CHAPTER THIRTY
"The thing is amounting to an obsession," Doctor Keltridge told Professor Opdyke testily, two months later. "I never saw a case of such ineradicable dubiousness concerning all the things that do not count."
"But the fellow is sincere," the professor urged in extenuation.
"Yes; that makes it all so much the worse, as we doctors are aware. It's a species of disease, Opdyke, and when a patient takes his disease seriously, as a general rule it's all up with him. Just how far has Brenton gone?"
"From our standpoint, not very far; from the standpoint of the student mind, to the outer limits of agnosticism."
The doctor whistled thoughtfully.
"What a damn-fool he is, Opdyke!" he remarked, with stress upon the hyphen.
"Yes, and no. If I were going to analyze him, I'd write his formula as B{_3}M+ECo{_7}, thrice brilliant man plus—and, mind you, the plus is a serious handicap—an embodied conscience raised to the seventh power. Brenton is brilliant; but his mind works in a series of swift flashes, and the flashes dazzle him till they spoil all of his perspective. Instead of taking them for what they are, mere sparks flying from the ends of broken mental contact, he thinks that they are errant gleams of universal truth, vouchsafed to him alone. Then his seven-horse-power conscience goes to work, and bids him scatter the gleams across a darkening world. If he didn't mean so very well, he would do infinitely better. However, he—"
"Is Brenton," the doctor interposed quietly. "What is more, he will be Brenton till the end of time. He even may get worse, by way of natural reaction from the strain he was under with his wife. He steadied to that better than I hoped, steadied to the baby's death, and steadied to the reproaches she considerately heaped on him for her parting gift."
"Reproaches?"
"Yes. She told him that he was to blame for the whole situation; that, if he hadn't run amok, she would be jogging contentedly along the path of ancestral Calvinism. Moreover, the fact that there is more than a grain of truth in her contention doesn't lessen the sting that it has left behind. Now, as a natural consequence, the strain over, he is letting go entirely. He is made like that. Unless we want him to go to pieces utterly, we shall either have to invoke the aid of circumstance, or else bring him up with a round turn, ourselves."
"How?" the professor queried flatly. "A man in his position is not amenable to discipline."
"I'm not so sure of that." The doctor chuckled. "I am a trustee, you know."
"Then he'll resign."
"Not a bit of it. He may threaten it, may talk grand and elevated nonsense concerning freedom of speech and all the rest of it. When it comes to resignation, though, he will draw in his horns. His life is in that laboratory of yours."
"And in his students?"
"No. There's the trouble. It's the idea itself he's after, not its growing grip upon the world at large."
"Then what makes him——" The professor paused for the fitting word.
The doctor supplied it, and remorselessly.
"Explatterate? Because it's a part of him to talk forth his imaginings, and, just at the present hour, he lacks all proper outlet but his class. Something has gone bad inside the man; no wonder, though, when one thinks of all that he has gone through. Even you, Opdyke, will never know the worst of that. Still, we shall have to put some sort of brake upon him; he can't go on like this."
For a little while, the professor smoked in silence.
"Can't you warn him unofficially, Keltridge?" he asked then.
"That he is disgracing the department?"
"No. That he is wrecking his final chance to amount to anything that's practical? That, if he holds on here, he must keep within some sort of limits in the things he says? That, if he lets go this present opportunity, he'll turn into the worst of all things, a mental derelict?"
The doctor groaned at the suggestion.
"Opdyke, I'll be hanged if I'll put in all my time, playing intellectual wet-nurse to Scott Brenton! I've served my turn. If ever he began to cut his wisdom teeth, it's time he was about it."
The professor took up the metaphor and cast it back upon the doctor.
"A good many babies die of teething," he said. "I've heard you say, yourself, that it was the one time in all a man's life when he was most dependent on the ministrations of the doctor."
The doctor rose and straightened up his shoulders.
"Fairly caught," he confessed. "Well, I'll do my best. Meanwhile, how is Reed?"
"Too busy to think much about himself."
"Not overworking?" the doctor questioned sharply.
"No. At least, not if his mental condition is any index to his physical. He is eager as a boy over the way his work is coming in. Did I tell you he has an assistant coming, day after to-morrow? Poor little Dennison has been swamped, for two weeks, in the rising tide of things that he knew nothing at all about. I must say he's been heroic in his efforts to help Reed out."
The doctor nodded.
