"It aint, though; it's a boy."
Kathryn's eyes drooped wearily.
"Well, never mind about that now. There must be some mistake, though,
for my heart was set on having a little girl. Anyway, you can tell Mr.
Brenton it's all right. And now, nurse, I think I'll try to take a
nap."
"And shall I leave the baby, ma'am?"
Kathryn, already settling her cheek upon her hand, stirred wearily.
"Certainly not, nurse, if he's going to cry like that," she said, with
querulous decision.
That was late at night. Next morning, she aroused herself to some
slight show of interest as concerned the child.
"It's such a disappointment to have him a boy," she still lamented.
"Boys' clothes are so very ugly. However," lifting herself up upon her
elbow, she stared down at the puckered face in the nest of soft white
flannel; then she fell back again with a little shiver of disgust; "for
the matter of that, nurse, he's very ugly, too."
This time, the nurse felt herself justified in indignant remonstrance.
Indeed, in all her forty years of nursing, she never had been in
contact with a mother who was so unappreciative.
"Ugly, Mrs. Brenton!" Her voice gathered force and fervour, as she went
on. "How can you say so? He's a puffic' fibbous."
This time, however, the nurse's zeal outran discretion. "Fibbous" or
no, the baby certainly was red to a fault, his infant brow was crowned
with a rampant thatch of jet black hair, and no nonagenarian ever was
one half so wrinkled as this small stranger in the halls of time. Even
Scott Brenton, his heart thrilling and throbbing with the fearful new
joys of his paternity, experienced an unmistakable chill, when first he
gazed upon the countenance of his new-born son. Of course, he must be
beautiful. Every young baby is that, ex officio. Nevertheless, Scott
Brenton, looking at him, was fully conscious that he would become yet
more beautiful, once he had been bleached a little, to say nothing of
having had some of the puckers straightened out. And, besides, he was
so curiously invertebrate, had such a tendency to coil himself to the
likeness of a shrimp. In time, beyond a doubt, he would come out all
right. For the present moment, though, he was a trifle problematic in
his attractions.
"What shall we call him, Catie?" Scott asked her gently, the second
night after the boy was born.
Her frown was petulant.
"Catie!" she echoed. "Why can't you call me Katharine, Scott? It is so
much more dignified than that old baby name. I'd meant to call our baby
by it, really call her by it, not by some uncouth nickname. Yes. I know
I was baptised Catie; but so you were baptised Walter. We both of us,
you see, have something to forget. Any way, I am determined to save the
baby so much, so I want to take plenty of time to choose a good name
for him. There's no hurry, for the present." She was silent, for a
moment. Then she added, with rare tact, "I do so hope that, in course
of time, he will improve a little in his looks. Nurse says that now he
is just the image of you. No, nurse. I don't believe I want him in
here. Really, he does make the bed very warm."
Indeed, from the first hour of his advent, that was her attitude
towards the baby boy. As a piece of her own property, she tolerated
him; she assumed it, as a matter of course, that in herself alone
should be vested all rights of dictatorship over him. But when, in any
way, he interfered with her personal comfort, she handed him over to
the safe keeping of his nurse. And the nurse received him with a
gratitude unblunted by her forty years' experience of similar babies.
She coddled him, and dandled him, and rubbed his little backbone, and
whispered into his disregarding ears over and over again that he was a
itty-bitty puffic' fibbous, whatever that mamma of his might think
about it. He was a puffic' fibbous; and she knew.
Despite what seemed to Brenton the exceeding ugliness of his small son,
he took an infinite delight in his society. From the first day on, he
persecuted the nurse with inquiries as to the child's condition,
persecuted her, too, with insistent offers of help in administering to
the baby needs. By the half-hour at a time, the rector of Saint
Peter's, leaving his parish in the hands of the new curate whose advent
had been simultaneous with that of the baby boy, hung above the frilly
basket in which his small son either lay in a placid doze, or else
contorted himself and shrieked discordantly.
It was a great day for Brenton, a red-letter day, when first the child
was laid across his blanket-covered knees, while the nurse stood by,
uttering many cautions and forcibly adjusting the angles of the
clerical elbows, the better to support their tiny burden. Then she
backed off, and stood gazing down upon the two of them adoringly.
"A puffic' fibbous!" she ejaculated. "And, what's more, the puffic'
image of his popper!"
But, by this time, Scott Brenton felt no chill at the suggestion of the
likeness of this pink and curly little being to himself. The baby was
four days old; already he seemed to Brenton to have curled his rosy
little self into his father's inmost heart. Already, too, the father
was learning the mingled joy and pain of looking towards the future:
the joy of anticipating all that his boy might become, the pain of
knowing how fast and how irrevocably the baby days were passing on. He
longed to see his child a full-grown man, a happier, better man than he
himself had ever been. He also longed to hold fast to each one of the
hours of babyhood, to keep them from slipping out from actual existence
into the vague horizon of more or less distant memory.
