August 21, 2025 • 34 mins
Gabrielle has always called the imposing brick mansion on the rugged New England coast home. But when she returns to Wastewater Hall, she finds it transformed into a sinister place brimming with malevolence. As she delves deeper into the dark mysteries that have overtaken her beloved home, each step brings her closer to danger—and perhaps even death. Join Gabrielle on her harrowing journey to uncover the truth behind this haunting transformation. - Summary by kirk202
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eighteen, Part two of The Black Flemings by Kathleen Norris.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter eighteen,
Part two. Flora's voice stopped abruptly, with the effect of
an interruption. I hated her, she said simply, after a moment,
and was still ah. Yes, I did, David, she added suddenly,
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her eyes always closed, and as if David had protested,
I hated her. I managed her house, I answered the
inquiries of anybody who came to call. I talked about
her with Roger when he was anxious, and I hated her.
She made him miserable. She was a mixture of a
child and a nun. She hated life, hated marriage. Lily
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and I were ready enough for it, watching our friends
Mary and bewidowed and marry again. But this girl loathed
her wifehood, her position, her husband. And her husband was
Roger Fleming. He couldn't kiss her, but what she would
shut those dark, sad eyes of hers and offer her
cheek like a child. I remember her shutting her eyes
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and turning her face away when we would kiss her,
Tom said, clearing his throat. Whether she actually wrote to
her mother asking for a reconciliation or not, I don't know,
Flora resumed. Roger had forbidden her to truckle, as he
called it. He felt that she must wait for advances
from her mother. They never quarreled about it, but I
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heard her say sometimes I wish my mother would walk in,
and heard Roger answer her, not unkindly, but half chokingly,
not into my house. One day, when they had been
married a few months, he was talking to me about
his brother Will. Why don't you marry Will, Flo, he
said to me, with a sort of laugh. Good enough
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for the poor relation, I said, said, trying to laugh back.
But I was bitter then. Life was utterly hateful to me.
Why how can you remember, he said, with a look
that told me that he knew that he himself, and
that old, unhappy love of mine for him was keeping
me dark and angry and fuming about wastewater for the
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best years of my life. I may marry Will, I said,
trembling all over, And a few months later I did,
although the idea had never come into my mind until
that day. Not that I didn't love your father, Sylvia,
I did. Everyone loved poor Will, and he had loved
me a long, long time. Will and I were married,
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and Roger gave his brother a handsome check, which Will
put into a patent for a bedcouch. Not that it mattered,
Not that it mattered. Flora's tired voice said drearily and
was silent. Part of the time we lived at Wastewater,
she resumed, and sometimes when Will was trying one of
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his new jobs. We had an apartment in Boston. Lily
was sometimes with us, and sometimes she and Cecily and
Roger went on short trips. They went to Bermuda one spring.
I remember Cecely was having one of her better times.
Then Roger would come to me distressed. Ceicely was having
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those hateful pains again. She would come into a Boston
hospital for an operation, and I would go to see
her every day and bring her and her nurses back
to Wastewater and stay for a while until she felt stronger.
Sylvia was born in Boston, but a few weeks later
we came to Wastewater, and both Roger and his wife
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grew so fond of her that I had an excuse
for almost never leaving, although I kept my little Boston flat.
Will was in the West for almost two years, working
in Portland, and Oakland and Los Angeles, and sometimes who
would talk as if the baby and I might join
him there. But as Cicely grew no stronger and poor
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little Lily began to show signs of a sort of
well they called it passive melancolia, And as the baby
grew to be everybody's plaything. She opened her sunken eyes
and fixed them with the shadow of a dark smile
upon Sylvia's stricken and acutely attentive face. Mamma, Sylvia breathed,
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bowing her dark head over her mother's hand. Poor little Silver,
as Roger used to call you, Flora said tenderly. I
did it for you, dear, or at least I meant
it for you. But it was never deliberate. It was
all an accident. She sank into quiet and almost immediately breathed,
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as if she were deeply asleep. Sylvia, not changing her
position by a hair's breadth, signaled to the others a
question as to the propriety of their slipping away, But
no one had stirred when Flora quite simply opened her
eyes and said, in a relieved tone, I want you
to know everything. You don't blame me too much. Sylvia.
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Have I told you, she added, anxious and alarmed. Did
I tell you about Gabriela, Mamma darling tomorrow? No, no,
Flora said feverishly, to day I had told you of
my marrying, yes, and that poor little Lily seemed so upset.
She had always been a forlorn, sentimental little thing, Lily.
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There had been different admirers, and she always took them seriously,
weeping and questioning herself and her motives, until my mother
and I used to want to shake her. But after
my mother's death and your mother's death, David, and when
you boys went off to school, she became gently melancholy,
yet not always sad either, but wandering a little and strange.
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There was a handsome, good for nothing sort of fellow
hanging about at Tenseil's in Keyport, then Sharpngay. His name
was He was an agent for something, if he was anything.
He and Lily used to walk along the cliff road,
and sometimes she would cry and tell Cecily that he
was as fine a gentleman as any man she knew,
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only unfortunate that sort of thing. I didn't like it,
but I dreaded telling Roger, for he was so quickly
roused to anger, and I thought he might horsewhip the
man and drive Lily clean out of her senses. Well,
one day, when Sylvie was almost three, and will had
been in the West for six months or so, and
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when Cicely was all upset and lying on the couch
like a little waxen ghost, Margaret Nolan came to me.
This same Margaret we have now. She was an old
servant here even then, and shaking all over and crying.
Poor Margaret. She told me that she was worried about
miss Lily. If that rough in Sharper has taken advantage
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of her, poor little, wandering, witted thing that she is,
I think they'll hang him, she said. I was sick
with the shame and the fright of it. I knew
Roger would go after any man that touched one of
his household with a revolver. It was all terrifying to me,
But I told Margaret, whom poor Lily had taken into
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her confidence, to go after the man sharpenay find out
if he could marry Lily and keep the whole thing
absolutely secret. It meant banishment for Lily from Cecily's presence.
I knew that for Cicely had a horror of such things,
had a horror even of little babies in their needs.
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Used to shut her eyes with a sort of sickness.
