The Kentons

W >> William Dean Howells >> The Kentons


He answered nothing, but looked definitively down at the flowers in his
hand.

"Oh, I say!" Lottie exulted.

Boyne remained fixed in fealty to the Rasmiths, with whom Breckon was
also talking as Mrs. Kenton came up with the judge. She explained how
sorry her daughter Ellen was at not being able to say goodbye; she was
still not at all well; and the ladies received her excuses with polite
patience. Mrs. Rasmith said she did not know what they should do without
Boyne, and Miss Rasmith put her arm across his shoulders and pulled him
up to her, and implored, "Oh, give him to me, Mrs. Kenton!"

Boyne stole an ashamed look at his mother, and his father said, with an
unbending to Breckon which must have been the effect of severe
expostulation from Mrs. Kenton, "I suppose you and the ladies will go to
Paris together."

"Why, no," Breckon said, and he added, with mounting confusion, "I--I had
arranged to keep on to Rotterdam. I was going to mention it."

"Keep on to Rotterdam!" Mrs. Rasmith's eyes expressed the greatest
astonishment.

"Why, of course, mother!" said her daughter. "Don't you know? Boyne
told us."

Boyne, after their parting, seized the first chance of assuring his
mother that he had not told Miss Rasmith that, for he had not known it,
and he went so far in her condemnation to wonder how she could say such
a thing. His mother said it was not very nice, and then suggested that
perhaps she had heard it from some one else, and thought it was he. She
acquitted him of complicity with Miss Rasmith in forbearing to contradict
her; and it seemed to her a fitting time to find out from Boyne what she
honestly could about the relation of the Rasmiths to Mr. Breckon. It was
very little beyond their supposition, which every one else had shared,
that he was going to land with them at Boulogne, and he must have changed
his mind very suddenly. Boyne had not heard the Rasmiths speak of it.
Miss Rasmith never spoke of Mr. Breckon at all; but she seemed to want to
talk of Ellen; she was always asking about her, and what was the matter
with her, and how long she had been sick.

"Boyne," said his mother, with a pang, "you didn't tell her anything
about Ellen?"

"Momma!" said the boy, in such evident abhorrence of the idea that she
rested tranquil concerning it. She paid little attention to what Boyne
told her otherwise of the Rasmiths. Her own horizon were so limited that
she could not have brought home to herself within them that wandering
life the Rasmiths led from climate to climate and sensation to sensation,
with no stay so long as the annually made in New York, where they
sometimes passed months enough to establish themselves in giving and
taking tea in a circle of kindred nomads. She conjectured as ignorantly
as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would not have
enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a California
politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period following
upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith's father, whose name was
not Rasmith.

What Mrs. Kenton divined was that they had wanted to get Breckon, and
that so far as concerned her own interest in him they had wanted to get
him away from Ellen. In her innermost self-confidences she did not
permit herself the notion that Ellen had any right to him; but still it
was a relief to have them off the ship, and to have him left. Of all the
witnesses of the fact, she alone did not find it awkward. Breckon
himself found it very awkward. He did not wish to be with the Rasmiths,
but he found it uncomfortable not being with them, under the
circumstances, and he followed them ashore in tingling reveries of
explanation and apology. He had certainly meant to get off at Boulogne,
and when he had suddenly and tardily made up his mind to keep on to
Rotterdam, he had meant to tell them as soon as he had the labels on his
baggage changed. He had not meant to tell them why he had changed his
mind, and he did not tell them now in these tingling reveries. He did
not own the reason in his secret thoughts, for it no longer seemed a
reason; it no longer seemed a cause. He knew what the Rasmiths would
think; but he could easily make that right with his conscience, at least,
by parting with the Kentons at Rotterdam, and leaving them to find their
unconducted way to any point they chose beyond. He separated himself
uncomfortably from them when the tender had put off with her passengers
and the ship had got under way again, and went to the smoking-room, while
the judge returned to his book and Mrs. Kenton abandoned Lottie to her
own devices, and took Boyne aside for her apparently fruitless inquiries.

They were not really so fruitless but that at the end of them she could
go with due authority to look up her husband. She gently took his book
from him and shut it up. "Now, Mr. Kenton," she began, "if you don't go
right straight and find Mr. Breckon and talk with him, I--I don't know
what I will do. You must talk to him--"

"About Ellen?" the judge frowned.

