CHAPTER XVIII
Thedoctor returned with another doctor, in the course of the strange disorganized day, and Etta, murmuring with the other maids in the kitchen, sucked in a great sigh as she escorted them upstairs. Poor Mrs. Fleming would be a long time getting over this night’s work! she and Hedda and Trude said, over and over again, while the professional men were in consultation. Sylvia, who had been lying down, went upstairs with them, Gabrielle waiting restlessly for their opinion.
Almost immediately after they had come down, however, David called her. She went out of the dining room to find him on the stairway.
“Gay, dear, Aunt Flora wants to see you.”
His tone frightened her.
“She’s not very sick?”
“We hope not, dear. But they are not—satisfied. They give no hope. Sylvia’s making her take some broth now. She wants to see you and me and Tom.”
“But, David, we can get her in to Boston, can’t we? Didn’t Hedda say something about an ambulance this afternoon?”
“It’s a question of whether the roads are passable. They are discussing that now.”
A great awe fell upon Gabrielle as she went up to the crowded little bedroom. She could see nothing exceptAunt Flora, lying straight in the girlish little bed with its paper and ribbon souvenirs tied to the white enamel bars; Aunt Flora looking sunken-cheeked and ghastly, and living only in her restless and tortured eyes.
“How do you feel now?” David said, cheerfully, sitting down beside the bed, and patting her hand. She did not smile. But she moved her eyes to his face and fixed them there.
Sylvia was at one side of the bed, David and Tom took chairs at the foot, and Gabrielle quite naturally sank to her knees beside Sylvia, so that the two girls’ faces were close to Flora’s.
It was afternoon now, a steely-clear winter afternoon at about four o’clock, and to Gabrielle’s wearied senses no hour in the strange twenty-four since she and David had walked in the great wind to Crowchester seemed more strange or unreal than this one. Aunt Flora lying here, grizzled, dressed in one of the plain nightgowns of John’s wife’s and surrounded by little Etta’s keepsakes; Tom serious and still, oddly dishevelled and disorderly from the long night and the day’s broken rest; Sylvia pale, and with new and tragic deeps in her dark eyes; and David as always the balance wheel that seemed to keep them all steady.
Flora moved her solemn gaze to Gabrielle’s face.
“I am very sick,” she whispered.
“Oh, Aunt Flora, you’ll feel so much better when you get into a comfortable hospital,” Gabrielle said, gently, infinitely distressed.
“No,” the sick woman said, shaking her head, “they’ll not move me! David told you and Tom something yesterday,” she added, wearily shutting her eyesand hardly moving her lips. “You should have known it long ago. You—and Tom, are angry at me?”
“Oh, Aunt Flora—no!”
“You are Roger Fleming’s daughter, Gabrielle,” Flora whispered, clutching her hand, and eyeing her anxiously.
“So David said,” Gabrielle murmured, with a troubled glance at him. To talk in this childish, lifeless way, Aunt Flora must be very ill!
“You should have known it long ago,” Flora repeated, beating gently on Gabrielle’s hand. “It was the sin—the terrible sin of my life. But, David,” she interrupted herself, appealing to him, “I did not mean to harm them!”
“I’m sure of it, Aunt Flora! But why worry yourself with it now? We are all safe, all well—couldn’t it wait?” David urged, with infinite gentleness.
“No—no—no!” she exclaimed, raising herself to a sitting position and struggling almost as if they were constraining her physically. “I must talk now—and then I shall sleep! You must let me talk, and then I shall sleep! I want you all to understand.
“Did you ever know,” she went on, seeming to feel her way for the right phrases, and sinking back into the pillows with shut eyes, “did you ever know how I happened to come first to Wastewater? My father was John Fleming, Roger Fleming’s cousin—he was a dentist, in Brookline. We were very poor when I was a child, and the first days I remember were of a little Brookline flat, and my mother sewing at a sewing machine. My sister Lily was a delicate little baby then—Lily was six years younger than I. For days and days anddays of rain I remember the sewing machine, and the crying of the baby, and my mother murmuring at the hall door to men who came about bills. In the spring I had to take the baby out, and sometimes the wind would chap both our faces, and we would sit crying in the park. It seems to me we were always cold—I don’t believe children get such deep impressions of hot weather——”
“Dearest, do you want to talk now?” Sylvia asked, tenderly, as the harsh, deep voice paused.
Flora opened the eyes that had been slowly sinking shut, and widened them anxiously.
“Yes, I must talk,” she answered. And she looked about the silent little group alarmedly, as if she feared that one of them might have slipped away. “When I was eight, and Lily two years old,” she went on, “our father died. My mother was left miserably poor, and I heard enough talk then among her and her few friends to fear—as only a child can fear!—actual starvation.
“It was then that an uncle of whom we had scarcely heard came to see us. That was Tom Fleming, Roger’s father. He had quarrelled with my father years before, and, as everything my father touched turned to loss, so everything that Tom Fleming went into prospered. It was a railroad venture that made his fortune finally, but everything—properties, bonds, stocks—went well with him!
“He came to my mother’s poor little flat, and—ah, my God, my God!” whispered Flora, forgetting her audience, as she pressed a dark hand to her eyes, and speaking to herself. “What a day that was for me. He asked my mother to bring her little girls to hiscountry house, to Wastewater, until she should get her bearings! He left money on the little red tablecloth in the dining room—my poor mother burst out crying, and tried to kiss his hand——
“A week later, on a summer afternoon, we got here. I had never seen the inside of a big house or the open expanse of the sea before, never been in a stable yard, where there were chickens and cats and horses. And we had half-a-dozen horses at Wastewater then, Uncle Tom’s big Percherons, and riding horses.
