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The Kentons

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #3362 · 441,833 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Kentons

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: October 24, 2004 [eBook #3362]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3362

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE 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 Kento

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