“They ran up and waked Aunt Flora,” David added, “and got her out here—she was still in the sitting room—and Sylvia had the presence of mind to grab a sheet full of clothes and things, the maids got out some china, and all the blankets that were in the store closet, and their own trunks—but there won’t be much saved!” he finished, shaking his head. “Comfort to think that if there were five hundred men here we couldn’t have saved it!”
And after a long silence broken only by exclamations of horror and concern, as the flames had their way, Hedda said again softly:
“This’ll kill Mrs. Fleming, all right.”
Sylvia had gone back into the summer-house and was leaning over her mother. They could hear Flora’s feeble, hoarse murmurs in reply to the girl’s tender inquiries. Gabrielle felt again that there would be no end to this fearful blackness, wind, noise, and confusion of body and soul.
An hour later there were shouts in the garden. A motor car rattled in, driven, already with a strange disregard for what had been the stately boundaries of Wastewater, straight over the ashy garden. It was the Keyport carpenter, with fifteen or twenty excited young men hanging on his car. The high tide had washed out a hundred feet of the road, he announced; “couple hundred people watching the fire from the other side, in spite of the wind!”
“Some fire!” said Harry Trueman. He had had to drive twelve miles out of his way to get here at all. He added cheerfully that he had thought he might find the whole family burned to cinders.
A stiff wind was still blowing, but its violence had enormously abated; the air was warmer every instant, and the fire, less than four hours after it had been discovered, had done its work, and had actually been blown out, against many a shattered remnant of black wall. Here and there it was still gnawing hungrily, sucking like a vicious and unsated animal among ruins that by its dying light the Flemings could barely recognize as the library, the old downstairs playroom, the office.
Now it was safe to move the women to what was left of John’s house. The windmill, collapsing, had inundated the lower floor, and one side of the house had been caught by the flames. But on the south side a bedroom, dining room, and kitchen were intact, and Gabrielle and Sylvia found a lamp and turned down the bed where John’s little Etta had slept for most of her fifteen years. Etta’s innocent little trophies—Miss Alcott’s books, pencil boxes, and hand-painted cups—were ranged neatly about. Flora, muttering, was lowered tenderly into the sheets, and the blankets and little blue comforter spread over her.
No further danger from fire; the worst was over. Rain was now sluicing as gently, as steadily and calmly over the wreckage as if the night of horror had been only a dream, as if Gabrielle might awaken in her comfortable big bed, as she had so often awakened, to look out upon a typical autumn sky and sea, a nameless little poor relation in Wastewater’s splendid walls.
But now, wearied, confused, puzzled as she was, she knew that Wastewater itself had not disappeared from the earth more completely than that old Gabrielle. If she had not a name, a place in the world, she had a brother! And to Gabrielle this utter earthquake was like the presage of a more sunshiny and smiling morning than she had ever known.