The rest of the house party was to her a thrilling, but too rapidly
flying, dream. The young people walked, rosy and whirled and beaten
and shouting with laughter, in the formidable ending of the storm the
next day; they ate ravenously, laughed a great deal, and formed a whole
new series of those special jokes and phrases that come into being in
every successful house party. A dozen small incidents a day sent them
into gales of mirth, and the recollection and recounting of these same
incidents rendered everyone incoherent and hysterical at meals.
On the third day of the five the sun came out resplendent and dazzling,
if not very warm, and the sea turned a clear sapphire, with jade-green
lights where the chastened waves broke over the rocks. The sky was
pale, high, clear, and bright as enamel, and the snow frozen hard
underfoot. Skating was attempted in the old tennis-court; there was
snowballing, faces grew hot, and deluges of the soft and silent cotton
fell from low branches and spattered the girls’ coats and the men’s
shoulders. Maids were always sweeping the mud- and snow-strewn side
entry now, and hurrying away with wet wraps.
On the last night came the Christmas dance, when everybody knew
everybody else, and the mere hasty dinner beforehand and the ecstasy of
dressing after dinner were--Gabrielle thought--delight enough. They
had trimmed the house yesterday with holly and greens, and even the
Montallens had pushed chairs about with hearty good-will and climbed on
ladders to try out chandeliers. Gabrielle told herself a hundred times
that she must refuse to dance--she did not really know how to dance
well--she was the youngest, anyway, and must make herself Sylvia’s
right hand, as hostess.
But in the end, studying herself in the _café-au-lait_ lace gown, which
came up almost to the round creamy column of her throat and down almost
to her ankles, and which had long, delicately fluted sleeves to her
very wrists and was altogether demure to the point of affectation, Gay
hoped that she would be asked to dance. Frank du Spain would surely be
kind if she did not dance very well.
“There will be a dozen prettier dresses to-night than this one!” she
told herself, going slowly downstairs and wishing in a panic that the
others had waited for her. Suppose they laughed at this dress--nuns and
graduate pupils as old as the Countess might not be supposed to know
much about clothes.
However, only a few guests had arrived, shy charming girls and boys
from the old mansions in and about Crowchester; the musicians were
tuning up deliciously, and the big floor shone inviting and bare.
Sylvia, being introduced and introducing with her mother’s and David’s
help, had time to say generously, “It’s charming! It’s just right for
you, Gay, absolutely suitable!” and Gay’s heart soared and her cheeks
warmed; she became the pleasantest and most efficient of hostesses:
piloting mothers and guardians to chairs, chatting simply and merrily,
and too absorbed in the delightful scene to know or care what was
happening to herself.
Aunt Flora was quite magnificent in plum colour; her nearest approach
in many years to clothing that was not mourning. The Montallen girls
were pretty in pink-and-silver and blue-and-silver gauze. Sylvia was
superb in a simple white brocade with a thread of gold--her gold
slippers made her look unusually tall--and there was a gold spray of
something that looked like thistledown in her hair. Gabrielle was near
enough to her sometimes to hear the pleasant sweetness of her replies
to neighbourly greetings.
“Indeed I remember the Robinsons! I shall be coming home very soon
now, you know, Doctor, and I certainly mean my good neighbours to be
part of the new life! Mrs. George, and this is never Betty! Well,
Betty----! No, but I shall really be home in June, and then we’ll make
some changes here, and see if we can’t make Wastewater a little more
comfortable!”
And now and then she turned to David, in a fashion that was sisterly,
yet not quite sisterly either, and with her lovely smile.
“David, I wonder if you’d call Maria’s or Daisy’s attention to those
candles? They’ll be dripping directly.” Or, “David, will you send Mrs.
Wilkinson’s coat upstairs? She doesn’t want to go up----”
Gabrielle was talking to a nice old couple, established expectantly at
one of the two card tables that had been provided, when the first dance
started. Sylvia was still in the receiving line beside her mother, but
David came up to the card table with another bridge-playing elderly
couple, and when the four had settled themselves and cut the new pack,
he stood smiling before Gay, with his tall, sleek black head a little
bent, and his smiling eyes on her, and his arms open.