"Dolph is a good sort. In the last analysis, he is not unlike Reed; they have the same staying power, the same trick of hating to take themselves in earnest. Still, for Reed's sake as well as Dolph's, I'm glad a trained assistant is coming. In fact, I might say I am glad on my own account."
"You?"
The doctor laughed.
"Yes. I've had Dolph at all hours, tearing his hair in my laboratory, while I tried to coach him. I do think, for a boy brought up on belles-lettres, he's made a decent showing as assistant mineralogist. I like Dolph. He's an all-round good fellow."
The professor laid aside his pipe; then he looked up keenly.
"He's at your house often?" he inquired.
The doctor read his old friend like a large-print page. Reading, he straightway became impenetrable.
"Yes. He drops in rather often," he assented. "Of course, he knows I am a good deal interested in Reed's new venture. Wonderful, isn't it, the way it has turned out so well? If only Brenton had one quarter of his steady grip!"
But, for the present, steady grip was the one thing Brenton lacked. Indeed, watching the recent chaos of his domestic life, one could scarcely wonder. As the doctor had said, reaction was bound to come. It had been no small upsetting, too, the saying farewell to his association with Saint Peter's Parish. The sudden reversal of his collar buttons was, in a sense, typical of the sudden reversal of all his habits of thought and life. His grip had been loosening, during many previous months; the sudden change in his responsibilities appeared to have relaxed it utterly.
In the broadest sense, Brenton's old work, like his new, had been teaching. Now, however, the enthusiasm of his gospel was possessing him completely, a gospel, nowadays, solely of the science which, heretofore, threading through and through the fabric of his sermons, had of necessity been juggled to the likeness of the Book of Revelation. Now that he could set it forth in all its nakedness, it seemed to Brenton more than ever like the Book of Revelation. Day after day, his enthusiasm for his theme increased its pace, threw off the bridle of hard, concrete fact, ran to the speculative limits of its course, and then ran past them. By the first of May, Brenton's lectures had made themselves one of the features of the college world; but, by the same token, they had ceased to be lectures upon chemistry, and had become harangues upon every phase of the allied sciences, harangues which ran through the entire gamut of abstract investigation, and came to rest at last upon the pair of finite questions:Whence?andWhither?
And, by the first of May, the student world was all agog, seeking to answer those questions flatly and quite off-hand, instead of waiting for experience of life to give the answer for them. Brenton, meantime, was becoming ten times the force he had been at Saint Peter's; the only trouble lay in the fact that now his force was, not formative, but deformative.
"He's making himself a reputation, fast enough," Dolph Dennison said, one day. "How much good he is accomplishing, though, is another question."
To Dolph's surprise, Olive opposed him.
"Isn't there always good in simple, downright sincerity?" she queried.
"Not a bit of it," Dolph assured her bluntly, for a certain talk between them, weeks before, a talk disastrous to the best of Dolph's plans for life, had in no sense put an end to their good friendship. "Sincerity itself is nothing. It's the thing one gets sincere about." Then, without waiting for an answer, "What a woman you are, Olive!" he said.
"Because I stand up for Mr. Brenton?"
"Because, down in your secret heart, you rather admire him for his confounded weaknesses." Dolph spoke with increasing bluntness.
"Not for his weaknesses, Dolph. The man is plucky and sincere. For the sake of the things that he believes are true, he will give up, has given up, more than most of us will ever gain."
Dolph plunged his fists into his pockets.
"Hang it all, Olive! Do be concrete," he bade her.
"I will, if I can," she said fearlessly. "It's only that the things themselves aren't too concrete."
"No." Dolph spoke incisively. "I should say they aren't. Olive look here. Don't get your values muddled, at this stage of the game."
Despite their friendship, she looked up at him haughtily.
"What do you mean, Dolph?"
For a minute, he stared down at her, smiling slightly and with a look in his eyes that nullified the frank brutality of his next words.
"Don't get mawkish over Brenton, Olive, just because he is a pitiful weakling who, in spite of all his good intentions, has made a consistent mess of everything he's tried to do. Because a man is weak, he isn't necessarily more lovable. Because he has an incurable disease, he isn't, of necessity, any more a subject for idolatry. No; I don't mean that to lap over on to Opdyke, either. If ever a man was healthy, Opdyke is that man. But Brenton isn't. His logic and his conscience both are full of bacteria, bad little bacteria that swim around and mess things. He may pull out of it, of course, and make something in the end. Then, you can set him up on a pedestal and stick flowers in his fair hair. For the present, though, do keep sane about him, and deplore him, not admire."
