The father and the mother had witnessed with tempered satisfaction
the interest which seemed to be growing up between Ellen and the young
minister. By this time they had learned not to expect too much of any
turn she might take; she reverted to a mood as suddenly as she left it.
They could not quite make out Breckon himself; he was at least as great
a puzzle to them as their own child was.
“It seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, in their first review of the affair, after
Boyne had done a brother’s duty in trying to bring Ellen under their
mother’s censure, “that he was the gentleman who discussed the theatre
with Boyne at the vaudeville last winter. Boyne just casually mentioned
it. I was so provoked!”
“I don’t see what bearing the fact has,” the judge remarked.
“Why, Boyne liked him very much that night, but now he seems to feel
very much as Lottie does about him. He thinks he laughs too much.”
“I don’t know that there’s much harm in that,” said the judge. “And I
shouldn’t value Boyne’s opinion of character very highly.”
“I value any one’s intuitions--especially children’s.”
“Boyne’s in that middle state where he isn’t quite a child. And so is
Lottie, for that matter.”
“That is true,” their mother assented. “And we ought to be glad of
anything that takes Ellen’s mind off herself. If I could only believe
she was forgetting that wretch!”
“Does she ever speak of him?”
“She never hints of him, even. But her mind may be full of him all the
time.”
The judge laughed impatiently. “It strikes me that this young Mr.
Breckon hasn’t much advantage of Ellen in what Lottie calls closeness!”
“Ellen has always been very reserved. It would have been better for her
if she hadn’t. Oh, I scarcely dare to hope anything! Rufus, I feel that
in everything of this kind we are very ignorant and inexperienced.”
“Inexperienced!” Renton retorted. “I don’t want any more experience of
the kind Ellen has given us.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean--this Mr. Breckon. I can’t tell what attracts
him in the child. She must appear very crude and uncultivated to him.
You needn’t resent it so! I know she’s read a great deal, and you’ve
made her think herself intellectual--but the very simple-heartedness of
the way she would show out her reading would make such a young man see
that she wasn’t like the girls he was used to. They would hide their
intellectuality, if they had any. It’s no use your trying to fight it
Mr. Kenton. We are country people, and he knows it.”
“Tuskingum isn’t country!” the judge declared.
“It isn’t city. And we don’t know anything about the world, any of us.
Oh, I suppose we can read and write! But we don’t know the a, b, c of
the things he, knows. He, belongs to a kind of society--of people--in
New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never imagined
before. They made me feel very belated and benighted--as if I hadn’t,
read or thought anything. They didn’t mean to; but I couldn’t help it,
and they couldn’t.”
“You--you’ve been frightened out of your propriety by what you’ve seen
in New York,” said her husband.
“I’ve been frightened, certainly. And I wish you had been, too. I wish
you wouldn’t be so conceited about Ellen. It scares me to see you so.
Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone! You must see that. And she
doesn’t dress like the girls he’s used to. I know we’ve got her things
in New York; but she doesn’t wear them like a New-Yorker. I hope she
isn’t going in for MORE unhappiness!”
At the thought of this the judge’s crest fell. “Do you believe she’s
getting interested in him?” he asked, humbly.
“No, no; I don’t say that. But promise me you won’t encourage her in it.
And don’t, for pity’s sake, brag about her to him.”
“No, I won’t,” said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.
The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview
with his wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung
convalescently along the promenade on their steamer-chairs. These, so
far as they were women, were of such sick plainness that when he came
to Ellen his heart throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother’s
aspersion of her health and beauty. She looked not only very well, and
very pretty, but in a gay red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her
father’s uncritical eyes, very stylish. The glow left his heart at eight
of the empty seat beside her.
“Where is Lottie?” he asked, though it was not Lottie’s whereabouts that
interested him.
“Oh, she’s walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere,” said Ellen.
“Then she’s made up her mind to tolerate him, has she?” the father
asked, more lightly than he felt.
Ellen smiled. “That wasn’t anything very serious, I guess. At any rate,
she’s walking with him.”
“What book is that?” he asked, of the volume she was tilting back and
forth under her hand.
