The Brentons | Page 3

dip it on your bread as soon as you can; it gets cold so soon, these winter mornings."
But he ignored the spoon she offered him. When he spoke, it was with a curious hesitation.
"Mother, did I tell you what Professor Mansfield said?"
"Yes."
"Weren't you glad--just a very little?" His tone was boyish in its pleading.
Mrs. Brenton's answer was evasive.
"Of course, Scott. I am always glad, when your teachers speak well of you," she said.
"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother; but do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on, that I should not make a record as a chemist?"
While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under some conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to read in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father, astoundingly like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times.
Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet.
"But are you going to keep on?"
He tried to regain his former accent.
"That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he seemed to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been used to taking any chance that came. What do you think I'd better do?"
For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile that held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at last she answered.
"You must do as you think right, my son."
"But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her.
This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own.
"It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may be that this will be the next best thing, after all."
"Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?"
She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt him.
"Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively.
"Between now and next summer."
"Why not wait till then?"
He crossed her question with another.
"What's the use of waiting?"
"You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.
Scott shut his teeth hard upon an end of sausage. It seemed to him that it was only one more phase of the same futile whole, when his teeth encountered a hard bit of bone. And his mother sat there, outwardly impartial, inwardly disapproving, and talked about more light, when already his young eyes were blinded by the lustrous dazzle. Oh, well! It was all in the day's work, all in the difference between nineteen and thirty-nine, he told himself as patiently as he was able. And his mother at thirty-nine, he realized with disconcerting clearness, was infinitely older than Professor Mansfield's wife at sixty. Indeed, he sometimes wondered if she ever had been really young, ever really young enough to forget her heritage of piety in healthy, worldly zeal. Whatever the depths of one's filial devotion, it sometimes jars a little to have one's mother use, by choice, the phraseology of the minor prophets. In fact, in certain of his more unregenerate moments, Scott Brenton had allowed himself to marvel that he had not been christened Malachi. At least, it would have been in keeping with the habitual tone of the domestic table talk. And yet, in other moments, he realized acutely that that same heritage was in his nature, too. The village gossips had been exceedingly benevolent, in that they had spared him any inkling of the sources whence had come certain other strains which set his blood to tingling every now and then.
Just such a strain was tingling now, as he laid down his knife and fork, rested his elbows on the table before him and clasped his hands tight above his plate.
"I think I have all the light I am likely to get, mother," he said steadily.
"But, if the light within thee be--"
He checked her with a sudden petulant lift of his head. And, after all, it was not quite her fault. Life, for her, had been so hard and so busy that he ought not to grudge her the consolation she had been able to dig up out of the accumulated d��bris of the ancestral trick of sermonizing. In a more gracious, plastic