CHAPTER III
So therewas the story, thought David, rousing himself from his favourite position of leaning forward in his low chair, with his linked hands between his knees, and looking upward at the superb and smiling portrait once more—there was the story to the present day. Flora had guarded her forlorn little sister to the end, ten years ago; had educated Lily’s child, Gabrielle, that same Gabrielle who was to return from years of schooling to-day. Flora’s own splendid child, the beautiful Sylvia, would also be coming home from college one of these days to claim her great inheritance, to be owner and mistress of Wastewater. David himself, finishing college, had had some rather unhappy dull years in business in New York, had gone from the handling of pictures to the painting of pictures, and was now happy in the knowledge that his day as a painter of this same murmuring sea was coming, if not quite come.
In his thirty-first year, he kept a small studio in New York; his friends, his fellow workers, were there, the galleries and exhibitions were there. But he did much of his painting near Wastewater and had a sort of studio-barn at Keyport, where canvases were stored, and into which he sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Flora regarded him, however coolly and suspiciously, as a son; he was Sylvia’s guardian, he was Roger’s trustee, he advised and counselled the motherand daughter in everything they did. And then—he added this fact with a rather rueful smile to all the other facts of his life—he had always loved Sylvia, from the days of her imperious babyhood. He had gone from a big-brotherly adoration to a more definite thing; she knew it—trust Sylvia!—although he had never told her.
Aunt Flora knew it, too, or at least suspected it, but then it was natural to Aunt Flora to suppose all the world in love with her splendid child. Sylvia was just twenty; give her another year or two, David would muse, let her feel her wings. And then perhaps—perhaps they two would bring the Fleming line back to Wastewater.
The clock on the mantel struck an uncertain, silvery six. David looked at his watch in surprise: six o’clock. Gabrielle would be here in another two hours. Heavens, he said half aloud, stirring the fire and glancing over his shoulder at the deepened shadows of the ugly old room, how the wind howled about Wastewater in the autumn evenings, and how clearly one heard the gulls and the slash-slash of the sea!
Flora came in with a lamp; usually Hedda’s burden, but Hedda had gone downstairs, she explained; David rose. They were setting its familiar pink china globe carefully upon the crowded table when there was a stir outside in the upper hall, and the door opened, and a tall girl came quickly in, with a little nervous laughter in her greeting.
David had last seen Gabrielle at sixteen, when her teeth were strapped in a gold band and her young boyish figure still had a sort of gawky overgrownness about it. She had been convalescent after a fever when she hadsailed for France, then, and wearing big dark glasses on her bright eyes for fear of the glare of the sea, and had been plainly dressed in a heavy black coat and a school-girlish hat. She had been crying, too, emotional little Gabrielle; she had not altogether been a prepossessing little person, although David had always liked her and had given her a genuinely affectionate brotherly kiss for good-bye.
But that memory had not prepared him for this girl’s appearance; tired she undoubtedly was, train-rumpled, cold, and wind-blown, but she was oddly impressive for all that.
She enveloped Flora, who had stood wiping her oily hands on a barred tea towel, with a quick embrace and a kiss; then her eyes found David, and she held out both her hands.
“David! But how exactly as you were! And how like Uncle Roger!”
David had forgotten the husky voice, with a delicious touch of contralto roughness in it; he had forgotten nothing else, for this eager, graceful woman had about her little of the awkward, tear-stained child of more than two years before.
She was tall, perhaps not quite so tall as Sylvia, but very much more so than he had remembered her. Her hair, tawny, thick, spraying into fine tendrils on her forehead in the old way, hardly showed at all under her traveller’s hat, but her mouth had gained in sweetness and power, and in the creamy pallor of her face—so different, as it had always been different, from Sylvia’s rose-and-whiteness!—her eyes were astonishing. Even as a child she had had memorable eyes.
They were beautifully shaped, deep-set eyes, of the living grayness of star sapphires. In odd contrast to the warm brunette skin and the fair hair, they were black-fringed, and the brows above them were black and straight. This had made the child look odd, pixy-like, years ago, with her flying fair hair and nervous little forehead, but it made this serene girl superb.
