Thenext day after a little dance does not dawn very early. Ray woke late, with a vague trouble in his mind, which he thought at first was the sum of the usual regrets for awkward things done and foolish things said the night before. Presently it shaped itself as an anxiety which had nothing to do with the little dance, and which he was helpless to deal with when he recognized it. Still, as a definite anxiety, it was more than half a question, and his experience did not afford him the means of measuring its importance or ascertaining its gravity. He carried it loosely in his mind when he went to see Kane, as something he might or might not think of.
Kane was in bed, convalescent from a sharp gastric attack, and he reached Ray a soft moist hand across the counterpane and cheerily welcomed him. His coat and hat hung against a closet door, and looked so like him that they seemed as much part of him as his hair and beard, which were smoothly brushed, and gave their silver delicately against the pillow. A fire of soft coal purred in the grate, faded to a fainter flicker by the sunlight that poured in at the long south windows, and lit up the walls book-lined from floor to ceiling.
“Yes,” he said, in acceptance of the praises of its comfort that Ray burst out with, “I have lived in this room so long that I begin to cherish the expectation of dying in it. But, really, is this the first time you’ve been here?”
“The first,” said Ray. “I had to wait till you were helpless before I got in.”
“Ah, no; ah, no! Not so bad as that. I’ve often meant to ask you, when there was some occasion; but there never seemed any occasion; and I’ve lived here so much alone that I’m rather selfish about my solitude; I like to keep it to myself. But I’m very glad to see you; it was kind of you to think of coming.” He bent a look of affection on the young fellow’s handsome face. “Well, how wags the gay world?” he asked.
“Does the gay world do anything so light-minded as to wag?” Ray asked in his turn, with an intellectual coxcombry that he had found was not offensive to Kane. “It always seems to me very serious as a whole, the gay world, though it has its reliefs, when it tries to enjoy itself.” He leaned back in his chair, and handled his stick a moment, and then he told Kane about the little dance which he had been at the night before. He sketched some of the people and made it amusing.
“And which of your butterfly friends told you I was ill?” asked Kane.
“The butterflyest of all: Mrs. Denton.”
“Oh! Didshegive the little dance?”
“No. I dropped in at the Hugheses’ on the way tothe dance. But I don’t know how soon she may be doing something of the kind. They’re on the verge of immense prosperity. Her husband has invented a new art process, and it’s going to make them rich. He doesn’t seem very happy about it, but she does. He’s a dreary creature. At first I used to judge her rather severely, as we do with frivolous people. But I don’t know that frivolity is so bad; I doubt if it’s as bad as austerity; they’re both merely the effect of temperament, it strikes me. I like Mrs. Denton, though she does appear to care more for the cat than the twins. Perhaps she thinks she can safely leave them to him. He’s very devoted to them; it’s quite touching. It’s another quality of paternal devotion from Mr. Brandreth’s; it isn’t half so voluble. But it’s funny, all the same, to see how much more care of them he takes than their mother does. He looks after them at table, and he carries them off and puts them to bed with his own hands apparently,” said Ray, in celibate contempt of the paternal tenderness.
“I believe that in David’s community,” Kane suggested, “the male assisted the female in the care of their offspring. We still see the like in some of the feathered tribes. In the process of social evolution the father bird will probably leave the baby bird entirely to the mother bird; and the mother bird, as soon as she begins to have mind and money, will hire in some poor bird to look after them. Mrs. Denton seems to have evolved in the direction of leaving them entirely to the father bird.”
“Well, she has to do most of the talking. Have you ever heard,” Ray asked from the necessary association of ideas, “about her husband’s Voice?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, it seems that Mr. Denton has an inward monitor of some kind, like the demon of Socrates, that they call a Voice, and that directs his course in life, as I understand. I suppose it’s authorized him to go on with his process, which he was doubtful about for a good while, because if it succeeded it would throw a lot of people out of work. Then you’ve never heard of his Voice?”
“No,” said Kane. He added: “I suppose it’s part of the psychical nonsense that they go into in all sorts of communities. And Hughes,” he asked after a moment—“how is Hughes now?”
“He’s generally busy with his writing, and I don’t always see him. He’s a fine old fellow, if he does prefer to call me out of my name; he still addresses me generally as Young Man. Mrs. Denton has tried to teach him better; but he says that names are the most external of all things, and that I am no more essentially Ray than I am Hughes. There’s something in it; I think one might get a kind of story out of the notion.”
Kane lay silent in a pensive muse, which he broke to ask with a smile: “And how is Peace these days? Do you see her?”
“Yes; she’s very well, I believe,” said Ray, briefly, and he rose.
“Oh!” said Kane, “must you go?”
He kept Ray’s hand affectionately, and seemed loath to part with him. “I’m glad you don’t forget the Hugheses in the good time you’re having. It shows character in you not to mind their queerness; I’m sure you won’t regret it. Your visits are a great comfort to them, I know. I was afraid that you would not get over the disagreeable impression of that first Sunday, and I’ve never been sure that you’d quite forgiven me for taking you.”
“Oh yes, I had,” said Ray, and he smiled with the pleasure we all feel when we have a benefaction attributed to us. “I’ve forgiven you much worse things than that!”
“Indeed! You console me! But for example?”
“Refusing to look at my novel a second time,” answered Ray, by a sudden impulse.
“I don’t understand you,” said Kane, letting his hand go.
“When Mr. Brandreth offered to submit it to you in the forlorn hope that you might like it and commend it.”
“Brandreth never asked me to look at it at all; the only time I saw it was when you let me take it home with me. What do you mean?”
“Mr. Brandreth wrote me saying he wanted to try it on a friend of mine, and it came back the same day with word that my friend had already seen it,” said Ray, in an astonishment which Kane openly shared.
“And was that the reason you were so cold withme for a time? Well, I don’t wonder! You had a right to expect that I would say anything in your behalf under the circumstances. And I’m afraid I should. But I never was tempted. Perhaps Brandreth got frightened and returned the manuscript with that message because he knew he couldn’t trust me.”
“Perhaps,” said Ray, blankly.
“Who else could it have been? Have you any surmise?”
