Tresten nodded a protesting assent.
‘Not quite so bad,’ he said, with the encouraging smile which could persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. ‘Of the two, if you two are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She’ll slip him, she’s an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them; but she’s an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp! as you say. She was not worth carrying off. I consented to try it to quiet him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we must take pattern by him. It’s a mad love.’
‘A Titan’s love!’ the baroness exclaimed, groaning. ‘The woman!—no matter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of a great man’s passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents fraught with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it sounds badly, but there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, for whom no degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to him! He—that great he—covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takes the flame—the pure spirit of her—to himself. Were men like him!—they would have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morally on alpine elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his fellows. Do not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted him in a storm, and the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous, cruel—yes, but she blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author of his madness. It is the snake’s nature of the girl which distracts him; she is in his blood. Had she come to me, I would have helped her to cure him; or had you succeeded in carrying her off, I would have stood by their union; or were she a different creature, and not the shifty thing she is, I could desire him to win her. A peasant girl, a workman’s daughter, a tradesman’s, a professional singer, actress, artist—I would have given my hand to one of these in good faith, thankful to her! As it is, I have acted in obedience to his wishes, without idle remonstrances—I know him too well; and with as much cordiality as I could put into an evil service. She will drag him down, down, Tresten!’
‘They are not joined yet,’ said the colonel.
‘She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me—her letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit—throws a light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is one of the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that palling, they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark before the time is ripe—ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though god-like he seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in any hands. This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.’
‘She shows mighty little of the inclination,’ said the colonel.
‘To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!’
The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.
‘Ultimately?’ the baroness asked, and brooded. ‘But she will have to see him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she does.’
‘She will shirk the interview,’ Tresten remarked. ‘Supposing they meet: I don’t think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has an hour’s grace to catch her up and be off with her. She’s as calm as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly as a clock’s pendulum. I’ve spoken to many a sentinel outpost who wasn’t deader on the subject in monosyllables than mademoiselle. She has a military erectness, and answers you and looks you straight at the eyes, perfectly unabashed by your seeing “the girl she is,” as you say. She looked at me downright defying me to despise her. Alvan has been tricked by her colour: she’s icy. She has no passion. She acts up to him when they’re together, and that deceives him. I doubt her having blood—there’s no heat in it, if she has.’