“It’s not that,” Lady Sybil replied, smiling. “They have set fire to the Mansion House, Mary. You can see the flames in the room on the farther side of the door.”
Mary uttered an exclamation of horror, and they all looked out. The Mansion House was the most distant house on the north, or left-hand, side of the Square, viewed from the window at which they stood; the house next Miss Sibson’s being about the middle of the west side. Nearer them, on the same side as the Mansion House, stood another public building — the Custom House. And nearer again, being the most northerly house on their own side of the Square, stood a third — the Excise Office.
They had thus a fair, though a side view, of the front of the Mansion House, and were able to watch, with what calmness they might, the flames shoot from one window after another; until, presently, meeting in a waving veil of fire, they hid — save when the wind blew them aside — all the upper part of the house from their eyes.
A great fire in the night, the savage, uncontrollable revolt of man’s tamed servant — is at all times a terrible sight. Nor on this occasion was it only the horror of the flames, roaring and crackling and pouring forth a million of sparks, which chained their eyes. For as these rose, they shed an intense light, not only on the heights of Redcliffe, visible above the east side of the Square, and on the stately tower which rose from them, but on the multitude below; on the hurrying forms that, monkey-like, played before the flames and seemed to feed them, and on a still stranger sight, the expanse of up-turned faces that, in the rear of the active rioters, extended to the farthest limit of the Square.
For it was the quiescence, it was the inertness of the gazing crowd which most appalled the spectators at the window. To see that great house burn and to see no man stretch forth a hand to quench it, this terrified. “Oh, but it is frightful! It is horrible!” Mary exclaimed.
“I should like to knock their heads together!” Miss Sibson cried sternly. “What are the soldiers doing? What is anyone doing?”
“They have hounded on the dogs,” Lady Sybil said slowly — she alone seemed to view the sight with a dispassionate eye, “and they are biting instead of barking! That is all.”
“Dogs?” Miss Sibson echoed.
“Ay, the dogs of Reform!” Lady Sybil replied cynically. “Brougham’s dogs! Grey’s dogs! Russell’s dogs! I could wish Sir Robert were here, it would so please him to see his words fulfilled!” And then, as in surprise at the thing she had uttered, “I wonder when I wished to please him before?” she muttered.
“Oh, but it is frightful!” Mary repeated, unable to remove her eyes from the flames.
It was frightful; even while they were all sane people in the room, and, whatever their fears, restrained them. What then was it a moment later, when the woman of the house burst in upon them, with a maid in wild hysterics clinging to her, and another on the threshold screaming “Fire! Fire!”
“It’s all on fire at the back!” the woman panted. “It’s on fire, it’s all on fire, my lady, at the back!”
“It’s all — what?” Miss Sibson rejoined, in a tone which had been known to quell the pertest of seventeen-year-old rebels. “It is what, woman? On fire at the back? And if it is, is that a ground for forgetting your manners? Where is your deportment? Fire, indeed! Are you aware whose room this is? For shame! And you, silly,” she continued, addressing herself to the maid, “be silent, and go outside, as becomes you.”
But the maid, though she retreated to the door, continued to scream, and the woman of the house to wring her hands. “You had better go and see what it is,” Lady Sybil said, turning to the schoolmistress. For, strange to say, she who a few hours before had groaned if a coal fell on the hearth, and complained if her book slid from the couch, was now quite calm.
“They are afraid of their own shadows,” Miss Sibson cried contemptuously. “It is the reflection they have seen.”
But she went. And as it was but a step to a window overlooking the rear, Mary went with her.
They looked. And for a moment something like panic seized them. The back of the house was not immediately upon the quay, but through an opening in the warehouses which fringed the latter it commanded a view of the water and the masts, and of the sloping ground which rose to College Green. And high above, dyeing the Floating Basin crimson, the Palace showed in a glow of fire; fire which seemed to be on the point of attacking the Cathedral, of which every pinnacle and buttress, with every chimney of the old houses clustered about it, stood out in the hot glare. It was clear that the building had been burning some time, for the roar of the flames could be heard, and almost the hiss of the water as innumerable sparks floated down to it.
