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David Widger - "Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Napoleon"

G. A. Henty - "Bonnie Prince Charlie"

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Gulielma Zollinger - "A Boy's Ride"

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

G >> George Meredith >> The Tragic Comedians, Complete




'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.




CHAPTER VIII

Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of his
tricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her. All the rest to
come was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for a
plan of action. Who can hold her back when a woman is decided to move?
Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and
the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the same
elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel
daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational. That
is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and inflamed
to fly the barriers intercepting. He fancied he had achieved it. Alvan
thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents. The consolatory
sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in the
contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused by those
people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a wife after
the fashion of orderly citizens. It would be on their heads! But why
vision mischance? An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends,
that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection
without casting a shadow. Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry!

No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was
she. Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed
fortieth year! Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?
Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it would
be sunshine in the subterranean sphere. The very thinking of her
dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting
phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come.'

To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a
celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of
mortal life in the highest. He wondered how it was that he could have
waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and he
just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the minutes,
much as she did, only more fierily. The ceaseless warfare called politics
must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of another kind. He
was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a panorama of
illimitable felicity. And there were certain things he must overcome
before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love of
contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his
whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking
it either. There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the
battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the big artillery.

Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of the
trains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; he
looked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swiss law;
considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was a lawyer
bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as
pleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it
wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses,
turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed at such
a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wild man,
cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the ranks
of the soberly blissful. These he could imagine that he complimented by
the wish. Then why should he doubt of his fortune? He did not.

The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey. Late
in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's. A letter
was handed to him. His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for
her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse. 'And now my
turn!' said he, not overjoyously. The words Jew and demagogue and
baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.
But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and
champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal
and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were
to know him and change their tone.

As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at
the answer to a tap. He started; his face was a shield's welcome to the
birdlike applicant for admission. Clotilde stood hesitating.

He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, and
drew her in.

'Alvan, I have come.'

She was like a bird in his hands, palpitating to extinction.

He bent over her: 'What has happened?'

Trembling, and very pale, hard in her throat she said, 'The worst.'

'You have spoken to them both subsequent to this?' he shook the letter.

'It is hopeless.'

'Both to father and mother?'

'Both. They will not hear your name; they will not hear me speak. I
repeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them. They hate--hate
you, hate me for thinking of you. I had no choice; I wrote at once and
followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want of breath,
not want of courage. I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all I can do.

She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids.

But he said nothing. She looked up at him. Her strained pale eyes
provoked a closer embrace.

'This would be the home for you if we were flying,' said he, glancing
round at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, 'Tell me what there
is to be told.'

'Alvan, I have; that is all. They will not listen; they loathe Oh! what
possesses them!'

'They have not met me yet!'

'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 sex; and now, flushing 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 snatched 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-passages.'

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, assisted 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
passed.

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 shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter
leaning on him.

She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as
her passion 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-flashing 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 God'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, assuring 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 passion 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 God, little more to learn of you. You! ah--thief!'