thinking a good deal about the young man lying ill amongst strangers.
She was not one of those who had sent him the three-cornered notes or
even a bunch of flowers. She knew that he was receiving abounding tokens
of kindness and sympathy from different quarters, and a certain inward
feeling restrained her from joining in these demonstrations. If he had
been suffering from some deadly and contagious malady she would have
risked her life to help him, without a thought that there was any
wonderful heroism in such self-devotion. Her friend Lurida might have
been capable of the same sacrifice, but it would be after reasoning with
herself as to the obligations which her sense of human rights and duties
laid upon her, and fortifying her courage with the memory of noble
deeds recorded of women in ancient and modern history. With Euthymia the
primary human instincts took precedence of all reasoning or reflection
about them. All her sympathies were excited by the thought of this
forlorn stranger in his solitude, but she felt the impossibility of
giving any complete expression to them. She thought of Mungo Park in the
African desert, and she envied the poor negress who not only pitied him,
but had the blessed opportunity of helping and consoling him. How near
were these two human creatures, each needing the other! How near in
bodily presence, how far apart in their lives, with a barrier seemingly
impassable between them!
XXIII. THE MEETING OF MAURICE AND EUTHYMIA.
These autumnal fevers, which carry off a large number of our young
people every year, are treacherous and deceptive diseases. Not only are
they liable, as has been mentioned, to various accidental complications
which may prove suddenly fatal, but too often, after convalescence
seems to be established, relapses occur which are more serious than the
disease had appeared to be in its previous course. One morning Dr. Butts
found Maurice worse instead of better, as he had hoped and expected to
find him. Weak as he was, there was every reason to fear the issue
of this return of his threatening symptoms. There was not much to do
besides keeping up the little strength which still remained. It was all
needed.
Does the reader of these pages ever think of the work a sick man as much
as a well one has to perform while he is lying on his back and taking
what we call his “rest”? More than a thousand times an hour, between a
hundred and fifty and two hundred thousand times a week, he has to lift
the bars of the cage in which his breathing organs are confined, to save
himself from asphyxia. Rest! There is no rest until the last long sigh
tells those who look upon the dying that the ceaseless daily task, to
rest from which is death, is at last finished. We are all galley-slaves,
pulling at the levers of respiration,--which, rising and falling like so
many oars, drive us across an unfathomable ocean from one unknown shore
to another. No! Never was a galley-slave so chained as we are to these
four and twenty oars, at which we must tug day and night all our life
long.
The doctor could not find any accidental cause to account for this
relapse. It presently occurred to him that there might be some local
source of infection which had brought on the complaint, and was still
keeping up the symptoms which were the ground of alarm. He determined to
remove Maurice to his own house, where he could be sure of pure air,
and where he himself could give more constant attention to his patient
during this critical period of his disease. It was a risk to take,
but he could be carried on a litter by careful men, and remain wholly
passive during the removal. Maurice signified his assent, as he could
hardly help doing,--for the doctor's suggestion took pretty nearly the
form of a command. He thought it a matter of life and death, and was
gently urgent for his patient's immediate change of residence. The
doctor insisted on having Maurice's books and other movable articles
carried to his own house, so that he should be surrounded by familiar
sights, and not worry himself about what might happen to objects which
he valued, if they were left behind him.
All these dispositions were quickly and quietly made, and everything
was ready for the transfer of the patient to the house of the hospitable
physician. Paolo was at the doctor's, superintending the arrangement
of Maurice's effects and making all ready for his master. The nurse in
attendance, a trustworthy man enough in the main, finding his patient in
a tranquil sleep, left his bedside for a little fresh air. While he
was at the door he heard a shouting which excited his curiosity, and he
followed the sound until he found himself at the border of the lake. It
was nothing very wonderful which had caused the shouting. A Newfoundland
dog had been showing off his accomplishments, and some of the idlers
were betting as to the time it would take him to bring back to his
master the various floating objects which had been thrown as far from
the shore as possible. He watched the dog a few minutes, when his
attention was drawn to a light wherry, pulled by one young lady and
steered by another. It was making for the shore, which it would soon
reach. The attendant remembered all at once, that he had left his
charge, and just before the boat came to land he turned and hurried back
to the patient. Exactly how long he had been absent he could not have
said,--perhaps a quarter of an hour, perhaps longer; the time appeared
short to him, wearied with long sitting and watching.
It had seemed, when he stole away from Maurice's bedside, that he was
not in the least needed. The patient was lying perfectly quiet, and to
all appearance wanted nothing more than letting alone. It was such a
comfort to look at something besides the worn features of a sick man, to
hear something besides his labored breathing and faint, half-whispered
words, that the temptation to indulge in these luxuries for a few
minutes had proved irresistible.
