CHAPTER XVI
Theweeks that followed seemed to Gabrielle Fleming, even at the time when they were actually passing, strangely and darkly unnatural, and afterward they remained a fearful memory in her life. Long before the tragedy in which they culminated she was quite definitely conscious of some brooding cloud, some horror impending over the household, she felt herself bound by a strange interior inhibition, or by a hundred inherited and instinctive inhibitions, from speaking freely, from throwing off, or attempting to throw off, the fears that possessed her.
Outwardly, as the serene autumn darkened and shortened into winter, the household seemed merely what the return of the heir had made it; Tom invalided, restless, in love with his cousin Gabrielle; Sylvia beautiful and confident, as she faced the changed future; Aunt Flora silent, coughing with her usual autumn bronchitis, moving about the house as the very personification of its sinister history; David grave and kindly, managing, advising, affectionate with them all; and the staff of kindly old servants duly drawing shades, lighting fires, serving meals.
Actually, Gabrielle felt sometimes that they were all madmen in a madhouse, and vague disturbing thoughts of her own unfortunate little mother would flit throughher mind, and she would wonder if her own reason would sustain much of this sort of suspense.
For suspense it was. The girl knew not why or what she feared, and they all feared. But she knew that their most resolute attempts at laughter and chatter somehow fell flat, that they glanced nervously over their shoulders when a door slammed, and that the shadows and gloom of the half-used old place seemed, of an autumn evening, when the winds were crying, to be creeping from the corners and lurking in the halls, ready to capture whatever was young and happy in dark old Wastewater and destroy it as so much youth and happiness years ago had been destroyed.
Nowadays, she fancied, the very voices of the maids, as they talked over trays or brooms in the hall, took on wailing notes, the clocks ticked patient warnings, a shattered coal on the fire would make them all jump. Gabrielle, with her heart beginning a quick and unreasoning beat, would turn off her bath water lest its roaring drown some warning sound, would stand poised, in her wrapper, as if for flight from she knew not what, listening—listening——
But it was only the October winds, sweeping the trees bare of their last tattered banners, only the fresh, harsh rush of the sea against the rocks, and the scream of a blown gull!
“Sylvia, does it make you feel as if you would like to scream, sometimes?” Gay asked one day, in the bare sunlight of the garden.
“Does what?” But in Sylvia’s dark eyes there was perfect comprehension. “It is almost,” she added, in a low tone, “as if people did really stay about a place tohaunt it. That poor little shadowy Cecily—the second Mrs. Fleming—who died, and your mother, and my father, and Uncle Roger——”
“And all their passions and all their hates!” Gabrielle said, in a fearful whisper, glancing up at the grim outlines of the enormous pile, “and all those dusty, empty halls and locked rooms! To me,” she went on, speaking with her eyes still on the black-brick, black-vine-covered house, “it is all coloured by that horrifying experience, here in the side lane, almost a year ago—when I first saw my mother——”
The mere memory of it frightened her. She seemed to see again the gray whirls of snow in the shadowy lane, the writhing, huddled gray figure among the writhing ropes and curtains of white.
“Gabrielle, don’t!” Sylvia said quickly, with a nervous laugh.
“No, but Sylvia, you feel it, too?”
“Ah, of course I do! Mamma so ill and silent, Tom so strange, David not——” Sylvia’s lip trembled, as much to her own surprise as Gay’s—“David is not himself,” she said, hurriedly. “He came back from this trip—changed! Whether it is Tom’s return, with all the memories and changes, I don’t know. Only,” added Sylvia, quite frankly blinking wet eyes, “only I have noticed a change in him, just lately, and it has—worried me! Perhaps it’s only a passing phase for us all,” she interrupted herself hastily, “one of those wretched times that all families go through! Partly weather, and partly nerves, and partly changes and sickness——”
“And largely Wastewater,” Gay said, hugging her great coat about her, as the girls rapidly walked aboutthe garden. “There seems to be an atmosphere about the place stronger than us all. We’re all nervous, jumpy. Last night, just as I was about to turn out the light in the sitting room, it seemed to me the picture of Uncle Roger was—I don’t know! breathing, looking at me—alive! I almost screamed. And the night after David came back, I picked up his letters, he had dropped them in the hall, and when I knocked on his door with them he fairly shouted ‘What’s that!’ and frightened me, and himself, too, he told me, almost out of our senses!”
