The Kentons

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"I don't see what that has to do with me," said Lottie. No one was
alarmed by her announcement that if she did not like Scheveningen she
should stay at The Hague, whatever the rest did; in the event fortune
favored her going with her family.

The hotel in The Hague was very pleasant, with a garden behind it, where
a companionable cat had found a dry spot, and where Lottie found the cat
and made friends with it. But she said the hotel was full of Cook's
tourists, whom she recognized, in spite of her lifelong ignorance of
them, by a prescience derived from the conversation of Mr. Pogis, and
from the instinct of a society woman, already rife in her. She found
that she could not stay in a hotel with Cook's tourists, and she took her
father's place in the exploring party which went down to the
watering-place in the afternoon, on the top of a tram-car, under the
leafy roof of the adorable avenue of trees which embowers the track to
Scheveningen. She disputed Boyne's impressions of the Dutch people, whom
he found looking more like Americans than any foreigners he had seen, and
she snubbed Breckon from his supposed charge of the party. But after the
start, when she declared that Ellen could not go, and that it was
ridiculous for her to think of it, she was very good to her, and looked
after her safety and comfort with a despotic devotion.

At the Kurhaus she promptly took the lead in choosing rooms, for she had
no doubt of staying there after the first glance at the place, and she
showed a practical sense in settling her family which at least her mother
appreciated when they were installed the next day.

Mrs. Kenton could not make her husband admire Lottie's faculty so
readily. "You think it would have been better for her to sit down with
Ellen, on the sand and dream of the sea," she reproached him, with a
tender resentment on behalf of Lottie. "Everybody can't dream."

"Yes, but I wish she didn't keep awake with such a din," said the judge.
After all, he admired Lottie's judgment about the rooms, and he censured
her with a sigh of relief from care as he sank back in the easy-chair
fronting the window that looked out on the North Sea; Lottie had already
made him appreciate the view till he was almost sick of it.

"What is the matter?" said Mrs. Kenton, sharply. "Do you want to be in
Tuskingum? I suppose you would rather be looking into Richard's
back-yard."

"No," said the judge, mildly, "this is very nice."

"It will do Ellen good, every minute. I don't care how much she sits on
the sands and dream. I'll love to see her."

The sitting on the sand was a survival of Mr. Kenton's preoccupations of
the sea-side. As a mater of fact, Ellen was at that moment sitting in
one of the hooked wicker arm-chairs which were scattered over the whole
vast beach like a growth of monstrous mushrooms, and, confronting her in
cosey proximity, Breckon sat equally hidden in another windstuhl. Her
father and her mother were able to keep them placed, among the multitude
of windstuhls, by the presence of Lottie, who hovered near them, and,
with Boyne, fended off the demure, wicked-looking little Scheveningen
girls. On a smaller scale these were exactly like their demure,
wicked-looking Scheveningen mothers, and they approached with knitting in
their hands, and with large stones folded in their aprons, which they had
pilfered from the mole, and were trying to sell for footstools. The
windstuhl men and they were enemies, and when Breckon bribed them to go
away, the windstuhl men chased them, and the little girls ran, making
mouths at Boyne over their shoulders. He scorned to notice them; but he
was obliged to report the misconduct of Lottie, who began making eyes at
the Dutch officers as soon as she could feel that Ellen was safely off
her hands. She was the more exasperating and the more culpable to Boyne,
because she had asked him to walk up the beach with her, and had then
made the fraternal promenade a basis of operations against the Dutch
military. She joined her parents in ignoring Boyne's complaints, and
continued to take credit for all the pleasant facts of the situation; she
patronized her family as much for the table d'hote at luncheon as for the
comfort of their rooms. She was able to assure them that there was not a
Cook's tourist in the hotel, where there seemed to be nearly every other
kind of fellow-creature. At the end of the first week she had
acquaintance of as many nationalities as she could reach in their native
or acquired English, in all the stages of haughty toleration, vivid
intimacy, and cold exhaustion. She had a faculty for getting through with
people, or of ceasing to have any use for them, which was perhaps her
best safeguard in her adventurous flirting; while the simple aliens were
still in the full tide of fancied success, Lottie was sick of them all,
and deep in an indiscriminate correspondence with her young men in
Tuskingum.

