CHAPTER XIX.—FIRE!

‘There is nothing so hard, nothing so difficult as to get a governess nowadays,’ said the Countess of Wolverhampton, quite unaware that she was but echoing the complaint of many ladies of a lesser degree, to the effect that it is next to impossible to procure pattern cooks, prize housemaids, exemplary seamstresses, or model kitchen-maids, in these degenerate times. ‘I mean a really satisfactory governess of course,’ added the noble mistress of High Tor. Lady Wolverhampton and her two elder daughters were the sole occupants of the smallest of the suite of drawing-rooms, the windows of which were yet open to admit the balmy air of the hot evening. Dinner was but just over, and the flush of the sinking sun was faintly visible on the heathy ridges and pine-groves to the west.

‘It is very tiresome, mamma,’ said sympathetic Lady Maud.

‘It is more than tiresome,’ rejoined the Countess. ‘It makes me, on your sister’s account, very anxious. If I had known, when Miss Grainger left us, how very long it would take to replace her, and that dear Alice would be for months at a stand-still so far as her education went, I should not have parted with her so readily.’

‘But she left us because she was going to be married,’ said Lady Gladys smiling; ‘and we could not, I suppose, have forbidden the banns on account of the scarcity of good governesses. I wonder, by the way, how the scarcity can exist, when we are so perpetually informed that the governess market—a phrase which I don’t like, suggesting as it does white slavery, involuntary servitude, and the auctioneer’s hammer—is overstocked.’

‘That sounds clever, Gladys,’ answered Lady Wolverhampton in her plain way; ‘but I am afraid that, like most clever-sounding things, it proves nothing. I could get a highly certificated instructress, a person primed with information on particular subjects, warranted to be worth a handsome salary, a’——

‘A teaching-machine, in fact,’ suggested bright Lady Gladys, seeing that her mother hesitated for the lack of a word.

‘Precisely. A teaching-machine,’ resumed the Countess. ‘But I don’t want one. I wish Alice’s governess, whoever she may be, to be a good sensible young woman, such as Miss Grainger was; and instead of that, all my correspondents write to me of the degrees and diplomas that have been taken out by those they recommend. I suppose I am an old-fashioned person, but I do wish’——

But before the Countess of Wolverhampton could complete her discourse on the governess topic, the door was jerked open, and the old butler, who had permitted himself to turn the handle for once with such unconventional vivacity, stood gasping in the doorway with a face as white as his cravat.

‘Why, Bugles!’ began the Countess, rising in alarm; for that an ox should talk, as Livy tells us that a Roman representative of the bovine genus actually did, is scarcely more calculated to disturb the nerves than that a well-trained servant should crack the ice of his artificial decorum. The Earl, who was, like his wife, a partisan of old fashions, was lingering over his wine in the dining-room, and might of course be ill. Apoplexy was the first thought that rose, like a sheeted spectre, before the Countess’s mind.

‘Fire, my lady! Fire at High Tor; broke out sudden; and all the village is in flames!’ panted out Bugles the butler, who was fat and short of breath. And without were to be vaguely heard other voices and the sound of running feet, and the cry, alarming above all others, of ‘Fire! fire!’ as grooms and gardeners forgot their usual respectful reticence in the first flush of the anticipated struggle with the direst foe of man and his works.

‘There really is a fire, and I’m afraid a great one, to judge by the smoke and the sparks,’ said Lord Harrogate, who at this juncture entered. ‘My father has had his horse saddled already, and has started by this time for the village, and I am going too of course. I only came first to see if’——

‘If we were ready to come too?’ cried Lady Maud. ‘To be sure we will, the moment we can get our hats, Gladys and I. Alice will stay with mamma. We can’t work at putting out the fire, but we may be of use somehow.’