“What is the use of surmising?” Ray retorted. “It’s all over. The story is dead, and I wish it was buried. Don’t bother about it! And try to forgive me for suspectingyou.”
“It was very natural. But you ought to have known that I loved you too much not to sacrifice a publisher to you if I had him fairly in my hand.”
“Oh, thank you! And—good-by. Don’t think anything more about it. I sha’n’t.”
Therecould be only one answer to the riddle, if Kane’s suggestion that Mr. Brandreth had returned the manuscript without showing it to any one were rejected. The publisher could speak of no one besides Kane as a friend except Miss Hughes, and it was clearly she who had refused to look again at Ray’s book. She had played a double part with him; she had let him make a fool of himself; she had suffered him to keep coming to her, and reading his things to her, and making her his literary confidante. He ground his teeth with shame to think how he had sought her advice and exulted in her praise; but the question was not merely, it was not primarily, a question of truth or untruth, kindness or unkindness toward himself, but of justice toward Kane. He had told her of the resentment he had felt toward Kane; he had left her to the belief that he still suspected Kane of what she had done. If she were willing that he should remain in this suspicion, it was worse than anything he now accused her of.
He kept away from Chapley’s all day, because of the embarrassment of seeing her with that in his mind. He decided that he must never see her again till she showed some wish to be relieved from the false position she had suffered herself to be placed in. At the end of the afternoon there came a knock at his door, and he set the door open and confronted Mr. Brandreth, who stood smiling at the joke of his being there, with his lustrous silk hat and gloves and light overcoat on. Ray passed some young banter with him in humorous recognition of the situation, before they came to business, as Mr. Brandreth called it.
“Look here!” said the publisher, with a quizzical glance at him from Ray’s easy-chair, while Ray himself lounged on the edge of his bed. “Did you think I wanted to show your novel to old Kane, that time when I sent back for it?”
“Yes,” said Ray; and he could not say any more for his prescience of what was coming.
“Well, I didn’t,” Mr. Brandreth returned. “And if I’d ever thought you suspected him, I should have told you so long ago. The person that I did want it for is anxious you should know it wasn’t Kane, and I thought I’d better come and tell you so by word of mouth; I rather made a mess of it before, in writing. If you’ve any feeling about the matter, it’s only fair to Kane to assure you that he wasn’t at all the person.”
“Kane told me so himself to-day,” said Ray; “and all the grudge I felt was gone long ago.”
“Well, of course! It’s a matter of business.” In turning it off in this common-sense way Mr. Brandreth added lightly, “I’m authorized to tell you who it really was, if you care to know.”
Ray shook his head. “I don’t care to know. What’s the use?”
“There isn’t any. I’m glad you take it the way you do, and it will be a great relief to—the real one.”
“It’s all right.”
Ray had been strengthening his defences against any confidential approach from the moment Mr. Brandreth began to speak; he could not help it. Now they began to talk of other things. At the end the publisher returned to the book with a kind of desperate sigh: “You haven’t done anything with your story yet, I suppose?”
“No,” said Ray.
Mr. Brandreth, after a moment’s hesitation, went away without saying anything more. Even that tentative inquiry about the fate of his book could not swerve Ray now from his search for the motives which had governed Peace in causing this message to be sent him. It could only be that she had acted in Kane’s behalf, who had a right to justice from her, and she did not care what Ray thought of her way of doing justice. In the complex perversity of his mood the affair was so humiliating to him, as it stood, that he could not rest in it. That evening he went determined to make an opportunity to speak with her alone, if none offered.
It was she who let him in, and then she stood looking at him in a kind of daze, which he might well have taken for trepidation. It did not give him courage, and he could think of no better way to begin than to say, “I have come to thank you, Miss Hughes, for your consideration for Mr. Kane. I couldn’t haveexpected less of you, when you found out that I had been suspecting him of that friendly refusal to look at my manuscript the second time.”
His hard tone, tense with suppressed anger, had all the effect he could have wished. He could see her wince, and she said, confusedly, “I told Mr. Brandreth, and he said he would tell you it wasn’t Mr. Kane.”
“Yes,” said Ray, stiffly, “he came to tell me.”
She hesitated, and then she asked, “Did he tell you who it was?”
“No. But I knew.”
If she meant him to say something more, he would not; he left to her the strain and burden that in another mood he would have shared so willingly, or wholly assumed.
At a little noise she started, and looked about, and then, as if returning to him by a painful compliance with his will, she said, “When he told me what he had done to get the manuscript back, I couldn’t let him give it to me.”
She stopped, and Ray perceived that, for whatever reason, she could say nothing more, at least of her own motion. But it was not possible for him to leave it so.
“Of course,” he said, angrily, “I needn’t ask you why.”
“It was too much for me to decide,” she answered, faintly.
“Yes,” he assented, “it’s a good deal to take another’s fate in one’s hands. But you knew,” he added, with a short laugh, “you had my fortune in your hands, anyway.”
“I didn’t see that then,” she answered, and she let her eyes wander, and lapsed into a kind of absence, which vexed him as a slight to the importance of the affair.
“But it doesn’t really matter whether you decided it by refusing or consenting to look at the book again,” he said. “The result would have been the same, in any case.”
She lifted her eyes to his with a scared look, and began, “I didn’t say that”—and then she stopped again, and looked away from him as before.
“But if I can’t thank you for sparing me an explicit verdict,” he pushed on, “I can appreciate your consideration for Kane, and I will carry him any message you will trust me with.” He rose as he said this, and he found himself adding, “And I admire your strength in keeping your own counsel when I’ve been talking my book over with you. It must have been amusing for you.”
When he once began to revenge himself he did not stop till he said all he had thought he thought. She did not try to make any answer or protest. She sat passive under his irony; at times he thought her hardly conscious of it, and that angered him the more, and he resented the preoccupation, and then the distraction with which she heard him to the end.
