CHAPTER IV
THE RESCUE
Matthew stopped short, unable to move a yard further, his eyes fixed upon the slight form hanging so dangerously high above him. It was truly an awful moment for both the lads, a moment never afterwards to be forgotten by either of them. The time of suspense was but seconds; it seemed years. But George, his knees firmly pressed against the low parapet wall that ran along the top in front of the house, had no difficulty in supporting the weight, and not too much in actually hauling up his living burden. Another moment and he had seized one arm with a strong grip; the next he had pulled the child to him on the roof.
"Safe! thank God!" he murmured, almost breathless with his exertions and still more with his agitation.
Safe! As if to mock him a great tongue of flame shot from the window from which rescuer and rescued had but now emerged, and a cry of despair rose from Matthew below.
"Run for the library!" Blackett shouted, a thought suddenly striking him. "Run, run!" And the boy pointed to a sort of wing, an addition to the mansion recently made by the Squire, and devoted to his books and the extensive and valuable collection of antiquities and curiosities of which he was very proud. This building was connected with the body of the house by only one small arched door, on the ground-floor.
George understood, and cautiously but rapidly edging his way along the broad leaden gutter behind the parapet, he drew the girl, by this time conscious once more, but dazed with fright, to the outlying portion of the roof, which was as yet untouched by the flames. He peered over for Matthew, but could see nothing of him.
For the moment the two were in no danger. But the flames were already licking the portion of the library immediately adjoining the house proper; soon the whole wing must be ablaze. The boy gazed wildly around, to see if there was any means, however risky or even desperate, by which escape might be made. He saw nothing but the slender branches of a magnificent yew that grew in the retired garden behind and close to the library. These boughs overtopped even the tall building, and some of them overhung the roof a little. But the nearest of them was ten feet above the heads of the two, and hopelessly out of reach. Would that some great gust of wind would drive those branches within clutching distance!
This tantalizing thought had hardly taken possession of George's mind when his attention was attracted by shouts from below. Peering down he was astonished to see Matthew rapidly climbing the yew. The same thought had struck him also! Up the climber swarmed, higher and higher. Then he began without hesitation to crawl along some of the topmost branches that overhung the library roof. Outwards he crept, embracing tightly half a dozen of the long thin boughs; they seemed but little more than twigs.
"You'll be dashed to pieces!" Mary cried; "go back, go back!"
"Haven't you a rope anywhere?" George asked eagerly.
"Every rope and ladder locked up in the stable yard," was the breathless reply, "and the men away. This is our only chance. Catch hold."
As Matthew spoke, the end of the long swaying branches, swinging ever lower, came down to the roof, and a good yard or more of the greenery was within George's grasp. Matthew lay at full length on his collection of boughs in order that his weight might keep the ends down. It was a precarious position truly, but Matthew was very light, and had absolutely no fear for himself.
"Lash her well to three or four of the strongest of the boughs," he said hurriedly; "give the rope half a dozen good turns about her waist and the boughs. They are yew and very tough. Quick!"
Hardly knowing what he was doing, George obeyed. He was a bit of a sailor, and in a couple of minutes he had bound the child to the branches in a way to satisfy even Matthew, who still lay amongst the foliage, some three yards away.
"Now cling for your life to the rest of the branches you've got, Fairburn, till I go down to the long thick arm there below. Can you hold?"
"Yes!" cried the other cheerfully, light beginning to dawn upon him. "I can hold on; you go down."
Matthew moved down, and the branches, relieved of their burden, began to exert a considerable upward pull. But the weight of the boy and the girl held down the ends, and they awaited Matthew's call. It soon came, though the interval of waiting seemed an age.
"Now then!" came the shout, and George could see his quondam enemy firmly seated on a stout branch that had been cut shorter, its foliage having interfered with the light of one of the windows of the library. Matthew was sitting astride, his legs firmly gripping the branch. "Now drop yourselves over," he went on. "You'll fall right on the top of me, and I'll grab you. Throw one arm round Mary's waist, and then seize the branches with both hands and stick tight."
"I'll stick like a leech," George replied, "but it's a fearful drop."
"There's no other way, none! See! the blaze has caught the library roof behind you! It will be upon you in another minute. Drop over, for pity's sake!"
George set his teeth, placed one arm round the child's slender form, gripped hard a handful of the pliant boughs, and dropped over the parapet, Mary closing her eyes in her mortal fright. With a huge swing the branches bent, and in an instant the two were swaying a good fifteen feet below, George almost jerked from his hold. The boughs creaked but did not snap.
"Thank heaven!" cried Matthew, "I have you!" And reaching up, he got a grip of George's foot and dragged down the swinging pair.
