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Laura Lee Hope - "The Bobbsey Twins at Meadow Brook"

George Crabbe - "Miscellaneous Poems"

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The Tragic Comedians, Complete

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




A letter of reply from that noble lady was due. Possibly she had
determined not to write, but to act. She was a lady of exalted birth, a
lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a
social and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motion
now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost
happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair. 'You have
been a little weak,' the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a
soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and
know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O that I had your
beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I could imitate.' She
carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying: 'I have seen
your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air of
composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features. 'For I
can't call you good looking,' she said within herself, for the
satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.
And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced
woman in confession must be:

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with
his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash
his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul
to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'But put this
on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his box--'I
loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping out
of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she has to hunt
herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him she
guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could you expect a girl,
who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says. And he answers
with no matter what of a gallant kind.

In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while
gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,
where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal
river. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes and
the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she sat and
waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel! who
proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan's beloved,
because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a way of proving
goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them day after
day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to
sultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee and
butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the
glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek
or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he was
useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her
feet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were like
hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he
seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness. She had been
expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and
valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.

But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his
passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up the
tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her
parents:

'Will I have you? I? You ask me what is my will? It sounds oddly from
you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and nothing
has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him is unaltered,
and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by my
unhappiness. The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.
Sigismund Alvan. To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my
soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my
parents--I hate them.'

Marko pressed her hands. If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.
The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a
heart that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you. I
know you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let me
cherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should
it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to
him, and then you may choose between us.'

The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young woman
realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of a
slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and this
she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on her, and
melting her to him.

She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew at
the throat of Marko's, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long
delays in the destroying of a weaker.

She left her chair and cried: 'As you will. What is it to me? Take me, if
you please. Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand. You have as much
of me as is there. My life is gone. You or another! But take this warning
and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I see Sigismund Alvan
I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of you, lying dead
beneath me.'

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited her to
a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, all of
you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to
him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the lives of any
dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. I am true to
him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take this miserable body,
but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God gives me sight
of him. I am Alvan's eternally. All your laws are mockeries. You, and my
people, and your priests, and your law-makers, are shadows,
brain-vapours. Let him beckon!--So you have your warning. Do what I may,
I cannot be called untrue. And now let me be; I want repose; my head
breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!'

Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.

The hand was nerveless: it was her dear hand. Had her tongue been more
venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made
it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote. In him there
was love for two.

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was
unconscious he did so. He brought her peace, he brought her old throning
self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her
feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned
him. The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan
beam on her guilty destiny.

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on
the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked
and shuttered.

He went. He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely
bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned. It is difficult in
affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe a
duty. The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his candour
a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his
goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to every
trial. Perhaps, for the sake of peace . . . after warning him . . . her
meditations tottered in dots.

But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking without
language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a dash
usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than the
dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the
adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two paces
to mother's lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it would
appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted if it stood
out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting our animal do our
thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeably so long as his
projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though we have clearly
apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently well understand the
whither of our destination under his guidance. No counsel can be saner
than that the heart should be bidden to speak out in plain verbal speech
within us. For want of it, Clotilde's short explorations in Dot-and-Dash
land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet they seemed not only
unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable to come. Or
possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep his word, and save
her from worse by stepping to the altar between her and Marko, there
calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his presence would
breathe courage into her to go to him. It set her looking to the altar
as a prospect of deliverance.

Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clotilde's wintry face
now that Marko was among them; her inference tallied with his report of
their interview, so she supposed the girl to have accepted more or less
heartily Marko's forgiveness. For him the girl's eyes were soft and kind;
her gaze was through the eyelashes, as one seeing a dream on a far
horizon. Marko spoke of her cheerfully, and was happy to call her his
own, but would not have her troubled by any ceremonial talk of their
engagement, so she had much to thank him for, and her consciousness of
the signal instance of ingratitude lying ahead in the darkness, like a
house mined beneath the smiling slumberer, made her eager to show the
real gratefulness and tenderness of her feelings. This had the appearance
of renewed affection; consequently her parents lost much of their fear of
the besieger outside, and she was removed to the city. Two parties were
in the city, one favouring Alvan, and one abhorring the audacious Jew.
Together they managed to spread incredible reports of his doings, which
required little exaggeration to convince an enemy that he was a man with
whom hostility could not be left to sleep. The General heard of the man's
pleading his cause in all directions to get pressure put upon him,
showing something like a devilish persuasiveness, Jew and demagogue
though he was; for there seemed to be a feeling abroad that the interview
this howling lover claimed with Clotilde ought to be granted. The latest
report spoke of him as off to the General's Court for an audience of his
official chief. General von Rudiger looked to his defences, and he had
sufficient penetration to see that the weakest point of them might be a
submissive daughter.

