Chapter Sixteen
The Harvest of Fire
In face of Death human antagonism becomes suddenly absorbed in the mad craving for Life.
The bitter hatred, the fearful rage, the furious struggle of the past few minutes were, in that instant, forgotten as though they had never been. Speechless with terror we gazed hopelessly at each other. Ah! I can see that picture still. Am I ever likely to forget it?
The Baronne, deathly white, stood there a handsome figure, trembling in her wonderfully embroidered pink kimono, her eyes fixed and starting as though madness were stealing into her brain. Paulton stood with his lips badly cut. Young Faulkner was erect and calm, with set teeth, blood spattered about his pyjamas, and an angry red wound showing at the spot where Paulton in his frenzy had bitten into his shoulder.
Truly, it was a weird and terrible scene. I stood aghast.
The fierce devouring roar in the house increased. It sounded like a furnace heard at night in the Black Country. Quickly the air grew thicker. Through the door, dark yellow, choking smoke percolated, then rolled upward in spirals that became merged in the general atmosphere.
We both slipped into our clothes hurriedly. Then Faulkner was the first to act.
Crossing quickly to the window, he pulled aside the curtains, thrust down the handle, and pushed open both frames. A red, quivering glow flickered in the blackness of the night, revealing for an instant the level meadow far below, the trees silhouetted upon it, the outlines of a distant wood.
Now he was kneeling on the broad window-sill of the long casement window, his body thrust far out. I saw him glance to right and left, then look down towards the earth. Slowly he drew back. Once more he stood amongst us.
“We are pretty high up,” he said, without any sign of emotion. “Thirty feet I should say.”
He looked about him. Then he went over to the beds, and pulled off all the clothes.
“Six blankets and six sheets – but I wouldn’t trust the sheets, and the blankets are too short,” he observed as though nothing unusual were happening.
A washstand, a couple of antique wardrobes, four chairs with high carved backs, a dressing-table and a smaller table, was all that the room contained besides the beds. He glanced up at the ceiling. It was solid. He tore up the carpet. Beneath it was a loose board, hinged. He lifted it by the ring. Smoke rolled up into his face, and he slammed the board down again, stamping his foot upon it. And at that instant the gas suddenly went out.
In the sky, the lurid light still rose and fell over the meadows and hills. The fierce roaring in the house grew louder. From a cover beyond the lawn came the echo of crackling wood and cracking timber, but nowhere was a human voice audible.
At this juncture, to my amazement, Faulkner calmly produced his cigarette case, lit a cigarette, topped it and offered me one. I took it without knowing what I did – I, who had so often pretended that in a moment of crisis I should never lose my head!
“What’s to be done?” I gasped, beside myself. “Where is Vera?” I knew that in another moment I should be upon my knees, praying as I had only once in my life prayed before. It is, alas, only at such times that many of us think of our Maker and invoke His aid. In the ordinary course of life prayers weary so many of us and we feel we do not need them. I remember still, a typhoon off Japan, and how everybody prayed fervently. Yet when the seas subsided, and we felt safe once more, we all pretended we forgot how frightened we had been, and especially how we had implored forgiveness for our sins and promised never to sin again. We humans are, after all, but abject cowards.
“There is nothing to be done, that I can see,” Faulkner answered. He glanced again at the beds, now naked of coverings, then up at the curtain-pole over the window. He pulled over the smaller table, climbed on to it, then proceeded, leisurely as it seemed to me, to examine the rings of the curtain-pole with the help of the bedroom candle he held above his head. Every second brought us nearer a terrible fate.
“These are good stout hooks,” he said, puffing smoke out of his nose. “They ought to hold all right. What do you think, Ashton?”
“Oh, for the love of Heaven do something —anything!” I exclaimed, for already the room was stifling, and down the passage the fire could be heard crackling as it ate its way towards us. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what you mean, or what you ask me.”
