“As you have it?” Sylvia echoed. “I don’t believe you still understand,” she added, bewilderedly, in a lower tone, and was still.
She let Gabrielle guide her downstairs and slipped into her place at the improvised table quietly, not looking up, nor tasting the solids, although she drank her hot coffee gratefully.
“David, could we possibly get Mamma in to a doctor—to a sanitarium?” she asked, presently, in a low voice.
“John and Walker have gone round the long way to Crowchester, for the doctor,” David said, glad to talk. “The road’s washed out, you know. They ought to be back in another hour, and then we can tell something.”
“She looks—like death,” Sylvia said, with suddenly trembling lips.
“I think it is only shock,” David answered. Gabrielle, warmed and lulled by food and fire, had dropped her beautiful dishevelled head against the back of her chair; Tom had flung himself upon the little sofa and was already asleep. David replenished the fire, and he and Sylvia sat watching it, sometimes exchanging a few words, or sometimes going upstairs to look at the invalid, who seemed sleeping.
The doctor came and went at five without waking either Tom or Gabrielle; a cold dawn was over the world when the girl stirred under her heap of comforters and sat up blinking and rosy, wondering for a long stupefied minute where she was and why Tom should be stretched out sound asleep a few feet away. Margret had come out from Keyport, John’s wife and daughter were lamenting and sympathizing in the disordered kitchen, and two or three score of sightseers were already picking their way about the ruins of what had been Wastewater.
Gay, going out with Tom, just as the winter sun rose dazzling and clear, and feeling strangely stiff and stupid, looked about her in blank amazement. Where the house had stood for more than a century was only a singed and hideous stretch of wreckage now, heaps of blackened bricks, tumbled masses of half-burned plaster and mortar. Twisted pipes glistened wet in rain, the whole smelled acridly, here and there some hidden heap of wood or paper smouldered sullenly.
The garden paths had been partly obliterated by fallen walls, trees were down, and ashes coated the leafless rose trees and the evergreens.
The sea was rolling gaily in the sunrise, emerald-green flecked cheerfully with white; gulls were dipping and arching, the fresh, clean, peaceful air was tainted acridly with the smell of wet burned ruins. The day was so crystal clear that Gabrielle could see the tiny figures of men going out under white sails at Keyport and at Crowchester.