The Kentons

W >> William Dean Howells >> The Kentons


There seemed to be no getting away from the Queen, for Boyne. The valet
not only talked about her, as the pleasantest subject which he could
find, but he insisted upon showing Boyne all her palaces. He took him
into the Parliament house, and showed him where she sat while the
queen-mother read the address from the throne. He introduced him at a
bazar where the shop-girl who spoke English better than Boyne, or at
least without the central Ohio accent, wanted to sell him a miniature of
the Queen on porcelain. She said the Queen was such a nice girl, and she
was herself such a nice girl that Boyne blushed a little in looking at
her. He bought the miniature, and then he did not know what to do with
it; if any of the family, if Lottie, found out that he had it, or that
Trannel, he should have no peace any more. He put it in his pocket,
provisionally, and when he came giddily out of the shop he felt himself
taken by the elbow and placed against the wall by the valet, who said the
queens were coming. They drove down slowly through the crowded, narrow
street, bowing right and left to the people flattened against the shops,
and again Boyne saw her so near that he could have reached out his hand
and almost touched hers.

The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether
he had not tried to do so. If he had he would have been arrested
--he knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it. He knew that he
imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he
imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic. At the
same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and she became
aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the anarchist
from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been meant for
her. Perhaps it was a pistol.

He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to
Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before him.
They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter there,
and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the other
spectators and wait for the queens to appear and get into their carriage.
The young Queen's looks were stamped in Boyne's consciousness, so that he
saw her wherever he turned, like the sun when one has gazed at it. He
thought how that Trannel had said he ought to hand her into her carriage,
and he shrank away for fear he should try to do so, but he could not
leave the place till she had come out with the queen--mother and driven
off. Then he went slowly and breathlessly into the hotel, feeling the
Queen's miniature in his pocket. It made his heart stand still, and then
bound forward. He wondered again what he should do with it. If he kept
it, Lottie would be sure to find it, and he could not bring himself to
the sacrilege of destroying it. He thought he would walk out on the
breakwater as far as he could and throw it into the sea, but when he got
to the end of the mole he could not do so. He decided that he would give
it to Ellen to keep for him, and not let Lottie see it; or perhaps he
might pretend he had bought it for her. He could not do that, though,
for it would not be true, and if he did he could not ask her to keep it
from Lottie.

At dinner Mr. Trannel told him he ought to have been there to see the
Queen; that she had asked especially for him, and wanted to know if they
had not sent up her card to him. Boyne meditated an apt answer through
all the courses, but he had not thought of one when they had come to the
'corbeille de fruits', and he was forced to go to bed without having
avenged himself.

In taking rooms for her family at the hotel, Lottie had arranged for her
emancipation from the thraldom of rooming with Ellen. She said that had
gone on long enough; if she was grown up at all, she was grown up enough
to have a room of her own, and her mother had yielded to reasoning which
began and ended with this position. She would have interfered so far as
to put Lottie into the room next her, but Lottie said that if Boyne was
the baby he ought to be next his mother; Ellen might come next him, but
she was going to have the room that was furthest from any implication of
the dependence in which she had languished; and her mother submitted
again. Boyne was not sorry; there had always been hours of the night
when he felt the need of getting at his mother for reassurance as to
forebodings which his fancy conjured up to trouble him in the wakeful
dark. It was understood that he might freely do this, and though the
judge inwardly fretted, he could not deny the boy the comfort of his
mother's encouraging love. Boyne's visits woke him, but he slept the
better for indulging in the young nerves that tremor from impressions
against which the old nerves are proof. But now, in the strange fatality
which seemed to involve him, Boyne could not go to his mother. It was
too weirdly intimate, even for her; besides, when he had already tried to
seek her counsel she had ignorantly repelled him.

The night after his day in The Hague, when he could bear it no longer, he
put on his dressing-gown and softly opened Ellen's door, "awake, Ellen?"
he whispered.

"Yes, What is it, Boyne" her gentle voice asked.

"He came and sat down by her bed and stole his hand into hers, which she
put out to him. The watery moonlight dripped into the room at the edges
of the shades, and the long wash of the sea made itself regularly heard
on the sands.

"Can't you sleep?" Ellen asked again. "Are you homesick?"

"Not exactly that. But it does seem rather strange for us to be off here
so far, doesn't it?"

