The red-brown front of our larger hay-barn loomed in a faint unnatural light, at close quarters, upon my first inquiring gaze. The big sliding doors were open, and the slanting wagon-bridge running down from their threshold was piled high with chairs, bedding, crockery, milk-pans, clothing—the jumbled remnants of our household gods. Turning, I looked across the yard upon what was left of the Beech homestead—a glare of cherry light glowing above a fiery hole in the ground.
Strangely enough this glare seemed to perpetuate in its outlines the shape and dimensions of the vanished house. It was as if the house were still there, but transmuted from joists and clap-boards and shingles, into an illuminated and impalpable ghost of itself. There was a weird effect of transparency about it. Through the spectral bulk of red light I could see the naked and gnarled apple-trees in the home-orchard on the further side; and I remembered at once that painful and striking parallel of Scrooge gazing through the re-edified body of Jacob Marley, and beholding the buttons at the back of his coat. It all seemed some monstrous dream.
But no, here the others were. Janey Wilcox and the Underwood girl had come out from the barn, and were carrying in more things. I perceived now that there was a candle burning inside, and presently Esther Hagadorn was to be seen. Hurley had disappeared, and so I went up the sloping platform to join the women—noting with weak surprise that my knees seemed to have acquired new double joints and behaved as if they were going in the other direction. I stumbled clumsily once I was inside the barn, and sat down with great abruptness on a milking-stool, leaning my head back against the haymow, and conscious of an entire indifference as to whether school kept or not.
The feeble light of the candle was losing itself upon the broad high walls of new hay; the huge shadows in the rafters overhead; the women-folk silently moving about, fixing up on the barn floor some pitiful imitation, poor souls, of the home that had been swept off the face of the earth, and outside, through the wide sprawling doors, the dying away effulgence of the embers of our roof-tree lingering in the air of the winter night.
Abner Beech came in presently, with the gun in one hand, and a blackened and outlandish-looking object in the other, which turned out to be the big pink sea-shell that used to decorate the parlor.
Again it was like some half-waking vision—the mantel. He held it up for M’rye to see, with a grave, tired smile on his face.
“We got it out, after all—just by the skin of our teeth,” he said, and Hurley, behind him, confirmed this by an eloquent grimace.
M’rye’s black eyes snapped and sparkled as she lifted the candle and saw what this something was. Then she boldly put up her face and kissed her husband with a resounding smack. Truly it was a night of surprises.
“That’s about the only thing I had to call my own when I was married,” she offered in explanation of her fervor, speaking to the company at large. Then she added in a lower tone, to Esther: “He used to play with it for hours at a stretch—when he was a baby.”
“‘Member how he used to hold it up to his ear, eh, mother?” asked Abner, softly.