Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, Ellen?”

  “You know you’ve got to tell him, first.”

  “Tell him?” Mrs. Kenton repeated, but she knew what Ellen meant.

  “About — Mr. Bittridge. All about it. Every single thing. About his kissing me that night.”

  At the last demand Mrs. Kenton was visibly shaken in her invisible assent to the girl’s wish. “Don’t you think, Ellen, that you had better tell him that — some time?”

  “No, now. And you must tell him. You let me go to the theatre with him.” The faintest shadow of resentment clouded the girl’s face, but still Mrs. Kenton, thought she knew her own guilt, could not yield.

  “Why, Ellen,” she pleaded, not without a reproachful sense of vulgarity in such a plea, “don’t you suppose HE ever — kissed any one?”

  “That doesn’t concern me, momma,” said Ellen, without a trace of consciousness that she was saying anything uncommon. “If you won’t tell him, then that ends it. I won’t see him.”

  “Oh, well!” her mother sighed. “I will try to tell him. But I’d rather be whipped. I know he’ll laugh at me.”

  “He won’t laugh at you,” said the girl, confidently, almost comfortingly. “I want him to know everything before I meet him. I don’t want to have a single thing on my mind. I don’t want to think of myself!”

  Mrs. Kenton understood the woman — soul that spoke in these words. “Well,” she said, with a deep, long breath, “be ready, then.”

  But she felt the burden which had been put upon her to be so much more than she could bear that when she found her husband in their parlor she instantly resolved to cast it upon him. He stood at the window with his hat on.

  “Has Breckon been here yet?” he asked.

  “Have you seen him yet?” she returned.

  “Yes, and I thought he was coming right here. But perhaps he stopped to screw his courage up. He only knew how little it needed with us!”

  “Well, now, it’s we who’ve got to have the courage. Or you have. Do you know what Ellen wants to have done?” Mrs. Kenton put it in these impersonal terms, and as a preliminary to shirking her share of the burden.

  “She doesn’t want to have him refused?”

  “She wants to have him told all about Bittridge.”

  After a momentary revolt the judge said, “Well, that’s right. It’s like Ellen.”

  “There’s something else that’s more like her,” said Mrs. Kenton, indignantly. “She wants him to told about what Bittridge did that night — about him kissing her.”

  The judge looked disgusted with his wife for the word; then he looked aghast. “About—”

  “Yes, and she won’t have a word to say to him till he is told, and unless he is told she will refuse him.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “No, but I know she will.”

  “If she didn’t say she would, I think we may take the chances that she won’t.”

  “No, we mustn’t take any such chances. You must tell him.”

  “I? No, I couldn’t manage it. I have no tact, and it would sound so confoundedly queer, coming from one man to another. It would be — indelicate. It’s something that nobody but a woman — Why doesn’t she tell him herself?”

  “She won’t. She considers it our part, and something we ought to do before he commits himself.”

  “Very well, then, Sarah, you must tell him. You can manage it so it won’t by so — queer.

  “That is just what I supposed you would say, Mr. Kenton, but I must say I didn’t expect it of you. I think it’s cowardly.”

  “Look out, Sarah! I don’t like that word.”

  “Oh, I suppose you’re brave enough when it comes to any kind of danger. But when it comes to taking the brunt of anything unpleasant—”

  “It isn’t unpleasant — it’s queer.”

  “Why do you keep saying that over and over? There’s nothing queer about it. It’s Ellenish but isn’t it right?”

  “It’s right, yes, I suppose. But it’s squeamish.”

  “I see nothing squeamish about it. But I know you’re determined to leave it to me, and so I shall do it. I don’t believe Mr. Breckon will think it’s queer or squeamish.”

  “I’ve no doubt he’ll take it in the right way; you’ll know how to—” Kenton looked into his hat, which he had taken off and then put it on again. His tone and his manner were sufficiently sneaking, and he could not make them otherwise. It was for this reason, no doubt, that he would not prolong the interview.

  “Oh yes, go!” said Mrs. Kenton, as he found himself with his hand on the door. “Leave it all to me, do!” and he was aware of skulking out of the room. By the time that it would have taken him so long as to walk to the top of the grand stairway he was back again. “He’s coming!” he said, breathlessly. “I saw him at the bottom of the stairs. Go into your room and wash your eyes. I’LL tell him.”

  “No, no, Rufus! Let me! It will be much better. You’ll be sure to bungle it.”

