The Kentons

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He had made an overture to its renewal in the book he lent her, and then
Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter had appeared on deck, and borne down upon
him when he was walking with Lottie Kenton and trying to begin his
self-retrieval through her. She had left him; but they had not, and in
the bonds of a prophet and his followers he found himself bound with them
for much more conversation than he had often held with them ashore. The
parochial duties of an ethical teacher were not strenuous, and Breckon
had not been made to feel them so definitely before. Mrs. Rasmith held
that they now included promising to sit at her table for the rest of the
voyage; but her daughter succeeded in releasing him from the obligation;
and it was she who smilingly detached the clinging hold of the elder
lady. "We mustn't keep Mr. Breckon from his friends, mother," she said,
brightly, and then he said he should like the pleasure of introducing
them, and both of the ladies declared that they would be delighted.

He bowed himself off, and half the ship's-length away he was aware, from
meeting Lottie with her little Englishman, that it was she and not Ellen
whom he was seeking. As the couple paused in whirring past Breckon long
enough to let Lottie make her hat fast against the wind, he heard the
Englishman shout:

"I say, that sister of yours is a fine girl, isn't she?"

"She's a pretty good--looker," Lottie answered back. "What's the matter
with HER sister?"

"Oh, I say!" her companion returned, in a transport with her slangy
pertness, which Breckon could not altogether refuse to share.

He thought that he ought to condemn it, and he did condemn Mrs. Kenton
for allowing it in one of her daughters, when he came up to her sitting
beside another whom he felt inexpressibly incapable of it. Mrs. Kenton
could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters,
like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made
them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he
saw. She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had
the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen, with
her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest spirit in
her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable to his sex
as he could. But this bold defence was as far from the poor lady as any
spoken reproach was from him. Her daughter had to check in her a
mechanical offer to rise, as if to give Breckon her place, the theory and
practice of Tuskingum being that their elders ought to leave young people
alone together.

"Don't go, momma," Ellen whispered. "I don't want you to go."

Breckon, when he arrived before them, remained talking on foot, and,
unlike Lottie's company, he talked to the mother. This had happened
before from him, but she had not got used to it, and now she deprecated
in everything but words his polite questions about her sufferings from
the rough weather, and his rejoicing that the worst was probably over.
She ventured the hope that it was so, for she said that Mr. Kenton had
about decided to keep on to Holland, and it seemed to her that they had
had enough of storms. He said he was glad that they were going right on;
and then she modestly recurred to the earlier opinion he had given her
husband that it would be better to spend the rest of the summer in
Holland than to go to Italy, as if she wished to conform herself in the
wisdom of Mr. Kenton's decision. He repeated his conviction, and he said
that if he were in their place he should go to The Hague as soon as they
had seen Rotterdam, and make it their headquarters for the exploration of
the whole country.

"You can't realize how little it is; you can get anywhere in an hour; the
difficulty is to keep inside of Holland when you leave any given point.
I envy you going there."

Mrs. Kenton inferred that he was going to stop in France, but if it were
part of his closeness not to tell, it was part of her pride not to ask.
She relented when he asked if he might get a map of his and prove the
littleness of Holland from it, and in his absence she could not well
avoid saying to Ellen, "He seems very pleasant."

"Yes; why not?" the girl asked.

"I don't know. Lottie is so against him."

"He was very kind when you were all sick."

"Well, you ought to know better than Lottie; you've seen him so much
more." Ellen was silent, and her mother advanced cautiously, "I suppose
he is very cultivated."

"How can I tell? I'm not."

"Why, Ellen, I think you are. Very few girls have read so much."

"Yes, but he wouldn't care if I were cultivated, Ha is like all the rest.
He would like to joke and laugh. Well, I think that is nice, too, and I
wish I could do it. But I never could, and now I can't try. I suppose
he wonders what makes me such a dead weight on you all."

"You know you're not that, Ellen! You musn't let yourself be morbid. It
hurts me to have you say such things."

"Well, I should like to tell him why, and see what he would say."

"Ellen!"

"Why not? If he is a minister he must have thought about all kinds of
things. Do you suppose he ever knew of a girl before who had been
through what I have? Yes, I would like to know what he would really
say."

"I know what he ought to say! If he knew, he would say that no girl had
ever behaved more angelically."

