Three hours later she said good-bye to him composedly at Aunt Flora’s
side. He carried away a pleasant recollection of her, standing there
tall and smiling, with her gray eyes shining. She was a more than
usually interesting type of girl, David mused, going upon his way, and
as the man of the family it behooved him to think out some constructive
line of guidance in her direction. What about an allowance? Just what
would Gabrielle’s status be a year from now, when Sylvia reached her
majority and Aunt Flora no longer controlled both girls as if their
position were equal? Sylvia might graciously provide for this less
fortunate cousin if Sylvia were properly influenced.
This was October; Sylvia was going with the Montallen girls to Quebec
for a simple family Thanksgiving week-end, but she would be home for
almost three weeks at Christmas time. David must manage a talk with
her then. Perhaps the peculiar embarrassments and deprivations of
Gabrielle’s position had never occurred to Sylvia, as indeed they never
had presented themselves so forcibly to David before. “She is certainly
a stunning creature--character, too,” David thought. “God help the
child, shut up there with Aunt Flora and the servants, and with Aunt
Flora always so curiously hostile to her, at that! I’ll try to get down
there before Christmas--see how it goes!”
And he put the thought of Wastewater behind him, as he usually did at
about this point in his journey toward Boston or New York.
But Gabrielle had found nothing at Wastewater to make her forget David,
and the thought of him lingered with her for many, many days.
They were hard days, these first after her return. Flora was not
visibly unfriendly toward her, and the servants were always responsive
and interested. But Gabrielle was left almost entirely to her own
resources, and after the regular rule of the convent life, the orderly
waxed halls in which the sunshine lay in shining pools, the low, kindly
voices, the chip-chipping of girls’ feet, the cheerful chatter in the
long refectory, the sheltered fragrance of the walled garden, the girl
felt lonely and at a loss for employment.
She aired her bed and ordered her room before breakfast; descended
promptly, commented with Aunt Flora upon the weather.
“What a wind this morning, Aunt Flora!”
“Yes, indeed, and in the night.”
“It didn’t keep you awake, Aunt Flora?”
“Not the wind, no. I am not a good sleeper.”
Then silence; and Daisy or Sarah with the rolls and coffee, to ask in a
low tone:
“Will you have an egg, Mrs. Fleming?”
“I think not, this morning. Perhaps Miss Gabrielle----”
For Gabrielle was not “Miss Fleming” really, although she was used
to the name. Sylvia was that, always. Perhaps Miss Gabrielle would
have an egg; oftener not. There was no deep golden corn bread to be
anticipated here, as a regular Friday morning treat; but sometimes
special muffins or a little omelette came up, and then Gabrielle always
smiled affectionately and said to herself: “Margret’s here!”
After breakfast every morning she mounted through the large, gloomy
halls to her room, wrote in her diary, went resolutely at her French or
Italian. Then she went down to the square piano and began with scales,
études and nocturnes, sonatinas. When the half-hour after eleven
sounded, usually she went out, down to the shore, scrambling among the
big rocks she remembered so well, watching this favourite pool or that,
as it slowly and solemnly brimmed, overflowed, drained again.
This side of the shore was in shade now, for Wastewater stood on its
own little jutting point of cliff and forest, and the sun, at autumn
midday, had moved behind the trees. Gabrielle would fall to dreaming,
as she stared across the softly heaving, shining expanse of the water,
her back against a great boulder, her feet, in their rough little
shoes, braced against a smaller one.
Going in to lunch blinking and hungry, the instant effect of closeness,
odorous age, and quiet darkness would envelop her. She would look with
secret curiosity at her aunt’s mottled, dark face. Aunt Flora had been
quietly reading and writing all morning, she would read and write all
afternoon.
Immediately after luncheon came Mrs. Fleming’s one outing of the
day. Sometimes she walked about the borders with John, discussing
changes, her silk skirt turned up over her decent alpaca petticoat,
efficient-looking overshoes covering her congress gaiters if the
paths were damp. Sometimes John brought the surrey, and Aunt Flora
and Gabrielle went into Crowchester to shop. Flora kept a small car,
but she did not like it; she did not even like the cars of others,
Gabrielle discovered, when they honked behind the stout old bay horse
on the roads.
