_ With a rustle born of plenteous starch, a quiver of nodding roses on her hat and an ultra-evident aroma of violet preceding her coming, Katharine swept across the floor and halted beside Opdyke's couch. Even in the first instant of keen resentment at her appearing, Opdyke was conscious of no small surprise at beholding her so well dressed. In his crass ignorance, he had yet to learn that, in the minds of the elect, good clothes are an essential weapon in contesting the claims of sin-born disease. Indeed, he confessed to himself that, had Katharine only been a shade more self-distrustful, she would not have been a bad looking woman. It was very plain, however, that even the salary of the rector of Saint Peter's would not hold out long before the demands made upon it by the rector's lady's wardrobe. Moreover, it was a little bit surprising to find the country daisy expanded to the limits of a prize sunflower such as this.
"You must remember me, Mr. Opdyke," she was saying effusively. "Such an old, old acquaintance, you know! It must be at least seven or eight years, since I first knew you. I was only little Katharine Harrison then; I remember perfectly how shy and gauche I was, and how terrified at you. Shall I sit here? Thank you. And you were very nice to me. I often tell Scott how much it meant to me. Really, it was my first introduction to the big, big world."
Opdyke rallied swiftly to this unlooked-for demand upon his social instincts.
"No one ever would have suspected it from seeing you, Mrs. Brenton," he assured her, with manful falsity.
She crackled her starch at him, with a buoyant pleasure in his words.
"You have all your old ingratiating tricks of speech," she told him. "Really, nowadays, you ought to be steadying down a little, Mr. Opdyke."
"And thinking on my latter end?" he queried, although he flushed a little at her words. "It's not profitable to meditate upon a blank monotony, you know."
Swiftly she bent forward, resting her elbow on her white linen knee, her chin on her white silk palm.
"But why let it be monotonous?" she demanded.
Reed made a wry face, ostensibly at his own situation, actually at the brutally frank question from what was, in fact, a total stranger.
"I really don't see how I well can help it, Mrs. Brenton," he said quietly.
Lifting her chin from her palm, she clasped her gloves in her lap, and looked down at her host with manifest encouragement.
"Only by lifting yourself above it, Mr. Opdyke," she enlightened him.
Reed smiled grimly.
"I'm very heavy; it would take too large a derrick," he replied. "How is Brenton, to-day?"
"Quite as usual, thank you. Of course, we both are so busy that I see comparatively little of him," Katharine said serenely.
Reed caught at the digression.
"Of course. I suppose the youngster keeps you very busy, Mrs. Brenton."
"Oh, it isn't the baby. I have a wonderful nurse for him, some one Doctor Keltridge recommended."
Again Reed caught at the chance for a digression.
"Doctor Keltridge is a wonderful man," he remarked, a little bit maliciously.
Too late, he realized his blunder, for without delay, Katharine seized the opportunity to snap back to her former position.
"Yes, after his fashion. It is only rather sad to see so broad an intellect buried under the masses of old-time tradition. He gives a strychnine tonic when we others would merely pour ourselves into the gap, and fight disease with mind."
Opdyke's brown eyes became inscrutable.
"But do you think that mind can do the business, Mrs. Brenton?" he inquired.
"Yes, if we apply it in all earnestness. Of course, one must first believe; then the rest of it is easy."
"But," Opdyke's eyes were still inscrutable, although his accent was that of the eager student; "do you think that one's mind always matches up to the size of the disease? I should suppose that, just now and then, they might not fit."
"Dear Mr. Opdyke, there is always the Universal Mind on whom we are allowed to call, in time of need," Katharine assured him, with an unction that made Opdyke long to pitch her, head first, starch and all, through the open window just behind her. No wonder Brenton looked about all in, if this was the sort of domestic table talk dished up for him!
There was a short pause, broken only by the faint crackling of starchy petticoats. Then Katharine unclasped her hands, straightened her hat, and clasped her hands anew, this time slightly above the region of the belt.
"Mr. Opdyke," she said gravely then; "something within me, here, urges me to give you the message."
"The--?" Reed inquired politely.
"The message of our faith. When I came in, it was my only idea to drop in on you and cheer you up a bit; but now--"
During her impressive pause, Opdyke reflected that it was plain the woman was lying flagrantly, that she had come to see him with fell purpose. He loathed that purpose absolutely; he resented it most keenly. None the less, the one course open to him was to submit as little ungraciously as he was able. No moral force would be able to dislodge his guest; and Ramsdell could not well be summoned, to pluck forth the rector's lady and escort her, willy-nilly, to the outer door.
