Delia Blanchflower Part 53

"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 pa.s.sion 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 coa.r.s.e 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x and l.u.s.t. 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 sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.sent--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 improving her French in Paris--and Winnington, with his hands in his pockets, talked gossip and gardening, without a word of anything that had happened since they three had last met in that room; when Weston, ghostly but convalescent, came in to show herself; when Delia's black spitz careered all over his recovered mistress, and even the cats came to rub themselves against her skirts, it was impossible not to feel for the moment, tremulously happy, and strangely delivered--in this house whence Gertrude Marvell had departed.

How vivid was the impression of this latter fact on the other two may be imagined. When Delia had gone upstairs to chat with Weston, Lady Tonbridge looked at Winnington--

"To what do we owe this crowning mercy? Who dislodged her?"

Winnington's glance was thoughtful.

"I guess it has been her own doing entirely. But I know nothing."

"Hm.--Well, if I may advise, dear Mr. Mark, ask no questions. And"--his old friend put a hand on his arm--"May I go on?" A smile, not very gay, permitted her.

"Let her be!" she said softly, with a world of sympathy in her clear brown eyes. "She's suffered--and she's on edge." He laid his hand on hers, but said nothing.

The days pa.s.sed by. Winnington did as he had been told; and Madeleine Tonbridge seemed to see that Delia was dumbly grateful to him.

Meanwhile in the eyes of her two friends she made little or no advance towards recapturing her former health and strength. The truth, of course, was that she was consumed by devouring and helpless anxiety.

She wrote to Lathrop, posting the letter at a distant village; and received no answer. Then she ascertained that he was not at the cottage, and a casual line in the _Tocsin_ informed her that he had been in town taking part in the foundation of an "outspoken"

newspaper--outspoken on "the fundamental questions of s.e.x, liberty, and morals involved in the suffrage movement."

But a letter addressed "To be forwarded" to the _Tocsin_ office produced no more result than her first. Meanwhile she had written imploringly to various prominent members of the organisation in London pointing out the effect on public opinion that must be produced all through Southern England by any attack on Monk Lawrence. She received two cold and cautious replies. It seemed to her that the writers of them were even more in the dark than she.

The days ran on. The newspapers were full of the coming Woman Suffrage Bill, and its certain defeat in the Commons. Sir Wilfrid Lang was leading the forces hostile to the Suffrage, and making speech after speech in the country to cheering audiences, denouncing the Bill, and the mad women who had tried to promote it by a campaign of outrage, "as ridiculous as it was criminal." He was to move the rejection of it on the second reading, and was reported to be triumphantly confident of the result.