It was Catia, then, or, rather, Kathryn, who kept a weather eye upon
the social powers of the parish. Brenton was too busy doing other
things. Somebody, though, she argued, must look out for the personal
end of life, as well as for the theological. Else, the parish would
fall to pieces about their ears. Brenton might be giving them the bread
of life; but man should not live by bread alone. He needed an
occasional cup of afternoon tea to wash it down. Therefore Kathryn
revised her social balance sheets often and with the utmost care.
Out of deference to what Kathryn was still pleased to term her
husband's cloth, the Brentons promptly had been received into the
inmost circles of the college set, an honour which they shared with
Prather, the fussy little novelist. Kathryn liked the novelist; he was
such an unctuous, eager little man, so redolent of the elements that
went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his
novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his
local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble
truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of
town were splashed thickly with his name.
At the faculty wives Kathryn looked askance. They most of them knew
things and they wore their clothes as if they were accustomed to them.
Nevertheless, they seemed to her a little bit old-fashioned. Some of
the grown-up daughters, the ones who had not been in college, she liked
a little better. Nevertheless, Kathryn's attempts at closest
comradeship were with certain of the young instructors. She told
herself that she was mothering them, giving their homeless selves an
outlook on domestic life. What the young instructors told, would be
better for the editing. Indeed, it was somewhat edited and pruned of
its finest flowers of speech, out of loyalty to Brenton whom they one
and all admired exceedingly.
Brenton himself, meanwhile, though liking those jovial youngsters who,
in reality, were of his age and epoch, was finding his most satisfying
intimacy in the friendship of two of the older men: Doctor Eustace
Keltridge, and Professor Opdyke.
Of the two of them, both mellow men of learning and of kindly humour,
Doctor Keltridge was easily first choice. Before Scott Brenton had been
a month over Saint Peter's Parish, he had fallen into the habit of
dropping in upon the doctor at all sorts of hours and upon all sorts of
pretexts, now smoking with him in the library and discussing things
ecclesiastical, now following him into the laboratory, to hang above
the trays of cultures, or the charts of perverse fever cases, while the
doctor expounded and predicted, laying down the law with voice and fist
and trenchant word. He saw Olive, as a rule, when he was passing in and
out. Sometimes they merely nodded from afar, sometimes they had a
little conversation. It was always as immaterial as possible, yet it
never failed to have a little flavour of personal and friendly
understanding.
Next to the absent-minded and erratic doctor, Brenton's loyalty was
given to Professor Opdyke. At the very first, the consciousness that
the gray-haired professor was father to his old-time idol had made all
the difference; but, after a time, that fact sank into insignificance
beside the personality of the man himself. Never was any artist more
devoted to his medium, whether that medium were water colours or
progressive harmonies, than was Professor Opdyke to his balances and
his blow-pipes, to his effervescent mixtures and to his most unholy
smells. His laboratory was his studio, a place apart from all the
outside world, the threshold where he was content to stand and knock,
waiting in perfect, reverential patience until the mysterious door
ahead of him should open just a very little wider. To the outward eye,
he was languid, indifferent, a little cynical and prone to boredom.
Underneath it, though, the fires of his enthusiasm, of his ambition to
advance, not his own career, but the sum total of scientific knowledge:
this fire was burning at white heat. Indeed, it cost him something to
bank down the flame upon the side of his nature which lay open to the
general view. His somewhat cynical humour was the material which he
selected for the banking.
Professor Opdyke almost never was betrayed into the sin of talking
shop. Upon the rare occasions that he gave himself the privilege, save
to his classes, he insisted upon but one congenial hearer, and that
that one should be with him behind closed doors. More and more often,
as the second winter of his acquaintance with Brenton went on, he chose
Brenton as the one hearer he allowed himself. This was partly by reason
of Brenton's interest in Reed, for, whatever his habit with his chemistry,
it must be confessed that Professor Opdyke talked in season and out
about his son. Partly, too, it came by way of Professor Mansfield whose
introduction of Brenton would have been the _Open, Sesame_ to any
sanctum in America. Most of all, though, it came from Brenton himself,
from the young rector's manifest enthusiasm for all that went under the
name of chemistry, an enthusiasm based, as Professor Opdyke made prompt
discovery, upon no mere smattering of knowledge.