If I nursed Sylvia or discussed one of her little
illnesses in her room, such a thing as this would
have revolted her. Margaret found out that Charpigner had disappeared,
and all her efforts to get hold of him then
or since were useless. He had no ties, no responsibilities,
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nobody cared whether he lived or died. He simply went away.
So a few weeks went by, and I was sick
with anxiety and shame. Lily, I used to marvel at
it was perfectly serene and quiet. She was so simple,
poor soul, that she would go into the village and
buy pink baby ribbons. God alone knows how many hints
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she gave or whom she told. Finally, I planned to
take her to my apartment in Boston, live quietly there
with the baby that is my Sylvia, and perhaps one
other servant, and tell Roger and Cicely that Lily wanted
to study art or music. Afterward, we could place her
poor baby in some good institution, and then maybe I
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could tell Roger that was August, late July, in August,
and that was the August that Tom ran away from school.
She opened her eyes, looked about the circle. We didn't
hear of it until three days later. Flora went on presently,
addressing herself now to Tom, for that master you had
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was positive that he would find you. After three days,
he telegraphed, Roger, is your son with you missing since
Monday morning. Roger, poor fellow was proud at first his son,
fourteen years old, had run away to see the young monkey.
He ought to be thrashed for this, he would say, chuckling.
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He notified the police and went down to New York
that week, getting the whole machinery in motion. You'll not
thrash him, I used to say. You'll give him a
new bicycle. That'll be your thrashing. Proud eh. Tom In
erupted the narrative with a grin. Oh yes, just at first.
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But after a few weeks, perhaps not so long, he
began to speak more seriously. He couldn't have given us
all the slip. He isn't more than a child, he
would say. As he came and went. I told them
I was fifteen Tom contributed, all I did was sign
up with the whaling fleet. I thought it all out.
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The saturday before, on a school hike, I shipped a
bundle to New York Harbor. There were some clothes in
it that I didn't want. It was all a blind
and in my note to Dad, I said that I
had seen the Panama fruit boats going out, and they
made me sick to get to sea. We found the bundle,
and we searched the fruit boats, but we never got
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trace of you. Flora said I was an ass, and
I got up pretty well bumped out of me. Tom said, musingly.
A lot they cared who I was. On Old Jensen's valcare.
A fellow named Kelly went overboard that first run, and
I went into Montreal three months later with Kit Kelly's papers.
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Kelly and I stuck together until he got married. Everyone
always called me Kit. I never took any special trouble
then to hide myself. I always thought i'd come home
my next shore leave. Roger spent the rest of his
life hunting you. Flora said he was never at home
for more than a few weeks or a few days
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at a time after that, And we all knew Cecily
was happier when he was away. She had been much
better that spring, he and she had gone to Old
Point comfort, and she had seemed much more human somehow.
But this autumn she was wretched, sad and worried about herself.
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And she'd begun to say again, even to him, what
she had often said to Lily and me, My marriage
was a In all marriage is not wrong. But God
intended me for a life of prayer and holiness. And
what have I accomplished by disobeying the guidance of my
own conscience? This sort of thing made Roger furious, and
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I could see it if she could not. We'd have
a fine world if you had your way, Sis, he
said to her. Once, where would the younger generation come from? Oh, Roger,
don't she would say. He would look at her, look
at me, shrug and smile. But presently I would see
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into what impatient lines his face would fall. It would
have been a calamity for her to have a child,
he said to me, one day. We would surely have
had two children on our hands. Then, once he had
told me bitterly and resentfully that her hasty and ill
considered marriage was killing her, she was seventeen in years
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when we were married, he said, But I can understand
her mother's fury now. She was about nine years old.
Where life was concerned a mystic, a child saint torturing
herself with scruples and with half assimilated scraps of theology
and mysticism. That was the situation here at Wastewater. That September,
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when Roger had word from the police at Guam that
a boy who might have been Tom was there. As
a matter of fact, this was that first false Tom,
who had them all deceived for so long. Roger went
off to San Francisco, possibly to sail, as indeed he
did finally sail for the Orient Will. My husband had
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been away almost a year. David here was in boarding school,
left alone with Cicely and Lily. I did not dare
risk Lily's baby being born in Wastewater. It would have
started any amount of talk. And although poor Lily was
not responsible, and though Margaret had been spreading hints as
to Lily's having secretly married this Sharpngay, it seemed wiser
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not to have the whole thing here. Lily went in
to my Boston apartment and I got her a good
practical nurse, and her baby was born months too soon
and died within a few minutes. Died, said more than
one of the young voices died. Indeed, it never breathed
at all. Lily was very ill and went, as is
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not uncommon in such cases, into a sort of low
fever like the old brain fever, and she was near
death for a long long time. I lived with her
and the nurse and a good servant named Carrie in
the Boston apartment, for Cecily had grown worse by that time,
and the Crowchester doctor had quite frankly diagnosed her trouble
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as a tumor. We had heard that were before many times,
but Roger would never believe it. Cecily believed, though, and
she was furious at the Crowchester man because he would
not operate in her husband's absence. So we had dismissed
the Crowchester doctor, always a hard thing to do, and
Cecely told him frankly that she wanted to come into
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Boston and stay at a hospital for observation. She was
at Saint John's, only a few blocks from my apartment,
and I went to see her every morning before luncheon,
and every late afternoon. She seemed more cheerful in the hospital,
and the doctors were hopeful that a few weeks of
it would make a new woman of her. One day,
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about a week after Lily's poor little baby had come
and gone, the old doctor in whom Cecely specially trusted,
the man who had her in charge, walked down the
hospital steps and into the park with me, and we
had a long talk sitting on a park bench. He
told me then, and you may imagine what I felt
when I heard it, that there was every probability that
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young missus Roger fled I was about to become a mother.
For a while, I was stupefied. I asked him to
have a consultation. He said, no, that was not necessary
now and might distress her. She had, he gathered from
hints to the nurse, she had had certain curious dislike
for the idea of motherhood. Dislike doctor. I said, I
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believe it would kill her if she did not kill herself.
And I tried to give him some idea of her character.
