Daughters of Belgravia; vol 3 of 3

“What does it matter to you if I am prejudiced? After all, you could only care for my liking as you care for the liking of a dozen other men. Come – strangers almost though we are – tell me who is the most favoured amongst your worshippers! For, in spite of being prejudiced, I have felt a great interest in you ever since I first looked on your face.”

She glances up at him, and the colour deepens on her cheek.

“Why should you take an interest in me? I am only a poor artist, and quite below your notice,” she answers, with a sort of proud humility.

“You would not say that if you knew how much I have thought about you, how your face has haunted me. It has bewitched me —malgre moi– I think. Do you know, Mademoiselle Ange, that if I am like someone you knew, you are strangely like someone I have seen; someone who certainly was not so beautiful as you are, or I should remember her to my cost,” he adds softly.

She flushes still deeper as she listens, then turns the subject by saying lightly:

“And what am I to tell you about myself? Only that I have a great deal of admiration and very little love! Perhaps you will think that is all I ought to expect, being myself! But really I don’t believe anyone has ever loved me!”

“It would indeed, be strange if they hadn’t,” he replies, unable to remove his gaze from her. “You are deceiving yourself or deceiving me. You are not one to be seen and not loved —madly loved! No matter the dire results of it!” he cries eagerly, and her lids droop under the infinite passion of his eyes.

“It is very hard to tell the real from the sham in love, and in everything else I don’t take the trouble to try; I class them all together, and value them at just as much as they are worth,” she says with a low laugh. “You asked me which of them I liked best – no one; but somehow, though I only saw you two nights ago, you seem to stand apart from the rest, you are different to me! You won’t be ashamed to come here now and then? I am not a grande duchesse, but still – ”

“I’ll come till you tire of me. I am afraid that will be too soon. You women are so capricious, especially lovely ones.”

“To everyone else, perhaps, but never to you!” she almost whispers, looking right into his eyes now with a yearning, wistful look that might make him lose his head, and he feels already that the best thing he can do is not to see Mademoiselle Ange again.

But what man has the strength of mind to resist a sudden and violent passion like this? He thinks, as he gazes infatuated on her, of some splendidly plumaged bird, of a mirage in the desert, of heavily scented exotics, of burning skies, or rather he feels all this, for her prerogative is to inspire sensation. To look at her is a species of moral dram drinking, and she stands in comparison to better, purer women, women like Zai, as brandy stands to weak wine and water.

“If Rubens had seen this girl,” Delaval says to himself, “he would not have sent down for all time a burlesque upon this splendid red and white, this fleshly magnificence!”

“Do you know I had an instinct when I saw you the other night? I believed you were my fate,” she says in a dreamy voice, but so suddenly that he starts a little.

It is startling to think that he should in any way be connected with the fate of this exquisite woman.

As she sits here before him, her hands clasped loosely together, a sort of abandon in her lovely figure, the light throws up richer gold on her hair, the soft folds of her satin gown fall round her moulded form like the robes of an empress, and he almost groans as he realises how impossible it would be to choose a life for one gifted with such rare physical beauty, that would not be hedged round with ten thousand dangers.

He shudders as he feels that this gift of beauty must be a curse, dragging her downwards.

“I your fate? God knows what your fate will be! You must have been mad to choose such an awful life.”

“Because you think me pretty, you say that! What is the use of being good-looking if it can bring me none of the nice things I desire? I might as well be ugly and old and senseless, if I had to be shut up within the narrow limits of most women’s lives. How could I gain power, the appreciation which is my due, if the public do not see me and judge for themselves? I wanted to be rich and I am so; I wanted to ride in carriages like I have seen women do, whose beauty has paled beside mine. What women care to live always in insignificance, obscurity, and, worst of all, in poverty?” she asks simply.

Lord Delaval is too much homme du monde to shrink from her when she says all this – when she breathes a creed utterly antagonistic to the training of good women. He does not revolt even from the evidently hard realism of her nature; the manner in which she seems to appraise and value her own attractions, setting no store on the beauty which womanly women hold as a gift beyond price, but only as a means of winning money, makes him regard her with a curious feeling that has no repulsion in it.

