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Algernon Charles Swinburne - "A Century of Roundels"

Anthony Trollope - "The Chateau of Prince Polignac"

Richard Jefferies - "Field and Hedgerow"

Wilkie Collins - "Hide and Seek"

The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




'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
worship 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 glass, 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?'

She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: 'I
will,' but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-acting
her part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension of
the part he was for playing to the same audience. 'Yes, I will do all,
all that you command. I am yours. I will go with you. Bid me do whatever
you can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I have hitherto
called mine:--not that!'

'And that is what I have to request of you,' said he, with his calm smile
brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable to her. 'And
this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are you prepared to
do it? Will you?'

She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against her
imploring eyes. 'If you can ask me--if you can positively wish it--yes,'
she said. 'But think of what you are doing. Oh! Alvan, not back to them!
Think!'

He smiled insufferably. He was bent on winning a parent-blest bride, an
unimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of the
world's polished silver vessels.

'Think that you are doing this for me!' said he. 'It is for my sake. And
now, madame, I give you back your daughter. You see she is mine to give,
she obeys me, and I--though it can be only for a short time--give her
back to you. She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do not
forget that. And so, madame, I have the honour,' he bowed profoundly.

He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm. 'What you have done in
obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten. Never can I
sufficiently thank you. I know how much it has cost you. But here is the
end of your trials. All the rest is now my task. Rely on me with your
whole heart. Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding. Be sure
of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of injustice
I shall be beside you to take you to myself. Be sure of that, and be not
unhappy. They shall not keep you from me for long. Submit a short while
to the will of your parents: mine you will find the stronger. Resolve it
in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for it is impossible to me
to waver. Consider me as the one fixed light in your world, and look to
me. Soon, then! Have patience, be true, and we are one!'

He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand. The horribly empty
sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuous
face.

His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone. She seemed a
dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering
himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he
could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the
brief vision of her unfitness to be left. The compressed energy of the
man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims
of family ties and duties, intoxicated him. He thought but of the present
achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad reputation among
these people, from whom he was about to lead forth a daughter for Alvan's
wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his exhibition of
generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he delivered his
retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--that the worst was over;
he had to deal no more with silly women: now for Clotilde's father! Women
were privileged to oppose their senselessness to the divine fire: men
could not retreat behind such defences; they must meet him on the common
ground of men, where this constant battler had never yet encountered a
reverse.

Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to
reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the
diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;
and the lady of the house. He was going--he could actually go and leave
her! She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she
did so as much as she had force to make it visible. She saw him smiling
incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy. She
could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she took
the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.

'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had
the choice of you and he abjured you. He has cast you off!'

She phrased it in speech to herself. It was incredible, but it was clear:
he had gone.

The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.

'He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily to
renounce you.'

She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother
heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at
the window.

The craven's first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for
light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered of
quietness if she submitted.

And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been
guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to him,
the which may be love's glory when marriage crowns it. By his rejecting
her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but a castaway.
It was not natural that he should leave her; 'not natural in him to act
his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at the mercy of
those who might pick her up. She was, in her humiliation and dread, all
of the moment, she could see to no distance; and judging of him, feeling
for herself, within that contracted circle of sensation--sure, from her
knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done unwisely--she became swayed
about like a castaway in soul, until her distinguishing of his mad
recklessness in the challenge of a power greater than his own grew
present with her as his personal cruelty to the woman who had flung off
everything, flung herself on the tempestuous deeps, on his behalf. And
here she was, left to float or founder! Alvan had gone. The man rageing
over the room, abusing her 'infamous lover, the dirty Jew, the notorious
thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,' etc., etc., frightful epithets, not to be
transcribed--was her father. He had come, she knew not how. Alvan had
tossed her to him.

Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady's heart by the
brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the
creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel,
she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted. Her
cry to him: 'If you had been wiser, this would not have been!' will sink
to the inward meditation: 'If he had been truer!'--and though she does
not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is
already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun. They are
not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of them makes
it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.

Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail small
boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious outbreak
she was exposed to. She might so far have exonerated him had she been
able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him in blind
reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising material
rigours. After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for a young
woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched through
the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by the
hair-Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a huge
forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his
daughter's flight to the Jew. He seemed to have a grim indifference to
exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a
satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or three
maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly managing
them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely cracking a
whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time by hunting her
as she likes to run. Police were round his house. The General chattered
and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies of that Jew--the
things that Jew would attempt. He dragged her indoors, muttering of his
policy in treating her at last to a wholesome despotism.

