The Bell in the Fog | Page 3

by the artist, who
painted into her his own dream of exquisite childhood."
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