 Part 1, Chapter 6 of the Pride of Yenneco. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Sylvia M.B. in Washington State. The Pride of Yenneco. By Edgerton and Agnes Castle. Part 1, Chapter 6. The night before my wedding day, new as natural enough, there was a restlessness upon me which would not let me sleep or think of sleep. When supper was over I bade my servant's retire. They had thought me cracked. And with reason, I believe, for the way in which I had wandered about the house all day, moving and shifting and preparing and giving orders to no seeming purpose. I sat down in my uncle's room and, drawing the chair he had died in opposite his portrait, I held a strange conclave with, as I believed then, his ghost. I know now that if any spirit communed with me that night, it was my own evil angel. I had had the light set where it best illuminated the well-known countenance. At my elbow was a goodly bottle of his famous red wine. Na, old one, said I, aloud, leaning back in my chair in luxurious self-satisfaction and proud complacency. I am doing well for the old name. Who knows if one day thou countest not kings among thy descendants? Me thought the old man grinned back at me his hideous tusked grin. Tis well, girl ten, he said. I enrolled the pedigree, that cursed parchment. What a part it has played in my life. His evil part as fatal as the apple by which our first parents fell. It is pride that damns us all, and I read aloud the entries I had made. They sounded very well, and so my uncle thought, or seemed to, for I swear he winked at me and said, Write it an ink, lad, that must stand clear for das glink shown. And then, though I was very comfortable, I had to get up and find the ink, and engross the noble record of my marriage. Filling in the date with care, for my uncle, dead or alive, was not one to disobey. Tis good. Then again, said my uncle, and thou dost well, but remember, without I had done so well that thou hast not reasoned thus. And what, added my uncle, sniggering, will the blue-dirtle say when he hears the news, De he, nephew basal. I had thought of that myself. It was another glorious pull over the renegade, or upon my uncle. It was surely the proud fiend himself bent upon my destruction, fell to telling me I must write to my family at once, that the letter might be dispatched in the morning. I protested. I was bound to secrecy, I told him, but he scowled, and would have it that I must trim him up for my duty to my mother. And he further made me a very long sermon upon the curses that would befall a bad child. And thus egged on, what could I do? I indicted a very flaming document indeed, and under the seal of the strictest confidence made my poor mother acquainted with all the greatness her son was bringing into his family, and bade her rejoice with him. The night was well-worn when I had finished, and the bottle of potent burgundy was nearly out, too. Then, meaning to rise and withdraw, I fell asleep in my chair. It was gray dawn before I awoke, and I was cold as I stretched myself and staggered to my feet. In the weird, thin light my uncle's face now shone out, drawn and austere, with something of the look I remembered it to have borne in death. But it was the dawn of my wedding day, and I went to my bed, stumbling over Ulianos, who sat, the faithful dog, asleep on the threshold, to dream of my wedding, a wedding with royal pomp, to the blare of trumpets and acclamations of multitude, hinacle hock, hock dem edlem, yenacle. The village of Wilhelm's Dahl is quite an hour's drive, even at the pace of my good horse, along the downhill road, which leads from my uplifted mansion into the valley land. It takes two hours for the return way. For safety's sake I made the announcement of my approaching marriage to the household as late in the day as possible, and though sorely tempted to betray the exalted rank of the future mistress to the astonished major domo, to Ulianos, with his usual imperturbability, he interpreted my commands. I refrained with a sense that the impression created would only, after all, be heightened if the discourse were withheld till the actual apparition of the newly made wife. But in the vain arrogance of my delight I ordered every detail of the reception which was to greet us, at which I was determined should be magnificent enough to make up for the enforced whole-a-corner secrecy of the marriage ceremony. Schultz the Factor, my chief huntsman, and the highest among my people were to head torchlight processions of their particular subordinates at stated places along the avenue that led upwards to the house. There was to be feasting and music in the courtyard, flowers were to be strewn from the very threshold of her new home to the door of my princess's bridal chamber. God knows all the extravagance I planned. It makes me sick now to think back on it. And the wedding. Ah, that was a wedding to be proud of. It was a dull and cloudy evening, with a high moist wind that came in wild gusts, sweeping over the plains and tearing the leaves from the forest trees, bringing with it now a swift moonlit clearing upon the lowering face of heaven, now only thicker darkness and torrents of rain. It was all but night already in the forest roads when I started, and quite night as I emerged from out of the shelter of the mountains into the flat country. Yenos sat on the box, and my chasers hung on behind, and my four horses kept up a splendid pace upon the level ground. I had dressed very fine as became a bridegroom, but fortunate it was that I had brought a dark cloak with me, for a fearful burst of storm ring came down upon me as I jumped out from the carriage at the church door. And indeed, despite that protection my fine white satin clothes were spliced with mud, and my carefully powdered queues sadly disarranged in the few steps I had to take before reaching shelter, for the wind blew a very hurricane, and the rain came down like the rain of the deluge. The church porch was lit only by an ill-trimmed wick floating in a saucer of oil. But by the flickering light, envious and frail as it was, I discerned at once the figure of Mademoiselle Otely's nurse awaiting us. Without a word she beckoned me to follow her into the church. The place struck cold and damp with a death-like closeness after the warm blustering air I had just left. It was even darker than the porch outside. Its sole illumination proceeding from the faint glow of the little sanctuary lamp and the sullen yellow flame of two or three tallow candles stuck on spikes before a rough wooden statue on a pillar at one side. I, flanked by Janos and his two satellites, followed the gaunt figure to the very altar rails, where, with an imperious gesture, she signed me to take my place. Before turning to go she stood still a second looking at me, and me thought, or it may have been a fancy born of the dismal place and the dismal gloom, that I had never seen human countenance express so much hatred as did that woman's in the mysterious gleam of the lamp. My heart contracted with an omen of forthcoming ill. Then I heard her feet go down the aisle. The door opened and closed, and we were left alone. In the silence of the church, the most poverty-stricken and desolate, the most miserable, the most ruined be yet used as the house of God I think I had ever entered. At the foot of the altar of my faith, a sudden misgiving seized upon me, how would all this end? I was going to bind myself for life with the most solemn vows. Would all the honor and glory of the alliance compensate me for the loss of my liberty? I was only twenty-six. And I knew of her who was henceforth to be my second self no more, rather less than I knew of any of the barefooted maids that slipped grinning about the passages of Tollendall. To be frank with myself, the glamour of gratified vanity once stripped from before the eye of my inmost soul, what was the naked, hideous truth? I had no more love for her, man for woman, than for rosy coffee or black-brown sorolta. Here my reflections were broken in upon by the very patter of naked souls that had been in my thoughts. And a little ragged boy, in a dilapidated surplus, ran around the sanctuary from some back door, and felt a lighting a pair of candles on the altar, a proceeding which only seemed once more to heighten the darkness. Presently, in a surplus in cassock as tattered as acolytes, with long white hair lying unkempt upon his shoulders, an old priest, ensued the oldest man I have ever seen alive, I believe, came forth with tottering steps. Before him, the tattered urchin, behind him a sacristan well-nigh as antique as himself, and as utterly paparized. These were to be the ministers of my grand marriage, but almost immediately a fresh clamour of opening doors, and a light, sedate footfall struck my ear, and all doubt and dismay disappeared like magic. Closely enveloped in the folds of a voluminous dark velvet cloak, with its hood drawn forward over her head, and beneath this shade her face muffled in the gathers of a white lace veil, I knew the stately height of my bride as she advanced towards me, and the sight of her, the sound of her brave step, set my heart dancing with the old triumph. She stood beside me, and as the words were spoken I fought no more of the mean surroundings of the evil omens, of the responsibilities and consequences of my act. It was nothing to me now that the old priest who wedded us, and his companion who ministered to him, should look more like mouldering corpses than living men, that the nurses' burning eyes should still seek my face with evil look. I had no thought to spare for the position of my bride herself, her filial disobedience, her loneliness, no feeling of tenderness for the touching character of her confidence in me, no doubt as to her future happiness as my wife, nor as to my capacity for compensating her for the sacrifice of so much. I did not wonder at, nay, notice even, the absence of the lady in waiting, that moving spirit of our courtship. My whole soul was possessed in triumph, I was self-centered on my own success. The words were spoken, my voice rang out boldly, but hers was the barest breath of speech behind her muffling drapery. I slipped the ring, it had been my aunt's, with a passing wonder that it should prove so much too large upon the slender finger that hardly protruded from a fall of enveloping lace. We were drenched with a perfect shower of holy water out of a tin bucket, and then, man and wife, we went to the sacristy to sign our names by the light of one smoking tallow candle. I dashed mine forth with splendid flourish, the good old name of Yenneco of Farringdon Dane and Tullendall, all my qualifications, territorial, military, and inherited, and she penned hers in the flowing handwriting I already knew, Marie Ottely, the lofty, simple signature, as I thought with swelling heart of sovereigns. I pressed into the old priest's cold fingers as he peered at us from the book, right and left with dull bewildered eyes in which I thought to see the dawn of a vague misgiving. A purse bulging with notes to the value of double the sum promised, and then with her hand upon my arm I led her to my carriage. The rain had begun again, and the wind was storming when we drove off, my wife and I. And for a little while, a long time it seemed to me, there was silence between us. Broken only by the beating of drops against the pains of the carriage and the steady tramp of my horseshoes on the wet road. Now that I had accomplished my wish, a strange embarrassment fell upon me. I had no desire to speak of love to the woman I had won. I had won her. I had triumphed. That was sufficient. I would not have undone my deed for the world, but nonetheless the man who finds himself the husband, and has never been the lover, is placed in a singular position. I looked at the veiled figure beside me and wondered at its stillness. The light of the little lantern inside the carriage flickered upon the crimson of the velvet cloak and the white folds of the veil that hid her face from me. Then I awoke to the consciousness of the sorry figure I must present in her eyes. And drawing from my pocket a ring, the richest I had been able to find among my aunt's rich store, I took the hand that lay half-hidden and passive beside me, meaning to slip the jewel over the plain gold circlet I had already placed upon it. Now as I took the hand into my own, I was struck with its smallness, its slenderness, its lightness. I remembered that even in the dark church, and with but the tips of the fingers resting in my own, a similar impression had vaguely struck me. I lifted it, spread out the little long thin fingers. Too often had I kissed the dimpled firm hand of her serene highness not to know the difference. This was my wife's hand. There was my ring. But who was my wife? I felt like a man in a bad dream. I do not know if I spoke or not, but every fiber of me was crying out aloud as it were in a frenzy. I suppose I turned or looked at any rate my companion, as if in answer to a question, said composedly, Yes, sir, it is so. At the same moment, putting up her veil with her right hand, she disclosed to me the features of Oataly, the Lady in Waiting. End of Part One, Chapter Six. Part One, Chapter Seven of the Pride of Yenneco. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Sylvia M.B. in Washington State. The Pride of Yenneco by Edgerton in Agnes Castle, Part One, Chapter Seven. I must have stared like a madman for very fear of my own violence. I dared not move or speak. Mademoiselle Oataly, or to call her by her proper name, Madame de Yenneco, very composedly removed her veil from her hair, pushed back her hood, and withdrew the hand which I still unconsciously clutched. Then she turned and looked at me as if waiting for me to speak first. I said in a sort of whisper, What does this mean? It means, Mr. de Yenneco, that for your own good you have been deceived. There was a little quiver in her voice. Was it fear? Was it mockery? I thought the latter, and the strenuous control I was endeavouring to put upon my seething passion of fury and bewilderment, broke down. I threw up my arms, the natural gesture of a man driven beyond bounds, and as I did so felt the figure beside me make a sudden abrupt movement. I thought that she shrank from me, that she feared lest I, I, basal Yenneco, would strike her, a woman. This aroused me at once to a sense of my own position, and at the same time to one of bitterest contempt for her. But as I wheeled round to gaze at her, I saw that whatever charges might be laid upon her, and God knows she had wrought a singular evil upon me. The accusation of cowardice could not be part of them. Her face showed white indeed in the pale light. Her features set. But her eyes looked fearlessly into mine. Every line of her figure expressed the most dauntless determination. She was braced to endure, ready to face what she had drawn upon herself. This was no craven, rather the very spirit of daring. In God's name I cried, Why have you done this? And did you think? She said, looking at me, I thought with a sort of pity, that princesses out of fairy tales are so ready to bury lovers of low degree, no matter how rich or how gallant. Oh, I know what you would say, but you are well born. But for all that, princesses do not wed with such as you, sir. Every drop of my blood revolted against the smart of this humiliation. Stammering and protesting, my wrath overflowed my lips. But this deception, this impossible insane fraud, what is its object? What is your object? You encouraged me, you incited me. Confusion! I cried and clashed my head. I think I'm going mad. Her serene harness thought that she would like to see me settled in life, said my bride, with the old look of derision on her face. I seized her hand. It was the princess's plan then, I asked in a whisper, and it seemed to me as if everything turned to crimson before my eyes. She met my look, and it must have been a terrible one, with the same dauntlessness as before, and answered after a little pause, with cool deliberation. Yes, it was the princess's plan. The carriage drove on through the rain, and again there was silence between us. My pulses beat loud in my ears. I saw, as if written in fire, the whole devilish plot to humiliate me for my presumption. I saw myself as I must appear to that high-born lady, a ridiculous aspirant whose claim was too absurd even to be seriously dealt with. And she, the creature who had lent herself to my shame, without whose glib tongue and pert audacious counsels I had never presumed, who had dared to carry out smiling so gross a fraud to wear my ring and front me still, how was I to deal with her? These were the thoughts that surged backward and forwards in my mind, futile wreckage on Stormy Sea in the first patient of my anger. You know, I said at last, and felt like a man who touches solid earth at last, that this is no marriage. Her countenance expressed at this the most open amazement and the most righteous indignation. How, sir, she cried, has not the priest wedded us? Are we not of the same faith, and does not the same church bind us? Have not we together received a most solemn sacrament? Have not you, Basil, and I, Marie Utterly, sworn faith to each other until death do us part? You may like it or not, Mr. De Yenico, but we are nonetheless man and wife as fast as church can make us. As she spoke, she smiled again, and looked at me with that dimple coming and going beside the curve of her lip. As they say, men do at the point of some violent death, so I saw in the space of a second my whole life stretched before me, past and future. I saw the two alternatives that lay to my hand and their full consequences. I knew what the audacious little deceiver beside me ignored, that it rested upon my pleasure alone to acknowledge or not the validity of this marriage. Let me take the step which as a man of honor I ought to take, which as a Yenico and my uncle's heir I was pledged in conscience to take. It was to hold myself up to universal mockery, and I should lay bare before a grinning world the whole extent of my pretensions and their requital. On the other hand, let me keep my secret for a while and seemingly accept my wife, the whole point of the cursed jest would fail. Let me show the princess that my love for her was not so overpowering, nor my disappointment so heartbreaking, but that I had been able to find temporary compensation in the substitute with whom she had herself provided me. There are more souls lost, I believe, through the fear of ridicule than through all the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. My resolution was promptly taken. My revenge would be more exquisite and subtle than the trick that had been played upon me. I would take her to my home, this damsel whom no feeling of maidenly restraint, of womanly compassion, had kept from acting so base apart, and for a while at least, not all the world should guess, but that in winning her my dearest wish had been accomplished. Afterwards, when I had tamed that insolent spirit, when I had taught this wild tassel gentle to come to my hand and fly at my bidding, and I smiled to myself as I laid that plan which was full as cruel as the deception that had been practiced upon me, and which I am ashamed to set out in black and white before me now. Afterwards, when I chose to repudiate the woman who had usurped my name through the most bare-faced imposture, if I knew the law both of land and church, I could not be gained, said. I had warned her that this marriage was no marriage. What could a gentleman do more? A sudden calmness fell over me. It struck me that the laugh would be on my side, after all. My companion was first to speak. She settled herself in the corner of the carriage, something like a bird that settles down in its nest, and still with her eyes, which now looked very dark in the uncertain light, fixed upon me, said in a tone of the utmost security, you can beat me, of course, if you like, and you can murder me if you are very, very angry, but you cannot undo what is done. I am your wife. She gave a little nod which was the perfection of impudence. She was like some wild thing of the woods that has never seen a human being before, and is absolutely fearless because of its absolute ignorance. I ought to have pitied her, seeing how young, how childish she was. But though there sprang into my heart strange feelings, and that dimple tempted me more and more, there was no relenting in my angry soul. Only I told myself that my revenge would be sweet. And I was half distraught, I think, between the conflict of pride, disappointment, and the strange alluring charm that this being would so betray me was yet beginning to have upon me. The speed of our four horses was slackening. We were already on the mountain road which led to my castle. There was a glimmer of moon again, the rain beat was silent on the panes, and I could see from a turning in the road the red gleam of the torchbearers whom I had ordered for the bridal welcome. The monstrous absurdity of the situation struck me afresh, and my resolution grew firmer. How could I expose myself a poor, tricked fool to the eyes of that people who regarded me as something not unlike a demigod? No, I would keep the woman. She had sought me, not I her. I would keep her for a space at least, and let no man suspect that she was not my choice. And then in the rightness of time, when I would sell this old rook's nest and betake me home to England as a dutiful nephew, why then my Lady Princess should have her made of honour back again, and see if she would find it so easy to settle her in life once more? What pity should I have upon her who had no pity for me, who had sold her maiden pride in such assorted barter for a husband? This was no mere tool of a woman's scorn. No, contempt by her I had wooed, played with no doubt I had been, but I had seen enough of the relations of the two girls not to know well who was the moving spirit and all their actions. This lady had had an eye to her own interests while lending herself to my humiliation. Thinking upon it now, with as cool a brain as I might, and once I had settled upon my resolve, the first frenzy of my rage died away. I told myself that the new Madame Yenneco lied when she said it was altogether the Princess's plan, and indeed I afterwards heard from her own lips that in this I had guessed but a third of the actual truth. And now as we were drawing close to the first post where my overdossal and zealous retainers were already raising a fearful clamor, and I must perforce assume some attitude to face the people, I turned to my strange bride and said to her, Do you think then it is the right of a husband to strike or slay his wife? If so, I marvel that you should have been so eager to enter upon the wedded state. She put out her hand to me, and for the first time her composure wavered. The tears welled into her eyes, and her lips quittered. No, she said, and therefore I chose you, Mr. Yenneco, not for your fine riches, not for your pedigree, and here the little demon seemed she could not refrain from a malicious smile under the very mist of her tears, but because you are an Englishman and incapable of harshness to a woman. And so said I, not believing her disinterested severation, a wit, but with a queer feeling at my heart at once bitterly angry at each word that betrayed the determination of her deceit and her most unwombly machinations, and yet strangely melted to her. It is reckoning on my weak good nature that you have played me this trick. No, sir, she said, flushing. I reckoned on your manliness. And then she added with the most singular simplicity, I liked you. Besides too well to see you unhappily married, and the other orderly would have made you a wretched wife. I burst out laughing, for by the mains of my great-uncle the explanation was comic, and she felt her laughing too. My servants must have thought we were a merry couple. And as she laughed and I looked at her, knowing her now my own, and looking at her therefore with other eyes I deemed I had never seen a woman laugh to such bewitching purpose. And though