What a strange, half child, half mystic she was. He
listened to me very gravely. It was important, he said,
not to shock her. That was the first time I
ever heard of a shock as an actual danger to
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a sick person. I remember he explained it carefully. Cecily
did not have the vitality of a hummingbird. He said,
if we could get a hold of the husband, I
had to go on. I explained that her husband was
much older, was in fact twenty three or four years older,
and that in the true sense, she did not love him.
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And I said that I was sure that if she
were to have a baby, her love for it would
come with a child. I said all the usual things,
and he agreed with me. He told me the circumstance
of the false diagnosis was unusual, but it had happened before,
happened in his practice before. There was, of course a
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possibility now that he was mistaken, that it was what
the other doctors had always supposed, And there was every
probability that the baby would not live under the curious circumstances.
But it seemed cruel not to give young missus Fleming
this hope. It would be no hope to her. I said,
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whatever the child, if it lived, mine come to mean
to her this prospect would make her absolutely ill. We
agreed that for a while. Therefore, nothing must be said
about it. But it was only ten days later that
they took zess Lee up to the surgery, and her baby,
two months too soon, was born. She was dying, they
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thought that night, and there seemed every probability that the
baby would die too. A nice little nurse there told
me that she wanted to give the child lay baptism,
and I made no objection. She asked me what name,
and I said Mary. It was the first name I
thought of. I'll name her that and my name. She said,
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I'll call her Mary Gabriella. Me, said Gabriela, Fleming in
a sharp whisper that echoed like a pistol shot in
the room. Her dilated eyes moved to David's face. I
told you last night, gay, David said gently. You told
me yes. But I thought my mother, I thought Lily.
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I only thought that she had loved Uncle Roger instead
of the man sharpingay, the girl stammered, I I'm their child,
she whispered. She got to her feet, her eyes upon
the distance, her mouth working, and walked bewilderedly to the door.
Mama Sylvia said sharply, as Flora moaned and seemed to
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contract into something smaller than her already shrunken self as
she sank deep into the white pillow. Tom, give me
that medicine, Sylvia commanded, in a frightened low tone. Bring
her back, David, Flora said, struggling to raise herself and
following Gabriela with her eyes. She must hear, gay, David said,
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at the girl's elbow. She gave him a day's look,
devoid of any expression whatsoever. Aunt Flora wants us all
to listen, the man said, without protest. She came back
to her place at the bedside. The sunset was dying
from the walls now, and a old wintry chill was
falling through the cold, dark afternoon air. Flora looked fixedly
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at Gabriella, who, pale and tense with a bitten lower
lip and star sapphire eyes widened with excitement and pain,
never moved her gaze from her face. Cicely was so ill,
said Flora, after a moment, that for two or three
days they feared for her life. I got a good
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nurse and stayed at the hospital myself, and sent the
tiny baby to my apartment when she was about nine
days old. Trying all the time to get in touch
with Roger in San Francisco. He had sailed then for Guam,
but we did not know that until weeks later, when
the telegrams all came back, but there was no attempt
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at secrecy. The old doctor told me that he had
tried kindly and gently to inform young missus Fleming of
the birth of a child, that indeed she had some
hazy recollect of the crisis of her illness before the anesthetic,
but that she had given no sign of understanding him.
I rented the furnished apartment next to mine and brought
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her there. She looked dying then as she was. She
lay perfectly passive and motionless all day, sometimes crying, sometimes reading,
only taking a little tea or a little soup. One
day I came home and she had put on her
wrapper and come into Lily's room. Lily was bitter and
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was sitting up, and I had begun to feel, as
one does feel in such emergencies, that I might wither.
This time, strange and terrible as it was, Sylvia was
on the floor with a doll, and the nurse had
brought the new baby in in her basket to get
the sunshine in the window. There Cicely was crying, crying hysterically,
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But even that much emotion seemed to me a good sign.
Lily was lying on the bed and Cicely kneeling beside her,
with her face buried against her knees. I had been
utterly dissatisfied with Cicely's nurse, who was a careless, neglectful creature,
and I was furious to see that she had let
her patient get out of bed at all. Cicely, I said,
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you must not. Excitement like this will be dangerous to you.
Lily looked at me with that bright, childish smile she
had had since her illness. Cicely has been looking at
my baby flow, she said, happily. Isn't it a sweet
baby flow? It couldn't be wrong to have a sweet
baby like that, could it. The servant Carrie looked at
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me significantly, and I saw that salvation for Cecely might
lie here. Cicely had been looking into my eyes. Now
she buried her face again and burst out in a
sort of whisper. Oh my God, I thank thee, Oh
my God, how good thou art. I am so grateful,
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I am so humbly grateful. We got her back to bed,
and when we were alone, she said to me, Flora,
I must tell you something. I can tell you now,
for I am going to die and God has forgiven me.
I could not give my life to any other soul, Flora,
and I could not die knowing that my sins would
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be visited on a poor little baby. No, no, I
could not bear that. They told me, the doctor told
me at the hospital, or I dreamed it on that
terrible night of the operation. She said, Flora, did you
know that I thought I had a child that night? No,
or they told me I did, she said, beginning to
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be frightened again. Don't bother your head about it now, Cicely,
I said, just get well so that when Roger comes
back she shuddered at Roger's name, and begin to get excited.
I will be dead before that, and God will have
forgiven me. Flora. She said, Ah, you don't think I
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was a sinner, but I was before I ever took
my marriage vow. I had taken another when I was
only fourteen years old. Another girl and I at the
convent had taken a solemn oath to God that we
would never marry. Poor child breathed Gabriella's pale lips involuntarily,
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Poor child Flora echoed without opening her eyes. Her voice
was so weak that David held water to her mouth,
and she drank with difficulty. Poor little Cicely. She said
that when she had first come to waste Water, she
had no thought of lovers or love in her mind.
That she had been bewildered and astonished at the emotion
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Roger had almost at once roused in her, but that
she had never thought of it as love, that all
her thoughts and senses had been in a wild confusion,
dulminating on the day that he and she drove into
Minford beyond Tensels quite simply, and that Roger, who knew
the justice there, got a special license and they were
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married that night. She went quite simply away from her
mother's room, expecting to be questioned in the morning, but
her mother did not miss her. Cicely was quietly dressing
when her mother awakened the next day. She said she
remembered her vow that day, and when she came to
this part, I thought she was going to die. She said,
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quite seriously, that she had had not one single happy
moment since, and I suppose when Roger laughed at her scruples.
