Neither spoke again. They went into the dark hallway, and upstairs, and the gloom of Wastewater sucked them in and wrapped them about with all its oppressive silences, its misunderstandings, and its memories.
CHAPTER XVI
The weeks that followed seemed to Gabrielle Fleming, even at the time when they were actually passing, strangely and darkly unnatural, and afterward they remained a fearful memory in her life. Long before the tragedy in which they culminated she was quite definitely conscious of some brooding cloud, some horror impending over the household, she felt herself bound by a strange interior inhibition, or by a hundred inherited and instinctive inhibitions, from speaking freely, from throwing off, or attempting to throw off, the fears that possessed her.
Outwardly, as the serene autumn darkened and shortened into winter, the household seemed merely what the return of the heir had made it; Tom invalided, restless, in love with his cousin Gabrielle; Sylvia beautiful and confident, as she faced the changed future; Aunt Flora silent, coughing with her usual autumn bronchitis, moving about the house as the very personification of its sinister history; David grave and kindly, managing, advising, affectionate with them all; and the staff of kindly old servants duly drawing shades, lighting fires, serving meals.
Actually, Gabrielle felt sometimes that they were all madmen in a madhouse, and vague disturbing thoughts of her own unfortunate little mother would flit through her mind, and she would wonder if her own reason would sustain much of this sort of suspense.
For suspense it was. The girl knew not why or what she feared, and they all feared. But she knew that their most resolute attempts at laughter and chatter somehow fell flat, that they glanced nervously over their shoulders when a door slammed, and that the shadows and gloom of the half-used old place seemed, of an autumn evening, when the winds were crying, to be creeping from the corners and lurking in the halls, ready to capture whatever was young and happy in dark old Wastewater and destroy it as so much youth and happiness years ago had been destroyed.
Nowadays, she fancied, the very voices of the maids, as they talked over trays or brooms in the hall, took on wailing notes, the clocks ticked patient warnings, a shattered coal on the fire would make them all jump. Gabrielle, with her heart beginning a quick and unreasoning beat, would turn off her bath water lest its roaring drown some warning sound, would stand poised, in her wrapper, as if for flight from she knew not what, listening—listening——
But it was only the October winds, sweeping the trees bare of their last tattered banners, only the fresh, harsh rush of the sea against the rocks, and the scream of a blown gull!
“Sylvia, does it make you feel as if you would like to scream, sometimes?” Gay asked one day, in the bare sunlight of the garden.
“Does what?” But in Sylvia’s dark eyes there was perfect comprehension. “It is almost,” she added, in a low tone, “as if people did really stay about a place to haunt it. That poor little shadowy Cecily—the second Mrs. Fleming—who died, and your mother, and my father, and Uncle Roger——”