Delia Blanchflower

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Delia Blanchflower

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

Delia was already at the flat to receive her friend, having
quietly--but passionately--insisted, against all the entreaties of Mrs.
Matheson and Lady Tonbridge. Winnington helped the nurse and the porter
to carry Gertrude Marvell upstairs. They laid her on the bed, and the
doctor who had been summoned took her in charge. As he was leaving the
room, Winnington turned back--to look at his enemy. How far more
formidable to him in her weakness than in her strength! The keen eyes
were closed, the thin mouth relaxed and bloodless shewing the teeth,
the hands mere skin and bone. She lay helpless and only half-conscious
on her pillows, with nurse and doctor hovering round her, and Delia
kneeling beside her. Yet, as he closed the door, Winnington realised
her power through every vein! It rested entirely with her whether or no
she would destroy Delia, as she must in the end destroy herself.

He waited in the drawing-room for Delia. She came at last, with a cold
and alien face. "Don't come again, please! Leave us to ourselves. I
shall have doctors--and nurses. We'll let you know."

He took her hands tenderly. But she drew them away--shivering a little.

"You don't know--you can't know--what it means to me--to _us_--to see
what she has suffered. There must be no one here but those--who
sympathise--who won't reproach--" Her voice failed her.

There was nothing for it but to go.

Chapter XVIII

Great is the power of martyrdom!--of the false no less than the
true--and whether the mind consent or no.

During the first week of Gertrude Marvell's recovery--or partial
recovery--from her prison ordeal, both Winnington and Delia realised
the truth of this commonplace to the full. Winnington was excluded from
the flat. Delia, imprisoned within it, was dragged, day by day, through
deep waters of emotion and pity. She envied the heroism of her friend
and leader; despised herself for not having been able to share it; and
could not do enough to soothe the nervous suffering which Gertrude's
struggle with law and order had left behind it.

But with the beginning of the second week some strange facts emerged.
Gertrude was then sufficiently convalescent to be moved into the
drawing-room, to see a few visitors, and to exchange experiences. All
who came belonged to the League, and had been concerned in the
Parliamentary raid. Most of them had been a few days or a week in
prison. Two had been hunger-strikers. And as they gathered round
Gertrude in half-articulate worship, Delia, passing from one revealing
moment to another, suddenly felt herself superfluous--thrust away! She
could not join in their talk except perfunctorily; the violence of it
often left her cold and weary; and she soon recognised half in
laughter, half bitterly, that, as one who had been carried out of the
fray, like a naughty child, by her guardian, she stood in the opinion
of Gertrude's visitors, on a level altogether inferior to that of
persons who had "fought it out."

This, however, would not have troubled her--she was so entirely of the
same opinion herself. But what began to wound her to the quick was
Gertrude's own attitude towards her. She had been accustomed for so
long to be Gertrude's most intimate friend, to be recognised and envied
as such, that to be made to feel day by day how small a hold--for some
mysterious reason--she now retained on that fierce spirit, was galling
indeed. Meanwhile she had placed all the money realised by the sale of
her jewels,--more than three thousand pounds--in Gertrude's hands for
League purposes; her house was practically Gertrude's, and had Gertrude
willed, her time and her thoughts would have been Gertrude's also. She
would not let herself even think of Winnington. One glance at the
emaciated face and frame beside her was enough to recall her from what
had otherwise been a heavenly wandering.

But she was naturally quick and shrewd, and she soon made herself face
the fact that she was supplanted. Supplanted by many--but especially by
one. Marion Andrews had not been in the raid--Delia often uneasily
pondered the why and wherefore. She came up to town a week after it,
and was then constantly in Gertrude's room. Between Delia, and this
iron-faced, dark-browed woman, with her clumsy dress and brusque ways,
there was but little conversation. Delia never forgot their last
meeting at Maumsey; she was often filled with dire forebodings and
suspicions; and as the relation between Gertrude and Miss Andrews
became closer, they grew and multiplied.

At last one morning Gertrude turned her back on invalid ways. She got
up at her usual time; she dismissed her nurse; and in the middle of the
morning she came in upon Delia, who, in the desultory temper born of
physical strain, was alternately trying to read Marshall's "Economics
of Industry," and writing to Lady Tonbridge about anything and
everything, except the topics that really occupied her mind.

Delia sprang up to get her a shawl, to settle her on the sofa. But
Gertrude said impatiently--

"Please don't fuss. I want to be treated now as though I were well--I
soon shall be. And anyway I am tired of illness." And she took a plain
chair, as though to emphasize what she had said.

