CHAPTER XXI
Shewas tall, and wearing a dark blue suit under a belted brown coat, a loose rich sable-skin about her shoulders. A blue hat, bright with cornflowers was pressed down over her sunny hair.
David’s heart gave a great plunge, raced, stopped short, and began to plunge again. It was really Gabrielle.
But she was so beautiful, she was so graceful and swift and young and radiant, as she came toward them, that David was incapable of speech, bereft of all emotion except the overpowering realization of what she meant to him.
The day became incredibly glorious, became spring indeed, when she put both her warm hands in his, and held him at arm’s-length, and looked at him, and then at the reconstruction, and the young green about her, with a great sigh of relief and joy that was half a sob.
Perhaps her own emotions were also unexpectedly overwhelming, for even while she laughed and greeted Etta and John and the dog with quite her usual gaiety, David noticed an occasional break in her eager voice and a film of tears in her shining eyes.
“Oh, David—Wastewater again!” she said. “If you knew—if you knew how hungry I’ve been for the old place! Oh, David—what a wonderful barn—but isn’t itdelicious—and that’s your house, Etta, and it looksso comfortable—like a little English inn—and the arch—David, it’s all so wonderful! Oh, do tell me everything, everyone! I’m so glad to get home——”
He had known that he loved her, but David had never dreamed that he could love her like this. To see her take off the heavy brown coat and consign it and the fur to Etta, and to have her straighten her little white frills at throat and wrists of the trim little dark blue suit, in just her old, busy way, and to have her fairly dance along at his side, excitedly inspecting all that had happened and that was to happen, was to be transported—for David—straight into a country of no laws and no precedents. Gay, sweet and blue-eyed and husky of voice; Gay, slender and eager and responsive; Gay, home again.
“But let me tell Etta and John my news before we leave them,” she had said, in the first rush of greetings. “Who do you think has just gotten married?”
“Not you, Miss Gabrielle, although goodness knows you look happy enough for anything,” Etta had said, cheered in spite of her determined efforts to resist.
“Not I—do you hear her, David! No, I’m to be next,” Gabrielle had answered, with a gaiety that stabbed David to the heart. “No, but Miss Sylvia and Mr. Tom were married a month ago, before we ever left San Francisco,” she added, joyously.
“Good grief!” Etta said, in a hushed voice. David only fixed astonished and suddenly enlightened eyes upon the girl’s face.
“Married in San Francisco,” Gabrielle repeated, nodding triumphantly. “You’re not one bit more surprised than I am! Well, yes, for I did suspect it,” sheadded, more moderately. “I knew that they were falling in love with each other, of course. But I never dreamed that they haddoneit until we were three days out! Then Sylvia wouldn’t let me wireless, because she said everybody on the boat would know. So we went on to Panama, and then she and Tom wanted to go on farther, and Margret and I wanted to come home—and here I am!”
Etta was by this time sufficiently recovered from her stupefaction to ask for further details, and David, watching Gabrielle as she half laughingly and half seriously gave them, had time to appreciate how the girl had grown to womanhood in this time of absence. With a sort of negligent readiness, and yet with a certain dignity, too, she satisfied the eager questions of the older man and woman, all the while reserving, he could see, the more intimate narrative for his ears alone.
They were not to be alone immediately, however, for Etta and John accompanied them through the barns, Etta harping plaintively upon the quality of the buildings now in course of erection in the Crowchester Manor Estates.
“But you won’t want a big house here, all by yourself. Them Crowchester houses are handsomer than any Mr. Rucker ever showed me,” Etta said.
“I had breakfast with Mrs. Rucker. Isn’t she always the nicest person?” Gabrielle was thereby reminded to tell him. “And what a ducky baby. We got in to New York yesterday morning, you know, and came up on the night train. I went straight to your Keyport house, hoping to find you, but you’d just gone. I left all my things there, and of course I’m to stay there to-night.”
“You won’t be going away again, Miss Gabrielle?” John asked.
“Why, that depends——” She looked at David in a little confusion, looked back into the sweet open spaces of the barn. “I may go to England——” she began.
“Looks like you might be surprising us, too, one of these days!” Etta said, shrewd and curious.
David glanced quickly at the girl; she was walking beside Etta.
“You wouldn’t want me to be an old maid, Etta?” she asked, once more with that new, poised manner.
