The Mysterious Three Part 22

"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 j.a.pan, 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 pa.s.sage 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 bra.s.s 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 G.o.d! Help_!" The door of the room creaked ominously. Phew! The heat in the pa.s.sage was scorching it. In a minute it would burst into flame. Where was that voice? I rushed to the window--

"_h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo_!" 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 chateau 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.