CHAPTER XX
It wasmore than a long year later that David Fleming, driving the car that Sylvia had ordered with such happy confidence before that long-awaited twenty-first birthday, left Crowchester, and followed the familiar road along the cliffs.
The spring was early, and the sweetness of it was already in the air; there were patches of emerald grass in sheltered places, and all the rich warm milky odours of turned earth and fruit blossoms, new leaves and the first hardy lilacs. Babies in sheltered coaches were airing along the little streets of Keyport, and if the restless little breezes and the sunless shadows were chilly, in the sunlight there was a delicious warmth.
The familiar dips and turns of the road were all like so many welcoming faces to David, and when he reached the boundaries of Wastewater he might almost have fancied, for a moment, that the old order of things had remained unchanged, that back of that barrier of great trees, now trembling into tiny dots of palest green, he might indeed find the grim dark building, the shuttered windows, the dank unhealthy shrubs and paths that had been the first home of his recollection.
The brick walls and the iron gates, more deeply bedded than ever in fallen leaves and mould, were unchanged, but the road between them, so many yearsunused, had been somewhat cut by wheels, and had been churned into mud. It stood open, but David left his car outside, got out and turned his back to the land for a moment, standing staring out to sea, as he had done upon that autumn day more than two years ago, that dreary, dark October day when Gabrielle had first come home.
He remembered, as his eyes idly followed the scrambling path down between the rocks and the bare mallow bushes to the shore, the muggy smells that had always assaulted his nostrils when the big side door of Wastewater had been opened, the smell of distant soup bones, dust, horsehair furniture, decaying wood, stifling coal fires that smoked. He remembered his aunt, rigid and stern, before the fire, her apprehensive, nervous eyes always moving behind him when he entered the room, and searching there for some menace always feared and never realized. He remembered the lamps, the antimacassars, the booming voices of the maids in the gloomy halls.
And then Gabrielle, in her velvet gown, with her big, starry eyes. Gabrielle, so young and so alone, met by such staggering blows, such bitter truths. Gabrielle watching Sylvia’s youth and happy fortune so wistfully, bearing her own sorrows and burdens with her own inimitable childish courage and dignity.
What a time—what a time! the man mused, his breast rising on a great sigh, as he shook his head slowly. Sylvia’s majority, and then Tom’s return, Aunt Flora’s stupefying revelation as to Gay’s parentage, and then the last scene—or almost the last—when he had gone upstairs to tell them—Gabrielle and Tom, that theywere brother and sister, and the great wind and the fire had trapped them there.
So that had been the end of Wastewater, with these four young persons, all Flemings, flying for their lives through the night, and Aunt Flora, who had spent all her life there, killed by the falling of all her moral and material walls in one terrible crash. She had lain for almost twenty-four hours in John’s dismantled house, without pain of body, and in a lulled state even of mind, but she had been dying none the less. David had reviewed a hundred times the dark and forbidding afternoon, the ugly red of the sunset, as it shone upon the walls, and the memory of Aunt Flora’s sunken face against the pillows, the memory of her monotonous, weary voice.
The last of her generation, that stormy and ill-governed generation whose passions and weaknesses had filled the whole house with tragedies for so many years, she had died very quietly, quite as if going to sleep, before the ashes of the old place had been cold. Sylvia, beautiful, twenty-one, her own life as truly in ruins and ashes about her, had been kneeling beside her mother at the end, the doctor standing gravely near, and David himself watching them all with that strange quality of responsibility that seemed to be his destiny where each and every one of them was concerned.
Afterward, Tom had taken the girls in to Boston, where Sylvia, ill from shock and sorrow, had been left in the care of Gabrielle and a nurse, while Tom and David came back to Wastewater for the funeral.
David, reaching this point, turned back and looked across the old garden, to find the glint of headstones farup the northwest corner of the estate, beyond the woods, and under a fountain of delicate blue-green willow-whips.
Much of the garden was left after only one season’s neglect, he mused, and could be reclaimed. There were healthy-looking roses, and the splendid hedge of lilacs was already bursting from hard brown buds into white and lavender plumes. The conifers looked clean and fresh in their new tips, even the maples and elms were magnificent as ever.
An odd new look of something like pioneer roughness had been given the place, however, by the raw wood-piles. Gay’s one stipulation, David smiled to remember, in one of the few allusions she had made to the subject, had been in reference to the heavy evergreen shrubbery close to the house. Mightn’t—she had put it so, although all this land was hers now—mightn’t a lot of those ugly old pines and cypresses come down?
