‘’Tis a mercy, my lord, it broke out when it did,’ said Charley Joyce, best bowler in the local cricket club and best woodman in the Earl’s employment, and in both of these capacities well known to the Earl’s heir. ‘There’d ha’ been a lot of us burned in our beds, if it had tarried till after midnight. All came,’ he added, ‘of that blessed rock-oil from Ameriky.’
Such indeed was the reported origin of the disaster. A girl, for milking purposes, had taken a tin lamp with her into a cowshed; the cow had kicked over the lamp, and the burning petroleum had set fire to the straw litter, whence the flames had mounted to the thatched roof. Thatched roofs, picturesque to look upon, were only too numerous for safety in that West-country village. The fire had crawled and darted, lithe as a serpent, from gable to porch and from paling to stable.
‘There! Look at the school-house now!’ cried a score of voices; and indeed the flames were pouring outwards through the shattered windows and licking the blackened walls, and withering to charred sticks the pretty hedge where the fragrant woodbine had clung so lovingly to the quickset, and scorching the very flowers in the garden.
‘The fire began near about there,’ remarked Joyce; but Lord Harrogate was already out of earshot, since his keen eye had caught a glimpse of a pale beautiful face, in the midst of the confusion of the crowded street. He pushed his way through the excited throng.
‘You are not hurt, Miss Gray, I hope and trust?’ he said with an eagerness that surprised himself.
‘No; but my house is burning,’ said Ethel in reply; ‘and I am a stranger, and—— But pray, my lord, do not trouble yourself to’—— For the young man had drawn her arm gently but firmly through his.
‘You must let me choose for you,’ he said. ‘My sisters are here, close by, at Mrs Prosser’s, who keeps the village shop—a kind motherly old soul. I must leave you with them.’
Thus Ethel allowed herself to be led to the place where, amidst a knot of women, whose awe-stricken faces told how great was their interest in the spectacle, the Ladies De Vere stood watching the progress of the fire. Lord Harrogate did not linger for an instant, but went back to put heart into the men still battling with the encroaching flames.
It was no trifle, this hand-to-hand combat, as it were, with the fire; the fierce heat driving back the volunteers who ventured very near to the tottering walls to fling water upon the blazing timbers, while the blinding smoke rushed volleying out to blear the eyes and clog the lungs of the workers, and ever and anon some tall chimney or breached roof would fall with a crash, sending showers of bricks and half-consumed wood into the midst of the crowd; and hairbreadth escapes were many and bruises numerous.