CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was not

ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not done

troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful emotions

beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding his crust,

to support life, of corporations that can be talked into admitting the

rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the basis

of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder in his breast

and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing while the

electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of Clotilde, and the

success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily many times he

reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his arms withered

with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All the evidence

opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that he had her

fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason told him by

what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battled for his reason.

Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to his book of the Law,

besieging Church and State with it, pointing to texts of the law which

proved her free to choose her lord and husband for herself, expressing

his passionate love by his precise interpretation of the law: and still

with the cold sentience gaining on him, against the current of his

tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, of her being actually what

he had named her in moments of playful vision--slippery, a serpent, a

winding hare; with the fear that she might slip from him, betray, deny

him, deliver him to ridicule, after he had won his way to her over every

barrier. During his proudest exaltations in success, when his eyes were

sparkling, there was a wry twitch inward upon his heart of hearts.

But if she was a hare, he was a hunter, little inclining to the chase now

for mere physical recreation. She had roused the sportsman's passion as

well as the man's; he meant to hunt her down, and was not more scrupulous

than our ancient hunters, who hunted for a meal and hunted to kill, with

none of the later hesitations as to circumventing, trapping, snaring by

devices, and the preservation of the animal's coat spotless. Let her be

lured from her home, or plucked from her home, and if reluctant,

disgraced, that she may be dependent utterly on the man stooping to pick

her up! He was equal to the projecting of a scheme socially infamous,

with such fanatical intensity did the thought of his losing the woman

harass him, and the torrent of his passion burst restraint to get to her

to enfold her--this in the same hour of the original wild monster's

persistent and sober exposition of the texts of the law with the voice of

a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let it be said, with a modern

gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. All means were to be tried.

His eye burned on his prize, mindless of what she was dragged through, if

there was resistance, or whether by the hair of her head or her skirts,

or how she was obtained. His interpretation of the law was for the powers

of earth, and other plans were to propitiate the powers under the earth,

and certain distempered groanings wrenched from him at intervals he

addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the powers above,

so that nothing of him should be lost which might get aid of anything

mundane, infernal, or celestial.

Thus it is when Venus bites a veritable ancient male. She puts her venom

in a magnificent beast, not a pathetic Phaedra. She does it rarely, for

though to be loved by a bitten giant is one of the dreams of woman, the

considerate Mother of Love knows how needful it is to protect the

sentiment of the passion and save them from an exhibition of the fires of

that dragon's breath. Do they not fly shrieking when they behold it?

Barely are they able to read of it. Men, too, accustomed to minor doses

of the goddess, which moderate, soften, counteract, instead of inflicting

the malady, abhor and have no brotherhood with its turbulent victim.

It was justly matter for triumph, due to an extraordinary fervour of

pleading upon a plain statement of the case, that Alvan should return

from his foray bringing with him an emissary deputed by General von

Rudiger's official chief to see that the young lady, so passionately

pursued by the foremost of his time in political genius and oratory, was

not subjected to parental tyranny, but stood free to exercise her choice.

Of the few who would ever have thought of attempting, a diminished number

would have equalled that feat. Alvan was no vain boaster; he could gain

the ears of grave men as well as mobs and women. The interview with

Clotilde was therefore assured to him, and the distracting telegrams and

letters forwarded to him by Tresten during his absence were consequently

stabs already promising to heal. They were brutal stabs--her packet of

his letters and presents on his table made them bleed afresh, and the odd

scrawl of the couple of words on the paper set him wondering at the

imbecile irony of her calling herself 'The child' in accompaniment to

such an act, for it reminded him of his epithet for her, while it dealt

him a tremendous blow; it seemed senselessly malign, perhaps flippant, as

she could be, he knew. She could be anything weak and shallow when out of

his hands; she had recently proved it still, in view of the interview,

and on the tide of his labours to come to that wished end, he struck his

breast to brave himself with a good hopeful spirit. 'Once mine!' he said.

Moreover, to the better account, Clotilde's English friend had sent him

the lines addressed to her, in which the writer dwelt on her love of him

with a whimper of the voice of love. That was previous to her perjury by

little, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on events

by the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time between this

love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannous intervention.

