The Kentons

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Ellen went away to her state-room and sat down on the sofa opposite
Lottie, and she lost herself in a muse in which she was found by the
voice of the sufferer in the berth.

"If you haven't got anything better to do than come in here and stare at
me, I wish you would go somewhere else and stare. I can tell you it
isn't any joke."

"I didn't know I was staring at you," said Ellen, humbly.

"It would be enough to have you rising and sinking there, without your
staring at all: If you're going to stay, I wish you'd lie down. I don't
see why you're so well, anyway, after getting us all to come on this
wild-goose chase."

"I know, I know," Ellen strickenly deprecated. "But I'm not going to
stay. I jest came for my things."

"Is that giggling simpleton sick? I hope he is!"

"Mr. Breckon?" Ellen asked, though she knew whom Lottie meant. "No, he
isn't sick. He was at lunch."

"Was poppa?"

"He was at breakfast."

"And momma?"

"She and Boyne are both in bed. I don't know whether they're very sick."

"Well, then, I'll just tell you what, Ellen Kenton!" Lottie sat up in
accusal. "You were staring at something he said; and the first thing we
all know it will be another case of Bittridge!" Ellen winced, but Lottie
had no pity. "You don't know it, because you don't know anything, and
I'm not blaming you; but if you let that simpleton--I don't care if he is
a minister!--go 'round with you when your family are all sick abed,
you'll be having the whole ship to look after you."

"Be still, Lottie!" cried Ellen. "You are awful," and, with a flaming
face, she escaped from the state-room.

She did not know where else to go, and she beat along the sides of the
corridor as far as the dining-saloon. She had a dim notion of trying to
go up into the music-room above, but a glance at the reeling steep of the
stairs forbade. With her wraps on her arm and her sea-cap in her hand,
she stood clinging to the rail-post.

Breckon came out of the saloon. "Oh, Miss Kenton," he humbly entreated,
"don't try to go on deck! It's rougher than ever."

"I was going to the music-room," she faltered.

"Let me help you, then," he said again. They mounted the gangway-steps,
but this time with his hand under her elbow, and his arm alert as before
in a suspended embrace against her falling.

She had lost the initiative of her earlier adventure; she could only
submit herself to his guidance. But he almost outdid her in meekness,
when he got her safely placed in a corner whence she could not be easily
flung upon the floor. "You must have found it very stuffy below; but,
indeed, you'd better not try going out."

"Do you think it isn't safe here?" she asked.

"Oh yes. As long as you keep quiet. May I get you something to read?
They seem to have a pretty good little library."

They both glanced at the case of books; from which the steward-librarian
was setting them the example of reading a volume.

"No, I don't want to read. You musn't let me keep you from it."

"Well, one can read any time. But one hasn't always the chance to say
that one is ashamed. Don't pretend you don't understand, Miss Kenton!
I didn't really mean anything. The temptation to let you exaggerate my
disability was too much for me. Say that you despise me! It would be
such a comfort."

"Weren't you hurt?"

"A little--a little more than a little, but not half so much as I
deserved--not to the point of not being able to cut up my meat. Am I
forgiven? I'll promise to cut up all your meat for you at dinner! Ah,
I'm making it worse!"

"Oh no. Please don't speak of it"

"Could you forbid my thinking of it, too?" He did not wait for her to
answer. "Then here goes! One, two, three, and the thought is banished
forever. Now what shall we speak of, or think of? We finished up the
weather pretty thoroughly this morning. And if you have not the weather
and the ship's run when you're at sea, why, you are at sea. Don't you
think it would be a good plan, when they stick those little flags into
the chart, to show how far we've come in the last twenty-four hours, if
they'd supply a topic for the day? They might have topics inscribed on
the flags-standard topics, that would serve for any voyage. We might
leave port with History--say, personal history; that would pave the way
to a general acquaintance among the passengers. Then Geography, and if
the world is really round, and what keeps the sea from spilling. Then
Politics, and the comparative advantages of monarchical and republican
governments, for international discussion. Then Pathology, and whether
you're usually sea-sick, and if there is any reliable remedy. Then--for
those who are still up--Poetry and Fiction; whether women really like
Kipling, and what kind of novels you prefer. There ought to be about ten
topics. These boats are sometimes very slow. Can't you suggest
something, Miss Kenton? There is no hurry! We've got four to talk over,
for we must bring up the arrears, you know. And now we'll begin with
personal history. Your sister doesn't approve of me, does she?"

