"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven."--Emerson.
All through that long, wild night David searched and shouted, to find
only snow and silence.
Through the darkness and the falling flakes he could not see more than
a foot ahead, and when he would stumble over a stone or the fallen
trunk of a tree, he would stoop down and search through the drifts with
his bare hands, thinking perhaps that she might have fallen, and not
finding her, he would again take up his fruitless search, while cold
fear gnawed at his heart.
At home in the warm farm house, sat the Squire who had done his duty.
The consciousness of having done it, however, did not fill him with
that cheerful glow of righteousness that is the reward of a good
conscience--on the contrary, he felt small. It might have been
imagination, but he felt, somehow, as if his wife and Kate were
shunning him. Once he had tried to take his wife's hand as she stood
with her face pressed to the window trying to see if she could make out
the dim outline of David returning with Anna, but she withdrew her hand
impatiently as she had never done in the thirty years of their married
life. Amasy's hardness was a thing no longer to be condoned.
Furthermore, when the clock had struck eleven and then twelve, and yet
no sign of David or Anna, the Squire had reached for his fur cap and
announced his intention of "going to look for 'em." But like the
proverbial worm, the wife of his bosom had turned, and with all the
determination of a white rabbit she announced: "If I was you, Amasy, I'd stay to hum; seems as if you had made almost
enough trouble for one day." With the old habit of authority, strong
as ever, he looked at the worm, but there was a light in its eyes that
warned him as a danger signal.
They were alone together, the Squire and his wife, and each was alone
in sorrow, the yoke of severity she had bowed beneath for thirty years
uncomplainingly galled to-night. It had sent her boy out into the
storm--perhaps to his death. There was little love in her heart for
Amasy.
He tried to think that he had only done his duty, that David and Anna
would come back, and that, in the meantime, Louisa was less a comfort
to him, in his trouble, than she had ever been before. It was, of
course, his trouble; it never occurred to him that Louisa's heart might
have been breaking on its own account.