“And all their passions and all their hates!” Gabrielle said, in a fearful whisper, glancing up at the grim outlines of the enormous pile, “and all those dusty, empty halls and locked rooms! To me,” she went on, speaking with her eyes still on the black-brick, black-vine-covered house, “it is all coloured by that horrifying experience, here in the side lane, almost a year ago—when I first saw my mother——”
The mere memory of it frightened her. She seemed to see again the gray whirls of snow in the shadowy lane, the writhing, huddled gray figure among the writhing ropes and curtains of white.
“Gabrielle, don’t!” Sylvia said quickly, with a nervous laugh.
“No, but Sylvia, you feel it, too?”
“Ah, of course I do! Mamma so ill and silent, Tom so strange, David not——” Sylvia’s lip trembled, as much to her own surprise as Gay’s—“David is not himself,” she said, hurriedly. “He came back from this trip—changed! Whether it is Tom’s return, with all the memories and changes, I don’t know. Only,” added Sylvia, quite frankly blinking wet eyes, “only I have noticed a change in him, just lately, and it has—worried me! Perhaps it’s only a passing phase for us all,” she interrupted herself hastily, “one of those wretched times that all families go through! Partly weather, and partly nerves, and partly changes and sickness——”
“And largely Wastewater,” Gay said, hugging her great coat about her, as the girls rapidly walked about the garden. “There seems to be an atmosphere about the place stronger than us all. We’re all nervous, jumpy. Last night, just as I was about to turn out the light in the sitting room, it seemed to me the picture of Uncle Roger was—I don’t know! breathing, looking at me—alive! I almost screamed. And the night after David came back, I picked up his letters, he had dropped them in the hall, and when I knocked on his door with them he fairly shouted ‘What’s that!’ and frightened me, and himself, too, he told me, almost out of our senses!”
“I don’t sleep well,” Sylvia confessed. “I don’t believe any of us do. I don’t think we should stay here. If Tom has to go away——”
She stopped. It was impossible not to assume now that Tom’s plans depended upon Gabrielle. Yet there was about the younger girl none of the happiness that comes with a flattering and welcome affair. Gabrielle instead was quite obviously experiencing a deepening depression and uneasiness. Every day showed her more clearly that Tom considered her bound to marry him, interpreting everything she said and did according to his own cheerfully complacent self-confidence.
Her kindness had carried her too far, now, for honourable retreat. She could not even get away from Wastewater, to think in peace, for Tom would not hear of separation, they had known each other long enough, they had “considered” enough, he said; when Aunt Flora and Sylvia took the apartment of which they were always speaking for the winter, Tom and Gabrielle would be married and go south together—go anywhere she wanted to go, but together. Bermuda or Florida or San Diego were all equally indifferent to Tom, as long as he had his wife with him.
The very words made Gabrielle’s blood run cold. It was in vain that she tried to imagine herself married, rich, going about the world as Mrs. Tom Fleming. Every fibre of body and soul revolted; she liked Tom, she would have done almost anything to please him, but somehow the thought of him as her husband made her feel a little faint.