Delia Blanchflower | Page 5

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