CHAPTER X
Thenight that followed was one of the strange, abnormal times that seemed—David thought more than once—so peculiarly appropriate, so peculiarly in tone with the atmosphere of Wastewater; with the empty, dusky, decaying rooms, with the shadowy mirrors clouded with mould, with the memories, the tragedies, the ghosts and echoes that on a bitter winter night seemed to throng the old place.
Outside there was a sharp frost, and when the massed silent snow slipped from the branches of the old elms, an occasional crack like a pistol shot sounded through the night. A cold bright moon moved over the packed snow, and the sea swelled with booming, sullen rushes over the rocks. Clocks seemed, to David, to stand still; to mark strange hours.
When Gabrielle had put her young arm about the shrinking, withered form of the harmless old feeble-minded woman that David did now indeed recognize as Aunt Lily, for some reason he had felt his throat thick, and his eyes blind with tears. The girl was so young, she had been so full of hope and gaiety and high spirits during the happy holidays and the weeks that followed; she had tramped beside him chattering like a sturdy little sister, belted into a big coat, her eager feet stamping and dancing on the snow, her cheeks glowing with the tingle of the pure cold air. They had had somecontented rainy mornings together, in the bare upstairs room he called his studio, and they had sometimes played a sort of double solitaire in the evenings, Gay as anxiously excited as a child, and saying “Oh, fudge!” when the cards fell wrong, in a little baffled, furious tone that always made him laugh. He and she had thought the weak little mother and the worthless, wandering father long ago vanished from her problem; the child had quite a sufficient problem left, as it was! And she had faced it so bravely, faced it cheerfully even with the constant reminder of Sylvia’s contrasted good fortune, Sylvia’s wealth, Sylvia’s impeccable parentage, right before her vision.
Now, suddenly, while her heart was thumping with the shock and terror of awakening from sleep to find this dreadful apparition in her room, she had had to accept this same mowing, gibbering, weeping old woman as her mother. And David loved her that she had not hesitated, where for sheer bewilderment he knew he might have hesitated.
She had not glanced at Aunt Flora, who was leaning sick and silent against a chair, nor at the cowed and white-faced old Belgian servants, nor at him. Quite simply she had put her arm about poor Aunt Lily, touched her young lips to the yellowed old forehead where the forlorn wisps of grayish hair hung down, and then turned, steady-eyed and ashen-cheeked but quite composed, to say quietly:
“Where does she sleep, Aunt Flora? In that room where I saw the light? I’ll go up with her—she’s shuddering with cold, she’ll be ill. I’ll—you’ll go with me, won’t you, Margret? We’ll get her to bed.”
For Margret, also pale, in a gray wrapper, and looking anxiously from one to the other as if to read in their faces what had occurred, had joined the group from some rear doorway.
“No, that was partly it, Gabrielle,” Flora forced herself to say, with chattering teeth. “She hasn’t been so bad until lately. And after you met her, that day, we moved her into the back of the house—someone was always supposed to be near her. You shouldn’t have gotten out of bed and come through the halls in your bare feet, Lily!” Flora mildly reproached her sister. Lily clung stubbornly to Gabrielle’s arm, but they were all moving slowly in the direction of the rooms Flora had mentioned now, through the bitter darkness of the halls. The lamp, carried by David, sent their shadows wheeling about the angles and corners ahead of them, doors banged, shutters creaked, and when Lily’s chattering whisper of complacency and exulting triumph was silent, they could hear Hedda and Trude telling Margret that the sick lady had wandered into Miss Gabrielle’s rooms in the night and frightened her.
Lily was really almost sick by the time they reached the homely, comfortable rooms, which, Gabrielle noted, were well furnished, and warmed by a still-glowing stove. David built up the fire while they put the poor little chattering creature to bed, and Gabrielle, without seeming to be even now conscious of anybody’s presence but that of her mother, caught up an old ivory-backed brush and massed the straying gray hair into order, pinning it, David noted pitifully, with the pins that had held back from her face her own thick, rich braids. There was a tenderness, an absorbed, gentle, and childishpity about her whole attitude the while she did so that made his throat thicken again.
Meanwhile Margret and Hedda, evidently well used to this ministry and moving about the room with an air of being entirely at home there, had supplied Lily with hot-water bottles and some sort of milky hot drink which Lily fretfully complained was bitter.
“It has her sleeping stuff in it,” Margret explained, in an aside. Lily smiled knowingly at Gabrielle.
“They wouldn’t mind poisoning me a bit, dearie,” she said, in a loud whisper. “At Crosswicks they used always be trying to poison us.”
However, she took the drink, when Gabrielle held the glass, in short sips, meanwhile patting the girl’s hand, beaming, and occasionally, with increasing drowsiness, recalling old memories.
