CHAPTER XII
Gabrielle, however, was more affronted than puzzled by it. It made her definitely uneasy. She suspected at once what was in his mind, and in the utter despair that engulfed her she felt that this would be the crowning trial, the crowning indignity, in a life that was filled with both.
The days since her discovery regarding her mother had seemed endless to her. They were the cold dark days that follow the coming in of the new year, there was nothing of the holidays’ snap and exhilaration about them. Rain, clouds, winds, heavy snows, rushing storms had thundered and banged about Wastewater; Gay felt that every out-of-door garment she had was twisted and soaked and half dried; she was sick with loneliness and discouragement.
In vain she made herself practise, made herself walk and study. There was no life in it; everything she did come up against a blank wall, a dreary “What’s the use?” What was the use of living, to find that so much that was weak and stupid and wrong was blended into one’s blood?
If there had been a sweet, interested mother to put her arm about one, or a big father to advise and adore, if there had been normal friendships, neighbours, all the cheerful life of the average American girl—ah, that would have been so different! But Gabrielle was alone,yet curiously imprisoned in this dreary old silent place, tied to the poor little invalid who rarely identified her, and to dismal, quiet Aunt Flora, and to all the ghosts and echoes of Wastewater.
Tied, too, to an unceasing contemplation of Sylvia’s perfections, Sylvia’s good fortune, Sylvia’s charms. Sylvia would be home in June as the daughter of the house, and the heiress; already some papering and painting was being done in preparation for her return; she herself had selected papers and hangings in Boston weeks ago.
Gabrielle had borne bravely the initial shock of discovering her mother but she weakened as the slow, cold weeks went by, let her music go, neglected her books, wept and brooded a great deal. David’s birthday letter brought the first smile of many days to her face, and she opened it with the old brightness he always brought to her shining in her eyes.
The cryptic phrases made her bite her lip thoughtfully; look off into space for a little while. And presently she went for a lonely walk by the sea, and half-a-mile away from the house, seated upon a rock above the ebbing teeth of the cold tide, she read the letter again.
Then she tore it to scraps and buried it under a stone. Her cheeks blazed with colour and a nervous hammering commenced in her heart. He could not mean—but hecouldnot mean that he meant to ask her to marry him?
This would be preposterous; it certainly was not that. Yet as Gabrielle remembered the phrases of the short letter the horrible conviction came to her that her suspicion was justified. He was engaged to Sylvia, orat least there was between them an understanding more or less definite; that was what he meant by Sylvia’s part, Sylvia’s “coming into it a little.” And the rest was between him and Gabrielle.
Oh, he could not intend to hurt her so terribly, to add this insufferably humiliating thing to all that she was enduring now!
“I don’t believe it!” Gabrielle said aloud to the gulls and the sea. “David wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be honest, and he would know how mortally—how mortally hurt I would be!”
But the uncomfortable fear persisted. David always entered into Sylvia’s and Aunt Flora’s plans with all the affectionate interest of a devoted son. He knew they were troubled about Gay. He would step into the breach and solve the Gay problem once and for all.
“Oh, my God, I cannot bear it, if he begins to say something like that to me!” Gay said, passionately, getting to her feet and beginning to walk along the rough shore blindly, hardly conscious of what she was doing. “How cruel—how cruel they are! They don’t know, you see,” she added, to herself, more quietly. “They don’t know how hard it is! Aunt Flora will think it over and decide that David would be a most wonderful match for me——”
Her heart began to beat fast again, and her face burned.
“If he comes here next week,” she said, hurriedly and feverishly, “I will not be here! Where can I go? I won’t—I can’t have him tell me about it, that Sylvia thinks it wise, and Aunt Flora thinks it wise. No, my dear David,” Gay said, stumbling on, and cryingbitterly as she went, “you are the one man in the world who cannot solve my problems by marrying me! You would do it, to have them happy, and to make me happy, but that would be more than I can bear! I’ve borne a great deal—I wish I had never been born!” And blinded by tears, she sat down upon a rock, and buried her head in her arms, and sobbed aloud.
But when she got home she was quite herself again, and had the puppy in the sitting room before dinner, playing with him charmingly in her low chair; standing him up on his indeterminate little hind legs, in a dancing position, doubling him up with little bites and woofs of affection, to which the struggling puppy made little woofing and biting replies.
