“I knew when I first saw you that you and I were exactly alike in our ideas and feelings. Somehow I felt it directly we spoke. I knew that you would never give to any man that which was not his—for you are dreadfully proud and cold and hard at the core, and when I found out, a day or two ago, that unconsciously I had learned to love you—do you hear me?—to love you with my whole being—when I found out that nothing short of an entire surrender of your soul—of yourself—would satisfy me, I trembled at the vision of bliss or torture that possibly lies before me—look at me, Gabrielle!”
There is a quiet command in his voice which she never attempts to resist. To everyone else sharp, caustic, cold, and full of sneers, to this man she is the humblest of slaves; his, to do with as he wills. A daughter of Belgravia, with Lady Beranger’s worldly-wise notions dinned into her ears, and with worldly, ambitious women examples for her in daily life—of this man she wants nothing, only himself; to gain his love, and above all, to be let to love him, she would fling all other considerations to the four winds without a murmur or a regret.
In a sort of maze, she lifts up a pair of big, incredulous black eyes to him now—eyes so soft and wistful—so filled with newborn light that no one would believe they belonged to Gabrielle Beranger.
She forgets everything but him and the giant fact that he is hers. In spite of her peculiar nature and practical turn, she has pictured, like most of her sex, a paradise of love about this man, and lost in the golden vision of Love’s paradise gained, she lets her usual scepticism slip out of her mind, and only knows that Lord Delaval, whom she has worshipped for three years with the feverish fierceness of her Bedouin nature, is wooing her—strangely and abruptly, but in the sweetest, subtlest way that a man can woo. Gabrielle is sharp as a needle, yet it never crosses her brain in her lovesick frenzy that real feeling is not eloquent in expression, and that when a man really craves anything and trembles lest he should not grasp it, flowers of rhetoric are usually denied to his tongue.
She sits spellbound, with drooping lids. Literally nothing seems to live in her, save a vivid sense of his words, and the intensity of their meaning. Her keen intelligence is lulled to sleep, her habit of doubting is dead, pro tem. She does not try to subject his protestations to any analytical process; they only seem to float through her mind in a kind of soft mist, and she sits white now and silent, and feeling, as she thinks she can never feel again, content, almost in a dream, and yet full, awfully full, of an intensified vitality.
“I want to tell you, Gabrielle,” Lord Delaval says very low, while his audacious arm steals round her magnificent shoulders and her crimson cheek is pillowed on his breast, “that I love you as no one has ever loved you, and that I am determined to win from you all that I wish! I have never been baulked yet, if I determined to reach anything. If I preserve my will intact, I shall not accept anything but the whole from you, the whole, sweetheart—do you hear? Of your heart and soul and body I will have all—all! or die unsatisfied. My hope to gain all this is by knowledge of your nature. It is you—you that I love, not a part of you, not an ideal being of you, not what you represent to other men’s eyes, but what you are with your thousand imperfections, even blots. Nothing, Gabrielle, will change me towards you, for I have only given you what is yours by the law of affinity, and you, Gabrielle—well, I defy you to say that you are not wholly and solely mine.”
It is masterful wooing this, insolent in fact, and it would revolt most women. Zai and even Baby, with her fast proclivities, would not understand it, and it would jar on their thoroughbred natures, but Gabrielle likes it.
The whole thing fascinates her—a visible shiver runs over her. Lord Delaval feels the shiver, and his arm draws her more closely to him, while the ghost of a cynical smile crosses his mouth. He stoops his head and looks full into her eyes, and then his lips rest upon hers, long and passionately, while her heart beats as wildly as a bird in the grasp of a fowler.
Luckily for her she has been partially imbued with a respect for Lady Beranger’s beloved convenances and bienséances. Luckily for her, Belgravian morals, though they may be lax, are too worldly-wise not to know a limit.
Even while Lord Delaval’s kiss lingers on her mouth she pulls herself away from him, angry with herself that she has allowed that long passionate caress, and yet feeling that she would have been more than mortal if she had resisted it. But she resolves to sift him, au fond, to find out at once if in truth the man is only laughing at her or whether, oh blessed thought, she has caught his errant fancy or “love” as she calls it.