These were the thoughts that surged backward and forwards in my mind, futile wreckage on stormy sea, in the first passion of my anger.
“You know,” I said at last, and felt like a man who touches solid earth at last, “that this is no marriage.”
Her countenance expressed at this the most open amazement and the most righteous indignation.
“How, sir,” she cried—“has not the priest wedded us? Are we not of the same faith, and does not the same Church bind us? Have not we together received a most solemn sacrament? Have not you, Basil, and I, Marie Ottilie, sworn faith to each other until death do us part? You may like it or not, Monsieur de Jennico, but we are none the less man and wife, as fast as Church can make us.”
As she spoke she smiled again, and looked at me with that dimple coming and going beside the curve of her lip.
As they say men do at the point of some violent death, so I saw in the space of a second my whole life stretched before me, past and future.
I saw the two alternatives that lay to my hand, and their full consequences.
I knew what the audacious little deceiver beside me ignored—that it rested upon my pleasure alone to acknowledge or not the validity of this marriage. Let me take the step which as a man of honour I ought to take, which as a Jennico and my uncle’s heir I was pledged in conscience to take, it was to hold myself up to universal mockery—and I should lay bare before a grinning world the whole extent of my pretensions and their requital.