The black Flemings

by Kathleen Thompson Norris

For years Sylvia’s mother and David, watching her grow from a beautiful childhood to a fine and conscientious girlhood, had prefaced all talk of her fortune with “unless Tom comes home.” But gradually that had stopped; gradually they, and her circle, and the girl herself, had come to think of her as the rightful heiress.

Now, between luncheon and dinner upon a burning summer afternoon, all this had been snatched from her; instantly taken, beyond all doubt or question. Here was Tom, indisputably reëstablished as sole legatee, as owner of everything here at Wastewater. Yesterday, a rather carelessly dressed brown-faced sailor, with a harsh blue-black jaw, unnoticed among a hundred others in a crowded harbour city, to-night he was their host.

Sylvia asked no sympathy and made no complaint. But the very foundations of her life were shaken; all the ambitions of her busy college years were laid waste, and from being admired and envied, she must descend to pity and obscurity. She and her mother would have Flora’s few thousand a year; plenty, of course, much more than the majority of persons had, Sylvia knew that. But she must readjust everything now to this level, abandon the little red checkbook, and learn to live without the respectfully congratulatory and envious glances. It was bitterly hard. Wherever her thoughts went she was met by that new and baffling consideration of ways and means. Europe? But could they afford it? Escape from the whole tangle? Yes, but how? They could not leave Gabrielle here with Tom, even if Sylvia were not indeed needed while all the matter of the inheritance was being adjusted. Sylvia had said a hundred times that she would really have liked to be among the women who must make their own fortune and their own place in the world; now she found it only infinitely humiliating and wearisome to contemplate.

She did not know whether to be resentful or relieved at the general tendency now to overlook her; Tom naturally had the centre of the stage. But it was all uncomfortable and unnatural, and the girl felt superfluous, unhappy, restless, and unsettled for the first time in her well-ordered life.

Flora had borne the news with the look of one touched by death. She had not in fact been made ill, nor had her usual course of life been altered in any way, unless her stony reserve grew more stony and her stern gray face more stern. But David thought more than once that her nephew’s reappearance seemed to affect Aunt Flora with a sort of horror, as if he had come back from the dead.

She had presented him with her lifeless cheek to kiss when he arrived, and there had been a deep ring, harsh and almost frightening, in the voice with which she had welcomed him. Flora was not mercenary; Gabrielle and David both appreciated clearly that it was not her daughter’s loss of a fortune that had affected her. But from the very hour of Tom’s return she seemed like a woman afraid, nervous, apprehensive, anxious at one moment to get away from Wastewater, desolated at another at the thought of leaving the place where she had spent almost all her life.

Oddly, seeing this fear, David and Gay saw too that it was not of Tom, or of any possible secret or revelation connected with Tom. It was as if Flora saw in his reappearance the reappearance too of some old fear or hate, or perhaps of a general fear and hate that had once controlled all her life, and that had seemed to be returning with his person.

“There is a curse on this place, I think!” Gabrielle heard her whisper once, many times over and over. But it was not to Gabrielle she spoke. And one night she fainted.

Tom had been telling them a particularly hair-raising tale at table, and because he really felt the horrible thrill of it himself, he did not, as was usual with him, embroider it with all sorts of flat and stupid inventions of his own. It was the story of a man, stranded on a small island, conscious of a hidden crime, and attempting to act the part of innocence.

“Of all things,” Gabrielle had said, impressed, “it seems to me the most terrible would be to have a secret to hide! I mean it,” the girl had added, seriously, turning her sapphire eyes from one to another, as they smiled at her earnestness, “I would rather be a beggar—or in prison—or sick—or banished—anything but to be afraid!”