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Delia Blanchflower

by Mrs. Humphry Ward · English · Gutenberg #9665 · 638,718 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Delia Blanchflower

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: January 1, 2006 [eBook #9665]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9665

Credits: Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Charlie Kirschner and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DELIA BLANCHFLOWER ***




Produced by Andrew Templeton, Juliet Sutherland, Charlie
Kirschner and PG Distributed Proofreaders











                                 DELIA

                              BLANCHFLOWER


                                   BY


                           MRS. HUMPHRY WARD

                   AUTHOR "LADY ROSE'S DAUGHTER," ETC.


                        Frontispiece in color by

                              WILL FOSTER




DELIA BLANCHFLOWER




Chapter I


"Not a Britisher to be seen--or scarcely! Well, I can do without 'em
for a bit!"

And the Englishman whose mind shaped these words continued his
leisurely survey of the crowded salon of a Tyrolese hotel, into which a
dining-room like a college hall had just emptied itself after the
mid-day meal. Meanwhile a German, sitting near, seeing that his tall
neighbour had been searching his pockets in vain for matches, offered
some. The Englishman's quick smile in response modified the German's
general opinion of English manners, and the two exchanged some remarks
on the weather--a thunder shower was splashing outside--remarks which
bore witness at least to the Englishman's courage in using such
knowledge of the German tongue as he possessed. Then, smoking
contentedly, he leant against the wall behind him, still looking on.

He saw a large room, some seventy feet long, filled with a
miscellaneous foreign crowd--South Germans, Austrians, Russians,
Italians--seated in groups round small tables, smoking, playing cards
or dominoes, reading the day's newspapers which the funicular had just
brought up, or lazily listening to the moderately good band which was
playing some Rheingold selection at the farther end.

To his left was a large family circle--Russians, according to
information derived from the headwaiter--and among them, a girl,
apparently about eighteen, sitting on the edge of the party and
absorbed in a novel of which she was eagerly turning the pages. From
her face and figure the half savage, or Asiatic note, present in the
physiognomy and complexion of her brothers and sisters, was entirely
absent. Her beautiful head with its luxuriant mass of black hair, worn
low upon the cheek, and coiled in thick plaits behind, reminded the
Englishman of a Greek fragment he had admired, not many days before, in
the Louvre; her form too was of a classical lightness and perfection.
The Englishman noticed indeed that her temper was apparently not equal
to her looks. When her small brothers interrupted her, she repelled
them with a pettish word or gesture; the English governess addressed
her, and got no answer beyond a haughty look; even her mother was
scarcely better treated.

Close by, at another table, was another young girl, rather younger than
the first, and equally pretty. She too was dark haired, with a delicate
oval face and velvet black eyes, but without any of the passionate
distinction, the fire and flame of the other. She was German,
evidently. She wore a plain white dress with a red sash, and her little
feet in white shoes were lightly crossed in front of her. The face and
eyes were all alive, it seemed to him, with happiness, with the mere
pleasure of life. She could not keep herself still for a moment. Either
she was sending laughing signals to an elderly man near her, presumably
her father, or chattering at top speed with another girl of her own
age, or gathering her whole graceful body into a gesture of delight as
the familiar Rheingold music passed from one lovely _motif_ to another.

"You dear little thing!" thought the Englishman, with an impulse of
tenderness, which passed into foreboding amusement as he compared the
pretty creature with some of the matrons sitting near her, with one in
particular, a lady of enormous girth, whose achievements in eating and
drinking at meals had seemed to him amazing. Almost all the middle-aged
women in the hotel were too fat, and had lost their youth thereby,
prematurely. Must the fairy herself--Euphrosyne--come to such a muddy
vesture in the end? Twenty years hence?--alack!

"Beauty that must die." The hackneyed words came suddenly to mind, and
haunted him, as his eyes wandered round the room. Amid many coarse or
commonplace types, he yet perceived an unusual number of agreeable or
handsome faces; as is indeed generally the case in any Austrian hotel.
Faces, some of them, among the very young girls especially, of a
rose-tinted fairness, and subtly expressive, the dark brows arching on
white foreheads, the features straight and clean, the heads well
carried, as though conscious of ancestry and tradition; faces, also, of
the _bourgeoisie_, of a simpler, Gretchen-like beauty; faces--a few--of
"intellectuals," as he fancied,--including the girl with the
novel?--not always handsome, but arresting, and sometimes noble. He
felt himself in a border land of races, where the Teutonic and Latin
strains had each improved the other; and the pretty young girls and
women seemed to him like flowers sprung from an old and rich soil. He
found his pleasure in watching them--the pleasure of the Ancient
Mariner when he blessed the water-snakes. Sex had little to say to it;
and personal desire nothing. Was he not just over forty?--a very busy
Englishman, snatching a hard-earned holiday--a bachelor, moreover,
whose own story lay far behind him.

"_Beauty that must die_" The words reverberated and would not be
dismissed. Was it because he had just been reading an article in a new
number of the _Quarterly_, on "Contemporary Feminism," with mingled
amazement and revolt, roused by some of the strange facts collected by
the writer? So women everywhere--many women at any rate--were turning
indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections,
servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality
and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long
marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own
fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting
away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know
everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous? He
himself was a countryman, an English provincial, with English public
school and university traditions of the best kind behind him, a mind
steeped in history, and a natural taste for all that was ancient and
deep-rooted. The sketch of an emerging generation of women, given in
the _Quarterly_ article, had made a deep impression upon him. It seemed
to him frankly horrible. He was of course well acquainted, though
mainly through the newspapers, with English suffragism, moderate and
extreme. His own country district and circle were not, however, much
concerned with it. And certainly he knew personally no such types as
the _Quarterly_ article described. Among them, no doubt, were the women
who set fire to houses, and violently interrupted or assaulted Cabinet
ministers, who wrote and maintained newspapers that decent people would
rather not read, who grasped at martyrdom and had turned evasion of
penalty into a science, the continental type, though not as yet
involved like their English sisters in a hand-to-hand, or fist-to-fist
struggle with law and order, were, it seemed, even more revolutionary
in principle, and to some extent in action. The life and opinions of a
Sonia Kovalevski left him bewildered. For no man was less omniscient
than he. Like the Cabinet minister of recent fame, in the presence of
such _femmes fortes_, he might have honestly pleaded, _mutatis
mutandis_, "In these things I am a child."

Were these light-limbed, dark-eyed maidens under his eyes touched with
this new anarchy? They or their elders must know something about it.
There had been a Feminist congress lately at Trient--on the very site,
and among the ghosts of the great Council. Well, what could it bring
them? Was there anything so brief, so passing, if she did but know it,
as a woman's time for happiness? "_Beauty that must die_."

As the words recurred, some old anguish lying curled at his heart
raised its head and struck. He heard a voice--tremulously
sweet--"Mark!--dear Mark!--I'm not good enough--but I'll be to you all
a woman can."

_She_ had not played with life--or scorned it--or missed it. It was not
_her_ fault that she must put it from her.

In the midst of the crowd about him, he was no longer aware of it.
Still smoking mechanically, his eyelids had fallen over his eyes, as
his head rested against the wall.

He was interrupted by a voice which said in excellent though foreign
English--

"I beg your pardon, sir--I wonder if I might have that paper you are
standing on?"

He looked down astonished, and saw that he was trampling on the day's
_New York Herald_, which had fallen from a table near. With many
apologies he lifted it, smoothed it out, and presented it to the
elderly lady who had asked for it.

She looked at him through her spectacles with a pleasant smile.

"You don't find many English newspapers in these Tyrolese hotels?"

"No; but I provide myself. I get my _Times_ from home."

"Then, as an Englishman, you have all you want. But you seem to be
without it to-night?"

"It hasn't arrived. So I am reduced, as you see, to listening to the
music."

"You are not musical?"

"Well, I don't like this band anyway. It makes too much noise. Don't
you think it rather a nuisance?"

"No. It helps these people to talk," she said, in a crisp, cheerful
voice, looking round the room.

"But they don't want any help. Most of them talk by nature as fast as
the human tongue can go!"

"About nothing!" She shrugged her shoulders.

Winnington observed her more closely. She was, he guessed, somewhere
near fifty; her scanty hair was already grey, and her round, plain face
was wrinkled and scored like a dried apple. But her eyes, which were
dark and singularly bright, expressed both energy and wit; and her
mouth, of which the upper lip was caught up a little at one corner,
seemed as though quivering with unspoken and, as he thought, sarcastic
speech. Was she, perchance, the Swedish _Schriftstellerin_ of whom he
had heard the porter talking to some of the hotel guests? She looked a
lonely-ish, independent sort of body.

"They seem nice, kindly people," he said, glancing round the salon.
"And how they enjoy life!"

"You call it life?"

He laughed out.

"You are hard upon them, madame. Now I--being a mere man--am lost in
admiration of their good looks. We in England pride ourselves on our
women, But upon my word, it would be difficult to match this show in an
English hotel. Look at some of the faces!"

She followed his eyes--indifferently.

"Yes--they've plenty of beauty. And what'll it do for them? Lead them
into some wretched marriage or other--and in a couple of years there
will be neither beauty nor health, nor self-respect, nor any interest
in anything, but money, clothes, and outwitting their husbands."

"You forget the children!"

"Ah--the children"--she said in a dubious tone, shrugging her shoulders
again.

The Englishman--whose name was Mark Winnington--suddenly saw light
upon her.

A Swedish writer, a woman travelling alone? He remembered the sketch of
"feminism" in Sweden which he had just read. The names of certain
woman-writers flitted through his mind. He felt a curiosity mixed with
distaste. But curiosity prevailed.

He bent forward. And as he came thereby into stronger light from a
window on his left, the thought crossed the mind of his neighbour that
although so fully aware of other people's good looks, the tall
Englishman seemed to be quite unconscious of his own. Yet in truth he
appeared both to her, and to the hotel guests in general, a kind of
heroic creature. In height he towered beside the young or middle-aged
men from Munich, Buda-Pesth, or the north Italian towns, who filled the
_salon_. He had all that athlete could desire in the way of shoulders,
and lean length of body; a finely-carried head, on which the brown hair
was wearing a little thin at the crown, while still irrepressibly
strong and curly round the brow and temple; thick penthouse brows, and
beneath them a pair of greyish eyes which had already made him friends
with the children and the dogs and half the grown-ups in the place. The
Swedish lady admitted--but with no cordiality--that human kindness
could hardly speak more plainly in a human face than from those eyes.
Yet the mouth and chin were thin, strong and determined; so were the
hands. The man's whole aspect, moreover, spoke of assured position, and
of a keen intelligence free from personal pre-occupations, and keeping
a disinterested outlook on the world. The woman who observed him had in
her handbag a book by a Russian lady in which Man, with a capital,
figured either as "a great comic baby," or as the "Man-Beast," invented
for the torment of women. The gentleman before her seemed a little
difficult to fit into either category.

But if she was observing him, he had begun to question her.

"Will you forgive me if I ask an impertinent question?"

"Certainly. They are the only questions worth asking."

He laughed.

"You are, I think, from Sweden?"

"That is my country."

"And I am told you are a writer?" She bent her head. "I can see also
that you are--what shall I say?--very critical of your sex--no doubt,
still more of mine! I wonder if I may ask "--

He paused, his smiling eyes upon her.

"Ask anything you like."

"Well, there seems to be a great woman-movement in your country. Are
you interested in it?"

"You mean--am I a feminist? Yes, I happen to dislike the word; but it
describes me. I have been working for years for the advancement of
women. I have written about it--and in the Scandinavian countries we
have already got a good deal. The vote in Sweden and Norway; almost
complete equality with men in Denmark. Professional equality, too, has
gone far. We shall get all we want before long?" Her eyes sparkled in
her small lined face.

"And you are satisfied?"

"What human being of any intelligence--and I am intelligent," she
added, quietly,--"ever confessed to being 'satisfied'? Our shoe pinched
us. We have eased it a good deal."

"You really find it substantially better to walk with?"

"Through this uncomfortable world? Certainly. Why not?"

He was silent a little. Then he said, with his pleasant look, throwing
his head back to observe her, as though aware he might rouse her
antagonism.

"All that seems to me to go such a little way."

"I daresay," she said, indifferently, though it seemed to him that she
flushed. "You men have had everything you want for so long, you have
lost the sense of value. Now that we want some of your rights, it is
your cue to belittle them. And England, of course, is hopelessly
behind!" The tone had sharpened.

He laughed again and was about to reply when the band struck up Brahm's
Hungarian dances, and talk was hopeless. When the music was over, and
the burst of clapping, from all the young folk especially, had died
away, the Swedish lady said abruptly--

"But we had an English lady here last year--quite a young girl--very
handsome too--who was an even stronger feminist than I."

"Oh, yes, we can produce them--in great numbers. You have only to look
at our newspapers."

His companion's upper lip mocked at the remark.

"You don't produce them in great numbers--like the young lady I speak
of."

"Ah, she was good-looking?" laughed Winnington. "That, of course, gave
her a most unfair advantage."

"A man's jest," said the other dryly--"and an old one. But naturally
women take all the advantage they can get--out of anything. They need
it. However, this young lady had plenty of other gifts--besides her
beauty. She was as strong as most men. She rode, she climbed, she sang.
The whole hotel did nothing but watch her. She was the centre of
everything. But after a little while she insisted on leaving her father
down here to over-eat himself and play cards, while she went with her
maid and a black mare that nobody but she wanted to ride, up to the
_Jagd-hütte_ in the forest. There!--you can see a little blue smoke
coming from it now"--

She pointed through the window to the great forest-clothed cliff, some
five thousand feet high, which fronted the hotel; and across a deep
valley, just below its topmost point, Mark Winnington saw a puff of
smoke mounting into the clear sky.

--"Of course there was a great deal of talk. The men gossipped and the
women scoffed. Her father, who adored her and could not control her in
the least, shrugged his shoulders, played bridge all day long with an
English family, and would sit on the verandah watching the path--that
path there--which comes down from the _Jagd-hütte_ with a spy-glass.
Sometimes she would send him down a letter by one of the Jager's boys,
and he would send a reply. And every now and then she would come
down--riding--like a Brunhilde, with her hair all blown about her--and
her eyes--_Ach_, superb!"

The little dowdy woman threw up her hands.

Her neighbour's face shewed that the story interested and amused him.

"A Valkyrie, indeed! But how a feminist?"

"You shall hear. One evening she offered to give an address at the
hotel on 'Women and the Future.' She was already of course regarded as
half mad, and her opinions were well known. Some people objected, and
spoke to the manager. Her father, it was said, tried to stop it, but
she got her own way with him. And the manager finally decided that the
advertisement would be greater than the risk. When the evening came the
place was _bondé_; people came from every inn and pension round for
miles. She spoke beautiful German, she had learnt it from a German
governess who had brought her up, and been a second mother to her; and
she hadn't a particle of _mauvaise honte_. Somebody had draped some
Austrian and English flags behind her. The South Germans and Viennese,
and Hungarians who came to listen--just the same kind of people who are
here to-night--could hardly keep themselves on their chairs. The men
laughed and stared--I heard a few brutalities--but they couldn't keep
their eyes off her, and in the end they cheered her. Most of the women
were shocked, and wished they hadn't come, or let their girls come. And
the girls themselves sat open-mouthed--drinking it in."

"Amazing!" laughed the Englishman. "Wish I had been there! Was it an
onslaught upon men?"

"Of course," said his companion coolly. "What else could it be? At
present you men are the gaolers, and we the prisoners in revolt. This
girl talked revolution--they all do. 'We women _intend_ to have equal
rights with you!--whatever it cost. And when we have got them we shall
begin to fashion the world as _we_ want it--and not as you men have
kept it till now. _Gare à vous!_ You have enslaved us for ages--you may
enslave us a good while yet--but the end is certain. There is a new age
coming, and it will be the age of the free woman!'--That was the kind
of thing. I daresay it sounds absurd to you--but as she put it--as she
looked it--I can tell you, it was fine!"

The small, work-worn hands of the Swedish lady shook on her knee. Her
eyes seemed to hold the Englishman at bay. Then she added, in another
tone.

"Some people of course walked out, and afterwards there were many
complaints from fathers of families that their daughters should have
been exposed to such a thing. But it all passed over."

"And the young lady went back to the forest?"

"Yes,--for a time."

"And what became of the black mare?"

"Its mistress gave her to an inn-keeper here when she left. But the
first time he went to see the horse in the stable, she trampled on him
and he was laid up for weeks."

"Like mistress, like mare?--Excuse the jest! But now, may I know the
name of the prophetess?"

"She was a Miss Blanchflower," said the Swedish lady, boggling a little
over the name. "Her father had been a governor of one of your
colonies."

Winnington started forward in his chair.

"Good heavens!--you don't mean a daughter of old Bob Blanchflower!"

"Her father's name was Sir Robert Blanchflower."

The tanned face beside her expressed the liveliest interest.

"Why, I knew Blanchflower quite well. I met him long ago when I was
staying with an uncle in India--at a station in the Bombay presidency.
He was Major Blanchflower then"--

The speaker's brow furrowed a little as though under the stress of some
sudden recollection, and he seemed to check himself in what he was
saying. But in a moment he resumed:--

"A little after that he left the army, and went into Parliament.
And--precisely!--after a few years they made him governor
somewhere--not much of a post. Then last year his old father, a
neighbour of mine in Hampshire, quite close to my little place, went
and died, and Blanchflower came into a fortune and a good deal of land
besides. And I remember hearing that he had thrown up the Colonial
Service, had broken down in health, and was living abroad for some
years to avoid the English climate. That's the man of course. And the
Valkyrie is Blanchflower's daughter! Very odd that! I must have seen
her as a child. Her mother"--he paused again slightly--"was a Greek by
birth, and gloriously handsome. Blanchflower met her when he was
military attaché at Athens for a short time.--Well, that's all very
interesting!"

And in a ruminating mood the Englishman took out his cigarette-case.

"You smoke, Madame?"

The Swedish lady quietly accepted the courtesy. And while the too
insistent band paused between one murdered Wagnerian fragment and
another, they continued a conversation which seemed to amuse them both.

       *       *       *       *       *

A little later the Englishman went out into the garden of the hotel,
meaning to start for a walk. But he espied a party of young people
gathered about the new lawn-tennis court where instead of the languid
and dishevelled trifling, with a broken net and a wretched court, that
was once supposed to attract English visitors, he had been already
astonished to find Austrians and Hungarians--both girls and
boys--playing a game quite up to the average of a good English club.
The growing athleticism and independence, indeed, of the foreign girl,
struck, for Winnington, the note of change in this mid-European
spectacle more clearly than anything else. It was some ten years since
he had been abroad in August, a month he had been always accustomed to
spend in Scotch visits; and these young girls, with whom the Tyrol
seemed to swarm, of all European nationalities other than English,
still in or just out of the schoolroom; hatless and fearless; with
their knapsacks on their backs, sometimes with ice-axes in their hands;
climbing peaks and passes with their fathers and brothers; playing
lawn-tennis like young men, and shewing their shapely forms sometimes,
when it was a question of attacking the heights, in knicker-bocker
costume, and at other times in fresh white dresses and bright-coloured
jerseys, without a hint of waist; these young Atalantas, budding and
bloomed, made the strongest impression upon him, as of a new race.
Where had he been all these years? He felt himself a kind of Rip van
Winkle--face to face at forty-one with a generation unknown to him. No
one of course could live in England, and not be aware of the change
which has passed over English girls in the same direction. But the
Englishman always tacitly assumes that the foreigner is far behind him
in all matters of open-air sport and physical development. Winnington
had soon confessed the touch of national arrogance in his own surprise;
and was now the keen and much attracted spectator.

