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Emboldened by her silence, he approached and caught her hand, she wrenched it from his grasp and motioned him from her with a gesture of such royal contempt that he quailed before her. All suddenly the flood-gates of her speech were loosened, the rising tide of burning indignation that in its very force had held her dumb and motionless, now broke forth unrestrainedly.
She could say no more, and as the whole audience thrilled in sympathy with her emotion, there was a hoarse cry from the men's side of the room, and John forced his way to the aisle and rushed forward to the platform. "Martha! Martha!" "Arthur! O Arthur!" Pent-up love burst the flood-gates of despair and oblivion, and caught these two young hearts in its torrent.
The matter was nothing less than putting flood-gates with double bridges, draining three or four hundred acres, cutting canals, and laying out roadways. When the duke had explained the condition of the land, Charles Mignon remarked that time must be allowed for the soil, which was still moving, to settle and grow solid in a natural way.
And suddenly she broke down, in a strange, stammering, tearless way, opening the dry flood-gates over which rattled an avalanche of words bitter, breathless phrases rushing brokenly from lips that shrank as they formed them. Plank sat inert, the corroding echo of the words clattering in his ears.
And when Uncle Henry finished he had not forgotten a single thing Betsy had told him and asked, "What do you think of THAT for a little girl ten years old today?" Cousin Ann opened the flood-gates wide and burst out, "I think I never heard of a child's doing a smarter, grittier thing ... AND I DON'T CARE IF SHE DOES HEAR ME SAY SO!" It was a great, a momentous, an historic moment!
And then came the miracle. Right across the horizon, a little higher than the sun, a long thin bar of cloud suddenly changed colour, becoming rich dark purple, and all along its jagged upper edge the light shot out in one continuous sheet of bright glory to the zenith, while below there poured from the bar a long cascade, a very Niagara of golden mist and rain, as if the flood-gates of some celestial dam had suddenly given way, and all the precious stuff were escaping in a cataract through the rift, in one gigantic plunge, to be lost for ever in some bottomless abyss.
Indeed, sense and reason saith, it is a fearful thing for the church of God to be exposed to the rage of her enemy all over the world at once; and that all nations should shut up their gates, let down their portcullises, bolt up their doors, and set open their flood-gates to destroy them: but so will be the dispensation of God, to the end deliverance may be the sweeter, and the enemies fall the more headlong, and the arm of God the more manifest, both for the one, and against the other.
Knott's gray eyes, as he sipped his port, still more the tone of Roger Ormiston's laugh, she did understand somehow. And this last jarred upon her cruelly. It opened the flood-gates of doubt which Mary like so many another woman in respect of the man she loves had striven very valiantly to keep shut.
At the end of August the indefatigable Doctor set off on his last journey. He made for Tanganyika, and on New Year's Day, 1873, he was near Lake Bangweolo. It rained harder than ever, pouring down as if the flood-gates of heaven were opened.
Fondly surveying the house, the terraced garden, in which, as a boy, he had so often strayed, and the park beyond it, where he had chased the deer; his gaze rose to the cloudy heights of Pendle, springing immediately behind the mansion, and up which he had frequently climbed. The flood-gates of memory were opened at once, and a whole tide of long-buried feelings rushed upon his heart.
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