CHAPTER XVII
“She’sall right—she opened her eyes a few minutes ago—she’ll be all right——”
The voice was droning away close to her ear in the howling noise and blackness. Gabrielle made an effort to think and to move her head. But her senses all reeled together in a sort of vertigo, and her temples hammered as if they would split. She relapsed into blackness again.
David’s voice, of course. She had fallen from a great height, she supposed, for she was lying in some bitterly cold place—out of doors—the sea never sounded so close inside.
Beyond and above the sound of the sea, breaking on the rocks, was a constant rushing of high winds and the creaking and dashing of bare branches. And there was another sound, of sucking and roaring, deep crashes—like the cascading of bricks.
“No, no, she’s all right—she’s coming round——” This was that droning voice, David’s voice. Then a mutter of other voices, Hedda’s saying something about china; John’s, the gardener’s voice, telling someone to “hoist it over there.”
“I feel like Bill the Lizard!” Gabrielle thought, finding the idea very funny, and immediately beginning to cry. And she opened eyes brimming with tears andlooked into David’s anxious face, close above her own, against a background of red lights and shadows.
Dizziness overcame her, and she shut her eyes again, but not without a bewildered and weary smile that tore at the man’s heart. And then there followed another period of utter darkness during which she could not quite tell if the roaring and crackling were inside or outside of her head.
Suddenly she remembered. They were in Tom’s study, she and Tom and David, and David had come up to say——
And Gay instantly sat upright and looked at David with wild and frightened eyes. She wore the velvet gown in which she had dined, such endless ages ago, and about her, as she half lay in David’s arms, a heavy blanket had been wrapped. David’s face was grimed and sooty, and in the queer lurid light in the summer-house she could see that it was anxious and pale.
They were in the summer-house; that was it. But why should they be here upon this bitter wild night, and whence came the queer pinkish glow that was lighting the black garden and the bare trees in so unnatural a way? John and Trude were draping great curtains—were they the old library curtains?—against the latticed walls; outside, the closely set evergreen shrubs and the lee of the north wall combined to give the summer-house a sort of protection.
“Gabrielle—dearest——” David said. And she felt a hot tear on her face, and put up her finger to touch it wonderingly. “You’re all right, dear!” he added, tenderly. And then, to someone in the gloomy confusion of old twisted benches and rickety rustic tables behindhim, “She’s all right, Sylvia. Tell Aunt Flora she’s all right.”
Gabrielle heard a thick, fretful murmur in answer, and asked, in a child’s awed whisper:
“Is Aunt Flora sick?”
“Frightened,” David said, in answer. “And you fainted, dear. Tom and I got you down by the kitchen stairway.”
Recollection was beginning to come back rapidly now, and Gay frowned faintly with the pain of it as she said:
“Tom—you came up—I remember now. But David, was that true?”
“All true, dear. But don’t think about it now!” David said. And Gabrielle closed her eyes for what seemed a long time again. The man her poor little mother had loved had been Roger Fleming! Roger was her father.
“Does Tom believe it?” the girl whispered, after a while.
“Oh, yes. He is very—very fine about it, Gay,” David said. “There will be no arguing, no trouble for you, dear. Can you—can you—not worry about it?”
“But, David,” she was more like herself every minute now, and spoke with a voice full of its own peculiar vitality, “what happened?”
“Fire, dear. Wastewater’s going, Gabrielle! In an hour the old place will be gone!”
“Wastewater!” she echoed, in a whisper. And for the first time she turned her eyes toward the source of the glow. Three hundred yards away, and lighting up the whole black world upon the wild winter night, the old house was one roaring mass of flames.
“Tom?” the girl asked, instantly. “Did he—he was with us—did everyone——”
“Everyone is safe, dear! Some of the maids had gone in to Crowchester when John took in his wife. The others are here. Sylvia was the coolest of all; she was asleep, but she had time to grab some clothes—got out easily! Aunt Flora was in the downstairs sitting room, where I had left her—she’s here. I think the shock has been terrible, but she is safe. You fainted, seemed to come to just as we got you down here, and then fainted—or went off into a sort of swoon—again. But now you feel all right?”
