“Well, old fellow, I’ve got some good news for you,” said Mr. Brandreth, when Ray showed himself at the door of the publisher’s little den the next morning. Ray thought that he carried the record of the event he had witnessed in every lineament, but Mr. Brandreth could have seen nothing unusual in his face. “The editor ofEvery Eveninghas just been here, and he wants to see you about taking hold of his literary department.” Ray stared blankly. Mr. Brandreth went on with generous pleasure: “He’s had some trouble with the man who’s been doing it, and it’s come to a complete break at last, and now he wants you to try. He’s got some new ideas about it. He wants to make something specially literary of the Saturday issue; he has a notion of restoring the old-fashioned serial. If you take charge, you could work in theModern Romeoon him; and then, if it succeeds as a serial, we can republish it in book form! Better see him at once! Isn’t it funny how things turn out? He said he was coming down town in a Broadway car, and happened to catch sight of Coquelin’s name on a poster at the theatre, and it made him think of you. He’d always liked that thing you did for him, and when he got down here, he jumped out and camein to ask about you. I talked you into him good and strong, and he wants to see you.”
Ray listened in nerveless passivity to news that would have transported him with hope a few hours before. Mr. Brandreth might well have mistaken his absent stare for the effect of such a rapture. He said, as a man does when tempted a little beyond prudence by the pleasure he is giving:
“The fact is, I’ve been thinking about that work of yours, myself. I want to trysomenovel for the summer trade; and I want you to let me see it again. I want to read it myself this time. They say a publisher oughtn’t to know anything about the inside of a book, but I think we might make an exception of yours.” Ray’s face remained unchanged, and Mr. Brandreth now asked, with a sudden perception of its strangeness: “Hello! What’s the matter? Anything gone wrong with you?”
“No, no,” Ray struggled out, “not with me. But”—
“Nothing new with the Hugheses, I hope?” said Mr. Brandreth, with mounting alarm. “Miss Hughes was to have come back to work this morning, but she hasn’t yet. No more diphtheria, I hope? By Jove, my dear fellow, I don’t think you ought to come here if there is! I don’t think it’s quite fair to me.”
“It isn’t diphtheria,” Ray gasped. “But they’re in great trouble. I hardly know how to tell you. That wretched creature, Denton, has killed himself. He’s been off his base for some time, and I’ve beendreading—I’ve been there all night with them. He took prussic acid and died instantly. Mr. Hughes and I had a struggle with him to prevent—prevent him; and the old man got a wrench, and then he had a hemorrhage. He is very weak from it, but the doctor’s brought him round for the present. Miss Hughes wanted me to come and tell you.”
“Has it got out yet?” Mr. Brandreth asked. “Are the reporters on to it?”
“The fact has to come out officially through the doctor, but it isn’t known yet.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” said Mr. Brandreth. “It will be an awful scandal.”
There had been a moment with Ray too when the scandal of the fact was all he felt. “Yes,” he said, mechanically.
“You see,” Mr. Brandreth explained, “those fellows will rummage round in every direction, for every bit of collateral information, relevant and irrelevant, and they will make as much as they can of the fact that Miss Hughes was employed here.”
“I see,” said Ray.
Mr. Brandreth fell into a rueful muse, but he plucked himself out of it with self-reproachful decency. “It’s awful for them, poor things!”
“It’s the best thing that could have happened, under the circumstances,” said Ray, with a coldness that surprised himself, and a lingering resentment toward Denton that the physical struggle had left in his nerves. “It was a question whether he should killhimself, or kill some one else. He had a mania of sacrifice, of atonement. Somebody had to be offered up. He was a crank.” Ray pronounced the word with a strong disgust, as if there were nothing worse to be said of a man. He paused, and then he went on. “I shall have to tell you all about it, Brandreth;” and he went over the event again, and spared nothing.
Mr. Brandreth listened with starting eyes. As if the additional details greatly discouraged him, he said, “I don’t think those things can be kept from coming out. It will be a terrible scandal. Of course, I pity the family; and Miss Hughes. It’s strange that they could keep living on with such a danger hanging over them for weeks and months, and not try to do anything about it—not have him shut up.”
“The doctor says we’ve no idea what sort of things people keep living on with,” said Ray, gloomily. “The danger isn’t always there, and the hope is. The trouble keeps on, and in most cases nothing happens. The doctor says nothing would have happened in this case, probably, if the man had staid quietly in the country, in the routine he was used to. But when he had the stress of new circumstances put on him, with the anxieties and the chances, and all the miseries around him, his mind gave way; I don’t suppose it was ever a very strong one.”
“Oh, I don’t see how the strongest stands it, in this infernal hurly-burly,” said Mr. Brandreth, with an introspective air. He added, with no effect of relieffrom his reflection, “I don’t know what I’m going to say to my wife when all this comes out. I’ve got to prepare her, somehow—her and her mother. Look here! Why couldn’t you go up to Mr. Chapley’s with me, and see him? He wasn’t very well, yesterday, and said he wouldn’t be down till this afternoon. My wife’s going there to lunch, and we can get them all together before the evening papers are out. Then I think we could make them see it in the right light. What do you say?”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t go with you. If I can be of any use,” said Ray, with an inward regret that he could think of no excuse for not going.
“I think you can be of the greatest use,” said Mr. Brandreth. He called a clerk, and left word with him that he should not be in again till after lunch. “You see,” he explained, as they walked out together, “if we can get the story to Mrs. Brandreth and her mother before it comes to them in print it won’t seem half as bad. Some fellow is going to get hold of the case and work it for all it is worth. He is going to unearth Mr. Hughes’s whole history, and exploit him as a reformer and a philosopher. He’s going to find out everybody who knows him, or has ever had anything to do with him, and interview people right and left.”
Ray had to acknowledge that this was but too probable. He quailed to think of the publicity which he must achieve in the newspapers, and how he must figure before the people of Midland, who had expected such a different celebrity for him.
“You must look out for yourself. I’m going to put Mr. Chapley on his guard, and warn the ladies not to see any reporters or answer any questions. By-the-way, does Mr. Kane know about this yet?”
“I’ve just come from his place; he wasn’t at home; I left a note for him.”
“I wonder if we hadn’t better go round that way and tell him?” Mr. Brandreth faltered a moment, and then pushed on. “Or, no! He’s a wary old bird, and I don’t think he’ll say anything that will commit anybody.” They walked on in silence for awhile before Mr. Brandreth said, with an air of relevance, “Of course, I shouldn’t want you to count too much upon our being able to do anything with your book this year, after all.”