This was the medicine for her--he knew her! Whether he did or not, he
knew the potency of his physic. He knew that osiers can be made to bend.
With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the
window-shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he left
her there and roared across the household that any one holding
communication with the prisoner should be shot like a dog. This was a
manifestation of power in a form more convincing than the orator's.

She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
abandoned by her lover. She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
misfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She was
isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our natural
obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
to the semblance of it only. 'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named his time for
returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about forty
hours. She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father should
be so fiercely excited against this man! Can he have reasons I have not
heard of?' Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the question in her
quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip.
The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew. She saw them
involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a sinister
appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as well as
to Alvan's fatal decision. Her misery was traceable to his conduct and
his judgement--both bad. And yet all this while he might be working to
release her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to the side of her lover
against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as well as she
could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to appear. She
spent her heart on it. A note to her friend, the English lady, protested
her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a frozen resignation
to the loss of him--all around her was so dark! By-and-by there was a
scratching at her door. The maid whom she trusted brought her news of
Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and mistress knelt. Hope
flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers were exchanged
through the partition.

'Where is he?'

'Gone.'

'But where?'

'He has left the city.'

Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one for
Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking
practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an
address. She did not ask herself whether the maid's information was
honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.

She wept through the night. It was one of those nights of the torrents of
tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there be
ought of that besides the breathing structure. The reason why she wept
with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity
for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the
love whereby she was tormented. They do not weep thus who have a heart
for the struggle. In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no
longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other words,
unable any further to contend.

Reality was too strong! This morning her sisters came to her room
imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their
prospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sister
Lotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan's name was infamous
in society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemned
to seclusion. A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set her
tears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could he
hold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jew
democrat? He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with his
brother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wrongly
Alvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all,
perhaps to her father's military and diplomatic career principally: the
head of their house would be ruined. She was compelled to weep again by
having no other reply. The tears were now mixed drops of pity for her
absent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when she
shed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as many
bosoms drained of self-pity will become.

Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and had
a languid willingness to gain outward comfort. To be caressed a little by
her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after her heavy
scourging. She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them to be
selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made them seem
a soft reminder of what life had been. Alvan had gone. Her natural
blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire relinquishment; it
knelled in a vacant chamber. He had gone; he had committed an
irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain provoking,
that was too severe for him: he was not the lover he fancied himself, or
not the lord of men she had fancied him. Her excessive misery would not
suffer a picture of him, not one clear recollection of him, to stand
before her. He who should have been at hand, had gone, and she was
fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being abandoned, her blank night of
imagination felt that there was nothing left for her save to fall upon
those nearest.

She gave her submission to her mother. In her mind, during the last
wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her
cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: 'He may come, and I am his
if he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people.' He had taught her to
rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting
herself loose from him. In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to
believe if the saint will appear. However, she submitted. Then there was
joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.




CHAPTER IX

After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of
the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath. He
proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing
his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and
was on a strange and tangled one. The sense of power in him was leonine
enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did
that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.
They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be
acting his part, brilliant though it was. He crammed his energy into his
idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously. Before the world, it
would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world
acclaiming him:

'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law,
from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old
lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman! Alvan, the republican, is
eminently a citizen. Consider his past life by that test of his
character.'

He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,
through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly
slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to
be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower. Lower, of course, the
multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they have
in exchange for it is not an independent one. Ceasing to be a social
rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he passed
under the bondage of that position.

Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be
trusted now. She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society,
and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.
The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger was a man of
the world. An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to
him--now, at least. And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride
of his house. 'A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall
in good time be cause for some parental gratification.'

The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of
Clotilde. He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another
intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs. These gentlemen brought
no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to extract
a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of
course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official
influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the
proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary
and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his
pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of
his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it
yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blow
startling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
between man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He could not
raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied
contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow
both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their
courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. The
bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoese
conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to
lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of
the powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! What
was this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no sooner
asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,
confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her. Why had
he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired.
She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury, went his
way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going
under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute in the
gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the night.

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for the
self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,
it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon
that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
opposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a
stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By
shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
reduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him; his
history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole quality
of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of one for a
mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever
he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so
uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
ourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must win
her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She was
his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she would
cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his frame,
bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam to his
arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they
signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower than
the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot!
drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that
blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde! Clotilde! Where has one
read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and
flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble? Fish, fool,
fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing but your fool's face in the
water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool! Fish for the
flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head! What impious
villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might have it
bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the ceremonies! They
laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of the gods is the
lightning of death's irony over mortals. Can they have a finer subject
than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O for
yesterday! He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
groaned. A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
private dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off; he
came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the friend
nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were
dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the
truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the
woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his career had
been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but a
fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet
she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself
once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and
she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a
melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.