THE BLACK FLEMINGS
THE
BLACK FLEMINGS
BY
KATHLEEN NORRIS
[Illustration]
_PALO ALTO EDITION_
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
1929
COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925, 1926, BY KATHLEEN
NORRIS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY
LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
THE BLACK FLEMINGS
THE BLACK FLEMINGS
CHAPTER I
Once through the dark old iron gates, he seemed to have left the warm
and friendly autumn day, the warm and friendly world, behind him.
David Fleming laughed half aloud at the fancy and stepped back into the
rambling country road, where wheel tracks were so quickly obliterated
in the loose-drifting sand, to contrast once more, for his own
amusement, the peaceful dreaming landscape in the afternoon sunlight
and the sinister shadows of Wastewater.
Five miles away along the rugged coast lay Crowchester, the little
fishing village whose activities tinged the fresh salty air, even here,
with the odour of salted fish. Between Crowchester and Wastewater,
beside whose forbidding great gates he stood, ran the irregular road,
rising through dunes, skirting wind-twisted groves of pine and fir,
disappearing into ragged hollows to emerge again on turfy bluffs, and
finally winding in here toward the old brick house that lay hidden
behind these high walls.
On his right lay the shore, rocky, steep, rough, with pebbles
complaining as the tide dragged them to and fro, surf hammering
restlessly among the rocks or brimming and ebbing with tireless
regularity over the scooped stone of the pools. No two inches of it,
no two drops of its immensity ever the same; it held him now, as it had
held him for so many hours in his very babyhood, in a sort of tranced
contemplation.
The sun was setting in angry red beyond the forest behind him, but a
hard and brilliant light still lay on the water, and the waves were
sculptured harshly in silver-tipped steel. Where the old brick wall of
Wastewater descended to the shore enough sand had been stored in the
lee of the wall to form a triangular strip of beach, and here scurfy
suds were eddying lazily, hemmed back from the tide by a great jammed
log and only stirred now and then by a fringe of the surf, which formed
new bubbles even while it pricked the old.
On the sharp irregular fall of the cliff, distorted, wind-blown
pines and tight-woven mallows clung, with the hardy smaller growths
of the seaside: blown blue lupin, coarse sedge and furzy grasses,
yellow-topped odorous sage and dry fennel. About their exposed,
tenaciously clinging roots was tangled all the litter of the sea:
ropes, slender logs as white and bare as old bones, seaweeds, and
cocoanut shells.
David breathed the salty, murmuring air, faintly scented with fish,
looked back once more toward the shining roofs and the rising faint
plumes of smoke above Crowchester, shrugged his shoulders with a
philosophic laugh, and turned again toward Wastewater’s gates.
These were four: two great wrought-iron wings in the centre, where
carriages had once entered and departed, and, designed ingeniously in
the same enormous framework, two smaller gates, one on each side, for
foot passengers.
The carriage gates had been closed for years and were bedded deep
in dry grass and fallen leaves, and the right-hand smaller gate had
perhaps not been opened three times in its more than one hundred years’
existence. But the left-hand gate stood slightly ajar, and beyond it
ran a faintly outlined footpath into a deep old garden. The whole
elaborate structure, met by the mossy brick wall on both sides, was
thick with rust, its scrolls and twisted bars shone brick-red in the
last of the sunlight.
David had walked briskly from the village and his blood was moving
rapidly, but he shivered as the familiar atmosphere once more
enveloped him. Once again the dilapidated, stately old garden with its
bottle-edged flower beds, where the ragged rose bushes were already
showing red and yellow hips, where the pines were shedding their
slippery needles, and where the maples and elms looked tattered and
forlorn.
The place had been thickly planted almost two hundred years ago; it
was densely overgrown now; the trees crowded each other, and the
growth underneath them was sickly. The old path was spongy with wet
leaves underfoot, and the air so pungent with their sharp odour as to
be almost anæsthetic. Between the blackened trunks on the right David
could again see the serenely moving, deeply breathing surface of the
ocean, but now the garden and low cliffs shut off the shore.
On all other sides lay the garden and the thicket of the plantation
through which presently, after some winding, he came upon Wastewater
Hall itself, standing up boldly in the twilight gloom. The last dying
fires of the sunset, burning through black tree trunks behind it,
seemed only to make darker than ever the outlines of the great dark
red brick house, three-storied and with a steep mansard as well, its
uncompromising bulk enhanced rather than softened by a thickly wooded
coat of black ivy.
