He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of himself, and, “See here, Brandreth,” he said, “what is so very remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six months among the trade?”
Mr. Brandreth stared at him, and then said, with a flash of recollection, “Oh! That girl! Well, she was determined to have something exclusive about the book, and I just threw out the remark. I wasn’t thinking of your side of the business entirely. Ray, you’re a good fellow, and I don’t mind telling you that when I chanced it on this book of yours, it had got to a point with us where we had to chance it on something. Mr. Chapley had let the publishing interests of the house go till there was hardly anything of them left; and when he went up into the country, this spring, he was strongly opposed to my trying anything in the publishing line. But my wife and I talked it over, and she saw as well as I did that I should either have to go actively into the business, or else go out of it. As it stood, it wouldn’t support two families. So I made up my mind to risk your book. If it had failed it would have embarrassed me awfully; I don’t say but what I could have pulled through, but it would have been rough sledding.”
“That is interesting,” said Ray. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t begin to pose as your preserver.”
“Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that,” Mr. Brandreth gayly protested. “And at the last moment it might have been some one else. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that the night you came and wanted me to take old Hughes’s book, I talked it very seriously over with my wife, and we determined that we would look at it in the morning, and perhaps postpone your novel. We woke the baby up with our talk, and then he woke us up the rest of the night, and in the morning we were not fit to grapple with the question, and I took that for a sign and let them go on with your book. I suppose these things were in my mind when I told that girl what she repeated to you.”
“Well, the incidents are dramatic enough,” said Ray, musingly. “Even tragical.”
“Yes,” sighed Mr. Brandreth. “I always dreaded to ask you how you made it right with Mr. Hughes.”
“Oh, Mrs. Denton made it right with him,” Ray scoffed. “I told her how I failed with you, and she went right to him and said that you had taken his book and would bring it out at once.”
Mr. Brandreth looked pained. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that. But I’m satisfied now that I acted for the best in keeping on with your book. I’m going to have Mr. Hughes’s carefully examined, though. I believe there’s the making of another hit in it. By-the-way,” he ended, cheerily, “you’ll be glad to know that A Modern Romeo has come of age; we’ve just printed the twenty-first thousand of him.”
“Is it possible!” said Ray, with well-simulated rapture. With all the talk there had been about the book, he supposed it had certainly gone to fifty thousand by this time.
The sale never really reached that figure. It went to forty two or three thousand, and there it stopped, and nothing could carry it farther. The author talked the strange arrest over with the publisher, but they could arrive at no solution of the mystery. There was no reason why a book which had been so widely talked about and written about should not keep on selling indefinitely; there was every reason why it should; but it did not. Had it, by some process of natural selection, reached exactly those people who cared for a psychological novel of its peculiar make, and were there really no more of them than had given it just that vogue? He sought a law for the fact in vain, in the more philosophical discussions he held with old Kane, as well as in his inquiries with Mr. Brandreth.