One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was being tyrannized and

tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the fields too, as the

mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think.

Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General von

Rudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claim

the privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's house with

him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness.

Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a

probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of whom

offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw from the

tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to imagine

they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and charm of

aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man, pulling at the

man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities, committing a whole

sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable wall to her maiden

past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us moustached her. She

was a clear-faced girl and mother of young blushes before the years were

at their work of transformation upon her countenance and behind her

bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps she was combative, and

fought them for touching her ungallantly; and that perhaps was her first

manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth, a wife openly maltreated, a

woman of breeding, but with a man's head, capable of inspiring man-like

friendships, and of entertaining them. She was radically-minded, strongly

of the Radical profession of faith, and a correspondent of revolutionary

chiefs; both the trusted adviser and devoted slave of him whose future

glorious career she measured by his abilities. Rumour blew out a candle

and left the wick to smoke in relation to their former intercourse. The

Philistines revenged themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew

demagogue with the weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous

or nothing, and they must show that they are so when they can; and best

do they show it by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a

woman; for to be in error in malice does not hurt them, but they

profoundly feel that they are fools if they are duped.

She was aware of the recent course of events; she had as she protested,

nothing to accuse herself of, and she could hardly part her lips without

a self-exculpation.

'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'He will

have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He will

manacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss her

chance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid for their

reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, and I shall

be condemned by the kind of court-martial which hurries over the forms of

a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like justice.

You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enter into her

enthusiasm. She will make him believe I conspired against her. Men in

love are children with their mistresses--the greatest of them; their

heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him! At his

instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the

Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous and a

shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I obeyed his

wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would not have it on my

conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was

refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness, Tresten, that for a

young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack and march. Qualities of

mind-mind! They were out of the question. He had a taste for a wife. If

he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she might not have harmed him--the

contrary; cut his talons. What is this girl? Exactly what one might be

sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, would lead him to fix on; a

daughter of the Philistines, naturally, and precisely the one of all on

earth likely to confound him after marriage as she has played fast and

loose with him before it. He has never understood women--cannot read

them. Could a girl like that keep a secret? She's a Cressida--a creature

of every camp! Not an idea of the cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment

in harmony with it! She is viler than any of those Berlin light o' loves

on the eve of Jena. Stable as a Viennese dancing slut home from

Mariazell! This is the girl-transparent to the whole world! But his heart

is on her, and he must have her, I suppose; and I shall have to bear her

impertinences, or sign my demission and cease to labour for the cause at

least in conjunction with Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of

it, and I am doomed to uselessness.'

Tresten nodded a protesting assent.

'Not quite so bad,' he said, with the encouraging smile which could

persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you two

are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she's

an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them;

but she's an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real

embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp! as

you say. She was not worth carrying off. I consented to try it to quiet

him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we must

take pattern by him. It's a mad love.'

'A Titan's love!' the baroness exclaimed, groaning. 'The woman!--no

matter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of a great

man's passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents fraught

with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it sounds badly, but

there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, for whom no

degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to him!

He--that great he--covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takes the

flame--the pure spirit of her--to himself. Were men like him!--they would

have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morally on alpine

elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his fellows. Do

not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted him in a storm, and

the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous, cruel--yes, but she

blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author of his madness. It is the

snake's nature of the girl which distracts him; she is in his blood. Had

she come to me, I would have helped her to cure him; or had you succeeded

in carrying her off, I would have stood by their union; or were she a

different creature, and not the shifty thing she is, I could desire him

to win her. A peasant girl, a workman's daughter, a tradesman's, a

professional singer, actress, artist--I would have given my hand to one

of these in good faith, thankful to her! As it is, I have acted in

obedience to his wishes, without idle remonstrances--I know him too well;

and with as much cordiality as I could put into an evil service. She will

drag him down, down, Tresten!'

'They are not joined yet,' said the colonel.

'She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me--her

letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throws a

light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her

out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to

consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her

hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is one of

the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy

comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that palling,

they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark before the

time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though god-like he

seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in any hands.

This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'

'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.

'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'

The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.

'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see

him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she

does.'

