“I should wish to be alone, Nina, and undisturbed,” said Kate, at last, her patience being entirely exhausted.
Nina made her very deepest reverence, and withdrew.
Kate waited for a few seconds, till all sound of her retiring steps had died away, then arose, and locked the door.
She was alone; the packet which the Abbé had delivered lay on the table before her; she bent down over it, and wept. The utter misery of sorrow is only felt where self-reproach mingles with our regrets. All the pangs of other misfortunes are light in comparison with this. The irrevocable past was her own work; she knew it, and cried till her very heart seemed bursting.
CHAPTER IX. SECRETS OF HEAD AND HEART
I must ask of my reader to leave this chamber, where, overwhelmed by her sorrows, poor Kate poured out her grief in tears, and follow me to a small but brilliantly lighted apartment, in which a little party of four persons was seated, discussing their wine, and enjoying the luxury of their cigars. Be not surprised when we say that one of the number was a lady. Madame de Heidendorf, however, puffed her weed with all the zest of a smoker; the others were the Archduke Ernest, a plain, easy-tempered looking man, in the gray undress of an Austrian General, the Foreign Minister, Count Nõrinberg, and our old acquaintance, the Abbé D'Esmonde.
The table, besides the usual ornaments of a handsome dessert, was covered with letters, journals, and pamphlets, with here and there a colored print in caricature of some well-known political personage. Nothing could be more easy and unconstrained than the air and bearing of the guests. The Archduke sat with his uniform coat unbuttoned, and resting one leg upon a chair before him. The Minister tossed over the books, and brushed off the ashes of his cigar against the richly damasked table-cloth; while even the Abbé seemed to have relaxed the smooth urbanity of his face into a look of easy enjoyment Up to this moment the conversation had been general, the principal topics being the incidents of the world of fashion, the flaws and frivolities, the mishaps and misadventures of those whose names were familiar to his Imperial Highness, and in whose vicissitudes he took the most lively interest. These, and a stray anecdote of the turf in England, were the only subjects he cared for, hating politics and State affairs with a most cordial detestation. His presence, however, was a compliment that the Court always paid “the Countess,” and he submitted to his torn of duty manfully.
Deeply involved in the clouds of his cigar-smoke, and even more enveloped in the misty regions of his own reveries, he sipped his wine in silence, and heard nothing of the conversation about him. The Minister was then perfectly free to discuss the themes most interesting to him, and learn whatever he could of the state of public opinion in Italy.
“You are quite right, Abbé,” said he, with a sage shake of the head. “Small concessions, petty glimpses of liberty, only give a zest for more enlarged privileges. There is nothing like a good flood of popular anarchy for creating a wholesome disgust to freedom. There must be excesses!”