:iJ;-i:l l:!initilHt, and slie saw it. " Where is he now ? " said she. « At his hotel." <^ Alone?" '< Leczel is with him." " That looks like war." Tresten shrugged again. "It might have been foreseen by everybody concerned in the affair. The girl does not care for him one corner of an eye ! She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore she had never com- mitted herself to an oath to him, sneered at him. _ She positively sneered. Her manner to me assures me without question that if he had stood in my place she would have insulted him." " Scarcely. She would do in his absence what she would not do under his eyes," remarked the baroness. " It 's de- cided, then ? " "Quite." "Will he be here to-night ? " " I think not." " Was she really insolent ? " " For a girl in her position, she was." " Did you repeat her words to him ? '' " Some of them." " What description of insolence ? " " She spoke of his vanity. . . ." " Proceed." " It was more her manner to me, as the one of the two appearing as his friend. She was tolerably civil to Storchel : and the difference of behaviour must have been designed, for she not only looked at Storchel in a way to mark the difference, she addressed him rather eagerly before we turned on our heels, to tell him she would write to Ai7?i, and let him have her reply in a letter. He will get some coquettish rigmarole." " That seems monstrous ! — if one could be astonished by her," said the baroness. " When is she to write ? " " She may write : the letter will find no receiver," said Tresten, significantly raising his eyebrows. "The legal gentleman is gone — blown from a gun I He's off hosae. 142 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS He informed me that he should write to the General, throw- ing up his office, and an end to his share in the business.'' " There was no rudeness to the poor man ? " *' Dear me, no. But imagine a quiet little advocate, very- precise and silky — you 've had a hint of him — and all of a sudden the client he has by the ear swells into a tremen- dous beast — a combination of lion and elephant — bellows and shakes the room, stops and stamps before him, dis- charging an unintelligible flood of racy vernacular punctu- ated in thunder. You hear him and see him ! Alvan lost his head — some of his hair too. The girl is not worth a lock. But he *s past reason." ^'He takes it so," said the baroness, musing. "It will be the sooner over. She never cared for him a jot. And there 's the sting. He has called up the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him to scorn. Hard for any man to bear ! — Alvan of all men ! Why does he not come here ? He might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him to sleep in the end. However, he has done nothing ? " That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a serious point, and repeated the question sharply. "Has he been to the house ? — no ? — writing ? " Tresten dropped a nod. " Not to the girl, I suppose. To the father ? " said she. " He has written to the General." " You should have stopped it." " Tell a vedette to stop cavalry. You 're not thinking of the man. He's in a white frenzy." "I will go to him." " You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of his poison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti's going to him after he had let his men walk into a trap — and that was through a woman : and he was quieted, and the chief overlooked it ; and two days after, Nuciotti blew his brains out. He 'd have been alive now if he had been left alone. Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women's weeping. He has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the deuce with the name she deserves, and challenging the General." " That letter is despatched ? " THE TEAGIC COMEDIANS 143 "Rlidiger has it by this time." The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten : she struck her lap. " Alvan ! Is it he ? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. He will not fight, be sure." "Perhaps not," Tresten said. "As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her : it cannot be too widely known. I could cry : ' What wisdom there is in men when they are mad ! ' We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary courtesy. * With the name she deserves,' you say ? He pitched the very name at her character plainly ? — called her what she is ? " The baroness could have bornt^ to hear it: she had no feminine horror of the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction between camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge of cuttle-fish ink at the character of the girl, and added : " The bath 's a black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regret- table, no doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be dangerous to check him : he 'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is with him and gives him head. It ^s about time for me to go back to him, for there may be business." The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's eruption the drop-scene would fall. Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter, and knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken oif from the baleful girl, the worst must have been passed, she thought. He had broken with the girl : she reviewed him under the light of that sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he would again be the man she prized and hoped much of ! How thickly he had been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of scorn of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself to entertain while he was writhing in the toils, and 144 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS very bluntly and dismissingly felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous lunatic fit, that promised to release him from his fatal passion, seemed, on the contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display. Wives he should have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she thought in her great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened pretensions to be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and merited. The word (she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound beyond healing. It pronounced in a single breath the girl's right name and his pledge of a return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could do ; it uttered anathema on his love of her ; it painted his white glow of unreason and fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon every part of his character that was tenderest with him. After speaking such things a man comes to his senses or he dies. So thought the baroness, and she was not more than commonly curious to hear how the Eiidigers had taken the insult they had brought on themselves, and not unwilling to wait to see Alvan till he was cool. His vanity, when threaten^ ing to bleed to the death, would not be civil to the surgeon before the second or third dressing of his wound. CHAPTER XVIII. In the house of the Rtldigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apart from it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act of obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a consequence she was full of grovelling revolt. Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this final instance of dutifulness : one was the sight of that hateful rigid face and glacier eye of Tresten ; the other was the loophole she left for subsequent insur- gency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy. Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not mistake her meaning, and the little man's pair ot Bpectacles had, she fancied, been dim. He was touched* THE TRAGIC COJVIEDIANS 145 Here was a friend ! Here was the friend she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with Alvan ! Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion. By contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies, and she invoked her treasure- stores of the craven's craftiness in revolt to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse her cause. He was to be taught to understand — nay, angelically he would understand at once — why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily. Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty to her family, terrorized, a prisoner ' beside this blue lake, in sight of the sublimest scenery of earth,' and hating his associate — hating him, she repeated and underscored — she had belied herself ; she was willing to meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heart to Al van's true friend — his only true friend. He would instantly discern her unhappy plight. In the presence of his associate she could explain nothing, do nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. She had good reason to know that man for her enemy. She could prove him a traitor to Alvan. Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr. Storchel's integrity and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified before him, as if affected by some wicked spell. She owned she had utterly belied herself; she protested she had been no free agent. The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel's shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by. The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a heart, their heads being too awful. ^ She was directing the letter when Marko Komaris gave his name outside her door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally ; he was aware of her design to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would be a waste 146 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike the sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant. " Too late," he said, pointing to the letter she held. '' Dr. Storchel has gone." She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would remain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when Marko said: "Alvan has challenged your father to fight him." With that he turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the family. She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan and a duel — Alvan challenging her father — Alvan, the contemner of the senseless appeal to arms for the settlement of personal disputes ! — darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whom she met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent, her sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation with the gentlemen. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep in peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the city. She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they assailed her in huge heaps ; and she did not ask herself whether she had ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud of her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid figure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposed herself to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the figure, ab- horred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some great cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose lucent reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere, he to crave to fight ! to seek the life-blood of the father of his beloved ! More unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must know the challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde ever again. She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of mental drowning for a truce to the bitter riddle. Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS 147 (ength of the day. Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of blood : he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him under the beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could occasionally con- jure them up in their vividness ; but had she not in truth been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photo- graphs of him with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of the gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back ? She inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their separation — if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing him as he was actually before their misunderstanding ! The sun-tracing would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do : seeing him as he was then, the hour would be revived, she would certainly feel him as he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him to her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character. Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was wel- come. The youth visited her in the evening, and with a glitter of his large black eyes bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough : one was too much. What had he to say ? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though she was putting questions incredu- lously, with an understanding duller than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while she listened shot light- nings in her head, whose revelations were too intelligible to be looked at ? We think it devilish when our old nature is incandescent to talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in hoping, hungering, and fearing ; and we call on the civilized mind to disown it. The tightened grasp of her hand confessed her understanding of the thing she pressed to hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to herself to repu- diate it under an accumulating horror, at the same time that the repetition doubly and trebly confirmed it, so as to exon- 148 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS erate her criminal sensations by casting tlie whole burden on the material fact. Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him dead in the act of telling it. " What ? " she cried : " what ? " and then : '' You ? " and her fingers were bonier in their clutch : " Let me hear. It can't be ! " She snapped at herself for not pitying him more, but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot : she saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents opposed to Alvan swept away : she saw him as a black gate breaking to a flood of light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed it, but if it was to be ? ..." Oh ! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to fight ? . . . they put it upon you ? You fight Jmn ? But it is cruel, it is abominable. Incredible ! You have ac- cepted the challenge, you say ? " He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love. She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their heartlessness in permitting him to fight. " This is positive ? This is really true ? " she said, burning and dreading to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with her other hand, loath- ing herself, loathing parents and friends who had brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was guilty ! By dint of calling out on their heart- lessness, and a spur of conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion: " But, Marko ! Marko ! poor child ! you cannot fight ; you have never fired a pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for these habits of men ; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you not know ? " " I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day," he said. Compassion thrilled her. " A couple of hours ! Unhappy boy ! But do you not know that he is a dead shot ? He is famous for his aim. He never misses. He can do all THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS 149 the duellist^s wonders both with sword aud pistol, and that is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he — before these parents of mine drove him . . . and me ! I think we are both mad — he despised duelling. He ! He ! Alvan ! who has challenged my father ! I have heard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he ? what has he changed to ? And it would be cowardly to kill you, Marko." " I take my chance," Marko said. "You have no chance. His aim is unerring." She insisted on the deadliness of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that her conscience approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatal aim. " If you stood against him he would not spare you — perhaps not ; I fear he would not, as far as I know him now. He can be ter- rible in wrath. I think he would warn you ; but two men face to face ! and he suspecting that you cross his path ! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreat you. By your love of me ! Oh ! no blood. I do not want to lose you. I could not bear it." " Would you regret me ? " said he. Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made her fondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowing him doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestined to be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She mur- mured phrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for being speechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing at whom a voice of no omin- ous empty sound was given her; and still she felt more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the re- flection that utterance was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of his with- drawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a chal- lenge accepted. It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed without and within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he left her. The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about : his phantom seemed present; and for a time 150 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS she beheld him both upright in life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should die ! it was the fatality. How strange it was ! Providence, after bitterly- misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko. Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. " Do not put blood between us. Oh ! I love you more than ever. Why did you let that horrible man you take for a friend come here ? I hate him, and cannot feel my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He made me say the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko ! You have no cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do not aim ; fire in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think . . ." She sank to her chair, exclaiming : " I am a prisoner ! " She could not walk two steps ; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and the paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the result. Dread Power ! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance upon hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears considerate of our wishes, in- spirited her to be ready for what Providence was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was ! It is the dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with de- sires will offer up bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with desires expecting to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes the direction of events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song to that contriving agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became practically active, darting here and there over the room, burning letters, pack- ing a portable bundle of clothes, in preparation for the domestic confusion of the morrow when the body of Marko would be driven to their door, and amid the wailing and the hubbub she would escape unnoticed to Alvan, Provi- dence-guided ! Out of the house would then signify assuredly to Alvan's arms. The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she not been sensible of paying heavily for it} and thus, as he would wish to be, was Marko of double THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS 151 service to her ; for she was truly fond of the beautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. His blood was ou the heads of those who permitted him to face the danger ! She would have felt for him still more tenderly if it were permitted to a woman's heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, she cannot do : she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consent that one of them should be swept away. Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thought of adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt of the object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, and dressed in two of certain garments which would have swoln her bundle too much. This was the day of Providence : she had strung herself to do her part in it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could speak her " Heaven be with you ! '^ unshaken, though sadly. Her father had returned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised from the vaults. Carriage wheels would give her the first intimation of it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if the carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds of the poor boy descended to make the melan- choly announcement. She could not but apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would probably be ! Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could not blame Alvan for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim of it. In any case the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her opportunity marked by the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she sat rocking her parcel on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed with an alluring terrpr of him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against red-streaked heavens, more grandly Sa- tanic in his angry mightiness than she had ever realized that figure, and she trembled and shuddered, fearing to meet him, yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes on his breast in blindest happiness. She gave the very sob for the occasion. 152 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS A carriage drove at full speed to tlie door. Full speed could not be the pace for a funeral load. That was a visi- tor to her father on business. She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and must be ready. Her pathos was ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickened on her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be undergoing for Marko : or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she would cer- tainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accu- mulated enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew to be most moving, in an ex- treme fear that she might weaken her required energies for action at the approaching signal. Feet came rushing up the stairs : her door was thrown open, and the living Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look an expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and she said : "Oh, yes, she was glad, of course." She was glad that Alvan had pardoned him for his rashness ; she was vexed that her projected confusion of the household had been thwarted : vexed, petrified with astonishment. "But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?" he almost wept to say. Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was unaware of her ground for laughing. It was the laugh of the tragic comedian. Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth ? " You — him ? " she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt. She laughed. The world is upside down — a world without light, or pointing finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore bereft of all mysterious and at- tractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world — if this be true! But it can still be disbelieved. He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive, " Leave me ! " The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger. His manner of going smote her brain. THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS 153 Was it credible? Was it possible to think of Alvan (vounded ? — the giant laid on his back and in the hands of the leech ? Assuredly it was a mockery of all calcula- tions. She could not conjure up the picture of him, and her emotions were merely struck and stunned. If this be true ! But it can be resolutely disbelieved. We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship, lose. our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko's tale confirmed, whispers of leaden im- port, physicians' rumours, and she doubted. She clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain, but not her belief in the invincibility of Alvan ; she could not imagine him overthrown in a conflict — and by a hand that she had taken and twisted in her woman's hand subduingly ! He, the unerring shot, laid low by one who had never burnt powder till the day before the duel ! It was easier to remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational dis- tinctness of the whispers. She dashed her " Impossible ! " at Providence, conceived the tale in wilful and almost buoy- ant self-deception to be a conspiracy in the family to hide from her Al van's magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from the field of strife. That was the most evident fact. She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each and hugging it after the false life was out. So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvan's descending to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be rebutted by laughter : and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, " They act it well ! " and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception. Them, however, and their acting she could have withstood enough to silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist the look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and stimulate further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run to 154 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS the wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheat her heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the imposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed within her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned the earth, and earth's teachings, and the under- standing of life. Rational clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought that Alvan lay wounded and in danger, was one thought : that Marko had stretched him there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning. She knew not in truth what to feel : the craven's dilemma when yet feeling much. Anger at Providence rose uppermost. She had so shifted and wound about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely and with wholeness encounter a shock : she had no sensation firm enough to be stamped by a signet. Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought " Why is it not Alvan who speaks ? " rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was too shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love of the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of others flew with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and the spirit presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper substitutes for her conscience. THE TKAGIC COMEDIANS 165 CHAPTER XIX. Alvan was dead. The shot of his adversary, accidentally well-directed, had struck him mortally. He died on the morning of the third day after the duel. There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agonies made a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live. The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon. She was his nurse and late confidante : a tear- less woman, rigid in service. Death relaxed his hold in her hand. He met his fate like the valiant soul he was. Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodily tor- tures to stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of his prostration, might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates felling a man like him by a youngster's hand and for a shallow girl ! He might have fathered some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour : for such is our manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreck through unseaworthy pretensions. There was no interval on his passage from anguish to immobility. Silent was that house of many chambers. That mass of humanity profusely mixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion for the future of man- kind and vanity of person, magnanimity and sensualism, high judgement, reckless indiscipline, chivalry, savagery, solidity, fragmentariness, was dust. The two men composing it, the untamed and the candi- date for citizenship, in mutual dissension pulled it down. He perished of his weakness, but it was a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the blot does not over- shadow his life. His end was a derision because the animal in him ran him unchained and bounding to it. A stormy blood made wreck of a splendid intelligence. Yet they that pronounce over him the ordinary fatalistic epi- taph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom of men measuring the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, should pause to think whether fool or madman is the title for one who was a zealous worker, respected by 156 THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS great heads of Ms time, acknowledged the head of the voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we have seen, insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer fires through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to ruin. As little was he the vanished god whom his working people hailed deplor- ingly on the long procession of his remains from city to city under charge of the baroness. That last word of his history ridicules the eulogy of partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of worshipping is to conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant : for truth will have her just pro- portions, and vindicates herself upon a figure over-idealized by bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the balance of the two extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored : his last temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver, one of the lividly ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish where their character strikes the note of discord with life ; for otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing demonia- cally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs. The characters of the hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic ; not many are of a stature and a complexity calling for the junction of the two Muses to name them. While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, the woman, poor Clotilde, astonished her com- patriots by passing comedy and tragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slain Alvan. In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect our knowledge of her. It was a gentle youth ; her parents urged her to it : a particular letter, the letter of the chal- lenge to her father, besliming her, was shown; ~a hideou? provocation pushed to the foullest. Who can blame Princ^ Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery than he ? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, the never extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little of life appearing to remain to him. Before heaven he was guiltless. He wa» ^ood. Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, d^^A THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS 157 she rose out of nothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make a good youth happy, or nurse him sinking — be of that use. Besides he was a refuge from the roof of her parents. She shut her eyes on the past, sure of his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense of being, she prized above other virtues, and perhaps she had a fancy that to be allied to it was to be doing good. After a few months she buried him. From that day, or it may be, on her marriage day, her heart was Alvan's. Years later she wrote her version of the story, not sparing herself so much as she supposed. Providence and her parents were not forgiven. But as we are in her debt for some instruction, she may now be suffered to go. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date tO\ which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. mm-'^ t'AK 1 1 i 966 mz 'eeBSRCiI ^^ tR m %yk ETVEtr DtrTW^9"?M LOAN DEPT. m ?■ ^ ^QQ^ LD 21A-60rH-10,'65 (F7763sl0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley J^^ i?