THE BLACK FLEMINGS

THE
BLACK FLEMINGS

BY
KATHLEEN NORRIS

PALO ALTO EDITION

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
1929

COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925, 1926, BY KATHLEEN
NORRIS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED
IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY
LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

THE BLACK FLEMINGS

THE BLACK FLEMINGS

CHAPTER I

Once through the dark old iron gates, he seemed to have left the warm and friendly autumn day, the warm and friendly world, behind him.

David Fleming laughed half aloud at the fancy and stepped back into the rambling country road, where wheel tracks were so quickly obliterated in the loose-drifting sand, to contrast once more, for his own amusement, the peaceful dreaming landscape in the afternoon sunlight and the sinister shadows of Wastewater.

Five miles away along the rugged coast lay Crowchester, the little fishing village whose activities tinged the fresh salty air, even here, with the odour of salted fish. Between Crowchester and Wastewater, beside whose forbidding great gates he stood, ran the irregular road, rising through dunes, skirting wind-twisted groves of pine and fir, disappearing into ragged hollows to emerge again on turfy bluffs, and finally winding in here toward the old brick house that lay hidden behind these high walls.

On his right lay the shore, rocky, steep, rough, with pebbles complaining as the tide dragged them to and fro, surf hammering restlessly among the rocks or brimming and ebbing with tireless regularity over the scooped stone of the pools. No two inches of it, no two drops of its immensity ever the same; it held him now, as it had held him for so many hours in his very babyhood, in a sort of tranced contemplation.

The sun was setting in angry red beyond the forest behind him, but a hard and brilliant light still lay on the water, and the waves were sculptured harshly in silver-tipped steel. Where the old brick wall of Wastewater descended to the shore enough sand had been stored in the lee of the wall to form a triangular strip of beach, and here scurfy suds were eddying lazily, hemmed back from the tide by a great jammed log and only stirred now and then by a fringe of the surf, which formed new bubbles even while it pricked the old.

On the sharp irregular fall of the cliff, distorted, wind-blown pines and tight-woven mallows clung, with the hardy smaller growths of the seaside: blown blue lupin, coarse sedge and furzy grasses, yellow-topped odorous sage and dry fennel. About their exposed, tenaciously clinging roots was tangled all the litter of the sea: ropes, slender logs as white and bare as old bones, seaweeds, and cocoanut shells.

David breathed the salty, murmuring air, faintly scented with fish, looked back once more toward the shining roofs and the rising faint plumes of smoke above Crowchester, shrugged his shoulders with a philosophic laugh, and turned again toward Wastewater’s gates.

These were four: two great wrought-iron wings in the centre, where carriages had once entered and departed, and, designed ingeniously in the same enormous framework, two smaller gates, one on each side, for foot passengers.

The carriage gates had been closed for years and were bedded deep in dry grass and fallen leaves, and the right-hand smaller gate had perhaps not been opened three times in its more than one hundred years’ existence. But the left-hand gate stood slightly ajar, and beyond it ran a faintly outlined footpath into a deep old garden. The whole elaborate structure, met by the mossy brick wall on both sides, was thick with rust, its scrolls and twisted bars shone brick-red in the last of the sunlight.

David had walked briskly from the village and his blood was moving rapidly, but he shivered as the familiar atmosphere once more enveloped him. Once again the dilapidated, stately old garden with its bottle-edged flower beds, where the ragged rose bushes were already showing red and yellow hips, where the pines were shedding their slippery needles, and where the maples and elms looked tattered and forlorn.

The place had been thickly planted almost two hundred years ago; it was densely overgrown now; the trees crowded each other, and the growth underneath them was sickly. The old path was spongy with wet leaves underfoot, and the air so pungent with their sharp odour as to be almost anæsthetic. Between the blackened trunks on the right David could again see the serenely moving, deeply breathing surface of the ocean, but now the garden and low cliffs shut off the shore.

On all other sides lay the garden and the thicket of the plantation through which presently, after some winding, he came upon Wastewater Hall itself, standing up boldly in the twilight gloom. The last dying fires of the sunset, burning through black tree trunks behind it, seemed only to make darker than ever the outlines of the great dark red brick house, three-storied and with a steep mansard as well, its uncompromising bulk enhanced rather than softened by a thickly wooded coat of black ivy.

It was an enormous old Georgian building, impressive for size if for nothing more. Wastewater’s twenty acres stood on a sharply jutting point of cliff, and the house faced the sea on three sides; the garden was shut off from the road by the long western wall. Immediately back of the kitchen and stable yards there was a rear gate, buried in shrubbery and quite out of sight from the house, for delivery wagons and tradespeople.

The main entrance was on the eastern front, facing straight out to sea, but this presented now only rows of shuttered windows and stone steps deep in fallen leaves, and David stopped instead at the stone steps of the columned side door. Leaves had littered the paths and lay thick upon the struggling grass of the rose beds, but these three steps had been swept clean, their dried surfaces still showing the marks of a wet broom.

David, absorbing the details with the eye of one who perhaps is reluctant to see confirmed previous impressions or fears, shrugged again, made a little face between impatience, amusement, and misgiving, and gave the old-fashioned iron bell-pull a vigorous jerk.

Then came a long wait. But he did not ring again. The first fifteen of David’s thirty-one years had been spent here, within these grave old walls, and he knew exactly what was happening now inside.

The jerk on the brass-handled wire would set into convulsive motion one of a row of precariously balanced bells far down in the enormous stone-floored kitchen. Most of these bells had not been rung for two generations at least. They were connected with the bedrooms and the study—it had been a long time since any resident of Wastewater had felt it necessary to summon a servant to bedrooms or study. In the row, David remembered, were also the front-door bell, dining-room bell, and the side-door bell. He began to wonder if the last were broken.

No, someone was coming. He could not possibly have heard steps behind that massive and impenetrable door, but he assuredly sensed a motion there, stirring, creaking, the distant bang of another door.

Then another wait, not so long. And at last the door was carefully opened by Hedda, who looked casually at him with squinting old white-lashed eyes, looked back in concern at her bars and bolts, closed the door behind him, and then said in a mild old voice in which traces of her Belgian origin lingered:

“Good. How is Mister David?”

“Splendid,” David answered, with a heartiness that the chill of the dark old hall already tinged with a certain familiar depression. “Where’s my aunt, Hedda?”

Hedda had been staring at him with a complacent, vacuous smile, like the slightly demented creature she really was. Now she roused herself just a shade and answered in a slightly reproachful voice:

“Where but upstairs shall she be?”

David remembered now that Gabrielle had long ago announced, with her precocious little-girl powers of observation, that “Hedda always tells us things the first time as if it were the twentieth, and her patience quite worn out with telling us!” An affectionate half smile twitched the corners of David’s mouth as he thought of that old tawny-headed, rebellious little Gabrielle of ten years before, and he followed the smile with as sudden a sigh.

He mounted gloomy, wide old stairs through whose enormous western windows a dim light was struggling. The treads were covered with a dark carpet strapped in brass rods. Gabrielle, as a baby, had loved the top-shaped ends of these rods, had stolen them, been detected, restored them, how many, many times!

The thought of her more than the thought of his old little self, of Tom and Sylvia, who were the real Flemings, after all, always came to him strangely when he first returned to the old house after any absence. Gabrielle, shouting, roaring, weeping, laughing, had roused more echoes in Wastewater than all the rest of them put together; she roused more echoes now, poor little Gabrielle!

Poor Gabrielle, and poor Tom! mused David. Life had dealt oddly with both these long-ago, eager, happy children, as Life seemed to have a fashion of dealing with the children of so strange and silent, so haunted and mysterious an old house. The shadow of the house, as real upon his spirit as was the actual shadow of the autumn twilight upon these stained old walls, shut heavily upon David as he crossed the upper hallways and turned the knob of the sitting-room door.

His aunt, in the widow’s black she had worn for some eighteen years, was sitting erect in an upholstered armchair by the fire. She turned to glance toward him as he came in and welcomed him with a lifeless cheek to kiss and with the warmest smile her face ever knew.

It was not very warm; Flora Fleming had the black colouring of the clan; her look was always heavy, almost forbidding. She was in the middle fifties now; there was a heavy threading of gray in her looped, oily dark hair. Her skin was dark and the rough heavy eyebrows almost met above her sharply watchful eyes. There were black hairs at the corners of her lips and against her ears below her temples; her eyes were set a shade too close together, her teeth were slightly yellowed, too prominent, and rested upon her bitten lower lip. She wore, as always, a decent handsome silk that seemed never old and never new; there was a heavy book in her knuckly, nervous hands, and David noted for the first time to-day a discoloured vein or two in her somewhat florid, long face.

“This is good of you, David,” she said, dispassionately, putting her glasses into her book and laying it aside.

“Didn’t wake you from a nap?” David said, glad to sit down after his brisk walk.

“A nap?” She dismissed it with a quiet, not quite pleased smile. “Since when have I had that weakness?” she asked. “No. On an afternoon like this, with the leaves falling, one hears the wind about Wastewater if it blows nowhere else, and the sea. I can never nap in the afternoons. I hear—voices,” she finished, as if half to herself.

“Lord, one realizes how lonely the old place is, coming back to it!” David said, cheerfully.

“Not for me,” his aunt again corrected him in her quiet voice that seemed full of autumnal reveries and the quiet falling of leaves itself. “Other places are lonely. Not this.”

