“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.
XXII.
Mrs. Kenton woke with the clear vision which is sometimes vouchsafed to people whose eyes are holden at other hours of the day. She had heard Boyne opening and shutting Ellen’s door, and her heart smote her that he should have gone to his sister with whatever trouble he was in rather than come to his mother. It was natural that she should put the blame on her husband, and “Now, Mr. Kenton,” she began, with an austerity of voice which he recognized before he was well awake, “if you won’t take Boyne off somewhere to-day, I will. I think we had better all go. We have been here a whole fortnight, and we have got thoroughly rested, and there is no excuse for our wasting our time any longer. If we are going to see Holland, we had better begin doing it.”
The judge gave a general assent, and said that if she wanted to go to Flushing he supposed he could find some garden-seeds there, in the flower and vegetable nurseries, which would be adapted to the climate of Tuskingum, and they could all put in the day pleasantly, looking round the place. Whether it was the suggestion of Tuskingum in relation to Flushing that decided her against the place, or whether she had really meant to go to Leyden, she now expressed the wish, as vividly as if it were novel, to explore the scene of the Pilgrims’ sojourn before they sailed for Plymouth, and she reproached him for not caring about the place when they both used to take such an interest in it at home.
“Well,” said the judge, “if I were at home I should take an interest in it here.”
This provoked her to a silence which he thought it best to break in tacit compliance with her wish, and he asked, “Do you propose taking the whole family and the appurtenances? We shall be rather a large party.”
“Ellen would wish to go, and I suppose Mr. Breckon. We couldn’t very well go without them.”
“And how about Lottie and that young Trannel?”
“We can’t leave him out, very well. I wish we could. I don’t like him.”
“There’s nothing easier than not asking him, if you don’t want him.”
“Yes, there is, when you’ve got a girl like Lottie to deal with. Quite likely she would ask him herself. We must take him because we can’t leave her.”
“Yes, I reckon,” the judge acquiesced.
“I’m glad,” Mrs. Kenton said, after a moment, “that it isn’t Ellen he’s after; it almost reconciles me to his being with Lottie so much. I only wonder he doesn’t take to Ellen, he’s so much like that—”
She did not say out what was in her mind, but her husband knew. “Yes, I’ve noticed it. This young Breckon was quite enough so, for my taste. I don’t know what it is that just saves him from it.”
“He’s good. You could tell that from the beginning.”
They went off upon the situation that, superficially or subliminally, was always interesting them beyond anything in the world, and they did not openly recur to Mrs. Kenton’s plan for the day till they met their children at breakfast. It was a meal at which Breckon and Trammel were both apt to join them, where they took it at two of the tables on the broad, seaward piazza of the hotel when the weather was fine. Both the young men now applauded her plan, in their different sorts. It was easily arranged that they should go by train and not by tram from The Hague. The train was chosen, and Mrs. Kenton, when she went to her room to begin the preparations for a day’s pleasure which constitute so distinctly a part of its pain, imagined that everything was settled. She had scarcely closed the door behind her when Lottie opened it and shut it again behind her.
“Mother,” she said, in the new style of address to which she was habituating Mrs. Kenton, after having so long called her momma, “I am not going with you.”
“Indeed you are, then!” her mother retorted. “Do you think I would leave you here all day with that fellow? A nice talk we should make!”
“You are perfectly welcome to that fellow, mother, and as he’s accepted he will have to go with you, and there won’t be any talk. But, as I remarked before, I am not going.”
“Why aren’t you going, I should like to know?”
“Because I don’t like the company.”
“What do you mean? Have you got anything against Mr. Breckon?”
“He’s insipid, but as long as Ellen don’t mind it I don’t care. I object to Mr. Trannel!”
“Why?”
“I don’t see why I should have to tell you. If I said I liked him you might want to know, but it seems to me that my not liking him is — my not liking him is my own affair.” There was a kind of logic in this that silenced Mrs. Kenton for the moment. In view of her advantage Lottie relented so far as to add, “I’ve found out something about him.”
Mrs. Kenton was imperative in her alarm. “What is it?” she demanded.
Lottie answered, obliquely: “Well, I didn’t leave The Hague to get rid of them, and then take up with one of them at Scheveningen.”
“One of what?”
“COOK’S TOURISTS, if you must know, mother. Mr. Trannel, as you call him, is a Cook’s tourist, and that’s the end of it. I have got no use for him from this out.”
Mrs. Kenton was daunted, and not for the first time, by her daughter’s superior knowledge of life. She could put Boyne down sometimes, though not always, when he attempted to impose a novel code of manners or morals upon her, but she could not cope with Lottie. In the present case she could only ask, “Well?”
