“She’s all right--she opened her eyes a few minutes ago--she’ll be all
right----”
The voice was droning away close to her ear in the howling noise and
blackness. Gabrielle made an effort to think and to move her head. But
her senses all reeled together in a sort of vertigo, and her temples
hammered as if they would split. She relapsed into blackness again.
David’s voice, of course. She had fallen from a great height, she
supposed, for she was lying in some bitterly cold place--out of
doors--the sea never sounded so close inside.
Beyond and above the sound of the sea, breaking on the rocks, was a
constant rushing of high winds and the creaking and dashing of bare
branches. And there was another sound, of sucking and roaring, deep
crashes--like the cascading of bricks.
“No, no, she’s all right--she’s coming round----” This was that droning
voice, David’s voice. Then a mutter of other voices, Hedda’s saying
something about china; John’s, the gardener’s voice, telling someone to
“hoist it over there.”
“I feel like Bill the Lizard!” Gabrielle thought, finding the idea very
funny, and immediately beginning to cry. And she opened eyes brimming
with tears and looked into David’s anxious face, close above her own,
against a background of red lights and shadows.
Dizziness overcame her, and she shut her eyes again, but not without a
bewildered and weary smile that tore at the man’s heart. And then there
followed another period of utter darkness during which she could not
quite tell if the roaring and crackling were inside or outside of her
head.
Suddenly she remembered. They were in Tom’s study, she and Tom and
David, and David had come up to say----
And Gay instantly sat upright and looked at David with wild and
frightened eyes. She wore the velvet gown in which she had dined, such
endless ages ago, and about her, as she half lay in David’s arms, a
heavy blanket had been wrapped. David’s face was grimed and sooty, and
in the queer lurid light in the summer-house she could see that it was
anxious and pale.
They were in the summer-house; that was it. But why should they be here
upon this bitter wild night, and whence came the queer pinkish glow
that was lighting the black garden and the bare trees in so unnatural
a way? John and Trude were draping great curtains--were they the old
library curtains?--against the latticed walls; outside, the closely set
evergreen shrubs and the lee of the north wall combined to give the
summer-house a sort of protection.
“Gabrielle--dearest----” David said. And she felt a hot tear on her
face, and put up her finger to touch it wonderingly. “You’re all right,
dear!” he added, tenderly. And then, to someone in the gloomy confusion
of old twisted benches and rickety rustic tables behind him, “She’s
all right, Sylvia. Tell Aunt Flora she’s all right.”
Gabrielle heard a thick, fretful murmur in answer, and asked, in a
child’s awed whisper:
“Is Aunt Flora sick?”
“Frightened,” David said, in answer. “And you fainted, dear. Tom and I
got you down by the kitchen stairway.”
Recollection was beginning to come back rapidly now, and Gay frowned
faintly with the pain of it as she said:
“Tom--you came up--I remember now. But David, was that true?”
“All true, dear. But don’t think about it now!” David said. And
Gabrielle closed her eyes for what seemed a long time again. The man
her poor little mother had loved had been Roger Fleming! Roger was her
father.
“Does Tom believe it?” the girl whispered, after a while.
“Oh, yes. He is very--very fine about it, Gay,” David said. “There will
be no arguing, no trouble for you, dear. Can you--can you--not worry
about it?”
“But, David,” she was more like herself every minute now, and spoke
with a voice full of its own peculiar vitality, “what happened?”
“Fire, dear. Wastewater’s going, Gabrielle! In an hour the old place
will be gone!”
“Wastewater!” she echoed, in a whisper. And for the first time she
turned her eyes toward the source of the glow. Three hundred yards
away, and lighting up the whole black world upon the wild winter night,
the old house was one roaring mass of flames.
“Tom?” the girl asked, instantly. “Did he--he was with us--did
everyone----”
“Everyone is safe, dear! Some of the maids had gone in to Crowchester
when John took in his wife. The others are here. Sylvia was the coolest
of all; she was asleep, but she had time to grab some clothes--got out
easily! Aunt Flora was in the downstairs sitting room, where I had left
her--she’s here. I think the shock has been terrible, but she is safe.
