Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and had a languid willingness to gain outward comfort.  To be caressed a little by her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after her heavy scourging.  She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made them seem a soft reminder of what life had been.  Alvan had gone.  Her natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire relinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber.  He had gone; he had committed an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain provoking, that was too severe for him:  he was not the lover he fancied himself, or not the lord of men she had fancied him.  Her excessive misery would not suffer a picture of him, not one clear recollection of him, to stand before her.  He who should have been at hand, had gone, and she was fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being abandoned, her blank night of imagination felt that there was nothing left for her save to fall upon those nearest.

She gave her submission to her mother.  In her mind, during the last wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran:  ’He may come, and I am his if he comes:  and if not, I am bound to my people.’  He had taught her to rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting herself loose from him.  In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to believe if the saint will appear.  However, she submitted.  Then there was joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.

CHAPTER IX

After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath.  He proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing his heart’s intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and was on a strange and tangled one.  The sense of power in him was leonine enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path:  yet did that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.  They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be acting his part, brilliant though it was.  He crammed his energy into his idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously.  Before the world, it would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world acclaiming him: 

’Alvan’s wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law, from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman!  Alvan, the republican, is eminently a citizen.  Consider his past life by that test of his character.’

He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become, through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower.  Lower, of course, the multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they have in exchange for it is not an independent one.  Ceasing to be a social rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position.