Chapter XV: The Stolen Letter

Jasper Denzil, his arm, bruised and crushed as it had been beneath the weight of the fallen horse, still needing the support of a sling, and his pallid cheek and dim eye telling that he had not wholly regained his strength, lounged among the cushions of a sofa in what was called the White Room at Carbery. This room, which owed its name to the colour of its panelled walls, sparely relieved by mouldings of gold and pale blue, overlooked the park and adjoined the billiard-room; and Jasper, with an invalid’s caprice, had chosen it for his especial apartment during the period of his compulsory confinement to the house.

Time hung more heavily than ever on the captain’s hands since his accident had cut him off from his ordinary habits of life. Of intellectual resources he had few indeed, being one of those men (and they are numerous amongst us) to whom reading is a weariness of spirit, and thinking a laborious mental process, and who undergo tortures of boredom when thrown helpless into that worst of all company—their own. His sisters’ affection, his sisters’ innocent anxiety to anticipate his wishes and soothe his pain, bored him more than it touched him. He was not of a tender moral fibre, and barely tolerated at best those of his own blood and name. He would very much have preferred as a nurse bluff Jack Prodgers, to Blanche and Lucy. With Prodgers he had topics and interests in common; the minds of the two captains ran nearly in identical grooves; whereas his sisters did not fathom his nature or partake his tastes. So dreary was the existence to which this once brilliant cavalry officer was now condemned, that he had actually come to look forward with a sort of languid excitement to the professional visits of little Dr Aulfus from Pebworth, whose gig, to the great disgust of Mr Lancetter, the High Tor surgeon, was daily to be seen traversing the carriage-drive of Carbery Chase. With his father, Jasper’s dealings were coldly decorous, no fondness and no trust existing on either side. Sir Sykes had announced to Jasper that his debts—of which the baronet, through a chance interview with Mr Wilkins the attorney from London, had been made aware—had been paid in full.

‘I must ask you, Jasper,’ Sir Sykes had said, ‘for two assurances: one to the effect that no more secret liabilities exist to start up at unexpected moments; and the other, that you will never again ride a steeplechase.’

‘For my own sake, sir, I’ll promise you that last willingly enough,’ said Jasper, with a sickly smile. ‘I didn’t use to mind that kind of thing; but I suppose I am not so young in constitution as I was, and don’t come up to time so readily. And as for more snakes in the grass, such as those which that impudent cur Wilkins wheedled me into signing, for his own benefit and that of his worthy allies, I give you my word there’s not one. Some fresh tailor or liveryman may send a bill in one day. A gentleman can’t always be quite sure as to how many new coats and hired broughams may be totted up against him by those harpies at the West End; but that is all. I should have won a hatful of money the other day if anybody but Hanger had been on The Smasher’s back, when that savage brute rushed at the wall; but I don’t owe any, except a hundred and fifty which Prodgers lent me, and every farthing of which I paid to the bookmakers before the race, in hope of receiving it back with a tidy sum to boot.’

Sir Sykes had forthwith inclosed a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds to Captain Prodgers, with a very frigid acknowledgment of the accommodation offered to his son.

‘I could wish that you had other friends, other pursuits too,’ he said coldly to Jasper. ‘However, I will not lecture. You are of an age to select your own associates.’

Captain Denzil then, being on terms of chilling civility with his father, and an uncongenial companion for his sisters, yielded himself the more readily to the singular fascination which Ruth Willis could, when she chose, exert. Sir Sykes’s ward had a remarkable power of pleasing when it suited her to please. She had at the first conciliated the servants at Carbery—no slight feat, considering the dull weight of stolid prejudice which she had to encounter—and had won the regard of the baronet’s two daughters. Then Lucy and Blanche had felt the ardour of their early girlish friendship for the Indian orphan cool perceptibly, perhaps because the latter no longer gave herself the same pains to win their suffrages. And now she laid herself out to be agreeable to Jasper. Nothing could be more natural or befitting than that a young lady, under deep obligations to the master of the house, should shew her gratitude by doing little acts of kindness to her guardian’s son when a prisoner; and without any apparent effort or design, Ruth seemed to appropriate the invalid as her own. She talked to him—she was by far better informed than the average of her sex and age, and had a rare tact which taught her when to speak, and of what—and she read to him. A more fastidious listener than Jasper might have been charmed with that sweet untiring voice, so admirably modulated that it assumed the tone most suited to the subject-matter, be it what it might. The captain, whose boast it was, that with the exception of racing calendars and cavalry manuals, he had not opened a book since he left school, cared for nothing but newspapers, and especially newspapers of a sporting turn, and such literature is not generally very inviting to a feminine student; but Miss Willis shewed no symptoms of weariness as she retailed to her hearer the cream of the turf intelligence.

