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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, Complete,
+by George Meredith
+#70 in our series by George Meredith
+
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+Title: The Tragic Comedians, Complete
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, Complete, by Meredith
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+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Barriers are for those who cannot fly
+Be good and dull, and please everybody
+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
+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
+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
+His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence
+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
+Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise
+Music in Italy?  Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous
+Not much esteem for non-professional actresses
+Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency
+Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded
+Polished barbarism
+Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers)
+She felt in him a maker of facts
+Strength in love is the sole sincerity
+The brainless in Art and in Statecraft
+The way is clear: we have only to take the step
+The worst of omens is delay
+Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable
+Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away
+To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind
+Two wishes make a will
+Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies
+Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
+Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be
+World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v1
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+1892
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they
+met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so.  He
+was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly through
+her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers
+during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at
+the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these backflowings
+and gaps in the feelings.  She had grown reconciled to the perturbation
+of his messages, and would have preferred to have him startling and
+thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she welcomed him, and
+feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill of the fit of
+shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that she had reached
+his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical measures to lead
+to their union.  On one subject sure to be raised against him by her
+parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the baroness.
+
+She asked to see a photograph of her.
+
+Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in
+profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman.  The
+eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's drooped
+till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.
+
+'Think of her age,' said Alvan, colouring.  He named a grandmaternal date
+for the year of the baroness's birth.
+
+Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting
+lineaments came to an abrupt finish.
+
+She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still
+eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally.  He could
+not contest the woeful verdict.
+
+'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing.  The baroness was a woman
+fair to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think it
+incredible: she really was once.
+
+Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed.  He
+shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little.  For the first time
+since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was
+likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip.  She sighed again.
+He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.
+
+'Yes--now,' he said, impatiently.
+
+'I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,' said she, sad of voice.
+
+The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to defend
+the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.
+
+Clotilde 'tolled' her naughty head.
+
+'But it is a strong face,' she said, 'a strong face--a strong jaw, by
+Lavater!  You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating
+in her distress.  Now she is old--and you are friends.'
+
+'Friends, yes,' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she
+deserved to be praised for her open mind.
+
+'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath.  The title
+this girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and
+his burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine the
+mood of the giver.  She had positively humbled him so far as with a
+single word to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her
+look at the photograph.  Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the
+man's vanity, he did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a
+misconception injurious in the slightest degree to the sentiments he
+entertained toward the older lady as well as the younger.  'Friends!
+you are right; good friends; only you should know that it is just a
+little--a trifle different.  The fact is, I cannot kill the past, and I
+would not.  It would try me sharply to break the tie connecting us, were
+it possible to break it.  I am bound to her by gratitude.  She is old
+now; and were she twice that age, I should retain my feeling for her.
+You raise your eyes, Clotilde!  Well, when I was much younger I found
+this lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she honoured me with her
+confidence.  Young man though I was, I defended her; I stopped at no
+measure to defend her: against a powerful husband, remember--the most
+unscrupulous of foes, who sought to rob her of every right she possessed.
+And what I did then I again would do.  I was vowed to her interests, to
+protect a woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at trifles, as you
+know; you have read my speech in defence of myself before the court.  By
+my interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I estranged my family
+and made the world my enemy.  I gave my time and money, besides the
+forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably there was an
+arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her, so that the
+baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling herself indebted.
+You will not think that out of the way: men of the world do not.  As for
+matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart as the Poles.'
+
+He spoke hurriedly.  He had said all that could be expected of him.
+
+They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden
+green in the yellow beams.  One of these trees among its well-robed
+fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten.  From the low sweeping
+branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its
+shadow; a vision of blackness.
+
+'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,
+screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and
+if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.
+
+'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan.
+'And now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day.  En avant!
+contre les canons!  A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the
+afternoon.  I shall see you in the evening.  So our separation won't be
+for long this time.  All the auspices are good.  We shall not be rich--
+nor poor.'
+
+Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the
+store by her.
+
+'We don't count it,' said he.  'Not rich, certainly. And you will not
+expect me to make money by my pen.  Above all things I detest the writing
+for money.  Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of
+the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt!  And
+journalism for money is Egyptian bondage.  No slavery is comparable to
+the chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me;
+and I give my self, I do not sell.  I write when I have matter in me and
+in the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'
+
+'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde.  'I would rather
+be in want of common comforts.'
+
+He squeezed her wrist.  They were again in front of the black-draped
+blighted tree.  It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf
+bearing a semblance of livid metal.  They looked at it as having seen it
+before, and passed on.
+
+'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he resumed,
+radiating his full bloom on her.
+
+'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.
+
+To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial
+chuckle.  'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.
+Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all.  Look at
+me.'  He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his
+eagle eyes.  He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,
+expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under the
+glances of a girl.  'Do you take me for one who could be content with the
+part of second?  I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will have
+too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly.  I was not
+fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I.  I carry too
+decisive a weight in the balance to victory.  I have a taste for fruits,
+my fairest!  And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid
+honours.'  He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of
+his eyes.
+
+'"Bride of the Elect of the People!"  is not that as glorious a title,
+think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God's grace on
+his worm-eaten throne?  I win that seat by service, by the dedication of
+this brain to the people's interests.  They have been ground to the dust,
+and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood.  I am the
+soldier of justice against the army of the unjust.  But I claim my
+reward.  If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy.  I will have my
+station.  I win it not only because I serve, but because also I have
+seen, have seen ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten--
+because I am soldier and prophet.  The brain of man is Jove's eagle and
+his lightning on earth--the title to majesty henceforth.  Ah!  my
+fairest; entering the city beside me, and the people shouting around, she
+would not think her choice a bad one?'
+
+Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.
+
+'We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day
+comes,' he continued after a while.  'The day is coming, but we must wait
+for it, work on.  I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a
+head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be
+beneficent.  I set them moving on the lines of the law of things.  I am
+no empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in
+politics.  When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step
+to the realization of it.  One step.  It will be taken in my time, or
+acknowledged later.  I stand for index to the people of the path they
+should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
+not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh!  That is a middle-
+class invention to effect a compromise.  With the people the matter rests
+with their intelligence!  meanwhile my star is bright and shines
+reflected.'
+
+'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
+lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
+ground, but always either up or straight before you.'
+
+'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling.  'Here we are at this
+funereal tree again.  All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
+us perpetually to this tree.  It 's the only dead one here.'
+
+He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
+decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
+small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
+It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.
+
+'Not a single bare spot!  but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
+Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen.  'This is a tree for a
+melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
+a scene with his mistress, or tales of her!  By the way and by the way,
+my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for
+me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below.
+Women who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered
+women, though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'
+
+He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not
+sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive
+in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.
+The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her
+locks were golden serpents.
+
+'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.
+
+'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered.  'In good time.  You
+understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
+and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first .  .  . !  But her heart is
+quite sound.  Have no fear!  I guarantee it; I know her to the roots.
+She desires my welfare, she does my behests.  If I am bound to her by
+gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me.  The utmost she
+will demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me
+in the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my
+heart; therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'
+
+They left the tree behind them.
+
+'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,
+without looking back.  'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under
+world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has
+looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself.  Hecate and
+Hermes know about it.  Phoebus cannot light it.  That tree stands for
+Death blooming.  We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely
+tree.  Down there!  When do we go?  The shudder in that tree is the air
+exchanging between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it's on
+the border line.  I just felt the creep.  I think you did.  The reason
+is--there is always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of
+chill breeze took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at
+that very moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I
+acknowledged that death could do the trick.  But death, my love, is far
+from us two!'
+
+'Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?' said Clotilde.
+
+'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed.  The baroness was not so easily
+defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared.  'She is the best
+of comrades, best of friends.  She has her faults; may not relish the
+writ announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as true
+as she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you.  That I can
+promise.  My poor Lucie!  She is winter, if you will.  It is not the
+winter of the steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country;
+a fine landscape of winter.  The outlines of her face .  .  .  .  She has
+a great brain.  How much I owe that woman for instruction!  You meet now
+and then men who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are
+the pick of men.  And the choicest women are those who yield not a
+feather of their womanliness for some amount of manlike strength.  And
+she is one; man's brain, woman's heart.  I thought her unique till I
+heard of you.  And how do I stand between you two?  She has the only
+fault you can charge me with; she is before me in time, as I am before
+you.  Shall I spoil you as she spoilt me?  No, no!  Obedience to a boy
+is the recognition of the heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as
+much as I love my love.  I do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour,
+support.  You will not rule me, but you will invigorate, and if you are
+petted, you shall not be spoilt.  Do not expect me to show like that
+undertakerly tree till my years are one hundred.  Even then it will be
+dangerous to repose beneath my branches in the belief that I am sapless
+because I have changed colour.  We Jews have a lusty blood.  We are
+strong of the earth.  We serve you, but you must minister to us.
+Sensual?  We have truly excellent appetites.  And why not?  Heroical too!
