LITMIR.BIZ

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denying it; he has certainly made love to her, under the cover of some incomprehensible doctrine all about “affinities,” in which he believes no whit himself; he has beguiled her affections, or rather her passions, by the sweet words that are as sweet now as when Adam whispered them to his Eve in Paradise; he has beguiled her by soft treacherous kisses, in which the beak of the cruel vulture is hid beneath the tender touch of the dove, until this woman has paid him back by an enduring but terrible love that is not only a nuisance but may be worse.

      Why Lord Delaval has made love to her, really not caring for her, is not difficult to tell. He adores beauty, and Gabrielle has plenty of it; her other attraction to him has been her intense contrast to the other women of the London world, with whom his flirtations have been as numerous as stars in a southern sky.

      With her big black gipsy eyes, her demonstrative manner, her bizarre words and ways, and with the very vehemence and intensity of the passion that has repelled him even while it attracted him, his erratic fancy has been caught, but never enchained. He rather dislikes her now; and, after this, what breath can fill and re-inspire a dead fancy?

      “Lord Delaval, is it true that you are going to marry Zai?” she asks for the third time, in a quiet hushed voice, that yet teems with a keen concentrated scorn that she means to cut like a whipcord, and from which he recoils angrily, for he is a thorough Epicurean in his liking for pleasantness, and a mental tussle disturbs his equanimity.

      “It is quite true!” he says, rather haughtily, but when he sees her turn whiter than before, and her mouth quiver with pain, he relents. “I should have told you before, but Zai wished it kept quiet!”

      “She did, did she? She knew she has acted a treacherous, deceitful part. Good Heavens! what are you marrying her for?”

      “Because I love her!” he answers coolly, “and because she loves me!”

      “Loves you – you! Why all London knows of her love for Carlton Conway!”

      He shrinks a little from this, and the colour mounts hotly to his face, but soon recedes again, leaving him quite pallid.

      “All London knows a good deal that does not exist!”

      “Il n’y’a pas de fumée sans feu,” she says sneeringly.

      “Zai is too good, too pure, to deceive any man,” he answers quietly, but the remark about Carl rankles in his mind. “You don’t understand your sister, Miss Beranger, or you would not depreciate your own judgment of human nature by believing her capable of deceit, or falsity, or evil of any kind! If all women were like her the world would be a paradise!”

      “Fools’ paradise!” she cries contemptuously. “I certainly never gave you credit for being hoodwinked by a few babyish ways and innocent smiles! a man of your mind!” she goes on frankly – a frankness which is the very essence of consummate flattery – but he is not to be taken in.

      “Thanks for the pretty compliment! it would turn my head if I was younger, coming from such fresh scarlet lips,” he replies with a Jesuitical smile; “but I am getting quite old, and as hard as adamant; not even your approbation can make my mind rise to the height of folly which would discover flaws in angels or paint a lily black.”

      “I really think you have begun to hate me!” she says passionately, with tears welling up in her eyes; “Have you?”

      He looks at her for a moment steadily. He has thought her face, in spite of its beauty, false, wicked, and meretricious. He sees it now lovely in its creamy tints, its superb eyes, its chiselled features, and its waves of dusky hair, and withal a soft and tender expression leavening the whole.

      “No!” he answers slowly. “I don’t hate you at all. It depends on yourself, Gabrielle, if I hate you later!”

      She marks at once the relenting in his features, and, like the busy bee, improves the shining hour.

      “You’ll never hate me, for pity’s sake!” she cries, and flinging herself down on the path she wreathes her arms round his knees, while her fierce black eyes, with a good deal of the tiger-cat in their depths, seem to devour greedily his handsome face. “Delaval! who will love you as I do? who will hunger and thirst for your every word and look like me? Oh if you were ever so poor and humble, but still yourself, I would slave for you, die for you! only – only – I could not bear that any other woman should cling to you like this!” and with a sudden spring she throws herself on his breast, panting, breathless, quivering from head to foot. “Delaval, you have pretended to love me. You have kissed me, and you have made me love you, till I am mad with misery, till I lose sight of all that women hold dear – pride – reserve – delicacy! For mercy’s sake don’t give me up, and place an insuperable bar between us two!”

      But he coolly puts her aside – not roughly, but very determinedly.

      “So!” she says, standing tall and erect before him. “So! words are of no avail. Love is a theme you have heard so often that its name has an empty sound! You are an honourable man, Lord Delaval! Your conscience can never prick you. For you have never acted basely, cruelly, to anyone in your life!” she cries, with a sneer.

      He feels quite an aversion to her as he answers: “Men may be dishonourable towards women, perhaps. But rely upon it, it is the woman’s fault if they are so! Men may act cruelly, basely, but I’ll be sworn baseness and cruelty have been forced from them in order to check a woman’s undisciplined feelings, in order to recall a woman to the decorum which belongs to her sex! I think, Miss Beranger, since I am not honoured by your good opinion, my best move will be to say ‘Good-bye!’ ”

      She feels that she has played her game wretchedly. The man is a vain man; and instead of reaching his heart through fair means, she has lost her temper, wounded his amour propre, and placed a further barrier betwixt them. Once more she is down on her knees, her clasped hands lifted, her face quivering with emotion. Gabrielle is a born actress; but now her acting is supremely good, for there is a deal of genuine feeling in it.

      “Delaval! Forgive! forgive! I was mad to speak as I did! Oh I could kill myself for it! Say you forgive me, Delaval!”

      But he stands motionless and impassive still.

      “You won’t? Have you grown utterly hard and cold and strange then to me? Have you no mercy, no pity, no compunction? Can you face me like a stock or a stone, and trample on my heart like this? Don’t you know that you gave me the right to love you – by your kisses, by the specious words that have fallen from your lips? And I believed in them! I believed that some day I should be your wife! Oh Delaval! if I have showed an undisciplined mind, a want of decorum, it is your fault. You are a man, I but a poor weak loving woman. You are the stronger, I but the weaker vessel. It is you who should have saved me from myself. It is you who should have placed a dam against the sluice-gates of a love that is going to wreck my whole life! Delaval, dearest, say, have you never cared for me? Has it all been untrue, a hideous delusion, a chimera of my own brain? – a device of the Devil to lull me in a slumber of Paradise only to awake to a full sense of his tortures? Oh, if I could die! If I could die! For I have nothing to live for now – nothing! I shall die; for I could not live and see another come between my Heaven and me! I could curse her!”

      Lord Delaval winces a little at this. Curses are hard words to come near the soft little tender girl he is going to marry, and whose words to him are as shy as the light of a star.

      But, just for once, he is taken rather aback. Shoals of women have loved him, and reproached him, but never like this. It is the first time he has evoked such a fierce tornado, and for a moment it staggers him. Then he becomes conscious of a feeling of thankfulness that this woman, beautiful and adoring, is not going to be his wife!

      “I can do nothing but regret!” he says gently. “My faith is pledged to your sister, and – and – forgive me if I say that I do not wish to recall it! It is kinder to you, and kinder to myself, to speak openly!”

      After this, nothing can be said, she feels.

      She rises slowly from her knees, and stands a little apart. After all, she is not bad, she is not lost to shame; and it dyes

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