“No, ma’am!” Etta said, positively. “We certainly need some new life about the place. I’s saying to John a few days ago I hope both the girls’d get married.”
“Well,” Gabrielle said, with a somewhat dreamy expression in her blue eyes, “then let’s hope we will.” And David, although she immediately changed the subject by speaking of the kitchen yard of the new house, was certain that he saw the colour creep up under her clear skin, and the hint of a mysterious smile.
“Don’t shock us with too many surprises in one morning, Gabrielle,” he warned her, trying to smile naturally.
“Ah, no, I shall save something and let things appear by degrees!” she answered, cheerfully. “Brick wall here, David?”
“Brick wall here, joining the stable wall in a long line, with the poplars back of it,” he agreed, with a suddenly cold, heavy heart. “Jim has managed to save the poplars, you see. And all the kitchen matters will be reached through a little round-topped gate in the wall about here.”
“And the dining-room windows looking out here where all the lilacs are?”
“With a sort of portico—an open court, tiled, here on the north front—where it will be cool in the afternoons.”
“David, it’s so much more wonderful than I dreamed it would be! Imagine a new Wastewater, all sunshine and happiness, instead of that terrible old barrack full of jealousy and secrets and plots! Isn’t it like a fairy tale? To think that life can be so sweet——”
“Gay, there’s no sweetness that you don’t deserve,” David said, suddenly, as they followed the others. “After that defrauded childhood, and all the shocks and sorrows you had when you first came home two years ago, nothing could be too much!”
“I feel now,” the girl answered, seriously, “as if, on that last night of fire and horror and bewilderment, the whole dreadful thing had been burned out—cauterized, made clean once and for all, and that now we start with a new order!”
“I don’t know as there’s a prettier place anywhere than Browns’,” said Etta’s mildly complaining voice. “If she has one window she has a hundred——”
“Etta!” Gabrielle said, briskly, paying no attention, “have you some chops? Mr. David and I are going to have our lunch down on the shore. And will you make us some coffee, Etta, and give us matches and butter and all the rest of it? It’s half-past eleven now, and we’ll want to start about one.—Now, show me everything, David, and tell me ten thousand things about everything!”
“John, have you those blue-prints?” David, out ofwhose sky the sun had dropped leaving everything dark and gray, asked the foreman.
“The plans for the house that looks sorter slumped down, with the roof two stories deep?” John asked, as one anxious to coöperate intelligently.
“Certainly! The only ones we have,” David answered, impatiently. Gabrielle bent suddenly down over the dog, but when she and David were strolling away through the perfumed warmth and the sweet young green of the garden, she asked, with her old wide-eyed, delighted smile:
“John and Etta don’t approve of Mr. Rucker’s plans?”
But David’s heart was too sick for laughter.
“You really may be following Sylvia’s example one of these days, Gabrielle?”
Instantly the clear warm skin was flooded with colour and an oddly troubled look came into her beautiful eyes.
“Well, I suppose so——”
David spoke smilingly, but with rather a dry mouth.
“You got over—you forgot—the man of whom you told me more than two years ago?”
“No,” she answered, briefly.
“You mean that you have seen him again?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Ah,” David said, blindly trying to say something that should avert her too-close scrutiny, “I see.”
He felt his heart leaden. It was with sort of physical difficulty that he guided her through the new Wastewater that was yet in so many ways the old.
So much was his anyway, he told himself. This dayof her dear companionship, this luncheon on the rocks, this monopoly of her husky and wonderful voice, her earnest, quick glances, her laughter, were his for a little while. Even over the utter desolation of his spirit, he was won to an exquisite and yet agonizing happiness by this nearness of all her sweetness and charm again.
First, she must see the plans. They sat down upon a pile of clear lumber in the trembling green shade of overhanging maple branches, and pegged the fluttering blue sheets with bits of rock, and bent over them.
And now, as she eagerly identified the placing of casement windows and bricked terraces, she was so close that David got the actual flowery fragrance of her, and her warm, satin-smooth hand occasionally touched his. She had laid aside her big coat, and looked a little less impressive in the plain little suit and delicate white frills, and somehow all the more her own wonderful self, the eager, busy, interested little Gay of years ago.
“David, see here, dear——” She added the little word so unconsciously, he thought, with a pang! “See here, dear, these two rooms upstairs will be almost empty—this with a north light, in case my smart cousin should want to do some painting.”
