Baroness Sterzl was one of those happily rare natures who have not one redeeming point. In her Moravian estate, whither they now retired, she was sick of her life, and treated Zinka with affectionate austerity. Bored and embittered, she was always bewailing herself and made every one miserable by her sour mien and doleful, appearance. When the year of mourning was ended she began to crave for some excitement; she made excursions to watering places, and to Vienna, where she gathered round her the fragmentary remains of her old circle of acquaintance and tried to astonish them by magnificent reminiscences of her sojourn in Rome. At the same time she still wore deep furbelows of crape, and wrote her invitations on black-edged paper; she talked incessantly of her broken mother's-heart wearing, as it were, a sort of Niobe nimbus; while, in fact, her display of mourning was nothing more than a last foothold for her vanity. General von Klinger always declared that at the bottom of her heart she was very proud of her son having been run through by a Sempaly.
She died, about three years after the catastrophe, of bronchitis, which only proved fatal because, though she already had a severe cold, nothing could dissuade her from going on a keen April morning to see the ceremony of washing the beggars feet at the Burg, with a friend from the convent of the Sacred Heart.
Zinka felt the loss of her mother more deeply than could have been expected. Year after year she spent summer and winter in her country house, where Gabrielle Truyn, with her English governess, sometimes passed a few weeks with her--her only visitors. Truyn very rarely went to see her, and never stayed more than a few hours; and the sacrifice it was to him to lend his little companion for those visits can only be appreciated by those who have understood how completely his life was bound up in hers.
With Princess Vulpini Zinka kept up an affectionate correspondence. Very, very, slowly did her grief fade into the background; but--as is always the case with a noble nature--it elevated and strengthened her. She gave up her whole time to acts of kindness and benevolence; the only pleasure in which, for years, she could find any real comfort was alleviating the woes of others.
Not long after the death of the baroness, General von Klinger left Europe to travel, and did not return till the following spring twelvemonths. He disembarked at Havre and proceeded to Paris, where he proposed spending a few days to see the Salon before going home. By the obliging intervention of a friend he was admitted to the "vernis sage"--varnishing day, or, more properly, the private view--the day before the galleries were opened to the public. Among the little crowd of fashionable ladies who had gained admittance by the good offices of a drawing-master or an artist friend, he observed a remarkably pretty young girl who, with her nose in the air, was skipping from one picture to another with a light and vigorous step, and pronouncing judgment on the works exhibited with the inexorable severity and innocent conceit of a fanatical novice. This fair young critic was so thoroughly aristocratic in her bearing, there was something so engaging in her girlish arrogance, so like a spoilt child in her confidential chat with her companion--an elderly man, and one of the best known artists of Paris--that the old soldier-painter could not help watching her with kindly interest. Presently she happened to see him; scrutinized him for a moment, and came to meet him with gay familiarity.
"Why, General! are you back at last? How glad papa will be--and you have not altered in the very least!..."
"I cannot say the same of you, Countess Gabrielle," he replied.
"Well, of course. We last met four years ago at Zini's I think, ..." she chattered on. "Then I was a child, and now I am grown up; and I will tell you something. General, I have exhibited a picture--quite a small water color drawing," and she blushed, which made her look like her father, "you will come and look at it will you not?"
"Of course," he declared; and then, glancing at her dress: "You are in mourning?" he said hesitatingly.