Gabrielle, however, was more affronted than puzzled by it. It made her
definitely uneasy. She suspected at once what was in his mind, and in
the utter despair that engulfed her she felt that this would be the
crowning trial, the crowning indignity, in a life that was filled with
both.
The days since her discovery regarding her mother had seemed endless to
her. They were the cold dark days that follow the coming in of the new
year, there was nothing of the holidays’ snap and exhilaration about
them. Rain, clouds, winds, heavy snows, rushing storms had thundered
and banged about Wastewater; Gay felt that every out-of-door garment
she had was twisted and soaked and half dried; she was sick with
loneliness and discouragement.
In vain she made herself practise, made herself walk and study. There
was no life in it; everything she did come up against a blank wall, a
dreary “What’s the use?” What was the use of living, to find that so
much that was weak and stupid and wrong was blended into one’s blood?
If there had been a sweet, interested mother to put her arm about
one, or a big father to advise and adore, if there had been normal
friendships, neighbours, all the cheerful life of the average American
girl--ah, that would have been so different! But Gabrielle was alone,
yet curiously imprisoned in this dreary old silent place, tied to the
poor little invalid who rarely identified her, and to dismal, quiet
Aunt Flora, and to all the ghosts and echoes of Wastewater.
Tied, too, to an unceasing contemplation of Sylvia’s perfections,
Sylvia’s good fortune, Sylvia’s charms. Sylvia would be home in June as
the daughter of the house, and the heiress; already some papering and
painting was being done in preparation for her return; she herself had
selected papers and hangings in Boston weeks ago.
Gabrielle had borne bravely the initial shock of discovering her mother
but she weakened as the slow, cold weeks went by, let her music go,
neglected her books, wept and brooded a great deal. David’s birthday
letter brought the first smile of many days to her face, and she opened
it with the old brightness he always brought to her shining in her eyes.
The cryptic phrases made her bite her lip thoughtfully; look off into
space for a little while. And presently she went for a lonely walk by
the sea, and half-a-mile away from the house, seated upon a rock above
the ebbing teeth of the cold tide, she read the letter again.
Then she tore it to scraps and buried it under a stone. Her cheeks
blazed with colour and a nervous hammering commenced in her heart. He
could not mean--but he _could_ not mean that he meant to ask her to
marry him?
This would be preposterous; it certainly was not that. Yet as Gabrielle
remembered the phrases of the short letter the horrible conviction came
to her that her suspicion was justified. He was engaged to Sylvia, or
at least there was between them an understanding more or less definite;
that was what he meant by Sylvia’s part, Sylvia’s “coming into it a
little.” And the rest was between him and Gabrielle.
Oh, he could not intend to hurt her so terribly, to add this
insufferably humiliating thing to all that she was enduring now!
“I don’t believe it!” Gabrielle said aloud to the gulls and the sea.
“David wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be honest, and he would know how
mortally--how mortally hurt I would be!”
But the uncomfortable fear persisted. David always entered into
Sylvia’s and Aunt Flora’s plans with all the affectionate interest of a
devoted son. He knew they were troubled about Gay. He would step into
the breach and solve the Gay problem once and for all.
“Oh, my God, I cannot bear it, if he begins to say something like that
to me!” Gay said, passionately, getting to her feet and beginning to
walk along the rough shore blindly, hardly conscious of what she was
doing. “How cruel--how cruel they are! They don’t know, you see,” she
added, to herself, more quietly. “They don’t know how hard it is!
Aunt Flora will think it over and decide that David would be a most
wonderful match for me----”
Her heart began to beat fast again, and her face burned.
“If he comes here next week,” she said, hurriedly and feverishly, “I
will not be here! Where can I go? I won’t--I can’t have him tell me
about it, that Sylvia thinks it wise, and Aunt Flora thinks it wise.
No, my dear David,” Gay said, stumbling on, and crying bitterly as she
went, “you are the one man in the world who cannot solve my problems by
marrying me! You would do it, to have them happy, and to make me happy,
but that would be more than I can bear! I’ve borne a great deal--I wish
I had never been born!” And blinded by tears, she sat down upon a rock,
and buried her head in her arms, and sobbed aloud.
But when she got home she was quite herself again, and had the puppy
in the sitting room before dinner, playing with him charmingly in her
low chair; standing him up on his indeterminate little hind legs, in
a dancing position, doubling him up with little bites and woofs of
affection, to which the struggling puppy made little woofing and biting
replies.