“Come on, Gay!”
“Oh, but, David,” she said, flurried, “I don’t dance! At least, I know
I dance badly, for it’s been mostly with girls! Really--really I’d
rather not----”
David altered neither his position nor his expression.
“Come on!” he said. And Gay, with her face flushing exquisitely under
the warm, colourless skin, put herself into his arms. And this was for
her the wonderful moment of a wonderful evening; she liked to remember
that happy second, when the lights and music and flowers and voices
were all shining and flashing together in the shabby old ballroom, and
David had made her dance with him.
They moved off smoothly. There were a few other couples already
dancing, and presently David said: “I got the book, Miss Mansfield’s
book, with your dolls’-house story in it, and it is truly remarkable.”
“Oh, I’m so glad you read it for yourself!” Gay exclaimed.
“You gave it to me quite as effectively,” David commented, and was
still again. But after a few moments, while they were walking before
the first encore, he said: “You dance delightfully. Don’t have the
slightest hesitation about dancing!” And later, when they came up to
Sylvia and Aunt Flora, he repeated to them: “She dances perfectly, of
course. I’ve been trying her out. I hope we’ll hear no more of this
not-being-able-to-dance!”
Gay had a second’s uncomfortable impression that Sylvia was not quite
pleased; but as David immediately carried Sylvia off for the second
dance, there was no time to wonder at it. Gay dutifully took Sylvia’s
place beside her aunt, but almost all the guests had arrived now; the
girls and Aunt Flora had counted them, forty-three, a hundred times,
but now Flora whispered with a sort of agitated pride that there were
fifty-one, and, with the household, sixty-one. It was many years since
Wastewater had had a party of this size!
“Sylvia says that we must have a furnace put in,” sighed Flora, “and
that means tearing up floors--goodness knows what----”
Gay now plunged into the delights of her first real dance with all the
ecstasy of eighteen. She danced with any one and everyone, she scarcely
knew or cared with whom, but she was always conscious of David, who,
in his character as host, was obviously taking upon himself the
responsibility for whatever girl looked momentarily like a wallflower,
or whatever elderly woman needed an escort across the room.
The glorious, crowded hours flew by, with laughter and compliments and
music, with icy brief drinks, and the exchanges of congratulations.
“Isn’t it all wonderful! We’re having the most wonderful time!”
“Isn’t it! I’m so glad you’re liking it!”
Then presently there was an old-fashioned and lavish supper, with
bonbons and laughter, and Sylvia in a red-white-and-blue tissue cap
that made her look like a beautiful, proud young Liberty, and Gay
mischievous and delicious under a pomponned black-and-white Pierrette
hat. It was long after midnight, and the first good-byes were being
said, when Gay found herself sitting on the first step above the dim
landing with David.
“I discovered this place,” said David, panting, and wiping his forehead
frankly. “You can look down on them and they can’t see you. Glory----!
It’s warm.”
Gay sat sweetly cool and radiant beside him; her little slippers were
planted neatly in front of her, not a hair of the bright waves was
disordered, her skin had the cool dewy freshness of a child’s skin.
“Having a good time, Gay?”
“Oh, David!”
“What did you want to speak about?” he asked. For she had begged him
for a quiet word.
“It’s this,” Gay began. She was still talking rapidly and earnestly,
five minutes later, when Sylvia came tripping down behind them from the
dimly lighted upper hall, with some well-wrapped women following.
“Sorry to disturb you! David, I think perhaps you’d better come down,”
said Sylvia. “People are going.”
Gay and David stood up, and Gay realized then for the first time that
she had had her fingers gripped tightly on David’s arm, and for some
obscure reason felt a little self-conscious about it.
They all went downstairs, and there were no more confidences that
night. To Gay, who was tired out with felicity, the rest was all a
blur. She managed to hang up the lace gown carefully, but left her
other clothing and her slippers where they fell, and tumbled into bed
with her massed hair untouched, nearer sleep already than waking.
And the next day was confusing, too. Even the girls looked weary, and
the packing went on between yawning and laughing reminiscences, and
congratulations upon what had really been a great success.
Outside were a low unfriendly sky and a strong wind across the snow.