On one of the grounds he saw the little German girl--Euphrosyne, as he
had already dubbed her--having a lesson from a bullying elder brother.
The youth, amazed at his own condescension, scolded his sister
perpetually, and at last gave her up in despair, vowing that she would
never be any good, and he was not going to waste his time in teaching
such a ninny. Euphrosyne sat down beside the court, with tears in her
pretty eyes, her white feet crossed, her dark head drooping; and two
girl companions, aged about sixteen or seventeen, like herself, came up
to comfort her.

"I could soon shew you how to improve your service, Mademoiselle," said
Winnington, smiling, as he passed her. Euphrosyne looked up startled,
but at sight of the handsome middle-aged Englishman, whom she unkindly
judged to be not much younger than her father, she timidly replied:--

"It is hateful, Monsieur, to be so stupid as I am!"

"Let me shew you," repeated Winnington, kindly. At this moment, a
vigilant English governess--speaking with a strong Irish-American
accent--came up, and after a glance at the Englishman, smilingly
acquiesced. The two comforters of Euphrosyne, graceful little maids,
with cherry-coloured jerseys over their white frocks, and golden brown
hair tied with the large black bows of the _Backfisch_, were eager to
share the lesson, and soon Winnington found himself the centre of a
whole bevy of boys and girls who had run up to watch Euphrosyne's
performance.

The English governess, a good girl, in spite of her accent, and the
unconscious fraud she was thereby perpetrating on her employers,
thought she had seldom witnessed a more agreeable scene.

"He treats them like princesses, and yet he makes them learn," she
thought, a comment which very fairly expressed the mixture of something
courtly with something masterful in the Englishman's manner. He was
patience itself; but he was also frankness itself, whether for praise
or blame; and the eagerness to please him grew fast and visibly in all
these young creatures.

But as soon as he had brought back Euphrosyne's smiles, and roused a
new and fierce ambition to excel in all their young breasts, he dropped
the lesson, with a few gay slangy words, and went his way, leaving a
stir behind him of which he was quite unconscious. And there was no
Englishman looking on who might have told the charmed and conquered
maidens that they had just been coached by one of the most famous of
English athletes, born with a natural genius for every kind of game,
from cricket downwards.

       *       *       *       *       *

On his way to the eastern side of the pass on which stood the group of
hotels, Winnington got his post from the _concierge_, including his
nightly _Times_, and carried it with him to a seat with which he was
already familiar.

But he left the _Times_ unopened, for the spectacle before him was one
to ravish the senses from everything but itself. He looked across the
deep valley of the Adige, nearly four thousand feet below him, to the
giant range of the Dolomite Alps on the eastern side. The shadow of the
forest-clad mountain on which he stood spread downwards over the plain,
and crept up the mountains on the farther edge. Above a gulf of deepest
blue, inlaid with the green of vineyards and forest lakes, he beheld an
aerial world of rose-colour--the giant Dolomites, Latemar, Rosengarten,
Schlern--majestic rulers of an upper air, so pure and luminous, that
every tiny shadow cast by every wisp of wandering cloud on the bare red
peaks, was plainly visible across the thirty miles of space.
Rosengarten, with its snowless, tempest-beaten crags, held the centre,
flushing to its name; and to the right and left, peak ranged beyond
peak, like courtiers crowding to their king; chief among them a vast
pyramid, blood-red in the sunset, from which the whole side, it seemed,
had been torn away, leaving a gash so fresh it might have been ripped
by a storm of yesterday, yet older perhaps than Calvary....

The great show faded through every tone of delicate beauty to a starry
twilight,--passion into calm. Winnington watched till it was done,
still with the Keatsian tag in his mind, and that deep inner memory of
loss, to which the vanished splendour of the mountains seemed to make a
mystic answering. He was a romantic--some would have said a sentimental
person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that
might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst
despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He
had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the
busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he
had had a year of unceasing and strenuous work, with no time to
himself; and it had suddenly been borne in upon him, in choosing
between the Alps and Scotland, that a man must sometimes be alone, for
his soul's health. And he had never relished the luxury of occasional
solitude so sharply as on this pine-scented evening in Tyrol.

It was not till he was sitting again under the electric light of the
hotel verandah that he opened his _Times_. The first paragraph which
his eye lit upon was an obituary notice of Sir Robert Blanchflower
"whose death, after a long illness and much suffering, occurred last
week in Paris." The notice ended with the words--"the deceased baronet
leaves a large property both in land and personalty. His only child, a
daughter, Miss Delia Blanchflower, survives him."

Winnington laid down the paper. So the Valkyrie was now alone in the
world, and mistress no doubt of all her father's wealth. "I must have
seen her--I am sure there was a child about"; he said to himself again;
and his thoughts went groping into a mostly forgotten past, and as he
endeavoured to reconstruct it, the incident which had brought him for a
few weeks into close relations with Robert Blanchflower, then Major
Blanchflower of the--Dragoons, came at last vividly back to him.

An easy-going husband--a beautiful wife, not vicious, but bored to
death--the inevitable third, in the person of a young and amorous
cavalry officer--and a whole Indian station, waiting, half maliciously,
half sadly, for the _banal_ catastrophe:--it was thus he remembered the
situation. Winnington had arrived on the scene as a barrister of some
five years' standing, invalided after an acute attack of pneumonia, and
the guest for the winter of his uncle, then Commissioner of the
district. He discovered in the cavalry officer a fellow who had been
his particular protégé at Eton, and had owed his passionately coveted
choice for the Eleven largely to Winnington's good word. The whole
dismal little drama unveiled itself, and Winnington was hotly moved by
the waste and pity of it. He was entertained by the Blanchflowers and
took a liking to them both. The old friendship between Winnington and
the cavalryman was soon noticed by Major Blanchflower, and one night he
walked home with Winnington, who had been dining at his house, to the
Commissioner's quarters. Then, for the first time, Winnington realised
what it may be to wrestle with a man in torment. The next day, the
young cavalryman, at Winnington's invitation, took his old friend for a
ride, and before dawn on the following day, the youth was off on leave,
and neither Major nor Mrs. Blanchflower, Winnington believed, had ever
seen him again. What he did with the youth, and how he did it, he
cannot exactly remember, but at least he doesn't forget the grip of
Blanchflower's hand, and the look of deliverance in his strained,
hollow face. Nor had Mrs. Blanchflower borne her rescuer any grudge. He
had parted from her on the best of terms, and the recollection of her
astonishing beauty grows strong in him as he thinks of her.

So now it is her daughter who is stirring the world! With her father's
money and her mother's eyes,--not to speak of the additional
trifles--eloquence, enthusiasm, &c.--thrown in by the Swedish woman,
she ought to find it easy.

The dressing-gong of the hotel disturbed a rather sleepy reverie, and
sent the Englishman back to his _Times_. And a few hours later he went
to a dreamless bed, little guessing at the letter which was even then
waiting for him, far below, in the Botzen post-office.




Chapter II


Winnington took his morning coffee on a verandah of the hotel, from
which the great forests of Monte Vanna were widely visible. Upwards
from the deep valley below the pass, to the topmost crags of the
mountain, their royal mantle ran unbroken. This morning they were
lightly drowned in a fine weather haze, and the mere sight of them
suggested cool glades and verdurous glooms, stretches of pink willow
herb lighting up the clearings--and in the secret heart of them such
chambers "deaf to noise and blind to light" as the forest lover knows.
Winnington promised himself a leisurely climb to the top of Monte
Vanna. The morning foretold considerable heat, but under the pines one
might mock at Helios.

Ah!--Euphrosyne!

She came, a vision of morning, tripping along in her white shoes and
white dress; followed by her English governess, the lady, as Winnington
guessed, from West Belfast, tempered by Brooklyn. The son apparently
was still in bed, nor did anyone trouble to hurry him out of it. The
father, a Viennese judge _en retraite_, as Winnington had been already
informed by the all-knowing porter of the hotel, was a shrewd
thin-lipped old fellow, with the quiet egotism of the successful
lawyer. He came up to Winnington as soon as he perceived him, and
thanked him in good English for his kindness to Euphrosyne of the day
before. Winnington responded suitably and was soon seated at their
table, chatting with them while they took their coffee. Euphrosyne
shewed a marked pleasure in his society, and upon Winnington, steeped
in a holiday reaction from much strenuous living, her charm worked as
part of the charm of the day, and the magic of the mountain world. He
noticed, however, with a revival of alarm, that she had a vigorous
German appetite of her own, and as he watched the rolls disappear he
trembled for the slender figure and the fawn-like gait.

After breakfast, while the governess and the girl disappeared, the
father hung over the verandah smoking, beside the Englishman, to whom
he was clearly attracted. He spoke quite frankly of his daughter, and
her bringing up. "She is motherless; her mother died when she was ten
years old; and since, I must educate her myself. It gives me many
anxieties, but she is a sweet creature, _dank sei gott_! I will not let
her approach, even, any of these modern ideas about women. My wife
hated them; I do also. I shall marry her to an honest man, and she will
make a good wife and a good house-mother."

"Mind you choose him well!" said Winnington, with a shrug. His eyes at
that moment were critically bent on a group of Berliners, men of the
commercial and stock-broking class, who, with their wives, had arrived
a couple of nights before. The men were strolling and smoking below.
They were all fat, red-faced and overbearing. When they went for walks,
the man stalked in front along the forest paths, and the woman followed
behind, carrying her own jacket. Winnington wondered what it might be
like to be the wife of any of them. These _Herren_ at any rate might
not be the worse for a little hustling from the "woman movement." He
could not, however, say honestly that the wives shewed any
consciousness of ill-fortune. They were almost all plump, plumper even
than their husbands, expensively dressed and prosperous looking; and
the amount of Viennese beer they consumed at the forest restaurants to
which their husbands conducted them, seemed to the Englishman
portentous.

"Yes, my daughter is old-fashioned," resumed the ex-judge,
complacently, after a pause. "And I am grateful to Miss Johnson, who
has trained her very well. If she were like some of the girls one sees
now! Last year there was a young lady here--_Ach, Gott!_" He raised his
shoulders, with a contemptuous mouth.

"Miss Blanchflower?" asked Winnington, turning towards the speaker with
sudden interest.

"That I believe was her name. She was mad, of course. _Ach_, they have
told you?--of that _Vortrag_ she gave?--and the rest? After ten
minutes, I made a sign to my daughter, and we walked out. I would not
have had her corrupted with these ideas for the whole world. And such
beauty, you understand! That makes it more dangerous. _Ja, ja,
Liebchen--ich komme gleich!_"

For there had been a soft call from Euphrosyne, standing on the steps
of the hotel, and her fond father hurried away to join her.

At the same moment, the porter emerged, bearing a bundle of letters and
newspapers which had just arrived. Eager for his _Times_ Winnington
went to meet him, and the man put into his hands what looked like a
large post. He carried it off into the shelter of the pines, for the
sun was already blazing on the hotel. Two or three letters on county
business he ran through first. His own pet project, as County
Councillor,--a county school for crippled children, was at last getting
on. Foundation stone to be laid in October--good! "But how the deuce
can I get hold of some more women to help work it! Scandalous, how few
of the right sort there are about! And as for the Asylums Committee, if
we really can't legally co-opt women to it, as our clerk says"--he
looked again at a letter in his hand--"the law is an ass!--a
double-dyed ass. I swear I won't visit those poor things on the women's
side again. It's women's work--let them do it. The questions I have to
ask are enough to make an old gamp blush. Hallo, what's this?"

He turned over a large blue envelope, and looked at a name stamped
across the back. It was the name of a well-known firm of London
solicitors. But he had no dealings with them, and could not imagine why
they should have written to him.

He opened the letter carelessly, and began to read it,--presently with
eager attention, and at last with amazement.

It ran as follows:

     "From Messrs. MORTON, MANNERS & LATHOM,
      Solicitors,
      Adelphi,
      London, W. C."

"Dear Sir,--We write on behalf of Lord Frederick Calverly, your
co-executor, under Sir Robert Blanchflower's will, to inform you that
in Sir Robert's last will and testament--of which we enclose a
copy--executed at Meran six weeks before his decease, you are named as
one of his two executors, as sole trustee of his property, and sole
guardian of Sir Robert's daughter and only child, Miss Delia
Blanchflower, until she attains the age of twenty-five. We believe that
this will be a complete surprise to you, for although Sir Robert,
according to a statement he made during his last illness to his sister,
Miss Elizabeth Blanchflower, intended to communicate with you before
signing the will, his weakness increased so rapidly, after it was
finally drawn up, that he was never able to do so. Indeed the morning
after his secretary had written out a clear copy of what he himself had
put together, he had a most alarming attack from which he rallied with
difficulty. That afternoon he signed the will, and was just able to
write you the letter which we also enclose, marked by himself, as you
will see. He was never properly conscious afterwards, and he died in
Paris last Thursday, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Mont
Parnasse on the Saturday following. The will which was in our custody
was opened in London yesterday, by Lord Frederick Calverly, in Miss
Blanchflower's presence. We understand from her that she has already
written to you on the subject. Lord Frederick would also have done so,
but that he has just gone to Harrogate, in a very poor state of health.
He begs us to say that he is of course quite aware that your
engagements may not allow you to accept the functions offered you under
the will, and that he will be in considerable anxiety until he knows
your decision. He hopes that you will at least accept the executorship;
and indeed ventures to appeal very strongly on that account to your old
friendship for Sir Robert; as he himself sees no prospect of being able
to carry out unaided the somewhat heavy responsibilities attaching to
the office.

"You will see that a sum of £4000 is left to yourself under the will."

     We remain, dear Sir,

     Your obedient servants,

     MORTON, MANNERS & LATHOM.
      "(Solicitors.)"

     "MARK WINNINGTON, Esq., J. P.
      Bridge End, Maumsey,
      Hants."

A bulky document on blue paper, and also a letter had dropped to the
ground. Winnington stooped for the letter, and turned it over in
stupification. It was addressed in a faltering hand, and marked, "To be
forwarded after my death." He hastily broke the seal.

"MY DEAR MARK WINNIXGTON,--I know well what I am laying upon you. I
have no right to do it. But I remember certain days in the past, and I
believe if you are still the same man you were then, you will do what I
ask. My daughter ought to be a fine woman. At present she seems to me
entirely and completely out of her mind. She has been captured by the
extreme suffrage movement, and by one of the most mischievous women in
it; and I have no influence with her whatever. I live in terror of what
she may do; of what they may lead her to do. To attempt to reason with
her is useless; and for a long time my health has been such that I have
avoided conflict with her as much as possible. But things have now come
to such a pass that something must be done, and I have tried in these
last weeks, ill as I am, to face the future. I want if I can to save
Delia from wasting herself, and the money and estates I should
naturally leave her, upon this mad campaign. I want, even against her
will, to give her someone to advise and help her. I feel bitterly that
I have done neither. The tropics ruined me physically, and I seem to
have gone to pieces altogether the last few years. But I love my child,
and I can't leave her without a real friend or support in the world. I
have no near relations, except my sister Elizabeth, and she and Delia
are always at feud. Freddie Calverly my cousin, is a good fellow in his
way, though too fussy about his health. He has a fair knowledge of
business, and he would have been hurt if I had not made him executor.
So I have appointed him, and have of course left him a little money.
But he could no more tackle Delia than fly. In the knock-about life we
have led since I left the Colonial Service, I seem to have shed all my
old friends. I can think of no one who could or would help me in this
strait but you--and you know why. God bless you for what you once did
for me. There was never any other cloud between my poor wife and me.
She turned to me after that trouble, and we were happy till the end.

"I have heard too something of you from Maumsey people, since I
inherited Maumsey, though I have never been able to go there. I know
what your neighbours think of you. And now Delia is going to be your
neighbour. So, drawing a bow at a venture, as a dying man must, I have
made you Delia's guardian and trustee, with absolute power over her
property and income till she is twenty-five. When she attains that
age--she is now nearly twenty-two--if she marries a man approved by
you, or if you are satisfied that her connection with militant
suffragism has ceased, the property is to be handed over to her in full
possession, and the trust will come to an end. If on the contrary, she
continues in her present opinion and course of action, I have left
directions that the trust is to be maintained for Delia's life-time,
under certain conditions as to her maintenance, which you will find in
the will. If you yourself are not willing to administer the trust,
either now or later, the property will devolve to the Public Trustee,
for whom full instructions are left. And at Delia's death it will be
divided among her heirs, if she has any, and various public objects.

"I cannot go further into details. My strength is almost out. But this
one thing may I beg?--if you become my child's guardian, get the right
person to live with her. I regard that as all-important. She must have
a chaperon, and she will try to set up one of the violent women who
have divided her from me. Especially am I in dread of a lady, an
English lady, a Miss Marvell, whom I engaged two years ago to stay with
us for the winter and read history with Delia. She is very able and a
very dangerous woman, prepared I believe, to go to any length on behalf
of her 'cause.' At any rate she filled Delia's head with the wildest
suffragist notions, and since then my poor child thinks of nothing
else. Even since I have been so ill--this last few weeks--I know she
has been in communication with this woman. She sympathises with all the
horrible things they do, and I am certain she gives all the money she
can to their funds. Delia is a splendid creature, but she is vain and
excitable and they court her. I feel that they might tempt her into any
madness.

"Goodbye. I made the doctor give me strychnine and morphia enough to
carry me through this effort. I expect it will be the last. Help me,
and my girl--if you can--for old sake's sake. Goodbye."

     Your grateful old friend,

     "ROBERT BLANCHFLOWER."

"Good heavens!" was all Winnington could find to say, as he put down
the letter.

Then, becoming aware, as the verandah filled after breakfast, that he
was in a very public place, he hastily rose, thrust the large
solicitor's envelope, with its bulky enclosures into his coat pocket,
and proceeded to gather up the rest of his post. As he did so, he
suddenly perceived a black-edged letter, addressed in a remarkably
clear handwriting, with the intertwined initials D. B. in the corner.

A fit of silent laughter, due to his utter bewilderment, shook him. He
put the letter with all its fellows into another pocket and hurried
away into the solitude of the woods. It was some time before he had
succeeded in leaving all the tourists' paths and seats behind. At last
in a green space of bilberry and mossy rock, with the pines behind him,
and the chain of the Dolomites, sun-bathed, in front, he opened and
read his "ward's" first letter to him.

"DEAR MR. WINNINGTON,--I understood--though very imperfectly--from my
father, before he died, that he had appointed you my guardian and
trustee till I should reach the age of twenty-five, and he explained to
me so far as he could his reason for such a step. And now I have of
course read the will, and the solicitors have explained to me clearly
what it all means.

"You will admit I think that I am placed in a very hard position. If my
poor father had not been so ill, I should certainly have tried to argue
with him, and to prevent his doing anything so unnecessary and unjust
as he has now done--unjust both to you and to me. But the doctors
absolutely forbade me to discuss any business with him, and I could do
nothing. I can only hope that the last letter he wrote to you, just
before his death, and the alterations he made in his will about the
same time, gave him some comfort. If so, I do not grudge them for one
moment.

"But now you and I have to consider this matter as sensible people, and
I suggest that for a man who is a complete stranger to me, and probably
altogether out of sympathy with the ideas and principles, I believe in
and am _determined_ to act upon--(for otherwise my father would not
have chosen you)--to undertake the management of my life and affairs,
would be really grotesque. It must lead to endless friction and trouble
between us. If you refuse, the solicitors tell me, the Public
Trustee--which seems to be a government office--will manage the
property, and the Court of Chancery will appoint a guardian in
accordance with my father's wishes. That would be bad enough,
considering that I am of full age and in my right mind--I can't promise
to give a guardian chosen in such a way, a good time. But at any rate,
it would be less odious to fight a court and an office, if I must
fight, than a gentleman who is my near neighbour in the county, and was
my father's and mother's friend. I do hope you will think this over
very carefully, and will relieve both yourself and me from an
impossible state of things. I perfectly realise of course that my
father appointed you my guardian, in order to prevent me from making
certain friends, and doing certain things. But I do not admit the right
of any human being--not even a father--to dictate the life of another.
I intend to stick to my friends, And to do what my conscience directs.

