As a matter of course, Catie came to Scott's commencement. Had she
answered sincerely to any questions put to her, she would have
confessed to a two-fold purpose: the showing off of her proprietorship
in Scott, and the showing off of her pair of new frocks, the most
elaborate achievements as yet attempted by the village dressmaker. It
must be confessed, however, that Catie found both of these deeds a
little disillusioning. Scott was so busy in so many ways that he seemed
to Catie to spare her only the smaller fragments of his time; and her
two new gowns, which at home had been tried on amid the plaudits of the
girl friends bidden to the private view, sank into insignificance
beside the round dozen or more frocks which each of the other
commencement guests was wearing in bewildering succession. To be sure,
Catie's gowns had the most trimming on them; but her satisfaction in
that fact was somewhat modified by the discovery that all her trimming
was running the wrong way.
Nevertheless, Catie enjoyed some happy hours, despite the chilling
disappointment of finding her frocks inadequate. It would have been
nicer, of course, not to discover too late that she lacked the proper
gown for any especial function; nicer to have seen herself, as she saw
some other girls, girls not nearly so pretty as herself, attended, not
by one swain only, but surrounded by a laughing, eager dozen. Still,
there were compensations, chaperons among them. Catie's expressed
regrets were wholly perfunctory, whenever Mrs. Brenton confessed that
she was tired and needed to lie down.
For Mrs. Brenton also had come to Scott's commencement which, to her
mind, was the crowning event of her own lifetime. Not only that, but
somehow or other she had squeezed out the money to buy herself a new
black silk gown, the first one since her marriage, more than twenty
years before. Moreover, in deference to the prevailing styles, she
explained to Scott on her way up from the station, she had had it made
to hook up in the back above a little black lace tucker. Scott, as a
matter of course, did not know a tucker from a turnip. None the less,
he nodded his approval. That same evening, he confessed to himself a
moderate degree of pride, when he introduced Reed Opdyke to his mother.
Mrs. Brenton might lack certain social frills and furbelows; but no one
could look into her honest face above the trim little black lace
tucker, without realizing that she was of good, old-fashioned stock
which never would degenerate. No one but a lady born could take herself
so simply. Scott read Opdyke's approval in his eyes, the while he
himself stood apart and talked to Catie.
It was when young Opdyke's eyes passed on to rest on Catie, though,
that Scott felt certain doubts, lately risen up within him, crystallize
and solidify past all gainsaying. Outwardly, Opdyke's manner was
respect itself; but there was an odd little twinkle in his eyes, as he
gazed down on the top of Catie's flower-strewn hat, now tipped
coquettishly askew as the girl turned her head sidewise and upward to
speak to her tall companion. Catie was pretty, of course; but was she
quite--well--right? Were her manners, like the cut and colour of her
garments, a thought too pronounced and noticeable? Was her voice a
little bit too loud, her manner too assured? Or was it that those other
girls beside her elbow were effete and colourless? Scott struggled to
repress his doubts, while he watched the gay assurance with which Catie
answered to Reed Opdyke's chaff. Scott was perfectly well aware that
Opdyke would not have chaffed some of those other girls upon such short
acquaintance, and the surety made him restless. He took it out in
wishing that Catie had not adorned her girlish neck with a gilded chain
which could have restrained a bulldog, or a convict.
Then he pulled himself up short. Catie was Catie, and his guest. She
would have fought for him on any issue, and downed any number of foes
in the fighting. To Mrs. Brenton, she was as dear as any daughter, dear
as the daughter that she meant one day to be. Besides, who was he, a
self-help student temporarily excused from waiting upon table and
attired in a misfit evening coat hired from a ghetto tailor: who was he
to criticise the flowers and frills of Catie? If she had had the
chances which had come to him, if she could have gone to Smith, for
instance, or Bryn Mawr, she would have come out of the mill a finished
little product, clever, adaptable, and not a gawky, under-nourished,
over-strenuous bumpkin like himself. In the depths of his
self-abasement, Scott Brenton did not hesitate to ply himself with ugly
adjectives. Indeed, they seemed to him to be doing something towards
the removal of his doubts concerning Catie's pinchbeck chain.
