Robert inwardly resolved to make the total $1,025.
"Most of those dead or likely to die," continued Emily, while Robert held Elsie and Mrs. Barlow rocked in her easy-chair, "belonged to the hapless group that had been penned in the top story of the Harmon building. They were employes of the firm of Carter & Hallowell, lace dealers. Shut off by a solid wall from the Cazenove street side of the building, they had not heard the shouts of fire until too late. A broad sheet of flame barred their exit to the stairs, which were midway along the corridor. Over fifteen of the girls, however, had come down safely in the elevator, and Alexander, the colored elevator boy, had promised to make a return trip for the others. He was true to his word and was seen remounting as high as the fifth story. But here the heated iron cables refused to work, and the poor fellow, stuck fast between two floors, unable to escape from his wooden box, must have suffered a martyr's death."
"Poor boy!" murmured Mrs. Barlow. Perhaps she was thinking of her own 17-year-old son, whose death within a twelvemonth had deprived her home of its only masculine presence.
"Heroism!" cried Robert. "It is all around us in homespun, and yet we run back to search for it under togas or coats of mail."
"Oscar Schubert's death was equally mysterious," continued Emily, turning the Beacon inside out. "He was a hook-and-ladder man, attached to company 3, a German, and in every way a valuable servant. The poor fellow left a wife and two flaxen-haired children, whose lamentations at the hospital when the body proved to be that of their father brought tears to the eyes even of the stoical attendants, accustomed as they are to the surroundings of death."
Here Emily was interrupted by a glee of laughter from a romping group downstairs. It was the children coming home from Sunday school. A tiptoe peep at the visitor magically hushed their merriment, but Robert persuaded the youngest to intrust herself to his unoccupied knee, where he held her as a counterpoise to Elsie, inwardly resolving to increase his subscription to $50 for the sake of Oscar Schubert's two little ones.
"But the tenderest sympathy," read Emily, "is reserved for the Lacy girls, sole supports of a large family, the cares of which, however, did not seem to weigh upon their amiable dispositions. They had embraced each other on the ledge before jumping, and leaped together, arm in arm, missing the extended net by taking too strong a horizontal impulse, which threw them almost to the curbstone. In the case of Mary, the elder sister, death was instantaneous, but the features were not marred in the least. The face of Florence, the younger, had been crushed in beyond recognition, yet she lingered on and it was nearly two hours before her heart finally ceased to beat. A feeble mother, an irresponsible brother and several small sisters are left to mourn these truly estimable young women."
During this paragraph Robert's promissory subscription had silently risen to $100. If it continued mounting he would soon have little ready cash to meet his current expenses with. Little Elsie and Bessie, the midget of all, listened wonderingly on his knee; and it is not surprising if during the paragraph that followed, all about money losses and insurance policies and proprietors' histories, his thoughts, startled by a casual mention of Prof. Arnold's name in the reading, roamed away to his own teens, when he used to sit on his Uncle Benjamin's knee, as the little girls were sitting on his.
He called up a picture of the Yorkshire youth who had been brought over to the new world, with a younger brother and sister, by parents richer in virtue than in coin of the world. Both the sons had won wealth and Benjamin fame. Beginning as a gardener, he soon wrung recognition for his botanical learning from a world which he affronted from beginning to end by an independence passing far over the line into the region of eccentricity. He belonged to the rare class of self-made scholars, and a popular herb-balsam of his compounding had laid the corner-stone of a fortune which sixty years of prudent addition had reared even higher than that of his brother Henry, the banker. An Englishman by birth, he had refused to change his allegiance. "Salute the flag you're born under," was the motto he preached; and, consistently inconsistent in this regard, he applauded the equally strong American loyalty of his sister's son, Robert Floyd.
How upright, how unimpeachable, he had been, thought Robert, in his old-school fixity of principle! Overbearing to those he distrusted, irritable among shams, he was charity itself to real merit and to the poor. His pet aversions made a long and amusing list—lawyers, electric lights, theaters, agnostics, cats; but each was only the reverse side of a medal whose obverse was passionate love. If, for instance, he was known to have stoned stray kittens from his garden, he made up for his cruelty by treating dogs almost as human beings.