'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet: I

don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has

an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as calm as the

face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly

as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel outpost who wasn't

deader on the subject in monosyllables than mademoiselle. She has a

military erectness, and answers you and looks you straight at the eyes,

perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl she is," as you say. She

looked at me downright defying me to despise her. Alvan has been tricked

by her colour: she's icy. She has no passion. She acts up to him when

they're together, and that deceives him. I doubt her having

blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'

'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!' the

baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I assure

you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to the

Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What

character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'

Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act the

part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with no

ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal, a

stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of Storchel

and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded by the

little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentler explosions.

Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut her lips tight

for a laugh of essential humour.

CHAPTER HIV

Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had overcome

Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General had not

consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror of

the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged that

Tresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hear from

her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speak with her

alone before the official interview in the presence of the notary, when

she was publicly to state her decision and freedom of choice, according

to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through his envoy.

'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan. 'But I have worked

for it--I have worked! I have been talking to-day for six hours

uninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a caged

bear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform none of

his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper touched a

particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the, winding of

a key. Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General. I could get

no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called up

Hollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear,

or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin. They have been

hard at her, the whole family! and I shall want the two hours I

stipulated for to the full. What do you say?--come, I wager I do it

within one hour! They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will be

some time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind her

defences; but an hour's an age with a woman. Clotilde? I wager I have her

on her knees in half an hour! These notions of duty, and station, and her

fiddle-de-dee betrothal to that Danube osier with Indian-idol eyes, count

for so much mist. She was and is mine. I swear to strike to her heart in

ten minutes! But, madam, if not, you may pronounce me incapable of

conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impression of facts. I say

I will do it! I am insane if I may not judge from antecedents that my

voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at one signal--at a look! I

am prepared to stake my reason on her running to me before I speak a

word:--and I will not beckon. I promise to fold my arms and simply look.'

'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about

half a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you

alone,' said the baroness.

Alvan opened his eyes. He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at

the bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time.

She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass the

needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the

instinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I have had

three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,

curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,

baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down to

the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar degree

of earnestness. As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she, and from

spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'

'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed

the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the

condition of the man who could accept it for that.

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste

on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,

which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him in

retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my lead!

and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction. I shall

have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and the dose

must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read her flatly. I

read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical tolerance. I'm in

the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair Greeks.'

'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the baroness.

'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the

small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up. It is

the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants,

gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men who have

given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling--the philosophy

of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun. Horace

avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine

sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver, and gave him a

jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his

philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting Horace! He is the

versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty ways:

the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming unbelievers!'

'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the

musical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. I see

her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors which

give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant, not

much bigger than a dewdrop. And so should a man's heart reflect her! Take

her on the light in it, she is perfection. We won't take her in the shady

part or on your flat looking-glasses. There never was necessity for

accuracy of line in the portraiture of women. The idea of them is all we

want: it's the best of them. You will own she's Greek; she's a

Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian. One of those delicious

girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER, THE

DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER. There you have Clotilde:

she's a TO-MORROWER. You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to see her at

all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you her promise to

hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going. Ay, so we have

patience! Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one's

fortieth year!--it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.'

Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,

when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.

'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.

'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my

forty-first a sage.'

'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'

'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide

and master.'

'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined to

come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to

rest one's faith on. Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like, were

not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of them.

Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud career

deviate.'

'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan. 'I am the wine, and she the crystal

cup. She has avowed it again and again. You read her as she is when away

from me. Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to

contend when she stands alone. But when I am beside her, when we are

together--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of me by

the magic I have seen each time we encountered. She knows it well.'

'She may know it too well.'

'For what?' He frowned.

'For the chances of your meeting.'

'You think it possible she will refuse?'

A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face. He fetched a big

breath.

'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and

everything written there is imposture! I can account for all that she has

done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me. Not that she

should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it! Refuse? But I

have done my work, done what I said I would do. I stand in my order of

battle, and she refuses? No! I stake my head on it! I have not a clod's

perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me from a

flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has gained

his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays blind

with chance.'