Gabrielle had by this time quite convinced herself that it was idiotic
to suspect sensible David of anything so fantastic as disposing of
Sylvia, whom he so heartily admired, and offering himself to her, whom
he had not seen for twelve long weeks. She put the suspicion resolutely
from her.
Aunt Flora had softened so much to Ben, as the puppy was called, that
he was a regular third in the evening group, and had even been up to
Lily’s room. Flora often pretended that Ben could not be comfortable
curled up in a ball in an armchair and sound asleep, and would drag him
into her lap with an impatient “Here, if you won’t be quiet anywhere
else!” To-night Gay forestalled this by surrendering him to Aunt Flora
as soon as dinner was over. Neither played cards to-night, Flora
thoughtfully pulled the little dog’s soft ears, Gabrielle sat opposite,
with Emerson’s Essays open in her lap.
“Poor Lily isn’t going to last much longer, Gabrielle,” Flora said,
presently, with a sigh. The relief of sharing her secret had quite
visibly softened Flora, and she often discussed Gay’s mother with the
girl as with a confidante and an equal. “I think we must have a doctor,
now. I know, of course, what he will say; she had constant care from a
doctor while she was at Crosswicks. But, afterward, it is as well to
have had some advice.”
Gabrielle, listening soberly, nodded with a sigh. She could not pretend
to grieve. More, she could not pretend that it would not be a great
lightening of her load when that frail little babbling personality was
no more. She thirsted to get away from Wastewater, away from ghosts
and shadows and echoes, into the world again! Away from David, with
his kind eyes and his interested smile, away from Sylvia, who was so
cruelly armed at all points with beauty and intelligence, with friends
and money and position and power!
Presently Flora spoke of Sylvia; David would be home in a few days now,
and Sylvia in less than five weeks. It would be so wonderful to have
Sylvia home for always.
“Do you know, Gabrielle,” said Flora, jerking her yarn composedly
over Ben’s little sleeping head, “I would not be intensely surprised
if nothing came of the understanding between David and Sylvia. From
something she wrote me, I rather suspect that there is somebody----No,
I can’t say that. Perhaps it is only that she does not want to think of
anything so serious so soon. She’s not yet twenty-one, after all. But
she wrote me as if she might be thinking it wiser for David----”
Gabrielle heard no more. Her throat constricted again, and her hands
grew cold. All the fears of the afternoon returned in full force. But
surely--surely they couldn’t all be so simple as to think that she
would placidly and gratefully accept this solution of her problem, her
poverty, her namelessness, her superfluousness!
David would not, anyway, she told herself a hundred times in the days
to come. David was understanding, David was everything that was kind
and good. He would help her find her independence, he would always be
her friend, and Gay knew, in her own secret heart, that her universe
would always revolve about him, that there would always be a mysterious
potency in the mere sound of his voice, or touch of his hand, where she
was concerned.
But discuss her with Sylvia and Aunt Flora, and kindly and with
big-brotherly superiority offer her a “plan,” a plan to accept his name
and his protection, simply because she was so apparently incapable of
taking care of herself! Gabrielle suffocated at the thought. No, David
couldn’t be David and do that.
In the ten days that elapsed before his arrival at Wastewater she
alternated between such violent extremes of feeling, and lay awake
pondering, imagining, and analyzing the situation so constantly at
night that she was genuinely exhausted when the afternoon of his coming
came at last.
There were moments when she felt she could not see him, dared not face
him. There were times when she longed for his arrival, and to assure
herself with a first glance that all this nervous anticipation was her
own ridiculous imagining, and that no thought of it had ever crossed
his mind!
When he finally came Gay was in the garden. For spring had come
to Wastewater, and David’s fancy of finding her before a fire in
the sitting room had been outdated by two full weeks of sunshine.
There was fresh green grass sprouting about the old wall, there
were daisy-starred stretches of it under the massed blossoms of the
fruit trees; gracious shadows lay long and sweet everywhere over new
green leaves; the willows were jade fountains of foliage, the maples
uncurling moist little red and gold tendrils, and the lilacs were
rustling columns of clean new leafage and plumy blossom. The last of
the frost had melted from the newly turned sods; gulls were walking
about, pulling at worms, and spring sunset lay over the broad, gently
heaving surface of an opal sea.