"Do you think he would? Perhaps he would say that if I hadn't been so
proud and silly--Here he comes! Shall we ask him?"

Breckon approached with his map, and her mother gasped, thinking how
terrible such a thing would be if it could be; Ellen smiled brightly up
at him. "Will you take my chair? And then you can show momma your map.
I am going down," and while he was still protesting she was gone.

"Miss Kenton seems so much better than she did the first day," he said,
as he spread the map out on his knees, and gave Mrs. Kenton one end to
hold.

"Yes," the mother assented, as she bent over to look at it.

She followed his explanation with a surface sense, while her nether mind
was full of the worry of the question which Ellen had planted in it.
What would such a man think of what she had been through? Or, rather,
how would he say to her the only things that in Mrs. Kenton's belief he
could say? How could the poor child ever be made to see it in the light
of some mind not colored with her family's affection for her? An
immense, an impossible longing possessed itself of the mother's heart,
which became the more insistent the more frantic it appeared. She
uttered "Yes" and "No" and "Indeed" to what he was saying, but all the
time she was rehearsing Ellen's story in her inner sense. In the end she
remembered so little what had actually passed that her dramatic reverie
seemed the reality, and when she left him she got herself down to her
state-room, giddy with the shame and fear of her imaginary self-betrayal.
She wished to test the enormity, and yet not find it so monstrous, by
submitting the case to her husband, and she could scarcely keep back her
impatience at seeing Ellen instead of her father.

"Momma, what have you been saying to Mr. Breckon about me?"

"Nothing," said Mrs. Kenton, aghast at first, and then astonished to
realize that she was speaking the simple truth. "He said how much better
you were looking; but I don't believe I spoke a single word. We were
looking at the map."

"Very well," Ellen resumed. "I have been thinking it all over, and now I
have made up my mind."

She paused, and her mother asked, tremulously, "About what, Ellen?"

"You know, momma. I see all now. You needn't be afraid that I care
anything about him now," and her mother knew that she meant Bittridge,
"or that I ever shall. That's gone forever. But it's gone," she added,
and her mother quaked inwardly to hear her reason, "because the wrong and
the shame was all for me--for us. That's why I can forgive it, and
forget. If we had done anything, the least thing in the world, to
revenge ourselves, or to hurt him, then--Don't you see, momma?"

"I think I see, Ellen."

"Then I should have to keep thinking about it, and what we had made him
suffer, and whether we hadn't given him some claim. I don't wish ever to
think of him again. You and poppa were so patient and forbearing, all
through; and I thank goodness now for everything you put up with; only I
wish I could have borne everything myself."

"You had enough to bear," Mrs. Kenton said, in tender evasion.

"I'm glad that I had to bear so much, for bearing it is what makes me
free now." She went up to her mother and kissed her, and gazed into her
face with joyful, tearful looks that made her heart sink.




XIV.

Mrs. Kenton did not rest till she had made sure from Lottie and Boyne
that neither of them had dropped any hint to Ellen of what happened to
Bittridge after his return to Tuskingum. She did not explain to them why
she was so very anxious to know, but only charged them the more solemnly
not to let the secret, which they had all been keeping from Ellen, escape
them.

They promised, but Lottie said, "She's got to know it some time, and I
should think the sooner the better."

"I will be judge of that, Lottie," said her mother, and Boyne seized his
chance of inculpating her with his friend, Mr. Pogis. He said she was
carrying on awfully with him already; and an Englishman could not
understand, and Boyne hinted that he would presume upon her American
freedom.

"Well, if he does, I'll get you to cowhide him, Boyne," she retorted, and
left him fuming helplessly, while she went to give the young Englishman
an opportunity of resuming the flirtation which her mother had
interrupted.

