The Brentons. Anna Chapin Ray
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