‘Ah! je t’adore mon âme:Ah! je te donne—tout! tout!Et toi?—veux tu etre infameAh! veux tu me rendre—fou?’
‘Ah! je t’adore mon âme:Ah! je te donne—tout! tout!Et toi?—veux tu etre infameAh! veux tu me rendre—fou?’
‘Ah! je t’adore mon âme:Ah! je te donne—tout! tout!Et toi?—veux tu etre infameAh! veux tu me rendre—fou?’
and, youmustsay, it sounds like a declaration!”
A deep crimson wave sweeps over the stormy face of Gabrielle Beranger, making her look like a beautiful fiend. A frown gathers unmistakably on her forehead, and the large but well-formed hand, that holds her parasol, clutches the handle like a vice, with a passion that the owner does not care to conceal.
“So Lady Beranger said that? How dare she hit at my mother’s birth as she is always doing. I am sure it does not show her to have any of the delicate feelingswhich aristocrats are supposed to monopolise! And after all, she only took my mother’s leavings.”
“How ridiculously sensitive you are on the point of your maternal history, Gabrielle. I wish I could make you forget all about it, that you might not remind one of it so often,” Zai says wearily.
For Gabrielle Beranger, like many of us, has a decided cross. And that cross is the social status of the Frenchbouquetièrethat Lord Beranger had elevated to his bosom and position in the days of his hot-headed, unwary youth. No one would believe such a peccadillo of him now—starch as his own stick-ups; full of proprieties, and a slave to the voice of the world.
Her dead mother’s birth is the skeletonin Gabrielle’s cupboard that is dragged out for her own and her step-sisters’ benefit continually, and yet, this same sensitiveness is curiously inconsistent with her self-complacency and undeniable pretension.
“Yes, Gabrielle, you are absurdly sensitive on some things. I can’t think why, since we are all Lord Beranger’s daughters,” Zai murmurs carelessly, pulling off absently the leaves from a little bough of willow, and wondering what Carl and Crystal are amusing themselves with. Perhaps, ah! the thought makes her feel quite sick! Crystal Meredyth is regaling Carl on the same sort of passionate music as Gabrielle has favoured Lord Delaval with.
“Yes; we are all Lord Beranger’s daughters; but you all have thesangre azulrunning through your veins, while I havethe muddy current of the Quartier Latin to boast of; and then again, all the money in the place, little as it is, came with my step-mother, and Papa and I are dependents on her bounty.”
Zai does not answer, the subject is threadbare, and silence is so pleasant with the mighty elms sending long shadows across the emerald grass, with the foliage rustling gently, and fleecy white clouds scudding along the sapphire sky, tempering the amber heat.
The muddy current that Gabrielle hates is not the only misfortune Lord Beranger’s early imprudence has brought her. He had married a second time, and the three girls, Beatrice, Zaidie and Mirabelle were no longer in actual babyhood when Gabrielle was brought from the French people who had charge of her to Belgravia—brought with all the faults and failings of bourgeoisie, faults and failings that to Lady Beranger’s notions are too dreadful.
“It is far easier to eradicate bad temper, or want of principle, than to putsavoire faire, or a due sense of the convenances, into a girl,” she always says, but all the same she has tried to do her duty by this step-daughter of hers, in her cold steely way, and is quite convinced that she has been the means of snatching the brand from the burning, and saving a soul from perdition.
As Gabrielle and Zai stand side by side, quite a family resemblance can be traced between them. But it is only a general resemblance after all; for they are really as dissimilar as light and darkness.
Gabrielle has none of Zai’s angelic type.A celebrated French author once said that womankind are divided into three classes—Angels, Imbeciles, Devils.
Zai is an angel. Gabrielle is certainly not an imbecile, therefore she must be in the last class.
Both the sisters are tall, and both are slender, and both bear upon them an unmistakably aristocratic air, though Gabrielle’s claims to it are only partial. She inherits the creamy skin, the coal black heavy tresses, and the bold passionful eyes of her French mother, and in spite of her ripe and glowing tints of opal and rose, and her full pouting lips, she is cast in a much harder mould than Zai or the other sisters.
Gabrielle is in fact too hard and self-reliant for a woman, whose very helplessness is her chief charm, and in whom the clinging confiding nature that yearns for sympathyand support appeals to the masculine heart as most graceful and touching of all things, for timidity is the most taking attribute of the fair sex, though it has its attendant sufferings and inconveniences.
The self-assertion, and freedom, and independence that there is so much chatter about amongst our women now-a-days is only a myth after all, for a real refined womanly nature closes like the leaf of the sensitive plant at unaccustomed contact with the world.
But there are women, andwomen, and men who fancy each sort according to good or bad taste. There is none of the sensitive plant about Gabrielle Beranger anyway. She is of a really independent nature that will assert itselfper fas et ne fas—a nature that can brook no control, and that throws off all conventional shackles with barelyconcealed contempt. She is a Bohemian all over, she has belonged to the Bedouins of civilisation from her youth up, and has run rampant through a labyrinth of low life, and the tastes that go hand in hand with it, but on the principle that all things are good for something, Gabrielle’s hardness and self-reliance, united to acuteness, have served her during her career when a nobler but weaker nature might have sunk beyond redemption.
Her early years have unfitted her for the Belgravian life that fate has chalked out, and a treadmill of social duties proves so tiresome that no paraphernalia of luxury—dearly as she loves it—reconciles her to her lot. At least it did not do so until she fell head over ears in love with the fair, languid, and brilliant peer—the Earl of Delaval.
Her wilful, fiery spirit revolts at being a sort of pariah to her stepmother and her stepmother’s swell relatives, the swells whom (until she knew Lord Delaval) her revolutionary spirit despised utterly. She would give worlds if the man she loves was a Bohemian like herself, and whatever is true in her is comprised in her feelings for him.
She is an enigma to her sisters, whose promising education has to a certain extent reduced ideas and feelings within the radius of “propriety,” and taught them, at any rate, the eleventh Commandment—that all Belgravia knows,
“Thou shalt not be found out.”