“Why, I couldn’t get enough of the stairs—I worked my way up and down them for days, singing to myself for pure rapture. It was all a fairy tale to me; the silver, the meals, the big rooms—what a wonderland it was!
“Uncle Tom was a widower with two sons, boys of thirteen and eleven—Roger and Will. They were out in the stable yards with some puppies when we got there, and Roger was not too big a boy to take a little girl cousin under his wing—he showed me the puppies, he let me name one of them ‘Silver.’
“I have never seen any other puppies that were to me as—as strangely important as those were,” Flora went on, her eyes closed, her voice the mere essence of its usual self. “Nor such a lingering early summer afternoon as that was! It seemed to me my heart would burst with joy. To have supper in the pantry that was full of maids and sunshine, and such supplies of cake and butter and milk, and to sleep in a big smooth bed, in such a great room——
“All those early days were filled with anxiety for me. I was afraid any instant that we might be sent away. My mother told me long afterward that I cried myselfalmost sick with excitement when she told me that Uncle Tom had asked her to stay and take care of his house for him. I don’t remember that, but I remember in my gratitude telling Roger that I hoped some day he would be out at sea in a wreck, and that I would save his life—and how he laughed at me.
“He was, I suppose, as handsome a boy as ever lived—it was not that. Surely I was too small a girl to know or care what real beauty was! But I loved him from the first instant I saw him.
“Not—I think now—as other children love, as other young girls love. There was no vanity in it—I can say that. There was no happiness, no prettiness. It was agony to me, almost from that first June afternoon.
“He seemed to me to be in a class all by himself. Whether I liked it or not—and it was years before I realized it fully—I had to keep him there! His least word was important, his kindness made me tremble all over, and if ever Roger were cross with me, I used to be actually sick with grief, and my mother would ask him to come up to my room and let me sob wildly in his arms and beg him to forgive me.
“I never got any pleasure out of it, God knows. It was constant pain. If he smiled at any one else, I was wretched. No matter what he did, his laugh, his voice with his horse, his use of his hands—and he had beautiful hands!—was full of magic for me. I used to pray—topraythat he would not always seem so wonderful to me, that I would see him in ordinary human daylight. I never did. He was my whole world.
“So the years went by, and Uncle Tom died, and Roger was the heir. Roger was twenty-five then, talland straight, and so clever that he could do anything! He rode and he sang, he danced and shot better than any of his friends. Women were already beginning—ah, how women loved him!
“Will, his brother, had been wild from his very boyhood—from his fifteenth year. He drank heavily, gambled; he and his father had been enemies for a long time. Uncle Tom had advanced money to Will, great sums of it, and Will had gambled it away. He left Will a comfortable fortune, he left Roger Wastewater and the rest of his money. And Roger was—everything. He had a manner, a sweetness—I don’t know, a way of seeming interested—seeming absorbed in what you were telling him.
“And he was witty, too. What parties I can remember here, when they would all be laughing at him—crying with laughter——
“I was twenty when Uncle Tom died. My mother went on keeping house for Roger and Will, and perhaps she thought sometimes of what I prayed and prayed might come to pass—that Roger Fleming and I might be man and wife, and Wastewater her home for ever!
“For years I had to see him depart for those long visits of his in Boston, when he was—ah, yes, it wasn’t only my imagination!—when he was the idol of them all—fêted and followed and imitated by the very best of them. I had to say good-bye to him when he started off to Europe with beautiful girls in the party—money, youth, lovely clothes, romantic settings—all against me!
“Presently he was thirty, and I was twenty-five—twenty-six—twenty-seven—— And then, suddenly, heseemed for the first time to see me. I didn’t dare believe it at first.
“I didn’t dare believe it. He would follow me down to the shore and sit there with Lily and me—he would come back unexpectedly from Boston or New York—I would hear his voice, as I hear it now: ‘Flo! Where’s Flo?’
“Ah, what days those were! They seemed all rose-colour. I’ve come to hate the memory of them now—but they were Heaven then! Sometimes now I find myself obliged to go over them, day after day, and hour after hour—day after day and hour after hour of a fool’s Paradise——
“One day he said to me—one night rather, when there was gray moonlight over the garden, and he and I were walking up and down, and poor Lily, inside at the piano, was singing—‘Flo, why is it that I have grown to prefer puttering about this old place with you and Lil to any other thing in the world?’
“‘Perhaps because you like me, Roger,’ I said. I’ve been ready to bite my tongue out for it a thousand times in these thirty years! But it bought me a few more hours of insanity then. He caught me in his arms and laughed as he kissed me.
“‘Why, that’s the way of it, is it?’ he said. ‘How long has this been going on, eh?’
“‘Always,’ I told him. ‘Poor little Flo,’ he said, ‘with all you know of me, is it like that?’
“‘Like that,’ I said, and he kissed me again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we will have to see about this!’
“That was all. Presently I ran into the house with my heart simply singing, and all that summer night Ilay awake laughing and crying for joy. And the next morning I hardly dared raise my eyes to him.
“It was that next day that your mother came to Wastewater, David. It was the very next day——”
Flora had been talking with her eyes shut. Now she opened them, almost as if she were surprised to see the circle of attentive and serious young faces. Her hand beat the coverlid restlessly.
“Your mother was about thirty, and a widow,” she said. “She had been widowed a few months before your birth, and you were only three or four weeks old. She was a beautiful woman, with reddish thick hair, all swathed in crêpe, and with the trailing dresses of the tiny baby in her arms. Her father was an Argentine planter, and she was taking you—David—back to Rosario, where she had sisters and cousins. But for some reason the boat was a month delayed—a strike, perhaps, the service was very uneven then—and she had written my mother asking if she might come for a few days to Wastewater. Families did more of that sort of thing then. Her husband had been a Fleming, and I remember that he had once spent a vacation with us here, when he was a little boy—David Fleming. She told me a hundred times afterward that she had written my mother only because she was so lonely and sad in the big city—she hardly expected an answer. She knew that Tom Fleming was dead, she hardly knew anything about Roger and Will.