Down they had accordingly come, to be chopped and piled into substantial stacks against some coming winter. Also stacked and piled were the bricks that had been Wastewater, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of bricks, that had been scraped and aligned into long solid blocks.
Some day, David mused, there would be a home here again. But when, the young persons most concerned had not yet definitely stated. He sighed as he thought of them, and smiled above the sigh.
A start had been made, at least. There was a handsome building already standing; a long low barn of friendly warm clinkered brick, with the wide new doors of a garage at one end, and at the other, across an arch,beyond which cows and horses might be fenced some day, was a homely, comfortable cottage, of the type that faces a thousand English lanes, steep roof cut by white-curtained dormers, latticed deep windows against which vines were already trained, and a hooded doorway with a brass knocker.
An Airedale, whirling about the corner of the building with a wild flourish, leaped upon David in welcome, and immediately curled himself rapturously in the short film of the grass, with all four feet in the air, writhing in puppy ecstasies.
“Here, here, Ben!” David said, laughing. “Grow up! It’s ridiculous to see a dog of your age acting that way!”
But he was rubbing and tousling the rough head affectionately, none the less, as he called, “Etta! John!”
In answer Etta, John’s wife, appeared with an undisturbed smile. For the months of building last fall, and again this spring, Mr. David had been living in his little Keyport farmhouse and might be expected here at almost any minute to inspect and approve. Etta herself had watched so much of the re-building with secret contempt. It seemed odd, when one could afford a nice square plastered house, and a corrugated iron barn, to waste twice as much money on what John considered “monkey shines.” But Miss Gabrielle and Miss Sylvia and Mr. Tom had all been away for more than a year now, in California and Mexico and Panama, and now it was Central America, and dear knows what it’d be next, and consequently Mr. David and his friend Mr. Rucker had had it all their own way.
Etta had no objection to Mr. Rucker, who was always so kind and polite, and funny, too, if you always understoodjust what he meant, but she could not understand why he should drag in talk about Swedish farmhouses and Oxford.
“I don’t know anything about Oxford,” Etta had more than once commented to her husband, “but I do know that the Swedes all get here as fast as they can, and why any one’d want to bring their clumsy-looking old barns after them beats me! Mr. Rucker was showing me the pitchers in a book; ‘It looks like something a child would make with blocks, if you’d ask me!’ I told him.”
“I hope when they build a house it’s going to look decent,” John might answer, uneasily. “I don’t know what better they’d want than three stories with plenty of bay windows and porches. I seen one pitcher Mr. David had in a book with all the roofs kinder sloping down into the garden, and the windows all different sizes and levels. Mr. Rucker says he has some old leaded windows from a bar-room—that’s what he said—for the liberry. I had Davis, over to the Lumber Company, send him a catalogue, and mark all the new doors and windows with a blue pencil, but I don’t know if he got it.”
To-day David gave Etta an opportunity for criticism when he said cheerfully, as she somewhat reluctantly accompanied him about the place:
“How’s the house, Etta—comfortable?”
“Oh, we’re quite comfortable, thank you,” Etta answered, primly, in a faintly complaining tone, “and John’s got the Eyetalians engaged to start the side garden anyway before the folks get back. But here’s the thing that I’ll never get through my head,” Ettaadded, with the readiness of an already well-aired grievance, as she looked up at the wide archway and its casement windows above; “it don’t seem sensible to have that arch, or gate, or whatever you call it, making the barn and the house into one. As far as needing the room goes, we’ll never need it, for John would no more think of going through that way for the hay than flying over the moon. I was thinking it would look handsomer to have the barn separate—and while the men are right here, and before Miss Gabrielle gets home to look at the plans for a house, and dear knows when that will be now!—why, they could tear out that arch real easy, and smooth the brick up so that it’d never show—and it does seem as if it’d be more Christian—more like the way other places look—places like the Smiths’, over to Tinsalls, that have millions of dollars, but their house looks so neat and square——”
“Ah, they’ve got the stable foundations started,” David said, in satisfaction, paying no attention to Etta’s remarks.
“Oh, yes, sir, they got the cement in day before yesterday,” Etta, diverted, answered, in the same placid whine.
“That’s fine,” David said, nodding to the various workmen as he walked about. “Room for four cows and about that many horses, and some day we’ll put a chicken run on that end.”
