Chapter XXV The Perverseness of Words
“Berriet mein blasses Angesicht
Dir nicht mein Liebeswehe?
Und willst du, dass der stolze Mund
Das Bettelwort gestehe?”
HEINE.
Steven, stretching a determined hand at last to the bell, was arrested in the act by the sound of the opening door. He turned to see Sidonia standing in the entrance.
It seemed as if, after all, these two were as yet unripe for love’s fulfilment. The pride of each, unchastened, the quick susceptibilities, the unreasonable expectations and demands of the crudely young, built frowning barriers between them.
Steven, who but last night had burned with ardour for his lost bride; who, but this morning, had set out to win her back, tender, conquering, almost joyous, felt the fretful impatience of his ten minutes of waiting leap into positive anger under the accusing glance of Sidonia’s eyes. Their looks met—one might almost say, struck—like steel blades, each quick to feel and resent the other’s attitude.
“Ah, no, he does not love!” cried the girl, in her heart. And—
“She never loved me,” said the man in his pride. “I have been a triple fool!”
But did she think that a Waldorff-Kielmansegg was thus to be played with, made the sport of heaven knew what ignoble feminine intrigue, a marriage of convenience, quickly repented of, and then, farewell? No, he had his rights as a man, his honour to defend, and things could not end here.
“What brings you?” asked Sidonia. Being the woman, she was the first to speak.
His tone was harsh as he made answer: “Because it is time this folly should cease. Because you are my wife. Because you bear my name. Because your honour is mine, and I will not have you running about the world—under no better guard than that of Burgravine Betty.”
The contempt of his accents, the doubt, stung her beyond bearing.
“By all accounts,” she cried—and there was almost a sneer upon her sweet lips—“you had been willing enough, not so long ago, to trust her with your own honour.”
So the fiddler had been right. Betty had made mischief! The thought danced a moment through Steven’s brain; but in the confusion of anger he failed to seize its real import.
Sidonia went on, vainly endeavouring to steady her voice as it throbbed to the beating of her heart:
“You talk of honour! Is it honourable to speak of her like this—is it generous?”
“Generous?” he echoed. “Will you teach me generosity, you who drove me away, without explanation—without giving me a chance to explain? You, the bride of an hour!”
“Come, then, I am listening now. Explain.” Her accent, her air, were passionately peremptory. Her fingers sought hastily in the reticule at her side—the tangible evidence of her misfortune was hidden there. She laid the note before him on the table, spreading it and smoothing it out for him, even as Betty had done for her on the wedding day, in the turret at Wellenshausen. “Explain this,” she said.
Steven cast a quick glance at the incriminating document, opened his mouth upon scorn and denial, then checked himself with a bitter laugh and a shrug of the shoulders.
“Tell her the naked truth!” It was the fiddler’s advice. To tell her upon what a petty rock their barque was foundering... it ought to have been an easy thing! Yet the man stood, contemptuous, smiling, silent. Every instinct of his being revolted against the girl’s haughty command. His pride alone would have kept him mute, but there was something yet stronger, more intimate, to restrain him. “Tell her the naked truth!” Naked enough was the truth, ugly enough, sordid enough, to be convincing if he could have brought himself to speak it! The truth? Why, here it would have been: “Your Aunt Betty offered herself to me, threw herself upon my protection. I did not love her, I did not want her. She gave me no choice; and this is her woman’s revenge!”
Aye, it is all very well to say: “You are an honest lad.” But if a gentleman has behind him long generations of gentlemen, each of whom has planned his life upon the conventional code of honour among gentlemen, he cannot easily bring his lips to form the words that will betray a woman in relation to himself—least of all, perhaps, where he has been loved and has not loved in return.
So his lips were silent upon that smile of scorn. And Sidonia’s last hope—how strong it had been, how dear, she never knew till this moment—agonized within her. That he should mock her for jealousy: that was the supreme insult.
As in a flash of unbearable illumination she saw herself in his eyes, heavy-lidded, unkempt; saw the figure that had provoked just now even Betty’s pity; saw beside her, Betty, rich in loveliness, velvet clad... it was no wonder that Beau Cousin Kielmansegg should fix her with this smile, this contempt.
And Steven, in his morgue, who would have perished rather than condescend to explain—could he but have known (Ah, if youth but knew!) that no explanation was really needed of him, that no words are ever needed in the great crises of life! Words are our enemies. The inability to express the subtleties of wounded feeling, the false witness that our tongues bear against us, have divided more lovers secretly yearning for each other than ever did most adverse circumstances. One touch of his hand on hers, one kiss upon her lips, and Sidonia would have felt the truth, would have understood that he loved her, and that, to him who loves, the beloved is queen. Angry Steven, Steven the lover, had never even noticed the dishevelment of her bright hair. Her face was pale?—it was a pearl in his eyes. Her attire was shabby?—it might have been a garment of state. Had Betty broken in on them then, in all her glory, he would have drawn no comparison, save to the superlative advantage of the woman who was his choice.
Alas! if youth but knew!
