Our Own Set Part 6

CHAPTER VI.

Sempaly's intimacy with the Sterzls grew daily; he did the honors of Rome to Zinka, and dined with them as a fourth two or three times a week. After the tableaux at the Ilsenberghs' Zinka was asked everywhere; all the men were at her feet, and all the ladies wanted to learn her songs. The men she treated with the utmost indifference and to the ladies she was always obliging, particularly to those whom no one else would take the pains to be civil to, all of which greatly added to her popularity. Truyn's little girl--a spoilt, shy thing, who quarrelled with her maid three times a week regularly and insisted on learning everything from Latin to water-color drawing, though she would submit to no teacher but her father, perfectly wors.h.i.+pped Zinka and to her was as docile as a lamb. Princess Vulpini was delighted at her influence on her little niece and declared that Zinka was a real treasure; and Lady Julia Ellis, who had made the young girl's acquaintance two years since at Meran, was proud to take her out.

Whenever the baroness could not go the English lady was always ready to chaperon Zinka, and when Lady Julia was 'at home' Zinka had to help her to receive her guests and to make tea.

Countess Schalingen, a Canoness devoted to painting, full of sentimentality and romance, whose ideas had not yet got beyond Winterhalter, called Zinka 'quite delicious,' took her on excursions, dragged her to all the curiosity-dealers, and finally painted her portrait on a handscreen for Princess Vulpini--her head and shoulders in gauzy drapery coming out of a lily. Before the end of a fortnight a rich American had enquired about her rank and extraction, and the handsome Crespigny had learnt all about her fortune. Norina paid his court to her when his tyrant's back was turned and Mrs. Ferguson did her the honor of being madly jealous.

But all this did not turn her head, it did not seem even to astonish her; she had always been spoilt and wherever she had gone she had found friends and admirers. When people were kind to her she was delighted, but she would have been much more astonished if they had not been kind.

Sempaly had called her "_a Botticelli_," but the word was only applicable to her mind; in appearance she had none of the ascetic grace of the pre-Raphaelites. She was more like the crayon figures of Latour, or that typical beauty of the eighteenth century, la Lamballe. She had not the bloom of pink and white, but was pale, even in her youthful freshness with soft shadows under her eyes; and her hair, which was thick and waved naturally had reddish lights in the brown. A tender down softened its outline on her temples without shading her forehead, and gave her face a look of peculiar innocence. She was slight but not angular, her arms were long and thin, her hands small and sometimes red. Her moods varied between dreamy thoughtfulness and saucy high spirits, her gait was usually free and light but occasionally a little awkward, "like an angel with its wings clipped," Sempaly said. She had a low veiled voice in speaking that reminded one of the vibrating tones of an Amati violin. She was as wild as a boy, as graceful as a water nixie, and as innocent as a child--with the crude innocence of a girl who has been brought up chiefly by men--and all her ideas had the stamp of dreamy seclusion and fervid sentiment.

She had had French and English governesses and had even been to school in a convent for a year; still, the ruling influence in her life had been that of her guardian. General Sterzl--an eccentric being with an intense horror of sentimental school-friends.h.i.+ps and of the conventional propriety that comes of too early familiarity with the world. It was to him that Zinka owed the one good word which Countess Ilsenbergh spoke in her favor:

"One thing must be admitted; she is not affected, she is as natural as one of our own girls."

"Poor Coralie!" the baroness would frequently exclaim, "what a pity that she is not here; what a treat it would be for her!"

"Yes," Sterzl would answer in his dry way, "she was in too great a hurry." And the baroness would cast her eyes up to heaven.

Coralie was her eldest and favorite daughter. Disappointed in her love of some hard-hearted gentleman she had renounced the vanities of the world some three years since, but--like her mother's worthy daughter--even in the depth of her disappointment and despair she had taken care to choose a convent where the recluses were divided into ladies and sisters, where the children who came to school there played hide and seek under a French name, and where being a boarder was called being _en pension_.

"Poor Coralie!" the baroness would sigh; and then seating herself at her writing-table she would scribble endless letters about the delights of a residence at Rome to all her friends in Austria, and especially to her sister, the Baroness Wolnitzka.

Baroness Sterzl was a typical specimen of a cla.s.s of n.o.bility peculiar to Austria, and called there, Heaven knows why, "the onion n.o.bility"

(zwiebeln.o.blesse). It is a circle that may be described as a branch concern of the best society; a half-blood relation; a mixture of the elements that have been sifted out of the upper aristocracy and of the parvenus from below, who find that they can be reciprocally useful; a circle in which almost every man is a baron, and every woman, without exception, is a baroness. Its members are for the most part poor, but refined beyond expression. The mothers scold their children in bad French and talk to their friends in fas.h.i.+onable slang; they give parties, at which there is nothing to eat--but the family plate is displayed, and where the company always consists of the same old bachelors who dye their hair and know the _Almanack de Gotha_ by heart.

