CHAPTER XXII.
BOX FIFTY-TWO.
In the midst of it all, she went and caught a horrible cold.
Aunt Blin, I mean.
It was all by wearing her india-rubbers a week too long, a week after she had found the heels were split; and in that week there came a heavy rain-storm.
She had to stay at home now. Bel went to the rooms and brought back button-holes for her to make. She could not do much; she was feverish and languid, and her eyes suffered. But she liked to see something in the basket; she was always going to be "well enough to-morrow." When the work had to be returned, Bel hurried, and did the button-holes of an evening.
Mr. Hewland brought grapes and oranges and flowers to Miss Bree. Bel fetched home little presents of her own to her aunt, making a pet of her: ice-cream in a paper cone, horehound candy, once, a tumbler of black currant jelly. But that last was very dear. If Aunt Blin had eaten much of other things, they could not have afforded it, for there were only half earnings now.
To-morrow kept coming, but Miss Bree kept on not getting any better. "She didn't see the reason," she said; "she never had a cold hang on so. She believed she'd better go out and shake it off. If she could have rode down-town she would, but somehow she didn't seem to have the strength to walk."
The reason she "couldn't have rode," was because all the horses were sick. It was the singular epidemic of 1872. There were no cars, no teams; the queer sight was presented in a great city, of the driveways as clear as the sidewalks; of nobody needed to guard the crossings or unsnarl the "blocks;" of stillness like Sunday, day after day; of men harnessed into wagons,—eight human beings drawing, slowly and heavily, what any poor old prickle-ribs of a horse, that had life left in him at all, would have trotted cheerfully off with. A lady's trunk was a cartload; and a lady's trunk passing through the streets was a curiosity; you could scarcely get one carried for love or money.
Aunt Blin was a good deal excited; she always was by everything that befell "her Boston." She would sit by the window in her blanket shawl, and peer down the Place to see the mail-carts and express wagons creep slowly by, along Tremont Street, to and from the railways. She was proud for the men who turned to and did quadruped work with a will in the emergency, and so took hold of its sublimity; she was proud of the poor horses, standing in suffering but royal seclusion in their stables, with hostlers sitting up nights for them, and the world and all its business "seeing how it could get along without them;" she was proud of all this crowd of business that had, by hook or by crook (literally, now), to be done.
She wanted the evening paper the minute it came. She and the music mistress took the "Transcript" between them, and had the first reading weeks about. This was her week; she held herself lucky.
The epizootic was like the war: we should have to subside into common items that would not seem like news at all when that was over.
We all know, now, what the news was after the epizootic.
Meanwhile Aunt Blin believed, "on her conscience," she had got the epidemic herself.
Bel had worked hard at the rooms this week, and late at home in the evenings. Some of the girls lived out at the Highlands, and some in South Boston; there were days when they could not get in from these districts; for such as were on the spot there was double press and hurry. And it was right in the midst of fall and winter work. Bel earned twelve dollars in six days, and got her pay.
On Saturday night she brought home four Chater's crumpets, and a pint of oysters. She stewed the oysters in a porringer out of which everything came nicer than out of any other utensil. While they were stewing, she made a bit of butter up into a "pat," and stamped it with the star in the middle of the pressed glass saltcellar; she set the table near the fire, and laid it out in a specially dainty way; then she toasted the muffins, and it was past seven o'clock before all was done.
Aunt Blin sat by, and watched and smelled. She was in no hurry; two senses at a time were enough to have filled. She had finished the paper,—it was getting to be an old and much rehashed story, now,—and had sent it down to Miss Smalley. It would be hers first, now, for a week. Very well, the excitement was over. That was all she knew about it.
In the privacy and security of her own room, and with muffins and oysters for tea, Aunt Blin took out her upper teeth, that she might eat comfortably. Poor Aunt Blin! she showed her age and her thinness so. She had fallen away a good deal since she had been sick. But she was getting better. On Monday morning, she thought she would certainly be able to go out. All she had to do now was to be careful of her cough; and Bel had just bought her a new pair of rubbers.
Bartholomew had done his watching and smelling, likewise; he had made all he could be expected to of that limited enjoyment. Now he walked round the table with an air of consciousness that supper was served. He sat by his mistress's chair, lifted one paw with well-bred expressiveness, stretching out the digits of it as a dainty lady extends her lesser fingers when she lifts her cup, or breaks a bit of bread. It was a delicate suggestion of exquisite appreciation, and of most excellent manners. Once he began a whine, but recollected himself and suppressed it, as the dainty lady might a yawn.
Aunt Blin gave him two oysters, and three spoonfuls of broth in his own saucer, before she helped herself. After all, she ate in her turn very little more. It was hardly worth while to have made a business of being comfortable.
"I don't think they have such good oysters as they used to," she remarked, stepping over her s'es in a very carpeted and stocking-footed way.
"Perhaps I didn't put enough seasoning"—Bel began, but was interrupted in the middle of her reply.
The big bell two squares off clanged a heavy stroke caught up on the echo by others that sounded smaller farther and farther away, making their irregular, yet familiar phrase and cadence on the air.
It was the fire alarm.
"H—zh! Hark!" Aunt Blin changed the muffled but eager monosyllable to a sharper one; and being reminded, felt in her lap, under her napkin, for her "ornaments," as Bel called them.
But she counted the strokes before she put them in, nodding her head, and holding up her finger to Bel and Bartholomew for silence. Everything stopped where it was with Miss Bree when the fire alarm sounded.