“Can anything—anything make you really happy, Gabrielle?” Trixy had asked one day, years ago, when she and her two sisters had enjoyed, to their heart’s content,a big box at Drury Lane, and a pantomime with a transformation scene that had worked up their young minds into a fever of excitement, and Gabrielle had sat through it all without a change on her dark face.
“Happy,” she had said, “can anything giverealhappiness? Of happiness in a positive state I knew nothing, my dear properly-brought-up young sister. I am only able to make my comparison by a greater or lesser feeling of misery. I dare say I often shock you by my sentiments, but anyone who has been kicked about like a football in this world, as I have, is not likely to look at things in the same light as you Belgravian girls. I believe you all regard with suspicion the poor wight for whom life hasn’t been allcouleur de rose, and think it a shocking instance ofdepravity of human nature if one should not be intensely content in such a remarkably pleasant world.”
“Where have you learned such a queer way of thinking, Gabrielle?” Zai and Baby demanded in a breath.
“Where, indeed?” Gabrielle was not going to say.Pas si bête!She averts her head and holds her peace, and is quite sharp enough to know that to the little, pink, unsullied ears, it would not do to whisper the secrets of the past, when, almost a guttergamin, she had picked up notions of life and its thousand joys and ten thousand miseries. A little red and whitepierrotte’sgarb, in the rollicking mad Carnival time—a gaudy tinselled box of cheap and nasty bon-bons—a fragment of flimsy, soiled, but flaring ribbon—or a battered artificial flower to deck her coal-blackplaits. These pretty well had been her catalogue of joys, but the miseries were just countless in the bare and squalid roomau cinquièmeamong the roofs and the sparrows—a mother always meretricious in her youth and beauty, but absolutely awful with faded cheeks and haggard eyes, dying the death of a daughter of Heth—without one prayer on her pallid mouth—without one hope in her reckless breast. Then—the woeful absence of bread, the continual presence of drink.
For can there be a spectacle more sickening than a drunken woman—dead for the nonce to shame and disgrace; the idiotic glare in the eye, the foolish simper on the grinning lips, the flow of words that pour unchecked from a debased mind?
When Gabrielle’s memory conjures up all this she closes her black eyes tightly totry and shut out the horrible past, and yet she loves her Bohemia still, and hates Belgravia, save the one particular spot in it where Lord Delaval lives and moves, and has his being.
She is thinking of him now under the arching elms. Athwart their fluttering leaves she can see his blond aristocratic face, and she longs to be back to hear his voice, the languid accents of which are harmony to her ears.
“Shall I go in now and say you prefer dreaming away the hours here tocotelettes soubiseand cold chicken?” she asks, breaking in rather sharply on the long silence which has fallen, and during which she sees plainly enough that poor little love-sick Zai has entirely forgotten her proximity even. She is wonderfully practical is Gabrielle Beranger, a child of the south, for hermaternal ancestors were pure Marseillaise. She is brimful of passion, but the passion is sufficiently material to permit of love of Lord Delaval and love of the flesh pots to go hand-in-hand, and it occurs to her at this moment, in the midst of her reverie under the elms, that thecotelettes soubiseandCailles à point d’aspergesdo not improve by growing cold.
“I am not day-dreaming, Gabrielle. Cannot one be allowed to think, even, without being called to account for it?” Zai asks wearily.
“Not when the thoughts are, to say the least, very foolish ones. When the subject of them is one Carlton Conway,jeune amoureuxat the Bagatelle, and very much the reverse of one of Lady Beranger’s pet eligibles.”
A swift colour like a deep rose pinksweeps over Zai’s face, a colour that creeps up to the roots of her ruddy chestnut hair, and dyes her fair lily-like throat. The name Gabrielle whispers has a magical charm about it, for besides the blush, it evokes the softest of love-lights into Zai’s grey eyes.
“I will go in with you if you like,” she says in a voice that sounds quite meek and deprecatory, and Gabrielle, as she glances at her, feels sorry that her careless words should hurt this loving, tender heart. If there is a soft spot in her heart for one of her own sex it is for this step-sister of hers. Trixy she hates, and Baby she despises, but Zai, although like the others, born and bred in Belgravia, is of quite another mould. But though Gabrielle is fond of Zai, she will not hesitate to plunge the dagger (metaphorically) into her heart ifthe time should come when such would serve her own purposes.
“I didn’t mean to chaff or worry just now, Zai,” she says quite softly, with a humility that is quite foreign to her, “but you know you wear your heart so much on your sleeve, child, that no wonder daws will peck.”
Zai’s lids droop, and her lips twitch as if fully aware of her shortcomings. She is desperately in love, and has a simple nature in spite of Belgravia’s training, and she is much too loyal to dream of denying the existence of a love that is part and parcel of her nature. Her passion for Carl Conway is like the air of Heaven to her, invisible, intangible, but yet it encircles her soul, and is just the Alpha and Omega of everything.
“You see, Zai, the governor and herladyship want a pull up and not a drag down—the family finances are so seedy that they want rich men for sons-in-law. Even a German prince wouldn’t find favour in their sight. They mean Trixy and you to marry Lord Delaval and Archibald Hamilton; they don’t care in the least which marries which, so long as both goodpartisare secured. Baby will follow suit, directly you are both safely settled down with your money-bags. She is of that infantile sort that Shortland is supposed to have a fancy for, so probably the parents will go in for strawberry leaves for their youngest born. Zai, don’t you pity any man who marries Baby? She is the greatest little caution in life.”
“And what are they going to do withyou, Gabrielle?” Zai asks, ignoring the hits at Baby.
“Withme, oh, nothing. Nought can always take care of itself, for it never comes to harm, you know,” Gabrielle answers bitterly, “butyouare the one object of solicitude to Lady Beranger just now. Of course, with all her ambitious ideas, it does seem hard for you to subside into the wife of an actor, who has nothing to recommend him except a good-looking face, and a pleasant way of making love—arôlehe goes through nearly every day of his life, so that practice has made it perfect.”
“His chief recommendation is—himself!” Zai whispers with quivering lips, and another hot and fleeting blush.
