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Pride of Jennico

[124] <h2 class="p4">CHAPTER IX</h2> It was full of this resolve, with an uplifted consciousness of my own virtue, that I started next morning beside her upon our homeward way. The day was very bright; and the bare trees, with here and there a yellow or red leaf, showed against a sky of palest blue. There was a frost about us, and our horses were fresh and full of pranks, as we wound down the rocky paths. My wife, too, was in a skittish humour, which irritated me a little as being ill-assorted to my own high-strung feelings and my secret sense of magnanimity. She mocked at my solemn face, she sang ends of silly songs to herself. I would have spoken to her of what was on my heart; I would have had her grateful to me, conscious of her own sin and my generosity. But I could get her to hearken to no serious speech. She called me “Monsieur de la Faridondaine,” and plucked a bunch of ash berries as we rode, and stuck them over one ear, and asked me, her face dimpling, if it was not becoming to her. And then, when I still urged that I would talk of grave matters, she pulled a grimace, and fell to mimicking Schultz[125] with “Jawohl, Gnädigster Herr,” till I was fain to laugh with her and put off my sermon till the audience was better disposed. But my heart was something sore against her. And when we reached home, I found that awaiting me which awoke a flame of the fierce resentment of the first hour of discovery. It was a letter from my mother in answer to the wild, inflated, triumphant lucubration I had sent her on the eve of my wedding-day. I had, of course, not attempted to undeceive her—in fact, as I have already set down, it was only within the last twenty-four hours that I had settled upon a definite plan of action. My dear mother, who dearly loved, as she herself admitted, the princes of this earth, was in a tremendous flutter at my exalted alliance. I read her words, her proud congratulations, with a feeling of absolute nausea. My brother, she wrote, was torn betwixt a sense of the increased family importance and the greenest envy, that I, who had paid no price of honour for the gaining of them, should have risen to such heights of grandeur and wealth. Not hearing from me since the great announcement, she had ventured (so she confessed) to confide my secret to a few dear friends, and “it had got about strangely,” she added naïvely. The whole Catholic world, the whole English world of fashion, was ringing[126] with the news of the great Jennico match. In fact, the poor lady was as nearly beside herself with pride and glory when she wrote to me, as I had been when I gave her the news. I did not—I am glad to say this—I did not for a second waver in my resolution of fidelity to my wife, but I told myself, with an intolerable sense of injury, that I could never face the shame of returning to England again; that the full sacrifice entailed upon me was not only the degradation of an unsuitable alliance, but that hardest of trials to the true-blooded Englishman, perpetual expatriation! In this grim and bitter temper I marched into the room where I now sit, and drew back the curtain from my uncle’s picture and took forth the pedigree from its hidden recess. The old man wore, as I knew he would, a most severe countenance. But I turned my back upon him in a disrespectful fashion I had never dared display during his life, and spread out again that fateful roll of parchment on the table before me, while with penknife and pumicestone I sought to efface all traces of that vainglorious entry that mocked me in its clear black and white. The blood was surging in my head and singing in my ears, when I heard a light step, and looking up saw Ottilie. She could[127] not have come at a worse moment. She held letters in her hand, which upon seeing me she thrust into her pocket with a sly look and something of a blush. She too, it seemed, had found a courier awaiting her; the secretness of the action stirred the heat of my feelings against her yet more. But I strove to be calm and judicial. “Ottilie,” I said, “come here. I have to converse with you on matters of importance.” She drew near me; pouting and with a lagging step, like a naughty child. “That sacred pedigree,” she said, and thrust out her under-lip. She spoke in French, which gave the words altogether a different meaning, and in my then humour I was hugely shocked to hear such an expression from her lips. “You behave strangely,” I said, with coldness, not to be mollified by the half-pleading, half-mischievous glance she cast upon me, “and you speak like a child. There has been enough of childishness, enough of folly, in this business. It is time to be serious,” I said, and struck the table with my flat palm as I spoke. “Well, let us be serious,” she retorted, slapping the table too, and then sat down beside me, propping her chin upon her hands in her favourite[128] attitude. “Am I not serious?” she proceeded, looking at me with a face of mock solemnity. “Well, Mr. my husband, what do you wish of me?” “Have you ever thought, Ottilie,” said I, “of the position you have placed me in? I have been obliged to-day to come to a grave resolution—I have had to make up my mind to give up my country and remain here for the rest of my life. It is in direct defiance to my uncle’s commands and last wishes, and it is no pleasant thing to an Englishman to give up his native land.” “If so, why do it?” she said coolly. “I am quite willing