Chapter Eighteen

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_ "But, really, she wasn't always so impossible," Olive argued above the coffee, that night. "All things are possible to an open mind," her father rejoined placidly. Olive changed her phrase for one more downright. "Then, if you must have it, she wasn't always so totally vulgar as she is now." "Time always brings development," Doctor Keltridge reminded her benignly, while he thrashed about in his cup with a spoon, much as he might have wielded a glass rod in a delinquent mixture. Then, his spoon poised in mid air, he asked, with a sudden show of curiosity, "On what do you base your theory, Olive?" Olive's reply was feminine, and very convincing to herself. "Because, if she had been, she never would have been asked out to dinner." "Duty," Doctor Keltridge suggested. "Well, not twice at the same place, then." "She doesn't eat with her knife," the doctor responded hopefully. "Therefore she must be evolving just a very little." "How do you know?" "Because she used to--evidently. That type always does." Olive laughed. "Father, I don't believe you ever have really admired Mrs. Brenton," she said. "No." The doctor spoke with slow decision. "There is no especial reason that I should. She is a totally brainless little cus--" "Father!" The doctor shot one expressive glance at his horrified daughter. Then, with exceeding deliberation, he continued his interrupted word. "--tomer, and her only place in the moral universe is to act as a leech on Brenton's nervous system. The worst of it is, when her beneficent work is ended, he'll find out that he is powerless to shake her off. It's enough, the watching them, I mean, to make one believe in a tentative marriage system, at least within the rural districts. The bumpkin comes up to marriageable age, and takes the first--" "Father!" Olive remonstrated once more. "Mr. Brenton isn't a bumpkin. He never was." "My dear," the doctor set down his empty cup; "who mentioned Brenton, anyway? I was merely talking about Brenton's wife." Olive went a step backward in the conversation. "She may not literally eat with her knife," she said; "but, at least, she does it metaphorically, and then, at the end, she licks it. Yes, that's very vulgar; but it is true, and there's nobody but you to hear it. Listen. I haven't told you the worst yet." And Olive recounted to her father Kathryn Brenton's catechism concerning Opdyke, her manifest and merciless curiosity, so thinly veiled behind her avowed desire to administer consolation. When she had finished, the doctor shook his wise gray head. "Some women are merely pussy cats, Olive, and some of them are panthers," he said gravely. "I am glad you told me. I'll put the Opdykes on their guard. Reed has seemed to be gaining lately; more depends on his nerves than those New York butchers of his are quite aware. I do know it, because I've taken care of his mother ahead of him; and there are some cases when an old-fashioned doctor with common sense and a closet full of family traditions is worth a dozen modern surgeons. Reed has been doing a little better lately; you and Dolph Dennison, with all your nonsense, are steadying him wonderfully. But that she-gargoyle! Olive, she'd have Reed in his coffin, inside of half an hour. I'll see that she's kept out on the steps. If she wants to kill her husband, I can't help it. She's got her grip on him. I'll be hanged, though, if she gets that nose of hers inside Reed Opdyke's room." "I wonder," Olive rested her elbows on the table, and spoke down at her interlaced fingers; "wonder why it is we both of us dislike her so." "I've been her doctor," Doctor Keltridge observed, as if that one fact were sufficient explanation. "But she must have lucid intervals." "Precious few," the doctor growled. "What's worse, they are getting fewer, every week. If I were in Brenton's place, I'd take to drink, and use that as an excuse for beating her. He's denied that luxury, though, by what she calls his cloth. To hear her talk, you'd think we laymen dressed in tissue-paper napkins." Olive disregarded the digression. "And yet, she isn't really bad to him." "Depends on what you call being really bad," the doctor growled again. "Of course, she doesn't put senna in his tea, nor take tucks in his Sunday trousers; but she does nip off the tips of all his best growths with that temper of hers, or else freeze them with her lack of comprehension. She's a pachyderm and she's a pig; and, if she keeps on, she'll drag her husband to her level. Brenton's got yeast in him, Olive, fine, lively yeast. There is no telling what he would rise to, if only we could succeed in abolishing her." "If only she wouldn't allude to him in public as His Reverence!" Olive sighed. "It is almost as bad as her coy flirtation with him, during sermon time. If I were in his place, I'd brain her." The doctor pushed his chair back from the table. "You couldn't," he said