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.