"Aren't you a little hard on him, Dolph?" Olive asked steadily, although her cheeks were burning with the truth of his implied accusal.
"No; I'm not."
There came a short pause. Then,—
"I am very sorry for him," Olive said a little obstinately.
"Be sorry, then. Be just as sorry as you can. But, for heaven's sake, don't tell him so," Dolph retorted rather mercilessly. "If he's ever going to amount to anything, he must be brought up with a round turn, not coddled and treated as a victim of untoward circumstance. If he behaves like this over a growing pain in his theology, what do you suppose he'd do in Opdyke's place?"
Olive struggled to regain her hauteur.
"The cases aren't parallel, Dolph," she said. "One is a physical matter; the other concerns the spirit."
Once again Dolph paused and looked down at her intently. Then,—
"Which is which?" he queried. "No; don't get testy, Olive. I'm not producing any brief for Opdyke. In fact, he doesn't need one; we both of us know already what he stands for. But I do hate to see a girl like you go off her head about such a man as Brenton, a man with a Christian Science wife and a thrilling voice and speaking eyes: all deadly assets for a misunderstood ex-preacher. No; I do not like Brenton. He's not my sort. Neither, for the fact of it, is he your sort."
Olive compressed her lips.
"I may help to make him so," she said.
"Best let him make himself; he's had too many formative fingers in his pie, already. Besides," Dolph's lips curled into an irrepressible smile; "how do you know it would be for his advantage?"
For one instant, Olive struggled with her pique. Then she cast it off, and looked up at Dolph with her old smile.
"You hit hard, Dolph," she told him; "but I'm not sure you aren't in the right of it, after all. I like Mr. Brenton. I am sorry for him; perhaps it has muddled my values, as you call it, to be on the inside circle of his advisers. Still, there is something to be said upon the other side. You can't comprehend a man like Mr. Brenton, if you try."
"Why not? Not that I've tried over much, though," Dolph added, in hasty confession.
"It wouldn't have done you any good, if you had tried," Olive assured him flatly. "You haven't a single point in common. By ancestry and training, you're as unlike as a Zulu and an Eskimo. You began at about the point where Mr. Brenton, if he's lucky, will leave off. Your great-great-grandparents settled once for all the questions that he's agonizing over now. Naturally, you don't remember their struggles, and so you can't see why his should take it out of him, any more than you can see why a personable man like him ever could have married—"
"What your father aptly terms the She-Gargoyle?" Dolph inquired. "No; I can't. But then the question arises promptly, how can you?"
Olive smiled a little sadly. Loath though she was to acknowledge it to Dolph, of late she had been finding out that comprehension does not always make for full approval.
"As you say, Dolph," she told him; "it's the woman of me. After our own fashion, we every one of us are natural nurses; we know when our menfolk are in pain."
"Not always, Olive." Dolph spoke sadly.
"Yes, Dolph, we do. Hard as it is, though, sometimes we have to admit we have no cure for that especial pain. Still, you can be quite sure that it isn't easy for us to turn away and leave it, unhealed and aching." Then she threw off the little allegory, and once more spoke with spirit. "Dolph, we're created in mental couples, I suspect. Much as I care for Reed, it was you who had the insight to plan how he could make his life over into something besides the bare existence we all were dreading. In the same way, I may be the one to take in the tragedy of Mr. Brenton's indeterminate existence, and make it just a little lighter, if only by my understanding. Anyway, I mean to try."
She turned in across the lawn, leaving Dolph to stare after her retreating figure with no small anxiety.
"Blast the understanding!" he said profanely. "And then, blast the preacher!"
The poor preacher, however, for preacher still he was, in spite of the reversal of his collar fastenings, was feeling himself already blasted. He had been spending a long hour in the doctor's laboratory; and the doctor, for the once, had turned his back upon his pans and trays of cultures, and lavished his entire attention on his visitor.
"It's just here, Brenton," he said quietly, after an hour of argument; "you can do one of two things: you can keep to your text and teach those girls straight chemistry; or—"
Brenton faced him squarely, squarely capped the sentence with a single word.
"Resign."
"Yes."
"You mean you think I am a failure in my teaching?"
"No. Your teaching is all right. You are a born chemist and a born teacher. It's your infernal preaching I object to," the doctor told him unexpectedly.
"My preaching?"
"Yes. You employ your pulpit methods in your classes. You take a chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and determinate as A+B. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to teach, not glittering abstractions having to do with man's latter end. The fact is, you've spent so long in trying to subject your theology to scientific proof that, now you're surfeited with science, you are trying to use it as a feeder to your theologic fires."