Later, as it chanced, Reed Opdyke and Scott Brenton found themselves
going up the street together.
"It's all hours, I suppose," Opdyke said rather indistinctly through a
mammoth yawn. "Still, Brenton, what if it is? Come along to Mory's."
"Too late," Scott objected, with a guilty recollection of his mother
who would have wrestled in prayer, all night long, could she have seen
her son's steps turn towards Mory's and at the bacchanalian hour of
half-past ten.
But Opdyke's hand was on his watch.
"Not a bit. Besides, it's our last chance, you know."
"Till next year," Scott corrected, though he yielded to the hand upon
his arm.
Opdyke shook his head.
"No next year about it, Brenton. That's all off."
"What now?" Scott asked him in some surprise, for it had been an
understood thing that Opdyke took his graduate science courses in the
university that was giving him his bachelor's degree.
"The ancestral crank has slipped a cog," Opdyke returned profanely.
"Being interpreted, my reverend sire thinks I'd do better work at the
School of Mines and then in Europe. I'm sorry, too, confound it, even
if I know his head is level. I'd been looking forward to the pleasure
of romping along here for another year or two, and watching you get
changed into a parson. It would have been well worth my while, too. It
isn't every sinner like myself that has the chance to see a saint in
the making. I should have found it an edifying spectacle." Then
suddenly he broke off, and spoke with obvious sincerity. "Hang it all,
Scott! What's the use? Chuck theology, and come along with me and be
some sort of an engineer, or else the chemist old Mansfield has set his
heart on making out of you."
As he spoke, his hand tightened on Scott's arm. Under the street light
beside them, he could see the colour rush into the face of his
companion, as if in answer to the touch and the appeal; could see the
thin lips waver, then set themselves into a stern, hard line. Then,--
"It would break my mother's heart," Scott said gravely.
Instantly Opdyke flung up his head and relaxed the pressure of his
hand.
"Then--last call for science!" he said, with a carelessness which did
not quite ring true. "Your mother is worth the sacrifice, Brenton. I
saw that for myself, to-night."
It was not until they were settled at an initial-hacked table in the
smoke-thick air of Mory's that either of them spoke again. Then it was
Opdyke who broke the silence.
"Who's the girl, Brenton? Your Book of Chronicles hasn't mentioned her,
so far as I know."
"She's----" Scott hesitated, a little at a loss as to the proper way of
cataloguing Catie.
Opdyke nodded at the hesitation.
"Ja. I comprehend. Well, she's a pretty thing, and she knows her good
points," he answered. "That counts a lot, too, in a girl like that."
Scott turned on him a little bit pugnaciously, the more so by reason of
his own doubts of an hour before.
"Like what?" he queried curtly.
However, Opdyke had no idea of being betrayed into any indiscretion.
"Like her," he made tranquil answer, and then he bent above his glass
of beer and blew aside the froth. "She is sure to arrive," he went on,
after a minute. "The only thing I question is whether you may not have
to hustle a good deal, to keep up with her. You're a born student,
Brenton, and a sanctimonious grind. Nevertheless, when it comes to the
worldly question of arriving, you're a confoundedly lazy lubber, and I
suspect you always will be."
Commencement over, and the intervening summer, Scott Brenton set
himself to work to try to prove the falsity of Opdyke's words, by way
of the divinity school. Moreover, as in the case of Opdyke, although in
a wholly different sense, the parental plans for Scott had slipped a
cog. He also left the university behind him, and went elsewhere in
search of his professional degree. The change of plan, however, did not
achieve itself without some tears and many lamentations upon the part
of Mrs. Brenton. In carrying out her wishes that Scott should preach
the gospel to the heathen, it never had occurred to her that he could
preach any but the most azure forms of ultra-Calvinism. A sudden fading
in the dye of his theology well-nigh destroyed all of her pleasure in
his preaching.
