“She likes him?” David managed to say, slowly.
“I think she’s beginning to. She has a nice sort of friendly way with him,” Sylvia said. “He doesn’t seem to bore her as he does me! He wearies me almost to tears.”
“I thought—it seemed to me it was just—her way,” David reasoned. And the darkest shadow that he had ever known at Wastewater fell upon his heart then, and he felt that he could not support it. Of course; she would be the rich and beloved, the furred and jewelled little Mrs. Fleming of Wastewater—he must not stand in her way——
A few days later he went off for a fortnight’s tramp, with Rucker, he said, somewhere in Canada. He left no address, promising to send them a line now and then. And Gabrielle, bewildered with the pain of his composed and quiet parting, watching his old belted suit and the sturdy, shabby knickers out of sight, said to herself again, “I am afraid.”
Tom had made her his special ally and confidante of late, and only Gabrielle knew how far her friendship had been influential in keeping him at home at all. He disliked his Aunt Flora, and felt that Sylvia looked down upon him, as indeed she did. David, affectionately interested as he was, was a forceful, almost a formidable element, wherever he might be, and nobody knew it better than Tom. David might be, comparatively speaking, poor, he might wear his old paint-daubed jacket, he might deprecatingly shrug when a discussion was under way, he might listen smilingly without comment when Tom was noisily emphatic, yet Tom knew, and they all recognized, that there was a silent power behind David. He was a gentleman; books, art galleries, languages, political and social movements, David was quietly in touch with them all. He was what Tom would never be, that strange creature, a personality. Even while he nodded and applauded and praised, he had an uncomfortable effect of making Tom feel awkward and even humble, making him see how absurd were his pretence and his shallow vanity, after all.
But Gay was inexacting, friendly, impressionable, and she combined a most winning and motherly concern for Tom’s physical welfare with a childish appetite for his tales. She felt intensely sorry for Tom, chained here in the unsympathetic environment he had always disliked, and she assumed an attitude that was somewhat that of a mother, somewhat that of a sister, and devoted herself to him.
She liked him best when he talked of the sea, as they sat on the rocks facing the northeast, sheltered by the rise of the garden cliff from the afternoon sea. Dots of boats would be moving far out upon the silky surface of the waters; now and then a big liner went slowly by, writing a languid signature in smoke scarcely deeper in tone than the summer sky. Tom talked of boats: little freighters fussing their way up and down strange coasts, nosing into strange and odorous tropic harbours; Palermo, with the tasselled donkeys jerking their blue and red headdresses upon the sun-soaked piers; Nictheroy in its frame of four hundred islands; Batavia, Barbadoes, Singapore—Tom knew them all. Sometimes the listening girl was fascinated by real glimpses of the great nations, seen through their shipping, saw England in her grim colliers, fighting through mists and cold and rolling seas, saw the white-clad cattle kings of the pampas watching the lading of the meat boats from under broad-brimmed white hats.
And it seemed to Gabrielle, and to them all, that as the days went by Tom lost some of his surface boastfulness and became simpler and more true. He was not stupid, and he must see himself how differently they received his inconsequential, honest talk from the fantastic and elaborate structures he so often raised to impress them. “I’m beginning to like him!” she said. And she wondered why Aunt Flora and Sylvia looked at her so oddly.
CHAPTER XV
One afternoon, when he had been at home for several weeks, he and Gay were alone on the rocks. It was again a burning afternoon, but Tom liked heat, and Gabrielle’s dewy skin still had the child’s quality of only glowing the more exquisitely for the day’s warmth. Sylvia and her mother had gone into Crowchester. David was still away.