The Tragic Comedians | Page 3

dressed in white and scarlet, sprang
from his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the
arch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a
while. The music had seized him. He snatched bow and fiddle from one
of the ring, and with a few strokes kindled their faces. Then seating
himself, on a bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the
strings and flung up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous
notes when Clotilde and her cavalier, and other couples of the party,
came nigh; for he was on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved it
too well to suffer intruders to break the flow, or to think of them. They
were close by when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of a fiery
tribe) to its finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and jumped
back to his carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked,
leather- hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and skin of
burnished walnut made him look an offshoot, but one of the celestial
branch.
He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he was
paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von
Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and
also that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet. In

those very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko
had recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could
have staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her. Adieu to Count
Constantine. Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to
suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight
from her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant
which sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness. She struck,
like fate, one blow. She discovered that the prince, in addition to his
beauty and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love
with goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she
set her face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in
goodness. And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was
to subdue her. Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a
docile infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero
who would wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound? Siegfried
could not be dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms. She
caught a glorious image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and
it informed her that she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a
match for a famous conqueror, was a woman of decisive and
independent, perhaps unexampled, force of character. Her idea of a
spiritual superiority that could soar over those two men, the bad and the
good--the bad because of his vileness, the good because of his
frailness--whispered to her of deserving, possibly of attracting, the best
of men: the best, that is, in the woman's view of us--the strongest, the
great eagle of men, lord of earth and air.
One who will dominate me, she thought.
Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has
brought her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she
persuades the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as
her pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her
parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid's
presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.
Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,
disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his
vehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of the

beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the
conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Her
brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temper
of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of
politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know
that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused by
the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar to
history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state
paralyzes his wrath.
Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and it
was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
behaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs
and tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which