“I don’t sleep well,” Sylvia confessed. “I don’t believe any of us do. I don’t think we should stay here. If Tom has to go away——”
She stopped. It was impossible not to assume now that Tom’s plans depended upon Gabrielle. Yet there was about the younger girl none of the happiness that comes with a flattering and welcome affair. Gabrielle instead was quite obviously experiencing a deepening depression and uneasiness. Every day showed her more clearly that Tom considered her bound to marry him, interpreting everything she said and did according to his own cheerfully complacent self-confidence.
Her kindness had carried her too far, now, for honourable retreat. She could not even get away from Wastewater, to think in peace, for Tom would not hear of separation, they had known each other long enough, they had “considered” enough, he said; when Aunt Flora and Sylvia took the apartment of which they were always speaking for the winter, Tom and Gabrielle would be married and go south together—go anywhere she wanted to go, but together. Bermuda orFlorida or San Diego were all equally indifferent to Tom, as long as he had his wife with him.
The very words made Gabrielle’s blood run cold. It was in vain that she tried to imagine herself married, rich, going about the world as Mrs. Tom Fleming. Every fibre of body and soul revolted; she liked Tom, she would have done almost anything to please him, but somehow the thought of him as her husband made her feel a little faint.
Yet how, after all this kindly talk, after these hours of listening, of companionship, suddenly break free? Gabrielle dared ask no help; Sylvia or Aunt Flora would only hurt him a thousand times more than she would, even David’s touch could not be trusted here. Besides, she did not feel herself deserving of help or extrication; she had brought this most uncomfortable state of affairs upon herself, shehadbeen too kind to Tom, shehadlet him drift happily into the idea that they cared for each other.
The girl began to feel with a sort of feverish terror that she must be free—free if she had to run away into the world alone. From a distance she could write them, she could explain! But she could not go on in this fashion, with every hour deepening the misunderstanding between herself and Tom, tightening the net.
November came in bare and cold, with a faint powdering of snow upon the frozen ground. Suddenly summer-time, and shining seas, and sunshine seemed but dreams, life had become all winter, there would never be warmth and flowers again. Wastewater was bleakly cold; oil stoves burned coldly, like lifeless red-eyed stage fires in mica and coloured glass, the halls were frigid, the family huddled about fires.
Tools sounded metallically all day upon the new radiators, that, still unconnected, stood about wet and cold and forlorn against the walls. Tom spent most of his days upstairs in his “study,” where a roaring airtight stove, connected with the old flue, made the air warm. He must start southward soon, they all said, and yet there was no definite plan of a departure.
David was still immersed in the business of the estate; Flora was wretched with rheumatism and malaria; Gabrielle, of them all, was the least anxious to suggest a change, and so precipitate a settlement with Tom.
On the fourth day of the month came the Great Wind. Keyport and Crowchester, and indeed all the towns along the coast for miles, would long talk of it, would date domestic events from it. The night of the third was cold and deathly clear, with a fiery unwarming sunset behind sombre black tree trunks, and a steely brightness over the sea. Gabrielle saw milk-white frost in the upturned clods in the garden; the light was hardly gone when a harsh moonlight lay upon the bare black world.
There was a good deal of air stirring in the night, and toward morning it grew so cold that the girls, chattering and shaking, met in the halls, seeking blankets and hot bottles. Gay and Sylvia knocked on David’s door; he must take extra covering to Tom; David’s teeth clicked and his laughter had a ghoulish sound as he obeyed.
The day broke gray and cold in a hurricane that racked and bowed the trees and bushes, laid the chrysanthemums flat, rattled dry frozen leaves and broken branches on the porches. Whitecaps raced on the gray, rough sea, doors slammed, casements rattled, and atregular intervals the wind seemed to curl about the house like a visible thing, and whined and chuckled and sobbed in the chimneys. Fires were kept burning, and Sylvia and Gabrielle, in their thickest sweaters, stuffed the sitting-room window ledges with paper to keep out the straight icy current of the air.
