Indeed, if there was any “standoffishness” to be detected, it was Silvia who must be impeached. Yet “standoffishness,” even to Uncle Henry’s limited power of analysis, did not quite express Silvia’s quality. “Just a bit under the mark, not up to romps,” was the definition that he and Uncle Abearrived at, as, after waving their fat hands from the window of the motor that took them to the station at the conclusion of their visit, they lit the first cigars of Peter’s Christmas present to them. Naturally they had not begun on them when they were staying with him, for there was always a box open in the smoking-room.
“Come on wonderful, has Peter,” said Uncle Henry. “A jolly boy. Handsome, too. Not much wrong with that marriage.”
Uncle Abe had a short attack of what he called his “morning cough.” Joanna, who was in the other motor, called it “smoke and drink.”
“Shouldn’t wonder if you’re right, Henry,” he said when he recovered. “I had the same idea.”
“Well, I must say it occurred to me,” said Henry. “She seemed a bit thoughtful. And that would account for Peter’s high spirits. Amazing!”
Uncle Abe put up his window.
“I’ve a bit of a cough this morning,” he said. “And there’s a pretty fortune for any child to come into.”
Peter was sitting over the fire in his bedroom that night watching it, and trying to determine that when a certain coal ceased flaring with its spray of bubbling gas he would go to Silvia’s room, and, one way or another, make an end of an intolerable situation. He had no idea (so much depended on her) what his “line” would be. Certainly he would tell her that he knew what she, all these days, had kept from him; but, beyond that, he could not, in the vaguest manner even, forecast the development of the situation. During these four days she had shown him nothing that he could construe into a signal; not once had heseen her privately, and, when in public, he had kept up his rôle of the rollicking host. He had no idea, for instance, whether she knew into what lodging his surly chimney, not yet coaxed into proper behaviour, had driven him. She had asked no further question since that general inquiry on the stairs, and he had volunteered no information. Equally had he avoided any private conference with Nellie; sometimes in a casual meeting of their eyes he had conjectured an unspoken communication; but he knew her views, as the situation concerned himself and Silvia, and there was no use in hammering at that any further. Nothing else, comparatively, concerned him.
There had been a general air of fatigued reaction abroad this evening. Mrs. Wardour, Silvia, and Nellie had gone to bed within a couple of hours of the termination of dinner, and he and his father had had but a shortséancein the billiard-room before parting. Peter had an excuse for this early dispersal, for he must be at Whitehall by ten o’clock to-morrow morning, to deal with accumulations.
Yes; when that lump of coal collapsed he would go to Silvia. Sleepily he watched it, trying in some ill-defined manner to abstract himself from agitating thought, to give himself a rest before he plunged into some sort of breaking waves. He drowsed for a little, and, still looking at his fire between half-closed lids, he fell fast asleep.
The fire had gone out except for a glimmer of dying embers, and for the moment of bewildered awakening before he realized that he was still in his armchair in front of the grate he thought that he was back in his old room, and that the chimney was smoking. As he came to himself, he realized where he was, and even more keenly realized why his mindhad caught hold of that idea of the smoking chimney. There was a strong smell of smoke in the room, and, jumping up, he turned on the switch of the electric light, which was close to his hand. He heard it click, but there was no illumination in answer. He had matches in his pocket, and, lighting one, kindled one of the candles that stood on the mantelpiece. Wide awake now, he was more than ever conscious of that smell of burning, and going to the door he opened it. A great swirl of smoke came in, bellying up from the main staircase on the left. Through it there came the noise of crackling wood, and a shoot of veiled flame.
Peter gripped his own mind. On his right, close at hand, were the rooms where his father and Nellie slept. Farther along to the right was a second staircase, communicating with the ground floor, and communicating also with the servants’ wing. Half shutting his eyes against the sting of the smoke, he groped his way first to Nellie’s door.
“Nellie,” he cried, throwing it open, “get up at once: there’s a fire in the house.”
He never felt more completely himself; all his brain was tinglingly awake, and behind his brain something else....
“Don’t wait a moment,” he said. “Get along the passage and down the stairs. I’ll send my father to you.”
He saw her on her way and plunged into his father’s room.
“House on fire, father,” he said. “Go straight through to your right into the servants’ wing, and bang on every door. Wake Mrs. Wardour, two doors away. Then join Nellie downstairs. Don’t wait: I don’t know how serious it is.”
Away to the left, beyond that column of smoke now pouring up the main staircase, was the baize door behind which were the rooms that he and Silvia had occupied, and where now she was alone. He tried to dash along the corridor to reach them, but the heat drove him back. Already tongues of flame licked through the banisters of the main staircase, past which he had to go in order to get to her. He was cut off from that access.