+Soldiers, poets, musicians; the Gentile's masters in mental arithmetic--
+keenest of weapons: surpassing him in common sense and capacity for
+brotherhood.  Ay, and in charity; or what stores of vengeance should we
+not have nourished!  Already we have the money-bags.  Soon we shall hold
+the chief offices.  And when the popular election is as unimpeded as the
+coursing of the blood in a healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and
+topmost, for he is pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-
+day communities.  But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of
+the Jew.  I am no champion of a race.  I am for the world, for man!'
+
+Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a
+large following among the people.
+
+He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian.  Yes, if I were
+other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able
+lieutenants.'
+
+'Tell me of your interview with Ironsides,' she said proudly and fondly.
+
+'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, putting
+his lips among the locks.  'Well, we met: he requested it.  We agreed
+that we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately
+have to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could
+compare our plans for governing.  He showed me his hand.  I showed him
+mine.  We played open-handed, like two at whist.  He did not doubt my
+honesty, and I astonished him by taking him quite in earnest.  He has
+dealt with diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old
+Ironer!  I love him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean
+deceit.  He will outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple
+evolution rapidly performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies!
+Then he has them, bagsful of them!  The world will see; and see giant
+meet giant, I suspect.  He and I proposed each of us in the mildest
+manner contrary schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe!  Enough
+that we parted with mutual respect.  He is a fine fellow: and so was my
+friend the Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu.  Napoleon was a fine
+engine:--there is a difference.  Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow!  but he
+and I may cross.  His ideas are not many.  The point to remember is that
+he is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe.
+He has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and
+traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able
+to combine, and the likeliest that he will do.  Good.  We opine that we
+are equal to the same.  He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and
+save him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which
+accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron.  We think the
+more precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes.  But
+such an adversary is not to be underrated.  I do not underrate him: and
+certainly not he me.  Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a
+fluent tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people,
+as knowing them the greater power.  He sees that their knowledge of their
+power must eventually come to them.  In the meantime his party is
+forcible enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at
+present: and he is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical.
+He is curiously simple, not really cynical.  His apparent cynicism is
+sheer irritability.  His contemptuous phrases are directed against
+obstacles: against things, persons, nations that oppose him or cannot
+serve his turn against his king, if his king is restive; but he respects
+his king: against your friends' country, because there is no fixing it to
+a line of policy, and it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that
+country the best in Europe after his own.  He is nearest to contempt in
+his treatment of his dupes and tools, who are dropped out of his mind
+when he has quite squeezed them for his occasion; to be taken up again
+when they are of use to him.  Hence he will have no following.  But let
+me die to-morrow, the party I have created survives.  In him you see the
+dam, in me the stream.  Judge, then, which of them gains the future!--
+admitting that, in the present he may beat me.  He is a Prussian, stoutly
+defined from a German, and yet again a German stoutly defined from our
+borderers: and that completes him.  He has as little the idea of humanity
+as the sword of our Hermann, the cannon-ball of our Frederick.  Observe
+him.  What an eye he has!  I watched it as we were talking: and he has, I
+repeat, imagination; he can project his mind in front of him as far as
+his reasoning on the possible allows: and that eye of his flashes; and
+not only flashes, you see it hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a
+Balearic slinger about to whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is
+hard, and is dead certain of its mark-within his practical compass, as I
+have said.  I see farther, and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a
+dreamer.  In my opinion, when we cross our swords I stand a fair chance
+of not being worsted. We shall: you shrink?  Figuratively, my darling
+have no fear!  Combative as we may be, both of us, we are now grave
+seniors, we have serious business: a party looks to him, my party looks
+to me.  Never need you fear that I shall be at sword or pistol with any
+one.  I will challenge my man, whoever he as that needs a lesson, to
+touch buttons on a waistcoat with the button on the foil, or drill fiver
+and eights in cards at twenty paces: but I will not fight him though he
+offend me, for I am stronger than my temper, and as I do not want to take
+his nip of life, and judge it to be of less value than mine, the
+imperilling of either is an absurdity.'
+
+'Oh!  because I know you are incapable of craven fear,' cried Clotilde,
+answering aloud the question within herself of why she so much admired,
+why she so fondly loved him.  To feel his courage backing his high good
+sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astute self-
+control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible.  It seemed
+to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she saw their
+triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she should
+instantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his Republican
+Princess.  She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue of
+her being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, and
+she thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her on
+that eminence.  Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kings
+can summon through the trumpet!  She could surely pass through the trial
+with her parents that she might step to the place beside him!  She
+pressed his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory.  Was it love?
+It was as lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to.
+
+She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where her
+parents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name the
+hotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive.  'Am I
+not precise as an office clerk?' she said, with a pleasant taste of the
+reality her preciseness pictured.
+
+'Practical as the head of a State department,' said he, in good faith.
+
+'I shall not keep you waiting,' she resumed.
+
+'The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our
+success, my golden crest!'
+
+'Have no misgivings, Sigismund.  You have transformed me.  A spark of you
+is in my blood.  Come.  I shall send word to your hotel when you are to
+appear.  But you will come, you will be there, I know.  I know you so
+entirely.'
+
+'As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when they
+have married him.  At least you ought to know me.  You know that if I
+were to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it
+forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to
+go through during our interlude with papa and mama.'
+
+'I almost wish you would,' said she.  She looked half imploringly, biting
+her lip to correct the peeping wish.
+
+Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave.  Flight and
+defiance are our last resource.  Now that I see you resolved I shun the
+scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be.
+How can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into
+your veins?  The other day on the heights--had you consented then?  Well!
+it would have been very well, but not so well.  We two have a future, and
+are bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for an
+example, if we can.  I take you from your father's house, from your
+mother's arms, from the "God speed" of your friends.  That is how Alvan's
+wife should be presented to the world.'
+
+Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and
+despatched.  To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really
+was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural
+impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that
+language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,
+while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed
+expression of the pretty impulse.  But wiser is it always that the star
+in the ascendant should not address the one waning.  Hardly can a word be
+uttered without grossly wounding.  She would not do it to a younger
+rival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age!  She babbles of a
+friendship: she plays at childish ninny!  The display of her ingenuous
+happiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges.  The
+declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a
+deeper, a longer-tried suffering.  Actually the letter of the rising star
+assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and
+personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt
+also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.
+
+Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high.
+He was too robust, he had been too successful.  Your very successful hero
+regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a
+peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the
+other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their
+sisters.  His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he
+had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of
+their sex.  The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on
+his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he
+said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,
+millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units.  He would have stared
+like any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a
+likeness unto men in their fight with the world.  Women for him were
+objects to be chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like the
+sportsman's business, with keen relish both for the pursuit and the prey,
+and a view of the termination of his pastime.  Their feelings he could
+appreciate during the time when they flew and fell, perhaps a little
+longer; but the change in his own feelings withdrew him from the
+communion of sentiment.  This is the state of men who frequent the
+avenues of success.  At present he was thinking of a wife, and he
+approved the epistle to the baroness cordially.
+
+'I do think it a nice kind of letter, and quite humble enough,' said
+Clotilde.
+
+He agreed, 'Yes, yes: she knows already that this is really serious with
+me.'
+
+So much for the baroness.
+
+Now for their parting.  A parting that is no worse than the turning of a
+page to a final meeting is made light of, but felt.  Reason is all in our
+favour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slip
+between the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though it be
+not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness.  Clotilde
+required reassuring and comforting: 'I am certain you will prevail; you
+must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact,' she sighed
+in a languor: 'only, my people are hard to manage.  I see more clearly
+now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by a sort of
+compact so long as I did nothing decisive.  That I see.  But, then again,
+have I not your spirit in me now?  What has ever resisted you?--Then,
+as I am Alvan's wife, I share his heart with his fortunes, and I do not
+really dread the scenes from anticipating failure, still-the truth is,
+I fear I am three parts an actress, and the fourth feels itself a
+shivering morsel to face reality.  No, I do not really feel it, but press
+my hand, I shall be true--I am so utterly yours: and because I have such
+faith in you.  You never, yet have failed'
+
+'Never: and it is impossible for me to conceive it,' said Alvan
+thoughtfully.
+
+His last word to her on her departure was 'Courage!'  Hers to him was
+conveyed by the fondest of looks.  She had previously said 'To-morrow!'
+to remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, and
+herself that she would not long stand alone.  She did not doubt of her
+courage while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strong
+men of earth.  She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from the
+waving fingers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of his
+tricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her.  All the rest to
+come was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for a
+plan of action.  Who can hold her back when a woman is decided to move?
+Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and
+the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the same
+elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel
+daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational.  That
+is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and inflamed
+to fly the barriers intercepting.  He fancied he had achieved it.  Alvan
+thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents.  The consolatory
+sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in the
+contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused by those
+people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a wife after
+the fashion of orderly citizens.  It would be on their heads!  But why
+vision mischance?  An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends,
+that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection
+without casting a shadow.  Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry!
+
+No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was
+she.  Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed
+fortieth year!  Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?
+Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it would
+be sunshine in the subterranean sphere.  The very thinking of her
+dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting
+phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come.'
