"It is too far," said Mrs. Hobart. "Go and make them go to bed in my great front room. Then you"ll feel easier, and can come back. You"ll want Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks"s house for the rest of you, and plenty of things besides."
While she was talking she had pulled the blankets and coverlet from the bed, and spread them on the floor. Mrs. Marchbanks actually walked down stairs with her chignon in one hand and the Sevres cup in the other.
"People _do_ do curious things at fires," said Mrs. Hobart, cool, and noticing everything.
She had got the bureau-drawers emptied now into the blankets. Barbara followed her lead, and they took all the clothing; from the closets and wardrobe.
"Tie those up, Elijah. Carry them off to a safe place, and come back, up here."
Then she went to the next room. From that to the next and the next, she pa.s.sed on, in like manner,--Barbara, and by this time the rest of us, helping; stripping the beds, and making up huge bundles on the floors of the contents of presses, drawers, and boxes.
"Clothes are the first thing," said she. "And this way, you are pretty sure to pick up everything." Everything _was_ picked up, from Mrs. Marchbanks"s jewel-case and her silk dresses, to Mr. Marchbanks"s shaving brushes, and the children"s socks that they had had pulled off last night.
Elijah carried them all off, and piled them up in Mrs. Hobart"s great clean laundry-room to await orders. The men hailed him as he went and came, to do this, or fetch that. "I"m doing _one_ thing," he answered.
"You keep to yourn."
"They"re comin"," he said, as he returned after his third trip. "The bells are ringin", an" they"re a swarmin" up the hill,--two ingines, an" a ruck o" boys an" men. Melindy, she"s keepin" the laundry door locked, an" a lettin" on me in."
Mrs. Marchbanks came hurrying back before the crowd. Some common, ecstatic little boys, rushing foremost to the fire, hustled her on her own lawn. She could hardly believe even yet in this inevitable irruption of the Great Uninvited.
Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks and Maud met her and came in with her. Mr.
Marchbanks and Arthur had hastened round to the rear, where the other gentlemen were still hard at work.
"Now," said Mrs. Hobart, as lightly and cheerily as if it had been the putting together of a Christmas pudding, and she were ready for the citron or the raisins,--"now--all that beautiful china!"
She had been here at one great, general party, and remembered the china, although her party-call, like all her others, had been a failure. Mrs. Marchbanks received a good many people in a grand, occasional, wholesale civility, to whom she would not sacrifice any fraction of her private hours.
Mrs. Hobart found her way by instinct to the china-closet,--the china-room, more properly speaking. Mrs. Marchbanks rather followed than led.
The shelves, laden with costly pottery, reached from floor to ceiling.
The polish and the colors flashed already in the fierce light of the closely neighboring flames. Great drifts and clouds of smoke against the windows were urging in and stifling the air. The first rush of water from the engines beat against the walls.
"We must work awful quick now," said Mrs. Hobart. "But keep cool. We ain"t afire yet."
She gave Mrs. Marchbanks her own keys, which she had brought down stairs. That lady opened her safe and took out her silver, which Arthur Marchbanks and James Hobart received from her and carried away.
Mrs. Hobart herself went up the step-ladder that stood there before the shelves, and began to hand down piles of plates, and heavy single pieces. "Keep folks out, Elijah," she ordered to her man.
We all helped. There were a good many of us by this time,--Olivia, and Adelaide, and the servant-girls released from below, besides the other Marchbankses, and the Hobarts, and people who came in, until Elijah stopped them. He shut the heavy walnut doors that led from drawing-room and library to the hall, and turned the great keys in their polished locks. Then he stood by the garden entrance in the sheltered side-angle, through which we pa.s.sed with our burdens, and defended that against invasion. There was now such an absolute order among ourselves that the moral force of it repressed the excitement without that might else have rushed in and overborne us.
"You jest keep back; it"s all right here," Elijah would say, deliberately and authoritatively, holding the door against unlicensed comers; and boys and men stood back as they might have done outside the shine and splendor and privilege of an entertainment.
It lasted till we got well through; till we had gone, one by one, down the field, across to our house, the short way, back and forth, leaving the china, pile after pile, safe in our cellar-kitchen.
Meanwhile, without our thinking of it, Barbara had been locked out upon the stairs. Mother had found a tall Fayal clothes-basket, and had collected in it, carefully, little pictures and precious things that could be easily moved, and might be as easily lost or destroyed.
Barbara mounted guard over this, watching for a right person to whom to deliver it.
Standing there, like Casabianca, rough men rushed by her to get up to the roof. The hall was filling with a crowd, mostly of the curious, untrustworthy sort, for the work just then lay elsewhere.
So Barbara held by, only drawing back with the basket, into an angle of the wide landing. n.o.body must seize it heedlessly; things were only laid in lightly, for careful handling. In it were children s photographs, taken in days that they had grown away from; little treasures of art and remembrance, picked up in foreign travel, or gifts of friends; all sorts of priceless odds and ends that people have about a house, never thinking what would become of them in a night like this. So Barbara stood by.
