The girl was still shaken badly, but the lights and the voices had instantly dissipated the horrifying mystery and fear, and although Gay was pale and spoke with a somewhat dry throat, it was steadily enough, it was even with a pathetic sort of reassurance in her voice, and a trembling eagerness to quiet the strange visitor, to restore the fantastic unnaturalness of the scene to something like the normal.
“You—you frightened me so!” she said to the little old woman, gently, touching her on the arm, even trying to draw about the shaking little old figure the big slipping gray shawl. “You—she didn’t mean any harm, David,” Gay said, with her breath coming easier every second. “She—I think she’s a little——” A significant lifting of Gay’s eyebrows finished the sentence. “Margret knows her—Aunt Flora knows who she is!” she added, appealingly.
“I wanted to see you, dear, and Flora wouldn’t let me!” the old woman said, tearfully and childishly, catching Gay’s hands and beginning to mumble kisses over them.
David made a sudden exclamation.
“Is it—I’ve not seen her for twenty years!” he said, with a puzzled look at his aunt, about whose shaking form he immediately put a bracing arm. “Isn’t it your mother, Aunt Flora? Is it Aunt John? I thought she was dead.”
“Yes—just help me take her to her room, David,” Flora said, feverishly and blindly. “Just—take her arm, Hedda. We’ll get her all comfortable, and then I’ll explain. I’ll explain to you and Gabrielle—you needn’t be afraid of this happening again—I’ll—I’ll—— Let Trude take her, Gabrielle.”
“But she doesn’t want to go, do you, dear?” Gay asked, pitifully. And David thought her youth and beauty, the hanging rope of glorious tawny hair, the slim figure outlined in her plain little embroidered nightgown, and the kimono she had caught up, contrasted to that shaking old creature’s feebleness and wildness, were the most extraordinary things he had ever seen in his life. But then the whole thing was like a crazy dream.
“But she must go,” Flora reiterated, firmly, her voice shaking and raw, her face streaked with green lines across its pallor.
“Aunt John,” David pleaded, gently, taking an elbow that controlled a thin old yellow hand like a hanging bird’s claw. For he remembered the days when “Aunt John” had kept house for them all, when Flora was a brisk young woman, and Lily only a timid, romantic girl, when his own mother was mistress of Wastewater, and poor Tom and himself the idolized small boys of the family.
“What are you calling me ‘Aunt John’ for, David Fleming?” said the old woman, shrilly and suddenly. “Mamma died years and years ago, didn’t she, Flora? I’m your Aunt Lily, and I came down to see my girl!”