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CHAPTER II.
SANDILANDS

 
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
’Tis woman’s whole existence.”
 

It must be a rose-tinted existence. So outsiders fancy as they look at Sandilands from under the shadowy light and shade that falls across some mossy bank, but before they venture an opinion on the subject, let them pause. The judging of other folks’ lives by their external surroundings is the most deceptive work possible.

Sandilands is a paradise, but, like the original Paradise, it has a serpent crawling over its flowers – nay, it has more than one.

“Going down to Sandilands just for a breath of fresh air, you know, after the stuffiness of Town,” Lady Beranger imparts to the Dowager Marchioness of Damesbury.

But the Dowager knows better. She knows that Lady Beranger delights in the stuffiness of Town, especially in the season, and that Sandilands is only a decoy duck for Lord Delaval.

So she shakes her well-known curls solemnly at the fibber and says nothing, but thinks ever so much the more. She is an astute old aristocrat, old – Heaven knows how old – but as festive as a young thing of one score, and always to be found at country houses, as a sort of standing dish.

They do say – they who say everything – that she never spends any of her own income, but is kept in board and lodging by the friends whom she honours by feeding at their expense.

“We are only going down for a week, couldn’t we persuade you, dear Marchioness, to run down with us?”

Yes. The Dowager accepts with pleasure. She is a bit of a wag. She has lived so long in the world that she has grown a little cynical and humorous over its fads and follies, and Lady Beranger amuses her immensely. It’s such fun to think that Lady Beranger believes she takes her in, when all the while she reads Lady B. through and through, and knows that she is only asked down to Sandilands for mamma to talk to, while her daughters catch the eligibles.

The day after the Berangers come down to Sandilands is a day of days. A sort of day on which one feels satisfied with one’s-self and with one’s neighbours, and a day on which we forget all the bad days, simply because this one is so exceptionally beautiful.

A mite of a breeze swishes by, just to stir up the leaves overhead out of their laziness, and to make them grumble monotonously at being disturbed. The big brown bees greedily devour the faces of the fragrant roses, the morning is dressed up in pale crimson, the scent of flowers weighs down the babyish wings of the air, and a couple of pinkish, purplish clouds stand like motionless pillars of Heaven.

It feels to the most unromantic like a hasty snatch of golden splendour gone astray from Eden, an hour in which “Society” forgets its paltry ambitions and heart-burnings, and feels as if there is yet some balm in Gilead, and a life beyond Tophet, in which human hearts will have peace and rest.

Zai has slipped out through the long French casement that opens on the lawn. Gabrielle has contrived to get Lord Delaval into the music-room, where she feeds him with passionate French love-songs, in a low, rich contralto. Trixy, leaning back, fair and indolent, and a trifle indifferent, listens to Archibald Hamilton’s prosy discourse on the Land Bill. Baby has meandered down the flowery paths with young Hargreaves, the good-looking village Vet, on pretence of showing him an ill-conditioned Persian cat, but in reality to amuse herself with him faute de mieux.

So Zai, once out of sight, flies swiftly through the shrubberies, and only pauses when the far end of the grounds is reached.

It is just from this particular spot that a glimpse of Elm Lodge can be had.

She leans languidly against an old oak, with the grass, which is yet virgin from the Sun-god’s kisses, making a dainty green carpet for her little feet.

Poor little Zai! A daughter of Belgravia is a traitor to her creed, for she is honestly, desperately in love.

If Carl Conway could see her at this moment, men are such slaves to beauty that he would be doubly enamoured of his little sweetheart. The background of dark green glossy foliage throws up almost too vividly her lovely white flesh tints and her slender statuesque figure. Her hands are folded loosely together, and a far-off expression lurks in her big, luminous grey eyes, half veiled by broad, drooping lids and long, curling lashes.

Zai is dreaming – “only dreaming.”

Her dreams are:

 
“Dim and faint as the mists that break
At sunrise from a mountain lake,”
 

but they are evidently pleasant, for a soft smile passes over her lips, and her face seems to overflow with sunshine, while all manner of entrancing dimples spring into life, and make a “parfait amour” of her as our neighbours across the Channel say.

Perhaps an acute physiognomist would find something wanting in the fair sweet, girlish face, a power, a firmness, character, in fact, but few of us are true physiognomists, even if acute ones, and very few eyes, especially masculine ones, would discover flaws in the entrancing beauty that has caught Carl Conway’s worldly heart.

