Chapter Ten

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_ It was not until a good two weeks later that Olive Keltridge came into any actual contact with the new rector. At the Dennison dinner, she had been too busy in dodging the conversational assaults of the rector's lady to pay any great amount of attention to the rector himself. Since that time, she had viewed Brenton only with the height of the chancel steps between them. However, Olive was conscious that the man interested her, even at that distance; and it was with some degree of impatience that she confessed her interest to young Dolph Dennison who, as a rule, was her safety valve. "I despise a woman who goes mad about the clergy, Dolph, and I despise the way this new rector-man of ours keeps my eyes glued upon him, all the time he's preaching. It isn't the quality of his sermons, either; it is something inherent in the man himself that causes me to watch him." Dolph Dennison laughed with the callousness of a wayward boy. He was years younger than his brother, the professor. Moreover, he had never taken any especial pains to expedite the processes of his growing up. "You'll recover, Olive; I have seen you enthused like this, before. As for Brenton, it's a mere case of burbling genteel platitudes in a marvellous voice. Even I, though I deplore the platitudes, find my own gooseflesh rising in response to his larynx. It's a tremendous asset to a man, that! Some day, when I have the time, I'll work it out into a series of equations: heart and brain and larynx as the unknown quantities to be properly equated, so much brain for so much, or so little, larynx. Thanks, no. I won't come in. I'm late for luncheon now. You will be at the Evans tea, to-morrow afternoon?" Nodding cheerily, young Dennison went on his way, leaving Olive to ponder upon the accuracy of his diagnosis. Was it only larynx, after all? Or had the new young rector something back of it, something that singled him out from the ruck of men, and held him up as worthy of attention? Olive's eyes grew thoughtful, for an instant, at the question. Then the laugh came back into them again, the while she thought of Mrs. Brenton. It was only the next afternoon that Brenton came by appointment to call on Doctor Keltridge. There were certain minor matters to be discussed between the rector and his senior warden, before it appeared really wise to bring them up in open meeting. To both men, it seemed possible to discuss them with greater freedom from interruption at the doctor's house than at the rectory. Therefore had been the appointment between them. According to his custom, Brenton kept his appointment to the very letter, and the clocks were striking three, when the Keltridge maid deposited him in the Keltridge drawing-room. The doctor showed himself less punctual, however, and a good quarter of an hour elapsed before steps were heard in the hall outside. Moreover, before Brenton had time to question to himself the weight of those same steps, the door was pushed open to admit, not a keen-faced and grizzly doctor, but a totally apologetic Olive. "Mr. Brenton?" she said, with a slight lift, as of question, in her voice. "Really, I am so penitent at the message I am bringing you. The maid told me you were here. Then, after a while, she came back again and told me she couldn't find my father anywhere." With a courteous little gesture, Brenton interrupted her apology and half rose from his chair. "Really, it's not at all a matter for apology, Miss Keltridge. I can come again, some other day. Your father is a busy man, I know." But Olive stayed him with scanty ceremony. "No; wait, Mr. Brenton. I hadn't finished my tale. Besides, when you have lived in town a little longer, you'll know that nobody ever does apologize for my father; we all revel in his dear old absurdities. Sit down, please. He will be here before very long." Brenton did sit down, the while he suppressed a vague question regarding the filial nature of the word absurdities. Then he yielded to the merriment in Olive's eyes, and laughed outright and boyishly. "I've heard something of the sort already, Miss Keltridge," he confessed. "What was it, this time?" For an instant, Olive paused, astonished at the change which had come over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as Dolph Dennison himself. "This time? I went to see, went to the laboratory, though the maid had told me he wasn't in there. She had knocked twice; then she had opened the door to look in. At first, I agreed with her. Then I heard a little noise, over in a corner behind the table. There on the floor, the flat floor, sat my father, sixty-five years old. His hair was all on end, and his cheek was smudged with something yellow, and he was as happy as a baby in a sand pile. Doing?" Olive made a helpless little gesture. "How should I know? I'm no student of germs. He had a row of glass pans in front of him, with hideous messes in them, and he appeared to be sounding the depths of iniquity in them with a small glass divining rod." Then their eyes met above the finished story, and together the two of them burst out laughing, like a pair of merry children. "You think he will become visible, in course of time?" Brenton asked her. She shook her head, as she laughed again. "I trust so, Mr. Brenton; but, of course, nobody ever can predict. He knows you are here. At least," swiftly she amended her phrase; "he did know it. How long the fact stays by him is another question. If you were only a germ, now----" She surveyed him dubiously. "You wouldn't care to go into the laboratory?" she asked him. A sudden light flashed up into Scott Brenton's face, the dazzle of a flame long buried, never entirely to be extinguished. "If I might! Wouldn't it disturb him, though?" But Olive had