Best of all, David thought, covertly studying her, as she sat upon the stiff-backed little chair Flora indicated, between Flora’s own armchair and David’s; best of all were her contours, the making of her. Child of little cry-baby Aunt Lily and the peripatetic agent she might be, but she was splendidly fine in her outlines and textures for all that. Her hands were fine, white, not too small, beautifully shaped. Her ankles were fine, her head nicely set and nicely poised when she moved it quickly to look at him or at her aunt. The shape of her face was fine, the cheek-bones a thought too high, the upper lip a shade too short, but the modelling of the mouth and temples and the clean cut of the chin were perfect. Her big teeth were white and glistening, her fair hair controlled to neatness in spite of its rebel tendrils, and brushed to a goldeny lustre. Her voice, husky and sweet, and lower than that of most women, was most distinctive of all. David wished that Aunt Flora would show something a little more motherly, a little more hospitable in her welcome—would at least ask Gabrielle to take off her hat.
But Flora, for her, was not ungracious.
“You are early, Gabrielle,” she said, kindly. “David had said something of meeting you in Crowchester if you came down on the two o’clock train.”
“I came on a special train this morning. We stopped at Worcester, with some girls who live there.”
“You’re not tired?”
“Well.” The white teeth flashed. “Rumpled and train-dusty and a little confused. We got into Montreal—what is to-day?—day before yesterday. Yesterday we were on the train, last night in the Boston convent.”
“You hardly know where you are?” David, speaking for the first time, suggested.
“Ah, I know I’m at Wastewater!” she answered, eagerly. “Every inch of the way I’ve been getting more and more excited. The sea—you can’t know what it meant to me! I could just see it, in the dusk. I can’t believe that to-morrow it will be there, right outside the windows, right below the garden!”
“Yet you’ve been on the sea all the way from France,” Flora said, repressively. Flora disliked enthusiasm.
“But not our sea, as we know it here at Wastewater,” Gabrielle answered, more quietly. “To-morrow I’ll walk along our shore and out the little gate on to the cliffs toward Tinsalls—do you ever walk that way now, David? And Keyport! I must go to Keyport, too.”
Her voice faltered on the last phrases a little uncertainly, and David interpreted aright her quick flush and the glance she sent her aunt. Tom’s name was indissolubly linked with that of Keyport, for his father had first sought him, and had always suspected that his escape had been planned there. And since Uncle Roger’s death, Flora, whose own daughter’s fortunehinged upon Tom’s return or non-return, had not encouraged much hopeful speculation about him among the younger members of the family. But Flora had been rooted securely for many placid years now, and she only commented mildly:
“Keyport. That’s where your uncle first hunted for poor Tom. Dear me, how many years ago!”
“No word—never any word,” David said, shaking his head in answer to Gabrielle’s quick questioning glance. “We won’t hear, now. The war split up the whole world; there must have been hundreds of lives lost upon the sea, and upon the land, too, for that matter, with no record left anywhere.”
“Think of it—Tom!” Gabrielle said, under her breath. And for a long moment they were all silent. Then Flora asked the newcomer if she would like to go upstairs.
“You’ll hardly have time to change, now,” said Flora. “One of the girls has made the old blue room ready for you. Call Maria if you need anything.”
“Maria! Then she didn’t marry her sailor!” Gabrielle said, laughing as she rose. “And Margret’s not here any longer?”
“She comes and goes; she’s pretty old now,” David said, as Flora merely seemed to be waiting patiently for Gabrielle to go.
“She’ll come over to see me, or I’ll go into Keyport and find her,” Gabrielle promised. “Ah,” she said, on a long sigh, departing, “it’s so good to be home!”
The door shut behind her; there was utter silence in the room. Flora, who usually had her knitting at thistime, sat back with leaden, closed eyes; David glanced at her, looked back at the fire.
“Is she like what you expected?” David asked.
“She’s like nothing—nobody,” Flora answered, in a low tone.
“She’s handsome!” David offered. “Poor child!”
Flora made no answer. She opened her eyes, and began to knit, flinging the granite-gray yarn free with little flying jerks. David was mending the fire when Hedda came stolidly in to announce dinner.
Gabrielle joined them on the way downstairs; David smiled at her.
“Seems strange to be home?”
“It seems,” she said, “as if I had never been away! The old rooms, the old things, this old good feeling of the first autumn cold in the house—and that loud sound of the sea——”
Meals at Wastewater nowadays were tedious and formal affairs. The dining room was large and draughty, and the candles lighted on the side tables wavered in the cool autumn evening. There were great bay windows on the north and east walls; the latter sometimes caught the clean sweet light of sunrise, but almost all the year through it was a dreary room even in the daytime. These bays were now shut off in heavy rep curtains, with tassels and ropes; the walls were covered with a heavy old pressed paper in chocolate and gold; the floor, outside the “body-Brussels” rug, shone slippery and dark. In one corner, cunningly concealed in paper and wainscoting, was the door into the enormous, inconvenient pantry; the kitchen and storerooms were downstairs, and in pauses in the meal the dinerscould hear the creaking of the dumb-waiter ropes and the maids’ anxious voices echoing in the shaft.
