Storchel
+in a way to mark the difference, she addressed him rather eagerly before
+we turned on our heels, to tell him she would write to him, and let him
+have her reply in a letter. He will get some coquettish rigmarole.'
+
+'That seems monstrous!--if one could be astonished by her,' said the
+baroness. 'When is she to write?'
+
+'She may write: the letter will find no receiver,' said Tresten,
+significantly raising his eyebrows. 'The legal gentleman is gone--blown
+from a gun! He's off home. He informed me that he should write to
+the General, throwing up his office, and an end to his share in the
+business.'
+
+'There was no rudeness to the poor man?'
+
+'Dear me, no. But imagine a quiet little advocate, very precise and
+silky--you've had a hint of him--and all of a sudden the client he has
+by the ear swells into a tremendous beast--a combination of lion and
+elephant--bellows and shakes the room, stops and stamps before him,
+discharging an unintelligible flood of racy vernacular punctuated in
+thunder. You hear him and see him! Alvan lost his head--some of his hair
+too. The girl is not worth a lock. But he's past reason.'
+
+'He takes it so,' said the baroness, musing. 'It will be the sooner
+over. She never cared for him a jot. And there's the sting. He has
+called up the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him to
+scorn. Hard for any man to bear!--Alvan of all men! Why does he not come
+here? He might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him to
+sleep in the end. However, he has done nothing?'
+
+That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a serious
+point, and repeated the question sharply. 'Has he been to the
+house?--no?--writing?'
+
+Tresten dropped a nod.
+
+'Not to the girl, I suppose. To the father?' said she.
+
+'He has written to the General.'
+
+'You should have stopped it.'
+
+'Tell a vedette to stop cavalry. You're not thinking of the man. He's in
+a white frenzy.'
+
+'I will go to him.'
+
+'You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of his
+poison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti's going to him after he had
+let his men walk into a trap--and that was through a woman: and he was
+quieted; and the chief overlooked it; and two days after, Nuciotti blew
+his brains out. He'd have been alive now if he had been left alone.
+Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women's weeping.
+He has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the
+deuce with the name she deserves, and challengeing the General.'
+
+'That letter is despatched?'
+
+'Rudiger has it by this time.'
+
+The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten: she struck her lap. 'Alvan! Is
+it he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no
+fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. He
+will not fight, be sure.'
+
+'Perhaps not,' Tresten said.
+
+'As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannot
+be too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men when
+they are mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary
+courtesy. "With the name--she deserves," you say?
+
+He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she
+is?'
+
+The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror
+of the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction
+between camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge
+of cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's a
+black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no
+doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be
+dangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is
+with him and gives him head. It 's about time for me to go back to him,
+for there may be business.'
+
+The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's
+eruption the drop-scene would fall.
+
+Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter,
+and knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables
+expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting
+for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a
+promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl,
+the worst must have been passed, she thought.
+
+He had broken with the girl: she reviewed him under the light of that
+sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he
+would again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he had
+been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of
+scorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself
+to entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and
+dismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous
+lunatic fit, that promised to release him from his fatal passion,
+seemed, on the contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display.
+Wives he should have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she
+thought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened
+pretensions to be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and
+merited. The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound
+beyond healing. It pronounced in a single breath the girl's right name
+and his pledge of a return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could
+do; it uttered anathema on his love of her; it painted his white glow
+of unreason and fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon
+every part of his character that was tenderest with him. After speaking
+such things a man comes to his senses or he dies. So thought the
+baroness, and she was not more than commonly curious to hear how the
+Rudigers had taken the insult they had brought on themselves, and
+not unwilling to wait to see Alvan till he was cool. His vanity, when
+threatening to bleed to the death, would not be civil to the surgeon
+before the second or third dressing of his wound.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apart
+from it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act of
+obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a
+consequence she was full of grovelling revolt.
+
+Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this
+final instance of dutifulness--one was the sight of that hateful rigid
+face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for
+subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy,
+Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not
+mistake her meaning, and the little man's pair of spectacles had, she
+fancied, been dim. He was touched. Here was a friend! Here was the
+friend she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with
+Alvan! Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion.
+By contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to
+defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies,
+and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven's craftiness in revolt
+to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse
+her cause. He was to be taught to understand--nay, angelically he would
+understand at once--why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily.
+Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty
+to her family, terrorized, a prisoner 'beside this blue lake, in sight
+of the sublimest scenery of earth,' and hating his associate--hating
+him, she repeated and underscored--she had belied herself; she was
+willing to meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heart
+to Alvan's true friend--his only true friend. He would instantly discern
+her unhappy plight. In the presence of his associate she could explain
+nothing, do nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. She
+had good reason to know that man for her enemy. She could prove him a
+traitor to Alvan. Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr.
