I had sworn to give my bride a royal reception, and a royal reception she received.
Schultz had generously carried out his instructions. We sat down to a sumptuous meal which would not have misbefitted the Emperor himself. I could not eat. The acclamations and the rejoicings struck cold upon my ear. But the bride—enigma to me then as now—sat erect in her great chair at the other end of the great table, and smiled and drank and feasted daintily, and met my eye now and again with as pretty and as blushing a look as if I had chosen her among a thousand. 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! What would I not give now to be back at that hour! What would I not give to see her there at the head of my board once more! What is all the world to me—what all the traditions of my family—what even the knowledge of her deceit and my humiliation, compared with the waste and desolation of my life without her!
CHAPTER VIII
And now what I must set down of myself is so passing strange that had I not, I myself, lived through it, were I not now in an earthly hell for the mere want of her, I could not have believed that human nature—above all the superior quality of human nature appertaining to Basil Jennico—could be so weak a thing.
I had meant to be master: I found myself a slave! And slave of what? A dimple, a pair of yellow eyes, veiled by long black lashes—a saucy child!
I had meant to have held her merely as my toy, at the whim of my will and pleasure: and behold! the very sound of her voice, the fall of her light foot, would set my blood leaping; under the glance of her wilful eye my whole being would become as wax to the flame.
In olden days people would have said I was bewitched.