"I came to talk to you about plans. You're not busy!"

"Busy!" The scornful tone was a trifle bitter also, as Gertrude
perceived. Delia put aside her book, and her writing-board, and
descended to her favourite place on the hearth rug. The two friends
surveyed each other.

"Gertrude, it's absurd to talk as though you were well!" cried Delia.
"You look a perfect wreck!"

But there was more in what she saw--in what she felt--than physical
wreck. There was a moral and spiritual change, subtler than any
physical injury, and probably more permanent. Gertrude Marvell had
never possessed any "charm," in the sense in which other leaders of the
militant movement possessed it. A clear and narrowly logical brain, the
diamond sharpness of an astonishing will, and certain passions of hate,
rather than passions of love, had made the strength of her personality,
and given her an increasing ascendancy. But these qualities had been
mated with a slender physique--trim, balanced, composed--suggesting a
fastidious taste, and nerves perfectly under control; a physique which
had given special accent and emphasis to her rare outbreaks of spoken
violence. Refinement, seemliness, "ladylikeness,"--even Sir Robert
Blanchflower in his sorest moments would scarcely have denied her
these.

In a measure they were there still, but coupled with pathetic signs of
some disintegrating and poisonous influence. The face which once, in
its pallid austerity, had not been without beauty, had now coarsened,
even in emaciation. The features stood out disproportionately; the hair
had receded from the temples; something ugly and feverish had been, as
it were, laid bare. And composure had been long undermined. The nurse
who had just left had been glad to go.

Gertrude received Delia's remark with impatience.

"Do please let my looks alone! As if you could boast!" The speaker's
smile softened as she looked at the girl's still bandaged arm, and pale
cheeks. "That in fact is what I wanted to say, Delia. You ought to be
going home. You want the country and the garden. And I, it seems--so
this tiresome Doctor says--ought to have a fortnight's sea."

"Oh--" said Delia, with a sudden flush. "So you think we ought to give
up the flat? Why can't I come with you to the sea?"

"I thought you had begun to do various things--cripples--and
cottages--and schools--for Mr. Winnington," said Gertrude, drily.

"I wanted to--but Weston's illness stopped it--and then I came here."

"Well, you 'wanted to.' And why shouldn't you?"

There was a silence. Then Delia looked up--very pale now--her head
thrown back.

"So you mean you wish to get rid of me, Gertrude!"

"Nothing of the sort. I want you to do--what you clearly wish to do."

"When have I ever shown you that I wished to desert you--or--the
League?"

"Perhaps I read you better than you do yourself," said
Gertrude, slightly reddening too. "Of course you have been
goodness--generosity--itself. But--this cause wants more than
gifts--more than money-it wants a woman's _self_!"

"Well?" Delia waited.

Gertrude moved impatiently.

"Why should we play the hypocrite with each other!" she said at last.
"You won't deny that what Mr. Winnington thinks--what Mr. Winnington
feels--is infinitely more important to you now than what anybody else
in the world thinks or feels?"

"Which I shewed by coming up here against his express wishes?--and
joining in the raid, after he had said all that a man could say against
it, both to you and to me?"

"Oh, I admit you did your best--you did your best," said Gertrude
sombrely. "But I know you, Delia!--I know you! Your heart's not in
it--any more."

Delia rose, and began slowly to pace the room. There was a wonderful
virginal dignity--a suppressed passion--in her attitude, as though she
wrestled with inward wound. But she said nothing, except to ask--as she
paused in front of Gertrude--

"Where are you going--and who is going with you?"

"I shall go to the sea, somewhere--perhaps to the Isle of Wight. I
daresay Marion Andrews will come with me. She wants to escape her
mother for a time."

"Marion Andrews?" repeated Delia thoughtfully. Then, after a
moment--"So you're not coming down to Maumsey any more?"

"Ask yourself what there is for me to do there, my dear child! Frankly,
I should find the society of Mr. Winnington and Lady Tonbridge rather
difficult! And as for their feelings about me!"

"Do you remember--you promised to live with me for a year?"

"Under mental reservation," said Gertrude, quietly. "You know very
well, I didn't accept it as an ordinary post."

"And now there's nothing more to be got out of me? Oh, I didn't mean
anything cruel!" added the girl hastily. "I know you must put the cause
first."

"And you see where the cause is," said Gertrude grimly. "In ten days
from now Sir Wilfrid Lang will have crushed the bill."