“Of course,” said Ray. “If I’m mixed up with this business in the papers, my name won’t be a very good one for a respectable house to conjure with for some years to come. Perhaps never.”
At that moment he was mere egoist, feeling nothing but the mockery and the malice of fortune; all his compassion for the hapless creatures whose misery had involved him died within him.
“Oh, I don’t mean that, exactly,” said Mr. Brandreth. “But isn’t it curious how we’re all bound together here? It’s enough to make one forswear all intercourse with his fellow-beings. Here we are in same boat with people whom I didn’t know the existence of six months ago; and because Mr. Chapley has stood by his old friend and tried to help himalong, he will probably be pilloried with him before the public as a fellow-Tolstoïan, and people all over the country that used to order their books through us will think we’re in sympathy with the anarchists, and won’t have any more to do with us than if we had published theKreuzer Sonata.”
Ray thought how he had never asked to know the Hugheses at all, and was not justly responsible for them, even through a tie of ancient friendship. But in the presence of Mr. Brandreth’s shameless anxieties, he was ashamed to air his own. He only said, cynically: “Yes, it appears that a homicidal lunatic can’t take himself harmlessly out of the world. His fate reaches out in every direction, and covers everybody that knew him with confusion. And they talk of a moral government of the universe!”
“Yes!” said Mr. Brandreth, with as much satisfaction in Ray’s scorn of the order of things as his mild nature could probably feel.
At Mr. Chapley’s house they learned that Mrs. Brandreth had brought the baby to spend the day with her mother. Her sister, whom Ray knew, met the two men at the door on her way out to a young ladies’ lunch, and told them they would find her father in his library. She said Mr. Kane was there with him; and Mr. Brandreth, with a glance at Ray, said, “Well, that’s first-rate!” and explained, as they pushed on upstairs, “He may be able to suggest something.”
Kane did not suggest anything at once. He listened in silence and without apparent feeling to Ray’s story.
“Dear me!” Mr. Chapley lamented. “Dreadful, dreadful! Poor David must be in a sad state about it! And I’m not fit to go to him!”
“He wouldn’t expect you, sir,” Mr. Brandreth began.
“I don’t know; he would certainly come to me if I were in trouble. Dear, dear! Was the hemorrhage very exhausting, Mr.—er—Ray?”
Ray gave the doctor’s word that there was no immediate danger from it, and Mr. Brandreth made haste to say that he had come to tell the ladies about the affair before they saw it in the papers, and to caution them against saying anything if reporters called.
“Yes, that’s very well,” said Mr. Chapley. “But I see nothing detrimental to us in the facts.”
“No, sir. Not unless they’re distorted, and—in connection with your peculiar views, sir. When those fellows get on to your old friendship with Mr. Hughes, andhispeculiar views, there’s no telling what they won’t make of them.” Kane glanced round at Ray with arched eyes and pursed mouth. Mr. Brandreth turned toward Ray, and asked sweetly, “Should you mind my lighting one of those after-dinner pastilles?” He indicated the slender stem in the little silver-holder on the mantel. “Of course there’s no danger of infection now; but it would be a little more reassuring to my wife, especially as she’s got the boy here with her.”
“By all means,” said Ray, and the pastille begansending up a delicate thread of pungent blue smoke, while Mr. Brandreth went for his wife and mother-in-law.
“It seems to me you’re in a parlous state, Henry,” said Kane. “I don’t see but you’ll have to renounce Tolstoï and all his works if you ever get out of this trouble. I’m sorry for you. It takes away half the satisfaction I feel at the lifting of that incubus from poor David’s life. I think I’d better go.” He rose, and went over to give his hand to Mr. Chapley, where he sat in a reclining-chair.
Mr. Chapley clung to him, and said feebly: “No, no! Don’t go, Kane. We shall need your advice, and—and—counsel,” and while Kane hesitated, Mr. Brandreth came in with the ladies, who wore a look of mystified impatience.
“I thought they had better hear it from you, Mr. Ray,” he said, and for the third time Ray detailed the tragical incidents. He felt as if he had been inculpating himself.
Then Mrs. Chapley said: “It is what we might have expected from the beginning. But if it will be a warning to Mr. Chapley”—
Mrs. Brandreth turned upon her mother with a tone that startled Mr. Chapley from the attitude of gentle sufferance in which he sat resting his chin upon his hand. “I don’t see what warning there can be for papa in such a dreadful thing. Do you think he’s likely to take prussic acid?”
“I don’t say that, you know well enough, child.But I shall be quite satisfied if it is the last of Tolstoïsm inthisfamily.”
“It has nothing to do with Tolstoï,” Mrs. Brandreth returned, with surprising energy. “If we’d all been living simply in the country, that wretched creature’s mind wouldn’t have been preyed upon by the misery of the city.”
“There’s more insanity in proportion to the population in the country than there is in the city,” Mrs. Chapley began.
Mrs. Brandreth ignored her statistical contribution. “There’s no more danger of father’s going out to live on a farm, or in a community, than there is of his taking poison; and at any rate he hasn’t got anything to do with what’s happened. He’s just been faithful to his old friend, and he’s given his daughter work. I don’t care how much the newspapers bring that in. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
Mr. Brandreth looked at his wife in evident surprise; her mother said, “Well, my dear!”
Her father gently urged: “I don’t think you’ve quite understood your mother. She doesn’t look at life from my point of view.”
“No, Henry, I’m thankful to say I don’t,” Mrs. Chapley broke in; “and I don’t know anybody who does. If I had followed you and your prophet, we shouldn’t have had a roof over our heads.”
“A good many people have no roofs over their heads,” Mr. Chapley meekly suggested.
“That’s no reason why we shouldn’t,” said his wife.
“No; you’re right there, my dear. That’s the hopeless part of it. Perhaps poor David is right, and the man who attempts to solve the problem of altruism singly and in his own life”—
Mrs. Brandreth would not let him finish. “The question is, what are we going to do for these poor things in their trouble?” She looked at Ray, who had sat by trying in his sense of intrusion and superfluity to shrink into as small a space as possible. He now blushed to find himself appealed to. He had not seen Mrs. Brandreth often, and he had not reversed his first impression of a narrow, anxious, housewifely spirit in her, sufficient to the demands of young motherhood, but of few and scanty general sympathies.
