About a quarter of a mile from Stacey’s house lay the village of Meldrun, straggling along one side of a small river, which, having flowed prettily through the Carroll property, its steep banks massed with rhododendrons, issued thence into practical life, like a business man after a condescending hour with the arts. It fell, that is, into rapids, the water power from which was utilized by a small hosiery factory. Around this plant had grown up the village, consisting of a company store and of some fifty incredibly abject huts, leaning at strange angles, propped up anyhow, when in acute danger of collapse, by logs; the effect of the whole like that of a Vorticist picture. The beginning of many of Stacey’s rides led him perforce through this ignoble place. The brick factory itself stood close beside the road he must follow, on a narrow strip of ground between it and the river, and through the broken glass of its windows slovenly girls leered out at him or shouted uncomplimentary remarks, and he could see the pale, hard-featured faces of ten- and twelve-year old children. If Stacey was walking Duke, he would wave his hat as he passed, but mostly he went through the town at a gallop. He rode well, and with his impassive, rather stern face, he must have looked like some callous medieval condottiere. No one in Meldrun would have heard of condottieri, but the effect would be the same.
Really, however, Stacey was far from impassive. This misery of which he caught a glimpse troubled him profoundly,—the more since, so far as he could see, there was nothing he could do about it. Yet, oddly, he rode through Meldrun oftener than he needed to.
The house of the factory owner, a Mr. Langdon, stood on the crest of a low hill some distance back to the left just before the village began; on one side its grounds adjoined the Carroll property. It was an imposing pillared mansion built as a plantation house before the Civil War, but Stacey gazed across at it grimly each time that he rode out through Meldrun. However, he did not see what he could do about this, either. He tried to dismiss both house and village from his thoughts.
Mr. Langdon himself, a pleasant-faced elderly man with a young wife and three small daughters, he knew by sight and nodded to curtly when they happened to meet. But, for all his deliberate isolation, he had been unable not to pick up a few scraps of gossip here and there, and also there was Elijah, an unquenchable fountain of information. So Stacey learned that the Langdons were a South Carolina family; that they had formerly owned the house and a thousand acres round about—the whole valley, indeed, including the property that was now Mr. Carroll’s; that they had lost everything during the Civil War and emigrated to Georgia; and that it was only five years ago that the present Mr. Langdon had returned, to buy back the family home and with it the hosiery factory that had been erected by some one else. Stacey also learned, listening distractedly to Elijah, that there was no love for the factory owner among his employees, and that that one young fellow—“yes, suh, he’s bad, Mistuh Stacey!”—had said “how he was goin’ to get Mistuh Langdon one day.”
“Well—and then?” thought Stacey, with a shrug of his shoulders, finding the intention laudable enough, but seeing no solution of anything in it.
But one night toward the end of April Stacey, lying awake on his sleeping-porch, became aware of an odd glow in the moonless night. “A fire, of course,” he thought, as he got quickly out of bed to make sure that it was not in his own house. Houses hereabouts always burned down sooner or later, what with the general carelessness and the lack of any fire department. But from his porch, which faced west, Stacey could not see the fire. It must be somewhere to the east, since it reddened the near side of the shrubbery on the lawn and shone fantastically against the glossy leaves of a tulip tree.
He hurried down the hall to the other end of the house. But tall trees and the distant barrier of white pines that marked the Carroll boundary cut off his view, and he could make out only that the fire was somewhere in Meldrun. The confused murmur of many voices reached him.
He threw on some clothes, slipped an electric flash-light into his pocket, then ran downstairs. Elijah was just starting up then. The old man was breathless with haste and excitement. “It—it am Mistuh Langdon’s house ’at’s buhnin’, Mistuh Stacey!” he stuttered. “My Lawd, but she shuah is buhnin’, suh!”
For a moment Stacey was rather pleased at the news; then he shrugged his shoulders at feeling so childish an emotion. “All right,” he said, “I’ll go over and see if I can help.”