Bit by bit, then, the professor lowered the guard he had built up
before his holy places, relaxed the vigilance of his watch upon them
lest they should be invaded by the careless feet of those that did not
comprehend. Scott Brenton did comprehend. To him, experimenting was an
act of reverence, not a deed of idle curiosity. The world-laws were, to
him, full of purpose, albeit only half revealed; and blessed was he who
should assist in the revealing.
Brenton, listening, talking in his turn, sometimes questioning,
sometimes uttering a trenchant bit of argument, felt the old impulses
stirring within him, felt the old love of science renewing its hold
upon his heart and brain. Not that he regretted his holy calling; at
least, not yet. It was a goodly privilege to be allowed to set forth to
all men the modern, elastic gospel of good will coupled with a bowing
acquaintance with the sciences. Much might be done, that way, he told
himself, while steadily he disregarded the voices whispering in his
ears that he was offering his parishioners a set of pretty painted toys
instead of the rugged, vital facts of universal law. Still, the toys
were prettier and vastly more refined than were the old-time goblins of
his mother's day, the goblins marched to and fro persistently by half a
score of Parson Wheelers in their time. Those were monstrosities,
palpably of human creation and yet in the likeness of no mortal thing.
The toys he offered to his people were at least shaped and coloured
into dainty imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the
substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would
have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and
wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness.
Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to
himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an
afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as
he would and did, they burnt within him with an increasing fierceness,
burnt away, indeed, some of the scaffolding upon which his system of
theology had reared itself.
More than a little of this conflagration the professor realized. Also
he realized its potential danger. If the scaffolding began to go, what
then? Would the flames blaze up all the higher on the heap of fallen
ruins; or would the ice water which, in the Parson Wheelers, had taken
the place of good red blood, spurt from the veins of this, their
latter-day descendant, and quench the fires before they reached the
superstructure of his faith? The professor realized to the full,
moreover, his personal accountability in the matter. None the less, he
could never quite decide where the real right lay. Should he ignore the
possible loss to science or should he help on the probable loss to
theologic eloquence? He shook his head at the question. Like all true
scientists, he must hold himself impartial. Asked, however, he surely
had no moral right to withhold facts from a mature mind like that of
Scott Brenton. Facts he would give, and plainly, and without
modification or omission. There, though, he would stop. The inferences
which Brenton should draw out from them should be no concern of his.
And Scott Brenton who, from the start, had had a trick of drawing
inferences to suit himself, was all the better pleased on that account.
By degrees, then, the intimacy between the two men waxed strong. The
one imparted things; the other absorbed them greedily. As time went on,
there were few days in the week which did not find them together at
some hour and place or other: in the laboratory, in the rector's study
at the church, on the golf links, or scouring the hill and valley roads
that stretched out, a lovely network to enmesh the town.
One such walk had been scheduled for a day in April, a day when the
whole physical world is a fragrant commentary on the truths of
resurrection. The professor, it had been agreed, should call for
Brenton at two. At half-past two, he had not appeared; and Brenton,
loath to lose his half-day in the open, set out in search of him.
As a matter of course, the search began in the outer laboratory where,
in all probability, the professor had been hindered by a student
grappling either with conscience or a condition, perhaps, indeed, with
both combined. Such things had happened more than once in Brenton's
experience of the department. The fact that it was a girls' college,
though, made the earlier alternative more probable than was the later
one. Brenton smiled a little, as he thanked his lucky stars that it was
not the custom of the college girls to haunt their spiritual pilots as
insistently as some of them haunted their mental ones. Smiling still,
he doffed his hat before the dozen girls in the outer laboratory, while
he looked about him. Professor Opdyke was not there. After an instant's
hesitation, Brenton crossed the intervening strip of floor and tapped
upon the door leading to the private laboratory beyond.
"Come in."
The voice was more than a trifle husky; and the professor's chair was
carefully planted with its high back to the light. The professor was in
the chair, and bent above the table which, Brenton's quick eye noted,
was bare of anything that looked like work. As Brenton's face appeared
in the doorway, Professor Opdyke looked up at him in a vague
uncertainty which all at once changed to a guilty recognition.
