However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact
that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his
widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but
offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne of Grace.
"Oh, my dearest Lord and Master," she prayed, at her evening devotions
upon her knees and with her work-roughened hands clasped upon the gaudy
patchwork quilt; "guide Thou my son. Bring him to feel that his perfect
happiness can come only from going forth to preach Thy word to all
men."
And, as it chanced, the door of her room had been left slightly open.
Scott Brenton, young and alert and full of enthusiasms which his years
of grinding work and economy had been powerless to down, came leaping
up the steps just then. The front door had been left unlocked for him.
He closed it noiselessly behind him, and then started to run up the
stairs. The murmur of his mother's voice checked him, stayed his step a
moment, and then changed its pace. He went on up the stairs quite
soberly, thoughtful, his face a little overcast.
It was now the middle of the Christmas holidays of his junior year. The
day he had left college for the short vacation, his chemistry professor
had sent for him and had said things to him about his last term's work
and about his examination papers at the end of the term. The things
were courteous as concerned the past; to Scott Brenton's mind, they
were dazzling as concerned the future. The dazzle had endured until his
mother's words had fallen on his ears. Then it had eclipsed itself,
leaving him to wonder whether, after all, it had not been the _ignis
fatuus_ of self-elation, and not the steady glow of truth. Scott
Brenton was not much more given to introspection, at that epoch of his
life, than is any other healthy youngster of nineteen. None the less,
he slept curiously little, that night.
Next morning, while he dressed, he kept his teeth shut cornerwise, a
habit he had when he was making up his mind to any noxious undertaking.
Then he went downstairs, to find his mother smiling contentedly to
herself, while she added the finishing touches to the breakfast. It was
sausage, that morning, Scott Brenton always remembered afterwards. They
had been chosen out of deference to his boyish appetite. He never
tasted them again, if he could help it. They seemed to have added to
their already strange assortment of flavours a tang of bitterness that
bore the seeds of spiritual indigestion.
His mother looked up to greet him with an eagerness from which she
vainly sought to banish pride. He was her only child, her all; and he
was sufficiently good to look upon, clever enough to pass muster in a
crowd. To her adoring eyes, however, he was a mingling of an Adonis
with a Socrates. And she herself, by encouragement and admonition and
self-denying toil, had helped to make him what he was. Small wonder
that her pride in him could never be completely downed! Nevertheless,--
"Have a good time, last night?" she asked him tamely.
But she missed a certain young enthusiasm from his accent, as he
answered,--
"Fine!"
"Catie there?" she asked again, with the crisp elision of one whose
life has been too strenuous to waste itself in the more leisurely forms
of speech.
"Yes. Is breakfast ready?"
She nodded, as she speared the sizzling sausages one by one and
transferred them to a platter. Then, while she poured off a little of
the fat by way of gravy, she put yet another question.
"Look pretty?" she said.
Her son felt no difficulty in applying the question to Catie, the
proper object, rather than to the sausages on which his mother's gaze
was bent.
"About as usual," he said temperately.
His mother laughed out suddenly. The laugh brought back to her face a
faint resemblance to the girl who, as the pretty daughter of old Parson
Wheeler, had been the acknowledged belle of all the small community.
Later on, all the small community had been jarred to its social
foundations by the discovery that Betty Wheeler, child of a long, long
line of parsons, was going to marry Birge Brenton who had come to
"clerk it" in the village store. She did marry him, and, a little later
on, and most obligingly for all concerned, he died. Few people mourned
him. His wife, though, was among the few. She had a conscience of
Puritan extraction, and the keenest possible sense of what was seemly.
Scott, at the time, was ten days old; therefore he did not share her
mourning. Indeed, he was too busy trying to adjust himself to things in
general and pins in particular to have much energy or time left over to
spare for thinking about other people. Already, the trail of Mrs.
Brenton's reading ancestors had led her to the naming her child Walter
Scott. Her sense of decorum caused her to wonder vaguely, after her
husband died, whether it would not be proper to change the baby's name
to Birge. Her wonderings, though, merely served to render her uneasy;
they bore no fruit in action. The associations with the name were not
of the sort she cared to emphasize, and the boy was allowed to keep his
more impressive label.
As time went on, though, he rebelled against the childish Wally and
insisted on the Scott, but prefixed by the blank initial whose
significance, he fondly hoped, would permanently remain a mystery. A
month, however, after he had entered college, he was known as Ivanhoe
to all the class who knew anything about him at all; and, in the
catalogue published in his sophomore year, he was registered quite
curtly as Scott Brenton. Never again in all his lifetime did the
incriminating _W_ reappear.
