gallant side as well as a bad; an excellent case for
rhetoric. Marko supplied the world’s opinion
of the affair, bravely owning it to be not unfavourable.
Her worthy relatives, the Frau v. Crestow and
husband, had very properly furnished a report to the
family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over
it, with the epithets applied to Alvan, intimated
how he would have been received on a visit to demand
her in marriage. There was no chance of her being
allowed to enter houses where this ‘rageing
demagogue and popular buffoon’ was a guest;
his name was banished from her hearing, so she was
compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable
to take such services without rewarding him, she fondled:
it pained her to see him suffer. Those who toss
crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and then
be moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them,
but the dumb mendicant’s delight in it is winning,
and a little cannot hurt. Besides, if any one
had a claim on her it was the prince; and as he was
always adoring, never importunate, he restored her
to the pedestal she had been really rudely shaken from
by that other who had caught her up suddenly into
the air, and dropped her! A hand abandoned to
her slave rewarded him immeasurably. A heightening
of the reward almost took his life. In the peacefulness
of dealing with a submissive love that made her queenly,
the royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool,
seemed predatory and insolent. Thus, after that
scene of ‘first love,’ in which she had
been actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill
or two for the recovering of him) reconciled to the
not seeing of the noble actor; for nothing could erase
the scene—it was historic; and Alvan would
always be thought of as a delicious electricity.
She and Marko were together on the summer excursion
of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in
her delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.
True gentlemen are imperfectly valued when they are
under the shadow of giants; but still Clotilde’s
experience of a giant’s manners was favourable
to the liberty she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy
of this kind, rather warmer than her word for it would
imply. She owned that she could better live the
poetic life—that is, trifle with fire and
reflect on its charms in the society of Marko.
He was very young, he was little more than an adolescent,
and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string
or slacken him. One could play on him securely,
thinking of a distant day —and some shipwreck
of herself for an interlude—when he might
be made happy.
Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in her likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-knowledge,