She was tall, and wearing a dark blue suit under a belted brown coat,
a loose rich sable-skin about her shoulders. A blue hat, bright with
cornflowers was pressed down over her sunny hair.
David’s heart gave a great plunge, raced, stopped short, and began to
plunge again. It was really Gabrielle.
But she was so beautiful, she was so graceful and swift and young and
radiant, as she came toward them, that David was incapable of speech,
bereft of all emotion except the overpowering realization of what she
meant to him.
The day became incredibly glorious, became spring indeed, when she put
both her warm hands in his, and held him at arm’s-length, and looked
at him, and then at the reconstruction, and the young green about her,
with a great sigh of relief and joy that was half a sob.
Perhaps her own emotions were also unexpectedly overwhelming, for even
while she laughed and greeted Etta and John and the dog with quite her
usual gaiety, David noticed an occasional break in her eager voice and
a film of tears in her shining eyes.
“Oh, David--Wastewater again!” she said. “If you knew--if you knew
how hungry I’ve been for the old place! Oh, David--what a wonderful
barn--but isn’t it _delicious_--and that’s your house, Etta, and it
looks so comfortable--like a little English inn--and the arch--David,
it’s all so wonderful! Oh, do tell me everything, everyone! I’m so glad
to get home----”
He had known that he loved her, but David had never dreamed that he
could love her like this. To see her take off the heavy brown coat and
consign it and the fur to Etta, and to have her straighten her little
white frills at throat and wrists of the trim little dark blue suit, in
just her old, busy way, and to have her fairly dance along at his side,
excitedly inspecting all that had happened and that was to happen, was
to be transported--for David--straight into a country of no laws and no
precedents. Gay, sweet and blue-eyed and husky of voice; Gay, slender
and eager and responsive; Gay, home again.
“But let me tell Etta and John my news before we leave them,” she had
said, in the first rush of greetings. “Who do you think has just gotten
married?”
“Not you, Miss Gabrielle, although goodness knows you look happy enough
for anything,” Etta had said, cheered in spite of her determined
efforts to resist.
“Not I--do you hear her, David! No, I’m to be next,” Gabrielle had
answered, with a gaiety that stabbed David to the heart. “No, but Miss
Sylvia and Mr. Tom were married a month ago, before we ever left San
Francisco,” she added, joyously.
“Good grief!” Etta said, in a hushed voice. David only fixed astonished
and suddenly enlightened eyes upon the girl’s face.
“Married in San Francisco,” Gabrielle repeated, nodding triumphantly.
“You’re not one bit more surprised than I am! Well, yes, for I did
suspect it,” she added, more moderately. “I knew that they were
falling in love with each other, of course. But I never dreamed that
they had _done_ it until we were three days out! Then Sylvia wouldn’t
let me wireless, because she said everybody on the boat would know. So
we went on to Panama, and then she and Tom wanted to go on farther, and
Margret and I wanted to come home--and here I am!”
Etta was by this time sufficiently recovered from her stupefaction to
ask for further details, and David, watching Gabrielle as she half
laughingly and half seriously gave them, had time to appreciate how
the girl had grown to womanhood in this time of absence. With a sort
of negligent readiness, and yet with a certain dignity, too, she
satisfied the eager questions of the older man and woman, all the while
reserving, he could see, the more intimate narrative for his ears alone.
They were not to be alone immediately, however, for Etta and John
accompanied them through the barns, Etta harping plaintively upon the
quality of the buildings now in course of erection in the Crowchester
Manor Estates.
“But you won’t want a big house here, all by yourself. Them Crowchester
houses are handsomer than any Mr. Rucker ever showed me,” Etta said.
“I had breakfast with Mrs. Rucker. Isn’t she always the nicest person?”
Gabrielle was thereby reminded to tell him. “And what a ducky baby.
We got in to New York yesterday morning, you know, and came up on the
night train. I went straight to your Keyport house, hoping to find you,
but you’d just gone. I left all my things there, and of course I’m to
stay there to-night.”
“You won’t be going away again, Miss Gabrielle?” John asked.
“Why, that depends----” She looked at David in a little confusion,
looked back into the sweet open spaces of the barn. “I may go to
England----” she began.
“Looks like you might be surprising us, too, one of these days!” Etta
said, shrewd and curious.
David glanced quickly at the girl; she was walking beside Etta.
“You wouldn’t want me to be an old maid, Etta?” she asked, once more
with that new, poised manner.
