CHAPTER XIV
So therewas this new fact with which to deal: Tom Fleming had come home. Tom, thirty, lean, burned a leathery brown by a thousand tropic suns, had apparently determined to return with infinitely less deliberation than he had exercised over his running away, almost twenty years before.
He made no particular explanation of his old reasons for departure; on the other hand, there was no mystery about it. The sea, and ships, adventure, danger, exploration, storms, had always been more real to Tom than his name and family and Wastewater. He had found them all, drunk deep of them all, between fourteen and thirty; he meant, of course, to go back to them some day.
Meanwhile, he had been ill, was still weak and shaken and unable to face even the serenest cruise. And so he had come home, “to see the folks,” he explained, with a grin on his brown face, which wore smooth deep folds about cheek-bones and chin, for all his leanness, that made him look older than he was.
In actual features he was as handsome as his handsome father. But Tom, garrulous, boastful, simply shrewd and childishly ignorant, was in no other way like Black Roger. Roger had been an exquisite, loving fine linen, fine music and books, the turn of a phrase, or the turn of a woman’s wrist. All these were an unknownworld to Tom, and Tom seemed to know it, and to be actuated in his youthful, shallow bombast by the fear that these others—these re-discovered relatives—might fancy him ashamed of it.
Tom never was ashamed of anything, he instantly gave them to understand. No, sir, he had knocked men down, he had run risks, he had been smarter than the others, he had “foxed” them! In Archangel or Tahiti, Barbadoes or Yokohama, Tom’s adventures had terminated triumphantly. Women had always been his friends, scores of women. Mysterious Russian women who were really the political power behind international movements, beautiful Hawaiian girls, stunning Spanish señoritas in Buenos Aires, he held them all in the hollow of his lean, brown-hided hand.
He was a hero in his own eyes; he wanted to be a hero in the eyes of his relatives, as well. It was perhaps only Gabrielle, who had wistfully longed to be claimed and admired, too, so short a time ago, who appreciated, upon that strange first evening, that there was something intensely pathetic in Tom’s boasting.
What were this old brick house, and these women with their fuss about vases of flowers and clean sheets, to him? he seemed to ask, scornfully. Let ’em think he was a rough-neck if they wanted to, he didn’t care! Everyone looking at him so solemnly, everyone implying that this money of his father’s was so important—let ’em find out it didn’t mean so much to Tom Fleming!
Yet Tom was impressed, deeply and fundamentally stirred by this homecoming, in a sense that all his adventures had never stirred him. Old memorieswrenched at his heart; his wonderful father had been here at Wastewater when Tom had last been here, and his father’s frail little second wife, the delicate Cecily, who had been the object of a sort of boyish admiration from Tom. Perhaps the lean, long, sun-browned sailor, whose actual adventures had taken the place of that little boy’s dreams of the sea, felt deep within himself that he had not gained everything by the change. Slowly all the fibres of soul and body had been hardening, coarsening; Tom had not been conscious of the slow degrees of the change. But he was vaguely conscious of it now.
The old house had seemed to capture and preserve the traditions, the dignified customs of his race; the very rooms seemed full of reproaches and of questions.
His aunt he found only older, grimmer, more silent than he had remembered her; Sylvia had grown from a tiny girl into a beautiful woman, and Gabrielle’s birth had not been until after his departure. But David and he had spent all their little-boy days together, and David immediately assumed the attitude of his guide, wandering about the old place with him in a flood of reminiscences, and taking him down to the housekeeping regions, where old Hedda and Trude and Margret, who remembered him as a child, wept and laughed over him excitedly.
Tom enjoyed this, but when the first flush of greetings to the family and the first shock of stunned surprise were over, a curious restraint seemed to fall upon their relationship, and the return of the heir made more troublesome than ever the separate problems of the group.
Sylvia, from the first half-incredulous instant, had borne the blow with all her characteristic dignity and courage. It was hard for her to realize, as she immediately realized, that even in her loss she was comparatively unimportant, and that whoso surrendered the fortune was infinitely of less moment than whoso received it. But she gave no sign.
She welcomed Tom with charming simplicity, with a spontaneous phrase or two of eagerness and astonishment, and no word was said of material considerations until much later. Yet it was an exquisitely painful situation for Sylvia, the more because she had been so absolute a tool in the hands of the fate that had first made her rich and now made her poor in a breath.
