CHAPTER XV
Oneafternoon, when he had been at home for several weeks, he and Gay were alone on the rocks. It was again a burning afternoon, but Tom liked heat, and Gabrielle’s dewy skin still had the child’s quality of only glowing the more exquisitely for the day’s warmth. Sylvia and her mother had gone into Crowchester. David was still away.
Tom had taken a rather personal tone of late with Gabrielle, a tone that the girl found vaguely disquieting. Now he was asking her, half smiling, and half earnest, if she had ever been in love. And as he asked it, he put his lean brown hand over hers, as it lay on the rocks beside him. Gay did not look down at their hands, but her heart rose in her breast, and she wriggled her own warm fingers slightly, as a hint to be set free.
“Have I ever been in love? Yes, I think so, Tom.”
“Oh, you think so? As bad as that! A lot you know about it,” Tom jeered, good-naturedly. “If you’d ever been in love, you’d know it,” he added.
“I suppose so,” Gabrielle agreed, amiably.
“Well, who is it?” asked Tom, curiously. “David, huh?”
Gabrielle felt as if touched by a galvanic shock. There was a choking confusion in all her senses and a scarlet colour in her face as she said:
“David? David is—Sylvia’s.”
“Oh, zat so?” Tom asked, interestedly. “I thought so!” he added, in satisfaction. And with a long half whistle and pursed lips, after a moment of profound thought, when his half-closed eyes were off across the wide seas, he repeated thoughtfully, “Is—that—so? Say, my coming home must have made some difference to them,” he added, suddenly, as Gay did not speak.
“Only in this way,” the girl said, quickly, with one hand quite unconsciously pressed against the pain that was like a physical cut in her heart. “Only in that now he will feel free to ask her, Tom!”
“Sa-a-ay—!” Tom drawled, with a crafty and cunning look of incredulity and sagacity. “He’d hate her with a lot of money tied to her—I don’t think,” he added, good-naturedly. But a moment later a different look, new to him lately, came into his face, and he said more quietly and with conviction: “I don’t know, though. I’ll bet you’re right!”
Immediately afterward he fell into a sort of study, in a fashion not unusual with him. He freed Gabrielle’s hand, crossed his arms, and sat staring absently out across the ocean, with his lean body sprawled comfortably into the angles of the rocks, and his Panama tilted over his face.
“I wish to God I knew if I was going to get well and back to sea again!” he said, presently, in a fretful sort of voice.
Gabrielle, who had relievedly availed herself of this interval to shift by almost imperceptible degrees to a seat a trifle more distant, was now so placed that she could meet his eyes when he looked up. She had intended to say to him, as they had all been saying,some comforting vague thing about the doctor’s hopeful diagnosis of his illness, and about patience and rest. But when she saw the big, pathetically childish dark eyes staring up wistfully, a sudden little pang of pity made her say instead, gently:
“I don’t know, Tom. But you’re so young and strong; they all say you will!”
“I’m in no condition to ask a girl to marry me!” Tom said, moodily.
“Oh, Tom,” Gabrielle said, interested at once, “have you a girl?”
He looked at her, as she sat at an angle of the great shaded boulders, with a sort of sea-shine trembling like quicksilver over her. She was in thin, almost transparent white, with a wide white hat pushed down over her richly shining tawny hair and shadowing her flushed earnest face. The hot day had deepened the umber shadows about her beautiful eyes; tiny gold feathers of her hair lay like a baby’s curls against her warm forehead. Her crossed white ankles, her fine, locked white hands, the whole slender, fragrant, youthful body might have been made for a study of ideal girlhood and innocence, and sweetness and summer-time.
“Lemme tell you something,” the man began, in his abrupt way. And he took from his pocket a slim, flat leather wallet, brown once, but now worn black and oily, and containing only a few papers.
One of these was an unmounted camera print of a woman’s picture. She was a slim, dark woman, looking like a native of some tropic country, wearing a single white garment, barefooted, and with flowers about her shoulders and head. The setting was of palms and sea;indeed the woman’s feet were in the waves. She was smiling, but the face was clumsily featured, the mouth large and full, and the expression, though brightly happy, was stupid. The picture was dirty, curled by much handling.
“She’s—sweet,” Gay said, hesitatingly, at a loss.
“Sweet, huh?” Tom echoed, taking back the picture, nursing it in both cupped hands, and studying it hungrily, as if he had never seen it before. “That’s Tana,” he said, softly.
“Tana?”
“My wife,” Tom added, briefly. And there was no bragging in his tone now. “She was the sweetest woman God ever made!” he said, sombrely.
“Your—Tom, yourwife?”
“Certainly,” Tom answered, shortly. “Now go tell that to them all!” he added, almost angrily. “Tell them I married a girl who was part nigger if you want to!”