“No, ma’am!” Etta said, positively. “We certainly need some new life
about the place. I’s saying to John a few days ago I hope both the
girls’d get married.”
“Well,” Gabrielle said, with a somewhat dreamy expression in her blue
eyes, “then let’s hope we will.” And David, although she immediately
changed the subject by speaking of the kitchen yard of the new house,
was certain that he saw the colour creep up under her clear skin, and
the hint of a mysterious smile.
“Don’t shock us with too many surprises in one morning, Gabrielle,” he
warned her, trying to smile naturally.
“Ah, no, I shall save something and let things appear by degrees!” she
answered, cheerfully. “Brick wall here, David?”
“Brick wall here, joining the stable wall in a long line, with the
poplars back of it,” he agreed, with a suddenly cold, heavy heart. “Jim
has managed to save the poplars, you see. And all the kitchen matters
will be reached through a little round-topped gate in the wall about
here.”
“And the dining-room windows looking out here where all the lilacs are?”
“With a sort of portico--an open court, tiled, here on the north
front--where it will be cool in the afternoons.”
“David, it’s so much more wonderful than I dreamed it would be! Imagine
a new Wastewater, all sunshine and happiness, instead of that terrible
old barrack full of jealousy and secrets and plots! Isn’t it like a
fairy tale? To think that life can be so sweet----”
“Gay, there’s no sweetness that you don’t deserve,” David said,
suddenly, as they followed the others. “After that defrauded childhood,
and all the shocks and sorrows you had when you first came home two
years ago, nothing could be too much!”
“I feel now,” the girl answered, seriously, “as if, on that last night
of fire and horror and bewilderment, the whole dreadful thing had been
burned out--cauterized, made clean once and for all, and that now we
start with a new order!”
“I don’t know as there’s a prettier place anywhere than Browns’,” said
Etta’s mildly complaining voice. “If she has one window she has a
hundred----”
“Etta!” Gabrielle said, briskly, paying no attention, “have you some
chops? Mr. David and I are going to have our lunch down on the shore.
And will you make us some coffee, Etta, and give us matches and butter
and all the rest of it? It’s half-past eleven now, and we’ll want to
start about one.--Now, show me everything, David, and tell me ten
thousand things about everything!”
“John, have you those blue-prints?” David, out of whose sky the sun
had dropped leaving everything dark and gray, asked the foreman.
“The plans for the house that looks sorter slumped down, with the
roof two stories deep?” John asked, as one anxious to coöperate
intelligently.
“Certainly! The only ones we have,” David answered, impatiently.
Gabrielle bent suddenly down over the dog, but when she and David were
strolling away through the perfumed warmth and the sweet young green of
the garden, she asked, with her old wide-eyed, delighted smile:
“John and Etta don’t approve of Mr. Rucker’s plans?”
But David’s heart was too sick for laughter.
“You really may be following Sylvia’s example one of these days,
Gabrielle?”
Instantly the clear warm skin was flooded with colour and an oddly
troubled look came into her beautiful eyes.
“Well, I suppose so----”
David spoke smilingly, but with rather a dry mouth.
“You got over--you forgot--the man of whom you told me more than two
years ago?”
“No,” she answered, briefly.
“You mean that you have seen him again?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Ah,” David said, blindly trying to say something that should avert her
too-close scrutiny, “I see.”
He felt his heart leaden. It was with sort of physical difficulty that
he guided her through the new Wastewater that was yet in so many ways
the old.
So much was his anyway, he told himself. This day of her dear
companionship, this luncheon on the rocks, this monopoly of her husky
and wonderful voice, her earnest, quick glances, her laughter, were his
for a little while. Even over the utter desolation of his spirit, he
was won to an exquisite and yet agonizing happiness by this nearness of
all her sweetness and charm again.
First, she must see the plans. They sat down upon a pile of clear
lumber in the trembling green shade of overhanging maple branches, and
pegged the fluttering blue sheets with bits of rock, and bent over them.
And now, as she eagerly identified the placing of casement windows
and bricked terraces, she was so close that David got the actual
flowery fragrance of her, and her warm, satin-smooth hand occasionally
touched his. She had laid aside her big coat, and looked a little
less impressive in the plain little suit and delicate white frills,
and somehow all the more her own wonderful self, the eager, busy,
interested little Gay of years ago.
“David, see here, dear----” She added the little word so unconsciously,
he thought, with a pang! “See here, dear, these two rooms upstairs
will be almost empty--this with a north light, in case my smart cousin
should want to do some painting.”
“Do you mean that you and Tom and Sylvia really plan to make your home
here?” David asked.