The letters which she had invited from these while still in New York
arrived with the first of those readdressed from the judge's London
banker. She had more letters than all the rest of the family together,
and counted a half-dozen against a poor two for her sister. Mrs. Kenton
cared nothing about Lottie's letters, but she was silently uneasy about
the two that Ellen carelessly took. She wondered who could be writing to
Ellen, especially in a cover bearing a handwriting altogether strange to
her.

"It isn't from Bittridge, at any rate," she said to her husband, in the
speculation which she made him share. "I am always dreading to have her
find out what Richard did. It would spoil everything, I'm afraid, and
now everything is going so well. I do wish Richard hadn't, though, of
course, he did it for the best. Who do you think has been writing to
her?"

"Why don't you ask her?"

"I suppose she will tell me after a while. I don't like to seem to be
following her up. One was from Bessie Pearl, I think."

Ellen did not speak of her letters to her mother, and after waiting a day
or two, Mrs. Kenton could not refrain from asking her.

"Oh, I forgot," said Ellen. "I haven't read them yet."

"Haven't read them!" said Mrs. Kenton. Then, after reflection, she
added, "You are a strange girl, Ellen," and did not venture to say more.

"I suppose I thought I should have to answer them, and that made me
careless. But I will read them." Her mother was silent, and presently
Ellen added: "I hate to think of the past. Don't you, momma?"

"It is certainly very pleasant here," said Mrs. Kenton, cautiously.
"You're enjoying yourself--I mean, you seem to be getting so much
stronger."

"Why, momma, why do you talk as if I had been sick?" Ellen asked.

"I mean you're so much interested."

"Don't I go about everywhere, like anybody?" Ellen pursued, ignoring her
explanation.

"Yes, you certainly do. Mr. Breckon seems to like going about."

Ellen did not respond to the suggestion except to say: "We go into all
sorts of places. This morning we went up on that schooner that's drawn
up on the beach, and the old man who was there was very pleasant.
I thought it was a wreck, but Mr. Breckon says they are always drawing
their ships that way up on the sand. The old man was patching some of
the wood-work, and he told Mr. Breckon--he can speak a little Dutch--that
they were going to drag her down to the water and go fishing as soon as
he was done. He seemed to think we were brother and sister." She
flushed a little, and then she said: "I believe I like the dunes as well
as anything. Sometimes when those curious cold breaths come in from the
sea we climb up in the little hollows on the other side and sit there out
of the draft. Everybody seems to do it."

Apparently Ellen was submitting the propriety of the fact to her mother,
who said: "Yes, it seems to be quite the same as it is at home. I always
supposed that it was different with young people here. There is
certainly no harm in it."

Ellen went on, irrelevantly. "I like to go and look at the Scheveningen
women mending the nets on the sand back of the dunes. They have such
good gossiping times. They shouted to us last evening, and then laughed
when they saw us watching them. When they got through their work they
got up and stamped off so strong, with their bare, red arms folded into
their aprons, and their skirts sticking out so stiff. Yes, I should like
to be like them."

"You, Ellen!"

"Yes; why not?"

Mrs. Kenton found nothing better to answer than,

"They were very material looking."

"They are very happy looking. They live in the present. That is what I
should like: living in the present, and not looking backwards or
forwards. After all, the present is the only life we've got, isn't it?"

"I suppose you may say it is," Mrs. Kenton admitted, not knowing just
where the talk was leading, but dreading to interrupt it.

"But that isn't the Scheveningen woman's only ideal. Their other ideal
is to keep the place clean. Saturday afternoon they were all out
scrubbing the brick sidewalks, and clear into the middle of the street.
We were almost ashamed to walk over the nice bricks, and we picked out as
many dirty places as we could find."

Ellen laughed, with a light-hearted gayety that was very strange to her,
and Mrs. Kenton, as she afterwards told her husband, did not know what to
think.

"I couldn't help wondering," she said, "whether the poor child would have
liked to keep on living in the present a month ago."

"Well, I'm glad you didn't say so," the judge answered.




XX.

From the easy conquest of the men who looked at her Lottie proceeded to
the subjection of the women. It would have been more difficult to put
these down, if the process had not been so largely, so almost entirely
subjective. As it was, Lottie exchanged snubs with many ladies of the
continental nationalities who were never aware of having offered or
received offence. In some cases, when they fearlessly ventured to speak
with her, they behaved very amiable, and seemed to find her conduct
sufficiently gracious in return. In fact, she was approachable enough,
and had no shame, before Boyne, in dismounting from the high horse which
she rode when alone with him, and meeting these ladies on foot, at least
half-way. She made several of them acquainted with her mother, who,
after a timorous reticence, found them very conversable, with a range of
topics, however, that shocked her American sense of decorum. One Dutch
lady talked with such manly freedom, and with such untrammelled intimacy,
that she was obliged to send Boyne and Lottie about their business, upon
an excuse that was not apparent to the Dutch lady. She only complimented
Mrs. Kenton upon her children and their devotion to each other, and when
she learned that Ellen was also her daughter, ventured the surmise she
was not long married.

