CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The opening of the second semester of the college year found Instructor Brenton busy with his classes.
Conservative old Saint Peter's had taken the upheaval badly, not so much the theoretic questions at stake regarding the soundness of their rector's doctrine, as the loss of their rector himself. The older members of the congregation loved Brenton as a son, the younger ones as something a little dearer than a brother. One and all, they missed his pastoral visitations, his incisive sermons on the righteousness of honest living; above all else, they missed his voice. If they could have kept these personal marks of the man himself, their rector might have been welcome to believe anything he chose. He was their shepherd and their friend. His curate was there to supply theology enough to answer for them both.
However, Brenton, once his resignation was handed in, turned a deaf ear alike to argument and coaxing. The reason for his resignation he had insisted on setting forth downrightly: he was able no longer to affirm absolute belief in some of the main tenets of his church. The entire community loved Brenton. Now it gave proof of that love in a most loyal fashion. It neither gossiped, nor indulged in undue speculation; it merely did its best to accept the given explanation in all simplicity, and say as little about it as was possible. How well it lived up to its efforts was another question.
Of course, one little circle of Brenton's intimates, the Keltridges and the Opdykes and the Dennisons, talked of the matter freely among themselves, discussing causes, watching for effects. They regretted the necessity for change, doubted it, even. Granted the necessity, though, they rejoiced that Brenton could be transplanted from one calling to the other, without the need for their losing him from their midst. It was Brenton the friend they cared for; not Brenton the preacher and pastor of souls. Moreover, there was not one of them who, asked, would have hesitated to affirm that now at last Scott Brenton was entering upon his true calling. Indeed, had not Professor Opdyke the word of his old colleague, Professor Mansfield, to that effect? Had not Professor Mansfield, even, left his classroom, in the middle of the term, for the sake of appearing before the trustees of the college, and giving his vehement testimony to that same effect?
The college, that section of the college, at least, which dealt with the chemical department, rejoiced greatly, when once Scott Brenton was launched upon his lecture courses. Doctor Keltridge, trustee and medical adviser, though, had a double cause for his rejoicing. Not only did he believe that at last Brenton was the right peg in the proper hole; but he was overjoyed at the possibility of what the change might accomplish in the man himself. Brenton, on the morning that his child had died, had lost something which he never would regain. In more senses than one, his wife and he, henceforward, would be twain, not the one flesh ordained by matrimony. In the hour of his supreme need, Katharine had left him and had gone her scientific way. In that hour, moreover, his little son, pledge of their closest union, had been taken from him; and Brenton was only too well aware that now no second and similar pledge would ever be. In the eyes of the world and of the literal law, Katharine was still his wife. In the eye of the spirit, she was holding herself as far aloof from him as if their marriage had never taken place, so far aloof that, nowadays, Brenton scarcely felt the friction of her presence.
For the first month and the second, this aloofness came upon Scott Brenton's nerves, and drove him well-nigh mad. Night after night, he tramped the floor, asking himself in vain if such a situation could develop, without some fault upon his side. Day after day, he strove most conscientiously to renew the old relations with his wife. He might as well have tried to exhume his baby son and blow in the breath of life between the folded lips. The one was no more dead than was the other. Moreover, as he had been in no conscious sense the cause of either tragedy, so in no sense could he be the conscious cure. The forces culminating in his present trouble had been set in motion long, long before the hour when Catie had poked her curly head in at the gate. Critical, censorious and selfishly ambitious in her little childhood, her womanhood had strengthened along these well-marked lines, and the lines had led her infallibly into the net of the shallowest, most smug religion that ever has set forth a plausible excuse for total selfishness. Once she was landed in the net, the rest was simple. She was in growing harmony with Universal Mind. Whatever thing opposed her viewpoint was out of harmony, and therefore sinful and laden with incipient disease, curable only so far as it yielded allegiance to her scientific doctrine.
And that allegiance Brenton would not yield. In that one matter, he stood firm, albeit he realized but too well that his firmness jeopardized for ever his relations with his wife. After the funeral of their little son, there had been two stormy scenes between them, and then a silence more pregnant of disaster than any storm could ever be. Katharine smiled, and carried her chin high in the air. Brenton's head was bowed between his shoulders; he walked heavily, his eyes upon the ground. Indeed, the two of them were equally lacking in elasticity. Katharine's tension was too great to admit of any margin for spring. Brenton's relaxation was too complete to leave any one aware that a spring ever had existed.
