The Brentons | Page 2

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 said, a little bit imperiously considering his age; "no matter now about Catie. I want to talk to you about--"
"About?" she queried nervously, while he hesitated under what obviously was a pretext of picking out the brownest sausage.
"About--myself."
Her nervousness increased.
"Take some more gravy, Scott," she urged him hurriedly. "You'd better