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 anutterance that the constant good service it does would make it seeman appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matterdistasteful to those expository pens. Upon examination, claimants to theepithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters, Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost. Wherever she canget to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically. Asfor that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew andthe angry captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no lesscompletely than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant. 

Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumenshrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy ofstudy. 

The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass underthis word as under their banner and motto. Their acts are incredible:they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipsehistorical couples upon our planet. Yet they do belong to history, theybreathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them iswritten in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, wasof a mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modernbrain which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can createthem, to set it spinning. 

A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil. He was theleader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, wellhated 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 thisman should have come to his end through love, and the woman who lovedhim have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we haveto study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask ifit was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters intothe systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its placeof abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for thepassion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomesof one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal natureout of its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their storytells of a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor isthere anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidentscould never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how thecomic in their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They arereal creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the worldby a lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagineevents and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can readus no such furrowing lesson in life. 

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

CHAPTER I

An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams thepastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that herweb is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger wasdissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous inher seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawna lively fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of hernative land. Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastimecounting among the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism knownas aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on thecontrary very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours forthe imbibing of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charmingcountenance and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for herchoice to be decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosinginstantly, after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet ofpastry. These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and littleso is the starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one objectof the worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his fora nod. But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive totaste to try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled todeliver verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that. Andas it happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your tastewill frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: theyoung coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters toescape drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simpleblocks or limp festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have aknowledge of her sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality. The more imagination she has, for a source of strength in the futuredays, 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 inthe mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites. Shewas not under a French mother's rigid supervision. In France the motherresolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of thatunequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory. Vigilantforesight is not so much practised where the world is less accuratelycomprehended. Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and theyoung women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from whatthey inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, thatthe 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 littledashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin, but they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have hadthe world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is common duringyouth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown ofwisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love fromthe calculations on behalf of her girl. 

Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) thatClotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartartrained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at theHungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene atall events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floatingthreads. A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprangfrom his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at thearch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for awhile. The music had seized him. He snatched bow and fiddle from oneof the ring, and with a few strokes kindled their faces. Then seatinghimself, on a bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched thestrings and flung up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneousnotes 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 lovedit 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 ofa fiery tribe) to its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled andjumped back to his carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked, leather-hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes andskin of burnished walnut made him look an offshoot, but one of thecelestial branch. 

He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he waspaying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General vonRudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, andalso that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet. Inthose very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Markohad recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he couldhave staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her. Adieu to CountConstantine. Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have tosuppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straightfrom her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchantwhich sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness. She struck, like fate, one blow. She discovered that the prince, in addition to hisbeauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in lovewith goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she sether face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility ingoodness. And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was tosubdue her. Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docileinfant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero whowould wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound? Siegfried couldnot be dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms. She caught aglorious image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informedher that she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match fora famous conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhapsunexampled, force of character. Her idea of a spiritual superiority thatcould soar over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad becauseof his vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her ofdeserving, 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, lordof earth and air. 

One who will dominate me, she thought. 

Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm hasbrought her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, shepersuades the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long asher pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, herparents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid'spresumption, 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 hisvehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of thebeauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, throughthe conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Herbrothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temperof the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state ofpolitics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders knowthat they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confusedby the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliarto history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded stateparalyzes his wrath. 

Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, andit was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capriciousbehaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it wasbecause she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs andtangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids thebold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned original ofher society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France, she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage toour loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor suppliedPrince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion. She to him waswhat she sought for in another. As much as she pitied herself for notlighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met thewoman, so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warmaffection, not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being. For she could not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeingof the object we yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen. Dressed, to delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care shebestowed 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 toher thinking guiltily. We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and howis he to declare his eagleship save by breaking through our meanconventional systems, tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teethof vulgar ordinances? Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for theknots it tied and untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was aninterfusion of philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded. She tried hard, but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero'sexhibition of flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the weddedwoman. Further thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despisedthe complication, yet without perceiving how else he was to manifesthimself legitimately in a dull modern world. The rescuing her fromdeath would be a poor imitation of worn-out heroes. His publication of atrumpeting book fell appallingly flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantrydone as an officer in war (defending his country too) distinguished thesoldier, but failed to add the eagle feather to the man. She had a mindof 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 speculativefancy unselected. 

So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is notwithout exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turnfrom us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or sofleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for theright one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was roundClotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing herfresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of muchsolicitation 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 recordthat he may seem an eagle. 

'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know, ' a gentleman of her countrysaid to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He saidit 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 professinguniversal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having anenvious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be thechoicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and shedimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to herbefore. She smiled musingly. 

CHAPTER II

'Who is the man they call Alvan?' She put the question at the firstopportunity to an aunt of hers. 

Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror wascomforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed. 

'Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about acreature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and aJew!'

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 theThrone and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what heis. '

'But is he clever?'

'Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. Youcould 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 thatstation. 

The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation uponhim. Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembledAlvan's. He being that furious creature, she thought of herself at herwildest, which was in her estimation her best; and consequently, shebeing by no means a furious creature, though very original, she couldnot meditate on him without softening the outlines given him by report;all because of the likeness between them; and, therefore, as she hadknowingly been taken for furious by very foolish people, she settledit that Alvan was also a victim of the prejudices he scorned. It hadpleased her at times to scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendousweight she brought on herself by the indulgence. She drew on herrecollections of the Satanic in her bosom when so situated, and neverhaving admired herself more ardently than when wearing that aspect, shewould 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 hadthe same abhorrence of Jewry. One of the favourite similes of the familyfor whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew:and it was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was inthe veins of the latest generation and might have been traced on thematernal side. 

Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowardsis the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolentimpudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurancerepulsive. She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan. Luckily for thegentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meethim again in Italy. 

She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; shesummoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish, still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practiceof the art she could at any time blow up a company--scatter mature andseasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give ourstout sex a shaking. 

Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and fallinginto disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancientlady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where thebrain of her race is located. There it occurred that a dashing officerof social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, fora comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: 'Isee you know Alvan. '

Alvan once more. 

'Indeed I do not, ' she said, for she was addressing an officer highabove Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she wasalmost past contradiction of the charge. 

'Surely you must, ' said he; 'where is the lady who could talk and thinkas 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 wasamazed yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle, and a dashing officer, rejoin: 'Come, come, let us be honest. That isall 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 lovethe man. '

'Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is atotal stranger to me, ' she said, seeing the Jew under quite a differentillumination. 

'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. Thoseideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heardhim use them. He has just the same original views of society and historyas yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike... You talkalike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous?You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius, " andmore for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do notknow and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appearedto have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make thegreater sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth apretty woman's "bite. " Come, now--you must believe me: at a supperat Alvan's table the other night, the talk happened to be of amodern Caesar, which led to the real one, and from him to "Plutarch'sPompeius, " as Alvan called him; and then he said of him what you havejust said, absolutely the same down to the allusion to the bite. Iassure you. And you have numbers of little phrases in common: you arepartners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those who cannot fly: that isAlvan's. I could multiply them if I could remember; they struck me asyou 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 inthe air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politicsand pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catchand 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 isconfined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field(part lawn, part marsh) of the social world: they were readers insympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying incommon, 'Plutarch's Pompeius, ' may be traceable to a reading of someprofessorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage ofChaeroneia. The dainty savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done withothers. And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; shehad often wished that Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinkingof him) had been endowed with the beauty of his rival: one or two ofPlutarch's touches upon the earlier history of Pompeius had netted herfancy, faintly (your generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung herblood; she liked the man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, shewould have preferred him femininely. His name was not written Pompey toher, as in English, to sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befittinggreat and lamentable fortunes, which the young lady declined to sharesolely because of her attraction to the victor, her compulsion to renderunto the victor the sunflower's homage. She rendered it as a slave: thesplendid man beloved to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was hernatural choice. 

Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew. Still a Jewof whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and ofthe exceptional she dreamed. He might have the head of a Caesar. Sheimagined a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything butbright to the eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy, encrusted, unkempt: the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf. Herhungry inquiries in a city where Alvan was well known, brought her fullinformation of one who enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides theinfluence of his political leadership; but no description of his aspectaccompanied it, for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about thecity, none thought of describing him, and she did not push that questionbecause she had sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the moreshe heard of his genius, to keep him repulsive. It appeared that hisbravery was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of ithad been given in the city not long since. He had her ideas, and he wonmultitudes with them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and hewas learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flowof rhetoric. She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relyingon her intuition to tell her more than we get from books, and on hersweet impudence for a richer original strain. She began to appreciatenow a reputation for profound acquirements. Learned professors ofjurisprudence and history were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way asCount Kollin. She heard things related of Alvan by the underbreath. Thatcircle below her own, the literary and artistic, idolized him; histalk, 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 enamouredbaroness. No one blamed Alvan. He had shown his chivalrous valourin defending her. The baroness was not a young woman, and she was ahardbound Blue. She had been the first to discover the prodigy, and hadpruned, corrected, and published him; he was one of her political works, promising to be the most successful. An old affair apparently; butthe association of a woman's name with Alvan's, albeit the name of aveteran, roused the girl's curiosity, leading her to think his mentaland magnetic powers must be of the very highest, considering hisphysical repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to yield him such extremedevotion. She commissioned her princely serving-man, who had followedand was never far away from her, to obtain precise intelligence of thisnotorious Alvan. 

Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of therumours about Alvan and the baroness. But why should his lady troubleherself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely besupposed she would meet by accident? He asked her this. Clotilde saidit was common curiosity. She read him a short lecture on the dismalnarrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking aninterest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world whereideas were current and speech was wine. The prince nodded; if she hadthese opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he sharedthem, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of timethat he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one farremoved from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link;he was capable of thinking all that came to him from her ablessing--shocks, wounds and disruptions. He did not add largely to herstock of items, nor did he fetch new colours. The telegraph wire washis model of style. He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of the beauty and vacuity of their world: and howdismally narrow that world was, she felt with renewed astonishment atevery dive out of her gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; sothat she was ready to scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobaccosmoke--the familiar incense of those homes where speech was wine. 

At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same citywith him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimateremarks--things homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she wasever to meet this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipseof all others. She desired to meet him for comparison's sake, and tocriticize a popular hero. It was inconceivable that any one popularcould approach her standard, but she was curious; flame played abouthim; she had some expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created bythe recent subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; andsome feeling of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged herto be rid of her delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man onour earth, that she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhapscompliant, and so please her parents, be good and dull, and pleaseeverybody, and adieu to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with thebeasts!... 

Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land sheliked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady insupreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: 'Such a breakfast, my dear!' Thecostly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughtsof the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it? Never inthat lady's recollection, or her husband's either, she exclaimed. Andwhere was the breakfast? Why, at Alvan's, to be sure; where else couldsuch a breakfast be?

'And you know Alvan!' cried Clotilde, catching excitement from thelady'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 husbandto-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 itcordially; for it is pleasant to have some one to show, and pleasantto assist some one eager to see: besides, many had petitioned her for asight of Alvan; she was used to the request. 

'You're not obliged to wait for to-morrow, ' she said. 'Come to one ofour gatherings to-night. Alvan will be here. '

'You invite me?'

'Distinctly. Pray, come. He is sure to be here. We have his promise, andAlvan never fails. Was it not Frau v. Crestow who did us the favour ofour 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 inundertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous gatherings ofthe finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband agreed to jointhem after the sitting of the Chamber upon a military-budget vote. The whole plan was nicely arranged and went well. Clotilde dressedcarefully, letting her gold-locks cloud her fine forehead carelessly, with finishing touches to the negligence, for she might be challenged totake part in disputations on serious themes, and a handsome youngwoman who has to sustain an argument against a man does wisely when sheforearms her beauties for a reserve, to carry out flanking movements ifrequired. The object is to beat him. 

CHAPTER III

Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvanwas present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witteddamsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from hercompanion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, wherethree gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapoursof tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of them wasof good stature. One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildlyJewish. The third was distressingly branded with the slum and guttersigns of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have doneit more effectively. The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executedby priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worshipin the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not moreloathsome. She sank on a sofa. That the man? Oh! Jew, and fifty timesover Jew! nothing but Jew!

The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritablymagnificent was the first whom she had noticed. 

She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feedingon the contrast. This man's face was the born orator's, with thelight-giving eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped forspeechfulness and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before hetook the headship of armies and marched to empire. 

The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his featuresand his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. Alas, he couldnot be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build! One couldvision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorouslyrich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme ashe talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheetlightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancingoutpour. 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, thatdrained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reducedhim to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in thecontemplation 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. Itterrified her soul to think he was Alvan. She feared scarcely less thatit might not be he. Between these dreads of doubt and belief she playedat cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased herself, and gloated. It is he! not he! he! not he! mostcertainly! impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me! If another, woeme! For she had come to see Alvan. Alvan and she shared ideas. Theytalked marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposinghe was not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment. The suppositionthat 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 anoble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes. Perchance a Jew of theSpanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew aswell as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles amajesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his racefavoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew isgrave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fieryeastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! afigure of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted toinspirit and be tempered by the intellect. 

She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learningthat the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared toexpress her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrasesof very eminent surprise. Necessarily it would be the greatest ofsurprises. 

The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde'sattention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be otherthan profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered), dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of whichshe cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin's head ifher insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker. Hepursued his talk: there was little danger of not hearing him. There wasonly the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice. His voicehad the mellow fulness of the clarionet. But for the subject, she couldhave fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges. She hadnever heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amplyflowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent:a perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument. He had notes lesspastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging ofhis theme. The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, untilthe mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertioncaused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself, remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her societyan original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very muchbeneath 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 breatheout the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn. 

The young flower of her sex burned to speak, to deliver an opinion. Shewas unaccustomed to yield a fascinated ear. She was accustomed ratherto dictate and be the victorious performer, and though now she was notanxious to occupy the pulpit--being too strictly bred to wish for a postpublicly in any of the rostra--and meant still less to dispossess thepresent 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 todissent. A young lady cannot so well say to an unknown gentleman: 'Youhave spoken truly, sir, ' as, 'That is false!' for to speak in the formercase would be gratuitous, and in the latter she is excused by the moralwarmth provoking her. Further, dissent rings out finely, and approvalis a feeble murmur--a poor introduction of oneself. Her moral warmthwas ready and waiting for the instigating subject, but of course she wasunconscious of the goad within. Excitement wafted her out of herself, aswe say, or out of the conventional vessel into the waves of her troublednature. He had not yet given her an opportunity for dissenting; she wascompelled to agree, dragged at his chariot-wheels in headlong agreement. 

His theme was Action; the political advantages of Action; and heillustrated his view with historical examples, to the credit of theFrench, the temporary discredit of the German and English races, whotend to compromise instead. Of the English he spoke as of a powerextinct, a people 'gone to fat, ' who have gained their end in a hoard ofgold and shut the door upon bandit ideas. Action means life to the soulas to the body. Compromise is virtual death: it is the pact betweencowardice and comfort under the title of expediency. So do we gatherdead matter about us. So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt. Thewar with evil in every form must be incessant; we cannot have peace. Letthen our joy be in war: in uncompromising Action, which need not be theless a sagacious conduct of the war.... Action energizes men's brains, generates grander capacities, provokes greatness of soul betweenenemies, and is the guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit ofour species. To doubt that, is to doubt of good being to be had for theseeking. He drew pictures of the healthy Rome when turbulent, the doomedquiescent. Rome struggling grasped the world. Rome stagnant invitedGoth and Vandal. So forth: alliterative antitheses of the accustomedpamphleteer. At last her chance arrived. 

His opposition sketch of Inaction was refreshed by an analysis of thecharacter of Hamlet. Then he reverted to Hamlet's promising youth. Howbrilliantly 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. Thethree made chorus in a noise of boots on the floor. 

Her hero faced about and stood up, looking at her fulgently. Their eyesengaged without wavering on either side. Brave eyes they seemed, eachpair of them, for his were fastened on a comely girl, and she had strungherself 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 thecommencement?'

'After the apparition of Hamlet's father the prince was mad, ' saidClotilde hurriedly, and she gazed for her hostess, a paroxysm of alarmsucceeding that of her boldness. 

'Why should we two wait to be introduced?' said he. 'We know oneanother. 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 radiantface. His being Alvan, and his knowing her and speaking her name, allwas 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, 'Forgood!' 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 convinceyou. '

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 moreimportant actors: we are not at Elsinore. You are aware that I hoped tomeet you?'

'Is there a periodical advertisement of your hopes?--or do they come tous by intuition?'

'Kollin was right!--the ways of the serpent will be serpentine. I knewwe must meet. It is no true day so long as the goddess of the morningand the sun-god are kept asunder. I speak of myself, by what I have feltsince 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 confessour weakness. '

'Unlike! for the world and I meet and part: not we two. '

Clotilde attempted an answer: it would not come. She tried to berevolted by his lording tone, and found it strangely inoffensive. Hislording presence and the smile that was like a waving feather on itcompelled her so strongly to submit to hear, as to put her in danger ofappearing 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. Youdeparted 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 heardthat you were the person I wanted. In default of you I paraded theisland with Tiberius, who is my favourite tyrant. We took the initiativeagainst the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written bya plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account ofmy extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic. He apologizedin turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that themisunderstanding between us was past cement: for each of us loved theman but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his officethan he is in himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friendthat each of us loved. So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he wouldhave done had I been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperormy respectful adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins. Mademoiselle, by delaying your departure seven days you would have savedme from death. You see, the official is the artificial man, and I oughtto have known there is no natural man left in us to weigh against theartificial. I counted on the emperor's personal affection, forgettingthat 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 oursick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish! Verily the seconddeath of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the islandseven days earlier, was harder to bear. Tell me frankly--the music inItaly?'

'Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous. '

'Excellent!' his eyes flashed delightedly. 'O comrade of comrades! thatyear lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I havegained. Yes, brainless! There, in music, we beat them, as politicallyFrance beats us. No life without brain! The brainless in Art and inStatecraft 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 thePhilistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the greenblades 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 anda Jew. You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit somesparkling incredulity. The Christian is like the politician in supposingthe original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the patternof the monster he was originally taught to hate. But the Jew has beena little christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian. So with demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we growconservatived. Try to think individually upon what you have to learncollectively--that is your task. You are of the few who will be equal toit. We are not men of blood, believe me. I am not. For example, I detestand I decline the duel. I have done it, and proved myself a man of metalnotwithstanding. To say nothing of the inhumanity, the senselessness ofduelling revolts me. 'Tis a folly, so your nobles practise it, andyour royal wiseacre sanctions. No blood for me: and yet I tell youthat whatever opposes me, I will sweep away. How? With the brain. If wedescend to poor brute strength or brutal craft, it is from failing inthe brain: we quit the leadership of our forces, and the descent is thebeast's confession. Do I say how? Perhaps by your aid. --You do notstart and cry: "Mine!" That is well. I have not much esteem fornon-professional actresses. They are numerous and not entertaining. --Youleave 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 andspeak to you. Heart to heart, then! Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to winyou--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: "Ihave discovered the wife for you, Alvan. " I had previously heard of herfrom another as having touched the islet of Capri. "But, " said Kollin, "she is a gold-crested serpent--slippery!" Is she? That only tells me ofa little more to be mastered. I feel my future now. Hitherto it has beena land without sunlight. Do you know how the look of sunlight on aland calms one? It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the endgained--not the end to labour, just heaven! but peace to the heart'scraving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in thewaters of life. Conjure up your vision of Italy. Remember the meaningof Italian light and colour: the clearness, the luminous fulness, thethoughtful shadows. Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to theeye, spirit-speaking to the mind. They throb. You carve shapes of Godsout of that sky, the sea, those peaks. They live with you. How theysatiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from itsprickly nest!--Well, and you are my sunlighted land. And you will haveto be fought for. And I see not the less repose in the prospect! Partof you may be shifty-sand. The sands are famous for their goldenshining--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 youwill 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 phrasesin common, and aphorisms, it appears. Why? but that our minds act inunison. What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?--the cityof Paris, Lutetia. '

'Could you make it good?' said Clotilde. 

He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, likeswallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of thestream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies, leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment thatmust be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mindfrom the touchings and probings of her character on these flights. 

She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom theappearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful andreassuring; 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 thatlistened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sureit was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that wentspeeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more outof her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, deniedher 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 thatfact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible. In the presenceof the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept awaywith very little creaking of its timbers on the flood. When we feel itspower we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space, indifferent to nakedness. And after trimming ourselves for it, the sageasks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certainsome day to feel. Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had wonfame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, andperilously, for courage. She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herselfto meet it, and Alvan to be it. Her famous originality was a trumpetblown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudlyhis esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding. Eachhad evoked the other. Their common anticipations differed in this, thathe had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; andseeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured soddensatyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her onits divinest whirlwind. 

They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty beforecaptivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractivecomeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear, and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained discipleof the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points andthe extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she wasdoing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank inhis looks on her. Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcelyspeculation. She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward, under haphazard flashes. The sight of her hand disengaged told her ithad been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those weremen and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of thewords she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs shehad crossed. And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to pressforward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividnessand at least indicate her force of character. The splendour of the manquite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; sheset fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of herfair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merelywomanly, a poor charm of her sex. The intellectual endowment wasrarer: still rarer the moral audacity. O, to match this man's embracingdiscursiveness! his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong soundhe brought out of all subjects! He struck, and they rang. There was abell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significancewas on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer anyafflicting lumpishness. His brain was vivifying light. And how humanehe was! how supremely tolerant! Where she had really thought instead offlippantly tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for anecho, his firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she hadfelt deeper than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed. Strange toconsider: with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift oflife thrice dear to him, he was fearless. Less by what he said than bydivination she discerned that he knew not fear. If for only that, shewould have hung to him like his shadow. She could have detected a brazenpretender. A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would havewritten down coxcomb. Her social training and natural perception raisedher to a height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from theeloquently lofty. He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out ata first view, bidding that which he was be known. Fearless, confident, able, he could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable. She whowas this man's mate would consequently wed his possessions, includingcourage. Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it inan equal degree. Was she not displaying it? The worthy people of thecompany stared, as she now perceived, and she was indifferent; herrelatives were present without disturbing her exaltation. She wheeledabove their heads in the fiery chariot beside her sun-god. It couldnot but be courage, active courage, superior to her previous tentativesteps--the verbal temerities she had supposed so dauntless. For nowshe was in action, now she was being tried to match the preacher andincarnation of the virtues of action!

Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--thesymbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive, eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting himto proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; lightin light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and thereforenot light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: andoh! constantly entertaining. 

The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady's shape. Did hethink it, or a dash of something like it?

His mood was luxurious. He had found the fair and youthful originalwoman of refinement and station desired by him. He had good reasonto wish to find her. Having won a name, standing on firm ground, withpromise of a great career, chief of what was then taken for a growingparty and is not yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it isiron, his youth had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor, whom to call Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdomin conduct, but whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey. Verilyshe was original; and a grey original should seem remarkable above ablooming blonde. If originality in woman were our prime request, thegrey should bear the palm. She has gone through the battle, retainingthe 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, warmerthan the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepidas devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan. He took it luxuriously becausehe believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage ofthe adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in returnfor energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his naturallongings. 

Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was thebreath of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotildein the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductivelyassuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winningher. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpableabout a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her whichwould give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through themixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior. He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express itsincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with hiscourage to support the originality she was famed for. 

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvanfor counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exactphrasing of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature. He satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peacethat night. Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines ofa contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to cappingverses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubiousflavour 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 elementsconstitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining towantonness out of bravado as well as by taste. Alvan, lookingindolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of thesuperfluousness 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 toomuch! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed theirchatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him ofher capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too withher blush. She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibilityforbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had anairy latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her forher boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: heliked also the distinction she made. 

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation tohis requirements in a wife. They marched to the table together, and sattogether, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal. Hisrobustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wifemight be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, hispossible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountifulheavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dreamof the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position ofinterpreter of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoymentof the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharingit with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise thanhe on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindledto the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was notdevoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at herfather's board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and thatvineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country tobe enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty frommuch talking and excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaringthe wine princely. Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are notfor the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from FrenchSauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?'

'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf init, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'

'Glorious!'

He toasted the grape. 'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the youngsun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the witheredsun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes tenof gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stemclusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, herheaven-kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of theRhine. 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 aftera day of savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in theincessantly verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table. Clotildeacquiesced: she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollickingfaun. She was realizing fairyland. 

They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between themas with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting andbranching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of theharmony. So ran their chirping arguments and diversions. The carryingon of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to thoseundetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something isin process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and lookedhard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them. The Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with naturewas generally considered to have done that night his most ancient andreputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessedanywhere, and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our latercivilization. Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intensedivinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could beperceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, wasvisible. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' And if nature, character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress'sgolden hair, did prepare them for Love's lightning-match, not theless were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze. Likewise, Time, imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussyreiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magicalfact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing fromnight to day. He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but aslong 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 allowedthem to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-roadquietly out of the way. They were ungrateful, of course, when theperformance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside himpretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob themof the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep betweenthem 'for ever, ' and fresh. 

The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning. Alvan assisted at thecloaking and hooding of Clotilde. Her relatives were at hand; they hungby while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlightthat laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass andstone. 

'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 anestablished right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor didher people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt whichhad struck the pair. These things, and many things that islands know notof, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulnessof Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an islandatmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or thebreastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or notropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seenof it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there. But even wherehe walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a landbowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan's behaviourwas passing heteroclite. He needed to be the kingly fellow he was, crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose ituninterruptedly. 'She is mine; I have won her this night!' his bearingsaid; and Clotilde's acquiesced; and the worthy couple following themhad to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering. Partly by habit, andof his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that oncetaken could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a goodtideway strong in his own passion and his lady's up against the lastdefences--her parents. A difficulty with them was foreseen. What is adifficulty!--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: aknot 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 difficultybetter than the woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of aresistance, if only because it was a portion of the dowry she broughthim. Good soldiers (who have won their grades) are often of a peacefultemper and would not raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemysets their pugnacious forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins withelectrical fire, till they are as racers on the race-course. --His inmosthearty devil was glad of a combat that pertained to his possession ofher, for battle gives the savour of the passion to win, and victorydignifies a prize: he was, however, resolved to have it, if possible, according to the regular arrangement of such encounters, formal, withoutsnatchings, 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 presentfeelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!' The comparisonhad been used or implied to him before. 

'No!' said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, 'nomore 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 theshort cut to happiness, centaur and nymph? One leap and a gallop, and weshould be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents andfriends to run about for the wits they lose in running. But no! Nomore scandals. That silver moon invites us by its very spell of brightserenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the moreprolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the endof the draught. But no!' his voice deepened--'the handsome face of theorb that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop betweenus two. Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be takenall 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, thelike!--sunless, waterless, without a flower! It is the old volcano land:it grows one bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you willknow 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 hestables himself; yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb hefinishes 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 beconscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation. 

'Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician'streatise 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 mestill. '

'May the sensation never quit you!'

'It will not. '

'What a night!' Alvan raised his head: 'A night cast for our firstmeeting 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 everon that house for me, Clotilde. I would it were leagues distant, or thedoor 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 herfamily 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 receiveme, ' said Alvan. 

She stopped walking in sheer fright. 

'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horrorof each and the commotion. 

'To-morrow or the day after--not later. No delays! You are mine, we areone; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both. IfI could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestallingmischances. Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes areour gold slipping away?'

She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, onlyto shun the pledge it signified. He opened an abyss at her feet, and indeadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh! not yet; not immediately. ' Shetrembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness. 'There will be such... Not yet! Perhaps later. They must not be troubledyet--at present. I am... I cannot--pray, delay!'

'But you are mine!' said Alvan. 'You feel it as I do. There can be noreal impediment?'

She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties. In fearof his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of theirimbecility: '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 areneither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at present. '

To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's backto the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit, and beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look onthis pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and hishissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes andthe geese of the world. She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: whichimaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice, active and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would bewarm. 

He read something of her weakness. 'And supposing I decide that it mustbe?'

'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that shehad lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women ofthe world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the criticalmoment: and she had lost it by being too sincere. Her cowardice appearedto her under that aspect. 

'Now I perceive that the task is harder, ' said Alvan, seeing her huddledin 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 seentonight that we are fated for one another? It is your destiny, andtrifling with destiny is a dark business. Look at me. Do you doubt myhaving absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me tobear, 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 herhence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; butdesperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had thisof the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker offacts. He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she feltlike 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 withhim for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: abad name among her people and class, and chains in private. He was oldenough to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood lessfiery than the junction of his passions. 'Well, well!--but we might sosoon have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad! It is but todetermine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisomecircuit. Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of theheart. Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls! and she is agirl, 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, andsleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she isnot a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the worldmay see; and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite beforethe 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, notthe mother's. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought, reflective, if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he wasby nature two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother thatsleeps beside her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry. Before the ghost walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of actionwould have whiffed away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzymoralizer, waiting for the winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. Theapparition of his father to him poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the blood distracted a head steeped in Wittenbergphilosophy. With metaphysics in one and poison in the other, with theouter world opened on him and this world stirred to confusion, he worethe semblance of madness; he was throughout sane; sick, but never withhis 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 tobe able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewellswere spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person thatOphelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology forhim in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termedgold-crested serpent. 

He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit oflikeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her. 

And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he hadreturned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened herwith were no longer imminent. 

CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have ashort sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip toher own sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest inher. The exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the artto frame her apology. The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan, she saw Prince Marko. She was gentle to him, in anticipation of hisgrief; she could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequiousbeauty, and when her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acutesensibility to the blow, honourably she inflicted it. 

'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell youI 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 theirbrightness moistened and flashed. 

Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said. He knewthe man. 

Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself. For the firstfew 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. Herparents had postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm;it was his violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that shefeared, as nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting, seeing, nor hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whosecuriosity is refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thingwhich frightened it. Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courageflooded back; she hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelledthat he did not, reproached him; she could almost have scorned him forlistening to the hesitations of the despicable girl so little resemblingwhat she really was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf ofher family to spare them a sudden shock. Remembering her generousconsiderations in their interests, she thought he should have known thatthe creature he called a child would have yielded upon supplication tofly with him. Her considerateness for him too, it struck her next, wasthe cause of her seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceivedit and put it aside. He should have seen that she could be brave, andwas a mate for him. And if his shallow experience of her wrote her downnerveless, his love should be doing. 

Was it love? Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decidedwill whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, hadshe the freedom of a man. She would not have listened (it was quitetrue) to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed aninterval 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 herselfto study it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering amongthem pity, thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between admirationand pathetic esteem, like that the musician has for a preciousinstrument giving sweet sound when shattered. He served her faithfully, in spite of his distaste for some of his lady's commissions. She had toget her news of Alvan through Marko. He brought her particulars of theold trial of Alvan, and Alvan's oration in defence of himself fora lawless act of devotion to the baroness; nothing less than thesuccessfully scheming to wrest by force from that lady's enemy adocument precious to her lawful interests. It was one of those caseswhich have a really high gallant side as well as a bad; an excellentcase for rhetoric. Marko supplied the world's opinion of the affair, bravely owning it to be not unfavourable. Her worthy relatives, theFrau v. Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report tothe family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with theepithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been receivedon a visit to demand her in marriage. There was no chance of her beingallowed to enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and popularbuffoon' was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so shewas compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such serviceswithout rewarding him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer. Those who toss crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and thenbe moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them, but the dumbmendicant'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 alwaysadoring, never importunate, he restored her to the pedestal she had beenreally rudely shaken from by that other who had caught her up suddenlyinto the air, and dropped her! A hand abandoned to her slave rewardedhim immeasurably. A heightening of the reward almost took his life. In the peacefulness of dealing with a submissive love that made herqueenly, the royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool, seemedpredatory and insolent. Thus, after that scene of 'first love, ' in whichshe had been actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill or twofor the recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the nobleactor; for nothing could erase the scene--it was historic; and Alvanwould always be thought of as a delicious electricity. She and Markowere 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 shadowof giants; but still Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners wasfavourable to the liberty she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of thiskind, rather warmer than her word for it would imply. She owned that shecould better live the poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflecton its charms in the society of Marko. He was very young, he was littlemore than an adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers wouldstring or slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of adistant day--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when hemight be made happy. 

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion toanatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him inher likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; nowgrovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject;and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in analteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering apicked self-knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is verylike me: that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparisonwooed her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nippedher so shrewdly as to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and thevivisected youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness ata touch. It was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomyis the title for the operation, because the probing of herself inanother, with the liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt to feel that she prosecuted her researches ina dead body. The moment her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrankunder a stroke of pain, she abstained from carving, and simultaneouslyconscious 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 ofhis 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 lookedat 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, andsoftened to her victim. Clotilde opened her arms, charming awayher wound, as she soothed him, both by the act of soothing and thereflection that she could not be so very like one whom she pitied andconsoled. 

She was charitably tender. If it be thought that she was cruel toexcess, plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight ofa youth who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, andraised out of it by a smile. This young man's responsive spirit acted onher as the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frameexcites the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul toshow the miracle of our revival. Worship provokes the mortal goddess toa manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half toblame. 

She had latterly been thinking of Alvan's rejection of the part ofcentaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning. He was togain her lawfully after dominating her utterly. That was right, but itlevelled imagination. There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love aform of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominatedutterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she ismoved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessitycan exist for the former: and the reverse. In the union of the twoconditions she sees herself slavishly domesticated. With her IndianBacchus imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, andhe was beside her. --Quick to the saddle, away! The forest of terrorsis ahead; they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on itsborders; the dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts leanto an upright in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and womenwith the voice of a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot beworse than a world defied. They drain a cup of milk apiece and theyspur, for this is the way to the golden Indian land of the planted vineand the lover's godship. --Ludicrous! There is no getting fartherthan the cup of milk with Marko. They curvet and caper to be forwardunavailingly. It should be Alvan to bring her through the forest tothe planted vine in sunland. Her splendid prose Alvan could do whatthe sprig of poetry can but suggest. Never would malicious fairy in oldwoman's form have offered Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride'simagination of him confronting perils. Yet, O shameful contrariety ofthe fates! he who could, will not; he who would, is incapable. Let itnot be supposed that the desire of her bosom was to be run away within person. Her simple human nature wished for the hero to lift herinsensibly over the difficult opening chapter of the romance--through'the forest, ' or half imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meetthe 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 greatprose giant, with the poetic departed! Naturally she turned to caressthe poetic while she had it beside her. And it was a wonder to observethe young prince's heavenly sensitiveness to every variation of hermoods. He knew without hearing when she had next seen Alvan, thoughit had not been to speak to him. He looked, and he knew. The liquiddarkness of his large eastern eyes cast a light that brought her heartout: she confessed it, and she comforted him. The sweetest in the womancaused her double-dealing. 

Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him. Acommon friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him. He was aneminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorantthat her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such aman as the demagogue and Jew. Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him toabet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimatelyto allow his own house to be their place of meeting. Alvan achieved thefirst of the steps unassisted. Whether or not his character stoodwell with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solidattainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputablecitizen and erudite to support him. Rhetoric in a worthy cause has goodchances of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seemexcellent to the professor when one promising fair to be the politicalgenius of his time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could makehim 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 ofher conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here. ' Sheanswered: 'No, he has not yet come. '--How could she tell that he was notpresent 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 surroundinghim to buzz about some recent pamphlet. 

She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as bydegrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him, it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for thephysical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late, Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instantnaturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as ifthere had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influenceon her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professorrevealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spokeof it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her inthe dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbsin his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the possessionof her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: 'That ishe, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom Imust brush away. '

'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractionala weight as her tone declared him. 'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he doesnot 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 hadfastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as thewrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone. 

