Ellen did not move or manifest any consciousness when the steamer left
her dock and moved out into the stream, or take any note of the tumult
that always attends a great liner’s departure. At breakfast-time her
mother came to her from one of the brief absences she made, in the hope
that at each turn she should find her in a different mood, and asked if
she would not have something to eat.
“I’m not hungry,” she answered. “When will it sail?”
“Why, Ellen! We sailed two hours ago, and the pilot has just left us.”
Ellen lifted herself on her elbow and stared at her. “And you let me!”
she said, cruelly.
“Ellen! I will not have this!” cried her mother, frantic at the
reproach. “What do you mean by my letting you? You knew that we were
going to sail, didn’t you? What else did you suppose we had come to the
steamer for?”
“I supposed you would let me stay, if I wanted to: But go away, momma,
go away! You’re all against me--you, and poppa, and Lottie, and Boyne.
Oh, dear! oh, dear!” She threw herself down in her berth and covered her
face with the sheet, sobbing, while her mother stood by in an anguish of
pity and anger. She wanted to beat the girl, she wanted to throw herself
upon her, and weep with her in the misery which she shared with her.
Lottie came to the door of the state-room with an arm-load of
long-stemmed roses, the gift of the young Mr. Plumpton, who had not had
so much to be entreated to come down to the steamer and see her off as
Boyne had pretended. “Momma,” she said, “I have got to leave these roses
in here, whether Ellen likes it or not. Boyne won’t have them in his
room, because he says the man that’s with him would have a right to
object; and this is half my room, anyway.”
Mrs. Kenton frowned and shook her head, but Ellen answered from under
the sheet, “I don’t mind the roses, Lottie. I wish you’d stay with me a
little while.”
Lottie hesitated, having in mind the breakfast for which the horn
had just sounded. But apparently she felt that one good turn deserved
another, and she answered: “All right; I will, Nell. Momma, you tell
Boyne to hurry, and come to Ellen as soon as he’s done, and then I will
go. Don’t let anybody take my place.”
“I wish,” said Ellen, still from under the sheet, “that momma would have
your breakfast sent here. I don’t want Boyne.”
Women apparently do not require any explanation of these swift
vicissitudes in one another, each knowing probably in herself the nerves
from which they proceed. Mrs. Kenton promptly assented, in spite of the
sulky reluctance which Lottie’s blue eyes looked at her; she motioned
her violently to silence, and said: “Yes, I will, Ellen. I will send
breakfast for both of you.”
When she was gone, Ellen uncovered her face and asked Lottie to dip a
towel in water and give it to her. As she bathed her eyes she said, “You
don’t care, do you, Lottie?”
“Not very much,” said Lottie, unsparingly. “I can go to lunch, I
suppose.”
“Maybe I’ll go to lunch with you,” Ellen suggested, as if she were
speaking of some one else.
Lottie wasted neither sympathy nor surprise on the question. “Well,
maybe that would be the best thing. Why don’t you come to breakfast?”
“No, I won’t go to breakfast. But you go.”
When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly
explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone. Before the young
man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table,
her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not
be made worse, and so she remained silent. Judge Kenton sat with his
eyes fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast
for him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those
moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish
dependence. Lottie offered him another alternative by absently laying
hold of his napkin on the table.
“That’s mine,” he said, with husky gloom.
She tossed it back to him with prompt disdain and a deeply eye-lashed
glance at a napkin on her right. The young man who sat next it said,
with a smile, “Perhaps that’s yours-unless I’ve taken my neighbor’s.”
Lottie gave him a stare, and when she had sufficiently punished him for
his temerity said, rather sweetly, “Oh, thank you,” and took the napkin.
“I hope we shall all have use for them before long,” the young man
ventured again.
“Well, I should think as much,” returned the girl, and this was the
beginning of a conversation which the young man shared successively with
the judge and Mrs. Kenton as opportunity offered. He gave the judge his
card across the table, and when the judge had read on it, “Rev. Hugh
Breckon,” he said that his name was Kenton, and he introduced the young
man formally to his family. Mr. Breckon had a clean-shaven face, with an
habitual smile curving into the cheeks from under a long, straight nose;
his chin had a slight whopper-jaw twist that was charming; his gay eyes
were blue, and a full vein came down his forehead between them from his
smooth hair. When he laughed, which was often, his color brightened.