Horror-struck, Mary grasped her companion’s arm. And “Good Heavens!” Miss Sibson muttered. “The whole city will be burned!”
“And we are between the two fires,” Mary faltered. An involuntary shudder might be pardoned her.
“Ay, but far enough from them,” the schoolmistress answered, recovering herself. “On this side, the water makes us safe.”
“And on the other?”
“La, my dear,” Miss Sibson replied confidently. “The folks are not going to burn their own houses. They are angry with the Corporation. They hold them all one with Wetherell. And for the Bishop, they’ve so abused him the last six months that he’s hardly dared to show his wig on the streets, and it’s no wonder the poor ignorants think him fair game. But we’re just ordinary folk, and they’ll no more harm us than fly. But we must go back to your mother.”
They went back, and wisely Miss Sibson made no mystery of the truth; repeating, however, those arguments against giving way to alarm which she had used to Mary.
“The poor dear gentleman has lost his house,” she concluded piously. “But we should be thankful he has another.”
Lady Sybil took the news with calmness; her eyes indeed seemed brighter, as if she enjoyed the excitement. But the frightened woman at the door refused to be comforted, and underlying the courage of the two who stood by Lady Sybil’s couch was a secret uneasiness, which every cheer of the crowd below the windows, every “huzza” which rose from the revellers, every wild rush from one part of the Square to another tended to strengthen. In her heart Miss Sibson owned that in all her experience she had known nothing like this; no disorder so flagrant, so unbridled, so daring. She could carry her mind back to the days when the cheek of England had paled at the Massacres of September in Paris. The deeds of ‘98 in Ireland, she had read morning by morning in the journals. The Three Days of July, with their street fighting, were fresh in all men’s minds — it was impossible to ignore their bearing on the present conflagration. And if here was not the dawn of Revolution, if here were not signs of the crash of things, appearances deceived her. But even so, she was not to be dismayed. She believed that even in revolutions a comfortable courage, sound sense, and a good appetite went far. And “I’d like to hear John Thomas Gaisford talk to me of guillotines!” she thought. “I’d make his ears burn!”
Meanwhile, Mary was thinking that, whatever the emergency, her mother was too ill to be moved. Miss Sibson might be right, the danger might be remote. But it was barely midnight; and long hours of suspense must be lived through before morning came. Meanwhile there were only women in the house, and, bravely as the girl controlled herself, a cry more reckless than usual, an outburst of cheering more savage, a rush below the windows, drove the blood to her heart. And presently, while she gazed with shrinking eyes on the crowd, now blood-red in the glow of the burning timbers, now lost for a moment in darkness, a groan broke from it, and she saw pale flames appear at the windows of the house next the Mansion House. They shot up rapidly, licking the front of the buildings.
Miss Sibson saw them at the same moment, and “The villains!” she exclaimed. “God grant it be an accident!”
Mary’s lips moved, but no sound came from them.
Lady Sybil laughed her shrill laugh. “The curs are biting bravely!” she said. “What will Bristol
say to this?”
“Show them that they have gone too far!” Miss Sibson answered stoutly. “The soldiers will act now, and put them in their places, as they did in Wiltshire in the winter! And high time too!”
But though they watched in tense anxiety for the first sign of action on the part of the troops, for the first movement of the authorities, they gazed in vain. The miscreants, who fed the flames and spread them, were few; and in the Square were thousands who had property to lose, and friends and interests in jeopardy. If a tithe only of those who looked on, quiescent and despairing, had raised their hands, they could have beaten the rabble from the place. But no man moved. The fear of coming trouble, which had been long in the air, paralysed even the courageous, while the ignorant and the timid believed that they saw a revolution in progress, and that henceforth the mob would rule — and woe betide the man who set himself against it! As it had been in Paris, so it would be here. And so the flames spread, before the eyes of the terrified women at the window, before the eyes of the inert multitude, from the house first attacked to its neighbour, and from that to the next and the next. Until the noise of the conflagration, the crash of sinking walls, the crackling of beams were as the roar of falling waters, and the Square in that hideous red light, which every moment deepened, resembled an inferno, in which the devils of hell played awful pranks, and wherein, most terrible sight of all, thousands who in ordinary times held the salvation of property to be the first of duties, stood with scared eyes, passive and cowed.
