Our Own Set Part 14

The member of the family who was most keenly alive to the change in their social relations, oddly enough, was Cecil. He had been wont to feel himself superior to these silly cla.s.s-jealousies, and at the same time had a reasonable and manly dignity of his own that had preserved him from that morbid petulance which sometimes stands in arms against all friendly advances from men who, after all, cannot help the fact of their superior birth. Democratic touchiness is a disease to which, in the old-world countries where hereditary rank is still a living fact, every man who is not a toady is liable--from Werther downwards--when fate brings him into contact with aristocratic circles. Sterzl had moved in them so long that he was acclimatized; or rather, it had attacked him late in life, and, as is always the case when grown-up men take infantine complaints, with aggravated severity. He attributed all his sister's misery, not to his own want of caution and Sempaly's weakness of character, but to the tyranny of social prejudice; and he turned against society with vindictive contempt, making himself perfectly intolerable wherever he went. Being a well-bred man, accustomed all his life to the graces of politeness, he could not become absolutely ill-mannered--but as ill-mannered as he could be he certainly was: a.s.sertive, irritable, always on the defensive, he was constantly involved in some argument or dispute.

Even at home he was not the same; his pride was deeply nettled by Zinka's total inability to hide her suffering, while he felt it humiliating to be able to do nothing to comfort her. At first, in the hope of diverting her thoughts, he would bring her tickets for concerts or the theatre, and give her a thousand costly trinkets, old treasures of porcelain, carved ivory, and curiosities of art, such as she had once loved. She used to rejoice over these pretty trifles--now she smiled as a sick man smiles at some dainty he no longer has any appet.i.te for. He could see how sincerely she tried to be delighted, but the tears were in her eyes all the while.

This drove Sterzl to desperation. At first he religiously avoided mentioning Sempaly in her presence, but as days and weeks pa.s.sed and she brought no change in her crushed melancholy, he waxed impatient. He took it into his head that it would be well to open Zinka's eyes with regard to Sempaly. Sterzl himself was energetic, always looking to the future; he had it out with his disappointments and got rid of them, however hard he might have been hit. He had always let things roll if they would not stand, and then set to work to begin again. His great point in life was to see things as they were. Truth was his divinity, and he could not understand that to a creature const.i.tuted like Zinka, illusion was indispensable; that she still laid no blame on Sempaly, but only on the alteration in his circ.u.mstances--on her own unworthiness--on anything and everything but himself; that it was a necessity of her nature to be able still to love him, even though she knew that he was lost to her forever. His austere nature could not enter into Zinka's soft and impressible susceptibility.

So when he took to speaking slightingly or contemptuously of Sempaly on every possible opportunity she never answered him, but listened in silence, looking at him with frightened, astonished eyes and a pale face, like a martyr to whom her tormentors try to prove that there is no G.o.d. The result of Cecil's well-meant but injudicious proceedings was a temporary coolness between himself and his sister--a coolness which, on his part, lay only on the surface, but which froze her spirit to its depths, and all this naturally tended to add fuel to Sterzl's detestation of Sempaly. The two men were in daily intercourse, and now in a state of constant friction. Sterzl would make biting remarks over the smallest negligence or oversight of which Sempaly might be guilty, and was bitterly sarcastic as to the incompetence of a young connection of the Sempalys who had not long since been attached to the emba.s.sy.

"To be sure," he ended by declaring, "in Austria it is a matter of far greater importance that an attache should be a man of family than that he should know how to spell." To such depths of clumsy rudeness could he descend.

Sempaly, without losing his supercilious good humor, would only smile, or answer in his most piping tones:

"You are very right; the view we take of privilege is quite extraordinary. We should form ourselves on the model of the French corps diplomatique; do not you think so?" For, a few days previously, the Figaro had published a satirical article on the presentation of a plebeian representative of the republic at some foreign court.

Well, Sempaly might have retorted in a much haughtier key--but the lighter his irony the more it exasperated Sterzl.

CHAPTER V.

Countess Jatinska spent almost the whole of her stay in Rome on her sofa. When she was asked what she thought of Rome she replied that she found it very fatiguing; when the same question was put to her daughters they, on the contrary, declared themselves enchanted. Sempaly knew full well that in all Rome there was nothing they liked better than their ne'er-do-weel cousin. He displayed for their benefit all his most amiable graces; criticised or admired their dresses, touched up their coiffure with his own light hand, faithfully reported to them all their conquests, and made them presents of cigarettes and of trinkets from Castellani's.

