Dawn of Love (eBook)

Barbara Cartland (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2019 | 1. Auflage
298 Seiten
Barbara Cartland eBooks Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78867-177-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Handsome, popular and much in demand in the Social world, Alstone, the Duke of Windlemere is bored with life and, seeking entertainment, he is drawn into a foolhardy wager with his friend Sir Hugo Benson.
The bet concerns whether they can successfully replicate the experiment in George Bernard Shaw's play, Pygmalion, in which Eliza Doolittle is taken from the flower market in London and trained to pass as a 'lady' in Society.
Unbeknown to her, Sir Hugo's niece, the beautiful, innocent orphan, Lorena, whom he summons back to England from her French Convent School, is chosen by him to play the part and is taken to meet the sophisticated Windlemere Set made up of the Duke's spoilt entourage.
On arrival with her uncle at the Duke's palatial stately home, Mere, Lorena is overawed by her surroundings and by the dashing and handsome Duke.
And for his part the Duke is captivated by Lorena's intelligence, honesty and loveliness. Not only is Lorena capable, it seems, of being accepted by his snobbish friends.
She inspires respect as well - and even love.

Textauszug

Chapter Two

Waiting on the platform, Sir Hugo admitted to himself that he was apprehensive.

He had not really meant to become so involved in a wager that might easily cost him a great deal of money.

He had had too much to drink at the races and, although he was never drunk, he was far too fastidious for that, he thought afterwards that it must have slightly distorted his usual common sense.

The real reason that he had entered into the argument was that Archie Carnforth had annoyed him.

He was in fact the only close friend of the Duke’s who Sir Hugo had little liking for.

He was so self-opinionated, so absolutely certain that he was always right and that his opponents on whatever subject must therefore of necessity be wrong.

He had been particularly irritating at the races where, when each one of the outsiders won, he lectured the rest of the party on how they should have been knowledgeable enough to have anticipated that a particular horse had a chance.

Although he was a well-known racehorse owner, he seldom placed a bet and Hugo Benson and a number of other people found that in itself distinctly tiresome.

Anyway, Sir Hugo thought, he had let himself in for what promised to be a difficult and uncomfortable visit to Mere and instead of looking forward, as he usually did, to being with the Duke and his friends, he was definitely feeling anxious.

Too late he thought that he should have insisted on keeping Lorena for a week in London so that he could at least dress her suitably before he presented her to his opponents in the contest.

That was what Professor Higgins in Pygmalion had done and Sir Hugo thought that he had been singularly remiss in forgetting that the clothes a woman was dressed in were perhaps more important than anything else.

‘I have made a fool of myself,’ he reflected ruefully.

And, as if he sensed what he was feeling, Perry, who was with him, urged,

“Cheer up, Hugo. Your traditional good luck will stand you in good stead.”

Sir Hugo laughed.

“Is it so obvious that I am anticipating the worst?”

“You have spoken barely a word since we left White’s Club,” Perry replied, “and that is unusual to say the least of it.”

Over dinner at Mere they had had quite a fight as to who should actually accompany Sir Hugo to the Railway Station.

Lord Carnforth had suggested that he himself should go, but that had been turned down because, as Hugo Benson said, he was so deeply involved that he might easily contrive in one way or another to make Lorena nervous and wary of what was waiting for her.

Finally the Duke decided who it was to be, saying that as Judge he was appointing Perry, believing that he could rely on him to be impartial as it was a question of sportsmanship.

“He may be supporting you, Hugo,” the Duke said, “but he will feel responsible to me in seeing that you take no unfair advantage on the way to Mere.”

“If you ask me, I am carrying far too much weight in this race,” Sir Hugo complained. “Firstly I am not allowed to warn the child, secondly, she will have a stranger in the shape of Perry listening to every word she says and thirdly she will already be feeling tired after journeying all the way from Rome.”

“I will take all those facts into consideration,” Lord Carnforth said in a manner that set Sir Hugo’s teeth on edge.

Now Sir Hugo turned to Perry,

“I have just realised that I should at least have been allowed to dress Lorena for the part she is to play.”

“That is the wrong expression,” Perry said quickly. “She is not allowed to know that it is a part. If she puts on an act, you know as well as I do that it will be obvious to everybody.”

Sir Hugo nodded.

“At the same time she will, I suppose, be wearing only the clothes she has worn at school,”

He groaned as he thought how badly dressed the schoolgirls were he had sometimes seen parading crocodile fashion through Hyde Park.

If Lorena looked anything like them, he decided that he would call the whole thing off and refuse to take her to Mere.

