Erlach Court Part 36

CHAPTER x.x.xIII.

STELLA'S FAILURE.

Like most of the salons of foreigners in Paris, even of the most distinguished, that of the Lipinskis produces the impression of a social menagerie. Artists, Americans, diplomatists, stand out in strong relief against a background of old Russian acquaintances. French people are seldom met with there. Scarcely three months have pa.s.sed since the Lipinskis took up their abode in Paris, and they have not yet had time to organize their circle. The agreeable atmosphere of every-day intimacy which const.i.tutes the chief charm of every select circle is lacking. The Russians and the elderly diplomatists gather for the most part about the fireplace, where Madame Lipinski holds her little court.

She is an uncommonly distinguished, graceful old lady, who had been a celebrated beauty in the best days of the Emperor Nicholas's reign, and had played her part at court. One of the Empress's maids of honour, she had preserved in her heart an undying, unchanging love for the chivalric, maligned Emperor, so sadly tried towards the end of his life. She wears her thick white hair stroked back from her temples and adorned by a rather fantastic cap of black lace; her tiny ears, undecorated by ear-rings, are exposed,--which looks rather odd in a woman of her age. As soon as she becomes at her ease with a new acquaintance she tells him of the annoyance which these same tiny ears occasioned her at the time when she was maid of honour. The Empress condemned her to wear her hair brushed down over her cheeks, merely because the Emperor once at a ball extolled the beauty of her ears.

"She was jealous, the poor Empress," the old lady is wont to close her narrative by declaring, and then, raising her eyes to heaven, she says, with a deprecatory shrug, "Of me!" What she likes best to tell, however, is how the Emperor once, when he honoured her with a morning call, had with the greatest patience kindled her fire in the fireplace, whereupon she had exclaimed, "Ah, Sire, if Europe could behold you now!"

The artistic element collects about Natalie.

On the day when Edgar and Zino are sent to the Lipinskis' to observe Stella and Monsieur Cabouat, the artistic element is represented by a pianist of much pretension and with his fingers stuck into india-rubber thimbles, and besides by Signor della Seggiola.

Della Seggiola, without his gray velvet cap, in a black dress-coat, looks freshly washed and--immensely unhappy. His comfortable, barytone self-possession stands him in no stead in this cool atmosphere: he has no opportunity to produce the jokes and merry quips with which he is wont to enliven his scholars during his lessons. Restless and awkward, he goes from one arm-chair to another, is absorbed in admiration of a piece of j.a.panese lacquer, and breathes a sigh of relief when he is asked to sing something, which seems to him far easier in a drawing-room than to talk.

The pianist, on the contrary, needs a deal of urging before he consents to pound away fiercely at the Pleyel piano as though he were a personal enemy of the maker.

"I have a great liking for artists," Madame Lipinski, after watching the barytone through her eye-gla.s.s, declares to her neighbour Prince Suwarin, who is known in Parisian society by the nickname of _memento mori_, "but they seem to me like hounds,--delightful to behold in the open air, but mischievous in a drawing-room. One always dreads lest they should upset something. Natalie disagrees with me: she likes to have them in the house; she is exactly my opposite, my daughter."

In this Prince Capito agrees with her, and hence his regard for Natalie.

It is about half-past ten when Edgar and Zino enter the Lipinski drawing-room. After Edgar has paid his respects to both ladies of the house,--a ceremony much prolonged by Madame Lipinski,--he looks about for Stella, and perceives her directly in the centre of the room, seated on a yellow divan from which rises a tall camellia-tree with red blossoms, beside Zino. He is about to approach her, when he feels a hand upon his arm. He turns. Stasy stands beside him, affected, languis.h.i.+ng, in a youthful white gown, a bouquet of roses on her breast, and a huge feather fan in her hand.

"What an unexpected pleasure!" she murmurs.

As just at this moment a young lady, a pupil of the pianist, has seated herself at the piano, to play a bolero, Edgar is obliged to keep quiet, and cannot help being detained beside the wicked old fairy; nay, he is even pinned down in a chair beside her.

