The Two Vanrevels
CHAPTER V
Nero not the Last Violinist of his Kind
Miss Carewe was at her desk, writing to Sister Cecilia, whom she most loved
of all the world, when the bells startled her with their sudden clangor. The
quill dropped from her hand; she started to her feet, wide-eyed, not
understanding; while the whole town, drowsing peacefully a moment ago, resounded
immediately with a loud confusion. She ran to the front door and looked out, her
heart beating wildly.
The western sky was touched with a soft rose-color, which quickly became a
warm glow, fluctuated, and, in the instant, shot up like the coming of a full
Aurora. Then through the broken foliage of the treetops could be seen the orange
curls of flames, three-quarters of a mile away though they were.
People, calling loudly that "it was Carewe's warehouses," were running down
the street. From the stable, old Nelson, on her father's best horse, came
galloping, and seeing the white figure in the doorway, cried out in a quavering
voice, without checking his steed.
"I goin' tell yo' pa, Miss Betty, he in de kentry on lan' bus'ness. Go back
in de house, Missy!"
The other servants, like ragged sketches in the night, flitted by, with
excited ejaculations, to join the runners, and Miss Betty followed them across
the dew-strewn turf in her night slippers, but at the gate she stopped.
From up the street came the sound of a bell smaller than those of the
churches and courthouse, yet one that outdid all others in the madness of its
appeal to clear the way. It was borne along by what seemed at first an
indefinite black mass, but which—as the Aurora grew keener, producing even here
a faint, yellow twilight—resolved itself into a mob of hoarsely-shouting men and
boys, who were running and tugging at ropes, which drew along three
extraordinary vehicles. They came rapidly down the street and passed Miss Betty
with a hubbub and din beyond all understanding; one line of men, most of them in
red shirts and oil-cloth helmets, at a dead run with the hose-cart; a second
line with the hand-engine; the third dragging the ladder-wagon. One man was
riding, a tall, straight gentleman in evening clothes and without a hat, who
stood precariously in the hose-cart, calling in an annoyed tone through a brazen
trumpet. Miss Betty recognized him at once; it was he who caught her kitten; and
she thought that if she had been Fanchon Bareaud she must have screamed a
warning, for his balance appeared a thing of mere luck, and, if he fell, he
would be trampled under foot and probably run over by the engine. But, happily
(she remembered), she was not Fanchon Bareaud!
Before, behind, and beside the Department, raced a throng of boys, wild with
the joy experienced by their species when property is being handsomely
destroyed; after them came panting women, holding their sides and gasping with
the effort to keep up with the flying procession.
Miss Betty trembled, for she had never seen the like in her life; she stood
close to the hedge and let them go by; then she turned in after them and ran
like a fleet young deer. She was going to the fire.
Over all the uproar could be heard the angry voice through the trumpet,
calling the turns of the streets to the men in the van, upbraiding them and
those of the other two companies impartially; and few of his hearers denied the
chief his right to express some chagrin; since the Department (organized a
half-year, hard-drilled, and this its first fire worth the name) was late on
account of the refusal of the members to move until they had donned their new
uniforms; for the uniforms had arrived from Philadelphia two months ago, and
tonight offered the first opportunity to display them in public.
"Hail Vanrevel!" panted Tappingham Marsh to Eugene Madrillon, as the two,
running in the van of the "Hose Company," splattered through a mud-puddle.
"You'd think he was Carewe's only son and heir instead of his worst enemy. Hark
to the man!"
"I'd let it burn, if I were he," returned the other.
"It was all Crailey's fault," said Tappingham, swinging an arm free to wipe
the spattered mud from his face. "He swore he wouldn't budge without his
uniform, and the rest only backed him up; that was all. Crailey said Carewe
could better afford to lose his shanties than the overworked Department its
first chance to look beautiful and earnest. Tom asked him why he didn't send for
a fiddle," Marsh finished with a chuckle.
"Carewe might afford to lose a little, even a warehouse or two, if only out
of what he's taken from Crailey and the rest of us, these three years!"
"Taken from Vanrevel, you mean. Who doesn't know where Crailey's—Here's Main
Street; look out for the turn!"
They swung out of the thick shadows of Carewe Street into full view of the
fire, and their faces were illuminated as by sunrise.
