But, to his regret, Brenton was deaf to his harangue.

"You think," he was repeating; "that it may end in that?"

The doctor ruffled his hair until it stood on end, rampant and tousled as a corn-husk mat.

"Good Lord, man! A doctor doesn't think things," he said, with sudden ire. "Moreover, if he did, he wouldn't say them out. Else, where would his patients be? You can frighten any man to death, by offering him a premature glimpse into the next decade. One day at a time is enough for most of us; more than some of us can manage. As for Reed, it is impossible to testify at present; in the end, I fancy, he will be the chief witness for the defence. Meanwhile, he's game. You don't find him maundering supinely about his latter end. No! Do sit down. That wasn't a back-hander, aimed at you, Brenton. I hit straight, or not at all. I wish I could give you a tonic that would take away a little of your blamed self-sensitiveness, if I can coin the term. You're as unselfish as the rest of them, until you get hold of a bit of impersonal slander. Then you seize it in your arms, and hold it on your mental stomach like a mustard plaster. It doesn't do any good, though. It hurts like thunder in the time of it, and it plays the deuce with your later digestion."

Obediently Brenton sat down; or, to speak more accurately, was borne down by the weight of the doctor's energetic denunciation. It was the first time that he had found the doctor in such a mood as that. Mercifully, Brenton had no inkling that he had brought it on himself by his prelude to the talk. It would have shocked him unspeakably, had it dawned upon him that Doctor Keltridge, within himself, was applying profane adjectives to the spiritual doubtings of his rector. It would have astounded him beyond all words, had he known how trivial to the doctor's seasoned mind had seemed his own juggling touch upon the rival claims of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Had Brenton held within himself one tenth of Reed Opdyke's staying power, all would have come out right in the end. The pieces of the puzzle would have fallen into their true places. Instead, Scott Brenton, in his impatience, was apparently determined to chop the pieces into smaller bits, and then to deface their surfaces almost past recognition. Therefore it had seemed to Doctor Keltridge the one way of escape from the whole pother had been opened by his words, which he now repeated with a fresh emphasis that he hoped would finally impress them upon Scott Brenton's ear.

"Yes; and so, with all this complication on his hands, the professor is hunting for a new assistant."

This time, Brenton looked at him keenly.

"Are you telling that fact to me, for any especial reason, doctor?" he demanded.

"Yes, to my shame, I am. By good rights, Brenton, I ought to order you into a sanatorium, until you get over the desire to make an idiot of yourself. I doubt, though, if it would do any good. I fancy that your case is chronic, that you won't be happy till you've muddled your intellectual salvation according to your own notions. If that's the fact, the sooner you go about it, the better. Your hanging on at Saint Peter's is only so much wear and tear upon your nerves. Ours, too, when it comes to that. One doesn't get much sanctification out of a sermon couched in glittering generalities and delivered by a rector with a crumpled brow. Therefore the trustee of the college has told tales to the doctor, and the doctor is hinting the gist of those tales to his patient."

"Do you think I'd fill the place?" Brenton's voice surprised himself by its unwonted quivering of eagerness.

"Depends on whether you get the chance," the doctor parried. "Moreover, your getting the chance depends on what you think about your taking it. There's another man talked about for the position; but I have a good deal of say in the matter, and Opdyke has more. He considers you rather a genius in his line, a wasted genius, and would jump at a chance to have you put in under him as instructor. What do you think?"

Brenton's reply came without an instant's hesitation.

"I will take it, if it's offered me."

"You know it will shut Saint Peter's door to you for ever? In a case like this, one can't go back again."

"I know," Brenton made brief assent.

"You realize all you are giving up?"

"I do."

"You know the world is full of potential Prathers; and you also know what your wife will say? Does she understand what you have been going through?"

Brenton's lips stiffened.

"I have not meant to keep anything back from her. How far she has grasped all it has meant to me—However, in honour, I have done my best."

And, despite the weakening drop of his voice on the final phrases, the doctor believed him. Believing and likewise knowing Katharine, he pitied Brenton from the bottom of his heart. After all, was the fellow quite so invertebrate as he had sometimes seemed?

"Well, I will talk to Opdyke first, and then bring the matter up before the rest of the trustees. There's a meeting, early in October. Best not do anything until that is over. Then, in all decency, you will have to give a little time to Saint Peter's. You can't well bolt off, like a cook in a tantrum. Prepare their Christmas diet for them; and then go into this other thing, directly after mid-years."

"But, feeling as I do, have I any right to keep on at Saint Peter's?" Brenton queried.

The doctor cut his query short.

"Business is business, no matter how you feel. That curate of yours is as futile as a Persian pussy in a ten-horse plough. It takes a little time to pick up the right sort of a new man for a church like this; you have no right to leave the whole plant at loose ends, while they are about it, just because your ego has a pain in its psychological digestion. People have got to go on being married and buried, even if you can't make a scientific assay of the doctrine of the Atonement. Well," the doctor rose and emptied out his long-cold pipe; "that's all. I wish you luck, Brenton, and I'll help you all I can. Whatever I think about your mental calibre, I do believe that you are honest; and, after all, that's the main thing we all are trying for. Now go along, and talk this matter over with your wife. By the way, how is the baby?"

"A little droopy still. It's not too easy to bring him out of it, as long as I can only give him your stuff on the sly, when Mrs. Brenton is out of the room." Brenton cast a hasty glance at his watch. "It's time he had it now. I must be going," he said hurriedly, and, an instant later, he had bolted from the room.

