CHAPTER XIII
He plunged, the next morning, into work, going off to Keyport immediately after breakfast and returning late in the afternoon. The day was exquisite beyond words, the sea satiny blue, and there was real summer warmth in the sweet spring stillness of the air. David saw Gabrielle in the garden when he came back, and took his painting gear upstairs, determined not to make himself ridiculous in her eyes again. But a power stronger than himself immediately took him downstairs again. He walked, with an air of strolling, to the hollies, where she had been. But she was gone.
David now felt irrationally and without analysis that he must see her, and at once. He had nothing to say to her, and if he had, he might have waited until dinner-time brought them together. But he felt like a lost child, not seeing that figure in blue gingham—his eyes searched for it hungrily, swept each new vista; he felt actually sick with disappointment when moment after moment went by and there was no sign of her down the lane, on the cliff road, or among the rocks. He thought of nothing but the finding of her; Gabrielle in her blue gingham seated by a pool, running along with Ben—just to find her——
She came into the sitting room just before dinner, and David, who was actually exhausted from the monotonous hammering of thoughts about only her, darednot trust himself to look up as she slipped into her chair. He was glancing over a newAtlantic; he pretended that he had not heard Gay enter.
“It was young Doctor Ensicoe, the son,” said Gabrielle’s voice, suddenly, quietly in the silence, to Aunt Flora. “I took him upstairs. He says to watch, and let his father know if there seems to be any pain or restlessness.”
If the words had been so many bombs they could scarcely have had a more extraordinary effect upon David. He felt as if his heart had given a great plunge, stopped short, raced on again madly; he felt as if his mouth and throat were dry, a sort of weakness and vertigo that were yet exquisitely pleasant seized him.
It was impossible for him to speak to this girl, or to look up, while this state of affairs lasted. If she saw that he was nervous and unlike himself, she must think what she would——! David could only try to get a grip upon soul and body, and betray himself as little as possible.
This moment was the end of all peace for him. For although he did indeed presently hand his aunt the magazine with some brief comment, and although dinner and the evening proceeded as usual, he was beginning to suspect that his whole life had been changed now, mysteriously changed—partly perhaps his own doing, through that long-cherished dream of an imaginary scene with an imaginary Gabrielle.
But no matter how it had come about. The blazing and inescapable truth was that there was nothing else in the world for him but this quiet, slender, serious, tawny-headed girl. He did not know what he felttoward her, or whether the wild confusion of his senses might be called anything so reasonable as feeling; she was simply in the world, she was sitting in chairs, opening doors, speaking in that incredibly thrilling voice, raising those extraordinary eyes—that was enough.
David had never before been really in love. But he had thought he loved Sylvia, and he did not put in that same category his feeling for Gabrielle. This was nothing that could be classified or regulated; regulate it, indeed, David thought, with an almost audible groan when he came to this word in his thoughts; as well regulate raging flames or rushing waters!
It devoured him with fever. He was unable to eat for excitement, never happy one instant out of Gabrielle’s company, acutely miserable when in it. He lay awake in the warm spring nights thinking of what he had said to her during the past day, and as her looks and words in reply—such quiet words, such rare looks!—came back before his vision, he would feel his heart stop, and his breath would fail him with sheer fear and terror and hope and agony of doubt.
He sat at breakfast, pushing about the toast that was so much chalk and plaster to his palate, scalding himself with his coffee one morning, forgetting it entirely the next. His eyes never left Gabrielle. She would glance up, passing him perhaps the omelette that he would not even see, much less taste, and at his awkward laugh, muttered words, and hastily averted look she would perhaps colour confusedly. If she directed a simple question to him, he found it maddeningly difficult to answer.
“I beg pardon——?” He had to leave the sentence hanging rawly. He could not say her name.
“I asked you: did Margret say anything about medicines?”
“I—I—you mean on Sunday——?”
“No,” Gay would say, astonished at his manner. “I mean this morning, five minutes ago.”
“Oh, I see—I see! Did—who? What?”
“Never mind. I’ll ask her,” Gay would finish, deciding that David must be absolutely absorbed in the picture he was painting. David would watch her go from the room, gracious, sweet, beautiful in her cotton gown. All the spring seemed only a setting for her loveliness, the lilacs and the blue sky, the sunshine and the drifting snow of fruit blossoms.
