Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  She now went about not only to all the places where she could make Ellen’s amusement serve as an excuse, but to others when she could not coax or compel the melancholy girl. She was as constant at matinees of one kind as Boyne at another sort; she went to the exhibitions of pictures, and got herself up in schools of painting; she frequented galleries, public and private, and got asked to studio teas; she went to meetings and conferences of aesthetic interest, and she paid an easy way to parlor lectures expressive of the vague but profound ferment in women’s souls; from these her presence in intellectual clubs was a simple and natural transition. She met and talked with interesting people, and now and then she got introduced to literary people. Once, in a book-store, she stood next to a gentleman leaning over the same counter, whom a salesman addressed by the name of a popular author, and she remained staring at him breathless till he left the place. When she bragged of the prodigious experience at home, her husband defied her to say how it differed from meeting the lecturers who had been their guests in Tuskingum, and she answered that none of them compared with this author; and, besides, a lion in his own haunts was very different from a lion going round the country on exhibition. Kenton thought that was pretty good, and owned that she had got him there.

  He laughed at her, to the children, but all the same she believed that she was living in an atmosphere of culture, and with every breath she was sensible of an intellectual expansion. She found herself in the enjoyment of so wide and varied a sympathy with interests hitherto strange to her experience that she could not easily make people believe she had never been to Europe. Nearly every one she met had been several times, and took it for granted that she knew the Continent as well as they themselves.

  She denied it with increasing shame; she tried to make Kenton understand how she felt, and she might have gone further if she had not seen how homesick he was for Tuskingum. She did her best to coax him and scold him into a share of the pleasure they were all beginning to have in New York. She made him own that Ellen herself was beginning to be gayer; she convinced him that his business was not suffering in his absence and that he was the better from the complete rest he was having. She defied him, to say, then, what was the matter with him, and she bitterly reproached herself, in the event, for not having known that it was not homesickness alone that was the trouble. When he was not going about with her, or doing something to amuse the children, he went upon long, lonely walks, and came home silent and fagged. He had given up smoking, and he did not care to sit about in the office of the hotel where other old fellows passed the time over their papers and cigars, in the heat of the glowing grates. They looked too much like himself, with their air of unrecognized consequence, and of personal loss in an alien environment. He knew from their dress and bearing that they were country people, and it wounded him in a tender place to realize that they had each left behind him in his own town an authority and a respect which they could not enjoy in New York. Nobody called them judge, or general, or doctor, or squire; nobody cared who they were, or what they thought; Kenton did not care himself; but when he missed one of them he envied him, for then he knew that he had gone back to the soft, warm keeping of his own neighborhood, and resumed the intelligent regard of a community he had grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let them know he was in town, and then he was hurt that they ignored him. He kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought that it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New York, and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the indifference of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his local distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the pleasant younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up at one, he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had outlived the period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city as he world once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except the basements of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and picked up copies of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he read them, he sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away with the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see, with compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by these means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently proposed to go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.

  He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the winter wore away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute instructions for getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the book-stalls by conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife could see that he had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find from one as from the other.

  She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope, for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with a kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six weeks before he left his room.

  He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and he was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that when his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for him he submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. Her heart smote her for her guilty joy in his sentence, and she punished herself by asking if it would not do him more good to get back to the comfort and quiet of their own house. She went to the length of saying that she believed his attack had been brought on more by homesickness than anything else. But the doctor agreed rather with her wish than her word, and held out that his melancholy was not the cause but the effect of his disorder. Then she took courage and began getting ready to go. She did not flag even in the dark hours when Kenton got back his courage with his returning strength, and scoffed at the notion of Europe, and insisted that as soon as they were in Tuskingum he should be all right again.

  She felt the ingratitude, not to say the perfidy, of his behavior, and she fortified herself indignantly against it; but it was not her constant purpose, or the doctor’s inflexible opinion, that prevailed with Kenton at last a letter came one day for Ellen which she showed to her mother, and which her mother, with her distress obscurely relieved by a sense of its powerful instrumentality, brought to the girl’s father. It was from that fellow, as they always called him, and it asked of the girl a hearing upon a certain point in which, it had just come to his knowledge, she had misjudged him. He made no claim upon her, and only urged his wish to right himself with her because she was the one person in the whole world, after his mother, for whose good opinion he cared. With some tawdriness of sentiment, the letter was well worded; it was professedly written for the sole purpose of knowing whether, when she came back to Tuskingum, she would see him, and let him prove to her that he was not wholly unworthy of the kindness she had shown him when he was without other friends.

  “What does she say?” the judge demanded.

  “What do you suppose?” his wife retorted. “She thinks she ought to see him.”

