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The Brentons

by Anna Chapin Ray · English · Gutenberg #21763 · 628,087 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Brentons

Author: Anna Chapin Ray

Illustrator: Wilson C. Dexter


        
Release date: June 8, 2007 [eBook #21763]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

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        Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
        produced from scans of public domain material produced by
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRENTONS ***




Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from scans of public domain material produced by
Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.)






NOVELS BY

ANNA CHAPIN RAY

THE DOMINANT STRAIN
BY THE GOOD STE. ANNE
ON THE FIRING LINE
HEARTS AND CREEDS
ACKROYD OF THE FACULTY
QUICKENED
THE BRIDGE BUILDERS
OVER THE QUICKSANDS
A WOMAN WITH A PURPOSE
THE BRENTONS


[Illustration: Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands
around her cup.

Frontispiece. _See Page_ 84]




THE BRENTONS



BY

ANNA CHAPIN RAY

Author of "A Woman with a Purpose," "The Bridge Builders," etc.



WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
WILSON C. DEXTER



BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1912

_Copyright, 1912,_
By Little, Brown, and Company.

_All rights reserved_

Published, January, 1912

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.




Transcriber's Note:

Beginning with Chapter 19 the spelling of Kathryn inexplicably changes
to Katherine.

The Table of Contents is not contained in the original book. It has
been generated for the convenience of the reader.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER ONE                         CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER  TWO                        CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER THREE                       CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER FOUR                        CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER FIVE                        CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIX                         CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN                       CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER EIGHT                       CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER NINE                        CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TEN                         CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER ELEVEN                      CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE                      CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTEEN                    CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER FOURTEEN                    CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER FIFTEEN                     CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN                     CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO




THE BRENTONS

CHAPTER ONE


However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact
that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his
widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but
offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne of Grace.

"Oh, my dearest Lord and Master," she prayed, at her evening devotions
upon her knees and with her work-roughened hands clasped upon the gaudy
patchwork quilt; "guide Thou my son. Bring him to feel that his perfect
happiness can come only from going forth to preach Thy word to all
men."

And, as it chanced, the door of her room had been left slightly open.
Scott Brenton, young and alert and full of enthusiasms which his years
of grinding work and economy had been powerless to down, came leaping
up the steps just then. The front door had been left unlocked for him.
He closed it noiselessly behind him, and then started to run up the
stairs. The murmur of his mother's voice checked him, stayed his step a
moment, and then changed its pace. He went on up the stairs quite
soberly, thoughtful, his face a little overcast.

It was now the middle of the Christmas holidays of his junior year. The
day he had left college for the short vacation, his chemistry professor
had sent for him and had said things to him about his last term's work
and about his examination papers at the end of the term. The things
were courteous as concerned the past; to Scott Brenton's mind, they
were dazzling as concerned the future. The dazzle had endured until his
mother's words had fallen on his ears. Then it had eclipsed itself,
leaving him to wonder whether, after all, it had not been the _ignis
fatuus_ of self-elation, and not the steady glow of truth. Scott
Brenton was not much more given to introspection, at that epoch of his
life, than is any other healthy youngster of nineteen. None the less,
he slept curiously little, that night.

Next morning, while he dressed, he kept his teeth shut cornerwise, a
habit he had when he was making up his mind to any noxious undertaking.
Then he went downstairs, to find his mother smiling contentedly to
herself, while she added the finishing touches to the breakfast. It was
sausage, that morning, Scott Brenton always remembered afterwards. They
had been chosen out of deference to his boyish appetite. He never
tasted them again, if he could help it. They seemed to have added to
their already strange assortment of flavours a tang of bitterness that
bore the seeds of spiritual indigestion.

His mother looked up to greet him with an eagerness from which she
vainly sought to banish pride. He was her only child, her all; and he
was sufficiently good to look upon, clever enough to pass muster in a
crowd. To her adoring eyes, however, he was a mingling of an Adonis
with a Socrates. And she herself, by encouragement and admonition and
self-denying toil, had helped to make him what he was. Small wonder
that her pride in him could never be completely downed! Nevertheless,--

"Have a good time, last night?" she asked him tamely.

But she missed a certain young enthusiasm from his accent, as he
answered,--

"Fine!"

"Catie there?" she asked again, with the crisp elision of one whose
life has been too strenuous to waste itself in the more leisurely forms
of speech.

"Yes. Is breakfast ready?"

She nodded, as she speared the sizzling sausages one by one and
transferred them to a platter. Then, while she poured off a little of
the fat by way of gravy, she put yet another question.

"Look pretty?" she said.

Her son felt no difficulty in applying the question to Catie, the
proper object, rather than to the sausages on which his mother's gaze
was bent.

"About as usual," he said temperately.

His mother laughed out suddenly. The laugh brought back to her face a
faint resemblance to the girl who, as the pretty daughter of old Parson
Wheeler, had been the acknowledged belle of all the small community.
Later on, all the small community had been jarred to its social
foundations by the discovery that Betty Wheeler, child of a long, long
line of parsons, was going to marry Birge Brenton who had come to
"clerk it" in the village store. She did marry him, and, a little later
on, and most obligingly for all concerned, he died. Few people mourned
him. His wife, though, was among the few. She had a conscience of
Puritan extraction, and the keenest possible sense of what was seemly.

Scott, at the time, was ten days old; therefore he did not share her
mourning. Indeed, he was too busy trying to adjust himself to things in
general and pins in particular to have much energy or time left over to
spare for thinking about other people. Already, the trail of Mrs.
Brenton's reading ancestors had led her to the naming her child Walter
Scott. Her sense of decorum caused her to wonder vaguely, after her
husband died, whether it would not be proper to change the baby's name
to Birge. Her wonderings, though, merely served to render her uneasy;
they bore no fruit in action. The associations with the name were not
of the sort she cared to emphasize, and the boy was allowed to keep his
more impressive label.

As time went on, though, he rebelled against the childish Wally and
insisted on the Scott, but prefixed by the blank initial whose
significance, he fondly hoped, would permanently remain a mystery. A
month, however, after he had entered college, he was known as Ivanhoe
to all the class who knew anything about him at all; and, in the
catalogue published in his sophomore year, he was registered quite
curtly as Scott Brenton. Never again in all his lifetime did the
incriminating _W_ reappear.

If his mother felt regretful for the change, she was far too wise to
show it. Indeed, it is quite likely that she felt no regrets at all. By
the time that Scott came to his 'teens, Mrs. Brenton was doing her
level and conscientious best to conceal from him the demoralizing fact
of her belief that he could do almost no wrong, and she clung to the
modifying _almost_ with a passionate fervour born of her clerical
ancestry and her consequent belief in the inherent viciousness of
unconverted man. Moreover, her inherited notions of conversion included
spiritual writhings and physical night-sweats and penitential tears by
way of its accomplishment. According to the creed of all the Parson
Wheelers since the Puritan migration, one became a Christian rather
violently, and not by leisurely unfolding. It had been to her the
greatest of all reliefs since the unconfessed one born of her husband's
premature removal, when the young Walter Scott had got himself
converted by means of an itinerant revivalist. From that time on, her
gaze had been fixed unfalteringly upon the hour when he should assume
the mantle of his clerical grandparents; and she inclined to look upon
his other talents as being so many manifestations of diabolic
ingenuity.

And now, these Christmas holidays, the diabolism seemed to her to be
rampant; it effervesced through all Scott's being like the mysterious
things he brewed within his test-tubes. Not that Mrs. Brenton would
have known a test-tube by sight, however. She only had gleaned from her
son's talk the fact that they existed and held fizzy compounds which
would kill you, if you drank them. Perhaps her analogy was all the
better for her lack of specific knowledge. In any case, she saw and
feared the effervescence. The sausages and the white bowl of hot fat
gravy were so much carefully considered bait to lure her son back into
the paths of orthodox uprightness. While they were being
swallowed--slowly, by reason of their mussiness--she had certain things
she wished to say to him.

To her extreme surprise, Scott said them first to her.

"Mother," he said, a little bit imperiously considering his age; "no
matter now about Catie. I want to talk to you about--"

"About?" she queried nervously, while he hesitated under what obviously
was a pretext of picking out the brownest sausage.

"About--myself."

Her nervousness increased.

"Take some more gravy, Scott," she urged him hurriedly. "You'd better
dip it on your bread as soon as you can; it gets cold so soon, these
winter mornings."

But he ignored the spoon she offered him. When he spoke, it was with a
curious hesitation.

"Mother, did I tell you what Professor Mansfield said?"

"Yes."

"Weren't you glad--just a very little?" His tone was boyish in its
pleading.

Mrs. Brenton's answer was evasive.

"Of course, Scott. I am always glad, when your teachers speak well of
you," she said.

"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother;
but do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on,
that I should not make a record as a chemist?"

While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under some
conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to read
in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral
tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's
other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of
the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father,
astoundingly like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times.

Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet.

"But are you going to keep on?"

He tried to regain his former accent.

"That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he
was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he
seemed to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been
used to taking any chance that came. What do you think I'd better do?"

For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile
that held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at
last she answered.

"You must do as you think right, my son."

"But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her.

This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own.

"It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may
be that this will be the next best thing, after all."

"Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?"

She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his
half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for
fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt
him.

"Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively.

"Between now and next summer."

"Why not wait till then?"

He crossed her question with another.

"What's the use of waiting?"

"You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.

Scott shut his teeth hard upon an end of sausage. It seemed to him that
it was only one more phase of the same futile whole, when his teeth
encountered a hard bit of bone. And his mother sat there, outwardly
impartial, inwardly disapproving, and talked about more light, when
already his young eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well!
It was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen
and thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his
mother at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was
infinitely older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he
sometimes wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young
enough to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal.
Whatever the depths of one's filial devotion, it sometimes jars a
little to have one's mother use, by choice, the phraseology of the
minor prophets. In fact, in certain of his more unregenerate moments,
Scott Brenton had allowed himself to marvel that he had not been
christened Malachi. At least, it would have been in keeping with the
habitual tone of the domestic table talk. And yet, in other moments, he
realized acutely that that same heritage was in his nature, too. The
village gossips had been exceedingly benevolent, in that they had
spared him any inkling of the sources whence had come certain other
strains which set his blood to tingling every now and then.

Just such a strain was tingling now, as he laid down his knife and
fork, rested his elbows on the table before him and clasped his hands
tight above his plate.

"I think I have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said
steadily.

"But, if the light within thee be--"

He checked her with a sudden petulant lift of his head. And, after all,
it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy
that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to
dig up out of the accumulated _débris_ of the ancestral trick of
sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have
taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily
more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither
was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out
of season, and always for the purpose of clinching an obnoxious point.

"It isn't," he said, as quietly as he was able. Then the boyishness
pent up within him came bursting out once more. "Listen, mother," he
said impetuously. "Really, this thing has got to be talked out between
us to the very dregs. We may as well face it now as ever, and come to
the final conclusion. I know you started out to make me into a
minister. I know you feel that it is the one great profession of them
all. But is it?"

For a minute, her hands gripped each other; but they were underneath
the hanging edge of tablecloth, and so invisible to Scott.

"What can be greater than to speak the truth that makes us free?" she
questioned.

"Isn't there more than one kind of truth, mother?" he challenged her.

"How can there be?"

Again he shut his teeth and swallowed down his opposition. He was too
immature to argue that there might be different facets to the selfsame
truth.

"Listen, mother," he began again, when he had proved to himself that he
could rely upon his self-control. "As I say, I started out to be a
minister, to be another Parson Wheeler in fact, if not in name. I know
it has been your dream to hear me preach, some day or other. And I know
how you have pinched and scrimped and worked, to give me the education
that I was bound to need."

"You have worked, too, Scott," she told him, in swift generosity. "You
have tugged along and gone without things and worked hard, in your
books and out of them. You know I have been proud of you; the credit
for it isn't all mine, by any means."

His young face flushed and softened. Unclasping his hands, he leaned
across the table and laid his palm upon her fingers as they rested on
the cloth beside her plate. Both palm and fingers were roughened and
callous with hard work; but mother and son both were of that
fast-vanishing class of folk who spell their _Education_ with the
largest sort of capital letter. Their minds were alike, in that they
both believed the work worth while, for the sake of all that it would
be able to accomplish.

"Thank you, mother," Scott said unsteadily. "I am glad you feel so,
even if I don't deserve it." Then he steadied sharply and became
practical. "So far, we've put it through, one way or the other," he
went on. "Still, if I go in for the ministry," and his mother winced at
the bald worldliness of his phrasing; "I shall have a year and a half
more at college, and then three years of divinity school. We can do it,
I suppose. For a matter of fact, I ought to be able to put it through
alone, without a cent from you; but is it quite worth while? According
to Professor Mansfield, if I keep steady, I can go straight from my
degree into the laboratory as a paid demonstrator. It wouldn't be much
pay, of course. Still, it would help along, and I could go on studying
under him, all the time I was about it. By the time three years were
over, the three years I would have to spend in the divinity school, I
should be, ought to be, well upon my feet and walking towards a future
of my own."

His mother drew a long breath, as the swift torrent of words came to an
end. Then,--

"And at the end of twenty years, my son? That is the real question."

Scott's enthusiasm all went out of him. His assent came heavily.

"Yes," he admitted. "Yes. I suppose that is the real question, mother.
It all depends--"

She looked up at him sharply, as if in haste to probe the limits of his
hesitation.

"Depends?" she echoed.

"Upon the way you feel about it, mother."

She shook her head.

"Not that," she offered swift correction; "but upon the question which
is right. You are at the forking of the roads, the narrow and the
broad. You are almost a man, Scott. I have no right to decide this for
you; you must make your own choice for yourself. However, my son, you
know my dreams for you; you know my prayers."

And Scott Brenton, boy as he was in years, bowed his head in grave
assent, and then and there made his great renunciation. He did know his
mother's dreams; he had overheard, albeit unknown to her, her prayer.
She had given all she had for him; his young honour, taking no thought
for disastrous consequences, demanded that he should give up at least
this one thing for her. He pushed back his chair, went around the table
and laid one hand upon her shoulder.

"I do know, mother dear. As far as I can, I will do my best to carry
them all out."

He bent above her in a brief, awkward caress, the caress of a man whose
life has been too hard and too narrow to give him opportunity to
perfect himself in the arts of masculine endearments. Then, leaving his
breakfast half uneaten, he went away upstairs and shut the door of his
own room behind him. A long hour later, he came down the stairs again,
and went away in search of Catie.

He hoped Catie would listen to him, and understand him and his crisis;
but, all the time he hoped, he was conscious of a sneaking fear lest
she would not. Scott loved to talk things out, and Catie, when she was
not too busy otherwise, was a good listener. Nevertheless, her
comprehensions were concrete and very, very finite.




CHAPTER TWO


To all seeming, there always had been a Catie in Scott Brenton's life,
always had been a Catie for him to seek in seasons of domestic stress
or discipline. Indeed, his first memory of her was inextricably mingled
with the recollections of an early spanking. Scott was naturally a good
child, and Mrs. Brenton, as a rule, spanked cunningly, but very seldom.
Now and then, she felt that circumstances justified the deed.

Scott, seven years old and inventive withal, had been locked up in the
house alone, one day, while his mother went to a particularly
attractive funeral with carriages enough for even the outside circle of
the mourners. One such mourner failing, she had been bidden to the
vacant seat in the rearmost carriage, and her absence had been
prolonged unduly. She came home, expecting to find Scott wailing loudly
for his missing mother. Instead, she found him playing camp-out Indian,
as he called it, with her best bed by way of wickiup, and the wickiup
was provisioned lavishly and stickily from the resources of the closet
where she kept her jams.

Prudence and frugality demanded that Mrs. Brenton should remove her
best clothes, before she essayed to administer justice at short range.
Scott, left to himself, played on contentedly the while, until his camp
was rudely invaded by a foe clad in a second-best petticoat and a
shoulder shawl, and armed with a slipper which had seen better days.
Even then, prudence cried out for yet another delay, for the young
Indian was carrying so much of his commissariat upon his person that it
seemed wise to wash him, before she proceeded to the spanking. Mrs.
Brenton's point of view, moreover, was decidedly old-fashioned. Instead
of rejoicing at this fresh manifestation of her boy's imagination, she
concentrated all her remarks upon what she termed his theft, and she
frugally used the period while she was scrubbing him, to drive her
spoken condemnations home. Accordingly, it was a long, long time of
duplex agony before the spanking finally achieved itself, and Scott,
clean, but tingling from the slipper's impact, was told to go out and
sit down on the doorstep and think over what a bad, bad boy he had
been.

Like Alexander the Less, he found the doorstep distinctly cooling to
his fevered person, and he sat there contentedly enough, while he gave
himself over to the luxury of bubbly sobs and of digging his fists into
his weeping eyes. So absorbed was he in this soothing occupation that
he paid no heed to the patter of approaching footsteps, until a voice
fell on his ears.

"Cry-baby!" the voice chirped, in the high key which, to the youthful
mind, is expressive of disdain. And then it added even more
disdainfully, "Dirty-face!"

Dazed by this two-fold attack upon him, Scott took down his smudgy
fists and displayed to the intruder's view his smudgy countenance. An
older pair of eyes might easily have discovered cause for wonder that,
in so short a time since his scrubbing, so great a quantity of mother
earth could have found its way upward to mingle with his tears and form
the dust that grimed his face. Despite his tears and his grime,
however, Scott's manly temper roused itself to face his critic.

"I ain't!" he bellowed hotly at the air around him, without troubling
himself to look to see whence the strange voice had come.

The voice reflected somewhat of his opposition.

"You are, too. What's on your face?"

"Blackberry jam and soap," Scott answered, with a craftiness beyond his
years. He told the literal truth, but not all the truth. No need to
inform this critical stranger what was the crust that lay on top of
all.

The critical stranger removed her pink countenance from the crack
between the front-fence pickets, and pushed the gate open just a very
little way. Seen through the larger crack, she stood revealed to Scott,
a slim little damsel of perhaps six years, her pink calico frock
starched until it stood out stiffly above her knees, and her topmost
curl tied up with a mammoth bow of green gauze ribbon, obviously culled
from some box of ancestral finery. She was a pretty child; but, even at
that tender age, the decision of her little mouth and chin was too
pronounced, the lift of her small head a trifle too self-satisfied.

"What's the matter, cry-baby?" she inquired, as Scott's interest in her
appearing was punctuated with a fresh gulp of woe.

"I've been spanked."

The critical light faded from her eyes, to be replaced by another
light, this time of interest.

"What for?"

"I was playing Indian in mother's jam."

Most damsels of that age would have asked for further particulars.
Instead,--

"Hh!" she sniffed, and the sniff spoke volumes as to the quality of her
young imagination.

Scott felt it lay upon him to defend himself from all which the sniff
implied.

"'Twas fun, too," he asserted suddenly, as, with a final wipe of his
fist across his eyes, he dismissed the outward traces of his grief.
"You get things to eat to take with you, and the bed's the camp, and
you live there for years and always, all alone. And then they smell the
things you're eating and--"

"Who's they?" the small girl demanded.

"Oh, wolves and Indians and things, and they come around and growl
awfully. But you aren't afraid. You take your gun, and crawl in under
the blankets and go on eating, sure they won't come in after you--"

"What do you eat?"

