Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Lottie had listened in silent scorn to the whole proceedings up to this point, and had refused a part in the general recognition of Breckon as a special providence. Now she flashed out with a terrible volubility: “What did I tell you? What else could you expect of a Cook’s tourist? And mom — mother wanted to make me go with you, after I told her what he was! Well, if I had have gone, I’ll bet I could have kept him from playing his tricks. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have taken any liberties, with me along. I’ll bet if he had, it wouldn’t have been Boyne that got arrested. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have got off so easily with the magistrate, either! But I suppose you’ll all let him come bowing and smiling round in the morning, like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouths. That seems to be the Kenton way. Anybody can pull our noses, or get us arrested that wants to, and we never squeak.” She went on a long time to this purpose, Mrs. Kenton listening with an air almost of conviction, and Ellen patiently bearing it as a right that Lottie had in a matter where she had been otherwise ignored.

  The judge broke out, not upon Lottie, but upon his wife. “Good heavens, Sarah, can’t you make the child hush?”

  Lottie answered for her mother, with a crash of nerves and a gush of furious tears: “Oh, I’ve got to hush, I suppose. It’s always the way when I’m trying to keep up the dignity of the family. I suppose it will be cabled to America, and by tomorrow it will be all over Tuskingum how Boyne was made a fool of and got arrested. But I bet there’s one person in Tuskingum that won’t have any remarks to make, and that’s Bittridge. Not, as long as Dick’s there he won’t.”

  “Lottie!” cried her mother, and her father started towards her, while Ellen still sat patiently quiet.

  “Oh, well!” Lottie submitted. “But if Dick was here I know this Trannel wouldn’t get off so smoothly. Dick would give him a worse cowhiding than he did Bittridge.”

  Half the last word was lost in the bang of the door which Lottie slammed behind her, leaving her father and mother to a silence which Ellen did not offer to break. The judge had no heart to speak, in his dismay, and it was Mrs. Kenton who took the word.

  “Ellen,” she began, with compassionate gentleness, “we tried to keep it from you. We knew how you would feel. But now we have got to tell you. Dick did cowhide him when he got back to Tuskingum. Lottie wrote out to Dick about it, how Mr. Bittridge had behaved in New York. Your father and I didn’t approve of it, and Dick didn’t afterwards; but, yes, he did do it.”

  “I knew it, momma,” said Ellen, sadly.

  “You knew it! How?”

  “That other letter I got when we first came — it was from his mother.”

  “Did she tell—”

  “Yes. It was terrible she seemed to feel so. And I was sorry for her. I thought I ought to answer it, and I did. I told her I was sorry, too. I tried not to blame Richard. I don’t believe I did. And I tried not to blame him. She was feeling badly enough without that.”

  Her father and mother looked at each other; they did not speak, and she asked, “Do you think I oughtn’t to have written?”

  Her father answered, a little tremulously: “You did right, Ellen. And I am sure that you did it in just the right way.”

  “I tried to. I thought I wouldn’t worry you about it.”

  She rose, and now her mother thought she was going to say that it put an end to everything; that she must go back and offer herself as a sacrifice to the injured Bittridges. Her mind had reverted to that moment on the steamer when Ellen told her that nothing had reconciled her to what had happened with Bittridge but the fact that all the wrong done had been done to themselves; that this freed her. In her despair she could not forbear asking, “What did you write to her, Ellen?”

  “Nothing. I just said that I was very sorry, and that I knew how she felt. I don’t remember exactly.”

  She went up and kissed her mother. She seemed rather fatigued than distressed, and her father asked her. “Are you going to bed, my dear?”

  “Yes, I’m pretty tired, and I should think you would be, too, poppa. I’ll speak to poor Boyne. Don’t mind Lottie. I suppose she couldn’t help saying it.” She kissed her father, and slipped quietly into Boyne’s room, from which they could hear her passing on to her own before they ventured to say anything to each other in the hopeful bewilderment to which she had left them.