“When did you see them last?” she asked.
He told her, and she said, “Well, I am going right up there with Percy.”
“And bring back the scarlet fever to your child!” cried her mother. “You shall neither of you go, as long as I have anything to say about it. Or, if you do, you shall not come back to this house, and I shall keep the baby here till there isn’t the least fear of danger; and I don’t know how long that will be.”
All the grandmother rose in Mrs. Chapley; she lifted her voice, and in the transport of her alarm and indignation she suddenly appealed to Mr. Kane from the wilfulness she evidently feared in her daughter: “What do you think, Mr. Kane?”
“I wouldn’t presume to decide such a question finally; it’s too important,” Kane said, in his mellowmurmur. “But I wish that for the moment Mrs. Brandreth would let me be the bearer of her kind messages and inquiries. If you haven’t been in the habit of calling there”—
“I have never been there at all, I’m sorry to say,” Mrs. Brandreth frankly declared.
“Ah! Well, I don’t see what good could come of it, just at present; and there might be some lingering infection.”
“It has been carried in clothes across the ocean months afterwards, and in letters,” Mrs. Chapley triumphed.
Kane abandoned the point to her. “The situation might be very much worse for the Hugheses, as I was saying to Henry before you came in. The Powers are not commonly so considerate. It seems to me distinctly the best thing that could have happened, at least as far as Denton is concerned.”
“Surely,” said Mrs. Chapley, “you don’t approve of suicide?”
“Not in the case of sane and happy people,” Kane blandly replied. “The suicide of such persons should be punished with the utmost rigor of the law. But there seem to be extenuating circumstances in the present instance; I hope the coroner’s jury will deal leniently with the culprit. I must go and see if I can do anything for David. Probably I can’t. It’s always a question in these cases whether you are not adding to the sufferings of the mourners by your efforts to alleviate them; but you can only solve it at their expense by trying.”
“And you will let us know,” said Mrs. Chapley, “whetherwecan do anything, Mr. Kane.”
Mrs. Brandreth did not openly persist in her determination to go to the Hugheses. She said, “Yes, be sure you let us know,” and when Kane had gone on an errand of mercy which he owned was distasteful to him, her husband followed Ray down to the door.
“You see what splendid courage she has,” he whispered, with a backward glance up the stairs. “I must confess that it surprised me, after all I’ve seen her go through, that stand she took with her mother. But I don’t altogether wonder at it; they were disagreeing about keeping up the belladonna when I found them, upstairs, and I guess Mrs. Brandreth’s opposition naturally carried over into this question about the Hugheses. Of course Mrs. Chapley means well, but if Mrs. Brandreth could once be got from under her influence she would be twice the woman she is. I think she’s right about the effect of our connection with the family before the public. They can’t make anything wrong out of it, no matter how they twist it or turn it. I’m not afraid. After all, it isn’t as if Mr. Hughes was one of those howling socialists. An old-time Brook Farmer—it’s a kind of literary tradition; it’s like being an original abolitionist. I’m going to see if I can’t get a glimpse of that book of his without committing myself. Well, let me know how you get on. I wouldn’t let that chance onEvery Eveningslip. Better see the man. Confound the papers! I hope they won’t drag us in!”
A fewlines, with some misspelling of names, told the story of the suicide and inquest in the afternoon papers, and it dwindled into still smaller space and finer print the next morning. The publicity which those least concerned had most dreaded was spared them. Ray himself appeared in print as a witness named Bray; there was no search into the past of Hughes and his family, or their present relations; none of the rich sensations of the case were exploited; it was treated as one of those every-day tragedies without significance or importance, which abound in the history of great cities, and are forgotten as rapidly as they occur. The earth closed over the hapless wretch for whom the dream of duty tormenting us all, more or less, had turned to such a hideous nightmare, and those whom his death threatened even more than his life drew consciously or unconsciously a long breath of freedom.
Mr. Brandreth’s courage rose with his escape; there came a moment when he was ready to face the worst; the moment did not come till the danger of the worst was past. Then he showed himself even eager to retrieve the effect of anxieties not compatible with a scrupulous self-respect.
“Why should we laugh at him?” Kane philosophized, in talking the matter over with Ray. “The ideals of generosity and self-devotion are preposterous in our circumstances. He was quite right to be cautious, to be prudent, to protect his business and his bosom from the invasion of others’ misfortunes, and to look anxiously out for the main chance. Who would do it for him, if he neglected this first and most obvious duty? He has behaved most thoughtfully and kindly toward Peace through it all, and I can’t blame him for not thrusting himself forward to offer help when nothing could really be done.”
Kane had himself remained discreetly in the background, and had not cumbered his old acquaintance with offers of service. He kept away from the funeral, but he afterwards visited Hughes frequently, though he recognized nothing more than the obligation of the early kindness between them. This had been affected by many years of separation and wide divergence of opinion, and it was doubtful whether his visits were altogether a pleasure to the invalid. They disputed a good deal, and sometimes when Hughes lost his voice from excitement and exhaustion, Kane’s deep pipe kept on in a cool smooth assumption of positions which Hughes was physically unable to assail.
Mr. Chapley went out of town to his country place in Massachusetts, to try and get back his strength after a touch of the grippe. The Sunday conventicles had to be given up because Hughes could no longer lead them, and could not suffer the leadership of others. Hewas left mainly for society and consolation to the young fellow who did not let him feel that he differed from him, and was always gently patient with him.
Ray had outlived the grudge he felt at Kane for delivering him over to bonds which he shirked so lightly himself; but this was perhaps because they were no longer a burden. It was not possible for him to refuse his presence to the old man when he saw that it was his sole pleasure; he had come to share the pleasure of these meetings himself. As the days which must be fewer and fewer went by he tried to come every day, and Peace usually found him sitting with her father when she reached home at the end of the afternoon. Ray could get there first because his work on the newspaper was of a more flexible and desultory sort; and he often brought a bundle of books for review with him, and talked them over with Hughes, for whom he was a perspective of the literary world, with its affairs and events. Hughes took a vivid interest in the management of Ray’s department ofEvery Evening, and gave him advice about it, charging him not to allow it to be merely æsthetic, but to imbue it with an ethical quality; he maintained that literature should be the handmaid of reform; he regretted that he had not cast the material ofThe World Revisitedin the form of fiction, which would have given it a charm impossible to a merely polemical treatise.