Unfortunately, Maurice's slumbers did not remain tranquil during the
absence of the nurse. He very soon fell into a dream, which began
quietly enough, but in the course of the sudden transitions which dreams
are in the habit of undergoing became successively anxious, distressing,
terrifying. His earlier and later experiences came up before him,
fragmentary, incoherent, chaotic even, but vivid as reality. He was at
the bottom of a coal-mine in one of those long, narrow galleries, or
rather worm-holes, in which human beings pass a large part of their
lives, like so many larvae boring their way into the beams and rafters
of some old building. How close the air was in the stifling passage
through which he was crawling! The scene changed, and he was climbing a
slippery sheet of ice with desperate effort, his foot on the floor of a
shallow niche, his hold an icicle ready to snap in an instant, an abyss
below him waiting for his foot to slip or the icicle to break. How thin
the air seemed, how desperately hard to breathe! He was thinking of
Mont Blanc, it may be, and the fearfully rarefied atmosphere which he
remembered well as one of the great trials in his mountain ascents. No,
it was not Mont Blanc,--it was not any one of the frozen Alpine summits;
it was Hecla that he was climbing.
The smoke of the burning mountain was wrapping itself around him; he was
choking with its dense fumes; he heard the flames roaring around him, he
felt the hot lava beneath his feet, he uttered a faint cry, and awoke.
The room was full of smoke. He was gasping for breath, strangling in the
smothering oven which his chamber had become.
The house was on fire!
He tried to call for help, but his voice failed him, and died away in a
whisper. He made a desperate effort, and rose so as to sit up in the bed
for an instant, but the effort was too much for him, and he sank back
upon his pillow, helpless. He felt that his hour had come, for he could
not live in this dreadful atmosphere, and he was left alone. He could
hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to
another. It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the
fate that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and
then burned. Death had not the terror for him that it has for most
young persons. He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly, sometimes
wistfully, even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction
had come upon him as a temptation. But here was death in an unexpected
and appalling shape. He did not know before how much he cared to live.
All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long, vivid
flash. The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line, and
past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision. The
dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror. He
felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,--the
rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into
which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures
which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat
themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures
passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if
simultaneous. The vision of the “inward eye” was so intensified in this
moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence.
Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description
means. The development of a photograph may not explain it, but it
illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections
of the drowning man's experience. The sensitive plate has taken one look
at a scene, and remembers it all,
Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air, the wing in
flight, the leaf as it falls, the wave as it breaks. All there, but
invisible; potentially present, but impalpable, inappreciable, as if not
existing at all. A wash is poured over it, and the whole scene comes
out in all its perfection of detail. In those supreme moments when death
stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods
the undeveloped pictures of vanished years, stored away in the memory,
the vast panorama of a lifetime, and in one swift instant the past comes
out as vividly as if it were again the present. So it was at this moment
with the sick man, as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die.
For he saw no hope of relief: the smoke was drifting in clouds into
the room; the flames were very near; if he was not reached and rescued
immediately it was all over with him.
His past life had flashed before him. Then all at once rose the thought
of his future,--of all its possibilities, of the vague hopes which he
had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him.
There was something, then, to be lived for, something! There was a new
life, it might be, in store for him, and such a new life! He thought of
all he was losing. Oh, could he but have lived to know the meaning of
love! And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of
death, but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness
for him.
All this took place in the course of a very few moments. Dreams and
visions have little to do with measured time, and ten minutes, possibly
fifteen or twenty, were all that had passed since the beginning of those
nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air
he was breathing.
What had happened? In the confusion of moving books and other articles
to the doctor's house, doors and windows had been forgotten. Among the
rest a window opening into the cellar, where some old furniture had
been left by a former occupant, had been left unclosed. One of the lazy
natives, who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar, had thrown
the burning stump in at this open window. He had no particular intention
of doing mischief, but he had that indifference to consequences which is
the next step above the inclination to crime. The burning stump happened
to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open.
The smoker went his way without looking behind him, and it so chanced
that no other person passed the house for some time. Presently the straw
was in a blaze, and from this the fire extended to the furniture, to the
stairway leading up from the cellar, and was working its way along the
entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was
lying.
The blaze was fierce and swift, as it could not help being with such a
mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress, dry old furniture,
and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score
or two of years. The whole house was, in the common language of the
newspaper reports, “a perfect tinder-box,” and would probably be a heap
of ashes in half an hour. And there was this unfortunate deserted sick
man lying between life and death, beyond all help unless some unexpected
assistance should come to his rescue.
