The Pride of Jennico: Being a Memoir of Captain Basil Jennico

MEMOIR OF CAPTAIN BASIL JENNICO (BEGUN, APPARENTLY IN GREAT TROUBLE AND STRESS OF MIND, AT THE CASTLE OF TOLLENDHAL, IN MORAVIA, ON THE THIRD DAY OF THE GREAT STORM, LATE IN THE...

MY great-uncle’s will, forcible, concise, indisputable as it was, had been (so the man of law informed me) drawn out in a great hurry, dictated, indeed, between spasms of agony...

I MIND me that when she had drawn from me all she had wanted to know, the little lady’s pert tongue became still for a while, and that she stretched her long young limbs and lay...

I HAD questioned János on our homeward way concerning my new acquaintances; but the fellow was so ill-disposed by nature to external gossip, so wholly occupied with the minute f...

WHAT first entered my brain as the wildest possibility grew rapidly to a desire which possessed my whole being with absolute passion. The situation was in itself so singular and...

When supper was over I bade my servants 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...

I MUST have stared like a madman. For very fear of my own violence, I dared not move or speak. Mademoiselle Ottilie, or, to call her by her proper name, Madame de Jennico, very...

AND now what I must set down of myself is so passing strange that had I not, I myself, lived through it, were I not now in an earthly hell for the mere want of her, I could not...

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...

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 fam...

THERE is very little more to tell. The new inn wherein I found János established was but a poor place in a poor village, a sort of summer resort abandoned in winter-time save by...

I HAD thought upon that day when, in my ill temper, I irreparably insulted my wife, that I could never bring myself to face the exposure which a return to England would necessar...

THE tenth hour of an October night had rung out over a fog-swathed London; yet, despite the time of year, unfashionable for town life, despite the unpropitious weather, the long...

IT was over a dish of devilled kidneys and a couple of bottles of Burgundy that—pressed by the eager curiosity of his English friends, no less than by the interest M. de Ville-R...

IT is 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 Jenn...

IT was towards the middle of December that we started upon the journey—a little sooner indeed than my surgeon and mentor approved of, but his power over me dwindled as my own st...

WHEN I reached the Schloss Graben I stood a moment to reconnoitre, and found myself in the same still, cobble-paved road where I had met Anna a few hours before. On my left rose...

I RUSHED out into the street, treading as if on air, my cloak floating behind me, my head thrown back, all warnings unheeded in the first overpowering tide of this joy which had...

A KNOCK without aroused us. With a stifled cry of alarm, the woman who had made no sound on the violent entry of an armed man upon her unprotected solitude, now fell into deadly...

I SHALL carry to the grave, as one of the sweetest of my life, the memory of that night journey. Coming as it did between the fierce emotions and dangers of our meeting and flig...

FOR the space of a few seconds we three stood motionless. The awful stillness of the shadow of death was upon our souls. Then, approaching from the distance came again to our ea...