“Do they say when they’ll be coming back, sir?” Etta asked.
“Any time this summer, I suppose,” David said. “Mr. Tom is quite himself again—too well, in fact, Miss Sylvia wrote. I think she and Miss Gabrielle wouldhave been glad to come straight home from San Francisco, but Mr. Tom saw the masts of ships again, and that was enough. He wired they wanted me to go around the world with them, but eventually they seemed to have compromised on Panama. I’ve not had letters yet, but in a telegram a few days ago—I told you that?—there was some talk of Central America.”
“Dear me,” said Etta, who always made this remark in any pause, “haven’t there been changes? That grand old house—John says it’d cost a million dollars to rebuild it now—it does seem such a pity it had to burn down!”
“The insurance,” David said, consolingly, “will more than build a much prettier and more homelike Wastewater.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Etta said, with the relished pessimism of an old servant. “I was wondering if Mr. Rucker had seen them pretty plastered houses over to the Crowchester Manor Estates?” she asked, adroitly.
David did not answer. He looked at the mud-spattered and torn blue-print that was anchored from the coquettish spring breezes upon a plank with two brick-bats, murmured to the contractor, suggested, approved.
It was easy for his thoughts to find Gabrielle at Wastewater, for they were almost all of her in these days, and it was here that she had spent her life, except her school years. David had no recollection of her in any other setting. To-day, as always, she seemed to be beside him, walking through the strangely altered spring garden, talking with him of the changes to be.
She had borne herself, he had thought, with his affectionate quiet pride in her carrying as ever an undercurrent of pain—she had borne herself in the trying time of readjustments and changes better than all of them. There was a native dignity, a fineness about her, that made it possible for her apparently to forget herself entirely.
As he remembered her, in the few weeks that had intervened between her departure with Tom and Sylvia for the West, in old Margret’s care, it was difficult to recall any special demonstration of her own feelings at all. Sylvia had been actually if not seriously ill, Tom had suffered a dangerous relapse after the strain and exposure of the night, but Gay had been just her usual self. David had had a thousand cares: first to establish them temporarily in a comfortable hotel, then to commence the endless business of placing Gabrielle in her rightful position, with all it involved in the matter of taxes, transfers, legal delays of every sort.
He had written to the far-away Hannah Rosecrans in Australia, and had had a prompt and satisfactory reply. Hannah was Mrs. Tarwood, now, with children of her own. She gladly and unsuspiciously supplied a hundred details: the Fleming baby’s first nurse’s name at the big hospital, the name of a young doctor who had more than once come to see little Gabrielle in her first delicate weeks of life. Through these and Flora’s other clues David established the matter legally beyond all doubt, and Tom simplified the question of property division by being eager to reserve about only one fifth of his father’s estate for himself, giving hishalf-sister everything else. Wastewater, the jewels, this piece of property, that other, this stock and those bonds, everything, in short, about which division might have presented the slightest difficulty, Tom would have impatiently discarded in her favour. He was going to die anyway, he would remind them.
Beyond all this, David had Sylvia’s inheritance to handle. Flora had left a will, but it was superseded by an urgent note to her daughter, written at the time when Sylvia was supposed heiress to the whole Fleming fortune, begging her to make over her own money to Gabrielle.
Sylvia, hysterical and sensitive and unreasonable, had still persisted that this must be done; Gay—she protested in floods of shamed tears—had been wronged long enough! No, it must be all, all Gay’s, and she, Sylvia, would go forth into the world penniless, and make her own way—she would be happier so.
It had been Gay, patient and serious, in her new black, who had talked her into a healthier frame of mind. Gay had sat beside her cousin’s bed, smiling, talking occasionally, interesting Sylvia in the various phases of the business as they had come up, had managed both invalids and the whole comfortable suite, and had joined David, to affix a signature or witness a deed, as quietly as if this earthquake had touched her personally not at all.
Most admirable, he thought, had been her attitude with Tom. From the strange, disorganized winter day of Aunt Flora’s death, Gay had been quite simply, affectionately, and appreciatively Tom’s little sister. There had been no scenes, no hysteria, no superfluouswords; David did not even suppose that the sister and brother had discussed the subject. Immediately, and with a youthful and almost childish grace that David, remembering, would recall with suddenly blinking eyes, she had adopted big, clumsy, unpolished Tom. In three days, quite without awkwardness, if with a sometimes slightly heightened colour, he had heard her speak of “my brother” to doctors, nurses, waiters in the hotel.
