“I’m not angry——” Gabrielle began, and stopped abruptly, biting her lip, and turned her eyes, brimming again, toward the glow of the range.
“I know, it seems awful hard, but this has always been a bitter thing to Miss Flora, and she has taken her own way about it,” Margret said, kindly, and there was silence again. “You know your mamma,” the old woman began again, presently, and Gay’s eyes, startled, fixed themselves for a moment upon Margret’s face, as if the girl found the term strange. “Your mamma made a silly marriage, dear,” Margret went on, “and Miss Flora felt very badly about it. Your mother was such a pretty, gentle girl, too,” she added. “I’d see her gathering flowers, or maybe hear her singing at the piano, when I’d come up here to Wastewater to help them out with sickness, or company, or whatever it was. Very pretty, Miss Lily was. There was quite a family then. Miss Flora had married Mr. Will Fleming, and Sylvia was just a little thing, as dark as a gipsy. And of course that was just the time that poor Mr. Roger’s wife was dying of some miserable growth she’d had for years, and it was when Tom run away. Mrs. Roger Fleming had a big couch on the porch in summer, and she’d be laying there, and perhaps Mr. Roger reading to her, or talking about some cure; they were for ever trying new cures and new doctors! And Miss Flora would have Sylvia out there, with her big rag doll—Sylvia’s father was never much of a success, they used to say, he was usually away somewhere getting a new job of some sort,” Margret added, reminiscently.
“Somehow I never think of Aunt Flora as having a husband,” Gay said, in a sombre, tear-thickened voice. “Her being Sylvia’s mother, and all that, seems natural enough. But to think of her as Mrs. Will Fleming always is so queer.”
“I don’t know that she ever loved Mr. Will,” Margret said, with a glance behind her at Hedda, who was straightening the kitchen as composedly and indifferently as if the hour had been four o’clock in the afternoon instead of the morning. Hedda was paying no attention and Margret went on, with all an old servant’s significance: “It was well known that Miss Flora loved Roger Fleming all her life, and she was engaged to him after his first wife, that was David’s and Tom’s mother, died.”
“Yes, I know,” Gabrielle said, with a long sigh. She had heard all this before.
“When Roger Fleming married the second time, she took his brother Will,” Margret resumed, “and for a while they had a little apartment in Boston, and he was in a bank there, but he died when Miss Sylvia was only three and Miss Flora was here more than she ever was there, anyway; Miss Lily stayed here all the time. And then, that terrible summer when little Tom ran away, if Miss Lily didn’t fall in love with a man nobody knew anything about——”
There was an old-fashioned little peasant bench beside the stove, brought from across the seas when Hedda and Trude had come to America twenty-five years before, and Gabrielle was on this low seat now, with her arms across Margret’s knees. She looked up into Margret’s face wistfully as she said:
“But there was nothing against my father? Wasn’t he just a young man who was staying in Crowchester for a while?”
“He had some sort of agency,” Margret said. “No, dear, for all we ever knew he was a good enough man. But he was no husband for Miss Lily, who was Mr. Roger Fleming’s cousin, and had lived here at Wastewater all her life. And more than that, she married him secretly, and that’s always a bad thing!” the old woman added, impressively.
“Yes, I know!” Gabrielle murmured, with impatience and pain in her voice. “But I don’t see anything so terrible in it!” she finished, looking back at the fire again and half to herself.