This was Black Roger, who had been master here at Wastewater all the
days of his stormy and brilliant life. The face at which David was
staring now so thoughtfully had been one of the handsomest of its
generation. When Roger Fleming, arrogant, young, rich, had posed for
this picture, now a whole third of a century ago, the world had been at
his feet.
What a different world it had been, mused David; a world without
an electric light or bell or street car to disturb it--without a
moving picture or an automobile! But Roger Fleming, this exquisite,
negligently smiling gentleman pictured with the bay horse and the slim
greyhound, had missed none of these things from his crowded life. He
had had wealth and beauty, travel, books, he had inherited Wastewater,
and women--women had always been but too kind to him!
His first wife, Janet Fleming, the widow of a distant relative, had
come first to Wastewater about thirty years before. Janet was then
twenty-two, weeping, helpless, alone--unless the four-weeks-old baby
in her arms might be considered a companion. This baby had been David
himself, fatherless since five months before his birth. Exactly seven
weeks after her tearful and black-swathed arrival in the house of her
kinsman, Janet, David’s young mother, had married Black Roger Fleming
of Wastewater.
There had been quite a houseful of relatives, all more or less distant,
there to receive her, for in the comfortable fashion of a past day the
rich young heir of Wastewater had felt himself responsible for his less
fortunate kin, especially his women kin; and more than that, it had
suited his somewhat feudal ideas of hospitality to gather the entire
clan about his big dining table.
So David’s mother had found Roger with a stately, withered little
gray-headed second cousin--his uncle’s widowed daughter-in-law--“Aunt
John,” keeping house for him, and assisting her a dark-eyed, vivacious
daughter named Flora, and a smaller, more delicate, and timid daughter,
Lily--third cousins, if relationships were to be traced. And besides
these there was Roger’s younger brother, Will, a sweet, idle, endearing
ne’er-do-well, who was supposedly studying law with a Boston firm,
and who was actually doing nothing at all except enjoy life as an
irresponsible junior.
Roger’s marriage made small difference in the others’ lives; David,
whose memory began a few years after this, indeed could remember them
all, living along comfortably in the big house. He remembered his
dark-eyed, animated mother, who shortly after marrying Roger had had
another boy baby in her arms; he remembered “Aunt John,” who managed
the house and ruled the children and servants; Aunt Flora, watchful and
jealous and sharp-tongued; Uncle Will, idle and laughing; Aunt Lily,
small and delicate, reading Tennyson and singing “In Old Madrid” at the
square piano; remembered his own splendid, rollicking baby half-brother
Tom, and remembered above all Roger himself, still handsome, superb,
riding his horses along the cliffs all about, driving splendid bays
in an open barouche, carrying off the boys’ mother to hear Irving’s
“Thomas à Becket” or Rostand’s “L’Aiglon” in Boston.
A veritable horde of servants kept this big household
comfortable--butlers, gardeners, a coachman, a stable boy, fat cooks
in the kitchen, whispering maids in the upper halls, and almost always
a comfortable middle-aged housekeeping person who conferred constantly
with old “Aunt John” and haggled with fruit peddlers at the gate in the
sandy back lane.
This staff of domestics was lessened now, although there were still a
butler and half-a-dozen underlings. But there had been other changes
more important at Wastewater.
First, when David was six and little Tom Fleming five years old, their
mother had died. Afterward, the boys had been packed off to boarding
school and had been there when they heard of another death at home,
this time of old “Aunt John.”
But Flora and Lily and Will continued to live there with Roger, and it
was only a few months after their mother’s death that Flora, between
a frown and a smile, had told them that she was shortly to take that
mother’s place: she and Roger were to be married as soon as his year of
mourning was over.
This had not deeply impressed the little boys; they cared little what
their elders did, and had it not been that a new figure had immediately
come upon the scene, David thought, long afterward, that he might
easily have believed himself to have dreamed Flora’s announcement.
But a new figure did come, among the many friends and relatives who
were always drifting through Wastewater, the figure of a certain
handsome, sensible blonde Mrs. Kent, from Montreal, merely visiting
Roger on her way back home, and with her, her little daughter Cecily,
fresh from a Baltimore school. Cecily had been seventeen then, dark,
fragile, flower-like. She was merely a child, going home to her father
and little brother and stopping to visit a friend of Mamma’s on the way.
Roger was in the early forties at this time--actually older than
Cecily’s mother, whom he had known as a girl, in Boston. But six days
after their arrival at Wastewater Cecily ran away with him and they
were married.
