Delia Blanchflower

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"You kicked me!--you had the sharpest little toes!"

"Did I?" said Delia composedly. "I was rather good at kicking. So you
are Billy Andrews?"

"Right. I'm Captain now, and they've just made me adjutant down here
for the Yeomanry. My mother keeps house for me. You're coming here to
live? Please let me say how sorry I was to see your sad news." The
condolence was a little clumsy but sincere.

"Thank you. I must go and see to the luggage. Let me introduce you to
Miss Marvell--Captain Andrews--Miss Marvell."

That lady bowed coldly, as Delia departed. The tall, soldierly man,
whose pleasant looks were somewhat spoilt by a slightly underhung
mouth, and prominent chin, disguised, however, by a fine moustache,
offered assistance with the luggage.

"There is no need, thank you," said Miss Marvell. "Miss Blanchflower
and her maid will see to it."

And the Captain noticed that the speaker remained entirely passive
while the luggage was being collected and piled into a fly by the
porters, directed by Miss Blanchflower and her maid. She stood quietly
on the platform, till all was ready, and Delia beckoned to her. In the
intervals the soldier tried to make conversation, but with very small
success. He dwelt upon some of the changes Miss Blanchflower would find
on the estate; how the old head-keeper, who used to make a pet of her,
was dead, and the new agent her father had put in was thought to be
doing well, how the village had lost markedly in population in the last
few years--this emigration to Canada was really getting beyond a
joke!--and so forth. Miss Marvell made no replies. But she suddenly
asked him a question.

"What's that house over there?"

She pointed to a grey facade on a wooded hill some two miles off.

"That's our show place--Monk Lawrence! We're awfully proud of
it--Elizabethan, and that kind of thing. But of course you've heard of
Monk Lawrence! It's one of the finest things in England."

"It belongs to Sir Wilfrid Lang?"

"Certainly. Do you know him? He's scarcely been there at all, since he
became a Cabinet Minister; and yet he spent a lot of money in repairing
it a few years ago. They say it's his wife's health--that it's too damp
for her. Anyway it's quite shut up,--except that they let tourists see
it once a month."

"Does anybody live in the house?"--

"Oh--a caretaker, of course,--one of the keepers. They let the
shooting. Ah! there's Miss Blanchflower calling you."

Miss Marvell--as the gallant Captain afterwards remembered--took a long
look at the distant house and then went to join Miss Blanchflower. The
Captain accompanied her, and helped her to stow away the remaining bags
into the fly, while a small concourse of rustics, sprung from nowhere,
stolidly watched the doings of the heiress and her friend. Delia
suddenly bent forward to him, as he was about to shut the door, with an
animated look--"Can you tell me who that gentleman is who has just
walked off towards the village?"--she pointed.

"His name is Lathrop. He lives in a place just the other side of yours.
He's got some trout-hatching ponds--will stock anybody's stream for
them. Rather a queer customer!"--the good-natured Captain dropped his
voice. "Well, good-bye, my train's just coming. I hope I may come and
see you soon?"

Delia nodded assent, and they drove off.

"By George, she's a beauty!" said the Captain to himself as he turned
away. "Nothing wrong with her that I can see. But there are some
strange tales going about. I wonder who that other woman is.
Marvell--Gertrude Marvell?--I seem to have heard the name
somewhere.--Hullo, Masham, how are you?" He greeted the leading local
solicitor who had just entered the station, a man with a fine ascetic
face, and singularly blue eyes. Masham looked like a starved poet or
preacher, and was in reality one of the hardest and shrewdest men of
business in the southern counties.

"Well, did you see Miss Blanchflower?" said the Captain, as Masham
joined him on the platform, and they entered the up train together.

"I did. A handsome young lady! Have you heard the news?"

"No."

"Your neighbor, Mr. Winnington--Mark Winnington--is named as her
guardian under her father's will--until she is twenty-five. He is also
trustee, with absolute power over the property."

The Captain shewed a face of astonishment.

"Gracious! what had Winnington to do with Sir Robert Blanchflower!"

"An old friend, apparently. But it is a curious will."

The solicitor's abstracted look shewed a busy mind. The Captain had
never felt a livelier desire for information.