  “Well?” said the judge.

  “Well?” Mrs. Kenton returned, in a note of exasperation, as if she were not going to let herself be forced to the initiative.

  “I thought you thought—”

  “I did think that. Now I don’t know what to think. We have got to wait.”

  “I’m willing to wait for Ellen!”

  “She seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, “to have more sense than both the other children put together, and I was afraid—”

  “She might easily have more sense than Boyne, or Lottie, either.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Kenton began. But she did not go on to resent the disparagement which she had invited. “What I was afraid of was her goodness. It was her goodness that got her into the trouble, to begin with. If she hadn’t been so good, that fellow could never have fooled her as he did. She was too innocent.”

  The judge could not forbear the humorous view. “Perhaps she’s getting wickeder, or not so innocent. At any rate, she doesn’t seem to have been take in by Trannel.”

  “He didn’t pay any attention to her. He was all taken up with Lottie.”

  “Well, that was lucky. Sarah,” said the judge, “do you think he is like Bittridge?”

  “He’s made me think of him all the time.”

  “It’s curious,” the judge mused. “I have always noticed how our faults repeat themselves, but I didn’t suppose our fates would always take the same shape, or something like it.” Mrs. Kenton stared at him. “When this other one first made up to us on the boat my heart went down. I thought of Bittridge so.”

  “Mr. Breckon?”

  “Yes, the same lightness; the same sort of trifling — Didn’t you notice it?”

  “No — yes, I noticed it. But I wasn’t afraid for an instant. I saw that he was good.”

  “Oh!”

  “What I’m afraid of now is that Ellen doesn’t care anything about him.”

  “He isn’t wicked enough?”

  “I don’t say that. But it would be too much happiness to expect in one short life.”

  The judge could not deny the reasonableness of her position. He could only oppose it. “Well, I don’t think we’ve had any more than our share of happiness lately.”

  No one except Boyne could have made Trannel’s behavior a cause of quarrel, but the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was quite as effective. In Lottie this took the form of something so active, so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth. Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had ever had her acquaintance. In his doubt he ventured to address her, and then Lottie turned her back upon him in a manner that was perfectly convincing. He attempted a smiling ease with Mrs. Kenton and the judge, but they shared neither his smile nor his ease, and his jocose questions about the end of yesterday’s adventures, which he had not been privy to, did not seem to appeal to the American sense of humor in them. Ellen was not with them, nor Boyne, but Trannel was not asked to take either of the vacant places at the table, even when Breckon took one of them, after a decent exchange of civilities with him. He could only saunter away and leave Mrs. Kenton to a little pang.

  “Tchk!” she made. “I’m sorry for him!”

  “So am I,” said the judge. “But he will get over it — only too soon, I’m afraid. I don’t believe he’s very sorry for himself.”

  They had not advised with Breckon, and he did not feel authorized to make any comment. He seemed preoccupied, to Mrs. Kenton’s eye, when she turned it up
on him from Trannel’s discomfited back, lessening in the perspective, and he answered vaguely to her overture about his night’s rest. Lottie never made any conversation with Breckon, and she now left him to himself, with some remnants of the disapproval which she found on her hands after crushing Trannel. It could not be said that Breckon was aware of her disapproval, and the judge had no apparent consciousness of it. He and Breckon tried to make something of each other, but failed, and it all seemed a very defeating sequel to Mrs. Kenton after the triumphal glow of the evening before. When Lottie rose, she went with her, alleging her wish to see if Boyne had eaten his breakfast. She confessed, to Breckon’s kind inquiry, that Boyne did not seem very well, and that she had made him take his breakfast in his room, and she did not think it necessary to own, even to so friendly a witness as Mr. Breckon, that Boyne was ashamed to come down, and dreaded meeting Trannel so much that she was giving him time to recover his self-respect and courage.

  XV.

  As soon as she and Lottie were gone Breckon began, rather more formidably than he liked, but helplessly so: “Judge Kenton, I should be glad of a few moments with you on — on an important — on a matter that is important to me.”

