The Kentons

W >> William Dean Howells >> The Kentons


"Oh, she doesn't want any breakfast, she says. Is momma sick, too?
Where's Boyne?"

The judge reported as to her mother, and Mr. Breckon, after the exchange
of a silent salutation with the girl, had a gleeful moment in describing
Boyne's revolt at the steward's notion of gruel. "I'm glad to see you so
well, Miss Kenton," he concluded.

"I suppose I will be sick, too, if it gets rougher," she said, and she
turned from him to give a rather compendious order to the table steward.

"Well, you've got an appetite, Ellen," her father ventured.

"I don't believe I will eat anything," she checked him, with a falling
face.

Breckon came to the aid of the judge. "If you're not sick now, I
prophesy you won't be, Miss Kenton. It can't get much rougher, without
doing something uncommon."

"Is it a storm?" she asked, indifferently.

"It's what they call half a gale, I believe. I don't know how they
measure it."

She smiled warily in response to his laugh, and said to her father, "Are
you going up after breakfast, poppa?"

"Why, if you want to go, Ellen--"

"Oh, I wasn't asking for that; I am going back to Lottie. But I should
think you would like the air. Won't it do you good?"

"I'm all right," said the judge, cheered by her show of concern for some
one else. "I suppose it's rather wet on deck?" he referred himself to
Breckon.

"Well, not very, if you keep to the leeward. She doesn't seem a very wet
boat."

"What is a wet boat" Ellen asked, without lifting her sad eyes.

"Well, really, I'm afraid it's largely a superstition. Passengers like
to believe that some boats are less liable to ship seas--to run into
waves--than others; but I fancy that's to give themselves the air of old
travellers."

She let the matter lapse so entirely that he supposed she had forgotten
it in all its bearings, when she asked, "Have you been across many
times?"

"Not many-four or five."

"This is our first time," she volunteered.

"I hope it won't be your last. I know you will enjoy it." She fell
listless again, and Breckon imagined he had made a break. "Not," he
added, with an endeavor for lightness, "that I suppose you're going for
pleasure altogether. Women, nowadays, are above that, I understand.
They go abroad for art's sake, and to study political economy, and
history, and literature--"

"My daughter," the judge interposed, "will not do much in that way, I
hope."

The girl bent her head over her plate and frowned.

"Oh, then," said Breckon, "I will believe that she's going for purely
selfish enjoyment. I should like to be justified in making that my
object by a good example."

Ellen looked up and gave him a look that cut him short in his glad note.
The lifting of her eyelids was like the rise of the curtain upon some
scene of tragedy which was all the more impressive because it seemed
somehow mixed with shame. This poor girl, whom he had pitied as an
invalid, was a sufferer from some spiritual blight more pathetic than
broken health. He pulled his mind away from the conjecture that tempted
it and went on: "One of the advantages of going over the fourth or fifth
time is that you're relieved from a discoverer's duties to Europe. I've
got absolutely nothing before me now, but at first I had to examine every
object of interest on the Continent, and form an opinion about thousands
of objects that had no interest for me. I hope Miss Kenton will take
warning from me."

He had not addressed Ellen directly, and her father answered: "We have no
definite plans as yet, but we don't mean to overwork ourselves even if
we've come for a rest. I don't know," he added, "but we had better spend
our summer in England. It's easier getting about where you know the
language."

The judge seemed to refer his ideas to Breckon for criticism, and the
young man felt authorized to say, "Oh, so many of them know the language
everywhere now, that it's easy getting about in any country."

"Yes, I suppose so," the judge vaguely deferred.

"Which," Ellen demanded of the young man with a nervous suddenness, "do
you think is the most interesting country?"

He found himself answering with equal promptness, "Oh, Italy, of course."

"Can we go to Italy, poppa?" asked the girl.

"I shouldn't advise you to go there at once" Breckon intervened, smiling.
"You'd find it Pretty hot there now. Florence, or Rome, or Naples--you
can't think of them."

"We have it pretty hot in Central Ohio," said the judge, with latent
pride in his home climate, "What sort of place is Holland?"

"Oh, delightful! And the boat goes right on to Rotterdam, you know."

"Yes. We had arranged to leave it at Boulogne," but we could change.
"Do you think your mother would like Holland?" The judge turned to his
daughter.

"I think she would like Italy better. She's read more about it," said
the girl.