“So she came here, not six months a widow, and from the instant she got here Roger Fleming was a changed being. I never saw a man so instantly—possessed. That very first night he was asking me:‘Isn’t she beautiful, Flo? Isn’t she wonderful?’ He hung about her—I don’t think he ever thought of me again, or of anything but Janet. Seven weeks later they were married.
“She was beautiful,” Flora went on, after a dead silence in which none of the young persons seemed to find the right word, and in which her hand beat steadily on the bed, and her eyes were shut. “She went with him to Boston, Washington, everywhere! And ten months later she gave him a son—Tom.”
She looked at Tom strangely, closed her eyes again.
“My mother, all this while,” Flora resumed, “had been like a sort of housekeeper. She was a little, wiry woman, very gray, as poor Lily was, at the end. Two years after Roger and Janet were married my mother died, and then Lily and I felt keenly what our exact position here was—poor relations in a rich man’s house.
“Roger always was generous to us, he was the soul of generosity, and he was prospering as steadily as his father had. And Janet was kind, too. She and Roger sometimes went away for weeks and left the two little boys with us, and I remember more than once Roger telling me that it was only my influence that kept his brother Will straight at all.
“Will was like many a young man in those times. He would have a position for a while, give it up for different reasons, drink and gamble and idle for a while, and be persuaded into another position again. It wasn’t considered disgraceful then. He was a sweet, good-natured sort of fellow—he would spend weeks here at Wastewater, perfectly willing to idle about with Lily and Janet and me, and the babies—for David was hardlymore!—and to have a little pocket money from Roger. And then he would go over to Keyport or Crowchester and be there whole days—drinking and playing poker——”
Sylvia drew a quick, sharp breath.
“You mustn’t judge your father too harshly,” Flora whispered, moving her troubled eyes to her daughter’s face. “Nowadays it sounds far worse than it did then. Almost every family had such a son, and frequently you would hear even mothers laughing as they said that it was time for Dick or Jack to marry and settle down.
“Afterward, Will would be two or three days sick in bed,” the droning, weary voice presently resumed, “and Roger would talk to him so kindly, begging him to pull himself together and get a new start. And then Roger would find him a new position, and Will would come down to dinner, rested and shaved and well dressed and in high spirits, telling us all how rich he was going to be!
“So I tried to make myself indispensable, and I hoped and hoped that Lily would marry—marry Will or anybody, as a sort of justification for my remaining single. I looked out for you boys’ wardrobes, mothered Will, managed their parties—managed the servants.
“Your mother, Janet, went to the opera with your father one night,” she added, opening her eyes to look at David and Tom, “and a day or two later he telegraphed me from New York that, as she was not well, he would keep her there until it was safe to bring her home. That was a snowy Sunday afternoon. I remember that Will and Lily and I played games with you little fellows, put you to bed ourselves—it was almostas if we knew that you were not to see your mother again.
“The days went by: you went back to school——and I knew—I knew all the time that it was the end! Ten days later your Mother died, and the day after her funeral Roger went away—where, I never knew. He was gone for weeks, came home, would burst out into bitter crying at the table, walk up and down the garden like a madman, and be off again.
“One day, about six or seven weeks after Janet’s death, he said to me, in a dark, moody sort of tone: ‘Flo, how long am I to wear mourning—outside? Inside,’ he said, passionately, ‘I shall mourn her all my life!’
“‘A year,’ I told him.
“It was a dark, misty day, I remember, with the garden full of thick cold fog, and lights burning at the lunch table. He and I had come out and were walking along the cliff road in the mist. We could hear the buoys ringing—ringing away toward Keyport.
“‘Flo,’ he said, ‘when that time is up, will you forgive me and marry me? You and I understand each other. I want to be anchored. I want to be done with the world and make this my world!’ And he looked back toward the garden and the house.
“‘Gladly, Roger!’ I said. And for a long while we did not speak again. Then he said to me, ‘Will you tell Lily and the boys and Will that it is to be that way?’ and I said yes. You remember, David?”
“Yes, I remember your telling us that you were to be married to him,” David’s voice said, strangely vital against that other monotonous voice.
“Sometimes—but not often!—we would talk of itquietly,” Flora resumed. “Not that I was ever happy about it. But I told myself I would be! I told myself that it should—itmust—mean happiness to us both.
“Janet died in January. This was—perhaps—March.
“A few days later, in April, a Mrs. Kent, whom Roger had admired immensely as a beautiful girl when he was hardly more than a boy—when he was, in fact, in college—came here with her daughter for a visit. I don’t think the mother was more than thirty-seven or -eight; she had been a great belle and had married at eighteen. She was plump and pretty, covered with jewels, full of life, and had left her husband and little boy in Canada to bring this child from a school in Baltimore. She had—just this hair,” Flora said, laying her dark thin hand upon Gabrielle’s tawny rich masses as the girl knelt beside her.
“The girl Cecily was seventeen, dark, and pale-faced. She looked like a child—she had her hair in a braid.
“There were other old friends in the party, a group of them had come down from Boston to see Roger Fleming, and we were very gay. I don’t know that I ever heard greater laughing or chattering here, or that we ever served more formal meals—I had my hands full. Lily saw more of little Cecily Kent than I did, and she told me one day—not that it interested me particularly then!—that the girl had been attending a convent in Montreal and longed to be a nun, and that her mother had said that she would rather see her dead.