  “Well,” said the judge, cautiously. Whatever was coming, he wished to guard himself from the mistake that he had once so nearly fallen into, and that still made him catch his breath to think of. “How can I be of use to you?”

  “I don’t know that you can be of any use — I don’t know that I ought to speak to you. But I thought you might perhaps save me from — save my taking a false step.”

  He looked at Kenton as if he would understand, and Kenton supposed that he did. He said, “My daughter once mentioned your wish to talk with me.”

  “Your daughter?” Breckon stared at him in stupefaction.

  “Yes; Ellen. She said you wished to consult me about going back to your charge in New York, when we were on the ship together. But I don’t know that I’m very competent to give advice in such—”

  “Oh!” Breckon exclaimed, in a tone of immense relief, which did not continue itself in what he went on to say. “That! I’ve quite made up my mind to go back.” He stopped, and then he burst out, “I want to speak with you about her.” The judge sat steady, still resolute not to give himself away, and the young man scarcely recovered from what had been a desperate plunge in adding: “I know that it’s usual to speak with her — with the lady herself first, but — I don’t know! The circumstances are peculiar. You only know about me what you’ve seen of me, and I would rather make my mistakes in the order that seems right to me, although it isn’t just the American way.”

  He smiled rather piteously, and the judge said, rather encouragingly, “I don’t quite know whether I follow you.”

  Breckon blushed, and sought help in what remained of his coffee. “The way isn’t easy for me. But it’s this: I ask your leave to ask Miss Ellen to marry me.” The worst was over now, and looked as if it were a relief. “She is the most beautiful person in the world to me, and the best; but as you know so little of me, I thought it right to get your leave — to tell you — to — to — That is all.” He fell back in his chair and looked a at Kenton.

  “It is unusual,” the judge began.

  “Yes, Yes; I know that. And for that reason I speak first to you. I’ll be ruled by you implicitly.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Kenton said. “I would have expected that you would speak to her first. But I get your point of view, and I must say I think you’re right. I think you are behaving — honorably. I wish that every one was like you. But I can’t say anything now. I must talk with her mother. My daughter’s life has not been happy. I can’t tell you. But as far as I am concerned, and I think Mrs. Kenton, too, I would be glad — We like you Mr. Breckon. We think you are a good man.

  “Oh, thank you. I’m not so sure—”

  “We’d risk it. But that isn’t all. Will you excuse me if I don’t say anything more just yet — and if I leave you?”

  “Why, certainly.” The judge had risen and pushed back his chair, and Breckon did the same. “And I shall — hear from you?”

  “Why, certainly,” said the judge in his turn.

  “It isn’t possible that you put him off!” his wife reproached him, when he told what had passed between him and Breckon. “Oh, you couldn’t have let him think that we didn’t want him for her! Surely you didn’t!”

  “Will you get it into your head,” he flamed back, “that he hasn’t spoken to Ellen yet, and I couldn’t accept him till she had?”

  “Oh yes. I forgot that.” Mrs. Kenton struggled with the fact, in the difficulty of realizing so strange an order of procedure. “I suppose it’s his being educated abroad that way. But, do go back to him, Rufus, and tell him that of course—”

  “I will do nothing of the kind, Sarah! What are you thinking of?”

  “Oh, I don’t know what I’m thinking of! I must see Ellen, I suppose. I’ll go to her now. Oh, dear, if she doesn’t — if she lets such a chance slip through her fingers — But she’s quite likely to, she’s so obstinate! I wonder what she’ll want us to do.”

  She fled to her daughter’s room and found Boyne there, sitting beside his sister’s bed, giving her a detailed account of his adventure of the day before, up to the moment Mr. Breckon met him, in charge of the detectives. Up to that moment, it appeared to Boyne, as nearly as he could recollect, that he had not broken down, but had behaved himself with a dignity which was now beginning to clothe his whole experience. In the retrospect, a quiet heroism characterized his conduct, and at the moment his mother entered the room he was questioning Ellen as to her impressions of his bearing when she first saw him in the grasp of the detectives.