  “Very well, then. We will go to Europe.”

  “Not on my account!” Mrs. Kenton consciously protested.

  “No; not on your account, or mine, either. On Nelly’s account. Where is she? I want to talk with her.”

  “And I want to talk with you. She’s out, with Lottie; and when she comes back I will tell her what you say. But I want to know what you think, first.”

  III.

  It was some time before they arrived at a common agreement as to what Kenton thought, and when they reached it they decided that they must leave the matter altogether to Ellen,
as they had done before. They would never force her to anything, and if, after all that her mother could say, she still wished to see the fellow, they would not deny her.

  When it came to this, Ellen was a long time silent, so long a time that her mother was beginning restively to doubt whether she was going to speak at all. Then she drew a long, silent breath. “I suppose I ought to despise myself, momma, for caring for him, when he’s never really said that he cared for me.”

  “No, no,” her mother faltered.

  “But I do, I do!” she gave way piteously. “I can’t help it! He doesn’t say so, even now.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” It hurt her mother to own the fact that alone gave her hope.

  The girl was a long time silent again before she asked, “Has poppa got the tickets?”

  “Why, he wouldn’t, Ellen, child, till he knew how you felt,” her mother tenderly reproached her.

  “He’d better not wait!” The tears ran silently down Ellen’s cheeks, and her lips twitched a little between these words and the next; she spoke as if it were still of her father, but her mother understood. “If he ever does say so, don’t you speak a word to me, momma; and don’t you let poppa.”

  “No; indeed I won’t,” her mother promised. “Have we ever interfered, Ellen? Have we ever tried to control you?”

  “He WOULD have said so, if he hadn’t seen that everybody was against him.” The mother bore without reply the ingratitude and injustice that she knew were from the child’s pain and not from her will. “Where is his letter? Give me his letter!” She nervously twitched it from her mother’s hand and ran it into her pocket. She turned away to go and put off her hat, which she still wore from coming in with Lottie; but she stopped and looked over her shoulder at her mother. “I’m going to answer it, and I don’t want you ever to ask me what I’ve said. Will you?”

  “No, I won’t, Nelly.”

  “Well, then!”

  The next night she went with Boyne and Lottie to the apartment overhead to spend their last evening with the young people there, who were going into the country the next day. She came back without the others, who wished to stay a little longer, as she said, with a look of gay excitement in her eyes, which her mother knew was not happiness. Mrs. Kenton had an impulse to sweep into her lap the lithograph plans of the steamer, and the passage ticket which lay open on the table before herself and her husband. But it was too late to hide them from Ellen. She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down again. “Oh, I didn’t think you would do it!” she burst out; and she ran away to her room, where they could hear her sobbing, as they sat haggardly facing each other.

  “Well, that settles it,” said Benton at last, with a hard gulp.

  “Oh, I suppose so,” his wife assented.

  On his part, now, he had a genuine regret for her disappointment from the sad safety of the trouble that would keep them at home; and on her part she could be glad of it if any sort of comfort could come out of it to him.

  “Till she says go,” he added, “we’ve got to stay.”

  “Oh yes,” his wife responded. “The worst of it is, we can’t even go back to Tuskingum.” He looked up suddenly at her, and she saw that he had not thought of this. She made “Tchk!” in sheer amaze at him.

  “We won’t cross that river till we come to it,” he said, sullenly, but half-ashamed. The next morning the situation had not changed overnight, as they somehow both crazily hoped it might, and at breakfast, which they had at a table grown more remote from others with the thinning out of the winter guests of the hotel, the father and mother sat down alone in silence which was scarcely broken till Lottie and Boyne joined them.

  “Where’s Ellen?” the boy demanded.

  “She’s having her breakfast in her room,” Mrs. Kenton answered.

  “She says she don’t want to eat anything,” Lottie reported. “She made the man take it away again.”

  The gloom deepened in the faces of the father and mother, but neither spoke, and Boyne resumed the word again in a tone of philosophic speculation. “I don’t see how I’m going to get along, with those European breakfasts. They say you can’t get anything but cold meat or eggs; and generally they don’t expect to give you anything but bread and butter with your coffee. I don’t think that’s the way to start the day, do you, poppa?”

  Kenton seemed not to have heard, for he went on silently eating, and the mother, who had not been appealed to, merely looked distractedly across the table at her children.

  “Mr. Plumpton says he’s coming down to see us off,” said Lottie, smoothing her napkin in her lap. “Do you know the time of day when the boat sails, momma?”

  “Yes,” her brother broke in, “and if I had been momma I’d have boxed your ears for the way you went on with him. You fairly teased him to come. The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma.”

