Archie was voluble about this non-essential in face of the personal
tragedy, anxious to state his theory of the disaster, because he had
more than an uncomfortable consciousness of what the servants and the
men on the place were saying about it. And that was that the master
himself had set the house on fire. It had started in the large, empty
drawing-room, in which the decorators had been still working with
paints, oils, and inflammable stuff. The workmen, however, had not been
in the room for hours before the fire started. The only person who had
entered it during the evening was Archie himself, for it was on his way
from his library to his suite of rooms in the other wing. He had sat up
late as usual after the guests had gone, smoking and drinking by
himself, then had stumbled drowsily through the house to his bedroom,
and on the way doubtless had dropped a match or lighted cigar in the
drawing-room, and in his fuddled condition had failed to notice what he
had done.
The first person to discover the fire had happened to be Tom Clark, who
had been returning late from the village to his shack on the hill, and
had seen an unnatural glow through the long French windows of the
drawing-room. By the time he had roused the house servants in their
remote quarters and set off for the garage to summon help, the
drawing-room and the adjoining hall were a mass of flame. When he
returned with the new hose-cart and helpers the servants had already
opened the large front door, admitting the wind, which blew the fire
through the stairway like a bellows and completed the destruction of the
house. Clark knew as well as Ferguson, the superintendent, and a
half-dozen others, that when Archie emerged from his rooms on the ground
floor, he was not fully undressed: though it was past one in the
morning, he had not yet gone to bed. And although no one said anything,
habitually cautious as such people usually are when indiscretion may
involve them with their masters, they had easily made the correct
deductions about the cause of the fire....
When Archie came from the orangery, he saw Clark standing on the terrace
beside the ruins, examining the scene of his already famous exploit of
the night before. He may well have been wondering how he had ever
succeeded in keeping his balance and in crawling like a fly over the
surface of the wall he had helped to put up. There were a number of
other people loitering about the ruins, some of them from neighboring
estates, who had motored over to offer help and lingered to discuss the
disaster. Archie joined a group of these, among whom was the stone
mason. He was feeling unhappy about many things, especially about his
responsibility for the fire. He began to talk out his theory, turning
first to Clark.
"You didn't happen to see any of the men hanging about the place when
you came up last night?" he asked.
"No," the mason replied shortly.
"I thought maybe those Italians might have been sneaking about here.
They're ugly fellows," Archie remarked.
"I didn't see nobody around."
"Some of those fellows are regular anarchists," Archie persisted. "They
wouldn't stop at firing a house to get even with a man they're down on."
The mason stared at him out of his steely blue eyes, but said nothing.
He began to understand what Archie was driving at, and a deep disgust
for the man before him, who was trying to "put over" this cheap
falsehood to "save his face," filled the mason's soul. The others had
instinctively drawn away from them, and Clark himself looked as if he
wanted to turn on his heel. But he listened.
"I shouldn't be surprised if the house had been set on fire," Archie
continued confidentially. "I'm going to have detectives look into it. It
must have been either that or spontaneous combustion in the
drawing-room."
The mason's lips twitched ominously.
"But I think it was set on purpose!" Archie asserted.
"Oh, go to hell!" the mason groaned, his emotions getting the better of
him. "Set, nothing!... Spontaneous combustion! You know how it got on
fire better than anybody."
"What do you mean?" Archie demanded.
But the mason strode away from him around the corner of the wall and
disappeared. Archie followed him with his eyes, dazed and scowling. He
had never liked the fellow, and resented the fact that he had been the
hero of the disaster, while he himself, as he was well enough aware, had
presented a sorry figure. Now this common workman had insulted him a
second time, treated him as though he were dirt, dared even to make
dastardly insinuations. Across Archie's miserable mind came Adelle's
confused words about her property belonging to the stone mason--a half
of it. He had explained this at the time as due to the shock and a
woman's sentimental feeling of gratitude, but now he began to give it
another and more sinister interpretation. What had she been doing up at
this fellow's shack that afternoon? It hardly seemed possible, but
unfortunately in Archie's set, even among the very best people socially
of Bellevue, almost anything in the way of sex aberration was possible.
He started back for the orangery, but before he got there he realized
that it would be just as well not to approach his wife at this time with
what he had in mind. Lying there with her dead child in her arms she had
the air of a wounded wild animal that might be aroused to a dangerous
fury. He had the sense to see that even if his worst suspicions were
justified, it was hardly the moment to exact his social rights.
So he wandered back to the ruin of Highcourt, where he found condoling
friends, who took him off to the country club and kept him there, and it
is to be feared provided him with his usual consolation for the manifold
contrarieties of life, even for the very rich.