David remembered all this well, the uproar in the house, Flora’s loud
voice, Lily crying loudly, Mrs. Kent fainting and sobbing. Lily and
Flora came to their senses because they had no choice, and settled down
to keeping house for the white-faced little bride, but Mrs. Kent never
forgave her daughter or spoke to her again. It was at about this time
that Flora quietly married Will Fleming; married him, David knew now,
because she could not marry his brother.
Then came sad, sad years to Wastewater, years that sobered the dashing
master of the house for the first time in his life. For it became
evident from the first that the new Mrs. Fleming would not bear her
title long. The city doctors, one after the other, gave her illness the
name of a lingering and incurable malady, but Cecily herself knew, and
perhaps Roger knew, that it was youth--youth forced too soon into the
realities of loneliness, responsibility, passion, and fear--that was
really killing her.
Placid, uncomplaining, sweet, Cecily lay on a couch for months and
months, sometimes worse, sometimes so much better that she could walk
slowly up and down the garden paths above the sea on Roger’s arm. Aunt
Flora, David remembered, had been living in Boston then, where Uncle
Will had some temporary position, but Flora came back to Wastewater
for the long vacation, bringing with her her own baby, the lovely
black-eyed girl that was Sylvia; “even then the little thing was as
proud as Lucifer himself!” thought David, reaching this point in his
recollections with a smile.
Flora and her tearful little sister Lily and the baby did not go back
to Boston in the winter; they would join Will “later on after Cecily’s
operation,” they said. And even David knew that “later on” might be
only when Cecily was dead. He and Tom went back to school in September,
and neither ever saw Cecily again; he and Tom had played late in the
clear twilight, along the shore, their new school suits had been laid
neatly upon their beds when they came into the close, stuffy house, and
their valises packed capably by Aunt Flora.
Cecily had been lying on a big couch by the fire; David sat on a
low tuffet beside her and held her hand with all the heartache of
an inarticulate fifteen-year-old before a tragedy he may not share.
Lily, who had been strangely pretty and gay of late, was at the piano,
sometimes singing, sometimes murmuring with Roger, who was leaning
above her. Sylvia, three years old, was running back and forth in the
pleasant soft light that shimmered with the reflected motion of the
sunset on the sea.
That was the last of domestic peace and happiness at Wastewater for a
long time. For it was only a week after that that young Tom ran away
from school, and Roger was dragged from the bedside of his wife, just
facing another operation, to go in search of his boy.
Tom, a sturdy, self-confident boy, now past fourteen, had indeed often
threatened this; he was no student; his only books were sea tales; his
one thought was of the open sea. He had picked up enough sea talk in
Keyport, the straggling village of fishermen’s huts halfway between
Crowchester and Wastewater, to pass for a sailor anywhere; he left for
his father a smudged and misspelt but unmistakably gay letter, assuring
him that he would be back by Christmas, anyway, and love to everybody,
and tell Sylvia that he would bring her a doll, maybe from China, and
not to worry about him, because----!
Eighteen long years ago now, but they had never seen Tom since. That
had been the beginning of Roger’s long cruises, always seeking his
son, always returning to Wastewater with the hope of word from him. He
had come back that same winter from the first search to find Cecily
dying, sinking under heavy narcotics, but knowing that he was there,
they thought, and happier when he was beside her. And twice there
had been word, a scratched letter from Tom in Pernambuco three years
after he went away, and another several years later from Guam. Both
contained love, casual greeting; Tom was on an interesting trip now,
but immediately after it he was coming home.
So Roger travelled, hoped, came and went untiringly, and Flora kept
Wastewater open, ready for the runaway’s return, and meanwhile a home,
a headquarters for all the other members of the family. Here David
himself came for all his vacations, here Lily crept back, crushed,
almost vacant-minded, deserted by her “travelling agent,” and with a
tawny-headed baby girl something a little worse than fatherless.
Will Fleming, who had protested for cheerful idle years that office
work would kill him, had proved his words when Sylvia was only four
by quite simply dying of pneumonia during a long absence in the West,
and so Flora and Lily were alone again at Wastewater, but with the
two little girls to take their places as the children of the old
place. Flora’s child, Sylvia, was a superbly proud little creature,
tall, imperious, with scarlet cheeks, the white Fleming skin, the
black Fleming eyes, indeed as absolute a “black Fleming” as ever
had been born. Lily’s Gabrielle, three years younger, was a thin,
nervous, tawny-headed little creature, full of impish excitements and
imaginings. Roger would find the two little girls, when he came back
weary-hearted and sick, playing “flower ladies” with much whispering
and subdued laughter in the old garden, or penning crabs and small sea
creatures in pebbly prisons on the shore.