"No, certainly not. Talk with him about anything that interests you. Be
pleasant to him. Can't you see that he's going on to Rotterdam on our
account?"

"Then I wish he wasn't. There's no use in it."

"No matter! It's polite in him, and I want you to show him that you
appreciate it."

"Now see here, Sarah," said the judge, "if you want him shown that we
appreciate his politeness why don't you do it yourself?"

"I? Because it would look as if you were afraid to. It would look as if
we meant something by it."

"Well, I am afraid; and that's just what I'm afraid of. I declare, my
heart comes into my mouth whenever I think what an escape we had. I
think of it whenever I look at him, and I couldn't talk to him without
having that in my mind all the time. No, women can manage those things
better. If you believe he is going along on our account, so as to help
us see Holland, and to keep us from getting into scrapes, you're the one
to make it up to him. I don't care what you say to show him our
gratitude. I reckon we will get into all sorts of trouble if we're left
to ourselves. But if you think he's stayed because he wants to be with
Ellen, and--"

"Oh, I don't KNOW what I think! And that's silly I can't talk to him.
I'm afraid it'll seem as if we wanted to flatter him, and goodness knows
we don't want to. Or, yes, we do! I'd give anything if it was true.
Rufus, do you suppose he did stay on her account? My, oh my! If I
could only think so! Wouldn't it be the best thing in the world for the
poor child, and for all of us? I never saw anybody that I liked so much.
But it's too good to be true."

"He's a nice fellow, but I don't think he's any too good for Ellen."

"I'm not saying he is. The great thing is that he's good enough, and
gracious knows what will happen if she meets some other worthless fellow,
and gets befooled with him! Or if she doesn't take a fancy to some one,
and goes back to Tuskingum without seeing any one else she likes, there
is that awful wretch, and when she hears what Dick did to him--she's just
wrong-headed enough to take up with him again to make amends to him. Oh,
dear oh, dear! I know Lottie will let it out to her yet!"

The judge began threateningly, "You tell Lottie from me--"

"What?" said the girl herself, who had seen her father and mother
talking together in a remote corner of the music-room and had stolen
light-footedly upon them just at this moment.

"Lottie, child," said her mother, undismayed at Lottie's arrival in her
larger anxiety, "I wish you would try and be agreeable to Mr. Breckon.
Now that he's going on with us to Holland, I don't want him to think
we're avoiding him."

"Why?"

"Oh, because."

"Because you want to get him for Ellen?"

"Don't be impudent," said her father. "You do as your mother bids you."

"Be agreeable to that old Breckon? I think I see myself! I'd sooner
read! I'm going to get a book now." She left them as abruptly as she
had come upon them, and ran across to the bookcase, where she remained
two stepping and peering through the glass doors at the literature
within, in unaccustomed question concerning it.

"She's a case," said the judge, looking at her not only with relenting,
but with the pride in her sufficiency for all the exigencies of life
which he could not feel in Ellen. "She can take care of herself."

"Oh yes," Mrs. Kenton sadly assented, "I don't think anybody will ever
make a fool of Lottie."

"It's a great deal more likely to be the other way," her father
suggested.

"I think Lottie is conscientious," Mrs. Kenton protested. "She wouldn't
really fool with a man."

"No, she's a good girl," the judge owned.

"It's girls like Ellen who make the trouble and the care. They are too
good, and you have to think some evil in this world. Well!" She rose
and gave her husband back his book.

"Do you know where Boyne is?"

"No. Do you want him to be pleasant to Mr. Breckon?"

"Somebody has got to. But it would be ridiculous if nobody but Boyne
was."

She did not find Boyne, after no very exhaustive search, and the boy was
left to form his bearing towards Breckon on the behavior of the rest of
his family. As this continued helplessly constrained both in his father
and mother, and voluntarily repellent in Lottie, Boyne decided upon a
blend of conduct which left Breckon in greater and greater doubt of his
wisdom in keeping on to Rotterdam. There was no good reason which he
would have been willing to give himself, from the beginning. It had been
an impulse, suddenly coming upon him in the baggage-room where he had
gone to get something out of his trunk, and where he had decided to have
the label of his baggage changed from the original destination at
Boulogne to the final port of the steamer's arrival. When this was once
done he was sorry, but he was ashamed to have the label changed back.
The most assignable motive for his act was his reluctance to go on to
Paris with the Rasmiths, or rather with Mrs. Rasmith; for with her
daughter, who was not a bad fellow, one could always manage. He was
quite aware of being safely in his own hands against any design of Mrs.
Rasmith's, but her machinations humiliated him for her; he hated to see
her going through her manoeuvres, and he could not help grieving for her
failures, with a sort of impersonal sympathy, all the more because he
disliked her as little as he respected her.

