“If she hadn’t, could she be letting him come to speak to you? I don’t believe she ever really cared for Bittridge — or not after he began flirting with Mrs. Uphill.” She had no shrinking from the names which Kenton avoided with disgust. “The only question for you is to consider what you shall say to Mr. Breckon.”
“Say to him? Why, of course, if Ellen has made up her mind, there’s only one thing I can say.”
“Indeed there is! He ought to know all about that disgusting Bittridge business, and you have got to tell him.”
“Sarah, I couldn’t. It is too humiliating. How would it do to refer him to — You could manage that part so much better. I don’t see how I could keep it from seeming an indelicate betrayal of the poor child—”
“Perhaps she’s told him herself,” Mrs. Kenton provisionally suggested.
The judge eagerly caught at the notion. “Do you think so? It would be like her! Ellen would wish him to know everything.”
He stopped, and his wife could see that he was trembling with excitement. “We must find out. I will speak to Ellen—”
“And — you don’t think I’d better have the talk with him first?”
“Certainly not!”
“Why, Rufus! You were not going to look him up?”
“No,” he hesitated; but she could see that some such thing had been on his mind.
“Surely,” she said, “you must be crazy!” But she had not the heart to blight his joy with sarcasm, and perhaps no sarcasm would have blighted it.
“I merely wondered what I had better say in case he spoke to me before you saw Ellen — that’s all. Sarah! I couldn’t have believed that anything could please me so much. But it does seem as if it were the assurance of Ellen’s happiness; and she has deserved it, poor child! If ever there was a dutiful and loving daughter — at least before that wretched affair — she was one.”
“She has been a good girl,” Mrs. Kenton stoically admitted.
“And they are very well matched. Ellen is a cultivated woman. He never could have cause to blush for her, either her mind or her manners, in any circle of society; she would do him credit under any and all circumstances. If it were Lottie—”
“Lottie is all right,” said her mother, in resentment of his preference; but she could not help smiling at it. “Don’t you be foolish about Ellen. I approve of Mr. Breckon as much as you do. But it’s her prettiness and sweetness that’s taken his fancy, and not her wisdom, if she’s got him.”
“If she’s got him?”
“Well, you know what I mean. I’m not saying she hasn’t. Dear knows, I don’t want to! I feel just as you do about it. I think it’s the greatest piece of good fortune, coming on top of all our trouble with her. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing.”
He was instantly appeased. “Are you going to speak with Ellen” he radiantly inquired.
“I will see. There’s no especial hurry, is there?”
“Only, if he should happen to meet me—”
“You can keep out of his way, I reckon. Or You can put him off, somehow.”
“Yes,” Kenton returned, doubtfully. “Don’t,” he added, “be too blunt with Ellen. You know she didn’t say anything explicit to me.”
“I think I will know how to manage, Mr. Kenton.”
“Yes, of course, Sarah. I’m not saying that.”
Breckon did not apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father’s jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his table, and who listened with one ear to the vigorous retorts of Lottie in her combat with Breckon.
The judge witnessed it all with a grave displeasure, more and more painfully apparent to his wife. She could see the impatience, the gathering misgiving, in his face, and she perceived that she must not let this come to conscious dissatisfaction with Breckon; she knew her husband capable of indignation with trifling which would complicate the situation, if it came to that. She decided to speak with Ellen as soon as possible, and she meant to follow her to her state-room when they left the table. But fate assorted the pieces in the game differently. Boyne walked over to the place where Miss Rasmith was sitting with her mother; Lottie and Mr. Pogis went off to practise duets together, terrible, four-handed torments under which the piano presently clamored; and Ellen stood for a moment talked to by Mr. Breckon, who challenged her then for a walk on deck, and with whom she went away smiling.
Mrs. Kenton appealed with the reflection of the girl’s happiness in her face to the frowning censure in her husband’s; but Kenton spoke first. “What does he mean?” he demanded, darkly. “If he is making a fool of her he’ll find that that game can’t be played twice, with impunity. Sarah, I believe I should choke him.”