"My sister?" Ellen faltered, and, between the conscience to own the fact
and the kindness to deny it, she stopped altogether.

"I needn't have asked. She told me so herself, in almost as many words.
She said I was slippery, and as close as a trap. Miss Kenton! I have
the greatest wish to know whether I affect you as both slippery and
close!"

"I don't always know what Lottie means."

"She means what she says; and I feel that I am under condemnation till I
reform. I don't know how to stop being slippery, but I'm determined to
stop being close. Will you tell her that for me? Will you tell her that
you never met an opener, franker person?--of course, except herself!--and
that so far from being light I seemed to you particularly heavy? Say
that I did nothing but talk about myself, and that when you wanted to
talk about yourself you couldn't get in a word edgewise. Do try, now,
Miss Kenton, and see if you can! I don't want you to invent a character
for me, quite."

"Why, there's nothing to say about me," she began in compliance with his
gayety, and then she fell helpless from it.

"Well, then, about Tuskingum. I should like to hear about Tuskingum, so
much!"

"I suppose we like it because we've always lived there. You haven't been
much in the West, have you?"

"Not as much as I hope to be." He had found that Western people were
sometimes sensitive concerning their section and were prepared to resent
complacent ignorance of it. "I've always thought it must be very
interesting."

"It isn't," said the girl. "At least, not like the East. I used to be
provoked when the lecturers said anything like that; but when you've been
to New York you see what they mean."

"The lecturers?" he queried.

"They always stayed at our house when they lectured in Tuskingum."

"Ah! Oh yes," said Breckon, grasping a situation of which he had heard
something, chiefly satirical. "Of course. And is your father--is Judge
Kenton literary? Excuse me!"

"Only in his history. He's writing the history of his regiment; or he
gets the soldiers to write down all they can remember of the war, and
then he puts their stories together."

"How delightful!" said Breckon. "And I suppose it's a great pleasure to
him."

"I don't believe it is," said Ellen. "Poppa doesn't believe in war any
more."

"Indeed!" said Breckon. "That is very interesting."

"Sometimes when I'm helping him with it--"

"Ah, I knew you must help him!"

"And he comes to a place where there has been a dreadful slaughter, it
seems as if he felt worse about it than I did. He isn't sure that it
wasn't all wrong. He thinks all war is wrong now."

"Is he--has he become a follower of Tolstoy?"

"He's read him. He says he's the only man that ever gave a true account
of battles; but he had thought it all out for himself before he read
Tolstoy about fighting. Do you think it is right to revenge an injury?"

"Why, surely not!" said Breckon, rather startled.

"That is what we say," the girl pursued. "But if some one had injured
you--abused your confidence, and--insulted you, what would you do?"

"I'm not sure that I understand," Breckon began. The inquiry was
superficially impersonal, but he reflected that women are never
impersonal, or the sons of women, for that matter, and he suspected an
intimate ground. His suspicions were confirmed when Miss Kenton said:
"It seems easy enough to forgive anything that's done to yourself; but if
it's done to some one else, too, have you the right--isn't it wrong to
let it go?"

"You think the question of justice might come in then? Perhaps it ought.
But what is justice? And where does your duty begin to be divided?"
He saw her following him with alarming intensity, and he shrank from the
responsibility before him. What application might not she make of his
words in the case, whatever it was, which he chose not to imagine?
"To tell you the truth, Miss Kenton, I'm not very clear on that point
--I'm not sure that I'm disinterested."

"Disinterested?"

"Yes; you know that I abused your confidence at luncheon; and until I
know whether the wrong involved any one else--" He looked at her with
hovering laughter in his eyes which took wing at the reproach in hers.
"But if we are to be serious--"

"Oh no," she said, "it isn't a serious matter." But in the helplessness
of her sincerity she could not carry it off lightly, or hide from him
that she was disappointed.

He tried to make talk about other things. She responded vaguely, and
when she had given herself time she said she believed she would go to
Lottie; she was quite sure she could get down the stairs alone. He
pursued her anxiously, politely, and at the head of her corridor took
leave of her with a distinct sense of having merited his dismissal.

"I see what you mean, Lottie," she said, "about Mr. Breckon."

Lottie did not turn her head on the pillow. "Has it taken you the whole
day to find it out?"




XII.

The father and the mother had witnessed with tempered satisfaction the
interest which seemed to be growing up between Ellen and the young
minister. By this time they had learned not to expect too much of any
turn she might take; she reverted to a mood as suddenly as she left it.
They could not quite make out Breckon himself; he was at least as great a
puzzle to them as their own child was.

