CHAPTER IV.
Mr. and Lady Julia Ellis--she was an earl's daughter--English people of enormous wealth and amazing condescension, had for many years spent the winters in Rome. In former times the lady's eccentricities had given rise to much discussion; now she was an old lady with white hair, fine regular features and much too fat arms. Like all English women of her day she appeared in a low gown on all occasions of full dress, and was fond of decking her head with a pink feather. Her husband was younger than she was and had a handsome, thoroughly English face, with a short beard and very picturesque curly white hair. His profile was rather like that of Mendelssohn, a fact of which he was exceedingly proud. Besides this he was proud of two other things: of his wife, who had been admired in her youth by King George IV. and of a very old umbrella, because Felix Mendelssohn had once borrowed it. He had a weakness for performing on the concertina and had musical evenings once a week.
It happened that on the occasion when the Jatinskys first went to one of these parties Tulpin the Russian genius whose great work had served as the introduction to the Ilsenbergh tableaux, was elaborating a new opera to a French libretto on a national Russian story. He was, of course, one of those Russians who combine a passionate devotion to the national Slav cause with a fervent wish to be mistaken for born Parisians wherever they appear. The piano groaned under his hands, while sundry favorite phrases from Orphée aux Enfers and other well-known works were heard above the rolling sea of tremolos. From time to time the performer threw in a word to elucidate the situation: "The czar speaks...." "The bojar speaks...." "The peasant speaks...." "The sighing of the wind in the Caucasus...." "The foaming of the torrent...." While Mr. Ellis, who believed implicitly in the opera, was heard murmuring: "Splendid! ... magnificent! The opera must be worked out--it must not remain unperformed!"
"Worked out!" sighed Tulpin with melancholy irony. "That is no concern of mine. We--we have the ideas, the working out we leave to--to--to others, in short. You must remember that I cannot read a note of music--literally, not a note," he repeated with intense and visible satisfaction, and he flung off a few stumbling arpeggios, while Mr. Ellis cried: "Astonishing!" and compared him with Mendelssohn, which Tulpin, who believed only in the music of the future, took very much amiss. A Grand Prix de Musique, from the French academy of arts at the Villa Medici, who had been waiting more than an hour to perform his "Arab symphony," muttered to himself: "Good heavens! leave music to us, and let us be thankful that we are not great folks!"
At last Lady Julia took pity on her guests and invited them to go to take tea; every one was only too glad to accept, and in a few minutes the music room was almost empty. Madame Tulpin, out of devotion, the Grand Prix out of spite, and Mr. Ellis out of duty were all that remained within hearing. In the adjoining room every one had burst into conversation over their tea; still, a certain gloom prevailed. Melancholy seemed to have fallen upon the party like an epidemic, and the subject that was most eagerly discussed was the easiest mode of suicide.
Tulpin rattled and thumped on; suddenly he stopped--the Jatinskys had come in, and their advent was such a godsend that even the genius abandoned the piano in their honor. They all three were smiling in the most friendly--it might almost be said the most reassuring manner; for Countess Ilsenbergh had not failed to impress upon them the very mixed character of Roman society, and, feeling their own superiority, they were able to cover their self-consciousness with the most engaging amiability. The two younger ladies were surrounded--besieged--and the strange thing was that the women paid them even greater homage than the men. Everything about them was admired: their small feet, their finely-cut profiles, their incredibly slender waists, the color of their hair, the artistic simplicity of their dresses--and bets were laid as to whether these were the production of Fanet or of Worth. But now there was the little commotion in the next room that is caused by the arrival of some very popular person. Zinka, without her mother, under her brother's escort only, came in and gave her slim hand with an affectionate greeting to the lady of the house.
"You are an incorrigible truant, you always come too late;" said Lady Julia in loving reproach.
"Like repentance and the police," said Zinka merrily; and then Lady Julia introduced her to Countess Jatinska.
"But you must help me with the tea; you know I always reckon on you for that," Lady Julia went on. "Give your charming countrywomen some, will you?"
Polyxena and Nini were sitting a yard or two off, surrounded by all the young men of Rome; Zinka was going towards them with her winning grace of manner when Sempaly happened to come up, and found himself so unexpectedly face to face with her that he had no alternative but to shake hands, and he could not avoid saying a few words. Of course--like any other man in his place--he made precisely the most unlucky speech he could possibly have hit upon:
"We have not met for some time."
She looked him in the face but of half-shut eyes, with her head slightly thrown back, and replied, with very becoming defiance:
"You have carried out the penance you began on Ash-Wednesday!"
"Perhaps," and he could not help smiling.
She shrugged her shoulders: "I had intended to break off our friendship," she went on, "but now that I see the cause of your faithlessness,"--and she glanced at the handsome young countesses--"I quite understand it. Will you at any rate do me the favor of introducing me to the ladies?"
"Fräulein Sterzl--" said Sempaly; but hardly had he uttered the words when a scarcely suppressed smile curled Polyxena's lip. Zinka saw the smile, and she saw too that Sempaly's manner instantly changed; he put on an artificial expression of intolerable condescension.
Zinka turned very pale, her eyes flashed indignantly as she hastily returned the young Austrians' bow and at once went back to her post. Sterzl, who was talking to Truyn in a recess and saw the little scene from a distance, frowned darkly. Sempaly meanwhile seated himself on a stool by his cousins and with his back to the tea-table where Zinka was busying herself.
