“She’s dark,” the mother said, in a quiet voice that swelled in spite of her. And she glanced at the picture of Sylvia on Sylvia’s bureau—a stunning Sylvia in a big fur collar and a small fur hat.
It was for Gabrielle to scour the woods for beautiful shrubs and winter colours, and she did it enthusiastically, well rewarded when Flora smiled, in spite of herself, at the sight of berry-studded briars and glossy pointed holly interspersed with scarlet beads. There were no loneliness and no idleness for Gabrielle now; she was off, well wrapped and in heavy overshoes, immediately after lunch, sometimes laughing aloud when she found herself in the sunlighted snowy sweetness of the woods, trampling the first light fall of virgin snow, breathing the spicy, tingling air with great eager respirations, and calling out a holiday greeting to other holly- and mistletoe-hunting folk.
CHAPTER VI
On the day that Sylvia and her guests were coming from the north, and David probably from the south, there was no sunshine. There was a cold, unsteady, wind, and a cold, hard, low-hung mackerel sky, under which the sea moved rough and restless, topped with racing caps of white. All the world was gray and forlorn; distances were shortened, the little houses in Crowchester and Keyport were closed against the weather and showed no sign of life except the varying plumes of smoke that rose from their frosted roofs. From them occasionally emerged muffled and mittened figures, with tippets blowing behind them or bellying giddily before; Gabrielle, who had gone into town with John on some last errands, thought she had never seen so many shabby hungry gulls, so many lean cats investigating snow-topped garbage barrels, such dreary-looking raiment hung snow-laden upon such sagging clotheslines.
“A heavy storm on the way,” John said. And Gabrielle, beside him on the front seat of the little car, with a crate of eggs steadied at her feet and two quarts of whipping cream held firmly in two bottles in her lap, looked up at the scudding sky and thought with exhilaration that it was probably true, and that all the company, and David, would be here in a few hours, to make merry in Wastewater and defy it.
She picked and seeded raisins for an hour in the kitchen before luncheon, and came to the meal with her cheeks red and her head hot, and after luncheon went out into the woods, where a genuine colour presently stung the warm brunette skin to glowing, and where wrestling and tugging with obdurate saplings made her tingle from head to foot and push her hat back from her damp forehead, laughing and panting with the tussle. Aunt Flora had said, with one of her rare touches of companionship, “I would just like that empty corner of the hall filled up—some sort of branchy thing——” and Gabrielle had been only too glad to make it her business to fill it. She had left her aunt “resting,” as unusual an employment for Flora as were the flush on her face and the wire curlers in her hair.
Everyone in the big house had been wrought, now, to a pitch of expectation bordering upon fever. The last plate was washed, the last spoon polished; the shelves of long-unused pantries downstairs were loaded with cakes and pies and cold meats and bread and sauces and trembling jellies; the big rooms upstairs were aired and warmed; there were fat comforters folded invitingly across the foot of the big, freshly made beds; there were open fires and stove fires everywhere. Floors shone with wax; palms moved green fronds gently in well-dusted corners; lamps were filled, clocks were ticking busily. Gabrielle felt in her veins the excitement that is a part of physical strain. She, like everyone else, was tired, but it was a happy sort of fatigue, after all.
On this last afternoon she had gone a little deeper into the woods than was necessary, or than she had planned to go for the last greens, as a glance at her wrist watch showed her. It was already half-past three o’clock when, with her arms full of fragrant boughs, she started back toward the house, perhaps a mile away. The day had grown a little colder, the wind had steadied to something like a gale, and the sea—for she never was quite out of sight of the sea—was in an uproar, running high and wild, breaking furiously upon the rocks, and flinging itself twenty feet into the air when these stood fast, as they had stood for a thousand years.
Suddenly, creeping through bare boughs like little silent fairies shod in down, came drifting the first snowflakes. They came timidly, irresolutely at first, clinging here to a fir and there to a bare maple twig, moving restlessly and gently in all directions, fluttering, changing places, like the breast-feathers of a white baby swan, from which perhaps, thought Gay whimsically, Mother Nature, who loves to repeat her forms, had copied them.
“Oh, this is glorious!” she said aloud to the sweet, empty forest. And she began to walk briskly with that dancing step of hers that meant utter happiness and felicity.