‘It is more than tiresome,’ rejoined the Countess. ‘It makes me, on your sister’s account, very anxious. If I had known, when Miss Grainger left us, how very long it would take to replace her, and that dear Alice would be for months at a stand-still so far as her education went, I should not have parted with her so readily.’
‘But she left us because she was going to be married,’ said Lady Gladys smiling; ‘and we could not, I suppose, have forbidden the banns on account of the scarcity of good governesses. I wonder, by the way, how the scarcity can exist, when we are so perpetually informed that the governess market—a phrase which I don’t like, suggesting as it does white slavery, involuntary servitude, and the auctioneer’s hammer—is overstocked.’
‘That sounds clever, Gladys,’ answered Lady Wolverhampton in her plain way; ‘but I am afraid that, like most clever-sounding things, it proves nothing. I could get a highly certificated instructress, a person primed with information on particular subjects, warranted to be worth a handsome salary, a’——
‘A teaching-machine, in fact,’ suggested bright Lady Gladys, seeing that her mother hesitated for the lack of a word.
‘Precisely. A teaching-machine,’ resumed the Countess. ‘But I don’t want one. I wish Alice’s governess, whoever she may be, to be a good sensible young woman, such as Miss Grainger was; and instead of that, all my correspondents write to me of the degrees and diplomas that have been taken out by those they recommend. I suppose I am an old-fashioned person, but I do wish’——
But before the Countess of Wolverhampton could complete her discourse on the governess topic, the door was jerked open, and the old butler, who had permitted himself to turn the handle for once with such unconventional vivacity, stood gasping in the doorway with a face as white as his cravat.
‘Why, Bugles!’ began the Countess, rising in alarm; for that an ox should talk, as Livy tells us that a Roman representative of the bovine genus actually did, is scarcely more calculated to disturb the nerves than that a well-trained servant should crack the ice of his artificial decorum. The Earl, who was, like his wife, a partisan of old fashions, was lingering over his wine in the dining-room, and might of course be ill. Apoplexy was the first thought that rose, like a sheeted spectre, before the Countess’s mind.
‘Fire, my lady! Fire at High Tor; broke out sudden; and all the village is in flames!’ panted out Bugles the butler, who was fat and short of breath. And without were to be vaguely heard other voices and the sound of running feet, and the cry, alarming above all others, of ‘Fire! fire!’ as grooms and gardeners forgot their usual respectful reticence in the first flush of the anticipated struggle with the direst foe of man and his works.
‘There really is a fire, and I’m afraid a great one, to judge by the smoke and the sparks,’ said Lord Harrogate, who at this juncture entered. ‘My father has had his horse saddled already, and has started by this time for the village, and I am going too of course. I only came first to see if’——
‘If we were ready to come too?’ cried Lady Maud. ‘To be sure we will, the moment we can get our hats, Gladys and I. Alice will stay with mamma. We can’t work at putting out the fire, but we may be of use somehow.’