Aunt Flora had acquaintances in Crowchester, but no friends. She
never made calls, or entertained at luncheon or dinner. She bowed and
talked to the minister’s wife when she met her in a shop, she knew
the librarian and the school superintendent, and she belonged, at
least nominally, to the Woman’s Improvement Club. Once, in December,
there was a lecture at the club on the modern British poets and Flora
took Gabrielle, who wore her velvet dress, and was much flushed and
excited and youthfully friendly in the dim, women-crowded rooms, and
who carried away a delightful impression of Hodgson and Helen Eden and
Louise Guiney and tea and cake.
But a week later, when the president of the club sent Gay a card
for a dance to be given by the choicest of Crowchester’s youth that
winter, Flora shook her head. Much better for Gay not to associate
with the village people; Sylvia despised them. It was too easy to
become involved in things that had never been acceptable to Wastewater.
Gabrielle wrote a charming little note of regret.
Flora wrote to Sylvia every three or four days and received
delightful letters from her daughter at least once a week. Sylvia
wrote interestedly of a hundred activities, and Gay’s word for her
cousin came to be, in her own heart, “superior.” Sylvia was assuredly
“superior.” She was still playing golf, for the snows were late, and
basket ball, and squash; she was working for mid-term examinations
in history, philosophy, and economics. She would have sounded almost
formidable if the Thanksgiving letter had not struck a warmer note:
Sylvia was ski-ing, tobogganing, dancing; she had been to a little
home fancy-dress party as “Night”; her letter was full of delightful
allusions to young men, “Bart Montallen, who is in diplomacy,” a
charming Gregory Masters, and a “dear idiotic cousin of Gwen’s, Arthur
Tipping, who will be Lord Crancastle some day, in all probability--but
all such simple people and not rich!” Some of these might come down to
Wastewater for a few days before Christmas. Gabrielle’s heart leaped at
the mere thought.
Gabrielle sometimes wondered what Flora wrote to Sylvia in those long,
closely lined letters that went so regularly from Wastewater. Flora
would sit scratching at her desk in the upstairs sitting room, look
away thoughtfully, begin to scratch again. Sometimes Gabrielle saw her
copying long excerpts from books; indeed, Flora not infrequently read
these aloud to her niece, a thought from some bishops’ letters from the
Soudan, lines from “Aurora Leigh” or “Lady Clare.”
These were almost all gift books, bound in tooled leather and gilded,
with gilded tops. The old house was full of gift books. Gabrielle
imagined the last generation as giving its friends large, heavy,
badly bound, or at least insecurely bound, books on all occasions,
“The Culprit Fay,” “Evangeline,” and “Hiawatha,” Flaxman’s gracious
illustrations for Schiller’s “Bell,” Dante with the plates of Doré.
Idly she dipped into them all, idly closed them. Sometimes in the
long wintry afternoons she opened the lower drawers of the bookshelves
and looked at all the stereoscope pictures of Niagara, and Japan with
wistaria falling over arbours, and Aunt Flora and Lily, Gabrielle’s own
slender mother, in riding habits, with long veils flowing from their
black silk hats. The tiny figures stood out in bold relief, the flowers
seemed to move in the breezes of so many years ago; there was a Swiss
mountain scene that Gabrielle had loved all her life, with a rough slab
of drift almost in the very act of coasting upon the road where men and
Newfoundland dogs were grouped.
Her hardest time was when the decorous afternoon excursion or walk was
over, at perhaps four o’clock. Dinner was at seven; the winter dusk
began to close down two and a half hours before dinner. The girl could
not with propriety walk far from the house in the dark, even if she
had cared to traverse the cliff roads at night. The servants were far
downstairs, all elderly in any case. Aunt Flora hated young servants.
Sometimes she went to the piano and would find herself meandering
through an old opera score, “Traviata” or “Faust.” Sometimes, if the
afternoon was clear, she walked rapidly to Keyport and rapidly back.