  “We must risk that. You were quite right, Sarah. It would have been cowardly in me to let you do it.”

  “Rufus! You know I didn’t mean it! Surely you’re not resenting that?”

  “No. I’m glad you made me see it. You’re all right, Sarah, and you’ll find that it will all come out all right. You needn’t be afraid I’ll bungle it. I shall use discretion. Go—”

  “I shall not stir a step from this parlor! You’ve got back all your spirit, dear,” said the old wife, with young pride in her husband. “But I must say that Ellen is putting more upon you than she has any right to. I think she might tell him herself.”

  “No, it’s our business — my business. We allowed her to get in for it. She’s quite right about it. We must not let him commit himself to her till he knows the thing that most puts her to shame. It isn’t enough for us to say that it was really no shame. She feels that it casts a sort of stain — you know what I mean, Sarah, and I believe I can make this young man know. If I can’t, so much the worse for him. He shall never see Ellen again.”

  “Oh, Rufus!”

  “Do you think he would be worthy of her if he couldn’t?”

  “I think Ellen is perfectly ridiculous.”

  “Then that shows that I am right in deciding not to leave this thing to you. I feel as she does about it, and I intend that he shall.”

  “Do you intend to let her run the chance of losing him?”

  “That is what I intend to do.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you what: I am going to stay right here. We will both see him; it’s right for us to do it.” But at a rap on the parlor door Mrs. Kenton flew to that of her own room, which she closed upon her with a sort of Parthian whimper, “Oh, do be careful, Rufus!”

  Whether Kenton was careful or not could never be known, from either Kenton himself or from Breckon. The judge did tell him everything, and the young man received the most damning details of Ellen’s history with a radiant absence which testified that they fell upon a surface sense of Kenton, and did not penetrate to the all-pervading sense of Ellen herself below. At the end Kenton was afraid he had not understood.

  “You understand,” he said, “that she could not consent to see you before you knew just how weak she thought she had been.” The judge stiffened to defiance in making this humiliation. “I don’t consider, myself, that she was weak at all.”

  “Of course not!” Breckon beamed back at him.

  “I consider that throughout she acted with the greatest — greatest — And that in that affair, when he behaved with that — that outrageous impudence, it was because she had misled the scoundrel by her kindness, her forbearance, her wish not to do him the least shadow of injustice, but to give him every chance of proving himself worthy of her tolerance; and—”

  The judge choked, and Breckon eagerly asked, “And shall I — may I see her now?”

  “Why — yes,” the judge faltered. “If you’re sure—”

  “What about?” Breckon demanded.<
br />
  “I don’t know whether she will believe that I have told you.”

  “I will try to convince her. Where shall I see her?”

  “I will go and tell her you are here. I will bring her—”

  Kenton passed into the adjoining room, where his wife laid hold of him, almost violently. “You did it beautifully, Rufus,” she huskily whispered, “and I was so afraid you would spoil everything. Oh, how manly you were, and how perfect he was! But now it’s my turn, and I will go and bring Ellen — You will let me, won’t you?”

  “You may do anything you please, Sarah. I don’t want to have any more of this,” said the judge from the chair he had dropped into.

  “Well, then, I will bring her at once,” said Mrs. Kenton, staying only in her gladness to kiss him on his gray head; he received her embrace with a superficial sultriness which did not deceive her.

  Ellen came back without her mother, and as soon as she entered the room, and Breckon realized that she had come alone, he ran towards her as if to take her in his arms. But she put up her hand with extended fingers, and held him lightly off.

  “Did poppa tell you?” she asked, with a certain defiance. She held her head up fiercely, and spoke steadily, but he could see the pulse beating in her pretty neck.

  “Yes, he told me—”

  “And — well?”

  “Oh, I love you, Ellen—”

  “That isn’t it. Did you care?”

  Breckon had an inspiration, an inspiration from the truth that dwelt at the bottom of his soul and had never yet failed to save him. He let his arms fall and answered, desperately: “Yes, I did. I wished it hadn’t happened.” He saw the pulse in her neck cease to beat, and he swiftly added, “But I know that it happened just because you were yourself, and were so—”

  “If you had said you didn’t care,” she breathlessly whispered, “I would never have spoken to you.” He felt a conditional tremor creeping into the fingers which had been so rigid against his breast. “I don’t see how I lived through it! Do you think you can?”