"It isn't her husband," Mrs. Kenton explained, with inward trouble.
"It's just a gentleman that came over with us," and she went with her
trouble to her own husband as soon as she could.

"I'm afraid it isn't the custom to go around alone with young men as much
as Ellen thinks," she suggested.

"He ought to know," said the judge. "I don't suppose he would if it
wasn't."

"That is true," Mrs. Kenton owned, and for the time she put her
misgivings away.

"So long as we do nothing wrong," the judge decided, "I don't see why we
should not keep to our own customs."

"Lottie says they're not ours, in New York."

"Well, we are not in New York now."

They had neither of them the heart to interfere with Ellen's happiness,
for, after all, Breckon was careful enough of the appearances, and it was
only his being constantly with Ellen that suggested the Dutch lady's
surmise. In fact, the range of their wanderings was not beyond the
dunes, though once they went a little way on one of the neatly bricked
country roads that led towards The Hague. As yet there had been no
movement in any of the party to see the places that lie within such easy
tram-reach of The Hague, and the hoarded interest of the past in their
keeping. Ellen chose to dwell in the actualities which were an
enlargement of her own present, and Lottie's active spirit found
employment enough in the amusements at the Kurhaus. She shopped in the
little bazars which make a Saratoga under the colonnades fronting two
sides of the great space before the hotel, and she formed a critical and
exacting taste in music from a constant attendance at the afternoon
concerts; it is true that during the winter in New York she had cast
forever behind her the unsophisticated ideals of Tuskingum in the art, so
that from the first she was able to hold the famous orchestra that played
in the Kurhaus concert-room up to the highest standard. She had no use
for anybody who had any use for rag-time, and she was terribly severe
with a young American, primarily of Boyne's acquaintance, who tried to
make favor with her by asking about the latest coon-songs. She took the
highest ethical ground with him about tickets in a charitable lottery
which he had bought from the portier, but could not move him on the lower
level which he occupied. He offered to give her the picture which was
the chief prize, in case he won it, and she assured him beforehand that
she should not take it. She warned Boyne against him, under threats of
exposure to their mother, as not a good influence, but one afternoon,
when the young Queen of Holland came to the concert with the
queen-mother, Lottie cast her prejudices to the winds in accepting the
places which the wicked fellow-countryman offered Boyne and herself, when
they had failed to get any where they could see the queens, as the Dutch
called them.

The hotel was draped with flags, and banked with flowers about the main
entrance where the queens were to arrive, and the guests massed
themselves in a dense lane for them to pass through. Lottie could not
fail to be one of the foremost in this array, and she was able to decide,
when the queens had passed, that the younger would not be considered a
more than average pretty girl in America, and that she was not very well
dressed. They had all stood within five feet of her, and Boyne had
appropriated one of the prettiest of the pretty bends which the gracious
young creature made to right and left, and had responded to it with an
'empressement' which he hoped had not been a sacrifice of his republican
principles.

During the concert he sat with his eyes fixed upon the Queen where she
sat in the royal box, with her mother and her ladies behind her, and
wondered and blushed to wonder if she had noticed him when he bowed, or
if his chivalric devotion in applauding her when the audience rose to
receive her had been more apparent than that of others; whether it had
seemed the heroic act of setting forth at the head of her armies, to beat
back a German invasion, which it had essentially been, with his
instantaneous return as victor, and the Queen's abdication and adoption
of republican principles under conviction of his reasoning, and her
idolized consecration as the first chief of the Dutch republic. His
cheeks glowed, and he quaked at heart lest Lottie should surprise his
thoughts and expose them to that sarcastic acquaintance, who proved to be
a medical student resting at Scheveningen from the winter's courses and
clinics in, Vienna. He had already got on to many of Boyne's curves, and
had sacrilegiously suggested the Queen of Holland when he found him
feeding his fancy on the modern heroical romances; he advised him as an
American adventurer to compete with the European princes paying court to
her. So thin a barrier divided that malign intelligence from Boyne's
most secret dreams that he could never feel quite safe from him, and yet
he was always finding himself with him, now that he was separated from
Miss Rasmith, and Mr. Breckon was taken up so much with Ellen. On the
ship he could put many things before Mr. Breckon which must here perish
in his breast, or suffer the blight of this Mr. Trannel's raillery. The
student sat near the Kentons at table, and he was no more reverent of the
judge's modest convictions than of Boyne's fantastic preoccupations. The
worst of him was that you could not help liking him: he had a fascination
which the boy felt while he dreaded him, and now and then he did
something so pleasant that when he said something unpleasant you could
hardly believe it.

