Delia Blanchflower | Page 5

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