As he did laugh, he broke her heart. I told
her that no minor child could take a valid vow
of that sort, and that indeed her very marriage might
be questioned, since her age had been given as nineteen
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no use. She believed me only enough to say that
no irregularity in her license could possibly make her child
more a curse than she would feel a child of
hers to be. But I understand now I never had
a child. It's Lily's child, she said, over and over again,
with so much deep thankfulness, that I could only be
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thankful too. Lily told me all about it, she said,
so humbly and tenderly. And she is no worse a
sinner than I less, perhaps, for she loved and I
did not. I dismissed the nurse that afternoon, as it chanced,
and sent for a nurse we had had from Crochester,
Hannah Rosecrantz, a fine girl. She came the next day,
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and I told her naturally the whole truth, but that
both my poor Lily and missus Fleming must be treated
with the utmost consideration. Until mister Fleming came home. Cicely
was now all anxiety to get back to waste Water.
She said that she never wanted to see again the
cruel old doctor who had frightened her. So I explained
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the situation to him, and presently we all came back
to waste Water, leaving Carrie behind us, simply because she
did not want to come. Hannah Rosecrantz was engaged to
be married. She was with us only a few weeks
and then went to Australia, where her husband has become
well to do. She idolized the baby and loved Lily too,
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but I suppose servant fashion she gave the other servants
to believe that there was something amiss. Anyway, it was
always miss Lily's baby from the very first. Lily had
told Margaret about her troubles months before, and I was
never in any doubt what Margaret thought. As for Cicely,
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she seemed to think it settled. Our Crochester doctor was recalled,
but there was nothing he could do except keep her quiet.
She was sinking very fast. She died when Gabriella was
only seven or eight weeks old. Roger got home too
late the day before the funeral, but even then I
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thought that any accident might show him the truth. I
told myself that in all this confusion, it would only
sadden him more. I I don't know now what I
thought or why I did what I did. But Lily
and the baby and Margaret had their own suite of rooms,
and Roger naturally paid little attention to them. In his
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grief for his wife. He saw the baby took it
for granted she was Lily's. And I told myself that
some time I would, of course tell him the whole story,
or somebody would. He would meet the old doctor who
had attended Cicely, or the doctor who had attended Lily
in Boston, or he might run across Kerry or Hannah Rosecrantz.
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Cicely was buried here where we buried Lily. Only last
spring Roger went off on his searches, came home gray headed,
and so changed went off again. And I never told
him I had begun it to protect Cicely, to comfort Lily.
I never had planned it. It all seemed to come
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about of itself, and for the first six years of
her life, Gabriela called Lily Mama. Then Lily became very bad,
and we put her in a sanitarium, and she never knew,
and then Will Fleming, my husband died, and I thought
fool that I was. Flora added after a pause, with
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infinite fatigue and a sort of self contempt in her voice.
I cared for Roger even then. I cared for him,
even then I was widowed, and he twice a widower.
He loved my child, but he loved Gabriella as well.
I could not. I could not put Ceicely Fleming's child
ahead of me. Roger needed me. He turned to me
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for everything. I could not see his little girl placed
ahead of me, pushing me out of his life. I couldn't,
she said more loudly, choking. I had given my life
to him, my whole wife. He had trampled me under
his feet. Gabriela was fair, she was like Cecily's mother.
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She was a beautiful baby. I knew he would give
his whole heart to her, live for her. One day
he said that he was going to change his will,
make a generous provision for Lily's poor little girl. And
I was glad. It wasn't money that mattered to me.
I would have starved for him. He said that in
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case his boy never came back, the little girl should
share and share a like like sisters. And I was
glad there was never any plan in what I did.
I used to think that any hour my change it,
any chance word. I knew that Roger had written a
will in Janet's day, when Tom was a baby, and
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when he might have had half a dozen other children.
But after this talk he had a good many interviews
with his lawyer, and I supposed that he had done
what he said. He was not here very much. I
came to believe that he hated the old place and
me and Lily and everything that reminded him that he
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had once been young and free, with the world at
his feet. I used to think that even if he
had found Tom, he would have gone on wandering. But
at last, when he came home, it was to die.
He died, you remember David, quite quietly and without pain.
One summer day he had been warned of his heart.
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He was packing to go off to Panama. A doctor
there had written that there was a young fellow just
answering Tom's description with with whatver nerever it is when
a man loses all memory amnesia. A few days later
we read the will you remember David on such a
hot morning in the library. Sylvia and Gabriella were playing
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outside on the terrace where the high Ranges are. Old
Judge Baron had come down from the city. We read
the will, and I knew then what I had done.
Gabriela was not mentioned. Gabriella was not mentioned. The will
stood as it had stood when he wrote it when
Tom was a baby. Everything everything to his child or children,
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and there was a condical dated about the time of
his last return home, giving everything, everything to Sylvia in
case Tom did not come back. My God, my God,
Flora whispered under her breath and lay still. I had
woned it all my life, and now I had it,
she said after a while, in a voice that was weakening,
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weakening from moment to moment, and yet full of passion
and fire. Still I had it all. Judge Baron went away,
David went away. I was alone with Sylvia and little Gabriella,
and waste water was mine. I remember in the first, long,
warm afternoon that I walked slowly through it from room
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to room, and thought that I had survived them all,
Uncle Tom, Roger, Janet, Cicely, Will, all all the black
Fleming's gone except me. I had only to keep silent,
and my child would be rich. I think that's all
she added, opening her sunken, dark eyes and fixing them
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steadily upon David's face. That explains it all, doesn't it.
I have lived in fear. I knew the old doctor
was dead, but I used to lie in the nights
imagining that he had happened to tell someone, someone who
was drawing nearer and nearer to my life every moment.