'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knewsomething of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into thecharacter of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance ofrumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, andmade sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in itthat his vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception;all, everything; all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as Ishall--only aid me a little. '

She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the importof the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to hispenetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, ofexcellent substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose forthemselves--the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grandaccusation; and they have had to drink it, and they have blinkedover the tonic draught with such power of taking a bracing as theirconstitutions could summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual historyare the sexes to be seen standing more acutely divided. Well maythe lady be silent; her little sins are magnified to herself to theproportion of the greatness of heart forgiving her; and that, withhis mysterious penetration and a throb of her conscience, holds hertongue-tied. She does not imagine the effect of her silence upon themagnanimous wretch. Some of these lovers, it has to be stated in sadnessfor the good name of man, have not preserved an attitude that said sonobly, 'Child, thou art human--thou art woman!' They have undone it andgone to pieces with an injured lover's babble of persecuting inquiriesfor confessions. Some, on the contrary, retaining the attitude, havebeen unable to digest the tonic; they did not prepare their systems asthey did their dose, possibly thinking the latter a supererogatory heavythump on a trifle, the which was performed by them artfully for a meansof swallowing and getting that obnoxious trifle well down. These areever after love's dyspeptics. Very few indeed continue at heart inharmony with their opening note to the silent fair, because in truth thegeneral anticipation is of her proclaiming, if not angelical innocence, a softly reddened or blush-rose of it, where the little guiltiness liespathetic 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 numberthese indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, withoutwill, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him. Hewould have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but ratherfor a sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young, graceful, comely, and a lady of station. Once in his good keeping, herlord would answer for her. And this was a manfully generous view of thesituation. It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood. But howof his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, adefeat? Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as aheroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself! Wise are themothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it onlyto guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending generosity, until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of thesex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal. 

Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, theorigin of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the manwas frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth ofmadness. 

After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof ofthe amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxinganxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to thesister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair througha demi-ceremony of betrothal. It sprang Clotilde astride nearer toreality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the changeat home. A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan'spushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been. Shewaited for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet totake; she feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; theold wheel revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait forcircumstances to bring the change they cannot work for themselves; andonce more the two fell asunder. She had thoughts of the cloister. Hervenerable relative died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she wasinduced to think of marriage. An illness laid her prostrate; shecontemplated 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. Thegrace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an IndianBacchus were native to him. In her convalescence, she asked herself whatmore she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she inreturn might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness. Forshe had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in theSpartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently. But he was a flowerin sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it. Why should shewithhold from him a thing so easily given? The convalescent is receptiveand undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming intothe frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; itis infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloudacross it and lends it only a tender wistfulness. 

Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter ofour island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, andat an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air. Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness. There came aletter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kinglyAlpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veinsbecame 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, andone more intoxicating to them, was never devised. It chirrups of thedear silly couple. Well, this was her wish. Was it his? Young health onthe flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other thanAlvan's wish; she believed in his wishing it. Then as he wished and shewished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her ownfor being his as well. She hurried her friend and her friend'sfriends on horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodgedoverlooking mountain and lake. The professor reported him outweariedwith excess of work. Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirtywere laid to his charge. Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Herreckless defence of him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her tocomprehend his dealings with her, and how it was that he stormed her andconsented to be beaten. He had a thousand occupations, an ambition outof the world of love, chains to break, temptations, leanings... Tut, tut! She had not lived in her circle of society, and listened tothe tales of his friends and enemies, and been the correspondent offlattering and flattered men of learning, without understanding howa man like Alvan found diversions when forbidden to act in a givendirection: and now that her healthful new blood inspired the courage toturn 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. Shehad perforce of her radiant new healthfulness arrived at an exactunderstanding of him. Where she was deluded was in supposing that shewould no longer dread his impetuous disposition to turn rosy visionsinto facts. But she had the revived convalescent's ardour to embracethings positive while they were not knocking at the door; dreams wereabhorrent to her, tasteless and innutritious; she cast herself on theflood, relying on his towering strength and mastery of men and events tobring 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 ina chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death'sHeads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss ladentered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below hadasked for him--Dr. Alvan. Who could the lady be? He thought of toomany. The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness. Issuing andbeholding 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 mypolitical stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another foran immediate introduction to your father. '

'True?'

'The truth, as you shall see. So, you have come, you have found me! Thistime 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 wasready to match with a loyal devotion to his captive. Her coming clearedeverything. 

Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a memberof the party. His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx haswhispered. They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, toanother caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge inmorning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb ofday at his birth--he them. 

Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Twowishes! Mine was in your breast. You wedded yours to it. At last!--andwe are one. Not a word more of time lost. My wish is almost a will initself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till thesleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our twowishes united dare the world to divide them. What can? My wish was yourdestiny, yours is mine. We are one. ' He poetized on his passion, anddramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the manholding 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, likemetal in the furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid orsolid. You make him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: butfixed or flowing, he is lord of you. That is the universal penalty: youmust, 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! Andnow 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 notcompromise 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 worldis a variable monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false;but those who weld strength with sincerity may practise their rites ofreligion publicly, and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate. Nay, Isay 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. Politicallyalso we know that strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow. Behind the veil of our human conventions power is constant as ever, andto 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 whowakens 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 myexperience resisted. I have a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; Ihave a voice for ears, a net for butterflies, a hook for fish, anddesperation to plunge into marshes: but the feu follet will not becaught. One must wait--wait till her desire to have a soul bids her cometo us. She has come! A soul is hers: and see how, instantly, the oldmonster, the world, which has no soul--not yet: we are helping it to getone--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe. For I do give youa soul, think as you will of it. I give you strength to realize, courageto act. It is the soul that does things in this life--the rest isvapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do music by the pure note wonfrom resolute strings. The tense chord is music, and it is love. Thishigher and higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like aharp. '

'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!' exclaimedClotilde. 

'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 isthe garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view;the view within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, ourhistory 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, peeledand sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have theirpleasures in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! theyshall 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 amneither, but a man of law, a student of the sciences, a politician, onthe road to government and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt asmuch from light literature as from heavy-as much, that is, from thepictures of our human blood in motion as from the clever assortment ofour forefatherly heaps of bones. Shun those who cry out against fictionand have no taste for elegant writing. For to have no sympathy with theplayful 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 leavethem!'

'Leave them?'

'You with me. No more partings. The first year, the first day shall bedated 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 asheaf 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 ofthis 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 fictionand 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 themeshes are on my head and arms. I fancied I dealt with a woman; a womanneeding protection! She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man. Thatis between us two. But think of us facing the world, and trust me; takemy hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight. Trust it tome, 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 yourreality: all others are phantoms. You can impose on them, not on me. Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be yoursalvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, andthe subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it. Butthe courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I amdistant and maligned--can you fancy your having that? No! be wise ofwhat you really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow. '

'Then, ' said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, 'do you doubt your abilityto win me without a scandal?'

'Back me, and I win you!' he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: asudden 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 tobe done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to wastein retarding the inevitable? Pottering up steps that can be taken at onebound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne, and their kneecaps the footing stumps. But for us two life begins upthere. Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is ourshrine. I have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirstto live. '

She murmured, in a fervour, 'You shall!' and slipped behind herdefences. 'To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a littletime; 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 anexcuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting, --it wasalso a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to thestep. 

She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giantat the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play ofknife and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, livelyFrenchmen and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring Englishof both sexes, not encouraging to conversation in their look of palliddisgust of the art, Alvan started general topics and led them. The leadcame to him naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind bothstored and effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growthof life. She did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classesand sets, or that he should be famed for charming women. Her friend wasenraptured with him. Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatterbetween 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 notan easy thing to say how she stood definitely. She had obeyed her dyingrelative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko's, andhad pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentionsto the prince. It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; andchiefly for his well-being. She had reserved her full consent: theplighting was incomplete. Prince Marko knew that there was another, amagical person, a genius of the ring, irresistible. He had been warned, that should the other come forth to claim her.... And she was about towrite 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 hadto make her choice of one, and tell the prince she did love him, but... Dots are the best of symbols for rendering cardisophistical subtletiesintelligible, and as they are much used in dialogue, one should havenow and then permission to print them. Especially feminine dialoguereferring to matters of the uncertain heart takes assistance from troopsof dots; and not to understand them at least as well as words, whenwords have as it were conducted us to the brink of expression, and shownus the precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the marketplace. 

Sunless rose the morning. The blanketed figures went out to salute ablanketed sky. Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness invarious forms, including laughter's. Alvan frankly declared himself thedisappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight longloved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and thelakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde'sEnglish friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemnreality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materiallydefining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)announce the hour for her departure. He promised her a positive sunriseif she would delay. Her child lay recovering from an illness in thetown below, and she could not stay. But Clotilde had coughed in the dampmorning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposedto it. Had not the lady heard her cough? She had, but personally shewas 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 acough as that?' The lady repeated 'My child!' Clotilde said it hadbeen agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be besideher 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 coursehe was beaten. He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence. Clotildelikened his appearance to a strangled roar. 'Mothers and theirchildren are too much for me!' he said, penitent for his betrayal ofover-urgency, as he helped to wrap her warmly, and counselled her verymode 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: acustomary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting theirshores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters:but Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showingcoldness in devoting herself to her child. 

'No, they attend to their duties, ' he assented generally, desperatelyjust. 

'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--aburning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separatedon the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrippathfarers. 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 heramusement. 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 theexcess of life that he put about her. This time there was no prospect ofhis courtship relapsing. 

'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend. 

'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively. 'If, dearEnglishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood. But Alvan mountshigh over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, sogenerous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be. '

The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult tomiss--more was expected to be said of him. 

'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan, ' she remarked, for she hadheard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also beenpolite to her under vexation. 

Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, anddisliked 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 upongood authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed thelesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace. 

BOOK 2. 

CHAPTER VII

He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when theymet, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so. He was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantlythrough her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimesgathers during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create thesebackflowings and gaps in the feelings. She had grown reconciled tothe perturbation of his messages, and would have preferred to havehim startling and thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, shewelcomed him, and feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chillof the fit of shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign thatshe had reached his level, and might own it by speaking of the practicalmeasures to lead to their union. On one subject sure to be raisedagainst him by her parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: thebaroness. 

She asked to see a photograph of her. 

Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids inprofile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman. Theeyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's droopedtill they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism. 

'Think of her age, ' said Alvan, colouring. He named a grandmaternal datefor the year of the baroness's birth. 

Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchantinglineaments came to an abrupt finish. 

She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, stilleyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally. He couldnot contest the woeful verdict. 

'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing. The baroness was a womanfair to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might thinkit incredible: she really was once. 

Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed. Heshrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little. For the first timesince they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it waslikely 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 todefend 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, byLavater! You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivatingin her distress. Now she is old--and you are friends. '

'Friends, yes, ' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course shedeserved to be praised for her open mind. 

'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath. The titlethis girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, andhis burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examinethe mood of the giver. She had positively humbled him so far as with asingle word to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in herlook at the photograph. Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of theman's vanity, he did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of amisconception injurious in the slightest degree to the sentiments heentertained toward the older lady as well as the younger. 'Friends!you are right; good friends; only you should know that it is just alittle--a trifle different. The fact is, I cannot kill the past, and Iwould not. It would try me sharply to break the tie connecting us, wereit 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. Youraise your eyes, Clotilde! Well, when I was much younger I found thislady in desperate ill-fortune, and she honoured me with her confidence. Young man though I was, I defended her; I stopped at no measure todefend her: against a powerful husband, remember--the most unscrupulousof foes, who sought to rob her of every right she possessed. And whatI did then I again would do. I was vowed to her interests, to protect awoman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at trifles, as you know;you have read my speech in defence of myself before the court. By myinterpretation of the case, I was justified; but I estranged my familyand made the world my enemy. I gave my time and money, besides theforfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably there was anarrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her, so thatthe baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling herselfindebted. You will not think that out of the way: men of the world donot. As for matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart as thePoles. '

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 goldengreen in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robedfellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweepingbranches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black asits 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, andif 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. Enavant! contre les canons! A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in theafternoon. I shall see you in the evening. So our separation won't befor long this time. All the auspices are good. We shall not be rich--norpoor. '

Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to thestore by her. 

'We don't count it, ' said he. 'Not rich, certainly. And you will notexpect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writingfor money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judgesof the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt! Andjournalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable tothe 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 andin the direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'

'I would never ask you to sell yourself, ' said Clotilde. 'I would ratherbe in want of common comforts. '

He squeezed her wrist. They were again in front of the black-drapedblighted tree. It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurfbearing a semblance of livid metal. They looked at it as having seen itbefore, and passed on. 

'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' heresumed, 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 genialchuckle. 'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad. Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all. Look atme. ' He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening hiseagle eyes. He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element, expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity underthe glances of a girl. 'Do you take me for one who could be content withthe part of second? I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I willhave too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly. I was notfashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I. I carry toodecisive a weight in the balance to victory. I have a taste for fruits, my fairest! And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendidhonours. ' He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour ofhis 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 graceon his worm-eaten throne? I win that seat by service, by the dedicationof this brain to the people's interests. They have been ground to thedust, and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood. I amthe soldier of justice against the army of the unjust. But I claimmy reward. If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy. I will have mystation. I win it not only because I serve, but because also Ihave seen, have seen ahead, seen where all is dark, read theunwritten--because I am soldier and prophet. The brain of man is Jove'seagle 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 thatday comes, ' he continued after a while. 'The day is coming, but we mustwait for it, work on. I have the secret of how to head the people--toput a head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe itwill 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 ofscience in politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there isbut a step to the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in mytime, or acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the paththey should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooneror later: not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That isa middle-class invention to effect a compromise. With the people thematter rests with their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright andshines reflected. '

'I notice, ' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as asplendid lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you neverlook on the ground, but always either up or straight before you. '

'People have remarked it, ' said he, smiling. 'Here we are at thisfunereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conductus perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here. '

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branchesdecorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; thesmall 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!' saidAlvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree fora 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 theway, my fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind ofgarb for me, should I be ordered off the first to join the duskyarmy below. Women who put on their dead husbands in public are notwell-mannered women, though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he wasnot sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not moreimpressive in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his truelove's hair. The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunlesslizards: 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. Youunderstand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one youngand beautiful, with golden tresses; at first... ! But her heart isquite 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 bygratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost shewill demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for mein the fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half myheart; 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 underworld; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree haslooked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate andHermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands forDeath blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homelytree. Down there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the airexchanging between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it'son the border line. I just felt the creep. I think you did. The reasonis--there is always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit ofchill breeze took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imaginingat that very moment what of all possible causes might separate us, andI acknowledged that death could do the trick. But death, my love, is farfrom us two!'

'Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?' saidClotilde. 

'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed. The baroness was not so easilydefended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared. 'She is the bestof comrades, best of friends. She has her faults; may not relish thewrit announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and astrue as she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you. That I canpromise. My poor Lucie! She is winter, if you will. It is not the winterof the steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country; a finelandscape 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 menwho have the woman in them without being womanized; they are the pick ofmen. And the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of theirwomanliness for some amount of manlike strength. And she is one; man'sbrain, woman's heart. I thought her unique till I heard of you. And howdo I stand between you two? She has the only fault you can charge mewith; she is before me in time, as I am before you. Shall I spoil youas she spoilt me? No, no! Obedience to a boy is the recognition of theheir-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 notrule me, but you will invigorate, and if you are petted, you shall notbe spoilt. Do not expect me to show like that undertakerly tree till myyears are one hundred. Even then it will be dangerous to repose beneathmy branches in the belief that I am sapless because I have changedcolour. We Jews have a lusty blood. We are strong of the earth. Weserve you, but you must minister to us. Sensual? We have truly excellentappetites. And why not? Heroical too! Soldiers, poets, musicians; theGentile's masters in mental arithmetic--keenest of weapons: surpassinghim in common sense and capacity for brotherhood. Ay, and in charity; orwhat stores of vengeance should we not have nourished! Already we havethe money-bags. Soon we shall hold the chief offices. And when thepopular election is as unimpeded as the coursing of the blood ina healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and topmost, for he ispre-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 nochampion of a race. I am for the world, for man!'

Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and alarge following among the people. 

He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian. Yes, if I wereother than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off ablelieutenants. '

'Tell me of your interview with Ironsides, ' she said proudly and fondly. 

'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, puttinghis lips among the locks. 'Well, we met: he requested it. We agreed thatwe were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately haveto decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could compareour plans for governing. He showed me his hand. I showed him mine. Weplayed 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 withdiplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old Ironer! I lovehim for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean deceit. He willoutwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple evolution rapidlyperformed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies! Then he has them, bagsful of them! The world will see; and see giant meet giant, Isuspect. He and I proposed each of us in the mildest manner contraryschemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe! Enough that we partedwith mutual respect. He is a fine fellow: and so was my friendthe Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu. Napoleon was a fineengine:--there is a difference. Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow! but heand I may cross. His ideas are not many. The point to remember is thathe is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density ofthe globe. He has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that theenemy 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 hisviziercraft--and save him the labour of patiently attempting oratoryand persuasion, which accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not iniron. We think the more precious metal will beat him when the broaderconflict comes. But such an adversary is not to be underrated. I do notunderrate him: and certainly not he me. Had he been born with the giftsof patience and a fluent tongue, and not a petty noble, he might havebeen for the people, as knowing them the greater power. He sees thattheir knowledge of their power must eventually come to them. In themeantime his party is forcible enough to assure him he is not fightinga losing game at present: and he is, no doubt, by lineage and histraditions monarchical. He is curiously simple, not really cynical. Hisapparent cynicism is sheer irritability. His contemptuous phrases aredirected against obstacles: against things, persons, nations that opposehim or cannot serve his turn against his king, if his king is restive;but he respects his king: against your friends' country, because thereis no fixing it to a line of policy, and it seems to have collapsed; buthe likes that country the best in Europe after his own. He is nearest tocontempt in his treatment of his dupes and tools, who are dropped out ofhis mind when he has quite squeezed them for his occasion; to be takenup 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 himyou see the dam, in me the stream. Judge, then, which of them gainsthe future!--admitting that, in the present he may beat me. He is aPrussian, stoutly defined from a German, and yet again a German stoutlydefined from our borderers: and that completes him. He has as littlethe idea of humanity as the sword of our Hermann, the cannon-ball ofour Frederick. Observe him. What an eye he has! I watched it as we weretalking: and he has, I repeat, imagination; he can project his mind infront of him as far as his reasoning on the possible allows: and thateye of his flashes; and not only flashes, you see it hurling a bolt; itgives me the picture of a Balearic slinger about to whizz the stone forthat eye looks far, and is hard, and is dead certain of its mark-withinhis practical compass, as I have said. I see farther, and I fancy Iproved to him that I am not a dreamer. In my opinion, when we cross ourswords 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 ofus, we are now grave seniors, we have serious business: a party looks tohim, my party looks to me. Never need you fear that I shall be at swordor pistol with any one. I will challenge my man, whoever he as thatneeds a lesson, to touch buttons on a waistcoat with the button on thefoil, or drill fiver and eights in cards at twenty paces: but I will notfight him though he offend me, for I am stronger than my temper, and asI do not want to take his nip of life, and judge it to be of less valuethan 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 highgood sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astuteself-control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible. Itseemed to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she sawtheir triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she shouldinstantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his RepublicanPrincess. She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue ofher being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, andshe thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her onthat eminence. Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kingscan summon through the trumpet! She could surely pass through thetrial with her parents that she might step to the place beside him! Shepressed his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory. Was it love? Itwas as lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to. 