I was full of my cruel intent, and though I dubbed her false and shameless, and as deceitful a little cat as ever a man could meet, yet the dimple drew me, and I put my arms around her and kissed it, as my lips touched hers I knew I was a lost man. The next moment we were surrounded with a tribe of leaping peasants. The horses were plunging, torches were waving, and casting shadows upon the savage, laughing faces. If I had cursed myself for my happy thought before, I cursed myself still more now. But the situation had to be accepted. And the way in which my bride blushing crimson from my kiss, she who had no blush to spare for herself before this night, adapted herself to it, was a marvel to me, as indeed all that I was to see or learn of her during our brief moon of wedded life was likewise to prove. I am bound to say that the princess herself could not have behaved with a better grace than this burger daughter amid the wild peasants and their almost eastern fashion of receiving their liege lady. Within a little distance of the house it became impossible to advance with the carriage, and we were feigned to order a halt and a light all in the stormy wind, and proceed on foot through the throng which had gathered thick and close above the gates, and which even Schultz's stout cane failed to disperse. My wife, I did not call her so then in my mind, but now I can call her by no other name, my wife passed through them as if she had done nothing all her life but receive the homage of the people. She gave her hand to be kissed to half a hundred fierce lips. She smiled at the poor women who clutched the hem of her gown and knelt before her. The flush my kiss had called into being had not yet faded from her cheek. There was a light in her eye, a smile upon her lip. As I looked at her and watched I could not but admit that there was no need for me to feel ashamed of her that night. I had sworn to give my bride a royal reception, and a royal reception she received. Schultz had generously carried out his instructions. We sat down to a sumptuous meal which would not have misbefitted the emperor himself. I could not eat. The acclimations and rejoicing struck cold upon my ear, but the bride, enigma to me then as now, sat erect in her great chair at the other end of the great table, and smiled and drank and feasted daintily, and met my eye now and again with as pretty and as blushing a look as if I had chosen her among a thousand. The gypsies played their maddening music, the music of my dream, and the cries in the courtyard rose now and then to a very clamour of enthusiasm. Schultz, with a truly German sentimentality, had presented his new mistress with a large bouquet of white flowers. The smell of them turned to me faint. I knew that in the great room beyond, all illuminated by a hundred wax candles, was the portrait of my uncle, stern and solitary. I would not have dared to go into that room that night to have met the look of his single watchful eye, and yet, oh God, how are we made, and of what strange clay? What would I not give now to be back at that hour? What would I not give to see her there at the head of my board once more? What is all the world to me? What all the traditions of my family? What even the knowledge of her deceit and my humiliation, compared with the waste and desolation of my life without her? I had meant to be master. I found myself a slave. A slave of what? A dimple, a pair of yellow eyes, veiled by long black lashes. A saucy child. I had meant to have held her merely as my toy, at the whim of my will and pleasure, and behold the very sound of her voice the fall of her light foot would set my blood leaping under the glance of her willful eye my whole being would become as wax to the flame. In olden days people would have said I was bewitched. 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 wolf that has proved in 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 with 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 bare-faced little schemer, most errant, adventurous 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 conscious 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 from 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 words she would answer me what things 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 has gone from me, perhaps forever 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 seem 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 smoldering 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 Yanos 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, too, 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 lovers' love for her was plainer than ever to me now. In the midst of the new feelings with which my unsought pride 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 a while the idea, at first rejected as monstrous, impossible, may even as a base breach of faith to my dead uncle, that I might make the sacrifice of my cynical 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 and 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 utterly 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 seized 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 stillness. She whipped my blood for me like a frosty wind, or so it seemed to me, took a new bloom and a new beauty in her happiness, for she was happy. The only sour visage in Tolendal 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, Sevinianos, 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 nursing she loved and quite as vehement a fashion, and therefore I bore with her. We had been married a week, when Otley 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 a fresh violet, 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 Otley 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 misgivings. 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 Yinoco to have acted ladies made 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 and its ripples, her lip in its arch, her nostrils, her little chin, her light 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 realize that she had better follow my advice. Will you put on my boots, 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 staggs, or while the 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 Tolendall a very vortex. The wild place pleased her fancy. We had some splendid boar hunting in the almost inaccessible passes of the mountains and utterly showed herself as keen at the chase as I, although womanlike 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 to the novel excitement of the life, the long days 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, basal. And I promised her that we should only return to Tolendall to settle matters with the steward and provide ourselves with what we wanted, and then 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 in 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 and the pine forest without, I resolved to sacrifice my pride and keep my lowborn wife. End of Part 1 Chapter 8 Part 1 Chapter 9 of The Pride of Yenakou This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recorded by Sylvia M.B. in Washington State. The Pride of Yenakou by Edgerton and Agnes Castle. Part 1 Chapter 9 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 upon us, and our horses were fresh and full of pranks as we wound down the rocky paths. My wife, too, was in a skittish humor, 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 inns 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 Ferendonteine, 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 agreements, and fell to mimicking schultz with Yavor, Nagdis de Herr. Till I was pained 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 awaited 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 deceive 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 honor 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 naively. The whole Catholic world, the whole English world of fashion, was ringing with the news of the great Yenical 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 waiver 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 pumice-stone I sought to efface all traces of that vain glorious 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 utterly. 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 plush. 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. "'Autolie,' I said, come here. I have to converse with you on matters of importance. She drew near to me pouting and with a lagging step like a naughty child. That sacred pedigree,' she said, and thrust out her underlip. She spoke in French, which gave the words altogether a different meaning. And in my then-humour I was hugely shocked to hear such an expression from her lips. "'You behave strangely,' I said, with coldness, not to be mollified by the half pleading, half mischievous glance she cast upon me. "'And you speak like a child. There has been enough of childishness, enough of folly in this business. It is time to be serious,' I said, and struck the table with my flat palm as I spoke. "'Well, let us be serious,' she retorted, slapping the table too, and then sat down beside me, propping her chin upon her hands in her favorite attitude. "'Am I not serious?' she proceeded, looking at me with a face of mock solemnity. "'Well, Mr. my husband, what do you wish of me? Have you ever thought utterly,' said I, "'of the position you have placed me in? I have been obliged today to come to a grave resolution. I have had to make up my mind to give up my country and remain here for the rest of my life. It is in direct defiance to my uncle's commands and last wishes. And it is no pleasant thing to an emushman to give up his native land. "'If so, why do it?' she said coolly. I am quite willing to go to England. In fact, I should rather like it. "'Because before heaven, madame,' said I, irritated beyond bounds, you have left me no other alternative. Do you think I am going home to be a laughing stalk among my people?' "'Then,' she said, with lightning quickness, you broke her promise of secrecy. It is your own fault. You should have kept your word.' Struck by the irrefutable truth of this remark, although at the same time my wrath was secretly accumulated against her for this systematic indifference to her own share in a transaction where she was the chief person to blame, I kept silence for a moment, drumming with my fingers on the table. "'And, Yen,' she said at last, with a note of amusement and tender indulgence in her voice, as a mother might speak to her unreasonable infant. This terrible resolution taken. What follows? You have effaced, I see, your entry in the famous pedigree, and you would now fill it up with a detail of your real alliance? Is that it?' I glanced up at her. Her eyes were dancing with an eager light, her lip trembling as if over some merry word she yet forebore to speak. Her want of sympathy in sight of my evident distress was hard to bear. "'Yes,' I answered. The pedigree must be filled up. I don't even know your whole name, nor who your father was, nor yet your mother. I have your word for it, however,' I said, and the sentence was bitter to me to speak, that your family was originally of burger origin. Put down,' she answered. Marie Autely Palin, daughter of the deceased Heron Gime Hamrath Baron Palin, half doctor to his serene highness of the reigning Duke of Lausites. The bend dropped from my hand. Your father was a doctor? I asked in an extinguished voice. Ennobled, she returned promptly, after successfully piloting his serene highness through a bad attack of jaundice. And your mother, I murmured, clinging yet to the hope that on the mother's side at least the connection might prove a little more worthy of the house of Yenekul, she hesitated and glanced at me. Once more I seemed to see some inner source of mirth bubble on her lip, or was it only that she was possessed by the very spirit of mischief. Anyhow, she forced her smile to gravity again, and answered me steadily, while her eyes sought mine with a curious, determined