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 upon
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 pin 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.