"The d--"
"Arling!" Dolph made hasty substitution. "But I fancy he is well-tried,
all right, if he has had to dance professional attendance on her.
Where'd she catch it, Olive?"
"Nobody knows. My father says it is like any other germ, floats around
in the air and is harmless, until it lights on some degenerate tissue.
But then, he never did like Mrs. Brenton."
"The question is," Dolph said, with sudden gravity; "will Brenton get
it? I'd rather he'd be afflicted with curacy than with this other
thing."
"Curacy?" Olive questioned. "What's that?"
"Acting like this curate chap, and giving his congregation red-hot pap
for their Sabbatic food. At least, that's curable; the other isn't."
But Reed shook his head. Despite his unvarying point of view, he knew
Scott Brenton better.
"You don't need to worry about Brenton," he assured them. "He has some
common sense and a little logic; both things render him immune."
Dolph settled back in his chair and crossed his legs.
"Yes, Olive, I intend to outstay you," he said, in answer to her
glance. "You were here first; it's your turn to go now. But about this
latest freak of Mrs. Brenton: where do you suppose she picked it up?"
"Evolved it from within."
"Doubted. I've talked to her, Opdyke; she's not the kind to evolve
anything, certainly not a full-fledged case of--"
Olive interrupted.
"There is some good in it, though," she persisted.
"Where?" Opdyke asked her.
"The complexion; it's better than any amount of massage. One never
wrinkles, when one is convinced that nothing can go wrong."
"What about measles?" Dolph demanded pertly.
But Reed objected to the trivial interlude.
"I wish I knew how Brenton really would be taking it," he said, rather
more insistently than it was his wont to speak. "The poor beggar has
had bad times lately with his Ego; always has had, in fact. He has an
enormous conscience, linked with an insatiate desire to put the whole
universe under a blowpipe, and then weigh up the residue. That's
infernally bad for a preacher, especially when he has a wife who is
strong neither in her cooking nor in her sense of humour. Yes, I know
something about Mrs. Brenton, even if I haven't seen her lately.
Besides, I shall see her, some day. She is still clamouring at my
portal; it's only a matter of time now, before she downs the outer
guards and gets in."
"Reed, you won't allow it!" Olive said quickly, for she thought she was
aware what such a call portended.
Opdyke's smile was grim.
"The inner fortress is invincible, Olive, so don't worry. I sha'n't
encourage the maid to let her in. Still, if she breaks through, at
least it will keep her out of mischief in other quarters, and I am a
long way more invulnerable than Brenton."
"They say," Dolph remarked at the opposite wall; "that it is a
perfectly grand thing for the temper."
Olive answered without a trace of malice, so intent was she upon the
question at issue.
"Really, Dolph, I think she isn't cantankerous. Quite selfish people
never are; they just grab everything in sight, with a total serenity
and regardless of any consequences. That is the reason Mrs. Brenton is
such a good subject for her new religion."
Reed roused himself from a brown study.
"If you meet Brenton anywhere, Olive, don't you want to ask him to come
in to see me soon? I've some things I want to say to him; not about
this, of course. Yes, I could telephone, Dennison; but I hate to
interrupt him, when he is in his study at the church; and, at the
house, there's always the danger of calling out Mrs. Brenton. Going? I
wish you wouldn't. Still," and the brown eyes sought the window; "I
can't blame you, such a day."
"Oh, Reed, don't!" Olive said hastily, as she bent to take his hand.
"It makes us seem so selfish. When will the time ever come that you can
go, too?"
Reed shut his lips. Although, of late, both he and Olive had dropped
their reticence and faced squarely and without evasion the facts of his
long imprisonment, even with Dolph, the mention of it hurt him acutely.
Dolph, that day, was so astonishingly alert, so scrupulously charming
in his Sunday trim, such a contrast to himself, flattened out under a
plaid steamer rug whose fringe persisted in getting into his mouth at
times, and with his wavy hair a little disarranged across his forehead.
Ramsdell was invaluable; but, after all, he was nurse primarily, not
valet. But, as for Dolph, he was a thing of beauty and, what was more,
a thing of life, not a soggy bundle like himself. Indeed, he was a fit
comrade for Olive.
Despite his blithe farewell, Reed's brown eyes drooped heavily, after
he had watched the two of them pass out of sight around the corner of
the doorway. Good comrades? Yes. The thin lips lost their steadiness,
quivered a little, then opened, to send an answer out to the final hail
that came back to him from the hall below. A moment afterward, the chin
quivered, even as the lips had done, and something glittered on the
long brown lashes.
"Ramsdell?" Reed said, a little later.
"Yes, sir."