The doctor listened for the closing of the door. Then his face lost a little of its keenness, and he sighed.

"It must be the very devil and all to have a conscience," he remarked at the four walls around him. "Thank God for one thing: I'm immune."

Filling himself a fresh pipe, he sat himself down to its enjoyment. Half way through it, he spoke once more.

"That woman would beat the Devil in a game of poker, if she could get the immortal souls of men by way of chips."

But the only immortal soul in Katharine's hands just now was the one inside her baby boy, a flimsy, fragile little chip upon the tides of time. However, it would not be Katharine's fault, if time were not soon exchanged for eternity.

Not that Katharine abused the child, though; not that she exactly neglected it. She chose its clothing and food with a proper degree of care; she consulted more than one efficient matron of Saint Peter's congregation, before she accepted the references of the nurse. That done, she left the child's routine chiefly to the nurse; to the nurse exclusively she left all the more tender ministrations to the little, dawning personality. Upon one point, however, she stood firm. When the child was ailing, it should be brought at once to her for succour. It should be healed by the power of her mind, not poisoned by the nostrums of a man like Doctor Keltridge, good as gold, but slavish in his adherence to the foolish old traditions.

Therefore it came about that, when the cruel dog days fell upon the town, when baby after baby became a victim to their scourge until at last it was the Brenton baby's turn, then Katharine suddenly discovered that mind was a poor weapon against incipient dysentery. She fought the disease most valiantly; she even stayed at home for two entire days, holding the baby in one arm, a fat black volume in the other hand, reading and pondering by turns. Being human and feminine and, by this time, a little tired, it is not to be wondered at that occasionally her mind wandered a little from the child to the best amount of starch for muslin frocks. Still, as a whole, she held herself fairly steady; and, by the end of the third day, she was rejoiced to find the child was on the gain. Openly and aloud, she proceeded to give testimony as concerned this test case. To Brenton she talked of it incessantly, in the hope of assisting his conversion to her standards. Unhappily, Brenton, after talking with Doctor Keltridge, and heavily bribing the nurse to hold her tongue, knew more about the causes of the cure than Katharine did, and hence his conversion was not greatly expedited by it.

It was a good ten days afterward, a good week after his talk with Doctor Keltridge, that Brenton dropped in at the Keltridges', one morning, to make his report upon the child. It was the ending of the office hour; three or four patients still were awaiting their turns for consultation. Accordingly, Olive, meeting Brenton on the steps, took him to the library to wait.

"No use your going in there to sit with all the other germs," she told him lightly, as she removed her hat pins and took off her hat. "Come in here, and tell me how the boy is getting on. Better, I hope."

"Yes, better. Still, it is slow to get him up again. Babies are such frail little things; a breath can send them up or down. Of course, I am very anxious."

Olive took swift note of the singular number of the pronoun; its very unconsciousness made it the more ominous. It was really that which framed her answer.

"Yes; but you have a treasure of a nurse. Mrs. Prather tells me that she is a host in herself."

As Olive spoke, she flattered herself that she had bridged the chasm successfully. A glance at Brenton, though, assured her that he had been momentarily aware of the existence of the chasm. Hastily she changed the subject, too hastily, as it proved, to select her new theme with care.

"My father has been telling me a little bit about your future plans, Mr. Brenton."

"My plans?"

She mistook his question utterly.

"No need to worry," she said, with a sudden accent of hauteur. "Of course, I never should think of speaking of them to any outsider. But my father has a trick of talking most things over with me; we have been alone together for so long."

"Of course. There is no reason that you shouldn't know. Besides, it will be an open secret soon. As soon as things are settled with the trustees, I shall resign."

"I am very sorry," Olive said quite simply.

His colour came.

"It is the only honourable thing for me to do, Miss Keltridge."

"I know that," she told him, with a swift return to her old downrightness. "And I am sorry for you, yourself. You must have suffered, in this whole thing, a great deal more than any of us know."

For an instant, his gray eyes deepened, burned. He started to hold out his hand to hers; then he checked the gesture.

"I have. It's not an easy thing to do, Miss Keltridge, the sliding out of a concrete and detailed theology into a something that at best is—"

She cut off his final word.

"I know. Doubting isn't so easy as most people imagine it to be. And you—It must have been fearful."

"To have had such doubts?" he assented musingly. "Yes—"

Again she cut him off, this time rather unexpectedly. Brenton was conscious of a momentary wonder whether her sympathy was less than she had led him to anticipate.

"No; to have had such beliefs, in the first place. If only they had been a little milder, you never would have distrusted them. It's nothing but the rasping surface of a creed that sets the doubts to working."

He tried to conceal a slight sense of hurt beneath his laugh at the concrete image called into being by her words.

"Like ivy poison, when you rub it, and it spreads? Perhaps." Then suddenly his eyes went grave. "The curious fact about it all, Miss Keltridge, is that our beliefs never take half the hold on us that our doubts do. My inherited notions of original sin and a violent conversion never by any chance could have upset my worldly advancement. This last phase of my querying—to phrase it mildly—is going to overturn my—" And, for the first time in her knowledge of him, Olive heard his laugh ring bitter; "my whole scheme of domestic economics."

Bitter as was his laugh, though, Brenton's face was only sad. To Olive, watching him and suddenly grown aware of his weakness, it was plain that life was taking it out of him rather badly, plain that the man before her was hungering for comprehension, comfort. What did he get of that sort, at home?