As the attendant drew near the house where Maurice was lying, he was
horror-struck to see dense volumes of smoke pouring out of the lower
windows. It was beginning to make its way through the upper windows,
also, and presently a tongue of fire shot out and streamed upward along
the side of the house. The man shrieked Fire! Fire! with all his might,
and rushed to the door of the building to make his way to Maurice's
room and save him. He penetrated but a short distance when, blinded and
choking with the smoke, he rushed headlong down the stairs with a cry of
despair that roused every man, woman, and child within reach of a human
voice. Out they came from their houses in every quarter of the village.
The shout of Fire! Fire! was the chief aid lent by many of the young and
old. Some caught up pails and buckets: the more thoughtful ones filling
them; the hastier snatching them up empty, trusting to find water nearer
the burning building.
Is the sick man moved?
This was the awful question first asked,--for in the little village all
knew that Maurice was about being transferred to the doctor's house. The
attendant, white as death, pointed to the chamber where he had left him,
and gasped out,
“He is there!”
A ladder! A ladder! was the general cry, and men and boys rushed off
in search of one. But a single minute was an age now, and there was no
ladder to be had without a delay of many minutes. The sick man was going
to be swallowed up in the flames before it could possibly arrive. Some
were going for a blanket or a coverlet, in the hope that the young man
might have strength enough to leap from the window and be safely caught
in it. The attendant shook his head, and said faintly,
“He cannot move from his bed.”
One of the visitors at the village,--a millionaire, it was said,--a
kind-hearted man, spoke in hoarse, broken tones:
“A thousand dollars to the man that will bring him from his chamber!”
The fresh-water fisherman muttered, “I should like to save the man and
to see the money, but it ain't a thaousan' dollars, nor ten thaousan'
dollars, that'll pay a fellah for burnin' to death,--or even chokin' to
death, anyhaow.”
The carpenter, who knew the framework of every house in the village,
recent or old, shook his head.
“The stairs have been shored up,” he said, “and when the fists that
holds 'em up goes, down they'll come. It ain't safe for no man to go
over them stairs. Hurry along your ladder,--that's your only chance.”
All was wild confusion around the burning house. The ladder they had
gone for was missing from its case,--a neighbor had carried it off for
the workmen who were shingling his roof. It would never get there in
time. There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a mile from the
lakeside settlement. Some were throwing on water in an aimless, useless
way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden syringe: it seemed
like doing something, at least. But all hope of saving Maurice was fast
giving way, so rapid was the progress of the flames, so thick the cloud
of smoke that filled the house and poured from the windows. Nothing was
heard but confused cries, shrieks of women, all sorts of orders to
do this and that, no one knowing what was to be done. The ladder! The
ladder! Five minutes more and it will be too late!
In the mean time the alarm of fire had reached Paolo, and he had stopped
his work of arranging Maurice's books in the same way as that in which
they had stood in his apartment, and followed in the direction of the
sound, little thinking that his master was lying helpless in the burning
house. “Some chimney afire,” he said to himself; but he would go and
take a look, at any rate.
Before Paolo had reached the scene of destruction and impending death,
two young women, in boating dresses of decidedly Bloomerish aspect,
had suddenly joined the throng. “The Wonder” and “The Terror” of their
school-days--Miss Euthymia rower and Miss Lurida Vincent had just come
from the shore, where they had left their wherry. A few hurried words
told them the fearful story. Maurice Kirkwood was lying in the chamber
to which every eye was turned, unable to move, doomed to a dreadful
death. All that could be hoped was that he would perish by suffocation
rather than by the flames, which would soon be upon him. The man who had
attended him had just tried to reach his chamber, but had reeled back
out of the door, almost strangled by the smoke. A thousand dollars had
been offered to any one who would rescue the sick man, but no one had
dared to make the attempt; for the stairs might fall at any moment, if
the smoke did not blind and smother the man who passed them before they
fell.
The two young women looked each other in the face for one swift moment.
“How can he be reached?” asked Lurida. “Is there nobody that will
venture his life to save a brother like that?”
“I will venture mine,” said Euthymia.
“No! no!” shrieked Lurida,--“not you! not you! It is a man's work, not
yours! You shall not go!” Poor Lurida had forgotten all her theories
in this supreme moment. But Euthymia was not to be held back. Taking a
handkerchief from her neck, she dipped it in a pail of water and bound
it about her head. Then she took several deep breaths of air, and filled
her lungs as full as they would hold. She knew she must not take a
single breath in the choking atmosphere if she could possibly help it,
and Euthymia was noted for her power of staying under water so long that
more than once those who saw her dive thought she would never come up
again. So rapid were her movements that they paralyzed the bystanders,
who would forcibly have prevented her from carrying out her purpose.