She had carried Tom, he realized now, by storm, by the sheer force of her own extraordinary personality. If Tom had ever been in any doubt as to the fashion of recommencing their friendship along these wholly altered lines, Gabrielle had instantly dispelled it.
More, she had given Tom as a brother ten times the visible affection and confidence that she had been willing to give him in any other relationship. Gabrielle had been afraid to be too friendly before. Now she was free to laugh with him, to spoil him, to tease him, to sit on the edge of his bed and hold his big, hard hand while she recounted to him her daily adventures.
And Tom had proved quite unconsciously, by his pathetically eager and proud acceptance of this new state of affairs, that it was her companionship, her sympathy he had wanted. He had wanted to be a little needed, a little admired, to be of some consequence to David, to the admirable Sylvia, and lastly, to inconsiderable and neglected little Gabrielle.
He had seized upon his half-brotherhood with her as he had never developed exactly the same relationship with David. Indeed, so consummately wise had been this child’s—for David thought of her as scarcely morethan a child—this child’s handling of the situation, that within a week of the change Tom’s tone had actually taken on the half-proud, half-chiding note of an adoring elder brother, and David had seen in his eyes the pleased recognition of the fact that at least no one else was, or could be, Gabrielle’s “family” but himself.
Tom’s condition appearing to be supremely unsatisfactory, there had immediately been talk of southern California or Florida for the winter. For Sylvia, who was strangely shaken, quiet, and unlike herself even when physically well again, it seemed a wise solution, too. Gabrielle was of course to accompany her brother, and David must follow as soon as all their complicated affairs permitted.
Saying good-bye to the little black-clad group, when he had escorted them as far as Chicago, David had returned somewhat sadly to his duties as doubly, trebly an executor, his canvases, and the lonely painting of the first snows. And after that the months had somehow slipped by in a very chain of delays and complications: upon the only occasion when David had actually been packed and ready to start for the West, a telegram from his closest friend, Jim Rucker, or rather from Jim’s wife, in Canada, relative to an accident, illness, and the need of his help, had taken him far up into the Winnipeg woods instead.
Had the three Flemings been in La Crescenta, high and dry above ocean and the valleys of southern California, where they had at first quite established themselves, with a piano and a garden and a telephone, David might have joined them during the second summer. But by this time Tom was entirely well again, perfectlyable to live in the East, winter and summer if he liked, “but catch me doing it,” wrote Tom, in his large sprawling hand, and the travellers had gone into Mexico.
“Do for Heaven’s sake be careful, Gay,” David had written anxiously. “You appear to be the brains of the expedition. You may get into hot water down there!”
“Sylvia, on the contrary, is the brains of the expedition, as you so elegantly phrase it,” Gabrielle had answered, cheerfully, “and as to getting into trouble—no such luck!”
Then they were in San Francisco again, and David, with a muffled hammering going on steadily in his heart when he thought of seeing Gay again, had been expectant of a wire saying that any day might find them turning eastward. But no, for Tom had caught sight of all the huddled masts in the San Francisco harbour, the mysterious thrilling hulls that say “Marseilles” and “Sydney” and “Rio de Janeiro,” and he had been all for Australia—all for South America—had compromised finally upon Panama.
That was two months ago. Now, perhaps still feeling that the late New England spring would be chilly, they were apparently off for Guatemala and Honduras.
David could school his heart the better to patience because he had no hope. No hope even in her obscure little friendless days really of winning Gabrielle, and less hope now. His attitude toward all women, as he himself sometimes vaguely sensed, was one of an awed simplicity; they seemed miraculous to David, they interested him strangely and deeply, as beings whose lightest word had a mysterious significance.
If he had once loved Sylvia dearly, loyally, admiringly—andhe knew that for almost all her life he had—then what he felt toward Gabrielle was entirely different. There was no peace in it, no sanity, no pleasure. It burned, an uncomfortable and incessant pain, behind every other thought; it penetrated into every tiniest event and act of his life.
The mail to David, nowadays, meant either nothing or everything. Usually it was nothing. Once a month perhaps it glowed and sparkled with one of those disreputable and miscellaneous little envelopes that Gabrielle affected: sometimes a hotel sheet, sometimes a lined shiny page torn from an account book, but always exquisite to David because of the fine square crowded writing and the delicious freedom and cleverness of the phrases.
