After her letters had been put aside and the ordinary newspapers, she took up a new number of the _Tocsin_. The first page was entirely given up to an article headed "How LONG?" She read it with care, her delicate mouth tightening a little. She herself had suggested the lines of it a few days before, to the Editor, and her hints had been partially carried out. It gave a scathing account of Sir Wilfrid's course on the suffrage question--of his earlier coquettings with the woman's cause, his defection and "treachery," the bitter and ingenious hostility with which he was now pursuing the Bill before the House of Commons. "An amiable, white-haired nonent.i.ty for the rest of the world--who only mention him to marvel that such a man was ever admitted to an English Cabinet--to us he is the 'smiler with the knife,' the a.s.sa.s.sin of the hopes of women, the reptile in the path. The Bill is weakening every day in the House, and on the night of the second reading it will receive its 'coup de grace' from the hand of Sir Wilfrid Lang. Women of England--_how long_!--"

Gertrude pushed the newspaper aside in discontent. Her critical sense was beginning to weary of the shrieking note. And the descent from the "a.s.sa.s.sin of the hopes of women" to "the reptile in the path" struck her as a silly bathos.

Suddenly, a reverie--a waking dream--fell upon her, a visionary succession of sights and sounds. A dying sunset--and a rising wind, sighing through dense trees--old walls--the light from a kitchen window--voices in the distance--the barking of a dog....

"Oh Gertrude!--how late I am!"

Delia entered hurriedly, with an anxious air.

"I should have been down long ago, but Weston had one of her attacks, and I have been looking after her."

Weston was Delia's maid who had been her constant companion for ten years. She was a delicate nervous woman, liable to occasional onsets of mysterious pain, which terrified both herself and her mistress, and had hitherto puzzled the doctor.

Gertrude received the news with a pa.s.sing concern.

"Better send for France, if you are worried. But I expect it will be soon over."

"I don't know. It seems worse than usual. The man in Paris threatened an operation. And here we are--going up to London in a fortnight!"

"Well, you need only send her to the Brownmouth hospital, or leave her here with France and a good nurse."

"She has the most absurd terror of hospitals, and I certainly couldn't leave her," said Delia, with a furrowed brow.

"You certainly couldn't stay behind!" Gertrude looked up pleasantly.

"Of course I want to come--" said Delia slowly.

"Why, darling, how could we do without you? You don't know how you're wanted. Whenever I go up town, it's the same--'When's she coming?' Of course they understood you must be here for a while--but the heart of things, the things that concern _us_--is London."

"What did you hear yesterday?" asked Delia, helping herself to some very cold coffee. Nothing was ever kept warm for her, the owner of the house; everything was always kept warm for Gertrude. Yet the fact arose from no Sybaritic tendency whatever on Gertrude's part. Food, clothing, sleep--no religious ascetic could have been more sparing than she, in her demands upon them. She took them as they came--well or ill supplied; too pre-occupied to be either grateful or discontented. And what she neglected for herself, she equally neglected for other people.

"What did I hear?" repeated Gertrude. "Well, of course, everything is rushing on. There is to be a raid on Parliament as soon as the session begins--and a deputation to Downing Street. A number of new plans, and devices are being discussed. And there seemed to me to be more volunteers than ever for 'special service'?"

She looked up quietly and her eyes met Delia's;--in hers a steely ardour, in Delia's a certain trouble.

"Well, we want some cheering up," said the girl, rather wearily. "Those two last meetings were--pretty depressing!--and so were the bye-elections."

She was thinking of the two open-air meetings at Brownmouth and Frimpton. There had been no violence offered to the speakers, as in the Latchford case; the police had seen to that. Her guardian had made no appearance at either, satisfied, no doubt, after enquiry, that she was not likely to come to harm. But the evidence of public disapproval could scarcely have been more chilling--more complete. Both her speaking, and that of Gertrude and Paul Lathrop, seemed to her to have dropped dead in exhausted air. An audience of boys and girls--an accompaniment of faint jeers, testifying rather to boredom than hostility--a sense of blank waste and futility when all was over:--her recollection had little else to shew.

Gertrude interrupted her thought.