“Gabrielle had a little gray coat and a hat with gray fur on it—beaver, it was real beaver—it looked so good with her golden curls!” she said once, complacently. “Roger said she looked like a squirrel. Where is Roger, Flora? Why don’t he come up some night, so’s we could all play euchre, like we use’ to?”
And at another time, some moments later, she added, in a sweet and natural voice: “I was looking all over the place for Tom. He gets my nasturtium seeds and eats them! But I don’t know where all this snow’s come from. It was real sunny yesterday when I put them out, and Roger and Will were in swimming!”
All this time Flora had sat in an armchair by the stove, with one hard, veiny hand tight over her eyes. Margret lessened the lights, Lily began to sink into sleep, and Gabrielle sat timidly down near her, stillholding her hand. The servants slipped away, but still Flora did not stir.
When Lily was so soundly off that their voices did not disturb her, David touched Gabrielle’s arm, and stiff, and looking a little bewildered, she rose noiselessly to her feet. Flora started up, pale, and with a bitten under lip and a look of some deep fright in her eyes, and they quietly left the room, David carrying the lamp as before.
“And now,” he said, cheerfully, when they were back in the hall outside of Gabrielle’s room, “there’s no good worrying ourselves about all this to-night! You look exhausted, Aunt Flora, and Gay here has had enough. Jump into bed, Gay, it’s after two, and get off to sleep. I’ll leave my door open and you leave yours—or if you like I’ll wheel this couch up against your door and sleep on it myself.”
“No, David, thank you; I’m not afraid now,” the girl said, quietly and seriously, and David knew that there were more than vague unnamed terrors to occupy her thoughts now. “I’ll do splendidly, and to-morrow we’ll talk. I only hope,” she added slowly, “my mother will not be ill, although”—and there was infinite sadness in her voice—“perhaps I shouldn’t even hope that, for her! Good-night, Aunt Flora.”
And with a sudden impulse that seemed to David infinitely fine and sweet, she stooped and kissed her aunt’s cheek before she turned to her own door.
“Good-night, Gay dear, don’t worry!” David said, tenderly. And with a quick emotion as natural as hers had been, he kissed her forehead as a brother might have done. Flora had already gone, and Gay smiled at him pathetically as she shut her door.
She would not think to-night, the girl told herself restlessly. But there was nothing for it but thought. She was bitterly cold, and shuddered as she snuggled into the covers, and stared out with persistently wakeful eyes at the blackness of the big room. Gay heard creaks, crackling, the lisp of falling blots of snow, the detonations of contracting furniture in distant closed rooms, the reports of breaking branches outside. And always there was the cold, regular pulse of the sea.
The girl looked at her watch; twenty minutes of three, and she seemed to have been tossing here for hours. Her brain seethed; faces, voices, came and went, problems for the future, speculations as to the past. She was deathly cold; she wondered if there were any fuel at her cold fireplace, lighted the candle, and investigated. None.
“Well, these windows at least can be closed!” Gay decided, with chattering teeth. The night struck through her thin nightgown like a wall of ice as she struggled with the heavy blinds. Gabrielle experienced a weary and desperate sensation of discouragement; the horrible night would never end, her thoughts would never straighten themselves out into peace and quiet again, there would never be sunlight, warmth, safety in the world!
Looking down, however, toward the kitchen wing, she saw that a heartening red light was striking through the shutters, and immediately she caught up her wrapper and went slippered and shuddering down the long stairs and passages that led to the kitchen.
She opened the door upon heartening lamplight and firelight; Margret, Trude, and Hedda were in comfortabletalk beside the stove, and a boiling coffee-pot sent a delicious fragrance into the dark old room.
“Margret,” Gay began, piteously, with a suddenly childish feeling of tears in her voice. “I can’t sleep—I’ve been lying awake——”
And immediately she was on her knees beside Margret, and had her bright head buried in the old servant’s lap, and Margret’s hand was stroking her hair.
Gay, after the first tears, did not cry. But as the blessed heat and light seemed to penetrate to the centre of her chilled being, and as the old servant’s hands gently stroked her hair, she felt as if she could kneel here for ever, not facing anything, not thinking, just warm again and among human voices once more.
Margret’s words, if they were words, were indistinguishable; neither Hedda nor Trude spoke at all. The Belgian women looked on with their faded old eyes red with sympathy. Trude put a smoking cup of coffee, mixed in the French fashion, as Gay liked it, on the table, and Hedda turned a fresh piece of graham toast on the range, and Margret coaxed the girl to dispose of the hot drink before there was any talk.