“I’m convinced that if I had it in that shape it would readily find a publisher, and I’m going to see what I can do to work it over as soon as I’m about again.”
“I hope you’ll be luckier than I’ve been with fiction,” said Ray. “I don’t know but it might be a good plan to turnA Modern Romeointo a polemical treatise. We might change about, Mr. Hughes.”
Hughes said, “Why don’t you bring your story up here and read it to me?”
“Wouldn’t that be taking an unfair advantage of you?” Ray asked. “Just at present my chief’s looking over it, to see if it won’t do for thefeuilletonwe’re going to try. He won’t want it; but it affords a little respite for you, Mr. Hughes, as long as he thinks he may.”
He knew that Peace must share his constraint in speaking of his book. When they were alone for a little while before he went away that evening he said to her, “You have never told me yet that you forgave me for my bad behavior about my book the last time we talked about it.”
“Did you wish me to tell you?” she asked, gently. “I thought I needn’t.”
“Yes, do,” he urged. “You thought I was wrong?”
“Yes,” she assented.
“Then you ought to say, in so many words, ‘I forgive you.’”
He waited, but she would not speak.
“Why can’t you say that?”
She did not answer, but after a while she said, “I think what I did was a good reason for”—
“My being in the wrong? Then why did you do it? Can’t you tell me that?”
“Not—now.”
“Some time?”
“Perhaps,” she murmured.
“Then I may ask you again?”
She was silent, sitting by the window in the little back room, where her head was dimly outlined against the late twilight. Between the rushing trains at the front they could hear Mrs. Denton talking to her father, joking and laughing. Our common notion of tragedy is that it alters the nature of those involved, as if it were some spiritual chemistry combining the elements of character anew. But it is merely an incident of our being, and, for all we can perceive, is of no more vital effect than many storms in the material world. What it does not destroy, it leaves essentially unchanged. The light creature whom its forces had beaten to the earth, rose again with the elasticity of light things, when it had passed. She was meant to be what she was made, and even Ray, with the severity of his young morality, and the paucity of his experience, perceived that the frivolity which shocked him was comfort and cheer to the sick old man. She sat with him, and babbled and jested; and Ray saw with a generous resentment that she must always have been his favorite. There was probably a responsive lightness in Hughes’s own soul to which hers brought the balm of kinship and of perfect sympathy. There was no apparent consciousness of his preference in the sisters; each in her way accepted it as something just and fit. Peace looked after the small housekeeping, and her sister had more and more the care of their father.
Mrs. Denton’s buoyant temperament served a better purpose in the economy of sorrow than a farther-sighted seriousness. In virtue of all that Ray had ever read or fancied of such experiences, the deaths that had bereaved her ought to have chastened and sobered her, and he could not forgive her because she could not wear the black of a hushed and spiritless behavior. It even shocked him that Peace did nothing to restrain her, but took her from moment to moment as she showed herself, and encouraged her cheerful talk, and smiled at her jokes. He could not yet understand how the girl’s love was a solvent of all questions that harass the helpless reason, and embitter us with the faults of others; but from time to time he had a sense of quality in her that awed him from all other sense of her. There is something in the heart of man that puts a woman’s charm before all else, and that enables evil and foolish women to find husbands, while good and wise women die unwed. But in the soul of incontaminate youth there is often a passionate refusal to accept this instinct as the highest. The ideal of womanhood is then something too pure and hallowed even for the dreams of love. It was something like this, a mystical reverence or a fantastic exaltation, which removed Ray further from Peace, in what might have joined their lives, than he was the first day they met, when he began to weave about her the reveries which she had no more part in than if they had been the dreams of his sleep. They were of the stuff of his literature, and like the innumerably trooping, insubstantial fanciesthat followed each other through his brain from nothing in his experience. When they ceased to play, as they must after the little romance of that first meeting had yielded to acquaintance, what had taken their place? At the end of the half-year which had united them in the intimacy of those strange events and experiences, he could not have made sure of anything but a sort of indignant compassion that drew him near her, and the fantastic sentiment that held him aloof. The resentment in his pity was toward himself as much as her father; when he saw her in the isolation where the old man’s preference for her sister left her, he blamed himself as much as them.
Peace blamed no one by word or look. He doubted if she saw it, till he ventured one day to speak of her father’s fondness for her sister, and then she answered that he would always rather have Jenny with him than any one else. Ray returned some commonplaces, not too sincere, about the compensation the care of her father must be to Mrs. Denton in her bereavement, and Peace answered as frankly as before that they had got each other back again. “Father didn’t want her to marry Ansel, and he didn’t care for the children. He couldn’t help that; he was too old; and after we were all shut up here together they fretted him.”
She sighed gently, in the way she had, and Ray said, with the fatuity of comforters, “I suppose they are better off out of this world.”
“They were born into this world,” she answered.
“Yes,” he had to own.
He saw how truly and deeply she grieved for the little ones, and he realized without umbrage that she mourned their wretched father too, with an affection as simple and pure. There were times when he thought how tragical it would be for her to have cared for Denton, in the way his wife cared so little; and then his fancy created a situation in whose unreality it ran riot. But all the time he knew that he was feigning these things, and that there was no more truth in them than in the supposition which he indulged at other times that he was himself in love with Mrs. Denton, and always had been, and this was the reason why he could not care for Peace. It was the effect in both cases of the æsthetic temperament, which is as often the slave as the master of its reveries.
It was in Mrs. Denton’s favor that she did not let the drift of their father’s affections away from Peace carry her with them. The earthward bodily decline of the invalid implied a lapse from the higher sympathies to the lower, and she seemed to have some vague perception of this, which she formulated in her own way, once, when she wished to account for the sick man’s refusal of some service from Peace which he accepted from herself.
“He has more use for me here, Peace, because I’m of the earth, earthy, but he’ll want you somewhere else.”
The old man clung to the world with a hope that admitted at least no open question of his living. He said that as soon as the spring fairly opened, and theweather would allow him to go out without taking more cold, he should carry his manuscript about to the different publishers, and offer it personally. He thought his plan carefully out, and talked it over with Ray, whom he showed that his own failure with his novel was from a want of address in these interviews. He proposed to do something for Ray’s novel as soon as he secured a publisher for himself, and again he bade him bring it and read it to him. Ray afterwards realized with shame that he would have consented to this if Hughes had persisted. But the invitation was probably a mere grace of civility with him, an effect of the exuberant faith he had in his own success.
