Then Moses called the fire department from the kitchen telephone, noticing, as he picked up the receiver, that much flesh had been burned off his right hand by the cellar doorknob. His lips were swollen with adrenaline and he felt peculiarly at ease. Then he ran down to the hall where the guests were still waltzing and told Justina that her house was burning. She was perfectly composed and when Moses stopped the music she asked the guests to go out on the lawn. They could hear the bull horn in the village beginning to sound. There were many doors onto the terrace and as the guests crowded out of the hall, away from the lights of the party, they stepped into the pink glow of fire, for the flames had blown straight up the clock tower and while there were still no signs of fire in the hall the tower was blazing like a torch. Then the fire trucks could be heard coming down the road toward the drive and Justina started down the hall to great them at her front door as she had greeted J. C. Penney, Herbert Hoover and the Prince of Wales, but as she started down the hall a rafter somewhere in the tower burned loose from its shorings, crashed through the ceiling of the rotunda and then all the lights in the house flickered and went out.
Melissa called to her guardian in the dark and the old woman joined them—now she seemed bent—and walked between them out to the terrace where D’Alba and Mrs. Enderby took her arms. Then Moses ran around to the front of the house to move the cars of the guests. They seemed to be all that was worth saving. “For the last six nights I been trying to discharge my conjugal responsibilities,” one of the firemen said, “and every time I get started that damned bull horn …” Moses bumped a dozen cars down over the grass to safety and then went through the crowd, looking for his wife. She was in the garden with most of the other guests and he sat beside her at the pool and put his burned hand into the water. The fire must have been visible for miles then, for crowds of men, women and children were climbing over the garden walls and pouring in at all the gates. Then the Venetian room took fire and, saturated with the salts of the Adriatic, it bloomed like paper, and the iron works of the old clock, bells and gears had begun to crash down through the remains of the tower. A brisk wind carried the flames deep into the northwest and then slowly the garden and the whole valley began to fill up with a bitter smoke. The place burned until dawn and looked, in the morning light with only its chimneys standing, like the hull of some riverboat.
Later the next afternoon Justina, Mrs. Enderby and the count flew to Athens and Moses and Melissa went happily into New York.
But Betsey returned, long before this. Coming home one night Coverly found his house lighted and shining and his Venus with a ribbon in her hair. (She had been staying with a girl friend in Atlanta and had been disappointed.) Much later that night, lying in bed, they heard the sounds of rain and then Coverly put on some underpants and went out the back door and walked through the Frascatis’ yard and the Galens’ to the Harrows’, where Mr. Harrow had planted some rose bushes in a little crescent-shaped plot. It was late and all the houses were dark. In the Harrows’ garden Coverly picked a rose and then walked back through the Galens’ and the Frascatis’ to his own house and laid the rose between Betsey’s legs—where she was forked—for she was his potchke once more, his fleutchke, his notchke, his little, little squirrel.
In the early summer both Betsey and Melissa had sons and Honora was as good as or better than her word. A trust officer from the Appleton Bank brought the good news to Coverly and Moses and they agreed to continue Honora’s contributions to the Sailor’s Home and the Institute for the Blind. The old lady wanted nothing more to do with the money. Coverly came on from Remsen Park to New York and planned with Moses to visit St. Botolphs for a week end. The first thing they would do with Honora’s money was to buy Leander a boat and Coverly wrote his father that they were coming.