+
+To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a
+celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of
+mortal life in the highest.  He wondered how it was that he could have
+waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and he
+just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the minutes,
+much as she did, only more fierily.  The ceaseless warfare called
+politics must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of another
+kind.  He was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a panorama
+of illimitable felicity.  And there were certain things he must overcome
+before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love of
+contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his
+whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking
+it either.  There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the
+battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the big artillery.
+
+Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of the
+trains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; he
+looked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swiss law;
+considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was a lawyer
+bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as
+pleading eloquently.  The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it
+wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses,
+turgid enough, even to his own judgement.  Poets would have failed at
+such a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured.  He was a wild
+man, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the
+ranks of the soberly blissful.  These he could imagine that he
+complimented by the wish.  Then why should he doubt of his fortune?
+He did not.
+
+The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey.  Late
+in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's.  A letter
+was handed to him.  His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for
+her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse.  'And now
+my turn!' said he, not overjoyously.  The words Jew and demagogue and
+baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.
+But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and
+champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal
+and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were
+to know him and change their tone.
+
+As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at
+the answer to a tap.  He started; his face was a shield's welcome to the
+birdlike applicant for admission.  Clotilde stood hesitating.
+
+He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, and
+drew her in.
+
+'Alvan, I have come.'
+
+She was like a bird in his hands, palpitating to extinction.
+
+He bent over her: 'What has happened?'
+
+Trembling, and very pale, hard in her throat she said, 'The worst.'
+
+'You have spoken to them both subsequent to this?' he shook the letter.
+
+'It is hopeless.'
+
+'Both to father and mother?'
+
+'Both.  They will not hear your name; they will not hear me speak.  I
+repeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them.  They hate--hate
+you, hate me for thinking of you.  I had no choice; I wrote at once and
+followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want of breath,
+not want of courage.  I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all I can do.
+
+She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids.
+
+But he said nothing.  She looked up at him.  Her strained pale eyes
+provoked a closer embrace.
+
+'This would be the home for you if we were flying,' said he, glancing
+round at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, 'Tell me what there
+is to be told.'
+
+'Alvan, I have; that is all.  They will not listen; they loathe Oh! what
+possesses them!'
+
+'They have not met me yet!'
+
+'They will not, will not ever--no!'
+
+'They must.'
+
+'They refuse.  Their child, for daring to say she loves you, is detested.
+Take me--take me away!'
+
+'Run?--facing the enemy?' His countenance was the fiery laugh of a
+thirster for strife.  'They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is made
+of!'
+
+Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion.  'I found
+them celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the Austrian Count
+Walburg; I thought it favourable for us.  I spoke of you to my mother.
+Oh, that scene!  What she said I cannot recollect: it was a hiss.  Then
+my father.  Your name changed his features and his voice.  They treated
+me as impure for mentioning it.  You must have deadly enemies.
+I was unable to recognize either father or mother--they have become
+transformed.  But you see I am here.  Courage!  you said; and I
+determined I would show it, and be worthy of you.  But I am pursued,
+I am sure.  My father is powerful in this place; we shall barely have
+time to escape.'
+
+Alvan's resolution was taken.
+
+'Some friend--a lady living in the city here--name her, quick!--one you
+can trust,' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of
+drillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders.  'Yes, you have shown
+courage.  Now it must be submission to me.  You shall be no runaway
+bride, but honoured at the altar.  Out of this hotel is the first point.
+You know some such lady?'
+
+Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest.  She could have prophesied
+certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so
+sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost
+in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a
+drawing back.  She could not get the word or even the look to encounter
+his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where they
+were together alone.  She could not refuse the protection he offered in a
+person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of where they
+were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of
+entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged to
+it.  She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a
+Madame Emerly, living near the hotel.  Her heart sank like a stone.
+'It is for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his
+generosity in temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph.
+'But my wife shall not be snatched by a thief in the night.  Are you not
+my wife--my golden bride?  And you may give me this pledge of it, as if
+the vows had just been uttered .  .  .  and still I resign you till we
+speak the vows.  It shall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her
+glory, that she ran to her nuptials through rat-passages.'
+
+His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her.  She was cooled by her
+despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay, but that
+centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her enthusiasm,
+thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they were united,
+her step was irrevocable.  Her having entered the hotel, her being in
+this room, certified to that.  It seemed to her while she was waiting for
+the carriage he had ordered that she was already half a wife.  She was
+not conscious of a blush.  The sprite in the young woman's mind whispered
+of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it.  And undoubtedly,
+contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart of fire.  An
+impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for his chivalrousness
+had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing she praised.
+Otherwise she was not ill at ease.  Alvan summoned his gaiety, all his
+homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quitting the room
+she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomy foreboding.
+A maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling of devotion to
+her, ran up the steps of the hotel.  Her tale was, that the General had
+roused the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heard whither
+Clotilde was going.
+
+Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly's drawing-room
+relating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, assisted by
+the lover whom she had introduced.  Her hostess promised shelter and
+exhibited sympathy.  The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knew
+Alvan by reputation.  He was insurrectionally notorious in morals and
+menacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowing tongue,
+and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love and
+deference toward her family, won her personally.  She promised the best
+help she could give them.  They were certainly in a romantic situation,
+such as few women could see and decline their aid to the lovers.
+
+Madame Emerly proved at least her sincerity before many minutes had
+passed.
+
+Chancing to look out into the street, she saw Clotilde's mother and her
+betrothed sister stepping up to the house.  What was to be done?  And was
+the visit accidental?  She announced it, and Clotilde cried out, but
+Alvan cried louder: 'Heaven-directed!  and so, let me see her and speak
+to her--nothing could be better.'
+
+Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head
+premonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer,
+if I am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.'
+
+'Yes!  yes!' Clotilde replied: 'Oh!  do that.'
+
+She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming
+voice.
+
+'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity.  'Plain-dealing; no
+subterfuge!  Begin with foul falsehood?  No.  I would not have you
+burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our
+account.  And when it would be bad policy?  .  .  .  Oh, no, worse than
+the sin! as the honest cynic says.  We will go down to Madame von
+Rudiger, and she shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her
+daughter's hand.'
+
+Clotilde rocked in an agony.  Her friend was troubled.  Both ladies knew
+what there would be to encounter better than he.  But the man, strong in
+his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.
+
+Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame
+Emerly's reception room.  She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me.'
+
+'Is this forsaking?'  He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone
+which supplies the answer.
+
+'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'
+
+He kissed her fingers.  'Trust to me.'
+
+She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter
+leaning on him.
+
+She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as
+her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a
+warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning
+into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly
+degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a
+part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.
+
+Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain
+tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the spirit
+to be a melting prize of the winner.
+
+Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering
+thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring
+their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius of
+Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in
+whatsoever person.  We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be
+prey, we lose the soul of election.
+
+Mark her as she proceeds.  For should her hero fail, and she be suffering
+through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will
+seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable
+weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength.  And it will
+seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just
+expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it was
+only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of
+espousing.  The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled
+when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of
+putting themselves in the right to themselves.  The love she bore him,
+because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was
+ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason
+(where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it
+seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict,
+insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked.  He roused the
+tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest
+reason, close as it ever is to the craven's heart in its hour of trial,
+whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by the swollen
+conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize.  That
+frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions.  It spies the spot
+of truth.  Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then, so
+unerring is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform
+ourselves into cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple
+over the Sphinx of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious
+creature in an epigram.  But there was as much more in Alvan than any
+faint-hearted thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more
+in the world than the epigrams aimed at it contain.
+
+'Courage!' said he: and she tremblingly: 'Be careful!' And then they were
+in the presence of her mother and sister.
+
+Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure.  Her
+mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a
+woman's combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.
+
+'Away with that man!  I will not suffer him near me,' she cried.
+
+Alvan advanced to her: 'Tell me, madame, in God's name, what you have
+against me.'
+
+She swung her back on him.  'Go, sir!  my husband will know how to deal
+with one like you.  Out of my sight, I say!'
+
+The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde.  She went up to
+him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal,
+said: 'Let us go: come.  I will not bear to hear you so spoken to.  No
+one shall treat you like that when I am near.'
+
+She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experience
+of the commencement.  He did but clasp her hand, assuring the Frau von
+Rudiger that no word of hers could irritate him.  'Nothing can make me
+forget that you are Clotilde's mother.  You are the mother of the lady I
+love, and may say what you will to me, madame.  I bear it.'
+
+'A man spotted with every iniquity the world abhors, and I am to see him
+holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable!  And because
+there is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talk
+of his foul passion for my daughter.  I repeat: that which you have to do
+is to go.  My ears are shut.  You can annoy, you can insult, you cannot
+move me.  Go.'  She stamped: her aspect spat.
+
+Alvan bowed.  Under perfect self-command, he said: 'I will go at once to
+Clotilde's father.  I may hope, that with a reasonable man I shall
+speedily come to an understanding.'
+
+She retorted: 'Enter his house, and he will have you driven out by his
+lacqueys.'
+
+'Hardly: I am not of those men who are driven from houses,' Alvan said,
+smiling.  'But, madame, I will act on your warning, and spare her father,
+for all sakes, the attempt; seeing he does not yet know whom he deals
+with.  I will write to him.'