Boyne was named last, and then Mr. Breckon said, with a smile that
showed all his white teeth, “Oh yes, Mr. Boyne and I are friends
already--ever since we found ourselves room-mates,” and but for us, as
Lottie afterwards noted, they might never have known Boyne was rooming
with him, and could easily have made all sorts of insulting remarks
about Mr. Breckon in their ignorance.
The possibility seemed to delight Mr. Breckon; he invited her to make
all the insulting remarks she could think of, any way, and professed
himself a loser, so far as her real opinion was withheld from him by
reason of his rashness in giving the facts away. In the electrical
progress of their acquaintance she had begun walking up and down the
promenade with him after they came up from breakfast; her mother had
gone to Ellen; the judge had been made comfortable in his steamer-chair,
and Boyne had been sent about his business.
“I will try to think some up,” she promised him, “as soon as I HAVE
any real opinion of you,” and he asked her if he might consider that a
beginning.
She looked at him out of her indomitable blue eyes, and said, “If it
hadn’t been for your card, and the Reverend on it, I should have said
you were an actor.”
“Well, well,” said Mr. Breckon, with a laugh, “perhaps I am, in a way.
I oughtn’t to be, of course, but if a minister ever forces himself, I
suppose he’s acting.”
“I don’t see,” said Lottie, instantly availing herself of the opening,
“how you can get up and pray, Sunday after Sunday, whether you feel like
it or not.”
The young man said, with another laugh, but not so gay, “Well, the case
has its difficulties.”
“Or perhaps you just read prayers,” Lottie sharply conjectured.
“No,” he returned, “I haven’t that advantage--if you think it one. I’m a
sort of a Unitarian. Very advanced, too, I’m afraid.”
“Is that a kind of Universalist?”
“Not--not exactly. There’s an old joke--I’m not sure it’s very
good--which distinguishes between the sects. It’s said that the
Universalists think God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians
think they are too good to be damned.” Lottie shrank a little from him.
“Ah!” he cried, “you think it sounds wicked. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not
clerical enough to joke about serious things.”
He looked into her face with a pretended anxiety. “Oh, I don’t know,”
she said, with a little scorn. “I guess if you can stand it, I can.”
“I’m not sure that I can. I’m afraid it’s more in keeping with an
actor’s profession than my own. Why,” he added, as if to make a
diversion, “should you have thought I was an actor?”
“I suppose because you were clean-shaved; and your pronunciation. So
Englishy.”
“Is it? Perhaps I ought to be proud. But I’m not an Englishman. I am a
plain republican American. May I ask if you are English?”
“Oh!” said Lottie. “As if you thought such a thing. We’re from Ohio.”
Mr. Breckon said, “Ah!” Lottie could not make out in just what sense.
By this time they were leaning on the rail of the promenade, looking
over at what little was left of Long Island, and she said, abruptly: “I
think I will go and see how my father is getting along.”
“Oh, do take me with you, Miss Kenton!” Mr. Breckon entreated. “I am
feeling very badly about that poor old joke. I know you don’t think well
of me for it, and I wish to report what I’ve been saying to your father,
and let him judge me. I’ve heard that it’s hard to live up to Ohio
people when you’re at your best, and I do hope you’ll believe I have not
been quite at my best. Will you let me come with you?”
Lottie did not know whether he was making fun of her or not, but she
said, “Oh, it’s a free country,” and allowed him to go with her.
His preface made the judge look rather grave; but when he came to the
joke, Kenton laughed and said it was not bad.
“Oh, but that isn’t quite the point,” said Mr. Breckon. “The question
is whether I am good in repeating it to a young lady who was seeking
serious instruction on a point of theology.”
“I don’t know what she would have done with the instruction if she
had got it,” said the judge, dryly, and the young man ventured in her
behalf:
“It would be difficult for any one to manage, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Kenton assented, and Lottie could see that he was thinking
Ellen would know what to do with it.
She resented that, and she was in the offence that girls feel when
their elders make them the subject of comment with their contemporaries.
“Well, I’ll leave you to discuss it alone. I’m going to Ellen,” she
said, the young man vainly following her a few paces, with apologetic
gurgles of laughter.
“That’s right,” her father consented, and then he seized the opening to
speak about Ellen. “My eldest daughter is something of an invalid, but
I hope we shall have her on deck before the voyage is over. She is more
interested in those matters than her sister.”
“Oh!” Mr. Breckon interpolated, in a note of sympathetic interest. He
could not well do more.