‘I don’t half like her. There are times when I could almost say, I hate her!’ thought Jasper to himself once and again; ‘but she’s clever, and has something about her which I don’t understand, for she never bores a fellow.’

It was a burning day in early August. The windows of the White Room were open, and the heavy hum of the bees, as they loaded themselves with the plunder of the blossoms that clustered so thickly without, had in itself a drowsy potency. Jasper, overcome by heat and lassitude, had fallen asleep among his cushions, and Ruth Willis, who had been reading to him, laid down the paper and slipped softly from the room, closing the door behind her. She met no one, either on her way to her own chamber or as, having donned her garden hat and jacket, she descended the stairs. It was her practice on most fine days to leave the house for a solitary ramble either in the park or among the woods that sloped down to the river.

It was Ruth’s custom, when thus she sallied forth alone, to take with her a book, which she could read when seated on some granite boulder against which the swift stream chafed in vain, or amidst the gnarled roots of the ancient trees in the Chase. Nor did she, like the majority of young ladies, consider nothing worth her study save the contents of the last green box of novels from a London circulating library, preferring often the perusal of the quaint pretty old books that are usually allowed to sleep unmolested on their shelves, here the verses of a forgotten poet, there perhaps some idyl unsurpassed in its simple sweetness of thought and diction.

With works of this description, well chosen once but now voted obsolete, the library at Carbery Chase was richly stored; and Sir Sykes had willingly given to his ward the permission which she asked, to have free access to its treasures. He himself spent most of his time while within doors in this same library, and there Ruth fully expected to find him, when she entered it, accoutred for her walk. She had in her hand a tiny tome, bound in tawny leather, and with a faded coat of arms, on which might still be deciphered the De Vere wyverns stamped upon the cover. To replace this and to select another volume, she should have to pass Sir Sykes’s writing-table, in front of the great stained glass window; but he would merely look up with a nod and smile as the small slender form of his ward flitted by.

Sir Sykes, however, contrary to his habit at that hour, was not in the library. He must but recently have quitted it, however, for the ink in the pen that he had laid aside was yet wet, and the note which he had been engaged in writing was unfinished. On a desk which occupied the right-hand corner of the writing-table, a large old desk, the queer inlaid-work of which, in ivory and tortoise-shell, had probably been that of some Chinese or Hindu mechanic, lay an open letter, the bluish paper and formal penmanship of which suggested the idea of business. Now, it may seem trite to say that a regard for the sanctity of another person’s correspondence is not merely innate in every honourable mind, but so strongly inculcated upon us by education and example, that there are many who are capable of actual crime, yet who would be degraded in their own esteem by any prying into what was meant to meet no eyes but those of the legitimate recipient. Yet Ruth Willis, the instant that she perceived herself to be alone in the room, unhesitatingly drew near to the table and took a brief survey of what lay upon it. As she caught a glimpse of the letter, her very breathing seemed to stop, and a strange glittering light came into her large eyes, and a crimson flush mantled in her pale cheek.

‘I must have it!’ she exclaimed passionately. ‘At any risk I must know all, must realise the extent of the danger, and whence it threatens. There is not a moment to lose!’

Quick as thought the girl snatched up the letter from the desk on which it lay, and darted towards the French window nearest to the now empty fire-place. The window stood open. As she neared it, she heard a man’s tread in the passage, a man’s hand upon the door of the library. To avoid detection, her only chance was in her own promptitude and coolness. She had but just time to pass through the opening and to conceal herself among the rose-trees and flowering shrubs, before Sir Sykes entered the room that she had so lately left. She thrust the letter into her pocket and cowered down close to the wall, terror in her eyes and quick-moving lips, for she knew but too well that in such a case as this no social subterfuge, no fair seeming excuse could avail her.