“Marguerite,” he says – he has already come to her Christian name, but among her class this is so common that she probably never even notices it. “Tell me, have you no heart, no feeling, that you talk so strangely?”

“Do I talk strangely?” she asks with a bewildering smile. “Do I differ so much in my words and ways from your high-born English misses – the women who live in what you call your May Fair, your Belgravia, who sell themselves for gold? I have heard that it is the trade, the profession, of those ladies very often to lay themselves out to win some man, no matter how old he is, how ugly he is, so that he is rich! And then they give themselves in exchange for money or title. But it is a fair bargain, is it not so? So much flesh and blood for so much gold, and your aristocratic world smiles on them and honours them, while it and you condemn such poor girls as I, who only use my youth and good looks in the pursuit of my profession. There is only one difference you see, the matrimonial market is not open to such as me with my soiled name, so I am obliged to try and make a name and reputation for myself.”

As he listens to her he wonders how a music-hall singer has learned the astute wisdom of the world, how words flow to her lips so easily, how, in spite of the surroundings of her daily life, her voice is so sweet and low and soft, her manner so well-bred, her language so refined.

“You say I have no heart, no feeling?” she goes on, drawing nearer him and placing her hand upon her breast with a melo-dramatic air, “but what have I to do with such things? Who has ever taught me what love means? Cruelty and insult I have suffered. Once – ah! I nearly died because he whom I adored, trampled on my heart as if it had been dust beneath his feet! But that is past and gone. I forgive him and I do not resent it, but love him still. Love, you know, like one gives to the dead. No! Respect and tenderness to me are just empty sounds. Who in all this world ever cared whether I suffered, whether I lived or – died? No one!”

Her face glows with emotion, and he, as her wild, reckless words sweep over his ear, feels as if some spell was at work; the room seems to stifle him, and Marguerite’s great black eyes seem to blaze and burn into his brain.

“You see I am quite removed from the pale of men’s sympathy. I cannot find any happiness in the way other women find it. I am only a pariah – an outcast.”

“You say that you have no chances of happiness like other women have, that there are none who would care to marry you! You will find out your mistake some day, Marguerite. You will find that such a face as yours can win, not only admiration and love, but a husband,” he answers. And he actually believes that, if the Gordian knot was not already tied, there is no knowing what imprudence he might not commit for a creature as rarely lovely as this!

“Is that true?” she asks, lifting her head with a strange light in her eyes. “Would men who are far above me – like you, for instance – ever stoop to me?”

He half turns away from her. Perhaps his good angel is hovering near, for he comes to the conclusion that it may be best for her and best for himself if this interview comes to an end.

She seems to have the power of drawing him nearer and nearer to her every moment.

“When you know more of the world,” he says quietly, “my greatness will diminish very greatly in your eyes, if it does not cease altogether. Why, you have raised me aloft, Marguerite, when you don’t even know my name or the class I belong to!”

She smiles rather bitterly, and a bright pink surges over her face.

“I know who you are – you are Lord Delaval!” she answers in a very low voice, that lingers a little over his name. “Your friends who were with you the other night told me.”

“Ah!” he says, “and did they tell you more about me than my name?” he asks eagerly, for somehow he is very averse to her knowing that he is married.

“No,” she replies. “Nothing. Wait! They did say that you were not married.”

He flushes and is silent a second.

“They told you the truth,” he says calmly, but, lax as he is, his conscience gives a throb of compunction at denying the existence of Zai – Zai, who loves him with every inch of her heart. “But I must go now. I have been here too long already, Marguerite,” he adds rather abruptly.

“You are going?” she asks regretfully, and a tear glistens on her lash. “Do you know I believe I shall never see you again. Is this the only time – tell me the truth, it will be kinder! – that my eyes will look on your face?”

“No. Of course we shall meet again.”

“When?” she asks fervently.

“When? In a very few days, I trust.”

“Will you come here on Wednesday night to supper? Ah, do! Let me have some date to look forward to! Yet, no! Do not come! What use is it for us to meet again? Are you not as far removed from me as heaven from earth? as respectability from unrespectability? Say, is there not an obstacle between us two that we cannot surmount?”