“Do you mean that you and Tom and Sylvia really plan to make your home here?” David asked.
“As for Tom, I can’t say—he and Sylvia will surely spend their summers here. But this will always be home, headquarters, for me,” Gay said. And she laid her beautiful hand upon the blue-prints almost with a caress. “My little house!” she said, lovingly, “with its chimney seats and casement windows—and we must have roses and hollyhocks jammed up against them insummer, and with its darling white woodwork and pink and blue papers, and with its little breakfast room looking over the sea——”
“Not so little,” David warned her, “you will have a dozen rooms, you know, besides the servants’ quarters in that high roof that John dislikes so heartily.”
“Little beside all those high brick walls and wings and windows of the old Wastewater,” she countered. “Poor unhappy Wastewater!” she said more than once, as they walked slowly about, in the increasing warmth of the day. “Sic semper tyrannis!” And she touched the neatly ranked bricks with a gentle hand. “We could build ten houses, couldn’t we?”
“You will have enough bricks there to do everything you ever want to—walls, bath-houses, paths, new buildings,” David assured her.
Gabrielle had picked a plume of purple lilac; she slowly twirled it and sniffed it as they walked. The late morning was so still that they could hear an occasional distant cock-crow. Silence, fragrance, and the sweetness of expanding life lay upon the world like a spell.
“Do you see that angle of land there,” the girl asked, presently, when with their lunch basket they were going toward the shore, “there, just beyond the spit, with its own little curve of bay? That never seemed quite to belong to the rest of the place.”
“You could sell it,” David suggested, catching her firm hand in his as she cautiously followed him down the rocky path.
“Oh, no! I don’t mean that. But you see what a cunning little homestead it would make all by itself,”Gabrielle said, making her way to their old favourite spot and beginning the preparations for a little driftwood fire. “It has good trees, and that line of silver birches, and it has dogwoods. I was wondering if Tom and Sylvia wouldn’t like a house there all their own—no responsibility, a place they could shut up and leave when they wanted to wander.”
“Then they are not going to live with her,” David thought, with his heart sinking again.
She had been talking about them in a desultory fashion all morning, but when the coffee was boiling, and the buns toasted, and the chops dripping and sizzling, she settled herself back comfortably against the rocks, and gave him the story consecutively.
“Sylvia is a changed person in lots of ways,” said Gay, with relish. “And in other ways she is exactly what she always was and always will be. She has the—you take cream, David?—she has the family pride. Only it takes a rather nice form with her, the form of self-respect. Sylvia must—she simplymustrespect herself. And after poor Aunt Flora died, what with having lost her fortune and then having to bear what she considered—and what really was!—a terrible blow to her pride, poor Sylvia really suffered terribly. She kept trying to analyse how she felt, and convince me about it, and I know that’s what made her ill. She couldn’t quite get used to not being—what shall I call it?—admirable, superb, superior—that was always my old word for her.
“She talked about college courses, and I think she must have written the Dean about it, but perhaps she wasn’t much encouraged. After all, Sylvia’s onlytwenty-two, and perhaps professors have to be a little older.
“So we drifted down to southern California, Sylvia in mourning, of course, and not taking any interest in anything, and Tom worse. But when we got to La Crescenta suddenly we all felt better. Tom began to eat and sleep; Sylvia and I took long walks; we even went in to Los Angeles to concerts.
“And in no time she found that she could still be—superior, with Tom. He began to admire her tremendously—he thought she knew everything! But never in my life have I seen Sylvia so—well, so gentle with anybody as she was with Tom! She began to make much of whatheknew—regularly draw him out; he speaks very good Spanish you know, and you can use Spanish a good deal there. Sylvia talked to him about boats, navigation, places he had been and we hadn’t, and all the time”—and Gabrielle’s eyes danced—“all the time it was just as if she was afraid of breaking the spell she had put on herself—if you know what I mean, David?”
“I think I do.”
“Meanwhile,” the girl resumed, with keen enjoyment, “Tom was changing, too. He’s gotten—finer, in a funny sort of way. His voice has grown finer, and he—he just stares at Sylvia whatever she does, and smiles at whatever she says, and he is like a lion on a string!”
Her joyous laugh was infectious, and David laughed in spite of himself.