One—two—three—four—five.
"In the city," said Aunt Blin, with a certain weird unconscious satisfaction; and whipped the porcelains into their places before the second tolling should begin. They were like Pleasant Riderhood's back hair: she was all twisted up, now, and ready.
One—two.
"That ain't fur off. Down Bedford Street way. Give me the fire-book, and my glasses."
She turned the folds of the card with one hand, and adjusted her spectacles with the other.
"Bedford and Lincoln. Why, that's close by where Miss Proddle boards!"
"That's the box, Auntie. You always forget the fire isn't in the box."
"Well, it will be if they don't get along with their steamers. I ain't heard one go by yet."
"They haven't any horses, you know."
"Hark! there's one now! O, do hush! There's the bell again!"
Bel was picking up the tea-things for washing. She set down the little pile which she had gathered, went to the window, and drew up the blind.
"My gracious! And there's the fire!"
It shone up, red, into the sky, from over the tall roofs.
Ten strokes from the deep, deliberate bells.
"There comes Miss Smalley, todillating up to see," said Bel, excitedly.
"And the people are just rushing along Tremont Street!"
"Can you see? asked Miss Smalley, bustling in like the last little belated hen at feeding-time, with a look on all sides at once to discover where the corn might be.
"Isn't it big, O?" And she stood up, tiptoe, by the window, as if that would make any comparative difference between her height and that of Hotel Devereux, across the square; or as if she could reach up farther with her eyes after the great flashes that streamed into the heavens.
Again the smiting clang,—repeated, solemn, exact. No flurry in those measured sounds, although their continuance tolled out a city's doom.
Twice twelve.
"There goes Mr. Sparrow," said the music mistress, as the watchmaker's light, unequal hop came over the stairs. "I suppose he can see from his window pretty near where it is."
A slight, dull color came up into the angles of the little lady's face, as she alluded to the upper lodger's room, for there was a tacit impression in the house—and she knew it—that if Miss Smalley and Mr. Sparrow had been thrown together earlier in life, it would have been very suitable; and that even now it might not be altogether too late.
Another step went springing down. Bel knew that, but she said nothing.
"Don't you think we might go out to the end of the street and see?" suggested Miss Smalley.
Bel had on hat and waterproof in a moment.
"Don't you stir, Auntie, to catch cold, now! We'll be back directly."
Miss Smalley was already in her room below, snatching up hood and shawl.
Down the Place they went, and on, out into the broad street. Everybody was running one way,—northward. They followed, hurrying toward the great light, glowing and flashing before them.
From every westward avenue came more men, speeding in ever thickening lines verging to one centre. Like streams into a river channel, they poured around the corners into Essex Street, at last, filling it from wall to wall,—a human torrent.
"This is as far as we can go," Miss Smalley said, stopping in one of the doorways of Boylston Market. A man in a blouse stood there, ordering the driver of a cart.
"Where is the fire, sir?" asked Miss Smalley, with a ladylike air of not being used to speak to men in the street, but of this being an emergency.
"Corner of Kingston and Summer; great granite warehouse, five stories high," said the man in the blouse, civilly, and proceeding to finish his order, which was his own business at the moment, though Boston was burning.
The two women turned round and went back. The heavy bells were striking three times twelve.
A boy rushed past them at the corner by the great florist's shop. He was going the other way from the fire, and was impatient to do his errand and get back. He had a basket of roses to carry; ordered for some one to whom it would come,—the last commission of that sort done that night perhaps,—as out of the very smoke and terror of the hour; a singular lovely message of peace, of the blessed thoughts that live between human hearts though a world were in ashes. All through the wild night, those exquisite buds would be silently unfolding their gracious petals. How strange the bloomed-out roses would look to-morrow!
All the house in Leicester Place was astir, and recklessly mixed up, when Miss Smalley and Bel Bree came back. The landlady and her servant were up in Mr. Sparrow's room, calling to Miss Bree below. The whole place was full of red fierce light.
Aunt Blin, faithful to Bel's parting order, stood in the spirit of an unrelieved sentinel, though the whole army had broken camp, keeping herself steadfastly safe, in her own doorway. To be sure, there was a draught there, but it was not her fault.
"I must go up and see it," she said eagerly, when Bel appeared. Bel drew her into the room, put her first into a gray hospital dressing-gown, then into a waterproof, and after all covered her up with a striped blue and white bed comforter. She knew she would keep dodging in and out, and she might as well go where she would stay quiet.
And so these three women went up-stairs, where they had never been before. The door of Mr. Hewland's room was open. A pair of slippers lay in the middle of the floor; a newspaper had fluttered into a light heap, like a broken roof, beside them; a dressing-gown was thrown over the back of a chair.
Bel came last, and shut that door softly as she passed, not letting her eyes intrude beyond the first involuntary glimpse. She was maidenly shy of the place she had never seen,—where she had heard the footsteps go in and out, over her head.
The five women crowded about and into Mr. Sparrow's little dormer window. Miss Smalley lingered to notice the little black teapot on the grate-bar, where a low fire was sinking lower,—the faded cloth on the table, and the empty cup upon it,—the pipe laid down hastily, with ashes falling out of it. She thought how lonesome Mr. Sparrow was living,—doing for himself.