The a.s.semblage listens in silence to the young performer's first effort; but when the Spanish dance is followed by a Swedish 'reverie'

the silence ceases. The hum of conversation rises throughout the room,--conversation conducted in that half-whisper which reminds one of the low murmur of faded leaves. The first to begin it was Zino.

"I do not understand how such delicate hands can have so hard a touch,"

he whispers, leaning a little towards Stella, with a significant glance towards the narrow-chested little American at the piano. "Dummy instruments ought always to be provided for these drawing-room performances of young ladies: there would be just as much opportunity for the performers to display their beautiful hands, and the misery of the audience would be greatly alleviated."

Stella laughs a little, a very little. She is melancholy to-night. Zino thinks of the sword of Damocles suspended above her fair head, and pities her. For a moment he is compa.s.sionately silent; then, espying Anastasia, he says, "I should like to know how the Gurlichingen comes here. She is a person of whom, were I Natalie, I should steer clear."

"To steer clear of the Gurlichingen against her will is almost as difficult as to steer clear of an epidemic disease; she steals upon us perfectly unawares," says Stella, with a slight shrug.

"Of all antipathetic women whom I have ever encountered, the Gurlichingen is the most antipathetic," the Prince boldly a.s.severates.

"Her smile is peculiarly agreeable. It always reminds me of Captain White's Oriental pickles,--'the most exquisite compound of sweet and sour.' At Nice they called her the death's-head with forget-me-not eyes. To-night she looks like a skeleton at a masquerade. Just look at her! If she only would not show all her thirty-two teeth at once!"

"Where is she?" asks Stella, slightly turning her head. So great has been her dread of perceiving somewhere her menacing destiny, Monsieur de Hauterive, that hitherto she has not looked about at all.

"There, between Rohritz and that flower-table, there----"

By 'Rohritz' Stella has been wont for weeks to understand the husband of Therese; she has not yet heard of Edgar's arrival in Paris. She raises her eyes, and starts violently. He is here in the same room with her, and has not even taken the trouble to bid her good-evening. Good heavens! what of that? How many minutes will pa.s.s before Monsieur de Hauterive comes to ask her to redeem Therese Rohritz's pledged word?

and then---- The blood mounts to her cheeks.

"_Sapristi!_" Zino thinks to himself, "can it be possible that my brother-in-law has been keener of vision than my very clever sister?"

"Do you not think, Baron Rohritz," Stasy meanwhile remarks to the victim still fettered to her side, "that Prince Capito pays too marked attention to our little friend Stella?"

"That is his affair," Edgar replies, coldly.

"And what does your sister-in-law say to Stella's conduct with Capito?"

"My sister-in-law evidently has no fault whatever to find with the young lady, for this very day she praised her in the warmest terms."

"Yes, yes," Stasy murmurs; "Therese, they say, has taken Stella under her wing."

"She is very fond of her."

"Yes, yes; all Paris is aware that Therese,"--to speak all the more familiarly of her distinguished acquaintances the less intimate she is with them is one of Stasy's disagreeable characteristics,--"that Therese has set herself the task of marrying Stella well. If this be so she ought to advise the girl to conduct herself somewhat more prudently, or the little goose will soon have compromised herself so absolutely that it will be impossible to find a respectable match for her. Do you know that for Stella's sake Zino has joined della Seggiola's cla.s.s?"

"Would you make Stella Meineck responsible for Prince Capito's eccentricities?"