And then, one day, a new thought struck him. What if, in time, the
child slipped, too? That night, he walked the study floor till dawn.
Next day, he went to see Professor Opdyke in his private laboratory.
All this time, he had been lavishing his entire stock of pity upon
Reed. He knew better now, saw things by far more clearly. The almost
imperceptible weight across his blanket-covered knees had been enough
to open a new vein of understanding, a dawning realization of just what
it was that the past year had brought to Professor Opdyke, as much,
indeed, as to Reed, his son. He went to see Professor Opdyke and, after
blundering through the inevitable vague preliminaries, he came directly
to the point and, out of his six days' experience of fatherhood, he
gave to the professor a sympathetic comfort hitherto denied him.
It was the first of many similar lessons Brenton received from the warm
contact of the shrimp-like bundle on his knees, the first and therefore
memorable. It was also memorable for quite another reason: the renewal
of his intimacy with the professor and the private laboratory.
Of late, this intimacy had been dropping out of sight a little.
Whatever time that Brenton took for visiting the Opdykes, quite as a
matter of course he had been lavishing on Reed. It never had occurred
to him till now that, quite as much as Reed, Reed's father might be
needing the tonic of outside visitations, the stimulus of contacts
alien to his daily cares, the sympathetic comradeship of an individual
able to arouse him from the alternate contemplation of his official
duties at the college and of the sombre cloud hanging above his home.
All at once, it came to Brenton that the professor himself might also
be a candidate for sympathy, a grateful recipient of diverting
conversations which did not focus themselves entirely upon Reed. The
first experimental visit to the private laboratory proved to be such an
entire success that others followed it until, by degrees, Brenton slid
back into his old fashion of spending many of his odd hours among the
balances and test-tubes, among the old, familiar sights, the smells so
wholly unforgettable.
At any other time, under any other circumstances, the spell of the
place would not have been one half so potent. Now, in the intimacy
evoked by hour-long discussions of their sons' possible futures, the
professor was coming to take a dominant place in Brenton's life. After
preaching what he felt to be unprovable futilities, it was no small
satisfaction to Brenton to come into contact with a man whose sane and
practical working creed was supported by a perfect trestlework of
interlocking equations based, in their turn, on fundamental and
well-proved natural laws. After attributing the erratic courses of
humanity to the caprices of an all-wise, but slightly captious,
Creator, it was very good to sit and discuss them with a comrade who
insisted upon reducing them all to rule and order, who declared, and
also proved past all gainsaying, that nothing ever really happened,
that the very thing which man calls chance is only another name for his
blindness to some link connecting the event and cause. Even the
shrimp-like propensities of his small son. Even the flat, flat figure
stretched out on the couch, up-stairs at home. The Creator did not do
just the thing itself, in sheer and potent wantonness. He merely laid
down the laws. One followed them implicitly; or else, like every
law-breaker, got punished.
And the look of the place; the old, old fascinating reek of it; the
click of glass on glass; the whirring flare of freshly-lighted Bunsen
burners! In vain Brenton tried his best to deaden his senses to the
lure of it; but it was of no use. The charm was in his blood; it would
not down. The smell of hydrogen sulphide was dearer to him than any
incense; his fingers shut upon the test-tubes with a greedier clutch
than any they had ever given to The Book of Common Prayer. And yet, by
some curious mental process, that book of prayer, its age-old
liturgies, never rang more sonorous in his mind than when they echoed
in his ears above the whirring of the Bunsen burners. Science was his
passion, not theology; but science aroused in him a spirit of
reverential worship for his Creator as mere theology had never done. He
caught himself, one day, even, with his eyes glued fast to the
professor's deft manipulations, while he himself was saying, half
aloud,--
"The Lord is in His holy temple." And then, next in line, "When man
doeth that which is lawful, he shall save his soul alive."
Law everywhere! And then, quite as a corollary, life! But how dared he,
how dared any man, preach from a pulpit, when it was given to him to
toil in a laboratory, instead? Which was the greater reverence: to
exploit one's own belief; or, open-minded, to be searching for a
clearer outlook upon truth? And so, bit by bit, the lure of the
laboratory beckoned to Scott Brenton, just as, bit by bit, his wife and
his profession lost their hold upon him; lost it, to his regret, lost
it by their own failure to supply his highest needs. As to the
laboratory itself and all it offered, it was no mean achievement for it
to make good to Brenton all the other lacks, whether in his
professional career, or in his wife herself. Indeed, he turned to
science, his first great love, as some other men might have turned to
the wooing society of a stage soubrette. As the weeks went on, and the
tentacles of his priesthood, coming into contact with his doubts and
failing to penetrate them, by slow degrees relaxed their grip on him,
by those same slow degrees, he felt his manhood yielding to the
insistent demands of nature's law upon her votaries. As yet, however,
he had no realization that now the ultimate result was but a matter of
time. Professor Opdyke realized it, though, quite clearly; and he laid
his plans accordingly.
