She stopped. And after a long minute of silence the young persons
looked at each other. Tom had been sitting throughout in a low chair
with his hands locked; now he merely grinned nervously and shrugged.
David’s face was stern and grave; he had folded his arms and had been
staring ahead of him with a faint frown. Now his eyes moved about the
circle and returned to space. Sylvia’s vivid dark face with its white,
white skin was drained of colour, her eyes looked tortured, and she was
breathing fast. As she knelt beside the bed, she half supported her
mother upon her arm, her anxious and stricken face close to the leaden,
ghastly face upon the pillow.
Gabrielle had been kneeling, too, as she listened. But at the end she
rose and walked to the little window.
Outside, in the winter dusk, lay the soaked, blackened ruins of the old
stables, those clean big airy stables that Gabrielle had so loved as
a little girl. Nearer, against the angle of the house, lay the wreck
of the windmill, the great rusty hoops and singed wood piled almost
as high as the window. Beyond all were the bare winter woods, looking
desolate and forlorn in the cool gray light, and on the right brimmed
and lowered the steely surface of a cold and unfriendly sea.
As Gabrielle stood there, her weary heart and mind whirled hither and
thither by a hundred conflicting thoughts, in a very storm of pity
and pain, the island lights suddenly pricked through the dove-gray of
the gloom and flashed their pinkish radiance against the gaining and
prevailing shadows. The girl’s thoughts travelled to them idly--she
thought of little ships cutting their way through the trackless waters,
and dark-faced, rough men twisting the spokes of the little wheels and
peering out across the waves to find that steadily pulsating flash.
Somebody had lighted a light in the room behind her; she saw her own
reflection, slender, aureoled, against the dark night. David touched
her arm.
A sudden bitter need of tears possessed her, and her breast swelled.
But she only raised heavy eyes to his questioningly, and bit her lip to
steady it.
“Aunt Flora wants to speak to you, Gay.” The girl could tell by David’s
tone that he had said it before. He gently turned her toward the bed.
She looked bewilderedly at Tom, who was busy at the lamp, and at
Sylvia, who stood at the foot of the bed. Like a person in a dream she
went slowly toward Flora, and knelt down beside her.
Flora reached out hard and anxious fingers and gripped the girl’s hand.
“I told David this yesterday--he told you and Tom--he was to tell
you--when the fire came----” Flora whispered.
“He did tell us.” Gabrielle’s beautiful voice sounded childish and
husky in contrast to the other weak voice. “But I thought--I thought
that--my mother--Lily was still my mother, and that Uncle Roger was
my father--that I had no right to call him father. It seems”--her
lips shook again--“it seems that I might have had--a father----”
she faltered. Her voice thickened and stopped. She raised her eyes
appealingly, almost apologetically to David, who was watching closely.
“I never--had--any one,” she said, with suddenly brimming eyes.
Flora spoke, and immediately afterward, in a strange muse that was not
hearing, Gabrielle heard Sylvia give a sort of cry, and then David
leaned over her and said tenderly:
“Gay--she is very ill, dear. If you can----?”
“If I can--what--David?” she repeated, confused, her beautiful eyes
wide and anxious.
“She wants you to forgive her, Gabrielle,” David answered.
Gabrielle still appeared bewildered; she looked from one face to
another.
“Yes, I will, of course I will,” she said, quickly and simply.
“Then tell her so, Gabrielle.”
Gabrielle bent her gaze upon her aunt’s sunken face, a blot against
the white pillows, and Flora fixed upon her the tragic look of her
darkening eyes.
“I am sorry, Aunt Flora,” Gabrielle stammered, in tears. “I know--I
know how hard it must have been for you. I am so sorry.”
“You will forgive me, Gabrielle?” Flora whispered, feverishly. “In all
the years to come you will not hate me? You have grown to be a lovely
woman--I did not harm you. I might have harmed you--but it was Sylvia,
in the end, who paid for what I did.”
“I will never hate you,” Gabrielle said, slowly and steadily, like a
child repeating a lesson.
“It was because I loved him so,” said Flora’s drawn, dark mouth, in a
whisper. She sank back, seemed to be sinking away from earth and the
things of earth altogether. “God bless you, Gabrielle, you have made it
easy for me to die,” she added, in the mere breath of a voice.