concisely. "It's not according to the laws of nature." He started for his laboratory. A moment later, he came back again, his coat under his arm, his hair rampant and his tie already gloriously askew. "She can 'Reverence' him all she wants to," he said, casting the words at Olive as if they had been an iron projectile; "but she doesn't care one grain for him. In fact, she only cares for the materials shut up inside her skin. She's a monstrosity of selfishness; that's what she is, no more fit to be a rector's wife, wife of a man like Brenton, than a tin can of corned beef with a crack in it. She's poisonous, Olive, poisonous! Ptomaines aren't in it, by comparison. At least, they're sudden; and she drags it out to all infinity. Poor Brenton!" And, with a gulp of sympathetic ire, the doctor vanished, this time to be seen no more. Whatever were the doctor's forms of speech, his facts were sound. Not in vain had he been Scott Brenton's senior warden, all these months; not in vain Kathryn's medical adviser and unwilling confidant, during the recent weeks of her approach to motherhood. He had learned to know the fineness of the man, the reverent housing he gave to his ideals, the care he lavished on their betterment; and just so surely he also knew the sordid selfishness of the woman, her lack of any ideals beyond the petty ones concerning food and raiment and mere personal advancement, her ruthless disregard of all that related to her husband's individual or professional welfare. Scott Brenton spoke even of his doubts with a reverent reticence. Kathryn Brenton vaunted her supposed beliefs in phrases which, even to the bluff old doctor's ears, amounted to the extreme of blasphemy. The rector, even in the richness of his humour, treated as somehow fine and sacred matters of every-day routine. The rector's lady took the very materials that went into her husband's Sunday sermons, and used them as themes for joking of a species which passed the limits of the doctor's comprehension. To Scott, the very religion that he sought to question, was a pure white lily reverently to be placed beneath his microscope. To Kathryn, it was a red, red rose to be worn flauntingly upon the apex of her Sunday hat. On week days, she was developing a cheap irreverence which never could be in danger of turning into anything more vital. It needs some brains and no small amount of reverence in any man, before he can become an honest agnostic; in both brains and reverence, Kathryn was supremely lacking. How far this lack of reverence resulted from her husband's vacillating viewpoint, the doctor could not fathom. More than a little, he surmised. Had Brenton never wavered in his theology, Kathryn would have clung like a limpet to the bed-rock of her congenital Baptist faith. And yet, the doctor could not hold Brenton altogether responsible for Kathryn's development. The germs of mental cheapness were in Kathryn's nature, as were the germs of more or less illogical doubtings just as surely inherent in Scott Brenton's brain. He had increased the tendency, not created it. Neither could the doctor quite make up his mind whether the two of them were conscious of the growing gulf between them. To begin with, he could not decide whether, on their wedding day, there ever had been any real spiritual tangency between them. Reed said not; but Reed had been young, at the time of his earlier acquaintance with them, and so incapable of forming any stable judgment. Knowing Brenton, it seemed incredible to the doctor that he could have been so supinely idiotic as to have allowed himself, against his will, to be gobbled up by Kathryn--for it was thus that Doctor Eustace Keltridge diagnosed their entrance into matrimony. However, the doctor lacked some knowledge of the determining factors in the case. He had no notion how Kathryn had spread her net before the idealistic young student who was too intent upon his personal problems, as concerned his choice of a profession and his duty to his mother, to heed the matrimonial pitfalls laid at his unwary feet. However, that there was a gulf, and that an ever-widening one, between them was a fact to which the keen-sighted doctor could not blind himself. He was seeing much of the Brentons, during these winter weeks. Kathryn telephoned to him, almost daily, to consult him about her many ills, real or imaginary, about every ill, in short, to which feminine flesh was heir, from nervous palpitations of the heart down, or up, to housemaid's knee. The doctor longed to give her a downright piece of his mind. Instead, he gave her unmedicated sugar pills and as courteous attention as he could pull together. His old-time instinctive dislike of Kathryn was gathering point and focus, in these days, by reason of her increasing references to Claims, and the All-Mind, and to the fact that the pain in a neglected tooth was only a manifestation of cowardly unbelief. The doctor scented mischief in the glib