Delia Blanchflower

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In this way, without knowing it, he helped her to keep her secret, and,
intermittently, to fight down her fears.

On one of these afternoons, in the February twilight, he had been
talking to both the ladies, describing _inter alia_ a brief call at
Monk Lawrence and a chat with Daunt, when Madeleine Tonbridge went away
to change her walking dress, and he and Delia were left alone.
Winnington was standing in the favourite male attitude--his hands in
his pockets, and his back to the fire; Delia was on a sofa near. The
firelight flickered on the black and white of her dress, and on the
face which in losing something of its dark bloom had gained infinitely
in other magic for the eyes of the man looking down upon her.

Suddenly she said--

"Do you remember when you wanted me to say--I was sorry for Gertrude's
speech--and I wouldn't?"

He started.

"Perfectly."

"Well, I am sorry now. I see--I know--it has been all a mistake."

She lifted her eyes to his, very quietly--but the hands on her lap
shook.

His passionate impulse was to throw himself at her feet, and silence
any further humbleness with kisses. But he controlled himself.

"You mean--that violence--has been a mistake?"

"Yes--just that. Oh, of course!"--she flushed again--"I am just as much
for _women_--I am just as rebellious against their wrongs--as I ever
was. I shall be a Suffragist always. But I see now--what we've stirred
up in England. I see now--that we can't win that way--and that we
oughtn't to win that way."

He was silent a moment, and then said in a rather muffled voice--

"I don't know who else would have confessed it--so bravely!" His
emotion seemed to quiet her. She smiled radiantly.

"Does it make you feel triumphant?"

"Not in the least!"

She held out both hands, and he grasped them, smiling
back--understanding that she wished him to take it lightly.

Her eyes indeed now were full of gaiety--light swimming on depths.

"You won't be always saying 'I told you so?'"

"Is it my way?"

"No. But perhaps it's cunning on your part. You know it pays better to
be generous."

They both laughed, and she drew her hands away. In another minute, she
had asked him to go on with some reading aloud while she worked. He
took up the book. The blood raced in his veins. "Soon, soon!"--he said
to himself, only to be checked by the divining instinct which
added--"but not yet!"

* * * * *

Only a few more days now, to the Commons debate. Every morning the
newspapers contained a crop of "militant" news of the kind foreshadowed
by Gertrude Marvell--meetings disturbed, private parties raided,
Ministers waylaid, windows smashed, and the like, though in none of the
reports did Gertrude's own name appear. Only two days before the
debate, a glorious Reynolds in the National Gallery was all but
hopelessly defaced by a girl of eighteen. Feeling throughout the
country surged at a white-heat. Delia said little or nothing, but the
hollows under her eyes grew steadily darker, and her cheeks whiter. Nor
could Winnington, for all his increasing anxiety, devote himself to
soothing or distracting her. An ugly strike in the Latchford
brickfields against nonunion labour was giving the magistrates of
the country a good deal of anxiety. Some bad outrages had already
occurred, and Winnington was endeavouring to get a Board of Trade
arbitration,--all of which meant his being a good deal away from home.

Meanwhile Delia was making a new friend. Easily and simply, though no
one knew exactly how, Susy Amberley had found her way to the heart of
the young woman so much talked about and so widely condemned by the
county. Her own departure for London had been once more delayed by the
illness of her mother. But the worst of her own struggle was over now;
and no one had guessed it. She was a little older, though it was hardly
perceptible to any eye but her mother's; a little graver; in some ways
sweeter, in others perhaps a trifle harder, like the dipped sword. Her
dress had become less of a care to her; she minded the fashions less
than her mother. And there had opened before her more and more
alluringly that world of social service, which is to so many beautiful
souls outside Catholicism the equivalent of the vowed and dedicated
life.

But just as of old, she guessed Mark Winnington's thoughts, and by some
instinct divined his troubles. He loved Delia Blanchflower; that she
knew by a hundred signs; and there were rough places in his road,--that
too she knew. They were clearly not engaged; but their relation was
clearly, also, one of no ordinary friendship. Delia's dependence on
him, her new gentleness and docility were full of meaning--for Susy. As
to the causes of Delia's depression, why, she had lost her friend, or
at any rate, to judge from the fact that Delia was at Maumsey, while
Miss Marvell remained, so report said, in London--had ceased to agree
or act with her. Susy divined and felt for the possible tragedy
involved. Delia indeed never spoke of the militant propaganda; but she
often produced on Susy a strange impression as of someone
listening--through darkness.