“As for Tom, I can’t say--he and Sylvia will surely spend their summers
here. But this will always be home, headquarters, for me,” Gay said.
And she laid her beautiful hand upon the blue-prints almost with a
caress. “My little house!” she said, lovingly, “with its chimney seats
and casement windows--and we must have roses and hollyhocks jammed up
against them in summer, and with its darling white woodwork and pink
and blue papers, and with its little breakfast room looking over the
sea----”
“Not so little,” David warned her, “you will have a dozen rooms, you
know, besides the servants’ quarters in that high roof that John
dislikes so heartily.”
“Little beside all those high brick walls and wings and windows of the
old Wastewater,” she countered. “Poor unhappy Wastewater!” she said
more than once, as they walked slowly about, in the increasing warmth
of the day. “_Sic semper tyrannis!_” And she touched the neatly ranked
bricks with a gentle hand. “We could build ten houses, couldn’t we?”
“You will have enough bricks there to do everything you ever want
to--walls, bath-houses, paths, new buildings,” David assured her.
Gabrielle had picked a plume of purple lilac; she slowly twirled it
and sniffed it as they walked. The late morning was so still that they
could hear an occasional distant cock-crow. Silence, fragrance, and the
sweetness of expanding life lay upon the world like a spell.
“Do you see that angle of land there,” the girl asked, presently, when
with their lunch basket they were going toward the shore, “there, just
beyond the spit, with its own little curve of bay? That never seemed
quite to belong to the rest of the place.”
“You could sell it,” David suggested, catching her firm hand in his as
she cautiously followed him down the rocky path.
“Oh, no! I don’t mean that. But you see what a cunning little homestead
it would make all by itself,” Gabrielle said, making her way to
their old favourite spot and beginning the preparations for a little
driftwood fire. “It has good trees, and that line of silver birches,
and it has dogwoods. I was wondering if Tom and Sylvia wouldn’t like a
house there all their own--no responsibility, a place they could shut
up and leave when they wanted to wander.”
“Then they are not going to live with her,” David thought, with his
heart sinking again.
She had been talking about them in a desultory fashion all morning,
but when the coffee was boiling, and the buns toasted, and the chops
dripping and sizzling, she settled herself back comfortably against the
rocks, and gave him the story consecutively.
“Sylvia is a changed person in lots of ways,” said Gay, with relish.
“And in other ways she is exactly what she always was and always will
be. She has the--you take cream, David?--she has the family pride.
Only it takes a rather nice form with her, the form of self-respect.
Sylvia must--she simply _must_ respect herself. And after poor Aunt
Flora died, what with having lost her fortune and then having to bear
what she considered--and what really was!--a terrible blow to her
pride, poor Sylvia really suffered terribly. She kept trying to analyse
how she felt, and convince me about it, and I know that’s what made
her ill. She couldn’t quite get used to not being--what shall I call
it?--admirable, superb, superior--that was always my old word for her.
“She talked about college courses, and I think she must have written
the Dean about it, but perhaps she wasn’t much encouraged. After all,
Sylvia’s only twenty-two, and perhaps professors have to be a little
older.
“So we drifted down to southern California, Sylvia in mourning, of
course, and not taking any interest in anything, and Tom worse. But
when we got to La Crescenta suddenly we all felt better. Tom began to
eat and sleep; Sylvia and I took long walks; we even went in to Los
Angeles to concerts.
“And in no time she found that she could still be--superior, with Tom.
He began to admire her tremendously--he thought she knew everything!
But never in my life have I seen Sylvia so--well, so gentle with
anybody as she was with Tom! She began to make much of what _he_
knew--regularly draw him out; he speaks very good Spanish you know,
and you can use Spanish a good deal there. Sylvia talked to him about
boats, navigation, places he had been and we hadn’t, and all the
time”--and Gabrielle’s eyes danced--“all the time it was just as if she
was afraid of breaking the spell she had put on herself--if you know
what I mean, David?”
“I think I do.”
“Meanwhile,” the girl resumed, with keen enjoyment, “Tom was changing,
too. He’s gotten--_finer_, in a funny sort of way. His voice has grown
finer, and he--he just stares at Sylvia whatever she does, and smiles
at whatever she says, and he is like a lion on a string!”
Her joyous laugh was infectious, and David laughed in spite of himself.
