Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 aesthetic 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 no 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 accep
t 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 comer, 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.”

  XXXIV.

  “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 Modem 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 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 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 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 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, an
d 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.

  “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.”