AND now what I must set down of myself is so passing strange that
had I not, I myself, lived through it, were I not now in an earthly
hell for the mere want of her, I could not have believed that human
nature—above all the superior quality of human nature appertaining to
Basil Jennico—could be so weak a thing.
I had meant to be master: I found myself a slave! And slave of what?
A dimple, a pair of yellow eyes, veiled by long black lashes—a saucy
child!
I had meant to have held her merely as my toy, at the whim of my will
and pleasure: and behold! the very sound of her voice, the fall of her
light foot, would set my blood leaping; under the glance of her wilful
eye my whole being would become as wax to the flame.
In olden days people would have said I was bewitched.
I think, looking back on it all now, that it was perhaps her singular
dissimilarity from any other woman I had ever met that began the spell.
Had she opposed to my anger, on that memorable night of our marriage,
the ordinary arms of a woman discovered; had she wept, implored,
bewailed her fate, who shall say that, even at the cost of my vanity,
I might not have driven her straight back to her Princess? Who shall
say that I should have wished to keep her, even to save myself from
ridicule? It is impossible for me now to unravel the tangled threads
of that woof that has proved the winding-sheet of my young happiness;
but this I know—this of my baseness and my better nature—that once I
had kissed her I was no longer a free man. And every day that passed,
every hour I spent beside her, welded closer and firmer the chains of
my servitude.
She was an enigma which I ever failed to solve. That alone was
alluring. Judged by her actions, most barefaced little schemer,
most arrant adventuress plotting for a wealthy match, there was
yet something about her which absolutely forbade me to harbour in
her presence an unworthy thought of her. Guilty of deceit such as
hers had been towards me, she ought to have displayed either a
conscience-stricken or a brazen soul: I found her emanate an atmosphere
not only of childlike innocence but of lofty purity that often made me
blush for my grosser imaginings.
She ought, by rights, to have feared me—to have been humble at least:
she was as proud as Lucifer before the fall and as fearless as he when
he dared defy his Creator. She ought to have mistrusted me, shown doubt
of how I would treat her: and alas! in what words could I describe the
confidence she gave me? so generous, so sublime, so guileless. It would
have forced one less enamoured than myself into endeavouring to deserve
it for very shame!
A creature of infinite variety of moods, with never a sour one among
them; the serenest temper and the merriest heart I have ever known; a
laugh to make an old man young, and a smile to make a young man mad; as
fresh as spring; as young and as fanciful! I never knew in what word
she would answer me, what thing she would do, in what humour I should
find her. Yet her tact was exquisite. She dared all and never bruised
a fibre (till that last terrible day, my poor lost love!). And besides
and beyond this, there was yet another thing about her which drew me on
till I was all lost in love. She was elusive. I never felt sure of her,
never felt that she was wholly mine. Her tenderness—oh, my God, her
tenderness!—was divine, and yet I felt I had not all she had to give.
There was still a secret hanging upon that exquisite lip, a mystery
that I had yet to solve, a land that lay unexplored before me. And it
comes upon me like madness, now that she is gone from me, perhaps for
ever, that I may never know the word of the riddle.
I have said that the past is like a dream to look back upon; no part of
it is more dreamlike than the days which followed my strange wedding.
They seemed to melt into each other, and yet it is the memory of them
which is at once my joy and my torture now.
At first she did not touch, nor did I, upon the question which lay
like a covered fire always smouldering between us; and in a while it
came about with me that I lived as a gambler upon the pleasure of
the moment. And though in my heart I had not told myself yet that I
would give up my revenge,—though it was hidden there, a sleeping
viper, cruel and implacable,—I strove to forget it, strove to think
neither of the future nor of the past. I hung a curtain over my uncle’s
picture, at which old János nearly broke his heart. I rolled up the
pedigree very tight and rammed it into a drawer ... and the autumn days
seemed all too short for the golden hours they gave me.
No one came to disturb us in our solitude, no hint from the outer
world. We two were as apart in our honeymoon as the most jealous
lovers could wish. I knew not what had become of the Princess. In very
truth I could not bear to think of her; the memory of the absurd part I
had been made to play was so unpalatable, was associated with so much
that was painful and humiliating, and brought with it such a train of
disquieting reflections that I drove it from me systematically. I never
wanted to see the woman again, to hear her voice, or even learn what
had become of her. That I never had one particle of lover’s love for
her was plainer than ever to me now, in the midst of the new feelings
with which my unsought bride inspired me. I knew what love meant at
last, and would at times be filled with an angry contempt for myself,
that she who had proved herself so all unworthy should be the one to
have this power upon me.
Thus the days went by quite aimlessly. And by-and-by as they went the
thought of what I had planned to do became less and less welcome to
me, not (to my shame be it said) for its wickedness, but because I
could not contemplate life without my present happiness. And after yet
a while the idea (at first rejected as monstrous, impossible, nay,
even as a base breach of faith to my dead uncle) that I might make the
sacrifice of my Jennico pride and actually content myself after all
with this unfit alliance, began to take shape within me. Gradually
this idea grew dearer to me hour by hour, though I still in secret
held to the possibility of my other plan, as a sort of “rod in pickle”
over the head of my perverse companion, and caressed it now and again
in my inmost soul—when she was most provoking—as a method to bring
her to my knees in dire humiliation, but only to have the ultimate
sweetness of nobly forgiving her. For Ottilie was far from showing a
proper spirit of contrition or a fitting sense of what she owed me; and
this galled me at times to the quick. I had never ceased to entertain
the resolve of taming the wild little lady, although I found it
increasingly difficult to begin the process.
