We had been married a week when Ottilie first made allusion to the Princess. We were to ride out on that day, and she came down to breakfast all equipped but for one boot.
I have never seen so daintily untidy a person as she was in all my life. Her hair smelt of fresh violets, but there was always a twist out of place, or a little curl that had broken loose. Her clothes were of singular fineness and richness, but she would tear them and tatter them like a very schoolgirl romp. And so that morning she tripped in with one pink satin bedroom slipper and one yellow leather riding boot. I would not let her send for her dark-visaged attendant to repair the neglect, but fetched the boot myself and knelt to put it on. As I took off the slipper I paused for a moment weighing it in my hand. It was so little a thing, so slender, so pretty! She looked down at me with a smile, and said composedly:
“Do you think, sir, that the other Ottilie could have put on that shoe?”
It was, as I said, the first time that the subject had been mentioned between us since the night of our marriage. I felt as if a cloud came over me, and looked up darkly at her. It was not wise, surely, I thought in my heart, to touch upon what I was willing to forget. But she had no misgiving. She slipped out from under her long riding skirt the small unbooted foot in its shining pink silk stocking, and said:
“You would not have liked, Monsieur de Jennico, to have acted lady’s-maid to her, for you are very fastidious, as it did not take me long to find out. Oh,” she went on, “if you knew how grateful you ought to be to me for preventing you from marrying her! You would have been so unhappy, and you deserved a better fate.”
“But I thought,” said I—and such was my weakness that the sight of her pretty foot took away my anger, and I was all lost in the discovery of how everything about her seemed to curve: her hair in its ripples, her lip in its arch, her nostrils, her little chin, her lithe young waist, and now, her foot—“I thought,” and as I spoke I took it into my hand, “it was the Princess’s plan.”
“Did I say so?” she said lightly. “That woman was never capable of a plan in her life! No, sir, I always made her do what I liked. Her intelligence was just brilliant enough to allow her to realise that she had better follow my advice. Will you put on my boot, sir? Ah! what treachery.” I held her tightly by the heel and looked up well pleased at her laughing face—I loved to watch her laugh—and then I kissed her silk stocking and put the boot on. To such depths had I come in my unreasoning infatuation. I felt no anger with her for the revelation which, indeed, as I think I have previously set down, was from the beginning scarcely news to me. I had yet to learn how completely innocent of all complicity in the deception played upon me was her poor Serenity, how innocent even of the pride and contempt I still attributed to her!
The season for the chase had opened; once or twice I had already been out with the keepers after stags, or wild boars, and my wife, a pretty figure in her three-cornered hat and fine green riding suit, had ridden courageously at my side. At the beginning of the third week we made a journey higher into the mountains and stayed a few days at a certain hunting-box, the absolute isolation of which seemed by contrast to make Tollendhal a very vortex. The wild place pleased her fancy. We had some splendid boar-hunting in the almost inaccessible passes of the mountains, and Ottilie showed herself as keen at the chase as I, although, woman-like, she shrank from the finish. She vowed she loved the loneliness, the simplicity, of the rough wood-built lodge, the savageness of the scenery. She loved too the novel excitement of the life, the long day’s riding, the sleepy supper by the roaring wood fire, with the howl of the dogs outside, and the cry of the autumn wind about the heights. She begged me with pretty insistence that we should come back and spend the best part of the coming month in this airy nest.
“We are more alone,” she said coaxingly, with one of her rare fits of tenderness. “You are more mine, Basil.” And I promised her that we should only return to Tollendhal to settle matters with the steward and provide ourselves with what we wanted, and then that we should have a new honeymoon. I would have promised anything at such a moment. It is the truth that in those days, somehow, we had, as she said, grown closer to each other.
On the last night, wearied out by the long hours on horseback, she had fallen asleep as she sat in a great carved wooden chair by the flaming hearth, while I sat upon the other side, wakeful, watching her, full of thought. She looked all a child as she slept, her face small and pale and tired, the shadow of the long lashes very black upon her cheeks. And then came upon me like a sort of nightmare the memory of what I had meant to make of this young creature who had trusted herself to me. For the first time I faced my future boldly, and took a great resolve in the silence, listening to the fall of her light breath, and the sullen roar of the wind in the pine forest without.