The mystery in which I am shrouded, the obvious melancholy of my demeanour, the very indifference with which I receive all notice, added, of course, to my wealth, and possibly to the belief that I am still a prize in the matrimonial market, my extraordinary luck at cards, when I can be induced to play, my carelessness to loss or gain—all this has placed me upon a pinnacle which is as gratifying to my mother as (or, so I hear, for I have declined all reconciliation with the renegade) it is galling to my brother and his family.
But the best yet, so far as I am concerned, is that no one has dared to put to me an indiscreet question, and that even my mother, although her wistful eyes implore my confidence, respects my silence.
Now, having tried in vain to find a solace in the pleasures of town, I have betaken myself to that part of the island which is the cradle of our race, to try whether a taste of good old English sport may not revive some interest in my life.
Often in that last month at Tollendhal, when the whole land was locked in ice and the grey sky looked down pitilessly upon the white earth, day by day, with never a change and scarcely a shadow, I thought of the green winters of my youth in the old country; of rousing gallops, with the west wind in my face, across wide fields all verdant still and homely; of honest English faces, English voices, the tongue of the hounds, the blast of the cracked horn, with almost a passion of desire. It seemed to me that, if I could be back in the midst of it all again, I might feel as the boy Basil had felt, and be rid, were it but for the space of a good cross-country run, of that present Basil Jennico whose brain was so weary of working upon the same useless round, whose heart was so sore within him.
So soon therefore as the weather broke—for the winter has been hard even in this milder climate—I accepted my mother’s offer of her dower-house, set up a goodly stable of hunters, and established myself at the Manor of Farringdon Dane. I have actually derived some satisfaction from a couple of days’ sport, to which a sight of my lord brother’s discomfiture, each time I cut him deliberately in the face of the whole field, has added perhaps a grain.
April 29th.
I am this day like the man in the Gospel who, having driven out the devil from his heart and swept and garnished it, finds himself presently possessed of seven devils worse than the first! The demon of wrath I had exorcised, I believed, long ago; the fiend of unrest and longing I had thought these days to have laid too. In spite of her too obdurate resentment, I had no feeling for my wife, wherever she might be, but tenderness. Now, oh, Ottilie, Ottilie! do I most hate thee or love thee? I know not, by my soul! Yet this at least I do know: mine thou art, and mine thou shalt remain, though we never meet again on earth: mine, as I am thine, though the true, good race of Jennico wither and die on my barren stock.