Let Him Lie (27 page)

But of course he could. But of course he did. But of course he would. He intended to leave her here in the burning house. He intended her death. He was wiping her out of his way as remorselessly as he had wiped Molyneux—more remorselessly, since murder, like other activities, grows easier with practice. He was watching not far away from her, the creeping and leaping of the flames that were to be her cremation-fires. Perhaps he had gagged her so tightly, not to prevent others hearing but to spare his own guilty ears her outcries. Silent, he might, if his heart misgave him, imagine her already dead.

But why the fire? Why could not Molyneux's murderer quiet her, as he had quieted Molyneux, with a bullet through the brain? What! A second bullet? A second obvious murder? No! Somebody had more sense than that. Somebody was staging an accident with Jeanie's parlour fire.
This old wood, it is like iron in some ways, but it will not stand constant heat. It dries and dries and dries. And one night it starts to smoulder and to smoke. And there is another old house burnt to the ground.
Somebody had said that to Jeanie not long ago. And somebody—several people, probably—would say something like it again at the inquest on her. And the verdict would be accidental death. And the coroner would issue a sapient warning against the danger of coal grates in old timber-built houses. And nobody would ever know that she had been murdered. And nobody would ever know who had murdered Molyneux.

Jeanie writhed upon the floor and dragged at her wrists until it seemed that the stuff that bound them must have cut its way to the burning bones: it was no use. Silently, as in a nightmare, she screamed against the cloth around her face. Her chest seemed bursting, her eyes seemed starting, hot and pulsing, from their sockets. A red cloud seemed to expand and shrink, expand and shrink, before her eyes in time to the thumping of her heart. No writhing of her neck, no twisting of her head against the boards of the floor, would loosen that cruel gag in her mouth.

“Oh help! Oh help!” cried Jeanie, but silently. Her hands plucked at her bonds, her feet ran down the stairs, but all in fancy. She could not stir nor whisper.

There was a crash in the room below. Foolish piercing hope sprang up in Jeanie's heart, stilling her breath to listen. Somebody had arrived to help her. There was another less noisy crash, a busy crackle, a happy rush of rustling sound. No. Nobody had come to help her. Those were the first of many crashes and smashes. Crash! fell the mantelshelf and smash! its ornaments as the flames swept up and burnt away the woodwork. Crash! went the metal tea-things to the floor as the table-legs swept off in a shower of fire, buckled in a heap of cinder. Crash! and smash! would soon go the plaster upon the ceiling below and the plaster on the walls, and the pictures and the screen. Crash the heavy bedroom furniture through the floor as the flames swept upwards to the timber-work of the roof. Then smash and tinkle a few loose tiles and out, flames, to the sky, free, joyful, beautiful, dancing and bowing, rushing up and sinking down, element to element, fire to wind, higher, higher, growing by what they fed on, cracking, exploding, roaring, under the frosty heavens!

Already the skin of Jeanie's face seemed to feel the blistering flames. It burnt. It seemed like bursting, it was so hot with fear and the constriction of the gag. All her blood seemed in her skin. She lay quite still, suddenly calm, in a sort of unreality of existence, assuring herself that nothing of all this was really happening, that she was dreaming, that all the time, really, she was safe. Such things as these—flames, destruction, hatred, violent death—did not, could not happen to people like her.

“Oh but they did, they could! Molyneux, that harmless, kindly, modest man had been murdered in his safe orchard as Jeanie was being murdered in her safe cottage. Suddenly, with a rush like an enveloping flame in a draught, terror came back to Jeanie. She writhed, she silently shrieked. The heat left her skin, her heart hammered as if it must soon break and fail, her face felt suddenly cold as if a ghost had breathed on it and a wetness that was not of hot sweat but of cold tears ran into her eyes.