“Only I don’t understand exactly,” he went on, “how you could let me do it, in spite of the temptation. I can imagine that the loss of my acquaintance will be a deprivation to you; you’ll miss the pleasureof leading me on to make a fool of myself; but you know you can still laugh at me, and that ought to keep you in spirits for a long time. I won’t ask your motive in sending word to me by a third person. I dare say you didn’t wish to tell me to my face; and it couldn’t have been an easy thing to write.”
“I ought to have written,” she said, meekly. “I see that now. But to-day, I couldn’t. There is something—He offered to go to you—he wished to; and—I let him. I was wrong. I didn’t think how it might seem.”
“Oh, there was no reason why you should have thought of me in the matter. I’m glad you thought of Mr. Kane; I don’t ask anything more than that.”
“Oh, you don’t understand,” she began. “You don’t know”—
“Yes, I understand perfectly, and I know all that I wish to know. There was no reason why you should have protected me against my own folly. I have got my deserts, and you are not to blame if I don’t like them. Good-by.”
As he turned to go, she lifted her eyes, and he could see that they were blind with tears.
He went out and walked up and down the long, unlovely avenue, conscious of being the ugliest thing in it, and unconsciously hammered by its brutal noises, while he tried to keep himself from thinking how, in spite of all he had said, he knew her to be the soul of truth and goodness. He knew that all he had said was from the need of somehow venting his wounded vanity. As far as any belief in wrong done him was concerned, the affair was purely histrionic on his part; but he had seen that the pain he gave was real; the image of her gentle sufferance of his upbraiding went visibly before him. The wish to go back and own everything to her became an intolerable stress, and then he found himself again at her door.
He rang, and after waiting a long time to hear the click of the withdrawing latch, he rang again. After a further delay the door opened, and he saw Hughes standing at the top of the stairs with a lamp held above his head.
“Who is there?” the old man called down, with his hoarse voice.
“It’s I, Mr. Hughes,” Ray answered, a new trouble blending with his sense of the old man’s picturesque pose, and the leonine grandeur of his shaggy head. “Mr. Ray,” he explained.
“Oh!” said Hughes. “I’m glad to see you. Will you come up?” He added, as Ray mounted to him, and they entered his room together, “I am alone here for the time. My daughters have both gone out. Will you sit down?” Ray obeyed, with blank disappointment. Hughes could not have known of his earlier visit, or had forgotten it. “They will be in presently. Peace was here till a little while ago; when Ansel and Jenny came in, they all went out together.” He lapsed into a kind of muse, staring absently at Ray from his habitual place beside the window. He came back to a sense of him with words that had no evident bearing upon the situation.
“The thing which renders so many reformers nugatory and ridiculous, and has brought contempt and disaster on so many good causes, is the attempt to realize the altruistic man in competitive conditions. That must always be a failure or worse.” He went on at length to establish this position. Then, “Here is my son-in-law”—and the old man had the effect of stating the fact merely in illustration of the general principle he had laid down—“who has been giving all his spare time this winter to an invention in the line of his art, and had brought it to completion within a few days. He has all along had misgivings as to the moral bearing of his invention, since every process of the kind must throw a number of people out of work, and he has shown a morbid scruple in the matter which I have tried to overcome with every argument in my power.”
“I thought,” Ray made out to say, in the pause Hughes let follow, “he had come to see all that in another light.”
“Yes,” the old man resumed, “he has commonly yielded to reason, but there is an unpractical element in the man’s nature. In fact, here, this morning, while we supposed he was giving the finishing touches to his work, he was busy in destroying every vestige of result which could commend it to the people interested in it. Absolutely nothing remains to show that he ever had anything of the kind successfully in hand.”
“Is it possible?” said Ray, deeply shocked. “I am so sorry to hear it”—
The old man had not heard him or did not heed him. “He has been in a very exalted state through the day, and my daughters have gone out to walk with him; it may quiet his nerves. He believes that he has acted in obedience to an inner Voice which governs his conduct. I know nothing about such things; but all such suggestions from beyond are to my thinking mischievous. Have you ever been interested in the phenomena of spiritualism, so-called?”
Ray shook his head decidedly. “Oh, no!” he said, with abhorrence.
“Ah! The Family were at one time disposed to dabble in those shabby mysteries. But I discouraged it; I do not deny the assumptions of the spiritualists; but I can see no practical outcome to the business; and I have used all my influence with Ansel to put him on his guard against this Voice, which seems to be a survival of some supernatural experiences of his among the Shakers. It had lately been silent, and had become a sort of joke with us. But he is of a very morbid temperament, and along with this improvement, there have been less favorable tendencies. He has got a notion of expiation, of sacrifice, which is perhaps a survival of his ancestral Puritanism. I suppose the hard experiences of the city have not been good for him. They prey upon his fancy. It would be well if he could be got into the country somewhere; though I don’t see just how it could be managed.”
Hughes fell into another muse, and Ray asked, “What does he mean by expiation?”
The old man started impatiently. “Mere nonsense; the rags and tatters of man’s infancy, outworn and outgrown. The notion that sin is to be atoned for by some sort of offering. It makes me sick; and of late I haven’t paid much attention to his talk. I supposed he was going happily forward with his work; I was necessarily much preoccupied with my own; I have many interruptions from irregular health, and I must devote every available moment to my writing. There is a passage, by-the-way, which I had just completed when you rang, and which I should like to have your opinion of, if you will allow me to read it to you. It is peculiarly apposite to the very matter we have been speaking of; in fact, I may say it is an amplification of the truth that I am always trying to impress upon Ansel, namely, that when you are in the midst of a battle, as we all are here, you must fight, and fight for yourself, always, of course, keeping your will fixed on the establishment of a lasting peace.” Hughes began to fumble among the papers on the table beside him for his spectacles, and then for the scattered sheets of his manuscript. “Yes, there is a special obligation upon the friends of social reform to a life of common-sense. I have regarded the matter from rather a novel standpoint, and I think you will be interested.”
The old man read on and on. At last Ray heard the latch of the street door click, and the sound of the opening and then the shutting of the door. A confused noise of feet and voices arrested the reading which Hughes seemed still disposed to continue, andlight steps ascended the stairs, while as if in the dark below a parley ensued. Ray knew the high, gentle tones of Peace in the pleading words, “But try, try to believe that if it says that, it can’t be the Voice you used to hear, and that always told you to do what was right. It is a wicked Voice, now, and you must keep saying to yourself that it is wicked and you mustn’t mind it.”
