The Datchet Diamonds
Copyright© 2024 by Richard Marsh
Chapter 17: The Most Dangerous for of All
Mr. Paxton withdrew his face from the window. He turned towards the door, his ears wide open. The speakers were talking so loudly that he could hear distinctly, without moving from his post of vantage on the shelf, every word which was uttered. They seemed to be in a state of great excitement.
The first voice he heard belonged evidently to the quick-witted individual who had fastened him in the trap which he himself had entered.
“There he is--inside there he is--ran in of his own accord he did, so I shut the door, and I slipped the bolt before he knowed where he was. The winder’s only a little ‘un--if he gets hisself out, you can call me names.”
The second voice was one which Mr. Paxton did not remember to have previously noticed.
“Blast him!--what do I care where he is? He ain’t no affair of mine! There’s the Toff, and a crowd of ‘em down there--you come and lend a hand!”
“Not me! I ain’t a-taking any! I ain’t going to get myself choked, not for no Toff, nor yet for any one else. I feel more like cutting my lucky--only I don’t know my way across these ---- hills.”
“You ain’t got no more pluck than a chicken. Go and put the ‘orse in! Me and them other two chaps will bring ‘em up. We shall have to put the whole lot aboard, and make tracks as fast as the old mare will canter.”
A third voice became audible--a curiously husky one, as if its owner was in difficulties with his throat.
“Here’s the Toff--he seems to be a case. I ain’t a-going down no more. It’s no good a-trying to put it out--you might as well try to put out ‘ell fire!”
Then a fourth voice--even huskier than the other.
“Catch ‘old! If some one don’t catch ‘old of the Baron I shall drop ‘im. My God! this is a pretty sort of go!”
There was a pause, then the voice of the first speaker again.
“He do look bad, the Baron do--worse nor the Toff, and he don’t seem too skittish!”
“Strikes me he ain’t far off from a coffin and a six-foot ‘ole. You wouldn’t look lively if you’d had what he ‘as. That there ---- brained ‘im, and now he’s been burned alive. I tell you what it is, we shall have to look slippy if we want to get ourselves well out of this. Them others will have to scorch--it’s no good trying to get ‘em out--no mortal creature could live down there--it’ll only be a bit sooner, anyhow. The whole ---- place is like a ---- tinder-box. It’ll all be afire in less than no time, and it’ll make a bonfire as’ll be seen over all the countryside; and if we was seen a-making tracks away from it, there might be questions asked, and we mightn’t find that pretty!”
“Where’s the ---- as done it all?”
“In there--that’s where he is!”
“In there? Sure? My----! wouldn’t I like to strip his skin from off his ---- carcase!”
“He’ll have his skin stripped off from him without your doing nothing, don’t you be afraid--and made crackling of! He’ll never get outside of that--he’ll soon be warm enough--burnt to a cinder, that’s what he’ll be!”
Suddenly there was a tumult of exclamations and of execrations, sound of the opening of a door, and of a general stampede. Then silence.
And Mr. Paxton realised to the full what had happened. For into the place of his imprisonment there penetrated, all at once, the fumes of smoke--fumes which had an unpleasantly irritating effect upon the tonsils of his throat.
The house was on fire! The hanging-lamp which he had sent crashing to the floor had done its work--had, indeed, plainly, done more than he intended. Nothing so difficult to extinguish as the flames of burning oil. Nothing which gets faster, fiercer, more rapidly increasing hold--nothing which, in an incredibly short space of time, causes more widespread devastation.
The house was on fire! and he was caged there like a rat in a trap! The smoke already reached him--already the smell of the fire was in his nostrils. And those curs, those cowards, those nameless brutes, thinking only of their wretched selves, had left their comrades in that flaming, fiery furnace, to perish by the most hideous of deaths, and had left him, also, there to burn.
In a sudden paroxysm of rage, leaping off the shelf, he rushed to the opposite end of what, it seemed, bade fair to be his crematorium, and flung himself with all his weight and force against the door. It never yielded--he might as well have flung himself against the wall. He shouted through it, like a madman--
“Open the door! Open the door, you devils!”
In his frenzy a stream of oaths came flooding from his lips. In such situations even clean-mouthed men can swear. There are not many of us who, brought suddenly, under such circumstances, face to face with the hereafter, can calm our minds and keep watch and ward over our tongues. Mr. Paxton, certainly, was not such an one. He was, rather, as one who was consumed with fury.
What was that? He listened. It was the sound of wheels and of a horse’s hoofs. Those scoundrels were off--fleeing for their lives. And he was there--alone! And in the dreadful furnace, at the bottom of that narrow flight of steps, the miserable creatures with whom he had had such a short and sharp reckoning were being burned.
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