Daughters of Belgravia Vol.1

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CHAPTER I.
A LEADER OF SOCIETY.
“O Love! when Womanhood is in the flush,
And Man a pure unspotted thing,
His first breathed word, and her half-conscious blush,
Are fair as light in Heaven—or flowers in Spring!”

“Lady Beranger
at home.

A 1, Belgrave Square.—June 20th.”

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{2} 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{3} 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{4} 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{5} 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{6} 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