“Why,” he answered, “we can easily get the steel cross-pieces off those bedsteads, and, hooked one to another with these stout brass curtain-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 cutting our hands to pieces? These flat bedstead bands are very sharp, you know.”
He remained fiddling with the hooks with one hand, while with the other he still held the candle above his head. The heat was becoming intolerable. Now we could hardly see across the room, and the smoke hurt our eyes.
All this had happened quickly, though in my dread the seconds seemed hours.
A wild cry in the room made us start. The Baronne had apparently gone suddenly mad. Dashing towards the door, she unlocked it and flung it wide open. An instant later she had disappeared – rushed out into the blinding smoke.
I ran at the door to slam it. As I did so I stumbled over something on the 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 felt nothing but unutterable contempt for him – a man I believed to be a murderer, driven through sheer mental torture to mumble prayers to his Creator 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 that choked 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 by terror.
Faulkner had removed all the hooks from which the heavy curtain-rings had hung. Now he was at work wrenching the steel bedstead binders from their 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 the crackling of the woodwork and the falling of scorched walls. From afar came the sound of a mighty crash, the glare in the sky brightened, a thousand sparks were swept across the window. Instinctively we knew that in one of the west wings a roof had fallen in.
Hark! What was that? A voice was calling – a girl’s shrill voice, it sounded almost like a child’s. Whence did the cry come? It was nowhere in the house. Yet it could hardly be outside.
“Help! Quick! Quick! My God! Help!” The door of the room creaked ominously. Phew! The heat in the passage was scorching it. In a minute it would burst into flame. Where was that voice? I rushed to the window —
“Hello! Hello!” I shouted at the top of my voice.
The cry came from above. Tightly clutching the window frame I leapt forward and peered up in the darkness. As I did so, a coil of stout rope fell past me and disappeared. Now a rope was hanging down across the window from above. I stretched out an arm, and was just able to clutch 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 for courtesies. 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 a shout of laughter sounded in the room. Scrambling to my feet, I saw Faulkner laughing. Had the man any nerves at all? Did he know what fear meant?
“Paulton did that,” he exclaimed. “I think he’s the limit. Look at him sliding 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. “You can’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 as best he could.
“Go down at once,” he shouted in a tone of extraordinary firmness. “We don’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 the window. She rested her feet upon the window-sill, and looked at us.
“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “It is tied very firmly, and the staple can’t give way.”
“Don’t be frightened!” And this from the “chit of a girl,” as I had called her the night before when she had so cleverly induced us to stay in the room. She was just visible now in the blackness beneath, as she slid down the rope with remarkable agility.
“Go ahead, Ashton,” Faulkner said, as the rope slackened. “I’ll steady the 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 a chimney. My smarting eyes met Faulkner’s as I clutched the rope with both hands and prepared to swing out. His eyes were bloodshot, red and swollen. Yet he was actually smiling. And he had lit another cigarette!
It was with a feeling of intense relief, that as I looked up from the ground, I saw Faulkner swing out on the rope from the fourth storey window, twisting round and round like a joint upon a roasting jack. It is said that in moments of acute crisis thoughts, absurd in their triviality, sometimes take prominence. It was so now. As I watched, with halting breath, Faulkner’s hunched-up figure slowly sliding down like a monkey on a string, only one thought was in my mind.
Would he, when he reached the ground, have that cigarette between his lips?
He reached the ground, and I went up to him. In an access of emotion I grasped 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 of matches. I do think,” he added, “it might have occurred to you to hang on to the rope to prevent my spinning round in that absurd fashion. I hate 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 sight impressed though it appalled me. Together we walked out into the weedy Italian garden, a hundred yards or more, and there stood watching the spectacle. Truly, it was superb. One after another immense sheets of flame shot up high into the sky, parted into fifty tongues which quivered for an instant, then vanished.
Where was Vera? What of her? Was she still alive, or had she died in that awful furnace?
