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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Kentons, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Kentons
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Last Updated: February 25, 2009
+Release Date: August 21, 2016 [EBook #3362]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KENTONS ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE KENTONS
+
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the
+average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they had
+spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had
+grown easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their
+comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short
+outings, which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper
+Lakes in the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well
+anywhere as in the great square brick house which still kept its four
+acres about it, in the heart of the growing town, where the trees
+they had planted with their own hands topped it on three aides, and a
+spacious garden opened southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton
+had his library, where he transacted by day such law business as he had
+retained in his own hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife’s
+room and sit with her there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their
+girls, where they could hear them laughing with the young fellows who
+came to make the morning calls, long since disused in the centres of
+fashion, or the evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great
+world. She sewed, and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or
+they played checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she
+found herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let
+him make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes
+he laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good
+comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be. They had long ago
+quarrelled out their serious differences, which mostly arose from
+such differences of temperament as had first drawn them together; they
+criticised each other to their children from time to time, but they
+atoned for this defection by complaining of the children to each other,
+and they united in giving way to them on all points concerning their
+happiness, not to say their pleasure.
+
+They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war,
+and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice
+of the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five
+years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second
+son died when he was yet a babe in his mother’s arms, and there was an
+interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their
+eldest son was already married, and settled next them in a house which
+was brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less
+ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had grown
+naturally into a share of his father’s law practice, and he had taken it
+all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a show of giving
+it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton was well on in
+the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had become mainly the
+legal business of a large corporation. In this form it was distasteful
+to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in his hands, but
+he gave much of his time, which he saved his self-respect by calling his
+leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the war.
+
+In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his
+youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on
+the whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian,
+Pennsylvanian, and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of
+foreign strains, were of the purest American stock, and spoke the
+best English in the world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of
+happiness, and had incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate
+in the State. The growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had
+increased only to five thousand during the time he had known it, which
+was almost an ideal figure for a county-town. There was a higher average
+of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider and
+evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less
+brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was
+fully up to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the
+national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under
+the sun. It, was Kenton’s pride and glory that he had been a part of the
+finest army known in history. He believed that the men who made history
+ought to write it, and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged
+his companions in arms to set down everything they could remember of
+their soldiering, and to save the letters they had written home, so
+that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography of the
+regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely personal
+character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his way to the
+fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of
+fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with his
+want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and
+American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of material
+which he could not have refused to keep for the soldiers who brought it
+to him, more or less in a humorous indulgence of his whim. But he even
+offered to receive it, and in a community where everything took the
+complexion of a joke, he came to be affectionately regarded as a crank
+on that point; the shabbily aging veterans, whom he pursued to their
+workbenches and cornfields, for, the documents of the regimental
+history, liked to ask the colonel if he had brought his gun. They,
+always give him the title with which he had been breveted at the
+close of the war; but he was known to the younger, generation of his
+fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr. Kenton in the
+presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his children she
+called him Poppa, as they did.
+
+The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father’s affairs
+without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the
+popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined
+with his mother in a respect for Kenton’s theory of the regimental
+history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a
+little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their
+party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history,
+but she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly
+or indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for
+parties and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from
+young men and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays,
+for circuses and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and
+she devoted herself to her pleasures without the shadow of chaperonage,
+which was, indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.
+
+In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set
+bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who,
+upon the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs,
+drew their mother’s notice to his sister’s excesses in carrying-on, and
+required some action that should keep her from bringing the name,
+of Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and
+lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up
+from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in
+his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which
+he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the
+literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been
+written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his
+elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it
+apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able
+to take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an
+importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none
+of the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a
+bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from
+unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister
+promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified
+gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell
+from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy,
+just as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at
+moments when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His
+stately but vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond
+his years, but this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the
+humiliation of his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the
+easier prey of Lottie’s ridicule. He got on best, or at least most
+evenly, with his eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because
+she took all life so; and she was able to interpret him to his father
+when his intolerable dignity forbade a common understanding between
+them. When he got so far beyond his depth that he did not know what
+he meant himself, as sometimes happened, she gently found him a safe
+footing nearer shore.
+
+Kenton’s theory was that he did not distinguish among his children. He
+said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world,
+but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them
+for the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most
+shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered
+his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more
+accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had
+social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife
+that Nelly knew ten times as much.
+
+Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew
+all the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German
+scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving
+school, when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in
+Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the first
+book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual
+honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with
+the judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at the
+moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father explained
+to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and would just,
+as he said, show them a few of the documents he had collected. He
+made Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand on the most
+characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet what one
+dared that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she was
+literary enough.
+
+She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any
+one who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the
+most cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more
+beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them,
+and Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them. No
+one seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man came
+who was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it was
+doubtful whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too transparent
+to hide her feeling from her father and mother, who saw with even more
+grief than shame that she could not hide it from the man himself, whom
+they thought so unworthy of it.
+
+He had suddenly arrived in Tuskingum from one of the villages of the
+county, where he had been teaching school, and had found something to do
+as reporter on the Tuskingum ‘Intelligencer’, which he was instinctively
+characterizing with the spirit of the new journalism, and was pushing as
+hardily forward on the lines of personality as if he had dropped down
+to it from the height of a New York or Chicago Sunday edition. The judge
+said, with something less than his habitual honesty, that he did not
+mind his being a reporter, but he minded his being light and shallow;
+he minded his being flippant and mocking; he minded his bringing his
+cigarettes and banjo into the house at his second visit. He did not mind
+his push; the fellow had his way to make and he had to push; but he did
+mind his being all push; and his having come out of the country with as
+little simplicity as if he had passed his whole life in the city. He
+had no modesty, and he had no reverence; he had no reverence for Ellen
+herself, and the poor girl seemed to like him for that.
+
+He was all the more offensive to the judge because he was himself to
+blame for their acquaintance, which began when one day the fellow
+had called after him in the street, and then followed down the shady
+sidewalk beside him to his hour, wanting to know what this was he had
+heard about his history, and pleading for more light upon his plan in
+it. At the gate he made a flourish of opening and shutting it for the
+judge, and walking up the path to his door he kept his hand on the
+judge’s shoulder most offensively; but in spite of this Kenton had
+the weakness to ask him in, and to call Ellen to get him the most
+illustrative documents of the history.
+
+The interview that resulted in the ‘Intelligencer’ was the least evil
+that came of this error. Kenton was amazed, and then consoled, and then
+afflicted that Ellen was not disgusted with it; and in his conferences
+with his wife he fumed and fretted at his own culpable folly, and tried
+to get back of the time he had committed it, in that illusion which
+people have with trouble that it could somehow be got rid of if it could
+fairly be got back of; till the time came when his wife could no longer
+share his unrest in this futile endeavor.
+
+She said, one night when they had talked late and long, “That can’t be
+helped now; and the question is what are we going to do to stop it.”
+
+The judge evaded the point in saying, “The devil of it is that all the
+nice fellows are afraid of her; they respect her too much, and the very
+thing which ought to disgust her with this chap is what gives him his
+power over her. I don’t know what we are going to do, but we must break
+it off, somehow.”
+
+“We might take her with us somewhere,” Mrs. Kenton suggested.
+
+“Run away from the fellow? I think I see myself! No, we have got to stay
+and face the thing right here. But I won’t have him about the house any
+more, understand that. He’s not to be let in, and Ellen mustn’t see him;
+you tell her I said so. Or no! I will speak to her myself.” His wife
+said that he was welcome to do that; but he did not quite do it. He
+certainly spoke to his daughter about her, lover, and he satisfied
+himself that there was yet nothing explicit between them. But she was so
+much less frank and open with him than she had always been before that
+he was wounded as well as baffled by her reserve. He could not get her
+to own that she really cared for the fellow; but man as he was, and old
+man as he was, he could not help perceiving that she lived in a fond
+dream of him.
+
+He went from her to her mother. “If he was only one-half the man she
+thinks he is!”--he ended his report in a hopeless sigh.
+
+“You want to give in to her!” his wife pitilessly interpreted. “Well,
+perhaps that would be the best thing, after all.”
+
+“No, no, it wouldn’t, Sarah; it would be the easiest for both of us, I
+admit, but it would be the worst thing for her. We’ve got to let it run
+along for a while yet. If we give him rope enough he may hang himself;
+there’s that chance. We can’t go away, and we can’t shut her up, and we
+can’t turn him out of the house. We must trust her to find him out for
+herself.”
+
+“She’ll never do that,” said the mother. “Lottie says Ellen thinks he’s
+just perfect. He cheers her up, and takes her out of herself. We’ve
+always acted with her as if we thought she was different from other
+girls, and he behaves to her as if she was just like all of them, just
+as silly, and just as weak, and it pleases her, and flatters her; she
+likes it.”
+
+“Oh, Lord!” groaned the father. “I suppose she does.”
+
+This was bad enough; it was a blow to his pride in Ellen; but there was
+something that hurt him still worse. When the fellow had made sure of
+her, he apparently felt himself so safe in her fondness that he did not
+urge his suit with her. His content with her tacit acceptance gave the
+bitterness of shame to the promise Kenton and his wife had made each
+other never to cross any of their children in love. They were ready
+now to keep that promise for Ellen, if he asked it of them, rather
+than answer for her lifelong disappointment, if they denied him. But,
+whatever he meant finally to do, he did not ask it; he used his footing
+in their house chiefly as a basis for flirtations beyond it. He began
+to share his devotions to Ellen with her girl friends, and not with her
+girl friends alone. It did not come to scandal, but it certainly came to
+gossip about him and a silly young wife; and Kenton heard of it with
+a torment of doubt whether Ellen knew of it, and what she would do; he
+would wait for her to do herself whatever was to be done. He was never
+certain how much she had heard of the gossip when she came to her
+mother, and said with the gentle eagerness she had, “Didn’t poppa talk
+once of going South this winter?”
+
+“He talked of going to New York,” the mother answered, with a throb of
+hope.
+
+“Well,” the girl returned, patiently, and Mrs. Kenton read in her
+passivity an eagerness to be gone from sorrow that she would not suffer
+to be seen, and interpreted her to her father in such wise that he could
+not hesitate.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+If such a thing could be mercifully ordered, the order of this event had
+certainly been merciful; but it was a cruel wrench that tore Kenton from
+the home where he had struck such deep root. When he actually came to
+leave the place his going had a ghastly unreality, which was heightened
+by his sense of the common reluctance. No one wanted to go, so far as
+he could make out, not even Ellen herself, when he tried to make her say
+she wished it. Lottie was in open revolt, and animated her young men to
+a share in the insurrection. Her older brother was kindly and helpfully
+acquiescent, but he was so far from advising the move that Kenton had
+regularly to convince himself that Richard approved it, by making him
+say that it was only for the winter and that it was the best way of
+helping Ellen get rid of that fellow. All this did not enable Kenton to
+meet the problems of his younger son, who required him to tell what he
+was to do with his dog and his pigeons, and to declare at once how he
+was to dispose of the cocoons he had amassed so as not to endanger the
+future of the moths and butterflies involved in them. The boy was so
+fertile in difficulties and so importunate for their solution, that he
+had to be crushed into silence by his father, who ached in a helpless
+sympathy with his reluctance.
+
+Kenton came heavily upon the courage of his wife, who was urging forward
+their departure with so much energy that he obscurely accused her of
+being the cause of it, and could only be convinced of her innocence when
+she offered to give the whole thing up if he said so. When he would not
+say so, she carried the affair through to the bitter end, and she did
+not spare him some, pangs which she perhaps need not have shared with
+him. But people are seldom man and wife for half their lives without
+wishing to impart their sufferings as well as their pleasures to each
+other; and Mrs. Kenton, if she was no worse, was no better than other
+wives in pressing to her husband’s lips the cup that was not altogether
+sweet to her own. She went about the house the night before closing it,
+to see that everything was in a state to be left, and then she came to
+Kenton in his library, where he had been burning some papers and getting
+others ready to give in charge to his son, and sat down by his cold
+hearth with him, and wrung his soul with the tale of the last things she
+had been doing. When she had made him bear it all, she began to turn the
+bright side of the affair to him. She praised the sense and strength of
+Ellen, in the course the girl had taken with herself, and asked him
+if he, really thought they could have done less for her than they were
+doing. She reminded him that they were not running away from the fellow,
+as she had once thought they must, but Ellen was renouncing him, and
+putting him out of her sight till she could put him out of her mind. She
+did not pretend that the girl had done this yet; but it was everything
+that she wished to do it, and saw that it was best. Then she kissed
+him on his gray head, and left him alone to the first ecstasy of his
+homesickness.
+
+It was better when they once got to New York, and were settled in an
+apartment of an old-fashioned down-town hotel. They thought themselves
+very cramped in it, and they were but little easier when they found that
+the apartments over and under them were apparently thought spacious for
+families of twice their numbers. It was the very quietest place in the
+whole city, but Kenton was used to the stillness of Tuskingum, where,
+since people no longer kept hens, the nights were stiller than in the
+country itself; and for a week he slept badly. Otherwise, as soon as
+they got used to living in six rooms instead of seventeen, they were
+really very comfortable.
+
+He could see that his wife was glad of the release from housekeeping,
+and she was growing gayer and seemed to be growing younger in the
+inspiration of the great, good-natured town. They had first come to New
+York on their wedding journey, but since that visit she had always let
+him go alone on his business errands to the East; these had grown less
+and less frequent, and he had not seen New York for ten or twelve years.
+He could have waited as much longer, but he liked her pleasure in the
+place, and with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he went
+about with her to the amusements which she frequented, as she said, to
+help Ellen take her mind off herself. At the play and the opera he
+sat thinking of the silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its
+leafless maples, and the life that was no more in it than if they had
+all died out of it; and he could not keep down a certain resentment,
+senseless and cruel, as if the poor girl were somehow to blame for their
+exile. When he betrayed this feeling to his wife, as he sometimes must,
+she scolded him for it, and then offered, if he really thought anything
+like that, to go back to Tuskingum at once; and it ended in his having
+to own himself wrong, and humbly promise that he never would let the
+child dream how he felt, unless he really wished to kill her. He was
+obliged to carry his self-punishment so far as to take Lottie very
+sharply to task when she broke out in hot rebellion, and declared that
+it was all Ellen’s fault; she was not afraid of killing her sister; and
+though she did not say it to her, she said it of her, that anybody else
+could have got rid of that fellow without turning the whole family out
+of house and home.
+
+Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she
+did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull
+propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was
+as afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was
+thrown back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became friends
+in their common dislike of New York; and pending some chance of bringing
+each other under condemnation they lamented their banishment from
+Tuskingum together. But even Boyne contrived to make the heavy time
+pass more lightly than she in the lessons he had with a tutor, and the
+studies of the city which he carried on. When the skating was not good
+in Central Park he spent most of his afternoons and evenings at the
+vaudeville theatres. None of the dime museums escaped his research,
+and he conversed with freaks and monsters of all sorts upon terms of
+friendly confidence. He reported their different theories of themselves
+to his family with the same simple-hearted interest that he criticised
+the song and dance artists of the vaudeville theatres. He became an
+innocent but by no means uncritical connoisseur of their attractions,
+and he surprised with the constancy and variety of his experience in
+them a gentleman who sat next him one night. Boyne thought him a person
+of cultivation, and consulted him upon the opinion he had formed that
+there was not so much harm in such places as people said. The gentleman
+distinguished in saying that he thought you would not find more harm in
+them, if you did not bring it with you, than you would in the legitimate
+theatres; and in the hope of further wisdom from him, Boyne followed him
+out of the theatre and helped him on with his overcoat. The gentleman
+walked home to his hotel with him, and professed a pleasure in his
+acquaintance which he said he trusted they might sometime renew.
+
+All at once the Kentons began to be acquainted in the hotel, as often
+happens with people after they have long ridden up and down in the
+elevator together in bonds of apparently perpetual strangeness. From
+one friendly family their acquaintance spread to others until they were,
+almost without knowing it, suddenly and simultaneously on smiling and
+then on speaking terms with the people of every permanent table in the
+dining-room. Lottie and Boyne burst the chains of the unnatural kindness
+which bound them, and resumed their old relations of reciprocal censure.
+He found a fellow of his own age in the apartment below, who had the
+same country traditions and was engaged in a like inspection of the
+city; and she discovered two girls on another floor, who said they
+received on Saturdays and wanted her to receive with them. They made
+a tea for her, and asked some real New Yorkers; and such a round of
+pleasant little events began for her that Boyne was forced to call his
+mother’s attention to the way Charlotte was going on with the young men
+whom she met and frankly asked to call upon her without knowing anything
+about them; you could not do that in New York, he said.
+
+But by this time New York had gone to Mrs. Kenton’s head, too, and
+she was less fitted to deal with Lottie than at home. Whether she had
+succeeded or not in helping Ellen take her mind off herself, she had
+certainly freed her own from introspection in a dream of things which
+had seemed impossible before. She was in that moment of a woman’s life
+which has a certain pathos for the intelligent witness, when, having
+reared her children and outgrown the more incessant cares of her
+motherhood, she sometimes reverts to her girlish impulses and ideals,
+and confronts the remaining opportunities of life with a joyful hope
+unknown to our heavier and sullener sex in its later years. It is this
+peculiar power of rejuvenescence which perhaps makes so many women
+outlive their husbands, who at the same age regard this world as an
+accomplished fact. Mrs. Kenton had kept up their reading long after
+Kenton found himself too busy or too tired for it; and when he came
+from his office at night and fell asleep over the book she wished him to
+hear, she continued it herself, and told him about it. When Ellen began
+to show the same taste, they read together, and the mother was not
+jealous when the father betrayed that he was much prouder of his
+daughter’s culture than his wife’s. She had her own misgivings that she
+was not so modern as Ellen, and she accepted her judgment in the case of
+some authors whom she did not like so well.
+
+She now went about not only to all the places where she could make
+Ellen’s amusement serve as an excuse, but to others when she could not
+coax or compel the melancholy girl. She was as constant at matinees
+of one kind as Boyne at another sort; she went to the exhibitions of
+pictures, and got herself up in schools of painting; she frequented
+galleries, public and private, and got asked to studio teas; she went to
+meetings and conferences of aesthetic interest, and she paid an easy
+way to parlor lectures expressive of the vague but profound ferment
+in women’s souls; from these her presence in intellectual clubs was
+a simple and natural transition. She met and talked with interesting
+people, and now and then she got introduced to literary people. Once,
+in a book-store, she stood next to a gentleman leaning over the same
+counter, whom a salesman addressed by the name of a popular author, and
+she remained staring at him breathless till he left the place. When she
+bragged of the prodigious experience at home, her husband defied her to
+say how it differed from meeting the lecturers who had been their guests
+in Tuskingum, and she answered that none of them compared with this
+author; and, besides, a lion in his own haunts was very different from
+a lion going round the country on exhibition. Kenton thought that was
+pretty good, and owned that she had got him there.
+
+He laughed at her, to the children, but all the same she believed that
+she was living in an atmosphere of culture, and with every breath she
+was sensible of an intellectual expansion. She found herself in the
+enjoyment of so wide and varied a sympathy with interests hitherto
+strange to her experience that she could not easily make people believe
+she had never been to Europe. Nearly every one she met had been several
+times, and took it for granted that she knew the Continent as well as
+they themselves.
+
+She denied it with increasing shame; she tried to make Kenton understand
+how she felt, and she might have gone further if she had not seen how
+homesick he was for Tuskingum. She did her best to coax him and scold
+him into a share of the pleasure they were all beginning to have in New
+York. She made him own that Ellen herself was beginning to be gayer;
+she convinced him that his business was not suffering in his absence and
+that he was the better from the complete rest he was having. She defied
+him, to say, then, what was the matter with him, and she bitterly
+reproached herself, in the event, for not having known that it was not
+homesickness alone that was the trouble. When he was not going about
+with her, or doing something to amuse the children, he went upon long,
+lonely walks, and came home silent and fagged. He had given up smoking,
+and he did not care to sit about in the office of the hotel where other
+old fellows passed the time over their papers and cigars, in the heat of
+the glowing grates. They looked too much like himself, with their air of
+unrecognized consequence, and of personal loss in an alien environment.
+He knew from their dress and bearing that they were country people,
+and it wounded him in a tender place to realize that they had each left
+behind him in his own town an authority and a respect which they could
+not enjoy in New York. Nobody called them judge, or general, or doctor,
+or squire; nobody cared who they were, or what they thought; Kenton did
+not care himself; but when he missed one of them he envied him, for
+then he knew that he had gone back to the soft, warm keeping of his own
+neighborhood, and resumed the intelligent regard of a community he had
+grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former
+years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let
+them know he was in town, and then he was hurt that they ignored him. He
+kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought that
+it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New York,
+and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the indifference
+of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his local
+distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the pleasant
+younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up at one,
+he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had outlived the
+period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city as he world
+once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except the basements
+of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and picked up copies
+of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he read them, he
+sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away with
+the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see, with
+compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by these
+means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently proposed to
+go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.
+
+He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they
+should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the
+winter wore away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute
+instructions for getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the
+book-stalls by conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife
+could see that he had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find
+from one as from the other.
+
+She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and
+that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl
+herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope,
+for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with
+a kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in
+one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to
+the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he
+lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six
+weeks before he left his room.
+
+He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and
+he was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that
+when his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for
+him he submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. Her heart smote her for
+her guilty joy in his sentence, and she punished herself by asking if it
+would not do him more good to get back to the comfort and quiet of their
+own house. She went to the length of saying that she believed his attack
+had been brought on more by homesickness than anything else. But the
+doctor agreed rather with her wish than her word, and held out that his
+melancholy was not the cause but the effect of his disorder. Then she
+took courage and began getting ready to go. She did not flag even in the
+dark hours when Kenton got back his courage with his returning strength,
+and scoffed at the notion of Europe, and insisted that as soon as they
+were in Tuskingum he should be all right again.
+
+She felt the ingratitude, not to say the perfidy, of his behavior,
+and she fortified herself indignantly against it; but it was not her
+constant purpose, or the doctor’s inflexible opinion, that prevailed
+with Kenton at last a letter came one day for Ellen which she showed to
+her mother, and which her mother, with her distress obscurely relieved
+by a sense of its powerful instrumentality, brought to the girl’s
+father. It was from that fellow, as they always called him, and it asked
+of the girl a hearing upon a certain point in which, it had just come
+to his knowledge, she had misjudged him. He made no claim upon her, and
+only urged his wish to right himself with her because she was the one
+person in the whole world, after his mother, for whose good opinion he
+cared. With some tawdriness of sentiment, the letter was well worded;
+it was professedly written for the sole purpose of knowing whether, when
+she came back to Tuskingum, she would see him, and let him prove to her
+that he was not wholly unworthy of the kindness she had shown him when
+he was without other friends.
+
+“What does she say?” the judge demanded.
+
+“What do you suppose?” his wife retorted. “She thinks she ought to see
+him.”
+
+“Very well, then. We will go to Europe.”
+
+“Not on my account!” Mrs. Kenton consciously protested.
+
+“No; not on your account, or mine, either. On Nelly’s account. Where is
+she? I want to talk with her.”
+
+“And I want to talk with you. She’s out, with Lottie; and when she comes
+back I will tell her what you say. But I want to know what you think,
+first.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It was some time before they arrived at a common agreement as to what
+Kenton thought, and when they reached it they decided that they must
+leave the matter altogether to Ellen, as they had done before. They
+would never force her to anything, and if, after all that her mother
+could say, she still wished to see the fellow, they would not deny her.
+
+When it came to this, Ellen was a long time silent, so long a time that
+her mother was beginning restively to doubt whether she was going to
+speak at all. Then she drew a long, silent breath. “I suppose I ought to
+despise myself, momma, for caring for him, when he’s never really said
+that he cared for me.”
+
+“No, no,” her mother faltered.
+
+“But I do, I do!” she gave way piteously. “I can’t help it! He doesn’t
+say so, even now.”
+
+“No, he doesn’t.” It hurt her mother to own the fact that alone gave her
+hope.
+
+The girl was a long time silent again before she asked, “Has poppa got
+the tickets?”
+
+“Why, he wouldn’t, Ellen, child, till he knew how you felt,” her mother
+tenderly reproached her.
+
+“He’d better not wait!” The tears ran silently down Ellen’s cheeks, and
+her lips twitched a little between these words and the next; she spoke
+as if it were still of her father, but her mother understood. “If he
+ever does say so, don’t you speak a word to me, momma; and don’t you let
+poppa.”
+
+“No; indeed I won’t,” her mother promised. “Have we ever interfered,
+Ellen? Have we ever tried to control you?”
+
+“He WOULD have said so, if he hadn’t seen that everybody was against
+him.” The mother bore without reply the ingratitude and injustice that
+she knew were from the child’s pain and not from her will. “Where is his
+letter? Give me his letter!” She nervously twitched it from her mother’s
+hand and ran it into her pocket. She turned away to go and put off her
+hat, which she still wore from coming in with Lottie; but she stopped
+and looked over her shoulder at her mother. “I’m going to answer it, and
+I don’t want you ever to ask me what I’ve said. Will you?”
+
+“No, I won’t, Nelly.”
+
+“Well, then!”
+
+The next night she went with Boyne and Lottie to the apartment overhead
+to spend their last evening with the young people there, who were going
+into the country the next day. She came back without the others,
+who wished to stay a little longer, as she said, with a look of gay
+excitement in her eyes, which her mother knew was not happiness. Mrs.
+Kenton had an impulse to sweep into her lap the lithograph plans of
+the steamer, and the passage ticket which lay open on the table before
+herself and her husband. But it was too late to hide them from Ellen.
+She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down
+again. “Oh, I didn’t think you would do it!” she burst out; and she
+ran away to her room, where they could hear her sobbing, as they sat
+haggardly facing each other.
+
+“Well, that settles it,” said Benton at last, with a hard gulp.
+
+“Oh, I suppose so,” his wife assented.
+
+On his part, now, he had a genuine regret for her disappointment from
+the sad safety of the trouble that would keep them at home; and on her
+part she could be glad of it if any sort of comfort could come out of it
+to him.
+
+“Till she says go,” he added, “we’ve got to stay.”
+
+“Oh yes,” his wife responded. “The worst of it is, we can’t even go back
+to Tuskingum.” He looked up suddenly at her, and she saw that he had not
+thought of this. She made “Tchk!” in sheer amaze at him.
+
+“We won’t cross that river till we come to it,” he said, sullenly, but
+half-ashamed. The next morning the situation had not changed overnight,
+as they somehow both crazily hoped it might, and at breakfast, which
+they had at a table grown more remote from others with the thinning out
+of the winter guests of the hotel, the father and mother sat down alone
+in silence which was scarcely broken till Lottie and Boyne joined them.
+
+“Where’s Ellen?” the boy demanded.
+
+“She’s having her breakfast in her room,” Mrs. Kenton answered.
+
+“She says she don’t want to eat anything,” Lottie reported. “She made
+the man take it away again.”
+
+The gloom deepened in the faces of the father and mother, but neither
+spoke, and Boyne resumed the word again in a tone of philosophic
+speculation. “I don’t see how I’m going to get along, with those
+European breakfasts. They say you can’t get anything but cold meat or
+eggs; and generally they don’t expect to give you anything but bread and
+butter with your coffee. I don’t think that’s the way to start the day,
+do you, poppa?”
+
+Kenton seemed not to have heard, for he went on silently eating, and the
+mother, who had not been appealed to, merely looked distractedly across
+the table at her children.
+
+“Mr. Plumpton says he’s coming down to see us off,” said Lottie,
+smoothing her napkin in her lap. “Do you know the time of day when the
+boat sails, momma?”
+
+“Yes,” her brother broke in, “and if I had been momma I’d have boxed
+your ears for the way you went on with him. You fairly teased him to
+come. The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma.”
+
+“What time does the boat sail, momma!” Lottie blandly persisted. “I
+promised to let Mr. Plumpton know.”
+
+“Yes, so as to get a chance to write to him,” said Boyne. “I guess when
+he sees your spelling!”
+
+“Momma! Do wake up! What time does our steamer sail?”
+
+A light of consciousness came into Mrs. Renton’s eyes at last, and she
+sighed gently. “We’re not going, Lottie.”
+
+“Not going! Why, but we’ve got the tickets, and I’ve told--”
+
+“Your father has decided not to go, for the present. We may go later in
+the summer, or perhaps in the fall.”
+
+Boyne looked at his father’s troubled face, and said nothing, but Lottie
+was not stayed from the expression of her feelings by any ill-timed
+consideration for what her father’s might be. “I just know,” she fired,
+“it’s something to do with that nasty Bittridge. He’s been a bitter dose
+to this family! As soon as I saw Ellen have a letter I was sure it was
+from him; and she ought to be ashamed. If I had played the simpleton
+with such a fellow I guess you wouldn’t have let me keep you from going
+to Europe very much. What is she going to do now? Marry him? Or doesn’t
+he want her to?”
+
+“Lottie!” said her mother, and her father glanced up at her with a face
+that silenced her.
+
+“When you’ve been half as good a girl as Ellen has been, in this whole
+matter,” he said, darkly, “it will be time for you to complain of the
+way you’ve been treated.”
+
+“Oh yes, I know you like Ellen the best,” said the girl, defiantly.
+
+“Don’t say such a thing, Lottie!” said her mother. “Your father loves
+all his children alike, and I won’t have you talking so to him. Ellen
+has had a great deal to bear, and she has behaved beautifully. If we are
+not going to Europe it is because we have decided that it is best not to
+go, and I wish to hear nothing more from you about it.”
+
+“Oh yes! And a nice position it leaves me in, when I’ve been taking
+good-bye of everybody! Well, I hope to goodness you won’t say anything
+about it till the Plumptons get away. I couldn’t have the face to meet
+them if you did.”
+
+“It won’t be necessary to say anything; or you can say that we’ve merely
+postponed our sailing. People are always doing that.”
+
+“It’s not to be a postponement,” said Kenton, so sternly that no one
+ventured to dispute him, the children because they were afraid of him,
+and their mother because she was suffering for him.
+
+At the steamship office, however, the authorities represented that it
+was now so near the date of his sailing that they could not allow him to
+relinquish his passages except at his own risk. They would try to sell
+his ticket for him, but they could not take it back, and they could not
+promise to sell it. There was reason in what they said, but if there had
+been none, they had the four hundred dollars which Kenton had paid
+for his five berths and they had at least the advantage of him in
+the argument by that means. He put the ticket back in his pocket-book
+without attempting to answer them, and deferred his decision till he
+could advise with his wife, who, after he left the breakfast-table upon
+his errand to the steamship office, had abandoned her children to their
+own devices, and gone to scold Ellen for not eating.
+
+She had not the heart to scold her when she found the girl lying face
+downward in the pillow, with her thin arms thrown up through the coils
+and heaps of her loose-flung hair. She was so alight that her figure
+scarcely defined itself under the bedclothes; the dark hair, and the
+white, outstretched arms seemed all there was of her. She did not stir,
+but her mother knew she was not sleeping. “Ellen,” she said, gently,
+“you needn’t be troubled about our going to Europe. Your father has gone
+down to the steamship office to give back his ticket.”
+
+The girl flashed her face round with nervous quickness. “Gone to give
+back his ticket!”
+
+“Yes, we decided it last night. He’s never really wanted to go, and--”
+
+“But I don’t wish poppa to give up his ticket!” said Ellen. “He must get
+it again. I shall die if I stay here, momma. We have got to go. Can’t
+you understand that?”
+
+Mrs. Kenton did not know what to answer. She had a strong superficial
+desire to shake her daughter as a naughty child which has vexed its
+mother, but under this was a stir stronger pity for her as a woman,
+which easily, prevailed. “Why, but, Ellen dear! We thought from what you
+said last night--”
+
+“But couldn’t you SEE,” the girl reproached her, and she began to cry,
+and turned her face into the pillow again and lay sobbing.
+
+“Well,” said her mother, after she had given her a little time, “you
+needn’t be troubled. Your father can easily get the ticket again; he can
+telephone down for it. Nothing has been done yet. But didn’t you really
+want to stay, then?”
+
+“It isn’t whether I want to stay or not,” Ellen spoke into her pillow.
+“You know that. You know that I have got to go. You know that if I saw
+him--Oh, why do you make me talk?”
+
+“Yes, I understand, child.” Then, in the imperious necessity of blaming
+some one, Mrs. Kenton added: “You know how it is with your father. He is
+always so precipitate; and when he heard what you said, last night, it
+cut him to the heart. He felt as if he were dragging you away, and this
+morning he could hardly wait to get through his breakfast before he
+rushed down to the steamship office. But now it’s all right again, and
+if you want to go, we’ll go, and your father will only be too glad.”
+
+“I don’t want father to go against his will. You said he never wanted to
+go to Europe.” The girl had turned her face upon her mother again; and
+fixed her with her tearful, accusing eyes.
+
+“The doctors say he ought to go. He needs the change, and I think we
+should all be the better far getting away.”
+
+“I shall not,” said Ellen. “But if I don’t--”
+
+“Yes,” said her mother, soothingly.
+
+“You know that nothing has changed. He hasn’t changed and I haven’t. If
+he was bad, he’s as bad as ever, and I’m just as silly. Oh, it’s like a
+drunkard! I suppose they know it’s killing them, but they can’t give it
+up! Don’t you think it’s very strange, momma? I don’t see why I should
+be so. It seems as if I had no character at all, and I despise myself
+so! Do you believe I shall ever get over it? Sometimes I think the best
+thing for me would be to go into an asylum.”
+
+“Oh yes, dear; you’ll get over it, and forget it all. As soon as you see
+others--other scenes--and get interested--”
+
+“And you don’t you don’t think I’d better let him come, and--”
+
+“Ellen!”
+
+Ellen began to sob again, and toss her head upon the pillow. “What shall
+I do? What shall I do?” she wailed. “He hasn’t ever done anything bad to
+me, and if I can overlook his--his flirting--with that horrid thing,
+I don’t know what the rest of you have got to say. And he says he can
+explain everything. Why shouldn’t I give him the chance, momma? I do
+think it is acting very cruel not to let him even say a word.”
+
+“You can see him if you wish, Ellen,” said her mother, gravely. “Your
+father and I have always said that. And perhaps it would be the best
+thing, after all.”
+
+“Oh, you say that because you think that if I did see him, I should be
+so disgusted with him that I’d never want to speak to him again. But
+what if I shouldn’t?”
+
+“Then we should wish you to do whatever you thought was for your
+happiness, Ellen. We can’t believe it would be for your good; but if it
+would be for your happiness, we are willing. Or, if you don’t think it’s
+for your happiness, but only for his, and you wish to do it, still we
+shall be willing, and you know that as far as your father and I are
+concerned, there will never be a word of reproach--not a whisper.”
+
+“Lottie would despise me; and what would Richard say?”
+
+“Richard would never say anything to wound you, dear, and if you don’t
+despise yourself, you needn’t mind Lottie.”
+
+“But I should, momma; that’s the worst of it! I should despise myself,
+and he would despise me too. No, if I see him, I am going to do it
+because I am selfish and wicked, and wish to have my own way, no matter
+who is harmed by it, or--anything; and I’m not going to have it put on
+any other ground. I could see him,” she said, as if to herself, “just
+once more--only once more--and then if I didn’t believe in him, I could
+start right off to Europe.”
+
+Her mother made no answer to this, and Ellen lay awhile apparently
+forgetful of her presence, inwardly dramatizing a passionate scene of
+dismissal between herself and her false lover. She roused herself from
+the reverie with a long sigh, and her mother said, “Won’t you have some
+breakfast, now; Ellen?”
+
+“Yes; and I will get up. You needn’t be troubled any more about me,
+momma. I will write to him not to come, and poppa must go back and get
+his ticket again.”
+
+“Not unless you are doing this of your own free will, child. I can’t
+have you feeling that we are putting any pressure upon you.”
+
+“You’re not. I’m doing it of my own will. If it isn’t my free will, that
+isn’t your fault. I wonder whose fault it is? Mine, or what made me so
+silly and weak?”
+
+“You are not silly and weak,” said her mother, fondly, and she bent over
+the girl and would have kissed her, but Ellen averted her face with
+a piteous “Don’t!” and Mrs. Kenton went out and ordered her breakfast
+brought back.
+
+She did not go in to make her eat it, as she would have done in the
+beginning of the girl’s trouble; they had all learned how much better
+she was for being left to fight her battles with herself singlehanded.
+Mrs. Kenton waited in the parlor till her husband same in, looking
+gloomy and tired. He put his hat down and sank into a chair without
+speaking. “Well?” she said.
+
+“We have got to lose the price of the ticket, if we give it back. I
+thought I had better talk with you first,” said Kenton, and he explained
+the situation.
+
+“Then you had better simply have it put off till the next steamer. I
+have been talking with Ellen, and she doesn’t want to stay. She wants
+to go.” His wife took advantage of Kenton’s mute amaze (in the nervous
+vagaries even of the women nearest him a man learns nothing from
+experience) to put her own interpretation on the case, which, as it was
+creditable to the girl’s sense and principle, he found acceptable if not
+imaginable. “And if you will take my advice,” she ended, “you will go
+quietly back to the steamship office and exchange your ticket for the
+next steamer, or the one after that, if you can’t get good rooms, and
+give Ellen time to get over this before she leaves. It will be much
+better for her to conquer herself than to run away, for that would
+always give her a feeling of shame, and if she decides before she goes,
+it will strengthen her pride and self-respect, and there will be less
+danger--when we come back.”
+
+“Do you think he’s going to keep after her!”
+
+“How can I tell? He will if he thinks it’s to his interest, or he can
+make anybody miserable by it.”
+
+Kenton said nothing to this, but after a while he suggested, rather
+timorously, as if it were something he could not expect her to approve,
+and was himself half ashamed of, “I believe if I do put it off, I’ll
+run out to Tuskingum before we sail, and look after a little matter of
+business that I don’t think Dick can attend to so well.”
+
+His wife knew why he wanted to go, and in her own mind she had already
+decided that if he should ever propose to go, she should not gainsay
+him. She had, in fact, been rather surprised that he had not proposed
+it before this, and now she assented, without taxing him with his real
+motive, and bringing him to open disgrace before her. She even went
+further in saying: “Very well, then you had better go. I can get on very
+well here, and I think it will leave Ellen freer to act for herself if
+you are away. And there are some things in the house that I want, and
+that Richard would be sure to send his wife to get if I asked him, and
+I won’t have her rummaging around in my closets. I suppose you will want
+to go into the house?”
+
+“I suppose so,” said Renton, who had not let a day pass, since he left
+his house, without spending half his homesick time in it. His wife
+suffered his affected indifference to go without exposure, and trumped
+up a commission for him, which would take him intimately into the house.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The piety of his son Richard had maintained the place at Tuskingum in
+perfect order outwardly, and Kenton’s heart ached with tender pain as he
+passed up the neatly kept walk from the gate, between the blooming ranks
+of syringas and snowballs, to his door, and witnessed the faithful
+care that Richard’s hired man had bestowed upon every detail. The grass
+between the banks of roses and rhododendrons had been as scrupulously
+lawn-mowered and as sedulously garden-hosed as if Kenton himself had
+been there to look after its welfare, or had tended the shrubbery as
+he used to do in earlier days with his own hand. The oaks which he had
+planted shook out their glossy green in the morning gale, and in the
+tulip-trees, which had snowed their petals on the ground in wide circles
+defined by the reach of their branches, he heard the squirrels barking;
+a red-bird from the woody depths behind the house mocked the cat-birds
+in the quince-trees. The June rose was red along the trellis of the
+veranda, where Lottie ought to be sitting to receive the morning calls
+of the young men who were sometimes quite as early as Kenton’s present
+visit in their devotions, and the sound of Ellen’s piano, played
+fitfully and absently in her fashion, ought to be coming out
+irrespective of the hour. It seemed to him that his wife must open
+the door as his steps and his son’s made themselves heard on the walk
+between the box borders in their upper orchard, and he faltered a
+little.
+
+“Look here, father,” said his son, detecting his hesitation. “Why don’t
+you let Mary come in with you, and help you find those things?”
+
+“No, no,” said Kenton, sinking into one of the wooden seats that flanked
+the door-way. “I promised your mother that I would get them myself. You
+know women don’t like to have other women going through their houses.”
+
+“Yes, but Mary!” his son urged.
+
+“Ah! It’s just Mary, with her perfect housekeeping, that your mother
+wouldn’t like to have see the way she left things,” said Kenton, and he
+smiled at the notion of any one being housekeeper enough to find a flaw
+in his wife’s. “My, but this is pleasant!” he added. He took off his
+hat and let the breeze play through the lank, thin hair which was still
+black on his fine, high forehead. He was a very handsome old man, with
+a delicate aquiline profile, of the perfect Roman type which is perhaps
+oftener found in America than ever it was in Rome. “You’ve kept it very
+nice, Dick,” he said, with a generalizing wave of his hat.
+
+“Well, I couldn’t tell whether you would be coming back or not, and I
+thought I had better be ready for you.”
+
+“I wish we were,” said the old man, “and we shall be, in the fall, or
+the latter part of the summer. But it’s better now that we should go--on
+Ellen’s account.”
+
+“Oh, you’ll enjoy it,” his son evaded him.
+
+“You haven’t seen anything of him lately?” Kenton suggested.
+
+“He wasn’t likely to let me see anything of him,” returned the son.
+
+“No,” said the father. “Well!” He rose to put the key into the door, and
+his son stepped down from the little porch to the brick walk.
+
+“Mary will have dinner early, father; and when you’ve got through here,
+you’d better come over and lie down a while beforehand.”
+
+Kenton had been dropped at eight o’clock from a sleeper on the Great
+Three, and had refused breakfast at his son’s house, upon the plea that
+the porter had given him a Southern cantaloupe and a cup of coffee on
+the train, and he was no longer hungry.
+
+“All right,” he said. “I won’t be longer than I can help.” He had got
+the door open and was going to close it again.
+
+His son laughed. “Better not shut it, father. It will let the fresh air
+in.”
+
+“Oh, all right,” said the old man.
+
+The son lingered about, giving some orders to the hired man in the
+vegetable garden, for an excuse, in the hope that his father might
+change his mind and ask him to come into the house with him; he felt it
+so forlorn for him to be going through those lifeless rooms alone.
+When he looked round, and saw his father holding the door ajar, as if
+impatiently waiting for him to be gone, he laughed and waved his hand
+to him. “All right, father? I’m going now.” But though he treated the
+matter so lightly with his father, he said grimly to his wife, as he
+passed her on their own porch, on his way to his once, “I don’t like to
+think of father being driven out of house and home this way.”
+
+“Neither do I, Dick. But it can’t be helped, can it?”
+
+“I think I could help it, if I got my hands on that fellow once.”
+
+“No, you couldn’t, Dick. It’s not he that’s doing it. It’s Ellen; you
+know that well enough; and you’ve just got to stand it.”
+
+“Yes, I suppose so,” said Richard Kenton.
+
+“Of course, my heart aches for your poor old father, but so it would if
+Ellen had some kind of awful sickness. It is a kind of sickness, and you
+can’t fight it any more than if she really was sick.”
+
+“No,” said the husband, dejectedly. “You just slip over there, after a
+while, Mary, if father’s gone too long, will you? I don’t like to have
+him there alone.”
+
+“‘Deed and ‘deed I won’t, Dick. He wouldn’t like it at all, my spying
+round. Nothing can happen to him, and I believe your mother’s just made
+an excuse to send him after something, so that he can be in there alone,
+and realize that the house isn’t home any more. It will be easier for
+him to go to Europe when he finds that out. I believe in my heart that
+was her idea in not wanting me to find the things for him, and I’m not
+going to meddle myself.”
+
+With the fatuity of a man in such things, and with the fatuity of
+age regarding all the things of the past, Kenton had thought in his
+homesickness of his house as he used to be in it, and had never been
+able to picture it without the family life. As he now walked through the
+empty rooms, and up and down the stairs, his pulse beat low as if in the
+presence of death. Everything was as they had left it, when they went
+out of the house, and it appeared to Kenton that nothing had been
+touched there since, though when he afterwards reported to his wife that
+there was not a speck of dust anywhere she knew that Mary had been going
+through the house, in their absence, not once only, but often, and she
+felt a pang of grateful jealousy. He got together the things that Mrs.
+Kenton had pretended to want, and after glancing in at the different
+rooms, which seemed to be lying stealthily in wait for him, with their
+emptiness and silence, he went down-stairs with the bundle he had made,
+and turned into his library. He had some thought of looking at the
+collections for his history, but, after pulling open one of the drawers
+in which they were stored, he pushed it to again, and sank listlessly
+into his leather-covered swivel-chair, which stood in its place before
+the wide writing-table, and seemed to have had him in it before he sat
+down. The table was bare, except for the books and documents which he
+had sent home from time to time during the winter, and which Richard or
+his wife had neatly arranged there without breaking their wraps. He
+let fall his bundle at his feet, and sat staring at the ranks of books
+against the wall, mechanically relating them to the different epochs of
+the past in which he or his wife or his children had been interested
+in them, and aching with tender pain. He had always supposed himself a
+happy and strong and successful man, but what a dreary ruin his life had
+fallen into! Was it to be finally so helpless and powerless (for with
+all the defences about him that a man can have, he felt himself fatally
+vulnerable) that he had fought so many years? Why, at his age, should
+he be going into exile, away from everything that could make his days
+bright and sweet? Why could not he come back there, where he was now
+more solitary than he could be anywhere else on earth, and reanimate the
+dead body of his home with his old life? He knew why, in an immediate
+sort, but his quest was for the cause behind the cause. What had he
+done, or left undone? He had tried to be a just man, and fulfil all
+his duties both to his family and to his neighbors; he had wished to be
+kind, and not to harm any one; he reflected how, as he had grown older,
+the dread of doing any unkindness had grown upon him, and how he had
+tried not to be proud, but to walk meekly and humbly. Why should he be
+punished as he was, stricken in a place so sacred that the effort to
+defend himself had seemed a kind of sacrilege? He could not make it out,
+and he was not aware of the tears of self-pity that stole slowly down
+his face, though from time to time he wiped them away.