She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where herparents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name thehotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive. 'Am Inot precise as an office clerk?' she said, with a pleasant taste of thereality 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 oursuccess, my golden crest!'

'Have no misgivings, Sigismund. You have transformed me. A spark of youis in my blood. Come. I shall send word to your hotel when you are toappear. But you will come, you will be there, I know. I know you soentirely. '

'As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even whenthey have married him. At least you ought to know me. You know that ifI were to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called itforth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have togo through during our interlude with papa and mama. '

'I almost wish you would, ' said she. She looked half imploringly, bitingher lip to correct the peeping wish. 

Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave. Flight anddefiance are our last resource. Now that I see you resolved I shun thescandal, 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 intoyour 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, foran example, if we can. I take you from your father's house, from yourmother's arms, from the "God speed" of your friends. That is how Alvan'swife should be presented to the world. '

Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, anddespatched. To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it reallywas; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the naturalimpulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and thatlanguage is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation, while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formedexpression of the pretty impulse. But wiser is it always that the starin the ascendant should not address the one waning. Hardly can a wordbe uttered without grossly wounding. She would not do it to a youngerrival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age! She babbles of afriendship: she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuoushappiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges. Thedeclarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with adeeper, a longer-tried suffering. Actually the letter of the rising starassumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, andpersonal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contemptalso of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused. 

Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high. Hewas too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful heroregards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, ata peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down theother--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with theirsisters. His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as hehad not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion oftheir sex. The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything onhis making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, hesaid, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands, millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units. He would have staredlike any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to alikeness unto men in their fight with the world. Women for him wereobjects to be chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like thesportsman's business, with keen relish both for the pursuit and theprey, and a view of the termination of his pastime. Their feelings hecould appreciate during the time when they flew and fell, perhaps alittle longer; but the change in his own feelings withdrew him fromthe communion of sentiment. This is the state of men who frequentthe avenues of success. At present he was thinking of a wife, and heapproved the epistle to the baroness cordially. 

'I do think it a nice kind of letter, and quite humble enough, ' saidClotilde. 

He agreed, 'Yes, yes: she knows already that this is really serious withme. '

So much for the baroness. 

Now for their parting. A parting that is no worse than the turning of apage to a final meeting is made light of, but felt. Reason is all in ourfavour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slipbetween the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though itbe not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness. Clotilderequired reassuring and comforting: 'I am certain you will prevail;you must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact, ' shesighed in a languor: 'only, my people are hard to manage. I see moreclearly now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by asort 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 resistedyou?--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 fourthfeels itself a shivering morsel to face reality. No, I do not reallyfeel it, but press my hand, I shall be true--I am so utterly yours: andbecause I have such faith in you. You never, yet have failed. '

'Never: and it is impossible for me to conceive it, ' said Alvanthoughtfully. 

His last word to her on her departure was 'Courage!' Hers to him wasconveyed by the fondest of looks. She had previously said 'To-morrow!'to remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, andherself that she would not long stand alone. She did not doubt of hercourage while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strongmen of earth. She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from thewaving fingers. 

CHAPTER VIII

Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of histricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her. All the rest tocome was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for aplan 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 andthe parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see thesame elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife andrebel daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational. That is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark andinflamed to fly the barriers intercepting. He fancied he had achievedit. Alvan thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents. Theconsolatory sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, inthe contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be rousedby those people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win awife after the fashion of orderly citizens. It would be on their heads!But why vision mischance? An old half-jesting prophecy of his amonghis friends, that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon hisrecollection without casting a shadow. Lo, the reckless prophet about tomarry!

No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was she. Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomedfortieth year! Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: itwould be sunshine in the subterranean sphere. The very thinking ofher dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally invitingphosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come. '

To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were acelestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste ofmortal life in the highest. He wondered how it was that he could havewaited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, andhe just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of theminutes, much as she did, only more fierily. The ceaseless warfarecalled politics must have been the distraction: he forgot any other ofanother kind. He was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, apanorama of illimitable felicity. And there were certain things he mustovercome before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate loveof contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not muchliking it either. There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does notlike the battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the bigartillery. 

Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of thetrains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; helooked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swisslaw; considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was alawyer bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well aspleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought itwise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses, turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed atsuch a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wildman, cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enterthe ranks of the soberly blissful. These he could imagine that hecomplimented by the wish. Then why should he doubt of his fortune? Hedid not. 

The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey. Latein the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's. A letterwas handed to him. His eyes all over the page caught the note of it forher beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse. 'And nowmy turn!' said he, not overjoyously. The words Jew and demagogue andbaroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him. But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, andchampion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legaland natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they wereto know him and change their tone. 

As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened atthe answer to a tap. He started; his face was a shield's welcome to thebirdlike applicant for admission. Clotilde stood hesitating. 

He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, anddrew 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. Irepeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them. They hate--hateyou, hate me for thinking of you. I had no choice; I wrote at onceand followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want ofbreath, not want of courage. I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all Ican do. 

She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids. 

But he said nothing. She looked up at him. Her strained pale eyesprovoked a closer embrace. 

'This would be the home for you if we were flying, ' said he, glancinground at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, 'Tell me what thereis to be told. '

'Alvan, I have; that is all. They will not listen; they loathe Oh! whatpossesses 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 athirster for strife. 'They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is madeof!'

Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion. 'I foundthem celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the AustrianCount Walburg; I thought it favourable for us. I spoke of you to mymother. Oh, that scene! What she said I cannot recollect: it was ahiss. Then my father. Your name changed his features and his voice. Theytreated me as impure for mentioning it. You must have deadly enemies. I was unable to recognize either father or mother--they have becometransformed. But you see I am here. Courage! you said; and I determinedI would show it, and be worthy of you. But I am pursued, I am sure. Myfather 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 youcan trust, ' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind ofdrillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders. 'Yes, you have showncourage. 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. Youknow some such lady?'

Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest. She could have prophesiedcertain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was sosure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmostin casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be adrawing back. She could not get the word or even the look to encounterhis close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed wherethey were together alone. She could not refuse the protection he offeredin a person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of wherethey were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea ofentreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urgedto it. She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, aMadame Emerly, living near the hotel. Her heart sank like a stone. 'Itis for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his generosityin temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph. 'But my wifeshall not be snatched by a thief in the night. Are you not my wife--mygolden bride? And you may give me this pledge of it, as if the vows hadjust been uttered... And still I resign you till we speak the vows. Itshall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her glory, that sheran to her nuptials through rat-passages. '

His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her. She was cooled by herdespondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay, but that centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of herenthusiasm, thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case theywere united, her step was irrevocable. Her having entered the hotel, herbeing in this room, certified to that. It seemed to her while she waswaiting for the carriage he had ordered that she was already half awife. She was not conscious of a blush. The sprite in the young woman'smind whispered of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it. Andundoubtedly, contemplated from the outside, this room was the heartof fire. An impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for hischivalrousness had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing shepraised. Otherwise she was not ill at ease. Alvan summoned his gaiety, all his homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quittingthe room she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomyforeboding. A maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling ofdevotion to her, ran up the steps of the hotel. Her tale was, that theGeneral had roused the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heardwhither Clotilde was going. 

Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly's drawing-roomrelating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, assistedby the lover whom she had introduced. Her hostess promised shelter andexhibited sympathy. The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knewAlvan by reputation. He was insurrectionally notorious in morals andmenacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowingtongue, and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love anddeference toward her family, won her personally. She promised the besthelp 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 hadpassed. 

Chancing to look out into the street, she saw Clotilde's mother and herbetrothed sister stepping up to the house. What was to be done? Andwas the visit accidental? She announced it, and Clotilde cried out, butAlvan cried louder: 'Heaven-directed! and so, let me see her and speakto her--nothing could be better. '

Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own headpremonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer, if Iam 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 comingvoice. 

'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity. 'Plain-dealing;no subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have youburdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on ouraccount. 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 sheshall make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter's hand. '

Clotilde rocked in an agony. Her friend was troubled. Both ladies knewwhat there would be to encounter better than he. But the man, strong inhis belief in himself, imposed his will on them. 

Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to MadameEmerly's reception room. She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me. '

'Is this forsaking?' He could ask it in the deeply questioning tonewhich 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 utterleaning on him. 

She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere asher passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for awarning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turninginto that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidlydegenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her beinga part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man. 

Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certaintendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares thespirit to be a melting prize of the winner. 

Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by coweringthus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuringtheir idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the geniusof Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, inwhatsoever person. We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to beprey, we lose the soul of election. 

Mark her as she proceeds. For should her hero fail, and she be sufferingthrough his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it willseem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorableweakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength. And it willseem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her justexpectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for itwas only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought ofespousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoledwhen they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner ofputting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him, because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success shewas ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without somereason (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 theconflict, insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked. He rousedthe 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 oftrial, whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by theswollen conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize. That frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions. It spies thespot 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 transformourselves into cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and toppleover the Sphinx of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysteriouscreature in an epigram. But there was as much more in Alvan than anyfaint-hearted thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is morein the world than the epigrams aimed at it contain. 

'Courage!' said he: and she tremblingly: 'Be careful!' And then theywere in the presence of her mother and sister. 

Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure. Hermother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with awoman'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 haveagainst me. '

She swung her back on him. 'Go, sir! my husband will know how to dealwith one like you. Out of my sight, I say!'

The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde. She went up tohim, 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 oneshall treat you like that when I am near. '

She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experienceof the commencement. He did but clasp her hand, assuring the Frau vonRudiger that no word of hers could irritate him. 'Nothing can make meforget that you are Clotilde's mother. You are the mother of the lady Ilove, 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 seehim holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable! And becausethere is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talkof his foul passion for my daughter. I repeat: that which you have todo is to go. My ears are shut. You can annoy, you can insult, you cannotmove me. Go. ' She stamped: her aspect spat. 

Alvan bowed. Under perfect self-command, he said: 'I will go at onceto Clotilde's father. I may hope, that with a reasonable man I shallspeedily come to an understanding. '

She retorted: 'Enter his house, and he will have you driven out by hislacqueys. '

'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 dealswith. 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 havealready destroyed my daughter's reputation by inducing her to leave herfather's house and hesitate to return. Oh! you are known. You are knownfor your dealings with women as well as men. We know you. We have, wepray to God, little more to learn of you. You! ah--thief!'

'Thief!' Alvan's voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it. Shehad up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern thatshe 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 didnot. 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 cursesand threats. Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to himthan to you. And never will I return to you. You have killed my love; Iam this man's own because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, ashis 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 amhis. I glory in him. '

Her gaze on Alvan said: 'Now!' Was she not worthy of him now? And wouldthey 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 areflection in dull metal. He smiled calmly from her to her mother. Hesaid:

'You accuse me of stealing your child, madame. You shall acknowledgethat you have wronged me. Clotilde, my Clotilde! may I count on you todo all and everything for me? Is there any sacrifice I could ask thatwould be too hard for you? Will you at one sign from me go or do as Irequest you?'

She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: 'Iwill, ' but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-actingher part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension ofthe 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 whateveryou can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I havehitherto called mine:--not that!'

'And that is what I have to request of you, ' said he, with his calmsmile brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable toher. 'And this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are youprepared to do it? Will you?'

She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against herimploring 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, anunimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of theworld's polished silver vessels. 

'Think that you are doing this for me!' said he. 'It is for my sake. Andnow, 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 herback to you. She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do notforget that. And so, madame, I have the honour, ' he bowed profoundly. 

He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm. 'What you have donein obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten. Never canI sufficiently thank you. I know how much it has cost you. But here isthe end of your trials. All the rest is now my task. Rely on me withyour 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 ofinjustice 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. Submita short while to the will of your parents: mine you will find thestronger. Resolve it in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, forit is impossible to me to waver. Consider me as the one fixed light inyour world, and look to me. Soon, then! Have patience, be true, and weare one!'

He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand. The horribly emptysublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuousface. 

His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone. She seemeda dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in masteringhimself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that hecould within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled thebrief vision of her unfitness to be left. The compressed energy ofthe man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to theclaims of family ties and duties, intoxicated him. He thought but ofthe present achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a badreputation among these people, from whom he was about to lead fortha daughter for Alvan's wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of hisexhibition of generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when hedelivered his retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--thatthe worst was over; he had to deal no more with silly women: now forClotilde's father! Women were privileged to oppose their senselessnessto the divine fire: men could not retreat behind such defences; theymust meet him on the common ground of men, where this constant battlerhad never yet encountered a reverse. 

Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than toreflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in thediverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;and the lady of the house. He was going--he could actually go and leaveher! She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that shedid so as much as she had force to make it visible. She saw him smilingincomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy. She could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and shetook the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff. 

'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he hadthe choice of you and he abjured you. He has cast you off!'

She phrased it in speech to herself. It was incredible, but it wasclear: 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 readilyto renounce you. '

She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her motherheaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing atthe window. 

The craven's first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx forlight, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered ofquietness if she submitted. 

And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have beenguilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running tohim, the which may be love's glory when marriage crowns it. By hisrejecting her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, buta castaway. It was not natural that he should leave her; 'not natural inhim to act his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was atthe mercy of those who might pick her up. She was, in her humiliationand dread, all of the moment, she could see to no distance; andjudging of him, feeling for herself, within that contracted circle ofsensation--sure, from her knowledge of her cowardice, that he had doneunwisely--she became swayed about like a castaway in soul, until herdistinguishing of his mad recklessness in the challenge of a powergreater than his own grew present with her as his personal cruelty tothe woman who had flung off everything, flung herself on the tempestuousdeeps, on his behalf. And here she was, left to float or founder! Alvanhad 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 thebrighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, thecreature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel, she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted. Hercry to him: 'If you had been wiser, this would not have been!' will sinkto the inward meditation: 'If he had been truer!'--and though she doesnot necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there isalready a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun. Theyare not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of themmakes 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 frailsmall boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furiousoutbreak she was exposed to. She might so far have exonerated him hadshe been able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on himin blind reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercisingmaterial rigours. After having enjoyed extraordinary independence fora young woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marchedthrough the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her bythe hair-Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of ahuge forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of hisdaughter's flight to the Jew. He seemed to have a grim indifference toexposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was asatisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two orthree maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightlymanaging them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merelycracking a whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting timeby hunting her as she likes to run. Police were round his house. TheGeneral chattered and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larceniesof that Jew--the things that Jew would attempt. He dragged herindoors, muttering of his policy in treating her at last to a wholesomedespotism. 

This was the medicine for her--he knew her! Whether he did or not, heknew the potency of his physic. He knew that osiers can be made tobend. With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up thewindow-shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and heleft her there and roared across the household that any one holdingcommunication with the prisoner should be shot like a dog. This was amanifestation 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, conceivingwith much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes ofmisfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She wasisolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our naturalobstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her tocling to the semblance of it only. 'I marry Alvan!' was her iteratedanswer to her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet brokenher; and she spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures thatstrive to nail themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named histime for returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued forabout forty hours. She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange thatmy father should be so fiercely excited against this man! Can he havereasons I have not heard of?' Her father's unwonted harshness suggestedthe question in her quailing nature, which was beginning to have amovement to kiss the whip. The question set her thinking of the reasonsshe knew. She saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and theywore a sinister appearance; in reality her present scourging was due tothem as well as to Alvan's fatal decision. Her misery was traceable tohis conduct and his judgement--both bad. And yet all this while he mightbe working to release her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to theside of her lover against these executioner parents, and scribbled tohim as well as she could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urginghim to appear. She spent her heart on it. A note to her friend, theEnglish lady, protested her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a frozen resignation to the loss of him--all around her was sodark! By-and-by there was a scratching at her door. The maid whom shetrusted brought her news of Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid andmistress knelt. Hope flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whisperswere 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 onefor Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinkingpractically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without anaddress. She did not ask herself whether the maid's information washonest, 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 torrentsof tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there beought of that besides the breathing structure. The reason why she weptwith so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessityfor draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished thelove whereby she was tormented. They do not weep thus who have a heartfor the struggle. In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in otherwords, unable any further to contend. 

Reality was too strong! This morning her sisters came to her roomimploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be theirprospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sisterLotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan's name was infamousin society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemnedto seclusion. A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set hertears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could hehold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jewdemocrat? He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with hisbrother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wronglyAlvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all, perhaps to her father's military and diplomatic career principally: thehead of their house would be ruined. She was compelled to weep again byhaving no other reply. The tears were now mixed drops of pity for herabsent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when sheshed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as manybosoms drained of self-pity will become. 

Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction andhad a languid willingness to gain outward comfort. To be caressed alittle by her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable afterher heavy scourging. She wished for the touches of affection, knowingthem to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its realitymade them seem a soft reminder of what life had been. Alvan had gone. Her natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entirerelinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber. He had gone; he hadcommitted an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his ownvain provoking, that was too severe for him: he was not the loverhe fancied himself, or not the lord of men she had fancied him. Herexcessive misery would not suffer a picture of him, not one clearrecollection of him, to stand before her. He who should have been athand, had gone, and she was fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and beingabandoned, her blank night of imagination felt that there was nothingleft for her save to fall upon those nearest. 

She gave her submission to her mother. In her mind, during the lastwrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and hercowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: 'He may come, and I am hisif he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people. ' He had taught herto rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cuttingherself loose from him. In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows tobelieve if the saint will appear. However, she submitted. Then there wasjoy in the family, and she tasted their caresses. 

CHAPTER IX

After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sightof the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath. Heproceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressinghis 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 wasleonine enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever thepath: yet did that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him withsearching eyes. They set him spying over himself at an actor who had notneeded to be acting his part, brilliant though it was. He crammed hisenergy into his idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously. Before the world, it would without question redound to his credit, andhe heard the world acclaiming him:

'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor ofLaw, from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in theold lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman! Alvan, the republican, is eminently a citizen. Consider his past life by that test of hischaracter. '

He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become, through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactlyslavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happyto be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower. Lower, of course, the multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nodthey have in exchange for it is not an independent one. Ceasing to bea social rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and hepassed under the bondage of that position. 

Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she couldbe trusted now. She had committed herself, perished as a maiden ofsociety, and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it anddecide by it. The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudigerwas a man of the world. An honourable son-in-law could not but beacceptable to him--now, at least. And such a son-in-law would ultimatelybe the pride of his house. 'A flower from thy garden, friend, and mywearing it shall in good time be cause for some parental gratification. '

The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost ofClotilde. He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and anotherintimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs. These gentlemen broughtno message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed toextract a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of course he refused; they hinted that the General might haveofficial influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred themto the proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something ofextraordinary and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner oftreating his pretensions to the hand of the lady. 

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, becauseof his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect onit yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blowstartling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictlypolite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respectbetween man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, whichindicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with onesuch as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He couldnot raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to theimplied contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he wasobliged to swallow both the history and the insult, returning them theequivalent of their courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunderheavily. 

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain himadmission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. Thebearer of it was dismissed without an answer. 

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoeseconspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat toboat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of theripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkledto lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy'sreadings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as hewas by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight ofthe powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on hiscareer by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! Whatwas this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no soonerasked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminatedthe room, telling him she might have been his own this instant, confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her. Whyhad he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinelyinspired. She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury, went his way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoesegoing under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute inthe gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of thenight. 

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for theself-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of hiserror, it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; andupon that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the forceopposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it waspetty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness ofthe position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would haverevived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was astolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he hadchosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. Byshutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thingreduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him;his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the solequality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath ofone for a mark. 

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by thefever he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises isnot so uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed. Frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conductingourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerveswill change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colourpresenting them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravaganceupon perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He mustwin her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! Shewas his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--shewould cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in hisframe, bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swamto his arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose thefault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignlybeholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemiescould not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, theysignified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures asshatters 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 onelike him, became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass!tottering idiot! drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performingsuicide with that blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde!Clotilde! Where has one read the story of a man who had the jewel ofjewels in his hand, and flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flunga pebble? Fish, fool, fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing butyour 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'shead! What impious villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that hemight have it bestowed on him according to his own prescription of theceremonies! They laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of thegods is the lightning of death's irony over mortals. Can they have afiner subject than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O foryesterday! 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 handwhile smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep hisprivate dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclopshurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off;he came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to thefriend nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with allthe truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss ofthe woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his careerhad been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but afragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would behimself once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to fulltide and she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, shebecame a melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears. 

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giantin him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of herlips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tendereyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varyingshades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lightedwater, swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengersdistinctly beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more ofspirit in his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through agiant'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 andlay down life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passionwas 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. Hewas true man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his hugepersonality to pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being asoul wedged in the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and givingmighty sound of timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, hesuffered, 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 thehungry instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them isindistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain heraldharmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time andspace, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurancethat the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is notmelodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is notdone by miracle. 

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiantindistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shiverystedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderfulnor indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; thehandsome boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was herslave, and she required for her mate a master: she felt it and shesided to him quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of theacknowledgement of a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsedon the occasions of his absence, and owning his power over her when theywere together again, she sowed the fatal conviction that he held herat present, and that she was a woman only to be held at present, by thepalpable grasp of his physical influence. Partly it was correct, notentirely, seeing that she kept the impression of a belief in him evenwhen she drifted away through sheer weakness, but it was the singlepositive view he had of her, and it was fatal, for it begat a devil ofimpatience. 

'They are undermining her now--now--now!'

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, alreadyindifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed onhis agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, wouldhave arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough tonurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart'sfaintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of hismastery, 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. Buthow had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, withoutanswering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work tocomplete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of GiantDuplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in theirfavour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilleda legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get theletter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them. 

CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received theenemy's counter-stroke. Count Walburg and his companion brought a letterfrom Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him. 

Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past mustbe dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; shehad 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; hesmote a forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand. That was the dumboration of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to thestate of brute. His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shookthe reptile letter under a terrible frown. 

Tresten saw that he supposed himself to be perfectly master of his actsbecause he had not spoken, and had managed to preserve the ordinarycourtesies. 

'You have done your commission, ' the colonel said to Count Walburg, whose companion was not disposed to go without obtaining satisfactoryassurances, and pressed for them. 

Alvan fastened on him. 'You adopt the responsibility of this?' Hedisplayed 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. Hisfriend was not a man of the sword, and was not under the obligation toaccept an insult. They left the letter to do its work. 

Big natures in their fits of explosiveness must be taken by flyingshots, 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 ofcomfortable little ones would doubt the unselfishness of his love ofDejaneira. Yes, really; they would think it was not a chivalrous love:they would consider that he thought of himself too much. They woulddoubt, too, of his being a gentleman! Partial glimpses of him, one mayfear, will be discomposing to simple natures. There was a short blackeruption. Alvan controlled it, to ask hastily what the baroness thoughtand what she had heard of Clotilde. Tresten made sign that it wasnothing of the best. 

'See! my girl has hundreds of enemies, and I, only I, know her and candefend her--weak, base shallow trickster, traitress that she is!' criedAlvan, and came down in a thundershower upon her: 'Yesterday--the daybefore--when? just now, here, in this room; gave herself--and now!'He bent, and immediately straightening his back, addressed Colonel vonTresten as her calumniator, 'Say your worst of her, and I say I willmake of that girl the peerless woman of earth! I! in earnest! it's nodream. She can be made.... O God! the beast has turned tail! I knew shecould. There 's three of beast to one of goddess in her, and sether 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 hateher. 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 thatvilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thunderedher signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of herputting her name to the letter. She had done that, written her name tothe renunciation of him! No individual could bear the sight of sucha crime, and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim toatone for it. Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman;she became that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would notdistinguish her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it washis knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on thesex. He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her lettersticking in his ribs. The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumpedit, 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 mansnapped in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of herfragmentarily. It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, andsceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke theshaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, andthough tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed herhand over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like thedeadly-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 completelyout. She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon. He lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex witha cowl of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the oneand all alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs on us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinnerpeeped out on him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of hisgreat-heartedness. 'For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I wouldhave sacrificed for that woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my immortality. She knew it, and she--look!' he unwrinkled the lettercarefully for it to be legible, and clenched it in a ball. ' Signs hername, signs her name, her name!--God of heaven! it would be incrediblein 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!' thecolonel's eyelids were blinking, and Alvan dinted his finger-nail underher name: 'there it is: Clotilde: signed shamelessly. Just as she mighthave 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 ayell beneath a cathedral dome. 'Why, the woman has been in my hands--Ireleased her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all thecode, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we twostrangers! Do you hear that, Tresten? Why, if you had seen her!--shewas lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down underbolt and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman's heart! that never abreath should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, orby accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth. "I think it best for usboth. " So she thinks for me! She not only decides, she thinks; she isthe active principle; 'tis mine to submit. --A certain presumption was inthat girl always. Ha! do you hear me? Her letter may sting, it shall notdupe. Strangers? Poor fool! You see plainly she was nailed down to writethe 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 leftthe city. Now to find her!'

He began marching about the room with great strides. 'I 'll have thewhole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I 'll have them bythe 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 thanany man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it's war. Ideclare war on them. They will have it! I mean to take that girl fromthem--snatch or catch! The girl is my girl, and if there are lawsagainst my having my own, to powder with the laws! Well, and do yousuppose me likely to be beaten? Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesara people's legend. Not if they are history, and eloquence andcommandership have power over the blood and souls of men. First, I writeto her!'

His friend suggested that he knew not where she was. But already the penwas at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher. 

Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him ofhis fever. As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, morefiercely desired. The concentration of his active mind directed hiswhole being on the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human. Thatlast day when he had seen her appeared to him as the day of days. Thatday was Clotilde herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman, andsaw himself translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all wasdark, as in front. That one day was the sun of his life. It had been aday of rain, and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with thedark threaded air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past alldaily radiance. His letter was a burning hymn to the day. His moralgrandeur on the day made him live as part of the splendour. Was itpossible for the woman who had seen him then to be faithless to him? Theswift deduction from his own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion tothe contrary, and he became lighthearted. He hummed an air when he hadfinished his letter to her. 

Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some weredespatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; otherswere told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde. Hisgold rained into their hands with the directions. 

Colonel von Tresten was the friend of his attachment to the baroness; afriend of both, and a warm one. Men coming into contact with Alvan tooktheir shape of friend or enemy sharply, for he was friend or enemy ofno dubious feature, devoted to them he loved, and a battery on them heopposed. The colonel had been the confidant of the baroness's grief overthis love-passion of Alvan's, and her resignation. He shared her doubtsof Clotilde's nobility of character: the reports were not favourable tothe young lady. But the baroness and he were of one opinion, that Alvanin love was not likely to be governable by prudent counsel. He dropped aword 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 heras you please. ' Adopting the tone of argument, he said: 'She writesthat letter. Well? It is her writing, and the moment, I am sure of it ashers, I would not have it unwritten. I love it!' He looked maddish withhis love of the horrible thing, and resumed soberly: 'The point is, thatshe has the charm for me. She is plastic in my hands. Other men wouldwaste the treasure. I make of her what I will, and she knows it, andknows that she hangs on me to flourish worthily. I breathe the very soulof the woman into her. As for that letter of hers--' it burnt him thistime 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 isabsent from Alvan! I can forgive. The letter's nothing; it meansnothing--except "Thou fool, Alvan, to let me go. " Yes, that! Her peopleare acting tyrant with her--as legally they have no right to do in thiscountry, and I shall prove it to them. When I have gained admission toher--and I soon shall: it can't be refused: I am off to the head of herfather's office to-morrow, and I have only to represent the state ofaffairs to the Minister in my language to obtain his authority to demandadmission to her:--then, friend, you will see! I lift my finger, andyou will see! At my request she went back to her mother. I have but tobeckon. '

He had cooled to the happy assurance of his authority over her, all thegiants of his system being well in action, and when that is the casewith a big nature it is at rest, or such is the condition of reposegranted it in life. 

On the morrow he was off to batter at doors which would have expectedrather the summons of an armed mob at his heels than the strange cry ofthe 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 andsecret letter-bearers were attaining a position of dignity through therumour of legal gentlemen about to direct the movements of the besiegingarmy. 

A stir seemed to her to prognosticate a rescue and she went notunwillingly. To be in motion, to see roadside faces, pricked her senseswith some hope. She had gained the peace she needed, and in that stateher heart began to be agitated by a fresh awakening, luxurious at firstrather than troublesome. She had sunk so low that the light of Alvanseemed too distant for a positive expectation of him; but few approachedher whom she did not fancy under strange disguises: the gentlemen wereservants, the blouses were gentlemen; she looked wistfully at old womenbearing baskets, for the forbidden fruit to peep out in the form of anenvelope. All passed her blankly, noticing her eyes. 

The journey was short; she was taken to a place a little beyond the headof the lake, and there, though she had liberty to breathe the air, fastfixed within the walls of a daily sameness that became gradually the humof voices accusing Alvan of one in excess of the many sins laid againsthim by his enemies. Was he not possibly an empty pretender to power--amere great talker?

Her bit of liberty increased her chafing at the deadly monotony of thisexistence, and envenomed the accusation by seeming to push her forthquite half way to meet him, if he would but come or show sign! Sheimpetuously vindicated him from the charge of crediting the sincerity ofany words she might have committed to paper at the despotic dictation ofher father. Oh, no; Alvan could not be guilty of such folly as that; hecould not; it would be to suppose him unacquainted with her, ignorantof the nature of women. He would know that she wrote the words--why? Shecould not perfectly recollect how she had come to write them, and foundit easier to extinguish the act of having written them at all, which wasdone by the angry recurrence to his failure to intervene now whenthe drama cried for his godlike appearance. Perhaps he was reallyunacquainted with her thought her stronger than she was! The ideareflected a shadow on his intelligence. She was not in a situation thatcould 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 timeto 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 letterswere unimportant she wrote flowingly, happy to be praised. They wereoccasionally addressed to friends; she discovered herself writing oneto the professor, in which he was about to be informed that she hadresolved to banish Alvan from her mind for ever. She stopped; her heartstopped; the pen fell from her hand, in loathing. Her father warily badeher proceed. She could not; she signified it choking. Only a few daysbefore she had written to the professor exultingly of her engagement. She refused to belie herself in such a manner; retrospectively her rapidcontradictions appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human, and she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat theGeneral was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergoneby a sudden burst of his wrath. He knew the proper physic. 'You girlswant 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 youhesitate! Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you havetold him you have given him up, and what objection can you have totelling others now you have done it?'

'I was forced to it, body and soul!' cried Clotilde, sobbing andbursting into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she hadput 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, allthe world may see. I would rather write that I hate him. '

'You write, the man is now as nothing to me!' said her father, dashinghis finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow. 'Orelse, my girl, you've been playing us a pretty farce!' He strung himselffor 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 itwritten-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 lookedsuch sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling surethey would be discerned as the work of compulsion. So she wrote onmechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of futurerevolt. Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; andshe remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage byscattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that wesink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantlyin the morning. She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death wouldbe welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promiseof courage. She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she whodid not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent ofher lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him. With theseideas in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple oflines to Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten andprostrate--she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and wasaware of a flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his beingdeceived by it; it was an insult to his understanding. Full surely theprofessor would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach toher and read her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a pieceof slavishness. She was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated theconfession. But that promise of courage, coming of her ownership ofsense, vindicated her prospectively; she had so little of it that sheembraced it as a present possession, and she made it Alvan's task toput it to the trial. Hence it became Alvan's offence if, owing tohis absence, she could be charged with behaving badly. Her generositypardoned him his inexplicable delay to appear in his might: 'But seewhat your continued delay causes!' she said, and her tone was merelysorrowful. 

She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor whenhis answer arrived. The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover'sfaithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore theletter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language, taking the frosty sentences piecemeal. He begged her to be firm inher resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents! This man of highintelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistressmoralizing. Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, andhad within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, thisman--if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour todeserve the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan's ageand her better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes ofher family, and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as anychronicled. 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 strongarm save the baroness. The professor's emphasized approval of herresolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to thebaroness. The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone ofgosling innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumphof candour. She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuringherself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have movedher, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: ithad been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman. The old womanwas 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 ofrobbing. She could not have had the idea, else how could she have madethe petition? And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her purefriendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea. Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civilityinsisted on the purity of her friendship. Nay, in mercy to the poorgentleman, friendship it must be. 

A letter of reply from that noble lady was due. Possibly she haddetermined 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 asocial and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motionnow behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair. 'Youhave been a little weak, ' the phantom said to her, and she acquiescedwith a soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are awoman, and know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O thatI had your beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I couldimitate. ' She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still bysaying: 'I have seen your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, themuch coveted air of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of herfeatures. 'For I can't call you good looking, ' she said within herself, for the satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrastas well. And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent aharsh-faced woman in confession must be:

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a manwith his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance todash his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank insoul to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'Butput this on the white page, ' says she to the surging father inside hisbox--'I loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic manjumping out of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that shehas to hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shalltell him she guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could youexpect 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 whilegazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley, where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidalriver. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyesand the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she satand waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel!who proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan'sbeloved, because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a wayof proving goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so. 

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them dayafter day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed tosultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under beeand butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father onthe glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush hercheek or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: hewas useless to her, utterly. 

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at herfeet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were likehope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, heseemed 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 hadbeen expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain andvalley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance. 

But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and hispassionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up thetiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on herparents:

'Will I have you? I? You ask me what is my will? It sounds oddly fromyou, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, andnothing has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him isunaltered, and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me bymy 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 mysoul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even myparents--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 aheart that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you. Iknow you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let mecherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and shouldit be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you tohim, and then you may choose between us. '

The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young womanrealizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion ofa slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, andthis she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining onher, and melting her to him. 

She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flewat the throat of Marko's, eager to satiate its vengeance for these longdelays 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 asmuch of me as is there. My life is gone. You or another! But takethis warning and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I seeSigismund Alvan I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all ofyou, lying dead beneath me. '

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited herto a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, allof you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to getto him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the livesof any dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. Iam true to him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take thismiserable body, but my soul is free to love him and to go to him whenGod gives me sight of him. I am Alvan's eternally. All your laws aremockeries. 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 wantrepose; 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 morevenomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself madeit be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote. In himthere was love for two. 

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she wasunconscious he did so. He brought her peace, he brought her old throningself back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at herfeet. 

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warnedhim. The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wanbeam on her guilty destiny. 

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders onthe breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was lockedand shuttered. 

He went. He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitelybred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned. It is difficult inaffliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owea duty. The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in hiscandour a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for hisgoodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal toevery trial. Perhaps, for the sake of peace... After warning him... Hermeditations tottered in dots. 

But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinkingwithout language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come adash usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other thanthe dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as theadventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of twopaces to mother's lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, itwould appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greetedif it stood out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting ouranimal do our thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeablyso long as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even thoughwe have clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficientlywell understand the whither of our destination under his guidance. Nocounsel can be saner than that the heart should be bidden to speakout in plain verbal speech within us. For want of it, Clotilde's shortexplorations in Dot-and-Dash land were of a kind to terrify her, and yetthey seemed not only unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidableto come. Or possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep hisword, and save her from worse by stepping to the altar between herand Marko, there calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and hispresence would breathe courage into her to go to him. It set her lookingto the altar as a prospect of deliverance. 

Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clotilde's wintry facenow that Marko was among them; her inference tallied with his report oftheir interview, so she supposed the girl to have accepted more or lessheartily Marko's forgiveness. For him the girl's eyes were soft andkind; her gaze was through the eyelashes, as one seeing a dream on a farhorizon. Marko spoke of her cheerfully, and was happy to call her hisown, but would not have her troubled by any ceremonial talk of theirengagement, so she had much to thank him for, and her consciousness ofthe signal instance of ingratitude lying ahead in the darkness, like ahouse mined beneath the smiling slumberer, made her eager to showthe real gratefulness and tenderness of her feelings. This had theappearance of renewed affection; consequently her parents lost much oftheir fear of the besieger outside, and she was removed to the city. Two parties were in the city, one favouring Alvan, and one abhorring theaudacious Jew. Together they managed to spread incredible reports of hisdoings, which required little exaggeration to convince an enemy that hewas a man with whom hostility could not be left to sleep. The Generalheard of the man's pleading his cause in all directions to get pressureput upon him, showing something like a devilish persuasiveness, Jew anddemagogue though he was; for there seemed to be a feeling abroad thatthe interview this howling lover claimed with Clotilde ought to begranted. The latest report spoke of him as off to the General's Courtfor an audience of his official chief. General von Rudiger looked tohis defences, and he had sufficient penetration to see that the weakestpoint of them might be a submissive daughter. 

