Part 14

He turned, and glanced at Ray impatiently, as if he were eager to get back to his work; but the gloomy face which he usually wore was gone; his eyes expressed only an intense preoccupation through which gleamed a sudden gayety, as if it flashed into them from some happier time in the past. “Oh, yes,” he said to his wife, while he took hold of Ray’s arm and turned him about; “this is the way you want me to look.”

“As soon as your process succeeds, I expect you to look that way all the time. And I’m going to go round and do my work in a low-neck dress; and we are going to have champagne at every meal. I am going to have a day, on my card, and I am going to have afternoon teas and give dinners. We are going into the best society.”

Denton slid his hand down Ray’s arm, and kept Ray’s hand in his hot clasp while he rapidly asked him about the side of his life which that costume represented, as though now for the first time he had a reason for caring to know anything of the world and its pleasures.

“And those people don’t do anything else?” he asked, finally.

“Isn’t it enough?” Ray retorted. “They think they do a great deal.”

Denton laughed in a strange nervous note, catching his breath, and keeping on involuntarily. “Yes; too much. I pity them.”

“Well,” said his wife, “I want to be an object of pity as soon as possible. Don’t lose any more time, now, Ansel, from that precious process.” The light went out of his face again, and he jerked his head erect sharply, like one listening, while he stood staring at her. “Oh, now, don’t be ridiculous, Ansel!” she said.

XXIX.

The next 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! Did _she_ give the little dance?”

“No. I dropped in at the Hugheses’ on the way to the 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 with me 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 suspecting _you_.”

“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.”

XXX.

There could 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 have expected 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 pleasure of 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, and light 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?”