+
+He heard steps in the hall without, advancing and pausing, which must be
+those of his son coming back for him, and with these advances and pauses
+giving him notice of his approach; but he did not move, and at first
+he did not look up when the steps arrived at the threshold of the room
+where he sat. When he lifted his eyes at last he saw Bittridge lounging
+in the door-way, with one shoulder supported against the door-jamb, his
+hands in his pockets and his hat pushed well back on his forehead. In an
+instant all Kenton’s humility and soft repining were gone. “Well, what
+is it?” he called.
+
+“Oh,” said Bittridge, coming forward. He laughed and explained, “Didn’t
+know if you recognized me.”
+
+“I recognized you,” said Kenton, fiercely. “What is it you want?”
+
+“Well, I happened to be passing, and I saw the door open, and I thought
+maybe Dick was here.”
+
+It was on Kenton’s tongue to say that it was a good thing for him
+Dick was not there. But partly the sense that this would be unbecoming
+bluster, and partly the suffocating resentment of the fellow’s
+impudence, limited his response to a formless gasp, and Bittridge went
+on: “But I’m glad to find you here, judge. I didn’t know that you were
+in town. Family all well in New York?” He was not quelled by the silence
+of the judge on this point, but, as if he had not expected any definite
+reply to what might well pass for formal civility, he now looked aslant
+into his breast-pocket from which he drew a folded paper. “I just got
+hold of a document this morning that I think will interest you. I was
+bringing it round to Dick’s wife for you.” The intolerable familiarity
+of all this was fast working Kenton to a violent explosion, but he
+contained himself, and Bittridge stepped forward to lay the paper on
+the table before him. “It’s the original roster of Company C, in your
+regiment, and--”
+
+“Take it away!” shouted Kenton, “and take yourself away with it!” and he
+grasped the stick that shook in his hand.
+
+A wicked light came into Bittridge’s eye as he drawled, in lazy scorn,
+“Oh, I don’t know.” Then his truculence broke in a malicious amusement.
+“Why, judge, what’s the matter?” He put on a face of mock gravity, and
+Kenton knew with helpless fury that he was enjoying his vantage. He
+could fall upon him and beat him with his stick, leaving the situation
+otherwise undefined, but a moment’s reflection convinced Kenton that
+this would not do. It made him sick to think of striking the fellow, as
+if in that act he should be striking Ellen, too. It did not occur to him
+that he could be physically worsted, or that his vehement age would
+be no match for the other’s vigorous youth. All he thought was that it
+would not avail, except to make known to every one what none but her
+dearest could now conjecture. Bittridge could then publicly say, and
+doubtless would say, that he had never made love to Ellen; that if there
+had been any love-making it was all on her side; and that he had only
+paid her the attentions which any young man might blamelessly pay a
+pretty girl. This would be true to the facts in the case, though it was
+true also that he had used every tacit art to make her believe him in
+love with her. But how could this truth be urged, and to whom? So far
+the affair had been quite in the hands of Ellen’s family, and they had
+all acted for the best, up to the present time. They had given Bittridge
+no grievance in making him feel that he was unwelcome in their house,
+and they were quite within their rights in going away, and making it
+impossible for him to see her again anywhere in Tuskingum. As for his
+seeing her in New York, Ellen had but to say that she did not wish it,
+and that would end it. Now, however, by treating him rudely, Kenton was
+aware that he had bound himself to render Bittridge some account of his
+behavior throughout, if the fellow insisted upon it.
+
+“I want nothing to do with you, sir,” he said, less violently, but,
+as he felt, not more effectually. “You are in my house without my
+invitation, and against my wish!”
+
+“I didn’t expect to find you here. I came in because I saw the door
+open, and I thought I might see Dick or his wife and give them, this
+paper for you. But I’m glad I found you, and if you won’t give me any
+reason for not wanting me here, I can give it myself, and I think I can
+make out a very good case for you.” Kenton quivered in anticipation of
+some mention of Ellen, and Bittridge smiled as if he understood. But he
+went on to say: “I know that there were things happened after you first
+gave me the run of your house that might make you want to put up the
+bars again--if they were true. But they were not true. And I can prove
+that by the best of all possible witnesses--by Uphill himself. He stands
+shoulder to shoulder with me, to make it hot for any one who couples his
+wife’s name with mine.”
+
+“Humph!” Kenton could not help making this comment, and Bittridge, being
+what he was, could not help laughing.
+
+“What’s the use?” he asked, recovering himself. “I don’t pretend that
+I did right, but you know there wasn’t any harm in it. And if there had
+been I should have got the worst of it. Honestly, judge, I couldn’t tell
+you how much I prized being admitted to your house on the terms I was.
+Don’t you think I could appreciate the kindness you all showed me?
+Before you took me up, I was alone in Tuskingum, but you opened every
+door in the place for me. You made it home to me; and you won’t believe
+it, of course, because you’re prejudiced; but I felt like a son and
+brother to you all. I felt towards Mrs. Kenton just as I do towards my
+own mother. I lost the best friends I ever had when you turned against
+me. Don’t you suppose I’ve seen the difference here in Tuskingum? Of
+course, the men pass the time of day with me when we meet, but they
+don’t look me up, and there are more near-sighted girls in this town!”
+ Kenton could not keep the remote dawn of a smile out of his eyes, and
+Bittridge caught the far-off gleam. “And everybody’s been away the whole
+winter. Not a soul at home, anywhere, and I had to take my chance of
+surprising Mrs. Dick Kenton when I saw your door open here.” He laughed
+forlornly, as the gleam faded out of Kenton’s eye again. “And the worst
+of it is that my own mother isn’t at home to me, figuratively speaking,
+when I go over to see her at Ballardsville. She got wind of my
+misfortune, somehow, and when I made a clean breast of it to her, she
+said she could never feel the same to me till I had made it all right
+with the Kentons. And when a man’s own mother is down on him, judge!”
+
+Bittridge left Kenton to imagine the desperate case, and in spite of his
+disbelief in the man and all he said, Kenton could not keep his hardness
+of heart towards him. “I don’t know what you’re after, young man,” he
+began. “But if you expect me to receive you under my roof again--”
+
+“Oh, I don’t, judge, I don’t!” Bittridge interposed. “All I want is to
+be able to tell my mother--I don’t care for anybody else--that I saw
+you, and you allowed me to say that I was truly sorry for the pain--if
+it was pain; or annoyance, anyway--that I had caused you, and to go back
+to her with the hope of atoning for it sometime or somehow. That’s all.”
+
+“Look here!” cried Renton. “What have you written to my daughter for?”
+
+“Wasn’t that natural? I prized her esteem more than I do yours even; but
+did I ask her anything more than I’ve asked you? I didn’t expect her to
+answer me; all I wanted was to have her believe that I wasn’t as black
+as I was painted--not inside, anyway. You know well enough--anybody
+knows--that I would rather have her think well of me than any one else
+in this world, except my mother. I haven’t got the gift of showing out
+what’s good in me, if there is any good, but I believe Miss Ellen would
+want to think well of me if I gave her a chance. If ever there was an
+angel on earth, she’s one. I don’t deny that I was hopeful of mercy from
+her, because she can’t think evil, but I can lay my hand on my heart and
+say that I wasn’t selfish in my hopes. It seemed to me that it was
+her due to understand that a man whom she had allowed to be her friend
+wasn’t altogether unworthy. That’s as near as I can come to putting into
+words the motive I had in writing to her. I can’t even begin to put
+into words the feeling I have towards her. It’s as if she was something
+sacred.”
+
+This was the feeling Renton himself had towards his daughter, and for
+the first time he found himself on common ground with the scapegrace
+who professed it, and whose light, mocking face so little enforced his
+profession. If Bittridge could have spoken in the dark, his words might
+have carried a conviction of his sincerity, but there, in plain day,
+confronting the father of Ellen, who had every wish to believe him true,
+the effect was different. Deep within his wish to think the man honest,
+Kenton recoiled from him. He vaguely perceived that it was because she
+could not think evil that this wretch had power upon her, and he was
+sensible, as he had not been before, that she had no safety from him
+except in absence. He did not know what to answer; he could not repel
+him in open terms, and still less could he meet him with any words that
+would allow him to resume his former relations with his family. He said,
+finally: “We will let matters stand. We are going to Europe in a week,
+and I shall not see you again. I will tell Mrs. Kenton what you say.”
+
+“Thank you, judge. And tell her that I appreciate your kindness more
+than I can say!” The judge rose from his chair and went towards the
+window, which he had thrown open. “Going to shut up? Let me help you
+with that window; it seems to stick. Everything fast up-stairs?”
+
+“I--I think so,” Kenton hesitated.
+
+“I’ll just run up and look,” said Bittridge, and he took the stairs two
+at a time, before Kenton could protest, when they came out into the hall
+together. “It’s all right,” he reported on his quick return. “I’ll just
+look round below here,” and he explored the ground-floor rooms in turn.
+“No, you hadn’t opened any other window,” he said, glancing finally into
+the library. “Shall I leave this paper on your table?”
+
+“Yes, leave it there,” said Kenton, helplessly, and he let Bittridge
+close the front door after him, and lock it.
+
+“I hope Miss Lottie is well,” he suggested in handing the key to Kenton.
+“And Boyne” he added, with the cordiality of an old family friend.
+“I hope Boyne has got reconciled to New York a little. He was rather
+anxious about his pigeons when he left, I understand. But I guess
+Dick’s man has looked after them. I’d have offered to take charge of the
+cocoons myself if I’d had a chance.” He walked, gayly chatting, across
+the intervening lawn with Kenton to his son’s door, where at sight of
+him bra. Richard Kenton evanesced into the interior so obviously that
+Bittridge could not offer to come in. “Well, I shall see you all when
+you come back in the fall, judge, and I hope you’ll have a pleasant
+voyage and a good time in Europe.”
+
+“Thank you,” said Kenton, briefly.
+
+“Remember me to the ladies!” and Bittridge took off his hat with his
+left hand, while he offered the judge his right. “Well, good-bye!”
+
+Kenton made what response he could, and escaped in-doors, where his
+daughter-in-law appeared from the obscurity into which she had retired
+from Bittridge. “Well, that follow does beat all! How, in the world did
+he find you, father?”
+
+“He came into the house,” said the judge, much abashed at his failure to
+deal adequately with Bittridge. He felt it the more in the presence of
+his son’s wife. “I couldn’t, seem to get rid of him in any way short of
+kicking him out.”
+
+“No, there’s nothing equal to his impudence. I do believe he would have
+come in here, if he hadn’t seen me first. Did you tell him when you were
+going back, father? Because he’d be at the train to see you off, just as
+sure!”
+
+“No, I didn’t tell him,” said Kenton, feeling move shaken now from the
+interview with Bittridge than he had realized before. He was ashamed to
+let Mary know that he had listened to Bittridge’s justification, which
+he now perceived was none, and he would have liked to pretend that he
+had not silently condoned his offences, but Mary did not drive him to
+these deceptions by any further allusions to Bittridge.
+
+“Well, now, you must go into the sitting-room and lie down on the
+lounge; I promised Dick to make you. Or would you rather go up-stairs to
+your room?”
+
+“I think I’ll go to my room,” said Kenton.
+
+He was asleep there on the bed when Richard came home to dinner and
+looked softly in. He decided not to wake him, and Mary said the sleep
+would do him more good than the dinner. At table they talked him over,
+and she told her husband what she knew of the morning’s adventure.
+
+“That was pretty tough for father,” said Richard. “I wouldn’t go into
+the house with him, because I knew he wanted to have it to himself; and
+then to think of that dirty hound skulking in! Well, perhaps it’s for
+the best. It will make it easier, for father to go and leave the place,
+and they’ve got to go. They’ve got to put the Atlantic Ocean between
+Ellen and that fellow.”
+
+“It does seem as if something might be done,” his wife rebelled.
+
+“They’ve done the best that could be done,” said Richard. “And if
+that skunk hasn’t got some sort of new hold upon father, I shall be
+satisfied. The worst of it is that it will be all over town in an hour
+that Bittridge has made up with us. I don’t blame father; he couldn’t
+help it; he never could be rude to anybody.”
+
+“I think I’ll try if I can’t be rude to Mr. Bittridge, if he ever
+undertakes to show in my pretence that he has made it up with us,” said
+Mary.
+
+Richard tenderly found out from his father’s shamefaced reluctance,
+later, that no great mischief had been done. But no precaution on his
+part availed to keep Bittridge from demonstrating the good feeling
+between himself and the Kentons when the judge started for New York the
+next afternoon. He was there waiting to see him off, and he all but
+took the adieus out of Richard’s hands. He got possession of the judge’s
+valise, and pressed past the porter into the sleeping-car with it, and
+remained lounging on the arm of the judge’s seat, making conversation
+with him and Richard till the train began to move. Then he ran outside,
+and waved his hand to the judge’s window in farewell, before all that
+leisure of Tuskingum which haunted the arrival and departure of the
+trains.
+
+Mary Kenton was furious when her husband came home and reported the fact
+to her.
+
+“How in the world did he find out when father was going?”
+
+“He must have come to all the through trains since he say him yesterday.
+But I think even you would have been suited, Mary, if you had seen his
+failure to walk off from the depot arm-in-arm with me:
+
+“I wouldn’t have been suited with anything short of your knocking, him
+down, Dick.”
+
+“Oh, that wouldn’t have done,” said Richard. After a while he added,
+patiently, “Ellen is making a good deal of trouble for us.”
+
+This was what Mary was thinking herself, and it was what she might have
+said, but since Dick had said it she was obliged to protest. “She isn’t
+to blame for it.”
+
+“Oh, I know she isn’t to blame.”
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+The father of the unhappy girl was of the same mixed mind as he rode
+sleeplessly back to New York in his berth, and heard the noises of
+slumber all round him. From time to time he groaned softly, and
+turned from one cheek to the other. Every half-hour or so he let his
+window-curtain fly up, and lay watching the landscape fleeting past; and
+then he pulled the curtain down again and tried to sleep. After passing
+Albany he dozed, but at Poughkeepsie a zealous porter called him
+by mistake, and the rest of the way to New York he sat up in the
+smoking-room. It seemed a long while since he had drowsed; the thin nap
+had not rested him, and the old face that showed itself in the glass,
+with the frost of a two days’ beard on it, was dry-eyed and limply
+squared by the fall of the muscles at the corners of the chin.
+
+He wondered how he should justify to his wife the thing which he felt as
+accountable for having happened to him as if he could have prevented it.
+It would not have happened, of course, if he had not gone to Tuskingum,
+and she could say that to him; now it seemed to him that his going,
+which had been so imperative before he went, was altogether needless.
+Nothing but harm had come of it, and it had been a selfish indulgence of
+a culpable weakness.
+
+It was a little better for Kenton when he found himself with his family,
+and they went down together to the breakfast which the mother had
+engaged the younger children to make as pleasant as they could for their
+father, and not worry him with talk about Tuskingum. They had, in fact,
+got over their first season of homesickness, and were postponing their
+longing for Tuskingum till their return from Europe, when they would all
+go straight out there. Kenton ran the gauntlet of welcome from the black
+elevator-boys and bell-boys and the head-waiter, who went before him to
+pull out the judge’s chair, with commanding frowns to his underlings
+to do the like for the rest of the family; and as his own clumsy Irish
+waiter stood behind his chair, breathing heavily upon the judge’s head,
+he gave his order for breakfast, with a curious sense of having got home
+again from some strange place. He satisfied Boyne that his pigeons and
+poultry had been well cared for through the winter, and he told Lottie
+that he had not met much of anybody except Dick’s family, before he
+recollected seeing half a dozen of her young men at differed times. She
+was not very exacting about them and her mind seemed set upon Europe, or
+at least she talked of nothing else. Ellen was quiet as she always was,
+but she smiled gently on her father, and Mrs. Kenton told him of the
+girl’s preparations for going, and congratulated herself on their wisdom
+in having postponed their sailing, in view of all they had to do; and
+she made Kenton feel that everything was in the best possible shape. As
+soon as she got him alone in their own room, she said, “Well, what is
+it, poppa?”
+
+Then he had to tell her, and she listened with ominous gravity. She did
+not say that now he could see how much better it would have been if he
+had not gone, but she made him say it for her; and she would not let
+him take comfort in the notion of keeping the fact of his interview with
+Bittridge from Ellen. “It would be worse than useless. He will write to
+her about it, and then she will know that we have been, concealing it.”
+
+Kenton was astonished at himself for not having thought of that. “And
+what are you going to do, Sarah?”
+
+“I am going to tell her,” said Mrs. Kenton.
+
+“Why didn’t poppa tell me before?” the girl perversely demanded, as soon
+as her another had done so.
+
+“Ellen, you are a naughty child! I have a great mind not to have a word
+more to say to you. Your father hasn’t been in the house an hour. Did
+you want him to speak before Lottie and Boyne!”
+
+“I don’t see why he didn’t tell me himself. I know there is something
+you are keeping back. I know there is some word--”
+
+“Oh, you poor girl!” said her mother, melting into pity against all
+sense of duty. “Have we ever tried to deceive you?”
+
+“No,” Ellen sobbed, with her face in her hands. “Now I will tell you
+every word that passed,” said Mrs. Kenton, and she told, as well as she
+could remember, all that the judge had repeated from Bittridge. “I don’t
+say he isn’t ashamed of himself,” she commented at the end. “He ought to
+be, and, of course, he would be glad to be in with us again when we go
+back; but that doesn’t alter his character, Ellen. Still, if you can’t
+see that yourself, I don’t want to make you, and if you would rather go
+home to Tuskingum, we will give up the trip to Europe.”
+
+“It’s too late to do that now,” said the girl, in cruel reproach.
+
+Her mother closed her lips resolutely till she could say, “Or you can
+write to him if you want to.”
+
+“I don’t want to,” said Ellen, and she dragged herself up out of her
+chair, and trailed slowly out of the room without looking at her mother.
+
+“Well?” the judge asked, impatiently, when he came in as soon after this
+as he decently could. They observed forms with regard to talking about
+Ellen which, after all, were rather for themselves than for her; Mrs.
+Kenton, at least, knew that the girl knew when they were talking about
+her.
+
+“She took it as well as I expected.”
+
+“What is she going to do?”
+
+“She didn’t say. But I don’t believe she will do anything.”
+
+“I wish I had taken our tickets for next Saturday,” said Kenton.
+
+“Well, we must wait now,” said his wife. “If he doesn’t write to her,
+she won’t write to him.”
+
+“Has she ever answered that letter of his?”
+
+“No, and I don’t believe she will now.”
+
+That night Ellen came to her mother and said she need not be afraid of
+her writing to Bittridge. “He hasn’t changed, if he was wrong, by coming
+and saying those things to poppa, and nothing has changed.”
+
+“That is the way I hoped you would see it; Ellen.” Her mother looked
+wistfully at her, but the girl left her without letting her satisfy the
+longing in the mother’s heart to put her arms round her child, and pull
+her head down upon her breast for a cry.
+
+Kenton slept better that night than his wife, who was kept awake by a
+formless foreboding. For the week that followed she had the sense of
+literally pushing the hours away, so that at times she found herself
+breathless, as if from some heavy physical exertion. At such times she
+was frantic with the wish to have the days gone, and the day of their
+sailing come, but she kept her impatience from her husband and children,
+and especially from Ellen. The girl was passive enough; she was almost
+willing, and in the preparation for their voyage she did her share of
+the shopping, and discussed the difficult points of this business with
+her mother and sister as if she had really been thinking about it all.
+But her mother doubted if she had, and made more of Ellen’s sunken eyes
+and thin face than of her intelligent and attentive words. It was these
+that she reported to her husband, whom she kept from talking with Ellen,
+and otherwise quelled.
+
+“Let her alone,” she insisted, one morning of the last week. “What can
+you do by speaking to her about it? Don’t you see that she is making the
+best fight she can? You will weaken her if you interfere. It’s less than
+a week now, and if you can only hold out, I know she can.”
+
+Kenton groaned. “Well, I suppose you’re right, Sarah. But I don’t like
+the idea of forcing her to go, unless--”
+
+“Then you had better write to that fellow, and ask him to come and get
+her.”
+
+This shut Kenton’s mouth, and he kept on with his shaving. When he
+had finished he felt fresher, if not stronger, and he went down to
+breakfast, which he had alone, not only with reference to his own
+family, but all the other guests of the hotel. He was always so early
+that sometimes the dining-room was not open; when this happened, he used
+to go and buy a newspaper at the clerk’s desk, for it was too early then
+for the news-stand to be open. It happened so that morning, and he got
+his paper without noticing the young man who was writing his name in
+the hotel register, but who looked briskly up when the clerk bade Kenton
+good-morning by name.
+
+“Why, judge!” he said, and he put out a hand which Kenton took with
+trembling reluctance and a dazed stare. “I thought you sailed last
+Saturday!”
+
+“We sail next Saturday,” said Kenton.
+
+“Well, well! Then I misunderstood,” said Bittridge, and he added: “Why,
+this is money found in the road! How are all the family? I’ve got my
+mother here with me; brought her on for a kind of a little outing.
+She’ll be the most surprised woman in New York when I tell her you’re
+here yet. We came to this hotel because we knew you had been here, but
+we didn’t suppose you were here! Well! This is too good! I saw Dick,
+Friday, but he didn’t say anything about your sailing; I suppose he
+thought I knew. Didn’t you tell me you were going in a week, that day in
+your house?”
+
+“Perhaps I did,” Kenton faltered out, his eyes fixed on Bittridge’s with
+a helpless fascination.
+
+“Well, it don’t matter so long as you’re here. Mother’s in the parlor
+waiting for me; I won’t risk taking you to her now, judge--right off the
+train, you know. But I want to bring her to call on Mrs. Kenton as soon
+after breakfast as you’ll let me. She just idolizes Mrs. Kenton, from
+what I’ve told her about her. Our rooms ready?” He turned to the
+clerk, and the clerk called “Front!” to a bellboy, who ran up and took
+Bittridge’s hand-baggage, and stood waiting to follow him into the
+parlor. “Well, you must excuse me now, judge. So long!” he said, gayly,
+and Kenton crept feebly away to the dining-room.
+
+He must have eaten breakfast, but he was not aware of doing so; and the
+events of his leaving the table and going up in the elevator and finding
+himself in his wife’s presence did not present themselves consecutively,
+though they must all have successively occurred. It did not seem to him
+that he could tell what he knew, but he found himself doing it, and her
+hearing it with strange quiet.
+
+“Very well,” she said. “I must tell Ellen, and, if she wishes, we must
+stay in and wait for their call.”
+
+“Yes,” the judge mechanically consented.
+
+It was painful for Mrs. Kenton to see how the girl flushed when she
+announced the fact of Bittridge’s presence, for she knew what a strife
+of hope and shame and pride there was in Ellen’s heart. At first she
+said that she did not wish to see him, and then when Mrs. Kenton would
+not say whether she had better see him or not, she added, vaguely, “If
+he has brought his mother--”
+
+“I think we must see them, Ellen. You wouldn’t wish to think you had
+been unkind; and he might be hurt on his mother’s account. He seems
+really fond of her, and perhaps--”
+
+“No, there isn’t any perhaps, momma,” said the girl, gratefully. “But I
+think we had better see them, too. I think we had better ALL see them.”
+
+“Just as you please, Ellen. If you prefer to meet them alone--”
+
+“I don’t prefer that. I want poppa to be there, and Lottie and Boyne
+even.”
+
+Boyne objected when he was told that his presence was requested at this
+family rite, and he would have excused himself if the invitation had
+been of the form that one might decline. “What do I want to see him
+for?” he puffed. “He never cared anything about me in Tuskingum. What’s
+he want here, anyway?”
+
+“I wish you to come in, my son,” said his mother, and that ended it.
+
+Lottie was not so tractable. “Very well, momma,” she said. “But don’t
+expect me to speak to him. I have some little self-respect, if the rest
+of you haven’t. Am I going to shake hands with him! I never took the
+least notice of him at home, and I’m not going to here.”
+
+Bittridge decided the question of hand-shaking for her when they met.
+He greeted her glooming brother with a jolly “Hello, Boyne!” and without
+waiting for the boy’s tardy response he said “Hello, Lottie!” to the
+girl, and took her hand and kept it in his while he made an elaborate
+compliment to her good looks and her gain in weight. She had come
+tardily as a proof that she would not have come in at all if she had not
+chosen to do so, and Mrs. Bittridge was already seated beside Ellen on
+the sofa, holding her hand, and trying to keep her mobile, inattentive
+eyes upon Ellen’s face. She was a little woman, youthfully dressed,
+but not dressed youthfully enough for the dry, yellow hair which curled
+tightly in small rings on her skull, like the wig of a rag-doll. Her
+restless eyes were round and deep-set, with the lids flung up out of
+sight; she had a lax, formless mouth, and an anxious smile, with which
+she constantly watched her son for his initiative, while she recollected
+herself from time to time, long enough to smooth Ellen’s hand between
+her own, and say, “Oh, I just think the world of Clarence; and I guess
+he thinks his mother is about right, too,” and then did not heed what
+Ellen answered.
+
+The girl said very little, and it was Bittridge who talked for all,
+dominating the room with a large, satisfied presence, in which the judge
+sat withdrawn, his forehead supported on his hand, and his elbow on the
+table. Mrs. Kenton held herself upright, with her hands crossed before
+her, stealing a look now and then at her daughter’s averted face, but
+keeping her eyes from Mrs. Bittridge, who, whenever she caught Mrs.
+Kenton’s glance, said something to her about her Clarence, and how he
+used to write home to her at Ballardsville about the Kentons, so
+that she felt acquainted with all of them. Her reminiscences were
+perfunctory; Mrs. Bittridge had voluntarily but one topic, and that
+was herself, either as she was included in the interest her son must
+inspire, or as she included him in the interest she must inspire. She
+said that, now they had met at last, she was not going to rest till the
+Kentons had been over to Ballardsville, and made her a good, long visit;
+her son had some difficulty in making her realize that the Kentons were
+going to Europe. Then she laughed, and said she kept forgetting; and she
+did wish they were all coming back to Tuskingum.
+
+If it is a merit to treat a fatuous mother with deference, Bittridge had
+that merit. His deference was of the caressing and laughing sort, which
+took the spectator into the joke of her peculiarities as something they
+would appreciate and enjoy with him. She had been a kittenish and petted
+person in her youth, perhaps, and now she petted herself, after she had
+long ceased to be a kitten. What was respectable and what was pathetic
+in her was her wish to promote her son’s fortunes with the Kentons, but
+she tried to do this from not a very clear understanding of her part,
+apparently, and little sense of the means. For Ellen’s sake, rather
+than hers, the father and mother received her overtures to their liking
+kindly; they answered her patiently, and Mrs. Kenton even tried to lead
+the way for her to show herself at her best, by talking of her journey
+on to New York, and of the city, and what she would see there to
+interest her. Lottie and Boyne, sternly aloof together in one of their
+momentary alliances, listened to her replies with a silent contempt
+that almost included their mother; Kenton bore with the woman humbly and
+sadly.
+
+He was, in fact, rather bewildered with the situation, for which he felt
+himself remotely if not immediately responsible. Bittridge was there
+among them not only on good terms, but apparently in the character of a
+more than tolerated pretendant to Ellen’s favor. There were passages of
+time is which the father was not sure that the fellow was not engaged
+to his daughter, though when these instants were gone he was aware that
+there had been no overt love-making between them and Bittridge had never
+offered himself. What was he doing there, then? The judge asked himself
+that, without being able to answer himself. So far as he could make
+out, his wife and he were letting him see Ellen, and show her off to
+his mother, mainly to disgust her with them both, and because they were
+afraid that if they denied her to him, it would be the worse for them
+through her suffering. The judge was not accustomed to apply the tests
+by which people are found vulgar or not; these were not of his simple
+world; all that he felt about Mrs. Bittridge was that she was a very
+foolish, false person, who was true in nothing but her admiration of her
+rascal of a son; he did not think of Bittridge as a rascal violently,
+but helplessly, and with a heart that melted in pity for Ellen.
+
+He longed to have these people gone, not so much because he was so
+unhappy in their presence as because he wished to learn Ellen’s feeling
+about them from his wife. She would know, whether Allen said anything
+to her or not. But perhaps if Mrs. Kenton had been asked to deliver her
+mind on this point at once she would have been a little puled. All that
+she could see, and she saw it with a sinking of the heart, was that
+Ellen looked more at peace than she had been since Bittridge was last
+in their house at Tuskingum. Her eyes covertly followed him as he sat
+talking, or went about the room, making himself at home among them, as
+if he were welcome with every one. He joked her more than the rest, and
+accused her of having become a regular New-Yorker; he said he supposed
+that when she came back from Europe she would not know anybody in
+Tuskingum; and his mother, playing with Ellen’s fingers, as if they had
+been the fringe of a tassel, declared that she must not mind him, for he
+carried on just so with everybody; at the same time she ordered him to
+stop, or she would go right out of the room.
+
+She gave no other sign of going, and it was her son who had to make the
+movement for her at last; she apparently did not know that it was her
+part to make it. She said that now the Kentons must come and return her
+call, and be real neighborly, just the same as if they were all at home
+together. When her son shook hands with every one she did so too, and
+she said to each, “Well, I wish you good-morning,” and let him push her
+before him, in high delight with the joke, out of the room.
+
+When they were gone the Kentons sat silent, Ellen with a rapt smile on
+her thin, flushed face, till Lottie said, “You forgot to ask him if
+we might BREATHE, poppa,” and paced out of the room in stately scorn,
+followed by Boyne, who had apparently no words at the command of his
+dumb rage. Kenton wished to remain, and he looked at his wife for
+instruction. She frowned, and he took this for a sign that he had better
+go, and he went with a light sigh.
+
+He did not know what else to do with himself, and he went down to the
+reading-room. He found Bittridge there, smoking a cigar, and the young
+man companionably offered to bestow one upon him; but the judge stiffly
+refused, saying he did not wish to smoke just then. He noted that
+Bittridge was still in his character of family favorite, and his hand
+trembled as he passed it over the smooth knob of his stick, while he
+sat waiting for the fellow to take himself away. But Bittridge had
+apparently no thought of going. He was looking at the amusements for the
+evening in a paper he had bought, and he wished to consult the judge as
+to which was the best theatre to go to that night; he said he wanted to
+take his mother. Kenton professed not to know much about the New York
+theatres, and then Bittridge guessed he must get the clerk to tell him.
+But still he did not part with the judge. He sat down beside him, and
+told him how glad he was to see his family looking so well, especially
+Miss Ellen; he could not remember ever seeing her so strong-looking. He
+said that girl had captured his mother, who was in love with pretty much
+the whole Kenton family, though.
+
+“And by-the-way,” he added, “I want to thank you and Mrs. Kenton, judge,
+for the way you received my mother. You made her feel that she was among
+friends. She can’t talk about anything else, and I guess I sha’n’t have
+much trouble in making her stay in New York as long as you’re here. She
+was inclined to be homesick. The fact is, though I don’t care to have it
+talked about yet, and I wish you wouldn’t say anything to Dick about it
+when you write home, I think of settling in New York. I’ve been offered
+a show in the advertising department of one of the big dailies--I’m not
+at liberty to say which--and it’s a toss-up whether I stay here or go to
+Washington; I’ve got a chance there, too, but it’s on the staff of a new
+enterprise, and I’m not sure about it. I’ve brought my mother along to
+let her have a look at both places, though she doesn’t know it, and I’d
+rather you wouldn’t speak of it before her; I’m going to take her on to
+Washington before we go back. I want to have my mother with me, judge.
+It’s better for a fellow to have that home-feeling in a large place from
+the start; it keeps him out of a lot of things, and I don’t pretend to
+be better than other people, or not more superhuman. If I’ve been able
+to keep out of scrapes, it’s more because I’ve had my mother near me,
+and I don’t intend ever to be separated from her, after this, till I
+have a home of my own. She’s been the guiding-star of my life.”
+
+Kenton was unable to make any formal response, and, in fact, he was so
+preoccupied with the question whether the fellow was more a fool or
+a fraud that he made no answer at all, beyond a few inarticulate
+grumblings of assent. These sufficed for Bittridge, apparently, for he
+went on contentedly: “Whenever I’ve been tempted to go a little wild,
+the thought of how mother would feel has kept me on the track like
+nothing else would. No, judge, there isn’t anything in this world like a
+good mother, except the right kind of a wife.”
+
+Kenton rose, and said he believed he must go upstairs. Bittridge said,
+“All right; I’ll see you later, judge,” and swung easily off to advise
+with the clerk as to the best theatre.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Kenton was so unhappy that he could not wait for his wife to come to him
+in their own room; he broke in upon her and Ellen in the parlor, and at
+his coming the girl flitted out, in the noiseless fashion which of late
+had made her father feel something ghostlike in her. He was afraid
+she was growing to dislike him, and trying to avoid him, and now he
+presented himself quite humbly before his wife, as if he had done wrong
+in coming. He began with a sort of apology for interrupting, but his
+wife said it was all right, and she added, “We were not talking about
+anything in particular.” She was silent, and then she added again:
+“Sometimes I think Ellen hasn’t very fine perceptions, after all. She
+doesn’t seem to feel about people as I supposed she would.”
+
+“You mean that she doesn’t feel as you would suppose about those
+people?”
+
+Mrs. Kenton answered, obliquely. “She thinks it’s a beautiful thing in
+him to be so devoted to his mother.”
+
+“Humph! And what does she think of his mother?”
+
+“She thinks she has very pretty hair.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton looked gravely down at the work she had in her hands, and
+Kenton did not know what to make of it all. He decided that his wife
+must feel, as he did, a doubt of the child’s sincerity, with sense of
+her evasiveness more tolerant than his own. Yet he knew that if it
+came to a question of forcing Ellen to do what was best for her,
+or forbidding her to do what was worst, his wife would have all the
+strength for the work, and he none. He asked her, hopelessly enough, “Do
+you think she still cares for him?”
+
+“I think she wishes to give him another trial; I hope she will.” Kenton
+was daunted, and he showed it. “She has got to convince herself, and
+we have got to let her. She believes, of course, that he’s here on her
+account, and that flatters her. Why should she be so different from
+other girls?” Mrs. Kenton demanded of the angry protest in her husband’s
+eye.
+
+His spirit fell, and he said, “I only wish she were more like them.”
+
+“Well, then, she is just as headstrong and as silly, when it comes to a
+thing like this. Our only hope is to let her have her own way.”
+
+“Do you suppose he cares for her, after all?”
+
+Mrs. Kenton was silent, as if in exhaustive self-question. Then she
+answered: “No, I don’t in that way. But he believes he can get her.”
+
+“Then, Sarah, I think we have a duty to the poor child. You must tell
+her what you have told me.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton smiled rather bitterly, in recognition of the fact that the
+performance of their common duty must fall wholly to her. But she merely
+said: “There is no need of my telling her. She knows it already.”
+
+“And she would take him in spite of knowing that he didn’t really care
+for her?”
+
+“I don’t say that. She wouldn’t own it to herself.”
+
+“And what are you going to do?”
+
+“Nothing. We must let things take their course.”
+
+They had a great deal more talk that came to the same end. They played
+their sad comedy, he in the part of a father determined to save his
+child from herself, and she in hers of resisting and withholding him.
+It ended as it had so often ended before--he yielded, with more faith in
+her wisdom than she had herself.
+
+At luncheon the Bittridges could not join the Kentons, or be asked to do
+so, because the table held only four, but they stopped on their way to
+their own table, the mother to bridle and toss in affected reluctance,
+while the son bragged how he had got the last two tickets to be had that
+night for the theatre where he was going to take his mother. He seemed
+to think that the fact had a special claim on the judge’s interest, and
+she to wish to find out whether Mrs. Kenton approved of theatre-going.
+She said she would not think of going in Ballardsville, but she supposed
+it was more rulable in New York.
+
+During the afternoon she called at the Kenton apartment to consult the
+ladies about what she ought to wear. She said she had nothing but a
+black ‘barege’ along, and would that do with the hat she had on? She had
+worn it to let them see, and now she turned her face from aide to side
+to give them the effect of the plumes, that fell like a dishevelled
+feather-duster round and over the crown. Mrs. Kenton could only say that
+it would do, but she believed that it was the custom now for ladies to
+take their hats off in the theatre.
+
+Mrs. Bittridge gave a hoarse laugh. “Oh, dear! Then I’ll have to fix my
+hair two ways? I don’t know what Clarence WILL say.”
+
+The mention of her son’s name opened the way for her to talk of him in
+relation to herself, and the rest of her stay passed in the celebration
+of his filial virtues, which had been manifest from the earliest period.
+She could not remember that she ever had to hit the child a lick, she
+said, or that he had ever made her shed a tear.
+
+When she went, Boyne gloomily inquired, “What makes her hair so much
+darker at the roots than it is at the points?” and his mother snubbed
+him promptly.
+
+“You had no business to be here, Boyne. I don’t like boys hanging about
+where ladies are talking together, and listening.”
+
+This did not prevent Lottie from answering, directly for Boyne, and
+indirectly for Ellen, “It’s because it’s begun to grow since the last
+bleach.”
+
+It was easier to grapple with Boyne than with Lottie, and Mrs. Kenton
+was willing to allow her to leave the room with her brother unrebuked.
+She was even willing to have had the veil lifted from Mrs. Bittridge’s
+hair with a rude hand, if it world help Ellen.
+
+“I don’t want you to think, momma,” said the girl, “that I didn’t know
+about her hair, or that I don’t see how silly she is. But it’s all the
+more to his credit if he can be so good to her, and admire her. Would
+you like him better if he despised her?”
+
+Mrs. Kenton felt both the defiance and the secret shame from which it
+sprang in her daughter’s words; and she waited for a moment before she
+answered, “I would like to be sure he didn’t!”
+
+“If he does, and if he hides it from her, it’s the same as if he didn’t;
+it’s better. But you all wish to dislike him.”
+
+“We don’t wish to dislike him, Ellen, goodness knows. But I don’t think
+he would care much whether we disliked him or not. I am sure your poor
+father and I would be only too glad to like him.”
+
+“Lottie wouldn’t,” said Ellen, with a resentment her mother found
+pathetic, it was so feeble and aimless.
+
+“Lottie doesn’t matter,” she said. She could not make out how nearly
+Ellen was to sharing the common dislike, or how far she would go in
+fortifying herself against it. She kept with difficulty to her negative
+frankness, and she let the girl leave the room with a fretful sigh, as
+if provoked that her mother would not provoke her further. There were
+moments when Mrs. Kenton believed that Ellen was sick of her love, and
+that she would pluck it out of her heart herself if she were left alone.
+She was then glad Bittridge had come, so that Ellen might compare with
+the reality the counterfeit presentment she had kept in her fancy; and
+she believed that if she could but leave him to do his worst, it would
+be the best for Ellen.
+
+In the evening, directly after dinner, Bittridge sent up his name for
+Mrs. Kenton. The judge had remained to read his paper below, and Lottie
+and Boyne had gone to some friends in another apartment. It seemed to
+Mrs. Kenton a piece of luck that she should be able to see him alone,
+and she could not have said that she was unprepared for him to come in,
+holding his theatre-tickets explanatorily in his hand, or surprised when
+he began:
+
+“Mrs. Kenton, my mother’s got a bad headache, and I’ve come to ask a
+favor of you. She can’t use her ticket for to-night, and I want you to
+let Miss Ellen come with me. Will you?”
+
+Bittridge had constituted himself an old friend of the whole family from
+the renewal of their acquaintance, and Mrs. Kenton was now made aware of
+his being her peculiar favorite, in spite of the instant repulsion she
+felt, she was not averse to what he proposed. Her fear was that Ellen
+would be so, or that she could keep from influencing her to this test
+of her real feeling for Bittridge. “I will ask her, Mr. Bittridge,” she
+said, with a severity which was a preliminary of the impartiality she
+meant to use with Ellen.
+
+“Well, that’s right,” he answered, and while she went to the girl’s room
+he remained examining the details of the drawing-room decorations in
+easy security, which Mrs. Kenton justified on her return.
+
+“Ellen will be ready to go with you, Mr. Bittridge.”
+
+“Well, that’s good,” said the young man, and while he talked on she sat
+wondering at a nature which all modesty and deference seemed left
+out of, though he had sometimes given evidence of his intellectual
+appreciation of these things. He talked to Mrs. Kenton not only as if
+they were in every-wise equal, but as if they were of the same age,
+almost of the same sex.
+
+Ellen came in, cloaked and hatted, with her delicate face excited in
+prospect of the adventure; and her mother saw Bittridge look at her with
+more tenderness than she had ever seen in him before. “I’ll take good
+care of her, Mrs. Kenton,” he said, and for the first time she felt
+herself relent a little towards him.
+
+A minute after they were gone Lottie bounced into the room, followed by
+Boyne.
+
+“Momma!” she shouted, “Ellen isn’t going to the theatre with that
+fellow?”
+
+“Yes, she is.”
+
+“And you let her, momma! Without a chaperon?”
+
+Boyne’s face had mirrored the indignation in his sister’s, but at
+this unprecedented burst of conventionality he forgot their momentary
+alliance. “Well, you’re a pretty one to talk about chaperons! Walking
+all over Tuskingum with fellows at night, and going buggy-riding with
+everybody, and out rowing, and here fairly begging Jim Plumpton to come
+down to the steamer and see you off again!”
+
+“Shut up!” Lottie violently returned, “or I’ll tell momma how you’ve
+been behaving with Rita Plumpton yourself.”
+
+“Well, tell!” Boyne defied her.
+
+“Oh, it don’t matter what a brat of a boy says or does, anyway,” said
+Lottie. “But I think Ellen is disgracing the family. Everybody in the
+hotel is laughing at that wiggy old Mrs. Bittridge, with her wobbly
+eyes, and they can see that he’s just as green! The Plumptons have been
+laughing so about them, and I told them that we had nothing to do with
+them at home, and had fairly turned Bittridge out of the house, but he
+had impudence enough for anything; and now to find Ellen going off to
+the theatre with him alone!”
+
+Lottie began to cry with vexation as she whipped out of the room, and
+Boyne, who felt himself drawn to her side again, said, very seriously:
+“Well, it ain’t the thing in New York, you know, momma; and anybody can
+see what a jay Bittridge is. I think it’s too bad to let her.”
+
+“It isn’t for you to criticise your mother, Boyne,” said Mrs. Kenton,
+but she was more shaken than she would allow. Her own traditions were so
+simple that the point of etiquette which her children had urged had not
+occurred to her. The question whether Ellen should go with Bittridge at
+all being decided, she would, of course, go in New York as she would go
+in Tuskingum. Now Mrs. Kenton perceived that she must not, and she had
+her share of humiliation in the impression which his mother, as her
+friend, apparently, was making with her children’s acquaintances in the
+hotel. If they would think everybody in Tuskingum was like her, it
+would certainly be very unpleasant, but she would not quite own this
+to herself, still less to a fourteen-year-old boy. “I think what your
+father and I decide to be right will be sufficient excuse for you with
+your friends.”
+
+“Does father know it?” Boyne asked, most unexpectedly.
+
+Having no other answer ready, Mrs. Kenton said, “You had better go to
+bed, my son.”
+
+“Well,” he grumbled, as he left the room, “I don’t know where all the
+pride of the Kentons is gone to.”
+
+In his sense of fallen greatness he attempted to join Lottie in her
+room, but she said, “Go away, nasty thing!” and Boyne was obliged to
+seek his own room, where he occupied himself with a contrivance he was
+inventing to enable you to close your door and turn off your gas by
+a system of pulleys without leaving your bed, when you were tired of
+reading.
+
+Mrs. Kenton waited for her husband in much less comfort, and when he
+came, and asked, restlessly, “Where are the children?” she first told
+him that Lottie and Boyne were in their rooms before she could bring
+herself to say that Ellen had gone to the theatre with Bittridge.
+
+It was some relief to have him take it in the dull way he did, and to
+say nothing worse than, “Did you think it was well to have her!”
+
+“You may be sure I didn’t want her to. But what would she have said if
+I had refused to let her go? I can tell you it isn’t an easy matter to
+manage her in this business, and it’s very easy for you to criticise,
+without taking the responsibility.”
+
+“I’m not criticising,” said Kenton. “I know you have acted for the
+best.”
+
+“The children,” said Mrs. Kenton, wishing to be justified further,
+“think she ought to have had a chaperon. I didn’t think of that; it
+isn’t the custom at home; but Lottie was very saucy about it, and I had
+to send Boyne to bed. I don’t think our children are very much comfort
+to us.”
+
+“They are good children,” Kenton said, said--provisionally.
+
+“Yes, that is the worst of it. If they were bad, we wouldn’t expect any
+comfort from them. Ellen is about perfect. She’s as near an angel as a
+child can be, but she could hardly have given us more anxiety if she had
+been the worst girl in the world.”
+
+“That’s true,” the father sadly assented.
+
+“She didn’t really want to go with him to-night, I’ll say that for her,
+and if I had said a single word against it she wouldn’t have gone. But
+all at once, while she sat there trying to think how I could excuse
+her, she began asking me what she should wear. There’s something strange
+about it, Rufus. If I believed in hypnotism, I should say she had gone
+because he willed her to go.”
+
+“I guess she went because she wanted to go because she’s in love with
+him,” said Kenton, hopelessly.
+
+“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton agreed. “I don’t see how she can endure the sight of
+him. He’s handsome enough,” she added, with a woman’s subjective logic.
+“And there’s something fascinating about him. He’s very graceful, and
+he’s got a good figure.”
+
+“He’s a hound!” said Kenton, exhaustively.
+
+“Oh yes, he’s a hound,” she sighed, as if there could be no doubt on
+that point. “It don’t seem right for him to be in the same room with
+Ellen. But it’s for her to say. I feel more and more that we can’t
+interfere without doing harm. I suppose that if she were not so
+innocent herself she would realize what he was better. But I do think he
+appreciates her innocence. He shows more reverence for her than for any
+one else.”
+
+“How was it his mother didn’t go?” asked Kenton.
+
+“She had a headache, he said. But I don’t believe that. He always
+intended to get Ellen to go. And that’s another thing Lottie was vexed
+about; she says everybody is laughing at Mrs. Bittridge, and it’s
+mortifying to have people take her for a friend of ours.”
+
+“If there were nothing worse than that,” said Kenton, “I guess we could
+live through it. Well, I don’t know how it’s going to all end.”