meaning at variance with the mock meekness of the rest of her countenance. Put down, M. Yenekul, and of Sophia Mueller likewise deceased, and add, if you like, once personal maid to her serene highness, the dowager duchess, Marie Ottolie of Lausites. I sat like a man struck silly, and in the tide of fury that swept over me, my single lucid thought was that if I spoke or moved, I should disgrace myself. And she chose that moment, poor child, to come over to me and place her arms around my neck, and say caressingly in my ear, write it, write it, sir, and then tell me that, seeing that I am I, and that I should not be different from myself or are the daughter of the emperor, all this matters little to you since we love each other. I put her from me. My hands were trembling, but I was very gentle. I brought her round to face me, and she waited my answer with a triumphant smile. It was that smile undid me and her. She made too sure of me. She had conquered me too easily all along. You ask over much. I said, when I could command my voice enough to speak, you take over much for granted. You forget how you have deceived me, how you have betrayed me. I am willing, I said, to believe you have not been all to blame, that you were encouraged and upheld by another. But this does not exonerate you from the chief share in a very questionable transaction. The words fell cuttingly. I saw how the smile faded from her face, saw how the pretty dimple lingered a second like a pale ghost of itself, and then was lost in the droop of her lip, which trembled like a chidden babes. And I took a cruel joy to think I had hit her at last. But in a second or two she spoke with all her old courage. It is well, she said, to blame where blame is due. If you wish to blame any one for our marriage, blame me alone. The other utterly never received your letter, never knew you wanted to marry her, had nothing to say to what you call my betrayal of you. She would have prevented this marriage if she could. Nay, I will tell you more. I believe she might have even married you had I given her the chance. But I knew you would marry her solely because of her position, of her tactile, that you had no love for her beyond your insane love of her royal blood. I thought you worthy of better things. I thought you could rise above so pitigable a weakness. I thought you could learn of love, that love alone is worth living for. And if you have not learned, if indeed, my scholar, you have been taught nothing in love school, if you can lay bare your soul now and tell yourself that you would rather have had the wife you wanted in your overweening vanity, than the wife I am to you, why then, sir, I have made a grievous mistake, and I am willing to acknowledge that I have committed an irrevocable wrong both to you and to myself. Now, as she spoke, I was torn by a strange mixture of feelings, and my love for her contended with my pride, my wounded vanity, my sense of injury. I could not in truth answer that I would rather have been wedded to the princes. For one thing, had these weeks made clear to me above all things, and that was that married life with her would have been intolerable. But my anger against the woman I did love in spite of myself was not lessened by the tone of reproachful superiority she assumed, and because of the truth of her rebuke, it was the harder for myself love to bear. Before I could muster words clear enough and severe enough to answer her, she proceeded, come, Basil, come rise above this failing which is so unworthy of you. Throw that musty old pedigree away before it eats all the manliness out of your life. What does it mean but that you can trace your family up to a greater number of probable rascals, hard and selfish old men than another. Be proud of yourself for what you are. Be proud of your forefathers indeed if they have done fine deeds of valor or virtue. But this can't about birth for birth's sake, about the superiority of aristocracy as aristocracy. What does it amount to? It is to me the most foolish of superstitions. Was that old man, she asked, pointing to my uncle, who frowned upon her murderously, was that old man a better man than his hide-up Yanos? Was he a braver soldier? Was he a better servant to his master? Was he more honest in his dealings, shooter in his counsel? I tell you, I honor Yanos as much as I would have honored him. I tell you that if I love you, I love you for what you are, not because you are descended from some ignorant savage king, not because you can boast at the blood of the worst of men and sovereigns, the most profligate, the most treacherous, the most faithless, Charles Steward runs in your veins. I hope, sir, as little of it as possible. I sprang to my feet, to be thus raided by her who should be needing for forgiveness it was intolerable. I think, I thundered, that considering your position a little humility would be more becoming than this attitude. You should remember that you are here on tolerance only, that it is to my generosity alone that you owe the right to call yourself an honest woman. What do you mean, said she as fiercely as I had spoken myself? I mean, said I, I mean, madam, that you are what I choose to make you, that marriage you so skillfully encompassed is, if I choose it, no marriage. She put her hands to her head like one who has turned suddenly giddy. You married me before God's altar, she said in a sort of whisper. You married me and you took me home. I was still too angry to stay my tongue. With a bitter laugh, I married the princess. I said, but I took the servant home. A burning tide of blood rushed to her brow. I saw it unseen as a man does in passion. But I have lived that scene over and over again waking and dreaming since and every detail of it is stamped upon my brain. Next she grew livid white and spread out her hands as the way precipice had suddenly opened before her and then she cried, and this is your English honor? And turning on her heels she left me. The scorn of her tone cut me like a whip. I swore a mighty oath that I would never forgive her till she sued for pardon. She must be taught who was master. In solitude she should reflect and learn to rue her sins to me. Her audacity, her unwarrantable presumption, her ingratitude. All in my white heat of anger I summoned Janos and made him tell his mistresses' nurse that had gone into the mountains for a week. And then I ordered a fresh horse and followed only by the old man, dashed off like one possessed into the rocky wastes. Alone in that solitary hut by that hearth where but the night previous my heart had overflowed with such tenderness for her I sat and nursed my grievances and brooded upon my wrongs till they grew to overpowering size and multiplied a thousandfold. And curious it is that what I thought of most was the bitter unfairness to me, the monstrous injustice of her contempt at the very moment when I had meant to sacrifice my life and prospects to her. I told myself she didn't love me, had never loved me, and worked myself to a pitch of frenzy over that thought. The memory of her announcement on this afternoon, the full knowledge of her deceit, the confession of her worst and burger origin, weighed not now one featherweight in my resentment. That I had cast from me as the least of my troubles. So can a man change and so can love swallow up all other passions. No doubt I told myself. She was mocking me now in her own mind. No doubt she reckoned that her poor infatuated fool would come creeping back with all promptitude and beg for her smile. She should learn at last that she had married a man. Not till I saw her down at my very feet would I take her back to my breast. All the next day I hunted in a bitter wind and in a bitter temper. There were clouds arising, my huntsman told me, that looked very like snow clouds, and I must beware being snowed up upon the height. I was in the humor to welcome hardship and even danger, and so the whole day we rode after an old rogue bore and came back in darkness, at no small risk, empty-handed, and the roughness of my temper by no means improved. Next day the weather still held up, and again I hunted. My men must have wondered what had come over their erstwhile genial master. Even my uncle could not have shown them a harder rule or ridden them with less consideration, through the hardest of ways in the teeth of the most fiendish of winds. That night again I sat and brooded by the leaping flame of the pine logs. But it was in a different mood. All my surly determination, my righteous indignation, had melted from me, leaving me as weak as water. Of a sudden, in the closest heat of the chase, there had come to me an awful vision of what I had done, a terrible swift realization of the insult I had flung at the face of the woman who was indeed the wife of my heart and love. Oh God, what had I done? I had sought to humble her. I had but debased myself. Through the whole day her words, Is this your English honour? Had wrung a dismal rhythm in my ear to the beat of my horse's hooves on the hard ground, to the call of the horn amid the winding rocks. The vision of her faded smile, of her dimple pale into a pitiable ghost, of her babyish drooping lip, and then of her white face struck with such scorn haunted me to madness. I sickened from my food as I sat to my supper. And put down my cup untasted. And now as the wind whistled and the foreboded storm was gathering upon us, the longing to see her, to be with her to kneel at her feet, yes, I would now be the one to kneel, came upon me with such violence that I could not withstand it. I ordered my horses. I would listen to no remonstrance, no warning. I must return to Tollendall, I said. Were all the powers of darkness leaked against me, and return I did. It was a piece of full hardiness in which I ran, unheeding the risk of my life, but the providence that protects madmen protected me that night. And Yannos and I arrived in safety, through a gale of wind and a fall of snow that might indeed have proved our death. All covered with rhyme, I ran into the house and up to the door of her room. It was past midnight, and there I paused for a moment fearing to disturb her. Two or three of the women came pattering down the passage to me and with expressive gestures addressed me voluably. One of the girls was weeping. I could not understand a word they said, but with a new terror, I burst open the door of the bedroom. In this appalling dread, I realized for the first time how I loved my wife. The room was all empty and all dark. I called for lights. There was no trace of her presence. Her bed had not been slept in. Like a maniac, I tore about the house seeking her, shrieking her name, demanding explanations from those to whom my speech meant nothing. I wrecked little of my dignity, little of the impression I must create upon my household. And at last Yannos, his wrinkle face, withered up and contorted with the trouble he dared not speak, gave me the tidings that the gracious lady had gone. She and her nurse had set forth on foot and left no message with anyone. What need is there for me to write down what I endured that black night? When I look back upon it, it is as one may look back upon some terrible nightmare, some hideous memory of delirium. She had left me, and left me thus without a word, and with but one sign. The cursed pedigree was still spread upon the table where we had quarreled. I found upon it her wedding-ring. A great cross had been drawn over the half-written entry of our marriage. That was all, but it was surely enough. The jewels I had given her were carefully packed in their cases and laid upon a table in her room. Her own things had been gathered together the day of her departure, which was the day I left her. And they had been fetched the next morning by some strange servant and an unknown traveling coach. More than this I have not been able to glean, for the storm has rendered the ways impassable. But it is rumored that the Countess to Shrekendarf is dead, and that the Princess also has left the country. I have no more to say. It is only two nights ago since