“Well, old fellow, I’ve got some good news for you,” said Mr. Brandreth, when Ray showed himself at the door of the publisher’s little den the next morning. Ray thought that he carried the record of the event he had witnessed in every lineament, but Mr. Brandreth could have seen nothing unusual in his face. “The editor of Every Evening has just been here, and he wants to see you about taking hold of his literary department.” Ray stared blankly. Mr. Brandreth went on with generous pleasure: “He’s had some trouble with the man who’s been doing it, and it’s come to a complete break at last, and now he wants you to try. He’s got some new ideas about it. He wants to make something specially literary of the Saturday issue; he has a notion of restoring the old-fashioned serial. If you take charge, you could work in the Modern Romeo on him; and then, if it succeeds as a serial, we can republish it in book form! Better see him at once! Isn’t it funny how things turn out? He said he was coming down town in a Broadway car, and happened to catch sight of Coquelin’s name on a poster at the theatre, and it made him think of you. He’d always liked that thing you did for him, and when he got down here, he jumped out and came{276} in to ask about you. I talked you into him good and strong, and he wants to see you.”
Ray listened in nerveless passivity to news that would have transported him with hope a few hours before. Mr. Brandreth might well have mistaken his absent stare for the effect of such a rapture. He said, as a man does when tempted a little beyond prudence by the pleasure he is giving:
“The fact is, I’ve been thinking about that work of yours, myself. I want to try some novel for the summer trade; and I want you to let me see it again. I want to read it myself this time. They say a publisher oughtn’t to know anything about the inside of a book, but I think we might make an exception of yours.” Ray’s face remained unchanged, and Mr. Brandreth now asked, with a sudden perception of its strangeness: “Hello! What’s the matter? Anything gone wrong with you?”
“No, no,” Ray struggled out, “not with me. But”—
“Nothing new with the Hugheses, I hope?” said Mr. Brandreth, with mounting alarm. “Miss Hughes was to have come back to work this morning, but she hasn’t yet. No more diphtheria, I hope? By Jove, my dear fellow, I don’t think you ought to come here if there is! I don’t think it’s quite fair to me.”
“It isn’t diphtheria,” Ray gasped. “But they’re in great trouble. I hardly know how to tell you. That wretched creature, Denton, has killed himself. He’s been off his base for some time, and I’ve been{277} dreading—I’ve been there all night with them. He took prussic acid and died instantly. Mr. Hughes and I had a struggle with him to prevent—prevent him; and the old man got a wrench, and then he had a hemorrhage. He is very weak from it, but the doctor’s brought him round for the present. Miss Hughes wanted me to come and tell you.”
“Has it got out yet?” Mr. Brandreth asked. “Are the reporters on to it?”
“The fact has to come out officially through the doctor, but it isn’t known yet.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” said Mr. Brandreth. “It will be an awful scandal.”
There had been a moment with Ray too when the scandal of the fact was all he felt. “Yes,” he said, mechanically.
“You see,” Mr. Brandreth explained, “those fellows will rummage round in every direction, for every bit of collateral information, relevant and irrelevant, and they will make as much as they can of the fact that Miss Hughes was employed here.”
“I see,” said Ray.
Mr. Brandreth fell into a rueful muse, but he plucked himself out of it with self-reproachful decency. “It’s awful for them, poor things!”
“It’s the best thing that could have happened, under the circumstances,” said Ray, with a coldness that surprised himself, and a lingering resentment toward Denton that the physical struggle had left in his nerves. “It was a question whether he should kill{278} himself, or kill some one else. He had a mania of sacrifice, of atonement. Somebody had to be offered up. He was a crank.” Ray pronounced the word with a strong disgust, as if there were nothing worse to be said of a man. He paused, and then he went on. “I shall have to tell you all about it, Brandreth;” and he went over the event again, and spared nothing.
Mr. Brandreth listened with starting eyes. As if the additional details greatly discouraged him, he said, “I don’t think those things can be kept from coming out. It will be a terrible scandal. Of course, I pity the family; and Miss Hughes. It’s strange that they could keep living on with such a danger hanging over them for weeks and months, and not try to do anything about it—not have him shut up.”