+
+They sat talking sadly, but finding a certain comfort in their mutual
+discouragement, and in their knowledge that they were doing the best
+they could for their child, whose freedom they must not infringe so far
+as to do what was absolutely best; and the time passed not so heavily
+till her return. This was announced by the mounting of the elevator to
+their landing, and then by low, rapid pleading in a man’s voice outside.
+Kenton was about to open the door, when there came the formless noise of
+what seemed a struggle, and Ellen’s voice rose in a muffed cry: “Oh! Oh!
+Let me be! Go away! I hate you!” Kenton the door open, and Ellen burst
+in, running to hide her face in her mother’s breast, where she sobbed
+out, “He--he kissed me!” like a terrified child more than an insulted
+woman. Through the open door came the clatter of Bittridge’s feet as he
+ran down-stairs.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+When Mrs. Kenton came from quieting the hysterical girl in her room she
+had the task, almost as delicate and difficult, of quieting her husband.
+She had kept him, by the most solemn and exhaustive entreaty, from
+following Bittridge downstairs and beating him with his stick, and now
+she was answerable to him for his forbearance. “If you don’t behave
+yourself, Rufus,” she had to say, “you will have some sort of stroke.
+After all, there’s no harm done.”
+
+“No harm! Do you call it no harm for that hound to kiss Ellen?”
+
+“He wouldn’t have attempted it unless something had led up to it, I
+suppose.”
+
+“Sarah! How can you speak so of that angel?”
+
+“Oh, that angel is a girl like the rest. You kissed me before we were
+engaged.”
+
+“That was very different.”
+
+“I don’t see how. If your daughter is so sacred, why wasn’t her mother?
+You men don’t think your wives are sacred. That’s it!”
+
+“No, no, Sarah! It’s because I don’t think of you as apart from myself,
+that I can’t think of you as I do of Ellen. I beg your pardon if I
+seemed to set her above you. But when I kissed you we were very young,
+and we lived in a simple day, when such things meant no harm; and I was
+very fond of you, and you were the holiest thing in the world to me. Is
+Ellen holy to that fellow?”
+
+“I know,” Mrs. Kenton relented. “I’m not comparing him to you. And there
+is a difference with Ellen. She isn’t like other girls. If it had been
+Lottie--”
+
+“I shouldn’t have liked it with Lottie, either,” said the major,
+stiffly. “But if it had been Lottie she would have boxed his ears for
+him, instead of running to you. Lottie can take care of herself. And I
+will take care of Ellen. When I see that scoundrel in the morning--”
+
+“What will you do, an old man like you! I can tell you, it’s something
+you’ve just got to bear it if you don’t want the scandal to fill the
+whole hotel. It’s a very fortunate thing, after all. It’ll put an end to
+the whole affair.”
+
+“Do you think so, Sarah? If I believed that. What does Ellen say?”
+
+“Nothing; she won’t say anything--just cries and hides her face. I
+believe she is ashamed of having made a scene before us. But I know that
+she’s so disgusted with him that she will never look at him again, and
+if it’s brought her to that I should think his kissing her the greatest
+blessing in the world to us all. Yes, Ellen!”
+
+Mrs. Kenton hurried off at a faint call from the girl’s room, and when
+she came again she sat down to a long discussion of the situation with
+her husband, while she slowly took down her hair and prepared it for
+the night. Her conclusion, which she made her husband’s, was that it
+was most fortunate they should be sailing so soon, and that it was the
+greatest pity they were not sailing in the morning. She wished him to
+sleep, whether she slept herself or not, and she put the most hopeful
+face possible upon the matter. “One thing you can rest assured of,
+Rufus, and that is that it’s all over with Ellen. She may never speak to
+you about him, and you mustn’t ever mention him, but she feels just as
+you could wish. Does that satisfy you? Some time I will tell you all she
+says.”
+
+“I don’t care to hear,” said Kenton. “All I want is for him to keep away
+from me. I think if he spoke to me I should kill him.”
+
+“Rufus!”
+
+“I can’t help it, Sarah. I feel outraged to the bottom of my soul. I
+could kill him.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton turned her head and looked steadfastly at him over her
+shoulder. “If you strike him, if you touch him, Mr. Kenton, you will
+undo everything that the abominable wretch has done for Ellen, and you
+will close my mouth and tie my hands. Will you promise that under no
+provocation whatever will you do him the least harm? I know Ellen better
+than you do, and I know that you will make her hate you unless--”
+
+“Oh, I will promise. You needn’t be afraid. Lord help me!” Kenton
+groaned. “I won’t touch him. But don’t expect me to speak to him.”
+
+“No, I don’t expect that. He won’t offer to speak to you.”
+
+They slept, and in the morning she stayed to breakfast with Ellen
+in their apartment, and let her husband go down with their younger
+children. She could trust him now, whatever form his further trial
+should take, and he felt that he was pledging himself to her anew, when
+Bittridge came hilariously to meet him in the reading-room, where he
+went for a paper after breakfast.
+
+“Ah, judge!” said the young man, gayly. “Hello, Boyne!” he added to the
+boy, who had come with his father; Lottie had gone directly up-stairs
+from the breakfast-room. “I hope you’re all well this morning? Play not
+too much for Miss Ellen?”
+
+Kenton looked him in the face without answering, and then tried to get
+away from him, but Bittridge followed him up, talking, and ignoring his
+silence.
+
+“It was a splendid piece, judge. You must take Mrs. Kenton. I know
+you’ll both like it. I haven’t ever seen Miss Ellen so interested. I
+hope the walk home didn’t fatigue her. I wanted to get a cab, but she
+would walk.” The judge kept moving on, with his head down. He did not
+speak, and Bittridge was forced to notice his silence. “Nothing the
+matter, I hope, with Miss Ellen, judge?”
+
+“Go away,” said the judge, in a low voice, fumbling the head of his
+stick.
+
+“Why, what’s up?” asked Bittridge, and he managed to get in front of
+Kenton and stay him at a point where Kenton could not escape. It was a
+corner of the room to which the old man had aimlessly tended, with no
+purpose but to avoid him:
+
+“I wish you to let me alone, sir,” said Kenton at last. “I can’t speak
+to you.”
+
+“I understand what you mean, judge,” said Bittridge, with a grin, all
+the more maddening because it seemed involuntary. “But I can explain
+everything. I just want a few words with you. It’s very important; it’s
+life or death with me, sir,” he said, trying to look grave. “Will you
+let me go to your rooms with you?”
+
+Kenton made no reply.
+
+Bittridge began to laugh. “Then let’s sit down here, or in the ladies’
+parlor. It won’t take me two minutes to make everything right. If you
+don’t believe I’m in earnest I know you don’t think I am, but I can
+assure you--Will you let me speak with you about Miss Ellen?”
+
+Still Kenton did not answer, shutting his lips tight, and remembering
+his promise to his wife.
+
+Bittridge laughed, as if in amusement at what he had done. “Judge, let
+me say two words to you in private! If you can’t now, tell me when you
+can. We’re going back this evening, mother and I are; she isn’t well,
+and I’m not going to take her to Washington. I don’t want to go leaving
+you with the idea that I wanted to insult Miss Ellen. I care too much
+for her. I want to see you and Mrs. Kenton about it. I do, indeed. And
+won’t you let me see you, somewhere?”
+
+Kenton looked away, first to one side and then to another, and seemed
+stifling.
+
+“Won’t you speak to me! Won’t you answer me? See here! I’d get down on
+my knees to you if it would do you any good. Where will you talk with
+me?”
+
+“Nowhere!” shouted Kenton. “Will you go away, or shall I strike you with
+my stick?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t think,” said Bittridge, and suddenly, in the wantonness of
+his baffled effrontery, he raised his hand and rubbed the back of it in
+the old man’s face.
+
+Boyne Kenton struck wildly at him, and Bittridge caught the boy by the
+arm and flung him to his knees on the marble floor. The men reading in
+the arm-chairs about started to their feet; a porter came running,
+and took hold of Bittridge. “Do you want an officer, Judge Kenton?” he
+panted.
+
+“No, no!” Kenton answered, choking and trembling. “Don’t arrest him. I
+wish to go to my rooms, that’s all. Let him go. Don’t do anything about
+it.”
+
+“I’ll help you, judge,” said the porter. “Take hold of this fellow,” he
+said to two other porters who came up. “Take him to the desk, and
+tell the clerk he struck Judge Kenton, but the judge don’t want him
+arrested.”
+
+Before Kenton reached the elevator with Boyne, who was rubbing his
+knees and fighting back the tears, he heard the clerk’s voice saying,
+formally, to the porters, “Baggage out of 35 and 37” and adding, as
+mechanically, to Bittridge: “Your rooms are wanted. Get out of them at
+once!”
+
+It seemed the gathering of neighborhood about Kenton, where he had felt
+himself so unfriended, against the outrage done him, and he felt the
+sweetness of being personally championed in a place where he had thought
+himself valued merely for the profit that was in him; his eyes filled,
+and his voice failed him in thanking the elevator-boy for running before
+him to ring the bell of his apartment.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The next day, in Tuskingum, Richard, Kenton found among the letters of
+his last mail one which he easily knew to be from his sister Lottie,
+by the tightly curled-up handwriting, and by the unliterary look of the
+slanted and huddled address of the envelope: The only doubt he could
+have felt in opening it was from the unwonted length at which she had
+written him; Lottie usually practised a laconic brevity in her notes,
+which were suited to the poverty of her written vocabulary rather than
+the affluence of her spoken word.
+
+   “Dear Dick” [her letter ran, tripping and stumbling in its course],
+   “I have got to tell you about something that has just happened here,
+   and you needent laugh at the speling, or the way I tell it, but just
+   pay attention to the thing itself, if you please. That disgusting
+   Bittridge has been here with his horrid wiggy old mother, and momma
+   let him take Ellen to the theatre. On the way home he tried to make
+   her promise she would marry him and at the door he kissed her. They
+   had an awful night with her hiseterics, and I heard momma going in
+   and out, and trying to comfort her till daylight, nearly. In the
+   morning I went down with poppy and Boyne to breakfast, and after I
+   came up, father went to the reading-room to get a paper, and that
+   Bittridge was there waiting for him, and wanted to speak with him
+   about Ellen. Poppa wouldent say a word to him, and he kept
+   following poppa up, to make him. Boyne says be wouldent take no for
+   an ansir, and hung on and hungon, till poppa threatened to hitt him
+   with his cane. Then he saw it was no use, and he took his hand and
+   rubbed it in poppa’s face, and Boyne believes he was trying to pull
+   poppa’s nose. Boyne acted like I would have done; he pounded
+   Bittridge in the back; but of course Bittridge was too strong for
+   him, and threw him on the floor, and Boyne scraped his knee so that
+   it bledd. Then the porters came up, and caught Bittridge, and
+   wanted to send for a policeman, but father wouldent let them, and
+   the porters took Bittridge to the desk and the clerk told him to get
+   out instantly and they left as soon as old Wiggy could get her
+   things on. I don’t know where they went, but he told poppa they
+   were going home to-day any way. Now, Dick, I don’t know what you
+   will want to do, and I am not going to put you up to anything, but I
+   know what I would do, pretty well, the first time Bittridge showed
+   himself in Tuskingum. You can do just as you please, and I don’t
+   ask you to believe me if you’re think I’m so exciteable that I cant
+   tell the truth. I guess Boyne will say the same. Much love to
+   Mary. Your affectionate sister,
+
+                         “Lottie.
+
+   “P. S.--Every word Lottie says is true, but I am not sure he meant
+   to pull his nose. The reason why he threw me down so easily is, I
+   have grown about a foot, and I have not got up my strength. BOYNE.
+
+   “This is strictly confidential. They don’t know we
+   are writing. LATTIE.”
+
+
+After reading this letter, Richard Kenton tore it into small pieces, so
+that there should not be even so much witness as it bore to facts that
+seemed to fill him with fury to the throat. His fury was, in agreement
+with his temperament, the white kind and cold kind. He was able to keep
+it to himself for that reason; at supper his wife knew merely that
+he had something on his mind that he did not wish to talk of; and
+experience had taught her that it would be useless to try making him
+speak.
+
+He slept upon his wrath, and in the morning early, at an hour when he
+knew there would be no loafers in the place, he went to an out-dated
+saddler’s shop, and asked the owner, a veteran of his father’s regiment,
+“Welks, do you happen to have a cowhide among your antiquities?”
+
+“Regular old style?” Welks returned. “Kind they make out of a cow’s hide
+and use on a man’s?”
+
+“Something of that sort,” said Richard, with a slight smile.
+
+The saddler said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an
+upper shelf. He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking
+thing in his hand. “I reckon that’s what you’re after, squire.”
+
+“Reckon it is, Welks,” said Richard, drawing it through his tubed left
+hand. Then he buttoned it under his coat, and paid the quarter which
+Welks said had always been the price of a cowhide even since he could
+remember, and walked away towards the station.
+
+“How’s the old colonel” Welks called after him, having forgotten to ask
+before.
+
+“The colonel’s all right,” Richard called back, without looking round.
+
+He walked up and down in front of the station. A local train came in
+from Ballardsville at 8.15, and waited for the New York special, and
+then returned to Ballardsville. Richard had bought a ticket for that
+station, and was going to take the train back, but among the passengers
+who descended from it when it drew in was one who saved him the trouble
+of going.
+
+Bittridge, with his overcoat hanging on his arm, advanced towards him
+with the rest, and continued to advance, in a sort of fascination, after
+his neighbors, with the instinct that something was about to happen,
+parted on either side of Richard, and left the two men confronted.
+Richard did not speak, but deliberately reached out his left hand, which
+he caught securely into Bittridge’s collar; then he began to beat him
+with the cowhide wherever he could strike his writhing and twisting
+shape. Neither uttered a word, and except for the whir of the cowhide in
+the air, and the rasping sound of its arrest upon the body of Bittridge,
+the thing was done in perfect silence. The witnesses stood well back in
+a daze, from which they recovered when Richard released Bittridge with
+a twist of the hand that tore his collar loose and left his cravat
+dangling, and tossed the frayed cowhide away, and turned and walked
+homeward. Then one of them picked up Bittridge’s hat and set it aslant
+on his head, and others helped pull his collar together and tie his
+cravat.
+
+For the few moments that Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely
+found words coherent enough for question, and when they did, Bittridge
+had nothing but confused answers to give to the effect that he did not
+know what it meant, but he would find out. He got into a hack and had
+himself driven to his hotel, but he never made the inquiry which he
+threatened.
+
+In his own house Richard Kenton lay down awhile, deadly sick, and
+his wife had to bring him brandy before he could control his nerves
+sufficiently to speak. Then he told her what he had done, and why, and
+Mary pulled off his shoes and put a hot-water bottle to his cold feet.
+It was not exactly the treatment for a champion, but Mary Kenton was not
+thinking of that, and when Richard said he still felt a little sick at
+the stomach she wanted him to try a drop of camphor in addition to the
+brandy. She said he must not talk, but she wished him so much to talk
+that she was glad when he began.
+
+“It seemed to be something I had to do, Mary, but I would give anything
+if I had not been obliged to do it:
+
+“Yes, I know just how you feel, Dick, and I think it’s pretty hard this
+has come on you. I do think Ellen might--”
+
+“It wasn’t her fault, Mary. You mustn’t blame her. She’s had more to
+bear than all the rest of us.” Mary looked stubbornly unconvinced, and
+she was not moved, apparently, by what he went on to say. “The thing now
+is to keep what I’ve done from making more mischief for her.”
+
+“What do you mean, Dick? You don’t believe he’ll do anything about it,
+do you?”
+
+“No, I’m not afraid of that. His mouth is shut. But you can’t tell how
+Ellen will take it. She may side with him now.”
+
+“Dick! If I thought Ellen Kenton could be such a fool as that!”
+
+“If she’s in love with him she’ll take his part.”
+
+“But she can’t be in love with him when she knows how he acted to your
+father!”
+
+“We can’t be sure of that. I know how he acted to father; but at this
+minute I pity him so that I could take his part against father. And I
+can understand how Ellen--Anyway, I must make a clean breast of it. What
+day is this Thursday? And they sail Saturday! I must write--”
+
+He lifted himself on his elbow, and made as if to throw off the shawl
+she had spread upon him.
+
+“No, no! I will write, Dick! I will write to your mother. What shall
+I say?” She whirled about, and got the paper and ink out of her
+writing-desk, and sat down near him to keep him from getting up, and
+wrote the date, and the address, “Dear Mother Kenton,” which was the way
+she always began her letters to Mrs. Kenton, in order to distinguish her
+from her own mother. “Now what shall I say?”
+
+“Simply this,” answered Richard. “That I knew of what had happened in
+New York, and when I met him this morning I cowhided him. Ugh!”
+
+“Well, that won’t do, Dick. You’ve got to tell all about it. Your mother
+won’t understand.”
+
+“Then you write what you please, and read it to me. It makes me sick to
+think of it.” Richard closed his eyes, and Mary wrote:
+
+   “DEAR MOTHER KENTON,--I am sitting by Richard, writing at his
+   request, about what he has done. He received a letter from New York
+   telling him of the Bittridges’ performances there, and how that
+   wretch had insulted and abused you all. He bought a cowhide;
+   meaning to go over to Ballardsville, and use it on him there, but B.
+   came over on the Accommodation this morning, and Richard met him at
+   the station. He did not attempt to resist, for Richard took him
+   quite by surprise. Now, Mother Kenton, you know that Richard
+   doesn’t approve of violence, and the dear, sweet soul is perfectly
+   broken-down by what he had to do. But he had to do it, and he
+   wishes you to know at, once that he did it. He dreads the effect
+   upon Ellen, and we must leave it to your judgment about telling her.
+   Of course, sooner or later she must find it out. You need not be
+   alarmed about Richard. He is just nauseated a little, and he will
+   be all right as soon as his stomach is settled. He thinks you ought
+   to have this letter before you sail, and with affectionate good-byes
+   to all, in which Dick joins,
+
+                  “Your loving daughter,
+
+                            “Mary KENTON.”
+
+“There! Will that do?”
+
+“Yes, that is everything that can be said,” answered Richard, and Mary
+kissed him gratefully before sealing her letter.
+
+“I will put a special delivery on it,” she said, and her precaution
+availed to have the letter delivered to Mrs. Kenton the evening the
+family left the hotel, when it was too late to make any change in their
+plans, but in time to give her a bad night on the steamer, in her doubt
+whether she ought to let the family go, with this trouble behind them.
+
+But she would have had a bad night on the steamer in any case, with the
+heat, and noise, and smell of the docks; and the steamer sailed with her
+at six o’clock the next morning with the doubt still open in her mind.
+The judge had not been of the least use to her in helping solve it, and
+she had not been able to bring herself to attack Lottie for writing to
+Richard. She knew it was Lottie who had made the mischief, but she could
+not be sure that it was mischief till she knew its effect upon Ellen.
+The girl had been carried in the arms of one of the stewards from the
+carriage to her berth in Lottie’s room, and there she had lain through
+the night, speechless and sleepless.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Ellen did not move or manifest any consciousness when the steamer left
+her dock and moved out into the stream, or take any note of the tumult
+that always attends a great liner’s departure. At breakfast-time her
+mother came to her from one of the brief absences she made, in the hope
+that at each turn she should find her in a different mood, and asked if
+she would not have something to eat.
+
+“I’m not hungry,” she answered. “When will it sail?”
+
+“Why, Ellen! We sailed two hours ago, and the pilot has just left us.”
+
+Ellen lifted herself on her elbow and stared at her. “And you let me!”
+ she said, cruelly.
+
+“Ellen! I will not have this!” cried her mother, frantic at the
+reproach. “What do you mean by my letting you? You knew that we were
+going to sail, didn’t you? What else did you suppose we had come to the
+steamer for?”
+
+“I supposed you would let me stay, if I wanted to: But go away, momma,
+go away! You’re all against me--you, and poppa, and Lottie, and Boyne.
+Oh, dear! oh, dear!” She threw herself down in her berth and covered her
+face with the sheet, sobbing, while her mother stood by in an anguish of
+pity and anger. She wanted to beat the girl, she wanted to throw herself
+upon her, and weep with her in the misery which she shared with her.
+
+Lottie came to the door of the state-room with an arm-load of
+long-stemmed roses, the gift of the young Mr. Plumpton, who had not had
+so much to be entreated to come down to the steamer and see her off as
+Boyne had pretended. “Momma,” she said, “I have got to leave these roses
+in here, whether Ellen likes it or not. Boyne won’t have them in his
+room, because he says the man that’s with him would have a right to
+object; and this is half my room, anyway.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton frowned and shook her head, but Ellen answered from under
+the sheet, “I don’t mind the roses, Lottie. I wish you’d stay with me a
+little while.”
+
+Lottie hesitated, having in mind the breakfast for which the horn
+had just sounded. But apparently she felt that one good turn deserved
+another, and she answered: “All right; I will, Nell. Momma, you tell
+Boyne to hurry, and come to Ellen as soon as he’s done, and then I will
+go. Don’t let anybody take my place.”
+
+“I wish,” said Ellen, still from under the sheet, “that momma would have
+your breakfast sent here. I don’t want Boyne.”
+
+Women apparently do not require any explanation of these swift
+vicissitudes in one another, each knowing probably in herself the nerves
+from which they proceed. Mrs. Kenton promptly assented, in spite of the
+sulky reluctance which Lottie’s blue eyes looked at her; she motioned
+her violently to silence, and said: “Yes, I will, Ellen. I will send
+breakfast for both of you.”
+
+When she was gone, Ellen uncovered her face and asked Lottie to dip a
+towel in water and give it to her. As she bathed her eyes she said, “You
+don’t care, do you, Lottie?”
+
+“Not very much,” said Lottie, unsparingly. “I can go to lunch, I
+suppose.”
+
+“Maybe I’ll go to lunch with you,” Ellen suggested, as if she were
+speaking of some one else.
+
+Lottie wasted neither sympathy nor surprise on the question. “Well,
+maybe that would be the best thing. Why don’t you come to breakfast?”
+
+“No, I won’t go to breakfast. But you go.”
+
+When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly
+explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone. Before the young
+man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table,
+her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not
+be made worse, and so she remained silent. Judge Kenton sat with his
+eyes fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast
+for him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those
+moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish
+dependence. Lottie offered him another alternative by absently laying
+hold of his napkin on the table.
+
+“That’s mine,” he said, with husky gloom.
+
+She tossed it back to him with prompt disdain and a deeply eye-lashed
+glance at a napkin on her right. The young man who sat next it said,
+with a smile, “Perhaps that’s yours-unless I’ve taken my neighbor’s.”
+
+Lottie gave him a stare, and when she had sufficiently punished him for
+his temerity said, rather sweetly, “Oh, thank you,” and took the napkin.
+
+“I hope we shall all have use for them before long,” the young man
+ventured again.
+
+“Well, I should think as much,” returned the girl, and this was the
+beginning of a conversation which the young man shared successively with
+the judge and Mrs. Kenton as opportunity offered. He gave the judge his
+card across the table, and when the judge had read on it, “Rev. Hugh
+Breckon,” he said that his name was Kenton, and he introduced the young
+man formally to his family. Mr. Breckon had a clean-shaven face, with an
+habitual smile curving into the cheeks from under a long, straight nose;
+his chin had a slight whopper-jaw twist that was charming; his gay eyes
+were blue, and a full vein came down his forehead between them from his
+smooth hair. When he laughed, which was often, his color brightened.
+
+Boyne was named last, and then Mr. Breckon said, with a smile that
+showed all his white teeth, “Oh yes, Mr. Boyne and I are friends
+already--ever since we found ourselves room-mates,” and but for us, as
+Lottie afterwards noted, they might never have known Boyne was rooming
+with him, and could easily have made all sorts of insulting remarks
+about Mr. Breckon in their ignorance.
+
+The possibility seemed to delight Mr. Breckon; he invited her to make
+all the insulting remarks she could think of, any way, and professed
+himself a loser, so far as her real opinion was withheld from him by
+reason of his rashness in giving the facts away. In the electrical
+progress of their acquaintance she had begun walking up and down the
+promenade with him after they came up from breakfast; her mother had
+gone to Ellen; the judge had been made comfortable in his steamer-chair,
+and Boyne had been sent about his business.
+
+“I will try to think some up,” she promised him, “as soon as I HAVE
+any real opinion of you,” and he asked her if he might consider that a
+beginning.
+
+She looked at him out of her indomitable blue eyes, and said, “If it
+hadn’t been for your card, and the Reverend on it, I should have said
+you were an actor.”
+
+“Well, well,” said Mr. Breckon, with a laugh, “perhaps I am, in a way.
+I oughtn’t to be, of course, but if a minister ever forces himself, I
+suppose he’s acting.”
+
+“I don’t see,” said Lottie, instantly availing herself of the opening,
+“how you can get up and pray, Sunday after Sunday, whether you feel like
+it or not.”
+
+The young man said, with another laugh, but not so gay, “Well, the case
+has its difficulties.”
+
+“Or perhaps you just read prayers,” Lottie sharply conjectured.
+
+“No,” he returned, “I haven’t that advantage--if you think it one. I’m a
+sort of a Unitarian. Very advanced, too, I’m afraid.”
+
+“Is that a kind of Universalist?”
+
+“Not--not exactly. There’s an old joke--I’m not sure it’s very
+good--which distinguishes between the sects. It’s said that the
+Universalists think God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians
+think they are too good to be damned.” Lottie shrank a little from him.
+“Ah!” he cried, “you think it sounds wicked. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not
+clerical enough to joke about serious things.”
+
+He looked into her face with a pretended anxiety. “Oh, I don’t know,”
+ she said, with a little scorn. “I guess if you can stand it, I can.”
+
+“I’m not sure that I can. I’m afraid it’s more in keeping with an
+actor’s profession than my own. Why,” he added, as if to make a
+diversion, “should you have thought I was an actor?”
+
+“I suppose because you were clean-shaved; and your pronunciation. So
+Englishy.”
+
+“Is it? Perhaps I ought to be proud. But I’m not an Englishman. I am a
+plain republican American. May I ask if you are English?”
+
+“Oh!” said Lottie. “As if you thought such a thing. We’re from Ohio.”
+
+Mr. Breckon said, “Ah!” Lottie could not make out in just what sense.
+
+By this time they were leaning on the rail of the promenade, looking
+over at what little was left of Long Island, and she said, abruptly: “I
+think I will go and see how my father is getting along.”
+
+“Oh, do take me with you, Miss Kenton!” Mr. Breckon entreated. “I am
+feeling very badly about that poor old joke. I know you don’t think well
+of me for it, and I wish to report what I’ve been saying to your father,
+and let him judge me. I’ve heard that it’s hard to live up to Ohio
+people when you’re at your best, and I do hope you’ll believe I have not
+been quite at my best. Will you let me come with you?”
+
+Lottie did not know whether he was making fun of her or not, but she
+said, “Oh, it’s a free country,” and allowed him to go with her.
+
+His preface made the judge look rather grave; but when he came to the
+joke, Kenton laughed and said it was not bad.
+
+“Oh, but that isn’t quite the point,” said Mr. Breckon. “The question
+is whether I am good in repeating it to a young lady who was seeking
+serious instruction on a point of theology.”
+
+“I don’t know what she would have done with the instruction if she
+had got it,” said the judge, dryly, and the young man ventured in her
+behalf:
+
+“It would be difficult for any one to manage, perhaps.”
+
+“Perhaps,” Kenton assented, and Lottie could see that he was thinking
+Ellen would know what to do with it.
+
+She resented that, and she was in the offence that girls feel when
+their elders make them the subject of comment with their contemporaries.
+“Well, I’ll leave you to discuss it alone. I’m going to Ellen,” she
+said, the young man vainly following her a few paces, with apologetic
+gurgles of laughter.
+
+“That’s right,” her father consented, and then he seized the opening to
+speak about Ellen. “My eldest daughter is something of an invalid, but
+I hope we shall have her on deck before the voyage is over. She is more
+interested in those matters than her sister.”
+
+“Oh!” Mr. Breckon interpolated, in a note of sympathetic interest. He
+could not well do more.
+
+It was enough for Judge Kenton, who launched himself upon the
+celebration of Ellen’s gifts and qualities with a simple-hearted
+eagerness which he afterwards denied when his wife accused him of it,
+but justified as wholly safe in view of Mr. Breckon’s calling and his
+obvious delicacy of mind. It was something that such a person would
+understand, and Kenton was sure that he had not unduly praised the
+girl. A less besotted parent might have suspected that he had not deeply
+interested his listener, who seemed glad of the diversion operated by
+Boyne’s coming to growl upon his father, “Mother’s bringing Ellen up.”
+
+“Oh, then, I mustn’t keep your chair,” said the minister, and he rose
+promptly from the place he had taken beside the judge, and got himself
+away to the other side of the ship before the judge could frame a
+fitting request for him to stay.
+
+“If you had,” Mrs. Kenton declared, when he regretted this to her, “I
+don’t know what I would have done. It’s bad enough for him to hear you
+bragging about the child without being kept to help take care of her,
+or keep her amused, as you call it. I will see that Ellen is kept amused
+without calling upon strangers.” She intimated that if Kenton did not
+act with more self-restraint she should do little less than take Ellen
+ashore, and abandon him to the voyage alone. Under the intimidation he
+promised not to speak of Ellen again.
+
+At luncheon, where Mr. Breckon again devoted himself to Lottie, he and
+Ellen vied in ignoring each other after their introduction, as far as
+words went. The girl smiled once or twice at what he was saying to her
+sister, and his glance kindled when it detected her smile. He might be
+supposed to spare her his conversation in her own interest, she looked
+so little able to cope with the exigencies of the talk he kept going.
+
+When he addressed her she answered as if she had not been listening, and
+he turned back to Lottie. After luncheon he walked with her, and their
+acquaintance made such a swift advance that she was able to ask him if
+he laughed that way with everybody.
+
+He laughed, and then he begged her pardon if he had been rude.
+
+“Well, I don’t see what there is to laugh at so much. When you ask me
+a thing I tell you just what I think, and it seems to set you off in a
+perfect gale. Don’t you expect people to say what they think?”
+
+“I think it’s beautiful,” said the young man, going into the gale, “and
+I’ve got to expecting it of you, at any rate. But--but it’s always so
+surprising! It isn’t what you expect of people generally, is it?”
+
+“I don’t expect it of you,” said Lottie.
+
+“No?” asked Mr. Breckon, in another gale. “Am I so uncandid?”
+
+“I don’t know about uncandid. But I should say you were slippery.”
+
+At this extraordinary criticism the young man looked graver than he had
+yet been able to do since the beginning of their acquaintance. He said,
+presently, “I wish you would explain what you mean by slippery.”
+
+“You’re as close as a trap!”
+
+“Really?”
+
+“It makes me tired.”
+
+“If you’re not too tired now I wish you would say how.”
+
+“Oh, you understand well enough. You’ve got me to say what I think about
+all sorts of things, and you haven’t expressed your opinion on a single,
+solitary point?”
+
+Lottie looked fiercely out to sea, turning her face so as to keep him
+from peering around into it in the way he had. For that reason, perhaps,
+he did not try to do so. He answered, seriously: “I believe you are
+partly right. I’m afraid I haven’t seemed quite fair. Couldn’t you
+attribute my closeness to something besides my slipperiness?” He began
+to laugh again. “Can’t you imagine my being interested in your opinions
+so much more than my own that I didn’t care to express mine?”
+
+Lottie said, impatiently, “Oh, pshaw!” She had hesitated whether to say,
+“Rats!”
+
+“But now,” he pursued, “if you will suggest some point on which I can
+give you an opinion, I promise solemnly to do so,” but he was not very
+solemn as he spoke.
+
+“Well, then, I will,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s very strange, to
+say the least, for a minister to be always laughing so much?”
+
+Mr. Breckon gave a peal of delight, and answered, “Yes, I certainly do.”
+ He controlled himself so far as to say: “Now I think I’ve been pretty
+open with you, and I wish you’d answer me a question. Will you?”
+
+“Well, I will--one,” said Lottie.
+
+“It may be two or three; but I’ll begin with one. Why do you think a
+minister ought to be more serious than other men?”
+
+“Why? Well, I should think you’d know. You wouldn’t laugh at a funeral,
+would you?”
+
+“I’ve been at some funerals where it would have been a relief to laugh,
+and I’ve wanted to cry at some weddings. But you think it wouldn’t do?”
+
+“Of course it wouldn’t. I should think you’d know as much as that,” said
+Lottie, out of patience with him.
+
+“But a minister isn’t always marrying or burying people; and in the
+intervals, why shouldn’t he be setting them an example of harmless
+cheerfulness?”
+
+“He ought to be thinking more about the other world, I should say.”
+
+“Well, if he believes there is another world--”
+
+“Why! Don’t you?” she broke out on him.
+
+Mr. Breckon ruled himself and continued--“as strenuously and
+unquestionably as he ought, he has greater reason than other men for
+gayety through his faith in a happier state of being than this. That’s
+one of the reasons I use against myself when I think of leaving off
+laughing. Now, Miss Kenton,” he concluded, “for such a close and
+slippery nature, I think I’ve been pretty frank,” and he looked round
+and down into her face with a burst of laughter that could be heard
+an the other side of the ship. He refused to take up any serious topic
+after that, and he returned to his former amusement of making her give
+herself away.
+
+That night Lottie came to her room with an expression so decisive in her
+face that Ellen, following it with vague, dark eyes as it showed itself
+in the glass at which her sister stood taking out the first dismantling
+hairpins before going to bed, could not fail of something portentous in
+it.
+
+“Well,” said Lottie, with severe finality, “I haven’t got any use
+for THAT young man from this time out. Of all the tiresome people, he
+certainly takes the cake. You can have him, Ellen, if you want him.”
+
+“What’s the matter with him?” asked Ellen, with a voice in sympathy with
+the slow movement of her large eyes as she lay in her berth, staring at
+Lottie.
+
+“There’s everything the matter, that oughtn’t to be. He’s too trivial
+for anything: I like a man that’s serious about one thing in the
+universe, at least, and that’s just what Mr. Breckon isn’t.” She went at
+such length into his disabilities that by the time she returned to the
+climax with which she started she was ready to clamber into the upper
+berth; and as she snapped the electric button at its head she repeated,
+“He’s trivial.”
+
+“Isn’t it getting rough?” asked Ellen. “The ship seems to be tipping.”
+
+“Yes, it is,” said Lottie, crossly. “Good-night.”
+
+If the Rev. Mr. Breckon was making an early breakfast in the hope of
+sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without
+encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he
+was destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by
+the paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each
+forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked
+his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very
+sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother was reported by her father
+to be feeling the motion too much to venture out. The judge was, in
+fact, the only person at table when Breckon sat down; but when he had
+accounted for his wife’s absence, and confessed that he did not believe
+either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and
+advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It
+had not gone so far as this in the judge’s experience of a neurotic
+invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He
+had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain,
+and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and asked her
+where Lottie was.
+
+“Oh, she doesn’t want any breakfast, she says. Is momma sick, too?
+Where’s Boyne?”
+
+The judge reported as to her mother, and Mr. Breckon, after the exchange
+of a silent salutation with the girl, had a gleeful moment in describing
+Boyne’s revolt at the steward’s notion of gruel. “I’m glad to see you so
+well, Miss Kenton,” he concluded.
+
+“I suppose I will be sick, too, if it gets rougher,” she said, and she
+turned from him to give a rather compendious order to the table steward.
+
+“Well, you’ve got an appetite, Ellen,” her father ventured.
+
+“I don’t believe I will eat anything,” she checked him, with a falling
+face.
+
+Breckon came to the aid of the judge. “If you’re not sick now, I
+prophesy you won’t be, Miss Kenton. It can’t get much rougher, without
+doing something uncommon.”
+
+“Is it a storm?” she asked, indifferently.
+
+“It’s what they call half a gale, I believe. I don’t know how they
+measure it.”
+
+She smiled warily in response to his laugh, and said to her father, “Are
+you going up after breakfast, poppa?”
+
+“Why, if you want to go, Ellen--”
+
+“Oh, I wasn’t asking for that; I am going back to Lottie. But I should
+think you would like the air. Won’t it do you good?”
+
+“I’m all right,” said the judge, cheered by her show of concern for some
+one else. “I suppose it’s rather wet on deck?” he referred himself to
+Breckon.
+
+“Well, not very, if you keep to the leeward. She doesn’t seem a very wet
+boat.”
+
+“What is a wet boat” Ellen asked, without lifting her sad eyes.
+
+“Well, really, I’m afraid it’s largely a superstition. Passengers like
+to believe that some boats are less liable to ship seas--to run into
+waves--than others; but I fancy that’s to give themselves the air of old
+travellers.”
+
+She let the matter lapse so entirely that he supposed she had forgotten
+it in all its bearings, when she asked, “Have you been across many
+times?”
+
+“Not many-four or five.”
+
+“This is our first time,” she volunteered.
+
+“I hope it won’t be your last. I know you will enjoy it.” She fell
+listless again, and Breckon imagined he had made a break. “Not,” he
+added, with an endeavor for lightness, “that I suppose you’re going for
+pleasure altogether. Women, nowadays, are above that, I understand. They
+go abroad for art’s sake, and to study political economy, and history,
+and literature--”
+
+“My daughter,” the judge interposed, “will not do much in that way, I
+hope.”
+
+The girl bent her head over her plate and frowned.
+
+“Oh, then,” said Breckon, “I will believe that she’s going for purely
+selfish enjoyment. I should like to be justified in making that my
+object by a good example.”
+
+Ellen looked up and gave him a look that cut him short in his glad note.
+The lifting of her eyelids was like the rise of the curtain upon some
+scene of tragedy which was all the more impressive because it seemed
+somehow mixed with shame. This poor girl, whom he had pitied as an
+invalid, was a sufferer from some spiritual blight more pathetic than
+broken health. He pulled his mind away from the conjecture that tempted
+it and went on: “One of the advantages of going over the fourth or fifth
+time is that you’re relieved from a discoverer’s duties to Europe. I’ve
+got absolutely nothing before me now, but at first I had to examine
+every object of interest on the Continent, and form an opinion about
+thousands of objects that had no interest for me. I hope Miss Kenton
+will take warning from me.”
+
+He had not addressed Ellen directly, and her father answered: “We have
+no definite plans as yet, but we don’t mean to overwork ourselves even
+if we’ve come for a rest. I don’t know,” he added, “but we had better
+spend our summer in England. It’s easier getting about where you know
+the language.”
+
+The judge seemed to refer his ideas to Breckon for criticism, and the
+young man felt authorized to say, “Oh, so many of them know the language
+everywhere now, that it’s easy getting about in any country.”
+
+“Yes, I suppose so,” the judge vaguely deferred.
+
+“Which,” Ellen demanded of the young man with a nervous suddenness, “do
+you think is the most interesting country?”
+
+He found himself answering with equal promptness, “Oh, Italy, of
+course.”
+
+“Can we go to Italy, poppa?” asked the girl.
+
+“I shouldn’t advise you to go there at once” Breckon intervened,
+smiling. “You’d find it Pretty hot there now. Florence, or Rome, or
+Naples--you can’t think of them.”
+
+“We have it pretty hot in Central Ohio,” said the judge, with latent
+pride in his home climate, “What sort of place is Holland?”
+
+“Oh, delightful! And the boat goes right on to Rotterdam, you know.”
+
+“Yes. We had arranged to leave it at Boulogne,” but we could change.
+“Do you think your mother would like Holland?” The judge turned to his
+daughter.
+
+“I think she would like Italy better. She’s read more about it,” said
+the girl.
+
+“Rise of the Dutch Republic,” her father suggested.
+
+“Yes, I know. But she’s read more about Italy!”
+
+“Oh, well,” Breckon yielded, “the Italian lakes wouldn’t be impossible.
+And you might find Venice fairly comfortable.”
+
+“We could go to Italy, then,” said the judge to his daughter, “if your
+mother prefers.”
+
+Breckon found the simplicity of this charming, and he tasted a yet finer
+pleasure in the duplicity; for he divined that the father was seeking
+only to let his daughter have her way in pretending to yield to her
+mother’s preference.
+
+It was plain that the family’s life centred, as it ought, about this
+sad, sick girl, the heart of whose mystery he perceived, on reflection,
+he had not the wish to pluck out. He might come to know it, but he would
+not try to know it; if it offered itself he might even try not to know
+it. He had sometimes found it more helpful with trouble to be ignorant
+of its cause.
+
+In the mean time he had seen that these Kentons were sweet, good
+people, as he phrased their quality to himself. He had come to terms of
+impersonal confidence the night before with Boyne, who had consulted
+him upon many more problems and predicaments of life than could have yet
+beset any boy’s experience, probably with the wish to make provision for
+any possible contingency of the future. The admirable principles which
+Boyne evolved for his guidance from their conversation were formulated
+with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling
+his laughter in his pillow. He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to
+weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable
+levity. With his sense of being really very light at most times, and
+with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with
+Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding to her
+frankness was concerned, been close. He relished the unsparing honesty
+with which she had denounced him, and though he did not yet know his
+outcast condition with relation to her, he could not think of her
+without a smile of wholly disinterested liking. He did not know, as a
+man of earlier date would have known, all that the little button in the
+judge’s lapel meant; but he knew that it meant service in the civil war,
+a struggle which he vaguely and impersonally revered, though its details
+were of much the same dimness for him as those of the Revolution and
+the War of 1812. The modest distrust which had grown upon the bold
+self-confidence of Kenton’s earlier manhood could not have been more
+tenderly and reverently imagined; and Breckon’s conjecture of things
+suffered for love’s sake against sense and conviction in him were his
+further tribute to a character which existed, of course, mainly in this
+conjecture. It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the
+subjection to his wife’s, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless
+becomes, a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the
+actual performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in
+deference to the good woman. She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a
+sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having
+no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her
+mother’s devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant
+barometer. It had become apparent that Miss Kenton was her father’s
+favorite in a special sense, and that his partial affection for her
+was of much older date than her mother’s. Not less charming than her
+fondness for her father was the openness with which she disabled his
+wisdom because of his partiality to her.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+When they left the breakfast table the first morning of the rough
+weather, Breckon offered to go on deck with Miss Kenton, and put her
+where she could see the waves. That had been her shapeless ambition,
+dreamily expressed with reference to some time, as they rose. Breckon
+asked, “Why not now?” and he promised to place her chair on deck where
+she could enjoy the spectacle safe from any seas the boat might ship.
+Then she recoiled, and she recoiled the further upon her father’s
+urgence. At the foot of the gangway she looked wistfully up the reeling
+stairs, and said that she saw her shawl and Lottie’s among the others
+solemnly swaying from the top railing. “Oh, then,” Breckon pressed her,
+“you could be made comfortable without the least trouble.”
+
+“I ought to go and see how Lottie is getting along,” she murmured.
+
+Her father said he would see for her, and on this she explicitly
+renounced her ambition of going up. “You couldn’t do anything,” she
+said, coldly.
+
+“If Miss Lottie is very sea-sick she’s beyond all earthly aid,” Breckon
+ventured. “She’d better be left to the vain ministrations of the
+stewardess.”
+
+Ellen looked at him in apparent distrust of his piety, if not of his
+wisdom. “I don’t believe I could get up the stairs,” she said.
+
+“Well,” he admitted, “they’re not as steady as land--going stairs.” Her
+father discreetly kept silence, and, as no one offered to help her, she
+began to climb the crazy steps, with Breckon close behind her in latent
+readiness for her fall.
+
+From the top she called down to the judge, “Tell momma I will only stay
+a minute.” But later, tucked into her chair on the lee of the bulkhead,
+with Breckon bracing himself against it beside her, she showed no
+impatience to return. “Are they never higher than that” she required
+of him, with her wan eyes critically on the infinite procession of the
+surges.
+
+“They must be,” Breckon answered, “if there’s any truth in common
+report. I’ve heard of their running mountains high. Perhaps they used
+rather low mountains to measure them by. Or the measurements may
+not have been very exact. But common report never leaves much to the
+imagination.”
+
+“That was the way at Niagara,” the girl assented; and Breckon obligingly
+regretted that he had never been there. He thought it in good taste that
+she should not tell him he ought to go. She merely said, “I was there
+once with poppa,” and did not press her advantage. “Do they think,” she
+asked, “that it’s going to be a very long voyage?”
+
+“I haven’t been to the smoking-room--that’s where most of the thinking
+is done on such points; the ship’s officers never seem to know about
+it--since the weather changed. Should you mind it greatly?”
+
+“I wouldn’t care if it never ended,” said the girl, with such a note of
+dire sincerity that Breckon instantly changed his first mind as to her
+words implying a pose. She took any deeper implication from them in
+adding, “I didn’t know I should like being at sea.”
+
+“Well, if you’re not sea-sick,” he assented, “there are not many
+pleasanter things in life.”
+
+She suggested, “I suppose I’m not well enough to be sea-sick.” Then she
+seemed to become aware of something provisional in his attendance, and
+she said, “You mustn’t stay on my account. I can get down when I want
+to.”
+
+“Do let me stay,” he entreated, “unless you’d really rather not,” and
+as there was no chair immediately attainable, he crouched on the deck
+beside hers.
+
+“It makes me think,” she said, and he perceived that she meant the sea,
+“of the cold-white, heavy plunging foam in ‘The Dream of Fair Women.’
+The words always seemed drenched!”
+
+“Ah, Tennyson, yes,” said Breckon, with a disposition to smile at the
+simple-heartedness of the literary allusion. “Do young ladies read
+poetry much in Ohio?”
+
+“I don’t believe they do,” she answered. “Do they anywhere?”
+
+“That’s one of the things I should like to know. Is Tennyson your
+favorite poet?”
+
+“I don’t believe I have any,” said Ellen. “I used to like Whither, and
+Emerson; aid Longfellow, too.”
+
+“Used to! Don’t you now?”
+
+“I don’t read them so much now,” and she made a pause, behind which he
+fancied her secret lurked. But he shrank from knowing it if he might.
+
+“You’re all great readers in your family,” he suggested, as a polite
+diversion.
+
+“Lottie isn’t,” she answered, dreamily. “She hates it.”
