The night that followed was one of the strange, abnormal times that
seemed--David thought more than once--so peculiarly appropriate, so
peculiarly in tone with the atmosphere of Wastewater; with the empty,
dusky, decaying rooms, with the shadowy mirrors clouded with mould,
with the memories, the tragedies, the ghosts and echoes that on a
bitter winter night seemed to throng the old place.
Outside there was a sharp frost, and when the massed silent snow
slipped from the branches of the old elms, an occasional crack like a
pistol shot sounded through the night. A cold bright moon moved over
the packed snow, and the sea swelled with booming, sullen rushes over
the rocks. Clocks seemed, to David, to stand still; to mark strange
hours.
When Gabrielle had put her young arm about the shrinking, withered
form of the harmless old feeble-minded woman that David did now indeed
recognize as Aunt Lily, for some reason he had felt his throat thick,
and his eyes blind with tears. The girl was so young, she had been so
full of hope and gaiety and high spirits during the happy holidays and
the weeks that followed; she had tramped beside him chattering like a
sturdy little sister, belted into a big coat, her eager feet stamping
and dancing on the snow, her cheeks glowing with the tingle of the pure
cold air. They had had some contented rainy mornings together, in the
bare upstairs room he called his studio, and they had sometimes played
a sort of double solitaire in the evenings, Gay as anxiously excited
as a child, and saying “Oh, fudge!” when the cards fell wrong, in a
little baffled, furious tone that always made him laugh. He and she had
thought the weak little mother and the worthless, wandering father long
ago vanished from her problem; the child had quite a sufficient problem
left, as it was! And she had faced it so bravely, faced it cheerfully
even with the constant reminder of Sylvia’s contrasted good fortune,
Sylvia’s wealth, Sylvia’s impeccable parentage, right before her vision.
Now, suddenly, while her heart was thumping with the shock and terror
of awakening from sleep to find this dreadful apparition in her room,
she had had to accept this same mowing, gibbering, weeping old woman as
her mother. And David loved her that she had not hesitated, where for
sheer bewilderment he knew he might have hesitated.
She had not glanced at Aunt Flora, who was leaning sick and silent
against a chair, nor at the cowed and white-faced old Belgian servants,
nor at him. Quite simply she had put her arm about poor Aunt Lily,
touched her young lips to the yellowed old forehead where the forlorn
wisps of grayish hair hung down, and then turned, steady-eyed and
ashen-cheeked but quite composed, to say quietly:
“Where does she sleep, Aunt Flora? In that room where I saw the light?
I’ll go up with her--she’s shuddering with cold, she’ll be ill.
I’ll--you’ll go with me, won’t you, Margret? We’ll get her to bed.”
For Margret, also pale, in a gray wrapper, and looking anxiously from
one to the other as if to read in their faces what had occurred, had
joined the group from some rear doorway.
“No, that was partly it, Gabrielle,” Flora forced herself to say, with
chattering teeth. “She hasn’t been so bad until lately. And after you
met her, that day, we moved her into the back of the house--someone
was always supposed to be near her. You shouldn’t have gotten out of
bed and come through the halls in your bare feet, Lily!” Flora mildly
reproached her sister. Lily clung stubbornly to Gabrielle’s arm, but
they were all moving slowly in the direction of the rooms Flora had
mentioned now, through the bitter darkness of the halls. The lamp,
carried by David, sent their shadows wheeling about the angles and
corners ahead of them, doors banged, shutters creaked, and when Lily’s
chattering whisper of complacency and exulting triumph was silent,
they could hear Hedda and Trude telling Margret that the sick lady had
wandered into Miss Gabrielle’s rooms in the night and frightened her.
