The Kentons

W >> William Dean Howells >> The Kentons


"Well, then," said the judge, "I don't see what you're scared at."

"I'm not SCARED. But, oh, Rufus! It can't come to anything! There isn't
time!" An hysterical hope trembled in her asseveration of despair that
made him smile.

"I guess if time's all that's wanted--"

"He is going to get off at Boulogne."

"Well, we can get off there, too."

"Rufus, if you dare to think of such a thing!"

"I don't. But Europe isn't so big but what he can find us again if he
wants to."

"Ah, if he wants to!"

Ellen seemed to have let her mother take her languor below along with the
shawls she had given her. Buttoned into a close jacket, and skirted
short for the sea, she pushed against the breeze at Breckon's elbow with
a vigor that made him look his surprise at her. Girl-like, she took it
that something was wrong with her dress, and ran herself over with an
uneasy eye.

Then he explained: "I was just thinking how much you were like Miss
Lottie-if you'll excuse my being so personal. And it never struck me
before."

"I didn't suppose we looked alike," said Ellen.

"No, certainly. I shouldn't have taken you for sisters. And yet, just
now, I felt that you were like her. You seem so much stronger this
morning--perhaps it's that the voyage is doing you good. Shall you be
sorry to have it end?"

"Shall you? That's the way Lottie would answer."

Breckon laughed. "Yes, it is. I shall be very sorry. I should be
willing to have it rough again, it that would make it longer. I liked
it's being rough. We had it to ourselves." He had not thought how that
sounded, but if it sounded particular, she did not notice it.

She merely said, "I was surprised not to be seasick, too."

"And should you be willing to have it rough again?"

"You wouldn't see anything more of your friends, then."

"Ah, yes; Miss Rasmith. She is a great talker, Did you find her
interesting?"

"She was very interesting."

"Yes? What did she talk about?"

Ellen realized the fact too late to withhold "Why, about you."

"And was that what made her interesting?"

"Now, what would Lottie say to such a thing as that?" asked Ellen,
gayly.

"Something terribly cutting, I'm afraid. But don't you! From you I
don't want to believe I deserve it, no matter what Miss Rasmith said me."

"Oh, she didn't say anything very bad. Unless you mind being a universal
favorite."

"Well, it makes a man out rather silly."

"But you can't help that."

"Now you remind me of Miss Lottie again!"

"But I didn't mean that," said Ellen, blushing and laughing. "I hope you
wouldn't think I could be so pert."

"I wouldn't think anything that wasn't to your praise," said Breckon, and
a pause ensued, after which the words he added seemed tame and flat.
"I suspect Miss Rasmith has been idealizing the situation. At any rate,
I shouldn't advise you to trust her report implicitly. I'm at the head
of a society, you know, ethical or sociological, or altruistic, whatever
you choose to call it, which hasn't any very definite object of worship,
and yet meets every Sunday for a sort of worship; and I have to be in the
pulpit. So you see?"

Ellen said, "I think I understand," with a temptation to smile at the
ruefulness of his appeal.

Breckon laughed for her. "That's the mischief and the absurdity of it.
But it isn't so bad as it seems. They're really most of them hard-headed
people; and those that are not couldn't make a fool of a man that nature
hadn't begun with. Still, I'm not very well satisfied with my work among
them--that is, I'm not satisfied with myself." He was talking soberly
enough, and he did not find that she was listening too seriously. "I'm
going away to see whether I shall come back." He looked at her to make
sure that she had taken his meaning, and seemed satisfied that she had.
"I'm not sure that I'm fit for any sort of ministry, and I may find the
winter in England trying to find out. I was at school in England, you
know."

Ellen confessed that she had not known that.

"Yes; I suppose that's what made me seem 'so Englishy' the first day to
Miss Lottie, as she called it. But I'm straight enough American as far
as parentage goes. Do you think you will be in England-later?"

"I don't know. If poppa gets too homesick we will go back in the fall."

"Miss Kenton," said the young man, abruptly, "will you let me tell you
how much I admire and revere your father?"

Tears came into her eyes and her throat swelled. "But you don't know,"
she begun; and then she stopped.

"I have been wanting to submit something to his judgment; but I've been
afraid. I might seem to be fishing for his favor."

"Poppa wouldn't think anything that was unjust," said Ellen, gravely.

"Ah," Breckon laughed, "I suspect that I should rather have him unjust.
I wish you'd tell me what he would think."

