The Brentons | Page 5

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.

CHAPTER TWO
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