She had borne herself, he had thought, with his affectionate quiet pride in her carrying as ever an undercurrent of pain—she had borne herself in the trying time of readjustments and changes better than all of them. There was a native dignity, a fineness about her, that made it possible for her apparently to forget herself entirely.
As he remembered her, in the few weeks that had intervened between her departure with Tom and Sylvia for the West, in old Margret’s care, it was difficult to recall any special demonstration of her own feelings at all. Sylvia had been actually if not seriously ill, Tom had suffered a dangerous relapse after the strain and exposure of the night, but Gay had been just her usual self. David had had a thousand cares: first to establish them temporarily in a comfortable hotel, then to commence the endless business of placing Gabrielle in her rightful position, with all it involved in the matter of taxes, transfers, legal delays of every sort.
He had written to the far-away Hannah Rosecrans in Australia, and had had a prompt and satisfactory reply. Hannah was Mrs. Tarwood, now, with children of her own. She gladly and unsuspiciously supplied a hundred details: the Fleming baby’s first nurse’s name at the big hospital, the name of a young doctor who had more than once come to see little Gabrielle in her first delicate weeks of life. Through these and Flora’s other clues David established the matter legally beyond all doubt, and Tom simplified the question of property division by being eager to reserve about only one fifth of his father’s estate for himself, giving his half-sister everything else. Wastewater, the jewels, this piece of property, that other, this stock and those bonds, everything, in short, about which division might have presented the slightest difficulty, Tom would have impatiently discarded in her favour. He was going to die anyway, he would remind them.
Beyond all this, David had Sylvia’s inheritance to handle. Flora had left a will, but it was superseded by an urgent note to her daughter, written at the time when Sylvia was supposed heiress to the whole Fleming fortune, begging her to make over her own money to Gabrielle.
Sylvia, hysterical and sensitive and unreasonable, had still persisted that this must be done; Gay—she protested in floods of shamed tears—had been wronged long enough! No, it must be all, all Gay’s, and she, Sylvia, would go forth into the world penniless, and make her own way—she would be happier so.
It had been Gay, patient and serious, in her new black, who had talked her into a healthier frame of mind. Gay had sat beside her cousin’s bed, smiling, talking occasionally, interesting Sylvia in the various phases of the business as they had come up, had managed both invalids and the whole comfortable suite, and had joined David, to affix a signature or witness a deed, as quietly as if this earthquake had touched her personally not at all.
Most admirable, he thought, had been her attitude with Tom. From the strange, disorganized winter day of Aunt Flora’s death, Gay had been quite simply, affectionately, and appreciatively Tom’s little sister. There had been no scenes, no hysteria, no superfluous words; David did not even suppose that the sister and brother had discussed the subject. Immediately, and with a youthful and almost childish grace that David, remembering, would recall with suddenly blinking eyes, she had adopted big, clumsy, unpolished Tom. In three days, quite without awkwardness, if with a sometimes slightly heightened colour, he had heard her speak of “my brother” to doctors, nurses, waiters in the hotel.
She had carried Tom, he realized now, by storm, by the sheer force of her own extraordinary personality. If Tom had ever been in any doubt as to the fashion of recommencing their friendship along these wholly altered lines, Gabrielle had instantly dispelled it.
More, she had given Tom as a brother ten times the visible affection and confidence that she had been willing to give him in any other relationship. Gabrielle had been afraid to be too friendly before. Now she was free to laugh with him, to spoil him, to tease him, to sit on the edge of his bed and hold his big, hard hand while she recounted to him her daily adventures.
And Tom had proved quite unconsciously, by his pathetically eager and proud acceptance of this new state of affairs, that it was her companionship, her sympathy he had wanted. He had wanted to be a little needed, a little admired, to be of some consequence to David, to the admirable Sylvia, and lastly, to inconsiderable and neglected little Gabrielle.