Once again, at her own question, Olive felt the chasm widening between them, felt it and instinctively detested it. Still, she could not keep her mind from lingering an instant on the wonder whether, if Brenton's wife had been sensitive, unselfish, alert to supply, in so far as lay within her, the sympathy of which he plainly was in need, the present crisis ever would have dawned. She doubted. If ever there had been a case where a wife had muddled things by her total lack of comprehension, here it was. A blind intolerance would have been nothing by comparison.

Suddenly she threw back her shoulders and lifted up her head. It was morally and socially impossible to be heaping all the blame, even of a mental crisis, on the wife. She, as a woman, owed the other woman more sufferance than that. And Brenton was disappointingly weak. No strong man would have fallen down in such a muddle, by reason of a tempest in his spiritual teapot. Besides, if he had steadied to his strain, he might perhaps have held his wife also steady, might even have prevented her allegiance to her new creed. Olive's innate sense of justice demanded division of the blame.

Yet, as the girl pronounced her judgments on both Brenton and his wife, she was conscious of an immense wave of pity which spent itself entirely upon Brenton. Brenton was weak, was futile, disappointing; nevertheless, it was plain that he was suffering keenly. And, just because the nature of his suffering was so alien to all her own life's standards, it impressed itself on Olive as the grim, silent endurance of Reed Opdyke had never done. Reed was Reed, a solid fact past all gainsaying; his point of view had become one of the necessities of her daily life. Always she could predict with just how great a degree of manliness he would bear himself. As for Brenton—

To her extreme surprise, Olive's mind stopped short, and refused to continue the comparison.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The curate, after the manner of his kind, was having tea with a feminine member of his congregation. This time, the honour had fallen upon Olive, who had received it with temperate resignation rather than exuberant joy. Divested of his bunny hood, the curate was a weedy young man with painfully good intentions and a receding chin. Furthermore, he confessed to liking caraway seed in his tea cakes. In other words, the trail of his nursery was still upon him. Accordingly, to atone for the skim-milk quality of his conversation, Olive habitually refused him cream in his tea, and squeezed in lemon juice until he cried aloud for mercy.

On this particular afternoon, quite as a matter of course, the talk had turned on Brenton. Indeed, it seemed to Olive, nowadays, that the talk invariably did turn on Brenton. All summer long, his matrimonial incongruities, to use no stronger term for the domestic ecclesiastical situation, had furnished talk for half the tea tables in town. Moreover, it was only when a man was present that any woman lifted up her voice in Katharine's defence. Left to themselves, they knew perfectly well that all the scholarly stoops and resonant voices and luminous gray eyes in all creation were not responsible for their universal sympathy for Brenton. The woman was a toad, a selfish and ambitious toad, hopping, hopping, hopping up across the surface of the human pyramid before her. However, in the presence of an occasional tea-drinking husband, one or the other of them embraced convention and talked feelingly of Mrs. Brenton's virtues. As a rule, though, she confessed to herself later on that she had been insistently harping upon a non-existent entity.

Of late, though, a new element had crept into the talk. Without a definite word of any sort having been spoken, there was a widening circle of belief that Brenton's days at Saint Peter's were coming to an end; that he had stumbled over some obstacle in his professional pathway; in short, that he had come an ecclesiastical cropper. Just the form taken by that cropper, just when his relations with Saint Peter's would cease, just why and wherefore, just what would be the next page of Brenton's history: all this was still an enigma past all finding out. For that very reason, it added untold zest to all the cups of tea. Indeed, it had quite ousted the subject of Reed Opdyke from the public mind. Reed, in his own time, had been the one great theme. As the months ran on, though, he presented very little variety to the general eye, and one's subject must show variety at any cost. Therefore Opdyke was abandoned, and Brenton substituted in his place.

Questioned, Olive would have found it hard to tell why the inveterate harping upon Brenton vexed her so. She had been frankly irate, earlier, when the talk had turned on Opdyke; more than once, she had freed her mind and departed on her heels. However, that had been very different; very, very different. Opdyke was an individual; his predicament was a purely personal matter, concerning himself alone. He did not talk of it, himself. Therefore it seemed to Olive that there was no especial reason that all the women in town, some of them total strangers, should be babbling unceasingly about it, with every degree of curiosity and of mawkish sentiment.

But Brenton, partly by virtue of his position in the public eye, partly by reason of something in his make-up which led him to clamour forth his intellectual hardships to any sympathetic ear that offered; by that same token, Brenton seemed to the girl to be the more in need of calm protection. Reed, shut away from all the clamour, was powerless to defend himself. Brenton, timing his steps to the rhythm of the chorus, even giving an occasional metronomic signal to that chorus, was equally powerless to suppress it. The fact that the lack of power was in himself, not in circumstance: this only made it the more piteous. And Olive, listening, did pity Brenton, pity him increasingly, albeit with the pity which is not at all akin to love. It was not his own fault entirely that his virile strength was crossed by the wavering, widening line of weakness that kept him from shutting his teeth upon the results of his spiritual manoeuvres; not his own fault that his analytic logic was a long way sounder than his common sense.

"Two lumps, Mr. Ross?" Olive queried, over the second cup of tea. She knew quite well that the question would stamp her once and for all as a careless hostess. Nevertheless, she asked it, as her only means of deflecting the talk from Brenton.

The curate gave a soft and patient sigh.

"No sugar, Miss Keltridge," he corrected her gently; "and, if you don't mind, please not quite so much lemon. There!" He lifted his hand appealingly.