Hannah Rosecrountz, the carry we had in Boston, the doctor
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Lily had, whose very name I can't remember. They all
knew any day might have brought them back to me
with their questions. I used to imagine that I might
go to jail, but I never was anything else but
in jail all my life long. End of chapter eighteen
Chapter eighteen, Part two of The Black Flemings by Kathleen Norris.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter eighteen,
Part two. Flora's voice stopped abruptly, with the effect of
an interruption. I hated her, she said simply, after a moment,
and was still ah. Yes, I did, David, she added suddenly,
(00:26):
her eyes always closed, and as if David had protested,
I hated her. I managed her house, I answered the
inquiries of anybody who came to call. I talked about
her with Roger when he was anxious, and I hated her.
She made him miserable. She was a mixture of a
child and a nun. She hated life, hated marriage. Lily
(00:50):
and I were ready enough for it, watching our friends
Mary and bewidowed and marry again. But this girl loathed
her wifehood, her position, her husband. And her husband was
Roger Fleming. He couldn't kiss her, but what she would
shut those dark, sad eyes of hers and offer her
cheek like a child. I remember her shutting her eyes
(01:13):
and turning her face away when we would kiss her,
Tom said, clearing his throat. Whether she actually wrote to
her mother asking for a reconciliation or not, I don't know,
Flora resumed. Roger had forbidden her to truckle, as he
called it. He felt that she must wait for advances
from her mother. They never quarreled about it, but I
(01:36):
heard her say sometimes I wish my mother would walk in,
and heard Roger answer her, not unkindly, but half chokingly,
not into my house. One day, when they had been
married a few months, he was talking to me about
his brother Will. Why don't you marry Will, Flo, he
said to me, with a sort of laugh. Good enough
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for the poor relation, I said, said, trying to laugh back.
But I was bitter then. Life was utterly hateful to me.
Why how can you remember, he said, with a look
that told me that he knew that he himself, and
that old, unhappy love of mine for him was keeping
me dark and angry and fuming about wastewater for the
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best years of my life. I may marry Will, I said,
trembling all over, And a few months later I did,
although the idea had never come into my mind until
that day. Not that I didn't love your father, Sylvia,
I did. Everyone loved poor Will, and he had loved
me a long, long time. Will and I were married,
(02:42):
and Roger gave his brother a handsome check, which Will
put into a patent for a bedcouch. Not that it mattered,
Not that it mattered. Flora's tired voice said drearily and
was silent. Part of the time we lived at Wastewater,
she resumed, and sometimes when Will was trying one of
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his new jobs. We had an apartment in Boston. Lily
was sometimes with us, and sometimes she and Cecily and
Roger went on short trips. They went to Bermuda one spring.
I remember Cecely was having one of her better times.
Then Roger would come to me distressed. Ceicely was having
(03:24):
those hateful pains again. She would come into a Boston
hospital for an operation, and I would go to see
her every day and bring her and her nurses back
to Wastewater and stay for a while until she felt stronger.
Sylvia was born in Boston, but a few weeks later
we came to Wastewater, and both Roger and his wife
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grew so fond of her that I had an excuse
for almost never leaving, although I kept my little Boston flat.
Will was in the West for almost two years, working
in Portland, and Oakland and Los Angeles, and sometimes who
would talk as if the baby and I might join
him there. But as Cicely grew no stronger and poor
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little Lily began to show signs of a sort of
well they called it passive melancolia, And as the baby
grew to be everybody's plaything. She opened her sunken eyes
and fixed them with the shadow of a dark smile
upon Sylvia's stricken and acutely attentive face. Mamma, Sylvia breathed,
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bowing her dark head over her mother's hand. Poor little Silver,
as Roger used to call you, Flora said tenderly. I
did it for you, dear, or at least I meant
it for you. But it was never deliberate. It was
all an accident. She sank into quiet and almost immediately breathed,
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as if she were deeply asleep. Sylvia, not changing her
position by a hair's breadth, signaled to the others a
question as to the propriety of their slipping away, But
no one had stirred when Flora quite simply opened her
eyes and said, in a relieved tone, I want you
to know everything. You don't blame me too much. Sylvia.
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Have I told you, she added, anxious and alarmed. Did
I tell you about Gabriela, Mamma darling tomorrow? No, no,
Flora said feverishly, to day I had told you of
my marrying, yes, and that poor little Lily seemed so upset.
She had always been a forlorn, sentimental little thing, Lily.
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There had been different admirers, and she always took them seriously,
weeping and questioning herself and her motives, until my mother
and I used to want to shake her. But after
my mother's death and your mother's death, David, and when
you boys went off to school, she became gently melancholy,
yet not always sad either, but wandering a little and strange.
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There was a handsome, good for nothing sort of fellow
hanging about at Tenseil's in Keyport, then Sharpngay. His name
was He was an agent for something, if he was anything.
He and Lily used to walk along the cliff road,
and sometimes she would cry and tell Cecily that he
was as fine a gentleman as any man she knew,
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only unfortunate that sort of thing. I didn't like it,
but I dreaded telling Roger, for he was so quickly
roused to anger, and I thought he might horsewhip the
man and drive Lily clean out of her senses. Well,
one day, when Sylvie was almost three, and will had
been in the West for six months or so, and
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when Cicely was all upset and lying on the couch
like a little waxen ghost, Margaret Nolan came to me.
This same Margaret we have now. She was an old
servant here even then, and shaking all over and crying.
Poor Margaret. She told me that she was worried about
miss Lily. If that rough in Sharper has taken advantage
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of her, poor little, wandering, witted thing that she is,
I think they'll hang him, she said. I was sick
with the shame and the fright of it. I knew
Roger would go after any man that touched one of
his household with a revolver. It was all terrifying to me,
But I told Margaret, whom poor Lily had taken into
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her confidence, to go after the man sharpenay find out
if he could marry Lily and keep the whole thing
absolutely secret. It meant banishment for Lily from Cecily's presence.
I knew that for Cicely had a horror of such things,
had a horror even of little babies in their needs.
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Used to shut her eyes with a sort of sickness.
If I nursed Sylvia or discussed one of her little
illnesses in her room, such a thing as this would
have revolted her. Margaret found out that Charpigner had disappeared,
and all her efforts to get hold of him then
or since were useless. He had no ties, no responsibilities,
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nobody cared whether he lived or died. He simply went away.
