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The Bell In The Fog
by
Again he turned away impatiently. “I believe I am rather fond of children,” he admitted. “I catch myself watching them on the street when they are pretty enough. Well, who does not like them?” he added, with some defiance.
He went back to his work; he was chiselling a story which was to be the foremost excuse of a magazine as yet unborn. At the end of half an hour he threw down his wondrous instrument–which looked not unlike an ordinary pen–and making no attempt to disobey the desire that possessed him, went back to the gallery. The dark splendid boy, the angelic little girl were all he saw–even of the several children in that roll-call of the past–and they seemed to look straight down his eyes into depths where the fragmentary ghosts of unrecorded ancestors gave faint musical response.
“The dead’s kindly recognition of the dead,” he thought. “But I wish these children were alive.”
For a week he haunted the gallery, and the children haunted him. Then he became impatient and angry. “I am mooning like a barren woman,” he exclaimed. “I must take the briefest way of getting those youngsters off my mind.”
With the help of his secretary, he ransacked the library, and finally brought to light the gallery catalogue which had been named in the inventory. He discovered that his children were the Viscount Tancred and the Lady Blanche Mortlake, son and daughter of the second Earl of Teignmouth. Little wiser than before, he sat down at once and wrote to the present earl, asking for some account of the lives of the children. He awaited the answer with more restlessness than he usually permitted himself, and took long walks, ostentatiously avoiding the gallery.
“I believe those youngsters have obsessed me,” he thought, more than once. “They certainly are beautiful enough, and the last time I looked at them in that waning light they were fairly alive. Would that they were, and scampering about this park.”
Lord Teignmouth, who was intensely grateful to him, answered promptly.
“I am afraid,” he wrote, “that I don’t know much about my ancestors–those who didn’t do something or other; but I have a vague remembrance of having been told by an aunt of mine, who lives on the family traditions–she isn’t married–that the little chap was drowned in the river, and that the little girl died too–I mean when she was a little girl–wasted away, or something–I’m such a beastly idiot about expressing myself, that I wouldn’t dare to write to you at all if you weren’t really great. That is actually all I can tell you, and I am afraid the painter was their only biographer.”
The author was gratified that the girl had died young, but grieved for the boy. Although he had avoided the gallery of late, his practised imagination had evoked from the throngs of history the high-handed and brilliant, surely adventurous career of the third Earl of Teignmouth. He had pondered upon the deep delights of directing such a mind and character, and had caught himself envying the dust that was older still. When he read of the lad’s early death, in spite of his regret that such promise should have come to naught, he admitted to a secret thrill of satisfaction that the boy had so soon ceased to belong to any one. Then he smiled with both sadness and humor.
“What an old fool I am!” he admitted. “I believe I not only wish those children were alive, but that they were my own.”
The frank admission proved fatal. He made straight for the gallery. The boy, after the interval of separation, seemed more spiritedly alive than ever, the little girl to suggest, with her faint appealing smile, that she would like to be taken up and cuddled.
“I must try another way,” he thought, desperately, after that long communion. “I must write them out of me.”
He went back to the library and locked up the tour de force which had ceased to command his classic faculty. At once, he began to write the story of the brief lives of the children, much to the amazement of that faculty, which was little accustomed to the simplicities. Nevertheless, before he had written three chapters, he knew that he was at work upon a masterpiece–and more: he was experiencing a pleasure so keen that once and again his hand trembled, and he saw the page through a mist. Although his characters had always been objective to himself and his more patient readers, none knew better than he–a man of no delusions–that they were so remote and exclusive as barely to escape being mere mentalities; they were never the pulsing living creations of the more full-blooded genius. But he had been content to have it so. His creations might find and leave him cold, but he had known his highest satisfaction in chiselling the statuettes, extracting subtle and elevating harmonies, while combining words as no man of his tongue had combined them before.