He went to the door, and opened it. The passage, their one hope of reaching the body of the Castle, was an impassable mass of flame at its further end. Kingston came back into the room. Even now the full horror of the situation had not struck him.
‘I’m afraid we can’t escape that way,’ he said quietly. ‘The corridor is ablaze.’
Gundred, meanwhile, was vigorously pulling at the bell; in the silence that followed Kingston’s announcement she continued methodically at her task, and the knob could be heard slapping again and again into its socket as she released it.
Isabel had said nothing hitherto. He waited poignantly to hear what she would suggest.
At last she spoke. Her voice was strained with agony and terror.
‘And I--I cannot move,’ she said. ‘I am tied by the leg.’
Kingston turned furiously upon Gundred, who, in an access of vain frenzy, was rending and tearing the bell.
‘Leave off making that hideous row!’ he exclaimed. ‘What do you suppose is the use of it? Do you imagine the servants will come through three yards of fire to get us out?’
‘What are we to do?’ asked Gundred feebly.
‘I’m hanged if I know,’ replied her husband. ‘We must do something, that’s certain, and pretty quickly. These old rooms will burn like tinder. There must be some way along outside.’ He looked out of the farther window. Now the clamour of the fire was growing every moment more insistent. The night air was aglow, and burning fragments were dropping like meteors towards the sea beneath.
‘Yes,’ said Kingston. ‘There is a little ledge of rock. One couldn’t walk along it in the daytime, but we have no choice. Gundred, you will have to do what you can. You will be able to get along quite safely, if you go quickly and don’t think about it. And I must take charge of Isabel. Isabel, I’m afraid it won’t be very good for your bad leg, but I must carry you somehow. And there is no time to be lost.’
Then Gundred understood everything. In the midst of an orderly comfortable life, it is not easy to understand that one is suddenly hemmed in by inexorable death. But at last the facts of the situation all burst in a shrieking pandemonium upon Gundred’s brain. She faced round upon her husband, read his face, and knew suddenly what terrible thing it was that he was thinking. In that awful moment of unveiled sincerity she saw that she, his wife, came second in his consideration. She was to get away as best she could. It was Isabel that mattered. The slow secret fears of her life roared out into the open, swept down upon her in a storm, and culminated. She clasped her hands for self-control, as the world shook and tottered round her. Desperately she clutched at her escaping senses; then, in a swirl, everything rushed together, grew dark, vanished. She dropped her hands, gave a sharp, moaning cry, and fainted. In the blank silence that followed her fall the voracious bellowing of the fire drew closer and fiercer.