“I am not going to make a laughing stock of myself,” he said aloud.

There was a look of surprise on Perry’s face and Sir Hugo explained,

“I am aware that I made a vital error from the word ‘go’. Let’s make it quite clear, Perry, that if the child is plain, spotty and badly dressed, you go to Mere without me. I am not going to have Archie crowing over me from the moment he sees her and every time she opens her mouth.”

“I see no reason why she should not be attractive if she is your niece,” Perry pointed out disarmingly.

“Archie is right,” Sir Hugo continued gloomily, “unfledged girls of that age are gauche, stupid and shy. Why the devil did I get into this mess in the first place?”

“Because it annoyed you that Archie was so dogmatic.”

Sir Hugo laughed.

“That is true,” he admitted.

“Well, I am interested in this competition or whatever you like to call it,” Perry said, “not only because I agree with you as Archie can be infuriatingly dictatorial, but also because it appears to amuse Alstone.”

Sir Hugo smiled.

“I imagined that was why you were supporting me.”

“He is bored, Hugo. It seems incredible, but he is!”

“That is Daisy’s fault,” Sir Hugo replied. “She has been presuming on his affections for far too long. I could have warned her that he was chafing at the bit.”

“Why did you not do so?”

Sir Hugo grinned.

“Daisy has done her best on several occasions to ‘put a spoke in my wheel’.”

“So it was ‘tit-for-tat’!”

“Exactly. I am hoping that once Alstone is free of her, he will find a woman who is more amenable and certainly one who is more pleasant to his friends.”

“Have you anyone in mind?” Perry enquired.

“As a matter of fact there is someone,” Sir Hugo answered, “who I nearly suggested might be invited to Mere this week until I thought that it might confuse the issue.”

“Yes, of course. We want Alstone to concentrate on the contest. She had better come another time and certainly not when Daisy is there.”

“That is what I thought,” Sir Hugo agreed. “As Daisy is to be at Mere this week, there is no room for anyone else.”

The two men smiled knowingly at each other.

The Countess of Hellingford had been overbearing and, they thought, at times disloyal to both of them.

Because they were genuinely fond of the Duke, they felt it essential to protect him from anyone who exploited him too obviously and that was particularly true of women.

Because he was so rich, those he favoured invariably took advantage of his generosity, which was indeed understandable up to a certain point.

But Daisy Hellingford was greedy and it was not only the diamonds she wore round her neck that the Duke had paid for but the horses she rode and the cars she was driven in.

She also expected him to provide a great many other things that were not usually in the category of permissible gifts from a man to his mistress.

Daisy was by no means impoverished and her husband, who was conveniently big game hunting in Africa, was decently well off and owned a large estate in Gloucestershire.

That he was not travelling without female companionship enabled Daisy to gain the sympathy of women in playing the part of a wronged wife

But Sir Hugo and Perry were convinced that, if there was anything irregular about the whole arrangement, it was of Daisy’s doing.

“I can tell you one thing,” Perry said now, “when they do part, we will make damned sure that someone at Mere counts the Van Dykes and the collection of snuffboxes.”

Sir Hugo laughed.

They were both thinking of another of the Duke’s ladyloves he had parted from with much recrimination on her side only to find after the break was final that quite a number of the miniatures, which were family heirlooms, had mysteriously disappeared.

They had been returned after quite a large amount of money had changed hands in compensation.

“Here comes the train,” Sir Hugo now exclaimed.

Perry thought with slight amusement that his friend was definitely tense and it was so amazingly unlike Sir Hugo to be worried about anything.

He was one of those people who always seem to be riding high and immune from the small and irrelevant anxieties of the common herd, so this was certainly an unusual condition for him to be in.

The train puffed slowly to the end of the platform and Perry found that he too was intensely curious as to what Lorena would look like.

It would certainly be great fun and a triumph if she was as attractive as he and her uncle hoped, but his common sense told him that this was very unlikely.

She might not be quite as bad as Archie Carnforth depicted, but he was right in saying that a schoolgirl, any schoolgirl, would be out of place at Mere with the men and women who were among the most sophisticated to be found in Europe.

Now that King Edward was dead and the hostesses who had presided over the brilliant and glittering salons that had been so much a part of his reign had gone, there was only the Windlemere Set left to glitter with what was not only a social but also an intellectual brilliance.

The women were chosen for their beauty and the men for their brains.

Like Sir...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.5.2019
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Historische Romane
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-78867-177-5 / 1788671775
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78867-177-4 / 9781788671774