The Kentons

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"Regular old style?" Welks returned. "Kind they make out of a cow's
hide and use on a man's?"

"Something of that sort," said Richard, with a slight smile.

The saddler said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an
upper shelf. He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking
thing in his hand. "I reckon that's what you're after, squire."

"Reckon it is, Welks," said Richard, drawing it through his tubed left
hand. Then he buttoned it under his coat, and paid the quarter which
Welks said had always been the price of a cowhide even since he could
remember, and walked away towards the station.

"How's the old colonel" Welks called after him, having forgotten to ask
before.

"The colonel's all right," Richard called back, without looking round.

He walked up and down in front of the station. A local train came in
from Ballardsville at 8.15, and waited for the New York special, and then
returned to Ballardsville. Richard had bought a ticket for that station,
and was going to take the train back, but among the passengers who
descended from it when it drew in was one who saved him the trouble of
going.

Bittridge, with his overcoat hanging on his arm, advanced towards him
with the rest, and continued to advance, in a sort of fascination, after
his neighbors, with the instinct that something was about to happen,
parted on either side of Richard, and left the two men confronted.
Richard did not speak, but deliberately reached out his left hand, which
he caught securely into Bittridge's collar; then he began to beat him
with the cowhide wherever he could strike his writhing and twisting
shape. Neither uttered a word, and except for the whir of the cowhide in
the air, and the rasping sound of its arrest upon the body of Bittridge,
the thing was done in perfect silence. The witnesses stood well back in
a daze, from which they recovered when Richard released Bittridge with a
twist of the hand that tore his collar loose and left his cravat
dangling, and tossed the frayed cowhide away, and turned and walked
homeward. Then one of them picked up Bittridge's hat and set it aslant
on his head, and others helped pull his collar together and tie his
cravat.

For the few moments that Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely
found words coherent enough for question, and when they did, Bittridge
had nothing but confused answers to give to the effect that he did not
know what it meant, but he would find out. He got into a hack and had
himself driven to his hotel, but he never made the inquiry which he
threatened.

In his own house Richard Kenton lay down awhile, deadly sick, and his
wife had to bring him brandy before he could control his nerves
sufficiently to speak. Then he told her what he had done, and why, and
Mary pulled off his shoes and put a hot-water bottle to his cold feet.
It was not exactly the treatment for a champion, but Mary Kenton was not
thinking of that, and when Richard said he still felt a little sick at
the stomach she wanted him to try a drop of camphor in addition to the
brandy. She said he must not talk, but she wished him so much to talk
that she was glad when he began.

"It seemed to be something I had to do, Mary, but I would give anything
if I had not been obliged to do it:

"Yes, I know just how you feel, Dick, and I think it's pretty hard this
has come on you. I do think Ellen might--"

"It wasn't her fault, Mary. You mustn't blame her. She's had more to
bear than all the rest of us." Mary looked stubbornly unconvinced, and
she was not moved, apparently, by what he went on to say. "The thing now
is to keep what I've done from making more mischief for her."

"What do you mean, Dick? You don't believe he'll do anything about it,
do you?"

"No, I'm not afraid of that. His mouth is shut. But you can't tell how
Ellen will take it. She may side with him now."

"Dick! If I thought Ellen Kenton could be such a fool as that!"

"If she's in love with him she'll take his part."

"But she can't be in love with him when she knows how he acted to your
father!"

"We can't be sure of that. I know how he acted to father; but at this
minute I pity him so that I could take his part against father. And I
can understand how Ellen--Anyway, I must make a clean breast of it.
What day is this Thursday? And they sail Saturday! I must write--"

He lifted himself on his elbow, and made as if to throw off the shawl she
had spread upon him.

"No, no! I will write, Dick! I will write to your mother. What shall I
say?" She whirled about, and got the paper and ink out of her
writing-desk, and sat down near him to keep him from getting up, and
wrote the date, and the address, "Dear Mother Kenton," which was the way
she always began her letters to Mrs. Kenton, in order to distinguish her
from her own mother. "Now what shall I say?"

"Simply this," answered Richard. "That I knew of what had happened in
New York, and when I met him this morning I cowhided him. Ugh!"

"Well, that won't do, Dick. You've got to tell all about it. Your
mother won't understand."

