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.