OR three days the storm of bewilderment and of laughter raged over the city of Leicester, and then it ended as foolishly as it had begun. On Friday night in "The Advocate" the "Bellsmith story" was relegated to an inner page, and by Saturday morning some knotty problem of municipal politics, involving the paving of Grand Street, had arisen to drive it out of sight entirely.
blazed "The Courier" clear across its front page in letters even larger than those given to Bellsmith. It was apparently major tactics with "The Courier" to inveigle some prominent simpleton into making some preposterous statement, especially one involving large sums of money. Anyway, there was something else for "The Tribune and Press" to deny on Saturday night.
During those three days, however, Bellsmith remained in his own house strictly in seclusion, locked in the Vatican. That had been the 1870 method of acting in the face of disaster or disgrace, and no other course ever occurred to Bellsmith. Even pulling up stakes and running off to Atlantic City or Pinehurst would not have been the same thing—not at all the same thing. That would have lacked the essence of the grand gesture, of stoicism in the face of shame. One drew into one's shell, to be sure, but the shell must remain there, dignified, stony, never budging an inch, where all Main Street and all Leicester could see it if they chose, although it was better form not to look.
As one got used to the thing it was not so bad. Indeed, as the days went on and the tension relaxed it was almost jolly—rather like being bottled up in a siege or isolated in a country house during a snowstorm. After the telephone wires were disconnected and the plain-clothes policeman went on duty at the iron fence not a soul came near the door; not even from the Pilgrim Trust; and in the ensuing quiet a spirit of mild, chaste hilarity began to run through the house. The five inmates had never been so close to one another as they were in those days. At night, on the second day, William put candles and flowers on the table for dinner and turned off the electric bulbs. There was no birthday cake, but one felt that there ought to be. Just what the connection was it would be difficult to say, but the effect was undeniable.
The plain-clothes policeman, especially, kept up the sense of siege, of dramatic importance. Even Bellsmith used to take mild satisfaction in watching him out by the gate. Sometimes Keefe, in a spirit of gruff, diffident etiquette, would come around from the stables and lean beside him against the iron fence, but every half-hour or so the policeman would come in the front door to get warm, and then he became William's peculiar property. At regular intervals all day long in the silence of the great house, Bellsmith, from his room up-stairs, could hear William's bantering, unofficial tones as he opened the door for the man of the law and then the rumbling, non-committal tones of the latter replying.
For a long time, sitting idly in the hall above. Bellsmith kept wondering what was so strangely familiar about the officer's voice. Then suddenly he realized that the policeman talked in perfect musical "fourths," supremely bass. In his first two words of a sentence the policeman's abysmal tones invariably struck deepest E, then contra A then back to E—exactly the motif of a man tuning a bull fiddle.
Sometimes when he went to the door to admit their guardian. William would playfully keep the huge door partly closed on its big brass chain and cautiously hurl a mock challenge:
"Halt! Who goes there?"
To this the officer would answer (deepest E): "Frinds!"
"Pass, frinds!" from William.
The chain would rattle out of its socket, and Bellsmith would hear the two pass down the hall to the servants' dining-room for a cup of tea on William's part and a cup of coffee on the part of the officer—"black and tan," they came to call it. That policeman left a strong impression on William's life. For months afterward, if any question of criminal law or police methods arose, he was always ready with a decisive and authoritative answer.
On Friday night the plain-clothes man appeared in the library, with his hat in his hand and his hair water-brushed, to say that there seemed to be no farther use for his services. On Saturday morning Bellsmith got a bill for his hire.
At intervals all day long Bellsmith rejoiced in that bill. It was such a novel idea—"By one policeman, so much; by one detective, so much more." And policemen came so surprisingly cheap, too. Why would n't it be fun to keep one all the time? He wondered how much a fireman would cost.