When she had received the picture through the mail, some months before the fire which consumed the hotel—a fire through which she had not passed, but out of which she had come a widow—she proudly passed it around among the friends waiting with her at the post-office, replying to their questions as they admired it:
“Oh, yes! That's where he works—if you can call it work. He's the head steward in it. All that row o' winders where you see the awnin's down, they're his—an' them that ain't down, they're his, too—that is to say, it's his jurisdiction.
“You see, he's got the whip hand over the cook an' the sto'eroom, an' that key don't go out o' his belt unless he knows who's gettin' what—an' he's firm. Morris always was. He's like the iron law of the Ephesians.”
“What key?”
It was an old lady who held the picture at arm's length, the more closely to scan it, who asked the question. She asked it partly to know, as neither man nor key appeared in the photograph, and partly to parry the “historic allusion”—a disturbing sort of fire for which Mrs. Morris was rather noted and which made some of her most loyal townsfolk a bit shy of her.
“Oh, I ain't referrin' to the picture,” she hastened to explain. “I mean the keys thet he always carries in his belt. The reg'lar joke there is to call him 'St. Peter,' an' he takes it in good part, for, he declares, if there is such a thing as a similitude to the kingdom o' Heaven in a hotel, why, it's in the providential supply department which, in a manner, hangs to his belt. He always humors a joke—'specially on himself.”
No one will ever know through what painful periods of unrequited longing the Widow Morris had sought solace in this, her only cherished “relic,” after the “half hour of sky-works” which had made her, in her own vernacular, “a lonely, conflagrated widow, with a heart full of ashes,” before the glad moment when it was given her to discern in it an unsuspected and novel value. First had come, as a faint gleam of comfort, the reflection that although her dear lost one was not in evidence in the picture, he had really been inside the building when the photograph was taken, and so, of course, he must be in there yet!
At first she experienced a slight disappointment that her man was not visible, at door or window. But it was only a passing regret. It was really better to feel him surely and broadly within—at large in the great house, free to pass at will from one room to another. To have had him fixed, no matter how effectively, would have been a limitation. As it was, she pressed the picture to her bosom as she wondered if, perchance, he would not some day come out of his hiding to meet her.
It was a muffled pleasure and tremulously entertained at first, but the very whimsicality of it was an appeal to her sensitized imagination, and so, when finally the thing did really happen, it is small wonder that it came somewhat as a shock.
It appears that one day, feeling particularly lonely and forlorn, and having no other comfort, she was pressing her tear-stained face against the row of window-shutters in the room without awnings, this being her nearest approach to the alleged occupant's bosom, when she was suddenly startled by a peculiar swishing sound, as of wind-blown rain, whereupon she lifted her face to perceive that it was indeed raining, and then, glancing back at the photograph, she distinctly saw her husband rushing from one window to another, drawing down the sashes on the side of the house that would have been exposed to the real shower whose music was in her ears.