The Kentons

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But by this time New York had gone to Mrs. Kenton's head, too, and she
was less fitted to deal with Lottie than at home. Whether she had
succeeded or not in helping Ellen take her mind off herself, she had
certainly freed her own from introspection in a dream of things which had
seemed impossible before. She was in that moment of a woman's life which
has a certain pathos for the intelligent witness, when, having reared her
children and outgrown the more incessant cares of her motherhood, she
sometimes reverts to her girlish impulses and ideals, and confronts the
remaining opportunities of life with a joyful hope unknown to our heavier
and sullener sex in its later years. It is this peculiar power of
rejuvenescence which perhaps makes so many women outlive their husbands,
who at the same age regard this world as an accomplished fact. Mrs.
Kenton had kept up their reading long after Kenton found himself too busy
or too tired for it; and when he came from his office at night and fell
asleep over the book she wished him to hear, she continued it herself,
and told him about it. When Ellen began to show the same taste, they
read together, and the mother was not jealous when the father betrayed
that he was much prouder of his daughter's culture than his wife's. She
had her own misgivings that she was not so modern as Ellen, and she
accepted her judgment in the case of some authors whom she did not like
so well.

She now went about not only to all the places where she could make
Ellen's amusement serve as an excuse, but to others when she could not
coax or compel the melancholy girl. She was as constant at matinees of
one kind as Boyne at another sort; she went to the exhibitions of
pictures, and got herself up in schools of painting; she frequented
galleries, public and private, and got asked to studio teas; she went to
meetings and conferences of aesthetic interest, and she paid an easy way
to parlor lectures expressive of the vague but profound ferment in
women's souls; from these her presence in intellectual clubs was a simple
and natural transition. She met and talked with interesting people, and
now and then she got introduced to literary people. Once, in a
book-store, she stood next to a gentleman leaning over the same counter,
whom a salesman addressed by the name of a popular author, and she
remained staring at him breathless till he left the place. When she
bragged of the prodigious experience at home, her husband defied her to
say how it differed from meeting the lecturers who had been their guests
in Tuskingum, and she answered that none of them compared with this
author; and, besides, a lion in his own haunts was very different from a
lion going round the country on exhibition. Kenton thought that was
pretty good, and owned that she had got him there.

He laughed at her, to the children, but all the same she believed that
she was living in an atmosphere of culture, and with every breath she was
sensible of an intellectual expansion. She found herself in the
enjoyment of so wide and varied a sympathy with interests hitherto
strange to her experience that she could not easily make people believe
she had never been to Europe. Nearly every one she met had been several
times, and took it for granted that she knew the Continent as well as
they themselves.

She denied it with increasing shame; she tried to make Kenton understand
how she felt, and she might have gone further if she had not seen how
homesick he was for Tuskingum. She did her best to coax him and scold
him into a share of the pleasure they were all beginning to have in New
York. She made him own that Ellen herself was beginning to be gayer; she
convinced him that his business was not suffering in his absence and that
he was the better from the complete rest he was having. She defied him,
to say, then, what was the matter with him, and she bitterly reproached
herself, in the event, for not having known that it was not homesickness
alone that was the trouble. When he was not going about with her, or
doing something to amuse the children, he went upon long, lonely walks,
and came home silent and fagged. He had given up smoking, and he did not
care to sit about in the office of the hotel where other old fellows
passed the time over their papers and cigars, in the heat of the glowing
grates. They looked too much like himself, with their air of
unrecognized consequence, and of personal loss in an alien environment.
He knew from their dress and bearing that they were country people, and
it wounded him in a tender place to realize that they had each left
behind him in his own town an authority and a respect which they could
not enjoy in New York. Nobody called them judge, or general, or doctor,
or squire; nobody cared who they were, or what they thought; Kenton did
not care himself; but when he missed one of them he envied him, for then
he knew that he had gone back to the soft, warm keeping of his own
neighborhood, and resumed the intelligent regard of a community he had
grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former
years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let
them know he was in town, and then he was hurt that they ignored him.
He kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought
that it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New
York, and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the
indifference of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his
local distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the
pleasant younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up
at one, he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had
outlived the period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city
as he world once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except
the basements of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and
picked up copies of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he
read them, he sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away
with the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see,
with compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by
these means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently
proposed to go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.