A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by a
messenger. The General thought over it. The letter was by no means a
seductive letter for a young lady to receive from such a person, yet he
did not anticipate the whole effect it would produce when ultimately he
decided to give it to her, being of course unaware of the noble style of
Clotilde's address to the baroness. He stipulated that there must be no
reply to it except through him, and Clotilde had the coveted letter in
her hands at last. Here was the mediatrix--the veritable goddess with the
sword to cut the knot! Here was the manifestation of Alvan!




BOOK 3.




CHAPTER XII

She ran out to the shade of the garden walls to be by herself and in the
air, and she read; and instantly her own letter to the baroness crashed
sentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combative
instinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and deride
it. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment; then
they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill as a glacier
cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervid respectfulness, of
innocent supplication for maternal affection, for some degree of
benignant friendship!

The baroness coldly stated, that she had arrived in the city to do her
best in assisting to arrange matters which had come to a most unfortunate
and impracticable pass. She alluded to her established friendship for
Alvan, but it was chiefly in the interests of Clotilde that the latter
was requested to perceive the necessity for bringing her relations with
Dr. Alvan to an end in the discreetest manner now possible to the
circumstances. This, the baroness pursued, could only be done by her
intervention, and her friendship for Dr. Alvan had caused her to
undertake the little agreeable office. For which purpose, promising her
an exemption from anything in the nature of tragedy scenes, the baroness
desired Clotilde to call on her the following day between certain
specified hours of the afternoon.

That was all.

The girl in her letter to the baroness had constrained herself to write,
and therefore to think, in so beautiful a spirit of ignorant innocence,
that the vileness of an answer thus brutally throwing off the mask of
personal disinterestedness appeared to her both an abominable piece of
cynicism on the part of a scandalous old woman, and an insulting
rejection of the cover of decency proposed to the creature by a
daisy-minded maiden.

She scribbled a single line in receipt of the letter and signed her
initials.

'The woman is hateful!' she said to her father; she was ready to agree
with him about the woman and Alvan. She was ashamed to have hoped
anything of the woman, and stamped down her disappointment under a
vehement indignation, that disfigured the man as well. He had put the
matter into the hands of this most detestable of women, to settle it as
she might think best! He and she!--the miserable old thing with her
ancient arts and cajoleries had lured him back! She had him fast again,
in spite of--for who could tell? perhaps by reason of her dirty habits:
she smoked dragoon cigars! All day she was emitting tobacco-smoke; it was
notorious, Clotilde had not to learn it from her father; but now she saw
the filthy rag that standard of female independence was--that petticoated
Unfeminine, fouler than masculine! Alvan preferred the lichen-draped tree
to the sunny flower, it was evident, for never a letter from Alvan had
come to her. She thought in wrath, nothing but the thoughts of wrath, and
ran her wits through every reasonable reflection like a lighted brand
that flings its colour, if not fire, upon surrounding images. Contempt of
the square-jawed withered woman was too great for Clotilde to have a
sensation of her driving jealousy until painful glimpses of the man made
jealousy so sharp that she flew for refuge to contempt of the pair. That
beldam had him back: she had him fast. Oh! let her keep him! Was he to be
regretted who could make that choice?

Her father did not let the occasion slip to speak insistingly as the
world opined of Alvan and his baroness. He forced her to swallow the
calumny, and draw away with her family against herself through strong
disgust.

Out of a state of fire Clotilde passed into solid frigidity. She had
neither a throb nor a passion. Wishing seemed to her senseless as life
was. She could hear without a thrill of her frame that Alvan was in the
city, without a question whether it was true. He had not written, and he
had handed her over to the baroness! She did not ask herself how it was
that she had no letter from him, being afraid to think about it, because,
if a letter had been withheld by her father, it was a part of her
whipping; if none had been written, there was nothing to hope for. Her
recent humiliation condemned him by the voice of her sufferings for his
failure to be giant, eagle, angel, or any of the prodigious things he had
taught her to expect; and as he had thus deceived her, the glorious lover
she had imaged in her mind was put aside with some of the angry disdain
she bestowed upon the woman by whom she had been wounded. He ceased to be
a visioned Alvan, and became an obscurity; her principal sentiment in
relation to him was, that he threatened her peace. But for him she would
never have been taught to hate her parents; she would have enjoyed the
quiet domestic evenings with her people, when Marko sang, and her sisters
knitted, and the betrothed sister wore a look very enviable in the
abstract; she would be seeing a future instead of a black iron gate! But
for him she certainly would never have had, that letter from the
baroness!

On the morning after the information of Alvan's return, her father, who
deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent to
demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what her stunned
heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was behind it,
and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with another
piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters, arranged
the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet coins, lock
of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his hand to
Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with the
forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--or of one
of them--she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde,' but the gentlest
title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the word 'child'
to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he should be
interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos
on their side. They are consoled too.

Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! It had
been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when he had
not been feeling at all: and this marks a division.

