The Brentons

by Anna Chapin Ray

Used as he had become, the past two years, to pinpricks of this sort, his colour betrayed how much the present pinprick hurt him. None the less, he still held on to his temper.

"And I wasn't?" he queried, with an effort at a smile. "Sorry, Catia. What's the trouble?"

"All sorts of little things," she answered, with a disconcerting frankness. "Not any one of them count for much; but, taken all together, they're——" She hesitated for a word.

Brenton supplied it.

"Deplorable!" Then he added, "Sorry, Catia, as I said before. Still, I suppose, if I'm not a beauty, I'm about what the good Lord made me."

"Fudge!" She put down her cup and rested her chin upon her palms. Seen across the table and in a pose so undeniably feminine and so becoming to almost every woman, Catia was good to look upon; would have been good, that is, had not her personality been uncomfortably domineering. The two years since her marriage had rubbed down certain of her angles, and had given her at least a superficial polish. She occasionally admitted to herself that she was very near to being handsome. A more critical observer and one less prejudiced, however, might possibly have added that she was curiously devoid of charm.

Brenton, on the other hand, was growing curiously magnetic, as the months ran on, was developing a personal charm of which his student days had given scarcely any hint. The old lines, born of hard work and scanty nourishment, had vanished from his face. In place of them had come other lines, vastly more becoming, lines engraved by earnest, conscientious thought and study, by a life so ascetic as to be a little narrow, perhaps, but noble enough in its aspirations to lift itself high above the common level. He still was lean and thin, still a little stooping. The habits of his life would account for that; he was too busy saving other men's souls to give much thought to the preservation of his own body.

Even in a small and humdrum country parish, the souls of men need careful shepherding; every now and then there comes a petty crisis when they confess to a desire for outside guidance, and it was in such crises that Scott Brenton found his opportunity. His sermons, albeit a trifle immature, were really clever. None the less, they dwindled into insignificance beside the practical, personal help he gave to his parishioners, a help that came without the asking, whether the crisis were a dying cow, a small son's broken arm, or a fire in a granary just after the final harvest. Whatever happened in the parish, for good or ill, Scott Brenton always appeared upon the scene. At the very first, he had come of his own accord. Later, if his arrival delayed itself for a dozen minutes, he was sent for in hot haste. In every crisis, he was ready with practical advice; but he worked with both hands, the while he gave it.

Under such conditions, how he wrote his sermons was a question unanswerable by any one but Catia who trimmed the lamps, next morning. To Catia's great disgust, despite the scale of living due to his profession, Brenton had taken it quietly for granted that, for the present, they would keep no maid. His salary was small; he must have something saved to give away in cases of emergency. Catia and he were strong, and the rectory was small. Of course, Catia could have a little girl to come in at odd hours. What other help she needed, he would give her out of his scanty leisure. And Catia, who had dreamed of a luxurious idleness unknown to most women in that community of simple habits, was forced to tie on a wide pinafore and roll up her sleeves above a steaming dishpan. She did it all, however, with an air of patient martyrdom which was not lost upon her husband; while, upon the rare occasions when they entertained a clerical guest, she added an extra note of unaccustomed abnegation which was intended to impress upon the guest that she was the hapless victim of a fall from better days. The parish, in so far as she was able, she disdained completely. At the infrequent times that she was driven into close quarters with it, she made up for her unpopularity among the vestrymen by taking it out most vigorously upon their wives. Indeed, her lifelong familiarity with what she termed the narrowness of a small community made her the more intolerant, now that its groove was closing about her for a second time.

Therefore, for over a year now, Catia secretly had chafed with the friction of her surroundings. As yet, however, she had not confessed to Brenton the chafing, had not explained to him that her eyes were searching their horizon for any possible loophole of escape. Catia was more wise than are most women. She never wasted any breath in demanding absolute futilities. For the present, she saw clearly, Brenton was quite contented with his parish. For the present, it was enough for his young ambitions to know he had a parish and was doing it some good. Later, she would take a hand in stirring up his slumbering ambition. If she knew Scott at all, he would not be content for ever with preaching to country farmers and dandling their babies on his knees; nor with interspersing moral reflections with inquiries regarding the season's crops; nor with basing his sermons upon the tares and the wheat, and the fig tree, and other texts so palpably bucolic in their interest. However, Catia would grant him a little resting time, before she goaded him up to girding his loins anew. Indeed, he needed it, she admitted freely to herself in her more generous moments. The years of study, long at best, and, in his case, lengthened by needful intervals of money-earning toil, had taken it out of him badly. He needed a little time to recover from their strain, to grow accustomed to his new dignity as preacher and to learn to take himself a little less strenuously, before he would be fitted to assume his proper place in a wider field than any of which as yet he appeared to be dreaming.