+
+“Ah, I referred more particularly to the others,” said Breckon, and
+he began to laugh, and then checked himself. “Your mother, and the
+judge--and your brother--”
+
+“Boyne reads about insects,” she admitted.
+
+“He told me of his collection of cocoons. He seems to be afraid it has
+suffered in his absence.”
+
+“I’m afraid it has,” said Ellen, and then remained silent.
+
+“There!” the young man broke out, pointing seaward. “That’s rather a
+fine one. Doesn’t that realize your idea of something mountains high?
+Unless your mountains are very high in Ohio!”
+
+“It is grand. And the gulf between! But we haven’t any in our part. It’s
+all level. Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?”
+
+“Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to
+begin counting.”
+
+“Yes,” said the girl, and she added, vaguely: “I suppose it’s like
+everything else in that. We have to make-believe before we can believe
+anything.”
+
+“Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary,” Breckon
+assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. “We shouldn’t
+have the atomic theory without it.” She did not say anything, and he
+decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading. He
+tried to be more concrete. “We have to make-believe in ourselves before
+we can believe, don’t we? And then we sometimes find we are wrong!” He
+laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:
+
+“And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in
+yourself?”
+
+“That’s what I’m trying to decide,” he replied. “Sometimes I feel like
+renouncing myself altogether; but usually I give myself another chance.
+I dare say if I hadn’t been so forbearing I might have agreed with your
+sister about my unfitness for the ministry.”
+
+“With Lottie?”
+
+“She thinks I laugh too much!”
+
+“I don’t see why a minister shouldn’t laugh if he feels like it. And if
+there’s something to laugh at.”
+
+“Ah, that’s just the point! Is there ever anything to laugh at? If we
+looked closely enough at things, oughtn’t we rather to cry?” He laughed
+in retreat from the serious proposition. “But it wouldn’t do to try
+making each other cry instead of laugh, would it? I suppose your sister
+would rather have me cry.”
+
+“I don’t believe Lottie thought much about it,” said Ellen; and at this
+point Mr. Breckon yielded to an impulse.
+
+“I should think I had really been of some use if I had made you laugh,
+Miss Kenton.”
+
+“Me?”
+
+“You look as if you laughed with your whole heart when you did laugh.”
+
+She glanced about, and Breckon decided that she had found him too
+personal. “I wonder if I could walk, with the ship tipping so?” she
+asked.
+
+“Well, not far,” said Breckon, with a provisional smile, and then he was
+frightened from his irony by her flinging aside her wraps and starting
+to her feet. Before he could scramble to his own, she had slid down
+the reeling promenade half to the guard, over which she seemed about to
+plunge. He hurled himself after her; he could not have done otherwise;
+and it was as much in a wild clutch for support as in a purpose to save
+her that he caught her in his arms and braced himself against the ship’s
+slant. “Where are you going? What are you trying to do?” he shouted.
+
+“I wanted to go down-stairs,” she protested, clinging to him.
+
+“You were nearer going overboard,” he retorted. “You shouldn’t have
+tried.” He had not fully formulated his reproach when the ship righted
+herself with a counter-roll and plunge, and they were swung staggering
+back together against the bulkhead. The door of the gangway was within
+reach, and Breckon laid hold of the rail beside it and put the girl
+within. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
+
+“No, no; I’m not hurt,” she panted, sinking on the cushioned benching
+where usually rows of semi-sea-sick people were lying.
+
+“I thought you might have been bruised against the bulkhead,” he said.
+“Are you sure you’re not hurt that I can’t get you anything? From the
+steward, I mean?”
+
+“Only help me down-stairs,” she answered. “I’m perfectly well,” and
+Breckon was so willing on these terms to close the incident that he was
+not aware of the bruise on his own arm, which afterwards declared itself
+in several primitive colors. “Don’t tell them,” she added. “I want to
+come up again.”
+
+“Why, certainly not,” he consented; but Boyne Kenton, who had been an
+involuntary witness of the fact from a point on the forward promenade,
+where he had stationed himself to study the habits of the stormy petrel
+at a moment so favorable to the acquaintance of the petrel (having
+left a seasick bed for the purpose), was of another mind. He had been
+alarmed, and, as it appeared in the private interview which he demanded
+of his mother, he had been scandalized.
+
+“It is bad enough the way Lottie is always going on with fellows. And
+now, if Ellen is going to begin!”
+
+“But, Boyne, child,” Mrs. Kenton argued, in an equilibrium between the
+wish to laugh at her son and the wish to box his ears, “how could she
+help his catching her if he was to save her from pitching overboard?”
+
+“That’s just it! He will always think that she did it just so he would
+have to catch her.”
+
+“I don’t believe any one would think that of Ellen,” said Mrs. Kenton,
+gravely.
+
+“Momma! You don’t know what these Eastern fellows are. There are so few
+of them that they’re used to having girls throw themselves at them, and
+they will think anything, ministers and all. You ought to talk to Ellen,
+and caution her. Of course, she isn’t like Lottie; but if Lottie’s
+been behaving her way with Mr. Breckon, he must suppose the rest of the
+family is like her.”
+
+“Boyne,” said his mother, provisionally, “what sort of person is Mr.
+Breckon?”
+
+“Well, I think he’s kind of frivolous.”
+
+“Do you, Boyne?”
+
+“I don’t suppose he means any harm by it, but I don’t like to see a
+minister laugh so much. I can’t hardly get him to talk seriously about
+anything. And I just know he makes fun of Lottie. I don’t mean that he
+always makes fun with me. He didn’t that night at the vaudeville, where
+I first saw him.”
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“Don’t you remember? I told you about it last winter.”
+
+“And was Mr. Breckon that gentleman?”
+
+“Yes; but he didn’t know who I was when we met here.”
+
+“Well, upon my word, Boyne, I think you might have told us before,” said
+his mother, in not very definite vexation. “Go along, now!”
+
+Boyne stood talking to his mother, with his hands, which he had not
+grown to, largely planted on the jambs of her state-room door. She was
+keeping her berth, not so much because she was sea-sick as because it
+was the safest place in the unsteady ship to be in. “Do you want me to
+send Ellen to you!”
+
+“I will attend to Ellen, Boyne,” his mother snubbed him. “How is
+Lottie?”
+
+“I can’t tell whether she’s sick or not. I went to see about her and she
+motioned me away, and fairly screamed when I told her she ought to keep
+out in the air. Well, I must be going up again myself, or--”
+
+Before lunch, Boyne had experienced the alternative which he did not
+express, although his theory and practice of keeping in the open air
+ought to have rendered him immune. Breckon saw his shock of hair, and
+his large eyes, like Ellen’s in their present gloom, looking out of it
+on the pillow of the upper berth, when he went to their room to freshen
+himself for the luncheon, and found Boyne averse even to serious
+conversation: He went to lunch without him. None of the Kentons were at
+table, and he had made up his mind to lunch alone when Ellen appeared,
+and came wavering down the aisle to the table. He stood up to help her,
+but seeing how securely she stayed herself from chair to chair he sank
+down again.
+
+“Poppy is sick, too, now,” she replied, as if to account for being
+alone.
+
+“And you’re none the worse for your little promenade?” The steward came
+to Breckon’s left shoulder with a dish, and after an effort to serve
+himself from it he said, with a slight gasp, “The other side, please.”
+ Ellen looked at him, but did not speak, and he made haste to say: “The
+doctor goes so far as to admit that its half a gale. I don’t know just
+what measure the first officer would have for it. But I congratulate you
+on a very typical little storm, Miss Kenton; perfectly safe, but very
+decided. A great many people cross the Atlantic without anything half
+as satisfactory. There is either too much or too little of this sort
+of thing.” He went on talking about the weather, and had got such a
+distance from the point of beginning that he had cause to repent being
+brought back to it when she asked:
+
+“Did the doctor think, you were hurt?”
+
+“Well, perhaps I ought to be more ashamed than I am,” said Breckon. “But
+I thought I had better make sure. And it’s only a bruise--”
+
+“Won’t you let ME help you!” she asked, as another dish intervened at
+his right. “I hurt you.”
+
+Breckon laughed at her solemn face and voice. “If you’ll exonerate
+yourself first,” he answered: “I couldn’t touch a morsel that conveyed
+confession of the least culpability on your part. Do you consent?
+Otherwise, I pass this dish. And really I want some!”
+
+“Well,” she sadly consented, and he allowed her to serve his plate.
+
+“More yet, please,” he said. “A lot!”
+
+“Is that enough?”
+
+“Well, for the first helping. And don’t offer to cut it up for me! My
+proud spirit draws the line at cutting up. Besides, a fork will do the
+work with goulash.”
+
+“Is that what it is?” she asked, but not apparently because she cared to
+know.
+
+“Unless you prefer to naturalize it as stew. It seems to have come in
+with the Hungarian bands. I suppose you have them in--”
+
+“Tuskingum? No, it is too small. But I heard them at a restaurant in New
+York where my brother took us.”
+
+“In the spirit of scientific investigation? It’s strange how a common
+principle seems to pervade both the Hungarian music and cooking--the
+same wandering airs and flavors--wild, vague, lawless harmonies in both.
+Did you notice it?”
+
+Ellen shook her head. The look of gloom which seemed to Breckon habitual
+in it came back into her face, and he had a fantastic temptation to
+see how far he could go with her sad consciousness before she should
+be aware that he was experimenting upon it. He put this temptation from
+him, and was in the enjoyment of a comfortable self-righteousness when
+it returned in twofold power upon him with the coming of some cutlets
+which capriciously varied the repast.
+
+“Ah, now, Miss Kenton, if you were to take pity on my helplessness!”
+
+“Why, certainly!” She possessed herself of his plate, and began to cut
+up the meat for him. “Am I making the bites too small?” she asked, with
+an upward glance at him.
+
+“Well, I don’t know. Should you think so?” he returned, with a smile
+that out-measured the morsels on the plate before her.
+
+She met his laughing eyes with eyes that questioned his honesty, at
+first sadly, and then indignantly. She dropped the knife and fork upon
+the plate and rose.
+
+“Oh, Miss Kenton!” he penitently entreated.
+
+But she was down the slanting aisle and out of the reeling door before
+he could decide what to do.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+It seemed to Breckon that he had passed through one of those accessions
+of temperament, one of those crises of natural man, to put it in the
+terms of an older theology than he professed, that might justify him in
+recurring to his original sense of his unfitness for his sacred calling,
+as he would hardly ham called it: He had allowed his levity to get the
+better of his sympathy, and his love of teasing to overpower that love
+of helping which seemed to him his chief right and reason for being a
+minister: To play a sort of poor practical joke upon that melancholy
+girl (who was also so attractive) was not merely unbecoming to him as
+a minister; it was cruel; it was vulgar; it was ungentlemanly. He could
+not say less than ungentlemanly, for that seemed to give him the only
+pang that did him any good. Her absolute sincerity had made her such
+an easy prey that he ought to have shrunk from the shabby temptation in
+abhorrence.
+
+It is the privilege of a woman, whether she wills it or not, to put a
+man who is in the wrong concerning her much further in the wrong than he
+could be from his offence. Breckon did not know whether he was suffering
+more or less because he was suffering quite hopelessly, but he was sure
+that he was suffering justly, and he was rather glad, if anything, that
+he must go on suffering. His first impulse had been to go at once to
+Judge Kenton and own his wrong, and take the consequences--in fact,
+invite them. But Breckon forbore for two reasons: one, that he had
+already appeared before the judge with the confession of having possibly
+made an unclerical joke to his younger daughter; the other, that the
+judge might not consider levity towards the elder so venial; and though
+Breckon wished to be both punished and pardoned, in the final analysis,
+perhaps, he most wished to be pardoned. Without pardon he could see no
+way to repair the wrong he had done. Perhaps he wished even to retrieve
+himself in the girl’s eyes, or wished for the chance of trying.
+
+Ellen went away to her state-room and sat down on the sofa opposite
+Lottie, and she lost herself in a muse in which she was found by the
+voice of the sufferer in the berth.
+
+“If you haven’t got anything better to do than come in here and stare
+at me, I wish you would go somewhere else and stare. I can tell you it
+isn’t any joke.”
+
+“I didn’t know I was staring at you,” said Ellen, humbly.
+
+“It would be enough to have you rising and sinking there, without your
+staring at all: If you’re going to stay, I wish you’d lie down. I don’t
+see why you’re so well, anyway, after getting us all to come on this
+wild-goose chase.”
+
+“I know, I know,” Ellen strickenly deprecated. “But I’m not going to
+stay. I jest came for my things.”
+
+“Is that giggling simpleton sick? I hope he is!”
+
+“Mr. Breckon?” Ellen asked, though she knew whom Lottie meant. “No, he
+isn’t sick. He was at lunch.”
+
+“Was poppa?”
+
+“He was at breakfast.”
+
+“And momma?”
+
+“She and Boyne are both in bed. I don’t know whether they’re very sick.”
+
+“Well, then, I’ll just tell you what, Ellen Kenton!” Lottie sat up in
+accusal. “You were staring at something he said; and the first thing we
+all know it will be another case of Bittridge!” Ellen winced, but Lottie
+had no pity. “You don’t know it, because you don’t know anything, and
+I’m not blaming you; but if you let that simpleton--I don’t care if he
+is a minister!--go ‘round with you when your family are all sick abed,
+you’ll be having the whole ship to look after you.”
+
+“Be still, Lottie!” cried Ellen. “You are awful,” and, with a flaming
+face, she escaped from the state-room.
+
+She did not know where else to go, and she beat along the sides of the
+corridor as far as the dining-saloon. She had a dim notion of trying to
+go up into the music-room above, but a glance at the reeling steep of
+the stairs forbade. With her wraps on her arm and her sea-cap in her
+hand, she stood clinging to the rail-post.
+
+Breckon came out of the saloon. “Oh, Miss Kenton,” he humbly entreated,
+“don’t try to go on deck! It’s rougher than ever.”
+
+“I was going to the music-room,” she faltered.
+
+“Let me help you, then,” he said again. They mounted the gangway-steps,
+but this time with his hand under her elbow, and his arm alert as before
+in a suspended embrace against her falling.
+
+She had lost the initiative of her earlier adventure; she could only
+submit herself to his guidance. But he almost outdid her in meekness,
+when he got her safely placed in a corner whence she could not be easily
+flung upon the floor. “You must have found it very stuffy below; but,
+indeed, you’d better not try going out.”
+
+“Do you think it isn’t safe here?” she asked.
+
+“Oh yes. As long as you keep quiet. May I get you something to read?
+They seem to have a pretty good little library.”
+
+They both glanced at the case of books; from which the steward-librarian
+was setting them the example of reading a volume.
+
+“No, I don’t want to read. You musn’t let me keep you from it.”
+
+“Well, one can read any time. But one hasn’t always the chance to say
+that one is ashamed. Don’t pretend you don’t understand, Miss Kenton!
+I didn’t really mean anything. The temptation to let you exaggerate my
+disability was too much for me. Say that you despise me! It would be
+such a comfort.”
+
+“Weren’t you hurt?”
+
+“A little--a little more than a little, but not half so much as I
+deserved--not to the point of not being able to cut up my meat. Am I
+forgiven? I’ll promise to cut up all your meat for you at dinner! Ah,
+I’m making it worse!”
+
+“Oh no. Please don’t speak of it”
+
+“Could you forbid my thinking of it, too?” He did not wait for her to
+answer. “Then here goes! One, two, three, and the thought is banished
+forever. Now what shall we speak of, or think of? We finished up the
+weather pretty thoroughly this morning. And if you have not the weather
+and the ship’s run when you’re at sea, why, you are at sea. Don’t you
+think it would be a good plan, when they stick those little flags into
+the chart, to show how far we’ve come in the last twenty-four hours, if
+they’d supply a topic for the day? They might have topics inscribed on
+the flags-standard topics, that would serve for any voyage. We might
+leave port with History--say, personal history; that would pave the way
+to a general acquaintance among the passengers. Then Geography, and if
+the world is really round, and what keeps the sea from spilling. Then
+Politics, and the comparative advantages of monarchical and republican
+governments, for international discussion. Then Pathology, and whether
+you’re usually sea-sick, and if there is any reliable remedy. Then--for
+those who are still up--Poetry and Fiction; whether women really like
+Kipling, and what kind of novels you prefer. There ought to be about
+ten topics. These boats are sometimes very slow. Can’t you suggest
+something, Miss Kenton? There is no hurry! We’ve got four to talk over,
+for we must bring up the arrears, you know. And now we’ll begin with
+personal history. Your sister doesn’t approve of me, does she?”
+
+“My sister?” Ellen faltered, and, between the conscience to own the fact
+and the kindness to deny it, she stopped altogether.
+
+“I needn’t have asked. She told me so herself, in almost as many words.
+She said I was slippery, and as close as a trap. Miss Kenton! I have the
+greatest wish to know whether I affect you as both slippery and close!”
+
+“I don’t always know what Lottie means.”
+
+“She means what she says; and I feel that I am under condemnation till
+I reform. I don’t know how to stop being slippery, but I’m determined to
+stop being close. Will you tell her that for me? Will you tell her
+that you never met an opener, franker person?--of course, except
+herself!--and that so far from being light I seemed to you particularly
+heavy? Say that I did nothing but talk about myself, and that when you
+wanted to talk about yourself you couldn’t get in a word edgewise. Do
+try, now, Miss Kenton, and see if you can! I don’t want you to invent a
+character for me, quite.”
+
+“Why, there’s nothing to say about me,” she began in compliance with his
+gayety, and then she fell helpless from it.
+
+“Well, then, about Tuskingum. I should like to hear about Tuskingum, so
+much!”
+
+“I suppose we like it because we’ve always lived there. You haven’t been
+much in the West, have you?”
+
+“Not as much as I hope to be.” He had found that Western people were
+sometimes sensitive concerning their section and were prepared to
+resent complacent ignorance of it. “I’ve always thought it must be very
+interesting.”
+
+“It isn’t,” said the girl. “At least, not like the East. I used to be
+provoked when the lecturers said anything like that; but when you’ve
+been to New York you see what they mean.”
+
+“The lecturers?” he queried.
+
+“They always stayed at our house when they lectured in Tuskingum.”
+
+“Ah! Oh yes,” said Breckon, grasping a situation of which he had heard
+something, chiefly satirical. “Of course. And is your father--is Judge
+Kenton literary? Excuse me!”
+
+“Only in his history. He’s writing the history of his regiment; or he
+gets the soldiers to write down all they can remember of the war, and
+then he puts their stories together.”
+
+“How delightful!” said Breckon. “And I suppose it’s a great pleasure to
+him.”
+
+“I don’t believe it is,” said Ellen. “Poppa doesn’t believe in war any
+more.”
+
+“Indeed!” said Breckon. “That is very interesting.”
+
+“Sometimes when I’m helping him with it--”
+
+“Ah, I knew you must help him!”
+
+“And he comes to a place where there has been a dreadful slaughter, it
+seems as if he felt worse about it than I did. He isn’t sure that it
+wasn’t all wrong. He thinks all war is wrong now.”
+
+“Is he--has he become a follower of Tolstoy?”
+
+“He’s read him. He says he’s the only man that ever gave a true account
+of battles; but he had thought it all out for himself before he read
+Tolstoy about fighting. Do you think it is right to revenge an injury?”
+
+“Why, surely not!” said Breckon, rather startled.
+
+“That is what we say,” the girl pursued. “But if some one had injured
+you--abused your confidence, and--insulted you, what would you do?”
+
+“I’m not sure that I understand,” Breckon began. The inquiry was
+superficially impersonal, but he reflected that women are never
+impersonal, or the sons of women, for that matter, and he suspected an
+intimate ground. His suspicions were confirmed when Miss Kenton said:
+“It seems easy enough to forgive anything that’s done to yourself; but
+if it’s done to some one else, too, have you the right--isn’t it wrong
+to let it go?”
+
+“You think the question of justice might come in then? Perhaps it ought.
+But what is justice? And where does your duty begin to be divided?” He
+saw her following him with alarming intensity, and he shrank from the
+responsibility before him. What application might not she make of his
+words in the case, whatever it was, which he chose not to imagine? “To
+tell you the truth, Miss Kenton, I’m not very clear on that point--I’m
+not sure that I’m disinterested.”
+
+“Disinterested?”
+
+“Yes; you know that I abused your confidence at luncheon; and until I
+know whether the wrong involved any one else--” He looked at her with
+hovering laughter in his eyes which took wing at the reproach in hers.
+“But if we are to be serious--”
+
+“Oh no,” she said, “it isn’t a serious matter.” But in the helplessness
+of her sincerity she could not carry it off lightly, or hide from him
+that she was disappointed.
+
+He tried to make talk about other things. She responded vaguely, and
+when she had given herself time she said she believed she would go
+to Lottie; she was quite sure she could get down the stairs alone. He
+pursued her anxiously, politely, and at the head of her corridor took
+leave of her with a distinct sense of having merited his dismissal.
+
+“I see what you mean, Lottie,” she said, “about Mr. Breckon.”
+
+Lottie did not turn her head on the pillow. “Has it taken you the whole
+day to find it out?”
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The father and the mother had witnessed with tempered satisfaction
+the interest which seemed to be growing up between Ellen and the young
+minister. By this time they had learned not to expect too much of any
+turn she might take; she reverted to a mood as suddenly as she left it.
+They could not quite make out Breckon himself; he was at least as great
+a puzzle to them as their own child was.
+
+“It seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, in their first review of the affair, after
+Boyne had done a brother’s duty in trying to bring Ellen under their
+mother’s censure, “that he was the gentleman who discussed the theatre
+with Boyne at the vaudeville last winter. Boyne just casually mentioned
+it. I was so provoked!”
+
+“I don’t see what bearing the fact has,” the judge remarked.
+
+“Why, Boyne liked him very much that night, but now he seems to feel
+very much as Lottie does about him. He thinks he laughs too much.”
+
+“I don’t know that there’s much harm in that,” said the judge. “And I
+shouldn’t value Boyne’s opinion of character very highly.”
+
+“I value any one’s intuitions--especially children’s.”
+
+“Boyne’s in that middle state where he isn’t quite a child. And so is
+Lottie, for that matter.”
+
+“That is true,” their mother assented. “And we ought to be glad of
+anything that takes Ellen’s mind off herself. If I could only believe
+she was forgetting that wretch!”
+
+“Does she ever speak of him?”
+
+“She never hints of him, even. But her mind may be full of him all the
+time.”
+
+The judge laughed impatiently. “It strikes me that this young Mr.
+Breckon hasn’t much advantage of Ellen in what Lottie calls closeness!”
+
+“Ellen has always been very reserved. It would have been better for her
+if she hadn’t. Oh, I scarcely dare to hope anything! Rufus, I feel that
+in everything of this kind we are very ignorant and inexperienced.”
+
+“Inexperienced!” Renton retorted. “I don’t want any more experience of
+the kind Ellen has given us.”
+
+“I don’t mean that. I mean--this Mr. Breckon. I can’t tell what attracts
+him in the child. She must appear very crude and uncultivated to him.
+You needn’t resent it so! I know she’s read a great deal, and you’ve
+made her think herself intellectual--but the very simple-heartedness of
+the way she would show out her reading would make such a young man see
+that she wasn’t like the girls he was used to. They would hide their
+intellectuality, if they had any. It’s no use your trying to fight it
+Mr. Kenton. We are country people, and he knows it.”
+
+“Tuskingum isn’t country!” the judge declared.
+
+“It isn’t city. And we don’t know anything about the world, any of us.
+Oh, I suppose we can read and write! But we don’t know the a, b, c of
+the things he, knows. He, belongs to a kind of society--of people--in
+New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never imagined
+before. They made me feel very belated and benighted--as if I hadn’t,
+read or thought anything. They didn’t mean to; but I couldn’t help it,
+and they couldn’t.”
+
+“You--you’ve been frightened out of your propriety by what you’ve seen
+in New York,” said her husband.
+
+“I’ve been frightened, certainly. And I wish you had been, too. I wish
+you wouldn’t be so conceited about Ellen. It scares me to see you so.
+Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone! You must see that. And she
+doesn’t dress like the girls he’s used to. I know we’ve got her things
+in New York; but she doesn’t wear them like a New-Yorker. I hope she
+isn’t going in for MORE unhappiness!”
+
+At the thought of this the judge’s crest fell. “Do you believe she’s
+getting interested in him?” he asked, humbly.
+
+“No, no; I don’t say that. But promise me you won’t encourage her in it.
+And don’t, for pity’s sake, brag about her to him.”
+
+“No, I won’t,” said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.
+
+The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview
+with his wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung
+convalescently along the promenade on their steamer-chairs. These, so
+far as they were women, were of such sick plainness that when he came
+to Ellen his heart throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother’s
+aspersion of her health and beauty. She looked not only very well, and
+very pretty, but in a gay red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her
+father’s uncritical eyes, very stylish. The glow left his heart at eight
+of the empty seat beside her.
+
+“Where is Lottie?” he asked, though it was not Lottie’s whereabouts that
+interested him.
+
+“Oh, she’s walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere,” said Ellen.
+
+“Then she’s made up her mind to tolerate him, has she?” the father
+asked, more lightly than he felt.
+
+Ellen smiled. “That wasn’t anything very serious, I guess. At any rate,
+she’s walking with him.”
+
+“What book is that?” he asked, of the volume she was tilting back and
+forth under her hand.
+
+She showed it. “One of his. He brought it up to amuse me, he said.”
+
+“While he was amusing himself with Lottie,” thought the judge, in his
+jealousy for her. “It is going the same old way. Well!” What he said
+aloud was, “And is it amusing you?”
+
+“I haven’t looked at it yet,” said the girl. “It’s amusing enough to
+watch the sea. Oh, poppa! I never thought I should care so much for it.”
+
+“And you’re glad we came?”
+
+“I don’t want to think about that. I just want to know that I’m here.”
+ She pressed his arm gently, significantly, where he sat provisionally
+in the chair beside her, and he was afraid to speak lest he should scare
+away the hope her words gave him.
+
+He merely said, “Well, well!” and waited for her to speak further. But
+her impulse had exhausted itself, as if her spirit were like one of
+those weak forms of life which spend their strength in a quick run or
+flight, and then rest to gather force for another. “Where’s Boyne?” he
+asked, after waiting for her to speak.
+
+“He was here a minute ago. He’s been talking with some of the deck
+passengers that are going home because they couldn’t get on in America.
+Doesn’t that seem pitiful, poppa? I always thought we had work enough
+for the whole world.”
+
+“Perhaps these fellows didn’t try very hard to find it,” said the judge.
+
+“Perhaps,” she assented.
+
+“I shouldn’t want you to get to thinking that it’s all like New York.
+Remember how comfortable everybody is in Tuskingum.”
+
+“Yes,” she said, sadly. “How far off Tuskingum seems!”
+
+“Well, don’t forget about it; and remember that wherever life is
+simplest and purest and kindest, that is the highest civilization.”
+
+“How much like old times it seems to hear you talk that way, poppa! I
+should think I was in the library at home. And I made you leave it!” she
+sighed.
+
+“Your mother was glad of any excuse. And it will do us all good, if we
+take it in the right way,” said the judge, with a didactic severity that
+did not hide his pang from her.
+
+“Poor poppa!” she said.
+
+He went away, saying that he was going to look Lottie up. His simple
+design was to send Lottie to her mother, so that Breckon might come back
+to Ellen; but he did not own this to himself.
+
+Lottie returned from another direction with Boyne, and Ellen said,
+“Poppa’s gone to look for you.”
+
+“Has he?” asked Lottie, dropping decisively into her chair. “Well,
+there’s one thing; I won’t call him poppa any more.”
+
+“What will you call him?” Boyne demanded, demurely.
+
+“I’ll call him father, it you want to know; and I’m going to call momma,
+mother. I’m not going to have those English laughing at us, and I won’t
+say papa and mamma. Everybody that knows anything says father and mother
+now.”
+
+Boyne kept looking from one sister to another during Lottie’s
+declaration, and, with his eyes on Ellen, he said, “It’s true, Ellen.
+All the Plumptons did.” He was very serious.
+
+Ellen smiled. “I’m too old to change. I’d rather seem queer in Europe
+than when I get back to Tuskingum.”
+
+“You wouldn’t be queer there a great while,” said Lottie. “They’ll all
+be doing it in a week after I get home.”
+
+Upon the encouragement given him by Ellen, Boyne seized the chance
+of being of the opposition. “Yes,” he taunted Lottie, “and you think
+they’ll say woman and man, for lady and gentleman, I suppose.”
+
+“They will as soon as they know it’s the thing.”
+
+“Well, I know I won’t,” said Boyne. “I won’t call momma a woman.”
+
+“It doesn’t matter what you do, Boyne dear,” his sister serenely assured
+him.
+
+While he stood searching his mind for a suitable retort, a young man,
+not apparently many years his senior, came round the corner of the
+music-room, and put himself conspicuously in view at a distance from the
+Kentons.
+
+“There he is, now,” said Boyne. “He wants to be introduced to Lottie.”
+ He referred the question to Ellen, but Lottie answered for her.
+
+“Then why don’t you introduce him?”
+
+“Well, I would if he was an American. But you can’t tell about these
+English.” He resumed the dignity he had lost in making the explanation
+to Lottie, and ignored her in turning again to Ellen. “What do you
+think, Ellen?”
+
+“Oh, don’t know about such things, Boyne,” she said, shrinking from the
+responsibility.
+
+“Well; upon my word!” cried Lottie. “If Ellen can talk by the hour
+with that precious Mr. Breckon, and stay up here along with him, when
+everybody else is down below sick, I don’t think she can have a great
+deal to say about a half-grown boy like that being introduced to me.”
+
+“He’s as old as you are,” said Boyne, hotly.
+
+“Oh! I saw him associating with you, and I thought he was a boy, too.
+Pardon me!” Lottie turned from giving Boyne his coup-de-grace, to plant
+a little stab in Ellen’s breast. “To be sure, now Mr. Breckon has found
+those friends of his, I suppose he won’t want to flirt with Ellen any
+more.”
+
+“Ah, ha, ha!” Boyne broke in. “Lottie is mad because he stopped to speak
+to some ladies he knew. Women, I suppose she’d call them.”
+
+“Well, I shouldn’t call him a gentleman, anyway,” said Lottie.
+
+The pretty, smooth-faced, fresh-faced young fellow whom their varying
+debate had kept in abeyance, looked round at them over his shoulder as
+he leaned on the rail, and seemed to discover Boyne for the first time.
+He came promptly towards the Kentons.
+
+“Now,” said Lottie, rapidly, “you’ll just HAVE to.”
+
+The young fellow touched his cap to the whole group, but he ventured to
+address only Boyne.
+
+“Every one seems to be about this morning,” he said, with the cheery
+English-rising infection.
+
+“Yes,” answered Boyne, with such snubbing coldness that Ellen’s heart
+was touched.
+
+“It’s so pleasant,” she said, “after that dark weather.”
+
+“Isn’t it?” cried the young fellow, gratefully. “One doesn’t often get
+such sunshine as this at sea, you know.”
+
+“My sister, Miss Kenton, Mr. Pogis,” Boyne solemnly intervened. “And
+Miss Lottie Kenton.”
+
+The pretty boy bowed to each in turn, but he made no pretence of
+being there to talk with Ellen. “Have you been ill, too?” he actively
+addressed himself to Lottie.
+
+“No, just mad,” she said. “I wasn’t very sick, and that made it all the
+worse being down in a poky state-room when I wanted to walk.”
+
+“And I suppose you’ve been making up for lost time this morning?”
+
+“Not half,” said Lottie.
+
+“Oh, do finish the half with me!”
+
+Lottie instantly rose, and flung her sister the wrap she had been
+holding ready to shed from the moment the young man had come up. “Keep
+that for me, Nell. Are you good at catching?” she asked him.
+
+“Catching?”
+
+“Yes! People,” she explained, and at a sudden twist of the ship she made
+a clutch at his shoulder.
+
+“Oh! I think I can catch you.”
+
+As they moved off together, Boyne said, “Well, upon my word!” but Ellen
+did not say anything in comment on Lottie. After a while she asked, “Who
+were the ladies that Mr. Breckon met?”
+
+“I didn’t hear their names. They were somebody he hadn’t seen before
+since the ship started. They looked like a young lady and her mother.
+It made Lottie mad when he stopped to speak with them, and she wouldn’t
+wait till he could get through. Ran right away, and made me come, too.”
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+Breckon had not seen the former interest between himself and Ellen
+lapse to commonplace acquaintance without due sense of loss. He suffered
+justly, but he did not suffer passively, or without several attempts
+to regain the higher ground. In spite of these he was aware of being
+distinctly kept to the level which he accused himself of having chosen,
+by a gentle acquiescence in his choice more fatal than snubbing. The
+advances that he made across the table, while he still met Miss Kenton
+alone there, did not carry beyond the rack supporting her plate. She
+talked on whatever subject he started with that angelic sincerity which
+now seemed so far from him, but she started none herself; she did not
+appeal to him for his opinion upon any question more psychological than
+the barometer; and,
+
+          “In a tumultuous privacy of storm,”
+
+he found himself as much estranged from her as if a fair-weather crowd
+had surrounded them. He did not believe that she resented the levity he
+had shown; but he had reason to fear that she had finally accepted it as
+his normal mood, and in her efforts to meet him in it, as if he had no
+other, he read a tolerance that was worse than contempt. When he tried
+to make her think differently, if that was what she thought of him,
+he fancied her rising to the notion he wished to give her, and then
+shrinking from it, as if it must bring her the disappointment of some
+trivial joke.
+
+It was what he had taught her to expect of him, and he had himself to
+blame. Now that he had thrown that precious chance away, he might well
+have overvalued it. She had certain provincialisms which he could not
+ignore. She did not know the right use of will and shall, and would and
+should, and she pronounced the letter ‘r’ with a hard mid-Western twist.
+Her voice was weak and thin, and she could not govern it from being at
+times a gasp and at times a drawl. She did not dress with the authority
+of women who know more of their clothes than the people they buy them
+of; she did not carry herself like a pretty girl; she had not the
+definite stamp of young-ladyism. Yet she was undoubtedly a lady in every
+instinct; she wore with pensive grace the clothes which she had not
+subjected to her personal taste; and if she did not carry herself like a
+pretty girl, she had a beauty which touched and entreated.
+
+More and more Breckon found himself studying her beauty--her soft, brown
+brows, her gentle, dark eyes, a little sunken, and with the lids pinched
+by suffering; the cheeks somewhat thin, but not colorless; the long
+chin, the clear forehead, and the massed brown hair, that seemed too
+heavy for the drooping neck. It was not the modern athletic type; it
+was rather of the earlier period, when beauty was associated with the
+fragility despised by a tanned and golfing generation. Ellen Kenton’s
+wrists were thin, and her hands long and narrow. As he looked at her
+across the racks during those two days of storm, he had sometimes the
+wish to take her long, narrow hands in his, and beg her to believe that
+he was worthier her serious friendship than he had shown himself. What
+he was sure of at all times now was that he wished to know the secret
+of that patient pathos of hers. She was not merely, or primarily, an
+invalid. Her family had treated her as an invalid, but, except Lottie,
+whose rigor might have been meant sanatively, they treated her more with
+the tenderness people use with a wounded spirit; and Breckon fancied
+moments of something like humility in her, when she seemed to cower from
+his notice. These were not so imaginable after her family took to their
+berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a
+sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child
+might show at some incomprehensible harm. It was this grief which he had
+refused not merely to know--he still doubted his right to know it--but
+to share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and
+had exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with
+the fair weather, he felt himself farther from her than before their
+acquaintance began.
+
+He had made an overture to its renewal in the book he lent her, and then
+Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter had appeared on deck, and borne down
+upon him when he was walking with Lottie Kenton and trying to begin his
+self-retrieval through her. She had left him; but they had not, and in
+the bonds of a prophet and his followers he found himself bound with
+them for much more conversation than he had often held with them ashore.
+The parochial duties of an ethical teacher were not strenuous, and
+Breckon had not been made to feel them so definitely before. Mrs.
+Rasmith held that they now included promising to sit at her table for
+the rest of the voyage; but her daughter succeeded in releasing him from
+the obligation; and it was she who smilingly detached the clinging
+hold of the elder lady. “We mustn’t keep Mr. Breckon from his friends,
+mother,” she said, brightly, and then he said he should like the
+pleasure of introducing them, and both of the ladies declared that they
+would be delighted.
+
+He bowed himself off, and half the ship’s-length away he was aware, from
+meeting Lottie with her little Englishman, that it was she and not Ellen
+whom he was seeking. As the couple paused in whirring past Breckon long
+enough to let Lottie make her hat fast against the wind, he heard the
+Englishman shout:
+
+“I say, that sister of yours is a fine girl, isn’t she?”
+
+“She’s a pretty good--looker,” Lottie answered back. “What’s the matter
+with HER sister?”
+
+“Oh, I say!” her companion returned, in a transport with her slangy
+pertness, which Breckon could not altogether refuse to share.
+
+He thought that he ought to condemn it, and he did condemn Mrs. Kenton
+for allowing it in one of her daughters, when he came up to her sitting
+beside another whom he felt inexpressibly incapable of it. Mrs. Kenton
+could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters,
+like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made
+them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he
+saw. She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had
+the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen,
+with her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest
+spirit in her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable
+to his sex as he could. But this bold defence was as far from the poor
+lady as any spoken reproach was from him. Her daughter had to check in
+her a mechanical offer to rise, as if to give Breckon her place, the
+theory and practice of Tuskingum being that their elders ought to leave
+young people alone together.
+
+“Don’t go, momma,” Ellen whispered. “I don’t want you to go.”
+
+Breckon, when he arrived before them, remained talking on foot, and,
+unlike Lottie’s company, he talked to the mother. This had happened
+before from him, but she had not got used to it, and now she deprecated
+in everything but words his polite questions about her sufferings from
+the rough weather, and his rejoicing that the worst was probably over.
+She ventured the hope that it was so, for she said that Mr. Kenton had
+about decided to keep on to Holland, and it seemed to her that they had
+had enough of storms. He said he was glad that they were going right on;
+and then she modestly recurred to the earlier opinion he had given
+her husband that it would be better to spend the rest of the summer in
+Holland than to go to Italy, as if she wished to conform herself in the
+wisdom of Mr. Kenton’s decision. He repeated his conviction, and he said
+that if he were in their place he should go to The Hague as soon as they
+had seen Rotterdam, and make it their headquarters for the exploration
+of the whole country.
+
+“You can’t realize how little it is; you can get anywhere in an hour;
+the difficulty is to keep inside of Holland when you leave any given
+point. I envy you going there.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton inferred that he was going to stop in France, but if it were
+part of his closeness not to tell, it was part of her pride not to ask.
+She relented when he asked if he might get a map of his and prove the
+littleness of Holland from it, and in his absence she could not well
+avoid saying to Ellen, “He seems very pleasant.”
+
+“Yes; why not?” the girl asked.
+
+“I don’t know. Lottie is so against him.”
+
+“He was very kind when you were all sick.”
+
+“Well, you ought to know better than Lottie; you’ve seen him so much
+more.” Ellen was silent, and her mother advanced cautiously, “I suppose
+he is very cultivated.”
+
+“How can I tell? I’m not.”
+
+“Why, Ellen, I think you are. Very few girls have read so much.”
+
+“Yes, but he wouldn’t care if I were cultivated, Ha is like all the
+rest. He would like to joke and laugh. Well, I think that is nice, too,
+and I wish I could do it. But I never could, and now I can’t try. I
+suppose he wonders what makes me such a dead weight on you all.”
+
+“You know you’re not that, Ellen! You musn’t let yourself be morbid. It
+hurts me to have you say such things.”
+
+“Well, I should like to tell him why, and see what he would say.”
+
+“Ellen!”
+
+“Why not? If he is a minister he must have thought about all kinds
+of things. Do you suppose he ever knew of a girl before who had been
+through what I have? Yes, I would like to know what he would really
+say.”
+
+“I know what he ought to say! If he knew, he would say that no girl had
+ever behaved more angelically.”
+
+“Do you think he would? Perhaps he would say that if I hadn’t been so
+proud and silly--Here he comes! Shall we ask him?”
+
+Breckon approached with his map, and her mother gasped, thinking how
+terrible such a thing would be if it could be; Ellen smiled brightly up
+at him. “Will you take my chair? And then you can show momma your map. I
+am going down,” and while he was still protesting she was gone.
+
+“Miss Kenton seems so much better than she did the first day,” he said,
+as he spread the map out on his knees, and gave Mrs. Kenton one end to
+hold.
+
+“Yes,” the mother assented, as she bent over to look at it.
+
+She followed his explanation with a surface sense, while her nether mind
+was full of the worry of the question which Ellen had planted in it.
+What would such a man think of what she had been through? Or, rather,
+how would he say to her the only things that in Mrs. Kenton’s belief he
+could say? How could the poor child ever be made to see it in the
+light of some mind not colored with her family’s affection for her? An
+immense, an impossible longing possessed itself of the mother’s heart,
+which became the more insistent the more frantic it appeared. She
+uttered “Yes” and “No” and “Indeed” to what he was saying, but all the
+time she was rehearsing Ellen’s story in her inner sense. In the end she
+remembered so little what had actually passed that her dramatic reverie
+seemed the reality, and when she left him she got herself down to
+her state-room, giddy with the shame and fear of her imaginary
+self-betrayal. She wished to test the enormity, and yet not find it so
+monstrous, by submitting the case to her husband, and she could scarcely
+keep back her impatience at seeing Ellen instead of her father.
+
+“Momma, what have you been saying to Mr. Breckon about me?”
+
+“Nothing,” said Mrs. Kenton, aghast at first, and then astonished to
+realize that she was speaking the simple truth. “He said how much better
+you were looking; but I don’t believe I spoke a single word. We were
+looking at the map.”
+
+“Very well,” Ellen resumed. “I have been thinking it all over, and now I
+have made up my mind.”
+
+She paused, and her mother asked, tremulously, “About what, Ellen?”
+
+“You know, momma. I see all now. You needn’t be afraid that I care
+anything about him now,” and her mother knew that she meant Bittridge,
+“or that I ever shall. That’s gone forever. But it’s gone,” she added,
+and her mother quaked inwardly to hear her reason, “because the wrong
+and the shame was all for me--for us. That’s why I can forgive it,
+and forget. If we had done anything, the least thing in the world, to
+revenge ourselves, or to hurt him, then--Don’t you see, momma?”
+
+“I think I see, Ellen.”
+
+“Then I should have to keep thinking about it, and what we had made him
+suffer, and whether we hadn’t given him some claim. I don’t wish ever
+to think of him again. You and poppa were so patient and forbearing, all
+through; and I thank goodness now for everything you put up with; only I
+wish I could have borne everything myself.”
+
+“You had enough to bear,” Mrs. Kenton said, in tender evasion.
+
+“I’m glad that I had to bear so much, for bearing it is what makes me
+free now.” She went up to her mother and kissed her, and gazed into her
+face with joyful, tearful looks that made her heart sink.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Mrs. Kenton did not rest till she had made sure from Lottie and Boyne
+that neither of them had dropped any hint to Ellen of what happened to
+Bittridge after his return to Tuskingum. She did not explain to them why
+she was so very anxious to know, but only charged them the more solemnly
+not to let the secret, which they had all been keeping from Ellen,
+escape them.
+
+They promised, but Lottie said, “She’s got to know it some time, and I
+should think the sooner the better.”
+
+“I will be judge of that, Lottie,” said her mother, and Boyne seized his
+chance of inculpating her with his friend, Mr. Pogis. He said she
+was carrying on awfully with him already; and an Englishman could not
+understand, and Boyne hinted that he would presume upon her American
+freedom.
+
+“Well, if he does, I’ll get you to cowhide him, Boyne,” she retorted,
+and left him fuming helplessly, while she went to give the young
+Englishman an opportunity of resuming the flirtation which her mother
+had interrupted.
+
+With her husband Mrs. Kenton found it practicable to be more explicit.
+“I haven’t had such a load lifted off my heart since I don’t know when.
+It shows me what I’ve thought all along: that Ellen hasn’t really cared
+anything for that miserable thing since he first began going with Mrs.
+Uphill a year ago. When he wrote that letter to her in New York she
+wanted to be sure she didn’t, and when he offered himself and misbehaved
+so to both of you, she was afraid that she and you were somehow to
+blame. Now she’s worked it out that no one else was wronged, and she is
+satisfied. It’s made her feel free, as she says. But, oh, dear me!” Mrs.
+Kenton broke off, “I talk as if there was nothing to bind her; and yet
+there is what poor Richard did! What would she say if she knew that?
+I have been cautioning Lottie and Boyne, but I know it will come out
+somehow. Do you think it’s wise to keep it from her? Hadn’t we better
+tell her? Or shall we wait and see--”
+
+Kenton would not allow to her or to himself that his hopes ran with
+hers; love is not business with a man as it is with a woman; he feels it
+indecorous and indelicate to count upon it openly, where she thinks it
+simply a chance of life, to be considered like another. All that Kenton
+would say was, “I see no reason for telling her just yet. She will have
+to know in due time. But let her enjoy her freedom now.”
+
+“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton doubtfully assented.
+
+The judge was thoughtfully silent. Then he said: “Few girls could have
+worked out her problem as Ellen has. Think how differently Lottie would
+have done it!”
+
+“Lottie has her good points, too,” said Mrs. Kenton. “And, of course, I
+don’t blame Richard. There are all kinds of girls, and Lottie means no
+more harm than Ellen does. She’s the kind that can’t help attracting;
+but I always knew that Ellen was attractive, too, if she would only find
+it out. And I knew that as soon as anything worth while took up her mind
+she would never give that wretch another thought.”
+
+Kenton followed her devious ratiocinations to a conclusion which he
+could not grasp. “What do you mean, Sarah?”
+
+“If I only,” she explained, in terms that did not explain, “felt as sure
+of him as I do about him!”
+
+Her husband looked densely at her. “Bittridge?”
+
+“No. Mr. Breckon. He is very nice, Rufus. Yes, he is! He’s been showing
+me the map of Holland, and we’ve had a long talk. He isn’t the way
+we thought--or I did. He is not at all clerical, or worldly. And he
+appreciates Ellen. I don’t suppose he cares so much for her being
+cultivated; I suppose she doesn’t seem so to him. But he sees how wise
+she is--how good. And he couldn’t do that without being good himself!