All the square open space down through which the blue heavens looked between those great towering buildings, was filled with brightness as with a flood. The air was lurid crimson. Every stone and chip and fragment, lay revealed in the strange, transfiguring light. Away across the stable-roofs, they could read far-off signs painted in black letters upon brick walls. Church spires stood up, bathed in a wild glory, pointing as out of some day of doom, into the everlasting rest. The stars showed like points of clear, green, unearthly radiance, against that contrast of fierce red.
It surged up and up, as if it would over-boil the very stars themselves. It swayed to right,—to left; growing in an awful bulk and intensity, without changing much its place, to their eyes, where they stood. On the tops of the high Apartment Hotel, and all the flat-roofed houses in Hero and Pilgrim streets, were men and women gazing. Their faces, which could not have been discerned in the daylight, shone distinct in this preternatural illumination. Their voices sounded now and then, against the yet distant hum and crackle of the conflagration, upon the otherwise still air. The rush had, for a while, gone by. The streets in this quarter were empty.
Grand and terrible as the sight was to them in Leicester Place, they could know or imagine little of what the fire was really doing.
"It backs against the wind," they heard one man say upon the stable-roof.
They could not resist opening the window, just a little, now and then, to listen; though Bel would instantly pull Aunt Blin away, and then they would put it down. Poor Aunt Blin's nose grew very cold, though she did not know it. Her nose was little and sensitive. It is not the big noses that feel the cold the most. Aunt Blin took cold through her face and her feet; and these the dressing-gown, and the waterproof, and the comforter, did not protect.
"It must have spread among those crowded houses in Kingston and South streets," Aunt Blin said; and as she spoke, her poor old "ornaments" chattered.
"Aunt Blin, you shall come down, and take something hot, and go to bed!" exclaimed Bel, peremptorily. "We can't stay here all night. Mr. Sparrow will be back,—and everybody. I think the fire is going down. It's pretty still now. We've seen it all. Come!"
They had never a thought, any of them, of more than a block or so, burning. Of course the firemen would put it out. They always did.
"See! See!" cried the landlady. "O my sakes and sorrows!"
A huge, volcanic column of glittering sparks—of great flaming fragments—shot up and soared broad and terrible into the deep sky. A long, magnificent, shimmering, scintillant train—fire spangled with fire—swept southward like the tail of a comet, that had at last swooped down and wrapped the earth.
"The roofs have fallen in," said innocent old Miss Smalley.
"That will be the last. Now they will stop it," said Bel. "Come, Auntie!"
And after midnight, for an hour or more, the house, with the five women in it, hushed. Aunt Blin took some hot Jamaica ginger, and Bel filled a jug with boiling water, wrapped it in flannel, and tucked it into the bed at her feet. Then she gave her a spoonful of her cough-mixture, took off her own clothes, and lay down.
Still the great fire roared, and put out the stars. Still the room was red with the light of it. Aunt Blin fell asleep.
Bel lay and listened, and wondered. She would not move to get up and look again, lest she should rouse her aunt. Suddenly, she heard the boom of a great explosion. She started up.
Miss Smalley's voice sounded at the door.
"It's awful!" she whispered, through the keyhole, in a ghostly way. "I thought you ought to know. The cinders are flying everywhere. I heard an engine come up from the railroad. People are running along the streets, and teams are going, and everything,—the other way! They're blowing up houses! There, don't you hear that?"
It was another sullen, heavy roar.
Bel sprang out of bed; hurried into her garments; opened the door to Miss Smalley. They went and stood together in the entry-window.
"All Kingman's carriages are out; sick horses and all; they've trundled wheelbarrow loads of things down to the stable. There's a heap of furniture dumped down in the middle of the place. Women are going up Tremont Street with bundles and little children. Where do you s'pose it's got to?"
"See there!" said Bel, pointing across the square to the great, dark, public building. High up, in one of the windows, a gas-light glimmered. Two men were visible in the otherwise deserted place. They were putting up a step-ladder.
"Do you suppose they are there nights,—other nights?" Bel asked Miss Smalley.
"No. They're after books and things. They're going to pack up."
"The fire can't be coming here!"
Bel opened the window carefully, as she spoke. A man was standing in the livery-stable door. A hack came rapidly down, and the driver called out something as he jumped off.
"Where?" they heard the hostler ask.
"Most up to Temple Place."
"Do they mean the fire? They can't!"
They did; but they were, as we know, somewhat mistaken. Yet that great, surf-like flame, rushing up and on, was rioting at the very head of Summer Street, and plunging down Washington. Trinity Church was already a blazing wreck.
"Has it come up Summer Street, or how?" asked Bel, helplessly, of helpless Miss Smalley. "Do you suppose Fillmer & Bylles is burnt?"
"I must ask somebody!"
These women, with no man belonging to them to come and give them news,—restrained by force of habit from what would have been at another time strange to do, and not knowing even yet the utter exceptionality of this time,—while down among the hissing engines and before the face of the conflagration stood girls in delicate dress under evening wraps, come from gay visits with brothers and friends, and drawn irresistibly by the grand, awful magnetism of the spectacle,—while up on the aristocratic avenues, along Arlington Street, whose windows flashed like jewels in the far-shining flames, where the wonderful bronze Washington sat majestic and still against that sky of stormy fire as he sits in every change and beautiful surprise of whatever sky of cloud or color may stretch about him,—on Commonwealth Avenue, where splendid mansions stood with doors wide open, and drays unloading merchandise saved from the falling warehouses into their freely offered shelter,—ladies were walking to and fro, as if in their own halls and parlors, watching, and questioning whomsoever came, and saying to each other hushed and solemn or excited words,—when the whole city was but one great home upon which had fallen a mighty agony and wonder that drove its hearts to each other as the hearts of a household,—these two, Bel Bree and little Miss Smalley, knew scarcely anything that was definite, and had been waiting and wondering all night, thinking it would be improper to talk into the street!
