For a few moments thereafter nothing was seen by Marguerite. The walls of the house were a curtain between her and the tragic stage. She could only imagine the overturning of furniture, the pillage of rooms a moment since clean and orderly, now a dirty wreckage, a pandemonium of a search—and then the empty roof was no longer empty. A man sprang out upon it, a man wearing the uniform of a French officer. He had been bolted like a rat by dogs.
Clearly his enemies were upon his heels. Marguerite saw him spring over the parapet on to the adjoining roof and a cloud of women assail him. Somehow he threw them off, somehow he dived and dodged between them, somehow he reached the further parapet, found a ladder propped against the outside wall, and slid down it on to a third housetop. And as he reached the flat terrace, yet another swarm of screaming termagants enveloped him. He was borne down to the floor of the room.
For a little while there was a wild tossing of arms, a confusion of bodies. It seemed to Marguerite as though all these women had suddenly melted into one fabulous monster. Then, with shrieks of joy and flutterings of scarves and handkerchiefs, they stood apart, dancing flatly on their feet. The officer for his part lay inert and for the best of reasons; he was bound hand and foot. . . . And shortly afterwards the women lighted a fire. . . .
“A fire?” said Marguerite, in a perplexity. “Why a fire?”
She watched—and then she heard the dreadful loud moan of a man in the extremity of pain. In a moment she was shaking Paul Ravenel by the shoulder, her face white and quivering, her eyes still looking out in horror upon a world incredible.
Ravenel came slowly out of a deep sleep, with a thought that once more the insurgents were about his door. But a few stammering words from Marguerite brought him quickly to his feet. He unlocked a cupboard and took from it a carbine in a canvas case. He slipped off the case and fitted a charged magazine beneath the breech.
Whilst he was speaking he was already on the stair. Marguerite could not wait below as he had bidden her. This horror must end. She must know, of her own knowledge, that it had ended. She followed Paul as far as the mouth of the trap, and came to a stop there, her feet upon the stairs, her head just above the level of the roof. The groans of the tortured man floated across the open space mingled with the triumphant screams of the women.