+Rufus! If we could only hope such a thing. But, of course, there are
+thousands after him!”
+
+“There are not thousands of Ellens after him,” said the judge, before he
+could take time to protest. “And I don’t want him to suppose that she is
+after him at all. If he will only interest her and help her to keep her
+mind off herself, it’s all I will ask of him. I am not anxious to part
+with her, now that she’s all ours again.”
+
+“Of course,” Mrs. Kenton soothingly assented. “And I don’t say that she
+dreams of him in any such way. She can’t help admiring his mind. But
+what I mean is that when you see how he appreciates her, you can’t help
+wishing he could know just how wise, and just how good she is. It did
+seem to me as if I would give almost anything to have him know what she
+had been through with that--rapscallion!”
+
+“Sarah!”
+
+“Oh, you may Sarah me! But I can tell you what, Mr. Kenton: I believe
+that you could tell him every word of it, and only make him appreciate
+her the more. Till you know that about Ellen, you don’t know what a
+character she is. I just ached to tell him!”
+
+“I don’t understand you, my dear,” said Kenton. “But if you mean to tell
+him--”
+
+“Why, who could imagine doing such a thing? Don’t you see that it is
+impossible? Such a thing would never have come into my head if it hadn’t
+been for some morbid talk of Ellen’s.”
+
+“Of Ellen’s?”
+
+“Oh, about wanting to disgust him by telling him why she was such a
+burden to us.”
+
+“She isn’t a burden!”
+
+“I am saying what she said. And it made me think that if such a person
+could only know the high-minded way she had found to get out of her
+trouble! I would like somebody who is capable of valuing her to value
+her in all her preciousness. Wouldn’t you be glad if such a man as he is
+could know how and why she feels free at last?”
+
+“I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Kenton, haughtily, “There’s only
+one thing that could give him the right to know it, and we’ll wait for
+that first. I thought you said that he was frivolous.”
+
+“Boyne said that, and Lottie. I took it for granted, till I talked with
+him to-day. He is light-hearted and gay; he likes to laugh and joke; but
+he can be very serious when he wants to.”
+
+“According to all precedent,” said the judge, glumly, “such a man ought
+to be hanging round Lottie. Everybody was that amounted to anything in
+Tuskingum.”
+
+“Oh, in Tuskingum! And who were the men there that amounted to anything?
+A lot of young lawyers, and two students of medicine, and some railroad
+clerks. There wasn’t one that would compare with Mr. Breckon for a
+moment.”
+
+“All the more reason why he can’t really care for Ellen. Now see here,
+Sarah! You know I don’t interfere with you and the children, but I’m
+afraid you’re in a craze about this young fellow. He’s got these friends
+of his who have just turned up, and we’ll wait and see what he does with
+them. I guess he appreciates the young lady as much as he does Ellen.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton’s heart went down. “She doesn’t compare with Ellen!” she
+piteously declared.
+
+“That’s what we think. He may think differently.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton was silenced, but all the more she was determined to make
+sure that Mr. Breckon was not interested in Miss Rasmith in any measure
+or manner detrimental to Ellen. As for Miss Rasmith herself, Mrs. Kenton
+would have had greater reason to be anxious about her behavior with
+Boyne than Mr. Breckon. From the moment that the minister had made his
+two groups of friends acquainted, the young lady had fixed upon Boyne
+as that member of the Kenton group who could best repay a more intimate
+friendship. She was polite to them all, but to Boyne she was flattering,
+and he was too little used to deference from ladies ten years his senior
+not to be very sensible of her worth in offering it. To be unremittingly
+treated as a grown-up person was an experience so dazzling that his
+vision was blinded to any possibilities in the behavior that formed it;
+and before the day ended Boyne had possessed Miss Rasmith of all that it
+was important for any fellow-being to know of his character and history.
+He opened his heart to eyes that had looked into others before his,
+less for the sake of exploiting than of informing himself. In the rare
+intelligence of Miss Rasmith he had found that serious patience with
+his problems which no one else, not Ellen herself, had shown, and
+after trying her sincerity the greater part of the day he put it to
+the supreme test, one evening, with a book which he had been reading.
+Boyne’s literature was largely entomological and zoological, but this
+was a work of fiction treating of the fortunes of a young American
+adventurer, who had turned his military education to account in the
+service of a German princess. Her Highness’s dominions were not in any
+map of Europe, and perhaps it was her condition of political incognito
+that rendered her the more fittingly the prey of a passion for the
+American head of her armies. Boyne’s belief was that this character
+veiled a real identity, and he wished to submit to Miss Rasmith the
+question whether in the exclusive circles of New York society any young
+millionaire was known to have taken service abroad after leaving west
+Point. He put it in the form of a scoffing incredulity which it was a
+comfort to have her take as if almost hurt by his doubt. She said that
+such a thing might very well be, and with rich American girls marrying
+all sorts of titles abroad, it was not impossible for some brilliant
+young fellow to make his way to the steps of a throne. Boyne declared
+that she was laughing at him, and she protested that it was the last
+thing she should think of doing; she was too much afraid of him. Then he
+began to argue against the case supposed in the romance; he proved from
+the book itself that the thing could not happen; such a princess would
+not be allowed to marry the American, no matter how rich he was. She
+owned that she had not heard of just such an instance, and he might
+think her very romantic; and perhaps she was; but if the princess was an
+absolute princess, such as she was shown in that story, she held that
+no power on earth could keep her from marrying the young American. For
+herself she did not see, though, how the princess could be in love
+with that type of American. If she had been in the princess’s place she
+should have fancied something quite different. She made Boyne agree with
+her that Eastern Americans were all, more or less, Europeanized, and it
+stood to reason, she held, that a European princess would want something
+as un-European as possible if she was falling in love to please herself.
+They had some contention upon the point that the princess would want
+a Western American; and then Miss Rasmith, with a delicate audacity,
+painted an heroic portrait of Boyne himself which he could not recognize
+openly enough to disown; but he perceived resemblances in it which went
+to his head when she demurely rose, with a soft “Good-night, Mr. Kenton.
+I suppose I mustn’t call you Boyne?”
+
+“Oh yes, do!” he entreated. “I’m-I’m not grown up yet, you know.”
+
+“Then it will be safe,” she sighed. “But I should never have thought
+of that. I had got so absorbed in our argument. You are so logical, Mr.
+Kenton--Boyne, I mean--thank you. You must get it from your father. How
+lovely your sister is!”
+
+“Ellen?”
+
+“Well, no. I meant the other one. But Miss Kenton is beautiful, too. You
+must be so happy together, all of you.” She added, with a rueful smile,
+“There’s only one of me! Good-night.”
+
+Boyne did not know whether he ought not in humanity, if not gallantry,
+to say he would be a brother to her, but while he stood considering, she
+put out a hand to him so covered with rings that he was afraid she had
+hurt herself in pressing his so hard, and had left him before he could
+decide.
+
+Lottie, walking the deck, had not thought of bidding Mr. Pogis
+good-night. She had asked him half a dozen times how late it was, and
+when he answered, had said as often that she knew better, and she was
+going below in another minute. But she stayed, and the flow of her
+conversation supplied him with occasion for the remarks of which he
+seldom varied the formula. When she said something too audacious for
+silent emotion, he called out, “Oh, I say!” If she advanced an opinion
+too obviously acceptable, or asked a question upon some point where
+it seemed to him there could not be two minds, he was ready with the
+ironical note, “Well, rather!” At times she pressed her studies of his
+character and her observations on his manner and appearance so far that
+he was forced to protest, “You are so personal!” But these moments
+were rare; for the most part, “Oh I say!” and “Well, rather!” perfectly
+covered the ground. He did not generally mind her parody of his poverty
+of phrase, but once, after she had repeated “Well rather!” and “Oh,
+I say!” steadily at everything he said for the whole round of the
+promenade they were making, he intimated that there were occasions when,
+in his belief, a woman’s abuse of the freedom generously allowed her sex
+passed the point of words.
+
+“And when it passes the point of words” she taunted him, “what do you
+do?”
+
+“You will see,” he said, “if it ever does,” and Lottie felt justified by
+her inference that he was threatening to kiss her, in answering:
+
+“And if I ever SEE, I will box your ears.”
+
+“Oh, I say!” he retorted. “I should like to have you try.”
+
+He had ideas of the rightful mastery of a man in all things, which
+she promptly pronounced brutal, and when he declared that his father’s
+conduct towards his wife and children was based upon these ideas, she
+affirmed the superiority of her own father’s principles and behavior.
+Mr. Pogis was too declared an admirer of Judge Kenton to question
+his motives or method in anything, and he could only generalize, “The
+Americans spoil their women.”
+
+“Well, their women are worth it,” said Lottie, and after allowing the
+paradox time to penetrate his intelligence, he cried out, in a glad
+transport:
+
+“Oh, I SAY!”
+
+At the moment Boyne’s intellectual seance with Miss Rasmith was
+coming to an end. Lottie had tacitly invited Mr. Pogis to prolong the
+comparison of English and American family life by stopping in front of
+a couple of steamer-chairs, and confessing that she was tired to death.
+They sat down, and he told her about his mother, whom, although his
+father’s subordinate, he seemed to be rather fonder of. He had some
+elder brothers, most of them in the colonies, and he had himself been
+out to America looking at something his father had found for him in
+Buffalo.
+
+“You ought to come to Tuskingum,” said Lottie.
+
+“Is that a large place?” Mr. Pogis asked. “As large as Buffalo?”
+
+“Well, no,” Lottie admitted. “But it’s a growing place. And we have the
+best kind of times.”
+
+“What kind?” The young man easily consented to turn the commercial into
+a social inquiry.
+
+“Oh, picnics, and river parties, and buggy-rides, and dances.”
+
+“I’m keen on dancing,” said Mr. Pogis. “I hope they’ll give us a dance
+on board. Will you put me down for the first dance?”
+
+“I don’t care. Will you send me some flowers? The steward must have some
+left in the refrigerator.”
+
+“Well, rather! I’ll send you a spray, if he’s got enough.”
+
+“A spray? What’s a spray?”
+
+“Oh, I say! My sister always wears one. It’s a long chain of flowers
+reachin’ from your shoulder diagonally down to your waist.”
+
+“Does your sister always have her sprays sent to her?”
+
+“Well, rather! Don’t they send flowers to girls for dances in the
+States?”
+
+“Well, rather! Didn’t I just ask you?”
+
+This was very true, and after a moment of baffle Mr. Pogis said, in
+generalization, “If you go with a young lady in a party to the theatre
+you send her a box of chocolates.”
+
+“Only when you go to theatre! I couldn’t get enough, then, unless you
+asked me every night,” said Lottie, and while Mr. Pogis was trying to
+choose between “Oh, I say!” and something specific, like, “I should like
+to ask you every night,” she added, “And what would happen if you sent a
+girl a spray for the theatre and chocolates for a dance? Wouldn’t it jar
+her?”
+
+Now, indeed, there was nothing for him but to answer, “Oh, I say!”
+
+“Well, say, then! Here comes Boyne, and I must go. Well, Boyne,” she
+called, from the dark nook where she sat, to her brother as he stumbled
+near, with his eyes to the stars, “has the old lady retired?”
+
+He gave himself away finely. “What old lady!”
+
+“Well, maybe at your age you don’t consider her very old. But I don’t
+think a boy ought to sit up mooning at his grandmother all night. I know
+Miss Rasmith’s no relation, if that’s what you’re going to say!”
+
+“Oh, I say!” Mr. Pogis chuckled. “You are so personal.”
+
+“Well, rather!” said Lottie, punishing his presumption. “But I don’t
+think it’s nice for a kid, even if she isn’t.”
+
+“Kid!” Boyne ground, through his clenched teeth.
+
+By this time Lottie was up out of her chair and beyond repartee in her
+flight down the gangway stairs. She left the two youngsters confronted.
+
+“What do you say to a lemon-squash?” asked Mr. Pogis, respecting his
+friend’s wounded dignity, and ignoring Lottie and her offence.
+
+“I don’t care if I do,” said Boyne in gloomy acquiescence.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+Few witnesses of the fact that Julia Rasmith and her mother had found
+themselves on the same steamer with the Rev. Hugh Breckon would have
+been of such a simple mind as to think they were there by accident, if
+they had also been witnesses of their earlier history. The ladies could
+have urged that in returning from California only a few days before
+the Amstel sailed, and getting a state-room which had been unexpectedly
+given up, they had some claim to a charitable interpretation of their
+behavior, but this plea could not have availed them with any connoisseur
+of women. Besides, it had been a matter of notoriety among such of Mr.
+Breckon’s variegated congregation as knew one another that Mrs. Rasmith
+had set her heart on him, it Julia had not set her cap for him. In that
+pied flock, where every shade and dapple of doubt, from heterodox Jew to
+agnostic Christian, foregathered, as it has been said, in the misgiving
+of a blessed immortality, the devotion of Mrs. Rasmith to the minister
+had been almost a scandal. Nothing had saved the appearance from this
+character but Mr. Breckon’s open acceptance of her flatteries and
+hospitalities; this was so frank, and the behavior of Julia herself so
+judicious under the circumstances, that envy and virtue were, if not
+equally silenced, equally baffled. So far from pretending not to see her
+mother’s manoeuvres, Julia invited public recognition of them; in the
+way of joking, which she kept within the limits of filial fondness, she
+made fun of her mother’s infatuation to Breckon himself, and warned
+him against the moment when her wiles might be too much for him. Before
+other people she did not hesitate to save him from her mother, so that
+even those who believed her in the conspiracy owned that no girl could
+have managed with more cleverness in a situation where not every one
+would have refused to be placed. In this situation Julia Rasmith had the
+service of a very clear head, and as was believed by some, a cool heart;
+if she and her mother had joint designs upon the minister, hers was the
+ambition, and her mother’s the affection that prompted them. She was a
+long, undulant girl, of a mixed blondness that left you in doubt, after
+you had left her, whether her hair or her complexion were not of one
+tint; but her features were good, and there could be no question of her
+captivating laugh, and her charming mouth, which she was always pulling
+down with demure irony. She was like her mother in her looks, but her
+indolent, droning temperament must have been from her father, whose
+memory was lost in that antiquity which swallows up the record of so
+many widows’ husbands, and who could not have left her what was left of
+her mother’s money, for none of it had ever been his. It was still her
+mother’s, and it was supposed to be the daughter’s chief attraction.
+There must, therefore, have been a good deal of it, for those who were
+harshest with the minister did not believe that a little money would
+attract him. Not that they really thought him mercenary; some of his
+people considered him gay to the verge of triviality, but there were
+none that accused him of insincerity. They would have liked a little
+more seriousness in him, especially when they had not much of their
+own, and would have had him make up in severity of behavior for what he
+lacked, and what they wished him to lack, in austerity of doctrine.
+
+The Amstel had lost so much time in the rough weather of her first days
+out that she could not make it up with her old-fashioned single screw.
+She was at best a ten-day boat, counting from Sandy Hook to Boulogne,
+and she had not been four days out when she promised to break her record
+for slowness. Three days later Miss Rasmith said to Breckon, as he took
+the chair which her mother agilely abandoned to him beside her: “The
+head steward says it will be a twelve-day trip, end our bedroom steward
+thinks more. What is the consensus of opinion in the smoking-room? Where
+are you going, mother? Are you planning to leave Mr. Breckon and me
+alone again? It isn’t necessary. We couldn’t get away from each other
+if we tried, and all we ask--Well, I suppose age must be indulged in its
+little fancies,” she called after Mrs. Rasmith.
+
+Breckon took up the question she had asked him. “The odds are so heavily
+in favor of a fifteen-days’ run that there are no takers.”
+
+“Now you are joking again,” she said. “I thought a sea-voyage might make
+you serious.”
+
+“It has been tried before. Besides, it’s you that I want to be serious.”
+
+“What about? Besides, I doubt it.”
+
+“About Boyne.”
+
+“Oh! I thought you were going to say some one else.”
+
+“No, I think that is very well settled.”
+
+“You’ll never persuade my mother,” said Miss Rasmith, with a low,
+comfortable laugh.
+
+“But if you are satisfied--”
+
+“She will have to resign herself? Well, perhaps. But why do you wish me
+to be serious about Boyne?”
+
+“I have no doubt he amuses you. But that doesn’t seem a very good reason
+why you should amuse yourself with him.”
+
+“No? Why not?”
+
+“Well, because the poor boy is in earnest; and you’re not
+exactly--contemporaries.”
+
+“Why, how old is Boyne?” she asked, with affected surprise.
+
+“About fifteen, I think,” said Breckon, gravely.
+
+“And I’m but a very few months past thirty. I don’t see the great
+disparity. But he is merely a brother to me--an elder brother--and he
+gives me the best kind of advice.”
+
+“I dare say you need it, but all the same, I am afraid you are putting
+ideas into his head.”
+
+“Well, if he began it? If he put them in mine first?”
+
+She was evidently willing that he should go further, and create the
+common ground between them that grows up when one gives a reproof and
+the other accepts it; but Breckon, whether he thought that he had now
+done his duty, and need say no more, or because he was vexed with her,
+left the subject.
+
+“Mrs. Rasmith says you are going to Switzerland for the rest of the
+summer.”
+
+“Yes, to Montreux. Are you going to spend it in Paris?”
+
+“I’m going to Paris to see. I have had some thoughts of Etretat; I have
+cousins there.”
+
+“I wish that I could go to the sea-side. But this happens to be one of
+the summers when nothing but mountains can save my mother’s life. Shall
+you get down to Rome before you go back?”
+
+“I don’t know. If I sail from Naples I shall probably pass through
+Rome.”
+
+“You had better stop off. We shall be there in November, and they
+say Rome is worth seeing,” she laughed demurely. “That is what Boyne
+understands. He’s promised to use his influence with his family to let
+him run down to see us there, if he can’t get them all to come. You
+might offer to personally conduct them.”
+
+“Yes.” said Breckon, with the effect of cloture. “Have you made many
+acquaintances an board?”
+
+“What! Two lone women? You haven’t introduced us to any but the Kentons.
+But I dare say they are the best. The judge is a dear, and Mrs. Kenton
+is everything that is motherly and matronly. Boyne says she is very well
+informed, and knows all about the reigning families. If he decides
+to marry into them, she can be of great use in saving him from a
+mesalliance. I can’t say very much for Miss Lottie. Miss Lottie seems to
+me distinctly of the minx type. But that poor, pale girl is adorable. I
+wish she liked me!”
+
+“What makes you think she doesn’t like you?” Breckon asked.
+
+“What? Women don’t require anything to convince them that other women
+can’t bear them. They simply know it. I wonder what has happened to
+her?”
+
+“Why do you think anything has happened to her?”
+
+“Why? Well, girls don’t have that air of melancholy absence for nothing.
+She is brooding upon something, you may be sure. But you have had so
+many more opportunities than I! Do you mean that you haven’t suspected a
+tragical past far her?”
+
+“I don’t know,” said Breckon, a little restively, “that I have allowed
+myself to speculate about her past.”
+
+“That is, you oughtn’t to have allowed yourself to do so. Well, there
+I agree with you. But a woman may do so without impertinence, and I am
+sure that Miss Kenton has a story. I have watched her, and her face has
+told me everything but the story.”
+
+Breckon would not say that some such revelation had been made to him,
+and in the absence of an answer from him Miss Rasmith asked, “Is she
+cultivated, too?”
+
+“Too?”
+
+“Like her mother.”
+
+“Oh! I should say she had read a good dial. And she’s bookish, yes, in a
+simple-hearted kind of way.”
+
+“She asks you if you have read ‘the book of the year,’ and whether you
+don’t think the heroine is a beautiful character?”
+
+“Not quite so bad as that. But if you care to be serious about her!”
+
+“Oh, I do!”
+
+“I doubt it. Then, I should say that she seems to have grown up in a
+place where the interests are so material that a girl who was disposed
+to be thoughtful would be thrown back upon reading for her society more
+than in more intellectual centres--if there are such things. She has
+been so much with books that she does not feel odd in speaking of them
+as if they were the usual topics of conversation. It gives her a certain
+quaintness.”
+
+“And that is what constitutes her charm?”
+
+“I didn’t know that we were speaking of her charm.”
+
+“No, that is true. But I was thinking of it. She fascinates me. Are they
+going to get off at Boulogne?”
+
+“No, they are going on to Rotterdam.”
+
+“To be sure! Boyne told me. And are you going on with them?”
+
+“I thought we talked of my going to Paris.” Breckon looked round at her,
+and she made a gesture of deprecation.
+
+“Why, of course! How could I forget? But I’m so much interested in Miss
+Kenton that I can’t think of anything else.”
+
+“Not even of Miss Rasmith?”
+
+“Not even of Miss Rasmith. I know that she has a history, and that it’s
+a sad one.” She paused in ironical hesitation. “You’ve been so good as
+to caution me about her brother--and I never can be grateful enough--and
+that makes me almost free to suggest--”
+
+She stopped again, and he asked, hardily, “What?”
+
+“Oh, nothing. It isn’t for me to remind my pastor, my ghostly
+adviser”--she pulled down her mouth and glanced at him demurely--“and
+I will only offer the generalization that a girl is never so much in
+danger of having her heart broken as when she’s had it broken--Oh, are
+you leaving me?” she cried, as Breckon rose from his chair.
+
+“Well, then, send Boyne to me.” She broke into a laugh as he faltered.
+“Are you going to sit down again? That is right. And I won’t talk any
+more about Miss Kenton.”
+
+“I don’t mind talking of her,” said Breckon. “Perhaps it will even be
+well to do so if you are in earnest. Though it strikes me that you have
+rather renounced the right to criticise me.”
+
+“Now, is that logical? It seems to me that in putting myself in the
+attitude of a final friend at the start, and refusing to be anything
+more, I leave established my right to criticise you on the firmest
+basis. I can’t possibly be suspected of interested motives. Besides,
+you’ve just been criticizing me, if you want a woman’s reason!”
+
+“Well, go on.”
+
+“Why, I had finished. That’s the amusing part. I should have supposed
+that I could go on forever about Miss Kenton, but I have nothing to go
+upon. She has kept her secret very well, and so have the rest of them.
+You think I might have got it out of Boyne? Perhaps I might, but you
+know I have my little scruples. I don’t think it would be quite fair, or
+quite nice.”
+
+“You are scrupulous. And I give you credit for having been more delicate
+than I’ve been.”
+
+“You don’t mean you’ve been trying to find it out!”
+
+“Ah, now I’m not sure about the superior delicacy!”
+
+“Oh, how good!” said Miss Rasmith. “What a pity you should be wasted in
+a calling that limits you so much.”
+
+“You call it limiting? I didn’t know but I had gone too far.”
+
+“Not at all! You know there’s nothing I like so much as those little
+digs.”
+
+“I had forgotten. Then you won’t mind my saying that this surveillance
+seems to me rather more than I have any right to from you.”
+
+“How exquisitely you put it! Who else could have told me to mind my
+own business so delightfully? Well, it isn’t my business. I acknowledge
+that, and I spoke only because I knew you would be sorry if you had gone
+too far. I remembered our promise to be friends.”
+
+She threw a touch of real feeling into her tone, and he responded, “Yes,
+and I thank you for it, though it isn’t easy.”
+
+She put out her hand to him, and, as he questioningly took it, she
+pressed his with animation. “Of course it isn’t! Or it wouldn’t be for
+any other man. But don’t you suppose I appreciate that supreme courage
+of yours? There is nobody else-nobody!--who could stand up to an
+impertinence and turn it to praise by such humility.”
+
+“Don’t go too far, or I shall be turning your praise to impertinence
+by my humility. You’re quite right, though, about the main matter. I
+needn’t suppose anything so preposterous as you suggest, to feel that
+people are best left alone to outlive their troubles, unless they are of
+the most obvious kind.”
+
+“Now, if I thought I had done anything to stop you from offering that
+sort of helpfulness which makes you a blessing to everybody, I should
+never forgive myself.”
+
+“Nothing so dire as that, I believe. But if you’ve made me question the
+propriety of applying the blessing in all cases, you have done a very
+good thing.”
+
+Miss Rasmith was silent and apparently serious. After a moment she said,
+“And I, for my part, promise to let poor little Boyne alone.”
+
+Breckon laughed. “Don’t burlesque it! Besides, I haven’t promised
+anything.”
+
+“That is very true,” said Miss Rasmith, and she laughed, too.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+In one of those dramatic reveries which we all hold with ourselves when
+fortune has pressingly placed us, Ellen Kenton had imagined it possible
+for her to tell her story to the man who had so gently and truly tried
+to be her friend. It was mostly in the way of explaining to him how she
+was unworthy of his friendship that the story was told, and she fancied
+telling it without being scandalized at violating the conventions that
+should have kept her from even dreaming of such a thing. It was all
+exalted to a plane where there was no question of fit or unfit in doing
+it, but only the occasion; and he would never hear of the unworthiness
+which she wished to ascribe to herself. Sometimes he mournfully left
+her when she persisted, left her forever, and sometimes he refused,
+and retained with her in a sublime kindness, a noble amity, lofty and
+serene, which did not seek to become anything else. In this case she
+would break from her reveries with self-accusing cries, under her
+breath, of “Silly, silly! Oh, how disgusting!” and if at that moment
+Breckon were really coming up to sit by her, she would blush to her
+hair, and wish to run away, and failing the force for this, would sit
+cold and blank to his civilities, and have to be skilfully and gradually
+talked back to self-respect and self-tolerance.
+
+The recurrence of these reveries and their consequence in her made it
+difficult for him to put in effect the promise he had given himself in
+Miss Rasmith’s presence. If Ellen had been eager to welcome his coming,
+it would have been very simple to keep away from her, but as she
+appeared anxious to escape him, and had to be entreated, as it were,
+to suffer his society, something better than his curiosity was piqued,
+though that was piqued, too. He believed that he saw her lapsing again
+into that morbid state from which he had seemed once able to save her,
+and he could not help trying again. He was the more bound to do so by
+the ironical observance of Miss Rasmith, who had to be defied first, and
+then propitiated; certainly, when she saw him apparently breaking faith
+with her, she had a right to some sort of explanation, but certainly
+also she had no right to a blind and unreasoning submission from him.
+His embarrassment was heightened by her interest in Miss Kenton,
+whom, with an admirable show of now finding her safe from Breckon’s
+attractions, she was always wishing to study from his observation. What
+was she really like? The girl had a perfect fascination for her; she
+envied him his opportunities of knowing her, and his privileges of
+making that melancholy face light up with that heart-breaking smile, and
+of banishing that delicious shyness with which she always seemed to meet
+him. Miss Rasmith had noticed it; how could she help noticing it?
+
+Breckon wished to himself that she had been able to help noticing it, or
+were more capable of minding her own business than she showed herself,
+and his heart closed about Ellen with a tenderness that was dangerously
+indignant. At the same time he felt himself withheld by Miss Rasmith’s
+witness from being all to the girl that he wished to be, and that he now
+seemed to have been in those first days of storm, while Miss Rasmith and
+her mother were still keeping their cabin. He foresaw that it would end
+in Miss Rasmith’s sympathetic nature not being able to withhold itself
+from Ellen’s need of cheerful companionship, and he was surprised, as
+little as he was pleased, one morning, when he came to take the chair
+beside her to find Miss Rasmith in it, talking and laughing to the girl,
+who perversely showed herself amused. Miss Rasmith made as if to offer
+him the seat, but he had to go away disappointed, after standing long
+enough before them to be aware that they were suspending some topic
+while he stayed.
+
+He naturally supposed the topic to be himself, but it was not so, or at
+least not directly so. It was only himself as related to the scolding he
+had given Miss Rasmith for trifling with the innocence of Boyne, which
+she wished Miss Kenton to understand as the effect of a real affection
+for her brother. She loved all boys, and Boyne was simply the most
+delightful creature in the world. She went on to explain how delightful
+he was, and showed a such an appreciation of the infantile sweetness
+mingled with the mature severity of Boyne’s character that Ellen could
+not help being pleased and won. She told some little stories of Boyne
+that threw a light also their home life in Tuskingum, and Miss Rasmith
+declared herself perfectly fascinated, and wished that she could go and
+live in Tuskingum. She protested that she should not find it dull; Boyne
+alone would be entertainment enough; and she figured a circumstance so
+idyllic from the hints she had gathered, that Ellen’s brow darkened in
+silent denial, and Miss Rasmith felt herself, as the children say in
+the game, very hot in her proximity to the girl’s secret. She would have
+liked to know it, but whether she felt that she could know it when
+she liked enough, or whether she should not be so safe with Breckon in
+knowing it, she veered suddenly away, and said that she was so glad to
+have Boyne’s family know the peculiar nature of her devotion, which
+did not necessarily mean running away with him, though it might come
+to that. She supposed she was a little morbid about it from what Mr.
+Breckon had been saying; he had a conscience that would break the peace
+of a whole community, though he was the greatest possible favorite, not
+only with his own congregation, which simply worshipped him, but with
+the best society, where he was in constant request.
+
+It was not her fault if she did not overdo these history, but perhaps
+it was all true about the number of girls who were ready and willing to
+marry him. It might even be true, though she had no direct authority for
+saying it, that he had made up his mind never to marry, and that was the
+reason why he felt himself so safe in being the nicest sort of friend.
+He was safe, Miss Rasmith philosophized, but whether other people were
+so safe was a different question. There were girls who were said to
+be dying for him; but of course those things were always said about a
+handsome young minister. She had frankly taken him on his own ground,
+from the beginning, and she believed that this was what he liked. At any
+rate, they had agreed that they were never to be anything but the best
+of friends, and they always had been.
+
+Mrs. Kenton came and shyly took the chair on Miss Rasmith’s other side,
+and Miss Rasmith said they had been talking about Mr. Breckon, and she
+repeated what she had been saying to Ellen. Mrs. Kenton assented more
+openly than Ellen could to her praises, but when she went away, and her
+daughter sat passive, without comment or apparent interest, the mother
+drew a long, involuntary sigh.
+
+“Do you like her, Ellen?”
+
+“She tries to be pleasant, I think.”
+
+“Do you think she really knows much about Mr. Breckon?”
+
+“Oh yes. Why not? She belongs to his church.”
+
+“He doesn’t seem to me like a person who would have a parcel of girls
+tagging after him.”
+
+“That is what they do in the East, Boyne says.”
+
+“I wish she would let Boyne alone. She is making a fool of the child.
+He’s round with her every moment. I think she ought to be ashamed, such
+an old thing!”
+
+Ellen chose to protest, or thought it fair to do so. “I don’t believe
+she is doing him any harm. She just lets him talk out, and everybody
+else checks him up so. It was nice of her to come and talk with me, when
+we had all been keeping away from her. Perhaps he sent her, though. She
+says they have always been such good friends because she wouldn’t be
+anything else from the beginning.”
+
+“I don’t see why she need have told you that.”
+
+“Oh, it was just to show he was run after. I wonder if he thinks we are
+running after him? Momma, I am tired of him! I wish he wouldn’t speak to
+me any more.”
+
+“Why! do you really dislike him, Ellen?”
+
+“No, not dislike him. But it tires me to have him trying to amuse me.
+Don’t you understand?”
+
+Mrs. Kenton said yes, she understood, but she was clear only of the fact
+that Ellen seemed flushed and weak at that moment. She believed that
+it was Miss Rasmith and not Mr. Breckon who was to blame, but she said:
+“Well, you needn’t worry about it long. It will only be a day or two now
+till we get to Boulogne, and then he will leave us. Hadn’t you better go
+down now, and rest awhile in your berth? I will bring your things.”
+
+Ellen rose, pulling her wraps from her skirts to give them to her
+mother. A voice from behind said between their meeting shoulders: “Oh,
+are you going down? I was just coming to beg Miss Kenton to take a
+little walk with me,” and they looked round together and met Breckon’s
+smiling face.
+
+“I’m afraid,” Mrs. Kenton began, and then, like a well-trained American
+mother, she stopped and left the affair to her daughter.
+
+“Do you think you can get down with them, momma?” the girl asked, and
+somehow her mother’s heart was lightened by her evasion, not to call it
+uncandor. It was at least not morbid, it was at least like other girls,
+and Mrs. Kenton imparted what comfort there was in it to the judge, when
+he asked where she had left Ellen.
+
+“Not that it’s any use,” she sighed, when she had seen him share it with
+a certain shamefacedness. “That woman has got her grip on him, and she
+doesn’t mean to let go.”
+
+Kenton understood Miss Rasmith by that woman; but he would not allow
+himself to be so easily cast down. This was one of the things that
+provoked Mrs. Kenton with him; when he had once taken hope he would not
+abandon it without reason. “I don’t see any evidence of her having her
+grip on him. I’ve noticed him, and he doesn’t seem attentive to her. I
+should say he tried to avoid her. He certainly doesn’t avoid Ellen.”
+
+“What are you thinking of, Rufus?”
+
+“What are you? You know we’d both be glad if he fancied her.”
+
+“Well, suppose we would? I don’t deny it. He is one of the most
+agreeable gentlemen I ever saw; one of the kindest and nicest.”
+
+“He’s more than that,” said the judge. “I’ve been sounding him on
+various points, and I don’t see where he’s wrong. Of course, I don’t
+know much about his religious persuasion, if it is one, but I think I’m
+a pretty fair judge of character, and that young man has character.
+He isn’t a light person, though he likes joking and laughing, and he
+appreciates Ellen.”
+
+“Yes, so do we. And there’s about as much prospect of his marrying her.
+Rufus, it’s pretty hard! She’s just in the mood to be taken with him,
+but she won’t let herself, because she knows it’s of no use. That Miss
+Rasmith has been telling her how much he is run after, and I could
+see that that settled it for Ellen as plainly as if she said so. More
+plainly, for there’s enough of the girl in her to make her say one thing
+when she means another. She was just saying she was sick of him, and
+never wanted to speak to him again, when he came up and asked her to
+walk, and she went with him instantly. I knew what she meant. She wasn’t
+going to let him suppose that anything Miss Rasmith had said was going
+to change her.”
+
+“Well, then,” said the judge, “I don’t see what you’re scared at.”
+
+“I’m not SCARED. But, oh, Rufus! It can’t come to anything! There isn’t
+time!” An hysterical hope trembled in her asseveration of despair that
+made him smile.
+
+“I guess if time’s all that’s wanted--”
+
+“He is going to get off at Boulogne.”
+
+“Well, we can get off there, too.”
+
+“Rufus, if you dare to think of such a thing!”
+
+“I don’t. But Europe isn’t so big but what he can find us again if he
+wants to.”
+
+“Ah, if he wants to!”
+
+Ellen seemed to have let her mother take her languor below along with
+the shawls she had given her. Buttoned into a close jacket, and skirted
+short for the sea, she pushed against the breeze at Breckon’s elbow with
+a vigor that made him look his surprise at her. Girl-like, she took it
+that something was wrong with her dress, and ran herself over with an
+uneasy eye.
+
+Then he explained: “I was just thinking how much you were like Miss
+Lottie-if you’ll excuse my being so personal. And it never struck me
+before.”
+
+“I didn’t suppose we looked alike,” said Ellen.
+
+“No, certainly. I shouldn’t have taken you for sisters. And yet, just
+now, I felt that you were like her. You seem so much stronger this
+morning--perhaps it’s that the voyage is doing you good. Shall you be
+sorry to have it end?”
+
+“Shall you? That’s the way Lottie would answer.”
+
+Breckon laughed. “Yes, it is. I shall be very sorry. I should be willing
+to have it rough again, it that would make it longer. I liked it’s being
+rough. We had it to ourselves.” He had not thought how that sounded, but
+if it sounded particular, she did not notice it.
+
+She merely said, “I was surprised not to be seasick, too.”
+
+“And should you be willing to have it rough again?”
+
+“You wouldn’t see anything more of your friends, then.”
+
+“Ah, yes; Miss Rasmith. She is a great talker, Did you find her
+interesting?”
+
+“She was very interesting.”
+
+“Yes? What did she talk about?”
+
+Ellen realized the fact too late to withhold “Why, about you.”
+
+“And was that what made her interesting?”
+
+“Now, what would Lottie say to such a thing as that?” asked Ellen,
+gayly.
+
+“Something terribly cutting, I’m afraid. But don’t you! From you I don’t
+want to believe I deserve it, no matter what Miss Rasmith said me.”
+
+“Oh, she didn’t say anything very bad. Unless you mind being a universal
+favorite.”
+
+“Well, it makes a man out rather silly.”
+
+“But you can’t help that.”
+
+“Now you remind me of Miss Lottie again!”
+
+“But I didn’t mean that,” said Ellen, blushing and laughing. “I hope you
+wouldn’t think I could be so pert.”
+
+“I wouldn’t think anything that wasn’t to your praise,” said Breckon,
+and a pause ensued, after which the words he added seemed tame and flat.
+“I suspect Miss Rasmith has been idealizing the situation. At any rate,
+I shouldn’t advise you to trust her report implicitly. I’m at the head
+of a society, you know, ethical or sociological, or altruistic, whatever
+you choose to call it, which hasn’t any very definite object of worship,
+and yet meets every Sunday for a sort of worship; and I have to be in
+the pulpit. So you see?”
+
+Ellen said, “I think I understand,” with a temptation to smile at the
+ruefulness of his appeal.
+
+Breckon laughed for her. “That’s the mischief and the absurdity of it.
+But it isn’t so bad as it seems. They’re really most of them hard-headed
+people; and those that are not couldn’t make a fool of a man that nature
+hadn’t begun with. Still, I’m not very well satisfied with my work among
+them--that is, I’m not satisfied with myself.” He was talking soberly
+enough, and he did not find that she was listening too seriously. “I’m
+going away to see whether I shall come back.” He looked at her to make
+sure that she had taken his meaning, and seemed satisfied that she had.
+“I’m not sure that I’m fit for any sort of ministry, and I may find the
+winter in England trying to find out. I was at school in England, you
+know.”
+
+Ellen confessed that she had not known that.
+
+“Yes; I suppose that’s what made me seem ‘so Englishy’ the first day to
+Miss Lottie, as she called it. But I’m straight enough American as far
+as parentage goes. Do you think you will be in England-later?”
+
+“I don’t know. If poppa gets too homesick we will go back in the fall.”
+
+“Miss Kenton,” said the young man, abruptly, “will you let me tell you
+how much I admire and revere your father?”
+
+Tears came into her eyes and her throat swelled. “But you don’t know,”
+ she begun; and then she stopped.
+
+“I have been wanting to submit something to his judgment; but I’ve been
+afraid. I might seem to be fishing for his favor.”
+
+“Poppa wouldn’t think anything that was unjust,” said Ellen, gravely.
+
+“Ah,” Breckon laughed, “I suspect that I should rather have him unjust.
+I wish you’d tell me what he would think.”
+
+“But I don’t know what it is,” she protested, with a reflected smile.
+
+“I was in hopes Miss Rasmith might have told you. Well, it is simply
+this, and you will see that I’m not quite the universal favorite she’s
+been making you fancy me. There is a rift in my lute, a schism in my
+little society, which is so little that I could not have supposed
+there was enough of it to break in two. There are some who think their
+lecturer--for that’s what I amount to--ought to be an older, if not
+a graver man. They are in the minority, but they’re in the right, I’m
+afraid; and that’s why I happen to be here telling you all this. It’s
+a question of whether I ought to go back to New York or stay in London,
+where there’s been a faint call for me.” He saw the girl listening
+devoutly, with that flattered look which a serious girl cannot keep out
+of her face when a man confides a serious matter to her. “I might
+safely promise to be older, but could I keep my word if I promised to
+be graver? That’s the point. If I were a Calvinist I might hold fast by
+faith, and fight it out with that; or if I were a Catholic I could
+cast myself upon the strength of the Church, and triumph in spite of
+temperament. Then it wouldn’t matter whether I was grave or gay; it
+might be even better if I were gay. But,” he went on, in terms which,
+doubtless, were not then for the first time formulated in his mind,
+“being merely the leader of a sort of forlorn hope in the Divine
+Goodness, perhaps I have no right to be so cheerful.”
+
+The note of a sad irony in his words appealed to such indignation for
+him in Ellen as she never felt for herself. But she only said, “I don’t
+believe Poppa could take that in the wrong way if you told him.”
+
+Breckon stared. “Yes your father! What would he say?”
+
+“I can’t tell you. But I’m sure he would know what you meant.”
+
+“And you,” he pursued, “what should YOU say?”
+
+“I? I never thought about such a thing. You mustn’t ask me, if you’re
+serious; and if you’re not--”
+
+“But I am; I am deeply serious. I would like, to know how the case
+strikes you. I shall be so grateful if you will tell me.”
+
+“I’m sorry I can’t, Mr. Breckon. Why don’t you ask poppa?”
+
+“No, I see now I sha’n’t be able. I feel too much, after telling you,
+as if I had been posing. The reality has gone out of it all. And I’m
+ashamed.”
+
+“You mustn’t be,” she said, quietly; and she added, “I suppose it would
+be like a kind of defeat if you didn’t go back?”
+
+“I shouldn’t care for the appearance of defeat,” he said, courageously.
+“The great question is, whether somebody else wouldn’t be of more use in
+my place.”
+
+“Nobody could be,” said she, in a sort of impassioned absence, and then
+coming to herself, “I mean, they wouldn’t think so, I don’t believe.”
+
+“Then you advise--”
+
+“No, no! I can’t; I don’t. I’m not fit to have an opinion about such a
+thing; it would be crazy. But poppa--”
+
+They were at the door of the gangway, and she slipped within and left
+him. His nerves tingled, and there was a glow in his breast. It was
+sweet to have surprised that praise from her, though he could not have
+said why he should value the praise or a girl of her open ignorance and
+inexperience in everything that would have qualified her to judge him.
+But he found himself valuing it supremely, and wonderingly wishing to be
+worthy of it.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Ellen discovered her father with a book in a distant corner of the
+dining-saloon, which he preferred to the deck or the library for his
+reading, in such intervals as the stewards, laying and cleaning the
+tables, left him unmolested in it. She advanced precipitately upon him,
+and stood before him in an excitement which, though he lifted his dazed
+eyes to it from his page, he was not entirely aware of till afterwards.
+Then he realized that her cheeks were full of color, and her eyes of
+light, and that she panted as if she had been running when she spoke.
+
+“Poppa,” she said, “there is something that Mr. Breckon wants to speak
+to you--to ask you about. He has asked me, but I want you to see him,
+for I think he had better tell you himself.”
+
+While he still stared at her she was as suddenly gone as she had come,
+and he remained with his book, which the meaning had as suddenly left.
+There was no meaning in her words, except as he put it into them, and
+after he had got it in he struggled with it in a sort of perfunctory
+incredulity. It was not impossible; it chiefly seemed so because
+it seemed too good to be true; and the more he pondered it the more
+possible, if not probable, it became. He could not be safe with it till
+he had submitted it to his wife; and he went to her while he was sure of
+repeating Ellen’s words without varying from them a syllable.
+
+To his astonishment, Mrs. Kenton was instantly convinced. “Why, of
+course,” she said, “it can’t possibly mean anything else. Why should it
+be so very surprising? The time hasn’t been very long, but they’ve been
+together almost every moment; and he was taken with her from the very
+beginning--I could see that. Put on your other coat,” she said, as she
+dusted the collar of the coat the judge was wearing. “He’ll be looking
+you up, at once. I can’t say that it’s unexpected,” and she claimed a
+prescience in the matter which all her words had hitherto denied.
+
+Kenton did not notice her inconsistency. “If it were not so exactly
+what I wished,” he said, “I don’t know that I should be surprised at
+it myself. Sarah, if I had been trying to imagine any one for Ellen, I
+couldn’t have dreamed of a person better suited to her than this young
+man. He’s everything that I could wish him to be. I’ve seen the pleasure
+and comfort she took in his way from the first moment. He seemed to make
+her forget--Do you suppose she has forgotten that miserable wretch Do
+you think--”
+
+“If she hadn’t, could she be letting him come to speak to you? I don’t
+believe she ever really cared for Bittridge--or not after he began
+flirting with Mrs. Uphill.” She had no shrinking from the names which
+Kenton avoided with disgust. “The only question for you is to consider
+what you shall say to Mr. Breckon.”
+
+“Say to him? Why, of course, if Ellen has made up her mind, there’s only
+one thing I can say.”
+
+“Indeed there is! He ought to know all about that disgusting Bittridge
+business, and you have got to tell him.”
+
+“Sarah, I couldn’t. It is too humiliating. How would it do to refer him
+to--You could manage that part so much better. I don’t see how I could
+keep it from seeming an indelicate betrayal of the poor child--”
+
+“Perhaps she’s told him herself,” Mrs. Kenton provisionally suggested.
+
+The judge eagerly caught at the notion. “Do you think so? It would be
+like her! Ellen would wish him to know everything.”
+
+He stopped, and his wife could see that he was trembling with
+excitement. “We must find out. I will speak to Ellen--”
+
+“And--you don’t think I’d better have the talk with him first?”
+
+“Certainly not!”
+
+“Why, Rufus! You were not going to look him up?”
+
+“No,” he hesitated; but she could see that some such thing had been on
+his mind.
+
+“Surely,” she said, “you must be crazy!” But she had not the heart to
+blight his joy with sarcasm, and perhaps no sarcasm would have blighted
+it.
+
+“I merely wondered what I had better say in case he spoke to me before
+you saw Ellen--that’s all. Sarah! I couldn’t have believed that anything
+could please me so much. But it does seem as if it were the assurance
+of Ellen’s happiness; and she has deserved it, poor child! If ever
+there was a dutiful and loving daughter--at least before that wretched
+affair--she was one.”
+
+“She has been a good girl,” Mrs. Kenton stoically admitted.
+
+“And they are very well matched. Ellen is a cultivated woman. He never
+could have cause to blush for her, either her mind or her manners,
+in any circle of society; she would do him credit under any and all
+circumstances. If it were Lottie--”
+
+“Lottie is all right,” said her mother, in resentment of his preference;
+but she could not help smiling at it. “Don’t you be foolish about Ellen.
+I approve of Mr. Breckon as much as you do. But it’s her prettiness and
+sweetness that’s taken his fancy, and not her wisdom, if she’s got him.”
+
+“If she’s got him?”
