CHAPTER IV
Gabriellewas wandering along an overgrown path before breakfast the next morning when David came after her and sauntered at her side. The sun was shining brilliantly after a clearing storm, the air aromatic with delicious leaf-scent, and the sea dancing and blue. Everything was singing and shining in a warm bath of sweet clear light, there were a few late birds hopping about, and gulls walked on the sunken brick paths as boldly as the pigeons did. Under the thick growth of the cedars and conifers golden shafts penetrated; the paths and garden beds were deep in sodden and drifted leaves.
“Oh, what a morning!” sang Gabrielle, as David joined her.
“What a morning!” he echoed. And he added, “I needn’t ask if you slept well?”
For indeed she was glowing from a bath, from a night’s deep rest, glowing with all the morning beauty of healthy eighteen. The sun shone upon her warm brown hair, rousing golden lights in it, and her gray-sapphire eyes were shining. David noted that she walked with a little spring, as if in mere walking there were not quite enough action to free the bubbling vitality within her.
“I didn’t dare go far,” she said, “for I suppose breakfast is still at half-past eight? But presently—whenI’ve unpacked and gotten things straightened out—I’m going to explore!”
“I like this Quaker costume,” David said, glancing at the plain gray dress.
“This? It’s the Sunday uniform,” Gabrielle told him. “Black on week-days, and black always for the street—sometimes we went to the Madeleine or Notre Dame on Sundays, you know, and twice to organ concerts. But these we always wore indoors at St. Susanna’s.”
“All very well for the smaller girls,” David smiled, “but didn’t you others rebel?”
“Ah, but I have other clothes,” said Gabrielle, interestedly. “There’s a lovely countess in Paris, a widow, who is one of the old children——”
“One of the——?”
“Old children. One of the alumnæ of St. Susanna’s,” she elucidated, laughing at his bewildered look. “That’s what the nuns call them, ‘the old children.’ And every year this countess takes the graduates and goes with them to buy suitable clothes—that is, if there aren’t fathers and mothers to do it for them,” added Gabrielle. “So she took me, the darling! We all know her quite well, and the last year one may go to her Sunday afternoon teas four or five times,” explained the girl, seriously. “That is, if you’ve nodevoirs.”
“Devoirs?”
“Penances. Punishments to write for breaking rules,” she said.
“I feel dense.Devoirs, of course,” said David, diverted. “Tell me more of this. If you had nodevoirsyou might go to tea with the countess?”
“So that we might comport ourselves becomingly in society,” agreed Gabrielle. “And then, two weeks before we left for Cherbourg, she took me into the city, and bought me—oh, lovely things! A velvet dress; I wore that once on the boat. And a lovely brown lace dress, and a hat, and a suit, and three blouses. But we had to travel in our uniforms, of course. ‘Religious in habit. Students in uniform.’ That’s the rule.”
David was finding this extremely amusing and interesting. Through the medium of such engaging youth and freshness, such simplicity and eagerness, almost anything would have been somewhat so. But this glimpse of girlhood managed so decorously by rule was new to him, and it contrasted oddly with—well, for example, with Sylvia’s breezy independence and that of all the other young women he knew.
“Did you—did any of the girls really like it, Gabrielle?”
“Did——?” The wonderful eyes widened and were more wonderful than ever. “But we all loved it!” she exclaimed. “We had—fun. The gardens were perfectly beautiful, and on Sundays there was always a sweet, and often on Thursdays! Or some girl’s father would send her a great box of chocolates.”
“You were in Normandy when I was in Paris,” David said, wondering if he would have thought to send a box of chocolates to St. Susanna’s if she had been there.
“Normandy! Isn’t it—but you don’t know it!” she said. “It’s heavenly. We have such a cunning little place there; it was a sort of gate-lodge once, and of course we had the sea!—it used to remind me of Wastewater, only of course the sun seemed to set in the wrongdirection!——David,” Gabrielle broke off to ask earnestly, “didn’t you find Paris very disappointing?”
“Rucker and I were only there ten days, on our way to Spain, to paint,” David reminded her. “No, I don’t remember that it was exactly—disappointing,” he added, in a tone that made her laugh.
“To me,” the girl said, “Paris was all Dumas and Victor Hugo and Stanley Weyman. I like their Paris the best. Sedans, masked riders, horses waiting in the angles of the walls——It made me almost glad not to see London,” she added, gravely. “Imagine losing Dickens’s London, and Thackeray’s, and Trollope’s! Oh, look,” she said, in a tone rich with affectionate recollection, as they stopped by the old sundial set in a mouldy circle of emerald grass.
“You still like adventure stories?” David suggested, remembering that she always had liked them.
“Not always,” Gabrielle answered. And with a suddenly warming enthusiasm, she recounted to him a story she had read on the boat, one of a collection of short stories.
It was so simple that it hardly engaged his attention at first: the story of two rich little girls, with a marvellous doll’s house, and two poor little girls socially debarred from being asked in to inspect it. Gabrielle described the minute perfections of the doll’s house, the tiny beds and curtains, the marvel of a microscopic glass lamp, and the wistful wonder of the little pariahs, one bold and eager, the other shy, her little head hanging, her little hand always grasping a corner of her big sister’s apron. By chance the poor little girls were offered an opportunity to creep in, and they were rapturouslyinspecting the wonder when the rich little girls’ mother indignantly discovered them, sent them forth with insulting scorn, sent them shamed and bewildered on their homeward road. And the older child sat by the roadside, heaving with hurt and fury and heat and fatigue, with the little sister close beside her. And the simple story ended quite simply with the little sister’s murmured words of courage and comfort:
“Never mind. I seen the little tiny glass lamp!”
