Daughters of Belgravia; vol 1 of 3

“But what will they say to our escapade? The garden is a large one, and it is close upon twelve o’clock now. You know how strict Lady Beranger’s notions are regarding the bienséances, and that such a nocturnal excursion will be in her eyes, flagrant. Unless indeed,” and he lowers his voice to the most harmonious key, “you were with a man you were engaged to!”

She does not seem to hear, or else she does not heed, the concluding words of his sentence, a deafness and indifference on her part that rails him considerably.

“If I were Gabrielle, I should answer, au diable with anyone who wants to coerce me, especially when what I wish to do is innocent enough. As it is, those dreadful bogies of my life, convenances and bienséances, must be infringed, the flagrancy of a nocturnal escapade braved, for I will go round the garden, and you, Lord Delaval, you will surely be kind enough to stay here quietly under these lovely trees, until I come. Don’t let any one see you, for Heaven’s sake, that is, not mamma, or she will be suspecting I am flown, goodness knows where! I won’t tax your patience for more than ten minutes I promise.”

So after all she has not proposed a longer promenade for the sake of his society, he thinks angrily. It is simply girlish nonsense that she wishes to indulge in, or – perhaps she wants to have a quiet cry over Carl Conway’s engagement to Crystal Meredyth. This suspicion ices his tone, and alters his manner strangely.

“I cannot possibly let you go by yourself, but if you will go, I will go with you!”

“No! No! Do let me go by myself. What I want so much is to be alone with night, with the silence – with myself,” she answers hastily, then she adds quietly:

“You see I have such a headache, Lord Delaval.”

“I cannot let you go alone,” he replies, rather haughtily, dreadfully irritated at her evident reluctance to his company, when he fain would give ten years of his life to be able to catch the slight figure in his arms, and to rain down as many caresses as are his bent on her sweet face, and withal he yearns for the power of making her fold her lovely butterfly wings, to settle down at his feet, possibly to be spurned when sick of her.

“If I let you venture out of my sight at such an hour, what account should I be able to render to Lady Beranger? So you see I must accompany you.”

“Then I will go into the house at once,” she flashes.

“The most sensible thing for you to do,” he says, coldly, and his tone vexes her immensely, for she does not of course know that he is only too willing to stay here, in these quiet, deserted grounds, with myriads of stars overhead, and the great elms casting down cool shadows on them, while he can gaze his fill on what seems to him to-night the rarest loveliness he has looked on in his thirty years.

But Zai, though she fumes inwardly, thinks discretion is the better part of valour and says nothing. In truth, all she longs for is a few moments’ quiet, during which she can nerve herself to pass Carl Conway calmly, now that she has found out his duplicity.

And she would have staked her existence on his honour and fidelity!

Turning suddenly, she wanders down the first path and on and on, communing with her own heart, fighting with the love which is greater and stronger than herself, utterly forgetful that a tall, stately form stalks by her side in dignified silence.

Then, when more than ten minutes have elapsed, Lord Delaval’s voice rouses her into consciousness of her whereabouts and her supreme folly.

“Well!” he says, “do you think we have had enough of this garden? The dew is falling fast, and I am unsentimental enough to be liable to rheumatism.”

Zai stops short and faces him.

“I beg your pardon, Lord Delaval. I – I really forgot you were with me. Let us go back at once, of course.”

She has braced up her courage to meet the grand ordeal – the ordeal which she believes will lay her young life in ashes.

It is to look Carl Conway in the face, like Tennyson’s Lady Clara Vere de Vere, to slay her unfaithful lover with a glance.

Thinking of this, she hurries on, oblivious again of Lord Delaval’s proximity, until they reach the house.

Just as they are on the point of entering, a hand pushes back the lace curtains of the long French casement that gives out on this portion of the lawn, and lies diagonally, as it were, with the path leading up to the entrance, and without any reason the two pause side by side a moment. Two figures – a man and a woman, stand well relieved against the background of brilliant light. The woman is very tall and slender, and clad in amber flowing drapery, with a blood red pomegranate flower burning vividly against her massive coronet of black hair. The man is also tall, and wears a fair, boyish appearance.

The two voices float out distinctly enough on the stillness outside.

