‘Wake up, darling, quick! The house is on fire. We’ve no time even to dress; so come with me now to the hall.’
Albert stretched and got out of bed. He was wide awake and perfectly calm.
‘Go back to your room,’ he said, ‘and throw your clothes out of the window, or you’ll have nothing to go home in. I’ll do the same and come along for you when I’ve finished.’
‘What a brilliant idea!’
Jane flew back to her room and in a very short time had thrown all her possessions on to the gravel outside. Presently Albert came running down the passage and they went, hand in hand, to join the others in the hall.
‘Here they are! That’s everybody, then.’
Mr Buggins was cool and collected; it seemed perfectly natural that he, and not General Murgatroyd, should be taking charge of everything.
‘Now,’ he said in a firm voice. ‘This part of the house is quite safe for the present, so as we are all here I think we might begin to save what we can.
‘I must beg you all not to go upstairs again. The wing in which your bedrooms are situated is in a very dangerous position and will be the next to go. The dining-room must also, of course, be left to its fate, but we can safely collect things from the drawing-room, billiard- and smoking-rooms. I telephoned some time ago for the fire brigade, but I’m afraid it will be at least an hour before they can possibly arrive. When they come they will naturally decide for themselves where they can go; we must be on the safe side. The servants are all engaged with a chain of buckets in trying to prevent the garages and outhouses from catching, in which I think they may succeed. It would be useless for amateurs to attempt saving the house, the fire has much too firm a hold.’
The party dispersed into the various sitting-rooms leading out of the hall and began to work with a will.
Albert, at great personal danger, put a damp handkerchief over his mouth and dashed into the dining-room which was dense with smoke. Cutting them out of their frames with some difficulty he managed to save the portraits by Winterhalter of Selina, Lady Craigdalloch and her husband, the fourth Earl.
(The present Lady Craigdalloch was never able to forgive him this when she heard about it afterwards. It became her pet grievance.
‘The dining-room,’ she would say, ‘was full of beautiful Raeburns, and what must the young idiot do but risk his life to save the two ugliest pictures in the house. It drives me mad.’)
As he ran out of the castle to bestow the Winterhalters in a place of safety, Albert was amused to observe General Murgatroyd carrying with great care an enormous coloured print which had hung in a place of honour over the smoking-room mantelpiece. It was entitled ‘The Grandest View in Europe’, thus leading one to expect a view of Mont Blanc, the Doge’s Palace, Chartres Cathedral or some such popular beauty spot, instead of which it depicted the back of a horse’s head as it would appear to the rider, with two large grey ears sticking up in the immediate foreground. Beyond the ears could be seen a stone wall which was being negotiated with success by two horses and with no success at all by a third. Hounds running across an adjacent field gave the clue to the whole thing; a hunt was evidently in progress. ‘The Grandest View in Europe’ having been reverently deposited among the rapidly growing collection of objects on the lawn, its saviour trotted back to the house, bent upon rescuing the head of a moose which hung in the hall.
Admiral Wenceslaus now staggered forth with a load of miscellaneous objects, including a chronometer, a model of the Victory in silver, a book entitled The Triumph of Unarmed Forces, which he had been trying for some time to lend to various members of the party, and several whisky bottles. Mr Buggins followed him with Prince Charlie’s boot, several old family miniatures and a lock of Bothwell’s hair.
Sally, looking rather green, sat tucked up on a sofa and watched these proceedings with some amusement. Albert stopped for a moment to ask her how she felt.
‘Oh, quite all right, longing to help, but Walter made me promise I’d stay here.’
‘D’you know how the fire started?’
‘No; Haddock, the butler, says he has no idea at all. He discovered it, you know. The smoke was pouring in at his window and he says he only got some of the maids out just in time.’
When Albert went back to the house he noticed that flames were already beginning to envelop his own bedroom. Meeting Jane in the hall he kissed her hurriedly and said, ‘Take care of yourself, my precious, won’t you?’ She was carrying the Jacob’s Ladder.
He then saved his portrait of Sally and several albums containing water-colours from the billiard-room. Lady Prague was busy showing two men how to take the billiard table to pieces. They had been managing far better before she came along.
Albert and Jane made many journeys and succeeded in saving all the plush chairs, bead stools, straw boxes, wax flowers, shell photograph-frames and other nineteenth-century objects which they had collected together from various parts of the house.
(When Lady Craigdalloch, far away in Africa, had recovered from the first shock of hearing that Dalloch Castle was razed to the ground, she said that, at any rate, all the Victorian rubbish there would now have vanished for ever and that this was a slight consolation. Her horror and amazement when, on her return, she was confronted by every scrap of that ‘Victorian rubbish’ which had always been such a thorn in her flesh, knew no bounds.)
At last all the furniture that it was possible to move reposed on the lawn in safety, and there was nothing left to do but sit ‘like Lady Airlie in the ballad’, as Mr Buggins
