Read Ebook: The Brentons by Ray Anna Chapin Dexter Wilson C Illustrator

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Ebook has 2356 lines and 108870 words, and 48 pages

"I think I have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said steadily.

"But, if the light within thee be--"

"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 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.

To all seeming, there always had been a Catie in Scott Brenton's life, always had been a Catie for him to seek in seasons of domestic stress or discipline. Indeed, his first memory of her was inextricably mingled with the recollections of an early spanking. Scott was naturally a good child, and Mrs. Brenton, as a rule, spanked cunningly, but very seldom. Now and then, she felt that circumstances justified the deed.

Scott, seven years old and inventive withal, had been locked up in the house alone, one day, while his mother went to a particularly attractive funeral with carriages enough for even the outside circle of the mourners. One such mourner failing, she had been bidden to the vacant seat in the rearmost carriage, and her absence had been prolonged unduly. She came home, expecting to find Scott wailing loudly for his missing mother. Instead, she found him playing camp-out Indian, as he called it, with her best bed by way of wickiup, and the wickiup was provisioned lavishly and stickily from the resources of the closet where she kept her jams.

Prudence and frugality demanded that Mrs. Brenton should remove her best clothes, before she essayed to administer justice at short range. Scott, left to himself, played on contentedly the while, until his camp was rudely invaded by a foe clad in a second-best petticoat and a shoulder shawl, and armed with a slipper which had seen better days. Even then, prudence cried out for yet another delay, for the young Indian was carrying so much of his commissariat upon his person that it seemed wise to wash him, before she proceeded to the spanking. Mrs. Brenton's point of view, moreover, was decidedly old-fashioned. Instead of rejoicing at this fresh manifestation of her boy's imagination, she concentrated all her remarks upon what she termed his theft, and she frugally used the period while she was scrubbing him, to drive her spoken condemnations home. Accordingly, it was a long, long time of duplex agony before the spanking finally achieved itself, and Scott, clean, but tingling from the slipper's impact, was told to go out and sit down on the doorstep and think over what a bad, bad boy he had been.

Like Alexander the Less, he found the doorstep distinctly cooling to his fevered person, and he sat there contentedly enough, while he gave himself over to the luxury of bubbly sobs and of digging his fists into his weeping eyes. So absorbed was he in this soothing occupation that he paid no heed to the patter of approaching footsteps, until a voice fell on his ears.

"Cry-baby!" the voice chirped, in the high key which, to the youthful mind, is expressive of disdain. And then it added even more disdainfully, "Dirty-face!"

Dazed by this two-fold attack upon him, Scott took down his smudgy fists and displayed to the intruder's view his smudgy countenance. An older pair of eyes might easily have discovered cause for wonder that, in so short a time since his scrubbing, so great a quantity of mother earth could have found its way upward to mingle with his tears and form the dust that grimed his face. Despite his tears and his grime, however, Scott's manly temper roused itself to face his critic.

"I ain't!" he bellowed hotly at the air around him, without troubling himself to look to see whence the strange voice had come.

The voice reflected somewhat of his opposition.

"You are, too. What's on your face?"

"Blackberry jam and soap," Scott answered, with a craftiness beyond his years. He told the literal truth, but not all the truth. No need to inform this critical stranger what was the crust that lay on top of all.

The critical stranger removed her pink countenance from the crack between the front-fence pickets, and pushed the gate open just a very little way. Seen through the larger crack, she stood revealed to Scott, a slim little damsel of perhaps six years, her pink calico frock starched until it stood out stiffly above her knees, and her topmost curl tied up with a mammoth bow of green gauze ribbon, obviously culled from some box of ancestral finery. She was a pretty child; but, even at that tender age, the decision of her little mouth and chin was too pronounced, the lift of her small head a trifle too self-satisfied.

"What's the matter, cry-baby?" she inquired, as Scott's interest in her appearing was punctuated with a fresh gulp of woe.

"I've been spanked."

The critical light faded from her eyes, to be replaced by another light, this time of interest.

"What for?"

"I was playing Indian in mother's jam."

Most damsels of that age would have asked for further particulars. Instead,--

"Hh!" she sniffed, and the sniff spoke volumes as to the quality of her young imagination.

Scott felt it lay upon him to defend himself from all which the sniff implied.

"'Twas fun, too," he asserted suddenly, as, with a final wipe of his fist across his eyes, he dismissed the outward traces of his grief. "You get things to eat to take with you, and the bed's the camp, and you live there for years and always, all alone. And then they smell the things you're eating and--"

"Who's they?" the small girl demanded.

"Oh, wolves and Indians and things, and they come around and growl awfully. But you aren't afraid. You take your gun, and crawl in under the blankets and go on eating, sure they won't come in after you--"

"What do you eat?"

Had Scott been a few years older, he doubtless would have answered,--

"Pemmican."

As it was, however, he responded glibly,--

"Snake meat."

"Hh!" Again there came the sniff. "Snakes don't have meat. They only wiggle."

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