“They were only here a short week—it was spring, and there were walks and picnics, and bridge and music and billiards—the time flew by. And it was on theafternoon when the Kents were going, their baggage in the hall, and when the other guests had gone, that Cecily Kent burst out crying, and Roger put his arm about her.
“The moment I saw that my heart turned to water. That moment,” Flora said, with sudden bitter violence, raising herself upon her elbow, “all my hopes died, all my trust in him! It was my curse that I could not stop loving him as well——!”
The cold winter sunset, streaming through the bare woods beyond the stable yard, shone red upon the cheap cheerful paper of the walls, and struck Flora’s grizzled hair with a tinge of blood, and shadowed clearly behind her the hand she raised.
“They had already been man and wife forty-eight hours,” she said. “I think Roger Fleming felt remorse for the first time in his life when he saw the mother’s face. Perhaps life had always been too easy for him, perhaps it had really never occurred to him that a few months a widower, and with his two little sons, and with his forty years, he might not be thought an ideal match for a dreamy girl of seventeen. He had always been so courted—so wanted.
“At first Mrs. Kent talked of annulling the marriage—she was more like a woman suddenly smitten with insanity than any one I ever saw before or since. She grasped the girl by the arm, and her eyes blazed, and her face was ashen. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you shall not have her! She’s hardly more than a baby—she knows nothing of life!’
“‘Mamma,’ Cecily said, crying and clinging to her, ‘we were married two days ago. I am his wife.’
“I remember the mother looking at her, and the terrible silence there was in the hall. Lily began to whimper, beside me, and I caught her by the wrist. There were servants staring from the dining-room doorway.
“‘You—Sissy?’ Mrs. Kent said, in a whisper. Cecily went down on her knees, sobbing—almost screaming—like a child, and caught her mother about her knees.
“‘Cecily,’ Roger said, trying to raise her, ‘you are mine now. Your mother cannot hurt you. You are my wife!’
“‘Oh, let me go with my mother!’ she sobbed. ‘I hate you!’
“‘She is—in fact—your wife?’ Mrs. Kent said, looking over Cecily’s head at him.
“Roger nodded. ‘Then you must stay with your husband, my child,’ Mrs. Kent said, very gravely. ‘And may God punish you through your children, Roger Fleming,’ she said, ‘for what you have done to mine. Go tear the buds from those rose trees,’ she said, pointing to the garden, ‘go strip the new green fruit from your trees—and you will harvest what you must harvest now! Your little boys there, playing in the drive, are better fitted for life than she is!’ And she turned to Moses, the coloured butler we had then. ‘Moses, put my bags in the carriage,’ she said.
“Nobody spoke as she went away. Cecily lay on the floor, moaning, Roger on one knee beside her, talking naturally and kindly. She never saw her mother, or her father, or her brother again. I heard long afterward that the pretty, cheerful mother had died and the father married again. They—they would be your people, Gabrielle. You could easily trace them.
“Cecily had been three days a wife, but she had lost her husband then! She never knew it—but I did, and I—God forgive me, I was glad. When she clung to her mother and screamed that she hated him, a look came into Roger Fleming’s face that only I could understand. It was as if she had said, ‘I am seventeen and he is forty! I knew nothing—he knew everything. My only loves were a daughter’s love—a sister’s love. He demanded more of me, and—if I had it!—I would loathe myself for giving it! He has robbed me of my mother, and my father, and my body, and my soul!’
“She cried all that night—would not come downstairs, or eat, or look at him, or talk to him. She cried for many days, and Roger used all his patience and all his kindness trying to console her. But he never gave her love again—he never had it to give, after that day! She had cut him to the very heart, and the Flemings are all proud, and none of them ever prouder than he!
“After a while she began to slip about the house like a shadow; she had never been pretty—except for her eyes that were like Gabrielle’s, here—and she grew so thin and so white that she seemed all eyes. She would have no company, no entertaining, she seemed even to dread talking to Roger, and was fondest of you children and poor Lily. It was never any definite illness at first, just the doctor for one pain or another, and Roger taking her in for consultations and advice. They all gave the same advice, she needed amusement and relief from mental strain. But that was one thing he couldn’t buy her! She used to lie out there in the garden telling Lily about her mother and father——”
Flora’s voice stopped abruptly, with the effect of an interruption.
“I hated her,” she said, simply, after a moment, and was still.
“Ah, yes, I did, David!” she added, suddenly, her eyes always closed, and as if David had protested. “I hated her. I managed her house, I answered the inquiries of anybody who came to call, I talked about her with Roger when he was anxious—and I hated her.
“She made him—miserable. She was a mixture of a child and a nun. She hated life, hated marriage. Lily and I were ready enough for it, watching our friends marry, and be widowed, and marry again! But this girl loathed her wifehood, her position, her husband—and her husband was Roger Fleming! He couldn’t kiss her but what she would shut those dark, sad eyes of hers and offer her cheek like a child!”
“I remember her, shutting her eyes and turning her face away when we would kiss her,” Tom said, clearing his throat.
“Whether she actually wrote to her mother asking for a reconciliation or not, I don’t know,” Flora resumed. “Roger had forbidden her to ‘truckle,’ as he called it; he felt that she must wait for advances from her mother. They never quarrelled about it, but I heard her say sometimes, ‘I wish my mother would walk in!’ and heard Roger answer her, not unkindly, but half-jokingly: ‘Not into my house!’
“One day, when they had been married a few months, he was talking to me about his brother Will. ‘Why don’t you marry Will, Flo?’ he said to me, with a sortof laugh. ‘Good enough for the poor relation?’ I said, trying to laugh back. But I was bitter, then—life was utterly hateful to me. ‘Why, how you can remember!’ he said, with a look that told me that he knew that he himself, and that old unhappy love of mine for him, was keeping me dark and angry and fuming about Wastewater for the best years of my life!