seen the lighting of the quiet face, and her curiosity was aroused. What was there in the mere mention of a laboratory that could so transform a humdrum little rector into a thing of fire? That it was the laboratory, Olive never stopped to question. She was far too sane, too used to the tame-tabby-cat propensities of youthful rectors, to imagine for a moment that the enthusiasm had come out of the chance to escape from her society. Therefore she decided that, for the present, she would keep this particular rector to herself, on the off-chance of discovering the real source of his enthusiasm. Her knowledge of her father's habits assured her, beyond doubt, that later on, much later, there would still be plenty of time for the laboratory visit. Accordingly, she answered Brenton's question with flat discouragement. "Probably," she told him quite uncompromisingly. "However, it is good for him to be disturbed, once in a while, even if he doesn't always take it so very nicely." With palpable regret, Brenton settled back again in his chair. "Oh, well, I'd hate to be disturbing him," he said politely. "Better stay here and wait," Olive advised him. "It can't be long before he comes, and some of those glass pans were very awful." "Do you think so? One never really minds a laboratory smell, after the first whiff of it. It seems to go into the system once for all, at the start. After," this time, the regret was even more palpable; "one always rather longs to get back into it." Olive smiled. "So I have noticed, with my father." Then her accent changed, grew less conventional. "You have had it, then, Mr. Brenton?" "Of another sort. I had three years in a chemical laboratory, when I was in college," he told her simply. "Really? And you liked it?" His voice dropped by a whole octave, thrilled with a new resonance which, for some reason that she could not analyze then or after, set the girl's nerves all a-quiver. It was the voice of a man who, for the first time, is confessing aloud his master passion. "It made life over for me," he said gravely. "Then--Forgive me, if I have no right to ask the question. But one generally keeps on with a thing like that." Olive was painfully aware that her curiosity, however she wrapped it up in apologies, was most unjustifiable. Scott Brenton, however, did not appear to find it so. Too simple-minded and downright to obtrude his personal history, he also was too simple-minded to conceal it. "I should have kept on with it, at any cost," he answered; "only for the sake of my mother. She was a widow without much money; she was giving all she had to educate me, and her heart was set on--something else." If Olive noted the little pause, she had at least the super-feminine tact to ignore it. "Your priesthood?" He nodded slowly. "After a fashion,--yes." This time, the pause seemed to her entirely natural. "She must be very happy now," she answered. "Saint Peter's is a dear old church, mellow enough in its traditions to make up for its hopelessly new architecture; and I am sure you'll love this sleepy town." But it was plain to her that Brenton, quite oblivious to her words, was pursuing his own train of thought. Out of it he spoke. "My mother died, two years ago, Miss Keltridge." Her reply came promptly. "How glad you must be that she lived to know that her wishes had been carried out!" This time, the pause was a good deal longer. Without Olive's in the least suspecting it, the invincible honour of the man before her was struggling with his reticence. Should he absorb a praise to which he had no right; or should he thrust his confidence upon her at this early stage of their acquaintance? Honour won out. "Only in part," he said a little sadly. "Really, Miss Keltridge, there's no especial reason I should bore you with all this, except that I don't like to be caught, sailing under false colours. I wanted to be a chemist of some sort or other, something experimental and theoretical, if I could; and they told me that I could. Sometimes I wish they hadn't. It would have simplified things a good deal, if I never had found it out. And my mother, all the time, had been denying herself in order to prepare me to preach the bluest sort of Calvinism. I found that it was going to break her heart, if I gave up the plan, so I gave up the chemistry, instead, and took the preaching. Unfortunately, though, in the meantime, the chemistry--and some other things--had made me also give up the Calvinism. And so, in the end of all things, even my preaching seemed to her a wretched compromise." His eyes were fixed upon the carpet, and he could not see her face; but the gentleness in her young voice set his pulses pounding. In all his life up to this hour, such gentleness never had been meant for him. His mother was too stern; Catia too metallic. As for other women, he had never been in sufficiently short range of them, psychologically speaking, to be aware whether they meant to be gentle to him or not. "I think," Olive was saying; "that she understands it better now. Anyway, you always will be glad of the choice you made." His eyes still on the carpet at his feet, Scott Brenton spoke moodily. "I wish I knew," he said. And then he was aghast at the consciousness that, before this comparative stranger, and a girl at that, he had taken down the barriers before the secret of his disappointment. Happily, however, Olive was serenely unconscious of either barriers or secret. Instead, she was intent on preventing any retro-active regrets upon the part of a devoted son. "All creeds are a good deal alike, just as they say all roads lead to Rome," she reminded him, with a curious crossing of Mrs. Brenton's mental trail. "The preaching, after all, is the main thing, that and the priestly life; it doesn't make much difference whether you wear