Was she so small a thing?  Not if she succumbed.  She was petty, vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted:  she cast an evil beam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were by his pure intentions and the approbation of society.  But he had a broad full heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her, uplifting her, richly endowing her.  No meanness of heart was in him.  He lay down at night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness.  ’Tomorrow! you bird of to-morrow!’ he let fly his good-night to her.

CHAPTER XV

He slept.  Near upon morning he roused with his tender fit strong on him, but speechless in the waking as it had been dreamless in sleep.  It was a happy load on his breast, a life about to be born, and he thought that a wife beside him would give it language.  She should have, for she would call out, his thousand flitting ideas now dropped on barren ground for want of her fair bosom to inspire, to vivify, to receive.  Poetry laid a hand on him:  his desire of the wife, the children, the citizen’s good name—­of these our simple civilized ambitions—­was lowly of the earth, throbbing of earth, and at the same time magnified beyond scope of speech in vast images and emblems resembling ranges of Olympian cloud round the blue above earth, all to be decipherable, all utterable, when she was by.  What commoner word!—­yet wife seemed to him the word most reverberating of the secret sought after by man, fullest at once of fruit and of mystery, or of that light in the heart of mystery which makes it magically fruitful.

He felt the presence of Clotilde behind the word; but in truth the delicate sensations breeding these half-thoughts of his, as he lay between sleeping and waking, shrank from conjuring up the face of the woman who had wounded them, and a certain instinct to preserve and be sure of his present breathing-space of luxurious tranquillity kept her veiled.  Soon he would see her as his wife, and then she would be she, unveiled ravishingly, the only she, the only wife!  He knew the cloud he clasped for Clotilde enough to be at pains to shun a possible prospect of his execrating it.  Oh, the only she, the only wife! the wild man’s reclaimer! the sweet abundant valley and channel of his river of existence henceforward!  Doubting her in the slightest was doubting her human.  It is the brain, the satanic brain which will ever be pressing to cast its shadows:  the heart is clearer and truer.

He multiplied images, projected visions, nestled in his throbs to drug and dance his brain.  He snatched at the beauty of a day that outrolled the whole Alpine hand-in-hand of radiant heaven-climbers for an assurance of predestined celestial beneficence; and again, shadowily thoughtful of the littleness of the thing he exalted and claimed, he staked his reason on the positive blessing to come to him before nightfall, telling himself calmly that he did so because there would be madness in expecting it otherwise:  he asked for so little!  Since he asked for so little, to suppose that it would not be granted was irrational.  None but a very coward could hesitate to stake his all on the issue.