Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “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 w
rap she had been holding ready to shed from the moment the young man had come up. “Keep that for me, Nell. Are you good at catching?” she asked him.

  “Catching?”

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

  “Oh! I think I can catch you.”

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

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

  XIII.

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

  “In a tumultuous privacy of storm,”

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

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

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

  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.