She had not wanted Uncle Roger’s money; she had indeed been a child when the will was made; Tom might easily have been supposed to return, the second Mrs. Fleming might have had children, and her own mother, although she had indeed married Will Fleming rather late in life, might have given Sylvia younger sisters and brothers.
But gradually the path had cleared before Sylvia. Tom had not come home, Sylvia’s father had died, leaving her still the only child, Cecily had died childless, and Uncle Roger had died.
For years Sylvia’s mother and David, watching her grow from a beautiful childhood to a fine and conscientious girlhood, had prefaced all talk of her fortune with “unless Tom comes home.” But gradually that had stopped; gradually they, and her circle, and the girl herself, had come to think of her as the rightful heiress.
Now, between luncheon and dinner upon a burningsummer afternoon, all this had been snatched from her; instantly taken, beyond all doubt or question. Here was Tom, indisputably reëstablished as sole legatee, as owner of everything here at Wastewater. Yesterday, a rather carelessly dressed brown-faced sailor, with a harsh blue-black jaw, unnoticed among a hundred others in a crowded harbour city, to-night he was their host.
Sylvia asked no sympathy and made no complaint. But the very foundations of her life were shaken; all the ambitions of her busy college years were laid waste, and from being admired and envied, she must descend to pity and obscurity. She and her mother would have Flora’s few thousand a year; plenty, of course, much more than the majority of persons had, Sylvia knew that. But she must readjust everything now to this level, abandon the little red checkbook, and learn to live without the respectfully congratulatory and envious glances. It was bitterly hard. Wherever her thoughts went she was met by that new and baffling consideration of ways and means. Europe? But could they afford it? Escape from the whole tangle? Yes, but how? They could not leave Gabrielle here with Tom, even if Sylvia were not indeed needed while all the matter of the inheritance was being adjusted. Sylvia had said a hundred times that she would really have liked to be among the women who must make their own fortune and their own place in the world; now she found it only infinitely humiliating and wearisome to contemplate.
She did not know whether to be resentful or relieved at the general tendency now to overlook her; Tomnaturally had the centre of the stage. But it was all uncomfortable and unnatural, and the girl felt superfluous, unhappy, restless, and unsettled for the first time in her well-ordered life.
Flora had borne the news with the look of one touched by death. She had not in fact been made ill, nor had her usual course of life been altered in any way, unless her stony reserve grew more stony and her stern gray face more stern. But David thought more than once that her nephew’s reappearance seemed to affect Aunt Flora with a sort of horror, as if he had come back from the dead.
She had presented him with her lifeless cheek to kiss when he arrived, and there had been a deep ring, harsh and almost frightening, in the voice with which she had welcomed him. Flora was not mercenary; Gabrielle and David both appreciated clearly that it was not her daughter’s loss of a fortune that had affected her. But from the very hour of Tom’s return she seemed like a woman afraid, nervous, apprehensive, anxious at one moment to get away from Wastewater, desolated at another at the thought of leaving the place where she had spent almost all her life.
Oddly, seeing this fear, David and Gay saw too that it was not of Tom, or of any possible secret or revelation connected with Tom. It was as if Flora saw in his reappearance the reappearance too of some old fear or hate, or perhaps of a general fear and hate that had once controlled all her life, and that had seemed to be returning with his person.
“There is a curse on this place, I think!” Gabrielle heard her whisper once, many times over and over.But it was not to Gabrielle she spoke. And one night she fainted.
Tom had been telling them a particularly hair-raising tale at table, and because he really felt the horrible thrill of it himself, he did not, as was usual with him, embroider it with all sorts of flat and stupid inventions of his own. It was the story of a man, stranded on a small island, conscious of a hidden crime, and attempting to act the part of innocence.
“Of all things,” Gabrielle had said, impressed, “it seems to me the most terrible would be to have a secret to hide! I mean it,” the girl had added, seriously, turning her sapphire eyes from one to another, as they smiled at her earnestness, “I would rather be a beggar—or in prison—or sick—or banished—anything but to be afraid!”
Flora, at the words, had risen slowly to her feet, staring blindly ahead of her, and with a hurried and suffocated word had turned from her place at the table. And before David could get to her, or Sylvia make anything but a horrified exclamation, she had fainted.
