Aunt Flora always watching jealously; Aunt Lily tearful and singing her romantic little songs; gallant little Tom reading his sea stories on the old nursery window-sill; dark little proud Sylvia with her glossy curls; baby Gay herself, wistful and alone; they all seemed to pass before the girl’s eyes in a long and haunting procession, crying as they went that they had always failed, even here, in all this wealth and beauty, to find happiness and peace!
“I will be happy,” Gabrielle had sworn to herself solemnly, frightened at the history of the place. “I will try never to be proud or jealous or cruel. We are Flemings, we four—and I as much a Fleming as any one of them now, and we must not make their mistakes! God helping us,” she thought, remembering the little nun who had years ago read the Sermon on the Mount to a class of inattentive little girls so many times, “we will all be good, and meek, and merciful, and some day—years and years from now—we will come back to Wastewater again and rebuild it.
“Good-bye, Wastewater!” she had whispered, leaning back to look through the glass window of the motor car. And from beyond the ruins, the ashes, the bare garden, and the moonlit sea, the island lights had flashed her an answer.
CHAPTER XX
It was more than a long year later that David Fleming, driving the car that Sylvia had ordered with such happy confidence before that long-awaited twenty-first birthday, left Crowchester, and followed the familiar road along the cliffs.
The spring was early, and the sweetness of it was already in the air; there were patches of emerald grass in sheltered places, and all the rich warm milky odours of turned earth and fruit blossoms, new leaves and the first hardy lilacs. Babies in sheltered coaches were airing along the little streets of Keyport, and if the restless little breezes and the sunless shadows were chilly, in the sunlight there was a delicious warmth.
The familiar dips and turns of the road were all like so many welcoming faces to David, and when he reached the boundaries of Wastewater he might almost have fancied, for a moment, that the old order of things had remained unchanged, that back of that barrier of great trees, now trembling into tiny dots of palest green, he might indeed find the grim dark building, the shuttered windows, the dank unhealthy shrubs and paths that had been the first home of his recollection.
The brick walls and the iron gates, more deeply bedded than ever in fallen leaves and mould, were unchanged, but the road between them, so many years unused, had been somewhat cut by wheels, and had been churned into mud. It stood open, but David left his car outside, got out and turned his back to the land for a moment, standing staring out to sea, as he had done upon that autumn day more than two years ago, that dreary, dark October day when Gabrielle had first come home.
He remembered, as his eyes idly followed the scrambling path down between the rocks and the bare mallow bushes to the shore, the muggy smells that had always assaulted his nostrils when the big side door of Wastewater had been opened, the smell of distant soup bones, dust, horsehair furniture, decaying wood, stifling coal fires that smoked. He remembered his aunt, rigid and stern, before the fire, her apprehensive, nervous eyes always moving behind him when he entered the room, and searching there for some menace always feared and never realized. He remembered the lamps, the antimacassars, the booming voices of the maids in the gloomy halls.
And then Gabrielle, in her velvet gown, with her big, starry eyes. Gabrielle, so young and so alone, met by such staggering blows, such bitter truths. Gabrielle watching Sylvia’s youth and happy fortune so wistfully, bearing her own sorrows and burdens with her own inimitable childish courage and dignity.