"How long have you been working on this thing?"
"Eleven months and a 'alf, sir."
"Have I made any gain at all?"
"Ye--es, sir. Oh, yes."
Reed smiled grimly.
"How much am I going to keep on gaining?"
"Well, sir," Ramsdell's accent was supposed to be encouraging; "you
see, there's always 'ope, sir."
"I'm glad of so much. Well, never mind about that now. I want to send a
telegram. Please get the blanks."
With Ramsdell seated by his side, blanks in one hand, fountain pen in
the other, Opdyke paused to consider.
"Well, there's no use beating about the bush. I may as well go straight
to the point. Ready, Ramsdell? All right. _To H. P. Whittenden, Seven,
Blank Street, New York City._ Sure you've got that right? All right.
Then: _Getting badly bored and losing grip fast. Come pull me out.
Opdyke._ That's all, Ramsdell. Send it off, to-night."
Next afternoon, Whittenden came, to all seeming the same unspoiled,
curly-headed youngster who had helped to open Brenton's eyes, so long
ago, to the real good there was in life, despite the melancholy
teachings of his early Calvinism. The professor was busy with a class,
Mrs. Opdyke had a cold; and so it came about that Olive, dropping in,
that morning, and hearing of the dilemma, offered to drive down to meet
the guest.
"You always were a comfort, Olive," Reed assured her gratefully.
"You've a general-utility sort of disposition that seems to balk at
nothing, and therefore we all impose upon you. Sure you don't mind? You
can't miss Whittenden. I've told you too many things about him, and he
looks exactly the sort of man he is."
Olive did not miss him. More than that, she used the fifteen minutes of
their drive together to impress upon the guest's mind the salient facts
of Reed's history during the past eleven months, facts largely of the
spirit, not a mere physical chronology.
"And the worst of it all is," she said, as she drew up at the Opdyke
gate; "we none of us, however much we care for him, however hard we
try, can get inside the situation and share it with him. He is bound to
go through it, all alone. That is the most maddening phase of the whole
thing."
But Whittenden, looking into her brown eyes, had his doubts of that.
Before he went to bed, that night, his doubts were even greater.
As a matter of fact, neither Reed Opdyke nor his guest slept very much,
that night. Indeed, they scarcely went to bed at all. Ramsdell, dozing
in the next room, fully dressed, to be in call when Opdyke needed to be
put into bed, had a hazy idea that the evening was eighteen hours long
and that both the men talked throughout it, without pause. The truth of
the matter was, however, that the pauses were both long and frequent,
those quiet times which come across a conversation full of mutual
understanding. At the start, there had been a good deal to say on both
sides. It was the first time the two men had met since Opdyke's
accident; an experience such as that can never fully be explained by
letters, especially when, on one side, the letters have to be dictated
to a man like Ramsdell, sounder of heart than of orthography. Reed
slurred over most of the details of the accident, even now. What he did
not slur over, what he had summoned his friend to hear, was the record
of the months that had come after, a record which, for just the once,
he allowed himself to paint in its true colours, dull, dun gray, and
deep, deep black.
"That's all, Whittenden," he said abruptly at last. "I suppose I might
have gone about it a little bit more tersely; but, the fact is, I
haven't been letting myself rehearse it often. It's bad for the
audience."
"And almighty good for you," the curly-headed rector said tranquilly.
"Mind if I smoke, Reed?"
"Of course not. Sorry I can't join you. It's forbidden fruit, like most
other things, these days." He lay very still, for a while. Then he
looked up, with the ghost of his accustomed smile. "Well, what do you
make out of it all, Whittenden? You've heard and seen the worst of me.
Now what next? Is this losing my grip the final stage of the whole bad
matter?"
Whittenden flung up one lean hand to grasp the chairback above his
head. Then he smoked in silence for a time, his clear eyes fixed on
Opdyke's face. At last, he spoke.
"Reed, it sounds infernally like preaching, and you know I draw the
line at that, except from the pulpit. However, I don't know why, even
if one is a preacher, it's not as decent to quote Bible as to quote
Shakespeare; and there's one sentence that keeps coming into my head,
while I watch you, about losing your life and finding it again. You may
think you've lost your grip on yourself; but, from your own showing,
you've gained a lot of grip on your friends, and I'm not sure that may
not count fully as much, in the long run. As for the bore of it, I
can't much wonder. I'd go mad, myself, laid out here like a poker, and
left, half the day, to ponder on the things I hadn't had time to finish
doing. But, for the rest of it--Reed, I knew you in what you are
pleased to call your palmy days. They were palmy, too; it must have
hurt like thunder to be plucked out of them. And yet," the clear eyes
swept from the topmost wave of brown hair down across the intent face,
so curiously alive, down across the inert body, so curiously dead; "and
yet, I'll be hanged if I don't believe you are more of a man, more of
an active force, than you were then."
