DURING a period of supreme trial Sir David showed himself a man of courage and resource. The appalling thunder of the explosion, the vision of the fiery upheaval of the floor were still in his ears and eyes, when he leapt to the immediate necessity of action and of his taking the situation by the throat. Tuke was disabled—his servant half-insane with hysteria. Somebody must rally the household, and quickly; for, though the dense pall of smoke that choked the room, fitful fires were winking and blossoming; and it was evident that the place was alight in more than one quarter. It was no time to marvel or speculate over the nature of the wild catastrophe that had occurred. His interest at the outset was to secure the escape of every inmate of the house; and he plunged into the hall with a shrieking summons to man and maid to make for the passage. Into this, heavy clouds of gaseous vapour were rolling from its further end; their direction seeming to point to the locality of the explosion. He ran to the front-door, tore open the fastenings, and flung a way into the freezing cold of the outer night. Then he rushed back and, repeating his summons, made for the stair-foot. Here he met them coming down pell-mell—choking, sobbing, feeling their way in mad terror—men, women, and the one boy.
What was it? What had happened?
His sister flung herself into his arms, imploring to be saved; Dunlone, quaking and white as a turnip, shook out curses of impotent frenzy; the maids cried and gabbled volubly, and even the boy was moved to some shrill expression of inquiry as to the cause of so stupendous a bang.
The little baronet silenced and marshalled them all. He led them—preceded by one loving soul—shivering and shrieking down the passage—into the open air; and there against a snow-drift he left them, and fled back to his duty.
Not an individual, thank God!—save those already accounted for—was injured. He came upon the master, faint and stumbling, in the hall. On one side the faithful groom supported him; on the other a poor girl received his weight. She, this pathetic maid, looked dumbly at the rescuer, wistful as a shorn lamb.
“What can you do to this?” her eyes said. They might have yearned as those of her, the mother of the cripple that was brought to Jesus.
“Help him outside,” he said, with compassion in his voice. He did not know that here his quarrel with his friend was pitifully resolved.
Through the now ruddy fog he went down into the room of death. Brander, lying in his agony at the step-foot, cried to him to save him from a horrible fate.
“The worthy first,” he said sternly, and could have found it in his heart to pity the poor wretch for the despairing moan he vented. But it was Whimple he hunted for and shrieked to; and whose prostrate form he at length stumbled upon.
“What are you doing here?” he yelled. “Do you want to be grilled like a herring?”
“Let me burn and cleanse my hands,” the poor fool cried up. “No water will wash them.”
“You madman! You struck for your life and revenged your master!”
“My God! Is he dead?”
The man got to his feet in the terror of the thought.
“Is he dead?” he whispered awfully, his ghastly face pressed forward.
“No—but he’s hurt—he’s hurt. And there’s another to pull from the fire—Luvaine, that my mind misgives me lies at the source of this trouble. You’ll come, man, and help me with him, if he’s alive?”
“Yes, yes—life! Oh! show me where I can do something to save it!”
He stumbled blindly after the other, and he gave out a heavy groan as he passed by the inanimate bundle on the floor. Bloody Jack Fern showed his right title to the adjective; but it was obvious he was gone beyond considerations of rescue.
The draught drawn into the burning house had for the moment a little thinned the smoke in the passage. They took advantage of the respite, and plunged for the rearward chamber, where they assumed the victim must lie. The misty lightnings flashed from the blazing room were their only lamps of guidance; for the crash had extinguished or overturned every taper in the lower part of the building, and a reeling darkness added to the horror of the situation.
Fortunately Dennis was familiar with every stone of the old grange; and he led Sir David, who clung to his coat-skirt, with an unerring instinct. But at the very entrance of the vault they stumbled over some débris, and recovering themselves and moving forward again, down they clumped upon a flap of shattered wood-work, and near rolled into a black yawning mouth that breathed a sick vapour at them.
Blythewood raised himself cautiously on his hands.
“Luvaine!” he yelled. “Where are you, man? Luvaine! Luvaine!”
No sound of answer came back to them; but, listening intently, they were in a moment aware of a little breathing moan against the wall in their neighbourhood.
“He’s there, by the Lord!” said Sir David, in a suppressed voice.
When, come again with difficulty to their feet, they followed the whispered clue to the poor broken creature and tried to shift him, he pattered out such a delirium of torment that they must refrain from the effort to bear him out in their arms. But they made a sling of Whimple’s coat, and getting him into this as best they could, they took it between them, and treading with infinite care, accomplished their escape from that veritable trap of death. Returning to the passage, they found this to be filled anew with driving volumes of vapour, and a great increase of roaring and flaming sounds to proceed from the dining-hall; but they passed the danger at a scamper, looking thereinto as they fled by at a rising sea of fire that leapt up the walls in pointing waves, and fell and spread abroad and leapt again. And from the threshold step, over which in his terror he had managed to struggle his half-paralyzed arms, Brander screamed to them and prayed to their mercy with knotted hands.
And at the last they saved the scoundrel, when the heat smote upon their faces like scourges of nettle and the smoke plugged their throats; and they laid him down in the snow a little apart from the rest, and paused at length and wiped their sooty brows and breathed in the frost as if it were perfumed sunlight.