It was this wonderful, this incomparable woman, he would remind himself scathingly, that he had affronted with his insultingly casual offer of marriage a week ago. No wonder the girl had put a definite distance between them since! But he knew he would ask her again, simply because there was no other conceivable thing for him to do.
His dream of the little farmhouse in Keyport returned now, but it was a dream infinitely enhanced, and haloed by all the colours of the rainbow. David could hardly bear the poignant sweetness of the thought of Gay as his wife; Gay perhaps chatting over a late breakfast on the porch with him; Gay travelling with him, and looking over a steamer rail as the blue mountains of Sicily or the green shores of the Isle of Wight slowly formed themselves on the horizon. Once, when he was quietly painting, the thought of Gay with a child in her armscame to him suddenly, and David felt his eyes sting and the palms of his hands suddenly moist.
She was leagues away from him now, never with him when she could avoid it, never alone with him at all. She was apparently living a life of her own, coming and going gently and pleasantly, answering, listening, but no longer the Gabrielle he had known a few months ago.
And ten days after his return she was still further removed by her mother’s death. Lily died quite peacefully one sweet May evening, after an afternoon when she had seemed more normal than for years. She had had for some days the idea that Gabrielle was her old nurse, Miss Rosecrans, and made all her few demands of the girl under that name. But at the very end, when Gabrielle was kneeling beside her, with sorrowful, tear-brimmed eyes fixed upon the yellowed little sunken face, Lily opened her eyes, fixed them affectionately upon Flora, and asked feebly:
“Is this big girl my baby, Flo?”
“This is Gabrielle, Lily,” Flora said, clearing her throat.
Lily smiled with ineffable satisfaction at Gabrielle, and said contentedly:
“Gabrielle. Isn’t it a pretty name? Do you like it? Did Roger like it?”
“I am going to say some prayers, Mother,” Gabrielle said, smiling with wet cheeks, and with the salt taste of her own tears in her mouth. Lily opened her eyes briefly, for the last time.
“Ah, I wish you would!” she said, with a smile and a deep sigh. And she never moved or spoke again.
Two days later she was buried in the little plot withinWastewater’s wide walls; the doctor, Flora weeping on David’s arm, Gay standing straight and alone, and the awestruck maids were all her little funeral train. It was Flora who seemed to feel the loss most, and with surprising force; she seemed broken and aged, and it was for Gabrielle to comfort her.
“I never supposed it would be so,” Flora repeated, over and over. “That I would be the last—that Will and Roger and Lily would all be gone before me!”
She would not stay in bed; Flora did not belong to the generation that can eat and read and idle comfortably under covers. She was up at her usual hour upon every one of the sweet, warm fragrant mornings, when dawn crept in across the sea and the wet garden sent up a very bouquet of perfumes through the open upstairs windows. But she was silent and sad, and when Sylvia’s long-awaited happy Commencement came, Flora was really too ill to go, although she refused to concede to herself the luxury even of one hour upon a couch, or the satisfaction of a single visit from the doctor. David went up alone to the Commencement, and brought Sylvia back with him. It was on that last day of her college life, a day of flowers and white gowns, crowds, music, laughter, and tears, that Sylvia found time to say to him pleadingly:
“David dear, my letter didn’t hurt you terribly?”
“I’d had something of the same feeling myself, you know,” he reminded her. “Our letters crossed. You remember I said just what you did, that it must either be an engagement or nothing, and that I knew you would prefer it to be nothing just at this time.”
“Oh, yes!” responded Sylvia, narrowing her eyes,and speaking a little vaguely. And David saw that while her letter, a letter written in a charmingly frank fashion, and asking please—please to be free from any engagement to him for a little while, had made a romantic sort of impression upon her mind, his had scarcely registered upon her consciousness at all. In other words, Sylvia was her own whole world just at the moment, and the only things that mattered were her own moods, her own ideas, her own individual desires.
