PART IIICHAPTER IMemoir of Captain Basil Jennico(RESUMED IN THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 1773)In my Castle of Tollendhal,March, 1773.Itis the will of one whose wishes are law to me that I should proceed with these pages, begun under such stress of mental trouble, until I bring the tangled story of Basil Jennico’s marriage to its singular settlement.Without, as I now write, all over the land, the ice-bound brooks are melting, and our fields and roads are deep in impassable mud. The whole air is full of the breath of spring, as grateful to the nostrils as it is stirring to the blood of man, to the sap of trees.But it is ill getting about, for all that the springtime is so sweet—as sweet and as capricious as a woman wooed—and thus there is time for this occupationof scribe; yet it is a curious task for one bred to so vastly different a trade; neither, God knows, do I find time heavy on my hands just now! Nevertheless, I must even end this preface as I have begun it, and say that I am fain to do as I am bidden.The last line I traced upon these sheets (I am filled with a good deal of wonder at, and no little admiration of myself, when I view what a goodly mass I have already blackened) was penned at one of the darkest moments of that dark year.M. de Schreckendorf—little messenger of such ill omen—had but just departed, and in the month that followed his visit the courage had failed me to resume my melancholy record, though truly I had things to relate that a man might consider like to form a more than usually thrilling chapter of autobiography.Towards the beginning of September, I, still a dweller upon my mother’s little property—most peaceful haunt, it would seem, in the heart of our peaceful land—began to find myself the object of a series of murderous attacks—these, so repeated and inveterate, that it was evident that they were dictated by the most deliberate purpose, and the more alarming, perhaps, that I could give then no guess from what quarter they proceeded.Suspicion fell on a poaching gang, on a dishonest groom, on a discharged bailiff. At length, seeing my mother like to fall ill of the anxiety, I consented to return to London, although the country life and the wholesome excitement of sport had afforded me a relief from my restlessness which existence in the town was far from providing.No sooner, however, was I fully installed in my London chambers, than the persecution began afresh. I had fallen into an idle habit of going night after night to White’s, there to bet and gamble with my modish acquaintances. ’Twas not that the dice had any special attraction for me, but that my nights were so long.On my way thither one mid-October foggy evening, my life was once more attempted, and this time with a deliberation and ferocity which might well have proved successful at last.As it was, however, I again providentially escaped, and was able to proceed to the club, where I had an appointment with a poor youth—our Norfolk neighbour, Sir John Beddoes—who had already lost a great deal of money to me, and would not be content until he had lost a great deal more: I had the most insupportable good luck.I little knew that I should find awaiting me there the greatest danger I had yet to run;that the head which had directed all these blows in the dark was, de guerre lasse, preparing to attack me in the open, and push its malice to a certain climax. A foreign gentleman—one Chevalier de Ville-Rouge, as I knew him then—had sedulously sought first my acquaintance, and thereupon my company, for some weeks past. And though I had not found him very entertaining—I was not in the mood to be entertained by any one—I had no reason to deny him either the one or the other.But this night, after first addressing me with looks and tones which began to strike me as unwarrantable, he sat a round of hazard with me, for the sole and determined purpose, as I even then saw, of grossly insulting me. As a reply, I struck him across the face, for, however transparent was the trap laid for me, the provocation before witnesses was of a kind I could not pass over. And, ’fore Heaven, I believe I was in my heart glad of the diversion!The meeting was fixed for the next morning. Neither of us would consent to delay, and indeed the German’s whole demeanour, once he had given a loose rein to his fury, was more that of a wild beast thirsting for blood than of a being endowed with reason.Both Sir John Beddoes and Mr. Carew, who had formed our party, indignant at the coarseness of the foreigner’s behaviour, volunteered on the spot to be my seconds, and Carew, who has a subtle knowledge of the etiquette of honour, arranged the details of our meeting. It was to take place in Chelsea Gardens half an hour after sunrise. The weapons chosen by M. de Ville-Rouge were swords, for although the quarrel had been of his own seeking, my blow had given him the right of choice.It was two o’clock before I found myself again alone in my rooms that night, my friends having conducted me home, and seeming somewhat loath to retire. I was longing for a couple of hours’ solitude before the dawn of the day which might be my last. I felt that my career had reached its turning-point, that this was an event otherwise serious than any of the quarrels in which I had been hitherto embroiled, and that the conduct of affairs was not in my hands.Carew was anxious about me—he had never yet seen a duellist of my kidney, I believe—and my very quietness puzzled him.“Make that nutcracker attendant of yours prepare you a hot drink, man,” cried he, as at last, with honest Beddoes, he withdrew, “and get to bed. Nothing will steady your hand like a spell of sleep.”But there was no sleep for me. Besides that the pain of the slight wound which I had received in the night’s guet-apens was stiffening to great soreness, there was an excitement in my brain—partially due to the fever incident on the hurt—which would not permit the thought of rest.I had but little business to transact. In view of the present uncertainty of my life, I had recently drawn up a will in which, after certain fitting legacies, I left my great fortune to my wife. Now I merely gathered together the whole of this accumulated narrative of mine into a weighty packet, and after addressing it, deposited it in János’s hands with the strict injunction, in the event of my demise, to deliver it personally to Ottilie.No farewell message would be so eloquent as these pages in which I had laid bare the innermost thoughts of my soul since I first knew her. She should receive no other message from me. I next tore up poor Beddoes’s litter of I O U’s, and making a parcel of the fragments directed it to him. János received my instructions with his usual taciturn docility, yet if anything could have roused me from the curious state of apathy in which I found myself, it would have been the sight of the dumb concern on the faithful fellow’s countenance.Having thus put all my worldly affairs in order,I sat me down in my armchair, awaiting the dawn, and viewed the past as one who has done with life. I had a strong presentiment upon me that I should not survive the meeting.At times, the vision of my wife sleeping, at that very moment, as I had so often watched her sleep, lightly and easily as a child, little wotting, little caring, perhaps, if she had wotted, of her husband’s solemn vigil, would rise up before me with a vividness so cruel as well-nigh to rouse me. But the new calmness of my soul defied these assaults; an unknown philosophy had succeeded to the violence of my emotions.When my seconds called for me in the first greyness of the morning they found me ready for them. They themselves were shivering from the raw cold, with arms thrust to the elbows into the depths of their muffs; Carew, all yellow and shrivelled,—an old man of a sudden,—and Beddoes, blue and purple, the sleep still in his swollen eyes, hardly able to keep his teeth from chattering—a very schoolboy! They could scarce conceal their amazement at my placidity. It was not, indeed, that I found myself bodily fit for the contest, for the whole of my left side was stiff, and I could hardly move that arm without pain; yet placid I was, I scarcely now know why.Thus we set forth in Sir John Beddoes’s coach, János on the box, and a civil, shy young man on the back seat beside Beddoes: this was, the latter informed me, the best surgeon he had been able to secure at such short notice.The fog disappeared, and when the mists evaporated it promised to be a fine, bright, frosty morning.Now, it may be after all that I was a little light-headed with the heat of the wound in my blood, for I have no very clear recollections of that morning. It remains in my mind rather as a bright-coloured fantasy than a series of events I have actually lived through.I remember, as a man may remember a scene in a play, a garden running down to the river-side, very bare and desolate, and the figure and face of my bulky antagonist as he conferred excitedly with two outlandish-looking men, his seconds. These had fierce moustaches, and reminded me vaguely of the cravat captains I had known in the Empire. Then the scene shifts: we stand facing each other. I am glad of the chill of the air, with nothing between it and my fevered breast but the thinness of my shirt. But my opponent stamps like a menacing bull, as if furious at the benumbing blasts. Now I am fighting—fightingfor my life—as never in battle or in single combat have I had need to fight before. This is no courteous duel between gentlemen, no honourable meeting, but the struggle of a man with his murderer. Physically at a disadvantage from my hurt, I am moreover conscious that against this brute fury all my skill at arms is of no avail and my strength is rapidly failing. Then, as he drives me by the sheer weight of his mass, I see his face thrust forward into mine, distorted with such a frenzy that I wonder in a sort of unformed way why this man should thus thirst to kill me. The next moment, with an extraordinary sense of universal failure and disorganisation which is yet not pain, I realise that I am hit—badly hit.Upon that instant I find my brain cleared to a lucidity I have never felt before. I see my opponent’s sword flash ruby red with my own blood in the sun rays; I see him smile, a smile of glorious triumph, which cuts a deep dimple beside his lip; I hear him pant at me the strange words, “Ha! Ottilie!” and then I am again seared, rent once more, and to the sound of a howl of many voices my world falls into chaos and exists no more.