CHAPTER XIX
Shestopped. And after a long minute of silence the young persons looked at each other. Tom had been sitting throughout in a low chair with his hands locked; now he merely grinned nervously and shrugged. David’s face was stern and grave; he had folded his arms and had been staring ahead of him with a faint frown. Now his eyes moved about the circle and returned to space. Sylvia’s vivid dark face with its white, white skin was drained of colour, her eyes looked tortured, and she was breathing fast. As she knelt beside the bed, she half supported her mother upon her arm, her anxious and stricken face close to the leaden, ghastly face upon the pillow.
Gabrielle had been kneeling, too, as she listened. But at the end she rose and walked to the little window.
Outside, in the winter dusk, lay the soaked, blackened ruins of the old stables, those clean big airy stables that Gabrielle had so loved as a little girl. Nearer, against the angle of the house, lay the wreck of the windmill, the great rusty hoops and singed wood piled almost as high as the window. Beyond all were the bare winter woods, looking desolate and forlorn in the cool gray light, and on the right brimmed and lowered the steely surface of a cold and unfriendly sea.
As Gabrielle stood there, her weary heart and mindwhirled hither and thither by a hundred conflicting thoughts, in a very storm of pity and pain, the island lights suddenly pricked through the dove-gray of the gloom and flashed their pinkish radiance against the gaining and prevailing shadows. The girl’s thoughts travelled to them idly—she thought of little ships cutting their way through the trackless waters, and dark-faced, rough men twisting the spokes of the little wheels and peering out across the waves to find that steadily pulsating flash.
Somebody had lighted a light in the room behind her; she saw her own reflection, slender, aureoled, against the dark night. David touched her arm.
A sudden bitter need of tears possessed her, and her breast swelled. But she only raised heavy eyes to his questioningly, and bit her lip to steady it.
“Aunt Flora wants to speak to you, Gay.” The girl could tell by David’s tone that he had said it before. He gently turned her toward the bed.
She looked bewilderedly at Tom, who was busy at the lamp, and at Sylvia, who stood at the foot of the bed. Like a person in a dream she went slowly toward Flora, and knelt down beside her.
Flora reached out hard and anxious fingers and gripped the girl’s hand.
“I told David this yesterday—he told you and Tom—he was to tell you—when the fire came——” Flora whispered.
“He did tell us.” Gabrielle’s beautiful voice sounded childish and husky in contrast to the other weak voice. “But I thought—I thought that—my mother—Lily was still my mother, and that Uncle Roger was myfather—that I had no right to call him father. It seems”—her lips shook again—“it seems that I might have had—a father——” she faltered. Her voice thickened and stopped. She raised her eyes appealingly, almost apologetically to David, who was watching closely. “I never—had—any one,” she said, with suddenly brimming eyes.
Flora spoke, and immediately afterward, in a strange muse that was not hearing, Gabrielle heard Sylvia give a sort of cry, and then David leaned over her and said tenderly:
“Gay—she is very ill, dear. If you can——?”
“If I can—what—David?” she repeated, confused, her beautiful eyes wide and anxious.
“She wants you to forgive her, Gabrielle,” David answered.
Gabrielle still appeared bewildered; she looked from one face to another.
“Yes, I will, of course I will,” she said, quickly and simply.
“Then tell her so, Gabrielle.”
Gabrielle bent her gaze upon her aunt’s sunken face, a blot against the white pillows, and Flora fixed upon her the tragic look of her darkening eyes.
“I am sorry, Aunt Flora,” Gabrielle stammered, in tears. “I know—I know how hard it must have been for you. I am so sorry.”
“You will forgive me, Gabrielle?” Flora whispered, feverishly. “In all the years to come you will not hate me? You have grown to be a lovely woman—I did not harm you. I might have harmed you—but it was Sylvia, in the end, who paid for what I did.”
“I will never hate you,” Gabrielle said, slowly and steadily, like a child repeating a lesson.
“It was because I loved him so,” said Flora’s drawn, dark mouth, in a whisper. She sank back, seemed to be sinking away from earth and the things of earth altogether. “God bless you, Gabrielle, you have made it easy for me to die,” she added, in the mere breath of a voice.
