The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

And being a bachelor, wealthy, handsome, and properly launched, he was soon skimming that social sea of many crafts. For the first time since his abrupt severance from the Los Olivos festivities he enjoyed society. San Francisco's had seemed a poor imitation of what novels described, but Washington was full of brilliant interest. And he met more than one woman who recalled his boyish ideals, women who were far more like the vision in the English church-yard than Delfina Carillo; who, indeed, had not resembled the English girl in anything but manifest of race, and had been an ideal apart, never to be encountered again in this world.

It was a long and exciting session, and he gave all the energies of his mind to the great question of reconstruction, but more than once he asked himself if the time had not come to marry, if it were not a duty to his old self to gratify the ambition to which he owed the foundations of his success with life. A beautiful and high-bred wife would still afford him profound satisfaction, no doubt of that. He could in the last ten or twelve years have married more than one charming San Francisco girl, but that interval of passionate love between his youthful ambition and his many opportunities had given him a distaste for a lukewarm marriage. Here in Washington, however, California seemed a long way off, and he was only forty, in the very perfection of mental and physical vigor. Could he not love again? Surely a man in the long allotted span must begin life more than once. He found himself, after an hour, in some beautiful woman's boudoir, or with a charming girl in the pale illumination of a conservatory, longing for the old tremors of hope and despair, and he determined to let himself go at the first symptom. But he continued to be merely charmed and interested. If the turbulent waters were in him still, they had fallen far below their banks and would not rise at his bidding.

It was not to be expected that the Señora would write; she hated the sight of a pen, and only wrote once a month—with sighs of protest that were almost energetic—to her daughters. Padre Ortega was too old for correspondence; consequently Talbot heard no news of Santa Ursula except from his major-domo, who wrote a monthly report of the progress of the olive-trees and the hotel. This person was not given to gossip, and Talbot was in ignorance of the health of his old friend, in spite of one or two letters of inquiry, until almost the end of the session. Then the major-domo was moved to write the following postscript to one of his dry reports:—

The Señora is dying, I guess—consumption, the galloping kind. You may see her again, and you main't. We're all sorry here, for she's always bin square and kind.

There still remained three weeks of the session, but Talbot's committee had finished its work, and he was practically free. He paired with a friendly Democrat, and started for California the day he received the letter. The impulse to go to the bedside of his old friend had been immediate and peremptory. He forgot the pleasant women in Washington, his new-formed plans. The train seemed to walk.

They were not sentimental memories that moved so persistently in his mind during that long hot journey overland. Had they risen they would have been rebuked, as having no place in the sad reality of to-day. An old friend was dying, the most necessary and sympathetic he had known. He realized that she had become a habit, and that when she left the world he would be very much alone. His mind dwelt constantly on that large brown kindly presence, and he winked away more than one tear as he reflected that he should go to her no more for sympathy, do nothing further to alleviate the loneliness of her life. In consequence he was in no way prepared for what awaited him at Los Olivos.

He arrived at night. Padre Ortega was away, so he could get no news of the Señora except that she was still alive. He sent her a note at once, telling her to expect him at eleven the next morning.

Again he took a long hot ride over sun-burned hills and fields, for it wanted but a few weeks of his birthday. As he cantered through the oaks near the house he saw that a hammock was swung across the veranda, and that some one lay in it—a woman, for a heavy braid of black hair hung over the side and trailed on the floor.

"Surely," he thought, "surely—it cannot be the Señora—in a hammock!" And then he suddenly realized that the disease must have taken her flesh.

His hands trembled as he dismounted and tied his horse to a tree, and he lingered as long as he could, for he felt that his face was white. But he was a man long used to self-control, and in a moment he walked steadily forward and ascended the steps to the veranda. And then as he stood looking down upon the hammock he needed all the control he possessed.