“About—this is April. About Christmas time,” Gay resumed, “I began to notice it. Tom was funnyand humble and quiet with Sylvia, and Sylvia was bent upon making much of Tom; she’d quote him—I don’t know whether I can convey this to you—but she’d say to me so seriously, ‘Tom says the rain isn’t over. Tom doesn’t like Doctor Madison; he thinks his manner with us is a little too assured’, that sort of thing,” Gabrielle explained, frowning faintly despite her smile, in her eagerness to make him understand her.
“Well, we went to San Francisco, and there I really did have the best time I ever had in my life!” Gabrielle said. “The Montallen girls were there, with their brother, and we had some wonderful parties—we went through Chinatown, and out to the beach, and up the mountain, and everywhere. And I suppose I hadn’t been noticing Sylvia very closely, because, after the Montallens left——”
“Oh, they left, did they?” David, interested in the brother, asked.
“Yes, they came straight home. It’s the Montallens,” Gabrielle said, parenthetically, “that want me to go abroad with them in June.”
“I see. Will the brother go?”
“Oh, I think so.”
“I see. But go on—about Sylvia.”
“Well, when they left Sylvia suddenly seemed so odd. She cried a good deal, and she was quite cranky—not a bit like herself. By this time we were all getting ready for the Panama trip. Margret thought that perhaps it was young Bart Montallen, who is a perfectly stunning fellow—in diplomacy——” Gabrielle elaborated.
“I remember him,” David said, briefly.
“But one day Sylvia broke down and cried for an hour,” Gabrielle said. “It was the day before we sailed, and we were at the Fairmont. It almost drove me wild—it had been a real responsibility, anyway,” the girl interrupted herself to remind him. “When we left here I was worried sick about Tom, we were all blue and dazed—and really I’d had it all on my mind until I got a little nervous.
“I coaxed Sylvia and petted her, and finally she told me that he had asked her to marry him—and there I made my first mistake,” Gay added, widening her eyes so innocently at David that he laughed aloud. “I said—trying to be sympathetic, you know—‘And of course, you wouldn’t!’ and she got rather red and looked straight at me and said, ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ I said, rather feebly, ‘Well, I didn’t know you cared about him,’ and she said, ‘I don’t. But I consider him in every way one of the finest men I ever knew!’ Of course I said I did, too.
“Then she began to cry again, and said that she was entirely alone in the world—all that,” Gay resumed, “and she said that any woman would be proud to marry Tom, but that she was afraid everyone would think she was influenced by the thought of his money.”
“And what did you say to that?” David asked, diverted.
Gabrielle gave him her gravely wise look, and the beautiful face, flushed with the warmth of the day and shaded by the blue hat, was so near that David lost the thread of her words for a few seconds, in sheer marvelling at her beauty.
“I said I did not think that that should be a consideration,”she answered. “I said that no one had thought that ofyou, when you were engaged to her,” she added, after a moment, and with a sudden smile.
David, who was leaning back against a rock and had his arms folded, flushed a little in his turn.
“I don’t think that was ever, really, an engagement,” he offered.
And remembering suddenly that he had terminated what had been a rather definite understanding with Sylvia, simply that he might offer Gabrielle his name and his protection, he had an instant of being hardly able to believe himself the same man.
“So then we all left the next morning. That was fun!” the girl went on. “The ship was delightful, and nobody was sick, and it was a January day as warm and green as June—and Tom was just wild with high spirits; I never saw him so gay! And well he might be, for he and Sylvia had been married that morning.
“Sylvia, on the other hand, acted very queerly; cried a good deal—stuck close to me and seemed cross. Once when I asked her if it was Tom that was worrying her, she said savagely ‘No,’ that she wished she had never seen Tom Fleming, and that he had wrecked her happiness for life. And she went back to Aunt Flora’s old talk,” Gabrielle added, seriously, “about the curse on the Flemings, and all that.
“She would hardly speak to Tom—and I can tell you, David,” the girl interrupted herself again to say, “I didn’t anticipate a particularly pleasant trip to Panama. Tom seemed queer, too, and Margret told me that she thought the whole thing was a mistake.
“I remembered afterward that Sylvia talked a gooddeal about the annulment of marriages on those first few days. She kept telling me that for a woman an annulment had no value, because any ‘honourable’ woman would feel herself just as much bound after it as before, but it would at least set the man free. That was two days after we sailed, and it was that very night that I was playing cribbage with the old captain—who was a perfect old Scottish darling!—and afterward went up on the bridge with him. And when I was slipping down to my room, knowing that Margret would be out of her senses with anxiety, and Sylvia hunting for me perhaps, I passed a man and a woman at the rail.