For two or three days a letter would make him exquisitely happy. He always put off the work of answering for a fortnight if possible—but sometimes he could not wait so long—to savour more fully the privilege he felt it to be, and to lessen the interval before the next letter from her.
When his answer had gone there was always a time of blankness. David would walk past the Keyport post office, go back, ask casually if there were letters—no matter. But when something approaching a fortnight passed, he would find himself thinking of nothing else but that precious little sheet; find himself declining invitations to Boston or New York for fear of missing it for an unnecessary few days, find himself wiring Rucker in the latter place, “If letters for me, please forward.”
For the rest, when Sylvia wrote with charming regularityevery week Gabrielle was, of course, always mentioned, and almost always in a way that gave David more pain than pleasure.
The doctor, Sylvia might write, for example, “of course madly in love with Gay,” had said this or that about Tom’s staying where he was. Or, “our fellow traveller, whose son is the nice Yale boy, has taken a great fancy to my humble self, perhaps in self-defence, as the boy can see nothing but Gabrielle.” Gabrielle “got a blue hat and a dark blue suit in San Francisco, and looked stunning.” Gabrielle wanted to add a line. And there, added, would be the precious line: “Love; I am writing.”
What David suffered during these crowded months that were yet so empty without, only David knew. He knew now that whatever his feeling was, it was the only emotion of any importance that he had ever known in his life. The departure for the war front, five years before, somewhat reminded him of it, but, after all, those feelings had been faint and vague compared to these. Buying his uniforms, equipping his bag, cutting every tie with the old life, facing the utterly unknown in the new, David remembered feeling some such utter obsession and excitement as he felt now.
But, after the thrilling commencement, that military life had faded into the stupidity of mismanaged training for what he had felt to be an ill-conceived purpose. David could only remember it now as a boy’s blind exultation and enthusiasm.
This other thing was the realest in the world—the devouring need of a man for the one woman, the beautiful, inaccessible, wonderful woman who could neveragain, lost or won, be put out of his life. David was perhaps not so much humble as unanalytical; he never had felt himself a particularly desirable husband, although at one time, studying Sylvia’s future prospects with his characteristic interest and concern, he had been obliged to recognize the fact that her marriage to him would be an extremely suitable thing.
Now he felt that nothing about him was suitable or desirable. No woman could possibly contemplate marriage with him with any enthusiasm; least of all this beautiful woman of twenty, whose wealth was the smallest of her advantages. David was not a particularly successful painter, past thirty, leading the quietest and least thrilling of lives. It was a part of the conscientiousness that these brilliant Flemings and their exactions had bred in him, that he felt himself in honour bound now not to complicate Gabrielle’s problems by any hint of his own personal hopes or fears. She needed him too much, in the management of her own and Tom’s business, for that. Self-consciousness between them would have been a fresh trial for her, just emerging from too many changes and sorrows.
Wastewater was all hers now, for Tom did not care to live there, even if it had been the wisest thing in the world for him to do. He had deeded it all to her, and she and Rucker had held a casual correspondence regarding the new barns and John’s house, and the prospect of a new Wastewater. It must be “rambly and irregular,” Gabrielle had stipulated, “perhaps a little like one of those French farmhouses of creamy white brick with the red roofs.” It must have “one long nice room, with an open fireplace at the end, wheresupper or breakfast could be brought in if it was snowing.” And she “would love a hall with glass doors and fanlights at the front and back, so that when you stood at the front door on a hot summer day you could see wallflowers and gillies and things all growing in the back garden, right straight through the house.”
Rucker, who did a good deal of this sort of thing, had been immensely interested; indeed, he and his wife and the tiny baby were established at Keyport with David now, so that his summer holidays and week-ends might be spent in the neighbourhood. He had submitted certain plans to Gabrielle in Los Angeles, and Gabrielle had wired her approval from Mexico City; now they were to commence building, but with some agitation on the part of Rucker, who made worried references to “moving the hollies,” and “saving those copper beeches and maples on the north front.”
“Mr. Rucker got those red tiles, John,” David said to-day to the foreman, “and they come fourteen inches square. So just give me an idea in a day or two how large that terrace is.”
“There’s Mr. Rucker now,” Etta said, disconsolately, as a Ford came in the service gate, and turned toward the barns. “No, it isn’t,” she added, peering.
They all looked in that direction as the car stopped, and a young woman jumped out, and dismissed it, and came toward them.