Delia Blanchflower Part 33

At that moment, an idea occurred to her. Her face, responsive as a wave to the wind, relaxed. Its sullenness disappeared in sudden brightness--in something like triumph. She raised her eyes. Their tremulous, half whimsical look set Winnington wondering what she could be going to say next.

"You seem to have beaten me," she said, with a little nod--"or you think you have."

"I have no thoughts that you mightn't know," was the quiet reply.

"You want me to promise not to do it again?"

"If you mean to keep it."

As he stood by the fire, looking down upon her rather sternly--she yet perceived in his grey eyes, something of that expression she had seen there at their first meeting--as though the heart of a good man tried to speak to her. The same expression--and yet different; with something added and interfused, which moved her strangely.

"Odd as it may seem, I will keep it!" she said. "Yet without giving up any earlier purpose, or promise, whatever." Each word was emphasized.

His face changed.

"I won't worry _you_ in any such way again," she added hastily and proudly.

Some other words were on her lips, but she checked them. She held out her hand for the cheque, and the smile with which she accepted it, after her preceding pa.s.sion, puzzled him.

She locked up the cheque in a drawer of her writing-table. Winnington's horse pa.s.sed the window, and he rose to go. She accompanied him to the hall door and waved a light farewell. Winnington's response was ceremonious. A sure instinct told him to shew no further softness. His dilemma was getting worse and worse, and Lady Tonbridge had been no use to him whatever.

Chapter XII

One of the first days of the New year rose clear and frosty. When the young housemaid who had temporarily replaced Weston as Delia's maid drew back her curtains at half-past seven, Delia caught a vision of an opaline sky with a sinking moon and fading stars. A strewing of snow lay on the ground, and the bare black trees rose, vividly separate, on the white stretches of gra.s.s. Her window looked to the north along the bases of the low range of hills which shut in the valley and the village. A patch of paler colour on the purple slope of the hills marked the long front of Monk Lawrence.

As she sleepily roused herself, she saw her bed littered with dark objects--two leather boxes of some size, and a number of miscellaneous cases--and when the maid had left the room, she lay still, looking at them. They were the signs and symbols of an enquiry she had lately been conducting into her possessions, which seemed to her to have yielded very satisfactory results. They represented in the main the contents of a certain cupboard in the wall of her bedroom where Lady Blanchflower had always kept her jewels, and where, in consequence, Weston had so far locked away all that Delia possessed. Here were all her own girlish ornaments--costly things which her father had given her at intervals during the three or four years since her coming out; here were her Mother's jewels, which Sir Robert had sent to his bankers after his wife's death, and had never seen again during his lifetime; and here were also a number of family jewels which had belonged to Delia's grandmother, and had remained, after Lady Blanchflower's death, in the custody of the family lawyers, till Delia, to whom they had been left by will, had appeared to claim them.

Delia had always known that she possessed a quant.i.ty of valuable things, and had hitherto felt but small interest in them. Gertrude's influence, and her own idealism had bred in her contempt for gauds. It was the worst of breeding to wear anything for its mere money value; and nothing whatever should be worn that wasn't in itself beautiful.

Lady Blanchflower's taste had been, in Delia's eyes, abominable; and her diamonds,--tiaras, pendants and the rest--had absolutely nothing to recommend them but their sheer brute cost. After a few glances at them, the girl had shut them up and forgotten them.

But they _were_ diamonds, and they must be worth some thousands.

It was this idea which had flashed upon her during her last talk with Winnington, and she had been brooding over it, and pondering it ever since. Winnington himself was away. He and his sister had been spending Christmas with some cousins in the midlands. Meanwhile Delia recognised that his relation to her had been somewhat strained. His letters to her on various points of business had been more formal than usual; and though he had sent her a pocket Keats for a Christmas present, it had arrived accompanied merely by his "kind regards" and she had felt unreasonably aggrieved, and much inclined to send it back. His cheque meanwhile for 500 had gone into Delia's bank. No help for it--considering all the Christmas bills which had been pouring in! But she panted for the time when she could return it.

As for his threat of permanently refunding the money out of his own pocket, she remembered it with soreness of spirit. Too bad!

Well, there they lay, on the counterpane all round her--the means of checkmating her guardian. For while she was rummaging in the wall-safe, the night before, suddenly the fire had gone down, and the room had sunk to freezing point. Delia, brought up in warm climates, had jumped shivering into bed, and there, heaped round with the contents of the cupboard, had examined a few more cases, till sleep and cold overpowered her.

In the grey morning light she opened some of the cases again. Vulgar and ugly, if you like--but undeniably, absurdly worth money! Her dark eyes caught the sparkle of the jewels running through her fingers.

These tasteless things--mercifully--were her own--her very own.

Winnington had nothing to say to them! She could wear them--or give them--or sell them, as she pleased.

She was alternately exultant, and strangely full of a fluttering anxiety. The thought of returning Winnington's cheque was sweet to her.

But her disputes with him had begun to cost her more than she had ever imagined they could or would. And the particular way out, which, a few weeks before, she had so impatiently desired--that he should resign the guardianship, and leave her to battle with the Court of Chancery as best she could--was no longer so attractive to her. To be cherished and cared for by Mark Winnington--no woman yet, but had found it delightful. Insensibly Delia had grown accustomed to it--to his comings and goings, his business-ways, abrupt sometimes, even peremptory, but informed always by a kindness, a selflessness that amazed her.