“About--this is April. About Christmas time,” Gay resumed, “I began to
notice it. Tom was funny and humble and quiet with Sylvia, and Sylvia
was bent upon making much of Tom; she’d quote him--I don’t know whether
I can convey this to you--but she’d say to me so seriously, ‘Tom says
the rain isn’t over. Tom doesn’t like Doctor Madison; he thinks his
manner with us is a little too assured’, that sort of thing,” Gabrielle
explained, frowning faintly despite her smile, in her eagerness to make
him understand her.
“Well, we went to San Francisco, and there I really did have the best
time I ever had in my life!” Gabrielle said. “The Montallen girls were
there, with their brother, and we had some wonderful parties--we went
through Chinatown, and out to the beach, and up the mountain, and
everywhere. And I suppose I hadn’t been noticing Sylvia very closely,
because, after the Montallens left----”
“Oh, they left, did they?” David, interested in the brother, asked.
“Yes, they came straight home. It’s the Montallens,” Gabrielle said,
parenthetically, “that want me to go abroad with them in June.”
“I see. Will the brother go?”
“Oh, I think so.”
“I see. But go on--about Sylvia.”
“Well, when they left Sylvia suddenly seemed so odd. She cried a good
deal, and she was quite cranky--not a bit like herself. By this time
we were all getting ready for the Panama trip. Margret thought that
perhaps it was young Bart Montallen, who is a perfectly stunning
fellow--in diplomacy----” Gabrielle elaborated.
“I remember him,” David said, briefly.
“But one day Sylvia broke down and cried for an hour,” Gabrielle
said. “It was the day before we sailed, and we were at the Fairmont.
It almost drove me wild--it had been a real responsibility, anyway,”
the girl interrupted herself to remind him. “When we left here I was
worried sick about Tom, we were all blue and dazed--and really I’d had
it all on my mind until I got a little nervous.
“I coaxed Sylvia and petted her, and finally she told me that he
had asked her to marry him--and there I made my first mistake,” Gay
added, widening her eyes so innocently at David that he laughed aloud.
“I said--trying to be sympathetic, you know--‘And of course, you
wouldn’t!’ and she got rather red and looked straight at me and said,
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I said, rather feebly, ‘Well, I didn’t know you
cared about him,’ and she said, ‘I don’t. But I consider him in every
way one of the finest men I ever knew!’ Of course I said I did, too.
“Then she began to cry again, and said that she was entirely alone in
the world--all that,” Gay resumed, “and she said that any woman would
be proud to marry Tom, but that she was afraid everyone would think she
was influenced by the thought of his money.”
“And what did you say to that?” David asked, diverted.
Gabrielle gave him her gravely wise look, and the beautiful face,
flushed with the warmth of the day and shaded by the blue hat, was so
near that David lost the thread of her words for a few seconds, in
sheer marvelling at her beauty.
“I said I did not think that that should be a consideration,” she
answered. “I said that no one had thought that of _you_, when you were
engaged to her,” she added, after a moment, and with a sudden smile.
David, who was leaning back against a rock and had his arms folded,
flushed a little in his turn.
“I don’t think that was ever, really, an engagement,” he offered.
And remembering suddenly that he had terminated what had been a
rather definite understanding with Sylvia, simply that he might offer
Gabrielle his name and his protection, he had an instant of being
hardly able to believe himself the same man.
“So then we all left the next morning. That was fun!” the girl went on.
“The ship was delightful, and nobody was sick, and it was a January day
as warm and green as June--and Tom was just wild with high spirits; I
never saw him so gay! And well he might be, for he and Sylvia had been
married that morning.
“Sylvia, on the other hand, acted very queerly; cried a good
deal--stuck close to me and seemed cross. Once when I asked her if it
was Tom that was worrying her, she said savagely ‘No,’ that she wished
she had never seen Tom Fleming, and that he had wrecked her happiness
for life. And she went back to Aunt Flora’s old talk,” Gabrielle added,
seriously, “about the curse on the Flemings, and all that.
“She would hardly speak to Tom--and I can tell you, David,” the girl
interrupted herself again to say, “I didn’t anticipate a particularly
pleasant trip to Panama. Tom seemed queer, too, and Margret told me
that she thought the whole thing was a mistake.
“I remembered afterward that Sylvia talked a good deal about the
annulment of marriages on those first few days. She kept telling me
that for a woman an annulment had no value, because any ‘honourable’
woman would feel herself just as much bound after it as before, but it
would at least set the man free. That was two days after we sailed,
and it was that very night that I was playing cribbage with the old
captain--who was a perfect old Scottish darling!--and afterward went
up on the bridge with him. And when I was slipping down to my room,
knowing that Margret would be out of her senses with anxiety, and
Sylvia hunting for me perhaps, I passed a man and a woman at the rail.