The change in tint had come, to all appearing, during the summer that
had followed his bachelor's degree. How far, however, the stability of
the dyes had been affected by Scott's previous experiments in Professor
Mansfield's laboratory, it would be hard to say. It is quite within the
limits of scientific possibility that certain chemical changes might
have been taking place for many months, changes so slight and so slow
as to have escaped the notice of Scott or any of his friends who
chanced to feel an interest in the soundness of his theology. Doubtless
the change was there, potential, its elements held in suspension and
only waiting for the final molecule to arrive and start precipitation.
The molecule arrived, that summer, in the person of a curly-haired
young expounder of the Nicene Creed who came to spend July and August
at the mountain inn where Scott, after the fashion of needy students
New England over, was alternately engaged in keeping the books and
sorting up the mail. It was by way of this latter function that Scott
first came to be on speaking terms with the youthful rector of
Saint-Luke-the-Good-Physician's. And the rector, despite his four
hyphens and the gold cross that dangled on the front of his
ecclesiastical waistcoat, was an honest, unspoiled boy who was quick to
realize the curious appeal in the loneliness of Scott, to realize it
and to answer to it.
The early steps of their acquaintance were limited to the daily handing
out the letters, the daily thankful accepting them. Then, one morning,
Scott so far forgot his official and personal manners as to comment
upon the familiar imprint of one of the envelopes, as it was changing
hands. He made instant apology; but his penitence was forgotten in the
discovery that the curly-headed divine was also an old student of
Professor Mansfield. The rest of the steps were logical and
consecutive, down to those final days of August when together,
hard-working, would-be student and holiday-making, prosperous divine,
they spent Scott's leisure hours afield, talking, talking, talking of
the things one only mentions to one's spiritual next of kin.
Before he left the mountains, Scott's mind was made up definitely to
the step which was next before him. He knew that step would grieve his
mother, would well-nigh break her heart. None the less, he was resolved
to take it. Indeed, in honour, it seemed to him no other course was
open to him, albeit, in his more downright moments, he realized that
the taking it was nothing in the world but a miserable sort of
compromise between his mother's wishes and his own. He had given her
his word that he would be a preacher; keep his given word he must and
would. Nevertheless, preaching, he must choose for himself a gentler
sort of gospel than the lurid, flaming fires delighted in and set forth
with all the cunning of word imagery, by every Parson Wheeler of his
line. His God should be an honest gentleman, and not an all-pursuing
Thing of Wrath.
For some reason he would have been loath to analyze, even to himself,
it was to Catie that Scott first announced his change of plan. Catie
took the announcement tranquilly. To her mind, religion was something
that one put on, together with one's Sunday hat. There was no reason
one of them should be unchanging in form more than the other. One's
theology, like one's brims, should broaden with the fashion; the forms
of worship might as well grow high as the outline of one's hat-crown.
Given the three main elements of best clothes, a Sunday on which to
wear them and an appreciative church to wear them in, and Catie asked
no further consolations of religion. The tolerance Scott liked,
although he deplored the cause.
"Lovely, Scott!" Catie said, with some enthusiasm, when at last she had
grasped in its entirety, not Scott's idea, but the outward form in
which it clothed itself. "You'll wear a surplice, then, and a purple
stripe around your neck, and sing the prayers, like the man I saw in
Boston. He had candles, too, burning at the back, beside a great brass
cross."
Scott shook his head in swift negation. As yet, the higher forms of
ritualism were totally unknown to him.
"That's Catholic, Catie," he reminded her. "Of course, I sha'n't do
that."
"No; 'twas Episcopal," she contradicted. "It said so, on a sign beside
the door. But, Scott, that makes me think--"
"Well?" he asked, wondering at her hesitation.
"Would you mind very much," she came forward to his side and fell to
fingering the top button of his coat caressingly; "would you mind it so
very much not to call me Catie any more?"
