There was 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 Peace constantly 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 Ray sat 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, _you_ are in danger! You”--
“It’s my _right_ to 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 hopeless answers; 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!”