A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by amessenger. The General thought over it. The letter was by no means aseductive letter for a young lady to receive from such a person, yet hedid not anticipate the whole effect it would produce when ultimately hedecided to give it to her, being of course unaware of the noble style ofClotilde's address to the baroness. He stipulated that there must be noreply to it except through him, and Clotilde had the coveted letter inher hands at last. Here was the mediatrix--the veritable goddess withthe sword to cut the knot! Here was the manifestation of Alvan!

BOOK 3. 

CHAPTER XII

She ran out to the shade of the garden walls to be by herself and in theair, and she read; and instantly her own letter to the baroness crashedsentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combativeinstinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and derideit. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment;then they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill asa glacier cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervidrespectfulness, of innocent supplication for maternal affection, forsome degree of benignant friendship!

The baroness coldly stated, that she had arrived in the city to doher best in assisting to arrange matters which had come to a mostunfortunate and impracticable pass. She alluded to her establishedfriendship for Alvan, but it was chiefly in the interests of Clotildethat the latter was requested to perceive the necessity for bringingher relations with Dr. Alvan to an end in the discreetest manner nowpossible to the circumstances. This, the baroness pursued, could onlybe done by her intervention, and her friendship for Dr. Alvan hadcaused her to undertake the little agreeable office. For which purpose, promising her an exemption from anything in the nature of tragedyscenes, the baroness desired Clotilde to call on her the following daybetween 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 ofpersonal disinterestedness appeared to her both an abominable pieceof cynicism on the part of a scandalous old woman, and an insultingrejection of the cover of decency proposed to the creature by adaisy-minded maiden. 

She scribbled a single line in receipt of the letter and signed herinitials. 

'The woman is hateful!' she said to her father; she was ready to agreewith him about the woman and Alvan. She was ashamed to have hopedanything of the woman, and stamped down her disappointment under avehement indignation, that disfigured the man as well. He had put thematter into the hands of this most detestable of women, to settle itas she might think best! He and she!--the miserable old thing with herancient 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; itwas notorious, Clotilde had not to learn it from her father; but nowshe saw the filthy rag that standard of female independence was--thatpetticoated Unfeminine, fouler than masculine! Alvan preferred thelichen-draped tree to the sunny flower, it was evident, for never aletter from Alvan had come to her. She thought in wrath, nothing but thethoughts of wrath, and ran her wits through every reasonable reflectionlike a lighted brand that flings its colour, if not fire, uponsurrounding images. Contempt of the square-jawed withered woman was toogreat for Clotilde to have a sensation of her driving jealousy untilpainful glimpses of the man made jealousy so sharp that she flew forrefuge to contempt of the pair. That beldam had him back: she had himfast. Oh! let her keep him! Was he to be regretted who could make thatchoice?

Her father did not let the occasion slip to speak insistingly as theworld opined of Alvan and his baroness. He forced her to swallow thecalumny, and draw away with her family against herself through strongdisgust. 

Out of a state of fire Clotilde passed into solid frigidity. She hadneither a throb nor a passion. Wishing seemed to her senseless as lifewas. She could hear without a thrill of her frame that Alvan was in thecity, without a question whether it was true. He had not written, and hehad handed her over to the baroness! She did not ask herself how itwas 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 ofher whipping; if none had been written, there was nothing to hope for. Her recent humiliation condemned him by the voice of her sufferings forhis failure to be giant, eagle, angel, or any of the prodigious thingshe had taught her to expect; and as he had thus deceived her, theglorious lover she had imaged in her mind was put aside with some of theangry disdain she bestowed upon the woman by whom she had been wounded. He ceased to be a visioned Alvan, and became an obscurity; her principalsentiment in relation to him was, that he threatened her peace. But forhim she would never have been taught to hate her parents; she would haveenjoyed the quiet domestic evenings with her people, when Marko sang, and her sisters knitted, and the betrothed sister wore a look veryenviable in the abstract; she would be seeing a future instead of ablack iron gate! But for him she certainly would never have had, thatletter from the baroness!

On the morning after the information of Alvan's return, her father, whodeserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sentto demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what herstunned heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness wasbehind it, and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her withanother piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters, arranged the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amuletcoins, lock of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in hishand to Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half withthe forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--orof one of them--she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde, ' but thegentlest title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of theword 'child' to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if heshould be interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by havingthe pathos on their side. They are consoled too. 

Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! Ithad been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when hehad not been feeling at all: and this marks a division. 

She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying hisrelease by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She waspersonally to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party, and who would give her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, whileassuring the gentleman she was acting with perfect freedom, she wasto be under her oath not to read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, herbetrothed. Her father assumed the fact of her renewed engagement to theprince, as her whole family did; strangely, she thought: it struck heras a fatality. He said that Alvan was working him great mischief, doinghim deadly injury in his position, and for no just reason, inasmuch ashe--a bold, bad man striving to ruin the family on a point of pride--haddeclared that he simply considered himself bound in honour to her, onlya little doubtful of her independent action at present; and a releaseof him, accompanied by her plain statement of her being under nocompulsion, voluntarily the betrothed of another, would solve thedifficulty. A certain old woman, it seemed, was anxious to have himformally released. 

With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, theGeneral begged her to comply, pulling the hands he squeezed in a way tostrongly emphasize his affectionate entreaty. 

She went straight to Marko, consenting that he should have Alvan'sletter unopened (she cared not to read it, she said), on his promise togive it up to her within a stated period. There was a kind of prohibitedpleasure, sweet acid, catching discord, in the idea of this lover'skeeping the forbidden thing she could ask for when she was curious aboutthe other, which at present she was not; dead rather; anxious to pleaseher parents, and determined to be no rival of the baroness. Markopromised it readily, adding: 'Only let the storm roll over, that we mayhave more liberty, and I myself, when we two are free, will lead youto 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 thatshe could love him; untroubled by another, she could love and be true tohim: her maternal inner nature yearned to the frailbodied youth. 

She made a comparison in her mind of Alvan's love and Marko's, and ofthe lives of the two men. There was no grisly baroness attached to theprince's life. 

She wrote the letter to Alvan, feeling in the words that said she wasplighted to Prince Marko, that she said, and clearly said, the baronessis now relieved of a rival, and may take you! She felt it so acutely asto feel that she said nothing else. 

Severances are accomplished within the heart stroke by stroke; withinthe craven's heart each new step resulting from a blow is temporarilyan absolute severance. Her letter to Alvan written, she thought nottenderly 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 thesense that the thing was done, made her stony to Alvan. 

On the introduction of Colonel von Tresten, whose name she knew, butwas 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 thecolonel to state, that the letter could make no difference, and all wasto be as she had written it. 

The colonel bowed stiffly. 

It would have comforted her to have been allowed to say: 'I cease to bethe rival of that execrable harridan!'

The delivery of so formidable a cat-screech not being possible, shestood in an attitude of mild resignation, revolving thoughts of herfather's praises of his noble daughter, her mother's kiss, the caressesof her sisters, and the dark bright eyes of Marko, the peace of thedomestic circle. This was her happiness! And still there was time, stillhope 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 ofher pulses. She had been swayed to act against him by tales which in herheart 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 inthe end and hear her reproaches for his delay. He seemed to her now tohave the character of a storm outside a household wrapped in comfortablemonotony. Her natural spiritedness detested the monotony, her cravensoul fawned for the comfort. After her many recent whippings the comfortwas immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the lookof a burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonelvon Tresten's hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvanto come, knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scenefollowing his appearance. Yet she would have gone to him; without anydoubt his presence and the sense of his greater power declared by hiscoming would have lifted her over to him. The part of her nature adoringstorminess wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other partwhich cuddled security. Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far fromoffering himself in such a shape to a girl that had jilted the friend heloved, insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figureof soldierly complacency in marble. Her pencilled acknowledgement of thebaroness's letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construedas an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was. He haddeparted before Clotilde heard a step. 

Immediately thereupon it came: to her mind that Tresten was one ofAlvan's bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And herfather spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangelyenough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profoundreverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downrightimpossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said, talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but nowbecoming convinced that such a family as hers could never toleratehim--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, hispolitics, his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partlyhinted. 

She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might bestrung together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baronessgave his cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, sheremembered, used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriorsdedicating their swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, shefelt sure, was an accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, shemust be hated by the man reverencing the baroness. If ever man hadexecutioner 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 inanimateframe in the hands of her torturers breaking her on the wheel. Shecalled to mind a fancy that she had looked at Tresten out of herdeadness earnestly for just one instant: more than an instant she couldnot, beneath her father's vigilant watch and into those repellant coldblue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly have understood the fleetinglook. What were her words! what her deeds!

The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like aninfant; and the man's face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--heworshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde's hatred of him that itoverflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed himto act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one ofAlvan's pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not everthought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; butnow she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man Isupposed him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and forperceiving and adding up Alvan's faults of character, to the freezingshe had taken from that most antipathetic person. She confessed tosensations of spite which would cause her to reject and spurn even hispleadings for Alvan, if they were imaginable as actual. Their not beingimaginable allowed her to indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for thegratification of the idea of wounding some one, though it were herlover, connected with this Tresten. 

The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman's admirerhad vitiated Clotilde's blood. She was not only not mistress of herthoughts, she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by anydesires, except that the people about her should caress and warm her, until, with no gaze backward, she could say good-bye to them, full ofmeaning as a good-bye to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as theswallow quits her eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that theywere 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 whichthwarted her timid anticipation of it by pressing on her naturalinstinct at all costs to bargain for an escape from pain, and making hersimulate contentment to cheat her muffled wound and them. 

CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he wasnot ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was notdone troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tunefulemotions beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demandinghis crust, to support life, of corporations that can be talked intoadmitting the rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the basis of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunderin his breast and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashingwhile the electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings ofClotilde, and the success of his efforts caught her back to him. Dailymany times he reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and hisarms withered with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. Allthe evidence opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore thathe had her fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reasontold him by what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battledfor his reason. Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to hisbook of the Law, besieging Church and State with it, pointing to textsof the law which proved her free to choose her lord and husband forherself, expressing his passionate love by his precise interpretation ofthe law: and still with the cold sentience gaining on him, against thecurrent of his tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, ofher being actually what he had named her in moments of playfulvision--slippery, a serpent, a winding hare; with the fear that shemight slip from him, betray, deny him, deliver him to ridicule, afterhe had won his way to her over every barrier. During his proudestexaltations in success, when his eyes were sparkling, there was a wrytwitch inward upon his heart of hearts. 

But if she was a hare, he was a hunter, little inclining to the chasenow for mere physical recreation. She had roused the sportsman's passionas well as the man's; he meant to hunt her down, and was not morescrupulous than our ancient hunters, who hunted for a meal and hunted tokill, 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 ifreluctant, disgraced, that she may be dependent utterly on the manstooping to pick her up! He was equal to the projecting of a schemesocially infamous, with such fanatical intensity did the thought ofhis losing the woman harass him, and the torrent of his passion burstrestraint to get to her to enfold her--this in the same hour of theoriginal wild monster's persistent and sober exposition of the texts ofthe law with the voice of a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let itbe said, with a modern gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. Allmeans were to be tried. His eye burned on his prize, mindless of whatshe was dragged through, if there was resistance, or whether by the hairof her head or her skirts, or how she was obtained. His interpretationof the law was for the powers of earth, and other plans were topropitiate the powers under the earth, and certain distempered groaningswrenched from him at intervals he addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the powers above, so that nothing of him should be lostwhich might get aid of anything mundane, infernal, or celestial. 

Thus it is when Venus bites a veritable ancient male. She puts her venomin a magnificent beast, not a pathetic Phaedra. She does it rarely, forthough 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 thesentiment of the passion and save them from an exhibition of the firesof 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 minordoses of the goddess, which moderate, soften, counteract, instead ofinflicting the malady, abhor and have no brotherhood with its turbulentvictim. 

It was justly matter for triumph, due to an extraordinary fervour ofpleading upon a plain statement of the case, that Alvan should returnfrom his foray bringing with him an emissary deputed by General vonRudiger's official chief to see that the young lady, so passionatelypursued by the foremost of his time in political genius and oratory, was not subjected to parental tyranny, but stood free to exerciseher choice. Of the few who would ever have thought of attempting, adiminished number would have equalled that feat. Alvan was no vainboaster; he could gain the ears of grave men as well as mobs and women. The interview with Clotilde was therefore assured to him, and thedistracting telegrams and letters forwarded to him by Tresten duringhis absence were consequently stabs already promising to heal. They werebrutal stabs--her packet of his letters and presents on his table madethem bleed afresh, and the odd scrawl of the couple of words on thepaper set him wondering at the imbecile irony of her calling herself'The child' in accompaniment to such an act, for it reminded him ofhis epithet for her, while it dealt him a tremendous blow; it seemedsenselessly malign, perhaps flippant, as she could be, he knew. Shecould be anything weak and shallow when out of his hands; she hadrecently proved it still, in view of the interview, and on the tide ofhis labours to come to that wished end, he struck his breast to bravehimself with a good hopeful spirit. 'Once mine!' he said. 

Moreover, to the better account, Clotilde's English friend had sent himthe lines addressed to her, in which the writer dwelt on her love of himwith a whimper of the voice of love. That was previous to her perjury bylittle, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on eventsby the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time betweenthis love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannousintervention. One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was beingtyrannized and tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the fieldstoo, as the mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think. 

Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General vonRudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claimthe privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's housewith him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness. 

Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after aprobationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but ofwhom offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jawfrom the tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible toimagine they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness andcharm 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 impenetrablewall to her maiden past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of usmoustached her. She was a clear-faced girl and mother of youngblushes before the years were at their work of transformation upon hercountenance and behind her bosom. The years were rough artists: perhapsshe was combative, and fought them for touching her ungallantly; andthat 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. Shewas radically-minded, strongly of the Radical profession of faith, anda correspondent of revolutionary chiefs; both the trusted adviser anddevoted slave of him whose future glorious career she measured byhis abilities. Rumour blew out a candle and left the wick to smokein relation to their former intercourse. The Philistines revengedthemselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew demagogue with theweapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous or nothing, andthey must show that they are so when they can; and best do they show itby publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a woman; for tobe in error in malice does not hurt them, but they profoundly feel thatthey 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 withouta self-exculpation. 

'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'Hewill have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He willmanacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss herchance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid fortheir reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, andI shall be condemned by the kind of court-martial which hurries over theforms of a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel likejustice. You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enterinto 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 princesof the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrousand a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. Iobeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I wouldnot 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 packand march. Qualities of mind-mind! They were out of the question. He hada taste for a wife. If he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she mightnot have harmed him--the contrary; cut his talons. What is this girl?Exactly what one might be sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, wouldlead him to fix on; a daughter of the Philistines, naturally, andprecisely the one of all on earth likely to confound him after marriageas she has played fast and loose with him before it. He has neverunderstood women--cannot read them. Could a girl like that keep asecret? She's a Cressida--a creature of every camp! Not an idea of thecause he is vowed to! not a sentiment in harmony with it! She is vilerthan any of those Berlin light o' loves on the eve of Jena. Stable as aViennese dancing slut home from Mariazell! This is the girl-transparentto 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 mydemission and cease to labour for the cause at least in conjunctionwith Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of it, and I am doomed touselessness. '

Tresten nodded a protesting assent. 

'Not quite so bad, ' he said, with the encouraging smile which couldpersuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you twoare divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she'san 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 realembrace 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 toquiet him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and wemust take pattern by him. It's a mad love. '

'A Titan's love!' the baroness exclaimed, groaning. 'The woman!--nomatter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of agreat man's passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidentsfraught with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it soundsbadly, but there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, forwhom no degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her tohim! He--that great he--covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takesthe flame--the pure spirit of her--to himself. Were men like him!--theywould have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morallyon alpine elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above hisfellows. Do not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted himin a storm, and the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous, cruel--yes, but she blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author ofhis 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 curehim; or had you succeeded in carrying her off, I would have stood bytheir union; or were she a different creature, and not the shifty thingshe is, I could desire him to win her. A peasant girl, a workman'sdaughter, a tradesman's, a professional singer, actress, artist--I wouldhave given my hand to one of these in good faith, thankful to her! Asit is, I have acted in obedience to his wishes, without idleremonstrances--I know him too well; and with as much cordiality as Icould 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--herletter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throwsa light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trickher out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours toconsolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, throughher hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She isone of the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that theyenjoy comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and thatpalling, they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his markbefore the time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, thoughgod-like he seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough inany 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 seehim; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if shedoes. '

'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 hehas an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's ascalm as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him justas unconcernedly as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentineloutpost who wasn't deader on the subject in monosyllables thanmademoiselle. She has a military erectness, and answers you and looksyou straight at the eyes, perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girlshe is, " as you say. She looked at me downright defying me to despiseher. Alvan has been tricked by her colour: she's icy. She has nopassion. She acts up to him when they're together, and that deceiveshim. 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, Iassure you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile tothe Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. Whatcharacter of man is this Dr. Storchel?'

Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to actthe part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law withno ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal, a stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear ofStorchel and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeededby the little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentlerexplosions. Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut herlips tight for a laugh of essential humour. 

CHAPTER XIV

Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he hadovercome Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General hadnot consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terrorof the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged thatTresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hearfrom her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speakwith her alone before the official interview in the presence of thenotary, when she was publicly to state her decision and freedom ofchoice, according to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through hisenvoy. 

