“So David said,” Gabrielle murmured, with a troubled glance at him. To talk in this childish, lifeless way, Aunt Flora must be very ill!
“You should have known it long ago,” Flora repeated, beating gently on Gabrielle’s hand. “It was the sin—the terrible sin of my life. But, David,” she interrupted herself, appealing to him, “I did not mean to harm them!”
“I’m sure of it, Aunt Flora! But why worry yourself with it now? We are all safe, all well—couldn’t it wait?” David urged, with infinite gentleness.
“No—no—no!” she exclaimed, raising herself to a sitting position and struggling almost as if they were constraining her physically. “I must talk now—and then I shall sleep! You must let me talk, and then I shall sleep! I want you all to understand.
“Did you ever know,” she went on, seeming to feel her way for the right phrases, and sinking back into the pillows with shut eyes, “did you ever know how I happened to come first to Wastewater? My father was John Fleming, Roger Fleming’s cousin—he was a dentist, in Brookline. We were very poor when I was a child, and the first days I remember were of a little Brookline flat, and my mother sewing at a sewing machine. My sister Lily was a delicate little baby then—Lily was six years younger than I. For days and days and days of rain I remember the sewing machine, and the crying of the baby, and my mother murmuring at the hall door to men who came about bills. In the spring I had to take the baby out, and sometimes the wind would chap both our faces, and we would sit crying in the park. It seems to me we were always cold—I don’t believe children get such deep impressions of hot weather——”
“Dearest, do you want to talk now?” Sylvia asked, tenderly, as the harsh, deep voice paused.
Flora opened the eyes that had been slowly sinking shut, and widened them anxiously.
“Yes, I must talk,” she answered. And she looked about the silent little group alarmedly, as if she feared that one of them might have slipped away. “When I was eight, and Lily two years old,” she went on, “our father died. My mother was left miserably poor, and I heard enough talk then among her and her few friends to fear—as only a child can fear!—actual starvation.
“It was then that an uncle of whom we had scarcely heard came to see us. That was Tom Fleming, Roger’s father. He had quarrelled with my father years before, and, as everything my father touched turned to loss, so everything that Tom Fleming went into prospered. It was a railroad venture that made his fortune finally, but everything—properties, bonds, stocks—went well with him!
“He came to my mother’s poor little flat, and—ah, my God, my God!” whispered Flora, forgetting her audience, as she pressed a dark hand to her eyes, and speaking to herself. “What a day that was for me. He asked my mother to bring her little girls to his country house, to Wastewater, until she should get her bearings! He left money on the little red tablecloth in the dining room—my poor mother burst out crying, and tried to kiss his hand——