What a different world it had been, mused David; a world without an electric light or bell or street car to disturb it—without a moving picture or an automobile! But Roger Fleming, this exquisite, negligently smiling gentleman pictured with the bay horse and the slim greyhound, had missed none of these things from his crowded life. He had had wealth and beauty, travel, books, he had inherited Wastewater, and women—women had always been but too kind to him!
His first wife, Janet Fleming, the widow of a distant relative, had come first to Wastewater about thirty years before. Janet was then twenty-two, weeping, helpless, alone—unless the four-weeks-old baby in her arms might be considered a companion. This baby had been David himself, fatherless since five months before his birth. Exactly seven weeks after her tearful and black-swathed arrival in the house of her kinsman, Janet, David’s young mother, had married Black Roger Fleming of Wastewater.
There had been quite a houseful of relatives, all more or less distant, there to receive her, for in the comfortable fashion of a past day the rich young heir of Wastewater had felt himself responsible for his less fortunate kin, especially his women kin; and more than that, it had suited his somewhat feudal ideas of hospitality to gather the entire clan about his big dining table.
So David’s mother had found Roger with a stately, withered little gray-headed second cousin—his uncle’s widowed daughter-in-law—“Aunt John,” keeping house for him, and assisting her a dark-eyed, vivacious daughter named Flora, and a smaller, more delicate, and timid daughter, Lily—third cousins, if relationships were to be traced. And besides these there was Roger’s younger brother, Will, a sweet, idle, endearing ne’er-do-well, who was supposedly studying law with a Boston firm, and who was actually doing nothing at all except enjoy life as an irresponsible junior.
Roger’s marriage made small difference in the others’ lives; David, whose memory began a few years after this, indeed could remember them all, living along comfortably in the big house. He remembered his dark-eyed, animated mother, who shortly after marrying Roger had had another boy baby in her arms; he remembered “Aunt John,” who managed the house and ruled the children and servants; Aunt Flora, watchful and jealous and sharp-tongued; Uncle Will, idle and laughing; Aunt Lily, small and delicate, reading Tennyson and singing “In Old Madrid” at the square piano; remembered his own splendid, rollicking baby half-brother Tom, and remembered above all Roger himself, still handsome, superb, riding his horses along the cliffs all about, driving splendid bays in an open barouche, carrying off the boys’ mother to hear Irving’s “Thomas à Becket” or Rostand’s “L’Aiglon” in Boston.
A veritable horde of servants kept this big household comfortable—butlers, gardeners, a coachman, a stable boy, fat cooks in the kitchen, whispering maids in the upper halls, and almost always a comfortable middle-aged housekeeping person who conferred constantly with old “Aunt John” and haggled with fruit peddlers at the gate in the sandy back lane.
This staff of domestics was lessened now, although there were still a butler and half-a-dozen underlings. But there had been other changes more important at Wastewater.
First, when David was six and little Tom Fleming five years old, their mother had died. Afterward, the boys had been packed off to boarding school and had been there when they heard of another death at home, this time of old “Aunt John.”
But Flora and Lily and Will continued to live there with Roger, and it was only a few months after their mother’s death that Flora, between a frown and a smile, had told them that she was shortly to take that mother’s place: she and Roger were to be married as soon as his year of mourning was over.
This had not deeply impressed the little boys; they cared little what their elders did, and had it not been that a new figure had immediately come upon the scene, David thought, long afterward, that he might easily have believed himself to have dreamed Flora’s announcement.