Lord Delaval has shunned all his old haunts, turned the cold shoulder to his numerous loves, avoided even looking at the professional and other beauties, and evinced an utter devotion to one woman—his wife—a fact which has amazed Society, amongst whom his fickleness has been a by-word hitherto.
Prophecies as to the duration of such strange and praiseworthy conduct are rife.
Will he stick to it?
The “No’s” preponderate considerably over the “Yes’s,” but time will reveal which of the gossips are the best judges of human nature.
When the season is over, they come down to Delaval Court—a magnificent place in Hampshire—and here among the beautiful sylvan shades, Zai discovers that she has really fallen over head and ears in love with her handsome husband, but with a graver, even tenderer, sentiment than mere being “in love.” She is grown so fragile that she looks as if a breath of wind would blow her away, but her heart beats stronger than ever with two feelings—love for the man she has married, and love for the child which is to perfect her life; and Lord Delaval, about whom is a deal of indolent sybaritical self-indulgence, has his “mystic” summer too.
He really finds it quite delicious to talk of the future as he lies stretched at full length on the cool green velvety sward at his wife’s feet, in the twilight and the starlight, with the subtle fragrance of a myriad flowers pervading their senses, and the Channel sweeping before them like a great phantom sea.
Somehow the stars seem to shine with a holier, tenderer radiance; the roses sigh out greater sweetness; the waters murmur more gladly to him than they have ever done before in his life.
True, that in these charmed moments he talks principally of town topics; and she scarcely comprehends the gist of the gossip. Belgravian born and bred as she is, she has never in fact really comprehended the world of London well, but she likes to hear her husband tell about it, simply because it is the world in which he has lived so much.
But somehow, to Zai, the theatres, the balls, Hurlingham, the fashionable resorts, the feverish dissipation among which she passed nineteen years seem distant and even myths now. She cares nothing for town, save the Park, and even that cannot vie, in her eyes, with the delightful green shades and sunlit bits that Delaval Court owns.
She does not feel the least interested in the new professional beauties or the American stars that crop up, to make themselves nine days’ wonders at the risk of a life-long reputation. Zai has, in fact, a foolish horror of women being held up to public view and subjected to public admiration and criticism. Her notions are a little obsolete, perhaps, for neither Lord nor Lady Beranger are good, simple folk, and have plenty of the “go-ahead” sentiments of their fellow aristocrats, and their daughters have certainly not been brought up as quietly and carefully as they might have been.