“‘I may marry Will,’ I said, trembling all over. And a few months later I did, although the idea had never come into my mind until that day. Not that I didn’t love your father, Sylvia; I did. Everyone loved poor Will, and he had loved me a long, long time. Will and I were married, and Roger gave his brother a handsome check—which Will put into a patent for a bed-couch——
“Not that it mattered! Not that it mattered!” Flora’s tired voice said, drearily, and was silent.
“Part of the time we lived at Wastewater,” she resumed, “and sometimes, when Will was trying one of his new jobs, we had an apartment in Boston. Lily was sometimes with us, and sometimes she and Cecily and Roger went on short trips—they went to Bermuda one spring, I remember—Cecily was having one of her better times.
“Then Roger would come to me, distressed; Cecily was having those hateful pains again. She would come in to a Boston hospital for an operation, and I would go to see her every day, and bring her and her nurses back to Wastewater, and stay for a while, until she felt stronger.
“Sylvia was born in Boston, but a few weeks later we came to Wastewater, and both Roger and his wife grewso fond of her that I had an excuse for almost never leaving, although I kept my little Boston flat. Will was in the West for almost two years, working in Portland, and Oakland, and Los Angeles, and sometimes we would talk as if the baby and I might join him there. But as Cecily grew no stronger, and poor little Lily began to show signs of a sort of well—they called it ‘passive melancholia,’ and as the baby grew to be everybody’s plaything——”
She opened her sunken eyes and fixed them with the shadow of a dark smile upon Sylvia’s stricken and acutely attentive face.
“Mamma——” Sylvia breathed, bowing her dark head over her mother’s hand.
“Poor little Silver, as Roger used to call you!” Flora said, tenderly. “I did it for you, dear, or at least I meant it for you. But it was never deliberate—it was all an accident.”
She sank into quiet, and almost immediately breathed as if she were deeply asleep. Sylvia, not changing her position by a hair’s breadth, signalled to the others a question as to the propriety of their slipping away. But no one had stirred when Flora quite simply opened her eyes, and said in a relieved tone:
“I want you to know everything. You don’t blame me too much, Sylvia? Have I told you”—she added, anxious and alarmed—“did I tell you about Gabrielle?”
“Mamma, darling—to-morrow——?”
“No, no,” Flora said, feverishly, “to-day! I had told you of my marrying—yes, and that poor little Lily seemed so upset.
“She had always been a forlorn, sentimental littlething, Lily. There had been different admirers, and she always took them seriously, weeping and questioning herself and her motives until my mother and I used to want to shake her. But after my mother’s death, and your mother’s death, David, and when you boys went off to school, she became gently melancholy—yet not always sad, either, but wandering a little, and strange.
“There was a handsome, good-for-nothing sort of fellow hanging about at Tinsalls in Keyport then. Charpentier his name was—he was an agent for something, if he was anything. He and Lily used to walk along the cliff road, and sometimes she would cry and tell Cecily that he was as fine a gentleman as any man she knew, only unfortunate—that sort of thing.
“I didn’t like it, but I dreaded telling Roger, for he was so quickly roused to anger, and I thought he might horsewhip the man and drive Lily clean out of her senses.
“Well, one day, when Sylvia was almost three, and Will had been in the West for six months or so, and when Cecily was all upset and lying on the couch like a little waxen ghost, Margret Nolan came to me—this same Margret we have now; she was an old servant here even then—and shaking all over and crying—poor Margret!—she told me that she was ‘worried’ about Miss Lily.
“‘If that ruffian Charpentier has taken advantage of her, poor little wandering-witted thing that she is, I think they’ll hang him!’ she said.
“I was sick with the shame and the fright of it. I knew Roger would go after any man that touched one of his household with a revolver. It was all terrifying to me, but I told Margret—whom poor Lily had takeninto her confidence—to go after the man Charpentier, find out if he could marry Lily, and keep the whole thing absolutely secret. It meant banishment for Lily from Cecily’s presence, I knew that, for Cecily had a horror of such things—had a horror even of little babies and their needs—used to shut her eyes with a sort of sickness if I nursed Sylvia, or discussed one of her little illnesses in her room. Such a thing as this would have revolted her!
“Margret found out that Charpentier had disappeared, and all our efforts to get hold of him, then or since, were useless. He had no ties, no responsibilities, nobody cared whether he lived or died. He simply went away.
“So a few weeks went by, and I was sick with anxiety and shame. Lily—I used to marvel at it—was perfectly serene and quiet. She was so simple, poor soul!—that she would go in to the village and buy pink baby-ribbons—God alone knows how many hints she gave or whom she told!
“Finally, I planned to take her to my apartment in Boston, live quietly there with the baby—that is, my Sylvia, and perhaps one other servant, and tell Roger and Cecily that Lily wanted to study art—or music. Afterward, we could place her poor baby in some good institution, and then, maybe, I could tell Roger.
“That was August—late July and August. And that was the August that Tom ran away from school.”
She opened her eyes, looked about the circle.
“We didn’t hear of it until three days later,” Flora went on, presently, addressing herself now to Tom. “For that master you had was positive that he wouldfind you. After three days he telegraphed Roger: ‘Is your son with you? Missing since Monday morning.’
“Roger, poor fellow, was proud at first. His son, fourteen years old, had run away to sea—the young monkey! ‘He ought to be thrashed for this,’ he would say, chuckling. He notified the police and went down to New York that week, getting the whole machinery in motion. ‘You’ll not thrash him,’ I used to say. ‘You’ll give him a new bicycle—that’ll be your thrashing!’”
“Proud, hey?” Tom interrupted the narrative, with a grin.
“Oh, yes—just at first. But after a few weeks—perhaps not so long, he began to speak more seriously. ‘He couldn’t have given us all the slip—he isn’t more than a child,’ he would say, as he came and went.”