But Katharine's pause had ended.
"But now I feel that it would be wrong for me to neglect the chance to sow my little seed in the soil so plainly harrowed for its growth. Mr. Opdyke," and now the roses trembled with her earnestness; "do you realize at all the meaning of the word
disease?"
Reed yielded to a wayward impulse left over from his boyhood.
"It generally is supposed to be connected rather intimately with germs, Mrs. Brenton," he assured her.
"By no means. And so you really do cling to the old, old fallacies? It seems too bad, and for such a man as you are. Most of us, you know, have cast them over. We now are quite convinced that disease is but another name for sin and unbelief; that the universal cure lies in the submission of one's will to the dictates of the Universal Mind."
"Really? How interesting!" Opdyke's courteous voice lacked none of the symptoms of complete conviction.
Katharine leaned a little nearer.
"Mr. Opdyke, little as you may believe it, physical disease has no real existence."
"Indeed?" Reed queried politely, quite as if the question had no personal significance for him.
"Not at all. It only shows the inherent weakness of the one who believes himself an invalid."
This time, Reed felt himself suddenly turning balky.
"Oh, I say!" he protested.
Katharine laid a steadying hand upon the couch, and Opdyke eyed the steadying hand much as if it had been a toad.
"Mr. Opdyke, even in so sad a case as yours, the remedy is quite within your hands," she told him gravely.
Reed's sense of humour came back again to his relief.
"How do you make that out?" he asked her, taking his eyes from the potential hopping toad to rest them on the face before him, a face serenely smug with the consciousness of its own sanctification.
"If you would only trust and believe, would throw your whole nature into tune with spiritual law and order, you could get up off from that couch, tomorrow, and walk down to the post office and back again."
Reed lost the great essential fact, unhappily, in gloating over the finale. Why didn't the woman say the butcher shop, and done with it, since she was so set upon a rhetorical slump of some sort? However, he smothered his interest in the detail, and went back again to the central fact.
"It only rests with you how long you are to lie here, Mr. Opdyke," Katharine was reiterating solemnly, yet with the same carefully manufactured smile that had appeared upon her lips simultaneously with the first expressions of her creed.
Reed experienced a sudden wave of physical nausea, as he watched it.
"I wish that I could believe you, Mrs. Brenton," he said dryly. "Unfortunately, it is quite impossible."
Katharine did her best to make her smile more luminous.
"You think so, Mr. Opdyke? So long as you will not believe, you will not throw off your weakness of the body. You must face disease, not yield to it. You must lift yourself above it, must plant your feet upon it in firm disdain, and, using it as a footstool, arise from its ugly foundations to a perfect and sinless state of health." Again she paused, and fixed her rapt gaze upon his face which slowly was reddening and stiffening into something closely akin to a blinding rage. "Mr. Opdyke, believe me: your poor, broken body is only the outer guise of your erring mind. Dismiss your error; throw yourself unresistingly into the vast and placid pool of the Cosmic Ego, and you will arise from your bed of pain, a cured and healthy man."
A little vein beside Reed's temple swelled slightly and began to throb. It seemed to him that this impossible woman was tearing his nerves apart in a remorseless effort to get at the inmost secrets of his consciousness. By all the laws of self-preservation, he had every right to drive her from the room. By all the laws of chivalrous courtesy, he must lie there, prostrate, at her mercy, and listen to her with an unflinching smile, until the wheels of her enthusiasm should run down--if, indeed, they ever did.
"I am afraid, Mrs. Brenton," he was beginning as suavely as he was able.
Katharine, however, interrupted him.
"Mr. Opdyke," she demanded, with a sort of religious sternness; "have you ever faced disease?"
"I was under the impression that I had," he answered curtly.
"Looked it steadily between the eyes, I mean; sought to impress it with your mental dominance? Disease is a coward, we are told, a coward who leaves us, when it knows we feel no fear of it. If you just once would assert your manliness, not lie there, supine, and--"
"Mr. Hopdyke," Ramsdell's voice said from the threshold; "Doctor Keltridge is downstairs, and is very anxious to see you about something most important. What shall I tell 'im?"
Reed, his temples throbbing now in good earnest, smothered a
Thank God, and turned to smile at Ramsdell. Ramsdell met the smile with impenetrable gravity. None the less, a look in the tail of his eye set Opdyke wondering whether, indeed, the message from the doctor was quite the accident it seemed.
"Send him up, of course, Ramsdell. Doctor Keltridge is too busy a man to be kept waiting," he said briefly.