This had been on Tom’s third evening at home, a close summer night that had afforded Flora ample excuse for feeling oppressed. Yet Gay, looking about the circle as the days went by—David as always thoughtful and sympathetic, if he was more than usually silent, Sylvia beautiful and serene, if also strangely subdued, Tom seeming to belong so much less to Wastewater, with his strange manners and his leathery skin, than any of the others, Aunt Flora severe and terrible—felt arising in her again all the fearful apprehensions of her first weeks there, almost a year ago.
What was going to happen? her heart hammered incessantly. What was going to happen?
Whatcouldhappen? These were not the days of mysterious murders and secret passages, dark deeds in dark nights! Why did Wastewater suddenly seem a dreadful place again, a place that was indeed allied to the measureless ocean, with its relentless advance and retreat, and to the dark woods, behind which red sunsets smouldered so angrily, but that had nothing in common with the sweet village life of Crowchester and Keyport, where happy children played through vacation days and little boats danced in and out.
“I am afraid!” Gabrielle whispered to herself, more than once, as the blazing blue days of August went by, and the moon walked across the sea in the silent, frightening nights. David and Tom were there, seven or eight maids, gardener, chauffeur, stableman—yet she was afraid. “If we are only all out of here before winter comes!” she would think, staring at the high, merciless sky, where distant wisps of cloud drifted against the merciless bright distances of the summer sea. She could not face another winter at Wastewater!
David was quiet in these days, spending long hours with Tom, painting, taking solitary walks before breakfast, Gabrielle knew. The girl would look at him wistfully; ah, why couldn’t they all seem as young as they were! Why weren’t they all walking, talking, picnicking together as other families did! David was always kind, always most intelligently sympathetic in any problem; but he seemed so far away! She could not break through the wall that seemed to have grown betweenthem. It made her quiet, unresponsive, in her turn.
David, watching her, thought what a mad dream his had been, of Gabrielle as his wife! and felt himself, bitterly, to be a failure. Had he taken his place years ago in the world of business and professional men, had he risen to a reputation and an income, he might have had the right to speak now! As it was, she was as inaccessible, from the standpoint of his poverty, his stupid silences and inexperience, as a star. She had no thought of him, except as a useful older brother, and talking business with Tom. He was an idling fool of an unsuccessful painter in a world full of conversational, pleasant failures. He hated himself, his canvases and palettes, his paltry four thousand a year, his old sickening complacencies over a second-hand book or a volume of etchings. Life had become insufferable to him, and David told himself that if it had not been for Tom’s needs he would have disappeared for another long year of painting in Europe—or in China!
As it was, he had to see her every day, the woman who filled all the world with exquisite pain for him, and with an agonizing joy. She came downstairs, pale and starry-eyed, in her thin white gown and shady hat, on these hot days, she asked him a simple question, she pleaded without words for his old friendship and understanding.
He could not give it. And one day Sylvia asked him if he had noticed that Tom was falling in love with Gay.
David stood perfectly still. For a few seconds he had a strange brassy taste in his mouth, a feeling that the world had simply stopped. Everything was over. Hope was dead within him.
“Haven’t you noticed it?” Sylvia said. “Ah, I do hope it’s true!”
They were in the downstairs sitting room, which had been darkened against the blazing heat of the day. All four of the young Flemings had been down on the rocks, by the sea, on a favourite bit of beach. But even there the day had been too hot for them, and now, at five, they had idled slowly toward the house, through a garden in which the sunlight lay in angry, blazing pools of brightness, between the unstirring thick leafage of the trees. There was no life in the air to-day, no life in the slow lip and rock of the sea. The girls had talked of a sea bath at twilight when the night might be shutting down with something like a break in the heat, but even that necessitated more effort than they cared to make. Dressing again, Gabrielle had protested, would reduce them to their former state of limp and sticky discomfort.
The sitting room was hot, and smelt of dust and upholstery and old books. Through the old-fashioned wooden blinds the sun sent dazzling slits of light, swimming with motes. There was a warm gloom here, like the gloom in a tropic cave.