As the season advanced, and the heat within-doors increased, they had to open the windows, and then the infernal uproar of the avenue filled the room, so that they could not hear one another speak till the windows were closed again. But the rush and clank of the elevated trains, the perpetual passage of the surface cars, with the clatter of their horses’ hoofs, and the clash of the air-slitting bells, the grind and jolt of the heavy trucks, the wild clatter of express carts across the rails or up and down the tracks, the sound of feet and voices, the cries of the fruit-venders, and the whiffs of laughter and blasphemy that floated up from the turmoil below like filthy odors, seemed not so keenly to afflict the sick man, or to rend his nerves with the anguish that forced the others to shut it all out, and rather stifle in the heat. Yet, in some sort, he felt it too, for once when Ray spoke of it, he said yes, it wasatrocious. “But,” he added, “I am glad I came and placed myself where I could fully realize the hideousness of a competitive metropolis. All these abominations of sight and sound, these horrible discords, that offend every sense, physically express the spiritual principle underlying the whole social framework. It has been immensely instructive to me, and I have got some color of it into my book: not enough, of course, but infinitely more than I could possibly have imagined. No one can imagine the horror, the squalor, the cruel and senseless turpitude which these things typify, except in their presence. I have merely represented the facts in regard to them, and have left the imagination free to deal with the ideal city as a contrast, with its peaceful streets, cleanly and quiet, its stately ranks of beautiful dwellings, its noble piles of civic and religious architecture, its shaded and colonnaded avenues, its parks and gardens, and all planned and built, not from the greed and the fraud of competition, but from the generous and unselfish spirit of emulation, wherein men join to achieve the best instead of separating to get the most. Think of a city operated by science, as every city might be now, without one of the wretched animals tamed by the savage man, and still perpetuated by the savage man for the awkward and imperfect uses of a barbarous society! A city without a horse, where electricity brought every man and everything silently to the door. Jenny! Get me that manuscript, will you? The part I was writing on to-day—in the desk—the middle drawer—I should like to read”—
Mrs. Denton dropped her cat from her lap and ran to get the manuscript. But when she brought it to her father, and he arranged the leaves with fluttering fingers, he could not read. He gasped out a few syllables, and in the paroxysm of coughing which began, he thrust the manuscript toward Ray.
“He wants you to take it,” said Peace. “You can take it home with you. You can give it to me in the morning.”
Ray took it, and stood by, looking on, not knowing how to come to their help for the sick man’s relief, and anxious not to cumber them. When they had got him quiet again, and Ray had once more thrown up the window, and let in the mild night air which came laden with that delirium of the frenzied city, Peace followed him into the little back room, where they stood a moment.
“For Heaven’s sake,” he said, “why don’t you get him away from here, where he could be a little more out of the noise? It’s enough to drive a well man mad.”
“He doesn’t feel it as if he were well,” she answered. “We have tried to get him to let us bring his bed out here. But he won’t. I think,” she added, “that he believes it would be a bad omen to change.”
“Surely,” said Ray, “a man like your father couldn’t care for that ridiculous superstition. What possible connection could his changing to a quieter place have with his living or”—
“It isn’t a matter of reason with him. I can seehow he’s gone back to his early life in a great many things in these few days. He hasn’t been so much like himself for a long time as he has to-night.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He says to let him have his own way about it. He says that—the noise can’t make any difference—now.”
They were in the dark; but he knew from her voice that tears were in her eyes. He felt for her hand to say good-night. When he had found it, he held it a moment, and then he kissed it. But no thrill or glow of the heart justified him in what he had done. At the best he could excuse it as an impulse of pity.
Theeditor ofEvery Eveninggave Ray his manuscript back. He had evidently no expectation that Ray could have any personal feeling about it, or could view it apart from the interests of the paper. He himself betrayed no personal feeling where the paper was concerned, and he probably could have conceived of none in Ray.
“I don’t think it will do for us,” he said. “It is a good story, and I read it all through, but I don’t believe it would succeed as a serial. What do you think, yourself?”
“I?” said Ray. “How could I have an unprejudiced opinion?”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. You know what we want; we’ve talked it over enough; and you ought to know whether this is the kind of thing. Anyhow, it’s within your province to decide. I don’t think it will do, but if you think it will, I’m satisfied. You must take the responsibility. I leave it to you, and I mean business.”
Ray thought how old Kane would be amused if he could know of the situation, how he would inspect and comment it from every side, and try to get novel phrases for it. He believed himself that no authorhad ever been quite in his place before; it was like something in Gilbert’s operas; it was as if a prisoner were invited to try himself and pronounce his own penalty. His chief seemed to see no joke in the affair; he remained soberly and somewhat severely waiting for Ray’s decision.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” said Ray. “I don’t think it would do forEvery Evening. Even if it would, I should doubt the taste of working in something of my own on the reader at the beginning.”
“I shouldn’t care for that,” said the chief, “if it were the thing.”
Ray winced, but the chief did not see it. Now, as always, it was merely and simply a question of the paper. He added carelessly:
“I should think such a story as that would succeed as a book.”
“I wish you would get some publisher to think so.”
The chief had nothing to say to that. He opened his desk and began to write.
In spite of the rejected manuscript lying on the table before him, Ray made out a very fair day’s work himself, and then he took it up town with him. He did not go at once to his hotel, but pushed on as far as Chapley’s, where he hoped to see Peace before she went home, and ask how her father was getting on; he had not visited Hughes for several weeks; he made himself this excuse. What he really wished was to confront the girl and divine her thoughts concerning himself. He must do that, now; but if it were notfor the cruelty of forsaking the old man, it might be the kindest and best thing never to go near any of them again.
He had the temporary relief of finding her gone home when he reached Chapley’s. Mr. Brandreth was there, and he welcomed Ray with something more than his usual cordiality.
“Look here,” he said, shutting the door of his little room. “Have you got that story of yours where you could put your hand on it easily?”
“I can put my hand on it instantly,” said Ray, and he touched it.
“Oh!” Mr. Brandreth returned, a little daunted. “I didn’t know you carried it around with you.”
“I don’t usually—or only when I’ve got it from some publisher who doesn’t want it.”
“I thought it had been the rounds,” said Mr. Brandreth, still uneasily.