******It is sometimes but a short and easy way up to the gates of death, but a long and weary journey back to life. It was a long and weary journey to me.I was like to a man who travels in the dead of night over rough ways, and now and again slumbers uneasily with troubled dreams, and now looks out upon a glimmer of light in some house or village, and now on nothing but the pitchy darkness; and yet he is always travelling on and on till he is weary with madness of fatigue. And then, as the dawn breaks upon the wanderer, and he sees a strange land around him, so the dawn of what seemed a new existence began to break for me, and I looked upon life anew with wondering eyes.At first I looked as the traveller may, with eyes so tired and drowsy as scarce to care to notice. But in yet a little while I warmed and quickened to the sun of returning health. I began to be something more than a mere tortured mass of humanity; each breath was no longer misery to draw; the mind was able to re-assert authority over the flesh. That dark, watchful figure that seemed to have been sitting at the foot of my bed for centuries, that was János! Poor old fellow! I could not yet speak to him, but I could smile. My next thought was amaze that I shouldbe in a strange room; it had a very teasing tapestry; its figures had worried me long before I could notice them. In a little while I began to understand that I was not in my own chambers, and to feel such irritation at the liberty which had been taken with me that I should have demanded instant explanation had my strength been equal to the task.But I come of too vigorous stock, the blood that runs in my veins is too sweet—because I have not, like so many young fools of my day, poisoned it with endless potations and dissoluteness—for me, when once on the broad high road to recovery (to continue my travelling simile), to dally over the ground.Moreover I was too well nursed. János, it seems, after the first couple of visits, in each of which I was wisely bled of the diminished store the Chevalier’s sword had left in my veins—János had had a great quarrel with the surgeon, vowing he would not see his master’s murder completed before his eyes and never a chance of hanging the murderer.It had ended in the old soldier taking the law into his own hands, dismissing the man of medicine, and treating me after his own lights. He had had a fairly good apprenticeship, havingattended my uncle through all his campaigns. As far as I am concerned I am convinced that in this, as well as in another matter which I am about to relate, he saved my life.The other matter has reference to the very change of quarters which had excited my ire, the true explanation of which, however, I did not receive until I was strong enough to entertain visitors. János would give me little or no satisfaction.“I thought in myself it would be more wholesome for your honour than your other house,” was the utmost I could extract. Indeed, he strenuously discouraged all conversation. But the day when this stern guardian first consented to admit Carew and Beddoes to my presence,—and that was not till I could sit up in bed and converse freely,—all that I had been curious about was made clear to me.Carew, indeed, had the virtue of being an excellent gossip. I had at one time deemed it his only quality, but I learned better then. Both the gentlemen, each in his own fashion, displayed a certain emotion at seeing me again, in which pleasure at the fact of my being still in the land of the living, and likely to remain so, was qualified by the painful impression produced by my altered appearance.Sir John, the boy, sat himself down on the edge of my bed and squeezed my hand in silence, with something like tears in his eyes. Carew, the roué, was very deliberate in his choice of a chair, took snuff with a vast deal of elegant gesture, and fired off, with it might be an excess of merriment, such jocularities as he had gathered ready against the occasion. Both of them seemed to deem it incumbent upon them to avoid any reference to the duel. I, however, very promptly brought up the subject.“Now, for God’s sake,” I said, “let a poor man who has been kept like a child with a cross nurse—take your pap, go to sleep, ask no questions—learn at last a little about himself. In the first place, where am I? In the second, what has become of the red devil who brought me to this pass?”“In the first place, Jennico,” said Carew, “you are at the house of Lady Beddoes, mother to our friend here, a very pleasing little residence situate on Richmond Hill. Secondly, that red devil, as you call him, that most damnable villain, has fled the country, as well he might, for if ever a knave deserved stringing up as high as Haman—but of that anon. There is a good deal to tell you if you think you can bear the excitement.“Well,” he pursued, upon my somewhat pettish asseveration, “I myself think a little pleasant conversation will do you more good than harm. To begin with, you are doubtless not aware that you are a dead man.”“How?” cried I, a little startled, for my nerve was yet none of the strongest.“Nay, nay, dash you, Carew,” interposed Sir John, “don’t ye make those jokes. Gruesome, I call ’em: it makes me creep! No, Basil, lad, thou art alive, and wilt live to set that Chevalier, whoever he may be, swinging for it yet.” And here in his eager partisanship he broke into a volley of execrations which would have run my poor great-uncle’s performances pretty close.“Why,” said I impatiently, “‘tis enigma to me still why I am here; why I am dead; why the Chevalier should hang. I think you have all sworn to drive me mad among you.”I was so evidently exasperated that Beddoes, all of a tremble, besought Carew to explain the situation.“He’ll do himself a mischief,” he cried pathetically; “do you tell him, Carew,—you know what a fool I am!”Carew was nothing loath to set about what was indeed the chief pleasure of his life, the retailing ofscandal; and it seems that the Jennico duel was a very pretty scandal indeed.“I will take your last question first,” said he, settling himself to his task with gusto. “Why the Chevalier should hang? Who he really is, where he comes from, why he hates you with such deadly hatred, Jennico, are all mysteries which I confess myself unable to fathom—doubtless you can furnish us with the clue by-and-by.”As he spoke his pale eye kindled with a most devouring curiosity. Nevertheless as I showed no desire to interrupt him by any little confidence, he proceeded glibly:“But why the Chevalier should hang is another matter. Gadzooks, I’d run him down myself were it but for his impudence in getting gentlemen like myself to come and see foul play. Why, Jennico, man, don’t you know that after charging you like a bull, and running you once through the body, the scoundrel stabbed you again as you were sinking down and the sword had dropped from your hand. I doubt me he would have spitted you a third time to make quite sure, had not Beddoes and I fallen upon him.”“I’d have run him through,” here interposed Sir John excitedly; “I had drawn for it, had I not, Dick?—and I’d have run him through, but thatthe surgeon called out that you were dead; and dash me, between the turn I got and the way those queer seconds of his hustled him away, I lost the chance! And the three of them ran, they ran like rats, to the river. Gad, I’d have left my mark on them even then, but Carew, be hanged to him, held on by my coat-tails.”“‘Tis just as Jack told you,” said Carew. “No sooner had they heard you were dead, my friend, than they ran for it, and it is quite true that I restrained Jack here from sticking them in the back as they skedaddled. A pretty affair of honour, indeed!”I lay back on my pillows awhile, musing. I had had time to reflect on many things these days, and—God knows—there were enigmas enough in my life to give me food for reflection. What I had just heard caused me no surprise, tallying as it did with conclusions I had previously reached.After a moment Carew cleared his throat, edged his chair a foot nearer, and queried confidentially: “Did it never strike you that the Chevalier must have been part and parcel, if not the moving spirit, of those attacks upon your life which you told us of that night at the club? You did not appear to have a notion of it then. Yet there was not a manof us there who did not see but the quarrel was deliberately got up.”“And d’ye mind,” cried Sir John, “how he bet me you would not live a month?”