Meanwhile, between the insistent interests that centred in his son, and
the persistent efforts of the professor to make good all other lacks,
Scott Brenton was finding life a saner and a happier thing than he had
ever dreamed. Even his doubtings almost ceased to sting him, nowadays.
A Creator whose achievements ran throughout the gamut from the actions
of a bit of sodium flung into a dish of water, up to the intricate
brain processes of a baby just beginning, as the phrase is, to take
notice: surely a Creator capable of that was not likely to bungle His
plans and be driven to reconstruct them now and then, either by
miraculous intervention, or by thrusting a brake between the cogs of
the revolving wheels of everlasting law. If the baby boy absorbed the
contents of his bottle too fast for his good, he had a wholly
consequent stomach ache. If Reed Opdyke tried conclusions with black
powder and with lumps of loosened rock, he was laid on his back, with
uncompromising promptness. In neither case was there a question of
bringing distress upon the children of men, willingly or unwillingly.
They brought it on themselves; theirs was the fault. As well blame a
railway engine for running over the well-meaning individual who lies
down on the track to rest and meditate on higher things, as blame the
natural law with which men tamper. The All-Wise shows His goodness to
His creatures in that He has laid down law of any sort, not left the
universe to chance and wilful freakishness. As for gospel, the
essential thing to preach was the duty of living according to the law.
After all, it was living, not belief, that counted in the end of
everything.
And, all that spring and early summer, it was living that Scott Brenton
preached. He left to his new curate all the insisting upon proper
points of doctrine. He himself took as his sole concern the thing he
felt most vital, life itself. And, as the weeks went on, perchance in
consonance with his new doctrine concerning man's grip on life eternal,
perchance by reason of his greater enjoyment of life temporal, Brenton
grew stronger, infinitely more alert, infinitely more virile in his
magnetism. The old, limp husk, partly of heredity, in part of starved
existence, was falling off from him. More and more plainly, as it fell,
there stood revealed to all who had the eyes to see, the nervous figure
of the man within.
Even Katharine felt the change instinctively, although, nowadays, she
was too absorbed in realizing her identity with the All-Mind, with
proving that suffering was nothing in the world but absent-minded sin,
to pay any great attention to so concrete a matter as her husband's
improved appetite and better sleep. Katharine, by now, had come to the
point where she was beginning to dispense with the services of Doctor
Keltridge in any minor crisis; and, instead, to sit and meditate upon
the crisis, with a black-bound, fine-print, much-begilded volume open
on her knee. As always, Katharine reckoned shrewdly. If an ordinary
five-dollar copy of her new spiritual check-book upon the bank of
health were potent to subdue any sort of pains from indigestion to a
raging tooth, then a ten-dollar binding super-added ought, of a surety,
to be able to cope with tuberculosis or the hookworm. Therefore she had
chosen to fortify herself once and for all.
Meanwhile, the little table beside her bed-head was fast heaping itself
with small books of devotion, books from which the old-time cross was
conspicuously absent. At present, it was taxing all her ingenuity, all
the fervour of her new belief, to make its tenets tally with her young
son's attitude concerning colic, doubtless because, at some point or
other, he had escaped from perfect contact with the All-Mind, the
Healer. Some noxious claim or other still held good over him, despite
her efforts to eradicate its malignant influence. It was disappointing.
Still, as yet she was merely a novice in the great order of the new
religion; and she only wondered at the swift hold her untrained mind
had gained upon the pliant body of her husband.
Katharine smiled contentedly above her open book. Strange that she ever
could have cherished the false notion that she and Scott were alien in
their natures! Rather not! They both were ultra-scientific,
fundamentally alike. As yet, of course, Scott did not spell his science
with an X; but that was bound to come. How could it be otherwise,
indeed, when his mere carnal appetite for bacon and dry toast had
multiplied itself by ten, as result of her devotion to the book now
lying open on her knee? It would be so very good, when she had brought
her own husband to her way of thinking. For Scott was still her
husband, still in a sense her property; therefore he still was dear to
her, after her selfish fashion. His acceptance of her standards would
be infinitely good; infinitely better would be the knowledge that she
herself had converted him to their acceptation. And after Scott?
Katharine's prominent and shallow eyes grew hazy with the greatness of
her thoughts, the while she meditated upon the wider field of labour
offered her in the person of Reed Opdyke. Glorious indeed would be the
conversion and the consequent cure of a desperate case like that! It
would be a brilliant vindication of her science from the slanders of
that decreasing number who persisted in ignoring the prefatory X.
Katharine's eyes grew yet more dreamy, above the open pages of her
book. If courage were only hers, and patience, it all would come to her
in the fulness of time.