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Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Chapter 41 |
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_ CHAPTER XLI After a time Adelle became confusedly conscious of some disturbance around her. She thought at first that it must be Archie noisily entering the neighboring chamber. But soon she heard loud cries and sat upright, listening. Then she became aware of a thick, suffocating atmosphere and the acrid taste of smoke in her mouth. The electric light would not respond to her touch. She knew what it meant--Fire! With one bound she leaped from her bed and ran, just as she was in nightdress, for the hall from which the large staircase led up to the upper story--the only approach to her child's rooms from this end of the house. The staircase was a bank of roaring flame and the hall itself was vividly streaked with dashes of eating flame. She rushed chokingly straight for the blazing staircase and would have died in the fire had not one of the servants caught her in time and dragged her back outside through the open door. She quickly slipped through the man's grasp, and without uttering a cry started around the house for the servants' entrance. Archie came stumbling into the light, half dressed in his evening clothes, struggling to put an arm into one of the sleeves of his coat. She cried,-- "The boy--the boy--save him!" One glance at Archie's nerveless, vacant face was enough. There was no help to be had in him! "Dell--where is he?" Archie called, still fumbling for the lost sleeve. But she had disappeared. At the servants' door some men were pounding and shouting. The door was locked and bolted and stood fast. Adelle threw herself against it, pounding with her fists; then, as if divining its unyielding strength, she sped on around the corner of the house to the open terrace. There a number of the servants and helpers on the estate were running to and fro shouting and calling for help. Already the fire gleamed through the house from the front and the wind lifted great plumes of flame against the dark hillside, painting the tall eucalyptus trees fantastically. The fire, starting evidently in the central part of the house which contained the drawing-room, had shot first up the broad staircase and was now eating its way through the second floor and reaching across to the farther wing that hung directly above the canon. More and more persons arrived while Adelle ran up and down the terrace, like a hunted animal, moaning--"Boy! Boy!" There was talk of ladders, which had been left by the workmen at the garage half a mile away. Before these could be got or the hose attached to the fireplugs, the flame had swirled out from the lonely wing where the child and his nurse slept. Even if the ladders came, they would be of no use over the deep pit of the canon, and the center of the house was now a roaring furnace. Adelle clung to the rough rock of her great wall--the supporting wall to this part of her house--the wall she had watched with such interest, such admiration for its size and strength. It reached away from her slight, white figure down into the gloom of the canon, and upon it rested the burning house. While she clung there dry-eyed, moaning, she was conscious of Archie's attempt to pull her back. He was the same bewildered figure, collarless, in evening clothes--the same feeble, useless man, failing her at this crisis as always. She shook off his touch with repugnance and crouched close to the wall, as near as she could get to her child. Then there passed a few of those terrible moments that are as nothing and as a lifetime crowded with agony to the human being. The wind poured noisily through the canon, bending before its blast the swaying trees, but even louder than the wind was the roar of the conquering fire that now illuminated all the hillside like day and revealed the little figures of impotent men and women, who ran this way and that confusedly, helplessly, crying and shouting. The center of the great house was a solid pillar of flame, and the fire was eating its way on either side into the wings. The wing where the child slept rose from the canon like a walled castle, impregnable--Adelle might remember that "Boy" had chosen these rooms in the remote corner of the house, fascinated by their lofty perch over the deep canon. And there, at the bottom of the wall that she had built, the mother clung, helpless, beyond reach of her child. A man ran out on the parapet of the terrace past Adelle. He stopped where the parapet touched the sheer wall of the building, looked up at the burning house which cast out great waves of heat, knocked off his shoes, threw down his coat, and dove as it seemed into space. She knew it was Clark, the stone mason. People crowded around Adelle and leaned over the parapet to see what had become of him. They shouted--"See him! There! There!"--pointing, as the wreaths of smoke rose and revealed the man's dark figure clinging to the wall, creeping forward, walking, as it were, on nothing in space. With fingers and toes he stuck himself like a leech to the broken surfaces of the rock wall, feeling for the cracks and crannies, the stone edgings, the little pockets in the masonry that he himself had laid. He climbed upwards in a zigzag, slowly, steadily, groping above his head for the next clutch, clinging, crawling like a spider over the surface of sheer rock. As he rose foot by foot he became clearly visible in the red light of the flames, a dark shadow stretched against the blank surface above the gulf. The Scotch foreman said,-- "He's crazy--he can't skin that wall!" Adelle knew that he was speaking of the stone mason; she knew that Clark was daring the impossible to get at her child, to save her "Boy." She felt in every fiber of her body the strain of that feat--the clinging, creeping progress up the perpendicular wall over the canon. Those around groaned as they watched, expecting each moment to see the man's body fall backwards sickeningly into space. But he stuck to the wall as if part of it, his arms widespread, his fingers feeling every inch for hold, and now he was mounting faster as if sure of himself, confident that he could cling. If he could keep hold until his hand touched the first row of window-sills, he had a chance. A long red arm reached up; groped painfully; the finger-tips touched the end of a blind. There was dead silence except for the roar of the wind-driven fire while the mason pawed along the window-sill for safe lodgment; then--"He's caught it!" A shout went up, and while her breath seemed to choke her, Adelle saw the man in the glare of the flame pull himself up, inch by inch, until his head was level with the glass, butt his head against the heavy pane, and with a final heave disappear within while a black smudge of smoke poured from the vent he had made. A long, silent, agonizing emptiness while he was gone, and he was back at the window, standing large and bloody in the light, his arms about the figure of the nurse, who had evidently fainted. Adelle felt one sharp pang of agony;--"Why had he taken her, not the child?" But her soul rejected this selfish thought;--"He knows," she said, "he knows--he must save her first!" Clark had tied the sheets under the woman's shoulders, and holding the weight of the body with one hand, he crept lightly from one window ledge to the next until he came within reach of the terrace, then swung the woman and cast her loose. She fell in a heap beside Adelle. They said she was living. Already the mason had groped his way back along the sills to the open window and disappeared. When he reappeared he had the small boy in his arms, evidently asleep or unconscious, for he lay a crumpled little bundle against the mason's breast. This time Clark continued his course along the sills until he reached a gutter, clinging with one hand, holding his burden tight with the other. It was a feat almost harder than the skinning of the naked wall. When he dropped the last ten feet to the ground cries rose from the little group below. It was the unconscious recognition of an achievement that not one man in ten thousand was capable of, a combination of courage, skill, and perfect nerve which let him walk safely above the abyss across the perpendicular wall. It was more than human,--the projection of man's will in reckless daring that defies the physical world. Adelle always remembered receiving the child, who was still sleeping, she thought, from the mason's arms. Clark was breathing hard, and his face was slit across by a splinter from the window-pane. He was a terrible, ghastly figure. The blood ran down his bare arms and dripped on the white bundle he gave her.... Then she remembered no more until she was in a bare, cold room--the place that was to have been the orangery, where they kept the garden tools. She was kneeling, still holding in her arms her precious bundle, calling coaxingly,--"Boy, wake up! Boy, it's mother! Boy, how can you sleep like that!" calling softly, piteously, moaningly, until she knew that her child could never answer her. He had been smothered by the smoke before the mason reached him. Then Adelle knew nothing more of that night and its horrors. _ |
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