"And everybody seems to be clamouring that we've given them the
excuse!"

Fierce colour overspread Gertrude's thin temples and cheeks.

"They'll take it, anyway; and we've got to do all we can--meetings,
processions, way-laying Ministers--the usual things--and any new
torment we can devise."

"But I thought you were going to Southsea!"

"Afterwards--afterwards!" said Gertrude, with visible temper. "I shall
run down to Brighton tomorrow, and come back fresh on Monday."

"To this flat?"

"Oh no--I've found a lodging."

Delia turned away--her breath fluttering.

"So we part to-morrow!" Then suddenly she faced round on Gertrude. "But
I don't go, Gertrude--till I have your promise!"

"What promise?"

"To let--Monk Lawrence _alone_!" said the girl with sudden intensity,
and laying her uninjured hand on a table near, she stooped and looked
Gertrude in the eyes.

Gertrude broke into a laugh.

"You little goose! Do you think I look the kind of person for nocturnal
adventures?--a cripple--on a stick? Yes, I know you have been talking
to Marion Andrews. She told me."

"I warned _you_," said Delia, with determination--"which was more to
the point. Everything Mr. Lathrop told me, I handed on to you."

There was an instant's silence. Then Gertrude laid a skeleton hand upon
the girl's hand--gripping it painfully.

"And do you suppose--that anything Mr. Lathrop could say, or you
could say, could prevent my carrying out plans that seemed to me
necessary--in this war!"

Delia gasped.

"Gertrude!--you mean to do it!"

Gertrude released her--almost threw her hand away.

"I have told you why you are a fool to think so. But if you do think
so, go and tell Mr. Winnington! Tell him everything!--make him enquire.
I shall be in town--ready for the warrant."

The two faced each other.

"And now," said Gertrude--"though I am convalescent--we have had
enough of this." She rose tottering--and felt for her stick. Delia
gave it her.

"Gertrude!" It was a bitter cry of crushed affection and wounded trust.
It arrested Gertrude for a moment on her way to the door. She turned in
indecision--then shook her head--muttered something inarticulate, and
went.

* * * * *

That afternoon Delia sent a telegram to Lady Tonbridge who had returned
to Maumsey--"Can you and Nora come and stay with me for three months. I
shall be quite alone." She also despatched a note to Winnington's club,
simply to say that she was going home tomorrow. She had no recent news
of Winnington's whereabouts, but something told her that he was still
in town--still near her.

Then she turned with energy to practical affairs--arrangements for
giving up the flat, dismissing some servants, despatching others to
Maumsey. She had something of a gift for housekeeping, and on this
evening of all others she blessed its tasks. When they met at dinner,
Gertrude was perfectly placid and amiable. She went to bed early, and
Delia spent the hours after dinner in packing, with her maid. In the
middle of it came a line from Winnington--"Good news indeed! I go down
to Maumsey early, to see that the Abbey is ready for you. Don't bother
about the flat. I have spoken to the Agents. They will do everything.
_Au revoir!"_

The commonplace words somehow broke down her self-control. She sent
away her maid, put out the glaring electric light, and sat crouched
over the fire, in the darkness, thinking her heart out. Once she sprang
up suddenly, her hands at her breast--"Oh Mark, Mark--I'm coming back
to you, Mark,--I'm coming back--I'm _free!_"--in an ecstasy.

But only to feel herself the next moment, quenched--coerced--her
happiness dashed from her. If she gave herself to Mark, her knowledge,
her suspicions, her practical certainty must go with the gift. She
could not keep from him her growing belief that Monk Lawrence was
vitally threatened, and that Gertrude, in spite of audacious denials,
was still madly bent upon the plot. And to tell him would mean instant
action on his part: arrest--prison--perhaps death--for this woman she
had adored, whom she still loved with a sore, disillusioned tenderness.
She could not tell him!--and therefore she could not engage herself to
him. Had Gertrude realised that?--counted upon it?

No. She must work in other ways--through Mr. Lathrop--through various
members of the "Daughters" Executive who were personally known to her.
Gertrude must be restrained--somehow--by those who still had influence
with her.

The loneliness of that hour sank deep into Delia's soul. Never had she
felt herself so motherless, so forlorn. Her passion for this elder
woman during three years of fast-developing youth had divided her from
all her natural friends. As for her relations, her father's sister,
Elizabeth Blanchflower, a selfish, eccentric old maid, had just
acknowledged her existence in two chilly notes since she returned to
England; while Lord Frederick, Winnington's co-executor, had in the
same period written her one letter of half-scolding, half-patronising
advice, and sent a present of game to Maumsey. Since then she
understood he had been pursuing his enemy the gout from "cure" to
"cure," and "Mr. Mark" certainly had done all the executor's work that
had not been mere formality.

