Our Own Set: A Novel

by Ossip Schubin

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.

CHAPTER V.

Countess Jatinska spent almost the whole of her stay in Rome on her sofa. When she was asked what she thought of Rome she replied that she found it very fatiguing; when the same question was put to her daughters they, on the contrary, declared themselves enchanted. Sempaly knew full well that in all Rome there was nothing they liked better than their ne'er-do-weel cousin. He displayed for their benefit all his most amiable graces; criticised or admired their dresses, touched up their coiffure with his own light hand, faithfully reported to them all their conquests, and made them presents of cigarettes and of trinkets from Castellani's.