With her husband Mrs. Kenton found it practicable to be more explicit.
"I haven't had such a load lifted off my heart since I don't know when.
It shows me what I've thought all along: that Ellen hasn't really cared
anything for that miserable thing since he first began going with Mrs.
Uphill a year ago. When he wrote that letter to her in New York she
wanted to be sure she didn't, and when he offered himself and misbehaved
so to both of you, she was afraid that she and you were somehow to blame.
Now she's worked it out that no one else was wronged, and she is
satisfied. It's made her feel free, as she says. But, oh, dear me!"
Mrs. Kenton broke off, "I talk as if there was nothing to bind her; and
yet there is what poor Richard did! What would she say if she knew that?
I have been cautioning Lottie and Boyne, but I know it will come out
somehow. Do you think it's wise to keep it from her? Hadn't we better
tell her? Or shall we wait and see--"

Kenton would not allow to her or to himself that his hopes ran with hers;
love is not business with a man as it is with a woman; he feels it
indecorous and indelicate to count upon it openly, where she thinks it
simply a chance of life, to be considered like another. All that Kenton
would say was, "I see no reason for telling her just yet. She will have
to know in due time. But let her enjoy her freedom now."

"Yes," Mrs. Kenton doubtfully assented.

The judge was thoughtfully silent. Then he said: "Few girls could have
worked out her problem as Ellen has. Think how differently Lottie would
have done it!"

"Lottie has her good points, too," said Mrs. Kenton. "And, of course, I
don't blame Richard. There are all kinds of girls, and Lottie means no
more harm than Ellen does. She's the kind that can't help attracting;
but I always knew that Ellen was attractive, too, if she would only find
it out. And I knew that as soon as anything worth while took up her mind
she would never give that wretch another thought."

Kenton followed her devious ratiocinations to a conclusion which he could
not grasp. "What do you mean, Sarah?"

"If I only," she explained, in terms that did not explain, "felt as sure
of him as I do about him!"

Her husband looked densely at her. "Bittridge?"

"No. Mr. Breckon. He is very nice, Rufus. Yes, he is! He's been
showing me the map of Holland, and we've had a long talk. He isn't the
way we thought--or I did. He is not at all clerical, or worldly. And he
appreciates Ellen. I don't suppose he cares so much for her being
cultivated; I suppose she doesn't seem so to him. But he sees how wise
she is--how good. And he couldn't do that without being good himself!
Rufus! If we could only hope such a thing. But, of course, there are
thousands after him!"

"There are not thousands of Ellens after him," said the judge, before he
could take time to protest. "And I don't want him to suppose that she is
after him at all. If he will only interest her and help her to keep her
mind off herself, it's all I will ask of him. I am not anxious to part
with her, now that she's all ours again."

"Of course," Mrs. Kenton soothingly assented. "And I don't say that she
dreams of him in any such way. She can't help admiring his mind. But
what I mean is that when you see how he appreciates her, you can't help
wishing he could know just how wise, and just how good she is. It did
seem to me as if I would give almost anything to have him know what she
had been through with that--rapscallion!"

"Sarah!"

"Oh, you may Sarah me! But I can tell you what, Mr. Kenton: I believe
that you could tell him every word of it, and only make him appreciate
her the more. Till you know that about Ellen, you don't know what a
character she is. I just ached to tell him!"

"I don't understand you, my dear," said Kenton. "But if you mean to tell
him--"

"Why, who could imagine doing such a thing? Don't you see that it is
impossible? Such a thing would never have come into my head if it hadn't
been for some morbid talk of Ellen's."

"Of Ellen's?"

"Oh, about wanting to disgust him by telling him why she was such a
burden to us."

"She isn't a burden!"

"I am saying what she said. And it made me think that if such a person
could only know the high-minded way she had found to get out of her
trouble! I would like somebody who is capable of valuing her to value
her in all her preciousness. Wouldn't you be glad if such a man as he is
could know how and why she feels free at last?"

"I don't think it's necessary," said Kenton, haughtily, "There's only one
thing that could give him the right to know it, and we'll wait for that
first. I thought you said that he was frivolous."

"Boyne said that, and Lottie. I took it for granted, till I talked with
him to-day. He is light-hearted and gay; he likes to laugh and joke; but
he can be very serious when he wants to."

"According to all precedent," said the judge, glumly, "such a man ought
to be hanging round Lottie. Everybody was that amounted to anything in
Tuskingum."

"Oh, in Tuskingum! And who were the men there that amounted to anything?
A lot of young lawyers, and two students of medicine, and some railroad
clerks. There wasn't one that would compare with Mr. Breckon for a
moment."

"All the more reason why he can't really care for Ellen. Now see here,
Sarah! You know I don't interfere with you and the children, but I'm
afraid you're in a craze about this young fellow. He's got these friends
of his who have just turned up, and we'll wait and see what he does with
them. I guess he appreciates the young lady as much as he does Ellen."