She had no friends, no one who cared for her!--except Winnington--her
chilled heart glowed to the name!--Lady Tonbridge, and poor Weston.
Among the Daughters she had acquaintances, but no intimates. Gertrude
had absorbed her; she had lived for Gertrude and Gertrude's ideas.

And now she was despised--cast out. She tried to revive in herself the
old crusading flame--the hot unquestioning belief in Women's Rights
and Women's Wrongs--the angry contempt for men as a race of coarse and
hypocritical oppressors, which Gertrude had taught her. In vain. She
sat there, with these altruistic loves and hates--premature, artificial
things!--drooping away; conscious only, nakedly conscious, of the
thirst for individual happiness, personal joy--ashamed of it too, in
her bewildered youth!--not knowing that she was thereby best serving
her sex and her race in the fore-ordained ways of destiny. And the
wickedness of men? But to have watched a good man, day by day, had
changed all the values of the human scene. Her time would come
again--with fuller knowledge--for bitter loathing of the tyrannies of
sex and lust. But this, in the natural order, was her hour for
hope--for faith. As the night grew deeper, the tides of both rose and
rose within her--washing her at last from the shores of Desolation. She
was going home. Winnington would be there--her friend. Somehow, she
would save Gertrude. Somehow--surely--she would find herself in Mark's
arms again. She went to sleep with a face all tears, but whether for
joy or sorrow, she could hardly have told.

Next morning Marion arrived early, and carried Gertrude off to
Victoria, en route for Brighton. Gertrude and Delia kissed each other,
and said Good-bye, without visible emotion.

"Of course I shall come down to plague you in the summer," said
Gertrude, and Delia laughed assent--with Miss Andrews standing by. The
girl went through a spasm of solitary weeping when Gertrude was finally
gone; but she soon mastered it, and an hour later she herself was in
the train.

Oh, the freshness of the February day--of the spring breathing
everywhere!--of the pairing birds and the springing wheat--and the
bright patches of crocuses and snowdrop in the gardens along the line.
A rush of pleasure in the mere return to the country and her home, in
the mere welling back of health, the escape from daily friction, and
ugly, violent thoughts, overflowed all her young senses. She was a
child on a holiday. The nightmare of the Raid--of those groups of
fighting, dishevelled women, ignominiously overpowered, of the grinning
crowd, the agonising pain of her arm, and the policeman's rough grip
upon it--began to vanish "in black from the skies."

Until--the train ran into the long cutting half way between Latchford
and Maumsey, above which climbed the steep woods of Monk Lawrence.
Delia knew it well. And she had no sooner recognised it than her gaiety
fell--headlong--like a shot bird. She waited in a kind of terror for
the moment when the train should leave the cutting, and the house come
into view, on its broad terrace carved out of the hill. Yes, there it
was, far away, the incomparable front, with its beautiful
irregularities, and its equally beautiful symmetries, with its oriel
windows flashing in the sun, the golden grey of its stone work, the
delicate tracery on its tall twisted chimneys, and the dim purples of
its spreading roofs. It lay so gently in the bosom of the woods which
clasped it round--as though they said--"See how we have guarded and
kept it through the centuries for you, the children of to-day."

The train sped on, and looking back Delia could just make out a whitish
patch on the lower edge of the woods. That was Mr. Lathrop's cottage.
It seemed to her vaguely that she had seen his face in the front rank
of the crowd in Parliament Square; but she had heard nothing of him, or
from him since their last talk. She had indeed written him a short
veiled note as she had promised to do, after Gertrude's first denials,
repeating them--though she herself disbelieved them--and there had been
no reply. Was he at home? Had he perhaps discovered anything more?

When she alighted at Maumsey, with her hand in Winnington's, the fresh
colour in her cheeks had disappeared again, and he was dismayed anew at
her appearance, though he kept it to himself. But when she was once
more in the familiar drawing-room, sitting in her grandmother's chair,
obliged to rest while Lady Tonbridge poured out tea--Nora was improving
her French in Paris--and Winnington, with his hands in his pockets,
talked gossip and gardening, without a word of anything that had
happened since they three had last met in that room; when Weston,
ghostly but convalescent, came in to show herself; when Delia's black
spitz careered all over his recovered mistress, and even the cats came
to rub themselves against her skirts, it was impossible not to feel for
the moment, tremulously happy, and strangely delivered--in this house
whence Gertrude Marvell had departed.