When there was nothing else to be done he was ready to attend them--of course, under the charge of some older lady--to see galleries and churches, Polyxena had a way, that was highly characteristic, of rus.h.i.+ng past the greatest works with her nose in the air and laughing as she repeated some imbecile remark that she had overheard, or pointed out some eccentricity of tourist costume. Nini took art more seriously, looked carefully at everything by the catalogue, and even kept a diary.

Xena was commonly thought the handsomer and the more brilliant of the sisters, and Sempaly apparently devoted himself chiefly to her, but he decidedly liked Nini best. The hours that he did not spend with his cousins he pa.s.sed at the club, where he gambled away large sums.

Meanwhile, he was looking very ill and complained of a return of old Roman fever.

And what did the world say to his behavior? The phlegmatic Italians did not trouble themselves about the matter; Madame de Gandry and Mrs.

Ferguson laughed over it; Siegburg p.r.o.nounced it disgraceful, and Ilsenbergh called it bad taste to say the least. That he ought to have arranged to leave Rome everybody agreed. Princess Vulpini held long and lamentable conferences with General von Klinger--reproaching herself bitterly for not having seen the position of affairs long ago--but she had never attached any importance to Sempaly's marked attentions, having had no eyes for anything but Siegburg's devotion to Zinka, and she had taken a quite motherly interest in what she regarded as a good match for both.

Truyn was perfectly furious with Sempaly. All that he was to Zinka during these weeks can only be divined by those who have pa.s.sed through such a time of grief and humiliation, with the consciousness of having a high-souled and tender friend in the back-ground. He was the only person who never aggravated her wound. He had the gentle touch, the delicate skill, which the best man or woman can only acquire through the ordeal of an aching heart. He came every afternoon with his little girl to take Zinka for a walk, for he knew that the regular drive on the Corso could only bring her added pain; and while the baroness, with outspread skirts, drove in the wake of fas.h.i.+on up to the Villa Borghese and the Pincio, these three--with the general, not unfrequently, for a fourth--would wander through silent and deserted cloisters or take long walks across the Campagna. Not once did Truyn bring a secret tear to her eye; if some accidental remark or a.s.sociation brought the hot color to her thin cheek he could always turn the subject so as to spare her.

One sultry afternoon, late in spring, Truyn and his two daughters--as he was wont to call Zinka and Gabrielle--with the soldier-artist were sauntering home, after a long walk, through the sombre and picturesque streets that surround the Pantheon. The neighborhood is humble and wretched, but over a garden wall rose a mulberry tree in whose green branches a blackbird was singing, and a few red geraniums blazed behind rusty window-bars, bright specks in the monotonous brown; above the roofs bent the deep blue sky; the air was heavy and hot, and full of obscure smells of gutters and stale vegetables. Somewhere, in an upstairs room, a woman sang a love-song of melancholy longing. Suddenly the blackbird and the woman ceased singing at the same time; a dismal howl and groan echoed through the street, and a ma.s.s of black shadows darkened the scene. Zinka, who had lately become excessively nervous, started and shuddered.

"It is nothing--only a funeral," Truyn explained, taking off his hat.

That was all--a Roman funeral, grim but picturesque--a long procession of mysteriously-shrouded figures, only able to see through two slits in the sack-like cowls that covered their heads, ropes round their waists, and torches or mystical banners in their hands--banners with the emblems of death. These were followed by a troop of barefooted friars, and last came the bier covered with a bright yellow pall, carried by four more of the shrouded figures, who bent under its weight as they shuffled along. The ruddy flare and the black smoke wreaths, the groan-like chant, the uncanny glitter of the men's eyes out of the formless hoods--ghastly, ghostly, and exhaling a savor of mouldiness and incense, like the resurrection of a fragment of the middle ages--the procession defiled through the narrow street. Zinka, half-fainting, clung to Truyn; Gabrielle, whose childish nerves were less shocked, watched them with intense curiosity and began to question a woman who stood near her in the crowd that had collected, in her fluent, bungling Italian:

"Who is it they are burying?" she asked at length.

"A woman," was the answer.

"Was she young?"

"_Si_."

"And what did she die of? of fever?"

"No," said the Roman shrugging her shoulders; and then she added, in the slow musical drawl of the Roman peasant:

"_Di pa.s.sione_."