“Well, it’s extremely nice to know that you feel so,” David pursued, resolutely combating the creeping quiet, the something that was almost depression, always ready to come out of musty corners and capture one here. “But when the girls are home we’ll have some young life at Wastewater, and then—when they marry, you’ll have to move yourself into brighter quarters—into a city apartment, perhaps!”

“When they marry?” she repeated, slightly stressing the pronoun.

“As I suppose they will?” David elucidated, looking up.

“They?”

“Sylvia—and Gabrielle, too!” he reminded her.

“Oh, Gabrielle?” She repeated the name quietly. “To be sure, she will marry,” she said, musingly. “But I can hardly feel that quite as much my affair as Sylvia’s future, David,” she finished, mildly.

“Daughter and niece!” David summarized it. “Sylvia rich and Gabrielle penniless, but both young and both our girls!”

“I can’t see it quite that way,” Mrs. Fleming said, thoughtfully, after a pause. “Gabrielle gets here to-night—you knew that?”

“That’s what brings me,” he answered. “I thought perhaps you would like me to meet her in Boston, bring her home?”

“I wired in answer to the Mother Superior’s wire,” Flora said, “that she was quite capable of making the journey herself. She should be here at about eight to-night. She is eighteen, David. There is no necessity of making a child of her!”

“No,” he conceded, good-humouredly. “But it might seem a little warmer welcome. I’ll go in to Crowchester for her, at least. After all, we’ve not seen her for years—for more than two years! When I was in Paris—when Jim Rucker and I were on our way to Spain—it was midsummer, and she and some of the other girls and nuns were in Normandy. I shall be glad to see her again.”

“I wish,” said Mrs. Fleming, slowly, “that I could say as much. But her return brings it all up again, David. I shall do all I can for her, try my best to place her well. But when I think of my delicate little sister,” Flora rushed on, in a voice suddenly shaking, “and of her giving her life for this unwelcome child—the old bitterness rises up in me——!”

She stopped as if she were choking, and with set lips and inflated nostrils sat breathing quickly and looking into the fire, shaken by the painful agitation of a passion usually suppressed.

“I know. I know,” David, who came nearer than any one else in the world to intimacy with this woman, said soothingly. “But it wasn’t Gabrielle’s fault that poor little Aunt Lily made a stupid marriage with a—what was he? A travelling agent? Surely—surely, if you loved Aunt Lily, you can make up all the sorrow and shame of it to Gabrielle! There was—there was a marriage there, Aunt Flora?” David added, with a keen look up from his own finely shaped hands, now linked and hanging between his knees as he sat forward in his low chair.

“Between Lily and Charpentier? Certainly!” she answered, sharply. And suspiciously she added: “What makes you ask that?”

“It has sometimes gone through my head that there might not have been—that that might account for her despair and her death,” David suggested. “Not that it matters much,” he added, more briskly. “What matters is that here we have Gabrielle, a young thing of eighteen, apparently all over her early frailness and delicateness—at least, I gather so?” he interrupted himself to ask, with another upward glance.

“The Superior writes that she is in perfect health.”

“Good. So here we have Gabrielle,” resumed David, “eighteen, finished off most satisfactorily by almost eight years with the good Sisters and with two post-graduate years in the Paris convent—discovered not to have a vocation——”

“Which I profoundly hoped she would have!” put in Flora, forcefully.

“Oh, come, Aunt Flora—the poor little thing! Why should she be a religious if she doesn’t want to? After all, she’s your sister’s child and your own Sylvia’s cousin—give her a chance!” David pleaded, good-naturedly.

Flora looked at him temperately, patiently.

“But of course I shall give her a chance, David!” she said, quietly. “She will unquestionably have some plan for herself. I shall see that it is helped, if it is reasonable. But in the old days,” Flora added, “she was treated exactly as a child of the house. She must not expect that now. There have been changes since then, David. Poor Tom’s loss, Roger’s death—poor Mamma’s death——”

She was silent. David, staring thoughtfully into the fire, was silent, too. The strangely repressive influence of the twilight, the old room, the cold, reminiscent voice that somehow rang of the tomb, the autumn winds beginning to whine softly about the old house, and beyond and above and through all sounds the quiet steady suck and rising rush of the sea, the scream of little pebbles beneath the shrill fine crying of gulls in the dusk, had taken possession of his spirit again. Something mysterious, unhappy about it all—something especially so about Flora—was oppressing him once more.

But why? David asked himself, angrily. Here was a widowed woman, living in an old house only a few miles from the very heart of civilization, contented with her solitude, yet counting the hours until her idolized daughter’s return to Wastewater for the summer months; conscientious in the discharge of her duty where Gabrielle, her sister’s motherless little girl, was concerned, spending her days peacefully among servants and flowers, books and memories.

Many and many another elderly woman lived so. What was there so strangely disturbing, so almost menacing about this one? He did not know. He told himself impatiently now that it was only because she was his kinswoman that she had power to make him so uneasy; this was, in short, the disadvantage of knowing her so well.

“The girls will brighten you up!” he remarked, hopefully.

“Perhaps,” his aunt answered, forbiddingly. And again there was silence, and presently Mrs. Fleming went away, with some murmur of dinner.

Left alone, David glanced about the familiar room, whose every detail had been just as it was now in all the days he could remember. It was a large room with rep-curtained bays on two sides. The furniture was all dark and heavy, sixty, seventy years old. Carved walnut, oak, horsehair, heavy-fringed upholstery, stiffly laundered antimacassars, bookcases whose glass doors mirrored the room, gas jets on heavy black-and-gilt brass arms.

A hanging lamp was lowered over the centre table, where albums and gift books, shells and vases were neatly ranged upon a mat of Berlin wool. A coal fire was smoking sulkily in the steel-rodded grate; the mantelpiece was of brown marble flanked with columns of shining black; the mantelshelf bore another fringed specimen of Berlin wool work and was decorated by a solid black marble clock with gilt horses mounting it in a mad scramble; two beautiful great Sèvres vases of blue china wreathed with white roses and filled with dry teazels, some small photographs in tarnished metal frames, and several smaller articles: Turkish and Chinese boxes, Japanese lacquer ash trays, and a tiny Dresden couple.

There were what-nots in two corners, with their flights of graded and scalloped shelves similarly loaded; here were more photographs, more gift books, a row of lichen owls on a strip of stiff silvery lichen, small specimens of Swiss wood-carving and cloisonné, a china clock that had not moved its hands in all of David’s lifetime, a teacup or two, a vial of sand from the banks of the Jordan, a bowl of Indian brass filled with coloured pebbles, bits of branched coral, goldstone, a chain of Indian beads, and some Aztec pottery in rich brick-brown and painted stripes.

On the walls were dark old paintings, engravings, and woodcuts in heavy frames, interspersed here and there with rubbishy later contributions: “A Yard of Roses” in a white-and-gilt mat and frame, and a coloured photograph of ladies and children, too sickeningly pretty, in high-belted empire gowns and curls, dancing to the music of a spinet.

The only notable thing among all these was a life-size study that hung above the mantel: the portrait in oil of a man of perhaps thirty or thirty-five. David ended his inspection with a long look at it, and his thoughts went to its subject.

CHAPTER II

This was Black Roger, who had been master here at Wastewater all the days of his stormy and brilliant life. The face at which David was staring now so thoughtfully had been one of the handsomest of its generation. When Roger Fleming, arrogant, young, rich, had posed for this picture, now a whole third of a century ago, the world had been at his feet.

What a different world it had been, mused David; a world without an electric light or bell or street car to disturb it—without a moving picture or an automobile! But Roger Fleming, this exquisite, negligently smiling gentleman pictured with the bay horse and the slim greyhound, had missed none of these things from his crowded life. He had had wealth and beauty, travel, books, he had inherited Wastewater, and women—women had always been but too kind to him!

His first wife, Janet Fleming, the widow of a distant relative, had come first to Wastewater about thirty years before. Janet was then twenty-two, weeping, helpless, alone—unless the four-weeks-old baby in her arms might be considered a companion. This baby had been David himself, fatherless since five months before his birth. Exactly seven weeks after her tearful and black-swathed arrival in the house of her kinsman, Janet, David’s young mother, had married Black Roger Fleming of Wastewater.

There had been quite a houseful of relatives, all more or less distant, there to receive her, for in the comfortable fashion of a past day the rich young heir of Wastewater had felt himself responsible for his less fortunate kin, especially his women kin; and more than that, it had suited his somewhat feudal ideas of hospitality to gather the entire clan about his big dining table.

So David’s mother had found Roger with a stately, withered little gray-headed second cousin—his uncle’s widowed daughter-in-law—“Aunt John,” keeping house for him, and assisting her a dark-eyed, vivacious daughter named Flora, and a smaller, more delicate, and timid daughter, Lily—third cousins, if relationships were to be traced. And besides these there was Roger’s younger brother, Will, a sweet, idle, endearing ne’er-do-well, who was supposedly studying law with a Boston firm, and who was actually doing nothing at all except enjoy life as an irresponsible junior.

Roger’s marriage made small difference in the others’ lives; David, whose memory began a few years after this, indeed could remember them all, living along comfortably in the big house. He remembered his dark-eyed, animated mother, who shortly after marrying Roger had had another boy baby in her arms; he remembered “Aunt John,” who managed the house and ruled the children and servants; Aunt Flora, watchful and jealous and sharp-tongued; Uncle Will, idle and laughing; Aunt Lily, small and delicate, reading Tennyson and singing “In Old Madrid” at the square piano; remembered his own splendid, rollicking baby half-brother Tom, and remembered above all Roger himself, still handsome, superb, riding his horses along the cliffs all about, driving splendid bays in an open barouche, carrying off the boys’ mother to hear Irving’s “Thomas à Becket” or Rostand’s “L’Aiglon” in Boston.