“I told them I was fifteen,” Tom contributed. “All I did was sign up with the whaling fleet!—I’d thought it all out. The Saturday before, on a school hike, I shipped a bundle to New York harbour. There were some clothes in it that I didn’t want—it was all a blind. And in my note to Dad I said that I had seen the Panama fruit boats going out, and they made me sick to get to sea.”
“We found the bundle, and we searched the fruit boats, but we never got trace of you,” Flora said.
“I was an ass, and I got it pretty well bumped out of me,” Tom said, musingly. “A lot they cared who I was, on old Jensen’sValkyr. A fellow named Kelly went overboard that first run, and I went into Montreal three months later, with Kit Kelly’s papers. Kelly and I stuck together until he got married; everyone alwayscalled me Kit. I never took any special trouble then to hide myself.—I always thought I’d come home, my next shore leave.”
“Roger spent the rest of his life hunting you,” Flora said. “He was never at home for more than a few weeks, or a few days, at a time, after that, and we all knew Cecily was happier when he was away. She had been much better that spring; he and she had gone to Old Point Comfort, and she had seemed much more human, somehow. But this autumn she was wretched, sad and worried about herself, and she had begun to say again, even to him, what she had often said to Lily and me: ‘My marriage was a sin. All marriage is not wrong. But God intended me for a life of prayer and holiness, and what have I accomplished by disobeying the guidance of my own conscience?’
“This sort of thing made Roger furious, and I could see it, if she could not. ‘We’d have a fine world, if you had your way, Sis,’ he said to her once. ‘Where would the younger generation come from?’
“‘Oh, Roger, don’t!’ she would say. He would look at her, look at me, shrug, and smile. But presently I would see into what impatient lines his face would fall. ‘It would have been a calamity for her to have a child!’ he said to me one day. ‘We would surely have had two children on our hands then!’ Once he had told me, bitterly and resentfully, that her hasty and ill-considered marriage was killing her. ‘She was seventeen in years when we were married,’ he said. ‘But I can understand her mother’s fury now. She was about nine years old where life was concerned—a mystic, a child saint—torturingherself with scruples and with half-assimilated scraps of theology and mysticism!’
“That was the situation here at Wastewater that September, when Roger had word from the police at Guam that a boy who might have been Tom was there. As a matter of fact, this was that first ‘false Tom,’ who had them all deceived for so long. Roger went off to San Francisco, possibly to sail—as indeed he did finally sail—for the Orient. Will, my husband, had been away almost a year. David here was in boarding school.
“Left alone with Cecily and Lily, I did not dare risk Lily’s baby being born in Wastewater. It would have started any amount of talk, and although poor Lily was not responsible, and although Margret had been spreading hints as to Lily’s having secretly married this Charpentier, it seemed wiser not to have the whole thing here. Lily went in to my Boston apartment, and I got her a good practical nurse, and her baby was born months too soon—and died within a few minutes!”
“Died!” said more than one of the young voices.
“Died. Indeed, it never breathed at all. Lily was very ill, and went—as is not uncommon in such cases—into a sort of low fever, like the old brain fever, and she was near death for a long, long time.
“I lived with her, and the nurse, and a good servant named Carrie, in the Boston apartment, for Cecily had grown worse by that time, and the Crowchester doctor had quite frankly diagnosed her trouble as a tumour. We had heard that word before many times, but Roger never would believe it. Cecily believed it though, and she was furious at the Crowchester man because hewould not operate in her husband’s absence. So we had dismissed the Crowchester doctor—always a hard thing to do—and Cecily told him frankly that she wanted to come in to Boston and stay at a hospital for observation.
“She was at St. John’s, only a few blocks from my apartment, and I went to see her every morning before luncheon and every late afternoon. She seemed more cheerful in the hospital, and the doctors were hopeful that a few weeks of it would make a new woman of her.
“One day, about a week after Lily’s poor little baby had come and gone, the old doctor in whom Cecily specially trusted, the man who had her in charge, walked down the hospital steps and into the park with me, and we had a long talk, sitting on a park bench. He told me then—and you may imagine what I felt when I heard it!—that there was every probability that young Mrs. Roger Fleming was about to become a mother.
“For a while I was stupefied. I asked him to have a consultation. He said no, that was not necessary now, and might distress her. She had, he gathered from hints to the nurse,—she had a certain curious dislike for the idea of motherhood.
“‘Dislike, Doctor!’ I said. ‘I believe it would kill her, if she did not kill herself!’
“And I tried to give him some idea of her character, what a strange half child, half mystic she was. He listened to me very gravely. It was important, he said, not to shock her.
“That was the first time I ever heard of shock as an actual danger to a sick person. I remember he explainedit carefully. Cecily did not have the vitality of a humming-bird, he said. If we could get hold of the husband——
“I had to go on. I explained that her husband was much older, was, in fact, twenty-three or -four years older, and that—in the true sense—she did not love him. And I said that I was sure that if she were to have a baby, her love for it would come with the child.
“I said all the usual things, and he agreed with me. He told me the circumstance of the false diagnosis was unusual, but it had happened before—happened in his practice before. There was of course a possibility now that he was mistaken, that it was what the other doctors had always supposed. And there was every probability that the baby would not live, under the curious circumstances. But it seemed cruel not to give young Mrs. Fleming this hope.
“‘It would be no hope to her!’ I said. ‘Whatever the child, if it lived, might come to mean to her, this prospect would make her absolutely ill.’
