Delia Blanchflower Part 6

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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+rk. 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, pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sed, 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, flus.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.body 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 att.i.tude 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, s.p.a.cious 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 gra.s.s-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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 s.p.a.ced 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.