The Brentons - Anna Chapin Ray

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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.

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      In the fulness of time, Scott married Catie. To put the case more accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie. From start to finish, Catie was the active force in whatever wooing achieved itself, the active force which swept down on and annexed a passive principle.

      From the start, their courtship lacked most of the hallmarks of that tender process. There were few endearments, fewer still of the half-told, half-guessed confidences which, by their very fragmentary nature only serve to add emphasis to a comprehension that can construct a living, vital intimacy out of such slight materials. Indeed, there was no especial effort at spiritual comprehension between them. Instead, their unsentimental wooing was a sort of amatory bargain day for Catie, who must have the best sort of husband to be found on the domestic market. For Scott, on the other

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