There is a wistful look in Zai’s face however, which does not deteriorate from her attractions. It has come with the thought that just there over the clump of swaying pines, is the house where Crystal Meredyth lives, and where Carl is staying.

“Zai!”

Zai has been a fixture against the oak tree for an hour, and so absorbed in her thoughts that the far-off expression lingers in her glance as she turns slowly round.

“Yes, Gabrielle.”

“Your mother wants you. Her ladyship’s keen instinct divined that in all probability you were mooning away your time out here.”

“Mooning, Gabrielle, what a word.”

“A very good word, and an expressive one. All Belgravia speaks slang now; it has become quite fashionable to imitate the coal-heavers and the horsey men, and I don’t dislike it myself. It is far better than the refined monotonous twaddle of those horrible convenances.”

“Do you talk slang to Lord Delaval?” Zai asks with a smile.

“Pas si bête! I leave that till I have landed my fish!”

“I often wonder, Gabrielle, if you really care for that man, or if you are only trying to catch him.”

“Both, dear. The first feeling naturally induces the last inclination. But we can’t stay chattering here; lunch is ready and the stepmother wants you.”

“What for?” asks Zai, with unusual petulance.

She does not want to leave this charmed spot, with the big trees arching overhead, the swallows foolishly whirling round and round up in the sky, the sunlight falling on hollow and glade and dell, and just over there the house where her Carl dwells.

“How should I know? Lady Beranger is not likely to confide her desires to such a heretic as myself; perhaps she does not think it quite the thing for the flower of her flock to stand like a marble effigy of love and patience for the under-gardener to gape at.”

“As if I care who stares at me!” Zai mutters with unwonted recklessness.

“Of course you don’t, pas le moins du monde! Zaidie Beranger, a modern Galatea, that only her Pygmalion, Carl Conway, can rouse into feeling or life, must naturally be as impervious as the Sphinx to curiosity,” Gabrielle says mockingly, with an expressive shrug of her shoulders that, together with a slight accent, denote that she has only a part claim to English nationality.

“Don’t chaff, Gabrielle, it is most unlady-like,” Zai says, imitating Lady Beranger’s slow solemn voice, and both burst out laughing.

“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 anybody’s 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 t’adore 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 mother’s 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 mother’s 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 mother’s birth is the skeleton in Gabrielle’s 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 can’t think why, since we are all Lord Beranger’s 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 Beranger’s 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 Beranger’s 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 Beranger’s 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 Zai’s 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 Gabrielle’s 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, Gabrielle’s 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 stepmother’s 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.”

“Can anything – anything make you really happy, Gabrielle?” Trixy had asked one day, years ago, when she and her two sisters had enjoyed, to their heart’s content, a big box at Drury Lane, and a pantomime with a transformation scene that had worked up their young minds into a fever of excitement, and Gabrielle had sat through it all without a change on her dark face.

“Happy,” she had said, “can anything give real happiness? Of happiness in a positive state I knew nothing, my dear properly-brought-up young sister. I am only able to make my comparison by a greater or lesser feeling of misery. I dare say I often shock you by my sentiments, but anyone who has been kicked about like a football in this world, as I have, is not likely to look at things in the same light as you Belgravian girls. I believe you all regard with suspicion the poor wight for whom life hasn’t been all couleur de rose, and think it a shocking instance of depravity of human nature if one should not be intensely content in such a remarkably pleasant world.”

“Where have you learned such a queer way of thinking, Gabrielle?” Zai and Baby demanded in a breath.

“Where, indeed?” Gabrielle was not going to say. Pas si bête! She averts her head and holds her peace, and is quite sharp enough to know that to the little, pink, unsullied ears, it would not do to whisper the secrets of the past, when, almost a gutter gamin, she had picked up notions of life and its thousand joys and ten thousand miseries. A little red and white pierrotte’s garb, in the rollicking mad Carnival time – a gaudy tinselled box of cheap and nasty bon-bons – a fragment of flimsy, soiled, but flaring ribbon – or a battered artificial flower to deck her coal-black plaits. These pretty well had been her catalogue of joys, but the miseries were just countless in the bare and squalid room au cinquième among the roofs and the sparrows – a mother always meretricious in her youth and beauty, but absolutely awful with faded cheeks and haggard eyes, dying the death of a daughter of Heth – without one prayer on her pallid mouth – without one hope in her reckless breast. Then – the woeful absence of bread, the continual presence of drink.

For can there be a spectacle more sickening than a drunken woman – dead for the nonce to shame and disgrace; the idiotic glare in the eye, the foolish simper on the grinning lips, the flow of words that pour unchecked from a debased mind?