“Ay,” said Carew, “and Jennico knows best himself if in his gay youth, in foreign parts, he has not given good cause for this mortal enmity, though to be sure the mystery thickens when we remember how friendly you were with each other. Jennico is such a close dog; he keeps such a dashed tight counsel!”I smiled. Jennico would keep his counsel still. I meant these good fellows should expound my riddles for me, not I theirs.“But since I am dead,” said I, “I fear, Jack, thou hast lost on me again.”“The gentleman did not leave his address,” said Sir John with a grin; and he furtively squeezed my hand to express his secret sense of the little transaction of the I O U’s.“We made some clamour at the Embassy, I promise you,” interposed Carew; “we were anxious to pay him all his due, you may be sure. But devil a bit of satisfaction could we get, save indeed that the Ambassador took to his bed with a fit of gout, and you being dead, Jennico,—you are dead still, remember,—to bury you was thebest thing your friends could do for you, till you were able to take fit measures to protect yourself. And indeed it was that queer old Tartar of yours, your János, or whatever you call him, who loudly insisted upon your demise, when we found the first alarm was unfounded and that you still breathed. Gad, I believe you have as many lives as a cat! This fellow then says to us in his queer jargon: ’My master lives, but he must all the same be thought dead.’ And faith he besought us with such urgency, that, what with seeing you lying there, and knowing what we knew of the foul play that had been practised upon you, we were ready enough to fall in with his desires. Sir John bethought him of his mother’s house at Richmond, and offered to accompany you there,—or rather your body: you were little less just then. Next the surgeon swore the journey would kill you, and your servant swore you should not be harboured in the town. The fellow knew you: ’Good breed,’ he said, ’not easily killed!’ And so he won the day, and Miles the surgeon gave in; but indeed he told me apart, ’twas waste of time disputing, for anyhow you could not see the noon. But here you are at my Lady Beddoes’s house at Richmond, alive and like to live, though you have ceased to exist for most men. There was a charming, reallya most touching, obituary notice in the Gazettes; you have been duly lamented at the clubs—and forgotten within the usual nine days. Rumours will soon begin to get about of course, but nobody knows anything positive. The secret is still kept. János, I believe, has contrived to assuage the anxiety of your relatives.”Here the speaker took so copious a pinch to refresh himself after his long speech that he set me off sneezing, whereupon my special Cerberus promptly made his appearance and bundled the visitors forth without more ado.******I have said that my friend’s belief in the Chevalier’s implication in the divers murderous onsets that had been made upon me, previous to his own, did not surprise me. The memory of M. de Ville-Rouge’s cry, as he dealt me what he believed my death stroke,—a cry in which it would be hard to say whether savage triumph or sheer vindictiveness most predominated,—had come back on me, as soon as I could think at all, with most revealing force.His arrival in England had coincided with the beginning of the persecution. The look on his face as I had last seen it, that smile and that dimple, had haunted me during long hours of deliriumwith a most maddening, grotesque, and horrible likeness to the face of her I had so loved. Coupling these things in later sanity of mind with the other evidence, I could not doubt but that here had been some relative of Ottilie, who had interest to put an end to her husband’s existence. Had not her pock-marked Mercury at the close of our interview uttered words of earnest warning? ay, I minded them now:“The matter will not end here.... Have a care, young man....”As I thought of all this, as the whole meaning of what had seemed so mysterious now lay clear before me, I would be seized with a sort of deadly anguish, compared to which all my previous sufferings, whether of body or mind, had been but trivial. Could she, could Ottilie, haveknownof this work? Could she—haveinspiredit?The sweat that would break out upon me at such a thought was more than all my fever had wrung from my body, and my faithful leech would wonder to find me faint and reeking, and would puzzle his poor brains in vain upon the cause, and decoct me new teas of dreadful compounds, febrifuges which he vowed had never failed.But then at other times the vision of my wife would rise before me and shame me. I would seeagain her noble brow, her clear eye, her arched and innocent lip, and in my weakness and the passion of my longing I would turn and weep upon my pillow to think that, having to my sorrow lost her, I should come now to lose even my faith in her, and yet should love her still with such mad love.Now there must be, as János would have it, something remarkably tough in the breed of Jennico for me to recover from such wounds both bodily and mental. Recover I did, however, in spite of all odds; and a resolve I made with returning strength did a good deal to ease my mind, tossed between such torturing fluctuations.This resolve was no less than to leave the country some fine morning, in secret, so soon as I could undertake the journey with any likelihood of being able to persevere in it, to speed to Budissin, and discover for myself the real attitude of Ottilie towards me. I was determined that, according as I found her,—either what my heart would still deem her, or yet so base a thing as the fiend whispered,—that I would try to win her back, were I to die in the attempt, or thrust her from my life for ever.Thus when I heard that my enemy and the world believed me dead, when I realised that shetoo must probably share in the delusion, I was glad, for not only would it materially facilitate my re-entering the Duchy, but it would afford me an excellent opportunity of judging her real feelings. I had no doubt but that, if I set to work in a proper manner and duly preserved my incognito, I should be able, now that all pretext for quarantine had disappeared, to secure an interview without too much difficulty.So all my desires hastening towards that goal, I set myself to become a whole man again with so much energy that even János was surprised at the rapidity of my progress.
PART IIICHAPTER IMemoir of Captain Basil Jennico(RESUMED IN THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 1773)In my Castle of Tollendhal,March, 1773.Itis the will of one whose wishes are law to me that I should proceed with these pages, begun under such stress of mental trouble, until I bring the tangled story of Basil Jennico’s marriage to its singular settlement.Without, as I now write, all over the land, the ice-bound brooks are melting, and our fields and roads are deep in impassable mud. The whole air is full of the breath of spring, as grateful to the nostrils as it is stirring to the blood of man, to the sap of trees.But it is ill getting about, for all that the springtime is so sweet—as sweet and as capricious as a woman wooed—and thus there is time for this occupationof scribe; yet it is a curious task for one bred to so vastly different a trade; neither, God knows, do I find time heavy on my hands just now! Nevertheless, I must even end this preface as I have begun it, and say that I am fain to do as I am bidden.The last line I traced upon these sheets (I am filled with a good deal of wonder at, and no little admiration of myself, when I view what a goodly mass I have already blackened) was penned at one of the darkest moments of that dark year.M. de Schreckendorf—little messenger of such ill omen—had but just departed, and in the month that followed his visit the courage had failed me to resume my melancholy record, though truly I had things to relate that a man might consider like to form a more than usually thrilling chapter of autobiography.Towards the beginning of September, I, still a dweller upon my mother’s little property—most peaceful haunt, it would seem, in the heart of our peaceful land—began to find myself the object of a series of murderous attacks—these, so repeated and inveterate, that it was evident that they were dictated by the most deliberate purpose, and the more alarming, perhaps, that I could give then no guess from what quarter they proceeded.Suspicion fell on a poaching gang, on a dishonest groom, on a discharged bailiff. At length, seeing my mother like to fall ill of the anxiety, I consented to return to London, although the country life and the wholesome excitement of sport had afforded me a relief from my restlessness which existence in the town was far from providing.No sooner, however, was I fully installed in my London chambers, than the persecution began afresh. I had fallen into an idle habit of going night after night to White’s, there to bet and gamble with my modish acquaintances. ’Twas not that the dice had any special attraction for me, but that my nights were so long.On my way thither one mid-October foggy evening, my life was once more attempted, and this time with a deliberation and ferocity which might well have proved successful at last.As it was, however, I again providentially escaped, and was able to proceed to the club, where I had an appointment with a poor youth—our Norfolk neighbour, Sir John Beddoes—who had already lost a great deal of money to me, and would not be content until he had lost a great deal more: I had the most insupportable good luck.I little knew that I should find awaiting