The highly distinguished and honourable conclusion of her school days, her youth, her beauty, her sense of closely impending power could not but be deliciously stimulating to a nature like Sylvia’s. She and David stopped two nights in Boston, Sylvia with a schoolmate, David at a hotel, met on the languid, warm spring mornings to explore the quiet shops and to discuss various plans for Wastewater: electric lighting for Wastewater, a furnace for Wastewater, a hot-water system for Wastewater. There was a delightful new, red, slim checkbook; there was an imposing balance at the bank. Sylvia bought herself one or two charming frocks as a sort of promissory note of the financial independence that was so soon to be, and she did not forget a broad lacy black hat for dear little Gabrielle, who had had such a sad year, and a lacy thin black afternoon gown to match it.
Gabrielle, when they reached Wastewater, met them all in white, and Sylvia gave her a warm kiss and murmured just the right phrase of sympathy as they went upstairs to find her mother. The gardens were exquisite in early June bloom; the whole house smelled of roses and summer weather; birds were flashing in andout of the cherry trees; John was on his knees beside the strawberry bed.
But Flora sat upstairs before the cold grate, with the windows shut, and her first words to Sylvia were broken by tears. Sylvia comforted her with a sort of loving impatience in her voice.
“Mamma, darling! Is this reasonable! Isn’t it after all a blessed solution for poor little Aunt Lily?”
“But I never thought it would be so!” Flora faltered, blowing her nose, sniffling, straightening her glasses with all the unlovely awkwardness of hard-fought grief. And immediately she regained her composure, almost with a sort of shame, and David could say truthfully to Sylvia a little later, when the three young persons were wandering through the garden, that Sylvia had done her mother good already.
Sylvia indeed did them all good; she was delighted with everything, appreciative and pleasant with the maids, and sisterly in her manner toward Gabrielle. David found her sensible and clever in the business conferences they had on the dreamy summer mornings in the little office downstairs, where perhaps the first mistress of Wastewater had transacted her business also, more than a hundred years before—the business of superintending stores and soap-making, weaving and dyeing, bartering in cocks and geese and the selling of lambs. Sylvia waived all unnecessary matters, was brightly receptive, and in every way businesslike and yet confident in David’s judgment. Later she would debate with John about fruit, with Trude about preserving, with Daisy about tablecloths, all in her own pleasantly unhesitating yet considerate manner. It was evidentthat she would assume her responsibilities thoroughly, yet with no jarring and disrupting of the accustomed course of things.
In one of the late evenings when Sylvia came into Gay’s room to brush her hair and to gossip, Gay broached her plan of going to a Boston convent as soon as the hot weather should be over, to look about her and find some sort of work. Sylvia listened thoughtfully and looked up with a kindly smile.
“You’d be happier so, Gabrielle?”
“I think so,” Gay answered.
“What is it?” Sylvia questioned, kindly. “Wastewater too lonely?”
Gabrielle did not answer immediately, except by a quick shake of her head. Presently she said, a little thickly:
“No, I love Wastewater more than any other place in the world.”
“Well,” said Sylvia, musing, “if you must try your wings, by all means try them! Be sure we’ll all be interested in making it a success, Gay. Mamma and I may go abroad in the fall—it isn’t definite, of course, but I think she would like it, if all my various anchors here can be managed without me.”
Gabrielle had been burning, fearing, hating to ask it; she found herself saying now, with a little unconquerable incoherence:
“Then you and David——?”
“David and I,” answered Sylvia, with a quick, mysterious smile, “are quite the best friends in the world!”
Did she know? David, in asking her to free him, had told her how much? Gay looked at her cousin throughthe mirror, and her face blazed. But Sylvia, curling the end of her long braid thoughtfully about her finger, was unsuspicious. Gay wondered if she could be acting.
“I don’t mind telling you, dear,” said Sylvia, presently, “that I wrote David in the spring, feeling that our understanding was an injustice to us both, and asked him to be just my good friend—my best friend,” Sylvia interrupted herself to say, with a little emotion, “for to me he is the finest man in the world!—for a little while longer. And as he has been my obedient knight ever since I was a little curly-headed despot in short frocks, of course he obeyed me,” she ended, with a little whimsical glance and smile. And now, having gotten to her feet, and come over to the mirror, she laid one arm affectionately about Gabrielle’s shoulder. “I love that bright thick hair of yours,” Sylvia said.
