Winter sunlight was slanting into the room when she awakened, and for a
while she lay still, trying to reconcile these beams from the southwest
with any possible hour on a January morning. Her watch had stopped at
half-past three. Or had it stopped?
She sat up, bewildered, the ticking watch at her ear. Sunshine from the
southwest, and her watch briskly ticking at half-past three!
“It can’t be!” Gabrielle said aloud, beginning heavily the business
of dressing. “Why, where are they all?” she murmured, gradually
fitting together in her mind the events of the past night. “Why didn’t
someone----”
Flooding sunlight and cold pure air from the southwest! The day seemed
turned around as, fifteen minutes later, she went slowly downstairs.
Nobody anywhere--sitting room, dining room, halls, pantry; but Hedda
and Margret were quietly talking over some busy chopping and peeling
in the spotless kitchen, and Margret started a wood fire in the
dining-room stove, and Hedda brought Gabrielle a delicious breakfast
luncheon and placed it on a small table near the blaze.
Gabrielle was there alone, thoughtful over her meal, when David came
cheerfully in. He looked just his pleasant self as he sat down, his
dark hair a little tumbled, and his old corduroy jacket spotted about
the cuffs with paint, but Gabrielle thought he gave her an unusually
sharp keen look, and felt tears prick behind her eyes as she smiled in
answer.
“Well,” he said, “you got some sleep!”
“Eleven hours,” said Gay.
“I’m glad. You looked all in last night. And Margret said you came down
to the kitchen, late as it was, and talked things over----”
“For an hour.” Gay pushed away her table, almost untouched.
“Feel like a walk?”
“Oh, no, thank you, David.” She smiled gratefully, but he heard the
sharp sigh that followed the words. “I feel--broken,” she said, with
suddenly wet eyes.
“I don’t blame you,” he answered, gently. “But you mustn’t take all
this too hard, Gay. There’s nothing--disgraceful about it, after all.
Your mother had typhoid fever, and it left her--like this. She doesn’t
suffer--indeed, poor Aunt Flora suffers much, much more than she does!
Aunt Flora’s just been telling me that Aunt Lily is usually perfectly
serene and happy, wanders in the garden, loves the flowers----”
Balm was creeping into the girl’s heart with every word he said, and
David saw, with a deep relief in his heart, that he was making an
impression.
“Finish your chocolate,” he pleaded. And smiling over the brink of her
cup with wearied eyes, Gay obediently picked it up and drank it to the
dregs.
“It seems that Aunt Lily has been restless since you came home,” David
added. “They never really know how much she understands or how she
learns things. But she knew that you were here and she has been wild
to see you. Being winter, she had been indoors most of the time, and
since Christmas, Aunt Flora says, she has been unusually restless.
That’s really the whole explanation--and that isn’t so terrible, is
it?” he finished, with a smile.
Gabrielle looked at him soberly.
“I would like to see her again,” she said, slowly.
“Well, by all means!” he answered, cheerfully. “I hear from Margret
that she seems to have a heavy cold and she’s in bed. But you can go up
there--talk to her----”
“My mother, David----” the girl faltered. And the eyes she turned from
his were brimming again. “It’s so different--from what most girls
think--when they say ‘Mother!’” she managed to say.
“I know,” David said, quickly, with infinite pity in his voice, “I
know, Gay. It’s very hard, dear.”
“What I realize now,” Gay began again, after a brief silence, and in a
voice she resolutely held steady, “what has come to me--suddenly!--is
that my name really is Fleming, that there was never any marriage at
all--between my mother and Charpentier.”
It was quite true that the thought had come to her suddenly, for at the
actual commencement of the sentence she had had no distinct suspicion
in the matter. Forlornly, she had been instinctively searching for
some phrase that should win David’s sympathy, that should help him to
realize how lonely and sad she felt.
But now the vague sorrow in her heart, the indefinable weight upon
her spirit, seemed to crystallize into these words, and almost
frightened of herself when she had said them, she ended on a note of
interrogation, and turned toward David for his denial.
There was a revulsion almost nauseating in its violence upon her when
David only looked at her with infinite pity and concern, and asked:
“Gay, my dear, dear Gay, why do you say that?”
