Chapter Twenty-Six

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_ 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. _

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