Mrs. Kenton's heart went down. "She doesn't compare with Ellen!" she
piteously declared.

"That's what we think. He may think differently."

Mrs. Kenton was silenced, but all the more she was determined to make
sure that Mr. Breckon was not interested in Miss Rasmith in any measure
or manner detrimental to Ellen. As for Miss Rasmith herself, Mrs. Kenton
would have had greater reason to be anxious about her behavior with Boyne
than Mr. Breckon. From the moment that the minister had made his two
groups of friends acquainted, the young lady had fixed upon Boyne as that
member of the Kenton group who could best repay a more intimate
friendship. She was polite to them all, but to Boyne she was flattering,
and he was too little used to deference from ladies ten years his senior
not to be very sensible of her worth in offering it. To be unremittingly
treated as a grown-up person was an experience so dazzling that his
vision was blinded to any possibilities in the behavior that formed it;
and before the day ended Boyne had possessed Miss Rasmith of all that it
was important for any fellow-being to know of his character and history.
He opened his heart to eyes that had looked into others before his, less
for the sake of exploiting than of informing himself. In the rare
intelligence of Miss Rasmith he had found that serious patience with his
problems which no one else, not Ellen herself, had shown, and after
trying her sincerity the greater part of the day he put it to the supreme
test, one evening, with a book which he had been reading. Boyne's
literature was largely entomological and zoological, but this was a work
of fiction treating of the fortunes of a young American adventurer, who
had turned his military education to account in the service of a German
princess. Her Highness's dominions were not in any map of Europe, and
perhaps it was her condition of political incognito that rendered her the
more fittingly the prey of a passion for the American head of her armies.
Boyne's belief was that this character veiled a real identity, and he
wished to submit to Miss Rasmith the question whether in the exclusive
circles of New York society any young millionaire was known to have taken
service abroad after leaving west Point. He put it in the form of a
scoffing incredulity which it was a comfort to have her take as if almost
hurt by his doubt. She said that such a thing might very well be, and
with rich American girls marrying all sorts of titles abroad, it was not
impossible for some brilliant young fellow to make his way to the steps
of a throne. Boyne declared that she was laughing at him, and she
protested that it was the last thing she should think of doing; she was
too much afraid of him. Then he began to argue against the case supposed
in the romance; he proved from the book itself that the thing could not
happen; such a princess would not be allowed to marry the American, no
matter how rich he was. She owned that she had not heard of just such an
instance, and he might think her very romantic; and perhaps she was; but
if the princess was an absolute princess, such as she was shown in that
story, she held that no power on earth could keep her from marrying the
young American. For herself she did not see, though, how the princess
could be in love with that type of American. If she had been in the
princess's place she should have fancied something quite different. She
made Boyne agree with her that Eastern Americans were all, more or less,
Europeanized, and it stood to reason, she held, that a European princess
would want something as un-European as possible if she was falling in
love to please herself. They had some contention upon the point that the
princess would want a Western American; and then Miss Rasmith, with a
delicate audacity, painted an heroic portrait of Boyne himself which he
could not recognize openly enough to disown; but he perceived
resemblances in it which went to his head when she demurely rose, with a
soft "Good-night, Mr. Kenton. I suppose I mustn't call you Boyne?"

"Oh yes, do!" he entreated. "I'm-I'm not grown up yet, you know."

"Then it will be safe," she sighed. "But I should never have thought of
that. I had got so absorbed in our argument. You are so logical, Mr.
Kenton--Boyne, I mean--thank you. You must get it from your father. How
lovely your sister is!"

"Ellen?"

"Well, no. I meant the other one. But Miss Kenton is beautiful, too.
You must be so happy together, all of you." She added, with a rueful
smile, "There's only one of me! Good-night."

Boyne did not know whether he ought not in humanity, if not gallantry, to
say he would be a brother to her, but while he stood considering, she put
out a hand to him so covered with rings that he was afraid she had hurt
herself in pressing his so hard, and had left him before he could decide.