'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan. 'But I haveworked for it--I have worked! I have been talking to-day for six hoursuninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a cagedbear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform noneof his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper toucheda particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the windingof a key. Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General. I couldget no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called upHollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear, or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin. They havebeen hard at her, the whole family! and I shall want the two hours Istipulated for to the full. What do you say?--come, I wager I do itwithin one hour! They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will besome time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind herdefences; but an hour's an age with a woman. Clotilde? I wager I haveher 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-idoleyes, count for so much mist. She was and is mine. I swear to striketo her heart in ten minutes! But, madam, if not, you may pronounce meincapable of conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impressionof facts. I say I will do it! I am insane if I may not judge fromantecedents that my voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at onesignal--at a look! I am prepared to stake my reason on her running to mebefore I speak a word:--and I will not beckon. I promise to fold my armsand simply look. '

'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in abouthalf a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see youalone, ' said the baroness. 

Alvan opened his eyes. He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman atthe bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time. She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compassthe needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but theinstinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I havehad 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 downto the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similardegree 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 atthe condition of the man who could accept it for that. 

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad tasteon his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies, which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him inretort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose. 

'Marvellously, ' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to mylead! 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, andthe dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I readher flatly. I read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophicaltolerance. I'm in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fairGreeks. '

'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance, ' interposed thebaroness. 'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any;and the small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could takeup. It is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retiredmerchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men who have given over thinking, and young men who never hadfeeling--the philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn tofat in the sun. Horace avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quotethat unsanguine sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver, and gave him a jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields itspoor ghost to his philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlastingHorace! He is the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who marchalong flinty ways: the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of theconforming unbelievers!'

'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera, ' Alvan murmured, amorous of themusical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. Isee her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrorswhich 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 theshady part or on your flat looking-glasses. There never was necessityfor accuracy of line in the portraiture of women. The idea of them isall we want: it's the best of them. You will own she's Greek; she'sa Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian. One of thosedelicious girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER, THE DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER. There you haveClotilde: she's a TO-MORROWER. You climb the peak of to-morrow, and tosee her at all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you herpromise to hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going. Ay, so wehave patience! Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one'sfortieth 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 myforty-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 guideand master. '

'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declinedto come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, somethingto 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 oneof them. Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proudcareer deviate. '

'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan. 'I am the wine, and she the crystalcup. She has avowed it again and again. You read her as she is whenaway from me. Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfitto contend when she stands alone. But when I am beside her, when we aretogether--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of meby 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 bigbreath. 

'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, andeverything written there is imposture! I can account for all that shehas done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me. Not thatshe 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 myorder of battle, and she refuses? No! I stake my head on it! I have nota clod's perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me froma flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has gainedhis position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays blindwith chance. '

He started up in agitation. 'Lucie! I am a grinning skull without abrain if that girl refuses! She will not. ' He took his hat to leave, adding, to seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'Shewill not refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; Ihave 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 totteringyet 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 canpossibly refuse. Her manners are generally good; freakish, but good inthe main. Perhaps she takes a sting... But there is no sting here. Itwould 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 isan exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I have helped you toa wrong impression of her. You will really appreciate her wit; you willindeed; believe me, you will. We pardon nonsense in a girl. Married, shewill put on the matron with becoming decency, and I am responsible forher then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her with me I warranther mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle, like the Cossack'shorse. 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 ofthat?'

'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 appetitein toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the firepreparing the feast. 

'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resumingthe offence on the apology for it. 'I could talk with interest of atrousseau. I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about achoice of wedding-presents. As she is legally free to bestow her hand onme--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide tobe married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris. Shehas a turn for startling. I can imagine that if I proposed a run forit she would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than inacquiescing in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partlybecause, in the first case, she would throw herself and the rest ofthe adventure on me, at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of herimpulses; and in the second, because she is a girl who would require afull band of the best Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep upher spirits among her people during the preparations for espousing ademocrat, demagogue, and Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth toher own. Give Momus a sister, Clotilde is the lady! I know her. Iwould undertake to put a spell on her and keep her contented on afrontier--not Russian, any barbarous frontier where there is a sun. Shemust have sun. One might wrap her in sables, but sun is best. She lovesit best, though she looks remarkably well in sables. Never shall Iforget... She is frileuse, and shivers into them! There are Frenchmenwho could paint it--only Frenchmen. Our artists, no. She is very French. Born in France she would have been a matchless Parisienne. Oh! she'sa riddle of course. I don't pretend to spell every letter of her. Thereturning of my presents is odd. No, I maintain that she is a cowardacting under domination, and there's no other way of explainingthe puzzle. I was out of sight, they bullied her, and sheyielded--bewilderingly, past comprehension it seems--cat!--until youremember what she's made of: she's a reed. Now I reappear armed withpowers to give her a free course, and she, that abject whom you beheldrecently renouncing me, is, you will see, the young Aurora she was whenshe came striking at my door on the upper Alp. That was a morning! Thatmorning is Clotilde till my eyes turn over! She is all young heaven andthe mountains for me! She's the filmy light above the mountains thatweds white snow and sky. By the way, I dreamt last night she was half awoman, half a tree, and her hair was like a dead yewbough, which is asyou know of a brown burnt-out colour, suitable to the popular conceptionof widows. She stood, and whatever turning you took, you struck back onher. Whether my widow, I can't say: she must first be my wife. Oh, fortomorrow!'

'What sort of evening is it?' said the baroness. 

'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along, ' Alvan replied, andseized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again. Theytouched 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!... Thething's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should beridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten. There is no other reasonfor 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, propelsa shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes theRhone-stream. There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpidliquid tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knowsno abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citiedplains ahead. 

His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (tomixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if thisone were granted him!

He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on thetask; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imaginationspun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of hisfrenzies, though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he hadmade some noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so purethat it was infamous to thwart them. At a certain age honest men madesacrifice of their liberty to society, and he had been ready to performthe duty of husbanding a woman. A man should have a wife and rearchildren, not to be forgotten in the land, and to help mankind bytransmitting to future times qualities he has proved priceless:he thought of the children, and yearned to the generations of menphysically and morally through them. 

This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excessesof temper. 

Was she so small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty, vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evilbeam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and rousedthe giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as theywere by his pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he hada 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. Helay 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 ahappy load on his breast, a life about to be born, and he thought thata wife beside him would give it language. She should have, for she wouldcall out, his thousand flitting ideas now dropped on barren ground forwant of her fair bosom to inspire, to vivify, to receive. Poetry laida hand on him: his desire of the wife, the children, the citizen's goodname--of these our simple civilized ambitions--was lowly of the earth, throbbing of earth, and at the same time magnified beyond scope ofspeech in vast images and emblems resembling ranges of Olympian cloudround the blue above earth, all to be decipherable, all utterable, whenshe was by. What commoner word!--yet wife seemed to him the word mostreverberating of the secret sought after by man, fullest at once offruit and of mystery, or of that light in the heart of mystery whichmakes it magically fruitful. 

He felt the presence of Clotilde behind the word; but in truth thedelicate sensations breeding these half-thoughts of his, as he laybetween sleeping and waking, shrank from conjuring up the face of thewoman who had wounded them, and a certain instinct to preserve and besure of his present breathing-space of luxurious tranquillity kept herveiled. 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 heclasped for Clotilde enough to be at pains to shun a possible prospectof his execrating it. Oh, the only she, the only wife! the wild man'sreclaimer! the sweet abundant valley and channel of his river ofexistence henceforward! Doubting her in the slightest was doubting herhuman. It is the brain, the satanic brain which will ever be pressing tocast its shadows: the heart is clearer and truer. 

He multiplied images, projected visions, nestled in his throbs to drugand dance his brain. He snatched at the beauty of a day that outrolledthe whole Alpine hand-in-hand of radiant heaven-climbers for anassurance of predestined celestial beneficence; and again, shadowilythoughtful of the littleness of the thing he exalted and claimed, he staked his reason on the positive blessing to come to him beforenightfall, telling himself calmly that he did so because there wouldbe madness in expecting it otherwise: he asked for so little! Sincehe asked for so little, to suppose that it would not be granted wasirrational. None but a very coward could hesitate to stake his all onthe issue. 

Singularly small indeed the other aims in life appeared by comparisonwith this one, but his intellect, in the act of pleading excuses for hisimpatience, distinguished why it should be so. The crust, which is notmuch, is everything to the starving beggar; and he was eager for thecrust that he might become sound and whole again, able to give theirjust proportion to things, as at present he acknowledged himself hardlyable 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 hisleadership. There would have to be an end of it speedily, else men mightname him worthless dog!

Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful nakedness, a wedding of whiteand blue, of purest white and bluest blue. Alvan crossed the islandbridges when the sun had sprung on his shivering fair prey, to makethe young fresh Morning rosy, and was glittering along the smoothlake-waters. Workmen only were abroad, and Alvan was glad to be out withthem to feel with them as one of them. Close beside him the vivid geniusof the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heavenin his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble. Alvancherished a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him withthe feeling of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor, with the knowledge of our frailty. Him, as well as the great Englishmanand a Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied tothat progenitor's questioning of him, but said 'You know the love ofwoman: He loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler. He too wasa worker, a champion worker. He doated on the prospect of plunging intohis work; the vision of jolly giant labours told of peace obtained, andthere could be no peace without his prize. 

He listened to the workmen's foot-falls. The solitary sound and steadymotion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not lessthan the changes of light in heaven above the roofs. With the goldenlight came numbers, workmen still. Their tread on the stones roused someof his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watchedthe scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities, easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered. Thesenumbers 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 intobondage for not knowing how to use it. They will have it again: theyhave it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex oftheir brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. Theywill have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to theleadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in thespiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justiceof these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady ourcolumn of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers'arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, whichwill base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base ofyonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guaranteefor the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' heapostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right, thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, ofthe great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And right am I too, between thatmetal-rail of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incompletefor want of an element of the other!' Practically and in vision rightwas Alvan, for those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former, he counted on the supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguishedwhere it lay in perpetuity. 

During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb theycould put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He hadresembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supplefor business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; hehad strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too shortfor the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; toovaluable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the sheddingof blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not. 

He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that heconfessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging: he was thereforebound to endure a retort. Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, hecould be temperate. Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him thesensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger ofhis being excited to betray it. Shadowily he thought of the hard wordshurled at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde's fatherdid him by plotting to rob him of his daughter. But how had an Alvanreplied?--with the arts of peaceful fence victoriously. He conceived ofno temptation to his repressed irascibility save the political. A daymight come for him and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle ina tussle. On that day he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan feltassured, he would be more master of himself than his antagonist. He wasfor the young world, in the brain of a new order of things; the otherbased his unbending system on the visions of a feudal chief, and wouldwin a great step perchance, but there he would stop: he was not with thefuture!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recentcharioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come, which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing. He had aname, he had a station: he wanted power and he saw it approaching. 

He wanted a wife too. Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previousto the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger's house. Alvanconsequently 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 seeher, positively to see her and hear her voice!--almost instantly to hearher 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, orin her bosom, or at her waist! She had innumerable tricks of indicationin these shifty pretty ways of hers, and was full of varying speech tothe cunning reader of her. 

'But keep her to seriousness, ' Alvan said. 'Our meeting must be earlyto-day--early in the afternoon. She is not unlikely to pretend totrifle. She has not seen me for some time, and will probably enough playat emancipation and speak of the "singular impatience of the seigneurAlvan. " Don't you hear her? I swear to those very words! She "loves herliberty, " and she curves her fan and taps her foot. "The seigneur Alvanappears 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, Frenchcoquette, whatever she pleases to-morrow, and I'll be satisfied. AllI beg is for plain dealing on a business matter. This is a businessmatter, a business meeting. I thoroughly know the girl's heart, and knowthat in winning the interview I win her. Only'--he pressed his friend'sarm--'but, my dear Tresten, you understand. You're a luckier fellow thanI--for the time, at all events. Make it as short as you can. You'll findme here. I shall take a book--one of the Pandects. I don't suppose Ishall work. I feel idle. Any book handy; anything will interest me. Ishould walk or row on the lake, but I would rather be sure of readinessfor 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 twiceher spirit: and that she knows;--she was a new woman, ten times thehappier for having some grains of my courage. So she'll be glad tocome 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 MontBlanc to-day, Tresten! It's the very day for an ascent:--one of the rarecrystalline jewels coming in a Swiss August; we should see the kingdomsof the earth--and a Republic! But I could climb with all my heart in asnowstorm to-day. Andes on Himalayas! as high as you like. The Republicby the way, small enough in the ring of empires and monarchies, if youmeasure it geometrically! You remember the laugh at the exact elevationof Mount Olympus? But Zeus's eagle sat on it, and top me Olympus, afteryou have imagined the eagle aloft there! after Homer, is the meaning. That will be one of the lessons for our young Republicans--to teach themnot to give themselves up to the embrace of dead materialism because, as they fancy, they have had to depend on material weapons for carvingtheir way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidaldelusion! The spiritual weapon has done most, and always does. They aresons 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 oldorder 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. Appointfor the afternoon--not late. Too near night will seem like Orpheus goingbelow, and I hope to meet a living woman, not a ghost--ha! colouredlike a lantern in a cavern, good Lord! Covered with lichen! Say threeo'clock, not later. The reason is, I want to have it over early andbe sure of what I am doing; I'm bothered by it; I shall have to makearrangements ... A thousand little matters... Telegraph to Paris, Idaresay; 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 beghastly. I had a dream of a dead tree that upset me. In fact, you see Imust 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. Shelistens, but I don't want to speak. Dead silence!--let it be a dashof the pen till you return. As for these good people hurrying to theirtraffic, and tourists and loungers, they have a trick for killing timewithout hurting him. I wish I had. I try to smother a minute, and up theold 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'venot seen a newspaper and won't look at one. Here we separate. Be formalin mentioning me to her but be particularly civil. I know you have theright tone: she's a critical puss. Days like these are the days for herto 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 latefor society at Luchon and Cauterets. She likes mountains, she mountswell: 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 theword and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde's likings, andthe honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her inPyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons. She was friande ofchocolates, bon-bons: she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of goodwine. She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of thevery best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, andin millinery likewise. A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisianladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable toClotilde. He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, andmighty men in letters. She should have the cream of Paris. Does she hintat rewarding him for his trouble? The thought of her indebted lips, halfclosed, 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 pluckedfrom them, the life goes with it. 

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--theforty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirtiesof other men. 

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to planthis affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearerthan she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining andeyes charged with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intenselyall who passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects intheir passage. The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from awhirring of wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel whenimagination shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if thewheels be not stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitalityinside him absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receivingmultitudinous vivid impressions, he did not commune with one, wasunaware of them. His thick black hair waved and glistened over thefine aquiline of his face. His throat was open to the breeze. His greatbreast and head were joined by a massive column of throat that gavevolume for the coursing of the blood to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it, extinguish it. His fortieth yearwas written on his complexion and presence: it was the fortieth ofa giant growth that will bend at the past eightieth as little as therock-pine, should there come no uprooting tempest. It said manhood, andbreathed of settled strength of muscle, nerve, and brain. 

Of the people passing, many knew him not, but marked him; some knew himby repute, one or two his person. To all of them he was a noticeablefigure; even those of sheeplike nature, having an inclination to startupon the second impulse in the flanks of curious sheep when theirfirst had been arrested by the appearance of one not of their kind, acknowledged the eminence of his bearing. There may have been apassenger in the street who could tell the double tale of the stick heswung in his hand, showing a gleam of metal, whereon were engravednames of the lurid historic original owner, and of the donor and therecipient. According to the political sentiments of the narrator wouldhis tale be coloured, and a simple walking-stick would be clothed inTarquin guilt for striking off heads of the upper ranks of Frenchmentill the blood of them topped the handle, or else wear hues of wonder, seem very memorable; fit at least for a museum. If the Christianaristocrat might shrink from it in terror and loathing, the PaynimRepublican of deep dye would be ready to kiss it with veneration. But, assuming them to have a certain bond of manliness, both agree inpronouncing the deed a right valiant and worthy one, which caused thisinstrument to be presented to Alvan by a famous doctor, who, hearing ofhis repudiation of the duel, and of his gallant and triumphant defenceof 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 adark alley of the public park, sent him, duly mounted and engraved, anillustrious fellow to the weapon of defence, as a mode of commemoratinghis just abhorrence of bloodshed and his peaceful bravery. 

Observers of him would probably speculate on his features and thecarriage of his person as he went by them; with a result in theirminds that can be of no import to us, men's general speculations beingdirected by their individual aims and their moods, their timidities, prejudices, envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he wasa potential figure. If to know him the rising demagogue of the timedressed him in such terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila ofthe voracious hordes which live from hand to mouth, without interventionof a banker and property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shoneunder a different aspect enough to send them to the poets to solvetheir perplexity, had the knowledge been subjoined that this terrificdevastator swinging the sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who stakedhis all upon his love, loved up to his capacity desperately, loved agirl, and hung upon her voice to hear whether his painful knocking at adoor should gain him admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizensof the legitimately-satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girlannihilate him. 

He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had neverceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but witha compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilizedman, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was thecivilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her, with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped tolead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman'sfriend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation, but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousingermane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders andmain supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature ofhis blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on adamsel of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies andgoverned by some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in herreputation for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness andher turn for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties, put forth these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here andthere among them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorousClotilde. What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and thebaroness partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposingher sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, hiswilder animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatenedwith a diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned togratify the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will bein danger of playing prematurely for power to seat her beside him high:while at the same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer'shead are secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edgeof his Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwiseyour half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to havemarried 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. Shedelayed her descent from her chamber. He saw how she touched at herhair, more distinctly than he saw the lake before his eyes. He watchedher, and the growl of a coming roar from him rebuked her trickydeliberateness. Deciding at last, she slips down the stairs like awaterfall, and is in the room, erect, composed--if you do not lay earagainst her bosom. Tresten stares at her, owns she is worth a struggle. Love does this, friend Tresten! Love, that stamps out prejudice andbids inequality be smooth. Tresten stares and owns she is worth heavierlabours, worse than his friend has endured. Love does it! Love, thathallows a stranger's claim to the flower of a proud garden: Love haswon her the freedom to suffer herself to be chosen by the stranger. Whatmatters which of them toiled to bring them to so sweet an end! It wasnot either of them, but Love. By and by, after acting serenest innocent, suddenly broken, she will be copious of sad confessions. That will bein their secresy: in the close and boundless together of clasped hands. Deep eyes, that give him in realms of light within light all that hehas dreamed of rapturousness and blessedness, you are threatened witha blinding kiss if you look abashed:--if her voice shall dare repeatanother of those foolish self-reproaches, it shall be construed as apetition for further kisses. Silence! he said to her, imagining that hehad been silent, and enjoying silence with a perfect quietude beyondthe trouble of a thought of her kisses and his happiness. His full heartcraved 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 separationand the reunion: he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was onlyfor the drawing of most blissful breath. 

