Brenton lifted his head to stare at her, aghast.
"Catia, I can't," he told her sternly.
Nevertheless, in the end of things, he did. His later self-reckonings were all the more severe on that account. In more senses than one, Scott Brenton's rest-time ended with his turning his back upon the country parish.
CHAPTER NINE
"Well, what do you think about it, father?" Olive Keltridge queried, as she tapped the table with the corner of the note she was holding in her hand.
The tapping, however, was no indication of any filial impatience. It was merely to remind her parent that something was still expected of him, before he drifted off again into an absent-minded study of the medical journal clutched between his fists. Olive Keltridge would have been the last person in the world to dissent from the general adoration of her father. He was all in all to her, as she to him. None the less, she was driven to admit at times that it was a trifle difficult to keep him up to his social duties.
Olive's mother had died, six years before. The girl had come out of school to take upon her slim young shoulders the management of her father's house. Moreover, in that aged town where, aside from a few score new professors and their callow young assistants, everybody's grandparents had played dolls and tin soldiers together, Dr. Keltridge's absent-minded fashion of failing to provide his daughter with a feminine chaperon had caused no comment whatsoever. Everybody that one met out at dinner knew all about everybody else for several generations. Either they were indigenous, and born knowing; or else, imported and properly accredited, they took measures to inform themselves at the earliest possible opportunity. All the other people, whom one saw in church and in the street cars, did not count at all.
For that reason, no one appeared to find it at all strange that, from the day she put on long frocks, Olive Keltridge should preside, unchaperoned, at her father's table, should receive her father's guests without other protection from their wiles than that accorded by his presence. To be sure, that presence was not invariably dependable. On more than one occasion, Olive had been obliged to delay the serving of the dinner and excuse herself from her waiting guests, while she went in search of her father in his laboratory. The guests, though, as a rule, had known Doctor Eustace Keltridge even longer than his daughter had had the chance to do. They forgot their hunger completely in their amused curiosity as to the condition in which their host would put in his appearance.
Olive Keltridge was a born hostess. She had been prompt to grasp the fact that guests should be amused as well as fed, prompt to realize that a family skeleton can easily be converted to a family Jack-in-the-box, if only he can be snatched from the closet and manipulated with a little tact. Upon the first occasion of her father's failure to line up beside her in season to receive his guests, she had gone in search of him a little petulantly, had reappeared beside him, hot-cheeked and a trifle sulky. That one experience had been the last one of its kind, however. Olive had lain awake, that night, to ponder on the interval between the time of her discovering her sire, his hair rampant, his necktie shockingly awry and his sleeves rolled up, messing contentedly among his pots and pans of cultures and totally oblivious of his waiting guests, and the much later time when she had literally driven him, irreproachably clad and beaming delightedly, into the drawing-room ahead of her. She had thought it all over, all, from the quality of the delayed dinner down to the things that the guests were likely to be saying in her absence. Then, young as she was, she took her resolution. After that, she would catch her father suddenly, and bring him back, red-handed. A man like Doctor Keltridge ought not to be reduced to the conventional dead level of his fellow townsmen; it would be a waste of rare material. Rather, as the phrase is, he should be featured. And Olive proceeded to feature him accordingly, to the solid satisfaction of her father and to the no small rapture of his old-time cronies.