Had Scott been a few years older, he doubtless would have answered,--

"Pemmican."

As it was, however, he responded glibly,--

"Snake meat."

"Hh!" Again there came the sniff. "Snakes don't have meat. They only
wiggle."

Scott glared at her, during a moment of speechless hostility. Then
suddenly he fired upon her with what was to be the favourite weapon of
his later life.

"Prove it!" he ordered her defiantly.

But his defiance fell upon a surface quite impenetrable to its shaft.

"Sha'n't!"

"'Fraid cat!" he retorted curtly.

"Ain't!"

And then, for a short while, there was a silence. Out of the corner of
her eye, the little girl was watching Scott. Scott, his head
ostentatiously averted, was gazing at something he had dug up out of
his trouser pocket, something concealed within the curve of his smudgy
hand. Young as he was, his theories did not fail him. The silence
prolonged itself for minutes which seemed to them both like hours. Then
the eternal feminine yielded to the sting of curiosity.

"What you got?" she asked him, as the gate swung open just a little
wider.

Scott was too canny to yield one whit of his advantage. His hand shut
into a fist.

"That's telling."

The gate swung open wider yet, and the small girl marched through the
opening.

"Tell me," she said imperiously. "I want to see it."

Scott still held himself aloof, still held his trophy concealed from
her curious eyes. She tried to grasp his hand, missed it, then
succeeded. Then she tried to pry open the tight-shut fingers.

"Show me!" she ordered.

He shook his head, smiling derisively at her, while her strong little
fingers did their best to pluck open his hard little fist.

Without another word, she bent above his hand. An instant later, the
hand flew open, and the ball of the opening thumb showed the prints of
small, sharp teeth.

"What is it?" she asked once more.

Scott's voice dropped to a murmur which was charged with mystery.

"It's a back tooth of the whale that swallowed Jonah."

Instantly she struck his hand a blow that sent his trophy flying off
into the thick grass beside the step.

"It is not," she said shrilly. "It's nothing but a dirty old chicken
bone, so there!"

And then, to the unspeakable astonishment of Scott, she seated herself
upon the bottom step, smoothed her calico skirt across her little
knees, and prepared to await further developments in tranquil comfort.
It was thus that Scott Brenton first learned the lesson that the
feminine mind only gains the fullest comfort in having the last word,
when it is able to sit by and watch that word sink in and be digested.
Later on in his life, the lesson was repeated again and again, with an
increasing list of corollaries. Oddly enough, too, it was always given
to him by the selfsame teacher, sometimes with mildness, sometimes with
spiritual floggings.

This time, however, she appeared to be contented with the form her
teaching had taken, contented, too, with its effect upon himself.
Accordingly, she made no effort to continue the discussion. She merely
sat there, silent, in the place whence she had ousted him, and gloated
on her victory, sure that in time his masculine impatience would lead
him to break in upon the pause.

She knew her man.

"What's your name?" Scott asked her curtly, after an interval of
digging one heel and then the other into the turf beside the step.

"Catie."

"Catie what?"

"Catie Harrison."

"Huuh!"

She scented criticism in his reply.

"It's better than yours is," she retorted.

"It is not, too," he made counter retort. "Besides, you don't know my
name."

Slowly the little damsel nodded, once, twice.

"Yes, I do. The man told me."

"What man?"

"The man that sells hens' eggs to my mother. I asked him, and he told
me."

Scott eyed her with fierce hostility. Was there no limit to this small
girl's all-penetrating curiosity?

"What is it, then?" he asked defiantly.

"It's Walter Scott Brenton," she assured him. And then she added, by
way of turning her triumph into a crushing rout, "I think it's the
homeliest name I ever heard."

And once again Scott Brenton gritted his teeth upon the fact that he
was downed.

Later, he took his turn for extracting information concerning his
uninvited guest. He extracted it from herself, however, and with
refreshing directness. At the advanced age of seven years, one sees no
especial use in conventional beatings about the bush. One goes straight
to the point, or else one keeps still entirely; and, at that phase of
his existence, keeping still was not Scott Brenton's forte. Indeed, he
was later than are the most of us in learning the lesson that the
keenest social weapon lies in reticence.

The starchy little damsel, it appeared, was the daughter of a petty
farmer, lately come into the village. She was an only child; her home
was the third house up the street, and her mother, busy about her
household tasks and already a good deal under the thumb of her small
daughter, considered her whole maternal duty done when the child was
washed and curled and clothed in starch, and then turned out to play.
Catie was able to look out for herself, Catie's mother explained
contentedly to her new neighbours, and she knew enough to come home,
when she was hungry. Best let her go her ways, then. She would learn to
be a little woman, all the sooner; and, in the meantime, it was a great
deal easier to do the housework without having a child under foot about
the kitchen.

And go her ways the little damsel did, with only her guardian angel to
see to it that her way was not the wrong one. By the time her father's
first week's rent was due, Catie had made acquaintance with every
inhabitant of the village, from the Methodist minister down to the
blacksmith's bob-tailed cat. Not only that; but Catie, by dint of many
questions, had discovered why the Methodist minister's wife was buried
in the churchyard with a slice of marble set up on top of her, and why
the blacksmith's bob-tailed cat lacked the major portion of her left
ear. If ever there was a gossip in the making, it was Catie Harrison.
More than that, her accumulated gossip was sorted out and held in
reserve, ready to be applied to any end that suited her small
convenience. Scott Brenton found that fact out to his cost, when the
story of his camp and his subsequent spanking came back upon him by way
of the man that sold the hens' eggs, in retaliation for his refusal to
ask that he himself and Catie should be allowed to have a ride in the
egg-man's wagon. Catie might be but six years and nine months old; but
already her infant brain had fathomed the theory of effectual relation
between the crime and the punishment. Her ideal Gehenna would be made
up of countless little assorted hells, not of one vast and
indiscriminate lake of flaming brimstone. Perchance this very fact had
its own due share of influence upon the later theology of Scott
Brenton.

That there would be influence, no one who watched the children could
deny. After the first day's squabbles, perhaps even on account of them,
they became inseparable. When they were not together, either Catie was
looking for Scott, or Scott for Catie, save upon the too frequent
occasions when discipline fell upon the two of them simultaneously and
forced them into a temporary captivity. When they were held apart, they
spent their time planning up new things to do together, once the
parental ban was off their intercourse. When they were together, it was
Scott who supplied the imagination for the pair of them. Catie's share
lay in the crafty outworking of the plan. When their plans came to
disaster, as often happened by reason of the boldness of Scott's young
conceptions, Catie took the disappointment with the temper of a little
vixen, kicked against the pricks and openly defied the Powers that Be.
Scott, on the other hand, shut his teeth and accepted the penalty,
already intent upon the question as to what he should undertake another
time.

And so the days wore on. To the adult mind, they would have seemed to
pass monotonously. The quicker child perceptions, though, the
magnifying point of view that makes a mountain out of every mole hill,
caused them to seem charged with an infinite amount of variety and
incident, full of enthusiastic dreams and thrills, and of crushing
disappointments which, however, never completely ended hope. Scott's
heritage from the long line of Parson Wheelers would have made him
stick to the belief that two and two must always equal four, had it not
been for that other heritage which kept him always hoping that some day
or other it might equal five. Already, he was starting on a life-long
quest for that same five, and Catie, nothing loath, went questing by
his side. Catie, though, went out of the merest curiosity, and her
invariable "I told you so" added the final, the most poignant sting to
all of Scott's worst disappointments. At the mature age of six or
seven, Catie Harrison showed quite plainly that no mere longing for a
possible ideal would ever lure her from the path of practical
expediency. She walked slowly, steadily ahead, while her boy companion
leaped to and fro about her, chasing first one bright butterfly of the
imagination and then another, only to clutch them and bring them back
to her to be viewed relentlessly with prosaic eyes which saw only the
spots where his impatient touch had rubbed away the downy bloom.

And so the months rolled past them both, Catie the young materialist
and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried
the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the
treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never
ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of
the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky
striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which
seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final
pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to
another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes
were also on the finish, but for a different reason. His mother, one
night a week before his fourteenth birthday, had talked to him of
college, of his grandfather, the final Parson Wheeler of the line, and,
vaguely, of certain ambitions which had sprung up within her heart, the
morning she had listened to the birth-cry of her baby boy.

A week later, she had given him his grandfather's great gold pen,
albeit with plentiful instructions to the effect that he was not to use
it, but to keep it in its box, untarnished, until such time as he was
fitted to employ it in writing sermons of his own. Scott had received
the gift with veneration, and then quite promptly had summoned Catie to
do reverence at the selfsame shrine. But Catie had rebelled.

"Fudge!" she had said crisply. "What's the sense of having a useful
thing like that, that you can't use?"




CHAPTER THREE


At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton's favourite pastime had been
what he termed "playing Grandpa Wheeler." The game accomplished itself
by means of a chair by way of pulpit, and a serried phalanx of other
chairs by way of congregation, whom the young preacher harangued by the
hour together. The harangues were punctuated by occasional bursts of
song, not always of a churchly nature, and emphasized by gestures which
were more forceful than devout. In this game Mrs. Brenton often joined
him, lending her thin soprano voice to help out his quavering childish
notes, and doing her conscientious best, the while, to keep the songs
attuned to the key of proper piety. To be sure, she did insist upon
bringing her sewing into church and, on one occasion, she patched her
young son's trousers into a hideous pucker, by reason of her greater
interest in the method of his expoundings.

"Just for all the world like father!" she was wont to say. "But
wherever did he pick it up, when father was in his grave, three years
before the child was born?"

The question was left unanswered by herself of whom she asked it. All
too soon, moreover, it was joined by another question of similar
import, but far more appalling. Indeed, where did the boy, where does
any boy, pick up the tricks and manners and the phraseology of certain
of his forbears who quitted the world before he fairly entered it? In
Scott's case, the example was a flagrant one.

At the starting of the game of "Grandpa Wheeler," Mrs. Brenton had been
so charmed with the outworkings of heredity as to balk at nothing Scott
might do: sermon, hymn, or even prayer. When she was sure of her rôle
and had the leisure, she joined him in his imitative worship,
delighting in the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phrases of
convention rolled off from her son's baby lips. And then, one day,
Scott's memory failed him in his invocation. There came a familiar
phrase or two, and then a babble of meaningless syllables, ending in a
long-drawn and relieved Amen. An instant later, Scott lifted up his
head.

"Mo--ther," he shrilled vaingloriously; "I forgetted how it ought to
go; but didn't I put up a bully bluff?"

And, in consequence, Mrs. Brenton took her prayers into bed with her,
that night. Some of them, even, lasted till the dawn.

This was when Scott was only four. By the time he was fourteen, he took
himself more seriously. He still played "Grandpa Wheeler" in
imagination; but he no longer called it play, but plans. Already, he
was looking forward to the hour when, in creaking Sunday shoes and
shiny Sunday broadcloth, he should mount the stairs of the
old-fashioned pulpit in the village church, gather the hearts of the
waiting congregation within the welcoming and graceful gesture which
would prelude his opening prayer, and then scourge those same hearts
with the lashing truths which lead unto regeneration. He saw himself
distinctly in this rôle, more distinctly, even, than in the blurry
mirror before which he performed his morning toilet. It was no especial
wonder that he did so. Ever since he had been old enough to pay heed to
anything, his mother had been holding the picture up before his eyes.

Catie, however, refused to be impressed by the picture.

"What makes you want to be a minister?" she asked him. "I'd rather you
kept a store. There's lots more money in it."

"I don't see what difference it is going to make to you?" Scott
answered rather cavalierly.

Catie's reply was matter-of-fact, regardless of the sentimental nature
of its substance.

"Don't be stupid, Scott. Of course, we shall be married, when we get
grown up, and then you'll have me to support."

It was the first time she had announced this rather radical plan of
hers, so it was no especial wonder that, for the moment, it took
Scott's breath away. Not that he objected especially, however. It was
only the novelty of the idea that staggered him. To his
slowly-developing masculine mind, it never had occurred that he and
Catie could not go on for ever, just chums and playmates and, now and
then, lusty foes, without complicating their relations by more formal,
final ties. He rallied swiftly, however.

"Well, you'll have to marry a minister, then," he told her sturdily.

Her nose wrinkled in disgust.

"And wear shabby clothes and a bad bonnet, like Mrs. Platt, and have to
go to all the funerals in town! How horrid! Oh, Scott, do be some other
kind of a man. A minister's wife can't dance anything but the Virginia
reel, nor play anything more than muggins. Why can't you be a dentist,
if you won't keep a store?"

For the once, Scott showed himself dominant, aggressive.

"Because I'd rather preach. It's what all my people have always done."

Then Catie made her blunder.

"What about your father?" she asked, and her voice was taunting.

Scott forgot his holy heritage and turned upon her swiftly.

"Shut up!" he bade her curtly, and her cheek tingled under the blow he
dealt her.

It was the first time in his life that Scott had turned upon her with
decision. Moreover, perchance it would have been better for him, had it
not been the last.

For three days afterward, the subject was as a sealed book between
them. Then Catie broke the seals, and gingerly.

"I have been thinking about your being a minister," she told him, as
she dropped into step beside him, on the way to school. "Of course, you
were very rude to treat me the way you did, the other day; and I hope
you are sorry."

Scott shut his teeth, although he nodded shortly. He had not enjoyed
the three-day frost between himself and Catie; but he was sure that, in
the final end, he had been in the right of it, even if he had been a
little unceremonious in pressing the matter home on her attention.
Moreover, his will had triumphed; Catie had been the one, not he, to
break the silence. The casualness of her "Hullo!" that morning, had not
deceived him in the least. He was perfectly well aware that she had
lain in wait for his passing, her eye glued to the crack of the
front-window curtains. The victory was his. He could afford to yield
the minor point concerning manners, when he stood so firmly entrenched
upon that other point which concerned the ministry.

"Of course," he conceded guardedly; "I know I was beastly when I hit a
girl."

"Yes." Catie's accent was uncompromising. "It was a disgrace to you. I
wonder you can look me in the face. If it had been any other boy, I
never would have spoken to him again as long as I lived."

"Really?" To her extreme disgust, Scott seemed to take her utterances
merely as matter for scientific investigation.

"Of course not," she said impatiently.

"But why?" he asked her.

"Why?" she flashed. "Because he wouldn't deserve to be spoken to, nor
even looked at."

"No; I don't mean that," the boy answered, still with the same apparent
desire to probe the situation to the very bottom. "But why should you
speak to me, and not to him?"

She suspected him of fishing for a sweetie, and, out of sheer
contrariety, she flung him a bit of crust.

"Because I am used to you, I suppose. One gets so, after eight or nine
years of growing up together." And, in that one sentence, Catie showed
the practical maturity of her grasp on life and on Scott Brenton.

Half way to the distant schoolhouse, she spoke again, this time more
tactfully.

"Never mind the spat, Scott. That's over and done with, even if you
were horrid," she told him. "But really, now we're growing up, we ought
to think things over and decide things." And, despite her short frocks
and her childish face, her words held a curious accent of mature
decision.

"What sort of things?"

"The things you are going to do, when you grow up."

"I have decided, I tell you," he said stubbornly.

"To be a country parson, all your days?" she queried flippantly.

"To be a minister, yes. Not a country one, though."

"Oh." She pondered. "What then?"

He looked over her head, not so much in disdain as in search of a more
distant vista.

"In a city church, of course, a great stone church with towers and
chimes and arches, and crowded full of people, and with their horses
and carriages waiting at the doors," he answered, he who had never
trodden a paved street in all his life.

"Oh!" But, this time, the monosyllable was breathy, and not sharp.

"Yes, and there will be a choir as good as those people who sang at the
town hall, last Thanksgiving, and flowers, lots of them, roses in
winter, even," he went on eagerly. "And you can hear a pin drop while I
am preaching, only once in a while somebody will sob a little in the
pauses, and then put in a roll of hundred-dollar bills when the
contribution box comes round."

Catie drew another long breath, and her eyes sparkled.

"Lovely!" she said, and she stretched out the word to its full length
by way of expressing her contentment. "And where'll I be?"

Scott withdrew his eyes from distant space and gazed upon her blankly.

"I hadn't thought about that," he said.

Then, for an instant, the glory of his dream was shattered.

"Pig!" Catie said concisely.

However, it was not within the limits of her curiosity to drop the
prediction at this piquant point. The framing of the picture, for so
she regarded it, had pleased her. Scott failing, she must fill in the
portrait to suit herself.

"I'll tell you, then. I shall be there, in the very front seat, dressed
in flowing curls," Catie's hair, at this epoch, was pokery in its stiff
straightness; "and a real lace dress. And, after service, all the rich
people in the church will ask us out to dinner. Of course, in a church
like that, the minister's wife is always at the top of things, and I
shall help along your work by making people like me and be willing to
listen to your sermons because you are my husband."

And then the two young egotists fell silent, each one of them lost in
outlining a future in which he himself was the central point, the
guiding principle of all things. Between the two of them, however,
there was this one essential difference: Scott's forecastings were
vague and rosy dreams, Catie's were concrete plans.

None the less and despite that difference, from that time onward, it
was tacitly agreed between the children that Scott would one day be a
minister, with Catie for his wife. To be sure, it was Catie herself who
supplied the latter clause, not Scott.

"You'll have to have some sort of a wife," she argued superbly.
"Ministers always do. It might as well be me. You like me better than
any of the other girls, and I am used to having you around." And, upon
this rocky basis of practicality, their young romance was built.

Mrs. Brenton, meanwhile, looked on them with contented eyes, smiling a
little now and then at the downright fashion in which the
thirteen-year-old Catie made known her matrimonial plans. Mrs. Brenton
liked Catie well enough, but not too well. She could have dreamed of
another sort of wife for her boy, for Catie's crudeness occasionally
irritated her, Catie's self-centred ambition, her intervals of density
sometimes came upon Mrs. Brenton's nerves. However, girls were scarce
upon the horizon of the Brentons. Catie was not perfect; but, at least,
she might be infinitely worse. And Scott would be sure to need a
practical wife, to counteract his habitual disregard of concrete
things. Catie would see to it that his wristbands were not frayed and
that his buttons were in their proper places. She might not enter into
his ideals, but she would mend his socks and insist upon his changing
them when he had wet his feet. Socks were more important to a man than
mere ideals, any day, more important, that is, as concerned his
conjugal relations. Scott could make up his ideals to suit himself. His
socks must be prepared for him by wifely hands.

Of course, they were only children now, only little children, too young
to be thinking about such things as marriage. And yet--And Mrs. Brenton
shook her head. And yet, were not the happiest marriages prearranged in
just this way? Surely, this was far better as a preparation for wedded
life than was the sudden, feverish courtship which rushed at
express-train speed and clatter from the first introduction of two
strangers to the final irrevocable words before the altar. Mrs.
Brenton's own experience had taught her that acquaintance should come
before one's marriage, not wait till after.