The net result of all these guessings was that the tender Susy fell
suddenly in love with Delia--first for Mark's sake, then for her own;
and became in a few days of frequent meetings, Delia's small worshipper
and ministering spirit. Delia surrendered, wondering; and it was soon
very evident that, on her side, the splendid creature, in her
unrevealed distress, pined after all to be loved, and by her own sex.
She told Susy no secrets, either as to Winnington, or Gertrude; but
very soon, just as Susy was certain about her, so she--very pitifully
and tenderly--became certain about Susy. Susy loved--or had once
loved--Winnington. And Delia knew very well, whom Winnington loved. The
double knowledge softened all her pride--all her incipient jealousy
away. She took Susy into her heart, though not wholly into her
confidence; and soon the two began to walk the lonely country roads
together hand in hand. Susy's natural tasks took her often among the
poor. But Delia would not go with her. She shrank during these days,
with a sick distaste from the human world around her,--its possible
claims upon her. Her mind was pre-engaged; and she would not pretend
what she could not feel.

This applied especially to the folk on her father's estate. As to the
neighbours of her own class, they apparently shrank from her. She was
left coldly alone. No one called, but Susy, France and his wife, and
Captain Andrews. Mrs. Andrews indeed was loud in her denunciation of
Delia and all her crew. Her daughter Marion had abominably deserted
all her family duties, without any notice to her family, and was
now--according to a note left behind--brazenly living in town with
some one or other of the "criminals" to whom Miss Blanchflower of
course, had introduced her. But as she had given no address she was
safe from pursuit. Mrs. Andrews' life had never been so uncomfortable.
She had to maid herself, and do her own housekeeping, and the thing was
Scandalous and intolerable. She filled the local air with wailing and
abuse.

But her son, the gallant Captain, would not allow any abuse of Delia
Blanchflower in his presence. He had begun, indeed, immediately after
Delia's return, to haunt the Abbey so persistently that Madeleine
Tonbridge had to make an opportunity for a few quiet words in his ear,
after which he disappeared disconsolate.

But he was a good fellow at heart, and the impression Delia had made
upon him, together with some plain speaking on the subject from Lady
Tonbridge, in the course of a chance meeting in the village, roused a
remorseful discomfort in him about his sister. He tried honestly to
find out where she was, but quite in vain. Then he turned upon his
Mother, and told her bluntly she was herself to blame for her
daughter's flight. "Between us, we've led her a dog's life, Mother,
there, that's the truth! All the same, I'm damned sorry she's taken up
with this business."

However, it mattered nothing to anybody whether the Captain was "damned
sorry" or not. The hours were almost numbered. The Sunday before the
Tuesday fixed for the Second Reading came and went. It was a foggy
February day, in which the hills faded from sight, and all the world
went grey. Winnington spent the afternoon at Maumsey. But neither he
nor Madeleine seemed to be able to rouse Delia during that day from a
kind of waking dream--which he interpreted as a brooding sense of some
catastrophe to come.

He was certain that her mind was fixed on the division ahead--the
scene in the House of Commons--and on the terror of what the
"Daughters"--Gertrude perhaps in the van--might be planning and
plotting in revenge for it. His own feeling was one of vast relief that
the strain would be so soon over, and his own tongue loosed. Monk
Lawrence was safe enough! And as for any other attempt at vengeance, he
dismissed the notion with impatient scorn.

But meanwhile he said not a word that could have jarred on any
conviction or grief of Delia's. Sometimes indeed they touched the great
subject itself--the "movement" in its broad and arguable aspects;
though it seemed to him that Delia could not bear it for long. Mind and
heart were too sore; and her weary reasonableness made him long for the
prophetic furies of the autumn. But always she felt herself enwrapped
by a tenderness, a chivalry that never failed. Only between her and
it--between her and him--as she lay awake through broken nights, some
barrier rose--dark and impassable. She knew it for the barrier of her
own unconquered fear.

Chapter XIX

On this same Sunday night before the date fixed for the Suffrage
debate, a slender woman, in a veil and a waterproof, opened the gate of
a small house in the Brixton Road. It was about nine o'clock in the
evening. The pavements were wet with rain, and a gusty wind was
shrieking through the smutty almond and alder trees along the road
which had ventured to put out their poor blossoms and leaves in the
teeth of this February gale.

The woman stood and looked at the house after shutting the gate, as
though uncertain whether she had found what she was looking for. But
the number 453, on the dingy door, could be still made out by the light
of the street opposite, and she mounted the steps.

