DAUGHTERS OF BELGRAVIA.
DAUGHTERS OF BELGRAVIA
BY
MRS. ALEXANDER FRASER,
Author of
“THE LAST DRAWING-ROOM,” “A FATAL PASSION,”
“THE MATCH OF THE SEASON,” “A FASHIONABLE MARRIAGE,”
“A PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY,” etc., etc., etc.
“O! Daughters of dreams and of stories
That life is not wearied of yet!
Faustine! Fragoletta! Dolores!
Fèlise and Yolande, Juliette!”
_IN THREE VOLUMES._
VOLUME III.
LONDON:
F. V. WHITE & CO.,
31, SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND.
1887.
PRINTED BY
KELLY AND CO., GATE STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS,
AND KINGSTON-ON-THAMES.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I.--“ARE YOU GOING TO MARRY ZAI?” 1
II.--CARLTON CONWAY 37
III.--ANTEROS 54
IV.--LA BLONDE AUX YEUX NOIR 92
V.--DRIFTING 114
VI.--IN THE MESHES 124
VII.--DEEPER AND DEEPER STILL 149
VIII.--DON’T YOU KNOW ME, DELAVAL? 175
IX.--THROUGH THE SHADOWS 189
“SELECT” NOVELS.
_Crown 8vo, cloth, 3s. 6d. each._
AT ALL BOOKSELLERS’ AND BOOKSTALLS.
By FLORENCE MARRYAT.
THE HEIR PRESUMPTIVE.
THE HEART OF JANE WARNER.
UNDER THE LILIES AND ROSES.
MY OWN CHILD.
HER WORLD AGAINST A LIE.
PEERESS AND PLAYER.
FACING THE FOOTLIGHTS.
MY SISTER THE ACTRESS.
By ANNIE THOMAS (Mrs. Pender Cudlip).
HER SUCCESS.
KATE VALLIANT.
JENIFER.
FRIENDS AND LOVERS.
By LADY CONSTANCE HOWARD.
MATED WITH A CLOWN.
ONLY A VILLAGE MAIDEN.
MOLLIE DARLING.
By MRS. HOUSTOUN, Author of “Recommended to Mercy.”
BARBARA’S WARNING.
By MRS. ALEXANDER FRASER.
THE MATCH OF THE SEASON.
A FATAL PASSION.
A PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
By IZA DUFFUS-HARDY.
ONLY A LOVE STORY.
NOT EASILY JEALOUS.
LOVE, HONOUR AND OBEY.
By JEAN MIDDLEMASS.
POISONED ARROWS.
By MRS. LOVETT CAMERON.
IN A GRASS COUNTRY.
A DEAD PAST.
A NORTH COUNTRY MAID.
By DORA RUSSELL. By LADY VIOLET GRENVILLE
OUT OF EDEN.
KEITH’S WIFE.
By NELLIE FORTESCUE HARRISON,
Author of “So runs my Dream.”
FOR ONE MAN’S PLEASURE.
By EDMUND LEATHES.
THE ACTOR’S WIFE.
By HARRIETT JAY.
A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE.
DAUGHTERS OF BELGRAVIA.
CHAPTER I.
“ARE YOU GOING TO MARRY ZAI?”
“If I could but know after all,
I might cease to hunger and ache,
Though your heart were ever so small,
If it were not a stone or a snake.”
It is the truth that Gabrielle is desperately in love with Lord Delaval,
and it is equally true that, thrusting all maidenly reserve to the four
winds, she does not hesitate to let him know it.
Last night--will she ever forget it? She was sitting in the twilight,
shaded from view by the amber hangings of the music room. For an hour
she had been singing the passionate French and Italian songs in which
she could pour out her soul freely, but she had tired of it since he was
not by for audience. So dashing her music aside she pulled a chair into
the embrasure of the bay window, and with her chin resting on her hand,
was soon lost in a waking dream, of which he, of course, was central
figure.
