Lucy Montgomery - A Tangled Web

As for Peter, when he got back his torn letter, he gave himself up to hate for a time and hated everything and everybody, living or dead. So matters stood until the night Dandy Dark's house burned down.

V

The old Moon Man went singing softly through the quiet September night, under a silvery harvest moon. He went along by the dim ghostly shore of the Indian Spring river, past friendly old fields where the wind purred like a big cat, through woods where the trees were talking about him, along lanes where there was a strippling of moonlight on the narrow grassy path and over hills where he paused to listen to eternity. He was very happy and he pitied the poor folks asleep in the houses as he went by. They did not know what they were missing.

It was he who first saw that Dandy Dark's house, perched on the shoulder of a small wooded hill where the road turned down to Bay Silver, was on fire. The flames were already bursting out of the roof of the ell when the Moon Man thundered on the door and a drowsy hired boy shuffled down from the kitchen chamber to demand what was up. The Moon Man told him and then strode calmly off. The fire was no longer any concern of his. He was not going to lose another minute of this beautiful night for it. Behind him he left alarm and confusion. Dandy Dark was away... nobody knew where. Dandy had taken to staying out late at nights, though as yet nobody knew of it except his wife. But the clan at large knew that something had come over Dandy in the past few weeks. He was changed. Unsociable, uneasy, irritable, absent-minded. Some put it down to the fact that the date for the jug decision was drawing near and argued that the decision must be in Dandy's hands, since he was so manifestly uncomfortable about it. Either that, or something had happened to the jug. Nobody dared ask Dandy about it; he positively snapped now if any one referred to the jug. But everybody more or less was beginning to feel uneasy, too. And now Dandy's house was burning. The hired boy had yelled down the hall for Mrs Dandy, had roused a neighbour on the phone and had dashed to the barn for ladders. In an incredibly short time a crowd had gathered, but from the first it was manifest that the house was doomed. They had got out most of the furniture and were grimly watching the spectacle when Dandy arrived home.

"Good Gosh," cried Dandy, "where is the jug?"

Incredible as it may seem, nobody had thought about the jug. Everybody stared at each other. There was no one to ask. Mrs Dandy, when the hired boy roused her, had promptly run out of the front door in her night-dress and fainted in a corner of the garden. Foolish Mrs Dandy was noted for doing things like that. She had been carried over to Penny Dark's house on the next farm and was being attended to there.

"Doesn't ANY ONE know anything about the jug?" howled Dandy, losing his head completely and running wildly about, clawing over the stuff that had been saved from his blazing roof-tree.

"Where was it kept?" shouted somebody.

"In the spare-room closet," moaned Dandy.

Nothing had been saved from the spare room. It was far down the upstairs hall in the ell and the hall had been too full of smoke to reach it.

Peter was standing among the crowd. He had been among the first to arrive and had worked heroically. And now they had not saved the jug. The jug Donna wanted so much... the old jug Aunt Becky had told him tales of in his childhood... the jug that had ruined his elopement and wrecked his hopes. Peter snatched a reeking coat that was hanging on the fence, flung it over his head and dashed into the house. He must save that jug for Donna.

Every one yelled after him and then went mad. The yard was filled with dancing, shouting frantic figures, among which suddenly appeared a raving maniac of a boy from Penny Dark's who gasped out a horrifying question. Where was Donna Dark? She had been staying all night with Mrs Dandy... she had been sleeping in the spare room... was she safe?

Some women fainted with a better excuse than Mrs Dandy. Some went shrieking about for Donna. The men gazed at each other and then at the burning house. They shook their heads. It was a madman's attempt to enter that house now. Peter would be burned to death, trying to save Donna... for nobody now doubted it was Donna he had gone to save. He must have heard what the boy was saying before any one else did.

Peter had gone up the blazing staircase three steps at a time, ready to plunge into the inferno of smoke and flame that had been the hall, when he stumbled and almost fell over the unconscious form of a woman lying on the floor at the head of the stairs.

Good God, who was it? She must be rescued, jug or no jug. He picked her up and turned back with a feeling of regret. No hope of the jug now. Poor Donna would be bitterly disappointed. He stumbled down the stairs and out of the door into the seething crowd. The yells and shouts changed suddenly to hurrahs. Peter was a hero. Eager hands took his slim white burden from him. Drowned John, who had just driven in, having heard of the fire but not of Donna's danger until he arrived there... was shaking his hand and sobbing, with tears running down his face.

"God bless you, Peter... you saved her... God bless you for saving Donna... my poor little motherless girl... " Drowned John was almost maudlin... people had to lead him away and calm him down, while Peter stood very still and tried to realize that it was Donna whom he had carried out of Dandy Dark's burning house. Donna!

"She kem up to-day to help me make the baked damson preserve," sobbed Mrs Dandy on the kitchen lounge at Penny Dark's. "I never did or could seem able to bake damsons so as to please Dandy. Donna knew how... Dandy's mother taught her 'fore she died... so I asked her if she'd come up and do 'em for me. They're all burned up now. It looked like rain at supper-time and Dandy was away... he's always away now, it seems to me... so I told Donna she might as well stay all night. Oh, dearie me, to think what might have happened!"

"The jug's gone, though," said William Y. gloomily.

"The jug? IT ain't broken?" cried Mrs Dandy shrilly.

"It's burned up with all the rest of the spare-room things."

"Oh, no, it ain't." Mrs Dandy looked very sly and cunning. "When I put Donna to sleep in the spare room I took the jug in its box outen the closet and took it down to my own room. I didn't know what Dandy might of said to me if I'd left that jug in the same room with ANYBODY. Folks say I'm silly but I'm not so silly as that. And when I heard Tyler yelling fire I grabbed holt of that box first thing along with the old teapot with the broken spout I keep my bit of money in, and run out with them and dropped them over the fence into the burdocks in the back yard. I reckon you'll find them there."

Find them there they did, much to everybody's relief. Donna had come to her senses and had been taken to the hospital, and everybody went home through the pale-yellow, windy dawn, telling tales about the fire. One of the funniest was that of Penny Dark, who, summoned to the telephone from his bed, had lost his head and torn over to Dandy's place in his pyjamas. Worse still, in trying to climb over the picket fence back of Dandy's barn, he had slipped and the waist cord of his pyjamas had caught on a picket. There poor Penny had hung, yelping piteously, until some one had heard him above all the din and rescued him. Most people thought it served him right for wearing pyjamas. It had been suspected for several years that he did but nobody ever was really sure, for old Aunt Ruth had kept his secret well.

"And Happy Dark is home," said Sim Dark. "Walked in last night after his mother had gone to bed, ate the supper she'd left, and then went to sleep in his own room. SHE didn't know it till he come down to breakfast this morning. Said he'd met an old crony in Singapore who gave him an old Charlottetown paper to read. It was the one where that fool reporter had writ up the story of the jug. Happy said he thought he might as well come home and see what his chances were for it. His mother's so uplifted she can hardly talk. Just sits and looks at him."