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.
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.
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.”
“Kid!” Boyne ground, through his clenched teeth.
By this time Lottie was up out of her chair and beyond repartee in her flight down the gangway stairs. She left the two youngsters confronted.
“What do you say to a lemon-squash?” asked Mr. Pogis, respecting his friend’s wounded dignity, and ignoring Lottie and her offence.
“I don’t care if I do,” said Boyne in gloomy acquiescence.
Few witnesses of the fact that Julia Rasmith and her mother had found themselves on the same steamer with the Rev. Hugh Breckon would have been of such a simple mind as to think they were there by accident, if they had also been witnesses of their earlier history. The ladies could have urged that in returning from California only a few days before the Amstel sailed, and getting a state-room which had been unexpectedly given up, they had some claim to a charitable interpretation of their behavior, but this plea could not have availed them with any connoisseur of women. Besides, it had been a matter of notoriety among such of Mr. Breckon’s variegated congregation as knew one another that Mrs. Rasmith had set her heart on him, it Julia had not set her cap for him. In that pied flock, where every shade and dapple of doubt, from heterodox Jew to agnostic Christian, foregathered, as it has been said, in the misgiving of a blessed immortality, the devotion of Mrs. Rasmith to the minister had been almost a scandal. Nothing had saved the appearance from this character but Mr. Breckon’s open acceptance of her flatteries and hospitalities; this was so frank, and the behavior of Julia herself so judicious under the circumstances, that envy and virtue were, if not equally silenced, equally baffled. So far from pretending not to see her mother’s manoeuvres, Julia invited public recognition of them; in the way of joking, which she kept within the limits of filial fondness, she made fun of her mother’s infatuation to Breckon himself, and warned him against the moment when her wiles might be too much for him. Before other people she did not hesitate to save him from her mother, so that even those who believed her in the conspiracy owned that no girl could have managed with more cleverness in a situation where not every one would have refused to be placed. In this situation Julia Rasmith had the service of a very clear head, and as was believed by some, a cool heart; if she and her mother had joint designs upon the minister, hers was the ambition, and her mother’s the affection that prompted them. She was a long, undulant girl, of a mixed blondness that left you in doubt, after you had left her, whether her hair or her complexion were not of one tint; but her features were good, and there could be no question of her captivating laugh, and her charming mouth, which she was always pulling down with demure irony. She was like her mother in her looks, but her indolent, droning temperament must have been from her father, whose memory was lost in that antiquity which swallows up the record of so many widows’ husbands, and who could not have left her what was left of her mother’s money, for none of it had ever been his. It was still her mother’s, and it was supposed to be the daughter’s chief attraction. There must, therefore, have been a good deal of it, for those who were harshest with the minister did not believe that a little money would attract him. Not that they really thought him mercenary; some of his people considered him gay to the verge of triviality, but there were none that accused him of insincerity. They would have liked a little more seriousness in him, especially when they had not much of their own, and would have had him make up in severity of behavior for what he lacked, and what they wished him to lack, in austerity of doctrine.
The Amstel had lost so much time in the rough weather of her first days out that she could not make it up with her old-fashioned single screw. She was at best a ten-day boat, counting from Sandy Hook to Boulogne, and she had not been four days out when she promised to break her record for slowness. Three days later Miss Rasmith said to Breckon, as he took the chair which her mother agilely abandoned to him beside her: “The head steward says it will be a twelve-day trip, end our bedroom steward thinks more. What is the consensus of opinion in the smoking-room? Where are you going, mother? Are you planning to leave Mr. Breckon and me alone again? It isn’t necessary. We couldn’t get away from each other if we tried, and all we ask—Well, I suppose age must be indulged in its little fancies,” she called after Mrs. Rasmith.
Breckon took up the question she had asked him. “The odds are so heavily in favor of a fifteen-days’ run that there are no takers.”
“Now you are joking again,” she said. “I thought a sea-voyage might make you serious.”
“It has been tried before. Besides, it’s you that I want to be serious.”
