The black Flemings

Once through the dark old iron gates, he seemed to have left the warm and friendly autumn day, the warm and friendly world, behind him.

David Fleming laughed half aloud at the fancy and stepped back into the rambling country road, where wheel tracks were so quickly obliterated in the loose-drifting sand, to contrast once more, for his own amusement, the peaceful dreaming landscape in the afternoon sunlight and the sinister shadows of Wastewater.

Five miles away along the rugged coast lay Crowchester, the little fishing village whose activities tinged the fresh salty air, even here, with the odour of salted fish. Between Crowchester and Wastewater, beside whose forbidding great gates he stood, ran the irregular road, rising through dunes, skirting wind-twisted groves of pine and fir, disappearing into ragged hollows to emerge again on turfy bluffs, and finally winding in here toward the old brick house that lay hidden behind these high walls.

On his right lay the shore, rocky, steep, rough, with pebbles complaining as the tide dragged them to and fro, surf hammering restlessly among the rocks or brimming and ebbing with tireless regularity over the scooped stone of the pools. No two inches of it, no two drops of its immensity ever the same; it held him now, as it had held him for so many hours in his very babyhood, in a sort of tranced contemplation.

The sun was setting in angry red beyond the forest behind him, but a hard and brilliant light still lay on the water, and the waves were sculptured harshly in silver-tipped steel. Where the old brick wall of Wastewater descended to the shore enough sand had been stored in the lee of the wall to form a triangular strip of beach, and here scurfy suds were eddying lazily, hemmed back from the tide by a great jammed log and only stirred now and then by a fringe of the surf, which formed new bubbles even while it pricked the old.

On the sharp irregular fall of the cliff, distorted, wind-blown pines and tight-woven mallows clung, with the hardy smaller growths of the seaside: blown blue lupin, coarse sedge and furzy grasses, yellow-topped odorous sage and dry fennel. About their exposed, tenaciously clinging roots was tangled all the litter of the sea: ropes, slender logs as white and bare as old bones, seaweeds, and cocoanut shells.

David breathed the salty, murmuring air, faintly scented with fish, looked back once more toward the shining roofs and the rising faint plumes of smoke above Crowchester, shrugged his shoulders with a philosophic laugh, and turned again toward Wastewater’s gates.

These were four: two great wrought-iron wings in the centre, where carriages had once entered and departed, and, designed ingeniously in the same enormous framework, two smaller gates, one on each side, for foot passengers.

The carriage gates had been closed for years and were bedded deep in dry grass and fallen leaves, and the right-hand smaller gate had perhaps not been opened three times in its more than one hundred years’ existence. But the left-hand gate stood slightly ajar, and beyond it ran a faintly outlined footpath into a deep old garden. The whole elaborate structure, met by the mossy brick wall on both sides, was thick with rust, its scrolls and twisted bars shone brick-red in the last of the sunlight.

David had walked briskly from the village and his blood was moving rapidly, but he shivered as the familiar atmosphere once more enveloped him. Once again the dilapidated, stately old garden with its bottle-edged flower beds, where the ragged rose bushes were already showing red and yellow hips, where the pines were shedding their slippery needles, and where the maples and elms looked tattered and forlorn.

The place had been thickly planted almost two hundred years ago; it was densely overgrown now; the trees crowded each other, and the growth underneath them was sickly. The old path was spongy with wet leaves underfoot, and the air so pungent with their sharp odour as to be almost anæsthetic. Between the blackened trunks on the right David could again see the serenely moving, deeply breathing surface of the ocean, but now the garden and low cliffs shut off the shore.

On all other sides lay the garden and the thicket of the plantation through which presently, after some winding, he came upon Wastewater Hall itself, standing up boldly in the twilight gloom. The last dying fires of the sunset, burning through black tree trunks behind it, seemed only to make darker than ever the outlines of the great dark red brick house, three-storied and with a steep mansard as well, its uncompromising bulk enhanced rather than softened by a thickly wooded coat of black ivy.

It was an enormous old Georgian building, impressive for size if for nothing more. Wastewater’s twenty acres stood on a sharply jutting point of cliff, and the house faced the sea on three sides; the garden was shut off from the road by the long western wall. Immediately back of the kitchen and stable yards there was a rear gate, buried in shrubbery and quite out of sight from the house, for delivery wagons and tradespeople.

The main entrance was on the eastern front, facing straight out to sea, but this presented now only rows of shuttered windows and stone steps deep in fallen leaves, and David stopped instead at the stone steps of the columned side door. Leaves had littered the paths and lay thick upon the struggling grass of the rose beds, but these three steps had been swept clean, their dried surfaces still showing the marks of a wet broom.