"Grab the branch with your legs, Fairburn! and I'll cut Mary clear."
No sooner said than done. By the aid of a good clasp-knife Matthew severed the cords and secured his little sister, her weight, however, as it came upon him, almost knocking him from his perch. But he held desperately, and in another moment had Mary on the branch beside him. Then George, throwing his legs apart, suddenly loosed his hold of the branches and dropped also astride of the bough, which he grasped tight with both hands. He swung round and hung from the branch head downwards. But the next minute he had righted himself, and was ready to help with Mary.
The rescue was complete. To guide the child along the branch, towards the middle of the tree, and then to lower her from limb to limb of the old yew was mere play to the two boys. The three dropped the last four or five feet to earth just as a man rushed forward with a great cry, to clasp in his arms the fainting girl.
"God is merciful!" he ejaculated. It was Squire Blackett, who had arrived just in time to see his beloved child saved from an awful fate.
For a few moments father and children clung to each other. When at length they looked round to express their gratitude to the plucky rescuer, he was nowhere to be seen. Seeing a great crowd of the Blackett pitmen arrive with a run, George had felt that he could be of no more use, and slipping into the wood had made for home. He wanted no thanks, and moreover the brig was to sail at four in the morning, at which time the tide would serve.
"He's gone—George has gone!" cried Matthew.
"We can never repay him," murmured Mr. Blackett. "We must go on to see him at the earliest moment in the morning."
When Mr. Blackett, with Matthew and the rescued Mary, drove early next day to the Fairburns' house, it was only to learn that George had sailed for London some hours before. There was no help for it, and all they could do was to overwhelm the father and mother with words of gratitude and praise. They informed the Fairburns that by the exertions of the men the library and its contents had been saved; the rest of the mansion was left a wreck. Mrs. Maynard had been drawn from the mass of burning rubbish at the foot of the staircase, and was now lying between life and death.
George had had a bad quarter of an hour at the parting from his parents, but by the time the vessel felt the swell of the open sea he was full of spirits again. The sea voyage, even in a dirty collier, was a delight. Then there was London the wonderful at the end of it, and he had long desired to see the great capital of which he had heard and read so much.
The London of Queen Anne's reign was not the huge overgrown London of our own day. But it was a notable city, and to George Fairburn and his contemporaries the grandest city in the world. The Great Fire had taken place but twenty years before George was born, yet already the city had risen from its ashes, with wider and nobler streets, and with a multitude of handsome churches which Wren had built. The new and magnificent St. Paul's, the great architect's proudest work, was rapidly approaching completion. George's father had witnessed the opening for worship of a portion of the cathedral five years before, and soon the stupendous dome, which was beginning to tower high above the city, would be finished. Sir Thomas Gresham's Exchange, the centre of the business life of the city, had been replaced by another and not less noble edifice. The great capital contained a population of well over half a million souls, a number that seemed incredible to those who knew only Bristol, and York, and Norwich, the English cities next in size. The houses stretched continuously from the city boundary to Westminster, and soon the two would be but one vast town. George had heard much of London Bridge, with its shops and its incessant stream of passengers and vehicles, and he hoped to visit the pleasant villages of Kensington and Islington, and many another that lay within a walk of great London. He hoped one day, too, to get a glimpse of some of the clever wits, Mat Prior, Wycherley, Dick Steele, and others, who haunted the coffee-houses of the capital, and of the rising young writer, Mr. Addison, not to mention a greater than them all, the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton. For George had ever been a great reader, even while he loved a good game as well as any boy in the land.
It was many a long year, however, ere George Fairburn was destined to see the mighty capital. Once fairly at sea, the skipper brought out and mounted his four little guns, to the lad's huge joy.
"You mean business, captain," he remarked with a merry laugh.
"I do, if there comes along a Frenchy who won't leave us alone," the old fellow replied, "leastways if she isn't too big a craft for us altogether."
The evening was coming in, the town of Yarmouth faintly visible through the haze, when suddenly the crew of the Ouseburn Lassie became aware of a big vessel in the offing.
"She's giving chase, by thunder!" cried the skipper, after he had taken a long look through the glass; and all was excitement on board the brig. Anxiously all hands watched the stranger, and at last the shout went up, "She's a Frenchy!"
"Aye, and a big 'un at that," somebody added.
Hastily the preparations were made to receive her, though the captain shook his head even as he gave his orders.
"It's no go," he whispered to George. "We've got these four small guns, but what's the good? We've nobody to man 'em; only a couple on 'em, leastways. And the Frenchman's a monster."
"We'll show them a bit of fight all the same," George put in eagerly. The old salt shook his head again.
Quickly the big vessel overhauled the collier brig, and signals were made to pull down her flag, whereupon the Englishman grunted.