“Perfectly! Even my head. But, David—I want to see Tom.”
“Tom! He was with John and the girls, saving what they could, until it was too late. But he’s here now. Tom!” David said, raising his voice. And immediately Tom, who had been with the group of maids in the doorway, watching the fire, turned and came toward them.
He was grimed and sooty, his black hair tossed about wildly, and he had a great overcoat on. Gabrielle saw the look on his handsome face, half desperate, half shamed, all questioning, and as he knelt before her, with a sudden impulse she opened her arms and laid her wet face against his own.
Tom tightened his own arms convulsedly about her, and for a long minute they clung together.
“Is it all right?” Gabrielle whispered. And Tom, gently putting the silky tangled web of her dishevelled hair back from her earnest face, answered:
“We got you out, huh?”
“Tom,” she said, clinging to him, and looking into his face anxiously, “I’m so glad! I have never had anybody—of my own——”
“Are you?” he said, awkwardly, yet pleased, in a low, gruff tone, as she stopped. “You’ve got a brother now, huh?” he added, with a sort of clumsy lightness.
For answer, still resting her pale and soot-streaked cheek against his own, she tightened her arm about his neck, and he felt her breast move on a deep sigh, half of weariness, half of content.
And David saw his half-brother very reverently, very gently, kiss her upon her closed eyes.
“The wind’s straight out of the northwest,” Tom said then, in a significant tone to David, “the whole place is bound to go. Nice thing if we’d gotten ’em into John’s house, like you suggested!”
“No, you were right about that,” David conceded, as Gay, smiling bewilderedly, and still a little dizzy, got to her feet. “John tells me the barn roof has caught!”
“South wing, sir—everything. My God, she is doing it up in style now!” Walker, the chauffeur, said, from the group of watching maids and men in the summer-house doorway. All the night was lighted by the demoniacal glare, banners of flame were being blown and twisted like rags upon the shrieking winds.
“Keep this blanket about you, Gay, and over your head!” David commanded, as they joined the others. “Good-bye, Wastewater!” he added, under his breath. “Do you see that the library wing has collapsed already? You’re looking straight across at the woods beyond! She’s going like tinder.”
“David, but surely that’s the library wing, burning now—the highest point of all!”
“No, that’s the very centre of the house. That’s about where Uncle Roger’s old rooms were. There—that’s your corner, where that jet of fire blew out—that wall will go next!”
Gabrielle shuddered, and shivered with the cold.
“Mother seems—broken,” Sylvia said, at Gay’s shoulder. “She loved the old place!”
“There’s going to be a change in the wind!” Tom muttered. “That river of sparks may be turned this way!”
“A change in the wind——?” Gabrielle echoed, incredulously. For to deduce any hint of a change from the furious gale that was blowing so strongly seemed miraculous to her. Even now the rush of air was so furious that they had almost to shout at times to be heard.
Somewhat sheltered in the black old shabby doorway of the long-unused summer-house, Gabrielle felt David’s arm tight about her shoulders. Was he conscious of it? She did not know. But she was exquisitely aware of it, even under her vertigo, weariness, and excitement, and so reinforced, she might have endured a score of such wild nights.
They all stood in the shelter, exclaiming, and looking over each others’ shoulders at the fearful conflagration that was sending great whirls and showers of sparks far up against the black winter sky. Flora alone made no move; she was rolled in what appeared to be a miscellaneously chosen half-dozen of blankets, a seventh rolled to pillow her head. She sat in the summer-house’s onechair, an old wicker armchair, with her bare head dishevelled and dropped back, and her eyes closed in a leaden face that even in the hideous light of the fire looked deathlike.
“This night’s work will kill her,” Hedda whispered once, glancing over her shoulder at her mistress. And Trude solemnly nodded.