"But I don't know what it is," she protested, with a reflected smile.

"I was in hopes Miss Rasmith might have told you. Well, it is simply
this, and you will see that I'm not quite the universal favorite she's
been making you fancy me. There is a rift in my lute, a schism in my
little society, which is so little that I could not have supposed there
was enough of it to break in two. There are some who think their
lecturer--for that's what I amount to--ought to be an older, if not a
graver man. They are in the minority, but they're in the right, I'm
afraid; and that's why I happen to be here telling you all this. It's
a question of whether I ought to go back to New York or stay in London,
where there's been a faint call for me." He saw the girl listening
devoutly, with that flattered look which a serious girl cannot keep out
of her face when a man confides a serious matter to her. "I might safely
promise to be older, but could I keep my word if I promised to be graver?
That's the point. If I were a Calvinist I might hold fast by faith, and
fight it out with that; or if I were a Catholic I could cast myself upon
the strength of the Church, and triumph in spite of temperament. Then it
wouldn't matter whether I was grave or gay; it might be even better if I
were gay. But," he went on, in terms which, doubtless, were not then for
the first time formulated in his mind, "being merely the leader of a sort
of forlorn hope in the Divine Goodness, perhaps I have no right to be so
cheerful."

The note of a sad irony in his words appealed to such indignation for him
in Ellen as she never felt for herself. But she only said, "I don't
believe Poppa could take that in the wrong way if you told him."

Breckon stared. "Yes your father! What would he say?"

"I can't tell you. But I'm sure he would know what you meant."

"And you," he pursued, "what should YOU say?"

"I? I never thought about such a thing. You mustn't ask me, if you're
serious; and if you're not--"

"But I am; I am deeply serious. I would like, to know how the case
strikes you. I shall be so grateful if you will tell me."

"I'm sorry I can't, Mr. Breckon. Why don't you ask poppa?"

"No, I see now I sha'n't be able. I feel too much, after telling you, as
if I had been posing. The reality has gone out of it all. And I'm
ashamed."

"You mustn't be," she said, quietly; and she added, "I suppose it would
be like a kind of defeat if you didn't go back?"

"I shouldn't care for the appearance of defeat," he said, courageously.
"The great question is, whether somebody else wouldn't be of more use in
my place."

"Nobody could be," said she, in a sort of impassioned absence, and then
coming to herself, "I mean, they wouldn't think so, I don't believe."

"Then you advise--"

"No, no! I can't; I don't. I'm not fit to have an opinion about such a
thing; it would be crazy. But poppa--"

They were at the door of the gangway, and she slipped within and left
him. His nerves tingled, and there was a glow in his breast. It was
sweet to have surprised that praise from her, though he could not have
said why he should value the praise or a girl of her open ignorance and
inexperience in everything that would have qualified her to judge him.
But he found himself valuing it supremely, and wonderingly wishing to be
worthy of it.




XVII.

Ellen discovered her father with a book in a distant corner of the
dining-saloon, which he preferred to the deck or the library for his
reading, in such intervals as the stewards, laying and cleaning the
tables, left him unmolested in it. She advanced precipitately upon him,
and stood before him in an excitement which, though he lifted his dazed
eyes to it from his page, he was not entirely aware of till afterwards.
Then he realized that her cheeks were full of color, and her eyes of
light, and that she panted as if she had been running when she spoke.

"Poppa," she said, "there is something that Mr. Breckon wants to speak to
you--to ask you about. He has asked me, but I want you to see him, for I
think he had better tell you himself."

While he still stared at her she was as suddenly gone as she had come,
and he remained with his book, which the meaning had as suddenly left.
There was no meaning in her words, except as he put it into them, and
after he had got it in he struggled with it in a sort of perfunctory
incredulity. It was not impossible; it chiefly seemed so because it
seemed too good to be true; and the more he pondered it the more
possible, if not probable, it became. He could not be safe with it till
he had submitted it to his wife; and he went to her while he was sure of
repeating Ellen's words without varying from them a syllable.

To his astonishment, Mrs. Kenton was instantly convinced. "Why, of
course," she said, "it can't possibly mean anything else. Why should it
be so very surprising? The time hasn't been very long, but they've been
together almost every moment; and he was taken with her from the very
beginning--I could see that. Put on your other coat," she said, as she
dusted the collar of the coat the judge was wearing. "He'll be looking
you up, at once. I can't say that it's unexpected," and she claimed a
prescience in the matter which all her words had hitherto denied.