"Should you however accept the guardianship--after this candid
statement of mine--you will, I suppose, feel bound to carry out my
father's wishes by refusing me money for the purposes he disapproved.
He told me indeed that I should be wholly dependent on my guardian for
money during the next three years, even though I have attained my legal
majority. I can say to you what I could not say to him, that I
_bitterly resent_ an arrangement which treats a grown person like a
child. Such things are not done to _men_. It is only women who are the
victims of them. It would be _impossible_ to keep up friendly relations
with a guardian, who would really only be there--only exist--to thwart
and coerce me.

"Let me point out that at the very beginning a difference must arise
between us, about the lady I am to live with. I have chosen my chaperon
already, as it was my moral, if not my legal right to do. But I am
quite aware that my father disapproved of her, and that you will
probably take the same view. She belongs to a militant suffrage
society, and is prepared at any moment to suffer for the great cause
she and I believe in. As to her ability, she is one of the cleverest
women in England. I am only too proud that she has consented--for a
time--to share my life, and nothing will _induce_ me to part with
her--as long as she consents to stay. But of course I know what you--or
any ordinary man--is likely to think of her.

"No!--we cannot agree--it is impossible we should agree--as guardian
and ward. If indeed, for the sake of your old friendship with my
father, you would retain the executorship--I am sure Lord Frederick
Calverly will be no sort of use!--till the affairs of the will,
death-duties, debts, and so on, are settled--and would at the same time
give up _any_ other connection with the property and myself, I should
be enormously grateful to you. And I assure you I should be very glad
indeed--for father's sake--to have your advice on many points connected
with my future life; and I should be all the more ready to follow it,
if you had renounced your legal power over me.

"I shall be much obliged if you will make your decision as soon as
possible, so that both the lawyer and I may know how to proceed."

     Yours faithfully,

     DELIA BLANCHFLOWER.

Mark Winnington put down the letter. Its mixture of defiance, patronage
and persuasion--its young angry cleverness--would have tickled a
naturally strong sense of humour at any other time. But really the
matter was too serious to laugh at.

"What on earth am I to do!"

He sat pondering, his mind running through a number of associated
thoughts, of recollections old and new; those Indian scenes of fifteen
years ago; the story told him by the Swedish lady; recent incidents and
happenings in English politics; and finally the tone in which
Euphrosyne's father had described the snatching of his own innocent
from the clutches of Miss Blanchflower.

Then it occurred to him to look at the will. He read it through; a
tedious business; for Sir Robert had been a wealthy man and the
possessions bequeathed--conditionally bequeathed--to his daughter were
many and various. Two or three thousand acres of land in one of the
southern counties, bordering on the New Forest; certain large interests
in Cleveland ironstone and Durham collieries, American and South
African shares, Canadian mortgage and railway debentures:--there was
enough to give lawyers and executors work for some time, and to provide
large pickings for the Exchequer. Among the legacies, he noticed the
legacy of £4000 to himself.

"Payment for the job!" he thought, and shook his head, smiling.

The alternative arrangements made for transferring the trust to the
Public Trustee, should Winnington decline, and for vesting the
guardianship of the daughter in the Court of Chancery, subject to the
directions of the will, till she should reach the age of twenty-five,
were clear; so also was the provision that unless a specific signed
undertaking was given by the daughter on attaining her twenty-fifth
birthday, that the moneys of the estate would not be applied to the
support of the "militant suffrage" propaganda, the trust was to be made
permanent, a life income of £2000 a year was to be settled on Miss
Blanchflower, and the remainder, i.e. by far the major part of Sir
Robert's property, was to accumulate, for the benefit of his daughter's
heirs should she have any, and of various public objects. Should Miss
Blanchflower sign the undertaking and afterwards break it, the Public
Trustee was directed to proceed against her, and to claim the
restitution of the property, subject always to her life allowance.

"Pretty well tied up," thought Winnington, marvelling at the strength
of feeling, the final exasperation of a dying man, which the will
betrayed. His daughter must somehow--perhaps without realising it--have
wounded him to the heart.

He began to climb again through the forest that he might think the
better. What would be the situation, supposing he undertook what his
old friend asked of him?

He himself was a man of moderate means and settled habits. His small
estate and modest house which a widowed sister shared with him during
six months in the year, left him plenty of leisure from his own
affairs, and he had filled that leisure, for years past, to
overflowing, with the various kinds of public work that fall to the
country gentleman with a conscience. He was never idle; his work
interested him, and there was no conceit in his quiet knowledge that he
had many friends and much influence. Since the death of the girl to
whom he had been engaged for six short months, fifteen years before
this date, he had never thought of marriage. The circumstances of her
death--a terrible case of lingering typhoid--had so burnt the pity of
her suffering and the beauty of her courage into his mind, that natural
desire seemed to have died with her. He had turned to hard work and the
bar, and equally hard physical exercise, and so made himself master
both of his grief and his youth. But his friendships with women had
played a great part in his subsequent life. A natural chivalry, deep
based, and, in manner, a touch of caressing charm, soon evoked by those
to whom he was attached, and not easily confounded in the case of a man
so obviously manly with any lack of self-control, had long since made
him a favourite of the sex. There were few women among his
acquaintances who did not covet his liking; and he was the repository
of far more confidences than he had ever desired. No one took more
trouble to serve; and no one more carelessly forgot a service he had
himself rendered, or more tenaciously remembered any kindness done him
by man, woman or child.

His admiration for women was mingled indeed often with profound pity;
pity for the sorrows and burdens that nature had laid upon them, for
their physical weakness, for their passive role in life. That beings so
hampered could yet play such tender and heroic parts was to him
perennially wonderful, and his sense of it expressed itself in an
unconscious homage that seemed to embrace the sex. That the homage was
not seldom wasted on persons quite unworthy of it, his best women
friends were not slow to see; but in this he was often obstinate and
took his own way.

This mingling in him of an unfailing interest in the sex with an entire
absence of personal craving, gave him a singularly strong position with
regard to women, of which he had never yet taken any selfish advantage;
largely, no doubt, because of the many activities, most of them
disinterested, by which his life was fed and freshened; as a lake is by
the streams which fill it.

He was much moved by his old friend's letter, and he walked about
pondering it, till the morning was almost gone. The girl's position
also seemed to him particularly friendless and perilous, though she
herself, apparently, would be the last person to think so, could she
only shake herself free from the worrying restrictions her father had
inflicted on her. Her letter, and its thinly veiled wrath, shewed quite
plainly that the task of any guardian would be a tough one. Miss
Blanchflower was evidently angry--very angry--yet at the same time
determined, if she could, to play a dignified part; ready, that is, to
be civil, on her own conditions. The proposal to instal as her
chaperon, instantly, without a day's delay, the very woman denounced in
her father's last letter, struck him as first outrageous, and then
comic. He laughed aloud over it.

Certainly--he was not bound in any way to undertake such a business.
Blanchflower had spoken the truth when he said that he had no right to
ask it. And yet--

His mind dallied with it. Suppose he undertook it, on what lines could
he possibly run it? His feeling towards the violent phase of the
"woman's movement," the militancy which during the preceding three or
four years had produced a crop of outrages so surprising and so ugly,
was probably as strong as Blanchflower's own. He was a natural
Conservative, and a trained lawyer. Methods of violence in a civilised
and constitutional State, roused in him indignant abhorrence. He could
admit no excuse for them; at any rate no justification.

But, fundamentally? What was his real attitude towards this wide-spread
claim of women, now so general in many parts of the world admitted
indeed in some English Colonies, in an increasing number of the
American states, in some of the minor European countries--to share the
public powers and responsibilities of men? Had he ever faced the
problem, as it concerned England, with any thoroughness or candour? Yet
perhaps Englishmen--all Englishmen--had now got to face it.

Could he discover any root of sympathy in himself with what were
clearly the passionate beliefs of Delia Blanchflower, the Valkyrie of
twenty-one, as they were also the passionate beliefs of the little
Swedish lady, the blue-stocking of fifty? If so, it might be possible
to guide, even to control such a ward, for the specified three years,
at any rate, without exciting unseemly and ridiculous strife between
her and her guardian.

"I ought to be able to do it"--he thought--"without upsetting the
apple-cart!"

For, as he examined himself he realised that he held no closed mind on
the subject of the rights or powers or grievances of women. He had
taken no active part whatever in the English suffragist struggle,
either against woman suffrage or for it; and in his own countryside it
mattered comparatively little. But he was well aware what strong forces
and generous minds had been harnessed to the suffrage cause, since Mill
first set it stirring; and among his dearest women friends there were
some closely connected with it, who had often mocked or blamed his own
indifference. He had always thought indeed, and he thought still--for
many reasons--that they attributed a wildly exaggerated importance to
the vote, which, as it seemed to him, went a very short way in the case
of men. But he had always been content to let the thing slide; having
so much else to do and think about.

Patience then, and respect for honest and disinterested conviction, in
any young and ardent soul; sharp discrimination between lawful and
unlawful means of propaganda, between debate, and stone-throwing; no
interference with the first, and a firm hand against the
second:--surely, in that spirit, one might make something of the
problem? Winnington was accustomed to be listened to, to get round
obstacles that other men found insuperable. It was scarcely conceit,
but a just self-confidence which suggested to him that perhaps Miss
Blanchflower would not prove so difficult after all. Gentleness,
diplomacy, decision,--by Jove, they'd all be wanted! But his legal
experience (he had been for some years a busy barrister), and his later
life as a practical administrator had not been a bad training in each
and all of these qualities.

Of course, if the girl were merely obstinate and stupid, the case might
indeed be hopeless. But the picture drawn by the Swedish woman of the
"Valkyrie" on her black mare, of the ardent young lecturer, facing her
indifferent or hostile audience with such pluck and spirit, dwelt with
him, and affected him strongly. His face broke into amusement as he
asked himself the frank question--"Would you do it, if you hadn't heard
that tale?--if you knew that your proposed ward was just a plain
troublesome chit of a schoolgirl, bitten with suffragism?"

He put the question to himself, standing on a pinnacle of shadowed
rock, from which the world seemed to sink into blue gulfs beneath him,
till on the farther side of immeasurable space the mountains
re-emerged, climbing to the noonday sun.

And he answered it without hesitation. Certainly, the story told him
had added a touch of romance to the bare case presented by the batch of
letters:--had lent a force and point to Robert Blanchflower's dying
plea, it might not otherwise have possessed. For, after all, he,
Winnington, was a very busy man; and his life was already mortgaged in
many directions. But as it was--yes--the task attracted him.

At the same time, the twinkle in his grey eyes shewed him ironically
aware of himself.

"Understand, you old fool!--the smallest touch of philandering--and the
whole business goes to pot. The girl would have you at her mercy--and
the thing would become an odious muddle and hypocrisy, degrading to
both. Can you trust yourself? You're not exactly made of flint: Can you
play the part as it ought to be played?"

Quietly, his face sank into rest. For him, there was that in memory,
which protected him from all such risks, which had so protected him for
fifteen years. He felt quite sure of himself. Ever since his great loss
he had found his natural allies and companions among girls and young
women as much as among men. The embarrassment of sex seemed to have
passed away for him, but not the charm. Thus, he took what for him was
the easier path of acceptance. Kindly and scrupulous as he was, it
would have been hard for him in any case to say No to the dead, more
difficult than to say it to the living. Yes!--he would do what was
possible. _The Times_ that morning contained a long list of outrages
committed by militant suffragists--houses burnt down, meetings
disturbed, members attacked. In a few months, or weeks, perhaps,
without counsel to aid or authority to warn her, the Valkyrie might be
running headlong into all the perils her father foresaw. He pledged
himself to protect her if he could.

       *       *       *       *       *

The post which left the hotel that evening took with it a short note
from Mark Winnington to Messrs. Morton, Manners & Lathom, accepting the
functions of executor, guardian and trustee offered him under Sir
Robert Blanchflower's will, and appointing an interview with them at
their office; together with a somewhat longer one addressed to "Miss
Delia Blanchflower, Claridge's Hotel, London.

"DEAR MISS BLANCHFLOWER, Pray let me send you my most sincere
condolence. Your poor father and I were once great friends, and I am
most truly sorry to hear of his death.

"Thank you for your interesting letter. But I find it impossible to
refuse your father's dying request to me, nor can I believe that I
cannot be of some assistance to his daughter. Let me try. We can always
give it up, if we cannot work it, but I see no reason why, with good
will on both sides, we should not make something of it.

"I am returning to London ten days from now, and hope to see you within
a fortnight.

"Please address, 'Junior Carlton Club, Pall Mall.'"

     Believe me,
          Yours very truly,
             "MARK WINNINGTON."


On his arrival, in London, Winnington found a short reply awaiting him.

"DEAR MR. WINNINGTON,--As you please. I am however shortly leaving for
Maumsey with Miss Marvell, who, as I told you, has undertaken to live
with me as my chaperon.

"We shall hope to see you at Maumsey."

     Yours faithfully,
         "DELIA BLANCHFLOWER."


A few days later, after long interviews with some very meticulous
solicitors, a gentleman, very much in doubt as to what his reception
would be, took train for Maumsey and the New Forest, with a view to
making as soon as possible a first call upon his ward.




Chapter III


"We ought soon to see the house."

The speaker bent forward, as the train, sweeping round a curve, emerged
from some thick woods Into a space of open country. It was early
September and a sleepy autumnal sunshine lay upon the fields. The
Stubbles just reaped ran over the undulations of the land in silky
purples and gold; the blue smoke from the cottages and farms hung
poised in mid air; the eye could hardly perceive any movement in the
clear stream beside the line, as it slipped noiselessly by over its
sandy bed; it seemed a world where "it was always afternoon"; and the
only breaks in its sunny silence came from the occasional coveys of
partridges that rose whirring from the harvest-fields as the train
passed.

Delia Blanchflower looked keenly at the English scene, so strange to
her after many years of Colonial and foreign wandering. She thought,
but did not say--"Those must be my fields--and my woods, that we have
just passed through. Probably I rode about them with Grandpapa. I
remember the pony--and the horrid groom I hated!" Quick the memory
returned of a tiny child on a rearing pony, alone with a sulky groom,
who, out of his master's sight, could not restrain his temper, and
struck the pony savagely and repeatedly over the head, to an
accompaniment of oaths; frightening out of her wits the little girl who
sat clinging to the creature's neck. And next she saw herself marching
in erect--a pale-faced thing of six, with a heart of fury,--to her
grandfather, to demand justice on the offender. And grandpapa had done
her bidding then as always; the groom was dismissed that day. It was
only grandmamma who had ever tried to manage or thwart her; result,
perpetual war, decided often for the time by the brute force at command
of the elder, but ever renewed. Delia's face flamed again as she
thought of the most humiliating incident of her childhood; when
Grandmamma, unable, to do anything with her screaming and stamping
self, had sent in despair for a stalwart young footman, and ordered him
to "carry Miss Delia up to the nursery." Delia could still feel herself
held, wriggling and shrieking face downwards, under the young man's
strong arm, unable either to kick or to scratch, while Grandmamma half
fearful, half laughing, watched the dire ascent from the bottom of the
stairs.

"Male tyranny--my first taste of it!" thought Delia, smiling at
herself. "It was fated then that I should be a militant."

She looked across at her friend and travelling companion, half inclined
to tell the story; but the sight of Gertrude Marvell's attitude and
expression checked the trivial reminiscence on her lips.

"Are you tired?" she said, laying her hand on the other's knee.

"Oh, no. Only thinking."

"Thinking of what?"--

"Of all there is to do."--

A kind of flash passed from one face to the other, Delia's eyes darkly
answering. They looked at each other for a little, as though in silent
conversation, and then Delia turned again to the landscape outside.

Yes, there was the house, its long, irregular line with the village
behind it. She could not restrain a slight exclamation as she caught
sight of it, and her friend opposite turned interrogatively.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing--only there's the Abbey. I don't suppose I've seen it since I
was twelve."

The other lady put up an eye-glass and looked where Miss Blanchflower
pointed; but languidly, as though it were an effort to shake herself
free from pre-occupying ideas. She was a woman of about thirty-five,
slenderly made, with a sallow, regular face, and good, though
short-sighted eyes. The eyes were dark, so was the hair, the features
delicate. Under the black shady hat, the hair was very closely and
neatly coiled. The high collar of the white blouse, fitting tightly to
the slender neck, the coat and skirt of blue serge without ornament of
any kind, but well cut, emphasized the thinness, almost emaciation, of
the form. Her attitude, dress, and expression conveyed the idea of
something amazingly taut and ready--like a ship cleared for action. The
body with its clothing seemed to have been simplified as much as
possible, so as to become the mere instrument of the will which
governed it. No superfluity whatever, whether of flesh on her small
bones, or of a single unnecessary button, fold, or trimming on her
dress, had Gertrude Marvell ever allowed herself for many years. The
general effect was in some way formidable; though why the neat
precision of the little lady should convey any notion of this sort, it
would not at first sight have been easy to say.

"How old did you say it is?"--she asked, after examining the distant
building, which could be now plainly seen from the train across a
stretch of green park.

"Oh, the present building is nothing--a pseudo-Gothic monstrosity,
built about 1830," laughed Delia; "but there are some old remains and
foundations of the abbey. It is a big, rambling old place, and I should
think dreadfully in want of doing up. My grandfather was a bit of a
miser, and though he was quite rich, he never spent a penny he could
help."

"All the better. He left the more for other people to spend." Miss
Marvell smiled--a slight, and rather tired smile, which hardly altered
the face.

"Yes, if they are allowed to spend it!" said Delia, with a shrug. "Oh
well, anyway the house must be done up--painted and papered and that
kind of thing. A trustee has got to see that things of that sort are
kept in order, I suppose. But it won't have anything to do with me,
except that for decency's sake, no doubt, he'll consult me. I shall be
allowed to choose the wall-papers I suppose!"

"If you want to," said the other drily.

Delia's brows puckered.

"We shall have to spend some time here, you know, Gertrude! We may as
well have something to do."

"Nothing that might entangle us, or take too much of our thoughts,"
said Miss Marvell, gently, but decidedly.

"I'm afraid I like furnishing," said Delia, not without a shade of
defiance.

"And I object--because I know you do. After all--you understand as
well as I do that _every day_ now is important. There are not so many
of us, Delia! If you're going to do real work, you can't afford to
spend your time or thoughts on doing up a shabby house."

There was silence a moment. Then Delia said abruptly--"I wonder when
that man will turn up? What a fool he is to take it on!"

"The guardianship? Yes, he hardly knows what he's in for." A touch of
grim amusement shewed itself for a moment in Miss Marvell's quiet face.

"Oh, I daresay he knows. Perhaps he relies on what everyone calls his
'influence.' Nasty, sloppy word--nasty sloppy thing! Whenever I'm
'influenced,' I'm degraded!" The young shoulders straightened
themselves fiercely.

"I don't know. It has its uses," said the other tranquilly.

Delia laughed radiantly.