Running easily, he did the quarter of a mile in three minutes, and, vaulting a fence, came out upon the sloping lawn of the Langdon home. It was covered with people shouting and moving about busily—mostly workers from the factory, and strewn with such household goods as had been rescued. The east wing of the house was burning fiercely; flames lapped the roof of the central part, and black smoke curled out of its upper windows. The west wing was not yet burning, though its blistered paint was peeling off in great flakes, and little spirals of smoke rose from its roof where sparks had caught.
Glancing around him in the flickering light, Stacey perceived a young woman sitting motionless on an overturned mahogany sideboard, a child in her lap and two others clinging to her skirts. He went up to her quickly.
“Mrs. Langdon?” he said stiffly. “I’m Stacey Carroll. Please tell me what to do.” He spoke stiffly not because he was unfriendly, but because Mrs. Langdon, like all the rest of the people around him, seemed far away, unrelated, a mere distant mathematical fact about which no emotion was possible.
“Thank you, Mr. Carroll,” she said pleasantly. “I’m afraid there’s nothing. The men are getting out what they can.”
“Well, I can help with that,” he replied.
The youngest child, a girl of six, was crying bitterly in her mother’s arms. “Mitzi, I want my Mitzi!” she sobbed monotonously.
“Who’s Mitzi?” Stacey asked quickly. “Some pet—still in the house?”
Mrs. Langdon smiled. “Mitzi is only Helen’s doll,” she explained. “We forgot it in the hurry, and now it’s too late. Her room was full of smoke even when we left it.”
Stacey, too, smiled—ever so faintly touched. “I’ll go and see if I can help Mr. Langdon,” he remarked. “Where is he?”
“Oh, thank you!” said the young woman. “He’s there at the west end of the house. Please don’t let him climb in again. He’s strained his ankle.”
A ladder had been placed against the low porch at the end of the west wing. Stacey scrambled up to the roof of the porch, where he found Mr. Langdon and others among a heterogeneous collection of household goods that had been carried out through an open second-story window. The tin roof was uncomfortably hot, and there was a good deal of smoke. Mr. Langdon was directing the lowering to the ground of a sofa and pausing between times to toss down less fragile belongings as they were brought out to him through the window. He appeared quite calm and greeted Stacey courteously.
“Mrs. Langdon told me you had strained your ankle,” Stacey remarked. “Hadn’t you better go back down and let me tend to this for you?”
“That is very kind of you, sir,” Mr. Langdon replied, “but I am all right. I regret that I cannot go inside with the others.”
“Well, I can do that, anyway,” said Stacey curtly, and, disregarding the other’s protests, went quickly over to the window and through it.
The room beyond was very hot but not yet burning, and there was not even much smoke. Three or four men were gathering up the few objects still remaining in it, and a frightened negro servant was standing very close to the window and directing their efforts. No one paid the least attention to his instructions, but a youth, coming in with a mattress from a room beyond, called: “Come on in theah, Joe!” at which the negro shook his head vigorously and the others laughed. Stacey went through another door.
This room was smoky and also nearly emptied of its furnishings. But three doors opened out of it and beyond one of these Stacey found himself at once in a hot choking mist. Here he was alone. He drew out his flash-light, and, his eyes smarting, explored the room. It was a sitting-room, he saw,—Mrs. Langdon’s probably,—and he could be of some use after all; for here hung a small Meissonier and there on a table was a vase—“Sèvres,” he remarked hoarsely. “Better than—mattresses.” He gathered up the vase, jerked the picture from the wall, and stumbled, coughing, from the room.
Just outside the door he ran into the young man of the mattress. “Here!” said Stacey wheezing, “take this—carefully—to Mr. Langdon, will you?”
“Shuah!” said the young man, who was chewing tobacco steadily. “You be’n in theah?” he inquired, waving his hand at the door.
Stacey nodded.
“Well, wait a minute en’ I’ll go back in with you when I’ve toted these out.”
“I’ll—have to—wait a minute,” Stacey replied, and the young man departed.
Presently he returned, and together the two went back into the sitting-room for more loot, emerging dripping with sweat and half choked. Yet Stacey was beginning to enjoy himself.
They tried the other two rooms, t............