phrases. He held his peace heroically, though, albeit now and then he longed to shake his babbling patient as the terrier shakes the rat. Brenton also he saw constantly. Indeed, he made a point of it, urging the young rector to drop into the laboratory in his few off-hours, or waylaying him in the midst of a round of pastoral calls and dragging him out for a tramp across the ice-white fields. The river, after a time or two, he avoided. He did not like the metaphors which the sight of it called into Brenton's conversation. Indeed, it was far better for any man to go scrabbling up an icy slope, breathless and upon all fours, than to stand in a bleak up-valley wind and meditate upon the sliding ice cakes in an iron-gray stream. Health and a feeling for the picturesque by no means always walk hand in hand; and it was health the doctor sought for Brenton, during those winter walks, a mental health that could best be evoked from hard bodily exercise, rather than from communings with what Kathryn glibly termed the Great All-Mind. Between the doctor and the increasing demands of parish work, Scott Brenton had very little time to spend at home. He would have mourned for this the more acutely, had Kathryn given any evidence of mourning on her side. Kathryn, however, was quite too busy sewing on preposterously small and preposterously frilly garments, quite too busy receiving pre-congratulatory calls from the women of the parish, to have any leisure left to bestow upon her husband. They met at meals; now and then they had an evening hour together, an hour when the chain of talk sagged heavily, broke, and fell into a sea of silence. Then either Kathryn wiped her eyes with ostentatious secrecy, arose and went away to bed; or else Brenton, after a furtive glance or two in the direction of her head, bent down above her sewing, stole out of the room as noiselessly as he was able and betook himself to the study where, often and often, the light burned almost till dawn. At the table, it was rather better. They could offer each other things to eat, and talk about the vagaries of the present cook who, under the best of circumstances, was bound to be the past cook within a week or so. Scott could ask Kathryn if she had seen the morning paper; Kathryn could ask Scott if he knew old Mrs. Swan was likely to die, before the day was at an end. Of any real talk about their personal relations to each other, of any but the most trivial reference to the great responsibility which now loomed close ahead of them: of this, there was nothing, nothing at all. Brenton would have loved to talk about it, to discuss it with his wife in perfect frankness, to show out to her in some small measure the overwhelming happiness that the outlook brought him, the wonderful and awful increase of personal responsibility. It would have given him untold pleasure to have gathered his wife into his arms, tight, tight, and held her there while, cheek pressed to cheek, they talked about the little stranger coming to their home, about the way they best could welcome him, and make him happy, and bring out all the best in him until his tiny person should become a hallowing influence within the home, a strengthening bond between them, man and wife. Just once he had tried it, never afterwards. Kathryn had laughed self-consciously, had bade him Sh-h-h-h! Then she had given him a pecking sort of kiss, and had wriggled out of his arms. While she had rearranged her dismantled pompadour, suspiciously awry since her husband's unwonted caress, she had explained quite carelessly that he need not worry. Doctor Keltridge was looking out for her, and people said he was wonderful in cases of that kind, even if he was a gruff old thing. The nurse was all engaged. She was very old, too; but people said that she was the best in town. But, of course, a woman in her position would have everything possible done. Really, he need not worry in the least. Brenton took the lesson to his heart; but he took it hard. It seemed to him a pity that all share in the great anticipation, full as it was of mingled fear and rapture and vast, vast responsibility, should be denied him. At the first, even knowing Kathryn as he did, he had looked for something else, had hoped that their loosening ties would tighten under the stress of the coming crisis. For Scott, beneath his proud reticence, his seeming blindness to the situation, was painfully aware of the gradual severance of interests between himself and Kathryn. This final lesson, though, rendered it unmistakable. Under its blow, his lined, lean cheeks whitened, his shoulders stooped a little more than usual when, after gently letting his wife go from his impetuous embrace, he turned away and sought his study. There, alone among the working tools of his profession, Scott Brenton first faced the realization that the extremest sort of separation is the one that goes on within the same four walls. Drearily Brenton sat himself