"Rise of the Dutch Republic," her father suggested.

"Yes, I know. But she's read more about Italy!"

"Oh, well," Breckon yielded, "the Italian lakes wouldn't be impossible.
And you might find Venice fairly comfortable."

"We could go to Italy, then," said the judge to his daughter, "if your
mother prefers."

Breckon found the simplicity of this charming, and he tasted a yet finer
pleasure in the duplicity; for he divined that the father was seeking
only to let his daughter have her way in pretending to yield to her
mother's preference.

It was plain that the family's life centred, as it ought, about this sad,
sick girl, the heart of whose mystery he perceived, on reflection, he had
not the wish to pluck out. He might come to know it, but he would not
try to know it; if it offered itself he might even try not to know it.
He had sometimes found it more helpful with trouble to be ignorant of its
cause.

In the mean time he had seen that these Kentons were sweet, good people,
as he phrased their quality to himself. He had come to terms of
impersonal confidence the night before with Boyne, who had consulted him
upon many more problems and predicaments of life than could have yet
beset any boy's experience, probably with the wish to make provision for
any possible contingency of the future. The admirable principles which
Boyne evolved for his guidance from their conversation were formulated
with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling his
laughter in his pillow. He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to
weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable
levity. With his sense of being really very light at most times, and
with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with
Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding to her
frankness was concerned, been close. He relished the unsparing honesty
with which she had denounced him, and though he did not yet know his
outcast condition with relation to her, he could not think of her without
a smile of wholly disinterested liking. He did not know, as a man of
earlier date would have known, all that the little button in the judge's
lapel meant; but he knew that it meant service in the civil war, a
struggle which he vaguely and impersonally revered, though its details
were of much the same dimness for him as those of the Revolution and the
War of 1812. The modest distrust which had grown upon the bold
self-confidence of Kenton's earlier manhood could not have been more
tenderly and reverently imagined; and Breckon's conjecture of things
suffered for love's sake against sense and conviction in him were his
further tribute to a character which existed, of course, mainly in this
conjecture. It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the
subjection to his wife's, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless becomes,
a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the actual
performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in deference
to the good woman. She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a sacrifice
to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having no wish that
could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her mother's
devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant barometer. It
had become apparent that Miss Kenton was her father's favorite in a
special sense, and that his partial affection for her was of much older
date than her mother's. Not less charming than her fondness for her
father was the openness with which she disabled his wisdom because of his
partiality to her.




X

When they left the breakfast table the first morning of the rough
weather, Breckon offered to go on deck with Miss Kenton, and put her
where she could see the waves. That had been her shapeless ambition,
dreamily expressed with reference to some time, as they rose. Breckon
asked, "Why not now?" and he promised to place her chair on deck where
she could enjoy the spectacle safe from any seas the boat might ship.
Then she recoiled, and she recoiled the further upon her father's
urgence. At the foot of the gangway she looked wistfully up the reeling
stairs, and said that she saw her shawl and Lottie's among the others
solemnly swaying from the top railing. "Oh, then," Breckon pressed her,
"you could be made comfortable without the least trouble."

"I ought to go and see how Lottie is getting along," she murmured.

Her father said he would see for her, and on this she explicitly
renounced her ambition of going up. "You couldn't do anything," she
said, coldly.

"If Miss Lottie is very sea-sick she's beyond all earthly aid," Breckon
ventured. "She'd better be left to the vain ministrations of the
stewardess."

Ellen looked at him in apparent distrust of his piety, if not of his
wisdom. "I don't believe I could get up the stairs," she said.

"Well," he admitted, "they're not as steady as land--going stairs." Her
father discreetly kept silence, and, as no one offered to help her, she
began to climb the crazy steps, with Breckon close behind her in latent
readiness for her fall.

From the top she called down to the judge, "Tell momma I will only stay a
minute." But later, tucked into her chair on the lee of the bulkhead,
with Breckon bracing himself against it beside her, she showed no
impatience to return. "Are they never higher than that" she required of
him, with her wan eyes critically on the infinite procession of the
surges.

"They must be," Breckon answered, "if there's any truth in common report.
I've heard of their running mountains high. Perhaps they used rather low
mountains to measure them by. Or the measurements may not have been very
exact. But common report never leaves much to the imagination."