Lily was really almost sick by the time they reached the homely,
comfortable rooms, which, Gabrielle noted, were well furnished, and
warmed by a still-glowing stove. David built up the fire while they
put the poor little chattering creature to bed, and Gabrielle, without
seeming to be even now conscious of anybody’s presence but that of her
mother, caught up an old ivory-backed brush and massed the straying
gray hair into order, pinning it, David noted pitifully, with the pins
that had held back from her face her own thick, rich braids. There was
a tenderness, an absorbed, gentle, and childish pity about her whole
attitude the while she did so that made his throat thicken again.
Meanwhile Margret and Hedda, evidently well used to this ministry and
moving about the room with an air of being entirely at home there, had
supplied Lily with hot-water bottles and some sort of milky hot drink
which Lily fretfully complained was bitter.
“It has her sleeping stuff in it,” Margret explained, in an aside. Lily
smiled knowingly at Gabrielle.
“They wouldn’t mind poisoning me a bit, dearie,” she said, in a loud
whisper. “At Crosswicks they used always be trying to poison us.”
However, she took the drink, when Gabrielle held the glass, in short
sips, meanwhile patting the girl’s hand, beaming, and occasionally,
with increasing drowsiness, recalling old memories.
“Gabrielle had a little gray coat and a hat with gray fur on
it--beaver, it was real beaver--it looked so good with her golden
curls!” she said once, complacently. “Roger said she looked like a
squirrel. Where is Roger, Flora? Why don’t he come up some night, so’s
we could all play euchre, like we use’ to?”
And at another time, some moments later, she added, in a sweet and
natural voice: “I was looking all over the place for Tom. He gets my
nasturtium seeds and eats them! But I don’t know where all this snow’s
come from. It was real sunny yesterday when I put them out, and Roger
and Will were in swimming!”
All this time Flora had sat in an armchair by the stove, with one hard,
veiny hand tight over her eyes. Margret lessened the lights, Lily began
to sink into sleep, and Gabrielle sat timidly down near her, still
holding her hand. The servants slipped away, but still Flora did not
stir.
When Lily was so soundly off that their voices did not disturb her,
David touched Gabrielle’s arm, and stiff, and looking a little
bewildered, she rose noiselessly to her feet. Flora started up, pale,
and with a bitten under lip and a look of some deep fright in her eyes,
and they quietly left the room, David carrying the lamp as before.
“And now,” he said, cheerfully, when they were back in the hall outside
of Gabrielle’s room, “there’s no good worrying ourselves about all this
to-night! You look exhausted, Aunt Flora, and Gay here has had enough.
Jump into bed, Gay, it’s after two, and get off to sleep. I’ll leave my
door open and you leave yours--or if you like I’ll wheel this couch up
against your door and sleep on it myself.”
“No, David, thank you; I’m not afraid now,” the girl said, quietly
and seriously, and David knew that there were more than vague unnamed
terrors to occupy her thoughts now. “I’ll do splendidly, and to-morrow
we’ll talk. I only hope,” she added slowly, “my mother will not be ill,
although”--and there was infinite sadness in her voice--“perhaps I
shouldn’t even hope that, for her! Good-night, Aunt Flora.”
And with a sudden impulse that seemed to David infinitely fine and
sweet, she stooped and kissed her aunt’s cheek before she turned to her
own door.
“Good-night, Gay dear, don’t worry!” David said, tenderly. And with a
quick emotion as natural as hers had been, he kissed her forehead as a
brother might have done. Flora had already gone, and Gay smiled at him
pathetically as she shut her door.
She would not think to-night, the girl told herself restlessly.
But there was nothing for it but thought. She was bitterly cold,
and shuddered as she snuggled into the covers, and stared out with
persistently wakeful eyes at the blackness of the big room. Gay heard
creaks, crackling, the lisp of falling blots of snow, the detonations
of contracting furniture in distant closed rooms, the reports of
breaking branches outside. And always there was the cold, regular pulse
of the sea.
The girl looked at her watch; twenty minutes of three, and she seemed
to have been tossing here for hours. Her brain seethed; faces, voices,
came and went, problems for the future, speculations as to the past.