David had taken his bags upstairs, greeted his aunt, who was knitting
in the sitting room, but without the fire, and had spent perhaps
ten restless and excited minutes in outward conversation and in
inner excitement. Where was Gay? When would the door handle turn
and the plainly gowned girl come in, with the smile flashing into
her star-sapphire eyes when she saw him, and the beautiful hand she
extended so quaintly, so demurely enhanced by the transparent white
cuff? David was so shaken by a strange emotion at the thought that
every moment was bringing their meeting closer, so confused by the
undercurrent of his thoughts--the undercurrent that would dwell upon
her greeting, and his introduction of all he had to say to her--that he
could hardly hear what his aunt was saying. When he did finally escape
to search for Gay, and when Hedda told him that she was in the garden,
he found himself standing quite still in the side passage, with his
heart thundering, and his senses swimming, and an actual unwillingness
upon him, after all these waiting days and weeks, to make real the
dream that he had cherished so long.
There she was, about the western turn of the house, half walking and
half running, with the puppy sometimes keeping his feet and sometimes
swung dizzily in the air on the rope that Gabrielle was carrying and
the little dog biting in a frenzy of joy. There was warm sweet light
in the garden at five o’clock, the day had been balmy enough to make
cooler airs at its close almost a relief.
Pleasant domestic sounds in the barnyard were all about: clucks and
moos, John whistling, and the stamping of big horses’ feet on distant
floors. The scent of violets and syringa, of lilacs and new grass, of
damply turned, sun-warmed earth was like a delicious sharp and heady
ether in the air.
David joined the girl just as she and the dog were turning down a
rambling sort of back road that led toward the sea; Gabrielle turned,
and although indeed she smiled, he saw that she was an older and a
soberer Gabrielle than the little schoolgirl of the Christmas holidays.
They walked the quarter mile to the shore deep in a conversation he had
not anticipated; she talked of her mother, whose life was a question
only of days now, and made one allusion to the deeper cause of pain to
herself.
“My finding out about myself--about my mother’s never having been
married, David--has made a sort of change in everything to me,” she
said, unemotionally. “I seem to feel now that I must do something--that
it is more than ever my duty to do something to make my own place
in life and stand upon my own feet. That’s the only way that I can
ever be happy, and I will be happy so, believe me!” she added,
nervously intercepting an interruption from him. “Doctor Ensicoe, from
Crowchester, says that my mother will not outlive the month. And then
I mean to write to the nuns in Boston and stay with them until I find
something that I can do. I know Aunt Flora will help me, for indeed
she offered to most generously, and, while I must--I will let her. She
was very kind about it all,” Gabrielle added, reaching safer waters
now, and so speaking more quietly. “We have never spoken of it except
at that one time. I said to her quite suddenly, one night when we
were going up to my mother’s room--I’d had it terribly on my mind, of
course, ‘Aunt Flora, answer me one question. There would be no use in
my attempting to trace Charpentier, my father, would there? There is
no record of that marriage, is there? That is the real reason for all
the mystery and secrecy, isn’t it?’ And she turned very pale,” went
on Gay, “and answered, ‘Yes.’ We never alluded to it again, although
many times since she has told me that Sylvia would always take care of
me--that I must not worry!” And catching a sudden look of determination
and interest in David’s face Gay went on hurriedly, “But indeed I don’t
worry, I shall get along splendidly and make you all proud of me!”
A sensation of pity so sudden and acute as to dry his mouth and press
like a pain behind his eyes silenced David for a moment. Then he said:
“But you are very young, Gay, and inexperienced, to face all the
ugliness and coldness of the world. Suppose,” David added, conscious
suddenly of the quickened beat of his heart, “there was some other plan
that eased, or helped to ease, all those worries of yours----?”
“Oh, my God,” Gay prayed, in a very panic of fear. “Oh, David,” she
cried, in the deeps of her being, “spare me! Oh, God, don’t let him
mean that he is going to ask me to marry him. Oh, no--no--no!”
Aloud she said nothing. They were on the sweet, grassy cliffs above the
sea, now, and Gay was looking out across the level stretches of the
peaceful water, over which shone the last of the long day’s light.
She was so beautiful, as she stood there, that for a moment David was
content to look at her and tell himself that he had not remembered how
lovely she was. Loose delicate tendrils of her tawny hair were blowing
about her white temples; there was a delicate creamy glow on her warm,
colourless skin, her great eyes seemed to give forth a starry shimmer
of their own. In the fine hands, encircled at the wrists, as David had
anticipated they would be, by transparent white cuffs, she held the
restless puppy against the young curve of her breast; in the old garden
and the spring sunset she looked like a slender, serious impersonation
of Memory or Poetry, or of some mythical young goddess, wandering under
the great trees.