"O well--if one can make the kind of weapon of it you do. I don't mean
of course that one shouldn't be rationally persuaded. But that's a
different thing. 'Influence' makes me think of canting clergymen, and
stout pompous women, who don't know what they're talking about, and
can't argue--who think they've settled everything by a stale
quotation--or an appeal to 'your better self'--or St. Paul. If Mr.
Winnington tries it on with 'influence'--we'll have some fun."

Delia returned to her window. The look her companion bent upon her was
not visible to her. It was curiously detached--perhaps slightly
ironical.

"I'm wondering what part I shall play in the first interview!" said
Miss Marvell, after a pause. "I represent the first stone in Mr.
Winnington's path. He will of course do his best to put me out of it."

"How can he?" cried Delia ardently. "What can he do? He can't send for
the police and turn you out of the house. At least I suppose he could,
but he certainly won't. The last thing a gentleman of his sort wants is
to make a scandal. Every one says, after all, that he is a nice
fellow!"--the tone was unconsciously patronising--"It isn't his fault
if he's been placed in this false position. But the great question for
me is--how are we going to manage him for the best?"

She leant forward, her chin on her hands, her sparkling eyes fixed on
her friend's face.

"The awkward thing is"--mused Miss Marvell--"that there is so little
_time_ in which to manage him. If the movement were going on at its old
slow pace, one might lie low, try diplomacy, avoid alarming him, and so
forth. But we've no time for that. It is a case of blow on blow--action
on action--and the publicity is half the battle."

"Still, a little management there must be, to begin with!--because
I--we--want money, and he holds the purse-strings. Hullo, here's the
station!"

She jumped up and looked eagerly out of the window.

"They've sent a fly for us. And there's the station-master on the
lookout. How it all comes back to me!"

Her flushed cheek showed a natural excitement. She was coming back as
its mistress to a house where she had been happy as a child, which she
had not seen for years. Thoughts of her father, as he had been in the
old days before any trouble had arisen between them, came rushing
through her mind--tender, regretful thoughts--as the train came slowly
to a standstill.

But the entire indifference or passivity of her companion restrained
her from any further expression. The train stopped, and she descended
to the platform of a small country station, alive apparently with
traffic and passengers.

"Miss Blanchflower?" said a smiling station-master, whose countenance
seemed to be trying to preserve the due mean between welcome to the
living and condolence for the dead, as, hat in hand, he approached the
newcomers, and guided by her deep mourning addressed himself to Delia.

"Why, Mr. Stebbing, I remember you quite well," said Delia, holding out
her hand. "There's my maid--and I hope there's a cart for the luggage.
We've got a lot."

A fair-haired man in spectacles, who had also just left the train,
turned abruptly and looked hard at the group as he passed them. He
hesitated a moment, then passed on, with a curious swinging gait, a
long and shabby over-coat floating behind him--to speak to the porter
who was collecting tickets at the gate opening on the road beyond.

Meanwhile Delia had been accosted by another gentleman, who had been
sitting reading his _Morning Post_ on the sunny platform, as the train
drew up. He too had examined the new arrivals with interest, and while
Delia was still talking to the station-master, he walked up to her.

"I think you are Miss Blanchflower: But you won't remember me." He
lifted his hat, smiling.

Delia looked at him, puzzled.

"Don't you remember that Christmas dance at the Rectory, when you were
ten, and I was home from Sandhurst?"

"Perfectly!--and I quarrelled with you because you wouldn't give me
champagne, when I'd danced with you, instead of lemonade. You said what
was good for big boys wasn't good for little girls--and I called you a
bully--"

"You kicked me!--you had the sharpest little toes!"

"Did I?" said Delia composedly. "I was rather good at kicking. So you
are Billy Andrews?"

"Right. I'm Captain now, and they've just made me adjutant down here
for the Yeomanry. My mother keeps house for me. You're coming here to
live? Please let me say how sorry I was to see your sad news." The
condolence was a little clumsy but sincere.

"Thank you. I must go and see to the luggage. Let me introduce you to
Miss Marvell--Captain Andrews--Miss Marvell."

That lady bowed coldly, as Delia departed. The tall, soldierly man,
whose pleasant looks were somewhat spoilt by a slightly underhung
mouth, and prominent chin, disguised, however, by a fine moustache,
offered assistance with the luggage.

"There is no need, thank you," said Miss Marvell. "Miss Blanchflower
and her maid will see to it."

And the Captain noticed that the speaker remained entirely passive
while the luggage was being collected and piled into a fly by the
porters, directed by Miss Blanchflower and her maid. She stood quietly
on the platform, till all was ready, and Delia beckoned to her. In the
intervals the soldier tried to make conversation, but with very small
success. He dwelt upon some of the changes Miss Blanchflower would find
on the estate; how the old head-keeper, who used to make a pet of her,
was dead, and the new agent her father had put in was thought to be
doing well, how the village had lost markedly in population in the last
few years--this emigration to Canada was really getting beyond a
joke!--and so forth. Miss Marvell made no replies. But she suddenly
asked him a question.

"What's that house over there?"

She pointed to a grey façade on a wooded hill some two miles off.

"That's our show place--Monk Lawrence! We're awfully proud of
it--Elizabethan, and that kind of thing. But of course you've heard of
Monk Lawrence! It's one of the finest things in England."

"It belongs to Sir Wilfrid Lang?"

"Certainly. Do you know him? He's scarcely been there at all, since he
became a Cabinet Minister; and yet he spent a lot of money in repairing
it a few years ago. They say it's his wife's health--that it's too damp
for her. Anyway it's quite shut up,--except that they let tourists see
it once a month."

"Does anybody live in the house?"--

"Oh--a caretaker, of course,--one of the keepers. They let the
shooting. Ah! there's Miss Blanchflower calling you."

Miss Marvell--as the gallant Captain afterwards remembered--took a long
look at the distant house and then went to join Miss Blanchflower. The
Captain accompanied her, and helped her to stow away the remaining bags
into the fly, while a small concourse of rustics, sprung from nowhere,
stolidly watched the doings of the heiress and her friend. Delia
suddenly bent forward to him, as he was about to shut the door, with an
animated look--"Can you tell me who that gentleman is who has just
walked off towards the village?"--she pointed.

"His name is Lathrop. He lives in a place just the other side of yours.
He's got some trout-hatching ponds--will stock anybody's stream for
them. Rather a queer customer!"--the good-natured Captain dropped his
voice. "Well, good-bye, my train's just coming. I hope I may come and
see you soon?"

Delia nodded assent, and they drove off.

"By George, she's a beauty!" said the Captain to himself as he turned
away. "Nothing wrong with her that I can see. But there are some
strange tales going about. I wonder who that other woman is.
Marvell--Gertrude Marvell?--I seem to have heard the name
somewhere.--Hullo, Masham, how are you?" He greeted the leading local
solicitor who had just entered the station, a man with a fine ascetic
face, and singularly blue eyes. Masham looked like a starved poet or
preacher, and was in reality one of the hardest and shrewdest men of
business in the southern counties.

"Well, did you see Miss Blanchflower?" said the Captain, as Masham
joined him on the platform, and they entered the up train together.

"I did. A handsome young lady! Have you heard the news?"

"No."

"Your neighbor, Mr. Winnington--Mark Winnington--is named as her
guardian under her father's will--until she is twenty-five. He is also
trustee, with absolute power over the property."

The Captain shewed a face of astonishment.

"Gracious! what had Winnington to do with Sir Robert Blanchflower!"

"An old friend, apparently. But it is a curious will."

The solicitor's abstracted look shewed a busy mind. The Captain had
never felt a livelier desire for information.

"Isn't there something strange about the girl?"--he said, lowering his
voice, although there was no one else in the railway carriage. "I never
saw a more beautiful creature! But my mother came home from London the
other day with some very queer stories, from a woman who had met them
abroad. She said Miss Blanchflower was awfully clever, but as wild as a
hawk--mad about women's rights and that kind of thing. In the hotel
where she met them, people fought very shy of her."

"Oh, she's a militant suffragist," said the solicitor quietly--"though
she's not had time yet since her father's death to do any mischief.
That--in confidence--is the meaning of the will."

The adjutant whistled.

"Goodness!--Winnington will have his work cut out for him. But he
needn't accept."

"He has accepted. I heard this morning from the London solicitor."

"Your firm does the estate business down here?"

"For many years. I hope to see Mr. Winnington to-morrow or next day. He
is evidently hurrying home--because of this."

There was silence for a few minutes; then the Captain said bluntly:

"It's an awful pity, you know, that kind of thing cropping up down
here. We've escaped it so far."

"With such a lot of wild women about, what can you expect?" said the
solicitor briskly. "Like the measles--sure to come our way sooner or
later."

"Do you think they'll get what they want?" "What--the vote? No--not
unless the men are fools." The refined, apostolic face set like iron.

"None of the womanly women want it," said the Captain with conviction.
"You should hear my mother on it."

The solicitor did not reply. The adjutant's mother was not in his eyes
a model of wisdom. Nor did his own opinion want any fortifying from
outside.

Captain Andrews was not quite in the same position. He was conscious of
a strong male instinct which disavowed Miss Blanchflower and all her
kind; but at the same time he was exceedingly susceptible to female
beauty, and it troubled his reasoning processes that anybody so
wrong-headed should be so good-looking. His heart was soft, and his
brain all that was wanted for his own purposes. But it did not enable
him-it never had enabled him--to understand these extraordinary
"goings-on," which the newspapers were every day reporting, on the part
of well-to-do, educated women, who were ready--it seemed--to do
anything outrageous--just for a vote! "Of course nobody would mind if
the rich women--the tax-paying women--had a vote--help us Tories
famously. But the women of the working-classes--why, Good Lord, look at
them when there's any disturbance on--any big strike--look at
Tonypandy!--a deal sight worse than the men! Give them the vote and
they'd take us to the devil, even quicker than Lloyd George!"

Aloud he said--

"Do you know anything about that lady Miss Blanchflower had with her?
She introduced me. Miss Marvell--I think that was the name. I thought I
had heard it somewhere."

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 passed 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 shirk. 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, passionate 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 passed, 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, flushing 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 nobody 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 attitude 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, spacious 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 grass-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-fashioned 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 spaced 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.

Then at a bound she sprang out of bed, and stood upright in the autumn
dawn.

"I hate myself!" she said fiercely--as she ran her hands through the
mass of her dark hair, and threw it back upon her shoulders. Hurrying
across the room in her night-gown, she threw back the curtains. A light
autumnal mist, through which the sun was smiling, lay on the garden.
Stately trees rose above it, and masses of flowers shewed vaguely
bright; while through the blue distances beyond, the New Forest
stretched to the sea.

But Delia was looking at herself, in a long pier-glass that represented
almost the only concession to the typical feminine needs in the room.
She was not admiring her own seemliness; far from it; she was rating
and despising herself for a feather-brained waverer and
good-for-nothing.

"Oh yes, you can _talk_!" she said, to the figure in the glass--"you
are good enough at that! But what are you going to _do_!--Spend your
time at Maple's and Waring--matching chintzes and curtains?--when
you've _promised_--you've _promised_! Gertrude's right. There _are_ all
sorts of disgusting cowardices and weaknesses in you! Oh! yes,
you'd like to go fiddling and fussing down here--playing the
heiress--patronising the poor people--putting yourself into beautiful
clothes--and getting heaps of money out of Mr. Winnington to spend.
It's in you--it's just in you--to throw everything over--to forget
everything you've felt, and everything you've vowed--and just _wallow_
in luxury and selfishness and snobbery! Gertrude's absolutely right.
But you shan't do it! You shan't put a hand to it! Why did that man
take the guardianship? Now it's his business. He may see to it! But
_you_--you have something else to do!"

And she stood erect, the angry impulse in her stiffening all her young
body. And through her memory there ran, swift-footed, fragments from a
rhetoric of which she was already fatally mistress, the formulae too of
those sincere and goading beliefs on which her youth had been fed ever
since her first acquaintance with Gertrude Marvell. The mind renewed
them like vows; clung to them, embraced them.

What was she before she knew Gertrude? She thought of that earlier
Delia as of a creature almost too contemptible to blame. From the
maturity of her twenty-one years she looked back upon herself at
seventeen or eighteen with wonder. That Delia had read nothing--knew
nothing--had neither thoughts or principles. She was her father's
spoilt child and darling; delighting in the luxury that surrounded his
West Indian Governorship; courted and flattered by the few English of
the colonial capital, and by the members of her father's staff; with
servants for every possible need or whim; living her life mostly in the
open air, riding at her father's side, through the sub-tropical forests
of the colony; teasing and tyrannising over the dear old German
governess who had brought her up, and whose only contribution to her
education--as Delia now counted education--had been the German tongue.
Worth something!--but not all those years, "when I might have been
learning so much else, things I shall never have time to learn
now!--things that Gertrude has at her finger's end. Why wasn't I taught
properly--decently--like any board school child! As Gertrude says, we
women want everything we can get! We _must_ know the things that men
know--that we may beat them at their own game. Why should every Balliol
boy--years younger than me--have been taught his classics and
mathematics,--and have everything brought to him--made easy for
him--history, political economy, logic, philosophy, laid at his
lordship's feet, if he will just please to learn!--while I, who have
just as good a brain as he, have had to pick up a few scraps by the
way, just because nobody who had charge of me ever thought it worth
while to teach, a girl. But I have a mind!--an intelligence!--even if I
am a woman; and there is all the world to know. Marriage? Yes!--but not
at the sacrifice of everything else--of the rational, civilised self."

On the whole though, her youth had been happy enough, with recurrent
intervals of _ennui_ and discontent. Intervals too of poetic
enthusiasm, or ascetic religion. At eighteen she had been practically a
Catholic, influenced by the charming wife of one of her father's
aides-de-camp. And then--a few stray books or magazine articles had
made a Darwinian and an agnostic of her; the one phase as futile as the
other.

"I knew nothing--I had no mind!"--she repeated with energy,--"till
Gertrude came."

And she thought with ardour of that intellectual awakening, under the
strange influence of the apparently reserved and impassive woman, who
had come to read history with her for six months, at the suggestion of
a friend of her father's, a certain cultivated and clever Lady
Tonbridge, "who saw how starved I was."

So, after enquiry, a lady who was a B.A. of London, and had taken
first-class honour in history--Delia's ambition would accept nothing
less--had been found, who wanted for health's sake a winter in a warm
climate, and was willing to read history with Governor Blanch-flower's
half-fledged daughter.

The friendship had begun, as often, with a little aversion. Delia was
made to work, and having always resented being made to do anything, for
about a month she disliked her tutor, and would have persuaded Sir
Robert to send her away, had not England been so far off, and the
agreement with Miss Marvell, whose terms were high, unusually
stringent. But by the end of the month the girl of eighteen was
conquered. She had recognised in Gertrude Marvell accomplishments that
filled her with envy, together with an intensity of will, a bitter and
fiery purpose, that astounded and subdued a young creature in whom
inherited germs of southern energy and passion were only waiting the
touch that starts the ferment. Gertrude Marvell had read an amazing
amount of history, and all from one point of view; that of the woman
stirred to a kind of madness by what she held to be the wrongs of her
sex. The age-long monopoly of all the higher forces of civilisation by
men; the cruel and insulting insistence upon the sexual and maternal
functions of women, as covering the whole of her destiny; the hideous
depreciation of her as an inferior and unclean creature, to which
Christianity, poisoned by the story of Eve, and a score of barbarous
beliefs and superstitions more primitive still, had largely
contributed, while hypocritically professing to enfranchise and exalt
her; the unfailing doom to "obey," and to bring forth, that has crushed
her; the labours and shames heaped upon her by men in the pursuit of
their own selfish devices; and the denial to her, also by men, of all
the higher and spiritual activities, except those allowed by a man-made
religion:--this feminist gospel, in some respects so bitterly true, in
others so vindictively false, was gradually and unsparingly pressed
upon Delia's quick intelligence. She caught its fire; she rose to its
call; and there came a day when Gertrude Marvell breaking through the
cold reserve she had hitherto interposed between herself and the pupil
who had come to adore her, threw her arms round the girl, accepting
from her what were practically the vows of a neophyte in a secret and
revolutionary service.

Joyous, self-dedicating moment! But it had been followed by a tragedy;
the tragedy of Delia's estrangement from her father. It was not long
before Sir Robert Blanchflower, a proud self-indulgent man, with a keen
critical sense, a wide acquaintance with men and affairs, and a number
of miscellaneous acquirements of which he never made the smallest
parade, had divined the spirit of irreconcilable revolt which animated
the slight and generally taciturn woman, who had obtained such a hold
upon his daughter. He, the god of his small world, was made to feel
himself humiliated in her presence. She was, in fact, his intellectual
superior, and the truth was conveyed to him in a score of subtle ways.
She was in his house simply because she was poor, and wanted rest from
excessive overwork, at someone else's expense. Otherwise her manner
suggested--often quite unconsciously--that she would not have put up
with his household and its regulations for a single day.

Then, suddenly, he perceived that he had lost his daughter, and the
reason of it. The last year of his official life was thenceforward
darkened by an ugly and undignified struggle with the woman who had
stolen Delia from him. In the end he dismissed Gertrude Marvell. Delia
shewed a passionate resentment, told him frankly that as soon as she
was twenty-one she should take up "the Woman's movement" as her sole
occupation, and should offer herself wherever Gertrude Marvell, and
Gertrude's leaders, thought she could be useful. "The vote _must_ be
got!"--she said, standing white and trembling, but resolute, before her
father--"If not peaceably, then by violence. And when we get it,
father, you men will be astonished to see what we shall do with it!"

Her twenty-first birthday was at hand, and would probably have seen
Delia's flight from her father's house, but for Sir Robert's breakdown
in health. He gave up his post, and it was evident he had not more than
a year or two to live. Delia softened and submitted. She went abroad
with him, and for a time he seemed to throw off the disease which had
attacked him. It was during a brighter interval that, touched by her
apparent concessions, he had consented to her giving the lecture in the
Tyrolese hotel the fame of which had spread abroad, and had even taken
a certain pleasure in her oratorical success.

But during the following winter--Sir Robert's last--which they spent
at Meran, things had gone from bad to worse. For months Delia never
mentioned Gertrude Marvell to her father. He flattered himself that the
friendship was at an end. Then some accident revealed to him that it
was as close as, or closer than ever; that they were in daily
correspondence; that they had actually met, unknown to him, in the
neighbourhood of Meran; and that Delia was sending all the money she
could possibly spare from her very ample allowance to "The Daughters of
Revolt," the far-spreading society in which Gertrude Marvell was now
one of the leading officials.

Some of these dismal memories of Meran descended like birds of night
upon Delia, as she stood with her arms above her head, in her long
night-gown, looking intently but quite unconsciously into the depths of
an old rosewood cheval glass. She felt that sultry night about her once
more, when, after signing his will, her father opened his eyes upon
her, coming back with an effort from the bound of death, and had said
quite clearly though faintly in the silence--

"Give up that woman, Delia!--promise me to give her up." And Delia had
cried bitterly, on her knees beside him--without a word--caressing his
hand. And the cold fingers had been feebly withdrawn from hers as the
eyes closed.

"Oh papa--papa!" The low murmur came from her, as she pressed her hands
upon her eyes. If the Christian guesses were but true, and in some
quiet Elysian state he might now understand, and cease to be angry with
her! Was there ever a great cause won without setting kin against kin?
"A man's foes shall be they of his own household." "It wasn't my
fault--it wasn't my fault!"

No!--and moreover it was her duty not to waste her strength in vain
emotion and regret. Her task was _doing_, not dreaming. She turned
away, banished her thoughts and set steadily about the task of
dressing.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Please Miss Blanchflower, there are two or three people waiting to see
you in the servants' hall."