It was enough for Judge Kenton, who launched himself upon the
celebration of Ellen’s gifts and qualities with a simple-hearted
eagerness which he afterwards denied when his wife accused him of it,
but justified as wholly safe in view of Mr. Breckon’s calling and his
obvious delicacy of mind. It was something that such a person would
understand, and Kenton was sure that he had not unduly praised the
girl. A less besotted parent might have suspected that he had not deeply
interested his listener, who seemed glad of the diversion operated by
Boyne’s coming to growl upon his father, “Mother’s bringing Ellen up.”
“Oh, then, I mustn’t keep your chair,” said the minister, and he rose
promptly from the place he had taken beside the judge, and got himself
away to the other side of the ship before the judge could frame a
fitting request for him to stay.
“If you had,” Mrs. Kenton declared, when he regretted this to her, “I
don’t know what I would have done. It’s bad enough for him to hear you
bragging about the child without being kept to help take care of her,
or keep her amused, as you call it. I will see that Ellen is kept amused
without calling upon strangers.” She intimated that if Kenton did not
act with more self-restraint she should do little less than take Ellen
ashore, and abandon him to the voyage alone. Under the intimidation he
promised not to speak of Ellen again.
At luncheon, where Mr. Breckon again devoted himself to Lottie, he and
Ellen vied in ignoring each other after their introduction, as far as
words went. The girl smiled once or twice at what he was saying to her
sister, and his glance kindled when it detected her smile. He might be
supposed to spare her his conversation in her own interest, she looked
so little able to cope with the exigencies of the talk he kept going.
When he addressed her she answered as if she had not been listening, and
he turned back to Lottie. After luncheon he walked with her, and their
acquaintance made such a swift advance that she was able to ask him if
he laughed that way with everybody.
He laughed, and then he begged her pardon if he had been rude.
“Well, I don’t see what there is to laugh at so much. When you ask me
a thing I tell you just what I think, and it seems to set you off in a
perfect gale. Don’t you expect people to say what they think?”
“I think it’s beautiful,” said the young man, going into the gale, “and
I’ve got to expecting it of you, at any rate. But--but it’s always so
surprising! It isn’t what you expect of people generally, is it?”
“I don’t expect it of you,” said Lottie.
“No?” asked Mr. Breckon, in another gale. “Am I so uncandid?”
“I don’t know about uncandid. But I should say you were slippery.”
At this extraordinary criticism the young man looked graver than he had
yet been able to do since the beginning of their acquaintance. He said,
presently, “I wish you would explain what you mean by slippery.”
“You’re as close as a trap!”
“Really?”
“It makes me tired.”
“If you’re not too tired now I wish you would say how.”
“Oh, you understand well enough. You’ve got me to say what I think about
all sorts of things, and you haven’t expressed your opinion on a single,
solitary point?”
Lottie looked fiercely out to sea, turning her face so as to keep him
from peering around into it in the way he had. For that reason, perhaps,
he did not try to do so. He answered, seriously: “I believe you are
partly right. I’m afraid I haven’t seemed quite fair. Couldn’t you
attribute my closeness to something besides my slipperiness?” He began
to laugh again. “Can’t you imagine my being interested in your opinions
so much more than my own that I didn’t care to express mine?”
Lottie said, impatiently, “Oh, pshaw!” She had hesitated whether to say,
“Rats!”
“But now,” he pursued, “if you will suggest some point on which I can
give you an opinion, I promise solemnly to do so,” but he was not very
solemn as he spoke.
“Well, then, I will,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s very strange, to
say the least, for a minister to be always laughing so much?”
Mr. Breckon gave a peal of delight, and answered, “Yes, I certainly do.”
He controlled himself so far as to say: “Now I think I’ve been pretty
open with you, and I wish you’d answer me a question. Will you?”
“Well, I will--one,” said Lottie.
“It may be two or three; but I’ll begin with one. Why do you think a
minister ought to be more serious than other men?”
“Why? Well, I should think you’d know. You wouldn’t laugh at a funeral,
would you?”
“I’ve been at some funerals where it would have been a relief to laugh,
and I’ve wanted to cry at some weddings. But you think it wouldn’t do?”
“Of course it wouldn’t. I should think you’d know as much as that,” said
Lottie, out of patience with him.
“But a minister isn’t always marrying or burying people; and in the
intervals, why shouldn’t he be setting them an example of harmless
cheerfulness?”
“He ought to be thinking more about the other world, I should say.”
“Well, if he believes there is another world--”
“Why! Don’t you?” she broke out on him.
