ought to hold all right. What do you think, Ashton?"
"Oh, for the love of Heaven do something--_anything_!" I exclaimed, foralready the room was stifling, and down the passage the fire could beheard crackling as it ate its way towards us. "I don't know what tothink. I don't know what you mean, or what you ask me."
"Why," he answered, "we can easily get the steel cross-pieces off thosebedsteads, and, hooked one to another with these stout brasscurtain-hooks they will reach to the ground easily. The question is--how shall we be able to secure the top one, and, when it is secured,shall we be able to let ourselves down the steel bands without cuttingour hands to pieces? These flat bedstead bands are very sharp, youknow."
He remained fiddling with the hooks with one hand, while with the otherhe still held the candle above his head. The heat was becomingintolerable. Now we could hardly see across the room, and the smokehurt our eyes.
All this had happened quickly, though in my dread the seconds seemedhours.
A wild cry in the room made us start. The Baronne had apparently gonesuddenly mad. Dashing towards the door, she unlocked it and flung itwide open. An instant later she had disappeared--rushed out into theblinding smoke.
I ran at the door to slam it. As I did so I stumbled over something onthe floor, and fell heavily.
I had stumbled over Paulton. In a paroxysm of terror he knelt there,motionless. He was praying! At any other time I should have feltnothing but unutterable contempt for him--a man I believed to be amurderer, driven through sheer mental torture to mumble prayers to hisCreator whose name I had several times heard him blasphemously invoke.Now I felt only pity--intense pity. But I had no time to think.Clambering to my feet I managed to reach the door through the smoke thatchoked me, and to shut it securely. The Baronne de Coudron had, I knew,rushed to her death in her sudden access of madness--madness induced byterror.
Faulkner had removed all the hooks from which the heavy curtain-ringshad hung. Now he was at work wrenching the steel bedstead binders fromtheir sockets and hooking them together. Mechanically I helped him.And all the time I could hear Paulton, hidden in the darkness,beseeching the Almighty to save him from a terrible death.
Louder and louder grew the roar of the approaching fire, and with it thecrackling of the woodwork and the falling of scorched walls. From afarcame the sound of a mighty crash, the glare in the sky brightened, athousand sparks were swept across the window. Instinctively we knewthat in one of the west wings a roof had fallen in.
Hark! What was that? A voice was calling--a girl's shrill voice, itsounded almost like a child's. Whence did the cry come? It was nowherein the house. Yet it could hardly be outside.
"Help! Quick! _Quick! My God! Help_!" The door of the room creakedominously. Phew! The heat in the passage was scorching it. In aminute it would burst into flame. Where was that voice? I rushed tothe window--
"_Hello! Hello_!" I shouted at the top of my voice.
The cry came from above. Tightly clutching the window frame I leaptforward and peered up in the darkness. As I did so, a coil of stoutrope fell past me and disappeared. Now a rope was hanging down acrossthe window from above. I stretched out an arm, and was just able toclutch it.
"Is it fast?" I shouted.
"Yes--fast to an iron staple that supports the chimney. Get out, quick!Quick!"
"Go down first--go down!" I shouted up.
"_I tell you to get out_!" the girl's voice cried. This was no time forcourtesies. The girl said we must go, and so...
I was pulled back violently from the window and flung on to the floor.A man was clutching at the rope. It was Paulton. At the same instant ashout of laughter sounded in the room. Scrambling to my feet, I sawFaulkner laughing. Had the man any nerves at all? Did he know whatfear meant?
"Paulton did that," he exclaimed. "I think he's the limit. Look at himsliding down--the cur! Who is the girl above?"
"I don't know, and don't care!" I cried. "Do for the love of Heaven,follow down. I'm suffocating. The fire will be on us in an instant."
"And leave the girl!" he said in a tone of reproach and surprise. "Youcan't mean it, Ashton."
"She won't go first--she said so."
"Won't she?"
He went over to the window, leaned out as I had done, and looked up asbest he could.
