“She has such misery before her if her father carries out his will.”
To hear these words from her, who of all others must be in her mistress’s confidence, ought, however amazing to reason and common sense, to have been a spur to one whose ambition soared so high. Nevertheless, I hesitated. To be honest with myself, not from a lover’s diffidence, from a lover’s dread of losing even hope, but rather from the fear of placing myself in an absurd position—of risking the deadly humiliation of a refusal.
I dared therefore nothing but soft looks, soft words, soft pressures of the hand; and the Princess received them all as she received everything that had gone before. From one in her position this might seem of itself encouragement enough in all conscience; but I waited in vain for some break in her unruffled composure—some instant in which I could mark that the Princess was lost in the woman. And so what drew me most to her kept me back. At the same time a rooted distrust of the little lady-in-waiting, a certain contempt, too, for her personality as belonging to that roture so despised of my great-uncle and myself, prevented me from placing confidence in her.
But she, nevertheless, precipitated the climax. It was three days after the scene in my great-uncle’s room, one Sunday morning, beside the holy-water font in the little chapel of Schreckendorf Castle, whither, upon the invitation of its present visitors—my own priest being ill, poor man, of an ague—I had betaken myself to hear mass. 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.”
I caught her hand as she would have hurried away.
“If I could be sure that this is not some foolish jest,” I said in a fierce whisper in her ear.
And she to me back again as fiercely:
“You are afraid!” she said with a curling lip.