"Not consciously," Brenton objected, as a flush crept up across his cheeks. "I have meant—"
The doctor interrupted, but not unkindly.
"Consciously or unconsciously, it's all one, Brenton, as concerns the output. You must bridle your scientific imagination and your tongue, or else you'll have the whole college by the ears. For the present, you are letting off harmless rockets. Before you know it, though, you'll be dynamiting the whole establishment. Best go slow."
Brenton attempted one last stand.
"Have I any right to go slow, doctor, when there's a principle involved? Have I any right to suppress eternal truths—"
Then the doctor lost his temper.
"Eternal pollywogs!" he burst out. "Man, you're daft. Who told you what truths are eternal? Who told you where science ends, and where theology begins? Who told you what we mean, when we sayprovable? For two thousand years, and then some more, we have been slowly sifting down a whole mass of ill-assorted beliefs into two great facts: Creator and created. For practical purposes, isn't that all we need to know? Isn't it all that we any of us can grasp: the surety that the Creative Mind would never have taken the trouble to fashion us, in the first place if he hadn't put inside us all the needful germs of progress, all the needful intellect to grasp the evident duty that lies just ahead? What else, then, do you need? No. Don't try to talk about it. Just go out and take a good, long walk in the fresh air, and forget your latter end in the more important concerns of deep breathing. You are getting disgustingly round-shouldered. Good bye. And, by the way, I'll tell Olive you will be back here to dinner."
But Brenton, going on his way, was totally oblivious to the doctor's sage counsel as to the merits of deep breathing. Neither did he realize in the least the splendid optimism of the stern old doctor's creed. For the hour, optimism was quite beyond his ken. He only realized that his own world had gone bad; that failure awaited him at every turn, not a downright and practical failure, either, but a nebulous and indeterminate futility. His life had been nothing but one restless struggle to arrive at something finite, something which should satisfy alike his heart and reason. Instead of gaining the one thing, it seemed to him that all had been lost. His present existence was as focusless as an eye after its lens has been extracted. His past had been opaque, his future would be permanently blurred. And for what good had been all the pain? It would have been far better, far more sane, if he had clung stoutly to the flaming horns of his hereditary Calvinism. Infinitely better to feel their scorching touch than to drift into a state of apathy past any feeling! And Brenton wondered vaguely whether he ever would feel anything again, anything, that is, as a personal issue, rather than as a scrap of the great world-plan. Most things, nowadays, left him conscious of being aloof, remote. Even the going away of his wife. Even the death of—He pulled himself up short. Not the baby's death. That was still personal, still very personal; personal was the message of those little waving hands. What did the baby see? Something denied for ever to his adult and doubting eyes?
Forgetful of the doctor's invitation to come back to dine, Brenton at twilight found himself upon the long white bridge, his elbows on the rail, his eyes upon the darkening surface of the river, as it swept down upon him from out the purpling hills. As of old, its mystery held him, the mystery of its ceaseless coming, the mystery of its ceaseless going on and on, until it lost all individual existence in the soundless, boundless sea. To-night, in the apathy which held his senses in subjection, he watched it through the dying twilight, until it ceased to be to him a river, but appeared to him as an embodiment of life itself, coming, coming, coming down to him out of the purpling distance, going, going, going down away from him into the deepening shadows. And then the light died, and darkness crept across it all, and then—extinction.
Next morning, he arranged it with Professor Opdyke that, for the present, the other assistant should take over all of his lectures, while he himself would put in his time inside the laboratory.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dolph, being Dolph, spoke out his fears to Opdyke. Dolph, being a rhetorician, approached his subject cornerwise, however.
"I wish to heaven you'd fall in love with Olive, Opdyke," he said moodily, next day.
Reed, looking up from the chaos of letters that were littering his couch, gave a short laugh.
"So that I could properly present my sympathy to you?" he queried, as a faint colour stole up across his cheeks.
Dolph dropped his rhetoric, and went bluntly to the point.
"No; so that you could obliterate Brenton's image from her mind."
"What do you mean, Dennison?" Reed spoke sternly.
Dolph threw himself back in his chair and answered at the ceiling.
"I am not sure I mean anything at all. Olive has sense enough for a dozen, and Brenton is a married man, with a vampire for a wife."
Reed cut in with a question, which showed plainly to Dolph how little he cared to discuss Dolph's fears concerning Olive.