A breeze was at our backs, and thus the smoke was swept away, revealing the conflagration in all its awful grandeur.
And now the window we had just left began suddenly to turn red. The redness grew brighter. As I watched it, panting with excitement, a red and yellow ribbon licked the window frame that a few minutes previously we had clutched. The ribbon broadened, lengthened, swept out into the night, lapping the grey wall of the old château until it floated high above the roof, shrivelling the ivy and burning it to ashes.
That was the last window in the main building. There was nothing more to 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 mile or more away, the entire roof broke inward, opening up to the sky an inferno from which blazing fragments in their thousands and myriad sparks shooting up into the sky illuminated fields and woods for several miles around.
“What a gorgeous sight!”
It was the middle of the night, and the place being far removed from any habitation save the little village two miles off behind the hill, the alarm had not yet been raised.
I turned. Faulkner’s eyes, wide open, were rivetted on the scene. For the first time in his life, as I believe, he had given way to his emotion. “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 the blood-red canopy flickering in the sky above I could see his eyes shining strangely, “Have you no sense at all of grandeur? Can’t you realise and appreciate the overpowering magnificence of all this? Have you no sentiment, romance or poetry at all in your conception? Don’t you feel the hand of Providence? Doesn’t this bring home to you the majesty of eternity better than any religion that has been tried or thought of? Really, Ashton, really…”
I was amazed at his sudden outburst of pent-up feeling – I had imagined him cold, undemonstrative, unemotional, a being without nerves and devoid of temperament. So his self-control and apparent calmness had been nothing but a mask. I think I liked him all the better for it.
We heard voices – women’s shrill, terrified voices. We were unable to locate them. Suddenly I started. Surely that was Vera’s voice! Yes, I recognised it.
Attentively we both listened. Then, as the flames shot up again, lighting up the meadows away to the woods, we both distinctly saw in silhouette a man and a woman struggling in the distance.
The man had her by the wrists. He was overpowering her. At that same moment the red glare sank, and both were hidden in the darkness.
Chapter Seventeen
Found in the Débris
We were on the alert in a moment.
Though we searched in the darkness for a distance of a hundred yards or more, we failed to come upon either the man or the woman of whom we had caught a brief glimpse as they struggled desperately.
Nor did we again hear the sound of voices. That I had heard Vera’s voice, I felt convinced. We wondered if there was a lodge, and how far it was away. Perhaps the servants had taken shelter there.
“The whole place seems to be deserted,” Faulkner said when, after a futile search, we again found ourselves near the burning château, where the fire had by this time subsided considerably. “And yet there must have been people in the house – at any rate, servants.”
We walked right round the château. What a huge old place it had been! No wonder the fire had taken a long time to reach us, if it had broken out, as it presumably had done, in a wing remote from the room where we had been. Judging by the architecture of the outer walls I concluded that the château must have been built towards the end of the fourteenth century, and afterwards added to.
There was a sharp nip in the air, and we felt chilly enough. Already the streaks of dawn were striving to pierce the belt of leaden clouds, against which the black pinewoods could be seen distinctly outlined.
Faulkner turned to me.
“Have you any money?” he asked.
“Plenty,” I answered. “Why?”
“When it is daylight we must make for the nearest village and get a conveyance to the railway-station. We must be miles from everywhere, or fire-escapes would have come along before now. I suppose the Baronne is dead.”
“She can have escaped only by a miracle,” I said. “We shall probably know soon.”
“And that cur – Paulton. What can have become of him?”
“I can’t help thinking it was Paulton we saw struggling. But who can the woman have been? I hope it wasn’t Vera. I am certain I heard her voice. What do you think?”
“It may have been Mademoiselle de Coudron,” Faulkner said. “She seems to have disappeared. What a brave girl! She must have climbed along the roofs to save us, with the fire just behind her. I wonder who the woman was who called for help first of all – I mean before we knew that fire had broken out.”