His tone was the truest Gabrielle had ever heard from him; the pain in it went to her heart.
“Tom, I’m so sorry,” she said, timidly. “Is she dead?”
“Yep,” he said, like a pistol shot, and was still.
“Lately, Tom?”
“Two years. Just before I was ill.”
Gabrielle was silent a long time, but it was her hand now that crept toward his, and tightened on it softly. And so they sat for many minutes, without speaking.
Then the girl said, “Tell me about her.”
Tom put the picture away reverently, carefully. For a few dubious minutes she felt that she had hurt him, but suddenly he began with the whole story.
He had met Tana when she was only fourteen, just before the entrance of the United States into the war. Her father was a native trader, but the girl had some white blood. Tom had remembered her, and when he was wounded and imprisoned, had escaped to make his way back, by the devious back roads of the seas, to the tropical island, and the group of huts, and Tana. And Tana had nursed him, and married him solemnly, according to all the customs of her tribe, and they had lived there in a little corner of Paradise, loving, eating, swimming, sleeping, for happy years. And then there had been Toam, little, soft, round, and brown, never dressed in all his short three years, never bathed except in the green warm fringes of the ocean, never fed except at his mother’s tender, soft brown breast until he was big enough to sit on his father’s knee and eat his meat and bananas like a man. There were plenty of other brown babies in the settlement, but it was Toam’s staggering little footprints in the wet sand that Tom remembered, Toam standing in a sun-flooded open reed doorway, with an aureole about his curly little head.
Tom had presently drifted into the service of a small freighting line again, but never for long trips, never absent for more than a few days or a week from Tana and Toam. And so the wonderful months had become years, and Tom was content, and Tana was more than that; until the fever came.
Tom had survived them both, laid the tiny brown body straight and bare beside the straightly drawn white linen that covered Tana. And then his own illness had mercifully shut down upon him, and he had known nothing for long months of native nursing.Months afterward he had found himself in a spare cabin upon a little freighter, bound eventually for the harbour of New York. Tana’s family, her village indeed, had been wiped out, the captain had told him. The ship had delayed only to superintend some burials before carrying him upon its somewhat desultory course. They had put into a score of harbours, and Tom was convalescent, before the grim, smoke-wrapped outlines of New York, burning in midsummer glare and heat, had risen before him. And Tom, then, sick and weary and weak and heartbroken, had thought he must come home to die.
But now, after these weeks at home, a subtle change had come over him, and he did not want to die. He told Gabrielle, and she began indeed to understand it, how strangely rigid and unlovely and lifeless domestic ideals according to the New England standards had seemed to him at first, how gloomy the rooms at Wastewater, how empty and unsatisfying the life.
But he was getting used to it all now. He thought Sylvia was a “beautiful young lady, but kinder proud.” Aunt Flora also was “O. K.” And David was of course a prince.
“He’s painting a I-don’t-know-what-you-call-it up in my room,” Tom said, unaffectedly. He had furnished one of the big mansard rooms at the top of the house with odd couches, rugs, and chairs, and sometimes spent the hot mornings there, with David painting beside him. If there was air moving, it might be felt here, and Tom liked the lazy and desultory talk as David worked. “Can he paint good at all? They don’t look much like the pictures in books.”
“They are beginning to say—at least some of them do—that he is a genius, Tom. No, it’s not like the pictures that one knows. But there are other men who paint that way—in his school.”
“He has a school, huh?”
“No, I mean his type of work.”
“I get you,” Tom said, good-naturedly. “I’m glad about him and Sylvia,” he added, after thought. “Engaged, are they?”
“Well, I suppose they will be. There was an understanding between them—he has something, you know, and Aunt Flora has an income, too. Your father settled something on her when Uncle Will died.”
“Do you suppose it’s money that’s holding them back?”
“I don’t imagine so. I think perhaps it’s all the change and confusion, and the business end of things.”
“I could fix ’em up!” Tom suggested, magnificently. “I wish to God,” he added, uneasily, under his breath, and without irreverence, “thatsomethingwould happen! The place makes me feel creepy, somehow. It’s—voodoo. I wish David would marry and take that death’s head of an old woman off with him—Aunt Flora. And then I’d like to beat it somewhere—Boston or New York—see some life! Theatres—restaurants—that sort of thing!”
Gabrielle did not ask what disposition he would make of herself under this arrangement. She knew.
She was down among the flowering border shrubs of the garden on the quiet September day when David unexpectedly came home. The whole world was shroudedin a warm, soft mist; the waves crept in lifelessly, little gulls rocked on the swells. Trees about Gabrielle were dripping softly, not a leaf stirred, and birds hopped like shadows, like paler shadows, and vanished against the quiet, opaque walls that shut her in.
