The Brentons | Page 2

from his accent, as he
answered,--
"Fine!"
"Catie there?" she asked again, with the crisp elision of one whose life
has been too strenuous to waste itself in the more leisurely forms of
speech.
"Yes. Is breakfast ready?"

She nodded, as she speared the sizzling sausages one by one and
transferred them to a platter. Then, while she poured off a little of the
fat by way of gravy, she put yet another question.
"Look pretty?" she said.
Her son felt no difficulty in applying the question to Catie, the proper
object, rather than to the sausages on which his mother's gaze was bent.
"About as usual," he said temperately.
His mother laughed out suddenly. The laugh brought back to her face a
faint resemblance to the girl who, as the pretty daughter of old Parson
Wheeler, had been the acknowledged belle of all the small community.
Later on, all the small community had been jarred to its social
foundations by the discovery that Betty Wheeler, child of a long, long
line of parsons, was going to marry Birge Brenton who had come to
"clerk it" in the village store. She did marry him, and, a little later on,
and most obligingly for all concerned, he died. Few people mourned
him. His wife, though, was among the few. She had a conscience of
Puritan extraction, and the keenest possible sense of what was seemly.
Scott, at the time, was ten days old; therefore he did not share her
mourning. Indeed, he was too busy trying to adjust himself to things in
general and pins in particular to have much energy or time left over to
spare for thinking about other people. Already, the trail of Mrs.
Brenton's reading ancestors had led her to the naming her child Walter
Scott. Her sense of decorum caused her to wonder vaguely, after her
husband died, whether it would not be proper to change the baby's
name to Birge. Her wonderings, though, merely served to render her
uneasy; they bore no fruit in action. The associations with the name
were not of the sort she cared to emphasize, and the boy was allowed to
keep his more impressive label.
As time went on, though, he rebelled against the childish Wally and
insisted on the Scott, but prefixed by the blank initial whose
significance, he fondly hoped, would permanently remain a mystery. A
month, however, after he had entered college, he was known as

Ivanhoe to all the class who knew anything about him at all; and, in the
catalogue published in his sophomore year, he was registered quite
curtly as Scott Brenton. Never again in all his lifetime did the
incriminating W reappear.
If his mother felt regretful for the change, she was far too wise to show
it. Indeed, it is quite likely that she felt no regrets at all. By the time
that Scott came to his 'teens, Mrs. Brenton was doing her level and
conscientious best to conceal from him the demoralizing fact of her
belief that he could do almost no wrong, and she clung to the
modifying almost with a passionate fervour born of her clerical
ancestry and her consequent belief in the inherent viciousness of
unconverted man. Moreover, her inherited notions of conversion
included spiritual writhings and physical night-sweats and penitential
tears by way of its accomplishment. According to the creed of all the
Parson Wheelers since the Puritan migration, one became a Christian
rather violently, and not by leisurely unfolding. It had been to her the
greatest of all reliefs since the unconfessed one born of her husband's
premature removal, when the young Walter Scott had got himself
converted by means of an itinerant revivalist. From that time on, her
gaze had been fixed unfalteringly upon the hour when he should
assume the mantle of his clerical grandparents; and she inclined to look
upon his other talents as being so many manifestations of diabolic
ingenuity.
And now, these Christmas holidays, the diabolism seemed to her to be
rampant; it effervesced through all Scott's being like the mysterious
things he brewed within his test-tubes. Not that Mrs. Brenton would
have known a test-tube by sight, however. She only had gleaned from
her son's talk the fact that they existed and held fizzy compounds which
would kill you, if you drank them. Perhaps her analogy was all the
better for her lack of specific knowledge. In any case, she saw and
feared the effervescence. The sausages and the white bowl of hot fat
gravy were so much carefully considered bait to lure her son back into
the paths of orthodox uprightness. While they were being
swallowed--slowly, by reason of their mussiness--she had certain
things she wished to say to him.

To her extreme surprise, Scott said them first to her.
"Mother," he