So a few weeks went by, and I was sick
with anxiety and shame. Lily, I used to marvel at
it was perfectly serene and quiet. She was so simple,
poor soul, that she would go into the village and
buy pink baby ribbons. God alone knows how many hints
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she gave or whom she told. Finally, I planned to
take her to my apartment in Boston, live quietly there
with the baby that is my Sylvia, and perhaps one
other servant, and tell Roger and Cicely that Lily wanted
to study art or music. Afterward, we could place her
poor baby in some good institution, and then maybe I
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could tell Roger that was August, late July, in August,
and that was the August that Tom ran away from school.
She opened her eyes, looked about the circle. We didn't
hear of it until three days later. Flora went on presently,
addressing herself now to Tom, for that master you had
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was positive that he would find you. After three days,
he telegraphed, Roger, is your son with you missing since
Monday morning. Roger, poor fellow was proud at first his son,
fourteen years old, had run away to see the young monkey.
He ought to be thrashed for this, he would say, chuckling.
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He notified the police and went down to New York
that week, getting the whole machinery in motion. You'll not
thrash him, I used to say. You'll give him a
new bicycle. That'll be your thrashing. Proud eh. Tom In
erupted the narrative with a grin. Oh yes, just at first.
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But after a few weeks, perhaps not so long, he
began to speak more seriously. He couldn't have given us
all the slip. He isn't more than a child, he
would say. As he came and went. I told them
I was fifteen Tom contributed, all I did was sign
up with the whaling fleet. I thought it all out.
(10:27):
The saturday before, on a school hike, I shipped a
bundle to New York Harbor. There were some clothes in
it that I didn't want. It was all a blind
and in my note to Dad, I said that I
had seen the Panama fruit boats going out, and they
made me sick to get to sea. We found the bundle,
and we searched the fruit boats, but we never got
(10:49):
trace of you. Flora said I was an ass, and
I got up pretty well bumped out of me. Tom said, musingly.
A lot they cared who I was. On Old Jensen's valcare.
A fellow named Kelly went overboard that first run, and
I went into Montreal three months later with Kit Kelly's papers.
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Kelly and I stuck together until he got married. Everyone
always called me Kit. I never took any special trouble
then to hide myself. I always thought i'd come home
my next shore leave. Roger spent the rest of his
life hunting you. Flora said he was never at home
for more than a few weeks or a few days
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at a time after that, And we all knew Cecily
was happier when he was away. She had been much
better that spring, he and she had gone to Old
Point comfort, and she had seemed much more human somehow.
But this autumn she was wretched, sad and worried about herself.
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And she'd begun to say again, even to him, what
she had often said to Lily and me, My marriage
was a In all marriage is not wrong. But God
intended me for a life of prayer and holiness. And
what have I accomplished by disobeying the guidance of my
own conscience? This sort of thing made Roger furious, and
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I could see it if she could not. We'd have
a fine world if you had your way, Sis, he
said to her. Once, where would the younger generation come from? Oh, Roger,
don't she would say. He would look at her, look
at me, shrug and smile. But presently I would see
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into what impatient lines his face would fall. It would
have been a calamity for her to have a child,
he said to me, one day. We would surely have
had two children on our hands. Then, once he had
told me bitterly and resentfully that her hasty and ill
considered marriage was killing her, she was seventeen in years
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when we were married, he said, But I can understand
her mother's fury now. She was about nine years old.
Where life was concerned a mystic, a child saint torturing
herself with scruples and with half assimilated scraps of theology
and mysticism. That was the situation here at Wastewater. That September,
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when Roger had word from the police at Guam that
a boy who might have been Tom was there. As
a matter of fact, this was that first false Tom,
who had them all deceived for so long. Roger went
off to San Francisco, possibly to sail, as indeed he
did finally sail for the Orient Will. My husband had
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been away almost a year. David here was in boarding school,
left alone with Cicely and Lily. I did not dare
risk Lily's baby being born in Wastewater. It would have
started any amount of talk. And although poor Lily was
not responsible, and though Margaret had been spreading hints as
to Lily's having secretly married this Sharpngay, it seemed wiser
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not to have the whole thing here. Lily went in
to my Boston apartment and I got her a good
practical nurse, and her baby was born months too soon
and died within a few minutes. Died, said more than
one of the young voices died. Indeed, it never breathed
at all. Lily was very ill and went, as is
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not uncommon in such cases, into a sort of low
fever like the old brain fever, and she was near
death for a long long time. I lived with her
and the nurse and a good servant named Carrie in
the Boston apartment, for Cecily had grown worse by that time,
and the Crowchester doctor had quite frankly diagnosed her trouble
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as a tumor. We had heard that were before many times,
but Roger would never believe it. Cecily believed, though, and
she was furious at the Crowchester man because he would
not operate in her husband's absence. So we had dismissed
the Crowchester doctor, always a hard thing to do, and
Cecely told him frankly that she wanted to come into
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Boston and stay at a hospital for observation. She was
at Saint John's, only a few blocks from my apartment,
and I went to see her every morning before luncheon,
and every late afternoon. She seemed more cheerful in the hospital,
and the doctors were hopeful that a few weeks of
it would make a new woman of her. One day,
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about a week after Lily's poor little baby had come
and gone, the old doctor in whom Cecely specially trusted,
the man who had her in charge, walked down the
hospital steps and into the park with me, and we
had a long talk sitting on a park bench. He
told me then, and you may imagine what I felt
when I heard it, that there was every probability that
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young missus Roger fled I was about to become a mother.
For a while, I was stupefied. I asked him to
have a consultation. He said, no, that was not necessary
now and might distress her. She had, he gathered from
hints to the nurse, she had had certain curious dislike
for the idea of motherhood. Dislike doctor. I said, I
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believe it would kill her if she did not kill herself.
And I tried to give him some idea of her character.
What a strange, half child, half mystic she was. He
listened to me very gravely. It was important, he said,
not to shock her. That was the first time I
ever heard of a shock as an actual danger to
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a sick person. I remember he explained it carefully. Cecily
did not have the vitality of a hummingbird. He said,
if we could get a hold of the husband, I
had to go on. I explained that her husband was
much older, was in fact twenty three or four years older,
and that in the true sense, she did not love him.