Kenton did not notice her inconsistency. "If it were not so exactly what
I wished," he said, "I don't know that I should be surprised at it
myself. Sarah, if I had been trying to imagine any one for Ellen, I
couldn't have dreamed of a person better suited to her than this young
man. He's everything that I could wish him to be. I've seen the
pleasure and comfort she took in his way from the first moment. He
seemed to make her forget--Do you suppose she has forgotten that
miserable wretch Do you think--"

"If she hadn't, could she be letting him come to speak to you? I don't
believe she ever really cared for Bittridge--or not after he began
flirting with Mrs. Uphill." She had no shrinking from the names which
Kenton avoided with disgust. "The only question for you is to consider
what you shall say to Mr. Breckon."

"Say to him? Why, of course, if Ellen has made up her mind, there's only
one thing I can say."

"Indeed there is! He ought to know all about that disgusting Bittridge
business, and you have got to tell him."

"Sarah, I couldn't. It is too humiliating. How would it do to refer him
to--You could manage that part so much better. I don't see how I could
keep it from seeming an indelicate betrayal of the poor child--"

"Perhaps she's told him herself," Mrs. Kenton provisionally suggested.

The judge eagerly caught at the notion. "Do you think so? It would be
like her! Ellen would wish him to know everything."

He stopped, and his wife could see that he was trembling with excitement.
"We must find out. I will speak to Ellen--"

"And--you don't think I'd better have the talk with him first?"

"Certainly not!"

"Why, Rufus! You were not going to look him up?"

"No," he hesitated; but she could see that some such thing had been on
his mind.

"Surely," she said, "you must be crazy!" But she had not the heart to
blight his joy with sarcasm, and perhaps no sarcasm would have blighted
it.

"I merely wondered what I had better say in case he spoke to me before
you saw Ellen--that's all. Sarah! I couldn't have believed that
anything could please me so much. But it does seem as if it were the
assurance of Ellen's happiness; and she has deserved it, poor child! If
ever there was a dutiful and loving daughter--at least before that
wretched affair--she was one."

"She has been a good girl," Mrs. Kenton stoically admitted.

"And they are very well matched. Ellen is a cultivated woman. He never
could have cause to blush for her, either her mind or her manners, in any
circle of society; she would do him credit under any and all
circumstances. If it were Lottie--"

"Lottie is all right," said her mother, in resentment of his preference;
but she could not help smiling at it. "Don't you be foolish about Ellen.
I approve of Mr. Breckon as much as you do. But it's her prettiness and
sweetness that's taken his fancy, and not her wisdom, if she's got him."

"If she's got him?"

"Well, you know what I mean. I'm not saying she hasn't. Dear knows, I
don't want to! I feel just as you do about it. I think it's the
greatest piece of good fortune, coming on top of all our trouble with
her. I couldn't have imagined such a thing."

He was instantly appeased. "Are you going to speak with Ellen" he
radiantly inquired.

"I will see. There's no especial hurry, is there?"

"Only, if he should happen to meet me--"

"You can keep out of his way, I reckon. Or You can put him off,
somehow."

"Yes," Kenton returned, doubtfully. "Don't," he added, "be too blunt
with Ellen. You know she didn't say anything explicit to me."

"I think I will know how to manage, Mr. Kenton."

"Yes, of course, Sarah. I'm not saying that."

Breckon did not apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and at
table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father's jealous
eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her
in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at
hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen
sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a
dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his
table, and who listened with one ear to the vigorous retorts of Lottie in
her combat with Breckon.

The judge witnessed it all with a grave displeasure, more and more
painfully apparent to his wife. She could see the impatience, the
gathering misgiving, in his face, and she perceived that she must not let
this come to conscious dissatisfaction with Breckon; she knew her husband
capable of indignation with trifling which would complicate the
situation, if it came to that. She decided to speak with Ellen as soon
as possible, and she meant to follow her to her state-room when they left
the table. But fate assorted the pieces in the game differently. Boyne
walked over to the place where Miss Rasmith was sitting with her mother;
Lottie and Mr. Pogis went off to practise duets together, terrible,
four-handed torments under which the piano presently clamored; and Ellen
stood for a moment talked to by Mr. Breckon, who challenged her then for
a walk on deck, and with whom she went away smiling.

