The Brentons | Page 8

one vast and indiscriminate lake of flaming
brimstone. Perchance this very fact had its own due share of influence
upon the later theology of Scott Brenton.
That there would be influence, no one who watched the children could
deny. After the first day's squabbles, perhaps even on account of them,
they became inseparable. When they were not together, either Catie
was looking for Scott, or Scott for Catie, save upon the too frequent
occasions when discipline fell upon the two of them simultaneously
and forced them into a temporary captivity. When they were held apart,
they spent their time planning up new things to do together, once the
parental ban was off their intercourse. When they were together, it was
Scott who supplied the imagination for the pair of them. Catie's share
lay in the crafty outworking of the plan. When their plans came to
disaster, as often happened by reason of the boldness of Scott's young
conceptions, Catie took the disappointment with the temper of a little
vixen, kicked against the pricks and openly defied the Powers that Be.
Scott, on the other hand, shut his teeth and accepted the penalty,
already intent upon the question as to what he should undertake another
time.
And so the days wore on. To the adult mind, they would have seemed
to pass monotonously. The quicker child perceptions, though, the
magnifying point of view that makes a mountain out of every mole hill,

caused them to seem charged with an infinite amount of variety and
incident, full of enthusiastic dreams and thrills, and of crushing
disappointments which, however, never completely ended hope. Scott's
heritage from the long line of Parson Wheelers would have made him
stick to the belief that two and two must always equal four, had it not
been for that other heritage which kept him always hoping that some
day or other it might equal five. Already, he was starting on a life-long
quest for that same five, and Catie, nothing loath, went questing by his
side. Catie, though, went out of the merest curiosity, and her invariable
"I told you so" added the final, the most poignant sting to all of Scott's
worst disappointments. At the mature age of six or seven, Catie
Harrison showed quite plainly that no mere longing for a possible ideal
would ever lure her from the path of practical expediency. She walked
slowly, steadily ahead, while her boy companion leaped to and fro
about her, chasing first one bright butterfly of the imagination and then
another, only to clutch them and bring them back to her to be viewed
relentlessly with prosaic eyes which saw only the spots where his
impatient touch had rubbed away the downy bloom.
And so the months rolled past them both, Catie the young materialist
and potential tyrant, and Scott Brenton the idealist. The years carried
the children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the
treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never
ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway
of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky
striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which
seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final
pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance
to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes
were also on the finish, but for a different reason. His mother, one night
a week before his fourteenth birthday, had talked to him of college, of
his grandfather, the final Parson Wheeler of the line, and, vaguely, of
certain ambitions which had sprung up within her heart, the morning
she had listened to the birth-cry of her baby boy.
A week later, she had given him his grandfather's great gold pen, albeit
with plentiful instructions to the effect that he was not to use it, but to

keep it in its box, untarnished, until such time as he was fitted to
employ it in writing sermons of his own. Scott had received the gift
with veneration, and then quite promptly had summoned Catie to do
reverence at the selfsame shrine. But Catie had rebelled.
"Fudge!" she had said crisply. "What's the sense of having a useful
thing like that, that you can't use?"
CHAPTER THREE
At the mature age of four, Scott Brenton's favourite pastime had been
what he termed "playing Grandpa Wheeler." The game accomplished
itself by means of a chair by way of pulpit, and a serried phalanx of
other chairs by way of congregation, whom the young preacher
harangued by the hour together. The harangues were punctuated by
occasional bursts of song, not always of a churchly nature, and
emphasized by gestures which were more forceful