“The whole thing is most mysterious, but the biggest mystery is the disappearance of everybody. We heard at least three voices in the darkness!”
Happening to glance down the long carriage drive which, after winding for a hundred yards across the broad, level lawns, disappeared into the wood, I noticed two men on horseback approaching at a walk. They had just emerged from the wood, and, so far as I could see in the half-light, were officials of some kind.
They broke into a jog-trot as they caught sight of us, and took a short cut across the grass. As they came near us we saw that they were two gendarmes.
“What are you doing here?” one of them asked sharply in French.
I didn’t like his tone, and I saw Faulkner’s lip twitch with annoyance. Instead of answering, we looked the two men up and down.
“What are you doing here – tell me at once,” the speaker repeated, in a bullying tone.
I suppose we did look disreputable, standing there without collars, with unlaced boots, and with our coat collars turned up. Also a day’s growth of beard is hardly conducive to a smart appearance, and in most civilised countries but America a man is judged by his appearance and by the clothes he wears.
“Who set fire to the château?” demanded the gendarme, quickly losing his temper as we refused to speak.
“Oh, we did, of course,” I exclaimed in French, meaning to be cynical. “We burnt it down on purpose.”
The man raised his black eyebrows, and glanced at his companion.
“You hear that?” he said meaningly.
The man who had remained silent produced a notebook and scribbled in it.
Faulkner turned to me.
“A few more of your ‘witticisms’ Ashton,” he said, “and we shall get penal servitude. Don’t you know you are talking to State officials, and have you ever known a State official to be other than matter-of-fact? For Heaven’s sake, don’t make more statements that may be used in evidence against us.”
“My friend was joking,” Faulkner said in his perfect French to the man who had addressed us; but the official seemed not to understand what the word plaisanterie meant.
At this juncture the men exchanged one or two remarks in a rapid undertone. Then, while one of them remained, apparently to keep guard over us, the other cantered away across the turf, struck the road close to the wood, and disappeared.
In the absence of his companion, who apparently was his superior in authority, the gendarme thawed to some extent. We gathered that the Château d’Uzerche was about eighty miles by road from Monte Carlo, and twelve or so miles from Digne, in the Bedeone Valley, also that no village lay within a radius of two miles of it. Small wonder, therefore, that no fire-escape had come.
“Where is la Baronne de Coudron?” the man asked suddenly.
We explained that we feared she had been either burnt or suffocated. At this he looked grave.
“And her companion, the Englishman Monsieur Paulton, where is he?”
Again we explained. He had escaped from the fire, but, since his escape, we had not seen him.
“Why do you want to know?” Faulkner asked, in his politest tones.
“Because,” the man answered, taken off his guard, “we have a warrant for the arrest of both Madame la Baronne and the Englishman.”
“Arrest! For what?” Faulkner asked.
“On several charges. The most recent is a charge of obtaining money by fraud – a large sum. There is also a charge of blackmail.”
“Against both?”
“Against both.”
I was silent. Here was a new phase of the affair. By degrees we gathered from him that Paulton was known to be interested in various undertakings of, to say the least, a dubious nature, also that he promoted wild-cat companies in England, on the Continent, and in America. Information that especially interested us was that all who had escaped from the fire had made their way to the lodge at the entrance to the drive.
It was at this juncture that the other gendarme reappeared. He was still on horseback, and, as he came towards us slowly, our attention became centred upon the man who walked beside him, with one hand on his stirrup. In the distance it looked very like Paulton.
He seemed quite composed. His mouth was bound up, partly concealing his face.
When a few yards from us the gendarme reined up. As he did so, Paulton raised his arm, pointed at me, and said in French —
“That’s the man you came to arrest. That is Dago Paulton.”
“And his companion?” the gendarme asked.
“Is his valet.”
“And your name, monsieur?”
