Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/55

 interesting history of that country, "fall into three rigidly separated castes: the nobility, a bare handful of tall, fair-haired, pure-blooded Slavs; the merchants and manufacturers, almost exclusively Jews and Germans; and the peasantry, the populace—a short, thick-set, swarthy race, of Slavic origin, no doubt, and speaking a Slavic tongue, but with most of the Slavic characteristics obliterated by admixture with the Turk Your true Slav peasant, with his mild blue eyes, and his trustful spirit, is as meek and as long-suffering as a dumb beast of burden. But your black-browed Monterossan, your Tchermnogorets, is fierce, lawless, resentful, and vindictive, a Turk's grandson, the Turk's first cousin: though no one detests the Turk more cordially than he."

Well, at Vescova, and, with diminishing force, throughout all Monterosso, Queen Aneli is entirely misunderstood and sullenly misliked. Her husband cannot be called precisely the idol of his people, either; but he is regarded with indulgence, even with hopefulness; he is a Monterossan, a Pavelovitch: he may turn out well yet. Aneli, on the contrary, is an alien, a German,. The feeling against her begins with the nobility. Save the half-dozen who are about her person, almost every mother's son or daughter of them fancies that he or she has been rudely treated by her, and quite frankly hates her. I am afraid, indeed, they have some real cause of grievance; for they are most of them rather tedious, and provincial, and narrow-minded; and they bore her terribly when they come to Court; and when she is bored, as we have seen, she is likely to show it pretty plainly. So they say she gives herself airs. They pretend that when she isn't absent-minded and monosyllabic, she is positively snappish. They denounce her as vain, shallow-pated, and extravagant. They twist and torture every word she speaks, and everything she does, into subject-matter for unfriendly criticism; and they quote as