Daughters of Belgravia; vol 1 of 3

“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 Delaval so 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, you must confess 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! I must be 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.

CHAPTER III.

AFTERNOON TEA

“All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.”

Reveries cannot 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 she wants 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 really grown 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 since she 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 of bleu 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 are walking 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 unmistakable cachet of 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 bitter knowledge 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 find me at home,” a thin and peevish voice answers.

It seems to rise from the depths of one of the most comfortable chairs, on which an amber-haired white witch lies half perdu.

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 the débutante of 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 sinks perpetually 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 a soupçon of self-consciousness, it is not a matter of marvel. A Belgravian damsel can scarcely, with all the bonne volonté imaginable, 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 childish treble 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, your flippancy 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.

“I prefer going 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 the convenances as 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, and don’t bring that horrid kitten here again.”

“I hate Lord 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 of his niceness?” 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 care for 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 how distraite you 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!’ ”

suggests Gabrielle once more. “Why did you not tell her that your daughter is stage 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 tiny pattes de velours are 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 eligible parti.”

“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 your outré notions 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 a mésalliance.”

“I think poor men ever so much nicer than 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 an eligible never 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 for me to 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 in her 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 the canaille in 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, and from 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, this actor, must think of you?”

“What could he think of me?” Zai asks quietly, with level half-closed eyes, but her assumption of courage is only skin deep. Anything unpleasant or invidious about this 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 is himself.

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.