CHAPTER VII

He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they

met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so. He

was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly through

her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers

during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at

the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these backflowings

and gaps in the feelings. She had grown reconciled to the perturbation of

his messages, and would have preferred to have him startling and

thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she welcomed him, and

feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill of the fit of

shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that she had reached

his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical measures to lead

to their union. On one subject sure to be raised against him by her

parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the baroness.

She asked to see a photograph of her.

Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in

profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman. The

eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's drooped

till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.

'Think of her age,' said Alvan, colouring. He named a grandmaternal date

for the year of the baroness's birth.

Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting

lineaments came to an abrupt finish.

She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still

eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally. He could not

contest the woeful verdict.

'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing. The baroness was a woman fair

to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think it

incredible: she really was once.

Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed. He

shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little. For the first time

since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was

likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip. She sighed again.

He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.

'Yes--now,' he said, impatiently.

'I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,' said she, sad of voice.

The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to defend

the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.

Clotilde 'tolled' her naughty head.

'But it is a strong face,' she said, 'a strong face--a strong jaw, by

Lavater! You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating in

her distress. Now she is old--and you are friends.'

'Friends, yes,' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she

deserved to be praised for her open mind.

'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath. The title this

girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and his

burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine the mood

of the giver. She had positively humbled him so far as with a single word

to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her look at the

photograph. Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the man's vanity, he

did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a misconception injurious

in the slightest degree to the sentiments he entertained toward the older

lady as well as the younger. 'Friends! you are right; good friends; only

you should know that it is just a little--a trifle different. The fact

is, I cannot kill the past, and I would not. It would try me sharply to

break the tie connecting us, were it possible to break it. I am bound to

her by gratitude. She is old now; and were she twice that age, I should

retain my feeling for her. You raise your eyes, Clotilde! Well, when I

was much younger I found this lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she

honoured me with her confidence. Young man though I was, I defended her;

I stopped at no measure to defend her: against a powerful husband,

remember--the most unscrupulous of foes, who sought to rob her of every

right she possessed. And what I did then I again would do. I was vowed to

her interests, to protect a woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at

trifles, as you know; you have read my speech in defence of myself before

the court. By my interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I

estranged my family and made the world my enemy. I gave my time and

money, besides the forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably

there was an arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her,

so that the baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling

herself indebted. You will not think that out of the way: men of the

world do not. As for matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart

as the Poles.'

He spoke hurriedly. He had said all that could be expected of him.

They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden

green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed

fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping

branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its

shadow; a vision of blackness.

'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,

screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and

if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.

'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan. 'And

now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day. En avant! contre

les canons! A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the afternoon. I

shall see you in the evening. So our separation won't be for long this

time. All the auspices are good. We shall not be rich--nor poor.'

Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the

store by her.

'We don't count it,' said he. 'Not rich, certainly. And you will not

expect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writing

for money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of

the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt! And

journalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable to the

chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me; and I

give my self, I do not sell. I write when I have matter in me and in the

direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'

'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde. 'I would rather

be in want of common comforts.'

He squeezed her wrist. They were again in front of the black-draped

blighted tree. It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf

bearing a semblance of livid metal. They looked at it as having seen it

before, and passed on.

'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he resumed,

radiating his full bloom on her.

'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.

To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial

chuckle. 'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.

Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all. Look at me.'

He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his eagle

eyes. He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,

expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under the

glances of a girl. 'Do you take me for one who could be content with the

part of second? I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will have

too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly. I was not

fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I. I carry too

decisive a weight in the balance to victory. I have a taste for fruits,

my fairest! And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid

honours.' He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of

his eyes.

'"Bride of the Elect of the People!" is not that as glorious a title,

think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God's grace on

his worm-eaten throne? I win that seat by service, by the dedication of

this brain to the people's interests. They have been ground to the dust,

and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood. I am the

soldier of justice against the army of the unjust. But I claim my reward.

If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy. I will have my station. I win

it not only because I serve, but because also I have seen, have seen

ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten--because I am soldier

and prophet. The brain of man is Jove's eagle and his lightning on

earth--the title to majesty henceforth. Ah! my fairest; entering the city

beside me, and the people shouting around, she would not think her choice

a bad one?'

Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.

'We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day

comes,' he continued after a while. 'The day is coming, but we must wait

for it, work on. I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a

head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be

beneficent. I set them moving on the lines of the law of things. I am no

empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in

politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step to

the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in my time, or

acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the path they

should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:

not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is a middle-class

invention to effect a compromise. With the people the matter rests with

their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and shines reflected.'

'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid

lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the

ground, but always either up or straight before you.'

'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling. 'Here we are at this

funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct

us perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here.'