Suddenly Gabrielle felt young, crude, hateful because she did not adore Sylvia, contemptible because she suffered in seeing that this other girl’s position and happy destiny it was to be always admired, always superb. Why couldn’t she—why couldn’t she school herself to think of Sylvia as rich and beautiful and adored, and married to David, and mistress of Wastewater? Weren’t there other men, other fortunes, other friends to be won? Gay laid Sylvia’s smooth hand against her cheek, and said like a penitent child:
“You’re awfully good! Iamgrateful to you.”
“That’s right!” Sylvia said, laughing. And she went upon her serene way, to brush her teeth and open her windows and jump into bed with her book of essays, always adequate and always sweet.
Gabrielle determined, as she usually determined at night, to begin again to-morrow, to force herself to meet Sylvia’s friendship and affection, David’s friendship and affection, with what was only, after all, a normal, natural response. Why must she tremble, suspect, watch, turn red and turn white in this maddening and idiotic manner, when these two older and infinitely superior persons only wanted her to be pleasant, natural, friendly, as they were? The younger girl felt as if she were living over a powder magazine; at David’s most casual word her throat would thicken, and her words become either incredibly foolish or stupidly heavy; and when he and Sylvia were together and out of her hearing, her soul and mind were in a tumult beside which actual bodily pain would have been a relief.
When they cheerfully asked her to join them on their way down for an afternoon of idling or reading on the shore, Gay put herself—as she furiously felt—in a ridiculous position by gruffly refusing. The two, and Aunt Flora, spectacled and armed with a book, would look at her in astonishment.
“Oh, if Aunt Flora’s going——” Gay might stammer, in her embarrassment using the very phrase she meant not to use. And Sylvia’s pretty mouth would twitch at the corners, and she would exchange a demure look with David, as if to say—Gabrielle fancied—“Isn’t she a deliciously gauche little creature? She is trying to clear the tracks for our affair!”
If, on the other hand, Gabrielle came innocently from half an hour among the sweet warmth and flying colour and the buzzing of bees about the sweet-pea vines, to meet David and Sylvia in the path, she might hearSylvia say lightly and good-temperedly—and might lie awake in the nights remembering it with a thumping heart and cheeks hot with shame!—“Not now, David. We can discuss this later!”
On a certain burning July day, several weeks after Sylvia’s homecoming, all four Flemings had planned to drive into Crowchester in the new car, for some shopping. Sylvia’s birthday was but a week ahead, and she was to have a house party for the event. To-day she had a neat list: gimp, enamel, candles, glue, lemonade glasses, Japanese lanterns? (with a question mark) and charcoal? (with another). For there were to be a beach picnic and a garden fête next week.
Just before they started, however, Gay begged to be excused. She was feeling the heat of the day, she said, and wanted to spend the afternoon quietly down on the shore with her Italian grammar. Instantly, without premeditation, David felt himself growing excited again—here was his chance at last for a talk alone with her; a chance that the last few weeks had not afforded him before. The sudden hope of it put him almost into a betraying confusion of excuses; but Sylvia, dismissing him amiably, fancied she knew the cause—and an entirely different cause—of his defection.
For David was in no mood to dance attendance upon his pretty elder cousin this particular afternoon. He had driven the new car down from Boston the week before with real enjoyment; it was a beautiful car, and David, who was not after all an experienced driver, was rather proud of his safe handling of it. But since it had been at Wastewater Sylvia had shown a strong preference for Walker’s driving. Walker was a niceyoung fellow of perhaps nineteen, a newcomer, who was to act as chauffeur and to help John with errands, and perhaps in September, when the road was less used, to teach Sylvia to drive.
For some obscure reason it angered David to have to sit idle beside the pleasantly youthful and amiable Walker and hear Sylvia’s clear-cut directions. He would rather, he thought ungraciously, he would far rather walk.
And to-day, when Gabrielle was graciously excused by Sylvia, he determined to stay at home, too. Of course this might mean that Aunt Flora would also stay, David reflected, to walk up and down above the sea, leaning upon his arm in her new feebleness and sadness.
