I MUST have stared like a madman. For very fear of my own violence, I
dared not move or speak. Mademoiselle Ottilie, or, to call her by her
proper name, Madame de Jennico, very composedly removed her veil from
her hair, pushed back her hood, and withdrew the hand which I still
unconsciously clutched. Then she turned and looked at me as if waiting
for me to speak first. I said in a sort of whisper:
“What does this mean?”
“It means, Monsieur de Jennico, that, for your own good, you have been
deceived.”
There was a little quiver in her voice. Was it fear? Was it mockery? I
thought the latter, and the strenuous control I was endeavouring to put
upon my seething passion of fury and bewilderment broke down. I threw
up my arms, the natural gesture of a man driven beyond bounds, and as
I did so felt the figure beside me make a sudden, abrupt movement. I
thought that she shrank from me—that she feared lest I, _I_, Basil
Jennico, would strike _her_, a woman! This aroused me at once to a
sense of my own position, and at the same time to one of bitterest
contempt for her. But as I wheeled round to gaze at her, I saw that
whatever charges might be laid upon her—and God knows she had wrought
a singular evil upon me!—the accusation of cowardice could not be part
of them. Her face showed white, indeed, in the pale light, her features
set; but her eyes looked fearlessly into mine. Every line of her figure
expressed the most dauntless determination. She was braced to endure,
ready to face, what she had drawn upon herself. This was no craven,
rather the very spirit of daring.
“In God’s name,” I cried, “why have you done this?”
“And did you think,” she said, looking at me, I thought, with a
sort of pity, “that princesses, out of fairy tales, are so ready to
marry lovers of low degree, no matter how rich or how gallant? Oh, I
know what you would say—that you are well-born; but for all that,
princesses do not wed with such as you, sir!”
Every drop of my blood revolted against the smart of this humiliation.
Stammering and protesting, my wrath overflowed my lips.
“But this deception,—this impossible, insane fraud,—what is its
object? What is _your_ object? You encouraged me—you incited me.
Confusion!” I cried and clasped my head. “I think I am going mad!”
“Her Serene Highness thought that she would like to see me settled in
life,” said my bride, with the old look of derision on her face.
I seized her hand.
“It was the Princess’s plan, then?” I asked in a whisper; and it seemed
to me as if everything turned to crimson before my eyes.
She met my look—and it must have been a terrible one—with the same
dauntlessness as before, and answered, after a little pause, with cool
deliberation:
“Yes, it was the Princess’s plan.”
The carriage drove on through the rain; and again there was silence
between us. My pulses beat loud in my ears; I saw, as if written in
fire, the whole devilish plot to humiliate me for my presumption. I saw
myself as I must appear to that high-born lady—a ridiculous aspirant
whose claim was too absurd even to be seriously dealt with. And she,
the creature who had lent herself to my shame, without whose glib
tongue and pert audacious counsels I had never presumed, who had dared
to carry out, smiling, so gross a fraud, to wear my ring and front me
still—how was I to deal with her?
These were the thoughts that surged backward and forwards in my mind,
futile wreckage on stormy sea, in the first passion of my anger.
“You know,” I said at last, and felt like a man who touches solid earth
at last, “that this is no marriage.”
Her countenance expressed at this the most open amazement and the most
righteous indignation.
“How, sir,” she cried—“has not the priest wedded us? Are we not of the
same faith, and does not the same Church bind us? Have not we together
received a most solemn sacrament? Have not you, Basil, and I, Marie
Ottilie, sworn faith to each other until death do us part? You may like
it or not, Monsieur de Jennico, but we are none the less man and wife,
as fast as Church can make us.”
As she spoke she smiled again, and looked at me with that dimple coming
and going beside the curve of her lip.
As they say men do at the point of some violent death, so I saw in the
space of a second my whole life stretched before me, past and future.
I saw the two alternatives that lay to my hand, and their full
consequences.