At the end of the concert, when he rose and stood with all the rest,
while the royal party left their box, and the orchestra played the Dutch
national hymn, he said, in a loud whisper, to Boyne: "Now's your time, my
boy! Hurry out and hand her into her carriage!"

Boyne fairly reeled at the words which translated a passage of the wild
drama playing itself in his brain, and found little support in bidding
his tormentor, "Shut up!" The retort, rude as it was, seemed
insufficient, but Boyne tried in vain to think of something else. He
tried to punish him by separating Lottie from him, but failed as signally
in that. She went off with him, and sat in a windstuhl facing his the
rest of the afternoon, with every effect of carrying on.

Boyne was helpless, with his mother against it, when he appealed to her
to let him go and tell Lottie that she wanted her. Mrs. Kenton said that
she saw no harm in it, that Ellen was sitting in like manner with Mr.
Breckon.

"Mr. Breckon is very different, and Ellen knows how to behave," he urged,
but his mother remained unmoved, or was too absent about something to
take any interest in the matter. In fact, she was again unhappy about
Ellen, though she put on such an air of being easy about her. Clearly,
so far as her maternal surmise could fathom the case, Mr. Breckon was
more and more interested in Ellen, and it was evident that the child was
interested in him. The situation was everything that was acceptable to
Mrs. Kenton, but she shuddered at the cloud which hung over it, and which
might any moment involve it. Again and again she had made sure that
Lottie had given Ellen no hint of Richard's ill-advised vengeance upon
Bittridge; but it was not a thing that could be kept always, and the
question was whether it could be kept till Ellen had accepted Mr. Breckon
and married him. This was beyond the question of his asking her to do
so, but it was so much more important that Mrs. Kenton was giving it her
attention first, quite out of the order of time. Besides, she had every
reason, as she felt, to count upon the event. Unless he was trifling
with Ellen, far more wickedly than Bittridge, he was in love with her,
and in Mrs. Kenton's simple experience and philosophy of life, being in
love was briefly preliminary to marrying. If she went with her anxieties
to her husband, she had first to reduce him from a buoyant optimism
concerning the affair before she could get him to listen seriously.
When this was accomplished he fell into such despair that she ended in
lifting him up and supporting him with hopes that she did not feel
herself. What they were both united in was the conviction that nothing
so good could happen in the world, but they were equally united in the
old American tradition that they must not lift a finger to secure this
supreme good for their child.

It did not seem to them that leaving the young people constantly to
themselves was doing this. They interfered with Ellen now neither more
nor less than they had interfered with her as to Bittridge, or than they
would have interfered with her in the case of any one else. She was
still to be left entirely to herself in such matters, and Mrs. Kenton
would have kept even her thoughts off her if she could. She would have
been very glad to give her mind wholly to the study of the great events
which had long interested her here in their scene, but she felt that
until the conquest of Mr. Breckon was secured beyond the hazard of
Ellen's morbid defection at the supreme moment, she could not give her
mind to the history of the Dutch republic.

"Don't bother me about Lottie, Boyne," she said. "I have enough to think
of without your nonsense. If this Mr. Trannel is an American, that is
all that is necessary. We are all Americans together, and I don't
believe it will make remark, Lottie's sitting on the beach with him."

"I don't see how he's different from that Bittridge," said Boyne. "He
doesn't care for anything; and he plays the banjo just like him."

Mrs. Kenton was too troubled to laugh. She said, with finality, "Lottie
can take care of herself," and then she asked, "Boyne, do you know whom
Ellen's letters were from?"

"One was from Bessie Pearl--"

"Yes, she showed me that. But you don't know who the other was from?"

"No; she didn't tell me. You know how close Ellen is."

"Yes," the mother sighed, "she is very odd."

