CHAPTER XXIII.
[PRINCE ZINO CAPITO.]
The smoking-room is a somewhat narrow apartment, with a large Oriental rug before the broad double windows, with very beautiful old weapons in a couple of stands against the wall, and with heavy antique carved oaken chests. The broad low arm-chairs and divans are covered with Oriental rugs and carpets which Rohritz, as he informs Stella, brought from Cairo himself.
The two children, a little boy twelve years old, with tight red stockings and very short breeches, and a little girl hardly three, in a white gown, with bare legs and arms, help their mamma to serve the coffee. Momond takes the ladies their cups, and Baby is steady enough on her legs to trip after him with a face of great solemnity, carrying the silver sugar-bowl tightly hugged up in her arms. After she has happily completed her round she puts the sugar-bowl down before her mother, with a sigh of relief as over a difficult duty fulfilled, and smooths down her short, stiff skirts with a very decorous air. But when her father, from the other side of the room, where he is talking with Stella, smiles at her, she runs to him with a glad cry, forgetting all decorum springs into his lap, and is petted and caressed by him to his heart's content.
"Do you know whom that picture represents, Baroness Stella?" the host now asks, pointing to a life-size photograph hanging beneath the portrait in oil of a beautiful, fair woman. Although Stella had noticed the photograph as soon as she entered the smoking-room, she pretends to have her attention attracted by it for the first time.
"Yes, the likeness can still be recognized," she replies, bestowing a critical glance upon the picture, "although if it ever looked really like Baron Edgar Rohritz he must have altered very much."
"Of course," says Rohritz: "the picture was taken twelve years ago. Edgar had it taken for our mother, just before he went to Mexico. When he returned to Europe, three years later, our mother was dead, and he was gray,--gray at twenty-seven! As he was always our mother's favourite, I have hung his picture below hers."
"I maintain that photograph to be the handsomest head of a man which I know," Thérèse interrupts her conversation with the Baroness to declare. "We often dispute about it with my brother Zino, who always cites the Apollo Belvedere as the highest type of manly beauty----"
"Because he himself resembles that arrogant fellow in the Vatican," her husband interposes, dryly.
It is strange how constantly the elder brother recalls Baron Edgar, although considerably older, and by no means so distinguished in looks.
Meanwhile, Thérèse runs on with her usual fluency:
"It is an immense pity that my brother-in-law cannot make up his mind to marry. You really cannot imagine, ladies, the pains I have taken to throw the lasso over his head. Quite in vain! And such superb matches as I have made for him,--Marguerite de Lusignan, who has just married the Duke Cesarini, and the charming Marie de Gallière,--in short, the loveliest, wealthiest girls,--tout ce qu'il y a de mieux. Oddly enough, the mothers liked him as well as the daughters. In vain! I never have seen a man with so decided a distaste for matrimony as Edgar's. Did you chance to hear of the scheme by which he contrived in Grätz to rid himself of manœuvring mammas?"
"Yes," says Stella, very coldly: "he spread abroad a report that he had suddenly lost his property."
"A delicious idea," Thérèse laughs. "Do you not think so?"
Stella is silent.
"It never occurred to him to originate the report," Edmund interposes now, rather irritably; "he was merely too lazy to contradict it. To hear you talk, Thérèse, one would suppose Edgar to be the most self-conceited coxcomb under the sun,--a man who spent his life in defending himself from the attacks of matrimonially-inclined ladies. But I assure you, Baroness Stella, that Edgar has not a trace of such nonsensical coxcombry. Perhaps you know him well enough to make your own estimate of his character."
"I know him very superficially," Stella replies, with a shrug.
"Why, I thought you spent several weeks last summer with him at Leskjewitsch's," says Rohritz, looking at her in surprise.
Without making any reply to this remark, Stella opens and shuts her fan, and says, with a slight curl of her lip, "His heroic opposition seems overcome at last; for, as I learned lately from a letter from Grätz, he has just been betrothed to a certain little Countess Strahlheim."
"Who wrote you so?" Thérèse cries. "That interests me immensely! Oh, the Machiavelli!"