“It was midnight, and there was no moon, but as I went by I heard
the man’s voice, and it was Tom’s. And then I saw that the woman was
Sylvia, and that she was crying. Tom was sort of growling--you know
how he talks when he is a little angry and a little ill at ease--and I
heard Sylvia say the word ‘annulment.’ ‘I can’t stand it, Tom, it was
all a silly mistake!’ she said. ‘You can’t talk like that, Sylvia,’ Tom
said, in a sort of shocked voice.
“Suddenly the whole thing came to me,” Gabrielle said, with all a
child’s wondering, delighted stare fixed upon David, “and I went
straight up to them and put my arm about them from behind and said,
‘Tell me about it, I _know_ you’re married!’
“Of course, I was delighted--much more so than you can believe--I
didn’t have to pretend _that_! Because I had had a sort of fear that
once they both got back to their natural surroundings Sylvia would get
proud and collegy--you know what I mean?--again,” the girl went on,
“and that Tom would begin to feel awkward and nothing would come of
their affair. So I made a great fuss--cried, really, I was so excited!
And just then Margret came along the deck, afraid I’d gone overboard
or something, and we told her--and _she_ laughed and cried. And Sylvia
began to seem more normal, especially when we went to our cabin, and I
said what a dear old fellow Tom was, and how he adored her. She began
to smile--the way she does, you know, when she really doesn’t want to
smile--and began to talk pityingly about a very pretty English girl on
board who had taken an immense fancy to him.
“Well, after _that_,” and Gay’s laugh was delicious to hear, “you
should have seen Sylvia! She--_glowed_! I never saw her so handsome,
and so happy, and so--well, you know her!--so superb. She was _all_ the
proud wife. Everything Tom did was mysteriously perfect, and everything
he said she listened to with as much attention as if it were his dying
words. She quoted him, she fenced herself off with him with rugs and
deck chairs and books, and read to him; they walked round and round the
deck together.
“It seems as if Sylvia must be a little superior on some count or other
to be happy!” Gay commented, affectionately and amusedly. “Now she’s
infinitely happy. She is Mrs. Tom Fleming, and she has a handsome, rich
husband who adores her, and presently they’ll have the most superior
children--and believe me,” the girl finished, laughing, “Sylvia will
feel that just what those children do is the astonishing thing; if any
other child is taller, she’ll say it is weedy and has outgrown its
strength, and if any child is smarter she’ll say it is unpleasantly
precocious!”
“So you got to Panama----?” David prompted after a silence devoted
to smiling musing, and the warmth and sweetness of the day, and the
delicate silver whisper of the sea among the rocks.
“So we got to Panama, and by this time Mr. and Mrs. Tom Fleming only
wanted to be left alone,” Gay resumed, raising her blue eyes to smile
at him. “So there were great debates. They didn’t want to wire you,
because such a wire is very apt to be noticed, and they didn’t quite
want to come home; in fact, they planned this Southern trip as a sort
of supplementary honeymoon. So, as there was a charming navy woman, a
Mrs. Stephens, coming all the way up, I was delighted to put myself and
Margret in her care. And that’s all.”
She had packed the remains of their meal into the little basket in
the old quick, capable way that David so well remembered, and now she
descended to a certain little pool among the rocks, and washed her
hands, pushing the frills of her cuffs back from her slender wrists as
she did so, and waving her hands in the air to dry them.
“You’ve told me everything--except your own affair, Gabrielle,” David
presently prompted, when they were making their way up the cliff path
to the garden.
“My--my own affair?” Perhaps she had not understood, for although she
turned scarlet suddenly, she made no further admission.
“There is--somebody, you told me once?” David prompted her.
“Oh, yes!” She dismissed it with a shrug. “_That_,” she said, with a
thoughtful note in her voice.
She added no more at the time. The enchanted hours of the day moved
to three o’clock. But when David, knowing her to be tired from the
long trip and probably confused with all the changes and impressions,
suggested their return to Keyport, she showed a reluctance as definite
as his own.
She had given him, on this spring day of lingering lights and soft
fragrance, such a revelation of her own sweetness, her own personality,
as made all his other recollections of her seem pale and dim.
Every turn of her head, every movement, every direct look from her
star-sapphire eyes, had deepened the old impression that there was
nobody quite like her in the world.