+
+'Letters from you will be flung back unopened.
+
+'It may, of course, be possible to destroy even my patience, madame.'
+
+'Mine, sir, is at an end.'
+
+'You reduce us to rely on ourselves; it is the sole alternative.'
+
+'You have not waited for that,' rejoined Frau von Rudiger.  'You have
+already destroyed my daughter's reputation by inducing her to leave her
+father's house and hesitate to return.  Oh! you are known.  You are known
+for your dealings with women as well as men.  We know you.  We have, we
+pray to God, little more to learn of you.  You!  ah--thief!'
+
+'Thief!'  Alvan's voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it.  She
+had up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern that
+she had struck the wound in his history; but he was terrible to look at,
+so she made the charge supportable by saying:
+
+'You have stolen my child from me!'
+
+Clotilde raised her throat, shrewish in excitement.  'False!  He did not.
+I went to him of my own will, to run from your heartlessness, mother--
+that I call mother!--and be out of hearing of my father's curses and
+threats.  Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to him than to
+you.  And never will I return to you.  You have killed my love; I am this
+man's own because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, as his
+partner in life for all it may give!--as his wife!  Trample on him, you
+trample on me.  Make black brows at your child for choosing the man, of
+all men alive, to worship and follow through the world.  I do.  I am his.
+I glory in him.'
+
+Her gaze on Alvan said: 'Now!' Was she not worthy of him now?  And would
+they not go forth together now?  Oh!  now!
+
+Her gaze was met by nothing like the brilliant counterpart she merited.
+It was as if she had offered her beauty to a glass, and found a
+reflection in dull metal.  He smiled calmly from her to her mother.  He
+said:
+
+'You accuse me of stealing your child, madame.  You shall acknowledge
+that you have wronged me.  Clotilde, my Clotilde!  may I count on you to
+do all and everything for me?  Is there any sacrifice I could ask that
+would be too hard for you?  Will you at one sign from me go or do as I
+request you?'
+
+She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: 'I
+will,' but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-acting
+her part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension of
+the part he was for playing to the same audience.  'Yes, I will do all,
+all that you command.  I am yours.  I will go with you.  Bid me do
+whatever you can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I have
+hitherto called mine:--not that!'
+
+'And that is what I have to request of you,' said he, with his calm smile
+brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable to her.
+'And this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are you
+prepared to do it?  Will you?'
+
+She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against her
+imploring eyes.  'If you can ask me--if you can positively wish it--yes,'
+she said.  'But think of what you are doing.  Oh!  Alvan, not back to
+them!  Think!'
+
+He smiled insufferably.  He was bent on winning a parent-blest bride,
+an unimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of the
+world's polished silver vessels.
+
+'Think that you are doing this for me!' said he.  'It is for my sake.
+And now, madame, I give you back your daughter.  You see she is mine to
+give, she obeys me, and I--though it can be only for a short time--give
+her back to you.  She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do not
+forget that.  And so, madame, I have the honour,' he bowed profoundly.
+
+He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm.  'What you have done
+in obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten.  Never can
+I sufficiently thank you.  I know how much it has cost you.  But here is
+the end of your trials.  All the rest is now my task.  Rely on me with
+your whole heart.  Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding.
+Be sure of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of
+injustice I shall be beside you to take you to myself.  Be sure of that,
+and be not unhappy.  They shall not keep you from me for long.  Submit a
+short while to the will of your parents: mine you will find the stronger.
+Resolve it in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for it is
+impossible to me to waver.  Consider me as the one fixed light in your
+world, and look to me.  Soon, then!  Have patience, be true, and we are
+one!'
+
+He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand.  The horribly empty
+sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuous
+face.
+
+His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone.  She seemed
+a dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering
+himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he
+could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the
+brief vision of her unfitness to be left.  The compressed energy of the
+man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims
+of family ties and duties, intoxicated him.  He thought but of the
+present achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad
+reputation among these people, from whom he was about to lead forth a
+daughter for Alvan's wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his
+exhibition of generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he
+delivered his retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--that the
+worst was over; he had to deal no more with silly women: now for
+Clotilde's father!  Women were privileged to oppose their senselessness
+to the divine fire: men could not retreat behind such defences; they must
+meet him on the common ground of men, where this constant battler had
+never yet encountered a reverse.
+
+Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to
+reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the
+diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;
+and the lady of the house.  He was going--he could actually go and leave
+her!  She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she
+did so as much as she had force to make it visible.  She saw him smiling
+incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy.
+She could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she
+took the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.
+
+'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had
+the choice of you and he abjured you.  He has cast you off!'
+
+She phrased it in speech to herself.  It was incredible, but it was
+clear: he had gone.
+
+The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.
+
+'He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily to
+renounce you.'
+
+She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother
+heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at
+the window.
+
+The craven's first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for
+light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered of
+quietness if she submitted.
+
+And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been
+guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to him,
+the which may be love's glory when marriage crowns it.  By his rejecting
+her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but a castaway.
+It was not natural that he should leave her; 'not natural in him to act
+his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at the mercy of
+those who might pick her up.  She was, in her humiliation and dread, all
+of the moment, she could see to no distance; and judging of him, feeling
+for herself, within that contracted circle of sensation--sure, from her
+knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done unwisely--she became swayed
+about like a castaway in soul, until her distinguishing of his mad
+recklessness in the challenge of a power greater than his own grew
+present with her as his personal cruelty to the woman who had flung off
+everything, flung herself on the tempestuous deeps, on his behalf.  And
+here she was, left to float or founder!  Alvan had gone.  The man rageing
+over the room, abusing her 'infamous lover, the dirty Jew, the notorious
+thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,' etc., etc., frightful epithets, not to be
+transcribed--was her father.  He had come, she knew not how.  Alvan had
+tossed her to him.
+
+Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady's heart by the
+brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the
+creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel,
+she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted.  Her
+cry to him: 'If you had been wiser, this would not have been!' will sink
+to the inward meditation: 'If he had been truer!'--and though she does
+not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is
+already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun.  They
+are not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of them
+makes it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.
+
+Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail small
+boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious outbreak
+she was exposed to.  She might so far have exonerated him had she been
+able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him in blind
+reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising material
+rigours.  After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for a young
+woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched through
+the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by the hair-
+Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a huge
+forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his
+daughter's flight to the Jew.  He seemed to have a grim indifference to
+exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a
+satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or three
+maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly managing
+them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely cracking a
+whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time by hunting her
+as she likes to run.  Police were round his house.  The General chattered
+and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies of that Jew--the
+things that Jew would attempt.  He dragged her indoors, muttering of his
+policy in treating her at last to a wholesome despotism.
+
+This was the medicine for her--he knew her!  Whether he did or not, he
+knew the potency of his physic.  He knew that osiers can be made to bend.
+With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the window-
+shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he left her
+there and roared across the household that any one holding communication
+with the prisoner should be shot like a dog.  This was a manifestation of
+power in a form more convincing than the orator's.
+
+She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
+abandoned by her lover.  She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
+with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
+misfortune, that reality had come.  The monster had hold of her.  She was
+isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive.  She had nothing but our natural
+obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
+to the semblance of it only.  'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
+her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
+spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
+themselves to the sound of it.  He listened and named his time for
+returning.  The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about
+forty hours.  She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father
+should be so fiercely excited against this man!  Can he have reasons I
+have not heard of?'  Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the
+question in her quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement
+to kiss the whip.  The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew.
+She saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a
+sinister appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as
+well as to Alvan's fatal decision.  Her misery was traceable to his
+conduct and his judgement--both bad.  And yet all this while he might be
+working to release her, near upon rescuing!  She swung round to the side
+of her lover against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as
+well as she could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to
+appear.  She spent her heart on it.  A note to her friend, the English
+lady, protested her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a
+frozen resignation to the loss of him--all around her was so dark!  By-
+and-by there was a scratching at her door.  The maid whom she trusted
+brought her news of Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and mistress
+knelt.  Hope flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers were
+exchanged through the partition.
+
+'Where is he?'
+
+'Gone.'
+
+'But where?'
+
+'He has left the city.'
+
+Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one for
+Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking
+practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an
+address.  She did not ask herself whether the maid's information was
+honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.
+
+She wept through the night.  It was one of those nights of the torrents
+of tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there be
+ought of that besides the breathing structure.  The reason why she wept
+with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity
+for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the
+love whereby she was tormented.  They do not weep thus who have a heart
+for the struggle.  In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no
+longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other words,
+unable any further to contend.
+
+Reality was too strong!  This morning her sisters came to her room
+imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their
+prospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sister
+Lotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan's name was infamous
+in society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemned
+to seclusion.  A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set her
+tears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could he
+hold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jew
+democrat?  He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with his
+brother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wrongly
+Alvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all,
+perhaps to her father's military and diplomatic career principally: the
+head of their house would be ruined.  She was compelled to weep again by
+having no other reply.  The tears were now mixed drops of pity for her
+absent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when she
+shed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as many
+bosoms drained of self-pity will become.
