“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 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 listened 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 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.
But I shall be quite satisfied if it is the last of Tolstoïism in this family.”
“It has nothing to do with Tolstoi,” 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.
“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 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.”
“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!”
XXXV.
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 aesthetic, 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 Modem 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 chiefs 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.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 530