The sea was rough and wild, bare branches bent and whipped noisily
about in the garden, and windows rattled. The house seemed big and
blank this morning, with fallen leaves and oddly disposed furniture
standing in the forlornly empty rooms that had looked so bright and
gay last night. John was in the house, with dry sacking bagged over
his boots as he moved palms about. But there was a roaring fire in
the airtight stove in the dining room, and another in the downstairs
sitting room, and the young persons, waiting for the sleigh to take
them to their train, gathered there.
David kept rather close to Gay, in an unobtrusive big-brotherly manner,
during the good-byes, and once he nodded to her and said briefly: “All
fixed. Don’t worry,” but if Sylvia saw these cryptic indications she
had no explanation of them until the following day. She did note, she
remembered afterward, that Frank du Spain’s farewells to them all, and
especially to David and Gay, were rather odd; not quite pugnacious,
not quite defiant, but with an odd touch of some such quality. David
enlightened her on the next afternoon, when the family was alone again.
This was Christmas Day, and they had all gone in the sleigh to
Crowchester to church in the morning, and, although Wastewater had
hardly even now recovered from its unwonted festivities, there had been
the usual great turkey, icy red cranberry jelly, crackling celery,
and bubbling mince pies that indicated a fresh celebration. This
meal, served in the warm dining room at half-past two, after the cold
drive and wait, had reduced all the family to a state bordering upon
comfortable coma. Sylvia, sleepily declaring that she meant to take
a brisk walk, collapsed into an armchair before the fire immediately
after the mid-afternoon dinner. David, determining from moment to
moment to go upstairs and get into tramping clothes, took a chair on
the other side; Flora went up to her room, where she indulged in the
unheard-of relaxations of her wrapper and a nap on the top of her
stiff, cold bed, with a comforter over her; and Gay, whose skin felt
prickly and whose head heavy, and who had enjoyed the mince pies and
the chestnut dressing and the walnuts only too well, wrapped herself up
warmly, left a message with Maria, and slipped quietly out of the side
door.
John was going into Keyport at five to take Margret home after the last
of the Christmas dinner had been discussed in the kitchen; Gabrielle
would walk the three miles in the roaring wind, and he could bring her
home.
The gale tore at her gaily, whistled in her ears, stung her flushed
face into chilly bloom again; rushes of spray blew across the dune
road, and the sea boiled and tumbled beside her. Gulls were blown
overhead, balanced yet tipped sidewise in the wild airs. The wind sang
high above her.
Other pedestrians, similarly affected by Christmas cheer, were walking
bundled and blown and bent forward, along the roads, and these and
Gay exchanged joyous shouts of “Merry Christmas!” It was good--it was
good--the girl exulted, to be out on such a day!
* * * * *
Meanwhile Sylvia and David, left alone by the sitting-room fire, with
only the occasional dropping of a coal or the onslaught of wind against
the shutters to interrupt them, could have the first real talk they had
had since their arrival at Wastewater. David, stretched luxuriously in
his chair, was free to study her, as she sat erect and beautiful in
the pleasant mingling of gray afternoon light and warm firelight. He
had always had a definite feeling of admiration, loyalty, affection
for and confidence in Sylvia, and he felt it still. But for the first
time, in this past week, she had seemed oddly to take her place down on
the comfortable level of other human beings. She no longer seemed--as
she so long had seemed--a creature unique and apart, a little more
beautiful, more fortunate, more clever than the rest. Her mother and he
had watched her grow up--a bright little conscientious girl with dark
braids, a splendid twelve-year-old, fifteen-year-old, meeting all the
problems and the increasing responsibilities of life so willingly, so
conscientiously; prettier every year, more responsive and satisfactory
every year.
And then presently she had been recognized as Uncle Roger’s heiress,
and she was to own Wastewater one of these days, and the very
substantial properties that went with Wastewater. David had initiated
her, responsive and serious, into the secrets of her first allowance,
her checkbook, her accounts. Did she know that she would be rich some
day?
She had answered in Victoria’s grave little phrase: “I had not known
I was so near the throne!” And since that time, now several years
ago, David had more than once thought that the proud beautiful young
creature had really felt herself, in a certain sense, a queen, had
really been a queen in her own little circle. Quite without realizing
it, he had always seen a little halo, a little aura, about Sylvia.