The flames of Wastewater swept southward, howling like fiends as they flung themselves up into the dark, crowded always from their places, as waves are crowded onward, by fresh roaring surges of fire. Where there had once been attic or mansard rooms in Wastewater there were now pits where pink flames burned under a play of dancing blue lights; at intervals of only a few minutes fresh portions of roofs and floors collapsed, and the maids would exclaim under their breath as the fresh grinding and sucking and devouring began.
“There won’t be a wall left standing,” Tom said. “And she’s not been burning an hour!”
“Tom, it must be almost morning,” Gabrielle whispered, too dazed with the night’s events to believe herself yet awake.
In answer he twisted his wrist about; and in the pink light she saw the tiny face of his watch. Not yet one o’clock!
“What I can’t understand,” David said, “is why five hundred men aren’t here from Keyport or Crowchester—of course there’s a terrible tide, and that road through the dunes to Tinsall’s may be under water. But you’d think a mob would be out here to watch the old place go!”
“You mean that they might have saved it, David?”Sylvia asked, shuddering with cold and nervousness as she wrapped herself in her blanket, and stood huddling at his side.
“Oh, no—nothing could do that!” he said. “Not even with all that water within a few feet,” he added, with a shrug toward the sea. “That’s the end of Wastewater!”
“David, we were all ’way upstairs. Did you and Tom get me down the stairs?” Gabrielle asked, presently.
“That’s one of the things we’ll talk about to-morrow,” David said. But immediately he added quietly: “Tom saved us all. My instinct was to rush away from the flames. His, being a sailor, was to get through them. And if we had run away, I believe we would have been trapped. Hedda tells me the only stairway in the far wing, where I would have gone, has been locked for years. Tom got us back of the wind by crossing the upper hall, and we climbed over that strip of roof to the old sewing room, and broke the window, and after that it was easy, down the kitchen stairway.”
“The fire was coming—where?”
“Straight up that main stairway, as if it were a furnace!”
“And did we cross—near it?”
David hesitated, and Tom, on Gabrielle’s other side, said gruffly:
“Not very.”
Gabrielle shivered. And for a while they all watched the fire in silence.
“Luckily, John’s wife and little girl and Daisy and Sarah, went in to Crowchester yesterday,” David presentlyexplained. “It seems that John saw it first; it started in the billiard-room wing. We think it may have been something the electricians did, or perhaps just rats and matches. John saw one of the windows all pink, from his room, but he thought probably some of us were down there, and actually went to bed. But after fifteen minutes or so he got up and looked out again——”
“My God, my heart turned to water!” John himself said, simply, as David paused. “The fire was bursting out of a dozen windows at once. She must have been burning since late afternoon, to get that start. I yelled for Frank, the Eyetalian, and Walker, and we all run to the house. Seemed to me we’d never rouse the girls!”
“We sleep,” Hedda said, gravely.
“They ran up and waked Aunt Flora,” David added, “and got her out here—she was still in the sitting room—and Sylvia had the presence of mind to grab a sheet full of clothes and things, the maids got out some china, and all the blankets that were in the store closet, and their own trunks—but there won’t be much saved!” he finished, shaking his head. “Comfort to think that if there were five hundred men here we couldn’t have saved it!”
And after a long silence broken only by exclamations of horror and concern, as the flames had their way, Hedda said again softly:
“This’ll kill Mrs. Fleming, all right.”
Sylvia had gone back into the summer-house and was leaning over her mother. They could hear Flora’s feeble, hoarse murmurs in reply to the girl’s tender inquiries. Gabrielle felt again that there would be noend to this fearful blackness, wind, noise, and confusion of body and soul.
An hour later there were shouts in the garden. A motor car rattled in, driven, already with a strange disregard for what had been the stately boundaries of Wastewater, straight over the ashy garden. It was the Keyport carpenter, with fifteen or twenty excited young men hanging on his car. The high tide had washed out a hundred feet of the road, he announced; “couple hundred people watching the fire from the other side, in spite of the wind!”
“Some fire!” said Harry Trueman. He had had to drive twelve miles out of his way to get here at all. He added cheerfully that he had thought he might find the whole family burned to cinders.
