As he turned to go, she lifted her eyes, and he could see that they were blind with tears.
He went out and walked up and down the long, unlovely avenue, conscious of being the ugliest thing in it, and unconsciously hammered by its brutal noises, while he tried to keep himself from thinking how, in spite of all he had said, he knew her to be the soul of truth and goodness. He knew that all he had said was from the need of somehow venting his wounded vanity. As far as any belief in wrong done him was concerned, the affair was purely histrionic on his part; but he had seen that the pain he gave was real; the image of her gentle sufferance of his upbraiding went visibly before him. The wish to go back and own everything to her became an intolerable stress, and then he found himself again at her door.
He rang, and after waiting a long time to hear the click of the withdrawing latch, he rang again. After a further delay the door opened, and he saw Hughes standing at the top of the stairs with a lamp held above his head.
“Who is there?” the old man called down, with his hoarse voice.
“It’s I, Mr. Hughes,” Ray answered, a new trouble blending with his sense of the old man’s picturesque pose, and the leonine grandeur of his shaggy head. “Mr. Ray,” he explained.
“Oh!” said Hughes. “I’m glad to see you. Will you come up?” He added, as Ray mounted to him, and they entered his room together, “I am alone here for the time. My daughters have both gone out. Will you sit down?” Ray obeyed, with blank disappointment. Hughes could not have known of his earlier visit, or had forgotten it. “They will be in presently. Peace was here till a little while ago; when Ansel and Jenny came in, they all went out together.” He lapsed into a kind of muse, staring absently at Ray from his habitual place beside the window. He came back to a sense of him with words that had no evident bearing upon the situation.
“The thing which renders so many reformers nugatory and ridiculous, and has brought contempt and disaster on so many good causes, is the attempt to realize the altruistic man in competitive conditions. That must always be a failure or worse.” He went on at length to establish this position. Then, “Here is my son-in-law”—and the old man had the effect of stating the fact merely in illustration of the general principle he had laid down—“who has been giving all his spare time this winter to an invention in the line of his art, and had brought it to completion within a few days. He has all along had misgivings as to the moral bearing of his invention, since every process of the kind must throw a number of people out of work, and he has shown a morbid scruple in the matter which I have tried to overcome with every argument in my power.”
“I thought,” Ray made out to say, in the pause Hughes let follow, “he had come to see all that in another light.”
“Yes,” the old man resumed, “he has commonly yielded to reason, but there is an unpractical element in the man’s nature. In fact, here, this morning, while we supposed he was giving the finishing touches to his work, he was busy in destroying every vestige of result which could commend it to the people interested in it. Absolutely nothing remains to show that he ever had anything of the kind successfully in hand.”
“Is it possible?” said Ray, deeply shocked. “I am so sorry to hear it”—