  “I think so,” he returned, with a faint, far suggestion of levity that brought from her an imperative, imploring —

  “Don’t!”

  Then he added, solemnly, “It had no more to do with you, Ellen, than an offence from some hateful animal—”

  “Oh, how good you are!” The fingers folded themselves, and her arms weakened so that there was nothing to keep him from drawing her to him. “What — what are you doing?” she asked, with her face smothered against his.

  “Oh, Ell-en, Ellen, Ellen! Oh, my love, my dearest, my best!”

  “But I have been such a fool!” she protested, imagining that she was going to push him from her, but losing herself in him more and more.

  “Yes, yes, darling! I know it. That’s why I love you so!”

  XXVI.

  “There is just one thing,” said the judge, as he wound up his watch that night, “that makes me a little uneasy still.”

  Mrs. Kenton, already in her bed turned her face upon him with a despairing “Tchk! Dear! What is it? I thought we had talked over everything.”

  “We haven’t got Lottie’s consent yet.”

  “Well, I think I see myself asking Lottie!” Mrs. Kenton began, before she realized her husband’s irony. She added, “How could you give me such a start?”

  “Well, Lottie has bossed us so long that I couldn’t help mentioning it,” said the judge.

  It was a lame excuse, and in its most potential implication his suggestion proved without reason. If Lottie never gave her explicit approval to Ellen’s engagement, she never openly opposed it. She treated it, rather, with something like silent contempt, as a childish weakness on Ellen’s part which was beneath her serious consideration. Towards Breckon, her behavior hardly changed in the severity which she had assumed from the moment she first ceased to have any use for him. “I suppose I will have to kiss him,” she said, gloomily, when her mother told her that he was to be her brother, and she performed the rite with as much coldness as was ever put in that form of affectionate welcome. It is doubtful if Breckon perfectly realized its coldness; he never knew how much he enraged her by acting as if she were a little girl, and saying lightly, almost trivially, “I’m so glad you’re going to be a sister to me.”

  With Ellen, Lottie now considered herself quits, and from the first hour of Ellen’s happiness she threw off all the care with all the apparent kindness which she had used towards her when she was a morbid invalid. Here again, if Lottie had minded such a thing, she might have been as much vexed by Ellen’s attitude as by Breckon’s. Ellen never once noticed the withdrawal of her anxious oversight, or seemed in the least to miss it. As much as her meek nature would allow, she arrogated to herself the privileges and prerogatives of an elder sister, and if it had been possible to make Lottie ever feel like a chit, there were moments when Ellen’s behavior would have made her feel like a chit. It was not till after their return to Tuskingum that Lottie took her true place in relation to the affair, and in the preparations for the wedding, which she appointed to be in the First Universalist Church, overruling both her mother’s and sister’s preferences for a home wedding, that Lottie rose in due authority. Mrs. Kenton had not ceased to feel quelled whenever her younger daughter called her mother instead of momma, and Ellen seemed not really to care. She submitted the matter to Breckon, who said, “Oh yes, if Lottie wishes,” and he laughed when Ellen confessed, “Well, I said we would.”

  With the lifting of his great anxiety, he had got back to that lightness which was most like him, and he could not always conceal from Lottie herself that he regarded her as a joke. She did not mind it, she said, from such a mere sop as, in the vast content of his love, he was.

  This was some months after Lottie had got at Scheveningen from Mr. Plumpton that letter which decided her that she had no use for him. There came the same day, and by the same post with it, a letter from one of her young men in Tuskingum, who had faithfully written to her all the winter before, and had not intermitted his letters after she went abroad. To Kenton he had always seemed too wise if not too good for Lottie, but Mrs. Kenton, who had her own doubts of Lottie, would not allow this when it came to the question, and said, woundedly, that she did not see why Lottie was not fully his equal in every way.

  “Well,” the judge suggested, “she isn’t the first young lawyer at the Tuskingum bar.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t wish her to be,” said Mrs. Kenton, who did not often make jokes.

  “Well, I don’t know that I would,” her husband assented, and he added, “Pretty good, Sarah.”

  “Lottie,” her mother summed up, “is practical, and she is very neat. She won’t let Mr. Elroy go around looking so slovenly. I hope she will make him have his hair cut, and not look as if it were bitten off. And I don’t believe he’s had his boots blacked since—”

  “He was born,” the judge proposed, and she assented.