When Gabrielle’s memory conjures up all this she closes her black eyes tightly to try and shut out the horrible past, and yet she loves her Bohemia still, and hates Belgravia, save the one particular spot in it where Lord Delaval lives and moves, and has his being.

She is thinking of him now under the arching elms. Athwart their fluttering leaves she can see his blond aristocratic face, and she longs to be back to hear his voice, the languid accents of which are harmony to her ears.

“Shall I go in now and say you prefer dreaming away the hours here to cotelettes soubise and cold chicken?” she asks, breaking in rather sharply on the long silence which has fallen, and during which she sees plainly enough that poor little love-sick Zai has entirely forgotten her proximity even. She is wonderfully practical is Gabrielle Beranger, a child of the south, for her maternal ancestors were pure Marseillaise. She is brimful of passion, but the passion is sufficiently material to permit of love of Lord Delaval and love of the flesh pots to go hand-in-hand, and it occurs to her at this moment, in the midst of her reverie under the elms, that the cotelettes soubise and Cailles à point d’asperges do not improve by growing cold.

“I am not day-dreaming, Gabrielle. Cannot one be allowed to think, even, without being called to account for it?” Zai asks wearily.

“Not when the thoughts are, to say the least, very foolish ones. When the subject of them is one Carlton Conway, jeune amoureux at the Bagatelle, and very much the reverse of one of Lady Beranger’s pet eligibles.”

A swift colour like a deep rose pink sweeps over Zai’s face, a colour that creeps up to the roots of her ruddy chestnut hair, and dyes her fair lily-like throat. The name Gabrielle whispers has a magical charm about it, for besides the blush, it evokes the softest of love-lights into Zai’s grey eyes.

“I will go in with you if you like,” she says in a voice that sounds quite meek and deprecatory, and Gabrielle, as she glances at her, feels sorry that her careless words should hurt this loving, tender heart. If there is a soft spot in her heart for one of her own sex it is for this step-sister of hers. Trixy she hates, and Baby she despises, but Zai, although like the others, born and bred in Belgravia, is of quite another mould. But though Gabrielle is fond of Zai, she will not hesitate to plunge the dagger (metaphorically) into her heart if the time should come when such would serve her own purposes.

“I didn’t mean to chaff or worry just now, Zai,” she says quite softly, with a humility that is quite foreign to her, “but you know you wear your heart so much on your sleeve, child, that no wonder daws will peck.”

Zai’s lids droop, and her lips twitch as if fully aware of her shortcomings. She is desperately in love, and has a simple nature in spite of Belgravia’s training, and she is much too loyal to dream of denying the existence of a love that is part and parcel of her nature. Her passion for Carl Conway is like the air of Heaven to her, invisible, intangible, but yet it encircles her soul, and is just the Alpha and Omega of everything.

“You see, Zai, the governor and her ladyship want a pull up and not a drag down – the family finances are so seedy that they want rich men for sons-in-law. Even a German prince wouldn’t find favour in their sight. They mean Trixy and you to marry Lord Delaval and Archibald Hamilton; they don’t care in the least which marries which, so long as both good partis are secured. Baby will follow suit, directly you are both safely settled down with your money-bags. She is of that infantile sort that Shortland is supposed to have a fancy for, so probably the parents will go in for strawberry leaves for their youngest born. Zai, don’t you pity any man who marries Baby? She is the greatest little caution in life.”

“And what are they going to do with you, Gabrielle?” Zai asks, ignoring the hits at Baby.

“With me, oh, nothing. Nought can always take care of itself, for it never comes to harm, you know,” Gabrielle answers bitterly, “but you are the one object of solicitude to Lady Beranger just now. Of course, with all her ambitious ideas, it does seem hard for you to subside into the wife of an actor, who has nothing to recommend him except a good-looking face, and a pleasant way of making love – a rôle he goes through nearly every day of his life, so that practice has made it perfect.”

“His chief recommendation is —himself!” Zai whispers with quivering lips, and another hot and fleeting blush.

“Well, yes. Je ne dis pas autrement! I haven’t a word to say against him. He is always nice to my face, though I don’t believe he likes me in his heart. You see I am not of your sort, Zai.”

Zai smiles softly at this, and then, with a woman’s way of harping on love subjects when in love herself, says suddenly:

“I wonder if Baby will marry Lord Delaval one of these days?”

“Lord Delaval!” echoes Gabrielle, with a start and a frown. “And why on earth should she marry him?”

