By the time we reached the smouldering ruins, a score of people, all of them peasants, stood staring at it. The good French farmers had each some platitude to make: “It must have been an enormous fire;” “It must have burned very quickly;” “Some one must have set it alight,” and so on. They were all people of the bovine type, as we found when we tried to obtain information from them.
The Baronne and her niece lived there. That was about all that they could tell us. Apparently they knew nothing of Paulton—had never seen or heard of him.
How many servants had there been in the Château they knew not. But a man and several women had just left the lodge in a motor-car.
“We can do no good by staying here,” Faulkner said at last. “We had better make for Digne. What puzzles me is, where can the servants be? There must have been servants, and they could have told us something. They are not at the lodge. Perhaps Paulton had taken them with him in the car we had seen. The only soul at the lodge is an old woman who is stone deaf, and she is crying so that she cannot speak at all.”
We stood gazing thoughtfully at the still smouldering fire, when Faulkner said suddenly—
“What is that big, square thing down among the twisted girders?” and he pointed to it.
We could not make out what it was. Then, all at once I realised.
“Why,” I said, “it’s a safe—one of those big American safes. I expect its contents are uninjured.”
But where was Vera? Ah! I felt beside myself in anxiety—a breathless, burning longing, to know how fared the one woman in all the world who held me in her hands for life, or for death.
She loved me, truly and well—of that I was convinced. And yet she existed in that mysterious hateful bondage—a bondage which, alas! she dared not attempt to break.