Our Own Set: A Novel

by Ossip Schubin

"What a cruel idea!" he heard in a lamentable voice from one of a row of chaperons, "to give a ball in such heat as this!"

It was the baroness, who was searching all round the room with her eye-glass and a very sour and puckered expression of face. Siegburg, who, as the general knew, was to have danced the cotillon with Zinka, was sitting out; when von Klinger asked him the reason he answered very calmly, that "he believed Zinka had felt tired and had gone home," But the way in which he said it roused the old man's suspicions that he put forward this hypothesis to prevent any further search being made for Zinka. He had seen her last in the corridor with Sempaly, and he hurried off to find her. He sought in vain in all the nooks hidden by the plants; in vain in the recesses behind the pillars--but the door to the garden was open. This filled him with apprehension--he went out, sure that he must be following them.

The air was oppressively sultry and damp; it crushed him with a sense of hopeless anxiety. The scirocco had cast its baleful spell over Rome.

Northerners who have never been in Rome have no idea of the nature of the scirocco; they suppose it to be a storm of hot wind. No.... it is when the air is still and damp, when it distils but does not waft a heavy perfume that the scirocco diffuses its poison: a subtle influence compounded of the scent of flowers that it forces into life only to destroy them--of the mists from the Tiber whose yellow flood--like mud mixed with gold, which rolls over the corpses and treasure that lie buried in its depths--of the exhalations from the graves, and the perennial incense from all the churches of Rome. The scirocco cheats the soul with delusive fancies and fills the heart with gloom and oppression; it inspires the imagination with dreams of splendid achievement and stretches the limbs on a couch in languor and exhaustion. It penetrates even the cool seclusion of the cloister and breathes on the pale cheek of the young nun who is struggling for devout aspiration, reminding her of long forgotten dreams.

All that is melancholy, all that is cruel and wicked in Rome--much, too, that is beautiful--is engendered by the scirocco. It is creative of glorious conceptions and of hideous deeds. One feels inclined to fancy that on the day when Caesar fell under the dagger of Brutus Scirocco and Tramontane fought their last fight for the mastery of Rome--and Scirocco won the day.

A dense grey cloud hung over the city and veiled the sinking moon. A cascade that tumbled from basin to basin, down the terraced slope of the Quirinal, plashed weirdly in the deep twilight of the earliest dawn, which was just beginning shyly to vie with the dying moon. Light and shade had ceased to exist; the whole scene presented the dim, smudged effect of a rubbed charcoal drawing.

The general sent a peering glance through the laurel-hedged alleys that led down the hill. Above the clipped evergreens, rose huge ilexes, wreathed to the very top with ivy and climbing roses. Here and there something white gleamed dimly in the grey--he rushed to meet it--it was a statue or a white blossomed shrub. Roses and magnolias opened their blossoms to the solitude, and the scent of orange-flowers filled the heavy air, stronger than all the other perfumes of the morning. Now and then, like a faint sigh, a shiver ran through the leaves--the fall of a dying flower.

The old man held his breath to listen; he called: "Zinka--Sempaly!" No answer.

Suddenly he heard low voices in a path known as the alley of the Sarcophagus and thither he bent his steps. The sullen light fell through a gap in the leafy wall on Sempaly and Zinka, seated on a bench, hand in hand, and talking familiarly, forgetful of all the world besides.

Zinka was the first to see him; she was not in the least disconcerted.