"Isn't there something strange about the girl?"--he said, lowering his
voice, although there was no one else in the railway carriage. "I never
saw a more beautiful creature! But my mother came home from London the
other day with some very queer stories, from a woman who had met them
abroad. She said Miss Blanchflower was awfully clever, but as wild as a
hawk--mad about women's rights and that kind of thing. In the hotel
where she met them, people fought very shy of her."

"Oh, she's a militant suffragist," said the solicitor quietly--"though
she's not had time yet since her father's death to do any mischief.
That--in confidence--is the meaning of the will."

The adjutant whistled.

"Goodness!--Winnington will have his work cut out for him. But he
needn't accept."

"He has accepted. I heard this morning from the London solicitor."

"Your firm does the estate business down here?"

"For many years. I hope to see Mr. Winnington to-morrow or next day. He
is evidently hurrying home--because of this."

There was silence for a few minutes; then the Captain said bluntly:

"It's an awful pity, you know, that kind of thing cropping up down
here. We've escaped it so far."

"With such a lot of wild women about, what can you expect?" said the
solicitor briskly. "Like the measles--sure to come our way sooner or
later."

"Do you think they'll get what they want?" "What--the vote? No--not
unless the men are fools." The refined, apostolic face set like iron.

"None of the womanly women want it," said the Captain with conviction.
"You should hear my mother on it."

The solicitor did not reply. The adjutant's mother was not in his eyes
a model of wisdom. Nor did his own opinion want any fortifying from
outside.

Captain Andrews was not quite in the same position. He was conscious of
a strong male instinct which disavowed Miss Blanchflower and all her
kind; but at the same time he was exceedingly susceptible to female
beauty, and it troubled his reasoning processes that anybody so
wrong-headed should be so good-looking. His heart was soft, and his
brain all that was wanted for his own purposes. But it did not enable
him-it never had enabled him--to understand these extraordinary
"goings-on," which the newspapers were every day reporting, on the part
of well-to-do, educated women, who were ready--it seemed--to do
anything outrageous--just for a vote! "Of course nobody would mind if
the rich women--the tax-paying women--had a vote--help us Tories
famously. But the women of the working-classes--why, Good Lord, look at
them when there's any disturbance on--any big strike--look at
Tonypandy!--a deal sight worse than the men! Give them the vote and
they'd take us to the devil, even quicker than Lloyd George!"

Aloud he said--

"Do you know anything about that lady Miss Blanchflower had with her?
She introduced me. Miss Marvell--I think that was the name. I thought I
had heard it somewhere."

The solicitor lifted his eyebrows.

"I daresay. She was in the stone-throwing raid last August. Fined 20s.
or a month, for damage in Pall Mall. She was in prison a week; then
somebody paid her fine. She professed great annoyance, but one of the
police told me it was privately paid by her own society. She's too
important to them--they can't do without her. An extremely clever
woman."

"Then what on earth does she come and bury herself down here for?"
cried the Captain.

Masham shewed a meditative twist of the lip.

"Can't say, I'm sure. But they want money. And Miss Blanchflower is an
important capture."

"I hope that girl will soon have the sense to shake them off!" said the
Captain with energy. "She's a deal too beautiful for that kind of
thing. I shall get my mother to come and talk to her."

The solicitor concealed his smile behind his _Daily Telegraph_. He had
a real liking and respect for the Captain, but the family affection of
the Andrews household was a trifle too idyllic to convince a gentleman
so well acquainted with the seamy side of life. What about that
hunted-looking girl, the Captain's sister? He didn't believe, he never
had believed that Mrs. Andrews was quite so much of an angel as she
pretended to be.

Meanwhile, no sooner had the fly left the station than Delia turned to
her companion--

"Gertrude!--did you see what that man was reading who passed us just
now? Our paper!--the _Tocsin_."

Gertrude Marvell lifted her eyebrows slightly.

"No doubt he bought it at Waterloo--out of curiosity."

"Why not out of sympathy? I thought he looked at us rather closely. Of
course, if he reads the _Tocsin_ he knows something about you! What fun
it would be to discover a comrade and a brother down here!"

"It depends entirely upon what use we could make of him," said Miss
Marvell. Then she turned suddenly on her companion--"Tell me really,
Delia--how long do you want to stay here?"

"Well, a couple of months at least," said Delia, with a rather
perplexed expression. "After all, Gertrude, it's my property now, and
all the people on it, I suppose, will expect to see one and make
friends. I don't want them to think that because I'm a suffragist I'm
going to shirk. It wouldn't be good policy, would it?"

