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

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