He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they
should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the winter wore
away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute instructions for
getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the book-stalls by
conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife could see that he
had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find from one as from
the other.

She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and
that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl
herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope,
for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with a
kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in
one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to
the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he
lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six
weeks before he left his room.

He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and he
was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that when
his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for him he
submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. Her heart smote her for her guilty
joy in his sentence, and she punished herself by asking if it would not
do him more good to get back to the comfort and quiet of their own house.
She went to the length of saying that she believed his attack had been
brought on more by homesickness than anything else. But the doctor
agreed rather with her wish than her word, and held out that his
melancholy was not the cause but the effect of his disorder. Then she
took courage and began getting ready to go. She did not flag even in the
dark hours when Kenton got back his courage with his returning strength,
and scoffed at the notion of Europe, and insisted that as soon as they
were in Tuskingum he should be all right again.

She felt the ingratitude, not to say the perfidy, of his behavior, and
she fortified herself indignantly against it; but it was not her constant
purpose, or the doctor's inflexible opinion, that prevailed with Kenton
at last a letter came one day for Ellen which she showed to her mother,
and which her mother, with her distress obscurely relieved by a sense of
its powerful instrumentality, brought to the girl's father. It was from
that fellow, as they always called him, and it asked of the girl a
hearing upon a certain point in which, it had just come to his knowledge,
she had misjudged him. He made no claim upon her, and only urged his
wish to right himself with her because she was the one person in the
whole world, after his mother, for whose good opinion he cared. With
some tawdriness of sentiment, the letter was well worded; it was
professedly written for the sole purpose of knowing whether, when she
came back to Tuskingum, she would see him, and let him prove to her that
he was not wholly unworthy of the kindness she had shown him when he was
without other friends.

"What does she say?" the judge demanded.

"What do you suppose?" his wife retorted. "She thinks she ought to see
him."

"Very well, then. We will go to Europe."

"Not on my account!" Mrs. Kenton consciously protested.

"No; not on your account, or mine, either. On Nelly's account. Where is
she? I want to talk with her."

"And I want to talk with you. She's out, with Lottie; and when she comes
back I will tell her what you say. But I want to know what you think,
first."




III.

It was some time before they arrived at a common agreement as to what
Kenton thought, and when they reached it they decided that they must
leave the matter altogether to Ellen, as they had done before. They
would never force her to anything, and if, after all that her mother
could say, she still wished to see the fellow, they would not deny her.

When it came to this, Ellen was a long time silent, so long a time that
her mother was beginning restively to doubt whether she was going to
speak at all. Then she drew a long, silent breath. "I suppose I ought
to despise myself, momma, for caring for him, when he's never really said
that he cared for me."

"No, no," her mother faltered.

"But I do, I do!" she gave way piteously. "I can't help it! He doesn't
say so, even now."

"No, he doesn't." It hurt her mother to own the fact that alone gave her
hope.

The girl was a long time silent again before she asked, "Has poppa got
the tickets?"

"Why, he wouldn't, Ellen, child, till he knew how you felt," her mother
tenderly reproached her.

"He'd better not wait!" The tears ran silently down Ellen's cheeks, and
her lips twitched a little between these words and the next; she spoke as
if it were still of her father, but her mother understood. "If he ever
does say so, don't you speak a word to me, momma; and don't you let
poppa."

"No; indeed I won't," her mother promised. "Have we ever interfered,
Ellen? Have we ever tried to control you?"

