The whole place was in a tumult. The streets were thronged. Passionate inquiries and greetings were passing from mouth to mouth. The chief thing was to get the girls under cover as quickly as possible, out of the hubbub all round the municipal buildings. The Bensons threw open their house; the Cossarts did the same. Sheila soon found herself, together with May Lawrence and Miss Adene, in her aunt’s drawing-room, where Raby and Ray had preceded them, and they were received with the warmest effusion by the company gathered there, for in the confusion and alarm nobody was confidently reckoned to be safe till he or she had been actually seen.
North came in a few minutes later.
“Effie has been taken straight home in our uncle’s carriage. We could not get at you, Sheila, so Oscar is to take you back later on, when the excitement is abated. Are the girls there? That’s all right. Yes, mater, I am safe enough; but don’t keep me. There are frantic mothers hunting up their children still. I believe no lives have been lost; but I must go and do what I can to reassure them. We must find the waifs and strays, and get them to their right owners!”
He kissed his mother and swung himself off; and then a little more quiet fell upon the room, whilst those who had been eye-witnesses of the catastrophe were eagerly called upon to relate their experiences.
Mrs. Cossart had not been at the hall that afternoon, being fatigued by her exertions the two previous days; and her husband, having let all the boys off, had had to keep to the office himself, and only came hurrying home in alarm and consternation when the news reached him that the Town Hall was on fire!
Sheila, listening breathlessly whilst some ladies who had been in the lower hall related their experiences, thought that they had escaped the worst of the terror by being in the upper room. Several of the children’s frocks had caught fire, and it seemed at one time as though the whole place and the hapless people would be in a blaze; but there were plenty of exits, and the police at the doors kept their heads, and passed the children out with great rapidity; and the firemen were on the scene almost at once. The flames got firm hold upon the temporary structures of stalls and so forth, but the building itself never took fire, being of solid stone.
There had been fearful screams, and wild panic; but on the whole the people had behaved exceedingly well, and though there was some inevitable crushing, there had been no actual block, and it was believed that no lives had been lost.
“The only man I saw who behaved really badly,” said one lady, who had evidently been instrumental in saving several children, and whose dress was much burnt in consequence, “was one of the actors from upstairs, who came flying down, and pushed and fought his way out without heeding anything or anybody. He overturned several little children, and one of them would have been trampled to death had not a policeman snatched it up. I was really glad to see another man—a fireman, I believe—give the young man a sound cuff on the side of his head that sent him reeling out into the open. I won’t say that nobody else hustled or pushed—at a time like that one cannot observe everything—but I saw no one else disgrace his manhood in that way.”
“Shameful,” said Mr. Tom sternly. “One of the actors, you say. One ought to be able to find out who it was.”