me there the greatest danger I had yet to run;that the head which had directed all these blows in the dark was, de guerre lasse, preparing to attack me in the open, and push its malice to a certain climax. A foreign gentleman—one Chevalier de Ville-Rouge, as I knew him then—had sedulously sought first my acquaintance, and thereupon my company, for some weeks past. And though I had not found him very entertaining—I was not in the mood to be entertained by any one—I had no reason to deny him either the one or the other.But this night, after first addressing me with looks and tones which began to strike me as unwarrantable, he sat a round of hazard with me, for the sole and determined purpose, as I even then saw, of grossly insulting me. As a reply, I struck him across the face, for, however transparent was the trap laid for me, the provocation before witnesses was of a kind I could not pass over. And, ’fore Heaven, I believe I was in my heart glad of the diversion!The meeting was fixed for the next morning. Neither of us would consent to delay, and indeed the German’s whole demeanour, once he had given a loose rein to his fury, was more that of a wild beast thirsting for blood than of a being endowed with reason.Both Sir John Beddoes and Mr. Carew, who had formed our party, indignant at the coarseness of the foreigner’s behaviour, volunteered on the spot to be my seconds, and Carew, who has a subtle knowledge of the etiquette of honour, arranged the details of our meeting. It was to take place in Chelsea Gardens half an hour after sunrise. The weapons chosen by M. de Ville-Rouge were swords, for although the quarrel had been of his own seeking, my blow had given him the right of choice.It was two o’clock before I found myself again alone in my rooms that night, my friends having conducted me home, and seeming somewhat loath to retire. I was longing for a couple of hours’ solitude before the dawn of the day which might be my last. I felt that my career had reached its turning-point, that this was an event otherwise serious than any of the quarrels in which I had been hitherto embroiled, and that the conduct of affairs was not in my hands.Carew was anxious about me—he had never yet seen a duellist of my kidney, I believe—and my very quietness puzzled him.“Make that nutcracker attendant of yours prepare you a hot drink, man,” cried he, as at last, with honest Beddoes, he withdrew, “and get to bed. Nothing will steady your hand like a spell of sleep.”But there was no sleep for me. Besides that the pain of the slight wound which I had received in the night’s guet-apens was stiffening to great soreness, there was an excitement in my brain—partially due to the fever incident on the hurt—which would not permit the thought of rest.I had but little business to transact. In view of the present uncertainty of my life, I had recently drawn up a will in which, after certain fitting legacies, I left my great fortune to my wife. Now I merely gathered together the whole of this accumulated narrative of mine into a weighty packet, and after addressing it, deposited it in János’s hands with the strict injunction, in the event of my demise, to deliver it personally to Ottilie.No farewell message would be so eloquent as these pages in which I had laid bare the innermost thoughts of my soul since I first knew her. She should receive no other message from me. I next tore up poor Beddoes’s litter of I O U’s, and making a parcel of the fragments directed it to him. János received my instructions with his usual taciturn docility, yet if anything could have roused me from the curious state of apathy in which I found myself, it would have been the sight of the dumb concern on the faithful fellow’s countenance.Having thus put all my worldly affairs in order,I sat me down in my armchair, awaiting the dawn, and viewed the past as one who has done with life. I had a strong presentiment upon me that I should not survive the meeting.At times, the vision of my wife sleeping, at that very moment, as I had so often watched her sleep, lightly and easily as a child, little wotting, little caring, perhaps, if she had wotted, of her husband’s solemn vigil, would rise up before me with a vividness so cruel as well-nigh to rouse me. But the new calmness of my soul defied these assaults; an unknown philosophy had succeeded to the violence of my emotions.When my seconds called for me in the first greyness of the morning they found me ready for them. They themselves were shivering from the raw cold, with arms thrust to the elbows into the depths of their muffs; Carew, all yellow and shrivelled,—an old man of a sudden,—and Beddoes, blue and purple, the sleep still in his swollen eyes, hardly able to keep his teeth from chattering—a very schoolboy! They could scarce conceal their amazement at my placidity. It was not, indeed, that I found myself bodily fit for the contest, for the whole of my left side was stiff, and I could hardly move that arm without pain; yet placid I was, I scarcely now know why.Thus we set forth in Sir John Beddoes’s coach, János on the box, and a civil, shy young man on the back seat beside Beddoes: this was, the latter informed me, the best surgeon he had been able to secure at such short notice.The fog disappeared, and when the mists evaporated it promised to be a fine, bright, frosty morning.Now, it may be after all that I was a little light-headed with the heat of the wound in my blood, for I have no very clear recollections of that morning. It remains in my mind rather as a bright-coloured fantasy than a series of events I have actually lived through.I remember, as a man may remember a scene in a play, a garden running down to the river-side, very bare and desolate, and the figure and face of my bulky antagonist as he conferred excitedly with two outlandish-looking men, his seconds. These had fierce moustaches, and reminded me vaguely of the cravat captains I had known in the Empire. Then the scene shifts: we stand facing each other. I am glad of the chill of the air, with nothing between it and my fevered breast but the thinness of my shirt. But my opponent stamps like a menacing bull, as if furious at the benumbing blasts. Now I am fighting—fightingfor my life—as never in battle or in single combat have I had need to fight before. This is no courteous duel between gentlemen, no honourable meeting, but the struggle of a man with his murderer. Physically at a disadvantage from my hurt, I am moreover conscious that against this brute fury all my skill at arms is of no avail and my strength is rapidly failing. Then, as he drives me by the sheer weight of his mass, I see his face thrust forward into mine, distorted with such a frenzy that I wonder in a sort of unformed way why this man should thus thirst to kill me. The next moment, with an extraordinary sense of universal failure and disorganisation which is yet not pain, I realise that I am hit—badly hit.Upon that instant I find my brain cleared to a lucidity I have never felt before. I see my opponent’s sword flash ruby red with my own blood in the sun rays; I see him smile, a smile of glorious triumph, which cuts a deep dimple beside his lip; I hear him pant at me the strange words, “Ha! Ottilie!” and then I am again seared, rent once more, and to the sound of a howl of many voices my world falls into chaos and exists no more.******It is sometimes but a short and easy way up to the gates of death, but a long and weary journey back to life. It was a long and weary journey to me.I was like to a man who travels in the dead of night over rough ways, and now and again slumbers uneasily with troubled dreams, and now looks out upon a glimmer of light in some house or village, and now on nothing but the pitchy darkness; and yet he is always travelling on and on till he is weary with madness of fatigue. And then, as the dawn breaks upon the wanderer, and he sees a strange land around him, so the dawn of what seemed a new existence began to break for me, and I looked upon life anew with wondering eyes.At first I looked as the traveller may, with eyes so tired and drowsy as scarce to care to notice. But in yet a little while I warmed and quickened to the sun of returning health. I began to be something more than a mere tortured mass of humanity; each breath was no longer misery to draw; the mind was able to re-assert authority over the flesh. That dark, watchful figure that seemed to have been sitting at the foot of my bed for centuries, that was János! Poor old fellow! I could not yet speak to him, but I could smile. My next thought was amaze that I shouldbe in a strange room; it had a very teasing tapestry; its figures had worried me long before I could notice them. In a little while I began to understand that I was not in my own chambers, and to feel such irritation at the liberty which had been taken with me that I should have demanded instant explanation had my strength been equal to the task.But I come of too vigorous stock, the blood that runs in my veins is too sweet—because I have not, like so many young fools of my day, poisoned it with endless potations and dissoluteness—for me, when once on the broad high road to recovery (to continue my travelling simile), to dally over the ground.Moreover I was too well nursed. János, it seems, after the first couple of visits, in each of which I was wisely bled of the diminished store the Chevalier’s sword had left in my veins—János had had a great quarrel with the surgeon, vowing he would not see his master’s murder completed before his eyes and never a chance of hanging the murderer.It had ended in the old soldier taking the law into his own hands, dismissing the man of medicine, and treating me after his own lights. He had had a fairly good apprenticeship, havingattended my uncle through all his campaigns. As far as I am concerned I am convinced that in this, as well as in another matter which I am about to relate, he saved my life.The other matter has reference to the very change of quarters which had excited my ire, the true explanation of which, however, I did not receive until I was strong enough to entertain visitors. János would give me little or no satisfaction.