"Jan Meert!" cried Martin. "Lord God! Give me Jan Meert! What matters Babette? There are a thousand Babettes, a thousand, but only one Solignac, and—heavens of grace! See there!"
I saw, but because I saw, I answered nothing. Babette? At the sight of Jan Meert's work I had forgotten Babette even while her name was on my lips. I would not give a fig for the patriotism of the man who does not hold his father's house dearer even than his country. In it every stick and stone is sacred, hallowed not alone by many a tradition, but by a thousand personal memories. Since the Lord God had taken my mother to Himself Solignac had been the one dearest thing in life, and behind the door that hung fretting on wrenched hinges Solignac lay in profanation, its great square hall a heaped mass of reeking filth. Not much was visible, but through the reeling uprights there showed a suggestion of charred beams, rent furnishings, and half-burnt tapestry strewn and scattered through with rubble from the upper walls; no! not much, but enough! How ruthless would be the destruction, how irreparable the ruin, when a casual clouded glance through sluggish smoke could tell so vile a tale!
Dismounting, we knotted our reins together and turned the horses loose. Blown as they were, they might be trusted not to stray, nor, so soundless was Solignac, its silence broken only by the crackle of fire or the rasp of wood on wood as the wreckage settled down, was there need to provide a way of escape. Jan Meert was no longer to be feared. He had done his worst, and moved on to other mischief.
At the threshold we paused, striving to measure that worst and failing miserably. It was like death, and who, in the first numbness of his sorrow, can weigh death in a balance to appraise the loss, or reckon up the sum of its significance? The method of devastation we could understand, but not the measure of its effects, and the thoroughness, the grim malignancy of the method appalled me.
It was Martin who first made the process clear. As I have said, he had seen war, and much of what was hidden from my ignorance was plain to his experience.
"See, Monsieur Gaspard," said he, as we stood beneath the lintel, and the sullen heat, acrid with the smell of smouldering wood, puffed and eddied into our faces. He was frankly weeping now, but, as I believe, unconsciously, his tears half grief, half rage at his helplessness. "See with what a system and to what an end these devils went to work. Not to burn Solignac, but to gut it beyond use was their object. Good and well if it burned, but to destroy was the chief thought. What have you done to Jan Meert that he should do this thing to Solignac? If there was a debt it's paid and the reckoning is due on our side now. They must have fired the house at a score of places; a score? two, three score, but not to burn. Look how it is always the same; the ends of the beams have gone, and then, pouf! down came the floor, down came the middle walls, down came the roof, beam upon beam, rafter on rafter, tearing the plaster and the copings with them till the very weight of all choked the fire to a smoulder and a smoke. But what mattered that! There is nothing left of Solignac but sheer walls, with here and there a splintered spear of wood thrust out for the bats to swing from, and that's what they worked for."
"In three hours?" said I helplessly; "three hours or four; how could that be?"
"What Jan Meert does not know at such work no man knows. A smear of fiery stuff here, a smear there, a touch under this beam, a touch under that; the furnishings piled to the middle of the floor for weight, the wood dry with the the dryness of three hundred years—but what does it matter how he did it; there it is."
Yes, there it was, and neither guesswork nor cry of the heart could make the disaster less complete, or lighten the weight of the blow. Three hundred years of tradition, three hundred years of life and death, man's honour and woman's pureness, mother's love and child's reverence, all ended, as it were, in a breath, ended by a brutal rogue's undeserved, unnatural, and unprofitable violence. Such an end to such a place was as horrible as a wolf's rending out the life of an innocent babe.
The heat was less than would have been supposed from such a pyramid of smoking stuff, and, Martin leading by a foot or two, we crossed the threshold. God! What a sight it was! Solignac was no mean house, and there upon the flags lay not alone the roof, but the ruin of two floors heaped in a pile whose ragged crests almost overtopped the jutting points of the nearer joists. Beams, rafters, marble panelling, roof tiles, rubble, rough-hewn masonry that had not seen the light for ten generations, all flung together in an inextricable confusion that beggars words. But whenever I hear it said that the glory of this world perisheth, and my mind gropes for a picture of the last and awful day of the Lord when the elements shall melt in fervent heat, back there comes a vision of that sheer and naked shaft crammed high with formless ruin, its blackened walls hung here or there with tattered curtain-ends, the shredded gauds and remnants of our pride, and over all a heavy pall of smoke whose acrid vapours stank smarting in the nostrils. Over all? No, not quite. At times the drifted reek eddied aside, and through the rift God's clear blue shone down.