Her lips are quivering. Her heart beats so loudly that he can almost count its throbs. Truly there is no acting in this. Marguerite has fallen in love with him at first sight, as he has done with her.

“There is no obstacle between us,” he whispers, once more denying his wife. “I will come on Wednesday.”

“You will?”

She holds out her hands to him, and as he clasps them closely, he bends his head and his lips nearly rest upon hers.

But it is only a passing madness. He is not quite lost yet. And Marguerite, as she looks up at him hastily, sees no trace of passion in his face.

When she is alone she kisses eagerly the hands he has held in his.

“He will come again, and again!” she says aloud. “He is not a man to stop at anything if inclination leads him. He spoke of my beauty. Oh! how I thank Heaven for it now —now that I know it will give me my heart’s desire yet!”

CHAPTER VII.

DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL

“If one should love you with real love —Such things have been —Things that your fair face knows nothing ofIt seems – Faustine?....“Curled lips, long since half kissed away,Still sweet and keen,You’d give him poison, shall we say?Or what – Faustine?”

They are much sought after, the little suppers that Mademoiselle Ange gives on Wednesday nights.

Dainty, récherché feasts, where the guests are chosen more for social than moral worth, and the cuisine is irreproachable.

Mademoiselle, with the tact of a hostess to the manner born, and the savoir-faire that she has learned goodness knows how, is careful that these small feasts shall savour rather of gay Bohemianism than the conventional dullness that some people deem inseparable from propriety.

But while she regulates the social element, she does not ignore sympathy between mind and body, and knowing that the nearest way to men’s hearts is through their palates, secures the services of a noted chef, who drives to the Rue Tronchet in his own chic brougham, and disburses himself of a hundred-guinea diamond ring before he commences the momentous operation of trussing an ortolan.

This Wednesday night most of the guests are assembled in the salon.

Lounging on a sofa is a superb brunette, perfectly dressed and bejewelled. She is Leonide Leroux, a dramatic star both in Paris and London. By her side, languidly stroking his moustache, sits Ivan Scoboloff, a Russian baron with more money than brains. Beside these are little Rose Marigny, soubrette at the Theatre des Galléries, Monsieur Chavard, dramatic critic and author, and Louis, Marquis de Belcour, a good-looking giant and as rich as Crœsus.

Mademoiselle Ange is not herself to-night. Lovely, of course, but with the sparkle of her beauty lacking, as she reclines in a red velvet chair, in an artistic pose, and gives small heed to the little tittle-tattle around.

The last Parisian scandal is discussed, the last mot of the coulisses related, but, contrary to her usual habit, Marguerite is evidently distraite, and every now and then she throws anxious glances towards the door.

The full light of the crystal chandelier falls upon the snowy white of her skin, the exquisite rose and opal tints of her lips and cheeks, and her large black eyes full of passion and fire.

The strongest glare can only show up her brilliance, and find no flaw or blemish in the marvellous colouring that looks as if it was Nature’s own handiwork.

All that the best Parisian modiste can do has been done for her, and she is exceptionally well got up this evening; for she has abandoned her usual preference for gorgeous hues and costly heavy materials, and her trailing skirts of purest white fall in cloud-like masses round her as she leans back with the mien of a young empress. Opals and brilliants fasten the laces on her bosom, and a single tropical flower, with blood-red petals, gleams near her slender throat.

Suddenly a radiant light flashes in her restless eyes. The portière is held back, and Lord Delaval enters.

As he approaches, a vivid flush of pleasure surges over her lovely face, and, as he takes her hand, she says, in a low, reproachful voice:

“I feared so much you were not coming, but you have come! Will you take me in?”

He offers her his arm and at this moment catches sight of De Belcour, who is looking at him with ill-concealed jealousy and vexation. He has met this man before, a year or two ago, and nods recognition, then, turning towards his companion, forgets his existence.

The portière is drawn aside, and they enter the supper-room. On the table are antique silver tripods holding rare hothouse flowers and richest fruit, vases of exquisite camellias of every colour are interspersed between, and the whole are lit up by the soft light of waxen tapers. The supper itself is one of those which has made Monsieur Hector a king of chefs. Meats have lost their identity in the elaboration of the flavouring, cunning dishes are ingeniously devised to give zest to appetites already satiated. Rhenish of the rarest bouquet and Comet claret, tribute from the cellar of a youthful Duc, contribute to the hilarious enjoyment of the company.

