‘What is that?’ said he. ‘Are they burning heather? My faith, it is sultry here; and the insects they so hum and drone, one might be in a wood instead of the open. And yet ’tis not like insects neither.’
The murmur, or clamour, whatever it was, appeared all in front of them, and to swell in volume as they advanced. They could see nothing beyond the sloping track before them, and the trees which topped it. As they reached these, Brion pulled on his rein, bidding his companion stop.
‘Listen!’ he said.
The noise, with their reaching the level ground, had sensibly increased, as when a swell is opened in an organ. Busy, multitudinous, inarticulate, it seemed as if compounded of a confusion of human voices, and cracking whips, and hissing kettles, their shrill spasmodic utterance perpetually punctuating a dull booming roar which never ceased; but all in a minor key, as though subdued by distance, and the closeness of the high trees which here shut in the track.
‘What is it, Brion?’ whispered the girl fearfully.
Something caught the tail of his eye, and he looked up to see a drift of what he could not mistake scudding over the tree-tops.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. His face was suddenly set like death. ‘Stay where you are, Joan, while I go and see.’
He drove spurs into his horse, and, leaping forward, rushed the few score yards to the bend where the Grange would come into view. He was incredulous still: it would appear too impossible a devilry on the part of Fate to have struck this blow, and struck it coincidently with his return. Yet, even before he reached the bend, he knew that it was true—was true. The red sparkle of it, like a cluster of hellish jewels, blinked and snickered at him through the green leaves. And then the next moment he had broken into the open, and pulling up so sharply as almost to throw his horse back on its haunches, rose in his stirrups and saw. From base to attic the house was one streaming robe of flame.
CHAPTER XXXII.
RETRIBUTION
When the crowner, with his twelve good men and true—yokels, for the most part, drawn from the neighbouring farms—came to sit on the body of Quentin Bagott, Scrivener Harnett—he who had witnessed the Will—was present, as representing the interests of the heir to the estate. Evidence as to facts being incontestable, the jury, following the plain lead of their officer—himself a friend of the attorney—gave in their verdict to the effect that the deceased had died by the visitation of God, being a very stout gentleman and suspect of Popish inclinations; which rider, however, the crowner—at Master Harnett’s instance—ruling to be irrelevant, it was omitted from the record, and the simple verdict left to stand.