The Benefactress Part 39

"How did it happen?" she asked, suddenly stopping before a knot of women. They were in the act of discussing her, and started and looked foolish.

"No one knows," said the eldest, when Anna repeated her question. "They say it was done on purpose."

"Done on purpose!" echoed Anna, staring at the speaker. "Why, who would set fire to a place on purpose?"

But to this question no reply at all was forthcoming. They fidgeted and looked at each other, and one of the younger ones t.i.ttered and then put her hand before her mouth.

In the potato field across the road, two storks, whose nest for many springs had been on one of the roofs now burning, had placed their young ones in safety and were watching over them. The young storks were only a few days old, and had been thrown out of the nest by the parents, and then dragged away out of danger into the field, the parents mounting guard over their bruised and dislocated offspring, and the whole group transformed in the glow into a beautiful, rosy, dazzling white, into a family of spiritualised, glorified storks, as they huddled ruefully together in their place of refuge. Anna saw them without knowing that she saw them; there were three little ones, and one was dead. The princess and Letty found her standing beside them, watching the roaring furnace of the stableyard with parted lips and wide-open, horror-stricken eyes.

"Most of the horses were got out in time," said the princess, taking Anna's arm, determined that she should not again slip away, "and they say the buildings are fully insured, and he will be able to have much better ones."

"But the time lost--they can't be built in a day----"

"The man I spoke to said they were such old buildings and in such a bad state that Axel can congratulate himself that they have been burned. But of course there will always be the time lost. Have you seen him? Let us go on a little--we shall be scorched to cinders here."

Both Axel and Dellwig were superintending the working of the hose. "I do not want my trees destroyed," he said to Dellwig, with whom in the stress of the moment he had resumed his earlier manner; "they are not insured." He had watched the stables go with an impa.s.siveness that struck several of the bystanders as odd. Dellwig and many others of the dwellers in that district were used to making a great noise on all occasions great and small, and they could by no means believe that it was natural to Axel to remain so calm at such a moment. "It is a great nuisance," Axel said more than once; but that also was hardly an adequate expression of feelings.

"They are well insured, I believe?" said Dellwig.

"Oh yes. I shall be able to have nice tight buildings in their place."

"They were certainly rather--rather dilapidated," said Dellwig, eyeing him.

"They were very dilapidated," said Axel.

Anna and the princess stood a little way from the engines watching the efforts to check the spread of the fire for some time before Axel noticed them. Manske, who had been the first to volunteer as a link in the human chain to the pump, bowed and smiled from his place at them, and was stared at in return by both women, who wondered who the begrimed and friendly individual could be. "It is the pastor," then said the princess, smiling back at him; on which Manske's smiles and bows redoubled, and he spilt half the contents of the bucket pa.s.sing through his hands.

"So it is," said Anna.

"Take care there, No. 3!" roared Dellwig, affecting not to know who No.

3 was, and glad of an opportunity of calling the parson to order.

Dellwig was making so much noise flinging orders and reprimands about, that a stranger would certainly have taken him for the frantic owner of the burning property.

"You see the pastor looks anything but alarmed," said the princess. "If Axel were losing much by this, Manske would be weeping into his bucket instead of smiling so kindly at us."

"So he would," said Anna, a little rea.s.sured by that cheerful and grimy countenance. Her eyes wandered to Axel, so cool and so vigilant, giving the necessary orders so quietly, losing no precious moments in trying to save what was past saving, and without any noise or any abuse getting what he wanted done. "It _can't_ be a good thing, a fire like this," she said to herself. "Whatever they say, it _can't_ be a good thing."

A huge pine-tree was dragged down at that moment, dragged in a direction away from its fellows, against a beech, whose branches it tore down in its fall, ruining the beech for ever, but smothering a few of its own twigs that had begun to burn among the fresh young leaves. Anna watched the havoc going on among poor Axel's trees in silence. "He _can't_ not care," she said to herself. He turned round quickly at that moment, as though he heard her thinking of him, and looked straight into her eyes.

"You here!" he exclaimed, striding across the road to her at once.

"Yes, we are here," replied the princess. "We cannot let our neighbour burn without coming to see if we can do anything. But seriously, I hear that it is a good thing for you."

"I prefer the less good thing that I had before, just now. But it is gone. I shall not waste time fretting over it."

He ran back again to stop something that was being done wrong, but returned immediately to tell them to go into his house and not stand there in the heat. "You look so tired--and anxious," he said, his eyes searching Anna's face. "Why are you anxious? The fire has frightened you? It is all insured, I a.s.sure you, and there is only the bother of having to build just now."

He could not stay, and hurried back to his men.

"We can go indoors a moment," said the princess, "and see what is going on in his house. It will be standing empty and open, and it is not necessary that he should suffer losses from thieves as well as from fire. His Mamsell is like all bachelors' Mamsells--losing, I am sure, no opportunity of feathering her nest at his expense."

Anna thought this a practical way of helping Axel, since the throwing of water on the flames was not required of her. She turned to call Letty, and found that no Letty was to be seen. "Why, where is Letty?" she asked, looking round.

"I thought she was behind us," said the princess.

"So did I," said Anna anxiously.

