Kenton was so unhappy that he could not wait for his wife to come to him
in their own room; he broke in upon her and Ellen in the parlor, and at
his coming the girl flitted out, in the noiseless fashion which of late
had made her father feel something ghostlike in her. He was afraid
she was growing to dislike him, and trying to avoid him, and now he
presented himself quite humbly before his wife, as if he had done wrong
in coming. He began with a sort of apology for interrupting, but his
wife said it was all right, and she added, “We were not talking about
anything in particular.” She was silent, and then she added again:
“Sometimes I think Ellen hasn’t very fine perceptions, after all. She
doesn’t seem to feel about people as I supposed she would.”
“You mean that she doesn’t feel as you would suppose about those
people?”
Mrs. Kenton answered, obliquely. “She thinks it’s a beautiful thing in
him to be so devoted to his mother.”
“Humph! And what does she think of his mother?”
“She thinks she has very pretty hair.”
Mrs. Kenton looked gravely down at the work she had in her hands, and
Kenton did not know what to make of it all. He decided that his wife
must feel, as he did, a doubt of the child’s sincerity, with sense of
her evasiveness more tolerant than his own. Yet he knew that if it
came to a question of forcing Ellen to do what was best for her,
or forbidding her to do what was worst, his wife would have all the
strength for the work, and he none. He asked her, hopelessly enough, “Do
you think she still cares for him?”
“I think she wishes to give him another trial; I hope she will.” Kenton
was daunted, and he showed it. “She has got to convince herself, and
we have got to let her. She believes, of course, that he’s here on her
account, and that flatters her. Why should she be so different from
other girls?” Mrs. Kenton demanded of the angry protest in her husband’s
eye.
His spirit fell, and he said, “I only wish she were more like them.”
“Well, then, she is just as headstrong and as silly, when it comes to a
thing like this. Our only hope is to let her have her own way.”
“Do you suppose he cares for her, after all?”
Mrs. Kenton was silent, as if in exhaustive self-question. Then she
answered: “No, I don’t in that way. But he believes he can get her.”
“Then, Sarah, I think we have a duty to the poor child. You must tell
her what you have told me.”
Mrs. Kenton smiled rather bitterly, in recognition of the fact that the
performance of their common duty must fall wholly to her. But she merely
said: “There is no need of my telling her. She knows it already.”
“And she would take him in spite of knowing that he didn’t really care
for her?”
“I don’t say that. She wouldn’t own it to herself.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Nothing. We must let things take their course.”
They had a great deal more talk that came to the same end. They played
their sad comedy, he in the part of a father determined to save his
child from herself, and she in hers of resisting and withholding him.
It ended as it had so often ended before--he yielded, with more faith in
her wisdom than she had herself.
At luncheon the Bittridges could not join the Kentons, or be asked to do
so, because the table held only four, but they stopped on their way to
their own table, the mother to bridle and toss in affected reluctance,
while the son bragged how he had got the last two tickets to be had that
night for the theatre where he was going to take his mother. He seemed
to think that the fact had a special claim on the judge’s interest, and
she to wish to find out whether Mrs. Kenton approved of theatre-going.
She said she would not think of going in Ballardsville, but she supposed
it was more rulable in New York.
During the afternoon she called at the Kenton apartment to consult the
ladies about what she ought to wear. She said she had nothing but a
black ‘barege’ along, and would that do with the hat she had on? She had
worn it to let them see, and now she turned her face from aide to side
to give them the effect of the plumes, that fell like a dishevelled
feather-duster round and over the crown. Mrs. Kenton could only say that
it would do, but she believed that it was the custom now for ladies to
take their hats off in the theatre.
Mrs. Bittridge gave a hoarse laugh. “Oh, dear! Then I’ll have to fix my
hair two ways? I don’t know what Clarence WILL say.”
The mention of her son’s name opened the way for her to talk of him in
relation to herself, and the rest of her stay passed in the celebration
of his filial virtues, which had been manifest from the earliest period.
She could not remember that she ever had to hit the child a lick, she
said, or that he had ever made her shed a tear.
When she went, Boyne gloomily inquired, “What makes her hair so much
darker at the roots than it is at the points?” and his mother snubbed
him promptly.
“You had no business to be here, Boyne. I don’t like boys hanging about
where ladies are talking together, and listening.”
This did not prevent Lottie from answering, directly for Boyne, and
indirectly for Ellen, “It’s because it’s begun to grow since the last
bleach.”
It was easier to grapple with Boyne than with Lottie, and Mrs. Kenton
was willing to allow her to leave the room with her brother unrebuked.
She was even willing to have had the veil lifted from Mrs. Bittridge’s
hair with a rude hand, if it world help Ellen.