But Olive, smiling brightly back at him, gave the uncut half of lemon another squeeze in her strong and supple fingers.

"Oh, but you will learn to like it in time, Mr. Ross. Then you will wonder how you even tolerated it in any other way."

"I dare say," the curate murmured meekly, as he took the cup.

"Indeed, I know," Olive assured him easily. "When I was young, I used to take it with all sorts of cream in it; but now—" She shook her head. Then she added suavely, "You are sure it is quite all right, Mr. Ross?"

The curate took a courteous taste. Then he strangled a little, not so much, though, at the tea as at the coming falsehood.

"Oh, very!" he said politely, and then he took to stirring his tea with suspicious fervour.

"How strange it always seems to have the town fill up again!" Olive observed, still determined to keep the talk away from Brenton. "And yet, we miss the girls, when they are gone."

"We miss them at the church," the curate answered with unexpected energy. "They increase the offertory at least twenty-five per cent, and they keep the choir boys from flatting on their upper notes. I had never seen a girls' college, till I came here; but I can't help thinking it has its own disadvantages. I like them in the aggregate, Miss Keltridge; but I can't seem to get on with them individually. They are so distressingly young. I leave all that to Mr. Brenton."

"He has been most successful," Olive assented tamely.

"Yes. He has a way with women, as they say; he manages them by the ears. At least—I mean—" The curate, confounded by the hideous mental picture that he had evoked, was floundering helplessly.

"Exactly," Olive assented once more.

The curate rallied.

"And yet, they all adore him," he concluded. "That is the strange thing about Mr. Brenton, Miss Keltridge. He manages most women grandly," the curate, sure that he had retrieved his error, in his self-gratulation promptly slipped into a second one; "but that suffragette wife of his—"

"Mrs. Brenton is not a suffragette," Olive interposed hurriedly.

"No? Well, she might as well be. She's Christian Scientist, and that is only the next thing to it. Besides, she is terribly masterful, is Mrs. Brenton. Take the case of the baby, for instance: no matter what happens to be the trouble with the little one, Mrs. Brenton won't allow a grain of calomel inside the house. I call it—"

"Olive!" It was the voice of the doctor, speaking from the threshold; and the voice was weighted with anxiety. "Can you be excused for just one minute?"

With a little gesture of apology, Olive left her place beside the tray, and went in the direction of the voice. She overtook her father in his consulting-room, where he was pacing the floor, fists in his pockets, hair awry and his face singularly dark and haggard.

"Olive," he said abruptly, as his daughter came in sight; "can you possibly send off that snippet, and go down to the Opdykes' for an hour?"

"I suppose I can. Is anything the matter?"

"Yes, and no. There's nothing new, exactly; but they all are—getting on their nerves. I've been down there, half the afternoon, trying to steady them; but it is a case where they need a woman. If you can go, Olive? And don't come back, until you can't do another thing for any of them. No matter if it does take it out of you; I can patch you up again, all right. And they all want you. Mrs. Opdyke asked if you would come." The doctor came to a full halt, his face very red, his eyes suffused, and fell to rubbing both hands through and through his hair.

Olive waited a full minute before she spoke. When she did speak, her clear young voice was steady and authoritative.

"Father, what is it? Something must be very wrong. Is Reed—worse?"

"No."

"Then what is it?"

The doctor's face grew redder still. Then, of a sudden, the words flew from him in a great gulp of woe.

"He told me, early this afternoon, what he claims to have known surely for a long, long time: that there is no chance for him to gain; that the lower part of his body is absolutely dead; that all our treatment, all our experimenting on it has not affected it at all; that, till the day he dies, he's bound to stay there just as you see him now, half of him perfectly well, half of him a senseless log."

Olive whitened, whitened. There came a faint blue line about her mouth, and her eyes glittered, hot and dry. Nevertheless,—

"You believe it?" she asked steadily.

"I didn't, at the first. In the end, he made me."

The white changed into gray, and the blue line widened.

"I'll go at once," she said briefly. "Please tell Mr. Ross I have been called out on an important errand."

For Olive Keltridge would not flinch, even in this present crisis. If Reed was in this final, consummating agony, and needed her, it was for her to go.

Five minutes later, the curate safely shunted to the front door and through it, the doctor came back again to Olive, a wine glass in his hand. She told him with a gesture that she preferred to be without it.

"You needn't worry," she said quietly, as she settled her hat and gave a touch or two to her crisp white gown; "I promise you I won't disgrace you. I shall go through it better, if I rely just on my nerves, not on a stimulant."

"But it is going to be a bad half-hour for you, Olive."

"Do you suppose I don't know that? Reed and I have been chums since I was three years old; I don't want to watch—"

But the doctor interrupted.

"It isn't Reed you'll have to watch. He will be watching you, trying to let you down as easily as he can. It's like the boy to take in the fact that this thing isn't going to be altogether easy for a few of us others to accept. As far as he is concerned, he's very quiet; his main anxiety appears to be for the effect of the shock on other people. You won't have any scene with Reed; he'll look out for that. It's his father and mother who are the present problem."

"They are—" Olive hesitated for a word.