+
+“Well, you know what I mean. I’m not saying she hasn’t. Dear knows, I
+don’t want to! I feel just as you do about it. I think it’s the greatest
+piece of good fortune, coming on top of all our trouble with her. I
+couldn’t have imagined such a thing.”
+
+He was instantly appeased. “Are you going to speak with Ellen” he
+radiantly inquired.
+
+“I will see. There’s no especial hurry, is there?”
+
+“Only, if he should happen to meet me--”
+
+“You can keep out of his way, I reckon. Or You can put him off,
+somehow.”
+
+“Yes,” Kenton returned, doubtfully. “Don’t,” he added, “be too blunt
+with Ellen. You know she didn’t say anything explicit to me.”
+
+“I think I will know how to manage, Mr. Kenton.”
+
+“Yes, of course, Sarah. I’m not saying that.”
+
+Breckon did not apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and
+at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father’s
+jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee
+with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not
+a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the
+difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and
+Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he
+had asked to lunch at his table, and who listened with one ear to the
+vigorous retorts of Lottie in her combat with Breckon.
+
+The judge witnessed it all with a grave displeasure, more and more
+painfully apparent to his wife. She could see the impatience, the
+gathering misgiving, in his face, and she perceived that she must not
+let this come to conscious dissatisfaction with Breckon; she knew her
+husband capable of indignation with trifling which would complicate the
+situation, if it came to that. She decided to speak with Ellen as soon
+as possible, and she meant to follow her to her state-room when they
+left the table. But fate assorted the pieces in the game differently.
+Boyne walked over to the place where Miss Rasmith was sitting with
+her mother; Lottie and Mr. Pogis went off to practise duets together,
+terrible, four-handed torments under which the piano presently clamored;
+and Ellen stood for a moment talked to by Mr. Breckon, who challenged
+her then for a walk on deck, and with whom she went away smiling.
+
+Mrs. Kenton appealed with the reflection of the girl’s happiness in her
+face to the frowning censure in her husband’s; but Kenton spoke first.
+“What does he mean?” he demanded, darkly. “If he is making a fool of her
+he’ll find that that game can’t be played twice, with impunity. Sarah, I
+believe I should choke him.”
+
+“Mr. Kenton!” she gasped, and she trembled in fear of him, even while
+she kept herself with difficulty from shaking him for his folly. “Don’t
+say such a thing! Can’t you see that they want to talk it over? If he
+hasn’t spoken to you it’s because he wants to know how you took what
+she said.” Seeing the effect of these arguments, she pursued: “Will you
+never have any sense? I will speak to Ellen the very minute I get her
+alone, and you have just got to wait. Don’t you suppose it’s hard for
+me, too? Have I got nothing to bear?”
+
+Kenton went silently back to his book, which he took with him to the
+reading-room, where from time to time his wife came to him and reported
+that Ellen and Breckon were still walking up and down together, or that
+they were sitting down talking, or were forward, looking over at the
+prow, or were watching the deck-passengers dancing. Her husband received
+her successive advices with relaxing interest, and when she had brought
+the last she was aware that the affair was entirely in her hands with
+all the responsibility. After the gay parting between Ellen and Breckon,
+which took place late in the afternoon, she suffered an interval to
+elapse before she followed the girl down to her state-room. She found
+her lying in her berth, with shining eyes and glad, red cheeks; she was
+smiling to herself.
+
+“That is right, Ellen,” her mother said. “You need rest after your long
+tramp.”
+
+“I’m not tired. We were sitting down a good deal. I didn’t think how
+late it was. I’m ever so much better. Where’s Lottie?”
+
+“Off somewhere with that young Englishman,” said Mrs. Kenton, as if that
+were of no sort of consequence. “Ellen,” she added, abruptly, trying
+within a tremulous smile to hide her eagerness, “what is this that Mr.
+Breckon wants to talk with your father about?”
+
+“Mr. Breckon? With poppa?”
+
+“Yes, certainly. You told him this morning that Mr. Breckon--”
+
+“Oh! Oh yes!” said Ellen, as if recollecting something that had slipped
+her mind. “He wants poppa to advise him whether to go back to his
+congregation in New York or not.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton sat in the corner of the sofa next the door, looking into
+the girl’s face on the pillow as she lay with her arms under her head.
+Tears of defeat and shame came into her eyes, and she could not see the
+girl’s light nonchalance in adding:
+
+“But he hasn’t got up his courage yet. He thinks he’ll ask him after
+dinner. He says he doesn’t want poppa to think he’s posing. I don’t know
+what he means.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton did not speak at once. Her bitterest mortification was not
+for herself, but for the simple and tender father-soul which had been
+so tried already. She did not know how he would bear it, the
+disappointment, and the cruel hurt to his pride. But she wanted to fall
+on her knees in thankfulness that he had betrayed himself only to her.
+
+She started in sudden alarm with the thought. “Where is he now--Mr.
+Breckon?”
+
+“He’s gone with Boyne down into the baggage-room.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton sank back in her corner, aware now that she would not have
+had the strength to go to her husband even to save him from the awful
+disgrace of giving himself away to Breckon. “And was that all?” she
+faltered.
+
+“All?”
+
+“That he wanted to speak to your father about?”
+
+She must make irrefragably sure, for Kenton’s sake, that she was not
+misunderstanding.
+
+“Why, of course! What else? Why, momma! what are you crying about?”
+
+“I’m not crying, child. Just some foolishness of your father’s. He
+understood--he thought--” Mrs. Kenton began to laugh hysterically. “But
+you know how ridiculous he is; and he supposed--No, I won’t tell you!”
+
+It was not necessary. The girl’s mind, perhaps because it was imbued
+already with the subject, had possessed itself of what filled her
+mother’s. She dropped from the elbow on which she had lifted herself,
+and turned her face into the pillow, with a long wail of shame.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+Mrs. Kenton’s difficulties in setting her husband right were
+indefinitely heightened by the suspicion that the most unsuspicious of
+men fell into concerning Breckon. Did Breckon suppose that the matter
+could be turned off in that way? he stupidly demanded; and when he was
+extricated from this error by his wife’s representation that Breckon
+had not changed at all, but had never told Ellen that he wished to speak
+with him of anything but his returning to his society, Kenton still
+could not accept the fact. He would have contended that at least the
+other matter must have been in Breckon’s mind; and when he was beaten
+from this position, and convinced that the meaning they had taken from
+Ellen’s words had never been in any mind but their own, he fell into
+humiliation so abject that he could hide it only by the hauteur with
+which he carried himself towards Breckon when they met at dinner. He
+would scarcely speak to the young man; Ellen did not come to the
+table; Lottie and Boyne and their friend Mr. Pogis were dining with the
+Rasmiths, and Mrs. Kenton had to be, as she felt, cringingly kind to
+Breckon in explaining just the sort of temporary headache that kept
+her eldest daughter away. He was more than ordinarily sympathetic
+and polite, but he was manifestly bewildered by Kenton’s behavior. He
+refused an hilarious invitation from Mrs. Rasmith, when he rose from
+table, to stop and have his coffee with her on his way out of the
+saloon. His old adorer explained that she had ordered a small bottle of
+champagne in honor of its being the night before they were to get into
+Boulogne, and that he ought to sit down and help her keep the young
+people straight. Julia, she brokenly syllabled, with the gay beverage
+bubbling back into her throat, was not the least use; she was worse than
+any. Julia did not look it, in the demure regard which she bent upon her
+amusing mother, and Breckon persisted in refusing. He said he thought
+he might safely leave them to Boyne, and Mrs. Rasmith said into her
+handkerchief, “Oh yes! Boyne!” and pressed Boyne’s sleeve with her
+knobbed and jewelled fingers.
+
+It was evident where most of the small bottle had gone, but Breckon was
+none the cheerfuller for the spectacle of Mrs. Rasmith. He could not
+have a moment’s doubt as to the sort of work he had been doing in New
+York if she were an effect of it, and he turned his mind from the sad
+certainty back to the more important inquiry as to what offence his wish
+to advise with Judge Kenton could have conveyed. Ellen had told him in
+the afternoon that she had spoken with her father about it, and she had
+not intimated any displeasure or reluctance on him; but apparently he
+had decided not to suffer himself to be approached.
+
+It might be as well. Breckon had not been able to convince himself that
+his proposal to consult Judge Kenton was not a pose. He had flashes
+of owning that it was contemplated merely as a means of ingratiating
+himself with Ellen. Now, as he found his way up and down among the empty
+steamer-chairs, he was aware, at the bottom of his heart, of not
+caring in the least for Judge Kenton’s repellent bearing, except as it
+possibly, or impossibly, reflected some mood of hers. He could not make
+out her not coming to dinner; the headache was clearly an excuse; for
+some reason she did not wish to see him, he argued, with the egotism of
+his condition.
+
+The logic of his conclusion was strengthened at breakfast by her
+continued absence; and this time Mrs. Kenton made no apologies for her.
+The judge was a shade less severe; or else Breckon did not put himself
+so much in the way to be withheld as he had the night before. Boyne and
+Lottie carried on a sort of muted scrap, unrebuked by their mother, who
+seemed too much distracted in some tacit trouble to mind them. From
+time to time Breckon found her eyes dwelling upon him wonderingly,
+entreatingly; she dropped them, if she caught his, and colored.
+
+In the afternoon it was early evident that they were approaching
+Boulogne. The hatch was opened and the sailors began getting up the
+baggage of the passengers who were going to disembark. It seemed a long
+time for everybody till the steamer got in; those going ashore sat on
+their hand-baggage for an hour before the tug came up to take, them
+off. Mr. Pogis was among them; he had begun in the forenoon to mark
+the approaching separation between Lottie and himself by intervals of
+unmistakable withdrawal. Another girl might have cared, but Lottie did
+not care, for her failure to get a rise out of him by her mockingly
+varied “Oh, I say!” and “Well, rather!” In the growth of his dignified
+reserve Mr. Pogis was indifferent to jeers. By whatever tradition
+of what would or would not do he was controlled in relinquishing her
+acquaintance, or whether it was in obedience to some imperative ideal,
+or some fearful domestic influence subtly making itself felt from the
+coasts of his native island, or some fine despair of equalling the
+imagined grandeur of Lottie’s social state in Tuskingum by anything he
+could show her in England, it was certain that he was ending with Lottie
+then and there. At the same time he was carefully defining himself from
+the Rasmiths, with whom he must land. He had his state-room things put
+at an appreciable distance, where he did not escape a final stab from
+Lottie.
+
+“Oh, do give me a rose out of that,” she entreated, in travestied
+imploring, as he stood looking at a withered bouquet which the steward
+had brought up with his rugs.
+
+“I’m takin’ it home,” he explained, coldly.
+
+“And I want to take a rose back to New York. I want to give it to a
+friend of mine there.”
+
+Mr. Pogis hesitated. Then he asked, “A man?” “Well, rather!” said
+Lottie.
+
+He answered nothing, but looked definitively down at the flowers in his
+hand.
+
+“Oh, I say!” Lottie exulted.
+
+Boyne remained fixed in fealty to the Rasmiths, with whom Breckon was
+also talking as Mrs. Kenton came up with the judge. She explained how
+sorry her daughter Ellen was at not being able to say goodbye; she was
+still not at all well; and the ladies received her excuses with polite
+patience. Mrs. Rasmith said she did not know what they should do without
+Boyne, and Miss Rasmith put her arm across his shoulders and pulled him
+up to her, and implored, “Oh, give him to me, Mrs. Kenton!”
+
+Boyne stole an ashamed look at his mother, and his father said, with
+an unbending to Breckon which must have been the effect of severe
+expostulation from Mrs. Kenton, “I suppose you and the ladies will go to
+Paris together.”
+
+“Why, no,” Breckon said, and he added, with mounting confusion, “I--I
+had arranged to keep on to Rotterdam. I was going to mention it.”
+
+“Keep on to Rotterdam!” Mrs. Rasmith’s eyes expressed the greatest
+astonishment.
+
+“Why, of course, mother!” said her daughter. “Don’t you know? Boyne told
+us.”
+
+Boyne, after their parting, seized the first chance of assuring his
+mother that he had not told Miss Rasmith that, for he had not known it,
+and he went so far in her condemnation to wonder how she could say such
+a thing. His mother said it was not very nice, and then suggested that
+perhaps she had heard it from some one else, and thought it was he.
+She acquitted him of complicity with Miss Rasmith in forbearing to
+contradict her; and it seemed to her a fitting time to find out from
+Boyne what she honestly could about the relation of the Rasmiths to Mr.
+Breckon. It was very little beyond their supposition, which every one
+else had shared, that he was going to land with them at Boulogne, and
+he must have changed his mind very suddenly. Boyne had not heard the
+Rasmiths speak of it. Miss Rasmith never spoke of Mr. Breckon at all;
+but she seemed to want to talk of Ellen; she was always asking about
+her, and what was the matter with her, and how long she had been sick.
+
+“Boyne,” said his mother, with a pang, “you didn’t tell her anything
+about Ellen?”
+
+“Momma!” said the boy, in such evident abhorrence of the idea that she
+rested tranquil concerning it. She paid little attention to what Boyne
+told her otherwise of the Rasmiths. Her own horizon were so limited that
+she could not have brought home to herself within them that wandering
+life the Rasmiths led from climate to climate and sensation to
+sensation, with no stay so long as the annually made in New York, where
+they sometimes passed months enough to establish themselves in giving
+and taking tea in a circle of kindred nomads. She conjectured as
+ignorantly as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would
+not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a
+California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period
+following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith’s father,
+whose name was not Rasmith.
+
+What Mrs. Kenton divined was that they had wanted to get Breckon, and
+that so far as concerned her own interest in him they had wanted to
+get him away from Ellen. In her innermost self-confidences she did not
+permit herself the notion that Ellen had any right to him; but still it
+was a relief to have them off the ship, and to have him left. Of all
+the witnesses of the fact, she alone did not find it awkward. Breckon
+himself found it very awkward. He did not wish to be with the
+Rasmiths, but he found it uncomfortable not being with them, under
+the circumstances, and he followed them ashore in tingling reveries of
+explanation and apology. He had certainly meant to get off at Boulogne,
+and when he had suddenly and tardily made up his mind to keep on to
+Rotterdam, he had meant to tell them as soon as he had the labels on his
+baggage changed. He had not meant to tell them why he had changed his
+mind, and he did not tell them now in these tingling reveries. He did
+not own the reason in his secret thoughts, for it no longer seemed a
+reason; it no longer seemed a cause. He knew what the Rasmiths would
+think; but he could easily make that right with his conscience, at
+least, by parting with the Kentons at Rotterdam, and leaving them to
+find their unconducted way to any point they chose beyond. He separated
+himself uncomfortably from them when the tender had put off with
+her passengers and the ship had got under way again, and went to the
+smoking-room, while the judge returned to his book and Mrs. Kenton
+abandoned Lottie to her own devices, and took Boyne aside for her
+apparently fruitless inquiries.
+
+They were not really so fruitless but that at the end of them she could
+go with due authority to look up her husband. She gently took his book
+from him and shut it up. “Now, Mr. Kenton,” she began, “if you don’t go
+right straight and find Mr. Breckon and talk with him, I--I don’t know
+what I will do. You must talk to him--”
+
+“About Ellen?” the judge frowned.
+
+“No, certainly not. Talk with him about anything that interests you. Be
+pleasant to him. Can’t you see that he’s going on to Rotterdam on our
+account?”
+
+“Then I wish he wasn’t. There’s no use in it.”
+
+“No matter! It’s polite in him, and I want you to show him that you
+appreciate it.”
+
+“Now see here, Sarah,” said the judge, “if you want him shown that we
+appreciate his politeness why don’t you do it yourself?”
+
+“I? Because it would look as if you were afraid to. It would look as if
+we meant something by it.”
+
+“Well, I am afraid; and that’s just what I’m afraid of. I declare, my
+heart comes into my mouth whenever I think what an escape we had. I
+think of it whenever I look at him, and I couldn’t talk to him without
+having that in my mind all the time. No, women can manage those things
+better. If you believe he is going along on our account, so as to help
+us see Holland, and to keep us from getting into scrapes, you’re the
+one to make it up to him. I don’t care what you say to show him our
+gratitude. I reckon we will get into all sorts of trouble if we’re left
+to ourselves. But if you think he’s stayed because he wants to be with
+Ellen, and--”
+
+“Oh, I don’t KNOW what I think! And that’s silly I can’t talk to him.
+I’m afraid it’ll seem as if we wanted to flatter him, and goodness knows
+we don’t want to. Or, yes, we do! I’d give anything if it was true.
+Rufus, do you suppose he did stay on her account? My, oh my! If I could
+only think so! Wouldn’t it be the best thing in the world for the poor
+child, and for all of us? I never saw anybody that I liked so much. But
+it’s too good to be true.”
+
+“He’s a nice fellow, but I don’t think he’s any too good for Ellen.”
+
+“I’m not saying he is. The great thing is that he’s good enough, and
+gracious knows what will happen if she meets some other worthless
+fellow, and gets befooled with him! Or if she doesn’t take a fancy to
+some one, and goes back to Tuskingum without seeing any one else she
+likes, there is that awful wretch, and when she hears what Dick did to
+him--she’s just wrong-headed enough to take up with him again to make
+amends to him. Oh, dear oh, dear! I know Lottie will let it out to her
+yet!”
+
+The judge began threateningly, “You tell Lottie from me--”
+
+“What?” said the girl herself, who had seen her father and mother
+talking together in a remote corner of the music-room and had stolen
+light-footedly upon them just at this moment.
+
+“Lottie, child,” said her mother, undismayed at Lottie’s arrival in her
+larger anxiety, “I wish you would try and be agreeable to Mr. Breckon.
+Now that he’s going on with us to Holland, I don’t want him to think
+we’re avoiding him.”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Oh, because.”
+
+“Because you want to get him for Ellen?”
+
+“Don’t be impudent,” said her father. “You do as your mother bids you.”
+
+“Be agreeable to that old Breckon? I think I see myself! I’d sooner
+read! I’m going to get a book now.” She left them as abruptly as she had
+come upon them, and ran across to the bookcase, where she remained two
+stepping and peering through the glass doors at the literature within,
+in unaccustomed question concerning it.
+
+“She’s a case,” said the judge, looking at her not only with relenting,
+but with the pride in her sufficiency for all the exigencies of life
+which he could not feel in Ellen. “She can take care of herself.”
+
+“Oh yes,” Mrs. Kenton sadly assented, “I don’t think anybody will ever
+make a fool of Lottie.”
+
+“It’s a great deal more likely to be the other way,” her father
+suggested.
+
+“I think Lottie is conscientious,” Mrs. Kenton protested. “She wouldn’t
+really fool with a man.”
+
+“No, she’s a good girl,” the judge owned.
+
+“It’s girls like Ellen who make the trouble and the care. They are too
+good, and you have to think some evil in this world. Well!” She rose and
+gave her husband back his book.
+
+“Do you know where Boyne is?”
+
+“No. Do you want him to be pleasant to Mr. Breckon?”
+
+“Somebody has got to. But it would be ridiculous if nobody but Boyne
+was.”
+
+She did not find Boyne, after no very exhaustive search, and the boy was
+left to form his bearing towards Breckon on the behavior of the rest of
+his family. As this continued helplessly constrained both in his father
+and mother, and voluntarily repellent in Lottie, Boyne decided upon a
+blend of conduct which left Breckon in greater and greater doubt of his
+wisdom in keeping on to Rotterdam. There was no good reason which he
+would have been willing to give himself, from the beginning. It had been
+an impulse, suddenly coming upon him in the baggage-room where he had
+gone to get something out of his trunk, and where he had decided to
+have the label of his baggage changed from the original destination at
+Boulogne to the final port of the steamer’s arrival. When this was once
+done he was sorry, but he was ashamed to have the label changed back.
+The most assignable motive for his act was his reluctance to go on
+to Paris with the Rasmiths, or rather with Mrs. Rasmith; for with her
+daughter, who was not a bad fellow, one could always manage. He was
+quite aware of being safely in his own hands against any design of Mrs.
+Rasmith’s, but her machinations humiliated him for her; he hated to see
+her going through her manoeuvres, and he could not help grieving for her
+failures, with a sort of impersonal sympathy, all the more because he
+disliked her as little as he respected her.
+
+The motive which he did not assign to himself was that which probably
+prevailed with him, though in the last analysis it was as selfish,
+no doubt, as the one he acknowledged. Ellen Kenton still piqued his
+curiosity, still touched his compassion. He had so far from exhausted
+his wish or his power to befriend her, to help her, that he had still a
+wholly unsatisfied longing to console her, especially when she drooped
+into that listless attitude she was apt to take, with her face fallen
+and her hands let lie, the back of one in the palm of the other, in
+her lap. It was possibly the vision of this following him to the
+baggage-room, when he went to open his trunk, that as much as anything
+decided him to have the label changed on his baggage, but he did not own
+it then, and still less did he own it now, when he found himself quite
+on his own hands for his pains.
+
+He felt that for some reason the Kentons were all avoiding him. Ellen,
+indeed, did not take part, against him, unless negatively, for she had
+appeared neither at lunch nor at dinner as the vessel kept on its way
+after leaving Boulogne; and when he ventured to ask for her Mrs. Kenton
+answered with embarrassment that she was not feeling very well. He asked
+for her at lunch, but not at dinner, and when he had finished that meal
+he went on the promenade-deck, and walked forlornly up and down, feeling
+that he had been a fool.
+
+Mrs. Kenton went below to her daughter’s room, and found Ellen there
+on the sofa, with her book shut on her thumb at the place where the
+twilight had failed her.
+
+“Ellen, dear,” her mother said, “aren’t you feeling well?”
+
+“Yes, I’m well enough,” said the girl, sensible of a leading in the
+question. “Why?”
+
+“Oh, nothing. Only--only I can’t make your father behave naturally with
+Mr. Breckon. He’s got his mind so full of that mistake we both came so
+near making that he can’t think of anything else. He’s so sheepish
+about it that he can hardly speak to him or even look at him; and I must
+confess that I don’t do much better. You know I don’t like to put myself
+forward where your father is, and if I did, really I don’t believe I
+could make up my mouth to say anything. I did want Lottie to be nice
+to him, but Lottie dislikes him so! And even Boyne--well, it wouldn’t
+matter about Boyne, if he didn’t seem to be carrying out a sort of
+family plan--Boyne barely answers him when he speaks to him. I don’t
+know what he can think.” Ellen was a good listener, and Mrs. Kenton,
+having begun, did not stop till she had emptied the bag. “I just know
+that he didn’t get off at Boulogne because he wanted to stay on with us,
+and thought he could be useful to us at The Hague, and everywhere; and
+here we’re acting as ungratefully! Why, we’re not even commonly polite
+to him, and I know he feels it. I know that he’s hurt.”
+
+Ellen rose and stood before the glass, into which he asked of her
+mother’s reflected face, while she knotted a fallen coil of hair into
+its place, “Where is he?”
+
+“I don’t know. He went on deck somewhere.”
+
+Ellen put on her hat and pinned it, and put on her jacket and buttoned
+it. Then she started towards the door. Her mother made way for her,
+faltering, “What are you going to do, Ellen?”
+
+“I am going to do right.”
+
+“Don’t-catch cold!” her mother called after her figure vanishing down
+the corridor, but the warning couched in these terms had really no
+reference to the weather.
+
+The girl’s impulse was one of those effects of the weak will in her
+which were apt to leave her short of the fulfilment of a purpose. It
+carried her as her as the promenade, which she found empty, and she went
+and leaned upon the rail, and looked out over the sorrowful North Sea,
+which was washing darkly away towards where the gloomy sunset had been.
+
+Steps from the other side of the ship approached, hesitated towards her,
+and then arrested themselves. She looked round.
+
+“Why, Miss Kenton!” said Breckon, stupidly.
+
+“The sunset is over, isn’t it?” she answered.
+
+“The twilight isn’t.” Breckon stopped; then he asked, “Wouldn’t you like
+to take a little walk?”
+
+“Yes,” she answered, and smiled fully upon him. He had never known
+before how radiant a smile she lead.
+
+“Better have my arm. It’s getting rather dark.”
+
+“Well.” She put her hand on his arm and he felt it tremble there, while
+she palpitated, “We are all so glad you could go on to Rotterdam. My
+mother wanted me to tell you.”
+
+“Oh, don’t speak of that,” said Breckon, not very appositely. Presently
+he forced a laugh, in order to add, with lightness, “I was afraid
+perhaps I had given you all some reason to regret it!”
+
+She said, “I was afraid you would think that--or momma was--and I
+couldn’t bear to have you.”
+
+“Well, then, I won’t.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+Breckon had answered with gayety, but his happiness was something beyond
+gayety. He had really felt the exclusion from the Kentons in which he
+had passed the day, and he had felt it the more painfully because
+he liked them all. It may be owned that he liked Ellen best from the
+beginning, and now he liked her better than ever, but even in the day’s
+exile he had not ceased to like each of them. They were, in their family
+affection, as lovable as that sort of selfishness can make people. They
+were very united and good to one another. Lottie herself, except in
+her most lurid moments, was good to her brother and sister, and almost
+invariably kind to her parents. She would not, Breckon saw, have brooked
+much meddling with her flirtations from them, but as they did not offer
+to meddle, she had no occasion to grumble on that score. She grumbled
+when they asked her to do things for Ellen, but she did them, and though
+she never did them without grumbling, she sometimes did them without
+being asked. She was really very watchful of Ellen when it would least
+have been expected, and sometimes she was sweet. She never was sweet
+with Boyne, but she was often his friend, though this did not keep her
+from turning upon him at the first chance to give him a little dig, or
+a large one, for that matter. As for Boyne, he was a mass of helpless
+sweetness, though he did not know it, and sometimes took himself for
+an iceberg when he was merely an ice-cream of heroic mould. He was as
+helplessly sweet with Lottie as with any one, and if he suffered keenly
+from her treacheries, and seized every occasion to repay them in kind,
+it was clearly a matter of conscience with him, and always for the good.
+Their father and mother treated their squabbles very wisely, Breckon
+thought. They ignored them as much as possible, and they recognized
+them without attempting to do that justice between them which would have
+rankled in both their breasts.
+
+To a spectator who had been critical at first, Mr. and Mrs. Kenton
+seemed an exemplary father and mother with Ellen as well as with their
+other children. It is easy to be exemplary with a sick girl, but they
+increasingly affected Breckon as exemplary with Ellen. He fancied that
+they acted upon each other beneficially towards her. At first he had
+foreboded some tiresome boasting from the father’s tenderness, and some
+weak indulgence of the daughter’s whims from her mother; but there was
+either never any ground for this, or else Mrs. Kenton, in keeping her
+husband from boasting, had been obliged in mere consistency to set a
+guard upon her own fondness.
+
+It was not that. Ellen, he was more and more decided, would have abused
+the weakness of either; if there was anything more angelic than her
+patience, it was her wish to be a comfort to them, and, between the
+caprices of her invalidism, to be a service. It was pathetic to see her
+remembering to do things for them which Boyne and Lottie had forgotten,
+or plainly shirked doing, and to keep the fact out of sight. She really
+kept it out of sight with them, and if she did not hide it from so close
+an observer as Breckon, that was more his fault than hers. When her
+father first launched out in her praise, or the praise of her reading,
+the young man had dreaded a rustic prig; yet she had never been a prig,
+but simply glad of what book she had known, and meekly submissive to his
+knowledge if not his taste. He owned that she had a right to her taste,
+which he found almost always good, and accounted for as instinctive in
+the absence of an imaginable culture in her imaginable ambient. So far
+as he had glimpses of this, he found it so different from anything
+he had known that the modest adequacy of Mrs. Kenton in the political
+experiences of modern Europe, as well as the clear judgments of Kenton
+himself in matters sometimes beyond Breekon himself, mystified him no
+less than Ellen’s taste.
+
+Even with the growth of his respect for their intelligence and his love
+of their kindliness, he had not been able to keep a certain patronage
+from mingling, and it was not till they evinced not only entire ability,
+but an apparent wish to get on without his approval, without his
+acquaintance even, that he had conceived a just sense of them. The like
+is apt to happen with the best of us, when we are also the finest, and
+Breckon was not singular in coming to a due consciousness of something
+valuable only in the hour of its loss. He did not know that the loss was
+only apparent. He knew that he had made a distinct sacrifice for these
+people, and that, when he had prepared himself to befriend them little
+short of self-devotion, they showed themselves indifferent, and almost
+repellent. In the revulsion of feeling, when Ellen gave him her mother’s
+message, and frankly offered him reparation on behalf of her whole
+family, he may have overdone his gratitude, but he did not overdo it to
+her perception. They walked up and down the promenade of the Amstel,
+in the watery North Sea moon, while bells after bells noted the hour
+unheeded, and when they parted for the night it was with an involuntary
+pressure of hands, from which she suddenly pulled hers, and ran down the
+corridor of her state-room and Lottie’s.
+
+He stood watching the narrow space in which she had vanished, and
+thinking how gentle she was, and how she had contrived somehow to make
+him feel that now it was she who had been consoling him, and trying to
+interest him and amuse him. He had not realized that before; he had
+been used to interesting and amusing her, but he could not resent it;
+he could not resent the implication of superiority, if such a thing were
+possible, which her kindness conveyed. The question with Breckon was
+whether she had walked with him so long because she wished, in the hour,
+to make up as fully as possible for the day’s neglect, or because she
+had liked to walk up and down with him. It was a question he found
+keeping itself poignantly, yet pleasantly, in his mind, after he had got
+into his berth under the solidly slumberous Boyne, and inclining now to
+one solution and now to the other, with a delicate oscillation that was
+charming.
+
+The Amstel took her time to get into Rotterdam, and when her passengers
+had gone ashore the next forenoon the train that carried Breckon to The
+Hague in the same compartment with the Kentons was in no greater hurry.
+It arrived with a deliberation which kept it from carrying them on to
+Amsterdam before they knew it, and Mrs. Kenton had time to place such
+parts of the wars in the Rise of the Dutch Republic as she could attach
+to the names of the stations and the general features of the landscape.
+Boyne was occupied with improvements for the windmills and the
+canal-boats, which did not seem to him of the quality of the Michigan
+aerometers, or the craft with which he was familiar on the Hudson River
+and on the canal that passed through Tuskingum. Lottie, with respect
+to the canals, offered the frank observation that they smelt, and in
+recognizing a fact which travel almost universally ignores in Holland,
+she watched her chance of popping up the window between herself and
+Boyne, which Boyne put down with mounting rage. The agriculture which
+triumphed everywhere on the little half--acre plots lifted fifteen
+inches above the waters of the environing ditches, and the black and
+white cattle everywhere attesting the immemorial Dutch ideal of a cow,
+were what at first occupied Kenton, and he was tardily won from them to
+the question of fighting over a country like that. It was a concession
+to his wife’s impassioned interest in the overthrow of the Spaniards in
+a landscape which had evidently not changed since. She said it was hard
+to realize that Holland was not still a republic, and she was not very
+patient with Breckon’s defence of the monarchy on the ground that the
+young Queen was a very pretty girl.
+
+“And she is only sixteen,” Boyne urged.
+
+“Then she is two years too old for you,” said Lottie.
+
+“No such thing!” Boyne retorted. “I was fifteen in June.”
+
+“Dear me! I should never have thought it,” said his sister.
+
+Ellen seemed hardly to look out of the window at anything directly, but
+when her father bade her see this thing and that, it seemed that she had
+seen it already. She said at last, with a quiet sigh, “I never want to
+go away.”
+
+She had been a little shy of Breckon the whole morning, and had kept him
+asking himself whether she was sorry she had walked so long with him the
+night before, or, having offered him due reparation for her family, she
+was again dropping him. Now and then he put her to the test by words
+explicitly directed at her, and she replied with the dreamy passivity
+which seemed her normal mood, and in which he could fancy himself half
+forgotten, or remembered with an effort.
+
+In the midst of this doubt she surprised him--he reflected that she was
+always surprising him--by asking him how far it was from The Hague to
+the sea. He explained that The Hague was in the sea like all the rest
+of Holland, but that if she meant the shore, it was no distance at all.
+Then she said, vaguely, she wished they were going to the shore. Her
+father asked Breckon if there was not a hotel at the beach, and the
+young man tried to give him a notion of the splendors of the Kurhaus
+at Scheveningen; of Scheveningen itself he despaired of giving any just
+notion.
+
+“Then we can go there,” said the judge, ignoring Ellen, in his decision,
+as if she had nothing to do with it.
+
+Lottie interposed a vivid preference for The Hague. She had, she said,
+had enough of the sea for one while, and did not want to look at it
+again till they sailed for home. Boyne turned to his father as if a good
+deal shaken by this reasoning, and it was Mrs. Kenton who carried the
+day for going first to a hotel in The Hague and prospecting from there
+in the direction of Scheveningen; Boyne and his father could go down to
+the shore and see which they liked best.
+
+“I don’t see what that has to do with me,” said Lottie. No one was
+alarmed by her announcement that if she did not like Scheveningen she
+should stay at The Hague, whatever the rest did; in the event fortune
+favored her going with her family.
+
+The hotel in The Hague was very pleasant, with a garden behind it, where
+a companionable cat had found a dry spot, and where Lottie found the
+cat and made friends with it. But she said the hotel was full of Cook’s
+tourists, whom she recognized, in spite of her lifelong ignorance of
+them, by a prescience derived from the conversation of Mr. Pogis, and
+from the instinct of a society woman, already rife in her. She found
+that she could not stay in a hotel with Cook’s tourists, and she
+took her father’s place in the exploring party which went down to the
+watering-place in the afternoon, on the top of a tram-car, under the
+leafy roof of the adorable avenue of trees which embowers the track to
+Scheveningen. She disputed Boyne’s impressions of the Dutch people, whom
+he found looking more like Americans than any foreigners he had seen,
+and she snubbed Breckon from his supposed charge of the party. But after
+the start, when she declared that Ellen could not go, and that it was
+ridiculous for her to think of it, she was very good to her, and looked
+after her safety and comfort with a despotic devotion.
+
+At the Kurhaus she promptly took the lead in choosing rooms, for she had
+no doubt of staying there after the first glance at the place, and
+she showed a practical sense in settling her family which at least her
+mother appreciated when they were installed the next day.
+
+Mrs. Kenton could not make her husband admire Lottie’s faculty so
+readily. “You think it would have been better for her to sit down with
+Ellen, on the sand and dream of the sea,” she reproached him, with a
+tender resentment on behalf of Lottie. “Everybody can’t dream.”
+
+“Yes, but I wish she didn’t keep awake with such a din,” said the judge.
+After all, he admired Lottie’s judgment about the rooms, and he censured
+her with a sigh of relief from care as he sank back in the easy-chair
+fronting the window that looked out on the North Sea; Lottie had already
+made him appreciate the view till he was almost sick of it.
+
+“What is the matter?” said Mrs. Kenton, sharply. “Do you want to be
+in Tuskingum? I suppose you would rather be looking into Richard’s
+back-yard.”
+
+“No,” said the judge, mildly, “this is very nice.”
+
+“It will do Ellen good, every minute. I don’t care how much she sits on
+the sands and dream. I’ll love to see her.”
+
+The sitting on the sand was a survival of Mr. Kenton’s preoccupations
+of the sea-side. As a mater of fact, Ellen was at that moment sitting in
+one of the hooked wicker arm-chairs which were scattered over the whole
+vast beach like a growth of monstrous mushrooms, and, confronting her
+in cosey proximity, Breckon sat equally hidden in another windstuhl. Her
+father and her mother were able to keep them placed, among the multitude
+of windstuhls, by the presence of Lottie, who hovered near them, and,
+with Boyne, fended off the demure, wicked-looking little Scheveningen
+girls. On a smaller scale these were exactly like their demure,
+wicked-looking Scheveningen mothers, and they approached with knitting
+in their hands, and with large stones folded in their aprons, which they
+had pilfered from the mole, and were trying to sell for footstools. The
+windstuhl men and they were enemies, and when Breckon bribed them to go
+away, the windstuhl men chased them, and the little girls ran, making
+mouths at Boyne over their shoulders. He scorned to notice them; but he
+was obliged to report the misconduct of Lottie, who began making eyes at
+the Dutch officers as soon as she could feel that Ellen was safely off
+her hands. She was the more exasperating and the more culpable to Boyne,
+because she had asked him to walk up the beach with her, and had then
+made the fraternal promenade a basis of operations against the Dutch
+military. She joined her parents in ignoring Boyne’s complaints, and
+continued to take credit for all the pleasant facts of the situation;
+she patronized her family as much for the table d’hote at luncheon as
+for the comfort of their rooms. She was able to assure them that there
+was not a Cook’s tourist in the hotel, where there seemed to be nearly
+every other kind of fellow-creature. At the end of the first week she
+had acquaintance of as many nationalities as she could reach in their
+native or acquired English, in all the stages of haughty toleration,
+vivid intimacy, and cold exhaustion. She had a faculty for getting
+through with people, or of ceasing to have any use for them, which was
+perhaps her best safeguard in her adventurous flirting; while the simple
+aliens were still in the full tide of fancied success, Lottie was sick
+of them all, and deep in an indiscriminate correspondence with her young
+men in Tuskingum.
+
+The letters which she had invited from these while still in New York
+arrived with the first of those readdressed from the judge’s London
+banker. She had more letters than all the rest of the family together,
+and counted a half-dozen against a poor two for her sister. Mrs. Kenton
+cared nothing about Lottie’s letters, but she was silently uneasy about
+the two that Ellen carelessly took. She wondered who could be writing to
+Ellen, especially in a cover bearing a handwriting altogether strange to
+her.
+
+“It isn’t from Bittridge, at any rate,” she said to her husband, in the
+speculation which she made him share. “I am always dreading to have her
+find out what Richard did. It would spoil everything, I’m afraid, and
+now everything is going so well. I do wish Richard hadn’t, though, of
+course, he did it for the best. Who do you think has been writing to
+her?”
+
+“Why don’t you ask her?”
+
+“I suppose she will tell me after a while. I don’t like to seem to be
+following her up. One was from Bessie Pearl, I think.”
+
+Ellen did not speak of her letters to her mother, and after waiting a
+day or two, Mrs. Kenton could not refrain from asking her.
+
+“Oh, I forgot,” said Ellen. “I haven’t read them yet.”
+
+“Haven’t read them!” said Mrs. Kenton. Then, after reflection, she
+added, “You are a strange girl, Ellen,” and did not venture to say more.
+
+“I suppose I thought I should have to answer them, and that made me
+careless. But I will read them.” Her mother was silent, and presently
+Ellen added: “I hate to think of the past. Don’t you, momma?”
+
+“It is certainly very pleasant here,” said Mrs. Kenton, cautiously.
+“You’re enjoying yourself--I mean, you seem to be getting so much
+stronger.”
+
+“Why, momma, why do you talk as if I had been sick?” Ellen asked.
+
+“I mean you’re so much interested.”
+
+“Don’t I go about everywhere, like anybody?” Ellen pursued, ignoring her
+explanation.
+
+“Yes, you certainly do. Mr. Breckon seems to like going about.”
+
+Ellen did not respond to the suggestion except to say: “We go into all
+sorts of places. This morning we went up on that schooner that’s drawn
+up on the beach, and the old man who was there was very pleasant. I
+thought it was a wreck, but Mr. Breckon says they are always drawing
+their ships that way up on the sand. The old man was patching some
+of the wood-work, and he told Mr. Breckon--he can speak a little
+Dutch--that they were going to drag her down to the water and go fishing
+as soon as he was done. He seemed to think we were brother and sister.”
+ She flushed a little, and then she said: “I believe I like the dunes as
+well as anything. Sometimes when those curious cold breaths come in
+from the sea we climb up in the little hollows on the other side and sit
+there out of the draft. Everybody seems to do it.”
+
+Apparently Ellen was submitting the propriety of the fact to her mother,
+who said: “Yes, it seems to be quite the same as it is at home. I
+always supposed that it was different with young people here. There is
+certainly no harm in it.”
+
+Ellen went on, irrelevantly. “I like to go and look at the Scheveningen
+women mending the nets on the sand back of the dunes. They have such
+good gossiping times. They shouted to us last evening, and then laughed
+when they saw us watching them. When they got through their work they
+got up and stamped off so strong, with their bare, red arms folded into
+their aprons, and their skirts sticking out so stiff. Yes, I should like
+to be like them.”
+
+“You, Ellen!”
+
+“Yes; why not?”
+
+Mrs. Kenton found nothing better to answer than,
+
+“They were very material looking.”
+
+“They are very happy looking. They live in the present. That is what
+I should like: living in the present, and not looking backwards or
+forwards. After all, the present is the only life we’ve got, isn’t it?”
+
+“I suppose you may say it is,” Mrs. Kenton admitted, not knowing just
+where the talk was leading, but dreading to interrupt it.
+
+“But that isn’t the Scheveningen woman’s only ideal. Their other
+ideal is to keep the place clean. Saturday afternoon they were all out
+scrubbing the brick sidewalks, and clear into the middle of the street.
+We were almost ashamed to walk over the nice bricks, and we picked out
+as many dirty places as we could find.”
+
+Ellen laughed, with a light-hearted gayety that was very strange to her,
+and Mrs. Kenton, as she afterwards told her husband, did not know what
+to think.
+
+“I couldn’t help wondering,” she said, “whether the poor child would
+have liked to keep on living in the present a month ago.”
+
+“Well, I’m glad you didn’t say so,” the judge answered.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+From the easy conquest of the men who looked at her Lottie proceeded to
+the subjection of the women. It would have been more difficult to put
+these down, if the process had not been so largely, so almost entirely
+subjective. As it was, Lottie exchanged snubs with many ladies of the
+continental nationalities who were never aware of having offered or
+received offence. In some cases, when they fearlessly ventured to speak
+with her, they behaved very amiable, and seemed to find her conduct
+sufficiently gracious in return. In fact, she was approachable enough,
+and had no shame, before Boyne, in dismounting from the high horse which
+she rode when alone with him, and meeting these ladies on foot, at least
+half-way. She made several of them acquainted with her mother, who,
+after a timorous reticence, found them very conversable, with a range of
+topics, however, that shocked her American sense of decorum. One
+Dutch lady talked with such manly freedom, and with such untrammelled
+intimacy, that she was obliged to send Boyne and Lottie about their
+business, upon an excuse that was not apparent to the Dutch lady. She
+only complimented Mrs. Kenton upon her children and their devotion
+to each other, and when she learned that Ellen was also her daughter,
+ventured the surmise she was not long married.
+
+“It isn’t her husband,” Mrs. Kenton explained, with inward trouble.
+“It’s just a gentleman that came over with us,” and she went with her
+trouble to her own husband as soon as she could.
+
+“I’m afraid it isn’t the custom to go around alone with young men as
+much as Ellen thinks,” she suggested.
+
+“He ought to know,” said the judge. “I don’t suppose he would if it
+wasn’t.”
+
+“That is true,” Mrs. Kenton owned, and for the time she put her
+misgivings away.
+
+“So long as we do nothing wrong,” the judge decided, “I don’t see why we
+should not keep to our own customs.”
+
+“Lottie says they’re not ours, in New York.”
+
+“Well, we are not in New York now.”
+
+They had neither of them the heart to interfere with Ellen’s happiness,
+for, after all, Breckon was careful enough of the appearances, and it
+was only his being constantly with Ellen that suggested the Dutch lady’s
+surmise. In fact, the range of their wanderings was not beyond the
+dunes, though once they went a little way on one of the neatly bricked
+country roads that led towards The Hague. As yet there had been no
+movement in any of the party to see the places that lie within such easy
+tram-reach of The Hague, and the hoarded interest of the past in
+their keeping. Ellen chose to dwell in the actualities which were
+an enlargement of her own present, and Lottie’s active spirit found
+employment enough in the amusements at the Kurhaus. She shopped in the
+little bazars which make a Saratoga under the colonnades fronting two
+sides of the great space before the hotel, and she formed a critical
+and exacting taste in music from a constant attendance at the afternoon
+concerts; it is true that during the winter in New York she had cast
+forever behind her the unsophisticated ideals of Tuskingum in the art,
+so that from the first she was able to hold the famous orchestra that
+played in the Kurhaus concert-room up to the highest standard. She had
+no use for anybody who had any use for rag-time, and she was terribly
+severe with a young American, primarily of Boyne’s acquaintance, who
+tried to make favor with her by asking about the latest coon-songs. She
+took the highest ethical ground with him about tickets in a charitable
+lottery which he had bought from the portier, but could not move him on
+the lower level which he occupied. He offered to give her the picture
+which was the chief prize, in case he won it, and she assured him
+beforehand that she should not take it. She warned Boyne against him,
+under threats of exposure to their mother, as not a good influence, but
+one afternoon, when the young Queen of Holland came to the concert with
+the queen-mother, Lottie cast her prejudices to the winds in accepting
+the places which the wicked fellow-countryman offered Boyne and herself,
+when they had failed to get any where they could see the queens, as the
+Dutch called them.
+
+The hotel was draped with flags, and banked with flowers about the
+main entrance where the queens were to arrive, and the guests massed
+themselves in a dense lane for them to pass through. Lottie could
+not fail to be one of the foremost in this array, and she was able
+to decide, when the queens had passed, that the younger would not be
+considered a more than average pretty girl in America, and that she was
+not very well dressed. They had all stood within five feet of her, and
+Boyne had appropriated one of the prettiest of the pretty bends which
+the gracious young creature made to right and left, and had responded to
+it with an ‘empressement’ which he hoped had not been a sacrifice of his
+republican principles.