"Yes, I don't see how I can forgive myself for making you come," said
Ellen, but her voice did not sound as if she were very unhappy.

"You couldn't help it," said Boyne, and the words suggested a question to
him. "Do you believe that such things are ordered, Ellen?"

"Everything is ordered, isn't it?"

"I suppose so. And if they are, we're not, to blame for what happens."

"Not if we try to do right."

"Of course. The Kentons always do that," said Boyne, with the faith in
his family that did not fail him in the darkest hour. "But what I mean
is that if anything comes on you that you can't foresee and you can't get
out of--" The next step was not clear, and Boyne paused. He asked,

"Do you think that we can control our feelings, Ellen?"

"About what?"

"Well, about persons that we like." He added, for safety, "Or dislike."

"I'm afraid not," said Ellen, sadly, "We ought to like persons and
dislike them for some good reason, but we don't."

"Yes, that's what I mean," said Borne, with a long breath. "Sometimes it
seems like a kind of possession, doesn't it?"

"It seems more like that when we like them," Ellen said.

"Yes, that's what I mean. If a person was to take a fancy to some one
that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn't be to blame
for it, would he?"

"Was that what you wanted to ask me about?"

Borne hesitated. "Yes" he said. He was in for it now.

Ellen had not noticed Boyne's absorption with Miss Rasmith on the ship,
but she vaguely remembered hearing Lottie tease him about her, and she
said now, "He wouldn't be to blame for it if he couldn't help it, but if
the person was much older it would be a pity!"

"Uh, she isn't so very much older," said Borne, more cheerfully than he
had spoken before.

"Is it somebody that you have taken a fancy to Borne?"

"I don't know, Ellen. That's what makes it so kind of awful. I can't
tell whether it's a real fancy, or I only think it is. Sometimes I think
it is, and sometimes I think that I think so because I am afraid to
believe it. Do you under Ellen?"

"It seems to me that I do. But you oughtn't to let your fancy run away
with you, Boyne. What a queer boy!"

"It's a kind of fascination, I suppose. But whether it's a real fancy or
an unreal one, I can't get away from it."

"Poor boy!" said his sister.

"Perhaps it's those books. Sometimes I think it is, and I laugh at the
whole idea; and then again it's so strong that I can't get away from it.
Ellen!"

"Well, Boyne?"

"I could tell you who it is, if you think that would do any good--if you
think it would help me to see it in the true light, or you could help me
more by knowing who it is than you can now."

"I hope it isn't anybody that you can't respect, Boyne?"

"No, indeed! It's somebody you would never dream of."

"Well?" Ellen was waiting for him to speak, but he could not get the
words out, even to her.

"I guess I'll tell you some other time. Maybe I can get over it myself."

"It would be the best way if you could."

He rose and left her bedside, and then he came back. "Ellen, I've got
something that I wish you would keep for me."

"What is it? Of course I will."

"Well, it's--something I don't want you to let Lottie know I've got.
She tells that Mr. Trannel everything, and then he wants to make fun.
Do you think he's so very witty?"

"I can't help laughing at some things he says."

"I suppose he is," Boyne ruefully admitted. "But that doesn't make you
like him any better. Well, if you won't tell Lottie, I'll give it to you
now."

"I won't tell anything that you don't want me to, Boyne."

"It's nothing. It's just-a picture of the Queen on porcelain, that I got
in The Hague. The guide took me into the store, and I thought I ought to
get something."

"Oh, that's very nice, Boyne. I do like the Queen so much. She's so
sweet!"

"Yes, isn't she?" said Boyne, glad of Ellen's approval. So far, at
least, he was not wrong. "Here it is now."

He put the miniature in Ellen's hand. She lifted herself on her elbow.
"Light the candle and let me see it."

"No, no!" he entreated. "It might wake Lottie, and--and--Good-night,
Ellen."

"Can you go to sleep now, Boyne?"

"Oh yes. I'm all right. Good-night."

"Good-night, then."

Borne stooped over and kissed her, and went to the door. He came back
and asked, "You don't think it was silly, or anything, for me to get it?"

"No, indeed! It's just what you will like to have when you get home.
We've all seen her so often. I'll put it in my trunk, and nobody shall
know about it till we're safely back in Tuskingum."

Boyne sighed deeply. "Yes, that's what I meant. Good-night."

"Good-night, Boyne."