Within a minute a puff was seen, and a round shot whizzed close past the Ouseburn Lassie's bows.
"Give them a reply!" George urged in great excitement.
"Wait a bit, my lad," and the skipper bided his time.
"Now!" came the order at length, and a couple of eight-pound balls flew straight to the Frenchman.
"Well hit!" shouted the Englishmen, as a shower of splinters was seen to fly upwards from the enemy's deck.
"It's enough to show 'em we've got mettle in us," growled the old captain, "and that's all we can say."
His words were justified, for the next moment there came another flash, and with a crash the brig's mast went by the board.
"Done for!" groaned the skipper. "We shall see the inside of a French prison, I reckon."
The enemy's long boat put out with a crew four times that of the brig. Within a quarter of an hour the Englishmen had all been transferred to the Louis Treize, and an officer and half a dozen men left in charge of the prize. The Frenchman at once set a course for Dunkirk, and, with a spanking breeze behind her, she made the port in fifteen hours. The noon of the next day saw George Fairburn and his companions clapped into a French prison.
"A bonny come off," the old skipper grumbled, "but we shall ha' to make the best on it."
It will not be forgotten that the war just begun was, to put it bluntly, a war to determine which of two indifferent princes, Philip of France and Charles of Austria, should have the Spanish crown. Lord Peterborough declared that it was not worth his country's while to fight for such "a pair of louts."
Into the war, however, England had thrown herself, under the direction of Harley, the famous Tory minister now in power, at home, and with Marlborough as commander-in-chief of both the English and the Dutch forces abroad. The General's first aim was to take back from Louis XIV all those fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands which had been seized and garrisoned by the French troops as if the country were a French possession.
He started from Kaiserwörth, a town on the Rhine, which his troops had captured from one of Louis's chief allies, the Elector of Cologne, before Marlborough arrived to take command. Venloo was taken in gallant style, and then the important city of Liége, on the Meuse. The result of the campaign was that the French had been chased from the Lower Rhine, and Holland, much to its relief, made far more safe from attack. Returning to England, the victorious commander was given a grand reception. And no wonder, for it was the first time for many a year that the French had received a real check.
While these things were going on in the Netherlands, another leader under the Grand Alliance, Prince Louis of Baden, took Landau, on the Rhine, from the French. In Italy, too, the allies triumphed, the gallant Prince Eugene, presently to be the warm and life-long friend of Marlborough, defeating the French brilliantly at Cremona, a fortunate thing for the Empire, which was thus secured from a French invasion through the Tyrol.
To crown the successes of the Grand Alliance during the campaign of 1702, the first of the war, the brave sailor Sir George Rooke, following the Spanish galleons and the French war vessels into the harbour of Vigo, destroyed the greater number of them. It was a repetition of Drake's famous expedition to "singe the King of Spain's beard."
All these things happened while George Fairburn and other English prisoners ate their hearts out in captivity at Dunkirk. The lad chafed under the surveillance to which he was subjected, and never passed a day without turning over in his mind some scheme of escape. How it was to be done, he did not see. But he waited for his chance, and meanwhile, partly to avoid being suspected, and partly to while away the hours he made friends with the soldiers on guard. He already knew a little French, and with his natural quickness he soon made rapid progress. At the end of a month he could get along capitally in the language; at the end of three months he could speak the tongue fluently; at the end of nine months—for thus did his term of captivity drag itself out—he was, so far as the language was concerned, almost a Frenchman. Thus the winter passed, and the spring of 1703 came round, George Fairburn still an inmate of a French prison, hopeless of escape, so far as he could see.
But his chance came at last suddenly and unexpectedly. One morning he was escorted to the Hôtel de Ville, to interpret for an officer examining a batch of English prisoners who had been brought in from the Netherlands border. The way to the town lay at no great distance from the shore, and he observed how a boat lay close in on the low sandy beach, no owner in sight. His heart leapt into his mouth, and he had much ado to keep himself from betraying his thoughts by the flush that mantled hotly on his cheek.
One, two, three hundred paces the boat was left behind. Now or never! Instantly the lad started off back to the spot, his feet flying across the sand.
A shout broke from the throats of his astonished guards, and a half score of bullets whistled after the runaway. George ducked his head and sped on unhurt. A second volley did little more harm than the first, merely grazing the lobe of his right ear. The race was furious, but the lusty English lad was far and away the superior of the heavy Frenchmen. He gained the boat, the enemy still a hundred paces behind. The painter was loosely wound round a large stone, and in a trice George had leapt with it into the little craft. He had just time to give a vigorous shove off before the pursuers came up, the foremost dashing into the sea after him.