He was a hero in his own eyes; he wanted to be a hero in the eyes of his relatives, as well. It was perhaps only Gabrielle, who had wistfully longed to be claimed and admired, too, so short a time ago, who appreciated, upon that strange first evening, that there was something intensely pathetic in Tom’s boasting.
What were this old brick house, and these women with their fuss about vases of flowers and clean sheets, to him? he seemed to ask, scornfully. Let ’em think he was a rough-neck if they wanted to, he didn’t care! Everyone looking at him so solemnly, everyone implying that this money of his father’s was so important—let ’em find out it didn’t mean so much to Tom Fleming!
Yet Tom was impressed, deeply and fundamentally stirred by this homecoming, in a sense that all his adventures had never stirred him. Old memories wrenched at his heart; his wonderful father had been here at Wastewater when Tom had last been here, and his father’s frail little second wife, the delicate Cecily, who had been the object of a sort of boyish admiration from Tom. Perhaps the lean, long, sun-browned sailor, whose actual adventures had taken the place of that little boy’s dreams of the sea, felt deep within himself that he had not gained everything by the change. Slowly all the fibres of soul and body had been hardening, coarsening; Tom had not been conscious of the slow degrees of the change. But he was vaguely conscious of it now.
The old house had seemed to capture and preserve the traditions, the dignified customs of his race; the very rooms seemed full of reproaches and of questions.
His aunt he found only older, grimmer, more silent than he had remembered her; Sylvia had grown from a tiny girl into a beautiful woman, and Gabrielle’s birth had not been until after his departure. But David and he had spent all their little-boy days together, and David immediately assumed the attitude of his guide, wandering about the old place with him in a flood of reminiscences, and taking him down to the housekeeping regions, where old Hedda and Trude and Margret, who remembered him as a child, wept and laughed over him excitedly.
Tom enjoyed this, but when the first flush of greetings to the family and the first shock of stunned surprise were over, a curious restraint seemed to fall upon their relationship, and the return of the heir made more troublesome than ever the separate problems of the group.
Sylvia, from the first half-incredulous instant, had borne the blow with all her characteristic dignity and courage. It was hard for her to realize, as she immediately realized, that even in her loss she was comparatively unimportant, and that whoso surrendered the fortune was infinitely of less moment than whoso received it. But she gave no sign.
She welcomed Tom with charming simplicity, with a spontaneous phrase or two of eagerness and astonishment, and no word was said of material considerations until much later. Yet it was an exquisitely painful situation for Sylvia, the more because she had been so absolute a tool in the hands of the fate that had first made her rich and now made her poor in a breath.
She had not wanted Uncle Roger’s money; she had indeed been a child when the will was made; Tom might easily have been supposed to return, the second Mrs. Fleming might have had children, and her own mother, although she had indeed married Will Fleming rather late in life, might have given Sylvia younger sisters and brothers.
But gradually the path had cleared before Sylvia. Tom had not come home, Sylvia’s father had died, leaving her still the only child, Cecily had died childless, and Uncle Roger had died.