She was deathly cold; she wondered if there were any fuel at her cold
fireplace, lighted the candle, and investigated. None.
“Well, these windows at least can be closed!” Gay decided, with
chattering teeth. The night struck through her thin nightgown like
a wall of ice as she struggled with the heavy blinds. Gabrielle
experienced a weary and desperate sensation of discouragement; the
horrible night would never end, her thoughts would never straighten
themselves out into peace and quiet again, there would never be
sunlight, warmth, safety in the world!
Looking down, however, toward the kitchen wing, she saw that a
heartening red light was striking through the shutters, and immediately
she caught up her wrapper and went slippered and shuddering down the
long stairs and passages that led to the kitchen.
She opened the door upon heartening lamplight and firelight; Margret,
Trude, and Hedda were in comfortable talk beside the stove, and a
boiling coffee-pot sent a delicious fragrance into the dark old room.
“Margret,” Gay began, piteously, with a suddenly childish feeling of
tears in her voice. “I can’t sleep--I’ve been lying awake----”
And immediately she was on her knees beside Margret, and had her bright
head buried in the old servant’s lap, and Margret’s hand was stroking
her hair.
Gay, after the first tears, did not cry. But as the blessed heat and
light seemed to penetrate to the centre of her chilled being, and as
the old servant’s hands gently stroked her hair, she felt as if she
could kneel here for ever, not facing anything, not thinking, just warm
again and among human voices once more.
Margret’s words, if they were words, were indistinguishable; neither
Hedda nor Trude spoke at all. The Belgian women looked on with their
faded old eyes red with sympathy. Trude put a smoking cup of coffee,
mixed in the French fashion, as Gay liked it, on the table, and Hedda
turned a fresh piece of graham toast on the range, and Margret coaxed
the girl to dispose of the hot drink before there was any talk.
Afterward, when Gay had dried her eyes upon a towel brought by the
sympathetic Hedda, and rolled herself tight in her wrapper, and had her
feet comfortably extended toward the range, Margret said:
“You mustn’t feel angry at us, Miss Gabrielle. It was to spare you, I’m
sure, that Miss Flora has kept this secret all these years.”
“I’m not angry----” Gabrielle began, and stopped abruptly, biting her
lip, and turned her eyes, brimming again, toward the glow of the range.
“I know, it seems awful hard, but this has always been a bitter thing
to Miss Flora, and she has taken her own way about it,” Margret said,
kindly, and there was silence again. “You know your mamma,” the
old woman began again, presently, and Gay’s eyes, startled, fixed
themselves for a moment upon Margret’s face, as if the girl found the
term strange. “Your mamma made a silly marriage, dear,” Margret went
on, “and Miss Flora felt very badly about it. Your mother was such a
pretty, gentle girl, too,” she added. “I’d see her gathering flowers,
or maybe hear her singing at the piano, when I’d come up here to
Wastewater to help them out with sickness, or company, or whatever it
was. Very pretty, Miss Lily was. There was quite a family then. Miss
Flora had married Mr. Will Fleming, and Sylvia was just a little thing,
as dark as a gipsy. And of course that was just the time that poor Mr.
Roger’s wife was dying of some miserable growth she’d had for years,
and it was when Tom run away. Mrs. Roger Fleming had a big couch on
the porch in summer, and she’d be laying there, and perhaps Mr. Roger
reading to her, or talking about some cure; they were for ever trying
new cures and new doctors! And Miss Flora would have Sylvia out there,
with her big rag doll--Sylvia’s father was never much of a success,
they used to say, he was usually away somewhere getting a new job of
some sort,” Margret added, reminiscently.
“Somehow I never think of Aunt Flora as having a husband,” Gay said,
in a sombre, tear-thickened voice. “Her being Sylvia’s mother, and all
that, seems natural enough. But to think of her as Mrs. Will Fleming
always is so queer.”
