A few lines, 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. He was 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 of _Every 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 of _The World
Revisited_ in 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 turn _A Modern Romeo_ into 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 the
_feuilleton_ we’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 fancies that 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 the weather 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 was atrocious. “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 see how 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.