Tom rose obediently, and Sylvia folded his rug for him, and went about straightening the room. The girls were accustomed to perform small services for Tom, who really was not strong enough to be quite independent of them yet. All three went downstairs together, Gabrielle loitering for a few minutes in Sylvia’s room, not so much because she had anything to say as because the nervousness and the vague apprehension, that possessed her like a fever, made her fear her own company.
When she turned back into the hall again Gabrielle was surprised to see Tom standing in his doorway.
“Did I leave my pipe upstairs?” he asked, in an odd voice.
“Oh, did you, Tom?” Gabrielle asked, eagerly, always glad to be useful to him; the more so as she found it more and more difficult to be affectionate. “No, let me! Let me!” she begged, taking the candle from his hand. “I’ll not be two minutes!”
Again—she remembered afterward!—he was smiling his odd, triumphant, yet threatening smile. But he said nothing as she took the lighted candle and started on the long way upstairs to the study.
Guarding the candle in the savage currents of air that leaked everywhere through windows and doors, Gabrielle had to move slowly, and in spite of herself the swooping darkness about her, the wild racket of the storm outside, and the shadows that wheeled and leaped before her frail little light made her suddenly afraid again. She was desperately afraid. David, Sylvia—all the human voices and hands, seemed worlds away.
Tom’s study was two floors above Gabrielle’s room, three above his own, and in a somewhat unused wing. The wind, in this part of the house, was singing in half-a-score of whining and shrieking voices together, and there was a thunderous sound, of something banging, booming, banging again with muffled blows, as if—Gabrielle thought—the house had gotten into the sea, or the sea into the house, and the waves were bursting over her.
Just as she reached for the handle of the study door her candle went out, and Gabrielle, with a pounding heart, groped in the warm blackness for the table and the matches and blessed light again! She was only a few minutes away from the protection and safety of the downstairs room, she told her heart—just a light and the half moment of finding the pipe again, and then the swift flight downstairs—anyhow, any fashion, to get downstairs——!
Her investigating hands found the brass box of matches, she struck one and held it with a shaking hand to her candle. There was no glow from the stove now, and the feeble light broke up inky masses of darkness. The square mansard windows strained as if any second they would burst in; a charge of howling winds swept by the window, swept on like a herd of bellowing buffaloes into the night.
Gabrielle, holding her light high the better to search the room for the pipe, and swallowing her fears resolutely, turned slowly about and stopped——