Nobody so gracious, so quietly joyous, nobody else at once so youthful
and so wise. A hundred times, by some quality of being simply and
eagerly happy just in the springtime, and the garden, and his company,
she reminded him of the long-ago little girl Gabrielle, and yet, at
twenty, David thought her already a woman.
They talked of the old Wastewater, as they planned and went to and fro
busied with problems of the proportions and the placing of the new. Of
the family, with its passions and hates, its jealousies and weaknesses.
“The new house,” Gabrielle said, whimsically, “will stand as much for
the new order as the old one did for the stupidities and affectations
of the old. It’s all to be simple, no affectations, no great big gloomy
basement regions for the servants--they’ll have their section as
comfortable, as sunshiny as the other. There’ll be open fires instead
of the old hideous grates, and rugs and clean floors instead of the old
dirty, hard-and-fast carpets, and bathrooms full of tiles and sunshine,
and sleeping porches instead of all that horrible rep curtaining--and
there’ll be----”
Her voice lowered. “There’ll be people loving each other,” she said.
“After all, isn’t that the answer to the whole problem? Women being
loyal and generous, instead of jealous and watching all the time, men
thinking of other people’s happiness, instead of having themselves
painted in picturesque attitudes.”
She finished laughing, but her face was presently serious again. They
were idly wandering through the ruins of the garden now, Gabrielle a
little flushed and tumbled from the efforts of raising a bent rose
bush, or straightening, with a little air of anxiety and concentration
that David thought somehow touchingly mother-like, a sheaf of timidly
budded whips that would some day be sweet with white syringa bloom.
She stopped at the old sundial and cleared the fallen packed damp
leaves from its face with a stick, and busied herself so earnestly
about it that David thought her more like an adorable child, and more
like a responsible little housewife, than ever. He thought of the wife
she would make some man some day, and felt suddenly that he must get
away--out of the country--anywhere!--before that time came.
“You can’t tell me your plans yet, Gabrielle dear?” he said, with a
rather dry throat, when they were beside the dial.
The girl’s colour deepened a little under the creamy skin, and for a
moment she did not answer. Then she said with a look straight into his
eyes:
“I could tell you--as far as they have gone.”
“Not unless you want to,” David answered, from the other side of the
dial, which he gripped with fingers that were suddenly shaking.
“The man of whom I spoke to you, so long ago,” Gabrielle said,
presently, “I saw again--this spring.”
“I see,” David said, with a nod, as she paused. “He did not marry the
other woman, then?”
“What other woman?” the girl demanded, amazed.
“I thought you said that he had cared for another woman?”
“Ah----? Ah, yes, so he had. No, he didn’t marry her. He is--quite
free,” said Gabrielle, working busily.
“You’re very sure you care for him, dear?” David said, already
relegated, in his own mind, to the sphere of the advisory, loving older
brother.
“Yes,” she said, with another upraised look. “I am sure. I have never
felt for anybody else what I do for him, and I know now I never shall.
When I first saw him--more than two years ago----”
“You saw him first then?”
“Well, I had seen him as a child. But after I got home from Paris I saw
him again,” the girl offered, lucidly.
“I see.” She was so radiant, she was so wonderful! If he should be some
utter good-for-naught, David thought----
“Then I did not see him, except occasionally,” Gabrielle resumed. “And
when I did not see him, then I knew that logically, actually, he was
everything I could love; a gentleman, kind, wise, admirable in every
way.”
“Rich?” David asked, in a silence, and with a faint frown.
“No. Not--exactly poor, either.”
“But does he know that you are rich, Gabrielle?”
“I don’t think it makes any difference to him,” the girl said,
thoughtfully, after a moment.
“I don’t suppose, of course, that it would!” David agreed, immediately.
“No. So that when I was away from him, I had time to think it out
logically and dispassionately, and I knew he was--the one,” the girl
resumed, “and when I saw him--whenever we were together, although I
couldn’t think logically, or indeed think at all,” she said, laughing,
and flushed, and meeting his eyes with a sort of defiant courage, “I
knew, from the way I felt, that there never could be, and never would
be, any one else!”
“I see, of course,” David said, slowly.
“Both ways,” Gabrielle went on, smiling a little anxiously, “I feel
safe. When I’m not with him I can reason about it, I can look forward
to all the years, thinking of myself as older, as the mother of
children,” the girl went on seriously, her voice lowered to the essence
of itself, her eyes upon the softly heaving and shining sea, “thinking
of the books, the tramps, the friendships we will share. There is no
moment of life that he will not make wonderful to me, poverty, change,
sorrow, travel--everything,” she finished, looking up smiling, yet with
the glitter of tears in her beautiful eyes.