All in all, the more she thought about it, Mrs. Brenton favoured
Catie's somewhat premature announcement of her plans. Despite his
heritage of sturdy parson blood, Mrs. Brenton confessed to herself that
Scott might easily become a little erratic now and then, might let go
his hold upon the one thing needful in order to gratify his curiosity
concerning the touch of less essential, more alluring trifles. He
needed the steady, sturdy influence of some one outside himself to keep
him always in the beaten tracks. Already, for better or for worse,
Catie's influence upon him was a strong one; stronger, Mrs. Brenton
admitted to herself with a woful little sigh, than that of his own
mother, despite the ill-concealed anxiety and the doting love that only
a mother can give, and then only to an only son. Between the two of
them, herself and Catie, Catie's will was the stronger law. Catie, if
she chose, could keep Scott's feet well in the limits of the beaten
trails. It should be her duty to impress on Catie's girlish mind that
the beaten trail was the only one for him to follow, the path of
expediency as well as the path of holiness; that complete contentment
and success lay only at its other end.

Accordingly, Mrs. Brenton took it upon her shoulders to play the part
of Providence for those two young children: Scott and Catie. To Scott,
she pointed out Catie as the girl best worth his attention and his
comradeship, the while, with the other hand, she still held up before
him the picture she had so long ago created, the picture of himself,
child of the preaching race of Wheelers, proclaiming the gospel to all
men and some heathen. Side by side she placed them: the world-given
wife, the heaven-offered career. Moreover, she was so far the artist
that she was able to shift her lights and shades to fall now upon the
one and now upon the other, according as Scott's interest in one or
other of them appeared to her to wane. Her quick-sighted mother love
was prompt to warn her of that waning, prompt to make her understand
that, to a boy like Scott, a hard and fast monotony would be fatal to
almost any plan.

With Catie, on the other hand, her course was altogether different,
altogether simpler. With the constant and unwavering blows of a
carpenter pounding a nail into an oaken plank, she pounded into Catie's
mind the undeniable truths that Scott's ancestry alone was enough to
fit him for the ministry; that the ministry, granted the sincerity of
its orthodox convictions, may be the highest field of labour offered to
any man. Moreover, to these palpable truths, she added others, a shade
less undeniable. She impressed it on the mind of Catie that Scott's
sole chance of happiness, in this life and the life to come, rested
upon their combined ability to shield him from any adverse influence
which might deflect his footsteps from his predestined goal. She
impressed it on the mind of Catie, also, that it was her girlish duty
to herd her immature companion into the proper fold; that her young and
sprightly charms, her girlish loyalty should be to her as a shepherd's
crook, the guiding wand to be applied in moments of extremest peril.

After her lights, Mrs. Brenton was canny. If she only had been a little
bit more worldly, she would have been a clever woman; moreover, her
potential cleverness had never been one half so manifest as when she
talked about all this to Catie. She did not put forward her urgings
crudely, as for the sake of Scott, her son. Rather than that, she held
them up to Catie coyly, as glimpses of opportunity and power which
waited for her at the gateway of maturity: opportunity given only to
the helpmeet of a man in the commanding position offered by his
ministerial profession, power given to that helpmeet by reason of her
position by his side.

Like the conductor of an orchestra who draws out from one instrument
and then another the varied themes of an overture, so Mrs. Brenton drew
from the unlike minds of Catie and her son the selfsame and
successive themes of what she, in her mother blindness, deemed the one
possible and ennobling overture to Scott Brenton's life. It was quite
characteristic of Mrs. Brenton's make-up, however, that she took no
thought of Catie's life, save in so far as it could be applied to the
ultimate development of Scott, her son.




CHAPTER FOUR


"A puffic' fibbous!" the monthly nurse had announced triumphantly, when
she had presented Mrs. Opdyke's first-born son to his mother for her
inspection.

The phrase, and the smile which invariably accompanied it, were the
main stock in trade of the monthly nurse. Upon these two items, she had
based her popularity which now had endured for more than a dozen years
of escorting over the threshold of this world the sons and daughters of
"first families only," as her professional card insisted. To be sure,
the constant employment of the phrase had robbed it of all critical
significance. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether, even at the start of
her career, the nurse had ever linked it in her mind with the great god
Apollo. From some one of her predecessors, she had picked it up and
found that it fitted well upon her tongue. Later, the "fibbouses"
abounded more and more plenteously, as her clientage increased, and she
applied the term indiscriminately, regardless whether the recipient
were an Apollo, or a mere Diana.

However, from the start, Reed Opdyke certainly deserved the phrase.
Long generations of clean, high-minded living cannot fail to produce an
effect upon their offspring. Reed's father had branched off from a line
of lawyers to hold the chair of chemistry in one of the great colleges
for girls. Reed's mother was of Pilgrim stock, well-nigh untainted by
the blood of later, lesser arrivals on the Massachusetts shore. On
either side of the house, it had been a matter of simple creed to hold
one's body and one's mind equally aloof from possibilities of disease.
Reed Opdyke's make-up showed the value of this creed.

Not that he thought very much about it, however. He accepted as a
matter of course his sanity, very much as he accepted most other things
that came in his way. His loosely curled fists within his pockets, his
head erect and his lips smiling, he went striding along through life,
taking the best of it as his natural right, and letting the rest of it
alone. From kindergarten into school and from school into college, the
old, old road trodden by all his ancestors, he journeyed quite as a
matter of course. In fact, it never struck him that any fellow could do
otherwise; never, that is, until he met Scott Brenton.

For Scott, in time, had also come to college. His mother had insisted
upon that; had worked for it that it might in time be possible; had
scrimped and toiled and saved, the while she had been training her only
child to a strict economy which, however galling, he must accept as
well worth the while for the sake of all that it was going to put
within his grasp. Accordingly, Scott had been sent to school throughout
the termtimes, sent well or ill, in good days and in bad. He had been
goaded into an ambition which held him at the top of his small classes
in the village school. When the top of the top class was reached, and
college was still inaccessible, Mrs. Brenton had stiffened her sinews
for yet greater toil and scrimping, and had sent her son up to Andover
where the Wheeler name was a tradition, where the knowledge of Scott's
ancestry would help him to find the employment that he needed. Scott's
education was to be by no means easy of achievement. To gain his school
diploma and his later degrees at college, he too must work, not alone
at books, but, in his off-hours, at any task that offered.

And Scott did work, too. Around him, other boys were going in for
football, making records on the track team, getting occasional leaves
to run in to Boston for an odd half-holiday. Then they came back,
hilarious and triumphant, to discuss their experience at mealtimes,
boasting, chaffing, wrangling merrily in the intimacy known to boyhood,
the world over. They never thought to pay any especial attention to the
other boy who brought them things to eat, a boy with luminous gray eyes
and clothes which were in sore need of pressing. He was just "that
waiter chap" and not a human being like themselves. They talked about
their secret plans before him, with no more thought of his personality
than as if he had been a concrete post. And, after listening to their
chatter throughout a protracted mealtime, after seeing, as he could not
fail to do, how he counted to them for absolutely nothing at all, Scott
Brenton had his hours when he too doubted the fact of his own humanity.
An active brain and an almost automatic body trained to supple service:
these by themselves, he realized, do not go far towards making a human
thing of life. Contacts are necessary for that, not total isolation;
and contact was the one thing denied him. Now and then he had his hours
of wishing that those other boys, boys whose talk was full of reference
to unfamiliar ways of life: of wishing that they would treat him a
little bit unkindly. Anything would be better than this absolute
ignoring of his individuality.

In his intervals of waiting on the table, he washed up the dishes. His
meals he took, standing by the sink, a plate on the shelf before him,
while he washed and chewed simultaneously. There were other tasks
besides, tasks all of them more or less menial, all of them adding to
the general drain upon his nerves and body. The rest of the time, his
studies kept him busy. Indeed, it was no small wonder that he was able
to maintain a decent footing in his class, so fagged out and weary was
he by the time he had a moment's leisure to prepare his next-day's
lessons. But prepare them he did, and well, although his eyes grew
heavy over the task and ached with the strain of working by the one dim
light with which his shabby garret room was equipped. It was a single
room, unhappily. Even there, all contact was denied him. Saint Simon,
sitting alone upon his pillar and gazing down upon his fellow men, was
no more solitary than was Scott Brenton. Moreover, Saint Simon had the
final consolation of being quite aware that he was looking down, a
consolation which, to Scott Brenton, was permanently refused.

And then, Andover done, there came college, not one of the small
colleges where individual idiosyncrasies count so much in making up the
estimate of the student's character; but a great university, so great
that it can stop to measure no man by any one trait or any several
traits, so busy that it must grasp him in the round, or not at all.
There lay the fact of Scott Brenton's ultimate salvation. He would have
been downed completely, judged by the finical standards of the little
college.

It was in his choice of college that, for the first time in his life,
Scott Brenton's will had become dominant. His mother would fain have
had it otherwise. The Wheelers, one and all, had been little-college
men. The tradition was in their blood, and she had inherited it to the
full: the strange belief that the smaller college offers less
temptation to go astray; the equally strange belief that the closer
contact with a few professors can quite atone for the lack of friction
against a great crowd of fellow students, alien to one another in
habits of mind and body, yet all of them, swiftly or sluggishly as may
be, moving towards the selfsame goal. It had seemed to Mrs. Brenton
something bordering on the blasphemous when Scott had endeavoured to
put this latter phase of the question before her. Realizing his own
futility upon that score, he finally had changed his tactics and
assured her that, as far as money-earning work went, there were ten
chances in the great college to one in the small.

And Scott was right, albeit his argument was wholly superficial. The
truth of the matter was that his Andover experience had left him sore
and downhearted; that he knew, in the bottom of his boyish soul, that
he must plunge beyond his depth and swim into a wider sea, or else go
down entirely, pushed out of sight beneath the overlapping circles of
the little cliques, all too self-centred to admit of any common focus.

Mrs. Brenton did not care at all about any common focus. The phrase
"college spirit" sounded intemperate, and she would have been the last
person in the world to agree to the belief that Scott could gain any
education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty
old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of
inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end
of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the
best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college,
the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the
devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy in
his off-hours to have time to get into mischief.

Moreover, the purely practical end of the keeping busy was beginning to
loom large upon Mrs. Brenton's horizon. More and more she was coming to
realize that it is no small undertaking for any widow with an almost
imperceptible income to put a son through college. Valiantly she toiled
and scrimped; but it was becoming increasingly necessary for Scott to
help her out in both the toiling and the scrimping. Accordingly, the
creases deepened, both vertically about the corners of Scott's lips and
horizontally across his shiny knees and shoulder blades. His eyes,
though, grew more luminous, as time went on, perhaps because they were
surrounded by ever deepening hollows.

It was those eyes that first caught the attention of Reed Opdyke.
Midway in his sophomore year, Opdyke, with a dozen others of his kind,
had revolted from the monotony of the commons table, and had set up a
so-called joint of their own, an eating-club presided over by a gaunt
and self-helping senior, and served by a quartette of cadaverous and
self-helping sophomores among whom was Scott Brenton.

Reed Opdyke was a busy youngster, full of the countless interests that
cram the college days of a popular, easy-going student. Also he was a
potential leader of men, who gave himself leisure to study the people
with whom he came into any kind of contact, to sort them out and
classify them according to their possibilities as they unveiled
themselves to his boyish eyes. Three of the cadaverous sophomores he
dismissed with a glance. They were impossible. They lacked all
spiritual yeast and, to the end of time, they would be waiters in one
sense or another. Scott Brenton was different. A fellow with those eyes
must have it in him to count for something, some day. Lounging in his
seat at table, Opdyke kept his eye on Scott, talked at him, then talked
to him; and then, obedient to some boyish whim or other, a few days
later, the meal ended, he took him by the elbow and walked him off to
Mory's for a second supper.

Mrs. Brenton, on her knees beside her bed, that night, prayed long and
fervently and with full particulars concerning the education of her
son. Her heart would have frozen with horror, had she seen the
smoke-filled room where her son was sitting, with Reed Opdyke across
the table from him. Her hopes for his future would have shrivelled into
naught, could she have realized that, over that very table, her son,
her Scott, was to receive a lesson, new and quite unforgettable. One
hour of jovial human comradeship had opened Scott Brenton's eyes to
more things than he ever yet had dreamed of. It had taught him once for
all that irresponsible, carefree youth is not, of necessity, vicious.

As the days and the weeks ran on, the comradeship increased. Measured
by the days of Opdyke, overflowing full of interests, it took the
smallest possible share of time: a look of comprehension, a word of
casual greeting, and, on rare occasions, a bit of a walk together when
their ways chanced to coincide. Still more occasionally, a stray hour
was spent at Mory's, or in Opdyke's room in Lawrence. As yet, a boyish
delicacy had kept Opdyke from seeking to invade what he knew could not
fail to be the barrenness of Scott Brenton's quarters.

Slight as was their intercourse, viewed in Opdyke's eyes, to Scott it
filled the whole horizon, the one near and vital fact which broke in
upon its emptiness and cut away the barren wastes about him. He lived
alternately upon the memory of Opdyke as he had seen him last, and upon
the anticipations of their next meeting. His hours of table service,
ceasing to be wearisome, had become veritable social functions, for was
there not always the chance of a random word and smile? Those failing,
there was always the pleasure of watching Opdyke, now lounging lazily
in his seat and mocking at his fellows, now bending forward above the
table, heedless of his cooling plate, the while he harangued his
companions with a facility which seemed to Scott the acme of brilliant
eloquence.

At Reed's elbow, Scott followed each inflection of the persuasive
voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol
scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all
self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the
chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature
thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was
given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an
object of idolatry to this gaunt starveling to whom, as he expressed
it, he had tried to be a little decent. It was quite within the limits
of his comprehension that he could step down now and then to Scott. It
never would have occurred to him, at that epoch of his experience, that
Scott could try to clamber up to him. Save for the minutes when he
consciously gave his attention to the ungainly young waiter, he
disregarded him completely.

The other boys, however, were quick to take in the situation and to
comment on it. "Reed's parson" they called Scott, and they chaffed
Opdyke mercilessly, when Scott's back was turned. Scott, had he heard
the chaff, would have been wounded to the death, a death he would have
met far, far inside his shell, regretful that ever he had come out of
it. Opdyke, however, merely laughed and stuck to his original position.

"A fellow with such eyes is bound to have it in him. He's never had a
chance," he said to his chaffing mates. "Wait till he finds himself,
and then see what happens."

"Nothing," came the prompt reply. "He won't ever find himself, Reed. He
has found you, and that's as much as such a fellow as he is, can ever
assimilate."

And the reply was by no means wide of the mark. For the present, Scott
Brenton was finding it all he could do to assimilate Reed Opdyke.
Indeed, it was only in the very end of all things that fulness of
assimilation came.

As the time went on, partly in defiance of the chaffing of his chronies,
partly on account of it, Opdyke lent himself more and more to the
assimilating process. He sought out Scott more often, had him in his
room, taught him to fill a pipe and smoke it after the fashion of a
gentleman, dropped into his ears specious hints regarding manners, and
about the efficiency of one's mattress as frugal substitute for a
tailor's pressboard. To be sure, upon that latter count Scott took him
with unforeseen literalness; and, in his zeal to carry out his teacher's
dictum, subjected his coat to the mattress treatment, as well as his
more simply-outlined nether garments. Moreover, it should be set down
as distinctly to Opdyke's credit that he suppressed his merriment, the
next time he saw the coat upon Scott Brenton's shoulders.

Just at this epoch, some waggish member of the eating club employed his
camera at their expense. The resultant film, in after weeks, became one
of the most popular assets of the class. True, the needful haste had
caused the camera to tip a little. None the less, what the picture
lacked in composition, it made up in clearness and in vitality. Taken
solely as a study of contrasting types, it was of no small sociological
value, since it proved past all gainsaying that the absolute democracy
of a great college can bring into close relationship the most
impossibly divergent natures.

Scott, at this time, was thin and lean. His shoulders were bowed a
little with the strain of unceasing work and worry; in his more
self-conscious moments, he shambled when he walked. Only moderately
tall, clothed in ill-cut garments which he wore as uneasily as
possible, his immature young figure was not one to call out much
admiration on the score of its virility. Indeed, the one really virile
thing about Scott Brenton was his hair, which sprang out strongly from
his scalp, fine, but thick and just a little wavy where it lay across
his crown. His head was well-shaped, only that it was a bit too high
above the ears, the brow a bit too salient; the eyes alone, though, at
that time, redeemed from hopeless mediocrity his worn, ill-nourished
face. Beside his hips, his hands dangled limply, showing a stretch of
unclothed wrist sticking out below the shrunken coat sleeves.

Beside him in the picture, Reed Opdyke strode lightly, still, to all
seeming, the "puffic' fibbous" that his nurse had dubbed him. Six feet
tall, lean and supple as a deerhound and as totally unconscious of his
long, slim body, it was impossible to fancy him as ever being betrayed
into an awkward motion. Above his straight, slim shoulders, his curly
brown head rose proudly, his thin lips smiled a greeting to all the
world around him, his brown eyes looked straight and true into the eyes
of every man he chanced to meet. Only his sense of humour and his
comfortable smattering of original sin could have saved Reed Opdyke
from being insupportable. Beauty like his, albeit manly, is bound to be
a certain handicap.




CHAPTER FIVE


It was to Reed Opdyke's influence that Scott owed the encouraging
plaudits of his chemistry professor.

In an elective system which, at that time, was still left quite
unmodified, Scott had happened upon the chemistry class by way of
filling up his courses for his sophomore year. He had been going on
with it indifferently for some months, when Opdyke had been transferred
to his division. Up to that time, Scott had liked the class but
temperately; that is, although it had seemed to him a useless frill
upon the garment of his education, he did not dislike it in the least,
and he had made a fair showing in his recitations.

Opdyke's coming into his division had changed all that. At first, Scott
merely had been possessed by a fury of desire to shine before his
idol's eyes. A little later on, Opdyke's manifest, albeit rather
casual, interest in the subject had led Scott to revise his earlier
notions carefully, to decide that there might be something in it, after
all. By the beginning of his junior year, Scott had won the tardy
attention of the head of the department. By the beginning of the
Christmas holidays of that junior year, the head of the department had
felt it his plain duty to explain to Scott that the road ahead of him
was likely to be an open one and easy. If he kept on as he had begun,
in time he might be head of a department on his own account. Absurd for
a fellow with a mind like his to be spending his time over rhetoric and
the classics! Science was his line, pure science; above all, chemistry.

And Scott had listened in silence, at first too much astounded by the
unexpected verdict to make answer. Then, as the head of the department
left off predicting and fell to making plans, Scott plucked up courage
to tell of the ministerial career supposedly ahead of him. The
professor, downright and enthusiastic in his utterances, pooh-poohed
the entire ministerial idea. Nonsense! Absurd! Spoil a chemist to make
a parson! Preposterous! Any one could preach, if he tried. Not one man
in a dozen could even make a quantitative analysis tally up, and get
anywhere near as much material out of it as went in. Waste on
flourishing gestures those lithe hands that were so obviously created
for the manipulation of such delicate things as balances and test-tubes
and the like! It was impossible. Scott must take the other idea home
with him and think it over carefully, during the coming holidays.