"Does anybody hear anything from the wife?"
"I don't, thank heaven!" Dolph assured him piously. "I did hear my sister-in-law explaining to a visitor that Mrs. Brenton was very busy in Boston. How she knew it; or whether she made it up for conversational purposes, I don't know. Neither do I know how long it takes to get one's self into commission as a healer. Doesn't Brenton ever say anything about her?"
"Not to me. Of course, it's not a subject where I like to be asking questions; and I suppose, for the same reason, he hates to open it up, himself."
"Naturally." Dolph's tone was dry. "Reed, who killed that baby?"
Opdyke raised his brows.
"I'm not the medical examiner, Dennison; I'm not obliged to say what I think about it," he returned.
Dolph sat up and faced his friend.
"I am, then. Opdyke, if it hadn't been a case of his own rector's family, Doctor Keltridge would have carried the matter to the courts."
"Did Olive tell you?"
"Olive doesn't tell things of that sort," Dolph said conclusively. "She's her father's own child." Then, of a sudden, he returned to his original charge. "Opdyke, why don't you think a little more about Olive Keltridge?" he demanded.
"Because I think quite enough of her, as it is," Reed answered.
"Of her, but not about her," Dolph said moodily. "Of course, if I could get her for my own wife, I wouldn't be giving you this advice. I've proved I can't, though—"
Reed interrupted.
"Girls have been known to change their minds," he said.
In spite of his sentimental regrets, Dolph laughed outright.
"If you had been present at our interview, you wouldn't have predicted any change in this case. Olive was—well, just as she always is, the soul of downright niceness; but she managed to leave me quite convinced once and for all that I might as well have wooed the woman in the moon. And, by Jove," Dolph's voice dropped to a confidential murmur; "now it's all over, I begin to think that she was right. It was a nasty half-hour for both of us; but we've come out of it, ripping good friends and without a sentimental regret to our names."
"Speaks well for Olive."
"Doesn't it? It's left me caring for her a long way more than ever, only not in the accepted-suitor sort of fashion. That's the reason I hate to see her drifting about, all at loose ends."
"Dennison," Reed spoke with masterful abruptness; "would you mind doing a letter or two at my dictation? Duncan is busy in the laboratory, this afternoon; and these things must go out on to-night's mail." His voice was steady, as he spoke; but in his brave brown eyes Dolph recognized the old-time harried, hunted look which he had hoped would never come again. Later, the letters done, Dolph went away without waiting for more conversation. For a singularly happy-go-lucky mortal, Dolph's instincts were to be by no means distrusted.
Dolph's going was only just in time to prevent his meeting Olive who came around the curve of the street, just as he was leaving the Opdyke grounds. He waved his hat to her from afar, and she answered his greeting; but neither of them changed the direction of his steps. They saw each other often enough, in any case; and it was an accepted fact between them that Reed's calls were better taken singly, as a rule, than in pairs.
However, as she went into Reed's room, that day, Olive began to have her doubts how long the old rule would hold good. Reed was increasingly busy, nowadays. Letters and drawings, photographs and samples of ores were piling in upon him from all parts of the country. The old phrase, indeed, was gaining a new fulfilment: the mountain was coming to Mahomet in all literalness. Olive had long since become accustomed to finding the room littered with the débris of much consulting, had grown accustomed to having her trivial gossip interrupted by the advent of fresh letters and a new supply of specimen ores. She had grown glib in reading off the unfamiliar phrasing of the letters, facile in writing down the totally unspellable words of Opdyke's dictated replies. In all of this, however, she had been made to feel aware that she herself stood first to Reed, his work stood second.
Not that Olive for one instant would have allowed herself consciously to become jealous of Reed's work. She was too sane and generous for that, too happy in the change it was making in Reed's existence. He was alert and enthusiastic now, where aforetime he was passive and plucky. His brown eyes snapped, not gleamed expressively. In short, the new assistant was finding out, to his extreme surprise, that his position was no sentimental sinecure, that, coming to be hands and feet to supplement an active scientific brain, he was likely to work more strenuously, more to the purpose, than he had done in the New York office of the brilliant specialist who had sent him up to Reed.
It was several weeks now since Dolph had made his crisp suggestion that Reed take his profession into bed with him. Even in that little time, the change was measureless; to all practical intents and purposes, the dying had come into a new life. The life, too, was by no means wholly intellectual. As Reed's professional enthusiasm grew stronger, his bodily gain apparently kept pace with it. To be sure, the lower half of him was totally, irrevocably dead. Nevertheless, by sheer, energetic will, Opdyke was making the upper half of his body do duty for the whole, was gaining a control over his crippled lower limbs that, six months before, he would have pronounced impossible.