“Oh, my God, my God, my God!” Gay exclaimed, suffocating. And she
got to her feet and walked to the embrasure of the big eastern bay
window, where she stood staring blindly out at the paths white with
shabby snow and the trees’ bare wet branches twinkling in the sunlight.
A passionate childish wish that she had never voiced this horrible
thought and so made it concrete in his consciousness and hers shook her
from head to foot. It was said--it was said--and now they must say more!
The fire in the stove had burned itself out; a chill was beginning to
pervade the gloomy great spaces of the dining room. The ugliest hour of
a cold, glaring winter afternoon lay upon the bare garden; through the
denuded shrubs they could see the steely ripple of the sea.
“You see that explains it all, David,” Gay said, hurriedly and briefly.
“Aunt Flora’s anger against my mother, and her anxiety to keep the
knowledge of her marriage from everyone. There _was_ no marriage----”
“That is a thing you could easily find out, Gay,” David reminded her,
watching her anxiously.
“Could find out?” There was a glint of hope in her voice, and in the
heavy, beautiful eyes she raised to his. “Do you mean that you don’t
know?”
“I think of course your mother was married!” David said, stoutly. “But
how can I convince you? I never gave it a moment’s thought before. Or
if I did,” he added, conscientiously, remembering vaguely some talk
before the fire with Aunt Flora, on the day that Gay had come home last
fall, “I must have been entirely reassured, for I never understand that
there was anything irregular about it at all.”
“I can ask,” Gay mused, sombrely.
“I _would_ ask, if I were you!” David answered, with a quick nod. “Only
remembering,” he added, “that if it should be what you fear, it does
not really touch _you_, Gay. You are not yet nineteen, and you are sure
to win friends, and your own place, and create your own life and your
own happiness, in these years that are ahead. Don’t feel anything but
pity, if this should be the case.”
She glanced at him gravely over her shoulder. Then he saw the blood
creep up under her clear, warmly colourless skin.
“I would like to have something--one thing!--in my life,” she said,
slowly, “of which I might be proud!”
David watched her as she walked slowly, and with her head held high in
a sort of weary dignity, from the room.
Flora, before the sitting-room fire later, told him that the girl had
been upstairs with poor Lily, who was in the drowsy state that followed
fatigue and the rather strong astringent medicine that Margret had
given her for a heavy cold. Gabrielle had sat beside her mother’s fire,
peacefully reading, Flora reported. Flora herself seemed oddly relieved
and at ease about the matter.
Gabrielle came into the room just before dinner, with her eyes still
clouded and heavy, but wearing the prettiest of her plain black
uniforms, with the white collar and cuffs that enhanced the delicate
beauty of her wrists and throat. She seemed composed but subdued,
and was so extraordinarily lovely, sitting silent in her chair after
dinner, raising her long curved lashes to look seriously at whoever
addressed her, that David thought that if anything could make Gay more
beautiful than before, this touch of tragedy and sorrow had done so.
To-night she seemed to have no heart for cards, and David dared not
suggest them; once, when Aunt Flora had left the room, she told him in
a hurried phrase, and with the hot colour burning in her cheeks, that
at the first opportunity she meant to question her aunt and clear up
the whole matter.
“I think you’re wise!” David said, warmly. “And meanwhile, would it do
any good to have me stay at Wastewater? Are you in the least nervous
about being left here?”
“Left here? With Margret and Daisy and Sarah and Hedda and Trude and
Aunt Flora?” she queried, looking up with the shadow of a sad smile.
“My dear David,” she added, as if half to herself, staring back at the
fire again, “what I have to fear is nothing from which you can save me!”
“Sad times come into every life, Gay,” the man said, trying to comfort
her. “I remember,” he blundered on, “I remember the day Tom and I were
brought home from school--when our mother died. That was before you
were born, or Sylvia was born. Aunt Flora wasn’t even married, if I
remember rightly--no, of course she wasn’t. For she was engaged to
Uncle Roger after that----”
“Ah, losing your mother is different!” Gay said, in a voice of pain.
“But with me, Davy, it would be better if I had lost her. If I had
never had her!”