“I’m—so—sorry!” Gay said, with a great sob. And she buried her face against the coverlet and burst into crying. “I’m so sorry that he was unkind to you—and that you could not forgive him and forgive me!” she sobbed. “We might have been—we might all have been so happy!”
“We might have been so happy,” Flora’s lips repeated. No other muscle of her bloodless face and shut eyes moved. “God bless you, Gabrielle,” she whispered again, as Gabrielle, drawn away by David’s hand, stopped to lay a wet cheek against hers and kiss her in farewell.
The girl, halfway to the door, and hardly conscious of what she was doing, suddenly wrenched herself free and went back to the bed. She fell on her knees, and catching the languid dark hand, put it to her lips.
“Aunt Flora, indeed I forgive you!” she said, weeping, “from my heart. I am so sorry you were so unhappy—that they all hurt you and failed you so! Dear Aunt Flora——”
Sylvia was on her knees on the other side, and crying as bitterly as Gabrielle, when David led the younger girl away. He and Margret established her upon a downstairs sofa, with cushions and covers before thefire, and she lay there in a dreamy state, not talking, hardly thinking, as the strange panorama of the last twenty-four hours wheeled through her weary head. She saw Flora only once again, and that was at the end, at seven o’clock.
At ten Tom drove them to Crowchester and they boarded the Boston train; Sylvia veiled and clinging tightly to Tom’s arm, Gabrielle and old Margret guiding them through the interested, warm train to the privacy of their drawing room.
Gabrielle’s last look at Wastewater had shown her only bare trees, blackened masses of ruins darker than the prevailing dark, open levels where the stately walls had been. A cold moon had been shining brightly upon the sea, had thrown the shadows of leafless bushes in a lacework across the bare brown space of the lawn, and against the steady rush and retreat of the short waves she had heard the tumbling cascading sound of some bit of wall collapsing upon the general collapse. Toward the distant west wall, beyond the woods, the changed perspective had left a long vista free, and Gabrielle could see the white gravestones in the moonlight.
Graves and ruins, ashes and bare branches, and beside them the unchanged, restless sea, and above them the unfeeling moonlight. The child of Wastewater looked back with a great gravity, a great solemnity in her heart. There had been laughter here, music and voices. Wastewater had had a housewarming, more than a hundred years before, when beautiful women, in the capes and high-waisted gowns of the Empire days, had been driven in jingling great coaches all the way fromBoston City to dance and rejoice with the young master of the mansion.
There had been a first Roger, in the buff and blue of the Revolution, Colonel Fleming, as black and as handsome as any of them, and there had been his son Tom, the good-hearted Tom who had come all the way to Brookline to find a cousin’s disconsolate little widow, with her sewing machine, and her girl babies, and offer them a home.
And there had been Tom’s son Roger, handsomest and most dashing of them all—David’s young mother, who was to win his heart, and that shadowy little Cecily, who must now be “mother” in Gabrielle’s thoughts.
Aunt Flora always watching jealously; Aunt Lily tearful and singing her romantic little songs; gallant little Tom reading his sea stories on the old nursery window-sill; dark little proud Sylvia with her glossy curls; baby Gay herself, wistful and alone; they all seemed to pass before the girl’s eyes in a long and haunting procession, crying as they went that they had always failed, even here, in all this wealth and beauty, to find happiness and peace!
“I will be happy,” Gabrielle had sworn to herself solemnly, frightened at the history of the place. “I will try never to be proud or jealous or cruel. We are Flemings, we four—and I as much a Fleming as any one of them now, and we must not make their mistakes! God helping us,” she thought, remembering the little nun who had years ago read the Sermon on the Mount to a class of inattentive little girls so many times, “wewill all be good, and meek, and merciful, and some day—years and years from now—we will come back to Wastewater again and rebuild it.
“Good-bye, Wastewater!” she had whispered, leaning back to look through the glass window of the motor car. And from beyond the ruins, the ashes, the bare garden, and the moonlit sea, the island lights had flashed her an answer.