I came home to such misery, and how I have passed the hours, what needs it to set forth. At times I tell myself that it is better show that she is false and base, and that I were the poorest of wretches to forgive her. But at times again I see the whole naked truth before me, and I know that she was to me what no woman can be again. And my uncle looks down at me as I write, with a sour frowning face and seems, strange it is, yet true, to revile me now with bitter scorn, for not having kept her to roturiere, but for having driven her from my castle. Thou hathst her, thou couldst not hold her, he seems to snarl. Old man, old man, is your teaching that has undone me? Do you approach me now that it has wrought my ruin? Basil Yennecol flung his pen from him, the logs in the hearth had burnt themselves to white ash, his candles were guttering in their sockets, and behind the close-drawn curtains the faint dawn was spreading over a world of snow. The wind still howled, the storm was still unabated. Another day, goon he, another hateful day. He flung his arms before him and his head down upon them. So sleep came upon him, and so Old Yennecol's, creeping in a little later, red-eyed from his watchful night, found him. The sleeper awoke as the man, with hands rough and gnarled, yet tender as a wound's. Strove to lift him to an easier attitude, woke and looked at him with fixed, semi-conscious stare. Oddly he cried wildly and suddenly brought back to gray reality, stopped and clashed his head. There was in the old servant's heart an all but immutable face so wistfully yearning of kindred sorrow, that suddenly catching sight of it in the midst of his despair, the young man broke down and fell forward like a child upon the faithful breast. Courage, honored master, said Yennecol's, we will find her again. End of Part 1, Chapter 9 Part 2, Chapter 1 of The Pride of Yennecol This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Sylvia M.B. in Washington State. The Pride of Yennecol by Edgerton in Agnes Castle. Part 2, Chapter 1 Memoir of Captain Basil Yennecol A portion written early in the year 1772 in his rooms at Griffin's Curzon Street. Home in England once again, if home it can be called. This set of hired chambers, so dreary within, with outside the lowering fog and the unfamiliar sounds that were once so familiar. It is all strange after eight years' exile. And the grime, the noise, the narrow limits, the bustle of this great city, weary me after the noble silence, the wide life at Tullendall. It was with no lightning of my thoughts that I saw the white cliffs of old England break the sullen gray of the horizon, with no patriotic joy that I set foot on my native soil again. But rather with a heavy, heavy heart. What can this land be to me now but a land of exile? All that makes home to a man I have left behind. I hardly know why I have resumed the thread of this miserable story. God knows that I have no good thing to narrate. And that this setting forth, this storing as it were of my bitter harvest of disappointments, can bring no solace with it. And yet man must hope as long as life lasts. And hope begins springing up again in defiance of all reason, that somehow, someday, we shall meet again. Therefore I write, in order that, shouldn't such a day come. She may read for herself and learn how the thought of her filled each moment of my life since our parting, that she may read how I have sought her, how I have mourned for her, that she may know that my love has never failed her. This it is that harkens me to my task. Moreover, all else is so savorless that I know not how otherwise to fill the time. I have been here five weeks. There are many houses where I am welcome, many friends who would gladly lend me their company. Many places where young men can find distraction of diverse kinds and degrees. But I have not succeeded in bringing myself to take up the new life with any zest. I had rather dwell upon the past, in spite of all its bitterness, than face the desolation of the present. It was on the third day of the great storm that the pen fell from my hand at Tullendall, and for four and twenty hours more that self-same storm raged in violence. One word of my old servants had brought me on a sudden to a definite purpose. I was full of eager hope of tracing her, of finding her, once it were possible to start upon the quest. For the gale which kept me prisoner must have retarded her likewise, and even with two days' start I told myself she could not have gone far upon her road, but I reckoned without the difficulties which the first great snowfall of the year, before the hard frost comes to make it passable for sledging, was creating for us in these heights where the drifts fill to such depths. Day and night my fellows worked to cut away for me down to the imperial road, and I worked with them, watched, encouraged them, and all it seemed to so little purpose that I thought I should have gone mad outright. The cruel heavens now smiled, now frowned upon our work, so that between frost and thaw and thaw and frost the task was doubled, and my prison-bars seemed to grow stronger instead of less. In this way it came to pass that it was full ten days from the time that she had left Tolendall, that I was at length able to start forth in pursuit. My first stage was, of course, to the castle of the old Countess Shrekendorf, where I found the place well night deserted, its mistress having been, even as I had been informed, a fortnight dead and buried. But there was a servant in charge of the empty desolate house, and from her I gleaned tidings both precise and sufficient. The princess had remained quietly at Shrekendorf during the weeks which had followed upon my marriage, but on the day previous to our return to Tolendall from the shooting lodge a couple of couriers had arrived at the Countess's gates, close one upon the other, bringing it would seem important letters for the princess, who had been greatly agitated upon receipt of them. She had hastily dispatched a mounted messenger to my wife, whether with a private communication from herself or merely two forward missives addressed to her from her own home, I know not. But in any rate the papers which utterly had hidden from me that fatal day were brought her by this man. After she left Tolendall a few hours later my wife had arrived at Shrekendorf in a peasant's cart. That same evening two traveling coaches bringing ladies, officers, and servants had made their appearance at the castle. It was one of these coaches which went to the strong house next morning and bore away Ottoli's belongings. In the afternoon the whole party, including my wife, had set forth in great haste for the North, despite universal warning of the gathering storm. There could be no doubt but that their destination was Los Eats, most probably the residence itself, Buddhism. When I had ascertained all this I promptly decided upon my course. Taking with me Janos only I instantly started for the next post-town where we were able to secure fresh horses and once we pushed on the same night some twenty miles further. Not until the sixth evening, however, despite our extraordinarily hard traveling, did we, mounted upon a pair of sorry and worn out nags, find ourselves crossing the bridge under the towered gates of Buddhism. That was then the sixteenth day from the date of my wife's flight. It seemed a singularly deserted town as we stumbled over the cobbles of the streets with the early dusk of the November day closing in upon us. So few people passed us as we went, so few windows cast a light into the gloom, so many houses and shops presented but blank closed shutter fronts. Janos knew his way having ridden with my uncle in all this district during the late war. There was a very good inn, he told me, on the bird plots in the shadow of the palace and as nothing could suit my purpose better, to the silver lion in Lusatia we therefore turned our horses' heads. It was cheering after a long wayfaring and the dismal nightmare-like impression of our passage through the empty town to see the casements of the same silver lions shine afar off rudderly and my heart leapt within me to discern dimly sketched behind it the towering outline of the palace wherein no doubt my lost bird had found refuge. The voice of the red-faced host who, at the sound of clattering hooves before his door, came bustling to greet us as fast as his goodly bulk will allow, struck on my ear with cheering omen. God greet ye, my lords, he cried as he lent a shoulder for my descent. Dear, welcome this bitter night to fireside and supper. Enter, my lords, I have good wine, good beds, good supper for your lordships and the best beer that is brewed between Munich and Berlin. Youssef, thou rang, see to his lordship's horses. Wife, gone greet our worshipful visitors. I write down the jargon much as I heard it, for, as I write, I am back again at that moment and feel once more the glow of hope which crept into my heart even as the genial warmth of the room unbent my frozen limbs. I had reached my journey's end and the old rhyme in the play, journey's end in lover's meeting, rang a merry burden in my thoughts. I marvel now that my hope should have been so forward that I should have reckoned so much more upon her woman's love than upon her woman's pride. Indeed I had not deemed my sin so great but that my penitence would amply atone. So I was all eagerness to satisfy my hungering heart by tidings of her and could hardly sit still to my supper, though we had ridden hard and I was famished, till I had induced my host to sit beside me and crack a bottle of his most recommended renish which should unloose a tongue that scarcely needed such inducement. For her sake that no scandal might be brooted about her fair name, I had determined to proceed cautiously. You have a fine town here, friend, said I, so far as I can judge this dark night. Truly, your lordship may say so, he said, and smacked his lips that I might understand how great a relish this fruit of his cellar left on a man's palate. But it has a deserted look, said I, idly, just to encourage him and talk. So many houses shut up, so few people about. He rolled the wine round his mouth in a reflective manner, then swallowed it with a gulp, and threw an uneasy look at me. At the same instant there flashed upon my mind what strange it may seem I had clean forgotten in the turmoil of my thoughts and the hurry of my pursuit. The reason for the very state of affairs I was commenting on, the plague of smallpox, the malady that had driven the princess to my land, I, in very truth, the town had a plague-stricken look, and I felt myself turn pale to think my wife had come back to this nest of infection. The sickness, said I then quickly, has it abated here? Nay, I know all about it, man, and have no fear of it. But how fares it in the town and in the palace? Oh, the sickness! Quoth my host with a great awkward laugh, his lordship means these few little cases of smallpox, nah, it had been nothing, and it is all over now. Only folk were such cowards and frightened themselves sick, and families fled because of the same foolish fear. Now myself, as his lordship sees, myself and my family and my servants, we have not known a day's ill health, because we kept our hearts up and drank good stuff. It is, as I said to his harness himself, who never left the place, but went out in our midst, the noble prince, and spat at fear, besides that he had already had it, like myself, it is the wine, said I, or the beer, if you know where to get it, that keeps a man sound. The designers says to me, but here I interrupted the speaker in a voice, the trembling of which I could not control. Is the duke at the palace now then with homeless household? He has been so my lord, said the man eagerly, up to the last week. So long indeed as there was a suspicion of illness among us, but now he is at the summer castle, Othelion Rue, near Rothenburg. Tis but three leagues from the town. The princess sir is always fond of Othelion Rue, even in this cold weather, and as she has but just returned