Her imperious determination was not to be resisted. And so Euthymia, a
willing martyr, if martyr she was to be, and not saviour, passed within
the veil that hid the sufferer.
Lurida turned deadly pale, and sank fainting to the ground. She was
the first, but not the only one, of her sex that fainted as Euthymia
disappeared in the smoke of the burning building. Even the rector grew
very white in the face,--so white that one of his vestry-men begged him
to sit down at once, and sprinkled a few drops of water on his forehead,
to his great disgust and manifest advantage. The old landlady was crying
and moaning, and her husband was wiping his eyes and shaking his head
sadly.
“She will nevar come out alive,” he said solemnly.
“Nor dead, neither,” added the carpenter. “Ther' won't be nothing left
of neither of 'em but ashes.” And the carpenter hid his face in his
hands.
The fresh-water fisherman had pulled out a rag which he called a
“hangkercher,”--it had served to carry bait that morning,--and was
making use of its best corner to dry the tears which were running down
his cheeks. The whole village was proud of Euthymia, and with these more
quiet signs of grief were mingled loud lamentations, coming alike from
old and young.
All this was not so much like a succession of events as it was like a
tableau. The lookers-on were stunned with its suddenness, and before
they had time to recover their bewildered senses all was lost, or seemed
lost. They felt that they should never look again on either of those
young faces.
The rector, not unfeeling by nature, but inveterately professional by
habit, had already recovered enough to be thinking of a text for the
funeral sermon. The first that occurred to him was this,--vaguely, of
course, in the background of consciousness:
“Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego came forth of the midst of the
fire.”
The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective
disposition. He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a
funeral pile blazing before his eyes. He, too, had his human sympathies,
but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how
he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of
attraction would be wanting,--perhaps his own services uncalled for.
Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of
mourners. The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every
sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to
the wail of the De Profundis. Not always,--not always; let us not be
cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say,
is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and
soul-subduing influences.
It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are
contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances
and individual thoughts and feelings. But linger as we may, we cannot
compress into a chapter--we could not crowd into a volume--all that
passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck
company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror. We
are dealing with an impossibility: consciousness is a surface; narrative
is a line.
Maurice had given himself up for lost. His breathing was becoming every
moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but
a few minutes longer.
“Robert!” he called in faint accents. But the attendant was not there to
answer.
“Paolo! Paolo!” But the faithful servant, who would have given his
life for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was
gathered.
“Oh, for a breath of air! Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed!
Too late! Too late!” he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying
expiration.
“Not too late!” The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if
it had come down to him from heaven.
In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms
of--a woman!
Out of the stifling chamber,--over the burning stairs,--close by the
tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,--out into the
open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,--carried as easily as if he
had been a babe, in the strong arms of “The Wonder” of the gymnasium,
the captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was
to make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.
Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers! It was a sound that
none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again,
unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking
vessel. Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who
had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives
soon to be wrapped in their burning shroud,--those stern men--the old
sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the
city counting-room--sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion
that overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are
capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.
This was the scene upon which the doctor and Paolo suddenly appeared at
the same moment.
As the fresh breeze passed over the face of the rescued patient, his
eyes opened wide, and his consciousness returned in almost supernatural
lucidity. Euthymia had sat down upon a bank, and was still supporting
him. His head was resting on her bosom. Through his awakening senses
stole the murmurs of the living cradle which rocked him with the
wavelike movements of respiration, the soft susurrus of the air that
entered with every breath, the double beat of the heart which throbbed
close to his ear. And every sense, and every instinct, and every
reviving pulse told him in language like a revelation from another
world that a woman's arms were around him, and that it was life, and not
death, which her embrace had brought him.
She would have disengaged him from her protecting hold, but the doctor
made her a peremptory sign, which he followed by a sharp command:--
“Do not move him a hair's breadth,” he said. “Wait until the litter
comes. Any sudden movement might be dangerous. Has anybody a brandy
flask about him?”
One or two members of the local temperance society looked rather
awkward, but did not come forward.
The fresh-water fisherman was the first who spoke.
“I han't got no brandy,” he said, “but there's a drop or two of old
Medford rum in this here that you're welcome to, if it'll be of any
help. I alliz kerry a little on 't in case o' gettin' wet 'n' chilled.”
So saying he held forth a flat bottle with the word Sarsaparilla stamped
on the green glass, but which contained half a pint or more of the
specific on which he relied in those very frequent exposures which
happen to persons of his calling.