Alexander Fraser - Daughters of Belgravia; vol 1 of 3

All the élite in London know these bits of pasteboard well, and all the élite like to avail themselves of Lady Beranger’s invitation, for Lady Beranger’s house is one of the swellest in town, and offers multifarious attractions.

Everything is en règle this fine June night, when myriads of stars keep high jubilee in the sky, and a round, yellow moon like a big blubber ball, promises to develop into yet greater brightness as the hours wear on.

The windows are ablaze from top to bottom of the Belgravian mansion. The floral decorations – banks of purple and white violets, straight from the glorious Riviera, are perfect and costly.

Achille, Lord Beranger’s famous French chef , has surpassed himself in dainty concoctions. Gunter has sent in buckets of his world-renowned ice, and Covent Garden has been ransacked for choicest fruits.

One little aside before we go any further. All this magnificence and lavishness is “on tic.” The Berangers, like a good many others of their class, are as poor as church mice; but “Society” – that English Juggernauth that crushes everything under its foot – demands that its votaries shall even ruin themselves to satisfy its claims – but revenons à nos moutons .

Everybody who is anybody is here. All the lords and the ladies, the honourables and dishonourables, the hangers on to aristocratic skirts, the nouveau riche , the pet parsons and actors, eligibles and detrimentals, and the black sheep, that go towards composing the “upper current.” The spacious rooms teem with handsome thoroughbred men, and lovely well- dressed ? – women. And yet “they come! they come,” though the clocks are chiming midnight and Coote and Tinney’s Band has been pouring out its softest strains for two hours.

The host and hostess are still on duty near the entrance, all ready to be photographed; so we’ll just take them.

Lord Beranger is tall and thin. His hair is so fair that the silver threads thickly intersecting it are hardly visible. His eyes are blue – the very light blue that denotes either insincerity or imbecility – his smile is too bland to be genuine, his talk is measured to match his gait, and he lives the artificial life of so many of his brotherhood, to whom the opinion of “the world” is everything.

Lady Beranger is fair, fat and forty – and a hypocrite – as she awaits her tardy guests, so weary, that under the shelter of her long trailing blue velvet skirts and point de gaze , she indulges in the gallinacious tendency of standing first on one leg and then on the other – her expression is as sweet as if she delighted to be a martyr to these late votaries of fashion.

Only once she loses sight of worldliness, and permits the ghost of a frown to flit across her brow, as she whispers to her husband:

“Is Zai with Delaval? I don’t see that Conway anywhere!”

Lord Beranger shrugs his shoulders and answers nothing. Achille’s best efforts in Salmis de Gibier, sauce Chasseur and Baba au Rhum , are just ready, and he is evolving the momentous point of who he should take in. He would not make an error in such an important thing as precedence for all the world! a regular society man is always a stickler for absurd little trifles like these. Does the handsome Duchess of Allchester rank higher than the elegant and younger Duchess of Eastminster? He turns up his light blue eyes and puckers his forehead in the vain hope of calling up to mind the date of the dukedoms, but it is futile; this salient fact has entirely slipped from his memory. So he goes in search of the patrician lady who finds most favour in his sight.

Lady Beranger, still in statu quo , turns towards a girl who has paused near, in the middle of a waltz.

“Gabrielle, can you tell me where Zai is?” she asks in icy tones. The tone and the gleam in her eyes betoken dislike, and the girl addressed pays her back with interest. There is quite a ring of malicious pleasure in her voice as she answers her stepmother.

“Zai wanted some supper after three dances with Carlton Conway, so he took her in to have some.”

Lady Beranger flushes angrily, and vouchsafing no further notice of her “cross in life” – Gabrielle – walks away in her stately fashion, exchanging pleasant words or smiles as she goes, but throwing a hawk-like glance round the room all the time.

Chafing inwardly at her stepdaughter’s answer, especially as it was made before Lord Delaval, she does a tour of the capacious salon , then dives through the crowd at the door of the supper room, and finally subsides on to a seat next to a fair-haired, blue-eyed, good-looking miniature of Lord Beranger.

“Baby, have you seen Zai?” she questions, low but sharply.

Baby Beranger looks up into her mother’s face with wide-open innocent eyes. It would be hard to credit the owner of such eyes with deceit, or such pretty red lips with fibs. Baby has such a sweet little face, all milk and roses, surmounted by little hyacinthine golden curls like a cherub’s or a cupid in a valentine, and her mouth is like an opening pomegranate bud, but no matter what her face expresses, she is born and bred in Belgravia, and is Belgravian to the backbone.

“Zai, mamma!” she says innocently, “she is waltzing with Lord Delaval I think.”

It is a deliberate falsehood, but it comes quite glibly from the child-like lips, and Baby, though she is only seventeen, has almost forgotten to blush when she does wrong.

“ Gabrielle is with Lord Delaval,” Lady Beranger snaps crossly. “ She is not one to let the grass grow under her feet if she has an object in view.”

“What object has Gabrielle to gain, mamma?” As if Baby didn’t know! As if she had not slipped in of a night, with bare, noiseless feet, and a white wrapper, making her look like a delicious little ghost, behind the screen in her sister’s room, and heard Gabrielle tell Zai that she fully intends being Countess of Delaval in spite of Lady Beranger’s circumventions! But though Baby is only seventeen she takes in her mother, who flashes sotto voce :

“What object has Gabrielle? Why to make the best match in town. I don’t believe that girl would stickle at anything.”

Gabrielle’s propensities to go ahead in everything are not interesting to Baby, who has quite a multitude of affaires du cœur of her own, so she agrees with her mother by a mournful shake of her curly head, and is speedily engrossed with a young German attaché , who, deluded by the apparent wealth of the host, thinks the youngest Honble. Miss Beranger will be a prize worth gaining.

Once more Lady Beranger breaks in on the preliminaries of this Anglo-Prussian alliance.

“Where’s Trixy?” she asks.

“Gone off to bed. She said she was ill, but I think she was angry because Carlton Conway forgot his dance.”

“Why did he forget his dance with her?” Lady Beranger mutters sternly, with hydra-headed suspicion gnawing her mind.

“Why?” Baby is a little at fault. She is rather distraite after Count Von Niederwalluf’s last sweet nothing, and she has not an answer ready, so she speaks the truth once in a way:

“I think Carlton Conway was out on the balcony with Zai, mamma.”