A young lad came up the court at last; he lived next door; he was an errand-boy in some great store on Franklin Street. His mother spoke to him from her window.
"Bennie! how is it?"
"Mother! All Boston is gone up! Summer Street, High Street, Federal Street, Pearl Street, Franklin Street, Milk Street, Devonshire Street,—everything, clear through to the New Post Office. I've been on the Common all night, guarding goods. There's another fellow there now, and I've come home to get warm. I'm almost frozen."
His mother was at the door as he finished speaking, and took him in; and they heard no more.
The boy's words were heavy with heavy meaning. He said them without any boy-excitement; they carried their own excitement in the heart of them. In those eight hours he had lived like a man; in an experience that until of late few men have known.
They did not know how long they stood there after that, with scarcely a word to each other,—only now and then some utterance of sudden recollection of this and that which must have vanished away within that stricken territory,—taking in, slowly, the reality, the tremendousness of what had happened,—was happening.
It was five o'clock when Mr. Hewland came in, and up the stairs, and found them there. Aunt Blin had not awaked. There was a trace of morphine in her cough-drops, and Bel knew now, since she had slept so long, that she would doubtless sleep late into the morning. That was well. It would be time enough to tell her by and by. There would be all day,—all winter,—to tell it in.
Mr. Hewland told them, hastily, the main history of the fire.
"Is Trinity Church?"—asked poor Miss Smalley tremblingly.
She had not said anything about it to Bel Bree; she could not think of that great stone tower as having let the fire in,—as not having stood, cool and strong, against any flame. And Trinity Church was her tower. She had sat in one seat in its free gallery for fourteen years. If that were gone, she would hardly know where to go, to get near to heaven. Only nine days ago,—All Saints' Day,—she had sat there listening to beautiful words that laid hold upon the faith of all believers, back through the church, back before Christ to the prophets and patriarchs, and told how God was her God because He had been theirs. The old faith,—and the Old Church! "Was Trinity?"—She could not say,—"burned."
But Mr. Hewland answered in one word,—"Gone."
That word answered so many questions on which life and love hung, that fearful night!
Mr. Hewland was wet and cold. He went up to his room and changed his clothing. When the daylight, pale and scared, was creeping in, he came down again.
"Would you not like to go down and see?" he said to Bel.
"Can I?"
"Yes. There is no danger. The streets are comparatively clear. I will go with you."
Bel asked Miss Smalley.
"Will you come? Auntie will be sure to sleep, I think."
Miss Smalley had scarcely heart either to go or stay. Of the two, it was easier to go. To do—to see—something.
Mr. Sparrow came in. He met them at the door, and turned directly back with them.
He, too, was a free-seat worshipper at Old Trinity. He and the music-mistress—they were both of English birth, hence of the same national faith—had been used to go from the same dwelling, separately, to the same house of worship, and sit in opposite galleries. But their hearts had gone up together in the holy old words that their lips breathed in the murmur of the congregation. These links between them, of country and religion, which they had never spoken of, were the real links.
As they went forth this Sunday morning, in company for the first time, toward the church in which they should never kneel again, they felt another,—the link that Eve and Adam felt when the sword of flame swept Paradise.
Plain old souls!—Plain old bodies, I mean, hopping and "todillating"—as Bel expressed the little spinster's gait—along together; their souls walked in a sweet and gracious reality before the sight of God.
Bel and Mr. Hewland were beside each other. They had never walked together before, of course; but they hardly thought of the unusualness. The time broke down distinctions; nothing looked strange, when everything was so.
They went along by the Common fence. In the street, a continuous line of wagons passed them, moving southward. Gentlemen sat on cart-fronts beside the teamsters, accompanying their fragments of property to places of bestowal. Inside the inclosure, in the malls, along under the trees, upon the grass, away back to the pond, were heaps of merchandise. Boxes, bales, hastily collected and unpacked goods of all kinds, from carpets to cotton-spools, were thrown in piles, which men and boys were guarding, the police passing to and fro among them all. People were wrapped against the keen November cold, in whatsoever they could lay their hands on. A group of men pacing back and forth before a pyramid of cases, had thrown great soft white blankets about their shoulders, whose bright striped borders hung fantastically about them, and whose corners fell and dragged upon the muddy ground.
Down by Park Street corner, and at Winter Street, black columns of coal smoke went up from the steamers; the hose, like monstrous serpents, twisted and trailed along the pavements; water stood in pools and flowed in runnels, everywhere.
They went down Winter Street, stepping over the hose-coils, and across the leaking streams; they came to the crossing of Washington, where yesterday throngs of women passed, shopping from stately store to store.
Beyond, were smoke and ruin; swaying walls, heaps of fallen masonry, chevaux-de-frises of bristling gas and water-pipes, broken and protruding. A little way down, to the left, sheets of flame, golden in the gray daylight, were pouring from the face of the beautiful "Transcript" building.
They stood, fearful and watchful, under the broken granite walls opposite Trinity Church.
Windows and doors were gone from the grand old edifice; inside, the fire was shining; devouring at its dreadful ease, the sacred architecture and furnishings that it had swept down to the ground.