“I thought in myself it would be more wholesome for your honour than your other house,” was the utmost I could extract. Indeed, he strenuously discouraged all conversation. But the day when this stern guardian first consented to admit Carew and Beddoes to my presence,—and that was not till I could sit up in bed and converse freely,—all that I had been curious about was made clear to me.Carew, indeed, had the virtue of being an excellent gossip. I had at one time deemed it his only quality, but I learned better then. Both the gentlemen, each in his own fashion, displayed a certain emotion at seeing me again, in which pleasure at the fact of my being still in the land of the living, and likely to remain so, was qualified by the painful impression produced by my altered appearance.Sir John, the boy, sat himself down on the edge of my bed and squeezed my hand in silence, with something like tears in his eyes. Carew, the roué, was very deliberate in his choice of a chair, took snuff with a vast deal of elegant gesture, and fired off, with it might be an excess of merriment, such jocularities as he had gathered ready against the occasion. Both of them seemed to deem it incumbent upon them to avoid any reference to the duel. I, however, very promptly brought up the subject.“Now, for God’s sake,” I said, “let a poor man who has been kept like a child with a cross nurse—take your pap, go to sleep, ask no questions—learn at last a little about himself. In the first place, where am I? In the second, what has become of the red devil who brought me to this pass?”“In the first place, Jennico,” said Carew, “you are at the house of Lady Beddoes, mother to our friend here, a very pleasing little residence situate on Richmond Hill. Secondly, that red devil, as you call him, that most damnable villain, has fled the country, as well he might, for if ever a knave deserved stringing up as high as Haman—but of that anon. There is a good deal to tell you if you think you can bear the excitement.“Well,” he pursued, upon my somewhat pettish asseveration, “I myself think a little pleasant conversation will do you more good than harm. To begin with, you are doubtless not aware that you are a dead man.”“How?” cried I, a little startled, for my nerve was yet none of the strongest.“Nay, nay, dash you, Carew,” interposed Sir John, “don’t ye make those jokes. Gruesome, I call ’em: it makes me creep! No, Basil, lad, thou art alive, and wilt live to set that Chevalier, whoever he may be, swinging for it yet.” And here in his eager partisanship he broke into a volley of execrations which would have run my poor great-uncle’s performances pretty close.“Why,” said I impatiently, “‘tis enigma to me still why I am here; why I am dead; why the Chevalier should hang. I think you have all sworn to drive me mad among you.”I was so evidently exasperated that Beddoes, all of a tremble, besought Carew to explain the situation.“He’ll do himself a mischief,” he cried pathetically; “do you tell him, Carew,—you know what a fool I am!”Carew was nothing loath to set about what was indeed the chief pleasure of his life, the retailing ofscandal; and it seems that the Jennico duel was a very pretty scandal indeed.“I will take your last question first,” said he, settling himself to his task with gusto. “Why the Chevalier should hang? Who he really is, where he comes from, why he hates you with such deadly hatred, Jennico, are all mysteries which I confess myself unable to fathom—doubtless you can furnish us with the clue by-and-by.”As he spoke his pale eye kindled with a most devouring curiosity. Nevertheless as I showed no desire to interrupt him by any little confidence, he proceeded glibly:“But why the Chevalier should hang is another matter. Gadzooks, I’d run him down myself were it but for his impudence in getting gentlemen like myself to come and see foul play. Why, Jennico, man, don’t you know that after charging you like a bull, and running you once through the body, the scoundrel stabbed you again as you were sinking down and the sword had dropped from your hand. I doubt me he would have spitted you a third time to make quite sure, had not Beddoes and I fallen upon him.”“I’d have run him through,” here interposed Sir John excitedly; “I had drawn for it, had I not, Dick?—and I’d have run him through, but thatthe surgeon called out that you were dead; and dash me, between the turn I got and the way those queer seconds of his hustled him away, I lost the chance! And the three of them ran, they ran like rats, to the river. Gad, I’d have left my mark on them even then, but Carew, be hanged to him, held on by my coat-tails.”“‘Tis just as Jack told you,” said Carew. “No sooner had they heard you were dead, my friend, than they ran for it, and it is quite true that I restrained Jack here from sticking them in the back as they skedaddled. A pretty affair of honour, indeed!”I lay back on my pillows awhile, musing. I had had time to reflect on many things these days, and—God knows—there were enigmas enough in my life to give me food for reflection. What I had just heard caused me no surprise, tallying as it did with conclusions I had previously reached.After a moment Carew cleared his throat, edged his chair a foot nearer, and queried confidentially: “Did it never strike you that the Chevalier must have been part and parcel, if not the moving spirit, of those attacks upon your life which you told us of that night at the club? You did not appear to have a notion of it then. Yet there was not a manof us there who did not see but the quarrel was deliberately got up.”“And d’ye mind,” cried Sir John, “how he bet me you would not live a month?”“Ay,” said Carew, “and Jennico knows best himself if in his gay youth, in foreign parts, he has not given good cause for this mortal enmity, though to be sure the mystery thickens when we remember how friendly you were with each other. Jennico is such a close dog; he keeps such a dashed tight counsel!”I smiled. Jennico would keep his counsel still. I meant these good fellows should expound my riddles for me, not I theirs.“But since I am dead,” said I, “I fear, Jack, thou hast lost on me again.”“The gentleman did not leave his address,” said Sir John with a grin; and he furtively squeezed my hand to express his secret sense of the little transaction of the I O U’s.“We made some clamour at the Embassy, I promise you,” interposed Carew; “we were anxious to pay him all his due, you may be sure. But devil a bit of satisfaction could we get, save indeed that the Ambassador took to his bed with a fit of gout, and you being dead, Jennico,—you are dead still, remember,—to bury you was thebest thing your friends could do for you, till you were able to take fit measures to protect yourself. And indeed it was that queer old Tartar of yours, your János, or whatever you call him, who loudly insisted upon your demise, when we found the first alarm was unfounded and that you still breathed. Gad, I believe you have as many lives as a cat! This fellow then says to us in his queer jargon: ’My master lives, but he must all the same be thought dead.’ And faith he besought us with such urgency, that, what with seeing you lying there, and knowing what we knew of the foul play that had been practised upon you, we were ready enough to fall in with his desires. Sir John bethought him of his mother’s house at Richmond, and offered to accompany you there,—or rather your body: you were little less just then. Next the surgeon swore the journey would kill you, and your servant swore you should not be harboured in the town. The fellow knew you: ’Good breed,’ he said, ’not easily killed!’ And so he won the day, and Miles the surgeon gave in; but indeed he told me apart, ’twas waste of time disputing, for anyhow you could not see the noon. But here you are at my Lady Beddoes’s house at Richmond, alive and like to live, though you have ceased to exist for most men. There was a charming, reallya most touching, obituary notice in the Gazettes; you have been duly lamented at the clubs—and forgotten within the usual nine days. Rumours will soon begin to get about of course, but nobody knows anything positive. The secret is still kept. János, I believe, has contrived to assuage the anxiety of your relatives.”Here the speaker took so copious a pinch to refresh himself after his long speech that he set me off sneezing, whereupon my special Cerberus promptly made his appearance and bundled the visitors forth without more ado.