The motive which he did not assign to himself was that which probably
prevailed with him, though in the last analysis it was as selfish, no
doubt, as the one he acknowledged. Ellen Kenton still piqued his
curiosity, still touched his compassion. He had so far from exhausted
his wish or his power to befriend her, to help her, that he had still a
wholly unsatisfied longing to console her, especially when she drooped
into that listless attitude she was apt to take, with her face fallen and
her hands let lie, the back of one in the palm of the other, in her lap.
It was possibly the vision of this following him to the baggage-room,
when he went to open his trunk, that as much as anything decided him to
have the label changed on his baggage, but he did not own it then, and
still less did he own it now, when he found himself quite on his own
hands for his pains.

He felt that for some reason the Kentons were all avoiding him. Ellen,
indeed, did not take part, against him, unless negatively, for she had
appeared neither at lunch nor at dinner as the vessel kept on its way
after leaving Boulogne; and when he ventured to ask for her Mrs. Kenton
answered with embarrassment that she was not feeling very well. He asked
for her at lunch, but not at dinner, and when he had finished that meal
he went on the promenade-deck, and walked forlornly up and down, feeling
that he had been a fool.

Mrs. Kenton went below to her daughter's room, and found Ellen there on
the sofa, with her book shut on her thumb at the place where the twilight
had failed her.

"Ellen, dear," her mother said, "aren't you feeling well?"

"Yes, I'm well enough," said the girl, sensible of a leading in the
question. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing. Only--only I can't make your father behave naturally with
Mr. Breckon. He's got his mind so full of that mistake we both came so
near making that he can't think of anything else. He's so sheepish about
it that he can hardly speak to him or even look at him; and I must
confess that I don't do much better. You know I don't like to put myself
forward where your father is, and if I did, really I don't believe I
could make up my mouth to say anything. I did want Lottie to be nice to
him, but Lottie dislikes him so! And even Boyne--well, it wouldn't
matter about Boyne, if he didn't seem to be carrying out a sort of family
plan--Boyne barely answers him when he speaks to him. I don't know what
he can think." Ellen was a good listener, and Mrs. Kenton, having
begun, did not stop till she had emptied the bag. "I just know that he
didn't get off at Boulogne because he wanted to stay on with us, and
thought he could be useful to us at The Hague, and everywhere; and here
we're acting as ungratefully! Why, we're not even commonly polite to
him, and I know he feels it. I know that he's hurt."

Ellen rose and stood before the glass, into which he asked of her
mother's reflected face, while she knotted a fallen coil of hair into its
place, "Where is he?"

"I don't know. He went on deck somewhere."

Ellen put on her hat and pinned it, and put on her jacket and buttoned
it. Then she started towards the door. Her mother made way for her,
faltering, "What are you going to do, Ellen?"

"I am going to do right."

"Don't-catch cold!" her mother called after her figure vanishing down
the corridor, but the warning couched in these terms had really no
reference to the weather.

The girl's impulse was one of those effects of the weak will in her which
were apt to leave her short of the fulfilment of a purpose. It carried
her as her as the promenade, which she found empty, and she went and
leaned upon the rail, and looked out over the sorrowful North Sea, which
was washing darkly away towards where the gloomy sunset had been.

Steps from the other side of the ship approached, hesitated towards her,
and then arrested themselves. She looked round.

"Why, Miss Kenton!" said Breckon, stupidly.

"The sunset is over, isn't it?" she answered.

"The twilight isn't." Breckon stopped; then he asked, "Wouldn't you like
to take a little walk?"

"Yes," she answered, and smiled fully upon him. He had never known
before how radiant a smile she lead.

"Better have my arm. It's getting rather dark."

