The Brentons. Anna Chapin Ray
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!"