From her lair among the fragrant bushes Ruth could see the baronet tossing over the papers that lay neatly arranged on his table, then hurrying to and fro in evident excitement. That he was seeking for the missing letter was clear.

‘Sooner or later,’ she murmured to herself, ‘he _must_ remember the window, and should he but see me, all is lost. In such a plight, boldness is safest.’

With a stealthy swiftness which had something feline in it, Ruth Willis made her way past shrubs and sheltering trees and black hedges of aged yew, trimmed, for generations past, by the gardener’s shears. There were men at work among the lawns and flower-beds, men at work too among the hothouses and conservatories. It would not be well, should suspicion be rife and inquiry active, that these men should have seen her. There was one place, however, where the trees of the garden overhung the fence dividing it from the park, and here there was a wicket, seldom used. To reach it she had to traverse one short stretch of greensward exposed to the observation of the under-gardeners at their work. Watching for a favourable moment, Ruth glided across the dangerous piece of open ground, unseen by those who were busy at that mowing and rolling, and weeding and pruning, which never seems to be finished in a rich man’s pleasaunce. With the speed of a hunted deer she threaded her way amidst the trees, opened the gate, and skirting the southern angle of the park, fled through the new plantations to her favourite resort, the woods beside the river.

No more peaceful and few prettier spots could easily have been found than that which Ruth now sought, a place where the swift stream, rushing down from its birthplace among the Dartmoor heights to end its short career in the blue sea—of which, between the interlacing boughs, a view could here and there be obtained—brawled among the red rocks that half choked up the deep and narrow ravine. A welcome coolness seemed to arise from where the spray of the pellucid water was sprinkled over boulders worn smooth by time; and clefts where the delicate lady-fern and many another dainty frond grew thickly. But Ruth Willis for once was blind to the beauty of the scene, deaf to the silvery music of the stream among the pebbles or to the carol of the birds. With dilated eyes and lips compressed, but with trembling fingers, she drew forth the stolen letter, and beneath the shadow of the overhanging boughs, eagerly, almost fiercely, read and re-read the words that it contained.

FIRES IN AMERICA.

The exceeding dryness of the atmosphere in the United States produces such an inflammability in buildings, that when a fire breaks out it proceeds with surprising velocity. Owing to this circumstance Americans have organised the most perfect system in the world of extinguishing fires, though all their efforts are often in vain. A stranger in New York or Boston would be astonished at the immense uproar caused by an outbreak of fire. Bells are rung, gongs sounded, and steam fire-engines rush along the streets regardless of everything. The unaccustomed stranger is apt to make a run of it when he sees the engines coming; the American simply steps on to the ‘side-walk’ or into a ‘store’ for a moment. It is provided by the city government that ‘the officers and men, with their teams and apparatus, shall have the right of way while going to a fire, through any street, lane, or alley,’ &c.; and most unreservedly do the said officers and men make use of this permission. If any old woman’s stall is at the corner of a street round which the steamers must go, there is no help for it; over it goes. If a buggy is left standing at a corner, the owner must not be surprised if but three wheels are left on it when he returns. Accidents of this latter kind, however, are rare; people recognise and yield willingly the right of way; and the quicker the engines go to a fire, the better pleased everybody is. It is quite a point of rivalry among the firemen who shall get the first water on a fire, and is mentioned always in the report of the engineer.

This is how it looks from the outside; but the greater part of those who see the engines go to a fire have no idea of the inner working of the system. All they know is that when there is a fire the engines go and put it out. We shall therefore now proceed to shew, first, the means for communicating alarms of fire; and second, the means for extinguishing fires when discovered.

There are in Boston (Mass.), which we may take as an example of a well-protected city, about two hundred and thirty-five alarm-boxes, which are small iron boxes placed at street corners, on public buildings, and in any convenient and necessary locality. Each box is connected by two wires with the head office at the City Hall, and has its number painted in red, and a notice stating where the key is kept, which is generally the nearest house. The authorities usually confide the key to some person whose premises are open all night, such as the proprietor of an hotel, an apothecary, or a doctor. When the box is opened, nothing is seen but a small hook at the top, the interior being concealed by another iron lid. Under this second lid is a steel cylinder with pieces of ebony let into its circumference to correspond with the number of the box. This cylinder is connected with one of the telegraph wires; and a steel spring which presses against it, with the other. When the hook is pulled down a clock-work arrangement causes the cylinder to revolve four times; the steel spring consequently passes over the entire surface of the cylinder four times, and contact is broken at the points where the spring touches only the non-conducting ebony. For instance, if the circumference of the cylinder in box 125 could be unrolled, it would present an appearance something like this: I II IIIII. Let us now follow the wires to the top of the City Hall, where, night and day, sits an operator watching the recording instrument. Here in a small room are numerous electrical instruments of all sorts, gongs, switches, keys, levers, and wires. In an attic overhead are the batteries. As soon as a box is opened and ‘pulled’ a bell strikes, and a recording instrument in front turns out a slip of paper, on which is printed the box number; thus

