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Pride of Jennico

[113] <h2 class="p4">CHAPTER VIII</h2> 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[114] 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. [115] 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[116] 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[117] 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[118] 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[119] 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[120] 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[121] 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[122] 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[123] 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. <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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