It was an enormous old Georgian building, impressive for size if for
nothing more. Wastewater’s twenty acres stood on a sharply jutting
point of cliff, and the house faced the sea on three sides; the garden
was shut off from the road by the long western wall. Immediately back
of the kitchen and stable yards there was a rear gate, buried in
shrubbery and quite out of sight from the house, for delivery wagons
and tradespeople.
The main entrance was on the eastern front, facing straight out to sea,
but this presented now only rows of shuttered windows and stone steps
deep in fallen leaves, and David stopped instead at the stone steps of
the columned side door. Leaves had littered the paths and lay thick
upon the struggling grass of the rose beds, but these three steps had
been swept clean, their dried surfaces still showing the marks of a wet
broom.
David, absorbing the details with the eye of one who perhaps is
reluctant to see confirmed previous impressions or fears, shrugged
again, made a little face between impatience, amusement, and misgiving,
and gave the old-fashioned iron bell-pull a vigorous jerk.
Then came a long wait. But he did not ring again. The first fifteen of
David’s thirty-one years had been spent here, within these grave old
walls, and he knew exactly what was happening now inside.
The jerk on the brass-handled wire would set into convulsive motion
one of a row of precariously balanced bells far down in the enormous
stone-floored kitchen. Most of these bells had not been rung for two
generations at least. They were connected with the bedrooms and the
study--it had been a long time since any resident of Wastewater had
felt it necessary to summon a servant to bedrooms or study. In the row,
David remembered, were also the front-door bell, dining-room bell, and
the side-door bell. He began to wonder if the last were broken.
No, someone was coming. He could not possibly have heard steps behind
that massive and impenetrable door, but he assuredly sensed a motion
there, stirring, creaking, the distant bang of another door.
Then another wait, not so long. And at last the door was carefully
opened by Hedda, who looked casually at him with squinting old
white-lashed eyes, looked back in concern at her bars and bolts, closed
the door behind him, and then said in a mild old voice in which traces
of her Belgian origin lingered:
“Good. How is Mister David?”
“Splendid,” David answered, with a heartiness that the chill of the
dark old hall already tinged with a certain familiar depression.
“Where’s my aunt, Hedda?”
Hedda had been staring at him with a complacent, vacuous smile, like
the slightly demented creature she really was. Now she roused herself
just a shade and answered in a slightly reproachful voice:
“Where but upstairs shall she be?”
David remembered now that Gabrielle had long ago announced, with her
precocious little-girl powers of observation, that “Hedda always tells
us things the first time as if it were the twentieth, and her patience
quite worn out with telling us!” An affectionate half smile twitched
the corners of David’s mouth as he thought of that old tawny-headed,
rebellious little Gabrielle of ten years before, and he followed the
smile with as sudden a sigh.
He mounted gloomy, wide old stairs through whose enormous western
windows a dim light was struggling. The treads were covered with a dark
carpet strapped in brass rods. Gabrielle, as a baby, had loved the
top-shaped ends of these rods, had stolen them, been detected, restored
them, how many, many times!
The thought of her more than the thought of his old little self, of Tom
and Sylvia, who were the real Flemings, after all, always came to him
strangely when he first returned to the old house after any absence.
Gabrielle, shouting, roaring, weeping, laughing, had roused more echoes
in Wastewater than all the rest of them put together; she roused more
echoes now, poor little Gabrielle!
Poor Gabrielle, and poor Tom! mused David. Life had dealt oddly with
both these long-ago, eager, happy children, as Life seemed to have
a fashion of dealing with the children of so strange and silent, so
haunted and mysterious an old house. The shadow of the house, as real
upon his spirit as was the actual shadow of the autumn twilight upon
these stained old walls, shut heavily upon David as he crossed the
upper hallways and turned the knob of the sitting-room door.
His aunt, in the widow’s black she had worn for some eighteen years,
was sitting erect in an upholstered armchair by the fire. She turned to
glance toward him as he came in and welcomed him with a lifeless cheek
to kiss and with the warmest smile her face ever knew.
