When Peace came back to her work, Mr. Brandreth, in admiration of her
spirit, confided to Ray that she had refused to take pay for the time
she had been away, and that no arguments availed with her.
“They must have been at unusual expense on account of this sickness, and
I understand that the son-in-law hasn’t earned anything for a month. But
what can you do?”
“You can’t do anything,” said Ray. Their poverty might be finally
reached from without, and it was not this which made him chiefly anxious
in his futile sympathy for Peace. He saw her isolated in the presence of
troubles from which he was held as far aloof as her father lived in his
dream of a practicable golden age. Their common sorrow, which ought to
have drawn the mother and father of the dead children nearer together,
seemed to have alienated them. After the first transports of her grief,
Mrs. Denton appeared scarcely to miss the little ones; the cat, which
they had displaced so rarely, was now always in her lap, and her idle,
bantering talk went on, about anything, about everything, as before, but
with something more of mockery for her husband’s depressions and
exaltations. It might have been from a mistaken wish to rouse him to
some sort of renewed endeavor that she let her reckless tongue run upon
what he had done with his process; it might have been from her
perception that he was most vulnerable there; Ray could not decide. For
the most part Denton remained withdrawn from the rest, a shadow and a
silence which they ignored. Sometimes he broke in with an irrelevant
question or comment, but oftener he evaded answering when they spoke to
him. If his wife pressed him at such times he left them; and then they
heard him talking to himself in his room, after an old habit of his; now
and then Ray thought he was praying. If he did not come back, Peace
followed him, and then her voice could be heard in entreaty with him.
“She’s the only one that can do anything with Ansel,” her sister lightly
explained one evening. “She has so much patience with him; father hasn’t
any more than I have; but Peace can persuade him out of almost anything
except his great idea of sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?” Ray repeated.
“Yes. I don’t know what he means. But he thinks he’s been very wicked,
trying to invent that process, and he can’t get forgiveness without some
kind of sacrifice. He’s found it in the Old Testament somewhere. _I_
tell him it’s a great pity he didn’t live in the days of the prophets;
he might have passed for one. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He
says we must make some sacrifice; but I can’t see what we’ve got left
to sacrifice. We might make a burnt offering of the chairs in father’s
stove; the coal’s about gone.”
She stopped, and looked up at Denton, who had come in with a book in his
hand; Peace glided in behind him.
“Oh, are you going to read us something, Ansel?” his wife asked with her
smile of thoughtless taunting. “I don’t see why you don’t give public
readings. You could read better than the elocutionists that used to read
to us in the Family. And it wouldn’t be taking the bread out of any one
else’s mouth.” She turned to Ray: “You know Ansel’s given up his place
so as to let another man have his chance. It was the least he could do
after he had tried to take away the livelihood of so many by inventing
that wicked process of his.”
Denton gave no sign of having heard her. He fixed his troubled eyes on
Ray. “Do you know that poem?” he asked, handing him the open book.
“Oh, yes,” said Ray.
“It’s a mistake,” said Denton, “all a mistake. I should like to write to
Tennyson and tell him so. I’ve thought it out. The true sacrifice would
have been the best, not the dearest; the best.”
The next day was Sunday, and it broke, with that swift, capricious heat
of our climate, after several days of cloudy menace. The sun shone, and
the streets were thronged with people. They were going to church in
different directions, but there was everywhere a heavy trend toward the
stations of the elevated road, and the trains were crammed with men,
women and children going to the Park. When Ray arrived there with one of
the throngs he had joined, he saw the roads full of carriages, and in
the paths black files of foot-passengers pushing on past the seats
packed with those who had come earlier, and sat sweltering under the
leafless trees. The grass was already green; some of the forwarder
shrubs were olive-gray with buds.
Ray walked deep into the Park. He came in sight of a bench near a shelf
of rock in a by-path, with a man sitting alone on it. There was room for
two, and Ray made for the place.
The man sat leaning forward with his heavy blonde head hanging down as
if he might have been drunk. He suddenly lifted himself, and Ray saw
that it was Denton. His face was red from the blood that had run into
it, but as it grew paler it showed pathetically thin. He stared at Ray
confusedly, and did not know him till he spoke.
Then he said, “Oh!” and put out his hand. A sudden kindness in Ray, more
than he commonly felt for the man whom he sometimes pitied, but never
liked, responded to the overture.
“May I have part of your bench?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Denton. “Sit down,” and he made way for him. “It isn’t mine;
it’s one of the few things in this cursed town that belongs to every
one.”