A veritable horde of servants kept this big household comfortable—butlers, gardeners, a coachman, a stable boy, fat cooks in the kitchen, whispering maids in the upper halls, and almost always a comfortable middle-aged housekeeping person who conferred constantly with old “Aunt John” and haggled with fruit peddlers at the gate in the sandy back lane.

This staff of domestics was lessened now, although there were still a butler and half-a-dozen underlings. But there had been other changes more important at Wastewater.

First, when David was six and little Tom Fleming five years old, their mother had died. Afterward, the boys had been packed off to boarding school and had been there when they heard of another death at home, this time of old “Aunt John.”

But Flora and Lily and Will continued to live there with Roger, and it was only a few months after their mother’s death that Flora, between a frown and a smile, had told them that she was shortly to take that mother’s place: she and Roger were to be married as soon as his year of mourning was over.

This had not deeply impressed the little boys; they cared little what their elders did, and had it not been that a new figure had immediately come upon the scene, David thought, long afterward, that he might easily have believed himself to have dreamed Flora’s announcement.

But a new figure did come, among the many friends and relatives who were always drifting through Wastewater, the figure of a certain handsome, sensible blonde Mrs. Kent, from Montreal, merely visiting Roger on her way back home, and with her, her little daughter Cecily, fresh from a Baltimore school. Cecily had been seventeen then, dark, fragile, flower-like. She was merely a child, going home to her father and little brother and stopping to visit a friend of Mamma’s on the way.

Roger was in the early forties at this time—actually older than Cecily’s mother, whom he had known as a girl, in Boston. But six days after their arrival at Wastewater Cecily ran away with him and they were married.

David remembered all this well, the uproar in the house, Flora’s loud voice, Lily crying loudly, Mrs. Kent fainting and sobbing. Lily and Flora came to their senses because they had no choice, and settled down to keeping house for the white-faced little bride, but Mrs. Kent never forgave her daughter or spoke to her again. It was at about this time that Flora quietly married Will Fleming; married him, David knew now, because she could not marry his brother.

Then came sad, sad years to Wastewater, years that sobered the dashing master of the house for the first time in his life. For it became evident from the first that the new Mrs. Fleming would not bear her title long. The city doctors, one after the other, gave her illness the name of a lingering and incurable malady, but Cecily herself knew, and perhaps Roger knew, that it was youth—youth forced too soon into the realities of loneliness, responsibility, passion, and fear—that was really killing her.

Placid, uncomplaining, sweet, Cecily lay on a couch for months and months, sometimes worse, sometimes so much better that she could walk slowly up and down the garden paths above the sea on Roger’s arm. Aunt Flora, David remembered, had been living in Boston then, where Uncle Will had some temporary position, but Flora came back to Wastewater for the long vacation, bringing with her her own baby, the lovely black-eyed girl that was Sylvia; “even then the little thing was as proud as Lucifer himself!” thought David, reaching this point in his recollections with a smile.

Flora and her tearful little sister Lily and the baby did not go back to Boston in the winter; they would join Will “later on after Cecily’s operation,” they said. And even David knew that “later on” might be only when Cecily was dead. He and Tom went back to school in September, and neither ever saw Cecily again; he and Tom had played late in the clear twilight, along the shore, their new school suits had been laid neatly upon their beds when they came into the close, stuffy house, and their valises packed capably by Aunt Flora.

Cecily had been lying on a big couch by the fire; David sat on a low tuffet beside her and held her hand with all the heartache of an inarticulate fifteen-year-old before a tragedy he may not share. Lily, who had been strangely pretty and gay of late, was at the piano, sometimes singing, sometimes murmuring with Roger, who was leaning above her. Sylvia, three years old, was running back and forth in the pleasant soft light that shimmered with the reflected motion of the sunset on the sea.

That was the last of domestic peace and happiness at Wastewater for a long time. For it was only a week after that that young Tom ran away from school, and Roger was dragged from the bedside of his wife, just facing another operation, to go in search of his boy.

Tom, a sturdy, self-confident boy, now past fourteen, had indeed often threatened this; he was no student; his only books were sea tales; his one thought was of the open sea. He had picked up enough sea talk in Keyport, the straggling village of fishermen’s huts halfway between Crowchester and Wastewater, to pass for a sailor anywhere; he left for his father a smudged and misspelt but unmistakably gay letter, assuring him that he would be back by Christmas, anyway, and love to everybody, and tell Sylvia that he would bring her a doll, maybe from China, and not to worry about him, because——!

Eighteen long years ago now, but they had never seen Tom since. That had been the beginning of Roger’s long cruises, always seeking his son, always returning to Wastewater with the hope of word from him. He had come back that same winter from the first search to find Cecily dying, sinking under heavy narcotics, but knowing that he was there, they thought, and happier when he was beside her. And twice there had been word, a scratched letter from Tom in Pernambuco three years after he went away, and another several years later from Guam. Both contained love, casual greeting; Tom was on an interesting trip now, but immediately after it he was coming home.

So Roger travelled, hoped, came and went untiringly, and Flora kept Wastewater open, ready for the runaway’s return, and meanwhile a home, a headquarters for all the other members of the family. Here David himself came for all his vacations, here Lily crept back, crushed, almost vacant-minded, deserted by her “travelling agent,” and with a tawny-headed baby girl something a little worse than fatherless.

Will Fleming, who had protested for cheerful idle years that office work would kill him, had proved his words when Sylvia was only four by quite simply dying of pneumonia during a long absence in the West, and so Flora and Lily were alone again at Wastewater, but with the two little girls to take their places as the children of the old place. Flora’s child, Sylvia, was a superbly proud little creature, tall, imperious, with scarlet cheeks, the white Fleming skin, the black Fleming eyes, indeed as absolute a “black Fleming” as ever had been born. Lily’s Gabrielle, three years younger, was a thin, nervous, tawny-headed little creature, full of impish excitements and imaginings. Roger would find the two little girls, when he came back weary-hearted and sick, playing “flower ladies” with much whispering and subdued laughter in the old garden, or penning crabs and small sea creatures in pebbly prisons on the shore.

One day, only a few weeks before his death, Roger had a long talk with David, walking back and forth along the garden paths that were sweating and panting under the breath of an untimely summer day in mid-May. There was no sun; a sort of milky mist lay over the sea; the warm plants dripped, and smelled of hothouses. David remembered watching the slow silky heaving of the obscured ocean as his stepfather talked.

“I made my will when you were only a baby, Dave—when Tom was born. That’s—my God, that’s twenty years ago. But I put a codicil in a week or two back, giving Will’s child—Sylvia here—the whole of it in case—he may have got mixed up in this sea warfare, you know—in case the boy never comes home. But he will! I gave Will’s widow—poor Flora—all that my own mother left, when Will died; that’ll take care of her and of Sylvia; Tom’ll see that they stay here at Wastewater if they want to. And Flora’ll care for poor Lily’s child. Your father fixed you pretty well—I’ve left you the Boston houses to remember your stepfather by. You’ve been like my own son to me, David. I’ve had a long run for my money,” Roger said somewhat sadly that same evening, looking up at his own portrait over the mantel, when the men were alone in the sitting room. “But a better man would have made a better job of it! Tom’ll come home, though, and there’ll be Flemings here again, boys and girls, David, to keep the old place warm.”

“I hope you’ll keep it warm yourself,” David had answered, cheerfully. “You’re not fifty-three yet!”

“No, Dave—I’ve lived too hard. I’ve broken the machinery,” Roger said; and it was true. “I remember my twenty-first birthday,” he went on, musingly, “when Oates turned the estate over to me. He was a nice fellow—forty, I suppose, making perhaps six thousand a year, and with half-a-dozen children. Homely little sandy fellow—he doesn’t look a day older to-day. I remember his watching me, I’d a hatful of florists’ and tailors’ bills to pay—watching me scribble off checks for twice his year’s income, right there in his office. I bought my dog, ‘Maggie’—that was ‘Queen Vic’s’ mother—that day. They were great years, David; young men don’t know anything like them to-day—but a better man might have made a better job of them! I didn’t want a wife—I wanted all the women in the world, until the day your mother walked in here with you in her arms, and that was a dozen years later. I wish we’d had a houseful like you, David—I wish Tom had had sisters and brothers—might have held the boy! Well,” the master of Wastewater had ended, “if Tom’s not here, turn it all over to Flora’s girl when she’s twenty-one. Women manage these things better. Sylvia’ll have her fun and build for the future, too. Or maybe she and the boy may make a match of it—they’re both Flemings, Dave. And more than that—your Aunt Flora has a score to settle with me—there’s a sort of poetic justice in her daughter’s getting it all. She—she cared, in her way—she’s not a woman to care easily, either. And she forgave my marrying your mother—she stood by your mother. But when it came to Cecily—Flora and I were to have been married then, you know—she won’t mention her name to this day! I’ve treated a good many women badly,” Roger had confessed, with a twitch of his handsome mouth, “but I never treated any one as badly as poor Flora.”