“Mr. Kenton!” she gasped, and she trembled in fear of him, even while she kept herself with difficulty from shaking him for his folly. “Don’t say such a thing! Can’t you see that they want to talk it over? If he hasn’t spoken to you it’s because he wants to know how you took what she said.” Seeing the effect of these arguments, she pursued: “Will you never have any sense? I will speak to Ellen the very minute I get her alone, and you have just got to wait. Don’t you suppose it’s hard for me, too? Have I got nothing to bear?”
Kenton went silently back to his book, which he took with him to the reading-room, where from time to time his wife came to him and reported that Ellen and Breckon were still walking up and down together, or that they were sitting down talking, or were forward, looking over at the prow, or were watching the deck-passengers dancing. Her husband received her successive advices with relaxing interest, and when she had brought the last she was aware that the affair was entirely in her hands with all the responsibility. After the gay parting between Ellen and Breckon, which took place late in the afternoon, she suffered an interval to elapse before she followed the girl down to her state-room. She found her lying in her berth, with shining eyes and glad, red cheeks; she was smiling to herself.
“That is right, Ellen,” her mother said. “You need rest after your long tramp.”
“I’m not tired. We were sitting down a good deal. I didn’t think how late it was. I’m ever so much better. Where’s Lottie?”
“Off somewhere with that young Englishman,” said Mrs. Kenton, as if that were of no sort of consequence. “Ellen,” she added, abruptly, trying within a tremulous smile to hide her eagerness, “what is this that Mr. Breckon wants to talk with your father about?”
“Mr. Breckon? With poppa?”
“Yes, certainly. You told him this morning that Mr. Breckon—”
“Oh! Oh yes!” said Ellen, as if recollecting something that had slipped her mind. “He wants poppa to advise him whether to go back to his congregation in New York or not.”
Mrs. Kenton sat in the corner of the sofa next the door, looking into the girl’s face on the pillow as she lay with her arms under her head. Tears of defeat and shame came into her eyes, and she could not see the girl’s light nonchalance in adding:
“But he hasn’t got up his courage yet. He thinks he’ll ask him after dinner. He says he doesn’t want poppa to think he’s posing. I don’t know what he means.”
Mrs. Kenton did not speak at once. Her bitterest mortification was not for herself, but for the simple and tender father-soul which had been so tried already. She did not know how he would bear it, the disappointment, and the cruel hurt to his pride. But she wanted to fall on her knees in thankfulness that he had betrayed himself only to her.
She started in sudden alarm with the thought. “Where is he now — Mr. Breckon?”
“He’s gone with Boyne down into the baggage-room.”
Mrs. Kenton sa
nk back in her corner, aware now that she would not have had the strength to go to her husband even to save him from the awful disgrace of giving himself away to Breckon. “And was that all?” she faltered.
“All?”
“That he wanted to speak to your father about?”
She must make irrefragably sure, for Kenton’s sake, that she was not misunderstanding.
“Why, of course! What else? Why, momma! what are you crying about?”
“I’m not crying, child. Just some foolishness of your father’s. He understood — he thought—” Mrs. Kenton began to laugh hysterically. “But you know how ridiculous he is; and he supposed — No, I won’t tell you!”
It was not necessary. The girl’s mind, perhaps because it was imbued already with the subject, had possessed itself of what filled her mother’s. She dropped from the elbow on which she had lifted herself, and turned her face into the pillow, with a long wail of shame.
XVIII.