I knew what the audacious little deceiver beside me ignored—that it
rested upon my pleasure alone to acknowledge or not the validity of
this marriage. Let me take the step which as a man of honour I ought
to take, which as a Jennico and my uncle’s heir I was pledged in
conscience to take, it was to hold myself up to universal mockery—and
I should lay bare before a grinning world the whole extent of my
pretensions and their requital.
On the other hand, let me keep my secret for a while and seemingly
accept my wife: the whole point of the cursed jest would fail.
Let me show the Princess that my love for her was not so overpowering,
nor my disappointment so heart-breaking, but that I had been able to
find temporary compensation in the substitute with whom she had herself
provided me. There are more souls lost, I believe, through the fear of
ridicule than through all the temptations of the world, the flesh, and
the devil!
My resolution was promptly taken: my revenge would be more exquisite
and subtle than the trick that had been played upon me.
I would take her to my home, this damsel whom no feeling of maidenly
restraint, of womanly compassion, had kept from acting so base a part;
and for a while, at least, not all the world should guess but that
in winning her my dearest wish had been accomplished. Afterwards,
when I had tamed that insolent spirit, when I had taught this wild
tassel-gentle to come to my hand and fly at my bidding—and I smiled
to myself as I laid that plan which was full as cruel as the deception
that had been practised upon me, and which I am ashamed to set out in
black and white before me now—afterwards, when I chose to repudiate
the woman who had usurped my name through the most barefaced imposture,
if I knew the law both of land and Church, I could not be gainsaid.
I had warned her that this marriage was no marriage. What could a
gentleman do more?
A sudden calmness fell over me; it struck me that the laugh would be on
my side after all.
My companion was first to speak. She settled herself in the corner of
the carriage something like a bird that settles down in its nest, and,
still with her eyes, which now looked very dark in the uncertain light,
fixed upon me, said in a tone of the utmost security:
“You can beat me of course, if you like, and you can murder me if you
are very, very angry; but you cannot undo what is done. I am your
wife!” She gave a little nod which was the perfection of impudence.
She was like some wild thing of the woods that has never seen a human
being before, and is absolutely fearless because of its absolute
ignorance. I ought to have pitied her, seeing how young, how childish,
she was. But though there sprang into my heart strange feelings,
and that dimple tempted me more and more, there was no relenting in
my angry soul. Only I told myself that my revenge would be sweet.
And I was half distraught, I think, between the conflict of pride,
disappointment, and the strange alluring charm that this being who had
so betrayed me was yet beginning to have upon me.
The speed of our four horses was slackening; we were already on the
mountain road which led to my castle. There was a glimmer of moon
again, the rain-beat was silent on the panes, and I could see from
a turning in the road the red gleam of the torch-bearers whom I had
ordered for the bridal welcome.
The monstrous absurdity of the situation struck me afresh, and my
resolution grew firmer. How could I expose myself, a poor tricked fool,
to the eyes of that people who regarded me as something not unlike a
demi-god? No, I would keep the woman. She had sought me, not I her. I
would keep her for a space at least, and let no man suspect that she
was not my choice. And then, in the ripeness of time, when I would sell
this old rook’s nest and betake me home to England as a dutiful nephew,
why, then my lady Princess should have her maid of honour back again,
and see if she would find it so easy to settle her in life once more!
What pity should I have upon her who had no pity for me, who had sold
her maiden pride in such a sordid barter for a husband? This was no
mere tool of a woman’s scorn. No! Contemned by her I had wooed, played
with, no doubt I had been; but I had seen enough of the relations of
the two girls not to know well who was the moving spirit in all their
actions. This lady had had an eye to her own interests while lending
herself to my humiliation. Thinking upon it now with as cool a brain as
I might,—and once I had settled upon my resolve, the first frenzy of
my rage died away,—I told myself that the new Madam Jennico lied when
she said it was altogether the Princess’s plan; and indeed I afterwards
heard from her own lips that in this I had guessed but a third of the
actual truth.
And now, as we were drawing close to the first post where my
over-docile and zealous retainers were already raising a fearful
clamour, and I must perforce assume some attitude to face the people,
I turned to my strange bride, and said to her:
“Do you think, then, it is the right of a husband to strike or slay his
wife? If so, I marvel that you should have been so eager to enter upon
the wedded state.”
