The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the
average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they had
spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had
grown easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their
comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short
outings, which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper
Lakes in the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well
anywhere as in the great square brick house which still kept its four
acres about it, in the heart of the growing town, where the trees
they had planted with their own hands topped it on three aides, and a
spacious garden opened southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton
had his library, where he transacted by day such law business as he had
retained in his own hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife’s
room and sit with her there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their
girls, where they could hear them laughing with the young fellows who
came to make the morning calls, long since disused in the centres of
fashion, or the evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great
world. She sewed, and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or
they played checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she
found herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let
him make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes
he laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good
comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be. They had long ago
quarrelled out their serious differences, which mostly arose from
such differences of temperament as had first drawn them together; they
criticised each other to their children from time to time, but they
atoned for this defection by complaining of the children to each other,
and they united in giving way to them on all points concerning their
happiness, not to say their pleasure.
They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war,
and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice
of the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five
years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second
son died when he was yet a babe in his mother’s arms, and there was an
interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their
eldest son was already married, and settled next them in a house which
was brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less
ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had grown
naturally into a share of his father’s law practice, and he had taken it
all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a show of giving
it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton was well on in
the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had become mainly the
legal business of a large corporation. In this form it was distasteful
to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in his hands, but
he gave much of his time, which he saved his self-respect by calling his
leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the war.
In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his
youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on
the whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian,
Pennsylvanian, and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of
foreign strains, were of the purest American stock, and spoke the
best English in the world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of
happiness, and had incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate
in the State. The growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had
increased only to five thousand during the time he had known it, which
was almost an ideal figure for a county-town. There was a higher average
of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider and
evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less
brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was
fully up to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the
national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under
the sun. It, was Kenton’s pride and glory that he had been a part of the
finest army known in history. He believed that the men who made history
ought to write it, and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged
his companions in arms to set down everything they could remember of
their soldiering, and to save the letters they had written home, so
that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography of the
regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely personal
character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his way to the
fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of
fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with his
want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and
American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of material
which he could not have refused to keep for the soldiers who brought it
to him, more or less in a humorous indulgence of his whim. But he even
offered to receive it, and in a community where everything took the
complexion of a joke, he came to be affectionately regarded as a crank
on that point; the shabbily aging veterans, whom he pursued to their
workbenches and cornfields, for, the documents of the regimental
history, liked to ask the colonel if he had brought his gun. They,
always give him the title with which he had been breveted at the
close of the war; but he was known to the younger, generation of his
fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr. Kenton in the
presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his children she
called him Poppa, as they did.
The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father’s affairs
without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the
popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined
with his mother in a respect for Kenton’s theory of the regimental
history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a
little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their
party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history,
but she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly
or indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for
parties and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from
young men and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays,
for circuses and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and
she devoted herself to her pleasures without the shadow of chaperonage,
which was, indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.
In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set
bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who,
upon the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs,
drew their mother’s notice to his sister’s excesses in carrying-on, and
required some action that should keep her from bringing the name,
of Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and
lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up
from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in
his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which
he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the
literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been
written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his
elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it
apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able
to take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an
importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none
of the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a
bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from
unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister
promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified
gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell
from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy,
just as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at
moments when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His
stately but vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond
his years, but this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the
humiliation of his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the
easier prey of Lottie’s ridicule. He got on best, or at least most
evenly, with his eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because
she took all life so; and she was able to interpret him to his father
when his intolerable dignity forbade a common understanding between
them. When he got so far beyond his depth that he did not know what
he meant himself, as sometimes happened, she gently found him a safe
footing nearer shore.
Kenton’s theory was that he did not distinguish among his children. He
said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world,
but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them
for the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most
shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered
his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more
accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had
social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife
that Nelly knew ten times as much.
Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew
all the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German
scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving
school, when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in
Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the first
book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual
honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with
the judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at the
moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father explained
to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and would just,
as he said, show them a few of the documents he had collected. He
made Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand on the most
characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet what one
dared that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she was
literary enough.
She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any
one who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the
most cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more
beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them,
and Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them. No
one seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man came
who was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it was
doubtful whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too transparent
to hide her feeling from her father and mother, who saw with even more
grief than shame that she could not hide it from the man himself, whom
they thought so unworthy of it.
