“Ah, losing your mother is different!” Gay said, in a voice of pain. “But with me, Davy, it would be better if I had lost her. If I had never had her!”
Nothing more was said until Aunt Flora returned, and then David felt a thrill of genuine admiration for the girl who could forget her own heartache to watch the elderly woman’s card game, prompting her, correcting her, discussing plays. Watching them both, he told himself that he would remain at Wastewater, whatever the inconvenience to himself, at least until he could make sure that Gabrielle had settled the wretchedly upsetting question of her own legitimacy.
But the next day was bright, and the sunshine almost warm. Gay seemed over the stormiest pain of her new shock and new suspicions, and David saw that she did not intend to hurry any further investigations. Moreover, his closest friend and associate, the lazy, happy-go-lucky Jim Rucker, in whose city studio David occasionally set up an easel, wired him distressedly concerning a question of some frames. Billings wanted to know if the snowscapes were to have the same frames as the picture called “White’s Barn, Keyport.” And if those three pictures came back from the Washington Exhibition, where did David want them left?
David was needed. He departed, carrying the comforting last memory of Gay, gloved and muffled, walking briskly in the winter garden, and promising him that if there were any really sensational weather developments in the next few weeks, she would send him word.
“If there’s a blizzard,” she promised, with almost her old smile, “you shall come back and paint it. Or one of those ice storms that coat all the branches with glass! And be sure to let me know if the ‘notes’—those little scrappy sketches I love so—sell, and which ones.”
“Lord, she is beautiful. Beautiful,” David said aloud, in the taxi. “I guess she’ll be sensible. She’s all right now!”
He did not know that she watched him out of sight with a heart like lead. With him the winter sunlight seemed to go, too, leaving only gray skies, gray sea, bare trees and frozen earth, leaving only shadows and damp odours of plaster and dust and kerosene in Wastewater’s big walls, leaving loneliness and fear and shame to Gabrielle.
Almost three weeks later she wrote him. David saw the Crowchester postmark and instantly knew whose pretty, square handwriting that must be. She wrote closely, evenly, yet there were a dash and a finish about the blocked letters that gave the sheet the effect of a rather unusual copper-plate engraving:
I had a long talk with Aunt Flora about ten days ago. And she told me the truth. It was what I suspected. There was never a marriage, and that was what broke her heart, and incidentally my poor mother’s heart. The disgrace of it, and the fever, coming all at once, were too much for her soul and mind, and can you wonder? I think I had braced myself to hear it, David, and expected it, and I am trying to meet it as well as I can, trying to work hard, and to keep busy, and to believe that it is only fair that I should pay for what was not my fault. That is the reason, of course—I mean the fact that it was all secret and wrong—that Uncle Roger never made any search for Charpentier, my father. My mother had no claim on him.
Aunt Flora was kindness itself about all this, and I think she feels bitterly sorry for me. She talked to me so kindly about Sylvia and herself always wanting me here, and indeed I could hardly be anywhere else now, for my mother has been pretty sick, and likes to have me about her. It seems that she fears any doctor we call in may be from one of those sanitariums she so hates, so we have not called one. She lies very peaceful and still, and, oddly enough, likes best to have me play and sing to her. One kind thing that Aunt Flora did was to have the old square piano upon which Sylvia and I used to practise years ago, brought up to my mother’s room, and often we spend our evenings there now.