David had been pleased, and secretly amused, to see that the old incorrigible smile was lighting his stepfather’s magnificent eyes. Upon whatever episodes in the past Roger’s mind was moving, he found them sweet. David liked to fancy the bustled and chignonned ladies of the ’Eighties thrilling over “Papagontier” roses from the irresistible Roger Fleming of Wastewater, the two-button kid gloves that agitated the clicking fans in the opera house when this winner of hearts sauntered in.

And after all, Death had come kindly, as Life had, to Black Roger Fleming. There had been one more hope about Tom; Roger had been eagerly and confidently flinging clothes into his well-worn trunk, telephoning, shouting directions, exulting in the need for action, all through a sweet June morning. Sylvia, nine years old, and Gabrielle, six, had been running at full speed along the upper hall, and they saw him come to his door—saw him fall, with one hand clutching his heart.

Aunt Lily’s periodic melancholia had developed into a more serious condition now, and she was away on one of her long absences in a sanitarium. But David was there. Flora was there, the old servants were there to fly to Roger’s side—already far too late. He had been warned of his heart; this was not utterly unexpected.

Three days later David wrote a letter to Tom, launched it out into the great world with little hope that he would ever read it. He was the heir, there was a large estate, he must come home.

But Tom had never come home.

CHAPTER III

So there was the story, thought David, rousing himself from his favourite position of leaning forward in his low chair, with his linked hands between his knees, and looking upward at the superb and smiling portrait once more—there was the story to the present day. Flora had guarded her forlorn little sister to the end, ten years ago; had educated Lily’s child, Gabrielle, that same Gabrielle who was to return from years of schooling to-day. Flora’s own splendid child, the beautiful Sylvia, would also be coming home from college one of these days to claim her great inheritance, to be owner and mistress of Wastewater. David himself, finishing college, had had some rather unhappy dull years in business in New York, had gone from the handling of pictures to the painting of pictures, and was now happy in the knowledge that his day as a painter of this same murmuring sea was coming, if not quite come.

In his thirty-first year, he kept a small studio in New York; his friends, his fellow workers, were there, the galleries and exhibitions were there. But he did much of his painting near Wastewater and had a sort of studio-barn at Keyport, where canvases were stored, and into which he sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Flora regarded him, however coolly and suspiciously, as a son; he was Sylvia’s guardian, he was Roger’s trustee, he advised and counselled the mother and daughter in everything they did. And then—he added this fact with a rather rueful smile to all the other facts of his life—he had always loved Sylvia, from the days of her imperious babyhood. He had gone from a big-brotherly adoration to a more definite thing; she knew it—trust Sylvia!—although he had never told her.

Aunt Flora knew it, too, or at least suspected it, but then it was natural to Aunt Flora to suppose all the world in love with her splendid child. Sylvia was just twenty; give her another year or two, David would muse, let her feel her wings. And then perhaps—perhaps they two would bring the Fleming line back to Wastewater.

The clock on the mantel struck an uncertain, silvery six. David looked at his watch in surprise: six o’clock. Gabrielle would be here in another two hours. Heavens, he said half aloud, stirring the fire and glancing over his shoulder at the deepened shadows of the ugly old room, how the wind howled about Wastewater in the autumn evenings, and how clearly one heard the gulls and the slash-slash of the sea!

Flora came in with a lamp; usually Hedda’s burden, but Hedda had gone downstairs, she explained; David rose. They were setting its familiar pink china globe carefully upon the crowded table when there was a stir outside in the upper hall, and the door opened, and a tall girl came quickly in, with a little nervous laughter in her greeting.

David had last seen Gabrielle at sixteen, when her teeth were strapped in a gold band and her young boyish figure still had a sort of gawky overgrownness about it. She had been convalescent after a fever when she had sailed for France, then, and wearing big dark glasses on her bright eyes for fear of the glare of the sea, and had been plainly dressed in a heavy black coat and a school-girlish hat. She had been crying, too, emotional little Gabrielle; she had not altogether been a prepossessing little person, although David had always liked her and had given her a genuinely affectionate brotherly kiss for good-bye.

But that memory had not prepared him for this girl’s appearance; tired she undoubtedly was, train-rumpled, cold, and wind-blown, but she was oddly impressive for all that.

She enveloped Flora, who had stood wiping her oily hands on a barred tea towel, with a quick embrace and a kiss; then her eyes found David, and she held out both her hands.

“David! But how exactly as you were! And how like Uncle Roger!”

David had forgotten the husky voice, with a delicious touch of contralto roughness in it; he had forgotten nothing else, for this eager, graceful woman had about her little of the awkward, tear-stained child of more than two years before.

She was tall, perhaps not quite so tall as Sylvia, but very much more so than he had remembered her. Her hair, tawny, thick, spraying into fine tendrils on her forehead in the old way, hardly showed at all under her traveller’s hat, but her mouth had gained in sweetness and power, and in the creamy pallor of her face—so different, as it had always been different, from Sylvia’s rose-and-whiteness!—her eyes were astonishing. Even as a child she had had memorable eyes.

They were beautifully shaped, deep-set eyes, of the living grayness of star sapphires. In odd contrast to the warm brunette skin and the fair hair, they were black-fringed, and the brows above them were black and straight. This had made the child look odd, pixy-like, years ago, with her flying fair hair and nervous little forehead, but it made this serene girl superb.

Best of all, David thought, covertly studying her, as she sat upon the stiff-backed little chair Flora indicated, between Flora’s own armchair and David’s; best of all were her contours, the making of her. Child of little cry-baby Aunt Lily and the peripatetic agent she might be, but she was splendidly fine in her outlines and textures for all that. Her hands were fine, white, not too small, beautifully shaped. Her ankles were fine, her head nicely set and nicely poised when she moved it quickly to look at him or at her aunt. The shape of her face was fine, the cheek-bones a thought too high, the upper lip a shade too short, but the modelling of the mouth and temples and the clean cut of the chin were perfect. Her big teeth were white and glistening, her fair hair controlled to neatness in spite of its rebel tendrils, and brushed to a goldeny lustre. Her voice, husky and sweet, and lower than that of most women, was most distinctive of all. David wished that Aunt Flora would show something a little more motherly, a little more hospitable in her welcome—would at least ask Gabrielle to take off her hat.

But Flora, for her, was not ungracious.

“You are early, Gabrielle,” she said, kindly. “David had said something of meeting you in Crowchester if you came down on the two o’clock train.”

“I came on a special train this morning. We stopped at Worcester, with some girls who live there.”

“You’re not tired?”

“Well.” The white teeth flashed. “Rumpled and train-dusty and a little confused. We got into Montreal—what is to-day?—day before yesterday. Yesterday we were on the train, last night in the Boston convent.”

“You hardly know where you are?” David, speaking for the first time, suggested.

“Ah, I know I’m at Wastewater!” she answered, eagerly. “Every inch of the way I’ve been getting more and more excited. The sea—you can’t know what it meant to me! I could just see it, in the dusk. I can’t believe that to-morrow it will be there, right outside the windows, right below the garden!”

“Yet you’ve been on the sea all the way from France,” Flora said, repressively. Flora disliked enthusiasm.

“But not our sea, as we know it here at Wastewater,” Gabrielle answered, more quietly. “To-morrow I’ll walk along our shore and out the little gate on to the cliffs toward Tinsalls—do you ever walk that way now, David? And Keyport! I must go to Keyport, too.”

Her voice faltered on the last phrases a little uncertainly, and David interpreted aright her quick flush and the glance she sent her aunt. Tom’s name was indissolubly linked with that of Keyport, for his father had first sought him, and had always suspected that his escape had been planned there. And since Uncle Roger’s death, Flora, whose own daughter’s fortune hinged upon Tom’s return or non-return, had not encouraged much hopeful speculation about him among the younger members of the family. But Flora had been rooted securely for many placid years now, and she only commented mildly:

“Keyport. That’s where your uncle first hunted for poor Tom. Dear me, how many years ago!”

“No word—never any word,” David said, shaking his head in answer to Gabrielle’s quick questioning glance. “We won’t hear, now. The war split up the whole world; there must have been hundreds of lives lost upon the sea, and upon the land, too, for that matter, with no record left anywhere.”

“Think of it—Tom!” Gabrielle said, under her breath. And for a long moment they were all silent. Then Flora asked the newcomer if she would like to go upstairs.

“You’ll hardly have time to change, now,” said Flora. “One of the girls has made the old blue room ready for you. Call Maria if you need anything.”

“Maria! Then she didn’t marry her sailor!” Gabrielle said, laughing as she rose. “And Margret’s not here any longer?”

“She comes and goes; she’s pretty old now,” David said, as Flora merely seemed to be waiting patiently for Gabrielle to go.

“She’ll come over to see me, or I’ll go into Keyport and find her,” Gabrielle promised. “Ah,” she said, on a long sigh, departing, “it’s so good to be home!”

The door shut behind her; there was utter silence in the room. Flora, who usually had her knitting at this time, sat back with leaden, closed eyes; David glanced at her, looked back at the fire.

“Is she like what you expected?” David asked.

“She’s like nothing—nobody,” Flora answered, in a low tone.

“She’s handsome!” David offered. “Poor child!”

Flora made no answer. She opened her eyes, and began to knit, flinging the granite-gray yarn free with little flying jerks. David was mending the fire when Hedda came stolidly in to announce dinner.

Gabrielle joined them on the way downstairs; David smiled at her.

“Seems strange to be home?”

“It seems,” she said, “as if I had never been away! The old rooms, the old things, this old good feeling of the first autumn cold in the house—and that loud sound of the sea——”

Meals at Wastewater nowadays were tedious and formal affairs. The dining room was large and draughty, and the candles lighted on the side tables wavered in the cool autumn evening. There were great bay windows on the north and east walls; the latter sometimes caught the clean sweet light of sunrise, but almost all the year through it was a dreary room even in the daytime. These bays were now shut off in heavy rep curtains, with tassels and ropes; the walls were covered with a heavy old pressed paper in chocolate and gold; the floor, outside the “body-Brussels” rug, shone slippery and dark. In one corner, cunningly concealed in paper and wainscoting, was the door into the enormous, inconvenient pantry; the kitchen and storerooms were downstairs, and in pauses in the meal the diners could hear the creaking of the dumb-waiter ropes and the maids’ anxious voices echoing in the shaft.

There was a great rubber plant in one corner, heavy walnut sideboards, and a great mirror over the black-and-white marble mantel that seemed to make the room darker and more gloomy. On the mantel was another heavy bronze-and-marble clock, this one under a clear tall bubble of glass ringed by a chenille cord. On each side of the clock stood heavy bronze statues of Grecian women holding aloft four-branched candlesticks that were never lighted.

There was never a fire nowadays in this fireplace, which was indeed a good twenty-five feet from the table, and must have burned for half a day in winter weather to make any impression upon the diners. Sometimes in January Flora would have an oil stove lighted in here during meals; usually she ate shuddering and rubbing her cold fingers dryly upon each other between courses, and escaped as soon as possible to the heavy warmth of the upstairs sitting room again.

Over the square walnut table hung a heavy lamp upon adjustable tarnished chains. Upon a walnut table in a corner stood the large birdcage, empty now, but where once Roger had kept the two green talkative parrots that had been one of the joys of David’s childhood and Tom’s.

“Here, open that cage, Katy—Addie—one of you!” David could remember his stepfather saying, when it was time for dessert. “Come here, Cassie-girl—come here, old Sultan!” And out would come the chuckling and murmuring birds, with the unearthly green of their feathers turned upside down or swept sideways as they sidled and climbed their way to their master’s shoulders. How often had David seen his stepfather, whom he so passionately admired, composedly eating his fruit and his cheese, with one small jade body mincing on his shoulder and the other weaving its way down his busy arm!

Gabrielle asked an occasional question or two to-night as the meal progressed; David—never an easy talker—did his best to keep the conversation moving. But Flora’s heavy silences were too much for both, and in the end it was a quiet meal. The wind outside whined and whispered at the closed shutters, shutters that, Gabrielle knew, gave upon a very jungle of heavy shrubbery on the northern and eastern fronts of the lower floor. Now and then an unused door, in some distant unused room, banged sullenly and was still.

Afterward they went back to their places beside the fire again, but in pure charity David presently suggested that the traveller be sent to bed. The warmth, the food, the quiet, and her fatigue were causing her an absolute torture of sleepiness; she held her eyes open with an effort, and answered her aunt’s questions with sudden stares and starts, smiling nervously as she roused herself to a full realization of where she was and what she was saying.

“Yes, go to bed,” said Flora, knitting. “And—sleep late if you like,” she added, as the slender young figure moved wearily to the door.

“Thank you,” Gabrielle answered, very low. “Good-night!” And it was only with his last glance at her that David realized with sudden compunction that she was on the verge of tears.

Tears, however, that she did not shed. She went resolutely up through the cold dark hallways and stairs to the third flight, where was the big room that had been assigned to her. The halls were pitchy dark, and the room, when she got to it, was impenetrably black.

Gabrielle groped for the matches, found them, struck a light, and drew toward her the hinged arm of the gaslight at the bureau. There was a bare brown marble top on the bureau, with a limp fringed towel laid across it; the bureau and the great table, desk, and bookcases were all enormous, heavy, and as impersonally bare as those in some old hotel. There was no closet, but there were two great wardrobes flanking a door that led to a sort of dressing passage or hallway, where there was a stationary washstand of wide, bare brown marble.

There were four high windows, reaching to the floor, with iron balconies outside; these were curtained in old-rose brocade, all silvery scrolls and cyclamen, tassels and cords. The bed was walnut, decorated with dots and ripples in mill-work, flat and bare. There were antimacassars on all the chairs, the neat green blotter on the desk had seen much use, Gabrielle’s trunk and suitcase had been set down in the centre of everything, and in her hurried scramble for a brush and a handkerchief before dinner she had tumbled the contents of the latter dishearteningly upon a sort of lounge set “cater-cornered” toward the empty fireplace.

Tumbled linen, the book she had been reading, her writing materials, a dozen disorderly trifles—Gabrielle quailed before the awful thought of having somehow to segregate them, to empty the suitcase and the trunk to-morrow. She was so dirty, too, and so cold, and the bathroom was across that formidable dark hall! She opened the bed with vigorous tugging—the sheets felt icily damp and lifeless.

Suddenly, as she struggled about forlornly in the dim light, a tap on the door made her heart leap. The old house was sufficiently full of ghosts without any such tangible horrors as this! But it was only good-natured, pock-marked Maria, with a kettle of hot water and a sympathetic look.

“Mr. David,” it appeared, had just slipped down to the kitchen, by whose sociable tea table Maria had been seated, to send someone up to Miss Gabrielle. Maria moved about the big chamber capably and not too silently, and Gabrielle felt her fears dissipate under the wholesome companionship. She managed a sort of sponge bath in the dressing room when Maria went downstairs for more hot water, this time in a rubber bag.

“Tell me about Margret, Maria. She’s not here any more?” Gabrielle questioned, when the maid came back. The girl was seated on her bed now, in her nightgown, brushing the long thick masses of her bright hair.

“She lives with her daughter in Keyport, mostly: she’s here nearly every day, though,” said Maria, folding and straightening capably. “She’s ’most eighty, Margret is.”

“She was my first nurse, when I came here as a baby with my mother,” Gabrielle said. “Such an old darling! My mother was—delicate, you know. She was Mrs. Fleming’s sister.”

“Sure, but that was before I come here,” Maria reminded her, with her pitted, plain face full of interest. “You don’t look like Miss Sylvia,” she added, mildly.

“Oh, no! She’s like all the Flemings—dark. Is she pretty?” Gabrielle demanded.

“They say she’s what you call a beauty,” Maria stated, dispassionately. Gabrielle felt a little thrill of interest, perhaps of more, the beginning of a jealous stir at her heart. When Maria had gone she sat on, cross-legged on her bed, in her shabby old convent wrapper, absent-mindedly brushing her hair, with her wide-awake eyes staring into the shadows of the stately old chamber.

Sylvia was “what you call a beauty.” Sylvia would have this whole place some day—would own Wastewater. Wastewater, the house that Gabrielle naturally thought the most interesting and important place in the world.

What did David think about Sylvia? Gabrielle wondered. He had sat there by the fire, with his handsome head bent a little to one side, and his hands linked, and a half smile upon his handsome face. He had glanced up at Gabrielle now and then, and always with a kindly smile. Was Sylvia to have David, too, with everything else?

But Gabrielle would not think about David. She dismissed him with a fervent, “I hope I won’t like him as well to-morrow! I hope he’s really horrid and disappointing!” and knelt down to say her prayers. Prayers had always been in the chapel at St. Susanna’s, and the girls had worn their black veils. But she dared not think of that, either—not to-night, when she was so alone.

She crossed the big room and opened a French window, pushed resolutely on the heavy shutters beyond, and hinged them back. The night was moonless, starless, and dark, and filled with the troubled creaking and rushing of branches and the steady crashing of the sea. The girl could not distinguish where the garden ended and the wide surface of the moving waters began, but these had been her loved and familiar companions from babyhood, and she felt nothing but a restful sense of being home again when she heard their voices.

A current of cool moving air stirred the room, the bureau gas-jet wavered and went out, and Gabrielle, used to electric lighting, laughed nervously and aloud as she turned back to grope once more for matches.

But turning on the narrow iron balcony her eyes were arrested by the great eastern façade of Wastewater, of which her windows were a part. It loomed in the night a shadow just a little blacker than the prevailing dark; her own room was in a corner, next came a deep angle, like the three sides of a court, and then the northern wing, where seamstresses and house servants and coachmen, ladies’ maids and valets, agents delayed overnight, all sorts of odd and inconsiderable gentry had been lodged in Wastewater’s days of glory, years before.

Gabrielle stared oddly at this wing for a few moments, looked back into her own room. There was no light behind her to be caught in a distant window and reflect itself like another light.

Her heart began to beat strong and fast. In the opposite wing, across the wide blackness of the court, in another corner room at the level of her own room—there was certainly a light. Gabrielle felt a sense of utter and unreasoning terror, she did not know why. She stared in a sort of horrified fascination at the yellow glints of light behind the shutter, her breath coming hard, one hand clutching her heart.

“David!” she whispered. Then frightened by her own voice she stumbled madly back in the dark, groping for gas fixtures, for matches, lighting her bedside lamp with shaking fingers, and springing in under the blankets with a long shudder of fear.

Safe—of course! But for a long time her heart did not resume its normal beat. There was something utterly unnerving about the sight of that quietly lighted apartment, mysteriously hung between the dark mysterious sky and wind and night and sea. Gabrielle did not fall asleep until she heard Aunt Flora and David come upstairs.