“What about? Besides, I doubt it.”
“About Boyne.”
“Oh! I thought you were going to say some one else.”
“No, I think that is very well settled.”
“You’ll never persuade my mother,” said Miss Rasmith, with a low, comfortable laugh.
“But if you are satisfied—”
“She will have to resign herself? Well, perhaps. But why do you wish me to be serious about Boyne?”
“I have no doubt he amuses you. But that doesn’t seem a very good reason why you should amuse yourself with him.”
“No? Why not?”
“Well, because the poor boy is in earnest; and you’re not exactly—contemporaries.”
“Why, how old is Boyne?” she asked, with affected surprise.
“About fifteen, I think,” said Breckon, gravely.
“And I’m but a very few months past thirty. I don’t see the great disparity. But he is merely a brother to me—an elder brother—and he gives me the best kind of advice.”
“I dare say you need it, but all the same, I am afraid you are putting ideas into his head.”
“Well, if he began it? If he put them in mine first?”
She was evidently willing that he should go further, and create the common ground between them that grows up when one gives a reproof and the other accepts it; but Breckon, whether he thought that he had now done his duty, and need say no more, or because he was vexed with her, left the subject.
“Mrs. Rasmith says you are going to Switzerland for the rest of the summer.”
“Yes, to Montreux. Are you going to spend it in Paris?”
“I’m going to Paris to see. I have had some thoughts of Etretat; I have cousins there.”
“I wish that I could go to the sea-side. But this happens to be one of the summers when nothing but mountains can save my mother’s life. Shall you get down to Rome before you go back?”
“I don’t know. If I sail from Naples I shall probably pass through Rome.”
“You had better stop off. We shall be there in November, and they say Rome is worth seeing,” she laughed demurely. “That is what Boyne understands. He’s promised to use his influence with his family to let him run down to see us there, if he can’t get them all to come. You might offer to personally conduct them.”
“Yes.” said Breckon, with the effect of cloture. “Have you made many acquaintances an board?”
“What! Two lone women? You haven’t introduced us to any but the Kentons. But I dare say they are the best. The judge is a dear, and Mrs. Kenton is everything that is motherly and matronly. Boyne says she is very well informed, and knows all about the reigning families. If he decides to marry into them, she can be of great use in saving him from a mesalliance. I can’t say very much for Miss Lottie. Miss Lottie seems to me distinctly of the minx type. But that poor, pale girl is adorable. I wish she liked me!”
“What makes you think she doesn’t like you?” Breckon asked.
“What? Women don’t require anything to convince them that other women can’t bear them. They simply know it. I wonder what has happened to her?”
“Why do you think anything has happened to her?”
“Why? Well, girls don’t have that air of melancholy absence for nothing. She is brooding upon something, you may be sure. But you have had so many more opportunities than I! Do you mean that you haven’t suspected a tragical past far her?”
“I don’t know,” said Breckon, a little restively, “that I have allowed myself to speculate about her past.”
“That is, you oughtn’t to have allowed yourself to do so. Well, there I agree with you. But a woman may do so without impertinence, and I am sure that Miss Kenton has a story. I have watched her, and her face has told me everything but the story.”
Breckon would not say that some such revelation had been made to him, and in the absence of an answer from him Miss Rasmith asked, “Is she cultivated, too?”
“Too?”
“Like her mother.”
“Oh! I should say she had read a good dial. And she’s bookish, yes, in a simple-hearted kind of way.”
“She asks you if you have read ‘the book of the year,’ and whether you don’t think the heroine is a beautiful character?”
“Not quite so bad as that. But if you care to be serious about her!”
“Oh, I do!”
“I doubt it. Then, I should say that she seems to have grown up in a place where the interests are so material that a girl who was disposed to be thoughtful would be thrown back upon reading for her society more than in more intellectual centres—if there are such things. She has been so much with books that she does not feel odd in speaking of them as if they were the usual topics of conversation. It gives her a certain quaintness.”
“And that is what constitutes her charm?”