Always--until now. David had always told himself that he dare not ask
Sylvia to be his wife, although she was the woman he knew best and
admired most in the world. It was an old habit of his to think of
her as the person he would have wished to marry had it been possible
to unite her youth and beauty and wealth to the small income, the
uncertain profession, and the ten years’ seniority of a man who was to
her a sort of older brother.
But he knew to-day that he could ask her. She had oddly seemed to come
into his zone during this holiday week; it was not that she was less
beautiful, less rich, less admirable. But she was--different, or he
was. She was just an extremely charming and fortunate girl of twenty,
who might love him as well as, perhaps better than, any other man.
She was splendidly high-principled and intelligent, but even these
qualities, at self-confident twenty, were not the surest guides in the
world. Oddly and unexpectedly enough, he had once or twice experienced,
just lately, a queer little pang of something like pity for Sylvia.
She impressed him as someone who had little to learn, but much to
experience.
Gay, on the other hand, was engagingly diffident and teachable. She
had a well-balanced little head, she had excellent judgment, she played
the piano nicely, spoke French perfectly, the Montallen girls had said,
and danced even better than she knew. But one felt that there were no
falls ahead of Gay, no humiliating descents from any heights, simply
because she had never scaled any heights. David was not analytical
enough to know that it was the sisterly little Gay who had quite
innocently and unconsciously shifted his attitude toward Sylvia. Gay
had told him of a delightful book that Sylvia called “pretty thin.” Gay
had said fervently, “Oh, thank you, David, you’ve saved me!” when he
had done her a small service yesterday. Gay had quoted him, followed
him with her eyes, consulted him, paid him a score of compliments in
her charming little-girl way; and Gay was an exceptionally lovely young
woman. Whatever her antecedents, she was delightful, eager, receptive,
unaffected, and like a nice child, with her willing flying feet, her
big eyes, her softly tumbled tawny hair, and her husky, protestant,
velvety little voice.
To-day, while he was idly thinking of what life would be when Sylvia
had taken possession of her inheritance, and had had her year or two of
independence, and then had agreed to be his wife, Sylvia suddenly spoke
of Gay.
“Have you any idea what she wants to do with herself, David?”
“Gay?”
Sylvia nodded.
“Mamma seems to feel nothing definite about it, and I couldn’t get
anything out of her. She said something vague about being an actress!
I suppose she’s at that age.”
And Sylvia smiled good-naturedly as she looked into the fire.
“She’s not happy here?” David asked, slowly.
“Yes, in a way I think she is. She’s young, of course, to try her
wings, and Mamma says she is really very conscientious about her
practising and languages. But of course this isn’t the place for her.”
“Isn’t?” David asked, looking up.
“No. In the first place, it’s too dull. In the second----”
“Why, there are some nice kids over at Crowchester,” David suggested,
“and she seems happy here. Then you’ll be home at midsummer----”
“Yes, I know, David,” Sylvia said, with a sudden colour in her face.
“But at the same time I don’t feel that just idling here is quite the
right solution for Gay. And I think it my duty, in a way, to think
out, for her, what is the right solution,” added Sylvia, with a smile.
“She’s handsome--she has her mother’s most unfortunate experience back
of her, and--if she should marry even six or eight years from now, it
would surely be better to launch her first into some interesting and
absorbing line of work.”
“She may marry before that!” David said, with a significant half smile.
“She had her first offer, it appears, on the night of the dance, and
she was quite upset about it.”
“Her first offer!” Sylvia echoed, in stupefaction. “One of the
Crowchester boys?”
“No, I don’t think she knows any of them well. Aunt Flora doesn’t
encourage any neighbourliness exactly. No, it was young Du Spain,”
David said.
“Frank du Spain!”
“It would appear that it was love at first sight with him.”
Sylvia stared a moment; hot colour in her face.
“I don’t believe it!” she said, finally.
“Oh, it was honest and above-board enough. That was the very point of
her speaking to me as she did,” David assured her, half amused and half
serious. “It seems he spoke to her at the dance----”
“He must be twenty!” Sylvia broke in, impatiently.