“I don’t want you to think, momma,” said the girl, “that I didn’t know
about her hair, or that I don’t see how silly she is. But it’s all the
more to his credit if he can be so good to her, and admire her. Would
you like him better if he despised her?”
Mrs. Kenton felt both the defiance and the secret shame from which it
sprang in her daughter’s words; and she waited for a moment before she
answered, “I would like to be sure he didn’t!”
“If he does, and if he hides it from her, it’s the same as if he didn’t;
it’s better. But you all wish to dislike him.”
“We don’t wish to dislike him, Ellen, goodness knows. But I don’t think
he would care much whether we disliked him or not. I am sure your poor
father and I would be only too glad to like him.”
“Lottie wouldn’t,” said Ellen, with a resentment her mother found
pathetic, it was so feeble and aimless.
“Lottie doesn’t matter,” she said. She could not make out how nearly
Ellen was to sharing the common dislike, or how far she would go in
fortifying herself against it. She kept with difficulty to her negative
frankness, and she let the girl leave the room with a fretful sigh, as
if provoked that her mother would not provoke her further. There were
moments when Mrs. Kenton believed that Ellen was sick of her love, and
that she would pluck it out of her heart herself if she were left alone.
She was then glad Bittridge had come, so that Ellen might compare with
the reality the counterfeit presentment she had kept in her fancy; and
she believed that if she could but leave him to do his worst, it would
be the best for Ellen.
In the evening, directly after dinner, Bittridge sent up his name for
Mrs. Kenton. The judge had remained to read his paper below, and Lottie
and Boyne had gone to some friends in another apartment. It seemed to
Mrs. Kenton a piece of luck that she should be able to see him alone,
and she could not have said that she was unprepared for him to come in,
holding his theatre-tickets explanatorily in his hand, or surprised when
he began:
“Mrs. Kenton, my mother’s got a bad headache, and I’ve come to ask a
favor of you. She can’t use her ticket for to-night, and I want you to
let Miss Ellen come with me. Will you?”
Bittridge had constituted himself an old friend of the whole family from
the renewal of their acquaintance, and Mrs. Kenton was now made aware of
his being her peculiar favorite, in spite of the instant repulsion she
felt, she was not averse to what he proposed. Her fear was that Ellen
would be so, or that she could keep from influencing her to this test
of her real feeling for Bittridge. “I will ask her, Mr. Bittridge,” she
said, with a severity which was a preliminary of the impartiality she
meant to use with Ellen.
“Well, that’s right,” he answered, and while she went to the girl’s room
he remained examining the details of the drawing-room decorations in
easy security, which Mrs. Kenton justified on her return.
“Ellen will be ready to go with you, Mr. Bittridge.”
“Well, that’s good,” said the young man, and while he talked on she sat
wondering at a nature which all modesty and deference seemed left
out of, though he had sometimes given evidence of his intellectual
appreciation of these things. He talked to Mrs. Kenton not only as if
they were in every-wise equal, but as if they were of the same age,
almost of the same sex.
Ellen came in, cloaked and hatted, with her delicate face excited in
prospect of the adventure; and her mother saw Bittridge look at her with
more tenderness than she had ever seen in him before. “I’ll take good
care of her, Mrs. Kenton,” he said, and for the first time she felt
herself relent a little towards him.
A minute after they were gone Lottie bounced into the room, followed by
Boyne.
“Momma!” she shouted, “Ellen isn’t going to the theatre with that
fellow?”
“Yes, she is.”
“And you let her, momma! Without a chaperon?”
Boyne’s face had mirrored the indignation in his sister’s, but at
this unprecedented burst of conventionality he forgot their momentary
alliance. “Well, you’re a pretty one to talk about chaperons! Walking
all over Tuskingum with fellows at night, and going buggy-riding with
everybody, and out rowing, and here fairly begging Jim Plumpton to come
down to the steamer and see you off again!”
“Shut up!” Lottie violently returned, “or I’ll tell momma how you’ve
been behaving with Rita Plumpton yourself.”
“Well, tell!” Boyne defied her.
“Oh, it don’t matter what a brat of a boy says or does, anyway,” said
Lottie. “But I think Ellen is disgracing the family. Everybody in the
hotel is laughing at that wiggy old Mrs. Bittridge, with her wobbly
eyes, and they can see that he’s just as green! The Plumptons have been
laughing so about them, and I told them that we had nothing to do with
them at home, and had fairly turned Bittridge out of the house, but he
had impudence enough for anything; and now to find Ellen going off to
the theatre with him alone!”
Lottie began to cry with vexation as she whipped out of the room, and
Boyne, who felt himself drawn to her side again, said, very seriously:
“Well, it ain’t the thing in New York, you know, momma; and anybody can
see what a jay Bittridge is. I think it’s too bad to let her.”