The talk is animated, bright sallies and sharp repartee and racy anecdotes succeed one another, and amidst it all, pleasant as it is, Lord Delaval’s conscience rather smites him for being where he is, while De Belcour waxes momentarily more wrathful at Mademoiselle Ange’s evident partiality for the comparative stranger – “ce milord Anglais!”

“Are these to-night’s spoils, Mademoiselle,” asks Ivan Scoboloff, taking a lovely red camellia bud from its vase and quietly putting it into his button-hole. “I believe all the conservatories are pillaged for your especial benefit, and you’ll turn Paris into a wilderness.”

“I am afraid my reign will last too short a while for that!” Marguerite laughs, but in a tone rather tinged with regret, as she carelessly plucks an exquisite Sofrano rose to pieces, that lies by her plate. “I am only the rage of an hour, the fashion of a season, you know!”

“If you did lay Paris waste, what matter?” asks De Belcour, “and while a laurel grows, you should have its tribute, for are you not the Queen of – Hearts?”

“I hate laurels, they are so gloomy, and I love flowers! though they are not so lasting! still I prefer them, and as for tributes, of course the praises of the public are for the singer and not for the woman! and I like it so. I love to be applauded when I sing. It is life and soul to me, but as for individual tributes, I don’t want them. I wonder why people pester me with baubles and with billets doux. Heaven knows I would rather be without them!” She speaks contemptuously, her eyes are scornful, and it is easy to see that she is absolutely in earnest.

“How inscrutable is woman!” Delaval remarks, with a little of his old cynicism; “she despises the admiration she does all her best to inspire, and repudiates the passion she has taken an immense trouble to create!”

“Inscrutable you call us?” Marguerite answers, her face sparkling with animation. “And yet you affect to read us so easily! We are not inscrutable, I think, but we are inconsistent perhaps – cold and passionate, selfish and self-denying, tender and heartless, kind and cold, a mixture of the serpent and the dove; gentle as a faithful hound when we love, fierce and relentless as the hawk to the quarry when we hate, or have cause for revenge!”

“A list of contradictions that prove you are inscrutable, ma belle!” observes Chavard, filling up his glass with Roussillion for the fifth time.

“I thought you knew us better; it is your trade,” Marguerite says carelessly, peeling a peach whose bloom is less lovely than her own. “I wonder when men who want to win our love will cease to woo us? The prize beyond a woman’s reach is always the most coveted; it has been so since Paradise; it will be so for all eternity!”

Her voice sinks lower as she says this, and there is quite a wistful look in her eyes as she turns them towards Delaval, that evinces them to be no affectation, but a true echo of her heart.

“Don’t let us talk of love, ma chère,” Leonide Leroux breaks in brightly. “It is the wettest blanket in the world. Love may be a charming companion, but we all know it is an intolerable master. It’s like this absinthe, delicious but dangerous; once let it get hold of you —eh bien!– the rest I know nothing about, but I have heard it is too terrible!”

“I cannot think what the devil people fall in love for,” Ivan Scoboloff murmurs languidly; “it’s an amusement that only suits boys and girls, but after five-and-twenty no sane man would think of such folly.”

“And yet I have seen you go in for it, although I fancy you have arrived at a little beyond twenty-five,” Chavard says quietly, with a meaning glance at Leonide Leroux.

“I am a girl, but I have never gone in for love,” Rose Marigny cries in her bird-like voice.

“That’s well done, Mademoiselle Rose; mind you keep to that. No love is half so sweet as caramels à la vanille or marrons glacés,” Mademoiselle Leroux answers, as she piles the above comestibles on her plate.

Meanwhile De Belcour joins very little in either conversation or laughter, and grows momentarily more ill at ease. Desperately jealous by nature, it irritates him almost beyond endurance to see Marguerite bestow her attention upon any other man.

