They all stood in the shelter, exclaiming, and looking over each others’ shoulders at the fearful conflagration that was sending great whirls and showers of sparks far up against the black winter sky. Flora alone made no move; she was rolled in what appeared to be a miscellaneously chosen half-dozen of blankets, a seventh rolled to pillow her head. She sat in the summer-house’s one chair, an old wicker armchair, with her bare head dishevelled and dropped back, and her eyes closed in a leaden face that even in the hideous light of the fire looked deathlike.
“This night’s work will kill her,” Hedda whispered once, glancing over her shoulder at her mistress. And Trude solemnly nodded.
The flames of Wastewater swept southward, howling like fiends as they flung themselves up into the dark, crowded always from their places, as waves are crowded onward, by fresh roaring surges of fire. Where there had once been attic or mansard rooms in Wastewater there were now pits where pink flames burned under a play of dancing blue lights; at intervals of only a few minutes fresh portions of roofs and floors collapsed, and the maids would exclaim under their breath as the fresh grinding and sucking and devouring began.
“There won’t be a wall left standing,” Tom said. “And she’s not been burning an hour!”
“Tom, it must be almost morning,” Gabrielle whispered, too dazed with the night’s events to believe herself yet awake.
In answer he twisted his wrist about; and in the pink light she saw the tiny face of his watch. Not yet one o’clock!
“What I can’t understand,” David said, “is why five hundred men aren’t here from Keyport or Crowchester—of course there’s a terrible tide, and that road through the dunes to Tinsall’s may be under water. But you’d think a mob would be out here to watch the old place go!”
“You mean that they might have saved it, David?” Sylvia asked, shuddering with cold and nervousness as she wrapped herself in her blanket, and stood huddling at his side.
“Oh, no—nothing could do that!” he said. “Not even with all that water within a few feet,” he added, with a shrug toward the sea. “That’s the end of Wastewater!”
“David, we were all ’way upstairs. Did you and Tom get me down the stairs?” Gabrielle asked, presently.