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{264} 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 For the most part Denton remained withdrawn from the rest, a shadow and a silence which they ignored.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{265} 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 every{266}where 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{267} 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?{268}”
“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,{269} 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{270} 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,{271} 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{272} 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{273} 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{274} 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.{275}”