“It isn’t for you to criticise your mother, Boyne,” said Mrs. Kenton,
but she was more shaken than she would allow. Her own traditions were so
simple that the point of etiquette which her children had urged had not
occurred to her. The question whether Ellen should go with Bittridge at
all being decided, she would, of course, go in New York as she would go
in Tuskingum. Now Mrs. Kenton perceived that she must not, and she had
her share of humiliation in the impression which his mother, as her
friend, apparently, was making with her children’s acquaintances in the
hotel. If they would think everybody in Tuskingum was like her, it
would certainly be very unpleasant, but she would not quite own this
to herself, still less to a fourteen-year-old boy. “I think what your
father and I decide to be right will be sufficient excuse for you with
your friends.”
“Does father know it?” Boyne asked, most unexpectedly.
Having no other answer ready, Mrs. Kenton said, “You had better go to
bed, my son.”
“Well,” he grumbled, as he left the room, “I don’t know where all the
pride of the Kentons is gone to.”
In his sense of fallen greatness he attempted to join Lottie in her
room, but she said, “Go away, nasty thing!” and Boyne was obliged to
seek his own room, where he occupied himself with a contrivance he was
inventing to enable you to close your door and turn off your gas by
a system of pulleys without leaving your bed, when you were tired of
reading.
Mrs. Kenton waited for her husband in much less comfort, and when he
came, and asked, restlessly, “Where are the children?” she first told
him that Lottie and Boyne were in their rooms before she could bring
herself to say that Ellen had gone to the theatre with Bittridge.
It was some relief to have him take it in the dull way he did, and to
say nothing worse than, “Did you think it was well to have her!”
“You may be sure I didn’t want her to. But what would she have said if
I had refused to let her go? I can tell you it isn’t an easy matter to
manage her in this business, and it’s very easy for you to criticise,
without taking the responsibility.”
“I’m not criticising,” said Kenton. “I know you have acted for the
best.”
“The children,” said Mrs. Kenton, wishing to be justified further,
“think she ought to have had a chaperon. I didn’t think of that; it
isn’t the custom at home; but Lottie was very saucy about it, and I had
to send Boyne to bed. I don’t think our children are very much comfort
to us.”
“They are good children,” Kenton said, said--provisionally.
“Yes, that is the worst of it. If they were bad, we wouldn’t expect any
comfort from them. Ellen is about perfect. She’s as near an angel as a
child can be, but she could hardly have given us more anxiety if she had
been the worst girl in the world.”
“That’s true,” the father sadly assented.
“She didn’t really want to go with him to-night, I’ll say that for her,
and if I had said a single word against it she wouldn’t have gone. But
all at once, while she sat there trying to think how I could excuse
her, she began asking me what she should wear. There’s something strange
about it, Rufus. If I believed in hypnotism, I should say she had gone
because he willed her to go.”
“I guess she went because she wanted to go because she’s in love with
him,” said Kenton, hopelessly.
“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton agreed. “I don’t see how she can endure the sight of
him. He’s handsome enough,” she added, with a woman’s subjective logic.
“And there’s something fascinating about him. He’s very graceful, and
he’s got a good figure.”
“He’s a hound!” said Kenton, exhaustively.
“Oh yes, he’s a hound,” she sighed, as if there could be no doubt on
that point. “It don’t seem right for him to be in the same room with
Ellen. But it’s for her to say. I feel more and more that we can’t
interfere without doing harm. I suppose that if she were not so
innocent herself she would realize what he was better. But I do think he
appreciates her innocence. He shows more reverence for her than for any
one else.”
“How was it his mother didn’t go?” asked Kenton.
“She had a headache, he said. But I don’t believe that. He always
intended to get Ellen to go. And that’s another thing Lottie was vexed
about; she says everybody is laughing at Mrs. Bittridge, and it’s
mortifying to have people take her for a friend of ours.”
“If there were nothing worse than that,” said Kenton, “I guess we could
live through it. Well, I don’t know how it’s going to all end.”
They sat talking sadly, but finding a certain comfort in their mutual
discouragement, and in their knowledge that they were doing the best
they could for their child, whose freedom they must not infringe so far
as to do what was absolutely best; and the time passed not so heavily
till her return. This was announced by the mounting of the elevator to
their landing, and then by low, rapid pleading in a man’s voice outside.
Kenton was about to open the door, when there came the formless noise of
what seemed a struggle, and Ellen’s voice rose in a muffed cry: “Oh! Oh!
Let me be! Go away! I hate you!” Kenton the door open, and Ellen burst
in, running to hide her face in her mother’s breast, where she sobbed
out, “He--he kissed me!” like a terrified child more than an insulted
woman. Through the open door came the clatter of Bittridge’s feet as he
ran down-stairs.