+Storchel's integrity and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified
+before him, as if affected by some wicked spell. She owned she had
+utterly belied herself; she protested she had been no free agent.
+
+The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel's
+shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as
+emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by.
+
+The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself
+and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of
+supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the
+feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a
+heart, their heads being too awful.
+
+She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outside
+her door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of her
+design to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would
+be a waste of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike
+the sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant. 'Too late,'
+he said, pointing to the letter she held. 'Dr. Storchel has gone.'
+
+She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would
+remain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when
+Marko said: 'Alvan has challenged your father to fight him.' With that
+he turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the
+family.
+
+She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan
+and a duel--Alvan challengeing her father--Alvan, the contemner of
+the senseless appeal to arms for the settlement 'of personal
+disputes!--darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whom
+she met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent,
+her sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation
+with the gentleman. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep
+in peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the
+city.
+
+She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered
+imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they
+assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had
+ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason
+of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud
+of her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid
+figure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposed
+herself to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the
+figure, abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some
+great cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose
+lucent reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere,
+he to crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his
+beloved! More unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must
+know the challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde
+ever again. She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of
+mental drowning for a truce to the bitter riddle.
+
+Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.
+Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her
+for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled
+and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of
+blood: he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him
+under the beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could
+occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in
+truth been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of
+him with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of
+the gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back?
+She inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their
+separation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing
+him as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracing
+would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him as
+he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as
+he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him
+to her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a
+stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.
+
+Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth
+visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black
+eyes bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and
+farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too
+much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She
+listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp,
+though she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding
+duller than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while
+she listened shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too
+intelligible to be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature
+is incandescent to talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in
+hoping, hungering, and fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to
+disown it. The tightened grasp of her hand confessed her understanding
+of the thing she pressed to hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to
+herself to repudiate it under an accumulating horror, at the same time
+that the repetition doubly and trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate
+her criminal sensations by casting the whole burden on the material
+fact.
+
+Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the
+family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him
+dead in the act of telling it.
+
+'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonier
+in their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself for
+not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot:
+she her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents
+opposed to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a
+flood of light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed
+it, but if it was to be?... 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to
+fight? ... they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is
+abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?'
+
+He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.
+
+She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their
+heartlessness in permitting him to fight.
+
+'This is positive? This is really true?' she said, burning and dreading
+to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with
+her other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who
+had brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer
+necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was
+guilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of
+conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:
+
+'But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired
+a pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for
+these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you
+not know?'
+
+'I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day,' he said.
+
+Compassion thrilled her. 'A couple of hours! Unhappy boy! But do you not
+know that he is a dead shot? He is famous for his aim. He never misses.
+He can do all the duellist's wonders both with sword and pistol, and
+that is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he--before
+these parents of mine drove him... and me! I think we are both mad--he
+despised duelling. He! He! Alvan! who has challenged my father! I have
+heard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he? what has he
+changed to? And it would be cowardly to kill you, Marko.'
+
+'I take my chance,' Marko said.
+
+'You have no chance. His aim is unerring.' She insisted on the
+deadliness of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that her
+conscience approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatal
+aim.
+
+If you stood against him he would not spare you--perhaps not; I fear
+he would not, as far as I know him now. He can be terrible in wrath.
+I think he would warn you; but two men face to face! and he suspecting
+that you cross his path! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreat
+you. By your love of me! Oh! no blood. I do not want to lose you. I
+could not bear it.'
+
+'Would you regret me?' said he.
+
+Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made her
+fondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowing
+him doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestined
+to be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She murmured
+phrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for being
+speechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing at
+whom a voice of no ominous empty sound was given her; and still she felt
+more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a
+tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterance
+was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly
+when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of
+his withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challenge
+accepted. It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed
+without and within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he
+left her.
+
+The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: his
+phantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright in
+life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should
+die! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterly
+misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko.
+
+Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent
+youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. 'Do not
+put blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you let
+that horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, and
+cannot feel my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He
+made me say the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko!
+You have no cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do
+not aim; fire in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think...'
+
+She sank to her chair, exclaiming: 'I am a prisoner!' She could not
+walk two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and
+the paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the
+result. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of
+blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance
+upon hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears
+considerate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for what
+Providence was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was!