a stole, or a gown and bands. And as for the chemistry," she laughed lightly; "if you ever feel your work in that was wasted, just go and talk to the head professor here. Only just the other day, I heard him laying down the law to father, claiming that his laboratory was the only open door to logic, the only training school where one can find out whether his elements can be combined safely, or whether they will explode and, what's a good deal more to the point, explode him with them." The laugh came back to Brenton's face. Once more Olive wondered at its charm. "There's something in his theory," he admitted. "Everything, according to his notion. The last I heard, the dear man apparently was trying to get himself annexed to the literary courses. He declared in open faculty meeting, the other day, that a proper training in chemistry would kill off a good fifty per cent of the modern novels. The authors would realize the explosiveness of their plots before they touched them, and wouldn't waste months on months of work, brewing what, in the end of it all, was nothing more than a mere flash in the pan. He was still elaborating his theory, when the President called him to order, ready for the motion to adjourn." Then she harked back to her former theme. "You must see the laboratory here, Mr. Brenton, if you care for such things. Girls? Oh, yes, of course; but you'll soon get past regarding that as any handicap. In fact, according to Professor Opdyke, it is one of the best equipped laboratories in the country." But Brenton's attention had wandered from the fact, caught by one of the minor details which surrounded it. "Professor Opdyke?" he echoed a little blankly. "Yes. You have met him?" "Not here. Not at all, in fact. The name is so uncommon that I am quite sure. And yet--" It was plain to Olive that Brenton was struggling with some half-forgotten memory, striving to bring it forth to light, to link it with the present; or, failing that, at least with something tangible in his past life. And yet, the blurring of his memory was not too inexplicable. Reed Opdyke still remembered Brenton clearly, still regretted the apparent waste of some of his more brilliant possibilities. Scott Brenton, on the other hand, had totally dismissed Reed Opdyke from his mind. In the contact between the two of them, the one had stepped up, the other down; and, as so often happens, the truer, the more lasting picture is the one gained from the upper level. Moreover, Brenton's later life, and most especially the summer which had followed the ending of his association with Reed Opdyke, had been so very strenuous as to obliterate by far the greater number of his earlier contacts. Then suddenly memory stirred in its sleep, stretched itself, awakened. "Did Professor Opdyke have a son?" he asked, with a new eagerness which was wholly alien to the one concerning his bit of autobiography. Olive smiled at his phrasing. "He did; I trust he still does," she answered; "though, with a mining man, one never can be quite sure. Why? Did you know Reed?" The colour came into Brenton's cheeks, as he blurted out the totally forgotten truth. "I adored him, all my last two years at college." "Really? Yes, he is Professor Opdyke's son; and people who have seen him lately tell me he is more adorable than ever." "When have you seen him?" For something in Olive's accent made Brenton realize that there was no necessity for any preliminary question concerning the fact that she knew Opdyke well. "Not since the year of his graduation. In fact, I was at his commencement. Why," and suddenly her eyes gathered into focus; "I remember you then, Mr. Brenton. Reed showed you to me as----" Then, all at once, she faltered and her colour came. He strove to help her out of the abyss into which she so unwittingly had fallen. "One of the waiters at his eating club, and popularly known there as 'Reed's Parson'?" he asked her, with a little smile which sought to cover the sting that came to him with the memory. But Olive shook her head. "No; not that at all. It was one of the Might-Have-Beens, he called you," she said, with brave downrightness. But, afterwards, when she thought the matter over, she wondered whether she had bettered it, or made it worse. In any case, she went on a little hastily. "Since then, as it happens, I never once have been here, when Reed has been at home. Of course, he has been back here now and then; but once I was in London, and in New York, the other times." "Where is he?" She shook her head again. "That is the hardest sort of question to answer, for he is always on the wing. He went in for mining engineering, and is making quite a record as consulting engineer. It's copper, I think, he consults about; anyway, no one ever can predict where he will be heard from next. Really, if you knew him, you must meet Professor Opdyke. The dear old man is bursting with pride in his only son; he talks about him by the hour at a time, if we let him. The trouble is that we all are so cloyed with hearing about Reed's virtues and Reed's triumphs that we have a tendency to run away before the paternal downpour commences. A new pair of ears will be a veritable godsend to his father. He and my father are the greatest sort of chums, and--" Suddenly Olive paused and began to look distinctly uneasy. "By the way, Mr. Brenton, where is my father? I really think that, in mercy to your patience, I'd better go and jog his memory once more." And jog his memory she did, and with such success that, this time, Doctor Keltridge put in a tardy and apologetic appearance. However, when, smiling guiltily at his own sins of omission, he came to greet his guest, he came alone. Olive, her hospitable duty done, had vanished, to return no more. _

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