And in an incredibly short space of time the Ladies De Vere and their brother were hurrying down the steep road that led to the scene of the disaster. High Tor House, isolated and on a lofty spot of rising ground, was in no sort of peril from the fire raging beneath; but the indwellers of the great mansion were not disposed, like the divinities of the Pagan Olympus, serenely to contemplate the woes of the inhabitants of earth, and without waiting for orders, nearly every boy and man in the Earl’s employ had hastened down to fight the common foe.

‘The dry weather—unusually dry for this moist district, where the last thing we generally have to complain of is the want of rain—must help the fire sadly,’ said Lord Harrogate, as the lodge-gates were left behind, and the lurid light of the conflagration became more and more distinctly visible through gaps in the high hedges that bordered the road. As they drew nearer, the eddying clouds of smoke, mingled with fiery dots here and there, the dull crimson glow, and the smothered sound of voices mingling with the roar of the flames and the clang of labour, gave unpleasant tokens of the mischief that was going on.

‘I hoped at the first that the report was an exaggerated one, as most reports are,’ said Lord Harrogate, as they came in sight of the burning houses. ‘But this is an ugly business. It is on one side of the street only, by good luck, that the fire is raging, and if we can keep it from spreading’——

The crash of a cottage roof tumbling in, and followed by a shower of sparks and small fragments of flaming wood, drowned the rest of the sentence. Matters were evidently bad enough, though not quite so bad as might have been augured from the first announcement of that herald of misfortune, Bugles the butler. The whole southern side of the long straggling street was more or less in flames; and to keep the fire from communicating itself to the houses on the opposite side of the road was a work which in itself taxed the strength of the whole adult male population to the utmost.

The noise, the smoke, the falling sparks, and the occasional plumping down into the dust of the road of some half-consumed scrap of woodwork, made Lord Harrogate’s sisters, who were physically no braver than the average of their sex, shrink back aghast.

‘Here, Maud!’ cried her brother impatiently. ‘We must not—or I must not—be drones in the hive. You know most of these good people—Mrs Prosser, for instance.—Mrs Prosser, my sisters will stay with you while I go forward to bear a hand in getting the fire under.—Where’s my father? Ah, there he is, in the thick of the smoke!’

And there, sure enough, was dimly to be seen the well-known figure of the old Earl giving orders to such as were cool enough to hearken to them, whilst his frightened horse, held by a groom, stood at some distance. Darting through the clouds of suffocating vapour, which were dense enough to suggest the idea of a battle, Lord Harrogate reached the place where his father was standing.

‘I don’t see any fire-engines!’ exclaimed the young man, looking with a sort of dismay at the chain of buckets passed from hand to hand. ‘What, in the name of all that’s wonderful, are the people dreaming of?’

‘We have sent to Pebworth for help,’ said the Earl, shaking his gray head; ‘but before any arrives, if the wind freshens the houses will be mere cinder-heaps. As for the parish engine, Stickles here has got the same story to tell that is only too common among us in England here.’

And Stickles, who was the clerk, rubbed his hands apologetically together as he faltered out, in reply to Lord Harrogate’s impatient question, the excuses which he had previously addressed to the Earl. The engine of which he was official custodian had been long out of repair, and was to have been ‘seen to,’ and should have been ‘seen to’ after harvest-time, had not the unfortunate outbreak of a very real and practical fire tested the unreadiness of the precautions for putting it out. As it was, the only available means of doing battle with the conflagration was the rude and simple one of flinging water on the flames, and at this task the inhabitants were busy enough. They were busier, however, before long, as, under the direction of Lord Harrogate, whom they respected, they began to tear down some portions of the burning buildings, in the hope of preventing the fire from spreading. A strange sight it was which the village street presented, encumbered as it was by chests and bedding and the poor furniture which had been hastily dragged out from the doors of cottages now blazing, and the wailing of frightened children, and the shrill voices of the women, blended with the hoarse deep roar of the triumphant flames.