  His mother took him by the arm, and said, “I want to speak with Ellen, Boyne,” and put him out of the door.

  Then she came back and sat down in his chair. “Ellen. Mr. Breckon has been speaking to your father. Do you know what about?”

  “About his going back to New York?” the girl suggested.

  Her mother kept her patience with difficulty. “No, not about that. About you! He’s asked your father — I can’t understand yet why he did it, only he’s so delicate and honorable, and goodness known we appreciate it — whether he can tell you that — that—” It was not possible for such a mother as Mrs. Kenton to say “He loves you”; it would have sounded as she would have said, too sickish, and she compromised on: “He likes you, and wants to ask you whether you will marry him. And, Ellen,” she continued, in the ample silence which followed, “if you don’t say you will, I will have nothing more to do With such a simpleton. I have always felt that you behaved very foolishly about Mr. Bittridge, but I hoped that when you grew older you would see it as we did, and — and behave differently. And now, if, after all we’ve been through with you, you are going to say that you won’t have Mr. Breckon—”

  Mrs. Kenton stopped for want of a figure that would convey all the disaster that would fall upon Ellen in such an event, and she was given further pause when the girl gently answered, “I’m not going to say that, momma.”

  “Then what in the world are you going to say?” Mrs. Kenton demanded.

  Ellen had turned her face away on the pillow, and now she answered, quietly, “When Mr. Breckon asks me I will tell him.”

  “Well, you had better!” her mother threatened in return, and she did not realize the falsity of her position till she reported Ellen’s words to the judge.

  “Well, Sarah, I think she had you there,” he said, and Mrs. Kenton then said that she did not care, if the child was only going to behave sensibly at last, and she did believe she was.

  “Then it’s all right” said the judge, and he took up the Tuskingum Intelligencer, lying till then unread in the excitements which had followed its arrival the day before, and began to read it.

  Mrs. Kenton sat dreamily watching him, with her hands fallen in her lap. She suddenly started up, with the cry, “Good gracious! Wha
t are we all thinking of?”

  Kenton stared at her over the top of his paper. “How, thinking of?”

  “Why Mr. Breckon! He must be crazy to know what we’ve decided, poor fellow!”

  “Oh,” said the judge, folding the Intelligencer on his knee. “I had forgotten. Somehow, I thought it was all settled.”

  Mrs. Kenton took his paper from him, and finished folding it. “It hasn’t begun to be settled. You must go and let him know.”

  “Won’t he look me up?” the judge suggested.

  “You must look him up. Go at once dear! Think how anxious he must be!”

  Kenton was not sure that Breckon looked very anxious when he found him on the brick promenade before the Kurhaus, apparently absorbed in noting the convulsions of a large, round German lady in the water, who must have supposed herself to be bathing. But perhaps the young man did not see her; the smile on his face was too vague for such an interest when he turned at Kenton’s approaching steps.

  The judge hesitated for an instant, in which the smile left Breckon’s face. “I believe that’s all right, Mr. Breckon,” he said. “You’ll find Mrs. Kenton in our parlor,” and then the two men parted, with an “Oh, thank you!” from Breckon, who walked back towards the hotel, and left Kenton to ponder upon the German lady; as soon as he realized that she was not a barrel, the judge continued his walk along the promenade, feeling rather ashamed.

  Mrs. Kenton had gone to Ellen’s room again when she had got the judge off upon his mission. She rather flung in upon her. “Oh, you are up!” she apologized to Ellen’s back. The girl’s face was towards the glass, and she was tilting her head to get the effect of the hat on it, which she now took off.

  “I suppose poppa’s gone to tell him,” she said, sitting tremulously down.

  “Didn’t you want him to?” her mother asked, stricken a little at sight of her agitation.

  “Yes, I wanted him to, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It makes it harder. Momma!”