Breckon had answered with gayety, but his happiness was something beyond gayety. He had really felt the exclusion from the Kentons in which he had passed the day, and he had felt it the more painfully because he liked them all. It may be owned that he liked Ellen best from the beginning, and now he liked her better than ever, but even in the day’s exile he had not ceased to like each of them. They were, in their family affection, as lovable as that sort of selfishness can make people. They were very united and good to one another. Lottie herself, except in her most lurid moments, was good to her brother and sister, and almost invariably kind to her parents. She would not, Breckon saw, have brooked much meddling with her flirtations from them, but as they did not offer to meddle, she had no occasion to grumble on that score. She grumbled when they asked her to do things for Ellen, but she did them, and though she never did them without grumbling, she sometimes did them without being asked. She was really very watchful of Ellen when it would least have been expected, and sometimes she was sweet. She never was sweet with Boyne, but she was often his friend, though this did not keep her from turning upon him at the first chance to give him a little dig, or a large one, for that matter. As for Boyne, he was a mass of helpless sweetness, though he did not know it, and sometimes took himself for an iceberg when he was merely an ice-cream of heroic mould. He was as helplessly sweet with Lottie as with any one, and if he suffered keenly from her treacheries, and seized every occasion to repay them in kind, it was clearly a matter of conscience with him, and always for the good. Their father and mother treated their squabbles very wisely, Breckon thought. They ignored them as much as possible, and they recognized them without attempting to do that justice between them which would have rankled in both their breasts.
To a spectator who had been critical at first, Mr. and Mrs. Kenton seemed an exemplary father and mother with Ellen as well as with their other children. It is easy to be exemplary with a sick girl, but they increasingly affected Breckon as exemplary with Ellen. He fancied that they acted upon each other beneficially towards her. At first he had foreboded some tiresome boasting from the father’s tenderness, and some weak indulgence of the daughter’s whims from her mother; but there was either never any ground for this, or else Mrs. Kenton, in keeping her husband from boasting, had been obliged in mere consistency to set a guard upon her own fondness.
It was not that. Ellen, he was more and more decided, would have abused the weakness of either; if there was anything more angelic than her patience, it was her wish to be a comfort to them, and, between the caprices of her invalidism, to be a service. It was pathetic to see her remembering to do things for them which Boyne and Lottie had forgotten, or plainly shirked doing, and to keep the fact out of sight. She really kept it out of sight with them, and if she did not hide it from so close an observer as Breckon, that was more his fault than hers. When her father first launched out in her praise, or the praise of her reading, the young man had dreaded a rustic prig; yet she had never been a prig, but simply glad of what book she had known, and meekly submissive to his knowledge if not his taste. He owned that she had a right to her taste, which he found almost always good, and accounted for as instinctive in the absence of an imaginable culture in her imaginable ambient. So far as he had glimpses of this, he found it so different from anything he had known that the modest adequacy of Mrs. Kenton in the political experiences of modern Europe, as well as the clear judgments of Kenton himself in matters sometimes beyond Breekon himself, mystified him no less than Ellen’s taste.
Even with the growth of his respect for their intelligence and his love of their kindliness, he had not been able to keep a certain patronage from mingling, and it was not till they evinced not only entire ability, but an apparent wish to get on without his approval, without his acquaintance even, that he had conceived a just sense of them. The like is apt to happen with the best of us, when we are also the finest, and Breckon was not singular in coming to a due consciousness of something valuable only in the hour of its loss. He did not know that the loss was only apparent. He knew that he had made a distinct sacrifice for these people, and that, when he had prepared himself to befriend them little short of self-devotion, they showed themselves indifferent, and almost repellent. In the revulsion of feeling, when Ellen gave him her mother’s message, and frankly offered him reparation on behalf of her whole family, he may have overdone his gratitude, but he did not overdo it to her perception. They walked up and down the promenade of the Amstel, in the watery North Sea moon, while bells after bells noted the hour unheeded, and when they parted for the night it was with an involuntary pressure of hands, from which she suddenly pulled hers, and ran down the corridor of her state-room and Lottie’s.
He stood watching the narrow space in which she had vanished, and thinking how gentle she was, and how she had contrived somehow to make him feel that now it was she who had been consoling him, and trying to interest him and amuse him. He had not realized that before; he had been used to interesting and amusing her, but he could not resent it; he could not resent the implication of superiority, if such a thing were possible, which her kindness conveyed. The question with Breckon was whether she had walked with him so long because she wished, in the hour, to make up as fully as possible for the day’s neglect, or because she had liked to walk up and down with him. It was a question he found keeping itself poignantly, yet pleasantly, in his mind, after he had got into his berth under the solidly slumberous Boyne, and inclining now to one solution and now to the other, with a delicate oscillation that was charming.