She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his release
by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She was personally
to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party, and who would give
her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while assuring the gentleman
she was acting with perfect freedom, she was to be under her oath not to
read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her betrothed. Her father assumed
the fact of her renewed engagement to the prince, as her whole family
did; strangely, she thought: it struck her as a fatality. He said that
Alvan was working him great mischief, doing him deadly injury in his
position, and for no just reason, inasmuch as he--a bold, bad man
striving to ruin the family on a point of pride--had declared that he
simply considered himself bound in honour to her, only a little doubtful
of her independent action at present; and a release of him, accompanied
by her plain statement of her being under no compulsion, voluntarily the
betrothed of another, would solve the difficulty. A certain old woman, it
seemed, was anxious to have him formally released.

With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, the
General begged her to comply, pulling the hands he squeezed in a way to
strongly emphasize his affectionate entreaty.

She went straight to Marko, consenting that he should have Alvan's letter
unopened (she cared not to read it, she said), on his promise to give it
up to her within a stated period. There was a kind of prohibited
pleasure, sweet acid, catching discord, in the idea of this lover's
keeping the forbidden thing she could ask for when she was curious about
the other, which at present she was not; dead rather; anxious to please
her parents, and determined to be no rival of the baroness. Marko
promised it readily, adding: 'Only let the storm roll over, that we may
have more liberty, and I myself, when we two are free, will lead you to
Alvan, and leave it to you to choose between us. Your happiness, beloved,
is my sole thought. Submit for the moment.' He spoke sweetly, with his
dearest look, touching her luxurious nature with a belief that she could
love him; untroubled by another, she could love and be true to him: her
maternal inner nature yearned to the frailbodied youth.

She made a comparison in her mind of Alvan's love and Marko's, and of the
lives of the two men. There was no grisly baroness attached to the
prince's life.

She wrote the letter to Alvan, feeling in the words that said she was
plighted to Prince Marko, that she said, and clearly said, the baroness
is now relieved of a rival, and may take you! She felt it so acutely as
to feel that she said nothing else.

Severances are accomplished within the heart stroke by stroke; within the
craven's heart each new step resulting from a blow is temporarily an
absolute severance. Her letter to Alvan written, she thought not tenderly
of him but of the prince, who had always loved a young woman, and was
unhampered by an old one. The composition of the letter, and the sense
that the thing was done, made her stony to Alvan.

On the introduction of Colonel von Tresten, whose name she knew, but was
dull to it, she delivered him her letter with unaffected composure,
received from him Alvan's in exchange, left the room as if to read it,
and after giving it unopened to Marko, composedly reappeared before the
colonel to state, that the letter could make no difference, and all was
to be as she had written it.

The colonel bowed stiffly.

It would have comforted her to have been allowed to say: 'I cease to be
the rival of that execrable harridan!'

The delivery of so formidable a cat-screech not being possible, she stood
in an attitude of mild resignation, revolving thoughts of her father's
praises of his noble daughter, her mother's kiss, the caresses of her
sisters, and the dark bright eyes of Marko, the peace of the domestic
circle. This was her happiness! And still there was time, still hope for
Alvan to descend and cut the knot. She conceived it slowly, with some
flush of the brain like a remainder of fever, but no throbs of her
pulses. She had been swayed to act against him by tales which in her
heart she did not credit exactly, therefore did not take within herself,
though she let them influence her by the goad of her fears and angers;
and these she could conjure up at will for the defence of her conduct,
aware of their shallowness, and all the while trusting him to come in the
end and hear her reproaches for his delay. He seemed to her now to have
the character of a storm outside a household wrapped in comfortable
monotony. Her natural spiritedness detested the monotony, her craven soul
fawned for the comfort. After her many recent whippings the comfort was
immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the look of a
burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonel von
Tresten's hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvan to come,
knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scene following
his appearance. Yet she would have gone to him; without any doubt his
presence and the sense of his greater power declared by his coming would
have lifted her over to him. The part of her nature adoring storminess
wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other part which cuddled
security. Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far from offering
himself in such a shape to a girl that had jilted the friend he loved,
insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figure of
soldierly complacency in marble. Her pencilled acknowledgement of the
baroness's letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construed as
an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was. He had
departed before Clotilde heard a step.

Immediately thereupon it came: to her mind that Tresten was one of
Alvan's bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And her
father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely
enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound
reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright
impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said,
talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now becoming
convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate
him--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his politics,
his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly hinted.

She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might be strung
together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baroness gave his
cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, she remembered,
used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors dedicating their
swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, she felt sure, was an
accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, she must be hated by the
man reverencing the baroness. If ever man had executioner stamped on his
face, it was he! Like the professor, nay, like Alvan himself, he would
not see that she was the victim of tyranny: none of her signs would they
see. They judged of her by her inanimate frame in the hands of her
torturers breaking her on the wheel. She called to mind a fancy that she
had looked at Tresten out of her deadness earnestly for just one instant:
more than an instant she could not, beneath her father's vigilant watch
and into those repellant cold blue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly
have understood the fleeting look. What were her words! what her deeds!