“But the words, the words! Whose words were they? Without the shedding of blood: what does that mean? If it was a sin for me to invent my process, how shall the sin be remitted?”
“There is that abject nonsense of his again!” said old Hughes, in a hoarse undertone which drowned for Ray some further words from Denton. “It’s impossible to get him away from that idea. Men have nothing to do with the remission of sins; it is their business to cease to do evil! But you might as well talk to a beetle!”
Ray listened with poignant eagerness for the next words of Peace, which came brokenly to his ear. He heard— “...justice and not sacrifice. If you try to do what is right—and—and to be good, then”—
“I will try, Peace, I will try. O Lord, help me!” came in Denton’s deep tones. “Say the words again. The Voice keeps saying those—But I will say yours after you!”
“I will have justice.” The girl’s voice was lifted with a note in it that thrilled to Ray’s heart, and made him start to his feet; Hughes laid a detaining hand upon his arm.
“I will have justice,” Denton repeated.
“And not sacrifice,” came in the girl’s tremulous accents.
“And not sacrifice,” followed devoutly from the man. “I will have justice, without the shedding of blood—it gets mixed; I can’t keep the Voice out!—and not sacrifice. What is justice? What is justice but sacrifice?”
“Yes, it is self-sacrifice! All our selfish wishes”—
“I have burnt them in a fire, and scattered their ashes!”
“And all gloomy and morbid thoughts that distress other people.”
“Oh, you know I wouldn’t distress any one! You know how my heart is breaking for the misery of the world.”
“Let her alone!” said old Hughes to Ray, in his thick murmur, as if he read Ray’s impulse in the muscle of his arm. “She will manage him.”
“But say those words over again!” Denton implored. “The Voice keeps putting them out of my mind!”
She said the text, and let him repeat it after her word by word, as a child follows its mother in prayer.
“And try hard, Ansel! Remember the children and poor Jenny!”
“Yes, yes. I will, Peace! Poor Jenny! I’m sorry for her. And the children—You know I wouldn’t harm any one for the whole world, don’t you, Peace?”
“Yes, I do know, Ansel, how good and kind you are; and I know you’ll see all this in the true light soon. But now you’re excited.”
“Well, say it just once more, and then I shall have it.”
Once more she said the words, and he after her. He got them straight this time, without admixture from the other text. There came a rush of his feet on the stairs, and a wild laugh.
“Jenny! Jenny! It’s all right now, Jenny!” he shouted, as he plunged into the apartment, and was heard beating as if on a door closed against him. It must have opened, for there was a sound like its shutting, and then everything was still except a little pathetic, almost inaudible murmur as of suppressed sobbing in the dark of the entry below. Presently soft steps ascended the stairs and lost themselves in the rear of the apartment.
“Now, young man,” said Hughes, “I think you had better go. Peace will be in here directly to look after me, and it will distress her to find any one else. It is all right now.”
“But hadn’t I better stay, Mr. Hughes? Can’t I be of use?”
“No. I will defer reading that passage to another time. You will be looking in on us soon again. We shall get on very well. We are used to these hypochrondriacal moods of Ansel’s.”
Therewas nothing for Ray to do but to accept his dismissal. He got himself stealthily down stairs and out of the house, but he could not leave it. He walked up and down before it, doubting whether he ought not to ring and try to get in again. When he made up his mind to this he saw that the front windows were dark. That decided him to go home.
He did not sleep, and the next morning he made an early errand to the publishers’. He saw Peace bent over her work in Mr. Chapley’s room. He longed to go and speak to her, and assure himself from her own words that all was well; but he had no right to do that, and with the first stress of his anxiety abated, he went to lay the cause of it before Kane.
“It was all a mere chance that I should know of this; but I thought you ought to know,” he explained.
“Yes, certainly,” said Kane; but he was less moved than Ray had expected, or else he showed his emotion less. “Hughes is not a fool, whatever Denton is; this sort of thing must have been going on a good while, and he’s got the measure of it. I’ll speak to Chapley about it. They mustn’t be left altogether to themselves with it.”
As the days began to go by, and Ray saw Peaceconstantly in her place at the publishers’, his unselfish anxiety yielded to the question of his own relation to her, and how he should make confession and reparation. He went to Kane in this trouble, as in the other, after he had fought off the necessity as long as he could, but they spoke of the other trouble first.
Then Ray said, with the effort to say it casually, “I don’t think I told you that the great mystery about my manuscript had been solved.” Kane could not remember at once what the mystery was, and Ray was forced to add, “It seems that the unknown friend who wouldn’t look twice at my book was—Miss Hughes.”
Kane said, after a moment, “Oh!” and then, as if it should be a very natural thing, he asked, “How did you find that out?”
“She got Mr. Brandreth to tell me it wasn’t you, as soon as she knew that I had suspected you.”
“Of course. Did he tell you who it was?”
“He was to tell me if I wished. But I knew it couldn’t be anybody but she, if it were not you, and I went to see her about it.”
“Well?” said Kane, with a kind of expectation in his look and voice that made it hard for Ray to go on.
“Well, I played the fool. I pretended that I thought she had used me badly. I don’t know. I tried to make her think so.”
“Did you succeed?”
“I succeeded in making her very unhappy.”
“That was success—of a kind,” said Kane, and he lay back in his chair looking into the fire, while Raysat uncomfortably waiting at the other corner of the hearth.
“Did she say why she wouldn’t look at your manuscript a second time?” Kane asked finally.
“Not directly.”
“Did you ask?”
“Hardly!”
“You knew?”
“It was very simple,” said Ray. “She wouldn’t look at it because it wasn’t worth looking at. I knew that. That was what hurt me, and made me wish to hurt her.”
Kane offered no comment. After a moment he asked: “Has all this just happened? Have you just found it out?”
“Oh, it’s bad enough, but isn’t so bad as that,” said Ray, forcing a laugh. “Still, it’s as bad as I could make it. I happened to go to see her that evening when I overheard her talk with Denton.”