“Well, yes.Je ne dis pas autrement!I haven’t a word to say against him. He is always nice to my face, though I don’t believe he likes me in his heart. You see I am not of your sort, Zai.”
Zai smiles softly at this, and then, with a woman’s way of harping on love subjects when in love herself, says suddenly:
“I wonder if Baby will marry Lord Delaval one of these days?”
“Lord Delaval!” echoes Gabrielle, with a start and a frown. “And why on earth should she marry him?”
“Because he has been fond of Baby as long as I can remember. When we were all children together, he used to fight her battles, and Baby at five was the most quarrelsome little monkey that you can imagine. She does not care for him now, but used to love sitting on his knee, and patting his cheeks, andon revient toujours, you know.”
“No! Idon’tknow,” Gabrielle answers with acerbity.
Her big black eyes dilate as she takes ineach unwelcome word and her full red lip curls scornfully.
“Idohate stupid little reminiscences of childhood, Zai.
‘I remember! I remember! when my little lovers came!With a lily or a cherry, or a new invented game!’
‘I remember! I remember! when my little lovers came!With a lily or a cherry, or a new invented game!’
‘I remember! I remember! when my little lovers came!With a lily or a cherry, or a new invented game!’
Did you ever hear such inane trash as this sort of thing, Zai! Are you a simpleton or are you trying to throw dust in my eyes? We know each other too well for that. Let us speak truth always. I like truth under all circumstances, even if the hearing of it crushes my heart and spoils my life; but of course let those live on lies who like them!”
And she laughs, a harsh unpleasant laugh, that Balzac and Georges Sand have taught her, and to which is coupled a natural capability of catching at the under currents of life.
“I never was a hypocrite, Gabrielle andIhate falsehoods as much as you do,” Zai answers rather hotly.
“Then why do you pretend that it’s Baby and not you that will become Lady Delaval by-and-by, perhaps.”
Zai faces her with a bright flush on her cheek, and a flash in her soft grey eyes.
“I Lady Delaval! Gabrielle, you must be mad to hint such a thing. Am I a child or a doll to be handed over to a man I would rather die than marry—if he were one of the Royalties and three times better looking than he is! Lord Delaval is an insipid dandy, with a weak face and—and just the opposite of what I admire!”
“Insipid, weak! Your ideas of him are just prejudice, Zai. You have heard your oracle run him down, and have taken in everything as if it was gospel. I am a bitof a physiognomist and I dare be sworn Lord Delaval never made up his mind to arrive at anything or anybody and failed!”
“He will fail ignominiously if he ever does me the honour of thinking of me as Lady Delaval! Gabrielle youknowI shall never marry any one if I don’t marry Carl!”
Gabrielle shrugs her grand shoulders again, while a shade of contempt passes over her mouth as she looks at her companion. Zai looks so fragile and weak—so unfit for any contest of life, a piece of rustic waxwork, in fact, to be carefully handled. She grows quite white as she glances, thinking how easily Lady Beranger will arrange the match if Lord Delaval is willing—Lord Delaval, whom she loves so desperately that she would rather shoothim dead on the spot than let any other woman call him husband.
Insipid! Weak! the words rail her as they recur to her mind, since it is Lord Delaval’s very force of character that is his greatest charm in her eyes, for she is of a nature to adore daring, even if unscrupulous and exercised in dishonourable cause. It is Delaval’s intense masculinity that has fascinated her, for before she came in contact with him, she had never met a man of an equal amount of vigour, combined with so much personal beauty.—Gabrielle Beranger is one of those girls that Mephistopheles calls of super-sensuous refinement. And weakness of character has something repulsive in it for her.
Her senses are too susceptible, and she has a habit of filtering her emotions throughthe medium of an imagination which is rather dangerously material.
“I hope you’ll prove yourself a paragon of strength, Zai,” she says, with a mocking smile. “Lord Delaval, to my idea, has such an absolute will that I sometimes think he has taken for himself the motto of Philip of Spain, ‘Time and I against any two.’ If I were you, child, I should take him and bowl Carl Conway over. There isn’t much of the right stuff in your beloved Carl, but in Lord Delaval there are possibilities of something far beyond the ordinary. Do you know, I think he and Randolph Churchill are much of a muchness, and you must acknowledge Lord Randolph is delicious; there’s a go about him which I love, and which makes up for his being a Conservative.”
“Gabrielle, if you admire Lord Delavalso much, why don’t you try and marry him yourself?” Zai asks suddenly.
Gabrielle blushes, blushes a fierce, unmistakable red; she does not often blush, for this is a habit less known in Bohemia than Belgravia even, but the blush after all is only the tell-tale of the storm of feeling within, and her voice is hard as stone as she answers:
“I! you forget I am Gabrielle Beranger, with a lot of muddy current in my veins, and only my face as my fortune. Lord Delaval probably regards me as a nought in creation, a social mistake; handsome and fastidious, he can look for a wife among the Royalties, if he likes.”
“Anyway, youmustconfess you are awfully in love with him, Gabrielle,” Zai cries, with a mischievous laugh, and once more Gabrielle colours like a rose.
“Silly child! I know my position too well for that.”
“I cannot understand why you should think so much of his standing—he is no better, socially, than all the other lords about town, and I cannot see why he should not marry a girl with whom he is always talking and flirting.”
“Flirting! Of course you think he flirts with me! You cannot believe that any man holds me in sufficient respect to treat me as he would you or any other girl of his own set. I should like to know if no one can really like me and not try to amuse idle hours by flirting with me, but I suppose that is too much to expect! Imustbe flirting material or nothing!”
Another silence falls on them after this outburst, then Gabrielle looks round and yawns.
“How I hate the country,” she avers, “it is full of dismal sounds; the cattle do nothing but moan, the sheep wail, ah! ah! ah! and nature is one unceasing coronach. I wonder how many days it is Lady Beranger’s will that we shall dabble in puddles, and look down empty roads. Do come along, Zai, your respected parent will kill me by the lightning of her eye if I go in without you. Just throw C. C. to the four winds, and come and make yourself agreeable to the menkind indoors.”