Many an afternoon, as long as the light lasted, she prowled about
within the confines of Wastewater itself, for besides the always
fascinating half-mile of shore there were the cliffs, the woods back
of the house, and all the stable yards, cow yards, chicken yards, all
the sheds and fences, the paddocks and lanes, the gates and walls
that almost two hundred years of homekeeping had accumulated. The
big stables were empty now except for one or two dray horses, the
sturdy bay that dragged the old surrey, and a lighter horse that
Sylvia--Gabrielle learned--sometimes used for riding. There was perhaps
one tenth of the hay stored that the big hay barn would accommodate,
one tenth of the grain. There were two cows, chickens, pigeons; there
were intersecting catacombs of empty rooms and lofts and sheds where
apples were left to ripen, or where feathers fluffed at the opening
of a door, or where cats fled like shadows. Towering above all, among
towering pear trees, there was the windmill, still creaking, splashing,
leaking.
John the gardener had a substantial brick house, a nice wife, and a
stolid little girl of fourteen who walked the three miles every day
to the Union High School between Tinsalls and Crowchester. Gabrielle
presently gathered that young Etta was taking two fifty-cent music
lessons every week in Crowchester, and that she was going to be a
school teacher. Her “grammer” lived in Crowchester, and when the
weather got very bad Etta and her mother sometimes stayed with
“grammer,” and Uncle Dick drove her to school, and she and her cousin
Ethel went to the movies every night.
Wastewater itself might have filled many a lonely afternoon, for there
were plenty of unused rooms worthy of exploring. But Gabrielle had
small heart for that. There was something wholesome and open about
the garden and the stable yards and the sea, but the big closed rooms
inside filled her with a vague uneasiness.
The girl would look up at them from outside when the winter sunsets
were flaming angrily behind the black etched branches of the bare
trees; look up at blank rows of shuttered windows, identify her own,
Aunt Flora’s, the upstairs sitting room with gaslight showing pink
through the shutters when the cold clear dusk fell; the dining room,
with Daisy pulling the rep curtains together.
These were human, used, normal, but there were so many others! Two
thirds of the entire lower floor was always sealed and dark, showing
from outside only solemn bays, and flat surfaces screened heavily in
shrubs and bushes. In the western wing, with hooded windows rising
only two or three feet above the old walk, were the kitchen windows;
but the older servants, Hedda and Maria and the cook, Trude, had
rooms obscurely situated somewhere far back of Aunt Flora’s rooms
and Sylvia’s room and the upstairs sitting room on the second floor.
Gabrielle’s room was on the third floor, and David’s, and the rooms
still kept ready for Tom; these were all that were used of some score
of rooms on that level, and Wastewater rose to a mansard as well, to
say nothing of the cupola that rose for two floors, and was finished
off with columns and a small circular room of glass, high above the
tops of the highest trees. Gabrielle remembered when she and Sylvia
used to think it a great adventure to creep up there and look down upon
a curiously twisted landscape, with all the familiar barns and fences
in the wrong places, and so little land, cut by such insignificant
ribbons of roads, and so much sea, broken by nothing at all!
“You could put a hundred people in here!” Gabrielle used to think. In
the days of its glory, Uncle Roger had told them more than once, there
had often been half that number at Wastewater.
All the sadder to find it so empty now, the girl would muse, wandering
through the quiet halls. If the winter sun were shining bright,
sometimes she opened the great double doors that shut off the end
of the dining-room hall, and penetrated, with a fast thumping heart
and nervously moving eyes, into what had been the boasted ballroom,
billiard room, library, drawing rooms of the house.
In this section was the unused front stairway; curved, enormous,
wheeling up from a great square hall. There were doors on all sides,
decorous heavy doors, all closed. Beyond them, Gabrielle’s peeping
eyes found great silent rooms, whose crystal-hung chandeliers tinkled
faintly and reminiscently when the door was opened; swathed hideous
satin furniture, rose-wreathed Moquette carpets in faint pinks and
blues, looped brocaded curtains creased and cracked with the years,
tables topped with marble and mosaic, great mirrors rising up to the
high ceilings; everything that could rot, rotting, everything that
could bear dust covered with a deep plush of dust.