One day, only a few weeks before his death, Roger had a long talk with
David, walking back and forth along the garden paths that were sweating
and panting under the breath of an untimely summer day in mid-May.
There was no sun; a sort of milky mist lay over the sea; the warm
plants dripped, and smelled of hothouses. David remembered watching the
slow silky heaving of the obscured ocean as his stepfather talked.
“I made my will when you were only a baby, Dave--when Tom was born.
That’s--my God, that’s twenty years ago. But I put a codicil in a
week or two back, giving Will’s child--Sylvia here--the whole of it
in case--he may have got mixed up in this sea warfare, you know--in
case the boy never comes home. But he will! I gave Will’s widow--poor
Flora--all that my own mother left, when Will died; that’ll take care
of her and of Sylvia; Tom’ll see that they stay here at Wastewater if
they want to. And Flora’ll care for poor Lily’s child. Your father
fixed you pretty well--I’ve left you the Boston houses to remember your
stepfather by. You’ve been like my own son to me, David. I’ve had a
long run for my money,” Roger said somewhat sadly that same evening,
looking up at his own portrait over the mantel, when the men were alone
in the sitting room. “But a better man would have made a better job of
it! Tom’ll come home, though, and there’ll be Flemings here again, boys
and girls, David, to keep the old place warm.”
“I hope you’ll keep it warm yourself,” David had answered, cheerfully.
“You’re not fifty-three yet!”
“No, Dave--I’ve lived too hard. I’ve broken the machinery,” Roger
said; and it was true. “I remember my twenty-first birthday,” he went
on, musingly, “when Oates turned the estate over to me. He was a nice
fellow--forty, I suppose, making perhaps six thousand a year, and
with half-a-dozen children. Homely little sandy fellow--he doesn’t
look a day older to-day. I remember his watching me, I’d a hatful of
florists’ and tailors’ bills to pay--watching me scribble off checks
for twice his year’s income, right there in his office. I bought my
dog, ‘Maggie’--that was ‘Queen Vic’s’ mother--that day. They were great
years, David; young men don’t know anything like them to-day--but
a better man might have made a better job of them! I didn’t want a
wife--I wanted all the women in the world, until the day your mother
walked in here with you in her arms, and that was a dozen years later.
I wish we’d had a houseful like you, David--I wish Tom had had sisters
and brothers--might have held the boy! Well,” the master of Wastewater
had ended, “if Tom’s not here, turn it all over to Flora’s girl when
she’s twenty-one. Women manage these things better. Sylvia’ll have her
fun and build for the future, too. Or maybe she and the boy may make a
match of it--they’re both Flemings, Dave. And more than that--your Aunt
Flora has a score to settle with me--there’s a sort of poetic justice
in her daughter’s getting it all. She--she cared, in her way--she’s
not a woman to care easily, either. And she forgave my marrying your
mother--she stood by your mother. But when it came to Cecily--Flora
and I were to have been married then, you know--she won’t mention her
name to this day! I’ve treated a good many women badly,” Roger had
confessed, with a twitch of his handsome mouth, “but I never treated
any one as badly as poor Flora.”
David had been pleased, and secretly amused, to see that the old
incorrigible smile was lighting his stepfather’s magnificent eyes.
Upon whatever episodes in the past Roger’s mind was moving, he found
them sweet. David liked to fancy the bustled and chignonned ladies of
the ’Eighties thrilling over “Papagontier” roses from the irresistible
Roger Fleming of Wastewater, the two-button kid gloves that agitated
the clicking fans in the opera house when this winner of hearts
sauntered in.
And after all, Death had come kindly, as Life had, to Black Roger
Fleming. There had been one more hope about Tom; Roger had been eagerly
and confidently flinging clothes into his well-worn trunk, telephoning,
shouting directions, exulting in the need for action, all through a
sweet June morning. Sylvia, nine years old, and Gabrielle, six, had
been running at full speed along the upper hall, and they saw him come
to his door--saw him fall, with one hand clutching his heart.
Aunt Lily’s periodic melancholia had developed into a more serious
condition now, and she was away on one of her long absences in a
sanitarium. But David was there. Flora was there, the old servants were
there to fly to Roger’s side--already far too late. He had been warned
of his heart; this was not utterly unexpected.
Three days later David wrote a letter to Tom, launched it out into the
great world with little hope that he would ever read it. He was the
heir, there was a large estate, he must come home.
But Tom had never come home.