Our Own Set. Ossip Schubin

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СКАЧАТЬ decided that this separate washing-basin would be a breach of the Immortal Principles of '89."

      "It is hardly credible!" observed Truyn; Ilsenbergh shrugged his shoulders and the countess innocently asked:

      "What are the immortal principles of '89?"

      "A sort of ideal convention between the aristocracy and the canaille," said Sempaly coolly. "Or if you prefer it, the first steps towards the abdication of privilege at the feet of the higher humanity," he added with a smile.

      The countess was no wiser than before, Sempaly laughed maliciously as he fanned himself with a Japanese screen, and Ilsenbergh said: "Then you are a democrat, Sempaly?"

      "From a bird's-eye point of view," added Truyn drily; he had not much faith in his cousin's liberalism.

      "I am always a democrat when I have just been reading 'The Dark Ages,'" said Sempaly--'The Dark Ages' was the name he chose to give to Ilsenbergh's newspaper.--"Besides, joking apart, I am really a liberal, though I own I am uneasy at the growing power of the radicals. By the bye, I had nearly forgotten to give you two items of news that will delight you Fritzi,"--addressing the countess. "The reds have won all the Paris elections, and at Madrid they have been shooting at the king."

      "Horrible!" exclaimed the countess, and she shuddered, "we shall see the Commune again before long."

      "'93," said Truyn, with his tone of dry irony.

      "We really ought to draw a cordon round the Austrian throne to protect it against the pestilential flood of democracy," said Sempaly very gravely. "Ilsenbergh you must petition the upper house."

      "Your jokes are very much out of place," said the countess, "the matter is serious."

      "Oh, no! not for us," said Truyn. "Our people are too long suffering."

      "They are sound at the core," interrupted Ilsenbergh with dramatic emphasis.

      "They do not yet know the meaning of liberty," said Sempaly laughing, "and to them equality is a mere abstraction--a metaphysical delicacy."

      "They are thoroughly good and loyal!" exclaimed Ilsenbergh, "and they know. … "

      "Oh!" cried Sempaly, "they know very little and that is your safeguard. When once their eyes are opened your life will cease to be secure. If I had been a bricklayer I should certainly have been a socialist," and he crossed his arms and looked defiantly at his audience.

      "A socialist!" cried Ilsenbergh indignantly. "You!--never. No, you could not have been a socialist; your religious feelings would have preserved you from such wickedness!"

      "Hm!" replied Sempaly suspiciously, and Truyn said with a twist of his lips:

      "As a bricklayer Sempaly might not have been so religious; he might have found some difficulty in worshipping a God who had treated him so scurvily."

      "Hush, Truyn!" exclaimed Sempaly, somewhat anxiously to his cousin. "You know I dislike all such discussions."

      "True. I remember you wear Catholic blinkers and are always nervous about your beliefs; and you would not like to feel any doubt as to the unlimited prolongation of your comfortable little existence," said Truyn in a tone of grave and languid banter. For Sempaly was not burthened with religion, though, like many folks to whom life is easy, he clung desperately to a hope in a future life, for which reason he affected 'Catholic blinkers' and would not have opened a page of Strauss for the world.

      "The sword is at our breast!" sighed the countess still sunk in dark forebodings. "This new ministry! … " And she shook her head.

      "It will do no harm beyond producing a few dreary articles in the papers and inundating us with new Acts which the crown will not trouble itself about for a moment," observed Sempaly.

      "The Austrian mob are gnashing their teeth already!" said the lady.

      "Nonsense! The Austrian mob is a very good dog at bottom; it will not bite till you forbid it to lick your hands," said her cousin calmly.

      "I should dislike one as much as the other," said the countess, looking complacently at her slender white fingers.

      "But tell us, Nicki," asked Ilsenbergh, "has not the change of ministry put a stop to your chances of promotion?" Sempaly was in fact an apprentice in the Roman branch of the great Austrian political incubator.

      "Of course," replied Sempaly. "I had hoped to be sent to London as secretary; but one of our secretaries here is to go to England, and the democrats are sending us one of their own protégés in his place. My chief told me so this morning."

      "Oh! who is our new secretary?" asked the countess much interested. "If he is a protégé of those creatures he must be a terrible specimen."

      "He is one Sterzl--and highly recommended; he comes from Teheran where he has distinguished himself greatly," said Sempaly.

      "Sterzl!" repeated Ilsenbergh scornfully.

      "Sterzl!" cried the lady in disgust. "It is to be hoped he has no wife,--that would crown all."

      "On that point I can reassure you," said the general; "Sterzl is unmarried."

      "You know him?" murmured the countess slightly abashed.

      "He is the son of one of my dearest friends--a fellow-officer," replied the general, "and if he has grown up as he promised he must be a man of talent and character--his abilities were brilliant."

      "That is something at any rate," Ilsenbergh condescended to say.

      "Yes, so it strikes me," added Sempaly; "we require one man who knows what work means."

      "I was promised that my nephew should have the appointment," muttered the countess. "It is disgusting!"

      "Utterly!" said Sempaly with a whimsical intonation. "A foreign element is always intrusive; we are much more comfortable among ourselves."

      Tea was now brought in on a Japanese table and the secretary and his inferior birth were for the time forgotten.

CHAPTER II.

       Table of Contents

      Sempaly was not merely affecting the democrat to annoy his cousin the countess; he firmly believed himself to be a liberal because he laughed at conservatism, and regarded the nobility as a time-honored structure--a relic of the past, like the pyramids, only not quite so perdurable. But in spite of his theoretical respect for the rights of man and his satirical contempt for the claims of privilege, Sempaly was really less tolerant than his cousin of "the dark ages." Ilsenbergh, with all his feudal crotchets, was an aristocrat only from a sense of fitness while Sempaly was an aristocrat by instinct; Ilsenbergh's pride of rank was an affair of party and dignity, Sempaly's was a matter of superfine nerves.

      A few days after this conversation Sempaly met the general and told him that the new secretary had arrived, adding with a smile: "I do not think he will do!"

      "Why not?" asked the general.

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