He started up in agitation. 'Lucie! I am a grinning skull without a brain

if that girl refuses! She will not.' He took his hat to leave, adding, to

seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'She will not

refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I have done

tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she--oh! she cannot, she will

not refuse. Never! I have eyes, I have wits, I am not tottering yet on my

grave--or it's blindly, if I am. I have my clear judgement, I am not an

imbecile. It seems to me a foolish suspicion that she can possibly

refuse. Her manners are generally good; freakish, but good in the main.

Perhaps she takes a sting . . . but there is no sting here. It would be

bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of . . . she has a heart! Well,

then, good manners and right feeling forbid her to refuse. She is an

exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I have helped you to a

wrong impression of her. You will really appreciate her wit; you will

indeed; believe me, you will. We pardon nonsense in a girl. Married, she

will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I am responsible for

her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her with me I warrant

her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle, like the Cossack's

horse. I fancy that at forty I am about as young as most young men. I

promise her another forty manful working years. Are you dubious of that?'

'I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,' said the baroness.

Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism,

comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in

toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire

preparing the feast.

'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resuming

the offence on the apology for it. 'I could talk with interest of a

trousseau. I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a

choice of wedding-presents. As she is legally free to bestow her hand on

me--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide to be

married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris. She has

a turn for startling. I can imagine that if I proposed a run for it she

would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in acquiescing

in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly because, in the

first case, she would throw herself and the rest of the adventure on me,

at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her impulses; and in the

second, because she is a girl who would require a full band of the best

Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up her spirits among her

people during the preparations for espousing a democrat, demagogue, and

Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to her own. Give Momus a

sister, Clotilde is the lady! I know her. I would undertake to put a

spell on her and keep her contented on a frontier--not Russian, any

barbarous frontier where there is a sun. She must have sun. One might

wrap her in sables, but sun is best. She loves it best, though she looks

remarkably well in sables. Never shall I forget . . . she is frileuse,

and shivers into them! There are Frenchmen who could paint it--only

Frenchmen. Our artists, no. She is very French. Born in France she would

have been a matchless Parisienne. Oh! she's a riddle of course. I don't

pretend to spell every letter of her. The returning of my presents is

odd. No, I maintain that she is a coward acting under domination, and

there's no other way of explaining the puzzle. I was out of sight, they

bullied her, and she yielded--bewilderingly, past comprehension it

seems--cat!--until you remember what she's made of: she's a reed. Now I

reappear armed with powers to give her a free course, and she, that

abject whom you beheld recently renouncing me, is, you will see, the

young Aurora she was when she came striking at my door on the upper Alp.

That was a morning! That morning is Clotilde till my eyes turn over! She

is all young heaven and the mountains for me! She's the filmy light above

the mountains that weds white snow and sky. By the way, I dreamt last

night she was half a woman, half a tree, and her hair was like a dead

yewbough, which is as you know of a brown burnt-out colour, suitable to

the popular conception of widows. She stood, and whatever turning you

took, you struck back on her. Whether my widow, I can't say: she must

first be my wife. Oh, for tomorrow!'

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

'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along,' Alvan replied, and

seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again. They

touched hands. He promised to call in the forenoon next day.

'Be cool,' she counselled him.

'Oh!' He flung back his head, making light of the crisis. 'After all,

it's only a girl. But, you know, what I set myself to win! . . . The

thing's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should be

ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten. There is no other reason for

the trouble we 're at, except that, as I have said a thousand times, she

suits me. No man can be cooler than I.'

'Keep so,' said the baroness.

He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a

shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the

Rhone-stream. There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid

tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no

abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains

ahead.

His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to

mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this

one were granted him!

He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the

task; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imagination

spun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies,

though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some

noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was

infamous to thwart them. At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of

their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of

husbanding a woman. A man should have a wife and rear children, not to be

forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future

times qualities he has proved priceless: he thought of the children, and

yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.

This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses

of temper.

Was she so small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty, vexatious,

irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil beam on his

reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the giants of

his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were by his

pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he had a broad full

heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her, uplifting her,

richly endowing her. No meanness of heart was in him. He lay down at

night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness. 'Tomorrow!

you bird of to-morrow!' he let fly his good-night to her.