— — — — — — — —

would mean box 125. It prints this four times—the number of revolutions made by the cylinder in the box—to avoid any error.

On the other side of the operator are three clock faces bearing numerals from one to nine, and a pointer. The one to the right is for the units, the middle one for the tens, the one to the left for the hundreds. Under them is a lever working horizontally. Immediately the operator receives the box number, he sets these pointers to correspond with it—namely, the left one he puts at 1, the middle at 2, the right one at 5—thus making 125—and then moves the lever underneath.

Now let us see what is the result of this manœuvring. Wires connect these machines with various church bells and gongs in all parts of the city, which ring out the alarm as the operator moves the lever. There are thirty-eight such bells in Boston. When there is a church bell in the neighbourhood, the fire department affixes an electrical hammer to it; if, however, there is no public bell in the right place, a large gong is erected. The machine at City Hall is automatic when once started, and causes the bells to sound the alarm three times as follows. For box 125 they would strike once; then a pause and strike twice; another pause and strike five times; then a much longer pause and repeat twice. For box 218 they strike 2—1—8, always sounding the number three times with intervals between. So quickly is all this managed that in half a minute after a person opens and ‘pulls’ a box he hears the bells begin to respond.

In case that the engines which go on the first alarm are not sufficiently numerous to extinguish the fire, a second alarm is given by the operator striking ten blows on the bells, which brings several more engines. If the fire is very serious, a third alarm brings still more engines with hose and ladder companies. This is given by striking twelve blows twice. If the conflagration is becoming very serious indeed, the entire fire department is summoned by striking twelve blows three times. This, of course, very rarely happens. Indeed so efficient are the men and apparatus, that even a second alarm is quite unusual. The second and third alarms are communicated to the City Hall operator by simply ‘pulling’ the same box a second and third time; or if the pulling apparatus should have been destroyed at an early stage of the fire, by transmitting a request by a Morse telegraph key, which is placed in every box for the use of the employés when out testing the circuits. Every one knows the number of the box situated near to his residence or place of business; so, if awakened by the bells in the night, he simply counts the box number, and if it is not near him, turns over and goes to sleep again reassured; whilst if it chance to be his number, he is at once ready to render any assistance.

The fire telegraph is also made use of by the city authorities for calling out the police or the military in case of a disturbance, and also for informing the parents who send their children to the public schools when there is to be no class, on account of bad weather or other reasons. Each of these circumstances has its special number. There is also a gong placed in every police station, which is struck directly from the boxes, and it frequently happens that the police have a flaming building barricaded by a rope, before the engines arrive.

Next, the means for extinguishing fires when discovered. In the city of Boston there are twenty-nine steam fire-engines in actual service, and seven held in reserve; eight chemical engines, throwing water impregnated with soda and sulphuric acid, which also serves as the motive-power; one steam self-propelling engine; one fire-boat to defend the water-front of the city; nearly forty hose carriages, about seventy thousand feet of hose, and twelve hook and ladder companies; besides other apparatus of various kinds, such as hand-engines, coal-wagons, sleighs for carrying the hose in winter, and several aërial ladders. The engines weigh from seven to nine thousand pounds, and cost about a thousand pounds each.

One of the most interesting features in the American fire-system is the extreme ingenuity that is exercised to insure the speedy arrival of the apparatus at a fire. As has been said, in less than a minute after the alarm-box has been pulled the bells are ringing out the alarm all over the city; and—incredible as it may seem—sometimes in _ten seconds_ after the alarm is rung, the engines have left their stations with steam up and every one prepared for work! Perhaps the best way to give a general idea of how this wonderful celerity is attained is to describe the interior arrangements of an engine-house.