Sometimes, on a winter noon, chinks of bright light penetrated the
closed shutters and spun with motes. Sometimes an old chest or chair
gave forth a pistol shot of sound, and for a few hideous seconds
Gabrielle’s heart would stand still with utter terror. Once the busy
scratching of some small animal behind a wainscot brought her heart
into her mouth.
In one room--it had been the “cherry-and-silver parlour” a hundred
years ago--there was a cabinet of odds and ends: Dresden statues,
broken fans, collapsed ivory boxes and cloisonné. In other rooms there
were odd bits, some good, but almost all very bad: majolica, onyx,
ormolu, terra cotta. There were one or two good pictures, forty bad
ones: seascapes with boats, still-life studies of dead fish, English
nobility of the First Empire days, breakfasting in gardens, peasants
doing everything ever done by peasants, old woodcuts of Queen Victoria
and “Yes or No?”, “Dignity and Impudence,” and Mrs. Siddons, curling
and water-stained in their heavy frames.
The books that filled the handsome glass-doored shelves in the dimly
lighted, mouldy library, where light crept as into a cave, and where
the air was always damp and heavily scented with decay, were almost all
ruined after some especially wet winter. Their backs were loosened,
their badly printed pages clung together with black stains: Lever and
Scott, Shakespeare, The Iliad, Somebody’s History of the World in
Twenty Volumes, Somebody Else’s Classic Literature in Forty. Sometimes
Gabrielle selected one or two, and carried them upstairs with her.
She read voraciously anything and everything: “Innocents Abroad,”
“Forty-one Years in India,” “The Household Book of English Verse,”
Strickland’s “Mary of Scotland.”
But even with reading, wandering, tramping, exploring, music,
languages, the time passed slowly. Gabrielle became, and laughed to
find herself becoming, deeply interested in Aunt Flora’s evening game
of solitaire. Perhaps the two women never came quite so close to
each other as then, when Gay bent her bright head interestedly above
the cards, and Flora, with a card suspended, listened to advice.
Affectionate, and hungry for affection, Gabrielle was oddly touched
when she realized that Flora really liked her companionship at this
time, if at no other. Gay had been perhaps a week at Wastewater when
one evening, Flora, shuffling her packs, said mildly:
“Don’t tire your eyes, Gabrielle, with that book!”
Gabrielle looked up, saw that the game was about to be commenced. She
had turned back to “Stratton” again, with a grateful smile, when Flora
said again:
“Was it last night when five aces came out in the first row?”
This was enough. The girl closed her book, leaned forward. Presently
she took a lighter chair, on the other side of the little card table,
and after that she always did.
On one of these evenings, when the wind was crying and they two seemed
alone, not only in the house, but in the world, Gay asked suddenly:
“Aunt Flora, does anybody live in that north wing, opposite where I am
but on the same floor?”
“I don’t understand you. How could--how do you mean?” said Mrs.
Fleming. Gay saw that she had turned a deathly colour, and was
breathing badly, and she told herself remorsefully that such a query,
hurled unexpectedly into the silence, might well terrify any nervous
elderly woman, living alone.
Eager to simplify matters, she recounted her odd experience on the
very first night after her return. She had often looked over in that
direction since, she went on, but had seen nothing. But, weary and
confused that first night, she might never have gotten to sleep but for
the reassuring knowledge that David was so near!
“You may have seen a reflection of some light in the trunk room, up
above where you are,” Flora suggested. “Perhaps Maria or Hedda went up
there with John and your trunk.”
“No, for they didn’t take my trunk until next day! But they might have
gone up there to make room,” Gabrielle conceded, cheerfully, distressed
at the continued pallor of her aunt’s face.
“I’ll have Hedda and Maria go all over everything,” Flora said. “I’ll
tell them to lock everything and look over everything to-morrow.” And
with a mottled hand that shook badly, she resumed her manipulation of
the cards, and Gabrielle for a time thought no more about the matter.