The family was at breakfast, with the lights lighted, when one of the oldest maples came down, with a long splintering crash that was like a slow scream. During the morning two other smaller trees fell, and whosoever opened an outside door was immediately spun about, and in a general uproar and rattle and flutter of everything inside, was obliged to beg help in closing it. After luncheon, John came in to say that his wife and little girl were so nervous that he was going to take them in to Crowchester. He could get the papers——
“No,” David said, “I may walk into Keyport later!”
“You’ll never keep your feet on the roads, sir. I never seen such a blow in my life. There was great gouts of foam blown as far back as the cow barn,” John said, respectfully. “I tied up the mill.”
David only smiled and shrugged, and at three o’clock went down to the side door, belted into his thick old coat. Sylvia and Gabrielle he had seen a few minutes before established with Tom and Aunt Flora in the comfortable study far upstairs, where there was a good fire burning.
As he slipped out, and dragged the door shut behind him, the wind snatched at him, and for a moment he really doubted his ability to make even Keyport, less than three miles away. There was a whirlwind loose in the yard; everything that could bang or blow or rattleor shriek was in motion, and the roar of the sea was deafening. The sun shone fitfully, between onslaughts from clouds that swept across a low iron sky; there had been a cold rush of hail an hour or two before; ledges and north fronts were still heaped white with it. There was not a boat upon the running high waters of the sea; David, letting himself out at the narrow back gate, saw the waves crashing up against the Keyport piers and flinging themselves high into the gray cold air.
Wastewater stood upon a point, and there was less uproar on the highway than upon their own cliffs. The wind faced him steadily here, stinging tears into his eyes, and pressing a weight like a moving wall against his breast. There was no escaping it, there was no dodging; David bent his head into it, knowing only that the road was hard and yellow beneath his staggering feet.
He jumped and shouted as a hand touched his arm, and he saw at his elbow Gabrielle’s blown and laughing and yet somewhat frightened face. Unsure of her welcome, she caught her arm tightly in his and pushed along gallantly at his shoulder.
“I couldn’t stand it!” she shouted, above the shriek of the wind, “I had to get out!”
“What did Aunt Flora say?” he shouted back, moving ahead simply because it was impossible to stand still.
“She doesn’t know! I only told Hedda—when I came downstairs!” Gay screamed.
“Well—hang tight!” And together they breasted the wall of air.
“Gay, you were mad to do this!” David shouted, after a hard mile.
“Oh, I’m loving it!” answered her exulting voice, close at his ear.
“I’m loving it, too!” he said. And suddenly they were both human, free of the shadows, able to laugh and struggle, to catch hands and shout again.
On their left the sea raged and bubbled, above them swept the wild airs; clouds and cold sunshine raced over the world, and the wind sailed with foam and mad leaves. But perhaps to both the man and the woman the physical struggle after these weeks of mental strain was actually refreshing; at all events, they reached Keyport, after an hour’s battling, in wild spirits.
The little town was made weather-tight against the storm, and presented only closed shutters and fastened storm doors to the visitors. Gabrielle and David made their way along the main street, catching at knobs and corners, and were blown into the bleak little post office, whose floors were strewn with torn papers and tracked with dried mud. The old postmaster eyed them over his goggles with mild surprise as he gave them letters from a mittened hand. The place smelled warmly of coal oil and hot metal; its quiet dazed them after the buffet of the storm.
The piers were deserted, except for a few anxious gulls that were blown crying above lashing waves; a group of tippeted boys exclaimed and shouted over the tide that had caught the end of River Street. David guided his companion into Keyport’s one forlorn little restaurant, and they sat at a narrow table spread with steel cutlery and a lamp, spotted cloth, drinking what Gabrielle said was the best coffee she had ever tasted.
“You crazy woman!” David said, affectionately,watching her as she sipped her scalding drink from a thick cup and smiled at him through the tawny mist of her blown hair.
He had, with some difficulty, made arrangements for their being driven back in the butcher’s Ford, at half-past five, when the butcher shop was closed. David did not dare risk the walk home in the early dark, and Gabrielle now began to feel through her delicious relaxation a certain muscle-ache and was willing to be reasonable. So that they had a full hour to employ, and they spent it leaning upon the little table, sharing hot toast and weak coffee, straightening the thick table-furnishing, setting sugar bowl and toothpick glass over the spots, talking—talking—talking as they had never talked before.