"Go down at once," he shouted in a tone of extraordinary firmness. "Wedon't move until you do."
I suppose his commanding tone made her realise he really meant to wait.Anyway, a moment later a girl's figure appeared, swinging above thewindow. She rested her feet upon the window-sill, and looked at us.
"Don't be frightened," she said. "It is tied very firmly, and thestaple can't give way."
"Don't be frightened!" And this from the "chit of a girl," as I hadcalled her the night before when she had so cleverly induced us to stayin the room. She was just visible now in the blackness beneath, as sheslid down the rope with remarkable agility.
"Go ahead, Ashton," Faulkner said, as the rope slackened. "I'll steadythe rope while you go down. Don't get excited! There's lots of time."
Smoke was floating up from the window now as though the window were achimney. My smarting eyes met Faulkner's as I clutched the rope withboth hands and prepared to swing out. His eyes were bloodshot, red andswollen. Yet he was actually smiling. And he had lit anothercigarette!
It was with a feeling of intense relief, that as I looked up from theground, I saw Faulkner swing out on the rope from the fourth storeywindow, twisting round and round like a joint upon a roasting jack. Itis said that in moments of acute crisis thoughts, absurd in theirtriviality, sometimes take prominence. It was so now. As I watched,with halting breath, Faulkner's hunched-up figure slowly sliding downlike a monkey on a string, only one thought was in my mind.
Would he, when he reached the ground, have that cigarette between hislips?
He reached the ground, and I went up to him. In an access of emotion Igrasped him by the hand.
"You are a hero, old chap!" I exclaimed. "A perfect hero!"
"Don't be foolish, Ashton," he answered. "Instead, hand out that box ofmatches. I do think," he added, "it might have occurred to you to hangon to the rope to prevent my spinning round in that absurd fashion. Ihate being made to look ridiculous."
He struck a match. Yes, the cigarette was still between his lips!
I had never before seen a blazing house at close quarters, and the sightimpressed though it appalled me. Together we walked out into the weedyItalian garden, a hundred yards or more, and there stood watching thespectacle. Truly, it was superb. One after another immense sheets offlame shot up high into the sky, parted into fifty tongues whichquivered for an instant, then vanished.
Where was Vera? What of her? Was she still alive, or had she died inthat awful furnace?
A breeze was at our backs, and thus the smoke was swept away, revealingthe conflagration in all its awful grandeur.
And now the window we had just left began suddenly to turn red. Theredness grew brighter. As I watched it, panting with excitement, a redand yellow ribbon licked the window frame that a few minutes previouslywe had clutched. The ribbon broadened, lengthened, swept out into thenight, lapping the grey wall of the old chateau until it floated highabove the roof, shrivelling the ivy and burning it to ashes.
That was the last window in the main building. There was nothing moreto burn. For some moments the flames seemed slightly to subside. Then,all at once, with a great crash which must surely have been heard a mileor more away, the entire roof broke inward, opening up to the sky aninferno from which blazing fragments in their thousands and myriadsparks shooting up into the sky illuminated fields and woods for severalmiles around.
"What a gorgeous sight!"
It was the middle of the night, and the place being far removed from anyhabitation save the little village two miles off behind the hill, thealarm had not yet been raised.
I turned.
Faulkner's eyes, wide open, were rivetted on the scene. Forthe first time in his life, as I believe, he had given way to hisemotion. "Ah!" he added in an undertone, "how this makes one think!"
"Think?" I said. "Of what?" My only thought was of my loved one.
He turned his head and looked at me.
"Oh," he answered cynically, "of what we shall have for lunch to-morrow.Good Heavens!" he exclaimed, and in the light cast down upon us by theblood-red canopy flickering in the sky above I could see his eyesshining strangely, "Have you no sense at all of grandeur? Can't yourealise and appreciate the overpowering magnificence of all this? Haveyou no sentiment, romance or poetry at all in your conception?