To his extreme surprise, Katharine took the hint and rose.
"And I must go, Mr. Opdyke. It has been such a pleasant time for me, this little talk with you. Some day, perhaps you will let me come again. Meanwhile, you really will be thinking over some of the things I've said?"
"Very likely," Reed answered rather shortly, as once more the hoptoad of a hand rested unpleasantly close to his shoulder. "It's not a thing one is likely to forget."
"I am so glad. How do you do, Doctor Keltridge?" she added archly. "You find me here, invading your province. I do hope you won't be too angry." And, with a nod to Reed, she rustled from the room.
It was plain, however, that the doctor was angry, very, very angry. With a gesture of complete disgust, he thrust aside the chair in which she had been sitting, drew up another and, seating himself, rested his long fingers on Opdyke's wrist, while his keen eyes searched the face, more flushed now than he had ever seen it, the veins about the temples filled to bursting and pounding madly, the wavy hair above them clinging tightly to the brow. As long as the rustling skirts were audible, the doctor sat there, silent, his face blackening more with every second. When at last the front-door screen had clicked behind her, he spoke.
"Boy, I'd have given a thousand dollars to have prevented this. That damned woman has been enough to put you back a dozen months. Yes, yes. I know she is a fool; but I also know that your nerves aren't in any state to stand her infernal diatribes. Been telling you it rested with you alone to choose the psychological moment for going out to walk, with your bed strapped on your back? Yes; I know, I tell you. No use for you to deny. No sense, either, for that matter. You owe the woman nothing; and, by thunder," he let go the wrist and gently laid his hand on Opdyke's throbbing head; "she is going to owe you a good deal. If she had kept on much longer, you'd have been a case for a hypodermic, perhaps worse. How the devil did she get up here, Ramsdell?"
Ramsdell, from the foot of the couch, was watching Opdyke with the dumb, anxious entreaty of a faithful dog.
"Really, I couldn't 'elp it, sir. Mr. Hopdyke 'ad sent me of an errand. When I got back, why, 'ere she was, a-going it as bad as any suffragette." Ramsdell checked himself abruptly, and gave a discreet little cough. Then, warned by something in the doctor's face that he could proceed with perfect safety, he went on once more. "As I came hup the stairs, I 'eard 'er telling Mr. Hopdyke that he must harise and leave 'is disease be'ind 'im; and hit seemed to me, sir, I'd best telephone to you, for fear he'd be doing a thing so rash, and 'urt 'imself for ever. I trust," he now addressed himself to Opdyke; "trust there was no liberty taken, sir."
Reed laughed, despite the fact that the encounter with Mrs. Brenton's new theology had left him feeling most ignobly weak.
"So that was it? Ramsdell, you're a wily fox. I'll see you don't regret it. And don't worry. I'm all right, and I promise you I won't try any gymnastics till the doctor gives me leave." Then, Ramsdell gone, he turned to the doctor in a sudden wave of self-surrender which the older man found exceeding pitiful. "Doctor, am I a futile sort of chap, or am I slowly going off my head? The woman talked the most utter rubbish; I know it's total rot. And yet--Doctor," and the brown eyes looked up into the keen eyes above them with an appeal before which the keen eyes veiled themselves. "Doctor," Reed added a bit unsteadily; "I thought I had succeeded in getting a firm grip on myself once for all; and now--it's gone."
In the end, it was a case for hypodermics, that night, the first time for almost a year. The doctor stayed with Reed till time for dinner; then, with an absolute casualness, he invited Mrs. Opdyke to let him stay and dine with her and the professor. Downstairs, his talk was cheery, careless; no one, seeing the doctor for the first time, would have suspected that anything was on his mind. The professor, though, knew his old friend better, yet he forebore to put a question. He knew that, when Doctor Keltridge was quite ready, he was wont to speak; but not before.
Doctor Keltridge's cigar, smoked in Reed's room, lasted long, that night; above it, the doctor was silent, indolent, and yet alert to every change in the face before him. At nine o'clock, he rose, dived into his breast pocket and pulled out a little case. An instant later, he had bent above the couch.
"Now, Ramsdell," he said cheerily, when he had once more tucked the rug in about Opdyke's arm; "you'd better get this fellow into bed at once. If he isn't sound asleep, inside an hour, you'll know what to do. A good night to you, boy, and many thanks for your educated taste in tobacco. Whatever you do, never allow your supplies to run low, or you'll straightway lose a good half of your social pull. Good night." And, with a nod to Ramsdell, he was gone.