“We agreed that for a while, therefore, nothing must be said about it. But it was only ten days later that they took Cecily up to the surgery, and her baby, two months too soon, was born. She was dying, they thought that night, and there seemed every probability that the baby would die, too. A nice little nurse there told me that she wanted to give the child lay-baptism, and I made no objection. She asked what name, and I said, ‘Mary.’ It was the first name I thought of. ‘I’ll name her that and my name,’ she said. ‘I’ll call her Mary Gabrielle!’”
“Me!” said Gabrielle Fleming, in a sharp whisperthat echoed like a pistol shot in the room. Her dilated eyes moved to David’s face.
“I told you last night, Gay,” David said, gently.
“You told me—yes, but I thought my mother—I thought Lily—I only thought that she had loved Uncle Roger, instead of the man Charpentier!” the girl stammered. “I—I am their child——” she whispered.
She got to her feet, her eyes upon the distance, her mouth working, and walked bewilderedly to the door.
“Mamma!” Sylvia said, sharply, as Flora moaned and seemed to contract into something smaller than her already shrunken self as she sank deep into the white pillow. “Tom, give me that medicine,” Sylvia commanded, in a frightened, low tone.
“Bring her back, David!” Flora said, struggling to raise herself and following Gabrielle with her eyes. “She must hear.”
“Gay,” David said, at the girl’s elbow. She gave him a dazed look devoid of any expression whatsoever. “Aunt Flora wants us all to listen,” the man said.
Without protest she came back to her place at the bedside.
The sunset was dying from the walls now, and a dull wintry chill was falling through the cold dark afternoon air. Flora looked fixedly at Gabrielle, who, pale and tense, with a bitten lower lip and star-sapphire eyes widened with excitement and pain, never moved her gaze from her face.
“Cecily was so ill,” said Flora, after a moment, “that for two or three days they feared for her life. I got a good nurse, and stayed at the hospital myself, and sent the tiny new baby to my apartment, when she wasabout nine days old, trying all the time to get in touch with Roger in San Francisco. He had sailed then, for Guam, but we did not know that until weeks later, when the telegrams all came back. But there was no attempt at secrecy.
“The old doctor told me that he had tried kindly and gently to inform young Mrs. Fleming of the birth of a child—that indeed she had some hazy recollections of the crisis of her illness, before the anæsthetic, but that she had given no sign of understanding him.
“I rented the furnished apartment next to mine and brought her there; she looked dying then, as she was—she lay perfectly passive and motionless all day, sometimes crying, sometimes reading, only taking a little tea, or a little soup.
“One day I came home, and she had put on a wrapper and come into Lily’s room. Lily was better and was sitting up, and I had begun to feel as one does feel in such emergencies that I might weather this time—strange and terrible as it was. Sylvia was on the floor with a doll, and the nurse had brought the new baby in, in her basket, to get the sunshine in the window there.
“Cecily was crying—crying hysterically—but even that much emotion seemed to me a good sign. Lily was lying on the bed, and Cecily kneeling beside her with her face buried against her knees.
“I had been utterly dissatisfied with Cecily’s nurse, who was a careless, neglectful creature, and I was furious to see that she had let her patient get out of bed at all.
“‘Cecily!’ I said. ‘Youmustnot—excitement like this will be dangerous to you!’
“Lily looked at me with that bright, childish smile shehad had since her illness. ‘Cecily has been looking at my baby, Flo,’ she said, happily. ‘Isn’t it a sweet baby, Flo? It couldn’t be wrong to have a sweet baby like that, could it?’
“The servant, Carrie, looked at me significantly. And I saw that salvation for Cecily might lie here. Cecily had been looking into my eyes. Now she buried her face again and burst out, in a sort of whisper:
“‘Oh, my God, I thank Thee! Oh, my God, how good Thou art! Oh, I am so grateful—I am so humbly grateful!’
“We got her back to bed, and when we were alone she said to me: ‘Flora, I must tell you something. I can tell you now, for I am going to die, and God has forgiven me! I could not give life to any other soul, Flora, and I could not die knowing that my sins would be visited on a poor little baby! No, no—I could not bear that.
“‘They told me, the doctor told me at the hospital—or I dreamed it, on that terrible night of the operation’, she said. ‘Flora, did you know that I thought I had a child that night? No, or they told me I did——’ she said, beginning to be frightened again.
“‘Don’t bother your head about it now, Cecily,’ I said. ‘Just get well, so that when Roger comes back——’
“She shuddered at Roger’s name, and began to get excited.
“‘I will be dead before that, and God will have forgiven me, Flora,’ she said. ‘Ah, you don’t think I was a sinner, but I was! Before I ever took my marriage vow, I had taken another, when I was only fourteenyears old! Another girl and I at the convent had taken a solemn oath to God that we would never marry!’”
“Poor child!” breathed Gabrielle’s pale lips, involuntarily.
“Poor child,” Flora echoed, without opening her eyes. Her voice was so weak that David held water to her mouth, and she drank with difficulty. “Poor little Cecily! She said that when she had first come to Wastewater she had no thought of lovers or love in her mind. That she had been bewildered and astonished at the emotion Roger had almost at once roused in her, but that she had never thought of it as love. That all her thoughts and senses had been in a wild confusion, culminating on the day that he and she drove in to Minford, beyond Tinsalls, quite simply, and that Roger, who knew the Justice there, got a special license and they were married.
“That night she went quite simply away from her mother’s room, expecting to be questioned in the morning. But her mother did not miss her; Cecily was quietly dressing when her mother awakened the next day. She said she remembered her vow that day. And when she came to this part, I thought she was going to die. She said quite seriously that she had had not one single happy moment since, and I suppose when Roger laughed at her scruples—as he did laugh—he broke her heart.
“I told her that no minor child could take a valid vow of that sort, and that indeed her very marriage might be questioned, since her age had been given as nineteen. No use! She believed me only enough to say that noirregularity in her license could possibly make her child more accursed than she would feel a child of hers to be.
