Daughters of Belgravia; vol 1 of 3

“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 one is insulted, one does not stop to think who offers 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, but hide 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 the bien conservè face 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 think how wickedly she is in love with that Conway, that actor, whose good looks might captivate some women – but hardly a woman in our class. 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 so queer 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 wrath nips 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 half so 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 wretchedly bizarre.”

“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 hurt your 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-backed fauteuil, 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 consolation you 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 marry Stubbs, 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 considerably ruffled 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 the boudoir. 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 fairest débutante of 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 civilised London 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 of me when she longed for that civilised Londoner?” he asks with a simper. Trixy enters at this moment and makes an unmistakable moue at 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 a carte blanche account 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 thrown away 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 upturned so 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.

CHAPTER IV.

LORD DELAVAL

“We played at Bondsman and at Queen,But as the days change – men change too;I find the grey seas’ notes of green,The green seas’ fervent flakes of blue,More fair than you.”

All the amber and purple and gold of the western sky has faded away, and only a faint rose glow lingers. The wind is dead, and soft and fragrant dusk lies like a mantle on the fair world, but the mantle of twilight is edged with the silver lustre of a tender young moon, and a shoal of inquisitive stars begin to peep at each other, when Gabrielle passes quickly upstairs and knocks at a door adjoining her own.

“Come in.”

Zai stands before her cheval-glass – a thing of beauty in a shimmering white silk, pore and virginal, a cluster of blush Noisette roses nestle in her bosom, and there is a bright flush on her cheek that adds tenfold to her loveliness.

“You have come for Fanchette, Gabrielle, but the bird has flown; only five minutes sooner you would have caught her. Trixy and Baby wanted her, and though I had not quite finished with her, I let her go.”

“Trixy and Baby are the most selfish creatures I know,” Gabrielle answers captiously. “Why cannot they stick to Marie? I am sure they might teach her to dress them, without continually asking for Fanchette. Au diable with those girls! Please don’t look so shocked, Zai. It is not half as bad as ‘Go to the Devil’ in English, and yet it is quite as relieving to one’s feelings. How on earth am I to get my hair done properly?”

“For the Meredyths’ ‘At Home?’ ”

“Of course. Do you know, Zai, Lady Beranger has asked Sir Everard Aylmer to go with us, and expressly confided him to my tender mercies.”

Zai opens her eyes and laughs.

“You see, Sir Everard has singled me out lately as an object of attention, and has actually talked to me for five consecutive minutes, somewhere about five times during our acquaintance – a frail basis to anchor hope on. Nevertheless, the step-mother, who, in spite of her ultra refinement, is an inveterate match-maker, has hatched a matrimonial project in her prolific brain for my benefit. You know I am like a bad shilling, always on her hands, and she would gladly see the last of me; but there is of course, as you know, another arrangement. She is anxious to kill two birds with one stone.”

“What can you mean, Gabrielle? You have the most marvellous fertility of imagination that I have ever met with. If anyone drops a lash, you discover a reason for the action, and the most trivial word, lightly spoken, possesses a mountain of meaning to your mind. What motive can mamma have, but one?”

“Eh bien!”

“She knows Sir Everard Aylmer is rich and has an old baronetcy, and she wants you to make a good marriage. Sir Everard is quite an ‘eligible’ you know.”

“Lady Beranger’s scheme doesn’t concern Sir Everard or poor little me. We are a couple of noughts in her eyes, and she is not going to trouble her brain with machinations about us. The head and the tail of the matter is —Lord Delaval!”

“I must be a simpleton or else you are too clever by half, Gabrielle. What on earth can you and Sir Everard and Lord Delaval have to do with one another?”

“Zai, you haven’t the tenth part of an inch the sharpness of Baby! the understanding of that child is miraculous. Well, I’ll tell you all that is passing in Lady Beranger’s head. To-night Trixy makes her appearance in public as the future Honourable Mrs. Stubbs! Heavens! what a name! By the way, what a short matter they made of that. Only three days ago she hated the sight of him, and now her destiny is une affaire faite.”