A stiff wind was still blowing, but its violence had enormously abated; the air was warmer every instant, and the fire, less than four hours after it had been discovered, had done its work, and had actually been blown out, against many a shattered remnant of black wall. Here and there it was still gnawing hungrily, sucking like a vicious and unsated animal among ruins that by its dying light the Flemings could barely recognize as the library, the old downstairs playroom, the office.
Now it was safe to move the women to what was left of John’s house. The windmill, collapsing, had inundated the lower floor, and one side of the house had been caught by the flames. But on the south side a bedroom, dining room, and kitchen were intact, and Gabrielle and Sylvia found a lamp and turned down thebed where John’s little Etta had slept for most of her fifteen years. Etta’s innocent little trophies—Miss Alcott’s books, pencil boxes, and hand-painted cups—were ranged neatly about. Flora, muttering, was lowered tenderly into the sheets, and the blankets and little blue comforter spread over her.
No further danger from fire; the worst was over. Rain was now sluicing as gently, as steadily and calmly over the wreckage as if the night of horror had been only a dream, as if Gabrielle might awaken in her comfortable big bed, as she had so often awakened, to look out upon a typical autumn sky and sea, a nameless little poor relation in Wastewater’s splendid walls.
But now, wearied, confused, puzzled as she was, she knew that Wastewater itself had not disappeared from the earth more completely than that old Gabrielle. If she had not a name, a place in the world, she had a brother! And to Gabrielle this utter earthquake was like the presage of a more sunshiny and smiling morning than she had ever known.
Downstairs, in John’s dining room, sacred hitherto to golden oak and tasselled plush, was heaped the incongruous salvage from Wastewater. Soup plates and cups filled with blackened water, chairs with sooty footprints upon the brocades, kitchen utensils and pots, books that had been useless and unread for sixty years and that were so much rubbish of paper, paste, and leather now, the shade of a lamp, standing alone, and another great lamp without its shade; just such miscellany as maids, chauffeur, and gardener had been able to snatch and carry away by the light of the fire itself.
Gabrielle and Tom worked valiantly at storing this mixed assortment at one side of the room; John lighted a coal fire in his own grate, and Hedda and Trude toiled kitchenward, extricating a coffee-pot from the crushed and saturated kitchen, and finding among Etta’s neat stores all the necessities for a meal, which was served in the dining room at about four o’clock. Sylvia was now upstairs with her mother, and David called Gabrielle aside and with a grave face advised her to go up to her cousin.
“She gathered a good deal from Aunt Flora’s muttering, Gay, and I’ve just been explaining things to her. Poor Sylvia! it’s come like a thunderbolt to her. Suppose you go up and tell her we want her down here, that we’re having some coffee?”
Gabrielle went up obediently. The lamp in young Etta’s bedroom was shaded now, and Flora seemed asleep. Sylvia was sitting in the shadow, but Gabrielle saw that she had been weeping. She rose at once and followed Gabrielle into the little upper hall, and Gabrielle put her arm about her. Sylvia seemed confused and shaken; she said in a worried, quick tone:
“Mamma is very, very ill! David tells me he thought she was, even before she had the shock of the fire. I feel as if I were in a terrible dream—I can’t believe what he tells me,” added poor Sylvia, “I can’t—I shall never believe that my mother could be—could be capable—my mother! whom I love so dearly——” She stopped.
“It doesn’t mean that one can’t love—one’s mother,” Gabrielle suggested, timidly. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had some rest and some coffee. She did it toprotect—Uncle Roger. We always knew she loved him.”
“Oh, gracious—how little you understand—how little anybody understands!” Sylvia exclaimed, under her breath, in despair. “You tell me that I needn’t stop loving her—and David tells me that it makes no real difference in my own life—as if I could!—as if I could go on living, and believing that my mother had been”—Sylvia’s voice deepened—“had been living alieall these years!” she finished, suffocating. “I tell you I simply couldn’t bear it! I’m wrong, perhaps, it’s all just pride, perhaps—but I never could look anybody in the face again, never hold up my head——”
“Sylvia, do come downstairs,” Gay pleaded. “It isn’t as bad as that, really it isn’t!”