Gabrielle had by this time quite convinced herself that it was idiotic to suspect sensible David of anything so fantastic as disposing of Sylvia, whom he so heartily admired, and offering himself to her, whom he had not seen for twelve long weeks. She put the suspicion resolutely from her.
Aunt Flora had softened so much to Ben, as the puppy was called, that he was a regular third in the evening group, and had even been up to Lily’s room. Flora often pretended that Ben could not be comfortable curled up in a ball in an armchair and sound asleep, and would drag him into her lap with an impatient “Here, if you won’t be quiet anywhere else!” To-night Gay forestalled this by surrendering him to Aunt Flora as soon as dinner was over. Neither played cards to-night, Flora thoughtfully pulled the little dog’s soft ears, Gabrielle sat opposite, with Emerson’s Essays open in her lap.
“Poor Lily isn’t going to last much longer, Gabrielle,” Flora said, presently, with a sigh. The relief of sharing her secret had quite visibly softened Flora, and she often discussed Gay’s mother with the girl as with a confidante and an equal. “I think we must have a doctor, now. I know, of course, what he will say; she had constant care from a doctor while she was at Crosswicks. But, afterward, it is as well to have had some advice.”
Gabrielle, listening soberly, nodded with a sigh. She could not pretend to grieve. More, she could not pretend that it would not be a great lightening of her load when that frail little babbling personality was no more. She thirsted to get away from Wastewater, away from ghosts and shadows and echoes, into the world again! Away from David, with his kind eyes and his interested smile, away from Sylvia, who was so cruelly armed at all points with beauty and intelligence, with friends and money and position and power!
Presently Flora spoke of Sylvia; David would be home in a few days now, and Sylvia in less than five weeks. It would be so wonderful to have Sylvia home for always.
“Do you know, Gabrielle,” said Flora, jerking her yarn composedly over Ben’s little sleeping head, “I would not be intensely surprised if nothing came of the understanding between David and Sylvia. From something she wrote me, I rather suspect that there is somebody—— No, I can’t say that. Perhaps it is only that she does not want to think of anything so serious so soon. She’s not yet twenty-one, after all. But she wrote me as if she might be thinking it wiser for David——”
Gabrielle heard no more. Her throat constricted again, and her hands grew cold. All the fears of the afternoon returned in full force. But surely—surely they couldn’t all be so simple as to think that she would placidly and gratefully accept this solution of her problem, her poverty, her namelessness, her superfluousness!
David would not, anyway, she told herself a hundred times in the days to come. David was understanding, David was everything that was kind and good. He would help her find her independence, he would always be her friend, and Gay knew, in her own secret heart, that her universe would always revolve about him, that there would always be a mysterious potency in the mere sound of his voice, or touch of his hand, where she was concerned.
But discuss her with Sylvia and Aunt Flora, and kindly and with big-brotherly superiority offer her a “plan,” a plan to accept his name and his protection, simply because she was so apparently incapable of taking care of herself! Gabrielle suffocated at the thought. No, David couldn’t be David and do that.
In the ten days that elapsed before his arrival at Wastewater she alternated between such violent extremes of feeling, and lay awake pondering, imagining, and analyzing the situation so constantly at night that she was genuinely exhausted when the afternoon of his coming came at last.
There were moments when she felt she could not see him, dared not face him. There were times when she longed for his arrival, and to assure herself with a first glance that all this nervous anticipation was her ownridiculous imagining, and that no thought of it had ever crossed his mind!
When he finally came Gay was in the garden. For spring had come to Wastewater, and David’s fancy of finding her before a fire in the sitting room had been outdated by two full weeks of sunshine. There was fresh green grass sprouting about the old wall, there were daisy-starred stretches of it under the massed blossoms of the fruit trees; gracious shadows lay long and sweet everywhere over new green leaves; the willows were jade fountains of foliage, the maples uncurling moist little red and gold tendrils, and the lilacs were rustling columns of clean new leafage and plumy blossom. The last of the frost had melted from the newly turned sods; gulls were walking about, pulling at worms, and spring sunset lay over the broad, gently heaving surface of an opal sea.