"That was the way at Niagara," the girl assented; and Breckon obligingly
regretted that he had never been there. He thought it in good taste that
she should not tell him he ought to go. She merely said, "I was there
once with poppa," and did not press her advantage. "Do they think," she
asked, "that it's going to be a very long voyage?"

"I haven't been to the smoking-room--that's where most of the thinking is
done on such points; the ship's officers never seem to know about it
--since the weather changed. Should you mind it greatly?"

"I wouldn't care if it never ended," said the girl, with such a note of
dire sincerity that Breckon instantly changed his first mind as to her
words implying a pose. She took any deeper implication from them in
adding, "I didn't know I should like being at sea."

"Well, if you're not sea-sick," he assented, "there are not many
pleasanter things in life."

She suggested, "I suppose I'm not well enough to be sea-sick." Then she
seemed to become aware of something provisional in his attendance, and
she said, "You mustn't stay on my account. I can get down when I want
to."

"Do let me stay," he entreated, "unless you'd really rather not," and as
there was no chair immediately attainable, he crouched on the deck beside
hers.

"It makes me think," she said, and he perceived that she meant the sea,
"of the cold-white, heavy plunging foam in 'The Dream of Fair Women.'
The words always seemed drenched!"

"Ah, Tennyson, yes," said Breckon, with a disposition to smile at the
simple-heartedness of the literary allusion. "Do young ladies read
poetry much in Ohio?"

"I don't believe they do," she answered. "Do they anywhere?"

"That's one of the things I should like to know. Is Tennyson your
favorite poet?"

"I don't believe I have any," said Ellen. "I used to like Whither, and
Emerson; aid Longfellow, too."

"Used to! Don't you now?"

"I don't read them so much now," and she made a pause, behind which he
fancied her secret lurked. But he shrank from knowing it if he might.

"You're all great readers in your family," he suggested, as a polite
diversion.

"Lottie isn't," she answered, dreamily. "She hates it."

"Ah, I referred more particularly to the others," said Breckon, and he
began to laugh, and then checked himself. "Your mother, and the judge
--and your brother--"

"Boyne reads about insects," she admitted.

"He told me of his collection of cocoons. He seems to be afraid it has
suffered in his absence."

"I'm afraid it has," said Ellen, and then remained silent.

"There!" the young man broke out, pointing seaward. "That's rather a
fine one. Doesn't that realize your idea of something mountains high?
Unless your mountains are very high in Ohio!"

"It is grand. And the gulf between! But we haven't any in our part.
It's all level. Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?"

"Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to begin
counting."

"Yes," said the girl, and she added, vaguely: "I suppose it's like
everything else in that. We have to make-believe before we can believe
anything."

"Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary," Breckon
assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. "We shouldn't
have the atomic theory without it." She did not say anything, and he
decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading.
He tried to be more concrete. "We have to make-believe in ourselves
before we can believe, don't we? And then we sometimes find we are
wrong!" He laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:

"And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in
yourself?"

"That's what I'm trying to decide," he replied. "Sometimes I feel like
renouncing myself altogether; but usually I give myself another chance.
I dare say if I hadn't been so forbearing I might have agreed with your
sister about my unfitness for the ministry."

"With Lottie?"

"She thinks I laugh too much!"

"I don't see why a minister shouldn't laugh if he feels like it. And if
there's something to laugh at."

"Ah, that's just the point! Is there ever anything to laugh at? If we
looked closely enough at things, oughtn't we rather to cry?" He laughed
in retreat from the serious proposition. "But it wouldn't do to try
making each other cry instead of laugh, would it? I suppose your sister
would rather have me cry."

"I don't believe Lottie thought much about it," said Ellen; and at this
point Mr. Breckon yielded to an impulse.

"I should think I had really been of some use if I had made you laugh,
Miss Kenton."

"Me?"

"You look as if you laughed with your whole heart when you did laugh."

She glanced about, and Breckon decided that she had found him too
personal. "I wonder if I could walk, with the ship tipping so?" she
asked.

"Well, not far," said Breckon, with a provisional smile, and then he was
frightened from his irony by her flinging aside her wraps and starting to
her feet. Before he could scramble to his own, she had slid down the
reeling promenade half to the guard, over which she seemed about to
plunge. He hurled himself after her; he could not have done otherwise;
and it was as much in a wild clutch for support as in a purpose to save
her that he caught her in his arms and braced himself against the ship's
slant. "Where are you going? What are you trying to do?" he shouted.