"The professor is crushed, stunned. It never once has seemed to cross his mind that this thing could be final; and now the fact has knocked him over. As for Mrs. Opdyke, I worry less. She has lost all grip on herself and is hysterical, with Ramsdell in attendance till I can send somebody in. That leaves Reed alone, to hear the echoes of the general unsettlement, and to think them over. Damn it all, Olive! It's bad enough to be knocked out, in the first place; but it's a long way worse to be out of it and to know that you are being wailed over. Mrs. Opdyke is having a veritable wake. For heaven's sake, hurry down there and see if you can't help Ramsdell to steady her down. If you can't, then let her wake it out to her heart's content, and you go up and talk to Reed. Else, he'll go mad."

And Olive went.

As the doctor had foretold, she found the house in psychological chaos. In the library, the professor sat alone beside his desk. Of a sudden, he had turned to the likeness of an old, old man, shrunken and bowed with a grief which, taking his vitality drop by drop, had left him in this present, final crisis, inert, passive, apathetic. He greeted Olive listlessly, answered a question so vaguely as to warn her that any effort on her part to rouse him would be worse than useless, worse because it would change his apathy into renewed despair. For a few minutes, the girl stood beside him, watching him silently, realizing that the shock had been so sudden that it had taken away the power to feel. Like a man knocked out in battle, he only had a dim realization that he had been shot down, pierced in some vital part. It would take him a long time to become aware of just the nature of his injury.

In the next room, Ramsdell was busy with Mrs. Opdyke, very busy, as Olive saw, once she crossed the threshold. She also saw that Ramsdell was as gentle as a woman in the crisis, as gentle and infinitely more strong. There was really nothing for her to do, nothing that Ramsdell, trained for such emergencies, could not do far, far better. And the hysterical sobbing, the moans of the mother's anguish, could be plainly heard through all the silent house. Olive pitied Mrs. Opdyke most intensely; but she was conscious of a sudden longing to administer a restorative box on the ear. It was unthinkable, to her young, elastic strength, that any one could be so weak as to throw over self-control completely; unthinkable that any mother could become so strident in her selfish agony of pity for her stricken son, when she could so much better be holding herself and him quite steady by her brave acceptance of untoward fortune. But then, Mrs. Opdyke was an older woman, and of more feminine mould. Besides, she had had an eighteen-month-long strain, and, moreover, she was Reed's mother, while she herself, Olive, was nothing but a rank outsider, and consequently callous. She did her best to dismiss her longing to smite the wailing Mrs. Opdyke; but the blue ring once more settled about her lips, as she went slowly up the stairs.

In Reed's room everything was curiously unchanged, curiously unlike the spiritual chaos below stairs. The September sunshine came sifting in through the tree tops to dapple with level spots of light the silky surface of the rug; the soft breeze stirred the curtains and then passed on to ruffle the curly mop of bright brown hair that gleamed like polished chestnuts in the sun. After the excitement and the tragedy of the lower rooms, this place seemed as quiet as a sanctuary; and Reed's face matched the quiet, as he turned his eyes to Olive.

"I suppose you know it, too," he said quite steadily. "I wanted to tell you, myself; but I couldn't seem to brace myself to the actual putting it into words. No; don't go to spilling any tears, Olive; it is too late for that. In fact," and then, just for a moment, the hand outstretched on the rug shut till the nails bit into the softness of the palm; "there is a certain relief in having it out and over, and all settled. We both of us have known we were facing the chance of it. Now we know the worst, and can take it as it comes."

Despite the little quiver of his voice upon the final words, there was a curious peace in his face, the light like nothing else on land and sea. Olive watched it, for a minute, through the blinding, burning tears. Then, forgetful of her promise to her father, she flung herself down on her knees beside the couch, and fell to sobbing like a little child.

She steadied herself soon, however; but not until, with a greater effort than she ever knew, Reed stretched out his arm to its fullest reach and laid his hand upon her cheek, her hair.

"Yes, Olive," he said, very low. "I am glad it hurts you just a little. I wanted you to care."

Then sharply he withdrew his hand and put it out of sight beneath the rug. When once more he spoke, his voice had its old resonance.

"Don't take it too hard, Olive," he bade her cheerily. "I was rather a selfish beast not to have told you earlier, instead of letting you go on hoping for the unattainable. Feeling better? That's good. Of course, we were bound to make our moan together; we've been chums too long to miss that, and there's much more comfort to be taken in a duet of misery than in a pair of separate solos. Now just tell me once for all that you are infernally sorry, and we'll consider that matter settled for all time. Sure you're all right? There's some wine, over in that closet. No? Well, then I'd like to suggest that your hat is rampantly askew. Harrowing scenes aren't good for millinery. Yes, that's straight. Now do haul up a chair, and we'll proceed to talk this thing out to the bitter end. There's no denying that I've made a mess of life by my own recklessness; but apparently I've got to go on living, just the same. Therefore, if you don't mind, suppose we plan how I can go to work to pick up the pieces."

And while, below stairs, Reed Opdyke's parents were prostrate in their sorrow, it was in this fashion that Olive Keltridge, sitting by his side, tried to help him to face forward steadily, and to pick up the useful fragments left of his broken life.



CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Saint Peter's Parish was fifteen miles and a consequent half-hour of time from the nearest fount of Christian Science teaching. Hence it resulted that only rarely had Katharine been used to refresh herself in the tenets of her new theology. In part, this came from her natural self-reliance, coupled with an indolence which made her shrink from the needful effort to catch an early train. In part, it came out of Brenton's heedful planning. Regretting, as he could not fail to do, his wife's allegiance to a creed so alien to the shreds of his own belief, not daring to oppose her absolutely in its observance, he contrived to strew her path with the accumulated petty obstacles which are so much more insurmountable than any single great one. He never set back the hands of the clock to make her miss her train; neither did he lock her in her room. He merely found out at the last minute that he needed one of the small personal services which only a wife can give.