Nothing more was said until Aunt Flora returned, and then David felt
a thrill of genuine admiration for the girl who could forget her own
heartache to watch the elderly woman’s card game, prompting her,
correcting her, discussing plays. Watching them both, he told himself
that he would remain at Wastewater, whatever the inconvenience to
himself, at least until he could make sure that Gabrielle had settled
the wretchedly upsetting question of her own legitimacy.
But the next day was bright, and the sunshine almost warm. Gay seemed
over the stormiest pain of her new shock and new suspicions, and David
saw that she did not intend to hurry any further investigations.
Moreover, his closest friend and associate, the lazy, happy-go-lucky
Jim Rucker, in whose city studio David occasionally set up an easel,
wired him distressedly concerning a question of some frames. Billings
wanted to know if the snowscapes were to have the same frames as the
picture called “White’s Barn, Keyport.” And if those three pictures
came back from the Washington Exhibition, where did David want them
left?
David was needed. He departed, carrying the comforting last memory
of Gay, gloved and muffled, walking briskly in the winter garden,
and promising him that if there were any really sensational weather
developments in the next few weeks, she would send him word.
“If there’s a blizzard,” she promised, with almost her old smile,
“you shall come back and paint it. Or one of those ice storms that
coat all the branches with glass! And be sure to let me know if the
‘notes’--those little scrappy sketches I love so--sell, and which ones.”
“Lord, she is beautiful. _Beautiful_,” David said aloud, in the taxi.
“I guess she’ll be sensible. She’s all right now!”
He did not know that she watched him out of sight with a heart like
lead. With him the winter sunlight seemed to go, too, leaving only gray
skies, gray sea, bare trees and frozen earth, leaving only shadows and
damp odours of plaster and dust and kerosene in Wastewater’s big walls,
leaving loneliness and fear and shame to Gabrielle.
Almost three weeks later she wrote him. David saw the Crowchester
postmark and instantly knew whose pretty, square handwriting that must
be. She wrote closely, evenly, yet there were a dash and a finish about
the blocked letters that gave the sheet the effect of a rather unusual
copper-plate engraving:
I had a long talk with Aunt Flora about ten days ago. And she told
me the truth. It was what I suspected. There was never a marriage,
and that was what broke her heart, and incidentally my poor mother’s
heart. The disgrace of it, and the fever, coming all at once, were
too much for her soul and mind, and can you wonder? I think I had
braced myself to hear it, David, and expected it, and I am trying
to meet it as well as I can, trying to work hard, and to keep busy,
and to believe that it is only fair that I should pay for what was
not my fault. That is the reason, of course--I mean the fact that it
was all secret and wrong--that Uncle Roger never made any search for
Charpentier, my father. My mother had no claim on him.
Aunt Flora was kindness itself about all this, and I think she feels
bitterly sorry for me. She talked to me so kindly about Sylvia and
herself always wanting me here, and indeed I could hardly be anywhere
else now, for my mother has been pretty sick, and likes to have me
about her. It seems that she fears any doctor we call in may be from
one of those sanitariums she so hates, so we have not called one. She
lies very peaceful and still, and, oddly enough, likes best to have
me play and sing to her. One kind thing that Aunt Flora did was to
have the old square piano upon which Sylvia and I used to practise
years ago, brought up to my mother’s room, and often we spend our
evenings there now.
And the letter went on, in a composed and courageous tone that David
found astonishing in any girl so young:
While she lives, which will not be long, for she seems more like
eighty than fifty now, and is so frail we hardly know whether she
will ever get up again--while she lives I must stay here, since
Sylvia and Aunt Flora will let me, whether my pride likes it or not,
of course. Afterward, I look to _work_--[she had underscored it
twice]--any sort of work, to help me get my balance back, to help
me feel that life is just in the long run, and that there is good
somewhere under all this.
David read the thin sheets more than once, and mused far more steadily
than he realized upon the situation of the lovely and loving young
creature to whom life had been so strangely harsh. There was not,
truly, as she had said, one thing of which she might be proud. Her
father was nothing to her, her mother was poor little weak-minded Aunt
Lily, the bread she ate, the roof that covered her, were Sylvia’s.
Nameless, penniless, at eighteen she faced the world with bare hands.
