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.
XXV.
LAPHAM awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from the loss of the
night before, through which it loomed mistily. But before he lifted
his head from the pillow, it gathered substance and weight against
which it needed all his will to bear up and live. In that moment he
wished that he had not wakened, that he might never have wakened; but
he rose, and faced the day and its cares.
The morning papers brought the report of the fire, and the conjectured
loss. The reporters somehow had found out the fact that the loss fell
entirely upon Lapham; they lighted up the hackneyed character of their
statements with the picturesque interest OF the coincidence that the
policy had expired only the week before; heaven knows how they knew it.
They said that nothing remained of the building but the walls; and
Lapham, on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell.
The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon the
blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of
ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears,
down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills
and copings.
He gathere
|