+It is the dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desires
+will offer up bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with
+desires expecting to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes
+the direction of events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song
+to that contriving agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became
+practically active, darting here and there over the room, burning
+letters, packing a portable bundle of clothes, in preparation for the
+domestic confusion of the morrow when the body of Marko would be driven
+to their door, and amid the wailing and the hubbub she would escape
+unnoticed to Alvan, Providence-guided! Out of the house would then
+signify assuredly to Alvan's arms.
+
+The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she not
+been sensible of paying heavily for it; and thus, as he would wish to
+be, was Marko of double service to her; for she was truly fond of the
+beautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. His
+blood was on the heads of those who permitted him to face the danger!
+She would have felt for him still more tenderly if it were permitted to
+a woman's heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, she
+cannot do: she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consent
+that one of them should be swept away.
+
+Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thought
+of adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt of
+the object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, and
+dressed in two of certain garments which would have swollen her bundle
+too much.
+
+This was the day of Providence: she had strung herself to do her part
+in it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her
+bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could
+speak her 'Heaven be with you!' unshaken, though sadly. Her father had
+returned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to
+her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised
+from the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation
+of it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if
+the carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds
+of the poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She could
+not but apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would
+probably be! Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could
+not blame Alvan for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim
+of it. In any case the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her
+opportunity marked by the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she
+sat rocking her parcel on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed with
+an alluring terror of him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against
+red-streaked heavens, more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness than
+she had ever realized that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered,
+fearing to meet him, yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes
+on his breast in blindest happiness. She gave the very sob for the
+occasion.
+
+A carriage drove at full speed to the door. Full speed could not be the
+pace for a funeral load. That was a visitor to her father on business.
+She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and
+must be ready.
+
+Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickened
+on her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be
+undergoing for Marko: or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she
+would certainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accumulated
+enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew
+to be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her required
+energies for action at the approaching signal.
+
+Feet came rushing up the stairs: her door was thrown open, and the
+living Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look an
+expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and
+she said: 'Oh, yes, she was glad, of course.' She was glad that Alvan
+had pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projected
+confusion of the household had been thwarted: vexed, petrified with
+astonishment.
+
+'But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?' he almost wept to say.
+
+Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was
+unaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragic
+comedian.
+
+Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and
+weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth?
+
+'You--him!' she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt.
+
+She laughed. The world is upside down--a world without light, or
+pointing finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore
+bereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse
+of a world--if this be true!
+
+But it can still be disbelieved.
+
+He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive,
+'Leave me!' The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger.
+His manner of going smote her brain.
+
+Was it credible? Was it possible to think of Alvan wounded?--the giant
+laid on his back and in the hands of the leech? Assuredly it was a
+mockery of all calculations. She could not conjure up the picture of
+him, and her emotions were merely struck and stunned. If this be true!
+
+But it can be resolutely disbelieved.
+
+We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or
+suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship,
+lose our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko's tale
+confirmed, whispers of leaden import, physicians' rumours, and she
+doubted. She clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain,
+but not her belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imagine
+him overthrown in a conflict--and by a hand that she had taken and
+twisted in her woman's hand subduingly! He, the unerring shot, laid low
+by one who had never burnt powder till the day before the duel! It
+was easier to remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational
+distinctness of the whispers. She dashed her 'Impossible!' at
+Providence, conceived the tale in wilful and almost buoyant
+self-deception to be a conspiracy in the family to hide from her Alvan's
+magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from the field of strife. That was
+the most evident fact. She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting
+each and hugging it after the false life was out.
+
+So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descending
+to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be
+rebutted by laughter: and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor
+imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, 'They
+act it well!' and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the
+dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what
+her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception.
+Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to
+silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved
+them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist
+the look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and
+stimulate further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run
+to the wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheat
+her heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the
+imposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the
+terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed
+within her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her
+feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned
+the earth, and earth's teachings, and the understanding of life.
+Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought
+that Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko
+had stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing
+thought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat and
+a state of burning. She knew not in truth what to feel: the craven's
+dilemma when yet feeling much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. She
+had so shifted and wound about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that
+she could no longer sanely and with wholeness encounter a shock: she had
+no sensation firm enough to be stamped by a signet.
+
+Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded
+antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word
+of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought 'Why is it not
+Alvan who speaks?' rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She
+framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery
+had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was
+too shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the
+intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love
+of the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of others
+flew with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and
+the spirit presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper
+substitutes for her conscience.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+Alvan was dead. The shot of his adversary, accidentally well-directed,
+had struck him mortally. He died on the morning of the third day after
+the duel. There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agonies
+made a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live.
+
+The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon. She
+was his nurse and late confidante a tearless woman, rigid in service.
