"There's my chest of drawers," said Dorothea under her breath. "Oh, Lettice, oh, Lettice! what is that man doing with my best crêpe de Chine nighties? Oh, look, he's packing them all up—he can't be going to wear them himself, he must be taking them for his best girl in Germany, and they're every single one embroidered with my name in full—oh, good gracious, how can he?" She broke into a hysterical giggle. "Oh, really, I do think Germans have funny sort of minds! Oh, look, look, there's your bureau out of the den—"
Lettice's bureau—it was Gardiner's bureau, the one he always used, the very one he had bought from Madame Hasquin in Lettice's presence; he loved it too much to let it out of his own room. The officer, staying his men with a word, began to look through the drawers, presumably for valuables. The file of Lettice's household bills he tossed aside; letters and other papers he skimmed, before rejecting them.
Lettice's hand fell from Dorothea's arm. She walked straight across the courtyard to his side. "What are you doing with that bureau?" she asked.
"Requisitioned for the army," was the curt reply.
"You mean, you want it yourself," said Lettice. "It's stealing; and you and your men are just thieves and murderers."
He turned, then, and looked at her, while Dorothea plucked at her sleeve, whispering frantic entreaties. But only a firing party could have silenced Lettice at that moment.
"No, madam, it is not stealing, it is war," said the German in an altered voice. "You are conquered; you have no longer any property or any rights but what we choose to allow you. You would do well to remember that. And let me advise you in future to be more careful of what you say. Not all my compatriots have an English education to look back upon."
Then Dorothea pulled her away, still reluctant; and it was Dorothea, in the nightmare minutes that followed, who sorted and packed in wild haste all she thought they could carry. There was not much left to take. She stuffed some clothes into a couple of pillow-cases, and dragged the silent Lettice out at the back, past some soldiers who with the same deadly method were smashing the windows in turn and spraying the interior. These men wore broad belts to which were attached a hatchet, a syringe, a small shovel, and a revolver. On the belts were the words, "Company of Incendiaries," also, "God with us." As Dorothea had said, Germans have funny sort of minds.
Crouching at the top of the orchard behind the house, the two girls watched the last of the Bellevue. First the petrol caught, an amethystine aura flickering insubstantial. Then the woodwork kindled, and yellow flames began to twine among that ghostly harebell blue. Orange pennons slid softly through the empty window frames; tiny golden curls started out along the eaves, small and even as a row of gas jets. The flames lengthened, they united, they rippled and flapped up the sky like a banner. They grew many-tinted, according to their fuel—gold, silver, ruby, emerald, amethyst, topaz, metallic blue. Lastly the roof fell in, and a great foursquare of fire puffed up to heaven, with streams of starry sparks, and clouds of glare, and floating flakes of gold. Dorothea was crying; but Lettice, her lips set grimly, watched to the end the destruction of Gardiner's hotel, the home he loved, which he had confided to her care.
Night came, but not darkness. Rochehaut was burning, Poupehan in the valley flared with half-a-dozen haystacks and a house or two, Corbion church was a beacon of tall flames on the hill, Alle's martyrdom showed as a pulsing glow of dusky rose in the overhanging cloud. On the far side of the valley, marching home with their booty down the road from Corbion to Bouillon, the soldiers of the Fatherland were singing, Deutschland über Alles.