The major-domo, an elderly, grey-haired man who had been born and reared upon the estate and who had taken service with Glyn Peterson on the day when he had first brought Jacqueline, a bride, to Beirnfels, caught sight of the riding-party returned and came hurrying to Jean’s side.
The tears were running down his wrinkled face as he recounted the discovery of the fire, which must have started either just before or during the servants’ dinner-hour, when few people, of course, were about the castle, and which had obtained a firm hold before it was detected.
The household staff, practised to a limited extent,—a fire drill had been held once a month in Peterson’s time—had done their hest to cope with the flames, but vainly. The high wind which had arisen had thwarted their utmost efforts, and finally giving up all hope of saving the interior from being gutted, they had confined themselves to rescuing such valuables as could be easily removed.
There was the usual mystery as to how the fire had originated, and several stories circulated amongst the chattering throng which hurried hither and thither, momentarily augmented by the peasants who, at sight of the castle in flames, had come trooping up the hill from the village below.
The most likely story, and the one to which Blaise inclined to give most credence, was that the child of a woman who worked daily at the castle, escaping from its mother’s care and launched on an independent voyage of discovery through the rooms, had knocked over a burning lamp. Then, terrified at the immediate consequences—the sudden flaring of some ancient tapestry, dry as tinder with the summer heat, near which the lamp had fallen—he had bolted away, out of the castle and so home, too scared to tell anyone of the accident.
But, as Jean commented mournfully, what did it matter how it happened? Except from the prosaic viewpoint of the fire insurance company, who would probably desire to know: all kinds of details that it was impossible to supply!
For her, nothing mattered except that Beirnfels, her home from childhood and the place where she and Blaise had proposed to spend a great part of their married life, was a furnace of flames.
It was a splendid but very terrible sight The great, grim walls of the castle stood four-square against the sky, charred and blackened but defiantly impervious to the flames that were licking covetously against the solid stone which fashioned them. Sentinel to the very end, they reared themselves unvanquished, guardians still, though all that they had sheltered through their centuries of watch and ward lay consumed within their very heart.
Jean, standing beside Blaise and watching the upward tossing flames and the crimson banner of the lowering heavens, spoke suddenly:
“‘And the sky as red as blood above it.’ Blaise, the last of Keturah Stanley’s prophecies has come true!”