+
+Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and had
+a languid willingness to gain outward comfort.  To be caressed a little
+by her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after her
+heavy scourging.  She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them
+to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made
+them seem a soft reminder of what life had been.  Alvan had gone.  Her
+natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire
+relinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber.  He had gone; he had
+committed an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain
+provoking, that was too severe for him: he was not the lover he fancied
+himself, or not the lord of men she had fancied him.  Her excessive
+misery would not suffer a picture of him, not one clear recollection of
+him, to stand before her.  He who should have been at hand, had gone, and
+she was fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being abandoned, her blank
+night of imagination felt that there was nothing left for her save to
+fall upon those nearest.
+
+She gave her submission to her mother.  In her mind, during the last
+wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her
+cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: 'He may come, and I am his
+if he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people.'  He had taught her to
+rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting
+herself loose from him.  In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to
+believe if the saint will appear.  However, she submitted.  Then there
+was joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of
+the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath.  He
+proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing
+his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and
+was on a strange and tangled one.  The sense of power in him was leonine
+enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did
+that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.
+They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be
+acting his part, brilliant though it was.  He crammed his energy into his
+idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously.  Before the world,
+it would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world
+acclaiming him:
+
+'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law,
+from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old
+lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman!  Alvan, the republican, is
+eminently a citizen.  Consider his past life by that test of his
+character.'
+
+He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,
+through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly
+slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to
+be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower.  Lower, of course,
+the multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they
+have in exchange for it is not an independent one.  Ceasing to be a
+social rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he
+passed under the bondage of that position.
+
+Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be
+trusted now.  She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society,
+and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.
+The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger was a man of
+the world.  An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to him--
+now, at least.  And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride of
+his house.  'A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall in
+good time be cause for some parental gratification.'
+
+The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of
+Clotilde.  He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another
+intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs.  These gentlemen brought
+no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to extract
+a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of
+course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official
+influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the
+proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary
+and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his
+pretensions to the hand of the lady.
+
+He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of
+his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it
+yet, being too anxious to sign the peace.  He felt as it were a blow
+startling him from sleep.  His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
+polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
+between man and man.  The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
+indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
+such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history.  He could not
+raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied
+contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow
+both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their
+courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.
+
+A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
+admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing.  The
+bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.
+
+Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance.  The fate of the noble Genoese
+conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
+boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
+ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to
+lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
+readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
+was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of
+the powers fitting him for battle.  A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
+career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it!  What
+was this girl in a life like his?  But, oh!  the question was no sooner
+asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
+the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,
+confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her.
+Why had he done it?  Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely
+inspired.  She warned him against the step.  But he, proud of his
+armoury, went his way.  He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed
+Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a
+minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy
+of the night.
+
+He was only calmer when morning came.  Night has little mercy for the
+self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,
+it has none.  The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon
+that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
+opposing him.  He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
+petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
+the position it explained.  Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
+revived him as they had always revived and fortified.  But here was a
+stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
+chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms.  By
+shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
+reduced him to hesitation.  And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;
+his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole
+quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of
+one for a mark.
+
+These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever
+he drew from his Fiesco bed.  Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so
+uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
+frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
+ourselves like madmen.  The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
+will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
+will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
+them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
+perceptibly plain matter.  The fitful colour is the fever.  He must win
+her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly!  She was
+his--she was torn from him!  She would come at his bidding--she would
+cower to her tyrants!  The thought of her was life and death in his
+frame, bright heaven and the abyss.  At one beat of the heart she swam to
+his arms, at another he was straining over darkness.  And whose the
+fault?
+
+He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
+beholding himself.  He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
+could not have been handier in using them.  From Alvan to Alvan, they
+signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
+to dust the pride of the works of men.  He was down among them, lower
+than the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
+became of monstrous distortion.  O fool!  dolt!  blind ass!  tottering
+idiot!  drunken masquerader!  miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide
+with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde!  Clotilde!
+Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his
+hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble?
+Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday!  There's nothing but your
+fool's face in the water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool!
+Fish for the flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head!
+What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might
+have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the
+ceremonies!  They laugh!  By Orcus! how they laugh!  The laughter of the
+gods is the lightning of death's irony over mortals.  Can they have a
+finer subject than a giant gone fool?
+
+Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing.  O for
+yesterday!  He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
+groaned.  A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
+having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
+while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
+private dignity in order.  He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
+hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck.  Dignity was cast off;
+he came out naked.  Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the
+friend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him,
+were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the
+truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the
+woman, was the ground of his anguish.  Each antecedent of his career had
+been a step of strength and success departed.  The woman was but a
+fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet
+she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself
+once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and
+she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a
+melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.
+
+The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force.  The giant
+in him loved her warmly.  Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
+lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
+eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
+shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,
+swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly
+beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in
+his passion than before this tempest.  A giant going through a giant's
+contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,
+likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was
+great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down
+life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not
+heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for
+the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites.  He was true
+man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to
+pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in
+the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of
+timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,
+to his depths.
+
+We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man.
+Love and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry
+instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
+indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
+harmonies have been heard.  But Love, which purifies and enlarges us,
+and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
+space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that
+the man is a temple fit for the rites.  Out of romances, he is not
+melodiously composed.  And in a giant are various giants to be slain,
+or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader.  It is not
+done by miracle.
+
+As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
+indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
+stedfastness.  His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor
+indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome
+boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and
+she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him
+quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of
+a mutual fitness.  Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of
+his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,
+she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she
+was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his
+physical influence.  Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she
+kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through
+sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it
+was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.
+
+'They are undermining her now--now--now!'
+
+He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
+indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
+his agitation.  Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
+have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
+nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
+faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
+mastery, took her for sand.  Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
+The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman.  But
+how had he come to be guilty of it?  he asked himself again; and, without
+answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
+complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
+Duplicity.  He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
+favour, with another commanding her to break it.  He gathered and drilled
+a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
+letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the
+enemy's counter-stroke.  Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter
+from Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him.
+
+Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must
+be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she had
+left the city.  She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded, but
+henceforward he should know that they were strangers.
+
+Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he smote a
+forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand.  That was the dumb oration
+of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the state of
+brute.  His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shook the
+reptile letter under a terrible frown.
+
+Tresten saw that he supposed himself to be perfectly master of his acts
+because he had not spoken, and had managed to preserve the ordinary
+courtesies.
+
+'You have done your commission,' the colonel said to Count Walburg, whose
+companion was not disposed to go without obtaining satisfactory
+assurances, and pressed for them.
+
+Alvan fastened on him.  'You adopt the responsibility of this?' He
+displayed the letter.
+
+'I do.'
+
+'It lies.'
+
+Tresten remarked to Count Walburg: 'These visits are provocations.'
+
+'They are not so intended,' said the count, bowing pacifically.  His
+friend was not a man of the sword, and was not under the obligation to
+accept an insult.  They left the letter to do its work.
+
+Big natures in their fits of explosiveness must be taken by flying shots,
+as dwarfs peep on a monster, or the Scythian attacked a phalanx.  Were we
+to hear all the roarings of the shirted Heracles, a world of comfortable
+little ones would doubt the unselfishness of his love of Dejaneira.
+Yes, really; they would think it was not a chivalrous love: they would
+consider that he thought of himself too much.  They would doubt, too,
+of his being a gentleman!  Partial glimpses of him, one may fear, will be
+discomposing to simple natures.  There was a short black eruption.  Alvan
+controlled it, to ask hastily what the baroness thought and what she had
+heard of Clotilde.  Tresten made sign that it was nothing of the best.
+
+'See! my girl has hundreds of enemies, and I, only I, know her and can
+defend her--weak, base shallow trickster, traitress that she is!' cried
+Alvan, and came down in a thundershower upon her: 'Yesterday--the day
+before--when? just now, here, in this room; gave herself--and now!'
+He bent, and immediately straightening his back, addressed Colonel von
+Tresten as her calumniator, 'Say your worst of her, and I say I will make
+of that girl the peerless woman of earth!  I! in earnest! it's no dream.
+She can be made .  .  .  .  O God! the beast has turned tail!  I knew she
+could.  There 's three of beast to one of goddess in her, and set her
+alone, and let her be hunted and I not by, beast it is with her!
+cowardly skulking beast--the noblest and very bravest under my wing!
+Incomprehensible to you, Tresten?  But who understands women!  You hate
+her.  Do not.  She 's a riddle, but no worse than the rest of the tangle.
+She gives me up?  Pooh!  She writes it.  She writes anything.  And that
+vilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thundered her
+signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of her putting
+her name to the letter.  She had done that, written her name to the
+renunciation of him!  No individual could bear the sight of such a crime,
+and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim to atone for
+it.  Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman; she became
+that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would not distinguish
+her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was his
+knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the sex.
+He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter
+sticking in his ribs.  The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped
+it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it, and
+was foul-mouthed.  Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man
+snapped in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her
+fragmentarily.  It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and
+sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the
+shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, and
+though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her hand
+over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the deadly-
+toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it.  The thing
+lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them: witness it
+in love murdered.
