He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it yet, being too anxious to sign the peace.  He felt as it were a blow startling him from sleep.  His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect between man and man.  The strange matter was behind their bearing, which indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history.  He could not raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied contempt of his character:  with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing.  The bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance.  The fate of the noble Genoese conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy’s readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of the powers fitting him for battle.  A man such as Alvan, arrested on his career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!—­think of it!  What was this girl in a life like his?  But, oh! the question was no sooner asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant, confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her.  Why had he done it?  Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired.  She warned him against the step.  But he, proud of his armoury, went his way.  He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going under; worse, for the drowner’s delirium swirls but a minute in the gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the night.

He was only calmer when morning came.  Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error, it has none.  The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force opposing him.  He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of the position it explained.  Great enemies, great undertakings, would have revived him as they had always revived and fortified.  But here was a stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms.  By shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing reduced him to hesitation.  And the thing had weapons to shoot at him; his history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole quality of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of one for a mark.