“Twenty-four, he says. I don’t imagine,” David said, leniently, “that
he had any immediate hopes, or indeed plans. But he assured her that
he was free, and that his father was only too anxious to have him
settle down; he said that his mother would ask her to visit them--at
Lake Forest, I believe, this summer. He wanted a promise of some
sort--he was in an absolute fever of excitement and eagerness when he
left--almost wrenched my hand off!”
“David, you didn’t----But it’s all too absurd! You didn’t encourage
them in this sort of nonsense?”
“Them? My dear Sylvia, you couldn’t have disposed of an unwelcome
suitor more calmly yourself than Gay did!” said David. “She told him,
it appears, that she was very much honoured, and she really liked him,
but he please wasn’t to say anything more about it for months, until
after midsummer, in short. She only told me because he insisted that
somebody--anybody--be informed that he never would change, and was in
earnest, and all that. And he wants to correspond, and she felt that
she ought to speak to Aunt Flora about that.”
“One wonders why she didn’t speak to Mamma in the first place,” Sylvia
said, slowly, remembering the farewells, and perhaps unreasonably
resenting a little Gay’s secret and Gay’s handling of it.
“She seems to want to dismiss the whole thing,” David explained. “I
only mention it as a suggestion that she may solve her own problems in
her own way one of these days.”
“And you really think she ought to live along here calmly, doing
nothing, and dependent upon other people?” Sylvia asked, with an
anxious and appealing little frown.
“Who, Gay?” said Flora Fleming, who had come downstairs and was now
being settled by David in her usual chair. “But there is no talk about
her going away, is there?” she asked, blinking through her glasses from
one face to another.
“Not immediately, Mamma dear,” Sylvia answered, with just a faint hint
of impatience in her voice that amused David with the realization
that he had never before seen Sylvia so human, and incidentally so
approachable. “But I suppose she will not stay here always. That
wouldn’t be fair to her or to you!”
“Oh, but what would you have her do, Sylvia?” demanded her mother in
alarm.
“Nothing definite, and don’t you two dear good people talk as if I
were an ogre!” Sylvia said, with a laugh. “What I had vaguely in mind
was some nice place--there are hundreds near the college--where she
could have some young life and at the same time, by courses or special
instruction, be fitting herself for her life work, whatever it’s to be!
That was my entire idea, I assure you.”
David took refuge in his usual thoughtful study of the fire; Aunt Flora
flung her yarn free with nervous fingers. Winter twilight was turning
the windowpanes opaque, and the room was warm and close.
“You mean that we should make her an allowance, Sylvia?” her mother
asked.
“Well--until she is on her own feet, of course. Pay her board, see that
she has the right clothes, and pocket money. But the quickest way to be
sure that she will take life seriously,” Sylvia said, “is not to make
it too easy for her!”
“But would you want her really to--to work, Sylvia?” demanded her
mother, as David, staring into the embers, with his locked hands
dropped between his knees, was still silent.
“Well, but, Mamma, wouldn’t you?” Sylvia countered. “With her
antecedents, perhaps inheriting that unfortunate nature of poor Aunt
Lily’s----”
“You never saw Aunt Lily!” David was upon the point of saying,
good-naturedly. But although Sylvia had indeed been only three or
four years old when frail, melancholy Aunt Lily had made the final
disappearance into a sanitarium that ended much later with her death,
he realized that Aunt Flora had talked frequently about her and held
his peace.
“Inheriting that unhappy nature from Aunt Lily,” pursued Sylvia, “and
inheriting goodness knows what from that casual father of hers--who
might, I suppose, turn up here any day and make trouble for all of
us--it does seem to me wisest to lay the basis of a normal, useful
life of her----”
“Her father’s dead!” Flora interrupted, with a sort of pain in her
voice, as Sylvia paused.
“You don’t _know_ that, Mamma.”
“No, but if he isn’t,” David said, “he’s dead to us. He has built up
a new life somewhere that he is only too anxious to keep from our
knowledge. If he had been in trouble he would have appeared fast
enough!”