+
+O that woman!  She has murdered love.  She has blotted love completely
+out.  She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon.
+He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with a
+cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one and
+all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs
+on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner peeped out
+on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his great-
+heartedness.  'For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I would have
+sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my
+immortality.  She knew it, and she--look!' he unwrinkled the letter
+carefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball.'  Signs her
+name, signs her name, her name!--God of heaven! it would be incredible in
+a holy chronicle--signs her name to the infamous harlotry!  See:
+"Clotilde von Rudiger."  It's her writing; that's her signature:
+"Clotilde" in full.  You'd hardly fancy that, now?  But look!' the
+colonel's eyelids were blinking, and Alvan dinted his finger-nail under
+her name: 'there it is: Clotilde: signed shamelessly.  Just as she might
+have written to one of her friends about bonnets, and balls, and books!
+Henceforward strangers, she and I?'
+
+His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a
+yell beneath a cathedral dome.  'Why, the woman has been in my hands--
+I released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the
+code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two
+strangers!  Do you hear that, Tresten?  Why, if you had seen her!--she
+was lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under
+bolt and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman's heart! that never a
+breath should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or
+by accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth.  "I think it best for us
+both."  So she thinks for me!  She not only decides, she thinks; she is
+the active principle; 'tis mine to submit.--A certain presumption was in
+that girl always.  Ha!  do you hear me?  Her letter may sting, it shall
+not dupe.  Strangers?  Poor fool!  You see plainly she was nailed down to
+write the thing.  This letter is a flat lie.  She can lie--Oh!  born to
+the art! born to it!--lies like a Saint tricking Satan!  But she says she
+has left the city.  Now to find her!'
+
+He began marching about the room with great strides.  'I 'll have the
+whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I 'll have them by
+the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force.
+I have sworn it.  I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than
+any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it's war.  I declare
+war on them.  They will have it!  I mean to take that girl from them--
+snatch or catch!  The girl is my girl, and if there are laws against my
+having my own, to powder with the laws!  Well, and do you suppose me
+likely to be beaten?  Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar a people's
+legend.  Not if they are history, and eloquence and commandership have
+power over the blood and souls of men.  First, I write to her!'
+
+His friend suggested that he knew not where she was.  But already the pen
+was at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher.
+
+Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him of his
+fever.  As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, more
+fiercely desired.  The concentration of his active mind directed his
+whole being on the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human.
+That last day when he had seen her appeared to him as the day of days.
+That day was Clotilde herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman,
+and saw himself translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all
+was dark, as in front.  That one day was the sun of his life.  It had
+been a day of rain, and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with
+the dark threaded air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past all
+daily radiance.  His letter was a burning hymn to the day.  His moral
+grandeur on the day made him live as part of the splendour.  Was it
+possible for the woman who had seen him then to be faithless to him?
+The swift deduction from his own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion
+to the contrary, and he became lighthearted.  He hummed an air when he
+had finished his letter to her.
+
+Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some were
+despatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; others
+were told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde.
+His gold rained into their hands with the directions.
+
+Colonel von Tresten was the friend of his attachment to the baroness;
+a friend of both, and a warm one.  Men coming into contact with Alvan
+took their shape of friend or enemy sharply, for he was friend or enemy.
+of no dubious feature, devoted to them he loved, and a battery on them he
+opposed.  The colonel had been the confidant of the baroness's grief over
+this love-passion of Alvan's, and her resignation.  He shared her doubts
+of Clotilde's nobility of character: the reports were not favourable to
+the young lady.  But the baroness and he were of one opinion, that Alvan
+in love was not likely to be governable by prudent counsel.  He dropped a
+word of the whispers of Clotilde's volatility.
+
+Alvan nodded his perfect assent.  'She is that, she is anything you like;
+you cannot exaggerate her for good or evil.  She is matchless, colour her
+as you please.'  Adopting the tone of argument, he said: 'She writes that
+letter.  Well?  It is her writing, and the moment, I am sure of it as
+hers, I would not have it unwritten.  I love it!'  He looked maddish with
+his love of the horrible thing, and resumed soberly: 'The point is, that
+she has the charm for me.  She is plastic in my hands.  Other men would
+waste the treasure.  I make of her what I will, and she knows it, and
+knows that she hangs on me to flourish worthily.  I breathe the very soul
+of the woman into her.  As for that letter of hers--' it burnt him this
+time to speak of the letter: 'she may write and write!  She's weak, thin,
+a reed; she--let her be!  Say of her when she plays beast--she is absent
+from Alvan!  I can forgive.  The letter's nothing; it means nothing--
+except "Thou fool, Alvan, to let me go."  Yes, that!  Her people are
+acting tyrant with her--as legally they have no right to do in this
+country, and I shall prove it to them.  When I have gained admission to
+her--and I soon shall: it can't be refused: I am off to the head of her
+father's office to-morrow, and I have only to represent the state of
+affairs to the Minister in my language to obtain his authority to demand
+admission to her:--then, friend, you will see!  I lift my finger, and you
+will see!  At my request she went back to her mother.  I have but to
+beckon.'
+
+He had cooled to the happy assurance of his authority over her, all the
+giants of his system being well in action, and when that is the case with
+a big nature it is at rest, or such is the condition of repose granted it
+in life.
+
+On the morrow he was off to batter at doors which would have expected
+rather the summons of an armed mob at his heels than the strange cry of
+the Radical man maltreated by love.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+The story of Clotilde's departure from the city, like that of Alvan's,
+communicated to her by her maid, was an anticipation of the truth,
+disseminated by her parents.  She was removed when the swarm of spies and
+secret letter-bearers were attaining a position of dignity through the
+rumour of legal gentlemen about to direct the movements of the besieging
+army.
+
+A stir seemed to her to prognosticate a rescue and she went not
+unwillingly.  To be in motion, to see roadside faces, pricked her senses
+with some hope.  She had gained the peace she needed, and in that state
+her heart began to be agitated by a fresh awakening, luxurious at first
+rather than troublesome.  She had sunk so low that the light of Alvan
+seemed too distant for a positive expectation of him; but few approached
+her whom she did not fancy under strange disguises: the gentlemen were
+servants, the blouses were gentlemen; she looked wistfully at old women
+bearing baskets, for the forbidden fruit to peep out in the form of an
+envelope.  All passed her blankly, noticing her eyes.
+
+The journey was short; she was taken to a place a little beyond the head
+of the lake, and there, though she had liberty to breathe the air, fast
+fixed within the walls of a daily sameness that became gradually the hum
+of voices accusing Alvan of one in excess of the many sins laid against
+him by his enemies.  Was he not possibly an empty pretender to power--
+a mere great talker?
+
+Her bit of liberty increased her chafing at the deadly monotony of this
+existence, and envenomed the accusation by seeming to push her forth
+quite half way to meet him, if he would but come or show sign!  She
+impetuously vindicated him from the charge of crediting the sincerity of
+any words she might have committed to paper at the despotic dictation of
+her father.  Oh, no; Alvan could not be guilty of such folly as that; he
+could not; it would be to suppose him unacquainted with her, ignorant of
+the nature of women.  He would know that she wrote the words--why?  She
+could not perfectly recollect how she had come to write them, and found
+it easier to extinguish the act of having written them at all, which was
+done by the angry recurrence to his failure to intervene now when the
+drama cried for his godlike appearance.  Perhaps he was really
+unacquainted with her thought her stronger than she was!  The idea
+reflected a shadow on his intelligence.  She was not in a situation that
+could bear of her blaming herself.
+
+While she was thus devoured by the legions of her enfeebled wits,
+Clotilde was assiduously courted by her family, and her father from time
+to time brought pen and paper for her to write anew from his dictation.
+He was pleased to hail her as his fair secretary, and when the letters
+were unimportant she wrote flowingly, happy to be praised.  They were
+occasionally addressed to friends; she discovered herself writing one to
+the professor, in which he was about to be informed that she had resolved
+to banish Alvan from her mind for ever.  She stopped; her heart stopped;
+the pen fell from her hand, in loathing.  Her father warily bade her
+proceed.  She could not; she signified it choking.  Only a few days
+before she had written to the professor exultingly of her engagement.
+She refused to belie herself in such a manner; retrospectively her rapid
+contradictions appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human, and
+she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat the General
+was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergone by a
+sudden burst of his wrath.  He knew the proper physic.  'You girls want
+the lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it.  Write: "He
+is now as nothing to me."  You shall write that you hate him, if you
+hesitate!  Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have
+told him you have given him up, and what objection can you have to
+telling others now you have done it?'
+
+'I was forced to it, body and soul!' cried Clotilde, sobbing and bursting
+into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had put on to
+propitiate him.  'If I have to tell, I will tell how it was.  For that my
+heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all the world may
+see.  I would rather write that I hate him.'
+
+'You write, the man is now as nothing to me!' said her father, dashing
+his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow.  'Or
+else, my girl, you've been playing us a pretty farce!'  He strung himself
+for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed.  'No, no,
+you're wiser, you're a better girl than that.  Write it.  I must have it
+written-here, come!  The worst is over; the rest is child's play.  Come,
+take the pen, I'll guide your hand.'