"He WOULD have said so, if he hadn't seen that everybody was against
him." The mother bore without reply the ingratitude and injustice that
she knew were from the child's pain and not from her will. "Where is his
letter? Give me his letter!" She nervously twitched it from her
mother's hand and ran it into her pocket. She turned away to go and put
off her hat, which she still wore from coming in with Lottie; but she
stopped and looked over her shoulder at her mother. "I'm going to answer
it, and I don't want you ever to ask me what I've said. Will you?"

"No, I won't, Nelly."

"Well, then!"

The next night she went with Boyne and Lottie to the apartment overhead
to spend their last evening with the young people there, who were going
into the country the next day. She came back without the others, who
wished to stay a little longer, as she said, with a look of gay
excitement in her eyes, which her mother knew was not happiness. Mrs.
Kenton had an impulse to sweep into her lap the lithograph plans of the
steamer, and the passage ticket which lay open on the table before
herself and her husband. But it was too late to hide them from Ellen.
She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down
again. "Oh, I didn't think you would do it!" she burst out; and she ran
away to her room, where they could hear her sobbing, as they sat
haggardly facing each other.

"Well, that settles it," said Benton at last, with a hard gulp.

"Oh, I suppose so," his wife assented.

On his part, now, he had a genuine regret for her disappointment from the
sad safety of the trouble that would keep them at home; and on her part
she could be glad of it if any sort of comfort could come out of it to
him.

"Till she says go," he added, "we've got to stay."

"Oh yes," his wife responded. "The worst of it is, we can't even go back
to Tuskingum." He looked up suddenly at her, and she saw that he had not
thought of this. She made "Tchk!" in sheer amaze at him.

"We won't cross that river till we come to it," he said, sullenly, but
half-ashamed. The next morning the situation had not changed overnight,
as they somehow both crazily hoped it might, and at breakfast, which they
had at a table grown more remote from others with the thinning out of the
winter guests of the hotel, the father and mother sat down alone in
silence which was scarcely broken till Lottie and Boyne joined them.

"Where's Ellen?" the boy demanded.

"She's having her breakfast in her room," Mrs. Kenton answered.

"She says she don't want to eat anything," Lottie reported. "She made
the man take it away again."

The gloom deepened in the faces of the father and mother, but neither
spoke, and Boyne resumed the word again in a tone of philosophic
speculation. "I don't see how I'm going to get along, with those
European breakfasts. They say you can't get anything but cold meat or
eggs; and generally they don't expect to give you anything but bread and
butter with your coffee. I don't think that's the way to start the day,
do you, poppa?"

Kenton seemed not to have heard, for he went on silently eating, and the
mother, who had not been appealed to, merely looked distractedly across
the table at her children.

"Mr. Plumpton says he's coming down to see us off," said Lottie,
smoothing her napkin in her lap. "Do you know the time of day when the
boat sails, momma?"

"Yes," her brother broke in, "and if I had been momma I'd have boxed your
ears for the way you went on with him. You fairly teased him to come.
The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma."

"What time does the boat sail, momma!" Lottie blandly persisted. "I
promised to let Mr. Plumpton know."

"Yes, so as to get a chance to write to him," said Boyne. "I guess when
he sees your spelling!"

"Momma! Do wake up! What time does our steamer sail?"

A light of consciousness came into Mrs. Renton's eyes at last, and she
sighed gently. "We're not going, Lottie."

"Not going! Why, but we've got the tickets, and I've told--"

"Your father has decided not to go, for the present. We may go later in
the summer, or perhaps in the fall."

Boyne looked at his father's troubled face, and said nothing, but Lottie
was not stayed from the expression of her feelings by any ill-timed
consideration for what her father's might be. "I just know," she fired,
"it's something to do with that nasty Bittridge. He's been a bitter dose
to this family! As soon as I saw Ellen have a letter I was sure it was
from him; and she ought to be ashamed. If I had played the simpleton
with such a fellow I guess you wouldn't have let me keep you from going
to Europe very much. What is she going to do now? Marry him? Or
doesn't he want her to?"

"Lottie!" said her mother, and her father glanced up at her with a face
that silenced her.