As the weeks ran on into months, the spiritual separation between them grew more definite. There was no friction, no clashing. They were too remote from each other for that. They met at meals as usual; they dined out together; occasionally they sat out a concert side by side. Apart from that, however, they went their ways without discussion. Katharine was flinging her entire enthusiasm, nowadays, into her religious life, and into its interesting corollary, the beautification of her bodily temple for the Universal Mind. She prinked and preened herself just as industriously as she conned her morocco-bound books of devotion. She went to church on Sundays with a zeal that balked at no combination of storms and mileage. Between the services, she spent the greater part of her time in the society of certain fellow scientists who lived not far away, and she emerged from their society so filled with zeal as to make small evangelistic forays into the borders of Saint Peter's Parish. Olive Keltridge was one victim. Ramsdell was another. Ramsdell, however, stated his own platform unmincingly.
"I beg your pardon for so speaking to a lady," he said crisply; "but I was born in the Established Church, and I don't go for kicking it over into a perfect slush of tommy-rot. Besides, my present job is to look out for Mr. Hopdyke, not to go off my 'ead, arguing about religion." And, with a salute more crushing than he was at all aware, Ramsdell swung on his heel and went striding away down the street.
All this was bound to tell upon a man of Brenton's calibre, the more so in that Brenton already was worn out with fighting his own personal battles of the spirit. For the first few weeks of this evident, though tacit, hostility, he suffered acutely, both from the hostility itself, and from his constant self-examinations to discover whether some fault of his had been the cause. In time, however, there came the inevitable reaction towards a sensible steadiness. Even the spirit can become callous in time, as Brenton was finding out, half to his own regret, half to his infinite relief.
Moreover, outside interests were daily growing more insistent; of necessity they crowded out a little of his personal and domestic worry. There were innumerable conferences with Doctor Keltridge and Professor Opdyke; there was one discussion with the assembled trustees of the college; there was one hard hour of explanation before the assembled wardens of the church. Last of all came the talk with his curate whom, despite his bunny hood and his archaic theological tenets, Brenton had grown to love. Up to the very hour of their talk, the callow little curate had gained no inkling of what his rector had been passing through. To his young mind, the experience was no less cruel to himself than it had been to Brenton. He had supposed that the belief of every man was cut out by a paper pattern outlined from directions in the Pentateuch, and washed in with dainty coloured borders taken from the Gospels and the Book of Revelation. It shocked him unspeakably to find that any man had dared to tear up that pattern and draft a fresh one for himself. However, as the talk went on, shock had yielded to an intense pity, born of his love for his superior officer. Brenton was mistaken, wofully mistaken; but the mistake had cost him dear. All the more, he was deserving pity upon that account. The tears stood in the little curate's honest eyes, as he gripped Brenton's hand at parting. He could not understand his rector in the least; but he could be perfectly aware that it was no small privilege to be admitted to the confidence of so upright a man.
These preliminary duties done, Brenton lost no time in making public the fact of his resignation. At the time, he was too busy with the practical details of his transplanting to pay any great heed to the storm of opposition which his resignation roused. Later on, it pleased him, just as the enthusiasm of his college classes pleased him, after it had ceased to be a fact and had turned into a memory. For the time being, though, he had stopped all feeling. Instead, he must preach his final sermons without flinching, must confine them so closely to the matter of mere practical living as to leave no loophole for dogma to creep in; he must make everything as easy as possible for his successor who, at best, was bound to have a hard time of it in starting; above all, he must help Katharine to choose exactly such a house as she wished, and to furnish it exactly as her taste should dictate. And so the pressure of outside interests fell on Scott Brenton's shoulders until, perforce, they straightened up to bear the burden. And the straightening was by no means wholly theoretical. It was an infinitely saner, sounder Brenton who faced his classes on the first morning of the new semester, than any one, watching him throughout the previous year, would have ever dared to hope.
And Doctor Keltridge, who had watched him rather hopelessly, gave great thanks accordingly.
"You've proved the wisdom of your change, Brenton," he remarked, one day.
"How is that?"
"The whole look of you. You aren't the same man you were, five months ago. Mentally and physically, you're sleeker."
Brenton laughed.
"Is that a sign of wisdom?"
The doctor met the question with composure.
"As a general thing, yes. The normal being is sleek by nature. It's only when he cramps himself that he gets wrinkled. Cramps himself, I say. Cramping from an outside source never has much effect upon him, unless he chooses to have it. No; that's not Christian Science; it's mere common sense. As a rule, the two things are incompatible. By the way, I hear that your ex-curate has been tackling your wife."
"No!"
