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Read Ebook: Daughters of Belgravia; vol. 1 of 3 by Fraser Alexander Mrs
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Ebook has 563 lines and 30954 words, and 12 pages
CHAP. PAGE
"SELECT" NOVELS.
AT ALL BOOKSELLERS' AND BOOKSTALLS.
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.
HER SUCCESS. KATE VALLIANT. JENIFER. FRIENDS AND LOVERS.
MATED WITH A CLOWN. ONLY A VILLAGE MAIDEN. MOLLIE DARLING.
BARBARA'S WARNING.
THE MATCH OF THE SEASON. A FATAL PASSION. A PROFESSIONAL BEAUTY.
ONLY A LOVE STORY. NOT EASILY JEALOUS. LOVE, HONOUR AND OBEY.
POISONED ARROWS.
IN A GRASS COUNTRY. A DEAD PAST. A NORTH COUNTRY MAID.
OUT OF EDEN. KEITH'S WIFE.
FOR ONE MAN'S PLEASURE.
THE ACTOR'S WIFE.
A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE.
DAUGHTERS OF BELGRAVIA.
A LEADER OF SOCIETY.
"O Love! when Womanhood is in the flush, And Man a pure unspotted thing, His first breathed word, and her half-conscious blush, Are fair as light in Heaven--or flowers in Spring!"
"LADY BERANGER AT HOME.
A 1, Belgrave Square.--June 20th."
The windows are ablaze from top to bottom of the Belgravian mansion. The floral decorations--banks of purple and white violets, straight from the glorious Riviera, are perfect and costly.
The host and hostess are still on duty near the entrance, all ready to be photographed; so we'll just take them.
Lord Beranger is tall and thin. His hair is so fair that the silver threads thickly intersecting it are hardly visible. His eyes are blue--the very light blue that denotes either insincerity or imbecility--his smile is too bland to be genuine, his talk is measured to match his gait, and he lives the artificial life of so many of his brotherhood, to whom the opinion of "the world" is everything.
Only once she loses sight of worldliness, and permits the ghost of a frown to flit across her brow, as she whispers to her husband:
"Is Zai with Delaval? I don't see that Conway anywhere!"
"Gabrielle, can you tell me where Zai is?" she asks in icy tones. The tone and the gleam in her eyes betoken dislike, and the girl addressed pays her back with interest. There is quite a ring of malicious pleasure in her voice as she answers her stepmother.
"Zai wanted some supper after three dances with Carlton Conway, so he took her in to have some."
Lady Beranger flushes angrily, and vouchsafing no further notice of her "cross in life"--Gabrielle--walks away in her stately fashion, exchanging pleasant words or smiles as she goes, but throwing a hawk-like glance round the room all the time.
"Baby, have you seen Zai?" she questions, low but sharply.
Baby Beranger looks up into her mother's face with wide-open innocent eyes. It would be hard to credit the owner of such eyes with deceit, or such pretty red lips with fibs. Baby has such a sweet little face, all milk and roses, surmounted by little hyacinthine golden curls like a cherub's or a cupid in a valentine, and her mouth is like an opening pomegranate bud, but no matter what her face expresses, she is born and bred in Belgravia, and is Belgravian to the backbone.
"Zai, mamma!" she says innocently, "she is waltzing with Lord Delaval I think."
It is a deliberate falsehood, but it comes quite glibly from the child-like lips, and Baby, though she is only seventeen, has almost forgotten to blush when she does wrong.
"What object has Gabrielle? Why to make the best match in town. I don't believe that girl would stickle at anything."
Once more Lady Beranger breaks in on the preliminaries of this Anglo-Prussian alliance.
"Where's Trixy?" she asks.
"Gone off to bed. She said she was ill, but I think she was angry because Carlton Conway forgot his dance."
"Why did he forget his dance with her?" Lady Beranger mutters sternly, with hydra-headed suspicion gnawing her mind.
"I think Carlton Conway was out on the balcony with Zai, mamma."
Baby has never been good at languages, or at anything, in fact, that her numerous governesses have toiled to cram into her pretty little head, but
She understands these three little words quite well. She has seen them in a little book called "Useful English and German Phrases for Tourists."
Meanwhile the moon has grown fuller and rounder and yellower, and is right prodigal of its beams--and no wonder--for its tender glances, satiated as they must be with mortal beauty, have seldom fallen on a fairer thing than this girl who, Belgravian born and bred, has braved that autocrat of her class, the convenances, and with a long dark cloak thrown over her snowy ball-dress, and a large hat hiding the glory of her hair, has stolen out amidst the fresh cool foliage of the square, to talk to her lover.
A fair young girl, with a pure soft face, that owns a magnificent pair of eyes, big and grey and black lashed, a little straight nose, and a mouth sweet to distraction. Her hat has fallen back, and her hair looks all afire with ruddy gleam as the bright moonlight touches it, and even through the long loose cloak the perfection of her tall, slender figure is visible.
The man she has elected her lord and king for evermore is a man to whom most women give a second glance.
Women like height and strength in man, and this one stands over six feet two, and has broad shoulders, and carries his brown, cropped head as haughtily as if he were a prince instead of a pauper, and what in social parlance is too awful--a detrimental.
"We must take our lives into our own hands, Zai," he says very passionately, marking how sweet his love looks under the soft moonbeams. "We must run away, my child!"
One arm is round her slim waist, her cheek, lovelier and whiter and purer than a white rose, is against his breast, her small snowflake of a hand lies restfully in his strong clasp.
Zaidie Beranger starts.
"Run away, Carl?" she asks in an awed voice. Such a frightful defiance of the convenances has never been known in the annals of the Berangers, and it sounds quite too awful in her tiny pink ears. Possibly, or rather probably, she has passed hours, delightful fleeting hours, in her own little sanctum sanctorum in Belgrave Square, picturing the pretty wedding at St. George's or St. Peter's, with the organ pealing out "The voice that breathed o'er Eden," the bevy of aristocratic bridesmaids, with Gabrielle and Trixy and Baby among them, attired in cream satin and dainty lace, and overladen with baskets of Marshal Niel roses, the central and most attractive figures on the scene her Carl and herself.
It is heartrending to think of the demolition of her lovely picture.
"Run away, Zai," Carl Conway answers impetuously, for the moonbeams are falling full on her face, deepening the lustre of the sweet grey eyes, dancing and quivering on the wealth of fair hair and making her seem if possible doubly desirable in his eyes. "If they won't let us have our way quietly and comfortably, of course we must run away. Shall we let them part us for ever? Could you bear it, my Zai? Could you know that for the rest of our natural existence that we shall never see each other, speak to one another, kiss each other again, and live?"
She listens rapt, as she always listens to each word and tone of the beloved voice, and she fully realises the intense misery of the situation.
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