“It was midnight, and there was no moon, but as I went by I heard the man’s voice, and it was Tom’s. And then I saw that the woman was Sylvia, and that she was crying. Tom was sort of growling—you know how he talks when he is a little angry and a little ill at ease—and I heard Sylvia say the word ‘annulment.’ ‘I can’t stand it, Tom, it was all a silly mistake!’ she said. ‘You can’t talk like that, Sylvia,’ Tom said, in a sort of shocked voice.
“Suddenly the whole thing came to me,” Gabrielle said, with all a child’s wondering, delighted stare fixed upon David, “and I went straight up to them and put my arm about them from behind and said, ‘Tell me about it, Iknowyou’re married!’
“Of course, I was delighted—much more so than you can believe—I didn’t have to pretendthat! Because I had had a sort of fear that once they both got back to their natural surroundings Sylvia would get proud and collegy—you know what I mean?—again,” the girl went on, “and that Tom would begin to feel awkward andnothing would come of their affair. So I made a great fuss—cried, really, I was so excited! And just then Margret came along the deck, afraid I’d gone overboard or something, and we told her—andshelaughed and cried. And Sylvia began to seem more normal, especially when we went to our cabin, and I said what a dear old fellow Tom was, and how he adored her. She began to smile—the way she does, you know, when she really doesn’t want to smile—and began to talk pityingly about a very pretty English girl on board who had taken an immense fancy to him.
“Well, afterthat,” and Gay’s laugh was delicious to hear, “you should have seen Sylvia! She—glowed! I never saw her so handsome, and so happy, and so—well, you know her!—so superb. She wasallthe proud wife. Everything Tom did was mysteriously perfect, and everything he said she listened to with as much attention as if it were his dying words. She quoted him, she fenced herself off with him with rugs and deck chairs and books, and read to him; they walked round and round the deck together.
“It seems as if Sylvia must be a little superior on some count or other to be happy!” Gay commented, affectionately and amusedly. “Now she’s infinitely happy. She is Mrs. Tom Fleming, and she has a handsome, rich husband who adores her, and presently they’ll have the most superior children—and believe me,” the girl finished, laughing, “Sylvia will feel that just what those children do is the astonishing thing; if any other child is taller, she’ll say it is weedy and has outgrown its strength, and if any child is smarter she’ll say it is unpleasantly precocious!”
“So you got to Panama——?” David prompted after a silence devoted to smiling musing, and the warmth and sweetness of the day, and the delicate silver whisper of the sea among the rocks.
“So we got to Panama, and by this time Mr. and Mrs. Tom Fleming only wanted to be left alone,” Gay resumed, raising her blue eyes to smile at him. “So there were great debates. They didn’t want to wire you, because such a wire is very apt to be noticed, and they didn’t quite want to come home; in fact, they planned this Southern trip as a sort of supplementary honeymoon. So, as there was a charming navy woman, a Mrs. Stephens, coming all the way up, I was delighted to put myself and Margret in her care. And that’s all.”
She had packed the remains of their meal into the little basket in the old quick, capable way that David so well remembered, and now she descended to a certain little pool among the rocks, and washed her hands, pushing the frills of her cuffs back from her slender wrists as she did so, and waving her hands in the air to dry them.
“You’ve told me everything—except your own affair, Gabrielle,” David presently prompted, when they were making their way up the cliff path to the garden.
“My—my own affair?” Perhaps she had not understood, for although she turned scarlet suddenly, she made no further admission.
“There is—somebody, you told me once?” David prompted her.
“Oh, yes!” She dismissed it with a shrug. “That,” she said, with a thoughtful note in her voice.
She added no more at the time. The enchantedhours of the day moved to three o’clock. But when David, knowing her to be tired from the long trip and probably confused with all the changes and impressions, suggested their return to Keyport, she showed a reluctance as definite as his own.
She had given him, on this spring day of lingering lights and soft fragrance, such a revelation of her own sweetness, her own personality, as made all his other recollections of her seem pale and dim. Every turn of her head, every movement, every direct look from her star-sapphire eyes, had deepened the old impression that there was nobody quite like her in the world.