And Scott did take the idea home with him; but, from the first, he
found it out of the question to think it over carefully. How could he,
when, within himself, he knew that his feeling for the profession laid
down before him by ancestral tradition and by his mother's constant
urgings: that his feeling for the ministry was a perfunctory affection,
a wholly different matter from the passionate desire that throbbed
within him at the thought of giving up his life to scientific study. To
preach ancient beliefs that no human power could verify, or to work on
steadily, helping to broaden the field of truth, and proving all things
as he went along: these were the alternatives. Obviously there could be
no comparison between them.

Scott took the idea home with him, as Professor Mansfield had advised
him. All those first days at home, he hugged the idea tight, tight,
caressed it, gloated over it in secret, but allowed no one, not even
Catie, to share it with him. Before he went back again to college, he
would show it to his mother, would allow her to share his ecstasy at
the new opportunity opened out before him. Not yet, however. For the
first time in all his life, Scott Brenton was seriously in love. He
gave to this new vision a fervent passion such as Catie had been
powerless to arouse; like all young lovers, he desired a little time to
revel in secret over the mere fact that he knew he was in love.

Of his mother's consent to the change of plan, Scott Brenton felt no
doubt. Little by little, with his growth towards manhood, Scott had
come to dominate his mother more than either of them realized. His very
repression, his subordination in all his other relationships, helped
towards this end. It was but a natural reaction from his servile
position when away from home that, once more at home, he should assert
himself as potential master of the house. His virile will was dormant,
crushed, but it was by no means dead. And his mother, adoring him and
idealizing him despite her maternal qualms on his account, yielded
herself readily enough to his domination. And then, all at once, her
yielding came to a sudden end against the bed rock of her character.
Her own ambition, Scott's ultimate salvation, alike forbade him to
renounce his ministerial career.

After all, though, it was one of the pitched battles that settle
themselves without the final appeal to arms. On that winter night when
Scott had come in, buoyantly alive and hopeful, to be met upon the
threshold by his mother's prayer, the boy had realized that the fight
was on. Next morning, over the plate of sausages, the crisis came, and
went. Contrary to all his expectations, Scott left the table
vanquished, his light of hope gone out for ever. It was a meagre
consolation that, in thinking back upon the matter afterwards, he could
take to himself the credit of having spoken no word which could ever
fester in his mother's mind.

He had gone up to his room to lock the door and then to stand long at
the window, staring with unseeing eyes down into the village street. By
good rights, he should have seen one future, if not the other, opening
out before him in ever-widening vistas. At nineteen or so, however, one
is not too imaginative. Scott merely saw a vagrant dog trying to paw
his way through a deep drift that lay across the road. He had a fellow
feeling for the dog, when he gave up his effort and, sitting down in
the ruins of his tunnel, abandoned himself to the contemplation of a
flea.

After a while, he gave up his moody drumming on the pane, turned his
back to the bleak perspective and, seizing his hat, departed in search
of Catie. He found Catie mending a tear in the new frock she had worn,
the night before, and unsympathetic in proportion to her discontent.
The hollowness of the world was all about him, when he went back to
college, three days later.

His first intention had been to throw over all his scientific study
once for all. Forbidden the whole loaf, why whet his appetite by
nibbling at the one slice offered him? His common sense, however, aided
by the urging of Professor Mansfield, restored him to his reason. Scott
had lost no time at all in making a clean breast of the matter to
Professor Mansfield: his mother's dreams for him, her prejudices, his
own choice and his renouncing of it all for the sake of what his mother
had already given up for him. To his colleagues, the old professor
expressed himself with plain profanity. To Scott, he took a gentler
tone, spoke with appreciation of a mother such as Mrs. Brenton must be,
spoke of the ministerial profession with an admiration he was far from
feeling, and then craftily suggested to his favourite student that the
preaching of the gospel should go hand in hand with scientific truth.
In these modern days, a clergyman should be fully abreast of scientific
thought. Best keep on with his chemistry. It might be useful to him,
later on. Even eternal brimstone was susceptible of analysis.

Then, an instant later, the old professor could have bitten out his
tongue for his unholy jest. His penitence was in no wise lessened by
the quality of Scott's answering laugh. Best leave those fellows to
their ministerial sackcloth, without questioning the quality of the
flax from which it was spun. A man of Scott Brenton's calibre would do
no harm by his preaching. What was the sense of seeking to upset any
orthodox beliefs he might happen to have inherited? Besides, as long as
Scott kept up his sciences, he was reasonably sure of keeping up his
common sense and, what was a long way more important, his perspective
and his sense of fun.

Despite his disappointed resolutions to dismiss the boy from his mind,
the old professor, going his chemical way, worried about Scott. It
seemed to him, according to his bald phrasing, to be a cruel waste of
good material to make a parson out of what might have been a great
explorer, for, to Professor Mansfield's mind, the incomplete and
lengthening list of elements was just as reasonable a field for
exploration as was the Antarctic Continent, or Darkest Africa. The
results, indeed, of such exploration were bound to be a great deal the
more useful. The professor worried. In time, he laid his worries on the
dinner table before Reed Opdyke whose father had been a classmate of
his own.

"It's an awful shame about young Brenton," he observed, when he and
Opdyke and the tobacco had been left to themselves.

"What about him?" Opdyke questioned carelessly, as he picked up a
match.

"That he has talents of his own, and a conscience that belongs to his
mother. I believe in mothers, Reed; yours is a wonderful woman. But, in
this case, I doubt the wonder, and I deplore the way she keeps her
thumb on Brenton."

"You think she does?"

"I know it. Her confounded theories of sanctity are putting a binding
around all his brain, a tight binding that is going to shrink and cause
a pucker. Brenton has a first-class scientific mind, granted it gets
the training. Left to himself and the divinity school, he'll turn into
a perfect ass as preacher."

Opdyke shook his head.

"Nothing so possible as that, I'm afraid," he contradicted. "He'll just
settle down on his heels, and shuffle along in----" He hesitated for a
finish of his phrase.

The professor supplied it, and ruthlessly.

"Mental carpet slippers. Precisely. And I could give him boots and
spurs."

"Why don't you do it, then?" Opdyke asked him bluntly.

In the interest of the subject, the old professor forgot that he was
talking to one of his students and about another.

"Because he's got the very devil of a conscience, and won't let me.
There is a widowed mother in the background, and a perfect retinue of
preaching ancestors, whole dozens of them and all Baptists, and they
have conspired to poison the boy's mind with the notion that it's up to
him to preach, too. It would be all right, if he had anything to say;
but he hasn't. He's tongue-tied and unmagnetic at the best; what's
more, he has learned too many things to let him flaunt abroad the old
beliefs as battle standards. He's gone too far, and not far enough. His
life is bound to be a miserable sort of compromise, a species of
battledore and shuttlecock arrangement between the limits of the deep
sea and the devil." And then the professor pulled himself up short.
"Know him?" he queried curtly, as he lit his match.

Opdyke nodded.

"As one does know people one never meets out anywhere," he said.

"What do you mean by that?" The question was still curt.

"He waits at my joint."

"Of course. And?"

Opdyke laughed.

"How do you know there is an _and_, Professor?" he asked easily.

"Because I know you, and because I've heard of 'Reed's parson.' You're
your father's own son, Reed. You never could get a starveling like
Scott Brenton out of sight of your conscience. How much have you seen
of him?"

"Not much." And Opdyke gave a few details.

The professor nodded thoughtfully. Then,--

"See more," he ordered; "any amount more. You have time enough, you
lazy young sinner, and I'll be answerable for all the consequences."

Opdyke yielded to his curiosity.

"What kind of consequences?"

"The inevitable kind that follow all you youngsters. Listen, boy.
Brenton is a mixture of genius, and prig, and ignorant young hermit;
or, rather, he has the elements all inside him, ready to be mixed.
You'll have to do the mixing."

"I?" Opdyke looked startled. "Professor, what a beast of a bore!"

"No matter if it is. I believe in the conservation of all latent
energy. Brenton's is all latent, and I count on you to do the
conserving. I've been asking questions lately. From all accounts, you
are the only man in college but myself who has taken the pains to get
inside the poor beggar's shell."

"Hm. Well?" Opdyke's eyes were on the smoke in front of him; but, to
the older man, it was plain that he was listening intently.

"Now you've got to go to work to get him out of his shell, so that
people can see what he is like and, more than that, so that he can find
out what people really are. He has no more knowledge of humanity than a
six-months puppy; in fact, he hasn't so much. And--he's--got--to--learn."
The words came weightily.

"What's the good?" Opdyke asked lazily.

The reply was unexpected, even to him who knew Professor Mansfield's
downright ways.

"To teach him what an ass he really is. Till he finds that out--till
you all find it out about yourselves, there's not much hope for any of
you."

Opdyke flushed.

"Thanks," he said a little shortly.

Bending across the table, the old professor laid a friendly hand upon
his arm.

"Don't be huffy, Reed. A few of you take in the knowledge with your
mother's milk. That's what saves society, by marking it off into
separate classes, what makes the difference between your father's son,
and the strenuous scion of fifty ministerial Wheelers. But, because
you've already got it, you owe all the more to the poor chaps who
haven't."

"Yes, sir." Opdyke's reply came with dutiful promptness, although it
was plain to the professor that he had flown quite beyond the limits of
the young mind before him. "What do you want me to do with him,
though?"

The professor's eyes twinkled, as he dragged himself back to the
practical aspects of the case.

"Coax him out of his shell. If he won't come, then haul him out by the
ears. Have him in your room and have some other men in there to meet
him. Take him about with you. Take him to Mory's, on a thick night
there. Show him life, the way you know it. If you must, show him an
occasional siren. I can say this to you, Reed, because I have taken
pains to find out that your sirens are pretty decent ones, cleaner than
most of them. To sum it up, let Scott Brenton see life as you are
living it, not as he imagines it from the point of view of the man who
never can do anything but sit back in a corner and look on."

Opdyke filled his pipe anew, puffed at it silently, then spoke.

"Beastly tantalizing thing to do," he said. "What in thunder is the
use?"

The professor spoke with sudden fervour.

"Much!" he said. "At least, it will teach him, when he's preaching for
the Lord, to remember that Mammon isn't always quite so black as he is
painted."

And so, on top of Reed Opdyke's other interests, Professor Mansfield
laid the burden of Scott Brenton's worldly training. In pointing out
the need of it to Opdyke, however, the old professor had been by no
means as downright as he seemed. From above his lecture notes and his
blowpipes, he kept keen eyes upon the members of his classes. Watching
Scott steadily, in those days which followed upon the boy's bitter
disappointment, he had seen new lines graving themselves about his
lips, lines of decision now, not of worried mal-nutrition, lines that
too easily might shape themselves to wilfulness. Scott, recluse that he
had been, had also been as steady as a deacon; but the old professor
realized that a reaction might come at almost any instant. One outlet,
and that the highest one, forbidden him, he might seek other, lower
ones in sheer bravado. Forbidden to climb into the Tree of Knowledge of
all Good, he might, in revenge, fall greedily upon the Apples of Sodom.
Left to himself, no one knew what harpies he might chance upon as
comrades, nor what sights they might show him. To prevent all that, to
provide him with an outlet which should be as wholesome as it was fresh
and sparkling, the professor had given him into the safe hands of Reed
Opdyke. It was as he said: he was quite well aware that, although Reed
had his sirens, they all were curiously clean ones; in short, that his
young Mammon was nobler far than many a senile God.




CHAPTER SIX


As a matter of course, Catie came to Scott's commencement. Had she
answered sincerely to any questions put to her, she would have
confessed to a two-fold purpose: the showing off of her proprietorship
in Scott, and the showing off of her pair of new frocks, the most
elaborate achievements as yet attempted by the village dressmaker. It
must be confessed, however, that Catie found both of these deeds a
little disillusioning. Scott was so busy in so many ways that he seemed
to Catie to spare her only the smaller fragments of his time; and her
two new gowns, which at home had been tried on amid the plaudits of the
girl friends bidden to the private view, sank into insignificance
beside the round dozen or more frocks which each of the other
commencement guests was wearing in bewildering succession. To be sure,
Catie's gowns had the most trimming on them; but her satisfaction in
that fact was somewhat modified by the discovery that all her trimming
was running the wrong way.

Nevertheless, Catie enjoyed some happy hours, despite the chilling
disappointment of finding her frocks inadequate. It would have been
nicer, of course, not to discover too late that she lacked the proper
gown for any especial function; nicer to have seen herself, as she saw
some other girls, girls not nearly so pretty as herself, attended, not
by one swain only, but surrounded by a laughing, eager dozen. Still,
there were compensations, chaperons among them. Catie's expressed
regrets were wholly perfunctory, whenever Mrs. Brenton confessed that
she was tired and needed to lie down.

For Mrs. Brenton also had come to Scott's commencement which, to her
mind, was the crowning event of her own lifetime. Not only that, but
somehow or other she had squeezed out the money to buy herself a new
black silk gown, the first one since her marriage, more than twenty
years before. Moreover, in deference to the prevailing styles, she
explained to Scott on her way up from the station, she had had it made
to hook up in the back above a little black lace tucker. Scott, as a
matter of course, did not know a tucker from a turnip. None the less,
he nodded his approval. That same evening, he confessed to himself a
moderate degree of pride, when he introduced Reed Opdyke to his mother.
Mrs. Brenton might lack certain social frills and furbelows; but no one
could look into her honest face above the trim little black lace
tucker, without realizing that she was of good, old-fashioned stock
which never would degenerate. No one but a lady born could take herself
so simply. Scott read Opdyke's approval in his eyes, the while he
himself stood apart and talked to Catie.

It was when young Opdyke's eyes passed on to rest on Catie, though,
that Scott felt certain doubts, lately risen up within him, crystallize
and solidify past all gainsaying. Outwardly, Opdyke's manner was
respect itself; but there was an odd little twinkle in his eyes, as he
gazed down on the top of Catie's flower-strewn hat, now tipped
coquettishly askew as the girl turned her head sidewise and upward to
speak to her tall companion. Catie was pretty, of course; but was she
quite--well--right? Were her manners, like the cut and colour of her
garments, a thought too pronounced and noticeable? Was her voice a
little bit too loud, her manner too assured? Or was it that those other
girls beside her elbow were effete and colourless? Scott struggled to
repress his doubts, while he watched the gay assurance with which Catie
answered to Reed Opdyke's chaff. Scott was perfectly well aware that
Opdyke would not have chaffed some of those other girls upon such short
acquaintance, and the surety made him restless. He took it out in
wishing that Catie had not adorned her girlish neck with a gilded chain
which could have restrained a bulldog, or a convict.

Then he pulled himself up short. Catie was Catie, and his guest. She
would have fought for him on any issue, and downed any number of foes
in the fighting. To Mrs. Brenton, she was as dear as any daughter, dear
as the daughter that she meant one day to be. Besides, who was he, a
self-help student temporarily excused from waiting upon table and
attired in a misfit evening coat hired from a ghetto tailor: who was he
to criticise the flowers and frills of Catie? If she had had the
chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for
instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would have come out of the mill a finished
little product, clever, adaptable, and not a gawky, under-nourished,
over-strenuous bumpkin like himself. In the depths of his
self-abasement, Scott Brenton did not hesitate to ply himself with ugly
adjectives. Indeed, they seemed to him to be doing something towards
the removal of his doubts concerning Catie's pinchbeck chain.

Later, as it chanced, Reed Opdyke and Scott Brenton found themselves
going up the street together.

"It's all hours, I suppose," Opdyke said rather indistinctly through a
mammoth yawn. "Still, Brenton, what if it is? Come along to Mory's."

"Too late," Scott objected, with a guilty recollection of his mother
who would have wrestled in prayer, all night long, could she have seen
her son's steps turn towards Mory's and at the bacchanalian hour of
half-past ten.

But Opdyke's hand was on his watch.

"Not a bit. Besides, it's our last chance, you know."

"Till next year," Scott corrected, though he yielded to the hand upon
his arm.

Opdyke shook his head.

"No next year about it, Brenton. That's all off."

"What now?" Scott asked him in some surprise, for it had been an
understood thing that Opdyke took his graduate science courses in the
university that was giving him his bachelor's degree.

"The ancestral crank has slipped a cog," Opdyke returned profanely.
"Being interpreted, my reverend sire thinks I'd do better work at the
School of Mines and then in Europe. I'm sorry, too, confound it, even
if I know his head is level. I'd been looking forward to the pleasure
of romping along here for another year or two, and watching you get
changed into a parson. It would have been well worth my while, too. It
isn't every sinner like myself that has the chance to see a saint in
the making. I should have found it an edifying spectacle." Then
suddenly he broke off, and spoke with obvious sincerity. "Hang it all,
Scott! What's the use? Chuck theology, and come along with me and be
some sort of an engineer, or else the chemist old Mansfield has set his
heart on making out of you."

As he spoke, his hand tightened on Scott's arm. Under the street light
beside them, he could see the colour rush into the face of his
companion, as if in answer to the touch and the appeal; could see the
thin lips waver, then set themselves into a stern, hard line. Then,--

"It would break my mother's heart," Scott said gravely.

Instantly Opdyke flung up his head and relaxed the pressure of his
hand.

"Then--last call for science!" he said, with a carelessness which did
not quite ring true. "Your mother is worth the sacrifice, Brenton. I
saw that for myself, to-night."

It was not until they were settled at an initial-hacked table in the
smoke-thick air of Mory's that either of them spoke again. Then it was
Opdyke who broke the silence.

"Who's the girl, Brenton? Your Book of Chronicles hasn't mentioned her,
so far as I know."

"She's----" Scott hesitated, a little at a loss as to the proper way of
cataloguing Catie.

Opdyke nodded at the hesitation.

"Ja. I comprehend. Well, she's a pretty thing, and she knows her good
points," he answered. "That counts a lot, too, in a girl like that."

Scott turned on him a little bit pugnaciously, the more so by reason of
his own doubts of an hour before.

"Like what?" he queried curtly.

However, Opdyke had no idea of being betrayed into any indiscretion.

"Like her," he made tranquil answer, and then he bent above his glass
of beer and blew aside the froth. "She is sure to arrive," he went on,
after a minute. "The only thing I question is whether you may not have
to hustle a good deal, to keep up with her. You're a born student,
Brenton, and a sanctimonious grind. Nevertheless, when it comes to the
worldly question of arriving, you're a confoundedly lazy lubber, and I
suspect you always will be."

Commencement over, and the intervening summer, Scott Brenton set
himself to work to try to prove the falsity of Opdyke's words, by way
of the divinity school. Moreover, as in the case of Opdyke, although in
a wholly different sense, the parental plans for Scott had slipped a
cog. He also left the university behind him, and went elsewhere in
search of his professional degree. The change of plan, however, did not
achieve itself without some tears and many lamentations upon the part
of Mrs. Brenton. In carrying out her wishes that Scott should preach
the gospel to the heathen, it never had occurred to her that he could
preach any but the most azure forms of ultra-Calvinism. A sudden fading
in the dye of his theology well-nigh destroyed all of her pleasure in
his preaching.

The change in tint had come, to all appearing, during the summer that
had followed his bachelor's degree. How far, however, the stability of
the dyes had been affected by Scott's previous experiments in Professor
Mansfield's laboratory, it would be hard to say. It is quite within the
limits of scientific possibility that certain chemical changes might
have been taking place for many months, changes so slight and so slow
as to have escaped the notice of Scott or any of his friends who
chanced to feel an interest in the soundness of his theology. Doubtless
the change was there, potential, its elements held in suspension and
only waiting for the final molecule to arrive and start precipitation.