“I didn’t know that we were speaking of her charm.”
“No, that is true. But I was thinking of it. She fascinates me. Are they going to get off at Boulogne?”
“No, they are going on to Rotterdam.”
“To be sure! Boyne told me. And are you going on with them?”
“I thought we talked of my going to Paris.” Breckon looked round at her, and she made a gesture of deprecation.
“Why, of course! How could I forget? But I’m so much interested in Miss Kenton that I can’t think of anything else.”
“Not even of Miss Rasmith?”
“Not even of Miss Rasmith. I know that she has a history, and that it’s a sad one.” She paused in ironical hesitation. “You’ve been so good as to caution me about her brother—and I never can be grateful enough—and that makes me almost free to suggest—”
She stopped again, and he asked, hardily, “What?”
“Oh, nothing. It isn’t for me to remind my pastor, my ghostly adviser”—she pulled down her mouth and glanced at him demurely—“and I will only offer the generalization that a girl is never so much in danger of having her heart broken as when she’s had it broken—Oh, are you leaving me?” she cried, as Breckon rose from his chair.
“Well, then, send Boyne to me.” She broke into a laugh as he faltered. “Are you going to sit down again? That is right. And I won’t talk any more about Miss Kenton.”
“I don’t mind talking of her,” said Breckon. “Perhaps it will even be well to do so if you are in earnest. Though it strikes me that you have rather renounced the right to criticise me.”
“Now, is that logical? It seems to me that in putting myself in the attitude of a final friend at the start, and refusing to be anything more, I leave established my right to criticise you on the firmest basis. I can’t possibly be suspected of interested motives. Besides, you’ve just been criticizing me, if you want a woman’s reason!”
“Well, go on.”
“Why, I had finished. That’s the amusing part. I should have supposed that I could go on forever about Miss Kenton, but I have nothing to go upon. She has kept her secret very well, and so have the rest of them. You think I might have got it out of Boyne? Perhaps I might, but you know I have my little scruples. I don’t think it would be quite fair, or quite nice.”
“You are scrupulous. And I give you credit for having been more delicate than I’ve been.”
“You don’t mean you’ve been trying to find it out!”
“Ah, now I’m not sure about the superior delicacy!”
“Oh, how good!” said Miss Rasmith. “What a pity you should be wasted in a calling that limits you so much.”
“You call it limiting? I didn’t know but I had gone too far.”
“Not at all! You know there’s nothing I like so much as those little digs.”
“I had forgotten. Then you won’t mind my saying that this surveillance seems to me rather more than I have any right to from you.”
“How exquisitely you put it! Who else could have told me to mind my own business so delightfully? Well, it isn’t my business. I acknowledge that, and I spoke only because I knew you would be sorry if you had gone too far. I remembered our promise to be friends.”
She threw a touch of real feeling into her tone, and he responded, “Yes, and I thank you for it, though it isn’t easy.”
She put out her hand to him, and, as he questioningly took it, she pressed his with animation. “Of course it isn’t! Or it wouldn’t be for any other man. But don’t you suppose I appreciate that supreme courage of yours? There is nobody else-nobody!—who could stand up to an impertinence and turn it to praise by such humility.”
“Don’t go too far, or I shall be turning your praise to impertinence by my humility. You’re quite right, though, about the main matter. I needn’t suppose anything so preposterous as you suggest, to feel that people are best left alone to outlive their troubles, unless they are of the most obvious kind.”
“Now, if I thought I had done anything to stop you from offering that sort of helpfulness which makes you a blessing to everybody, I should never forgive myself.”
“Nothing so dire as that, I believe. But if you’ve made me question the propriety of applying the blessing in all cases, you have done a very good thing.”
Miss Rasmith was silent and apparently serious. After a moment she said, “And I, for my part, promise to let poor little Boyne alone.”
Breckon laughed. “Don’t burlesque it! Besides, I haven’t promised anything.”
“That is very true,” said Miss Rasmith, and she laughed, too.