The Amstel took her time to get into Rotterdam, and when her passengers had gone ashore the next forenoon the train that carried Breckon to The Hague in the same compartment with the Kentons was in no greater hurry. It arrived with a deliberation which kept it from carrying them on to Amsterdam before they knew it, and Mrs. Kenton had time to place such parts of the wars in the Rise of the Dutch Republic as she could attach to the names of the stations and the general features of the landscape. Boyne was occupied with improvements for the windmills and the canal-boats, which did not seem to him of the quality of the Michigan aerometers, or the craft with which he was familiar on the Hudson River and on the canal that passed through Tuskingum. Lottie, with respect to the canals, offered the frank observation that they smelt, and in recognizing a fact which travel almost universally ignores in Holland, she watched her chance of popping up the window between herself and Boyne, which Boyne put down with mounting rage. The agriculture which triumphed everywhere on the little half—acre plots lifted fifteen inches above the waters of the environing ditches, and the black and white cattle everywhere attesting the immemorial Dutch ideal of a cow, were what at first occupied Kenton, and he was tardily won from them to the question of fighting over a country like that. It was a concession to his wife’s impassioned interest in the overthrow of the Spaniards in a landscape which had evidently not changed since. She said it was hard to realize that Holland was not still a republic, and she was not very patient with Breckon’s defence of the monarchy on the ground that the young Queen was a very pretty girl.
“And she is only sixteen,” Boyne urged.
“Then she is two years too old for you,” said Lottie.
“No such thing!” Boyne retorted. “I was fifteen in June.”
“Dear me! I should never have thought it,” said his sister.
Ellen seemed hardly to look out of the window at anything directly, but when her father bade her see this thing and that, it seemed that she had seen it already. She said at last, with a quiet sigh, “I never want to go away.”
She had been a little shy of Breckon the whole morning, and had kept him asking himself whether she was sorry she had walked so long with him the night before, or, having offered him due reparation for her family, she was again dropping him. Now and then he put her to the test by words explicitly directed at her, and she replied with the dreamy passivity which seemed her normal mood, and in which he could fancy himself half forgotten, or remembered with an effort.
In the midst of this doubt she surprised him—he reflected that she was always surprising him—by asking him how far it was from The Hague to the sea. He explained that The Hague was in the sea like all the rest of Holland, but that if she meant the shore, it was no distance at all. Then she said, vaguely, she wished they were going to the shore. Her father asked Breckon if there was not a hotel at the beach, and the young man tried to give him a notion of the splendors of the Kurhaus at Scheveningen; of Scheveningen itself he despaired of giving any just notion.
“Then we can go there,” said the judge, ignoring Ellen, in his decision, as if she had nothing to do with it.
Lottie interposed a vivid preference for The Hague. She had, she said, had enough of the sea for one while, and did not want to look at it again till they sailed for home. Boyne turned to his father as if a good deal shaken by this reasoning, and it was Mrs. Kenton who carried the day for going first to a hotel in The Hague and prospecting from there in the direction of Scheveningen; Boyne and his father could go down to the shore and see which they liked best.
“I don’t see what that has to do with me,” said Lottie. No one was alarmed by her announcement that if she did not like Scheveningen she should stay at The Hague, whatever the rest did; in the event fortune favored her going with her family.
The hotel in The Hague was very pleasant, with a garden behind it, where a companionable cat had found a dry spot, and where Lottie found the cat and made friends with it. But she said the hotel was full of Cook’s tourists, whom she recognized, in spite of her lifelong ignorance of them, by a prescience derived from the conversation of Mr. Pogis, and from the instinct of a society woman, already rife in her. She found that she could not stay in a hotel with Cook’s tourists, and she took her father’s place in the exploring party which went down to the watering-place in the afternoon, on the top of a tram-car, under the leafy roof of the adorable avenue of trees which embowers the track to Scheveningen. She disputed Boyne’s impressions of the Dutch people, whom he found looking more like Americans than any foreigners he had seen, and she snubbed Breckon from his supposed charge of the party. But after the start, when she declared that Ellen could not go, and that it was ridiculous for her to think of it, she was very good to her, and looked after her safety and comfort with a despotic devotion.
At the Kurhaus she promptly took the lead in choosing rooms, for she had no doubt of staying there after the first glance at the place, and she showed a practical sense in settling her family which at least her mother appreciated when they were installed the next day.
Mrs. Kenton could not make her husband admire Lottie’s faculty so readily. “You think it would have been better for her to sit down with Ellen, on the sand and dream of the sea,” she reproached him, with a tender resentment on behalf of Lottie. “Everybody can’t dream.”