Suddenly somebody, just come, and springing in at the open door, heard his name.
"Harry! Help me with this!" And Harry Goldthwaite pushed aside two men at the foot of the staircase, lifted up a small boy and swung him over the bal.u.s.ter, and ran up to the landing.
"Take hold of it with me," said Barbara, hurriedly. "It is valuable.
We must carry it ourselves. Don"t let anybody touch it. Over to Mrs.
Hobart"s."
"Hendee!" called out Harry to Mark Hendee, who appeared below. "Keep those people off, will you? Make way!" And so they two took the big basket steadily by the ears, and went away with it together. The first we knew about it was when, on their way back, they came down upon our line of march toward Elijah"s door.
Beyond this, there was no order to chronicle. So far, it seems longer in the telling than it did in the doing. We had to work "awful quick,"
as Mrs. Hobart said. But the nice and hazardous work was all done.
Even the press that held the table-napery was emptied to the last napkin, and all was safe.
Now the hall doors were thrown open; wagons were driven up to the entrances, and loaded with everything that came first, as things are ordinarily "saved" at a fire. These were taken over to Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks"s. Books and pictures, furniture, bedding, carpets; quant.i.ties were carried away, and quant.i.ties were piled up on the lawn. The men-servants came and looked after these; they had done all they could elsewhere; they left the work to the firemen now, and there was little hope of saving the house. The window-frames were smoking, and the panes were cracking with the heat, and fire was running along the piazza roofs before we left the building. The water was giving out.
After that we had to stand and see it burn. The wells and cisterns were dry, and the engines stood helpless.
The stable roofs fell in with a crash, and the flames reared up as from a great red crater and whirlpool of fire. They lashed forth and seized upon charred walls and timbers that were ready, without their touch, to spring into live combustion. The whole southwest front of the mansion was overswept with almost instant sheets of fire. Fire poured in at the cas.e.m.e.nts; through the wide, airy halls; up and into the rooms where we had stood a little while before; where, a little before that, the children had been safe asleep in their nursery beds.
Mrs. Marchbanks, like any other burnt-out woman, had gone to the home that offered to her,--her sister-in-law"s; Olivia and Adelaide were going to the Haddens; the children were at Mrs. Hobart"s; the things that, in their rich and beautiful arrangement, had made _home_, as well as enshrined the Marchbanks family in their sacredness of elegance, were only miscellaneous "loads" now, transported and discharged in haste, or heaped up confusedly to await removal. And the sleek servants, to whom, doubtless, it had seemed that their Rome could never fall, were suddenly, as much as any common Bridgets and Patricks, "out of a place."
Not that there would be any permanent difference; it was only the story and att.i.tude of a night. The power was still behind; the "Tailor" would sew things over again directly. Mrs. Roger Marchbanks would be comparatively composed and in order, at Mrs. Lewis"s, in a few days,--receiving her friends, who would hurry to make "fire-calls," as they would to make party or engagement or other special occasion visits; the cordons would be stretched again; not one of the crowd of people who went freely in and out of her burning rooms that night, and worked hardest, saving her library and her pictures and her carpets, would come up in cool blood and ring her door-bell now; the sanct.i.ty and the dignity would be as unprofanable as ever.
It was about four in the morning--the fire still burning--when Mrs.
Holabird went round upon the out-skirts of the groups of lookers-on, to find and gather together her own flock. Rosamond and Ruth stood in a safe corner with the Haddens. Where was Barbara?
Down against the close trunks of a cl.u.s.ter of linden-trees had been thrown cushions and carpets and some bundles of heavy curtains, and the like. Coming up behind, Mrs. Holabird saw, sitting upon this heap, two persons. She knew Barbara"s hat, with its white gull"s breast; but somebody had wrapped her up in a great crimson table-cover, with a bullion fringe. Somebody was Harry Goldthwaite, sitting there beside her; Barbara, with only her head visible, was behaving, out here in this unconventional place and time, with a tranquillity and composure which of late had been apparently impossible to her in parlors.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
"What will Mrs. Marchbanks do with Mrs. Hobart after this, I wonder?"
Mrs. Holabird heard Harry say.
"She"ll give her a sort of brevet," replied Barbara. "For gallant and meritorious services. It will be, "Our friend Mrs. Hobart; a near neighbor of ours; she was with us all that terrible night of the fire, you know." It will be a great honor; but it won"t be a full commission."
Harry laughed.
"Queer things happen when you are with us," said Barbara. "First, there was the whirlwind, last year,--and now the fire."
"After the whirlwind and the fire--" said Harry.
"I wasn"t thinking of the Old Testament," interrupted Barbara.
"Came a still, small voice," persisted Harry. "If I"m wicked, Barbara, I can"t help it. You put it into my head."
"I don"t see any wickedness," answered Barbara, quickly. "That was the voice of the Lord. I suppose it is always coming."