******I have said that my friend’s belief in the Chevalier’s implication in the divers murderous onsets that had been made upon me, previous to his own, did not surprise me. The memory of M. de Ville-Rouge’s cry, as he dealt me what he believed my death stroke,—a cry in which it would be hard to say whether savage triumph or sheer vindictiveness most predominated,—had come back on me, as soon as I could think at all, with most revealing force.His arrival in England had coincided with the beginning of the persecution. The look on his face as I had last seen it, that smile and that dimple, had haunted me during long hours of deliriumwith a most maddening, grotesque, and horrible likeness to the face of her I had so loved. Coupling these things in later sanity of mind with the other evidence, I could not doubt but that here had been some relative of Ottilie, who had interest to put an end to her husband’s existence. Had not her pock-marked Mercury at the close of our interview uttered words of earnest warning? ay, I minded them now:“The matter will not end here.... Have a care, young man....”As I thought of all this, as the whole meaning of what had seemed so mysterious now lay clear before me, I would be seized with a sort of deadly anguish, compared to which all my previous sufferings, whether of body or mind, had been but trivial. Could she, could Ottilie, haveknownof this work? Could she—haveinspiredit?The sweat that would break out upon me at such a thought was more than all my fever had wrung from my body, and my faithful leech would wonder to find me faint and reeking, and would puzzle his poor brains in vain upon the cause, and decoct me new teas of dreadful compounds, febrifuges which he vowed had never failed.But then at other times the vision of my wife would rise before me and shame me. I would seeagain her noble brow, her clear eye, her arched and innocent lip, and in my weakness and the passion of my longing I would turn and weep upon my pillow to think that, having to my sorrow lost her, I should come now to lose even my faith in her, and yet should love her still with such mad love.Now there must be, as János would have it, something remarkably tough in the breed of Jennico for me to recover from such wounds both bodily and mental. Recover I did, however, in spite of all odds; and a resolve I made with returning strength did a good deal to ease my mind, tossed between such torturing fluctuations.This resolve was no less than to leave the country some fine morning, in secret, so soon as I could undertake the journey with any likelihood of being able to persevere in it, to speed to Budissin, and discover for myself the real attitude of Ottilie towards me. I was determined that, according as I found her,—either what my heart would still deem her, or yet so base a thing as the fiend whispered,—that I would try to win her back, were I to die in the attempt, or thrust her from my life for ever.Thus when I heard that my enemy and the world believed me dead, when I realised that shetoo must probably share in the delusion, I was glad, for not only would it materially facilitate my re-entering the Duchy, but it would afford me an excellent opportunity of judging her real feelings. I had no doubt but that, if I set to work in a proper manner and duly preserved my incognito, I should be able, now that all pretext for quarantine had disappeared, to secure an interview without too much difficulty.So all my desires hastening towards that goal, I set myself to become a whole man again with so much energy that even János was surprised at the rapidity of my progress.
PART III
Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico(RESUMED IN THE SPRING OF THE YEAR 1773)
In my Castle of Tollendhal,March, 1773.
Itis the will of one whose wishes are law to me that I should proceed with these pages, begun under such stress of mental trouble, until I bring the tangled story of Basil Jennico’s marriage to its singular settlement.
Without, as I now write, all over the land, the ice-bound brooks are melting, and our fields and roads are deep in impassable mud. The whole air is full of the breath of spring, as grateful to the nostrils as it is stirring to the blood of man, to the sap of trees.
But it is ill getting about, for all that the springtime is so sweet—as sweet and as capricious as a woman wooed—and thus there is time for this occupationof scribe; yet it is a curious task for one bred to so vastly different a trade; neither, God knows, do I find time heavy on my hands just now! Nevertheless, I must even end this preface as I have begun it, and say that I am fain to do as I am bidden.
The last line I traced upon these sheets (I am filled with a good deal of wonder at, and no little admiration of myself, when I view what a goodly mass I have already blackened) was penned at one of the darkest moments of that dark year.
M. de Schreckendorf—little messenger of such ill omen—had but just departed, and in the month that followed his visit the courage had failed me to resume my melancholy record, though truly I had things to relate that a man might consider like to form a more than usually thrilling chapter of autobiography.
Towards the beginning of September, I, still a dweller upon my mother’s little property—most peaceful haunt, it would seem, in the heart of our peaceful land—began to find myself the object of a series of murderous attacks—these, so repeated and inveterate, that it was evident that they were dictated by the most deliberate purpose, and the more alarming, perhaps, that I could give then no guess from what quarter they proceeded.
Suspicion fell on a poaching gang, on a dishonest groom, on a discharged bailiff. At length, seeing my mother like to fall ill of the anxiety, I consented to return to London, although the country life and the wholesome excitement of sport had afforded me a relief from my restlessness which existence in the town was far from providing.
No sooner, however, was I fully installed in my London chambers, than the persecution began afresh. I had fallen into an idle habit of going night after night to White’s, there to bet and gamble with my modish acquaintances. ’Twas not that the dice had any special attraction for me, but that my nights were so long.
On my way thither one mid-October foggy evening, my life was once more attempted, and this time with a deliberation and ferocity which might well have proved successful at last.
As it was, however, I again providentially escaped, and was able to proceed to the club, where I had an appointment with a poor youth—our Norfolk neighbour, Sir John Beddoes—who had already lost a great deal of money to me, and would not be content until he had lost a great deal more: I had the most insupportable good luck.
I little knew that I should find awaiting me there the greatest danger I had yet to run;that the head which had directed all these blows in the dark was, de guerre lasse, preparing to attack me in the open, and push its malice to a certain climax. A foreign gentleman—one Chevalier de Ville-Rouge, as I knew him then—had sedulously sought first my acquaintance, and thereupon my company, for some weeks past. And though I had not found him very entertaining—I was not in the mood to be entertained by any one—I had no reason to deny him either the one or the other.
But this night, after first addressing me with looks and tones which began to strike me as unwarrantable, he sat a round of hazard with me, for the sole and determined purpose, as I even then saw, of grossly insulting me. As a reply, I struck him across the face, for, however transparent was the trap laid for me, the provocation before witnesses was of a kind I could not pass over. And, ’fore Heaven, I believe I was in my heart glad of the diversion!
The meeting was fixed for the next morning. Neither of us would consent to delay, and indeed the German’s whole demeanour, once he had given a loose rein to his fury, was more that of a wild beast thirsting for blood than of a being endowed with reason.
Both Sir John Beddoes and Mr. Carew, who had formed our party, indignant at the coarseness of the foreigner’s behaviour, volunteered on the spot to be my seconds, and Carew, who has a subtle knowledge of the etiquette of honour, arranged the details of our meeting. It was to take place in Chelsea Gardens half an hour after sunrise. The weapons chosen by M. de Ville-Rouge were swords, for although the quarrel had been of his own seeking, my blow had given him the right of choice.
It was two o’clock before I found myself again alone in my rooms that night, my friends having conducted me home, and seeming somewhat loath to retire. I was longing for a couple of hours’ solitude before the dawn of the day which might be my last. I felt that my career had reached its turning-point, that this was an event otherwise serious than any of the quarrels in which I had been hitherto embroiled, and that the conduct of affairs was not in my hands.
Carew was anxious about me—he had never yet seen a duellist of my kidney, I believe—and my very quietness puzzled him.
“Make that nutcracker attendant of yours prepare you a hot drink, man,” cried he, as at last, with honest Beddoes, he withdrew, “and get to bed. Nothing will steady your hand like a spell of sleep.”
But there was no sleep for me. Besides that the pain of the slight wound which I had received in the night’s guet-apens was stiffening to great soreness, there was an excitement in my brain—partially due to the fever incident on the hurt—which would not permit the thought of rest.
I had but little business to transact. In view of the present uncertainty of my life, I had recently drawn up a will in which, after certain fitting legacies, I left my great fortune to my wife. Now I merely gathered together the whole of this accumulated narrative of mine into a weighty packet, and after addressing it, deposited it in János’s hands with the strict injunction, in the event of my demise, to deliver it personally to Ottilie.