If his mother felt regretful for the change, she was far too wise to
show it. Indeed, it is quite likely that she felt no regrets at all. By
the time that Scott came to his 'teens, Mrs. Brenton was doing her
level and conscientious best to conceal from him the demoralizing fact
of her belief that he could do almost no wrong, and she clung to the
modifying _almost_ with a passionate fervour born of her clerical
ancestry and her consequent belief in the inherent viciousness of
unconverted man. Moreover, her inherited notions of conversion included
spiritual writhings and physical night-sweats and penitential tears by
way of its accomplishment. According to the creed of all the Parson
Wheelers since the Puritan migration, one became a Christian rather
violently, and not by leisurely unfolding. It had been to her the
greatest of all reliefs since the unconfessed one born of her husband's
premature removal, when the young Walter Scott had got himself
converted by means of an itinerant revivalist. From that time on, her
gaze had been fixed unfalteringly upon the hour when he should assume
the mantle of his clerical grandparents; and she inclined to look upon
his other talents as being so many manifestations of diabolic
ingenuity.
And now, these Christmas holidays, the diabolism seemed to her to be
rampant; it effervesced through all Scott's being like the mysterious
things he brewed within his test-tubes. Not that Mrs. Brenton would
have known a test-tube by sight, however. She only had gleaned from her
son's talk the fact that they existed and held fizzy compounds which
would kill you, if you drank them. Perhaps her analogy was all the
better for her lack of specific knowledge. In any case, she saw and
feared the effervescence. The sausages and the white bowl of hot fat
gravy were so much carefully considered bait to lure her son back into
the paths of orthodox uprightness. While they were being
swallowed--slowly, by reason of their mussiness--she had certain things
she wished to say to him.
To her extreme surprise, Scott said them first to her.
"Mother," he said, a little bit imperiously considering his age; "no
matter now about Catie. I want to talk to you about--"
"About?" she queried nervously, while he hesitated under what obviously
was a pretext of picking out the brownest sausage.
"About--myself."
Her nervousness increased.
"Take some more gravy, Scott," she urged him hurriedly. "You'd better
dip it on your bread as soon as you can; it gets cold so soon, these
winter mornings."
But he ignored the spoon she offered him. When he spoke, it was with a
curious hesitation.
"Mother, did I tell you what Professor Mansfield said?"
"Yes."
"Weren't you glad--just a very little?" His tone was boyish in its
pleading.
Mrs. Brenton's answer was evasive.
"Of course, Scott. I am always glad, when your teachers speak well of
you," she said.
"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother;
but do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on,
that I should not make a record as a chemist?"
While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under some
conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to read
in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral
tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's
other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of
the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father,
astoundingly like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times.
Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet.
"But are you going to keep on?"
He tried to regain his former accent.
"That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he
was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he
seemed to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been
used to taking any chance that came. What do you think I'd better do?"
For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile
that held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at
last she answered.
"You must do as you think right, my son."
"But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her.
This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own.
"It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may
be that this will be the next best thing, after all."
"Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?"
She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his
half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for
fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt
him.
"Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively.
"Between now and next summer."
"Why not wait till then?"
He crossed her question with another.
"What's the use of waiting?"
"You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.
Scott shut his teeth hard upon an end of sausage. It seemed to him that
it was only one more phase of the same futile whole, when his teeth
encountered a hard bit of bone. And his mother sat there, outwardly
impartial, inwardly disapproving, and talked about more light, when
already his young eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well!
It was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen
and thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his
mother at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was
infinitely older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he
sometimes wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young
enough to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal.
Whatever the depths of one's filial devotion, it sometimes jars a
little to have one's mother use, by choice, the phraseology of the
minor prophets. In fact, in certain of his more unregenerate moments,
Scott Brenton had allowed himself to marvel that he had not been
christened Malachi. At least, it would have been in keeping with the
habitual tone of the domestic table talk. And yet, in other moments, he
realized acutely that that same heritage was in his nature, too. The
village gossips had been exceedingly benevolent, in that they had
spared him any inkling of the sources whence had come certain other
strains which set his blood to tingling every now and then.
Just such a strain was tingling now, as he laid down his knife and
fork, rested his elbows on the table before him and clasped his hands
tight above his plate.
"I think I have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said
steadily.