“Well,” said Ray, cheerfully, “I suppose we’re all proprietors of the
Park, even if we’re not allowed to walk on our own grass.”
“Yes; but don’t get me thinking about that. There’s been too much of
that in my life. I want to get away--away from it all. We are going into
the country. Do you know about those abandoned farms in New England?
Could we go and take up one of them?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. But what could you do with it, if you did? The
owners left those farms because they couldn’t live on them. You would
have to fight a battle you’re not strong enough for. Better wait till
you get fairly on your feet.”
“Yes, I’m sick; I’m no good. But it would be expiation.”
Ray did not speak at once. Then, partly because he thought he might be
of use to the man by helping him to an objective vision of what was
haunting him, and partly from an æsthetic desire to pry into the
confusion of his turbid soul, he asked: “Do you mean for that invention
of yours?”
“No; that’s nothing; that was a common crime.”
“Well, I have no right to ask you anything further. But in any given
case of expiation, the trouble is that a man can’t expiate alone; he
makes a lot of other people expiate with him.”
“Yes; you can’t even sin alone. That is the curse of it, and then the
innocent have to suffer with the sinners. But I meant--the children.”
“The children?”
“Yes; I let them die.”
Ray understood now that it was remorse for his exposure of the little
ones to contagion which was preying on him. “I don’t think you were to
blame for that. It was something that might have happened to any one.
For the sake of your family you ought to look at it in the true light.
You are no more responsible for your children’s death than I am.” Ray
stopped, and Denton stared as if listening.
“What? What? What?” he said, in the tone of a man who tries to catch
something partly heard. “Did you hear?” he asked. “They are both talking
at once--with the same voice; it’s the twin nature.” He shook his head
vehemently, and said, with an air of relief: “Well, now it’s stopped.
What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” Ray answered.
“Oh! It was the Voice, then. You see it was a mistake not to do it
sooner; I ought to have _given_ them; not waited for them to be _taken_.
I couldn’t understand, because in the flesh they couldn’t speak. They
had to speak in the spirit. That was it--why they died. I thought that
if I took some rich man who had made his millions selfishly,
cruelly--you see?--it would satisfy justice; then the reign of peace and
plenty could begin. But that was wrong. That would have made the guilty
suffer for the innocent; and the innocent must suffer for the guilty.
Always! There is no other atonement. Now I see that. Oh, my soul, my
soul! What? No! Yes, yes! The best, the purest, the meekest! Always
that! Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission--Who do you
think is the best person in New York--the purest, the meekest?”
“Who?” Ray echoed.
“Yes,” said Denton. Then he broke off. “She said, No! No! No!” He
started up from the seat. “For their life, their life, their life! That
was where the wrong was. I knew it was all wrong, always. Oh, my soul,
my soul! What shall the atonement be?” He moved away, and at a few
paces’ distance he began to run.
Ray watched him running, running, till he was out of sight.
He passed a restless, anxious day, and in the evening he could not keep
from going to the Hugheses’. He found them all together, and gayer than
he had seen them since the children’s death. He tried to join in the
light-hearted fun that Mrs. Denton was making with her husband; she was
unusually fond, and she flattered him with praises of his talent and
good looks; she said his pallor became him.
“Do you know,” she asked Ray, “that we’re all going to New Hampshire to
live on an abandoned farm?”
She made Denton get his violin, and he played a long time. Suddenly he
stopped, and waited in the attitude of listening. He called out, “Yes!”
and struck the instrument over a chair-top, breaking it to splinters. He
jumped up as if in amaze at what had happened; then he said to Peace,
“I’ve made you some kindling.”
His wife said with a smile, “A man must do _something_ for a living.”
Denton merely looked at her with a kind of vague surprise. After a
moment’s suspense he wheeled about and caught his hat from the wall, and
rushed down the stairs into the street.
Hughes came in from the front room, with his pen in his hand, and
hoarsely gasping. “What is the matter?” he weakly whispered. No one
spoke, but the ruin of the violin answered for itself. “Some more of
that fool’s work, I suppose. It is getting past all endurance. He was
always the most unpractical creature, and of late, he’s become utterly
worthless.” He kept on moving his lips as if he were speaking, but no
sound came from them.
Mrs. Denton burst into a crowing laugh: “It’s too bad Ansel should have
_two_ voices and father none at all!”
The old man’s lips still moved, and now there came from them, “A fool, a
perfect fool!”