“Well, they’re the cheapest of the cheap. He actually showed me his coupons, and tried to put me down with the idea that everybody used them. But I guess he found it wouldn’t work. He said if you were not personally conducted it was all right.”
“Now, Lottie, you have got to tell me just what you mean,” said Mrs. Kenton, and from having stood during this parley, she sat down to hear Lottie out at her leisure. But if there was anything more difficult than for Lottie to be explicit it was to make her be so, and in the end Mrs. Kenton was scarcely wiser than she was at the beginning to her daughter’s reasons. It appeared that if you wanted to be cheap you could travel with those coupons, and Lottie d
id not wish to be cheap, or have anything to do with those who were. The Kentons had always held up their heads, and if Ellen had chosen to disgrace them with Bittridge, Dick had made it all right, and she at least was not going to do anything that she would be ashamed of. She was going to stay at home, and have her meals in her room till they got back.
Her mother paid no heed to her repeated declaration. “Lottie,” she asked, with the heart-quake that the thought of Richard’s act always gave her with reference to Ellen, “have you ever let out the least hint of that?”
“Of course I haven’t,” Lottie scornfully retorted. “I hope I know what a crank Ellen is.”
They were not just the terms in which Mrs. Kenton would have chosen to be reassured, but she was glad to be assured in any terms. She said, vaguely: “I believe in my heart that I will stay at home, too. All this has given me a bad headache.”
“I was going to have a headache myself,” said Lottie, with injury. “But I suppose I can get on along without. I can just simply say I’m not going. If he proposes to stay, too, I can soon settle that.”
“The great difficulty will be to get your father to go.”
“You can make Ellen make him,” Lottie suggested.
“That is true,” said Mrs. Kenton, with such increasing absence that her daughter required of her:
“Are you staying on my account?”
“I think you had better not be left alone the whole day. But I am not staying on your account. I don’t believe we had so many of us better go. It might look a little pointed.”
Lottie laughed harshly. “I guess Mr. Breckon wouldn’t see the point, he’s so perfectly gone.”
“Do you really believe it, Lottie?” Mrs. Kenton entreated, with a sudden tenderness for her younger daughter such as she did not always feel.
“I should think anybody would believe it — anybody but Ellen.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton dreamily assented.
Lottie made her way to the door. “Well, if you do stay, mother, I’m not going to have you hanging round me all day. I can chaperon myself.”
“Lottie,” her mother tried to stay her, “I wish you would go. I don’t believe that Mr. Trannel will be much of an addition. He will be on your poor father’s hands all day, or else Ellen’s, and if you went you could help off.”
“Thank you, mother. I’ve had quite all I want of Mr. Trannel. You can tell him he needn’t go, if you want to.”
Lottie at least did not leave her mother to make her excuses to the party when they met for starting. Mrs. Kenton had deferred her own till she thought it was too late for her husband to retreat, and then bunglingly made them, with so much iteration that it seemed to her it would have been far less pointed, as concerned Mr. Breckon, if she had gone. Lottie sunnily announced that she was going to stay with her mother, and did not even try to account for her defection to Mr. Trannel.
“What’s the matter with my staying, too?” he asked. “It seems to me there are four wheels to this coach now.”
He had addressed his misgiving more to Lottie than the rest; but with the same sunny indifference to the consequence for others that she had put on in stating her decision, she now discharged herself from further responsibility by turning on her heel and leaving it with the party generally. In the circumstances Mr. Trannel had no choice but to go, and he was supported, possibly, by the hope of taking it out of Lottie some other time.
It was more difficult for Mrs. Kenton to get rid of the judge, but an inscrutable frown goes far in such exigencies. It seems to explain, and it certainly warns, and the husband on whom it is bent never knows, even after the longest experience, whether he had better inquire further. Usually he decides that he had better not, and Judge Kenton went off towards the tram with Boyne in the cloud of mystery which involved them both as to Mrs. Kenton’s meaning.
XXIII.
Trannel attached himself as well as he could to Breckon and Ellen, and Breckon had an opportunity not fully offered him before to note a likeness between himself and a fellow-man whom he was aware of not liking, though he tried to love him, as he felt it right to love all men. He thought he had not been quite sympathetic enough with Mrs. Kenton in her having to stay behind, and he tried to make it up to Mr. Trannel in his having to come. He invented civilities to show him, and ceded his place next Ellen as if Trannel had a right to it. Trannel ignored him in keeping it, unless it was recognizing Breckon to say, “Oh, I hope I’m not in your way, old fellow?” and then making jokes to Ellen. Breckon could not say the jokes were bad, though the taste of them seemed to him so. The man had a fleeting wit, which scorched whatever he turned it upon, and yet it was wit. “Why don’t you try him in American?” he asked at the failure of Breckon and the tram conductor to understand each other in Dutch. He tried the conductor himself in American, and he was so deplorably funny that it was hard for Breckon to help being ‘particeps criminus’, at least in a laugh.