"See! There he is!" whispered Miss Smalley to Mr. Sparrow, as she gazed with unconscious tears falling fast down her pale old cheeks.
It was the Rector of Trinity, who thought to have stood this morning in the holy place to speak to his people. Down the middle of the street he came, and went up to the cumbered threshold and the open arch, within which a terrible angel was speaking in his stead.
"Do you think he remembers now, what he said about the God of Daniel, as he looks into the blazing fiery furnace?"
"I dare say he doesn't ever remember what he said; but he remembers always what is," answered the watch-maker.
CHAPTER XXIII.
EVENING AND MORNING: THE SECOND DAY.
The strange, sad Sunday wore along.
The teams rolled on, incessantly, through the streets; the blaze and smoke went up from the sixty acres of destruction; friends gathered together and talked of the one thing, that talk as they might, would not be put into any words. Men whose wealth had turned to ashes in a night went to and fro in the same coats they had worn yesterday, and hardly knew yet whether they themselves were the same or not. It seemed, so strangely, as if the clock might be set back somehow, and yesterday be again; it was so little way off!
Women who had received, perhaps, their last wages for the winter on Saturday night, sat in their rooms and wondered what would be on Monday.
Aunt Blin was excited; strong with excitement. She went down-stairs to see Miss Smalley, who was too tired to sit up.
Out of the fire, Bel Bree and Paulina Smalley had each brought something that remained by them secretly all this day.
When they had stopped there under those smoked and shattered walls, and Morris Hewland had drawn Bel's hand within his arm to keep her from any movement into danger, he had gently laid his own fingers, in care and caution, upon hers. A feeling had come to them both with the act, and for a moment, as if the world, with all its great built-up barriers of stone, had broken down around them, and lay at their feet in fragments, among which they two stood free together.
The music-mistress and the watchmaker, looking in upon their place of prayer, seeing it empty and eaten out by the yet lingering tongues of fire, had exchanged those words about the things that are. For a minute, through the emptiness, they reached into the eternal deep; for a minute their simple souls felt themselves, over the threshold of earthly ruin, in the spaces where there is no need of a temple any more; they forgot their worn and far-spent lives,—each other's old and year-marked faces; they were as two spirits, met without hindrance or incongruity, looking into each other's spiritual eyes.
Poor old Miss Smalley, when she came home and took off her hood before her little glass, and saw how pale she was with her night's watching and excitement, and how the thin gray hairs had straggled over her forehead, came back with a pang into the flesh, and was afraid she had been ridiculous; but lying tired upon her bed, in the long after hours of the day, she forgot once more what manner of outside woman she was, and remembered only, with a pervading peace, how the watchmaker had spoken.
Night came. The pillar of smoke that had gone up all day, turned again into a pillar of fire, and stood in the eastern heavens.
The time of safety, when there had been no flaming terror, was already so far off, that people, fearing this night to surrender themselves to sleep, wondered that in any nights they had ever dared,—wondered that there had ever been anything but fear and burning, in this great, crowded city.
The guards paced the streets; the roll of wagons quieted. The stricken town was like a fever patient seized yesterday with a sudden, devouring rage of agony,—to-day, calmed, put under care, a rule established, watchers set.
Miss Smalley went from window to window as the darkness—and the apparition of flame—came on. Rested by the day's surrender to exhaustion, she was alert and apprehensive and excited now.
"It will be sure to burst out again," she said; "it always does."
"Don't say so to Aunt Blin," whispered Bel. "Look at her cheeks, and her eyes. She is sick-abed this minute, and she will keep up!"
At nine o'clock, the very last thing, she spoke with the music-mistress again, at the door. Miss Smalley kept coming up into the passage to look out at that end window.
"I don't mean to get up if it does burn," Bel said, resolutely. "It won't come here. We ought to sleep. That's our business. There'll be enough to do, maybe, afterwards."
But for all that, in the dead of the night, she was roused again.
A sound of bells; a long alarm of which she lost the count; a great explosion. Then that horrible cataract of flame and sparks overhanging the stars as it did before, and paling them out.
It seemed as if it had always been so; as if there had never been a still, dark heaven under which to lie down tranquilly and sleep.
"The wind has changed, and the fire is awful, and I can't help it," sounded Miss Smalley's voice, meek and deprecating, through the keyhole, at which she had listened till she had heard Bel moving.
Bel lit the gas, and then went out into the passage.
Flakes of fire were coming down over the roofs into the Place itself.
The great rush and blaze were all this way, now. They were right under the storm of it.
Aunt Blin woke up.
"What is it?" she asked, excitedly. "Is it begun again? Is it coming?" And before Bel could stop her, she was out on the entry floor with her bare feet.
A floating cinder fell and struck the sash.
"We must be dressed! We must pack up! Make haste, Bel! Where's Bartholomew?"
Making a movement, hurriedly, to go back across her own room, Miss Bree turned faint and giddy, and fell headlong.
They got her into bed again, and brought her to. But with circulation and consciousness, came the rush of fever. In half an hour she was in a burning heat, wandering and crying out deliriously.
"O what shall we do? We must have a doctor. She'll die!" cried Bel.
"If I dared to go up and call Mr. Sparrow?" said the spinster, timidly.
Her thought reverted as instantly to Mr. Sparrow, and yet with the same conscious shyness, as if she had been eighteen, and the poor old watchmaker twenty-one. Because, you see, she was a woman; and she had but been a woman the longer, and her woman's heart grown tenderer and shyer, in its unlived life, that she was four and fifty, and not eighteen. There are three times eighteen in four and fifty.
