The Brentons. Anna Chapin Ray
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