Asbein Part 1

Asbein.

by Ossip Schubin.

FIRST BOOK.

"But--do you really not recognize me?" With these words, and with friendly, outstretched hands, a young lady hastened toward a man who, with gloomily contracted brow, wrapped in thought, went on his way without noticing either her or his surroundings. He was foolish, for his surroundings were picturesque--Rome, near the Fontana di Trevi, on a bright March afternoon. And the young lady--she was charming.

Although she had called to him in French, something about her--one could scarcely have told what--betrayed the Russian; everything, the pampered woman from the highest circles of society.

The young man whose attention she had sought to attract in such a violent and unconventional manner was just as evidently a Russian, but of quite a different condition. One could hardly decide to what fixed sphere of society he belonged, but one perceived immediately that his manners had never been improved, polished, softened by society discipline, that he was no man of the world. He was, evidently, a man who was apart from the rank and file, a man who stood far out from the conventional frame, a man whom no one could pa.s.s without twice looking after him. His form was large and somewhat heavy; his face, framed by dark, half-curled hair, in spite of the blunt profile, reminded one of Napoleon Bonaparte, but Bonaparte in the first romantic period of his life, before he had become fat and accustomed to pose for the cla.s.sic head of Csar.

She was the Princess Natalie Alexandrovna a.s.sanow; he the fted violin virtuoso and well-known composer, Boris Lensky.

She had run herself quite out of breath to catch up with him; twice she had called to him before he heard her; then he looked around and lifted his hat.

"Boris Nikolaivitch, do you not really recognize me?" said she, now in Russian, laughing and breathless.

"You here, Princess! Since when? Why have you given me no sign of your existence?" and he took both the slender girlish hands, still outstretched to him, in his.

"We only arrived here yesterday from Naples."

"Ah! and I go there to-day." His long-drawn words betrayed very significantly a certain vexation.

"Yes, to give three concerts there. I know; it was in the newspapers,"

she nodded earnestly, and sighed.

"Hm!" he began; "then--" he hesitated.

"Then you do not understand why I did not wait for the concerts?" said she, gayly; "it was impossible."

"Impossible?" said he with a short, defiant motion of the head, the motion of a too-tightly checked race-horse who impatiently jerks at the bridle. "How so impossible? What word is that from the mouth of a young lady who has nothing else in the world to do but amuse herself?"

"As if I were independent!" she sighed, with comic despair. "First, mamma could not leave Naples--hm--for family reasons. My sister is married there, you know. Then--then--"

"Do not trouble yourself with polite excuses," he interrupted her. "I see that you are no longer interested in my music;" and, half-jesting, half-vexed, shrugging his shoulders, he added, "What of it? One must put up with one's destiny!"

"I am no longer interested in your music!" said she, angrily; "and you venture to say that to me, even after I have run after you--yes, really run after you, which is not proper--only to----"

She stopped, her face wore a vexed, indignant expression. "Why did you do it?" said he, roughly; "it is not becoming."

Instead of losing her self-possession, she laughed heartily. "But, Boris Nikolaivitch," said she, "you speak as if you were a true man of the world. However, as you please, I thank you for the lecture. Adieu!"

And nodding her head quite arrogantly, she was about to turn on her heel, when her look met his. She saw that she had vexed him, remained standing, blushed, and lowered her eyes.

The waters of the Acqua Nigo foamed and sparkled gayly between the edges of the stone basin which Nicolo Salvi had made for them; the noonday church-bells mingled their deep, solemn voices with the caressing rippling of the waves; the sun shone full from the deep-blue, ice-cold heaven, a glaring, unpleasant March sun, which was light without warming, like the condescending smile of a great man, and Natalie's maid who, grumbling and bored, stood a step behind her young mistress, opened a round, green fan to shield her eyes, and at the same time stamped her feet from the cold. Around, the Roman life went on in its usual lazy way. Before a small, loaded cart stood a mule with a number of red and blue ta.s.sels about its ears and on its forehead hung a bra.s.s image of the Virgin. In the door of a vegetable shop, from which came a strong smell of herbs, crouched a black-eyed, white Spitz dog, that twitched its right ear uneasily. A fat, smooth-headed Capuchin pa.s.sed by, then came two shabbily dressed young people. The Capuchin stopped to scratch the mule's head, the young people nudged each other, and said in an undertone, while they pointed to the virtuoso: "_E Borisso Lensky_."

"There you have it," said the princess, shaking off her vexation with a charming, pleasant smile, and her head bent one side. "Great man that you are, and still you take it amiss in me." She said nothing more, only raised her great blue eyes and gave him a look, a never-to-be-forgotten look, behind whose roguishness a riddle was concealed.

"I take nothing amiss in you," said he, earnestly.

"Really nothing? Now, then, I can tell you how much, oh! how much, I have longed to hear you play again, that I, _cote qu'il cote_, seized the opportunity to ask you to stop in Rome on your return from Naples only to--" She hesitated, as if she were suddenly afraid of being indiscreet.