down in his cane-bottomed desk chair, shut his hands upon the edges of his blotting pad and stared the situation in the face. Life, to phrase it most unclerically, was distinctly a mess. It was going bad, going all the worse, apparently, because of the good intentions with which he himself had faced it. He really had meant well. He had chosen the profession on which his mother's hopes of happiness had been set. He had chosen the wife that she had put in his way; had been loyal to that wife in thought, and word, and deed. In short, he had done his crude, but level, best to keep at least two of the ten commandments, to say nothing of his less conscious struggles with the others. And what had happened? He and his profession were becoming incompatible. He and his wife were also becoming incompatible. The laws of science demanded that he seek the common factor, as source of the whole trouble. Therefore, he himself must be the sole cause of the wretched bungle Fate was making of his well-intentioned life. Was he so malevolent, or just futile? And which was the worse of the two alternatives? Anyway, the fact was that he felt himself an outcast, a negligible bit of driftwood upon the tide of opportunity. His profession had found him a useless unbeliever. In the end, it would cast him out completely, a tattered remnant of a soul, riddled with doubts. His wife would be quite too well-mannered to do anything so radical as to cast him out; but she was finding him devoid of interest for her, was holding herself aloof from him, shutting him away from any real spiritual intercourse with her, and reducing him to the bread-and-butter level of a table-mate and nothing more. In the end, even, it might-- Then Brenton shook his head, as he faced the fact that, in the end, it could not possibly be much worse than it was getting to be now. Of course, there was publicity to be avoided; but, on the other hand, publicity would bring a freedom from the strain of smiling jauntily at life, as though nothing really were amiss. For Brenton realized with a disconcerting clearness that something was amiss, much, much amiss; realized, moreover, that he had known it vaguely all along. The trouble, albeit still nameless, had been there all the time, from the first day that he, smarting from the impact of the maternal slipper, had smarted yet more keenly beneath the lash of Catie's young disdain. From that time onward, whether she was Catie, Catia, or Kathryn, her attitude had been the same, always disdainful, always a little uncomprehending of his point of view. She had used himself and his profession as a sort of social ladder whereby to clamber upward. Always she had disdained the material of which the ladder was constructed. Now that she was successfully landed upon the desired level and needed its support no longer, would she kick it aside entirely, with one flick of her slippered foot? As for their marriage: what had it really been? A delicately hand-wrought bond? A machine-made manacle? Indeed, the latter, and unbreakable. Brenton pulled himself up short, horrified at the abyss upon whose verge he found himself. He, the priest, vowed, despite his honest doubts, to the preaching of God's holy word and commandment, to be applying questions such as that to the marriage ties between himself and Catie! For, quite unconsciously, the swift revulsion flung him back upon the use of the old, almost forgotten name. No marriage, honestly entered into, honestly lived out, could be a machine-wrought manacle. If it seemed one, then the greater shame to those who wore it, the greater shame to him, the husband, that his more crass nature could throw doubt upon the fineness of the texture of the bond. Besides, Kathryn was his wife, his lawful, loyal, albeit sometimes uncomprehending, wife. That fact alone was quite sufficient. Beyond it, there was no need to probe. Kathryn and he were one; the sacred seal of joint parentage was soon to be placed upon their union, rendering it more permanent, more holy. If they had their trivial disagreements, what then? It was the place of him, the stronger, the steadier, to end them for all time. Even while they lasted, he was a priest and bound to patient service, not a fiction-monger, like little Prather, nosing about in every situation that arose, with the faint hope of picking up an occasional crumb of melodramatic copy. He was a priest, a man not so much of words as of holy life. And the way to priestly holiness did not lie along the hummocks of domestic squabbles. Brenton lifted his head, shut his teeth a little sidewise, straightened his shoulders, and went in search of Kathryn. But Kathryn, going off to bed, had locked her door behind her. However, had the priestly eye been properly applied to the keyhole, it would have made out the reassuring fact that Kathryn, sleeping, showed the unruffled countenance of a contented babe. _

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