"I hope I haven't waked you up too much?"

"Oh no. I can get to sleep easily again."

"Well, good-night." Boyne sighed again, but not so deeply, and this time
he went out.




XXII.

Mrs. Kenton woke with the clear vision which is sometimes vouchsafed to
people whose eyes are holden at other hours of the day. She had heard
Boyne opening and shutting Ellen's door, and her heart smote her that he
should have gone to his sister with whatever trouble he was in rather
than come to his mother. It was natural that she should put the blame on
her husband, and "Now, Mr. Kenton," she began, with an austerity of voice
which he recognized before he was well awake, "if you won't take Boyne
off somewhere to-day, I will. I think we had better all go. We have
been here a whole fortnight, and we have got thoroughly rested, and there
is no excuse for our wasting our time any longer. If we are going to see
Holland, we had better begin doing it."

The judge gave a general assent, and said that if she wanted to go to
Flushing he supposed he could find some garden-seeds there, in the flower
and vegetable nurseries, which would be adapted to the climate of
Tuskingum, and they could all put in the day pleasantly, looking round
the place. Whether it was the suggestion of Tuskingum in relation to
Flushing that decided her against the place, or whether she had really
meant to go to Leyden, she now expressed the wish, as vividly as if it
were novel, to explore the scene of the Pilgrims' sojourn before they
sailed for Plymouth, and she reproached him for not caring about the
place when they both used to take such an interest in it at home.

"Well," said the judge, "if I were at home I should take an interest in
it here."

This provoked her to a silence which he thought it best to break in tacit
compliance with her wish, and he asked, "Do you propose taking the whole
family and the appurtenances? We shall be rather a large party."

"Ellen would wish to go, and I suppose Mr. Breckon. We couldn't very
well go without them."

"And how about Lottie and that young Trannel?"

"We can't leave him out, very well. I wish we could. I don't like him."

"There's nothing easier than not asking him, if you don't want him."

"Yes, there is, when you've got a girl like Lottie to deal with. Quite
likely she would ask him herself. We must take him because we can't
leave her."

"Yes, I reckon," the judge acquiesced.

"I'm glad," Mrs. Kenton said, after a moment, "that it isn't Ellen he's
after; it almost reconciles me to his being with Lottie so much. I only
wonder he doesn't take to Ellen, he's so much like that--"

She did not say out what was in her mind, but her husband knew. "Yes,
I've noticed it. This young Breckon was quite enough so, for my taste.
I don't know what it is that just saves him from it."

"He's good. You could tell that from the beginning."

They went off upon the situation that, superficially or subliminally,
was always interesting them beyond anything in the world, and they did
not openly recur to Mrs. Kenton's plan for the day till they met their
children at breakfast. It was a meal at which Breckon and Trammel were
both apt to join them, where they took it at two of the tables on the
broad, seaward piazza of the hotel when the weather was fine. Both the
young men now applauded her plan, in their different sorts. It was
easily arranged that they should go by train and not by tram from The
Hague. The train was chosen, and Mrs. Kenton, when she went to her room
to begin the preparations for a day's pleasure which constitute so
distinctly a part of its pain, imagined that everything was settled. She
had scarcely closed the door behind her when Lottie opened it and shut it
again behind her.

"Mother," she said, in the new style of address to which she was
habituating Mrs. Kenton, after having so long called her momma, "I am not
going with you."

"Indeed you are, then!" her mother retorted. "Do you think I would
leave you here all day with that fellow? A nice talk we should make!"

"You are perfectly welcome to that fellow, mother, and as he's accepted
he will have to go with you, and there won't be any talk. But, as I
remarked before, I am not going."

"Why aren't you going, I should like to know?"

"Because I don't like the company."

"What do you mean? Have you got anything against Mr. Breckon?"

"He's insipid, but as long as Ellen don't mind it I don't care. I object
to Mr. Trannel!"

"Why?"

"I don't see why I should have to tell you. If I said I liked him you
might want to know, but it seems to me that my not liking him is--my not
liking him is my own affair." There was a kind of logic in this that
silenced Mrs. Kenton for the moment. In view of her advantage
Lottie relented so far as to add, "I've found out something about him."

Mrs. Kenton was imperative in her alarm. "What is it?" she demanded.

Lottie answered, obliquely: "Well, I didn't leave The Hague to get rid of
them, and then take up with one of them at Scheveningen."