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And I said that I was sure that if she
were to have a baby, her love for it would
come with a child. I said all the usual things,
and he agreed with me. He told me the circumstance
of the false diagnosis was unusual, but it had happened before,
happened in his practice before. There was, of course a
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possibility now that he was mistaken, that it was what
the other doctors had always supposed, And there was every
probability that the baby would not live under the curious circumstances.
But it seemed cruel not to give young missus Fleming
this hope. It would be no hope to her. I said,
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whatever the child, if it lived, mine come to mean
to her this prospect would make her absolutely ill. We
agreed that for a while. Therefore, nothing must be said
about it. But it was only ten days later that
they took zess Lee up to the surgery, and her baby,
two months too soon, was born. She was dying, they
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thought that night, and there seemed every probability that the
baby would die too. A nice little nurse there told
me that she wanted to give the child lay baptism,
and I made no objection. She asked me what name,
and I said Mary. It was the first name I
thought of. I'll name her that and my name. She said,
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I'll call her Mary Gabriella. Me, said Gabriela, Fleming in
a sharp whisper that echoed like a pistol shot in
the room. Her dilated eyes moved to David's face. I
told you last night, gay, David said gently. You told
me yes. But I thought my mother, I thought Lily.
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I only thought that she had loved Uncle Roger instead
of the man sharpingay, the girl stammered, I I'm their child,
she whispered. She got to her feet, her eyes upon
the distance, her mouth working, and walked bewilderedly to the door.
Mama Sylvia said sharply, as Flora moaned and seemed to
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contract into something smaller than her already shrunken self as
she sank deep into the white pillow. Tom, give me
that medicine, Sylvia commanded, in a frightened low tone. Bring
her back, David, Flora said, struggling to raise herself and
following Gabriela with her eyes. She must hear, gay, David said,
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at the girl's elbow. She gave him a day's look,
devoid of any expression whatsoever. Aunt Flora wants us all
to listen, the man said, without protest. She came back
to her place at the bedside. The sunset was dying
from the walls now, and a old wintry chill was
falling through the cold, dark afternoon air. Flora looked fixedly
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at Gabriella, who, pale and tense with a bitten lower
lip and star sapphire eyes widened with excitement and pain,
never moved her gaze from her face. Cicely was so ill,
said Flora, after a moment, that for two or three
days they feared for her life. I got a good
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nurse and stayed at the hospital myself, and sent the
tiny baby to my apartment when she was about nine
days old. Trying all the time to get in touch
with Roger in San Francisco. He had sailed then for Guam,
but we did not know that until weeks later, when
the telegrams all came back, but there was no attempt
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at secrecy. The old doctor told me that he had
tried kindly and gently to inform young missus Fleming of
the birth of a child, that indeed she had some
hazy recollect of the crisis of her illness before the anesthetic,
but that she had given no sign of understanding him.
I rented the furnished apartment next to mine and brought
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her there. She looked dying then as she was. She
lay perfectly passive and motionless all day, sometimes crying, sometimes reading,
only taking a little tea or a little soup. One
day I came home and she had put on her
wrapper and come into Lily's room. Lily was bitter and
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was sitting up, and I had begun to feel, as
one does feel in such emergencies, that I might wither.
This time, strange and terrible as it was, Sylvia was
on the floor with a doll, and the nurse had
brought the new baby in in her basket to get
the sunshine in the window. There Cicely was crying, crying hysterically,
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But even that much emotion seemed to me a good sign.
Lily was lying on the bed and Cicely kneeling beside her,
with her face buried against her knees. I had been
utterly dissatisfied with Cicely's nurse, who was a careless, neglectful creature,
and I was furious to see that she had let
her patient get out of bed at all. Cicely, I said,
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you must not. Excitement like this will be dangerous to you.
Lily looked at me with that bright, childish smile she
had had since her illness. Cicely has been looking at
my baby flow, she said, happily. Isn't it a sweet
baby flow? It couldn't be wrong to have a sweet
baby like that, could it. The servant Carrie looked at
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me significantly, and I saw that salvation for Cecely might
lie here. Cicely had been looking into my eyes. Now
she buried her face again and burst out in a
sort of whisper. Oh my God, I thank thee, Oh
my God, how good thou art. I am so grateful,
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I am so humbly grateful. We got her back to bed,
and when we were alone, she said to me, Flora,
I must tell you something. I can tell you now,
for I am going to die and God has forgiven me.
I could not give my life to any other soul, Flora,
and I could not die knowing that my sins would
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be visited on a poor little baby. No, no, I
could not bear that. They told me, the doctor told
me at the hospital, or I dreamed it on that
terrible night of the operation. She said, Flora, did you
know that I thought I had a child that night? No,
or they told me I did, she said, beginning to
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be frightened again. Don't bother your head about it now, Cicely,
I said, just get well so that when Roger comes
back she shuddered at Roger's name, and begin to get excited.
I will be dead before that, and God will have
forgiven me. Flora. She said, Ah, you don't think I
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was a sinner, but I was before I ever took
my marriage vow. I had taken another when I was
only fourteen years old. Another girl and I at the
convent had taken a solemn oath to God that we
would never marry. Poor child breathed Gabriella's pale lips involuntarily,
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Poor child Flora echoed without opening her eyes. Her voice
was so weak that David held water to her mouth,
and she drank with difficulty. Poor little Cicely. She said
that when she had first come to waste Water, she
had no thought of lovers or love in her mind.
That she had been bewildered and astonished at the emotion
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Roger had almost at once roused in her, but that
she had never thought of it as love, that all
her thoughts and senses had been in a wild confusion,
dulminating on the day that he and she drove into
Minford beyond Tensels quite simply, and that Roger, who knew
the justice there, got a special license and they were
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married that night. She went quite simply away from her
mother's room, expecting to be questioned in the morning, but
her mother did not miss her. Cicely was quietly dressing
when her mother awakened the next day. She said she
remembered her vow that day, and when she came to
this part, I thought she was going to die. She said,
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quite seriously, that she had had not one single happy
moment since, and I suppose when Roger laughed at her scruples.