There was a great rubber plant in one corner, heavy walnut sideboards, and a great mirror over the black-and-white marble mantel that seemed to make the room darker and more gloomy. On the mantel was another heavy bronze-and-marble clock, this one under a clear tall bubble of glass ringed by a chenille cord. On each side of the clock stood heavy bronze statues of Grecian women holding aloft four-branched candlesticks that were never lighted.
There was never a fire nowadays in this fireplace, which was indeed a good twenty-five feet from the table, and must have burned for half a day in winter weather to make any impression upon the diners. Sometimes in January Flora would have an oil stove lighted in here during meals; usually she ate shuddering and rubbing her cold fingers dryly upon each other between courses, and escaped as soon as possible to the heavy warmth of the upstairs sitting room again.
Over the square walnut table hung a heavy lamp upon adjustable tarnished chains. Upon a walnut table in a corner stood the large birdcage, empty now, but where once Roger had kept the two green talkative parrots that had been one of the joys of David’s childhood and Tom’s.
“Here, open that cage, Katy—Addie—one of you!” David could remember his stepfather saying, when it was time for dessert. “Come here, Cassie-girl—come here, old Sultan!” And out would come the chuckling and murmuring birds, with the unearthly green of their feathers turned upside down or swept sideways as theysidled and climbed their way to their master’s shoulders. How often had David seen his stepfather, whom he so passionately admired, composedly eating his fruit and his cheese, with one small jade body mincing on his shoulder and the other weaving its way down his busy arm!
Gabrielle asked an occasional question or two to-night as the meal progressed; David—never an easy talker—did his best to keep the conversation moving. But Flora’s heavy silences were too much for both, and in the end it was a quiet meal. The wind outside whined and whispered at the closed shutters, shutters that, Gabrielle knew, gave upon a very jungle of heavy shrubbery on the northern and eastern fronts of the lower floor. Now and then an unused door, in some distant unused room, banged sullenly and was still.
Afterward they went back to their places beside the fire again, but in pure charity David presently suggested that the traveller be sent to bed. The warmth, the food, the quiet, and her fatigue were causing her an absolute torture of sleepiness; she held her eyes open with an effort, and answered her aunt’s questions with sudden stares and starts, smiling nervously as she roused herself to a full realization of where she was and what she was saying.
“Yes, go to bed,” said Flora, knitting. “And—sleep late if you like,” she added, as the slender young figure moved wearily to the door.
“Thank you,” Gabrielle answered, very low. “Good-night!” And it was only with his last glance at her that David realized with sudden compunction that she was on the verge of tears.
Tears, however, that she did not shed. She went resolutely up through the cold dark hallways and stairs to the third flight, where was the big room that had been assigned to her. The halls were pitchy dark, and the room, when she got to it, was impenetrably black.
Gabrielle groped for the matches, found them, struck a light, and drew toward her the hinged arm of the gaslight at the bureau. There was a bare brown marble top on the bureau, with a limp fringed towel laid across it; the bureau and the great table, desk, and bookcases were all enormous, heavy, and as impersonally bare as those in some old hotel. There was no closet, but there were two great wardrobes flanking a door that led to a sort of dressing passage or hallway, where there was a stationary washstand of wide, bare brown marble.
There were four high windows, reaching to the floor, with iron balconies outside; these were curtained in old-rose brocade, all silvery scrolls and cyclamen, tassels and cords. The bed was walnut, decorated with dots and ripples in mill-work, flat and bare. There were antimacassars on all the chairs, the neat green blotter on the desk had seen much use, Gabrielle’s trunk and suitcase had been set down in the centre of everything, and in her hurried scramble for a brush and a handkerchief before dinner she had tumbled the contents of the latter dishearteningly upon a sort of lounge set “cater-cornered” toward the empty fireplace.
Tumbled linen, the book she had been reading, her writing materials, a dozen disorderly trifles—Gabrielle quailed before the awful thought of having somehow to segregate them, to empty the suitcase and the trunk to-morrow. She was so dirty, too, and so cold, and thebathroom was across that formidable dark hall! She opened the bed with vigorous tugging—the sheets felt icily damp and lifeless.