With Ramsdell to pull and pry him to position, nowadays, he sat leaning up against the pillows on his bed, for an hour or two of every morning. The effort brought the beads of sweat out upon his forehead; but he took that a good deal as a matter of course, talked bravely of a rolling chair and a lift built on the corner of the house and even, a little later on, of a motor car and of a down-town office. Best of all, the old haunted look had left his eyes for ever. At least, so Olive had believed, until that day. To-day, despite his smile of greeting, the old expression was peering out at her, and she felt her hopes chilling within her at the sight.
"What is it, Reed?" she asked him, after a few minutes of trivial conversation. "Something has gone wrong."
"Not with me," he told her quickly. "In fact, things are very right. Ask Ramsdell."
"But you look—"
"How?" His laugh awaited her final word.
"Worried," she told him flatly. "The way you used to look, last winter."
"No reason that I should," he reassured her. "Things are going swimmingly. Now that my new assistant has rallied from the shock of his surroundings and come to a realizing sense that I prefer technical journals to tracts, he is proving a grand success. He is going to be of immense help; and I needed him, now that work is piling in. I'm hoping, though, your father can plan some way of giving me a little better use of my arms. There's a loose screw in there that he ought to tighten."
"Reed," Olive spoke thoughtfully; "you are rather unusual."
With some effort, he kept all edge of bitterness out of his voice, as he replied,—
"I certainly trust so, Olive. It wouldn't be an advantage to humanity at large to have this a normal state of things. Still, it might be worse, lots worse. I'm not nearly so soggy as I was. Which reminds me: do you mind going to the bottom of that heap of letters and taking out the square gray one. Yes. That's it. Now read it. I've saved it up for your delight."
There came a silence, broken only by the noise of unfolded paper. Then Olive looked up.
"Reed! The—"
"Don't swear, Olive," he admonished her, and now his eyes were wholly mirthful.
"I wasn't going to. I was only hunting for a suitable epithet. How does she dare?"
"Dare take unto herself the glory of what she calls my incipient cure? I wish I thought it was that; but vertebrae are vertebrae, in spite of all the Christian Scientists in all creation. As for her claim, though, she's got us there, Olive. One can't well prove an alibi, when it's a case of absent treatment. Still, I must say I like her nerve."
"When did this thing come?" And Olive cast the letter from her, with a sudden fury which, for the instant, downed her sense of humour utterly.
"Only to-day. I had meant to try a chair, to-morrow; but, in view of her predictions, I'll be hanged if I will. She would go to cackling forth that it was all her doing. How do you suppose she knew anything about me, anyway?"
"Spies, probably. Those people will stoop to anything to carry on their cause," Olive said tartly.
"Then one ought to feel a sneaking admiration for theiresprit du corps, at least. In fact, if you translate the phrase literally enough, it holds the very nubbin of their whole belief. But I hope you noted the clause concerning Brenton. I am glad she even feels so much of interest in him."
Olive settled back in her chair, and yielded up her creed of married life briefly, trenchantly.
"Reed, if I owned a husband, I'd focus my mind upon his breakfasts and his buttonholes and his entertainment of an evening. That's what men want, not hifalutin' mind cures delivered at long range." Then she repented. "Still, I'm not fair to Mrs. Brenton, Reed. She doesn't interest me in the least."
"Does Brenton?" Reed asked. And then he shut his teeth, as he waited for the reply.
The reply, when it came, was direct.
"Yes, Reed; he does, intensely. He is a mass of brilliant possibilities that all are going wrong. Moreover, I can't help a feeling I could help him, if I would. I know that sometimes I have seen farther inside his mind than even he knows, and it has given me an odd feeling of responsibility over him, a responsibility that I can't see just how to carry out." Suddenly she paused. "Reed," she said; "you're not as well, to-day. What is the trouble? Are you overdoing; or has Ramsdell let you strain yourself?"
He forced a smile back to his lips, although his eyes were haggard.
"It's nothing, Olive, really." He spoke as lightly as he could. "Your imaginings concerning Brenton have lapped over on to me; that's all."
She felt the rebuke in his words, knew within herself how undeserved it was, and, rather than confess the truth, arose in her own defence.
