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 posi{238}tion 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?{239}”
“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{240} 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.{241}”
“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{242} 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 van{243}ity. 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.{244}
“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{245}”—
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?{246}”
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{247} 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?”
“There is that abject nonsense of his again!” said old Hughes, in a hoarse undertone which drowned for Ray some further words from Denton. “It’s impossible to get him away from that idea. Men have nothing to do with the remission of sins; it is their business to cease to do evil! But you might as well talk to a beetle!”
Ray listened with poignant eagerness for the next words of Peace, which came brokenly to his ear. He heard— “...justice and not sacrifice. If you try to do what is right—and—and to be good, then”—
“I will try, Peace, I will try. O Lord, help me!” came in Denton’s deep tones. “Say the words again. The Voice keeps saying those—But I will say yours after you!”
“I will have justice.” The girl’s voice was lifted with a note in it that thrilled to Ray’s heart, and made him start to his feet; Hughes laid a detaining hand upon his arm.{248}
“I will have justice,” Denton repeated.
“And not sacrifice,” came in the girl’s tremulous accents.
“And not sacrifice,” followed devoutly from the man. “I will have justice, without the shedding of blood—it gets mixed; I can’t keep the Voice out!—and not sacrifice. What is justice? What is justice but sacrifice?”
“Yes, it is self-sacrifice! All our selfish wishes”—
“I have burnt them in a fire, and scattered their ashes!”
“And all gloomy and morbid thoughts that distress other people.”
“Oh, you know I wouldn’t distress any one! You know how my heart is breaking for the misery of the world.”
“Let her alone!” said old Hughes to Ray, in his thick murmur, as if he read Ray’s impulse in the muscle of his arm. “She will manage him.”
“But say those words over again!” Denton implored. “The Voice keeps putting them out of my mind!”
She said the text, and let him repeat it after her word by word, as a child follows its mother in prayer.
“And try hard, Ansel! Remember the children and poor Jenny!”
“Yes, yes. I will, Peace! Poor Jenny! I’m sorry for her. And the children—You know I wouldn’t harm any one for the whole world, don’t you, Peace?{249}”
“Yes, I do know, Ansel, how good and kind you are; and I know you’ll see all this in the true light soon. But now you’re excited.”
“Well, say it just once more, and then I shall have it.”
Once more she said the words, and he after her. He got them straight this time, without admixture from the other text. There came a rush of his feet on the stairs, and a wild laugh.
“Jenny! Jenny! It’s all right now, Jenny!” he shouted, as he plunged into the apartment, and was heard beating as if on a door closed against him. It must have opened, for there was a sound like its shutting, and then everything was still except a little pathetic, almost inaudible murmur as of suppressed sobbing in the dark of the entry below. Presently soft steps ascended the stairs and lost themselves in the rear of the apartment.
“Now, young man,” said Hughes, “I think you had better go. Peace will be in here directly to look after me, and it will distress her to find any one else. It is all right now.”
“But hadn’t I better stay, Mr. Hughes? Can’t I be of use?”
“No. I will defer reading that passage to another time. You will be looking in on us soon again. We shall get on very well. We are used to these hypochrondriacal moods of Ansel’s.{250}”