How long she sat there she never knew. Anyway, the purple twilight had
merged into grey gloom, through which myriads of twinkling stars peered
down at her flushed cheeks and passionate black eyes, when suddenly a
voice startled her, a voice whose accents bore such genuine feeling in
them, that for a moment it seemed unfamiliar to her ears.
And this is what it said--while Gabrielle listened with beating heart
and bated breath, rent with jealousy and rage.
“Tell me! when is my probation to end? Have you no mercy for me?”
“What for?” and Zai’s tone, in comparison with his, was strangely hard
and cold.
“What for? Don’t you know that I want to claim you before all the world?
Don’t you know that I am longing to take my darling in my arms and swear
on her sweet lips how I love her?”
Whether Zai answered this phantasy tenderly or no, Gabrielle never knew,
for the two passed the open door and were out of hearing.
_The two!_
Her faithless lover and her step-sister!
Gabrielle flew upstairs noiselessly, and reaching her own room, locked
the door.
She was alone now--alone--thank God! alone! Here there were no mocking
eyes to note her horrible folly, to laugh at her awful, awful anguish,
here she could grind her white teeth in impotent rage, or grovel on the
floor in humiliation and a futile passion. She flung off the pretty
dress she had put on for dinner to please his eyes, a delicious
_mélange_ of white lace and vivid scarlet, the colour that suited best
her soft creamy skin and coal-black hair, and matched the hue of her
perfect lips, and she thrust impatiently aside the glittering bracelets
and rings with which she loved to deck her rounded arms and tapering
fingers.
What were these baubles worth now, that she had lost the jewel of Lord
Delaval’s heart?
_Vanitas Vanitatum!_
Sackcloth and ashes are the garments she should wear, poor, passionate,
reckless creature, a victim to a worldling’s fickleness. And Gabrielle,
the cynical, the votary of Balzac and Georges Sand, the unbeliever in
true feeling, wept bitterly over the wreck that had been made of her
life “for one man’s pleasure only.”
Her strictly worldly surroundings forbade her from giving way to an
honest violent grief that would serve for sluice-gates to her heart. And
she smothered back the sobs that broke from her with a rapidity of
passion that she couldn’t restrain.
Poor soul, that a sojourn in Belgravia had starved, it could find no
balm in Gilead, no physician, now that the one human creature she had
placed on a pedestal to worship had tumbled down ignominiously, to her
thinking the veriest lump of clay. And she writhed as she remembered
that not only by words and looks, but even by kisses on her red lips, he
had betrayed her.
She positively wailed out her misery and her wrath in a low deep wail,
weird enough to be a cry from one of Dante’s lost souls. Yet--
“Is it worth a tear? is it worth an hour?
To think of things that are well outworn,
Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,
The dreams foregone, and the deed forborne?”
Had she not lived long enough in her twenty-six years to know that man
and fickleness are synonymous terms, and to be avoided?
Apparently not--for even while she groans and moans over his
shortcomings, a mighty love fills her for the man whom she adores with a
wild, unreasoning, selfish passion, and whose happiness she would
immolate unscrupulously, if it pleased her to have it so. It must be
owned that Lord Delaval is both a flirt and a butterfly, and that he has
played fast and loose with mostly all the pretty women he has come
across.
Flirting comes to him as to the manner born; it lurks in his ultramarine
eyes, in the corners of his mouth, in his voice, in his manners, and in
his actions, and he thinks nothing of it.
Some women regret his love, some resign themselves to his fickle ways,
but Gabrielle Beranger is not of the common herd. She is a law unto
herself in all things. She can love well (in her fashion) and she can
hate well, with her great black gleaming orbs, her white passion-tossed
features, her tumultuous, unscrupulous spirit. She regrets now,
bitterly, but she does not dream of growing resigned.
“_Tout vient a celui qui sait attendre_,” she mutters to herself.
