The Tragic Comedians | Page 8

you.'
The Frau v. Crestow was a cousin of Clotilde's by marriage,
sentimental, but strict in her reading of the proprieties. She saw nothing
wrong in undertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous
gatherings of the finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband
agreed to join them after the sitting of the Chamber upon a
military-budget vote. The whole plan was nicely arranged and went
well. Clotilde dressed carefully, letting her gold-locks cloud her fine
forehead carelessly, with finishing touches to the negligence, for she
might be challenged to take part in disputations on serious themes, and
a handsome young woman who has to sustain an argument against a
man does wisely when she forearms her beauties for a reserve, to carry
out flanking movements if required. The object is to beat him.
CHAPTER III
Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvan
was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where
three gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue
vapours of tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of
them was of good stature. One she knew; he was the master of the
house, mildly Jewish. The third was distressingly branded with the
slum and gutter signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head
could not have done it more effectively. The vindictive caricatures of
the God Pan, executed by priests of the later religion burning to hunt
him out of worship in the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil
One, were not more loathsome. She sank on a sofa. That the man? Oh!
Jew, and fifty times over Jew! nothing but Jew!
The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably

magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.
She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the
contrast. This man's face was the born orator's, with the light-giving
eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for
speechfulness and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he
took the headship of armies and marched to empire.
The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. Alas, he could
not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build! One could
vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorously
rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he
talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet lightning
on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing outpour.
Looking on him was listening. Yes, the looking on him sufficed. Here
was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men, that drained
an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced him to the
state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the contemplation of a
girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood. She shrank to
smaller and smaller as she looked.
Be sure that she knew who he was. No, says she. But she knew. It
terrified her soul to think he was Alvan. She feared scarcely less that it
might not be he. Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played at
cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased
herself, and gloated. It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly!
impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me! If another, woe me! For she
had come to see Alvan. Alvan and she shared ideas. They talked
marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposing he was
not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment. The supposition that he
was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.
Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew? She feasted. It was a
noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes. Perchance a Jew of the
Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew as
well as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a
majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his race

favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew is
grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery
eastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! a
figure of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to
inspirit and be tempered by the intellect.
She was therefore prepared all the