“Yes, but I wish she didn’t keep awake with such a din,” said the judge. After all, he admired Lottie’s judgment about the rooms, and he censured her with a sigh of relief from care as he sank back in the easy-chair fronting the window that looked out on the North Sea; Lottie had already made him appreciate the view till he was almost sick of it.
“What is the matter?” said Mrs. Kenton, sharply. “Do you want to be in Tuskingum? I suppose you would rather be looking into Richard’s back-yard.”
“No,” said the judge, mildly, “this is very nice.”
“It will do Ellen good, every minute. I don’t care how much she sits on the sands and dream. I’ll love to see her.”
The sitting on the sand was a survival of Mr. Kenton’s preoccupations of the sea-side. As a mater of fact, Ellen was at that moment sitting in one of the hooked wicker arm-chairs which were scattered over the whole vast beach like a growth of monstrous mushrooms, and, confronting her in cosey proximity, Breckon sat equally hidden in another windstuhl. Her father and her mother were able to keep them placed, among the multitude of windstuhls, by the presence of Lottie, who hovered near them, and, with Boyne, fended off the demure, wicked-looking little Scheveningen girls. On a smaller scale these were exactly like their demure, wicked-looking Scheveningen mothers, and they approached with knitting in their hands, and with large stones folded in their aprons, which they had pilfered from the mole, and were trying to sell for footstools. The windstuhl men and they were enemies, and when Breckon bribed them to go away, the windstuhl men chased them, and the little girls ran, making mouths at Boyne over their shoulders. He scorned to notice them; but he was obliged to report the misconduct of Lottie, who began making eyes at the Dutch officers as soon as she could feel that Ellen was safely off her hands. She was the more exasperating and the more culpable to Boyne, because she had asked him to walk up the beach with her, and had then made the fraternal promenade a basis of operations against the Dutch military. She joined her parents in ignoring Boyne’s complaints, and continued to take credit for all the pleasant facts of the situation; she patronized her family as much for the table d’hote at luncheon as for the comfort of their rooms. She was able to assure them that there was not a Cook’s tourist in the hotel, where there seemed to be nearly every other kind of fellow-creature. At the end of the first week she had acquaintance of as many nationalities as she could reach in their native or acquired English, in all the stages of haughty toleration, vivid intimacy, and cold exhaustion. She had a faculty for getting through with people, or of ceasing to have any use for them, which was perhaps her best safeguard in her adventurous flirting; while the simple aliens were still in the full tide of fancied success, Lottie was sick of them all, and deep in an indiscriminate correspondence with her young men in Tuskingum.
The letters which she had invited from these while still in New York arrived with the first of those readdressed from the judge’s London banker. She had more letters than all the rest of the family together, and counted a half-dozen against a poor two for her sister. Mrs. Kenton cared nothing about Lottie’s letters, but she was silently uneasy about the two that Ellen carelessly took. She wondered who could be writing to Ellen, especially in a cover bearing a handwriting altogether strange to her.
“It isn’t from Bittridge, at any rate,” she said to her husband, in the speculation which she made him share. “I am always dreading to have her find out what Richard did. It would spoil everything, I’m afraid, and now everything is going so well. I do wish Richard hadn’t, though, of course, he did it for the best. Who do you think has been writing to her?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I suppose she will tell me after a while. I don’t like to seem to be following her up. One was from Bessie Pearl, I think.”
Ellen did not speak of her letters to her mother, and after waiting a day or two, Mrs. Kenton could not refrain from asking her.
“Oh, I forgot,” said Ellen. “I haven’t read them yet.”
“Haven’t read them!” said Mrs. Kenton. Then, after reflection, she added, “You are a strange girl, Ellen,” and did not venture to say more.
“I suppose I thought I should have to answer them, and that made me careless. But I will read them.” Her mother was silent, and presently Ellen added: “I hate to think of the past. Don’t you, momma?”
“It is certainly very pleasant here,” said Mrs. Kenton, cautiously. “You’re enjoying yourself—I mean, you seem to be getting so much stronger.”
“Why, momma, why do you talk as if I had been sick?” Ellen asked.
“I mean you’re so much interested.”
“Don’t I go about everywhere, like anybody?” Ellen pursued, ignoring her explanation.
“Yes, you certainly do. Mr. Breckon seems to like going about.”
Ellen did not respond to the suggestion except to say: “We go into all sorts of places. This morning we went up on that schooner that’s drawn up on the beach, and the old man who was there was very pleasant. I thought it was a wreck, but Mr. Breckon says they are always drawing their ships that way up on the sand. The old man was patching some of the wood-work, and he told Mr. Breckon—he can speak a little Dutch—that they were going to drag her down to the water and go fishing as soon as he was done. He seemed to think we were brother and sister.” She flushed a little, and then she said: “I believe I like the dunes as well as anything. Sometimes when those curious cold breaths come in from the sea we climb up in the little hollows on the other side and sit there out of the draft. Everybody seems to do it.”