And Katharine, by the very nature of her new and optimistic creed, was powerless to stand out against him. Earlier, fathoming his purposes, she would have raged, have burst into a passion. Now she could only minister to him with an impassive calm, while, in her secret heart, she was piously commending him to the attention of the Universal Mind for discipline. Unhappily for Katharine, however, the Universal Mind appeared to be engaged in some other direction, and Brenton, for the present, was left to go scot free.

This had been the state of the case, ever since the early spring, and Katharine felt the private and personal fount of sanctity within her to be running dry. She was just making up her mind to break away at any cost, when a new complication arose in the person of the baby. Not that Katharine's devotion to her child would have led her to any especial sacrifice, however. Indeed, there was no need for that. The nurse had proved herself an efficient substitute in any normal crisis; and any abnormal one, Katharine believed, could be controlled as well by absent treatment as by present. Unhappily, Katharine had reckoned without taking into account either Brenton's wilful allegiance to the old-fashioned notions of disease, or the nurse's abject allegiance to the father of her puny charge.

For, as the time ran on, no one could deny that the child was puny, that his birthright of health was dwindling fast. And, while it dwindled, the heat came on, and then the stifling dog days. It was a season when the lustiest of children wilted with the damp, depressing heat; and the Brenton baby, never lusty, wilted with them. Katharine treated him with conscientious regularity; but dog days and consequent dysentery proved too strenuous a claim for her to fight alone, and more and more eagerly she longed for the succour of the nearest local representative of the Mother Church.

Nevertheless, the more she longed, the more she shrank from carrying into effect her longing. Three days before this time, Brenton had come in upon her, sitting beside the weazen child, her eyes on space, her lips moving in silent self-communion. Across the room, the nurse was sobbing into her handkerchief. Now and then, between her sobs, she lifted up her irate eyes to glare upon the placid face beside the little crib.

Brenton had asked a question. Before Katharine could answer, the nurse had cut in and given him a few facts: hours and amounts and consequent symptoms which she deemed disturbing. And then, in a voice which made a curious contrast to the agitation of the nurse, Katharine had urged them to wait, quiet, until she had put the little human creature, suffering from some hidden sin or lack of faith, into a more total communion with the Infinite, the Healer; had even begged them not to allow their ill-concealed doubts to delay the perfect cure.

The nurse, heedless of the Infinite, the Healer, had interposed with a few more facts; had pointed out that physical mal-nutrition can not be made good by a diet of compressed air, however theological that air may be. The baby needed, not the Infinite, but finite stimulants and predigested foods. It needed to be left in peace and quiet, not be stirred up to listen to what, in her increasing ire, the nurse termed mummery and flummery. As for sin, the poor baby wasn't the sinner. It hadn't gone and neglected its only son—

In mercy, less for the logic of the nurse and the consequent feelings of his wife, than for his own nerves, Brenton interrupted. Like most men between two women, he only made the matter infinitely worse. There was a discussion; then there were words. Then Brenton lost his temper and departed on his heels, leaving his wife, the nurse, and the fretful baby wailing aloud in a discordant trio. As a natural result, Katharine forgot the needs of the child and sought the healing contact of the All-Mind upon her own account, while the nurse, drying her tears in haste, seized the child in one arm, the opportunity in the other, and administered the simple remedies she always kept on hand. Brenton, meanwhile, sought Doctor Keltridge. Half an hour later, he was back again, the doctor by his side.

The old doctor, dragged helter-skelter from his laboratory, was in wildest disarray, and his eyes were still a little vague, as he followed Brenton up the stairs to the nursery. Across the threshold of the nursery, however, the vagueness vanished; the eyes grew keen as sharp-pointed bits of steel, yet strangely gentle, while he sat down beside the crib and laid one mammoth brown hand above the scrawny little claw. Then, for just a minute, the keen eyes narrowed to a line. A minute afterward, he looked up and smiled across at Brenton.

"Yes, the little chap is sick, this time; it is about as well you called me in. It's been a bad summer for the children; he's had to take his turn with the rest of them, and it has pulled him down. Poor little youngster!" And one huge forefinger gently hooked itself into the neck of the little gown, drew it away and disclosed the piteous leanness of the throat and chest beneath, the fragile leanness of the baby bird just fallen from the nest. "Poor little youngster!" he repeated. "He has had a hard time of it in this world. Sometimes it does seem as if they didn't start with quite a fair chance."

"Doctor," the word came with something that was very like a groan; "I have done my best."

The doctor stopped him instantly.

"Brenton, I know that. You've had a bad time, too. Don't think for a minute I am forgetting that, even if I don't say too much about it. It's extra hard, in this case, for the boy was perfectly strong, when he was born."

"You mean—" Brenton's mouth had suddenly gone so dry that he could not finish out the phrase.

The doctor did not falter.

"Brenton, if I am to help you keep the boy, I shall have to talk to you brutally. The baby was born all right, healthy as a child could be, tough and strong enough for a dozen children. However, every baby needs a little nursing, needs a little dosing now and then, even if he is healthy. That is what your baby hasn't had. Mrs. Brenton, with the best will in the world, has fed him any sort of milk from any sort of cows, and she has counted on the Infinite to sterilize the milkman's fingers. And, in all probability, the Infinite didn't do it. Too busy, likely, in sterilizing the youngster's mind. Then, when a dose of honest castor oil would have made good the trouble, she gave him a dose of Science and Health, instead. It may be all right in theory; in this practical case, she might just as well have rolled up the inspired pages into pills and have poked them down the baby's throat." And then the doctor pulled himself up. "However, that's done with. Now, if you'll stand by me and see that my orders are carried out, I'll fall to work and try my best to undo the harm. You'll see me through, Brenton? It will keep you on duty steadily; but it is the one thing that will save your child."