+
+During the concert he sat with his eyes fixed upon the Queen where she
+sat in the royal box, with her mother and her ladies behind her, and
+wondered and blushed to wonder if she had noticed him when he bowed, or
+if his chivalric devotion in applauding her when the audience rose to
+receive her had been more apparent than that of others; whether it had
+seemed the heroic act of setting forth at the head of her armies, to
+beat back a German invasion, which it had essentially been, with his
+instantaneous return as victor, and the Queen’s abdication and adoption
+of republican principles under conviction of his reasoning, and her
+idolized consecration as the first chief of the Dutch republic. His
+cheeks glowed, and he quaked at heart lest Lottie should surprise his
+thoughts and expose them to that sarcastic acquaintance, who proved to
+be a medical student resting at Scheveningen from the winter’s courses
+and clinics in, Vienna. He had already got on to many of Boyne’s curves,
+and had sacrilegiously suggested the Queen of Holland when he found him
+feeding his fancy on the modern heroical romances; he advised him as an
+American adventurer to compete with the European princes paying court
+to her. So thin a barrier divided that malign intelligence from Boyne’s
+most secret dreams that he could never feel quite safe from him, and yet
+he was always finding himself with him, now that he was separated from
+Miss Rasmith, and Mr. Breckon was taken up so much with Ellen. On the
+ship he could put many things before Mr. Breckon which must here perish
+in his breast, or suffer the blight of this Mr. Trannel’s raillery. The
+student sat near the Kentons at table, and he was no more reverent of
+the judge’s modest convictions than of Boyne’s fantastic preoccupations.
+The worst of him was that you could not help liking him: he had a
+fascination which the boy felt while he dreaded him, and now and then
+he did something so pleasant that when he said something unpleasant you
+could hardly believe it.
+
+At the end of the concert, when he rose and stood with all the rest,
+while the royal party left their box, and the orchestra played the Dutch
+national hymn, he said, in a loud whisper, to Boyne: “Now’s your time,
+my boy! Hurry out and hand her into her carriage!”
+
+Boyne fairly reeled at the words which translated a passage of the wild
+drama playing itself in his brain, and found little support in
+bidding his tormentor, “Shut up!” The retort, rude as it was, seemed
+insufficient, but Boyne tried in vain to think of something else.
+He tried to punish him by separating Lottie from him, but failed as
+signally in that. She went off with him, and sat in a windstuhl facing
+his the rest of the afternoon, with every effect of carrying on.
+
+Boyne was helpless, with his mother against it, when he appealed to her
+to let him go and tell Lottie that she wanted her. Mrs. Kenton said that
+she saw no harm in it, that Ellen was sitting in like manner with Mr.
+Breckon.
+
+“Mr. Breckon is very different, and Ellen knows how to behave,”
+ he urged, but his mother remained unmoved, or was too absent about
+something to take any interest in the matter. In fact, she was again
+unhappy about Ellen, though she put on such an air of being easy about
+her. Clearly, so far as her maternal surmise could fathom the case, Mr.
+Breckon was more and more interested in Ellen, and it was evident that
+the child was interested in him. The situation was everything that was
+acceptable to Mrs. Kenton, but she shuddered at the cloud which hung
+over it, and which might any moment involve it. Again and again she had
+made sure that Lottie had given Ellen no hint of Richard’s ill-advised
+vengeance upon Bittridge; but it was not a thing that could be kept
+always, and the question was whether it could be kept till Ellen had
+accepted Mr. Breckon and married him. This was beyond the question of
+his asking her to do so, but it was so much more important that Mrs.
+Kenton was giving it her attention first, quite out of the order of
+time. Besides, she had every reason, as she felt, to count upon the
+event. Unless he was trifling with Ellen, far more wickedly than
+Bittridge, he was in love with her, and in Mrs. Kenton’s simple
+experience and philosophy of life, being in love was briefly preliminary
+to marrying. If she went with her anxieties to her husband, she had
+first to reduce him from a buoyant optimism concerning the affair before
+she could get him to listen seriously. When this was accomplished he
+fell into such despair that she ended in lifting him up and supporting
+him with hopes that she did not feel herself. What they were both united
+in was the conviction that nothing so good could happen in the world,
+but they were equally united in the old American tradition that they
+must not lift a finger to secure this supreme good for their child.
+
+It did not seem to them that leaving the young people constantly to
+themselves was doing this. They interfered with Ellen now neither more
+nor less than they had interfered with her as to Bittridge, or than
+they would have interfered with her in the case of any one else. She was
+still to be left entirely to herself in such matters, and Mrs. Kenton
+would have kept even her thoughts off her if she could. She would have
+been very glad to give her mind wholly to the study of the great events
+which had long interested her here in their scene, but she felt that
+until the conquest of Mr. Breckon was secured beyond the hazard of
+Ellen’s morbid defection at the supreme moment, she could not give her
+mind to the history of the Dutch republic.
+
+“Don’t bother me about Lottie, Boyne,” she said. “I have enough to think
+of without your nonsense. If this Mr. Trannel is an American, that
+is all that is necessary. We are all Americans together, and I don’t
+believe it will make remark, Lottie’s sitting on the beach with him.”
+
+“I don’t see how he’s different from that Bittridge,” said Boyne. “He
+doesn’t care for anything; and he plays the banjo just like him.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton was too troubled to laugh. She said, with finality, “Lottie
+can take care of herself,” and then she asked, “Boyne, do you know whom
+Ellen’s letters were from?”
+
+“One was from Bessie Pearl--”
+
+“Yes, she showed me that. But you don’t know who the other was from?”
+
+“No; she didn’t tell me. You know how close Ellen is.”
+
+“Yes,” the mother sighed, “she is very odd.”
+
+Then she added, “Don’t you let her know that I asked you about her
+letters.”
+
+“No,” said Boyne. His audience was apparently at an end, but he seemed
+still to have something on his mind. “Momma,” he began afresh.
+
+“Well?” she answered, a little impatiently.
+
+“Nothing. Only I got to thinking, Is a person able to control
+their--their fancies?”
+
+“Fancies about what?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. About falling in love.” Boyne blushed.
+
+“Why do you want to know? You musn’t think about such things, a boy like
+you! It’s a great pity that you ever knew anything about that Bittridge
+business. It’s made you too bold. But it seems to have been meant to
+drag us down and humiliate us in every way.”
+
+“Well, I didn’t try to know anything about it,” Boyne retorted.
+
+“No, that’s true,” his mother did him the justice to recognize. “Well,
+what is it you want to know?” Boyne was too hurt to answer at once, and
+his mother had to coax him a little. She did it sweetly, and apologized
+to him for saying what she had said. After all, he was the youngest,
+and her baby still. Her words and caresses took effect at last, and he
+stammered out, “Is everybody so, or is it only the Kentons that seem
+to be always putting--well, their affections--where it’s perfectly
+useless?”
+
+His mother pushed him from her. “Boyne, are you silly about that
+ridiculous old Miss Rasmith?”
+
+“No!” Boyne shouted, savagely, “I’m NOT!”
+
+“Who is it, then?”
+
+“I sha’n’t tell you!” Boyne said, and tears of rage and shame came into
+his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+In his exile from his kindred, for it came practically to that, Boyne
+was able to add a fine gloom to the state which he commonly observed
+with himself when he was not giving way to his morbid fancies or his
+morbid fears, and breaking down in helpless subjection to the nearest
+member of his household. Lottie was so taken up with her student that
+she scarcely quarrelled with him any more, and they had no longer those
+moments of union in which they stood together against the world. His
+mother had cast him off, as he felt, very heartlessly, though it was
+really because she could not give his absurdities due thought in view of
+the hopeful seriousness of Ellen’s affair, and Boyne was aware that
+his father at the best of times was ignorant of him when he was not
+impatient of him. These were not the best of times with Judge Kenton,
+and Boyne was not the first object of his impatience. In the last
+analysis he was living until he could get home, and so largely in the
+hope of this that his wife at times could scarcely keep him from taking
+some step that would decide the matter between Ellen and Breckon at
+once. They were tacitly agreed that they were waiting for nothing else,
+and, without making their agreement explicit, she was able to quell him
+by asking what he expected to do in case there was nothing between them?
+Was he going to take the child back to Tuskingum, which was the same
+as taking her back to Bittridge? it hurt her to confront him with this
+question, and she tried other devices for staying and appeasing him.
+She begged him now, seeing Boyne so forlorn, and hanging about the hotel
+alone, or moping over those ridiculous books of his, to go off with the
+boy somewhere and see the interesting places within such easy reach,
+like Leyden and Delft if he cared nothing for the place where William
+the Silent was shot, he ought to see the place that the Pilgrims started
+from. She had counted upon doing those places herself, with her husband,
+and it was in a sacrifice of her ideal that she now urged him to go
+with Boyne. But her preoccupation with Ellen’s affair forbade her
+self-abandon to those high historical interests to which she urged his
+devotion. She might have gone with him and Boyne, but then she must have
+left the larger half of her divided mind with Ellen, not to speak of
+Lottie, who refused to be a party to any such excursion. Mrs. Kenton
+felt the disappointment and grieved at it, but not without hope of
+repairing it later, and she did not cease from entreating the judge to
+do what he could at once towards fulfilling the desires she postponed.
+Once she prevailed with him, and really got him and Boyne off for a
+day, but they came back early, with signs of having bored each other
+intolerably, and after that it was Boyne, as much as his father, who
+relucted from joint expeditions. Boyne did not so much object to going
+alone, and his father said it was best to let him, though his mother
+had her fears for her youngest. He spent a good deal of his time on the
+trams between Scheveningen and The Hague, and he was understood to have
+explored the capital pretty thoroughly. In fact, he did go about with a
+valet de place, whom he got at a cheap rate, and with whom he conversed
+upon the state of the country and its political affairs. The valet said
+that the only enemy that Holland could fear was Germany, but an invasion
+from that quarter could be easily repulsed by cutting the dikes and
+drowning the invaders. The sea, he taught Boyne, was the great defence
+of Holland, and it was a waste of money to keep such an army as the
+Dutch had; but neither the sea nor the sword could drive out the Germans
+if once they insidiously married a Prussian prince to the Dutch Queen.
+
+There seemed to be no getting away from the Queen, for Boyne. The valet
+not only talked about her, as the pleasantest subject which he could
+find, but he insisted upon showing Boyne all her palaces. He took
+him into the Parliament house, and showed him where she sat while the
+queen-mother read the address from the throne. He introduced him at a
+bazar where the shop-girl who spoke English better than Boyne, or at
+least without the central Ohio accent, wanted to sell him a miniature of
+the Queen on porcelain. She said the Queen was such a nice girl, and she
+was herself such a nice girl that Boyne blushed a little in looking at
+her. He bought the miniature, and then he did not know what to do with
+it; if any of the family, if Lottie, found out that he had it, or that
+Trannel, he should have no peace any more. He put it in his pocket,
+provisionally, and when he came giddily out of the shop he felt himself
+taken by the elbow and placed against the wall by the valet, who said
+the queens were coming. They drove down slowly through the crowded,
+narrow street, bowing right and left to the people flattened against the
+shops, and again Boyne saw her so near that he could have reached out
+his hand and almost touched hers.
+
+The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether
+he had not tried to do so. If he had he would have been arrested--he
+knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it. He knew that he
+imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he
+imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic. At
+the same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and
+she became aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the
+anarchist from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been
+meant for her. Perhaps it was a pistol.
+
+He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to
+Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before
+him. They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter
+there, and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the
+other spectators and wait for the queens to appear and get into their
+carriage. The young Queen’s looks were stamped in Boyne’s consciousness,
+so that he saw her wherever he turned, like the sun when one has gazed
+at it. He thought how that Trannel had said he ought to hand her into
+her carriage, and he shrank away for fear he should try to do so, but he
+could not leave the place till she had come out with the queen--mother
+and driven off. Then he went slowly and breathlessly into the hotel,
+feeling the Queen’s miniature in his pocket. It made his heart stand
+still, and then bound forward. He wondered again what he should do with
+it. If he kept it, Lottie would be sure to find it, and he could not
+bring himself to the sacrilege of destroying it. He thought he would
+walk out on the breakwater as far as he could and throw it into the sea,
+but when he got to the end of the mole he could not do so. He decided
+that he would give it to Ellen to keep for him, and not let Lottie see
+it; or perhaps he might pretend he had bought it for her. He could not
+do that, though, for it would not be true, and if he did he could not
+ask her to keep it from Lottie.
+
+At dinner Mr. Trannel told him he ought to have been there to see the
+Queen; that she had asked especially for him, and wanted to know if they
+had not sent up her card to him. Boyne meditated an apt answer through
+all the courses, but he had not thought of one when they had come to
+the ‘corbeille de fruits’, and he was forced to go to bed without having
+avenged himself.
+
+In taking rooms for her family at the hotel, Lottie had arranged for her
+emancipation from the thraldom of rooming with Ellen. She said that had
+gone on long enough; if she was grown up at all, she was grown up enough
+to have a room of her own, and her mother had yielded to reasoning which
+began and ended with this position. She would have interfered so far as
+to put Lottie into the room next her, but Lottie said that if Boyne was
+the baby he ought to be next his mother; Ellen might come next him, but
+she was going to have the room that was furthest from any implication
+of the dependence in which she had languished; and her mother submitted
+again. Boyne was not sorry; there had always been hours of the night
+when he felt the need of getting at his mother for reassurance as to
+forebodings which his fancy conjured up to trouble him in the wakeful
+dark. It was understood that he might freely do this, and though the
+judge inwardly fretted, he could not deny the boy the comfort of his
+mother’s encouraging love. Boyne’s visits woke him, but he slept the
+better for indulging in the young nerves that tremor from impressions
+against which the old nerves are proof. But now, in the strange fatality
+which seemed to involve him, Boyne could not go to his mother. It was
+too weirdly intimate, even for her; besides, when he had already tried
+to seek her counsel she had ignorantly repelled him.
+
+The night after his day in The Hague, when he could bear it no longer,
+he put on his dressing-gown and softly opened Ellen’s door, “awake,
+Ellen?” he whispered.
+
+“Yes, What is it, Boyne” her gentle voice asked.
+
+“He came and sat down by her bed and stole his hand into hers, which she
+put out to him. The watery moonlight dripped into the room at the edges
+of the shades, and the long wash of the sea made itself regularly heard
+on the sands.
+
+“Can’t you sleep?” Ellen asked again. “Are you homesick?”
+
+“Not exactly that. But it does seem rather strange for us to be off here
+so far, doesn’t it?”
+
+“Yes, I don’t see how I can forgive myself for making you come,” said
+Ellen, but her voice did not sound as if she were very unhappy.
+
+“You couldn’t help it,” said Boyne, and the words suggested a question
+to him. “Do you believe that such things are ordered, Ellen?”
+
+“Everything is ordered, isn’t it?”
+
+“I suppose so. And if they are, we’re not, to blame for what happens.”
+
+“Not if we try to do right.”
+
+“Of course. The Kentons always do that,” said Boyne, with the faith in
+his family that did not fail him in the darkest hour. “But what I mean
+is that if anything comes on you that you can’t foresee and you can’t
+get out of--” The next step was not clear, and Boyne paused. He asked,
+
+“Do you think that we can control our feelings, Ellen?”
+
+“About what?”
+
+“Well, about persons that we like.” He added, for safety, “Or dislike.”
+
+“I’m afraid not,” said Ellen, sadly, “We ought to like persons and
+dislike them for some good reason, but we don’t.”
+
+“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Borne, with a long breath. “Sometimes it
+seems like a kind of possession, doesn’t it?”
+
+“It seems more like that when we like them,” Ellen said.
+
+“Yes, that’s what I mean. If a person was to take a fancy to some one
+that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn’t be to blame
+for it, would he?”
+
+“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?”
+
+Borne hesitated. “Yes” he said. He was in for it now.
+
+Ellen had not noticed Boyne’s absorption with Miss Rasmith on the ship,
+but she vaguely remembered hearing Lottie tease him about her, and she
+said now, “He wouldn’t be to blame for it if he couldn’t help it, but if
+the person was much older it would be a pity!”
+
+“Uh, she isn’t so very much older,” said Borne, more cheerfully than he
+had spoken before.
+
+“Is it somebody that you have taken a fancy to Borne?”
+
+“I don’t know, Ellen. That’s what makes it so kind of awful. I can’t
+tell whether it’s a real fancy, or I only think it is. Sometimes I think
+it is, and sometimes I think that I think so because I am afraid to
+believe it. Do you under Ellen?”
+
+“It seems to me that I do. But you oughtn’t to let your fancy run away
+with you, Boyne. What a queer boy!”
+
+“It’s a kind of fascination, I suppose. But whether it’s a real fancy or
+an unreal one, I can’t get away from it.”
+
+“Poor boy!” said his sister.
+
+“Perhaps it’s those books. Sometimes I think it is, and I laugh at the
+whole idea; and then again it’s so strong that I can’t get away from it.
+Ellen!”
+
+“Well, Boyne?”
+
+“I could tell you who it is, if you think that would do any good--if you
+think it would help me to see it in the true light, or you could help me
+more by knowing who it is than you can now.”
+
+“I hope it isn’t anybody that you can’t respect, Boyne?”
+
+“No, indeed! It’s somebody you would never dream of.”
+
+“Well?” Ellen was waiting for him to speak, but he could not get the
+words out, even to her.
+
+“I guess I’ll tell you some other time. Maybe I can get over it myself.”
+
+“It would be the best way if you could.”
+
+He rose and left her bedside, and then he came back. “Ellen, I’ve got
+something that I wish you would keep for me.”
+
+“What is it? Of course I will.”
+
+“Well, it’s--something I don’t want you to let Lottie know I’ve got. She
+tells that Mr. Trannel everything, and then he wants to make fun. Do you
+think he’s so very witty?”
+
+“I can’t help laughing at some things he says.”
+
+“I suppose he is,” Boyne ruefully admitted. “But that doesn’t make you
+like him any better. Well, if you won’t tell Lottie, I’ll give it to you
+now.”
+
+“I won’t tell anything that you don’t want me to, Boyne.”
+
+“It’s nothing. It’s just-a picture of the Queen on porcelain, that I got
+in The Hague. The guide took me into the store, and I thought I ought to
+get something.”
+
+“Oh, that’s very nice, Boyne. I do like the Queen so much. She’s so
+sweet!”
+
+“Yes, isn’t she?” said Boyne, glad of Ellen’s approval. So far, at
+least, he was not wrong. “Here it is now.”
+
+He put the miniature in Ellen’s hand. She lifted herself on her elbow.
+“Light the candle and let me see it.”
+
+“No, no!” he entreated. “It might wake Lottie, and--and--Good-night,
+Ellen.”
+
+“Can you go to sleep now, Boyne?”
+
+“Oh yes. I’m all right. Good-night.”
+
+“Good-night, then.”
+
+Borne stooped over and kissed her, and went to the door. He came back
+and asked, “You don’t think it was silly, or anything, for me to get
+it?”
+
+“No, indeed! It’s just what you will like to have when you get home.
+We’ve all seen her so often. I’ll put it in my trunk, and nobody shall
+know about it till we’re safely back in Tuskingum.”
+
+Boyne sighed deeply. “Yes, that’s what I meant. Good-night.”
+
+“Good-night, Boyne.”
+
+“I hope I haven’t waked you up too much?”
+
+“Oh no. I can get to sleep easily again.”
+
+“Well, good-night.” Boyne sighed again, but not so deeply, and this time
+he went out.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+Mrs. Kenton woke with the clear vision which is sometimes vouchsafed to
+people whose eyes are holden at other hours of the day. She had heard
+Boyne opening and shutting Ellen’s door, and her heart smote her that
+he should have gone to his sister with whatever trouble he was in rather
+than come to his mother. It was natural that she should put the blame
+on her husband, and “Now, Mr. Kenton,” she began, with an austerity of
+voice which he recognized before he was well awake, “if you won’t take
+Boyne off somewhere to-day, I will. I think we had better all go. We
+have been here a whole fortnight, and we have got thoroughly rested, and
+there is no excuse for our wasting our time any longer. If we are going
+to see Holland, we had better begin doing it.”
+
+The judge gave a general assent, and said that if she wanted to go
+to Flushing he supposed he could find some garden-seeds there, in the
+flower and vegetable nurseries, which would be adapted to the climate of
+Tuskingum, and they could all put in the day pleasantly, looking round
+the place. Whether it was the suggestion of Tuskingum in relation to
+Flushing that decided her against the place, or whether she had really
+meant to go to Leyden, she now expressed the wish, as vividly as if it
+were novel, to explore the scene of the Pilgrims’ sojourn before they
+sailed for Plymouth, and she reproached him for not caring about the
+place when they both used to take such an interest in it at home.
+
+“Well,” said the judge, “if I were at home I should take an interest in
+it here.”
+
+This provoked her to a silence which he thought it best to break in
+tacit compliance with her wish, and he asked, “Do you propose taking the
+whole family and the appurtenances? We shall be rather a large party.”
+
+“Ellen would wish to go, and I suppose Mr. Breckon. We couldn’t very
+well go without them.”
+
+“And how about Lottie and that young Trannel?”
+
+“We can’t leave him out, very well. I wish we could. I don’t like him.”
+
+“There’s nothing easier than not asking him, if you don’t want him.”
+
+“Yes, there is, when you’ve got a girl like Lottie to deal with. Quite
+likely she would ask him herself. We must take him because we can’t
+leave her.”
+
+“Yes, I reckon,” the judge acquiesced.
+
+“I’m glad,” Mrs. Kenton said, after a moment, “that it isn’t Ellen he’s
+after; it almost reconciles me to his being with Lottie so much. I only
+wonder he doesn’t take to Ellen, he’s so much like that--”
+
+She did not say out what was in her mind, but her husband knew. “Yes,
+I’ve noticed it. This young Breckon was quite enough so, for my taste. I
+don’t know what it is that just saves him from it.”
+
+“He’s good. You could tell that from the beginning.”
+
+They went off upon the situation that, superficially or subliminally,
+was always interesting them beyond anything in the world, and they did
+not openly recur to Mrs. Kenton’s plan for the day till they met their
+children at breakfast. It was a meal at which Breckon and Trammel were
+both apt to join them, where they took it at two of the tables on the
+broad, seaward piazza of the hotel when the weather was fine. Both
+the young men now applauded her plan, in their different sorts. It was
+easily arranged that they should go by train and not by tram from The
+Hague. The train was chosen, and Mrs. Kenton, when she went to her
+room to begin the preparations for a day’s pleasure which constitute so
+distinctly a part of its pain, imagined that everything was settled. She
+had scarcely closed the door behind her when Lottie opened it and shut
+it again behind her.
+
+“Mother,” she said, in the new style of address to which she was
+habituating Mrs. Kenton, after having so long called her momma, “I am
+not going with you.”
+
+“Indeed you are, then!” her mother retorted. “Do you think I would leave
+you here all day with that fellow? A nice talk we should make!”
+
+“You are perfectly welcome to that fellow, mother, and as he’s accepted
+he will have to go with you, and there won’t be any talk. But, as I
+remarked before, I am not going.”
+
+“Why aren’t you going, I should like to know?”
+
+“Because I don’t like the company.”
+
+“What do you mean? Have you got anything against Mr. Breckon?”
+
+“He’s insipid, but as long as Ellen don’t mind it I don’t care. I object
+to Mr. Trannel!”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“I don’t see why I should have to tell you. If I said I liked him you
+might want to know, but it seems to me that my not liking him is--my
+not liking him is my own affair.” There was a kind of logic in this that
+silenced Mrs. Kenton for the moment. In view of her advantage Lottie
+relented so far as to add, “I’ve found out something about him.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton was imperative in her alarm. “What is it?” she demanded.
+
+Lottie answered, obliquely: “Well, I didn’t leave The Hague to get rid
+of them, and then take up with one of them at Scheveningen.”
+
+“One of what?”
+
+“COOK’S TOURISTS, if you must know, mother. Mr. Trannel, as you call
+him, is a Cook’s tourist, and that’s the end of it. I have got no use
+for him from this out.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton was daunted, and not for the first time, by her daughter’s
+superior knowledge of life. She could put Boyne down sometimes, though
+not always, when he attempted to impose a novel code of manners or
+morals upon her, but she could not cope with Lottie. In the present case
+she could only ask, “Well?”
+
+“Well, they’re the cheapest of the cheap. He actually showed me his
+coupons, and tried to put me down with the idea that everybody used
+them. But I guess he found it wouldn’t work. He said if you were not
+personally conducted it was all right.”
+
+“Now, Lottie, you have got to tell me just what you mean,” said Mrs.
+Kenton, and from having stood during this parley, she sat down to hear
+Lottie out at her leisure. But if there was anything more difficult than
+for Lottie to be explicit it was to make her be so, and in the end
+Mrs. Kenton was scarcely wiser than she was at the beginning to her
+daughter’s reasons. It appeared that if you wanted to be cheap you could
+travel with those coupons, and Lottie did not wish to be cheap, or have
+anything to do with those who were. The Kentons had always held up their
+heads, and if Ellen had chosen to disgrace them with Bittridge, Dick had
+made it all right, and she at least was not going to do anything that
+she would be ashamed of. She was going to stay at home, and have her
+meals in her room till they got back.
+
+Her mother paid no heed to her repeated declaration. “Lottie,” she
+asked, with the heart-quake that the thought of Richard’s act always
+gave her with reference to Ellen, “have you ever let out the least hint
+of that?”
+
+“Of course I haven’t,” Lottie scornfully retorted. “I hope I know what a
+crank Ellen is.”
+
+They were not just the terms in which Mrs. Kenton would have chosen to
+be reassured, but she was glad to be assured in any terms. She said,
+vaguely: “I believe in my heart that I will stay at home, too. All this
+has given me a bad headache.”
+
+“I was going to have a headache myself,” said Lottie, with injury. “But
+I suppose I can get on along without. I can just simply say I’m not
+going. If he proposes to stay, too, I can soon settle that.”
+
+“The great difficulty will be to get your father to go.”
+
+“You can make Ellen make him,” Lottie suggested.
+
+“That is true,” said Mrs. Kenton, with such increasing absence that her
+daughter required of her:
+
+“Are you staying on my account?”
+
+“I think you had better not be left alone the whole day. But I am not
+staying on your account. I don’t believe we had so many of us better go.
+It might look a little pointed.”
+
+Lottie laughed harshly. “I guess Mr. Breckon wouldn’t see the point,
+he’s so perfectly gone.”
+
+“Do you really believe it, Lottie?” Mrs. Kenton entreated, with a sudden
+tenderness for her younger daughter such as she did not always feel.
+
+“I should think anybody would believe it--anybody but Ellen.”
+
+“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton dreamily assented.
+
+Lottie made her way to the door. “Well, if you do stay, mother, I’m not
+going to have you hanging round me all day. I can chaperon myself.”
+
+“Lottie,” her mother tried to stay her, “I wish you would go. I don’t
+believe that Mr. Trannel will be much of an addition. He will be on your
+poor father’s hands all day, or else Ellen’s, and if you went you could
+help off.”
+
+“Thank you, mother. I’ve had quite all I want of Mr. Trannel. You can
+tell him he needn’t go, if you want to.”
+
+Lottie at least did not leave her mother to make her excuses to the
+party when they met for starting. Mrs. Kenton had deferred her own
+till she thought it was too late for her husband to retreat, and then
+bunglingly made them, with so much iteration that it seemed to her it
+would have been far less pointed, as concerned Mr. Breckon, if she
+had gone. Lottie sunnily announced that she was going to stay with
+her mother, and did not even try to account for her defection to Mr.
+Trannel.
+
+“What’s the matter with my staying, too?” he asked. “It seems to me
+there are four wheels to this coach now.”
+
+He had addressed his misgiving more to Lottie than the rest; but with
+the same sunny indifference to the consequence for others that she had
+put on in stating her decision, she now discharged herself from further
+responsibility by turning on her heel and leaving it with the party
+generally. In the circumstances Mr. Trannel had no choice but to go, and
+he was supported, possibly, by the hope of taking it out of Lottie some
+other time.
+
+It was more difficult for Mrs. Kenton to get rid of the judge, but an
+inscrutable frown goes far in such exigencies. It seems to explain, and
+it certainly warns, and the husband on whom it is bent never knows, even
+after the longest experience, whether he had better inquire further.
+Usually he decides that he had better not, and Judge Kenton went off
+towards the tram with Boyne in the cloud of mystery which involved them
+both as to Mrs. Kenton’s meaning.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+Trannel attached himself as well as he could to Breckon and Ellen,
+and Breckon had an opportunity not fully offered him before to note
+a likeness between himself and a fellow-man whom he was aware of not
+liking, though he tried to love him, as he felt it right to love all
+men. He thought he had not been quite sympathetic enough with Mrs.
+Kenton in her having to stay behind, and he tried to make it up to Mr.
+Trannel in his having to come. He invented civilities to show him, and
+ceded his place next Ellen as if Trannel had a right to it. Trannel
+ignored him in keeping it, unless it was recognizing Breckon to say,
+“Oh, I hope I’m not in your way, old fellow?” and then making jokes to
+Ellen. Breckon could not say the jokes were bad, though the taste
+of them seemed to him so. The man had a fleeting wit, which scorched
+whatever he turned it upon, and yet it was wit. “Why don’t you try him
+in American?” he asked at the failure of Breckon and the tram conductor
+to understand each other in Dutch. He tried the conductor himself in
+American, and he was so deplorably funny that it was hard for Breckon to
+help being ‘particeps criminus’, at least in a laugh.
+
+He asked himself if that were really the kind of man he was, and he grew
+silent and melancholy in the fear that it was a good deal the sort of
+man. To this morbid fancy Trannel seemed himself in a sort of excess, or
+what he would be if he were logically ultimated. He remembered all the
+triviality of his behavior with Ellen at first, and rather sickened at
+the thought of some of his early pleasantries. She was talking gayly
+now with Trannel, and Breckon wondered whether she was falling under the
+charm that he felt in him, in spite of himself.
+
+If she was, her father was not. The judge sat on the other side of the
+car, and unmistakably glowered at the fellow’s attempts to make himself
+amusing to Ellen. Trannel himself was not insensible to the judge’s
+mood. Now and then he said something to intensify it. He patronized the
+judge and he made fun of the tourist character in which Boyne had got
+himself up, with a field-glass slung by a strap under one arm and a
+red Baedeker in his hand. He sputtered with malign laughter at a rather
+gorgeous necktie which Boyne had put on for the day, and said it was not
+a very good match for the Baedeker.
+
+Boyne retorted rudely, and that amused Trannel still more. He became
+personal to Breckon, and noted the unclerical cut of his clothes. He
+said he ought to have put on his uniform for an expedition like that,
+in case they got into any sort of trouble. To Ellen alone he was
+inoffensive, unless he overdid his polite attentions to her in carrying
+her parasol for her, and helping her out of the tram, when they arrived,
+shouldering every one else away, and making haste to separate her from
+the others and then to walk on with her a little in advance.
+
+Suddenly he dropped her, and fell back to Boyne and his father, while
+Breckon hastened forward to her side. Trannel put his arm across Boyne’s
+shoulders and asked him if he were mad, and then laughed at him. “You’re
+all right, Boyne, but you oughtn’t to be so approachable. You ought to
+put on more dignity, and repel familiarity!”
+
+Boyne could only twitch away in silence that he made as haughty as he
+could, but not so haughty that Trannel did not find it laughable, and he
+laughed in a teasing way that made Breckon more and more serious. He
+was aware of becoming even solemn with the question of his likeness to
+Trannel. He was of Trannel’s quality, and their difference was a matter
+of quantity, and there was not enough difference. In his sense of their
+likeness Breckon vowed himself to a gravity of behavior evermore
+which he should not probably be able to observe, but the sample he now
+displayed did not escape the keen vigilance of Trannel.
+
+“With the exception of Miss Kenton,” he addressed himself to the party,
+“you’re all so easy and careless that if you don’t look out you’ll lose
+me. Miss Kenton, I wish you would keep an eye on me. I don’t want to get
+lost.”
+
+Ellen laughed--she could not help it--and her laughing made it less
+possible than before for Breckon to unbend and meet Trannel on his own
+ground, to give him joke for joke, to exchange banter with him. He might
+never have been willing to do that, but now he shrank from it, in his
+realization of their likeness, with an abhorrence that rendered him
+rigid.
+
+The judge was walking ahead with Boyne, and his back expressed such
+severe disapproval that, between her fear that Trannel would say
+something to bring her father’s condemnation on him and her sense of
+their inhospitable attitude towards one who was their guest, in a sort,
+she said, with her gentle gayety, “Then you must keep near me, Mr.
+Trannel. I’ll see that nothing happens.”
+
+“That’s very sweet of you,” said Trannel, soberly. Whether he had now
+vented his malicious humor and was ready to make himself agreeable, or
+was somewhat quelled by the unfriendly ambient he had created, or was
+wrought upon by her friendliness, he became everything that could be
+wished in a companion for a day’s pleasure. He took the lead at the
+station, and got them a compartment in the car to themselves for the
+little run to Leyden, and on the way he talked very well. He politely
+borrowed Boyne’s Baedeker, and decided for the party what they had
+best see, and showed an acceptable intelligence, as well as a large
+experience in the claims of Leyden upon the visitor’s interest. He had
+been there often before, it seemed, and in the event it appeared that he
+had chosen the days sightseeing wisely.
+
+He no longer addressed himself respectfully to Ellen alone, but he
+re-established himself in Boyne’s confidence with especial pains, and he
+conciliated Breckon by a recognition of his priority with Ellen with a
+delicacy refined enough for even the susceptibility of a lover alarmed
+for his rights. If he could not overcome the reluctance of the judge, he
+brought him to the civil response which any one who tried for Kenton’s
+liking achieved, even if he did not merit it, and there remained no more
+reserve in Kenton’s manner than there had been with the young man from
+the first. He had never been a persona grata to the judge, and if he did
+not become so now, he at least ceased to be actively displeasing.
+
+That was the year before the young Queen came to her own, and in the
+last days of her minority she was visiting all the cities of her future
+dominion with the queen-mother. When Kenton’s party left the station
+they found Leyden as gay for her reception as flags and banners could
+make the gray old town, and Trannel relapsed for a moment so far as to
+suggest that the decorations were in honor of Boyne’s presence, but he
+did not abuse the laugh that this made to Boyne’s further shame.
+
+There was no carriage at the station which would hold the party of five,
+and they had to take two vehicles. Trannel said it was lucky they wanted
+two, since there were no more, and he put himself in authority to assort
+the party. The judge, he decided, must go with Ellen and Breckon, and he
+hoped Boyne would let him go in his carriage, if he would sit on the box
+with the driver. The judge afterwards owned that he had weakly indulged
+his dislike of the fellow, in letting him take Boyne, and not insisting
+on going himself with Tramiel, but this was when it was long too
+late. Ellen had her misgivings, but, except for that gibe about the
+decorations, Trannel had been behaving so well that she hoped she might
+trust Boyne with him. She made a kind of appeal for her brother, bidding
+him and Trannel take good care of each other, and Trannel promised so
+earnestly to look after Boyne that she ought to have been alarmed for
+him. He took the lead, rising at times to wave a reassuring hand to her
+over the back of his carriage, and, in fact, nothing evil could very
+well happen from him, with the others following so close upon him. They
+met from time to time in the churches they visited, and when they lost
+sight of one another, through a difference of opinion in the drivers as
+to the best route, they came together at the place Trannel had appointed
+for their next reunion.
+
+He showed himself a guide so admirably qualified that he found a way
+for them to objects of interest that had at first denied themselves in
+anticipation of the visit from the queens; when they all sat down at
+lunch in the restaurant which he found for them, he could justifiably
+boast that he would get them into the Town Hall, which they had been
+told was barred for the day against anything but sovereign curiosity.
+He was now on the best term with Boyne, who seemed to have lost all
+diffidence of him, and treated him with an easy familiarity that showed
+itself in his slapping him on the shoulder and making dints in his hat.
+Trannel seemed to enjoy these caresses, and, when they parted again for
+the afternoon’s sight-seeing, Ellen had no longer a qualm in letting
+Boyne drive off with him.
+
+He had, in fact, known how to make himself very acceptable to Boyne. He
+knew all the originals of his heroical romances, and was able to give
+the real names and the geographical position of those princesses who
+had been in love with American adventurers. Under promise of secrecy he
+disclosed the real names of the adventurers themselves, now obscured in
+the titles given them to render them worthy their union with sovereigns.
+He resumed his fascinating confidences when they drove off after
+luncheon, and he resumed them after each separation from the rest of the
+party. Boyne listened with a flushed face and starting eyes, and when at
+last Trannel offered, upon a pledge of the most sacred nature from him
+never to reveal a word of what he said, he began to relate an adventure
+of which he was himself the hero. It was a bold travesty of one of the
+latest romances that Boyne had read, involving the experience of an
+American very little older than Boyne himself, to whom a wilful young
+crown-princess, in a little state which Trannel would not name even to
+Boyne, had made advances such as he could not refuse to meet without
+cruelty. He was himself deeply in love with her, but he felt bound in
+honor not to encourage her infatuation as long as he could help, for he
+had been received by her whole family with such kindness and confidence
+that he had to consider them.
+
+“Oh, pshaw!” Boyne broke in upon him, doubting, and yet wishing not to
+doubt, “that’s the same as the story of ‘Hector Folleyne’.”
+
+“Yes,” said Trannel, quietly. “I thought you would recognize it.”
+
+“Well, but,” Boyne went on, “Hector married the princess!”
+
+“In the book, yes. The fellow I gave the story to said it would never
+do not to have him marry her, and it would help to disguise the fact.
+That’s what he said, after he had given the whole thing away.”
+
+“And do you mean to say it was you? Oh, you can’t stuff me! How did you
+get out of marrying her, I should like to know, when the chancellor came
+to you and said that the whole family wanted you to, for fear it would
+kill her if--”
+
+“Well, there was a scene, I can’t deny that. We had a regular family
+conclave--father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks--and we kept it
+up pretty much all night. The princess wasn’t there, of course, and I
+could convince them that I was right. If she had been, I don’t believe
+I could have held out. But they had to listen to reason, and I got away
+between two days.”
+
+“But why didn’t you marry her?”
+
+“Well, for one thing, as I told you, I thought I ought to consider
+her family. Then there was a good fellow, the crown-prince of
+Saxe-Wolfenhutten, who was dead in love with her, and was engaged to her
+before I turned up. I had been at school with him, and I felt awfully
+sorry for him; and I thought I ought to sacrifice myself a little to
+him. But I suppose the thing that influenced me most was finding out
+that if I married the princess I should have to give up my American
+citizenship and become her subject.”
+
+“Well?” Boyne panted.
+
+“Well, would you have done it?”
+
+“Couldn’t you have got along without doing that?”
+
+“That was the only thing I couldn’t get around, somehow. So I left.”
+
+“And the princess, did she--die?”
+
+“It takes a good deal more than that to kill a fifteen-year-old
+princess,” said Trannel, and he gave a harsh laugh. “She married
+Saxe-Wolfenhutten.” Boyne was silent. “Now, I don’t want you to speak
+of this till after I leave Scheveningen--especially to Miss Lottie. You
+know how girls are, and I think Miss Lottie is waiting to get a bind
+on me, anyway. If she heard how I was cut out of my chance with that
+princess she’d never let me believe I gave her up of my own free will?”
+
+“NO, no; I won’t tell her.”
+
+Boyne remained in a silent rapture, and he did not notice they were no
+longer following the rest of their party in the other carriage. This had
+turned down a corner, at which Mr. Breckon, sitting on the front seat,
+had risen and beckoned their driver to follow, but their driver, who
+appeared afterwards to have not too much a head of his own, or no head
+at all, had continued straight on, in the rear of a tram-car, which was
+slowly finding its way through the momently thickening crowd. Boyne was
+first aware that it was a humorous crowd when, at a turn of the street,
+their equipage was greeted with ironical cheers by a group of gay young
+Dutchmen on the sidewalk. Then he saw that the sidewalks were packed
+with people, who spread into the street almost to the tram, and that the
+house fronts were dotted with smiling Dutch faces, the faces of pretty
+Dutch girls, who seemed to share the amusement of the young fellows
+below.
+
+Trannel lay back in the carriage. “This is something like,” he said.
+“Boyne, they’re on to the distinguished young Ohioan--the only Ohioan
+out of office in Europe.”
+
+“Yes,” said Boyne, trying to enjoy it. “I wonder what they are holloing
+at.”
+
+Trannel laughed. “They’re holloing at your Baedeker, my dear boy. They
+never saw one before,” and Boyne was aware that he was holding his
+red-backed guide conspicuously in view on his lap. “They know you’re a
+foreigner by it.”
+
+“Don’t you think we ought to turn down somewhere? I don’t see poppa
+anywhere.” He rose and looked anxiously back over the top of their
+carriage. The crowd, closing in behind it, hailed his troubled face with
+cries that were taken up by the throng on the sidewalks. Boyne turned
+about to find that the tram-car which they had been following had
+disappeared round a corner, but their driver was still keeping on. At
+a wilder burst of applause Trannel took off his hat and bowed to the
+crowd, right and left.
+
+“Bow, bow!” he said to Boyne. “They’ll be calling for a speech the next
+thing. Bow, I tell you!”
+
+“Tell him to turn round!” cried the boy.
+
+“I can’t speak Dutch,” said Trannel, and Boyne leaned forward and poked
+the driver in the back.
+
+“Go back!” he commanded.
+
+The driver shook his head and pointed forward with his whip. “He’s all
+right,” said Trannel. “He can’t turn now. We’ve got to take the next
+corner.” The street in front was empty, and the people were crowding
+back on the sidewalks. Loud, vague noises made themselves heard round
+the corner to which the driver had pointed. “By Jove!” Trannel said, “I
+believe they’re coming round that way.”
+
+“Who are coming?” Boyne palpitated.
+
+“The queens.”
+
+“The queens?” Boyne gasped; it seemed to him that he shrieked the words.
+
+“Yes. And there’s a tobacconist’s now,” said Trannel, as if that were
+what he had been looking for all along. “I want some cigarettes.”
+
+He leaped lightly from the carriage, and pushed his way out of sight on
+the sidewalk. Boyne remained alone in the vehicle, staring wildly round;
+the driver kept slowly and stupidly on, Boyne did not know how much
+farther. He could not speak; he felt as if he could not stir. But the
+moment came when he could not be still. He gave a galvanic jump to the
+ground, and the friendly crowd on the sidewalk welcomed him to its ranks
+and closed about him. The driver had taken the lefthand corner, just
+before a plain carriage with the Queen and the queen-mother came in
+sight round the right. The young Queen was bowing to the people, gently,
+and with a sort of mechanical regularity. Now and then a brighter
+smile than that she conventionally wore lighted up her face. The simple
+progress was absolutely without state, except for the aide-de-camp on
+horseback who rode beside the carriage, a little to the front.
+
+Boyne stood motionless on the curb, where a friendly tall Dutchman had
+placed him in front that he might see the Queen.
+
+“Hello!” said the voice of Trannel, and elbowing his way to Boyne’s
+side, he laughed and coughed through the smoke of his cigarette. “I was
+afraid you had lost me. Where’s your carriage?”
+
+Boyne did not notice his mockeries. He was entranced in that beatific
+vision; his boy-heart went out in worship to the pretty young creature
+with a reverence that could not be uttered. The tears came into his
+eyes.
+
+“There, there! She’s bowing to you, Boyne, she’s smiling right at you.
+By Jove! She’s beckoning to you!”
+
+“You be still!” Boyne retorted, finding his tongue. “She isn’t doing any
+such a thing.”
+
+“She is, I swear she is! She’s doing it again! She’s stopping the
+carriage. Oh, go out and see what she wants! Don’t you know that a
+queen’s wish is a command? You’ve got to go!”
+
+Boyne never could tell just how it happened. The carriage did seem to be
+stopping, and the Queen seemed to be looking at him. He thought he
+must, and he started into the street towards her, and the carriage came
+abreast of him. He had almost reached the carriage when the aide turned
+and spurred his horse before him. Four strong hands that were like iron
+clamps were laid one on each of Boyne’s elbows and shoulders, and he was
+haled away, as if by superhuman force. “Mr. Trannel!” he called out in
+his agony, but the wretch had disappeared, and Boyne was left with his
+captors, to whom he could have said nothing if he could have thought of
+anything to say.
+
+The detectives pulled him through the crowd and hurried him swiftly down
+the side street. A little curiosity straggled after him in the shape
+of small Dutch boys, too short to look over the shoulders of men at the
+queens, and too weak to make their way through them to the front; but
+for them, Boyne seemed alone in the world with the relentless officers,
+who were dragging him forward and hurting him so with the grip of their
+iron hands. He lifted up his face to entreat them not to hold him so
+tight, and suddenly it was as if he beheld an angel standing in his
+path. It was Breckon who was there, staring at him aghast.
+
+“Why, Boyne!” he cried.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Breckon!” Boyne wailed back. “Is it you? Oh, do tell them I
+didn’t mean to do anything! I thought she beckoned to me.”
+
+“Who? Who beckoned to you?”
+
+“The Queen!” Boyne sobbed, while the detectives pulled him relentlessly
+on.
+
+Breckon addressed them suavely in their owe tongue which had never come
+in more deferential politeness from human lips. He ventured the belief
+that there was a mistake; he assured them that he knew their prisoner,
+and that he was the son of a most respectable American family, whom they
+could find at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He added some irrelevancies,
+and got for all answer that they had made Boyne’s arrest for sufficient
+reasons, and were taking him to prison. If his friends wished to
+intervene in his behalf they could do so before the magistrate, but for
+the present they must admonish Mr. Breckon not to put himself in the way
+of the law.
+
+“Don’t go, Mr. Breckon!” Boyne implored him, as his captors made him
+quicken his pace after slowing a little for their colloquy with Breckon.
+“Oh, where is poppa? He could get me away. Oh, where is poppa?”
+
+“Don’t! Don’t call out, Boyne,” Breckon entreated. “Your father is right
+here at the end of the street. He’s in the carriage there with Miss
+Kenton. I was coming to look for you. Don’t cry out so!”
+
+“No, no, I won’t, Mr. Breckon. I’ll be perfectly quiet now. Only do get
+poppa quick! He can tell them in a minute that it’s all right!”
+
+He made a prodigious effort to control himself, while Breckon ran
+a little ahead, with some wild notion of preparing Ellen. As he
+disappeared at the corner, Boyne choked a sob into a muffed bellow, and
+was able to meet the astonished eyes of his father and sister in this
+degree of triumph.
+
+They had not in the least understood Breckon’s explanation, and, in
+fact, it had not been very lucid. At sight of her brother strenuously
+upheld between the detectives, and dragged along the sidewalk, Ellen
+sprang from the carriage and ran towards him. “Why, what’s the matter
+with Boyne?” she demanded. “Are you hurt, Boyne, dear? Are they taking
+him to the hospital?”
