[CHAPTER IV]
The Great Disaster
THE mother was sitting over her cookstove. She was almost crouching over it. With her hands tightly clasped she seemed as though she was striving with every resource of her being to support herself under the crushing weight of the great grief with which she was beset. Her widely gazing eyes were straining with the mental anguish behind them. And they were utterly unseeing for all they stared into the ruddy heart of the fire shining between the upright bars. Stony misery looked out of them, that dreadful expression of heartbreak which seems to leave a woman powerless, helpless.
The living room about her was neat, and of its usual orderliness. It lacked nothing of the housewifely care that was usually bestowed upon it. For all the poverty of its furnishing, it was a place of comfort, which, even under Rebecca Carver’s suddenly imposed grief, had not been allowed to suffer. Her daughter Claire had seen to that. For the time her mother was submerged in her trouble, and the girl herself was no less stricken, but will and youth in the latter had overridden every weakness of the moment.
Thus the mother had sat for many hours. And the transformation which had taken place in her in twenty-four hours was something almost horrifying to the devoted daughter.
During the long hours of night the still, silent figure had nursed her despair. Claire, no less sleepless, had discovered her in precisely the same position each time she had left her bed in an adjoining room. She had prayed her mother, she had sought to persuade her by every means in her power, to seek her bed, and such peace as sleep might afford her. But it had all been useless. Each time her mother had obeyed her submissively, meekly, almost mechanically, only to return again to her vigil at the fireside the moment she had been left alone.
The grey afternoon was far advanced when Claire returned from the creek below with her arms full of a snowy laundry. Work! It had been the same all day with her. It was her only defence. She pushed her way in through the half-open door, and one swift glance and the sound of rustling paper as she deposited her burden on the well-worn table, told her of the unchanged mental attitude of her mother.
Just for a moment she stood regarding the bowed figure with troubled eye. She saw the crumpled news-sheet, one of the papers which Ivor had left with them the day before. It was crushed under her arms as they rested in her lap. And she understood. Her mother had been reading again, perhaps for the hundredth time, that brief newspaper story which was the source of the nightmare of disaster which had fallen upon them.
The girl was tired and utterly dispirited. Somehow her tall, graceful figure seemed slightly bowed out of its usual courageous bearing. Her pretty eyes were ringed about, as though, in the absence of observation, she had yielded to her woman’s expression of grief. But now, at the sight of the silent, tearless figure at the stove, she summoned every ounce of her youthful courage to her aid. She moved across the room quickly, and deliberately removed the paper from beneath the yielding arms.