Afterward, when Gay had dried her eyes upon a towel brought by the sympathetic Hedda, and rolled herself tight in her wrapper, and had her feet comfortably extended toward the range, Margret said:
“You mustn’t feel angry at us, Miss Gabrielle. It was to spare you, I’m sure, that Miss Flora has kept this secret all these years.”
“I’m not angry——” Gabrielle began, and stopped abruptly, biting her lip, and turned her eyes, brimming again, toward the glow of the range.
“I know, it seems awful hard, but this has always been a bitter thing to Miss Flora, and she has taken her own way about it,” Margret said, kindly, and there was silence again. “You know your mamma,” the old woman began again, presently, and Gay’s eyes, startled, fixed themselves for a moment upon Margret’s face, as if the girl found the term strange. “Your mamma made a silly marriage, dear,” Margret went on, “and Miss Flora felt very badly about it. Your mother was such a pretty, gentle girl, too,” she added. “I’d see her gathering flowers, or maybe hear her singing at the piano, when I’d come up here to Wastewater to help them out with sickness, or company, or whatever it was. Very pretty, Miss Lily was. There was quite a family then. Miss Flora had married Mr. Will Fleming, and Sylvia was just a little thing, as dark as a gipsy. And of course that was just the time that poor Mr. Roger’s wife was dying of some miserable growth she’d had for years, and it was when Tom run away. Mrs. Roger Fleming had a big couch on the porch in summer, and she’d be laying there, and perhaps Mr. Roger reading to her, or talking about some cure; they were for ever trying new cures and new doctors! And Miss Flora would have Sylvia out there, with her big rag doll—Sylvia’s father was never much of a success, they used to say, he was usually away somewhere getting a new job of some sort,” Margret added, reminiscently.
“Somehow I never think of Aunt Flora as having a husband,” Gay said, in a sombre, tear-thickened voice. “Her being Sylvia’s mother, and all that, seems natural enough. But to think of her as Mrs. Will Fleming always is so queer.”
“I don’t know that she ever loved Mr. Will,” Margret said, with a glance behind her at Hedda, who was straightening the kitchen as composedly and indifferently as if the hour had been four o’clock in the afternoon instead of the morning. Hedda was paying no attention and Margret went on, with all an old servant’s significance: “It was well known that Miss Flora loved Roger Fleming all her life, and she was engaged to him after his first wife, that was David’s and Tom’s mother, died.”
“Yes, I know,” Gabrielle said, with a long sigh. She had heard all this before.
“When Roger Fleming married the second time, she took his brother Will,” Margret resumed, “and for a while they had a little apartment in Boston, and he was in a bank there, but he died when Miss Sylvia was only three and Miss Flora was here more than she ever was there, anyway; Miss Lily stayed here all the time. And then, that terrible summer when little Tom ran away, if Miss Lily didn’t fall in love with a man nobody knew anything about——”
There was an old-fashioned little peasant bench beside the stove, brought from across the seas when Hedda and Trude had come to America twenty-five years before, and Gabrielle was on this low seat now, with her arms across Margret’s knees. She looked up into Margret’s face wistfully as she said:
“But there was nothing against my father? Wasn’t he just a young man who was staying in Crowchester for a while?”
“He had some sort of agency,” Margret said. “No, dear, for all we ever knew he was a good enough man.But he was no husband for Miss Lily, who was Mr. Roger Fleming’s cousin, and had lived here at Wastewater all her life. And more than that, she married him secretly, and that’s always a bad thing!” the old woman added, impressively.
“Yes, I know!” Gabrielle murmured, with impatience and pain in her voice. “But I don’t see anything so terrible in it!” she finished, looking back at the fire again and half to herself.
“Well, it was such a bad time, when they were all so upset,” Margret argued. “Miss Flora felt something terrible,” she added, simply, “when she knew that Miss Lily—her sister that she’d always guarded and loved so dearly—was secretly married and going to have a baby. I don’t know that she told Mrs. Roger Fleming, who was so little and so delicate, anything about it, but I know she talked it over with Mr. Roger, for he came to me—so kindly! he was a wonderful man for being kind-hearted—and told me that Miss Lily was going into Boston to live in Miss Flora’s little apartment for a little while, while they tried to find this man, Charpentier——”
“That was my father,” Gay interpolated.
“That was your father, dear. I went to Boston with your mother and got her nicely settled,” Margret resumed. “She was very quiet then, and pleased with the little things she was making for the baby, but it was only a few months later—when Mr. Roger was off hunting little Tom, and Mrs. Roger dying, with this doctor or that quack or dear knows what always in the house here—that poor Miss Lily got typhoid fever.”
“Before I was born!” Gay had heard of the typhoidfever, but had never quite placed it in the succession of events before.
