‘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.