“What are you talking about, you mad boy?”
“You see,” he said, “he was a decent fellow—I’d quite spread myself on him, and she was no end of a girl, quite the best I’ve done. And I’d got him right up to the fence, and I’m hanged if I could get him over. He perorated, he posed like a shop-walker, you could see him hanging limp like a broken puppet, and me behind with beads on my forehead uselessly jerking the wires.”
[p49]
“Poor old boy!” said Kate sympathetically. “Oh, he’ll do it beautifully when once you’re on the mountains. Now I look at you I can see you really are run down. I’ve been planning how I will make you a comfortable little study out of one of the bedrooms, and fix up your writing-table under a window that has a view, and give you a verandah to stalk up and down on when the fine frenzies seize you. But I don’t want you to come in for all the confusion of the first day.”
“Nonsense,” he said; “if you can stand it, I ought to be able to.”
But that noble sentiment was uttered at night, after a comfortable dinner at the club, and with the grateful appreciation of the sacrifice this loyal sister was making in breaking all her engagements to come to look after his welfare. It was before breakfast now, a time when the sentiments are absolutely raw, and the noblest mind is capable of resentment when not fortified with food. Hugh went out of the pantry and settled himself gloomily upon a side verandah, uncertain which to anathematize, the flies that had broken in upon his slumbers, or the ones that evidently were studiously refraining from awakening his sister and her handmaid.
But after a time the peace of the perfect morning soothed him, and he put his feet up on [p50] the verandah rail, and fell to marvelling at his own fame.
Five years ago he had been quite unknown—a struggling journalist savagely treated by Fate. And for sheer need once of saner employment for his leisure hours, he poured out some of the bitterness that a severe attack of indigestion had deposited on the wholesome substratum of his nature in perhaps as fierce a novel as had yet been written.
Five publishers rejected it with their customary regret; to the stereotyped refusal of the sixth the reader added a few lines, saying he had found much to admire in the work, but that a gracious public full of nerves would not stand so much cold water poured upon it. The seventh firm to whom he submitted the tale was on the verge of bankruptcy. Kinross was absolutely startled when he received a laconic note accepting his MS., and offering a very fair royalty. He was not to know that these publishers had taken it in the spirit of a man who with six shillings for his only capital puts five of them in a sweep where the odds are a thousand to one.
And then Fortune, who for more than forty years had pretended she did not know that there was any such person as Hugh Kinross cumbering the globe, suddenly veered [p51] round and smiled one of her most gracious smiles upon him.
He fairly leapt into fame. The inscrutable reading world, long bored almost to death by a sameness of methods, actually rose up and waved its hat at this savage treatment, and demanded that he should continue so to deal with it.