FIRE AND SACK
My first dismayed instinct was to pull Roland back upon his haunches,
my second to urge him through the wood by the shortest path he could
find. But Martin called me back.
"Not that way, Monsieur Gaspard. Never look rogues in the face if you
can see their backs, and perhaps old Babette has news."
Caution was wisest, and I followed him upstream. Five minutes' delay
could matter little to Solignac, and Babette's curiosity might be
trusted to have kept her informed of Jan Meert's doings. But we drew
the copse blank, though we hunted through it, crying her name
cautiously, there was no answer. To me silence was assurance. Jan
Meert and his fellow-rogues had left the chateau, having done their
worst, and the way was clear. No doubt we would find her waiting
helplessly before the ruin wrought by the Hollander, for she, too,
loved Solignac. The wonder was we had not already heard her outcry.
"Come," said I, driving Roland through the bushes.
"Better leave the horses behind," advised Martin.
But I would not.
"No," I answered curtly. "If Jan Meert is yonder we shall need their
legs; if not, why leave them?"
The time, be it remembered, was the verge of summer, almost summer
itself, with the foliage full and green, so it was not until the trees
thinned that I got my first sight of Solignac, a grey bulk of
weather-beaten stone between the columns of the oaks and pines. But it
was only when we had fairly cleared the wood that it dawned upon me
what and how much I owed the Hollander.
Through Martin's message, delivered at a time when no man likes to be
interrupted--for I talked with Brigitta in the shade, Roland's bridle
hooked over my arm--there had been a covert satisfaction that blunted
its edge. My recollection of what passed there differed from Martin's.
"Come, Monsieur Gaspard," said he, his sour look turned not on me, but
on the girl, "Solignac's a-fire, and there's a man's work to do."
"Solignac a-fire?" Not only I, but Brigitta echoed the words. As she
said them she laid her hands on my shoulders with a little high-pitched
laugh that set my heart beating even more than did the touch. The
peasant girl could feel as keenly as any fine lady, though of fine
ladies I knew nothing. My own thought was that Martin coined some
clumsy excuse to draw me home, anywhere away from Brigitta, whom he
hated malignantly, as only a narrow peasant can hate. So I added,
joining in the laugh, "Let who lit the fire put it out, and go thou and
help him."
"That's not Jan Meert's way," answered Martin, his voice rougher than I
had heard it since I had grown a man. "Come Monsieur Gaspard, come for
God's sake. You can find a face of brass any hour, but there's only
one Solignac."
"Is it serious?"
"Is Jan Meert serious? Is the devil serious? Solignac is hell, I tell
you, hell to-day, and Jan Meert its devil."
Even then, being, thank God, a man of no imagination, I did not
understand, and though we rode fast enough--too fast to please
Martin--it was the gallop that warmed my blood and not rage against Jan
Meert. Understand! How could I understand? How could any man
understand who has not seen the like? But now, as we broke the last
cover, I cried I do not know what curse, and spurred Roland forward at
a pace that cared never a jot whether or no the devil Jan Meert had
quitted that smoking hell of his own making. What three hundred grim
adventurous years had failed to do three hours had done, and the house
of my fathers was a hollow wreck. The walls still stood sheer, even
Jan Meert's malignancy had not strength to thrust stone from stone, but
the hewn mullions that divided the Norman windows were cracked with
fire, and from every blackened casement smoke blew out in little
vicious puffs as the great heat within poured up and out where once the
roof had been. There was neither flash nor glow of flame, no cataract
of fire, no roar of life swelling in destruction, nothing but the
sullen, steady flooding upwards of the reek. Solignac was already
dead, stripped and stretched on its funeral pyre, and the smoke of its
ashes cried to God for vengeance.
Martin, riding at my elbow, was speechless, but I could hear him
whimpering and whinging under his breath, as if a rough finger on a new
wound fretted him. To me, almost a peasant, as he had said, the sight
was a new one; but Martin had been my father's squire in wars south,
east, and west, and had seen both sack and siege. Then it was a matter
of course that the pride of ten generations should dissolve in one
hour's smoke and men and women go homeless, a thing to be borne
philosophically being the loss of others; but this was Solignac, this
was the birth-house of us both, and the cradle of his master's race,
and though he spoke no words, I knew well that every choked fret in the
throat was a curse that language could not match for expression or
better for force.
Round the north-west of the smoking house we dashed, our horses' mouths
frothing even in that short furlong; round to the grey façade where
stood the great door flush with the huge stone pillars from which it
hung.
"Babette!" I called out as we pulled up, "Babette! Babette! Where are
you, Babette?"
"Jan Meert!" cried Martin. "Lord God! Give me Jan Meert! What
matters Babette? There are a thousand Babettes, a thousand, but only
one Solignac, and--heavens of grace! See there!"