“Ferrari – Paoli Ferrari. My father was Italian, my mother English. I have been in Mr Paulton’s service as butler for the last three years. Previous to that I was butler to Count Pinto” – the Portuguese diplomat who had won the cup for shooting.
“Thank you, monsieur, I am exceedingly indebted to you,” the gendarme said blandly. Then, producing an official-looking document, he said to me —
“We have to take you into custody, you and Madame la Baronne.”
For some moments, indignation prevented my speaking. Was it possible these outrageous statements of Paulton’s would be taken without question? Such a thing seemed monstrous and grotesque, but knowing, as I did, how intensely stupid some police officials are, no matter to what country they may belong, I thought it likely that I should presently be marched off and placed under lock and key.
Faulkner, to my annoyance, seemed amused.
“They will march you twelve miles to Digne,” he said, “and when you get there and prove your identity they will apologise in the most humble fashion for the mistake that has been made. Meanwhile, you will have had your twelve-mile walk, and Paulton have been allowed to escape. Had we looked less disreputable than we do, our statements might have been believed in preference to his.”
In my indignation I at first became sarcastic, and thinking that liberty at that moment would be far better than being held up upon a false charge, I made a sudden bolt for it, cutting swiftly across a meadow and leaping a stream. I am a good runner, but, of course, the mounted gendarmes were quickly upon me, and cut me off, so I soon found myself in their hands.
Faulkner elected to come with me, but we were not marched to Digne. Instead, we were allowed to walk leisurely alongside the horses as far as the village, a distance of two miles or so, and there were shown into a comfortable room in the tiny police bureau, and given breakfast. The garde-champêtre spoke English fluently. He had lived in England several years. Consequently in a short time we succeeded in convincing him of the blunder the gendarme had made, and in proving who we were.
By this time the village was beginning to awaken, and crowds were on their way to the château. We soon found a tradesman willing to let out a horse and trap in return for a louis paid in advance. In this we also started back for the château, anxious to get news of Vera, and of Violet.
On our way by the road, we found the lodge of the château, it had not been in sight more than a minute, when a large red car passed out through the gateway into the high road we were on, turned, and sped away from us along the long white ribbon of road at terrific speed. It must, we calculated as it dwindled into a distant speck, have been travelling at a speed of quite sixty miles an hour. Faulkner looked at me significantly. Our surmise had been correct, the servants had sought shelter at the lodge and had now left.
By the time we reached the smouldering ruins, a score of people, all of them peasants, stood staring at it. The good French farmers had each some platitude to make: “It must have been an enormous fire;” “It must have burned very quickly;” “Some one must have set it alight,” and so on. They were all people of the bovine type, as we found when we tried to obtain information from them.
The Baronne and her niece lived there. That was about all that they could tell us. Apparently they knew nothing of Paulton – had never seen or heard of him.
How many servants had there been in the Château they knew not. But a man and several women had just left the lodge in a motor-car.
“We can do no good by staying here,” Faulkner said at last. “We had better make for Digne. What puzzles me is, where can the servants be? There must have been servants, and they could have told us something. They are not at the lodge. Perhaps Paulton had taken them with him in the car we had seen. The only soul at the lodge is an old woman who is stone deaf, and she is crying so that she cannot speak at all.”
We stood gazing thoughtfully at the still smouldering fire, when Faulkner said suddenly —
“What is that big, square thing down among the twisted girders?” and he pointed to it.
We could not make out what it was. Then, all at once I realised.
“Why,” I said, “it’s a safe – one of those big American safes. I expect its contents are uninjured.”
But where was Vera? Ah! I felt beside myself in anxiety – a breathless, burning longing, to know how fared the one woman in all the world who held me in her hands for life, or for death.
She loved me, truly and well – of that I was convinced. And yet she existed in that mysterious hateful bondage – a bondage which, alas! she dared not attempt to break.
What could be the truth? Why were her lips closed? – Ay, why indeed? I dreaded to think.