"A fact. The boy told me. She started out to tackle him, and he clinched with her. I must say it was plucky of him, even if it didn't appear to do much good."
Brenton's gray eyes clouded.
"The only question is: what is good," he said thoughtfully.
"No question about it," the doctor blustered. "The only chance the idiot woman has—"
Brenton interrupted.
"She is my wife," he reminded the doctor.
"I don't care if she is your wife, twenty times over," Doctor Keltridge said vehemently. "We both know the infernal thing that she has done."
"But, if she believed it was right—" Brenton was beginning faintly.
The doctor bore him down.
"Because she is a semi-maniac, she's not to be encouraged in her destruction of the human race," he argued hotly. Then, as he saw the tightening and the whitening of Brenton's lips, he forgot his argument in swift contrition. "Damn it all, Brenton! I vowed I'd never mention the thing to you again, as long as I lived, and here I am again, off on the same old subject. I'm a garrulous old man; but——" his keen face softened, puckered into a score of wrinkles; "but I loved that baby boy. I brought him into the world, and I had spent no small amount of time congratulating myself upon the fact that you'd got him, at any rate; that you'd have him for a comforting little peg to hang your spiritual hat on, when you came home from preaching the gospel to a disgruntled and disgruntling world. Almost I think I felt his death more than—"
"Not more than I." Brenton faced him steadily.
"Not in one sense. And yet, I did feel it more, because, from the first, I saw how needless it would be."
But Brenton lifted up his hand.
"It's over now," he said concisely. "Why talk about it? Some memories are best off, left to perish."
And, in all truth, this was one of them. Now and then, it would stir in its grave, and lift up its ugly head for recognition; but, as a rule, the two men had done their best to heap the dust of time and forgetfulness upon its grave. And yet, certain scenes are so hideous that one never quite forgets them. It had been ordained for Brenton that the passing of his baby son should be followed by such a scene, by a discovery so tragic as to make the painless baby death sink into insignificance beside it.
It was the doctor himself who had made the discovery, made it just too late to have it do much good to any one. The nurse and Brenton were still bending above the frilly crib, smoothing out the muslin folds around the child and straightening the blankets, when the doctor came into the room, eager, his face alight with strength and purpose to do his share in what he knew too well could be only a fight to the very finish. The words of cheer died from his lips, though, as he caught sight of Brenton's face.
"Not yet?" he asked, with an abruptness far more sympathetic than any amount of tears.
"Yes. Just now."
"Impossible!" The single word was curt. Still more curt was the brief question to the nurse, "You gave the stimulant, as I ordered?"
"Three times."
"What effect did it have?"
"None."
"Impossible!" the doctor said, yet once again. "It is what we always use in such cases as this. There must be some mistake. Show me the bottle."
The nurse turned scarlet at the curt command. Then quietly she rose and fetched the bottle, now half empty.
"Let me take it." The doctor's face was now as scarlet as her own, the veins upon his brow were swollen and hard as knotted cords; but his hand was very steady, as he took the bottle, removed the cork, smelled, tasted. "Who has had access to this bottle?" he thundered then, and his voice boded little good to any meddler.
"Mr. Brenton and myself."
"Who else?"
"Nobody."
The veins about the temples began throbbing heavily. Brenton could see the skin about them tighten to the pulse-beat. Between them, the keen eyes gleamed like balls of polished metal surcharged with electricity.
"Think again, nurse," Doctor Keltridge said slowly. "And remember that your professional reputation is at stake. That bottle has been emptied and refilled with water. Where has that bottle been?"
"On the mantel."
"Who has been in the room?"
"Mr. Brenton, myself, and the baby."
"And Mrs. Brenton?" The doctor's eyes were fixed upon the nurse, as he put the question. He did not see the sudden whitening of Brenton's face; but his trained ear did make out the swift intake of Brenton's breath.
"She came and went."
"When you were here?"
"Yes."
"And you were here, you or Mr. Brenton, all night long?"
"Yes."
"And all the morning?"
"Except when I was telephoning to you."
"Hm!" This time, as casually as he was able, the doctor glanced at Brenton, and his glance caught Brenton stuffing a wadded handkerchief into his pocket. Above his forehead, his hair was damp and sticky. "You left the room, while you called me up? And, when you went away, the bottle was on the mantel? You are sure?"
"I am sure."
"Where was it, when you came back?"
"In the same place. I know that, for I went straight to it. You had just told me it would keep the child alive, until you came." Under the rapid fire of questions, the nurse's voice began to show defiance.
The doctor recognized the defiance, and lifted up his head.
