The whim seized Lapham to test the chimney in the music-room;it had been tried in the dining-room below, and in his girls'
fireplaces above, but here the hearth was still clean.
He gathered some shavings and blocks together, and kindled them, and as the flame mounted gaily from them, he pulled up a nail-keg which he found there and sat down to watch it.Nothing could have been better;the chimney was a perfect success; and as Lapham glanced out of the torn linen sash he said to himself that that party, whoever he was, who had offered to buy his house might go to the devil; he would never sell it as long as he had a dollar.He said that he should pull through yet;and it suddenly came into his mind that, if he could raise the money to buy out those West Virginia fellows, he should be all right, and would have the whole game in his own hand.He slapped himself on the thigh, and wondered that he had never thought of that before;and then, lighting a cigar with a splinter from the fire, he sat down again to work the scheme out in his own mind.
He did not hear the feet heavily stamping up the stairs, and coming towards the room where he sat; and the policeman to whom the feet belonged had to call out to him, smoking at his chimney-corner, with his back turned to the door, "Hello! what are you doing here?""What's that to you?" retorted Lapham, wheeling half round on his nail-keg.
"I'll show you," said the officer, advancing upon him, and then stopping short as he recognised him."Why, Colonel Lapham! I thought it was some tramp got in here!""Have a cigar?" said Lapham hospitably."Sorry there ain't another nail-keg."The officer took the cigar."I'll smoke it outside.
I've just come on, and I can't stop.Tryin' your chimney?""Yes, I thought I'd see how it would draw, in here.
It seems to go first-rate."
The policeman looked about him with an eye of inspection.
"You want to get that linen window, there, mended up.""Yes, I'll speak to the builder about that.It can go for one night."The policeman went to the window and failed to pin the linen together where Lapham had failed before."I can't fix it."He looked round once more, and saying, "Well, good night,"went out and down the stairs.
Lapham remained by the fire till he had smoked his cigar;then he rose and stamped upon the embers that still burned with his heavy boots, and went home.He was very cheerful at supper.He told his wife that he guessed he had a sure thing of it now, and in another twenty-four hours he should tell her just how.He made Penelope go to the theatre with him, and when they came out, after the play, the night was so fine that he said they must walk round by the new house and take a look at it in the starlight.
He said he had been there before he came home, and tried Seymour's chimney in the music-room, and it worked like a charm.
As they drew near Beacon Street they were aware of unwonted stir and tumult, and presently the still air transmitted a turmoil of sound, through which a powerful and incessant throbbing made itself felt.
The sky had reddened above them, and turning the corner at the Public Garden, they saw a black mass of people obstructing the perspective of the brightly-lighted street, and out of this mass a half-dozen engines, whose strong heart-beats had already reached them, sent up volumes of fire-tinged smoke and steam from their funnels.
Ladders were planted against the facade of a building, from the roof of which a mass of flame burnt smoothly upward, except where here and there it seemed to pull contemptuously away from the heavy streams of water which the firemen, clinging like great beetles to their ladders, poured in upon it.
Lapham had no need to walk down through the crowd, gazing and gossiping, with shouts and cries and hysterical laughter, before the burning house, to make sure that it was his.
"I guess I done it, Pen," was all he said.
Among the people who were looking at it were a party who seemed to have run out from dinner in some neighbouring house;the ladies were fantastically wrapped up, as if they had flung on the first things they could seize.
"Isn't it perfectly magnificent!" cried a pretty girl.
"I wouldn't have missed it on any account.Thank you so much, Mr.Symington, for bringing us out!""Ah, I thought you'd like it," said this Mr.Symington, who must have been the host; "and you can enjoy it without the least compunction, Miss Delano, for I happen to know that the house belongs to a man who could afford to burn one up for you once a year.""Oh, do you think he would, if I came again?""I haven't the least doubt of it.We don't do things by halves in Boston.""He ought to have had a coat of his noncombustible paint on it," said another gentleman of the party.
Penelope pulled her father away toward the first carriage she could reach of a number that had driven up.
"Here, father! get into this."
"No, no; I couldn't ride," he answered heavily, and he walked home in silence.He greeted his wife with, "Well, Persis, our house is gone! And I guess I set it on fire myself;"and while he rummaged among the papers in his desk, still with his coat and hat on, his wife got the facts as she could from Penelope.She did not reproach him.
Here was a case in which his self-reproach must be sufficiently sharp without any edge from her.Besides, her mind was full of a terrible thought.
"O Silas," she faltered, "they'll think you set it on fire to get the insurance!"Lapham was staring at a paper which he held in his hand.
"I had a builder's risk on it, but it expired last week.
It's a dead loss."
"Oh, thank the merciful Lord!" cried his wife.
"Merciful!" said Lapham."Well, it's a queer way of showing it."He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which sometimes follows a great moral shock.It was perhaps rather a torpor than a sleep.
