Our Own Set Part 16

"At least she took an interest in her dress."

"Her dress!... she did not even know what she was talking about. She fled that we might not see her tears...." Sterzl broke out, losing all his self-control. Then he looked sternly at his friend as though he thought he had betrayed a secret But the old man's sad face rea.s.sured him. "It is of no use to try to act before you," he went on; "you are not blind--you must see how wretched she is--it is all over, general, she is utterly broken...." He started to his feet and after pacing the room two or three times stood still and with a helpless wave of the hands and a desperate shrug, he exclaimed: "There is nothing to be done--nothing!" Then he sat down again and buried his face in his hands.

Von Klinger cleared his throat, paused for a word and could find nothing better to say than: "In time--things will mend; you must have patience."

"Patience!" echoed Sterzl with an indescribable accent.

"Patience!--yes, if I could only hope that things would mend. At first it provoked me that she should let everybody see ... know ... I thought she might have more spirit and self-command. But now.--Good heavens!

she does all she can and it is killing her ... that is not her fault.

If only she were resentful--but she never complains; she is always content with everything, she never even contradicts my mother now. And then, what is worst of all, I hear her at night--her room is over mine--walking up and down, very softly as if she were afraid of waking anyone--up and down for hours; and often I hear her sobbing--she never sheds a tear by day!..." he sighed. "And then--if it were for a man who was worth it all!" he went on. "But that blue-eyed, boneless, good-for-nothing simpleton!... I ought never to have allowed her to step out of her own sphere--I ought never to have allowed them to become intimate! I knew he was not worthy of her, even when, as I believed--but you will laugh at my simplicity perhaps--he condescended to be in earnest.--You cannot imagine what it is now to have to meet him every day,--to hear him ask every day: 'how are you all at home?'--I feel ready to choke ... I could crush him under foot like a worm!... and I am bound to be civil. I may not even tell him that he has insulted me."

The baroness here came back.

"Lovely!" she exclaimed, with her affected giggle, "quite perfect!

Zinka has never had a dress that suited her so well."

"That is well!" said Sterzl vaguely, "where is she?"

"She is gone to lie down; she has a bad headache," minced the baroness.

"The young girls of the present day have no stamina. Why, at her age I...."

The general was not in the mood to listen to her sentimental reminiscences and he took his leave. In the hall he once more wrung Cecil's hand: "Fortune has favored you," he said; "you have a splendid career before you, and in her new and pleasant home Zinka will forget.--I congratulate you on your new start in life."

Aye--his new start in life!

CHAPTER II.

The Brancaleone Palace, on the slope of the Quirinal, is one of the finest in Rome, and particularly famous for its gardens, laid out in terraces down the side of the hill, with the lower rooms of the palazzo opening on to the uppermost level. The dancing was in a large, almost square, room adjoining a long vaulted corridor full of old pictures relieved here and there by the cold severity of an antique marble statue. It was lighted by marvellous chandeliers of Venetian gla.s.s that hung from the ceiling. At the end of the corridor two steps led down into an anteroom, dividing it from a smaller sanctuary where the gems of the Brancaleone collection were displayed--mixed up, unfortunately, with several modern monstrosities--and from this room a door opened into the garden.

Zinka arrived late. A transient and feverish expectancy lent her pinched features the brilliancy they had lost while her timid reserve gave her even more charm than her former innocent self-confidence, and her dress was certainly wonderfully becoming. Nor had she lost all her old popularity, for she was soon surrounded by a little crowd of Roman 'swells;' one or two even of the Jatinskas' admirers deserted to Zinka.

Truyn was not present; the cold his little girl had caught at St.

Peter's had developed into a serious illness, and he could not leave her.

Zinka, with her gliding grace, her small head held a little high, and her softened glance, was still pretty to watch as she danced, and attracted general attention. The music, the splendor of the entertainment, the consciousness of looking well put her into unwonted spirits. She sent a searching glance round the room--no, he was not there. Sterzl stood talking with the general, delighted with her little triumph and charming appearance; then he was congratulated by several men of distinction on his recent promotion. He thanked them with characteristic simplicity and sincerity--the evening was a success for him too. Not long after midnight he left to attend to pressing business--matters were in a very unsettled state--and went to the emba.s.sy.