No farewell message would be so eloquent as these pages in which I had laid bare the innermost thoughts of my soul since I first knew her. She should receive no other message from me. I next tore up poor Beddoes’s litter of I O U’s, and making a parcel of the fragments directed it to him. János received my instructions with his usual taciturn docility, yet if anything could have roused me from the curious state of apathy in which I found myself, it would have been the sight of the dumb concern on the faithful fellow’s countenance.
Having thus put all my worldly affairs in order,I sat me down in my armchair, awaiting the dawn, and viewed the past as one who has done with life. I had a strong presentiment upon me that I should not survive the meeting.
At times, the vision of my wife sleeping, at that very moment, as I had so often watched her sleep, lightly and easily as a child, little wotting, little caring, perhaps, if she had wotted, of her husband’s solemn vigil, would rise up before me with a vividness so cruel as well-nigh to rouse me. But the new calmness of my soul defied these assaults; an unknown philosophy had succeeded to the violence of my emotions.
When my seconds called for me in the first greyness of the morning they found me ready for them. They themselves were shivering from the raw cold, with arms thrust to the elbows into the depths of their muffs; Carew, all yellow and shrivelled,—an old man of a sudden,—and Beddoes, blue and purple, the sleep still in his swollen eyes, hardly able to keep his teeth from chattering—a very schoolboy! They could scarce conceal their amazement at my placidity. It was not, indeed, that I found myself bodily fit for the contest, for the whole of my left side was stiff, and I could hardly move that arm without pain; yet placid I was, I scarcely now know why.
Thus we set forth in Sir John Beddoes’s coach, János on the box, and a civil, shy young man on the back seat beside Beddoes: this was, the latter informed me, the best surgeon he had been able to secure at such short notice.
The fog disappeared, and when the mists evaporated it promised to be a fine, bright, frosty morning.
Now, it may be after all that I was a little light-headed with the heat of the wound in my blood, for I have no very clear recollections of that morning. It remains in my mind rather as a bright-coloured fantasy than a series of events I have actually lived through.
I remember, as a man may remember a scene in a play, a garden running down to the river-side, very bare and desolate, and the figure and face of my bulky antagonist as he conferred excitedly with two outlandish-looking men, his seconds. These had fierce moustaches, and reminded me vaguely of the cravat captains I had known in the Empire. Then the scene shifts: we stand facing each other. I am glad of the chill of the air, with nothing between it and my fevered breast but the thinness of my shirt. But my opponent stamps like a menacing bull, as if furious at the benumbing blasts. Now I am fighting—fightingfor my life—as never in battle or in single combat have I had need to fight before. This is no courteous duel between gentlemen, no honourable meeting, but the struggle of a man with his murderer. Physically at a disadvantage from my hurt, I am moreover conscious that against this brute fury all my skill at arms is of no avail and my strength is rapidly failing. Then, as he drives me by the sheer weight of his mass, I see his face thrust forward into mine, distorted with such a frenzy that I wonder in a sort of unformed way why this man should thus thirst to kill me. The next moment, with an extraordinary sense of universal failure and disorganisation which is yet not pain, I realise that I am hit—badly hit.
Upon that instant I find my brain cleared to a lucidity I have never felt before. I see my opponent’s sword flash ruby red with my own blood in the sun rays; I see him smile, a smile of glorious triumph, which cuts a deep dimple beside his lip; I hear him pant at me the strange words, “Ha! Ottilie!” and then I am again seared, rent once more, and to the sound of a howl of many voices my world falls into chaos and exists no more.
It is sometimes but a short and easy way up to the gates of death, but a long and weary journey back to life. It was a long and weary journey to me.
I was like to a man who travels in the dead of night over rough ways, and now and again slumbers uneasily with troubled dreams, and now looks out upon a glimmer of light in some house or village, and now on nothing but the pitchy darkness; and yet he is always travelling on and on till he is weary with madness of fatigue. And then, as the dawn breaks upon the wanderer, and he sees a strange land around him, so the dawn of what seemed a new existence began to break for me, and I looked upon life anew with wondering eyes.
At first I looked as the traveller may, with eyes so tired and drowsy as scarce to care to notice. But in yet a little while I warmed and quickened to the sun of returning health. I began to be something more than a mere tortured mass of humanity; each breath was no longer misery to draw; the mind was able to re-assert authority over the flesh. That dark, watchful figure that seemed to have been sitting at the foot of my bed for centuries, that was János! Poor old fellow! I could not yet speak to him, but I could smile. My next thought was amaze that I shouldbe in a strange room; it had a very teasing tapestry; its figures had worried me long before I could notice them. In a little while I began to understand that I was not in my own chambers, and to feel such irritation at the liberty which had been taken with me that I should have demanded instant explanation had my strength been equal to the task.
But I come of too vigorous stock, the blood that runs in my veins is too sweet—because I have not, like so many young fools of my day, poisoned it with endless potations and dissoluteness—for me, when once on the broad high road to recovery (to continue my travelling simile), to dally over the ground.
Moreover I was too well nursed. János, it seems, after the first couple of visits, in each of which I was wisely bled of the diminished store the Chevalier’s sword had left in my veins—János had had a great quarrel with the surgeon, vowing he would not see his master’s murder completed before his eyes and never a chance of hanging the murderer.
It had ended in the old soldier taking the law into his own hands, dismissing the man of medicine, and treating me after his own lights. He had had a fairly good apprenticeship, havingattended my uncle through all his campaigns. As far as I am concerned I am convinced that in this, as well as in another matter which I am about to relate, he saved my life.
The other matter has reference to the very change of quarters which had excited my ire, the true explanation of which, however, I did not receive until I was strong enough to entertain visitors. János would give me little or no satisfaction.
“I thought in myself it would be more wholesome for your honour than your other house,” was the utmost I could extract. Indeed, he strenuously discouraged all conversation. But the day when this stern guardian first consented to admit Carew and Beddoes to my presence,—and that was not till I could sit up in bed and converse freely,—all that I had been curious about was made clear to me.
Carew, indeed, had the virtue of being an excellent gossip. I had at one time deemed it his only quality, but I learned better then. Both the gentlemen, each in his own fashion, displayed a certain emotion at seeing me again, in which pleasure at the fact of my being still in the land of the living, and likely to remain so, was qualified by the painful impression produced by my altered appearance.
Sir John, the boy, sat himself down on the edge of my bed and squeezed my hand in silence, with something like tears in his eyes. Carew, the roué, was very deliberate in his choice of a chair, took snuff with a vast deal of elegant gesture, and fired off, with it might be an excess of merriment, such jocularities as he had gathered ready against the occasion. Both of them seemed to deem it incumbent upon them to avoid any reference to the duel. I, however, very promptly brought up the subject.
“Now, for God’s sake,” I said, “let a poor man who has been kept like a child with a cross nurse—take your pap, go to sleep, ask no questions—learn at last a little about himself. In the first place, where am I? In the second, what has become of the red devil who brought me to this pass?”
“In the first place, Jennico,” said Carew, “you are at the house of Lady Beddoes, mother to our friend here, a very pleasing little residence situate on Richmond Hill. Secondly, that red devil, as you call him, that most damnable villain, has fled the country, as well he might, for if ever a knave deserved stringing up as high as Haman—but of that anon. There is a good deal to tell you if you think you can bear the excitement.
“Well,” he pursued, upon my somewhat pettish asseveration, “I myself think a little pleasant conversation will do you more good than harm. To begin with, you are doubtless not aware that you are a dead man.”
“How?” cried I, a little startled, for my nerve was yet none of the strongest.
“Nay, nay, dash you, Carew,” interposed Sir John, “don’t ye make those jokes. Gruesome, I call ’em: it makes me creep! No, Basil, lad, thou art alive, and wilt live to set that Chevalier, whoever he may be, swinging for it yet.” And here in his eager partisanship he broke into a volley of execrations which would have run my poor great-uncle’s performances pretty close.