The two lonely women had a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and Flora a
telegram from Sylvia. And not long after that it was time to prepare
for Sylvia’s homecoming at Christmas.
This, Gabrielle perceived, was to be an event quite unparalleled by
any of the sober festivities at Wastewater since Uncle Roger’s day.
Last Christmas Flora had gone to Sylvia, shut in the college infirmary
with a sharp touch of influenza, and last summer Sylvia had taken a six
weeks’ extension course, and had spent only odd weeks and week-ends at
Wastewater; she had not been enough at home to alter in any way the
quiet routine of the household.
But this was different. The Christmas holidays, beginning with a little
Christmas house party, would be almost like a housewarming--a sort of
forerunner of Sylvia’s attaining her majority and becoming the real
owner and the mistress of Wastewater. Sylvia would be twenty-one in
late June, when David and her mother would end their long guardianship
and surrender to her her inheritance from Black Roger Fleming. Tom was
legally, technically, dead; the family felt now that he was truly dead,
and every passing year had helped to entrench Flora in her feeling of
security. If she had ever expected his return, she did so no longer.
The courts had confirmed Sylvia’s expectations. David and Flora had
administered her affairs carefully--Flora felt that to her Wastewater
would always be home, and that her beautiful child would be rich.
Gabrielle, speculating upon Sylvia’s prospects, had long ago satisfied
herself that whatever they were, David would share them. It was the
logical, the probable thing; Gabrielle had indeed taken it half for
granted, for years. Now, when she heard the quiet little note of
admiration in his voice when he spoke of Sylvia, when she studied
Sylvia’s pictures and found them beautiful, when she realized how
pledged he was to the service of Sylvia’s interests, anxious to do
everything that Sylvia would approve, she appreciated that forces as
strong as love bound them together, and she fancied--and not without
a little wistful pain--that love might easily--easily!--be there too.
Everything, everything for Sylvia.
The scale upon which the preparations for the Christmas house party
were commenced was astonishing to Gabrielle. She had not supposed her
aunt capable of even thinking in such terms. Aunt Flora had always
been the last person in the world to associate with thoughts of lavish
hospitality, generous and splendid entertaining.
But Aunt Flora went about this business of getting ready with a sure
and steady hand that astonished Gabrielle, who could remember nothing
of the old days of Wastewater’s splendour.
By mid-December some of the big downstairs rooms were opened, and
Margret, aged, gray, wrinkled like a rosy apple, and always with a
kindly word for Gabrielle, was directing the other servants in the
disposition of the furniture. Linen covers came off, mirrors were
rubbed, and fires crackled in the unused fireplaces. The chairs were
pushed to sociable angles, and whenever there was sunlight the windows
were opened wide to receive it.
Upstairs Flora counted out the beautiful heavy linen sheets, aired
the blankets, hung fringed towels upon the balcony railings to lose
their scent of camphor. From the dining-room mantel projected a new
and ugly but eminently satisfactory airtight stove, and the crackle of
wood within it and the delicious corresponding softness in the cool
heavy air of the room gave Gay one of the pleasantest sensations she
had had at Wastewater. In the big square pantry the maids washed and
piled china and glass; some of it Gabrielle had never seen before: pink
Doulton, green and pink Canton, fine Old Blue.
Downstairs in the kitchen region was pleasantest of all, for Trude
had a free hand at last, and she and Hedda often broke into their own
ecstatic tongue under the novelty and excitement of it, remembering
old days in Bruges, when they had made Christmas cakes and had stuffed
fat geese for the oven. Trude chopped mincemeat, made her famous damp,
dark, deliciously spiced dried-apple cake “by the yard,” Gabrielle
said, prepared great jars of sauces and mayonnaise and stored them in
the vault-like regions of the cellar, ready for the onslaught of young
appetites and unexpected meals between meals. The grocer’s boy from
Crowchester delivered whole crates of cereals and vegetables, and from
Boston came hams and bacon, raisins and nuts, meats and oysters in
boxes and kegs that dripped with ice.