“I----” David cleared his throat--“I am so glad you can tell me, Gay,”
he said, a little gruffly.
“I love to tell you!” the girl said, with an illuminated look.
“It--is settled, Gabrielle?”
“No. Not exactly. That is----” She coloured violently, laughed, and
grew suddenly pale. “No, it’s not settled,” she answered, confusedly.
“You can’t tell me anything more?” David asked, after a pause.
“Not--now, very well. At least, I think I can soon,” Gay said, laughing
and flushed, yet oddly near, he could see, to tears, too. “I know that
he--cares for me,” she added, after another brief silence.
“He has told you?”
“Well, no. Or yes, he has, too--in a way. But all that----” she broke
off, appealingly.
“Yes, I know,” David reassured her. “You shall tell me when you’re
ready.”
“David, I suppose we should be going back,” the girl said, reluctantly.
But she did not change her comfortable position, resting against the
dial, and looking alternately at its blackened old stone surface and
across the shining sea.
“Presently. I hate to end--to-day,” David answered, simply.
“So do I. Hasn’t it been a wonderful day? Doesn’t it seem like the
beginning of heavenly times?”
“One of the happiest of my life,” David said, trying to lighten the
words with his old friendly smile, and failing.
Gabrielle was silent, and in the stillness all the sweet sounds of
a spring afternoon made themselves heard: the lisp of the sea, the
chirp of little birds flying low in short curving flights among the
budding shrubs, a banging door in the farmhouse and the distant sound
of voices as the workmen put up their tools and started their motor
engines.
The sun was sending long slanting rays down across the torn earth, and
the old garden, and the piled bricks. John’s and Etta’s house, joined
by the simple curve of the arch to the long, low roofs of the barn,
looked everything that was homelike and comfortable in the sinking glow.
“I see summer suppers here, in the court,” Gabrielle said, presently,
in a low voice, as if half to herself. “Guest rooms all fresh and airy,
Sylvia’s children, and my children, drawing others here for picnics on
the shore, white dresses, and the harvest moon coming up there across
the sea, as we have seen it rise so many hundreds of times! I don’t
know which will be most wonderful, David: the long summers with the
hollyhocks and the twilights, or the winters with big fires and snow
and company coming in, all cold and laughing.
“I do think of going abroad,” she added, as for sheer pain David was
silent. “But I find myself thinking most often of getting home again,
with all the trunks and excitement, to settle again in Wastewater!”
“You really are going abroad, Gabrielle?” David asked. And to himself
he added, “Honeymoon.”
“Why, I don’t know. To-night I don’t feel as if I ever wanted to go
outside these gates again; I feel as if I wanted to stay right here,
watching them put every brick into place! But--_you_ would like to go
abroad again some day, wouldn’t you, David?”
“Oh, I? Yes, but that’s different,” the man answered, bringing himself
into the conversation with a little self-consciousness. “Yes,” David
said, slowly, frowning into space with narrowed eyes, “I think I may
go, one of these days. I would like to do some painting in Florence.”
Another silence, so exquisitely painful, so poignantly sweet, that
David felt he might stand so for ever, watching her, leaning in all
her beauty and her fragrant youth against the grim old dial, looking
sometimes at him, and sometimes off to sea, with her glorious and
thoughtful eyes.
“David, I got your message,” she said, suddenly, in a voice oddly
compounded of amusement and daring and a sort of fear.
“I’m glad,” David answered, mechanically. And then, rousing himself, he
added in surprise, “What message?”
“On the little draught of the house plans,” Gabrielle answered,
serenely.
“Which plans were those, dear? The ones Jim sent to San Francisco?”
“He sent them to San Francisco too late, but they sent them on and we
got them in Panama.”
“Did I send a message with them?” David asked, not remembering it.
“Scribbled on the margin of one of them,” Gabrielle nodded.
“A message--to _you_?” David said, in surprise.
“Well, I read it so.” The girl fell silent, and a robin with a warmly
stained breast, and a cocked head, hopped nearer and nearer to them.
“I don’t remember,” David admitted, after thought. It was obvious that
she wanted him to remember it, but, stupidly enough, he seemed to have
no recollection of it whatever.
“I think it must really have been to Jim Rucker,” Gabrielle added,
innocently. “It began ‘Dear Jim.’”
The blood came to David’s face and he laughed confusedly.
“I--did I scribble something to Jim on the margin? I remember that
we sent the plans back and forth a good deal,” he said, in a sort of
helpless appeal.