But it was not only the physical beauty that he saw. He saw in her too
the dearly companionable girl of the past mid-winter, whose husky,
sweet laughter had rung out over the card table, whose eager helpful
interest had made bright so many a dark sleety morning in the upstairs
studio, when the oil stove slowly warmed the air and scented it with
hot metal and kerosene vapours. He saw her buttoning on the big coat,
tramping through snowy woods at his side, with her hands deep in her
pockets, and her bright face glowing like a rose. And a first little
chilling fear crept over his bright dream; suppose--suppose she was not
for him, after all?
“Gabrielle,” he said, suddenly, his face reddening and his voice
shaking a little, “will you let me tell you what I planned for you and
for me?”
She gave him an agonized half glance, nodded, and said some
indistinguishable word of assent as she turned away.
“I was wondering----” David began. And suddenly it seemed all to go
flat and dull. He felt himself to have no business to be putting it
to her this way, this half-laughing, half-sympathetic, wholly kind
and comfortable way. The smooth phrases of his imaginings vanished in
air, he was merely a rather stupid man of thirty-one, bungling the
most delicate thing in all the world. It was too late to stop. The
girl’s face was crimson, but she had turned toward him gravely and
expectantly, and was looking at him steadily and bravely.
“This was my idea,” David began again, miserably. “I--I felt--I knew
that you were most unhappy, and that you felt lonely and as if you were
wasting time here, and yet doubtful about making a start elsewhere. And
it occurred to me----” He tried his best at this point to recapture
the affectionate whimsically practical note that these words had
always had in anticipation, but do what he would they sounded stupidly
patronizing and heavy. “It occurred to me,” he said again, “that you
and I are somewhat in the same boat. We’re Flemings, yet we don’t truly
belong at Wastewater--that belongs to Sylvia now! And wouldn’t it be a
very delightful thing for you and me to give them all a surprise and
just take ourselves out of their way, once and for all?”
She heard him so far. Then she stopped him with a sudden backward
movement of her head, and answered quietly, with a downward glance at
the puppy’s little snuggled form:
“Thank you, David. But you must see that I can’t--I can’t do that! But
thank you very much.”
David was honestly taken aback. Not that he had expected her to fall
into his arms--he did not know just what he had expected her to do.
But certainly not this! He had perhaps imagined her beautiful and
irradiating smile turned toward him, heard a rich cadence half of
reproach and half of pleasure in her voice as she said, something like,
“David Fleming! Are you asking me to marry you?”
This actuality was all confusing and different from the plan, and
his own feelings were disconcertingly different, too. The girl
looked unmistakably hurt and humiliated by what he had said, which
was astonishing enough. But even more astonishing was his own sudden
conviction that she had reason to seem so. What was he saying to her,
anyway? After all, her love affair was the most important thing in all
a girl’s life! It was not something to be flung at her unexpectedly,
between one’s arrival after weeks--after months of absence--and a
family dinner!
A half-analyzed consciousness of being wrong, combined with a general
confusion of mind and senses, was strong upon David as he blundered on:
“I may be surprising you, Gay. You see, I’ve been thinking about all
this for a long time! You can certainly say, ‘This is so sudden,’ in
the good old-fashioned manner, if you want to,” added David, nervously,
hoping to win back his humorous, comprehending little companion of
January with his anxious and appealing laugh.
But Gay did not laugh.
“I do appreciate your taking my problems so much to heart, David,” she
said, turning to pace staidly back through the twilight greenness and
sweetness toward the house. “But I really blame myself a good deal for
being such a baby! I’ve been selfishly dwelling upon my troubles, and
acting as if no girl ever had them to face before, and of course it has
worried you and Aunt Flora and Sylvia. But that’s over now, and I want
you to know that I do appreciate your sympathy, and your having thought
out this way of escape for me, and having planned it all with Sylvia.”
“As a matter of fact,” David interposed, eagerly, hoping that matters
might yet adjust themselves, “Sylvia’s letter to me, asking to be
set entirely free of any real or imaginary understanding between us,
crossed my letter to her saying that I--had other plans in mind.”