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches

decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the

small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.

It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

'Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said

Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree for a

melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after

a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the way, my

fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for

me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below. Women

who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered women,

though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not

sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive

in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.

The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her

locks were golden serpents.

'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.

'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered. 'In good time. You

understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young

and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first . . . ! But her heart is

quite sound. Have no fear! I guarantee it; I know her to the roots. She

desires my welfare, she does my behests. If I am bound to her by

gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost she will

demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me in the

fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my heart;

therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'

They left the tree behind them.

'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,

without looking back. 'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under

world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has

looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and

Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for Death

blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely tree. Down

there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air exchanging

between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it's on the border

line. I just felt the creep. I think you did. The reason is--there is

always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of chill breeze

took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at that very

moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I acknowledged

that death could do the trick. But death, my love, is far from us two!'

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

'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed. The baroness was not so easily

defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared. 'She is the best

of comrades, best of friends. She has her faults; may not relish the writ

announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as true as

she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you. That I can promise.

My poor Lucie! She is winter, if you will. It is not the winter of the

steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country; a fine

landscape of winter. The outlines of her face . . . . She has a great

brain. How much I owe that woman for instruction! You meet now and then

men who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are the pick

of men. And the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of their

womanliness for some amount of manlike strength. And she is one; man's

brain, woman's heart. I thought her unique till I heard of you. And how

do I stand between you two? She has the only fault you can charge me

with; she is before me in time, as I am before you. Shall I spoil you as

she spoilt me? No, no! Obedience to a boy is the recognition of the

heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as much as I love my love. I

do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour, support. You will not rule

me, but you will invigorate, and if you are petted, you shall not be

spoilt. Do not expect me to show like that undertakerly tree till my

years are one hundred. Even then it will be dangerous to repose beneath

my branches in the belief that I am sapless because I have changed

colour. We Jews have a lusty blood. We are strong of the earth. We serve

you, but you must minister to us. Sensual? We have truly excellent

appetites. And why not? Heroical too! Soldiers, poets, musicians; the

Gentile's masters in mental arithmetic--keenest of weapons: surpassing

him in common sense and capacity for brotherhood. Ay, and in charity; or

what stores of vengeance should we not have nourished! Already we have

the money-bags. Soon we shall hold the chief offices. And when the

popular election is as unimpeded as the coursing of the blood in a

healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and topmost, for he is

pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-day communities.

But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of the Jew. I am no

champion of a race. I am for the world, for man!'

Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a

large following among the people.

He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian. Yes, if I were

other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able

lieutenants.'

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

'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, putting

his lips among the locks. 'Well, we met: he requested it. We agreed that

we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately have

to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could compare

our plans for governing. He showed me his hand. I showed him mine. We

played open-handed, like two at whist. He did not doubt my honesty, and I

astonished him by taking him quite in earnest. He has dealt with

diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old Ironer! I love

him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean deceit. He will

outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple evolution rapidly

performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies! Then he has them,

bagsful of them! The world will see; and see giant meet giant, I suspect.

He and I proposed each of us in the mildest manner contrary

schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe! Enough that we parted

with mutual respect. He is a fine fellow: and so was my friend the

Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu. Napoleon was a fine

engine:--there is a difference. Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow! but he

and I may cross. His ideas are not many. The point to remember is that he

is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe. He

has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and

traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able

to combine, and the likeliest that he will do. Good. We opine that we are

equal to the same. He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and save

him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which

accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron. We think the more

precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes. But such an

adversary is not to be underrated. I do not underrate him: and certainly

not he me. Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a fluent

tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people, as

knowing them the greater power. He sees that their knowledge of their

power must eventually come to them. In the meantime his party is forcible

enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at present: and he

is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical. He is curiously

simple, not really cynical. His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability.

His contemptuous phrases are directed against obstacles: against things,

persons, nations that oppose him or cannot serve his turn against his

king, if his king is restive; but he respects his king: against your

friends' country, because there is no fixing it to a line of policy, and

it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that country the best in Europe

after his own. He is nearest to contempt in his treatment of his dupes

and tools, who are dropped out of his mind when he has quite squeezed

them for his occasion; to be taken up again when they are of use to him.

