reduced her to cling to the semblance of it only.
‘I marry Alvan!’ was her iterated answer
to her father, on his visits to see whether he had
yet broken her; and she spoke with the desperate firmness
of weak creatures that strive to nail themselves to
the sound of it. He listened and named his time
for returning. The tug between rigour and endurance
continued for about forty hours. She then thought,
in an exhaustion: ’Strange that my father
should be so fiercely excited against this man!
Can he have reasons I have not heard of?’
Her father’s unwonted harshness suggested the
question in her quailing nature, which was beginning
to have a movement to kiss the whip. The question
set her thinking of the reasons she knew. She
saw them involuntarily from the side of parents, and
they wore a sinister appearance; in reality her present
scourging was due to them as well as to Alvan’s
fatal decision. Her misery was traceable to his
conduct and his judgement—both bad.
And yet all this while he might be working to release
her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to the
side of her lover against these executioner parents,
and scribbled to him as well as she could under the
cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to appear.
She spent her heart on it. A note to her friend,
the English lady, protested her love for Alvan, but
with less abandonment, with a frozen resignation to
the loss of him—all around her was so dark!
By-and-by there was a scratching at her door.
The maid whom she trusted brought her news of Alvan:
outside the door and in, the maid and mistress knelt.
Hope flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the
whispers were exchanged through the partition.
‘Where is he?’
‘Gone.’
‘But where?’
‘He has left the city.’
Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the
door: that one for Alvan she retained, stung
by his desertion of her, and thinking practically
that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without
an address. She did not ask herself whether
the maid’s information was honest, for she wanted
to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.
She wept through the night. It was one of those
nights of the torrents of tears which wash away all
save the adamantine within us, if there be ought of
that besides the breathing structure. The reason
why she wept with so delirious a persistency was,
that her nature felt the necessity for draining her
of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished
the love whereby she was tormented. They do
not weep thus who have a heart for the struggle.
In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no
longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought:
in other words, unable any further to contend.