FLIRTATION.
“What the years mean--how time dies, and is not slain,
How love grows, and laughs, and cries and wanes again,
These were things she came to know and take the measure,
When her play was played out so for one man’s pleasure.”
Gabrielle’s cheeks grow crimson and her eyes glitter with pleasure, that
for a little while they two will be alone, with no stranger to
intermeddle with their joy, as she watches Lord Delaval approach nearer
and nearer and finally step over the sill of the casement.
There is always a peculiar directness, an odd sort of intimacy in his
manner towards her, whenever they are thrown alone together, that
produces at once a most unconventional effect.
Now, as he walks up towards the sofa where she sits, the orthodox smile
of greeting is lacking on his handsome face, the ordinary hand-clasp is
unoffered, and Gabrielle does not even attempt to rise from her nest of
downy cushions, while her face droops away a little from his gaze.
There is just a softer gleam in the big black eyes, a quick, nervous
pressure of the even white teeth on the full, red underlip, and these
are the only signs that she recognises his presence on the scene.
But Lord Delaval--confident and complacent--requires no spoken welcome.
He has come in not knowing who he may find in the room, but finding
Gabrielle, is ready, _faute de mieux_, to make love to her in the
underhand way that does not compromise a man, and passes away an hour.
Ever since Baby’s marriage to Archibald Hamilton had been hinted at by
Lady Beranger, and he had suspected Zai’s weakness for the popular
actor, he had insinuated a passion, if he had not one, for Gabrielle. It
may be that her evident liking for him, and her undeniable personal
attraction, had touched him; but--probably it was only a selfish
gratification he is given to seeking.
“I am so glad to find you alone. I wanted to see you so much,” he says
in a quiet outspoken fashion, that to a girl who hates what she terms
the insincerity and shams of society is, in itself, fascinating.
“You wanted to see me, and you are glad to find me alone!” she repeats,
then, to cover the nervousness his proximity always brings, she adds
flippantly:
“Really, Lord Delaval, if Lady Beranger heard you she would drop at such
a breach of the _convenances_.”
“Possibly,” he answers coolly, “but hang the _convenances_. Don’t you
know that there are times in every fellow’s life when he comes into
collision with the conventionalities, and either breaks them, or else
risks being broken by keeping them? So long as I can run with my
Juggurnauth, alias ‘Society,’ I am content, but I cannot throw myself
before it and get mangled. Do you know I rather fancied I had a chance
of finding you alone here, and so I determined to make chance a
certainty?”
Gabrielle gives him a quick glance of surprise, while her heart throbs
faster than it has ever done before in the six-and-twenty years she has
lived.
Lord Delaval has often _looked_ love at her--hinted at love, but he has
never gone as far as this.
She has met him by appointment once or twice; still, nothing has been
said to make her believe he really cared for her.
Now she reddens like a rose, and feels a nervous tremor run through her,
and yet his manner is scarcely like a lover’s. There is, in fact,
nothing in what he says that could not pass as the ordinary talk of
Society, yet the conversation seems lifted out from an ordinary
atmosphere. They two, Lord Delaval and herself, are alone, and he talks
to her just as if they were disembodied spirits. There are men
occasionally in this world who have the power of bringing a woman they
approach into direct contact with their own natures. They have a special
gift of penetration, and one feels that in whatever relation one meets
them, it is sustained by one’s _real_ self towards an equally _real_
individuality on the other side.
Lord Delaval always makes Gabrielle feel this, and his intense manner
adds to the feeling, but, with the supreme wilfulness of her nature, she
refuses to yield to the magnetic influence he has over her without, at
any rate, a struggle.
“You can have nothing to say to _me_, Lord Delaval, that all the world
and the world’s wife cannot hear. Are you mistaking me by chance for
Zai?” she asks, carelessly, but she has no control over her features,
and the excitement of his presence lends them a flashing, bewildering
beauty, that positively dazzles him--_pro tem.!_
He fixes his deep blue eyes on her with an expression of fervid
admiration, and her lids fall beneath the passion of his glance, but she
lifts them bravely, and meets his gaze full.
“You really look as if you thought I did not mean what I say!”
“And no more you do, _ma belle_,” he answers quietly. Outside the sun
shines down furiously; the air is warm as an Indian summer. Up and down,
up and down, the butterflies skim over the flowers, and a lazy rose-twig
gives an inert tap on the window pane. Gabrielle does not reply. She
feels shy, and as shyness is foreign to her, it is not only an
uncomfortable, but a painful sensation.
“You snubbed Aylmer last evening,” he says.
“Yes!” she answers laconically.
“But why? Did you forget how many good things he has to offer you? Most
women would jump at such a match.”
“_Soit!_ but _I_ don’t,” she answers indifferently.
“Of course not,” he tells her. “I know you better than you know
yourself--no one will ever know you as well as I do--and, still more,
Gabrielle, no one will ever love you as _I_ love you! No, don’t start!”
For she rises from her seat, feelings of various kinds surge over her,
and she clasps her fingers tightly together.
“Gabrielle, I have been longing to tell you this,” he goes on, in a
concentrated voice, which has a deal of suppressed passion in it; “I see
no reason for denying myself the expression of what is strong within me.
I don’t want you to tell me that you love me, for I should hate to evoke
from your sweet lips words that your _heart_ doesn’t force through them,
in spite of _convenances_! I only want you to listen to me when, instead
of dilating on the beauty of the weather, and so forth, I lay bare _my_
heart to you.”
Gabrielle believes he is laughing at her, and the belief lashes her into
fury.
“Please, Lord Delaval, reserve your amusement for some one else. I am
not of sufficiently elevated position for you to waste your breath on.
Do you forget that Lady Beranger looks on me as a sort of social pariah,
and almost a gutter-girl!” she flares out scornfully, her lips
trembling, and looking doubly tempting in their wrath.
Perhaps Lord Delaval, with his worship for pretty things, feels their
increased attraction, for as his eyes fall on them, his manner grows
really more impassioned. He moves closer to her side on the sofa, but
she averts her head, and piques him by a feigned coldness.
“I can’t see your face, Gabrielle! And I _want_ to see it while I talk
to you,” he pleads quite tenderly.
The tone touches her, not because she credits its sincerity, but because
she has never dreamed that _he_ could ever speak to her thus.
“Gabrielle, do you believe in affinities?”
“I believe in sympathy,” she answers, wondering what he is going to say
now.
“I am a firm believer in affinities, and don’t believe in the
possibility of love existing between two persons devoid of affinity.
Tell me, Gabrielle! do you follow me at all?”
She makes a slight gesture of assent, but she doesn’t in the slightest
comprehend what he is driving at. No matter, he is close besides her. If
she likes, she can touch him, and this is enough to put this impassioned
child of Eve into a fever of delight.
“I don’t believe that anyone can give another anything that does not
belong to that other. He may withhold it to a certain degree, but it
_must_ be given in the end. Perfect love is when one meets someone to
whom one can give all, and from whom one desires all.”
“Imperfect affinities are all that most people in _our_ world know of
love, and, Gabrielle, Belgravia is horribly ignorant, do you know?
Being so, they call a part of such and such a thing the whole, and
demand allegiance of one’s whole nature to a feeling that belongs to,
and feeds but a small part of it! Now, Gabrielle--my beautiful, tempting
Gabrielle! you and I have this in common, that we hate sham, and never
pretend to fine sentimental feelings unless we possess them. Isn’t it
true?”
Lord Delaval bends over her till his face nearly touches hers, and he
smiles conceitedly as he notices how rosy red the cheek near him grows
by his proximity.
“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!”