But for once Aunt Flora made no sign of abandoning the trip, and although Sylvia looked at him steadily, she also offered no objections. David could hardly believe that he was actually free, after these crowded weeks, to walk after Gabrielle through the garden, with no prospect of an immediate interruption.
His heart beat with a quite disproportionate emotion. If any one had told David Fleming a few weeks ago that the chance to follow his lonely little cousin down to the shore and to have a few minutes of talk alone with her would have made his temples hammer and his breath come quick with sheer emotion, he might have laughed.
But he was shaking to-day, and there was a drumming in his ears. Since Sylvia’s return he had had no such opportunity for a talk. Gabrielle was down in a favourite cranny of the great rocks; the blue tides swellingat her feet. David saw her black hat first, flung down on the strip of beach, then the slender white-shod feet, braced against a boulder, and then the white figure, with the tawny head bent over a book.
It was shady here, for this particular group of gray water-worn stones faced east, and the cliff was at her back. But there was a soft shimmer of light even in the shadow, and across the rocks above and behind her head the reflected sunshine on the sea ran in little unceasing ripples of brightness. She started as David came across the strand, and put her hand to her heart with a quite simple gesture of surprise.
“David, I thought you went with Sylvia!”
“Too hot,” he answered, briefly, flinging himself down at her feet and falling into contemplation of a weed-fringed pool that was patiently awaiting the tide. The water brimmed it, and grasses opened and moved mysteriously, showing exquisite colours as they spread. The ebb emptied it again, and the ribbons of grass lay lifeless against the wet and twinkling mosaic of life that coated the rocks. A steamer going by like a toy boat on the blue water ten miles away sent out a mild little plume of sound.
“‘Mia sorella ha una casa,’” David stated, with a careless glance at the book. “I had three Italian lessons once, and I know that!”
Gabrielle laughed, a little fluttered laugh, and extended to him a white hand and a stout volume, held title out.
“‘Anna Karenina,’” David read aloud, with a reproachful look. “Oh, you Gay deceiver!”
He had sometimes called her that in her babyhood, years ago, and he fancied there was a little softening shine, like a flurry of wind on gray water, in her eyes when she heard it now. But she gave no other sign.
“Is it the first time you have read it?” David asked, conventionally, wondering where his dear, confident companion of the January days had gone, and whether this new dignity and aloofness in Gabrielle were only a passing effect of sorrow, and of the displeasure his most ill-chosen words had given her, or whether he had dreamed that once she was ready to flash, to respond, to be affectionate with him.
“Oh, no!” she answered. “But I have to read it over now and then like ‘Cranford’ and ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘The Ring and the Book.’”
“A lot you get out of ‘The Ring and the Book!’” David teased, with a brotherly smile.
“I get what I can,” she answered, demurely, unprotesting, and with just a hint of her old easy fun with him. It was enough to turn his heart to water, and he formed within his confused mind a solemn resolution not to fail her again, not to offend, to watch this timid little seedling of returning confidence and friendship reverently and tenderly; to keep that at least, if he might have no more.
“But Anna’s is a sad story,” he said, looking at the book.
“Yes, but I like sad stories,” Gabrielle answered, thoughtfully.
“Love stories. Don’t all girls like love stories?”
“I don’t call this love,” Gabrielle objected, after abrief silence, when she had looked at the two words on the cover of the book until they spun and quivered before her eyes.
“Come now,” David offered, mildly, actually trembling lest some misstep on his part shatter the exquisite pleasure of this blue hour of summer, and the ripple and quiver of the sea against the big shady rocks, and the quiet beauty of the girl’s voice. “Don’t say that you think ‘Anna Karenina’ isn’t a love story!”
“It isn’t my idea of love,” Gabrielle persisted, with a faint stress on the personal pronoun.
“What would you call it?” David asked.
“Passion, egotism, selfishness,” the girl answered, unexpectedly and quietly, not raising her eyes, and as if she were thinking aloud.
“Oh——? And do you get this out of books?”
“Get what?” Gabrielle asked, after a pause.
“Your knowledge of love, Gay.”
