“You would not do so. For otherwise I should have to renounce the height of bliss. You are rich. I have nothing except my military standing, and the outlook to a higher rank in the future; and that is a possession I will not give up. It would be against all dignity, against my ideas of honour.”
“Bravo, my son! Now I am reconciled. It would be a sin and an outrage against your profession. You have not much farther to go to be colonel, and will certainly rise to general’s rank—may at last become commandant of a fortress, governor, or minister of war. That gives your wife also a desirable position.”
I remained quite silent. The prospect of being a commandant’s lady had no charms for me. It would have better suited me to have spent my life with the man of my choice in retirement in the country; but, still, the resolution he had just expressed was dear to me, for it protected him from any stain of the suspicion which my father nourished against him, and which would certainly have clung to him in the eyes of the world.
“Yes, quite reconciled,” my father went on, “and rightly too: for I believed it was chiefly for that purpose—— Now, now, you need not look in such a rage—I mean partly, for the purpose of withdrawing into private life; and that would have been very unfair of you. Unfair too towards my Martha—for she is the child of a soldier, the widow of a soldier; and I don’t believe that she could love a man in civilian’s costume for a continuance.”
Tilling was now obliged to smile. He threw me a look which said plainly “I know you better,” and answered aloud: “I think so too; she really only fell in love with my uniform”.
CHAPTER VI.
Marriage and visit to Berlin.—Lady Cornelia von Tessow and her son.—A wedding tour.—Life in garrison at Olmütz.—Christmas at Vienna.—Rumours of war.—A new-year’s party.—Back at Olmütz.—War imminent.—Outbreak of the Schleswig-Holstein War.—History of the quarrel.
IN September of this year our marriage took place.
My bridegroom had got two months leave for the wedding-tour. Our first stage was Berlin. I had expressed a wish to lay a wreath on the grave of Frederick’s mother, and begin our tour with that pilgrimage.
We stopped eight days in the Prussian capital. Frederick introduced me to his relatives who were living there, and all seemed to me the most amiable people in the world. And, really, everything we met was pleasant and beautiful—wearing as we did the rose-coloured glasses through which one looks at the outside world during the honeymoon. Besides, the newly-married pair were greeted on all sides with cheerful and kindly politeness; every one seemed to find it a duty to strew new roses on a path already so sunny.