"Of course. Go on." Then Brenton shut his teeth.

"Nurse, have you been able to give—" And the doctor put her through a searching catechism. Then, "So far, so good. I am glad you kept your head; it was the one chance. Now, suppose we look a little closer."

To Brenton, watching intently, it seemed almost impossible that those great, acid-stained hands could stir, then lift, the little form so tenderly. Indeed, once on the doctor's knee, the baby nestled weakly to the curve of his rough coat sleeve, the heavy lids lifted and the weazen face lighted with the ghost of a tired little smile. Then the lids fell heavily once more; but once more, also, there was the faintly nestling motion of the wee, weary body against the strong, kind arm. And, above the little body, the doctor's face, intently bent over the child, was lighted with a swift reflection from the greater light of the All-Father, yet above.

"Poor little kiddie!" he said slowly. "It's a close shave for him, Brenton; but, if you'll stand by and help, please God, we'll save him yet."

And Brenton did stand by, all evening long and all the night. The nurse was with him, watching. Katharine, furious beneath her scientific calm, came and went at intervals; but the doctor's bottle and spoon were in the breast pocket of Brenton's clerical coat, the doctor's written schedule was set down in duplicate on Brenton's cuff. And Brenton, too tired to be really weary, never once left his chair beside the frilly crib.

Later on, he never could remember what were his thoughts, that night. Being human and very wide awake, he must have thought something; but, ransack his mind as he would, nothing coherent ever came back to him out of the half-forgotten chaos. Indeed, it was as if his whole nature, body, mind, and spirit, were focussing itself upon one passionate desire that his child might live. Not that he consciously prayed. What was there that he could pray to, or for? Laws did not stop their working, to prolong one baby life. Useless to ask for mere futilities. Useless and totally irreverent to insult the Deity by suggesting to Him, however prayerfully, that He had made a bad mistake; that, were His attention only called to the mistake, doubtless He would be glad to set it right while time still remained to Him. And, if the mistake were not set right? If—well—if the child did—die, what then? Did that weazen little body, that mind as yet unopened to any but the simplest of sensations: did these hold within themselves the germs of conscious immortality? Or would the tiny flake of snow upon the desert's dusty waste vanish within its hour or two, be gone? The bud, cut from the rose, may open a bit, when placed in water; then it fades, and dies, and leaves no seed behind. In the same way, the budding life, cut from the parent stem—Who had cut it, though: God, or Katharine, or merely inexorable law? Brenton smothered a groan. Then, because law was inexorable, he cast aside his wonderings, looked at his cuff, at his watch, and shut his fingers upon the bottle and the spoon.

As for Katharine, it would have been well-nigh impossible for any one outside the influence of the mysterious tenets of her scientific creed, to analyze all she felt, that night. Moreover, her insulted creed, had the truth been told, seemed to herself scarcely more to be considered than her insulted self. The child was her own property. She had given it birth; it was for her alone to dictate its experiences. It was her child; not in any actual sense the child of Brenton. And Brenton, too, was hers. Little as she might have come to love him—for by now Katharine had passed the epoch where she reckoned him as anything beyond a subject for critical analysis and consequent deploring—little as she might have come to love him, he was yet her husband and so, in a sense, her chattel. It was for her to rule them both, her husband and her child; she should be dominant, they humbly subject. And now, all of a sudden, they both of them had thrown off her dominance, the child unconsciously, Brenton of his full volition. Apart from any question of the theologic controversy, the household had cast aside her sway, had, in a sense and temporarily, deposed her from her domestic throne, she the strong one of them all. Only her stoically optimistic creed kept Katharine, alone in her own room, from biting at her carefully-groomed finger tips.

And, besides, there was the question of the theologic controversy. What right had Brenton, or the nurse, or the meddlesome old doctor with his hair on end and without his cuffs, to come inside her house and overset her religion? To elevate their own, instead? It was her religion, just as it was her house, her child. And her religion was good. Else, she never would have adopted it. What matter if their cruder minds must have the crass physical details of bottles and spoons with which to fight sin-born disease? What if their narrow blindness destroyed their vision of the all-embracing, all-compelling Mind, source of Holiness, and of Knowledge, and, by consequence, of Health? Should she, by reason of their ignoble interferences and persecutions, yield her own allegiance to the Higher Light? Not she! Rather would she fling herself, heart and soul, into the freshening tide of her own visible church. Out of its ritual only, could she gain new fervour to bear and endure and then, if need be, fight for her spiritual freedom. It was only what the martyrs of old had done; only the work which fell upon the upholders of any new religion.

Katharine, walking the floor of her own room, that night, forgot the holy calm born of the Universal Mind and its optimistic tenets, and by slow degrees lashed herself into a scientific replica of a nervous tantrum. Described in unscientific language, she was a mere shaking bundle of injured and angry egotism. In the language of her creed, she was a suffering, striving martyr. Her martyrdom, moreover, led her to order breakfast served to her in her own room. It also led her to eat hungrily, in the intervals of making her toilet for the train.

She was already hatted and gloved, when Brenton discovered her intention.

"You are not going out, Katharine?" he asked, with the curious lack of tact which all men show at times.

"I am."

"But—the baby?"

"Baby is better. I have just been in to see him," she replied, as she buttoned her coat, and then flicked a grain of dust from its sleeve.

Brenton shut his lips for just a minute. Then,—

"Katharine," he said very gravely; "you must have seen that the baby is only just alive."

Katharine's glance was resting anxiously upon a drop or two of water on the fingers of her glove. She seemed not to have heard her husband's words. He repeated them.

"Katharine, can't you see that our baby, our little boy, is going fast?"

Katharine looked up.

"Nonsense, Scott!" she said, with perfect calm. "The baby is as well as he was, last night. If he is so desperately ill, the nurse wouldn't have gone away and left him all alone, as I found him. The nurse knows what she is about; that is," swiftly she corrected herself; "she would, if Doctor Keltridge would let her alone. If anything does happen to the child, it will be through you."

"Through me?" Brenton whitened.

"Yes," Katharine answered, reckless of her husband's hurt, reckless, too, of the probable state of his nerves, after his all-night vigil. "I could have cured baby, if you had kept out of it. Your doctors' poisons have done harm enough; but your fears, your distrust, have been the final touch. If you had let me alone, I could have saved him. Even now, it may not be too late." She turned, her chin in the air and her eyes bright with anger, although about her lips there lurked a little smile of pleasure in what seemed to her her own excessive self-control.

Brenton's self-control, though, was the greater. However much his voice might shake, the hand he laid upon her arm was singularly steady.

"Katharine, my dear wife," he said; "I must beg you not to go away from the house just now."

"Why not?" Katharine's voice was metallic in its hardness.

"I am afraid you will be sorry for ever, if you do. The baby—"

She shook his hand away.

"It is for the baby I am going, Scott. Here and alone, I am powerless to counteract the harm you do. I must have help."

"What help?" he asked her hoarsely, while his eyes, almost unseeingly, were busy with a thin trickle of water that clung to the front breadths of her pale-brown gown.

"The help of my church, of their combined prayers. Alone, I can do nothing. I must ask them all to help me, if my baby boy is to be saved from the consequences of his father's doubts."

"Katharine!"

But, with a flutter of her skirts, she had vanished from the room, smiling and self-reliant and very, very smug. To her belief, she had borne down the ignorant oppression of the unbeliever; she had given testimony to her indomitable confidence in her new creed; she was about to give still stronger testimony to the indomitable healing power of that same creed.

And Brenton, left alone, shut his teeth hard upon the ugly words that struggled to his lips. Then, white and wan, less from his all-night vigil than from the five-minute altercation with his wife, he turned away and re-entered the room where the child was lying.

It needed no eye skilled in watching the advance of death to be aware that the little life was ebbing fast. The look of waxiness had been increasing, all night long; the breathing was becoming fitful; the tiny figure seemed relaxed in every weakening limb. The eyes, though heavy and lustreless, were wide, wide open, and the white little lips wavered into a ghost of a smile, as Brenton crossed the threshold. Then one little hand stirred ever so slightly, strove to lift itself in greeting, failed.

"Daddy's boy!" Brenton said, as bravely as he could.

The ghost of the smile grew a bit stronger, as Brenton sat down beside the crib and, after his custom of these later days, held out one brown forefinger. Instantly, the wan little claw closed around the finger, the baby nestled slightly, and then fell into a light doze.

The nurse's voice, when she spoke, failed to penetrate the doze.

"I called up Doctor Keltridge, and he said he had a broken hip to set at once. It may be two hours, before he can get here. He told me to keep up the stimulant."

"You have used it?"

"Once, while you were talking to Mrs. Brenton. It is nearly time, again."

"Did it——" Brenton's voice failed him utterly.

The nurse hedged.

"It is too soon yet to know. The second dose ought to show more."

But the second dose did not show, nor yet the third. After the fourth one, the nurse looked up.

"Can you telephone to Mrs. Brenton?" she asked.

"You think?"

"That she should be here. Can you get her?"

And then Brenton was forced to confess the truth. The nurse accepted the truth as mercifully as she was able.

"Poor little woman!" she said. "Isn't it wonderful the hold the thing gets—"

Her question was never ended. Instead, she laid her hand on Brenton's sleeve.

"Look!" she whispered.

All at once, the doze had ended. With its ending, all look of tiredness and suffering had gone away out of the baby face. Instead, the little eyes were eager; the little lips were breaking into a smile of utter joyousness; the little arms were up-stretched strongly, the hands wide open and shaking in happy recognition.

"Nurse!" Then Brenton steadied himself with a mighty effort, and bent forward to hold out his arms. "Daddy take boy?" he urged gently, in his accustomed phrase.

There came an instantaneous check upon the baby's eagerness. The head turned, while the eyes met Brenton's without a spark of response. Then once again the little arms shot upward above the brightening face where the eager look of recognition was changing fast to a happiness ineffable, to a glad surety that the vision opened to the baby eyes alone was far beyond the dreams which mortal mind could fashion.

Then the little arms dropped backward; but the ineffable happiness remained.

Gently, very gently, Scott Brenton folded the baby hands across the muslin nightie, and smoothed the ruffled baby hair above the waxy brow. Then, half unconsciously,—

"For Thine is the Kingdom," he said.

And then, a little later on, he wondered why he had said it.



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 write A Portia of the Rockies when, 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.



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."