from visiting at another court, his highness, her father, has gone to join her thither. Our princess sir is a most beautiful young lady. Nay, if you will allow me, I will show you a portrait of her, which we have framed in my wife's room. A beautiful young lady sir. There will be rare festivities when she weds her cousin, the margrave of Lignitz Rothenburg. We have his portrait too, a very noble gentleman. I would show you these pictures. I think you would admire them. But I arrested him with a gesture, as in the hopes of distracting my attention from an awkward topic, he was about to roll his bulk in quest of these treasures. I had no wish indeed to feast my eyes upon that face, the lineaments of which, with all their beauty, I could not bear to recall. What was it to me whom that Otley married? If they had had a portrait of my Otley, indeed. But, sweet soul, she had told me herself of her obscurity and unimportance. And so, said I, they are at the summer palace, your reigning family. And though I had hugged the thought of her dear living presence so close to me this night, behind yonder palace walls, I nevertheless rejoiced to learn that she was safer, harbored. The princess has her retinue with her, I suppose. Oh, I, said the innkeeper, rising as he spoke, and clacking his tongue again over the last drop of his wine. Though our princess is so simple alas, if I may say so without disrespect, and loves not court fashions, but she has one favorite companion, and they are as sisters together, so that when one sees her highness, one may be sure the far line is not for distance. Oh, I, sir, they have returned from their travels together, though I have heard it rumored that one or two of her highness's attendants have been left behind, dead or ailing. Now, it is better to stay at home, strange places are unwholesome. He opened the stove door and shoved in two or three great logs, and I turned and stretched my limbs to the warmth with lazy content, and for the first time for many a long day and night a restful heart. Tomorrow I should see her. When I slept that night I dreamed golden dreams. The next day dawned upon a world all involved in creeping, grizzling mist that seemed to ooze even into the comfortable rooms of the silver lion, that rapped from my view the lofty towers of the palace beyond my window, and damped even my buoyant confidence. My good Yanos had the toothache, and though it was not in him to complain, the sight of his swollen, suffering face did not further encourage me to cheer. A little before noon we mounted to ride forth to Otulian Rue in the dismal weather. Our garments, despite the high duck's endless brushing, bore many traces of our hard journey. We cut but a poor figure, I thought, in these stained, rusty clothes, and the young lord of Tullendall was ill-mounted upon the wretched jade, in which had nevertheless faithfully served him upon his last cruel stage. The poor nag was yet full weary, and stumbled and drooped her head, while Yanos's white-faced bae might have stood for the very image of starving antiquity. I winced as I thought of Otuli's mocking glance, but the haste to see her overcame even my delicate vanity, following my host's directions, whom marvel greatly at our eccentricity that we should leave a warm stove door and good cheer from mere traveller's curiosity on such a day. We pattered forth through the town again, through streets yet more ghostlike in their daylight emptiness than they had seemed yester even. Patterned, once more across the wood of the bridge beneath which the sullen waters ran, without appearing to run, as gray and ledden as the heavens above. And after two hours dreary tramp along a popular bordered deserted road, we saw before us the gilded iron gate of Otulian Rue. Beyond there was a vision of French gardens, of bowling greens all drenched, of flat terraces whereon the ews fantastically cut stood about like pieces of a chessboard. Beyond that again rose the old Grecian porticoes and colonnades, and Chinese cupolas appertaining to the summer plazants of the reigning house. It might have looked fair enough under the bright skies in summer weather, with roses on the empty beds and sunshine on the little yellow spires, but it seemed a most desolate place as it lay beneath my eyes that noon. I told myself I should find sunshine even within, yet my heart lay heavy in my breast. A sentry with this pointed fur cap drawn down over his eyes, with the collar of his great coat drawn up above his ears, so that, of his countenance, only the end of a red nose was visible to the world. Marched up and down before the gates, and as we made ready to halt, challenged us roughly. At the sound of his call two more sentries appeared at different points, and tramped towards us with suspicion in their bearing. Evidently the duke was well guarded. I rode a few steps forward. When to my astonishment, it being full peacetime, the fellow brought his musket to the ready, and again cautioned me to pass on my way. But my way is to the palace. I bowed to him defiantly, despite the consciousness that the doubtful impression I must myself create could not be mitigated by the sight of Yanos behind me, for I am bound to say that in the plain garb I had insisted on his dawning, now much disordered, as I have said by our travels, with the natural grimness of his countenance enhanced by a screw of pain, a more truculent-looking ruffian it would have been hard to find. But so far I did not anticipate any more serious difficulty than what a few arguments could remove, and I carried a heavy purse. So I added boldly, I have business at the palace. The man-lord's weapon came a step nearer. Wants you calm, he asked more civilly. From Buddhism, said I, the musket instantly went up again, and its bearer retreated hastily a couple of paces. Tis against orders, he said, because of the sickness no one from Buddhism may pass the gates. The sickness again. I had then, by my impetuosity, my haste to follow in her traces, but raised a new barrier between us. I dismounted, threw my reins to Yanos, and advanced upon the soldier. But friend, said I, the fellow covered me with his weapon. Stand, he cried roughly, stand or I fire. I stood back, stock still. Here was a quandary indeed. But my god, I cried to him, I am a traveller, I have but passed through the town. I have come these eighty leagues upon urgent business, and I must see someone who I am told is in the palace. So saying, I drew forth a louis d'or, a stock of which I kept loose for such emergencies at my side pocket, and tossed it to the rascal. Now get me speech with a person in authority, said I. With one hand, and without lowering his firelock, he nimbly caught the coin in the fling and placed it in his mouth, after which he shook his head and remarked, indistinctly, tis no use. And then at last my sorely tried patience broke down, impotent otherwise in front of his menacing barrel. I cursed him long and loud with that choiceness and variety of epithet of which my own squadron life experience, as well as my apprenticeship to my great uncle, had given me a command. The clamor we made first drew the other soldiers, and next a little dapper officer from the guard room behind the inner gate, who ran out towards us, and at the utmost pitch of his naturally piping voice demanded in the name of all gods, thunders, and lightning-blasts what the matter was. My particular sentinel's utterance was something impeded by the louis d'or in his cheek, and I was consequently able to offer an explanation before him. On cover in my head and bowing I introduced myself in elegant phraseology, though of necessity for the distance between us in tones more suited to the parade-ground than to a polite ceremony, and laid bare my unfortunate position. I bewailed that through my brief halt in Buddhism ignorant of the infection I had evidently made myself amenable to quarantine, and requested his courteous assistance in the matter. My name was evidently quite unfamiliar to his ears, but perceiving that he had to deal with an equal, the little officer at once returned my salute with an extra flourish, and my civility by ordering the sentry to stand aside. Then, advancing gingerly in the mud to a more reasonable interval for conversation, he informed me, with another sweeping bow, that he was Captain Fryhair of von Krapitz, and that while it would be his pleasure to serve me in every possible manner, he regretted deeply that his orders were such that he could only ratify the sentry's conduct. There are no means, then, cried I, by which I can communicate in person with any resident of the palace? In person, said the officer, I regret none. His serene highnesses' orders are stringent, and when I tell you that our princess is actually behind these walls, you will understand the necessity. The sickness has been appalling, he added. He must have seen the blank dismay upon my countenance, for his own sharp visage expressed a comical mixture of sympathy and curiosity, and again approaching two steps he proceeded. I could perhaps convey some message. I shall soon be relieved from duty here. The person you wish to see is— It is a lady, said I, flushing. This was what the little gentleman had evidently expected. Suppressing a grain of satisfaction, he gave another salute and placed himself quite at my disposal. But I had an insurmountable objection to announce my real relationship to the woman who had fled from my protection. Courteous as my interlocutor was, and honorable and kind as he seemed to be, I could send no message to my wife through him. If you will see to the safe delivery of a letter, said I, I should be grateful indeed, his face fell. It is possible, perhaps, he said dubiously, but less easy of accomplishment. There will be the necessity of disinfection. If you think you're a beledule, forgive me for supposing you to be a sufferer from the tender passion. And believe me, I speak with sympathy. Here he thumped his little chest and heaved from its restricted depths a noisy sigh. If you think your beledule will not lose of its sweetness by a prolonged immersion in vinegar, I will do what I can. Nay, I think I can promise you that your letter will be delivered, if you will kindly inform me who the fair recipient is to be. Again I hesitated. I would not call her by her maiden name. To speak of her as my wife, to ball my strange story on the high road, was not only intolerable to my pride, but seemed inadvisable and certainly imprudent in my ignorance of her attitude at court. It is, said I, one of your princesses, court-ladies, and here his volubility spared me further circumlocution. It can certainly not be, he cried, that you have formed an unhappy attachment for the frau graph in von Kornstein. There remains then only the income test this year, fraulein von Aurebach and her sister, and fraulein Otterly Palin. These are all of our fair circle that are now in attendance at the palace. It is the last lady, I said, and was at once glad of my own circumspection, and troubled in my mind that she should be keeping her secret so well. Mais compliments, said he with a smirk. But I thought also with a shade of patronage, as if by mentioning her last he had also shown her to be the last in his worldly esteem. Once doubtless this would have galled me. Then, if I write now, I cried, and you, according to your kind offer, take charge of my letter. How soon can it be in her hands? But as soon as the guard has relieved me, good sir, am I free to act the gallant mercury? Pity it is that these sort of details of sickness and quarantine should come to spoil so pretty and errant. This was a fair court for cupid before the ugly plague came upon us. Yes, he had it. I have seen days. I had already drawn out my tablets, and thanking him, hurriedly, without, I fear, evincing much interest in his sentimental reflections, turned and making a standing desk of my horse, with a sheet spread upon the saddle, began, all in the dreary drizzle, to trace with fingers stiffened from the cold the few lines which were to bring my wife back to me. I