The candles blew a little in the breeze from the open window and the lighted shadows ran flickering in silver lines, along the dark floor. Peter stood holding the letter in his hand, looking out on to the black square of sky; the lights of the barges swung down the river and he could hear, very faintly, the straining of ropes and the turning of some mysterious wheel.
He saw Stephen--the great head, the flowing beard, the huge body--and then the inn with the thunder coming over the hill, and then, beyond that Treliss gleaming with its tiers of lights, above the breast of the sea. And from here, from this wide Embankment, down to that sea, there stretched, riding over hills, bending into valleys, always white and hard and stony, the road....
For an instant he felt as though the studio, the lights, the comforts were holding him like a prison--
“It's a letter from Stephen Brant,” he said, turning back from the window. “He seems well and happy--”
“Eating bread and cheese at an inn somewhere--on the road down to Cornwall.”
On the following Tuesday “Reuben Hallard” was published and on the Thursday afternoon Henry Galleon and Clare Rossiter were to come to tea. “Reuben Hallard” arrived in a dark red cover with a white paper label. The six copies lay on the table and looked at Peter as though he had had nothing whatever to do with their existence. He looked down upon them, opened one of them very tenderly, read half a page and felt that it was the best stuff he'd ever seen. He read the rest of the page and thought that the author, whoever the creature might be, deserved, imprisonment for writing such nonsense.
The feeling of strangeness towards it all was increased by the fact that Bobby had, with the exception of the final proofs--these Peter had read down by the sea--done most of the proof-correcting. It was a task for which his practical common sense and lack of all imagination admirably fitted him. There, at any rate, “Reuben Hallard” was, ready to face all the world, to go, perhaps, to the farthest Hebrides, to be lost in all probability, utterly lost, in the turgid flood of contemporary fiction.
There was a dedication “To Stephen”... How surprised Stephen would be! He looked at the chapter headings--An Old Man with a Lantern--the Road at Night.... Sun on the Western Moor--Stevenson--Tushery all of it! How they'd tear it to bits, those papers!