"O, Mr. Sparrow isn't any good!" cried Bel, impetuously. "If you wouldn't mind seeing whether Mr. Hewland is up-stairs?"
Miss Smalley did not mind that at all; and though numbly aggrieved at the reflection upon Mr. Sparrow, went up and knocked.
Bel heard Morris Hewland's spring upon the floor, and his voice, as he asked the matter. Heavy with fatigue, he had not roused till now.
As he came down, five minutes later, and Bel Bree met him at the door, the gas suddenly went out, and they stood, except for the flame outside, in darkness.
In house and street it was the same. Miss Smalley called out that it was so. "The stable light is gone," she said. "Yes,—and the lights down Tremont Street."
Then that fearful robe of fire, thick sown with spangling cinders, seemed sweeping against the window panes.
Only that terrible light over all the town.
"O, what does it mean?" said Bel.
"It is Chicago over again," the young man answered her, with a grave dismay in his voice.
"See there,—and there!" said Miss Smalley, at the window. "People are up, lighting candles."
"But Aunt Blin is sick!" said Bel. "We must take care of her. What shall we do?"
"I'll go and send a doctor; and I'll bring you news. Have you a candle? Stop; I'll fetch you something."
He sprang up-stairs, and returned with a box of small wax tapers. They were only a couple of inches long, and the size of her little finger.
"I'll get you something better if I can; and don't be frightened."
The great glare, though it shed its light luridly upon all outside, was not enough to find things by within. Bel took courage at this, thinking the heart of it must still be far off. She gave one look into the depth of the street, shadowed by its buildings, and having a strange look of eerie gloom, even so little way beneath that upper glow. Then she drew down the painted shades, and shut the sky phantom out.
"Mr. Hewland will come and tell us," she said. "We must work."
She heated water and got a bath for Aunt Blin's feet. She put a cool, wet bandage on her head. She mixed some mustard and spread a cloth and laid it to her chest. Miss Bree breathed easier; but the bandage upon her head dried as though the flame had touched it.
"I'll tell you what," said good, inopportune Miss Smalley; "she's going to be dreadful sick, I'm afraid. It'll be head and lungs both. That's what my sister had."
"Don't tell me what!" cried Bel, irritatedly.
But the doctor told her what, when he came.
Not in words; doctors don't do that. But she read it in his grave carefulness; she detected it in the orders which he gave. People brought up in the country,—where neighbors take care of each other, and where every symptom is talked over, and the history of every fatal disorder turns into a tradition,—learn about sickness and the meanings of it; on its ghastly and ominous side, at any rate.
Mr. Hewland came back and brought two candles, which he had with difficulty procured from a hotel. He brought word, also, that the fire was under control; that they need feel no more alarm.
And so this second night of peril and disaster passed painfully and slowly by.
But on the Monday, the day in which Boston was like a city given over into the hands of a host,—when its streets were like slow-moving human glaciers, down the midst of which in a narrow channel the heavier flow of burdened teams passed scarcely faster forward than the hindered side streams,—Aunt Blin lay in the grasp and scorch of a fire that feeds on life; wasting under that which uplifts and frenzies, only to prostrate and destroy.
I shall not dwell upon it. It had to be told; the fire also had to be told; for it happened, and could not be ignored. It happened, intermingling with all these very things of which I write; precipitating, changing, determining much.
Before the end of that first week, in which the stun and shock were reacting in prompt, cheerful, benevolent organizing and providing,—in which, through wonderful, dreamlike ruins, like the ruins of the far-off past, people were wandering, amazed, seeing a sudden torch laid right upon the heart and centre of a living metropolis and turning it to a shadow and a decay,—in which human interests and experiences came to mingle that had never consciously approached each other before,—in which the little household of independent existences in Leicester Place was fused into an almost family relation all at once, after years of mere juxtaposition,—before the end of that week, Aunt Blin died.
It was as though the fiery thrust that had transpierced the heart of "her Boston," had smitten the centre of her own vitality in the self-same hour.
All her clothes hung in the closet; the very bend of her arm was in the sleeve of the well worn alpaca dress, the work-basket, with a cloth jacket-front upon it, in which was a half-made button-hole, left just at the stitch where all her labor ended, was on the round table; Cheeps was singing in the window; Bartholomew was winking on the hearth-rug; and little Bel, among these belongings that she knew not what to do with any more, was all alone.
CHAPTER XXIV.
TEMPTATION.
The Relief Committee was organizing in Park Street Vestry.
Women with help in their hands and sympathy in their hearts, came there to meet women who wanted both; came, many of them, straight from the first knowledge of the loss of almost all their own money, with word and act of fellowship ready for those upon whose very life the blow fell yet closer and harder. Over the separating lines of class and occupation a divine impulse reached, at least for the moment, both ways.
"Boffin's Bower" was all alert with aggressive, independent movement. Here, they did not believe in the divine impulse of the hour. They would stay on their own side of the line. They would help themselves and each other. They would stand by their own class, and cry "hands off!" to the rich women.
What was to be done, for lasting understanding and true relation, between these conflicting, yet mutually dependent elements?
In their own separate places sat solitary girls and women who sought neither yet.
Bel Bree was one.