I saw, but because I saw, I answered nothing. Babette? At the sight
of Jan Meert's work I had forgotten Babette even while her name was on
my lips. I would not give a fig for the patriotism of the man who does
not hold his father's house dearer even than his country. In it every
stick and stone is sacred, hallowed not alone by many a tradition, but
by a thousand personal memories. Since the Lord God had taken my
mother to Himself Solignac had been the one dearest thing in life, and
behind the door that hung fretting on wrenched hinges Solignac lay in
profanation, its great square hall a heaped mass of reeking filth. Not
much was visible, but through the reeling uprights there showed a
suggestion of charred beams, rent furnishings, and half-burnt tapestry
strewn and scattered through with rubble from the upper walls; no! not
much, but enough! How ruthless would be the destruction, how
irreparable the ruin, when a casual clouded glance through sluggish
smoke could tell so vile a tale!
Dismounting, we knotted our reins together and turned the horses loose.
Blown as they were, they might be trusted not to stray, nor, so
soundless was Solignac, its silence broken only by the crackle of fire
or the rasp of wood on wood as the wreckage settled down, was there
need to provide a way of escape. Jan Meert was no longer to be feared.
He had done his worst, and moved on to other mischief.
At the threshold we paused, striving to measure that worst and failing
miserably. It was like death, and who, in the first numbness of his
sorrow, can weigh death in a balance to appraise the loss, or reckon up
the sum of its significance? The method of devastation we could
understand, but not the measure of its effects, and the thoroughness,
the grim malignancy of the method appalled me.
It was Martin who first made the process clear. As I have said, he had
seen war, and much of what was hidden from my ignorance was plain to
his experience.
"See, Monsieur Gaspard," said he, as we stood beneath the lintel, and
the sullen heat, acrid with the smell of smouldering wood, puffed and
eddied into our faces. He was frankly weeping now, but, as I believe,
unconsciously, his tears half grief, half rage at his helplessness.
"See with what a system and to what an end these devils went to work.
Not to burn Solignac, but to gut it beyond use was their object. Good
and well if it burned, but to destroy was the chief thought. What have
you done to Jan Meert that he should do this thing to Solignac? If
there was a debt it's paid and the reckoning is due on our side now.
They must have fired the house at a score of places; a score? two,
three score, but not to burn. Look how it is always the same; the ends
of the beams have gone, and then, pouf! down came the floor, down came
the middle walls, down came the roof, beam upon beam, rafter on rafter,
tearing the plaster and the copings with them till the very weight of
all choked the fire to a smoulder and a smoke. But what mattered that!
There is nothing left of Solignac but sheer walls, with here and there
a splintered spear of wood thrust out for the bats to swing from, and
that's what they worked for."
"In three hours?" said I helplessly; "three hours or four; how could
that be?"
"What Jan Meert does not know at such work no man knows. A smear of
fiery stuff here, a smear there, a touch under this beam, a touch under
that; the furnishings piled to the middle of the floor for weight, the
wood dry with the the dryness of three hundred years--but what does it
matter how he did it; there it is."
Yes, there it was, and neither guesswork nor cry of the heart could
make the disaster less complete, or lighten the weight of the blow.
Three hundred years of tradition, three hundred years of life and
death, man's honour and woman's pureness, mother's love and child's
reverence, all ended, as it were, in a breath, ended by a brutal
rogue's undeserved, unnatural, and unprofitable violence. Such an end
to such a place was as horrible as a wolf's rending out the life of an
innocent babe.
The heat was less than would have been supposed from such a pyramid of
smoking stuff, and, Martin leading by a foot or two, we crossed the
threshold. God! What a sight it was! Solignac was no mean house, and
there upon the flags lay not alone the roof, but the ruin of two floors
heaped in a pile whose ragged crests almost overtopped the jutting
points of the nearer joists. Beams, rafters, marble panelling, roof
tiles, rubble, rough-hewn masonry that had not seen the light for ten
generations, all flung together in an inextricable confusion that
beggars words. But whenever I hear it said that the glory of this
world perisheth, and my mind gropes for a picture of the last and awful
day of the Lord when the elements shall melt in fervent heat, back
there comes a vision of that sheer and naked shaft crammed high with
formless ruin, its blackened walls hung here or there with tattered
curtain-ends, the shredded gauds and remnants of our pride, and over
all a heavy pall of smoke whose acrid vapours stank smarting in the
nostrils. Over all? No, not quite. At times the drifted reek eddied
aside, and through the rift God's clear blue shone down.
Martin had entered a foot or two in advance, and that position he still
held, one arm thrust out and behind in the unconscious attitude of
protection. Suddenly I felt his hand shake with a jump, and his
fingers, still unconsciously, closed on my breast, pressing me back.
"We have seen enough, Monsieur Gaspard," said he, looking vaguely
round, "this thing hurts; why--why--stay any longer?"
Why indeed, seeing that I was beginning to understand, and every sharp
rasp of the disordered timbers as they settled down was the galling of
a wound, every smouldering glow of the grudging fire an eye of
derision? Only because his very touch was a warning, and that day was
Gaspard Hellewyl's second day of birth.