You fainted, seemed to come to just as we got you down here, and then
fainted--or went off into a sort of swoon--again. But now you feel all
right?”
“Perfectly! Even my head. But, David--I want to see Tom.”
“Tom! He was with John and the girls, saving what they could, until
it was too late. But he’s here now. Tom!” David said, raising his
voice. And immediately Tom, who had been with the group of maids in the
doorway, watching the fire, turned and came toward them.
He was grimed and sooty, his black hair tossed about wildly, and he had
a great overcoat on. Gabrielle saw the look on his handsome face, half
desperate, half shamed, all questioning, and as he knelt before her,
with a sudden impulse she opened her arms and laid her wet face against
his own.
Tom tightened his own arms convulsedly about her, and for a long minute
they clung together.
“Is it all right?” Gabrielle whispered. And Tom, gently putting the
silky tangled web of her dishevelled hair back from her earnest face,
answered:
“We got you out, huh?”
“Tom,” she said, clinging to him, and looking into his face anxiously,
“I’m so glad! I have never had anybody--of my own----”
“Are you?” he said, awkwardly, yet pleased, in a low, gruff tone, as
she stopped. “You’ve got a brother now, huh?” he added, with a sort of
clumsy lightness.
For answer, still resting her pale and soot-streaked cheek against his
own, she tightened her arm about his neck, and he felt her breast move
on a deep sigh, half of weariness, half of content.
And David saw his half-brother very reverently, very gently, kiss her
upon her closed eyes.
“The wind’s straight out of the northwest,” Tom said then, in a
significant tone to David, “the whole place is bound to go. Nice thing
if we’d gotten ’em into John’s house, like you suggested!”
“No, you were right about that,” David conceded, as Gay, smiling
bewilderedly, and still a little dizzy, got to her feet. “John tells me
the barn roof has caught!”
“South wing, sir--everything. My God, she is doing it up in style
now!” Walker, the chauffeur, said, from the group of watching maids
and men in the summer-house doorway. All the night was lighted by the
demoniacal glare, banners of flame were being blown and twisted like
rags upon the shrieking winds.
“Keep this blanket about you, Gay, and over your head!” David
commanded, as they joined the others. “Good-bye, Wastewater!” he added,
under his breath. “Do you see that the library wing has collapsed
already? You’re looking straight across at the woods beyond! She’s
going like tinder.”
“David, but surely that’s the library wing, burning now--the highest
point of all!”
“No, that’s the very centre of the house. That’s about where Uncle
Roger’s old rooms were. There--that’s your corner, where that jet of
fire blew out--that wall will go next!”
Gabrielle shuddered, and shivered with the cold.
“Mother seems--broken,” Sylvia said, at Gay’s shoulder. “She loved the
old place!”
“There’s going to be a change in the wind!” Tom muttered. “That river
of sparks may be turned this way!”
“A change in the wind----?” Gabrielle echoed, incredulously. For to
deduce any hint of a change from the furious gale that was blowing so
strongly seemed miraculous to her. Even now the rush of air was so
furious that they had almost to shout at times to be heard.
Somewhat sheltered in the black old shabby doorway of the long-unused
summer-house, Gabrielle felt David’s arm tight about her shoulders.
Was he conscious of it? She did not know. But she was exquisitely
aware of it, even under her vertigo, weariness, and excitement, and so
reinforced, she might have endured a score of such wild nights.
They all stood in the shelter, exclaiming, and looking over each
others’ shoulders at the fearful conflagration that was sending great
whirls and showers of sparks far up against the black winter sky.
Flora alone made no move; she was rolled in what appeared to be a
miscellaneously chosen half-dozen of blankets, a seventh rolled to
pillow her head. She sat in the summer-house’s one chair, an old
wicker armchair, with her bare head dishevelled and dropped back, and
her eyes closed in a leaden face that even in the hideous light of the
fire looked deathlike.
“This night’s work will kill her,” Hedda whispered once, glancing over
her shoulder at her mistress. And Trude solemnly nodded.
