Then another wait, not so long. And at last the door was carefully opened by Hedda, who looked casually at him with squinting old white-lashed eyes, looked back in concern at her bars and bolts, closed the door behind him, and then said in a mild old voice in which traces of her Belgian origin lingered:
“Good. How is Mister David?”
“Splendid,” David answered, with a heartiness that the chill of the dark old hall already tinged with a certain familiar depression. “Where’s my aunt, Hedda?”
Hedda had been staring at him with a complacent, vacuous smile, like the slightly demented creature she really was. Now she roused herself just a shade and answered in a slightly reproachful voice:
“Where but upstairs shall she be?”
David remembered now that Gabrielle had long ago announced, with her precocious little-girl powers of observation, that “Hedda always tells us things the first time as if it were the twentieth, and her patience quite worn out with telling us!” An affectionate half smile twitched the corners of David’s mouth as he thought of that old tawny-headed, rebellious little Gabrielle of ten years before, and he followed the smile with as sudden a sigh.
He mounted gloomy, wide old stairs through whose enormous western windows a dim light was struggling. The treads were covered with a dark carpet strapped in brass rods. Gabrielle, as a baby, had loved the top-shaped ends of these rods, had stolen them, been detected, restored them, how many, many times!
The thought of her more than the thought of his old little self, of Tom and Sylvia, who were the real Flemings, after all, always came to him strangely when he first returned to the old house after any absence. Gabrielle, shouting, roaring, weeping, laughing, had roused more echoes in Wastewater than all the rest of them put together; she roused more echoes now, poor little Gabrielle!
Poor Gabrielle, and poor Tom! mused David. Life had dealt oddly with both these long-ago, eager, happy children, as Life seemed to have a fashion of dealing with the children of so strange and silent, so haunted and mysterious an old house. The shadow of the house, as real upon his spirit as was the actual shadow of the autumn twilight upon these stained old walls, shut heavily upon David as he crossed the upper hallways and turned the knob of the sitting-room door.
His aunt, in the widow’s black she had worn for some eighteen years, was sitting erect in an upholstered armchair by the fire. She turned to glance toward him as he came in and welcomed him with a lifeless cheek to kiss and with the warmest smile her face ever knew.