“Yes; that is true! How generous you are! How can you endure to talk to me of my book? But I suppose you think that if I can stand it, you can.”
“I will go in, now,” said Peace, ignoring the drift of his words, “and see if father is awake.” She returned in a moment, and murmured softly, “Come!”
“Here is Mr. Ray, father,” said Mrs. Denton. She had to lift her voice to make the sick man hear, for the window was open, and the maniacal clamor of the street flooded the chamber. Hughes lay at his thin full-length in his bed, like one already dead.
He stirred a little at the sound of his daughter’s voice; and when he had taken in the fact of Ray’s presence, he signed to her to shut the window. The smells of the street, and the sick, hot whiffs from the passing trains were excluded; the powerful odors of the useless drugs burdened the air; by the light of the lamp shaded from Hughes’s eyes Ray could see the red blotches on his sheet and pillow.
He no longer spoke, but he could write with a pencil on the little memorandum-block which lay on the stand by his bed. When Peace said, “Father, Mr. Ray has come to tell you that his book has been accepted; Chapley & Co. are going to publish it,” the old man’s face lighted up. He waved his hand toward the stand, and Mrs. Denton put the block and pencil in it, and held the lamp for him to see.
Ray took the block, and read, faintly scribbled on it: “Good! You must get them to take my World Revisited.”
The sick man smiled as Ray turned his eyes toward him from the paper.
“What is it?” demanded Mrs. Denton, after a moment. “Some secret? What is it, father?” she pursued, with the lightness that evidently pleased him, for he smiled again, and an inner light shone through his glassy eyes. “Tell us, Mr. Ray!”
Hughes shook his head weakly, still smiling, and Ray put the leaf in his pocket. Then he took up the old man’s long hand where it lay inert on the bed.
“I will do my very best, Mr. Hughes. I will do everything that I possibly can.”