Gloria Victis! Part 16

After dinner the gentlemen retired to the smoking-room to smoke, the ladies to the drawing-room to yawn.

"I cannot cease looking at you, this evening, Comtesse," Charlotte Malzin exclaimed, seating herself on a sofa beside the daughter of the house, "your gown is enchanting."

"Very much too picturesque for this part of the world, they can't appreciate these contrasts of colour in this barbarous country," Ad'lin said crossly, as she was wont to receive the actress's advances. "They are far behind the age in Austria! _Dieu, qui l'Autriche m'ennuie!_"

The actress fell silent, in some confusion.

"What had the poet to say to you, Ad'lin?" asked the Baroness Melkweyser, after she had inspected through her eye-gla.s.s each piece of furniture in turn in the drawing-room.

"That he could not digest truffles, and that he means to dedicate his next work to me."

"Ah! the first item is highly interesting, and the last uncommonly flattering," the Melkweyser rejoined.

"Yes, it means that I must order at least fifty copies of the interesting effusion," Ad'lin said fretfully, adding with a half smile, "People in our position have to encourage literature--_n.o.blesse oblige_!"

The Baroness bit her lip and resumed her voyage of discovery, turning to a cabinet filled with antique porcelain.

"You really cannot think," Ad'lin began, leaving her sofa to join her friend, "how I have longed for you! You are the only link here in Austria between ourselves and civilization. I depend upon your forming an agreeable circle for us here."

It was noteworthy that since Zoe's return to her native land, Adeline's familiarity had seemed far less acceptable to her than it had been in Paris. "An agreeable circle!" she exclaimed, "that is easily said, but you make it very hard for me. You do not want to know our financiers ...."

"The Austrian financiers have no position; even the Rothschilds are not received at Court."

"And the Austrian aristocracy is excessively exclusive on its own soil--!" said Zoe.

"Ah that exclusiveness is a _fable convenue_," Ad'lin insisted, "I am convinced that if Austrian society knew us ...."

Instead of replying, the Melkweyser directed her eye-gla.s.s towards the porcelain on the shelves of the cabinet. "That is the Malzin old-Vienna tea-service."

"Yes, but it cannot be used--it is not complete."

"I know it, Wjera Zinsenburg has the other half."

"If it would give the Countess the slightest pleasure to complete the set, I should be perfectly ready to place this half at her disposal!"

Capriani's voice was heard to say.

The gentlemen had left their cigars and had come to the drawing-room for their coffee. Fermor who was too nervous to allow himself the indulgence of a cup of Mocha, sat down at the piano, and began to prelude in an affected manner.

Leaning in a languis.h.i.+ng att.i.tude against the raised cover of the piano, Ad'lin murmured, "No one but you invents such modulations. You ought to indulge me with a grand composition, Count; have you never completed one?"

"I am busy now with a work of some scope for a grand orchestra," Fermor lisped, dabbing his limp, bloodless hands upon the keyboard like a nervous kangaroo.

"Ah! A sonata?--An opera?"

"No, a requiem; that is a kind of requiem--more correctly a morning impromptu, the last thoughts of a dying poacher."

"Oh how interesting! Pray let me hear it."

"It is a rather complicated piece of music, Fraulein Capriani," Fermor always ignores the Capriani patent of n.o.bility--"if you are not especially fond of our German cla.s.sic masters ...."

"I adore Wagner and Beethoven."

"Then, indeed, I will .... but the harmony is very complicated!"

Whereupon he began, with closed eyes, after the fas.h.i.+on of pretentious dilettanti, to deliver himself of a piece of music, the beginning of which reminded one of a piano-tuner, and the intermediate portion of the triumphal march of an operetta, and which, after it had lasted half an hour, and the audience had given up all hope of relief, suddenly, and without any apparent reason stopped short, a common termination where there has been no reason for beginning.

"_C'est divin!_" Ad'lin exclaimed. "Your composition, Count, reminds me of the intermezzo of the Fifth symphony."

"You are mistaken, Fraulein Capriani, my composition recalls no other music!" Fermor said, greatly irritated.

With his eyes glowing, his full red underlip trembling, and his manner insolently obtrusive, Capriani threw himself down beside Charlotte Malzin upon the sofa and stretched his arm along the back of it behind her shoulders.

"Come and help me with my work, Count Malzin," Frau von Capriani called kindly from her pile of cretonne. "You have so steady a hand."

And while Fritz took his place beside her, and began to cut a bird of Paradise out of the stuff with great precision, Kilary took Arthur by the b.u.t.tonhole and said, "You ought to know all about it young man, how must one begin who wants to grow rich?"

"You must ask my father," Arthur replied insolently. "All that I understand of financial matters is, how to make debts."

A servant brought in the letters and papers upon a silver salver.

Whilst Arthur opened a dozen begging letters, and tossed them aside, ironically remarking, "Three impoverished Countesses--two Barons--a captain ..." and whilst Ad'lin hailed with enthusiasm two letters from a couple of French d.u.c.h.esses whom she counted among her friends, the Conte hurriedly ran his eye over an unpretending epistle which he had instantly opened. His hands trembled, a strange greed shone in his eyes, and quivered about his lips. Quite pale, as one is apt to be in a moment of victory he paced the room to and fro once or twice and then stepping directly up to Malzin he exclaimed, "What do you think--coal--! Schneeburg is a coal-bed. Extraordinary! Your father tried after madder, and I--have found coal!"

Malzin shuddered slightly, but merely said, "I congratulate you!"

"Malzin would never have forgiven himself if your bargain had turned out a poor one," sneered Kilary.

There was something in his irony that irritated Capriani, a rebellion of caste against the autocracy of money, which he chose to punish. As he was powerless with Kilary he turned to Malzin and said in a tone of insolent authority, "Malzin, get me the map of Bohemia that lies on my writing-table." At a moment like this the thin varnish of refinement which contact with the world had imparted was rubbed off entirely, he showed himself in all his coa.r.s.eness, and this not through any recklessness, but intentionally, in the consciousness that he, Alfred Capriani might do as he chose. At a moment like this he delighted in treading beneath his feet all who did not prostrate themselves before his millions.

Malzin had attained a height where such insults did not reach him. But the blood mounted to the cheek of the mistress of the mansion. "Arthur, go and get the map!" she said gently.

Fritz languidly prevented him. "You do not know where the thing is," he said good-humouredly and left the room.

Capriani went on pacing the s.p.a.cious apartment in long strides. "They are all alike, these blockheads," he muttered, "when they take it into their heads to work they are more stupid than ever. Old Malzin tried everything; he ruined himself in artificial madder-red, in lager beer, in sugar and in stocks,--and it never occurred to him that millions were lying in the ground beneath his feet."

Malzin returned with the map and as every table was overcrowded with bibelots and jardinieres, it was spread out upon the piano. Capriani eagerly travelled over it with his pudgy forefinger. "The track of the new railway must go here, between the iron works and Schneeburg."

"Then it must go a very long round," Arthur remarked, "can you obtain the permit?"

Capriani stuck a thumb in an arm-hole of his waistcoat and smiled.

"Malzin, you know the estates around here; to whom does that belong?"

pointing to a spot upon the map.

"That belongs to Kamenz," said Malzin bending forward, and fitting his eye-gla.s.s in his eye.

"And that?"

"To Lodrin."