As he did laugh, he broke her heart. I told
her that no minor child could take a valid vow
of that sort, and that indeed her very marriage might
be questioned, since her age had been given as nineteen
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no use. She believed me only enough to say that
no irregularity in her license could possibly make her child
more a curse than she would feel a child of
hers to be. But I understand now I never had
a child. It's Lily's child, she said, over and over again,
with so much deep thankfulness, that I could only be
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thankful too. Lily told me all about it, she said,
so humbly and tenderly. And she is no worse a
sinner than I less, perhaps, for she loved and I
did not. I dismissed the nurse that afternoon, as it chanced,
and sent for a nurse we had had from Crochester,
Hannah Rosecrantz, a fine girl. She came the next day,
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and I told her naturally the whole truth, but that
both my poor Lily and missus Fleming must be treated
with the utmost consideration. Until mister Fleming came home. Cicely
was now all anxiety to get back to waste Water.
She said that she never wanted to see again the
cruel old doctor who had frightened her. So I explained
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the situation to him, and presently we all came back
to waste Water, leaving Carrie behind us, simply because she
did not want to come. Hannah Rosecrantz was engaged to
be married. She was with us only a few weeks
and then went to Australia, where her husband has become
well to do. She idolized the baby and loved Lily too,
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but I suppose servant fashion she gave the other servants
to believe that there was something amiss. Anyway, it was
always miss Lily's baby from the very first. Lily had
told Margaret about her troubles months before, and I was
never in any doubt what Margaret thought. As for Cicely,
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she seemed to think it settled. Our Crochester doctor was recalled,
but there was nothing he could do except keep her quiet.
She was sinking very fast. She died when Gabriella was
only seven or eight weeks old. Roger got home too
late the day before the funeral, but even then I
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thought that any accident might show him the truth. I
told myself that in all this confusion, it would only
sadden him more. I I don't know now what I
thought or why I did what I did. But Lily
and the baby and Margaret had their own suite of rooms,
and Roger naturally paid little attention to them. In his
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grief for his wife. He saw the baby took it
for granted she was Lily's. And I told myself that
some time I would, of course tell him the whole story,
or somebody would. He would meet the old doctor who
had attended Cicely, or the doctor who had attended Lily
in Boston, or he might run across Kerry or Hannah Rosecrantz.
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Cicely was buried here where we buried Lily. Only last
spring Roger went off on his searches, came home gray headed,
and so changed went off again. And I never told
him I had begun it to protect Cicely, to comfort Lily.
I never had planned it. It all seemed to come
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about of itself, and for the first six years of
her life, Gabriela called Lily Mama. Then Lily became very bad,
and we put her in a sanitarium, and she never knew,
and then Will Fleming, my husband died, and I thought
fool that I was. Flora added after a pause, with
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infinite fatigue and a sort of self contempt in her voice.
I cared for Roger even then. I cared for him,
even then I was widowed, and he twice a widower.
He loved my child, but he loved Gabriella as well.
I could not. I could not put Ceicely Fleming's child
ahead of me. Roger needed me. He turned to me
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for everything. I could not see his little girl placed
ahead of me, pushing me out of his life. I couldn't,
she said more loudly, choking. I had given my life
to him, my whole wife. He had trampled me under
his feet. Gabriela was fair, she was like Cecily's mother.
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She was a beautiful baby. I knew he would give
his whole heart to her, live for her. One day
he said that he was going to change his will,
make a generous provision for Lily's poor little girl. And
I was glad. It wasn't money that mattered to me.
I would have starved for him. He said that in
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case his boy never came back, the little girl should
share and share a like like sisters. And I was
glad there was never any plan in what I did.
I used to think that any hour my change it,
any chance word. I knew that Roger had written a
will in Janet's day, when Tom was a baby, and
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when he might have had half a dozen other children.
But after this talk he had a good many interviews
with his lawyer, and I supposed that he had done
what he said. He was not here very much. I
came to believe that he hated the old place and
me and Lily and everything that reminded him that he
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had once been young and free, with the world at
his feet. I used to think that even if he
had found Tom, he would have gone on wandering. But
at last, when he came home, it was to die.
He died, you remember David, quite quietly and without pain.
One summer day he had been warned of his heart.
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He was packing to go off to Panama. A doctor
there had written that there was a young fellow just
answering Tom's description with with whatver nerever it is when
a man loses all memory amnesia. A few days later
we read the will you remember David on such a
hot morning in the library. Sylvia and Gabriella were playing
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outside on the terrace where the high Ranges are. Old
Judge Baron had come down from the city. We read
the will, and I knew then what I had done.
Gabriela was not mentioned. Gabriella was not mentioned. The will
stood as it had stood when he wrote it when
Tom was a baby. Everything everything to his child or children,
(32:39):
and there was a condical dated about the time of
his last return home, giving everything, everything to Sylvia in
case Tom did not come back. My God, my God,
Flora whispered under her breath and lay still. I had
woned it all my life, and now I had it,
she said after a while, in a voice that was weakening,
(33:03):
weakening from moment to moment, and yet full of passion
and fire. Still I had it all. Judge Baron went away,
David went away. I was alone with Sylvia and little Gabriella,
and waste water was mine. I remember in the first, long,
warm afternoon that I walked slowly through it from room
(33:26):
to room, and thought that I had survived them all,
Uncle Tom, Roger, Janet, Cicely, Will, all all the black
Fleming's gone except me. I had only to keep silent,
and my child would be rich. I think that's all
she added, opening her sunken, dark eyes and fixing them
(33:48):
steadily upon David's face. That explains it all, doesn't it.
I have lived in fear. I knew the old doctor
was dead, but I used to lie in the nights
imagining that he had happened to tell someone, someone who
was drawing nearer and nearer to my life every moment.
Hannah Rosecrountz, the carry we had in Boston, the doctor
(34:11):
Lily had, whose very name I can't remember. They all
knew any day might have brought them back to me
with their questions. I used to imagine that I might
go to jail, but I never was anything else but
in jail all my life long. End of chapter eighteen
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