“I’ll come in five minutes, Gabrielle,” Zai answers absently, and as soon as Gabrielle’s tall figure is out of sight, she forgets her promise in a delicious little reverie, in which the sunlight, glinting down through the tangled boughs, touches her cheek with the deepest pink and adds a softer lustre to her sweet grey eyes.
“I will never marry any one but you Carl, so long as I live,” she says half aloud fervently, then she glances furtively around, and when she finds she is all alone with the sunshine, the swaying leaves, the emerald grass, the foolish child devours with passionate kisses a tiny gold ring, which, after the fashion of romantic school-girls, is attached by a thin cord that encircles her pretty white throat, and rests night and day on the loving, fluttering heart that the same C. C., actor, pauper and detrimental, has taken possession of, wholly and solely.
“All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.”
“All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.”
“All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.”
Reveriescannot last for ever, even with Carl Conway’s handsome face present in them, and Zai starts to find that the sun-god is making rapid tracks westward, and remembers that Sandilands is one of those clockwork houses where unpunctuality at meals is a cardinal sin.
It is hard; for Zai, like a good many other girls who are in love, has no appetite. She fed to repletion on soft words and softer caresses in Belgrave Square, the night of the ball. And shewants nothing now until—until—some more of the same kind of nectar is given her.
She walks slowly down a narrow path fringed on either side thickly by glossy shrubs, and which leads to the back of the house, and indifferent to the regard and gossip of high life below stairs, runs up to her own room.
The sun has climbed up quite high in the western sky, and, enthroned in golden raiment, pours down such a reflection of his yellow glory on the toilette table, that she stands for a moment blinking and winking her pretty eyes like a newborn puppy.
Then she suddenly recollects something Gabrielle had told her, and stooping, stares hard at herself in her mirror.
She dreads to find that she has reallygrown white and thin, that she has “gone off” according to Lord Delaval’s verdict. The thought that Carl, who is so fastidious in his ideal of beauty, may find her wanting is too awful; so she falls to examining feature by feature eagerly.
These are what the looking-glass reflects back.
A small head, crowned with waves of hair, chestnut and silky, with threads of ruddy gold gleaming up here and there. A pair of big grey eyes, that can flash sharp lights in anger, but are as sweet and serene as a summer heaven when her soul is in sunshine. A pair of lips, red and tempting, cheeks, fair and lily white, with the faintest of pink rose petals laid on them, long, dark brown fringes to broad lids, whose shadow by and by may help to intensify a look of trouble in the eyes;but now all is morning in this charming face of nineteen.
Zai looks, but is not satisfied with the catalogue of charms presented to her critical gaze. Compared with the delicate perfection of Crystal Meredyth’s face, with its well-opened china blue eyes and coral pouting mouth, she feels her own to be a decided failure. Her nose is not a bit Grecian, her expression has not the ladylike inanimate look of Crystal’s.
She muses on, while she tidies her rebellious tresses that Zephyr has been taking liberties with, and fastens a bunch of dark-red glowing roses into the bodice of her white dress, and makes herself what Lady Beranger calls “presentable” before society. And, as she muses, a sparkling smile breaks on her mouth, for no reason whatever, except that she feels happy sinceshe loves Carl, and Carl loves her, and with the sparkle of this smile still lingering on her face she goes slowly down the grand staircase to find the luncheon-room deserted.
With a look of dismay at the huge Louis Seize timepiece opposite, the hand of which points at half-past four, she crosses a large square, tesselated hall, that opens into a boudoir that is a perfect gem in its way, and replete with all the luxury that “ye aristocrats” love.
The room is of an octagonal shape, with rare silken hangings ofbleu de ciel; the walls, of ivory and gold, are decorated by Horace Vernet’s delicious productions, varied by a pastel or two of Boucher’s, and with a tiny but exquisite Meissonier, which even a neophyte in painting would pick out, gleaming from the rest.
Art is everywhere, but art united with indulgence and indolence. The lounges and ottomans are deep and puffy, and marvellously soft, and fat downy cushions lie about in charming confusion.
So much for the room, which cannot be seen without at once suggesting the presence of an ultra-refined spirit.
This spirit, embodied in a good deal of flesh and blood and known as Lady Beranger, is here, presiding at afternoon tea.
Folds of rich black satin fall around her ample form, yards of priceless Chantilly go round her skirts and throat and wrists.
Satins and laces are her familiars, though the Beranger exchequer is low, for Worth and Elise, Lewis and Allenby, Marshall and Snelgrove supply them, and never worry for their bills.
Leaders of Society like Lady Beranger arewalking advertisements of the goods, and it is so easy to make your plain Mrs. Brown, Jones or Robinson pay up any bad debts among the “quality.”
Lady Beranger becomes her costly garments as well as they become her. She is a very tall woman, and very stately and handsome. Perhaps in the very palmiest days her beauty had never been classical. How seldom beauty is so! but she is very imposing to look on, and she is exceptionally thoroughbred in appearance. A woman in fact who bears upon her the unmistakablecachetof blue blood.
She has of course faults, and the gravest of them is love of money. It is the dream of her life that her lovely bouquet of daughters shall marry “fortunes,” and her cross at present consists in the bitterknowledge that both Trixy and Zai are in love, and in love with a pauper.
A pauper, for Trixy is, in her way—a very different way to her sisters’—as much in love with Carl Conway as Zai is.
Afternoon tea is quite an institution at Sandilands, and at half-past four Lady Beranger settles down to a substantial meal of cake and muffins and bread and butter, while the olive branches look on in silent wonderment, and ask themselves if a love of the fleshpots comes hand in hand with riper years.
“Trixy, I forgot to tell you that I met old Stubbs near the Lodge gates, and he is coming to call this afternoon,” Gabrielle announces, between slow sips of her tea.
“Is he! well he won’t findmeat home,” a thin and peevish voice answers.
It seems to rise from the depths of oneof the most comfortable chairs, on which an amber-haired white witch lies halfperdu.
This is Trixy Beranger, Lady Beranger’s eldest marketable article, and a lovely thing it is.
She would serve for an exact model, as she lounges here, of the lovely Persian girl that our Poet Laureate saw in his excursion up the Tigris to “Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold.”