Nobody so gracious, so quietly joyous, nobody else at once so youthful and so wise. A hundred times, by some quality of being simply and eagerly happy just in the springtime, and the garden, and his company, she reminded him of the long-ago little girl Gabrielle, and yet, at twenty, David thought her already a woman.
They talked of the old Wastewater, as they planned and went to and fro busied with problems of the proportions and the placing of the new. Of the family, with its passions and hates, its jealousies and weaknesses.
“The new house,” Gabrielle said, whimsically, “will stand as much for the new order as the old one did for the stupidities and affectations of the old. It’s all to be simple, no affectations, no great big gloomy basement regions for the servants—they’ll have their section as comfortable, as sunshiny as the other. There’ll be open fires instead of the old hideous grates, and rugs and clean floors instead of the old dirty, hard-and-fast carpets, and bathrooms full of tiles and sunshine, andsleeping porches instead of all that horrible rep curtaining—and there’ll be——”
Her voice lowered. “There’ll be people loving each other,” she said. “After all, isn’t that the answer to the whole problem? Women being loyal and generous, instead of jealous and watching all the time, men thinking of other people’s happiness, instead of having themselves painted in picturesque attitudes.”
She finished laughing, but her face was presently serious again. They were idly wandering through the ruins of the garden now, Gabrielle a little flushed and tumbled from the efforts of raising a bent rose bush, or straightening, with a little air of anxiety and concentration that David thought somehow touchingly mother-like, a sheaf of timidly budded whips that would some day be sweet with white syringa bloom.
She stopped at the old sundial and cleared the fallen packed damp leaves from its face with a stick, and busied herself so earnestly about it that David thought her more like an adorable child, and more like a responsible little housewife, than ever. He thought of the wife she would make some man some day, and felt suddenly that he must get away—out of the country—anywhere!—before that time came.
“You can’t tell me your plans yet, Gabrielle dear?” he said, with a rather dry throat, when they were beside the dial.
The girl’s colour deepened a little under the creamy skin, and for a moment she did not answer. Then she said with a look straight into his eyes:
“I could tell you—as far as they have gone.”
“Not unless you want to,” David answered, from the other side of the dial, which he gripped with fingers that were suddenly shaking.
“The man of whom I spoke to you, so long ago,” Gabrielle said, presently, “I saw again—this spring.”
“I see,” David said, with a nod, as she paused. “He did not marry the other woman, then?”
“What other woman?” the girl demanded, amazed.
“I thought you said that he had cared for another woman?”
“Ah——? Ah, yes, so he had. No, he didn’t marry her. He is—quite free,” said Gabrielle, working busily.
“You’re very sure you care for him, dear?” David said, already relegated, in his own mind, to the sphere of the advisory, loving older brother.
“Yes,” she said, with another upraised look. “I am sure. I have never felt for anybody else what I do for him, and I know now I never shall. When I first saw him—more than two years ago——”
“You saw him first then?”
“Well, I had seen him as a child. But after I got home from Paris I saw him again,” the girl offered, lucidly.
“I see.” She was so radiant, she was so wonderful! If he should be some utter good-for-naught, David thought——
“Then I did not see him, except occasionally,” Gabrielle resumed. “And when I did not see him, then I knew that logically, actually, he was everything I could love; a gentleman, kind, wise, admirable in every way.”
“Rich?” David asked, in a silence, and with a faint frown.
“No. Not—exactly poor, either.”
“But does he know that you are rich, Gabrielle?”
“I don’t think it makes any difference to him,” the girl said, thoughtfully, after a moment.
“I don’t suppose, of course, that it would!” David agreed, immediately.
“No. So that when I was away from him, I had time to think it out logically and dispassionately, and I knew he was—the one,” the girl resumed, “and when I saw him—whenever we were together, although I couldn’t think logically, or indeed think at all,” she said, laughing, and flushed, and meeting his eyes with a sort of defiant courage, “I knew, from the way I felt, that there never could be, and never would be, any one else!”
“I see, of course,” David said, slowly.
“Both ways,” Gabrielle went on, smiling a little anxiously, “I feel safe. When I’m not with him I can reason about it, I can look forward to all the years, thinking of myself as older, as the mother of children,” the girl went on seriously, her voice lowered to the essence of itself, her eyes upon the softly heaving and shining sea, “thinking of the books, the tramps, the friendships we will share. There is no moment of life that he will not make wonderful to me, poverty, change, sorrow, travel—everything,” she finished, looking up smiling, yet with the glitter of tears in her beautiful eyes.
