This side of the shore was in shade now, for Wastewater stood on its own little jutting point of cliff and forest, and the sun, at autumn midday, had moved behind the trees. Gabrielle would fall to dreaming, as she stared across the softly heaving, shining expanse of the water, her back against a great boulder, her feet, in their rough little shoes, braced against a smaller one.
Going in to lunch blinking and hungry, the instant effect of closeness, odorous age, and quiet darkness would envelop her. She would look with secret curiosity at her aunt’s mottled, dark face. Aunt Flora had been quietly reading and writing all morning, she would read and write all afternoon.
Immediately after luncheon came Mrs. Fleming’s one outing of the day. Sometimes she walked about the borders with John, discussing changes, her silk skirt turned up over her decent alpaca petticoat, efficient-looking overshoes covering her congress gaiters if the paths were damp. Sometimes John brought the surrey, and Aunt Flora and Gabrielle went into Crowchester to shop. Flora kept a small car, but she did not like it; she did not even like the cars of others, Gabrielle discovered, when they honked behind the stout old bay horse on the roads.
Aunt Flora had acquaintances in Crowchester, but no friends. She never made calls, or entertained at luncheon or dinner. She bowed and talked to the minister’s wife when she met her in a shop, she knew the librarian and the school superintendent, and she belonged, at least nominally, to the Woman’s Improvement Club. Once, in December, there was a lecture at the club on the modern British poets and Flora took Gabrielle, who wore her velvet dress, and was much flushed and excited and youthfully friendly in the dim, women-crowded rooms, and who carried away a delightful impression of Hodgson and Helen Eden and Louise Guiney and tea and cake.
But a week later, when the president of the club sent Gay a card for a dance to be given by the choicest of Crowchester’s youth that winter, Flora shook her head. Much better for Gay not to associate with the village people; Sylvia despised them. It was too easy to become involved in things that had never been acceptable to Wastewater. Gabrielle wrote a charming little note of regret.
Flora wrote to Sylvia every three or four days and received delightful letters from her daughter at least once a week. Sylvia wrote interestedly of a hundred activities, and Gay’s word for her cousin came to be, in her own heart, “superior.” Sylvia was assuredly “superior.” She was still playing golf, for the snows were late, and basket ball, and squash; she was working for mid-term examinations in history, philosophy, and economics. She would have sounded almost formidable if the Thanksgiving letter had not struck a warmer note: Sylvia was ski-ing, tobogganing, dancing; she had been to a little home fancy-dress party as “Night”; her letter was full of delightful allusions to young men, “Bart Montallen, who is in diplomacy,” a charming Gregory Masters, and a “dear idiotic cousin of Gwen’s, Arthur Tipping, who will be Lord Crancastle some day, in all probability—but all such simple people and not rich!” Some of these might come down to Wastewater for a few days before Christmas. Gabrielle’s heart leaped at the mere thought.
Gabrielle sometimes wondered what Flora wrote to Sylvia in those long, closely lined letters that went so regularly from Wastewater. Flora would sit scratching at her desk in the upstairs sitting room, look away thoughtfully, begin to scratch again. Sometimes Gabrielle saw her copying long excerpts from books; indeed, Flora not infrequently read these aloud to her niece, a thought from some bishops’ letters from the Soudan, lines from “Aurora Leigh” or “Lady Clare.”
These were almost all gift books, bound in tooled leather and gilded, with gilded tops. The old house was full of gift books. Gabrielle imagined the last generation as giving its friends large, heavy, badly bound, or at least insecurely bound, books on all occasions, “The Culprit Fay,” “Evangeline,” and “Hiawatha,” Flaxman’s gracious illustrations for Schiller’s “Bell,” Dante with the plates of Doré.
Idly she dipped into them all, idly closed them. Sometimes in the long wintry afternoons she opened the lower drawers of the bookshelves and looked at all the stereoscope pictures of Niagara, and Japan with wistaria falling over arbours, and Aunt Flora and Lily, Gabrielle’s own slender mother, in riding habits, with long veils flowing from their black silk hats. The tiny figures stood out in bold relief, the flowers seemed to move in the breezes of so many years ago; there was a Swiss mountain scene that Gabrielle had loved all her life, with a rough slab of drift almost in the very act of coasting upon the road where men and Newfoundland dogs were grouped.
Her hardest time was when the decorous afternoon excursion or walk was over, at perhaps four o’clock. Dinner was at seven; the winter dusk began to close down two and a half hours before dinner. The girl could not with propriety walk far from the house in the dark, even if she had cared to traverse the cliff roads at night. The servants were far downstairs, all elderly in any case. Aunt Flora hated young servants.