Mr. Breckon ruled himself and continued--“as strenuously and
unquestionably as he ought, he has greater reason than other men for
gayety through his faith in a happier state of being than this. That’s
one of the reasons I use against myself when I think of leaving off
laughing. Now, Miss Kenton,” he concluded, “for such a close and
slippery nature, I think I’ve been pretty frank,” and he looked round
and down into her face with a burst of laughter that could be heard
an the other side of the ship. He refused to take up any serious topic
after that, and he returned to his former amusement of making her give
herself away.
That night Lottie came to her room with an expression so decisive in her
face that Ellen, following it with vague, dark eyes as it showed itself
in the glass at which her sister stood taking out the first dismantling
hairpins before going to bed, could not fail of something portentous in
it.
“Well,” said Lottie, with severe finality, “I haven’t got any use
for THAT young man from this time out. Of all the tiresome people, he
certainly takes the cake. You can have him, Ellen, if you want him.”
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Ellen, with a voice in sympathy with
the slow movement of her large eyes as she lay in her berth, staring at
Lottie.
“There’s everything the matter, that oughtn’t to be. He’s too trivial
for anything: I like a man that’s serious about one thing in the
universe, at least, and that’s just what Mr. Breckon isn’t.” She went at
such length into his disabilities that by the time she returned to the
climax with which she started she was ready to clamber into the upper
berth; and as she snapped the electric button at its head she repeated,
“He’s trivial.”
“Isn’t it getting rough?” asked Ellen. “The ship seems to be tipping.”
“Yes, it is,” said Lottie, crossly. “Good-night.”
If the Rev. Mr. Breckon was making an early breakfast in the hope of
sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without
encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he
was destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by
the paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each
forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked
his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very
sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother was reported by her father
to be feeling the motion too much to venture out. The judge was, in
fact, the only person at table when Breckon sat down; but when he had
accounted for his wife’s absence, and confessed that he did not believe
either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and
advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It
had not gone so far as this in the judge’s experience of a neurotic
invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He
had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain,
and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and asked her
where Lottie was.
“Oh, she doesn’t want any breakfast, she says. Is momma sick, too?
Where’s Boyne?”
The judge reported as to her mother, and Mr. Breckon, after the exchange
of a silent salutation with the girl, had a gleeful moment in describing
Boyne’s revolt at the steward’s notion of gruel. “I’m glad to see you so
well, Miss Kenton,” he concluded.
“I suppose I will be sick, too, if it gets rougher,” she said, and she
turned from him to give a rather compendious order to the table steward.
“Well, you’ve got an appetite, Ellen,” her father ventured.
“I don’t believe I will eat anything,” she checked him, with a falling
face.
Breckon came to the aid of the judge. “If you’re not sick now, I
prophesy you won’t be, Miss Kenton. It can’t get much rougher, without
doing something uncommon.”
“Is it a storm?” she asked, indifferently.
“It’s what they call half a gale, I believe. I don’t know how they
measure it.”
She smiled warily in response to his laugh, and said to her father, “Are
you going up after breakfast, poppa?”
“Why, if you want to go, Ellen--”
“Oh, I wasn’t asking for that; I am going back to Lottie. But I should
think you would like the air. Won’t it do you good?”
“I’m all right,” said the judge, cheered by her show of concern for some
one else. “I suppose it’s rather wet on deck?” he referred himself to
Breckon.
“Well, not very, if you keep to the leeward. She doesn’t seem a very wet
boat.”
“What is a wet boat” Ellen asked, without lifting her sad eyes.
“Well, really, I’m afraid it’s largely a superstition. Passengers like
to believe that some boats are less liable to ship seas--to run into
waves--than others; but I fancy that’s to give themselves the air of old
travellers.”
She let the matter lapse so entirely that he supposed she had forgotten
it in all its bearings, when she asked, “Have you been across many
times?”
“Not many-four or five.”
“This is our first time,” she volunteered.
“I hope it won’t be your last. I know you will enjoy it.” She fell
listless again, and Breckon imagined he had made a break. “Not,” he
added, with an endeavor for lightness, “that I suppose you’re going for
pleasure altogether. Women, nowadays, are above that, I understand. They
go abroad for art’s sake, and to study political economy, and history,
and literature--”
“My daughter,” the judge interposed, “will not do much in that way, I
hope.”
The girl bent her head over her plate and frowned.
“Oh, then,” said Breckon, “I will believe that she’s going for purely
selfish enjoyment. I should like to be justified in making that my
object by a good example.”