A slatternly maid opened the door, and on being asked whether Mrs.
Marvell was at home, pointed curtly to a dimly lighted staircase, and
disappeared.

Gertrude Marvell groped her way upstairs. The house smelt repulsively
of stale food, and gas mingled, and the wailing wind from outside
seemed to pursue the visitor with its voice as she mounted. On the
second floor landing, she knocked at the door of the front room.

After an interval, some shuffling steps came to the door, and it was
cautiously opened.

"What's your business, please?"

"It's me--Gertrude. Are you alone?"

A sound of astonishment. The door was opened, and a woman appeared. Her
untidy, brown hair, touched with grey, fell back from a handsome
peevish face of an aquiline type. A delicate mouth, relaxed and
bloodless, seemed to make a fretful appeal to the spectator, and the
dark circles under the eyes shewed violet on a smooth and pallid skin.
She was dressed in a faded tea-gown much betrimmed, covered up with a
dingy white shawl.

"Well, Gertrude--so you've come--at last!"--she said, after a moment,
in a tone of resentment.

"If you can put me up for the night--I can stay. I've brought no
luggage."

"That doesn't matter. There's a stretcher bed. Come in." Gertrude
Marvell entered, and her mother closed the door.

"Well, mother--how are you?"

The daughter offered her cheek, which the elder woman kissed. Then Mrs.
Marvell said bitterly--

"Well, I don't suppose, Gertrude, it much matters to you how I am."

Gertrude took off her wet waterproof, and hat, and sitting down by the
fire, looked round her mother's bed-sitting-room. There was a tray on
the table with the remains of a meal. There were also a large number of
women's hats, some trimmed, some untrimmed, some in process of
trimming, lying about the room, on the different articles of furniture.
There was a tiny dog in a basket, which barked shrilly and feebly as
Gertrude approached the fire, and there were various cheap illustrated
papers and a couple of sixpenny novels to be seen emerging from the
litter here and there. For the rest, the furniture was of a squalid
lodging-house type. On the chimney-piece however was a bunch of
daffodils, the only fresh and pleasing object in the room.

To Gertrude it was as though she had seen it all before. Behind the
room, there stretched a succession of its ghostly fellows--the rooms of
her childhood. In those rooms she could remember her mother as a young
and comely woman, but always with the same slovenly dress, and the same
untidy--though then abundant and beautiful--hair. And as she half shut
her eyes she seemed also to see her younger sister coming in and
out--malicious, secretive--with her small turn-up nose, pouting lips,
and under-hung chin.

She made no reply to her mother's complaining remark. But while she
held her cold hands to the blaze that Mrs. Marvell stirred up, her eyes
took careful note of her mother's aspect. "Much as usual," was her
inward comment. "Whatever happens, she'll outlive me."

"You've been going on with the millinery?" She pointed to the hats. "I
hope you've been making it pay."

"It provides me with a few shillings now and then," said Mrs. Marvell,
sitting heavily down on the other side of the fire--"which Winnie
generally gets out of me!" she said sharply. "I am a miserable pauper
now, as I always have been."

Gertrude's look was unmoved. Her mother had, she knew, all that her
father had left behind him--no great sum, but enough for a solitary
woman to live on.

"Well, anyway, you must be glad of it as an occupation. I wish I could
help you. But I haven't really a farthing of my own, beyond the
interest on my L1000. I handle a great deal of money, but it all goes
to the League, and I never let them pay me more than my bare expenses.
Now then, tell me all about everybody!" And she lay back in the
dilapidated basket-chair that had been offered her, and prepared
herself to listen.

The family chronicle was done. It was as depressing as usual, and
Gertrude made but little comment upon it. When it was finished, Mrs.
Marvell rose, and put the kettle on the fire, and got out a couple of
fresh cups and saucers from a cupboard. As she did so, she looked round
at her visitor.

"And you're as deep in that militant business as ever."

Gertrude made a negligent sign of assent.

"Well, you'll never get any good of it." The mother's pale cheek
flushed. It excited her to have this chance of speaking her mind to her
clever and notorious daughter, whom in many ways she secretly envied,
while heartily disapproving her acts and opinions.

Gertrude shrugged her shoulders.

"What's the good of arguing?"

"Well, it's true"--said the mother, persisting. "Every new thing you
do, turns more people against you. Winnie's a Suffragist--but she says
you've spoilt all their game!"