“Still, Sylvia,” said Flora, trembling, “I should wish--and I know
David would--that Gay should have some sort of allowance made for her,
always. I know your uncle--I know Roger would want her not to have to
worry about money--say, a hundred and fifty a month! Or two hundred----”
“Do you mean just paid out of the estate?” Sylvia demanded, in honest
astonishment, and with a natural little resentment that her plans for
Gay should be so outdistanced by the others’ ideas. “But, David--don’t
you think that would be too ridiculous?” she asked, anxiously turning
toward him, after a surprised study of her mother’s flushed face.
“I think we can arrange it very nicely, somehow,” David said,
soothingly. “No need to go into it now, for she will certainly stay
here with Aunt Flora until you come home, at midsummer. And in the
meantime she may either form her own plans, or perhaps,” he added more
lightly, “perhaps another Frank du Spain will come on the scene, with
better success!”
Flora, diverted, asked him his meaning, and Sylvia thought she took a
surprising amount of interest in the immature affair. Young Du Spain
had told her he would inherit something, Flora said, and he seemed a
nice, cheerful young fellow. It seemed a great pity that they were not
older--that something definite might not come of it!
“Even now,” Flora argued, knitting fast, “if he really got a position,
through his father--Gay will have _something_--I would certainly not
let her go to him entirely empty-handed,” she went on, half aloud, as
if reasoning with herself. David remembered suddenly that, after all,
he and she were administrators of the estate until mid-June; they would
solve Gay’s problem somehow before that; he hardly imagined Sylvia
afterward disputing or changing any arrangement that they made about
Gay.
Perhaps Sylvia remembered this, too, and decided that her only policy
was a waiting one, until her full inheritance and liberty should be
put into her hands. She fell into kindly desultory talk about Gay, how
pretty the girl had grown, and how nicely mannered she was.
But when Flora, who seemed nervous and disturbed, presently got up and
went out of the room, Sylvia said to David:
“What I really have in the back of my head is that Mamma and I shall
have a long holiday in Europe next winter. I’ve never been, and it
would be wonderful to see England in the fall, and Paris, with all
the chestnuts turning red, and then settle down somewhere for two or
three months, perhaps, on the Riviera. It would do her a world of
good, and she seems upset of late. I think Gay’s being here,” Sylvia
added, thoughtfully, looking straight up into David’s eyes now, as they
stood together before the hearth, “has roused old, sad memories, and
I feel that I--well, I owe Mamma this holiday, after these years when
I’ve seen so little of her! I’ll get all my new responsibilities here
straightened out as soon as I can, graduate, perhaps get paperers and
furnace men working here, under Hedda and Trude, before we go, and then
have a real vacation before we come back,” she finished, smiling, “to
be the Flemings of Wastewater for the next forty or fifty years!”
“And of course there’s one more responsibility I hope you’ll decide
to assume, Sylvia,” David said, significantly, quite unexpectedly to
himself, but with his pleasant even voice and smile unchanged.
She understood him instantly and flushed rosily.
“Perhaps I will!” she answered, bravely.
“Be thinking it over?” he pursued.
Sylvia looked down at the pretty foot she had rested on the bright
brass and iron fire rods.
“It’s rather formidable,” she said, appealingly, looking up, “all
the business, the insurance and taxes and signatures--and my
graduation--and Wastewater, and the servants coming to me! I feel--feel
a little bit overwhelmed.”
“Of course you do!” David conceded, sympathetically.
“But I think,” Sylvia said, now with one hand on his shoulder and her
dark eyes raised seriously to his, “I think I’ve always had you in
mind, David--is that a very unwomanly thing to say? Give me a little
time to get my bearings.”
“All the time you want, dear!” David said, tenderly, as she paused.
For answer Sylvia raised her flushed and lovely face, and he kissed her
solemnly. Then the girl laughed a little excitedly and held him off
with both her hands linked in his, as she said:
“There, then! Is it ‘an understanding’?”
“It’s just what you wish, Sylvia.”
“Then that’s what I wish!” Sylvia answered, gaily. “Now let’s get our
coats on and race once or twice about the garden before it’s quite
dusk. Otherwise we sha’n’t be able to eat any of that cold turkey and
peach preserve dinner that Mamma’s probably fussing about now.”
