“Well, your ladyship knows Paris and I don’t,” the schoolmistress replied respectfully. “I can fancy anything there. But you may depend upon it, my lady, England is different. I know old Alderman Daniel calls Lord John Russell ‘Lord John Robespierre,’ and says he’s worse than a Jacobin. But I’ll never believe he’d cut the King’s head off! Never! And don’t you believe it, either, my lady. No, English are English! There’s none like them, and never will be. All the same,” she concluded, “I shall set ‘Honour the King!’ for a copy when the young ladies come back.”
Her views might not have convinced by themselves. But taken with tea and buttered toast, a good fire and a singing kettle, they availed. Lady Sybil was a shade easier that afternoon; and, naturally of a high courage, found a certain alleviation in the exciting doings under her windows. She was gracious to Miss Sibson, whose outpourings she received with languid amusement; and when Mary was not looking, she followed her daughter’s movements with mournful eyes. Uncertain as the wind, she was this evening in her best mood; as patient as she could be fractious, and as gentle as she was sometimes violent. She scouted the notion of danger with all Miss Sibson’s decision; and after tea she insisted that the lights should be shaded, and her couch be wheeled to the window, in order that, propped high with pillows, she might amuse herself with the hurly-burly in the Square below.
“To be sure,” Miss Sibson commented, “it will do no good to anyone, this; and many a poor chap will suffer for it by and by. That’s the worst of these Broughams and Besoms, my lady. It’s the low down that swallow the dust. It’s very fine to cry ‘King and Reform!’ and drink the Corporation wine! But it will be ‘Between our sovereign lord the King and the prisoner at the bar!’ one of these days! And their throats will be dry enough then!”
“Poor misguided people!” Mary murmured.
“They’ve all learned the Church Catechism,” the schoolmistress replied shrewdly. “Or they should have; it’s lucky for them—ay, you may shout, my lads—that there’s many a slip between the neck and the rope—Lord ha’ mercy!”
The last words fitted the context well enough; but they fell so abruptly from her lips that Mary, who was bending over her mother, looked up in alarm. “What is it?” she asked.
“Only,” Miss Sibson answered with composure, “what I ought to have said long ago—that nothing can be worse for her ladyship than the cold air that comes in at the cracks of this window!”
“It’s not that,” Lady Sybil replied, smiling. “They have set fire to the Mansion House, Mary. You can see the flames in the room on the farther side of the door.”
Mary uttered an exclamation of horror, and they all looked out. The Mansion House was the most distant house on the north, or left-hand, side of the Square, viewed from the window at which they stood; the house next Miss Sibson’s being about the middle of the west side. Nearer them, on the same side as the Mansion House, stood another public building—the Custom House. And nearer again, being the most northerly house on their own side of the Square, stood a third—the Excise Office.
They had thus a fair, though a side view, of the front of the Mansion House, and were able to watch, with what calmness they might, the flames shoot from one window after another; until, presently, meeting in a waving veil of fire, they hid—save when the wind blew them aside—all the upper part of the house from their eyes.