Gabrielle was wandering along an overgrown path before breakfast the
next morning when David came after her and sauntered at her side. The
sun was shining brilliantly after a clearing storm, the air aromatic
with delicious leaf-scent, and the sea dancing and blue. Everything
was singing and shining in a warm bath of sweet clear light, there
were a few late birds hopping about, and gulls walked on the sunken
brick paths as boldly as the pigeons did. Under the thick growth of the
cedars and conifers golden shafts penetrated; the paths and garden beds
were deep in sodden and drifted leaves.
“Oh, what a morning!” sang Gabrielle, as David joined her.
“What a morning!” he echoed. And he added, “I needn’t ask if you slept
well?”
For indeed she was glowing from a bath, from a night’s deep rest,
glowing with all the morning beauty of healthy eighteen. The sun
shone upon her warm brown hair, rousing golden lights in it, and her
gray-sapphire eyes were shining. David noted that she walked with a
little spring, as if in mere walking there were not quite enough action
to free the bubbling vitality within her.
“I didn’t dare go far,” she said, “for I suppose breakfast is still at
half-past eight? But presently--when I’ve unpacked and gotten things
straightened out--I’m going to explore!”
“I like this Quaker costume,” David said, glancing at the plain gray
dress.
“This? It’s the Sunday uniform,” Gabrielle told him. “Black on
week-days, and black always for the street--sometimes we went to the
Madeleine or Notre Dame on Sundays, you know, and twice to organ
concerts. But these we always wore indoors at St. Susanna’s.”
“All very well for the smaller girls,” David smiled, “but didn’t you
others rebel?”
“Ah, but I have other clothes,” said Gabrielle, interestedly. “There’s
a lovely countess in Paris, a widow, who is one of the old children----”
“One of the----?”
“Old children. One of the alumnæ of St. Susanna’s,” she elucidated,
laughing at his bewildered look. “That’s what the nuns call them,
‘the old children.’ And every year this countess takes the graduates
and goes with them to buy suitable clothes--that is, if there aren’t
fathers and mothers to do it for them,” added Gabrielle. “So she took
me, the darling! We all know her quite well, and the last year one may
go to her Sunday afternoon teas four or five times,” explained the
girl, seriously. “That is, if you’ve no _devoirs_.”
“_Devoirs_?”
“Penances. Punishments to write for breaking rules,” she said.
“I feel dense. _Devoirs_, of course,” said David, diverted. “Tell me
more of this. If you had no _devoirs_ you might go to tea with the
countess?”
“So that we might comport ourselves becomingly in society,” agreed
Gabrielle. “And then, two weeks before we left for Cherbourg, she took
me into the city, and bought me--oh, lovely things! A velvet dress; I
wore that once on the boat. And a lovely brown lace dress, and a hat,
and a suit, and three blouses. But we had to travel in our uniforms, of
course. ‘Religious in habit. Students in uniform.’ That’s the rule.”
David was finding this extremely amusing and interesting. Through
the medium of such engaging youth and freshness, such simplicity and
eagerness, almost anything would have been somewhat so. But this
glimpse of girlhood managed so decorously by rule was new to him, and
it contrasted oddly with--well, for example, with Sylvia’s breezy
independence and that of all the other young women he knew.
“Did you--did any of the girls really like it, Gabrielle?”
“Did----?” The wonderful eyes widened and were more wonderful than
ever. “But we all loved it!” she exclaimed. “We had--_fun_. The gardens
were perfectly beautiful, and on Sundays there was always a sweet, and
often on Thursdays! Or some girl’s father would send her a great box of
chocolates.”
“You were in Normandy when I was in Paris,” David said, wondering if he
would have thought to send a box of chocolates to St. Susanna’s if she
had been there.
“Normandy! Isn’t it--but you don’t know it!” she said. “It’s
heavenly. We have such a cunning little place there; it was a sort
of gate-lodge once, and of course we had the sea!--it used to remind
me of Wastewater, only of course the sun seemed to set in the wrong
direction!----David,” Gabrielle broke off to ask earnestly, “didn’t you
find Paris very disappointing?”
“Rucker and I were only there ten days, on our way to Spain, to
paint,” David reminded her. “No, I don’t remember that it was
exactly--disappointing,” he added, in a tone that made her laugh.
“To me,” the girl said, “Paris was all Dumas and Victor Hugo and
Stanley Weyman. I like their Paris the best. Sedans, masked riders,
horses waiting in the angles of the walls----It made me almost glad not
to see London,” she added, gravely. “Imagine losing Dickens’s London,
and Thackeray’s, and Trollope’s! Oh, look,” she said, in a tone rich
with affectionate recollection, as they stopped by the old sundial set
in a mouldy circle of emerald grass.
“You still like adventure stories?” David suggested, remembering that
she always had liked them.
“Not always,” Gabrielle answered. And with a suddenly warming
enthusiasm, she recounted to him a story she had read on the boat, one
of a collection of short stories.
It was so simple that it hardly engaged his attention at first: the
story of two rich little girls, with a marvellous doll’s house, and two
poor little girls socially debarred from being asked in to inspect it.
Gabrielle described the minute perfections of the doll’s house, the
tiny beds and curtains, the marvel of a microscopic glass lamp, and the
wistful wonder of the little pariahs, one bold and eager, the other
shy, her little head hanging, her little hand always grasping a corner
of her big sister’s apron. By chance the poor little girls were offered
an opportunity to creep in, and they were rapturously inspecting the
wonder when the rich little girls’ mother indignantly discovered them,
sent them forth with insulting scorn, sent them shamed and bewildered
on their homeward road. And the older child sat by the roadside,
heaving with hurt and fury and heat and fatigue, with the little sister
close beside her. And the simple story ended quite simply with the
little sister’s murmured words of courage and comfort:
“Never mind. I seen the little tiny glass lamp!”
