"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 pa.s.sage.
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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ton-hole, left just at the st.i.tch 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.