Ellen looked up and gave him a look that cut him short in his glad note.
The lifting of her eyelids was like the rise of the curtain upon some
scene of tragedy which was all the more impressive because it seemed
somehow mixed with shame. This poor girl, whom he had pitied as an
invalid, was a sufferer from some spiritual blight more pathetic than
broken health. He pulled his mind away from the conjecture that tempted
it and went on: “One of the advantages of going over the fourth or fifth
time is that you’re relieved from a discoverer’s duties to Europe. I’ve
got absolutely nothing before me now, but at first I had to examine
every object of interest on the Continent, and form an opinion about
thousands of objects that had no interest for me. I hope Miss Kenton
will take warning from me.”
He had not addressed Ellen directly, and her father answered: “We have
no definite plans as yet, but we don’t mean to overwork ourselves even
if we’ve come for a rest. I don’t know,” he added, “but we had better
spend our summer in England. It’s easier getting about where you know
the language.”
The judge seemed to refer his ideas to Breckon for criticism, and the
young man felt authorized to say, “Oh, so many of them know the language
everywhere now, that it’s easy getting about in any country.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” the judge vaguely deferred.
“Which,” Ellen demanded of the young man with a nervous suddenness, “do
you think is the most interesting country?”
He found himself answering with equal promptness, “Oh, Italy, of
course.”
“Can we go to Italy, poppa?” asked the girl.
“I shouldn’t advise you to go there at once” Breckon intervened,
smiling. “You’d find it Pretty hot there now. Florence, or Rome, or
Naples--you can’t think of them.”
“We have it pretty hot in Central Ohio,” said the judge, with latent
pride in his home climate, “What sort of place is Holland?”
“Oh, delightful! And the boat goes right on to Rotterdam, you know.”
“Yes. We had arranged to leave it at Boulogne,” but we could change.
“Do you think your mother would like Holland?” The judge turned to his
daughter.
“I think she would like Italy better. She’s read more about it,” said
the girl.
“Rise of the Dutch Republic,” her father suggested.
“Yes, I know. But she’s read more about Italy!”
“Oh, well,” Breckon yielded, “the Italian lakes wouldn’t be impossible.
And you might find Venice fairly comfortable.”
“We could go to Italy, then,” said the judge to his daughter, “if your
mother prefers.”
Breckon found the simplicity of this charming, and he tasted a yet finer
pleasure in the duplicity; for he divined that the father was seeking
only to let his daughter have her way in pretending to yield to her
mother’s preference.
It was plain that the family’s life centred, as it ought, about this
sad, sick girl, the heart of whose mystery he perceived, on reflection,
he had not the wish to pluck out. He might come to know it, but he would
not try to know it; if it offered itself he might even try not to know
it. He had sometimes found it more helpful with trouble to be ignorant
of its cause.
In the mean time he had seen that these Kentons were sweet, good
people, as he phrased their quality to himself. He had come to terms of
impersonal confidence the night before with Boyne, who had consulted
him upon many more problems and predicaments of life than could have yet
beset any boy’s experience, probably with the wish to make provision for
any possible contingency of the future. The admirable principles which
Boyne evolved for his guidance from their conversation were formulated
with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling
his laughter in his pillow. He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to
weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable
levity. With his sense of being really very light at most times, and
with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with
Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding to her
frankness was concerned, been close. He relished the unsparing honesty
with which she had denounced him, and though he did not yet know his
outcast condition with relation to her, he could not think of her
without a smile of wholly disinterested liking. He did not know, as a
man of earlier date would have known, all that the little button in the
judge’s lapel meant; but he knew that it meant service in the civil war,
a struggle which he vaguely and impersonally revered, though its details
were of much the same dimness for him as those of the Revolution and
the War of 1812. The modest distrust which had grown upon the bold
self-confidence of Kenton’s earlier manhood could not have been more
tenderly and reverently imagined; and Breckon’s conjecture of things
suffered for love’s sake against sense and conviction in him were his
further tribute to a character which existed, of course, mainly in this
conjecture. It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the
subjection to his wife’s, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless
becomes, a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the
actual performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in
deference to the good woman. She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a
sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having
no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her
mother’s devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant
barometer. It had become apparent that Miss Kenton was her father’s
favorite in a special sense, and that his partial affection for her
was of much older date than her mother’s. Not less charming than her
fondness for her father was the openness with which she disabled his
wisdom because of his partiality to her.