“I——” David cleared his throat—“I am so glad you can tell me, Gay,” he said, a little gruffly.
“I love to tell you!” the girl said, with an illuminated look.
“It—is settled, Gabrielle?”
“No. Not exactly. That is——” She coloured violently, laughed, and grew suddenly pale. “No, it’s not settled,” she answered, confusedly.
“You can’t tell me anything more?” David asked, after a pause.
“Not—now, very well. At least, I think I can soon,” Gay said, laughing and flushed, yet oddly near, he could see, to tears, too. “I know that he—cares for me,” she added, after another brief silence.
“He has told you?”
“Well, no. Or yes, he has, too—in a way. But all that——” she broke off, appealingly.
“Yes, I know,” David reassured her. “You shall tell me when you’re ready.”
“David, I suppose we should be going back,” the girl said, reluctantly. But she did not change her comfortable position, resting against the dial, and looking alternately at its blackened old stone surface and across the shining sea.
“Presently. I hate to end—to-day,” David answered, simply.
“So do I. Hasn’t it been a wonderful day? Doesn’t it seem like the beginning of heavenly times?”
“One of the happiest of my life,” David said, trying to lighten the words with his old friendly smile, and failing.
Gabrielle was silent, and in the stillness all the sweet sounds of a spring afternoon made themselves heard: the lisp of the sea, the chirp of little birds flying low in short curving flights among the budding shrubs, a banging door in the farmhouse and the distant sound ofvoices as the workmen put up their tools and started their motor engines.
The sun was sending long slanting rays down across the torn earth, and the old garden, and the piled bricks. John’s and Etta’s house, joined by the simple curve of the arch to the long, low roofs of the barn, looked everything that was homelike and comfortable in the sinking glow.
“I see summer suppers here, in the court,” Gabrielle said, presently, in a low voice, as if half to herself. “Guest rooms all fresh and airy, Sylvia’s children, and my children, drawing others here for picnics on the shore, white dresses, and the harvest moon coming up there across the sea, as we have seen it rise so many hundreds of times! I don’t know which will be most wonderful, David: the long summers with the hollyhocks and the twilights, or the winters with big fires and snow and company coming in, all cold and laughing.
“I do think of going abroad,” she added, as for sheer pain David was silent. “But I find myself thinking most often of getting home again, with all the trunks and excitement, to settle again in Wastewater!”
“You really are going abroad, Gabrielle?” David asked. And to himself he added, “Honeymoon.”
“Why, I don’t know. To-night I don’t feel as if I ever wanted to go outside these gates again; I feel as if I wanted to stay right here, watching them put every brick into place! But—youwould like to go abroad again some day, wouldn’t you, David?”
“Oh, I? Yes, but that’s different,” the man answered, bringing himself into the conversation with a little self-consciousness. “Yes,” David said, slowly,frowning into space with narrowed eyes, “I think I may go, one of these days. I would like to do some painting in Florence.”
Another silence, so exquisitely painful, so poignantly sweet, that David felt he might stand so for ever, watching her, leaning in all her beauty and her fragrant youth against the grim old dial, looking sometimes at him, and sometimes off to sea, with her glorious and thoughtful eyes.
“David, I got your message,” she said, suddenly, in a voice oddly compounded of amusement and daring and a sort of fear.
“I’m glad,” David answered, mechanically. And then, rousing himself, he added in surprise, “What message?”
“On the little draught of the house plans,” Gabrielle answered, serenely.
“Which plans were those, dear? The ones Jim sent to San Francisco?”
“He sent them to San Francisco too late, but they sent them on and we got them in Panama.”
“Did I send a message with them?” David asked, not remembering it.
“Scribbled on the margin of one of them,” Gabrielle nodded.
“A message—toyou?” David said, in surprise.
“Well, I read it so.” The girl fell silent, and a robin with a warmly stained breast, and a cocked head, hopped nearer and nearer to them.
“I don’t remember,” David admitted, after thought. It was obvious that she wanted him to remember it, but,stupidly enough, he seemed to have no recollection of it whatever.
“I think it must really have been to Jim Rucker,” Gabrielle added, innocently. “It began ‘Dear Jim.’”
The blood came to David’s face and he laughed confusedly.
“I—did I scribble something to Jim on the margin? I remember that we sent the plans back and forth a good deal,” he said, in a sort of helpless appeal.