"One of what?"

"COOK'S TOURISTS, if you must know, mother. Mr. Trannel, as you call
him, is a Cook's tourist, and that's the end of it. I have got no use
for him from this out."

Mrs. Kenton was daunted, and not for the first time, by her daughter's
superior knowledge of life. She could put Boyne down sometimes, though
not always, when he attempted to impose a novel code of manners or morals
upon her, but she could not cope with Lottie. In the present case she
could only ask, "Well?"

"Well, they're the cheapest of the cheap. He actually showed me his
coupons, and tried to put me down with the idea that everybody used them.
But I guess he found it wouldn't work. He said if you were not
personally conducted it was all right."

"Now, Lottie, you have got to tell me just what you mean," said Mrs.
Kenton, and from having stood during this parley, she sat down to hear
Lottie out at her leisure. But if there was anything more difficult than
for Lottie to be explicit it was to make her be so, and in the end Mrs.
Kenton was scarcely wiser than she was at the beginning to her daughter's
reasons. It appeared that if you wanted to be cheap you could travel
with those coupons, and Lottie did not wish to be cheap, or have anything
to do with those who were. The Kentons had always held up their heads,
and if Ellen had chosen to disgrace them with Bittridge, Dick had made it
all right, and she at least was not going to do anything that she would
be ashamed of. She was going to stay at home, and have her meals in her
room till they got back.

Her mother paid no heed to her repeated declaration. "Lottie," she
asked, with the heart-quake that the thought of Richard's act always gave
her with reference to Ellen, "have you ever let out the least hint of
that?"

"Of course I haven't," Lottie scornfully retorted. "I hope I know what a
crank Ellen is."

They were not just the terms in which Mrs. Kenton would have chosen to be
reassured, but she was glad to be assured in any terms. She said,
vaguely: "I believe in my heart that I will stay at home, too. All this
has given me a bad headache."

"I was going to have a headache myself," said Lottie, with injury.
"But I suppose I can get on along without. I can just simply say I'm not
going. If he proposes to stay, too, I can soon settle that."

"The great difficulty will be to get your father to go."

"You can make Ellen make him," Lottie suggested.

"That is true," said Mrs. Kenton, with such increasing absence that her
daughter required of her:

"Are you staying on my account?"

"I think you had better not be left alone the whole day. But I am not
staying on your account. I don't believe we had so many of us better go.
It might look a little pointed."

Lottie laughed harshly. "I guess Mr. Breckon wouldn't see the point,
he's so perfectly gone."

"Do you really believe it, Lottie?" Mrs. Kenton entreated, with a sudden
tenderness for her younger daughter such as she did not always feel.

"I should think anybody would believe it--anybody but Ellen."

"Yes," Mrs. Kenton dreamily assented.

Lottie made her way to the door. "Well, if you do stay, mother, I'm not
going to have you hanging round me all day. I can chaperon myself."

"Lottie," her mother tried to stay her, "I wish you would go. I don't
believe that Mr. Trannel will be much of an addition. He will be on your
poor father's hands all day, or else Ellen's, and if you went you could
help off."

"Thank you, mother. I've had quite all I want of Mr. Trannel. You can
tell him he needn't go, if you want to."

Lottie at least did not leave her mother to make her excuses to the party
when they met for starting. Mrs. Kenton had deferred her own till she
thought it was too late for her husband to retreat, and then bunglingly
made them, with so much iteration that it seemed to her it would have
been far less pointed, as concerned Mr. Breckon, if she had gone. Lottie
sunnily announced that she was going to stay with her mother, and did not
even try to account for her defection to Mr. Trannel.

"What's the matter with my staying, too?" he asked. "It seems to me
there are four wheels to this coach now."

He had addressed his misgiving more to Lottie than the rest; but with the
same sunny indifference to the consequence for others that she had put on
in stating her decision, she now discharged herself from further
responsibility by turning on her heel and leaving it with the party
generally. In the circumstances Mr. Trannel had no choice but to go,
and he was supported, possibly, by the hope of taking it out of Lottie
some other time.

It was more difficult for Mrs. Kenton to get rid of the judge, but an
inscrutable frown goes far in such exigencies. It seems to explain, and
it certainly warns, and the husband on whom it is bent never knows, even
after the longest experience, whether he had better inquire further.
Usually he decides that he had better not, and Judge Kenton went off
towards the tram with Boyne in the cloud of mystery which involved them
both as to Mrs. Kenton's meaning.