Gabrielle poured out her troubles like an exhausted child; her eyes glowed like stars in the gathering dusk, her cheeks deepened to an exquisite apricot-pink under their warm creamy colourlessness.
David watched her, listened, said little. But he began to realize that she was genuinely suffering and depressed and in the end a clean programme was planned, and David promised to put it into immediate execution.
Gabrielle liked Tom, but not as much as he thought she did. She wanted to get away, at once—to-morrow or day after to-morrow—to straighten out her thoughts and to see the whole tangle from a distance. Very good, said David, drawing a square on the tablecloth with the point of a fork. Aunt Flora should be told the whole story, and Gay should go in to Boston at once, to see—well, to see a dentist. She must develop a toothache,to-morrow morning, or as soon as the storm subsided. She could telegraph the nuns to-night, and be with them about this time to-morrow.
When he saw how her eyes danced and how impulsively she clasped her fingers together at the mere notion, David was able to form some idea of the strain she had been under.
“Oh, David—to see the streets and—and people, again! To feel that I needn’tfaceTom——”
“Meanwhile,” David proceeded with his plan, “I’ll get Tom to go off with me somewhere, just for a few weeks. Norfolk, maybe, or Palm Beach—it may clear up his mind, too. And perhaps I can explain to him that while you do like him, you don’t feel quite ready to be any man’s wife. I can tell him that the thought of it upsets you——”
“Ah, David, what an angel you are! But then what about Sylvia and Aunt Flora?”
“Well, they can follow you in to Boston. Sylvia spoke to me about either doing library work or teaching in some girls’ school; they can be looking about for an apartment. But the main point is,” ended David, “that you get out of it atonce, before you make yourself sick.”
“It seems so cowardly,” said Gabrielle, fairly trembling in her eagerness and satisfaction.
“No, it’s not cowardly. I suppose it’s what all girls feel,” David said, in a somewhat questioning voice, “before they get married——?”
“That’s just it,” Gay confessed, her cheeks suddenly scarlet. “I don’t know what most girls feel, and I haven’t any mother——”
She paused. But David, looking at her over his cigarette, merely flushed a little in his turn, and did not speak.
“But I know this,” Gabrielle went on, feeling for words, and ranging knives and forks and spoons in orderly rows, very busily, as she spoke, “I know that what makes me feel so—so doubtful, about marrying Tom, isn’t—isn’t being afraid, David,” she struggled on, her eyes pleading, and her cheeks childishly red. “It’s—not—being afraid!”
Their eyes met across the sorry little board, and for a moment the strange look held and neither spoke.
“I have been playing a part with Tom,” Gabrielle said, after a pause, “and I could go on playing it. I could marry him to-morrow, and—and still like him, and be kind to him! But, David,” she said, in a whisper, “is that enough?”
“I don’t know, dear,” David said, with a dry mouth. “You mean, that it could be different,” he added, presently, “that itwouldbe different, if it were that other man—of whom you spoke to me one day?”
The girl only nodded in answer, her eyes fixed with a sort of fear and shame and courage upon his. If it were the other man! she thought—if it were David! And at the mere flying dream of what marriage to David would mean—going out into life with David—Gabrielle felt her heart swell until something like an actual pain suffocated her and her senses swam together.
He sat there, unconscious, kindly, everything that was good and clever, handsome and infinitely dear, and she dared not even stretch out her hand to lay it upon his. His black hair was blown into loose waves, his oldrough coat hung open, his fine dark eyes and firm mouth expressed only sympathy and concern. She dared not think what love might do to them.
“I want—to be afraid when I am married,” she said. “I want to feel that I am putting my life into somebody’s keeping, going into a strange country—not just assuming new responsibilities—in the old!”
“I think I understand,” David said. And feeling that further talk of this sort was utterly unsafe for him and likely to prove only more unsettling to her, he proposed that they walk to the Whittakers’, a few blocks away, and see how the large and cheerful family was weathering the storm.
The Whittakers, mother, two unmarried daughters, two young sons, married daughter with husband and baby, were having a family tea that looked enchanting to Gabrielle and David, coming in out of the wind.