"It seems," said Mrs. Kenton, in their first review of the affair, after
Boyne had done a brother's duty in trying to bring Ellen under their
mother's censure, "that he was the gentleman who discussed the theatre
with Boyne at the vaudeville last winter. Boyne just casually mentioned
it. I was so provoked!"

"I don't see what bearing the fact has," the judge remarked.

"Why, Boyne liked him very much that night, but now he seems to feel very
much as Lottie does about him. He thinks he laughs too much."

"I don't know that there's much harm in that," said the judge. "And I
shouldn't value Boyne's opinion of character very highly."

"I value any one's intuitions--especially children's."

"Boyne's in that middle state where he isn't quite a child. And so is
Lottie, for that matter."

"That is true," their mother assented. "And we ought to be glad of
anything that takes Ellen's mind off herself. If I could only believe
she was forgetting that wretch!"

"Does she ever speak of him?"

"She never hints of him, even. But her mind may be full of him all the
time."

The judge laughed impatiently. "It strikes me that this young Mr.
Breckon hasn't much advantage of Ellen in what Lottie calls closeness!"

"Ellen has always been very reserved. It would have been better for her
if she hadn't. Oh, I scarcely dare to hope anything! Rufus, I feel that
in everything of this kind we are very ignorant and inexperienced."

"Inexperienced!" Renton retorted. "I don't want any more experience of
the kind Ellen has given us."

"I don't mean that. I mean--this Mr. Breckon. I can't tell what
attracts him in the child. She must appear very crude and uncultivated
to him. You needn't resent it so! I know she's read a great deal,
and you've made her think herself intellectual--but the very
simple-heartedness of the way she would show out her reading would make
such a young man see that she wasn't like the girls he was used to. They
would hide their intellectuality, if they had any. It's no use your
trying to fight it Mr. Kenton. We are country people, and he knows it."

"Tuskingum isn't country!" the judge declared.

"It isn't city. And we don't know anything about the world, any of us.
Oh, I suppose we can read and write! But we don't know the a, b, c of
the things he, knows. He, belongs to a kind of society--of people
--in New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never
imagined before. They made me feel very belated and benighted--as if I
hadn't, read or thought anything. They didn't mean to; but I couldn't
help it, and they couldn't."

"You--you've been frightened out of your propriety by what you've seen in
New York," said her husband.

"I've been frightened, certainly. And I wish you had been, too. I wish
you wouldn't be so conceited about Ellen. It scares me to see you so.
Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone! You must see that. And she
doesn't dress like the girls he's used to. I know we've got her things
in New York; but she doesn't wear them like a New-Yorker. I hope she
isn't going in for MORE unhappiness!"

At the thought of this the judge's crest fell. "Do you believe she's
getting interested in him?" he asked, humbly.

"No, no; I don't say that. But promise me you won't encourage her in it.
And don't, for pity's sake, brag about her to him."

"No, I won't," said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.

The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview with his
wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung convalescently
along the promenade on their steamer-chairs. These, so far as they were
women, were of such sick plainness that when he came to Ellen his heart
throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother's aspersion of her health
and beauty. She looked not only very well, and very pretty, but in a gay
red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her father's uncritical eyes,
very stylish. The glow left his heart at eight of the empty seat beside
her.

"Where is Lottie?" he asked, though it was not Lottie's whereabouts
that interested him.

"Oh, she's walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere," said Ellen.

"Then she's made up her mind to tolerate him, has she?" the father
asked, more lightly than he felt.

Ellen smiled. "That wasn't anything very serious, I guess. At any rate,
she's walking with him."

"What book is that?" he asked, of the volume she was tilting back and
forth under her hand.

She showed it. "One of his. He brought it up to amuse me, he said."

"While he was amusing himself with Lottie," thought the judge, in his
jealousy for her. "It is going the same old way. Well!" What he said
aloud was, "And is it amusing you?"

"I haven't looked at it yet," said the girl. "It's amusing enough to
watch the sea. Oh, poppa! I never thought I should care so much for
it."

"And you're glad we came?"

"I don't want to think about that. I just want to know that I'm here."
She pressed his arm gently, significantly, where he sat provisionally in
the chair beside her, and he was afraid to speak lest he should scare
away the hope her words gave him.

He merely said, "Well, well!" and waited for her to speak further. But
her impulse had exhausted itself, as if her spirit were like one of those
weak forms of life which spend their strength in a quick run or flight,
and then rest to gather force for another. "Where's Boyne?" he asked,
after waiting for her to speak.

