“He’d gotten here the very day of the funeral,” Margret nodded. “And he’d just stood looking at her as she lay there dead—she’d been more than five years his wife, and she was only twenty-two as she lay there with the flowers all around her! And he said to poor Miss Flora, ‘I killed her, Flora!’ And out of the house he walked, and we never saw him again until this day I’m talking about, six months after the funeral.
“By this time Miss Lily, your mother, was all over her illness, but the typhoid had left her very weak and light-headed, and sometimes she’d talk very queer, or cry, or whatever it was,” Margret went on. “In fact, that was the beginning of her trouble—she never again was—quite right—here,” interpolated Margret, significantly, touching her forehead. “Well, this day she was all in white, and she had an innocent sort of childish look, and Mr. David was home from school, and Miss Sylvia was running about, and you were just getting to the cunning age—my goodness, but you were a beautiful baby!” the old woman said again, affectionately. “Well, Mr. Will Fleming was home, he was out of a job again, and they were all out on the lawn—Mr. David was a fine little fellow of about thirteen then, and he saw Mr. Roger first, and he went running over. And Roger Fleming came up to them and asked, as he always did: ‘Any news of Tom? Any letter from my boy?’ and they told him, No. And then Miss Lily held you out to him so gently, and her face flushed up and she said: ‘Roger, you’ve hardly seen my pretty baby!’ and I remember his taking you in his arms and saying, ‘Well, hello, here’s a yellow-headed Fleming at last!’”
“Nobody seemed to make much of my Charpentier blood, or my name,” Gabrielle observed, drily.
“I remember,” Margret resumed, without answering, perhaps unhearing, “that after a while Mr. Roger said to Miss Flora, so sadly, ‘Look at them, David and Sylvia and this baby! But my own boy will never be master of Wastewater!’ and she said to him, ‘Roger, he’ll come home, dear!’
“But indeed he didn’t ever come home,” Margret finished, sighing, “and Miss Sylvia’s father died a year or two later and never left a son behind him. And after a while poor Mr. Roger died—he died a broken man. And then we had to send Miss Lily to Crosswicks, for she got worse and worse. She was there for fifteen years. But Crosswicks broke up last year, and Miss Flora didn’t quite know what to do with her,” Margret added, “and it was only while she was finding some other good place where she’d be happy that we thought of keeping her here. Poor, gentle little soul, she’d never hurt you or any one.”
Her voice died away into silence, and Gabrielle sat staring darkly into the fire, with a clouded face.
For a long time the two sat together, the girl with her young strong hands locked in Margret’s, and her eyes absently fixed on the dying fire, and gradually the old woman’s soothing voice had its effect. Margret gently begged her not to worry, there was no harm done, and perhaps it would be better, after all, to have her see her mother daily and naturally, as the poor little mental and physical wreck she was, and get over the fright and mystery once and for all. And now Gabrielle must take a bottle of hot water upstairs and get to sleep, for it was long after four, and they mustn’t keep poor Hedda up all night.
Hedda was quite frankly snoring in the rocker, back in the gloom, but Gabrielle obediently roused herself from deep study, and kissed Margret, and retraced her way up through the cold halls. Her room looked tumbled and was cold; she opened the window. Still night, night, night, black and cold and unbroken—there was no end to this winter night! But Gabrielle was young and cruelly wearied in mind and body, and after three minutes in the cool sheets a heavenly warmth began to envelop her, and she fell deeply asleep.
CHAPTER XI
Winter sunlight was slanting into the room when she awakened, and for a while she lay still, trying to reconcile these beams from the southwest with any possible hour on a January morning. Her watch had stopped at half-past three. Or had it stopped?