The molecule arrived, that summer, in the person of a curly-haired
young expounder of the Nicene Creed who came to spend July and August
at the mountain inn where Scott, after the fashion of needy students
New England over, was alternately engaged in keeping the books and
sorting up the mail. It was by way of this latter function that Scott
first came to be on speaking terms with the youthful rector of
Saint-Luke-the-Good-Physician's. And the rector, despite his four
hyphens and the gold cross that dangled on the front of his
ecclesiastical waistcoat, was an honest, unspoiled boy who was quick to
realize the curious appeal in the loneliness of Scott, to realize it
and to answer to it.

The early steps of their acquaintance were limited to the daily handing
out the letters, the daily thankful accepting them. Then, one morning,
Scott so far forgot his official and personal manners as to comment
upon the familiar imprint of one of the envelopes, as it was changing
hands. He made instant apology; but his penitence was forgotten in the
discovery that the curly-headed divine was also an old student of
Professor Mansfield. The rest of the steps were logical and
consecutive, down to those final days of August when together,
hard-working, would-be student and holiday-making, prosperous divine,
they spent Scott's leisure hours afield, talking, talking, talking of
the things one only mentions to one's spiritual next of kin.

Before he left the mountains, Scott's mind was made up definitely to
the step which was next before him. He knew that step would grieve his
mother, would well-nigh break her heart. None the less, he was resolved
to take it. Indeed, in honour, it seemed to him no other course was
open to him, albeit, in his more downright moments, he realized that
the taking it was nothing in the world but a miserable sort of
compromise between his mother's wishes and his own. He had given her
his word that he would be a preacher; keep his given word he must and
would. Nevertheless, preaching, he must choose for himself a gentler
sort of gospel than the lurid, flaming fires delighted in and set forth
with all the cunning of word imagery, by every Parson Wheeler of his
line. His God should be an honest gentleman, and not an all-pursuing
Thing of Wrath.

For some reason he would have been loath to analyze, even to himself,
it was to Catie that Scott first announced his change of plan. Catie
took the announcement tranquilly. To her mind, religion was something
that one put on, together with one's Sunday hat. There was no reason
one of them should be unchanging in form more than the other. One's
theology, like one's brims, should broaden with the fashion; the forms
of worship might as well grow high as the outline of one's hat-crown.
Given the three main elements of best clothes, a Sunday on which to
wear them and an appreciative church to wear them in, and Catie asked
no further consolations of religion. The tolerance Scott liked,
although he deplored the cause.

"Lovely, Scott!" Catie said, with some enthusiasm, when at last she had
grasped in its entirety, not Scott's idea, but the outward form in
which it clothed itself. "You'll wear a surplice, then, and a purple
stripe around your neck, and sing the prayers, like the man I saw in
Boston. He had candles, too, burning at the back, beside a great brass
cross."

Scott shook his head in swift negation. As yet, the higher forms of
ritualism were totally unknown to him.

"That's Catholic, Catie," he reminded her. "Of course, I sha'n't do
that."

"No; 'twas Episcopal," she contradicted. "It said so, on a sign beside
the door. But, Scott, that makes me think--"

"Well?" he asked, wondering at her hesitation.

"Would you mind very much," she came forward to his side and fell to
fingering the top button of his coat caressingly; "would you mind it so
very much not to call me Catie any more?"

Absorbed as he was in his theological transference, he had felt sure
that her request was on that selfsame theme, the more so, even, by
reason of her unwonted hesitation. In his extreme surprise, he laughed
a little at her question.

"Why not, Catie?"

She held up a forefinger of arch admonition.

"There you go again!" she told him, with mock petulance. "Do listen to
me, Scott. You're so interested in your everlasting old churches that
you haven't an idea to spare for me. I want you to promise that you
won't ever call me Catie any more."

"But why? What shall I call you?" he inquired, with masculine and dazed
bluntness.

"Catia. It is ever so much prettier; Catie is so babyish," she urged
him.

"But, if it is your name?" he urged in return.

Her retort came with unexpected pith and promptness. Moreover, it
struck home.

"So is the Baptist your church," she answered pertly. "I guess I have a
right to change, as well as you."

Mrs. Brenton, that same evening, took the disclosure in quite a
different spirit. To her mind, the relaxing of one's creed spelt ruin,
the doorway of the church Episcopal was but the outer portal of the
Church of Rome and, like all elderly women of puritanic stock who have
spent their lives in a Protestant community, Mrs. Brenton looked on
Rome as the last station but one upon the broad road to hell. None the
less, she strove to phrase her objections as gently as she was able.
However misguided Scott might be, she saw that he was in earnest, and
upon that account she was the more loath to hurt him.

"Scott," she said, with what appeared to herself to be the extreme of
tolerance; "if you must, I suppose you must; but I am sure that it will
kill your grandfather."

If Scott, just then, had been in a mood for theological discussion, he
might have pointed out to his mother the flaw in the logic of her own
belief. Grandfather Wheeler, translated into the glory that awaits the
faithful servant of the Lord, in all surety should have been beyond the
danger of vicarious and everlasting death. However, Scott was too much
in earnest, just then, about his own fate, to heed that of his worthy
and departed grandsire.

"I am sorry, mother," he repeated gravely; "but I am afraid it is that,
or nothing. All this summer, perhaps even before, I have been thinking
things over. I'll be glad to preach. Maybe--" his accent was boyish in
its extreme simplicity; "maybe, if I try my best, I'll do somebody a
little good. But," and his face stiffened, as he spoke; "but I'll be
hanged if I am going to stand up in the pulpit and say a whole lot of
things I don't believe and don't want to believe, just because
Grandfather Wheeler and Great-grandfather Wheeler and all that tribe
did believe them."

Across his energy, his growing excitement, Mrs. Brenton's level voice
cut in a little sternly.

"What is it that you don't believe, my son?" she asked him.

Scott rose to his feet, took a turn up the room, a turn down it. Then
he faced her.

"I'm not sure I even know that--yet," he answered. "I've got to find it
out. Honestly, mother," again there came a note of pleading; "isn't it
about as much to the point to find out the things you don't believe as
the things you do? And there must be some truth, somewhere, that's
worth the preaching, no matter how many things you have to throw over,
before you get to it. It's that I'm after now, a truth that is the
truth, that can be proved. Once I get it, I'll stand up and preach it,
and prove it, too, to every man I meet. That's what religion's for.
But, to do it, I must go into a church which gives you a little leeway,
a church which lets you interpret a few things to suit yourself, not
lays down the law about the last little phrase of the meaning you are
allowed to put into them."

Again there came the restless pacing of the room. This time, it lasted
longer. At last, though, he halted by her side, and rested one lean
hand upon her shoulder.

"Mother," he said, and now all boyishness had fallen away from him; "I
am sorry if this is going to hurt you; but I can't help it. Two years
ago, I told you I would study for the ministry. I shall keep my word;
but the way I keep it must be left for me to choose."

There was no mistaking the resonant purpose in his voice. Recognizing
it, his mother yielded to it of necessity. As quietly as possible, she
accepted the choice that he had made, and then she went away to her own
room. A half-hour later, kneeling beside her bed, she lost herself in
supplication on behalf of those who bow the knee to Baal.




CHAPTER SEVEN


In the fulness of time, Scott married Catie. To put the case more
accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie.
From start to finish, Catie was the active force in whatever wooing
achieved itself, the active force which swept down on and annexed a
passive principle.

From the start, their courtship lacked most of the hallmarks of that
tender process. There were few endearments, fewer still of the
half-told, half-guessed confidences which, by their very fragmentary
nature only serve to add emphasis to a comprehension that can construct
a living, vital intimacy out of such slight materials. Indeed, there
was no especial effort at spiritual comprehension between them.
Instead, their unsentimental wooing was a sort of amatory bargain day
for Catie, who must have the best sort of husband to be found on the
domestic market. For Scott, on the other hand, it was the bored
acquiescence of a man too full of other dreams and hopes and even
concrete plannings to regard the choosing of a wife as more important
than the selection of his next-morning's steak. His mother had
impressed upon him that Catie would be the best wife possible for him.
The professors in the divinity school had laid some stress upon the
advantage of their clergy's marrying young. Therefore Scott Brenton
dutifully took to himself a wife, without the slightest previous notion
of what domestic intercourse was bound to mean.

Notwithstanding the education given him by Reed Opdyke and his pseudo
sirens, young Scott Brenton was singularly ignorant of the elements
that go into the making of almost any woman, singularly ignorant
regarding all the practical details of wedded life. Of course, he knew
his mother well; but she seemed to him a little bit archaic. Besides,
he knew her only as a thing apart from all other human relations, as an
isolated personality whose one point of contact was with himself. The
society of a woman who parted her hair straight down the middle of her
head and who quoted Job at breakfast was not a perfect preparation for
modern domestic life.

As for Catie, or Catia, as she now called herself, she was modern
enough, distressingly so sometimes. Nevertheless, analyzed, she would
not have seemed to Scott at all domestic. She was too much wrapped up
in her own personal concerns, too uncomprehending in a spiritual
crisis. Domesticity, to be practical, must consist of something else
than mere ability to keep a house and to extract from the butcher the
best cuts obtainable for one's income. One's spiritual bric-a-brac must
be taken down and dusted with just as careful reverence as one shows
the glass things on one's mantel. Catia could cut her own cloth up into
pieces, and then sew up the pieces into quite presentable garments; she
could make good coffee and cook lamb chops to perfection; but, that
done, she could not sit down of an evening and fling herself, heart and
soul, into the interests of her husband's life.

Of this, as yet, Scott Brenton was mercifully ignorant. He might have
known it; but, unhappily, he never had found it altogether worth his
while to meditate very much upon the question. He passed by Catia as an
established fact; he left her quite unanalyzed. Instead, he turned the
whole force of his analytic power upon the needs of his profession,
without in the least realizing that, in the case of a married man,
professional acumen and efficiency depend a good deal upon the quality
of his domestic atmosphere. Later on, he was destined to find out that
a family jar at breakfast, a discussion born of a muddy cup of coffee
or a sticky muffin, can wreck the fervour of a sermon born of a week of
prayer and meditation, wreck it at so late an hour that any salvage is
impossible.

"Really," Catia observed to her solitary bridesmaid, a week before the
wedding day; "you'd never think it that Scott was just getting ready to
be married; would you?"

The bridesmaid was not so much tactless as envious. As she and Catia
were well aware, Scott Brenton was the one really personable man upon
the horizon of their village life, the only man who seemed to have it
in him to translate a wife out of that humdrum village into the
seething world beyond. Of course, it was nice of Catia to have chosen
her for bridesmaid. Nevertheless, it would have been far, far more
agreeable, if only she could have been the bride. Therefore,--

"No," she answered flatly. "No; I never would. I'd think he ought to be
in a perfect twitter, by this time; but he takes it as calmly as if a
wedding weren't any more important than a sack of beans."

Catia, hoping for a prompt denial of the point of view she had put
forth, was conscious of a certain pique at the prompt agreement. She
showed her pique with equal promptness, and phrased it in unanswerable
rebuke.

"How common you are, Eva!" she said quite scornfully. "A sack of beans!
One would know your father kept a country store."

Eva Saint Clair Andrews felt herself justified in the retort
discourteous.

"It is better to keep a country store than it is to hoe your own
potatoes, barefoot," she responded tartly. "Besides, what about Scott
Brenton's father?"

Then, catching sight, by way of the mirror, of Catia's irate
countenance, she stayed her speech. Already, she well realized, her
bridesmaid's robes were in the extreme of jeopardy. Unsatisfactory as
it was going to be to take the second place at Scott Brenton's wedding,
it would be far more unsatisfactory to take the twenty-second, and
watch the ceremony from one of the rear pews of the church, instead of
from the front aisle which answers architecturally to the functions of
the chancel. Besides, there was going to be a visiting minister extra,
a rector who was a classmate of Scott Brenton and therefore rather
young. And no one ever knew. Accordingly, Eva Saint Clair Andrews,
called usually by the whole of her name, even in intimate address,
stayed her speech and, after a fashion, temporized.

"Of course," she added, with a hasty giggle; "a minister like Scott is
more used to weddings than we girls are."

Turning from the mirror, Catia spoke with a dignity which was crushing.

"But not to his own," she informed her guest.

And Eva Saint Clair Andrews gave up the effort to extricate herself
from disgrace. Instead, she fell upon discussion of the wedding plans.

"How many do you expect at the reception, Catia?" she made query, with
an accent which discretion had suddenly rendered exceedingly full of
respect.

"Oh, I can't stop to count them up," Catia replied, with magnificent
carelessness. "I've asked about everybody in town, of course. Mother
would have insisted on it, anyway; and, besides, Scott's position would
make us do it, even if he were the only one to count."

Eva Saint Clair Andrews opened her blue eyes a little wider than was
quite becoming.

"I didn't suppose the Brentons were----" she was beginning.

But Catia interrupted, with a fresh access of magnificence.

"Not the Brentons, Eva," Catia had only lately forbidden herself the
village use of the full name, and her sudden recollection of the fact
caused her to speak with nippy brevity; "not the Brentons, but just
Scott himself. Of course, we owe it to his cloth."

"Yes," Eva Saint Clair Andrews answered, in an appreciative murmur.
None the less, lacking the training vouchsafed to Catia by the closing
functions of the divinity school, she wondered what the cloth might be,
that it should so outrank good Mrs. Brenton in its claim to social
precedence.

A week later, came the wedding. Even the most carping one of all the
village gossips was ready to agree that it had thrown new lustre over
the entire community, and even shed its beams into the next county
whence certain of the guests had come. There had been many guests and
some unusual costumes. The church had been filled with a wealth of
flowers, chiefly of the home-grown species, until the place reeked with
the spicy odours, not of Araby the blest, but of a kitchen garden, or a
soup bunch.

Beside the village parson, there had been three young clergymen in
attendance and more or less in active service while the nuptial knot
was being tied. Indeed, so many were there of them and so active were
they in their ministrations that poor Mrs. Brenton, down in the front
pew and painfully shiny between her proud maternal tears and the
reflected lustre of her new black satin frock, was never quite certain
in her mind which one of them, in the end, had pronounced her son and
Catia man and wife. For the sake of the ancestral Wheelers, she hoped
it was the broadcloth-coated village parson; but she had her doubts.
Her doubts increased into a positive agony of uneasiness when she
discovered, at the reception later on, that the three young clergymen,
with one consent, had put their waistcoats on hind side before. Had she
conceived the notion that, within the limits of three years, her son
would adopt the same preposterous fashion, she would have believed
herself in readiness for the nearest madhouse. Mercifully, however, so
much was spared her, at that time and for ever after.

The reception itself was a glorious occasion. Practically the entire
village was present, a good half of them in new frocks manufactured by
themselves in honour of the great event. It was now four years and
seven months since there had been a wedding in the village. The local
type of damsel was a pre-natal spinster, and the few village boys went
otherwhere in search of wives. Brides there had been, of course; but
they had been of the ready-made variety. Other communities had had the
glory of the weddings. It was not every day, by any means, that the
local leaders of society were asked to prepare themselves a wedding
garment. They stitched away all the more cunningly on that account.
Judged by the standards of the _Ladies' Galaxy_, their gowns were
models of the mode. Viewed even in the uncritical eyes of the visiting
clergy, they were, as has been said, unusual.

Aside from gowns, the reception was chiefly notable for its cake; not
cakes, but solid loaves made up in layers with oozy sweetnesses
sandwiched in between. Served with neither forks nor napkins, it gave
rise to complications; but it was none the less appreciated upon that
account. There were two kinds of lemonade, too, one plain, one mixed
with home-brewed grape juice. In all surety, Catia's wedding reception
left nothing lacking on the score of elegance. Later, her satisfaction
was obvious in her shining eyes, as she halted, half-way down the front
stairs, to look upon her guests. The reception was nearing its end, for
Catia was now dressed for going away, and topped with a hat which
combined the more essential characteristics of the helmet of the
British grenadier and a mascot upon a Princeton football field. Indeed,
it was almost as rigid in its outlines as was the smile which creased
its wearer's lips. Catia was not unimpressive in her new dignity of
wifehood; but the dignity bore traces of diligent rehearsal, and left
singularly little to the imagination. By her side, Scott, looking down
upon his fellow townsmen, wore the self-conscious smirk of a sheepish
schoolboy; and the best of his fellow townsmen respected him the more
on that account. Catia was the more impressive of the two, they told
themselves; but there was no especial sense in a pair of young things
like these, trying to act as if their getting married were a mere fact
of every-day routine.

Smiling steadily, Catia stood there, waiting until, by very force of
motionless persistence, she had focussed every eye upon her person.
Then, according to the mandates of the _Ladies' Galaxy_, she hurled her
bridal bouquet down across the banister, not upon the waiting Eva Saint
Clair Andrews who hankered for it lustily, but straight against the
manly waistcoat of the least and the pinkest one of the visiting
clergy, a youth of twenty-five or six who had reluctantly torn himself
away from an anxious wife and a croupy baby, on purpose to be on hand
at Brenton's wedding. Mercifully for Catia's poise, her young husband
forebore explaining to her the reason for the three-fold clerical roar
which went up upon the heels of her well-meant attention.

Afterwards, in looking backward, that evening seemed to Scott to stand
out as a dream, unforeseen, yet not inconsequential. Nothing that had
gone before appeared to him to be able to explain it. It just was, a
fact without any planning or volition on his part. He had known Catia
from his little boyhood, had been used to her, had counted on her in a
sense; but always he had held himself a little bit aloof from her, even
when, to outward seeming, he had sought her with the greatest
regularity. Early in their intercourse, indeed, he had discovered the
main fact of all those which were to govern their later life together:
that he could not so much talk over things with her, as talk them over
with himself when she was present.

And then, all at once and without warning, Catia had swept in and
dominated him completely, dominated him with her oozy layer cake, and
her two sorts of lemonade, and with her Princeton grenadier of a hat.
Beside it all, he felt himself dwindling into insignificance, despite
the hind-side-before waistcoats of the visiting clergymen and his
mother's gown of stiff black satin. It was a positive relief to him
when he could turn his back upon the whole hot, chattering function,
and, with Catia's new gilt-initialled bag to balance his much-rubbed
suitcase, go striding away to the station underneath the wintry
freshness of the night. Catia had rebelled at the idea of walking to
their train; but the one hack afforded by the village had gone away to
a funeral in the next town but two.

So they went stepping out into the new life before them: Catia Brenton
and Scott, her husband. To Catia it seemed that, the first of her
milestones reached, it was time for her to sit down for a while, and
rest, and take a little comfort out of thinking over what she already
had achieved. To Scott, the first stage of his journey had scarcely
been begun. Indeed, it did not even start from that night, nor from any
night in which Catia's memory could have a share. And yet, asked, he
would have been swift to affirm that he loved Catia; that life ahead of
him, without her for his wife, would be unsatisfactory, perhaps a
little vacant. Catia had always been a part of his environment, ever
since the long-gone day when she had hailed him, sodden in his weeping,
the while he cooled his nether man upon the chilly doorstep.

