Downstairs, in John’s dining room, sacred hitherto to golden oak and tasselled plush, was heaped the incongruous salvage from Wastewater. Soup plates and cups filled with blackened water, chairs with sooty footprints upon the brocades, kitchen utensils and pots, books that had been useless and unread for sixty years and that were so much rubbish of paper, paste, and leather now, the shade of a lamp, standing alone, and another great lamp without its shade; just such miscellany as maids, chauffeur, and gardener had been able to snatch and carry away by the light of the fire itself.
Gabrielle and Tom worked valiantly at storing this mixed assortment at one side of the room; John lighted a coal fire in his own grate, and Hedda and Trude toiled kitchenward, extricating a coffee-pot from the crushed and saturated kitchen, and finding among Etta’s neat stores all the necessities for a meal, which was served in the dining room at about four o’clock. Sylvia was now upstairs with her mother, and David called Gabrielle aside and with a grave face advised her to go up to her cousin.
“She gathered a good deal from Aunt Flora’s muttering, Gay, and I’ve just been explaining things to her. Poor Sylvia! it’s come like a thunderbolt to her. Suppose you go up and tell her we want her down here, that we’re having some coffee?”
Gabrielle went up obediently. The lamp in young Etta’s bedroom was shaded now, and Flora seemed asleep. Sylvia was sitting in the shadow, but Gabrielle saw that she had been weeping. She rose at once and followed Gabrielle into the little upper hall, and Gabrielle put her arm about her. Sylvia seemed confused and shaken; she said in a worried, quick tone:
“Mamma is very, very ill! David tells me he thought she was, even before she had the shock of the fire. I feel as if I were in a terrible dream—I can’t believe what he tells me,” added poor Sylvia, “I can’t—I shall never believe that my mother could be—could be capable—my mother! whom I love so dearly——” She stopped.
“It doesn’t mean that one can’t love—one’s mother,” Gabrielle suggested, timidly. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had some rest and some coffee. She did it to protect—Uncle Roger. We always knew she loved him.”
“Oh, gracious—how little you understand—how little anybody understands!” Sylvia exclaimed, under her breath, in despair. “You tell me that I needn’t stop loving her—and David tells me that it makes no real difference in my own life—as if I could!—as if I could go on living, and believing that my mother had been”—Sylvia’s voice deepened—“had been living a lie all these years!” she finished, suffocating. “I tell you I simply couldn’t bear it! I’m wrong, perhaps, it’s all just pride, perhaps—but I never could look anybody in the face again, never hold up my head——”
“Sylvia, do come downstairs,” Gay pleaded. “It isn’t as bad as that, really it isn’t!”
“Oh, what do you know, Gabrielle!” Sylvia exclaimed, impatiently. “You think being the child of a nobody, I suppose, is much the same as being Uncle Roger’s own daughter?”
“I would rather have the name of Charpentier honourably, than any name as I have it,” Gay answered, proudly and shortly.