“A few days later we read the will. You remember, David, on such a hot morning, in the library? Sylvia and Gabrielle were playing outside on the terrace where the hydrangeas are; old Judge Baron had come down from the city.
“We read the will, and I knew then what I had done. Gabrielle was not mentioned. Gabrielle was not mentioned! The will stood as it had stood when he wrote it, when Tom was a baby. Everything, everything to his child, or children. And there was a codicil, dated about the time of his last return home, giving everything, everything, to Sylvia, in case Tom did not come back!
“My God, my God——” Flora whispered, under her breath, and lay still.
“I had wanted it all my life, and now I had it,” she said, after a while, in a voice that was weakening, weakening from moment to moment, and yet full of passion and fire still. “I had it all. Judge Baron went away, David went away, I was alone with Sylvia and little Gabrielle, and Wastewater was mine. I remember, in the first long warm afternoon, that I walked slowly through it, from room to room, and thought that I had survived them all—Uncle Tom, Roger, Janet, Cecily, Will—all, all the Black Flemings gone except me! I had only to keep silent, and my child would be rich.
“I think that’s all,” she added, opening her sunken dark eyes and fixing them steadily upon David’s face. “That explains it all, doesn’t it? I have lived in fear. I knew the old doctor was dead, but I used to lie in the nights imagining that he had happened to tell someone—someone who was drawing nearer and nearer to my life every moment. Hannah Rosecrans, the Carrie we had in Boston, the doctor Lily had, whose very name I can’t remember—they all knew! Any day might have brought them back to me with their questions.
“I used to imagine that I might go to jail! But I never was anything else but in jail all my life long!”
CHAPTER XIX
She stopped. And after a long minute of silence the young persons looked at each other. Tom had been sitting throughout in a low chair with his hands locked; now he merely grinned nervously and shrugged. David’s face was stern and grave; he had folded his arms and had been staring ahead of him with a faint frown. Now his eyes moved about the circle and returned to space. Sylvia’s vivid dark face with its white, white skin was drained of colour, her eyes looked tortured, and she was breathing fast. As she knelt beside the bed, she half supported her mother upon her arm, her anxious and stricken face close to the leaden, ghastly face upon the pillow.
Gabrielle had been kneeling, too, as she listened. But at the end she rose and walked to the little window.
Outside, in the winter dusk, lay the soaked, blackened ruins of the old stables, those clean big airy stables that Gabrielle had so loved as a little girl. Nearer, against the angle of the house, lay the wreck of the windmill, the great rusty hoops and singed wood piled almost as high as the window. Beyond all were the bare winter woods, looking desolate and forlorn in the cool gray light, and on the right brimmed and lowered the steely surface of a cold and unfriendly sea.