Again a silence. Her eyes did not meet his, but she did not seem discomposed or agitated. She had gathered up a handful of white sand, and now she let it sift slowly through her fingers into the hemmed waters of the tide pool.
“Not entirely,” she answered, presently. And again the notes of her husky sweet voice seemed to David to fall slowly through the air like falling stars.
“I feel as if I had just begun to learn about it lately,” David said, clearing his throat and beginning to tremble. And as she did not answer, he told himself despairingly that he had again taken with her the very tone of all tones that must be avoided. “You’ve never been in love, Gabrielle?” he went on, desperately trying tolighten the tone of the conversation, make it seem like an ordinary casual talk.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, quickly. And now he had a flash of the star-sapphire eyes.
“But, Gay——” protested David, with the world falling to pieces about him. “Already?”
“Enough,” she answered, in a low voice, her beautiful hands busily straightening the little rocky, sandy frame of the pool, “to know that it is not vanity, and passion, and selfishness!” And she glanced at “Anna Karenina” again, as if their words were only of the book.
What she said was nothing. But there was a note of confession, of proud acknowledgment, in her tone that struck David to a numbed astonishment. Gay! This explained her silences—her depressions, her attitude toward his kindly brotherly offer of protection! The child was a woman.
“Gay, tell me,” he said, turning the knife in his heart. “Is it—a man?” he was going to ask. But as the absurd tenor of these words occurred to him, he slightly altered the question: “Is it a man I know, dear? Is it Frank du Spain?”
She gave him a quick level glance, flushed scarlet, and looked out across the shining sea. Cloud shadows were marking it with purple and brown, and there was a jade-green reef in the blue. Far off thunder rumbled; but in the hot still air about them there was no movement.
“No, it isn’t Frank. I don’t think you know him,” she answered, quietly, with her little-sisterly smile.
David was too thoroughly shaken and dazed to answer. He sat, in a sort of sickness, trying to assimilatethis new and amazing and most disquieting truth. Here was a new element to fit in among all the others—the child, the little tawny-headed girl of the family, cared for some unknown man. An unreasoning hate for this man stirred in David; he visualized a small and bowing Frenchman, titled perhaps, captivating to these innocent, convent-bred eyes.
“And will there be a happy ending?” he asked.
The girl seemed suddenly to have gained self-possession and her old serene spirit. She was smiling as she said:
“No. I think he likes another woman better than he likes me.”
“I can see that you don’t mean that,” David said, hurt and confused. Gabrielle caring——! Gabrielle keeping this away from them all——! He could not adjust himself to the thought of it easily, nor change all his ideas to meet it. “Some day will you tell me?” he said, a little uncertainly and clumsily, looking out upon what seemed suddenly a brazen glare of sea and sky.
“Some day!” she answered, quietly. And there was a silence.
It was broken by a calling voice from above them, first like the pipe of a gull, then resolving itself into a summons from Sarah. Gabrielle and David got to their feet with disturbed glances; it was perhaps only a caller, but Sarah sounded, as Gay said, scrambling briskly up the cliff at his side, “important.”
Sarah looked important, too, and her face had the deep flush on one side and the shiny paleness on the other that indicated an interrupted nap. If they pleased, it was a man for Mr. Fleming.
“From Boston?” David said, as they accompanied the maid through the garden.
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“It may be the electric-light man,” Gabrielle suggested, yet with an odd impending sense of something grave. Sarah quite obviously felt this, too, for she added curiously, flutteringly: “He’s a queer, rough sort of feller.”
“Where did you put him, Sarah?”
“He didn’t go in, Miss Gabrielle. He says he’d walk up and down outside. There he is.”
And Sarah indicated a tall, lean young man who was indeed walking up and down among the roses with long strides, and who now turned and came toward them.
Gay saw a burned, dark, sick-looking face, deep black eyes, a good suit that was somehow a little clumsy, on a tall figure that seemed a little clumsy, too. The man lifted his hat as he came toward them, and smiled under a curly thatch of very black, thick hair.
“Hello!” he said, in an oddly repressed sort of voice, holding out his hand. Gay could only smile bewilderedly, but David sprang forward with a sort of shout.
“Tom!” he said. “Tom Fleming! My God, you’ve come home!”