Mr. Brandreth laughed in rather a shame-faced way. “I may as well make a clean breast of it. As I told you when we first met, I’ve been wanting to publish a novel for some time; and although I haven’t read yours, the plot attracted me, and I thought I would give it another chance—the best chance I could. I wanted to show it to a friend of yours—I suppose I may say friend, at least it was somebody that I thought would be prejudiced more in favor of it than against it; and I had made up my mind that if the person approved of it I would read it too, and if we agreed about it, I would get Mr. Chapley to risk it. But—I found that the person had read it.”
“And didn’t like it.”
“I can’t say that, exactly.”
“If it comes to that,” said Ray, with a bitter smile, “it doesn’t matter about the precise terms.” He could not speak for a moment; then he swallowed the choking lump in his throat, and offered Brandreth his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Brandreth! I’m sure you’re my friend; and I sha’n’t forget your kindness.”
XXIII.
The disappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience. One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they met. He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described the poet’s betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted with that part of his poem, and cut it out.
As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.
When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.
The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.
“My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have forgiven me by eating salt with us?”