“Oh, it’s an editor, this time. It’s just been offered to me for serial use inEvery Evening, and I’ve declined it.”
“What do you mean?” Mr. Brandreth smiled in mystification.
“Exactly what I say.” Ray explained the affair as it had occurred. “It makes me feel like Brutus and the son of Brutus rolled into one. I’m going round to old Kane, to give the facts away to him. I think he’ll enjoy them.”
“Well! Hold on! What did the chief say about it?”
“Oh, he liked it. Everybody likes it, but nobody wants it. He said he thought it would succeed as a book. The editors all think that. The publishers think it would succeed as a serial.”
Ray carried it off buoyantly, and enjoyed the sort of daze Mr. Brandreth was in.
“See here,” said the publisher, “I want you to leave that manuscript with me.”
“Again?”
“Yes. I’ve never read it myself yet, you know.”
“Take it and be happy!” Ray bestowed it upon him with dramatic effusion.
“No, seriously!” said Mr. Brandreth. “I want to talk with you. Sit down, won’t you? You know the first time you were in here, I told you I was anxious to get Chapley & Co. in line as a publishing house again; I didn’t like the way we were dropping out and turning into mere jobbers. You remember.”
Ray nodded.
“Well, sir, I’ve never lost sight of that idea, and I’ve been keeping one eye out for a good novel, to start with, ever since. I haven’t found it, I don’t mind telling you. You see, all the established reputations are in the hands of other publishers, and you can’t get them away without paying ridiculous money, and violating the comity of the trade at the same time. If we are to start new, we must start with a new man.”
“I don’t know whether I’m a new man or not,” said Ray, “if you’re working up to me. Sometimes Ifeel like a pretty old one. I think I came to New York about the beginning of the Christian era. ButA Modern Romeois as fresh as ever. It has the dew of the morning on it still—rubbed off in spots by the nose of the professional smeller.”
“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “it’s new enough for all practical purposes. I want you to let me take it home with me.”
“Which of the leading orchestras would you like to have accompany you to your door?” asked Ray.
“No, no! Don’t expect too much!” Mr. Brandreth entreated.
“I don’t expect anything,” Ray protested.
“Well, that’s right—that’s the only business basis. But if itshouldhappen to be the thing, I don’t believe you’d be personally any happier about it than I should.”
“Oh, thank you!”
“I’m not a fatalist”—
“But it would look a good deal like fatalism.”
“Yes, it would. It would look as if it were really intended to be, if it came back to us now, after it had been round to everybody else.”
“Yes; but if it was fated from the beginning, I don’t see why you didn’t take it in the beginning. I should rather wonder what all the bother had been for.”
“You might say that,” Mr. Brandreth admitted.
Ray went off on the wave of potential prosperity, and got Kane to come out and dine with him. Theydecided upon Martin’s, where the dinner cost twice as much as at Ray’s hotel, and had more the air of being a fine dinner; and they got a table in the corner, and Ray ordered a bottle of champagne.
“Yes,” said Kane, “that is the right drink for a man who wishes to spend his money before he has got it. It’s the true gambler’s beverage.”
“You needn’t drink it,” said Ray. “You shall have thevin ordinairethat’s included in the price of the dinner.”
“Oh, I don’t mind a glass of champagne now and then, after I’ve brought my host under condemnation for ordering it,” said Kane.
“And I want to let my heart out to-night,” Ray pursued. “I may not have the chance to-morrow. Besides, as to the gambling, it isn’t I betting on my book; it’s Brandreth. I don’t understand yet why he wants to do it. To be sure, it isn’t a great risk he’s taking.”
“I rather think hehasto take some risks just now,” said Kane, significantly. He lowered his soft voice an octave as he went on. “I’m afraid that poor Henry, in his pursuit of personal perfectability, has let things get rather behindhand in his business. I don’t blame him—you know I never blame people—for there is always a question as to which is the cause and which is the effect in such matters. My dear old friend may have begun to let his business go to the bad because he had got interested in his soul, or he may have turned to his soul for refuge because he knew hisbusiness had begun to go to the bad. At any rate, he seems to have found the usual difficulty in serving God and Mammon; only, in this case Mammon has got the worst of it, for once: I suppose one ought to be glad of that. But the fact is that Henry has lost heart in business; he doesn’t respect business; he has a bad conscience; he wants to be out of it. I had a long talk with him before he went into the country, and I couldn’t help pitying him. I don’t think his wife and daughter even will ever get him back to New York. He knows it’s rather selfish to condemn them to the dulness of a country life, and that it’s rather selfish to leave young Brandreth to take the brunt of affairs here alone. But what are you to do in a world like this, where a man can’t get rid of one bad conscience without laying in another?”
In his pleasure with his paradox Kane suffered Ray to fill up his glass a second time. Then he looked dissatisfied, and Ray divined the cause. “Did you word that quite to your mind?”
“No, I didn’t. It’s too diffuse. Suppose we say that in our conditions no man can do right without doing harm?”
“That’s more succinct,” said Ray. “Is it known at all that they’re in difficulties?”
Kane smoothly ignored the question. “I fancy that the wrong is in Henry’s desire to cut himself loose from the ties that bind us all together here. Poor David has the right of that. We must stand or fall together in the pass we’ve come to; and we cannothelpfully eschew the world except by remaining in it.” He took up Ray’s question after a moment’s pause. “No, it isn’t known that they’re in difficulties, and I don’t say that it’s so. Their affairs have simply been allowed to run down, and Henry has left Brandreth to gather them up single-handed. I don’t know that Brandreth will complain. It leaves him unhampered, even if he can do nothing with his hands but clutch at straws.”
“Such straws as theModern Romeo?” Ray asked. “It seems to me thatIhave a case of conscience here. Is it right for me to let Mr. Brandreth bet his money on my book when there are so many chances of his losing?”
“Let us hope he won’t finally bet,” Kane suggested, and he smiled at the refusal which instantly came into Ray’s eyes. “But if he does, we must leave the end with God. People,” he mused on, “used to leave the end with God a great deal oftener than they do now. I remember that I did, myself, once. It was easier. I think I will go back to it. There is something very curious in our relation to the divine. God is where we believe He is, and He is a daily Providence or not, as we choose. People used to see His hand in a corner, or a deal, which prospered them, though it ruined others. They may be ashamed to do that now. But we might get back to faith by taking a wider sweep and seeing God in our personal disadvantages—finding Him not only in luck but in bad luck. Chance may be a larger law, with an orbit far transcending therange of the little statutes by which fire always burns, and water always finds its level.”