Suddenly, as she struggled about forlornly in the dim light, a tap on the door made her heart leap. The old house was sufficiently full of ghosts without any such tangible horrors as this! But it was only good-natured, pock-marked Maria, with a kettle of hot water and a sympathetic look.
“Mr. David,” it appeared, had just slipped down to the kitchen, by whose sociable tea table Maria had been seated, to send someone up to Miss Gabrielle. Maria moved about the big chamber capably and not too silently, and Gabrielle felt her fears dissipate under the wholesome companionship. She managed a sort of sponge bath in the dressing room when Maria went downstairs for more hot water, this time in a rubber bag.
“Tell me about Margret, Maria. She’s not here any more?” Gabrielle questioned, when the maid came back. The girl was seated on her bed now, in her nightgown, brushing the long thick masses of her bright hair.
“She lives with her daughter in Keyport, mostly: she’s here nearly every day, though,” said Maria, folding and straightening capably. “She’s ’most eighty, Margret is.”
“She was my first nurse, when I came here as a baby with my mother,” Gabrielle said. “Such an old darling! My mother was—delicate, you know. She was Mrs. Fleming’s sister.”
“Sure, but that was before I come here,” Maria reminded her, with her pitted, plain face full of interest. “You don’t look like Miss Sylvia,” she added, mildly.
“Oh, no! She’s like all the Flemings—dark. Is she pretty?” Gabrielle demanded.
“They say she’s what you call a beauty,” Maria stated, dispassionately. Gabrielle felt a little thrill of interest, perhaps of more, the beginning of a jealous stir at her heart. When Maria had gone she sat on, cross-legged on her bed, in her shabby old convent wrapper, absent-mindedly brushing her hair, with her wide-awake eyes staring into the shadows of the stately old chamber.
Sylvia was “what you call a beauty.” Sylvia would have this whole place some day—would own Wastewater. Wastewater, the house that Gabrielle naturally thought the most interesting and important place in the world.
What did David think about Sylvia? Gabrielle wondered. He had sat there by the fire, with his handsome head bent a little to one side, and his hands linked, and a half smile upon his handsome face. He had glanced up at Gabrielle now and then, and always with a kindly smile. Was Sylvia to have David, too, with everything else?
But Gabrielle would not think about David. She dismissed him with a fervent, “I hope I won’t like him as well to-morrow! I hope he’s really horrid and disappointing!” and knelt down to say her prayers. Prayers had always been in the chapel at St. Susanna’s, and the girls had worn their black veils. But she dared not think of that, either—not to-night, when she was so alone.
She crossed the big room and opened a French window, pushed resolutely on the heavy shutters beyond,and hinged them back. The night was moonless, starless, and dark, and filled with the troubled creaking and rushing of branches and the steady crashing of the sea. The girl could not distinguish where the garden ended and the wide surface of the moving waters began, but these had been her loved and familiar companions from babyhood, and she felt nothing but a restful sense of being home again when she heard their voices.
A current of cool moving air stirred the room, the bureau gas-jet wavered and went out, and Gabrielle, used to electric lighting, laughed nervously and aloud as she turned back to grope once more for matches.
But turning on the narrow iron balcony her eyes were arrested by the great eastern façade of Wastewater, of which her windows were a part. It loomed in the night a shadow just a little blacker than the prevailing dark; her own room was in a corner, next came a deep angle, like the three sides of a court, and then the northern wing, where seamstresses and house servants and coachmen, ladies’ maids and valets, agents delayed overnight, all sorts of odd and inconsiderable gentry had been lodged in Wastewater’s days of glory, years before.
Gabrielle stared oddly at this wing for a few moments, looked back into her own room. There was no light behind her to be caught in a distant window and reflect itself like another light.
Her heart began to beat strong and fast. In the opposite wing, across the wide blackness of the court, in another corner room at the level of her own room—there was certainly a light. Gabrielle felt a sense of utter and unreasoning terror, she did not know why. She stared in a sort of horrified fascination at the yellowglints of light behind the shutter, her breath coming hard, one hand clutching her heart.
“David!” she whispered. Then frightened by her own voice she stumbled madly back in the dark, groping for gas fixtures, for matches, lighting her bedside lamp with shaking fingers, and springing in under the blankets with a long shudder of fear.
Safe—of course! But for a long time her heart did not resume its normal beat. There was something utterly unnerving about the sight of that quietly lighted apartment, mysteriously hung between the dark mysterious sky and wind and night and sea. Gabrielle did not fall asleep until she heard Aunt Flora and David come upstairs.