"It's all a question of the relative importance of things," said the
other quietly. "London is our head quarters, and things are moving very
rapidly."

"I know. But, dear, you did promise! for a time"--pleaded Delia.
"Though of course I know how dull it must be for you, when you are the
life and soul of so many things in London. But you must remember that I
haven't a penny at this moment but what Mr. Winnington chooses to allow
me! We must come to some understanding with him, mustn't we, before we
can do anything? It is all so difficult!"--the girl's voice took a
deep, passionate note--"horribly difficult, when I long to be standing
beside you--and the others--in the open--fighting--for all I'm worth.
But how can I, just yet? I ought to have eight thousand a year, and Mr.
Winnington can cut me down to anything he pleases. It's just as
important that I should get hold of my money--at this particular
moment--as that I should be joining raids in London,--more important,
surely--because we want money badly!--you say so yourself. I don't want
it for myself; I want it all--for the cause! But the question is, how
to get it--with this will in our way. I--"

"Ah, there's that house again!" exclaimed Miss Marvell, but in the same
low restrained tone that was habitual to her. She bent forward to look
at the stately building, on the hill-side, which according to Captain
Andrews' information, was the untenanted property of Sir Wilfrid Lang,
whom a shuffle of offices had just admitted to the Cabinet.

"What house?"--said Delia, not without a vague smart under the sudden
change of subject. She had a natural turn for declamation; a girlish
liking to hear herself talk; and Gertrude, her tutor in the first
place, and now her counsellor and friend, had a quiet way of snubbing
such inclinations, except when they could be practically useful. "You
have the gifts of a speaker--we shall want you to speak more and more,"
she would say. But in private she rarely failed to interrupt an
harangue, even the first beginnings of one.

However, the smart soon passed, and Delia too turned her eyes towards
the house among the trees. She gave a little cry of pleasure.

"Oh, that's Monk Lawrence!--such a lovely--lovely old place! I used
often to go there as a child--I adored it. But I can't remember who
lives there now."

Gertrude Marvell handed on the few facts learned from the Captain.

"I knew"--she added--"that Sir Wilfrid Lang lived somewhere near here.
That they told me at the office."

"And the house is empty?" Delia, flushing suddenly and vividly, turned
to her companion.

"Except for the caretaker--who no doubt lives some where on the
ground-floor."

There was silence a moment. Then Delia laughed uncomfortably.

"Look here, Gertrude, we can't attempt anything of that kind _there_: I
remember now--it was Sir Wilfrid's brother who had the house, when I
used to go there. He was a great friend of Father's; and his little
girls and I were great chums. The house is just wonderful--full of
treasures! I am sorry it belongs to Sir Wilfrid--but nobody could lift
a finger against Monk Lawrence!"

Miss Marvell's eyes sparkled.

"He is the most formidable enemy we have," she said softly, between her
closed lips. A tremor seemed to run through her slight frame.

Then she smiled, and her tone changed.

"Dear Delia, of course I shan't run you into any--avoidable--trouble,
down here, apart from the things we have agreed on."

"What have we agreed on? Remind me!"

"In the first place, that we won't hide our opinions--or stop our
propaganda--to please anybody."

"Certainly!" said Delia. "I shall have a drawing-room meeting as soon
as possible. You seem to have fixed up a number of speaking engagements
for us both. And we told the office to send us down tons of
literature." Then her face broke into laughter--"Poor Mr. Winnington!"

* * * * *

"A rather nice old place, isn't it?" said Delia, an hour later, when
the elderly housekeeper, who had received them with what had seemed to
Delia's companion a quite unnecessary amount of fuss and family
feeling, had at last left them alone in the drawing-room, after taking
them over the house.