X
When they left the breakfast table the first morning of the rough
weather, Breckon offered to go on deck with Miss Kenton, and put her
where she could see the waves. That had been her shapeless ambition,
dreamily expressed with reference to some time, as they rose. Breckon
asked, “Why not now?” and he promised to place her chair on deck where
she could enjoy the spectacle safe from any seas the boat might ship.
Then she recoiled, and she recoiled the further upon her father’s
urgence. At the foot of the gangway she looked wistfully up the reeling
stairs, and said that she saw her shawl and Lottie’s among the others
solemnly swaying from the top railing. “Oh, then,” Breckon pressed her,
“you could be made comfortable without the least trouble.”
“I ought to go and see how Lottie is getting along,” she murmured.
Her father said he would see for her, and on this she explicitly
renounced her ambition of going up. “You couldn’t do anything,” she
said, coldly.
“If Miss Lottie is very sea-sick she’s beyond all earthly aid,” Breckon
ventured. “She’d better be left to the vain ministrations of the
stewardess.”
Ellen looked at him in apparent distrust of his piety, if not of his
wisdom. “I don’t believe I could get up the stairs,” she said.
“Well,” he admitted, “they’re not as steady as land--going stairs.” Her
father discreetly kept silence, and, as no one offered to help her, she
began to climb the crazy steps, with Breckon close behind her in latent
readiness for her fall.
From the top she called down to the judge, “Tell momma I will only stay
a minute.” But later, tucked into her chair on the lee of the bulkhead,
with Breckon bracing himself against it beside her, she showed no
impatience to return. “Are they never higher than that” she required
of him, with her wan eyes critically on the infinite procession of the
surges.
“They must be,” Breckon answered, “if there’s any truth in common
report. I’ve heard of their running mountains high. Perhaps they used
rather low mountains to measure them by. Or the measurements may
not have been very exact. But common report never leaves much to the
imagination.”
“That was the way at Niagara,” the girl assented; and Breckon obligingly
regretted that he had never been there. He thought it in good taste that
she should not tell him he ought to go. She merely said, “I was there
once with poppa,” and did not press her advantage. “Do they think,” she
asked, “that it’s going to be a very long voyage?”
“I haven’t been to the smoking-room--that’s where most of the thinking
is done on such points; the ship’s officers never seem to know about
it--since the weather changed. Should you mind it greatly?”
“I wouldn’t care if it never ended,” said the girl, with such a note of
dire sincerity that Breckon instantly changed his first mind as to her
words implying a pose. She took any deeper implication from them in
adding, “I didn’t know I should like being at sea.”
“Well, if you’re not sea-sick,” he assented, “there are not many
pleasanter things in life.”
She suggested, “I suppose I’m not well enough to be sea-sick.” Then she
seemed to become aware of something provisional in his attendance, and
she said, “You mustn’t stay on my account. I can get down when I want
to.”
“Do let me stay,” he entreated, “unless you’d really rather not,” and
as there was no chair immediately attainable, he crouched on the deck
beside hers.
“It makes me think,” she said, and he perceived that she meant the sea,
“of the cold-white, heavy plunging foam in ‘The Dream of Fair Women.’
The words always seemed drenched!”
“Ah, Tennyson, yes,” said Breckon, with a disposition to smile at the
simple-heartedness of the literary allusion. “Do young ladies read
poetry much in Ohio?”
“I don’t believe they do,” she answered. “Do they anywhere?”
“That’s one of the things I should like to know. Is Tennyson your
favorite poet?”
“I don’t believe I have any,” said Ellen. “I used to like Whither, and
Emerson; aid Longfellow, too.”
“Used to! Don’t you now?”
“I don’t read them so much now,” and she made a pause, behind which he
fancied her secret lurked. But he shrank from knowing it if he might.
“You’re all great readers in your family,” he suggested, as a polite
diversion.
“Lottie isn’t,” she answered, dreamily. “She hates it.”
“Ah, I referred more particularly to the others,” said Breckon, and
he began to laugh, and then checked himself. “Your mother, and the
judge--and your brother--”
“Boyne reads about insects,” she admitted.
“He told me of his collection of cocoons. He seems to be afraid it has
suffered in his absence.”
“I’m afraid it has,” said Ellen, and then remained silent.
“There!” the young man broke out, pointing seaward. “That’s rather a
fine one. Doesn’t that realize your idea of something mountains high?
Unless your mountains are very high in Ohio!”
“It is grand. And the gulf between! But we haven’t any in our part. It’s
all level. Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?”
“Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to
begin counting.”
