Out of deference to what Kathryn was still pleased to term her husband's cloth, the Brentons promptly had been received into the inmost circles of the college set, an honour which they shared with Prather, the fussy little novelist. Kathryn liked the novelist; he was such an unctuous, eager little man, so redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her. She explained to him that his local colour was so brilliant that it dazzled her; but the ignoble truth was that she found it boring, although her letters going out of town were splashed thickly with his name.
At the faculty wives Kathryn looked askance. They most of them knew things and they wore their clothes as if they were accustomed to them. Nevertheless, they seemed to her a little bit old-fashioned. Some of the grown-up daughters, the ones who had not been in college, she liked a little better. Nevertheless, Kathryn's attempts at closest comradeship were with certain of the young instructors. She told herself that she was mothering them, giving their homeless selves an outlook on domestic life. What the young instructors told, would be better for the editing. Indeed, it was somewhat edited and pruned of its finest flowers of speech, out of loyalty to Brenton whom they one and all admired exceedingly.
Brenton himself, meanwhile, though liking those jovial youngsters who, in reality, were of his age and epoch, was finding his most satisfying intimacy in the friendship of two of the older men: Doctor Eustace Keltridge, and Professor Opdyke.
Of the two of them, both mellow men of learning and of kindly humour, Doctor Keltridge was easily first choice. Before Scott Brenton had been a month over Saint Peter's Parish, he had fallen into the habit of dropping in upon the doctor at all sorts of hours and upon all sorts of pretexts, now smoking with him in the library and discussing things ecclesiastical, now following him into the laboratory, to hang above the trays of cultures, or the charts of perverse fever cases, while the doctor expounded and predicted, laying down the law with voice and fist and trenchant word. He saw Olive, as a rule, when he was passing in and out. Sometimes they merely nodded from afar, sometimes they had a little conversation. It was always as immaterial as possible, yet it never failed to have a little flavour of personal and friendly understanding.
Next to the absent-minded and erratic doctor, Brenton's loyalty was given to Professor Opdyke. At the very first, the consciousness that the gray-haired professor was father to his old-time idol had made all the difference; but, after a time, that fact sank into insignificance beside the personality of the man himself. Never was any artist more devoted to his medium, whether that medium were water colours or progressive harmonies, than was Professor Opdyke to his balances and his blow-pipes, to his effervescent mixtures and to his most unholy smells. His laboratory was his studio, a place apart from all the outside world, the threshold where he was content to stand and knock, waiting in perfect, reverential patience until the mysterious door ahead of him should open just a very little wider. To the outward eye, he was languid, indifferent, a little cynical and prone to boredom. Underneath it, though, the fires of his enthusiasm, of his ambition to advance, not his own career, but the sum total of scientific knowledge: this fire was burning at white heat. Indeed, it cost him something to bank down the flame upon the side of his nature which lay open to the general view. His somewhat cynical humour was the material which he selected for the banking.
Professor Opdyke almost never was betrayed into the sin of talking shop. Upon the rare occasions that he gave himself the privilege, save to his classes, he insisted upon but one congenial hearer, and that that one should be with him behind closed doors. More and more often, as the second winter of his acquaintance with Brenton went on, he chose Brenton as the one hearer he allowed himself. This was partly by reason of Brenton's interest in Reed, for, whatever his habit with his chemistry, it must be confessed that Professor Opdyke talked in season and out about his son. Partly, too, it came by way of Professor Mansfield whose introduction of Brenton would have been the Open, Sesame to any sanctum in America. Most of all, though, it came from Brenton himself, from the young rector's manifest enthusiasm for all that went under the name of chemistry, an enthusiasm based, as Professor Opdyke made prompt discovery, upon no mere smattering of knowledge.
Bit by bit, then, the professor lowered the guard he had built up before his holy places, relaxed the vigilance of his watch upon them lest they should be invaded by the careless feet of those that did not comprehend. Scott Brenton did comprehend. To him, experimenting was an act of reverence, not a deed of idle curiosity. The world-laws were, to him, full of purpose, albeit only half revealed; and blessed was he who should assist in the revealing.
Brenton, listening, talking in his turn, sometimes questioning, sometimes uttering a trenchant bit of argument, felt the old impulses stirring within him, felt the old love of science renewing its hold upon his heart and brain. Not that he regretted his holy calling; at least, not yet. It was a goodly privilege to be allowed to set forth to all men the modern, elastic gospel of good will coupled with a bowing acquaintance with the sciences. Much might be done, that way, he told himself, while steadily he disregarded the voices whispering in his ears that he was offering his parishioners a set of pretty painted toys instead of the rugged, vital facts of universal law. Still, the toys were prettier and vastly more refined than were the old-time goblins of his mother's day, the goblins marched to and fro persistently by half a score of Parson Wheelers in their time. Those were monstrosities, palpably of human creation and yet in the likeness of no mortal thing. The toys he offered to his people were at least shaped and coloured into dainty imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as he would and did, they burnt within him with an increasing fierceness, burnt away, indeed, some of the scaffolding upon which his system of theology had reared itself.
More than a little of this conflagration the professor realized. Also he realized its potential danger. If the scaffolding began to go, what then? Would the flames blaze up all the higher on the heap of fallen ruins; or would the ice water which, in the Parson Wheelers, had taken the place of good red blood, spurt from the veins of this, their latter-day descendant, and quench the fires before they reached the superstructure of his faith? The professor realized to the full, moreover, his personal accountability in the matter. None the less, he could never quite decide where the real right lay. Should he ignore the possible loss to science or should he help on the probable loss to theologic eloquence? He shook his head at the question. Like all true scientists, he must hold himself impartial. Asked, however, he surely had no moral right to withhold facts from a mature mind like that of Scott Brenton. Facts he would give, and plainly, and without modification or omission. There, though, he would stop. The inferences which Brenton should draw out from them should be no concern of his.
And Scott Brenton who, from the start, had had a trick of drawing inferences to suit himself, was all the better pleased on that account.