Trixy is a rare and radiant maiden—a bird of Paradise, over whom most men go mad, but do not care to wed, and to whom most women are cold, conscious that their good looks pale beside hers.
Gabrielle’s glowing beauty of coal-black tresses and creamy skin, waxes quite dim in Trixy’s proximity, and Baby’s cherub face and golden curls are nowhere, but Zai—well, Zai is a law unto herself.
Society last year had fallen down helplessly on its knees, and worshipped thedébutanteof the season, the Hon. Beatrix Beranger. From the Royalties downwards she was the rage.
They even likened her to every poetical saint in the calendar, and Trixy, not over-weighted with brains, and with her lovely head completely turned, in acknowledgment of the compliment, considers herself in duty bound towards mankind in general, and in fact a point of conscience, to “pose” accordingly.
She feels it incumbent on her never to allow herself to be out of drawing, as the R. A.’s have it, to be always (in spite of the discomfort of the thing) ready for an inspiration for a poet, or a study for a painter; so from sheer force of habit, that has become her second nature, she sinksperpetually into graceful attitudes, even if no one more important than Baby’s dachshund Bismark is by to admire.
She even arranges herself with due regard for the picturesque, when she retires to her own little sanctum for a siesta.
If Trixy’s beauty is in consequence marred just a little bit in the world by asoupçonof self-consciousness, it is not a matter of marvel. A Belgravian damsel can scarcely, with all thebonne volontéimaginable, personate Lalla Rookh, Idalian Aphrodite, Mary Anderson, the three Graces, a whole sisterhood of Muses, and herself to boot, without some one suffering in the transmogrification, and that some one is naturally—herself.
Just now Trixy, who has been reading an article on the Porte and Bulgaria, is“doing” an odalisque, out of a Turkish harem. She is surrounded by a pile of satin cushions with a tender background of pale lilac and gold embroidery that helps to enhance the wonderful transparency of her skin, displays to greater advantage the yellow wealth of her hair, and forms an effective relief for the little Greek profile, chiselled like a cameo.
Looking at her, it does not require much fertility of imagination to fancy her a Lurley, but Trixy Beranger it must be confessed is a Lurley more powerful to ensnare when silent than when she discourses. Such a stream of small talk, of silly frivolities, that pour from her perfect lips! The Mikado, tailor-made dresses, Mrs. Langtry’s American outfit, these are about the only topics on her brain, and she babbles about them in a sort of childishtreble that soon brings on a reaction in the breasts of her most devoted.
But though three parts of London have paid her attention, though dukes and earls have swelled the length of her train, long as a comet’s tail, Trixy has never had one eligible offer.
So now, after the season’s campaigning, and, superseded this last year by Zai, she is slightly disgusted at the non-appreciative qualities of the Upper Ten, though in no wise disenchanted with herself.
“May I enquire of whom you were speaking, Gabrielle?” Lady Beranger asks in a sepulchral tone, fanning herself with a huge Japanese screen, after her exertions with the cake, muffins, and bread and butter.
“Of old Stubbs! Of course he expects to find Trixy when he calls.”
“But I shan’t be!” Trixy reiterates decidedly. “I am going to Southampton to do some shopping. I am so comfortable I don’t want to move, but Gabrielle you might ring and order the carriage for me.”
Gabrielle laughs, and going over to her whispers:
“Old Stubbs was clad in a yellow-brown alpaca suit, and looked such a guy. He put me in mind of the frog that would a wooing go. I wonder what was the end of that frog.”
“About the same as old Stubbs’ will be, if he makes a fool of himself about me,” Trixy answers peevishly, while she settles herself in another picturesque attitude. “Still, whatever I choose to think of him, it is very unpleasant to have all one’s admirers run down, as you have a shocking habit of doing, Gabrielle.”
Gabrielle hearkens with a contemptuous smile, but she reddens hotly as Lady Beranger chimes in with:
“Of all things, flippancy is the most unlady-like. Gabrielle,yourflippancy jars on my nerves horribly, to say nothing of its being indicative of low birth and breeding. Old Stubbs, whom you are pleased to make a butt of, is one of our biggest millionaires, and a most eligible acquaintance.”
“Old Stubbs’ father was a butcher,” Gabrielle breaks in defiantly.
“Mr. Stubbs is a self-made man,” Lady Beranger says quietly, casting a scornful glance at her stepdaughter. “I admire self-made men immensely, and I hope Trixy knows better than to be guilty of such rudeness as going out.”
A frown puckers the odalisque’s fair brow.
“Iprefergoing out shopping, mamma, to staying at home to talk to such an ugly man,” she says wilfully.
“Fiddlesticks! Trixy. Recollect he is Hymen’s ambassador, that he is wrapped up in bank notes, and that beauty’s only skin deep,” Gabrielle tells her, with a laugh.
“If you think Mr. Stubbs so charming, mamma, you know you can have his society all to yourself.”
“I shall certainly make a point of being present,” Lady Beranger answers, without a ruffle on her tutored face. “You ought to know me well enough, Trixy, to be aware that I should never risk such a breach of theconvenancesas to allow a daughter of mine to receive, alone, any man, were he king or kaiser, who was not her acknowledged suitor.”
“Who is not an acknowledged suitor?” cries Baby, bouncing into the room after her usual fashion. Her hat has fallen off to the back of her head, her eyes dance with mischief, and her cheeks are flushed like damask roses, but her muslin dress is tossed and tumbled, and not improved by the muddy paws of a miserable half-bred Persian kitten which she holds in her arms.
“Hargreaves is such fun, Gabrielle! He came to look at Toots’ tootsey-wootseys, and made love to me instead,” she whispers.
“What a tomboy you are, Baby,” Lady Beranger says sharply. “Lord Delaval will be in to tea presently, so run off and change your dress. You look like a maid-of-all-work, with your fringe all uncurled and your soiled hands, anddon’tbring that horrid kitten here again.”
“IhateLord Delaval!” Baby cries frankly. “He is not half so handsome or so nice as—as—shoals of men I know.”