They went back a few steps, looking for her among the bystanders. They saw her at last a long way off, her handkerchief still round her head and her long thick hair blowing round her shoulders, rapt in contemplation of the fiery furnace. Then a shout went up from the people in the road, and they all ran back into the potato field. Anna and the princess stood rooted to the spot, clutching each other's hands. Letty looked round when she heard the shout, and began to run too. The flaming outer wall of the yard swayed and tottered and then fell outwards with a terrific crash and crackling, filling the road with a smoking heap of rubbish, and sending a shower of sparks on a puff of wind after the flying spectators.

The princess had certainly not run so fast since her girlhood as she did with Anna towards the spot in the field where they had last seen Letty.

A crowd had gathered round it, they could see, an excited, gesticulating crowd. But they found her apparently unhurt, sitting on the ground, surrounded by sympathisers, and with someone's coat over her head. She looked up, very pale, but smiling apologetically at her aunt. "It's all gone," she said, pointing to her head.

"What is gone?" cried Anna, dropping on her knees beside her.

"_Ach Gott, die Haare--die herrlichen Haare!_" lamented a woman in the crowd. The smell of burnt hair explained what had happened.

Anna seized her in her arms. "You might have been killed--you might have been killed," she panted, rocking her to and fro. "Oh, Letty--who saved you?"

"Somebody put this beastly thing over my head--it smells of herrings.

Sparks got into my hair, and it all frizzled up. Can't I take this off?

It's out now--and off too."

The princess felt all over her head through the coat, patting and pressing it carefully; then she took the coat off, and restored it with effusive thanks to its sheepish owner. There was a murmur of sympathy from the women as Letty emerged, shorn of those flowing curls that were her only glory. "_Oh Weh, die herrlichen Haare!_" sighed the women to one another, "_Oh Weh, oh Weh!_" But the handkerchief tied so tightly round her head had saved her from a worse fate; she had been an ugly little girl before--all that had happened was that she looked now like an ugly little boy.

"I say, Aunt Anna, don't mind," said Letty; for her aunt was crying, and kissing her, and tying and untying the handkerchief, and arranging and rearranging it, and stroking and smoothing the singed irregular wisps of hair that were left as though she loved them. "I'm frightfully sorry--I didn't know you were so fond of my hair."

"Come, we'll go to the house," was all Anna said, stumbling on to her feet and putting her arm round Letty. And they clung to each other so close that they could hardly walk.

"We are going indoors a moment," called the princess, who was very pale, to Axel as they pa.s.sed the engines.

He smiled across at her, and lifted his hat.

"I never saw anyone quite so composed," she observed to Anna, trying to turn her attention to other things. "Your man Dellwig, who has nothing to do with it all, is displaying the kind of behaviour the people expect on these occasions. I am sure that Axel has puzzled a great many people to-night."

Anna did not answer. She was thinking only of Letty. What a slender thread of chance had saved her from death, from a dreadful death, the little Letty who was under her care, for whom she was responsible, and whom she had quite forgotten in her stupid interest in Axel Lohm's affairs. Woman-like, she felt very angry with Axel. What did it matter to her whether his place burnt to ashes or not? But Letty mattered to her, her own little niece, poor solitary Letty, practically motherless, so ugly, and so full of good intentions. She had scolded her so much about Klutz; wretched Klutz, it was entirely his fault that Letty had been so silly, and yet only Letty had had the scoldings. Anna held her closer. In the light of that narrow escape how trivial, how indifferent, all this folly of love-talk and messages and anger seemed. For a short s.p.a.ce she touched the realities, she saw life and death in their true proportion; and even while she was looking at them with clear and startled vision they were blurred again into indistinctness, they faded away and were gone--rubbed out by the inevitable details of the pa.s.sing hour.

"I thought as much," said the princess, as they drew near the house.

"All the doors wide open and the place deserted." And Anna came back with a start from the reality to the well-known dream of daily life, and immediately felt as though that other flash had been the dream and only this were real.

The hall was in darkness, but there was light s.h.i.+ning through the c.h.i.n.ks of a door, and they groped their way towards it. The house was as quiet as death. They could hear the distant shouts of the men cutting down the trees in the garden, and the blows of the axes. The princess pushed open the door behind which the light was, and they found themselves in Axel's study, where the candles he had lit in order to read Letty's poem were still guttering and flaring in the draught from the open window. A clock on the writing-table showed that it was past midnight. The room looked very untidy and ill-cared for.

"A man without a wife," said the princess, gazing round at the litter, composed chiefly of cigar-ashes and old envelopes, "is a truly miserable being. What condition can be more wretched than to be at the mercy of a Mamsell? I shall go and inquire into the whereabouts of this one. Axel will want some food when he comes in."

She took up one of the candles and went out. Letty had sat down at once on the nearest chair, and was looking very pale. Anna untied the handkerchief, and tried to arrange what was left of her hair. "I must cut off these uneven ends," she said, "but there won't be any scissors here."

"I say," began Letty, staring very hard at her.

"I believe you were terribly scared, you poor little creature," said Anna, struck by her pale face, and pa.s.sing her hand tenderly over the singed head.