And then, suddenly, the rain fell in one blinding rushing flood, drenching the little group to the skin, blotting out everything with its torrential flow.
“Ah, look!” said Ruth, almost involuntarily. A great flash of light had broken through from the west, and against the violet black sky the rain looked like a silver wall. It was amazingly, even terribly, beautiful.
“We are in for a proper ducking,” she said, trying to regain the normal. “Wet to the skin already, all of us. And Sarah and Selina frightened to death, the little cowards! You’d better keep moving, dear. Come along.”
It seemed a weary way home. Never had Ruth been more thankful for the presence of Miss McCox in her household. Fires, hot baths, hot coffee, all were ready; and she dried even Selina, though surreptitiously, behind the kitchen door that none might behold her weakness, with her own hand. She put Violet to bed after her hot bath, and ordered her to stay there. Nothing but asserting herself forcibly kept Ruth from a like fate.
“Them as will be foolish, there is no reasoning with,” said Miss McCox, with dignity, and retreated to the kitchen muttering like the storm.
After a lull, it had returned again with renewed force. The old house rocked as the great wind hurled itself upon it, shrieking against the shuddering windows as if demanding admittance. Sheets of wild rain broke upon the panes, and every now and then the thunder crashed and broke and rent. After her dinner Ruth went up and sat by the log fire in Violet’s room. The pillow on which she lay was hardly whiter than the girl’s face. Her great gold eyes gazed out into the shadows blankly. Very small and young and helpless she looked, and Ruth’s heart ached for her. She chatted on cheerfully, as she wove a woollen garment for some little child of France with her ever-busy fingers; chatted of the little things about the farm; told little quaint stories of the animals and flowers. Had she known it, just so had Dick Carey often talked, in the winter evenings over the fire, to the listening children. But Violet Riversley just lay still, gazing into the shadows, taking little notice. She made no allusion to her violent attack of terror out in the storm, and it grew on Ruth uncannily and horribly that the girl who had clung to her, crying for help, had slipped away from her again, somewhere out into the darkness and silence, torn from all known anchorage.
The little dogs had remained in their baskets downstairs; only Larry had followed her up, and lay across the doorway, his nose upon his paws, his eyes gleaming watchfully out of the shadow. Every now and then, when the shattering wind with increasing violence struck against the house again and again and wailed away like a baffled spirit, he growled in his throat as at a visible intruder.
It was late before Ruth gathered her work up and said good-night. She was honestly tired in mind and body, but an unaccountable reluctance to leave Violet held her. And yet the girl was apparently less restless, more normal, than usual. Tired out, like herself, surely she would sleep. Her terror out in the storm seemed entirely to have gone.
So Ruth reasoned to herself as she went downstairs.
In the sitting-room the little dogs slept soundly in their baskets. The fire still burned, a handful of warm red ashes. The whole place seemed full of peace and comfort, in marked contrast to the rush and wail of the storm outside. Ruth crossed to the lamp to see that it was in order, and moved about putting little tidying touches to the room, as women do the last thing before they go upstairs to bed. She was fully alive to the fact that the three weeks of Violet’s visit had been a heavy strain on her, mentally and bodily. It would be quite easy to imagine things, to let this knowledge that she was fighting steadily, almost fiercely, against some awful unseen force overwhelm her, to drive her beyond the limits of what was sanely and reasonably possible. With her renewed sense of awareness of Dick Carey’s presence had come an indefinable yearning tenderness for Violet Riversley which had been lacking before in her kindly interest and friendship. To give way to fear or dread was the surest way to fail in both.