Sometimes she went to the piano and would find herself meandering through an old opera score, “Traviata” or “Faust.” Sometimes, if the afternoon was clear, she walked rapidly to Keyport and rapidly back. Many an afternoon, as long as the light lasted, she prowled about within the confines of Wastewater itself, for besides the always fascinating half-mile of shore there were the cliffs, the woods back of the house, and all the stable yards, cow yards, chicken yards, all the sheds and fences, the paddocks and lanes, the gates and walls that almost two hundred years of homekeeping had accumulated. The big stables were empty now except for one or two dray horses, the sturdy bay that dragged the old surrey, and a lighter horse that Sylvia—Gabrielle learned—sometimes used for riding. There was perhaps one tenth of the hay stored that the big hay barn would accommodate, one tenth of the grain. There were two cows, chickens, pigeons; there were intersecting catacombs of empty rooms and lofts and sheds where apples were left to ripen, or where feathers fluffed at the opening of a door, or where cats fled like shadows. Towering above all, among towering pear trees, there was the windmill, still creaking, splashing, leaking.
John the gardener had a substantial brick house, a nice wife, and a stolid little girl of fourteen who walked the three miles every day to the Union High School between Tinsalls and Crowchester. Gabrielle presently gathered that young Etta was taking two fifty-cent music lessons every week in Crowchester, and that she was going to be a school teacher. Her “grammer” lived in Crowchester, and when the weather got very bad Etta and her mother sometimes stayed with “grammer,” and Uncle Dick drove her to school, and she and her cousin Ethel went to the movies every night.
Wastewater itself might have filled many a lonely afternoon, for there were plenty of unused rooms worthy of exploring. But Gabrielle had small heart for that. There was something wholesome and open about the garden and the stable yards and the sea, but the big closed rooms inside filled her with a vague uneasiness.
The girl would look up at them from outside when the winter sunsets were flaming angrily behind the black etched branches of the bare trees; look up at blank rows of shuttered windows, identify her own, Aunt Flora’s, the upstairs sitting room with gaslight showing pink through the shutters when the cold clear dusk fell; the dining room, with Daisy pulling the rep curtains together.
These were human, used, normal, but there were so many others! Two thirds of the entire lower floor was always sealed and dark, showing from outside only solemn bays, and flat surfaces screened heavily in shrubs and bushes. In the western wing, with hooded windows rising only two or three feet above the old walk, were the kitchen windows; but the older servants, Hedda and Maria and the cook, Trude, had rooms obscurely situated somewhere far back of Aunt Flora’s rooms and Sylvia’s room and the upstairs sitting room on the second floor. Gabrielle’s room was on the third floor, and David’s, and the rooms still kept ready for Tom; these were all that were used of some score of rooms on that level, and Wastewater rose to a mansard as well, to say nothing of the cupola that rose for two floors, and was finished off with columns and a small circular room of glass, high above the tops of the highest trees. Gabrielle remembered when she and Sylvia used to think it a great adventure to creep up there and look down upon a curiously twisted landscape, with all the familiar barns and fences in the wrong places, and so little land, cut by such insignificant ribbons of roads, and so much sea, broken by nothing at all!
“You could put a hundred people in here!” Gabrielle used to think. In the days of its glory, Uncle Roger had told them more than once, there had often been half that number at Wastewater.
All the sadder to find it so empty now, the girl would muse, wandering through the quiet halls. If the winter sun were shining bright, sometimes she opened the great double doors that shut off the end of the dining-room hall, and penetrated, with a fast thumping heart and nervously moving eyes, into what had been the boasted ballroom, billiard room, library, drawing rooms of the house.
In this section was the unused front stairway; curved, enormous, wheeling up from a great square hall. There were doors on all sides, decorous heavy doors, all closed. Beyond them, Gabrielle’s peeping eyes found great silent rooms, whose crystal-hung chandeliers tinkled faintly and reminiscently when the door was opened; swathed hideous satin furniture, rose-wreathed Moquette carpets in faint pinks and blues, looped brocaded curtains creased and cracked with the years, tables topped with marble and mosaic, great mirrors rising up to the high ceilings; everything that could rot, rotting, everything that could bear dust covered with a deep plush of dust.
Sometimes, on a winter noon, chinks of bright light penetrated the closed shutters and spun with motes. Sometimes an old chest or chair gave forth a pistol shot of sound, and for a few hideous seconds Gabrielle’s heart would stand still with utter terror. Once the busy scratching of some small animal behind a wainscot brought her heart into her mouth.
In one room—it had been the “cherry-and-silver parlour” a hundred years ago—there was a cabinet of odds and ends: Dresden statues, broken fans, collapsed ivory boxes and cloisonné. In other rooms there were odd bits, some good, but almost all very bad: majolica, onyx, ormolu, terra cotta. There were one or two good pictures, forty bad ones: seascapes with boats, still-life studies of dead fish, English nobility of the First Empire days, breakfasting in gardens, peasants doing everything ever done by peasants, old woodcuts of Queen Victoria and “Yes or No?”, “Dignity and Impudence,” and Mrs. Siddons, curling and water-stained in their heavy frames.