Delia Blanchflower | Page 7

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