"Brenton! I quite forgot. I'm very sorry," he said; but his voice
lacked all resonance. "The fact is, I've had news from Reed."
"Bad?" The curt monosyllable was kinder than many words.
The professor nodded.
"There's been an accident."
"He's not--" Brenton faltered at the grisly word, not so much in mercy
to the father, seated there before him, as because the old-time love
for that father's son seemed to rise up and catch him by the throat and
strangle him.
The Professor gave a long, shuddering sigh, the sigh of a woman verging
on hysterics.
"No; not that--yet. They'll wire again, to-night, they tell me."
"When did you hear?"
"Just now. An hour ago. His mother doesn't know it yet. Brenton, I've
got to tell her." And the professor turned a wan, appealing face up to
the younger man, as though in search of help.
"Yes." The single word fell heavily. "You must." But Brenton, even
while he was speaking, shut his teeth upon the thought. Then the priest
within him rallied to the need, although the latent man of science in
him forbade him to accompany the rallying with many words. "Can I be of
any help?"
"If you feel you could go to the house with me, Brenton. You knew
Reed."
Brenton's alert ear caught the unconscious change of tense. He
interrupted with a question.
"Just how bad is it?"
"I don't know. 'Badly hurt', the telegram says. 'Will wire again in a
few hours'. I suppose it's the same old story: an explosive and a
panic. Somebody probably tried to stir a fire with a stick of frozen
dynamite, or some such foolery as that." The scorn in the words came
from the effort at self-mastery. Then the professor rose and looked
about him vaguely for his hat. When he had found it, "Come along," he
bade Brenton shortly. "We've got to get it over, even if it kills her.
I believe in anæsthetics and hypnosis in such a case as this: drugging
the victim and then impressing on him that he has always known the
trouble and that it's certain to come out all right in time. Well, are
you coming?" The voice sharpened again in its impatience to have the
bad hour over.
Out in the street and walking rapidly towards home, the professor spoke
once more. This time, there was no sharpness, but rather the same note
of appeal which Brenton had heard a little earlier.
"Brenton, it's your chance now. I've been showing you the best of all
my science. Now, for God's sake, give me back the best of your
religion. In a time like this, science can't help us much. It shows us
all the worst of things, and shuts down before whatever best there is.
If your religion is any good at all, now is the time we need to make it
count. Else, what's its use?"
Before the unexpected, swift appeal, Brenton was dumb. What was the
use, especially to a man like Professor Opdyke? It was all very well to
talk about Reed's being safe in his Maker's hands, when common sense
and science alike were insisting upon it that it was in all probability
the hands of the surgeon who could rescue him from peril; that much
less depended upon prayer than on the sterilizing processes. Of course,
no one, however scientific, could deny the Master's law at the back of
everything; but that law was a trifle too remote to be a potent source
of comfort to a quivering mind. Besides, when, in all probability, it
was that same law, either in breach or in observance, which had caused
the trouble, it seemed a little bit unmerciful to brandish the cause as
an instrument of healing.
After all, in such a case as this, what was religion good for? One
believed things, but only so far as they were based on law; and law is
a stiff sort of moral plaster to apply to a bleeding wound. Of course,
there was an infinite array of platitudes, phrased to fit every sort of
emergency known to man. However, in a crisis such as this, it seemed to
Brenton something little short of deliberate insult to offer a
platitude to a man of Professor Opdyke's sort. All he could find to do,
then, was to stand by and hold himself and them quite steady.
And stand by steadily he did, all through that interminable April
afternoon while the sun came sifting down through the elm buds, to
throw irrelevant golden splashes across their gloom; while the merry
voices of the college girls, passing by in the street outside, came
floating in across their waiting silence. There was nothing in the
world that he could do, except to be there and, now and then, to stave
off a caller too insistent to be appeased by any bulletin issued by the
maid. Among those callers was Prather, the novelist. Priest though he
was, Brenton was conscious of a human and athletic wish to wring his
neck, so palpably was his expression of fussy sympathy mingled with the
professional sense of copy latent in the situation.
And at last, when twilight had dulled the sunshine and sent the
chattering, laughing college girls home to supper, a messenger boy came
to the door to bring a yellow envelope.