But it was quite dark in the garden, and bitterly cold and windy, and
they had made only one turn when John rattled up to the side door with
the little car, from which Gay descended, weary, blown, but in high
spirits, hungry, comfortably weary, glad to be at home again. David
thought their all coming into the house together very homelike and
pleasant; the company was gone, but the family was gathered together
to discuss the remains of the big turkey and the memories of the house
party. He thought it would be charming to have this old house home for
them all, always; Gay was all the more attractive, after all, because
of the clouds and mists that hung over her birth and parentage, and
Sylvia would quickly get her bearings; she was too sane and fine to be
upset long even by her new importance.
Then the two girls, one so dark and the other so oddly fair, would
always be great friends, and even with Uncle Roger gone, and poor old
Tom gone, and so many other voices and faces gone for ever, Wastewater
would be a home for new Toms and Rogers, and again a hospitable and
imposing landmark in the countryside.
So musing, David thought with deep satisfaction of the future. Only
a few weeks before he had felt it would be an injustice to speak to
Sylvia, Sylvia the beauty, the heiress, barely of age. But Sylvia had
been brought into his own zone, in some strange manner, during these
Christmas holidays; for the first time in her life David had seen her
as perhaps needing affectionate guidance, sympathetic advice, as indeed
the young girl she really was, for all her superiorities. College was
all very well, thought David, for the nice, ordinary sort of girl like
Gwen or Laura Montallen; it helped them to form character, a sense of
balance and proportion, to make them into real women. But Sylvia was
different, she had been born balanced and conscientious and intelligent
and industrious, she needed softening now, and the interruption of her
own serene and unquestioned will. There was beginning to be just a hint
of the pedant, just a suggestion of the rut, about her.
It was sweet to him to think that with his love for her, his knowledge
of her affairs, his happy familiarity here at Wastewater, he might
actually give to a marriage with Sylvia more than any other man was
apt to give. That confident, straightforward decisiveness of hers was
exactly what led so many fine women into ridiculous marriages. He could
imagine Sylvia seriously telling him that she was about to marry some
engaging penniless idler: “He’s a count, you know, David--one of the
finest families in Europe!” Or perhaps she would not marry at all; she
had said laughingly of some young admirer months ago, “Possibly he
heard of Uncle Roger’s money, David!”
That wouldn’t do, either. Sylvia, pretty and spectacled, and
entertaining other nice unmarried college women here twenty years from
now was a dreadful thought.
For the world’s opinion of the proverbial guardian wedding with the
heiress David cared nothing at all. He was largely indifferent to
money; the little that he had sufficed him comfortably; his chief
expenses were for canvases and oils, and Wastewater and Keyport
supplied him with subjects the year round. Less than a dozen close
friends, a city club, an occasional dress rehearsal or first night, and
a seat alone five times a season at the opera were enough for David,
and for the rest he liked his comfortable old painting clothes, the
panorama of the seasons steadily moving onward--and always, behind and
through and above the leisurely tenor of his ways, Wastewater.
He roused from his reverie after supper to see Gay smiling at him from
the opposite chair.
“What are you thinking about, David? You looked so serious.”
“I was thinking very happy things about the future,” David answered,
exchanging just the fleeting shadow of a half smile with Sylvia.
“Look, Sylvia, I see a likeness to Uncle Roger in Gay now!” he
added, interestedly. “It’s stronger in this picture than in the one
downstairs!”
They all three looked up at the large portrait of Roger Fleming that
was above the mantel in Flora’s upstairs sitting room. Gay was just
below it, and she twisted her tawny head to look upward, too.
“I don’t see it!” Sylvia said, narrowing her eyes to scrutinize the
painted face and the living one. “But yes, I do, the mouths are
exactly alike!” she added, animatedly. “David, is mine like that?”
Flora was not in the room; they all glanced with instinctive caution
at the door now, as it rattled in a rising wind, perfectly aware that
to her nervous self-consciousness where all family discussions were
concerned even this much would be unwelcome.
But nobody came in, and Gay ended the debate about likenesses by
reminding them cheerfully:
“Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne;
The crossit line’s the kenter skein.”