When Gabrielle had put her young arm about the shrinking, withered form of the harmless old feeble-minded woman that David did now indeed recognize as Aunt Lily, for some reason he had felt his throat thick, and his eyes blind with tears. The girl was so young, she had been so full of hope and gaiety and high spirits during the happy holidays and the weeks that followed; she had tramped beside him chattering like a sturdy little sister, belted into a big coat, her eager feet stamping and dancing on the snow, her cheeks glowing with the tingle of the pure cold air. They had had some contented rainy mornings together, in the bare upstairs room he called his studio, and they had sometimes played a sort of double solitaire in the evenings, Gay as anxiously excited as a child, and saying “Oh, fudge!” when the cards fell wrong, in a little baffled, furious tone that always made him laugh. He and she had thought the weak little mother and the worthless, wandering father long ago vanished from her problem; the child had quite a sufficient problem left, as it was! And she had faced it so bravely, faced it cheerfully even with the constant reminder of Sylvia’s contrasted good fortune, Sylvia’s wealth, Sylvia’s impeccable parentage, right before her vision.
Now, suddenly, while her heart was thumping with the shock and terror of awakening from sleep to find this dreadful apparition in her room, she had had to accept this same mowing, gibbering, weeping old woman as her mother. And David loved her that she had not hesitated, where for sheer bewilderment he knew he might have hesitated.
She had not glanced at Aunt Flora, who was leaning sick and silent against a chair, nor at the cowed and white-faced old Belgian servants, nor at him. Quite simply she had put her arm about poor Aunt Lily, touched her young lips to the yellowed old forehead where the forlorn wisps of grayish hair hung down, and then turned, steady-eyed and ashen-cheeked but quite composed, to say quietly:
“Where does she sleep, Aunt Flora? In that room where I saw the light? I’ll go up with her—she’s shuddering with cold, she’ll be ill. I’ll—you’ll go with me, won’t you, Margret? We’ll get her to bed.”
For Margret, also pale, in a gray wrapper, and looking anxiously from one to the other as if to read in their faces what had occurred, had joined the group from some rear doorway.
“No, that was partly it, Gabrielle,” Flora forced herself to say, with chattering teeth. “She hasn’t been so bad until lately. And after you met her, that day, we moved her into the back of the house—someone was always supposed to be near her. You shouldn’t have gotten out of bed and come through the halls in your bare feet, Lily!” Flora mildly reproached her sister. Lily clung stubbornly to Gabrielle’s arm, but they were all moving slowly in the direction of the rooms Flora had mentioned now, through the bitter darkness of the halls. The lamp, carried by David, sent their shadows wheeling about the angles and corners ahead of them, doors banged, shutters creaked, and when Lily’s chattering whisper of complacency and exulting triumph was silent, they could hear Hedda and Trude telling Margret that the sick lady had wandered into Miss Gabrielle’s rooms in the night and frightened her.
Lily was really almost sick by the time they reached the homely, comfortable rooms, which, Gabrielle noted, were well furnished, and warmed by a still-glowing stove. David built up the fire while they put the poor little chattering creature to bed, and Gabrielle, without seeming to be even now conscious of anybody’s presence but that of her mother, caught up an old ivory-backed brush and massed the straying gray hair into order, pinning it, David noted pitifully, with the pins that had held back from her face her own thick, rich braids. There was a tenderness, an absorbed, gentle, and childish pity about her whole attitude the while she did so that made his throat thicken again.
Meanwhile Margret and Hedda, evidently well used to this ministry and moving about the room with an air of being entirely at home there, had supplied Lily with hot-water bottles and some sort of milky hot drink which Lily fretfully complained was bitter.
“It has her sleeping stuff in it,” Margret explained, in an aside. Lily smiled knowingly at Gabrielle.
“They wouldn’t mind poisoning me a bit, dearie,” she said, in a loud whisper. “At Crosswicks they used always be trying to poison us.”