And in an incredibly short space of time the Ladies De Vere and their brother were hurrying down the steep road that led to the scene of the disaster. High Tor House, isolated and on a lofty spot of rising ground, was in no sort of peril from the fire raging beneath; but the indwellers of the great mansion were not disposed, like the divinities of the Pagan Olympus, serenely to contemplate the woes of the inhabitants of earth, and without waiting for orders, nearly every boy and man in the Earl’s employ had hastened down to fight the common foe.
‘The dry weather—unusually dry for this moist district, where the last thing we generally have to complain of is the want of rain—must help the fire sadly,’ said Lord Harrogate, as the lodge-gates were left behind, and the lurid light of the conflagration became more and more distinctly visible through gaps in the high hedges that bordered the road. As they drew nearer, the eddying clouds of smoke, mingled with fiery dots here and there, the dull crimson glow, and the smothered sound of voices mingling with the roar of the flames and the clang of labour, gave unpleasant tokens of the mischief that was going on.
‘I hoped at the first that the report was an exaggerated one, as most reports are,’ said Lord Harrogate, as they came in sight of the burning houses. ‘But this is an ugly business. It is on one side of the street only, by good luck, that the fire is raging, and if we can keep it from spreading’——
The crash of a cottage roof tumbling in, and followed by a shower of sparks and small fragments of flaming wood, drowned the rest of the sentence. Matters were evidently bad enough, though not quite so bad as might have been augured from the first announcement of that herald of misfortune, Bugles the butler. The whole southern side of the long straggling street was more or less in flames; and to keep the fire from communicating itself to the houses on the opposite side of the road was a work which in itself taxed the strength of the whole adult male population to the utmost.
The noise, the smoke, the falling sparks, and the occasional plumping down into the dust of the road of some half-consumed scrap of woodwork, made Lord Harrogate’s sisters, who were physically no braver than the average of their sex, shrink back aghast.
‘Here, Maud!’ cried her brother impatiently. ‘We must not—or I must not—be drones in the hive. You know most of these good people—Mrs Prosser, for instance.—Mrs Prosser, my sisters will stay with you while I go forward to bear a hand in getting the fire under.—Where’s my father? Ah, there he is, in the thick of the smoke!’
And there, sure enough, was dimly to be seen the well-known figure of the old Earl giving orders to such as were cool enough to hearken to them, whilst his frightened horse, held by a groom, stood at some distance. Darting through the clouds of suffocating vapour, which were dense enough to suggest the idea of a battle, Lord Harrogate reached the place where his father was standing.
‘I don’t see any fire-engines!’ exclaimed the young man, looking with a sort of dismay at the chain of buckets passed from hand to hand. ‘What, in the name of all that’s wonderful, are the people dreaming of?’
‘We have sent to Pebworth for help,’ said the Earl, shaking his gray head; ‘but before any arrives, if the wind freshens the houses will be mere cinder-heaps. As for the parish engine, Stickles here has got the same story to tell that is only too common among us in England here.’
And Stickles, who was the clerk, rubbed his hands apologetically together as he faltered out, in reply to Lord Harrogate’s impatient question, the excuses which he had previously addressed to the Earl. The engine of which he was official custodian had been long out of repair, and was to have been ‘seen to,’ and should have been ‘seen to’ after harvest-time, had not the unfortunate outbreak of a very real and practical fire tested the unreadiness of the precautions for putting it out. As it was, the only available means of doing battle with the conflagration was the rude and simple one of flinging water on the flames, and at this task the inhabitants were busy enough. They were busier, however, before long, as, under the direction of Lord Harrogate, whom they respected, they began to tear down some portions of the burning buildings, in the hope of preventing the fire from spreading. A strange sight it was which the village street presented, encumbered as it was by chests and bedding and the poor furniture which had been hastily dragged out from the doors of cottages now blazing, and the wailing of frightened children, and the shrill voices of the women, blended with the hoarse deep roar of the triumphant flames.