Apparently Ellen was submitting the propriety of the fact to her mother, who said: “Yes, it seems to be quite the same as it is at home. I always supposed that it was different with young people here. There is certainly no harm in it.”
Ellen went on, irrelevantly. “I like to go and look at the Scheveningen women mending the nets on the sand back of the dunes. They have such good gossiping times. They shouted to us last evening, and then laughed when they saw us watching them. When they got through their work they got up and stamped off so strong, with their bare, red arms folded into their aprons, and their skirts sticking out so stiff. Yes, I should like to be like them.”
“You, Ellen!”
“Yes; why not?”
Mrs. Kenton found nothing better to answer than,
“They were very material looking.”
“They are very happy looking. They live in the present. That is what I should like: living in the present, and not looking backwards or forwards. After all, the present is the only life we’ve got, isn’t it?”
“I suppose you may say it is,” Mrs. Kenton admitted, not knowing just where the talk was leading, but dreading to interrupt it.
“But that isn’t the Scheveningen woman’s only ideal. Their other ideal is to keep the place clean. Saturday afternoon they were all out scrubbing the brick sidewalks, and clear into the middle of the street. We were almost ashamed to walk over the nice bricks, and we picked out as many dirty places as we could find.”
Ellen laughed, with a light-hearted gayety that was very strange to her, and Mrs. Kenton, as she afterwards told her husband, did not know what to think.
“I couldn’t help wondering,” she said, “whether the poor child would have liked to keep on living in the present a month ago.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t say so,” the judge answered.
From the easy conquest of the men who looked at her Lottie proceeded to the subjection of the women. It would have been more difficult to put these down, if the process had not been so largely, so almost entirely subjective. As it was, Lottie exchanged snubs with many ladies of the continental nationalities who were never aware of having offered or received offence. In some cases, when they fearlessly ventured to speak with her, they behaved very amiable, and seemed to find her conduct sufficiently gracious in return. In fact, she was approachable enough, and had no shame, before Boyne, in dismounting from the high horse which she rode when alone with him, and meeting these ladies on foot, at least half-way. She made several of them acquainted with her mother, who, after a timorous reticence, found them very conversable, with a range of topics, however, that shocked her American sense of decorum. One Dutch lady talked with such manly freedom, and with such untrammelled intimacy, that she was obliged to send Boyne and Lottie about their business, upon an excuse that was not apparent to the Dutch lady. She only complimented Mrs. Kenton upon her children and their devotion to each other, and when she learned that Ellen was also her daughter, ventured the surmise she was not long married.
“It isn’t her husband,” Mrs. Kenton explained, with inward trouble. “It’s just a gentleman that came over with us,” and she went with her trouble to her own husband as soon as she could.
“I’m afraid it isn’t the custom to go around alone with young men as much as Ellen thinks,” she suggested.
“He ought to know,” said the judge. “I don’t suppose he would if it wasn’t.”
“That is true,” Mrs. Kenton owned, and for the time she put her misgivings away.
“So long as we do nothing wrong,” the judge decided, “I don’t see why we should not keep to our own customs.”
“Lottie says they’re not ours, in New York.”
“Well, we are not in New York now.”
They had neither of them the heart to interfere with Ellen’s happiness, for, after all, Breckon was careful enough of the appearances, and it was only his being constantly with Ellen that suggested the Dutch lady’s surmise. In fact, the range of their wanderings was not beyond the dunes, though once they went a little way on one of the neatly bricked country roads that led towards The Hague. As yet there had been no movement in any of the party to see the places that lie within such easy tram-reach of The Hague, and the hoarded interest of the past in their keeping. Ellen chose to dwell in the actualities which were an enlargement of her own present, and Lottie’s active spirit found employment enough in the amusements at the Kurhaus. She shopped in the little bazars which make a Saratoga under the colonnades fronting two sides of the great space before the hotel, and she formed a critical and exacting taste in music from a constant attendance at the afternoon concerts; it is true that during the winter in New York she had cast forever behind her the unsophisticated ideals of Tuskingum in the art, so that from the first she was able to hold the famous orchestra that played in the Kurhaus concert-room up to the highest standard. She had no use for anybody who had any use for rag-time, and she was terribly severe with a young American, primarily of Boyne’s acquaintance, who tried to make favor with her by asking about the latest coon-songs. She took the highest ethical ground with him about tickets in a charitable lottery which he had bought from the portier, but could not move him on the lower level which he occupied. He offered to give her the picture which was the chief prize, in case he won it, and she assured him beforehand that she should not take it. She warned Boyne against him, under threats of exposure to their mother, as not a good influence, but one afternoon, when the young Queen of Holland came to the concert with the queen-mother, Lottie cast her prejudices to the winds in accepting the places which the wicked fellow-countryman offered Boyne and herself, when they had failed to get any where they could see the queens, as the Dutch called them.