Lottie, walking the deck, had not thought of bidding Mr. Pogis
good-night. She had asked him half a dozen times how late it was, and
when he answered, had said as often that she knew better, and she was
going below in another minute. But she stayed, and the flow of her
conversation supplied him with occasion for the remarks of which he
seldom varied the formula. When she said something too audacious for
silent emotion, he called out, "Oh, I say!" If she advanced an opinion
too obviously acceptable, or asked a question upon some point where it
seemed to him there could not be two minds, he was ready with the
ironical note, "Well, rather!" At times she pressed her studies of his
character and her observations on his manner and appearance so far that
he was forced to protest, "You are so personal!" But these moments were
rare; for the most part, "Oh I say!" and "Well, rather!" perfectly
covered the ground. He did not generally mind her parody of his poverty
of phrase, but once, after she had repeated "Well rather!" and "Oh, I
say!" steadily at everything he said for the whole round of the promenade
they were making, he intimated that there were occasions when, in his
belief, a woman's abuse of the freedom generously allowed her sex passed
the point of words.

"And when it passes the point of words" she taunted him, "what do you
do?"

"You will see," he said, "if it ever does," and Lottie felt justified by
her inference that he was threatening to kiss her, in answering:

"And if I ever SEE, I will box your ears."

"Oh, I say!" he retorted. "I should like to have you try."

He had ideas of the rightful mastery of a man in all things, which she
promptly pronounced brutal, and when he declared that his father's
conduct towards his wife and children was based upon these ideas, she
affirmed the superiority of her own father's principles and behavior.
Mr. Pogis was too declared an admirer of Judge Kenton to question his
motives or method in anything, and he could only generalize, "The
Americans spoil their women."

"Well, their women are worth it," said Lottie, and after allowing the
paradox time to penetrate his intelligence, he cried out, in a glad
transport:

"Oh, I SAY!"

At the moment Boyne's intellectual seance with Miss Rasmith was coming to
an end. Lottie had tacitly invited Mr. Pogis to prolong the comparison
of English and American family life by stopping in front of a couple of
steamer-chairs, and confessing that she was tired to death. They sat
down, and he told her about his mother, whom, although his father's
subordinate, he seemed to be rather fonder of. He had some elder
brothers, most of them in the colonies, and he had himself been out to
America looking at something his father had found for him in Buffalo.

"You ought to come to Tuskingum," said Lottie.

"Is that a large place?" Mr. Pogis asked. "As large as Buffalo?"

"Well, no," Lottie admitted. "But it's a growing place. And we have the
best kind of times."

"What kind?" The young man easily consented to turn the commercial into
a social inquiry.

"Oh, picnics, and river parties, and buggy-rides, and dances."

"I'm keen on dancing," said Mr. Pogis. "I hope they'll give us a dance
on board. Will you put me down for the first dance?"

"I don't care. Will you send me some flowers? The steward must have
some left in the refrigerator."

"Well, rather! I'll send you a spray, if he's got enough."

"A spray? What's a spray?"

"Oh, I say! My sister always wears one. It's a long chain of flowers
reachin' from your shoulder diagonally down to your waist."

"Does your sister always have her sprays sent to her?"

"Well, rather! Don't they send flowers to girls for dances in the
States?"

"Well, rather! Didn't I just ask you?"

This was very true, and after a moment of baffle Mr. Pogis said, in
generalization, "If you go with a young lady in a party to the theatre
you send her a box of chocolates."

"Only when you go to theatre! I couldn't get enough, then, unless you
asked me every night," said Lottie, and while Mr. Pogis was trying to
choose between "Oh, I say!" and something specific, like, "I should like
to ask you every night," she added, "And what would happen if you sent a
girl a spray for the theatre and chocolates for a dance? Wouldn't it jar
her?"

Now, indeed, there was nothing for him but to answer, "Oh, I say!"

"Well, say, then! Here comes Boyne, and I must go. Well, Boyne," she
called, from the dark nook where she sat, to her brother as he stumbled
near, with his eyes to the stars, "has the old lady retired?"

He gave himself away finely. "What old lady!"

"Well, maybe at your age you don't consider her very old. But I don't
think a boy ought to sit up mooning at his grandmother all night. I know
Miss Rasmith's no relation, if that's what you're going to say!"

"Oh, I say!" Mr. Pogis chuckled. "You are so personal."

"Well, rather!" said Lottie, punishing his presumption. "But I don't
think it's nice for a kid, even if she isn't."