"Granted that it was not in consequence of her direct permission, I do not say it was. But she makes appointments with him in the Louvre; and"--Stasy's eyes sparkle with fiendish triumph--"she visits him at his lodgings. A very worthy and truthful friend of mine has rooms opposite the Prince's in the Rue d'Anjou, and she lately saw Stella, closely veiled, pa.s.s beneath the archway of his----"

"Absurd!" Rohritz exclaims, indignantly; and, without allowing her to finish, he leaves her very unceremoniously to go to Stella. But before he can make his way among the various trains, and the thicket of furniture of a Parisian drawing-room, to the yellow divan, some one else has taken the place beside Stella just vacated by Zino,--a handsome, broad-shouldered man of about forty, well dressed, correct in his appearance, but not distinguished, although it would be impossible to describe what is lacking. There is something brand-new, stiff, s.h.i.+ny, about him. Between him and a dandy of the purest water, like Capito, for instance, there is the same difference that is to be found between a piece of genuine old Meissner porcelain and some of modern manufacture.

"Who is the man with the red face and peaked moustache beneath the camellia there?" Edgar asks his old acquaintance Prince Suwarin, whom he has just met.

"That is a certain Cabouat de Hauterive, a millionaire, who is very fond of pretty things," replies Suwarin. "A little while ago he bought a superb Rousseau for his gallery, and now, they say, he intends to buy a pretty wife for his house. But he is absolutely lacking in the very _A_, _B_, _C_ of aesthetic knowledge. The picture-dealer, Arthur Stevens, selected his Rousseau for him. I should like to know who found a wife for him. Whoever it was had good taste, I must say. The stupid fellow brags to all his acquaintances of the beauty of his new acquisition. She's a countrywoman of yours, if I'm not mistaken,--the young girl there beside him. She is simply divine!"

In fact, she is exquisitely lovely. How can Stasy presume to slander her so brutally? Truly it would be difficult to imagine anything more modest, more innocent, than the slender creature beside that broad-shouldered parvenu! Her elbows pressed close to her sides, her hands in her lap, with drooping head she sits there deadly pale, and evidently trembling with dread, as if awaiting sentence of death.

"It is a crime to force a young girl thus," Rohritz mutters between his set teeth. "I would not for the world have Therese's work to answer for. Fool that I am!--fool!"

Every drop of blood in his veins boils; for a moment it seems as if the sight of that pale, sad, child-like face must rob him of all self-control, as if thus at the last moment he must s.n.a.t.c.h her from the glittering, terrible fate to which she has devoted herself and bear her off in his arms, far, far away, to a peaceful green country where in the dreamy evening twilight stands a white castle in the shade of a mighty linden, where the odour of the linden-blossoms mingles on the evening breeze with the fragrance of the large, pale roses which look up from the dark verdure to the blue evening skies, where the music of gently-rustling leaves blends sadly with the sobbing ripple of the Save!

None but a maniac, however, would in our civilized century yield to such an impulse. Edgar is by no means a maniac: he is even too well bred to show the slightest outward sign of his agitation. Calmly, his eye-gla.s.s in his eye, he stands beside Suwarin and answers intelligibly and connectedly his questions as to the new Viennese ballet.

Stella Meineck has less self-control. While Monsieur in the most insinuating minor tones is preluding the momentous question, she is vainly trying to convince herself of all that should force her to receive his suit with joyful grat.i.tude from the hand of fate as a gift of G.o.d. She recalls the petty poverty of the life that lies behind her, the endless, monotonous misery of the future in galoches and water-proof that lies before her, the hotel-bill that is not paid, the golden brooch she has been obliged to sell to buy two pair of new gloves,--everything, in short, that is hopeless and comfortless in her life. Oh, she will be sensible, will accept his offer. There,--now he has put the great question, so distinctly, so clearly, that no pretence of misunderstanding that might delay the necessity for her reply is possible. She catches her breath; her heart beats as if it would break; black misty clouds float before her eyes; there is a sound in her ears as of the rus.h.i.+ng of a far-distant stream. She raises her head, and is about to speak, when her eyes meet Edgar's; and if instant death were to be the consequence of her refusal, her consent is no longer possible.

"You are very--very kind," she stammers, imploringly, "Monsieur de Hauterive, but I cannot--I cannot--forgive me, but--I cannot."

A moment more, and she is sitting alone beneath the camellia-bush.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV.

ROHRITZ DREAMS.