For nearly twenty years, they had been meeting life together, and
comparing notes upon the impressions they had gained. Often and often,
each one had found the other's notes a cipher, had lacked the cipher's
proper code. Nevertheless, there had been a certain sense of intimacy
in the mere fact of the comparison. Without Catia in his past, Scott
Brenton would have been lonely. Therefore he felt it safe to reason
that, without her in his future, the loneliness would become infinitely
worse. The marriage, in its inception, might have been altogether
Catia's doing. In the end, he had been giving it his full assent, and
he took his marriage vows in all sincerity, determined to do his best
towards their fulfilment.

His fingers shut quite closely, then, upon the slippery handle of
Catia's new bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they
halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left
behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people,
already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw
four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little
tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the
visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and,
still behind these two, the eager young face of the curly-headed rector
of the many hyphens, the man who first had opened his eyes to a
brand-new gospel, one of fatherly affection, not of pursuant wrath, a
gospel elastic as the mind of man, plastic as the flowing life of all
the ages, not a hard and fast affair whose boundaries were laid down
for all time, hundreds of years before. And this was the man of them
all, and not the broadcloth village parson, whom Scott Brenton had
chosen to pronounce himself and Catia man and wife.

Why not?

Scott waved his hand. His mother sought her handkerchief, though not to
wave it. His two classmates saluted him, the one with Catia's big
bouquet, the other with a crochetted "throw" snatched from the nearest
chair. Above them all, though, the curly-headed rector flung up his arm
in greeting, and with his arm his voice.

"Bless you, old man, and keep at it! Remember I'm always in the same
old corner, if you ever need me."

And Scott Brenton took the assurance with him, as he entered into his
new life.




CHAPTER EIGHT


"Scott," Catia let go the coffee pot and looked up to face him; "I do
wish you'd begin to think about smartening yourself up a little."

Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper
between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at
the arraignment which lay in Catia's tone, if not within her words.

"Smarten myself up?" he echoed, in blank question.

"Yes." Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands around
her cup. "I was looking at you, Scott, all the time this last
convocation was going on."

He smiled benevolently, by way of preparation for flinging himself once
more upon the columns of his morning paper.

"You'd much better have been looking at the Bishop," he advised her
good-temperedly.

She shook her head.

"The Bishop was all right," she said, with an emphasis so caustic as to
catch and hold his attention.

Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort,
his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the
less, he still held on to his temper.

"And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia.
What's the trouble?"

"All sorts of little things," she answered, with a disconcerting
frankness. "Not any one of them count for much; but, taken all
together, they're----" She hesitated for a word.

Brenton supplied it.

"Deplorable!" Then he added, "Sorry, Catia, as I said before. Still, I
suppose, if I'm not a beauty, I'm about what the good Lord made me."

"Fudge!" She put down her cup and rested her chin upon her palms. Seen
across the table and in a pose so undeniably feminine and so becoming
to almost every woman, Catia was good to look upon; would have been
good, that is, had not her personality been uncomfortably domineering.
The two years since her marriage had rubbed down certain of her angles,
and had given her at least a superficial polish. She occasionally
admitted to herself that she was very near to being handsome. A more
critical observer and one less prejudiced, however, might possibly have
added that she was curiously devoid of charm.

Brenton, on the other hand, was growing curiously magnetic, as the
months ran on, was developing a personal charm of which his student
days had given scarcely any hint. The old lines, born of hard work and
scanty nourishment, had vanished from his face. In place of them had
come other lines, vastly more becoming, lines engraved by earnest,
conscientious thought and study, by a life so ascetic as to be a little
narrow, perhaps, but noble enough in its aspirations to lift itself
high above the common level. He still was lean and thin, still a little
stooping. The habits of his life would account for that; he was too
busy saving other men's souls to give much thought to the preservation
of his own body.

Even in a small and humdrum country parish, the souls of men need
careful shepherding; every now and then there comes a petty crisis when
they confess to a desire for outside guidance, and it was in such
crises that Scott Brenton found his opportunity. His sermons, albeit a
trifle immature, were really clever. None the less, they dwindled into
insignificance beside the practical, personal help he gave to his
parishioners, a help that came without the asking, whether the crisis
were a dying cow, a small son's broken arm, or a fire in a granary just
after the final harvest. Whatever happened in the parish, for good or
ill, Scott Brenton always appeared upon the scene. At the very first,
he had come of his own accord. Later, if his arrival delayed itself for
a dozen minutes, he was sent for in hot haste. In every crisis, he was
ready with practical advice; but he worked with both hands, the while
he gave it.

Under such conditions, how he wrote his sermons was a question
unanswerable by any one but Catia who trimmed the lamps, next morning.
To Catia's great disgust, despite the scale of living due to his
profession, Brenton had taken it quietly for granted that, for the
present, they would keep no maid. His salary was small; he must have
something saved to give away in cases of emergency. Catia and he were
strong, and the rectory was small. Of course, Catia could have a little
girl to come in at odd hours. What other help she needed, he would give
her out of his scanty leisure. And Catia, who had dreamed of a
luxurious idleness unknown to most women in that community of simple
habits, was forced to tie on a wide pinafore and roll up her sleeves
above a steaming dishpan. She did it all, however, with an air of
patient martyrdom which was not lost upon her husband; while, upon the
rare occasions when they entertained a clerical guest, she added an
extra note of unaccustomed abnegation which was intended to impress
upon the guest that she was the hapless victim of a fall from better
days. The parish, in so far as she was able, she disdained completely.
At the infrequent times that she was driven into close quarters with
it, she made up for her unpopularity among the vestrymen by taking it
out most vigorously upon their wives. Indeed, her lifelong familiarity
with what she termed the narrowness of a small community made her the
more intolerant, now that its groove was closing about her for a second
time.

Therefore, for over a year now, Catia secretly had chafed with the
friction of her surroundings. As yet, however, she had not confessed to
Brenton the chafing, had not explained to him that her eyes were
searching their horizon for any possible loophole of escape. Catia was
more wise than are most women. She never wasted any breath in demanding
absolute futilities. For the present, she saw clearly, Brenton was
quite contented with his parish. For the present, it was enough for his
young ambitions to know he had a parish and was doing it some good.
Later, she would take a hand in stirring up his slumbering ambition. If
she knew Scott at all, he would not be content for ever with preaching
to country farmers and dandling their babies on his knees; nor with
interspersing moral reflections with inquiries regarding the season's
crops; nor with basing his sermons upon the tares and the wheat, and
the fig tree, and other texts so palpably bucolic in their interest.
However, Catia would grant him a little resting time, before she goaded
him up to girding his loins anew. Indeed, he needed it, she admitted
freely to herself in her more generous moments. The years of study,
long at best, and, in his case, lengthened by needful intervals of
money-earning toil, had taken it out of him badly. He needed a little
time to recover from their strain, to grow accustomed to his new
dignity as preacher and to learn to take himself a little less
strenuously, before he would be fitted to assume his proper place in a
wider field than any of which as yet he appeared to be dreaming.

However, two years, it seemed to Catia, had been an ample rest-time.
Therefore,--

"Fudge!" she said. And then, "Don't be profane, Scott," she rebuked
him, with the literalness which had replaced her meagre childish sense
of humour. "The good Lord didn't make your surplices a full eighth of a
yard too long, nor put you into a black stole for the whole year round.
Besides, you were the only man in that whole convocation that buttoned
his collar in front. I should have supposed you'd have known better
than that, before you got your license."

Brenton's lips curved into the little smile she always dreaded. Because
she dreaded it, it antagonized her.

"Did you?" he queried.

Her antagonism lent a tartness to her reply.

"I never professed to go through a divinity school," she retorted. "If
I had, though----" Her pause was fraught with meaning.

He made no effort to discount the meaning. Instead,--

"I don't doubt it, Catia," he responded quietly. "However, as it
happens, I had some other things to think about."

That brought her to a momentary halt. However, she swiftly rallied.

"Some people can think of more than one thing at a time," she
announced, with something of the same accent in which, long years
before, she had ejaculated "Dirty-Face!"

But Brenton's mind was hungrily intent upon his paper. Not even two
years of Catia's corrective moods had taught him to grasp the fact that
she would never cease from her corrections until he had given evidence
of writhing underneath their sting. It was not enough for her to have
the last word; she must be left in a position to gloat upon its visible
effect. Else, wherein lay the pleasure of having given it utterance?
Brenton, with manlike unconsciousness of this great fact of feminine
psychology, once more buried himself in his morning paper. Promptly and
ruthlessly Catia exhumed him.

"Scott," she said, with a petulance which she permitted herself but
rarely, not so much for moral reasons as because the _Ladies' Galaxy_
had pronounced it bad for the complexion; "do put down that stupid paper
and attend to me."

"Yes, dear." And Brenton blinked a little, in the sudden change of
focus demanded of his eyes.

Catia only saw the blinking, and to herself she pronounced it a new and
ugly mannerism. She did not take the trouble to notice the eyes
themselves, to read the earnest desire to please her, written so
plainly in their luminous gray depths.

"Oh, do wake up!" she adjured him, with increasing impatience. "Scott,
do you know you never really come to life till after breakfast? Can't
you see I want to talk to you? Now do listen and answer me. What do you
mean to do about this Saint Peter's matter?"

"To do about it!" It was no especial wonder that the echo irritated
Catia; and yet neither was it any especial wonder that Scott, in his
astonishment, was betrayed into an echo of that sort. As yet, her
meaning was opaque to him.

"Yes, do about it," Catia echoed, in her turn. "They say there's sure
to be a vacancy, and that it's a splendid place."

"Who say?" Brenton queried cautiously.

"All the convocation. Don't be a dunce and pretend, Scott. Anyway, I'm
not a mole; I can see which way the weather vanes are pointing. They
were all talking about it, while the convocation was going on. Ever so
many of the wives spoke to me about it, and told me that you were the
man who ought to have it."

Quite tranquilly Brenton helped himself to more butter.

"Then, knowing the Bishop's common sense, it seems highly probable to
me that I shall be the man to get it," he responded.

"You won't, unless you try for it," Catia assured him.

He shook his head. The idea of ecclesiastical wirepulling was repugnant
to his nature.

"One doesn't try for things of that kind, Catia," he answered.

"Then one doesn't get them," she retorted curtly.

It was Brenton who broke the next period of silence.

"Besides," he said, as if his sentences had followed each other without
break; "I am not at all sure that my work here is done, by any means."

"Scott!" Catia put on the cover of the sugar bowl with a defiant clash.
"Surely, you don't mean to stay buried in this little hole much
longer?"

Once more his smile showed whimsical.

"Really, Catia, I hadn't thought about it as a hole," he said. "About
my staying here or anywhere, I suppose it all depends upon the Bishop."

She pushed her chair back a little from the table, and then clasped her
hands upon the table's edge. Her attitude betokened her intention of
staying there until the matter had been fought out to a finish.

"Not one half so much upon the Bishop as it does upon yourself," she
told him firmly. "The Bishop decides things in the end; but he never
originates them. Unless you stir yourself a little and show him that
you're restless, you'll be welcome to sit for all time to come in one
corner of the diocese. In fact, you have been sitting in a corner for
two years. It is high time you showed him you were getting cramps in
your knees, and needed a higher seat to straighten them out. There is
no especial sense in your wasting your time among these people. Any
broken-down old hack ought to be all they've any right to look for."

"But not all they need," Brenton interpolated swiftly.

She waved aside the interpolation.

"It's what you need, Scott, I'm talking about," she told him. "You are
young, and you need a chance. What's more, the Bishop isn't going to
offer it to you, until you give him to understand that you expect it.
There are too many hungry mouths open for every bit of advantage to
make it worth his while to hunt for any more. As for Saint Peter's,
they all say it is an ideal parish: a rich church in a college town,
with a large salary and not too much work. In fact," Catia added
wisely; "they all say that there never does need to be too much work in
a parish where a good share of the congregation are very young, and
transients."

Brenton lifted his head. Then he lifted his brows, fine, narrow brows
and arching.

"It strikes me that there might be all the more," he said.

Catia's fingers beat a tattoo on the table.

"You're just for all the world like your mother, Scott," she said, with
renewed impatience.

"I hope so," Brenton assented gravely, for Mrs. Brenton had died, a
year before, and her memory still was sacred in the mind of her son.

Not even Catia, in her present mood, dared introduce a jarring note,
until a little interval had followed upon Scott's grave reply. She,
too, had cared for Mrs. Brenton; at least, she had cared as much as it
was in her to care for any one. She, too, had mourned sincerely, when
the patient, unselfish, plodding life went out. Indeed, there had
seemed to be no little cruelty in the fate which had ordained that Mrs.
Brenton, after giving her life and strength and all her prayers to the
equipment of her son in his profession, should not have been allowed a
little longer time to take pleasure in the things her tireless effort
had accomplished. For, though Scott had done his best to help himself,
the real strain had rested on his mother, the more real in that it had
been unbroken by the variety of his student existence, unrewarded by
the elating consciousness of personal achievement which had come to him
at the end of every stage of his development.

In all truth, it had been upon Mrs. Brenton that the burden had fallen
most heavily. She had accomplished the almost impossible achievement;
yet to her had been denied the fullest fruition of her dreams. Scott
was a clergyman at last, a preacher, it was said, of more than ordinary
promise; but the gospel that he was going forth to preach to all men
was not a gospel accredited by any of the ancestral Parson Wheelers.
Therefore it was that, after all her struggle, poor Mrs. Brenton died,
a disappointed woman. Therefore it was that, by the very reason of the
sincerity of his own decisions, Scott, her son, realized her
disappointment, and cherished her memory the more tenderly on that
account. Vaguely, but resolutely, he had clung to the hope that the day
would dawn when his mother would come into his own way of thinking. He
only resigned that hope, while he listened to the prayer of the village
parson beside his mother's open grave. It was an extemporaneous prayer;
but it lacked no detail on that account. And there are few things in
life more tragic than permanent misunderstandings between a child and
parent. That this one must now be permanent not even Scott Brenton's
theological tenets could leave him room for doubt.

Catia's cause for mourning was by far more practical. She realized that
it was Mrs. Brenton who had provided her with a professional husband,
in place of the petty farmers and shopkeepers who, otherwise, had
bounded her horizon. Moreover, she missed Mrs. Brenton sorely, when
there came a need to discuss Scott's faults and failings, to plan how
best to put an end to them before they stood in the way of his career.
Also of her career. For, despite her manifest disdain of the village
parish where, as it seemed to her, Scott was merely marking time, Catia
had her own keen notions as to the part, granted a suitable environment
to serve as stage, a rector's wife could play. Saint Peter's, taken as
a stage, would admirably suit her purposes. A college town, and a
girls' college town at that, could not fail to surround the rector's
lady, not only with a proper train of satellites, but with an audience
worthy of her utmost powers.

Already, at the recent convocation, she had probed the subject
cleverly. That is, in the most incidental fashion, she had led the talk
around to the new Bishop of Western Oklahoma, had casually mentioned
the parish whence he had clambered to the bishop's throne, and then, in
greedily receptive silence, she had listened to the scraps of
conversation evoked by her apparently careless words. At first, her
investigations had been carried on among the other diocesan wives.
Finding them, to all seeming, gullible and loquacious, she had even
ventured on the Bishop. And the good old Bishop, near-sighted and
slightly hard of hearing, had carried away the genial impression that
Brenton's wife was a very pretty woman and would be of inestimable help
to him in managing a parish. Indeed, the Bishop, who was celibate,
thought much about the helpful influence of a proper wife, the evening
after his short talk with Catia. He even wondered whether he had been
quite wise in allowing the two of them--for, ever afterward, he
persisted in thinking of them jointly--to be buried in a country parish
where it was possible an experienced widower might manage the work
alone.

Of this, however, and of the good Bishop's later meditations and of his
consequent questionings and investigations, Catia unhappily was in
ignorance. Her ignorance, moreover, led her now into employing on her
husband the final weapon in her woman's quiver, namely pathos.

She dropped her eyes to her fingernails, and spoke with reverential
deliberation.

"She was a good woman, Scott, a dear, good woman, even if she always
was a little narrow. It can't fail to be a pleasure to you now to think
back to the way we have done our best to carry out her wishes as--"
suddenly Catia bethought herself of the change in the label of their
theology--"as far as our own consciences would allow us. And now, dear
boy," her eyes drooped lower still over her request; "now that you
haven't her to consider any longer, aren't you willing to do just one
very, very little thing for me?"

"I hope so, Catia," Brenton responded, still quite gravely. "What is it
that you want?"

Despite her efforts to the contrary, her voice thrilled with the sudden
surety that she had gained her cause.

"Write to the Bishop, dear, and tell him you will take Saint Peter's,
when he offers it," she begged him.

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.

As a matter of course, under this new and unorthodox arrangement, a
dinner invitation at the Keltridges' became a thing of almost infinite
value. Apart from the surety of the good dinner, and the cordial
welcome of the pretty little hostess who, young as she was, yet
understood to the full the delicate distinction between chat and
chatter: apart from all this was the humorous question contained within
the host. No one could ever foretell whether he would greet them on the
threshold in his overcoat and goloshes, or be invisible until the
dinner was announced, and then be led in by one cuff, like a guilty
youngster caught among the jam pots. No one ever could foretell,
either, what would be the doctor's costume for the evening, whether it
would combine a dinner jacket and a four-in-hand, or whether a wadded
housecoat and no necktie at all above his evening linen would announce
to his guests that a sudden thirst for knowledge had cut athwart his
dressing and sent him to the laboratory to discover how some malignant
brew or other might be getting on. Upon one point only Olive, product
of these modern days, stood firm. Her father might be as charmingly
erratic as he chose; but he must sterilize his hands, before he came
into the drawing-room. And upon that one point of domestic discipline
his guests rested in placid confidence, sure that, as long as Olive was
at the helm, they could devour the Keltridge dinners in reasonable
surety of not being poisoned.

If Doctor Keltridge was charming as host, he was even more charming,
taken as a father. He was adoring, indulgent, whimsical, and singularly
tactful in spite of his absent-minded lapses. To Olive, indeed, he
seemed to be the only man at all well worth the while. Nevertheless, as
now, it sometimes became imperative to be a little masterful in
summoning him back to present consciousness just long enough to extract
an answer from him. Therefore she tapped the table sharply with the
corner of the note.

"Listen, father!" she urged him, as she laid her other hand across the
open paper. "What shall I say?"

"Say that they are impossible young asses, a year and a half behind the
times," her father growled, the while he shifted his paper slightly, to
free its final column from her covering fingers.

A total stranger to the doctor might have distrusted either his own
ears, or else the doctor's sanity. Olive knew her father, though; she
felt no forebodings, albeit her eyes danced at the unexpected nature of
his response.

"I am afraid that Mrs. Dennison might not take it nicely, if I did,"
she said.

The doctor's growl rumbled forth once more.

"Better know what one is talking about, then. That theory was all
exploded, months ago." Then some echo of his daughter's words seemed at
last to be penetrating his brain, and he lowered his paper with a sigh.
"What has Mrs. Dennison to do with a thing like this, Olive?" he
queried blankly. "Dennison is only history, not biological."