"When you've been half as good a girl as Ellen has been, in this whole
matter," he said, darkly, "it will be time for you to complain of the way
you've been treated."

"Oh yes, I know you like Ellen the best," said the girl, defiantly.

"Don't say such a thing, Lottie!" said her mother. "Your father loves
all his children alike, and I won't have you talking so to him. Ellen
has had a great deal to bear, and she has behaved beautifully. If we are
not going to Europe it is because we have decided that it is best not to
go, and I wish to hear nothing more from you about it."

"Oh yes! And a nice position it leaves me in, when I've been taking
good-bye of everybody! Well, I hope to goodness you won't say anything
about it till the Plumptons get away. I couldn't have the face to meet
them if you did."

"It won't be necessary to say anything; or you can say that we've merely
postponed our sailing. People are always doing that."

"It's not to be a postponement," said Kenton, so sternly that no one
ventured to dispute him, the children because they were afraid of him,
and their mother because she was suffering for him.

At the steamship office, however, the authorities represented that it was
now so near the date of his sailing that they could not allow him to
relinquish his passages except at his own risk. They would try to sell
his ticket for him, but they could not take it back, and they could not
promise to sell it. There was reason in what they said, but if there had
been none, they had the four hundred dollars which Kenton had paid for
his five berths and they had at least the advantage of him in the
argument by that means. He put the ticket back in his pocket-book
without attempting to answer them, and deferred his decision till he
could advise with his wife, who, after he left the breakfast-table upon
his errand to the steamship office, had abandoned her children to their
own devices, and gone to scold Ellen for not eating.

She had not the heart to scold her when she found the girl lying face
downward in the pillow, with her thin arms thrown up through the coils
and heaps of her loose-flung hair. She was so alight that her figure
scarcely defined itself under the bedclothes; the dark hair, and the
white, outstretched arms seemed all there was of her. She did not stir,
but her mother knew she was not sleeping. "Ellen," she said, gently,
"you needn't be troubled about our going to Europe. Your father has gone
down to the steamship office to give back his ticket."

The girl flashed her face round with nervous quickness. "Gone to give
back his ticket!"

"Yes, we decided it last night. He's never really wanted to go, and--"

"But I don't wish poppa to give up his ticket!" said Ellen. "He must
get it again. I shall die if I stay here, momma. We have got to go.
Can't you understand that?"

Mrs. Kenton did not know what to answer. She had a strong superficial
desire to shake her daughter as a naughty child which has vexed its
mother, but under this was a stir stronger pity for her as a woman, which
easily, prevailed. "Why, but, Ellen dear! We thought from what you said
last night--"

"But couldn't you SEE," the girl reproached her, and she began to cry,
and turned her face into the pillow again and lay sobbing.

"Well," said her mother, after she had given her a little time, "you
needn't be troubled. Your father can easily get the ticket again; he can
telephone down for it. Nothing has been done yet. But didn't you really
want to stay, then?"

"It isn't whether I want to stay or not," Ellen spoke into her pillow.
"You know that. You know that I have got to go. You know that if I saw
him--Oh, why do you make me talk?"

"Yes, I understand, child." Then, in the imperious necessity of blaming
some one, Mrs. Kenton added: "You know how it is with your father. He is
always so precipitate; and when he heard what you said, last night, it
cut him to the heart. He felt as if he were dragging you away, and this
morning he could hardly wait to get through his breakfast before he
rushed down to the steamship office. But now it's all right again, and
if you want to go, we'll go, and your father will only be too glad."

"I don't want father to go against his will. You said he never wanted to
go to Europe." The girl had turned her face upon her mother again; and
fixed her with her tearful, accusing eyes.

"The doctors say he ought to go. He needs the change, and I think we
should all be the better far getting away."

"I shall not," said Ellen. "But if I don't--"

"Yes," said her mother, soothingly.

