"Scott," Catia let go the coffee pot and looked up to face him; "I do
wish you'd begin to think about smartening yourself up a little."
Brenton, who still clung to his bachelor habit of reading the newspaper
between swallows of coffee and snatches of toast and jam, looked up at
the arraignment which lay in Catia's tone, if not within her words.
"Smarten myself up?" he echoed, in blank question.
"Yes." Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands around
her cup. "I was looking at you, Scott, all the time this last
convocation was going on."
He smiled benevolently, by way of preparation for flinging himself once
more upon the columns of his morning paper.
"You'd much better have been looking at the Bishop," he advised her
good-temperedly.
She shook her head.
"The Bishop was all right," she said, with an emphasis so caustic as to
catch and hold his attention.
Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort,
his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the
less, he still held on to his temper.
"And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia.
What's the trouble?"
"All sorts of little things," she answered, with a disconcerting
frankness. "Not any one of them count for much; but, taken all
together, they're----" She hesitated for a word.
Brenton supplied it.
"Deplorable!" Then he added, "Sorry, Catia, as I said before. Still, I
suppose, if I'm not a beauty, I'm about what the good Lord made me."
"Fudge!" She put down her cup and rested her chin upon her palms. Seen
across the table and in a pose so undeniably feminine and so becoming
to almost every woman, Catia was good to look upon; would have been
good, that is, had not her personality been uncomfortably domineering.
The two years since her marriage had rubbed down certain of her angles,
and had given her at least a superficial polish. She occasionally
admitted to herself that she was very near to being handsome. A more
critical observer and one less prejudiced, however, might possibly have
added that she was curiously devoid of charm.
Brenton, on the other hand, was growing curiously magnetic, as the
months ran on, was developing a personal charm of which his student
days had given scarcely any hint. The old lines, born of hard work and
scanty nourishment, had vanished from his face. In place of them had
come other lines, vastly more becoming, lines engraved by earnest,
conscientious thought and study, by a life so ascetic as to be a little
narrow, perhaps, but noble enough in its aspirations to lift itself
high above the common level. He still was lean and thin, still a little
stooping. The habits of his life would account for that; he was too
busy saving other men's souls to give much thought to the preservation
of his own body.
Even in a small and humdrum country parish, the souls of men need
careful shepherding; every now and then there comes a petty crisis when
they confess to a desire for outside guidance, and it was in such
crises that Scott Brenton found his opportunity. His sermons, albeit a
trifle immature, were really clever. None the less, they dwindled into
insignificance beside the practical, personal help he gave to his
parishioners, a help that came without the asking, whether the crisis
were a dying cow, a small son's broken arm, or a fire in a granary just
after the final harvest. Whatever happened in the parish, for good or
ill, Scott Brenton always appeared upon the scene. At the very first,
he had come of his own accord. Later, if his arrival delayed itself for
a dozen minutes, he was sent for in hot haste. In every crisis, he was
ready with practical advice; but he worked with both hands, the while
he gave it.
Under such conditions, how he wrote his sermons was a question
unanswerable by any one but Catia who trimmed the lamps, next morning.
To Catia's great disgust, despite the scale of living due to his
profession, Brenton had taken it quietly for granted that, for the
present, they would keep no maid. His salary was small; he must have
something saved to give away in cases of emergency. Catia and he were
strong, and the rectory was small. Of course, Catia could have a little
girl to come in at odd hours. What other help she needed, he would give
her out of his scanty leisure. And Catia, who had dreamed of a
luxurious idleness unknown to most women in that community of simple
habits, was forced to tie on a wide pinafore and roll up her sleeves
above a steaming dishpan. She did it all, however, with an air of
patient martyrdom which was not lost upon her husband; while, upon the
rare occasions when they entertained a clerical guest, she added an
extra note of unaccustomed abnegation which was intended to impress
upon the guest that she was the hapless victim of a fall from better
days. The parish, in so far as she was able, she disdained completely.
At the infrequent times that she was driven into close quarters with
it, she made up for her unpopularity among the vestrymen by taking it
out most vigorously upon their wives. Indeed, her lifelong familiarity
with what she termed the narrowness of a small community made her the
more intolerant, now that its groove was closing about her for a second
time.
Therefore, for over a year now, Catia secretly had chafed with the
friction of her surroundings. As yet, however, she had not confessed to
Brenton the chafing, had not explained to him that her eyes were
searching their horizon for any possible loophole of escape. Catia was
more wise than are most women. She never wasted any breath in demanding
absolute futilities. For the present, she saw clearly, Brenton was
quite contented with his parish. For the present, it was enough for his
young ambitions to know he had a parish and was doing it some good.
Later, she would take a hand in stirring up his slumbering ambition. If
she knew Scott at all, he would not be content for ever with preaching
to country farmers and dandling their babies on his knees; nor with
interspersing moral reflections with inquiries regarding the season's
crops; nor with basing his sermons upon the tares and the wheat, and
the fig tree, and other texts so palpably bucolic in their interest.
However, Catia would grant him a little resting time, before she goaded
him up to girding his loins anew. Indeed, he needed it, she admitted
freely to herself in her more generous moments. The years of study,
long at best, and, in his case, lengthened by needful intervals of
money-earning toil, had taken it out of him badly. He needed a little
time to recover from their strain, to grow accustomed to his new
dignity as preacher and to learn to take himself a little less
strenuously, before he would be fitted to assume his proper place in a
wider field than any of which as yet he appeared to be dreaming.
However, two years, it seemed to Catia, had been an ample rest-time.
Therefore,--
"Fudge!" she said. And then, "Don't be profane, Scott," she rebuked
him, with the literalness which had replaced her meagre childish sense
of humour. "The good Lord didn't make your surplices a full eighth of a
yard too long, nor put you into a black stole for the whole year round.
Besides, you were the only man in that whole convocation that buttoned
his collar in front. I should have supposed you'd have known better
than that, before you got your license."
Brenton's lips curved into the little smile she always dreaded. Because
she dreaded it, it antagonized her.
"Did you?" he queried.
Her antagonism lent a tartness to her reply.
"I never professed to go through a divinity school," she retorted. "If
I had, though----" Her pause was fraught with meaning.