[Gutenberg 52606] • Daughters of Belgravia; vol. 3 of 3

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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{2} 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{3} 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.{4}

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!{5}

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.