Ray’s voice broke a little as he said this; but he hoped Mr. Brandreth
did not notice, and he made haste to get out into the crowded street,
and be alone with his emotions. He was quite giddy with the turn that
Fortune’s wheel had taken, and he walked a long way up town before he
recovered his balance. He had never dreamt of such prompt consideration
as Mr. Brandreth had promised to give his novel. He had expected to
carry it round from publisher to publisher, and to wait weeks, and
perhaps whole months, for their decision. Most of them he imagined
refusing to look at it at all; and he had prepared himself for rebuffs.
He could not help thinking that Mr. Brandreth’s different behavior was
an effect of his goodness of heart, and of his present happiness. Of
course he was a little ridiculous about that baby of his; Ray supposed
that was natural, but he decided that if he should ever be a father he
would not gush about it to the first person he met. He did not like Mr.
Brandreth’s interrupting him with the account of those amateur
theatricals when he was outlining the plot of his story; but that was
excusable, and it showed that he was really interested. If it had not
been for the accidental fact that Mr. Brandreth had taken the part of
Romeo in those theatricals, he might not have caught on to the notion of
_A Modern Romeo_ at all. The question whether he was not rather silly
himself to enter so fully into his plot, helped him to condone Mr.
Brandreth’s weakness, which was not incompatible with shrewd business
sense. All that Mr. Brandreth had said of the state of the trade and its
new conditions was sound; he was probably no fool where his interest was
concerned. Ray resented for him the cruelty of Mr. Kane in turning the
baby’s precocity into the sort of joke he had made of it; but he admired
his manner of saying things, too. He would work up very well in a story;
but he ought to be made pathetic as well as ironical; he must be made to
have had an early unhappy love-affair; the girl either to have died, or
to have heartlessly jilted him. He could be the hero’s friend at some
important moment; Ray did not determine just at what moment; but the
hero should be about to wreck his happiness, somehow, and Mr. Kane
should save him from the rash act, and then should tell him the story of
his own life. Ray recurred to the manuscript he had left with Mr.
Brandreth, and wondered if Mr. Brandreth would read it himself, and if
he did, whether he would see any resemblance between the hero and the
author. He had sometimes been a little ashamed of that mesmerization
business in the story, but if it struck a mood of the reading public, it
would be a great piece of luck; and he prepared himself to respect it.
If Chapley & Co. accepted the book, he was going to write all that
passage over, and strengthen it.
He was very happy; and he said to himself that he must try to be very
good and to merit the fortune that had befallen him. He must not let it
turn his head, or seem more than it really was; after all it was merely
a chance to be heard that he was given. He instinctively strove to
arrest the wheel which was bringing him up, and must carry him down if
it kept on moving. With an impulse of the old heathen superstition
lingering in us all, he promised his god, whom he imagined to be God,
that he would be very grateful and humble if He would work a little
miracle for him, and let the wheel carry him up without carrying him
over and down. In the unconscious selfishness which he had always
supposed morality, he believed that the thing most pleasing to his god
would be some immediate effort in his own behalf, of prudent industry or
frugality; and he made haste to escape from the bliss of his high hopes
as if it were something that was wrong in itself, and that he would
perhaps be punished for.
He went to the restaurant where he had breakfasted, and bargained for
board and lodging by the week. It was not so cheap as he had expected to
get it; with an apparent flexibility, the landlord was rigorous on the
point of a dollar a day for the room; and Ray found that he must pay
twelve dollars a week for his board and lodging instead of the ten he
had set as a limit. But he said to himself that he must take the risk,
and must make up the two dollars, somehow. His room was at the top of
the house, and it had a view of the fourth story of a ten-story
apartment-house opposite; but it had a southerly exposure, and there
was one golden hour of the day when the sun shone into it, over the
shoulder of a lower edifice next to the apartment-house, and round the
side of a clock tower beyond the avenue. He could see a bit of the
châlet-roof of an elevated railroad station; he could see the tops of
people’s heads in the street below if he leaned out of his window far
enough, and he had the same bird’s-eye view of the passing carts and
carriages. He shared it with the sparrows that bickered in the
window-casing, and with the cats that crouched behind the chimneys and
watched the progress of the sparrows’ dissensions with furtive and
ironical eyes.
Within, the slope of the roof gave a picturesque slant to the ceiling.
The room was furnished with an American painted set; there was a clock
on the little shelf against the wall that looked as if it were French;
but it was not going, and there was no telling what accent it might tick
with if it were wound up. There was a little mahogany table in one
corner near the window to write on, and he put his books up on the shelf
on each side of the clock.
It was all very different from the dignified housing of his life at
Midland, where less than the money he paid here got him a stately
parlor, with a little chamber out of it, at the first boarding-house in
the place. But still he would not have been ashamed to have any one from
Midland see him in his present quarters. They were proper to New York in
that cosmopolitan phase which he had most desired to see. He tried
writing at the little table, and found it very convenient. He forced
himself, just for moral effect, and to show himself that he was master
of all his moods, to finish his letter to the _Echo_, and he pleased
himself very well with it. He made it light and lively, and yet
contrived to give it certain touches of poetry and to throw in bits of
description which he fancied had caught something of the thrill and
sparkle of the air, and imparted some sense of such a day as he felt it
to be. He fancied different friends turning to the letter the first
thing in the paper; and in the fond remembrance of the kindness he had
left behind there, he became a little homesick.