So said the tall and gentle-voiced housekeeper, Mrs. Bird, whose
emotions had been, in Miss Marvell's view, so unnecessarily exercised
on the evening of Delia's home-coming. Being a sensitive person, Mrs.
Bird had already learnt her lesson, and her manner had now become as
mildly distant as could be desired, especially in the case of Miss
Blanchflower's lady companion.

"People? What people?" asked Delia, looking round with a furrowed brow.
She and Gertrude were sitting together on the sofa when the housekeeper
entered, eagerly reading a large batch of letters which the London post
had just brought, and discussing their contents in subdued tones.

"It's the cottages, Miss. Her Ladyship used always to decide who should
have those as were vacant about this time of year, and two or three of
these persons have been up several times to know when you'd be home."

"But I don't know anything about it"--said Delia, rising reluctantly.
"Why doesn't the agent--why doesn't Mr. Frost do it?"

"I suppose--they thought--you'd perhaps speak a word to Mr. Frost,
Miss," suggested Mrs. Bird. "But I can send them away of course, if you
wish."

"Oh no, I'll come"--said Delia. "But it's rather tiresome--just
as"--she looked at Gertrude.

"Don't be long," said Miss Marvell, sharply, "I'll wait for you here."
And she plunged back into the letters, her delicate face all alive, her
eyes sparkling. Delia departed--evidently on a distasteful errand.

But twenty minutes later, she returned flushed and animated.

"I _am_ glad I went! Such tyranny--such monstrous tyranny!" She stood
in front of Gertrude breathing fast, her hands on her hips.

"What's the matter?"

"My grandmother had a rule--can you imagine anything so cruel!--that no
girl--who had gone wrong--was to be allowed in our cottages. If she
couldn't be provided for in some Home or other, or if her family
refused to give her up, then the family must go. An old man has been up
to see me--a widower with two daughters--one in service. The one in
service has come to grief--the son of the house!--the usual
story!"--the speaker's face had turned fiercely pale--"and now our
agent refuses to let the girl and her baby come home. And the old
father says--'What am I to do, Miss? I can't turn her out--she's my own
flesh and blood. I've got to stick to her--else there'll be worse
happening. It's not _justice_, Miss--and it's not Gospel.'
Well!"--Delia seated herself with energy,--"I've told him to have her
home at once--and I'll see to it."

Gertrude lifted her eyebrows, a gesture habitual with her, whenever
Delia wore--as now--her young prophetess look. Why feel these things so
much? Human nerves have only a certain limited stock of reactions.
Avenge--and alter them!

But she merely said--

"And the others?"

"Oh, a poor mother with eight children, pleading for a cottage with
three bedrooms instead of two! I told her she should have it if I had
to build it!--And an old woman who has lived fifty-two years in her
cottage, and lost all her belongings, begging that she mightn't be
turned out--for a family--now that it's too big for her. She shan't be
turned out! Of course I suppose it would be common sense"--the tension
of the speaker's face broke up in laughter--"to put the old woman into
the cottage of the eight children--and put the eight children into the
old woman's. But human beings are not cattle! Sentiment's something!
Why shouldn't a woman be allowed to die in her old home,--so long as
she pays the rent? I hate all this interference with people's lives!
And it's always the women who come worst off. 'Oh Mr. Frost, he never
pays no attention to us women. He claps 'is 'ands to his ears when he
sees one of us, and jest runs for it.' Well, I'll make Mr. Frost listen
to a woman!"

"I'm afraid Mr. Winnington is his master," said Gertrude quietly.
Delia, crimson again, shrugged her shoulders.

"We shall see!"

Gertrude Marvell looked up.

"Look here, Delia, if you're going to play the part of earthly
Providence to this village and your property in general--as I've said
to you before--you may as well tell the 'Daughters' you can't do
anything for them. That's a profession in itself; and would take you
all your time."

"Then of course, I shan't do it," said Delia, with decision. "But I
only want to put in an appearance--to make friends with the
people--just for a time, Gertrude! It doesn't do to be _too_ unpopular.
We're not exactly in good odour just now, are we?"

And sitting down on a stool beside the elder woman, Delia leant her
head against her friend's knee caressingly.

Gertrude gave an absent touch to the girl's beautiful hair, and then
said--

"So you _will_ take these four meetings?"

"Certainly!" Delia sprang up. "What are they? One at Latchford, one at
Brownmouth--Wanchester--and Frimpton. All right. I shall be pelted at
Brownmouth. But rotten eggs don't matter so much when you're looking
out for them--except on your face--Ugh!"

"And the meeting here?"

"Of course. Can't I do what I like with my own house? We'll have the
notices out next week."

Gertrude looked up--

"When did you say that man--Mr. Winnington--was coming?"

"His note this morning said 4:30."

"You'd better see him alone--for the first half hour anyway."

Delia made a face.

"I wish I knew what line to take up. You've been no use at all,
Gertrude!"

Gertrude smiled.

"Wait till you see him," she said coolly. "Mother-wit will help you
out."

"I wish I had anything to bargain with."

"So you have."

"Pray, what?"

"The meeting here. You _could_ give that up. And he needn't know
anything of the others yet awhile."

"What a charming opinion he will have of us both, by and bye," laughed
Delia, quietly. "And by all accounts he himself is a simple
paragon.--Heavens, how tiresome!"

Gertrude Marvell turned back to her letters.

"What does anyone know about a _man_?" she said, with slow
deliberation.

The midday post at Maumsey brought letters just after luncheon. Delia
turning hers over was astonished to see two or three with the local
postmark.

"What can people from _here_ be writing to me about?"

Gertrude absorbed in the new weekly number of the _Tocsin_ took no
notice, till she was touched on the shoulder by Delia.

"Yes?"

"Gertrude!--it's too amazing!" The girl's tone was full of a joyous
wonder. "You know they told us at head-quarters that this was one of
the deadest places in England--a nest of Antis--nothing doing here at
all. Well, what do you think?--here are _three_ letters by one post,
from the village--all greeting us--all knowing perfectly who you
are--that you have been in prison, etcetera--all readers of the
_Tocsin_, and burning to be doing something--"

"Burning something?" interposed the other in her most ordinary voice.

Delia laughed, again with the note of constraint.

"Well, anyway, they want to come and see us."

"Who are they?"

"An assistant mistress at the little grammar-school--that's No. 1. No.
2--a farmer's daughter, who says she took part in one of the raids last
summer, but nobody knows down here. Her father paid her fine. And No.
3. a consumptive dressmaker, who declares she hasn't much life left
anyway, and she is quite willing to give it to the 'cause'! Isn't it
wonderful how it spreads--it spreads!"

"Hm"--said Miss Marvell. "Well, we may as well inspect them. Tell them
to come up some time next week after dusk."

As she spoke, the temporary parlour-maid threw open the door of the
room which Delia had that morning chosen as her own sitting-room.

"Are you at home, Miss? Mrs. France would like to see you."

"Mrs. France?--Mrs. France? Oh, I know--the doctor's wife--Mrs. Bird
was talking of him this morning. Well, I suppose I must go." Delia
moved unwillingly. "I'm coming, Mary."

"Of course you must go," said Gertrude, a little peremptorily. "As we
are here we may as well reconnoitre the whole ground--find out
everything we can."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the drawing-room, to which some flowers, and a litter of new books
and magazines had already restored its inhabited look, Delia found a
woman awaiting her, in whom the girl's first glance discerned a
personality. She was dressed with an entire disregard of the fashion,
in plain, serviceable clothes. A small black bonnet tied under the chin
framed a face whose only beauty lay in the expression of the clear kind
eyes, and quiet mouth. The eyes were a little prominent; the brow above
them unusually smooth and untroubled, answering to the bands of brown
hair touched with grey which defined it. But the rest of the face was
marked by many deep lines--of experience, or suffering?--which showed
clearly that its owner had long left physical youth behind. And yet
perhaps youth--in some spiritual poetic sense--was what Mrs. France's
aspect most sharply conveyed.

She rose as Delia entered, and greeted her warmly.

"It is nice to see you settled here! Dr. France and I were great
friends of your old grandmother. He and she were regular cronies. We
were very sorry to see the news of your poor father's death."

The voice was clear and soft, and absolutely sincere. Delia felt drawn
to her. But it had become habitual to her to hold herself on the
defensive with strangers, to suspect hostility and disapproval
everywhere. So that her manner in reply, though polite enough, was
rather chilly.

But--the girl's beauty! The fame of it had indeed reached Maumsey in
advance of the heiress. Mrs. France, however, in its actual presence
was inclined to say "I had not heard the half!" She remembered Delia's
mother, and in the face before her she recognised again the Greek type,
the old pure type, reappearing, as it constantly does, in the mixed
modern race. But the daughter surpassed her mother. Delia's eyes, of a
lovely grey blue, lidded, and fringed, and arched with an exquisite
perfection; the curve of the slightly bronzed cheek, suggesting through
all its delicacy the fulness of young, sensuous life; the mouth,
perhaps a trifle too large, and the chin, perhaps a trifle too firm;
the abundance of the glossy black hair, curling wherever it was allowed
to curl, or wherever it could escape the tight coils in which it was
bound--at the temples, and over the brow; the beauty of the uncovered
neck, and of the amply-rounded form which revealed itself through the
thin black stripe of the mourning dress:--none of these "items" in
Delia's good looks escaped her admiring visitor.

"It's to be hoped Mr. Mark realises his responsibilities," she thought,
with amusement.

Aloud, she said--

"I remember you as quite a little thing staying with your
Grandmother--but you wouldn't remember me. Dr. France was grieved not
to come, but it's his hospital day."

Delia thanked her, without effusion. Mrs. France presently began to
feel conversation an effort, and to realise that the girl's wonderful
eyes were very observant and very critical. Yet she chose the very
obvious and appropriate topic of Lady Blanchflower, her strong
character, her doings in the village, her relation to the labourers and
their wives.

"When she died, they really missed her. They miss her still."

"Is it good for a village to depend so much on one person?" said Delia
in a detached voice.

Mrs. France looked at her curiously. Jealousy of one's grandmother is
not a common trait in the young. It struck her that Miss Blanchflower
was already defending herself against examples and ideals she did not
mean to follow. And again amusement--and concern!--on Mark
Winnington's account made themselves felt. Mrs. France was quite aware
of Delia's "militant" antecedents, and of the history of the lady she
had brought down to live with her. But the confidence of the doctor's
wife in Winnington's powers and charm was boundless. "He'll be a match
for them!" she thought gaily.

Meanwhile in reply, she smilingly defended her old friend Lady
Blanchflower from the implied charge of pauperising the village.

"Not at all! She never gave money recklessly--and the do-nothings kept
clear of her. But she was the people's friend--and they knew it.
They're very excited about your coming!"

"I daresay I shall change some things," said Delia decidedly. "I don't
approve of all Mr. Frost has been doing."

"Well, you'll have your guardian to help you," said Mrs. France
quietly.

Delia flushed, straightened her shoulders, and said nothing.

This time Mrs. France was fairly taken by surprise. She knew nothing
more of Sir Robert Blanchflower's will than that he had made Mr. Mark
Winnington his daughter's guardian, till she reached the age of
twenty-five. But that any young woman--any motherless and fatherless
girl--should not think herself the most lucky of mortals to have
obtained Mark Winnington as guide and defender, with first claim on his
time, his brains, his kindness, seemed incredible to Mark's old friend
and neighbour, accustomed to the daily signs of his immense and
deserved popularity. Then it flashed upon her--"Has she ever seen him?"

The doubt led to an immediate communication of the news that Winnington
had arrived from town that morning. Dr. France had seen him in the
village.

"You know him, of course, already?"

"Not at all," said Delia, indifferently. "He and I are perfect
strangers." Mrs. France laughed.

"I rather envy you the pleasure of making friends with him! We are all
devoted to him down here."

Delia lifted her eyebrows.

"What are his particular virtues? It's monotonous to possess them
_all_." The slight note of insolence was hardly disguised.

"No two friends of his would give you the same answer. I should give
you a different catalogue, for instance, from Lady Tonbridge--"

"Lady Tonbridge!" cried Delia, waking up at last. "You don't mean that
Lady Tonbridge lives in this neighbourhood?"

"Certainly. You know her?"

"She came once to stay with us in the West Indies. My father knew her
very well before she married. And I owe her--a great debt"--the last
words were spoken with emphasis.

Mrs. France looked enquiring.

"--she recommended to us the lady who is now living with me here--my
chaperon--Miss Marvell?"

There was silence for a moment. Then Mrs. France said, not without
embarrassment--

"Your father desired she should live with you?"

Delia flushed again.

"No. My father did not understand her."

"He did not agree with her views?"

"Nor with mine. It was horrid--but even relations must agree to differ.
Why is Lady Tonbridge here? And where is Sir Alfred? Papa had not heard
of them for a long time."

"They separated last year"--said Mrs. France gravely. "But Mr.
Winnington will tell you. He's a great friend of hers. She does a lot
of work for him."

"Work?"

"Social work!" smiled Mrs. France--"poor-law--schools--that kind of
thing. He ropes us all in."

"Oh!" said Delia, with her head in the air.

Mrs. France laughed outright.

"That seems to you so unimportant--compared to the vote."

"It _is_ unimportant!" said Delia, impetuously. "Nothing really matters
but the vote. Aren't you a Suffragist, Mrs. France?"

Mrs. France smilingly shook her head.

"I don't want to meddle with the men's business. And we're a long way
yet from catching up with our own. Oh, my husband has a lot of
scientific objections. But that's mine." Then her face grew
serious--"anyway, we can all agree, I hope, in hating violence. That
can never settle it."

She looked a little sternly at her young companion.

"That depends," said Delia. "But we mustn't argue, Mrs. France. I
should only make you angry. Ah!"

She sprang up and went to the window, just as steps could be heard on
the gravel outside.

"Here's someone coming." She turned to Mrs. France. "Is it Mr.
Winnington?"

"It is!" said her visitor, after putting on her glasses.

Delia surveyed him, standing behind the lace curtain, and Mrs. France
was relieved to see that a young person of such very decided opinions
could be still girlishly curious. She herself rose to go.

"Good-bye. I won't interrupt your talk with him."

"Good-looking?" said Delia, with mischief in her eyes, and a slight
gesture towards the approaching visitor.

"Don't you know what an athlete he is--or was?"

"Another perfection? Heavens!--how does he endure it?" said the girl,
laughing.

Mrs. France took her leave. She was a very motherly tender-hearted
woman, and she would like to have taken her old friend's grandchild in
her arms and kissed her. But she wisely refrained; and indeed the
instinct to shake her was perhaps equally strong. "How long will she
stand gossiping on the doormat with the paragon," said Delia savagely
to herself, when she was left alone. "Oh, how I hate a 'charming man'!"
She moved stormily to and fro, listening to the distant sounds of talk
in the hall, and resenting them. Then suddenly she paused opposite one
of the large mirrors in the room. A coil of hair had loosened itself;
she put it right; and still stood motionless, interrogating herself in
a proud concentration.

"Well?--I am quite ready for him."

But her heart beat uncomfortably fast as the door opened, and Mark
Winnington entered.




Chapter V


As Winnington advanced with outstretched hand to greet her, Delia was
conscious of a striking physical presence, and of an eye fixed upon her
at once kind and penetrating.

"How are you? You've been through a terrible time! Are you at all
rested? I'm afraid it has been a long, long strain."

He held her hand in both his, asking gentle questions about her
father's illness, interrogating her looks the while with a frank
concern and sympathy.

Delia was taken by surprise. For the first time that day she was
reminded of what was really, the truth. She _was_ tired--morally and
physically. But Gertrude Marvell never recognised anything of the kind;
and in her presence Delia rarely confessed any such weakness even to
herself.

As it was, her eyes and mouth wavered a little under Winnington's look.

"Thank you," she said quietly. "I shall soon be rested."

They sat down. Delia was conscious--unwillingly conscious, of a nervous
agitation she did her best to check. For Winnington also it was clearly
an awkward moment. He began at once to talk of his old recollections of
her parents, of her mother's beauty, of her father's reputation as the
most dashing soldier on the North-West frontier, in the days when they
first met in India.

"But his health was even then very poor. I suppose it was that made him
leave the army?"

"Yes--and then Parliament," said Delia. "He was ordered a warm climate
for the winter. But he could never have lived without working. His
Governorship just suited him."

She spoke with charming softness, beguiled from her insensibly by
Winnington's own manner. At the back of Winnington's mind, as they
talked, ran perpetual ejaculations--ejaculations of the natural man in
the presence of so much beauty. But his conversation with her flowed
the while with an even gentleness which never for a moment affected
intimacy, and was touched here and there with a note of deference, even
of ceremony, which disarmed his companion.

"I never came across your father down here--oddly enough," he said
presently. "He had left Sandhurst before I went to Eton; and then there
was Oxford, and then the bar. My little place belonged then to a
cousin, and I had hardly ever seen it. But of course I knew, your
grandmother--everybody did. She was a great centre--a great figure. She
has left her mark here. Don't you find it so?"

"Yes. Everybody seems to remember her."

But, in a moment, the girl before him had changed and stiffened. It
seemed to Winnington, as to Mrs. France, that she pulled herself up,
reacting against something that threatened her. The expression in her
eyes put something between them. "Perhaps you know"--she said--"that
my grandmother didn't always get on with my mother?"

He wondered why she had reminded him of that old family jar, which
gossip had spread abroad. Did it really rankle in her mind? Odd, that
it should!

"Was that so?" he laughed. "Oh, Lady Blanchflower had her veins of
unreason. One had to know where to have her."

"She took Greeks for barbarians--my father used to say," said Delia, a
little grimly. "But she was very good to me--and so I was fond of her."
"And she of you. But there are still tales going about--do you
mind?--of the dances you led her. It took weeks and months, they say,
before you and she arrived at an armed truce--after a most appalling
state of war! There's an old gardener here--retired now--who remembers
you quite well. He told me yesterday that you used to be very friendly
with him, and you said to him once--'I like Granny!--she's the master
of me!'"

The laughter in Winnington's eyes again kindled hers.

"I was a handful--I know." There was a pause. Then she added--"And I'm
afraid--I've gone on being a handful!" Gesture and tone showed that she
spoke deliberately.

"Most people of spirit are--till they come to handle themselves," he
replied, also with a slight change of tone.

"But that's just what women are never allowed to do, Mr. Winnington!"
She turned suddenly red, and fronted him. "There's always some man, who
claims to manage them and their affairs. We're always in
leading-strings--nobody ever admits we're grown up. Why can't we be
allowed like men--to stumble along our own way? If we make mistakes,
let's _pay_ for them! But let us at some time in our lives--at
least--feel ourselves free beings!"

There was no mistaking the purport of these words. They referred
clearly to her father's will, and her own position. After a moment's
thought, Winnington bent forward.

"I think I understand what you mean," he said gravely. "And I
sympathise with it more than you imagine."

Delia looked up impetuously--

"Then why, Mr. Winnington, did you consent to be my guardian?"

"Because--quite honestly--because I thought I could be of more use to
you perhaps than the Court of Chancery; and because your father's
letter to me was one very difficult to put aside."

"How could anyone in my father's state of health really judge
reasonably!" cried Delia. "I daresay it sounds shocking to you, Mr.
Winnington, but I can't help putting it to myself like this--Papa was
always able to contrive his own life as he chose. In his Governorship
he was a small king. He tried a good many experiments. Everybody
deferred to him. Everybody was glad to help him. Then when his money
came and the estate, nobody fettered him with conditions; nobody
interfered with him. Grandpapa and he didn't agree in a lot of things.
Papa was a Liberal; and Grandpapa was an awfully hot Conservative. But
Grandpapa didn't appoint a trustee, or tie up the estates--or anything
of that kind. It is simply and solely because I am a woman that these
things are done! I am not to be allowed _my_ opinions, in _my_ life,
though Papa was quite free to work for his in his life! This is the
kind of thing we call tyranny,--this is the kind of thing that's
driving women into revolt!"