She put out her hand to me, and for the first time her composure
wavered. The tears welled into her eyes and her lip quivered.
“No,” she said; “and therefore I chose you, Monsieur de Jennico, not
for your fine riches, not for your pedigree,”—and here, the little
demon! it seemed she could not refrain from a malicious smile under
the very mist of her tears,—“but because you are an Englishman, and
incapable of harshness to a woman.”
“And so,” said I, not believing her disinterested asseveration a
whit, but with a queer feeling at my heart at once bitterly angry at
each word that betrayed the determination of her deceit and her most
unwomanly machinations, and yet, and yet strangely melted to her, “it
is reckoning on my weak good-nature that you have played me this trick?”
“No, sir,” she said, flushing, “I reckoned on your manliness.” And then
she added, with the most singular simplicity: “I liked you, besides,
too well to see you unhappily married, and the other Ottilie would
have made you a wretched wife.”
I burst out laughing, for, by the manes of my great-uncle, the
explanation was comic! And she fell to laughing too,—my servants must
have thought we were a merry couple! And, as she laughed and I looked
at her, knowing her now my own, and looking at her therefore with
other eyes, I deemed I had never seen a woman laugh to such bewitching
purpose! And though I was full of my cruel intent, and though I dubbed
her false and shameless and as deceitful a little cat as ever a man
could meet, yet the dimple drew me, and I put my arms around her and
kissed it. _As my lips touched hers I knew I was a lost man!_
The next moment we were surrounded with a tribe of leaping peasants,
the horses were plunging, torches were waving and casting shadows
upon the savage, laughing faces. If I had cursed myself for my happy
thought before, I cursed myself still more now; but the situation had
to be accepted. And the way in which my bride, blushing crimson from
my kiss,—she who had no blush to spare for herself before this night,
adapted herself to it was a marvel to me, as indeed all that I was to
see or learn of her during our brief moon of wedded life was likewise
to prove.
I am bound to say that the Princess herself could not have behaved with
a better grace than this burgher daughter amid the wild peasants and
their almost Eastern fashion of receiving their liege lady.
Within a little distance of the house it became impossible to advance
with the carriage, and we were fain to order a halt and alight all
in the stormy wind, and proceed on foot through the throng which had
gathered thick and close about the gates, and which even Schultz’s
stout cane failed to disperse. My wife—I did not call her so then
in my mind, but now I can call her by no other name—my wife passed
through them as if she had done nothing all her life but receive the
homage of the people. She gave her hand to be kissed to half a hundred
fierce lips; she smiled at the poor women who clutched the hem of her
gown and knelt before her. The flush my kiss had called into being had
not yet faded from her cheek; there was a light in her eye, a smile
upon her lip. As I looked at her and watched I could not but admit that
there was no need for me to feel ashamed of her, that night.
I had sworn to give my bride a royal reception, and a royal reception
she received.
Schultz had generously carried out his instructions. We sat down to a
sumptuous meal which would not have misbefitted the Emperor himself.
I could not eat. The acclamations and the rejoicings struck cold upon
my ear. But the bride—enigma to me then as now—sat erect in her great
chair at the other end of the great table, and smiled and drank and
feasted daintily, and met my eye now and again with as pretty and as
blushing a look as if I had chosen her among a thousand. The gipsies
played their maddening music—the music of my dream—and the cries
in the courtyard rose now and then to a very clamour of enthusiasm.
Schultz, with a truly German sentimentality, had presented his new
mistress with a large bouquet of white flowers. The smell of them
turned me faint. I knew that in the great room beyond, all illuminated
by a hundred wax candles, was the portrait of my uncle, stern and
solitary. I would not have dared to go into that room that night to
have met the look of his single watchful eye.
And yet, O God! how are we made and of what strange clay! What would
I not give now to be back at that hour! What would I not give to see
her there at the head of my board once more! What is all the world to
me—what all the traditions of my family—what even the knowledge of
her deceit and my humiliation, compared with the waste and desolation
of my life without her!