CHAPTER IV

Gabrielle was wandering along an overgrown path before breakfast the next morning when David came after her and sauntered at her side. The sun was shining brilliantly after a clearing storm, the air aromatic with delicious leaf-scent, and the sea dancing and blue. Everything was singing and shining in a warm bath of sweet clear light, there were a few late birds hopping about, and gulls walked on the sunken brick paths as boldly as the pigeons did. Under the thick growth of the cedars and conifers golden shafts penetrated; the paths and garden beds were deep in sodden and drifted leaves.

“Oh, what a morning!” sang Gabrielle, as David joined her.

“What a morning!” he echoed. And he added, “I needn’t ask if you slept well?”

For indeed she was glowing from a bath, from a night’s deep rest, glowing with all the morning beauty of healthy eighteen. The sun shone upon her warm brown hair, rousing golden lights in it, and her gray-sapphire eyes were shining. David noted that she walked with a little spring, as if in mere walking there were not quite enough action to free the bubbling vitality within her.

“I didn’t dare go far,” she said, “for I suppose breakfast is still at half-past eight? But presently—when I’ve unpacked and gotten things straightened out—I’m going to explore!”

“I like this Quaker costume,” David said, glancing at the plain gray dress.

“This? It’s the Sunday uniform,” Gabrielle told him. “Black on week-days, and black always for the street—sometimes we went to the Madeleine or Notre Dame on Sundays, you know, and twice to organ concerts. But these we always wore indoors at St. Susanna’s.”

“All very well for the smaller girls,” David smiled, “but didn’t you others rebel?”

“Ah, but I have other clothes,” said Gabrielle, interestedly. “There’s a lovely countess in Paris, a widow, who is one of the old children——”

“One of the——?”

“Old children. One of the alumnæ of St. Susanna’s,” she elucidated, laughing at his bewildered look. “That’s what the nuns call them, ‘the old children.’ And every year this countess takes the graduates and goes with them to buy suitable clothes—that is, if there aren’t fathers and mothers to do it for them,” added Gabrielle. “So she took me, the darling! We all know her quite well, and the last year one may go to her Sunday afternoon teas four or five times,” explained the girl, seriously. “That is, if you’ve no devoirs.”

“Devoirs?”

“Penances. Punishments to write for breaking rules,” she said.

“I feel dense. Devoirs, of course,” said David, diverted. “Tell me more of this. If you had no devoirs you might go to tea with the countess?”

“So that we might comport ourselves becomingly in society,” agreed Gabrielle. “And then, two weeks before we left for Cherbourg, she took me into the city, and bought me—oh, lovely things! A velvet dress; I wore that once on the boat. And a lovely brown lace dress, and a hat, and a suit, and three blouses. But we had to travel in our uniforms, of course. ‘Religious in habit. Students in uniform.’ That’s the rule.”

David was finding this extremely amusing and interesting. Through the medium of such engaging youth and freshness, such simplicity and eagerness, almost anything would have been somewhat so. But this glimpse of girlhood managed so decorously by rule was new to him, and it contrasted oddly with—well, for example, with Sylvia’s breezy independence and that of all the other young women he knew.

“Did you—did any of the girls really like it, Gabrielle?”

“Did——?” The wonderful eyes widened and were more wonderful than ever. “But we all loved it!” she exclaimed. “We had—fun. The gardens were perfectly beautiful, and on Sundays there was always a sweet, and often on Thursdays! Or some girl’s father would send her a great box of chocolates.”

“You were in Normandy when I was in Paris,” David said, wondering if he would have thought to send a box of chocolates to St. Susanna’s if she had been there.

“Normandy! Isn’t it—but you don’t know it!” she said. “It’s heavenly. We have such a cunning little place there; it was a sort of gate-lodge once, and of course we had the sea!—it used to remind me of Wastewater, only of course the sun seemed to set in the wrong direction!——David,” Gabrielle broke off to ask earnestly, “didn’t you find Paris very disappointing?”

“Rucker and I were only there ten days, on our way to Spain, to paint,” David reminded her. “No, I don’t remember that it was exactly—disappointing,” he added, in a tone that made her laugh.

“To me,” the girl said, “Paris was all Dumas and Victor Hugo and Stanley Weyman. I like their Paris the best. Sedans, masked riders, horses waiting in the angles of the walls——It made me almost glad not to see London,” she added, gravely. “Imagine losing Dickens’s London, and Thackeray’s, and Trollope’s! Oh, look,” she said, in a tone rich with affectionate recollection, as they stopped by the old sundial set in a mouldy circle of emerald grass.

“You still like adventure stories?” David suggested, remembering that she always had liked them.

“Not always,” Gabrielle answered. And with a suddenly warming enthusiasm, she recounted to him a story she had read on the boat, one of a collection of short stories.

It was so simple that it hardly engaged his attention at first: the story of two rich little girls, with a marvellous doll’s house, and two poor little girls socially debarred from being asked in to inspect it. Gabrielle described the minute perfections of the doll’s house, the tiny beds and curtains, the marvel of a microscopic glass lamp, and the wistful wonder of the little pariahs, one bold and eager, the other shy, her little head hanging, her little hand always grasping a corner of her big sister’s apron. By chance the poor little girls were offered an opportunity to creep in, and they were rapturously inspecting the wonder when the rich little girls’ mother indignantly discovered them, sent them forth with insulting scorn, sent them shamed and bewildered on their homeward road. And the older child sat by the roadside, heaving with hurt and fury and heat and fatigue, with the little sister close beside her. And the simple story ended quite simply with the little sister’s murmured words of courage and comfort:

“Never mind. I seen the little tiny glass lamp!”

David was an artist, he adored beauty in youth, in words, in voices. Here he found them all combined in this eager creature who ended her tale with tears in her glorious eyes and a smile that asked for his sympathy twitching her splendid mouth. Told so plainly, under the dreaming autumn sky, in the thinning soft autumn sunlight of the old garden, the whole thing had a quite memorable pathos and charm, and when he thought of Gabrielle—as David did often in the days to come—he always thought of her standing by the sundial in the morning freshness, telling him the story of the doll’s house.

She had brushed the face of the dial free of leaves and pine needles and was scraping the deep incisions with a stick.

“Twenty minutes past eight,” she said, tipping her head to read the time. And afterward she read the inscription in her sweet husky voice:

“Turn, Flemynge, spin agayne;

The crossit line’s the kenter skein.

“One of my first recollections,” said Gabrielle, “is being down here with Uncle Roger and Sylvia—I must have been about six, for it was just before he died. He set us both up on the sundial, and told us it was older than the Stars and Stripes, that it had come from England for his grandfather, and what it meant. It meant that the Flemings were always bringing home wives from overseas and crossing the line. I remember it,” she added, as they strolled back toward the house, “because I said—looking out to sea—‘Will Tom have a wife when he comes home?’ and that pleased Uncle Roger, as anything did, I suppose,” Gabrielle ended, sighing, “that made Tom’s coming back at all seem likely!”

“Poor Tom! It would have been a nice inheritance,” David mused. “It has increased, even since Uncle Roger’s time, you know.”

“Is Sylvia apt to make her home here, David?” Gabrielle asked. “She sounds rather worldly—that’s a great convent word! But tell me, what is she like?”

“She is very beautiful, extremely clever, enormously admired,” David answered, with a little flush. “She has the white Fleming skin, high colour, shining black hair.”

“A girl off a handkerchief box?” Gabrielle suggested.

“Exactly.”

“And are there admirers?”

“A great many.”

The girl looked a quick question, half smiling, and he answered it pleasantly:

“Myself among them, of course! But Sylvia can look much higher than a painter of mediocre pictures.”

“I don’t believe they’re mediocre!” Gabrielle said, stoutly.

“I’ve some at Keyport, most of them are in New York, some on their way now to an exhibition in Washington,” David said. “When I come back you must see them, Gay!”

“When you come back——?” Her walk halted.

“I’m off for New York and then Washington this morning.”

“Oh.” It was not a question, not an exclamation. She pronounced the little monosyllable quietly, resumed her walking. “I like my little old name!” she presently said, with a glancing smile. And then, with sudden interest, as they came closer to the house: “David, tell me—who lives in that wing—up there, on the third floor?”

“Nobody, now. Those are old servants’ rooms; but the servants are on the other side now—Aunt Flora has only five or six. Hedda’s cousin is the cook, an old Belgian woman who’s been here—well, she must have been here several years before you went abroad?”

“Trude?”

“Yes, Trude. Then there’s Maria, the pock-marked one, and a couple of new ones from Crowchester, sisters named Daisy and Sarah, who live with John and Etta at the tenant house, out near the stables, and seem mainly interested in going into Crowchester. John occasionally employs others to assist him in the garden, his wife helps, I believe, with the laundry-work, and old Margret comes over from Keyport to lend a hand now and then. That’s the staff.”

“But look here, David,” said Gabrielle. “You see my open window up there, with the curtain blowing—and then all those blank windows—then turn the corner of the court and come out again in the north wing—up there—there was some light up there last night! I saw it when my own gaslight blew out. It was unmistakable, coming through the chinks of shutters! It gave me the creeps for a moment.”

“Reflection!” David said, smiling. “Reflection in glass.”

“No, for my light was out.”

“Reflection of some other window, then.”

“Yes, but whose?”

“I don’t know,” he told her, amused. “You’ll have ample opportunity to find out, my dear. I’m wondering what you’ll do with yourself, here all alone with Aunt Flora!”

“I’ll work,” she said, stoutly. But he could see that she herself felt a little daunted by the prospect. “I’ll practise, and keep up my French, and take walks into Keyport and Crowchester, and perhaps”—and she gave him a laughing look—“design all the little rooms and hallways of houses in beans when it rains!”