The girl spoke in a softened voice. She was standing thoughtfully by
the open window looking out, her hands clasping a chair behind her. Her
thin black dress, made short and plain, with a white frill at the open
neck and sleeves, by its very meagreness emphasized the young beauty of
the wearer,--a beauty full of significance, charged--over-charged--with
character. The attitude should have been one of repose; it was on the
contrary one of tension, suggesting a momentary balance only, of
impetuous forces. Delia was indeed suffering the onset of a wave of
feeling which had come upon her unexpectedly; for which she had not
prepared herself. This rambling old house with its quiet garden and
early Victorian furniture, had appealed to her in some profound and
touching way. Her childhood stirred again in her, and deep inherited
things. How well she remembered the low, spacious room, with its oak
wainscotting, its book-cases and its pictures! That crayon over the
writing-table of her grandmother in her white cap and shawl; her
grandfather's chair, and the old Bible and Prayer-book, beside it, from
which he used to read evening prayers; the stiff arm-chairs with their
faded chintz covers; the writing-table with its presentation inkstand;
the groups of silhouettes on the walls, her forbears of long ago; the
needlework on the fire-screen, in which, at nine years old, she had
been proud to embroider the white rose-bud still so lackadaisically
prominent; the stool on which she used to sit and knit beside her
grandmother; the place on the run where the old collie used to lie--she
saw his ghost there still!--all these familiar and even ugly objects
seemed to be putting out spiritual hands to her, playing on nerves once
eagerly responsive. She had never stayed for long in the house; but she
had always been happy there. The moral atmosphere of it came back to
her, and with a sense of the old rest and protection. Her grandfather
might have been miserly to others; he had always been kind to her. But
it was her grandmother who had been supreme in that room. A woman of
clear sense and high character; narrow and prejudiced in many respects,
but sorely missed by many when her turn came to die; a Christian in
more than name; sincerely devoted to her teasing little granddaughter.
A woman who had ordered her household justly and kindly; a personality
not soon forgotten.

"There is something of her in me still," thought Delia--"at least, I
hope there is. And where--is the rest of me going?"

"I think I'll take off my things, dear," said Gertrude Marvell,
breaking in on the girl's reverie. "Don't trouble. I know my room."

The door closed. Delia was now looking out into the garden, where on
the old grass-slopes the September shadows lay--still and slumbrous.
The peace of it, the breath of its old-world tradition, came upon her,
relaxing the struggle of mind and soul in which she had been living for
months, and that ceaseless memory which weighed upon her of her dying
father,--his bitter and increasing recoil from all that, for a while,
he had indulgently permitted--his final estrangement from her, her own
obstinacy and suffering.

"Yes!"--she cried suddenly, out loud, to the rosebushes beyond the open
window--"but it had a reason--it _had_ a reason!" She clasped her
hands fiercely to her breast. "And there is no birth without pain."

Chapter IV

A few days after her arrival, Delia woke up in the early dawn in the
large room that had been her grandmother's. She sat up in the broad
white bed with its dimity curtains, her hands round her knees, peering
into the half darkened room, where, however, she had thrown the windows
wide open, behind the curtains, before going to sleep. On the opposite
wall she saw an indifferent picture of her father as a boy of twelve on
his pony; beside it a faded photograph of her mother, her beautiful
mother, in her wedding dress. There had never been any real sympathy
between her mother and her grandmother. Old Lady Blanchflower had
resented her son's marriage with a foreign woman, with a Greek, in
particular. The Greeks were not at that moment of much account in the
political world, and Lady Blanchflower thought of them as a nation of
shams, trading on a great past which did not belong to them. Her secret
idea was that out of their own country they grew rich in disreputable
ways, and while at home, where only the stupid ones stayed, they were a
shabby, half-civilised people, mostly bankrupt. She could not imagine
how a girl got any bringing up at Athens, and believed nothing that her
son told her. So that when the young Mrs. Blanchflower arrived, there
were jars in the household, and it was not long before the spoilt and
handsome bride went to her husband in tears, and asked to be taken
away. Delia was surprised and touched, therefore, to find her mother's
portrait in her grandmother's room, where nothing clearly had been
admitted that had not some connection with family affection or family
pride. She wondered whether on her mother's death her grandmother had
hung the picture there in dumb confession of, or penance for, her own
unkindness.

The paper of the room was a dingy grey, and the furniture was heavily
old-fashioned and in Delia's eyes inconvenient. "If I'm going to keep
the room I shall make it all white," she thought, "with proper fitted
wardrobes, and some low bookcases--a bath, too, of course, in the
dressing-room. And they must put in electric light at once! How could
they have done without it all this time! I believe with all its faults,
this house could be made quite pretty!"

And she fell into a reverie,--eagerly constructive--wherein Maumsey
became, at a stroke, a House Beautiful, at once modern and
aesthetically right, a dim harmony in lovely purples, blues and greens,
with the few fine things it possessed properly spaced and grouped, the
old gardens showing through the latticed windows, and golden or silvery
lights, like those in a Blanche interior, gleaming in its now dreary
rooms.