The flames of Wastewater swept southward, howling like fiends as they
flung themselves up into the dark, crowded always from their places,
as waves are crowded onward, by fresh roaring surges of fire. Where
there had once been attic or mansard rooms in Wastewater there were
now pits where pink flames burned under a play of dancing blue lights;
at intervals of only a few minutes fresh portions of roofs and floors
collapsed, and the maids would exclaim under their breath as the fresh
grinding and sucking and devouring began.
“There won’t be a wall left standing,” Tom said. “And she’s not been
burning an hour!”
“Tom, it must be almost morning,” Gabrielle whispered, too dazed with
the night’s events to believe herself yet awake.
In answer he twisted his wrist about; and in the pink light she saw the
tiny face of his watch. Not yet one o’clock!
“What I can’t understand,” David said, “is why five hundred men aren’t
here from Keyport or Crowchester--of course there’s a terrible tide,
and that road through the dunes to Tinsall’s may be under water. But
you’d think a mob would be out here to watch the old place go!”
“You mean that they might have saved it, David?” Sylvia asked,
shuddering with cold and nervousness as she wrapped herself in her
blanket, and stood huddling at his side.
“Oh, no--nothing could do that!” he said. “Not even with all that water
within a few feet,” he added, with a shrug toward the sea. “That’s the
end of Wastewater!”
“David, we were all ’way upstairs. Did you and Tom get me down the
stairs?” Gabrielle asked, presently.
“That’s one of the things we’ll talk about to-morrow,” David said.
But immediately he added quietly: “Tom saved us all. My instinct was
to rush away from the flames. His, being a sailor, was to get through
them. And if we had run away, I believe we would have been trapped.
Hedda tells me the only stairway in the far wing, where I would have
gone, has been locked for years. Tom got us back of the wind by
crossing the upper hall, and we climbed over that strip of roof to the
old sewing room, and broke the window, and after that it was easy, down
the kitchen stairway.”
“The fire was coming--where?”
“Straight up that main stairway, as if it were a furnace!”
“And did we cross--near it?”
David hesitated, and Tom, on Gabrielle’s other side, said gruffly:
“Not very.”
Gabrielle shivered. And for a while they all watched the fire in
silence.
“Luckily, John’s wife and little girl and Daisy and Sarah, went in to
Crowchester yesterday,” David presently explained. “It seems that
John saw it first; it started in the billiard-room wing. We think it
may have been something the electricians did, or perhaps just rats and
matches. John saw one of the windows all pink, from his room, but he
thought probably some of us were down there, and actually went to bed.
But after fifteen minutes or so he got up and looked out again----”
“My God, my heart turned to water!” John himself said, simply, as David
paused. “The fire was bursting out of a dozen windows at once. She must
have been burning since late afternoon, to get that start. I yelled for
Frank, the Eyetalian, and Walker, and we all run to the house. Seemed
to me we’d never rouse the girls!”
“We sleep,” Hedda said, gravely.
“They ran up and waked Aunt Flora,” David added, “and got her out
here--she was still in the sitting room--and Sylvia had the presence
of mind to grab a sheet full of clothes and things, the maids got out
some china, and all the blankets that were in the store closet, and
their own trunks--but there won’t be much saved!” he finished, shaking
his head. “Comfort to think that if there were five hundred men here we
couldn’t have saved it!”
And after a long silence broken only by exclamations of horror and
concern, as the flames had their way, Hedda said again softly:
“This’ll kill Mrs. Fleming, all right.”
Sylvia had gone back into the summer-house and was leaning over her
mother. They could hear Flora’s feeble, hoarse murmurs in reply to the
girl’s tender inquiries. Gabrielle felt again that there would be no
end to this fearful blackness, wind, noise, and confusion of body and
soul.
An hour later there were shouts in the garden. A motor car rattled in,
driven, already with a strange disregard for what had been the stately
boundaries of Wastewater, straight over the ashy garden. It was the
Keyport carpenter, with fifteen or twenty excited young men hanging
on his car. The high tide had washed out a hundred feet of the road,
he announced; “couple hundred people watching the fire from the other
side, in spite of the wind!”
“Some fire!” said Harry Trueman. He had had to drive twelve miles out
of his way to get here at all. He added cheerfully that he had thought
he might find the whole family burned to cinders.