“‘But I understand now—I never had a child—it’s Lily’s child!’ she said, over and over again, with so much deep thankfulness that I could only be thankful, too. ‘Lily told me all about it,’ she said, so humbly and tenderly, ‘and she is no worse a sinner than I—less, perhaps, for she loved and I did not!’
“I dismissed the nurse that afternoon, as it chanced, and sent for a nurse we had had from Crowchester, Hannah Rosecrans, a fine girl. She came the next day, and I told her, naturally, the whole truth, but that both my poor Lily and Mrs. Fleming must be treated with the utmost consideration until Mr. Fleming came home.
“Cecily was now all anxiety to get back to Wastewater. She said that she never wanted to see again the cruel old doctor who had frightened her so. I explained the situation to him, and presently we all came back to Wastewater, leaving Carrie behind us simply because she did not want to come.
“Hannah Rosecrans was engaged to be married, she was with us only a few weeks, and then went to Australia, where her husband has become well-to-do. She idolized the baby, and loved Lily, too, but I suppose, servant-fashion, she gave the other servants to believe that there was something amiss. Anyway, it was always ‘Miss Lily’s baby,’ from the very first. Lily had told Margret about her troubles months before, and I was never in any doubt what Margret thought.
“As for Cecily, she seemed to think it settled. Our Crowchester doctor was recalled, but there was nothinghe could do except keep her quiet. She was sinking very fast; she died when Gabrielle was only seven or eight weeks old.
“Roger got home too late—the day before the funeral—but even then I thought that any accident might show him the truth. I told myself that in all this confusion it would only sadden him more. I—I don’t know now what I thought, or why I did what I did! But Lily and the baby and Margret had their own suite of rooms, and Roger naturally paid little attention to them—in his grief for his wife. He saw the baby, took it for granted she was Lily’s. And I told myself that sometime I would of course tell him the whole story, or somebody would. He would meet the old doctor who had attended Cecily, or the doctor who had attended Lily, in Boston. Or he might run across Carrie, or Hannah Rosecrans——
“Cecily was buried here where we buried Lily only last spring. Roger went off on his searches, came home—gray-headed and so changed!—went off again. And I never told him.
“I had begun it to protect Cecily, to comfort Lily—I never had planned it; it all seemed to come about of itself, and for the first six years of her life Gabrielle called Lily ‘Mamma.’ Then Lily became very bad, and we put her in a sanitarium, and she never knew. And then Will Fleming, my husband, died, and I thought——
“Fool that I was,” Flora added, after a pause, with infinite fatigue and a sort of self-contempt in her voice, “I cared for Roger even then—I cared for him even then. I was widowed, and he twice a widower. Heloved my child, but he loved Gabrielle as well. I could not—I could not put Cecily Fleming’s child ahead of mine. Roger needed me, he turned to me for everything. I could not see his little girl—placed ahead of me—pushing me out of his life——
“I couldn’t!” she said more loudly, choking. “I had given my life to him—my whole life! He had trampled me under his feet. Gabrielle was fair—she was like Cecily’s mother—she was a beautiful baby. I knew he would give his whole heart to her, live for her——
“One day he said that he was going to change his will, make a generous provision for Lily’s poor little girl, and I was glad. It wasn’t money that mattered—to me. I would have starved for him. He said that in case his boy never came back, the little girls should share and share alike, like sisters, and I was glad. There was never any plan in what I did—I used to think that any hour might change it, any chance word! I knew that Roger had written a will in Janet’s day, when Tom was a baby, and when he might have had half-a-dozen other children, but after this talk he had a good many interviews with his lawyer, and I supposed that he had done what he said.
“He was not here very much; I came to believe that he hated the old place, and me, and Lily, and everything that reminded him that he had once been young and free with the world at his feet. I used to think that even if he had found Tom, he would have gone on wandering. But at last, when he came home, it was to die. He died—you remember, David, quite quietly and without pain, one summer day—he had been warned of his heart. He was packing to go off toPanama, a doctor there had written that there was a young fellow just answering Tom’s description—with—with whatever it is when a man loses all memory—amnesia——
“A few days later we read the will. You remember, David, on such a hot morning, in the library? Sylvia and Gabrielle were playing outside on the terrace where the hydrangeas are; old Judge Baron had come down from the city.
“We read the will, and I knew then what I had done. Gabrielle was not mentioned. Gabrielle was not mentioned! The will stood as it had stood when he wrote it, when Tom was a baby. Everything, everything to his child, or children. And there was a codicil, dated about the time of his last return home, giving everything, everything, to Sylvia, in case Tom did not come back!
“My God, my God——” Flora whispered, under her breath, and lay still.
“I had wanted it all my life, and now I had it,” she said, after a while, in a voice that was weakening, weakening from moment to moment, and yet full of passion and fire still. “I had it all. Judge Baron went away, David went away, I was alone with Sylvia and little Gabrielle, and Wastewater was mine. I remember, in the first long warm afternoon, that I walked slowly through it, from room to room, and thought that I had survived them all—Uncle Tom, Roger, Janet, Cecily, Will—all, all the Black Flemings gone except me! I had only to keep silent, and my child would be rich.
“I think that’s all,” she added, opening her sunken dark eyes and fixing them steadily upon David’s face.“That explains it all, doesn’t it? I have lived in fear. I knew the old doctor was dead, but I used to lie in the nights imagining that he had happened to tell someone—someone who was drawing nearer and nearer to my life every moment. Hannah Rosecrans, the Carrie we had in Boston, the doctor Lily had, whose very name I can’t remember—they all knew! Any day might have brought them back to me with their questions.
“I used to imagine that I might go to jail! But I never was anything else but in jail all my life long!”