The Bell in the Fog | Page 7

rapture. Then he took the train for Lancashire, where the Lady
Mildred Mortlake lived in another ancestral home.
Possibly there are few imaginative writers who have not a leaning,
secret or avowed, to the occult. The creative gift is in very close
relationship with the Great Force behind the universe; for aught we
know, may be an atom thereof. It is not strange, therefore, that the
lesser and closer of the unseen forces should send their vibrations to it
occasionally; or, at all events, that the imagination should incline its ear
to the most mysterious and picturesque of all beliefs. Orth frankly
dallied with the old dogma. He formulated no personal faith of any sort,
but his creative faculty, that ego within an ego, had made more than
one excursion into the invisible and brought back literary treasure.
The Lady Mildred received with sweetness and warmth the generous
contributor to the family sieve, and listened with fluttering interest to
all he had not told the world--she had read the book--and to the strange,
Americanized sequel.
"I am all at sea," concluded Orth. "What had my little girl to do with
the tragedy? What relation was she to the lady who drove the young
man to destruction--?"
"The closest," interrupted Lady Mildred. "She was herself!"
Orth stared at her. Again he had a confused sense of disintegration.
Lady Mildred, gratified by the success of her bolt, proceeded less
dramatically:

"Wally was up here just after I read your book, and I discovered he had
given you the wrong history of the picture. Not that he knew it. It is a
story we have left untold as often as possible, and I tell it to you only
because you would probably become a monomaniac if I didn't. Blanche
Mortlake--that Blanche--there had been several of her name, but there
has not been one since--did not die in childhood, but lived to be
twenty-four. She was an angelic child, but little angels sometimes grow
up into very naughty girls. I believe she was delicate as a child, which
probably gave her that spiritual look. Perhaps she was spoiled and
flattered, until her poor little soul was stifled, which is likely. At all
events, she was the coquette of her day--she seemed to care for nothing
but breaking hearts; and she did not stop when she married, either. She
hated her husband, and became reckless. She had no children. So far,
the tale is not an uncommon one; but the worst, and what makes the
ugliest stain in our annals, is to come.
"She was alone one summer at Chillingsworth--where she had taken
temporary refuge from her husband--and she amused herself--some say,
fell in love--with a young man of the yeomanry, a tenant of the next
estate. His name was Root. He, so it comes down to us, was a
magnificent specimen of his kind, and in those days the yeomanry gave
us our great soldiers. His beauty of face was quite as remarkable as his
physique; he led all the rural youth in sport, and was a bit above his
class in every way. He had a wife in no way remarkable, and two little
boys, but was always more with his friends than his family. Where he
and Blanche Mortlake met I don't know--in the woods, probably,
although it has been said that he had the run of the house. But, at all
events, he was wild about her, and she pretended to be about him.
Perhaps she was, for women have stooped before and since. Some
women can be stormed by a fine man in any circumstances; but,
although I am a woman of the world, and not easy to shock, there are
some things I tolerate so hardly that it is all I can do to bring myself to
believe in them; and stooping is one. Well, they were the scandal of the
county for months, and then, either because she had tired of her new
toy, or his grammar grated after the first glamour, or because she feared
her husband, who was returning from the Continent, she broke off with
him and returned to town. He followed her, and forced his way into her

house. It is said she melted, but made him swear never to attempt to see
her again. He returned to his home, and killed himself. A few months
later she took her own life. That is all I know."
"It is quite enough for me," said Orth.
The next night, as his train travelled over the great wastes of Lancashire,
a thousand chimneys were spouting forth columns of fire. Where the
sky was not red it was black. The place looked like hell. Another time
Orth's imagination would have gathered immediate inspiration from
this wildest region of England.