"Steady, nurse," he cautioned her. "Don't get on your nerves now; there is too much at stake. Where were the others, while you were telephoning?"
"Mr. Brenton had gone downstairs to get his breakfast. Mrs. Brenton was dressing in her room."
"All the time?"
"I—I supposed so." The nurse turned to Brenton sharply. "You met her, Mr. Brenton, when she started down the stairs?" she asked him. "I am sure I heard you speaking to her, sure that I heard her answer."
Brenton wet his lips; then he passed his hand across his brow, palm outward. Both nurse and doctor could see the heavy streak of moisture gathered in the life-line.
"Forgive me, doctor," he said, after a minute. "I seem dazed by this thing; it has been a long and anxious night, and I am more upset than I had supposed. Mrs. Brenton? She has gone away to church; she felt that now, if ever, she needed the help and the prayers of her own people."
But the doctor was not to be put off with mere evasions. He pressed his question mercilessly, hating himself acutely, all the while.
"You saw her, as the nurse says, when she first came out of her room, this morning?"
"Yes." Brenton's voice had lost its resonance and sounded curiously listless, as he answered. "Yes, I saw her then, and urged her not to go."
The doctor's eyes veiled themselves abruptly, and he turned away. The nurse, watching, felt he was satisfied that no blunder had occurred within the house. Brenton, though, knew differently. Watching the doctor, he was well aware that, in the doctor's mind, there were no more doubts as to the person who had made the fatal substitution than as if, like Brenton's self, his keen old eyes had rested upon the telltale drops clinging to Katharine's front breadths.
The doctor's eyes had veiled themselves; Brenton had turned away and sunk down in a chair. An instant later, both the men had rallied to a swift attention. Katharine, alert, smiling a little and stepping lightly, carelessly, it seemed, was coming up the stairs.
Doctor Keltridge turned to the nurse.
"You must be very tired," he said, with a kindliness which yet held its own note of command. "Go now and eat a good breakfast, and then lie down. I shall be here, for the present." Then he faced back to Katharine, who stood upon the threshold.
"You here, doctor?" she said jauntily, as she came in. "I'm sure it's very good of you."
"Yes, Mrs. Brenton. I am here."
His accent took a little from the jauntiness of Katharine's bearing.
"Has anything happened?" she asked swiftly.
"Happened?" The doctor's voice was grim with unphrased reproach.
"How is my baby boy?" she asked again.
Her well-considered flutter of agitation angered the doctor utterly. His reply came like a blow from a bludgeon.
"Dead."
"Doctor! My baby boy! When? How?" And Katharine, really startled now, hurried across the floor to the corner where the frilly crib shielded the quiet sleeper from her gaze.
Half-way across the floor, she was brought to an abrupt halt. The doctor's hand was shut upon her arm in a clutch of iron; the doctor's eyes were blazing down at her in a rage such as Brenton, watching, had never before seen upon the face of human man.
"Stop!" he bade her curtly, yet in a voice too low to give the servants below stairs any hint of the strife going on above. "Your baby boy is sleeping in his Heavenly Father's arms. It is not for any one like you to try to waken him; not for you, unrepenting, to look into his face."
"Unrepenting! Doctor!" Katharine tried to shrink away from the accusing face and voice; but the iron hand held her firmly.
"Yes, unrepenting," the doctor repeated gravely and, as he spoke, he loosed his hold upon her arm. "Mrs. Brenton, you asked me how the baby died. There is your answer." And he pointed to the row of bottles on the shelf.
Instantly she rallied. Neither, whether to her shame or credit be it said, did she make any effort to deny his wordless charge.
"Well? Suppose I did?" she said, with sudden calmness. "It was my only chance to save my child."
"Katharine—"
"Wait, Brenton." The doctor spoke as gently as if he had been talking to a tired little child. "Please leave this thing to me; it may save you something, later on." Then his voice hardened. "You admit it, then?" he queried.
Without a glance at her husband, Katharine faced the doctor, her head held high, her eyes and cheeks blazing with anger.
"I am proud to do so," she said, and her voice was hard as steel. "It is my one chance to speak out in behalf of my faith."
"Your faith has murdered your child," the doctor told her harshly.
She answered him with equal harshness.
"The murder lies at your own door. Left alone, I would have saved him. Your drugs have weakened him; your unreasonable doubts have killed him utterly. Between the two of you, yourself and—him," and the little pause was venomous with unspoken hatred; "you have killed my baby boy. I did my best; I took the final chance. But I could not go to seek the help of my own church, and leave you, unguarded, to do your harm in your own way. I did the only thing left to me, when I emptied out your bottle and filled it with water. We are told that no healing can be accomplished, if drugs are being used at the same time."