“Not so nice as Hargreaves, the village veterinary,” Gabrielle breaks in maliciously, vexed at her idol being run down.
“Hargreaves! What can Baby know ofhisniceness?” Lady Beranger questions, in her severest tone.
“Nothing mamma; it is only Gabrielle’s spite because she thinks Lord Delaval such a paragon!”
Lady Beranger passes her eye over Gabrielle, icily.
“I do not think it is of importance to us what you think of Lord Delaval, Gabrielle, so long as your sentiments in no way clash with mine on the subject. Did you ask Zai to come in?”
“I am here, mamma, do you want me?” Zai says, walking quietly into the bosom of her family, and thinking what a very uncomfortable place it is.
The balmy breeze stirring the elm tops has not wooed her in vain—for her cheeks look like blush roses and her hair seems to have caught in its meshes every glint of sunlight that fell on it.
“Yes, I want you, or rather I don’t want you to take up your residence completely in the grounds, to ruin your skin, and to catch those vulgar things, freckles; you have a coarse flush on your face now, like a housemaid. Zai, I must really put my veto on your goings on.”
“What goings on, mamma? It is deliciously cool under the trees and this room is quite stifling. What can it signify if my skin does tan a little; I love to be out in the grounds, where I can think comfortably.”
“Think! what on earth can you have to think about, Zai?” Lady Beranger begins sternly, and Zai knows she is in for a lecture. “Girls of your age, if they are of properly-regulated minds, let others think for them. You have three or four serious duties in life to attend to. The first duty is to honour your father and mother and obey them implicitly; the second, is to take care of your looks, and to dress well; the third is——”
“To marry an eligible,” Gabrielle chimes in pertly.
“Exactly!” Lady Beranger says calmly. “Your chief duty is to show your gratitude to your parents, for all they have done for you, by making a good match.”
“I don’t care for money,” Zai murmurs meekly.
“Of course you don’t; you don’t carefor anything, that you ought to care for, Zai. You positively ignore the fact of who you are, and forget common deference to society, which is, attention to the people around you. Last Thursday night, I heard Lady Vandeleur bewailing howdistraiteyou were, and she smiled, Zai! smiled, quite in an aggravating way! She heard you reply to Lord Delaval when he asked for a valse: ‘I’ll take strawberry, please.’ No wonder she hinted to me that you had something on your mind!”
“Poor old Lady Vandeleur fancies, perhaps, like Shakspeare, that Zai has—
‘A madness most discreet,A choking gall, and a preserving sweet!’ ”
‘A madness most discreet,A choking gall, and a preserving sweet!’ ”
‘A madness most discreet,A choking gall, and a preserving sweet!’ ”
suggests Gabrielle once more. “Why did you not tell her that your daughter isstage struck?”
“Your attempts at wit are dreadful, Gabrielle,” Lady Beranger murmurs languidly. “Your tongue is, indeed, an unruly member.”
“I really think Zai has softening of the brain,” Trixy says spitefully. “She never remembers that her folly and eccentricity may compromise me. People might easily mistake one sister for the other.”
Spite is Trixy’s forte. Silky and saccharine, her tinypattes de veloursare always ready to creep out and scratch. Her mother understands her nature, and tries to check feline propensities; but Trixy, like many of her sex, is a born cat.
“Zai is more likely to compromise herself than you. She will establish a reputation for being queer, and damage her chance of securing an eligibleparti.”
“I wish there was no such word in English as eligible,” Gabrielle cries impetuously. “I hate the very sound of it. I suppose I am too low-born and democratic to appreciate the term. It seems to me, that every marriageable young woman should carry about a weighing-machine, and that, so long as Cyclops or any clod is heavily gilded—Hey! presto! he’s the man.”
Lady Beranger gives her a slow, level look, and wonders why such savages as Gabrielle exist.
“Please keep youroutrénotions to yourself,” she remarks quietly. “My daughters have been taught to look on a good marriage as their due, and I am sure it never enters into their heads to degrade themselves by amésalliance.”
“I think poor men ever so much nicerthan rich ones, mamma,” Zai murmurs deprecatingly, and her white little hands nervously clasping and unclasping.
“Do you recollect Evelyn Ashley, mamma?” Trixy asks in a gentle, but hypocritical voice. “No one ever forgets that she fell in love with a riding-master, and was on the brink of eloping with him, when, luckily his horse threw him and he was killed. Of course, she is all right now, and very nice; but I don’t believe anyone worth speaking of would dream of marrying her.”
“I am sure aneligiblenever would!” Gabrielle says satirically.
Zai’s grey eyes blaze, her little mouth quivers with excess of anger and indignation.
“By introducing that episode of Evelyn Ashley I conclude you mean to insinuate,Trixy, that her disgraceful affair is a parallel to what you think are my feelings for Carl?”
“Certainly. I call a riding-master quite as good, if not better, than an actor,” Trixy retorts coolly, though Carl Conway is as much in her head as in Zai’s heart.
“Gentlemen and officers have been forced through adverse circumstances to earn their bread by teaching riding, at least one hears of such cases. Of course it is not likely formeto have run across them,” she adds with supreme arrogance and a little curl of her pretty lip.
“And you think anyone following the profession of an actor, from sheer love of his art, cannot be a gentleman? Not even if by birth he is one—and in fact related to the best blood in England?” Zai demands, quite haughtily, with a glitter inher glance which rather awes Trixy, who, like all bullies, is not very courageous when it comes to a stand-up fight.
But before Zai has a reply, Lady Beranger steps in with her low imperious voice:
“I am shocked at you both. Can it be possible that daughters of mine, girls supposed to be well-bred, should discuss such subjects, and throw yourselves into the violence of washerwomen, proving yourselves no better than thecanaillein question. Zai, I see it is useless to try and reason with you. However, as I am your mother I am entitled to obedience, and I order you to abstain in the future from the society of Mr. Conway, so that, however much folly you may be guilty of, others will not be able to comment upon it.”
No answer, but Zai’s lids droop, andfrom beneath them big tears roll slowly down her cheeks, and her mouth quivers like a flogged child’s.
