The Tragic Comedians: A Study in a Well-known Story Part 9

'They will not, will not ever--no!'

'They must.'

'They refuse. Their child, for daring to say she loves you, is detested.

Take me--take me away!'

'Run?--facing the enemy?' His countenance was the fiery laugh of a thirster for strife. 'They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is made of!'

Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion. 'I found them celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the Austrian Count Walburg; I thought it favourable for us. I spoke of you to my mother. Oh, that scene! What she said I cannot recollect: it was a hiss. Then my father. Your name changed his features and his voice. They treated me as impure for mentioning it. You must have deadly enemies.

I was unable to recognize either father or mother--they have become transformed. But you see I am here. Courage! you said; and I determined I would show it, and be worthy of you. But I am pursued, I am sure. My father is powerful in this place; we shall barely have time to escape.'

Alvan's resolution was taken.

'Some friend--a lady living in the city here--name her, quick!--one you can trust,' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of drillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders. 'Yes, you have shown courage. Now it must be submission to me. You shall be no runaway bride, but honoured at the altar. Out of this hotel is the first point. You know some such lady?'

Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest. She could have prophesied certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a drawing back. She could not get the word or even the look to encounter his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where they were together alone. She could not refuse the protection he offered in a person of her own s.e.x; and now, flus.h.i.+ng with the thought of where they were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged to it. She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a Madame Emerly, living near the hotel. Her heart sank like a stone. 'It is for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his generosity in temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph. 'But my wife shall not be s.n.a.t.c.hed by a thief in the night. Are you not my wife--my golden bride? And you may give me this pledge of it, as if the vows had just been uttered... and still I resign you till we speak the vows. It shall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her glory, that she ran to her nuptials through rat-pa.s.sages.'

His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her. She was cooled by her despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay, but that centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her enthusiasm, thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they were united, her step was irrevocable. Her having entered the hotel, her being in this room, certified to that. It seemed to her while she was waiting for the carriage he had ordered that she was already half a wife. She was not conscious of a blush. The sprite in the young woman's mind whispered of fire not burning when one is in the heart of it. And undoubtedly, contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart of fire. An impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for his chivalrousness had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing she praised. Otherwise she was not ill at ease. Alvan summoned his gaiety, all his homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quitting the room she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomy foreboding. A maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling of devotion to her, ran up the steps of the hotel. Her tale was, that the General had roused the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heard whither Clotilde was going.

Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly's drawing-room relating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, a.s.sisted by the lover whom she had introduced. Her hostess promised shelter and exhibited sympathy. The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knew Alvan by reputation. He was insurrectionally notorious in morals and menacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowing tongue, and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love and deference toward her family, won her personally. She promised the best help she could give them. They were certainly in a romantic situation, such as few women could see and decline their aid to the lovers.

Madame Emerly proved at least her sincerity before many minutes had pa.s.sed.

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

Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head premonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer, if I am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.'

'Yes! yes!' Clotilde replied: 'Oh! do that.'

She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming voice.

'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity. 'Plain-dealing; no subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have you burdened, madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our account. And when it would be bad policy?... Oh, no, worse than the sin!

as the honest cynic says. We will go down to Madame von Rudiger, and she shall make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter's hand.'

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

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

'Is this forsaking?' He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone which supplies the answer.

'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'

He kissed her fingers. 'Trust to me.'

She had to wrap her s.h.i.+vering spirit in a blind reliance and utter leaning on him.

She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as her pa.s.sion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flas.h.i.+ng man.

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

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

Mark her as she proceeds. For should her hero fail, and she be suffering through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength. And it will seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it was only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of espousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of putting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him, because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason (where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict, insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked. He roused the tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest reason, close as it ever is to the craven's heart in its hour of trial, whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by the swollen conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize.

That frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions. It spies the spot of truth. Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then, so unerring is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform ourselves into cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple over the Sphinx of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious creature in an epigram. But there was as much more in Alvan than any faint-hearted thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more in the world than the epigrams aimed at it contain.

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

Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure. Her mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a woman's combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.

'Away with that man! I will not suffer him near me,' she cried.

Alvan advanced to her: 'Tell me, madame, in G.o.d's name, what you have against me.'

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

The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde. She went up to him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal, said: 'Let us go: come. I will not bear to hear you so spoken to. No one shall treat you like that when I am near.'

She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experience of the commencement. He did but clasp her hand, a.s.suring the Frau von Rudiger that no word of hers could irritate him. 'Nothing can make me forget that you are Clotilde's mother. You are the mother of the lady I love, and may say what you will to me, madame. I bear it.'

'A man spotted with every iniquity the world abhors, and I am to see him holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable! And because there is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talk of his foul pa.s.sion for my daughter. I repeat: that which you have to do is to go. My ears are shut. You can annoy, you can insult, you cannot move me. Go.' She stamped: her aspect spat.

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

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

'Hardly: I am not of those men who are driven from houses,' Alvan said, smiling. 'But, madame, I will act on your warning, and spare her father, for all sakes, the attempt; seeing he does not yet know whom he deals with. I will write to him.'

'Letters from you will be flung back unopened.

'It may, of course, be possible to destroy even my patience, madame.'

'Mine, sir, is at an end.'

'You reduce us to rely on ourselves; it is the sole alternative.'

'You have not waited for that,' rejoined Frau von Rudiger. 'You have already destroyed my daughter's reputation by inducing her to leave her father's house and hesitate to return. Oh! you are known. You are known for your dealings with women as well as men. We know you. We have, we pray to G.o.d, little more to learn of you. You! ah--thief!'

'Thief!' Alvan's voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it. She had up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern that she had struck the wound in his history; but he was terrible to look at, so she made the charge supportable by saying:

'You have stolen my child from me!'

Clotilde raised her throat, shrewish in excitement. 'False! He did not. I went to him of my own will, to run from your heartlessness, mother--that I call mother!--and be out of hearing of my father's curses and threats. Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to him than to you. And never will I return to you. You have killed my love; I am this man's own because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, as his partner in life for all it may give!--as his wife! Trample on him, you trample on me. Make black brows at your child for choosing the man, of all men alive, to wors.h.i.+p and follow through the world. I do. I am his. I glory in him.'

Her gaze on Alvan said: 'Now!' Was she not worthy of him now? And would they not go forth together now? Oh! now!

Her gaze was met by nothing like the brilliant counterpart she merited.

It was as if she had offered her beauty to a gla.s.s, and found a reflection in dull metal. He smiled calmly from her to her mother. He said:

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