“Do you think, then, it is the right of a husband to strike or slay his wife? If so, I marvel that you should have been so eager to enter upon the wedded state.”
She put out her hand to me, and for the first time her composure wavered. The tears welled into her eyes and her lip quivered.
“No,” she said; “and therefore I chose you, Monsieur de Jennico, not for your fine riches, not for your pedigree,”—and here, the little demon! it seemed she could not refrain from a malicious smile under the very mist of her tears,—“but because you are an Englishman, and incapable of harshness to a woman.”
“And so,” said I, not believing her disinterested asseveration a whit, but with a queer feeling at my heart at once bitterly angry at each word that betrayed the determination of her deceit and her most unwomanly machinations, and yet, and yet strangely melted to her, “it is reckoning on my weak good-nature that you have played me this trick?”
“No, sir,” she said, flushing, “I reckoned on your manliness.” And then she added, with the most singular simplicity: “I liked you, besides, too well to see you unhappily married, and the other Ottilie would have made you a wretched wife.”
I burst out laughing, for, by the manes of my great-uncle, the explanation was comic! And she fell to laughing too,—my servants must have thought we were a merry couple! And, as she laughed and I looked at her, knowing her now my own, and looking at her therefore with other eyes, I deemed I had never seen a woman laugh to such bewitching purpose! And though I was full of my cruel intent, and though I dubbed her false and shameless and as deceitful a little cat as ever a man could meet, yet the dimple drew me, and I put my arms around her and kissed it. As my lips touched hers I knew I was a lost man!
The next moment we were surrounded with a tribe of leaping peasants, the horses were plunging, torches were waving and casting shadows upon the savage, laughing faces. If I had cursed myself for my happy thought before, I cursed myself still more now; but the situation had to be accepted. And the way in which my bride, blushing crimson from my kiss,—she who had no blush to spare for herself before this night, adapted herself to it was a marvel to me, as indeed all that I was to see or learn of her during our brief moon of wedded life was likewise to prove.
I am bound to say that the Princess herself could not have behaved with a better grace than this burgher daughter amid the wild peasants and their almost Eastern fashion of receiving their liege lady.
Within a little distance of the house it became impossible to advance with the carriage, and we were fain to order a halt and alight all in the stormy wind, and proceed on foot through the throng which had gathered thick and close about the gates, and which even Schultz’s stout cane failed to disperse. My wife—I did not call her so then in my mind, but now I can call her by no other name—my wife passed through them as if she had done nothing all her life but receive the homage of the people. She gave her hand to be kissed to half a hundred fierce lips; she smiled at the poor women who clutched the hem of her gown and knelt before her. The flush my kiss had called into being had not yet faded from her cheek; there was a light in her eye, a smile upon her lip. As I looked at her and watched I could not but admit that there was no need for me to feel ashamed of her, that night.