"So this is the far-famed Zinka Sterzl!" exclaimed Polyxena: "She does credit to your taste, Nicki. But she allows herself to speak to you in a very extraordinary manner; it is really rather too much!" Sempaly made no reply. "She treats you already as if you were her own property."
"But Xena," said Nini, trying to moderate her sister's irony, "at least do not speak so loud." In a few minutes Mr. Ellis came to announce that Monsieur B. was about to play his 'Arab symphony,' and the company moved back into the drawing-room.
The evening had other treats in store; when Monsieur B. had done his place was taken by a young Belgian count who devoted all his spare time to the composition of funeral marches, who could also play songs and ballads, such as are usually confined to the streets of Florence or the cafés chantants of Paris, arranged for the piano, and who gave a duet between a cock and hen with so much feeling and effect that all the audience applauded heartily, especially the Jatinskys to whom this style of thing was quite a novelty. Then Mrs. Ferguson sang her French couplets, Mr. Ellis played an adagio by Beethoven on the concertina, and then Zinka was asked to sing.
"What am I to sing? You know the extent of my collection," she said with rather forced brightness to Mr. Ellis.
"Oh! a Stornello. We beg for a Stornello," said Siegburg following her to the piano--"vieni maggio, vieni primavera," and Lady Julia seconded the request.
Zinka laid her hands on the keys and began. Her voice sounded through the room a little husky at first, but very sweet, like the note of a forest bird.
Never before had she sat down to sing without bringing him to her side, even from the remotest corner of the room, at the very first notes; and now, involuntarily, she looked up to meet his gaze--but he was sitting by Polyxena, on a small sofa, in a very familiar attitude, leaning back, holding one foot on the other knee, and laughing at something that she was whispering to him. Zinka lost her self-command and was suddenly paralyzed with self-consciousness. She could not sing that song before him. Her voice broke; she forgot the accompaniment; felt about the notes, struck two or three wrong chords and at length rose with an awkward laugh:
"I cannot remember anything this evening!" she stammered.
Polyxena had some spiteful comment to make, of course, and Sempaly grew angry; he was on the point of rising to go to Zinka and console her for her failure, but before he could quite make up his mind to move, Nini had risen. In spite of her shyness she made her way straight across the room to Zinka and said something kind to her. Sempaly stayed where he was; but as they were leaving, he put on Nini's cloak for her, and said in a low tone: "Nini, you are a good fellow!" and he kissed her hand.
Sempaly's attentions had made Zinka the fashion; his sudden discontinuance, not merely of attentions, but of any but the barest civilities, of course, made her the laughing-stock of all their circle. The capital caricature that Sempaly had drawn of Sterzl and his sister that evening at the Vulpinis' was remembered once more; Madame de Gandry, to whom Sempaly had been very civil till he had neglected her for Zinka, showed the sketch to all her acquaintance, with a plentiful seasoning of spiteful insinuations. Every one was ready to laugh at the "little adventuress" who had come to Rome to bid for a prince's coronet and who had been obliged to submit to such condign humiliation.
The leaders of foreign society vied with each other in doing honor to the Jatinskys. Madame de Gandry set the example by giving a party at which Ristori was engaged to recite; Sterzl was of course, invited; his mother and sister were left out. It was the first time since Zinka's appearance at the Ilsenberghs' that she had been omitted from any entertainment, however select. Many ladies of the international circle followed Madame de Gandry's lead, wishing like her to make a parade before the Austrians of their own exclusiveness, and at the same time to be revenged on Zinka for many a saucy speech she had ventured to make when she was still one of the initiated--of the sacred inner circle. The Italian society of Rome did not of course trouble itself about all these trumpery subtleties, and behaved to Zinka with the same superficial politeness as before.
She, for her part, took no more note of their amenities than she did of the pin-pricks from the other side. If her feelings had not been so deeply engaged by Sempaly she would no doubt have taken all these petty social humiliations very hardly; but her anguish of soul had dulled her shallower feelings. There is a form of suffering which deadens the senses and which mockery cannot touch. It was all the same to her whether she was invited or not--she could not bear to go anywhere. The idea of meeting Sempaly with his cousins was as terrible as death itself. She was an altered creature. A shy, scared smile was always on her lips, like the ghost of departed joys, her movements had lost all their elasticity, and her gait was more than ever like that of an angel whose wings have been clipped.
Baroness Sterzl, of course, still drove out regularly on the Corso, and made the most praiseworthy attempts to keep up a bowing acquaintance with her former friends, and as often as she could she went out in the evening--alone. There was some consolation too in the proud consciousness of having quarrelled with Madame de Gandry and being on visiting terms with all the Roman duchesses. The only thing that caused her any serious discomfort was her sister Wolnitzka's persistent and indiscreet catechism as to the state of affairs between Zinka and Sempaly. She herself, out of mere idle bragging, had told Charlotte the first day of her arrival in Rome that Zinka's engagement was not yet made public.
Her aunt's coarse remarks and hints were fast driving Zinka crazy when Siegburg fortunately--perhaps intentionally, out of compassion for her--so frightened the mother and daughter, one evening when he met them at the palazetto, by his account of the Roman fever that they were panic-stricken, and fled the very next morning to Naples.
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 class-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: assertive, 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 appetite 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 passed 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 constituted like Zinka, illusion was indispensable; that she still laid no blame on Sempaly, but only on the alteration in his circumstances--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 God. 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 embassy.
"To be sure," he ended by declaring, "in Austria it is a matter of far greater importance that an attaché 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.