Delia had risen. She stood in what Gertrude Marvell would have called
her "pythian" attitude, hands behind her, her head thrown back,
delivering her prophetic soul. Winnington, as he surveyed her, was
equally conscious of her beauty and her absurdity. But he kept cool, or
rather the natural faculty which had given him so much authority and
success in life rose with a kind of zest to its new and unaccustomed
task.

"May I perhaps suggest--that your father was fifty-two when he
succeeded to this estate--and that you are twenty-one?"

"Nearly twenty-two," she interrupted, hastily.

"Nearly twenty-two," repeated Winnington. "And I assure you, that what
with 'People's Budgets,' and prowling Chancellors, and all the new
turns of the screw that the Treasury is for ever putting on, inheriting
an estate nowadays is no simple matter. Your father thought of that. He
wished to provide someone to help you."

"I could have found lawyers to help me."

"Of course you could. But my experience is that solicitors are good
servants but bad masters. It wants a good deal of practical knowledge
to direct them, so that you get what you want. I have gone a little way
into the business of the estate this morning with Mr. Masham, and in
town, with the Morton Manners people. I see already some complications
which will take me a deal of time and thought to straighten out. And I
am a lawyer, and if you will let me say so, just double your age."

He smiled at her, but Delia's countenance did not relax. Her mouth was
scornful.

"I daresay that's quite true, Mr. Winnington. But of course you know it
was _not_ on that account--or at any rate not chiefly on that account,
that my father left things as he did. He wished"--she spoke clearly and
slowly--"simply to prevent my helping the Suffrage movement in the way
I think best."

Winnington too had risen, and was standing with one hand on the
mantelpiece. His brow was slightly furrowed, not frowning exactly, but
rather with the expression of one trying to bring his mind into as
close touch as possible with another mind.

"I must of course agree with you. That is evidently one of the objects
of the will, though by no means--I think--the only one. And as to that,
should you not ask yourself--had not your father a right, even a duty,
to look after the disposal of his money as he thought best? Surely it
was his responsibility--especially as he was old, and you were young."

Delia had begun to feel impatient--to resent the very mildness of his
tone. She felt, as though she were an insubordinate child, being gently
reasoned with.

"No, I don't admit it!" she said passionately. "It was tampering with
the right of the next generation!"

"Might you not say the same of the whole--or almost the whole of our
system of inheritance?" he argued. "I should put it--that the old are
always trying to preserve and protect something they know is more
precious to them than it can be to the young--something as to which,
with the experience of life behind them, they believe they are wiser
than the young. _Ought_ the young to resent it?"

"Yes," persisted Delia. "_Yes_! They should be left to make their own
experiments."

"They have _life_ wherewith to make them! But the dead--" He paused.
But Delia felt and quivered under the unspoken appeal; and also under
the quick touch of something more personal--more intimate--in his
manner, expressing, it seemed, some deep feeling of his own. He, in
turn, perceived that she had grown very pale; he guessed even that she
was suddenly not very far from tears. He seemed to realise the weeks,
perhaps months, of conflict through which the girl had just passed. He
was sincerely sorry for her--sincerely drawn to her.

Delia broke the silence.

"It is no good I think discussing this any more--is it? There's the
will, and the question is"--she faced him boldly--"how are you and I
going to get on, Mr. Winnington?"

Winnington's seriousness broke up. He threw her a smiling look, and
with his hands in his pockets began to pace the room reflectively.

"I really believe we can pull it off, if we look at it coolly," he said
at last, pausing in front of her. "I am no bigot on the Suffrage
question--frankly I have not yet made up my mind upon it. All that I am
clear about--as your father was clear--is that outrage and violence are
_wrong_--in any cause. I cannot believe that we shan't agree there!"

He looked at her keenly. Delia was silent. Her face betrayed nothing,
though her eyes met his steadily.

"And in regard to that, there is of course one thing that troubles
me"--he resumed--"one thing in which I beg you to take my advice"--

Delia breathed quick.

"Gertrude Marvell?" she said. "Of course I knew that was coming!"

"Yes. That we must settle, I think." He kept his eyes upon her. "You
can hardly know that she is mentioned by name in your father's last
letter--the letter to me---as the one person whose companionship he
dreaded for you--the one person he hoped you would consent to part
from."

Delia had turned white.

"No--I didn't know."

"For that reason, and for others, I do entreat you"--he went on,
earnestly--"not to keep her here. Miss Marvell may be all that you
believe her. I have nothing to say against her,--except this. I am told
by those who know that she is already quite notorious in the militant
movement. She has been in prison, and she has made extremely violent
speeches, advocating what Miss Marvell calls war, and what plain people
call--crime. That she should live with you here would not only
prejudice your future, and divide you from people who should be your
natural friends; it would be an open disrespect to your father's
memory."

There was silence. Then Delia said, evidently mastering her excitement
with difficulty.

"I can't help it. She _must_ stay with me. Nobody need know--about my
father. Her name is not mentioned in the will."

"No. That is true. But his letter to me as your guardian and trustee
ought to be regarded equitably as part of the will; and I do not see
how it would be possible for me to acquiesce in something so directly
contrary to his last wishes. I beg you to look at it from my point of
view--"

"I do"--said Delia, flushing again. "But my letter warned you--"

"Yes--but I felt on receiving it that you could not possibly be aware
of the full strength of your father's feeling. Let me read you his
words."

He took an envelope from his pocket, observing her. Delia hastily
interposed.

"Don't, Mr. Winnington!--I'm sure I know."

"It is really my duty to read it to you," he said, courteously but
firmly.

She endured it. The only sign of agitation she shewed was the trembling
of her hands on the back of the chair she leant upon. And when he
returned it to his pocket, she considered for a moment or two, before
she said, breathing unevenly, and stumbling a little.--

"That makes no difference, Mr. Winnington. I expect you think me a
monster. All the same I loved my father in my own way. But I am not
going to barter away my freedom for anything or anyone. I am not part
of my father, I am myself. And he is not here to be injured or hurt by
anything I do. I intend to stick to Gertrude Marvell--and she to me."

And having delivered her ultimatum, she stood like a young goddess,
expectant and defiant.

Winnington's manner changed. He straightened himself, with a slight
shake of his broad shoulders, and went to look out of the window at the
end of the room. Delia was left to contemplate the back of a very tall
man in a serge suit and to rate herself for the thrill--or the
trepidation--she could not help feeling. What would he say when he
spoke again? She was angry with herself that she could not quite
truthfully say that she did not care.

When he returned, she divined another man. The tone was as courteous as
ever, but the first relation between them had disappeared; or rather it
had become a business relation, a relation of affairs.

"You will of course understand--that I cannot _acquiesce_ in that
arrangement?"

Delia's uncomfortable sense of humor found vent in a laugh--as civil
however as she could make it.

"I do understand. But I don't quite see what you can do, Mr.
Winnington!"

He smiled--quite pleasantly.

"Nor do I--just yet. But of course Miss Marvell will not expect that
your father's estate should provide her with the salary that would
naturally fall to a chaperon whom your guardian could approve?"

"I shall see to that. We shall not trouble you," said Delia, rather
fiercely.

"And I shall ask to see Miss Marvell before I go this morning--that I
may point out to her the impropriety of remaining here against your
father's express wishes."

Delia nodded.

"All right--but it won't do any good."

He made no reply, except to turn immediately to the subject of her
place of residence and her allowance.

"It is I believe understood that you will live mainly here--at
Maumsey."

"On the contrary!--I wish to spend a great part of the winter in
London."

"With Miss Marvell?"

"Certainly."

"I cannot, I am afraid, let you expect that I shall provide the money."

"It is my own money!"

"Not legally. I hate insisting on these things; but perhaps you ought
to know that the _whole_ of your father's property--everything that he
left behind him, is in trust."

"Which means"--cried Delia, quivering again--"that I am really a
pauper!--that I own nothing but my clothes--barely those!"

He felt himself a brute. "Can I really keep this up!" he thought.
Aloud, he said--"If you would only make it a little easy for your
trustee, he would be only too thankful to follow out your wishes!"

Delia made no reply, and Winnington took another turn up and down
before he paused in front of her with the words:--

"Can't we come to a compact? If I agree to London--say for six or
seven weeks--is there no promise you can make me in return?"

With an inward laugh Delia remembered Gertrude's injunction to "keep
something to bargain with."

"I don't know"--she said, reluctantly. "What sort of promise do you
want?"

"I want one equal to the concession you ask me to make," he said
gravely. "In my eyes nothing could be more unfitting than that you
should be staying in London--during a time of particularly violent
agitation--under the chaperonage of Miss Marvell, who is already
committed to this agitation. If I agree to such a direct contradiction
of your father's wishes, I must at least have your assurance that you
will do nothing violent or illegal, either down here or in London, and
that in this house above all you will take some pains to respect Sir
Robert's wishes. That I am sure you will promise me?"

She could not deny the charm of his direct appealing look, and she
hesitated.

"I was going to have a drawing-room meeting here as soon as
possible"--she said, slowly.

"On behalf of the 'Daughters of Revolt'?"

She silently assented.

"I may feel sure--may I not?--that you will give it up?"

"It is a matter of conscience with us"--she said proudly--"to spread
our message wherever we go."

"I don't think I can allow you a conscience all to yourself," he said
smiling. "Consider how I shall be straining mine--in agreeing to the
London plan!"

"Very well"--the words came out reluctantly. "If you insist--and if
London is agreed upon--I will give it up."

"Thank you," he said quietly. "And you will take part in no acts of
violence, either here or in London? It seems strange to use such words
to you. I hate to use them. But with the news in this week's papers I
can't help it. You will promise?"

There was a short silence.

"I will join in nothing militant down here," said Delia at last. "I
have already told Miss Marvell so."

"Or in London?"

She straightened herself.

"I promise nothing about London."

Guardian and ward looked straight into each other's faces for a few
moments. Delia's resistance had stirred a passion--a tremor--in her
pulses, she had never known in her struggle with her father. Winnington
was clearly debating with himself, and Delia seemed to see the thoughts
coursing through the grey eyes that looked at her, seriously indeed,
yet not without suggesting a man's humorous spirit behind them.

"Very well"--he said--"we will talk of London later.--Now may we just
sit down and run through the household arrangements and expenses
here--before I see Miss Marvell. I want to know exactly what you want
doing to this house, and how we can fix you up comfortably."

Delia assented. Winnington produced a note-book and pencil. Through his
companion's mind was running meanwhile an animated debate.

"I'm not bound to tell him of those other meetings I have promised?
'Yes, you are!' No,--I'm not. They're not to be here--and if I once
begin asking his leave for things--there'll be no end to it. I mean to
shew him--once for all--that I am of age, and my own mistress. He can't
starve me--or beat me!"

Her face broke into suppressed laughter as she bent it over the figures
that Winnington was presenting to her.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Well, I am rather disappointed that you don't want to do more to the
house," said Winnington, as he rose and put up his note-book. "I
thought it might have been an occupation for the autumn and winter. But
at least we can decide on the essential things, and the work can be
done while you are in town. I am glad you like the servants Mrs. Bird
has found for you. Now I am going off to the Bank to settle everything
about the opening of your account, and the quarterly cheque we have
agreed on shall be paid in to-morrow."

"Very well." But instantly through the girl's mind there shot up the
qualifying thought. "_He_ may say how it is to be spent--but _I_ have
made no promise!"

He approached her to take his leave.

"My sister comes home to-night. Will you try the new car and have tea
with us on Thursday?" Delia assented. "And before I go I should like to
say a word about some of the neighbours."

He tried to give her a survey of the land. Lady Tonbridge, of course,
would be calling upon her directly. She was actually in the village--in
the tiniest bandbox of a house. Her husband's brutality had at
last--two years before this date--forced her to leave him, with her
girl of fifteen. "A miserable story--better taken for granted. She is
the pluckiest woman alive!" Then the Amberleys--the Rector, his wife
and daughter Susy were pleasant people--"Susy is a particular friend of
mine. It'll be jolly if you like her."

"Oh, no, she won't take to me!" said Delia with decision.

"Why not?"

But Delia only shook her head, a little contemptuously.

"We shall see," said Winnington. "Well, good night. Remember, anything
I can do for you--here I am."

His eyes smiled, but Delia was perfectly conscious that the eager
cordiality, the touch of something like tenderness, which had entered
into his earlier manner, had disappeared. She realised, and with a
moment's soreness, that she had offended his sense of right--of what a
daughter's feeling should be towards a dead father, at any rate, in the
first hours of bereavement, when the recollections of death and
suffering are still fresh.

"I can't help it," she thought stubbornly. "It's all part of the price
one pays."

But when he was gone, she stood a long time by the window without
moving, thinking about the hour which had just passed. The impression
left upon her by Winnington's personality was uncomfortably strong. She
knew now that, in spite of her bravado, she had dreaded to find it so,
and the reality had more than confirmed the anticipation. She was
committed to a struggle with a man whom she must respect, and could not
help liking; whose only wish was to help and protect her. And beside
the man's energetic and fruitful maturity, she became, as it were, the
spectator of her own youth and stumbling inexperience.

But these misgivings did not last long. A passionate conviction, a
fanatical affection, came to her aid, and her doubts were impatiently
dismissed.

       *       *       *       *       *

Winnington found Miss Blanchflower's chaperon in a little sitting-room
on the ground floor already appropriated to her, surrounded with a
vast litter of letters and newspapers which she hastily pushed aside as
he entered. He had a long interview with her, and as he afterwards
confessed to Lady Tonbridge, he had rarely put his best powers forward
to so little purpose. Miss Marvell did not attempt to deny that she was
coming to live at Maumsey in defiance of the wishes of Delia's father
and guardian, and of the public opinion of those who were to be
henceforward Delia's friends and neighbours.

"But Delia has asked me to live with her. She is twenty-one, and women
are not now the mere chattels they once were. Both she and I have wills
of our own. You will of course give me no salary. I require none. But I
don't see how you're going to turn me out of Delia's house, if Delia
wishes me to stay."

And Winnington must needs acknowledge, at least to himself, that he did
not see either.

He put the lady however through a cross-examination as to her
connection with militancy which would have embarrassed or intimidated
most women; but Gertrude Marvell, a slight and graceful figure, sitting
erect on the edge of her chair, bore it with perfect equanimity,
apparently frank, and quite unashamed. Certainly she belonged to the
"Daughters of Revolt," the record of her imprisonment was there to shew
it; and so did Delia. The aim of both their lives was to obtain the
parliamentary vote for women, and in her opinion and that of many
others, the time for constitutional action--"for that nonsense"--as she
scornfully put it, had long gone by. As to what she intended to do, or
advise Delia to do, that was her own affair. One did not give away
one's plans to the enemy. But she realised, of course, that it would be
unkind to Delia to plunge her into possible trouble, or to run the risk
herself of arrest or imprisonment during the early days of Delia's
mourning; and of her own accord she graciously offered the assurance
that neither she nor Delia would commit any illegality during the two
months or so that they might be settled at Maumsey. As to what might
happen later, she, like Delia, declined to give any assurances. The
parliamentary situation was becoming desperate, and any action whatever
on the part of women which might serve to prod the sluggish mind of
England before another general election, was in her view not only
legitimate but essential.

"Of course I know what your conscience says on the matter," she said,
with her steady eyes on Winnington. "But--excuse me for saying so--your
conscience is not my affair."

Winnington rose, and prepared to take his leave. If he felt nonplussed,
he managed not to shew it.

"Very well. For the present I acquiesce. But you will scarcely wonder,
Miss Marvell, after this interview between us, if you find yourself
henceforward under observation. You are here in defiance of Miss
Blanchflower's legal guardian. I protest against your influence over
her; and I disapprove of your presence here. I shall do my best to
protect her from you."

She nodded.

"There of course, you will be in your right."

And rising, she turned to the open window and the bright garden
outside, with a smiling remark on the decorative value of begonias, as
though nothing had happened.

Winnington's temperament did not allow him to answer a woman uncivilly
under any circumstances. But they parted as duellists part before the
fray. Miss Marvell acknowledged his "Good afternoon," with a pleasant
bow, keeping her hands the while in the pockets of her serge jacket,
and she remained standing till Winnington had left the room.

"Now for Lady Tonbridge!" thought Winnington, as he rode away. "If she
don't help me out, I'm done!"

At the gate of Maumsey he stopped to speak to the lodge-keeper, and as
he did so, a man opened the gate, and came in. With a careless nod to
Winnington he took his way up the drive. Winnington looked after him in
some astonishment.

"What on earth can that fellow be doing here?"

He scented mischief; little suspecting however that a note from
Gertrude Marvell lay in the pocket of the man's shabby overcoat,
together with that copy of the _Tocsin_ which Delia's sharp eyes had
detected the week before in the hands of its owner.

Meanwhile as he drove homeward, instead of the details of county
business, the position of Delia Blanchflower, her personality, her
loveliness, her defiance of him, absorbed his mind completely. He began
to foresee the realities of the struggle before him, and the sheer
dramatic interest of it held him, as though someone presented the case,
and bade him watch how it worked out.




Chapter VI


The village or rather small town of Great Maumsey took its origin in a
clearing of that royal forest which had now receded from it a couple of
miles to the south. But it was still a rural and woodland spot. The
trees in the fields round it had still a look of wildness, as survivors
from the primeval chase, and were grouped more freely and romantically
than in other places; while from the hill north of the church, one
could see the New Forest stretching away, blue beyond blue, purple
beyond purple, till it met the shining of the sea.

Great Maumsey had a vast belief in itself, and was reckoned exclusive
and clannish by other places. It was proud of its old Georgian houses,
with their white fronts, their pillared porches, and the pediment
gables in their low roofs. The owners of these houses, of which there
were many, charmingly varied, in the long main street, were well aware
that they had once been old-fashioned, and were now as much admired in
their degree, as the pictures of the great English artists, Hogarth,
Reynolds, Romney, with which they were contemporary. There were earlier
houses too, of brick and timber, with overhanging top stories and
moss-grown roofs. There was a green surrounded with post and rails, on
which a veritable stocks still survived, kept in careful repair as a
memento of our barbarous forbears, by the parish Council. The church,
dating from that wonderful fourteenth century when all the world must
have gone mad for church-building, stood back from the main street,
with the rectory beside it, in a modest seclusion of their own.

It was all very English, very spick and span, and apparently very well
to do. That the youth of the village was steadily leaving it for the
Colonies, that the constant marrying in and in which had gone on for
generations had produced an ugly crop of mental deficiency, and
physical deformity among the inhabitants--that the standard of morals
was too low, and the standard of drink too high--were matters well
known to the Rector and the Doctor. But there were no insanitary
cottages, and no obvious scandals of any sort. The Maumsey estate had
always been well managed; there were a good many small gentlefolk who
lived in the Georgian houses, and owing to the competition of the
railways, agricultural wages were rather better than elsewhere.

About a mile from the eastern end of the village was the small
modernised manor-house of Bridge End, which belonged to Mark
Winnington, and where his sister Alice, Mrs. Matheson, kept him company
for the greater part of the year. The gates leading to Maumsey lay a
little west of the village, while on the hill to the north rose,
conspicuous against its background of wood, the famous old house of
Monk Lawrence. It looked down upon Maumsey on the one hand and Bridge
End on the other. It was generally believed that the owner of it, Sir
Wilfrid Lang, had exhausted his resources in restoring it, and that it
was the pressure of debt rather than his wife's health which had led to
its being shut up so long.