"Then you write what you please, and read it to me. It makes me sick to
think of it." Richard closed his eyes, and Mary wrote:

"DEAR MOTHER KENTON,--I am sitting by Richard, writing at his
request, about what he has done. He received a letter from New York
telling him of the Bittridges' performances there, and how that
wretch had insulted and abused you all. He bought a cowhide;
meaning to go over to Ballardsville, and use it on him there, but B.
came over on the Accommodation this morning, and Richard met him at
the station. He did not attempt to resist, for Richard took him
quite by surprise. Now, Mother Kenton, you know that Richard
doesn't approve of violence, and the dear, sweet soul is perfectly
broken-down by what he had to do. But he had to do it, and he
wishes you to know at, once that he did it. He dreads the effect
upon Ellen, and we must leave it to your judgment about telling her.
Of course, sooner or later she must find it out. You need not be
alarmed about Richard. He is just nauseated a little, and he will
be all right as soon as his stomach is settled. He thinks you ought
to have this letter before you sail, and with affectionate good-byes
to all, in which Dick joins,

"Your loving daughter,

"Mary KENTON."

"There! Will that do?"

"Yes, that is everything that can be said," answered Richard, and Mary
kissed him gratefully before sealing her letter.

"I will put a special delivery on it," she said, and her precaution
availed to have the letter delivered to Mrs. Kenton the evening the
family left the hotel, when it was too late to make any change in their
plans, but in time to give her a bad night on the steamer, in her doubt
whether she ought to let the family go, with this trouble behind them.

But she would have had a bad night on the steamer in any case, with the
heat, and noise, and smell of the docks; and the steamer sailed with her
at six o'clock the next morning with the doubt still open in her mind.
The judge had not been of the least use to her in helping solve it, and
she had not been able to bring herself to attack Lottie for writing to
Richard. She knew it was Lottie who had made the mischief, but she could
not be sure that it was mischief till she knew its effect upon Ellen.
The girl had been carried in the arms of one of the stewards from the
carriage to her berth in Lottie's room, and there she had lain through
the night, speechless and sleepless.




IX.

Ellen did not move or manifest any consciousness when the steamer left
her dock and moved out into the stream, or take any note of the tumult
that always attends a great liner's departure. At breakfast-time her
mother came to her from one of the brief absences she made, in the hope
that at each turn she should find her in a different mood, and asked if
she would not have something to eat.

"I'm not hungry," she answered. "When will it sail?"

"Why, Ellen! We sailed two hours ago, and the pilot has just left us."

Ellen lifted herself on her elbow and stared at her. "And you let me!"
she said, cruelly.

"Ellen! I will not have this!" cried her mother, frantic at the
reproach. "What do you mean by my letting you? You knew that we were
going to sail, didn't you? What else did you suppose we had come to the
steamer for?"

"I supposed you would let me stay, if I wanted to: But go away, momma, go
away! You're all against me--you, and poppa, and Lottie, and Boyne. Oh,
dear! oh, dear!" She threw herself down in her berth and covered her
face with the sheet, sobbing, while her mother stood by in an anguish of
pity and anger. She wanted to beat the girl, she wanted to throw herself
upon her, and weep with her in the misery which she shared with her.

Lottie came to the door of the state-room with an arm-load of
long-stemmed roses, the gift of the young Mr. Plumpton, who had not had
so much to be entreated to come down to the steamer and see her off as
Boyne had pretended. "Momma," she said, "I have got to leave these roses
in here, whether Ellen likes it or not. Boyne won't have them in his
room, because he says the man that's with him would have a right to
object; and this is half my room, anyway."

Mrs. Kenton frowned and shook her head, but Ellen answered from under the
sheet, "I don't mind the roses, Lottie. I wish you'd stay with me a
little while."

Lottie hesitated, having in mind the breakfast for which the horn had
just sounded. But apparently she felt that one good turn deserved
another, and she answered: "All right; I will, Nell. Momma, you tell
Boyne to hurry, and come to Ellen as soon as he's done, and then I will
go. Don't let anybody take my place."

"I wish," said Ellen, still from under the sheet, "that momma would have
your breakfast sent here. I don't want Boyne."