Everyone wanted his help or advice, and he must refuse now--as he had never refused before--because his time and thoughts were so much taken up with his ward's affairs. Delia knew that she was envied; and knew also that the neighbours thought her an ungrateful, unmanageable hoyden, totally unworthy of such devotion.

She sat up in bed, dreaming, her hands round her knees. No, she didn't want Winnington to give her up! Especially since she had found this easy way out. Why should there be any more friction between them at all? All that _he_ gave her henceforward should be religiously spent on the normal and necessary things. She would keep accounts if he liked, like any good little girl, and shew them up. Let him do with the trust fund exactly what he pleased. For a long time at any rate, she could be independent of it. Why had she never thought of such a device before?

But how to realise the jewels? In all business affairs, Delia was the merest child. She had been brought up in the midst of large expenditure, of which she had been quite unconscious. All preoccupation with money had seemed to her mean and pettifogging. Have it!--and spend it on what you want. But wants must be governed by ideas--by ethical standards. To waste money on personal luxury, on eating, drinking, clothes, or any form of mere display, in such a world as Gertrude Marvell had unveiled to her, seemed to Delia contemptible and idiotic. One must have _some_ nice clothes--some beauty in one's surroundings--and the means of living as one wished to live.

Otherwise, to fume and fret about money, to be coveting instead of giving, buying and bargaining, instead of thinking--or debating--was degrading. She loathed shopping. It was the drug which put women's minds to sleep.

Who would help her? She pondered. She would tell no one till it was done; not even Gertrude, whose cold, changed manner to her hurt the girl's proud sense to think of.

"I must do it properly--I won't be cheated!"

The London lawyers? No. The local solicitor, Mr. Masham? No! Her vanity was far too keenly conscious of their real opinion of her, through all their politeness.

Lady Tonbridge? No! She was Mark Winnington's intimate friend--and a const.i.tutional Suffragist. At the notion of consulting her,--on the means of providing funds for "militancy"--Delia sprang out of bed, and went to her dressing, dissolved in laughter.

And presently--sobered again, and soft-eyed--she was stealing along the pa.s.sage to Weston's door for a word with the trained nurse who was now in charge. Just a week now--to the critical day.

"Is Miss Marvell, in? Ask if she will see Mr. Lathrop for a few minutes?"

Paul Lathrop, left to himself, looked round Delia's drawing-room. It set his teeth on edge. What pictures--what furniture! A certain mellowness born of sheer time, no doubt--but with all its ugly ingredients still repulsively visible. Why didn't the heiress burn everything and begin again? Was all her money to be spent on burning other people's property, when her own was so desperately in need of the purging process--or on dreary meetings and unreadable newspapers?

Lathrop was already tired of these delights; his essentially Hedonist temper was re-a.s.serting itself. The "movement" had excited and interested him for a time; had provided besides easy devices for annoying stupid people. He had been eager to speak and write for it, had persuaded himself that he really cared.

But now candour--and he was generally candid with himself--made him confess that but for Delia Blanchflower he would already have cut his connection with the whole thing. He thought with a mixture of irony and discomfort of his "high-falutin" letter to her.

"And here I am--hanging round her"--he said to himself, as he strolled about the room, peering through his eye-gla.s.s at its common vases, and trivial knick-knacks--"just because Blaydes bothers me. I might as well cry for the moon. But she's worth watching, by Jove. One gets copy out of her, if nothing else! I vow I can't understand why my dithyrambs move her so little--she's dithyrambic enough herself!"

The door opened. He quickly pulled himself together. Gertrude Marvell came in, and as she gave him an absent greeting, he was vaguely struck by some change in her aspect, as Delia had long been. She had always seemed to him a cold half-human being, in all ordinary matters.

But now she was paler, thinner, more remote than ever. "Nerves strained--probably sleepless--" he said to himself. "It's the pace they will live at--it kills them all."

This kind of comment ran at the back of his brain, while he plunged into the "business"--which was his pretence for calling. Gertrude, as a District Organizer of the League of Revolt, had intrusted him with the running of various meetings in small places, along the coast, for which it humiliated him to remember that he had agreed to be paid. For at his very first call upon them, Miss Marvell had divined his impecunious state, and pounced upon him as an agent,--unknown, he thought, to Miss Blanchflower. He came now to report what had been done, and to ask if the meetings should be continued.

Gertrude Marvell shook her head.

"I have had some letters about your meetings. I doubt whether they have been worth while."

Miss Marvell's manner was that of an employer to an employee. Lathrop's vanity winced.

"May I know what was wrong with them?"

Gertrude Marvell considered. Her gesture, unconsciously judicial, annoyed Lathrop still further.

"Too much argument, I hear,--and too little feeling. Our people wanted more about the women in prison. And it was thought that you apologised too much for the outrages."

The last word emerged quite simply, as the only fitting one.

Lathrop laughed,--rather angrily.

"You must be aware, Miss Marvell, that the public thinks they want defence."