Mrs. Kenton’s difficulties in setting her husband right were indefinitely heightened by the suspicion that the most unsuspicious of men fell into concerning Breckon. Did Breckon suppose that the matter could be turned off in that way? he stupidly demanded; and when he was extricated from this error by his wife’s representation that Breckon had not changed at all, but had never told Ellen that he wished to speak with him of anything but his returning to his society, Kenton still could not accept the fact. He would have contended that at least the other matter must have been in Breckon’s mind; and when he was beaten from this position, and convinced that the meaning they had taken from Ellen’s words had never been in any mind but their own, he fell into humiliation so abject that he could hide it only by the hauteur with which he carried himself towards Breckon when they met at dinner. He would scarcely speak to the young man; Ellen did not come to the table; Lottie and Boyne and their friend Mr. Pogis were dining with the Rasmiths, and Mrs. Kenton had to be, as she felt, cringingly kind to Breckon in explaining just the sort of temporary headache that kept her eldest daughter away. He was more than ordinarily sympathetic and polite, but he was manifestly bewildered by Kenton’s behavior. He refused an hilarious invitation from Mrs. Rasmith, when he rose from table, to stop and have his coffee with her on his way out of the saloon. His old adorer explained that she had ordered a small bottle of champagne in honor of its being the night before they were to get into Boulogne, and that he ought to sit down and help her keep the young people straight. Julia, she brokenly syllabled, with the gay beverage bubbling back into her throat, was not the least use; she was worse than any. Julia did not look it, in the demure regard which she bent upon her amusing mother, and Breckon persisted in refusing. He said he thought he might safely leave them to Boyne, and Mrs. Rasmith said into her handkerchief, “Oh yes! Boyne!” and pressed Boyne’s sleeve with her knobbed and jewelled fingers.
It was evident where most of the small bottle had gone, but Breckon was none the cheerfuller for the spectacle of Mrs. Rasmith. He could not have a moment’s doubt as to the sort of work he had been doing in New York if she were an effect of it, and he turned his mind from the sad certainty back to the more important inquiry as to what offence his wish to advise with Judge Kenton could have conveyed. Ellen had told him in the afternoon that she had spoken with her father about it, and she had not intimated any displeasure or reluctance on him; but apparently he had decided not to suffer himself to be approached.
It might be as well. Breckon had not been able to convince himself that his proposal to consult Judge Kenton was not a pose. He had flashes of owning that it was contemplated merely as a means of ingratiating himself with Ellen. Now, as he found his way up and down among the empty steamer-chairs, he was aware, at the bottom of his heart, of not caring in the least for Judge Kenton’s repellent bearing, except as it possibly, or impossibly, reflected some mood of hers. He could not make out her not coming to dinner; the headache was clearly an excuse; for some reason she did not wish to see him, he argued, with the egotism of his condition.
The logic of his conclusion was strengthened at breakfast by her continued absence; and this time Mrs. Kenton made no apologies for her. The judge was a shade less severe; or else Breckon did not put himself so much in the way to be withheld as he had the night before. Boyne and Lottie carried on a sort of muted scrap, unrebuked by their mother, who seemed too much distracted in some tacit trouble to mind them. From time to time Breckon found her eyes dwelling upon him wonderingly, entreatingly; she dropped them, if she caught his, and colored.
In the afternoon it was early evident that they were approaching Boulogne. The hatch was opened and the sailors began getting up the baggage of the passengers who were going to disembark. It seemed a long time for everybody till the steamer got in; those going ashore sat on their hand-baggage for an hour before the tug came up to take, them off. Mr. Pogis was among them; he had begun in the forenoon to mark the approaching separation between Lottie and himself by intervals of unmistakable withdrawal. Another girl might have cared, but Lottie did not care, for her failure to get a rise out of him by her mockingly varied “Oh, I say!” and “Well, rather!” In the growth of his dignified reserve Mr. Pogis was indifferent to jeers. By whatever tradition of what would or would not do he was controlled in relinquishing her acquaintance, or whether it was in obedience to some imperative ideal, or some fearful domestic influence subtly making itself felt from the coasts of his native island, or some fine despair of equalling the imagined grandeur of Lottie’s social state in Tuskingum by anything he could show her in England, it was certain that he was ending with Lottie then and there. At the same time he was carefully defining himself from the Rasmiths, with whom he must land. He had his state-room things put at an appreciable distance, where he did not escape a final stab from Lottie.
“Oh, do give me a rose out of that,” she entreated, in travestied imploring, as he stood looking at a withered bouquet which the steward had brought up with his rugs.