"You know that nothing has changed. He hasn't changed and I haven't. If
he was bad, he's as bad as ever, and I'm just as silly. Oh, it's like a
drunkard! I suppose they know it's killing them, but they can't give it
up! Don't you think it's very strange, momma? I don't see why I should
be so. It seems as if I had no character at all, and I despise myself
so! Do you believe I shall ever get over it? Sometimes I think the best
thing for me would be to go into an asylum."

"Oh yes, dear; you'll get over it, and forget it all. As soon as you see
others--other scenes--and get interested--"

"And you don't you don't think I'd better let him come, and--"

"Ellen!"

Ellen began to sob again, and toss her head upon the pillow. "What shall
I do? What shall I do?" she wailed. "He hasn't ever done anything bad
to me, and if I can overlook his--his flirting--with that horrid thing,
I don't know what the rest of you have got to say. And he says he can
explain everything. Why shouldn't I give him the chance, momma? I do
think it is acting very cruel not to let him even say a word."

"You can see him if you wish, Ellen," said her mother, gravely. "Your
father and I have always said that. And perhaps it would be the best
thing, after all."

"Oh, you say that because you think that if I did see him, I should be so
disgusted with him that I'd never want to speak to him again. But what
if I shouldn't?"

"Then we should wish you to do whatever you thought was for your
happiness, Ellen. We can't believe it would be for your good; but if it
would be for your happiness, we are willing. Or, if you don't think it's
for your happiness, but only for his, and you wish to do it, still we
shall be willing, and you know that as far as your father and I are
concerned, there will never be a word of reproach--not a whisper."

"Lottie would despise me; and what would Richard say?"

"Richard would never say anything to wound you, dear, and if you don't
despise yourself, you needn't mind Lottie."

"But I should, momma; that's the worst of it! I should despise myself,
and he would despise me too. No, if I see him, I am going to do it
because I am selfish and wicked, and wish to have my own way, no matter
who is harmed by it, or--anything; and I'm not going to have it put on
any other ground. I could see him," she said, as if to herself, "just
once more--only once more--and then if I didn't believe in him, I could
start right off to Europe."

Her mother made no answer to this, and Ellen lay awhile apparently
forgetful of her presence, inwardly dramatizing a passionate scene of
dismissal between herself and her false lover. She roused herself from
the reverie with a long sigh, and her mother said, "Won't you have some
breakfast, now; Ellen?"

"Yes; and I will get up. You needn't be troubled any more about me,
momma. I will write to him not to come, and poppa must go back and get
his ticket again."

"Not unless you are doing this of your own free will, child. I can't
have you feeling that we are putting any pressure upon you."

"You're not. I'm doing it of my own will. If it isn't my free will,
that isn't your fault. I wonder whose fault it is? Mine, or what made
me so silly and weak?"

"You are not silly and weak," said her mother, fondly, and she bent over
the girl and would have kissed her, but Ellen averted her face with a
piteous "Don't!" and Mrs. Kenton went out and ordered her breakfast
brought back.

She did not go in to make her eat it, as she would have done in the
beginning of the girl's trouble; they had all learned how much better she
was for being left to fight her battles with herself singlehanded.
Mrs. Kenton waited in the parlor till her husband same in, looking gloomy
and tired. He put his hat down and sank into a chair without speaking.
"Well?" she said.

"We have got to lose the price of the ticket, if we give it back. I
thought I had better talk with you first," said Kenton, and he explained
the situation.

"Then you had better simply have it put off till the next steamer.
I have been talking with Ellen, and she doesn't want to stay. She wants
to go." His wife took advantage of Kenton's mute amaze (in the nervous
vagaries even of the women nearest him a man learns nothing from
experience) to put her own interpretation on the case, which, as it was
creditable to the girl's sense and principle, he found acceptable if not
imaginable. "And if you will take my advice," she ended, "you will go
quietly back to the steamship office and exchange your ticket for the
next steamer, or the one after that, if you can't get good rooms, and
give Ellen time to get over this before she leaves. It will be much
better for her to conquer herself than to run away, for that would always
give her a feeling of shame, and if she decides before she goes, it will
strengthen her pride and self-respect, and there will be less danger
--when we come back."