How vivid was the impression of this latter fact on the other two may
be imagined. When Delia had gone upstairs to chat with Weston, Lady
Tonbridge looked at Winnington--

"To what do we owe this crowning mercy? Who dislodged her?"
Winnington's glance was thoughtful.

"I guess it has been her own doing entirely. But I know nothing."

"Hm.--Well, if I may advise, dear Mr. Mark, ask no questions. And"--his
old friend put a hand on his arm--"May I go on?" A smile, not very gay,
permitted her.

"Let her be!" she said softly, with a world of sympathy in her clear
brown eyes. "She's suffered--and she's on edge." He laid his hand on
hers, but said nothing.

* * * * *

The days passed by. Winnington did as he had been told; and Madeleine
Tonbridge seemed to see that Delia was dumbly grateful to him.
Meanwhile in the eyes of her two friends she made little or no advance
towards recapturing her former health and strength. The truth, of
course, was that she was consumed by devouring and helpless anxiety.
She wrote to Lathrop, posting the letter at a distant village; and
received no answer. Then she ascertained that he was not at the
cottage, and a casual line in the _Tocsin_ informed her that he had
been in town taking part in the foundation of an "outspoken"
newspaper--outspoken on "the fundamental questions of sex, liberty, and
morals involved in the suffrage movement."

But a letter addressed "To be forwarded" to the _Tocsin_ office
produced no more result than her first. Meanwhile she had written
imploringly to various prominent members of the organisation in London
pointing out the effect on public opinion that must be produced all
through Southern England by any attack on Monk Lawrence. She received
two cold and cautious replies. It seemed to her that the writers of
them were even more in the dark than she.

The days ran on. The newspapers were full of the coming Woman Suffrage
Bill, and its certain defeat in the Commons. Sir Wilfrid Lang was
leading the forces hostile to the Suffrage, and making speech after
speech in the country to cheering audiences, denouncing the Bill, and
the mad women who had tried to promote it by a campaign of outrage, "as
ridiculous as it was criminal." He was to move the rejection of it on
the second reading, and was reported to be triumphantly confident of
the result.

Winnington meanwhile became more and more conscious of an abnormal
state of nerve and brain in this pale Delia, the shadow of her proper
self, and as the hours went on, he was presently for throwing all
Madeleine's counsels aside, and somehow breaking through the girl's
silence, in the hope of getting at--and healing--the cause of it. He
guessed of course at a hundred things to account for it--at a final
breach between her and Gertrude--at the disappointment of cherished
hopes and illusions--at a profound travail of mind, partly moral,
partly intellectual, going back over the past, and bewildered as to the
future. But at the first sign of a change of action, of any attempt to
probe her, on his part, she was off--in flight; throwing back at him
often a look at once so full of pain and so resolute that he dared not
pursue her. She possessed at all times a great personal dignity, and it
held him at bay.

He himself--unconsciously--enabled her to hold him at bay. Naturally,
he connected some of the haunting anxiety he perceived with Monk
Lawrence, and with Gertrude Marvell's outrageous speech in Latchford
market-place. But he himself, on the other hand, was not greatly
concerned for Monk Lawrence. Not only he---the whole neighbourhood was
on the alert, in defence of the famous treasure-house. The outside of
the building and the gardens were patrolled at night by two detectives;
and according to Daunt's own emphatic assurance to Winnington, the
house was never left without either the Keeper himself or his niece in
it, to mount guard. They had set up a dog, with a bark which was alone
worth a policeman. And finally, Sir Wilfrid himself had been down to
see the precautions taken, had especially ordered the strengthening of
the side door, and the provision of iron bars for all the ground floor
windows. As to the niece, Eliza Daunt, she had not made herself popular
with the neighbours or in the village; but she seemed an efficient and
managing woman, and that she "kept herself to herself" was far best for
the safety of Monk Lawrence.

Whenever during these days Winnington's business took him in the
Latchford direction, so that going or coming he passed Monk Lawrence,
he would walk up to the Abbey in the evening, and in the course of the
gossip of the day, all the reassuring news he had to give would be sure
to drop out; while Delia sat listening, her eyes fixed on him. And
then, for a time, the shadow almost lifted, and she would be her young
and natural self.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25