  “What time does the boat sail, momma!” Lottie blandly persisted. “I promised to let Mr. Plumpton know.”

  “Yes, so as to get a chance to write to him,” said Boyne. “I guess when he sees your spelling!”

  “Momma! Do wake up! What time does our steamer sail?”

  A light of consciousness came into Mrs. Renton’s eyes at last, and she sighed gently. “We’re not going, Lottie.”

  “Not going! Why, but we’ve got the tickets, and I’ve told—”

  “Your father has decided not to go, for the present. We may go later in the summer, or perhaps in the fall.”

  Boyne looked at his father’s troubled face, and said nothing, but Lottie was not stayed from the expression of her feelings by any ill-timed consideration for what her father’s might be. “I just know,” she fired, “it’s something to do with that nasty Bittridge. He’s been a bitter dose to this family! As soon as I saw Ellen have a letter I was sure it was from him; and she ought to be ashamed. If I had played the simpleton with such a fellow I guess you wouldn’t have let me keep you from going to Europe very much. What is she going to do now? Marry him? Or doesn’t he want her to?”

  “Lottie!” said her mother, and her father glanced up at her with a face that silenced her.

  “When you’ve been half as good a girl as Ellen has been, in this whole matter,” he said, darkly, “it will be time for you to complain of the way you’ve been treated.”

  “Oh yes, I know you like Ellen the best,” said the girl, defiantly.

  “Don’t say such a thing, Lottie!” said her mother. “Your father loves all his children alike, and I won’t have you talking so to him. Ellen has had a great deal to bear, and she has behaved beautifully. If we are not going to Europe it is because we have decided that it is best not to go, and I wish to hear nothing more from you about it.”

  “Oh yes! And a nice position it leaves me in, when I’ve been taking good-bye of everybody! Well, I hope to goodness you won’t say anything about it till the Plumptons get away. I couldn’t have the face to meet them if you did.”

  “It won’t be necessary to say anything; or you can say that we’ve merely postponed our sailing. People are always doing that.”

  “It’s not to be a postponement,” said Kenton, so sternly that no one ventured to dispute him, the children because they were afraid of him, and their mother because she was suffering for him.

  At the steamship office, however, the authorities represented that it was now so near the date of his sailing that they could not allow him to relinquish his passages except at his own risk. They would try to sell his ticket for him, but they could not take it back, and they could not promise to sell it. There was reason in what they said, but if there had been none, they had the four hundred dollars which Kenton had paid for his five berths and they had at least the advantage of him in the argument by that means. He put the ticket back in his pocket-book without attempting to answer them, and deferred his decision till he could advise with his wife, who, after he left the breakfast-table upon his errand to the steamship office, had abandoned her children to t
heir own devices, and gone to scold Ellen for not eating.

  She had not the heart to scold her when she found the girl lying face downward in the pillow, with her thin arms thrown up through the coils and heaps of her loose-flung hair. She was so alight that her figure scarcely defined itself under the bedclothes; the dark hair, and the white, outstretched arms seemed all there was of her. She did not stir, but her mother knew she was not sleeping. “Ellen,” she said, gently, “you needn’t be troubled about our going to Europe. Your father has gone down to the steamship office to give back his ticket.”

  The girl flashed her face round with nervous quickness. “Gone to give back his ticket!”

  “Yes, we decided it last night. He’s never really wanted to go, and—”

  “But I don’t wish poppa to give up his ticket!” said Ellen. “He must get it again. I shall die if I stay here, momma. We have got to go. Can’t you understand that?”

  Mrs. Kenton did not know what to answer. She had a strong superficial desire to shake her daughter as a naughty child which has vexed its mother, but under this was a stir stronger pity for her as a woman, which easily, prevailed. “Why, but, Ellen dear! We thought from what you said last night—”

  “But couldn’t you SEE,” the girl reproached her, and she began to cry, and turned her face into the pillow again and lay sobbing.

  “Well,” said her mother, after she had given her a little time, “you needn’t be troubled. Your father can easily get the ticket again; he can telephone down for it. Nothing has been done yet. But didn’t you really want to stay, then?”

  “It isn’t whether I want to stay or not,” Ellen spoke into her pillow. “You know that. You know that I have got to go. You know that if I saw him — Oh, why do you make me talk?”

  “Yes, I understand, child.” Then, in the imperious necessity of blaming some one, Mrs. Kenton added: “You know how it is with your father. He is always so precipitate; and when he heard what you said, last night, it cut him to the heart. He felt as if he were dragging you away, and this morning he could hardly wait to get through his breakfast before he rushed down to the steamship office. But now it’s all right again, and if you want to go, we’ll go, and your father will only be too glad.”