One day he stopped at a fancier’s, in the East Thirties, and sent up to
Wastewater a coffee-coloured airedale, seven weeks old. The creature
had somewhat the shape and feeling of a little muff, but was stocky,
warm, and wriggling, with a little eager red tongue coming and going,
and an entreating whine for whosoever stopped to finger his soft little
head. If Aunt Flora objected, David scribbled on his card, Gay was
to ask John please to keep Benbay, who was alas somewhat lacking in
points, but whose father was Champion Benbay Westclox II, until David
could take him away.
David, however, hoped that Aunt Flora would not object to Benbay. His
lack of “points” would not prevent the woolly little affectionate
creature from being a real companion and comfort to the lonely girl
at Wastewater. Studying, practising, brooding, walking alone in the
snow, eating meals alone with Aunt Flora in the dreary dining room,
singing her little songs to her forlorn and dying mother in the winter
evenings--David would shut his eyes and shake his head at the mere
thought of such a life for such a girl!
His exhibition was early in April, and was followed by another in
Chicago, where he would show pictures, and must be, if possible. David
planned to go to Wastewater immediately afterward and establish himself
there for the summer. Sylvia would be coming home in June, and there
would be all sorts of questions to settle. Sylvia would have plans--she
brimmed with plans. And of late David, musing over the problem of Gay
and her youth and her beauty and her future, had been entertaining a
new plan of his own.
It had come to him suddenly, this thought of a new solution for Gay,
and it had a strangely thrilling and heart-warming quality about it,
for all its undoubted whimsicality and unexpectedness. David had first
found himself thinking of it on the day when he and Jim Rucker were
bound for Chicago. David had been thinking idly, in his comfortable big
Pullman chair, and staring through the wide window at a landscape that,
although still bleak and bare, was already so different from what it
had been even a few weeks before.
Clouds so heavily packed then were flying wildly now across a sky that
seemed nearer, more accessible. Trees, leafless, yet had a faintly
moist and expectant air, as they whipped madly about. There were
thawing, and the taste of rain, and a great softening in the air; there
was ploughing under way, and children’s coats and winter hats were
already shabby and ready to be shed. Shadows lay longer, and daylight
lingered in the car almost until the dinner hour. David watched school
children stamping and running by the big roadside pools that were
ruffled by the wind; he saw mired cars in the muddy roads that were
hard as steel a few weeks before, and except on the northeastern sides
of fences and barns there was no more snow.
He was thinking of Gay, in a desultory fashion that had been customary
of late, just of Gay at Wastewater, coming and going in her plain
frocks, with her beautiful hand set off by the thin lawn cuff, and her
beautiful creamy throat rising from the broad, transparent organdy
collar, with that husky sweetness in her voice, and the fashion of
raising her up-curled lashes to look at him. Gay, opening doors,
walking by the sea----
And suddenly, full-grown in his mind, was the idea of marrying Gay. He
did not know whence it had come; it seemed complete, it was finished to
the last detail.
David was oddly shaken by this extraordinary inspiration. He did not
think of it as an idea: it was an obsession. Once in his mind, he could
think of nothing else, nor did he wish to think of anything else.
Under his desultory rambling conversations with Jim Rucker, during
their dinner, and while he was trying to read afterward, the insidious
sweetness of this astonishing vision persisted. David abandoned
himself to it over and over, as he might have done to some subtle and
dream-provoking drug.
He always imagined his homecoming to Wastewater, to find Gay in the
sitting room, sitting alone by the fire. He would come in to her, and
she would raise to his those beautiful, serious eyes, and he would
hear that husky, sweet voice in greeting. Sometimes the mere pleasure
of this much so intrigued David that he was obliged to go back to the
beginning and picture it all over again: the upstairs sitting room,
the drowsy coal fire in the steel-rodded grate; Uncle Roger’s smiling
picture, with the favourite horse and the greyhound, looking down from
above the mantel.
Then they would talk a little about her mother and Aunt Flora and
Sylvia, and then David would say unexpectedly: “I’ve thought of a
wonderful solution for you and all your troubles, dear old Gay. I want
you to marry me.” And when David reached this point in his dream, he
had to stop short. An odd, happy sort of suffocation would envelop
him, something that had nothing to do with love, but that seemed sheer
emotion, by a realization of the poignant dramatic beauty of the scene.
To be sure, David had said almost these very words to Sylvia only a
few months before. But strangely, strangely!--they had not seemed to
have anything in common with the same phrases when addressed to Gay.
