Then, as if, after having been swung out into space for an immeasurable distance, she came back to the same point again—and the mist melted away, and the light was clear once more; and with a keen vision, though still with a giddy and confused feeling in her head, Heather beheld Arthur coming out of the carpenter’s shop, dragging a bag of shavings after him, which he shot out into one of the lower floors of the silk factory.
Still she watched him. He piled shavings, sackful after sackful, among the bales of raw silk—he carried the old wrapperings and more shavings into the counting-house—she saw him bring jars of oil and turpentine and empty them on the heap he had already collected.
“He has gone mad,” she decided, rising up; “he has gone mad, and he is going to set the place on fire; and we cannot get out, and there is no help to be had.”
None, for they were locked in. She dared not go downstairs and beat at the gates, for she felt more afraid now of encountering Arthur than even of remaining where she was.
Oh! those cruel walls, those dead, eyeless, earless walls, to which she might scream herself hoarse in vain—this solitude in the midst of numbers—this helplessness, with help within a few feet of her—this prison without a gaoler—this cage in which they were both about to be burned to death.
Well enough she knew that if once the factory caught fire, no living creature could long breathe within that confined space. It would be like trying to exist in a brick oven with a furnace alight at the one end. Already she seemed to feel the hot tongues of flame licking her cheek—already the struggle for life, dear life, appeared to have begun—already the scorching heat was drying up her blood—already she was beating against the closed gates, beating with her clenched hands till they were bruised and bleeding, while the fire raged behind, and the air became hotter and hotter, the flames fiercer and fiercer.
Already the horror she had often felt of fire in that enclosed place seemed to have become a tangible reality; and, with a low cry, Heather rushed from the room, and down the staircase.
A moment before Arthur had come back across the yard, instinctively she felt for matches. Another second and it would be too late; all fear of meeting him was gone; all fear, save the dread of an awful death for both; and so she flew down the stairs and met him as he came out of his own apartment, with a box of vestas in his hand.
She need not have feared meeting him; all the dread she had felt was as nothing compared to the terror which came into his face at sight of his wife. They had changed places now, and it was she, not he, who was strong and mad; in her frenzy, she struck the box out of his hand, and it fell over the banisters, the matches scattering on the floor-cloth below. Then she threw herself upon him, and asked if he knew what it was he had been about to do. With passionate sobs she prayed him to stay his hand, and to spare them both. Scarcely knowing what she said, she asked what could have tempted him to such a deed; if he were insane to think of committing so great a sin. With her arms twined around him, and her words flowing fast and unpremeditated, she poured out all her dread, her trouble, her horror, in a few hurried sentences.
She might as well have spared her remonstrances and her entreaties. From the moment he beheld his wife, all hope of escape, honourable escape, even by death, from the position in which he had placed himself, vanished. He had laid his plans so well, as he thought; and behold, in a moment, her love overthrew them all! While she, clinging to him, went on praying and pleading, weeping and sobbing, all this passed through the man’s mind. For the time, he had been stunned, cowed, as though he had met a phantom; but now, pushing her from him, with a sudden force which made her stagger and reel, he disengaged himself from her, and backing into the room he had just left, locked and bolted the door behind him.