The big room was deliciously warm, and Mrs. Whittaker put Gay, who was a little shy, beside her and talked to her so charmingly that the girl’s heart expanded like a flower in sunshine. Mrs. Whittaker had known Gay’s poor little mother and both of Roger Fleming’s wives; she said that by a curious coincidence she had had a letter that very day from Mary Rosecrans.
“But you don’t remember her, of course,” she said. “She was a lovely nurse—a Crowchester girl, but married now and living in Australia. Let me see—nineteen—Dicky’s eighteen—she must have married when you were only a baby. But I had her when my Dicky here was born, and poor little Mrs. Roger Fleming had her for months and months at Wastewater. Now, Mr.Fleming, you’re going to let me keep this child overnight? The girls will take good care of her.”
“Oh, do!” said Sally and Harriet in one voice. And the Whittaker baby smiled up innocently into Gabrielle’s face. “And why didn’t you do this long ago, Gabrielle?” they reproached her. “You’ve been home almost a year.”
Gabrielle, kissing the top of the baby’s downy head, explained; David thought her more than ordinarily lovely in this group of youth and beauty. Harriet and Sally had been at boarding school, she reminded them, and Mrs. Whittaker had been staying with Anna and the new baby, and then Tom Fleming had come home——
“Ah, but nowdodo this again soon, you dear children!” their hostess said, when Gabrielle had pleaded that she really dared not stay, having run away for the walk in the wind as it was, and when the butcher’s hooded delivery wagon was at the door. And Gabrielle went out, clinging to David’s arm, into the creaking, banging, roaring darkness, with the motherly good-bye kiss warm upon her forehead.
The delight of this long afternoon of adventure and the prospect of escape to-morrow kept her laughing all the way home, and even when they got there, she seemed to carry something of the wholesome Whittaker fireside, something of the good out-of-doors with her into Wastewater.
But swiftly, relentlessly, the chilling atmosphere of repressions and fears shut down upon them all again; outside the night rioted madly, and the old house creaked and strained like a vessel at sea. Indoors lightsseemed to make but a wavering impression on the gloom of the big rooms, doors burst open, casements shook with a noise like artillery fire, and voices seemed to have strange echoes and hollow booming notes.
Once some window far upstairs was blown in, and the maids went upstairs in a flight, exclaiming under their breath, and slamming a score of doors on their way. Chilly draughts penetrated everywhere, and the dining room had a strange earthy smell, like a vault.
The girls wore their heavy coats to dinner, and after dinner went up to Tom’s study and built up the fire until the airtight stove roared and turned a clear pink. Tom lay on his couch; he had been oddly moody and silent to-night; Gabrielle played solitaire, talking as she played; Sylvia scribbled French verbs in the intervals of the conversation.
David and Aunt Flora had been with them until something after nine o’clock; then Flora had somewhat awkwardly and heavily asked him to come down with her to the sitting room; she wished to talk to him.
This was a common enough circumstance, for business matters were constantly arising for discussion. But her manner was strange to-night, Gabrielle thought, and the girl’s heart beat quickly as they went away. Now David would tell her that she, Gabrielle, wanted to go into Boston for a few days—perhaps he was telling her now——
A quiet half-hour went by, and then Sylvia stretched herself lazily and admitted that she was already half asleep. Tom had been lying with half-shut eyes, but with a look so steadily fixed upon Gabrielle that the girl was heartily glad to suggest that they all go downstairs.There had been something sinister, something triumphant and yet menacing in that quiet, unchanging look. She had met it every time she looked up from her cards, and it had finally blotted everything but itself from her thoughts.
Tom rose obediently, and Sylvia folded his rug for him, and went about straightening the room. The girls were accustomed to perform small services for Tom, who really was not strong enough to be quite independent of them yet. All three went downstairs together, Gabrielle loitering for a few minutes in Sylvia’s room, not so much because she had anything to say as because the nervousness and the vague apprehension, that possessed her like a fever, made her fear her own company.
When she turned back into the hall again Gabrielle was surprised to see Tom standing in his doorway.
“Did I leave my pipe upstairs?” he asked, in an odd voice.