“Yes,” said the girl, and she added, vaguely: “I suppose it’s like
everything else in that. We have to make-believe before we can believe
anything.”
“Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary,” Breckon
assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. “We shouldn’t
have the atomic theory without it.” She did not say anything, and he
decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading. He
tried to be more concrete. “We have to make-believe in ourselves before
we can believe, don’t we? And then we sometimes find we are wrong!” He
laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:
“And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in
yourself?”
“That’s what I’m trying to decide,” he replied. “Sometimes I feel like
renouncing myself altogether; but usually I give myself another chance.
I dare say if I hadn’t been so forbearing I might have agreed with your
sister about my unfitness for the ministry.”
“With Lottie?”
“She thinks I laugh too much!”
“I don’t see why a minister shouldn’t laugh if he feels like it. And if
there’s something to laugh at.”
“Ah, that’s just the point! Is there ever anything to laugh at? If we
looked closely enough at things, oughtn’t we rather to cry?” He laughed
in retreat from the serious proposition. “But it wouldn’t do to try
making each other cry instead of laugh, would it? I suppose your sister
would rather have me cry.”
“I don’t believe Lottie thought much about it,” said Ellen; and at this
point Mr. Breckon yielded to an impulse.
“I should think I had really been of some use if I had made you laugh,
Miss Kenton.”
“Me?”
“You look as if you laughed with your whole heart when you did laugh.”
She glanced about, and Breckon decided that she had found him too
personal. “I wonder if I could walk, with the ship tipping so?” she
asked.
“Well, not far,” said Breckon, with a provisional smile, and then he was
frightened from his irony by her flinging aside her wraps and starting
to her feet. Before he could scramble to his own, she had slid down
the reeling promenade half to the guard, over which she seemed about to
plunge. He hurled himself after her; he could not have done otherwise;
and it was as much in a wild clutch for support as in a purpose to save
her that he caught her in his arms and braced himself against the ship’s
slant. “Where are you going? What are you trying to do?” he shouted.
“I wanted to go down-stairs,” she protested, clinging to him.
“You were nearer going overboard,” he retorted. “You shouldn’t have
tried.” He had not fully formulated his reproach when the ship righted
herself with a counter-roll and plunge, and they were swung staggering
back together against the bulkhead. The door of the gangway was within
reach, and Breckon laid hold of the rail beside it and put the girl
within. “Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No, no; I’m not hurt,” she panted, sinking on the cushioned benching
where usually rows of semi-sea-sick people were lying.
“I thought you might have been bruised against the bulkhead,” he said.
“Are you sure you’re not hurt that I can’t get you anything? From the
steward, I mean?”
“Only help me down-stairs,” she answered. “I’m perfectly well,” and
Breckon was so willing on these terms to close the incident that he was
not aware of the bruise on his own arm, which afterwards declared itself
in several primitive colors. “Don’t tell them,” she added. “I want to
come up again.”
“Why, certainly not,” he consented; but Boyne Kenton, who had been an
involuntary witness of the fact from a point on the forward promenade,
where he had stationed himself to study the habits of the stormy petrel
at a moment so favorable to the acquaintance of the petrel (having
left a seasick bed for the purpose), was of another mind. He had been
alarmed, and, as it appeared in the private interview which he demanded
of his mother, he had been scandalized.
“It is bad enough the way Lottie is always going on with fellows. And
now, if Ellen is going to begin!”
“But, Boyne, child,” Mrs. Kenton argued, in an equilibrium between the
wish to laugh at her son and the wish to box his ears, “how could she
help his catching her if he was to save her from pitching overboard?”
“That’s just it! He will always think that she did it just so he would
have to catch her.”
“I don’t believe any one would think that of Ellen,” said Mrs. Kenton,
gravely.
“Momma! You don’t know what these Eastern fellows are. There are so few
of them that they’re used to having girls throw themselves at them, and
they will think anything, ministers and all. You ought to talk to Ellen,
and caution her. Of course, she isn’t like Lottie; but if Lottie’s
been behaving her way with Mr. Breckon, he must suppose the rest of the
family is like her.”
“Boyne,” said his mother, provisionally, “what sort of person is Mr.
Breckon?”
“Well, I think he’s kind of frivolous.”
“Do you, Boyne?”
“I don’t suppose he means any harm by it, but I don’t like to see a
minister laugh so much. I can’t hardly get him to talk seriously about
anything. And I just know he makes fun of Lottie. I don’t mean that he
always makes fun with me. He didn’t that night at the vaudeville, where
I first saw him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember? I told you about it last winter.”
