Now amongst the spectators was one whose life and reason were at stake on that attempt.
Mrs. Dodd was hurrying homeward from this very neighbourhood when the fire broke out. Her son Edward was coming at nine o'clock to tea, and, better still, to sleep. He was leaving the fire brigade. It had disappointed him; he found the fire-escape men saved the lives, the firemen only the property. He had gone into the business earnestly too; he had invented a thing like a treble pouch hook, which could be fastened in a moment to the end of a rope, and thrown into the window, and would cling to the bare wall, if there was nothing better, and enable him to go up and bring life down. But he had never got a chance to try it; and, per contra, he was on the engine when they went tearing over a woman and broke her arm and collar-bone in the Blackfriars Road; and also when they went tearing over their own fire-dog, and crippled him. All this seemed out of character, and shocked Edward; and then his mother could not get over the jacket.
In a quarter of an hour he was to take off the obnoxious jacket for ever, and was now lounging at the station smoking a short pipe, when a man galloped up crying “Fire!”
“All right!” said Edward, giving a whiff. “Where?”
“Lunatic Asylum. Drayton House.”
Guess how long before the horses were to, and the engine tearing at a gallop down the road, and the firemen shouting “Fire! fire!” to clear the way, and Edward's voice the loudest.
When the report of fire swept townward past Mrs. Dodd, she turned, and saw the glow.
“Oh dear,” said she, “that must be somewhere near Drayton House.” And full of the tender fears that fill such bosoms as hers for those they love, she could not go home till she had ascertained that it was not Drayton House. Moreover, Edward's was the nearest station; she had little hope now of seeing him to tea. She sighed, and retraced her steps, and made timid inquiries, but could gain no clear information. Presently she heard galloping behind her, and the fireman's wild sharp cry of fire. An engine drawn by two powerful brown horses came furiously, all on fire itself with red paint and polished steel gleaming in the lights; helmeted men clustered on it, and out of one of these helmets looked a face like a fighting lion's, the eyes so dilated, the countenance in such towering excitement, the figure half rising from his seat as though galloping was too slow and he wanted to fly. It was Edward. Mother and son caught sight of one another as the engine thundered by, and he gave her a solemn ardent look, and pointed towards the fire; by that burning look and eloquent gesture she knew it was something more than a common fire. She trembled and could not move. But this temporary weakness was followed by an influx of wild vigour; she forgot her forty-two years, and flew to hover round the fire as the hen round water. Unfortunately she was too late to get any nearer than the road outside the gates, the crowd was so dense. And, while her pale face and anxious eyes, the eyes of a wife and a mother, were bent on that awful fire, the human tide flowed swiftly up behind her, and there she was wedged in. She was allowed her foot of ground to stand and look like the rest—no more. Mere unit in that mass of panting humanity, hers was one of the thousands of upturned faces lurid in the light of the now blazing roof. She saw with thousands the hand break the window and clutch the frame; she gasped with the crowd at that terrible and piteous sight, and her bosom panted for her fellow-creature in sore peril. But what is this? The mob inside utter a great roar of hope; the crowd outside strain every eye.
A gleaming helmet overtops the outer wall. It is a fireman mounting the great elm-tree in the madhouse yard. The crowd inside burst in a cheer. He had a rope round his loins; his face was to the tree. He mounted and mounted like a cat; higher, and higher, and higher, till he reached a branch about twelve feet above the window and as many distant from it laterally; the crowd cheered him lustily. But Mrs. Dodd, half distracted with terror, implored them not to encourage him. “It is my child!” she cried despairingly; “my poor reckless darling! Come down, Edward; for your poor mother's sake, come down.”
“Dear heart,” said a woman, “it is the lady's son. Poor thing!”