Women apparently do not require any explanation of these swift
vicissitudes in one another, each knowing probably in herself the nerves
from which they proceed. Mrs. Kenton promptly assented, in spite of the
sulky reluctance which Lottie's blue eyes looked at her; she motioned her
violently to silence, and said: "Yes, I will, Ellen. I will send
breakfast for both of you."

When she was gone, Ellen uncovered her face and asked Lottie to dip a
towel in water and give it to her. As she bathed her eyes she said,
"You don't care, do you, Lottie?"

"Not very much," said Lottie, unsparingly. "I can go to lunch, I
suppose."

"Maybe I'll go to lunch with you," Ellen suggested, as if she were
speaking of some one else.

Lottie wasted neither sympathy nor surprise on the question. "Well,
maybe that would be the best thing. Why don't you come to breakfast?"

"No, I won't go to breakfast. But you go."

When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly
explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone. Before the young
man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table,
her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not be
made worse, and so she remained silent. Judge Kenton sat with his eyes
fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast for
him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those
moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish
dependence. Lottie offered him another alternative by absently laying
hold of his napkin on the table.

"That's mine," he said, with husky gloom.

She tossed it back to him with prompt disdain and a deeply eye-lashed
glance at a napkin on her right. The young man who sat next it said,
with a smile, "Perhaps that's yours-unless I've taken my neighbor's."

Lottie gave him a stare, and when she had sufficiently punished him for
his temerity said, rather sweetly, "Oh, thank you," and took the napkin.

"I hope we shall all have use for them before long," the young man
ventured again.

"Well, I should think as much," returned the girl, and this was the
beginning of a conversation which the young man shared successively with
the judge and Mrs. Kenton as opportunity offered. He gave the judge his
card across the table, and when the judge had read on it, "Rev. Hugh
Breckon," he said that his name was Kenton, and he introduced the young
man formally to his family. Mr. Breckon had a clean-shaven face, with an
habitual smile curving into the cheeks from under a long, straight nose;
his chin had a slight whopper-jaw twist that was charming; his gay eyes
were blue, and a full vein came down his forehead between them from his
smooth hair. When he laughed, which was often, his color brightened.

Boyne was named last, and then Mr. Breckon said, with a smile that showed
all his white teeth, "Oh yes, Mr. Boyne and I are friends already--ever
since we found ourselves room-mates," and but for us, as Lottie
afterwards noted, they might never have known Boyne was rooming with him,
and could easily have made all sorts of insulting remarks about Mr.
Breckon in their ignorance.

The possibility seemed to delight Mr. Breckon; he invited her to make all
the insulting remarks she could think of, any way, and professed himself
a loser, so far as her real opinion was withheld from him by reason of
his rashness in giving the facts away. In the electrical progress of
their acquaintance she had begun walking up and down the promenade with
him after they came up from breakfast; her mother had gone to Ellen; the
judge had been made comfortable in his steamer-chair, and Boyne had been
sent about his business.

"I will try to think some up," she promised him, "as soon as I HAVE any
real opinion of you," and he asked her if he might consider that a
beginning.

She looked at him out of her indomitable blue eyes, and said, "If it
hadn't been for your card, and the Reverend on it, I should have said you
were an actor."

"Well, well," said Mr. Breckon, with a laugh, "perhaps I am, in a way.
I oughtn't to be, of course, but if a minister ever forces himself, I
suppose he's acting."

"I don't see," said Lottie, instantly availing herself of the opening,
"how you can get up and pray, Sunday after Sunday, whether you feel like
it or not."

The young man said, with another laugh, but not so gay, "Well, the case
has its difficulties."

"Or perhaps you just read prayers," Lottie sharply conjectured.

"No," he returned, "I haven't that advantage--if you think it one.
I'm a sort of a Unitarian. Very advanced, too, I'm afraid."

"Is that a kind of Universalist?"

"Not--not exactly. There's an old joke--I'm not sure it's very good
--which distinguishes between the sects. It's said that the Universalists
think God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians think they are too
good to be damned." Lottie shrank a little from him. "Ah!" he cried,
"you think it sounds wicked. Well, I'm sorry. I'm not clerical enough
to joke about serious things."

He looked into her face with a pretended anxiety. "Oh, I don't know,"
she said, with a little scorn. "I guess if you can stand it, I can."

"I'm not sure that I can. I'm afraid it's more in keeping with an
actor's profession than my own. Why," he added, as if to make a
diversion, "should you have thought I was an actor?"