Usually an engine and a hose-carriage are kept in one house. This is a two-story building with a small tower or look-out. In the cellar are kept the steam-heaters and coal; on the first floor in front are the engine and hose-carriage, at the back the stables; on the second floor the sleeping-room of the men, their smoking and reading room, and a small tool-shop. There is a sort of wooden tunnel running up by the side of the stairs from the cellar to the top of the house, in which are hung the lengths of spare hose. In the front of the building is a large gateway, kept closed, for the entrance and exit of the engine. The engine stands facing the door, and by the side of it the hose-carriage. The firemen’s helmets and coats are hung on these; and in the engine the materials for getting up the fire are laid at the bottom; and close by is a sort of tow-torch soaked in oil, which is lighted and thrown on the fire by the engineman when they start. So inflammable is the material laid in the engine-furnace that the fire is lighted instantaneously. Coming up through the floor, and connecting with two pipes at the rear of the engine, are two tubes from the steam-heater mentioned above. This is simply a small boiler by which the boiler of the fire-engine is kept filled night and day with hot water, so that steam is up immediately after the fire is lighted. By the side of the engine is a large gong, on which the alarm is sounded by the same current that causes the strokes on the bells outside. Under this is a lever holding back a powerful spring, which, when released, opens the stable-doors without any attention from the firemen!

There are three horses—two for the engine, and one for the hose-carriage. They are kept in small stalls, and face the door of the house, with the door of the stall just in front of them, so that when the door is opened, the horses, on stepping out, stand by the side of the engine in readiness to be harnessed. And not only this, but the horses, without exception, are so well trained, that the instant the door is opened they run out and stand by the side of the engine-pole. They are always completely harnessed, and their harness is so constructed that in order to attach them to the engine only the joining of a few snap-hooks is necessary.

One fireman is always on patrol on the ‘floor,’ whose duty it is to count and register the alarm; another is on patrol in the neighbourhood. They sleep with everything on but their coat and boots, and each has a distinct place assigned to him, which he takes on the striking of an alarm. So the gong strikes, the stable-doors open, the horses rush out, the men tumble down-stairs from their rooms above, the horses are harnessed; and if the alarm calls for them, the doors are thrown open, and they are gone, occasionally, as was said, in ten or twelve seconds from the striking of the alarm.

The city of Boston is divided into ten fire districts, and each district placed under the charge of an assistant-engineer. Usually about five or six engines, with their accompanying hose-carriages, two hook and ladder companies, a coal-wagon, and one of the wagons of the protective brigade—carrying tarpaulins and rubber blankets, to protect property from injury by water, supported by the insurance companies—go to every fire. The entire force of the Fire department in 1876 was six hundred and sixty-seven men, controlled by three fire commissioners, one nominated by the mayor, and confirmed by the city council every year.

Such are the means possessed by a city of rather more than four hundred thousand inhabitants for protection against fire; and with such a splendid system and such a force of men and machines, it is difficult to understand how a fire could attain such awful proportions as that of 1872, when the loss amounted to four millions sterling.

Boston always took great pride and felt much confidence in her granite-fronted places of business, but her recent fire has relieved her of that misplaced confidence. The blocks of granite crumbled away, cracked and fell apart, and even exploded. Of course this was an exceptionally great heat, but one sees fewer warehouses fronted with granite now than before the fire.

Even during so terrible a calamity as this fire the characteristic wit of the American did not desert him. No sooner were the flames extinguished in the burnt district, than the occupiers of the premises put up notices on their lots stating their present residences and future plans. Usually, in the larger cities of the United States, a value is put upon time of which we have no conception in England. When a house is burnt down in London or Edinburgh, half a year may elapse before arrangements are made to build it up again. On the morning after a fire in New York, we were amused in observing that workmen were already engaged in preparations for a new building. Owing to this species of energy in the American people, the two half-destroyed cities of Boston and Chicago are built up again, handsomer and stronger than ever. And still the work of improving the fire department goes on. There are in the newspapers almost daily accounts of the trial of new engines, improved ladders, longer fire-escapes, and surer fire-extinguishing compounds, and nothing is spared in checking the tyranny of what has been so aptly termed a ‘good servant but bad master.’

MONSIEUR HOULOT.

IN THREE CHAPTERS.