He told how the flame had caught Muriel’s thin night-gear, and how rapidly it had been extinguished.
‘If you will tell me where to find your doctor, I will saddle one of the farm horses and ride over to fetch him, however far it may be,’ said Maurice.
‘You ride!’ cried Mrs. Trevanard, contemptuously, ‘and how are you to find your way from here to Seacomb before daybreak?’
‘I am not afraid. I have driven the road often with Martin.’
‘Let Martin go. He has known the way from childhood.’
This seemed a reasonable suggestion, and Maurice hurried off to wake Martin, just as Phœbe the housemaid arrived on the scene, sleepy, but sympathetic. She had expected to find old Mrs. Trevanard ill; in fact, had made up her mind that the old lady had had ‘a stroke,’ and was at her last gasp. She was therefore surprised to find the blind woman keen and active, only needing the aid of some one with eyes, to carry out her instructions.
Maurice was not sorry to remain on the spot while Martin went for the doctor, feeling that coolness and nerve might be needful.
Martin was up and dressed in the briefest possible space of time, and ran out to the stables to saddle the useful hack which was kept for the dog-cart. Day was beginning to show faint and pale in the east as he galloped away by the road that led to Seacomb, the same road by which Matthew Elgood and his wife had gone in the chill March morning, twenty years before, with Muriel’s child in their custody.
Maurice walked up and down the hall, listening for any sound from that inner room, and in half an hour had the satisfaction of hearing that she was sleeping tranquilly, and that she had been very little burned.
‘Thank God!’ he ejaculated fervently. ‘If this accident had been fatal I should have deemed myself her murderer.’