Then at a bound she sprang out of bed, and stood upright in the autumn
dawn.

"I hate myself!" she said fiercely--as she ran her hands through the
mass of her dark hair, and threw it back upon her shoulders. Hurrying
across the room in her night-gown, she threw back the curtains. A light
autumnal mist, through which the sun was smiling, lay on the garden.
Stately trees rose above it, and masses of flowers shewed vaguely
bright; while through the blue distances beyond, the New Forest
stretched to the sea.

But Delia was looking at herself, in a long pier-glass that represented
almost the only concession to the typical feminine needs in the room.
She was not admiring her own seemliness; far from it; she was rating
and despising herself for a feather-brained waverer and
good-for-nothing.

"Oh yes, you can _talk_!" she said, to the figure in the glass--"you
are good enough at that! But what are you going to _do_!--Spend your
time at Maple's and Waring--matching chintzes and curtains?--when
you've _promised_--you've _promised_! Gertrude's right. There _are_ all
sorts of disgusting cowardices and weaknesses in you! Oh! yes,
you'd like to go fiddling and fussing down here--playing the
heiress--patronising the poor people--putting yourself into beautiful
clothes--and getting heaps of money out of Mr. Winnington to spend.
It's in you--it's just in you--to throw everything over--to forget
everything you've felt, and everything you've vowed--and just _wallow_
in luxury and selfishness and snobbery! Gertrude's absolutely right.
But you shan't do it! You shan't put a hand to it! Why did that man
take the guardianship? Now it's his business. He may see to it! But
_you_--you have something else to do!"

And she stood erect, the angry impulse in her stiffening all her young
body. And through her memory there ran, swift-footed, fragments from a
rhetoric of which she was already fatally mistress, the formulae too of
those sincere and goading beliefs on which her youth had been fed ever
since her first acquaintance with Gertrude Marvell. The mind renewed
them like vows; clung to them, embraced them.

What was she before she knew Gertrude? She thought of that earlier
Delia as of a creature almost too contemptible to blame. From the
maturity of her twenty-one years she looked back upon herself at
seventeen or eighteen with wonder. That Delia had read nothing--knew
nothing--had neither thoughts or principles. She was her father's
spoilt child and darling; delighting in the luxury that surrounded his
West Indian Governorship; courted and flattered by the few English of
the colonial capital, and by the members of her father's staff; with
servants for every possible need or whim; living her life mostly in the
open air, riding at her father's side, through the sub-tropical forests
of the colony; teasing and tyrannising over the dear old German
governess who had brought her up, and whose only contribution to her
education--as Delia now counted education--had been the German tongue.
Worth something!--but not all those years, "when I might have been
learning so much else, things I shall never have time to learn
now!--things that Gertrude has at her finger's end. Why wasn't I taught
properly--decently--like any board school child! As Gertrude says, we
women want everything we can get! We _must_ know the things that men
know--that we may beat them at their own game. Why should every Balliol
boy--years younger than me--have been taught his classics and
mathematics,--and have everything brought to him--made easy for
him--history, political economy, logic, philosophy, laid at his
lordship's feet, if he will just please to learn!--while I, who have
just as good a brain as he, have had to pick up a few scraps by the
way, just because nobody who had charge of me ever thought it worth
while to teach, a girl. But I have a mind!--an intelligence!--even if I
am a woman; and there is all the world to know. Marriage? Yes!--but not
at the sacrifice of everything else--of the rational, civilised self."

On the whole though, her youth had been happy enough, with recurrent
intervals of _ennui_ and discontent. Intervals too of poetic
enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a
Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's
aides-de-camp. And then--a few stray books or magazine articles had
made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as futile as the
other.

"I knew nothing--I had no mind!"--she repeated with energy,--"till
Gertrude came."

And she thought with ardour of that intellectual awakening, under the
strange influence of the apparently reserved and impassive woman, who
had come to read history with her for six months, at the suggestion of
a friend of her father's, a certain cultivated and clever Lady
Tonbridge, "who saw how starved I was."

So, after enquiry, a lady who was a B.A. of London, and had taken
first-class honour in history--Delia's ambition would accept nothing
less--had been found, who wanted for health's sake a winter in a warm
climate, and was willing to read history with Governor Blanch-flower's
half-fledged daughter.

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