XXIII.


Trannel attached himself as well as he could to Breckon and Ellen, and
Breckon had an opportunity not fully offered him before to note a
likeness between himself and a fellow-man whom he was aware of not
liking, though he tried to love him, as he felt it right to love all men.
He thought he had not been quite sympathetic enough with Mrs. Kenton in
her having to stay behind, and he tried to make it up to Mr. Trannel in
his having to come. He invented civilities to show him, and ceded his
place next Ellen as if Trannel had a right to it. Trannel ignored him in
keeping it, unless it was recognizing Breckon to say, "Oh, I hope I'm not
in your way, old fellow?" and then making jokes to Ellen. Breckon could
not say the jokes were bad, though the taste of them seemed to him so.
The man had a fleeting wit, which scorched whatever he turned it upon,
and yet it was wit. "Why don't you try him in American?" he asked at
the failure of Breckon and the tram conductor to understand each other in
Dutch. He tried the conductor himself in American, and he was so
deplorably funny that it was hard for Breckon to help being 'particeps
criminus', at least in a laugh.

He asked himself if that were really the kind of man he was, and he grew
silent and melancholy in the fear that it was a good deal the sort of
man. To this morbid fancy Trannel seemed himself in a sort of excess,
or what he would be if he were logically ultimated. He remembered all
the triviality of his behavior with Ellen at first, and rather sickened
at the thought of some of his early pleasantries. She was talking gayly
now with Trannel, and Breckon wondered whether she was falling under the
charm that he felt in him, in spite of himself.

If she was, her father was not. The judge sat on the other side of the
car, and unmistakably glowered at the fellow's attempts to make himself
amusing to Ellen. Trannel himself was not insensible to the judge's
mood. Now and then he said something to intensify it. He patronized the
judge and he made fun of the tourist character in which Boyne had got
himself up, with a field-glass slung by a strap under one arm and a red
Baedeker in his hand. He sputtered with malign laughter at a rather
gorgeous necktie which Boyne had put on for the day, and said it was not
a very good match for the Baedeker.

Boyne retorted rudely, and that amused Trannel still more. He became
personal to Breckon, and noted the unclerical cut of his clothes. He
said he ought to have put on his uniform for an expedition like that, in
case they got into any sort of trouble. To Ellen alone he was
inoffensive, unless he overdid his polite attentions to her in carrying
her parasol for her, and helping her out of the tram, when they arrived,
shouldering every one else away, and making haste to separate her from
the others and then to walk on with her a little in advance.

Suddenly he dropped her, and fell back to Boyne and his father, while
Breckon hastened forward to her side. Trannel put his arm across Boyne's
shoulders and asked him if he were mad, and then laughed at him. "You're
all right, Boyne, but you oughtn't to be so approachable. You ought to
put on more dignity, and repel familiarity!"

Boyne could only twitch away in silence that he made as haughty as he
could, but not so haughty that Trannel did not find it laughable, and he
laughed in a teasing way that made Breckon more and more serious. He was
aware of becoming even solemn with the question of his likeness to
Trannel. He was of Trannel's quality, and their difference was a matter
of quantity, and there was not enough difference. In his sense of their
likeness Breckon vowed himself to a gravity of behavior evermore which he
should not probably be able to observe, but the sample he now displayed
did not escape the keen vigilance of Trannel.

"With the exception of Miss Kenton," he addressed himself to the party,
"you're all so easy and careless that if you don't look out you'll lose
me. Miss Kenton, I wish you would keep an eye on me. I don't want to
get lost."

Ellen laughed--she could not help it--and her laughing made it less
possible than before for Breckon to unbend and meet Trannel on his own
ground, to give him joke for joke, to exchange banter with him. He might
never have been willing to do that, but now he shrank from it, in his
realization of their likeness, with an abhorrence that rendered him
rigid.

The judge was walking ahead with Boyne, and his back expressed such
severe disapproval that, between her fear that Trannel would say
something to bring her father's condemnation on him and her sense of
their inhospitable attitude towards one who was their guest, in a sort,
she said, with her gentle gayety, "Then you must keep near me, Mr.
Trannel. I'll see that nothing happens."