“Because he has been fond of Baby as long as I can remember. When we were all children together, he used to fight her battles, and Baby at five was the most quarrelsome little monkey that you can imagine. She does not care for him now, but used to love sitting on his knee, and patting his cheeks, and on revient toujours, you know.”

“No! I don’t know,” Gabrielle answers with acerbity.

Her big black eyes dilate as she takes in each unwelcome word and her full red lip curls scornfully.

“I do hate stupid little reminiscences of childhood, Zai.

 
‘I remember! I remember! when my little lovers came!
With a lily or a cherry, or a new invented game!’
 

Did you ever hear such inane trash as this sort of thing, Zai! Are you a simpleton or are you trying to throw dust in my eyes? We know each other too well for that. Let us speak truth always. I like truth under all circumstances, even if the hearing of it crushes my heart and spoils my life; but of course let those live on lies who like them!”

And she laughs, a harsh unpleasant laugh, that Balzac and Georges Sand have taught her, and to which is coupled a natural capability of catching at the under currents of life.

“I never was a hypocrite, Gabrielle and I hate falsehoods as much as you do,” Zai answers rather hotly.

“Then why do you pretend that it’s Baby and not you that will become Lady Delaval by-and-by, perhaps.”

Zai faces her with a bright flush on her cheek, and a flash in her soft grey eyes.

“I Lady Delaval! Gabrielle, you must be mad to hint such a thing. Am I a child or a doll to be handed over to a man I would rather die than marry – if he were one of the Royalties and three times better looking than he is! Lord Delaval is an insipid dandy, with a weak face and – and just the opposite of what I admire!”

“Insipid, weak! Your ideas of him are just prejudice, Zai. You have heard your oracle run him down, and have taken in everything as if it was gospel. I am a bit of a physiognomist and I dare be sworn Lord Delaval never made up his mind to arrive at anything or anybody and failed!”

“He will fail ignominiously if he ever does me the honour of thinking of me as Lady Delaval! Gabrielle you know I shall never marry any one if I don’t marry Carl!”

Gabrielle shrugs her grand shoulders again, while a shade of contempt passes over her mouth as she looks at her companion. Zai looks so fragile and weak – so unfit for any contest of life, a piece of rustic waxwork, in fact, to be carefully handled. She grows quite white as she glances, thinking how easily Lady Beranger will arrange the match if Lord Delaval is willing – Lord Delaval, whom she loves so desperately that she would rather shoot him dead on the spot than let any other woman call him husband.

Insipid! Weak! the words rail her as they recur to her mind, since it is Lord Delaval’s very force of character that is his greatest charm in her eyes, for she is of a nature to adore daring, even if unscrupulous and exercised in dishonourable cause. It is Delaval’s intense masculinity that has fascinated her, for before she came in contact with him, she had never met a man of an equal amount of vigour, combined with so much personal beauty. – Gabrielle Beranger is one of those girls that Mephistopheles calls of super-sensuous refinement. And weakness of character has something repulsive in it for her.

Her senses are too susceptible, and she has a habit of filtering her emotions through the medium of an imagination which is rather dangerously material.

“I hope you’ll prove yourself a paragon of strength, Zai,” she says, with a mocking smile. “Lord Delaval, to my idea, has such an absolute will that I sometimes think he has taken for himself the motto of Philip of Spain, ‘Time and I against any two.’ If I were you, child, I should take him and bowl Carl Conway over. There isn’t much of the right stuff in your beloved Carl, but in Lord Delaval there are possibilities of something far beyond the ordinary. Do you know, I think he and Randolph Churchill are much of a muchness, and you must acknowledge Lord Randolph is delicious; there’s a go about him which I love, and which makes up for his being a Conservative.”

“Gabrielle, if you admire Lord Delaval so much, why don’t you try and marry him yourself?” Zai asks suddenly.

Gabrielle blushes, blushes a fierce, unmistakable red; she does not often blush, for this is a habit less known in Bohemia than Belgravia even, but the blush after all is only the tell-tale of the storm of feeling within, and her voice is hard as stone as she answers:

“I! you forget I am Gabrielle Beranger, with a lot of muddy current in my veins, and only my face as my fortune. Lord Delaval probably regards me as a nought in creation, a social mistake; handsome and fastidious, he can look for a wife among the Royalties, if he likes.”

“Anyway, you must confess you are awfully in love with him, Gabrielle,” Zai cries, with a mischievous laugh, and once more Gabrielle colours like a rose.

“Silly child! I know my position too well for that.”