“Well?”

“Then – but you surely see through it all?”

“Not a bit.”

“You are a simpleton, Zai. Don’t you see that this is a splendid chance for you and Lord Delaval to be together. I shall be bear leader to Sir Everard, so you will have it all your own way.”

“If I thought Lord Delaval was to be my attraction to-night, I would throw over the Meredyths, and go to bed,” Zai says carelessly.

“But why? This is simply a little arrangement by which Lady Beranger hopes to allow poor Lord Delaval to insinuate himself in your good graces, Zai. For you know he admires you awfully, now don’t you?” she asks, with a fierce jealousy making her tone tremulous. “And I am sure if he does, I don’t wish to be Mademoiselle de Trop,” she adds impatiently.

“Don’t talk nonsense, Gabrielle. Lord Delaval is in love with Baby, if he is in love with anyone but —himself.”

“In love with Baby!” echoes Gabrielle, scornfully. “I am sure he was never in love with her, and that he has a contempt for her fast, flirty ways.”

“Well, if he does not care for Baby, and wants a Beranger, he will have to marry you,” Zai says quietly.

“But it’s necessary for you all to marry rich men. You must.”

“Why?”

“Because, when your father and mother go over to the majority, you will be paupers.”

“Anyway, I am going to marry Carl,” Zai asserts positively. “And I would not go to the Meredyths’ this evening, only he is staying at Elm Lodge.”

Gabrielle bursts out laughing.

“Good gracious, what a fiasco it is! Lady Beranger will murder him, I believe. You won’t be allowed to speak to him.”

“Nobody could prevent – ”

Zai pauses, for at this moment Fanchette trips into the room.

Gabrielle greets her effusively.

“Dieu merci, Fanchette! Now I may hope to get my hair done. Zai, don’t wait for me to go down. Have Miss Trixy and Miss Mirabelle gone down yet, Fanchette?”

“Just this moment, mademoiselle.”

“And how do they look?”

“Miss Trixy is ravissante. She was very difficile, nothing would please her. I tried coiffure à la Ninon, or ringlets à la Cascade, or the simple plaits English mees likes.”

“And which has she gone down as – Ninon or the Cascade?” Gabrielle asks with a smile.

“Not one or the other, mademoiselle. She would have her head done with the weeds of the waves, and also des petites bêtes, I don’t know what you call them, fastened into it like a syrène.

“Ah, oui! I understand. She is a mermaid to-night, with sea-weeds and shell-fish. I can well imagine Mademoiselle Trixy difficile; being an angel to men and an angel to one’s femme-de-chambre are two different things. Fanchette, make me very beautiful to-night.”

“Mais, oui! Mademoiselle has the grand capability to be so.” And in a few moments her skilful fingers have gathered up Gabrielle’s lustrous tresses into a sort of crown, which becomes her well.

“How nice I should look in the Delaval coronet,” Gabrielle thinks, as she admires herself in the glass, with a truthfulness befitting a better cause.

Meanwhile Zai has descended the staircase, and, as she reaches the great square hall, Lord Beranger enters the house.

“Good evening, papa,” she says, lovingly twining her arm into his, “I was afraid I was late, but it seems it must be early, as you have only just come in.”

“Good evening, my pet,” says papa to this, his favourite daughter. “You are quite right in thinking it is late, but we have been taking our post-prandial cigar and coffee under the stars. Might I ask what you are so radiant for? Is there a big party on to-night?”

“The Meredyths’ ‘At Home,’ you know. Is it possible you have forgotten that Trixy is to make her débût to-night as an engaged young person?”

“Ugh!” Lord Beranger mutters to himself, half aloud. “Poor Trixy!” Then he remembers his wife’s admonition, and goes on blandly: “Stubbs isn’t a bad sort, Zai; a little too much flesh, and a little, too little, breeding; but we can’t have everything, child, and money makes the mare to go.”