“I’ll show it to you,” Gabrielle answered, suddenly. She put her hand into her pocket and brought out a curled slip of paper that had been cut from the stiff oiled sheet of an architect’s plans. “Here, David,” she invited him. “Read it with me.”
And she flattened it upon the old dial and glanced at him over her shoulder.
David, hardly knowing what he did, let his eyes fall upon the pencilled words. He read:
Dear Jim:No letter, but a message about her in one from Sylvia. Tell Mary I’m sorry I cut her dinner party!
Dear Jim:
No letter, but a message about her in one from Sylvia. Tell Mary I’m sorry I cut her dinner party!
It was signed with David’s own square, firm, unmistakable “D.”
“When I read that,” said Gabrielle, looking up with her face close to his, as he leaned at her shoulder, “I knew that the man I loved, loved me. And after that I couldn’t get home fast enough.”
“Gabrielle,” David said, trembling, and now she was in his arms. “Is it really so, dear? Dearest andloveliest of women, do you mean what you say?—Do you know what you are doing? I’m not the brilliant sort of man that you might marry, dear—I’ll never be rich, perhaps I’ll never be successful——”
“Ah, David,” the girl answered, facing him now, with both hands upon his shoulders, as he held her with his arms lightly linked about her, “do let’s not have any more misunderstandings and silences and half-said things at Wastewater? Tell me that you love me——”
There was a milky spring twilight in the old garden now; the sea had mysteriously blended itself with the sky, and a mild great moon was rising before the last of the sun’s radiance had fairly faded from the west. As the enervating warmth of the day died, delicious odours began to creep abroad in the dusk, and the plum tree that had burst prematurely into bloom shone like a great pale bouquet against the gathering shadows.
There were smells of grass and earth, the sweet breathing of a world wearied after the unwonted hours of sunshine; there was the clean smell of new paint from the regions back of the farmhouse and barn. The birds were still now, and the very sea seemed hushed.
And to both David and Gabrielle, as they dreamed of the days to come, the golden days of responsibilities and joys unthinkable now, it seemed that no hour would eclipse this hour, when they two, children of the old place, found love among its ruins, and planned there for a better future.
All the terrors, all the whispers, voices, fears, and hates, all the secrets and conspiracies that had shadowedWastewater in its old and arrogant days were gone. Roger with his vanity and arrogance was gone, Lily with her tears, Cecily frightened and saddened in her youth, Flora with her dark repressions and thwarted love.
The old Sylvia was gone, too, and in her academically complacent place was the much more human Mrs. Tom Fleming. And David was gone; never again would he be only the dreamy, detached painter, the amused older brother and audience for the younger folk, the philosopher who looked at love dispassionately. David was a man, now, and the thought of having this woman for his wife, the thought of the future, when they two would make a home together, for ever and for ever, as long as life should last, made him feel as shaken, as awkward, as humble and ignorant as the boy he had never really been.
All gone. But there remained, steadfast, gray-eyed, sometimes all a mother, sometimes all a child, always simple, direct, loving, anxious for peace and harmony, this tawny-headed waif who had drifted in among the black Flemings so mysteriously, who had flourished upon neglect and injustice, who had borne sorrow and shame courageously and unfalteringly, and who was now, of them all, left to be mistress here, to begin the new history and the new line.
“David, we will go to Florence together, in the fall, if we can tear ourselves away from our new house, and you shall copy little Dizianis and Guardis!”
“Ah, Gabrielle, don’t, my dear. I can’t—I can’t believe it. It seems too much.”
“But we’ll come back for a housewarming at Christmastime, David, and not miss one instant of the spring!”
“Yes, my darling,” David said.
“And we’ll have days in the city, David, buying towels and muffin rings,” the girl said, rejoicingly. “And then you’ll have an exhibition in April, and won’t you be proud of your nice furry wife, walking about among the pictures and listening to what people say!”
“I can hardly be prouder of her than I have always been, Gay.”
Silence. Her right hand was upon his shoulder, and his arm was strong and warm about her. David had only to bend his head to kiss the crown of her tawny, uncovered hair; the whole gracious, fragrant woman was in his arms. Their left hands, clasped, rested upon the dial.
So resting, they obscured the blackened old face that had serenely marked the hours under thin Scotch suns, under more than a hundred passionate years of the hotter suns of the New World. They hid the old legend: