Daughters of Belgravia; vol 2 of 3

“I knew when I first saw you that you and I were exactly alike in our ideas and feelings. Somehow I felt it directly we spoke. I knew that you would never give to any man that which was not his – for you are dreadfully proud and cold and hard at the core, and when I found out, a day or two ago, that unconsciously I had learned to love you – do you hear me? – to love you with my whole being – when I found out that nothing short of an entire surrender of your soul —of yourself– would satisfy me, I trembled at the vision of bliss or torture that possibly lies before me – look at me, Gabrielle!”

There is a quiet command in his voice which she never attempts to resist. To everyone else sharp, caustic, cold, and full of sneers, to this man she is the humblest of slaves; his, to do with as he wills. A daughter of Belgravia, with Lady Beranger’s worldly-wise notions dinned into her ears, and with worldly, ambitious women examples for her in daily life – of this man she wants nothing, only himself; to gain his love, and above all, to be let to love him, she would fling all other considerations to the four winds without a murmur or a regret.

In a sort of maze, she lifts up a pair of big, incredulous black eyes to him now – eyes so soft and wistful – so filled with newborn light that no one would believe they belonged to Gabrielle Beranger.

She forgets everything but him and the giant fact that he is hers. In spite of her peculiar nature and practical turn, she has pictured, like most of her sex, a paradise of love about this man, and lost in the golden vision of Love’s paradise gained, she lets her usual scepticism slip out of her mind, and only knows that Lord Delaval, whom she has worshipped for three years with the feverish fierceness of her Bedouin nature, is wooing her – strangely and abruptly, but in the sweetest, subtlest way that a man can woo. Gabrielle is sharp as a needle, yet it never crosses her brain in her lovesick frenzy that real feeling is not eloquent in expression, and that when a man really craves anything and trembles lest he should not grasp it, flowers of rhetoric are usually denied to his tongue.

She sits spellbound, with drooping lids. Literally nothing seems to live in her, save a vivid sense of his words, and the intensity of their meaning. Her keen intelligence is lulled to sleep, her habit of doubting is dead, pro tem. She does not try to subject his protestations to any analytical process; they only seem to float through her mind in a kind of soft mist, and she sits white now and silent, and feeling, as she thinks she can never feel again, content, almost in a dream, and yet full, awfully full, of an intensified vitality.

“I want to tell you, Gabrielle,” Lord Delaval says very low, while his audacious arm steals round her magnificent shoulders and her crimson cheek is pillowed on his breast, “that I love you as no one has ever loved you, and that I am determined to win from you all that I wish! I have never been baulked yet, if I determined to reach anything. If I preserve my will intact, I shall not accept anything but the whole from you, the whole, sweetheart – do you hear? Of your heart and soul and body I will have all —all! or die unsatisfied. My hope to gain all this is by knowledge of your nature. It is you —you that I love, not a part of you, not an ideal being of you, not what you represent to other men’s eyes, but what you are with your thousand imperfections, even blots. Nothing, Gabrielle, will change me towards you, for I have only given you what is yours by the law of affinity, and you, Gabrielle – well, I defy you to say that you are not wholly and solely mine.”

It is masterful wooing this, insolent in fact, and it would revolt most women. Zai and even Baby, with her fast proclivities, would not understand it, and it would jar on their thoroughbred natures, but Gabrielle likes it.

The whole thing fascinates her – a visible shiver runs over her. Lord Delaval feels the shiver, and his arm draws her more closely to him, while the ghost of a cynical smile crosses his mouth. He stoops his head and looks full into her eyes, and then his lips rest upon hers, long and passionately, while her heart beats as wildly as a bird in the grasp of a fowler.

Luckily for her she has been partially imbued with a respect for Lady Beranger’s beloved convenances and bienséances. Luckily for her, Belgravian morals, though they may be lax, are too worldly-wise not to know a limit.

Even while Lord Delaval’s kiss lingers on her mouth she pulls herself away from him, angry with herself that she has allowed that long passionate caress, and yet feeling that she would have been more than mortal if she had resisted it. But she resolves to sift him, au fond, to find out at once if in truth the man is only laughing at her or whether, oh blessed thought, she has caught his errant fancy or “love” as she calls it.

“Lord Delaval!” she says, in a voice in which pride and shame mingle strangely together, “because I am a woman, with a woman’s weak nature, do you believe me to be a fool? Do you think for a moment I deceive myself or let your words deceive me? Only last night you flirted horribly with Zai. Before, it was in Baby’s ear you whispered your soft nothings. It was Baby’s hand I have seen you furtively clasp. I know therefore that the love you profess for me is all stuff and nonsense! that playing with women’s feelings is delicious food for your vanity. But why you should pick me out, why I should be a butt for you, I am sure I can’t guess! I don’t care to believe that because I am what Lady Beranger thinks me, that you want to insult me!”

A look of pain crosses her brow, and an appeal for forbearance, dumb but very taking, goes up from her eyes. Lord Delaval seizes her hands and holds them fast while his gaze bears steadily down on her.

“You should not doubt, Gabrielle! I have told you the truth, upon my soul! No woman’s face can tempt me from you now. Whatever the past may have been, I swear I belong to you now and for ever! While I wait to claim you as my wife before the world, and I must wait, for reasons which will be satisfactory when I tell you them, you will go on doing as you do, draining men dry to the one drop of their souls that you can assimilate. But that is not love, though they may lay their lives and fortunes at your feet. Aylmer would never satisfy your heart, Gabrielle, but you may flirt with him if you like, and drive him mad by these sweet eyes, these soft red lips,” and he lifts up her face and studies it for a moment, “so long as when I want you, you come to me at once. It will be no sacrifice on your part, for you will only be obeying the law of your nature in loving me and I – I shall take you not as a gift, but as a right, my Gabrielle!”

Before she can answer him, he has taken her into his arms, and rained down kisses on her brow and cheeks and lips and is gone, with the conviction in his mind that, if he wishes it at any time, it will not require much pressing on his part to mould this girl’s future to his will.

True he does not care a snap of his fingers for her, but any woman, beautiful of face and form, is not an object to be disdained or rejected, and Lord Delaval is not the only voluptuary among the Upper Ten.

Alone with the gathering shadows, and still wrapped in the presence that has left her, Gabrielle sits for an hour undisturbed. In the latter days she has thought several times that Lord Delaval had begun to recognise her claims to admiration, in spite of his flirtations with Baby and Zai, and alas! for Belgravian nurturing, it is a truth that the consciousness that her attraction for the man is only a physical one, in which her brains and soul bear no perceptible part, is far from being an unpleasant sensation.

“How very shocking!” a few prim spinsters may exclaim, but it is nevertheless the truth and nothing but the truth. It may be that most women love to conquer with the legitimate weapon, beauty, of the sex.

Poor plain Madame de Staël would willingly have exchanged all the laurels men laid at her feet for the tiniest, meanest blossom offered in a spirit of “love” or “passion” by them to women whom she justly regarded as her inferiors.

Gabrielle forgets her cross, her mother’s low birth, Lady Beranger’s taunts and everything else unpleasant, as she positively revels in a sense of Lord Delaval’s admiration.

Rising from the lounge, she walks to the mantelpiece, and placing her elbows on it stares in a fixed, almost fierce way, into the mirror.

The shadows that flit over the room are broken here and there by a few last dying sunbeams, and her beauty is improved by the flickering light. The sweet eyes and soft red lips to which he had alluded, gain fresh merit since they are decoys to his erratic fancy, and have fanned the spark she has tried to ignite into a flame that has at last burst into words.

Then between her and the mirror the superb face of her lover rises up, and the cheek that has just been pressed against his breast glows a lovely carmine, that is wasted on the unappreciative dusk, as she clenches her little fist, and swears in true and forcible Bohemian fashion to bring all her woman’s wit to aid in winning this man for her husband.

Just at this moment Lady Beranger walks in, and without noticing her stepdaughter by word or look, throws herself a little wearily into an arm-chair.

“What are you thinking of, belle mere?” Gabrielle asks after a little.

“Thinking of! There is plenty to think of I am sure,” Lady Beranger retorts curtly. “I shall never be at rest till the girls are safely off my hands; unmarried daughters are the greatest responsibility breathing.”

“I will try and lessen your burden,” Gabrielle says, in a bland voice, but with a curl of her lip which the dusk hides, “I’ll promise not to say ‘no’ if anyone asks me to marry him.”

Lady Beranger laughs a sharp unpleasant laugh.

“It is not likely you will lessen my burden!” she says sharply. “Everard Aylmer, who was my forlorn hope for you, told me he was off directly for a tour in India, so he is not going to ask you.”

“May be, but then you see, there are other fools beside Sir Everard Aylmer, in this world, Lady Beranger,” Gabrielle answers flippantly, as she saunters out of the room.

“Hateful girl!”

And having relieved herself of this, Lady Beranger settles herself more comfortably, and begins to build castles in which Zai and Lord Delaval, Trixy and the fascinating Stubbs, and Baby with her elderly inamorato figure.

“That actor fellow showed his cards well last night,” she soliloquises. “He is after the Meredyth filthy lucre of course, so now there’s every chance of Zai catching Delaval. Trixy is thrown away on that dreadful cub, but after all, it doesn’t much matter who one marries. After a month or so, now-a-days, the women think twice as much of other people’s husbands as of their own. Baby will be all right in Archibald Hamilton’s keeping. That child really frightens me by her defiance of everything, and I shall be truly thankful to wash my hands of her before she goes to the furthest end of her tether. As for Gabrielle,” a frown puckers her ladyship’s patrician brow, “I wonder who she has got running in her head? I hope it is not Delaval; a neck to neck race between her and Zai would end in her winning by several lengths. Zai, though she is my own child, is the biggest little fool, with the primitive notions of the year One, and I can’t alter her, worse luck!”

CHAPTER III.

“FROGGY WOULD A WOOING GO.”

“Gold, gold, gold, gold,Bright and yellow, hard and cold;Molten, graven, hammered and roll’d,Heavy to get, and light to hold,Price of many a crime untold.”

“Poor Mr. Stubbs,” sneers Gabrielle.

“Poor Mr. Stubbs,” says Zai.

“Poor Mr. Stubbs,” laughs Baby.

And with very good reason.

It is his eighth visit.

Trixy has deserted her downy nest among her cerulean cushions, and sits bolt upright on a tall-backed chair. To-day is devoted by her to the personification of “Mary Anderson.”

Her attire is of virgin white, not flowing in undulating waves of Indian muslin, or ornamented by tucks à l’enfant, but falling in severe satin-like folds round her beautifully moulded figure; her wealth of yellow hair is gathered at the back of her dainty head in a classical knot, traversed by a long gold arrow. She wears no bracelets or rings to mar the perfect whiteness of her arm and fingers, and while one hand toys lazily with a mother o’ pearl paper-knife, the other rests on a well-thumbed copy of “The Lady of Lyons.”

Opposite her, but at a discreet distance, her Claude perches nervously on the edge of his chair; his face has acquired more flesh and blood with his increased importance as the fiancé of the beautiful Miss Beranger, and his puffy cheeks glow like holly-berries under her glance.

Not that her glance by any means shows the odalisque softness, of which mention has been made; on the contrary, there is an incipient loathing in it, that she tries to conceal under the shelter of her long golden lashes.

But everything nearly has two sides, and the white drooping lids find favour in her adorer’s sight, for he attributes them to the delicate shyness peculiar to the china beings of the Upper Ten, and unknown to the coarse delf of his own class.

Once, and once only, has he ventured to lift the lissom white fingers to his hungry lips very respectfully, bien entendu.

It was the day when, Lady Beranger standing by, Trixy agreed to barter her youth and beauty for:

“Gold, gold, gold, gold,Bright and yellow, hard and cold;Molten, graven, hammered and roll’d,Heavy to get, and light to hold,Price of many a crime untold.”

But she had drawn back her fingers before they arrived at his desired goal, with a sudden hauteur that almost petrified him into a stone.

It was the first time he had been thrown in such close contact with “high life,” and when it bristled up in aggrieved delicacy it appalled him; but the next moment, he awoke to a profound admiration for the maidenly reserve that was, of course, part and parcel of a refined nature.

Poor Mr. Stubbs! well may the Beranger girls pity him. He little dreams of the melting glances Trixy’s sweet blue eyes have given to Carlton Conway, or how eagerly the hand like a snowdrift has gone out to nestle in Carlton Conway’s clasp, and how the faint blush rose on her cheek has deepened into damask bloom when in the old days Carlton Conway whispered in her ear, nor how, tell it not in Gath! her pretty mouth had even pouted for Carlton Conway’s caress.

But we all know that where ignorance is bliss, etc., etc. Ever since Mr. Stubbs has been duly installed in the dignified position of “future,” to Lady Beranger’s eldest daughter, he makes periodical visits to Belgrave Square.

As it has been told, to day is his eighth visit, but he approaches no whit nearer to his divinity as regards heart – in fact he has decidedly made a retrograde movement in her opinion.

Trixy fully realises the truth of the old saw, “distance lends enchantment to the view,” and the nearer she sees him the more difficult it seems to her to swallow this big bitter pill, although it is heavily gilded. Still, she is determined to marry him somehow, for as regards more substantial things their hearts and such obsolete absurdities – she has fully realised the advantages and benefits this horrible sacrifice of herself, as she styles it, is likely to bestow.

What daughter of Belgravia hesitates long between love and ambition? That is, if she has been properly brought up? and how often are the marriages solemnised at St. George’s or St. Peter’s – marriages du cœur? A popular author writes of modern love —

“Though Cupid may seek for sweet faces,From ugliness fly as a curse,May sacrifice much for the Graces,He’ll sacrifice more for the —purse.The priest, if inclined for truth’s rigour,Might write on each conjugal docket,‘When a lover’s in love with the figure,The figure must be in – the pocket!’ ”

And he is very nearly right.

Trixy has on a table that stands beside her two open morocco cases. In one, a magnificent necklet of diamonds sparkles and scintillates in the daylight, flashing back glances at a set of pigeon-blood hued rubies that repose alongside.

When her eyes rest on these the odalisque softness steals back to her limpid glance.

“Do you approve of the ornaments?” the millionaire asks nervously of his “liege ladye.” He would not have ventured to say “Do you like me?” for all the world.

He is brimming over with gratification at his sumptuous gift being accepted, although Trixy has not had the grace to say even “thank you.”

But then she is so sure of him that she does not trouble about common politeness.

“I have not yet learnt your exact taste, you know,” he mumbles a little sheepishly, reddening to the roots of his more than auburn hair, possibly with the pleasurable vision of the time when he will know Trixy’s taste better.

Poor Mr. Stubbs!

At present she is still “doing” Mary Anderson, and may be a statue of Galatea for aught he can find in her of warmth, or learn of her tastes and feelings.

“The ornaments are very well,” answers this often-to-be-met-with type of Belgravian daughters, with an insolent indifference which is quite assumed, for such costly baubles are her heart’s delight. “I should certainly have preferred sapphires to rubies. They suit blondes so very much better.”

Poor Mr. Stubbs feels and looks extremely disappointed, and crestfallen. He has paid such a very large sum for the rubies. He has ransacked all the leading jewellers’ shops that the stones may be large, and flawless, and the exact colour of pigeon’s blood, and here is his reward.

For a moment it seems to him that there is something a little disheartening and depressing in aristocratic coldness and ingratitude, and that some of the gushing thanks of little Imogene of the Vivacity, or pretty Vi Decameron of the Can-Can Theatre would not be amiss, but only for one moment does his tuft-hunting soul turn traitor to the high life it adores, and he quickly brightens up.

“If you will allow me, I will take back the rubies, and desire sapphires to be sent instead.”

“Oh, no, no! it would scarcely be worth the trouble of changing them, these will do very well,” she answers in a tone of languor, but she remembers the vulgar old adage of “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush,” and to put a bar on any chance of losing the disparaged rubies, she quietly clasps the morocco cases, and locks them into an ivory and ebony Indian box.