+
+The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed.  They looked
+such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure
+they would be discerned as the work of compulsion.  So she wrote on
+mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future
+revolt.  Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and
+she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by
+scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we
+sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly in
+the morning.  She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would be
+welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise of
+courage.  She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who did
+not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of her
+lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him.  With these ideas
+in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of lines to
+Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and prostrate--
+she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was aware of a
+flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being deceived by
+it; it was an insult to his understanding.  Full surely the professor
+would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to her and read
+her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece of slavishness.  She
+was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the confession.  But that
+promise of courage, coming of her ownership of sense, vindicated her
+prospectively; she had so little of it that she embraced it as a present
+possession, and she made it Alvan's task to put it to the trial.  Hence
+it became Alvan's offence if, owing to his absence, she could be charged
+with behaving badly.  Her generosity pardoned him his inexplicable delay
+to appear in his might: 'But see what your continued delay causes!' she
+said, and her tone was merely sorrowful.
+
+She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when his
+answer arrived.  The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover's
+faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the
+letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language, taking
+the frosty sentences piecemeal.  He begged her to be firm in her
+resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents!  This man of high
+intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress
+moralizing.  Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and had
+within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this man--
+if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour to deserve
+the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan's age and her
+better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of her family,
+and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any chronicled.  Out
+on him!  She swept him from earth.
+
+And she had built some of her hopes on the professor.  'False friend!'
+she cried.
+
+She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.
+
+There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong
+arm save the baroness.  The professor's emphasized approval of her
+resolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and
+Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the baroness.
+The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of gosling
+innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph of
+candour.  She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring
+herself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have moved
+her, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: it
+had been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman.  The old woman
+was entreated to bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia,
+and let the young one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of robbing.
+She could not have had the idea, else how could she have made the
+petition?  And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure
+friendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea.
+Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civility
+insisted on the purity of her friendship.  Nay, in mercy to the poor
+gentleman, friendship it must be.
+
+A letter of reply from that noble lady was due.  Possibly she had
+determined not to write, but to act.  She was a lady of exalted birth,
+a lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a
+social and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motion
+now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost
+happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair.  'You have
+been a little weak,' the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a
+soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and
+know what our trials are when we are so persecuted.  O that I had your
+beautiful sedateness!  I do admire it, madam.  I wish I could imitate.'
+She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying: 'I have
+seen your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air
+of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features.  'For I
+can't call you good looking,' she said within herself, for the
+satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.
+And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced
+woman in confession must be:
+
+The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with
+his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash
+his hood, almost his head, off.  Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul
+to the ghostly.  The black page comprised a very long list.  'But put
+this on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his box--
+'I loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping
+out of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she has to
+hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him
+she guessed him to be no other than her lover.  'How could you expect a
+girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says.  And he
+answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.
+
+In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while
+gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,
+where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal
+river.  She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes
+and the consolation of weeping.  Dressed in black to the throat, she sat
+and waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel!
+who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan's
+beloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan!  How cheap such a way
+of proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider.  She wanted it so.
+
+The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight.  She had seen them day after
+day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to
+sultriness.  She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee
+and butterfly.  Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the
+glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek
+or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he was
+useless to her, utterly.
+
+Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her
+feet.  Her father had given him hope.  He came bearing eyes that were
+like hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he
+seemed unaware that she was inanimate.
+
+There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.
+
+He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness.  She had been
+expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and valley-
+hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.
+
+But he roused her.  With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his
+passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up the
+tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her
+parents:
+
+'Will I have you?  I?  You ask me what is my will?  It sounds oddly from
+you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and nothing
+has changed in me since then, nothing!  My feeling for him is unaltered,
+and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by my
+unhappiness.  The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.
+Sigismund Alvan.  To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my
+soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my
+parents--I hate them.'
+
+Marko pressed her hands.  If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.
+The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a
+heart that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you.
+I know you so well, Clotilde!  So, then, come to me, come with me, let me
+cherish you.  I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should
+it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to
+him, and then you may choose between us.'
+
+The generosity was evident.  There was nevertheless, to a young woman
+realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of a
+slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and this
+she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on her, and
+melting her to him.
+
+She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew at
+the throat of Marko's, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long
+delays in the destroying of a weaker.
+
+She left her chair and cried: 'As you will.  What is it to me?  Take me,
+if you please.  Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand.  You have as
+much of me as is there.  My life is gone.  You or another!  But take this
+warning and my oath with it.  I swear to you, that wherever I see
+Sigismund Alvan I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of
+you, lying dead beneath me.'
+
+The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited her to
+a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice!  I should rejoice to see you, all of
+you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to
+him I love.  Be under no delusion.  I love him better than the lives of
+any dear to me, or my own.  I am his.  He is my faith, my worship.  I am
+true to him, I am, I am.  You force my hand from me, you take this
+miserable body, but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God
+gives me sight of him.  I am Alvan's eternally.  All your laws are
+mockeries.  You, and my people, and your priests, and your law-makers,
+are shadows, brain-vapours.  Let him beckon!--So you have your warning.
+Do what I may, I cannot be called untrue.  And now let me be; I want
+repose; my head breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!'
+
+Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.
+
+The hand was nerveless: it was her dear hand.  Had her tongue been more
+venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made
+it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote.  In him
+there was love for two.
+
+Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was
+unconscious he did so.  He brought her peace, he brought her old throning
+self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her
+feet.
+
+If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned
+him.  The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan
+beam on her guilty destiny.
+
+She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on
+the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked
+and shuttered.
+
+He went.  He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely
+bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned.  It is difficult in
+affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe a
+duty.  The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his
+candour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his
+goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to every
+trial.  Perhaps, for the sake of peace .  .  .  after warning him .  .  .
+her meditations tottered in dots.
+
+But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking without
+language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a dash
+usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than the
+dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the
+adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two paces
+to mother's lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it would
+appear.  The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted if it
+stood out in words.  Could we live without ourselves letting our animal
+do our thinking for us legibly?  We live with ourselves agreeably so long
+as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though we have
+clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently well
+understand the whither of our destination under his guidance.  No counsel
+can be saner than that the heart should be bidden to speak out in plain
+verbal speech within us.  For want of it, Clotilde's short explorations
+in Dot-and-Dash land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet they seemed
+not only unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable to come.
+Or possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep his word, and save
+her from worse by stepping to the altar between her and Marko, there
+calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his presence would
+breathe courage into her to go.  to him.  It set her looking to the altar
+as a prospect of deliverance.
+
+Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clotilde's wintry face
+now that Marko was among them; her inference tallied with his report of
+their interview, so she supposed the girl to have accepted more or less
+heartily Marko's forgiveness.  For him the girl's eyes were soft and
+kind; her gaze was through the eyelashes, as one seeing a dream on a far
+horizon.  Marko spoke of her cheerfully, and was happy to call her his
+own, but would not have her troubled by any ceremonial talk of their
+engagement, so she had much to thank him for, and her consciousness of
+the signal instance of ingratitude lying ahead in the darkness, like a
+house mined beneath the smiling slumberer, made her eager to show the
+real gratefulness and tenderness of her feelings.  This had the
+appearance of renewed affection; consequently her parents lost much of
+their fear of the besieger outside, and she was removed to the city.
+Two parties were in the city, one favouring Alvan, and one abhorring the
+audacious Jew.  Together they managed to spread incredible reports of his
+doings, which required little exaggeration to convince an enemy that he
+was a man with whom hostility could not be left to sleep.  The General
+heard of the man's pleading his cause in all directions to get pressure
+put upon him, showing something like a devilish persuasiveness, Jew and
+demagogue though he was; for there seemed to be a feeling abroad that the
+interview this howling lover claimed with Clotilde ought to be granted.
+The latest report spoke of him as off to the General's Court for an
+audience of his official chief.  General von Rudiger looked to his
+defences, and he had sufficient penetration to see that the weakest point
+of them might be a submissive daughter.
+
+A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by a
+messenger.  The General thought over it.  The letter was by no means a
+seductive letter for a young lady to receive from such a person, yet he
+did not anticipate the whole effect it would produce when ultimately he
+decided to give it to her, being of course unaware of the noble style of
+Clotilde's address to the baroness.  He stipulated that there must be no
+reply to it except through him, and Clotilde had the coveted letter in
+her hands at last.  Here was the mediatrix--the veritable goddess with
+the sword to cut the knot!  Here was the manifestation of Alvan!
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Above all things I detest the writing for money
+Beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip
+Dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position
+Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity
+Hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers during absences
+His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability
+I give my self, I do not sell
+Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful
+Not in a situation that could bear of her blaming herself
+O for yesterday!
+Professional widows
+Self-consoled when they are not self-justified
+Want of courage is want of sense
+We shall not be rich--nor poor
+Work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v2
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS
+
+A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY
+
+By GEORGE MEREDITH
+
+1892
+
+
+
+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 HIV
+
+Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had overcome
+Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours.  The General had not
+consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror of
+the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged that
+Tresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hear from
+her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speak with her
+alone before the official interview in the presence of the notary, when
+she was publicly to state her decision and freedom of choice, according
+to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through his envoy.
