Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphry Ward (top 10 most read books in the world TXT) 📖

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