Now were all accounted for; but the bitter night must take much that the fire had spared unless they could win to some cover. They stood there, under a fat drift piled against a tree on the lawn—to the shelter of which men and women had forced and beaten a passage—they stood, a poor, homeless group, with their wounded laid on coats amongst them, and watched the processes of a new enemy they were powerless to control. And, as the fury of flame leapt from window to window, crossed by luminous shadows, as though fiends were ransacking the building for the little household treasures that are dear to sentiment, cries and exclamations of pity rose involuntarily from the lips of all, and some of the women wept and called upon the men for the love of God to return and rescue—what they did not know; but in truth it was the children of their imagination.
But suddenly a more real questioning terror was passing amongst them. The girl—Darda—where was she?
“In the stable,” murmured Tuke from the ground. His head was pillowed upon Betty’s shoulder. But for very shame the girl would have stripped off her skirt to wrap it about his frozen feet. They were risen above the petty conventions of behaviour, these two. In the shadow of pain, of death, they had failed of touch with the particular proprieties, and they clung together like sworn lovers and defied the world. And, at least for the moment, their attachment was respected of all, for the most paltry natures find life in its tragedies a little unadaptive to their rules of social conduct.
Now, at the word of horror, Dennis started forward with a cry of agony. His sister—his poor mindless charge! That he should have been so lapped in his own selfish misery as to forget her! He had thought, in his stunned mind, that she had been amongst the women. How could she be, when he had himself witnessed her removal to the stables?
He struggled off across the snow, followed by the tireless William. Angela, placed and supported between her brother and Dunlone, shrieked faintly after him. The girl must be held in durance—somewhere, in a place of safety. She should die were she brought again into her neighbourhood! Blythewood soothed her distress. She should be well protected, he swore. The lord, coming somewhat to himself, and perhaps relieved to be escaped under whatever conditions from that abode of brigands, cursed the lady under his breath for a little pretty whimpering,—and was half moved to slide his arm about her waist. He withheld that condescension, however, for the present.
The two men were seen to reach the stables—to force, after some strenuous effort, the door of the coach-house. From the gap made by them the terrified deer broke forth and scattered in all directions. Some sprang into drifts and were lost; some huddled against the wall, afraid to venture further; one or two came stumbling and leaping in the foot-tracks, and ran up, bleating very humanly for protection to those superior animals who could not find it for themselves.
And now ensued a period of intense anxiety and emotion; for minutes passed and the rescuers did not reappear. And, with incredible speed, rushing like a blood-wanton dog amongst a flock of sheep, the fire seized room after room and worried it, and raced on roaring until the whole building was involved. And young shoots of flame sprouted from the roof and grew and flourished in a moment like burning aloes, and the heat waxed intense.
From the first, indeed, no least hope of checking the conflagration had suggested itself. The old dry interior of the building caught as if all its solidity were so much illusion of lath and canvas; and the water-supply was frozen to a minimum.
Quite suddenly the little group made one mouth of a low moan of horror. Upon the north parapet of the roof a figure had come out—that of the missing girl. She stood beside a chimney-stack, whither the flames had not yet reached, and in the shaking glare she was as visible to all as though it were sunlight. She carried, it seemed, a bag of some sort in her hand, and she made no gesture of fear; but, in an instant, as a fountain of fire rose behind her, scattering sprays of sparks, she was dancing and kissing her hand to her own shadow on the chimney-stack.
Then they saw that the two men were come out of the stable and were standing beneath, calling frantically up to the mad creature; and she bent and looked down upon them, while sobs and cries broke from the watching women and the men breathed hard.
Her brother, it was evident, was beseeching her to throw herself, as her one chance, into a thick drift that lay beneath; and she could be seen to nod to him and to point exultantly to the bag on her arm. But in the act it slipped from her grasp and fell, and at once she fled after it, plunging from the parapet like a swimmer. Into the snow she went, as if it were foam, and flakes of the frozen crust of the drift span up and were flung against the wall. And the pent burden of the spectators found its shrill vent once more, and was lowered to sighs of pity as the two were seen coming across the snow with a limp shape looped between them.
She had dived, and over the brink of Cocytus. She had gone to the shades that were ever her kinsfolk. When they looked at her they saw a smile on her mouth; but her hair hung slack, as if the flame of her soul was withdrawn from it. She was reasonable at last; and to make her so just this had been needed—to snap her slender neck like a lily-stalk.
* * * * * * * * * * *
When, by midnight, the great fire was died down to a cinderous glow, gasping and winking amongst walls of slag, the sad onlookers were moved pathetically to see the purple vault above them all embroidered with stars; the clerestory of the trees hung with them; the white pavement ghostly in their radiance. The candles of the vast cathedral, whose tapering walls are the cone of the earth’s own shadow, were lit, and the voiceless anthems of peace rose in the dreaming sighs of half the world.
The flames, checked by the stone passage, and rising straight and clear in a windless night, had spared the stables; and thither at the last they all bent their footsteps, bearing the dead and the wounded with them.
My lord, my lady; Tom and Dick and Moll—there they were fain to camp amongst the muck and litter left by the fallow-deer; and the frost pinched them sadly, and hunger even, and for the sick thirst; and never did reluctant day so dawdle in the East.