【英文原著类】COUNT BUNKER(班克伯爵).pdf

COUNT BUNKER
COUNT BUNKER
BY J. STORER CLOUSTON
1
COUNT BUNKER
CHAPTER I
It is only with the politest affectation of interest, as a rule, that English
Society learns the arrival in its midst of an ordinary Continental nobleman;
but the announcement that the Baron Rudolph von Blitzenberg had been
appointed attache to the German embassy at the Court of St. James was
unquestionably received with a certain flutter of excitement. That his
estates were as vast as an average English county, and his ancestry among
the noblest in Europe, would not alone perhaps have arrested the attention
of the paragraphists, since acres and forefathers of foreign extraction are
rightly regarded as conferring at the most a claim merely to toleration. But
in addition to these he possessed a charming English wife, belonging to
one of the most distinguished families in the peerage (the Grillyers of
Monkton-Grillyer), and had further demonstrated his judgment by
purchasing the winner of the last year's Derby, with a view to improving
the horse- flesh of his native land.
From a footnote attached to the engraving of the Baron in a Homburg
hat holding the head of the steed in question, which formed the principal
attraction in several print-sellers' windows in adilly, one gathered that
though his faculties had been cultivated and exercised in every
conceivable direction, yet this was his first serious entrance into the
diplomatic world. There was clearly, therefore, something unusual about
the appointment; so that it was rumored, and rightly, that an international
importance was to be attached to the incident, and a pliment
to be perceived in the selection of so popular a link between the Anglo-
Saxon and the Teutonic peoples. Accordingly "Die Wacht am Rhein" was
played by the Guards' band down the entire length of Ebury Street,
photographs of the Baroness appeared in all the leading periodicals, and
Society, after its own less demonstrative but equally sincere