“Oh! And you spoke to her after that?”
There was a provisional condemnation in Kane’s tone which kindled Ray’s temper and gave him strength to retort: “No, Mr. Kane! I spoke to her before that; and it was when I came back—to tell her I was all wrong, and to beg her pardon—that I saw her father, and heard what I’ve told you.”
“Oh, I didn’t understand; I might have known that the other thing was impossible,” said Kane.
They were both silent, and Ray’s anger had died down into the shame that it had flamed up from,when Kane thoughtfully asked, “And you want my advice?”
“Yes.”
“Concretely?”
“As concretely as possible.”
“Then, if you don’t really know the reason why a girl so conscientious as Peace Hughes wouldn’t look at your manuscript again when she was practically left to decide its fate, I think you’d better not go there any more.”
Kane spoke with a seriousness the more impressive because he was so rarely serious, and Ray felt himself reddening under his eye.
“Aren’t you rather enigmatical?” he began.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Kane, and then neither spoke.
Some one knocked at the door. Kane called out, “Come in!” and Mr. Chapley entered.
After he had shaken hands with Kane and made Ray out, and had shaken hands with him, he said, with not more than his usual dejection, “I’m afraid poor David is in fresh trouble, Kane.”
“Yes?” said Kane, and Ray waited breathlessly to hear what the trouble was.
“That wretched son-in-law of his—though I don’t know why I should condemn him—seems to have been somewhere with his children and exposed them to scarlet fever; and he’s down with diphtheritic sore throat himself. Peace has been at home since the trouble declared itself, helping take care of them.”
“Is it going badly with them?” Kane asked.
“I don’t know. It’s rather difficult to communicate with the family under the circumstances.”
“You might have said impossible, without too great violence, Henry,” said Kane.
“I had thought of seeing their doctor,” suggested Mr. Chapley, with his mild sadness. “Ah, I wish David had stayed where he was.”
“We are apt to think these things are accidents,” said Kane. “Heaven knows. But scarlet fever and diphtheria are everywhere, and they take better care of them in town than they do in the country. Who did you say their doctor was?”
“Dear me! I’m sure I don’t know who he is. I promised Mr. Brandreth to look the matter up,” said Mr. Chapley. “He’s very anxious to guard against any spread of the infection to his own child, and my whole family are so apprehensive that it’s difficult. I should like to go and see poor David, myself, but they won’t hear of it. They’re quite in a panic as it is.”
“They’re quite right to guard against the danger,” said Kane, and he added, “I should like to hear David philosophize the situation. I can imagine how he would view the effort of each one of us to escape the consequences that we are all responsible for.”
“It is civilization which is in the wrong,” said Mr. Chapley.
“True,” Kane assented. “And yet our Indians suffered terribly from the toothache and rheumatism.You can carry your return to nature too far, Henry; Nature must meet Man half-way.” Kane’s eye kindled with pleasure in his phrase, and Ray could perceive that the literary interest was superseding the personal interest in his mind. “The earth is a dangerous planet; the great question is how to get away from it alive,” and the light in Kane’s eyes overspread his face in a smile of deep satisfaction with his paradox.
The cold-blooded talk of the two elderly men sent a chill to Ray’s heart. For him, at least, there was but one thing to do; and half an hour later he stood at the open street door of the Hughes apartment, looking up at Mrs. Denton silhouetted against the light on the landing as he had first seen her there.
“Oh, Mrs. Denton,” he called up, “how are the children?”
“I—I don’t know. They are very sick. The doctor is afraid”—
“Oh!” Ray groaned, at the stop she made. “Can I help—can’t I do something? May I come up?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered mechanically, and Ray was stooping forward to mount the stairs when he saw her caught aside, and Peace standing in her place.
“Don’t come up, Mr. Ray! You can’t do any good. It’s dangerous.”
“I don’t care for the danger,” he began. “Some one—some one must help you! Your father”—
“My father doesn’t need any help, and we don’t. Every moment you stay makes the danger worse!”
“But you,youare in danger! You”—
“It’s myrightto be. But it’s wrong for you. Oh, do go away!” She wrung her hands, and he knew that she was weeping. “I do thank you for coming. I was afraid you would come.”
“Oh, were you?” he exulted. “I am glad of that! You know how I must have felt, when I came to think what I had said.”
“Yes—but, go, now!”
“How can I do that? I should be ashamed”—
“But you mustn’t,” she entreated. “It would put others in danger, too. You would carry the infection. You must go,” she repeated.
“Well, I shall come again. I must know how it is with you. When may I come again!”
“I don’t know. You mustn’t come inside again.” She thought a moment. “If you come I will speak to you from that window over the door. You must keep outside. If you will ring the bell twice, I shall know it is you.”
She shut the door, and left him no choice but to obey. It was not heroic; it seemed cowardly; and he turned ruefully away. But he submitted, and twice a day, early in the morning and late at night, he came and rang for her. The neighbors, such as cared, understood that he was the friend of the family who connected its exile with the world; sometimes the passers mistook these sad trysts for the happy lovers’ meetings which they resembled, and lingered to listen, and then passed on.
They caught only anxious questions and hopelessanswers; the third morning that Ray came, Peace told him that the little ones were dead.
They had passed out of the world together, as they had entered it, and Ray stood with their mother beside the grave where they were both laid, and let her cling to his hand as if he were her brother. Her husband was too sick to be with them, and there had been apparently no question of Hughes’s coming, but Peace was there. The weather was that of a day in late March, bitter with a disappointed hope of spring. Ray went back to their door with the mourners. The mother kept on about the little ones, as if the incidents of their death were facts of a life that was still continuing.
“Oh, I know well enough,” she broke off from this illusion, “that they are gone, and I shall never see them again; perhaps their father will. Well, I don’t think I was so much to blame. I didn’t make myself, and I never asked to come here, any more than they did.”
She had the woe-begone hopeless face which she wore the first day that Ray saw her, after the twins had thrown her porte-monnaie out of the car window; she looked stunned and stupefied.