Alone we were by no means lonely, even though the days fell away into
a month’s length. We rode together, we drove, we walked; she chattered
like a magpie, and I never knew a second’s dulness. She whipped my
blood for me like a frosty wind, and, or so it seemed to me, took a
new bloom, a new beauty in her happiness. For she was happy. The only
sour visage in Tollendhal at the time was, I think, that of the strange
nurse. I had found her waiting in my wife’s bedroom the night of our
homecoming. She never spoke to me during the whole time of her stay,
nor to Schultz, although he was her countryman. With the others, of
course (saving János) she could not have exchanged a word, and but
that she spoke with her mistress sometimes, I should have thought her
dumb. That woman hated me. I have seen her eyes follow me about as if
she would willingly murder me; but her nursling she loved in quite as
vehement a fashion, and therefore I bore with her.
We had been married a week when Ottilie first made allusion to the
Princess. We were to ride out on that day, and she came down to
breakfast all equipped but for one boot.
I have never seen so daintily untidy a person as she was in all my
life. Her hair smelt of fresh violets, but there was always a twist
out of place, or a little curl that had broken loose. Her clothes were
of singular fineness and richness, but she would tear them and tatter
them like a very schoolgirl romp. And so that morning she tripped in
with one pink satin bedroom slipper and one yellow leather riding boot.
I would not let her send for her dark-visaged attendant to repair the
neglect, but fetched the boot myself and knelt to put it on. As I took
off the slipper I paused for a moment weighing it in my hand. It was
so little a thing, so slender, so pretty! She looked down at me with a
smile, and said composedly:
“Do you think, sir, that the other Ottilie could have put on that shoe?”
It was, as I said, the first time that the subject had been mentioned
between us since the night of our marriage. I felt as if a cloud came
over me, and looked up darkly at her. It was not wise, surely, I
thought in my heart, to touch upon what I was willing to forget. But
she had no misgiving. She slipped out from under her long riding skirt
the small unbooted foot in its shining pink silk stocking, and said:
“You would _not_ have liked, Monsieur de Jennico, to have acted
lady’s-maid to her, for you are very fastidious, as it did not take me
long to find out. Oh,” she went on, “if you knew how grateful you ought
to be to me for preventing you from marrying her! You would have been
so unhappy, and you deserved a better fate.”
“But I thought,” said I—and such was my weakness that the sight of her
pretty foot took away my anger, and I was all lost in the discovery of
how everything about her seemed to curve: her hair in its ripples, her
lip in its arch, her nostrils, her little chin, her lithe young waist,
and now, her foot—“I thought,” and as I spoke I took it into my hand,
“it was the Princess’s plan.”
“Did I say so?” she said lightly. “That woman was never capable of
a plan in her life! No, sir, I always made her do what I liked. Her
intelligence was just brilliant enough to allow her to realise that she
had better follow my advice. Will you put on my boot, sir? Ah! what
treachery.” I held her tightly by the heel and looked up well pleased
at her laughing face—I loved to watch her laugh—and then I kissed
her silk stocking and put the boot on. To such depths had I come in my
unreasoning infatuation. I felt no anger with her for the revelation
which, indeed, as I think I have previously set down, was from the
beginning scarcely news to me. I had yet to learn how completely
innocent of all complicity in the deception played upon me was her
poor Serenity, how innocent even of the pride and contempt I still
attributed to her!
The season for the chase had opened; once or twice I had already been
out with the keepers after stags, or wild boars, and my wife, a pretty
figure in her three-cornered hat and fine green riding suit, had ridden
courageously at my side. At the beginning of the third week we made a
journey higher into the mountains and stayed a few days at a certain
hunting-box, the absolute isolation of which seemed by contrast to
make Tollendhal a very vortex. The wild place pleased her fancy. We
had some splendid boar-hunting in the almost inaccessible passes of
the mountains, and Ottilie showed herself as keen at the chase as I,
although, woman-like, she shrank from the finish. She vowed she loved
the loneliness, the simplicity, of the rough wood-built lodge, the
savageness of the scenery. She loved too the novel excitement of the
life, the long day’s riding, the sleepy supper by the roaring wood
fire, with the howl of the dogs outside, and the cry of the autumn wind
about the heights. She begged me with pretty insistence that we should
come back and spend the best part of the coming month in this airy nest.
“We are more alone,” she said coaxingly, with one of her rare fits of
tenderness. “You are more mine, Basil.” And I promised her that we
should only return to Tollendhal to settle matters with the steward and
provide ourselves with what we wanted, and then that we should have
a new honeymoon. I would have promised anything at such a moment. It
is the truth that in those days, somehow, we had, as she said, grown
closer to each other.
On the last night, wearied out by the long hours on horseback, she had
fallen asleep as she sat in a great carved wooden chair by the flaming
hearth, while I sat upon the other side, wakeful, watching her, full of
thought. She looked all a child as she slept, her face small and pale
and tired, the shadow of the long lashes very black upon her cheeks.
And then came upon me like a sort of nightmare the memory of what I had
meant to make of this young creature who had trusted herself to me. For
the first time I faced my future boldly, and took a great resolve in
the silence, listening to the fall of her light breath, and the sullen
roar of the wind in the pine forest without.
I resolved to sacrifice my pride and keep my low-born wife.