‘Leave off making that hideous row!’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you suppose is the use of it? Do you imagine the servants will come through three yards of fire to get us out?’
‘What are we to do?’ asked Gundred feebly.
‘I’m hanged if I know,’ replied her husband. ‘We must do something, that’s certain, and pretty quickly. These old rooms will burn like tinder. There must be some way along outside.’ He looked out of the farther window. Now the clamour of the fire was growing every moment more insistent. The night air was aglow, and burning fragments were dropping like meteors towards the sea beneath.
‘Yes,’ said Kingston. ‘There is a little ledge of rock. One couldn’t walk along it in the daytime, but we have no choice. Gundred, you will have to do what you can. You will be able to get along quite safely, if you go quickly and don’t think about it. And I must take charge of Isabel. Isabel, I’m afraid it won’t be very good for your bad leg, but I must carry you somehow. And there is no time to be lost.’
Then Gundred understood everything. In the midst of an orderly comfortable life, it is not easy to understand that one is suddenly hemmed in by inexorable death. But at last the facts of the situation all burst in a shrieking pandemonium upon Gundred’s brain. She faced round upon her husband, read his face, and knew suddenly what terrible thing it was that he was thinking. In that awful moment of unveiled sincerity she saw that she, his wife, came second in his consideration. She was to get away as best she could. It was Isabel that mattered. The slow secret fears of her life roared out into the open, swept down upon her in a storm, and culminated. She clasped her hands for self-control, as the world shook and tottered round her. Desperately she clutched at her escaping senses; then, in a swirl, everything rushed together, grew dark, vanished. She dropped her hands, gave a sharp, moaning cry, and fainted. In the blank silence that followed her fall the voracious bellowing of the fire drew closer and fiercer.
‘My God!’ said Kingston, in the low tone of absolute terror, ‘what are we to do now?’ He looked at Isabel. Between the two helpless women he must make his choice. He must make it instantly, too. He could not by any possibility save both. He looked again from Isabel to Gundred. Isabel’s face, in that supreme hour, was white and wet with anguish, but she said nothing. She saw too well what Gundred’s collapse involved. Kingston still stood glancing from one to the other. He knew which of the two his whole soul cried aloud to save; he knew also which of the two his duty called on him to save. Love and duty were at last impossible to reconcile. On the razor’s edge of agony his mind poised and quivered through a pause that seemed to fill whole delirious hours, yet was come and gone in a flash. Insensibly he was waiting to hear Isabel pronounce his sentence and her own. All her passionate love of life shone in her straining eyes. They implored him, called upon him, cried violently to him for safety. And then, in an instant, Isabel’s eyes were opened, and her soul rose triumphant on its wings.
‘Your wife,’ she said, with dry lips, almost inaudibly. ‘Your wife. You must save her. Go—go quickly—and then come back for me—if there is time—oh God, come back for me quickly.’
All was over. He knew he must obey. Without a word, he turned and gathered up the inanimate bundle that was Gundred. In feverish haste he clambered with his burden through the window. Insatiably, terrifically, the fire raged and ravened overhead. As he went he had a last glimpse of Isabel, her face gleaming with fear, set in the strain of mortal anxiety, her white hands clenched and writhing together on the quilt. Then he was out in the darkness, with brands and lumps of burning matter falling thick about his ears, drifting down into the night, to sink at last, hissing, into the invisible sea below. Stumbling, tottering, staggering, he dragged his load. How he ever reached safety he could never have told. A hundred times it seemed as if he must fall. But he struggled on vaguely, half-consciously, through a nightmare, and found himself at last on sure ground, under the shelter of the old Castle walls. Savagely he dropped his unconscious burden on a level spot, then turned to rush back for Isabel. And, at that moment, before his bloodshot eyes, the old wooden wing collapsed into a blazing hell of fire—a vomiting pyramid of sparks and flame.