The big drawing-room in Belgrave Square is very dull. From outside comes the rush of vehicles, and the June sunshine tries to peer through the closed jalousies that fine ladies love. The clock ticks rather obtrusively, but Trixy likes to hear it, for it tells of the flight of time; a prospect she has at heart at this moment, and a short silence falls upon as ill-assorted a pair as ever a longing for the world’s vanities has brought together. Looking at them, the story of Beauty and the Beast presents itself, excepting that the Beast is not likely to turn out anything else, save as far as riches are concerned. From the day Mr. Stubbs popped the question, as Baby has it, and Trixy accepted him, Lady Beranger has thankfully thrown off the onus of chaperonage, which a rigid adherence to her beloved convenances insisted on before, and long tête-à-têtes are vouchsafed to the “happy young couple,” as she calls them (Extract from the Stubbs’ family bible – Peter Robinson Stubbs, born July 12th, 1820, rather upsets the word young), but her ladyship cannot stand the man in spite of his youth and happiness, and slips out of the way whenever his loud knock resounds through the mansion. She has no fear that Trixy will prove refractory now that the die is cast, and the match has been announced formally in the columns of the Court Journal and other Society papers. Besides, a dissolution of the contract would involve a return of very expensive presents, including the despised rubies, and Lady Beranger’s insight into human nature, or rather into her eldest daughter’s nature, leads her to think rightly. Trixy is her mother’s child to the backbone.

In spite of her utter loathing for the man to whom she is going to swear glibly love and eternal fealty, she has received too heavy substantial tokens of his regard to allow her golden calf to drift away. She has thoroughly made up her mind – such as it is – to cast away all romantic nonsense, i. e., her adoration of Carlton Conway, for the sake of worldly benefits, and now it is ten to one, that if the all-conquering C. C. came in his noble person to woo her, she would deliberately weigh against his undeniable fascination the prospect of being a leader of Society, with magnificent diggings in Park Lane, and the very comfortable sensation of a heavy balance at Coutts’.

“You think you really would prefer Park Lane to Carlton Gardens?” Mr. Stubbs inquires deferentially.

Under the powerful glamour of Trixy’s beauty he feels as if he could buy up the Fiji Isles, or even that very uncomfortable residence, Bulgaria, if she wills it. Of course, she likes the big house in Park Lane. What woman, especially a daughter of Belgravia, would not? with its superb array of balconies, and galleries, and conservatories, and its vast reception rooms, where Trixy fully intends to queen it over other leaders of Society, but she just bends her pretty little yellow-crowned head in assent.

One may have a dancing bear, but one is not forced to converse with him, she thinks, and she gives him a long, level look, wondering what animal he is really like. Gabrielle had likened him to a frog, but he is too bulky for that; a bear or a buffalo, she decides, and while she does so, he has come to the decision that no cage can be too gorgeous for his radiant Bird of Paradise, and he glances, but covertly, at her in a sort of maze at the curious freak of fortune that is going to bestow on him such a rara avis.

He looks sideways at her sweet scarlet lips, and marvels what he has ever done in his prosy money-making life to make him worthy of their being yielded to him – not yet, no, certainly– not yet, he is aware of that, but perhaps, some day! He gloats with an elderly gentleman’s gloating on the supple young form and perfect face, and quite a delightful awe creeps over him at the very idea of the future presence of this flesh and blood divinity at his hearth and board.

Nature has not been munificent to him in the way of looks. He has a broad, florid, rather flaccid physiognomy, and his proportions are not symmetrical, but taking him all round, he is not a bad sort, and he has a good heart.

True it beats beneath a huge mountain of flesh, but, never mind, it beats all the same with a good deal of honest warmth. His feelings towards his fair autocrat are a mixture of profound admiration and profound gratitude – the last sentiment being born of the first.

Gratitude is in fact an intensely tame word to express what he feels for Trixy’s munificent gift to him of herself. With all these feelings rife in his very broad breast, feelings that would gush forth eloquently in most men, Mr. Stubbs remains strictly practical and common-place, and fortunately his wife elect is better able to sympathise with him as he is than if Cupid spoke from his lips in flowers of rhetoric.

“And the furniture? From Jackson and Graham’s, I suppose?” he asks deprecatingly, as if it was her money and not his that was to pay for it.

“From Jackson and Graham’s of course! You surely are not thinking of going to Tottenham Court Road, Mr. Stubbs?” Trixy says raspily, with a little sniff of her Greek nose.

“No, no! of course not!” he murmurs alarmed.

“Remember, I cannot have any hangings but blue– blue suits my complexion, you know; not dark blue, mind, but bleu de ciel!”

“Blue, certainly,” he answers humbly, much more humbly probably than Jackson and Graham’s foreman would.

“And Mr. Stubbs, pray don’t forget that I hate anything modern. I like everything old, in furniture I mean!” she says, warming up with her subject. “Chippendale and all that sort of thing.”