It was not very warm; Flora Fleming had the black colouring of the
clan; her look was always heavy, almost forbidding. She was in the
middle fifties now; there was a heavy threading of gray in her looped,
oily dark hair. Her skin was dark and the rough heavy eyebrows almost
met above her sharply watchful eyes. There were black hairs at the
corners of her lips and against her ears below her temples; her eyes
were set a shade too close together, her teeth were slightly yellowed,
too prominent, and rested upon her bitten lower lip. She wore, as
always, a decent handsome silk that seemed never old and never new;
there was a heavy book in her knuckly, nervous hands, and David noted
for the first time to-day a discoloured vein or two in her somewhat
florid, long face.
“This is good of you, David,” she said, dispassionately, putting her
glasses into her book and laying it aside.
“Didn’t wake you from a nap?” David said, glad to sit down after his
brisk walk.
“A nap?” She dismissed it with a quiet, not quite pleased smile. “Since
when have I had that weakness?” she asked. “No. On an afternoon like
this, with the leaves falling, one hears the wind about Wastewater if
it blows nowhere else, and the sea. I can never nap in the afternoons.
I hear--voices,” she finished, as if half to herself.
“Lord, one realizes how lonely the old place is, coming back to it!”
David said, cheerfully.
“Not for me,” his aunt again corrected him in her quiet voice that
seemed full of autumnal reveries and the quiet falling of leaves
itself. “Other places are lonely. Not this.”
“Well, it’s extremely nice to know that you feel so,” David pursued,
resolutely combating the creeping quiet, the something that was almost
depression, always ready to come out of musty corners and capture
one here. “But when the girls are home we’ll have some young life at
Wastewater, and then--when they marry, you’ll have to move yourself
into brighter quarters--into a city apartment, perhaps!”
“When they marry?” she repeated, slightly stressing the pronoun.
“As I suppose they will?” David elucidated, looking up.
“They?”
“Sylvia--and Gabrielle, too!” he reminded her.
“Oh, Gabrielle?” She repeated the name quietly. “To be sure, she will
marry,” she said, musingly. “But I can hardly feel that quite as much
my affair as Sylvia’s future, David,” she finished, mildly.
“Daughter and niece!” David summarized it. “Sylvia rich and Gabrielle
penniless, but both young and both our girls!”
“I can’t see it quite that way,” Mrs. Fleming said, thoughtfully, after
a pause. “Gabrielle gets here to-night--you knew that?”
“That’s what brings me,” he answered. “I thought perhaps you would like
me to meet her in Boston, bring her home?”
“I wired in answer to the Mother Superior’s wire,” Flora said, “that
she was quite capable of making the journey herself. She should be here
at about eight to-night. She is eighteen, David. There is no necessity
of making a child of her!”
“No,” he conceded, good-humouredly. “But it might seem a little
warmer welcome. I’ll go in to Crowchester for her, at least. After
all, we’ve not seen her for years--for more than two years! When I
was in Paris--when Jim Rucker and I were on our way to Spain--it
was midsummer, and she and some of the other girls and nuns were in
Normandy. I shall be glad to see her again.”
“I wish,” said Mrs. Fleming, slowly, “that I could say as much. But her
return brings it all up again, David. I shall do all I can for her,
try my best to place her well. But when I think of my delicate little
sister,” Flora rushed on, in a voice suddenly shaking, “and of her
giving her life for this unwelcome child--the old bitterness rises up
in me----!”
She stopped as if she were choking, and with set lips and inflated
nostrils sat breathing quickly and looking into the fire, shaken by the
painful agitation of a passion usually suppressed.
“I know. I know,” David, who came nearer than any one else in the
world to intimacy with this woman, said soothingly. “But it wasn’t
Gabrielle’s fault that poor little Aunt Lily made a stupid marriage
with a--what was he? A travelling agent? Surely--surely, if you loved
Aunt Lily, you can make up all the sorrow and shame of it to Gabrielle!
There was--there _was_ a marriage there, Aunt Flora?” David added, with
a keen look up from his own finely shaped hands, now linked and hanging
between his knees as he sat forward in his low chair.
“Between Lily and Charpentier? Certainly!” she answered, sharply. And
suspiciously she added: “What makes you ask that?”
“It has sometimes gone through my head that there might not have
been--that that might account for her despair and her death,” David
suggested. “Not that it matters much,” he added, more briskly. “What
matters is that here we have Gabrielle, a young thing of eighteen,
apparently all over her early frailness and delicateness--at least, I
gather so?” he interrupted himself to ask, with another upward glance.
“The Superior writes that she is in perfect health.”
