AFTERNOON TEA.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.”
Reveries cannot last for ever, even with Carl Conway’s handsome face
present in them, and Zai starts to find that the sun-god is making rapid
tracks westward, and remembers that Sandilands is one of those clockwork
houses where unpunctuality at meals is a cardinal sin.
It is hard; for Zai, like a good many other girls who are in love, has
no appetite. She fed to repletion on soft words and softer caresses in
Belgrave Square, the night of the ball. And she wants nothing now
until--until--some more of the same kind of nectar is given her.
She walks slowly down a narrow path fringed on either side thickly by
glossy shrubs, and which leads to the back of the house, and indifferent
to the regard and gossip of high life below stairs, runs up to her own
room.
The sun has climbed up quite high in the western sky, and, enthroned in
golden raiment, pours down such a reflection of his yellow glory on the
toilette table, that she stands for a moment blinking and winking her
pretty eyes like a newborn puppy.
Then she suddenly recollects something Gabrielle had told her, and
stooping, stares hard at herself in her mirror.
She dreads to find that she has really grown white and thin, that she
has “gone off” according to Lord Delaval’s verdict. The thought that
Carl, who is so fastidious in his ideal of beauty, may find her wanting
is too awful; so she falls to examining feature by feature eagerly.
These are what the looking-glass reflects back.
A small head, crowned with waves of hair, chestnut and silky, with
threads of ruddy gold gleaming up here and there. A pair of big grey
eyes, that can flash sharp lights in anger, but are as sweet and serene
as a summer heaven when her soul is in sunshine. A pair of lips, red and
tempting, cheeks, fair and lily white, with the faintest of pink rose
petals laid on them, long, dark brown fringes to broad lids, whose
shadow by and by may help to intensify a look of trouble in the eyes;
but now all is morning in this charming face of nineteen.
Zai looks, but is not satisfied with the catalogue of charms presented
to her critical gaze. Compared with the delicate perfection of Crystal
Meredyth’s face, with its well-opened china blue eyes and coral pouting
mouth, she feels her own to be a decided failure. Her nose is not a bit
Grecian, her expression has not the ladylike inanimate look of
Crystal’s.
She muses on, while she tidies her rebellious tresses that Zephyr has
been taking liberties with, and fastens a bunch of dark-red glowing
roses into the bodice of her white dress, and makes herself what Lady
Beranger calls “presentable” before society. And, as she muses, a
sparkling smile breaks on her mouth, for no reason whatever, except that
she feels happy since she loves Carl, and Carl loves her, and with the
sparkle of this smile still lingering on her face she goes slowly down
the grand staircase to find the luncheon-room deserted.
With a look of dismay at the huge Louis Seize timepiece opposite, the
hand of which points at half-past four, she crosses a large square,
tesselated hall, that opens into a boudoir that is a perfect gem in its
way, and replete with all the luxury that “ye aristocrats” love.
The room is of an octagonal shape, with rare silken hangings of _bleu de
ciel_; the walls, of ivory and gold, are decorated by Horace Vernet’s
delicious productions, varied by a pastel or two of Boucher’s, and with
a tiny but exquisite Meissonier, which even a neophyte in painting would
pick out, gleaming from the rest.
Art is everywhere, but art united with indulgence and indolence. The
lounges and ottomans are deep and puffy, and marvellously soft, and fat
downy cushions lie about in charming confusion.
So much for the room, which cannot be seen without at once suggesting
the presence of an ultra-refined spirit.
This spirit, embodied in a good deal of flesh and blood and known as
Lady Beranger, is here, presiding at afternoon tea.
Folds of rich black satin fall around her ample form, yards of priceless
Chantilly go round her skirts and throat and wrists.
Satins and laces are her familiars, though the Beranger exchequer is
low, for Worth and Elise, Lewis and Allenby, Marshall and Snelgrove
supply them, and never worry for their bills.
Leaders of Society like Lady Beranger are walking advertisements of the
goods, and it is so easy to make your plain Mrs. Brown, Jones or
Robinson pay up any bad debts among the “quality.”
Lady Beranger becomes her costly garments as well as they become her.
She is a very tall woman, and very stately and handsome. Perhaps in the
very palmiest days her beauty had never been classical. How seldom
beauty is so! but she is very imposing to look on, and she is
exceptionally thoroughbred in appearance. A woman in fact who bears upon
her the unmistakable _cachet_ of blue blood.
She has of course faults, and the gravest of them is love of money. It
is the dream of her life that her lovely bouquet of daughters shall
marry “fortunes,” and her cross at present consists in the bitter
knowledge that both Trixy and Zai are in love, and in love with a
pauper.
A pauper, for Trixy is, in her way--a very different way to her
sisters’--as much in love with Carl Conway as Zai is.
Afternoon tea is quite an institution at Sandilands, and at half-past
four Lady Beranger settles down to a substantial meal of cake and
muffins and bread and butter, while the olive branches look on in silent
wonderment, and ask themselves if a love of the fleshpots comes hand in
hand with riper years.
“Trixy, I forgot to tell you that I met old Stubbs near the Lodge gates,
and he is coming to call this afternoon,” Gabrielle announces, between
slow sips of her tea.
“Is he! well he won’t find _me_ at home,” a thin and peevish voice
answers.
It seems to rise from the depths of one of the most comfortable chairs,
on which an amber-haired white witch lies half _perdu_.
This is Trixy Beranger, Lady Beranger’s eldest marketable article, and a
lovely thing it is.
She would serve for an exact model, as she lounges here, of the lovely
Persian girl that our Poet Laureate saw in his excursion up the Tigris
to “Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold.”
Trixy is a rare and radiant maiden--a bird of Paradise, over whom most
men go mad, but do not care to wed, and to whom most women are cold,
conscious that their good looks pale beside hers.
Gabrielle’s glowing beauty of coal-black tresses and creamy skin, waxes
quite dim in Trixy’s proximity, and Baby’s cherub face and golden curls
are nowhere, but Zai--well, Zai is a law unto herself.
Society last year had fallen down helplessly on its knees, and
worshipped the _débutante_ of the season, the Hon. Beatrix Beranger.
From the Royalties downwards she was the rage.
They even likened her to every poetical saint in the calendar, and
Trixy, not over-weighted with brains, and with her lovely head
completely turned, in acknowledgment of the compliment, considers
herself in duty bound towards mankind in general, and in fact a point of
conscience, to “pose” accordingly.
She feels it incumbent on her never to allow herself to be out of
drawing, as the R. A.’s have it, to be always (in spite of the
discomfort of the thing) ready for an inspiration for a poet, or a study
for a painter; so from sheer force of habit, that has become her second
nature, she sinks perpetually into graceful attitudes, even if no one
more important than Baby’s dachshund Bismark is by to admire.
She even arranges herself with due regard for the picturesque, when she
retires to her own little sanctum for a siesta.
If Trixy’s beauty is in consequence marred just a little bit in the
world by a _soupçon_ of self-consciousness, it is not a matter of
marvel. A Belgravian damsel can scarcely, with all the _bonne volonté_
imaginable, personate Lalla Rookh, Idalian Aphrodite, Mary Anderson, the
three Graces, a whole sisterhood of Muses, and herself to boot, without
some one suffering in the transmogrification, and that some one is
naturally--herself.
Just now Trixy, who has been reading an article on the Porte and
Bulgaria, is “doing” an odalisque, out of a Turkish harem. She is
surrounded by a pile of satin cushions with a tender background of pale
lilac and gold embroidery that helps to enhance the wonderful
transparency of her skin, displays to greater advantage the yellow
wealth of her hair, and forms an effective relief for the little Greek
profile, chiselled like a cameo.
Looking at her, it does not require much fertility of imagination to
fancy her a Lurley, but Trixy Beranger it must be confessed is a Lurley
more powerful to ensnare when silent than when she discourses. Such a
stream of small talk, of silly frivolities, that pour from her perfect
lips! The Mikado, tailor-made dresses, Mrs. Langtry’s American outfit,
these are about the only topics on her brain, and she babbles about them
in a sort of childish treble that soon brings on a reaction in the
breasts of her most devoted.
But though three parts of London have paid her attention, though dukes
and earls have swelled the length of her train, long as a comet’s tail,
Trixy has never had one eligible offer.
So now, after the season’s campaigning, and, superseded this last year
by Zai, she is slightly disgusted at the non-appreciative qualities of
the Upper Ten, though in no wise disenchanted with herself.
“May I enquire of whom you were speaking, Gabrielle?” Lady Beranger asks
in a sepulchral tone, fanning herself with a huge Japanese screen, after
her exertions with the cake, muffins, and bread and butter.
“Of old Stubbs! Of course he expects to find Trixy when he calls.”
“But I shan’t be!” Trixy reiterates decidedly. “I am going to
Southampton to do some shopping. I am so comfortable I don’t want to
move, but Gabrielle you might ring and order the carriage for me.”
Gabrielle laughs, and going over to her whispers:
“Old Stubbs was clad in a yellow-brown alpaca suit, and looked such a
guy. He put me in mind of the frog that would a wooing go. I wonder what
was the end of that frog.”
“About the same as old Stubbs’ will be, if he makes a fool of himself
about me,” Trixy answers peevishly, while she settles herself in another
picturesque attitude. “Still, whatever I choose to think of him, it is
very unpleasant to have all one’s admirers run down, as you have a
shocking habit of doing, Gabrielle.”
Gabrielle hearkens with a contemptuous smile, but she reddens hotly as
Lady Beranger chimes in with:
“Of all things, flippancy is the most unlady-like. Gabrielle, _your_
flippancy jars on my nerves horribly, to say nothing of its being
indicative of low birth and breeding. Old Stubbs, whom you are pleased
to make a butt of, is one of our biggest millionaires, and a most
eligible acquaintance.”
“Old Stubbs’ father was a butcher,” Gabrielle breaks in defiantly.
“Mr. Stubbs is a self-made man,” Lady Beranger says quietly, casting a
scornful glance at her stepdaughter. “I admire self-made men immensely,
and I hope Trixy knows better than to be guilty of such rudeness as
going out.”
A frown puckers the odalisque’s fair brow.
“I _prefer_ going out shopping, mamma, to staying at home to talk to
such an ugly man,” she says wilfully.
“Fiddlesticks! Trixy. Recollect he is Hymen’s ambassador, that he is
wrapped up in bank notes, and that beauty’s only skin deep,” Gabrielle
tells her, with a laugh.
“If you think Mr. Stubbs so charming, mamma, you know you can have his
society all to yourself.”
“I shall certainly make a point of being present,” Lady Beranger
answers, without a ruffle on her tutored face. “You ought to know me
well enough, Trixy, to be aware that I should never risk such a breach
of the _convenances_ as to allow a daughter of mine to receive, alone,
any man, were he king or kaiser, who was not her acknowledged suitor.”
“Who is not an acknowledged suitor?” cries Baby, bouncing into the room
after her usual fashion. Her hat has fallen off to the back of her head,
her eyes dance with mischief, and her cheeks are flushed like damask
roses, but her muslin dress is tossed and tumbled, and not improved by
the muddy paws of a miserable half-bred Persian kitten which she holds
in her arms.
“Hargreaves is such fun, Gabrielle! He came to look at Toots’
tootsey-wootseys, and made love to me instead,” she whispers.
“What a tomboy you are, Baby,” Lady Beranger says sharply. “Lord Delaval
will be in to tea presently, so run off and change your dress. You look
like a maid-of-all-work, with your fringe all uncurled and your soiled
hands, and _don’t_ bring that horrid kitten here again.”
“I _hate_ Lord Delaval!” Baby cries frankly. “He is not half so handsome
or so nice as--as--shoals of men I know.”
“Not so nice as Hargreaves, the village veterinary,” Gabrielle breaks in
maliciously, vexed at her idol being run down.
“Hargreaves! What can Baby know of _his_ niceness?” Lady Beranger
questions, in her severest tone.
“Nothing mamma; it is only Gabrielle’s spite because she thinks Lord
Delaval such a paragon!”
Lady Beranger passes her eye over Gabrielle, icily.
“I do not think it is of importance to us what you think of Lord
Delaval, Gabrielle, so long as your sentiments in no way clash with mine
on the subject. Did you ask Zai to come in?”
“I am here, mamma, do you want me?” Zai says, walking quietly into the
bosom of her family, and thinking what a very uncomfortable place it is.
The balmy breeze stirring the elm tops has not wooed her in vain--for
her cheeks look like blush roses and her hair seems to have caught in
its meshes every glint of sunlight that fell on it.
“Yes, I want you, or rather I don’t want you to take up your residence
completely in the grounds, to ruin your skin, and to catch those vulgar
things, freckles; you have a coarse flush on your face now, like a
housemaid. Zai, I must really put my veto on your goings on.”
“What goings on, mamma? It is deliciously cool under the trees and this
room is quite stifling. What can it signify if my skin does tan a
little; I love to be out in the grounds, where I can think
comfortably.”
“Think! what on earth can you have to think about, Zai?” Lady Beranger
begins sternly, and Zai knows she is in for a lecture. “Girls of your
age, if they are of properly-regulated minds, let others think for them.
You have three or four serious duties in life to attend to. The first
duty is to honour your father and mother and obey them implicitly; the
second, is to take care of your looks, and to dress well; the third
is----”
“To marry an eligible,” Gabrielle chimes in pertly.
“Exactly!” Lady Beranger says calmly. “Your chief duty is to show your
gratitude to your parents, for all they have done for you, by making a
good match.”
“I don’t care for money,” Zai murmurs meekly.
“Of course you don’t; you don’t care for anything, that you ought to
care for, Zai. You positively ignore the fact of who you are, and forget
common deference to society, which is, attention to the people around
you. Last Thursday night, I heard Lady Vandeleur bewailing how
_distraite_ you were, and she smiled, Zai! smiled, quite in an
aggravating way! She heard you reply to Lord Delaval when he asked for a
valse: ‘I’ll take strawberry, please.’ No wonder she hinted to me that
you had something on your mind!”
“Poor old Lady Vandeleur fancies, perhaps, like Shakspeare, that Zai
has--
‘A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet!’”
suggests Gabrielle once more. “Why did you not tell her that your
daughter is _stage struck_?”
“Your attempts at wit are dreadful, Gabrielle,” Lady Beranger murmurs
languidly. “Your tongue is, indeed, an unruly member.”
“I really think Zai has softening of the brain,” Trixy says spitefully.
“She never remembers that her folly and eccentricity may compromise me.
People might easily mistake one sister for the other.”
Spite is Trixy’s forte. Silky and saccharine, her tiny _pattes de
velours_ are always ready to creep out and scratch. Her mother
understands her nature, and tries to check feline propensities; but
Trixy, like many of her sex, is a born cat.
“Zai is more likely to compromise herself than you. She will establish a
reputation for being queer, and damage her chance of securing an
eligible _parti_.”
“I wish there was no such word in English as eligible,” Gabrielle cries
impetuously. “I hate the very sound of it. I suppose I am too low-born
and democratic to appreciate the term. It seems to me, that every
marriageable young woman should carry about a weighing-machine, and
that, so long as Cyclops or any clod is heavily gilded--Hey! presto!
he’s the man.”
Lady Beranger gives her a slow, level look, and wonders why such savages
as Gabrielle exist.
“Please keep your _outré_ notions to yourself,” she remarks quietly. “My
daughters have been taught to look on a good marriage as their due, and
I am sure it never enters into their heads to degrade themselves by a
_mésalliance_.”
“I think poor men ever so much nicer than rich ones, mamma,” Zai
murmurs deprecatingly, and her white little hands nervously clasping and
unclasping.
“Do you recollect Evelyn Ashley, mamma?” Trixy asks in a gentle, but
hypocritical voice. “No one ever forgets that she fell in love with a
riding-master, and was on the brink of eloping with him, when, luckily
his horse threw him and he was killed. Of course, she is all right now,
and very nice; but I don’t believe anyone worth speaking of would dream
of marrying her.”
“I am sure an _eligible_ never would!” Gabrielle says satirically.
Zai’s grey eyes blaze, her little mouth quivers with excess of anger and
indignation.
“By introducing that episode of Evelyn Ashley I conclude you mean to
insinuate, Trixy, that her disgraceful affair is a parallel to what you
think are my feelings for Carl?”
“Certainly. I call a riding-master quite as good, if not better, than an
actor,” Trixy retorts coolly, though Carl Conway is as much in her head
as in Zai’s heart.
“Gentlemen and officers have been forced through adverse circumstances
to earn their bread by teaching riding, at least one hears of such
cases. Of course it is not likely for _me_ to have run across them,” she
adds with supreme arrogance and a little curl of her pretty lip.
“And you think anyone following the profession of an actor, from sheer
love of his art, cannot be a gentleman? Not even if by birth he is
one--and in fact related to the best blood in England?” Zai demands,
quite haughtily, with a glitter in her glance which rather awes Trixy,
who, like all bullies, is not very courageous when it comes to a
stand-up fight.
But before Zai has a reply, Lady Beranger steps in with her low
imperious voice:
“I am shocked at you both. Can it be possible that daughters of mine,
girls supposed to be well-bred, should discuss such subjects, and throw
yourselves into the violence of washerwomen, proving yourselves no
better than the _canaille_ in question. Zai, I see it is useless to try
and reason with you. However, as I am your mother I am entitled to
obedience, and I order you to abstain in the future from the society of
Mr. Conway, so that, however much folly you may be guilty of, others
will not be able to comment upon it.”
No answer, but Zai’s lids droop, and from beneath them big tears roll
slowly down her cheeks, and her mouth quivers like a flogged child’s.
“What a poor weak thing she is,” Gabrielle thinks. “Why doesn’t she hold
her own, and set that mother of hers at defiance?”
But Zai does not care for defiance. Even in Belgravia she has been
taught to honour her father and her mother, and her natural instincts
are all for good.
“I must say, Zai,” Lady Beranger goes on coldly and cruelly, “that it is
a wonderment to me, this romantic, _low_, fancy for that young man. The
whole thing reflects on the proper amount of pride you ought to possess.
Has it by any chance struck you what this Mr. Conway, this _actor_, must
think of you?”
“What _could_ he think of me?” Zai asks quietly, with level half-closed
eyes, but her assumption of courage is only skin deep. Anything
unpleasant or invidious about _this actor_, as her mother scornfully
calls him, causes her to tremble inwardly like an aspen leaf--her love,
her own dear love, who, in her opinion, is higher than king or kaiser,
simply because he is _himself_.
Lady Beranger calmly returns the gaze, and as she replies the words drop
slowly from her lips, with a cool and merciless decision that is
unwarrantable, considering that there are two pairs of ears besides
Zai’s to listen.
“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.
[Illustration]