I think, looking back on it all now, that it was perhaps her singular dissimilarity from any other woman I had ever met that began the spell. Had she opposed to my anger, on that memorable night of our marriage, the ordinary arms of a woman discovered; had she wept, implored, bewailed her fate, who shall say that, even at the cost of my vanity, I might not have driven her straight back to her Princess? Who shall say that I should have wished to keep her, even to save myself from ridicule? It is impossible for me now to unravel the tangled threads of that woof that has proved the winding-sheet of my young happiness; but this I know—this of my baseness and my better nature—that once I had kissed her I was no longer a free man. And every day that passed, every hour I spent beside her, welded closer and firmer the chains of my servitude.
She was an enigma which I ever failed to solve. That alone was alluring. Judged by her actions, most barefaced little schemer, most arrant adventuress plotting for a wealthy match, there was yet something about her which absolutely forbade me to harbour in her presence an unworthy thought of her. Guilty of deceit such as hers had been towards me, she ought to have displayed either a conscience-stricken or a brazen soul: I found her emanate an atmosphere not only of childlike innocence but of lofty purity that often made me blush for my grosser imaginings.
She ought, by rights, to have feared me—to have been humble at least: she was as proud as Lucifer before the fall and as fearless as he when he dared defy his Creator. She ought to have mistrusted me, shown doubt of how I would treat her: and alas! in what words could I describe the confidence she gave me? so generous, so sublime, so guileless. It would have forced one less enamoured than myself into endeavouring to deserve it for very shame!
A creature of infinite variety of moods, with never a sour one among them; the serenest temper and the merriest heart I have ever known; a laugh to make an old man young, and a smile to make a young man mad; as fresh as spring; as young and as fanciful! I never knew in what word she would answer me, what thing she would do, in what humour I should find her. Yet her tact was exquisite. She dared all and never bruised a fibre (till that last terrible day, my poor lost love!). And besides and beyond this, there was yet another thing about her which drew me on till I was all lost in love. She was elusive. I never felt sure of her, never felt that she was wholly mine. Her tenderness—oh, my God, her tenderness!—was divine, and yet I felt I had not all she had to give. There was still a secret hanging upon that exquisite lip, a mystery that I had yet to solve, a land that lay unexplored before me. And it comes upon me like madness, now that she is gone from me, perhaps for ever, that I may never know the word of the riddle.
I have said that the past is like a dream to look back upon; no part of it is more dreamlike than the days which followed my strange wedding. They seemed to melt into each other, and yet it is the memory of them which is at once my joy and my torture now.
At first she did not touch, nor did I, upon the question which lay like a covered fire always smouldering between us; and in a while it came about with me that I lived as a gambler upon the pleasure of the moment. And though in my heart I had not told myself yet that I would give up my revenge,—though it was hidden there, a sleeping viper, cruel and implacable,—I strove to forget it, strove to think neither of the future nor of the past. I hung a curtain over my uncle’s picture, at which old János nearly broke his heart. I rolled up the pedigree very tight and rammed it into a drawer ... and the autumn days seemed all too short for the golden hours they gave me.
No one came to disturb us in our solitude, no hint from the outer world. We two were as apart in our honeymoon as the most jealous lovers could wish. I knew not what had become of the Princess. In very truth I could not bear to think of her; the memory of the absurd part I had been made to play was so unpalatable, was associated with so much that was painful and humiliating, and brought with it such a train of disquieting reflections that I drove it from me systematically. I never wanted to see the woman again, to hear her voice, or even learn what had become of her. That I never had one particle of lover’s love for her was plainer than ever to me now, in the midst of the new feelings with which my unsought bride inspired me. I knew what love meant at last, and would at times be filled with an angry contempt for myself, that she who had proved herself so all unworthy should be the one to have this power upon me.
Thus the days went by quite aimlessly. And by-and-by as they went the thought of what I had planned to do became less and less welcome to me, not (to my shame be it said) for its wickedness, but because I could not contemplate life without my present happiness. And after yet a while the idea (at first rejected as monstrous, impossible, nay, even as a base breach of faith to my dead uncle) that I might make the sacrifice of my Jennico pride and actually content myself after all with this unfit alliance, began to take shape within me. Gradually this idea grew dearer to me hour by hour, though I still in secret held to the possibility of my other plan, as a sort of “rod in pickle” over the head of my perverse companion, and caressed it now and again in my inmost soul—when she was most provoking—as a method to bring her to my knees in dire humiliation, but only to have the ultimate sweetness of nobly forgiving her. For Ottilie was far from showing a proper spirit of contrition or a fitting sense of what she owed me; and this galled me at times to the quick. I had never ceased to entertain the resolve of taming the wild little lady, although I found it increasingly difficult to begin the process.
Alone we were by no means lonely, even though the days fell away into a month’s length. We rode together, we drove, we walked; she chattered like a magpie, and I never knew a second’s dulness. She whipped my blood for me like a frosty wind, and, or so it seemed to me, took a new bloom, a new beauty in her happiness. For she was happy. The only sour visage in Tollendhal at the time was, I think, that of the strange nurse. I had found her waiting in my wife’s bedroom the night of our homecoming. She never spoke to me during the whole time of her stay, nor to Schultz, although he was her countryman. With the others, of course (saving János) she could not have exchanged a word, and but that she spoke with her mistress sometimes, I should have thought her dumb. That woman hated me. I have seen her eyes follow me about as if she would willingly murder me; but her nursling she loved in quite as vehement a fashion, and therefore I bore with her.