I went mad myself. I turned for an appreciable time into the madder man of the two; the railing and the raving were all on my side. They are not the least horrible thing that I remember. But I got through that stage, thank God! I like to think that one always must if there is time. There was time, and to spare, in my case. And there were those four calm candles waiting for me to behave myself, burning away as though they had never been out, one almost down to the shavings now, all four in their last half-inch, yet without another flicker between them of irresolution or remorse, true ecclesiastical candles to the end!
I had spat at them till my mouth was like an ash-pit; but there they burnt, corpse candles for the living who was worse than dead, mocking me with their four charmed flames. But mockery was nothing to me now. Nettleton had killed the nerve that mockery touches. When I shouted he gave me leave to go on till I was black in the face; nobody would hear me through the front of the house, and perhaps I remembered the heavy shutters he had made for the French windows at the time of the burglar scare? He went round to see if he could hear me through them, and he came back rubbing his hands. But now I took no more notice of his taunts. The last and cruellest was at the very flecks of blood on floor and shavings, flung far as froth in my demented efforts to tear either my foot from the trap or myself limb from limb.... And I had only sworn at him in my terrible preoccupation.
"No, that's where you're going, old cock!" he had answered. "And by the way, Gillon, when you get there I wish you'd ask for your friend Delavoye's old man of the soil; tell him his mantle's descended on good shoulders, will you? Tell him he's not the only pebble on the shores of Styx!"
That gave me something else to think about towards the end; but I had no longer any doubt about the man's inveterate insanity. His pale eyes had rolled and lightened with unstable fires. There had been something inconsecutive even in his taunts. Consistent only in keeping out of my way, he had explained himself once when I was trying to picture the wrath to come upon him, in the felon's dock, in the condemned cell, on the drop itself. It was only fools who looked forward or back, said Edgar Nettleton.
And I, who have done a little of both all my life, like most ordinary mortals, as I look back to the hour which I had every reason to recognise as my last on earth, the one redeeming memory is that of the complete calm which did ultimately oust my undignified despair. It may have been in answer to the prayers I uttered in the end instead of curses; that is more than man can say. I only know that I was not merely calm at the last, but immensely interested in what Nettleton would have called the winning candle. It burnt down to the last thin disk of grease, shining like a worn florin in the jungle of shavings that seemed to lean upon the flame and yet did not catch. Then the wick fell over, the last quarter-inch of it, and I thought that candle had done its worst. Head and heart almost burst with hope. No! the agony was not to be prolonged to the next candle, or the next but one. The very end of the first wick had done the business in falling over. I had forgotten that strong smell and the pools now drying on the floor.
It began in a thin blue spoonful of flame, that scooped up the worn grease coin, grew into a saucerful of violet edged with orange, and in ten or twenty seconds had the whole jungle of shavings in a blaze. But it was a violet blaze. It was not like ordinary fire. It was more like the thin blue waves that washed over the rocks of white asbestos in so many of our tenants' grates. And like a wave it passed over the surface of the floor, without eating into the wood.
There were no hangings in the room. The incendiary had relied entirely on his woodwork, and within a minute the floor was a sea of violet flames with red crests. There was one island. I had stooped after Nettleton left me for the last time, and swept the shavings clear of me on all sides, garnering as many as possible into the hole in the floor where the trap had been set, and drying the floor within reach as well as I could with the bare hand. There was this island, perhaps the size of a hearth-rug; and I cannot say that I was ever any hotter than I should have been on such a rug before a roaring fire.
But this fire did not roar, though it surged over the rest of the floor in its blue billows and its red-hot crests, flowing under the carpenter's bench as the sea flows under a pier. And the floor was not on fire; the fire was on the floor; and it was dying down! It was dying down before my starting eyes. Where the violet wave receded, it left little more mark than the waves of the sea leave on the sands. It was only the fiery crests that lingered, and crackled, and turned black and my senses left me before I saw the reason, or more than the first blinding ray of hope!
It was not Uvo Delavoye, and it was not Sarah, who was standing over me when I awoke to the physical agony on which that of the mind had acted lately as a perfect anodyne. It was the Delavoyes' doctor. Uvo had sent for him in the middle of the night, telling his poor people he felt much worse—having indeed a higher temperature—but being in reality only unbearably anxious about Nettleton and me. He wanted to know what Nettleton was doing. He wanted to be sure that I was safe in my bed. If his sister had not been nursing him, he would have made a third madman by crawling out to satisfy himself; as it was, he had sent for the doctor and told him all. And the doctor had not only come himself, but had knocked up his partner on the way, as they were both tenants on the Estate.