Opdyke was not asleep within an hour. Moreover, although Ramsdell did know what to do, and did it, the stroke of midnight found him still staring at the dark with burning eyes, while the pillowcase underneath his head hissed faintly to the steady throbbing of his temples. The noxious, deadly poison of Mrs. Brenton's talk had made its insidious way through and through his system, loosening its carefully maintained tensions, overthrowing its balances, stirring up all the old, forgotten dregs of rebellious restlessness and turning them into his blood. It mattered nothing that Reed Opdyke recognized the fact that it was poison, mattered nothing that he despised it and fought against it with every antidote within his reach. The harm was done; it would take long and long to undo it, to bring him back to his old mental health once more.
Across the darkness, his life seemed to him to be marching, pageant-wise, a series of separated scenes. They started, according to his idea, in the faint shaft of light that crept in to him through Ramsdell's keyhole--for, despite all orders, the faithful fellow had flatly refused to put himself into bed until Opdyke himself should be snoring. They started, each one of them, in the narrow thread of light; they marched slowly across the blackness of the ceiling above his head, and then they ranged themselves along the opposite wall, and lurked there in the shadow, leering at him. In each one of them, moreover, he held the very centre of the stage.
He saw himself a student, loitering about the elm-arched campus, lounging above a table in the smoke-thick air of Mory's, sitting in Professor Mansfield's study and gravely discussing with him the possibilities included in Scott Brenton. He saw himself in his professional school, star of his class, pampered godling of his mates. He saw himself, his fists in his pockets and his nose to the tanging breeze, striding along the Colorado mountain sides, saw himself, lightly poised on any sort of a contrivance that could swing from a rope's end, going down into the darkness of the mine. Then he saw himself--and, as he looked, his eyes were steady--scrambling over the heaps of wreckage towards the stark form beyond.
And then he saw himself the centre of a group of white-coated surgeons, with Ramsdell's face beside him, Ramsdell's curiously gentle arm around his shoulders. He saw himself, again with Ramsdell, this time at home, and with the stanch old doctor at his other side. And then, all at once, the other figures faded, and he saw himself alone with Olive; saw Olive, daintily alive and eager, saw her merry mask of teasing fun which never really covered the pitiful comprehension underneath; saw himself, still, helpless, a wretched compromise between death and life, answering her nonsense with laughing lips, but with eyes which, however brave, yet were full of an insistent appeal for something that she alone could give him. And Olive was not slow of understanding. Oh, God--
He flung his arm, the arm scarred with the fresh pricks of the useless hypodermic needle, across his burning eyes, his throbbing temples, before he finished out his phrase. Oh, God have mercy! What had he, albeit dumbly, allowed himself to ask of Olive? What right had he, henceforward, to call himself a man, or honourable, or brave, or anything else but an insufferably selfish cad, that he had ever once allowed one such instant of supine appeal to scar the surface of their perfect friendship? A girl like Olive was not for such a man as he was--now. Once, it might have been; but, at that time, it had not occurred to him to think about it. In the fulness of his powers, he had had scant time for women. Now, in his utter weakness--And Olive--
The thread of light became a sudden flood. His hot, wet eyes shrank from the dazzle.
"Did you speak, sir?" Ramsdell inquired, from the nearer threshold.
Some sudden instinct of weakness made Opdyke long for the touch of any firm and friendly hand.
"No, you old owl," he answered. "Still, now you are here, do you mind trying to straighten me out a little? Thanks. That's very good. Now go to bed. I think I am beginning to feel sleepy."
Ramsdell obediently vanished; and Opdyke, shutting his teeth upon his mental agonies, lay silent and as if turned to stone. With a supreme effort at self-control, he drove the pictures from the shadowy wall; he banished Olive from his mind. Instead, he forced himself to think of Whittenden, of the charge that Whittenden had laid on him concerning Brenton. It had seemed a bit unfair at the time; now, looking backward, Opdyke could see that, as usual, Whittenden had been wise. Responsibilities, such as that one, would be very steadying. The need of holding the next man fast would tighten his grip upon himself. After all, it was grip he needed; else, he would be a futile frazzle of humanity, like Prather.
With an inconsequential snap, poor Reed's brain was off again, and on a fresh and open stretch of road. Then suddenly it came against another obstacle. Only the very afternoon before, Prather had broken off his babble to advise a wife, as spiritual plaster for all of this world's woe. A wife! And for him! That any man in his position and with his outlook could harbour for an instant an idea so selfish! And even Olive--
However, this time, Ramsdell did not hear. _