“Don’t be foolish, Ashton,” he answered. “Instead, hand out that box of matches. I do think,” he added, “it might have occurred to you to hang on to the rope to prevent my spinning round in that absurd fashion. I hate being made to look ridiculous.”
He struck a match. Yes, the cigarette was still between his lips!
I had never before seen a blazing house at close quarters, and the sight impressed though it appalled me. Together we walked out into the weedy Italian garden, a hundred yards or more, and there stood watching the spectacle. Truly, it was superb. One after another immense sheets of flame shot up high into the sky, parted into fifty tongues which quivered for an instant, then vanished.
Where was Vera? What of her? Was she still alive, or had she died in that awful furnace?
A breeze was at our backs, and thus the smoke was swept away, revealing the conflagration in all its awful grandeur.
And now the window we had just left began suddenly to turn red. The redness grew brighter. As I watched it, panting with excitement, a red and yellow ribbon licked the window frame that a few minutes previously we had clutched. The ribbon broadened, lengthened, swept out into the night, lapping the grey wall of the old château until it floated high above the roof, shrivelling the ivy and burning it to ashes.
That was the last window in the main building. There was nothing more to burn. For some moments the flames seemed slightly to subside. Then, all at once, with a great crash which must surely have been heard a mile or more away, the entire roof broke inward, opening up to the sky an inferno from which blazing fragments in their thousands and myriad sparks shooting up into the sky illuminated fields and woods for several miles around.
“What a gorgeous sight!”
It was the middle of the night, and the place being far removed from any habitation save the little village two miles off behind the hill, the alarm had not yet been raised.
I turned. Faulkner’s eyes, wide open, were rivetted on the scene. For the first time in his life, as I believe, he had given way to his emotion. “Ah!” he added in an undertone, “how this makes one think!”