Gertrude's eyes shone; she despised her mother's opinion, and her
sister's still more, and yet once again in their neighbourhood, once
again in the old environment, she could not help treating them in the
old defiant brow-beating way.

"And you think, I suppose, that Winnie knows a good deal about it?"

"Well, she knows what everybody's saying--in the trams--and the trains
everywhere. Hundreds of them that used to be for you have turned over."

"Let them!"

The contemptuous tone irritated Mrs. Marvell. But at the same time she
could not help admiring her eldest daughter, as she sat there in the
fire-light, her quiet well-cut dress, her delicate hands and feet. It
was true indeed, she was a scarce-crow for thinness, and looked years
older--"somehow gone to pieces"--thought the mother, vaguely, and with
a queer, sudden pang.

"And you're going on with it?"

"What? Militancy? Of course we are--more than ever!"

"Why, the men laugh at you, Gertrude!"

"They won't laugh--by the time we've done," said Gertrude, with
apparent indifference. Her mother had not sufficient subtlety of
perception to see that the indifference was now assumed, to hide the
quiver of nerves, irreparably injured by excitement and overstrain.

"Well, all I know is, it's against nature to suppose that women can
fight men." Mrs. Marvell's remarks were rather like the emergence of
scattered spars from a choppy sea.

"We shall fight them," said Gertrude, sourly--"And what's more, we
shall beat them."

"All the same we've got to live with them!" cried her mother, suddenly
flushing, as old memories swept across her.

"Yes,--on our terms--not theirs!"

"I do believe, Gertrude, you hate the very sight of a man!" Gertrude
smiled again; then suddenly shivered, as though the cold wind outside
had swept through the room.

"And so would you--if you knew what I do!"

"Well I do know a good bit!" protested Mrs. Marvell. "And I'm a married
woman,--worse luck! and you're not. But you'll never see it any other
way than your own, Gertie. You got a kink in you when you were quite
a girl. Last week I was talking about you to a woman I know--and I
said--'It's the girls ruined by the bad men that make Gertrude so
mad'--and she said--'She don't ever think of the boys that are ruined
by the bad women!--Has she ever had a son--not she!' And she just cried
and cried. I suppose she was thinking of something."

Gertrude rose.

"Look here, mother. Can I go to bed? I'm awfully tired."

"Wait a bit. I'll make the bed."

Gertrude sat down by the fire again. Her exhaustion was evident, and
she made no attempt to help her mother. Mrs. Marvell let down the
chair-bed, drew it near the fire, and found some bed-clothes. Then she
produced night-things of her own, and helped Gertrude undress. When her
daughter was in bed, she made some tea, and dry toast, and Gertrude let
them be forced on her. When she had finished, the mother suddenly
stooped and kissed her.

"Where are you going to now, Gertrude? Are you staying on with that
lady in Hamptonshire?"

"Can't tell you my plans just yet," said Gertrude sleepily--"but you'll
know next week."

The lights were put out. Both women tried to sleep, and Gertrude was
soon heavily asleep.

But as soon as it was light, Mrs. Marvell heard her moving, the splash
of water, and the lighting of the fire. Presently Gertrude came to her
side fully dressed--

"There, mother, I've made _you_ a cup of tea! And now in a few minutes
I shall be off."

Mrs. Marvell sat up and drank the tea.

"I didn't think you'd go in such a hurry," she said, fretfully.

"I must. My day's so full. Well, now look here, Mother, I want you to
know if anything were to happen to me, my thousand pounds would come to
you first, and then to Winnie and her children. And it's my wish, that
neither my brother nor Henry shall touch a farthing of it. I've made a
will, and that's the address of my solicitors, who're keeping it." She
handed her mother an envelope.

Mrs. Marvell put down her tea, and put her handkerchief to her eyes.

"I believe you're up to something dreadful, Gertrude,--which you won't
tell me."

"Nonsense," said Gertrude, not however unkindly. "But we mayn't see
each other for a good while. There!--I'll open the windows--that'll
make you feel more cheerful." And she drew up the blinds to the dull
February day, and opened a window.

"I'll telephone to Winnie as I go past the Post Office to come and
spend the day with you--and I'll send up the servant to do your room.
Now don't fret."

"I'm a lonely old woman, Gertrude:--and I wish I was dead."

Gertrude frowned.

"You should try and read something, Mother--better than these trashy
novels. When I've time, I'll send you a parcel of books--I've got a
good many. And don't you let your work go--it's good for you. Now
good-bye."

The two women kissed--Mrs. Marvell embracing her daughter with a sudden
fierceness of emotion to which Gertrude submitted, almost for the first
time in her life. Then her mother pushed her away.

