The blue wall

by Richard Washburn Child

He wiped his tortoise-shell glasses as he looked at me and nodded.

“I shall not go to bed now,” said he. “I shall stay down here. Give the child clean clothing. And then to-morrow—”

I felt the warmth of the little body in the curve of my arm and whether for its own sake or its father’s, I do not know, but my heart was big for it. In spite of my feeling and the water in my eyes, I shut my teeth.

“To-morrow,” I said.

How little we knew.

How little I knew, for after I had washed the child, laid it in the big vacant bed, and blown out the candle, I remember I stood there in the dark beside little Julianna’s crib with my thoughts not on the child at all. It was the ghost of Monty Cranch that walked this way and that in front of me, sometimes looking into my eyes and saying, “What are you doing here?” and other times running up through the meadow away from his crime and again standing before a great shining Person and saying, “What I am, I was born; what I am, I must be.”

I went downstairs once that night and peeked in through the curtains. The Judge was at his desk with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes looking out from under his heavy eyebrows, as if he had the puzzle of the world in front of him and was almost afraid. I thought of how tired he must be and of what a day it had been for all of us.

At last a board squeaked on the stairs, reminding me of the late hour and my aching body and burning eyes. So I went up to bed and tossed about until I fell asleep.

I know I could not have slept very soundly. Little matters stick in the memory if they are connected with such affairs. And so I remember half waking to hear the slam of a blind and the howl of a wind that had sprung up. Things were rattling everywhere with every gust of it—the curtains, the papers on my bureau, the leaves on the trees outside, and I pulled the sheet over my head and thought of how my father and mother had gone down at sea, and fell into dreams of oceans of melted lead hissing and steaming and red.

I think it was the shout of some man that woke me, but that is neither here nor there. The house was afire! Yellow, dancing light and smoke poured under the door like something turned out of a pail. With every puff of the wind the trees in the orchard were all lit up and the flames yelled as if they were a thousand men far away and shouting together. Between the gusts you could hear the gentle snap and crackle and the splitting of sap in wood and a body’s own coughing when it tried to breathe in the solid mass of smoke. There were shouts of people outside, too, and the squeaking and scampering of rats through the walls. Out of my window I could see one great cloud of red sparks. They had burst out after a heat explosion and I heard the rattle and tinkle of a broken window above the roar of the fire.