CHAPTER XVIII.
"IT'S AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NOBODY GOOD."
They journeyed northward very slowly, stopping for a few days at all the great cities, so that October was gone and part of November when they reached Montreal. There they lingered a week, and then began the last stage of their journey home.
It was a desolate afternoon, near the middle of that most desolate month, November, when Captain Danton and his daughter stepped into the railway-fly at St. Croix, and were driven, as fast as the spavined old nag would go, to Danton Hall. A desolate afternoon, with a low leaden sky threatening snow, and earth like iron with hard black frost. A wretched complaining wind that made your nerves ache, worried the half-stripped trees, and now and then a great snowflake whirled in the dull grey air. The village looked silent and deserted as they drove through it, and a melancholy bell was slowly tolling, tolling, tolling all the way. Kate shivered audibly, and wrapped her fur-lined mantle closer around her.
"What is that wretched bell for?" she asked.
"It is the passing bell," replied the father, with a gloomy brow. "You know the fever is in the village."
"And someone is dead."
She looked out with a dreary, shivering sigh over the bleak prospect. Gaunt black trees, grim black marshes, dull black river, and low black sky. Oh, how desolate! How desolate it all was—as desolate as her own dead heart. What was the use of going away, what was the use of forgetting for a few poor moments, and then coming back to the old desolation and the old pain? What a weary, weary piece of business life was at best, not worth the trouble and suffering it took to live!
The drive to the Hall was such a short one, it hardly seemed to her they were seated before they were driving up the leafless avenue, where the trees loomed unnaturally large and black in the frosty air, and the dead leaves whirled in great wild drifts under the horse's feet. The gloom and desolation were here before them too. When they had gone away, nearly six months before, those bleak avenues had been leafy arcades, where the birds sang all the bright day long, flowers had bloomed wherever her eye rested, and red roses and sweetbrier had twined themselves around the low windows and stone pillars of the portico. Now the trees were writhing skeletons, the flowers dead with the summer, nothing left of the roses but rattling brown stalks, and the fish-pond lying under the frowning wintry sky like a sheet of steel.
She went up the stone steps and into the hall, still shivering miserably under her wraps, and saw Grace, and Eeny, and the servants assembled to welcome them, and listened like one in a dream. It all seemed so flat, and dead, and unsatisfying, and the old time and the old memories were back at her heart, until she almost went wild. She could see how Eeny and Grace looked a little afraid of her, and how differently they greeted her father; and how heartily and unaffectedly glad he was to be with them once more. And then she was toiling wearily up the long, wide stairway, followed by faithful Eunice, and had the four walls of her own little sitting room around her at last.