Suddenly and serenely he remembered another access. Along the front of the house below the windows of the room he at present occupied and those rooms behind the baize door beyond the flaming staircase, there ran externally the coping which had reminded him of that which ran along the flat belonging to Nellie’s mother in London. He remembered in the same flash the discussion that Nellie and he had held: how she had told him that, if he ever loved, he would be forced to make the passage of such a road at the bidding of that divine compulsion. It would not concern him, so she had said, that he incurred a mortal and a useless risk. He might not be able to rescue (here was the thesis) the beloved of his soul: any thought of rescue was outside the question. But, so she argued, he would not be able, if he loved, to resist the imperishable impulse.
Through the thick scorching air, with his candle guttering in the heat, he groped his way back to his room, and shutting the door against that burning blast, he went to the window. The gleam of the white stone coping was just visible, and taking off his coat and waistcoat, so as to be able to get closer to the wall, and kicking off his shoes, so as to secure a better grip, he let himself down on to it. There it was some ten or twelve inches in width; by standing verystraight up, with his arms flat out against the wall of the house, he had his balance well below him.
He moved his left foot first and brought the right foot up to it. He rocked at this first movement, and recovered himself.... And then when once he had started on his perilous way, the dawn and morning of it all broke on him. Cautiously and clingingly he advanced, but the caution—there was the sunlight of it—was no longer for himself, but for her whom he sought. For himself it seemed to matter not at all whether an unnerved step terminated his expedition: the object of it, the necessity, sheer as the drop below him, of reaching Silvia was utterly dominant. He could hear a dim roaring inside the house, but it neither delayed nor hastened him.
He had come to the window of her room, and now he could lean an elbow on the sill of it, while he rattled at the sash and tapped at the glass. Through her blind he saw her room spring into light, and found himself recording the fact that this electric circuit was still working. Immediately he heard her voice:
“Who is it?” she cried. “What is it?”
“Peter,” he said. “Open the window quickly.”
The sash flew up, and she was there, close to him.
“Give me a hand, darling,” he said. “Just pull me in. Don’t ask any questions.”
The window-sill was high above the coping, but with her hands, firm and strong as a boy’s, on his arm, he scrambled into the room.
“The house is on fire,” he said. “We’re cut off. The main staircase is blazing. But it will be all right: don’t be frightened. My father will have roused the servants by now.”
He paused, panting from some retarded terror of his climb, unfelt while he made it.
“Silvia!” he said.
She stared at him a moment.
“But you were safe, Peter,” she said. “What good was it that you came? Along that coping, did you come, all the way from your room?”
“I’m here anyhow; good, broad coping,” he said. “Now, can we do anything more? Let’s be practical: let’s think.”
For an immortal second she held him close.
“The big bell in the turret!” she said. “The rope goes through the corner of the little lobby outside my bathroom.”
“Oh, good thought,” said he. “Come and help me to pull it. We’ll talk afterwards, when we’ve done all we can.”
The sound of that reached the little town a mile away; the glare on the sky endorsed the signal. Outside on the terrace, facing the lake, and now vividly illuminated, were the other occupants from the house, busy with rescuings, and presently, shouted up to the two through the open window by which Peter had climbed in, came the news, conveyed here by telephone, that the fire-engines were on their way. A ladder was being fetched from the stable.... Had they no rope?... Then, as the conflagration spread, the electric light snapped itself out.
They had gone back, when the bell had done its work, to Silvia’s room. The angry glare from outside shone in through the window, and smoke drifted in from below the baize door that shut them off from the burning corridor. Already the fog of it obscured the glare.
“That’s all we can do,” said Peter. “Comeclose, my dear. You mustn’t be afraid. There’s no need.... We——”
She was clinging to him now.
“I have something to tell you,” she said.
“You needn’t,” said he quickly. “I know it.”
“You can’t,” said Silvia.
“But I do: your baby you mean, bless you.”
Suddenly her mouth began to quiver.
“Oh, my God! why did you come here?” she said. “You were safe.”
Outside beyond the baize door there was a crash of something falling, and she shrank into him.
“Why did you come?” she repeated.
“Because I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t my fault. You don’t understand——”
“You had to, do you mean?” she asked.
He made no reply to this: his presence answered for him.
“Oh, go back,” she cried. “You can go back still. If you love me——”
He took her close into one great enfoldment.
The roaring of the burning house, the glare of its great beacon, grew momently more vivid. Then from outside came a yell of voices, and they went to the window.
“They’ve come,” said Peter quietly.
A grinding of the gravel below, shouted orders, a raising of a ladder....
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