The room was full of smoke.He was gasping for breath,strangling in the smothering oven which his chamber had become.
The house was on fire!
He tried to call for help,but his voice failed him,and died away in a whisper.He made a desperate effort,and rose so as to sit up in the bed for an instant,but the effort was too much for him,and he sank back upon his pillow,helpless.He felt that his hour had come,for he could not live in this dreadful atmosphere,and he was left alone.He could hear the crackle of fire as the flame crept along from one partition to another.It was a cruel fate to be left to perish in that way,--the fate that many a martyr had had to face,--to be first strangled and then burned.Death had not the terror for him that it has for most young persons.He was accustomed to thinking of it calmly,sometimes wistfully,even to such a degree that the thought of self-destruction had come upon him as a temptation.But here was death in an unexpected and appalling shape.He did not know before how much he cared to live.All his old recollections came before him as it were in one long,vivid flash.The closed vista of memory opened to its far horizon-line,and past and present were pictured in a single instant of clear vision.The dread moment which had blighted his life returned in all its terror.He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint,impotent spasm,--the rush of air,--the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated.One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves,as real as at the moment of their occurrence.The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous.The vision of the "inward eye "was so intensified in this moment of peril that an instant was like an hour of common existence.Those who have been very near drowning know well what this description means.The development of a photograph may not explain it,but it illustrates the curious and familiar fact of the revived recollections of the drowning man's experience.The sensitive plate has taken one look at a scene,and remembers it all,Every little circumstance is there,--the hoof in air,the wing in flight,the leaf as it falls,the wave as it breaks.All there,but invisible;potentially present,but impalpable,inappreciable,as if not existing at all.A wash is poured over it,and the whole scene comes out in all its perfection of detail.In those supreme moments when death stares a man suddenly in the face the rush of unwonted emotion floods the undeveloped pictures of vanished years,stored away in the memory,the vast panorama of a lifetime,and in one swift instant the past comes out as vividly as if it were again the present.So it was at this moment with the sick man,as he lay helpless and felt that he was left to die.For he saw no hope of relief:the smoke was drifting in clouds into the room;the flames were very near;if he was not reached and rescued immediately it was all over with him.
His past life had flashed before him.Then all at once rose the thought of his future,--of all its possibilities,of the vague hopes which he had cherished of late that his mysterious doom would be lifted from him.There was something,then,to be lived for,something!There was a new life,it might be,in store for him,and such a new life!He thought of all he was losing.Oh,could he but have lived to know the meaning of love!And the passionate desire of life came over him,--not the dread of death,but the longing for what the future might yet have of happiness for him.
All this took place in the course of a very few moments.Dreams and visions have little to do with measured time,and ten minutes,possibly fifteen or twenty,were all that had passed since the beginning of those nightmare terrors which were evidently suggested by the suffocating air he was breathing.
What had happened?In the confusion of moving books and other articles to the doctor's house,doors and windows had been forgotten.
Among the rest a window opening into the cellar,where some old furniture had been left by a former occupant,had been left unclosed.
One of the lazy natives,who had lounged by the house smoking a bad cigar,had thrown the burning stump in at this open window.He had no particular intention of doing mischief,but he had that indifference to consequences which is the next step above the inclination to crime.The burning stump happened to fall among the straw of an old mattress which had been ripped open.The smoker went his way without looking behind him,and it so chanced that no other person passed the house for some time.Presently the straw was in a blaze,and from this the fire extended to the furniture,to the stairway leading up from the cellar,and was working its way along the entry under the stairs leading up to the apartment where Maurice was lying.
The blaze was fierce and swift,as it could not help being with such a mass of combustibles,--loose straw from the mattress,dry old furniture,and old warped floors which had been parching and shrinking for a score or two of years.The whole house was,in the common language of the newspaper reports,"a perfect tinder-box,"and would probably be a heap of ashes in half an hour.And there was this unfortunate deserted sick man lying between life and death,beyond all help unless some unexpected assistance should come to his rescue.