+Death relaxed his hold in her hand. He met his fate like the valiant
+soul he was. Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodily
+tortures to stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of his
+prostration, might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates felling
+a man like him by a youngster's hand and for a shallow girl! He might
+have fathered some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour: for
+such is our manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreck
+through unseaworthy pretensions. There was no interval on his passage
+from anguish to immobility.
+
+Silent was that house of many chambers. That mass of humanity profusely
+mixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion for
+the future of mankind and vanity of person, magnanimity and sensualism,
+high judgement, reckless indiscipline, chivalry, savagery, solidity,
+fragmentariness, was dust.
+
+The two men composing it, the untamed and the candidate for citizenship,
+in mutual dissension pulled it down. He perished of his weakness, but it
+was a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the blot does not
+overshadow his life. His end was a derision because the animal in him
+ran him unchained and bounding to it. A stormy blood made wreck of a
+splendid intelligence. Yet they that pronounce over him the ordinary
+fatalistic epitaph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom of
+men measuring the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, should
+pause to think whether fool or madman is the title for one who was a
+zealous worker, respected by great heads of his time, acknowledged the
+head of the voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we have
+seen, insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer
+fires through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to
+ruin. As little was he the vanished God whom his working people hailed
+deploringly on the long procession of his remains from city to city
+under charge of the baroness. That last word of his history ridicules
+the eulogy of partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of
+worshipping is to conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant: for truth
+will have her just proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figure
+over-idealized by bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the
+balance of the two extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to
+be adored: his last temptation caught him in the season before he had
+subdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of this
+world, stamped him a tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a
+self-deceiver, one of the lividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at,
+but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes the
+note of discord with life; for otherwise, in the reflection of their
+history, life will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to antic
+and dive into gulfs. The characters of the hosts of men are of the
+simple order of the comic; not many are of a stature and a complexity
+calling for the junction of the two Muses to name them.
+
+While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, the
+woman, poor Clotilde, astonished her compatriots by passing comedy and
+tragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slain
+Alvan. In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect our
+knowledge of her. It was a gentle youth; her parents urged her to it: a
+particular letter, the letter of the challenge to her father, besliming
+her, was shown;--a hideous provocation pushed to the foullest. Who can
+blame Prince Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery than
+he? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, the
+never extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little of
+life appearing to remain to him. Before heaven he was guiltless. He was
+good. Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, and she rose out of
+nothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make a
+good youth happy, or nurse him sinking--be of that use. Besides he was a
+refuge from the roof of her parents. She shut her eyes on the past, sure
+of his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense of being, she
+prized above other virtues, and perhaps she had a fancy that to be
+allied to it was to be doing good. After a few months she buried him.
+From that day, or it may be, on her marriage day, her heart was Alvan's.
+Years later she wrote her version of the story, not sparing herself so
+much as she supposed. Providence and her parents were not forgiven. But
+as we are in her debt for some instruction, she may now be suffered to
+go.
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS
+
+     A tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver
+     Above all things I detest the writing for money
+     At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly
+     Barriers are for those who cannot fly
+     Be good and dull, and please everybody
+     Beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip
+     Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies
+     Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession
+     Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered
+     Compromise is virtual death
+     Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath
+     Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change
+     Dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position
+     Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur
+     Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?
+     Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women
+     Fantastical
+     Finishing touches to the negligence
+     Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity
+     Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble
+     Gradations appear to be unknown to you
+     He had to go, he must, he has to be always going
+     He stormed her and consented to be beaten
+     Hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers during absences
+     His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence
+     His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability
+     Hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic
+     I give my self, I do not sell
+     I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy
+     I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you
+     If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature
+     Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days
+     Looking on him was listening
+     Love the difficulty better than the woman
+     Men in love are children with their mistresses
+     Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise
+     Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous
+     Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful
+     Not much esteem for non-professional actresses
+     Not in a situation that could bear of her blaming herself
+     O for yesterday!
+     Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency
+     Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded
+     Polished barbarism
+     Professional widows
+     Providence and her parents were not forgiven
+     Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers)
+     Self-consoled when they are not self-justified
+     She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each
+     She felt in him a maker of facts
+     Strength in love is the sole sincerity
+     The worst of omens is delay
+     The way is clear: we have only to take the step
+     The brainless in Art and in Statecraft
+     Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away
+     Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable
+     To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind
+     Trick for killing time without hurting him
+     Two wishes make a will
+     Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies
+     Want of courage is want of sense
+     We shall not be rich--nor poor
+     Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos on their side
+     Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
+     Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be
+     Work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter
+     World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly
+     World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Tragic Comedians, Complete, by George Meredith
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