The hotel was draped with flags, and banked with flowers about the main entrance where the queens were to arrive, and the guests massed themselves in a dense lane for them to pass through. Lottie could not fail to be one of the foremost in this array, and she was able to decide, when the queens had passed, that the younger would not be considered a more than average pretty girl in America, and that she was not very well dressed. They had all stood within five feet of her, and Boyne had appropriated one of the prettiest of the pretty bends which the gracious young creature made to right and left, and had responded to it with an ‘empressement’ which he hoped had not been a sacrifice of his republican principles.
During the concert he sat with his eyes fixed upon the Queen where she sat in the royal box, with her mother and her ladies behind her, and wondered and blushed to wonder if she had noticed him when he bowed, or if his chivalric devotion in applauding her when the audience rose to receive her had been more apparent than that of others; whether it had seemed the heroic act of setting forth at the head of her armies, to beat back a German invasion, which it had essentially been, with his instantaneous return as victor, and the Queen’s abdication and adoption of republican principles under conviction of his reasoning, and her idolized consecration as the first chief of the Dutch republic. His cheeks glowed, and he quaked at heart lest Lottie should surprise his thoughts and expose them to that sarcastic acquaintance, who proved to be a medical student resting at Scheveningen from the winter’s courses and clinics in, Vienna. He had already got on to many of Boyne’s curves, and had sacrilegiously suggested the Queen of Holland when he found him feeding his fancy on the modern heroical romances; he advised him as an American adventurer to compete with the European princes paying court to her. So thin a barrier divided that malign intelligence from Boyne’s most secret dreams that he could never feel quite safe from him, and yet he was always finding himself with him, now that he was separated from Miss Rasmith, and Mr. Breckon was taken up so much with Ellen. On the ship he could put many things before Mr. Breckon which must here perish in his breast, or suffer the blight of this Mr. Trannel’s raillery. The student sat near the Kentons at table, and he was no more reverent of the judge’s modest convictions than of Boyne’s fantastic preoccupations. The worst of him was that you could not help liking him: he had a fascination which the boy felt while he dreaded him, and now and then he did something so pleasant that when he said something unpleasant you could hardly believe it.
At the end of the concert, when he rose and stood with all the rest, while the royal party left their box, and the orchestra played the Dutch national hymn, he said, in a loud whisper, to Boyne: “Now’s your time, my boy! Hurry out and hand her into her carriage!”
Boyne fairly reeled at the words which translated a passage of the wild drama playing itself in his brain, and found little support in bidding his tormentor, “Shut up!” The retort, rude as it was, seemed insufficient, but Boyne tried in vain to think of something else. He tried to punish him by separating Lottie from him, but failed as signally in that. She went off with him, and sat in a windstuhl facing his the rest of the afternoon, with every effect of carrying on.
Boyne was helpless, with his mother against it, when he appealed to her to let him go and tell Lottie that she wanted her. Mrs. Kenton said that she saw no harm in it, that Ellen was sitting in like manner with Mr. Breckon.
“Mr. Breckon is very different, and Ellen knows how to behave,” he urged, but his mother remained unmoved, or was too absent about something to take any interest in the matter. In fact, she was again unhappy about Ellen, though she put on such an air of being easy about her. Clearly, so far as her maternal surmise could fathom the case, Mr. Breckon was more and more interested in Ellen, and it was evident that the child was interested in him. The situation was everything that was acceptable to Mrs. Kenton, but she shuddered at the cloud which hung over it, and which might any moment involve it. Again and again she had made sure that Lottie had given Ellen no hint of Richard’s ill-advised vengeance upon Bittridge; but it was not a thing that could be kept always, and the question was whether it could be kept till Ellen had accepted Mr. Breckon and married him. This was beyond the question of his asking her to do so, but it was so much more important that Mrs. Kenton was giving it her attention first, quite out of the order of time. Besides, she had every reason, as she felt, to count upon the event. Unless he was trifling with Ellen, far more wickedly than Bittridge, he was in love with her, and in Mrs. Kenton’s simple experience and philosophy of life, being in love was briefly preliminary to marrying. If she went with her anxieties to her husband, she had first to reduce him from a buoyant optimism concerning the affair before she could get him to listen seriously. When this was accomplished he fell into such despair that she ended in lifting him up and supporting him with hopes that she did not feel herself. What they were both united in was the conviction that nothing so good could happen in the world, but they were equally united in the old American tradition that they must not lift a finger to secure this supreme good for their child.