The warehouses stood on the river-bank, at the foot of the street, just south
of the new "covered bridge." There were four of them, huge, bare-sided
buildings; the two nearer the bridge of brick, the others of wood, and all of
them rich with stores of every kind of river-merchandise and costly freight:
furniture that had voyaged from New England down the long coast, across the
Mexican Gulf, through the flat Delta, and had made the winding journey up the
great river a thousand miles, and almost a thousand more, following the greater
and lesser tributaries; cloth from Connecticut that had been sold in
Philadelphia, then carried over mountains and through forests by steam, by
canal, by stage, and six-mule freight-wagons, to Pittsburg, down the Ohio, and
thence up to Rouen on the packet; Tennessee cotton, on its way to Massachusetts
and Rhode Island spindles, lay there beside huge mounds of raw wool from
Illinois, ready to be fed to the Rouen mill; dates and nuts from the Caribbean
Sea; lemons from groves of the faraway tropics; cigars from the Antilles;
tobacco from Virginia and Kentucky; most precious of all, the great granary of
the farmers' wheat from the level fields at home; and all the rich stores and
the houses that held them, as well as the wharves upon which they had been
landed, and the steamers that brought them up the Rouen River, belonged to
Robert Carewe.
That it was her father's property which was imperilled attested to the
justification of Miss Betty in running to a fire; and, as she followed the crowd
into Main Street, she felt a not unpleasant proprietary interest in the
spectacle. Very opposite sensations animated the breast of the man with the
trumpet, who was more acutely conscious than any other that these were Robert
Carewe's possessions which were burning so handsomely. Nor was he the only one
among the firemen who ground his teeth over the folly of the uniforms; for now
they could plainly see the ruin being wrought, the devastation threatened. The
two upper stories of the southernmost warehouse had swathed themselves in one
great flame; the building next on the north, also of frame, was smoking heavily;
and there was a wind from the southwest, which, continuing with the fire
unchecked, threatened the town itself. There was work for the Volunteer Brigade
that night.
They came down Main Street with a rush, the figure of their chief swaying
over them on his high perch, while their shouting was drowned in the louder roar
of greeting from the crowd, into which they plunged as a diver into the water,
swirls and eddies of people marking the wake. A moment later a section of the
roof of the burning warehouse fell in, with a sonorous and reverberating crash.
The "Engine Company" ran the force-pump out to the end of one of the lower
wharves; two lines of pipe were attached; two rows of men mounted the planks for
the pumpers, and, at the word of command, began the up-and-down of the
hand-machine with admirable vim. Nothing happened; the water did not come;
something appeared to be wrong with the mechanism. As everyone felt the crucial
need of haste, nothing could have been more natural than that all the members of
the "Engine Company" should simultaneously endeavor to repair the defect;
therefore ensued upon the spot a species of riot which put the engine out of its
sphere of usefulness.
In the meantime, fifty or sixty men and boys who ran with the machines, but
who had no place in their operation, being the Bucket Brigade, had formed a line
and were throwing large pails of water in the general direction of the
southernmost warehouse, which it was now impossible to save; while the gentlemen
of the "Hook-and-Ladder Company," abandoning their wagons, and armed with axes,
heroically assaulted the big door of the granary, the second building, whence
they were driven by the exasperated chief, who informed them that the only way
to save the wheat was to save the building. Crailey Gray, one of the berated
axemen, remained by the shattered door after the others had gone, and, struck by
a sudden thought, set his hand upon the iron latch and opened the door by this
simple process. It was not locked. Crailey leaned against the casement and
laughed with his whole soul and body.
Meanwhile, by dint of shouting in men's ears when near them, through the
trumpet when distant, tearing axes from their hands, imperiously gesticulating
to subordinate commanders, and lingering in no one spot for more than a second,
Mr. Vanrevel reduced his forces to a semblance of order in a remarkably short
time, considering the confusion into which they had fallen.
The space between the burning warehouse and that next it was not more than
fifty feet in width, but fifty feet so hot no one took thought of entering
there; an area as discomfiting in appearance as it was beautiful with the thick
rain of sparks and firebrands that fell upon it. But the chief had decided that
this space must be occupied, and more: must be held, since it was the only point
of defence for the second warehouse. The roof of this building would burn, which
would mean the destruction of the warehouse, unless it could be mounted, because
the streams of water could not play upon it from the ground, nor, from the
ladders, do much more than wet the projecting eaves. It was a gable roof, the
eaves twenty feet lower on the south side than on the north, where the ladders
could not hope to reach them. Vanrevel swung his line of bucketeers round to
throw water, not upon the flames, but upon the ladder-men.
Miss Carewe stood in the crowd upon the opposite side of the broad street.
