The priest alone seemed to pay no attention to the circumstance; nevertheless he felt and comprehended far better than they did the nature of the fate awaiting them, and hurried on to the conclusion of the Mass, which was by this time, fortunately, well-nigh over.
He had hardly finished the communion prayer before the heat and suffocation had become unbearable. In an agony of terror, the people made a rush to the gates, and tore down the screen of matting which separated the church from the porch beyond.
Then arose a wild cry of despair, filling the church from floor to ceiling—the cry of human beings caught in a snare from whence, except by a cruel death, there was no escaping. The porch was already a blazing furnace, filled almost to the roof, with fagots burning in all the fury that pitch and tar, and other combustibles flung liberally among them, were calculated to produce. These, then, were the sounds which had disturbed Nellie during Mass. The enemy had profited by the rapt devotion of these poor people to build up, unheard and unsuspected, their death-pile in the porch, after which doughty deed they had retired, closing the gates behind them, and trusting the rest to the terrible nature of the ally they had so recklessly invoked.
To attempt a passage through that sea of fire in its first wild fury would have been instant death; and amid the cries of women and children, many of whom were well-nigh trampled to death beneath the feet of their fellow-victims, the crowd swayed backward.
Then came another horror. An unhappy girl, one of the foremost of the throng, in her eagerness to escape, had rushed so far into the porch that her garments caught fire, and, mad with pain and fear, she flung herself face downward upon a heap of driftwood near her. It was all that was needed to complete the work of destruction. The wood, dry and combustible as tinder, ignited instantly, and in two minutes more was a mass of flame. In vain some of the men, with the priest at their head, leaped on it in a wild effort to trample it out before it could spread further. As fast as it was stifled in one place it broke out in another, the subtle element gliding along the walls and seizing upon stack after stack of wood with an ease and speed that mocked at all their efforts to extinguish it. No words can paint the horrors of the scene that followed! Heavy volumes of black smoke, ever and anon rolling upward from some new spot upon which the fire had fastened, at times shut out the light of day, and made the darkness almost palpable to the senses. Fire, bright and angry, flashing at first here and there at intervals, like forked lightning, through the gloom; then coming thicker and quicker, as it grew with what it fed on, hurrying and leaping in its exultant fury, licking up and devouring with hungry tongues all that opposed its progress—now spreading itself in sheets of molten flame, now contracting into red, hissing streams, bearing a terrible resemblance to fiery serpents, but never for a moment slackening in its work of woe, winding hither and thither, and in and out, and fastening with all the malice and tenacity of a conscious creature upon everything combustible within its reach, until the very rafters overhead were wreathed in flame—and underneath that awful canopy the panting, shrieking crowd, struggling in that sulphurous atmosphere of smoke and fire, rushing backward and forward, they knew not whither, in search of a safety they knew too well they could never find; for even while obeying the animal instinct to fly from danger, there was not a creature there who did not feel to the very inmost marrow of his being, that unless a miracle were interposed to save him, he was doomed then and there to die.
Nellie was the only person in the church, perhaps, with the sole exception of the pastor, who made no vain effort at escaping. Driven by the swaying of the others, after their first rush to the door, backward toward the altar, she had remained there quietly ever since, praying, or trying to pray, and shutting eyes and ears as much as might be to the terrible sights and sounds around her. Accident had, in fact, brought her to the only spot in the building where safety was for the moment feasible.
The altar was built, as we have already said, of stone, and being placed at some distance from any of the walls, the space in front, though stifling from heat and smoke, was clear of fire, and consequently of immediate danger.
Hither, therefore, the priest, who, having done all that man could do toward the stifling of the flames, now felt that another and a higher duty—the duty of his priestly office—must needs be exercised, endeavored to collect his flock, and hither, at his bidding, one by one they came, every hope of rescue extinguished in their bosoms, and scorched, and bruised, and half-suffocated as they were, lay down at his feet to die. There was no loud shrieking now—the silence of utter exhaustion had fallen upon them all, and only a low wail of pain broke now and then from the white, parched lips of some poor dying creature, as if in human expostulation with the sputtering and hissing of the flames that scorched him. Once, and only once, a less fitting sound was heard—a curse, deep but loud, on the foe that had so ruthlessly contrived their ruin.
It reached the ear of the priest as he stood before the altar, sometimes praying up aloud, sometimes with look and voice endeavoring to calm his people, waiting and watching with wise, heroic patience for the precise moment when, all hopes of human life abandoned, he might lead them to thoughts of that which is eternal.