What a time—what a time! the man mused, his breast rising on a great sigh, as he shook his head slowly. Sylvia’s majority, and then Tom’s return, Aunt Flora’s stupefying revelation as to Gay’s parentage, and then the last scene—or almost the last—when he had gone upstairs to tell them—Gabrielle and Tom, that they were brother and sister, and the great wind and the fire had trapped them there.
So that had been the end of Wastewater, with these four young persons, all Flemings, flying for their lives through the night, and Aunt Flora, who had spent all her life there, killed by the falling of all her moral and material walls in one terrible crash. She had lain for almost twenty-four hours in John’s dismantled house, without pain of body, and in a lulled state even of mind, but she had been dying none the less. David had reviewed a hundred times the dark and forbidding afternoon, the ugly red of the sunset, as it shone upon the walls, and the memory of Aunt Flora’s sunken face against the pillows, the memory of her monotonous, weary voice.
The last of her generation, that stormy and ill-governed generation whose passions and weaknesses had filled the whole house with tragedies for so many years, she had died very quietly, quite as if going to sleep, before the ashes of the old place had been cold. Sylvia, beautiful, twenty-one, her own life as truly in ruins and ashes about her, had been kneeling beside her mother at the end, the doctor standing gravely near, and David himself watching them all with that strange quality of responsibility that seemed to be his destiny where each and every one of them was concerned.
Afterward, Tom had taken the girls in to Boston, where Sylvia, ill from shock and sorrow, had been left in the care of Gabrielle and a nurse, while Tom and David came back to Wastewater for the funeral.
David, reaching this point, turned back and looked across the old garden, to find the glint of headstones far up the northwest corner of the estate, beyond the woods, and under a fountain of delicate blue-green willow-whips.
Much of the garden was left after only one season’s neglect, he mused, and could be reclaimed. There were healthy-looking roses, and the splendid hedge of lilacs was already bursting from hard brown buds into white and lavender plumes. The conifers looked clean and fresh in their new tips, even the maples and elms were magnificent as ever.
An odd new look of something like pioneer roughness had been given the place, however, by the raw wood-piles. Gay’s one stipulation, David smiled to remember, in one of the few allusions she had made to the subject, had been in reference to the heavy evergreen shrubbery close to the house. Mightn’t—she had put it so, although all this land was hers now—mightn’t a lot of those ugly old pines and cypresses come down?
Down they had accordingly come, to be chopped and piled into substantial stacks against some coming winter. Also stacked and piled were the bricks that had been Wastewater, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of bricks, that had been scraped and aligned into long solid blocks.
Some day, David mused, there would be a home here again. But when, the young persons most concerned had not yet definitely stated. He sighed as he thought of them, and smiled above the sigh.
A start had been made, at least. There was a handsome building already standing; a long low barn of friendly warm clinkered brick, with the wide new doors of a garage at one end, and at the other, across an arch, beyond which cows and horses might be fenced some day, was a homely, comfortable cottage, of the type that faces a thousand English lanes, steep roof cut by white-curtained dormers, latticed deep windows against which vines were already trained, and a hooded doorway with a brass knocker.