Our Own Set. Ossip Schubin
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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.
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.
"He speaks very bad French and he knows nothing about bric-à-brac," replied Sempaly with perfect gravity. "I introduced him yesterday to Madame de Gandry and he had hardly turned his back when she asked me--she is the daughter of a leather-seller at Lille, you know--'is he a man of family?'--and would you believe it, I could not tell her. That is the sort of thing I never know." Then he added with a singular smile: "His name is Cecil--Cecil Maria. Cecil Maria Sterzl! It sounds well do not you think?"
Cecil Maria! It was a ridiculous name and ill-suited the man. His father had been an officer of dragoons who had retired early to become a country gentleman--the dearest dream of the retired officer; his mother was a faded Fräulein von ---- who had all her linen--not merely for her trousseau but all she ever purchased--marked with her coronet, who stuck up a flag on the turret of their little country house with her arms, and insisted on being addressed as baroness--which she never had been--by all her acquaintance. When, within a year of her marriage, she became the mother of a fine boy it was a burning question what his name should be.
"Cecil Maria," lisped the lady.
"Nonsense! The boy shall be called Anthony after his grandfather," said his father, and the mother burst into tears. What man can resist the tears of the mother of his first-born? The child was christened Cecil.
His father died at the early age of forty; his youngest child, a little girl whom he worshipped, was dangerously ill of scarlet fever and he fell a victim to his devotion to her. Cecil was at that time a pretty but rather delicate boy, with an intense contempt for the French language which his sister's governess tried to instil into him, and a pronounced preference for the society of the stable-lads and peasant boys; the baroness was always complaining that he was dirty and did not care to keep his hands white. The guardianship of the orphans devolved on General Sterzl, their father's elder brother, who honestly did his best for them, managing their little fortune with care, and conscientiously directing their education. After a brief but keen inspection of the clever spoilt boy, of his silly mother, and of his cringing tutor, he shrugged his shoulders over this country gentleman's life and placed the lad in the Theresianum, a college which in the estimation of every Austrian officer is the first educational establishment in the world--provided, that is to say, that he himself was not brought up there.
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