Delia Blanchflower by Mrs. Humphry Ward (good beach reads TXT) 📕

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