He looked at Gabrielle hopefully with the words; perhaps when she knew
how completely above-board and deliberated the step had been she would
begin to see it in his light. But Gay merely reddened the more deeply,
if that were possible, and said hastily and uncomfortably:
“I see. And I do thank you! And I ask you--I _beg_ you--for the little
time I am at Wastewater,” she added, feverishly, as the vertigo of
shame and confusion that had been almost nauseating her threatened
to engulf her in a humiliating burst of tears, “please never to say
anything like this to me again! _Please_----! There are reasons----”
Gay fought on desperately, feeling with terror that tears might end in
his arms, and that utter capitulation on his own kindly humorous terms
must follow such a break-down, “there are reasons why it _kills_ me to
have you talk so! I beg you, David, to consider it all settled--all
over----”
“Why, of course I will!” David said, in a cold, quiet voice that braced
her like a plunge into icy waters. “I’m only sorry to distress you,”
he added, formally. “I had been thinking about it with a great deal of
pleasure, and I thought you might. I’m sorry. We’ll never speak of it
again.”
Then they were at the side door, and Gay escaped into the gloomy dark
hallway, and fled red-cheeked and panting to her room, where she
could cry, rage, shake herself, walk the floor, and analyse the whole
situation unobserved.
“Oh, you fool!” she said, scornfully, to her panting image in the
mirror. “You hysterical schoolgirl! Oh, how I hate him and his plans
for me!” she gritted, through shut teeth. “And I hate Sylvia worse!
I hate them all. He thought I would die of joy--he knows better now.
Oh, insulting! He wouldn’t have done that to Sylvia or one of the
Montallen girls! But it didn’t matter with me--Aunt Lily’s daughter,
with no father to stand up for me. And it isn’t my fault I haven’t a
father,” Gay said, pitifully, half aloud, leaning her elbows on the
bureau, and beginning to cry into her hands; “it isn’t my fault that
I’m all alone in the world!”
And again she flung herself on the bed, and her whole form was racked
and shaken by the violence of her weeping.
“He’ll see my red eyes at dinner and think it’s for him,” she broke
off, savagely, sitting up in the early dark and reaching for the
scrambling and mystified puppy, who was going upon a whimpering tour
of investigation among the pillows. Gay dried her eyes upon his downy
little back, lighted her lamp, and soused her eyes with cold water.
Half an hour later she went down to dinner, quite restored to calm and
ready to take a cheerful part in the conversation. But she would not
share the sitting room with her aunt and David after dinner.
She said, with that touch of new maturity and decision that David found
so touching and so amusing in little Gabrielle, that she would go up
and sit with her mother, thus releasing Margret for an hour or two
below stairs.
The room seemed to become blank, however, when she had gone quietly
away, and David was surprised to find that the thought of her had
become so habitual with him in the last few weeks that he was thinking
of her still, as steadily as if that strange hour in the garden were
the dream, and the Gay of his plan, the gracious Gay who had so many,
many times promised him, in his thoughts, to marry him, were the
reality.
He found himself restlessly making excuses to follow her upstairs.
Was Aunt Flora going up to see Aunt Lily to-night? Later, Flora said,
sombrely. Was it quite safe for Gabrielle up there alone with the
invalid? Oh, quite. Poor Lily had not the strength of a baby, now.
After an endless time they went upstairs, to find that Margret had just
come up, and Gay was ready to plead fatigue and slip away to bed. Aunt
Lily was a mere colourless slip of flesh and blood, quiet upon smooth
pillows now, with her gray hair brushed and pinned up neatly. Gay was
kneeling beside her in the orderly, lamp-lighted room when David went
in, with one of her beautiful hands clasping the yellowed old lifeless
fingers. She got to her feet with no sign of embarrassment, and in
another two minutes had disappeared for the night.
David saw a light in her transom, half an hour later, when he went to
his room. She was probably quietly reading, he thought; discomfited,
preferring the society of books to his own, after what had transpired
this afternoon.
He felt disappointed and humiliated, he missed the thrilling dream
that had kept him company for so long, and for a day or two he managed
to persuade himself that it was because Gay had failed him. She had
proved very much less satisfying than his thoughts of her; he had
unconsciously been idealizing her all this time. He had thought of her
as gracious, merry, provocative, responsive, and she had proved to be
merely embarrassed and awkward.
“Well!” he said, going off to sleep, “That’s over--no harm done!” But
he could not dismiss it. Again he said, almost aloud; “That’s over. No
harm done!”