“That is a better Hard Saying than the other,” Ray mocked. “‘I’ faith an excellent song.’ Have some more champagne. Now go on; but let us talk ofA Modern Romeo.”
“We will drink to it,” said Kane, with an air of piety.
“Well, sir,” said Mr. Brandreth when he found Ray waiting for him in his little room the next morning, “I haven’t slept a wink all night.”
Ray had not slept a wink himself, and he had not been able to keep away from Chapley’s in his fear and his hope concerning his book. He hoped Mr. Brandreth might have looked at it; he feared he had not. His heart began to go down, but he paused in his despair at the smiles that Mr. Brandreth broke into.
“It was that book of yours. I thought I would just dip into it after dinner, and try a chapter or two on Mrs. Brandreth; but I read on till eleven o’clock, and then she went to bed, and I kept at it till I finished it, about three this morning. Then the baby took up the strain for about half an hour and finishedme.”
Ray did not know what to say. He gasped out, “I’m proud to have been associated with young Mr. Brandreth in destroying his father’s rest.”
The publisher did not heed this poor attempt at nonchalance. “I left the manuscript for Mrs. Brandreth—she called me back to make sure, before I got out of doors—and if she likes it as well to the end—But I know she will! She likes you, Ray.”
“Does she?” Ray faintly questioned back.
“Yes; she thinks you’re all kinds of a nice fellow, and that you’ve been rather sacrificed in some ways. She thinks you behaved splendidly in that Denton business.”
Ray remained mutely astonished at the flattering opinions of Mrs. Brandreth; he had suspected them so little. Her husband went on, smiling:
“She wasn’t long making out the original of your hero.” Ray blushed consciously, but made no attempt to disown the self-portraiture. “Of course,” said Mr. Brandreth, “we’re all in the dark about the heroine. But Mrs. Brandreth doesn’t care so much for her.”
Now that he was launched upon the characters of the story, Mr. Brandreth discussed them all, and went over the incidents with the author, whose brain reeled with the ecstacy of beholding them objectively in the flattering light of another’s appreciation.
“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, at last, when Ray found strength to rise from this debauch of praise, “you’ll hear from me, now, very soon. I’ve made up my mind about the story, and unless Mrs. Brandreth should hate it very much before she gets through with it—Curious about women, isn’t it, how they always take the personal view? I believe the main reason why my wife dislikes your heroine is because she got her mixed up with the girl that took the part of Juliet away from her in our out-door theatricals. I tell her that you and I are not only the two Percys,we’re the two Romeos, too. She thinks your heroine is rather weak; of course you meant her to be so.”
Ray had not, but he said that he had, and he made a noisy pretence of thinking the two Romeos a prodigious joke. His complaisance brought its punishment.
“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, “I must tell you a singular thing that happened. Just as I got to that place where he shoots himself, you know, and she starts up out of her hypnotic trance, our baby gave a frightful scream, and Mrs. Brandreth woke and thought the house was on fire. I suppose the little fellow had a bad dream; it’s strange what dreams babiesdohave! But wasn’t it odd, happening when I was wrought up so? Looks like telepathy, doesn’t it? Of course my mind’s always on the child. By-the-way, if this thing goes, you must try a telepathic story. It hasn’t been done yet.”
“Magnificent!” said Ray. “I’ll do it!”
They got away from each other, and Ray went down to his work at theEvery Eveningoffice. He enslaved himself to it by an effort twice as costly as that of writing when he was in the deepest and darkest of his despair; his hope danced before him, and there was a tumult in his pulses which he could quiet a little only by convincing himself that as yet he had no promise from Mr. Brandreth, and that if the baby had given Mrs. Brandreth a bad day, it was quite within the range of possibility that the publisher might, after all, have perfectly good reasons for rejecting his book. He insisted with himself upon thisview of the case; it was the only one that he could steady his nerves with; and besides, he somehow felt that if he could feign it strenuously enough, the fates would be propitiated, and the reverse would happen.
It is uncertain whether it was his pretence that produced the result intended, but in the evening Mr. Brandreth came down to Ray’s hotel to say that he had made up his mind to take the book.
“We talked it over at dinner, and my wife made me come right down and tell you. She said you had been kept in suspense long enough, and she wasn’t going to let you go overnight. It’s the first bookwe’veever taken, and I guess she feels a little romantic about the new departure. By-the-way, we found out what ailed the baby. It was a pin that had got loose, and stuck up through the sheet in his crib. You can’t trust those nurses a moment. But I believe that telepathic idea is a good one.”
“Yes, yes; it is,” said Ray. Now that the certainty of acceptance had come, he was sobered by it, and he could not rejoice openly, though he was afraid he was disappointing Mr. Brandreth. He could only say, “It’s awfully kind of Mrs. Brandreth to think of me.”
“That’s her way,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he added briskly, “Well, now, let’s come down to business. How do you want to publish? Want to make your own plates?”
“No,” Ray faltered; “I can’t afford to do that; I had one such offer”—
“I supposed you wouldn’t,” Mr. Brandreth cut in,“but I thought I’d ask. Well, then, we’ll make the plates ourselves, and we’ll pay you ten per cent. on the retail price of the book. That is the classic arrangement with authors, and I think it’s fair.” When he said this he swallowed, as if there were something in his throat, and added, “Up to a certain point. And as we take all the risk, I think we ought to have—You see, on one side it’s a perfect lottery, and on the other side it’s a dead certainty. You can’t count on the public, but you can count on the landlord, the salesman, the bookkeeper, the printer, and the paper-maker. We’re at all the expense—rent, clerk-hire, plates, printing, binding, and advertising, and the author takes no risk whatever.”
It occurred to Ray afterwards that an author took the risk of losing his labor if his book failed; but the public estimates the artist’s time at the same pecuniary value as the sitting hen’s, and the artist insensibly accepts the estimate. Ray did not think of his point in season to urge it, but it would hardly have availed if he had. He was tremulously eager to close with Mr. Brandreth on any terms, and after they had agreed, he was afraid he had taken advantage of him.
When the thing was done it was like everything else. He had dwelt so long and intensely upon it in a thousand reveries that he had perhaps exhausted his possibilities of emotion concerning it. At any rate he found himself curiously cold; he wrote to his father about it, and he wrote to Sanderson, who would be sure to make a paragraph for theEcho, and unlessHanks Brothers killed his paragraph, would electrify Midland with the news. Ray forecast the matter and the manner of the paragraph, but it did not excite him.