Yet it was not to be so very large a party, after all. There would be
Laura and Gwen Montallen, the nice Canadian girls from Quebec; Bart
Montallen, their cousin from England; Arthur Tipping, “who will be Lord
Crancastle some day”; and Bart Montallen’s chum, a man named Frank du
Spain, from Harvard. All three of the men were in college together, and
the three girls had been classmates for years. David would of course
join them, making seven, and “Gay eight,” wrote Sylvia, kindly, “and we
may have an extra man for good measure, if I find just the right one,
so that we’ll be just ten, with you, Mamma dear. And that’s just right.
Now please don’t go to making too elaborate preparations, these are all
the simplest and least exacting of people, as you’ll instantly see.
They want to walk, talk, have some music perhaps--ask Gay to be ready,
for Mr. Tipping sings--have good meals, and in five days it will all
be over, and then you and I can have some real talks and make up for
lost time. Of course, if we could dance, one of the nights, that would
be wonderful, in the old parlour where the Neapolitan boy is, for the
ballroom’s much too big for so few. But I confess the thought of the
music daunts me----”
The thought of it, however, did not daunt Flora. There was even a
triumphant little smile on her face when she came to this line. A
four-piece orchestra should of course come down from Boston; the
square piano was wheeled into the ballroom, and two days before
Sylvia’s expected arrival two men with mud and ice on their boots, and
mittens crusted with ice, and red, frost-bitten faces, came out from
Crowchester with a whole truckload of potted palms and shining-leafed
shrubs, all boxed and sacked, tagged and crated carefully for their
return trip to Boston when the festivities should be over.
Gabrielle caught the joyous excitement of it, or perhaps created it
to a large extent, and in a shabby linen uniform and an old sweater
of David’s rushed about with dusters and buckets, nails and strings,
climbed ladders, rubbed silver, and flung herself into the preparations
generally with an enthusiasm that warmed even Aunt Flora. Flora had
loitered, coming out from church on the Sunday previous, and had quite
composedly asked a score of the nicest young persons in Crowchester to
the dance; invitations that, to Gabrielle’s surprise, were pleasantly
and informally worded and invariably accepted by mothers and aunts with
much appreciation. One day, when they were filling a great jar with the
spreading branches that bore polished fine leaves of wild huckleberry,
Flora said suddenly:
“What frocks have you, Gabrielle?”
“Well, I have my uniforms, and my new suit that I wear to church,”
Gabrielle responded, readily, “and my velvet for afternoons, and my
brown lace, and my three blouses.”
Flora said nothing at the time; she struggled with the branches
silently, removed the rough gloves that had covered her hands, and
called Daisy to sweep up the pantry floor. But later in the day she
showed Gabrielle one of the wardrobes that held Sylvia’s clothes.
“It will be a small dance, of course,” she said, “and your lace dress
is just from Paris, after all. But it’s possible that you might wear
one of these--some of them Sylvia hasn’t had on this year.” And she
drew out a limp skirt or two, a pink satin, a white net with pink roses
flouncing it, a brocaded scarlet and gold.
“All the rose colours!” Gabrielle said, smiling.
“She’s dark,” the mother said, in a quiet voice that swelled in spite
of her. And she glanced at the picture of Sylvia on Sylvia’s bureau--a
stunning Sylvia in a big fur collar and a small fur hat.
It was for Gabrielle to scour the woods for beautiful shrubs and winter
colours, and she did it enthusiastically, well rewarded when Flora
smiled, in spite of herself, at the sight of berry-studded briars and
glossy pointed holly interspersed with scarlet beads. There were no
loneliness and no idleness for Gabrielle now; she was off, well wrapped
and in heavy overshoes, immediately after lunch, sometimes laughing
aloud when she found herself in the sunlighted snowy sweetness of the
woods, trampling the first light fall of virgin snow, breathing the
spicy, tingling air with great eager respirations, and calling out a
holiday greeting to other holly- and mistletoe-hunting folk.