"My dear Delia!--what you want is to get out of this backwater, and back into the main stream! Even I get stale here. But in those great London meetings--there one catches on again!--one realises again--what it all _means_! Why not come up with me next week, even if the flat's not ready? I can't have you running down like this! Let's hurry up and get to London."

The speaker had risen, and standing behind Delia, she laid her hand on the waves of the girl's beautiful hair. Delia looked up.

"Very well. Yes, I'll come. I've been getting depressed. I'll come--at least if Weston's all right."

"I'm afraid, Miss Blanchflower, this is a very serious business!"

Dr. France was the speaker. He stood with his back to the fire, and his hands behind him, surveying Delia with a look of absent thoughtfulness; the look of a man of science on the track of a problem.

Delia's aspect was one of pale consternation. She had just heard that the only hope of the woman, now wrestling upstairs with agonies of pain, lay in a critical and dangerous operation, for which at least a fortnight's preliminary treatment would be necessary. A nurse was to be sent for at once, and the only question to be decided was where and by whom the thing was to be done.

"We _can_ move her," said France, meditatively; "though I'd rather not.

And of course a hospital is the best place."

"She won't go! Her mother died in a hospital, and Weston thinks she was neglected."

"Absurd! I a.s.sure you," said France warmly. "n.o.body is neglected in hospitals."

"But one can't persuade her--and if she's forced against her will, it'll give her no chance!" said Delia in distress. "No, it must be here. You say we can get a good man from Brownmouth?"

They discussed the possibilities of an operation at Maumsey.

Insensibly the doctor's tone during the conversation grew more friendly, as it proceeded. A convinced opponent of "feminism" in all its forms, he had thought of Delia hitherto as merely a wrong-headed, foolish girl, and could hardly bring himself to be civil at all to her chaperon, who in his eyes belonged to a criminal society, and was almost certainly at that very moment engaged in criminal practices. But Delia, absorbed in the distresses of someone she cared for, all heart and eager sympathy, her loveliness lending that charm to all she said and looked which plainer women must so frequently do without was a very mollifying and ingratiating spectacle. France began to think her--misled and unbalanced of course--but sound at bottom. He ended by promising to make all arrangements himself, and to go in that very afternoon to see the great man at Brownmouth.

When Delia returned to her maid's room, the morphia which had been administered was beginning to take effect, and Weston, an elderly woman with a patient, pleasing face, lay comparatively at rest, her tremulous look expressing at once the keenness of the suffering past, and the bliss of respite. Delia bent over her, dim-eyed.

"Dear Weston--we've arranged it all--it's going to be done here. You'll be at home--and I shall look after you."

Weston put out a clammy hand and faintly pressed Delia's warm fingers--

"But you were going to London, Miss. I don't want to put you out so."

"I shan't go till you're out of the wood, so go to sleep--and don't worry."

"Delia!--for Heaven's sake be reasonable. Leave Weston to France, and a couple of good nurses. She'll be perfectly looked after. You'll put out all out plans--you'll risk everything!"

Gertrude Marvell had risen from her seat in front of a crowded desk.

The secretary who generally worked with her in the old gun room, now become a militant office, had disappeared in obedience to a signal from her chief. Anger and annoyance were plainly visible on Gertrude's small chiselled features.

Delia shook her head.

"I can't!" she said. "I've promised. Weston has pulled _me_ through two bad illnesses--once when I had pneumonia in Paris--and once after a fall out riding. I daresay I shouldn't be here at all, but for her. If she's going to have a fight for her life--and Doctor France doesn't promise she'll get through--I shall stand by her."

Gertrude grew a little sallower than usual as her black eyes fastened themselves on the girl before her who had hitherto seemed so ductile in her hands. It was not so much the incident itself that alarmed her as a certain new tone in Delia's voice.

"I thought we had agreed--that nothing--_nothing_--was to come before the Cause!" she said quietly, but insistently.

Delia's laugh was embarra.s.sed.

"I never promised to desert Weston, Gertrude. I couldn't--any more than I could desert you."

"We shall want every hand--every ounce of help that can be got--through January and February. You undertook to do some office work, to help in the organisation of the processions to Parliament, to speak at a number of meetings--"