Yet how, after all this kindly talk, after these hours of listening, of companionship, suddenly break free? Gabrielle dared ask no help; Sylvia or Aunt Flora would only hurt him a thousand times more than she would, even David’s touch could not be trusted here. Besides, she did not feel herself deserving of help or extrication; she had brought this most uncomfortable state of affairs upon herself, she had been too kind to Tom, she had let him drift happily into the idea that they cared for each other.
The girl began to feel with a sort of feverish terror that she must be free—free if she had to run away into the world alone. From a distance she could write them, she could explain! But she could not go on in this fashion, with every hour deepening the misunderstanding between herself and Tom, tightening the net.
November came in bare and cold, with a faint powdering of snow upon the frozen ground. Suddenly summer-time, and shining seas, and sunshine seemed but dreams, life had become all winter, there would never be warmth and flowers again. Wastewater was bleakly cold; oil stoves burned coldly, like lifeless red-eyed stage fires in mica and coloured glass, the halls were frigid, the family huddled about fires.
Tools sounded metallically all day upon the new radiators, that, still unconnected, stood about wet and cold and forlorn against the walls. Tom spent most of his days upstairs in his “study,” where a roaring airtight stove, connected with the old flue, made the air warm. He must start southward soon, they all said, and yet there was no definite plan of a departure.
David was still immersed in the business of the estate; Flora was wretched with rheumatism and malaria; Gabrielle, of them all, was the least anxious to suggest a change, and so precipitate a settlement with Tom.
On the fourth day of the month came the Great Wind. Keyport and Crowchester, and indeed all the towns along the coast for miles, would long talk of it, would date domestic events from it. The night of the third was cold and deathly clear, with a fiery unwarming sunset behind sombre black tree trunks, and a steely brightness over the sea. Gabrielle saw milk-white frost in the upturned clods in the garden; the light was hardly gone when a harsh moonlight lay upon the bare black world.
There was a good deal of air stirring in the night, and toward morning it grew so cold that the girls, chattering and shaking, met in the halls, seeking blankets and hot bottles. Gay and Sylvia knocked on David’s door; he must take extra covering to Tom; David’s teeth clicked and his laughter had a ghoulish sound as he obeyed.
The day broke gray and cold in a hurricane that racked and bowed the trees and bushes, laid the chrysanthemums flat, rattled dry frozen leaves and broken branches on the porches. Whitecaps raced on the gray, rough sea, doors slammed, casements rattled, and at regular intervals the wind seemed to curl about the house like a visible thing, and whined and chuckled and sobbed in the chimneys. Fires were kept burning, and Sylvia and Gabrielle, in their thickest sweaters, stuffed the sitting-room window ledges with paper to keep out the straight icy current of the air.
The family was at breakfast, with the lights lighted, when one of the oldest maples came down, with a long splintering crash that was like a slow scream. During the morning two other smaller trees fell, and whosoever opened an outside door was immediately spun about, and in a general uproar and rattle and flutter of everything inside, was obliged to beg help in closing it. After luncheon, John came in to say that his wife and little girl were so nervous that he was going to take them in to Crowchester. He could get the papers——
“No,” David said, “I may walk into Keyport later!”