David, absorbing the details with the eye of one who perhaps is reluctant to see confirmed previous impressions or fears, shrugged again, made a little face between impatience, amusement, and misgiving, and gave the old-fashioned iron bell-pull a vigorous jerk.

Then came a long wait. But he did not ring again. The first fifteen of David’s thirty-one years had been spent here, within these grave old walls, and he knew exactly what was happening now inside.

The jerk on the brass-handled wire would set into convulsive motion one of a row of precariously balanced bells far down in the enormous stone-floored kitchen. Most of these bells had not been rung for two generations at least. They were connected with the bedrooms and the study--it had been a long time since any resident of Wastewater had felt it necessary to summon a servant to bedrooms or study. In the row, David remembered, were also the front-door bell, dining-room bell, and the side-door bell. He began to wonder if the last were broken.

No, someone was coming. He could not possibly have heard steps behind that massive and impenetrable door, but he assuredly sensed a motion there, stirring, creaking, the distant bang of another door.

Then another wait, not so long. And at last the door was carefully opened by Hedda, who looked casually at him with squinting old white-lashed eyes, looked back in concern at her bars and bolts, closed the door behind him, and then said in a mild old voice in which traces of her Belgian origin lingered:

“Good. How is Mister David?”

“Splendid,” David answered, with a heartiness that the chill of the dark old hall already tinged with a certain familiar depression. “Where’s my aunt, Hedda?”

Hedda had been staring at him with a complacent, vacuous smile, like the slightly demented creature she really was. Now she roused herself just a shade and answered in a slightly reproachful voice:

“Where but upstairs shall she be?”

David remembered now that Gabrielle had long ago announced, with her precocious little-girl powers of observation, that “Hedda always tells us things the first time as if it were the twentieth, and her patience quite worn out with telling us!” An affectionate half smile twitched the corners of David’s mouth as he thought of that old tawny-headed, rebellious little Gabrielle of ten years before, and he followed the smile with as sudden a sigh.

He mounted gloomy, wide old stairs through whose enormous western windows a dim light was struggling. The treads were covered with a dark carpet strapped in brass rods. Gabrielle, as a baby, had loved the top-shaped ends of these rods, had stolen them, been detected, restored them, how many, many times!

The thought of her more than the thought of his old little self, of Tom and Sylvia, who were the real Flemings, after all, always came to him strangely when he first returned to the old house after any absence. Gabrielle, shouting, roaring, weeping, laughing, had roused more echoes in Wastewater than all the rest of them put together; she roused more echoes now, poor little Gabrielle!

Poor Gabrielle, and poor Tom! mused David. Life had dealt oddly with both these long-ago, eager, happy children, as Life seemed to have a fashion of dealing with the children of so strange and silent, so haunted and mysterious an old house. The shadow of the house, as real upon his spirit as was the actual shadow of the autumn twilight upon these stained old walls, shut heavily upon David as he crossed the upper hallways and turned the knob of the sitting-room door.

His aunt, in the widow’s black she had worn for some eighteen years, was sitting erect in an upholstered armchair by the fire. She turned to glance toward him as he came in and welcomed him with a lifeless cheek to kiss and with the warmest smile her face ever knew.

It was not very warm; Flora Fleming had the black colouring of the clan; her look was always heavy, almost forbidding. She was in the middle fifties now; there was a heavy threading of gray in her looped, oily dark hair. Her skin was dark and the rough heavy eyebrows almost met above her sharply watchful eyes. There were black hairs at the corners of her lips and against her ears below her temples; her eyes were set a shade too close together, her teeth were slightly yellowed, too prominent, and rested upon her bitten lower lip. She wore, as always, a decent handsome silk that seemed never old and never new; there was a heavy book in her knuckly, nervous hands, and David noted for the first time to-day a discoloured vein or two in her somewhat florid, long face.

“This is good of you, David,” she said, dispassionately, putting her glasses into her book and laying it aside.

“Didn’t wake you from a nap?” David said, glad to sit down after his brisk walk.

“A nap?” She dismissed it with a quiet, not quite pleased smile. “Since when have I had that weakness?” she asked. “No. On an afternoon like this, with the leaves falling, one hears the wind about Wastewater if it blows nowhere else, and the sea. I can never nap in the afternoons. I hear--voices,” she finished, as if half to herself.

“Lord, one realizes how lonely the old place is, coming back to it!” David said, cheerfully.

“Not for me,” his aunt again corrected him in her quiet voice that seemed full of autumnal reveries and the quiet falling of leaves itself. “Other places are lonely. Not this.”

“Well, it’s extremely nice to know that you feel so,” David pursued, resolutely combating the creeping quiet, the something that was almost depression, always ready to come out of musty corners and capture one here. “But when the girls are home we’ll have some young life at Wastewater, and then--when they marry, you’ll have to move yourself into brighter quarters--into a city apartment, perhaps!”