“Good Lord!” David said, with a great laugh. “Do you remember my houses designed in white beans to amuse you and Sylvia on wet holidays? But you have no special plans for yourself, Gay?” he asked, more soberly. “Nothing you especially want to do?”

“I talked it over with Sister Borromeo and Sister Alcantara——” she was beginning, with a faintly worried look, when David laughed again.

“Are these Pullman cars?”

“No!” said Gabrielle, shocked yet laughing, as they mounted the three steps to the side door. “They are wonderful nuns. And they both feel that, under the circumstances, I had better wait and see if Aunt Flora has any plans or any use for me here!”

“And I think that, too,” David said, heartily, delighted to find her so reasonable. “You are not yet nineteen, after all, and we’ll find the happiest solution for you one of these days. I’ll be coming and going all winter, and Sylvia’ll be home, with a degree, in June. So keep up your spirits!”

“Ah, don’t worry about me!” she answered, courageously, going in to breakfast.

CHAPTER V

Three hours later she said good-bye to him composedly at Aunt Flora’s side. He carried away a pleasant recollection of her, standing there tall and smiling, with her gray eyes shining. She was a more than usually interesting type of girl, David mused, going upon his way, and as the man of the family it behooved him to think out some constructive line of guidance in her direction. What about an allowance? Just what would Gabrielle’s status be a year from now, when Sylvia reached her majority and Aunt Flora no longer controlled both girls as if their position were equal? Sylvia might graciously provide for this less fortunate cousin if Sylvia were properly influenced.

This was October; Sylvia was going with the Montallen girls to Quebec for a simple family Thanksgiving week-end, but she would be home for almost three weeks at Christmas time. David must manage a talk with her then. Perhaps the peculiar embarrassments and deprivations of Gabrielle’s position had never occurred to Sylvia, as indeed they never had presented themselves so forcibly to David before. “She is certainly a stunning creature—character, too,” David thought. “God help the child, shut up there with Aunt Flora and the servants, and with Aunt Flora always so curiously hostile to her, at that! I’ll try to get down there before Christmas—see how it goes!”

And he put the thought of Wastewater behind him, as he usually did at about this point in his journey toward Boston or New York.

But Gabrielle had found nothing at Wastewater to make her forget David, and the thought of him lingered with her for many, many days.

They were hard days, these first after her return. Flora was not visibly unfriendly toward her, and the servants were always responsive and interested. But Gabrielle was left almost entirely to her own resources, and after the regular rule of the convent life, the orderly waxed halls in which the sunshine lay in shining pools, the low, kindly voices, the chip-chipping of girls’ feet, the cheerful chatter in the long refectory, the sheltered fragrance of the walled garden, the girl felt lonely and at a loss for employment.

She aired her bed and ordered her room before breakfast; descended promptly, commented with Aunt Flora upon the weather.

“What a wind this morning, Aunt Flora!”

“Yes, indeed, and in the night.”

“It didn’t keep you awake, Aunt Flora?”

“Not the wind, no. I am not a good sleeper.”

Then silence; and Daisy or Sarah with the rolls and coffee, to ask in a low tone:

“Will you have an egg, Mrs. Fleming?”

“I think not, this morning. Perhaps Miss Gabrielle——”

For Gabrielle was not “Miss Fleming” really, although she was used to the name. Sylvia was that, always. Perhaps Miss Gabrielle would have an egg; oftener not. There was no deep golden corn bread to be anticipated here, as a regular Friday morning treat; but sometimes special muffins or a little omelette came up, and then Gabrielle always smiled affectionately and said to herself: “Margret’s here!”

After breakfast every morning she mounted through the large, gloomy halls to her room, wrote in her diary, went resolutely at her French or Italian. Then she went down to the square piano and began with scales, études and nocturnes, sonatinas. When the half-hour after eleven sounded, usually she went out, down to the shore, scrambling among the big rocks she remembered so well, watching this favourite pool or that, as it slowly and solemnly brimmed, overflowed, drained again.

This side of the shore was in shade now, for Wastewater stood on its own little jutting point of cliff and forest, and the sun, at autumn midday, had moved behind the trees. Gabrielle would fall to dreaming, as she stared across the softly heaving, shining expanse of the water, her back against a great boulder, her feet, in their rough little shoes, braced against a smaller one.

Going in to lunch blinking and hungry, the instant effect of closeness, odorous age, and quiet darkness would envelop her. She would look with secret curiosity at her aunt’s mottled, dark face. Aunt Flora had been quietly reading and writing all morning, she would read and write all afternoon.

Immediately after luncheon came Mrs. Fleming’s one outing of the day. Sometimes she walked about the borders with John, discussing changes, her silk skirt turned up over her decent alpaca petticoat, efficient-looking overshoes covering her congress gaiters if the paths were damp. Sometimes John brought the surrey, and Aunt Flora and Gabrielle went into Crowchester to shop. Flora kept a small car, but she did not like it; she did not even like the cars of others, Gabrielle discovered, when they honked behind the stout old bay horse on the roads.

Aunt Flora had acquaintances in Crowchester, but no friends. She never made calls, or entertained at luncheon or dinner. She bowed and talked to the minister’s wife when she met her in a shop, she knew the librarian and the school superintendent, and she belonged, at least nominally, to the Woman’s Improvement Club. Once, in December, there was a lecture at the club on the modern British poets and Flora took Gabrielle, who wore her velvet dress, and was much flushed and excited and youthfully friendly in the dim, women-crowded rooms, and who carried away a delightful impression of Hodgson and Helen Eden and Louise Guiney and tea and cake.

But a week later, when the president of the club sent Gay a card for a dance to be given by the choicest of Crowchester’s youth that winter, Flora shook her head. Much better for Gay not to associate with the village people; Sylvia despised them. It was too easy to become involved in things that had never been acceptable to Wastewater. Gabrielle wrote a charming little note of regret.

Flora wrote to Sylvia every three or four days and received delightful letters from her daughter at least once a week. Sylvia wrote interestedly of a hundred activities, and Gay’s word for her cousin came to be, in her own heart, “superior.” Sylvia was assuredly “superior.” She was still playing golf, for the snows were late, and basket ball, and squash; she was working for mid-term examinations in history, philosophy, and economics. She would have sounded almost formidable if the Thanksgiving letter had not struck a warmer note: Sylvia was ski-ing, tobogganing, dancing; she had been to a little home fancy-dress party as “Night”; her letter was full of delightful allusions to young men, “Bart Montallen, who is in diplomacy,” a charming Gregory Masters, and a “dear idiotic cousin of Gwen’s, Arthur Tipping, who will be Lord Crancastle some day, in all probability—but all such simple people and not rich!” Some of these might come down to Wastewater for a few days before Christmas. Gabrielle’s heart leaped at the mere thought.

Gabrielle sometimes wondered what Flora wrote to Sylvia in those long, closely lined letters that went so regularly from Wastewater. Flora would sit scratching at her desk in the upstairs sitting room, look away thoughtfully, begin to scratch again. Sometimes Gabrielle saw her copying long excerpts from books; indeed, Flora not infrequently read these aloud to her niece, a thought from some bishops’ letters from the Soudan, lines from “Aurora Leigh” or “Lady Clare.”

These were almost all gift books, bound in tooled leather and gilded, with gilded tops. The old house was full of gift books. Gabrielle imagined the last generation as giving its friends large, heavy, badly bound, or at least insecurely bound, books on all occasions, “The Culprit Fay,” “Evangeline,” and “Hiawatha,” Flaxman’s gracious illustrations for Schiller’s “Bell,” Dante with the plates of Doré.

Idly she dipped into them all, idly closed them. Sometimes in the long wintry afternoons she opened the lower drawers of the bookshelves and looked at all the stereoscope pictures of Niagara, and Japan with wistaria falling over arbours, and Aunt Flora and Lily, Gabrielle’s own slender mother, in riding habits, with long veils flowing from their black silk hats. The tiny figures stood out in bold relief, the flowers seemed to move in the breezes of so many years ago; there was a Swiss mountain scene that Gabrielle had loved all her life, with a rough slab of drift almost in the very act of coasting upon the road where men and Newfoundland dogs were grouped.

Her hardest time was when the decorous afternoon excursion or walk was over, at perhaps four o’clock. Dinner was at seven; the winter dusk began to close down two and a half hours before dinner. The girl could not with propriety walk far from the house in the dark, even if she had cared to traverse the cliff roads at night. The servants were far downstairs, all elderly in any case. Aunt Flora hated young servants.

Sometimes she went to the piano and would find herself meandering through an old opera score, “Traviata” or “Faust.” Sometimes, if the afternoon was clear, she walked rapidly to Keyport and rapidly back. Many an afternoon, as long as the light lasted, she prowled about within the confines of Wastewater itself, for besides the always fascinating half-mile of shore there were the cliffs, the woods back of the house, and all the stable yards, cow yards, chicken yards, all the sheds and fences, the paddocks and lanes, the gates and walls that almost two hundred years of homekeeping had accumulated. The big stables were empty now except for one or two dray horses, the sturdy bay that dragged the old surrey, and a lighter horse that Sylvia—Gabrielle learned—sometimes used for riding. There was perhaps one tenth of the hay stored that the big hay barn would accommodate, one tenth of the grain. There were two cows, chickens, pigeons; there were intersecting catacombs of empty rooms and lofts and sheds where apples were left to ripen, or where feathers fluffed at the opening of a door, or where cats fled like shadows. Towering above all, among towering pear trees, there was the windmill, still creaking, splashing, leaking.