“What a poor weak thing she is,” Gabrielle thinks. “Why doesn’t she hold her own, and set that mother of hers at defiance?”
But Zai does not care for defiance. Even in Belgravia she has been taught to honour her father and her mother, and her natural instincts are all for good.
“I must say, Zai,” Lady Beranger goes on coldly and cruelly, “that it is a wonderment to me, this romantic,low, fancy for that young man. The whole thing reflects on the proper amount of pride you ought to possess. Has it by any chance struck you what this Mr. Conway, thisactor, must think of you?”
“Whatcouldhe think of me?” Zai asksquietly, with level half-closed eyes, but her assumption of courage is only skin deep. Anything unpleasant or invidious aboutthis actor, as her mother scornfully calls him, causes her to tremble inwardly like an aspen leaf—her love, her own dear love, who, in her opinion, is higher than king or kaiser, simply because he ishimself.
Lady Beranger calmly returns the gaze, and as she replies the words drop slowly from her lips, with a cool and merciless decision that is unwarrantable, considering that there are two pairs of ears besides Zai’s to listen.
“Mr. Conway may think, without being especially vain, that he has made, without any effort of his own, a conquest of a silly love-sick girl, who has not enough of self-respect to conceal from him or others the magnitude of her folly.”
Zai gives a half-suppressed cry of indignation, a cry that makes even Trixy forget she is a languid odalisque, and start from the repose of her downy cushions.
“How dare you insult me so, mamma!”
Her tone strikes like an electric shock on her audience, and Lady Beranger, pushing her chair back, rises and stands tall and regal in her wrath.
“Zai, have you lost your senses that you presume to address me so?” she asks in slow cutting accents.
Zai gives a gasp and shivers from head to foot, then she grows suddenly calm but for the storm in her eyes. Those grey eyes of hers—holy as a Madonna—are strangely disturbed, and their iris is several shades deeper.
“I beg your pardon, mamma!” she murmurs at last, with an effort. “When oneis insulted, one does not stop to thinkwhooffers the insult. Perhaps this may excuse my having forgotten myself, but—” her voice waxes louder and her sweet mouth looks stronger—“if you think taunts or innuendos will estrange me from Carl, you are mistaken. I trust in him too entirely to believe he will ever think badly of me. I believe he loves me as much as I love him,” and Zai, having delivered herself of this, picks up her hat and leaves the room.
“Good gracious!” cries Trixy. “I could not have believed Zai was so brazen. Fancy her flaunting her love for that Conway before us all!”
“Zai is frank as daylight,” Gabrielle says, taking up the cudgels for her favourite sister. “That is more to be admired than those who perhaps have the same low tastes, buthide them under grand sentiments. I have seen you walk out of the room, as red as a turkey cock with anger, when Carl Conway has been talking to Zai!”
An unpleasant silence falls on the party after this, and Gabrielle stares at her stepmother, who, in spite of her annoyance looks like a Sphinx, and wishes herself an Œdipus, for to her a dissection of character is a fascinating study. But thebien conservèface before her has on its Richelieu waxen mask, and piques her by its impassiveness.
After a moment Lady Beranger sinks down into her chair again, pours out a second cup of tea, and butters a sixth piece of toast, then murmurs wearily:
“It would be impossible to say how much I have to bear with Zai. She is impressionable and wanting in pride! and she always forgets she is a Beranger. Just to thinkhow wickedly she is in love with that Conway, that actor, whose good looks might captivate some women—but hardly a woman inourclass. I told Lord Beranger a dozen times last season that it was the height of folly to have a play actor running loose about the house, but with the usual short-sightedness and obstinacy of men, he pooh-poohed me—and this is the result! There are plenty of detrimentals about, but they don’t all get their living by ranting and raving on the stage, for the benefit of the mob! And besides, the creature hasn’t a sou but his weekly salary, and spends so much on his gloves and gardenias that I am sure he has not saved a shilling to his name!”
“It’s no good saying anything now. Zai is quite gone on Carl Conway. She is soqueer too, she has even a heart, you know,” Gabrielle says with a short laugh. “She is going to marry her actor, and nobody else. I would not mind betting——”
“Gabrielle!” cries Lady Beranger in a horror-struck voice, shutting up her ears with the points of her fore-fingers.
“I beg your pardon, my lady! I know ‘betting’ is an awful word in your opinion; I ought not to have said it. What I ought to have said was that Zai was such frightful spoons——”
“Gabrielle!” interrupts the severe voice again.
Gabrielle bursts out laughing, the horrified expression of her stepmother’s face strikes her as so ludicrous, and her laugh is so infectious that Trixy joins in.
But Lady Beranger’s unmistakable wrathnips the laughter in the bud, and after an instant, Gabrielle asks in rather a constrained voice:
“If you intend to nestle all day on those cushions, I really must go out, Trixy.”
“Trixy will remain at home. I especially request it,” decrees her mother.
“But I have no wish to see that horrid Mr. Stubbs,” Trixy murmurs petulantly. “I’ll be nasty to him if I am made to see him!”
“Trixy!”
“I promised Lord Delaval to work him a pair of slippers and I must go and choose the crewels,” Trixy answers determinedly. “And besides, Mr. Hamilton and one or two of the Irish Fusiliers are going with Gabrielle and me to see the trysting well in Archer’s Wood.”
“And one admirer at home is not halfso amusing as half-a-dozen outside, is he, Trixy?” says incorrigible Gabrielle.
“I wish you wouldn’t amuse yourself at my expense always, Gabrielle! If you wish to know the truth, I do not want to go out to see all those men so much as I want to shop. I must have a new dress for the Annesleighs’ ball on Monday, and I cannot trust you to order it. You haven’t a bit of artistic taste and no eye for colours. In fact, your ideas are so wretchedlybizarre.”
“Thanks! I never did go in for dress,” Gabrielle answers flippantly. “You see beauty unadorned is adorned the most—but dolls are always prettier for the frocks they have on.”
“You can go with me in the carriage to Stallard’s and order the dress, Trixy—it will be much cooler, and less likely to hurtyour complexion—after Mr. Stubbs’ visit,” Lady Beranger says suavely, but Trixy suddenly remembering the trip to Archer’s Wood, and her host of admirers, frowns.