“It is growing very late, and Delaval and your sister, or Beatrice and Benedick, as you call them, have not put in an appearance yet,” Sir Everard Aylmer remarks presently, glancing at a tiny enamelled watch he wears.

“Doubtless they have lagged on the lawn for a sociable quarrel. Beatrice and Benedick had a weakness that way, you know,” and Gabrielle Beranger laughs somewhat artificially. “According to the hackneyed old proverb, ‘the quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.’ ”

“Delaval and your sister must be a most interesting pair of lovers,” drawls the Baronet with a smile. “Can you tell me, Miss Beranger, why quarrelling should be considered an incipient sign of love?”

“Dieu, how should I know? I never take the trouble to quarrel with anyone, and certainly was never in love.”

Gabrielle speaks out sharply, and at this moment she believes completely in her assertion, for the knowledge that Lord Delaval is wandering about a dew-lit lawn, with Zai’s lovely face at his side, and a white hand laid on his arm, makes her feel as if she positively hates him with all the force with which she is capable of hating as well as loving. That hydra-headed monster, yclept Jealousy, just tears her in twain, and it is with the utmost difficulty she keeps up a calm appearance and a desultory conversation with the man whom Lady Beranger has consigned to her kind devices with a —

“Now don’t forget, Gabrielle, that Sir Everard Aylmer is the sixteenth baronet, that he has a purse as long as his pedigree, and is an impressionable fool – you’ll never have such a chance again.”

“You never take the trouble to quarrel with anyone, and you certainly were never in love?” Sir Everard repeats after her, pretty nearly verbatim, like a parrot. “My dear Miss Beranger, how very dreadful! or rather, how very charming it would be for someone to try to vex you, so that having gone through the first exertion, you may, perchance, fall into the second state.”

“Ahem! Hardly probable, I think,” she answers carelessly, averting her head, and peering out into the fragrant shadows. But like Sister Anne, she sees no one, and all she hears is the leaf shaken by the wind; not a sign of the absentees meets her sight, and all her pictured enjoyment at Mrs. Meredyth’s “At Home” turns into the veriest Dead Sea fruit.

“Will you give me leave to try, Miss Beranger?” pleads a voice that, though drawling in tone, sounds more genuine than the plupart of voices in Tophet.

“To make me quarrel with you? Why, certainly! as the Yankees say; but I warn you that you will not be able to renew the combat a second time.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because quarrelling is such a nuisance, and it is so seldom worth making it up again, that I always eschew the acquaintance of the belligerent party, you know,” she says flippantly.

At this moment she is not only indifferent to, but she detests the very vision of the position and wealth Lady Beranger has put before her in such glowing terms, and which the “impressionable fool” beside her has it in his power to offer. Gabrielle’s heart – if what she has of heart is worthy of the name – is being sorely lacerated by the absence of the only face she loves to look upon, and she recollects fiercely that her sister’s grey eyes can gaze their fill on it, while her own glaring black ones are denied.

So she clenches her small fist and in her Bohemian fashion swears inwardly at the cruelty of fate that divides her from Lord Delaval, and barely hears the words of this evidently struck “sixteenth baronet.”

“But why should you make that a rule?” he persists.

He is not given to talking, but to-night he seems positively garrulous.

“Beatrice is a most delicious creature, why should you repudiate being like her, Miss Beranger?”

“Because I have no fancy for a Benedick.”

“Would you like to be Katherine, then? Is there a Petruchio living at whose bidding you could grow tame?”

Is there? she knows there is, and a bright flush suffuses her face while she acknowledges to herself that at his bidding she would be the veriest slave that ever trod the earth, and she answers all the more impetuously, with her eyes flashing.

“No! no! no! a hundred times no,” and Sir Everard cannot doubt that she answers truly.

She is so handsome, though, in her wild gipsy beauty, that he rouses out of his insular quiet ways of thinking, and decides that it would be a pity to tame her defiant spirit, or to hush the ringing tones of her voice.

“Would a Romeo suit you?” he questions, in such soft womanish accents that her scarlet lips curl as she listens.

“To smother me in sweets, do you mean? oh, no, Sir Everard! Aucun chemin des fleurs ne conduit à la gloire, you know, and I have lived such a work-a-day life, before I was brought into the sacred precincts of Belgravia, that to me, love and glory and ambition are synonymous words.”

