The Brentons. Anna Chapin Ray
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