Hence he will have no following. But let me die to-morrow, the party I

have created survives. In him you see the dam, in me the stream. Judge,

then, which of them gains the future!--admitting that, in the present he

may beat me. He is a Prussian, stoutly defined from a German, and yet

again a German stoutly defined from our borderers: and that completes

him. He has as little the idea of humanity as the sword of our Hermann,

the cannon-ball of our Frederick. Observe him. What an eye he has! I

watched it as we were talking: and he has, I repeat, imagination; he can

project his mind in front of him as far as his reasoning on the possible

allows: and that eye of his flashes; and not only flashes, you see it

hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a Balearic slinger about to

whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is hard, and is dead certain

of its mark-within his practical compass, as I have said. I see farther,

and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a dreamer. In my opinion, when

we cross our swords I stand a fair chance of not being worsted. We shall:

you shrink? Figuratively, my darling have no fear! Combative as we may

be, both of us, we are now grave seniors, we have serious business: a

party looks to him, my party looks to me. Never need you fear that I

shall be at sword or pistol with any one. I will challenge my man,

whoever he as that needs a lesson, to touch buttons on a waistcoat with

the button on the foil, or drill fiver and eights in cards at twenty

paces: but I will not fight him though he offend me, for I am stronger

than my temper, and as I do not want to take his nip of life, and judge

it to be of less value than mine, the imperilling of either is an

absurdity.'

'Oh! because I know you are incapable of craven fear,' cried Clotilde,

answering aloud the question within herself of why she so much admired,

why she so fondly loved him. To feel his courage backing his high good

sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astute

self-control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible. It

seemed to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she saw their

triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she should

instantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his Republican

Princess. She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue of

her being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, and

she thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her on

that eminence. Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kings

can summon through the trumpet! She could surely pass through the trial

with her parents that she might step to the place beside him! She pressed

his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory. Was it love? It was as

lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to.

She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where her

parents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name the

hotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive. 'Am I not

precise as an office clerk?' she said, with a pleasant taste of the

reality her preciseness pictured.

'Practical as the head of a State department,' said he, in good faith.

'I shall not keep you waiting,' she resumed.

'The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our

success, my golden crest!'

'Have no misgivings, Sigismund. You have transformed me. A spark of you

is in my blood. Come. I shall send word to your hotel when you are to

appear. But you will come, you will be there, I know. I know you so

entirely.'

'As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when they

have married him. At least you ought to know me. You know that if I were

to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it

forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to

go through during our interlude with papa and mama.'

'I almost wish you would,' said she. She looked half imploringly, biting

her lip to correct the peeping wish.

Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave. Flight and

defiance are our last resource. Now that I see you resolved I shun the

scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be. How

can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into your

veins? The other day on the heights--had you consented then? Well! it

would have been very well, but not so well. We two have a future, and are

bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for an example, if

we can. I take you from your father's house, from your mother's arms,

from the "God speed" of your friends. That is how Alvan's wife should be

presented to the world.'

Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and

despatched. To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really

was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural

impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that

language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,

while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed

expression of the pretty impulse. But wiser is it always that the star in

the ascendant should not address the one waning. Hardly can a word be

uttered without grossly wounding. She would not do it to a younger rival:

the letter strikes on the recipient's age! She babbles of a friendship:

she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuous happiness

causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges. The declarations of her

devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a deeper, a longer-tried

suffering. Actually the letter of the rising star assumes personal

feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and personal feeling

is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt also of one who

can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.

Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high. He was

too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful hero regards

them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a peculiar

poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the

other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their

sisters. His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he

had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of

their sex. The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on

his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he

said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,

millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units. He would have stared like

any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a likeness

unto men in their fight with the world. Women for him were objects to be

chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like the sportsman's business,

with keen relish both for the pursuit and the prey, and a view of the

termination of his pastime. Their feelings he could appreciate during the

time when they flew and fell, perhaps a little longer; but the change in

his own feelings withdrew him from the communion of sentiment. This is

the state of men who frequent the avenues of success. At present he was

thinking of a wife, and he approved the epistle to the baroness

cordially.

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

Clotilde.

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

me.'

So much for the baroness.

Now for their parting. A parting that is no worse than the turning of a

page to a final meeting is made light of, but felt. Reason is all in our

favour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slip

between the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though it be

not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness. Clotilde

required reassuring and comforting: 'I am certain you will prevail; you

must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact,' she sighed

in a languor: 'only, my people are hard to manage. I see more clearly

now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by a sort of

compact so long as I did nothing decisive. That I see. But, then again,

have I not your spirit in me now? What has ever resisted you?--Then, as I

am Alvan's wife, I share his heart with his fortunes, and I do not really

dread the scenes from anticipating failure, still-the truth is, I fear I

am three parts an actress, and the fourth feels itself a shivering morsel

to face reality. No, I do not really feel it, but press my hand, I shall

be true--I am so utterly yours: and because I have such faith in you. You

never, yet have failed'

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

thoughtfully.

His last word to her on her departure was 'Courage!' Hers to him was

conveyed by the fondest of looks. She had previously said 'To-morrow!' to

remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, and herself

that she would not long stand alone. She did not doubt of her courage

while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strong men of

earth. She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from the waving

fingers.