David was an artist, he adored beauty in youth, in words, in voices. Here he found them all combined in this eager creature who ended her tale with tears in her glorious eyes and a smile that asked for his sympathy twitching her splendid mouth. Told so plainly, under the dreaming autumn sky, in the thinning soft autumn sunlight of the old garden, the whole thing had a quite memorable pathos and charm, and when he thought of Gabrielle—as David did often in the days to come—he always thought of her standing by the sundial in the morning freshness, telling him the story of the doll’s house.
She had brushed the face of the dial free of leaves and pine needles and was scraping the deep incisions with a stick.
“Twenty minutes past eight,” she said, tipping her head to read the time. And afterward she read the inscription in her sweet husky voice:
“Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne;The crossit line’s the kenter skein.
“Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne;The crossit line’s the kenter skein.
“Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne;
The crossit line’s the kenter skein.
“One of my first recollections,” said Gabrielle, “is being down here with Uncle Roger and Sylvia—I musthave been about six, for it was just before he died. He set us both up on the sundial, and told us it was older than the Stars and Stripes, that it had come from England for his grandfather, and what it meant. It meant that the Flemings were always bringing home wives from overseas and crossing the line. I remember it,” she added, as they strolled back toward the house, “because I said—looking out to sea—‘Will Tom have a wife when he comes home?’ and that pleased Uncle Roger, as anything did, I suppose,” Gabrielle ended, sighing, “that made Tom’s coming back at all seem likely!”
“Poor Tom! It would have been a nice inheritance,” David mused. “It has increased, even since Uncle Roger’s time, you know.”
“Is Sylvia apt to make her home here, David?” Gabrielle asked. “She sounds rather worldly—that’s a great convent word! But tell me, what is she like?”
“She is very beautiful, extremely clever, enormously admired,” David answered, with a little flush. “She has the white Fleming skin, high colour, shining black hair.”
“A girl off a handkerchief box?” Gabrielle suggested.
“Exactly.”
“And are there admirers?”
“A great many.”
The girl looked a quick question, half smiling, and he answered it pleasantly:
“Myself among them, of course! But Sylvia can look much higher than a painter of mediocre pictures.”
“I don’t believe they’re mediocre!” Gabrielle said, stoutly.
“I’ve some at Keyport, most of them are in New York, some on their way now to an exhibition in Washington,” David said. “When I come back you must see them, Gay!”
“When you come back——?” Her walk halted.
“I’m off for New York and then Washington this morning.”
“Oh.” It was not a question, not an exclamation. She pronounced the little monosyllable quietly, resumed her walking. “I like my little old name!” she presently said, with a glancing smile. And then, with sudden interest, as they came closer to the house: “David, tell me—who lives in that wing—up there, on the third floor?”
“Nobody, now. Those are old servants’ rooms; but the servants are on the other side now—Aunt Flora has only five or six. Hedda’s cousin is the cook, an old Belgian woman who’s been here—well, she must have been here several years before you went abroad?”
“Trude?”
“Yes, Trude. Then there’s Maria, the pock-marked one, and a couple of new ones from Crowchester, sisters named Daisy and Sarah, who live with John and Etta at the tenant house, out near the stables, and seem mainly interested in going into Crowchester. John occasionally employs others to assist him in the garden, his wife helps, I believe, with the laundry-work, and old Margret comes over from Keyport to lend a hand now and then. That’s the staff.”
“But look here, David,” said Gabrielle. “You see my open window up there, with the curtain blowing—and then all those blank windows—then turn the cornerof the court and come out again in the north wing—up there—there was some light up there last night! I saw it when my own gaslight blew out. It was unmistakable, coming through the chinks of shutters! It gave me the creeps for a moment.”
“Reflection!” David said, smiling. “Reflection in glass.”
“No, for my light was out.”
“Reflection of some other window, then.”
“Yes, but whose?”
“I don’t know,” he told her, amused. “You’ll have ample opportunity to find out, my dear. I’m wondering what you’ll do with yourself, here all alone with Aunt Flora!”
“I’ll work,” she said, stoutly. But he could see that she herself felt a little daunted by the prospect. “I’ll practise, and keep up my French, and take walks into Keyport and Crowchester, and perhaps”—and she gave him a laughing look—“design all the little rooms and hallways of houses in beans when it rains!”
“Good Lord!” David said, with a great laugh. “Do you remember my houses designed in white beans to amuse you and Sylvia on wet holidays? But you have no special plans for yourself, Gay?” he asked, more soberly. “Nothing you especially want to do?”
“I talked it over with Sister Borromeo and Sister Alcantara——” she was beginning, with a faintly worried look, when David laughed again.
“Are these Pullman cars?”
“No!” said Gabrielle, shocked yet laughing, as they mounted the three steps to the side door. “They are wonderful nuns. And they both feel that, under thecircumstances, I had better wait and see if Aunt Flora has any plans or any use for me here!”
“And I think that, too,” David said, heartily, delighted to find her so reasonable. “You are not yet nineteen, after all, and we’ll find the happiest solution for you one of these days. I’ll be coming and going all winter, and Sylvia’ll be home, with a degree, in June. So keep up your spirits!”
“Ah, don’t worry about me!” she answered, courageously, going in to breakfast.