David was an artist, he adored beauty in youth, in words, in voices.
Here he found them all combined in this eager creature who ended her
tale with tears in her glorious eyes and a smile that asked for his
sympathy twitching her splendid mouth. Told so plainly, under the
dreaming autumn sky, in the thinning soft autumn sunlight of the
old garden, the whole thing had a quite memorable pathos and charm,
and when he thought of Gabrielle--as David did often in the days to
come--he always thought of her standing by the sundial in the morning
freshness, telling him the story of the doll’s house.
She had brushed the face of the dial free of leaves and pine needles
and was scraping the deep incisions with a stick.
“Twenty minutes past eight,” she said, tipping her head to read the
time. And afterward she read the inscription in her sweet husky voice:
“Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne;
The crossit line’s the kenter skein.
“One of my first recollections,” said Gabrielle, “is being down here
with Uncle Roger and Sylvia--I must have been about six, for it was
just before he died. He set us both up on the sundial, and told us it
was older than the Stars and Stripes, that it had come from England
for his grandfather, and what it meant. It meant that the Flemings
were always bringing home wives from overseas and crossing the line.
I remember it,” she added, as they strolled back toward the house,
“because I said--looking out to sea--‘Will Tom have a wife when he
comes home?’ and that pleased Uncle Roger, as anything did, I suppose,”
Gabrielle ended, sighing, “that made Tom’s coming back at all seem
likely!”
“Poor Tom! It would have been a nice inheritance,” David mused. “It has
increased, even since Uncle Roger’s time, you know.”
“Is Sylvia apt to make her home here, David?” Gabrielle asked. “She
sounds rather worldly--that’s a great convent word! But tell me, what
is she like?”
“She is very beautiful, extremely clever, enormously admired,” David
answered, with a little flush. “She has the white Fleming skin, high
colour, shining black hair.”
“A girl off a handkerchief box?” Gabrielle suggested.
“Exactly.”
“And are there admirers?”
“A great many.”
The girl looked a quick question, half smiling, and he answered it
pleasantly:
“Myself among them, of course! But Sylvia can look much higher than a
painter of mediocre pictures.”
“I don’t believe they’re mediocre!” Gabrielle said, stoutly.
“I’ve some at Keyport, most of them are in New York, some on their way
now to an exhibition in Washington,” David said. “When I come back you
must see them, Gay!”
“When you come back----?” Her walk halted.
“I’m off for New York and then Washington this morning.”
“Oh.” It was not a question, not an exclamation. She pronounced the
little monosyllable quietly, resumed her walking. “I like my little old
name!” she presently said, with a glancing smile. And then, with sudden
interest, as they came closer to the house: “David, tell me--who lives
in that wing--up there, on the third floor?”
“Nobody, now. Those are old servants’ rooms; but the servants are on
the other side now--Aunt Flora has only five or six. Hedda’s cousin is
the cook, an old Belgian woman who’s been here--well, she must have
been here several years before you went abroad?”
“Trude?”
“Yes, Trude. Then there’s Maria, the pock-marked one, and a couple of
new ones from Crowchester, sisters named Daisy and Sarah, who live
with John and Etta at the tenant house, out near the stables, and seem
mainly interested in going into Crowchester. John occasionally employs
others to assist him in the garden, his wife helps, I believe, with the
laundry-work, and old Margret comes over from Keyport to lend a hand
now and then. That’s the staff.”
“But look here, David,” said Gabrielle. “You see my open window up
there, with the curtain blowing--and then all those blank windows--then
turn the corner of the court and come out again in the north wing--up
there--there was some light up there last night! I saw it when my own
gaslight blew out. It was unmistakable, coming through the chinks of
shutters! It gave me the creeps for a moment.”
“Reflection!” David said, smiling. “Reflection in glass.”
“No, for my light was out.”
“Reflection of some other window, then.”
“Yes, but whose?”
“I don’t know,” he told her, amused. “You’ll have ample opportunity to
find out, my dear. I’m wondering what you’ll do with yourself, here all
alone with Aunt Flora!”
“I’ll work,” she said, stoutly. But he could see that she herself
felt a little daunted by the prospect. “I’ll practise, and keep up my
French, and take walks into Keyport and Crowchester, and perhaps”--and
she gave him a laughing look--“design all the little rooms and hallways
of houses in beans when it rains!”
“Good Lord!” David said, with a great laugh. “Do you remember my houses
designed in white beans to amuse you and Sylvia on wet holidays? But
you have no special plans for yourself, Gay?” he asked, more soberly.
“Nothing you especially want to do?”
“I talked it over with Sister Borromeo and Sister Alcantara----” she
was beginning, with a faintly worried look, when David laughed again.
“Are these Pullman cars?”
“No!” said Gabrielle, shocked yet laughing, as they mounted the three
steps to the side door. “They are wonderful nuns. And they both feel
that, under the circumstances, I had better wait and see if Aunt Flora
has any plans or any use for me here!”
“And I think that, too,” David said, heartily, delighted to find her so
reasonable. “You are not yet nineteen, after all, and we’ll find the
happiest solution for you one of these days. I’ll be coming and going
all winter, and Sylvia’ll be home, with a degree, in June. So keep up
your spirits!”
“Ah, don’t worry about me!” she answered, courageously, going in to
breakfast.