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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.”