It was such a scene — and they were only women, and alone in the house — as the mind cannot imagine and the eye views but once in a generation, nor ever forgets. In quiet Clifton, and on St. Michael’s Hill, children were snatched from their midnight slumbers and borne into the open, that they might see the city stretched below them in a pit of flame, with the overarching fog at once confining and reflecting the glare. Dundry Tower, five miles from the scene, shone a red portent visible for leagues; and in Chepstow and South Monmouth, beyond the wide estuary of the Severn, the light was such that men could see to read. From all the distant Mendips, and from the Forest of Dean, miners and charcoal-burners gazed southward with scared faces, and told one another that the revolution was begun; while Lansdowne Chase sent riders galloping up the London Road with the news that all the West was up. Long before dawn on the Monday horsemen and yellow chaises were carrying the news through the night to Gloucester, to Southampton, to Salisbury, to Exeter, to every place where scanty companies of foot lay, or yeomanry had their headquarters. And where these passed, alarming the sleeping inns and posthouses, panic sprang up upon their heels, and the travellers on the down nightcoaches marvelled at the tales which met them with the daylight.
If the sight viewed from a distance was so terrible as to appal a whole countryside, if, on those who gazed at it from vantage spots of safety, and did not guess at the dreadful details, it left an impression of terror never to be effaced, what was it to the three women who, in the Square itself, watched the onward march of the flames towards them, were blinded by the glare, choked by the smoke, deafened by the roar? Whom distance saved from no feature of the scene played under their windows: who could shun neither the savage cries of the drunken rabble, dancing before the doomed houses, nor the sight, scarce less amazing, of the insensibility which watched the march of the flames and stretched forth not a finger to stay them! Who, chained by Lady Sybil’s weakness to the place where they stood, saw house after house go up in flames, until all the side of the Square adjoining their own was a wall of fire; and who then were left to guess the progress, swift or slow, which the element was making towards them! For whom the copper-hued fog above them must have seemed, indeed, the roof of a furnace, from which escape grew moment by moment less likely?
XXXIV
HOURS OF DARKNESS
Long before this the women of the house had fled, taking Lady Sybil’s maid with them. And dreadful as was the situation of those who remained, appalling as were the fears of two of them, they were able to control themselves; the better because they knew that they had no aid but their own to look to, and that their companion was helpless. Fortunately Lady Sybil, who had watched the earlier phases of the riot with the detachment which is one of the marks of extreme weakness, had at a certain point turned faint, and demanded to be removed from the window. She was ignorant, therefore, of the approach of the flames and of the imminence of the peril. She had even, in spite of the uproar, dozed off, after a few minutes of trying irritation, into an uneasy sleep.
Mary and Miss Sibson were thus left free. But for what? Compelled to watch in suspense the progress of the flames, driven at times to fancy that they could feel the heat of the fire, assailed more than once by gusts of fear, as one or the other imagined that they were already cut off, they could not have held their ground but for their unselfishness; but for their possession of those qualities of love and heroism which raise women to the height of occasion, and nerve them to a pitch of endurance of which men are rarely capable. In the schoolmistress, with her powdered nose and her portly figure, and her dull past of samplers and backboards and Mrs. Chapone, there dwelt as sturdy a spirit as in any of the rough Bristol shipmasters from whom she sprang. She might be fond of a sweetbread, and a glass of port might not come amiss to her. But the heart in her was stout and large, and she had as soon dreamed of forsaking her forlorn companions as those bluff sailormen would have dreamed of striking their flag to a codfish Don, or to a shipload of mutinous slaves.
And Mary? Perchance the gentlest and the mildest are also the bravest, when the stress is real. Or perhaps those who have never known a mother’s love cling to the veriest shred and tatter of it, if it fall in their way. Or perhaps — but why explain that which all history has proved a hundred times over — that love casts out fear. Mary quailed, deafened by the thunder of the fire, with the walls of the room turning blood-red round her, and the smoke beginning to drift before the window. But she stood; and only once, assailed by every form of fear, did her courage fail her, or sink below the stronger nerve of the elder woman.