His watch went slowly. She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front ofTresten. 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 atfirst to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girlfor putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask? But he knew herso well: she would not trifle very long: his life on it, that she willsoon falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check: a word from Trestenthen, if he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her. Alvan heardher saying: 'I will see him yes, to-day. Let him appoint. He may comewhen he likes--come at once!'

'My life on it!' he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, thecertainty that she loved him. 

He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; hehad no recollection of the look of the street. A friend came up and puthim in the right way, walking back with him. This was General Leczel, afamous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage throughblood and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they namefreedom devotedly. Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel withcontinental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued thetalk on public affairs, to the note of: 'What but knocks will ever openthe Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the firstyears of the eighteenth century!'

Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him beforenight. Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he hadbeen absent fully an hour. He was not in sight right or left. Alvan wentto his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable ofimagining any event. He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick aswater were pressing round him. Unconsciously he had staked his all onthe revelation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His intellectweighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it; hemagnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his naturethat the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, ashe 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 thebreeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struckbarley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: heis flame kept under and straining to rise. 

CHAPTER XVII

The baroness expected to see Alvan in the morning, for he keptappointments, and he had said he would come. She conceived that she wasindependent of personal wishes on the subject of Clotilde; the furyof his passion prohibited her forming any of the wishes we send up todestiny when matters interesting us are in suspense, whether we haveliberated minds or not. She thought the girl would grant the interview;was sure the creature would yield in his presence; and then there wasan end to the shining of Alvan! Supposing the other possibility, he hadshown her such fierce illuminations of eye and speech that she foresawit would be a blazing of the insurrectionary beacon-fires of hellwith him. He was a man of angels and devils. The former had long beenconquering, but the latter were far from extinct. His passion for thisshallow girl had consigned him to the lower host. Let him be thwarted, his desperation would be unlikely to stop at legal barriers. Hislawyer's head would be up and armed astoundingly to oppose the law; hewould read, argue, and act with hot conviction upon the reverse of everytext of law. She beheld him storming the father's house to have outClotilde, reluctant or conniving; and he harangued the people, he boreoff his captive, he held her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defiedauthority, he was a public rebel--he with his detected little secretaim, which he nursed like a shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraidto be proud of it! She had seen that he aimed at standing well with theworld and being one with it honourably: holding to his principles ofcourse: but a disposition that way had been perceived, and the visionof him in open rebellion because of his shy catching at the thread of analliance with the decorous world, carved an ironic line on her jaw. 

Full surely he would not be baffled without smiting the world on theface. And he might suffer for it; the Rudigers would suffer likewise. 

She considered them very foolish people. Her survey of the littlenobility beneath her station had previously enabled her to account fortheir disgust of such a suitor as Alvan, and maintain that they wouldoppose him tooth and nail. Owing to his recent success, the anticipationof a peaceful surrender to him seemed now on the whole to carry mostweight. This girl gives Alvan her hand and her family repudiate her. Volatile, flippant, shallow as she is, she must have had some turn forhim; a physical spell was on her once, and it will be renewed when theymeet. It sometimes inspires a semblance of courage; she may determine;she may be stedfast long enough for him to take his measures to bear heraway. And the Brocken witches congratulate him on his prize!

Almost better would it be, she thought, that circumstance should thwarthim 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 tobetray the course of events. 

'How has it gone?' she said. 

He replied: 'As I told you. I fancied I gauged the hussy prettyclosely. '

'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, forshe was calm. It painted the necessary consequence of the refusal: anexplosion 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 everybodyconcerned in the affair. The girl does not care for him one corner of aneye! She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore shehad never committed herself to an oath to him, sneered at him. Shepositively sneered. Her manner to me assures me without question that ifhe had stood in my place she would have insulted him:

'Scarcely. She would do in his absence what she would not do under hiseyes, ' 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 hisfriend. She was tolerably civil to Storchel: and the difference ofbehaviour must have been designed, for she not only looked at Storchelin a way to mark the difference, she addressed him rather eagerly beforewe turned on our heels, to tell him she would write to him, and let himhave her reply in a letter. He will get some coquettish rigmarole. '

'That seems monstrous!--if one could be astonished by her, ' said thebaroness. '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--blownfrom a gun! He's off home. He informed me that he should write tothe General, throwing up his office, and an end to his share in thebusiness. '

'There was no rudeness to the poor man?'

'Dear me, no. But imagine a quiet little advocate, very precise andsilky--you've had a hint of him--and all of a sudden the client he hasby the ear swells into a tremendous beast--a combination of lion andelephant--bellows and shakes the room, stops and stamps before him, discharging an unintelligible flood of racy vernacular punctuated inthunder. You hear him and see him! Alvan lost his head--some of his hairtoo. The girl is not worth a lock. But he's past reason. '

'He takes it so, ' said the baroness, musing. 'It will be the soonerover. She never cared for him a jot. And there's the sting. He hascalled up the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him toscorn. Hard for any man to bear!--Alvan of all men! Why does he not comehere? He might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him tosleep in the end. However, he has done nothing?'

That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a seriouspoint, and repeated the question sharply. 'Has he been to thehouse?--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 ina white frenzy. '

'I will go to him. '

'You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of hispoison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti's going to him after he hadlet his men walk into a trap--and that was through a woman: and he wasquieted; and the chief overlooked it; and two days after, Nuciotti blewhis 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 thedeuce 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! Isit he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be nofighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. Hewill not fight, be sure. '

'Perhaps not, ' Tresten said. 

'As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannotbe too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men whenthey are mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinarycourtesy. "With the name--she deserves, " you say?

He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what sheis?'

The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horrorof the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinctionbetween camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a dischargeof cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's ablack one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, nodoubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would bedangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel iswith 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'seruption 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 syllablesexpunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waitingfor a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to apromise 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 thatsole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and hewould again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he hadbeen obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation ofscorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herselfto entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly anddismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageouslunatic 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, shethought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatenedpretensions to be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, andmerited. The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a woundbeyond healing. It pronounced in a single breath the girl's right nameand his pledge of a return to sanity. For it was the insanest he coulddo; it uttered anathema on his love of her; it painted his white glowof unreason and fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung uponevery part of his character that was tenderest with him. After speakingsuch things a man comes to his senses or he dies. So thought thebaroness, and she was not more than commonly curious to hear how theRudigers had taken the insult they had brought on themselves, andnot unwilling to wait to see Alvan till he was cool. His vanity, whenthreatening to bleed to the death, would not be civil to the surgeonbefore the second or third dressing of his wound. 

CHAPTER XVIII

In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apartfrom it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act ofobedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as aconsequence she was full of grovelling revolt. 

Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in thisfinal instance of dutifulness--one was the sight of that hateful rigidface and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left forsubsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy, Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might notmistake her meaning, and the little man's pair of spectacles had, shefancied, been dim. He was touched. Here was a friend! Here was thefriend she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link withAlvan! Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion. By contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her todefiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies, and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven's craftiness in revoltto compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouseher cause. He was to be taught to understand--nay, angelically he wouldunderstand at once--why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily. Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her dutyto her family, terrorized, a prisoner 'beside this blue lake, in sightof the sublimest scenery of earth, ' and hating his associate--hatinghim, she repeated and underscored--she had belied herself; she waswilling to meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heartto Alvan's true friend--his only true friend. He would instantly discernher unhappy plight. In the presence of his associate she could explainnothing, do nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. Shehad good reason to know that man for her enemy. She could prove him atraitor to Alvan. Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr. Storchel's integrity and kindness of heart, she had stood petrifiedbefore him, as if affected by some wicked spell. She owned she hadutterly belied herself; she protested she had been no free agent. 

The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel'sshoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above asemissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by. 

The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herselfand wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner ofsupplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by thefeeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of aheart, their heads being too awful. 

She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outsideher door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of herdesign to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it wouldbe a waste of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlikethe 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 wouldremain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed whenMarko said: 'Alvan has challenged your father to fight him. ' With thathe turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of thefamily. 

She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvanand a duel--Alvan challengeing her father--Alvan, the contemner ofthe senseless appeal to arms for the settlement 'of personaldisputes!--darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whomshe met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent, her sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultationwith the gentleman. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleepin peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left thecity. 

She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shatteredimagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, theyassailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she hadever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reasonof the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scudof her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendidfigure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposedherself to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped thefigure, abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like somegreat cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whoselucent 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 hisbeloved! More unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he mustknow the challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotildeever again. She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state ofmental 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 herfor a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settledand dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man ofblood: he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct himunder the beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She couldoccasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not intruth been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs ofhim with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant ofthe gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back?She inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since theirseparation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showinghim as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracingwould not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him ashe was then, the hour would be revived, --she would certainly feel him ashe lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get himto her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost astranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character. 

Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youthvisited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large blackeyes bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking andfarewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was toomuch. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. Shelistened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though she was putting questions incredulously, with an understandingduller than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct whileshe listened shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were toointelligible to be looked at? We think it devilish when our old natureis incandescent to talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest inhoping, hungering, and fearing; and we call on the civilized mind todisown it. The tightened grasp of her hand confessed her understandingof the thing she pressed to hear repeated, for the sake of seeming toherself to repudiate it under an accumulating horror, at the same timethat the repetition doubly and trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerateher criminal sensations by casting the whole burden on the materialfact. 

Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of thefamily, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw himdead in the act of telling it. 

'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonierin their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself fornot 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 parentsopposed to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to aflood of light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamedit, but if it was to be?... 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You tofight? ... They put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it isabominable. 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 theirheartlessness in permitting him to fight. 

'This is positive? This is really true?' she said, burning and dreadingto realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him withher other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends whohad brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheernecessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which wasguilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur ofconscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:

'But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fireda pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate forthese habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do younot 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 notknow 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, andthat is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he--beforethese parents of mine drove him... And me! I think we are both mad--hedespised duelling. He! He! Alvan! who has challenged my father! I haveheard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he? what has hechanged 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 thedeadliness of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that herconscience approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatalaim. 

If you stood against him he would not spare you--perhaps not; I fearhe 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 suspectingthat you cross his path! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreatyou. By your love of me! Oh! no blood. I do not want to lose you. Icould not bear it. '

'Would you regret me?' said he. 

Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made herfondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowinghim doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestinedto be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She murmuredphrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for beingspeechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing atwhom a voice of no ominous empty sound was given her; and still she feltmore warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from atone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterancewas inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringinglywhen he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility ofhis withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challengeaccepted. It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressedwithout and within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when heleft her. 

The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: hisphantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright inlife and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he shoulddie! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterlymisusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko. 

Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocentyouth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. 'Do notput blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you letthat horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, andcannot feel my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. Hemade 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. Donot 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 notwalk two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house andthe paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide theresult. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river ofblood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of relianceupon hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appearsconsiderate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for whatProvidence was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was!It is the dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desireswill offer up bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, withdesires expecting to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribesthe direction of events to the outer world. Her soul was in full songto that contriving agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs becamepractically active, darting here and there over the room, burningletters, packing a portable bundle of clothes, in preparation for thedomestic confusion of the morrow when the body of Marko would be drivento their door, and amid the wailing and the hubbub she would escapeunnoticed to Alvan, Providence-guided! Out of the house would thensignify assuredly to Alvan's arms. 

The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she notbeen sensible of paying heavily for it; and thus, as he would wish tobe, was Marko of double service to her; for she was truly fond of thebeautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. Hisblood 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 toa woman's heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, shecannot do: she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consentthat one of them should be swept away. 

Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thoughtof adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt ofthe object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, anddressed in two of certain garments which would have swollen her bundletoo much. 

This was the day of Providence: she had strung herself to do her partin it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in herbedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she couldspeak her 'Heaven be with you!' unshaken, though sadly. Her father hadreturned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried toher chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raisedfrom the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimationof it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, ifthe carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the secondsof the poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She couldnot but apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it wouldprobably be! Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She couldnot blame Alvan for his desperate passion, though pitying the victimof it. In any case the instant of the arrival of the carriage was heropportunity marked by the finger of Providence rendered visible, and shesat rocking her parcel on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed withan alluring terror of him as an immediate death-dealer who stood againstred-streaked heavens, more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness thanshe had ever realized that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered, fearing to meet him, yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyeson his breast in blindest happiness. She gave the very sob for theoccasion. 

A carriage drove at full speed to the door. Full speed could not be thepace for a funeral load. That was a visitor to her father on business. She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient andmust be ready. 

Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickenedon her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon beundergoing for Marko: or at least she would undergo it subsequently; shewould certainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accumulatedenumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knewto be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her requiredenergies for action at the approaching signal. 

Feet came rushing up the stairs: her door was thrown open, and theliving Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look anexpectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, andshe said: 'Oh, yes, she was glad, of course. ' She was glad that Alvanhad pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projectedconfusion of the household had been thwarted: vexed, petrified withastonishment. 

'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 wasunaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragiccomedian. 

Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling andweakling 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, orpointing finger, or affection for special favourites, and thereforebereft of all mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpseof 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 giantlaid on his back and in the hands of the leech? Assuredly it was amockery of all calculations. She could not conjure up the picture ofhim, 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, orsuffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship, lose our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko's taleconfirmed, whispers of leaden import, physicians' rumours, and shedoubted. She clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain, but not her belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imaginehim overthrown in a conflict--and by a hand that she had taken andtwisted in her woman's hand subduingly! He, the unerring shot, laid lowby one who had never burnt powder till the day before the duel! Itwas easier to remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradationaldistinctness of the whispers. She dashed her 'Impossible!' atProvidence, conceived the tale in wilful and almost buoyantself-deception to be a conspiracy in the family to hide from her Alvan'smagnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from the field of strife. That wasthe most evident fact. She ran through delusion and delusion, exhaustingeach and hugging it after the false life was out. 

So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descendingto the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to berebutted by laughter: and she could not, she could laugh no more, norimagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, 'Theyact it well!' and hate them for the serious whispering air, and thedropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of whather instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception. Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough tosilently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that provedthem to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resistthe look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, andstimulate further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to runto the wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheather heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for theimposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, theterrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawedwithin her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted herfeelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scornedthe earth, and earth's teachings, and the understanding of life. Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thoughtthat Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Markohad stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsingthought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat anda state of burning. She knew not in truth what to feel: the craven'sdilemma when yet feeling much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. Shehad so shifted and wound about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, thatshe could no longer sanely and with wholeness encounter a shock: she hadno sensation firm enough to be stamped by a signet. 

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shroudedantagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the wordof death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought 'Why is it notAlvan who speaks?' rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. Sheframed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before miseryhad possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then wastoo shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for theintensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her loveof the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of othersflew with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, andthe spirit presiding in her appears to have accepted them as propersubstitutes 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 afterthe duel. There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agoniesmade a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live. 

The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon. Shewas his nurse and late confidante a tearless woman, rigid in service. Death relaxed his hold in her hand. He met his fate like the valiantsoul he was. Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodilytortures to stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of hisprostration, might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates fellinga man like him by a youngster's hand and for a shallow girl! He mighthave fathered some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour: forsuch is our manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreckthrough unseaworthy pretensions. There was no interval on his passagefrom anguish to immobility. 

Silent was that house of many chambers. That mass of humanity profuselymixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion forthe 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 itwas a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the blot does notovershadow his life. His end was a derision because the animal in himran him unchained and bounding to it. A stormy blood made wreck of asplendid intelligence. Yet they that pronounce over him the ordinaryfatalistic epitaph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom ofmen measuring the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, shouldpause to think whether fool or madman is the title for one who was azealous worker, respected by great heads of his time, acknowledged thehead of the voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we haveseen, insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purerfires through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him toruin. As little was he the vanished God whom his working people haileddeploringly on the long procession of his remains from city to cityunder charge of the baroness. That last word of his history ridiculesthe eulogy of partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess ofworshipping is to conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant: for truthwill have her just proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figureover-idealized by bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get thebalance of the two extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man tobe adored: his last temptation caught him in the season before he hadsubdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of thisworld, stamped him a tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, aself-deceiver, one of the lividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes thenote of discord with life; for otherwise, in the reflection of theirhistory, life will seem a thing demoniacally inclined by fits to anticand dive into gulfs. The characters of the hosts of men are of thesimple order of the comic; not many are of a stature and a complexitycalling for the junction of the two Muses to name them. 

While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, thewoman, poor Clotilde, astonished her compatriots by passing comedy andtragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slainAlvan. In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect ourknowledge of her. It was a gentle youth; her parents urged her to it: aparticular letter, the letter of the challenge to her father, beslimingher, was shown;--a hideous provocation pushed to the foullest. Who canblame Prince Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery thanhe? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, thenever extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little oflife appearing to remain to him. Before heaven he was guiltless. He wasgood. Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, and she rose out ofnothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make agood youth happy, or nurse him sinking--be of that use. Besides he was arefuge from the roof of her parents. She shut her eyes on the past, sureof his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense of being, sheprized above other virtues, and perhaps she had a fancy that to beallied 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 somuch as she supposed. Providence and her parents were not forgiven. Butas we are in her debt for some instruction, she may now be suffered togo. 

 ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

 A tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver Above all things I detest the writing for money At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly Barriers are for those who cannot fly Be good and dull, and please everybody Beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered Compromise is virtual death Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change Dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women Fantastical Finishing touches to the negligence Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble Gradations appear to be unknown to you He had to go, he must, he has to be always going He stormed her and consented to be beaten Hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers during absences His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability Hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic I give my self, I do not sell I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days Looking on him was listening Love the difficulty better than the woman Men in love are children with their mistresses Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful Not much esteem for non-professional actresses Not in a situation that could bear of her blaming herself O for yesterday! Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded Polished barbarism Professional widows Providence and her parents were not forgiven Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers) Self-consoled when they are not self-justified She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each She felt in him a maker of facts Strength in love is the sole sincerity The worst of omens is delay The way is clear: we have only to take the step The brainless in Art and in Statecraft Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind Trick for killing time without hurting him Two wishes make a will Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies Want of courage is want of sense We shall not be rich--nor poor Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos on their side Who ever loved that loved not at first sight? Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be Work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly