But really I only came out for a whiff of fresh air; the house oppresses me. But there never is a bit of freedom at home, my mother never leaves me alone.
Perhaps she has right on her side, just now. You are tanning your skin in this broiling sun, and looking ill from the heat.
What can it signify how I look? Zai cries contemptuously.
Only that Lord Delaval was deploring this morning how white and thin you were looking. He even hinted that you had gone off a little, although you have had only one season in London.
Lord Delaval! Gabrielle. Pray, what right has he to indulge in personal remarks about me, and how much can his opinion affect me, do you think?
Gabrielle colours angrily.
As for that, Lord Delaval is not isolated in the place he holds in your estimation. What is anybodys opinion to you, you silly love-sick child, except one individual, and he is what Lady Beranger calls, a detrimental, and the object of her unmitigated dislike.
If you have only come out to vex me, Gabrielle, I think you had much better have stayed indoors and entertained Lord Delaval with more of those songs. Mamma calls them positively indecent; she says they are simply a declaration under cover of music, and that thoroughbred girls should be ashamed to sing them.
I heard you singing to Lord Delaval this morning, Gabrielle,
Ah! je tadore mon âme:
Ah! je te donne tout! tout!
Et toi? veux tu etre infame
Ah! veux tu me rendre fou?
and, you must say, it sounds like a declaration!
A deep crimson wave sweeps over the stormy face of Gabrielle Beranger, making her look like a beautiful fiend. A frown gathers unmistakably on her forehead, and the large but well-formed hand, that holds her parasol, clutches the handle like a vice, with a passion that the owner does not care to conceal.
So Lady Beranger said that? How dare she hit at my mothers birth as she is always doing. I am sure it does not show her to have any of the delicate feelings which aristocrats are supposed to monopolise! And after all, she only took my mothers leavings.
How ridiculously sensitive you are on the point of your maternal history, Gabrielle. I wish I could make you forget all about it, that you might not remind one of it so often, Zai says wearily.
For Gabrielle Beranger, like many of us, has a decided cross. And that cross is the social status of the French bouquetière that Lord Beranger had elevated to his bosom and position in the days of his hot-headed, unwary youth. No one would believe such a peccadillo of him now starch as his own stick-ups; full of proprieties, and a slave to the voice of the world.
Her dead mothers birth is the skeleton in Gabrielles cupboard that is dragged out for her own and her step-sisters benefit continually, and yet, this same sensitiveness is curiously inconsistent with her self-complacency and undeniable pretension.
Yes, Gabrielle, you are absurdly sensitive on some things. I cant think why, since we are all Lord Berangers daughters, Zai murmurs carelessly, pulling off absently the leaves from a little bough of willow, and wondering what Carl and Crystal are amusing themselves with. Perhaps, ah! the thought makes her feel quite sick! Crystal Meredyth is regaling Carl on the same sort of passionate music as Gabrielle has favoured Lord Delaval with.
Yes; we are all Lord Berangers daughters; but you all have the sangre azul running through your veins, while I have the muddy current of the Quartier Latin to boast of; and then again, all the money in the place, little as it is, came with my step-mother, and Papa and I are dependents on her bounty.
Zai does not answer, the subject is threadbare, and silence is so pleasant with the mighty elms sending long shadows across the emerald grass, with the foliage rustling gently, and fleecy white clouds scudding along the sapphire sky, tempering the amber heat.
The muddy current that Gabrielle hates is not the only misfortune Lord Berangers early imprudence has brought her. He had married a second time, and the three girls, Beatrice, Zaidie and Mirabelle were no longer in actual babyhood when Gabrielle was brought from the French people who had charge of her to Belgravia brought with all the faults and failings of bourgeoisie, faults and failings that to Lady Berangers notions are too dreadful.
It is far easier to eradicate bad temper, or want of principle, than to put savoire faire, or a due sense of the convenances, into a girl, she always says, but all the same she has tried to do her duty by this step-daughter of hers, in her cold steely way, and is quite convinced that she has been the means of snatching the brand from the burning, and saving a soul from perdition.
As Gabrielle and Zai stand side by side, quite a family resemblance can be traced between them. But it is only a general resemblance after all; for they are really as dissimilar as light and darkness.
Gabrielle has none of Zais angelic type. A celebrated French author once said that womankind are divided into three classes Angels, Imbeciles, Devils.
Zai is an angel. Gabrielle is certainly not an imbecile, therefore she must be in the last class.
Both the sisters are tall, and both are slender, and both bear upon them an unmistakably aristocratic air, though Gabrielles claims to it are only partial. She inherits the creamy skin, the coal black heavy tresses, and the bold passionful eyes of her French mother, and in spite of her ripe and glowing tints of opal and rose, and her full pouting lips, she is cast in a much harder mould than Zai or the other sisters.
Gabrielle is in fact too hard and self-reliant for a woman, whose very helplessness is her chief charm, and in whom the clinging confiding nature that yearns for sympathy and support appeals to the masculine heart as most graceful and touching of all things, for timidity is the most taking attribute of the fair sex, though it has its attendant sufferings and inconveniences.
The self-assertion, and freedom, and independence that there is so much chatter about amongst our women now-a-days is only a myth after all, for a real refined womanly nature closes like the leaf of the sensitive plant at unaccustomed contact with the world.
But there are women, and women, and men who fancy each sort according to good or bad taste. There is none of the sensitive plant about Gabrielle Beranger anyway. She is of a really independent nature that will assert itself per fas et ne fas a nature that can brook no control, and that throws off all conventional shackles with barely concealed contempt. She is a Bohemian all over, she has belonged to the Bedouins of civilisation from her youth up, and has run rampant through a labyrinth of low life, and the tastes that go hand in hand with it, but on the principle that all things are good for something, Gabrielles hardness and self-reliance, united to acuteness, have served her during her career when a nobler but weaker nature might have sunk beyond redemption.
Her early years have unfitted her for the Belgravian life that fate has chalked out, and a treadmill of social duties proves so tiresome that no paraphernalia of luxury dearly as she loves it reconciles her to her lot. At least it did not do so until she fell head over ears in love with the fair, languid, and brilliant peer the Earl of Delaval.
Her wilful, fiery spirit revolts at being a sort of pariah to her stepmother and her stepmothers swell relatives, the swells whom (until she knew Lord Delaval) her revolutionary spirit despised utterly. She would give worlds if the man she loves was a Bohemian like herself, and whatever is true in her is comprised in her feelings for him.
She is an enigma to her sisters, whose promising education has to a certain extent reduced ideas and feelings within the radius of propriety, and taught them, at any rate, the eleventh Commandment that all Belgravia knows,
Thou shalt not be found out.