“Oh, no, father,” said Peace, and she went up to the old man. “You know
Ansel isn’t a fool. You know he has been tried; and he is good, you know
he is! He has worked hard for us all; and I can’t bear to have you call
him names.”
“Let him show some common-sense, then,” said her father. “I have no wish
to censure him. But his continual folly wears me out. He owes it to the
cause, if not to his family, to be sensible and--and--practical. Tell
him I wish to see him when he comes in,” he added, with an air of
authority, like the relic of former headship. “It’s high time I had a
talk with him. These disturbances in the family are becoming very
harassing. I cannot fix my mind on anything.”
He went back into his own room, where they heard him coughing. It was a
moment of pain without that dignity which we like to associate with the
thought of suffering, but which is seldom present in it; Ray did not
dare to go; he sat keenly sensible of the squalor of it, unable to stir.
He glanced toward Peace for strength; she had her face hidden in her
hands. He would not look at Mrs. Denton, who was saying: “I think father
is right, and if Ansel can’t control himself any better than he has of
late, he’d better leave us. It’s wearing father out. Don’t you think he
looks worse, Mr. Ray?”
He did not answer, but remained wondering what he had better do.
Peace took down her hands and looked at him, and he saw that she wished
him to go. He went, but in the dark below he lingered, trying to think
whom he should turn to for help. He ran over Mr. Chapley, Brandreth,
Kane in his mind with successive rejection, and then he thought of
Kane’s doctor; he had never really seen him, but he feigned him the
wisest and most efficient of the doctors known to fiction. Of course it
must be a doctor whom Ray should speak to; but he must put the affair
hypothetically, so that if the doctor thought it nothing, no one would
be compromised. It must be a physician of the greatest judgment, a man
of sympathy as well as sagacity; no, it could be any sort of doctor, and
he ought to go to him at once.
He was fumbling in the dark for the wire that pulled the bolt of the
street door when a night-latch was thrust into the key-hole outside, and
the door was burst open with a violence that flung him back against the
wall behind it. Before it could swing to again he saw Denton’s figure
bent in its upward rush on the stairs; he leaped after him.
“Now, then!” Denton shouted, as they burst into the apartment together.
“The time has come! The time has come! They are calling you, Peace! You
wouldn’t let me give them, and the Lord had to take them, but they have
reconciled Him to you; He will accept you for their sake!”
Old Hughes had entered from his room, and stood looking on with a
frowning brows, but with more vexation than apprehension. “Be done with
that arrant nonsense!” he commanded. “What stuff are you talking?”
Denton’s wife shrank into the farthest corner, with the cat still in her
arms. Peace stood in the middle of the room staring at him. He did not
heed Hughes except to thrust him aside as he launched himself towards
the girl.
Ray slipped between them, and Denton regarded him with dull wavering
eyes like a drunken man’s. “Oh, you’re here still, are you?” he said; a
cunning gleam came into his eyes, and he dropped his voice from its
impassioned pitch. He kept his right hand in his coat pocket, and Ray
watched that hand too solely. Denton flashed past him, and with his left
swept away the hands which Peace mechanically lifted to her face, and
held them in his grip. Ray sprang upon him, and pinioned his right
wrist.
“Hold him fast!” Hughes added his grip to Ray’s. “He’s got something in
his pocket, there! Run to the window, Jenny, and call for help!”
“No, no, Jenny, don’t!” Peace entreated. “Don’t call out. Ansel won’t
hurt me! I know he’ll listen to me; won’t you Ansel? Oh, what is it you
want to do?”
“Here!” cried Denton. “Take it! In an instant you will be with them! The
sin will be remitted.” He struggled to reach her lips with the hand
which he had got out of his pocket. Old Hughes panted out:
“Open his fist! Tear it open. If I had a knife”--
“Oh, don’t hurt him!” Peace implored. “He isn’t hurting me.”
Denton suddenly released her wrists, and she sank senseless. Ray threw
himself on his knees beside her, and stretched his arms out over her.
Denton did not look at them; he stood a moment listening; then with a
formless cry he whirled into the next room. The door shut crashing
behind him, and then there came the noise of a heavy fall within. The
rush of a train made itself loudly heard in the silence.
A keen bitter odor in the air rapt Ray far away to an hour of childhood
when a storm had stripped the blossoms from a peach-tree by the house,
and he noted with a child’s accidental observance the acrid scent which
rose from them.
“That is prussic acid,” Hughes whispered, and he moved feebly towards
the door and pushed it open. Denton lay on the floor with his head
toward the threshold, and the old man stood looking down into his dead
face.
“It must have been that which he had in his hand.”