The Brentons. Anna Chapin Ray
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