Sylvia, whose rich dark beauty was enhanced by summer, and who was glowing like a rose despite tumbled hair and thin crumpled gown, came to stand at the window and look over David’s shoulder. Gabrielle and Tom, with the dog, had just walked down the drive, and disappeared in the direction of the stable. It had been Gabrielle’s extraordinary voice, heard outside, that had brought David to the window.
“You speak with feeling, Tom!” she had been saying.
The words had drifted in at the window, and David seemed still to hear them lingering, sweet and husky and amusedly maternal, in the air.
Of course, that was it. She would marry Tom.
The thought had never crossed his mind before; he seemed to know the fact now, and his heart and mind shrank away from it with utter unwillingness to believe. A month ago, poor as he was, he might have done anything——!
Now it was too late.
“I see him just as you see him, David,” Sylvia was saying. “A big, lax, good-natured sort of boastful boy, that’s what he is. But I don’t believe she sees him that way! And—if she could like him, it would be a wonderful marriage for her, wouldn’t it? Fancy that youngster as mistress here. And isn’t he exactly the sort of rather—well, what shall I say?—rather coarse, adoring man who would spoil a young and pretty wife?”
“She likes him?” David managed to say, slowly.
“I think she’s beginning to. She has a nice sort of friendly way with him,” Sylvia said. “He doesn’t seem to bore her as he does me! He wearies me almost to tears.”
“I thought—it seemed to me it was just—her way,” David reasoned. And the darkest shadow that he had ever known at Wastewater fell upon his heart then, and he felt that he could not support it. Of course; she would be the rich and beloved, the furred and jewelled little Mrs. Fleming of Wastewater—he must not stand in her way——
A few days later he went off for a fortnight’s tramp,with Rucker, he said, somewhere in Canada. He left no address, promising to send them a line now and then. And Gabrielle, bewildered with the pain of his composed and quiet parting, watching his old belted suit and the sturdy, shabby knickers out of sight, said to herself again, “I am afraid.”
Tom had made her his special ally and confidante of late, and only Gabrielle knew how far her friendship had been influential in keeping him at home at all. He disliked his Aunt Flora, and felt that Sylvia looked down upon him, as indeed she did. David, affectionately interested as he was, was a forceful, almost a formidable element, wherever he might be, and nobody knew it better than Tom. David might be, comparatively speaking, poor, he might wear his old paint-daubed jacket, he might deprecatingly shrug when a discussion was under way, he might listen smilingly without comment when Tom was noisily emphatic, yet Tom knew, and they all recognized, that there was a silent power behind David. He was a gentleman; books, art galleries, languages, political and social movements, David was quietly in touch with them all. He was what Tom would never be, that strange creature, a personality. Even while he nodded and applauded and praised, he had an uncomfortable effect of making Tom feel awkward and even humble, making him see how absurd were his pretence and his shallow vanity, after all.
But Gay was inexacting, friendly, impressionable, and she combined a most winning and motherly concern for Tom’s physical welfare with a childish appetite for his tales. She felt intensely sorry for Tom, chained here in the unsympathetic environment he had always disliked,and she assumed an attitude that was somewhat that of a mother, somewhat that of a sister, and devoted herself to him.
She liked him best when he talked of the sea, as they sat on the rocks facing the northeast, sheltered by the rise of the garden cliff from the afternoon sea. Dots of boats would be moving far out upon the silky surface of the waters; now and then a big liner went slowly by, writing a languid signature in smoke scarcely deeper in tone than the summer sky. Tom talked of boats: little freighters fussing their way up and down strange coasts, nosing into strange and odorous tropic harbours; Palermo, with the tasselled donkeys jerking their blue and red headdresses upon the sun-soaked piers; Nictheroy in its frame of four hundred islands; Batavia, Barbadoes, Singapore—Tom knew them all. Sometimes the listening girl was fascinated by real glimpses of the great nations, seen through their shipping, saw England in her grim colliers, fighting through mists and cold and rolling seas, saw the white-clad cattle kings of the pampas watching the lading of the meat boats from under broad-brimmed white hats.
And it seemed to Gabrielle, and to them all, that as the days went by Tom lost some of his surface boastfulness and became simpler and more true. He was not stupid, and he must see himself how differently they received his inconsequential, honest talk from the fantastic and elaborate structures he so often raised to impress them. “I’m beginning to like him!” she said. And she wondered why Aunt Flora and Sylvia looked at her so oddly.