David had taken his bags upstairs, greeted his aunt, who was knitting in the sitting room, but without the fire, and had spent perhaps ten restless and excited minutes in outward conversation and in inner excitement. Where was Gay? When would the door handle turn and the plainly gowned girl come in, with the smile flashing into her star-sapphire eyes when she saw him, and the beautiful hand she extended so quaintly, so demurely enhanced by the transparent white cuff? David was so shaken by a strange emotion at the thought that every moment was bringing their meeting closer, so confused by the undercurrent of his thoughts—the undercurrent that would dwell upon her greeting, and his introduction of all he had to say to her—that he could hardly hear what his aunt was saying. When hedid finally escape to search for Gay, and when Hedda told him that she was in the garden, he found himself standing quite still in the side passage, with his heart thundering, and his senses swimming, and an actual unwillingness upon him, after all these waiting days and weeks, to make real the dream that he had cherished so long.
There she was, about the western turn of the house, half walking and half running, with the puppy sometimes keeping his feet and sometimes swung dizzily in the air on the rope that Gabrielle was carrying and the little dog biting in a frenzy of joy. There was warm sweet light in the garden at five o’clock, the day had been balmy enough to make cooler airs at its close almost a relief.
Pleasant domestic sounds in the barnyard were all about: clucks and moos, John whistling, and the stamping of big horses’ feet on distant floors. The scent of violets and syringa, of lilacs and new grass, of damply turned, sun-warmed earth was like a delicious sharp and heady ether in the air.
David joined the girl just as she and the dog were turning down a rambling sort of back road that led toward the sea; Gabrielle turned, and although indeed she smiled, he saw that she was an older and a soberer Gabrielle than the little schoolgirl of the Christmas holidays. They walked the quarter mile to the shore deep in a conversation he had not anticipated; she talked of her mother, whose life was a question only of days now, and made one allusion to the deeper cause of pain to herself.
“My finding out about myself—about my mother’snever having been married, David—has made a sort of change in everything to me,” she said, unemotionally. “I seem to feel now that I must do something—that it is more than ever my duty to do something to make my own place in life and stand upon my own feet. That’s the only way that I can ever be happy, and I will be happy so, believe me!” she added, nervously intercepting an interruption from him. “Doctor Ensicoe, from Crowchester, says that my mother will not outlive the month. And then I mean to write to the nuns in Boston and stay with them until I find something that I can do. I know Aunt Flora will help me, for indeed she offered to most generously, and, while I must—I will let her. She was very kind about it all,” Gabrielle added, reaching safer waters now, and so speaking more quietly. “We have never spoken of it except at that one time. I said to her quite suddenly, one night when we were going up to my mother’s room—I’d had it terribly on my mind, of course, ‘Aunt Flora, answer me one question. There would be no use in my attempting to trace Charpentier, my father, would there? There is no record of that marriage, is there? That is the real reason for all the mystery and secrecy, isn’t it?’ And she turned very pale,” went on Gay, “and answered, ‘Yes.’ We never alluded to it again, although many times since she has told me that Sylvia would always take care of me—that I must not worry!” And catching a sudden look of determination and interest in David’s face Gay went on hurriedly, “But indeed I don’t worry, I shall get along splendidly and make you all proud of me!”
A sensation of pity so sudden and acute as to dry hismouth and press like a pain behind his eyes silenced David for a moment. Then he said:
“But you are very young, Gay, and inexperienced, to face all the ugliness and coldness of the world. Suppose,” David added, conscious suddenly of the quickened beat of his heart, “there was some other plan that eased, or helped to ease, all those worries of yours——?”
“Oh, my God,” Gay prayed, in a very panic of fear. “Oh, David,” she cried, in the deeps of her being, “spare me! Oh, God, don’t let him mean that he is going to ask me to marry him. Oh, no—no—no!”
Aloud she said nothing. They were on the sweet, grassy cliffs above the sea, now, and Gay was looking out across the level stretches of the peaceful water, over which shone the last of the long day’s light.
She was so beautiful, as she stood there, that for a moment David was content to look at her and tell himself that he had not remembered how lovely she was. Loose delicate tendrils of her tawny hair were blowing about her white temples; there was a delicate creamy glow on her warm, colourless skin, her great eyes seemed to give forth a starry shimmer of their own. In the fine hands, encircled at the wrists, as David had anticipated they would be, by transparent white cuffs, she held the restless puppy against the young curve of her breast; in the old garden and the spring sunset she looked like a slender, serious impersonation of Memory or Poetry, or of some mythical young goddess, wandering under the great trees.