"I had the intelligence from a Fräulein von Gurlichingen," says Stella.
"Gurlichingen? Anastasia Gurlichingen?" asks the Baron.
"You know the Gurlichingen?" Stella asks, in her turn.
"Know her! Who does not know the Gurlichingen?" says Rohritz. "She is the most restless phantom I have ever encountered, continually fluttering to and fro through the world, always in the train of some wealthy friend who pays her expenses. It has been her specialty hitherto to sacrifice herself for consumptive ladies: she has haunted Meran, Cairo, Corfu. There was no taint of legacy-hunting in her conduct,--heaven forbid such a suspicion! Hm! my brother-in-law Zino christened her the turkey-buzzard. If you owe your piece of news to no more trustworthy source of information, Baroness Stella, I must take the liberty of doubting its correctness."
"You know she is in Paris? She called upon me a little while ago, but I was not at home," said Thérèse, turning to Stella. "Have you any idea whom she is with now?"
"With the Princess Oblonsky," Stella replies.
"With the Oblonsky? Not with the former von Föhren?" husband and wife exclaim simultaneously.
"Certainly!"
"What a joke!--with the Oblonsky!"
Thérèse almost chokes with laughter.
It is ten o'clock. The children have long since disappeared with their bonne; the servant has brought in the tea-equipage. There is a pause in the conversation, such as is apt to ensue when people have laughed until they are tired. The Baron puts a fresh log on the fire and rakes the embers together. The blaze flames and crackles; little hovering lights and shadows dance over the old golden-brown leather tapestries. Suddenly the door opens, and unannounced, with the sans gêne of close relationship, a young man enters the room, tall, slender, with a certain attractive audacity expressed in the lines about his mouth and in his eyes which puts beyond question his resemblance to the Olympian dandy. It is the Apollo of modern drawing-room dimensions, the Apollo forty-four years old, already a little gray about the temples, with a wrinkle or two at the corners of his eyes, in a coat of Poole's, a gardenia in his button-hole, his crush hat under his arm,--Prince Zino Capito!
"Pray present me," he says, after he has greeted his sister, and Stella also, turning towards the Baroness.
"And you already know my new star?" Thérèse exclaims, in surprise, after she has fulfilled his request.
The Prince looks full at Stella, with a look peculiar to himself, a look in which admiration reaches the boundary of impertinence without crossing it,--then says, smiling,--
"Çà, Sasa!" when he is in a good humour he calls his sister thus, by the name which he gave her when he was a lisping baby in the nursery,--"ça, Sasa, do you really suppose that I would have rushed back from Lyons simply on the strength of the enthusiastic description of your latest trouvaille that you sent me in your note of invitation? No, my little sister, I am too well aware of your liability to acute attacks of enthusiasm not to receive your brilliant perorations with a justifiable mistrust. I once had the pleasure of seeing Mademoiselle very often, for a while," he continues, speaking French.
"Where?--when?" asks Thérèse.
"Three years ago, in Venice. Baron Meineck lived at the Britannia, where I also lodged, and Fräulein Stella came to Venice to take care of him.--They were sad days for you," he says, turning to Stella, very gravely, and with a degree of cordiality which he can impart to his voice when he chooses.
"And yet they were delightful days for me in spite of all," Stella replies, her eyes full of tears, and turning away her head.
"Most certainly you can look back to that time with a contented heart," he continues, in the same sympathetic tone. "I never have seen a daughter----" Suddenly he notices how the Baroness's glance rests upon him, and, becoming aware of the delicate nature of the situation, he finishes his sentence as best he can and tries to change the subject. But the Baroness has lost her equanimity: it is always intensely painful to her to know that she recalls to strangers the fact that her husband in his last illness was obliged to forego her care; Capito's words are like a reproof to her.
"Will you have the kindness to have a fiacre called for us?" she says, turning to the host.
Resisting all entreaties to prolong her stay, and to take another cup of tea, she pleads fatigue, the necessity of rising early, and so forth. When Capito takes leave of her he asks permission to pay his respects to the ladies.
