I resolved to sacrifice my pride and keep my low-born wife.
CHAPTER IX
It was full of this resolve, with an uplifted consciousness of my own virtue, that I started next morning beside her upon our homeward way. The day was very bright; and the bare trees, with here and there a yellow or red leaf, showed against a sky of palest blue. There was a frost about us, and our horses were fresh and full of pranks, as we wound down the rocky paths. My wife, too, was in a skittish humour, which irritated me a little as being ill-assorted to my own high-strung feelings and my secret sense of magnanimity. She mocked at my solemn face, she sang ends of silly songs to herself. I would have spoken to her of what was on my heart; I would have had her grateful to me, conscious of her own sin and my generosity. But I could get her to hearken to no serious speech. She called me “Monsieur de la Faridondaine,” and plucked a bunch of ash berries as we rode, and stuck them over one ear, and asked me, her face dimpling, if it was not becoming to her. And then, when I still urged that I would talk of grave matters, she pulled a grimace, and fell to mimicking Schultz with “Jawohl, Gnädigster Herr,” till I was fain to laugh with her and put off my sermon till the audience was better disposed.
But my heart was something sore against her. And when we reached home, I found that awaiting me which awoke a flame of the fierce resentment of the first hour of discovery. It was a letter from my mother in answer to the wild, inflated, triumphant lucubration I had sent her on the eve of my wedding-day. I had, of course, not attempted to undeceive her—in fact, as I have already set down, it was only within the last twenty-four hours that I had settled upon a definite plan of action. My dear mother, who dearly loved, as she herself admitted, the princes of this earth, was in a tremendous flutter at my exalted alliance. I read her words, her proud congratulations, with a feeling of absolute nausea. My brother, she wrote, was torn betwixt a sense of the increased family importance and the greenest envy, that I, who had paid no price of honour for the gaining of them, should have risen to such heights of grandeur and wealth. Not hearing from me since the great announcement, she had ventured (so she confessed) to confide my secret to a few dear friends, and “it had got about strangely,” she added naïvely. The whole Catholic world, the whole English world of fashion, was ringing with the news of the great Jennico match. In fact, the poor lady was as nearly beside herself with pride and glory when she wrote to me, as I had been when I gave her the news. I did not—I am glad to say this—I did not for a second waver in my resolution of fidelity to my wife, but I told myself, with an intolerable sense of injury, that I could never face the shame of returning to England again; that the full sacrifice entailed upon me was not only the degradation of an unsuitable alliance, but that hardest of trials to the true-blooded Englishman, perpetual expatriation!
In this grim and bitter temper I marched into the room where I now sit, and drew back the curtain from my uncle’s picture and took forth the pedigree from its hidden recess. The old man wore, as I knew he would, a most severe countenance.
But I turned my back upon him in a disrespectful fashion I had never dared display during his life, and spread out again that fateful roll of parchment on the table before me, while with penknife and pumicestone I sought to efface all traces of that vainglorious entry that mocked me in its clear black and white. The blood was surging in my head and singing in my ears, when I heard a light step, and looking up saw Ottilie. She could not have come at a worse moment. She held letters in her hand, which upon seeing me she thrust into her pocket with a sly look and something of a blush. She too, it seemed, had found a courier awaiting her; the secretness of the action stirred the heat of my feelings against her yet more. But I strove to be calm and judicial.
“Ottilie,” I said, “come here. I have to converse with you on matters of importance.”
She drew near me; pouting and with a lagging step, like a naughty child.