"Good-bye, Gertrude--you'd better go!"

Gertrude went out noiselessly, closing the door behind her with a
lingering movement, unlike her. In the tiny hall below, she found the
"general" at work, and sent her up to Mrs. Marvell. Then she went out
into the grey February morning, and the little girl of the landlady
standing on the steps saw her enter one of the eastward-bound trams.

Monday afternoon came. Winnington had been called away to Wanchester by
urgent County business; against his will, for there had been some bad
rioting the day before at Latchford, and he would rather have gone to
help his brother magistrates. But there was no help for it. Lady
Tonbridge was at the little Georgian house, shutting it up for six
months. Delia was left alone in the Abbey, consumed with a restless
excitement she had done her best to hide from her companions. She
suddenly made up her mind that she would go and see for herself, and by
herself, what was happening at Monk Lawrence. She set out unobserved
and on foot, and had soon climbed the hill and reached the wood walk
along its crest where she had once met Lathrop. Half way through,
she came on two persons whom she at once recognised as the
science-mistress, Miss Jackson, and Miss Toogood. They were waiting
slowly, and, as it seemed to Delia, sadly; the little dressmaker
limping painfully, with her head thrown back and a face of fixed and
tragic distress.

When they saw Delia, they stopped in agitation.

"Oh, Miss Blanchflower!--"

Delia who knew that Miss Jackson had been in town hoping for work at
the Central Office of the League of Revolt, divined at once that she
had been disappointed.

"They couldn't find you anything?"

The teacher shook her head.

"And the Governors have given me a month's salary here in lieu of
notice. I've left the school, Miss Blanchflower! I was in the Square
you know, that day--and at the Police Court afterwards. That was what
did it. And I have my old mother to keep."

A pair of haggard eyes met Delia's.

"Oh, but I'll help!" cried Delia.--"You must let me help!--won't you?"

"Thank you--but I've got a few savings," said the teacher quietly. "It
isn't that so much. It's--well, Miss Toogood feels it too. She was in
town--she saw everything. And she knows what I mean. We're
disheartened--that's what it is!"

"With the movement?" said Delia, after a moment.

"It seemed so splendid when we talked of it down here--and--it
_was_--so horrible!" Her voice dropped.

"So horrible!" echoed Miss Toogood drearily. "It wasn't what we meant,
somehow. And yet we'd read about it. But to see those young women
beating men's faces--well, it did for me!"

"The police were rough too!" cried Miss Jackson. "But you couldn't
wonder at it, Miss Blanchflower, could you?"

Delia looked into the speaker's frank, troubled face. "You and I felt
the same," she said in a choked voice. "It was ugly--and it was
absurd."

She walked back with them a little way, comforting them, as best she
could. And her sympathy, her sweetness did--strangely--comfort them.
When she left them, they walked on, talking tenderly of her, counting
on _her_ good fortune, if there was none for them.

At the end of the walk, towards Monk Lawrence, another figure emerged
from the distance. Delia started, then gathered all her wits; for it
was Lathrop.

He hurried towards her, breathless, cutting all preliminaries--

"I was coming to find you. I arrived this morning. There is something
wrong! I have just been to the house, and there is no one there."

"What do you mean?"

"No one. I went to Daunt's rooms. Everything locked. The house
absolutely dark--everywhere. And I know that he has had the strictest
orders!"

Without a word, she began to run, and he beside her. When she
slackened, he told her that while in London he had made the most
skilful enquiries he could devise as to the plot he believed to be on
foot. But--like Delia's own--they had been quite fruitless. Those
persons who had shared suspicion with him in December were now
convinced that the thing was dropped. All that he had ascertained was
that Miss Marvell was in town, apparently recovered, and Miss Andrews
with her.

"Well--and were you pleased with your raid?" he asked her, half
mockingly, as he opened the gate of Monk Lawrence for her.

She resented the question, and the tone of it, remembering his first
grandiloquent letter to her.

"_You_ ought to be," she said, drily. "It was the kind of thing you
recommended."

"In that letter I wrote you! I ought to have apologised to you for that
letter long ago. I am afraid it was an exercise. Oh, I felt it, I
suppose, when I wrote it."

There was a touch of something insolent in his voice.

She made no reply. If it had not been for the necessity which yoked
them, she would not have spent another minute in his company, so
repellent to her had he become--both in the inner and the outer man.
She tried only to think of him as an ally in a desperate campaign.

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