There was a crash below. And suddenly there was a dancing in the corner of the room towards which her eyes were staring. A dancing in the shadows, a flickering, a light-hearted soft motion of light on darkness. She could see, fitfully and vaguely now, the leg of her bed and the white coverlet, the gleam of the polished floor. Straining her head back to look over her shoulder, she saw a flame come through the floor at the corner-post, fall back, rise again. That dancing in her darkness was the reflection of those rising flames. The light of the flames danced silently and gaily like fairies upon the walls and floor. But the flames themselves hissed cruelly as they rose. It was foolish to struggle, yet impossible not to struggle. She could see the whole room now, in occasional fitful views. The room with its dark gleaming woodwork and pale bed-clothes rose round her, fell into darkness again, rose round her again. The flames embraced the great corner-post. It was hard, hard with centuries, but it could not resist the flames for long. They hissed continually now, and the air was warm.

All the warm night was full of roaring sound. Roaring, purring sound. What was that screech? a terrified owl, a cat? One screech, no more. And the night was of a roaring, purring, throbbing sound that did not keep time with Jeanie's heart. Not a motor-car. Better not think of motor-cars, and rescuers and life. Better not. That sudden sound was not really the slam of a metal door. This other sound was not really made by feet running up the brick path. The smashing of windows—it was the fire which caused that! A smashed-in window made the same sound, whether smashed by falling timbers or by a man's hand. But voices! Human voices! Strange, lovely and terrifying sound of human voices!

The flames hissed so steadily now in the corner of the room that all Jeanie's strained agonised focusing upon that raucous shouting brought no sense to her ears. Were they stopping to argue, while she lay here in such peril? One raised voice, a man's voice with a queer, loose, hysterical quality, shouted something unintelligible. Another voice, harder and better controlled, replied. There was a scuffle. A crash. A clatter of ironwork on stone.

Silence. Oh God! Silence but for the sound of the fire, the crackling and the hissing. Only a moment's silence. Then footsteps on the stairs. Light, running footsteps taking the stairs two at a time.

“Here! Here!” Jeanie imagined herself shouting. Her head nearly burst with the effort. It would burst soon, did not this gag come off, could not she roll away, somehow, from this fearful, increasing heat. It would swell and swell and burst the gag, and then it would burst itself.

The room sank and rose, sank and rose. As it rose, there rose with it, standing in the doorway, startled, pale, transfixed, wearing a fur-lined overcoat and a scarf hardly whiter than his face, the figure of Eustace Agatos.

It was not Eustace Agatos that Jeanie saw. For Eustace Agatos was mortal, a mere man. It was humanity itself that Jeanie saw, the rescuer, a demi-god, a creature larger than life, endowed with all possible human strength and radiance.

Yet when, to the accompaniment of a great many ejaculations and curses over fumbling fingers and a blunt penknife, the demi-god had cut and removed the bonds around Jeanie's ankles and wrists and mouth, and Jeanie had staggered to her feet, all she could find to say with her swollen tongue and tortured throat was:

“You don't need a fur overcoat in this heat...”

The words came out only a hoarse whisper. She giggled feebly. She had a sort of hazy idea that she had said something rather witty. But giggling made her throat hurt.

“Eh?” said Agatos. “Come along. Now come along. Come along quickly. Come along.”

All right. Jeanie was coming along. There was no hurry. She was free. Now that her limbs were free she was all right. She could do anything. Get out of the window if necessary. Drop over the well of the stairs. Anything. Come along indeed! A person had to know what it was to be tied up and helpless before he could realise what it meant to have the use of his limbs!

“Now
do
come along! The staircase will be gone in a moment. Come along!”

It was hot. It was terribly, dangerously hot.

“All right, I
am
coming,” weakly whispered Jeanie, clinging to the banisters. Good Lord, it was hot! She was in a bath of sweat! “Only my legs are stiff or something.”

Stiff! As she spoke they collapsed like boiled bits of macaroni, and half supported by the swearing Agatos, half a willing victim to the force of gravity, Jeanie slithered somehow or other down the stairs.

Downstairs was full of smoke. It got in her eyes, in her throat, it half suffocated her. Agatos cursed and fumbled violently with the chain and bolt she had so thoroughly fastened. With streaming eyes, coughing, supporting herself on the newel-post, Jeanie saw through the open doorway the furnace that was her parlour. Her ears seemed stunned with the roar of the flames. Even out here in the passage the paint was blistering on the panels. Her own skin felt like that, blistering and peeling.

“Hurry up! Do hurry up! It's hot! I can't breathe!”