to go to England. In fact, I should rather like it.” “Because, before heaven, madam,” said I, irritated beyond bounds, “you have left me no other alternative. Do you think I am going home to be a laughing-stock among my people?” “Then,” she said with lightning quickness, “you broke your promise of secrecy. It is your own fault: you should have kept your word.” Struck by the irrefutable truth of this remark, although at the same time my wrath was secretly accumulating against her for this systematic indifference to her own share in a transaction where she was the chief person to blame, I kept silence[129] for a moment, drumming with my fingers on the table. “Eh bien!” she said at last, with a note of amusement and tender indulgence in her voice as a mother might speak to her unreasonable infant. “This terrible resolution taken, what follows? You have effaced, I see, your entry in the famous pedigree, and you would now fill it up with the detail of your real alliance? Is that it?” I glanced up at her: her eyes were dancing with an eager light, her lip trembling as if over some merry word she yet forbore to speak. Her want of sympathy in sight of my evident distress was hard to bear. “Yes,” I answered, “the pedigree must be filled up. I don’t even know your whole name, nor who your father was, nor yet your mother. I have your word for it, however,” I said, and the sentence was bitter to me to speak, “that your family was originally of burgher origin.” “Put down,” she answered, “Marie Ottilie Pahlen, daughter of the deceased Herrn Geheimrath Baron Pahlen, Hof Doctor to his Serene Highness the Reigning Duke of Lausitz.” The pen dropped from my hand. “Your father was a doctor?” I asked in an extinguished voice. [130] “Ennobled,” she returned promptly, “after successfully piloting his Serene Highness through a bad attack of jaundice.” “And your mother?” I murmured, clinging yet to the hope that on the mother’s side at least the connection might prove a little more worthy of the House of Jennico. She hesitated and glanced at me. Once more I seemed to see some inner source of mirth bubble on her lip; or was it only that she was possessed by the very spirit of mischief? Anyhow, she forced her smile to gravity again and answered me steadily, while her eyes sought mine with a curious determined meaning at variance with the mock meekness of the rest of her countenance. “Put down, Monsieur de Jennico,—’and of Sophia Müller, likewise deceased,’ and add if you like, ’once personal maid to her Serene Highness the Dowager Duchess, Marie Ottilie of Lausitz.’” I sat like a man struck silly, and in the tide of fury that swept over me my single lucid thought was that if I spoke or moved I should disgrace myself. And she chose that moment, poor child, to come over to me and place her arms round my neck, and say caressingly in my ear: “Write it, write it, sir, and then tell me that, seeing that I am I, and that I should not be different[131] from myself were I the daughter of the Emperor, all this matters little to you since we love each other.” I put her from me: my hands were trembling, but I was very gentle. I brought her round to face me, and she awaited my answer with a triumphant smile. It was that smile undid me and her. She made too sure of me—she had conquered me too easily all along. “You ask overmuch,” I said when I could command my voice enough to speak, “you take overmuch for granted. You forget how you have deceived me; how you have betrayed me. I am willing,” I said, “to believe you have not been all to blame, that you were encouraged and upheld by another, but this does not exonerate you from the chief share in a very questionable transaction.” The words fell cuttingly. I saw how the smile faded from her face, saw how the pretty dimple lingered a second like a pale ghost of itself, and then was lost in the droop of her lip, which trembled like a chidden babe’s. And I took a cruel joy to think I had hit her at last. But in a second or two she spoke with all her old courage. “It is well,” she said, “to blame where blame is due. If you wish to blame any one for our marriage, blame me alone. The other Ottilie never[132] received your letter; never knew you wanted to marry her; had nothing to say to what you call my betrayal of you. She would have prevented this marriage if she could. Nay, I will tell you more: I believe she might even have married you had I given her the chance. But I knew you would marry her solely because of her position, of her title; that you had no love for her beyond your insane love of her royal blood. I thought you worthy of better things; I thought you could rise above so pitiable a weakness; I thought you could learn of love that love alone is worth living for! And if you have not learned, if indeed, my scholar, you have been taught nothing in love’s school, if you can lay bare your soul now and tell yourself that you would rather have had the wife you wanted in your overweening vanity than the wife I am to you, why then, sir, I have made a grievous mistake, and I am willing to acknowledge that I have committed an irrevocable wrong both to you and to myself.” Now, as she spoke, I was torn by a strange mixture of feelings, and my love for her contended with my pride, my wounded vanity, my sense of injury. I could not in truth answer that I would rather have been wedded to the Princess, for one thing had these weeks made clear to me above all[133] things, and that was that married life with her would have been intolerable. But my anger against the woman I did love in spite of myself was not lessened by the tone of reproachful superiority she assumed; and because of the truth of her rebuke it was the harder for my self-love to bear. Before I could muster words clear enough and severe enough to answer her with, she proceeded: “Come, Basil, come, rise above this failing which is so unworthy of you. Throw that musty old pedigree away before it eats all the manliness out of your life. What does it mean but that you can trace your family up to a greater number of probable rascals, hard and selfish old men, than another? Be proud of yourself for what you are; be proud of your forefathers, indeed, if they have done fine deeds of valour, or virtue; but this cant about birth for birth’s sake, about the superiority of aristocracy as aristocracy—what does it amount to? It is to me the most foolish of superstitions. Was that old man,” she asked, pointing to my uncle, who frowned upon her murderously—“was that old man a better man than his heiduck János? Was he a braver soldier? Was he a better servant to his master? Was he more honest in his dealings? shrewder in his counsel?[134] I tell you I honour János as much as I would have honoured him. I tell you that if I love you, I love you for what you are, not because you are descended from some ignorant savage king, not because you can boast that the blood of the worst of men and sovereigns, the most profligate, the most treacherous, the most faithless, Charles Stuart, runs in your veins—I hope, sir, as little of it as possible.” I sprang to my feet. To be thus rated by her who should be kneeling for forgiveness! It was intolerable. “I think,” I thundered, “that, considering your position, a little humility would be more becoming than this attitude! You should remember that you are here on tolerance only; that it is to my generosity alone that you owe the right to call yourself an honest woman.” “What do you mean?” said she, as fiercely as I had spoken myself. “I mean,” said I—“I mean, madam, that you are what I choose to make you. That marriage you so skilfully encompassed is, if I choose it, no marriage.” She put her hands to her head like one who has turned suddenly giddy. “You married me before God’s altar,” she said[135] in a sort of whisper; “you married me, and you took me home.” I was still too angry to stay my tongue. With a bitter laugh, “I married the Princess,” I said, “but I took the servant home.” A burning tide of blood rushed to her brow; I saw it unseeing, as a man does in passion; but I have lived that scene over and over again, waking and dreaming, since, and every detail of it is stamped upon my brain. Next she grew livid white, and spread out her hands, as though a precipice had suddenly opened before her; and then she cried: “And this is your English honour!” and turning on her heel she left me. The scorn of her tone cut me like a whip. I swore a mighty oath that I would never forgive her till she sued for pardon. She must be taught who was master. In solitude she should reflect, and learn to rue her sins to me—her audacity—her unwarrantable presumption—her ingratitude! All in my white heat of anger I summoned János and bade him tell his mistress’s nurse that I had gone into the mountains for a week. And then I ordered a fresh horse, and followed only by the old man, dashed off like one possessed into the rocky wastes. [136] Alone in the solitary hut, by that hearth where but the night previous my heart had overflowed with such tenderness for her, I sat and nursed my grievances and brooded upon my wrongs till they grew to overpowering size and multiplied a thousandfold; and curious it is that what I thought of most was the bitter unfairness to me, the monstrous injustice of her contempt, at the very moment when I had meant to sacrifice my life and prospects to her. I told myself she did not love me, had never loved me, and worked myself to a pitch of frenzy over that thought. The memory of her announcement on this afternoon, the full knowledge of her deceit, the confession of her worse than burgher origin, weighed not now one feather-weight in my resentment. That I had cast from me as the least of my troubles; so can a man change and so can love swallow up all other passions! No doubt, I told myself, she was mocking me now in her own mind; no doubt she reckoned that her poor infatuated fool would come creeping back with all promptitude and beg for her smile. She should learn at last that she had married a man; not till I saw her down at my very feet would I take her back to my breast. All next day I hunted in a bitter wind and in[137] a bitter temper. There were clouds arising, my huntsmen told me, that looked very like snow clouds, and I must beware being snowed up upon the height. I was in the humour to welcome hardship and even danger, and so the whole day we rode after an old rogue boar and came back in darkness, at no small risk, empty handed, and the roughness of my temper by no means improved. Next day the weather still held up, and again I hunted. My men must have wondered what had come over their erstwhile genial master. Even my uncle could not have shown them a harder rule or ridden them with less consideration through the hardest of ways in the teeth of the most fiendish of winds. That night, again, I sat and brooded by the leaping flame of the pine logs, but it was in a different mood. All my surly determination, my righteous indignation, had melted from me, leaving me as weak as water. Of a sudden in the closest heat of the chase there had come to me an awful vision of what I had done; a terrible swift realisation of the insult I had flung at the face of the woman who was indeed the wife of my heart and love. Oh, God, what had I done? I had sought to humble her—I had but debased myself! Through the whole day her words, “Is[138] this your English honour?” had rung a dismal rhythm in my ear to the beat of my horse’s hoofs on the hard ground, to the call of the horn amid the winding rocks. The vision of her faded smile, of her dimple paled to a pitiable ghost, of her babyish drooping lip, and then of her white face struck with such scorn, haunted me to madness. I sickened from my food as I sat to my supper, and put down my cup untasted. And now as the wind whistled and the foreboded storm was gathering upon us, the longing to see her, to be with her, to kneel at her feet—yes, I would now be the one to kneel—came upon me with such violence that I could not withstand it. I ordered my horses. I would listen to no remonstrance, no warning. I must return to Tollendhal, I said, were all the powers of darkness leagued against me. And return I did. It was a piece of foolhardiness in which I ran, unheeding, the risk of my life; but the Providence that protects madmen protected me that night, and Janos and I arrived in safety through a gale of wind and a fall of snow that might indeed have proved our death. All covered with rime I ran into the house and up to the door of her room. It was past midnight, and there I paused for a moment fearing to disturb her. [139] Two or three of the women came pattering down the passage to me and with expressive gestures addressed me volubly; one of the girls was weeping. I could not understand a word they said, but with a new terror I burst open the door of the bedroom. In this appalling dread I realised for the first time how I loved my wife! The room was all empty and all dark; I called for lights. There was no trace of her presence; her bed had not been slept in. Like a maniac I tore about the house, seeking her, shrieking her name, demanding explanations from those to whom my speech meant nothing. I recked little of my dignity, little of the impression I must create upon my household! And at last János, his wrinkled face withered up and contorted with the trouble he dared not speak, gave me the tidings that the gracious lady had gone. She and her nurse had set forth on foot and left no message with any one. What need is there for me to write down what I endured that black night? When I look back upon it it is as one may look back upon some terrible nightmare, some hideous memory of delirium. She had left me, and left me thus, without a word, and with but one sign. The cursed pedigree[140] was still spread upon the table where we had quarrelled. I found upon it her wedding ring. A great cross had been drawn over the half-written entry of our marriage. That was all, but it was surely enough. The jewels I had given her were carefully packed in their cases and laid upon a table in her room. Her own things had been gathered together the day of her departure, which was the day I left her, and they had been fetched the next morning by some strange servant in an unknown travelling coach. More than this I have not been able to glean, for the storm has rendered the ways impassable; but it is rumoured that the Countess de Schreckendorf is dead, and that the Princess also has left the country. I have no more to say. It is only two nights ago since I came home to such misery, and how I have passed the hours, what needs it to set forth? At times I tell myself that it is better so, that she is false and base, and that I were the poorest of wretches to forgive her. But at times again I see the whole naked truth before me, and I know that she was to me what no woman can be again. And my uncle looks down at me as I write, with a sour frowning face, and seems—strange it is, yet true—to revile me now with bitter scorn, not[141] for having kept her, the roturière, but for having driven her from my castle! “Thou hadst her; thou couldst not hold her,” he seems to snarl. Old man, old man, it is your teaching that has undone me; do you reproach me now that it has wrought my ruin? Basil Jennico flung his pen from him; the logs in the hearth had burnt themselves to white ash; his candles were guttering in their sockets, and behind the close-drawn curtains the faint dawn was spreading over a world of snow. The wind still howled, the storm was still unabated. “Another day,” groaned he, “another hateful day!” He flung his arms before him and his head down upon them. So sleep came upon him; and so old János, creeping in a little later, red-eyed from his watchful night, found him. The sleeper woke as the man, with hands rough and gnarled, yet tender as a woman’s, strove to lift him to an easier attitude; woke and looked at him with a fixed semi-conscious stare. “Ottilie!” he cried wildly, and suddenly brought back to grey reality stopped and clasped his head. There was in the old servant’s hard and all but immutable face so wistful a yearning of kindred[142] sorrow that, suddenly catching sight of it in the midst of his despair, the young man broke down and fell forward like a child upon that faithful breast. “Courage, honoured master,” said János, “we will find her again.” <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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