The dwellers in the village regarded it as the jewel in their
landscape, their common heritage and pride. Lady Tonbridge, whose
little drawing-room and garden to the back looked out on the hill and
the old house, was specially envied because she possessed so good a
view of it. She herself inhabited one of the very smallest of the
Georgian houses, in the main street of Maumsey. She paid a rent of no
more than £40 a year for it, and Maumsey people who liked her, felt
affectionately concerned that a duke's grand-daughter should be reduced
to a rent and quarters so insignificant.

Lady Tonbridge however was not at all concerned for the smallness of
her house. She regarded it as the outward and visible sign of the most
creditable action of her life--the action which would--or should--bring
her most marks when the recording angel came to make up her account.
Every time she surveyed its modest proportions the spirit of freedom
danced within her, and she envied none of the noble halls in which she
had formerly lived, and to some of which she still paid occasional
Visits.

At tea-time, on the day following Winnington's first interview with his
ward, Madeleine Tonbridge came into her little drawing-room, in her
outdoor things, and carrying a bundle of books under the arm.

As far as such words could ever apply to her she was tired and dusty.
But her little figure was so alert and trim, her grey linen dress and
its appointments so dainty, and the apple-red in her small cheeks so
bright, that one might have conceived her as just fresh from a maid's
hands, and stepping out to amuse herself, instead of as just returning
from a tedious afternoon's work, by which she had earned the large sum
of five shillings. A woman of forty-five, she looked her age, and she
had never possessed any positive beauty, unless it were the beauty of
delicate and harmonious proportion. Yet she had been pestered with
suitors as a girl, and unfortunately had married the least desirable of
them all. And now in middle life, no one had more devoted men-friends;
and that without exciting a breath of scandal, even in a situation
where one might have thought it inevitable.

She looked round her as she entered.

"Nora!--where are you?"

A girl, apparently about seventeen, put her head in through the French
window that opened to the garden.

"Ready for tea, Mummy?"

"Rather!"--said Lady Tonbridge, with energy, as she put a match to the
little spirit kettle on the tea-table where everything stood ready.
"Come in, darling."

And throwing off her hat and jacket, she sank into a comfortable
arm-chair with a sigh of fatigue. Her daughter quietly loosened her
mother's walking-shoes and took them away. Then they kissed each other,
and Nora went to look after the tea. She was a slim, pale-faced
school-girl, with yellow-brown eyes, and yellow-brown hair, not as yet
very attractive in looks, but her mother was convinced that it was only
the plainness of the cygnet, and that the swan was only a few years
off. Nora, who at seventeen had no illusions, was grateful to her
mother for the belief but did not share it in the least.

"I'm sure you gave that girl half an hour over time," she said
reprovingly, as she handed Lady Tonbridge her cup of tea--"I can't
think why you do it." She referred to the solicitor's daughter whom
Lady Tonbridge had been that afternoon instructing in the uses of the
French participle.

"Nor can I. A kind of ridiculous _esprit de métier_ I suppose. I
undertook to teach her French, and when after all these weeks she don't
seem to know a thing more than when she began, I feel as if I were
picking her dear papa's pockets."

"Which is absurd," said Nora, buttering her mother's toast, "and I
can't let you do it. Half a crown an hour is silly enough already, and
for you to throw in half an hour extra for nothing, can't be stood."

"I wish I could get it up to four hours a day," sighed the mother,
munching happily at her toast, while she held out her small stockinged
feet to the fire which Nora had just lit. "Just think. Ten shillings a
day--six days a week--ten months in the year. Why it would pay the
rent, we could have another servant, and I could give you twenty pounds
a year more for your clothes."

"Much obliged--but I prefer a live Mummy--and no clothes--to a dead
one. More tea?"

"Thanks. No chance, of course. Where could one find four persons a day,
in Maumsey, or near Maumsey, who want to learn French? The notion's
absurd. I shouldn't get the lessons I do, if it weren't for the
'Honourable.'"

"Snobs!"

"Not at all! Not a single family out of the people I go to deserve to
be called snobs. It's the natural dramatic instinct in us all. You
don't expect an 'Honourable' to be giving French lessons at half a
crown an hour, and when she does, you say--'Hullo! Some screw loose,
somewhere!'--and you at once feel a new interest in the French tongue,
and ask her to come along. I don't mind it a bit. I sit and spin yarns
about Drawing-rooms and Court balls, and it all helps.--When did you
get home?"

For Nora attended a High School in a neighbouring town, some five miles
away, journeying there and back by train.

"Half-past four. I met Mr. Winnington in his car, and he said he'd be
here about six."

"Good. I'm dying to talk to him. I have written to the Abbey to say we
will call to-morrow. Of course, I ought to be her nursing mother in
these parts"--said Lady Tonbridge reflectively--"I knew Sir Robert in
frocks, and we were always pals. But my dear, it was I who hatched the
cockatrice!"

Nora nodded gravely.

"It was I," pursued Lady Tonbridge, penitentially,--"who saddled him
with that woman--and I know he never forgave me. He as good as told me
so when we last met--for those few hours--at Basle. But how could I
tell? How could anybody tell--she would turn out such a creature? I
only knew that she had taken all kinds of honours. I thought I was
sending him a treasure."

"All the same you did it, Mummy. And it won't do to give yourself airs
now! That's what Mr. Winnington says. You've got to help him out."

"I say, don't talk secrets!" said a voice just outside the room. "For I
can't help hearing 'em. May I come in?"

And, pushing the half-open door, Mark Winnington stood smiling on the
threshold.

"I apologise. But your little maid let me in--and then vanished
somewhere, like greased lightning--after a dog."

"Oh, come in," said Lady Tonbridge, with resignation, extending at the
same time a hand of welcome--"the little maid, as you call her, only
came from your workhouse yesterday, and I haven't yet discovered a
grain of sense in her. But she gets plenty of exercise. If she isn't
chasing dogs, it's cats."

"Don't you attack my schools," said Winnington seating himself at the
tea-table. "They're A1, and you're very lucky to get one of my girls."

Madeleine Tonbridge replied tartly, that if he was a poor-law guardian,
and responsible for a barrack school it was no cause for boasting. She
had not long parted with another of his girls, who had tried on her
blouses, and gone out in her boots. She thought of offering the new
girl a free and open choice of her wardrobe to begin with, so as to
avoid unpleasantness.

"We all know that every mistress has the maid she deserves," said
Winnington, deep in gingerbread cake. "I leave it there--"

"Yes, jolly well do!" cried Nora, who had come to sit on a stool in
front of her mother and Winnington, her eager eyes glancing from one to
the other--"Don't start Mummy on servants, Mr. Winnington. If you do, I
shall go to bed. There's only one thing worth talking about--and
that's--"

"Maumsey!" he said, laughing at her.

"Have you accomplished anything?" asked Lady Tonbridge. "Don't tell me
you've dislodged the Fury?"

Winnington shook his head.

"_J'y suis--j'y reste_!"

"I thought so. There is no civilised way by which men can eject a
woman. Tell me all about it."

Winnington, however, instead of expatiating on the Maumsey household,
turned the conversation to something else--especially to Nora's first
attempts at golf, in which he had been her teacher. Nora, whose
reasonableness was abnormal, very soon took the hint, and after five
minutes' "chaff" with Winnington, to whom she was devoted, she took up
her work and went back to the garden.

"Nobody ever snubs me so efficiently as Nora," said Madeleine
Tonbridge, with resignation, "though you come a good second. Discreet I
shall never be. Don't tell me anything if you don't want to."

"But of course I want to! And there is nobody in the world so
absolutely bound to help me as you."

"I knew you'd say that. Don't pile it on. Give me the kitten--and
describe your proceedings."

Winnington handed her the grey Persian kitten reposing on a distant
chair, and Lady Tonbridge, who always found the process conducive to
clear thinking, stroked and combed the creature's beautiful fur, while
the man talked,--with entire freedom now that they were _tête-à-tête._

She was his good friend indeed, and she had also been the good friend
of Sir Robert Blanchflower. It was natural that to her he should lay
his perplexities bare.

       *       *       *       *       *

But after she had heard his story and given her best mind to his
position, she could not refrain from expressing the wonder she had felt
from the beginning that he should ever have accepted it at all.

"What on earth made you do it? Bobby Blanchflower had no more real
claim on you than this kitten!"

Winnington's grey eyes fixed on the trees outside shewed a man trying
to retrace his own course.

"He wrote me a very touching letter. And I have always thought that
men--and women--ought to be ready to do this kind of service for each
other. I should have felt a beast if I had said No, at once. But I
confess now that I have seen Miss Delia, I don't know whether I can do
the slightest good."

"Hold on!" said Lady Tonbridge, sharply,--"You can't give it
up--now."

Winnington laughed.

"I have no intention of giving it up. Only I warn you that I shall
probably make a mess of it."

"Well"--the tone was coolly reflective--"that may do _you_
good--whatever happens to the girl. You have never made a mess of
anything yet in your life. It will be a new experience."

Winnington protested hotly that her remark only shewed how little even
intimate friends know of each other's messes, and that his were already
legion. Lady Tonbridge threw him an incredulous look. As he sat there
in his bronzed and vigorous manhood, the first crowsfeet just beginning
to shew round the eyes, and the first streaks of grey in the brown
curls, she said to herself that none of her young men acquaintance
possessed half the physical attractiveness of Mark Winnington; while
none--old or young--could rival him at all in the humane and winning
spell he carried about with him. To see Mark Winnington _aux prises_
with an adventure in which not even his tact, his knowledge of men and
women, his candour, or his sweetness, might be sufficient to win
success, piqued her curiosity; perhaps even flattered that slight
inevitable malice, wherewith ordinary mortals protect themselves
against the favourites of the gods.

She was determined however to help him if she could, and she put him
through a number of questions. The girl then was as handsome as she
promised to be? A beauty, said Winnington--and of the heroic or poetic
type. And the Fury? Winnington described the neat, little lady,
fashionably Pressed and quiet mannered, who had embittered the last
years of Sir Robert Blanchflower, and firmly possessed herself of his
daughter.

"You will see her to-morrow, at my house, when you come to tea. I
carefully didn't ask her, but I am certain she will come, and Alice and
I shall of course have to receive her."

"She is not thin-skinned then?"

"What fanatic is? It is one of the secrets of their strength."

"She probably regards us all as the dust under her feet," said Lady
Tonbridge. "I wonder what game she will be up to here. Have you seen
the _Times_ this morning?"

Winnington nodded. It contained three serious cases of arson, in which
Suffragette literature and messages had been discovered among the
ruins, besides a number of minor outrages. An energetic leading article
breathed the exasperation of the public, and pointed out the spread of
the campaign of violence.

By this time Lady Tonbridge had carried her visitor into the garden,
and they were walking up and down among the late September flowers.
Beyond the garden lay green fields and hedgerows; beyond the fields
rose the line of wooded hill, and, embedded in trees, the grey and
gabled front of Monk Lawrence.

Winnington reported the very meagre promise he had been able to get out
of his ward and her companion.

"The comfort is," said Lady Tonbridge, "that this is a sane
neighbourhood--comparatively. They won't get much support. Oh, I don't
know though--" she added quickly. "There's that man--Mr. Lathrop, Paul
Lathrop--who took Wood Cottage last year--a queer fish, by all
accounts. I'm told he's written the most violent things backing up the
militants generally. However, his own story has put _him_ out of
Court."

"His own story?" said Winnington, with a puzzled look.

"Don't be so innocent!" laughed Lady Tonbridge, rather impatiently. "I
always tell you you don't give half place enough in life to
gossip-'human nature's daily food.' I knew all about him a week after
he arrived. However, I don't propose to save you trouble, Mr. Guardian!
Go and look up a certain divorce case, with Mr. Lathrop's name in it,
some time last year--if you want to know. That's enough for that."

But Winnington interrupted her, with a disturbed look. "I happened to
meet that very man you are speaking of--yesterday--in the Abbey drive,
going to call."

Lady Tonbridge shrugged her shoulders.

"There you see their freemasonry. I don't suppose they approve his
morals--but he supports their politics. You won't be able to banish
him!--Well, so the child is lovely? and interesting?"

Winnington assented warmly.

"But determined to make herself a nuisance to you? Hm! Mr. Mark--dear
Mr. Mark--don't fall in love with her!"

Winnington's expression altered. He did not answer for a moment. Then
he said, looking away--

"Do you think you need have said that?"

"No!"--cried Madeleine Tonbridge remorsefully. "I am a wretch. But
don't--_don't_!"

This time he smiled at her, though not without vexation.

"Do you forget that I am nearly old enough to be her father?"

"Oh that's nonsense!" she said hastily. "However--I'm not going to
flatter you--or tease you. Forgive me. I put it out of my head. I
wonder if there is anybody in the field already?"

"Not that I am aware of."

"Of course you know this kind of thing spoils a girl's prospects of
marriage enormously. Men won't run the risk."

Winnington laughed.

"And all the time, you're a Suffragist yourself!"

"Yes, indeed I am," was the stout reply. "Here am I, with a house and a
daughter, a house-parlourmaid, a boot-boy, and rates to pay. Why
shouldn't I vote as well as you? But the difference between me and the
Fury is that she wants the vote this year--this month--_this
minute_--and I don't care whether it comes in my time--or Nora's
time--or my grandchildren's time. I say we ought to have it--that it is
our right--and you men are dolts not to give it us. But I sit and wait
peaceably till you do--till the apple is ripe and drops. And meanwhile
these wild women prevent its ripening at all. So long as they rage,
there it hangs--out of our reach. So that I'm not only ashamed of them
as a woman--but out of all patience with them as a Suffragist! However
for heaven's sake don't let's discuss the horrid subject. I'll do all I
can for Delia--both for your sake and Bob's--I'll keep my best eye on
the Fury--I feel myself of course most abominably responsible for
her--and I hope for the best. Who's coming to your tea-party?"

Winnington enumerated. At the name of Susy Amberley, his hostess threw
him a sudden look, but said nothing.

"The Andrews'--Captain, Mrs. and Miss--," Lady Tonbridge exclaimed.

"Why did you ask that horrid woman?"

"We didn't! Alice indiscreetly mentioned that Miss Blanchflower was
coming to tea, and she asked herself."

"She's enough to make any one militant! If I hear her quote 'the hand
that rocks the cradle rules the world' once more, I shall have to smite
her. The girl's _down-trodden_ I tell you! Well, well--if you gossip
too little, I gossip too much. Heavens!--what a light!"

Winnington turned to see the glow of a lovely afternoon fusing all the
hill-side in a glory of gold and amethyst, and the windows in the long
front of Monk Lawrence taking fire under the last rays of a
fast-dropping sun.

"Do you know--I sometimes feel anxious about that house!" said
Madeleine Tonbridge, abruptly. "It's empty--it's famous--it belongs to
a member of the Government. What is to prevent the women from attacking
it?"

"In the first place, it isn't empty. The Keeper, Daunt, from the South
Lodge, has now moved into the house. I know, because Susy Amberley told
me. She goes up there to teach one of my cripples--Daunt's second girl.
In the next, the police are on the alert. And last--who on earth would
dare to attack Monk Lawrence? The odium of it would be too great. A
house bound up with English history and English poetry--No! They are
not such fools!"

Lady Tonbridge shook her head.

"Don't be so sure. Anyway you as a magistrate can keep the police up to
the mark."

Winnington departed, and his old friend was left to meditate on his
predicament. It was strange to see Mark Winnington, with his
traditional, English ways and feelings--carried, as she always felt, to
their highest--thus face to face with the new feminist forces--as
embodied in Delia Blanchflower. He had resented, clearly resented, the
introduction--by her, Madeleine--of the sex element into the problem.
But how difficult to keep it out! "He will see her constantly--he will
have to exercise his will against hers--he will get his way--and then
hate himself for conquering--he will disapprove, and yet admire,--will
offend her, yet want to please her--a creature all fire, and beauty,
and heroisms out of place! And she--could she, could I, could any woman
I know, fight Mark Winnington--and not love him all the time? Men are
men, and women are women--in spite of all these 'isms,' and 'causes.' I
bet--but I don't know what I bet!--" Then her thoughts gradually veered
away from Mark to quite another person.

How would Susan Amberley be affected by this new interest in Mark
Winnington's life? Madeleine's thoughts recalled a gentle face, a pair
of honest eyes, a bearing timid and yet dignified. So she was teaching
one of Mark's crippled children? And Mark thought no doubt she would
have done the like for anyone else with a charitable hobby? Perhaps she
would, for her heart was a fount of pity. All the same, the man--blind
bat!--understood nothing. No fault of his perhaps; but Lady Tonbridge
felt a woman's angry sympathy with a form of waste so common and so
costly.

And now the modest worshipper must see her hero absorbed day by day,
and hour by hour, in the doings of a dazzling and magnificent creature
like Delia Blanchflower. What food for torment, even in the meekest
spirit!

So that the last word the vivacious woman said to herself was a soft
"Poor Susy!" dropped into the heart of a September rose as she stooped
to gather it.




Chapter VII


A small expectant party were gathered for afternoon tea in the
book-lined sitting-room--the house possessed no proper drawing-room--of
Bridge End. Mrs. Matheson indeed, Mark's widowed sister, would have
resented it had anyone used the word "party" in its social sense. Miss
Blanchflower's father had been dead scarcely a month; and Mrs. Matheson
in her quiet way, held strongly by all the decencies of life. It was
merely a small gathering of some of the oldest friends and neighbours
of Miss Blanchflower's family--those who had stood nearest to her
grandparents--to welcome the orphan girl among them. Lady Tonbridge--of
whom it was commonly believed, though no one exactly knew why, that Bob
Blanchflower, as a youth had been in love with her, before ever he met
his Greek wife; Dr. France, who had attended both the old people till
their deaths, and had been much beloved by them; his wife; the Rector,
Mrs. Amberley, and Susy:--Mrs. Matheson had not intended to ask anyone
else. But the Andrews' had asked themselves, and she had not had the
moral courage to tell them that the occasion was not for them. She was
always getting Mark into difficulties, she penitently reflected, by her
inability to say No, at the right time, and with the proper force, Mark
could always say it, and stick to it smiling--without giving offence.

Mrs. Matheson was at the tea-table. She was tall and thin, with
something of her brother's good looks, but none of his over-flowing
vitality. Her iron-grey hair was rolled back from her forehead; she
wore a black dress with a high collar of white lawn, and long white
cuffs. Little Mrs. Amberley, the Rector's wife, sitting beside her,
envied her hostess her figure, and her long slender neck. She herself
had long since parted with any semblance of a waist, and the boned
collars of the day were a perpetual torment to one whose neck, from the
dressmaker's point of view, scarcely existed. But Mrs. Amberley endured
them, because they were the fashion; and to be moderately in the
fashion meant simply keeping up to the mark--not falling behind. It was
like going to church--an acceptance of that "general will," which
according to the philosophers, is the guardian of all religion and all
morality.

The Rector too, who was now handing the tea-cake, believed in
fashion--ecclesiastical fashion. Like his wife, he was gentle and
ineffective. His clerical dress expressed a moderate Anglicanism, and
his opinions were those of his class and neighbourhood, put for him day
by day in his favourite newspaper, with a cogency at which he
marvelled. Yet he was no more a hypocrite than his wife, and below his
common-places both of manner and thought there lay warm feelings and a
quick conscience. He was just now much troubled about his daughter
Susy. The night before she had told her mother and him that she wished
to go to London, to train for nursing. It had been an upheaval in their
quiet household. Why should she dream of such a thing? How could they
ever get on without her? Who would copy out his sermons, or help with
the schools? And her mother--so dependent on her only daughter! The
Rector's mind was much disturbed, and he was accordingly more absent
and more ineffective than usual.