A stiff wind was still blowing, but its violence had enormously abated;
the air was warmer every instant, and the fire, less than four hours
after it had been discovered, had done its work, and had actually been
blown out, against many a shattered remnant of black wall. Here and
there it was still gnawing hungrily, sucking like a vicious and unsated
animal among ruins that by its dying light the Flemings could barely
recognize as the library, the old downstairs playroom, the office.
Now it was safe to move the women to what was left of John’s house.
The windmill, collapsing, had inundated the lower floor, and one
side of the house had been caught by the flames. But on the south
side a bedroom, dining room, and kitchen were intact, and Gabrielle
and Sylvia found a lamp and turned down the bed where John’s little
Etta had slept for most of her fifteen years. Etta’s innocent little
trophies--Miss Alcott’s books, pencil boxes, and hand-painted
cups--were ranged neatly about. Flora, muttering, was lowered tenderly
into the sheets, and the blankets and little blue comforter spread over
her.
No further danger from fire; the worst was over. Rain was now sluicing
as gently, as steadily and calmly over the wreckage as if the night
of horror had been only a dream, as if Gabrielle might awaken in her
comfortable big bed, as she had so often awakened, to look out upon
a typical autumn sky and sea, a nameless little poor relation in
Wastewater’s splendid walls.
But now, wearied, confused, puzzled as she was, she knew that
Wastewater itself had not disappeared from the earth more completely
than that old Gabrielle. If she had not a name, a place in the world,
she had a brother! And to Gabrielle this utter earthquake was like the
presage of a more sunshiny and smiling morning than she had ever known.
Downstairs, in John’s dining room, sacred hitherto to golden oak and
tasselled plush, was heaped the incongruous salvage from Wastewater.
Soup plates and cups filled with blackened water, chairs with sooty
footprints upon the brocades, kitchen utensils and pots, books that had
been useless and unread for sixty years and that were so much rubbish
of paper, paste, and leather now, the shade of a lamp, standing alone,
and another great lamp without its shade; just such miscellany as
maids, chauffeur, and gardener had been able to snatch and carry away
by the light of the fire itself.
Gabrielle and Tom worked valiantly at storing this mixed assortment at
one side of the room; John lighted a coal fire in his own grate, and
Hedda and Trude toiled kitchenward, extricating a coffee-pot from the
crushed and saturated kitchen, and finding among Etta’s neat stores
all the necessities for a meal, which was served in the dining room at
about four o’clock. Sylvia was now upstairs with her mother, and David
called Gabrielle aside and with a grave face advised her to go up to
her cousin.
“She gathered a good deal from Aunt Flora’s muttering, Gay, and I’ve
just been explaining things to her. Poor Sylvia! it’s come like a
thunderbolt to her. Suppose you go up and tell her we want her down
here, that we’re having some coffee?”
Gabrielle went up obediently. The lamp in young Etta’s bedroom was
shaded now, and Flora seemed asleep. Sylvia was sitting in the shadow,
but Gabrielle saw that she had been weeping. She rose at once and
followed Gabrielle into the little upper hall, and Gabrielle put
her arm about her. Sylvia seemed confused and shaken; she said in a
worried, quick tone:
“Mamma is very, very ill! David tells me he thought she was, even
before she had the shock of the fire. I feel as if I were in a
terrible dream--I can’t believe what he tells me,” added poor Sylvia,
“I can’t--I shall never believe that my mother could be--could be
capable--my mother! whom I love so dearly----” She stopped.
“It doesn’t mean that one can’t love--one’s mother,” Gabrielle
suggested, timidly. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had some rest and
some coffee. She did it to protect--Uncle Roger. We always knew she
loved him.”
“Oh, gracious--how little you understand--how little anybody
understands!” Sylvia exclaimed, under her breath, in despair. “You
tell me that I needn’t stop loving her--and David tells me that it
makes no real difference in my own life--as if I could!--as if I could
go on living, and believing that my mother had been”--Sylvia’s voice
deepened--“had been living a _lie_ all these years!” she finished,
suffocating. “I tell you I simply couldn’t bear it! I’m wrong, perhaps,
it’s all just pride, perhaps--but I never could look anybody in the
face again, never hold up my head----”
“Sylvia, do come downstairs,” Gay pleaded. “It isn’t as bad as that,
really it isn’t!”