"Well." She put her hand on his arm and he felt it tremble there, while
she palpitated, "We are all so glad you could go on to Rotterdam. My
mother wanted me to tell you."

"Oh, don't speak of that," said Breckon, not very appositely. Presently
he forced a laugh, in order to add, with lightness, "I was afraid perhaps
I had given you all some reason to regret it!"

She said, "I was afraid you would think that--or momma was--and I
couldn't bear to have you."

"Well, then, I won't."





XIX.

Breckon had answered with gayety, but his happiness was something beyond
gayety. He had really felt the exclusion from the Kentons in which he
had passed the day, and he had felt it the more painfully because he
liked them all. It may be owned that he liked Ellen best from the
beginning, and now he liked her better than ever, but even in the day's
exile he had not ceased to like each of them. They were, in their family
affection, as lovable as that sort of selfishness can make people. They
were very united and good to one another. Lottie herself, except in her
most lurid moments, was good to her brother and sister, and almost
invariably kind to her parents. She would not, Breckon saw, have brooked
much meddling with her flirtations from them, but as they did not offer
to meddle, she had no occasion to grumble on that score. She grumbled
when they asked her to do things for Ellen, but she did them, and though
she never did them without grumbling, she sometimes did them without
being asked. She was really very watchful of Ellen when it would least
have been expected, and sometimes she was sweet. She never was sweet
with Boyne, but she was often his friend, though this did not keep her
from turning upon him at the first chance to give him a little dig, or a
large one, for that matter. As for Boyne, he was a mass of helpless
sweetness, though he did not know it, and sometimes took himself for an
iceberg when he was merely an ice-cream of heroic mould. He was as
helplessly sweet with Lottie as with any one, and if he suffered keenly
from her treacheries, and seized every occasion to repay them in kind,
it was clearly a matter of conscience with him, and always for the good.
Their father and mother treated their squabbles very wisely, Breckon
thought. They ignored them as much as possible, and they recognized them
without attempting to do that justice between them which would have
rankled in both their breasts.

To a spectator who had been critical at first, Mr. and Mrs. Kenton seemed
an exemplary father and mother with Ellen as well as with their other
children. It is easy to be exemplary with a sick girl, but they
increasingly affected Breckon as exemplary with Ellen. He fancied that
they acted upon each other beneficially towards her. At first he had
foreboded some tiresome boasting from the father's tenderness, and some
weak indulgence of the daughter's whims from her mother; but there was
either never any ground for this, or else Mrs. Kenton, in keeping her
husband from boasting, had been obliged in mere consistency to set a
guard upon her own fondness.

It was not that. Ellen, he was more and more decided, would have abused
the weakness of either; if there was anything more angelic than her
patience, it was her wish to be a comfort to them, and, between the
caprices of her invalidism, to be a service. It was pathetic to see her
remembering to do things for them which Boyne and Lottie had forgotten,
or plainly shirked doing, and to keep the fact out of sight. She really
kept it out of sight with them, and if she did not hide it from so close
an observer as Breckon, that was more his fault than hers. When her
father first launched out in her praise, or the praise of her reading,
the young man had dreaded a rustic prig; yet she had never been a prig,
but simply glad of what book she had known, and meekly submissive to his
knowledge if not his taste. He owned that she had a right to her taste,
which he found almost always good, and accounted for as instinctive in
the absence of an imaginable culture in her imaginable ambient. So far
as he had glimpses of this, he found it so different from anything he had
known that the modest adequacy of Mrs. Kenton in the political
experiences of modern Europe, as well as the clear judgments of Kenton
himself in matters sometimes beyond Breekon himself, mystified him no
less than Ellen's taste.

Even with the growth of his respect for their intelligence and his love
of their kindliness, he had not been able to keep a certain patronage
from mingling, and it was not till they evinced not only entire ability,
but an apparent wish to get on without his approval, without his
acquaintance even, that he had conceived a just sense of them. The like
is apt to happen with the best of us, when we are also the finest, and
Breckon was not singular in coming to a due consciousness of something
valuable only in the hour of its loss. He did not know that the loss was
only apparent. He knew that he had made a distinct sacrifice for these
people, and that, when he had prepared himself to befriend them little
short of self-devotion, they showed themselves indifferent, and almost
repellent. In the revulsion of feeling, when Ellen gave him her mother's
message, and frankly offered him reparation on behalf of her whole
family, he may have overdone his gratitude, but he did not overdo it to
her perception. They walked up and down the promenade of the Amstel, in
the watery North Sea moon, while bells after bells noted the hour
unheeded, and when they parted for the night it was with an involuntary
pressure of hands, from which she suddenly pulled hers, and ran down the
corridor of her state-room and Lottie's.