Susy herself, in a white frock, with touches of blue at her waist, and
in her shady hat, was moving about with cups of tea, taking that place
of Mrs. Matthews's lieutenant, which was always tacitly given her by
Winnington and his sister on festal occasions at Bridge End. As she
passed Winnington, who had been captured by Mrs. Andrews, he turned
with alacrity--

"My dear Miss Susy! What are you doing? Give me that cup!"

"No--please! I like doing it!" And she passed on, smiling, towards Lady
Tonbridge, whose sharp eyes had seen the trivial contact between
Winnington and the girl. How the mere sound of his voice had changed
the aspect of the young face! Poor child--poor child!

"How well you look Susy! Such a pretty dress!" said Madeleine tenderly
in the girl's ear.

Susy flushed.

"You really think so? Mother gave it me for a birthday present." She
looked up with her soft, brown eyes, which always seemed to have in
them, even when they smiled, a look of pleading--as of someone at a
disadvantage. At the same moment Winnington passed her.

"_Could_ you go and talk to Miss Andrews?" he said, over his shoulder,
so that only she heard.

Susy went obediently across the room to where a silent, dark-haired
girl sat by herself, quite apart from the rest of the circle. Marion
Andrews was plain, with large features and thick wiry hair. Maumsey
society in general declared her "impossible." She rarely talked; she
seemed to have no tastes; and the world believed her both stupid and
disagreeable. And by contrast with the effusive amiabilities of her
mother, she could appear nothing else. Mrs. Andrews indeed had a way of
using her daughter as a foil to her own qualities, which must have
paralysed the most self-confident, and Marion had never possessed any
belief in herself at all.

As Susy Amberley timidly approached her, and began to make
conversation, she looked up coldly, and hardly answered. Meanwhile Mrs.
Andrews was pouring out a flood of talk under which the uncomfortable
Winnington--for it always fell to him as host to entertain her--sat
practising endurance. She was a selfish, egotistical woman, with a vast
command of sloppy phrases, which did duty for all that real feeling or
sympathy of which she possessed uncommonly little. On this occasion she
was elaborately dressed,--overdressed--in a black satin gown, which
seemed to Winnington, an ugly miracle of trimming and tortured "bits."
Her large hat was thick with nodding plumes, and beside her spotless
white gloves and showy lace scarf, her daughter's slovenly coat and
skirt, of the cheapest ready-made kind, her soiled gloves, and clumsy
shoes, struck even a man uncomfortably. That poor girl seemed to grow
plainer and more silent every year.

He was just shaking himself free from the mother, when Dr. and Mrs.
France were announced. The doctor came in with a furrowed brow, and a
preoccupied look. After greeting Mrs. Matheson, and the other guests,
he caught a glance of enquiry from Winnington and went up to him.

"The evening paper is full of the most shocking news!" he said, with
evident agitation. "There has been an attempt on Hampton Court--and two
girls who were caught breaking windows in Piccadilly have been badly
hurt by the crowd. A bomb too has been found in the entrance of one of
the tube stations. It was discovered in time, or the results might have
been frightful."

"Good Heavens--those women again!" cried Mrs. Andrews, lifting hands
and eyes.

No one else spoke. But in everyone's mind the same thought emerged. At
any moment the door might open, and Delia Blanchflower and her chaperon
might come in.

The doctor drew Winnington aside into a bow-window.

"Did you know that the lady living with Miss Blanchflower was a member
of this League of Revolt?"

"Yes. You mean they are implicated in these things?"

"Certainly! I am told Miss Marvell was once an official--probably is
still. My dear Winnington--you can't possibly allow it!" He spoke with
the freedom of an intimate friend.

"How can I stop it," said Winnington, frowning. "My ward is of age. If
Miss Marvell does anything overt--But she has promised to do nothing
violent down here--they both have."

The doctor, an impetuous Ulsterman with white hair, and black eyes,
shrugged his shoulders impatiently. "When women once take to this kind
of thing"--he was interrupted by Mrs. Andrews' heavy voice rising
above the rather nervous and disjointed conversation of the other
guests--"If women only knew where their real power lies, Mrs. Matheson!
Why, 'the hand that rocks the cradle'--"

A sudden crash was heard.

"Oh, dear"--cried Lady Tonbridge, who had upset a small table with a
plate of cakes on it across the tail of Mrs. Andrews' dress--"how
stupid I am!"

"My gown!--my gown!" cried Mrs. Andrews in an anguish, groping for the
cakes.

In the midst of the confusion the drawing-room door had opened, and
there on the threshold stood Delia Blanchflower, with a slightly-built
lady behind her.

Winnington turned with a start and went forward to greet them. Dr.
France left behind in the bow-window observed their entry with a
mingling of curiosity and repulsion. It seemed to him that their entry
was that of persons into a hostile camp,--the senses all alert against
attack. Delia was of course in black, her face sombrely brilliant in
its dark setting of a plain felt hat, like the hat of a Cavalier
without its feathers. "She knows perfectly well we have been talking
about her!" thought Dr. France,--"that we have seen the newspapers. She
comes in ready for battle--perhaps thirsty for it! She is
excited--while the woman behind her is perfectly cool. The two
types!--the enthusiast--and the fanatic. But, by Jove, the girl is
handsome!"

Through the sudden silence created by their entry, Delia made her way
to Mrs. Matheson. Holding her head very high, she introduced "My
chaperon--Miss Marvell." And Winnington's sister nervously shook hands
with the quietly smiling lady who followed in Miss Blanchflower's wake.
Then while Delia sat down beside the hostess, and Winnington busied
himself in supplying her with tea, her companion fell to the Rector's
care.

The Rector, like Winnington, was not a gossip, partly out of scruples,
but mainly perhaps because of a certain deficient vitality, and he had
but disjointed ideas on the subject of the two ladies who had now
settled at the Abbey. He understood, however, that Delia, whom he
remembered as a child, was a "Suffragette," and that Mr. Winnington,
Delia's guardian, disapproved of the lady she had brought with her,
why, he could not recollect. This vague sense of something "naughty"
and abnormal gave a certain tremor to his manner as he stood beside
Gertrude Marvell, shifting from one foot to the other, and nervously
plying her with tea-cake.

Miss Marvell's dark eyes meanwhile glanced round the room, taking in
everybody. They paused a moment on the figure of the doctor, erect and
spare in a closely-buttoned coat, on his spectacled face, and
conspicuous brow, under waves of nearly white hair; then passed on. Dr.
France watched her, following the examining eyes with his own. He saw
them change, with a look--the slightest passing look--of recognition,
and at the same moment he was aware of Marion Andrews, sitting in the
light of a side window. What had happened to the girl? He saw her dark
face, for one instant, exultant, transformed; like some forest hollow
into which a sunbeam strikes. The next, she was stooping over a copy of
"Punch" which lay on the table beside her. A rush of speculation ran
through the doctor's mind.

"And you are settled at Maumsey?" Mrs. Matheson was saying to Delia;
aware as soon as the question was uttered that it was a foolish one.

"Oh no, not settled. We shall be there a couple of months."

"The house will want some doing up, Mark thinks."

"I don't think so. Not much anyway. It does very well."

There was an entire absence of girlish softness or shyness in the
speaker's manner, though it was both courteous and easy. The
voice--musically deep--and the splendid black eyes, that looked so
steadily at her, intimidated Mark Winnington's gentle sister.

Mrs. Andrews, whose dress, after Susy's ministration, had been declared
out of danger, bent across the tea-table, all smiles and benevolence
again, the plumes in her black hat nodding--

"It's like old times to have the Abbey open again, Miss Blanchflower!
Every week we used to go to your dear grandmother, for her Tuesday
work-party. I'm afraid you'll hardly revive _that_!"

Delia brought a rather intimidating brow to bear upon the speaker.

"I'm afraid not."

Lady Tonbridge, who had already greeted Delia as a woman naturally
greets the daughter of an old friend, came up as Delia spoke to ask for
a second cup of tea, and laid her hand on the girl's shoulder.

"Very sorry to miss you yesterday. I won't insult you by saying you've
grown. How about the singing? You used to sing I remember when I stayed
with you."

"Yes--but I've given it up. I took lessons at Munich last spring. But I
can't work at it enough. And if one can't work, it's no good."

"Why can't you work at it?"

Delia suddenly looked up in her questioner's face. Her gravity broke up
in a broad smile.

"Because there's so much else to do."

"What else?"

The look of excited defiance in the girl's eyes sharpened.

"Do you really want to know?"

"Certainly. The Suffrage and that kind of thing?" said Madeleine
Tonbridge lightly.

"The Suffrage and that kind of thing!" repeated Delia, still smiling.

Captain Andrews who was standing near, and whose martial mind was all
in confusion, owing to Miss Blanchflower's beauty, put in an eager
word.

"I never can understand, Miss Blanchflower, why you ladies want the
vote! Why, you can twist us round your little fingers!"

Delia turned upon him.

"But I don't want to twist you round my little finger!" she said, with
energy. "It wouldn't give me the smallest pleasure."

"I thought you wanted to manage us," said the Captain, unable to take
his eyes from her. "But you do manage us already!"

Delia's glance showed her uncertain whether the foe was worth her
steel.

"We want to manage ourselves," she said at last, smiling indifferently.
"We say you do it badly."

The Captain attempted to spar with her a little longer. Winnington
meanwhile stood, a silent listener, amid the group round the tea-table.
He--and Dr. France--were both acutely conscious of the realities behind
this empty talk; of the facts recorded in the day's newspapers; and of
the connection between the quiet lady in grey who had come in with
Delia Blanchflower, and the campaign of public violence, which was now
in good earnest alarming and exasperating the country.

Where was the quiet lady in grey? Winnington was thinking too much
about his ward to keep a constant eye upon her. But Dr. France observed
her closely, and he presently saw what puzzled him anew. After a
conversation, exceedingly bland, though rather monosyllabic, on Miss
Marvell's part, with the puzzled and inarticulate Rector, Delia's
chaperon had gently and imperceptibly moved away from the tea-table.
That she had been very coldly received by the company in general was no
doubt evident to her. She was now sitting beside that strange girl
Marion Andrews--to whom, as the Doctor had seen, she had been
introduced--apparently--by the Rector. And as Dr. France caught sight
of her, she and Marion Andrews rose and walked to a window opening on
the garden, apparently to look at the blaze of autumn flowers outside.

But it was the demeanour of the girl which again drew the doctor's
attention. Marion Andrews, who never talked, was talking fast and
earnestly to this complete stranger, her normally sallow face one glow.
It was borne in afresh upon Dr. France that the two were already
acquainted; and he continued to watch them as closely as politeness
allowed.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Will you come and look at the house?" said Winnington to his ward.
"Not that we have anything to shew--except a few portraits and old
engravings that might interest you. But it's rather a dear old place,
and we're very fond of it."

Delia went with him in silence. He opened the oval panelled
dining-room, and shewed her the portraits of his father, the venerable
head of an Oxford college, in the scarlet robes of a D.D., and others
representing his forebears on both sides--quiet folk, painted by decent
but not important painters. Delia looked at them and hardly spoke. Then
they went into Mrs. Matheson's room, which was bright with pretty
chintzes, books and water-colours, and had a bow-window looking on the
garden. Still Delia said nothing, beyond an absent Yes or No, or a
perfunctory word of praise. Winnington became very soon conscious of
some strong tension in her, which was threatening to break down; a
tension evidently of displeasure and resentment. He guessed what the
subject of it might be, but as he was most unwilling to discuss it with
her, if his guess were correct, he tried to soothe and evade her by
such pleasant talk as the different rooms suggested. The house through
which he led her was the home, evidently, of a man full of enthusiasms
and affections, caring intensely for many things, for his old school,
of which there were many drawings and photographs in the hall and
passages, for the two great games in which he himself excelled; for
poetry and literature--the house overflowed everywhere with books; for
his County Council work, and all the projects connected with it; for
his family and his intimate friends.

"Who is that?" asked Delia, pointing to a charcoal drawing in Mrs.
Matheson's sitting-room, of a noble-faced woman of thirty, in a
delicate evening dress of black and white.

"That is my mother. She died the year after it was taken."

Delia looked at it in silence a moment. There was something in its
dignity, its restfulness, its touch of austerity which challenged her.
She said abruptly--"I want to speak to you please, Mr. Winnington. May
we shut the door?"

Winnington shut the door of his sister's room, and returned to his
guest. Delia had turned very white.

"I hear Mr. Winnington you have reversed an order I wrote to our agent
about one of the cottages. May I know your reasons?"

"I was very sorry to do so," said Winnington gently; "but I felt sure
you did not understand the real circumstances, and I could not come and
discuss them with you."

Delia stood stormily erect, and the level light of the October
afternoon streaming in through a west window magnified her height, and
her prophetess air.

"I can't help shocking you, Mr. Winnington. I don't accept what you
say. I don't believe that covering up horrible things makes them less
horrible. I want to stand by that girl. It is cruel to separate her
from her old father!"

Winnington looked at her in distress and embarrassment.

"The story is not what you think it," he said earnestly. "But it is
really not fit for your ears. I have given great thought and much time
to it, yesterday and to-day. The girl--who is mentally deficient--will
be sent to a home and cared for. The father sees now that it is the
best. Please trust it to me."

"Why mayn't I know the facts!" persisted Delia, paler than before.

A flash of some quick feeling passed through Winnington's eyes.

"Why should you? Leave us older folk, dear Miss Delia, to deal with
these sorrowful things."

Indignation blazed up in her.

"It is for women to help women," she said, passionately. "It is no good
treating us who are grown up--even if we are young--like children any
more. We intend to _know_--that we may protect--and save."

"I assure you," said Winnington gravely, "that this poor girl shall
have every care--every kindness. So there is really no need for you to
know. Please spare yourself--and me!"

He had come to stand by her, looking down upon her. She lifted her eyes
to his unwillingly, and as she caught his smile she was invaded by a
sudden consciousness of his strong magnetic presence. The power in the
grey eyes, and in the brow over-hanging them, the kind sincerity
mingled with the power, and the friendliness that breathed from his
whole attitude and expression, disarmed her. She felt herself for a
moment--and for the first time--young and ignorant,--and that
Winnington was ready to be in the true and not merely in the legal
sense, her "guardian," if she would only let him.

But the moment of weakening was soon over. Her mind chafed and twisted.
Why had he undertaken it--a complete stranger to her! It was most
embarrassing--detestable--for them both!

And there suddenly darted through her memory the recollection of a
certain item in her father's will. Under it Mr. Winnington received a
sum of £4,000 out of her father's estate, "in consideration of our old
friendship, and of the trouble I am asking him to undertake in
connection with my estates,"--or words to that effect.

Somehow, she had never yet paid much attention to that clause in the
will. It occurred in a list of a good many other legacies, and had been
passed over by the lawyers in explaining the will to her, as something
entirely in the natural course of things. But the poisonous thought
suggested itself--"It was that which bribed him!--he would have given
it up, but for that!" He might not want it for himself--very
possibly!--but for his charities, his Cripple School and the rest. Her
face stiffened.

"If you have arranged with her father, of course I can't interfere,"
she said coldly. "But don't imagine, please, Mr. Winnington, for one
moment, that I accept your view of the things I 'needn't know.' If I am
to do my duty to the people on this estate--"

"I thought you weren't going to live on the estate?" he said, lifting
his eyebrows.

"Not at once--not this winter." She was annoyed to feel herself
stammering. "But of course I have a responsibility--"

The kindly laugh in his grey eyes faded.

"Yes--I quite admit that,--a great responsibility," he said slowly. "Do
you mind if I mention another subject?"

"The meetings?" she said, quickly. "You mean that?"

"Yes--the meetings. I have just seen the placard in the village."

"Well?" Her loveliness in defiance dazzled him, but he held on stoutly.

"You said nothing to me about these meetings the other day."

"You never asked me!"

He paused a moment.

"No--but was it quite--quite fair to me--to let me suppose that the
drawing-room meeting at Maumsey, which you kindly gave up, was the only
meeting you had in view?"

He saw her breath fluttering.

"I don't know what you supposed, Mr. Winnington! I said nothing."

"No. But you let me draw an inference--a mistaken inference.
However--let that be. Can I not persuade you--now--to give up the
Latchford meeting, and any others of the same kind you may have ahead?"

She flamed at him.

"I refuse to give them up!" she said, setting her teeth. "I have as
much right to my views as you, Mr. Winnington! I am of full age, and I
intend to work for them."

"Setting fire to houses--which is what your society is advocating--and
doing--hardly counts as 'views,'" he said, with sudden sternness.
"Risking the lives, or spoiling the property of one's fellow
countrymen, is not the same thing as political argument."

"It's _our_ argument--" she said passionately.--"The men who are
denying us the vote understand nothing else!"

The slightest humorous quiver in Winnington's strong mouth enraged her
still further. But he spoke with most courteous gravity.

"Then I can't persuade you to give up these meetings? I should of
course make no objection whatever, if these were ordinary Suffrage
meetings. But the Society you are going to represent and collect money
for is a Society that exists _to break the law_. And its members
have--just lately--come conspicuously into collision with the law. Your
father would have protested, and I am bound to protest--in his name."

"I cannot give them up."

He was silent a moment.

"If that is so"--he said at last--"I must do my best to protect you."

"I don't want any protection!"

"I am a magistrate, as well as your guardian. You must allow me to
judge. There is a very bitter feeling abroad, after these--outrages--of
the last few days. The village where you are going to speak has some
rowdy elements--drawn from the brickfields near it. You will certainly
want protection. I shall see that you get it."

He spoke with decision. Delia bit her lip.

"We prefer to risk our lives," she said at last. "I mean--there isn't
any risk!--but if there were--our lives are nothing in comparison with
the cause!"

"You won't expect your friends to agree with you," he said drily; then,
still holding her with an even keener look, he added--

"And there is another point in connection with these meetings which
distresses me. I see that you are speaking on the same platform--with
Mr. Paul Lathrop--"

"And why not?"--she flashed, the colour rushing to her cheeks.

He paused, walked away with his hands in his pockets, and came back
again.

"I have been making some enquiries about him. He is not a man with whom
you ought to associate--either in public, or in private."

She gave a sound--half scorn--half indignation which startled him.

"You mean--because of the divorce case?"

He looked at her amazed.

"That is what I meant. But--I certainly do not wish to discuss it with
you. Will you not take it from me that Mr. Lathrop is not--cannot be--a
man whom as a young unmarried woman you ought to receive in your
house--or with whom you should be seen in public."

"No, indeed I won't take it from you!" she said passionately. "Miss
Marvell knows--Miss Marvell told me. He ran away with some one he
loved. Her husband was _vile_! But she couldn't get any help--because
of the law--the abominable law--which punishes women--and lets men go
free. So they went away together, and after a little she died. Alter
your law, Mr. Winnington!--make it equal for men and women--and then
we'll talk."

As she spoke--childishly, defiant--Winnington's mind was filled with a
confusion of clashing thoughts--the ideals of his own first youth
which made such a speech in the mouth of a girl of twenty-one almost
intolerable to him--and the moral conditions--slowly gained--of his
maturity. He agreed with what she said. And yet it was shocking to him
to hear her say it.

"I don't quarrel with you as to that," he said, gravely, after a
moment. "Though I confess that in my belief you are too young to have
any real opinion about it. But there was much in the case which
concerned Mr. Lathrop, of which you _can_ have no idea. I repeat--he
is not a fit companion for you--and you do yourself harm by appearing
with him--in public or private."

"Miss Marvell approves"-

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