Even there her cheeks were uncomfortably hot, and sometimes she had to brush a
spark from her shoulder, though she was too much excited to mind this. She was
watching the beautiful fiery furnace between the north wall of the burning
warehouse and the south wall of its neighbor, the fifty feet brilliant and misty
with vaporous rose-color, dotted with the myriad red stars, her eyes shining
with the reflection of their fierce beauty. She saw how the vapors moved there,
like men walking in fire, and she was vaguely recalling Shadrach, Meshach, and
Abed-nego, when, over the silhouetted heads of the crowd before her, a long
black ladder rose, wobbled, tilted crazily, then lamely advanced and ranged
itself against the south wall of the second warehouse, its top rung striking ten
feet short of the eaves. She hoped that no one had any notion of mounting that
ladder.
A figure appeared upon it immediately, that of a gentleman, bareheaded and in
evening dress, with a brass trumpet swinging from a cord about his shoulders;
the noise grew less; the shouting died away, and the crowd became almost silent,
as the figure, climbing slowly drew up above their heads. Two or three rungs
beneath, came a second—a man in helmet and uniform. The clothes of both men,
drenched by the bucketeers, clung to them, steaming. As the second figure
mounted, a third appeared; but this was the last, for the ladder was frail, and
sagged toward the smoking wall with the weight of the three.
The chief, three-fourths of the way to the top, shouted down a stifled
command, and a short grappling-ladder, fitted at one end with a pair of spiked
iron hooks, was passed to him. Then he toiled upward until his feet rested on
the third rung from the top; here he turned, setting his back to the wall,
lifted the grappling-ladder high over his head so that it rested against the
eaves above him, and brought it down sharply, fastening the spiked hooks in the
roof. As the eaves projected fully three feet, this left the grappling-ladder
hanging that distance out from the wall, its lowest rung a little above the
level of the chief's shoulders.
Miss Betty drew in her breath with a little choked cry. There was a small
terraced hill of piled-up packing-boxes near her, possession of which had been
taken by a company of raggamuffinish boys, and she found herself standing on the
highest box and sharing the summit with these questionable youths, almost
without noting her action in mounting thither, so strained was the concentration
of her attention upon the figure high up in the rose-glow against the warehouse
wall. The man, surely, surely, was not going to trust himself to that bit of
wooden web hanging from the roof! Where was Miss Bareaud that she permitted it?
Ah, if Betty had been Fanchon and madwoman enough to have accepted this madman,
she would have compelled him to come down at once, and thereafter would lock him
up in the house whenever the bells rang!
But the roof was to be mounted or Robert Carewe's property lost. Already
little flames were dancing up from the shingles, where firebrands had fallen,
their number increasing with each second. So Vanrevel raised his arms, took a
hard grip upon the lowest rung of the grappling-ladder and tried it with his
weight; the iron hooks bit deeper into the roof; they held. He swung himself out
into the air with nothing beneath him, caught the rung under his knee, and for a
moment hung there while the crowd withheld from breathing; then a cloud of
smoke, swirling that way, made him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted
him out altogether, and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and
empty, so that at first there was an instant when they thought that he had
fallen. But, as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on the roof.
It was an agile and daring thing to do, and the man who did it was mightily
applauded. The cheering bothered him, however, for he was trying to make them
understand, below, what would happen to the "Engine Company" in case the water
was not sent through the lines directly; and what he said should be done to the
engineers included things that would have blanched the cheek of the most
inventive Spanish Inquisitor that ever lived.
Miss Betty made a gesture as if to a person within whispering distance. "Your
coat is on fire," she said in an ordinary conversational tone, without knowing
she had spoken aloud, and Mr. Vanrevel, more than one hundred feet away, seemed
particularly conscious of the pertinence of her remark. He removed the garment
with alacrity, and, for the lack of the tardy water, began to use it as a flail
upon the firebrands and little flames about him; the sheer desperate best of a
man in a rage, doing what he could when others failed him. Showers of sparks
fell upon him; the smoke was rising everywhere from the roof and the walls
below; and, growing denser and denser, shrouded him in heavy veils, so that, as
he ran hither and thither, now visible, now unseen, stamping and beating and
sweeping away the brands that fell, he seemed but the red and ghostly caricature
of a Xerxes, ineffectually lashing the sea. They were calling to him imploringly
to come down, in heaven's name to come down!
The second man had followed to the top of the ladder against the wall, and
there he paused, waiting to pass up the line of hose when the word should come
that the force-pump had been repaired; but the people thought that he waited
because he was afraid to trust himself to the grappling-ladder. He was afraid,
exceedingly afraid; though that was not why he waited; and he was still
chuckling over the assault of the axes.
His situation had not much the advantage of that of the chief: his red shirt
might have been set with orange jewels, so studded it was with the flying
sparks; and, a large brand dropping upon his helmet, he threw up his hand to
dislodge it and lost the helmet. The great light fell upon his fair hair and
smiling face, and it was then that Miss Betty recognized the Incroyable of her
garden.