But it was not only the physical beauty that he saw. He saw in her too the dearly companionable girl ofthe past mid-winter, whose husky, sweet laughter had rung out over the card table, whose eager helpful interest had made bright so many a dark sleety morning in the upstairs studio, when the oil stove slowly warmed the air and scented it with hot metal and kerosene vapours. He saw her buttoning on the big coat, tramping through snowy woods at his side, with her hands deep in her pockets, and her bright face glowing like a rose. And a first little chilling fear crept over his bright dream; suppose—suppose she was not for him, after all?
“Gabrielle,” he said, suddenly, his face reddening and his voice shaking a little, “will you let me tell you what I planned for you and for me?”
She gave him an agonized half glance, nodded, and said some indistinguishable word of assent as she turned away.
“I was wondering——” David began. And suddenly it seemed all to go flat and dull. He felt himself to have no business to be putting it to her this way, this half-laughing, half-sympathetic, wholly kind and comfortable way. The smooth phrases of his imaginings vanished in air, he was merely a rather stupid man of thirty-one, bungling the most delicate thing in all the world. It was too late to stop. The girl’s face was crimson, but she had turned toward him gravely and expectantly, and was looking at him steadily and bravely.
“This was my idea,” David began again, miserably. “I—I felt—I knew that you were most unhappy, and that you felt lonely and as if you were wasting time here, and yet doubtful about making a start elsewhere. And it occurred to me——” He tried his best at this point to recapture the affectionate whimsicallypractical note that these words had always had in anticipation, but do what he would they sounded stupidly patronizing and heavy. “It occurred to me,” he said again, “that you and I are somewhat in the same boat. We’re Flemings, yet we don’t truly belong at Wastewater—that belongs to Sylvia now! And wouldn’t it be a very delightful thing for you and me to give them all a surprise and just take ourselves out of their way, once and for all?”
She heard him so far. Then she stopped him with a sudden backward movement of her head, and answered quietly, with a downward glance at the puppy’s little snuggled form:
“Thank you, David. But you must see that I can’t—I can’t do that! But thank you very much.”
David was honestly taken aback. Not that he had expected her to fall into his arms—he did not know just what he had expected her to do. But certainly not this! He had perhaps imagined her beautiful and irradiating smile turned toward him, heard a rich cadence half of reproach and half of pleasure in her voice as she said, something like, “David Fleming! Are you asking me to marry you?”
This actuality was all confusing and different from the plan, and his own feelings were disconcertingly different, too. The girl looked unmistakably hurt and humiliated by what he had said, which was astonishing enough. But even more astonishing was his own sudden conviction that she had reason to seem so. What was he saying to her, anyway? After all, her love affair was the most important thing in all a girl’s life! It was not something to be flung at her unexpectedly,between one’s arrival after weeks—after months of absence—and a family dinner!
A half-analyzed consciousness of being wrong, combined with a general confusion of mind and senses, was strong upon David as he blundered on:
“I may be surprising you, Gay. You see, I’ve been thinking about all this for a long time! You can certainly say, ‘This is so sudden,’ in the good old-fashioned manner, if you want to,” added David, nervously, hoping to win back his humorous, comprehending little companion of January with his anxious and appealing laugh.
But Gay did not laugh.
“I do appreciate your taking my problems so much to heart, David,” she said, turning to pace staidly back through the twilight greenness and sweetness toward the house. “But I really blame myself a good deal for being such a baby! I’ve been selfishly dwelling upon my troubles, and acting as if no girl ever had them to face before, and of course it has worried you and Aunt Flora and Sylvia. But that’s over now, and I want you to know that I do appreciate your sympathy, and your having thought out this way of escape for me, and having planned it all with Sylvia.”
“As a matter of fact,” David interposed, eagerly, hoping that matters might yet adjust themselves, “Sylvia’s letter to me, asking to be set entirely free of any real or imaginary understanding between us, crossed my letter to her saying that I—had other plans in mind.”
