“It is too late now.” This was not one, but several voices together. As they spoke the windows of the house shone like the sunrise while a torrent of flame swept through the hall.
“Oh, Pell! Pell!” I cried out in agony. “Cannot you come to me?”
For a minute—it was scarcely longer—after I called, there was no answer. We stood in that red glare, and round us and beyond us closed the mysterious penumbra of the darkness. Without the circle, where we clung together in our horror, there was the freshness and the sweetness of the spring, and all the little quiet stirs that birds make when they nest at night. And it was out of this bird-haunted darkness that a shape moved suddenly past me into the flames, a shape which as the light edged it round I saw to be that of the old negress.
“She is looking for him,” I cried now. “Oh, don’t you see her?”
They gathered anxiously round me. “The fire has blinded her,” I heard them say. “She is looking straight at the flames.”
Yes, I was looking straight at the flames, for beyond the flames, past the unburned wing of the house, from the window of an old storeroom, which was never opened, they had told me, I saw the shape of the old negress pass again like a shadow. The next instant my heart melted with joy, for I saw that she was bringing the child in her arms. The little face was pale as death; the red curls were singed to black; but it was the child that she held. Even the unperceiving eyes about me, though they could see only material things, knew that Pell had come unharmed out of the fire. To them it was merely a shadow, a veil of smoke, which surrounded him. I alone saw the dark arms that enfolded him. I alone, among all those standing there in that awful light, recognized that dark compassionate face.
Her eyes found me at last, and I knew, in that moment of vision, what the message was that she had for me. Without a word I stepped forward, and held out my arms. As I did so, I saw a glory break in the dim features. Then, even while I gave my voiceless answer, the face melted from me into spirals of smoke. Was it a dream, after all? Was the only reality the fact that I held the child safe and unharmed in my arms?
A POINT IN MORALS
“The question seems to be—” began the Englishman. He looked up and bowed to a girl in black who had just come in from deck and was taking the seat beside him. “The question seems to be—” The girl was having some difficulty in removing her coat, and he turned to assist her.
“In my opinion,” remarked the distinguished alienist, who was returning from a vacation in Vienna, “the question is whether or not civilization is defeating its own aims in placing an exorbitant value on human life.” As he spoke he leaned forward authoritatively and accented his words with foreign precision.