"Who tells you?" the doctor queried stormily.
She stared at him disdainfully, before she answered,—
"The All-Mother of our Church." Then, still disdainfully, she turned to leave the room. "Scott, if you wish to speak to me, I shall be in my own room," she said.
And then, still smiling slightly, still a little bit disdainful, she went away and left the two men standing there alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
"He isn't always such an ass," Dolph said, as he crossed his legs, preparatory to a long discussion. "It's only when he sets out to be bold and bad that he's so intolerable."
"Prather and the adjectives don't seem to match up very well," Reed objected.
"No. That is the whole trouble; he can't live up to his ambitions. The poor little beggar would like nothing better than to go the pace, as a sort of experimental lap for the instruction of his characters; but he always finds the pace too swift, and lags behind. As result, he isn't fast, but merely skittish. In the same way, he'd like to pose as a black-hearted villain. Instead, he gets to a point where he is just about as unsanctified as a Sunday edition of fruit salad."
"Sunday?"
"Yes, when they chuck in all the odds and ends of wine left from the dinners of the week. To the untrained tongue, it is a fearful pleasure to partake thereof. Prather makes up his iniquitous debauches after the same recipe: absorbing the yellow journals and the orange output of his fellow novelists, going down to New York for a week end, and then coming home to embody in a novel his consequent attack of biliousness."
"You've read his last one?"
Dolph nodded.
"And therefore I know whereof I speak," he added gloomily. "I wish the little beggar would leave off his moving picture shows of town society, and hie his muse once more in search of subjects from the woolly West."
"Knowing the West more than a little, I don't." Reed spoke with decision.
"What's the harm?"
"He doesn't get within a gunshot of the truth."
"No matter. He thinks he does, and the average member of his reading public doesn't know enough to realize the difference."
"All the worse. He ought to be sued for libel. By the way, did you know he has been having his professional eye on me?"
"For what?"
"Copy, of course. He got to calling rather often. I must say that I lured him on; I found his babble a distraction. Then, one day—Prather is nothing, if not transparent—he let out the fact that he was taking notes of me, for his next novel."
"Of all the—"
Reed interrupted.
"Not in my present ignominy, however; but as I must have been, he explained most considerately, in my prime. He must have had good confidence in his own imagination, though."
"Of course," Dolph said serenely. "He's always banked on that. I've heard him telling, after any number of different dinners, what a feat it was for him to writeA Portia of the Rockieswhen, for a fact, he never had been farther west than Toledo. But what is he going to do with you?"
"Nothing. I called him off."
Dolph nodded at the ankle he was nursing in both hands.
"Grand work, that!" he said. "It would be about as easy as calling off a flea that was starting on a cross-country journey to the nearest dog. How did you manage?"
Reed's brown eyes laughed; but his voice was grave.
"I invoked Ramsdell, and he did the deed. From all accounts, he did it thoroughly, for Prather hasn't put his nose inside my room, since the day that Ramsdell escorted him downstairs."
"I say!" Dolph looked up suddenly. "I've a patch to put over that hole. About three weeks ago? Yes? Well, at Olive Keltridge's last dinner, Prather came edging up to me. I saw he had things on his mind, and I wasn't busy, so I let him get them off. Else, I was afraid he'd strangle with the unaccustomed load."
"And the things were me?" Reed inquired urbanely.
"Yes. He asked me if I had heard that you were growing very nervous lately. That you—Well, never mind the rest of it. In the time of it, though, I supposed that it was his novelist's imagination that had got to work. Now I know it was only another manifestation of the almighty Ramsdell."
"He is almighty, Dolph. I'd be badly off without him."
"So I observe." Dolph chuckled. "At first, I was as afraid of him as if he had been a country undertaker looking for a job; but I'm slowly coming to the belief that the fellow is an actual wag. Really, you'd be badly off without him. He'll stay on, of course?"
"As long as I can keep him. He informs me daily that he'll see me through it till I die. From all indications, though, I'm a good deal more afraid of his dying, first."
"Rot!" Dolph remarked cheerily. "What you need, Opdyke, is to forego thoughts of dying, and get busy."
"What about?" Reed asked a little bitterly. "My present environment isn't particularly fitted for the strenuous life."
Dolph shut his two hands, side by side, around his ankle. When he spoke, though, his voice was unconcerned.
"Not unless you take your profession into bed with you," he remarked.