“I don’t know that she ever loved Mr. Will,” Margret said, with a
glance behind her at Hedda, who was straightening the kitchen as
composedly and indifferently as if the hour had been four o’clock in
the afternoon instead of the morning. Hedda was paying no attention and
Margret went on, with all an old servant’s significance: “It was well
known that Miss Flora loved Roger Fleming all her life, and she was
engaged to him after his first wife, that was David’s and Tom’s mother,
died.”
“Yes, I know,” Gabrielle said, with a long sigh. She had heard all this
before.
“When Roger Fleming married the second time, she took his brother
Will,” Margret resumed, “and for a while they had a little apartment
in Boston, and he was in a bank there, but he died when Miss Sylvia
was only three and Miss Flora was here more than she ever was there,
anyway; Miss Lily stayed here all the time. And then, that terrible
summer when little Tom ran away, if Miss Lily didn’t fall in love with
a man nobody knew anything about----”
There was an old-fashioned little peasant bench beside the stove,
brought from across the seas when Hedda and Trude had come to America
twenty-five years before, and Gabrielle was on this low seat now, with
her arms across Margret’s knees. She looked up into Margret’s face
wistfully as she said:
“But there was nothing against my father? Wasn’t he just a young man
who was staying in Crowchester for a while?”
“He had some sort of agency,” Margret said. “No, dear, for all we ever
knew he was a good enough man. But he was no husband for Miss Lily,
who was Mr. Roger Fleming’s cousin, and had lived here at Wastewater
all her life. And more than that, she married him secretly, and that’s
always a bad thing!” the old woman added, impressively.
“Yes, I know!” Gabrielle murmured, with impatience and pain in her
voice. “But I don’t see anything so terrible in it!” she finished,
looking back at the fire again and half to herself.
“Well, it was such a bad time, when they were all so upset,” Margret
argued. “Miss Flora felt something terrible,” she added, simply,
“when she knew that Miss Lily--her sister that she’d always guarded
and loved so dearly--was secretly married and going to have a baby. I
don’t know that she told Mrs. Roger Fleming, who was so little and so
delicate, anything about it, but I know she talked it over with Mr.
Roger, for he came to me--so kindly! he was a wonderful man for being
kind-hearted--and told me that Miss Lily was going into Boston to live
in Miss Flora’s little apartment for a little while, while they tried
to find this man, Charpentier----”
“That was my father,” Gay interpolated.
“That was your father, dear. I went to Boston with your mother and got
her nicely settled,” Margret resumed. “She was very quiet then, and
pleased with the little things she was making for the baby, but it was
only a few months later--when Mr. Roger was off hunting little Tom, and
Mrs. Roger dying, with this doctor or that quack or dear knows what
always in the house here--that poor Miss Lily got typhoid fever.”
“Before I was born!” Gay had heard of the typhoid fever, but had never
quite placed it in the succession of events before.
“Just after you were born. Poor Miss Flora was pulled every which way,”
said Margret. “She’d rush into Boston to see Miss Lily, and she’d rush
back here, afraid Mrs. Roger had died while she was gone. She didn’t
dare risk the infection for Miss Sylvia, and so she sent for me, and I
took Miss Sylvia into the rooms where poor Miss Lily is now, and Miss
Sylvia hardly saw her mother for weeks. Miss Flora went up to see her
sister--that was your mother--every week, and while she did that she’d
never risk infection for little Sylvia.
“Well, then poor little Mrs. Roger died--very sudden, at the end. Miss
Lily was convalescent then, but weak as a rag, and she and you came
down here to Wastewater--and you were the most beautiful child I ever
laid my eyes on!” Margret broke off to say, seriously.
Gabrielle, red-eyed and serious, laughed briefly.
“Well, you were a beautiful child,” Margret persisted. “Miss Flora let
Miss Sylvia and me go on and take a peep at you, in a blanket, the day
you came. Miss Lily was very sick after the trip, and she didn’t get
out of bed for a week, and Hedda and I had you, and didn’t we make Miss
Sylvia jealous with the fuss we made over the new baby!