He asked himself if that were really the kind of man he was, and he grew silent and melancholy in the fear that it was a good deal the sort of man. To this morbid fancy Trannel seemed himself in a sort of excess, or what he would be if he were logically ultimated. He remembered all the triviality of his behavior with Ellen at first, and rather sickened at the thought of some of his early pleasantries. She was talking gayly now with Trannel, and Breckon wondered whether she was falling under the charm that he felt in him, in spite of himself.
If she was, her father was not. The judge sat on the other side of the car, and unmistakably glowered at the fellow’s attempts to make himself amusing to Ellen. Trannel himself was not insensible to the judge’s mood. Now and then he said something to intensify it. He patronized the judge and he made fun of the tourist character in which Boyne had got himself up, with a field-glass slung by a strap under one arm and a red Baedeker in his hand. He sputtered with malign laughter at a rather gorgeous necktie which Boyne had put on for the day, and said it was not a very good match for the Baedeker.
Boyne retorted rudely, and that amused Trannel still more. He became personal to Breckon, and noted the unclerical cut of his clothes. He said he ought to have put on his uniform for an expedition like that, in case they got into any sort of trouble. To Ellen alone he was inoffensive, unless he overdid his polite attentions to her in carrying her parasol for her, and helping her out of the tram, when they arrived, shouldering every one else away, and making haste to separate her from the others and then to walk on with her a little in advance.
Suddenly he dropped her, and fell back to Boyne and his father, while Breckon hastened forward to her side. Trannel put his arm across Boyne’s shoulders and asked him if he were mad, and then laughed at him. “You’re all right, Boyne, but you oughtn’t to be so approachable. You ought to put on more dignity, and repel familiarity!”
Boyne could only twitch away in silence that he made as haughty as he could, but not so haughty that Trannel did not find it laughable, and he laughed in a teasing way that made Breckon more and more serious. He was aware of becoming even solemn with the question of his likeness to Trannel. He was of Trannel’s quality, and their difference was a matter of quantity, and there was not enough difference. In his sense of their likeness Breckon vowed himself to a gravity of behavior evermore which he should not probably be able to observe, but the sample he now displayed did not escape the keen vigilance of Trannel.
“With the exception of Miss Kenton,” he addressed himself to the party, “you’re all so easy and careless that if you don’t look out you’ll lose me. Miss Kenton, I wish you would keep an eye on me. I don’t want to get lost.”
Ellen laughed — she could not help it — and her laughing made it less possible than before for Breckon to unbend and meet Trannel on his own ground, to give him joke for joke, to exchange banter with him. He might never have been willing to do that, but now he shrank from it, in his realization of their likeness, with an abhorrence that rendered him rigid.
The judge was walking ahead
with Boyne, and his back expressed such severe disapproval that, between her fear that Trannel would say something to bring her father’s condemnation on him and her sense of their inhospitable attitude towards one who was their guest, in a sort, she said, with her gentle gayety, “Then you must keep near me, Mr. Trannel. I’ll see that nothing happens.”
“That’s very sweet of you,” said Trannel, soberly. Whether he had now vented his malicious humor and was ready to make himself agreeable, or was somewhat quelled by the unfriendly ambient he had created, or was wrought upon by her friendliness, he became everything that could be wished in a companion for a day’s pleasure. He took the lead at the station, and got them a compartment in the car to themselves for the little run to Leyden, and on the way he talked very well. He politely borrowed Boyne’s Baedeker, and decided for the party what they had best see, and showed an acceptable intelligence, as well as a large experience in the claims of Leyden upon the visitor’s interest. He had been there often before, it seemed, and in the event it appeared that he had chosen the days sightseeing wisely.
He no longer addressed himself respectfully to Ellen alone, but he re-established himself in Boyne’s confidence with especial pains, and he conciliated Breckon by a recognition of his priority with Ellen with a delicacy refined enough for even the susceptibility of a lover alarmed for his rights. If he could not overcome the reluctance of the judge, he brought him to the civil response which any one who tried for Kenton’s liking achieved, even if he did not merit it, and there remained no more reserve in Kenton’s manner than there had been with the young man from the first. He had never been a persona grata to the judge, and if he did not become so now, he at least ceased to be actively displeasing.
That was the year before the young Queen came to her own, and in the last days of her minority she was visiting all the cities of her future dominion with the queen-mother. When Kenton’s party left the station they found Leyden as gay for her reception as flags and banners could make the gray old town, and Trannel relapsed for a moment so far as to suggest that the decorations were in honor of Boyne’s presence, but he did not abuse the laugh that this made to Boyne’s further shame.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 738