“Oh, did you, Tom?” Gabrielle asked, eagerly, always glad to be useful to him; the more so as she found it more and more difficult to be affectionate. “No, let me! Let me!” she begged, taking the candle from his hand. “I’ll not be two minutes!”
Again—she remembered afterward!—he was smiling his odd, triumphant, yet threatening smile. But he said nothing as she took the lighted candle and started on the long way upstairs to the study.
Guarding the candle in the savage currents of air that leaked everywhere through windows and doors, Gabrielle had to move slowly, and in spite of herself the swooping darkness about her, the wild racket of the stormoutside, and the shadows that wheeled and leaped before her frail little light made her suddenly afraid again. She was desperately afraid. David, Sylvia—all the human voices and hands, seemed worlds away.
Tom’s study was two floors above Gabrielle’s room, three above his own, and in a somewhat unused wing. The wind, in this part of the house, was singing in half-a-score of whining and shrieking voices together, and there was a thunderous sound, of something banging, booming, banging again with muffled blows, as if—Gabrielle thought—the house had gotten into the sea, or the sea into the house, and the waves were bursting over her.
Just as she reached for the handle of the study door her candle went out, and Gabrielle, with a pounding heart, groped in the warm blackness for the table and the matches and blessed light again! She was only a few minutes away from the protection and safety of the downstairs room, she told her heart—just a light and the half moment of finding the pipe again, and then the swift flight downstairs—anyhow, any fashion, to get downstairs——!
Her investigating hands found the brass box of matches, she struck one and held it with a shaking hand to her candle. There was no glow from the stove now, and the feeble light broke up inky masses of darkness. The square mansard windows strained as if any second they would burst in; a charge of howling winds swept by the window, swept on like a herd of bellowing buffaloes into the night.
Gabrielle, holding her light high the better to searchthe room for the pipe, and swallowing her fears resolutely, turned slowly about and stopped——
She thought that she screamed. But she made no sound. There was a man standing behind her, and smiling at her with an odd, sinister smile. But it was not that alone that froze her into a terror as cold as death, that held her motionless where she stood, like a woman of wood. It was that the man was Tom.
“Well, what’s the matter?” Tom asked, slowly and easily. His voice restored Gabrielle to some part of her senses, and she managed a sickly smile in return.
“You frightened me!” Gabrielle answered, her heart still pumping violently with the shock, and with a sort of undefined uneasiness, bred of the dark night, and the howling wind, and her solitariness far up here in the lonely old house.
Tom had lighted the lamp.
“Sit down,” he said. “I want to talk to you!”
“Oh, Tom—it’s after ten!” Gabrielle said, fluttering.
“Well, what of it? Here——” He pushed an armchair for her, and Gabrielle sat down in it, and blew out her candle. Tom opened the stove, dropped wood and paper inside, and the wind in the chimney caught at it instantly, with a roar. “I wanted to talk to you,” Tom added, “without Sylvia or any of the others around. They’re always around!”
One of them would be welcome now, Gabrielle thought, in a sort of panic. For Tom’s face looked stern and strange, and there was a rough sort of finality expressed in his manner that was infinitely disquieting.
She did not speak. She sat like a watchful, bright-eyedchild, following his every word and every movement. Tom would not hurt her—Tom would not kill her—said her frightened heart.
“Here’s what I want to know, Gabrielle,” he began, abruptly, when he had taken a chair close to her own. “What’s the idea? You know all about me—you can’t keep up this stalling for ever, you know.”
“Stalling——?” Gabrielle faltered.
“Bluffing—kidding—you know what I mean!” the man elucidated, shortly. “I’m getting kind of tired of it,” he added, warming, “I’m gettingdamnedtired of it! You know what I think about you, and you ought to know that I’m not the kind of man that lets anybody else walk off with my property. You’re mine, ain’t you—you’remine? Tell me that.”
His manner had grown so alarming, so actually threatening, that Gabrielle drew back a little in her chair, and her great eyes were dilated with a sort of terror as she answered, placatingly:
“You—you know I like you, Tom!”