"I suppose because you were clean-shaved; and your pronunciation. So
Englishy."

"Is it? Perhaps I ought to be proud. But I'm not an Englishman. I am a
plain republican American. May I ask if you are English?"

"Oh!" said Lottie. "As if you thought such a thing. We're from Ohio."

Mr. Breckon said, "Ah!" Lottie could not make out in just what sense.

By this time they were leaning on the rail of the promenade, looking over
at what little was left of Long Island, and she said, abruptly: "I think
I will go and see how my father is getting along."

"Oh, do take me with you, Miss Kenton!" Mr. Breckon entreated. "I am
feeling very badly about that poor old joke. I know you don't think well
of me for it, and I wish to report what I've been saying to your father,
and let him judge me. I've heard that it's hard to live up to Ohio
people when you're at your best, and I do hope you'll believe I have not
been quite at my best. Will you let me come with you?"

Lottie did not know whether he was making fun of her or not, but she
said, "Oh, it's a free country," and allowed him to go with her.

His preface made the judge look rather grave; but when he came to the
joke, Kenton laughed and said it was not bad.

"Oh, but that isn't quite the point," said Mr. Breckon. "The question is
whether I am good in repeating it to a young lady who was seeking serious
instruction on a point of theology."

"I don't know what she would have done with the instruction if she had
got it," said the judge, dryly, and the young man ventured in her behalf:

"It would be difficult for any one to manage, perhaps."

"Perhaps," Kenton assented, and Lottie could see that he was thinking
Ellen would know what to do with it.

She resented that, and she was in the offence that girls feel when their
elders make them the subject of comment with their contemporaries.
"Well, I'll leave you to discuss it alone. I'm going to Ellen," she
said, the young man vainly following her a few paces, with apologetic
gurgles of laughter.

"That's right," her father consented, and then he seized the opening to
speak about Ellen. "My eldest daughter is something of an invalid, but I
hope we shall have her on deck before the voyage is over. She is more
interested in those matters than her sister."

"Oh!" Mr. Breckon interpolated, in a note of sympathetic interest. He
could not well do more.

It was enough for Judge Kenton, who launched himself upon the celebration
of Ellen's gifts and qualities with a simple-hearted eagerness which he
afterwards denied when his wife accused him of it, but justified as
wholly safe in view of Mr. Breckon's calling and his obvious delicacy of
mind. It was something that such a person would understand, and Kenton
was sure that he had not unduly praised the girl. A less besotted parent
might have suspected that he had not deeply interested his listener, who
seemed glad of the diversion operated by Boyne's coming to growl upon his
father, "Mother's bringing Ellen up."

"Oh, then, I mustn't keep your chair," said the minister, and he rose
promptly from the place he had taken beside the judge, and got himself
away to the other side of the ship before the judge could frame a fitting
request for him to stay.

"If you had," Mrs. Kenton declared, when he regretted this to her,
"I don't know what I would have done. It's bad enough for him to hear
you bragging about the child without being kept to help take care of her,
or keep her amused, as you call it. I will see that Ellen is kept amused
without calling upon strangers." She intimated that if Kenton did not
act with more self-restraint she should do little less than take Ellen
ashore, and abandon him to the voyage alone. Under the intimidation he
promised not to speak of Ellen again.

At luncheon, where Mr. Breckon again devoted himself to Lottie, he and
Ellen vied in ignoring each other after their introduction, as far as
words went. The girl smiled once or twice at what he was saying to her
sister, and his glance kindled when it detected her smile. He might be
supposed to spare her his conversation in her own interest, she looked so
little able to cope with the exigencies of the talk he kept going.

When he addressed her she answered as if she had not been listening, and
he turned back to Lottie. After luncheon he walked with her, and their
acquaintance made such a swift advance that she was able to ask him if he
laughed that way with everybody.

He laughed, and then he begged her pardon if he had been rude.

"Well, I don't see what there is to laugh at so much. When you ask me a
thing I tell you just what I think, and it seems to set you off in a
perfect gale. Don't you expect people to say what they think?"

"I think it's beautiful," said the young man, going into the gale,
"and I've got to expecting it of you, at any rate. But--but it's always
so surprising! It isn't what you expect of people generally, is it?"

"I don't expect it of you," said Lottie.