“We might see about that Honiton flounce you set your heart on the other day. It would be lovely on a pale blue merv. Stallard does not mind his account running on, so you had better get some tea roses to wear with it,” Lady Beranger goes on carelessly, but noting that Trixy’s eyes sparkle at the fine raiment in perspective. “And now, child, run up and change that tumbled muslin for your new mauve costume, or I shall not indulge you with the dress.”
Trixy yields, and rising lazily, saunters out of the room. When she is fairly gone, Lady Beranger leans back in her gold-backedfauteuil, and partially closes her fine eyes.
“How thankful I shall be to get Trixy off my hands. She is so dreadfully extravagant and so eaten up with vanity. Nothing short of pale blue merv, and the Honiton, which costs about three guineas a yard (Stallard sticks it on so for credit, always), would have made her see Stubbs to-day, and yet, he is a ——”
“Millionaire,” she was going to say, when she remembers Gabrielle’s presence.
“Gabrielle, if you are going out, I wish you could drag Zai with you. She sits moping in the grounds after that horrid actor fellow until her brain will soften to keep her heart company. What a frightful anxiety marriageable daughters are!”
“Poor dear martyr,” Gabrielle murmurs. “I do believe I am the only consolationyou have in your troubles, though I do jar on your nerves, and am perpetually kicking against those tiresome convenances.”
Lady Beranger smiles icily.
“You certainly give me less trouble than Trixy and Zai, as far as love and marriage are concerned,” she replies pointedly. “In fact, it would perhaps be better if it were otherwise!” and Gabrielle, who is sharp as a needle, colours, and understands that the speech is simply a taunt that no one has offered to take her off her stepmother’s hands.
When she is quite alone Lady Beranger breathes more freely.
“I distrust that girl,” she mutters. “She is so intensely clever and cunning, yet she might be a help to me. She loves Lord Delaval desperately, and to gain her own ends she will make Trixy marryStubbs, and Baby Mr. Hamilton. So far, so good. Both men are rolling in wealth, and she will be so afraid of Lord Delaval fancying Zai, that she will force her into being a duchess or a princess. Zai is such a little fool, Gabrielle can twist her round her little finger. As for Conway, it is no use my bothering myself about him. Men in his position must find their own level; and only annoy like the sting of a passing gnat.”
Just as she comes to this conclusion a loud rat-tat resounds through the big house.
It is not a refined or timid knock, but decidedly obtrusive, yet it does not, strange to say, offend the delicate ear of Belgravia.
Lady Beranger draws herself together, as it were. She has been considerablyruffled at afternoon tea, but she composes her face into the sweet serenity it generally wears before the world.
“Show Mr. Stubbs in,” she desires, when the powdered flunkey hands her a card. “And, Theophrastus! not at home to any other visitors.”
She knows that the gentlemen staying at Sandilands have driven some distance, and are not likely to be back till dinner-time. So she is safe to prepare the way for Trixy’s future benefit. After all, is it worth while to envy Lady Beranger her charming home? or would not a dinner of herbs, when love and truth and honesty abound, be preferable to the stalled ox, and strife and scheming?
“How do you do, Mr. Stubbs?” she says, graciously, when a short, very obese man, and plain of feature, walks into theboudoir. He is very red in the face, both from exercise and from fond expectations, and he is not very ready of speech.
Lady Beranger eyes him keenly a moment from the top of his shining bald head to the foot, which is dumpy and decidedly plebeian.
He is certainly not a typical lover for the fairestdébutanteof 1886. But what matters?
He is Peter Stubbs, with a superb mansion in Park Lane, a gem of a place in Hampshire, and fifty thousand a year.
Does it signify one atom if he is as hideous as a gorilla, or as old as Mount Horeb?
Not in the very least.
“Trixy will be so charmed to see you, Mr. Stubbs. She was just complaining of the country, and longing for some civilisedLondon friend to come and enliven her—rustic neighbours are so very uninteresting, you know.”
Mr. Peter Stubbs reddens as if he were developing apoplectic symptoms, and smiles till he looks even more ugly than his wont.
“Did Miss Beatrix think ofmewhen she longed for that civilised Londoner?” he asks with a simper. Trixy enters at this moment and makes an unmistakablemoueat this question, but she is Lady Beranger’s daughter.
While she has been donning her mauve costume and thinking how nice she looks in it, she has realised the gratification it would be to have acarte blancheaccount at Worth’s.
“Of course I did, Mr. Stubbs,” she gushes effusively, with a beaming smile,“do you think I have forgotten already our charming chats in Belgrave Square, and our teas at your paradise in Park Lane?”
And she holds out a lovely plump hand, white as milk, which Mr. Stubbs takes and squeezes warmly.
“I see Zai at the far end of the lawn, I want to speak to her, so excuse me for a few minutes, Mr. Stubbs,” Lady Beranger says with delicious affability.
“Certainly! certainly! your ladyship. Miss Beatrix and I can manage to get along together remarkably well, I am sure; maybe we shall not mind if you find a good deal to say to Miss Zai,” he answers with a wink.
“Cad!” Lady Beranger mutters to herself as she steps out of the French casement. “Cad! vulgar wretch! Trixy will be thrownaway on him, that is, her beauty will—as for herself, she is so avaricious and selfish that his money will make up for everything. Good Heavens! whose voices are those?”
She crosses the lawn noiselessly, threads the shrubbery, and steals behind a clump of elms.
It is the identical spot where Zai had held her rose-coloured reverie this morning.
A few paces further on, with the elm branches drooping low as if to conceal them from view, but with the yellow rays of the setting sun falling on them, two heads, one close-cropped, the other crowned with ruddy chesnut, had been very near to one another, and these heads belonged to Zai and that “horrid actor fellow.”
Carl Conway’s arm had been round a slender waist, and Zai’s sweet face upturnedso that a moustached lip might rest on her coral mouth; but when Lady Beranger sees these two culprits, they have said good-bye, and are a discreet distance from one another.