Mrs. Kenton appealed with the reflection of the girl's happiness in her
face to the frowning censure in her husband's; but Kenton spoke first.
"What does he mean?" he demanded, darkly. "If he is making a fool of
her he'll find that that game can't be played twice, with impunity.
Sarah, I believe I should choke him."

"Mr. Kenton!" she gasped, and she trembled in fear of him, even while
she kept herself with difficulty from shaking him for his folly. "Don't
say such a thing! Can't you see that they want to talk it over? If he
hasn't spoken to you it's because he wants to know how you took what she
said." Seeing the effect of these arguments, she pursued: "Will you
never have any sense? I will speak to Ellen the very minute I get her
alone, and you have just got to wait. Don't you suppose it's hard for
me, too? Have I got nothing to bear?"

Kenton went silently back to his book, which he took with him to the
reading-room, where from time to time his wife came to him and reported
that Ellen and Breckon were still walking up and down together, or that
they were sitting down talking, or were forward, looking over at the
prow, or were watching the deck-passengers dancing. Her husband received
her successive advices with relaxing interest, and when she had brought
the last she was aware that the affair was entirely in her hands with all
the responsibility. After the gay parting between Ellen and Breckon,
which took place late in the afternoon, she suffered an interval to
elapse before she followed the girl down to her state-room. She found
her lying in her berth, with shining eyes and glad, red cheeks; she was
smiling to herself.

"That is right, Ellen," her mother said. "You need rest after your long
tramp."

"I'm not tired. We were sitting down a good deal. I didn't think how
late it was. I'm ever so much better. Where's Lottie?"

"Off somewhere with that young Englishman," said Mrs. Kenton, as if that
were of no sort of consequence. "Ellen," she added, abruptly, trying
within a tremulous smile to hide her eagerness, "what is this that Mr.
Breckon wants to talk with your father about?"

"Mr. Breckon? With poppa?"

"Yes, certainly. You told him this morning that Mr. Breckon--"

"Oh! Oh yes!" said Ellen, as if recollecting something that had slipped
her mind. "He wants poppa to advise him whether to go back to his
congregation in New York or not."

Mrs. Kenton sat in the corner of the sofa next the door, looking into the
girl's face on the pillow as she lay with her arms under her head. Tears
of defeat and shame came into her eyes, and she could not see the girl's
light nonchalance in adding:

"But he hasn't got up his courage yet. He thinks he'll ask him after
dinner. He says he doesn't want poppa to think he's posing. I don't
know what he means."

Mrs. Kenton did not speak at once. Her bitterest mortification was not
for herself, but for the simple and tender father-soul which had been so
tried already. She did not know how he would bear it, the
disappointment, and the cruel hurt to his pride. But she wanted to fall
on her knees in thankfulness that he had betrayed himself only to her.

She started in sudden alarm with the thought. "Where is he now
--Mr. Breckon?"

"He's gone with Boyne down into the baggage-room."

Mrs. Kenton sank back in her corner, aware now that she would not have
had the strength to go to her husband even to save him from the awful
disgrace of giving himself away to Breckon. "And was that all?" she
faltered.

"All?"

"That he wanted to speak to your father about?"

She must make irrefragably sure, for Kenton's sake, that she was not
misunderstanding.

"Why, of course! What else? Why, momma! what are you crying about?"

"I'm not crying, child. Just some foolishness of your father's. He
understood--he thought--" Mrs. Kenton began to laugh hysterically. "But
you know how ridiculous he is; and he supposed--No, I won't tell you!"

It was not necessary. The girl's mind, perhaps because it was imbued
already with the subject, had possessed itself of what filled her
mother's. She dropped from the elbow on which she had lifted herself,
and turned her face into the pillow, with a long wail of shame.




XVIII.