"But, if the light within thee be--"
He checked her with a sudden petulant lift of his head. And, after all,
it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy
that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to
dig up out of the accumulated _débris_ of the ancestral trick of
sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic existence, she would have
taken it out in Browning and the Russians; yet she was not necessarily
more narrow because her literary artists were pre-Messianic. Neither
was it the fault of those same artists that they were quoted in and out
of season, and always for the purpose of clinching an obnoxious point.
"It isn't," he said, as quietly as he was able. Then the boyishness
pent up within him came bursting out once more. "Listen, mother," he
said impetuously. "Really, this thing has got to be talked out between
us to the very dregs. We may as well face it now as ever, and come to
the final conclusion. I know you started out to make me into a
minister. I know you feel that it is the one great profession of them
all. But is it?"
For a minute, her hands gripped each other; but they were underneath
the hanging edge of tablecloth, and so invisible to Scott.
"What can be greater than to speak the truth that makes us free?" she
questioned.
"Isn't there more than one kind of truth, mother?" he challenged her.
"How can there be?"
Again he shut his teeth and swallowed down his opposition. He was too
immature to argue that there might be different facets to the selfsame
truth.
"Listen, mother," he began again, when he had proved to himself that he
could rely upon his self-control. "As I say, I started out to be a
minister, to be another Parson Wheeler in fact, if not in name. I know
it has been your dream to hear me preach, some day or other. And I know
how you have pinched and scrimped and worked, to give me the education
that I was bound to need."
"You have worked, too, Scott," she told him, in swift generosity. "You
have tugged along and gone without things and worked hard, in your
books and out of them. You know I have been proud of you; the credit
for it isn't all mine, by any means."
His young face flushed and softened. Unclasping his hands, he leaned
across the table and laid his palm upon her fingers as they rested on
the cloth beside her plate. Both palm and fingers were roughened and
callous with hard work; but mother and son both were of that
fast-vanishing class of folk who spell their _Education_ with the
largest sort of capital letter. Their minds were alike, in that they
both believed the work worth while, for the sake of all that it would
be able to accomplish.
"Thank you, mother," Scott said unsteadily. "I am glad you feel so,
even if I don't deserve it." Then he steadied sharply and became
practical. "So far, we've put it through, one way or the other," he
went on. "Still, if I go in for the ministry," and his mother winced at
the bald worldliness of his phrasing; "I shall have a year and a half
more at college, and then three years of divinity school. We can do it,
I suppose. For a matter of fact, I ought to be able to put it through
alone, without a cent from you; but is it quite worth while? According
to Professor Mansfield, if I keep steady, I can go straight from my
degree into the laboratory as a paid demonstrator. It wouldn't be much
pay, of course. Still, it would help along, and I could go on studying
under him, all the time I was about it. By the time three years were
over, the three years I would have to spend in the divinity school, I
should be, ought to be, well upon my feet and walking towards a future
of my own."
His mother drew a long breath, as the swift torrent of words came to an
end. Then,--
"And at the end of twenty years, my son? That is the real question."
Scott's enthusiasm all went out of him. His assent came heavily.
"Yes," he admitted. "Yes. I suppose that is the real question, mother.
It all depends--"
She looked up at him sharply, as if in haste to probe the limits of his
hesitation.
"Depends?" she echoed.
"Upon the way you feel about it, mother."
She shook her head.
"Not that," she offered swift correction; "but upon the question which
is right. You are at the forking of the roads, the narrow and the
broad. You are almost a man, Scott. I have no right to decide this for
you; you must make your own choice for yourself. However, my son, you
know my dreams for you; you know my prayers."
And Scott Brenton, boy as he was in years, bowed his head in grave
assent, and then and there made his great renunciation. He did know his
mother's dreams; he had overheard, albeit unknown to her, her prayer.
She had given all she had for him; his young honour, taking no thought
for disastrous consequences, demanded that he should give up at least
this one thing for her. He pushed back his chair, went around the table
and laid one hand upon her shoulder.
"I do know, mother dear. As far as I can, I will do my best to carry
them all out."
He bent above her in a brief, awkward caress, the caress of a man whose
life has been too hard and too narrow to give him opportunity to
perfect himself in the arts of masculine endearments. Then, leaving his
breakfast half uneaten, he went away upstairs and shut the door of his
own room behind him. A long hour later, he came down the stairs again,
and went away in search of Catie.
He hoped Catie would listen to him, and understand him and his crisis;
but, all the time he hoped, he was conscious of a sneaking fear lest
she would not. Scott loved to talk things out, and Catie, when she was
not too busy otherwise, was a good listener. Nevertheless, her
comprehensions were concrete and very, very finite.