+
+Before he could answer, and quite before the judge could reach the
+tragical group, she had flung her arms round Boyne’s neck, and was
+kissing his tear-drabbled face, while he lamented back, “They’re taking
+me to prison.”
+
+“Taking you to prison? I should like to know what for! What are you
+taking my brother to prison for?” she challenged the detectives, who
+paused, bewildered, while all the little Dutch boys round admired this
+obstruction of the law, and several Dutch housewives, too old to go
+out to see the queens, looked down from their windows. It was wholly
+illegal, but the detectives were human. They could snub such a friend of
+their prisoner as Breckon, but they could not meet the dovelike ferocity
+of Ellen with unkindness. They explained as well as they might, and at a
+suggestion which Kenton made through Breckon, they admitted that it was
+not beside their duty to take Boyne directly to a magistrate, who could
+pass upon his case, and even release him upon proper evidence of his
+harmlessness, and sufficient security for any demand that justice might
+make for his future appearance.
+
+“Then,” said the judge, quietly, “tell them that we will go with them.
+It will be all right, Boyne. Ellen, you and I will get back into the
+carriage, and--”
+
+“No!” Boyne roared. “Don’t leave me, Nelly!”
+
+“Indeed, I won’t leave you, Boyne! Mr. Breckon, you get into the
+carriage with poppa, and I--”
+
+“I think I had better go with you, Miss Kenton,” said Breckon, and in a
+tender superfluity they both accompanied Boyne on foot, while the judge
+remounted to his place in the carriage and kept abreast of them on their
+way to the magistrate’s.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+The magistrate conceived of Boyne’s case with a readiness that gave the
+judge a high opinion of his personal and national intelligence. He even
+smiled a little, in accepting the explanation which Breckon was able to
+make him from Boyne, but he thought his duty to give the boy a fatherly
+warning for the future. He remarked to Breckon that it was well for
+Boyne that the affair had not happened in Germany, where it would have
+been found a much more serious matter, though, indeed, he added, it
+had to be seriously regarded anywhere in these times, when the lives
+of sovereigns were so much at the mercy of all sorts of madmen and
+miscreants. He relaxed a little from his severity in his admonition to
+say directly to Boyne that queens, even when they wished to speak with
+people, did not beckon them in the public streets. When this speech
+translated to Boyne by Breckon, whom the magistrate complimented on the
+perfection of his Dutch, Boyne hung his head sheepishly, and could not
+be restored to his characteristic dignity again in the magistrate’s
+presence. The judge gratefully shook hands with the friendly justice,
+and made him a little speech of thanks, which Breckon interpreted, and
+then the justice shook hand with the judge, and gracefully accepted the
+introduction which he offered him to Ellen. They parted with reciprocal
+praises and obeisances, which included even the detectives. The judge
+had some question, which he submitted to Breckon, whether he ought not
+to offer them something, but Breckon thought not.
+
+Breckon found it hard to abdicate the sort of authority in which his
+knowledge of Dutch had placed him, and when he protested that he had
+done nothing but act as interpreter, Ellen said, “Yes, but we couldn’t
+have done anything without you,” and this was the view that Mrs. Kenton
+took of the matter in the family conclave which took place later in the
+evening. Breckon was not allowed to withdraw from it, in spite of many
+modest efforts, before she had bashfully expressed her sense of his
+service to him, and made Boyne share her thanksgiving. She had her arm
+about the boy’s shoulder in giving Breckon her hand, and when Breckon
+had got away she pulled Boyne to her in a more peremptory embrace.
+
+“Now, Boyne,” she said, “I am not going to have any more nonsense. I
+want to know why you did it.”
+
+The judge and Ellen had already conjectured clearly enough, and Boyne
+did not fear them. But he looked at his younger sister as he sulkily
+answered, “I am not going to tell you before Lottie.”
+
+“Come in here, then,” said his mother, and she led him into the next
+room and closed the door. She quickly returned without him. “Yes,” she
+began, “it’s just as I supposed; it was that worthless fellow who
+put him up to it. Of course, it began with those fool books he’s been
+reading, and the notions that Miss Rasmith put into his head. But he
+never would have done anything if it hadn’t been for Mr. Trannel.”
+
+Lottie had listened in silent scorn to the whole proceedings up to this
+point, and had refused a part in the general recognition of Breckon as
+a special providence. Now she flashed out with a terrible volubility:
+“What did I tell you? What else could you expect of a Cook’s tourist?
+And mom--mother wanted to make me go with you, after I told her what
+he was! Well, if I had have gone, I’ll bet I could have kept him from
+playing his tricks. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have taken any liberties,
+with me along. I’ll bet if he had, it wouldn’t have been Boyne that
+got arrested. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have got off so easily with the
+magistrate, either! But I suppose you’ll all let him come bowing and
+smiling round in the morning, like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouths.
+That seems to be the Kenton way. Anybody can pull our noses, or get us
+arrested that wants to, and we never squeak.” She went on a long time
+to this purpose, Mrs. Kenton listening with an air almost of conviction,
+and Ellen patiently bearing it as a right that Lottie had in a matter
+where she had been otherwise ignored.
+
+The judge broke out, not upon Lottie, but upon his wife. “Good heavens,
+Sarah, can’t you make the child hush?”
+
+Lottie answered for her mother, with a crash of nerves and a gush of
+furious tears: “Oh, I’ve got to hush, I suppose. It’s always the way
+when I’m trying to keep up the dignity of the family. I suppose it will
+be cabled to America, and by tomorrow it will be all over Tuskingum how
+Boyne was made a fool of and got arrested. But I bet there’s one person
+in Tuskingum that won’t have any remarks to make, and that’s Bittridge.
+Not, as long as Dick’s there he won’t.”
+
+“Lottie!” cried her mother, and her father started towards her, while
+Ellen still sat patiently quiet.
+
+“Oh, well!” Lottie submitted. “But if Dick was here I know this Trannel
+wouldn’t get off so smoothly. Dick would give him a worse cowhiding than
+he did Bittridge.”
+
+Half the last word was lost in the bang of the door which Lottie slammed
+behind her, leaving her father and mother to a silence which Ellen did
+not offer to break. The judge had no heart to speak, in his dismay, and
+it was Mrs. Kenton who took the word.
+
+“Ellen,” she began, with compassionate gentleness, “we tried to keep it
+from you. We knew how you would feel. But now we have got to tell you.
+Dick did cowhide him when he got back to Tuskingum. Lottie wrote out to
+Dick about it, how Mr. Bittridge had behaved in New York. Your father
+and I didn’t approve of it, and Dick didn’t afterwards; but, yes, he did
+do it.”
+
+“I knew it, momma,” said Ellen, sadly.
+
+“You knew it! How?”
+
+“That other letter I got when we first came--it was from his mother.”
+
+“Did she tell--”
+
+“Yes. It was terrible she seemed to feel so. And I was sorry for her. I
+thought I ought to answer it, and I did. I told her I was sorry, too.
+I tried not to blame Richard. I don’t believe I did. And I tried not to
+blame him. She was feeling badly enough without that.”
+
+Her father and mother looked at each other; they did not speak, and she
+asked, “Do you think I oughtn’t to have written?”
+
+Her father answered, a little tremulously: “You did right, Ellen. And I
+am sure that you did it in just the right way.”
+
+“I tried to. I thought I wouldn’t worry you about it.”
+
+She rose, and now her mother thought she was going to say that it put
+an end to everything; that she must go back and offer herself as a
+sacrifice to the injured Bittridges. Her mind had reverted to that
+moment on the steamer when Ellen told her that nothing had reconciled
+her to what had happened with Bittridge but the fact that all the wrong
+done had been done to themselves; that this freed her. In her despair
+she could not forbear asking, “What did you write to her, Ellen?”
+
+“Nothing. I just said that I was very sorry, and that I knew how she
+felt. I don’t remember exactly.”
+
+She went up and kissed her mother. She seemed rather fatigued than
+distressed, and her father asked her. “Are you going to bed, my dear?”
+
+“Yes, I’m pretty tired, and I should think you would be, too, poppa.
+I’ll speak to poor Boyne. Don’t mind Lottie. I suppose she couldn’t
+help saying it.” She kissed her father, and slipped quietly into Boyne’s
+room, from which they could hear her passing on to her own before they
+ventured to say anything to each other in the hopeful bewilderment to
+which she had left them.
+
+“Well?” said the judge.
+
+“Well?” Mrs. Kenton returned, in a note of exasperation, as if she were
+not going to let herself be forced to the initiative.
+
+“I thought you thought--”
+
+“I did think that. Now I don’t know what to think. We have got to wait.”
+
+“I’m willing to wait for Ellen!”
+
+“She seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, “to have more sense than both the other
+children put together, and I was afraid--”
+
+“She might easily have more sense than Boyne, or Lottie, either.”
+
+“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Kenton began. But she did not go on to resent
+the disparagement which she had invited. “What I was afraid of was her
+goodness. It was her goodness that got her into the trouble, to begin
+with. If she hadn’t been so good, that fellow could never have fooled
+her as he did. She was too innocent.”
+
+The judge could not forbear the humorous view. “Perhaps she’s getting
+wickeder, or not so innocent. At any rate, she doesn’t seem to have been
+take in by Trannel.”
+
+“He didn’t pay any attention to her. He was all taken up with Lottie.”
+
+“Well, that was lucky. Sarah,” said the judge, “do you think he is like
+Bittridge?”
+
+“He’s made me think of him all the time.”
+
+“It’s curious,” the judge mused. “I have always noticed how our faults
+repeat themselves, but I didn’t suppose our fates would always take the
+same shape, or something like it.” Mrs. Kenton stared at him. “When this
+other one first made up to us on the boat my heart went down. I thought
+of Bittridge so.”
+
+“Mr. Breckon?”
+
+“Yes, the same lightness; the same sort of trifling--Didn’t you notice
+it?”
+
+“No--yes, I noticed it. But I wasn’t afraid for an instant. I saw that
+he was good.”
+
+“Oh!”
+
+“What I’m afraid of now is that Ellen doesn’t care anything about him.”
+
+“He isn’t wicked enough?”
+
+“I don’t say that. But it would be too much happiness to expect in one
+short life.”
+
+The judge could not deny the reasonableness of her position. He could
+only oppose it. “Well, I don’t think we’ve had any more than our share
+of happiness lately.”
+
+No one except Boyne could have made Trannel’s behavior a cause of
+quarrel, but the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was
+quite as effective. In Lottie this took the form of something so active,
+so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth.
+Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare
+in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he
+came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had
+ever had her acquaintance. In his doubt he ventured to address her,
+and then Lottie turned her back upon him in a manner that was perfectly
+convincing. He attempted a smiling ease with Mrs. Kenton and the judge,
+but they shared neither his smile nor his ease, and his jocose questions
+about the end of yesterday’s adventures, which he had not been privy to,
+did not seem to appeal to the American sense of humor in them. Ellen was
+not with them, nor Boyne, but Trannel was not asked to take either of
+the vacant places at the table, even when Breckon took one of them,
+after a decent exchange of civilities with him. He could only saunter
+away and leave Mrs. Kenton to a little pang.
+
+“Tchk!” she made. “I’m sorry for him!”
+
+“So am I,” said the judge. “But he will get over it--only too soon, I’m
+afraid. I don’t believe he’s very sorry for himself.”
+
+They had not advised with Breckon, and he did not feel authorized to
+make any comment. He seemed preoccupied, to Mrs. Kenton’s eye, when she
+turned it upon him from Trannel’s discomfited back, lessening in the
+perspective, and he answered vaguely to her overture about his night’s
+rest. Lottie never made any conversation with Breckon, and she now left
+him to himself, with some remnants of the disapproval which she found on
+her hands after crushing Trannel. It could not be said that Breckon was
+aware of her disapproval, and the judge had no apparent consciousness
+of it. He and Breckon tried to make something of each other, but failed,
+and it all seemed a very defeating sequel to Mrs. Kenton after the
+triumphal glow of the evening before. When Lottie rose, she went with
+her, alleging her wish to see if Boyne had eaten his breakfast. She
+confessed, to Breckon’s kind inquiry, that Boyne did not seem very well,
+and that she had made him take his breakfast in his room, and she did
+not think it necessary to own, even to so friendly a witness as Mr.
+Breckon, that Boyne was ashamed to come down, and dreaded meeting
+Trannel so much that she was giving him time to recover his self-respect
+and courage.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+As soon as she and Lottie were gone Breckon began, rather more
+formidably than he liked, but helplessly so: “Judge Kenton, I should be
+glad of a few moments with you on--on an important--on a matter that is
+important to me.”
+
+“Well,” said the judge, cautiously. Whatever was coming, he wished to
+guard himself from the mistake that he had once so nearly fallen into,
+and that still made him catch his breath to think of. “How can I be of
+use to you?”
+
+“I don’t know that you can be of any use--I don’t know that I ought
+to speak to you. But I thought you might perhaps save me from--save my
+taking a false step.”
+
+He looked at Kenton as if he would understand, and Kenton supposed that
+he did. He said, “My daughter once mentioned your wish to talk with me.”
+
+“Your daughter?” Breckon stared at him in stupefaction.
+
+“Yes; Ellen. She said you wished to consult me about going back to your
+charge in New York, when we were on the ship together. But I don’t know
+that I’m very competent to give advice in such--”
+
+“Oh!” Breckon exclaimed, in a tone of immense relief, which did not
+continue itself in what he went on to say. “That! I’ve quite made up my
+mind to go back.” He stopped, and then he burst out, “I want to speak
+with you about her.” The judge sat steady, still resolute not to give
+himself away, and the young man scarcely recovered from what had been
+a desperate plunge in adding: “I know that it’s usual to speak with
+her--with the lady herself first, but--I don’t know! The circumstances
+are peculiar. You only know about me what you’ve seen of me, and I would
+rather make my mistakes in the order that seems right to me, although it
+isn’t just the American way.”
+
+He smiled rather piteously, and the judge said, rather encouragingly, “I
+don’t quite know whether I follow you.”
+
+Breckon blushed, and sought help in what remained of his coffee. “The
+way isn’t easy for me. But it’s this: I ask your leave to ask Miss Ellen
+to marry me.” The worst was over now, and looked as if it were a relief.
+“She is the most beautiful person in the world to me, and the best; but
+as you know so little of me, I thought it right to get your leave--to
+tell you--to--to--That is all.” He fell back in his chair and looked a
+at Kenton.
+
+“It is unusual,” the judge began.
+
+“Yes, Yes; I know that. And for that reason I speak first to you. I’ll
+be ruled by you implicitly.”
+
+“I don’t mean that,” Kenton said. “I would have expected that you would
+speak to her first. But I get your point of view, and I must say I think
+you’re right. I think you are behaving--honorably. I wish that every one
+was like you. But I can’t say anything now. I must talk with her mother.
+My daughter’s life has not been happy. I can’t tell you. But as far as I
+am concerned, and I think Mrs. Kenton, too, I would be glad--We like you
+Mr. Breckon. We think you are a good man.
+
+“Oh, thank you. I’m not so sure--”
+
+“We’d risk it. But that isn’t all. Will you excuse me if I don’t say
+anything more just yet--and if I leave you?”
+
+“Why, certainly.” The judge had risen and pushed back his chair, and
+Breckon did the same. “And I shall--hear from you?”
+
+“Why, certainly,” said the judge in his turn.
+
+“It isn’t possible that you put him off!” his wife reproached him, when
+he told what had passed between him and Breckon. “Oh, you couldn’t have
+let him think that we didn’t want him for her! Surely you didn’t!”
+
+“Will you get it into your head,” he flamed back, “that he hasn’t spoken
+to Ellen yet, and I couldn’t accept him till she had?”
+
+“Oh yes. I forgot that.” Mrs. Kenton struggled with the fact, in the
+difficulty of realizing so strange an order of procedure. “I suppose
+it’s his being educated abroad that way. But, do go back to him, Rufus,
+and tell him that of course--”
+
+“I will do nothing of the kind, Sarah! What are you thinking of?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know what I’m thinking of! I must see Ellen, I suppose.
+I’ll go to her now. Oh, dear, if she doesn’t--if she lets such a chance
+slip through her fingers--But she’s quite likely to, she’s so obstinate!
+I wonder what she’ll want us to do.”
+
+She fled to her daughter’s room and found Boyne there, sitting beside
+his sister’s bed, giving her a detailed account of his adventure of
+the day before, up to the moment Mr. Breckon met him, in charge of the
+detectives. Up to that moment, it appeared to Boyne, as nearly as he
+could recollect, that he had not broken down, but had behaved himself
+with a dignity which was now beginning to clothe his whole experience.
+In the retrospect, a quiet heroism characterized his conduct, and at the
+moment his mother entered the room he was questioning Ellen as to her
+impressions of his bearing when she first saw him in the grasp of the
+detectives.
+
+His mother took him by the arm, and said, “I want to speak with Ellen,
+Boyne,” and put him out of the door.
+
+Then she came back and sat down in his chair. “Ellen. Mr. Breckon has
+been speaking to your father. Do you know what about?”
+
+“About his going back to New York?” the girl suggested.
+
+Her mother kept her patience with difficulty. “No, not about that. About
+you! He’s asked your father--I can’t understand yet why he did it,
+only he’s so delicate and honorable, and goodness known we appreciate
+it--whether he can tell you that--that--” It was not possible for such
+a mother as Mrs. Kenton to say “He loves you”; it would have sounded as
+she would have said, too sickish, and she compromised on: “He likes
+you, and wants to ask you whether you will marry him. And, Ellen,” she
+continued, in the ample silence which followed, “if you don’t say you
+will, I will have nothing more to do With such a simpleton. I have
+always felt that you behaved very foolishly about Mr. Bittridge, but
+I hoped that when you grew older you would see it as we did, and--and
+behave differently. And now, if, after all we’ve been through with you,
+you are going to say that you won’t have Mr. Breckon--”
+
+Mrs. Kenton stopped for want of a figure that would convey all the
+disaster that would fall upon Ellen in such an event, and she was given
+further pause when the girl gently answered, “I’m not going to say that,
+momma.”
+
+“Then what in the world are you going to say?” Mrs. Kenton demanded.
+
+Ellen had turned her face away on the pillow, and now she answered,
+quietly, “When Mr. Breckon asks me I will tell him.”
+
+“Well, you had better!” her mother threatened in return, and she did not
+realize the falsity of her position till she reported Ellen’s words to
+the judge.
+
+“Well, Sarah, I think she had you there,” he said, and Mrs. Kenton
+then said that she did not care, if the child was only going to behave
+sensibly at last, and she did believe she was.
+
+“Then it’s all right” said the judge, and he took up the Tuskingum
+Intelligencer, lying till then unread in the excitements which had
+followed its arrival the day before, and began to read it.
+
+Mrs. Kenton sat dreamily watching him, with her hands fallen in her lap.
+She suddenly started up, with the cry, “Good gracious! What are we all
+thinking of?”
+
+Kenton stared at her over the top of his paper. “How, thinking of?”
+
+“Why Mr. Breckon! He must be crazy to know what we’ve decided, poor
+fellow!”
+
+“Oh,” said the judge, folding the Intelligencer on his knee. “I had
+forgotten. Somehow, I thought it was all settled.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton took his paper from him, and finished folding it. “It hasn’t
+begun to be settled. You must go and let him know.”
+
+“Won’t he look me up?” the judge suggested.
+
+“You must look him up. Go at once dear! Think how anxious he must be!”
+
+Kenton was not sure that Breckon looked very anxious when he found him
+on the brick promenade before the Kurhaus, apparently absorbed in noting
+the convulsions of a large, round German lady in the water, who must
+have supposed herself to be bathing. But perhaps the young man did not
+see her; the smile on his face was too vague for such an interest when
+he turned at Kenton’s approaching steps.
+
+The judge hesitated for an instant, in which the smile left Breckon’s
+face. “I believe that’s all right, Mr. Breckon,” he said. “You’ll find
+Mrs. Kenton in our parlor,” and then the two men parted, with an “Oh,
+thank you!” from Breckon, who walked back towards the hotel, and left
+Kenton to ponder upon the German lady; as soon as he realized that she
+was not a barrel, the judge continued his walk along the promenade,
+feeling rather ashamed.
+
+Mrs. Kenton had gone to Ellen’s room again when she had got the judge
+off upon his mission. She rather flung in upon her. “Oh, you are up!”
+ she apologized to Ellen’s back. The girl’s face was towards the glass,
+and she was tilting her head to get the effect of the hat on it, which
+she now took off.
+
+“I suppose poppa’s gone to tell him,” she said, sitting tremulously
+down.
+
+“Didn’t you want him to?” her mother asked, stricken a little at sight
+of her agitation.
+
+“Yes, I wanted him to, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It makes it
+harder. Momma!”
+
+“Well, Ellen?”
+
+“You know you’ve got to tell him, first.”
+
+“Tell him?” Mrs. Kenton repeated, but she knew what Ellen meant.
+
+“About--Mr. Bittridge. All about it. Every single thing. About his
+kissing me that night.”
+
+At the last demand Mrs. Kenton was visibly shaken in her invisible
+assent to the girl’s wish. “Don’t you think, Ellen, that you had better
+tell him that--some time?”
+
+“No, now. And you must tell him. You let me go to the theatre with him.”
+ The faintest shadow of resentment clouded the girl’s face, but still
+Mrs. Kenton, thought she knew her own guilt, could not yield.
+
+“Why, Ellen,” she pleaded, not without a reproachful sense of vulgarity
+in such a plea, “don’t you suppose HE ever--kissed any one?”
+
+“That doesn’t concern me, momma,” said Ellen, without a trace of
+consciousness that she was saying anything uncommon. “If you won’t tell
+him, then that ends it. I won’t see him.”
+
+“Oh, well!” her mother sighed. “I will try to tell him. But I’d rather
+be whipped. I know he’ll laugh at me.”
+
+“He won’t laugh at you,” said the girl, confidently, almost
+comfortingly. “I want him to know everything before I meet him. I
+don’t want to have a single thing on my mind. I don’t want to think of
+myself!”
+
+Mrs. Kenton understood the woman--soul that spoke in these words.
+“Well,” she said, with a deep, long breath, “be ready, then.”
+
+But she felt the burden which had been put upon her to be so much more
+than she could bear that when she found her husband in their parlor she
+instantly resolved to cast it upon him. He stood at the window with his
+hat on.
+
+“Has Breckon been here yet?” he asked.
+
+“Have you seen him yet?” she returned.
+
+“Yes, and I thought he was coming right here. But perhaps he stopped to
+screw his courage up. He only knew how little it needed with us!”
+
+“Well, now, it’s we who’ve got to have the courage. Or you have. Do
+you know what Ellen wants to have done?” Mrs. Kenton put it in these
+impersonal terms, and as a preliminary to shirking her share of the
+burden.
+
+“She doesn’t want to have him refused?”
+
+“She wants to have him told all about Bittridge.”
+
+After a momentary revolt the judge said, “Well, that’s right. It’s like
+Ellen.”
+
+“There’s something else that’s more like her,” said Mrs. Kenton,
+indignantly. “She wants him to told about what Bittridge did that
+night--about him kissing her.”
+
+The judge looked disgusted with his wife for the word; then he looked
+aghast. “About--”
+
+“Yes, and she won’t have a word to say to him till he is told, and
+unless he is told she will refuse him.”
+
+“Did she say that?”
+
+“No, but I know she will.”
+
+“If she didn’t say she would, I think we may take the chances that she
+won’t.”
+
+“No, we mustn’t take any such chances. You must tell him.”
+
+“I? No, I couldn’t manage it. I have no tact, and it would sound
+so confoundedly queer, coming from one man to another. It would
+be--indelicate. It’s something that nobody but a woman--Why doesn’t she
+tell him herself?”
+
+“She won’t. She considers it our part, and something we ought to do
+before he commits himself.”
+
+“Very well, then, Sarah, you must tell him. You can manage it so it
+won’t by so--queer.
+
+“That is just what I supposed you would say, Mr. Kenton, but I must say
+I didn’t expect it of you. I think it’s cowardly.”
+
+“Look out, Sarah! I don’t like that word.”
+
+“Oh, I suppose you’re brave enough when it comes to any kind of danger.
+But when it comes to taking the brunt of anything unpleasant--”
+
+“It isn’t unpleasant--it’s queer.”
+
+“Why do you keep saying that over and over? There’s nothing queer about
+it. It’s Ellenish but isn’t it right?”
+
+“It’s right, yes, I suppose. But it’s squeamish.”
+
+“I see nothing squeamish about it. But I know you’re determined to leave
+it to me, and so I shall do it. I don’t believe Mr. Breckon will think
+it’s queer or squeamish.”
+
+“I’ve no doubt he’ll take it in the right way; you’ll know how to--”
+ Kenton looked into his hat, which he had taken off and then put it on
+again. His tone and his manner were sufficiently sneaking, and he could
+not make them otherwise. It was for this reason, no doubt, that he would
+not prolong the interview.
+
+“Oh yes, go!” said Mrs. Kenton, as he found himself with his hand on the
+door. “Leave it all to me, do!” and he was aware of skulking out of the
+room. By the time that it would have taken him so long as to walk to
+the top of the grand stairway he was back again. “He’s coming!” he said,
+breathlessly. “I saw him at the bottom of the stairs. Go into your room
+and wash your eyes. I’LL tell him.”
+
+“No, no, Rufus! Let me! It will be much better. You’ll be sure to bungle
+it.”
+
+“We must risk that. You were quite right, Sarah. It would have been
+cowardly in me to let you do it.”
+
+“Rufus! You know I didn’t mean it! Surely you’re not resenting that?”
+
+“No. I’m glad you made me see it. You’re all right, Sarah, and you’ll
+find that it will all come out all right. You needn’t be afraid I’ll
+bungle it. I shall use discretion. Go--”
+
+“I shall not stir a step from this parlor! You’ve got back all your
+spirit, dear,” said the old wife, with young pride in her husband. “But
+I must say that Ellen is putting more upon you than she has any right
+to. I think she might tell him herself.”
+
+“No, it’s our business--my business. We allowed her to get in for it.
+She’s quite right about it. We must not let him commit himself to her
+till he knows the thing that most puts her to shame. It isn’t enough for
+us to say that it was really no shame. She feels that it casts a sort of
+stain--you know what I mean, Sarah, and I believe I can make this young
+man know. If I can’t, so much the worse for him. He shall never see
+Ellen again.”
+
+“Oh, Rufus!”
+
+“Do you think he would be worthy of her if he couldn’t?”
+
+“I think Ellen is perfectly ridiculous.”
+
+“Then that shows that I am right in deciding not to leave this thing to
+you. I feel as she does about it, and I intend that he shall.”
+
+“Do you intend to let her run the chance of losing him?”
+
+“That is what I intend to do.”
+
+“Well, then, I’ll tell you what: I am going to stay right here. We will
+both see him; it’s right for us to do it.” But at a rap on the parlor
+door Mrs. Kenton flew to that of her own room, which she closed upon her
+with a sort of Parthian whimper, “Oh, do be careful, Rufus!”
+
+Whether Kenton was careful or not could never be known, from either
+Kenton himself or from Breckon. The judge did tell him everything, and
+the young man received the most damning details of Ellen’s history with
+a radiant absence which testified that they fell upon a surface sense
+of Kenton, and did not penetrate to the all-pervading sense of Ellen
+herself below. At the end Kenton was afraid he had not understood.
+
+“You understand,” he said, “that she could not consent to see you before
+you knew just how weak she thought she had been.” The judge stiffened to
+defiance in making this humiliation. “I don’t consider, myself, that she
+was weak at all.”
+
+“Of course not!” Breckon beamed back at him.
+
+“I consider that throughout she acted with the greatest--greatest--And
+that in that affair, when he behaved with that--that outrageous
+impudence, it was because she had misled the scoundrel by her kindness,
+her forbearance, her wish not to do him the least shadow of injustice,
+but to give him every chance of proving himself worthy of her tolerance;
+and--”
+
+The judge choked, and Breckon eagerly asked, “And shall I--may I see her
+now?”
+
+“Why--yes,” the judge faltered. “If you’re sure--”
+
+“What about?” Breckon demanded.
+
+“I don’t know whether she will believe that I have told you.”
+
+“I will try to convince her. Where shall I see her?”
+
+“I will go and tell her you are here. I will bring her--”
+
+Kenton passed into the adjoining room, where his wife laid hold of
+him, almost violently. “You did it beautifully, Rufus,” she huskily
+whispered, “and I was so afraid you would spoil everything. Oh, how
+manly you were, and how perfect he was! But now it’s my turn, and I will
+go and bring Ellen--You will let me, won’t you?”
+
+“You may do anything you please, Sarah. I don’t want to have any more of
+this,” said the judge from the chair he had dropped into.
+
+“Well, then, I will bring her at once,” said Mrs. Kenton, staying only
+in her gladness to kiss him on his gray head; he received her embrace
+with a superficial sultriness which did not deceive her.
+
+Ellen came back without her mother, and as soon as she entered the room,
+and Breckon realized that she had come alone, he ran towards her as if
+to take her in his arms. But she put up her hand with extended fingers,
+and held him lightly off.
+
+“Did poppa tell you?” she asked, with a certain defiance. She held her
+head up fiercely, and spoke steadily, but he could see the pulse beating
+in her pretty neck.
+
+“Yes, he told me--”
+
+“And--well?”
+
+“Oh, I love you, Ellen--”
+
+“That isn’t it. Did you care?”
+
+Breckon had an inspiration, an inspiration from the truth that dwelt at
+the bottom of his soul and had never yet failed to save him. He let his
+arms fall and answered, desperately: “Yes, I did. I wished it hadn’t
+happened.” He saw the pulse in her neck cease to beat, and he swiftly
+added, “But I know that it happened just because you were yourself, and
+were so--”
+
+“If you had said you didn’t care,” she breathlessly whispered, “I would
+never have spoken to you.” He felt a conditional tremor creeping into
+the fingers which had been so rigid against his breast. “I don’t see how
+I lived through it! Do you think you can?”
+
+“I think so,” he returned, with a faint, far suggestion of levity that
+brought from her an imperative, imploring--
+
+“Don’t!”
+
+Then he added, solemnly, “It had no more to do with you, Ellen, than an
+offence from some hateful animal--”
+
+“Oh, how good you are!” The fingers folded themselves, and her arms
+weakened so that there was nothing to keep him from drawing her to him.
+“What--what are you doing?” she asked, with her face smothered against
+his.
+
+“Oh, Ell-en, Ellen, Ellen! Oh, my love, my dearest, my best!”
+
+“But I have been such a fool!” she protested, imagining that she was
+going to push him from her, but losing herself in him more and more.
+
+“Yes, yes, darling! I know it. That’s why I love you so!”
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+“There is just one thing,” said the judge, as he wound up his watch that
+night, “that makes me a little uneasy still.”
+
+Mrs. Kenton, already in her bed turned her face upon him with a
+despairing “Tchk! Dear! What is it? I thought we had talked over
+everything.”
+
+“We haven’t got Lottie’s consent yet.”
+
+“Well, I think I see myself asking Lottie!” Mrs. Kenton began, before
+she realized her husband’s irony. She added, “How could you give me such
+a start?”
+
+“Well, Lottie has bossed us so long that I couldn’t help mentioning it,”
+ said the judge.
+
+It was a lame excuse, and in its most potential implication his
+suggestion proved without reason. If Lottie never gave her explicit
+approval to Ellen’s engagement, she never openly opposed it. She treated
+it, rather, with something like silent contempt, as a childish weakness
+on Ellen’s part which was beneath her serious consideration. Towards
+Breckon, her behavior hardly changed in the severity which she had
+assumed from the moment she first ceased to have any use for him. “I
+suppose I will have to kiss him,” she said, gloomily, when her mother
+told her that he was to be her brother, and she performed the rite with
+as much coldness as was ever put in that form of affectionate welcome.
+It is doubtful if Breckon perfectly realized its coldness; he never
+knew how much he enraged her by acting as if she were a little girl,
+and saying lightly, almost trivially, “I’m so glad you’re going to be a
+sister to me.”
+
+With Ellen, Lottie now considered herself quits, and from the first hour
+of Ellen’s happiness she threw off all the care with all the apparent
+kindness which she had used towards her when she was a morbid invalid.
+Here again, if Lottie had minded such a thing, she might have been as
+much vexed by Ellen’s attitude as by Breckon’s. Ellen never once noticed
+the withdrawal of her anxious oversight, or seemed in the least to miss
+it. As much as her meek nature would allow, she arrogated to herself
+the privileges and prerogatives of an elder sister, and if it had been
+possible to make Lottie ever feel like a chit, there were moments when
+Ellen’s behavior would have made her feel like a chit. It was not till
+after their return to Tuskingum that Lottie took her true place in
+relation to the affair, and in the preparations for the wedding, which
+she appointed to be in the First Universalist Church, overruling both
+her mother’s and sister’s preferences for a home wedding, that Lottie
+rose in due authority. Mrs. Kenton had not ceased to feel quelled
+whenever her younger daughter called her mother instead of momma, and
+Ellen seemed not really to care. She submitted the matter to Breckon,
+who said, “Oh yes, if Lottie wishes,” and he laughed when Ellen
+confessed, “Well, I said we would.”
+
+With the lifting of his great anxiety, he had got back to that lightness
+which was most like him, and he could not always conceal from Lottie
+herself that he regarded her as a joke. She did not mind it, she said,
+from such a mere sop as, in the vast content of his love, he was.
+
+This was some months after Lottie had got at Scheveningen from Mr.
+Plumpton that letter which decided her that she had no use for him.
+There came the same day, and by the same post with it, a letter from one
+of her young men in Tuskingum, who had faithfully written to her all
+the winter before, and had not intermitted his letters after she went
+abroad. To Kenton he had always seemed too wise if not too good for
+Lottie, but Mrs. Kenton, who had her own doubts of Lottie, would not
+allow this when it came to the question, and said, woundedly, that she
+did not see why Lottie was not fully his equal in every way.
+
+“Well,” the judge suggested, “she isn’t the first young lawyer at the
+Tuskingum bar.”
+
+“Well, I wouldn’t wish her to be,” said Mrs. Kenton, who did not often
+make jokes.
+
+“Well, I don’t know that I would,” her husband assented, and he added,
+“Pretty good, Sarah.”
+
+“Lottie,” her mother summed up, “is practical, and she is very neat. She
+won’t let Mr. Elroy go around looking so slovenly. I hope she will make
+him have his hair cut, and not look as if it were bitten off. And I
+don’t believe he’s had his boots blacked since--”
+
+“He was born,” the judge proposed, and she assented.
+
+“Yes. She is very saving, and he is wasteful. It will be a very good
+match. You can let them build on the other corner of the lot, if Ellen
+is going to be in New York. I would miss Lottie more than Ellen about
+the housekeeping, though the dear knows I will miss them both badly
+enough.”
+
+“Well, you can break off their engagements,” said the judge.
+
+As yet, and until Ellen was off her hands, Lottie would not allow Mr.
+Elroy to consider himself engaged to her. His conditional devotion did
+not debar him from a lover’s rights, and, until Breckon came on from
+New York to be married, there was much more courtship of Lottie than
+of Ellen in the house. But Lottie saved herself in the form if not the
+fact, and as far as verbal terms were concerned, she was justified by
+them in declaring that she would not have another sop hanging round.
+
+It was Boyne, and Boyne alone, who had any misgivings in regard to
+Ellen’s engagement, and these were of a nature so recondite that when
+he came to impart them to his mother, before they left Scheveningen, and
+while there was yet time for that conclusion which his father suggested
+to Mrs. Kenton too late, Boyne had an almost hopeless difficulty in
+stating them. His approaches, even, were so mystical that his mother was
+forced to bring him to book sharply.
+
+“Boyne, if you don’t tell me right off just what you mean, I don’t know
+what I will do to you! What are you driving at, for pity’s sake? Are you
+saying that she oughtn’t to be engaged to Mr. Breckon?”
+
+“No, I’m not saying that, momma,” said Boyne, in a distress that caused
+his mother to take a reef in her impatience.
+
+“Well, what are you saying, then?”
+
+“Why, you know how Ellen is, momma. You know how conscientious
+and--and--sensitive. Or, I don’t mean sensitive, exactly.”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well, I don’t think she ought to be engaged to Mr. Breckon out
+of--gratitude.”
+
+“Gratitude?”
+
+“Yes. I just know that she thinks--or it would be just like her--that he
+saved me that day. But he only met me about a second before we came
+to her and poppa, and the officers were taking me right along towards
+them.” Mrs. Kenton held herself stormily in, and he continued: “I know
+that he translated for us before the magistrate, but the magistrate
+could speak a little English, and when he saw poppa he saw that it was
+all right, anyway. I don’t want to say anything against Mr. Breckon, and
+I think he behaved as well any one could; but if Ellen is going to marry
+him out of gratitude for saving me--”
+
+Mrs. Kenton could hold in no longer. “And is this what you’ve been
+bothering the life half out of me for, for the last hour?”
+
+“Well, I thought you ought to look at it in that light, momma.”
+
+“Well, Boyne,” said his mother, “sometimes I think you’re almost a
+fool!” and she turned her back upon her son and left him.
+
+Boyne’s place in the Kenton family, for which he continued to have
+the highest regard, became a little less difficult, a little less
+incompatible with his self-respect as time went on. His spirit, which
+had lagged a little after his body in stature, began, as his father
+said, to catch up. He no longer nourished it so exclusively upon
+heroical romance as he had during the past year, and after his return
+to Tuskingum he went into his brother Richard’s once, and manifested a
+certain curiosity in the study of the law. He read Blackstone, and could
+give a fair account of his impressions of English law to his father.
+He had quite outlived the period of entomological research, and he
+presented his collections of insects (somewhat moth-eaten) to his
+nephew, on whom he also bestowed his postage-stamp album; Mary Kenton
+accepted them in trust, the nephew being of yet too tender years for
+their care. In the preoccupations of his immediate family with Ellen’s
+engagement, Boyne became rather close friends with his sister-in-law,
+and there were times when he was tempted to submit to her judgment the
+question whether the young Queen of Holland did not really beckon to him
+that day. But pending the hour when he foresaw that Lottie should come
+out with the whole story, in some instant of excitement, Boyne had not
+quite the heart to speak of his experience. It assumed more and more
+respectability with him, and lost that squalor which had once put him to
+shame while it was yet new. He thought that Mary might be reasoned into
+regarding him as the hero of an adventure, but he is still hesitating
+whether to confide in her. In the meantime she knows all about it. Mary
+and Richard both approved of Ellen’s choice, though they are somewhat
+puzzled to make out just what Mr. Breckon’s religion is, and what his
+relations to his charge in New York may be. These do not seem to them
+quite pastoral, and he himself shares their uncertainty. But since his
+flock does not include Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter, he is content to
+let the question remain in abeyance. The Rasmiths are settled in Rome
+with an apparent permanency which they have not known elsewhere for a
+long time, and they have both joined in the friendliest kind of letter
+on his marriage to their former pastor, if that was what Breckon was.
+They have professed to know from the first that he was in love with
+Ellen, and that he is in love with her now is the strong present belief
+of his flock, if they are a flock, and if they may be said to have
+anything so positive as a belief in regard to anything.
+
+Judge Kenton has given the Elroys the other corner of the lot, and
+has supplied them the means of building on it. Mary and Lottie run
+diagonally into the home-house every day, and nothing keeps either from
+coming into authority over the old people except the fear of each other
+in which they stand. The Kentons no longer make any summer journeys, but
+in the winter they take Boyne and go to see Ellen in New York. They do
+not stay so long as Mrs. Kenton would like. As soon as they have fairly
+seen the Breckons, and have settled comfortably down in their pleasant
+house on West Seventy-fourth Street, she detects him in a secret habit
+of sighing, which she recognizes as the worst symptom of homesickness,
+and then she confides to Ellen that she supposes Mr. Kenton will
+make her go home with him before long. Ellen knows it is useless
+to interfere. She even encourages her father’s longings, so far as
+indulging his clandestine visits to the seedsman’s, and she goes with
+him to pick up second-hand books about Ohio in the War at the dealers’,
+who remember the judge very flatteringly.
+
+As February draws on towards March it becomes impossible to detain
+Kenton. His wife and son return with him to Tuskingum, where Lottie
+has seen to the kindling of a good fire in the furnace against their
+arrival, and has nearly come to blows with Mary about provisioning them
+for the first dinner. Then Mrs. Kenton owns, with a comfort which she
+will not let her husband see, that there is no place like home, and they
+take up their life in the place where they have been so happy and so
+unhappy. He reads to her a good deal at night, and they play a game
+of checkers usually before they go to bed; she still cheats without
+scruple, for, as she justly says, he knows very well that she cannot
+bear to be beaten.
+
+The colonel, as he is still invariably known to his veterans, works
+pretty faithfully at the regimental autobiography, and drives round the
+country, picking up material among them, in a buggy plastered with
+mud. He has imagined, since his last visit to Breckon, who dictates his
+sermons, if they are sermons, taking a stenographer with him, and the
+young lady, who is in deadly terror of the colonel’s driving, is of the
+greatest use to him, in the case of veterans who will not or cannot
+give down (as they say in their dairy-country parlance), and has already
+rescued many reminiscences from perishing in their faltering memories.
+She writes them out in the judge’s library when the colonel gets home,
+and his wife sometimes surprises Mr. Kenton correcting them there at
+night after she supposes he has gone to bed.
+
+Since it has all turned out for the best concerning Bittridge, she no
+longer has those pangs of self-reproach for Richard’s treatment of
+him which she suffered while afraid that if the fact came to Ellen’s
+knowledge it might make her refuse Breckon. She does not find her
+daughter’s behavior in the matter so anomalous as it appears to the
+judge.
+
+He is willing to account for it on the ground of that inconsistency
+which he has observed in all human behavior, but Mrs. Kenton is not
+inclined to admit that it is so very inconsistent. She contends that
+Ellen had simply lived through that hateful episode of her psychological
+history, as she was sure to do sooner or later and as she was destined
+to do as soon as some other person arrived to take her fancy.
+
+If this is the crude, common-sense view of the matter, Ellen herself is
+able to offer no finer explanation, which shall at the same time be more
+thorough. She and her husband have not failed to talk the affair over,
+with that fulness of treatment which young married people give their
+past when they have nothing to conceal from each other. She has
+attempted to solve the mystery by blaming herself for a certain
+essential levity of nature which, under all her appearance of gravity,
+sympathized with levity in others, and, for what she knows to the
+contrary, with something ignoble and unworthy in them. Breckon, of
+course, does not admit this, but he has suggested that she was first
+attracted to him by a certain unseriousness which reminded her of
+Bittridge, in enabling him to take her seriousness lightly. This is the
+logical inference which he makes from her theory of herself, but she
+insists that it does not follow; and she contends that she was moved to
+love him by an instant sense of his goodness, which she never lost, and
+in which she was trying to equal herself with him by even the desperate
+measure of renouncing her happiness, if that should ever seem her duty,
+to his perfection. He says this is not very clear, though it is awfully
+gratifying, and he does not quite understand why Mrs. Bittridge’s letter
+should have liberated Ellen from her fancied obligations to the past.
+Ellen can only say that it did so by making her so ashamed ever to have
+had anything to do with such people, and making her see how much she had
+tried her father and mother by her folly. This again Breckon contends
+is not clear, but he says we live in a universe of problems in which
+another, more or less, does not much matter. He is always expecting
+that some chance shall confront him with Bittridge, and that the man’s
+presence will explain everything; for, like so many Ohio people who
+leave their native State, the Bittridges have come East instead of going
+West, in quitting the neighborhood of Tuskingum. He is settled with his
+idolized mother in New York, where he is obscurely attached to one of
+the newspapers. That he has as yet failed to rise from the ranks in
+the great army of assignment men may be because moral quality tells
+everywhere, and to be a clever blackguard is not so well as to be simply
+clever. If ever Breckon has met his alter ego, as he amuses himself in
+calling him, he has not known it, though Bittridge may have been wiser
+in the case of a man of Breckon’s publicity, not to call it distinction.
+There was a time, immediately after the Breckons heard from Tuskingum
+that the Bittridges were in New York, when Ellen’s husband consulted her
+as to what might be his duty towards her late suitor in the event which
+has not taken place, and when he suggested, not too seriously, that
+Richard’s course might be the solution. To his suggestion Ellen
+answered: “Oh no, dear! That was wrong,” and this remains also Richard’s
+opinion.
+
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    A nature which all modesty and deference seemed left out of
+    All but took the adieus out of Richard’s hands
+    Americans spoil their women! “Well, their women are worth it”
+     An inscrutable frown goes far in such exigencies
+    Another problem, more or less, does not much matter
+    Certain comfort in their mutual discouragement
+    Conscience to own the fact and the kindness to deny it
+    Fatuity of a man in such things
+    Fatuity of age regarding all the things of the past
+    Fertile in difficulties and so importunate for their solution
+    Girl is never so much in danger of having her heart broken
+    Good comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be
+    He was too little used to deference from ladies
+    Impart their sufferings as well as their pleasures to each other
+    Know more of their clothes than the people they buy them of
+    Learning to ask her no questions about herself
+    Left him alone to the first ecstasy of his homesickness
+    Living in the present
+    Melting into pity against all sense of duty
+    Misgiving of a blessed immortality
+    More faith in her wisdom than she had herself
+    More helpful with trouble to be ignorant of its cause
+    Not find more harm in them, if you did not bring it with you
+    Not what their mothers but what their environments made them
+    Pain of the preparations for a day’s pleasure
+    Part of her pride not to ask
+    Performance of their common duty must fall wholly to her
+    Petted person in her youth, perhaps, and now she petted herself
+    Place where they have been so happy and so unhappy
+    Provoked that her mother would not provoke her further
+    Question whether the fellow was more a fool or a fraud
+    Relationship when one gives a reproof and the other accepts it
+    Relieved from a discoverer’s duties to Europe
+    Renunciation of his judgment in deference to the good woman
+    Waiting with patience for the term of his exile
+    We have to make-believe before we can believe anything
+    When he got so far beyond his depth
+    Why, at his age, should he be going into exile
+    Wife was glad of the release from housekeeping
+    Worst whim was having no wish that could be ascertained
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Kentons, by William Dean Howells
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