They let her talk on, mostly without interruption. Only, at this point Peace said, “That will be thought of, Jenny,” and the other asked, wistfully, “Do you think so, Peace? Well!”
Peacedid not come back to her work at the publishers’ for several weeks. The arrears began to accumulate, and Mr. Brandreth asked Ray to help look after it; Ray was now so often with him that their friendly acquaintance had become a confidential intimacy.
Men’s advance in these relations is rapid, even in later life; in youth it is by bounds. Before a week of their daily contact was out, Ray knew that Mrs. Chapley, though the best soul in the world, and the most devoted of mothers and grandmothers, had, in Mr. Brandreth’s opinion, a bad influence on his wife, and through her on his son. She excited Mrs. Brandreth by the long visits she paid her; and she had given the baby medicine on one occasion at least that distinctly had not agreed with it. “That boy has taken so much belladonna, as a preventive of scarlet fever, that I believe it’s beginning to affect his eyes. The pupils are tremendously enlarged, and he doesn’t notice half as much as he did a month ago. I don’t know when Mrs. Chapley will let us have Miss Hughes back again. Of course, I believe in taking precautions too, and I never could forgive myself if anything really happened. But I don’t want to be aperfect slave to my fears, or my mother-in-law’s, either—should you?”
He asked Ray whether, under the circumstances, he did not think he ought to get some little place near New York for the summer, rather than go to his country home in Massachusetts, where the Chapleys had a house, and where his own mother lived the year round. When Ray shrank from the question as too personal for him to deal with, Mr. Brandreth invited him to consider the more abstract proposition that if the two grandmothers had the baby there to quarrel over all summer, they would leave nothing of the baby, and yet would not part friends.
“I’ll tell you another reason why I want to be near my business so as to keep my finger on it all the time, this year,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he went into a long and very frank study of the firm’s affairs with Ray, who listened with the discreet intelligence which made everybody trust him. “With Mr. Chapley in the state he’s got into about business, when he doesn’t care two cents whether school keeps or not, I see that I’ve got to take the reins more and more into my own hands.” Mr. Brandreth branched off into an examination of his own character, and indirectly paid himself some handsome tributes as a business man. “I don’t mean to say,” he concluded, “that I’ve got the experience of some of the older men, but I do mean to say that experience doesn’t count for half of what they claim, in the book business, and I can prove it out of their own mouths. They all admitthat nobody can forecast the fate of a book. Of course if you’ve got a book by a known author, you’ve got something to count on, but not so much as people think, and some unknown man may happen along with a thing that hits the popular mood and outsell him ten times over. It’s a perfect lottery.”
“I wonder they let you send your lists of new publications through the mails,” said Ray, dryly.
“Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Though there are a good many blanks too. I suppose the moral difference between business and gambling is that in business you do work for a living, and you don’t propose to give nothing for something, even when you’re buying as cheap as you can to sell as dear as you can. With a book it’s even better. It’s something you’ve put value into, and you have a right to expect to get value out of it. That’s what I tell Mr. Chapley when he gets into one of his Tolstoï moods, and wants to give his money to the poor and eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.”
The two young men laughed at these grotesque conceptions of duty, and Mr. Brandreth went on:
“Yes, sir, if I could get hold of a good, strong, lively novel”—
“Well, there is alwaysA Modern Romeo,” Ray suggested.
Mr. Brandreth winced. “I know.” He added, with the effect of hurrying to get away from the subject, “I’ve had it over and over again with Mr. Chapley till I’m tired of it. Well, I suppose it’s his age,somewhat, too. Every man, when he gets to Mr. Chapley’s time of life, wants to go into the country and live on the land. I’d like to see him living on the land in Hatboro’, Massachusetts! You can stand up in your buggy and count half-a-dozen abandoned farms wherever you’ve a mind to stop on the road. By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, from an association of ideas that Ray easily followed, “have you seen anything of the book that Mr. Hughes is writing? He’s got a good title for it. ‘The World Revisited’ ought to sell the first edition of it at a go.”
“Before people found out what strong meat it was? It condemns the whole structure of society; he’s read me parts of it.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Brandreth, in a certain perplexity, “that might make it go too. People like strong meat. They like to have the structure of society condemned. There’s a good deal of sympathy with the underpinning; there’s no use trying to deny it. Confound it! I should like to try such a book as that in the market. But it would be regarded by everybody who knew him as an outcome of Mr. Chapley’s Tolstoï twist.”
“I understand that Mr. Hughes’s views are entirely opposed to Tolstoï’s. He regards him as unpractical,” said Ray, with a smile for Hughes’s practicality.
“It wouldn’t make any difference. They would call it Tolstoïan on Mr. Chapley’s account. People don’t know. There wasLooking Backward; they took that at a gulp, and didn’t know that it was therankest sort of socialism. My! If I could get hold of a book likeLooking Backward!”
“I might have it come out that the wicked cousin inA Modern Romeowas a secret Anarchist. That ought to make the book’s fortune.”
Ray could deal lightly with his rejected novel, but even while he made an open jest of it, the book was still inwardly dear to him. He still had his moments of thinking it a great book, in places. He was always mentally comparing it with other novels that came out, and finding it better. He could not see why they should have got publishers, and his book not; he had to fall back upon that theory of mere luck which first so emboldens and then so embitters the heart; and the hope that lingered in him was mixed with cynicism.
WhenPeace came back to her work, Mr. Brandreth, in admiration of her spirit, confided to Ray that she had refused to take pay for the time she had been away, and that no arguments availed with her.
“They must have been at unusual expense on account of this sickness, and I understand that the son-in-law hasn’t earned anything for a month. But what can you do?”
