That Reed Opdyke was very badly broken, no one, seeing him, could deny.
Exactly what was the nature of the break, no one but Reed Opdyke and
the surgeons knew. The surgeons were inclined to secrecy. Reed himself
welcomed no queries on the subject. He merely smiled inscrutably, and
talked about the weather.
When, in late May, he first came home, his room threatened to become a
place for penitential pilgrimage, a _memento-mori_ species of lay
shrine; but Reed stopped all that quite firmly. He had no mind to be a
hero anywhere, least of all in a town where ninety-seven per cent of
the populace was feminine. Moreover, unkindly as he took to hero
worship, he took still more unkindly to visits that quite obviously
were intended to console him.
"The Lord knows how long I'm destined to be lying up here," he remarked
to Olive Keltridge, after one such visitation. "Anyhow, it is sure to
be long enough for people to get the habit of me, and a chronic invalid
is bound to be used as a spiritual salve. One takes him tracts and
grape-fruit jelly, by way of offset to domestic rows. I'm not going to
become accessory after the fact to all the local improprieties. It
would have a rotten influence upon the entire community."
Olive, who had dropped in ostensibly for purposes of gossip, nodded in
comprehension. Indeed, she was in a position to comprehend the
situation a long way more perfectly than even Reed, its victim and by
no means of doubtful understanding, could ever do. She heard him talked
about in a fashion that she found revolting. Her old-time comrade was
as much a man as ever, despite his injuries, as sane in all his
outlook, as whimsical and impersonal in his fun. She therefore resented
the universal attitude of regarding him as a crushed archangel, a
candidate for repeated and unlimited doses of mental gruel. If ever a
man needed solid social nutriment, it was this energetic young engineer
who was temporarily dragged off from the scene of action and reduced to
the need of killing time within the limits of four walls. Indeed, it
would take a good deal of social nutriment and social spice as well, to
bring four walls and the exciting alternations of a canopy-top bed and
a chintz couch up to the level of interest gained out of a succession
of different mining camps and the different problems they presented,
above ground and below. To Reed Opdyke, used to tramping over mountain
trails, accustomed to riding anything from a half-broken cayuse to a
wabbly platform at a rope's end, the day's journey nowadays limited
itself to being lifted out of bed in the arms of his lusty nurse, being
placed with all discretion in the exact middle of a couch and in being
trundled slowly across the floor to the bay window. Later in the day,
the process repeated itself in the reverse direction, but with even
greater care because of the fatiguing experiences of the day. Therefore
it was that Reed Opdyke preferred his visitors to have the flavour of
tabasco, rather than whipped cream.
Olive dropped in upon him, every day, and she always found a welcome.
She had known Reed long enough not to be likely to collide with any of
his prejudices. She had rollicked with him in his active days often
enough to save him from feeling any ignominy in having her behold him
in his passive ones. She was never sentimental; never, since their
first inevitable bad half-hour together after his return, had she torn
her hair, metaphorically speaking, above the spectacle of his
afflictions. She merely handed him the things he couldn't reach; and
gossiped ceaselessly about the things that were happening among their
common friends, without making him half frantic because he could not go
out and happen, too. She even, and therein lay her final greatness,
blinked at Reed's occasional profanity as concerned his accident,
whereas the average woman would have wept maudlinly.
"Your vocabulary is a picturesque one, Reed," she told him, upon one
occasion. "I ought to be shocked; but I've known you too long to be
shocked at anything you do. Besides, in the end of all things, I
imagine I should follow your own deplorable methods of speech. Swearing
may not be decent socially; but it's a healthy pastime. Only look out
you don't do it in the midst of a pastoral call."
"By the way," Reed looked up suddenly; "I hear that one is imminent."
Olive lifted her brows.
"Who?"
"Brenton."
"Haven't you seen him yet?"
Reed shook his head.
"No. It's been pretty decent of him, too, to hold off a little. Most
parsons would have rushed in, hot foot, to administer extreme unction
and be sure I was in a proper mood concerning Providence. Brenton has
had the decency to wait a little. It was almighty decent, too. I knew
him in my palmy days, when life was young. It's young for him
still--Hold on, Olive; I'm not going to maunder!--and I had a natural
dread of having him come piling in here to crow about himself and
cackle over me."
Olive's laugh was obviously forced. Even the most irresponsible of
gossips is not always altogether hardened.