Then she added, "Don't you let her know that I asked you about her
letters."

"No," said Boyne. His audience was apparently at an end, but he seemed
still to have something on his mind. "Momma," he began afresh.

"Well?" she answered, a little impatiently.

"Nothing. Only I got to thinking, Is a person able to control their
--their fancies?"

"Fancies about what?"

"Oh, I don't know. About falling in love." Boyne blushed.

"Why do you want to know? You musn't think about such things, a boy like
you! It's a great pity that you ever knew anything about that Bittridge
business. It's made you too bold. But it seems to have been meant to
drag us down and humiliate us in every way."

"Well, I didn't try to know anything about it," Boyne retorted.

"No, that's true," his mother did him the justice to recognize. "Well,
what is it you want to know?" Boyne was too hurt to answer at once, and
his mother had to coax him a little. She did it sweetly, and apologized
to him for saying what she had said. After all, he was the youngest, and
her baby still. Her words and caresses took effect at last, and he
stammered out, "Is everybody so, or is it only the Kentons that seem to
be always putting--well, their affections--where it's perfectly useless?"

His mother pushed him from her. "Boyne, are you silly about that
ridiculous old Miss Rasmith?"

"No!" Boyne shouted, savagely, "I'm NOT!"

"Who is it, then?"

"I sha'n't tell you!" Boyne said, and tears of rage and shame came into
his eyes.





XXI.

In his exile from his kindred, for it came practically to that, Boyne was
able to add a fine gloom to the state which he commonly observed with
himself when he was not giving way to his morbid fancies or his morbid
fears, and breaking down in helpless subjection to the nearest member of
his household. Lottie was so taken up with her student that she scarcely
quarrelled with him any more, and they had no longer those moments of
union in which they stood together against the world. His mother had
cast him off, as he felt, very heartlessly, though it was really because
she could not give his absurdities due thought in view of the hopeful
seriousness of Ellen's affair, and Boyne was aware that his father at the
best of times was ignorant of him when he was not impatient of him.
These were not the best of times with Judge Kenton, and Boyne was not the
first object of his impatience. In the last analysis he was living until
he could get home, and so largely in the hope of this that his wife at
times could scarcely keep him from taking some step that would decide the
matter between Ellen and Breckon at once. They were tacitly agreed that
they were waiting for nothing else, and, without making their agreement
explicit, she was able to quell him by asking what he expected to do in
case there was nothing between them? Was he going to take the child back
to Tuskingum, which was the same as taking her back to Bittridge? it hurt
her to confront him with this question, and she tried other devices for
staying and appeasing him. She begged him now, seeing Boyne so forlorn,
and hanging about the hotel alone, or moping over those ridiculous books
of his, to go off with the boy somewhere and see the interesting places
within such easy reach, like Leyden and Delft if he cared nothing for the
place where William the Silent was shot, he ought to see the place that
the Pilgrims started from. She had counted upon doing those places
herself, with her husband, and it was in a sacrifice of her ideal that
she now urged him to go with Boyne. But her preoccupation with Ellen's
affair forbade her self-abandon to those high historical interests to
which she urged his devotion. She might have gone with him and Boyne, but
then she must have left the larger half of her divided mind with Ellen,
not to speak of Lottie, who refused to be a party to any such excursion.
Mrs. Kenton felt the disappointment and grieved at it, but not without
hope of repairing it later, and she did not cease from entreating the
judge to do what he could at once towards fulfilling the desires she
postponed. Once she prevailed with him, and really got him and Boyne off
for a day, but they came back early, with signs of having bored each
other intolerably, and after that it was Boyne, as much as his father,
who relucted from joint expeditions. Boyne did not so much object to
going alone, and his father said it was best to let him, though his
mother had her fears for her youngest. He spent a good deal of his time
on the trams between Scheveningen and The Hague, and he was understood to
have explored the capital pretty thoroughly. In fact, he did go about
with a valet de place, whom he got at a cheap rate, and with whom he
conversed upon the state of the country and its political affairs. The
valet said that the only enemy that Holland could fear was Germany, but
an invasion from that quarter could be easily repulsed by cutting the
dikes and drowning the invaders. The sea, he taught Boyne, was the great
defence of Holland, and it was a waste of money to keep such an army as
the Dutch had; but neither the sea nor the sword could drive out the
Germans if once they insidiously married a Prussian prince to the Dutch
Queen.