Everyone is well informed about the doings of the world--how many s.h.i.+fts Minnie N. had in her trousseau, why the engagement between Fritz O. and Lori P. was broken off, and much more to the same effect. Of late years the 'onion-n.o.bility,' with various other offshoots of the higher culture, has been swamped by the advance of the liberals, that is to say, by the progress of the financial cla.s.ses.

Only a year since the baroness herself had stood on the stairs of the opera-house to watch the occupants of the grand tier--at that time appropriated to the cream of the aristocracy--to take note of aristocratic dresses, and to hear aristocratic nothings from aristocratic lips. Now, in Rome, she was living in the whirl of society. Her satisfaction knew no bounds, and she made daily progress in exclusiveness; the Countess Ilsenbergh, as compared to her, was a mere bungler. But she was never so amusing to watch as when she met some fellow-countrymen of unt.i.tled rank. It happened that this winter there was in Rome a certain Herr Brauer, an old simpleton with a very handsome wife who laid herself open for the admiration of all the young men of any pretensions. Being furnished with a few letters of introduction he and his fascinating partner disported themselves very contentedly in the outer circle--the suburbs, so to speak--of good society without having a suspicion how far they were from the centre.

Baroness Sterzl could never cease wondering "how those people could be tolerated."

She was always well dressed, she gave capital little dinners, she had the neatest coupe and the most comfortable landau, and her coachman had the cleanest shaved imperial face and the smartest livery in Rome. Her manners were somewhat changeable, since she was constantly endeavoring to appropriate the airs and graces of the most fas.h.i.+onable women she met. She was extremely unpopular and consequently bored to death wherever she went; she was never quite easy as to her footing in society and lived in the discomfort of a person who is always trying to walk on tiptoe.

Her sole unqualified pleasure during this period--which, however, she always spoke of as the happiest of her life--was the writing of the above-mentioned letters home, and especially as has been said, to her sister the Baroness Wolnitzka in Bohemia.

She craved a public to witness her success and, like all mean natures, she knew no greater joy than that of exciting envy; she would often read these epistles to Zinka, for she was very proud of her wordy style. Zinka was somewhat disturbed by these flowery compositions which always ended with these words: "What a pity it is that you should not be here. It would give us the greatest pleasure to have you with us."

"Take care, mamma," said the girl, "they will take you at your word and descend upon us."

"What are you dreaming of?" said the baroness folding her letter with the utmost philosophy; "they have no money."

CHAPTER VII.

Hovels deep sunk in the ground, moss-grown thatched roofs, here and there an old lime-tree or a tall pear-tree with crabbed branches standing out black and bare against the wintry sky, slimy puddles, a pond full to the brim in which three forlorn-looking geese are sadly paddling, a swampy road along which a procession of ploughs are splas.h.i.+ng their way at the heels of the muddy, unkempt teams--in short, a Bohemian village, with a shabby manor-house beyond. Over the tumble-down gate-way, with a pigsty on one side and a dog-kennel on the other, hangs a coat of arms. The mansion--a square house with a steep s.h.i.+ngle roof--stands, according to the unromantic custom of the country, with one side looking on to the farm-yard; and the drawing-room windows open exactly over an enormous dung heap which a party of women are in the very act of turning with pitch-forks, under the superintendence of a short stout man in a weather-beaten hunting-hat and shooting-coat with padded silk sleeves out of which the wadding is peeping at a hundred holes. He is smoking a pipe with a china bowl decorated with a mincing odalisque. His face is broad and red, his ears purple, and his aspect is anything rather than aristocratic as he stands giggling and jesting with the damsels of the steaming midden.

This is Baron Wolnitzky, a man who, like a good many others, got himself a good deal talked about in 1848 and then vanished from the scene without leaving a trace behind.

Often when we see some dry and barren tree shedding its sere and mouldy leaves in the autumn we find it hard to believe that it bore blossoms in the spring; and the baron was like such a tree. In the spring-tide of 1848--an over-teeming spring throughout Europe--his soul too had blossomed. He had had patriotic visions and had uttered them in rhyme, and his country had hailed him as a prophet--perhaps because it needed an idol, or perhaps because in those agitated times it could not tell black from white. In those days he had displayed himself in a magnificent national costume with sleeves of the most elaborate cut, had married a patriotic wife who always dressed in the Slav colors: blue, white, and red, and who got two young men, also dressed in Slav costume, to mount guard at the door of her house. He was descended from a Polish family that had immigrated many generations since and his connections were as far as possible from being aristocratic, while he owed his little fortune entirely to his father who had put no 'baron'

before his name, and who had earned it honestly as a master baker. In feudal times it would hardly have occurred to him to furbish up this very doubtful patent of n.o.bility; but in the era of liberty it might pa.s.s muster and prove useful. A very shy pedigree serves to shed glory on a democratic martyr.

During the insurrection of June he fled with his wife in picturesque disguise; at first to Dresden, and then to Switzerland where he lived for some time in a boarding-house at Geneva, receiving homage as a political refugee, and horrifying the mistress by his enormous appet.i.te. At length he returned to Bohemia where the events of forty-eight and its picturesquely aparelled leaders had fallen into oblivion. He retired to his little estate and turned philosopher--philosophy, ever since the days of Diogenes, has been the acknowledged refuge of s.h.i.+pwrecked hopes and pretensions.

