"Your bride shall always find a friend in me."
But now the prince's wrath broke loose--he was furious; he swore that this insane marriage should never take place, and could not conceive how his brother--a man old enough to know better--could have allowed such a piece of madcap folly to enter his head.
The ladies rose and withdrew; Sempaly, who till within a few minutes had been so weak and vacillating, had suddenly become rigid in obstinacy and he desired the waiter to bring him the fateful number of 'High Life'. The prince read it, but his first observation was: "Well! and a pretty state the world would soon come to if every man who lets a charming adventuress entrap him into an indiscretion were to pay for it by marrying her!"
At this insulting epithet applied to Zinka, Sempaly fired up. He did not attempt to screen himself, he defended Zinka as against himself, with the most unsparing self-accusation. Egotistical, sensitive, and morally effete as he was, he was still a gentleman, and he now set no limits to his self-indictment; it seemed as though he thought that by heaping invective on his own head he could expiate the baseness into which he had been betrayed during the last few days. He told the whole story: that he had loved Zinka from the first time of seeing her: that he had been on the point of making her an offer when an accidental interruption had suddenly snatched him from the heaven of hope and bliss: that he had neglected and forsaken her: that his constant intimacy with his handsome cousins had raised a barrier between him and Zinka; then, how he had met her that night at the Brancaleones', and how, as he helped her to rise after her tumble, his passion had taken entire possession of him--all this he told, down to the moment when she had laid her head on his shoulder. "And before such guileless trust what man is there that would not bow in reverence!" he ended, "all Rome can bear witness to her sweetness and goodness; ask whom you will--Marie Vulpini, Truyn, even the Ilsenberghs--or Siegburg here."
The prince turned to Siegburg.
"I can make neither head nor tail of the matter," he said. "Is all he says of this girl true, or mere raving?"
Siegburg's answer was simple, eager, and plain; it is, at all times, a difficult thing for a young man to praise a girl without reflecting on her in any way, but Siegburg's testimony in Zinka's favor was a little masterpiece of genuine and respectful enthusiasm. Prince Sempaly's face grew darker as he spoke.
"And the young lady in question is the girl we met the other day in the Piazzi?" he said.
"Yes."
"The sister of the secretary of legation whom the ambassador introduced to me yesterday, and the niece of my old colonel?"