“Just after you were born. Poor Miss Flora was pulled every which way,” said Margret. “She’d rush into Boston to see Miss Lily, and she’d rush back here, afraid Mrs. Roger had died while she was gone. She didn’t dare risk the infection for Miss Sylvia, and so she sent for me, and I took Miss Sylvia into the rooms where poor Miss Lily is now, and Miss Sylvia hardly saw her mother for weeks. Miss Flora went up to see her sister—that was your mother—every week, and while she did that she’d never risk infection for little Sylvia.
“Well, then poor little Mrs. Roger died—very sudden, at the end. Miss Lily was convalescent then, but weak as a rag, and she and you came down here to Wastewater—and you were the most beautiful child I ever laid my eyes on!” Margret broke off to say, seriously.
Gabrielle, red-eyed and serious, laughed briefly.
“Well, you were a beautiful child,” Margret persisted. “Miss Flora let Miss Sylvia and me go on and take a peep at you, in a blanket, the day you came. Miss Lily was very sick after the trip, and she didn’t get out of bed for a week, and Hedda and I had you, and didn’t we make Miss Sylvia jealous with the fuss we made over the new baby!
“I remember one day—they were all in black then for poor Mrs. Roger, and Mr. Roger came home suddenly from one of his trips, poor man! We’d not seen him since the day of the funeral——”
“He got here too late to see her again?” Gabrielle asked, knowing the answer.
“He’d gotten here the very day of the funeral,” Margret nodded. “And he’d just stood looking at her as she lay there dead—she’d been more than five years his wife, and she was only twenty-two as she lay there with the flowers all around her! And he said to poor Miss Flora, ‘I killed her, Flora!’ And out of the house he walked, and we never saw him again until this day I’m talking about, six months after the funeral.
“By this time Miss Lily, your mother, was all over her illness, but the typhoid had left her very weak and light-headed, and sometimes she’d talk very queer, or cry, or whatever it was,” Margret went on. “In fact, that was the beginning of her trouble—she never again was—quite right—here,” interpolated Margret, significantly, touching her forehead. “Well, this day she was all in white, and she had an innocent sort of childish look, and Mr. David was home from school, and Miss Sylvia was running about, and you were just getting to the cunning age—my goodness, but you were a beautiful baby!” the old woman said again, affectionately. “Well, Mr. Will Fleming was home, he was out of a job again, and they were all out on the lawn—Mr. David was a fine little fellow of about thirteen then, and he saw Mr. Roger first, and he went running over. And Roger Fleming came up to them and asked, as he always did: ‘Any news of Tom? Any letter from my boy?’ and they told him, No. And then Miss Lily held you out to him so gently, and her face flushed up and she said: ‘Roger, you’ve hardly seen my pretty baby!’ and I remember his taking you in his arms and saying, ‘Well, hello, here’s a yellow-headed Fleming at last!’”
“Nobody seemed to make much of my Charpentier blood, or my name,” Gabrielle observed, drily.
“I remember,” Margret resumed, without answering, perhaps unhearing, “that after a while Mr. Roger said to Miss Flora, so sadly, ‘Look at them, David and Sylvia and this baby! But my own boy will never be master of Wastewater!’ and she said to him, ‘Roger, he’ll come home, dear!’
“But indeed he didn’t ever come home,” Margret finished, sighing, “and Miss Sylvia’s father died a year or two later and never left a son behind him. And after a while poor Mr. Roger died—he died a broken man. And then we had to send Miss Lily to Crosswicks, for she got worse and worse. She was there for fifteen years. But Crosswicks broke up last year, and Miss Flora didn’t quite know what to do with her,” Margret added, “and it was only while she was finding some other good place where she’d be happy that we thought of keeping her here. Poor, gentle little soul, she’d never hurt you or any one.”
Her voice died away into silence, and Gabrielle sat staring darkly into the fire, with a clouded face.
For a long time the two sat together, the girl with her young strong hands locked in Margret’s, and her eyes absently fixed on the dying fire, and gradually the old woman’s soothing voice had its effect. Margret gently begged her not to worry, there was no harm done, and perhaps it would be better, after all, to have her see her mother daily and naturally, as the poor little mental and physical wreck she was, and get over the fright and mystery once and for all. And now Gabrielle must takea bottle of hot water upstairs and get to sleep, for it was long after four, and they mustn’t keep poor Hedda up all night.
Hedda was quite frankly snoring in the rocker, back in the gloom, but Gabrielle obediently roused herself from deep study, and kissed Margret, and retraced her way up through the cold halls. Her room looked tumbled and was cold; she opened the window. Still night, night, night, black and cold and unbroken—there was no end to this winter night! But Gabrielle was young and cruelly wearied in mind and body, and after three minutes in the cool sheets a heavenly warmth began to envelop her, and she fell deeply asleep.