The little room which had been home while Aunt Blin lived there with her, was suddenly become only a dreary, lonely lodging-room. Cheeps and Bartholomew were there, chirping and purring, the sun was shining in; the things were all hers, for Aunt Blin had written one broad, straggling, unsteady line upon a sheet of paper the last day she lived, when the fever and confusion had ebbed away out of her brain as life ebbed slowly back, beaten from its outworks by disease, toward her heart, and she lay feebly, but clearly, conscious.
"I give all I leave in the world to my niece Belinda Bree."
"Kellup" came down and buried his sister, and "looked into things;" concluded that "Bel was pretty comfortable, and with good folks,—Mrs. Pimminy and Miss Smalley; 'sposed she calc'lated to keep on, now; she could come back if she wanted to, though."
Bel did not want to. She would stay here a little while, at any rate, and think. So Kellup went back into New Hampshire.
There was a little money laid up since Miss Bree and Bel had been together; Bel could get along, she thought, till work began again. But it was no longer living; it would not be living then; it would be only work and solitude. She was like a great many others of them now; girls without tie or belonging,—holding on where they could. Elise Mokey had said to her,—"See if you could help yourself if you hadn't Aunt Blin!" and now she began to look forward against that great, dark "If."
Everything had come together. If work had kept on, there would have been these little savings to fall back upon when earnings did not quite meet outlay. But now she should use them up before work came. And what did it signify, anyhow? All the comfort—all the meaning of it—was gone.
They were all kind to her; Miss Smalley sat with her evenings, till Bel wished she would have the wiser kindness to go away and let her be miserable, just a little while.
Morris Hewland knocked at the door one afternoon when the music-mistress was out, giving her lessons.
Bel did not ask him in to sit down; she stood just within the doorway, and talked with him.
He made some friendly inquiries that led to conversation; he drew her to say something of her plans. He had not come on purpose; he hardly knew what he had come for. He had only knocked to say a word of kindness; to look in the poor, pretty little face that he felt such a tenderness for.
"I can't bear to give things up,—because they were pleasant," Bel said. "But I suppose I shall have to go away. It isn't home; there isn't anybody to make home with any more. I know what I had thought of, a while ago; I believe I know what there is that I might do; I am just waiting until the thoughts come back, and begin to look as they did. Nothing looks as it did yet."
"Nothing?" asked Morris Hewland, his eyes questioning of hers.
"Yes,—friends. But the friends are all outside, after all."
Hewland stood silent.
How beautiful it might be to make home for such a little heart as this! To surround her with comfort and prettiness, such as she loved and knew how to contrive out of so little! To say,—"Let us belong together. Make home with me!"
Satan, as an angel of light, entered into him. He knew he could not say this to her as he ought to say it; as he would say it to a girl of his own class whom father and mother would welcome. There was no girl of his own class he had ever cared to say it to. This was the first woman he had found, with whom the home thought joined itself. And this could not rightly be. If he took her, he would no longer have the things to give her. They would be cast out together. And all he could do was to make pictures, of which he had never sold one, or thought to sell one, in all his life. He would be just as poor as she was; and he felt that he did not know how to be poor. Besides, he wanted to be rich for her. He wanted to give her,—now, right off,—everything.
Why shouldn't he give? Why shouldn't she take? He had plenty of money; he was his father's only son. He meant right; so he said to himself; and what had the world to do with it?
"I wish I could take care of you, Bel! Would you let me? Would you go with me?"
The words seemed to have said themselves. The devil, whom he had let have his heart for a minute, had got his lips and spoken through them before he knew.
"Where?" asked Bel. "Home?"
"Yes,—home," said the young man, hesitating.
"Where your mother lives?"
Bel Bree's simplicity went nigh to being a stronger battery of defense than any bristling of alarmed knowledge.
"No," said Morris Hewland. "Not there. It would not do for you, or her either. But I could give you a little home. I could take care of you all your life; all my life. And I would. I will never make a home for anybody else. I will be true to you, if you will trust me,—always. So help me God!"
He meant it; there was no dark, deliberate sin in his heart, any more than in hers; he was tempted on the tenderest, truest side of his nature, as he was tempting her. He did not see why he should not choose the woman he would live with all his life, though he knew he could not choose her in the face of all the world, though he could not be married to her in the Church of the Holy Commandments, with bridesmaids and ushers, and music and flowers, and point lace and white satin, and fifty private carriages waiting at the door, and half a ton of gold and silver plate and verd antique piled up for them in his father's house.
His father was a hard, proud, unflinching man, who loved and indulged his son, after his fashion and possibility; but who would never love or indulge him again if he offended in such a thing as this. His mother was a woman who simply could not understand that a girl like Bel Bree was a creature made by God at all, as her daughters were, and her son's wife should be.
"Do you care enough for me?"
Bel stood utterly still. She had never been asked any such questions before, but she felt in some way, that this was not all; ought not to be all; that there was more he was to say, before she could answer him.
He came toward her. He put his hands on hers. He looked eagerly in her eyes. He did not hesitate now; the man's nature was roused in him. He must make her speak,—say that she cared.
"Don't you care? Bel—you do! You are my little wife; and the world has not anything to do with it!"
She broke away from him; she shrunk back.
"Don't do that," he said, imploringly. "I'm not bad, Bel. The world is bad. Let us be as good and loving as we can be in it. Don't think me bad."
There was not anything bad in his eyes; in his young, loving, handsome face. Bel was not sure enough,—strong enough,—to denounce the evil that was using the love; to say to that which was tempting him, and her by him, as Peter's passionate remonstrance tempted the Christ,—"Thou art Satan. Get thee behind me."