“And was Mr. Breckon that gentleman?”
“Yes; but he didn’t know who I was when we met here.”
“Well, upon my word, Boyne, I think you might have told us before,” said
his mother, in not very definite vexation. “Go along, now!”
Boyne stood talking to his mother, with his hands, which he had not
grown to, largely planted on the jambs of her state-room door. She was
keeping her berth, not so much because she was sea-sick as because it
was the safest place in the unsteady ship to be in. “Do you want me to
send Ellen to you!”
“I will attend to Ellen, Boyne,” his mother snubbed him. “How is
Lottie?”
“I can’t tell whether she’s sick or not. I went to see about her and she
motioned me away, and fairly screamed when I told her she ought to keep
out in the air. Well, I must be going up again myself, or--”
Before lunch, Boyne had experienced the alternative which he did not
express, although his theory and practice of keeping in the open air
ought to have rendered him immune. Breckon saw his shock of hair, and
his large eyes, like Ellen’s in their present gloom, looking out of it
on the pillow of the upper berth, when he went to their room to freshen
himself for the luncheon, and found Boyne averse even to serious
conversation: He went to lunch without him. None of the Kentons were at
table, and he had made up his mind to lunch alone when Ellen appeared,
and came wavering down the aisle to the table. He stood up to help her,
but seeing how securely she stayed herself from chair to chair he sank
down again.
“Poppy is sick, too, now,” she replied, as if to account for being
alone.
“And you’re none the worse for your little promenade?” The steward came
to Breckon’s left shoulder with a dish, and after an effort to serve
himself from it he said, with a slight gasp, “The other side, please.”
Ellen looked at him, but did not speak, and he made haste to say: “The
doctor goes so far as to admit that its half a gale. I don’t know just
what measure the first officer would have for it. But I congratulate you
on a very typical little storm, Miss Kenton; perfectly safe, but very
decided. A great many people cross the Atlantic without anything half
as satisfactory. There is either too much or too little of this sort
of thing.” He went on talking about the weather, and had got such a
distance from the point of beginning that he had cause to repent being
brought back to it when she asked:
“Did the doctor think, you were hurt?”
“Well, perhaps I ought to be more ashamed than I am,” said Breckon. “But
I thought I had better make sure. And it’s only a bruise--”
“Won’t you let ME help you!” she asked, as another dish intervened at
his right. “I hurt you.”
Breckon laughed at her solemn face and voice. “If you’ll exonerate
yourself first,” he answered: “I couldn’t touch a morsel that conveyed
confession of the least culpability on your part. Do you consent?
Otherwise, I pass this dish. And really I want some!”
“Well,” she sadly consented, and he allowed her to serve his plate.
“More yet, please,” he said. “A lot!”
“Is that enough?”
“Well, for the first helping. And don’t offer to cut it up for me! My
proud spirit draws the line at cutting up. Besides, a fork will do the
work with goulash.”
“Is that what it is?” she asked, but not apparently because she cared to
know.
“Unless you prefer to naturalize it as stew. It seems to have come in
with the Hungarian bands. I suppose you have them in--”
“Tuskingum? No, it is too small. But I heard them at a restaurant in New
York where my brother took us.”
“In the spirit of scientific investigation? It’s strange how a common
principle seems to pervade both the Hungarian music and cooking--the
same wandering airs and flavors--wild, vague, lawless harmonies in both.
Did you notice it?”
Ellen shook her head. The look of gloom which seemed to Breckon habitual
in it came back into her face, and he had a fantastic temptation to
see how far he could go with her sad consciousness before she should
be aware that he was experimenting upon it. He put this temptation from
him, and was in the enjoyment of a comfortable self-righteousness when
it returned in twofold power upon him with the coming of some cutlets
which capriciously varied the repast.
“Ah, now, Miss Kenton, if you were to take pity on my helplessness!”
“Why, certainly!” She possessed herself of his plate, and began to cut
up the meat for him. “Am I making the bites too small?” she asked, with
an upward glance at him.
“Well, I don’t know. Should you think so?” he returned, with a smile
that out-measured the morsels on the plate before her.
She met his laughing eyes with eyes that questioned his honesty, at
first sadly, and then indignantly. She dropped the knife and fork upon
the plate and rose.
“Oh, Miss Kenton!” he penitently entreated.
But she was down the slanting aisle and out of the reeling door before
he could decide what to do.