It did not seem to them that leaving the young people constantly to themselves was doing this. They interfered with Ellen now neither more nor less than they had interfered with her as to Bittridge, or than they would have interfered with her in the case of any one else. She was still to be left entirely to herself in such matters, and Mrs. Kenton would have kept even her thoughts off her if she could. She would have been very glad to give her mind wholly to the study of the great events which had long interested her here in their scene, but she felt that until the conquest of Mr. Breckon was secured beyond the hazard of Ellen’s morbid defection at the supreme moment, she could not give her mind to the history of the Dutch republic.
“Don’t bother me about Lottie, Boyne,” she said. “I have enough to think of without your nonsense. If this Mr. Trannel is an American, that is all that is necessary. We are all Americans together, and I don’t believe it will make remark, Lottie’s sitting on the beach with him.”
“I don’t see how he’s different from that Bittridge,” said Boyne. “He doesn’t care for anything; and he plays the banjo just like him.”
Mrs. Kenton was too troubled to laugh. She said, with finality, “Lottie can take care of herself,” and then she asked, “Boyne, do you know whom Ellen’s letters were from?”
“One was from Bessie Pearl—”
“Yes, she showed me that. But you don’t know who the other was from?”
“No; she didn’t tell me. You know how close Ellen is.”
“Yes,” the mother sighed, “she is very odd.”
Then she added, “Don’t you let her know that I asked you about her letters.”
“No,” said Boyne. His audience was apparently at an end, but he seemed still to have something on his mind. “Momma,” he began afresh.
“Well?” she answered, a little impatiently.
“Nothing. Only I got to thinking, Is a person able to control their—their fancies?”
“Fancies about what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. About falling in love.” Boyne blushed.
“Why do you want to know? You musn’t think about such things, a boy like you! It’s a great pity that you ever knew anything about that Bittridge business. It’s made you too bold. But it seems to have been meant to drag us down and humiliate us in every way.”
“Well, I didn’t try to know anything about it,” Boyne retorted.
“No, that’s true,” his mother did him the justice to recognize. “Well, what is it you want to know?” Boyne was too hurt to answer at once, and his mother had to coax him a little. She did it sweetly, and apologized to him for saying what she had said. After all, he was the youngest, and her baby still. Her words and caresses took effect at last, and he stammered out, “Is everybody so, or is it only the Kentons that seem to be always putting—well, their affections—where it’s perfectly useless?”
His mother pushed him from her. “Boyne, are you silly about that ridiculous old Miss Rasmith?”
“No!” Boyne shouted, savagely, “I’m NOT!”
“Who is it, then?”
“I sha’n’t tell you!” Boyne said, and tears of rage and shame came into his eyes.
In his exile from his kindred, for it came practically to that, Boyne was able to add a fine gloom to the state which he commonly observed with himself when he was not giving way to his morbid fancies or his morbid fears, and breaking down in helpless subjection to the nearest member of his household. Lottie was so taken up with her student that she scarcely quarrelled with him any more, and they had no longer those moments of union in which they stood together against the world. His mother had cast him off, as he felt, very heartlessly, though it was really because she could not give his absurdities due thought in view of the hopeful seriousness of Ellen’s affair, and Boyne was aware that his father at the best of times was ignorant of him when he was not impatient of him. These were not the best of times with Judge Kenton, and Boyne was not the first object of his impatience. In the last analysis he was living until he could get home, and so largely in the hope of this that his wife at times could scarcely keep him from taking some step that would decide the matter between Ellen and Breckon at once. They were tacitly agreed that they were waiting for nothing else, and, without making their agreement explicit, she was able to quell him by asking what he expected to do in case there was nothing between them? Was he going to take the child back to Tuskingum, which was the same as taking her back to Bittridge? it hurt her to confront him with this question, and she tried other devices for staying and appeasing him. She begged him now, seeing Boyne so forlorn, and hanging about the hotel alone, or moping over those ridiculous books of his, to go off with the boy somewhere and see the interesting places within such easy reach, like Leyden and Delft if he cared nothing for the place where William the Silent was shot, he ought to see the place that the Pilgrims started from. She had counted upon doing those places herself, with her husband, and it was in a sacrifice of her ideal that she now urged him to go with Boyne. But her preoccupation with Ellen’s affair forbade her self-abandon to those high historical interests to which she urged his devotion. She might have gone with him and Boyne, but then she must have left the larger half of her divided mind with Ellen, not to speak of Lottie, who refused to be a party to any such excursion. Mrs. Kenton felt the disappointment and grieved at it, but not without hope of repairing it later, and she did not cease from entreating the judge to do what he could at once towards fulfilling the desires she postponed. Once she prevailed with him, and really got him and Boyne off for a day, but they came back early, with signs of having bored each other intolerably, and after that it was Boyne, as much as his father, who relucted from joint expeditions. Boyne did not so much object to going alone, and his father said it was best to let him, though his mother had her fears for her youngest. He spent a good deal of his time on the trams between Scheveningen and The Hague, and he was understood to have explored the capital pretty thoroughly. In fact, he did go about with a valet de place, whom he got at a cheap rate, and with whom he conversed upon the state of the country and its political affairs. The valet said that the only enemy that Holland could fear was Germany, but an invasion from that quarter could be easily repulsed by cutting the dikes and drowning the invaders. The sea, he taught Boyne, was the great defence of Holland, and it was a waste of money to keep such an army as the Dutch had; but neither the sea nor the sword could drive out the Germans if once they insidiously married a Prussian prince to the Dutch Queen.