Hitherto he has hugged to his bosom the notion that she is invariably cold – to him only she has been kind of late, and her kindness has made a great impression on him, simply from its contrast to the capricious manner she has towards others.

Is the love which he had begun to persuade himself she bore him nothing but a passing caprice after all – an amourette of an hour – to be abandoned when it has lost the zest of freshness? Irritation, wounded amour propre, fierce jealousy, all mingle together in his breast and make a formidable whole when the fear creeps on him that the woman he loves to fatuous stupidity sets so little value on his feelings that she is ready to sacrifice it to the gratification of a passing whim, the transient excitement of a new conquest.

For what else, he argues, and not without reason on his side, can prompt her to look and speak to Lord Delaval with eyes and lips that too truly simulate a love she cannot possibly feel for him, stranger as he is?

Every word, every glance she gives, tortures this impassioned, impetuous Frenchman, and he determines to dog her steps and her house to find out the mystery that drives him wild.

“When’s the new play coming out, Chavard?” Scoboloff asks, gloating, gourmet as he is, on the lusciousness of an apricot before him.

Chavard has written a play which his clique declare will take Paris by storm, and, intolerably vain of his brains, he is of their opinion.

“In about a month or two,” he answers.

“Shocking bad time for that sort of thing, isn’t it? No one will be left in Paris.”

“No one at all to speak of – only about a couple of millions!”

“Keep your smartness for your play, mon cher. Of course I meant no one in Society.”

“I don’t mind that. You swells are so phlegmatic, you see. The canaille laugh, and clap, and hoot, and shout at my work, and thoroughly appreciate my pet points, but the golden youth sleep always, snore even, through my best situations.”

“Quite true!” cries Leonide Leroux. “I have often noticed them yawn when I have been dying so beautifully in the Sphinx. What makes swells so sleepy, I wonder?”

“Affectation – a little ennui– and a great deal of dinner,” says Chavard.

“Let us go into the drawing-room and have some music,” Marguerite suggests, feeling possibly that at the supper-table she and Lord Delaval are too much en evidence.

So they all go, and Leonide Leroux sings them Il Bacio deliciously in a lovely soprano, while Marguerite lounges as usual in a large chair, and her eyes glance frequently at a group near the window of smokers, and which is composed of Scoboloff, Delaval and Rose Marigny, who puffs away prettily at a dainty Sultan doux, and evidently is no novice in the accomplishment.

Presently De Belcour draws near his hostess – De Belcour, with half his beauty spoiled by scowling eyes and a frown on his brow.

“Why waste your glances on people who don’t appreciate them?” he asks, in a low voice that has a sullen ring in it.

She laughs, and does not answer, so he pulls viciously at his long moustache to vent his anger on something, since he is afraid to vent it on her.

“You spoke the truth at supper to-night, Marguerite, when you said to woo a woman was a sure way not to win her; and yet, poets rave about the softness and the tenderness of women, and call them the link that unites earth with Heaven. Sapristi! for cold-blooded cruelty, for passionless devilment, a woman is to a man what a hawk is to a dove, a tigress to a tame cat!”

Marguerite elevates her pencilled brows slightly.

“I wish you would try and be less violent and abusive in your talk, Monsieur le Marquis: if you must talk to me, let the talk be endurable, anyway.”

He clenches his teeth to suppress the oath that rises to his lips.

“Marguerite! listen to me! Tell me, I implore of you, what spirit possesses you to-night? Is it your vanity, your love of fresh victories, that induces you to treat me like this? Marguerite, for the love of Heaven! – for the sake of what we have been to each other – do not make me suffer like this.”

But he might as well plead to a marble pillar.

“I wish you would go and smoke, and not talk nonsense,” she says, almost in a whisper, with a flush of annoyance on her cheek. “I only wish I could smoke.”

“If that is your only ambition, do it; most things end in smoke,” he replies meaningly and savagely; and while all this is going on, Lord Delaval watches her covertly, and it is dear incense to his vanity when he marks that De Belcour moves away from the evident contest, foiled and angry. “After all, perhaps Shropshire and Silverlake wronged her,” he thinks, and rather than the Frenchman shall monopolise her, he throws away his half-smoked cigar and saunters towards her.