“Oh, what do you know, Gabrielle!” Sylvia exclaimed, impatiently. “You think being the child of a nobody, I suppose, is much the same as being Uncle Roger’s own daughter?”
“I would rather have the name of Charpentier honourably, than any name as I have it,” Gay answered, proudly and shortly.
“As you have it?” Sylvia echoed. “I don’t believe you still understand,” she added, bewilderedly, in a lower tone, and was still.
She let Gabrielle guide her downstairs and slipped into her place at the improvised table quietly, not looking up, nor tasting the solids, although she drank her hot coffee gratefully.
“David, could we possibly get Mamma in to a doctor—to a sanitarium?” she asked, presently, in a low voice.
“John and Walker have gone round the long way toCrowchester, for the doctor,” David said, glad to talk. “The road’s washed out, you know. They ought to be back in another hour, and then we can tell something.”
“She looks—like death,” Sylvia said, with suddenly trembling lips.
“I think it is only shock,” David answered. Gabrielle, warmed and lulled by food and fire, had dropped her beautiful dishevelled head against the back of her chair; Tom had flung himself upon the little sofa and was already asleep. David replenished the fire, and he and Sylvia sat watching it, sometimes exchanging a few words, or sometimes going upstairs to look at the invalid, who seemed sleeping.
The doctor came and went at five without waking either Tom or Gabrielle; a cold dawn was over the world when the girl stirred under her heap of comforters and sat up blinking and rosy, wondering for a long stupefied minute where she was and why Tom should be stretched out sound asleep a few feet away. Margret had come out from Keyport, John’s wife and daughter were lamenting and sympathizing in the disordered kitchen, and two or three score of sightseers were already picking their way about the ruins of what had been Wastewater.
Gay, going out with Tom, just as the winter sun rose dazzling and clear, and feeling strangely stiff and stupid, looked about her in blank amazement. Where the house had stood for more than a century was only a singed and hideous stretch of wreckage now, heaps of blackened bricks, tumbled masses of half-burned plaster and mortar. Twisted pipes glistened wet in rain, the whole smelled acridly, here and there some hidden heap of wood or paper smouldered sullenly.
The garden paths had been partly obliterated by fallen walls, trees were down, and ashes coated the leafless rose trees and the evergreens.
The sea was rolling gaily in the sunrise, emerald-green flecked cheerfully with white; gulls were dipping and arching, the fresh, clean, peaceful air was tainted acridly with the smell of wet burned ruins. The day was so crystal clear that Gabrielle could see the tiny figures of men going out under white sails at Keyport and at Crowchester.
When, between David and Tom, with her hair twisted up into a great coil, and one of John’s coats buttoned about her, she walked slowly about the incredible desolation of the walls, the villagers drew back a little and eyed the family curiously.
“Pretty tough welcome home, Tom!” one of the younger men said, shyly but heartily sympathetic.
“Oh, that’s all right!” Tom said, with a nod.
“Dead loss, hey?” asked an older man, interestedly, making a tut-tutting sound.
“Nope. Some insurance,” Tom admitted. But the other merely shook his head, and made the same pitying, shocked sound again.
When they walked past what had been the sitting room Tom climbed over a mass of bricks and kicked free with his foot a segment of charred and soaked frame to which a tattered strip of canvas, stiff with paint, still clung.
“’Member this?” he asked.
David and Gabrielle looked at it, nodding. There were but a few useless inches of it left; but they could see it had been a painting. Still to be seen was a finelyexecuted hand, a man’s hand, laid upon the head of a beautiful greyhound.
“Uncle Roger,” David said, gravely.
“My father,” said Tom.
“And mine,” Gabrielle added, softly, a warm young vital hand in David’s, her beautiful eyes not raised from this tragic little last glimpse of the splendid and victorious Black Fleming of Wastewater.