•The house!' cried Gervaise suddenly. 'The house!' And through the murk they saw a red glow up the slope in the distance. Stapleton Court had been struck by lightning and one side of it was burning fiercely.
A quarter of an hour later the rain ceased and they watched the fire as it ate up the old mansion. Gervaise seemed heartbroken. It had been his home for so many years. He had resorted to so many shifts to keep it out of the clutches of mortgages; exercised so much ingenuity to preserve it and its parklands from the hands of vandals. Even so sober a man could not quite grip the fact that a roving comet might really destroy the whole earth in a few hours' time. Somehow he had always felt that after a brief sojourn in the Ark he would return to that beloved home, and now, whatever might befall, that could never be; it was being consumed before his eyes by flames.
Sam began to mutter useless words of comfort but Lavina promptly stopped him; she knew better than any of them, even Margery, what her father was feeling in those moments.
The lake had overflowed its banks, flooded by the terrific downpour. On one side it now stretched for half a mile across low-lying meadows, on the other it had risen half-way up the sloping lawn below the house. From time to time earth tremors made it sink or rise with startling suddenness and agitated its waters until they became like a rough sea, while on its shores oaks and elms crashed earthwards.
By eight o'clock the house was a flaming pile, more than half-consumed; but without warning another cloudburst shut it out from them and the spate of water was so solid that when the torrent eased, just about nine, they saw that it had extinguished the fire in the burning mansion.
From what little they could see through the still sheeting rain the tempest raged without abatement. The lake was half full of shattered trees which had been blown into it and were now being thrown about upon the heaving waters. Earth tremors shook the land almost without cessation; fork-lightning streaked the skies; earsplitting thunder boomed and reverberated overhead; the fury of the elements was indescribable.
From the time that they had rescued Derek the inmates of the Ark had thought of nothing but watching the incredibly terrible spectacle which was occurring before them. Hour after hour they had remained by the port-holes peering from them at every opportunity; nobody had even thought of suggesting an evening meal; they had forgotten the time and the fact that the chronometers might be ticking out the last minutes of their lives.
It was Oliver who recalled them to the probability of their impending fate by saying quietly:
'In case any of you wish to make last-minute preparations, I think I ought to warn you that it is now 10.45. We have only ten minutes to go.'
They left the port-holes then and looked at each other. It seemed that there was nothing to say, nothing to be done but to commend themselves to the mercy of the Father of all things.
Oliver alone remained near his instruments checking and recording. Margery went a little apart and, kneeling down, bowed her head in prayer. Sam's instinct was to follow her example but Lavina stood beside him holding his hand and he did not like to withdraw it. Gervaise had never made his daughters follow a conventional religion. Since Margery liked going to church he showed his tacit approval because he recognised that such devotions took the place of other things for certain types of women but when, at the age of sixteen, Lavina had told him that she djcl not wish to go to church any more because it bored her, he told her that, in that case, the church had ceased to serve any useful purpose for her. Lavina had never gone again but she was supremely confident that there was a God who would deal justly with her if she died, without her kneeling down to mumble set phrases or personal pleas for assistance.
She stood there with her chin up, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall of the Ark. Sam was beside her and Gervaise, on her other side, put an arm gently round her shoulders. Hemmingway sat down in an armchair opposite them and lit a cigarette. He had decided, quite disapassionately, that she was superbly beautiful and as he gazed up at her face the artist in him took a curious delight in the thought that, if they had to die, that living masterpiece was the last thing he would ever see.
Those last minutes seemed to drag interminably. The lake outside was still like a storm-tossed sea. The terrific downpour continued. Earthquake shocks were still felt through the buffer of the surrounding waters.
Sam was thinking over and over again: 'It can't happen. It can't happen—not to us.' Gervaise, that this was the greatest adventure that anyone could ever set out upon; either they would be blacked out in a few minutes or be re-born into a strange new world; Lavina, that she had had a lot of fun in this life and that it wouldn't be her fault if she didn't have a lot of fun in the next. Hemmingway was wondering vaguely if death would take them instantaneously or if they would first be called on to face awful torments -and, in the meantime, gazing enchanted at the perfection of Lavina's face. Margery was hypnotising herself with a rapid repetition of whispered words.
The tense silence was shattered by Oliver's voice as he announced quietly: 'By Greenwich Mean Time it is now 10.55.'
The Comet Strikes
For a moment nothing happened—nothing at all. They stared at each other waiting, wondering, holding their breath, tensing their muscles in an agony of suspense.
Suddenly the Ark began to rise. They could no longer see what was going on outside, but it felt for a second as though they were in an'express lift soaring upward.
There was a terrific jerk. Both the cables had snapped as the huge sphere was flung sideways right out of the water. It hovered in the air for a second then came plunging back into the lake. The electric lights flickered and went out. The mechanism of its gyroscopes was constructed to counter roll; not to withstand violent shocks. The floor tilted. Instantly the whole cabin was in confusion. Oliver fell backwards from his instruments; the others staggered, lost their balance and pitched for ward on their faces. The chairs slid sideways, bumping into one another. Books, boxes, binoculars and a score of other things crashed to the floor and rolled about it as the Ark, its gyroscopes broken, lurched heavily from side to side in the frightful upheaval.
Terrified, gasping, they scrambled to their knees and clun? to its solid fixtures to prevent themselves being flung backwards and forwards. Gradually the deck steadied a little a"1 they were able to get on their feet again. Gervaise found the switch of the emergency lights and turned them on.
The outer port-holes no longer oscillated above the inner ones as the sphere rolled and, staggering to them, they vver' able to peer out. Almost with surprise they saw that, excep for the fact that they had been carried a hundred yards nea^ to the north shore of the lake, the scene remained unaltete . The lake was still a tossing sheet of spray. The rain still shee^ down and through it, by the jagged flashes of lightning t» still lit the sky, they could see that the landscape of lake-shore, trees and ruined mansion was just the same.
With a shout Sam seized Lavina. 'We've come through, darling! D'you understand—we've come through! We're going to live now.'
Gervaise drew a deep breath. 'Yes, we've passed through the Valley of the Shadow and come out the other side.'
'I wonder what sort of a world is left to us, though,' Hemmingway said gloomily.
Margery felt sick and ill from the buffeting they had sustained but was thinking of the home in which she had lived all her life. During the last ten years much of her time had been spent in household drudgery but she had not really disliked it, and now the house was a burnt-out ruin. She had never altogether brought herself to believe in the comet, even though she had seen it, because she had a life-long habit of ignoring facts if they were unpleasant ones.