"I love your metaphors, Reed," she told him. "To be sure, it never had
occurred to me that Saint Peter's cock and Saint Peter's rector were
identical terms."
Reed digressed.
"What's Brenton's wife turned into?" he inquired.
Olive cast an apologetic glance at Mrs. Opdyke, knitting by the other
window. Then she dropped her hands, palms up, into her lap. The gesture
was so expressive as not to need the one word of her answer.
"Impossible."
"I'm not surprised."
"You had seen her?"
"Yes, at our commencement. She was a country daisy, if you choose: but
a nig-nose one, not a placid ox-eye."
This time, Olive felt called on to remonstrate.
"Reed, you are becoming intolerable. A man flat on his back ought to be
pondering upon the convolutions of his soul, not cultivating flowers of
rhetoric."
"Soul be hanged! I keep insisting that mine isn't in any more need of
attention than it was when I was up and doing, and it's a long way
greater bore. Besides, I am prouder of my rhetoric than of my spiritual
convolutions. But about Brenton's wife? She seemed to me then the
typical shrewd Yankee who would adapt herself to any sort of
circumstances and get the best end of any sort of bargain."
Olive nodded.
"You've about hit it, Reed. But then, I'm not fair to her."
"Not your sort, eh?" But Reed, as he looked at Olive and remembered
Catia, felt no real need to put the question.
"It's not that so much--well--no--I can't seem to understand her." Then
Olive's eyes met his directly, and she stopped her rambling with a
little laugh. "You needn't presume on your position, Reed. It's not
decent to make me tell what I think of Mrs. Brenton, when you know you
are driving me into a corner where I either have to lie, or else abuse
her to a perfectly strange man."
"I'm not a strange man. I've seen her in her salad days. 'Twas potato
salad, too, symbolic of the soil whence she had sprung."
But Olive held up her hand for mercy.
"Reed, you are a most impossible type of invalid. If you keep on like
this, I'll tell Mrs. Brenton that you'd love to have her come and sing
hymns to you."
"Olive! For--" And then his curiosity overcame his consternation. "Can
she sing?" he queried.
"Very prettily." Olive's accent defied analysis. "She would love it,
too. I know, because, only the other day, she asked me to give you a
message."
"And you embezzled it?"
"Until it seemed a proper season. If I had given it too early, you
might have mislaid it in your memory, and forgotten to send a grateful
answer."
"What did the woman want?" Reed questioned, with a sudden curtness that
betrayed to Olive's ear the crackling of the thin ice on which, day by
day, they skated over the surface of the tragedy.
Nevertheless, Olive struck out fearlessly. Even if the ice did crack
and let them through, such old, well-tried friends as Reed and herself
could face what lay beneath it, without sentimental fears. They had
taken one such plunge together; they both preferred to avoid another,
if they could, and yet better to flounder through the ice than to keep
away from it entirely. Therefore Olive's tone was nonchalant, as she
reported,--
"I met her in the street, the day after you came home, and she begged
me to tell you--"
"She took it as a matter of course you'd be bidden to the private
view," Reed interrupted.
"Of course. The whole community understood that. Else, what was the use
of our breaking our collar bones in unison, when you lured me into
tobogganing off the barn?" Olive replied promptly. "Where was I? Oh,
yes,--begged me to tell you how well she remembered your kindness to
her--yes, your kindness--when she was a shy child from the country."
Reed's comment was a terse one.
"Shy! She!" he said.
"You sound like an Indian dialect. However--And that she should claim a
place among your earlier friends, when the time came when they could
sit with you."
Reed squirmed.
"Sit with! Oh, Lord! That settles it, Olive. In spite of all your
polite evasions, the town does look upon me as a moral asset, a chronic
case to be put upon a par with other charities," he said, with sudden
bitterness.
Olive's colour came, though not from annoyance.
"Don't be a dunce, Reed," she besought him. "You merely are the latest
sensation in returning prodigals; you haven't sufficient staying power
to become a charity, or even a fad. Then I shall tell the sympathetic
lady--?"
"To go to everlasting thunder," Reed growled ungratefully. "Hang it
all, Olive, does she think I want a row of hens coming to cluck above
the ruins?"
"Which reminds me," Olive rose; "when do you look for the conjugal
rooster?"
"Brenton? Sit down again; you're not in any hurry," Reed urged her.
But she shook her head.