“The doctor says we’ve no idea what sort of things people keep living on with,” said Ray, gloomily. “The danger isn’t always there, and the hope is. The trouble keeps on, and in most cases nothing happens. The doctor says nothing would have happened in this case, probably, if the man had staid quietly in the country, in the routine he was used to. But when he had the stress of new circumstances put on him, with the anxieties and the chances, and all the miseries around him, his mind gave way; I don’t suppose it was ever a very strong one.”
“Oh, I don’t see how the strongest stands it, in this infernal hurly-burly,” said Mr. Brandreth, with an introspective air. He added, with no effect of relief{279} from his reflection, “I don’t know what I’m going to say to my wife when all this comes out. I’ve got to prepare her, somehow—her and her mother. Look here! Why couldn’t you go up to Mr. Chapley’s with me, and see him? He wasn’t very well, yesterday, and said he wouldn’t be down till this afternoon. My wife’s going there to lunch, and we can get them all together before the evening papers are out. Then I think we could make them see it in the right light. What do you say?”
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t go with you. If I can be of any use,” said Ray, with an inward regret that he could think of no excuse for not going.
“I think you can be of the greatest use,” said Mr. Brandreth. He called a clerk, and left word with him that he should not be in again till after lunch. “You see,” he explained, as they walked out together, “if we can get the story to Mrs. Brandreth and her mother before it comes to them in print it won’t seem half as bad. Some fellow is going to get hold of the case and work it for all it is worth. He is going to unearth Mr. Hughes’s whole history, and exploit him as a reformer and a philosopher. He’s going to find out everybody who knows him, or has ever had anything to do with him, and interview people right and left.”
Ray had to acknowledge that this was but too probable. He quailed to think of the publicity which he must achieve in the newspapers, and how he must figure before the people of Midland, who had expected such a different celebrity for him.{280}
“You must look out for yourself. I’m going to put Mr. Chapley on his guard, and warn the ladies not to see any reporters or answer any questions. By-the-way, does Mr. Kane know about this yet?”
“I’ve just come from his place; he wasn’t at home; I left a note for him.”
“I wonder if we hadn’t better go round that way and tell him?” Mr. Brandreth faltered a moment, and then pushed on. “Or, no! He’s a wary old bird, and I don’t think he’ll say anything that will commit anybody.” They walked on in silence for awhile before Mr. Brandreth said, with an air of relevance, “Of course, I shouldn’t want you to count too much upon our being able to do anything with your book this year, after all.”
“Of course,” said Ray. “If I’m mixed up with this business in the papers, my name won’t be a very good one for a respectable house to conjure with for some years to come. Perhaps never.”
At that moment he was mere egoist, feeling nothing but the mockery and the malice of fortune; all his compassion for the hapless creatures whose misery had involved him died within him.
“Oh, I don’t mean that, exactly,” said Mr. Brandreth. “But isn’t it curious how we’re all bound together here? It’s enough to make one forswear all intercourse with his fellow-beings. Here we are in same boat with people whom I didn’t know the existence of six months ago; and because Mr. Chapley has stood by his old friend and tried to help him{281} along, he will probably be pilloried with him before the public as a fellow-Tolstoïan, and people all over the country that used to order their books through us will think we’re in sympathy with the anarchists, and won’t have any more to do with us than if we had published the Kreuzer Sonata.”
Ray thought how he had never asked to know the Hugheses at all, and was not justly responsible for them, even through a tie of ancient friendship. But in the presence of Mr. Brandreth’s shameless anxieties, he was ashamed to air his own. He only said, cynically: “Yes, it appears that a homicidal lunatic can’t take himself harmlessly out of the world. His fate reaches out in every direction, and covers everybody that knew him with confusion. And they talk of a moral government of the universe!”
“Yes!” said Mr. Brandreth, with as much satisfaction in Ray’s scorn of the order of things as his mild nature could probably feel.