“Good. So here we have Gabrielle,” resumed David, “eighteen, finished
off most satisfactorily by almost eight years with the good Sisters and
with two post-graduate years in the Paris convent--discovered not to
have a vocation----”
“Which I profoundly hoped she would have!” put in Flora, forcefully.
“Oh, come, Aunt Flora--the poor little thing! Why should she be a
religious if she doesn’t want to? After all, she’s your sister’s child
and your own Sylvia’s cousin--give her a chance!” David pleaded,
good-naturedly.
Flora looked at him temperately, patiently.
“But of course I shall give her a chance, David!” she said, quietly.
“She will unquestionably have some plan for herself. I shall see that
it is helped, if it is reasonable. But in the old days,” Flora added,
“she was treated exactly as a child of the house. She must not expect
that now. There have been changes since then, David. Poor Tom’s loss,
Roger’s death--poor Mamma’s death----”
She was silent. David, staring thoughtfully into the fire, was silent,
too. The strangely repressive influence of the twilight, the old room,
the cold, reminiscent voice that somehow rang of the tomb, the autumn
winds beginning to whine softly about the old house, and beyond and
above and through all sounds the quiet steady suck and rising rush of
the sea, the scream of little pebbles beneath the shrill fine crying of
gulls in the dusk, had taken possession of his spirit again. Something
mysterious, unhappy about it all--something especially so about
Flora--was oppressing him once more.
But why? David asked himself, angrily. Here was a widowed woman, living
in an old house only a few miles from the very heart of civilization,
contented with her solitude, yet counting the hours until her idolized
daughter’s return to Wastewater for the summer months; conscientious
in the discharge of her duty where Gabrielle, her sister’s motherless
little girl, was concerned, spending her days peacefully among servants
and flowers, books and memories.
Many and many another elderly woman lived so. What was there so
strangely disturbing, so almost menacing about this one? He did not
know. He told himself impatiently now that it was only because she was
his kinswoman that she had power to make him so uneasy; this was, in
short, the disadvantage of knowing her so well.
“The girls will brighten you up!” he remarked, hopefully.
“Perhaps,” his aunt answered, forbiddingly. And again there was
silence, and presently Mrs. Fleming went away, with some murmur of
dinner.
Left alone, David glanced about the familiar room, whose every detail
had been just as it was now in all the days he could remember. It was
a large room with rep-curtained bays on two sides. The furniture was
all dark and heavy, sixty, seventy years old. Carved walnut, oak,
horsehair, heavy-fringed upholstery, stiffly laundered antimacassars,
bookcases whose glass doors mirrored the room, gas jets on heavy
black-and-gilt brass arms.
A hanging lamp was lowered over the centre table, where albums and
gift books, shells and vases were neatly ranged upon a mat of Berlin
wool. A coal fire was smoking sulkily in the steel-rodded grate; the
mantelpiece was of brown marble flanked with columns of shining black;
the mantelshelf bore another fringed specimen of Berlin wool work and
was decorated by a solid black marble clock with gilt horses mounting
it in a mad scramble; two beautiful great Sèvres vases of blue china
wreathed with white roses and filled with dry teazels, some small
photographs in tarnished metal frames, and several smaller articles:
Turkish and Chinese boxes, Japanese lacquer ash trays, and a tiny
Dresden couple.
There were what-nots in two corners, with their flights of graded and
scalloped shelves similarly loaded; here were more photographs, more
gift books, a row of lichen owls on a strip of stiff silvery lichen,
small specimens of Swiss wood-carving and cloisonné, a china clock that
had not moved its hands in all of David’s lifetime, a teacup or two,
a vial of sand from the banks of the Jordan, a bowl of Indian brass
filled with coloured pebbles, bits of branched coral, goldstone, a
chain of Indian beads, and some Aztec pottery in rich brick-brown and
painted stripes.
On the walls were dark old paintings, engravings, and woodcuts in heavy
frames, interspersed here and there with rubbishy later contributions:
“A Yard of Roses” in a white-and-gilt mat and frame, and a coloured
photograph of ladies and children, too sickeningly pretty, in
high-belted empire gowns and curls, dancing to the music of a spinet.
The only notable thing among all these was a life-size study that hung
above the mantel: the portrait in oil of a man of perhaps thirty or
thirty-five. David ended his inspection with a long look at it, and his
thoughts went to its subject.