The Brentons

The Brentons, by Anna Chapin
Ray

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Title: The Brentons
Author: Anna Chapin Ray
Illustrator: Wilson C. Dexter
Release Date: June 8, 2007 [EBook #21763]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BRENTONS ***

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NOVELS BY
ANNA CHAPIN RAY
THE DOMINANT STRAIN BY THE GOOD STE. ANNE ON THE
FIRING LINE HEARTS AND CREEDS ACKROYD OF THE
FACULTY QUICKENED THE BRIDGE BUILDERS OVER THE
QUICKSANDS A WOMAN WITH A PURPOSE THE BRENTONS
[Illustration: Catia put her elbows on the table and clasped her hands
around her cup.
Frontispiece. See Page 84]

THE BRENTONS

BY
ANNA CHAPIN RAY
Author of "A Woman with a Purpose," "The Bridge Builders," etc.

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY WILSON C. DEXTER

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1912
Copyright, 1912, By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published, January, 1912
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

Transcriber's Note:
Beginning with Chapter 19 the spelling of Kathryn inexplicably
changes to Katherine.
THE BRENTONS
CHAPTER ONE
However archaic and conventional it may sound, it is the literal fact
that young Scott Brenton was led into the ministry by the prayer of his
widowed mother. Furthermore, the prayer was not made to him, but
offered in secret and in all sincerity at the Throne of Grace.
"Oh, my dearest Lord and Master," she prayed, at her evening
devotions upon her knees and with her work-roughened hands clasped
upon the gaudy patchwork quilt; "guide Thou my son. Bring him to feel
that his perfect happiness can come only from going forth to preach
Thy word to all men."
And, as it chanced, the door of her room had been left slightly open.
Scott Brenton, young and alert and full of enthusiasms which his years
of grinding work and economy had been powerless to down, came
leaping up the steps just then. The front door had been left unlocked for
him. He closed it noiselessly behind him, and then started to run up the
stairs. The murmur of his mother's voice checked him, stayed his step a
moment, and then changed its pace. He went on up the stairs quite
soberly, thoughtful, his face a little overcast.
It was now the middle of the Christmas holidays of his junior year. The
day he had left college for the short vacation, his chemistry professor
had sent for him and had said things to him about his last term's work
and about his examination papers at the end of the term. The things
were courteous as concerned the past; to Scott Brenton's mind, they
were dazzling as concerned the future. The dazzle had endured until his
mother's words had fallen on his ears. Then it had eclipsed itself,

leaving him to wonder whether, after all, it had not been the ignis
fatuus of self-elation, and not the steady glow of truth. Scott Brenton
was not much more given to introspection, at that epoch of his life, than
is any other healthy youngster of nineteen. None the less, he slept
curiously little, that night.
Next morning, while he dressed, he kept his teeth shut cornerwise, a
habit he had when he was making up his mind to any noxious
undertaking. Then he went downstairs, to find his mother smiling
contentedly to herself, while she added the finishing touches to the
breakfast. It was sausage, that morning, Scott Brenton always
remembered afterwards. They had been chosen out of deference to his
boyish appetite. He never tasted them again, if he could help it. They
seemed to have added to their already strange assortment of flavours a
tang of bitterness that bore the seeds of spiritual indigestion.
His mother looked up to greet him with an eagerness from which she
vainly sought to banish pride. He was her only child, her all; and he
was sufficiently good to look upon, clever enough to pass muster in a
crowd. To her adoring eyes, however, he was a mingling of an Adonis
with a Socrates. And she herself, by encouragement and admonition
and self-denying toil, had helped to make him what he was. Small
wonder that her pride in him could never be completely downed!
Nevertheless,--
"Have a good time, last night?" she asked him tamely.
But she missed a certain young enthusiasm