"He isn't always such an ass," Dolph said, as he crossed his legs,
preparatory to a long discussion. "It's only when he sets out to be
bold and bad that he's so intolerable."
"Prather and the adjectives don't seem to match up very well," Reed
objected.
"No. That is the whole trouble; he can't live up to his ambitions. The
poor little beggar would like nothing better than to go the pace, as a
sort of experimental lap for the instruction of his characters; but he
always finds the pace too swift, and lags behind. As result, he isn't
fast, but merely skittish. In the same way, he'd like to pose as a
black-hearted villain. Instead, he gets to a point where he is just
about as unsanctified as a Sunday edition of fruit salad."
"Sunday?"
"Yes, when they chuck in all the odds and ends of wine left from the
dinners of the week. To the untrained tongue, it is a fearful pleasure
to partake thereof. Prather makes up his iniquitous debauches after the
same recipe: absorbing the yellow journals and the orange output of his
fellow novelists, going down to New York for a week end, and then
coming home to embody in a novel his consequent attack of biliousness."
"You've read his last one?"
Dolph nodded.
"And therefore I know whereof I speak," he added gloomily. "I wish the
little beggar would leave off his moving picture shows of town society,
and hie his muse once more in search of subjects from the woolly West."
"Knowing the West more than a little, I don't." Reed spoke with
decision.
"What's the harm?"
"He doesn't get within a gunshot of the truth."
"No matter. He thinks he does, and the average member of his reading
public doesn't know enough to realize the difference."
"All the worse. He ought to be sued for libel. By the way, did you know
he has been having his professional eye on me?"
"For what?"
"Copy, of course. He got to calling rather often. I must say that I
lured him on; I found his babble a distraction. Then, one day--Prather
is nothing, if not transparent--he let out the fact that he was taking
notes of me, for his next novel."
"Of all the--"
Reed interrupted.
"Not in my present ignominy, however; but as I must have been, he
explained most considerately, in my prime. He must have had good
confidence in his own imagination, though."
"Of course," Dolph said serenely. "He's always banked on that. I've
heard him telling, after any number of different dinners, what a feat
it was for him to write _A Portia of the Rockies_ when, for a fact, he
never had been farther west than Toledo. But what is he going to do
with you?"
"Nothing. I called him off."
Dolph nodded at the ankle he was nursing in both hands.
"Grand work, that!" he said. "It would be about as easy as calling off
a flea that was starting on a cross-country journey to the nearest dog.
How did you manage?"
Reed's brown eyes laughed; but his voice was grave.
"I invoked Ramsdell, and he did the deed. From all accounts, he did it
thoroughly, for Prather hasn't put his nose inside my room, since the
day that Ramsdell escorted him downstairs."
"I say!" Dolph looked up suddenly. "I've a patch to put over that hole.
About three weeks ago? Yes? Well, at Olive Keltridge's last dinner,
Prather came edging up to me. I saw he had things on his mind, and I
wasn't busy, so I let him get them off. Else, I was afraid he'd
strangle with the unaccustomed load."
"And the things were me?" Reed inquired urbanely.
"Yes. He asked me if I had heard that you were growing very nervous
lately. That you--Well, never mind the rest of it. In the time of it,
though, I supposed that it was his novelist's imagination that had got
to work. Now I know it was only another manifestation of the almighty
Ramsdell."
"He is almighty, Dolph. I'd be badly off without him."
"So I observe." Dolph chuckled. "At first, I was as afraid of him as if
he had been a country undertaker looking for a job; but I'm slowly
coming to the belief that the fellow is an actual wag. Really, you'd be
badly off without him. He'll stay on, of course?"
"As long as I can keep him. He informs me daily that he'll see me
through it till I die. From all indications, though, I'm a good deal
more afraid of his dying, first."
"Rot!" Dolph remarked cheerily. "What you need, Opdyke, is to forego
thoughts of dying, and get busy."
"What about?" Reed asked a little bitterly. "My present environment
isn't particularly fitted for the strenuous life."
Dolph shut his two hands, side by side, around his ankle. When he
spoke, though, his voice was unconcerned.
"Not unless you take your profession into bed with you," he remarked.
From behind Opdyke's courteous smile for a rather dull joke, there
gathered interest, comprehension, eagerness.
"Dennison, you mean something or other, out of that," he said, after a
little pause.
Dolph shot him one swift glance of scrutiny.
"Naturally. As a rule, I don't talk at random," he said then.
"What do you mean, exactly?" Reed sought to put the question steadily,
but his voice throbbed with excitement.
Satisfied with the start that he had made, Dolph let go his ankle and
sank back inertly in his chair.
"What idiots you specialist fellows are!" he observed indolently. "Once
you get smacked on the head, you're all in. You think you are killed,
and, instead of kicking around to find out the truth of the matter, you
promptly proceed to turn up your toes."
Reed eyed him keenly, spoke impatiently.
"Interpret, Dolph. I may be dense; but I can't see what it is you're
driving at."
"More fool you! I thought better of you, Opdyke, than all that," Dolph
told him, with unabated serenity. "Didn't you ever hear of such a thing
as a consulting engineer?"
"I ought, as it was my official title," Reed made curt answer. "What
then?"
"Put your title into commission, man."
"Impossible."
"Not at all. Of course, you can't go raging around the mountains; but
you may have heard of an old gentleman named Mahomet. Yes? Well, there
you are. And you've a laboratory and a staff of chemists under your
very elbow. Make your people come to you, instead of your going to
them. Your reputation is all made by now. Sit back and get the working
good out of it, not chuck it away as if it wasn't worth an uninitialled
Lincoln cent."