In the first place, for ten years he had been steadily and admiringly
moving toward the day of his marriage to Sylvia. He had administered
her fortune with that in view, and being at this moment under a
flexible sort of promise to marry Sylvia, an “understanding” that was
to be made more definite presently, only if she so decreed, he had
given some concerned thought a few months before to his future status
as the husband of a rich young wife, as a money-hating, society-hating,
display-hating painter married to a girl of twenty-one who might quite
naturally be expected to enjoy her money and the social advantages it
would give her.
David even now thought of himself as loving Sylvia and of being the
proper mate for her. But Sylvia did not love him, or if she did, she
also loved the thought of her independence, of travel with her mother.
They had always thought they loved each other, and, there being no
change now in his feeling toward her, David quite honestly believed
that he loved her still.
But part of his plan for Gay included an explanation to Sylvia of the
complications of the situation. Oddly enough, David did not dwell, in
his thoughts, upon this explanation. There was no thrill in imagining
that. He thought of it hurriedly; Sylvia beautiful and understanding,
of course; Sylvia saying, “Why, certainly, David. It does solve
everything for poor little Gay, and is much the wisest arrangement all
round!”
That would be gotten through as briefly as possible; probably by
letter, or perhaps David could see her for a moment at college.
And immediately this was over, he would be free for that strangely
thrilling scene with Gay--a scene of which he did not think as
connected with love-making in any way. He had “loved” Sylvia for years,
and there was none of that feeling here. No, this was just an inspired
solution of poor little Gay’s affairs.
For however wise and charming, she was not the type of girl who
battles, or who wishes to battle, successfully with the world. She was
alone, poor, nameless, and beautiful, and David shuddered as he thought
what life might add to her present load of troubles and wrongs.
On the other hand, it would be excruciating to her to live along
indefinitely at Wastewater. She would be dependent upon Sylvia, she
would have no real place in the family, and on every side would
be constant reminders of her mother’s unhappy life and of her own
illegitimacy.
But--married to him, established in the sunshiny little farmhouse in
Keyport where he kept a sort of studio--Mrs. David Fleming----!
“What a wonderful thing marriage is!” David thought, shutting the book
he could not read and lapsing contentedly into his golden dream again.
He pictured Gay as his happy, simple, busy young wife, pictured them
breakfasting on the shabby little east porch of the Keyport house on
some summer morning when the peaceful ocean swelled and shone like a
stretch of blue Chinese silk. “What a wonderful thing it is to take a
woman right out of her own house like that!” David said, with a strange
plunging at his heart. “I don’t know that I ever realized just what an
extraordinary thing it is, before!”
He began to imagine himself as introducing her to the simple household
arrangements there: the little wood stove, the saucepans in which
he and Rucker had sometimes scrambled eggs, the odd sketches and
“notes” on the walls, the whole slipshod, comfortable little bachelor
establishment. And his heart sang at the thought.
He was only Uncle Roger’s stepson, whose income was something like four
thousand a year. Gay was--nothing. What they did, where they went, how
they spent the little money they had, would be nobody’s business. They
would go to Spain, if a few pictures sold at some sale, next year, or
the year after--and if they had a child some day, David added in his
thoughts, with a little unconscious squaring of his shoulders, and a
grin, they would take him with them--drag him along and toughen him,
and let Aunt Flora and Sylvia say what they would!
The relief of not having to think of Wastewater, Aunt Flora, and--and,
yes, of Sylvia, too, made him feel a sort of shamed joy. In that
arrangement he would always have been self-conscious, fighting against
nameless and subtle and cramping opposition for his identity and his
freedom. If he wanted a studio in Wastewater, he knew just how Sylvia
would cushion it and beautify it. If he wanted old Rucker to come up
and paint for a while, he knew just how Aunt Flora, abetted by Sylvia,
would ask innocently: “How long will Mr. Rucker be with us, David?”
He knew--because he had indeed experienced it, when rendering her
accounts--exactly how conscientiously and incessantly Sylvia would
discuss money matters with him.
