After a half-hour had gone by, Philippina began to wonder where Gertrude
was. She looked in the living room, then in Eleanore's room, and then
hastened up the steps and peeped through the open door into Daniel's
room. Daniel had stopped playing and was talking with Eleanore.
Philippina turned back. On the stairs she met Jordan just then coming in
from his evening walk. She lighted a candle, and looked in the kitchen.
Gertrude was nowhere to be found.
"It is raining; there is her raincoat, and here is her umbrella, so she
can't have gone out," thought Philippina to herself. She sat down on the
kitchen table, and stared before her.
She was filled with an ugly, bitter suspicion; she scented a tragedy. In
the course of another half-hour, she got up, took the lighted candle,
and started out on a second search. Something drove her all about the
house: she went out into the hall, into the various rooms, and then back
to the kitchen.
All of a sudden she thought of the attic. It was the expression on
Gertrude's face the last time she kissed Agnes that made her think of
it. Was not the attic of any house, and particularly the one in this
house, the room that had the greatest attraction for her, and that her
light-fearing fancy invariably chose as the most desirable and befitting
place for her hidden actions?
She went up quickly and without making the least noise. Holding the
lighted candle out before her, she stared at a rafter from which hung a
human figure dressed in woman's clothes. She wheeled about, uttering a
stifled gurgle. A sort of drunkenness came over her; she was seized with
a terrible desire to dance. She raised one leg, and sank her teeth deep
into the nails of her right hand. In her convulsions she had the feeling
that some one was crying out to her in a strong voice: "Set it on fire!
Set it on fire!"
Near the chimney wall was a pile of letters and old newspapers. She fell
on her knees, and exclaimed: "Blaze! Blaze!" And then, half with horror
and half with rejoicing, she uttered a series of irrational, incoherent
sounds that were nothing more than "Hu-hu, oi-oi, hu-hu, oi-oi!"
The fire from the papers flared up at once, and she ran down the steps
with a roar and a bellow that are fearful to imagine, nerve-racking to
hear.
In a few minutes the house was a bedlam. Daniel ran up the steps,
Eleanore close behind him. The women in the lower apartments came
running up, screaming for water. Daniel and Eleanore turned back, and
dragged a big pail full of water up the stairs. The fire alarm was
turned in, the men made their way into the building, and with the help
of many hands the flames were in time extinguished.
Jordan was the first to see the lifeless Gertrude. Standing in smoke and
ashes, he sobbed and moaned, and finally fell to the floor as if struck
on the head with an axe. The men carried Gertrude's body out; her
clothes were still smoking.
Philippina had vanished.