PAGE 6
The Bell In The Fog
by
The child ushered him into the dining-room, where an old man was seated at the table reading his Bible. The room was at least eight hundred years old. The ceiling was supported by the trunk of a tree, black, and probably petrified. The windows had still their diamond panes, separated, no doubt, by the original lead. Beyond was a large kitchen in which were several women. The old man, who looked patriarchal enough to have laid the foundations of his dwelling, glanced up and regarded the visitor without hospitality. His expression softened as his eyes moved to the child.
“Who ‘ave ye brought?” he asked. He removed his spectacles. “Ah!” He rose, and offered the author a chair. At the same moment, the women entered the room.
“Of course you’ve fallen in love with Blanche, sir,” said one of them. “Everybody does.”
“Yes, that is it. Quite so.” Confusion still prevailing among his faculties, he clung to the naked truth. “This little girl has interested and startled me because she bears a precise resemblance to one of the portraits in Chillingsworth–painted about two hundred years ago. Such extraordinary likenesses do not occur without reason, as a rule, and, as I admired my portrait so deeply that I have written a story about it, you will not think it unnatural if I am more than curious to discover the reason for this resemblance. The little girl tells me that her ancestors lived in this very house, and as my little girl lived next door, so to speak, there undoubtedly is a natural reason for the resemblance.”
His host closed the Bible, put his spectacles in his pocket, and hobbled out of the house.
“He’ll never talk of family secrets,” said an elderly woman, who introduced herself as the old man’s daughter, and had placed bread and milk before the guest. “There are secrets in every family, and we have ours, but he’ll never tell those old tales. All I can tell you is that an ancestor of little Blanche went to wreck and ruin because of some fine lady’s doings, and killed himself. The story is that his boys turned out bad. One of them saw his crime, and never got over the shock; he was foolish like, after. The mother was a poor scared sort of creature, and hadn’t much influence over the other boy. There seemed to be a blight on all the man’s descendants, until one of them went to America. Since then, they haven’t prospered, exactly, but they’ve done better, and they don’t drink so heavy.”
“They haven’t done so well,” remarked a worn patient-looking woman. Orth typed her as belonging to the small middle-class of an interior town of the eastern United States.
“You are not the child’s mother?”
“Yes, sir. Everybody is surprised; you needn’t apologize. She doesn’t look like any of us, although her brothers and sisters are good enough for anybody to be proud of. But we all think she strayed in by mistake, for she looks like any lady’s child, and, of course, we’re only middle-class.”
Orth gasped. It was the first time he had ever heard a native American use the term middle-class with a personal application. For the moment, he forgot the child. His analytical mind raked in the new specimen. He questioned, and learned that the woman’s husband had kept a hat store in Rome, New York; that her boys were clerks, her girls in stores, or type-writing. They kept her and little Blanche–who had come after her other children were well grown–in comfort; and they were all very happy together. The boys broke out, occasionally; but, on the whole, were the best in the world, and her girls were worthy of far better than they had. All were robust, except Blanche. “She coming so late, when I was no longer young, makes her delicate,” she remarked, with a slight blush, the signal of her chaste Americanism; “but I guess she’ll get along all right. She couldn’t have better care if she was a queen’s child.”