“Where then is the blasted bolt?”

“Let me!”

With the opening of the door it seemed to Jeanie that the fire whooped joyfully behind her and flung a great arm through the parlour doorway. She did not turn back until her feet were on the beautiful, cold, snowy grass. Then a crash which sounded as though the roof had fallen in made her turn. The roof had not fallen in. But flames were coming through the window of her bedroom. The snow was all melted on the gable-edge. There was light all round, and where there had been night and darkness were strange colours that Jeanie had never seen before. The damson brick of the chimney gleamed a lurid orange m the flames, the yew-tree had flickered out of its night blackness to a brilliant green it never wore by daylight. But oh, its friendly tassels that overhung the roof were black, black and shrivelled and smoking. The tiny crackling of its oily leaflets Jeanie thought she could hear above all the other din.

“Oh, oh, my poor little cottage!” cried Jeanie, with a sudden rush of tears. The tears, washing out smoke and smart and terror, were so consoling that she made no attempt to check them, but stood there in the snow, bare-footed and quite unaware that snow was cold, encouraging her tears by gazing at the ruins of her home. Petronella, indifferent to human sorrow, purred round her ankles.

“That was the joists of the first floor falling down,” observed Mr. Agatos beside her. With some satisfaction he added: “It was a good thing you came along when you did. I think there is no staircase now.”

His white fleshy face was glistening with sweat and streaked with black dirt, but he looked to Jeanie like an angelic being.

“You had better have my overcoat!”

Jeanie glanced down at her torn dressing-gown, her dirty night-dress, her blackened feet.

“Well, perhaps I'd better. How did you get here?” He guided her arms into the sleeves of his coat and carefully, like a nursemaid, buttoned it across her chest.

“I was on my way home from a house I had been looking at in Somersetshire. I saw the windows lit up with a light that flickered and flickered and did not stay still. I looked in the front window, but the room was all ablaze. I ran round the house and smashed the window of the back room. My good God!” uttered Agatos, breaking off sharply and staring at Jeanie, his hand still on a button-hole, as if something had momentarily stunned his faculties. His mouth was open. His sparse black hair had ceased to mitigate the nakedness of his scalp and stood fluffed on end like a perianth around the disc of his face. “My good God!” he cried again with extreme vehemence, starting away from Jeanie towards the burning cottage and starting back again as the heat drove him off. “That man! That man! Did he get out? My God, I had forgotten him! My God, I should have looked for him!”

“What man? Didn't he get out? What happened? You can't do anything now!”

“If he is still in there, he is a dead man! Oh, but then I have killed him! I heard an iron clattering sound when I pushed him over! I heard that crash and I heard no more, and I straightway forgot him as I ran upstairs. Suppose he was stunned when I pushed him back into the cupboard under the stairs? I think he fell upon those andirons that are there! If so, he is dead now, that is certain!”

“What happened?”

“I put my hand on his chest and pushed him out of my way. And he staggered back, he lost his balance and fell. I was surprised. And glad too, I can tell you,” added Agatos with a pale smile, “because he was much bigger than me, and I did not really see how I was going to get past him.”

A question formed itself on Jeanie's lips. She was strangely unwilling to ask it. She knew the answer.

“He was mad, too,” pursued Agatos. “Come along, I think we had better go round to my car while we can still get round. This place will soon be too hot to be comfortable. Also you cannot stand about in the snow in bare feet.”

“Oh, I can't bear to see the trees all scorched!” uttered Jeanie hoarsely. “I suppose—I suppose the man was—”

“He was mad. He said there was plenty of room in Grim's Grave for everybody!”

“Grim's Grave!”

“Yes. Now come along, my dear, I think I hear a car arriving.”

“Grim's Grave!” repeated Jeanie. She had to stand still and think. “Then it
was
because of Grim's Grave that Molyneux was murdered!”

“And I said there is also plenty of room in that cupboard, and in you go! and I pushed him very hard, but I was very surprised and very glad too when in he did go. Ah, there is a car and somebody on a bicycle! We shall soon have all Handleston here! And here comes the fire-engine! Come along, or they will not know you are safe and will be trying to rescue you!”