The Tragic Comedians | Page 4

bids the bold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned
original of her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy,
Southern France, she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for
their heritage to our loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned
professor supplied Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a
companion. She to him was what she sought for in another. As much as
she pitied herself for not lighting on the predestined man, she pitied
him for having met the woman, so that her tenderness for both inspired
many signs of warm affection, not very unlike the thing it moaned
secretly the not being. For she could not but distinguish a more
poignant sorrow in the seeing of the object we yearn to vainly than in
vainly yearning to one unseen. Dressed, to delight him, in Prince
Marko's colours, the care she bestowed on her dressing was for the one
absent, the shrouded comer: so she pleased the prince to be pleasing to
her soul's lord, and this, owing to an appearance of satisfactory
deception that it bore, led to her thinking guiltily. We may ask it: an
eagle is expected, and how is he to declare his eagleship save by
breaking through our mean conventional systems, tearing links asunder,
taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances? Clotilde's imagination
drew on her reading for the knots it tied and untied, and its ideas of
grandeur. Her reading was an interfusion of philosophy skimmed, and
realistic romances deep-sounded. She tried hard, but could get no other

terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of flaming azure divineness than
the vile one of the wedded woman. Further thinking of it, she revived
and recovered; she despised the complication, yet without perceiving
how else he was to manifest himself legitimately in a dull modern
world. The rescuing her from death would be a poor imitation of
worn-out heroes. His publication of a trumpeting book fell appallingly
flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in war
(defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to add
the eagle feather to the man. She had a mind of considerable soaring
scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon, and declined the position
of his empress. The man must be a gentleman. Poets, princes, warriors,
potentates, marched before her speculative fancy unselected.
So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without
exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn from us
altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so
fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the
right one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round
Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh
ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much
solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.
Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice,
the living will retain the colours of the ideal. We have it on record that
he may seem an eagle.
'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her
country said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day.
He said it musingly.
He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic. She
had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an
envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the
choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she
dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her
before. She smiled musingly.

CHAPTER II
'Who is the man they call Alvan?' She put the question at the first
opportunity to an aunt of hers.
Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was
comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.
'Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a
creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a
Jew!'
Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. 'Is he clever?'
'He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the
Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what
he is.'
'But is he clever?'
'Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man.
You could not have been curious about a worse one.'
'Politically, you mean.'
'Of course I do.'
The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of
that station.
The