“Why,” said I impatiently, “‘tis enigma to me still why I am here; why I am dead; why the Chevalier should hang. I think you have all sworn to drive me mad among you.”
I was so evidently exasperated that Beddoes, all of a tremble, besought Carew to explain the situation.
“He’ll do himself a mischief,” he cried pathetically; “do you tell him, Carew,—you know what a fool I am!”
Carew was nothing loath to set about what was indeed the chief pleasure of his life, the retailing ofscandal; and it seems that the Jennico duel was a very pretty scandal indeed.
“I will take your last question first,” said he, settling himself to his task with gusto. “Why the Chevalier should hang? Who he really is, where he comes from, why he hates you with such deadly hatred, Jennico, are all mysteries which I confess myself unable to fathom—doubtless you can furnish us with the clue by-and-by.”
As he spoke his pale eye kindled with a most devouring curiosity. Nevertheless as I showed no desire to interrupt him by any little confidence, he proceeded glibly:
“But why the Chevalier should hang is another matter. Gadzooks, I’d run him down myself were it but for his impudence in getting gentlemen like myself to come and see foul play. Why, Jennico, man, don’t you know that after charging you like a bull, and running you once through the body, the scoundrel stabbed you again as you were sinking down and the sword had dropped from your hand. I doubt me he would have spitted you a third time to make quite sure, had not Beddoes and I fallen upon him.”
“I’d have run him through,” here interposed Sir John excitedly; “I had drawn for it, had I not, Dick?—and I’d have run him through, but thatthe surgeon called out that you were dead; and dash me, between the turn I got and the way those queer seconds of his hustled him away, I lost the chance! And the three of them ran, they ran like rats, to the river. Gad, I’d have left my mark on them even then, but Carew, be hanged to him, held on by my coat-tails.”
“‘Tis just as Jack told you,” said Carew. “No sooner had they heard you were dead, my friend, than they ran for it, and it is quite true that I restrained Jack here from sticking them in the back as they skedaddled. A pretty affair of honour, indeed!”
I lay back on my pillows awhile, musing. I had had time to reflect on many things these days, and—God knows—there were enigmas enough in my life to give me food for reflection. What I had just heard caused me no surprise, tallying as it did with conclusions I had previously reached.
After a moment Carew cleared his throat, edged his chair a foot nearer, and queried confidentially: “Did it never strike you that the Chevalier must have been part and parcel, if not the moving spirit, of those attacks upon your life which you told us of that night at the club? You did not appear to have a notion of it then. Yet there was not a manof us there who did not see but the quarrel was deliberately got up.”
“And d’ye mind,” cried Sir John, “how he bet me you would not live a month?”
“Ay,” said Carew, “and Jennico knows best himself if in his gay youth, in foreign parts, he has not given good cause for this mortal enmity, though to be sure the mystery thickens when we remember how friendly you were with each other. Jennico is such a close dog; he keeps such a dashed tight counsel!”
I smiled. Jennico would keep his counsel still. I meant these good fellows should expound my riddles for me, not I theirs.
“But since I am dead,” said I, “I fear, Jack, thou hast lost on me again.”
“The gentleman did not leave his address,” said Sir John with a grin; and he furtively squeezed my hand to express his secret sense of the little transaction of the I O U’s.
“We made some clamour at the Embassy, I promise you,” interposed Carew; “we were anxious to pay him all his due, you may be sure. But devil a bit of satisfaction could we get, save indeed that the Ambassador took to his bed with a fit of gout, and you being dead, Jennico,—you are dead still, remember,—to bury you was thebest thing your friends could do for you, till you were able to take fit measures to protect yourself. And indeed it was that queer old Tartar of yours, your János, or whatever you call him, who loudly insisted upon your demise, when we found the first alarm was unfounded and that you still breathed. Gad, I believe you have as many lives as a cat! This fellow then says to us in his queer jargon: ’My master lives, but he must all the same be thought dead.’ And faith he besought us with such urgency, that, what with seeing you lying there, and knowing what we knew of the foul play that had been practised upon you, we were ready enough to fall in with his desires. Sir John bethought him of his mother’s house at Richmond, and offered to accompany you there,—or rather your body: you were little less just then. Next the surgeon swore the journey would kill you, and your servant swore you should not be harboured in the town. The fellow knew you: ’Good breed,’ he said, ’not easily killed!’ And so he won the day, and Miles the surgeon gave in; but indeed he told me apart, ’twas waste of time disputing, for anyhow you could not see the noon. But here you are at my Lady Beddoes’s house at Richmond, alive and like to live, though you have ceased to exist for most men. There was a charming, reallya most touching, obituary notice in the Gazettes; you have been duly lamented at the clubs—and forgotten within the usual nine days. Rumours will soon begin to get about of course, but nobody knows anything positive. The secret is still kept. János, I believe, has contrived to assuage the anxiety of your relatives.”
Here the speaker took so copious a pinch to refresh himself after his long speech that he set me off sneezing, whereupon my special Cerberus promptly made his appearance and bundled the visitors forth without more ado.
I have said that my friend’s belief in the Chevalier’s implication in the divers murderous onsets that had been made upon me, previous to his own, did not surprise me. The memory of M. de Ville-Rouge’s cry, as he dealt me what he believed my death stroke,—a cry in which it would be hard to say whether savage triumph or sheer vindictiveness most predominated,—had come back on me, as soon as I could think at all, with most revealing force.
His arrival in England had coincided with the beginning of the persecution. The look on his face as I had last seen it, that smile and that dimple, had haunted me during long hours of deliriumwith a most maddening, grotesque, and horrible likeness to the face of her I had so loved. Coupling these things in later sanity of mind with the other evidence, I could not doubt but that here had been some relative of Ottilie, who had interest to put an end to her husband’s existence. Had not her pock-marked Mercury at the close of our interview uttered words of earnest warning? ay, I minded them now:
“The matter will not end here.... Have a care, young man....”
As I thought of all this, as the whole meaning of what had seemed so mysterious now lay clear before me, I would be seized with a sort of deadly anguish, compared to which all my previous sufferings, whether of body or mind, had been but trivial. Could she, could Ottilie, haveknownof this work? Could she—haveinspiredit?
The sweat that would break out upon me at such a thought was more than all my fever had wrung from my body, and my faithful leech would wonder to find me faint and reeking, and would puzzle his poor brains in vain upon the cause, and decoct me new teas of dreadful compounds, febrifuges which he vowed had never failed.
But then at other times the vision of my wife would rise before me and shame me. I would seeagain her noble brow, her clear eye, her arched and innocent lip, and in my weakness and the passion of my longing I would turn and weep upon my pillow to think that, having to my sorrow lost her, I should come now to lose even my faith in her, and yet should love her still with such mad love.
Now there must be, as János would have it, something remarkably tough in the breed of Jennico for me to recover from such wounds both bodily and mental. Recover I did, however, in spite of all odds; and a resolve I made with returning strength did a good deal to ease my mind, tossed between such torturing fluctuations.
This resolve was no less than to leave the country some fine morning, in secret, so soon as I could undertake the journey with any likelihood of being able to persevere in it, to speed to Budissin, and discover for myself the real attitude of Ottilie towards me. I was determined that, according as I found her,—either what my heart would still deem her, or yet so base a thing as the fiend whispered,—that I would try to win her back, were I to die in the attempt, or thrust her from my life for ever.
Thus when I heard that my enemy and the world believed me dead, when I realised that shetoo must probably share in the delusion, I was glad, for not only would it materially facilitate my re-entering the Duchy, but it would afford me an excellent opportunity of judging her real feelings. I had no doubt but that, if I set to work in a proper manner and duly preserved my incognito, I should be able, now that all pretext for quarantine had disappeared, to secure an interview without too much difficulty.
So all my desires hastening towards that goal, I set myself to become a whole man again with so much energy that even János was surprised at the rapidity of my progress.