"He was here a minute ago. He's been talking with some of the deck
passengers that are going home because they couldn't get on in America.
Doesn't that seem pitiful, poppa? I always thought we had work enough
for the whole world."

"Perhaps these fellows didn't try very hard to find it," said the judge.

"Perhaps," she assented.

"I shouldn't want you to get to thinking that it's all like New York.
Remember how comfortable everybody is in Tuskingum."

"Yes," she said, sadly. "How far off Tuskingum seems!"

"Well, don't forget about it; and remember that wherever life is simplest
and purest and kindest, that is the highest civilization."

"How much like old times it seems to hear you talk that way, poppa!
I should think I was in the library at home. And I made you leave it!"
she sighed.

"Your mother was glad of any excuse. And it will do us all good, if we
take it in the right way," said the judge, with a didactic severity that
did not hide his pang from her.

"Poor poppa!" she said.

He went away, saying that he was going to look Lottie up. His simple
design was to send Lottie to her mother, so that Breckon might come back
to Ellen; but he did not own this to himself.

Lottie returned from another direction with Boyne, and Ellen said,
"Poppa's gone to look for you."

"Has he?" asked Lottie, dropping decisively into her chair. "Well,
there's one thing; I won't call him poppa any more."

"What will you call him?" Boyne demanded, demurely.

"I'll call him father, it you want to know; and I'm going to call momma,
mother. I'm not going to have those English laughing at us, and I won't
say papa and mamma. Everybody that knows anything says father and mother
now."

Boyne kept looking from one sister to another during Lottie's
declaration, and, with his eyes on Ellen, he said, "It's true, Ellen.
All the Plumptons did." He was very serious.

Ellen smiled. "I'm too old to change. I'd rather seem queer in Europe
than when I get back to Tuskingum."

"You wouldn't be queer there a great while," said Lottie. "They'll all
be doing it in a week after I get home."

Upon the encouragement given him by Ellen, Boyne seized the chance of
being of the opposition. "Yes," he taunted Lottie, "and you think
they'll say woman and man, for lady and gentleman, I suppose."

"They will as soon as they know it's the thing."

"Well, I know I won't," said Boyne. "I won't call momma a woman."

"It doesn't matter what you do, Boyne dear," his sister serenely assured
him.

While he stood searching his mind for a suitable retort, a young man, not
apparently many years his senior, came round the corner of the
music-room, and put himself conspicuously in view at a distance from the
Kentons.

"There he is, now," said Boyne. "He wants to be introduced to Lottie."
He referred the question to Ellen, but Lottie answered for her.

"Then why don't you introduce him?"

"Well, I would if he was an American. But you can't tell about these
English." He resumed the dignity he had lost in making the explanation
to Lottie, and ignored her in turning again to Ellen. "What do you
think, Ellen?"

"Oh, don't know about such things, Boyne," she said, shrinking from the
responsibility.

"Well; upon my word!" cried Lottie. "If Ellen can talk by the hour with
that precious Mr. Breckon, and stay up here along with him, when
everybody else is down below sick, I don't think she can have a great
deal to say about a half-grown boy like that being introduced to me."

"He's as old as you are," said Boyne, hotly.

"Oh! I saw him associating with you, and I thought he was a boy, too.
Pardon me!" Lottie turned from giving Boyne his coup-de-grace, to plant
a little stab in Ellen's breast. "To be sure, now Mr. Breckon has found
those friends of his, I suppose he won't want to flirt with Ellen any
more."

"Ah, ha, ha!" Boyne broke in. "Lottie is mad because he stopped to
speak to some ladies he knew. Women, I suppose she'd call them."

"Well, I shouldn't call him a gentleman, anyway," said Lottie.

The pretty, smooth-faced, fresh-faced young fellow whom their varying
debate had kept in abeyance, looked round at them over his shoulder as he
leaned on the rail, and seemed to discover Boyne for the first time. He
came promptly towards the Kentons.

"Now," said Lottie, rapidly, "you'll just HAVE to."

The young fellow touched his cap to the whole group, but he ventured to
address only Boyne.

"Every one seems to be about this morning," he said, with the cheery
English-rising infection.

"Yes," answered Boyne, with such snubbing coldness that Ellen's heart was
touched.

"It's so pleasant," she said, "after that dark weather."

"Isn't it?" cried the young fellow, gratefully. "One doesn't often get
such sunshine as this at sea, you know."