He looked at Gabrielle hopefully with the words; perhaps when she knew how completely above-board and deliberated the step had been she would begin to see itin his light. But Gay merely reddened the more deeply, if that were possible, and said hastily and uncomfortably:
“I see. And I do thank you! And I ask you—Ibegyou—for the little time I am at Wastewater,” she added, feverishly, as the vertigo of shame and confusion that had been almost nauseating her threatened to engulf her in a humiliating burst of tears, “please never to say anything like this to me again!Please——! There are reasons——” Gay fought on desperately, feeling with terror that tears might end in his arms, and that utter capitulation on his own kindly humorous terms must follow such a break-down, “there are reasons why itkillsme to have you talk so! I beg you, David, to consider it all settled—all over——”
“Why, of course I will!” David said, in a cold, quiet voice that braced her like a plunge into icy waters. “I’m only sorry to distress you,” he added, formally. “I had been thinking about it with a great deal of pleasure, and I thought you might. I’m sorry. We’ll never speak of it again.”
Then they were at the side door, and Gay escaped into the gloomy dark hallway, and fled red-cheeked and panting to her room, where she could cry, rage, shake herself, walk the floor, and analyse the whole situation unobserved.
“Oh, you fool!” she said, scornfully, to her panting image in the mirror. “You hysterical schoolgirl! Oh, how I hate him and his plans for me!” she gritted, through shut teeth. “And I hate Sylvia worse! I hate them all. He thought I would die of joy—he knows better now. Oh, insulting! He wouldn’t have donethat to Sylvia or one of the Montallen girls! But it didn’t matter with me—Aunt Lily’s daughter, with no father to stand up for me. And it isn’t my fault I haven’t a father,” Gay said, pitifully, half aloud, leaning her elbows on the bureau, and beginning to cry into her hands; “it isn’t my fault that I’m all alone in the world!”
And again she flung herself on the bed, and her whole form was racked and shaken by the violence of her weeping.
“He’ll see my red eyes at dinner and think it’s for him,” she broke off, savagely, sitting up in the early dark and reaching for the scrambling and mystified puppy, who was going upon a whimpering tour of investigation among the pillows. Gay dried her eyes upon his downy little back, lighted her lamp, and soused her eyes with cold water. Half an hour later she went down to dinner, quite restored to calm and ready to take a cheerful part in the conversation. But she would not share the sitting room with her aunt and David after dinner.
She said, with that touch of new maturity and decision that David found so touching and so amusing in little Gabrielle, that she would go up and sit with her mother, thus releasing Margret for an hour or two below stairs.
The room seemed to become blank, however, when she had gone quietly away, and David was surprised to find that the thought of her had become so habitual with him in the last few weeks that he was thinking of her still, as steadily as if that strange hour in the gardenwere the dream, and the Gay of his plan, the gracious Gay who had so many, many times promised him, in his thoughts, to marry him, were the reality.
He found himself restlessly making excuses to follow her upstairs. Was Aunt Flora going up to see Aunt Lily to-night? Later, Flora said, sombrely. Was it quite safe for Gabrielle up there alone with the invalid? Oh, quite. Poor Lily had not the strength of a baby, now.
After an endless time they went upstairs, to find that Margret had just come up, and Gay was ready to plead fatigue and slip away to bed. Aunt Lily was a mere colourless slip of flesh and blood, quiet upon smooth pillows now, with her gray hair brushed and pinned up neatly. Gay was kneeling beside her in the orderly, lamp-lighted room when David went in, with one of her beautiful hands clasping the yellowed old lifeless fingers. She got to her feet with no sign of embarrassment, and in another two minutes had disappeared for the night.
David saw a light in her transom, half an hour later, when he went to his room. She was probably quietly reading, he thought; discomfited, preferring the society of books to his own, after what had transpired this afternoon.
He felt disappointed and humiliated, he missed the thrilling dream that had kept him company for so long, and for a day or two he managed to persuade himself that it was because Gay had failed him. She had proved very much less satisfying than his thoughts of her; he had unconsciously been idealizing her all this time. He had thought of her as gracious, merry, provocative,responsive, and she had proved to be merely embarrassed and awkward.
“Well!” he said, going off to sleep, “That’s over—no harm done!” But he could not dismiss it. Again he said, almost aloud; “That’s over. No harm done!”