Olive laughed outright.

"And Mrs. Dennison is only socio-hospitable," she responded. "Father,
you really are terrible, this morning."

The doctor smiled benevolently at her arraignment. Then, hurriedly
gathering himself together, he stuck out an appealing cup for some more
coffee.

Olive shook her head.

"No; not one other drop. You have had five, already. If you don't stop
at that, I'll tell the cook to put you on to postum. Now please do
listen to me. I was asking you whether we'd best go to this dinner of
Mrs. Dennison's."

"When?" the doctor inquired.

Olive's lips twitched at the corners.

"About a half an hour ago," she answered. "No, wait." Swiftly she
seized and snatched away the paper, just as her father was preparing to
bury himself anew. "The dinner is next Thursday, to meet Mr. Brenton."

"Who is Mr. Brenton?" her father asked, with bland interest.

"The new rector. You heard him, two weeks ago, you know." This time,
Olive's accent held a slight reproach. Purely as a matter of heredity,
Doctor Keltridge was senior warden of Saint Peter's; but, as a general
rule, he totally forgot to go to church.

"Oh, yes, yes. The new chap with the voice." The doctor roused himself
suddenly. "It is a wonderful voice, Olive; his whole respiratory system
must be perfect, and his lungs. I never heard a better resonance nor
better breath control. Really, I'd like to hear him speak at closer
range. When did you say the dinner is? Of course, we'll go. Dennison
isn't a bad little fellow, even if his mind did stop short at history."

"The dinner is for Thursday," Olive reiterated patiently.

"Thursday. Hm. What am I doing then?" her father questioned for, as may
be imagined, it was Olive who kept the run of his engagements.

"Nothing, after the hospital directors' meeting at two. Really," Olive
spoke a little absently, herself; "I almost wish that you were."

As invariably happened, the doctor's attention became alert when she
least expected it.

"Eh? What?" he asked her, in manifest surprise, for it was most unusual
for Olive to balk at any invitation.

Her colour came.

"Oh, it's all right. Of course, we'll go. In fact, there's no getting
out of it, as long as you are senior warden."

The doctor fished for the cord of his see-off glasses. When they were
astride his nose,--

"You like Mrs. Dennison, Olive," he said crisply. "Therefore, by a
process of elimination, it probably is the Brentons you don't want to
meet. What is the matter with them?"

"Oh, nothing," the girl evaded. "It's only that I hate too prompt a
rushing into a new acquaintance."

"Not always," her father reminded her. "As a rule, you've been willing
enough to meet the new people at the college."

Olive Keltridge's ancestral notions, the notions born of Brahmin and
academic New England, spoke in her reply.

"Yes; but they are different."

Her father, though, saw more clearly. He was too well aware of the
quality of the raw material whence the growing college faculties must
recruit their ranks.

"Not always, Olive; at least, not nowadays, even if it used to be. But
what is the matter with Brenton? He seems possible enough."

"Nothing," she confessed, with a little blush for her distinction
between man and wife. "It is only Mrs. Brenton. He is very possible, I
should say; but she seems to me a--" and Olive laughed at the absurdity
of her own coming phrase; "a trifle improbable."

The doctor shook his head.

"I haven't seen her."

"Yes, you have. She was just in front of us, the woman in the
pinky-yellow feather and the pompadour. You must remember her; she was
casting sheep's-eyes at Mr. Brenton, all the time he was preaching.
That was the way I found out who she was. My curiosity led me to ask
Dolph Dennison about her, and I was quite upset when Dolph tweaked my
elbow and made signals of distress at poor Mr. Brenton who was standing
near us. If he is as thin-skinned as he looks, poor man, it must be
rather hard to go into a new parish and watch the people getting
accustomed to his wife."

"He brought it on himself," the doctor said, with scanty charity.

"And he has also brought it upon us," Olive assented grimly. "Still, if
you say so, I will write to Mrs. Dennison that we will come. You'll not
forget? In the meantime, I'll raise my eben-ezer of devout thanksgiving
that I'm a girl and therefore can't possibly sit next to Mrs. Brenton
at the table. I only hope that honour will descend on you."

And it did.

Moreover, in the talk which followed on the being seated, it was Catia
who took the initiative. She was affable, as befitted her husband's
lofty rank, sprightly, as seemed considerate of the great age of the
man beside her. Both attributes were a little bit intensified by her
complete pleasure in her frock. It had come by express from New York,
that day, ordered by a picture in a catalogue. The box that held it was
adorned with a mammoth scarlet star, and the scheme of decoration of
the frock was wholly consonant with the star. Catia had ordered it in
hot haste, in deference to a rumour which had drifted to her ears,
outstretched in readiness for all such rumours, that, even in that
relatively small community, it was the custom to put on low-necked
frocks for dinner. It was the first time that Catia had worn a
low-necked frock; but she did not find it disconcerting in the least.
It did disconcert Brenton very much, however. Its abbreviated bodice
did not fit in with his notions of what was seemly for a rector's wife;
moreover, to the end of time, he never could find any great degree of
beauty in a woman's shoulder-blades.

Brenton himself was in his plain clerical costume from which, nowadays,
he made it his rule never to depart. It was a slightly different
costume from the one he had worn at first, more distinctly clerical.
Even in the morning, when it descended to the worldly level of a
subdued species of pepper-and-salt, it always opened chiefly in the
back, and a plain silver cross invariably dangled from a cord about his
neck. As a matter of course, he always kept himself clean-shaven; and
his scholarly stoop endured still, although the old, self-distrustful
shamble had strengthened into a manly stride. His eyes were as lustrous
as of old, his close, up-springing hair lay as thick as ever on his
crown; but the lower part of his face showed changes, born of the
years. Still lined, still looking just a little worn, it had gained
something in decision, gained infinitely more in sensitive refinement.
In Scott, the native clay was being replaced by translucent marble. In
Catia, it was hardening to something akin to adamant.

That night, Catia wasted but little time in the preliminary
conversation with her host who, as a matter of course, had taken her in
to dinner. Dennison was older than he looked, less impressed than he
seemed, and clothed impeccably. Catia dismissed him as a youngster of
scanty account, for he certainly was not formidable to look upon, and
her studies in the Napoleonic period had never brought her into close
acquaintance with his really epoch-making monograph. To be sure, she
had heard some one saying that he golfed extremely well; but as yet her
social education was far too rudimentary to allow her mind to grasp all
that that fact connoted. Therefore she turned her attention to Doctor
Keltridge a thought sooner than the strict laws of table talk allowed.
Of Doctor Keltridge she had heard already and often. He was their
senior warden, and she the rector's lady; they could not fail to have
many points in common. By way of discovering those points quite
promptly, Catia turned away from Dennison and ruthlessly cut in upon
Doctor Keltridge's amicable sparring with his other neighbour whom, as
it chanced, the good doctor had escorted across the portal of this
world.

"Oh, Doctor Keltridge!" Catia took great pleasure in the spontaneous
accent she contrived to fling into the words. "I do want--"

Startled, and a little bit surprised at the sudden voice above his
off-turned shoulder, the doctor bestirred himself and threw out a
vaguely searching hand. Then, as his hand found nothing before it but a
bank of flowers, he emitted one of the customary growls with which, to
his more intimate friends, he disclosed the fact that the motors of his
ego were temporarily stalled.

"Never is any butter at such a time!" he grumbled. Then he rallied to
the questioning note in Catia's voice. "What else can I get you,
madame?" he inquired benignly.

There was an instant's hush about the table. Olive, in the lee of the
clerical elbow and with young Dolph Dennison by her side, was palpably
in danger of hysterics. The others, all but Brenton, were well enough
accustomed to the doctor to await the finish of the interview with no
small degree of interest. Brenton felt the pause and reddened a little,
more in marital self-consciousness than from any specific sense of
conjugal alarm. Indeed, the only two unconscious ones about the table
were the two protagonists: Catia and the absent-minded doctor, neither
of whom appeared to be in the least aware of any pause in the general
talk.

"Nothing at all," Catia told him suavely. "It was only that I
wanted--"

Again there came the instant's hesitation. Again the doctor employed
that instant in a frenzied search about the table to discover and make
good the missing need. This time, though, his success was better. It
was with a sigh of unmistakable relief that his fingers shut upon the
salt. His gesture crossed the final words of Catia who had resumed her
broken phrase, now rounding to a satisfactory conclusion.

"--So much to meet you, Doctor Keltridge. Ever since I heard of you,"
her eyes looked smilingly into his keen ones which now, a little bit
inscrutable, were studying her intently from beneath their bushy brows;
"I have told Scott that I felt quite certain that we should find out we
had any number of tastes in common."

This time, the pause was not of Catia's making. The doctor let it
lengthen while, to all of his old friends about the table, it was plain
that the motors of his ego now were working at full speed. Meanwhile,
his keen old eyes were still resting upon Catia's up-raised face, and
in them was the same look an aged sheepdog might bestow upon a youthful
terrier puppy. Then a smile broke over the keen face, and the stern
eyes lighted, as the doctor spoke.

"I surely hope so, Mrs. Brenton," he answered her benignantly. "As you
see, I like horse radish with my oysters. How is it about you?"




CHAPTER TEN


It was not until a good two weeks later that Olive Keltridge came into
any actual contact with the new rector. At the Dennison dinner, she had
been too busy in dodging the conversational assaults of the rector's
lady to pay any great amount of attention to the rector himself. Since
that time, she had viewed Brenton only with the height of the chancel
steps between them. However, Olive was conscious that the man
interested her, even at that distance; and it was with some degree of
impatience that she confessed her interest to young Dolph Dennison who,
as a rule, was her safety valve.

"I despise a woman who goes mad about the clergy, Dolph, and I despise
the way this new rector-man of ours keeps my eyes glued upon him, all
the time he's preaching. It isn't the quality of his sermons, either;
it is something inherent in the man himself that causes me to watch
him."

Dolph Dennison laughed with the callousness of a wayward boy. He was
years younger than his brother, the professor. Moreover, he had never
taken any especial pains to expedite the processes of his growing up.

"You'll recover, Olive; I have seen you enthused like this, before. As
for Brenton, it's a mere case of burbling genteel platitudes in a
marvellous voice. Even I, though I deplore the platitudes, find my own
gooseflesh rising in response to his larynx. It's a tremendous asset to
a man, that! Some day, when I have the time, I'll work it out into a
series of equations: heart and brain and larynx as the unknown
quantities to be properly equated, so much brain for so much, or so
little, larynx. Thanks, no. I won't come in. I'm late for luncheon now.
You will be at the Evans tea, to-morrow afternoon?"

Nodding cheerily, young Dennison went on his way, leaving Olive to
ponder upon the accuracy of his diagnosis. Was it only larynx, after
all? Or had the new young rector something back of it, something that
singled him out from the ruck of men, and held him up as worthy of
attention? Olive's eyes grew thoughtful, for an instant, at the
question. Then the laugh came back into them again, the while she
thought of Mrs. Brenton.

It was only the next afternoon that Brenton came by appointment to call
on Doctor Keltridge. There were certain minor matters to be discussed
between the rector and his senior warden, before it appeared really
wise to bring them up in open meeting. To both men, it seemed possible
to discuss them with greater freedom from interruption at the doctor's
house than at the rectory. Therefore had been the appointment between
them.

According to his custom, Brenton kept his appointment to the very
letter, and the clocks were striking three, when the Keltridge maid
deposited him in the Keltridge drawing-room. The doctor showed himself
less punctual, however, and a good quarter of an hour elapsed before
steps were heard in the hall outside. Moreover, before Brenton had time
to question to himself the weight of those same steps, the door was
pushed open to admit, not a keen-faced and grizzly doctor, but a
totally apologetic Olive.

"Mr. Brenton?" she said, with a slight lift, as of question, in her
voice. "Really, I am so penitent at the message I am bringing you. The
maid told me you were here. Then, after a while, she came back again
and told me she couldn't find my father anywhere."

With a courteous little gesture, Brenton interrupted her apology and
half rose from his chair.

"Really, it's not at all a matter for apology, Miss Keltridge. I can
come again, some other day. Your father is a busy man, I know."

But Olive stayed him with scanty ceremony.

"No; wait, Mr. Brenton. I hadn't finished my tale. Besides, when you
have lived in town a little longer, you'll know that nobody ever does
apologize for my father; we all revel in his dear old absurdities. Sit
down, please. He will be here before very long."

Brenton did sit down, the while he suppressed a vague question regarding
the filial nature of the word _absurdities_. Then he yielded to the
merriment in Olive's eyes, and laughed outright and boyishly.

"I've heard something of the sort already, Miss Keltridge," he
confessed. "What was it, this time?"

For an instant, Olive paused, astonished at the change which had come
over her companion. His clerical veneer had fallen from him; the man
beneath was singularly human, likable, and as simple as Dolph Dennison
himself.

"This time? I went to see, went to the laboratory, though the maid had
told me he wasn't in there. She had knocked twice; then she had opened
the door to look in. At first, I agreed with her. Then I heard a little
noise, over in a corner behind the table. There on the floor, the flat
floor, sat my father, sixty-five years old. His hair was all on end,
and his cheek was smudged with something yellow, and he was as happy as
a baby in a sand pile. Doing?" Olive made a helpless little gesture.
"How should I know? I'm no student of germs. He had a row of glass pans
in front of him, with hideous messes in them, and he appeared to be
sounding the depths of iniquity in them with a small glass divining
rod."

Then their eyes met above the finished story, and together the two of
them burst out laughing, like a pair of merry children.

"You think he will become visible, in course of time?" Brenton asked
her.

She shook her head, as she laughed again.

"I trust so, Mr. Brenton; but, of course, nobody ever can predict. He
knows you are here. At least," swiftly she amended her phrase; "he did
know it. How long the fact stays by him is another question. If you
were only a germ, now----" She surveyed him dubiously. "You wouldn't
care to go into the laboratory?" she asked him.

A sudden light flashed up into Scott Brenton's face, the dazzle of a
flame long buried, never entirely to be extinguished.

"If I might! Wouldn't it disturb him, though?"

But Olive had seen the lighting of the quiet face, and her curiosity
was aroused. What was there in the mere mention of a laboratory that
could so transform a humdrum little rector into a thing of fire? That
it was the laboratory, Olive never stopped to question. She was far too
sane, too used to the tame-tabby-cat propensities of youthful rectors,
to imagine for a moment that the enthusiasm had come out of the chance
to escape from her society. Therefore she decided that, for the
present, she would keep this particular rector to herself, on the
off-chance of discovering the real source of his enthusiasm. Her
knowledge of her father's habits assured her, beyond doubt, that later
on, much later, there would still be plenty of time for the laboratory
visit. Accordingly, she answered Brenton's question with flat
discouragement.

"Probably," she told him quite uncompromisingly. "However, it is good
for him to be disturbed, once in a while, even if he doesn't always
take it so very nicely."

With palpable regret, Brenton settled back again in his chair.

"Oh, well, I'd hate to be disturbing him," he said politely.

"Better stay here and wait," Olive advised him. "It can't be long
before he comes, and some of those glass pans were very awful."

"Do you think so? One never really minds a laboratory smell, after the
first whiff of it. It seems to go into the system once for all, at the
start. After," this time, the regret was even more palpable; "one
always rather longs to get back into it."

Olive smiled.

"So I have noticed, with my father." Then her accent changed, grew less
conventional. "You have had it, then, Mr. Brenton?"

"Of another sort. I had three years in a chemical laboratory, when I
was in college," he told her simply.

"Really? And you liked it?"

His voice dropped by a whole octave, thrilled with a new resonance
which, for some reason that she could not analyze then or after, set
the girl's nerves all a-quiver. It was the voice of a man who, for the
first time, is confessing aloud his master passion.

"It made life over for me," he said gravely.

"Then--Forgive me, if I have no right to ask the question. But one
generally keeps on with a thing like that." Olive was painfully aware
that her curiosity, however she wrapped it up in apologies, was most
unjustifiable.

Scott Brenton, however, did not appear to find it so. Too simple-minded
and downright to obtrude his personal history, he also was too
simple-minded to conceal it.

"I should have kept on with it, at any cost," he answered; "only for
the sake of my mother. She was a widow without much money; she was
giving all she had to educate me, and her heart was set on--something
else."

If Olive noted the little pause, she had at least the super-feminine
tact to ignore it.

"Your priesthood?"

He nodded slowly.

"After a fashion,--yes."

This time, the pause seemed to her entirely natural.

"She must be very happy now," she answered. "Saint Peter's is a dear
old church, mellow enough in its traditions to make up for its
hopelessly new architecture; and I am sure you'll love this sleepy
town."

But it was plain to her that Brenton, quite oblivious to her words, was
pursuing his own train of thought. Out of it he spoke.

"My mother died, two years ago, Miss Keltridge."

Her reply came promptly.

"How glad you must be that she lived to know that her wishes had been
carried out!"

This time, the pause was a good deal longer. Without Olive's in the
least suspecting it, the invincible honour of the man before her was
struggling with his reticence. Should he absorb a praise to which he
had no right; or should he thrust his confidence upon her at this early
stage of their acquaintance? Honour won out.

"Only in part," he said a little sadly. "Really, Miss Keltridge,
there's no especial reason I should bore you with all this, except that
I don't like to be caught, sailing under false colours. I wanted to be
a chemist of some sort or other, something experimental and
theoretical, if I could; and they told me that I could. Sometimes I
wish they hadn't. It would have simplified things a good deal, if I
never had found it out. And my mother, all the time, had been denying
herself in order to prepare me to preach the bluest sort of Calvinism.
I found that it was going to break her heart, if I gave up the plan, so
I gave up the chemistry, instead, and took the preaching.
Unfortunately, though, in the meantime, the chemistry--and some other
things--had made me also give up the Calvinism. And so, in the end of
all things, even my preaching seemed to her a wretched compromise."

His eyes were fixed upon the carpet, and he could not see her face; but
the gentleness in her young voice set his pulses pounding. In all his
life up to this hour, such gentleness never had been meant for him. His
mother was too stern; Catia too metallic. As for other women, he had
never been in sufficiently short range of them, psychologically
speaking, to be aware whether they meant to be gentle to him or not.

"I think," Olive was saying; "that she understands it better now.
Anyway, you always will be glad of the choice you made."

His eyes still on the carpet at his feet, Scott Brenton spoke moodily.

"I wish I knew," he said.

And then he was aghast at the consciousness that, before this
comparative stranger, and a girl at that, he had taken down the
barriers before the secret of his disappointment.

Happily, however, Olive was serenely unconscious of either barriers or
secret. Instead, she was intent on preventing any retro-active regrets
upon the part of a devoted son.

"All creeds are a good deal alike, just as they say all roads lead to
Rome," she reminded him, with a curious crossing of Mrs. Brenton's
mental trail. "The preaching, after all, is the main thing, that and
the priestly life; it doesn't make much difference whether you wear a
stole, or a gown and bands. And as for the chemistry," she laughed
lightly; "if you ever feel your work in that was wasted, just go and
talk to the head professor here. Only just the other day, I heard him
laying down the law to father, claiming that his laboratory was the
only open door to logic, the only training school where one can find
out whether his elements can be combined safely, or whether they will
explode and, what's a good deal more to the point, explode him with
them."

