Given over in his youth to the ghostly influence of priestly tutors, he had led a melancholy, misanthropic existence. His delicate constitution made impossible any participation in the manly sports of his equals in rank. Therefore there was developed in him, as in many another recluse, an intense devotion to art; he was indefatigable in sifting and enlarging his collections.
People of his rank usually marry young. It was not so with him. As with several historic characters, the timidity of his temperament culminated in an aversion to women, which rendered futile all the bold schemes of ambitious mammas. In his solitude he had come to be forty-five years old; it was an article of faith in Austrian society that he never would marry, when suddenly his betrothal to Wjera Zinsenburg was announced.
His brother's creditors made wry faces; society laughed. Two months afterwards the strange couple were united in the chapel of the palace of the Zinsenburgs. Among those present at the ceremony there were some who envied the bridegroom, many who ridiculed him, and a few who pitied him.
As the pair stood beside each other before the altar they presented a strange contrast.
The face of the bride, nobly chiselled, and with an indignant curve of the full, red lips, recalled to the minds of all who had been in Rome a beautiful but unpleasing memory,--the profile of the Medusa in the Villa Ludovisi, that wondrous relievo in which the pride of a demon seems contending with the suffering of an angel.
The bridegroom looked as he did fifteen years afterward on his bier, only more unhappy, for upon the bier his face wore the expression of a man who had just been relieved of an old burden; at the altar his expression was that of one who bends beneath the weight of a burden just assumed.
It was shortly manifest that no late-awakened passion had decided him to contract this alliance. A weaker will had been forced to bow before a stronger.
CHAPTER XII.
But what had induced the exquisitely-beautiful girl to choose such a husband as this, every one asked; and no one answered. The question had to be dismissed with a shrug, and, 'She is a riddle!'
The same thing had been said four years previously, when with an air of proud indifference, and with cold, 'level-fronting eyelids,' she had appeared in Vienna society. There was about her an exotic air always irresistible to the genuine Austrian temperament. Her father was a diplomatist, her mother a Russian. Wjera's Russian blood betrayed itself in everything about her, in her deep, almost harsh voice, which was, nevertheless, capable of exquisite modulations, in the hybrid combination of Oriental nonchalance and northern energy that characterized her whole bearing, her gestures, her figure.