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.