Part 27 (1/2)

”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, rus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ne 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.