CHAPTER XVIII

In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apart from

it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act of

obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a

consequence she was full of grovelling revolt.

Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this

final instance of dutifulness--one was the sight of that hateful rigid

face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for

subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy,

Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not

mistake her meaning, and the little man's pair of spectacles had, she

fancied, been dim. He was touched. Here was a friend! Here was the friend

she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with Alvan!

Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion. By

contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to

defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies,

and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven's craftiness in revolt

to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse

her cause. He was to be taught to understand--nay, angelically he would

understand at once--why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily.

Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty

to her family, terrorized, a prisoner 'beside this blue lake, in sight of

the sublimest scenery of earth,' and hating his associate--hating him,

she repeated and underscored--she had belied herself; she was willing to

meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heart to Alvan's

true friend--his only true friend. He would instantly discern her unhappy

plight. In the presence of his associate she could explain nothing, do

nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. She had good reason to

know that man for her enemy. She could prove him a traitor to Alvan.

Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr. Storchel's integrity

and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified before him, as if affected

by some wicked spell. She owned she had utterly belied herself; she

protested she had been no free agent.

The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel's

shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as

emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by.

The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself

and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of

supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the

feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a

heart, their heads being too awful.

She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outside her

door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of her design

to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would be a

waste of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike the

sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant. 'Too late,' he

said, pointing to the letter she held. 'Dr. Storchel has gone.'

She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would

remain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when

Marko said: 'Alvan has challenged your father to fight him.' With that he

turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the family.

She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan

and a duel--Alvan challengeing her father--Alvan, the contemner of the

senseless appeal to arms for the settlement 'of personal

disputes!--darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whom she

met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent, her

sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation with

the gentleman. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep in

peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the

city.

She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered

imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they

assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had

ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason

of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud of

her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid

figure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposed herself

to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the figure,

abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some great

cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose lucent

reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere, he to

crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his beloved! More

unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must know the

challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde ever again.

She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of mental drowning

for a truce to the bitter riddle.

Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.

Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her

for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled

and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of blood:

he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him under the

beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could

occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in truth

been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of him

with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of the

gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back? She

inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their

separation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing

him as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracing

would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him as

he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as

he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him to

her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a

stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.

Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth

visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black eyes

bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and

farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too

much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She

listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though

she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding duller

than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while she listened

shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too intelligible to

be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature is incandescent to

talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in hoping, hungering, and

fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to disown it. The tightened

grasp of her hand confessed her understanding of the thing she pressed to

hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to herself to repudiate it under

an accumulating horror, at the same time that the repetition doubly and

trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate her criminal sensations by

casting the whole burden on the material fact.

Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the

family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him

dead in the act of telling it.

'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonier

in their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself for

not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot: she

her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents opposed

to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a flood of

light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed it, but if

it was to be? . . . 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to fight?

. . . they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is

abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?'

He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.

She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their

heartlessness in permitting him to fight.

'This is positive? This is really true?' she said, burning and dreading

to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with her

other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who had

brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer

necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was

guilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of

conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:

'But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired a

pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for

these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you

not know?'

'I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day,' he said.

Compassion thrilled her. 'A couple of hours! Unhappy boy! But do you not

know that he is a dead shot? He is famous for his aim. He never misses.

He can do all the duellist's wonders both with sword and pistol, and that

is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he--before these

parents of mine drove him . . . and me! I think we are both mad--he

despised duelling. He! He! Alvan! who has challenged my father! I have

heard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he? what has he

changed to? And it would be cowardly to kill you, Marko.'

'I take my chance,' Marko said.

'You have no chance. His aim is unerring.' She insisted on the deadliness

of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that her conscience

approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatal aim.

If you stood against him he would not spare you--perhaps not; I fear he

would not, as far as I know him now. He can be terrible in wrath. I think

he would warn you; but two men face to face! and he suspecting that you

cross his path! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreat you. By your

love of me! Oh! no blood. I do not want to lose you. I could not bear

it.'

'Would you regret me?' said he.

Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made her

fondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowing

him doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestined to

be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She murmured

phrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for being

speechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing at

whom a voice of no ominous empty sound was given her; and still she felt

more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a

tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterance

was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly

when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of his

withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challenge accepted.

It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed without and

within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he left her.

The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: his

phantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright in

life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should

die! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterly

misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko.

Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent

youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. 'Do not

put blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you let that

horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, and cannot feel

my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He made me say

the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko! You have no

cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do not aim; fire

in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think . . .'

She sank to her chair, exclaiming: 'I am a prisoner!' She could not walk

two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and the

paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the

result. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of

blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance upon

hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears

considerate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for what Providence

was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was! It is the

dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desires will offer up

bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with desires expecting

to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes the direction of

events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song to that contriving

agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became practically active,

darting here and there over the room, burning letters, packing a portable

bundle of clothes, in preparation for the domestic confusion of the

morrow when the body of Marko would be driven to their door, and amid the

wailing and the hubbub she would escape unnoticed to Alvan,

Providence-guided! Out of the house would then signify assuredly to

Alvan's arms.

The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she not

been sensible of paying heavily for it; and thus, as he would wish to be,

was Marko of double service to her; for she was truly fond of the

beautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. His

blood was on the heads of those who permitted him to face the danger! She

would have felt for him still more tenderly if it were permitted to a

woman's heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, she

cannot do: she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consent

that one of them should be swept away.

Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thought

of adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt of the

object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, and

dressed in two of certain garments which would have swollen her bundle

too much.

This was the day of Providence: she had strung herself to do her part in

it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her

bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could speak

her 'Heaven be with you!' unshaken, though sadly. Her father had

returned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to

her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised

from the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation of

it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if the

carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds of the

poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She could not but

apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would probably be!

Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could not blame Alvan

for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim of it. In any case

the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her opportunity marked by

the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she sat rocking her parcel

on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed with an alluring terror of

him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against red-streaked heavens,

more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness than she had ever realized

that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered, fearing to meet him,

yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes on his breast in blindest

happiness. She gave the very sob for the occasion.

A carriage drove at full speed to the door. Full speed could not be the

pace for a funeral load. That was a visitor to her father on business.

She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and

must be ready.

Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickened on

her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be

undergoing for Marko: or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she

would certainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accumulated

enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew

to be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her required

energies for action at the approaching signal.

Feet came rushing up the stairs: her door was thrown open, and the living

Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look an

expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and

she said: 'Oh, yes, she was glad, of course.' She was glad that Alvan had

pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projected confusion

of the household had been thwarted: vexed, petrified with astonishment.

'But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?' he almost wept to say.

Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was

unaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragic

comedian.

Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and

weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth?

'You--him!' she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt.

She laughed. The world is upside down--a world without light, or pointing

finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore bereft of all

mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world--if

this be true!

But it can still be disbelieved.

He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive,

'Leave me!' The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger.

His manner of going smote her brain.

Was it credible? Was it possible to think of Alvan wounded?--the giant

laid on his back and in the hands of the leech? Assuredly it was a

mockery of all calculations. She could not conjure up the picture of him,

and her emotions were merely struck and stunned. If this be true!

But it can be resolutely disbelieved.

We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or

suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship, lose

our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko's tale confirmed,

whispers of leaden import, physicians' rumours, and she doubted. She

clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain, but not her

belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imagine him

overthrown in a conflict--and by a hand that she had taken and twisted in

her woman's hand subduingly! He, the unerring shot, laid low by one who

had never burnt powder till the day before the duel! It was easier to

remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational distinctness of the

whispers. She dashed her 'Impossible!' at Providence, conceived the tale

in wilful and almost buoyant self-deception to be a conspiracy in the

family to hide from her Alvan's magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from

the field of strife. That was the most evident fact. She ran through

delusion and delusion, exhausting each and hugging it after the false

life was out.

So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descending

to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be

rebutted by laughter: and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor

imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, 'They

act it well!' and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the

dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what

her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception.

Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to

silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved

them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist the

look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and stimulate

further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run to the

wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheat her

heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the

imposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the

terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed

within her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her

feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned

the earth, and earth's teachings, and the understanding of life. Rational

clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought that Alvan lay

wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko had stretched him

there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which

her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning. She

knew not in truth what to feel: the craven's dilemma when yet feeling

much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. She had so shifted and wound

about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely

and with wholeness encounter a shock: she had no sensation firm enough to

be stamped by a signet.

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded

antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word

of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought 'Why is it not

Alvan who speaks?' rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She

framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery

had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was too

shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the

intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love

of the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of others flew

with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and the spirit

presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper substitutes for

her conscience.