“You can’t do anything,” said Ray. Their poverty might be finally reached from without, and it was not this which made him chiefly anxious in his futile sympathy for Peace. He saw her isolated in the presence of troubles from which he was held as far aloof as her father lived in his dream of a practicable golden age. Their common sorrow, which ought to have drawn the mother and father of the dead children nearer together, seemed to have alienated them. After the first transports of her grief, Mrs. Denton appeared scarcely to miss the little ones; the cat, which they had displaced so rarely, was now always in her lap, and her idle, bantering talk went on, about anything, about everything, as before, but with something more of mockery for her husband’s depressions and exaltations. It might have been from a mistaken wish torouse him to some sort of renewed endeavor that she let her reckless tongue run upon what he had done with his process; it might have been from her perception that he was most vulnerable there; Ray could not decide. For the most part Denton remained withdrawn from the rest, a shadow and a silence which they ignored. Sometimes he broke in with an irrelevant question or comment, but oftener he evaded answering when they spoke to him. If his wife pressed him at such times he left them; and then they heard him talking to himself in his room, after an old habit of his; now and then Ray thought he was praying. If he did not come back, Peace followed him, and then her voice could be heard in entreaty with him.
“She’s the only one that can do anything with Ansel,” her sister lightly explained one evening. “She has so much patience with him; father hasn’t any more than I have; but Peace can persuade him out of almost anything except his great idea of sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?” Ray repeated.
“Yes. I don’t know what he means. But he thinks he’s been very wicked, trying to invent that process, and he can’t get forgiveness without some kind of sacrifice. He’s found it in the Old Testament somewhere.Itell him it’s a great pity he didn’t live in the days of the prophets; he might have passed for one. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He says we must make some sacrifice; but I can’t see whatwe’ve got left to sacrifice. We might make a burnt offering of the chairs in father’s stove; the coal’s about gone.”
She stopped, and looked up at Denton, who had come in with a book in his hand; Peace glided in behind him.
“Oh, are you going to read us something, Ansel?” his wife asked with her smile of thoughtless taunting. “I don’t see why you don’t give public readings. You could read better than the elocutionists that used to read to us in the Family. And it wouldn’t be taking the bread out of any one else’s mouth.” She turned to Ray: “You know Ansel’s given up his place so as to let another man have his chance. It was the least he could do after he had tried to take away the livelihood of so many by inventing that wicked process of his.”
Denton gave no sign of having heard her. He fixed his troubled eyes on Ray. “Do you know that poem?” he asked, handing him the open book.
“Oh, yes,” said Ray.
“It’s a mistake,” said Denton, “all a mistake. I should like to write to Tennyson and tell him so. I’ve thought it out. The true sacrifice would have been the best, not the dearest; the best.”
The next day was Sunday, and it broke, with that swift, capricious heat of our climate, after several days of cloudy menace. The sun shone, and the streets were thronged with people. They were going to church in different directions, but there was everywhere a heavy trend toward the stations of the elevated road, and the trains were crammed with men, women and children going to the Park. When Ray arrived there with one of the throngs he had joined, he saw the roads full of carriages, and in the paths black files of foot-passengers pushing on past the seats packed with those who had come earlier, and sat sweltering under the leafless trees. The grass was already green; some of the forwarder shrubs were olive-gray with buds.
Ray walked deep into the Park. He came in sight of a bench near a shelf of rock in a by-path, with a man sitting alone on it. There was room for two, and Ray made for the place.
The man sat leaning forward with his heavy blonde head hanging down as if he might have been drunk. He suddenly lifted himself, and Ray saw that it was Denton. His face was red from the blood that had run into it, but as it grew paler it showed pathetically thin. He stared at Ray confusedly, and did not know him till he spoke.
Then he said, “Oh!” and put out his hand. A sudden kindness in Ray, more than he commonly felt for the man whom he sometimes pitied, but never liked, responded to the overture.
“May I have part of your bench?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Denton. “Sit down,” and he made way for him. “It isn’t mine; it’s one of the few things in this cursed town that belongs to every one.”
“Well,” said Ray, cheerfully, “I suppose we’re allproprietors of the Park, even if we’re not allowed to walk on our own grass.”
“Yes; but don’t get me thinking about that. There’s been too much of that in my life. I want to get away—away from it all. We are going into the country. Do you know about those abandoned farms in New England? Could we go and take up one of them?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. But what could you do with it, if you did? The owners left those farms because they couldn’t live on them. You would have to fight a battle you’re not strong enough for. Better wait till you get fairly on your feet.”
“Yes, I’m sick; I’m no good. But it would be expiation.”
Ray did not speak at once. Then, partly because he thought he might be of use to the man by helping him to an objective vision of what was haunting him, and partly from an æsthetic desire to pry into the confusion of his turbid soul, he asked: “Do you mean for that invention of yours?”
“No; that’s nothing; that was a common crime.”
“Well, I have no right to ask you anything further. But in any given case of expiation, the trouble is that a man can’t expiate alone; he makes a lot of other people expiate with him.”
“Yes; you can’t even sin alone. That is the curse of it, and then the innocent have to suffer with the sinners. But I meant—the children.”
“The children?”
“Yes; I let them die.”
Ray understood now that it was remorse for his exposure of the little ones to contagion which was preying on him. “I don’t think you were to blame for that. It was something that might have happened to any one. For the sake of your family you ought to look at it in the true light. You are no more responsible for your children’s death than I am.” Ray stopped, and Denton stared as if listening.
“What? What? What?” he said, in the tone of a man who tries to catch something partly heard. “Did you hear?” he asked. “They are both talking at once—with the same voice; it’s the twin nature.” He shook his head vehemently, and said, with an air of relief: “Well, now it’s stopped. What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Ray answered.
“Oh! It was the Voice, then. You see it was a mistake not to do it sooner; I ought to havegiventhem; not waited for them to betaken. I couldn’t understand, because in the flesh they couldn’t speak. They had to speak in the spirit. That was it—why they died. I thought that if I took some rich man who had made his millions selfishly, cruelly—you see?—it would satisfy justice; then the reign of peace and plenty could begin. But that was wrong. That would have made the guilty suffer for the innocent; and the innocent must suffer for the guilty. Always! There is no other atonement. Now I see that. Oh, my soul, my soul! What? No! Yes,yes! The best, the purest, the meekest! Always that! Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission—Who do you think is the best person in New York—the purest, the meekest?”
“Who?” Ray echoed.