She and Sylvia had been spending the afternoon upstairs in Tom’s “study,” as his mansard sitting room was called. The old piano upon which all these young men and women had practised, years ago, as children, had been moved up there now; there was a card table, magazines, books. The electric installation would be begun downstairs in a few weeks, and the whole place wore an unusually dismantled and desolate air; the girls were glad to take their sewing up to the cool and quiet of Tom’s study. Flora had been wretched with malaria of late, and spent whole days in bed, lying without a book or even her knitting, staring darkly and silently into space.
This afternoon Gabrielle had escaped, to scramble for half an hour along the shore, her busy eyes upon the twinkling low-tide life among the rocks, her thoughts a jumble of strange apprehensions and fears. Now she was lingering in the garden, reluctant to surrender herself once more to all the shadows and unnamed menaces of the house, picking a few of the brave bronze zinnias and the velvet wallflowers; the floating pale disks of cosmos, on their feathery leafage, were almost as high as her tawny head.
She started as David’s figure loomed suddenly through the soft veils of the autumn fog, close beside her, and laid her hand with a quite simple gesture of fright against her heart. The colour, brought by her scramblingwalk into her cheeks, ebbed slowly from beneath the warm cream of her skin. Her eyes looked large and childish in their delicate umber shadows. David saw the fine, frail linen over her beautiful young breast rise and fall with the quickened beat of her heart; the soft moist weather had curled her tawny hair into little damp feathers of gold, against her temples.
An ache of sheer pain, the pain of the artist for beauty beyond sensing, shook him. She was youth, sweetness, loveliness incarnate, here against a curtain of flowers and gray mist, with wallflowers in her hand, and the toneless pink and white stars of the cosmos floating all about her head. David gave her his hand, and she clung to it as if she would never let it go, as if she were a frightened child, found at last.
“David—thank God you’re home!” she said. “But you’ve tired yourself,” she added, instantly concerned. “You look thinner, and you look pale.”
“I’m fine,” he said, with his good smile. “But why did you want me back?” he asked, a little anxiously, in reference to her emotion at seeing him.
“Oh, I don’t know. Things”—she said, vaguely, with a glance toward the looming black shape of Wastewater, netted in its blackened vines—“things have—made me nervous. I’m not sleeping well.”
“Aunt Flora looks like a ghost, too,” the man said, and Gay gave a nervous little protesting laugh.
“Don’t talk about ghosts! But it’s only her old malaria, David,” she added, frowning faintly.
“I don’t know. Her colour looks ghastly. And Sylvia seems twitchy, too. What’s the matter with us all?”
“Us all?” She caught up the phrase accusingly. “Then you feel it, too?”
“I think I have always felt—something—of it, here!”
“It?” Gabrielle repeated the monosyllable thoughtfully, and as they turned slowly toward the house, “Horror——” she said, under her breath. “David, David, can’t we all get away?”
“We must get away,” he amended. “It isn’t a good atmosphere for any one! Perhaps next summer——”
He stopped. Sylvia had given him another significant hint a few minutes ago. But he dared not ask Gabrielle to confirm it. No, he was only a sort of big brother to her—she did not need him much now; presently she would not need him at all.
“David,” she said, quickly and distressedly, when in their slow and fog-enshrouded walk they had reached the little alley under the grapevines where Gay had seen her mother almost a year ago, “will you advise me?”
His face was instantly attentive; of the sudden plunge of his heart there was no sign.
“Gladly, dear.”
“Tom has asked me to marry him, David,” Gabrielle said.
Their eyes met seriously; David did not speak.
“I have known for some time that he would,” Gabrielle added, with the pleading look of a child in trouble who comes to an omnipotent elder.
“You told him——?”
“I—didn’t say no.”
There was a long pause while neither moved. A bird, unseen in the mist, croaked steadily, on a raucous note.
“You have promised him, Gabrielle?”
“No. I couldn’t do that. But—I couldn’t say no. I tried,” Gabrielle went on, in a sort of burst, and quite unconsciously clinging to David’s hands, “I did try to prevent it, David. You don’t know how I tried! He has been talking about it—oh, since before you went away! He told me he liked a girl, and he would tell me all about her, pretending that she was not I. I—prayed,” Gabrielle went on, passionately, “that it was not I!”
“Gabrielle, I would have spoken to him, saved you all this!”
“No, no, no, I know you would!” she said, feverishly. “Aunt Flora would have told him. But, David, we couldn’t have that! Why, it would have broken his heart! You see, he’s proud, and he feels—feels that there is—a difference between us and himself. He has been like a child about this, a child with a wonderful ‘surprise’ for me. I am to have jewels and travel and cars—everything.”
“If you marry him?” David asked, slowly.