"My sister, Miss Kenton, Mr. Pogis," Boyne solemnly intervened. "And
Miss Lottie Kenton."

The pretty boy bowed to each in turn, but he made no pretence of being
there to talk with Ellen. "Have you been ill, too?" he actively
addressed himself to Lottie.

"No, just mad," she said. "I wasn't very sick, and that made it all the
worse being down in a poky state-room when I wanted to walk."

"And I suppose you've been making up for lost time this morning?"

"Not half," said Lottie.

"Oh, do finish the half with me!"

Lottie instantly rose, and flung her sister the wrap she had been holding
ready to shed from the moment the young man had come up. "Keep that for
me, Nell. Are you good at catching?" she asked him.

"Catching?"

"Yes! People," she explained, and at a sudden twist of the ship she made
a clutch at his shoulder.

"Oh! I think I can catch you."

As they moved off together, Boyne said, "Well, upon my word!" but Ellen
did not say anything in comment on Lottie. After a while she asked, "Who
were the ladies that Mr. Breckon met?"

"I didn't hear their names. They were somebody he hadn't seen before
since the ship started. They looked like a young lady and her mother.
It made Lottie mad when he stopped to speak with them, and she wouldn't
wait till he could get through. Ran right away, and made me come, too."





XIII.

Breckon had not seen the former interest between himself and Ellen lapse
to commonplace acquaintance without due sense of loss. He suffered
justly, but he did not suffer passively, or without several attempts to
regain the higher ground. In spite of these he was aware of being
distinctly kept to the level which he accused himself of having chosen,
by a gentle acquiescence in his choice more fatal than snubbing. The
advances that he made across the table, while he still met Miss Kenton
alone there, did not carry beyond the rack supporting her plate. She
talked on whatever subject he started with that angelic sincerity which
now seemed so far from him, but she started none herself; she did not
appeal to him for his opinion upon any question more psychological than
the barometer; and,

"In a tumultuous privacy of storm,"

he found himself as much estranged from her as if a fair-weather crowd
had surrounded them. He did not believe that she resented the levity he
had shown; but he had reason to fear that she had finally accepted it as
his normal mood, and in her efforts to meet him in it, as if he had no
other, he read a tolerance that was worse than contempt. When he tried
to make her think differently, if that was what she thought of him, he
fancied her rising to the notion he wished to give her, and then
shrinking from it, as if it must bring her the disappointment of some
trivial joke.

It was what he had taught her to expect of him, and he had himself to
blame. Now that he had thrown that precious chance away, he might well
have overvalued it. She had certain provincialisms which he could not
ignore. She did not know the right use of will and shall, and would and
should, and she pronounced the letter 'r' with a hard mid-Western twist.
Her voice was weak and thin, and she could not govern it from being at
times a gasp and at times a drawl. She did not dress with the authority
of women who know more of their clothes than the people they buy them of;
she did not carry herself like a pretty girl; she had not the definite
stamp of young-ladyism. Yet she was undoubtedly a lady in every
instinct; she wore with pensive grace the clothes which she had not
subjected to her personal taste; and if she did not carry herself like a
pretty girl, she had a beauty which touched and entreated.

More and more Breckon found himself studying her beauty--her soft, brown
brows, her gentle, dark eyes, a little sunken, and with the lids pinched
by suffering; the cheeks somewhat thin, but not colorless; the long chin,
the clear forehead, and the massed brown hair, that seemed too heavy for
the drooping neck. It was not the modern athletic type; it was rather of
the earlier period, when beauty was associated with the fragility
despised by a tanned and golfing generation. Ellen Kenton's wrists were
thin, and her hands long and narrow. As he looked at her across the
racks during those two days of storm, he had sometimes the wish to take
her long, narrow hands in his, and beg her to believe that he was
worthier her serious friendship than he had shown himself. What he was
sure of at all times now was that he wished to know the secret of that
patient pathos of hers. She was not merely, or primarily, an invalid.
Her family had treated her as an invalid, but, except Lottie, whose rigor
might have been meant sanatively, they treated her more with the
tenderness people use with a wounded spirit; and Breckon fancied moments
of something like humility in her, when she seemed to cower from his
notice. These were not so imaginable after her family took to their
berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a
sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child might
show at some incomprehensible harm. It was this grief which he had
refused not merely to know--he still doubted his right to know it--but to
share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and had
exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with the fair
weather, he felt himself farther from her than before their acquaintance
began.