There he went out walking in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, played cards with the peasants and grew more vulgar, fatter, and hungrier every day; and if he ever had an idea it was unintentionally, in a bad dream after eating too much of some national delicacy.

His wife, a robust and worthy soul, though full of absurdities, bore a strong resemblance to the mother of the Regent Orleans in as much as she had a sound understanding combined with a very sentimental nature, was utterly devoid of tact, bitter to the verge of cynicism, thoroughly indiscreet and a great chatterbox.

She resigned herself without demur to the new order of things and brought a new tribe of children into the world, most of whom died young. Three survived; two sons, who so far broke through the traditions of the family as to become infantry officers, and one daughter, in whom patriotic romance once more flickered into fanaticism. This girl had been christened Bohuslawa, a name which was commonly shortened into Slawa, which in the more important dialects of the Slav tongue means Fame. She, like her mother, was of stalwart build, but her features were regular though statuesque and heavy--she was said to be like the Apollo Belvedere. She had already had four suitors but neither of them had met her views and now at twenty--having been born in forty-eight--she was spending the winter, unmarried and sorely discontented, in the country, where she occupied herself with serious studies and accepted the attentions of a needy young Pole who was devoted to her and in whom she condescended to take some slight interest.

But Baron Wolnitzky is still standing by the midden; the great black dog, which till this moment has never ceased barking at the door of his kennel, now, to introduce some variety into the programme, jumps on to its roof, from which advantageous standpoint he still barks without pause. Everything is dripping from the recently-thawed snow, and the air is full of the splash and gurgle of dropping and trickling water; the grey February twilight sinks upon the world and everything looks dingy and soaked.

A sound of creaking wheels is heard approaching, and a dung-cart appears in the gate-way.

"Well, what is going on in the town?" says the baron to the man who comes up to him, wrapped in an evil-smelling sheepskin and with the ears of his fur cap tied under his chin, to kiss his master's elbow.

"Have you brought the newspapers?"

"Yes, your Grace, my Lord Baron," says the man, "and a letter too." And he draws a packet tied up in a red and white handkerchief out of a pocket in his sheepskin. The baron looks at the doc.u.ments. "Another letter from Rome already," he mutters, grinning; "I must take it in at once that the women may have something to talk about."

The women, that is to say his wife and daughter, were sitting in the dining-room at a long table covered with a flowered cloth, on which stood the tea things, a paraffine lamp, and a breadbasket of dull silver filagree work. The lamp was smoking and the table looked as uncomfortable and dingy as the village outside, half-buried in manure.

The baroness, in a tan-colored loose gown, in which she looked squarer than ever, without a cap, her thin grey hair cut short, was hunting for the tenth time to-day, on and under every article of furniture, for the key of the storeroom. Bohuslawa, meanwhile sat still, with a volume of Mickiewicz in her hand, out of which she was reading aloud in rather stumbling Polish, with a harsh voice. A young man with a sharp-cut sallow face and long black hair, in a Polish braided coat, wide collar and olive-coloured satin cravat, corrected her p.r.o.nunciation now and then. He was her Polish adorer. He was one of that familiar species, the teacher of languages with a romance in the background; he lived in the neighouring town and came every Sat.u.r.day to the village, four railway stations off, to instruct Bohuslawa in Polish and spend Sunday with the family.

When the union of these two patriots--which had already been secretly discussed--was to take place, depended on a mysterious law-suit that the young Pole was carrying on against the Russian government. His name was Vladimir de Matuschowsky, his grandmother had been a Potocka, and when he was not giving lessons, he was meditating conspiracies.

"Is there nothing else for tea?" asked the baron, casting a doubtful eye on the stale-looking rolls in the bread-basket.

"No, the dogs have eaten up the cakes," replied the baroness coolly.

She was at the moment on all-fours under the piano, hunting for the key behind the pedal.

"You will get an apoplexy," said Bohuslawa crossly but without anxiety, and without making the smallest attempt to a.s.sist the old lady. But at this instant a housemaid came in with the sought-for key on a bent and copper-colored britannia-metal waiter.

"Oh, thank Heaven!" cried the baroness, "where was the wretched thing?"

"In the dog kennel,--your grace, my lady baroness, the puppy had dragged it there."

In her love for dogs again the baroness resembled the d.u.c.h.ess of Orleans; she always had a litter of half a dozen puppies to bring up, and the kennel was a well-known hiding place for everything that could not be found in its right place.

"The little rascals!" she exclaimed, with an admiring laugh at the ingenious perversity of her mischievous pets. "Bring the sugar then, Clara."

"I have a surprise for you," growled her husband, "a letter from Rome,"

and he produced the doc.u.ment, with its mixed odors of patchouli and damp sheepskin, and pushed it across to his wife, while he took up the rum bottle to flavor his tea.

"From Rome!" exclaimed the baroness, "that is delightful. Where, oh where are my spectacles?" And she felt and patted herself all over till the superfluous substance shook like a jelly.