"No; but I am a hen, and nobody knows when I may forget myself and
begin to cluck. No. Truly, Reed, my feelings are injured and I'm going
home."
"What's the use? You've nothing in the world to do."
"I beg your pardon, I have domestic cares. My blessed father has to go
to Boston at two-twenty. If I don't go home in season to arouse him to
the practical details inherent in the fact, he'll be starting off in
slippers and without his evening clothes. Really, Reed, I've got to
go."
"What are you going to do, this afternoon?" Reed's eyes were wishful,
for the time was hanging heavy in his idle hands. "Of course, though,
there's no sense in my being selfish."
Olive saw the wishfulness; but she ignored it. Both Professor Opdyke
and her father had told her that Reed's sentence was a long one, long
and heavy. Both Mrs. Opdyke and her husband had begged the girl to do
what she could to keep it from seeming too much like solitary
confinement. Olive was fond of Reed, though without the consciousness
of a single vein of sentiment to blur their friendship. She enjoyed his
society as much as she admired his virile, easy-going manliness. All
the more, on this account, she was sure that the only way of keeping
their friendship and their enjoyment keen would lie in avoiding any
surfeit. For herself, she felt no uneasiness. Reed's society, under no
circumstances, could become cloying. But for Reed she did not know. The
idler the hands, the sooner they weary of any toy. And poor Reed's
hands, in all surety, were very, very idle. Moreover, unless she went
out greedily in search of fresh variety, how could she bring it into
his present prison? If she spent too much time with him, inevitably
they would exhaust their fund of gossip. Then they would be driven into
becoming autobiographical, and that would be the finish of their
present friendship. Therefore,--
"Sorry, Reed," she told him; "but there's a tea on at the Prathers'.
Earlier, I'm taking Dolph Dennison canoeing."
"Olive!" Reed's accent was remonstrant. "How can you stand that little
duffer?"
Olive rose to the defence.
"He's not such a duffer. Of course, he's young and callow; but he's
good fun."
"Yes; but an instructor, and only rhetoric, at that." Reed's voice
showed his scorn.
"You're jealous, Reed. You think he will do better metaphors than you;
but you needn't worry. Dolph doesn't talk shop. Besides, he may get to
be a real professor, if he keeps at work; and," Olive's glance, merry
and not uncomfortably pitiful, rested upon the long-limbed figure lying
so flat beside her; "even you must admit it, Reed, that rhetoric is a
much safer means of livelihood than engineering. Good bye, boy, and
keep out of mischief till I get here, next time."
As it chanced, it was that afternoon that Brenton came to see him, for
the first time since Reed's return. Whatever Brenton's thought about
the matter, it must be confessed that Opdyke, albeit healthy-minded and
as philosophical as a surgical case can ever be, had felt a good deal
of dread of their meeting. In the old days, he had been the strong one
and the masterful, Brenton the weak. The present reversal of the
situation went upon his nerves.
He had remembered Brenton clearly, all these intervening years. More
than once, in the intervals of his strenuous life, he had found himself
wondering what the gaunt young countryman had become. In the time of
it, Reed had had no notion how thoroughly he had liked the fellow, how
thoroughly he had believed in his latent possibilities. Looking back
upon them now, judging them by the broader standards of his own wider
knowledge of the things that really count, Reed had felt his old-time
interest grow and quicken. It had caused him no especial surprise,
then, when a letter from his father had brought him news of the rector
of Saint Peter's. Neither had it caused him any more surprise when his
father's later letters recorded bit by bit the intimacy slowly growing
up between the scholarly young rector and his father's critical self.
Instead, Reed took a certain comfort in reflecting that he had foreseen
it all along. However, he had felt an undeniable curiosity to see the
shabby, under-nourished Scott Brenton, a thing of shambling feet and
knobbly joints, transmogrified into the well-groomed, easy-mannered
type of rector which had become traditional at Saint Peter's.
Nevertheless, now that he was at home once more and, to all seeming,
candidate for churchly ministrations, Reed found he drew back a little
from their meeting. At the start, even though his bodily strength
allowed it, his nervous energy shrank from the ordeal of seeing people.
It seemed to him that there would be so many things he ought to explain
to them to make his position clear. Of course, with his family and the
Keltridges and even the despised Dolph Dennison, it was different,
although even the irresponsible Dolph had floundered and struck bottom
on a conversational reef or two, and it had taken all Reed's grip to
haul him off and steer him into deep waters and consequent safety.