“Yes, and I’ve had about enough of that sort of thing!” Tom answered, harshly. “I’ve had enough of that kind of ‘of course I like you—let me think about it!’ You can make up your mindnow. You’re going to marry me, and soon, too. I’m going to tell them all to-morrow morning, and you and I’ll go into Boston some day next week and getmarried. And then when you want to go off with some other man for the whole afternoon, and come back laughing and whispering, you can ask me about it first!”
“Why, Tom,” Gabrielle said, with a frightened smile, “you’re not jealous?”
“Yes, I am, I’m damn jealous!” he answered, roughly catching her wrist and drawing her to him without leaving his seat. “I want you. You’ve as good as said you’d marry me a hundred times! I’ve got money enough to give you everything in God’s world you want. You can’t go back now on all you said—you can’t keep on bluffing and putting me off like a kid!”
“Tom, please——!” the girl stammered, on her feet and trying to free her hand. “You never did this before!”
He stood up, still holding tight to her wrist, and caught her in the grip of an iron arm.
“No,” he said, in a low voice, “I never did this before! But there’s no reason I shouldn’t kiss my girl. What are you afraid of?”
His big left hand gripped her cheeks, and he turned her face up to his and kissed her violently, more than once—a dozen times. Gabrielle, smothered, frightened, and struggling, pushed at his breast with all the strength of her young arms.
The opposition seemed to enrage Tom, for he only held her the tighter, his superior height as well as strength giving him all the advantage.
“Tom——” the girl panted. “I shall call!”
“Call,” he answered, easily and smiling. And the wild scream of the winds, whirling over the high roofs of Wastewater, seemed to echo the contemptuous note of angry laughter in his voice.
“No, but Tom—please—please!”
“Ah, well, that’s better! Now you say please, do you? Now you’re not quite so cold,” Tom muttered,kissing her hair and forehead, and raising the two hands he had caught tightly in one, to kiss the fingertips. “Now you’ll not be so cool, putting me off, asking for time, huh? Kiss me, Gay. You love me, don’t you?”
She would be out of it all to-morrow, safe with the quiet nuns in Boston, Gabrielle reminded herself. If she could but get away now, down to lights and voices, into the peace of her own room, and to-morrow—away!
“Tom, I can’t talk to you while you frighten me so!”
“Why, what are you afraid of?” he asked, very slightly releasing her, his black eyes seeming to devour her, and his breath in her face. “I’m not going to hurt you! I just wanted you to know that I’m tired of your holding me off, of having you tell me that ‘ofcourseyou like me,’ and all the rest of it. You’re going to marry me next week, aren’t you?” he asked, harshly.
Gabrielle held herself as far away from him as the iron grip about her shoulders permitted, and rested her hands perforce upon his shoulders.
“Tom, you will be ill,” she began, pleadingly.
“Cut that stuff out!” he commanded, his face darkening. “You give me your word to marry me next week, and I’ll let you go!”
The convent to-morrow. The safe bordered walks and walled gardens. The chapel, the refectory, the quiet footsteps and pleasant voices——
“Tom, don’t be angry with me. Of course I will. Of course I will—if——”
“You’ll not sneak to Aunt Flora, and say Tom scared it out of you, and get David to talk me off?”
The girl was silent during a second in which she sought words. But he saw the flicker of self-consciousnessin her eyes, and instantly his fury returned again.
“Promise me, as God is your Judge. Swear it!” he said, in a low voice that shook with a passionate effort at control. “Swear it—or I swear I’ll——”
The rest was lost. Gay was smothered in his arms again, her whole body bent backward so that she staggered in the struggle to keep her feet, her jaw caught in the grip of his hard fingers, and her lips stinging and burned and hurt under his kisses. The rich coil of her hair was loosened and fell in a web upon her shoulders, and through her choked throat and crushed mouth her voice came thickly:
“Tom! Tom—for God’s sake—David!”
And suddenly, above the wild envelopment of the wind, she heard her name shouted in answer: “Gabrielle!”
The girl screamed hysterically as the door was flung open, and the lamplight swooped and flared in the gust from the hall, and David, white and shaking, came in.
Then there was a pause. Tom dropped his arms, and Gabrielle crossed to David, and, quite automatically and without moving his eyes from Tom, David put his arm about her. And Gabrielle laid one hand upon his shoulder, and hid her face wearily against his breast, and clung there, as he had seen a storm-blown gull cling to some chance-found shelter, without moving, without seeing, without sound.