Within a short time Sempaly came in. He had spent the previous night, as was very generally known, at cards--this was a new form of dissipation for him--he had lost a great deal of money, and he looked worn and out of spirits. He did not care for dancing and came so late to ask his handsome cousins for the cotillon that they were both engaged--a result to which he was so manifestly indifferent that Nini actually wiped away a secret tear. He was now standing with his fingers in his waistcoat pockets and his gla.s.s in his eye, exchanging impertinent comments with a number of other young men, on the figure of this woman or that girl, and trying to imagine himself in the position of the fabulous savage who found himself for the first time in a civilized ball-room.

Suddenly he was silent--something had arrested his attention.

The band was playing a waltz at that time very popular: "_Stringi mi_,"

by Tosti. The room was very hot; it was the moment when the curls of the young ladies begin to straighten, and their movements--at first a little prim--begin to gain in freedom; when there is an electrical tension in the air suggestive of possible storms and the most indifferent looker-on is aware of an obscure excitement. Crespigny and Zinka spun past him--Zinka pale and cool in the midst of the emotional stir around her. She was not living in the present--she was in a dream.

Suddenly Crespigny, who was not a good dancer, stumbled against another couple, caught his foot in a lady's train and fell with his partner.

Sempaly pushed his way through the dancers with blind force and was the first to help Zinka to her feet. Without thinking for a moment of the hundred eyes that were fixed upon him he leaned over the young girl--her power over him had risen from the dead. She, bewildered by her fall, did not perhaps at first see who it was that had helped her to rise; she clung to his arm with half-shut eyes; then, as he whispered a few sympathizing words, she looked up, started, colored, and shrank from him.

"A very unpleasant accident," said some of the ladies.

Sempaly had taken possession of Zinka's slender hand and drew it with gentle insistence through his arm; then he led her out of the heated ball-room into the adjoining gallery.

The accident for which she had besieged Heaven with prayers had happened--the accident which threw him once more in her way. His old pa.s.sion was awake again; she saw it--she could read it in his eyes. She summoned up all her self-command to conceal her happiness--not so much out of deliberate calculation as from genuine timidity and womanly pride. He talked--saying all sorts of eager, sympathetic things--she asked only the coldest and simplest questions. He had fetched her a wrap and with the white shawl thrown around her he led her from one room to another among the fan-palms and creamy yellow statues. Now and then she spoke to some acquaintance whom they met wandering like themselves, but these were fewer and fewer. The supper-room was thrown open and every one was gone to the buffet.

Zinka's coldness, for which he was not at all prepared, provoked Sempaly greatly. He felt with sudden conviction that there could be no joy on earth to compare with that of once holding her in his arms and kissing her--devouring her with kisses. This image took entire possession of him and beyond the possible fulfilment of that dream he did not look. That joy must be his at any cost, if the whole world were to crumble at his feet.

"Zinka," he said in a low tone, "Zinka--Lent is over--Easter is come."

"Yes? what do you mean?" she said coldly, almost sternly.

"I mean," he said, and he looked her straight in the face, "that I have fasted and that now I will feast, and be happy."

They were in a small room--a sort of raised recess divided from the ball-room by a row of pillars; they were alone.

A joy so acute as to be almost pain came over Zinka. It blinded and stunned her; she did not speak, she did not smile, she did not even look up at him; she could not have stirred even if she had wished it--she was paralyzed. He thought she would not hear him.

"Zinka," he urged, "can you not forgive me for having jingled the fool's cap for six weeks till I could not hear the music of the spheres? Can you not forgive me--for the sake of the misery I have endured? I can bear it no longer--I confess and yield unconditionally--I cannot live without you...."

Zinka was not strong enough to bear such emotion; the terrible tension to which for the last quarter of an hour her pride had compelled her gave way; she tottered, put out her hands, and was falling. He put his arm round her and with the other hand pushed open a gla.s.s door that led into the garden.

"Come out, the air will do you good," he said scarcely audibly, and they went out on to the deserted terrace. His arm clasped her more closely and drew her to him. Involuntarily he waited till she should make some effort to free herself from his hold; but she was quite pa.s.sive; she only raised a tear-bedewed face with a blissful gaze into his eyes, and whispered: "I ought not to forgive you so easily...." and then, with no more distrust or fear than a child clinging to its mother, she let her head fall on his shoulder and sobbed for happiness.

A strange reverence came over him; the sound of some church bell came up from the city. He kissed her with solemn tenderness on the forehead and only said:

"My darling, my sacred treasure!" She was safe.

When the general came out of the card-room to look once more at the dancers before he withdrew, the cotillon, with its fanciful figures and lavish distribution of ribbons and flowers, was nearly over.

"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-gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ver 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.