From behind Opdyke's courteous smile for a rather dull joke, there gathered interest, comprehension, eagerness.
"Dennison, you mean something or other, out of that," he said, after a little pause.
Dolph shot him one swift glance of scrutiny.
"Naturally. As a rule, I don't talk at random," he said then.
"What do you mean, exactly?" Reed sought to put the question steadily, but his voice throbbed with excitement.
Satisfied with the start that he had made, Dolph let go his ankle and sank back inertly in his chair.
"What idiots you specialist fellows are!" he observed indolently. "Once you get smacked on the head, you're all in. You think you are killed, and, instead of kicking around to find out the truth of the matter, you promptly proceed to turn up your toes."
Reed eyed him keenly, spoke impatiently.
"Interpret, Dolph. I may be dense; but I can't see what it is you're driving at."
"More fool you! I thought better of you, Opdyke, than all that," Dolph told him, with unabated serenity. "Didn't you ever hear of such a thing as a consulting engineer?"
"I ought, as it was my official title," Reed made curt answer. "What then?"
"Put your title into commission, man."
"Impossible."
"Not at all. Of course, you can't go raging around the mountains; but you may have heard of an old gentleman named Mahomet. Yes? Well, there you are. And you've a laboratory and a staff of chemists under your very elbow. Make your people come to you, instead of your going to them. Your reputation is all made by now. Sit back and get the working good out of it, not chuck it away as if it wasn't worth an uninitialled Lincoln cent."
Nothing more nonchalant and unconcerned than Dolph's drawling utterance could have been imagined. None the less, his words appeared to have kindled into new flame the burnt-out fires of Opdyke's professional ambition. For a minute or two, he lay quite silent, while two scarlet patches glowed upon his cheeks, and while the eyes above them seemed to fix themselves on distant vistas far beyond the limits of Dolph's sight. Then at last, he spoke, whimsically as far as his mere wording went, but in a voice which Dolph found scarcely recognizable.
"Dennison," he said slowly; "for a man who aims to be considered a genius by reason of the chronic mismatching of his socks and ties, and by his discordant metaphors, you once in a while do have an inspiration. Thanks. And now, would you mind it, if I asked you to go home? I believe I'd like a little time to think things over. Come in, to-morrow morning, though. Else, I shall send Ramsdell out to capture you."
Next day, Dolph did come in, and again the next. On the third day, Opdyke had a half-dozen letters to show him, a half-dozen bits of planning to submit to his shrewd young brain.
"I've rather got to count on you in this thing, Dennison," he said concisely. "My father is an older man, and the past two years have been hard on him; he's not so aggressive as he was, not half so optimistic. Doctor Keltridge will be watching me to see that I'm not overdoing. He means well; but now and then it's healthy to overdo matters a little. Brenton has all he can handle, with his wife. Therefore, in view of Ramsdell's scholarly attainments, and until I'm justified in setting up a professional assistant, I rather fancy that it's up to you."
"Thanks. I'm there, every time," Dolph told him crisply. "Besides, after yesterday, I'd walk on my ears for you."
"You might give a sample exhibition now. Have you said anything, yet?"
"No chance. Besides, I rather hated—Hang it all, Reed, I don't want to be in a hurry about shuffling off in your best shoes!"
Reed's eyes lost a little of their eagerness; but his smile was unfaltering.
"They never were my shoes, Dolph. Even if they had been, I couldn't wear them now; that has all gone by. And, if they had been mine, and I had had to pass them on to some one else, there is no one in the world I'd see walking off in them so contentedly as I would see you. Fact, man, so take it as it comes, and enter into your own kingdom."
"If it is mine," Dolph said gravely.
"I think it is. It is for you to find out, though. But remember this: you are not to feel for one instant that you're dispossessing any rightful heir. The chance is yours, Dolph. Most likely it never would have been mine, in any case. Now it is totally impossible."
Dolph attempted one last remonstrance.
"But why?" he asked vehemently.
The smile faded from Reed's lips, and the lines around the lips grew grim.
"Because," he answered tersely; "my common sense is in working order, even if my legs are not."
And, with this downright assurance ringing in his ears and with the tragedy of its brave renunciation crowding out somewhat of his own hopefulness, Dolph Dennison went away in search of Olive Keltridge.
Olive, however, was gone to a luncheon out of town, so Dolph was told by the maid who answered to his ringing. Therefore he went his way once more; and, feeling idle, unsettled, alternately depressed at the prospect of what he deemed his coming selfishness in seeking Olive again later on, and elated with a general zeal for altruistic effort by the success of his attempt to arouse Opdyke's dormant ambition: because of all these things, he suddenly decided that it would be the part of good fellowship to pay a visit to his former rector and present colleague, Brenton.