Tom stood beside the table upon which he rested one big knotted hand. His hair was in disorder, his head hung forward menacingly, like the threatening jowl of a bulldog. He was the first to speak.
“Well, Dave, you can keep out of this,” he said, in a slow measured voice. “She’s going to marry me. She promised me to-night—didn’t you, Gabrielle? Tell him so—tell him you promised me. What’s”—Tom’s voice, under David’s steady look, and opposed to the strange silence in the storm-bound room, and the strange and awful paleness of David’s face, faltered slightly, and became less confident—“what’s the trouble?” he said.
“Shall we talk about this to-morrow, Tom?” David said, in a constrained tone.
“No, by God, we’ll talk about it now!” Tom answered. “I may be sick—or I may have been sick, for that’s more like it! But you’ve no need to talk to me as if I were a baby!”
“David——” Gabrielle breathed, against his breast.
“I’ll not leave you, dear,” he answered, very low, his lips against the tawny hair. “Tom, old boy, shall we go downstairs? We’re all nervous and upset to-night. I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Tell him you are going to marry me, Gay!” Tom said, savagely, without altering his position or seeming to see David.
“No, Tom,” David said, strangely and sadly,—“you can’t—I’m sorry, Tom. But you two—you two——” he went on, stammering, and looking from Gay’s face to the other man’s with infinite pity and distress. “You can’t marry her, Tom, now or ever. I’ve—I’ve got something to tell you that will make a difference.”
“By God, you can’t tell me anything that will make a difference!” Tom said, deep in his throat, still in the same position and without moving his eyes. “You keep your hands off her—keep out of my affairs!”
“David—don’t be angry with him,” Gabrielle pleaded. “Don’t be angry with him! It’s partly my fault—it’s partly my fault!”
“Angry with him?” David echoed. “My dear Gay—Tom—you mustn’t be angry withme. Aunt Flora just told me something, Tom. Gay’s father was not the man named Charpentier—as we had all believed! Uncle Roger never knew it—but Gay is your half-sister, Tom—born in the year after you ran away, when he was hunting all over the world for you.”
“What are you talking about?” Tom said, in a terrible voice. Gabrielle, her face ashen in the lamplight, was staring at David with dilated eyes. Now through her parted lips she breathed with utter horror:
“No—David, no——!”
“It’s true,” David said, simply. “There’s a curse upon the place, I think, and upon us all! It has killed them—one after the other; it is killing Aunt Flora now. Gay—Tom, old fellow, we have to pay with the rest! You must believe it. You’re brother and sister, Tom.”
Then for a long time there was silence in the room.
“Who told you that?” Tom asked then, in a sharp, sneering voice that cut through the unbroken stillness and the surrounding tumult of the storm. And instantly he added, in a changed tone: “Look out for her, David—she’s falling!”
Gabrielle indeed, with a long deep sob that ended with a sigh, had pitched against his shoulder. David caught her in his arms, her eyes were shut, and her whole body hung limp, her beautiful tawny hair falling free.
“Help me get her downstairs, Tom!” David said, everything else forgotten, brushing the silky, tawnytangle from her face and taking her in a firmer hold. “Open the door.”
Tom slowly, and watching him as if he were under some enchantment, moved to obey. The lamp flared again, a blast of wind whined and sang about the windows, and the casement burst open with a wild shout of streaming air, extinguishing the light and careening loose papers noisily about in the darkness.
But Tom and David neither saw nor cared. The opened hall door had shown the lonely passage outside lighted with a sickly pinkish glow that flickered on the weather-stained walls and sent lurching shadows along the passage. Above the creaking and crashing of the hurricane and the howling of the gale and the sea in the dark night they could hear now a brisk crackling and the devouring sound of red lips of flame. The wind that instantly rushed upon them brought the acrid taste of smoke, and even in their first stupefied look, they saw a detached banner of fire blow loose, far down the long hallway toward the stairs, and twist on the wind a moment like a blown handkerchief, and lose itself in a thick rolling plume of approaching smoke.
Tom slammed the door shut behind them; they were in the hall.
“Fire!” he shouted. “By God, the old place is on fire!”