Lord Delaval has laid a burthen on her which she cannot bear. She has
but one stimulus left in life, but one object. It is to appeal to
him--to his honour--to his love. If she fails--but she does not dream of
failing.
One thing, she will separate the man she loves, and the man who has
loved her, after the fashion of some men’s love, from her step-sister.
If not now, she will some day, even if Zai marries him.
To her the words--“Those whom God hath joined together let no man put
asunder,” are but idle prattle. A mere formula of the Church, a creed
which her blind unbelief in all good things makes her mock at and fling
aside like the voice of the wind.
Gabrielle is one part Belgravian and three parts French, and has the
faults of both. Honour and loyalty are dead letters to such women.
Strong and practical of nature, animal in instinct and passion, savage
and cruel in greed of love, is it likely that women possessing such
qualifications can wage war and be beaten?
Cunning, craftiness, deceit and falsity, ranged against truth,
innocence, purity and simple mindedness, form a very uneven contest, my
readers.
And, in spite of the pleasant doctrine that goodness rears its head over
badness, it is a fact that human creatures of the Gabrielle Beranger
type have often a better time of it in this world than their purer
sisterhood.
Gabrielle is not going to leave Lord Delaval in ignorance of her
sufferings, for she is not of the nature of a violet, or likely to let
concealment like a worm, &c., &c.
“Are you going to marry Zai?” she asks abruptly. She has come face to
face with him--accidentally on purpose--in a walk that is out of sight
of the windows at Sandilands.
Lord Delaval, Greek almost in indolence and love of rest and luxury, has
one habit to which most of our golden youth are not given--a habit of
rising early and going out early.
So that Gabrielle has him all to herself this bright sunny morning,
while the Beranger family are still enjoying their slumbers.
For an instant, surprise--and it must be confessed irritation at
meeting her--keeps him silent, so she repeats--
“Are you going to marry Zai?”
He looks at her--to say that he quails would be perhaps going too
far--but he is unmistakably nervous. There is more moral cowardice in
men than in women as a rule.
She stands like an image of Nemesis, right in the centre of the
path--immovable--a trifle formidable, her tall figure pulled well up to
its fullest height, her features rigid and white as a sheet, and only
her big black eyes burning with quite a hungry ferocious look as they
rest on the handsome blond face of the man who has made love to her.
How remarkably sorry he is for it now! But there is no denying it; he
has certainly made love to her, under the cover of some
incomprehensible doctrine all about “affinities,” in which he believes
no whit himself; he has beguiled her affections, or rather her passions,
by the sweet words that are as sweet now as when Adam whispered them to
his Eve in Paradise; he has beguiled her by soft treacherous kisses, in
which the beak of the cruel vulture is hid beneath the tender touch of
the dove, until this woman has paid him back by an enduring but terrible
love that is not only a nuisance but may be worse.
Why Lord Delaval has made love to her, really not caring for her, is not
difficult to tell. He adores beauty, and Gabrielle has plenty of it; her
other attraction to him has been her intense contrast to the other women
of the London world, with whom his flirtations have been as numerous as
stars in a southern sky.
With her big black gipsy eyes, her demonstrative manner, her _bizarre_
words and ways, and with the very vehemence and intensity of the passion
that has repelled him even while it attracted him, his erratic fancy has
been caught, but never enchained. He rather dislikes her now; and, after
this, what breath can fill and re-inspire a dead fancy?
“Lord Delaval, is it true that you are going to marry Zai?” she asks for
the third time, in a quiet hushed voice, that yet teems with a keen
concentrated scorn that she means to cut like a whipcord, and from which
he recoils angrily, for he is a thorough Epicurean in his liking for
pleasantness, and a mental tussle disturbs his equanimity.
“It is quite true!” he says, rather haughtily, but when he sees her
turn whiter than before, and her mouth quiver with pain, he relents. “I
should have told you before, but Zai wished it kept quiet!”
“She did, did she? She knew she has acted a treacherous, deceitful part.
Good Heavens! what are you marrying her for?”
“Because I love her!” he answers coolly, “and because she loves me!”
“Loves you--you! Why all London knows of her love for Carlton Conway!”
He shrinks a little from this, and the colour mounts hotly to his face,
but soon recedes again, leaving him quite pallid.
“All London knows a good deal that does not exist!”
“_Il n’y’a pas de fumée sans feu_,” she says sneeringly.
“Zai is too good, too pure, to deceive any man,” he answers quietly, but
the remark about Carl rankles in his mind. “You don’t understand your
sister, Miss Beranger, or you would not depreciate your own judgment of
human nature by believing her capable of deceit, or falsity, or evil of
any kind! If all women were like her the world would be a paradise!”
“Fools’ paradise!” she cries contemptuously. “I certainly never gave
_you_ credit for being hoodwinked by a few babyish ways and innocent
smiles! a man of _your_ mind!” she goes on frankly--a frankness which is
the very essence of consummate flattery--but he is not to be taken in.
“Thanks for the pretty compliment! it would turn my head if I was
younger, coming from such fresh scarlet lips,” he replies with a
Jesuitical smile; “but I am getting quite old, and as hard as adamant;
not even _your_ approbation can make my mind rise to the height of folly
which would discover flaws in angels or paint a lily black.”
“I really think you have begun to hate me!” she says passionately, with
tears welling up in her eyes; “Have you?”
He looks at her for a moment steadily. He has thought her face, in spite
of its beauty, false, wicked, and meretricious. He sees it now lovely in
its creamy tints, its superb eyes, its chiselled features, and its waves
of dusky hair, and withal a soft and tender expression leavening the
whole.
“No!” he answers slowly. “I don’t hate you at all. It depends on
yourself, Gabrielle, if I hate you later!”
She marks at once the relenting in his features, and, like the busy bee,
improves the shining hour.
“You’ll _never_ hate me, for pity’s sake!” she cries, and flinging
herself down on the path she wreathes her arms round his knees, while
her fierce black eyes, with a good deal of the tiger-cat in their
depths, seem to devour greedily his handsome face. “Delaval! who will
love you as I do? who will hunger and thirst for your every word and
look like me? Oh if you were ever so poor and humble, but still
yourself, I would slave for you, _die_ for you! only--only--I could not
bear that any other woman should cling to you like this!” and with a
sudden spring she throws herself on his breast, panting, breathless,
quivering from head to foot. “Delaval, you have pretended to love
me. You have kissed me, and you have made me love _you_, till I
am mad with misery, till I lose sight of all that women hold
dear--pride--reserve--delicacy! For mercy’s sake don’t give me up, and
place an insuperable bar between us two!”
But he coolly puts her aside--not roughly, but very determinedly.
“So!” she says, standing tall and erect before him. “So! words are of no
avail. Love is a theme you have heard so often that its name has an
empty sound! You are an honourable man, Lord Delaval! Your conscience
can never prick you. For you have never acted basely, cruelly, to anyone
in your life!” she cries, with a sneer.
He feels quite an aversion to her as he answers: “Men may be
dishonourable towards women, perhaps. But rely upon it, it is the
woman’s fault if they are so! Men may act cruelly, basely, but I’ll be
sworn baseness and cruelty have been forced from them in order to check
a woman’s undisciplined feelings, in order to recall a woman to the
decorum which belongs to her sex! I think, Miss Beranger, since I am not
honoured by your good opinion, my best move will be to say ‘Good-bye!’”
She feels that she has played her game wretchedly. The man is a vain
man; and instead of reaching his heart through fair means, she has lost
her temper, wounded his _amour propre_, and placed a further barrier
betwixt them. Once more she is down on her knees, her clasped hands
lifted, her face quivering with emotion. Gabrielle is a born actress;
but now her acting is supremely good, for there is a deal of genuine
feeling in it.
“Delaval! Forgive! forgive! I was mad to speak as I did! Oh I could
kill myself for it! Say you forgive me, Delaval!”
But he stands motionless and impassive still.
“You won’t? Have you grown utterly hard and cold and strange then to me?
Have you no mercy, no pity, no compunction? Can you face me like a stock
or a stone, and trample on my heart like this? Don’t you know that you
gave me the right to love you--by your kisses, by the specious words
that have fallen from your lips? And I believed in them! I believed that
some day I should be your wife! Oh Delaval! if I have showed an
undisciplined mind, a want of decorum, it is your fault. You are a man,
I but a poor weak loving woman. You are the stronger, I but the weaker
vessel. It is you who should have saved me from myself. It is you who
should have placed a dam against the sluice-gates of a love that is
going to wreck my whole life! Delaval, dearest, say, have you _never_
cared for me? Has it all been untrue, a hideous delusion, a chimera of
my own brain?--a device of the Devil to lull me in a slumber of Paradise
only to awake to a full sense of his tortures? Oh, if I could die! If I
could die! For I have nothing to live for now--nothing! I _shall_ die;
for I could not live and see another come between my Heaven and me! I
could curse her!”
Lord Delaval winces a little at this. Curses are hard words to come near
the soft little tender girl he is going to marry, and whose words to him
are as shy as the light of a star.
But, just for once, he is taken rather aback. Shoals of women have loved
him, and reproached him, but never like this. It is the first time he
has evoked such a fierce tornado, and for a moment it staggers him. Then
he becomes conscious of a feeling of thankfulness that this woman,
beautiful and adoring, is not going to be his _wife_!
“I can do nothing but regret!” he says gently. “My faith is pledged to
your sister, and--and--forgive me if I say that I do not wish to recall
it! It is kinder to you, and kinder to myself, to speak openly!”
After this, nothing can be said, she feels.
She rises slowly from her knees, and stands a little apart. After all,
she is not bad, she is not lost to shame; and it dyes her cheek crimson,
while her lids droop over the fire in her eyes, and her mouth
trembles--as much perhaps with wrath as sorrow.
What man can look utterly unmoved on such a spectacle as this?
“I feel so much for you,” he says quite softly, “but Fate has decreed
our paths to divide, and who can act against Fate? My faith, as I said,
is pledged to Zai; but there is no reason that you and I, Gabrielle,
should be foes. I shall always care for you, always take an interest in
you, always be glad to be a _brother_ to you!”
“A _brother_!” she mutters. “I am no hypocrite! I could never feel like
a sister towards you, and I will not pretend it! But we’ll part in
peace! Only--only--!”
She flings her arms round him, and lifts up wild wet eyes, their fire
and wrath all quenched in the passion that floods her whole being, “Say
that you _have_ loved me, if you do not love me now!”
It takes not only a perfect man, but a strong one, to reject a pleading
woman, especially if her prayer is for Love, and the lips with which she
utters it are fresh and tempting; and Lord Delaval is an imperfect man,
assuredly.
So he stoops; and while her flushed stormy face lies against his breast,
he kisses her, but only on the cheek, with the comfortable conviction
that he has preserved his loyalty to Zai intact by avoiding Gabrielle’s
lips. Most men now a-days are so addicted to splitting hairs!
“Good-bye!” she whispers, “I cannot stay here and see you and her
together!”
She says it so tragically, that he half smiles. He has always thought
her an excellent actress, but now she excels herself.
“Nonsense, Gabrielle!” he answers carelessly. “For God’s sake don’t make
a scandal whatever you do! If we _have_ made love--how many men and
women do the same--without one or the other bringing the house down
about their ears. You are not the only girl I have kissed and vowed all
sorts of things to, but no one else has made me repent my folly as you
have done. Come, kiss me--a kiss of peace--and forget that a kiss of
love has ever been exchanged between us. We must all bow to the
inevitable, and you cannot expect to be exempt.”
“But the inevitable in this case does not come from the hand of
Providence, but from the hand of the man who ought to be the last to
hurt me!” she says, passionately. “I _will_ kiss you--ay, kiss you a
dozen times; but, Delaval, they will be the kisses that one gives to the
man one loves best, and upon whom one will never look again!”
She kisses him as she speaks--kisses him on his brow, and eyes, and
lips, wildly, fiercely; then she almost pushes him from her.
“Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!” he answers quietly, “since you will have it so; and when we
meet again----”
“We shall _never_ meet again!” she says, abruptly.
“What folly!” he exclaims, impatiently. “I hope we never shall, until
you have regained your senses, and don’t act like a mad woman.”
“If I am a mad woman, you are the man who has made me so!” she retorts,
impetuously.
“God forgive you for it, for I cannot!” and turning on her heel, she is
soon out of view.
He shrugs his shoulders, and forgetting all about her, saunters back to
the house whistling an opera bouffe air.
But though the opera bouffe air runs in his head, in his mind there is
an unpleasant conviction that Gabrielle will make a scandal of some
sort.
“These hot-headed, hot-hearted women are the very devil,” he mutters
angrily to himself; “and I should not be surprised if she goes and
peaches to old Beranger and her Ladyship--but no matter--a coronet, and
a good-looking fellow like myself, to say nothing of the tin my dear
miserly old dad hoarded up, are proof against any back-biters, and I’ll
marry Zai yet, dear little thing. I do believe she is beginning to love
me!”
But even with this comforting reflection, he gives a little start at
luncheon when he sees one chair empty, and hears Trixy whisper to her
sister, “Gabrielle is so queer to-day, queerer than usual. I really
think she’s going off her head.”
Later on, at dinner, come Miss Beranger’s excuses.
“Gabrielle is not very well, and cannot come down,” Lady Beranger
remarks indifferently, going on with her _potage à la Reine_, and Lord
Delaval makes a tolerable meal--drinks a little more than usual, but not
too much (wine bibbing is not one of his faults), laughs and talks a
little nervously, and even is slightly _distrait_, while Zai sings in
her fresh sweet soprano a bit of Swinburne, set to pathetic music--
“If I could but know after all,
I might cease to hunger and ache,
Though your heart were ever so small,
If it were not a stone or a snake.”
He seems to look past her dainty chesnut-crowned head, as he listens to
these words, at Gabrielle--Gabrielle, with her wild wet eyes, her white
passion-tossed features, her clinging arms and bitter reproach.
All night long, through his sleep, they come back to him, and will not
be thrust away.
Once more, at breakfast, the empty chair faces him, and in spite of
himself he says to his hostess, “I hope Miss Beranger is better to-day?”
“Yes! I think so,” Lady Beranger answers; “at any rate, well enough to
travel. Gabrielle went off by the early train to Southampton, I believe,
didn’t she, Trixy?”
“I think so, mamma; at least, Fanchette told me. She has gone, but she
never said good-bye.”
“Ah! just like her,” Lady Beranger observes, carelessly. “Gabrielle is
so queer, so _bizarre_, you know.” And she takes another help of _fillet
de sole_, and gives no further thought to her stepdaughter.
“Will you come out on the lawn, the morning is perfect?” Lord Delaval
says to Zai, when they make a move from the table, and she, who has
determined to love him and obey him, turns up a fair sweet face, and
smiling, runs away for her hat.
He looks after her slender figure with visible admiration in his eyes.
Zai is his beau ideal, _pro tem._ of womankind.
“Don’t be long away,” he calls, softly; and he longs to have her with
him, where, sending the _convenances au diable_, he can gaze his fill on
her beauty, and kiss her to his heart’s content.
“A letter for you! my lord.”
He starts and stammers as he asks:
“For me?”
And, as he takes the sealed missive in his hand, a sort of foreboding
makes him pale and shrink from opening it.
He even forgets to wait for Zai, but walks out of the house, and down
towards the far end of the grounds, before he breaks the seal.
“When you read this, Delaval, I shall be dead. ‘What folly!’ I hear
you say. But folly or not, it is the truth. Oh, Delaval, I wonder I
did not die yesterday! when you killed me with your hard words and
looks. I cannot, I say, live and know that the love and caresses
that are all the world to me are given to another woman. I have no
home, no friends, no money. What then is left to me but death!
Good-bye! my love! my love! My last prayer will be that some day
you will say to yourself, ‘She loved me best of all.’ Good-bye!”
“GABRIELLE.”
When he has read it all, his first thought is, “What a very unpleasant
state of affairs.”
He cannot show the letter to his future wife or her people. He cannot
give a hint that Gabrielle may have committed the atrocious folly of
putting an end to herself. True, the uncertainty of her fate does not
conduce to his comfort or his equanimity of mind, but it is not to be
thought of that he should cut his own throat by showing her letter.
“Here goes!” he says, at last, with a sigh of relief, as the torn
fragments of Gabrielle’s last words scatter to the four winds, and he
turns with a tender smile to meet his betrothed, who comes slowly and
sadly, as it seems to him, up the garden walk.
“I thought you were never coming, darling,” he whispers in his softest
voice, while his ultramarine eyes look into her own longingly,
yearningly.
But Zai’s grey eyes do not respond, and her face is very grave as she
falters:
“Gabrielle! oh, how shall I tell you Gabrielle----?”
“Yes,” he questions feverishly, staring at her in his bewilderment.
“_Poor Gabrielle is dead!_”
“Dead?”
“Yes! We thought she had gone to Southampton, but she hasn’t--for--oh!
_what_ could have made her do it?” she cries, looking up with piteous
eyes into his white face. “She has drowned herself in the river! _What_
could have made her do such a terrible thing?”
“God knows!” he says.
It is quite true what Zai has told him.
Close to the brink of the Urling river that runs through the Sandilands
estate they have found Gabrielle’s hat. How well they know it, the
dainty hat with its pompon of vivid scarlet and black!
For five days they drag the river without success, but on the sixth day
a human form is brought and laid on the silvery bed of sand.
A woman’s form, tall and slender like Gabrielle’s, yet so unlike, for it
is terrible to look upon. The light summer dress she wore is tattered
and draggled and discoloured beyond recognition, and the face,--but none
who have known her can look twice on the fearful lineaments that the
water have so cruelly caressed and changed.
Not even her own father can believe that this awful thing lying at his
feet can be all that is left of his beautiful daughter, Gabrielle
Beranger.
* * * * *
Again Lady Beranger has to mourn like her fellow “quality” in “deep
kilts”--procured on credit--but this time she has a certain satisfaction
in it, which she salves down her conscience with by saying:
“Gabrielle was such a queer girl that she _must_ have come to an
out-of-the-way end. She was so fast, so _bizarre_, so dreadfully
indifferent to the _bienséances_ and the _convenances_, you know, and,
dear Marchioness, is it not far better to have drowned herself than to
have gone to the bad?”
The Marchioness, who has had a _jeunesse orageuse_ herself, shakes her
dyed curls solemnly and virtuously.
“Very true, dear Lady Beranger. Once a girl has got the bit between her
teeth, she is _sure_ to ride to the Devil, and poor dear Gabrielle
always struck me as the sort that go the fastest. Well! well! we must
console ourselves by the hope that the best thing possible has happened
to her. And how long are the weddings put off for?”
“Till November. This is not the first time Gabrielle has inconvenienced
me, but I suppose we _must_ delay the marriages for two months, or
people will talk. All these sort of things entail so much expense too;
no sooner has one gone into half-mourning for my dear lost Baby, but
there’s the deep black for Gabrielle again. It really seems to me that
she only thought of herself, and did not care a bit for the annoyance
and inconvenience she caused to others!”