To be sure, Dolph had never had the habit of calling upon Brenton. From the first, his liking for the man had been a temperate one, a liking mitigated by his own regrets concerning the nature of Brenton's sense of humour. Moreover, he shied a little bit at Brenton's priestly calling, shied a little bit more at the idea of coming into closer quarters with Brenton's wife. Now, from all accounts, the wife was somewhat in abeyance; and the sudden reversal of Brenton's collar buttons had turned him from the picture of a priest to at least the semblance of a man.
In regard to Brenton, Dolph Dennison saw no need to mince matters. His clear young eyes had made out the one loose thread that sagged and knotted across and across the texture of Brenton's mind. He saw it and, lacking knowledge of its source in Brenton's erratic father, he condemned it with the cocksure harshness of exceeding youth. Without it, Brenton would have been all man. With it, Dolph believed, he was predestined to futility. Indeed, what hope was there for a man who would get himself all waxy over such played-out doctrines as predestination, and then sit by, impotently calm, and watch his wife go off upon the Christian Science tangent, without a word to stop her and tie her down to reason? It was like finding cold, bare bones embedded in one's breakfast porridge. None the less, one did owe some social decencies to one's colleagues of the faculty. Therefore, despite his new-formed porridge metaphor, Dolph trudged away in the direction of the Brentons' home.
The new home was a smaller one than Saint Peter's rectory. It stood back a little from the street, under a trio of giant hemlocks which shaded the front verandah and the long stretch of gravelled walk. The shady walk was damp now, with the moisture of the early spring, and the wet little stones ground only softly underneath Dolph's heels, so softly that their murmur was quite inaudible inside the house, although a window, wide open to the front verandah, gave to Dolph, as he crossed the lawn, a full knowledge of the discussion going on within. It was a one-sided sort of a discussion, to all appearing. Moreover, from the pitch and the velocity of the voice, Dolph judged the discussion to be largely on the part of the Brentons' most recent cook.
"There's no use in my trying to please you," he heard the voice say, as he started up the strip of gravel. "You find fault with everything I do; you interfere with my rights—"
There came the low murmur of another voice. Then,—
"Rights? My rights to rule my life according to my own beliefs. My rights to seek the Universal Truth. I have my way to go, as you say you have yours. The two ways can never be the same. I have tried my best to make them so; but it is no use."
Again the murmur.
"And my best to live up to my share of a bad bargain," came the brutal answer. "My best to—" The voice choked with its own emotions.
"Tut! Tut!" Dolph remarked softly, at the invisible owner of the voice. "Steady, now; or you'll be crying, next thing you know."
His warning, though, was needless. No trace of tears came into the militant reply to the next low words.
"Yes, a bad, bad bargain. When we came together, I dreamed of a perfect union, a life of mutual opportunity. Oh, yes, I know. You say it's all on account of my beliefs, all because I have strayed away from the chalkline you marked out for me. But who else has strayed? Who else has thrown over his earlier creed? And you have thrown with it all belief in anything, tossed it aside as if it had been a worn-out rag. I have laid it aside, unharmed, and chosen out another creed of finer texture. And now you think I am going to stay here, inert, supine, and watch you tear that creed apart. Never!"
"Grand language, that," Dolph soliloquized, as he mounted the steps and came into hearing of the words. "Evidently, it's not the cook; she wouldn't be up to that level."
"Your fault? Whose fault, else? Who first took pains to teach me that the old creed of our parents was unbelievable? Who put the first questionings into my young mind? Who waked me from my mental sleep? It was you, yourself. Without you, I never should have known the peace which now I feel. For so much, I am grateful to you, Scott Brenton."
On the final sentences, the angry voice had lowered its pitch a little, as if to come into some slight consonance with the peace of which it boasted. The different cadence, coupled with the unexpected use of Brenton's given name, brought light to Dolph Dennison.
"Damn!" he remarked succinctly, letting go the knocker with which he had been hoping to put an end to the discussion. "It's Mrs. Brenton!"
And then, obedient to the town-wide impulse which never failed to come in times of trouble, Dolph bolted down the Brenton doorsteps on his tiptoes, and dashed away in search of Doctor Keltridge.
The pause which followed his departure, as a matter of course, had no connection with it. Rather, it was of two-fold purpose. Katharine needed time to catch her breath; Brenton needed time to rally his mind to meet the sudden strain. In the end, it was Brenton who spoke.