At Mr. Chapley’s house they learned that Mrs. Brandreth had brought the baby to spend the day with her mother. Her sister, whom Ray knew, met the two men at the door on her way out to a young ladies’ lunch, and told them they would find her father in his library. She said Mr. Kane was there with him; and Mr. Brandreth, with a glance at Ray, said, “Well, that’s first-rate!” and explained, as they pushed on upstairs, “He may be able to suggest something.”
Kane did not suggest anything at once. He lis{282}tened in silence and without apparent feeling to Ray’s story.
“Dear me!” Mr. Chapley lamented. “Dreadful, dreadful! Poor David must be in a sad state about it! And I’m not fit to go to him!”
“He wouldn’t expect you, sir,” Mr. Brandreth began.
“I don’t know; he would certainly come to me if I were in trouble. Dear, dear! Was the hemorrhage very exhausting, Mr.—er—Ray?”
Ray gave the doctor’s word that there was no immediate danger from it, and Mr. Brandreth made haste to say that he had come to tell the ladies about the affair before they saw it in the papers, and to caution them against saying anything if reporters called.
“Yes, that’s very well,” said Mr. Chapley. “But I see nothing detrimental to us in the facts.”
“No, sir. Not unless they’re distorted, and—in connection with your peculiar views, sir. When those fellows get on to your old friendship with Mr. Hughes, and his peculiar views, there’s no telling what they won’t make of them.” Kane glanced round at Ray with arched eyes and pursed mouth. Mr. Brandreth turned toward Ray, and asked sweetly, “Should you mind my lighting one of those after-dinner pastilles?” He indicated the slender stem in the little silver-holder on the mantel. “Of course there’s no danger of infection now; but it would be a little more reassuring to my wife, especially as she’s got the boy here with her.”
“By all means,” said Ray, and the pastille began{283} sending up a delicate thread of pungent blue smoke, while Mr. Brandreth went for his wife and mother-in-law.
“It seems to me you’re in a parlous state, Henry,” said Kane. “I don’t see but you’ll have to renounce Tolstoï and all his works if you ever get out of this trouble. I’m sorry for you. It takes away half the satisfaction I feel at the lifting of that incubus from poor David’s life. I think I’d better go.” He rose, and went over to give his hand to Mr. Chapley, where he sat in a reclining-chair.
Mr. Chapley clung to him, and said feebly: “No, no! Don’t go, Kane. We shall need your advice, and—and—counsel,” and while Kane hesitated, Mr. Brandreth came in with the ladies, who wore a look of mystified impatience.
“I thought they had better hear it from you, Mr. Ray,” he said, and for the third time Ray detailed the tragical incidents. He felt as if he had been inculpating himself.
Then Mrs. Chapley said: “It is what we might have expected from the beginning. But if it will be a warning to Mr. Chapley”—
Mrs. Brandreth turned upon her mother with a tone that startled Mr. Chapley from the attitude of gentle sufferance in which he sat resting his chin upon his hand. “I don’t see what warning there can be for papa in such a dreadful thing. Do you think he’s likely to take prussic acid?”
“I don’t say that, you know well enough, child.{284} But I shall be quite satisfied if it is the last of Tolstoïsm in this family.”
“It has nothing to do with Tolstoï,” Mrs. Brandreth returned, with surprising energy. “If we’d all been living simply in the country, that wretched creature’s mind wouldn’t have been preyed upon by the misery of the city.”
“There’s more insanity in proportion to the population in the country than there is in the city,” Mrs. Chapley began.
Mrs. Brandreth ignored her statistical contribution. “There’s no more danger of father’s going out to live on a farm, or in a community, than there is of his taking poison; and at any rate he hasn’t got anything to do with what’s happened. He’s just been faithful to his old friend, and he’s given his daughter work. I don’t care how much the newspapers bring that in. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
Mr. Brandreth looked at his wife in evident surprise; her mother said, “Well, my dear!”
Her father gently urged: “I don’t think you’ve quite understood your mother. She doesn’t look at life from my point of view.”