‘’Tis a mercy, my lord, it broke out when it did,’ said Charley Joyce, best bowler in the local cricket club and best woodman in the Earl’s employment, and in both of these capacities well known to the Earl’s heir. ‘There’d ha’ been a lot of us burned in our beds, if it had tarried till after midnight. All came,’ he added, ‘of that blessed rock-oil from Ameriky.’

Such indeed was the reported origin of the disaster. A girl, for milking purposes, had taken a tin lamp with her into a cowshed; the cow had kicked over the lamp, and the burning petroleum had set fire to the straw litter, whence the flames had mounted to the thatched roof. Thatched roofs, picturesque to look upon, were only too numerous for safety in that West-country village. The fire had crawled and darted, lithe as a serpent, from gable to porch and from paling to stable.

‘There! Look at the school-house now!’ cried a score of voices; and indeed the flames were pouring outwards through the shattered windows and licking the blackened walls, and withering to charred sticks the pretty hedge where the fragrant woodbine had clung so lovingly to the quickset, and scorching the very flowers in the garden.

‘The fire began near about there,’ remarked Joyce; but Lord Harrogate was already out of earshot, since his keen eye had caught a glimpse of a pale beautiful face, in the midst of the confusion of the crowded street. He pushed his way through the excited throng.

‘You are not hurt, Miss Gray, I hope and trust?’ he said with an eagerness that surprised himself.

‘No; but my house is burning,’ said Ethel in reply; ‘and I am a stranger, and—— But pray, my lord, do not trouble yourself to’—— For the young man had drawn her arm gently but firmly through his.

‘You must let me choose for you,’ he said. ‘My sisters are here, close by, at Mrs Prosser’s, who keeps the village shop—a kind motherly old soul. I must leave you with them.’

Thus Ethel allowed herself to be led to the place where, amidst a knot of women, whose awe-stricken faces told how great was their interest in the spectacle, the Ladies De Vere stood watching the progress of the fire. Lord Harrogate did not linger for an instant, but went back to put heart into the men still battling with the encroaching flames.

It was no trifle, this hand-to-hand combat, as it were, with the fire; the fierce heat driving back the volunteers who ventured very near to the tottering walls to fling water upon the blazing timbers, while the blinding smoke rushed volleying out to blear the eyes and clog the lungs of the workers, and ever and anon some tall chimney or breached roof would fall with a crash, sending showers of bricks and half-consumed wood into the midst of the crowd; and hairbreadth escapes were many and bruises numerous.

At last, however, the two engines from Pebworth came clattering into the street, and water being in that region of streams ready to hand, and the wind happily abating, the fire was fairly conquered, and all further danger at an end. There was no loss of life; but some were singed and many bruised; while thirty humble homes had been turned to heaps of smouldering ruin, and household gear and clothing, snatched from the flames, formed piles here and there in the wet road. Gradually the hospitality of this or that neighbour afforded temporary shelter to the crying children, the lamenting women, and the exhausted men; while a flying squadron of boys chased and led back captive the cows and pigs, the fowls and donkeys of those whose yards and sheds had been made desolate by the conflagration.

But what was Ethel to do? The old dame who served her had been readily received into the dwelling of a neighbour; and indeed nearly all of those so suddenly evicted had kindred, and all had friends to harbour them at this pinch. The young school-mistress looked forlorn indeed, as she stood alone in the midst of so many groups of voluble talkers.

‘You must come home with us, Miss Gray,’ said Lady Maud kindly; ‘must come up to High Tor House, I mean,’ she added, seeing that Ethel did not at first appear to comprehend her words, ‘and stay with us until something can be done. It is the least we can do for you, burned out of house and home in this dreadful way, as you have been.’

Lady Gladys heartily seconded the invitation; but Ethel still hesitated until the Earl drew near.

‘I have been telling Miss Gray here, papa, that we will take care of her at the House for a few days till she can look about her,’ said Lady Maud.

‘Quite right, my dear,’ answered the Earl with his fatherly smile; and thus the matter was settled.