"I wanted to go down-stairs," she protested, clinging to him.

"You were nearer going overboard," he retorted. "You shouldn't have
tried." He had not fully formulated his reproach when the ship righted
herself with a counter-roll and plunge, and they were swung staggering
back together against the bulkhead. The door of the gangway was within
reach, and Breckon laid hold of the rail beside it and put the girl
within. "Are you hurt?" he asked.

"No, no; I'm not hurt," she panted, sinking on the cushioned benching
where usually rows of semi-sea-sick people were lying.

"I thought you might have been bruised against the bulkhead," he said.
"Are you sure you're not hurt that I can't get you anything? From the
steward, I mean?"

"Only help me down-stairs," she answered. "I'm perfectly well," and
Breckon was so willing on these terms to close the incident that he was
not aware of the bruise on his own arm, which afterwards declared itself
in several primitive colors. "Don't tell them," she added. "I want to
come up again."

"Why, certainly not," he consented; but Boyne Kenton, who had been an
involuntary witness of the fact from a point on the forward promenade,
where he had stationed himself to study the habits of the stormy petrel
at a moment so favorable to the acquaintance of the petrel (having left
a seasick bed for the purpose), was of another mind. He had been
alarmed, and, as it appeared in the private interview which he demanded
of his mother, he had been scandalized.

"It is bad enough the way Lottie is always going on with fellows. And
now, if Ellen is going to begin!"

"But, Boyne, child," Mrs. Kenton argued, in an equilibrium between the
wish to laugh at her son and the wish to box his ears, "how could she
help his catching her if he was to save her from pitching overboard?"

"That's just it! He will always think that she did it just so he would
have to catch her."

"I don't believe any one would think that of Ellen," said Mrs. Kenton,
gravely.

"Momma! You don't know what these Eastern fellows are. There are so few
of them that they're used to having girls throw themselves at them, and
they will think anything, ministers and all. You ought to talk to Ellen,
and caution her. Of course, she isn't like Lottie; but if Lottie's been
behaving her way with Mr. Breckon, he must suppose the rest of the family
is like her."

"Boyne," said his mother, provisionally, "what sort of person is Mr.
Breckon?"

"Well, I think he's kind of frivolous."

"Do you, Boyne?"

"I don't suppose he means any harm by it, but I don't like to see a
minister laugh so much. I can't hardly get him to talk seriously about
anything. And I just know he makes fun of Lottie. I don't mean that he
always makes fun with me. He didn't that night at the vaudeville, where
I first saw him."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you remember? I told you about it last winter."

"And was Mr. Breckon that gentleman?"

"Yes; but he didn't know who I was when we met here."

"Well, upon my word, Boyne, I think you might have told us before," said
his mother, in not very definite vexation. "Go along, now!"

Boyne stood talking to his mother, with his hands, which he had not grown
to, largely planted on the jambs of her state-room door. She was keeping
her berth, not so much because she was sea-sick as because it was the
safest place in the unsteady ship to be in. "Do you want me to send
Ellen to you!"

"I will attend to Ellen, Boyne," his mother snubbed him. "How is
Lottie?"

"I can't tell whether she's sick or not. I went to see about her and she
motioned me away, and fairly screamed when I told her she ought to keep
out in the air. Well, I must be going up again myself, or--"

Before lunch, Boyne had experienced the alternative which he did not
express, although his theory and practice of keeping in the open air
ought to have rendered him immune. Breckon saw his shock of hair, and
his large eyes, like Ellen's in their present gloom, looking out of it on
the pillow of the upper berth, when he went to their room to freshen
himself for the luncheon, and found Boyne averse even to serious
conversation: He went to lunch without him. None of the Kentons were at
table, and he had made up his mind to lunch alone when Ellen appeared,
and came wavering down the aisle to the table. He stood up to help her,
but seeing how securely she stayed herself from chair to chair he sank
down again.

"Poppy is sick, too, now," she replied, as if to account for being alone.

