“I’m—so—sorry!” Gay said, with a great sob. And she buried her face against the coverlet and burst into crying. “I’m so sorry that he was unkind to you—and that you could not forgive him and forgive me!” she sobbed. “We might have been—we might all have been so happy!”
“We might have been so happy,” Flora’s lips repeated. No other muscle of her bloodless face and shut eyes moved. “God bless you, Gabrielle,” she whispered again, as Gabrielle, drawn away by David’s hand, stopped to lay a wet cheek against hers and kiss her in farewell.
The girl, halfway to the door, and hardly conscious of what she was doing, suddenly wrenched herself free and went back to the bed. She fell on her knees, and catching the languid dark hand, put it to her lips.
“Aunt Flora, indeed I forgive you!” she said, weeping, “from my heart. I am so sorry you were so unhappy—that they all hurt you and failed you so! Dear Aunt Flora——”
Sylvia was on her knees on the other side, and crying as bitterly as Gabrielle, when David led the younger girl away. He and Margret established her upon a downstairs sofa, with cushions and covers before the fire, and she lay there in a dreamy state, not talking, hardly thinking, as the strange panorama of the last twenty-four hours wheeled through her weary head. She saw Flora only once again, and that was at the end, at seven o’clock.
At ten Tom drove them to Crowchester and they boarded the Boston train; Sylvia veiled and clinging tightly to Tom’s arm, Gabrielle and old Margret guiding them through the interested, warm train to the privacy of their drawing room.
Gabrielle’s last look at Wastewater had shown her only bare trees, blackened masses of ruins darker than the prevailing dark, open levels where the stately walls had been. A cold moon had been shining brightly upon the sea, had thrown the shadows of leafless bushes in a lacework across the bare brown space of the lawn, and against the steady rush and retreat of the short waves she had heard the tumbling cascading sound of some bit of wall collapsing upon the general collapse. Toward the distant west wall, beyond the woods, the changed perspective had left a long vista free, and Gabrielle could see the white gravestones in the moonlight.
Graves and ruins, ashes and bare branches, and beside them the unchanged, restless sea, and above them the unfeeling moonlight. The child of Wastewater looked back with a great gravity, a great solemnity in her heart. There had been laughter here, music and voices. Wastewater had had a housewarming, more than a hundred years before, when beautiful women, in the capes and high-waisted gowns of the Empire days, had been driven in jingling great coaches all the way from Boston City to dance and rejoice with the young master of the mansion.
There had been a first Roger, in the buff and blue of the Revolution, Colonel Fleming, as black and as handsome as any of them, and there had been his son Tom, the good-hearted Tom who had come all the way to Brookline to find a cousin’s disconsolate little widow, with her sewing machine, and her girl babies, and offer them a home.
And there had been Tom’s son Roger, handsomest and most dashing of them all—David’s young mother, who was to win his heart, and that shadowy little Cecily, who must now be “mother” in Gabrielle’s thoughts.