Left to himself and thinking the matter over at his leisure, Reed
admitted, with an impersonal candour, that it was very easy for his
guests to err in tact. A man in his predicament was bound to be a
trifle flooring; it did not affect the question in the least that he
was in no wise responsible for the predicament. It had resulted, quite
simply, from his natural instincts, not from any conscious thirsting
for fame and for consequent Carnegie medals. However, the average
visitor could not be expected to be aware of that; and therefore he
would be more than likely to feel it incumbent upon him to say gracious
things in a tremulous falsetto voice. In the present case, the question
concerned itself with the problem whether or not Scott Brenton would
prove to be the average visitor.
When at last Brenton came, he proved himself to be quite apart from the
average. He neither floundered, nor did he err in tact. He even forgot
about any proper greetings, so promptly did he fling himself into a
tide of reminiscent gossip. Of course, the gossip straightway led to a
demand to be brought down to date in Opdyke's history, a demand which
concerned itself quite as much with the technique of mining as it did
with the more personal aspects of an engineering life and of the final
accident. They reached that in course of time, however; and Reed told
his tale willingly and without too much reservation, grateful alike for
the sympathetic interest and comprehension it evoked in Brenton, and
for the half-dozen downright words with which Brenton spoke his
sympathy.
"Of course," he added thoughtfully, his eyes on Opdyke's face; "it's
bound to be all sorts of a bore for a man like you to be lying up, to
say nothing of the waste of time for your profession, and of the purely
personal issue of the aches of it. However, I can't be altogether sorry
for the chance that strands you here in the edge of my own puddle. I
mean to have all the good of you, while you're in range. You remember
how the boys used to call me Reed's parson?"
Reed laughed.
"You knew it at the time? I must say you had the trick of looking
totally unconscious. Well, it's your turn now. Going, man? Sorry you
must; but you'll be coming in again, to-morrow? No; hang it all! You're
a parson, and to-morrow is Sunday."
To-morrow was Sunday, and the first one in the month. That meant three
services for Brenton, plus a Bible class at noon. Nevertheless, between
the services, he contrived to drop in for a look at Opdyke; not that
the look, taken as itself, was needful. All that morning long, and a
good share of the night before, there had not left him the picture of
the long, straight figure on the couch, and of the face above it, the
same face he recalled so well, and yet so curiously altered,
strengthened. The picture never left him; it was most distinct of all,
while, with an unwonted throb in his voice, he slowly read from the
open book before him,--
"Thou dost not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men--In Thy
wisdom Thou hast seen fit to visit him with trouble--"
Wisdom! Thy wisdom. Brenton's mind lingered on the words, even after
his tongue had passed on to the closing phrases of the prayer. Thy
wisdom? Yes. But what especial wisdom, what ineffable and divine
purpose lay behind the swift blow which had knocked into prostrate
helplessness a man such as Reed Opdyke? Was it quite honest and
above-board for him himself, Scott Brenton, to kneel there in the
chancel, praying aloud and fervently for the sanctification of a
Fatherly correction to him whose life, from all accounts, had held no
flagrant germ of error? And what especial sanctification was there,
beyond shutting one's teeth and taking it quite pluckily and as it
came?
Above the open book, Scott Brenton's eyes, wide open and very lustrous,
were looking past the bounding walls before him, seeing the brave smile
that Reed Opdyke had sent after him by way of parting. Brenton's voice,
meanwhile, always flexible and resonant, was throbbing with thoughts
which had no possible relation with the words now falling from his
tongue,--
"Fulfil the desires--as may be most expedient for them."
He recalled his mind to the words he uttered, recalled it with a jerk.
Was it expedient for Reed Opdyke to be overthrown and laid aside more
or less indefinitely, just as he was about touching the fulness of
professional success? Who ordained what was expedient, anyway?
Providence?
And then, in the hush that followed after the benediction, there came
into Brenton's ears the echo of Reed's voice, gay and indomitable
rather by force of will than from conviction.
"No," he had said to Brenton, midway in their conversation of the day
before. "No; it's not a chastisement of Providence. I have too much
respect for Providence to lay off on it the result of some infernal
fool's careless use of explosives. Providence, as a rule, doesn't go
out gunning with black powder. Its ways are more ineffable than that."
And yet, if not Providence, or its equivalent, Scott Brenton asked
himself above his clasped hands, then what?