“What is the trouble with me?” he asked Kane, whom he hastened to tell his news. “I ought to be in a transport; I’m not in anything of the kind.”
“Ah! That is very interesting. No doubt you’ll come to it. I had a friend once who was accepted in marriage by the object of his affections. His first state was apathy, mixed, as nearly as I could understand, with dismay. He became more enthusiastic later on, and lived ever after in the belief that he was one of the most fortunate of men. But I think we are the victims of conventional acceptations in regard to most of the great affairs of life. We are taught that we shall feel so and so about such and such things: about success in love or in literature; about the birth of our first-born; about death. But probably no man feels as he expected to feel about these things. He finds them of exactly the same quality as all other experiences; there may be a little more or a little less about them, but there isn’t any essential difference. Perhaps when we come to die ourselves, it will be as simply and naturally as—as”—
“As having a book accepted by a publisher,” Ray suggested.
“Exactly!” said Kane, and he breathed out his deep, soft laugh.
“Well, you needn’t go on. I’m sufficiently accountedfor.” Ray rose, and Kane asked him what his hurry was, and where he was going.
“I’m going up to tell the Hugheses.”
“Ah! then I won’t offer to go with you,” said Kane. “I approve of your constancy, but I have my own philosophy of such things. I think David would have done much better to stay where he was; I do not wish to punish him for coming to meet the world, and reform it on its own ground; but I could have told him he would get beaten. He is a thinker, or a dreamer, if you please, and in his community he had just the right sort of distance. He could pose the world just as he wished, and turn it in this light and in that. But here he sees the exceptions to his rules, and when I am with him I find myself the prey of a desire to dwell on the exceptions, and I know that I afflict him. I always did, and I feel it the part of humanity to keep away from him. I am glad that I do, for I dislike very much being with sick people. Of course I shall go as often as decency requires. For Decency,” Kane concluded, with the effect of producing a Hard Saying, “transcends Humanity. So many reformers forget that,” he added.
The days were now getting so long that they had just lighted the lamps in Hughes’s room when Ray came in, a little after seven. He had a few words with Peace in the family room first, and she told him that her father had passed a bad day, and she did not know whether he was asleep or not.
“Then I’ll go away again,” said Ray.
“No, no; if he is awake, he will like to see you. He always does. And now he can’t see you much oftener.”
“Oh, Peace! Do you really think so?”
“The doctor says so. There is no hope any more.” There was no faltering in her voice, and its steadiness strengthened Ray, standing so close to one who stood so close to death.
“Does he—your father—know?”
“I can’t tell. He is always so hopeful. And Jenny won’t hear of giving up. She is with him more than I am, and she says he has a great deal of strength yet. He can still work at his book a little. He has every part of it in mind so clearly that he can tell her what to do when he has the strength to speak. The worst is, when his voice fails him—he gets impatient. That was what brought on his hemorrhage to-day.”
“Peace! I am ashamed to think why I came to-night. But I hoped it might interest him.”
“About your book? Oh yes. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about it. I thought you would like to tell him.”
“Thank you,” said Ray. He was silent for a moment. She stood against the pale light of one of the windows, a shadowy outline, and he felt as if they were two translated spirits meeting there exterior to the world and all its interests; he made a mental note of his impression for use some time. But now he said: “I thought I should like to tell him, too. But after all, I’m not so sure. I’m not like you, Peace.And I suppose I’m punished for my egotism in the very hour of my triumph. It isn’t like a triumph; it’s like—nothing. I’ve looked forward to this so long—I’ve counted on it so much—I’ve expected it to be like having the world in my hand. But if I shut my hand, it’s empty.”
He knew that he was appealing to her for comfort, and he expected her to respond as she did.
“That’s because you don’t realize it yet. When you do, it will seem the great thing that it is.”
“Do you think it’s a great thing?”
“As great as any success can be.”
“Do you think it will succeed?”
“Mr. Brandreth thinks it will. He’s very hopeful about it.”
“Sometimes I wish it would fail. I don’t believe it deserves to succeed. I’m ashamed of it in places. Have I any right to let him foist it on the public if I don’t perfectly respect it? You wouldn’t if it were yours.”
He wished her to deny that it was bad in any part, but she did not. She merely said: “I suppose that’s the way our work always seems to us when it’s done. There must be a time when we ought to leave what we’ve done to others; it’s for them, not for ourselves; why shouldn’t they judge it?”
“Yes; that is true! How generous you are! How can you endure to talk to me of my book? But I suppose you think that if I can stand it, you can.”
“I will go in, now,” said Peace, ignoring the driftof his words, “and see if father is awake.” She returned in a moment, and murmured softly, “Come!”
“Here is Mr. Ray, father,” said Mrs. Denton. She had to lift her voice to make the sick man hear, for the window was open, and the maniacal clamor of the street flooded the chamber. Hughes lay at his thin full-length in his bed, like one already dead.
He stirred a little at the sound of his daughter’s voice; and when he had taken in the fact of Ray’s presence, he signed to her to shut the window. The smells of the street, and the sick, hot whiffs from the passing trains were excluded; the powerful odors of the useless drugs burdened the air; by the light of the lamp shaded from Hughes’s eyes Ray could see the red blotches on his sheet and pillow.
He no longer spoke, but he could write with a pencil on the little memorandum-block which lay on the stand by his bed. When Peace said, “Father, Mr. Ray has come to tell you that his book has been accepted; Chapley & Co. are going to publish it,” the old man’s face lighted up. He waved his hand toward the stand, and Mrs. Denton put the block and pencil in it, and held the lamp for him to see.
Ray took the block, and read, faintly scribbled on it: “Good! You must get them to take myWorld Revisited.”
The sick man smiled as Ray turned his eyes toward him from the paper.
“What is it?” demanded Mrs. Denton, after a moment. “Some secret? What is it, father?” shepursued, with the lightness that evidently pleased him, for he smiled again, and an inner light shone through his glassy eyes. “Tell us, Mr. Ray!”
Hughes shook his head weakly, still smiling, and Ray put the leaf in his pocket. Then he took up the old man’s long hand where it lay inert on the bed.
“I will do my very best, Mr. Hughes. I will do everything that I possibly can.”