[CHAPTER XVIII]
THE BITTENBENDER TRUNK
Miss Bradbury kept talking of returning to town, but still she lingered in the Ark. Mrs. Scollard was not well enough to resume her position in the city, and stayed on with her family at Crestville, her recovery retarded by her anxiety as to the next move, and by her unwillingness to continue to accept the kindness which Miss Bradbury truthfully assured her was for her hostess an economy over city expenditures. For though this were true, Miss Bradbury could not continue to carry an entire family on her shoulders, however broad they were, or however light their burden. In the meantime nothing changed in the arrangements at the Ark through the golden days of October, and, as if they had waited for Gretta to be safely harbored in her ark of refuge, the storms of winter set in prematurely in November, and with remarkable vigor.
The old house must have wondered at the way its new inmates set up stoves in every room where there was a chimney, and then drove them to their utmost. It had been accustomed only to a fire in the kitchen and in "the room." Gretta and Rosie seemed to have difficulty in adjusting their minds to this excess in the use of coal.
In the middle of November the first snow-storm of the year arrived untimely. It drifted to the height of a man's knee, and the thermometer dropped down past the naught on its register, down four more degrees. Of course such weather could not last, so early in the season; it was followed by a swift ascent of the thermometer, and the snow melted away faster than it had come. But while it lasted, it was an excellent imitation of winter, and not a little dismaying to novices in the art of living in the country.
The storm began on Friday; Don Dolor came up from the post-office with his back white with snow, and his long mane and tail balled with it. On Saturday the drifting snow lay over the Ark and its grounds and out-buildings like a beautiful blanket, and it was still falling. There was no denying that it was beautiful, but there was no denying either that it made the present world seem very solitary, and the outside world very distant and inaccessible.
The silence seemed like something tangible; as if one might take it by its corners and lift it up—only there was not precisely the right person to lift it. The licking of the little tongues of flame on the hearth fell curiously on Mrs. Scollard's ears, as if they should have been louder, but were muffled. The children's voices came down to her from above stairs loud and cheerful, but unreal, and through and above their ringing, she seemed to hear the silence of the snow-enveloped country.
Happie wandered restlessly into the room and threw herself into a chair with a movement most unlike her cheery, quick self.
"I feel suffocated, motherums," she said. "It's so still, so benumbed still, that I can hear the distant planets roll—hear them better than this one, for that matter; this one seems to be motionless."
"Make your own sounds, Happie," suggested her mother, not admitting to sharing her feeling. "Sing and shout; get the others to help you. What you have just said has a note of loneliness."
"I'm not so much lonely as lost, queer, restless," returned Happie. "And as to making sounds for ourselves, it's of no use. We've been trying it, but the more we sing, and laugh, and chatter, the more we hear the stillness of the earth. Gretta doesn't mind, because she's used to it, but Margery and I, and Laura, and even Polly a wee bit, are ready to fly into inch pieces."