  “Yes. She is very saving, and he is wasteful. It will be a very good match. You can let them build on the other corner of the lot, if Ellen is going to be in New York. I would miss Lottie more than Ellen about the housekeeping, though the dear knows I will miss them both badly enough.”

  “Well, you can break off their engagements,” said the judge.

  As yet, and until Ellen was off her hands, Lottie would not allow Mr. Elroy to consider himself engaged to her. His conditional devotion did not debar him from a lover’s rights, and, until Breckon came on from New York to be married, there was much more courtship of Lottie than of Ellen in the house. But Lottie saved herself in the form if not the fact, and as far as verbal terms were concerned, she was justified by them in declaring that she would not have another sop hanging round.

  It was Boyne, and Boyne alone, who had any misgivings in regard to Ellen’s engagement, and these were of a nature so recondite that when he came to impart them to his mother, before they left Scheveningen, and while there was yet time for that conclu
sion which his father suggested to Mrs. Kenton too late, Boyne had an almost hopeless difficulty in stating them. His approaches, even, were so mystical that his mother was forced to bring him to book sharply.

  “Boyne, if you don’t tell me right off just what you mean, I don’t know what I will do to you! What are you driving at, for pity’s sake? Are you saying that she oughtn’t to be engaged to Mr. Breckon?”

  “No, I’m not saying that, momma,” said Boyne, in a distress that caused his mother to take a reef in her impatience.

  “Well, what are you saying, then?”

  “Why, you know how Ellen is, momma. You know how conscientious and — and — sensitive. Or, I don’t mean sensitive, exactly.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I don’t think she ought to be engaged to Mr. Breckon out of — gratitude.”

  “Gratitude?”

  “Yes. I just know that she thinks — or it would be just like her — that he saved me that day. But he only met me about a second before we came to her and poppa, and the officers were taking me right along towards them.” Mrs. Kenton held herself stormily in, and he continued: “I know that he translated for us before the magistrate, but the magistrate could speak a little English, and when he saw poppa he saw that it was all right, anyway. I don’t want to say anything against Mr. Breckon, and I think he behaved as well any one could; but if Ellen is going to marry him out of gratitude for saving me—”

  Mrs. Kenton could hold in no longer. “And is this what you’ve been bothering the life half out of me for, for the last hour?”

  “Well, I thought you ought to look at it in that light, momma.”

  “Well, Boyne,” said his mother, “sometimes I think you’re almost a fool!” and she turned her back upon her son and left him.

  Boyne’s place in the Kenton family, for which he continued to have the highest regard, became a little less difficult, a little less incompatible with his self-respect as time went on. His spirit, which had lagged a little after his body in stature, began, as his father said, to catch up. He no longer nourished it so exclusively upon heroical romance as he had during the past year, and after his return to Tuskingum he went into his brother Richard’s once, and manifested a certain curiosity in the study of the law. He read Blackstone, and could give a fair account of his impressions of English law to his father. He had quite outlived the period of entomological research, and he presented his collections of insects (somewhat moth-eaten) to his nephew, on whom he also bestowed his postage-stamp album; Mary Kenton accepted them in trust, the nephew being of yet too tender years for their care. In the preoccupations of his immediate family with Ellen’s engagement, Boyne became rather close friends with his sister-in-law, and there were times when he was tempted to submit to her judgment the question whether the young Queen of Holland did not really beckon to him that day. But pending the hour when he foresaw that Lottie should come out with the whole story, in some instant of excitement, Boyne had not quite the heart to speak of his experience. It assumed more and more respectability with him, and lost that squalor which had once put him to shame while it was yet new. He thought that Mary might be reasoned into regarding him as the hero of an adventure, but he is still hesitating whether to confide in her. In the meantime she knows all about it. Mary and Richard both approved of Ellen’s choice, though they are somewhat puzzled to make out just what Mr. Breckon’s religion is, and what his relations to his charge in New York may be. These do not seem to them quite pastoral, and he himself shares their uncertainty. But since his flock does not include Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter, he is content to let the question remain in abeyance. The Rasmiths are settled in Rome with an apparent permanency which they have not known elsewhere for a long time, and they have both joined in the friendliest kind of letter on his marriage to their former pastor, if that was what Breckon was. They have professed to know from the first that he was in love with Ellen, and that he is in love with her now is the strong present belief of his flock, if they are a flock, and if they may be said to have anything so positive as a belief in regard to anything.