Yet she shrunk, bewildered.
"I don't know; I can't understand. Let me go now Mr. Hewland."
She turned away from him, into the chamber, and reached her hand to the door as she turned, putting her fingers on its edge to close it after him. She stood with her back to him; listening, not looking, for him to go.
He retreated, then, lingeringly, across the threshold, his eyes upon her still. She shut the door slowly, walking backward as she pushed it to. She had left, if not driven the devil behind her. Yet she did not know what she had done. She was still bewildered. I believe the worst she thought of what had happened was that he wanted to marry her secretly, and hide her away.
"Aunt Blin!" she cried, when she felt herself all alone. "Aunt Blin!—She can't have gone so very far away, quite yet!"
She went over to the closet, with her arms stretched out.
She went in, where Aunt Blin's clothes were hanging. She grasped the old, worn dress, that was almost warm with the wearing. She hid her face against the sleeve, curved with the shape of the arm that had bent to its tasks in it.
"Tell me, Aunt Blin! You can see clear, where you are. Is there any good—any right in it? Ought I to tell him that I care?"
She cried, and she waited; but she got no answer there. She came away, and sat down.
She was left all to herself in the hard, dreary world, with this doubt, this temptation to deal with. It was her wilderness; and she did not remember, yet, the Son of God who had been there before her.
"Why do they go off so far away in that new life, out of which they might help us?"
She did not know how close the angels were. She listened outside for them, when they were whispering already at her heart. We need to go in; not to reach painfully up, and away,—after that world in which we also, though blindly, dwell.
On the table lay Aunt Blin's great Bible; beside it her glasses.
Something that Miss Euphrasia had told them one day at the chapel, came suddenly into her mind.
"The angels are always near us when we are reading the Word, because they read, always, the living Word in heaven."
Was that the way? Might she enter so, and find them?
She moved slowly to the table.
It was growing dark. She struck a match and lit the gas, turning it low. She laid back the leaves of the large volume, to the latter portion. She opened it in Matthew,—to the nineteenth chapter.
When she had read that, she knew what she was to do.
She heard nothing more from Morris Hewland that night.
In the morning, early, she had her room bright and ready for the day. The light was calm and clear about her. The shadows were all gone.
She opened her door, and sat down, waiting, before the fire. Did she think of that night when she had had on the rose-colored silk, and had set the door ajar? Something in her had made her ashamed of that. She was not ashamed—she had no misgiving—of this that she was going to do now.
She was all alone; she had no other place to wait in she had no one to tell her anything. She was going to do a plain, right thing, whether it was just what anybody else would do, or not. She never even asked herself that question.
She heard Mr. Sparrow, with his hop and step, come down over the stairs. He always came down first of all. Then for another half hour, she sat still. At the end of that time, Morris Hewland's door unlatched and closed again.
Her heart beat quick. She stood up, with her face toward the open door. At the foot of that upper flight, she heard him pause. She could not see him till he passed; and he might pass without turning. Unless he turned, she would be out of his sight; for the door swung inward from the far corner. No matter.
He went by with a slow step. He could not help seeing the open door. But he did not stop or turn, until he reached the stairhead of the second flight; then he had to face this way again. And as he passed around the railing, he looked up; for Bel was standing where she had stood last night.
She had put herself in his way; but she had not done it lightly, with any half intent, to give him new opportunity for words. There was a pure, gentle quiet in her face; she had something herself to say. He saw it, and went back.
He colored, as he gave her his hand. Her face was pale.
"Come in a moment, Mr. Hewland," said the simple, girlish, voice.
He followed her in.
"You asked me questions last night, and I did not know how to answer them. I want to ask you one question, now."
She had brought him to the side of the round table, upon whose red cloth the large Bible lay. It was open at the place where she had read it.
She put her finger on the page, and made him look. She drew the finger slowly down from line to line, as if she were pointing for a little child to read; and his eye followed it.
"For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh.
"Wherefore, they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."
"Is that the way you will make a home and give it to me,—before them all?" she said.
He forgot the sophistries he might have used; he forgot to say that it was to leave father and mother and join himself to her, that he had purposed; he forgot to tell her again that he would be true to her all his life, and that nothing should put them asunder. He did not take up those words, as men have done, and say that God had joined their hearts together and made them in his sight one. The angels were beside him, in his turn, as he read. Those sentences of the Christ, shining up at him from the page, were like the look turned back upon Peter, showing him his sin.
"One flesh:" to be seen and known as one. To have one body of living; to be outwardly joined before the face of men. None to set them asunder, or hold them separate by thought, or accident, or misunderstanding. This was the sacred acknowledgment of man and wife, and he knew that he had not meant to make it.
As he stood there, silent, she knew it too. She knew that she should not have been his wife before anybody.
Her young face grew paler, and turned stern.
His flushed: a slow, burning, relentless flush, that betrayed him, marking him like Cain. He lowered his eyes in the heat of it, and stood so before the child.
She looked steadfastly at him for one instant; then she shut the book, and turned away, delivering him from the condemning light of her presence.
"No: I will not go to that little home with you," she said with a grief and scorn mingled in her voice, as they might have been in the voice of an angel.
When she looked round again, he was gone. Their ways had parted.
An hour later, Bel Bree turned the key outside her door, and with a little leather bag in her hand, saying not a word to any one, went down into the street.
Across the Common, and over the great hill, she walked straight to Greenley Street, and to Miss Desire.