Our Own Set. Ossip Schubin

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СКАЧАТЬ countess shrugged her shoulders and turned away from her flippant interlocutor, tapping her fan impatiently. "Do you mean to receive them Marie?" she asked.

      "Whom do I not receive?" said the princess in an undertone, with a significant glance.

      "Well I cannot--decidedly not," said the countess excitedly, "though I shall be grieved to annoy Sterzl. It will be his own fault entirely if he forces me to explain myself."

      "Do as you think proper," replied her friend, "but you know I am very fond of Sterzl; he stands high in my good graces."

      "What! le Paysan du Danube?" giggled Madame de Gandry, who had only partly understood the conversation.

      "Sterzl is a man of the highest respectability," said the countess icily; she did not intend to allow that little French woman to laugh at her fellow-countryman, though he was not a man of birth.

      "Le Paysan du Danube is my particular friend," said the princess with the simple heartiness that was so peculiarly her own. "I am very fond of him; he is quite one of ourselves."

      "He can have no higher reward on earth," said her brother with good-humored irony.

      "When my small boy fell and broke his arm, here in this very room, Sterzl picked him up, and you should have seen how gently he held my poor darling," added the princess.

      "That is ample evidence in favor of the fact that his woman-kind are presentable," laughed Sempaly.

      "But allow me to ask," interposed the Madame de Gandry, "just that I may understand what I am about--these Sterzls, they are not in good society in Austria?"

      "Our Austrian etiquette can afford no standpoint for foreign society," said Truyn with unusual sharpness, for he could not endure Madame de Gandry; "we receive no one who is not by birth one of ourselves."

      "Yes," said Sempaly with a keen glance, "Austrian society is as exclusive as the House of Israel, and scorns proselytes." And the leather-seller's daughter, who had not understood--or not chosen to understand Truyn's speech, replied with much presence of mind: "Ah, I am glad to know what I am about."

      Siegburg, who was sitting behind her, glanced at Sempaly and made an expressive grimace.

      Princess Vulpini looked almost spiteful. "I will not leave Sterzl in the lurch," she said, "and if his sister is like his description of her. … "

      "He has talked to you about his sister?" interrupted Sempaly.

      "To be sure," said the princess with a smile, "and to you too, I should not wonder, Nicki?"

      "No indeed, he does not show me his sacred places, I am not worthy," replied Sempaly. "He only told me that she was coming, and with a very singular smile. Hm, Hm! he seems to set great store by the young lady and will no doubt look out for a fine match for her. I should not wonder if he had got her here for that express purpose. Norina, take care of yourself--forewarned you know. … "

      "Mademoiselle Sterzl will hardly aspire to a prince's crown!" exclaimed Madame de Gandry, up in arms to defend her property.

      "Sterzl will not let his sister go for less," asserted Sempaly.

      "Do not talk such nonsense," said Truyn, to check Sempaly's audacity.

      But Sempaly was leaning over a table and scribbling on the back of an old letter; presently he handed the half sheet to the Countess Ilsenbergh; Madame de Gandry peeped over her shoulder.

      "Capital!" she exclaimed, "delicious!" Sempaly had sketched Sterzl as an auctioneer, the hammer in one hand and a fashionably-dressed doll in the other, with all the Princes in Rome crowded round. In one corner he had written: "This lot--Fräulein Sterzl--once, twice, thrice. … "

      The sketch was handed round; the likeness of Sterzl was unmistakable. Soon after the Countess Ilsenbergh went away, and as the company were not in the best of humors the two friends also withdrew shortly after midnight followed by those gentlemen who had come in their train.

      "Fritzi is really a victim to an idée fixe," the princess began when this indiscreet group had departed; "she wants me to entrench myself in dignified reserve against this poor little thing. What harm can the child do me?"

      "I cannot imagine," said Siegburg; "indeed, if she is pretty and has some money, it strikes me I will marry her myself--that will set matters straight" Siegburg was fond of talking of the money that his wife must bring him, and liked to air the selfishness of which he was innocent, as very rich folks sometimes make a parade of poverty.

      "And it was really very stupid of Fritzi to ventilate this idiotic nonsense before those two women," added the princess, who was apt to express herself strongly; but nothing that she said ever sounded badly, on the contrary, she lent a grace to whatever she said. "Does she think she can make me turn exclusive!"

      "I hope you observed how that pinchbeck countess was prepared to tread in her footsteps," said Seigburg.

      Truyn meanwhile was hunting eagerly about the chimney-shelf and the tables, assisted by the master of the house.

      "What are you looking for, Erich?" asked his sister.

      "For that sketch of Sempaly's. I should not like to leave the thing about. Excuse me, Nicki, the caricature was capital, I have nothing to say against it, if it had only been among ourselves; but you really ought not to have shown it to strangers. You are so heedless, you do not think of what you are doing."

      "And what have I done now?" asked Sempaly without any trace of annoyance.

      "You have simply stamped this young girl as an adventuress on the look-out for a husband."

      "Pooh! as if so trifling a jest could be taken in earnest!" said Sempaly. They searched everywhere for the caricature but in vain.

      "I am convinced that wretched woman put it in her pocket!" cried the princess indignantly. That wretched woman was of course Madame de Gandry.

      It was true that Princess Vulpini was very fond of Sterzl, and he returned her regard with almost rapturous devotion. In spite of an unpolished and absent manner he had a vein of poetic chivalry and a pure reverence for true and lofty womanhood. He could not think it worth his while to offer to any woman that flattery--often impertinent enough in reality--that gratifies some of the sex, and he had never learnt the A B C of modern gallantry; but in his intercourse with those whom he spoke of as "true women" there was a touch of chivalrous protection and reserved deference. His behavior to them was so full of an old-fashioned courtesy that he was certain to win their favor; he treated them partly like children that must be cared for, and partly like sacred beings before whom we must bow the knee.

      Immediately on his arrival in Rome the princess found great pleasure in their acquaintance, she confided to him all her little indignation at this or that grievance in Rome, and allowed him to take a variety of small cares off her shoulders, being, as all women of her soft nature are, very fastidious and utterly unpractical.

      There had been few sweeter girls in the Vienna world than the Countess Marie Truyn in her day, and there was not now in all Rome a more lovable woman than the Princess Vulpini. When in the afternoons she drove out in her open carriage, with her four or five children that looked as though they had been stolen straight out of one of Kate Greenaway's picture books, along the Corso to the Villa Borghese, СКАЧАТЬ