“I’m takin’ it home,” he explained, coldly.
“And I want to take a rose back to New York. I want to give it to a friend of mine there.”
Mr. Pogis hesitated. Then he asked, “A man?” “Well, rather!” said Lottie.
He answered nothing, but looked definitively down at the flowers in his hand.
“Oh, I say!” Lottie exulted.
Boyne remained fixed in fealty to the Rasmiths, with whom Breckon was also talking as Mrs. Kenton came up with the judge. She explained how sorry her daughter Ellen was at not being able to say goodbye; she was still not at all well; and the ladies received her excuses with polite patience. Mrs. Rasmith said she did not know what they should do without Boyne, and Miss Rasmith put her arm across his shoulders and pulled him up to her, and implored, “Oh, give him to me, Mrs. Kenton!”
Boyne stole an ashamed look at his mother, and his father said, with an unbending to Breckon which must have been the effect of severe expostulation from Mrs. Kenton, “I suppose you and the ladies will go to Paris together.”
“Why, no,” Breckon said, and he added, with mounting confusion, “I — I had arranged to keep on to Rotterdam. I was going to mention it.”
“Keep on to Rotterdam!” Mrs. Rasmith’s eyes expressed the greatest astonishment.
“Why, of course, mother!” said her daughter. “Don’t you know? Boyne told us.”
Boyne, after their parting, seized the first chance of assuring his mother that he had not told Miss Rasmith that, for he had not known it, and he went so far in her condemnation to wonder how she could say such a thing. His mother said it was not very nice, and then suggested that perhaps she had heard it from some one else, and thought it was he. She acquitted him of complicity with Miss Rasmith in forbearing to contradict her; and it seemed to her a fitting time to find out from Boyne what she honestly could about the relation of the Rasmiths to Mr. Breckon. It was very little beyond their supposition, which every one else had shared, that he was going to land with them at Boulogne,
and he must have changed his mind very suddenly. Boyne had not heard the Rasmiths speak of it. Miss Rasmith never spoke of Mr. Breckon at all; but she seemed to want to talk of Ellen; she was always asking about her, and what was the matter with her, and how long she had been sick.
“Boyne,” said his mother, with a pang, “you didn’t tell her anything about Ellen?”
“Momma!” said the boy, in such evident abhorrence of the idea that she rested tranquil concerning it. She paid little attention to what Boyne told her otherwise of the Rasmiths. Her own horizon were so limited that she could not have brought home to herself within them that wandering life the Rasmiths led from climate to climate and sensation to sensation, with no stay so long as the annually made in New York, where they sometimes passed months enough to establish themselves in giving and taking tea in a circle of kindred nomads. She conjectured as ignorantly as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith’s father, whose name was not Rasmith.
What Mrs. Kenton divined was that they had wanted to get Breckon, and that so far as concerned her own interest in him they had wanted to get him away from Ellen. In her innermost self-confidences she did not permit herself the notion that Ellen had any right to him; but still it was a relief to have them off the ship, and to have him left. Of all the witnesses of the fact, she alone did not find it awkward. Breckon himself found it very awkward. He did not wish to be with the Rasmiths, but he found it uncomfortable not being with them, under the circumstances, and he followed them ashore in tingling reveries of explanation and apology. He had certainly meant to get off at Boulogne, and when he had suddenly and tardily made up his mind to keep on to Rotterdam, he had meant to tell them as soon as he had the labels on his baggage changed. He had not meant to tell them why he had changed his mind, and he did not tell them now in these tingling reveries. He did not own the reason in his secret thoughts, for it no longer seemed a reason; it no longer seemed a cause. He knew what the Rasmiths would think; but he could easily make that right with his conscience, at least, by parting with the Kentons at Rotterdam, and leaving them to find their unconducted way to any point they chose beyond. He separated himself uncomfortably from them when the tender had put off with her passengers and the ship had got under way again, and went to the smoking-room, while the judge returned to his book and Mrs. Kenton abandoned Lottie to her own devices, and took Boyne aside for her apparently fruitless inquiries.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 734