“If I marry him. And I like him, David—ah, truly I do! I feel so badly for him. I feel as if it would be a real—a reallife, for me,” persisted little Gabrielle, gallantly, feeling for words, “to fill Wastewater with guests and hospitality and happiness again. I can’t bear to have him feel that, poor as I am, and—and nameless—and he knows I am nameless!—still, I couldn’t love him. It will make him bitter, and ugly, and he’ll go off again, and perhaps die. I’vehadto be kind, to put anything definite off, and so I’ve said nothing to anybody—not even Sylvia. I’ve had to—to—fightit out alone,” finished Gabrielle, with a trembling lip and swimming eyes, “and it has made me—nervous!”
“My dear girl,” David said, slowly, heavily, “you’re sure you wouldn’t be happy? You would be very rich, Gabrielle, and you could teach him to make the most of his money. I think it would make Aunt Flora and Sylvia very happy.”
Gabrielle was moving slowly ahead of him toward the house now. She half turned to look at him over her shoulder.
“David, do you think I should say yes?” she whispered.
“I think perhaps you should consider it gravely, Gay. You say you like him, and what other woman is he ever apt to find that would understand him, or even like him, so well? Imagine what harm his money is going to do to him, once he is better, mixing in the world again!? All sorts of social thieves will be upon him——”
“That’s what I think of!” she responded, eagerly, so childishly, so earnestly concerned that David felt his heart wrung afresh with a longing to put his arms about her, comfort her, kneel at her feet and put his lips to her beautiful young hands. “If—if only we can get out of here!” she whispered, with another strangely fearful glance at the old house, “his affairs straightened out, Sylvia and Aunt Flora and I—going somewhere!—anywhere! David, we mustn’t spend another winter here. And yet now, now,” she began again, with fresh agitation, “I don’t know what Tom thinks! He may think—indeed, I know he does think, that everythingwill be as he wishes! What could I do? I couldn’t help—and indeed, I didn’t say anything untrue! I only told him he must not think of such things until he was much, much better, but he seems to have taken that as a sort of—as a sort of—consent—in a way——”
“Shall I talk to him, dear? Tell him that you need more time?”
“Oh, no, please, David! Leave it to me!”
“Sometimes, I’ve been given to understand,” he said, with his quiet smile, “that a girl feels this way when she really is sure, or when, at all events, it develops that the doubt and hesitation were all natural enough, and part of—of really caring. Take time about it, Gabrielle. Money and position do count for something, after all, and he is a Fleming, and he knew your mother. It isn’t,” added David, with a little conscious change in his own tone, “it isn’t the other man of whom you spoke to me last June?”
For a moment Gay did not answer. Then she said, in a peculiar voice:
“I’ve often wondered what you meant by that conversation, David. Whether you remembered it? What was it? Had you consulted Aunt Flora and Sylvia as to my destiny—as to the problem of what was to become of me?”
“I—yes, I had written Sylvia, or no—not exactly that,” David stammered, taken unawares, and turning red. “I—it was just an idea of mine, it came into my head suddenly,” he added, with a most unwonted confusion in his manner, as he remembered that old bright dream of a porch on the seaward side of the Keyport farmhouse, and himself and poor little unwanted, illegitimateGay breakfasting there. “I wrote Sylvia about setting her free of a sort of understanding between us,” David went on, with a baffled feeling that his words were not saying what he wanted them to say. “As a matter of fact, a letter from her, saying the same thing, crossed mine,” he finished, again feeling that this statement was utterly flat and meaningless and not in the least relevant to the talk.
“You didn’t say you—cared,” Gabrielle said, very low. “You simply put it to me as a sort of—solution.”
“I see now that it was an affront to you, Gay,” David answered, sorely. “I have regretted it a thousand times! I wanted to offer you—what I had. But God knows,” he added, bitterly, “I have nothing to offer!”
“So that you—would not—do it again?” Gabrielle said, hardly above a breath, and breathing quickly, yet with an effort to appear careless.
“I would never offer any woman less than—love, again,” David answered. “If I had not been a bungling fool in such matters, you should never have been distressed by it!”
“You see, you did not care for me, David,” the girl reminded him, in a low, strained voice, and not meeting his eyes, when they were at the gloomy side door. The mist was thickening with twilight, and a fitful, warm wind was stirring its fold visibly.
“I had been thinking about it for days,” he said, “it had—I don’t know how to express it!—it had taken possession of me.”
Gabrielle, her shoulder turned toward him, flung up her head with a proud little motion.
“Tom—loves me,” she said, steadily. Yet David sawthe hand that held the flowers shake and the beautiful mouth tremble.
“Tom,” his half-brother said, still unable to shake off the wretched feeling that they were talking at cross-purposes, “would make you a devoted and generous husband, Gabrielle.”
Neither spoke again. They went into the dark hallway, and upstairs, and the gloom of Wastewater sucked them in and wrapped them about with all its oppressive silences, its misunderstandings, and its memories.