“I’ll show it to you,” Gabrielle answered, suddenly. She put her hand
into her pocket and brought out a curled slip of paper that had been
cut from the stiff oiled sheet of an architect’s plans. “Here, David,”
she invited him. “Read it with me.”
And she flattened it upon the old dial and glanced at him over her
shoulder.
David, hardly knowing what he did, let his eyes fall upon the pencilled
words. He read:
DEAR JIM:
No letter, but a message about her in one from Sylvia. Tell Mary I’m
sorry I cut her dinner party!
It was signed with David’s own square, firm, unmistakable “D.”
“When I read that,” said Gabrielle, looking up with her face close to
his, as he leaned at her shoulder, “I knew that the man I loved, loved
me. And after that I couldn’t get home fast enough.”
“Gabrielle,” David said, trembling, and now she was in his arms. “Is it
really so, dear? Dearest and loveliest of women, do you mean what you
say?--Do you know what you are doing? I’m not the brilliant sort of man
that you might marry, dear--I’ll never be rich, perhaps I’ll never be
successful----”
“Ah, David,” the girl answered, facing him now, with both hands upon
his shoulders, as he held her with his arms lightly linked about
her, “do let’s not have any more misunderstandings and silences and
half-said things at Wastewater? Tell me that you love me----”
* * * * *
There was a milky spring twilight in the old garden now; the sea had
mysteriously blended itself with the sky, and a mild great moon was
rising before the last of the sun’s radiance had fairly faded from
the west. As the enervating warmth of the day died, delicious odours
began to creep abroad in the dusk, and the plum tree that had burst
prematurely into bloom shone like a great pale bouquet against the
gathering shadows.
There were smells of grass and earth, the sweet breathing of a world
wearied after the unwonted hours of sunshine; there was the clean smell
of new paint from the regions back of the farmhouse and barn. The birds
were still now, and the very sea seemed hushed.
And to both David and Gabrielle, as they dreamed of the days to come,
the golden days of responsibilities and joys unthinkable now, it seemed
that no hour would eclipse this hour, when they two, children of the
old place, found love among its ruins, and planned there for a better
future.
All the terrors, all the whispers, voices, fears, and hates, all the
secrets and conspiracies that had shadowed Wastewater in its old and
arrogant days were gone. Roger with his vanity and arrogance was gone,
Lily with her tears, Cecily frightened and saddened in her youth, Flora
with her dark repressions and thwarted love.
The old Sylvia was gone, too, and in her academically complacent place
was the much more human Mrs. Tom Fleming. And David was gone; never
again would he be only the dreamy, detached painter, the amused older
brother and audience for the younger folk, the philosopher who looked
at love dispassionately. David was a man, now, and the thought of
having this woman for his wife, the thought of the future, when they
two would make a home together, for ever and for ever, as long as
life should last, made him feel as shaken, as awkward, as humble and
ignorant as the boy he had never really been.
All gone. But there remained, steadfast, gray-eyed, sometimes all a
mother, sometimes all a child, always simple, direct, loving, anxious
for peace and harmony, this tawny-headed waif who had drifted in
among the black Flemings so mysteriously, who had flourished upon
neglect and injustice, who had borne sorrow and shame courageously and
unfalteringly, and who was now, of them all, left to be mistress here,
to begin the new history and the new line.
“David, we will go to Florence together, in the fall, if we can tear
ourselves away from our new house, and you shall copy little Dizianis
and Guardis!”
“Ah, Gabrielle, don’t, my dear. I can’t--I can’t believe it. It seems
too much.”
“But we’ll come back for a housewarming at Christmas time, David, and
not miss one instant of the spring!”
“Yes, my darling,” David said.
“And we’ll have days in the city, David, buying towels and muffin
rings,” the girl said, rejoicingly. “And then you’ll have an exhibition
in April, and won’t you be proud of your nice furry wife, walking about
among the pictures and listening to what people say!”
“I can hardly be prouder of her than I have always been, Gay.”
Silence. Her right hand was upon his shoulder, and his arm was strong
and warm about her. David had only to bend his head to kiss the crown
of her tawny, uncovered hair; the whole gracious, fragrant woman was in
his arms. Their left hands, clasped, rested upon the dial.
So resting, they obscured the blackened old face that had serenely
marked the hours under thin Scotch suns, under more than a hundred
passionate years of the hotter suns of the New World. They hid the old
legend:
Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne,
The crossit line’s the kenter skein.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.