Absorbed as he was in his theological transference, he had felt sure
that her request was on that selfsame theme, the more so, even, by
reason of her unwonted hesitation. In his extreme surprise, he laughed
a little at her question.
"Why not, Catie?"
She held up a forefinger of arch admonition.
"There you go again!" she told him, with mock petulance. "Do listen to
me, Scott. You're so interested in your everlasting old churches that
you haven't an idea to spare for me. I want you to promise that you
won't ever call me Catie any more."
"But why? What shall I call you?" he inquired, with masculine and dazed
bluntness.
"Catia. It is ever so much prettier; Catie is so babyish," she urged
him.
"But, if it is your name?" he urged in return.
Her retort came with unexpected pith and promptness. Moreover, it
struck home.
"So is the Baptist your church," she answered pertly. "I guess I have a
right to change, as well as you."
Mrs. Brenton, that same evening, took the disclosure in quite a
different spirit. To her mind, the relaxing of one's creed spelt ruin,
the doorway of the church Episcopal was but the outer portal of the
Church of Rome and, like all elderly women of puritanic stock who have
spent their lives in a Protestant community, Mrs. Brenton looked on
Rome as the last station but one upon the broad road to hell. None the
less, she strove to phrase her objections as gently as she was able.
However misguided Scott might be, she saw that he was in earnest, and
upon that account she was the more loath to hurt him.
"Scott," she said, with what appeared to herself to be the extreme of
tolerance; "if you must, I suppose you must; but I am sure that it will
kill your grandfather."
If Scott, just then, had been in a mood for theological discussion, he
might have pointed out to his mother the flaw in the logic of her own
belief. Grandfather Wheeler, translated into the glory that awaits the
faithful servant of the Lord, in all surety should have been beyond the
danger of vicarious and everlasting death. However, Scott was too much
in earnest, just then, about his own fate, to heed that of his worthy
and departed grandsire.
"I am sorry, mother," he repeated gravely; "but I am afraid it is that,
or nothing. All this summer, perhaps even before, I have been thinking
things over. I'll be glad to preach. Maybe--" his accent was boyish in
its extreme simplicity; "maybe, if I try my best, I'll do somebody a
little good. But," and his face stiffened, as he spoke; "but I'll be
hanged if I am going to stand up in the pulpit and say a whole lot of
things I don't believe and don't want to believe, just because
Grandfather Wheeler and Great-grandfather Wheeler and all that tribe
did believe them."
Across his energy, his growing excitement, Mrs. Brenton's level voice
cut in a little sternly.
"What is it that you don't believe, my son?" she asked him.
Scott rose to his feet, took a turn up the room, a turn down it. Then
he faced her.
"I'm not sure I even know that--yet," he answered. "I've got to find it
out. Honestly, mother," again there came a note of pleading; "isn't it
about as much to the point to find out the things you don't believe as
the things you do? And there must be some truth, somewhere, that's
worth the preaching, no matter how many things you have to throw over,
before you get to it. It's that I'm after now, a truth that is the
truth, that can be proved. Once I get it, I'll stand up and preach it,
and prove it, too, to every man I meet. That's what religion's for.
But, to do it, I must go into a church which gives you a little leeway,
a church which lets you interpret a few things to suit yourself, not
lays down the law about the last little phrase of the meaning you are
allowed to put into them."
Again there came the restless pacing of the room. This time, it lasted
longer. At last, though, he halted by her side, and rested one lean
hand upon her shoulder.
"Mother," he said, and now all boyishness had fallen away from him; "I
am sorry if this is going to hurt you; but I can't help it. Two years
ago, I told you I would study for the ministry. I shall keep my word;
but the way I keep it must be left for me to choose."
There was no mistaking the resonant purpose in his voice. Recognizing
it, his mother yielded to it of necessity. As quietly as possible, she
accepted the choice that he had made, and then she went away to her own
room. A half-hour later, kneeling beside her bed, she lost herself in
supplication on behalf of those who bow the knee to Baal.