Mrs. Kenton's difficulties in setting her husband right were indefinitely
heightened by the suspicion that the most unsuspicious of men fell into
concerning Breckon. Did Breckon suppose that the matter could be turned
off in that way? he stupidly demanded; and when he was extricated from
this error by his wife's representation that Breckon had not changed at
all, but had never told Ellen that he wished to speak with him of
anything but his returning to his society, Kenton still could not accept
the fact. He would have contended that at least the other matter must
have been in Breckon's mind; and when he was beaten from this position,
and convinced that the meaning they had taken from Ellen's words had
never been in any mind but their own, he fell into humiliation so abject
that he could hide it only by the hauteur with which he carried himself
towards Breckon when they met at dinner. He would scarcely speak to the
young man; Ellen did not come to the table; Lottie and Boyne and their
friend Mr. Pogis were dining with the Rasmiths, and Mrs. Kenton had to
be, as she felt, cringingly kind to Breckon in explaining just the sort
of temporary headache that kept her eldest daughter away. He was more
than ordinarily sympathetic and polite, but he was manifestly bewildered
by Kenton's behavior. He refused an hilarious invitation from Mrs.
Rasmith, when he rose from table, to stop and have his coffee with her on
his way out of the saloon. His old adorer explained that she had ordered
a small bottle of champagne in honor of its being the night before they
were to get into Boulogne, and that he ought to sit down and help her
keep the young people straight. Julia, she brokenly syllabled, with the
gay beverage bubbling back into her throat, was not the least use; she
was worse than any. Julia did not look it, in the demure regard which
she bent upon her amusing mother, and Breckon persisted in refusing. He
said he thought he might safely leave them to Boyne, and Mrs. Rasmith
said into her handkerchief, "Oh yes! Boyne!" and pressed Boyne's sleeve
with her knobbed and jewelled fingers.

It was evident where most of the small bottle had gone, but Breckon was
none the cheerfuller for the spectacle of Mrs. Rasmith. He could not
have a moment's doubt as to the sort of work he had been doing in New
York if she were an effect of it, and he turned his mind from the sad
certainty back to the more important inquiry as to what offence his wish
to advise with Judge Kenton could have conveyed. Ellen had told him in
the afternoon that she had spoken with her father about it, and she had
not intimated any displeasure or reluctance on him; but apparently he had
decided not to suffer himself to be approached.

It might be as well. Breckon had not been able to convince himself that
his proposal to consult Judge Kenton was not a pose. He had flashes of
owning that it was contemplated merely as a means of ingratiating himself
with Ellen. Now, as he found his way up and down among the empty
steamer-chairs, he was aware, at the bottom of his heart, of not caring
in the least for Judge Kenton's repellent bearing, except as it possibly,
or impossibly, reflected some mood of hers. He could not make out her
not coming to dinner; the headache was clearly an excuse; for some reason
she did not wish to see him, he argued, with the egotism of his
condition.

The logic of his conclusion was strengthened at breakfast by her
continued absence; and this time Mrs. Kenton made no apologies for her.
The judge was a shade less severe; or else Breckon did not put himself so
much in the way to be withheld as he had the night before. Boyne and
Lottie carried on a sort of muted scrap, unrebuked by their mother, who
seemed too much distracted in some tacit trouble to mind them. From time
to time Breckon found her eyes dwelling upon him wonderingly,
entreatingly; she dropped them, if she caught his, and colored.

In the afternoon it was early evident that they were approaching
Boulogne. The hatch was opened and the sailors began getting up the
baggage of the passengers who were going to disembark. It seemed a long
time for everybody till the steamer got in; those going ashore sat on
their hand-baggage for an hour before the tug came up to take, them off.
Mr. Pogis was among them; he had begun in the forenoon to mark the
approaching separation between Lottie and himself by intervals of
unmistakable withdrawal. Another girl might have cared, but Lottie did
not care, for her failure to get a rise out of him by her mockingly
varied "Oh, I say!" and "Well, rather!" In the growth of his dignified
reserve Mr. Pogis was indifferent to jeers. By whatever tradition of
what would or would not do he was controlled in relinquishing her
acquaintance, or whether it was in obedience to some imperative ideal, or
some fearful domestic influence subtly making itself felt from the coasts
of his native island, or some fine despair of equalling the imagined
grandeur of Lottie's social state in Tuskingum by anything he could show
her in England, it was certain that he was ending with Lottie then and
there. At the same time he was carefully defining himself from the
Rasmiths, with whom he must land. He had his state-room things put at an
appreciable distance, where he did not escape a final stab from Lottie.

"Oh, do give me a rose out of that," she entreated, in travestied
imploring, as he stood looking at a withered bouquet which the steward
had brought up with his rugs.

"I'm takin' it home," he explained, coldly.

"And I want to take a rose back to New York. I want to give it to a
friend of mine there."

Mr. Pogis hesitated. Then he asked, "A man?" "Well, rather!" said
Lottie.