Nothing more nonchalant and unconcerned than Dolph's drawling utterance
could have been imagined. None the less, his words appeared to have
kindled into new flame the burnt-out fires of Opdyke's professional
ambition. For a minute or two, he lay quite silent, while two scarlet
patches glowed upon his cheeks, and while the eyes above them seemed to
fix themselves on distant vistas far beyond the limits of Dolph's
sight. Then at last, he spoke, whimsically as far as his mere wording
went, but in a voice which Dolph found scarcely recognizable.
"Dennison," he said slowly; "for a man who aims to be considered a
genius by reason of the chronic mismatching of his socks and ties, and
by his discordant metaphors, you once in a while do have an
inspiration. Thanks. And now, would you mind it, if I asked you to go
home? I believe I'd like a little time to think things over. Come in,
to-morrow morning, though. Else, I shall send Ramsdell out to capture
you."
Next day, Dolph did come in, and again the next. On the third day,
Opdyke had a half-dozen letters to show him, a half-dozen bits of
planning to submit to his shrewd young brain.
"I've rather got to count on you in this thing, Dennison," he said
concisely. "My father is an older man, and the past two years have been
hard on him; he's not so aggressive as he was, not half so optimistic.
Doctor Keltridge will be watching me to see that I'm not overdoing. He
means well; but now and then it's healthy to overdo matters a little.
Brenton has all he can handle, with his wife. Therefore, in view of
Ramsdell's scholarly attainments, and until I'm justified in setting up
a professional assistant, I rather fancy that it's up to you."
"Thanks. I'm there, every time," Dolph told him crisply. "Besides,
after yesterday, I'd walk on my ears for you."
"You might give a sample exhibition now. Have you said anything, yet?"
"No chance. Besides, I rather hated--Hang it all, Reed, I don't want to
be in a hurry about shuffling off in your best shoes!"
Reed's eyes lost a little of their eagerness; but his smile was
unfaltering.
"They never were my shoes, Dolph. Even if they had been, I couldn't
wear them now; that has all gone by. And, if they had been mine, and I
had had to pass them on to some one else, there is no one in the world
I'd see walking off in them so contentedly as I would see you. Fact,
man, so take it as it comes, and enter into your own kingdom."
"If it is mine," Dolph said gravely.
"I think it is. It is for you to find out, though. But remember this:
you are not to feel for one instant that you're dispossessing any
rightful heir. The chance is yours, Dolph. Most likely it never would
have been mine, in any case. Now it is totally impossible."
Dolph attempted one last remonstrance.
"But why?" he asked vehemently.
The smile faded from Reed's lips, and the lines around the lips grew
grim.
"Because," he answered tersely; "my common sense is in working order,
even if my legs are not."
And, with this downright assurance ringing in his ears and with the
tragedy of its brave renunciation crowding out somewhat of his own
hopefulness, Dolph Dennison went away in search of Olive Keltridge.
Olive, however, was gone to a luncheon out of town, so Dolph was told
by the maid who answered to his ringing. Therefore he went his way once
more; and, feeling idle, unsettled, alternately depressed at the
prospect of what he deemed his coming selfishness in seeking Olive
again later on, and elated with a general zeal for altruistic effort by
the success of his attempt to arouse Opdyke's dormant ambition: because
of all these things, he suddenly decided that it would be the part of
good fellowship to pay a visit to his former rector and present
colleague, Brenton.
To be sure, Dolph had never had the habit of calling upon Brenton. From
the first, his liking for the man had been a temperate one, a liking
mitigated by his own regrets concerning the nature of Brenton's sense
of humour. Moreover, he shied a little bit at Brenton's priestly
calling, shied a little bit more at the idea of coming into closer
quarters with Brenton's wife. Now, from all accounts, the wife was
somewhat in abeyance; and the sudden reversal of Brenton's collar
buttons had turned him from the picture of a priest to at least the
semblance of a man.
In regard to Brenton, Dolph Dennison saw no need to mince matters. His
clear young eyes had made out the one loose thread that sagged and
knotted across and across the texture of Brenton's mind. He saw it and,
lacking knowledge of its source in Brenton's erratic father, he
condemned it with the cocksure harshness of exceeding youth. Without
it, Brenton would have been all man. With it, Dolph believed, he was
predestined to futility. Indeed, what hope was there for a man who
would get himself all waxy over such played-out doctrines as
predestination, and then sit by, impotently calm, and watch his wife go
off upon the Christian Science tangent, without a word to stop her and
tie her down to reason? It was like finding cold, bare bones embedded
in one's breakfast porridge. None the less, one did owe some social
decencies to one's colleagues of the faculty. Therefore, despite his
new-formed porridge metaphor, Dolph trudged away in the direction of
the Brentons' home.
The new home was a smaller one than Saint Peter's rectory. It stood
back a little from the street, under a trio of giant hemlocks which
shaded the front verandah and the long stretch of gravelled walk. The
shady walk was damp now, with the moisture of the early spring, and the
wet little stones ground only softly underneath Dolph's heels, so
softly that their murmur was quite inaudible inside the house, although
a window, wide open to the front verandah, gave to Dolph, as he crossed
the lawn, a full knowledge of the discussion going on within. It was a
one-sided sort of a discussion, to all appearing. Moreover, from the
pitch and the velocity of the voice, Dolph judged the discussion to be
largely on the part of the Brentons' most recent cook.
"There's no use in my trying to please you," he heard the voice say, as
he started up the strip of gravel. "You find fault with everything I
do; you interfere with my rights--"