“Yes,” said Denton. Then he broke off. “She said, No! No! No!” He started up from the seat. “For their life, their life, their life! That was where the wrong was. I knew it was all wrong, always. Oh, my soul, my soul! What shall the atonement be?” He moved away, and at a few paces’ distance he began to run.
Ray watched him running, running, till he was out of sight.
He passed a restless, anxious day, and in the evening he could not keep from going to the Hugheses’. He found them all together, and gayer than he had seen them since the children’s death. He tried to join in the light-hearted fun that Mrs. Denton was making with her husband; she was unusually fond, and she flattered him with praises of his talent and good looks; she said his pallor became him.
“Do you know,” she asked Ray, “that we’re all going to New Hampshire to live on an abandoned farm?”
She made Denton get his violin, and he played a long time. Suddenly he stopped, and waited in the attitude of listening. He called out, “Yes!” and struck the instrument over a chair-top, breaking it to splinters. He jumped up as if in amaze at what hadhappened; then he said to Peace, “I’ve made you some kindling.”
His wife said with a smile, “A man must dosomethingfor a living.”
Denton merely looked at her with a kind of vague surprise. After a moment’s suspense he wheeled about and caught his hat from the wall, and rushed down the stairs into the street.
Hughes came in from the front room, with his pen in his hand, and hoarsely gasping. “What is the matter?” he weakly whispered. No one spoke, but the ruin of the violin answered for itself. “Some more of that fool’s work, I suppose. It is getting past all endurance. He was always the most unpractical creature, and of late, he’s become utterly worthless.” He kept on moving his lips as if he were speaking, but no sound came from them.
Mrs. Denton burst into a crowing laugh: “It’s too bad Ansel should havetwovoices and father none at all!”
The old man’s lips still moved, and now there came from them, “A fool, a perfect fool!”
“Oh, no, father,” said Peace, and she went up to the old man. “You know Ansel isn’t a fool. You know he has been tried; and he is good, you know he is! He has worked hard for us all; and I can’t bear to have you call him names.”
“Let him show some common-sense, then,” said her father. “I have no wish to censure him. But his continual folly wears me out. He owes it to the cause,if not to his family, to be sensible and—and—practical. Tell him I wish to see him when he comes in,” he added, with an air of authority, like the relic of former headship. “It’s high time I had a talk with him. These disturbances in the family are becoming very harassing. I cannot fix my mind on anything.”
He went back into his own room, where they heard him coughing. It was a moment of pain without that dignity which we like to associate with the thought of suffering, but which is seldom present in it; Ray did not dare to go; he sat keenly sensible of the squalor of it, unable to stir. He glanced toward Peace for strength; she had her face hidden in her hands. He would not look at Mrs. Denton, who was saying: “I think father is right, and if Ansel can’t control himself any better than he has of late, he’d better leave us. It’s wearing father out. Don’t you think he looks worse, Mr. Ray?”
He did not answer, but remained wondering what he had better do.
Peace took down her hands and looked at him, and he saw that she wished him to go. He went, but in the dark below he lingered, trying to think whom he should turn to for help. He ran over Mr. Chapley, Brandreth, Kane in his mind with successive rejection, and then he thought of Kane’s doctor; he had never really seen him, but he feigned him the wisest and most efficient of the doctors known to fiction. Of course it must be a doctor whom Ray should speak to; but he must put the affair hypothetically, so that if the doctorthought it nothing, no one would be compromised. It must be a physician of the greatest judgment, a man of sympathy as well as sagacity; no, it could be any sort of doctor, and he ought to go to him at once.
He was fumbling in the dark for the wire that pulled the bolt of the street door when a night-latch was thrust into the key-hole outside, and the door was burst open with a violence that flung him back against the wall behind it. Before it could swing to again he saw Denton’s figure bent in its upward rush on the stairs; he leaped after him.
“Now, then!” Denton shouted, as they burst into the apartment together. “The time has come! The time has come! They are calling you, Peace! You wouldn’t let me give them, and the Lord had to take them, but they have reconciled Him to you; He will accept you for their sake!”
Old Hughes had entered from his room, and stood looking on with a frowning brows, but with more vexation than apprehension. “Be done with that arrant nonsense!” he commanded. “What stuff are you talking?”
Denton’s wife shrank into the farthest corner, with the cat still in her arms. Peace stood in the middle of the room staring at him. He did not heed Hughes except to thrust him aside as he launched himself towards the girl.
Ray slipped between them, and Denton regarded him with dull wavering eyes like a drunken man’s. “Oh, you’re here still, are you?” he said; a cunning gleamcame into his eyes, and he dropped his voice from its impassioned pitch. He kept his right hand in his coat pocket, and Ray watched that hand too solely. Denton flashed past him, and with his left swept away the hands which Peace mechanically lifted to her face, and held them in his grip. Ray sprang upon him, and pinioned his right wrist.
“Hold him fast!” Hughes added his grip to Ray’s. “He’s got something in his pocket, there! Run to the window, Jenny, and call for help!”
“No, no, Jenny, don’t!” Peace entreated. “Don’t call out. Ansel won’t hurt me! I know he’ll listen to me; won’t you Ansel? Oh, what is it you want to do?”
“Here!” cried Denton. “Take it! In an instant you will be with them! The sin will be remitted.” He struggled to reach her lips with the hand which he had got out of his pocket. Old Hughes panted out:
“Open his fist! Tear it open. If I had a knife”—
“Oh, don’t hurt him!” Peace implored. “He isn’t hurting me.”
Denton suddenly released her wrists, and she sank senseless. Ray threw himself on his knees beside her, and stretched his arms out over her.
Denton did not look at them; he stood a moment listening; then with a formless cry he whirled into the next room. The door shut crashing behind him, and then there came the noise of a heavy fall within. The rush of a train made itself loudly heard in the silence.
A keen bitter odor in the air rapt Ray far away toan hour of childhood when a storm had stripped the blossoms from a peach-tree by the house, and he noted with a child’s accidental observance the acrid scent which rose from them.
“That is prussic acid,” Hughes whispered, and he moved feebly towards the door and pushed it open. Denton lay on the floor with his head toward the threshold, and the old man stood looking down into his dead face.
“It must have been that which he had in his hand.”