"And you're none the worse for your little promenade?" The steward came
to Breckon's left shoulder with a dish, and after an effort to serve
himself from it he said, with a slight gasp, "The other side, please."
Ellen looked at him, but did not speak, and he made haste to say: "The
doctor goes so far as to admit that its half a gale. I don't know just
what measure the first officer would have for it. But I congratulate you
on a very typical little storm, Miss Kenton; perfectly safe, but very
decided. A great many people cross the Atlantic without anything half as
satisfactory. There is either too much or too little of this sort of
thing." He went on talking about the weather, and had got such a
distance from the point of beginning that he had cause to repent being
brought back to it when she asked:

"Did the doctor think, you were hurt?"

"Well, perhaps I ought to be more ashamed than I am," said Breckon.
"But I thought I had better make sure. And it's only a bruise--"

"Won't you let ME help you!" she asked, as another dish intervened at his
right. "I hurt you."

Breckon laughed at her solemn face and voice. "If you'll exonerate
yourself first," he answered: "I couldn't touch a morsel that conveyed
confession of the least culpability on your part. Do you consent?
Otherwise, I pass this dish. And really I want some!"

"Well," she sadly consented, and he allowed her to serve his plate.

"More yet, please," he said. "A lot!"

"Is that enough?"

"Well, for the first helping. And don't offer to cut it up for me! My
proud spirit draws the line at cutting up. Besides, a fork will do the
work with goulash."

"Is that what it is?" she asked, but not apparently because she cared to
know.

"Unless you prefer to naturalize it as stew. It seems to have come in
with the Hungarian bands. I suppose you have them in--"

"Tuskingum? No, it is too small. But I heard them at a restaurant in
New York where my brother took us."

"In the spirit of scientific investigation? It's strange how a common
principle seems to pervade both the Hungarian music and cooking--the same
wandering airs and flavors--wild, vague, lawless harmonies in both. Did
you notice it?"

Ellen shook her head. The look of gloom which seemed to Breckon habitual
in it came back into her face, and he had a fantastic temptation to see
how far he could go with her sad consciousness before she should be aware
that he was experimenting upon it. He put this temptation from him, and
was in the enjoyment of a comfortable self-righteousness when it returned
in twofold power upon him with the coming of some cutlets which
capriciously varied the repast.

"Ah, now, Miss Kenton, if you were to take pity on my helplessness!"

"Why, certainly!" She possessed herself of his plate, and began to cut
up the meat for him. "Am I making the bites too small?" she asked, with
an upward glance at him.

"Well, I don't know. Should you think so?" he returned, with a smile
that out-measured the morsels on the plate before her.

She met his laughing eyes with eyes that questioned his honesty, at first
sadly, and then indignantly. She dropped the knife and fork upon the
plate and rose.

"Oh, Miss Kenton!" he penitently entreated.

But she was down the slanting aisle and out of the reeling door before he
could decide what to do.




XI.

It seemed to Breckon that he had passed through one of those accessions
of temperament, one of those crises of natural man, to put it in the
terms of an older theology than he professed, that might justify him in
recurring to his original sense of his unfitness for his sacred calling,
as he would hardly ham called it: He had allowed his levity to get the
better of his sympathy, and his love of teasing to overpower that love of
helping which seemed to him his chief right and reason for being a
minister: To play a sort of poor practical joke upon that melancholy girl
(who was also so attractive) was not merely unbecoming to him as a
minister; it was cruel; it was vulgar; it was ungentlemanly. He could
not say less than ungentlemanly, for that seemed to give him the only
pang that did him any good. Her absolute sincerity had made her such an
easy prey that he ought to have shrunk from the shabby temptation in
abhorrence.

It is the privilege of a woman, whether she wills it or not, to put a man
who is in the wrong concerning her much further in the wrong than he
could be from his offence. Breckon did not know whether he was suffering
more or less because he was suffering quite hopelessly, but he was sure
that he was suffering justly, and he was rather glad, if anything, that
he must go on suffering. His first impulse had been to go at once to
Judge Kenton and own his wrong, and take the consequences--in fact,
invite them. But Breckon forbore for two reasons: one, that he had
already appeared before the judge with the confession of having possibly
made an unclerical joke to his younger daughter; the other, that the
judge might not consider levity towards the elder so venial; and though
Breckon wished to be both punished and pardoned, in the final analysis,
perhaps, he most wished to be pardoned. Without pardon he could see no
way to repair the wrong he had done. Perhaps he wished even to retrieve
himself in the girl's eyes, or wished for the chance of trying.