The procession had pa.s.sed, the chanting had died away; the blackbird was singing l.u.s.tily once more; they went on their way--Truyn first, with Zinka hanging wearily on to his arm, behind them Gabrielle and the general.

"_Pa.s.sione!_ is that a Roman illness?" she asked with her insatiable inquisitiveness.

"No, it occurs in most parts of the world," said the general drily.

"But only among poor people, I suppose?" said the child.

"No, it is known to the better cla.s.ses too, but it is not called by the same name," said the old man with some bitterness, more to himself than to Gabrielle.

"Then it is wrong--a shameful thing to die of?" she asked with wide, astonished eyes.

Suddenly the general perceived that Zinka was listening; her head drooped as she heard the child's heedless catechism. He, under the circ.u.mstances, would have felt paralyzed--he would not have known what to say to the poor crushed soul; but not so Truyn. He turned to his companion and said something in a low tone. What, the general could not hear, but it must have been something kind and helpful--something which, without any direct reference to the past, conveyed his unalterable respect and regard, for she answered him almost brightly.

Then he went on talking of trifles, remembering little incidents of his boyhood, characteristic anecdotes of his parents, and such small matters as may divert a sick and weary spirit, till, when they parted at the door of the palazetto, Zinka was smiling. "That he has the brains of a genius I will not say, but he has genius of heart, I dare swear!" thought the soldier.

Truyn had gone out riding with her two or three times across the Campagna, and she had enjoyed it; but one day they met Sempaly, galloping with his two handsome cousins over the anemone-strewn sward.

From that day she made excuses for avoiding the Campagna--as though she thus avoided the chance, almost the certainty, of meeting him and them.

Why then did she remain in Rome at all? Sterzl would not hear of her quitting it, because he thought that the world of Rome would regard it as a flight after defeat. His mother too, on different grounds, set her face against any such abridgment of their stay in Rome. Had she not taken the palazetto till the fifteenth of May?

And did Zinka, in fact, wish to go? She often spoke of longing to be at home again, but whenever their departure was seriously discussed it gave her a shock. She dreaded meeting him--and longed for it all the same. And in the evening when a few old friends dropped in to call--Truyn every evening and Siegburg very frequently--Truyn noticed that every time there was a ring she sat with her eyes fixed in eager expectation on the door. She still cherished a sort of hope--a broken, moribund hope that was in fact no more than unrest--the vitality of suffering.

PART III.

EASTER.

CHAPTER I.

Pa.s.sion-week in Rome, and in all the glory and glow of an Italian spring. The glinting radiance brightens even the mystical gloom of St.

Peter's, sparkles for an instant on the holy-water in the basins, wanders from the heads of the gigantic cherubs and the colossal statues down to the inlaid pavement, with the cold sheen of sunlight on polished marble. The hours glide on--the long solemn hours of Holy-Thursday in Rome; the last gleam of daylight has faded away, the vast cathedral is filled with almost palpable twilight and its magnificence seems shrouded in a transparent veil of c.r.a.pe. The stone walls look dim and distant, the fane seems built of shadows, and sacred mystery falls as it were from heaven, deeper and more solemn as the minutes slip by, to sanctify the spot.

In the papal chapel Zinka is kneeling with Truyn and Gabrielle, her eyes fixed on her hands which are convulsively clasped, and praying with the pa.s.sion of a youthful nature whose yearning has found no foothold on earth and seeks a home in heaven. On both sides sit the prelates and dignitaries of the church in their carved stalls, inquisitive and prayerless foreigners crowd at their feet. The tragedy of the pa.s.sion is being recited in a monotonous, inconclusive chant that dies away in the dim corners of the chapel.

The last of the twelve tapers on the altar is extinguished....

"_Miserere mei_" the choristers cry with terrible emphasis; and then, awful but most sweet, beginning as a mere breath and rising to a mighty wail of grief, comes a voice like the utterance of the anguish of the G.o.d of Love over the misery from which He can never release mankind.

And before the majesty of that divine and selfless sorrow human sorrow bows in silence.

Zinka bends her head.--It is ended, the last sound has died away in a sob, the crowd rises to follow the procession which, with a cardinal at the head, wends its way through the church.

Truyn and the two girls quit the chapel; behind them the steps of the priests and choristers, drowned in their own echoes, sound like the rustling of angelic wings; the brooding, melancholy peacefulness has lulled Zinka's heart to rest; for the first time for many weeks she has forgotten....