"Bella! Bella! come back," shouted Cyril, and dashing forward he caught the girl in his arms and carried her away as the front door fell outward. A long tongue of flame shot out and licked the grass where Bella had stood a moment since.
By this time the house was blazing furiously, and every window save that out of which Mrs. Vand's head was thrust, vomited flame. The sky was now very dark, and the vivid redness of the flame in the gloom made a terrible and lovely spectacle. Bella, in her despair, would have rushed again to implore her aunt to escape, but that Cyril and Inglis held her firmly. "It is useless," they said, and the girl could not but admit that they were right.
Mrs. Vand apparently was quite mad. She kept flinging up her arms, and shouting out taunts to the police for having failed to catch her. Then she was seized with a fit of frenzy and began to throw things out of the window. Chairs, and looking-glasses, and rugs, and table ornaments did she fling out. Suddenly a devilish thought occurred to her crazed brain. She noted that a tongue of uncut corn stretched from the main body of wheat almost under the window. Darting back she plucked a flaming brand from the crackling door, and, regardless how it burnt the flesh of her hand, she ran to the window. "Off! off! off with you!" cried Mrs. Vand, and carefully dropping the brand on to the tongue of corn.
In one moment, as it seemed, the thread of fire ran along to the main body of the corn, and in an inconceivably short space of time, the acres of golden grain were a sheet of flame. The villagers, the police, both Cyril and Bella, ran for their lives, and it took them all their speed to escape the eager flames which licked their very heels. Pell-mell down to the boundary channel ran everyone. The plank bridge was broken, and many tumbled into the muddy water. Mrs. Vand stood at the window yelling, and clapping her hands like a fiend, and the whole vast fields of wheat flared like a gigantic bonfire.
Half swimming, half holding on to the broken bridge planks, Cyril, with Bella on his other arm, managed to scramble through that muddy ditch. Beside him shrieked women and cursed men and screamed children. The police having safely reached the other side stretched out arms to those in the water. Cyril and Bella were soon on dry land, and shortly everyone else was saved. Not a single life was lost, either by fire or water. And when safe on the hither side of this Jordan, the excited, smoke-begrimed throng looked at the flaming fields and the roaring furnace of the Manor house. The smoke and flame of the burning ascended to heaven and reddened the evening sky. Mrs. Vand, in setting fire to her last refuge, had indeed provided herself with a noble pyre and a dramatic end. Before those who watched could draw breath after their last exertions, the roof of the mansion fell in with a crash. Mrs. Vand gave one wild cry and fell backward. Then fierce, red flames enwrapped the whole structure, while far and wide the raging fire swept over the fields of the Solitary Farm.
"May God have mercy on her soul!" said Cyril removing his cap.
"Ah!" said Inglis, "if I had caught her, I wonder if the judge would have said as much."
"No," replied Bella, "she is dead, and she was innocent. God help her poor soul!" and everyone around echoed the wish.
Bella and Cyril did not go to London the next morning as they had arranged, but three days later. In the meanwhile search had been made amongst the ruins of the Manor-house for the body of Mrs. Vand. But nothing could be found. In that fierce furnace of flame she had been burnt to a cinder, and not even calcined bones could be gathered together. In a whirlwind of flame the unhappy woman had vanished, and her end affected Bella deeply. Indeed, Cyril feared lest the much-tried girl should fall ill, and on the third day he brought round the motor-car to Miss Ankers' cottage, to insist that she should come with him to London.