“If you are in that neighbourhood, David,” he could imagine her saying
pleasantly, “do get those bonds from Crocker and put them in the
safety-deposit boxes. I do think it was just a little irregular to
leave them there since they aren’t needed.” And, “Will you go over that
once again, David? You say they are reorganizing the company and want
me to accept these securities for the old--I don’t understand.”
“You only have to sign that certificate, dear; all the other
stockholders in the old company are doing it,” he imagined himself
responding, for the tenth time.
“Yes, but David, suppose this is so much worthless paper?” Sylvia
would ask, intelligently. And Aunt Flora would nod in grave approval
and admiration. No cheating Sylvia! “I don’t believe in scribbling my
signature anywhere and everywhere,” Sylvia would go on, reinforced.
“Please let’s go over it again and again, until it’s all quite clear!”
But with Gay, how simple and easy it would all be! Just their own happy
daily plans to discuss, and their own microscopic income to administer.
They would go up to Wastewater for Sunday dinner with Sylvia and
Aunt Flora, and Gay would really be a Fleming then, and all her old
unhappiness forgotten. Who would know--or care!--that beautiful young
Mrs. David Fleming had been born outside of Mrs. Grundy’s garden walls?
Gay would come in to her husband’s exhibitions, wearing that little
velvet gown, or another like it, so vitally eager, so interested, so
familiar with every stroke of the brush----
And at this point in his musing David would go back to the beginning
again, and think of Wastewater in an April twilight, a week or two from
now, and himself arriving there, to find Gay dreaming alone before the
fire in the upstairs sitting room. She would raise those star-sapphire
eyes and give him that radiant smile, and they would talk about Aunt
Lily, and Aunt Flora, and Sylvia, and then he would say suddenly:
“I’ve thought out a real plan for you, Gay! It involves my having a
talk with Sylvia, and it involves a little green-and-white farmhouse
and barn in Keyport, for which I pay a hundred dollars rent a year, and
a plain gold ring----!”
How bewildered she would look; he could see that faintly smiling,
maternally indulgent look----!
His dream took complete possession of David, and made everything he
did and said in these days seem unreal. The exhibition was under-run
by a strong current of it: “It involves you and me, Gay, and my having
a talk with Sylvia,” David was saying to himself over and over, and
the sale of a picture only made him think suddenly that he would like
to give her a little present. Oh, and he had his mother’s beautiful
old-fashioned diamond engagement ring, and also some almost valueless
but pretty topazes that had been hers, a ring and earrings and a chain,
and an oval onyx pin with a pearl in it. These would be charming with
Gay’s warm golden colouring--especially if she wore those plain little
velvet frocks----
Life took on quite a new meaning for David, and he said to himself
that it must be because he was moving in this matter with Gay’s safety
and comfort and future rather than his own predominant in his mind,
that this odd fluttering happiness, this poignant interest in the
tiniest things in his day--because oddly they all seemed connected
with his dream--this new delightful sense of values in anything and
everything, had come to him.
Spring was always late at Wastewater, but spring was surely here, he
thought, when he reached the old place late in an afternoon early in
May.
He had hoped to get to Wastewater in the middle of, or at least by the
third week in April, but upon returning to New York he found business
matters of Sylvia’s there which could not wait. It was with a grim
little twitch in the corner of his mouth that David devoted himself to
them. Sylvia would pay her next administrator; and it would not be her
affectionate cousin David!
Now he would not get to Wastewater until May, and the twenty-third of
April was Gay’s birthday! David felt quite disproportionately provoked
by the delay. Poor little Gay, she would not have much fun on her
nineteenth anniversary. And because it seemed so newly and delightfully
his business to think of Gay’s pleasure now before his own, he sent her
a birthday letter.
David wrote, with something less than the truth:
I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and hoping that, between us all
this summer, we can lighten that sad heart of yours. Or no, I won’t
say “us,” for I hope to do something toward it all by myself. I’ve
got a most attractive plan to propose to you, and you must make up
your mind to agree to it. I’m writing Sylvia about it, for she comes
into it a little--but not much. It is almost entirely dependent upon
you, and somewhat upon yours ever faithfully and affectionately,
DAVID.
She would get nothing from that, David assured himself as he mailed
the letter. Having done so he tried to think just why the thrilling
excitement that possessed him had seemed to exact that he relieve his
overcharged emotions with just so much of a hint. It would only puzzle
her----