"No?" asked Mr. Breckon, in another gale. "Am I so uncandid?"

"I don't know about uncandid. But I should say you were slippery."

At this extraordinary criticism the young man looked graver than he had
yet been able to do since the beginning of their acquaintance. He said,
presently, "I wish you would explain what you mean by slippery."

"You're as close as a trap!"

"Really?"

"It makes me tired."

"If you're not too tired now I wish you would say how."

"Oh, you understand well enough. You've got me to say what I think about
all sorts of things, and you haven't expressed your opinion on a single,
solitary point?"

Lottie looked fiercely out to sea, turning her face so as to keep him
from peering around into it in the way he had. For that reason, perhaps,
he did not try to do so. He answered, seriously: "I believe you are
partly right. I'm afraid I haven't seemed quite fair. Couldn't you
attribute my closeness to something besides my slipperiness?" He began
to laugh again. "Can't you imagine my being interested in your opinions
so much more than my own that I didn't care to express mine?"

Lottie said, impatiently, "Oh, pshaw!" She had hesitated whether to say,
"Rats!"

"But now," he pursued, "if you will suggest some point on which I can
give you an opinion, I promise solemnly to do so," but he was not very
solemn as he spoke.

"Well, then, I will," she said. "Don't you think it's very strange, to
say the least, for a minister to be always laughing so much?"

Mr. Breckon gave a peal of delight, and answered, "Yes, I certainly do."
He controlled himself so far as to say: "Now I think I've been pretty
open with you, and I wish you'd answer me a question. Will you?"

"Well, I will--one," said Lottie.

"It may be two or three; but I'll begin with one. Why do you think a
minister ought to be more serious than other men?"

"Why? Well, I should think you'd know. You wouldn't laugh at a funeral,
would you?"

"I've been at some funerals where it would have been a relief to laugh,
and I've wanted to cry at some weddings. But you think it wouldn't do?"

"Of course it wouldn't. I should think you'd know as much as that," said
Lottie, out of patience with him.

"But a minister isn't always marrying or burying people; and in the
intervals, why shouldn't he be setting them an example of harmless
cheerfulness?"

"He ought to be thinking more about the other world, I should say."

"Well, if he believes there is another world--"

"Why! Don't you?" she broke out on him.

Mr. Breckon ruled himself and continued--"as strenuously and
unquestionably as he ought, he has greater reason than other men for
gayety through his faith in a happier state of being than this. That's
one of the reasons I use against myself when I think of leaving off
laughing. Now, Miss Kenton," he concluded, "for such a close and
slippery nature, I think I've been pretty frank," and he looked round and
down into her face with a burst of laughter that could be heard an the
other side of the ship. He refused to take up any serious topic after
that, and he returned to his former amusement of making her give herself
away.

That night Lottie came to her room with an expression so decisive in her
face that Ellen, following it with vague, dark eyes as it showed itself
in the glass at which her sister stood taking out the first dismantling
hairpins before going to bed, could not fail of something portentous in
it.

"Well," said Lottie, with severe finality, "I haven't got any use for
THAT young man from this time out. Of all the tiresome people, he
certainly takes the cake. You can have him, Ellen, if you want him."

"What's the matter with him?" asked Ellen, with a voice in sympathy with
the slow movement of her large eyes as she lay in her berth, staring at
Lottie.

"There's everything the matter, that oughtn't to be. He's too trivial
for anything: I like a man that's serious about one thing in the
universe, at least, and that's just what Mr. Breckon isn't." She went at
such length into his disabilities that by the time she returned to the
climax with which she started she was ready to clamber into the upper
berth; and as she snapped the electric button at its head she repeated,
"He's trivial."

"Isn't it getting rough?" asked Ellen. "The ship seems to be tipping."

"Yes, it is," said Lottie, crossly. "Good-night."

If the Rev. Mr. Breckon was making an early breakfast in the hope of
sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without
encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he was
destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by the
paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each
forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked
his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very
sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother was reported by her father
to be feeling the motion too much to venture out. The judge was, in
fact, the only person at table when Breckon sat down; but when he had
accounted for his wife's absence, and confessed that he did not believe
either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and
advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It
had not gone so far as this in the judge's experience of a neurotic
invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He
had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain,
and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and asked her
where Lottie was.