“No, Henry, I’m thankful to say I don’t,” Mrs. Chapley broke in; “and I don’t know anybody who does. If I had followed you and your prophet, we shouldn’t have had a roof over our heads.”
“A good many people have no roofs over their heads,” Mr. Chapley meekly suggested.
“That’s no reason why we shouldn’t,” said his wife.{285}
“No; you’re right there, my dear. That’s the hopeless part of it. Perhaps poor David is right, and the man who attempts to solve the problem of altruism singly and in his own life”—
Mrs. Brandreth would not let him finish. “The question is, what are we going to do for these poor things in their trouble?” She looked at Ray, who had sat by trying in his sense of intrusion and superfluity to shrink into as small a space as possible. He now blushed to find himself appealed to. He had not seen Mrs. Brandreth often, and he had not reversed his first impression of a narrow, anxious, housewifely spirit in her, sufficient to the demands of young motherhood, but of few and scanty general sympathies.
“When did you see them last?” she asked.
He told her, and she said, “Well, I am going right up there with Percy.”
“And bring back the scarlet fever to your child!” cried her mother. “You shall neither of you go, as long as I have anything to say about it. Or, if you do, you shall not come back to this house, and I shall keep the baby here till there isn’t the least fear of danger; and I don’t know how long that will be.”
All the grandmother rose in Mrs. Chapley; she lifted her voice, and in the transport of her alarm and indignation she suddenly appealed to Mr. Kane from the wilfulness she evidently feared in her daughter: “What do you think, Mr. Kane?”
“I wouldn’t presume to decide such a question finally; it’s too important,” Kane said, in his mellow{286} murmur. “But I wish that for the moment Mrs. Brandreth would let me be the bearer of her kind messages and inquiries. If you haven’t been in the habit of calling there”—
“I have never been there at all, I’m sorry to say,” Mrs. Brandreth frankly declared.
“Ah! Well, I don’t see what good could come of it, just at present; and there might be some lingering infection.”
“It has been carried in clothes across the ocean months afterwards, and in letters,” Mrs. Chapley triumphed.
Kane abandoned the point to her. “The situation might be very much worse for the Hugheses, as I was saying to Henry before you came in. The Powers are not commonly so considerate. It seems to me distinctly the best thing that could have happened, at least as far as Denton is concerned.”
“Surely,” said Mrs. Chapley, “you don’t approve of suicide?”
“Not in the case of sane and happy people,” Kane blandly replied. “The suicide of such persons should be punished with the utmost rigor of the law. But there seem to be extenuating circumstances in the present instance; I hope the coroner’s jury will deal leniently with the culprit. I must go and see if I can do anything for David. Probably I can’t. It’s always a question in these cases whether you are not adding to the sufferings of the mourners by your efforts to alleviate them; but you can only solve it at their expense by trying.{287}”
“And you will let us know,” said Mrs. Chapley, “whether we can do anything, Mr. Kane.”
Mrs. Brandreth did not openly persist in her determination to go to the Hugheses. She said, “Yes, be sure you let us know,” and when Kane had gone on an errand of mercy which he owned was distasteful to him, her husband followed Ray down to the door.
“You see what splendid courage she has,” he whispered, with a backward glance up the stairs. “I must confess that it surprised me, after all I’ve seen her go through, that stand she took with her mother. But I don’t altogether wonder at it; they were disagreeing about keeping up the belladonna when I found them, upstairs, and I guess Mrs. Brandreth’s opposition naturally carried over into this question about the Hugheses. Of course Mrs. Chapley means well, but if Mrs. Brandreth could once be got from under her influence she would be twice the woman she is. I think she’s right about the effect of our connection with the family before the public. They can’t make anything wrong out of it, no matter how they twist it or turn it. I’m not afraid. After all, it isn’t as if Mr. Hughes was one of those howling socialists. An old-time Brook Farmer—it’s a kind of literary tradition; it’s like being an original abolitionist. I’m going to see if I can’t get a glimpse of that book of his without committing myself. Well, let me know how you get on. I wouldn’t let that chance on Every Evening slip. Better see the man. Confound the papers! I hope they won’t drag us in!{288}”