From the bowling green without came a gust of laughter; then a light voice broke into a stave of popular song. They had, in happier moments, heard that lilt upon the fiddle of wandering Hans; it struck them poignantly. Wounded love flamed into intemperate resentment.
“After all, Aunt Betty but told me the truth, if a little late—you have nothing to say,” said Sidonia, between teeth clenched upon a sob.
“Only this,” replied Steven, arrogantly, from the height of his disdain, “that I command you, as your husband, to come with me now.”
Sidonia pointed to the door.
“Herr Graf von Kielmansegg, my uncle expects to hear from the judges to-day anent the annulment of that ill-considered ceremony which made me nominally your wife. His lawyers will call upon you in due course.”
“Madam,” answered the count, bowing, “I intend to take up my abode in Cassel—at the Aigle Impérial. Therefore there will be no difficulty about my address. But let me remark that annulments are not easily concluded without the consent of both parties.”
He closed the door between them upon these words.
“He does not love me—he never loved me!” said Sidonia to her bursting heart. “It was all pride!”
The other unworthy suspicions, which Betty had so subtly instilled, could not live in her soul after having come again under the glance of Steven’s eye. But she had pride too, her woman’s pride, and it showed her what she had to do, even though it killed her.
“O Geiger-Onkel,” cried the poor child, “what have you brought me to! Even you have abandoned me!”
Betty’s arrows, shot at spiteful random, occasionally hit a truer mark than she herself suspected. When, in her tower prison, she had petulantly averred that the Burgrave would certainly keep in his own hands the choosing of Sidonia’s husband (and for very good reasons!) she had unconsciously struck the gold. The heiress’s guardian did not intend, if it could be helped, to have his accounts examined. Hence, apart from the humiliating pressure put upon him, against which his elementary violence rebelled, the young Austrian was the last person the Burgrave would have desired as nephew-in-law. There was a relentlessness in the young man’s eye and a clear penetration, which, whenever the Burgrave remembered them, sent uncomfortable chills through his frame. True, Count Kielmansegg had never breathed one syllable on the subject of his bride’s fortune; but this very silence struck the Chancellor as the more ominous.
“I shall have his lawyers on top of me before I know where I am,” he had many a time growled in those sullen days that followed Sidonia’s betrothal, chiefly at those hours of conscience’s activity, the dull hours before the dawn, when the night’s potations had ceased to stimulate.
It was not that Wellenshausen had ever been consciously dishonest. In his fine masculine, Germanic way, when he had put large sums of his ward’s money to his own uses, he had felt himself almost in the right. Was it not against nature that mere females should have advantages over the male? Indeed, he had scarcely taken the trouble to make memoranda of the expenditure: in Jerome’s kingdom, especially in financial matters, it was never customary to waste time upon details, and the sense of impending catastrophe, more particularly of late, had increased the sense of the value of the fleeting moment.
Since his second marriage the Burgrave had certainly taken both hands to Sidonia’s treasure. There was the loan to his Royal Master; a matter of high diplomacy! It was well to have a lien over so slippery a patron. And, besides, it would be all to the child’s advantage, no doubt, later on. Practically an investment! There were Betty’s pearls.... Well, in these uncertain times, might not jewels also be looked upon as an investment? none the worse for having gleamed so charmingly on Betty’s shoulders!
And there was this, and there was that.... In the small hours above mentioned, memory became inconveniently active. Once or twice the Burgrave had sat up in his feather-bed to wipe a clammy forehead; in truth, he did not know how much the heiress of Wellenshausen, apart from the lands, was heiress to. But there was a certain document of his late brother’s, referring, in very precise terms, to the Fideicommission, to the trust.
It was no wonder, then, that when Sidonia had come to him, on the day of the wedding, where he sat glowering over his wine-cup and the remains of the feast, and had told him how she and her new husband had parted for ever, the relief should have been so unexpected and so great as completely to sober him.
In a spasm of paternal affection he had assured her that such a ceremony could not count, and that it would be the easiest thing in the world to release her, since she wished it.
She had looked at him stonily over her bridal white. Was that indeed the case? she had asked. She had thought marriages were for ever.
And he had laughed at her joyously. “Na, na, little dove—a marriage of this kind, if one wishes it, was as good as no marriage at all!”
“Then see to it, please,” she had said steadily, avoiding his embrace.
There was horror in the look she cast upon him as she turned to leave the room; but he was too completely absorbed in his joy to see anything but the deliverance before him. He never even paused to wonder, to inquire the reason of the breach—and this, doubtless, had been well for Betty.
The connubial migration to Cassel, consent to which had been wrung from him at the expense of so much mental agony, now became a project which could not be soon enough, to please him, put into execution. For would it not mean the prompt legal annulment of Sidonia’s most inopportune alliance? His original jealousy of Beau Cousin would seem to have been the one thing really murdered in the oubliette; yet, perhaps, somewhere deep down in his consciousness, there faintly stirred, beneath all the other reasons for relief, a satisfaction at the thought that Cousin Kielmansegg could never again be made welcome to the house that had sheltered his divorced wife.