John the gardener had a substantial brick house, a nice wife, and a stolid little girl of fourteen who walked the three miles every day to the Union High School between Tinsalls and Crowchester. Gabrielle presently gathered that young Etta was taking two fifty-cent music lessons every week in Crowchester, and that she was going to be a school teacher. Her “grammer” lived in Crowchester, and when the weather got very bad Etta and her mother sometimes stayed with “grammer,” and Uncle Dick drove her to school, and she and her cousin Ethel went to the movies every night.

Wastewater itself might have filled many a lonely afternoon, for there were plenty of unused rooms worthy of exploring. But Gabrielle had small heart for that. There was something wholesome and open about the garden and the stable yards and the sea, but the big closed rooms inside filled her with a vague uneasiness.

The girl would look up at them from outside when the winter sunsets were flaming angrily behind the black etched branches of the bare trees; look up at blank rows of shuttered windows, identify her own, Aunt Flora’s, the upstairs sitting room with gaslight showing pink through the shutters when the cold clear dusk fell; the dining room, with Daisy pulling the rep curtains together.

These were human, used, normal, but there were so many others! Two thirds of the entire lower floor was always sealed and dark, showing from outside only solemn bays, and flat surfaces screened heavily in shrubs and bushes. In the western wing, with hooded windows rising only two or three feet above the old walk, were the kitchen windows; but the older servants, Hedda and Maria and the cook, Trude, had rooms obscurely situated somewhere far back of Aunt Flora’s rooms and Sylvia’s room and the upstairs sitting room on the second floor. Gabrielle’s room was on the third floor, and David’s, and the rooms still kept ready for Tom; these were all that were used of some score of rooms on that level, and Wastewater rose to a mansard as well, to say nothing of the cupola that rose for two floors, and was finished off with columns and a small circular room of glass, high above the tops of the highest trees. Gabrielle remembered when she and Sylvia used to think it a great adventure to creep up there and look down upon a curiously twisted landscape, with all the familiar barns and fences in the wrong places, and so little land, cut by such insignificant ribbons of roads, and so much sea, broken by nothing at all!

“You could put a hundred people in here!” Gabrielle used to think. In the days of its glory, Uncle Roger had told them more than once, there had often been half that number at Wastewater.

All the sadder to find it so empty now, the girl would muse, wandering through the quiet halls. If the winter sun were shining bright, sometimes she opened the great double doors that shut off the end of the dining-room hall, and penetrated, with a fast thumping heart and nervously moving eyes, into what had been the boasted ballroom, billiard room, library, drawing rooms of the house.

In this section was the unused front stairway; curved, enormous, wheeling up from a great square hall. There were doors on all sides, decorous heavy doors, all closed. Beyond them, Gabrielle’s peeping eyes found great silent rooms, whose crystal-hung chandeliers tinkled faintly and reminiscently when the door was opened; swathed hideous satin furniture, rose-wreathed Moquette carpets in faint pinks and blues, looped brocaded curtains creased and cracked with the years, tables topped with marble and mosaic, great mirrors rising up to the high ceilings; everything that could rot, rotting, everything that could bear dust covered with a deep plush of dust.

Sometimes, on a winter noon, chinks of bright light penetrated the closed shutters and spun with motes. Sometimes an old chest or chair gave forth a pistol shot of sound, and for a few hideous seconds Gabrielle’s heart would stand still with utter terror. Once the busy scratching of some small animal behind a wainscot brought her heart into her mouth.

In one room—it had been the “cherry-and-silver parlour” a hundred years ago—there was a cabinet of odds and ends: Dresden statues, broken fans, collapsed ivory boxes and cloisonné. In other rooms there were odd bits, some good, but almost all very bad: majolica, onyx, ormolu, terra cotta. There were one or two good pictures, forty bad ones: seascapes with boats, still-life studies of dead fish, English nobility of the First Empire days, breakfasting in gardens, peasants doing everything ever done by peasants, old woodcuts of Queen Victoria and “Yes or No?”, “Dignity and Impudence,” and Mrs. Siddons, curling and water-stained in their heavy frames.

The books that filled the handsome glass-doored shelves in the dimly lighted, mouldy library, where light crept as into a cave, and where the air was always damp and heavily scented with decay, were almost all ruined after some especially wet winter. Their backs were loosened, their badly printed pages clung together with black stains: Lever and Scott, Shakespeare, The Iliad, Somebody’s History of the World in Twenty Volumes, Somebody Else’s Classic Literature in Forty. Sometimes Gabrielle selected one or two, and carried them upstairs with her. She read voraciously anything and everything: “Innocents Abroad,” “Forty-one Years in India,” “The Household Book of English Verse,” Strickland’s “Mary of Scotland.”

But even with reading, wandering, tramping, exploring, music, languages, the time passed slowly. Gabrielle became, and laughed to find herself becoming, deeply interested in Aunt Flora’s evening game of solitaire. Perhaps the two women never came quite so close to each other as then, when Gay bent her bright head interestedly above the cards, and Flora, with a card suspended, listened to advice. Affectionate, and hungry for affection, Gabrielle was oddly touched when she realized that Flora really liked her companionship at this time, if at no other. Gay had been perhaps a week at Wastewater when one evening, Flora, shuffling her packs, said mildly:

“Don’t tire your eyes, Gabrielle, with that book!”

Gabrielle looked up, saw that the game was about to be commenced. She had turned back to “Stratton” again, with a grateful smile, when Flora said again:

“Was it last night when five aces came out in the first row?”

This was enough. The girl closed her book, leaned forward. Presently she took a lighter chair, on the other side of the little card table, and after that she always did.

On one of these evenings, when the wind was crying and they two seemed alone, not only in the house, but in the world, Gay asked suddenly:

“Aunt Flora, does anybody live in that north wing, opposite where I am but on the same floor?”

“I don’t understand you. How could—how do you mean?” said Mrs. Fleming. Gay saw that she had turned a deathly colour, and was breathing badly, and she told herself remorsefully that such a query, hurled unexpectedly into the silence, might well terrify any nervous elderly woman, living alone.

Eager to simplify matters, she recounted her odd experience on the very first night after her return. She had often looked over in that direction since, she went on, but had seen nothing. But, weary and confused that first night, she might never have gotten to sleep but for the reassuring knowledge that David was so near!

“You may have seen a reflection of some light in the trunk room, up above where you are,” Flora suggested. “Perhaps Maria or Hedda went up there with John and your trunk.”

“No, for they didn’t take my trunk until next day! But they might have gone up there to make room,” Gabrielle conceded, cheerfully, distressed at the continued pallor of her aunt’s face.

“I’ll have Hedda and Maria go all over everything,” Flora said. “I’ll tell them to lock everything and look over everything to-morrow.” And with a mottled hand that shook badly, she resumed her manipulation of the cards, and Gabrielle for a time thought no more about the matter.

The two lonely women had a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and Flora a telegram from Sylvia. And not long after that it was time to prepare for Sylvia’s homecoming at Christmas.

This, Gabrielle perceived, was to be an event quite unparalleled by any of the sober festivities at Wastewater since Uncle Roger’s day. Last Christmas Flora had gone to Sylvia, shut in the college infirmary with a sharp touch of influenza, and last summer Sylvia had taken a six weeks’ extension course, and had spent only odd weeks and week-ends at Wastewater; she had not been enough at home to alter in any way the quiet routine of the household.

But this was different. The Christmas holidays, beginning with a little Christmas house party, would be almost like a housewarming—a sort of forerunner of Sylvia’s attaining her majority and becoming the real owner and the mistress of Wastewater. Sylvia would be twenty-one in late June, when David and her mother would end their long guardianship and surrender to her her inheritance from Black Roger Fleming. Tom was legally, technically, dead; the family felt now that he was truly dead, and every passing year had helped to entrench Flora in her feeling of security. If she had ever expected his return, she did so no longer. The courts had confirmed Sylvia’s expectations. David and Flora had administered her affairs carefully—Flora felt that to her Wastewater would always be home, and that her beautiful child would be rich.

Gabrielle, speculating upon Sylvia’s prospects, had long ago satisfied herself that whatever they were, David would share them. It was the logical, the probable thing; Gabrielle had indeed taken it half for granted, for years. Now, when she heard the quiet little note of admiration in his voice when he spoke of Sylvia, when she studied Sylvia’s pictures and found them beautiful, when she realized how pledged he was to the service of Sylvia’s interests, anxious to do everything that Sylvia would approve, she appreciated that forces as strong as love bound them together, and she fancied—and not without a little wistful pain—that love might easily—easily!—be there too. Everything, everything for Sylvia.

The scale upon which the preparations for the Christmas house party were commenced was astonishing to Gabrielle. She had not supposed her aunt capable of even thinking in such terms. Aunt Flora had always been the last person in the world to associate with thoughts of lavish hospitality, generous and splendid entertaining.

But Aunt Flora went about this business of getting ready with a sure and steady hand that astonished Gabrielle, who could remember nothing of the old days of Wastewater’s splendour.

By mid-December some of the big downstairs rooms were opened, and Margret, aged, gray, wrinkled like a rosy apple, and always with a kindly word for Gabrielle, was directing the other servants in the disposition of the furniture. Linen covers came off, mirrors were rubbed, and fires crackled in the unused fireplaces. The chairs were pushed to sociable angles, and whenever there was sunlight the windows were opened wide to receive it.