Agnes Castle

“ Do you forget,” continued János, scolding more vehemently, “that they are all leagued against you in this country? Do you forget how they packed you out of the land last year, and warned you never to return? ’Tis very well to risk one’s life, but ’tis ill to throw it away.”
“Oh, János, true soul,” said I, as soon as I could get air to speak with, for his grasp upon the folds of my cloak was like an iron clamp, “all is changed, all is explained. You saw me last the most miserable of men: you see me now the happiest!” ”

“ Anna had listened with frowning brow; when all was still once more, she turned to the Princess, and briefly, but in that softened voice I remembered of old:
“I have told your ladies that you had bidden me attend to you this night, and that you must not be disturbed in the morning,” and then turned to me: “All is ready, sir; we have till noon before being discovered. And now, child,” she continued, as Ottilie, still closely clinging to my side, looked up inquiringly, “no time to lose; there is death in this for thy gracious lord, if not for us all as well.” ”

“ Both my kind attendants gave a cry as I opened my eyes.
“He is recovering, Trude,” said Madam Lothner (to call her now by her proper name) .
“Ah! gracious lady,” answered the wench in an unctuous tone of importance; “his face is still as red as the beet I was pickling when I heard you scream—would God the master were here to bleed him. Shall I send into the town to seek him?”
“God forbid!” cried her mistress, in a hasty and peremptory tone. “No, I tell you, Trude, he is recovering, and I have not been a doctor’s wife these six weeks for nothing. The flush is fading even as I look at him. ”

“ In my Castle of Tollendhal, March, 1773.
It is the will of one whose wishes are law to me that I should proceed with these pages, begun under such stress of mental trouble, until I bring the tangled story of Basil Jennico’s marriage to its singular settlement.
Without, as I now write, all over the land, the ice-bound brooks are melting, and our fields and roads are deep in impassable mud. The whole air is full of the breath of spring, as grateful to the nostrils as it is stirring to the blood of man, to the sap of trees. ”

“ Joys ever cling to the phials of memory like a scent which nought can obliterate.
And since I have undertaken to record the reconquest of Jennico’s happiness, there remains yet to tell the manner in which it all but foundered in the haven. For this heartwhole ecstasy of mine could not last in its entirety beyond a few brief moments. As I thus grasped my happiness, with a mind free at last from the confusing vapours of haste and excitement, even as the fair world around us emerged sharp and bright from amid the shadows of dawn, all the precariousness of our situation became likewise defined. ”

“ Our garments, despite the heiduck’s endless brushing, bore many traces of our hard journey. We cut but a poor figure, I thought, in these stained, rusty clothes; and the young lord of Tollendhal was ill-mounted upon the wretched jade, which had, nevertheless, faithfully served him upon his last cruel stage. The poor nag was yet full weary, and stumbled and drooped her head, while János’s white-faced bay might have stood for the very image of starving antiquity.
I winced as I thought of Ottilie’s mocking glance; but the haste to see her overcame even my delicate vanity. ”

“ First of all, the arrival of some important person from the Court of Lausitz may take place any day, and then—’Bonjour!’” She blew an airy kiss and waved her hand, while with a cold thrill I realised the irrefutable truth of her words.
“If it is to be,” she went on, unconsciously repeating almost the exact text of her mistress’s letter to me, “it must be at once and in secret. Mind, not a word to a soul till all is accomplished! On your honour I lay it! And she, her Highness, enjoins it upon you not to betray her to any single human being before you have acquired the right to protect her. ”

“ Ach! I do not know how it has been between you; but now that she thinks you dead, for God’s sake let it be!”
“By Heaven, Madam,” cried I, half mad, I believe, between pain, remorse, and fury, “these are strange counsels! Do you forget that we are man and wife, and this by her own doing? But truly I need not be surprised, for you do not hesitate before crime at the Court of Lausitz, and if murder be so lightly condoned, sure it is that bigamy must seem a very peccadillo.”
Madam Lothner stared at me with startled eyes and dropping jaw.
“Murder,” she whispered, “M. de Jennico! ”

“ He looked round with a smile in which melancholy and disdain were blended.
“Now, d—— me!” cried Sir John, struck in his easy good nature into sudden warmth and sympathy, “nay, now d—— me, Jennico! I will take any man a hundred guineas that you are alive this day month.”
“Done!” said the Chevalier, with such unexpected energy that all three turned round to look at him with surprise; perceiving which he went on, laughing to conceal an evident embarrassment: “Your betting habits here are infectious, but while I will not withdraw, I am prepared to be glad to lose rather than gain for once.” ”

“ Outside the snow was falling fast. All good citizens were within doors; there was as yet no suspicion of my presence in the town; the palace was quiet and my bitterest enemy was absent; to delay would be to lose our only chance. The passion of my arguments, none the less forcible, perhaps, because of the stress of circumstances which kept my voice at whisper pitch, bore down Anna’s protests, her peasant’s fears. I had, I believe, a powerful auxiliary in the woman’s knowledge of all that her beloved mistress might be made to suffer upon the discovery of my reappearance. ”

“ Upon that instant I find my brain cleared to a lucidity I have never felt before. I see my opponent’s sword flash ruby red with my own blood in the sun rays; I see him smile, a smile of glorious triumph, which cuts a deep dimple beside his lip; I hear him pant at me the strange words, “Ha! Ottilie!” and then I am again seared, rent once more, and to the sound of a howl of many voices my world falls into chaos and exists no more.
[239]
It is sometimes but a short and easy way up to the gates of death, but a long and weary journey back to life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ CHAPTER III I mind me that when she had drawn from me all she had wanted to know, the little lady’s pert tongue became still for a while, and that she stretched her long young limbs and lay back upon her mound of hay with the most absolute unconcern either of my presence or of the Princess’s, gazing skyward with a sudden gravity in her look. As for me, I was content to sit in silence too, glad of the quiet, because it gave me leisure to taste the full zest of this fortunate and singular meeting. I thought I had never seen a human being whom silence became so well as the Princess Ottilie. ”

“ Ottilie the Princess!... Everything was changed, and the relentless attitude of the Princess bore a very different aspect to the mere resentment of the injured wife. When my letters had been flung back in my face, when I had been kidnapped and expelled the country, it had been then by her orders. She had sent to demand the divorce. Who had set the bravo on my track? By whose wish had my life been so basely, so persistently, attempted? By hers—Ottilie, the Princess? A Princess who had repented of her freak, whose pride, whose reputation, had suffered from the stigma of an unequal match. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Basil Jennico turned instinctively towards the south, like the restless compass-needle, a way that had grown into a habit of late as his spirit strove to bridge across the leagues of sea and land that lay between him and his wife.
Was she thinking of him now? What was his curse was at the same time his triumph: he defied her to forget him any more than he could forget her! Those hours, had she not shared them with him? Come what would, no man could lay claim to be to her what he had been. No man—that way madness lay!... ”

“ I know nothing yet, but we will home to the inn and deliberate. There is nought so difficult but love will find the way, and Romeos will scale walls to reach their Juliets so long as this old world lasts.”
I rose as I spoke, and so did János, shaking the snow from his bent shoulders.
“I know nothing of the gentlemen your honour speaks of, nor of the ladies, but my old master, your honour’s uncle, did things in his days.... God forgive me that I should remember them against a holy soul in heaven! ”

“ And as, for fear of disturbing her, I restrained my passionate longing to kiss [326] those parted lips, those closed lids with the soft long eyelashes, I could not tell which I yearned for most: the Princess, the ripe woman I had found again ... or the wayward mistress playing at wife I had schooled myself to banish in the wasted days of my overweening vanity.
But why thus linger over the first stage of that happy journey? Joy can only be told by contrast to misery. We can explain sorrow in a hundred pages, but if delight cannot be told in one, it cannot be told at all. ”

“ I had no desire to speak of love to the woman I had won. I had won her, I had triumphed—that was sufficient. I would not have undone my deed for the world; but none the less the man who finds himself the husband and has never been the lover is placed in a singular position.
I looked at the veiled figure beside me and wondered at its stillness. The light of the little lantern inside the carriage flickered upon the crimson of the velvet cloak and the white folds of the veil [100] that hid her face from me. ”

“ Had ever poor soul been made to suffer more relentlessly where it had sinned?
“I have been brought low, very low,” said he to himself, and thought of the early days at Tollendhal when its young lord had deemed the whole earth created for his use. Yet, even as he spoke, he knew in his heart that the pride that was born in him would die with him only, and that if it had been mastered awhile it was only but because love had been stronger still. ”

“ This time I was shot at while sitting reading in my study at night, when all the household had retired. It was close weather, and I had drawn the curtains and opened the windows. The bullet again whizzed by my ear, and this time shattered the lamp beside me. No doubt the total darkness which ensued saved me from a second and better aim.”
“You are a fortunate young man,” said the Chevalier gravely.
“Do you think so, Chevalier?” answered Jennico, with a smile which all the bitterness of his thoughts could not altogether rob of sweetness. “I do not think any one need envy my fate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And what can more fitly occupy my poor mind than the setting forth, as clearly as may be, the divers events that have brought me to this strange plight in this strange place? although, I fear me, it may not in the end be over-clear, for in sooth I cannot even yet see a way through the confusion of my thoughts. Nay, I could at times howl in unison with yonder dismal wind for mad regret; and at times again rage and hiss and break myself, like the fitful gale, against the walls of this desolate house for anger at my fate and my folly! ”

“ The Princess had passed out first, and had condescended, smiling, to brush the pious drops from my finger; but Mademoiselle Ottilie paused as she too touched with hers my outstretched hand, and said in my ear as crossly as a spoilt child:
“You are not a very ardent lover, M. de Jennico. The days are going by; the Countess Schreckendorf is beginning to speak quite plain again. It is impossible that her Highness should be left in this liberty much longer.” ”

“ The cart swayed and creaked as János and Anna mounted and settled themselves at our feet, drawing the hay high over themselves. Then came another creaking and swaying in the forward end, we heard a jingle of bells, a crack of the whip and a hoarse shout: the cart groaned and strained to the effort of the horses, then yielded. And at a grave pace we rumbled over the cobble-stones, turning hither and thither through street after street which we could not see. And in the midst of our hay we felt a sense of comfortable irresponsibility and delicious mystery. ”