Tom slowly, and watching him as if he were under some enchantment, moved to obey. The lamp flared again, a blast of wind whined and sang about the windows, and the casement burst open with a wild shout of streaming air, extinguishing the light and careening loose papers noisily about in the darkness.
But Tom and David neither saw nor cared. The opened hall door had shown the lonely passage outside lighted with a sickly pinkish glow that flickered on the weather-stained walls and sent lurching shadows along the passage. Above the creaking and crashing of the hurricane and the howling of the gale and the sea in the dark night they could hear now a brisk crackling and the devouring sound of red lips of flame. The wind that instantly rushed upon them brought the acrid taste of smoke, and even in their first stupefied look, they saw a detached banner of fire blow loose, far down the long hallway toward the stairs, and twist on the wind a moment like a blown handkerchief, and lose itself in a thick rolling plume of approaching smoke.
Tom slammed the door shut behind them; they were in the hall.
“Fire!” he shouted. “By God, the old place is on fire!”
CHAPTER XVII
“She’s all right—she opened her eyes a few minutes ago—she’ll be all right——”
The voice was droning away close to her ear in the howling noise and blackness. Gabrielle made an effort to think and to move her head. But her senses all reeled together in a sort of vertigo, and her temples hammered as if they would split. She relapsed into blackness again.
David’s voice, of course. She had fallen from a great height, she supposed, for she was lying in some bitterly cold place—out of doors—the sea never sounded so close inside.
Beyond and above the sound of the sea, breaking on the rocks, was a constant rushing of high winds and the creaking and dashing of bare branches. And there was another sound, of sucking and roaring, deep crashes—like the cascading of bricks.
“No, no, she’s all right—she’s coming round——” This was that droning voice, David’s voice. Then a mutter of other voices, Hedda’s saying something about china; John’s, the gardener’s voice, telling someone to “hoist it over there.”