“Oh, what do you know, Gabrielle!” Sylvia exclaimed, impatiently. “You
think being the child of a nobody, I suppose, is much the same as being
Uncle Roger’s own daughter?”
“I would rather have the name of Charpentier honourably, than any name
as I have it,” Gay answered, proudly and shortly.
“As you have it?” Sylvia echoed. “I don’t believe you still
understand,” she added, bewilderedly, in a lower tone, and was still.
She let Gabrielle guide her downstairs and slipped into her place at
the improvised table quietly, not looking up, nor tasting the solids,
although she drank her hot coffee gratefully.
“David, could we possibly get Mamma in to a doctor--to a sanitarium?”
she asked, presently, in a low voice.
“John and Walker have gone round the long way to Crowchester, for the
doctor,” David said, glad to talk. “The road’s washed out, you know.
They ought to be back in another hour, and then we can tell something.”
“She looks--like death,” Sylvia said, with suddenly trembling lips.
“I think it is only shock,” David answered. Gabrielle, warmed and
lulled by food and fire, had dropped her beautiful dishevelled head
against the back of her chair; Tom had flung himself upon the little
sofa and was already asleep. David replenished the fire, and he and
Sylvia sat watching it, sometimes exchanging a few words, or sometimes
going upstairs to look at the invalid, who seemed sleeping.
The doctor came and went at five without waking either Tom or
Gabrielle; a cold dawn was over the world when the girl stirred under
her heap of comforters and sat up blinking and rosy, wondering for a
long stupefied minute where she was and why Tom should be stretched out
sound asleep a few feet away. Margret had come out from Keyport, John’s
wife and daughter were lamenting and sympathizing in the disordered
kitchen, and two or three score of sightseers were already picking
their way about the ruins of what had been Wastewater.
Gay, going out with Tom, just as the winter sun rose dazzling and
clear, and feeling strangely stiff and stupid, looked about her in
blank amazement. Where the house had stood for more than a century was
only a singed and hideous stretch of wreckage now, heaps of blackened
bricks, tumbled masses of half-burned plaster and mortar. Twisted pipes
glistened wet in rain, the whole smelled acridly, here and there some
hidden heap of wood or paper smouldered sullenly.
The garden paths had been partly obliterated by fallen walls, trees
were down, and ashes coated the leafless rose trees and the evergreens.
The sea was rolling gaily in the sunrise, emerald-green flecked
cheerfully with white; gulls were dipping and arching, the fresh,
clean, peaceful air was tainted acridly with the smell of wet burned
ruins. The day was so crystal clear that Gabrielle could see the
tiny figures of men going out under white sails at Keyport and at
Crowchester.
When, between David and Tom, with her hair twisted up into a great
coil, and one of John’s coats buttoned about her, she walked slowly
about the incredible desolation of the walls, the villagers drew back a
little and eyed the family curiously.
“Pretty tough welcome home, Tom!” one of the younger men said, shyly
but heartily sympathetic.
“Oh, that’s all right!” Tom said, with a nod.
“Dead loss, hey?” asked an older man, interestedly, making a
tut-tutting sound.
“Nope. Some insurance,” Tom admitted. But the other merely shook his
head, and made the same pitying, shocked sound again.
When they walked past what had been the sitting room Tom climbed over a
mass of bricks and kicked free with his foot a segment of charred and
soaked frame to which a tattered strip of canvas, stiff with paint,
still clung.
“’Member this?” he asked.
David and Gabrielle looked at it, nodding. There were but a few useless
inches of it left; but they could see it had been a painting. Still to
be seen was a finely executed hand, a man’s hand, laid upon the head
of a beautiful greyhound.
“Uncle Roger,” David said, gravely.
“My father,” said Tom.
“And mine,” Gabrielle added, softly, a warm young vital hand in
David’s, her beautiful eyes not raised from this tragic little last
glimpse of the splendid and victorious Black Fleming of Wastewater.