“I hate money,” Zai answers in a low voice. “I would not marry Mr. Stubbs if he were ten times richer.”

“Tut, tut, my pet. You must get romantic notions out of your head – romance doesn’t pay now-a-days. Good hard cash down, that’s the thing, and when you have nailed that, it’s time enough to indulge in other fancies.”

“Papa, how wicked you are. That’s one of Mamma’s sentiments. I don’t like to hear you say anything that is not right.”

“Don’t you? well, I won’t. Kiss me, little one, as a proof of forgiveness.”

Zai goes on tiptoe, and putting her arms round his neck, kisses him heartily, forgetful of the detriment to her bouquet of Noisette roses.

“Yes, Zai. It really quite escaped me that to-night Trixy makes her entrée into Society as an affianced one. Poor Trixy! And yet she is no object for pity, since Stubbs can supply her with all the gew-gaws she loves. Trixy always puts me in mind of that infant-mind that is pleased with a rattle – tickled with a straw. There is a charming youthfulness in her tastes, and a curious indifference in the manner by which she can satisfy them, that always puzzles me. There were never two natures so dissimilar as yours and hers. One could hardly believe you were children of the same parents. Trixy is so indolent and content, and you are just the reverse, my pet,” he goes on with a smile. “I suppose Delaval is back – he left us after luncheon at Kingsfold, saying he had something to do at Southampton – gloves to get, or something. And I am not surprised at his wanting to get back here, where he has such attractive metal, hasn’t he, Zai?”

“I don’t know anything about it, papa; nor do I wish to,” Zai flashes rather impetuously. “I see nothing interesting in Lord Delaval.”

“Don’t you?” Lord Beranger says rather curtly. “Delaval seems to have faults in your eyes that no other woman appears to discover. Why, do you know, Zai, there is no man admired or run after by the fair sex – from the Upper Ten downwards – as Lord Delaval?”

“Possibly,” is Zai’s reply. And she bites her lips to keep from saying more, and walks with her father into a small room in which coffee is going on, amidst lights and flowers and baskets of fruit.

Up at the far end Lady Beranger, and her son-in-law elect, Mr. Stubbs, are sitting. The millionaire has only just arrived, and, while he imbibes the scalding Mocha, out of egg-shell china, he looks anxiously at his pair of new primrose gloves, one of which has burst down the back, and at his lady-love, who sits some distance off.

As a matter of bodily comfort, Trixy would infinitely prefer her usual downy nest among the sky-blue cushions, but whatever may be her shortcomings in other respects, she always knows better than to allow her toilette and her surroundings to jurer at each other, as the French say.

An instinct, the artistic instinct, that seems to be born with some women, to whom art itself is quite a dead letter, serves to guide this daughter of Belgravia aright, and being cast for Sabrina to-night, in sea-green silk and misty lace, and coral and seaweed, and all the other concomitants that Gabrielle had yclept shell-fish – and Fanchette les petites bêtes– she keeps clear of blue back-ground. Effect is a grand thing in her estimation, and it is the apparent study of her existence to attain it.

She converses languidly with Mr. Hamilton, never casting a glance at her “future,” whose red face grows redder and redder, as he remarks her indifference.

Within the embrasure of the big bay window that gives on to the lawn, lolls Baby.

She is sweet to-night, clouds of snowy tulle float round her lovely little figure, and she wears no ornament but one magnificent poinsettia that droops over her left shoulder. Her golden hair, her great innocent blue eyes, her exquisite flower of a mouth, are all bewitching in their way, and so a man seems to think, who lounges carelessly over the back of her chair, partially concealed by the velvet hangings, but who raises his face when Lord Beranger and Zai enter, disclosing the features of Lord Delaval.

Lord Delaval is – as Gabrielle has said – superbly handsome. He is tall and his figure is slender, almost to fragility, though not without certain signs of muscular strength, that a pugilist’s eye would recognise at once.