He had suddenly arrived in Tuskingum from one of the villages of the
county, where he had been teaching school, and had found something to do
as reporter on the Tuskingum ‘Intelligencer’, which he was instinctively
characterizing with the spirit of the new journalism, and was pushing as
hardily forward on the lines of personality as if he had dropped down
to it from the height of a New York or Chicago Sunday edition. The judge
said, with something less than his habitual honesty, that he did not
mind his being a reporter, but he minded his being light and shallow;
he minded his being flippant and mocking; he minded his bringing his
cigarettes and banjo into the house at his second visit. He did not mind
his push; the fellow had his way to make and he had to push; but he did
mind his being all push; and his having come out of the country with as
little simplicity as if he had passed his whole life in the city. He
had no modesty, and he had no reverence; he had no reverence for Ellen
herself, and the poor girl seemed to like him for that.
He was all the more offensive to the judge because he was himself to
blame for their acquaintance, which began when one day the fellow
had called after him in the street, and then followed down the shady
sidewalk beside him to his hour, wanting to know what this was he had
heard about his history, and pleading for more light upon his plan in
it. At the gate he made a flourish of opening and shutting it for the
judge, and walking up the path to his door he kept his hand on the
judge’s shoulder most offensively; but in spite of this Kenton had
the weakness to ask him in, and to call Ellen to get him the most
illustrative documents of the history.
The interview that resulted in the ‘Intelligencer’ was the least evil
that came of this error. Kenton was amazed, and then consoled, and then
afflicted that Ellen was not disgusted with it; and in his conferences
with his wife he fumed and fretted at his own culpable folly, and tried
to get back of the time he had committed it, in that illusion which
people have with trouble that it could somehow be got rid of if it could
fairly be got back of; till the time came when his wife could no longer
share his unrest in this futile endeavor.
She said, one night when they had talked late and long, “That can’t be
helped now; and the question is what are we going to do to stop it.”
The judge evaded the point in saying, “The devil of it is that all the
nice fellows are afraid of her; they respect her too much, and the very
thing which ought to disgust her with this chap is what gives him his
power over her. I don’t know what we are going to do, but we must break
it off, somehow.”
“We might take her with us somewhere,” Mrs. Kenton suggested.
“Run away from the fellow? I think I see myself! No, we have got to stay
and face the thing right here. But I won’t have him about the house any
more, understand that. He’s not to be let in, and Ellen mustn’t see him;
you tell her I said so. Or no! I will speak to her myself.” His wife
said that he was welcome to do that; but he did not quite do it. He
certainly spoke to his daughter about her, lover, and he satisfied
himself that there was yet nothing explicit between them. But she was so
much less frank and open with him than she had always been before that
he was wounded as well as baffled by her reserve. He could not get her
to own that she really cared for the fellow; but man as he was, and old
man as he was, he could not help perceiving that she lived in a fond
dream of him.
He went from her to her mother. “If he was only one-half the man she
thinks he is!”--he ended his report in a hopeless sigh.
“You want to give in to her!” his wife pitilessly interpreted. “Well,
perhaps that would be the best thing, after all.”
“No, no, it wouldn’t, Sarah; it would be the easiest for both of us, I
admit, but it would be the worst thing for her. We’ve got to let it run
along for a while yet. If we give him rope enough he may hang himself;
there’s that chance. We can’t go away, and we can’t shut her up, and we
can’t turn him out of the house. We must trust her to find him out for
herself.”
“She’ll never do that,” said the mother. “Lottie says Ellen thinks he’s
just perfect. He cheers her up, and takes her out of herself. We’ve
always acted with her as if we thought she was different from other
girls, and he behaves to her as if she was just like all of them, just
as silly, and just as weak, and it pleases her, and flatters her; she
likes it.”
“Oh, Lord!” groaned the father. “I suppose she does.”
This was bad enough; it was a blow to his pride in Ellen; but there was
something that hurt him still worse. When the fellow had made sure of
her, he apparently felt himself so safe in her fondness that he did not
urge his suit with her. His content with her tacit acceptance gave the
bitterness of shame to the promise Kenton and his wife had made each
other never to cross any of their children in love. They were ready
now to keep that promise for Ellen, if he asked it of them, rather
than answer for her lifelong disappointment, if they denied him. But,
whatever he meant finally to do, he did not ask it; he used his footing
in their house chiefly as a basis for flirtations beyond it. He began
to share his devotions to Ellen with her girl friends, and not with her
girl friends alone. It did not come to scandal, but it certainly came to
gossip about him and a silly young wife; and Kenton heard of it with
a torment of doubt whether Ellen knew of it, and what she would do; he
would wait for her to do herself whatever was to be done. He was never
certain how much she had heard of the gossip when she came to her
mother, and said with the gentle eagerness she had, “Didn’t poppa talk
once of going South this winter?”
“He talked of going to New York,” the mother answered, with a throb of
hope.
“Well,” the girl returned, patiently, and Mrs. Kenton read in her
passivity an eagerness to be gone from sorrow that she would not suffer
to be seen, and interpreted her to her father in such wise that he could
not hesitate.