He stood watching the narrow space in which she had vanished, and
thinking how gentle she was, and how she had contrived somehow to make
him feel that now it was she who had been consoling him, and trying to
interest him and amuse him. He had not realized that before; he had been
used to interesting and amusing her, but he could not resent it; he could
not resent the implication of superiority, if such a thing were possible,
which her kindness conveyed. The question with Breckon was whether she
had walked with him so long because she wished, in the hour, to make up
as fully as possible for the day's neglect, or because she had liked to
walk up and down with him. It was a question he found keeping itself
poignantly, yet pleasantly, in his mind, after he had got into his berth
under the solidly slumberous Boyne, and inclining now to one solution and
now to the other, with a delicate oscillation that was charming.

The Amstel took her time to get into Rotterdam, and when her passengers
had gone ashore the next forenoon the train that carried Breckon to The
Hague in the same compartment with the Kentons was in no greater hurry.
It arrived with a deliberation which kept it from carrying them on to
Amsterdam before they knew it, and Mrs. Kenton had time to place such
parts of the wars in the Rise of the Dutch Republic as she could attach
to the names of the stations and the general features of the landscape.
Boyne was occupied with improvements for the windmills and the
canal-boats, which did not seem to him of the quality of the Michigan
aerometers, or the craft with which he was familiar on the Hudson River
and on the canal that passed through Tuskingum. Lottie, with respect to
the canals, offered the frank observation that they smelt, and in
recognizing a fact which travel almost universally ignores in Holland,
she watched her chance of popping up the window between herself and
Boyne, which Boyne put down with mounting rage. The agriculture which
triumphed everywhere on the little half--acre plots lifted fifteen inches
above the waters of the environing ditches, and the black and white
cattle everywhere attesting the immemorial Dutch ideal of a cow, were
what at first occupied Kenton, and he was tardily won from them to the
question of fighting over a country like that. It was a concession to
his wife's impassioned interest in the overthrow of the Spaniards in a
landscape which had evidently not changed since. She said it was hard to
realize that Holland was not still a republic, and she was not very
patient with Breckon's defence of the monarchy on the ground that the
young Queen was a very pretty girl.

"And she is only sixteen," Boyne urged.

"Then she is two years too old for you," said Lottie.

"No such thing!" Boyne retorted. "I was fifteen in June."

"Dear me! I should never have thought it," said his sister.

Ellen seemed hardly to look out of the window at anything directly, but
when her father bade her see this thing and that, it seemed that she had
seen it already. She said at last, with a quiet sigh, "I never want to
go away."

She had been a little shy of Breckon the whole morning, and had kept him
asking himself whether she was sorry she had walked so long with him the
night before, or, having offered him due reparation for her family, she
was again dropping him. Now and then he put her to the test by words
explicitly directed at her, and she replied with the dreamy passivity
which seemed her normal mood, and in which he could fancy himself half
forgotten, or remembered with an effort.

In the midst of this doubt she surprised him--he reflected that she was
always surprising him--by asking him how far it was from The Hague to the
sea. He explained that The Hague was in the sea like all the rest of
Holland, but that if she meant the shore, it was no distance at all.
Then she said, vaguely, she wished they were going to the shore. Her
father asked Breckon if there was not a hotel at the beach, and the young
man tried to give him a notion of the splendors of the Kurhaus at
Scheveningen; of Scheveningen itself he despaired of giving any just
notion.

"Then we can go there," said the judge, ignoring Ellen, in his decision,
as if she had nothing to do with it.

Lottie interposed a vivid preference for The Hague. She had, she said,
had enough of the sea for one while, and did not want to look at it again
till they sailed for home. Boyne turned to his father as if a good deal
shaken by this reasoning, and it was Mrs. Kenton who carried the day for
going first to a hotel in The Hague and prospecting from there in the
direction of Scheveningen; Boyne and his father could go down to the
shore and see which they liked best.