The laugh came back to Brenton's face. Once more Olive wondered at its
charm.

"There's something in his theory," he admitted.

"Everything, according to his notion. The last I heard, the dear man
apparently was trying to get himself annexed to the literary courses.
He declared in open faculty meeting, the other day, that a proper
training in chemistry would kill off a good fifty per cent of the
modern novels. The authors would realize the explosiveness of their
plots before they touched them, and wouldn't waste months on months of
work, brewing what, in the end of it all, was nothing more than a mere
flash in the pan. He was still elaborating his theory, when the
President called him to order, ready for the motion to adjourn." Then
she harked back to her former theme. "You must see the laboratory here,
Mr. Brenton, if you care for such things. Girls? Oh, yes, of course;
but you'll soon get past regarding that as any handicap. In fact,
according to Professor Opdyke, it is one of the best equipped
laboratories in the country."

But Brenton's attention had wandered from the fact, caught by one of
the minor details which surrounded it.

"Professor Opdyke?" he echoed a little blankly.

"Yes. You have met him?"

"Not here. Not at all, in fact. The name is so uncommon that I am quite
sure. And yet--"

It was plain to Olive that Brenton was struggling with some
half-forgotten memory, striving to bring it forth to light, to link it
with the present; or, failing that, at least with something tangible in
his past life. And yet, the blurring of his memory was not too
inexplicable. Reed Opdyke still remembered Brenton clearly, still
regretted the apparent waste of some of his more brilliant
possibilities. Scott Brenton, on the other hand, had totally dismissed
Reed Opdyke from his mind. In the contact between the two of them, the
one had stepped up, the other down; and, as so often happens, the
truer, the more lasting picture is the one gained from the upper level.
Moreover, Brenton's later life, and most especially the summer which
had followed the ending of his association with Reed Opdyke, had been
so very strenuous as to obliterate by far the greater number of his
earlier contacts.

Then suddenly memory stirred in its sleep, stretched itself, awakened.

"Did Professor Opdyke have a son?" he asked, with a new eagerness which
was wholly alien to the one concerning his bit of autobiography.

Olive smiled at his phrasing.

"He did; I trust he still does," she answered; "though, with a mining
man, one never can be quite sure. Why? Did you know Reed?"

The colour came into Brenton's cheeks, as he blurted out the totally
forgotten truth.

"I adored him, all my last two years at college."

"Really? Yes, he is Professor Opdyke's son; and people who have seen
him lately tell me he is more adorable than ever."

"When have you seen him?" For something in Olive's accent made Brenton
realize that there was no necessity for any preliminary question
concerning the fact that she knew Opdyke well.

"Not since the year of his graduation. In fact, I was at his commencement.
Why," and suddenly her eyes gathered into focus; "I remember you then,
Mr. Brenton. Reed showed you to me as----" Then, all at once, she
faltered and her colour came.

He strove to help her out of the abyss into which she so unwittingly
had fallen.

"One of the waiters at his eating club, and popularly known there as
'Reed's Parson'?" he asked her, with a little smile which sought to
cover the sting that came to him with the memory.

But Olive shook her head.

"No; not that at all. It was one of the Might-Have-Beens, he called
you," she said, with brave downrightness. But, afterwards, when she
thought the matter over, she wondered whether she had bettered it, or
made it worse. In any case, she went on a little hastily. "Since then,
as it happens, I never once have been here, when Reed has been at home.
Of course, he has been back here now and then; but once I was in
London, and in New York, the other times."

"Where is he?"

She shook her head again.

"That is the hardest sort of question to answer, for he is always on
the wing. He went in for mining engineering, and is making quite a
record as consulting engineer. It's copper, I think, he consults about;
anyway, no one ever can predict where he will be heard from next.
Really, if you knew him, you must meet Professor Opdyke. The dear old
man is bursting with pride in his only son; he talks about him by the
hour at a time, if we let him. The trouble is that we all are so cloyed
with hearing about Reed's virtues and Reed's triumphs that we have a
tendency to run away before the paternal downpour commences. A new pair
of ears will be a veritable godsend to his father. He and my father are
the greatest sort of chums, and--" Suddenly Olive paused and began to
look distinctly uneasy. "By the way, Mr. Brenton, where is my father? I
really think that, in mercy to your patience, I'd better go and jog his
memory once more."

And jog his memory she did, and with such success that, this time,
Doctor Keltridge put in a tardy and apologetic appearance. However,
when, smiling guiltily at his own sins of omission, he came to greet
his guest, he came alone. Olive, her hospitable duty done, had
vanished, to return no more.




CHAPTER ELEVEN


Saint Peter's Parish was unique in all New England. The trails of old
and new in its experience crossed and crisscrossed at every point,
causing a long succession of eccentricities which endeared themselves
to the minds of the oldest inhabitants. However, even the oldest
inhabitants breathed a deep sigh of relief, when finally they were
housed in the brand-new church up beside the college campus, a real
stone church, with transepts and painted windows and choir-stalls
within, and a cloister and a grand tall tower without. The ramshackle
old wooden church had been dear to them, had even remained dear to them
after the railroad had laid down its tracks under their very eaves; but
they were fretted by the crudely caustic comments of strangers coming
to the town, and they were still more fretted when the puffing,
screeching Sunday trains drowned the voice of the good old rector whose
mannerly traditions forbade his puffing and screeching in his turn.

He had been a dear old rector, rotund and pompous; and his surplice had
been fully as long and voluminous as a Mother Hubbard nightie. Possibly
it was on that account, to equalize the demand for muslin, that, in
those same old days, the choir had worn no surplices at all, but had
been accustomed to come tramping into church in all the bravery of sack
coats and violent haberdashery. Indeed, upon the part of certain of the
congregation, there had been a tendency to regard it as a finger-post
to Rome, when some younger member of the vestry suggested putting the
ban on scarlet neckties. Saint Peter's Parish was set like a holy
beacon in the very midst of a valley which was tainted with heresies
Arian and unspeakable, tainted so thoroughly that the ritualistic
development of Saint Peter's was delayed for decades upon that account.

Later, Saint Peter's became far wiser in its generation. Its policy had
been to extend a cordial welcome to all men of whatever creed, and its
early fathers had felt that it was surer to attract the more unstable
of its neighbours, if it held its threshold at the common level of them
all. In course of time, however, wisdom dawned and broadened to a
perfect day of psychological common sense. A theological reaction, of
whatever sort, was bound in the last analysis to be a matter of a
sudden leap, not of a deliberate slide. One either took a veritable
ski-jump into the next church but three, or else one merely stayed
where one was, and fretted about the details of the service.

It was now a good twenty years and more since Saint Peter's had
abandoned its old barracks of a church and moved up town into its new
quarters. As a matter of course, it had settled down as close as
possible to the campus. A student congregation might be a bit unstable,
taken as a parish; but it was distinctly lucrative, when it came to the
point of counting up the offertory. Furthermore, as result of its
Sunday-morning habits of arising, it was prone to turn in at the first
church door that offered.

Nowadays on Sunday mornings, Saint Peter's rector had no monopoly of
surplices. The choir, discreetly garbed and outwardly reverential,
warbled early English settings to the hymns, the while they came
striding slowly up the aisle in a species of churchly goose-step that
demanded a pause on each foot, to prevent the physical march outrunning
the musical one. Nowadays, too, there was daily celebration; that is,
when any one was sufficiently energetic to get up and get into church
in time. What happened upon those other days, when the rector was
abandoned to the rows of empty pews, was still a matter of profane
conjecture. Discussed in whispers, it was agreed to be a subject best
left to the disclosing hand of time.

Into this elaborate and decorative harness, Scott Brenton was now
breaking his young strength, his young ambition. In his old parish in
the hills, it had been a question of preaching the best sermons that he
could and looking out for his people in the intervals, rather than of
forms and ceremonies and intonations of the Nicene Creed. In accepting
the Bishop's intimation that Saint Peter's Parish would extend to him a
welcoming hand, he had thought singularly little about the outward
trappings of his priesthood. Catia knew it all; but she held her peace.
The Bishop also had held his peace, and a little bit for the same
reason that Catia had done. He knew the theological history of Scott
Brenton; he knew that, like all half-broken colts, he easily might shy
at first sight of the harness; yet, once with the harness on and fitted
to his back, he would fall to work in earnest and pull steadily with
the best of them. And it was the pulling that the Bishop wished, not
the mere jingling of the farthingale. Under the last incumbent, Saint
Peter's had been running down a little. It was not in all respects an
easy parish; and Brenton, young, earnest and as magnetic as he was
self-distrustful, was the very man to build it up. Nevertheless, the
Bishop saw to it that Scott Brenton should never attend a service at
Saint Peter's, until his acceptance of the parish was settled past all
gainsaying.

From the first morning of his reading service at Saint Peter's, Brenton
had been aware that he was opening a fresh chapter of his life. In the
old hillside parish, there had been things to do and souls to save.
Here, it seemed to him that all the souls had been saved prenatally. As
for the things to do, these people were too critical, too self-reliant
to take kindly to the intimate sort of ministrations in which, of old,
he had delighted. For the future, it would be the quality of his
sermons that counted most, rather than his personal contact with his
people.

The congregation seemed to him conglomerate, a jumble of conflicting
elements. There were the old, old residents and their offspring, people
who squabbled violently among themselves as to whose ancestor came
aboard the _Mayflower_ first, and which in what capacity. There were
the mediæval spinsters who always reach their best development in the
semi-small New England town, spinsters who have clubs and theories, and
yet play golf, and frivol delightfully above their luncheon tables. And
there were college girls in hordes, alert young things, critical alike
of evil and of good, of the hang of the back of a surplice where the
shoulders stoop a little, and of the turning of the final phrases that
naturally lead up to the _And now_--To Scott Brenton, looking down
upon the students in the congregation, his first Sunday morning at
Saint Peter's, their befeathered hats and their intent young faces
seemed to him the masking labels upon a store of frozen dynamite.
Thawed, it might serve for any amount of useful tunneling; it might go
off explosively in the open, at almost any given instant.

Taken all in all, it was upon the student fraction of his congregation
that Brenton looked with greatest interest; it was to them, in greatest
measure, that the best of his sermons preached themselves. The phrase
is no slipshod inversion of the fact. The best of all sermons do preach
themselves, both in their original inception and their ultimate
delivery. All the so-called preacher does about it is to give the
intermediate polishing to his projectile, and then to hold himself
still, while it is going off, and watch what happens, by way of
preparation for aiming his next shot.

As a matter of course, with a target so unstable as a student audience,
Brenton by no means hit the bull's-eye every time. That he did hit it
occasionally, however, argues no mean ability, no paltry knowledge of
youthful human nature. Over their Sunday dinners, the girls discussed
his sermons with increasing vigour. The echoes of these discussions,
coming to Brenton's ears, set him to preaching with increasing
conscientiousness. However, there still was salvation for him; it was
his sermons that he took so much in earnest, and not himself, the
preacher.

But, although it was upon his student hearers that Scott Brenton tossed
down, broadcast and unsaving, the best of all he had within himself, it
was among the permanent residents of Saint Peter's that his real work
was supposed to be done. He did that work most faithfully; he showed
himself both tireless and tactful in his arrangement of the parish
mechanism, in his gathering up and straightening and knotting here and
there the threads his predecessor had flung down in a tangled heap.
Nevertheless, his heart was in the other end of his work, not for any
individual interest in the different girls; but because his whole
instinct told him that here was the dynamic force of the whole
organization, that the rest of it was curiously static. Under those
befeathered hats were eager brains which weighed their theology and
measured it, not took it ready made. It was for him to serve it out to
them in such a guise that, weighed, they should not find it wanting.

Catia, on the other hand, looked upon the student end of her husband's
parish with disapproving eyes. The girls annoyed her by their cocksure
alertness, their little air of being primed, ready for any emergency
that chanced to offer. They vexed her by their manifest absorption in
her husband; they vexed her yet more by their inexplicable lack of
interest in herself.

Upon the older and more stable fraction of the parish, however, Catia
lavished an interested affection which would have seemed well-nigh
maternal, had it not been for the care she took to emphasize the gulf
in age which yawned between herself and certain of the individuals who
made up its list. She studied the list with no slight degree of care.
By the end of their first month in the new parish, she knew to a nicety
how the line of local social precedence ordered itself, where, at any
point in the procession, town must yield to gown, or the reverse. She
knew the lineage and history of all the wardens and their wives, and
then of all the vestry-men; she even cultivated a nodding acquaintance
with their family skeletons, and learned to recognize the seals upon
the doors that, as a rule, hid them from public view. She knew the
hobbies of the average prosperous member at large of the flock
ecclesiastical, and made a series of elaborate calculations regarding
the intersecting social orbits of those same members. As for the other,
lesser members of the congregation, she had an especial kind of smile,
half of sweetness, half of deprecation, that she bestowed upon each one
of them in turn; but she never made the slightest effort to separate
them, one from another, in her mind, or to return any of their calls.
To Catia's astute brain, the duty of a rector's lady consisted in
helping her husband up, not on.

It was at about this epoch, too, that Catia ceased to be Catia and
became Kathryn. In some respects, the most remarkable thing about the
change was the suddenness with which it was announced to Scott.

A dozen of them had been dining at the Keltridges', one night, six
months or so after Brenton had come to take charge of the congregation
of Saint Peter's. It was essentially a church-warden kind of dinner,
with all the other wardens and their wives to meet the rector and his
lady, the kind of dinner that one gives and goes to, out of stern
necessity, when, all the time, one longs for something just a little
less made up by rule of thumb. The one exception to the prevailing
ecclesiastical flavour, that night, was in the person of a local
novelist who, albeit suave and very bald, wrote novels of the raucous,
woolly West. Moreover, like all other novelists, he rejoiced in talking
shop. Accordingly, with the utmost expedition, he dragged the talk
around to the law regarding the choice of names.

"Of course," he expounded, for the benefit of whom it might concern;
"the first thing I always do, when I go to work, is to name my
characters. It's the hardest thing in the world to do--properly. You
can stick any sort of name to any sort of character, I know; but that's
not naming them. Not at all. The name must be a label; it must fit like
a glove, and yet the character must be fitted to it. And most of the
names I find are so trite."

"Likewise the characters," Dolph Dennison assured him, _sotto voce_.

Dolph, by way of his older brother, who was vestryman, might be termed
sub-ecclesiastical. However, in any case, he would have been sure of a
seat at the Keltridge dinner, even if all the other guests had been
archbishops. It needs at least one such irresponsible youngster to act
as appetizer for the solid things before him.

Only Olive heard his comment. As a matter of course, Dolph's place was
next to Olive. Long since, discerning hostesses had discovered that
therein lay the only path to peace. Otherwise, Dolph either sulked
palpably; or else ignored his other neighbour and shouted all his talk
across the table into Olive's ears. Not that either Dolph or Olive had
any notion of being at all in love with each other. It was merely that
things struck them the same way at the same instant, and that Dolph,
being young and a good deal spoiled, could see no reason against a
prompt exchange of comments on the fact. Therefore, for the peace of
the other people at the table, it had become a universal local law
that, no matter who took Olive Keltridge out, Dolph Dennison should be
placed at her other side.

Olive, then, heard Dolph's comment and, what was infinitely worse, she
feared the novelist had heard it, too. Therefore, to save the feelings
of the bald little man, she flung herself into the talk.

"I see exactly what you mean," she told him. "Your idea is that, when
you have conceived a character that is wholly original--"

"Ahem!" Dolph strangled suddenly.

But Olive continued, without pause for flinching, for now the bald
little novelist was facing her intently, and it was plain, from the
tentative waggling of his beard, that he would mount his hobby and be
off again, if she gave him so much as a comma's breadth by which to
creep back into the talk.

"Wholly original," she repeated sternly; "that it must be very trying
to be obliged to descend to the every day of things, and name her
Mamie."

There came a peal of laughter at the accent with which Olive had
contrived to endow the name. The peal was cut short, however, by the
fussy accent of the little novelist.

"You have hit the nail on the head, Miss Olive, distinctly on the
head," he assured her, with a bow and smile so suave as to be devoid of
meaning. "Really," and Olive felt as if she were a young child and he
were offering her a stick of candy; "it was a very smart little tap.
Yes, as you say, a Mamie is an anticlimax to one's best endeavours.
Now, if all the ladies," Olive had a momentary longing to hurl a plate
in his unctuous direction; "only were blessed with names like yours, we
poor novelists would never be devoid of sources for our inspiration."

"Encore!" remarked Dolph Dennison, with admirable gravity.

Once again Olive sought to save the situation, as well as to remove the
subject of the talk from resting solely on herself.

"If that is all you want," she answered lightly; "you surely will find
Mrs. Brenton's name offering you all sorts of inspiration, much better
than anything mine could give."

"Mrs. Brenton?" The little novelist was palpably uncertain as to whom
the name belonged. He was not only Unitarian by theology, but
inattentive by profession; and, moreover, he had but just returned from
a copy-hunting trip in the direction of his raucous West.

"Yes." Olive made signals of distress in the direction of the rector's
wife who was bending above her salad, with every appearance of anxious
absorption in her tour of discovery among its elements. Her colour
betrayed her, though, and Olive judged it would be the part of wisdom
to drag her by the heels into the talk. "Mrs. Brenton, I am just
telling Mr. Prather what a benefactor you ought to be considered,
according to his notion about names. Surely, yours is unusual enough to
win his full approval."

Even as she spoke, Olive realized the vapidness of her words and was
ashamed of them. An instant later, though, her shame exchanged itself
for astonishment.

The rector's lady raised her brows, and spoke with studied
carelessness.

"Really, Miss Keltridge," she said calmly; "there is nothing so very
unusual in the name of Kathryn."

"Kathryn!" Olive fairly stuttered over her reply, for she saw Scott
Brenton's eyes turn to his wife, and she read amazement in them,
amazement and something else that was dangerously akin to contempt. "I
thought your name was Catia, Mrs. Brenton."

But Kathryn Brenton laid down her fork, as though the salad had ceased
to interest her. Then she spoke, and her accent conveyed the same
impression as concerned the conversation.

"Oh, no; Catia is just a little nickname. That is all. My name is
really Kathryn."

And then, for an instant and to her lasting shame, Olive Keltridge's
glance sought that of Brenton. Before the hurt and abased look in his
deep gray eyes, her own eyes dropped, ashamed and pitiful. What right
had she, in a moment so tragic, albeit so very, very petty, to spy upon
him in his disappointment? What right to obtrude her honest sympathy
upon his secret pain?

She dropped her eyes, then, promptly. None the less, Scott Brenton
realized that, alone of all the group about the table, Olive Keltridge
had recognized both elements: the secret, and the pain.




CHAPTER TWELVE


It was Catia, then, or, rather, Kathryn, who kept a weather eye upon
the social powers of the parish. Brenton was too busy doing other
things. Somebody, though, she argued, must look out for the personal
end of life, as well as for the theological. Else, the parish would
fall to pieces about their ears. Brenton might be giving them the bread
of life; but man should not live by bread alone. He needed an
occasional cup of afternoon tea to wash it down. Therefore Kathryn
revised her social balance sheets often and with the utmost care.

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 wi

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