That was when Miss Sibson, after watching that latest and most pregnant sign, the eddying of smoke past the window, spoke out. “I’m going next door,” she cried in Mary’s ear. “There are papers I must save; they are all I have for my old age. The rest may go, but I can’t see them burn when five minutes may save them.”
But Mary clung to her desperately. “Oh!” she cried, “don’t leave me!”
Miss Sibson patted her shoulder. “I shall come back,” she said. “I shall come back, my dear, never fear. And then we must move your mother — into the Square if no better can be. Do you come down and let me in when I knock three times.”
Lady Sybil was still dozing, with a woollen wrap about her head to deaden the noise; and giving way to the cooler brain Mary went down with the schoolmistress. In the hall the roar of the fire was less, for the only window was shuttered. But the raucous voices of the mob, moving to and fro outside, were more clearly heard.
Miss Sibson, however, remained undaunted. “Put up the chain the moment I am outside,” she said.
“But are you not afraid?” Mary cried, holding her back.
“Of those scamps?” Miss Sibson replied truculently. “They had better not touch me!” And she turned the key and slipped out. Nor did she leave the step until Mary had put up the chain and re-locked the door.
Mary waited — oh, many, many minutes it seemed — in the gloom of the hall, pierced here and there by a lurid ray; with half her mind on her mother upstairs, and the other half on the ribald laughter, the drunken oaths and threats and curses which penetrated from the Square. It was plain that Miss Sibson had not gone too soon, for twice or thrice the door was struck with some heavy instrument, and harsh voices called on the inmates to open if they did not wish to be burned. Uncertain how the fire advanced, Mary heard them with a sick heart. But she held her ground, until, oh, joy! she heard voices raised in altercation, and among
them the schoolmistress’s. A hand knocked thrice, she turned the key and let down the chain. The door opened upon her, and on the steps, with her hand on a man’s shoulder, appeared Miss Sibson. Behind her and her captive, between them and that background of flame and confusion, stood a group of four or five men — dock labourers, in tarpaulins and frocks, who laughed tipsily.
“This lad will help to carry your mother out,” Miss Sibson said with the utmost coolness. “Come, my lad, and no nonsense! You don’t want to burn a sick lady in her bed!”
“No, I don’t, Missis,” the man grumbled sheepishly. “But I’m none here for that! I’m none here for that, and — —”
“You’ll do it, all the same,” the schoolmistress replied. “And I want one more. Here, you,” she continued, addressing a grinning hobbledehoy in a sealskin cap. “I know your face, and you’ll want someone to speak for you at the Assizes. Come in, you two, and the rest must wait until the lady’s carried out!”
And thereon, with that strange mixture of humanity and unreasoning fury of which the night left many examples, the men complied. The two whom she had chosen entered, the others suffered her to shut the door in their faces. Only, “You’ll be quick!” one bawled after her. “She’s afire next door!”
That was the warning that went with them upstairs, and it nerved them for the task before them. Over that task it were well to draw a veil. The poor sick woman, roused anew and abruptly to a sense of her surroundings, to the flickering lights, the smell of smoke, the strange faces, to all the horrors of that scene rarely equalled in our modern England, shrieked aloud. The courage, which had before upheld her, deserted her. She refused to be moved, refused to believe that they were there to save her; she failed even to recognise her daughter, she resisted their efforts, and whatever Mary could say or do, she added to the peril of the moment all the misery which frantic terror and unavailing shrieks could add. They did not know, while they reasoned with her, and tried to lift her, and strove to cloak her against the outer air, the minute at which the house might be entered; nor even that it was not already entered, already in some part on fire. The girl, though her hands were steady, though she never wavered, though she persisted, was white as paper. And even Miss Sibson was almost unnerved, when at last nature came to their aid, and with a frantic protest, a last attempt to thrust them from her, the poor woman swooned; and the men who had looked on, as unhappy as those engaged, lifted the couch and bore her down the stairs. Odd are the windings of chance and fate. These men, in whom every good instinct was awakened by the sight before them, might, had the schoolmistress’s eye alighted on others, have plundered on with their fellows; and with the more luckless of those fellows have stood on the scaffold a month later!
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 542