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,—