“I’m--so--sorry!” Gay said, with a great sob. And she buried her face
against the coverlet and burst into crying. “I’m so sorry that he was
unkind to you--and that you could not forgive him and forgive me!” she
sobbed. “We might have been--we might all have been so happy!”
“We might have been so happy,” Flora’s lips repeated. No other muscle
of her bloodless face and shut eyes moved. “God bless you, Gabrielle,”
she whispered again, as Gabrielle, drawn away by David’s hand, stopped
to lay a wet cheek against hers and kiss her in farewell.
The girl, halfway to the door, and hardly conscious of what she was
doing, suddenly wrenched herself free and went back to the bed. She
fell on her knees, and catching the languid dark hand, put it to her
lips.
“Aunt Flora, indeed I forgive you!” she said, weeping, “from my heart.
I am so sorry you were so unhappy--that they all hurt you and failed
you so! Dear Aunt Flora----”
Sylvia was on her knees on the other side, and crying as bitterly
as Gabrielle, when David led the younger girl away. He and Margret
established her upon a downstairs sofa, with cushions and covers before
the fire, and she lay there in a dreamy state, not talking, hardly
thinking, as the strange panorama of the last twenty-four hours wheeled
through her weary head. She saw Flora only once again, and that was at
the end, at seven o’clock.
At ten Tom drove them to Crowchester and they boarded the Boston train;
Sylvia veiled and clinging tightly to Tom’s arm, Gabrielle and old
Margret guiding them through the interested, warm train to the privacy
of their drawing room.
Gabrielle’s last look at Wastewater had shown her only bare trees,
blackened masses of ruins darker than the prevailing dark, open levels
where the stately walls had been. A cold moon had been shining brightly
upon the sea, had thrown the shadows of leafless bushes in a lacework
across the bare brown space of the lawn, and against the steady rush
and retreat of the short waves she had heard the tumbling cascading
sound of some bit of wall collapsing upon the general collapse. Toward
the distant west wall, beyond the woods, the changed perspective had
left a long vista free, and Gabrielle could see the white gravestones
in the moonlight.
Graves and ruins, ashes and bare branches, and beside them the
unchanged, restless sea, and above them the unfeeling moonlight.
The child of Wastewater looked back with a great gravity, a great
solemnity in her heart. There had been laughter here, music and voices.
Wastewater had had a housewarming, more than a hundred years before,
when beautiful women, in the capes and high-waisted gowns of the Empire
days, had been driven in jingling great coaches all the way from
Boston City to dance and rejoice with the young master of the mansion.
There had been a first Roger, in the buff and blue of the Revolution,
Colonel Fleming, as black and as handsome as any of them, and there
had been his son Tom, the good-hearted Tom who had come all the way to
Brookline to find a cousin’s disconsolate little widow, with her sewing
machine, and her girl babies, and offer them a home.
And there had been Tom’s son Roger, handsomest and most dashing of them
all--David’s young mother, who was to win his heart, and that shadowy
little Cecily, who must now be “mother” in Gabrielle’s thoughts.
Aunt Flora always watching jealously; Aunt Lily tearful and singing her
romantic little songs; gallant little Tom reading his sea stories on
the old nursery window-sill; dark little proud Sylvia with her glossy
curls; baby Gay herself, wistful and alone; they all seemed to pass
before the girl’s eyes in a long and haunting procession, crying as
they went that they had always failed, even here, in all this wealth
and beauty, to find happiness and peace!
“I will be happy,” Gabrielle had sworn to herself solemnly, frightened
at the history of the place. “I will try never to be proud or jealous
or cruel. We are Flemings, we four--and I as much a Fleming as any one
of them now, and we must not make their mistakes! God helping us,” she
thought, remembering the little nun who had years ago read the Sermon
on the Mount to a class of inattentive little girls so many times, “we
will all be good, and meek, and merciful, and some day--years and years
from now--we will come back to Wastewater again and rebuild it.
“Good-bye, Wastewater!” she had whispered, leaning back to look through
the glass window of the motor car. And from beyond the ruins, the
ashes, the bare garden, and the moonlit sea, the island lights had
flashed her an answer.