The Lake of Wine

by Bernard Capes

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?