There seemed to be no getting away from the Queen, for Boyne. The valet not only talked about her, as the pleasantest subject which he could find, but he insisted upon showing Boyne all her palaces. He took him into the Parliament house, and showed him where she sat while the queen-mother read the address from the throne. He introduced him at a bazar where the shop-girl who spoke English better than Boyne, or at least without the central Ohio accent, wanted to sell him a miniature of the Queen on porcelain. She said the Queen was such a nice girl, and she was herself such a nice girl that Boyne blushed a little in looking at her. He bought the miniature, and then he did not know what to do with it; if any of the family, if Lottie, found out that he had it, or that Trannel, he should have no peace any more. He put it in his pocket, provisionally, and when he came giddily out of the shop he felt himself taken by the elbow and placed against the wall by the valet, who said the queens were coming. They drove down slowly through the crowded, narrow street, bowing right and left to the people flattened against the shops, and again Boyne saw her so near that he could have reached out his hand and almost touched hers.
The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether he had not tried to do so. If he had he would have been arrested—he knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it. He knew that he imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic. At the same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and she became aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the anarchist from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been meant for her. Perhaps it was a pistol.
He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before him. They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter there, and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the other spectators and wait for the queens to appear and get into their carriage. The young Queen’s looks were stamped in Boyne’s consciousness, so that he saw her wherever he turned, like the sun when one has gazed at it. He thought how that Trannel had said he ought to hand her into her carriage, and he shrank away for fear he should try to do so, but he could not leave the place till she had come out with the queen—mother and driven off. Then he went slowly and breathlessly into the hotel, feeling the Queen’s miniature in his pocket. It made his heart stand still, and then bound forward. He wondered again what he should do with it. If he kept it, Lottie would be sure to find it, and he could not bring himself to the sacrilege of destroying it. He thought he would walk out on the breakwater as far as he could and throw it into the sea, but when he got to the end of the mole he could not do so. He decided that he would give it to Ellen to keep for him, and not let Lottie see it; or perhaps he might pretend he had bought it for her. He could not do that, though, for it would not be true, and if he did he could not ask her to keep it from Lottie.
At dinner Mr. Trannel told him he ought to have been there to see the Queen; that she had asked especially for him, and wanted to know if they had not sent up her card to him. Boyne meditated an apt answer through all the courses, but he had not thought of one when they had come to the ‘corbeille de fruits’, and he was forced to go to bed without having avenged himself.
In taking rooms for her family at the hotel, Lottie had arranged for her emancipation from the thraldom of rooming with Ellen. She said that had gone on long enough; if she was grown up at all, she was grown up enough to have a room of her own, and her mother had yielded to reasoning which began and ended with this position. She would have interfered so far as to put Lottie into the room next her, but Lottie said that if Boyne was the baby he ought to be next his mother; Ellen might come next him, but she was going to have the room that was furthest from any implication of the dependence in which she had languished; and her mother submitted again. Boyne was not sorry; there had always been hours of the night when he felt the need of getting at his mother for reassurance as to forebodings which his fancy conjured up to trouble him in the wakeful dark. It was understood that he might freely do this, and though the judge inwardly fretted, he could not deny the boy the comfort of his mother’s encouraging love. Boyne’s visits woke him, but he slept the better for indulging in the young nerves that tremor from impressions against which the old nerves are proof. But now, in the strange fatality which seemed to involve him, Boyne could not go to his mother. It was too weirdly intimate, even for her; besides, when he had already tried to seek her counsel she had ignorantly repelled him.
The night after his day in The Hague, when he could bear it no longer, he put on his dressing-gown and softly opened Ellen’s door, “awake, Ellen?” he whispered.
“Yes, What is it, Boyne” her gentle voice asked.
