The doctor interrupted, less out of charity for Mrs. Brenton than from his own impatient testiness.
"Wait and see, boy. Wait and see. It is quite evident that she's a gone case, that nothing can save her. Sometimes, I even shudder for her husband."
"Brenton? He's immune."
"There's never any telling. She and her friends probably have been at work with pick and shovel, for months, trying to undermine his foundations. They are an insidious crew, Reed, totally insidious. If a man is the least bit nervous, their absent-treatment methods get in their work with a fatal effect sometimes. I've been watching them for years. They mine and countermine, until it isn't safe to predict who is immune and who isn't. For all either of us know, you may be doomed to be the next victim. If you are, though, send for me. I'll cure you of it, if it takes a dose of lysol. Well, good bye, boy. I'll drop in again, within a day or so."
The doctor went his way, flinging back a trail of chaff as long as his voice could carry to the room above, a room curiously dim and still, it seemed to him, as he came out into the strident sunshine of the July day. Once in the street, moreover, and safely out of range of Opdyke's windows, his fun dropped from him, and he shook his sturdy shoulders, as if he were trying to shake them free from an ugly, yet invisible, burden.
"There's a change there," he muttered to himself; "and I'll be hanged if I can analyze it. It's a curious sort of settling down of the boy's whole nature, as if he had thrown off some maddening strain or other, as if he were getting some new sort of grip upon himself. I wonder what it is. He's not better, nor worse; it can't be his health, then. Bodily, he is just about holding his own; nervously, he is steadying. I believe I'll talk it up with Olive; he may have given her a clue."
Olive, however, questioned, had no ideas upon the subject. She too had noticed the change, had felt it, rather; it was too slight really to be noticed. She had wondered at it. It was as if Opdyke were slowly tightening all his contacts with what of life there still was left to him, determining to make the best of a bad matter, and to extract all the enjoyment he was able out of his narrowing surroundings.
Reason about the cause of this as Olive would, she could not fathom it. Was Opdyke merely sickening of the individual members of his scanty calling list, and seeking to increase its variety? Or was he slowly gathering up some of the broken ties, ready for the day when once more he should leave his prison and walk out among them, a free man? Of two things, though, Olive was assured. The change had started a good two months earlier, had dated, as nearly as she could reckon backwards, from the time of Whittenden's brief visit. And the change, whatever else its alterations in the life of Opdyke, had made not one grain of difference with their friendship. Indeed, it seemed to Olive now and then that Opdyke turned to her society the more eagerly after a protracted season of receiving varied calls. However, well he might turn to Olive! It was fifteen months, now, since his accident, fifteen months that the brace of New York surgeons had professed their inability to predict a future. Uncertainty like that is bound to tell on any man; and, throughout it all, Olive Keltridge never once had failed him.
That Opdyke was renewing, after his limited fashion, many of his old associations was a fact evident to the whole town. The knowledge that he was lowering his year-long barricade, as a matter of course, brought to his door a horde of visitors bound to be more or less unwelcome. As a matter of fact, on one pretext or another, nine tenths of them were turned away. Ramsdell saw to that. Despite his misplaced aspirates, he possessed a perfect genius for uttering gracious fibs with a totally impenetrable smile of deprecation. Moreover, he knew from long experience Reed's choice in people, and he read strangers keenly. Therefore more than one potential visitor, moved by a combination of curiosity and benevolence, was assured that "Mr. Hopdyke 'as 'ad a very bad night, and is just gone off to sleep," although Dolph Dennison's coat tails or Olive Keltridge's linen skirt might have been vanishing through the doorway as the less welcome guest came in at the front gate. In spite of the moral certainties of the later guest, it was impossible to prove that Ramsdell was lying flagrantly. One could only smile, and hand in a card, with the agreeable surety that it would be referred to the upstairs potentate and pigeonholed in Ramsdell's retentive memory as ticket for admission later on, or else a permanent rejection label, past all argument or gainsaying.
Prather, the novelist, was one of the first names on the lengthening list of those who were to be admitted at all sorts of hours. Reed Opdyke accepted him in mirthful gratitude to the Providence which had arranged so equable a quid pro quo. Prather was manifestly out for copy, despite his constant disavowals of what he termed an envious slander hatched by Philistine minds. Reed Opdyke's sense of humour was still sufficiently acute to assure him that there was every possibility that, at some more or less remote period, he would find a full-length portrait of himself in Prather's pages, a portrait all the more easily recognizable by reason of the disguises which would draw attention to the essential human fact hidden behind their veils. On the other hand, however, Prather himself was offering to Reed no small amusement. To a man used to the wide spaces of the mountain landscapes, to the vast secrets hidden within the bowels of the mines, it seemed little short of the incredible that any human being at all worthy of the name could be so infinitely fussy over trifles, could wear himself to shreds over framing a bit of repartee, could spend a tortured morning, reducing to the limits of a rhythmic paragraph the illimitable glories of the earth and sky. And the ways by which he sought to carry out his achievement! These baffled any comprehension born of Opdyke's brain.