CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!' . . .

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked

from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the

forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties

of other men.

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant his

affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer than

she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in

the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and eyes charged

with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely all who

passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in their passage.

The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a whirring of

wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when imagination

shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the wheels be not

stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality inside him

absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving multitudinous vivid

impressions, he did not commune with one, was unaware of them. His thick

black hair waved and glistened over the fine aquiline of his face. His

throat was open to the breeze. His great breast and head were joined by a

massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood

to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it,

extinguish it. His fortieth year was written on his complexion and

presence: it was the fortieth of a giant growth that will bend at the

past eightieth as little as the rock-pine, should there come no uprooting

tempest. It said manhood, and breathed of settled strength of muscle,

nerve, and brain.

Of the people passing, many knew him not, but marked him; some knew him

by repute, one or two his person. To all of them he was a noticeable

figure; even those of sheeplike nature, having an inclination to start

upon the second impulse in the flanks of curious sheep when their first

had been arrested by the appearance of one not of their kind,

acknowledged the eminence of his bearing. There may have been a passenger

in the street who could tell the double tale of the stick he swung in his

hand, showing a gleam of metal, whereon were engraved names of the lurid

historic original owner, and of the donor and the recipient. According to

the political sentiments of the narrator would his tale be coloured, and

a simple walking-stick would be clothed in Tarquin guilt for striking off

heads of the upper ranks of Frenchmen till the blood of them topped the

handle, or else wear hues of wonder, seem very memorable; fit at least

for a museum. If the Christian aristocrat might shrink from it in terror

and loathing, the Paynim Republican of deep dye would be ready to kiss it

with veneration. But, assuming them to have a certain bond of manliness,

both agree in pronouncing the deed a right valiant and worthy one, which

caused this instrument to be presented to Alvan by a famous doctor, who,

hearing of his repudiation of the duel, and of his gallant and triumphant

defence of himself against a troop of ruffians, enemies or scum of their

city, at night, by the aid of a common stout pedestrian stick, alone in a

dark alley of the public park, sent him, duly mounted and engraved, an

illustrious fellow to the weapon of defence, as a mode of commemorating

his just abhorrence of bloodshed and his peaceful bravery.

Observers of him would probably speculate on his features and the

carriage of his person as he went by them; with a result in their minds

that can be of no import to us, men's general speculations being directed

by their individual aims and their moods, their timidities, prejudices,

envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he was a potential figure.

If to know him the rising demagogue of the time dressed him in such

terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of the voracious hordes

which live from hand to mouth, without intervention of a banker and

property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone under a different

aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve their perplexity, had

the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific devastator swinging the

sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who staked his all upon his love,

loved up to his capacity desperately, loved a girl, and hung upon her

voice to hear whether his painful knocking at a door should

gain him admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizens of the

legitimately-satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girl annihilate

him.

He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had never

ceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but with

a compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilized

man, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was the

civilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her,

with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped to

lead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman's

friend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation,

but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousin

germane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders and

main supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature of his

blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on a damsel

of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies and governed by

some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in her reputation

for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness and her turn

for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties, put forth

these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here and there among

them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorous Clotilde.

What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and the baroness

partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposing her

sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, his wilder

animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatened with a

diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned to gratify

the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will be in danger

of playing prematurely for power to seat her beside him high: while at

the same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer's head are

secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edge of his

Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwise your

half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to have

married that drab-coloured unit? Power must be grasped . . . .

His watch told him that Tresten was now beholding her, or just about to.

The stillness of the heavens was remarkable. The hour held breath. She

delayed her descent from her chamber. He saw how she touched at her hair,

more distinctly than he saw the lake before his eyes. He watched her, and

the growl of a coming roar from him rebuked her tricky deliberateness.

Deciding at last, she slips down the stairs like a waterfall, and is in

the room, erect, composed--if you do not lay ear against her bosom.

Tresten stares at her, owns she is worth a struggle. Love does this,

friend Tresten! Love, that stamps out prejudice and bids inequality be

smooth. Tresten stares and owns she is worth heavier labours, worse than

his friend has endured. Love does it! Love, that hallows a stranger's

claim to the flower of a proud garden: Love has won her the freedom to

suffer herself to be chosen by the stranger. What matters which of them

toiled to bring them to so sweet an end! It was not either of them, but

Love. By and by, after acting serenest innocent, suddenly broken, she

will be copious of sad confessions. That will be in their secresy: in the

close and boundless together of clasped hands. Deep eyes, that give him

in realms of light within light all that he has dreamed of rapturousness

and blessedness, you are threatened with a blinding kiss if you look

abashed:--if her voice shall dare repeat another of those foolish

self-reproaches, it shall be construed as a petition for further kisses.

Silence! he said to her, imagining that he had been silent, and enjoying

silence with a perfect quietude beyond the trouble of a thought of her

kisses and his happiness. His full heart craved for the infinity of

silence.

Another moment and he was counting to her the days, hours, minutes, which

had been the gulf of torture between then and now--the separation and the

reunion: he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was only for the

drawing of most blissful breath.

His watch went slowly. She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front of

Tresten. Oh! he knew her so well. He guessed the length of her acting,

and the time for her earnestness. She would have to act a coquette at

first to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girl

for putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask? But he knew her so

well: she would not trifle very long: his life on it, that she will soon

falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check: a word from Tresten then, if

he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her. Alvan heard her

saying: 'I will see him yes, to-day. Let him appoint. He may come when he

likes--come at once'

'My life on it!' he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, the certainty

that she loved him.

He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; he

had no recollection of the look of the street. A friend came up and put

him in the right way, walking back with him. This was General Leczel, a

famous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage through blood

and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they name

freedom devotedly. Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel with

continental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued the

talk on public affairs, to the note of: 'What but knocks will ever open

the Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the first

years of the eighteenth century!'

Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him before

night. Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he had

been absent fully an hour. He was not in sight right or left. Alvan went

to his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable of

imagining any event. He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick as

water were pressing round him. Unconsciously he had staked his all on the

revelation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His intellect

weighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it; he

magnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his nature

that the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, as he

could think, made the world a whirlpool till he had it. He waited,

figureable by nothing so much as a wild horse in captivity sniffing the

breeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck

barley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: he

is flame kept under and straining to rise.