“I have it!” he cries gleefully, like a schoolboy who has succeeded in unravelling a problem of Euclid. “After running through this list of celebrities, I have pitched on the right one to please you; now, ’pon honour, isn’t it a Marc Antony you like best?”

“Perhaps he touches me nearer, only I am of such a horrible avaricious nature, and my ambition is so insatiable, that I should prefer some one who would gain a world for me, instead of losing one.”

“Almost a fool could do that,” he murmurs naïvely, and she, remembering Lady Beranger’s opinion of him, bites her lips to control a laugh. “I am sure I could aim at anything if you were not such a bright and particular star, and I could hope to reach you,” he goes on pêle-mêle, mixing up prose and poetry in a helplessly dismembered fashion.

Gabrielle laughs out freely at this, a laugh that is a perfect death-blow to sentiment although it is harmonious.

“Now, that’s a charmingly turned speech,” she replies, “I might almost fancy you a Frenchman. I am sure you have nothing to improve on it in your quiver, so on the principle of a bonne bouche we’ll go in and report to Lady Beranger that the others have not come in yet. I am afraid she will be angry at such a defiance of the bienséances,” she adds, but she thinks:

“Not that she will mind a bit, she will only think Lord Delaval is having it all his own way with the aid of his handsome face and that oily tongue of his.”

The two move off, and the lace curtains fall back into their place.

Then in a hard sort of voice, Zai turns to her companion:

“I hope you won’t be surprised at my speaking to you plainly, Lord Delaval, and don’t be shocked if I ignore the convenances in my words.”

He is feeling rather irritated against her. The evening had begun as he thought so sweetly, and now a latent suspicion is in his mind that Zai’s willingness to be with him so much to-night has proceeded from some arrière pensée which he cannot quite divine.

“Continue, and do not mind about shocking me I beg of you; I am capable of standing a good deal, you know,” and he gives a curt laugh.

“You heard, of course, all that Gabrielle and Sir Everard Aylmer said about us?”

He bows his head.

“Of course, Lord Delaval, you don’t require me to tell you how ridiculous all they said was, and since they were so ridiculous and never would be anything else, imagine how distasteful they are to me.”

“Which part of their conversation was distasteful?”

Zai blushes under the starlit sky.

“You must know which part,” she answers half shyly.

“That part about you and I being lovers?”

“Eh, bien!”

“Well, we are not, you know.”

“Admitted, but that is no reason we should not be.”

“Lord Delaval!” she flashes, “what can you be thinking of? You know quite well that you are nothing to me – nothing – and of course I am nothing to you!”

“Zai – don’t start, I must call you Zai, for I think of you as such – there is no distance between us two in my thoughts. I can prove to you, too, that you are mistaken in what you say; the man who has learnt to love you with a love that is infinite, a passion that is uncontrollable, and the dearest desire of whose heart is to pass his life in proving that love, cannot possibly be nothing to you! while, believe it or not, you are simply everything to him!”

“Lord Delaval!”

Carl had asked her whether she would ever allow other men to dare to make love to her, and she had answered that she would sooner die! and here she stands, alone with the starlit sky, the silence and the shadowy trees, herself and a man who not only dares to make love to her but absolutely does it in a possessive positive fashion that takes her breath away in sheer indignation and amazement.

Zai is very young, and, though a daughter of Belgravia, so strangely ignorant of the tricks and wiles of her own and the opposite sex, that for a moment she gasps, and then loses the sense of dignity in anger.

“How dare you say such words to me?” she asks, unconsciously using Carlton Conway’s word “dare.” “You know they are false – false as – as you are! You know that if you have any love it should be given to Gabrielle or Baby. You ought to be ashamed to say such things to me, when you know how you have made Gabrielle love you!”

“Gabrielle!” he repeats, with a complacent smile. Why! Zai is jealous after all! “Is it possible that you think of her and of me in the same breath? You might accredit me with better taste, I think. Come, Zai! will you let me try and convince you of the sincerity of my love for you?” he says softly.

“No! No!” she cries hastily, thinking it is base treason to Carl, even to listen to all this. “No! it would be useless, a waste of time on your part, since I tell you frankly that I could never love you.”

“A good many women say that, and yet learn the lesson of love at last, learn it too well, to their cost,” he remarks with supreme conceit.

“It may be so, very likely it is, in fact,” she replies as she scans his face, and, in spite of Carl, is fain forced to confess to herself that to women who love physical attraction, this man with his fair languid beauty, his earnest ultramarine eyes, must be irresistible. “But I could never be one of them.”

“Do give me leave to try,” he whispers in a voice that is wonderfully seductive. “You shall be as free as a bird, only I – I shall be bound – and willingly.”

“No! No!” she says, almost sharply.

It is not that she fears temptation, but the very idea of love from anyone but Carl is odious to her.

“I could never care for you. I could never marry you.”

“Reconsider that, Zai!”

“If I reconsidered it for ever I should never change my mind!”

Lord Delaval shrugs his shoulders slightly, and fixes his eyes steadily, almost rudely, on her.

“I am not, as a rule, a betting man, or I should be willing to lay very heavy odds that you will live to regret those words, or to unsay them.”

Why is it that at this moment an ice cold hand seems to grasp the girl’s heart and hold it in a vice? She is really as free as air, no human being has power of compulsion over her, least of all this man who dares to threaten her. Yet she shivers a little in the soft, warm, June air, and without answering a word walks hastily into the house.

Lady Beranger and Gabrielle stand near the entrance of the ball-room, and beyond them Zai sees Carlton Conway, and on his arm, just emerging from the supper-room, Crystal Meredyth.

A faintness creeps over her and her hands grow chill as death, while her face blanches to the hue of a white rose.

It seems too hard, too hard! that he should flaunt his flagrant flirtation with this girl before her very eyes; but she is equal to the occasion. With her dainty head erect, her slender figure pulled up to its utmost height, she passes her mother and sister, Lord Delaval still at her side, and, as she nears her lover and her rival, she looks up, smiles in Lord Delaval’s face, and lays her hand on his arm.

“First some supper, and then ten waltzes at least,” she says in a bright ringing tone, “and après cela, le deluge.”

A little haughty bend to Carl – Carl, whom she is loving at this moment with every fibre of her being, and she is gone, while Lord Delaval shrugs his shoulders once more and presses the little, white-gloved hand to his side, and says to himself with a feeling of complacency:

“Femme souvent varie – folle qui s’y fie!”

CHAPTER VI.

MISS FLORA FITZALLAN

“Love in a hut – with water and a crustIs, Love forgive us! Cinders – ashes – dust!”

A pretty little house, parfaitement bien monté, in Halfmoon Street. Plenty of marqueterie and rococo about, heaps of china monstrosities, heaps of nude statuary and glowing pictures, and shoals of devices in the shape of soft armchairs and cushions and sofas, to contribute to the well-being of man.

Altogether a charming little ménage, of which the presiding deity is Miss Fitzallan, leading lady at the Bagatelle Theatre.

They have been playing “Hearts versus Diamonds” at the theatre to-night, a comedy in three long acts, with a lot of emotional acting, which, when it goes on week after week, is, to say the least, a trifle fatiguing.

The Prince and Princess, accompanied by a party of foreign royalties, have been amongst the audience, and have been demonstrative in their approval. Altogether the evening has been exciting, and the actors are glad when it is over, and each one can drop down from his stilts of artificial feeling to the level of real life.

Miss Fitzallan is tired too; her rôle has been the most arduous of all, perhaps, save that of the jeune amoureux, who has had to play the handsome but rejected lover, with a passion he can simulate better than he can feel. So the leading lady sinks back into her luxurious little light blue brougham, with an enormous sensation of relief, and is driven quickly to her bijou house, where a small but exquisite supper is laid out.

The covers are for two.

Herself and the jeune amoureux.

Flora Fitzallan is past first youth, though she has never owned to more than twenty-three for the last ten years; but dress and the skilful touch of art completely conceal any ravages that time may have imprinted on her face.

On a primary glance, she is beautiful as a dream. On a second and more leisurely inspection, an acute and impartial observer may detect some undeniable flaws in her physiognomy.

Her eyes are a great deal too wide apart, although they are of a velvety brown, and melting in expression, and their brows and lashes are perfect. The nose is a little too retroussé or tip-tilted, according to Tennysonian phraseology, and her mouth is large, though the lips are red and tempting. She is a woman on a large scale, with a fulness of form which promises to develop into unromantic fat; but, supper finished, as she stands in a long, trailing white silk, with brilliants sparkling on her hair and neck, and ears and arms, there is really so much grace about her careless attitude, so much of imperial dignity about her, that it is impossible to stop and analyse her defects when her claims to admiration are so evident. She is clever, too, a sharp cleverness with nothing spirituelle about it, and, considering her birth and position in the social world, she is ladylike and even fastidious in her tastes. She is quite a woman of the people, with no mysterious aristocracy hanging over her advent into the world. Her father was a bookmaker, well known to every sporting man, and her mother had been one of the ballet at the Alhambra, until years and obesity had displaced her from that honourable berth.

A popular actress at one of the most fashionable London theatres, and a woman about whom several men, from Mayfair to High Holborn, have gone mad, she can have lovers at her feet every hour of the day, and enumerate them by legion; but though Miss Fitzallan is a professional, and attempts no display of prudery, and (this in an aside) very little of morality, she is a woman, with a woman’s natural tendency to love one man “de cœur” amongst the many aspirants to her favour. This man is – Carlton Conway.

He lies now, extended at full length on quite a sumptuous sofa, with a cigar between his lips, and his eyes closed. He has supped remarkably well, off dainty little dishes and the very best wine, and feels perfectly comfortable and satisfied physically, but his thoughts are not pleasant, and are wandering far away from his luxurious blue satin nest, within which he is enshrined as a deity, and installed in all the dignity of lover A 1.

He is not thinking of Miss Fitzallan, or of her good looks and success, although half the club men would willingly give some hundreds to fill his place with this charming Aspasia.

He is thinking how coolly Zai Beranger bowled him over for Lord Delaval at the Meredyths’ “At Home” two nights ago. He has loved Zai as much as such a nature as his can love, but it is a love that is subservient to amour propre. He had meant to seek her, to dance with her, to take her out on the lawn, to kiss her, and to believe that she was his, and his only.

And all these intentions were frustrated by his jealous ire at seeing Lord Delaval at her side. To pique her, he had devoted himself to Crystal Meredyth, and the tables had been turned on himself. The haughty little bend of Zai’s dainty head, as she passed him on the peer’s arm, had railed him more than he has ever been railed in all these years of unprecedented success amongst women, and, impassioned lover as he was of hers, the blow she has given his vanity has loosened her hold entirely upon him. He is not a man to waste his feelings on an unappreciative being. Crystal Meredyth likes him – he knows it, and she has money, lots of bank stock, and horses and diamonds – according to Lord Delaval – at her back, but somehow, Crystal, with all her prettiness, her innocent china-blue eyes, and her naïve conversation, has not caught his fancy, and as he lies here, he is making up his mind to throw Zai’s sweet image to the four winds, and to immolate himself and his handsome face and figure on the altar of Moloch. Miss Fitzallan stands patiently watching for a considerable length of time the reverie in which her lover – on and off the stage – is indulging, either forgetful, or else utterly regardless, of her very presence in the room.

She understands Carlton Conway’s light, fickle and selfish character, from the top of his head to the sole of his feet.

A man is never known so thoroughly in the domestic relations of life as he is by a woman like this, whose lover he has been since almost the first days of acting together.

With Miss Fitzallan, Carl throws off all restraint, and has no silence, such as he would have to preserve with a woman who was his – wife.

It is at Miss Fitzallan’s house that he feels himself completely at home – where he can fling himself sans cérémonie with dusty boots on satin sofas, smoke unrebuked the cigar interdicted in other drawing-rooms, and order the dainty dishes he prefers. He has suffered ennui covertly in the presence of the grande dames, in whose salons he had been gratified to find himself, but he yawns unreservedly in the very face of the Aspasia who belongs to him pro tem.

To Miss Fitzallan he speaks openly – thinks audibly – and is exactly the same before her as he is by himself. It is Balzac who says that if the mirror of truth be found anywhere, it is probably within the boudoir of Venus.