FullReads

“I told her not to do it; confound it! I told her not to do it!” he muttered aloud, storming about the room. “Here I’ve been since Christmas collecting that pile of ashes, and it had just reached the point where I could kindle a fire with three sticks of kindling and burn only one log if I wished. And then that confounded chambermaid disobeys me–distinctly disobeys me–and shovels it all out!”

He rang angrily for the chambermaid, whose name was Eliza, and who was tall and angular.

“Didn’t I tell you under no consideration to take away any of my ashes?” he demanded.

“But I swept the room into them, and they got all dirty,” she protested.

“Then don’t sweep the room again!” he interposed. “I want the ashes left hereafter.”

“But the fire will burn better without so many ashes; they chokes it,” said Eliza. “Most people like ’em cleaned out every week.”

“Most people are fools,” said the Man Above the Square. “You may go now.”

The loss of his ashes had so irritated him that it was a long time before he could yield himself to the influence of the blaze, which leapt merrily enough, in spite of the too clear hearth. He filled his pipe and smoked it out and filled it again; he tried the latest autobiography and Heine’s prose and the current magazines; and still his mind would not settle to restfulness and content. Then suddenly he remembered the date, the 20th of January. He took down his Keats. The owl, for all his feathers, might well have been a-cold on that night, too, for a shrill wind was up without. He glanced at his fire. Already the kindlings were settling into glowing heaps beneath the logs, a good start on a fresh pile of ashes. He snuggled more comfortably into his chair and began once more the deathless poem.

The clock ticked steadily; the wind sent crashing down the limb of an elm tree outside and shrieked exultingly; a log settled into the fire with a hiss and crackle of sparks. But he heard nothing. Presently he laid the book aside, for the poem was finished, and looked into the fire. It was sometimes a favorite question of his to inquire who ate Madeline’s feast, a point which Keats leaves in doubt; but he did not ask it to-night.

“Yes, it was ages long ago,” he said at length. “Ages long ago!”

Then he leaned forward, poking the fire meditatively, and added: “Steam heat in Madeline’s chamber? Impossible! But there might have been just such another fire as this!”

And was it a sudden thought, “like a full-blown rose,” making “purple riot” in his breast, too, or was it simply the leap of the firelight, which caused his face to flush?

“I wonder where they are now?” he whispered. “‘They are together in the arms of death,’ a later poet says. But surely the world has not so far ‘progressed’ that they do not live somewhere still.”

Then he recalled a visit he once made to a young doctor in a fine old New-England village. The doctor was not long out of college, and he had brought his bride to this little town, to an old house rich in tiny window panes, uneven floors and memories. Great fireplaces supplied the heat for the doctor and his wife, as it had done for the occupants who looked forth from the windows to see the soldiery go by on their way to join Washington at the siege of Boston. And when the Man Above the Square came on his visit he found in the fireplace which warmed the low-studded living room, that was library and drawing room as well, a heap of ashes more than a foot high, on which the great cordwood sticks roared merrily.

The doctor and his wife, sitting down before the blaze, pointed proudly to this heap of ashes, and the doctor said, “I brought Alice to this house a year ago, on the day of our wedding, and we kindled a fire here, on the bare hearth. Since then not a speck of ashes has been removed, except little bits from the front when the carpet was invaded. That pile of ashes is the witness to our year-long honeymoon.”

Then Alice smiled fondly into the rosy glow, herself more rosy, and they kissed each other quite unaffectedly.

The Man Above the Square, when his memory reached this point, let the ebony poker slide from his grasp. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “her name was really Madeline!”

Again he looked into the fire. “Could the ashes have been preserved if Madeline had not given the matter her personal attention, but had trusted to a housemaid?” he thought. What further reflections this question inspired must be left to conjecture. He did not speak again.

But presently he got up, went to his desk, and wrote a letter. He was a long time about it, consulting frequently with the fire and smiling now and then. When it was done he took it at once to the elevator to be mailed. Perhaps he thought it unsafe to wait the turning of the mood.