"Not imaginings, Reed," she said, and her self-protective dignity yet hurt him. "Now and then we women do have intuitions that are trustworthy. This, I think, is one of them. And Mr. Brenton needs all the help he can get, out of any sort of source."
Reed shut his teeth upon his hurt, until he could command his voice once more. Then,—
"I agree with you there, Olive," he assented. "Moreover, I wrote to Whittenden about him, a week ago. If any one can be of use, it will be Whittenden; he always knows what tonic it is best to prescribe. Must you go?" He looked up at her appealingly. Then the same appeal came into his voice, set it to throbbing with an accent wholly new to Olive's ears. "Olive," he said; "you're not going to misunderstand me, not going to allow Brenton to come in between us?"
Suddenly the girl went white; suddenly she bent down to rest her hand on his, in one of the few, few touches she had ever given his fingers since the day he had been brought home and laid there in his room, powerless to withdraw himself from too insistent human contacts. Her voice, when she spoke, had a throb that matched his own.
"Never, Reed!" she said.
A moment later, she was gone, leaving Opdyke there alone, to wonder and, wondering, to worry.
Two afternoons later, Duncan, the new assistant, brought up a message from the laboratory. Brenton would be at leisure, soon after four. Might he come up? That was just after luncheon. Therefore two hours would intervene, two hours for a quiet going over of certain things that Reed Opdyke felt it was for him alone to say, certain measures for Olive's safety which he alone should take. Indeed, there was no other man who stood, to Olive's mind, so nearly in a brother's place; no other man, it seemed to Opdyke, who owned one half so good a right to test the ground on which she stood, to assure himself that she might venture forward safely.
Opdyke was no sentimentalist. Nevertheless, he recognized all that it might portend when such a girl as Olive Keltridge, the soul of sanity and downrightness, talked about her comprehension of a man like Brenton. Moreover, Opdyke was no gossip. Nevertheless, he had not failed to hear a certain amount of speculation as to the possibilities of Brenton's seeking a divorce. Sought, there was no question of his getting it. Katharine's desertion was an established fact past all gainsaying.
And, if he sought it and won it, what then? Merely the helping him become as well worth while, as well worth Olive's while, as it was possible for any man to be. This was the task which Reed had set himself; the task for which he was bracing himself, during those two endless hours; the task for the accomplishment of which he was resolved, if need be, to tear away the coverings which, up to now, he had held fast above certain of the reticences of his own life. The tearing would be sure to hurt; but what of that? Olive, given the opportunity, would have done as much for him.
The afternoon lengthened interminably, and the clock was striking the half-hour, when Brenton finally came up the stairs. His face was grave, as he greeted his old friend, his eyes a little overcast and heavy.
Reed jerked his head in the direction of a chair.
"Sit down," he said hospitably; "and then fill up your pipe. Duncan doesn't smoke, worse luck; and I find I miss the old aroma. It's rather like incense offered to the ghost of my old self."
His accent was trivial, and Brenton, listening to the apparently careless words, could form no notion of the pains that had gone into their choosing.
"Your new self, I should say. It's astounding, Opdyke, the way you've picked yourself out of the rut and gone rushing ahead again."
"With a difference, though," Reed told him bluntly. "Is the jar full? You like the kind?"
"Yes, thanks." And Brenton filled his pipe. After a minute's puffing, "After all, Opdyke, you have pretty well minimized the difference," he observed.
"Thanks to Ramsdell and Duncan, yes. They have been wonderful props, and it's good to get on my professional legs again, whatever my bodily ones may do for me. Meanwhile, how are things going with you?"
Brenton smoked in silence for a minute. Then,—
"The wraith of my departed priestly calling forbids me to phrase my answer just as I'd like best to do," he said.
Reed nodded.
"So bad as that? What is the matter now?"
"It's hard to specify. I seem to have run myself aground."
"Pull off, then," Reed advised.
"No craft in sight to tow me."
Reed shut his teeth.
"Brenton, that has been your trouble from the start. You've always been drifting, anchor up, ready for a tow. Now hoist your sails and, for the Lord's sake, go ahead."
"Where?"
"Where! Wherever the chart takes you. What chart? The chart of plain duty, man, the duty of an honest citizen to make the most of himself and be a little good to humanity at large. No; wait. You've had your chances; you can't cry off on that. You had your chance, 'way back in college, and you chucked it over. How much more would it have hurt your mother to have seen you once for all take up a secular profession, than it would to have watched you setting out to preach all the things her own religion didn't stand for? You had another chance in Saint Peter's. It wasn't a small chance, either. You could have held that church together, solid; you could have brought its people to a working assent to a practical exposition of their creed that would have kept them busy and loyal to their Creator, in doing their duty to their co-created fellow men. Instead, you ignored your chance to keep them busy on things that would help on the world we live in, and spent all your energies in tangling up your notions of the world we came out of, and the world we, some day, are going into. As mental gymnastics, it was very pretty to watch; as a useful employment for a man who calls himself a pastor of souls, it wasn't worth a rush."
"But a man can't help his thoughts," Brenton expostulated suddenly.
"Can't he?" Reed whitened. "Brenton," he asked gravely; "don't you suppose that there have been times on times, since they lugged me up these stairs, that, if I had let myself go, I wouldn't have turned my face to the wall and cursed, not only the whole plan of creation, but the Creator himself? Times on times that, if I hadn't held tight to a few rudimentary notions that I took in with my mother's milk, notions about the decent and square thing to do for the God that made you, I wouldn't have tested the logic of your doubtings with a dose of cyanide? I tell you a man can help his thoughts. I tell you a man can hold to his beliefs. He can wonder about the petty things as much as he chooses, and it never does him one bit of harm. But the final great belief of all, that there is a wise Creator back of things, and that we owe Him at least as much loyal courtesy as we give to the best of our brother men: that is something it is in the hands of any man to hold on to, if he chooses. Brenton, I hate to lecture you," and, with a sudden gesture brimful of appealing for forgiveness, for loyal comprehension, Reed stretched out his hand; "but you have got to bring yourself up with a round turn. In some way or other, you have missed your chances. You have gone rushing off for shiny butterflies, when you ought to have stopped at home and milked the cows. Something," he smiled; "Whittenden says it was my downfall, set you to asking questions that you were too nearsighted to answer. Instead of sticking to a few fundamental bits of faith, you made yourself a ladder out of theological catchwords, clambered up it and kicked out all the rungs, one after another, as you climbed. Then you turned dizzy, and lost your grip, and fell all in a heap. Brenton, we've had about the same experience, one way or another, out of life."
"But you have braced up again and gone ahead," Brenton said slowly.
"So will you, man. That's why I am harrying you now, to start you up again. We neither one of us are half through our allotted term of years. In simple decency, we've got to play out the game."
"If we can," Brenton interrupted.
"Noifabout it. We've got it to do. Of course, we can't do it in quite the same old way. Be plucky as we can, it's impossible for us to deny that we've been scarred—badly; that the scars, some of them, can never really heal. Still, as long as we've a year ahead of us and a drop of fighting blood inside us—Brenton, it isn't easy; but it's our one way to prove we're game."
Then, for a while, the room was very still. At last, Reed spoke once more.
"Scott," he said slowly, and the old name held a note of great love; "once on a time, you didn't resent it when I told you that old Mansfield asked me to take you in hand and show you a few things out of my own experience. Don't resent it now. We've been too good friends for too many years for that."
Ramsdell's steady step came up the stairs, and Reed went on quite simply.
"Then you've heard from Whittenden?"
Brenton, pulling himself back to the present, looked up sharply at the question.
"How did you know?"
"He wrote me. What does he suggest?"
"Didn't he tell you that? He wants me to go down to him, and take over some of his settlement work."
"Shall you go?"
Brenton shook his head.
"It's out of the question, Opdyke. I only wish I could, for I am not of much use to your father, I'm afraid. Still, hereafter—Well, perhaps you've put new force into me by your admonitions." But his voice broke a little over the intentionally careless words.
Opdyke ignored the allusion.
"Then why not go to Whittenden?" he inquired, as carelessly as he was able.
Brenton arose and stood, erect, looking down at his old friend intently, as if anxious that Opdyke should lose no fragment of his meaning.
"Because, now more than ever," he said, a little bit insistently; "I feel it would be impossible for me to go away from the college. To change now would be a confession of another failure. If I am to make good at all, it must be here and soon. Besides," and now his accent changed; "I must stay on here and keep my house open, Opdyke. The time may come, when Mrs. Brenton wishes to come back to me. If it does come, she must find everything ready, waiting for her to make her realize that, at last, she is once more at home."
And then, as Ramsdell came inside the room, he turned and went away down the stairs. Watching him, Reed Opdyke could not but feel reassured on his account. Whatever his anxieties for himself and Olive, he could not fail to realize that, unknown to any of them, looking on, the steadying processes in Brenton had begun.