"Impossible." Reed spoke briefly.
"Why?" The answer was as brief.
"I don't see a dozen different people in a month, Whittenden. You've no
idea how few there are who--"
"Who take the trouble to come up your stairs? Exactly. Of course, there
are some others who'd be glad to come, and don't dare. There are also
some others who would be glad to come, and who probably would kill you,
if they did. Still, granted the solitary dozen: force isn't a thing one
measures by the acre, Reed. It is deep, not wide. Therefore your dozen
are enough."
"But why the dozen? They come to play with me. I don't do anything to
them."
"No?" Whittenden spoke with his eyes on his cigar. "Ask Ramsdell. Ask
Brenton. Ask--" he turned his eyes on Opdyke; "Miss Keltridge."
With a sudden gesture, Opdyke flung his arm across his brow and eyes.
"Don't!" he said, and his voice sounded stifled.
Deliberately his friend bent forward, took away the shielding arm, and
looked down into Opdyke's eyes unflinchingly.
"Reed, you must not let yourself get morbid," he said steadily. "God
knows there's every reason that you should; and yet, once you do, the
game is up. This is a thing you must face squarely, and remember, while
you face it, that not one life is concerned, but two." Then he let go
the arm, which went back to the old position, and, for a time, the room
was very still.
"Old man," Whittenden said, after a longish interval of smoking and
watching the shielded face; "I know I'm not much use; but doesn't it
help a little to know I'm here, and sick with the seeing for myself all
that this thing means to you? Of course, I had the letters; but they
didn't go far. One has to come and talk it out; and--Well, I'm here."
Then the arm came down, and the heavy eyes met Whittenden's.
"That's why I sent for you," Reed said. "I wanted you."
Ramsdell, in the next room, had quite a little doze, before once more
the voices waked him.
"You see," Reed said at last, as if there had been no pause at all; "I
was a little in the state those fellows were in, up at the mine. I
needed something equivalent to their extreme unction. The cases are
analogous; though, after all, I am not sure it would be quite as hard
to die into the next world as I'm finding it to die out of this."
Whittenden's clear eyes flickered. Then he braced himself and asked the
direct question to which his friend, for two long hours, had been so
plainly leading.
"Reed, do you mean this thing is--permanent?"
"Yes."
"You know it for a fact?"
"Yes."
"Since when?"
"A month or so."
"They told you?"
"No. They still keep up the fiction that they can't predict anything
with any surety."
"Then how do you know?"
"How does anybody know it, when more than half of himself is just so
much dead matter; when the division line between the dead part and the
alive doesn't move along by so much as one hair's breadth; when the
dead part is dead past any resurrection? It is my body, Whittenden. I
know it for a fact."
There was no especial answer to be made. Whittenden had the superlative
good sense to attempt none. After a silence, Reed spoke again.
"I haven't told anybody of it yet, till now. There was no use, and I
dreaded the row they'd be sure to make. Besides, I wanted to tell you,
first of all, because you are the one man in reach who has seen me in
the thick of things, and I knew there would be any amount of detail you
would take in, without my having to explain it to you."
The rector nodded. Through his curling smoke-trails, it seemed to him
he caught a glimpse of the rugged, ragged Colorado mountains, of a
shabby mining camp centring in a group of shafts, of squads of
rough-faced miners, and of Reed Opdyke, smiling and alert, striding
here and there among them, laying down the law superbly, a king among
his loyal and adoring subjects. And now--Whittenden flung back his
head, and his clear eyes glowed with his belief. Never more a king than
now, as he lay there, quiet, but very potent, establishing his throne
above the level of the powers of darkness who murmured threateningly
about his feet! And, meanwhile,--
"Queer thing about our bodies," Reed was saying; "queer and almost a
little cruel. We drive them at top speed and never think a thing about
them, as long as they go on all right. It's when they snap, that we
begin to realize all the things they've stood for."
Again there came the silence, while the eyes of the two men rested on
each other, more eloquent than many words. At last, Reed spoke again.
"It's all hours, Whittenden. I've been a beast to keep you up; still,
it is a relief to have it out and over. Now go to bed. Before you go,
though--for now and then we all of us want something we can hang on to,
and this is one of the times--I don't mean to funk my own share in the
main issue; but, Whittenden, before you go off to bed, would you mind
just saying the _Our Father_? It's some time since I've heard it, and,
in this present muddle of my universe, I've a general notion it might
be of help."