But the Baroness begs him to give himself no further trouble with regard to them, as she is scarcely ever at home,--whereupon she vanishes on the arm of the host, and the Prince twirls his moustache with a comical grimace.
"What annoys you, Zino?" Edmund asks on his return to the smoking-room; and when the Prince enlightens him as to the extent of his lack of tact, and the unfortunate family history of the Meinecks, he says,--
"I really do not see why Edgar considered it necessary to prepare us so carefully for the absurdities of the old Baroness. It is quite possible that she drove her husband distracted with her learning: nevertheless in ordinary intercourse she is very agreeable, and a very handsome old lady: she must have been handsomer in her time than her daughter."
"Do you think so?" asks Thérèse. "To me Stella seems charming."
"Elle est tout bêtement adorable," says Zino Capito, drinking his tea out of the Japanese cup his sister has just handed him. "How good your tea is, Sasa! in all Paris no one has such good tea as yours."
"You are very suspiciously complimentary," Thérèse rejoins. "What do you want me to do for you?"
"Ask me to dine soon, and ask the Meinecks," Zino replies, with his attractively audacious smile.
"No, I will not," Thérèse says, resolutely.
"And why not?"
"Because, as I now see, you would do all that you could to turn Stella's brain. I thought you had outgrown such foolish tricks."
"Hm!" says Capito.
"I am going to do all that I can to marry her well," Thérèse declares.
"Hm!" Capito says again, but in a different tone.
"If you like, I will invite you to meet the Gurlichingen; she is in Paris at present."
"Indeed! With whom is she travelling?
"With----" Thérèse looks full at him, with mirth in her eyes,--"with the Oblonsky!"
"Ah! Have her lungs become affected lately?" Zino asks, indifferently.
"Not that I know of; but she probably covets respectability," says Thérèse.
"Ah, tiens! cela doit être drôle. An entire change of system on Stasy's part, then," says Zino, putting down his teacup, and rising.
"She seems to have abandoned the lucrative calling of a turkey-buzzard," Rohritz remarks.
"Yes, and instead to have opened a laundry for the purification of--caps which have fallen among--among nettles, in the vicinity of mills.[[1]] Not a bad trade,--hm!"
"Going already, Zino?"
"Of course," says Zino, stretching himself and yawning as spoiled brothers allow themselves to do in presence of their sisters. "If you suppose I tore myself away from Lyons to drink tea with you, you are mistaken. Be good, Sasa: when will you invite the Meinecks and myself to dine?"
Thérèse, moving her forefinger to and fro before her face, makes the Roman gesture of refusal.
"Oh, very well; as you please," Zino mutters in an ill-humour. "Good-evening." "I wonder where I could meet her," he says, musingly, before lighting his cigar in the coupé that awaits him.
"Strange!" Rohritz remarks to his wife; "Edgar described the young Meineck to me as particularly gay and amusing."
"Indeed?"
"Now, for so young a creature, she seems to me particularly quiet."
"What would you have? Punchinello himself would grow melancholy with such a life as hers."
Her husband reflects for a few moments. After a while he says, "I wonder whether, after all, she was not a little smitten with Edgar?"
"Upon what do you base your conjecture?" Thérèse asks, in astonishment.
"She put on so extraordinarily indifferent an expression whenever he was mentioned."
Thérèse laughs aloud.
"What is there to laugh at?" her husband asks, rather crossly.
"Forgive me, but you remind me of the Frenchman who proposed to a young lady through her mother, and when he was asked by her what reason he had to suppose that her daughter liked him, replied, 'I am quite sure of it, for she always leaves the room as soon as I enter it.'"
"Laugh away; we shall soon see who is right. Moreover, Edgar must take some interest in her, or he would not have recommended her to us so warmly," replies Rohritz.
"Bah! he recommended her to us at the express request of our common friend Leskjewitsch," his wife rejoins.
"True; but----"
"She is a child in comparison with him. He might be her father."
Edmund is silent for a while, and then says, "That is true; she is a child,--and he is very sensible."