had little time for composition, and so wrote the words as they welled up from my heart. Dear love, said I, in the French which had been the language of our happiest moments. Your poor scholar has learnt his lesson so well that he cannot live without his teacher. Forget what has come between us. Remember only all that unites us and forgives. I have it seems involved myself in difficulty by passing through Buddhism, and so will I fear have to endure delay, before being permitted sight of your sweet face again. But let me have a word which may help me to bear the separation. Let me know that I may carry home my wife. I signed it. Your poor scholar and loving husband. Then I folded it, fastened it with a wafer, and after a minute's pause, decided to burn my ships, and address it by the right name of her to whom I destined it. Madame Autely de Yenoko, n'est-ce la princesse Marie Autely de Luceis? Vending over the living desk. The poor patient brute never budged but for his heaving flanks. I laid for a second, unperceived, I thought. My lips upon that name which haunted me. Sleeping and waking, and turning with a letter in my hand, found the frayere watching me, with his head upon one side, and so comical in error of sympathy, that at another moment I should have burst out laughing. It is Mildomages. Quoted he as, bending his supple spine again, he drew his sword with a charming gesture of courtesy, that this chaste salute should have to pass through the bitter waves of the court doctor's vinegar basin before reaching the virginal lips for which it is intended. Then I may rely upon your countenance, said I, unmindful of his mock Versailles flouriness, as I fixed my missive to the point of the sword, extended towards me for that purpose, by the longest arm the little fellow could make. I knew he would not read the tell-tale inscription until the unpoetic process he had so feelingly lamented should have been gone through, and I wondered, something anxiously whether I would not prove another complication. My wife, in her wounded pride having thus chosen to conceal our marriage, in truth I might have known it. Had she not shaken off my ring? Seeing upon what grounds we had parted, however, I dared not have addressed her otherwise, and so could see no way but to run some risk. When may I hope to receive an answer? You will forgive my impatience, said I, with a somewhat rueful smile, for you have some knowledge of the human heart I see, and so I venture further to trespass upon your great courtesy. I will meet here any messenger you may depute at any hour you name this afternoon. Myself, sir, myself, said the good-natured gentleman, and in as short a space as possible, shall we say, three o'clock? There were then a few minutes wanting to noon by my uncle's famous chronometer. Three hours seemed long. But as we must ever learn to do in life, I had to be content with a slice where I wanted the loaf. Now I have not even a crumb for my starving heart, and yet I live. As I had surmised my messenger continued to hold the missive at the extreme length of his weapon and arm, while we made our diverse conges and compliments. Thus we parted, he to withdraw to his guard-house and I with my attendant to ride back to the nearest village, with what appetite we might for our noonday meal. I rode along alone, again to the rendezvous, full early, poor fool. Yanos I had sent on to find lodgings for me in the neighborhood, out of range of infection, so that my time of purgatory need not be an hour prolonged. The sky had cleared somewhat, and it rained no more, but there was now a penetrating and moisture-charged wind. A little after the stroke of three my friend of the morning came forth, waving aside the sentries before, and halted within the former distance while I dismounted. His countenance was far from bearing the beaming cordiality with which he had last surveyed me, nor had his bow anything like its previous depth and roundness. He drew a folded paper from his pocket, attached it to the point of his sword, according to the process I had already witnessed, and presented it to me, observing dryly. I regret, sir, that there seems to be some mistake about this matter. The court doctor, who duly delivered the letter at the palace, informs me that none of Her Highness's ladies in waiting will consent to receive it, it being indeed addressed to some person unknown among them. There is no lady of the name of Yenoko among Her Highness's attendants. I felt myself blanching. Am I to understand? said I. The shoreline Otili Palin has repudiated this letter. My good sir, said he, looking at me, I thought with a sort of compassion, as if he feared I was weak in my head. I understand from the court doctor that Madweshahil Palin was the lady to whom the letter was at once offered, according to my request, and yours. There is perhaps some mystery. Here is his interest seem to flicker up again, and he smiled as who would say confide in me. But I could not bring my tongue to this humiliation less than ever then. I flicked the pour of vinegar sodden, despised the pistol from the point of his sword, and spreading it out once again added to it a sort of frenzy, this appeal. For God's sake, forgive me. You cannot mean to send me away like this, Otili. Write me one line, for from my soul I love you. Then I pasted the sheet again, and drawing a line through the title, wrote above it in great letters, shoreline Otili Palin, and then I said to the officer, He will be doing a deed of churr kindness than you can imagine, Captain Runcrabbitz, if you will have this letter placed again in the hands of Fraulein Palin. More I cannot say now, but someday if my fortune is not more evil than I dare reflect upon, I will explain. Wait here half an hour, he responded, with a return of his good nature. I am off duty and free for the rest of the day. If I can induce the court doctor to attend to me in truth, he is of a very surly mood this afternoon. I trust you may see me return a message of better tidings. Besides a very bubbling heat of curiosity there was real amiability in this readiness to help me. The half hour sped, and half an hour beyond it. Why do I linger upon such details? From sheer cowardly reluctance, I believe, to describe those moments of my great despair. And then a cockscomb of a servant fellow, in gorgeous livery and rib and queue, stepped forth from the gates, sniffing a bunch of stinking herbs, and stood and surveyed me for a second from head to foot, grinning all over his insolent visage, till I wonder how I kept my writing wit from searing it across. Well, sir, said I sternly. He felt maybe the note of master in my voice, for he cringed a little, and more civilly than his countenance suggested, requested to know if I was the gentleman with whom Captain the Friar von Krapitz had recently been conversing. Upon my reply he gingerly held up a filthy rag of paper, in which I recognized with a failing of the heart such as I cannot set forth in words my own letter once more. And in sight of my discomforture, resuming his native impudence, he proceeded in loud tones. My master bids me inform you that he can no longer be the means of annoying a young lady whom he respects so much as Manuel Zellperlin. She has requested that your letter may be returned to you again, and declares that she knows no such person as yourself, and is quite at a loss why she should be made the object of this strange persecution. The rogue sang out the words as one repeating a lesson in which he has been well-drilled. As I stood steroid in him, all other feelings swallowed up in the overwhelming tide of my disappointment. I saw him, as in a dream, toss the much-traveled note in the mud between us, turn on his heel, exchange a grin with the nearest sentry, jerk his thumb over his shoulder in my direction, tap his forehead significantly, and finally, swagger out of sight behind the little wicket. And still I stood immovable, unable to formulate a single thought in my paralyzed brain, the whole world before me a dull blank, yet knowing that, when I should begin to feel again, it would be hell indeed. A shout from the sentry suddenly aroused me. "'Tis better,' he called, that you should move on. And in a good sooth what had I more to do before those gates. I mounted my horse and rode backwards and forwards upon that wretched scrap of paper that had been charged with all the dearest longings of my heart, until it lay indistinguishable in the mud around it. Then I set spurs to my jade, and we rode, well-matched couple, away towards the strange village where I was to meet Janos. With the memory of that bitterest hour of his life burning so hot within him that he could continue his sedentary task no longer, but must rise and pace the room after the selen way, now well known to Janos, as betokening his master's worst moments. Basil Yenneco laughed aloud. Pride must have a fall. God knows his pride had had falls enough to kill the most robust of vices. Had ever a man been so humiliated, so condemned as he, had ever poor soul been made to suffer more relentlessly where it had sinned. I have been brought low, very low, he said to himself, and thought of the early days at Tolendol when its young lord had deemed the whole earth created for his use, yet even as he spoke he knew in his heart that the pride that was born in him would die with him only, and that if it had been mastered awhile it was only but because love had been stronger still. When he had taken the routurier unreservedly to his heart, when he had returned from the mountains to seek reconciliation, when he had followed her upon her flight, had twice besought her to return to him, when he had made his third and last futile appeal in the face of a slashing rebuff, pride had lain beneath the heel of love. He had been beaten, after all, by a pride greater than his own, and he knew that were she to call him even now he would come to her bidding in spite of all and through all. The boards of the narrow, irregular room creaked beneath his impatient tread. Outside the sounds of traffic were dying away. The last belated coaches had clattered down the streets. The tall running footman had extinguished his link. Basil Yenneco turned instinctively towards the south, like the restless compass needle, a way that had grown into a habit of late as his spirit strove to bridge across the leagues of sea and land that lay between him and his wife. Was she thinking of him now? What was his curse was at the same time his triumph. He defied her to forget him any more than he could forget her. Those hours had she not shared them with him? Come what would no man could late claim to be to her what he had been? No man, that way, madlessly. He looked round at the pages scored with his writings and gave a heart-sick sigh. And then at the door of the room beyond wherein stood that huge four-post bed where he had tossed through such sleepless hours and dreamed such dreams for the waking moment held the bitterness of death. Next he thought of the town beyond, so full yet to him so empty. How to pass the time that went by with such leaden feet? The days were bad enough, but the nights, the nights were terrible. Should he don his most brilliant suit and hide him out into the throng of men of fashion? Some of the Worstczycky gold would not come amiss at the dicing-table of My Lady Brambary, or at the Cocoa Tree, or yet the Hummums, where he said being as strong as the best of them he could crack a few bottles in good company. Good company for soothe what could all the world be to him for want of that one small bean? He might drink himself into oblivion, perhaps, a few hours oblivion, and be carried home in the early morning and wake at midday with a new headache and the old heartache. Of the three evils choose the least, since the great feather bed would hold no sleep yet awhile. Since to drag his misery into company was to add fire to its fever, Mr. Yennechal sat down again to his task, hoping so to wary his brain that it would grant him a few hours dreamless rest. End of Part 2, Chapter 1. Part 2, Chapter 2 of The Pride of Yennechal. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Sylvia M. B. in Washington State. The Pride of Yennechal by Edgerton in Agnes Castle. Part 2, Chapter 2. Captain Basil Yennechal's memoir continued. There is very little more to tell. The new inn wherein I found Yennechal's established was but a poor place in a poor village. A sort of summer resort abandoned in wintertime, saved by its own wretched inhabitants. The private chamber allotted to me, it was the only one, was bitter cold. But my choice lay between that and the common room below, full of evil smells and reeking boars and stifling stove heat. But I was in no mood to wreck a bodily inconvenience. My further action had to be determined upon, and torn two ways between anger and longing. I passed the evening and the greater part of the night in futile battle with myself. At length I resolved upon a plan which brought some calm into my soul, and with it a creeping ray of hope. I would lay my case before the Princess herself. She had been ever kindly in her dealings towards me. I had no reason to imagine, but that she was well disposed in my favour. She had had no part in her maid of honour's double dealings with me. I would pray her to speak to the way would be on my behalf, to place before her her duty towards the husband she had herself chosen. Thus, next morning, as clearly, temperately, and respectfully as might be, I indicted my letter, sealed it upon each fold with the Yenneco coat of arms, and, after deliberation, dispatched Yanos with it. The fellow had, according to my orders, purchased fresh horses, and cut a better figure than yesterday's, when he set off upon his errand. Duly and minutely instructed he was to present himself at another gate of the palace, and I trusted that making good use of the purse with which he was supplied, his mission might be more successfully accomplished than had been mine. And indeed, so far as he was concerned, this was the case. He came back sooner than I had supposed it possible to inform me that having been able to say he was not from Buddhism, he had been received with civility, and permitted to wait at the guardhouse of the north entrance while my letter was carried to the palace. After a short time, the messenger who had taken charge of it had returned, demanded, and carefully noted my name, qualities, and exact whereabouts, and bidden him go back to his master with the assurance that the princess would send her answer. I waited, tramping the short breadth of my miserable room like a caged wolf, anxiously peering every other minute through the rain-stained window which overlooked the high road. Reason seemed to offer by one conclusion concerning the result of the last appeal. She would come back to me, my offense bad as it had been, unmanly towards the woman who had lain in my arms, unworthy of a gentleman towards the lady whom he had resolved to acknowledge as his wife. My offense was not one that so true a penitence might not amply atone for. That was what reason said. But as often as confidence began to rise in my heart, an instinctive dread overcame me, an unaccountable, ominous misgiving that the happiness I had once held in my hand and so perversely cast from me was never to be mine again, and as the hours slowly fell away the dread became more poignant and the effort to hope more futile. Yanos had returned with his message about noon. It must have been at least five o'clock, for the world outside was wrapped in murky shadow, when there came a sound on the road that made my heart leap. A clatter of horses hooves and the rumbling of a coach, I threw open my window and thrust out my head. How vividly the impression comes back on me now. The cold rain upon my throbbing temples, the blinding light of joy that filled my brain as I strained my eyes to distinguish in the dust the nature of the vehicle which announced its approach with such important noise. It was a carriage guarded by an escort of dragoons who rode by the door, musket on thigh, an escort. It must be the princess herself. The princess come in person, the noble and gentle lady to bring me back my wife, my love. Fool! Fool! Fool! Thrice told! For my vain glorious self-conceit, my loving yearning heart, my spirits bounded at one leap to their old important arrogant level. I threw a hasty glance in the mirror to note that the pallor of my countenance and the disorder of my unpowdered hair were after all not unbecoming. As I dashed along the narrow wooden passage down the breakneck creaking stairs I will not say that in all the glow of my heart that had been so cold there was not now in this sudden relief from the iron pressure of anxiety a point of anger against a little truant, a vague determination to establish a certain balance of account to inflict some mild penance upon her as I set off against the very bitter one she had imposed on me. A minute ago I would have knelt before her and humbled myself to the very dust. When I reached the door of the drinking room I was already pluming myself upon a resolution to be merciful. I broke into the room out of the darkness with my head high, and was at first so dazzled by the light within as well as by the reeling triumph in my brain that for an instant I could distinguish nothing. Then with a sickening revulsion, with such rage as may have torn the soul of Lucifer struck from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell. I saw the single figure of Captain von Krapitz standing in the middle of the floor with much gravity and importance of demeanor. Flattened against the walls the boars stood open mouth all struck with amazement, and the little host was bowing anxiously to the belaced officer. Two dragoons guarded the door. Before even a word was uttered I felt that all was over for me, concentrating my energies then to face misfortune with as brave a front as I might. I halted before my friend of yesterday, and waited in silence for him to open proceedings. He bowed to me with great courtesy, looking upon me the while with eyes at once compassionate, curious, and yet respectful, as though upon one of newly discovered importance, and said, I grieve, sir, to be the bearer of an order which may cause you displeasure. But I beg you, being a soldier yourself, to consider me only as the instrument which does not presume to judge but obeys. Be pleased to read this. It is addressed to you. I took the great sealed envelope with fingers as cold and heavy as marble. Broke it open mechanically and red. At first it was without any comprehension of the words, which were nevertheless set forth in a very free flowing hand. But presently as the blood rushed in a tide of sudden anger to my brain, with a quickening and redoubled intensity of intelligence, the Princess Marie Ottolie of Saxelot Seats, so in the precious document, has received Monsieur de Yenneco's letter concerning a certain lady. Monsieur de Yenneco has already been given clearly to understand that his importunities are distressing. As the lady in question is a member of the princess's household, Monsieur de Yenneco will not be surprised at the steps which are not taken to secure her against further persecution. He is advised to accept the escort of the officer who carries the letter, and warn that any attempt at resistance, or any future infringement of the order issued by command of his serene highness, will be visited in the severest manner. In a bloody heat of rage, I looked up ready for any folly to strangle the precarious little instrument of a woman's implacable resentment, to find death on the bayonets of the hulking sentinels at the door, and be glad of it, so that I had shed somebody's blood for these insults. But meeting Captain von Krapitz, steady glance, I paused, and in that pause my sense returned. If love itself be a madness, as they say, what name shall we give to our wrath against those that we love? For that minute no poor chained bedlamite could have been more dangerously mad than I, but my British dread of ridicule saved my life that day, and perhaps that of others besides. Perhaps also the rope-itty, the sympathy that was stamped on the Captain's honest face had something to say to calming me. At any rate, I recovered from my convulsion, and awoke to the fact that blood was running down my shirt from where I had clenched my teeth upon my lip. I must have been a fearsome object to behold, and I have a good opinion of Captain von Krapitz's coolness that he should thus have stood and faced a man of twice his size, and in such a frenzy of probably four times his strength, with never a signal to his guard or even a step in retreat, said this gentleman then, delicately averting his eyes from my countenance, so soon as he saw I had come to my senses. If you will glance at this paper you will see that my orders are stringent, and I shall be greatly indebted to your courtesy if you will cooperate in their being carried out in the least unpleasant manner possible. Indeed, sir, he added in my hair hastily and kindly, resistance would be worse than useless. I glanced at the paper he presented to me, caught the words, order to Captain von Krapitz to convey Monsieur de Yenico beyond the frontier of Lusatia at any point he may himself choose, caught a further glimpse of such expressions, formal warning to Monsieur de Yenico, never to set foot more within the dominions of the Duke of Los Itz, severe penalty and so forth. I glanced and tossed the paper contemptuously on the table. That wife of mine had greater interest at the court than she had been want to pretend, and she was using it to some purpose. She was mightily determined that her offending husband should pay his debt to her pride to the last stripe of his punishment. I smiled in the bitterness of my soul. I was sane enough now, God knows. Well, she should have her wish. She should be persecuted no longer. I placed myself entirely at your convenience, said Monsieur de Krapitz, discreetly, adding, however, the significant remark, my order gives me twelve hours. He picked up the document as he spoke, folded it carefully, and placed it in his press pocket. Oh, as for me, said I, I ask for no respite. Could I desire to waste a second before shaking the dust of this cursed country from my feet? The time but to warn my servant and bid him truss up my portmanteau and saddle the horses. I understand, I added, with what I fear was a withering smile, that you are kind enough to offer me a seat in your carriage. Oh, my dear sir, returned the little man with an expression of relief. What a delightful thing it is to deal with an owned spree. And so, in scarce half an hour's time, the triumphal procession was ready to set forth. I entered the coach, and for a hair took his seat behind me. Yano, impassive, mounted its horse between two dragoons, whilst my own mount was led by a third soldier in the rear. And in this order we set off at a round pace for the celestine frontier, where I begged to be deposited. At first my good tempered and garrulous escort tried in vain to begal me into some conversation upon such abstract subjects as music and poetry. But his well-met efforts failed before my hopeless taciturnity, and it was in silence that we concluded the transit between Rothenburg and the border. As we parted, however, he held out his hand. Songstrakun, camarade, said he. What could I do but clasp for the good-natured little paw, as hardly as I might, and echo, although most untruly, Songstrakun, to the very throat I was full of rancor for everything belonging to Lusatia, and I swear the bitterness of it lay a palpable taste on my tongue. A free man again, I threw myself upon my horse, and took the straightest road for my empty home. Yano's had the wit to speak no word to me, save a direction now and again as to the proper way. And we rode like fairies to the cold, wet night. Breed a fine stalk, had said my good uncle to his heir, at least I thought, and the sound of my laugh rang ghastly even in my own ears. If I have proud road tour into the family, I am not like now to graft it onto the family tree.