"Only to play something for the Princess Natalie Alexandrovna a.s.sanow,"

he completed her sentence, laughing. "Good. I will come, Natalie Alexandrovna; in two weeks I am there. But if you are then in Florence or Nice----"

She was about to make a very positive a.s.sertion, when a slender, fashionably dressed man, with a very high hat and faultless gloves, pa.s.sed by them, greeted the princess respectfully, and, with a slight squint, measured Lensky from head to foot. Lensky recognized in him an officer of the guard, Count Konstantin Paulovitch Pachotin, and remembered last winter, during the season in St. Petersburg, he paid court to Natalie. The scrutinizing look of the young man vexed him beyond bounds; everything looked red before him. "Ah! he here?" he asked the young princess with mocking emphasis. "May one congratulate you?"

She frowned and turned away her head. "No!" murmured she. Then raising her wonderful eyes to him again: "So, farewell for two weeks!"

"Perhaps."

"Say positively, I beg you, and throw the traditional soldo in the fountain."

"With the best of intentions, I cannot do that; I have none with me,"

he laughed, now involuntarily.

She was charming. She wore a brown velvet bonnet that was fastened under the chin with broad ribbons. She had pushed back her veil, and the transparent brown gauze shining in the sun formed a golden background for her pretty, pale face. It was cold, although the beginning of March, and therefore her tall figure was wrapped to the feet in a sable-trimmed velvet cloak, beneath which a scarcely visible silk dress rustled very melodramatically. A delicate perfume of amber and fresh violets exhaled from her.

"You have no soldo?" said she; "then I will lend you one." She earnestly sought in her portemonnaie, whereupon she handed him the coin. He threw it in the basin of the noisy, rippling Fontana di Trevi.

The water sparkled golden for a moment, when the coin sank, and tried to form circles, but the spouting gayety of the cascade obliterated them.

"You will come!" said Natalie, laughing gayly.

"Yes, I will come," said he, not gayly as she, but gloomily, even grumbling. "But if you are not there," he added, "or----"

She had already turned to go, and without replying anything to his last words, she called to him over her shoulder:

"_Via Giulia Palazzo Morsini!_"

He looked after her for a long time. The fashionable dress at that time was very ugly. This little scene took place in the fifties, when the Empress Eugenie had again brought into favor the hoop-skirt which had disappeared quite a half-century before. But still Natalie Alexandrovna was charming. How peculiar her walk was, so light and still a little dragging, dreamily gliding, withal not weary, but with a peculiar certain characteristic rhythm. He thoughtfully hummed a melody to it.

Yes, he would come back. Whether he would have come back if the glance of the officer of the guard had not angered him? He must see, must teach this dandy!

"You speak just as if you were a true man of the world," the princess had replied to his--as he angrily told himself--highly unsuitable and tasteless advice. Now it might perhaps be small; yes, certainly it was small, but sometimes, sometimes he would secretly have preferred to be a true man of the world instead of being--a celebrity.

"She ran after me!" he said to himself again. "Why did she run after me? It was charming in her she would not have done it for any one else!

Bah! She is still only like all the others!" And the great artist, whose life resembled a continual triumphal procession, of whom already a finger-thick biography with glaringly false dates had appeared, and concerning whom the papers every day reported something remarkable, suddenly felt a kind of envy of Count Konstantin Paulovitch Pachotin, a St. Petersburg dandy, whose name had never been in the papers, and whom he despised for his narrow-mindedness.

He was a great genius, but, like many other great geniuses, he was of quite obscure parentage. Some a.s.serted he came from that horrible citadel of the poor in Moscow where misery intrenches itself against progress, in filth, stupidity, and vice; others said he had been found, a scarcely week-old child, wrapped in rags, before the door of the Conservatory in St. Petersburg. There were really all kinds of accounts in the papers. This one said that he was the son of a princess of the blood and a gypsy; that one, that he descended from an old princely family of the Czechs, and many other such romantic inventions. He shrugged his shoulders scornfully at all such improvisations, without refuting them by accurate personal accounts. How did the cold, hungry, maltreated sadness of his first youth concern the world? Now he was Boris Lensky, one of the first musicians of his time. Everything else could be indifferent to the man. It was indifferent to them; it was quite indifferent to them all, only not to him. The wounds which the tormenting martyrdom of his childhood had torn in his heart had never quite healed; therefore he showed a sensitiveness and irritability which even the most sympathetic person could scarcely comprehend.

But now he fared very well in the world. No one was so pampered, so caressed as he.

His playing exercised such a penetrating, sense-ensnaring charm that his listeners, transported in a kind of musical intoxication, lost their capability of judging, and even the most well-bred women crowded around him with allegiance so exaggerated that it tore down the boundary of every customary demeanor.