"Then, Katharine, what is it your plan to do?"
"My plan!" her voice bespoke her scorn. "At least, then, you are beginning to consider me a little."
"I always have meant to consider you, Katharine."
"When? In what way?" But she waited for no answer, except the one which she herself was ready to give. "None. You lived your life. You went your way. You gave me the crumbs of your time, of your mind. My share in your life came out of what your other friends left over. Did you consult me, when you turned into an Episcopalian? No! Did you consult me, when you threw it all aside, all your pretty broken toy that, once on a time, you had called religion, and went to teaching chemistry to a pack of girls? No! A thousand times, no! You made your life the way you wanted it. You say it was your right to do so. Then, in the same way, I claim it is my right, in searching for the truth, to make my life over into anything I choose."
"But, if your choice is not a wise one?"
She turned upon him fiercely.
"Who are you to judge? And is your own choice so wise? Your own choices, rather, for, if I remember clearly, there have been a number of them. And what good have they done to any man?"
"Too little good, Katharine," Brenton assented humbly. "At least, though, they have done no harm."
"How do you know that?" she taunted him defiantly. "How is any man to know the harm he can do by a wrong belief? No; I don't mean the harm you may have done to yourself. That is superficial. You can cure it easily; there are dozens of mental plasters that you can apply." Her voice grew yet more scornful on the phrase. "But what about the harm to other people? What about the harm to me from all your theological shilly-shally? The only wonder of it all is that I was given the strength to come out of it and into something better. And now—"
Brenton stayed her torrent of words by the very quiet of his brief question.
"Now, Katharine?"
"Now I demand my right to go out and make what I can of the little you have left me of my life."
"In what way?"
His quiet interrogations pierced her excitement as no opposition could have done. Her next reply, when it came, was almost devoid of passion.
"I wish to study. I must have my time for that, not fritter it away on managing servants and going to faculty dinners."
"To study what?"
Again she flung up her head, and her eyes glittered. Her voice, though, was now under perfect control.
"To study my religion, to learn to know it through and through."
"I thought you knew it now."
She looked at him as from a measureless height of wisdom and experience.
"Does one ever know the Infinite? Our belief can not be packed into a neat bundle and tied up in the Apostles Creed. It is deeper than that, and far, far wider. And then," and, to Brenton's astonishment, her face lighted with a smile which was curiously akin to one of happy peace; "and, in time, I shall do my best to prepare myself to be a Healer."
"Katharine!" Despite the peaceful smile which had heralded the announcement, Brenton felt his whole nature recoiling from the thought.
"Why not?" she asked him swiftly. "You mean I am not worthy? Of course not—yet. In time, though, it will come; in time, I shall be free from thoughts such as have dragged me down into to-day's discussion. Not, though, while I live with you as you are now. Not while I have the daily friction of your unbelief and opposition. While these confront me, I am tied down to the lower level; the hour has come when I know it is my higher duty to go free. For that reason, I have told you this, to-day. One has to make practical plans, even if it is to carry out spiritual endeavours. There are things to arrange, before I go."
There came a little silence. Then,—
"You are really going?" Brenton asked.
"I am."
"When?"
"I promised to be in Boston, early in the week."
Again there came the silence. This time, it lasted until, with an ostentatiously natural step, Katharine turned away and left the room. Then, for an instant, Brenton stood staring after her. An instant later, he had dropped down at his desk and buried his face within the circle of his clasped arms, covering his ears to shut out the echo of his wife's accusing words. He tried to drive off from his mind the ugly question how far he himself had been blamable for this thing; how far he might have steadied Katharine by forcing her to go with him into all the secrets of his life. Instead, he tried to fix his mind upon the approaching ruin of his home; but he only could succeed in thinking about the passing of his baby boy, about the way the weazen little arms had shot upward, waving in joyous and insistent recognition. After all their tedious, aching search for truth, Katharine's search and his, had it been given to that little child to find out and acknowledge the eternal verities, hidden for ever from their older eyes?
And, meanwhile, his world was waxing empty. First his beliefs had gone; and then his baby boy, his hope; and now, last of all, was to go his wife who should have been his final trust. The past was finished. Ahead of him was nothing but a lonely road which led nowhere and ended in nothing. Of what use for a tired man like himself to force himself up and on along it? Of what use to deny his share of domestic blame, merely because his intentions had been of the most unselfish? His head sank lower in his clasping arms.
It was so that Doctor Keltridge found him when, an hour later, he came marching in at the unlatched front door.