“He came and sat down by her bed and stole his hand into hers, which she put out to him. The watery moonlight dripped into the room at the edges of the shades, and the long wash of the sea made itself regularly heard on the sands.
“Can’t you sleep?” Ellen asked again. “Are you homesick?”
“Not exactly that. But it does seem rather strange for us to be off here so far, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, I don’t see how I can forgive myself for making you come,” said Ellen, but her voice did not sound as if she were very unhappy.
“You couldn’t help it,” said Boyne, and the words suggested a question to him. “Do you believe that such things are ordered, Ellen?”
“Everything is ordered, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. And if they are, we’re not, to blame for what happens.”
“Not if we try to do right.”
“Of course. The Kentons always do that,” said Boyne, with the faith in his family that did not fail him in the darkest hour. “But what I mean is that if anything comes on you that you can’t foresee and you can’t get out of—” The next step was not clear, and Boyne paused. He asked,
“Do you think that we can control our feelings, Ellen?”
“About what?”
“Well, about persons that we like.” He added, for safety, “Or dislike.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Ellen, sadly, “We ought to like persons and dislike them for some good reason, but we don’t.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Borne, with a long breath. “Sometimes it seems like a kind of possession, doesn’t it?”
“It seems more like that when we like them,” Ellen said.
“Yes, that’s what I mean. If a person was to take a fancy to some one that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn’t be to blame for it, would he?”
“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?”
Borne hesitated. “Yes” he said. He was in for it now.
Ellen had not noticed Boyne’s absorption with Miss Rasmith on the ship, but she vaguely remembered hearing Lottie tease him about her, and she said now, “He wouldn’t be to blame for it if he couldn’t help it, but if the person was much older it would be a pity!”
“Uh, she isn’t so very much older,” said Borne, more cheerfully than he had spoken before.
“Is it somebody that you have taken a fancy to Borne?”
“I don’t know, Ellen. That’s what makes it so kind of awful. I can’t tell whether it’s a real fancy, or I only think it is. Sometimes I think it is, and sometimes I think that I think so because I am afraid to believe it. Do you under Ellen?”
“It seems to me that I do. But you oughtn’t to let your fancy run away with you, Boyne. What a queer boy!”
“It’s a kind of fascination, I suppose. But whether it’s a real fancy or an unreal one, I can’t get away from it.”
“Poor boy!” said his sister.
“Perhaps it’s those books. Sometimes I think it is, and I laugh at the whole idea; and then again it’s so strong that I can’t get away from it. Ellen!”
“Well, Boyne?”
“I could tell you who it is, if you think that would do any good—if you think it would help me to see it in the true light, or you could help me more by knowing who it is than you can now.”
“I hope it isn’t anybody that you can’t respect, Boyne?”
“No, indeed! It’s somebody you would never dream of.”
“Well?” Ellen was waiting for him to speak, but he could not get the words out, even to her.
“I guess I’ll tell you some other time. Maybe I can get over it myself.”
“It would be the best way if you could.”
He rose and left her bedside, and then he came back. “Ellen, I’ve got something that I wish you would keep for me.”
“What is it? Of course I will.”
“Well, it’s—something I don’t want you to let Lottie know I’ve got. She tells that Mr. Trannel everything, and then he wants to make fun. Do you think he’s so very witty?”
“I can’t help laughing at some things he says.”
“I suppose he is,” Boyne ruefully admitted. “But that doesn’t make you like him any better. Well, if you won’t tell Lottie, I’ll give it to you now.”
“I won’t tell anything that you don’t want me to, Boyne.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just-a picture of the Queen on porcelain, that I got in The Hague. The guide took me into the store, and I thought I ought to get something.”
“Oh, that’s very nice, Boyne. I do like the Queen so much. She’s so sweet!”
“Yes, isn’t she?” said Boyne, glad of Ellen’s approval. So far, at least, he was not wrong. “Here it is now.”
He put the miniature in Ellen’s hand. She lifted herself on her elbow. “Light the candle and let me see it.”
“No, no!” he entreated. “It might wake Lottie, and—and—Good-night, Ellen.”
“Can you go to sleep now, Boyne?”
“Oh yes. I’m all right. Good-night.”
“Good-night, then.”
Borne stooped over and kissed her, and went to the door. He came back and asked, “You don’t think it was silly, or anything, for me to get it?”
“No, indeed! It’s just what you will like to have when you get home. We’ve all seen her so often. I’ll put it in my trunk, and nobody shall know about it till we’re safely back in Tuskingum.”
Boyne sighed deeply. “Yes, that’s what I meant. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Boyne.”
“I hope I haven’t waked you up too much?”
“Oh no. I can get to sleep easily again.”
“Well, good-night.” Boyne sighed again, but not so deeply, and this time he went out.