“I remember one day--they were all in black then for poor Mrs. Roger,
and Mr. Roger came home suddenly from one of his trips, poor man! We’d
not seen him since the day of the funeral----”
“He got here too late to see her again?” Gabrielle asked, knowing the
answer.
“He’d gotten here the very day of the funeral,” Margret nodded. “And
he’d just stood looking at her as she lay there dead--she’d been more
than five years his wife, and she was only twenty-two as she lay there
with the flowers all around her! And he said to poor Miss Flora, ‘I
killed her, Flora!’ And out of the house he walked, and we never saw
him again until this day I’m talking about, six months after the
funeral.
“By this time Miss Lily, your mother, was all over her illness, but
the typhoid had left her very weak and light-headed, and sometimes
she’d talk very queer, or cry, or whatever it was,” Margret went on.
“In fact, that was the beginning of her trouble--she never again
was--quite right--here,” interpolated Margret, significantly, touching
her forehead. “Well, this day she was all in white, and she had an
innocent sort of childish look, and Mr. David was home from school, and
Miss Sylvia was running about, and you were just getting to the cunning
age--my goodness, but you were a beautiful baby!” the old woman said
again, affectionately. “Well, Mr. Will Fleming was home, he was out of
a job again, and they were all out on the lawn--Mr. David was a fine
little fellow of about thirteen then, and he saw Mr. Roger first, and
he went running over. And Roger Fleming came up to them and asked, as
he always did: ‘Any news of Tom? Any letter from my boy?’ and they told
him, No. And then Miss Lily held you out to him so gently, and her face
flushed up and she said: ‘Roger, you’ve hardly seen my pretty baby!’
and I remember his taking you in his arms and saying, ‘Well, hello,
here’s a yellow-headed Fleming at last!’”
“Nobody seemed to make much of my Charpentier blood, or my name,”
Gabrielle observed, drily.
“I remember,” Margret resumed, without answering, perhaps unhearing,
“that after a while Mr. Roger said to Miss Flora, so sadly, ‘Look at
them, David and Sylvia and this baby! But my own boy will never be
master of Wastewater!’ and she said to him, ‘Roger, he’ll come home,
dear!’
“But indeed he didn’t ever come home,” Margret finished, sighing, “and
Miss Sylvia’s father died a year or two later and never left a son
behind him. And after a while poor Mr. Roger died--he died a broken
man. And then we had to send Miss Lily to Crosswicks, for she got
worse and worse. She was there for fifteen years. But Crosswicks broke
up last year, and Miss Flora didn’t quite know what to do with her,”
Margret added, “and it was only while she was finding some other good
place where she’d be happy that we thought of keeping her here. Poor,
gentle little soul, she’d never hurt you or any one.”
Her voice died away into silence, and Gabrielle sat staring darkly into
the fire, with a clouded face.
For a long time the two sat together, the girl with her young strong
hands locked in Margret’s, and her eyes absently fixed on the dying
fire, and gradually the old woman’s soothing voice had its effect.
Margret gently begged her not to worry, there was no harm done, and
perhaps it would be better, after all, to have her see her mother daily
and naturally, as the poor little mental and physical wreck she was,
and get over the fright and mystery once and for all. And now Gabrielle
must take a bottle of hot water upstairs and get to sleep, for it was
long after four, and they mustn’t keep poor Hedda up all night.
Hedda was quite frankly snoring in the rocker, back in the gloom,
but Gabrielle obediently roused herself from deep study, and kissed
Margret, and retraced her way up through the cold halls. Her room
looked tumbled and was cold; she opened the window. Still night, night,
night, black and cold and unbroken--there was no end to this winter
night! But Gabrielle was young and cruelly wearied in mind and body,
and after three minutes in the cool sheets a heavenly warmth began to
envelop her, and she fell deeply asleep.