+
+'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan.  'But I have worked
+for it--I have worked!  I have been talking to-day for six hours
+uninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a caged
+bear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform none of
+his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper touched a
+particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the, winding of
+a key.  Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General.  I could get
+no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called up
+Hollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear,
+or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin.  They have been
+hard at her, the whole family!  and I shall want the two hours I
+stipulated for to the full.  What do you say?--come, I wager I do it
+within one hour!  They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will be
+some time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind her
+defences; but an hour's an age with a woman.  Clotilde?  I wager I have
+her on her knees in half an hour!  These notions of duty, and station,
+and her fiddle-de-dee betrothal to that Danube osier with Indian-idol
+eyes, count for so much mist.  She was and is mine.  I swear to strike to
+her heart in ten minutes!  But, madam, if not, you may pronounce me
+incapable of conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impression of
+facts.  I say I will do it!  I am insane if I may not judge from
+antecedents that my voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at one
+signal--at a look!  I am prepared to stake my reason on her running to me
+before I speak a word:--and I will not beckon.  I promise to fold my arms
+and simply look.'
+
+'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about
+half a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you
+alone,' said the baroness.
+
+Alvan opened his eyes.  He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at
+the bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time.
+She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass the
+needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the
+instinct's positive.  To doubt it would upset my understanding.  I have
+had three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,
+curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,
+baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down to
+the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar degree
+of earnestness.  As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she, and from
+spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'
+
+'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed
+the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the
+condition of the man who could accept it for that.
+
+He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste
+on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,
+which he called the sapping of language.  She forbore to remind him in
+retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.
+
+'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my lead!
+and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction.
+I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and
+the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe.  You see I read her
+flatly.  I read and am charitable.  I have a perfect philosophical
+tolerance.  I'm in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair
+Greeks.'
+
+'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the baroness.
+'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the
+small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up.  It
+is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired
+merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men
+who have given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling--the
+philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun.
+Horace avaunt!  You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine
+sensualist for your case.  His love distressed his liver, and gave him a
+jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his
+philosophy, yours begins its labours.  That everlasting Horace!  He is
+the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty
+ways: the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming
+unbelievers!'
+
+'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the
+musical names.  'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian.  I
+see her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors
+which give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant,
+not much bigger than a dewdrop.  And so should a man's heart reflect her!
+Take her on the light in it, she is perfection.  We won't take her in the
+shady part or on your flat looking-glasses.  There never was necessity
+for accuracy of line in the portraiture of women.  The idea of them is
+all we want: it's the best of them.  You will own she's Greek; she's a
+Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian.  One of those
+delicious girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER,
+THE DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER.  There you have
+Clotilde: she's a TO-MORROWER.  You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to
+see her at all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you her
+promise to hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going.  Ay, so we
+have patience!  Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one's
+fortieth year!--it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.'
+
+Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,
+when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.
+
+'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.
+
+'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my forty-
+first a sage.'
+
+'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'
+
+'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide
+and master.'
+
+'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined to
+come to me.  I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to
+rest one's faith on.  Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like,
+were not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of
+them.  Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud
+career deviate.'
+
+'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan.  'I am the wine, and she the crystal
+cup.  She has avowed it again and again.  You read her as she is when
+away from me.  Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to
+contend when she stands alone.  But when I am beside her, when we are
+together--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of me by
+the magic I have seen each time we encountered.  She knows it well.'
+
+'She may know it too well.'
+
+'For what?' He frowned.
+
+'For the chances of your meeting.'
+
+'You think it possible she will refuse?'
+
+A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face.  He fetched a big
+breath.
+
+'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and
+everything written there is imposture!  I can account for all that she
+has done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me.  Not that
+she should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it!  Refuse?
+But I have done my work, done what I said I would do.  I stand in my
+order of battle, and she refuses?  No!  I stake my head on it!  I have
+not a clod's perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me
+from a flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has
+gained his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays
+blind with chance.'
+
+He started up in agitation.  'Lucie!  I am a grinning skull without a
+brain if that girl refuses!  She will not.'  He took his hat to leave,
+adding, to seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'She
+will not refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I
+have done tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she--oh! she cannot,
+she will not refuse.  Never!  I have eyes, I have wits, I am not
+tottering yet on my grave--or it's blindly, if I am.  I have my clear
+judgement, I am not an imbecile.  It seems to me a foolish suspicion that
+she can possibly refuse.  Her manners are generally good; freakish, but
+good in the main.  Perhaps she takes a sting .  .  .  but there is no
+sting here.  It would be bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of .  .  .
+she has a heart!  Well, then, good manners and right feeling forbid her
+to refuse.  She is an exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I
+have helped you to a wrong impression of her.  You will really appreciate
+her wit; you will indeed; believe me, you will.  We pardon nonsense in a
+girl.  Married, she will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I
+am responsible for her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her
+with me I warrant her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle,
+like the Cossack's horse.  I fancy that at forty I am about as young as
+most young men.  I promise her another forty manful working years.  Are
+you dubious of that?'
+
+'I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,' said the baroness.
+
+Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism,
+comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in
+toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire
+preparing the feast.
+
+'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resuming
+the offence on the apology for it.  'I could talk with interest of a
+trousseau.  I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a
+choice of wedding-presents.  As she is legally free to bestow her hand on
+me--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide to be
+married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris.  She has
+a turn for startling.  I can imagine that if I proposed a run for it she
+would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in acquiescing
+in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly because, in the
+first case, she would throw herself and the rest of the adventure on me,
+at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her impulses; and in the
+second, because she is a girl who would require a full band of the best
+Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up her spirits among her
+people during the preparations for espousing a democrat, demagogue, and
+Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to her own.  Give Momus a
+sister, Clotilde is the lady!  I know her.  I would undertake to put a
+spell on her and keep her contented on a frontier--not Russian, any
+barbarous frontier where there is a sun.  She must have sun.  One might
+wrap her in sables, but sun is best.  She loves it best, though she looks
+remarkably well in sables.  Never shall I forget .  .  .  she is
+frileuse, and shivers into them!  There are Frenchmen who could paint it
+--only Frenchmen.  Our artists, no.  She is very French.  Born in France
+she would have been a matchless Parisienne.  Oh!  she's a riddle of
+course.  I don't pretend to spell every letter of her.  The returning of
+my presents is odd.  No, I maintain that she is a coward acting under
+domination, and there's no other way of explaining the puzzle.  I was out
+of sight, they bullied her, and she yielded--bewilderingly, past
+comprehension it seems--cat!--until you remember what she's made of:
+she's a reed.  Now I reappear armed with powers to give her a free
+course, and she, that abject whom you beheld recently renouncing me, is,
+you will see, the young Aurora she was when she came striking at my door
+on the upper Alp.  That was a morning!  That morning is Clotilde till my
+eyes turn over!  She is all young heaven and the mountains for me!  She's
+the filmy light above the mountains that weds white snow and sky.  By the
+way, I dreamt last night she was half a woman, half a tree, and her hair
+was like a dead yewbough, which is as you know of a brown burnt-out
+colour, suitable to the popular conception of widows.  She stood, and
+whatever turning you took, you struck back on her.  Whether my widow, I
+can't say: she must first be my wife.  Oh, for tomorrow!'
+
+'What sort of evening is it?' said the baroness.
+
+'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along,' Alvan replied, and
+seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again.  They
+touched hands.  He promised to call in the forenoon next day.
+
+'Be cool,' she counselled him.
+
+'Oh!' He flung back his head, making light of the crisis.  'After all,
+it's only a girl.  But, you know, what I set myself to win!  .  .  .  The
+thing's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should be
+ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten.  There is no other reason
+for the trouble we 're at, except that, as I have said a thousand times,
+she suits me.  No man can be cooler than I.'
+
+'Keep so,' said the baroness.
+
+He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a
+shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the Rhone-
+stream.  There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid
+tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no
+abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains
+ahead.
+
+His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to
+mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this
+one were granted him!
+
+He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the
+task; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imagination
+spun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies,
+though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some
+noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was
+infamous to thwart them.  At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of
+their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of
+husbanding a woman.  A man should have a wife and rear children, not to
+be forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future
+times qualities he has proved priceless: he thought of the children, and
+yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.
+
+This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses
+of temper.
+
+Was she so small a thing?  Not if she succumbed.  She was petty,
+vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil
+beam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the
+giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were
+by his pure intentions and the approbation of society.  But he had a
+broad full heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her,
+uplifting her, richly endowing her.  No meanness of heart was in him.  He
+lay down at night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness.
+'Tomorrow! you bird of to-morrow!' he let fly his good-night to her.
+
+
+
+
+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
+At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly
+Hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic
+Men in love are children with their mistresses
+Providence and her parents were not forgiven
+She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each
+Trick for killing time without hurting him
+Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos on their side
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, v3
+by George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS, TRAGIC COMEDIANS, COMPLETE:
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Tragic Comedians, Complete, by Meredith
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of The Tragic Comedians, Complete,
+by George Meredith
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+
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