She showed it. “One of his. He brought it up to amuse me, he said.”
“While he was amusing himself with Lottie,” thought the judge, in his
jealousy for her. “It is going the same old way. Well!” What he said
aloud was, “And is it amusing you?”
“I haven’t looked at it yet,” said the girl. “It’s amusing enough to
watch the sea. Oh, poppa! I never thought I should care so much for it.”
“And you’re glad we came?”
“I don’t want to think about that. I just want to know that I’m here.”
She pressed his arm gently, significantly, where he sat provisionally
in the chair beside her, and he was afraid to speak lest he should scare
away the hope her words gave him.
He merely said, “Well, well!” and waited for her to speak further. But
her impulse had exhausted itself, as if her spirit were like one of
those weak forms of life which spend their strength in a quick run or
flight, and then rest to gather force for another. “Where’s Boyne?” he
asked, after waiting for her to speak.
“He was here a minute ago. He’s been talking with some of the deck
passengers that are going home because they couldn’t get on in America.
Doesn’t that seem pitiful, poppa? I always thought we had work enough
for the whole world.”
“Perhaps these fellows didn’t try very hard to find it,” said the judge.
“Perhaps,” she assented.
“I shouldn’t want you to get to thinking that it’s all like New York.
Remember how comfortable everybody is in Tuskingum.”
“Yes,” she said, sadly. “How far off Tuskingum seems!”
“Well, don’t forget about it; and remember that wherever life is
simplest and purest and kindest, that is the highest civilization.”
“How much like old times it seems to hear you talk that way, poppa! I
should think I was in the library at home. And I made you leave it!” she
sighed.
“Your mother was glad of any excuse. And it will do us all good, if we
take it in the right way,” said the judge, with a didactic severity that
did not hide his pang from her.
“Poor poppa!” she said.
He went away, saying that he was going to look Lottie up. His simple
design was to send Lottie to her mother, so that Breckon might come back
to Ellen; but he did not own this to himself.
Lottie returned from another direction with Boyne, and Ellen said,
“Poppa’s gone to look for you.”
“Has he?” asked Lottie, dropping decisively into her chair. “Well,
there’s one thing; I won’t call him poppa any more.”
“What will you call him?” Boyne demanded, demurely.
“I’ll call him father, it you want to know; and I’m going to call momma,
mother. I’m not going to have those English laughing at us, and I won’t
say papa and mamma. Everybody that knows anything says father and mother
now.”
Boyne kept looking from one sister to another during Lottie’s
declaration, and, with his eyes on Ellen, he said, “It’s true, Ellen.
All the Plumptons did.” He was very serious.
Ellen smiled. “I’m too old to change. I’d rather seem queer in Europe
than when I get back to Tuskingum.”
“You wouldn’t be queer there a great while,” said Lottie. “They’ll all
be doing it in a week after I get home.”
Upon the encouragement given him by Ellen, Boyne seized the chance
of being of the opposition. “Yes,” he taunted Lottie, “and you think
they’ll say woman and man, for lady and gentleman, I suppose.”
“They will as soon as they know it’s the thing.”
“Well, I know I won’t,” said Boyne. “I won’t call momma a woman.”
“It doesn’t matter what you do, Boyne dear,” his sister serenely assured
him.
While he stood searching his mind for a suitable retort, a young man,
not apparently many years his senior, came round the corner of the
music-room, and put himself conspicuously in view at a distance from the
Kentons.
“There he is, now,” said Boyne. “He wants to be introduced to Lottie.”
He referred the question to Ellen, but Lottie answered for her.
“Then why don’t you introduce him?”
“Well, I would if he was an American. But you can’t tell about these
English.” He resumed the dignity he had lost in making the explanation
to Lottie, and ignored her in turning again to Ellen. “What do you
think, Ellen?”
“Oh, don’t know about such things, Boyne,” she said, shrinking from the
responsibility.
“Well; upon my word!” cried Lottie. “If Ellen can talk by the hour
with that precious Mr. Breckon, and stay up here along with him, when
everybody else is down below sick, I don’t think she can have a great
deal to say about a half-grown boy like that being introduced to me.”
“He’s as old as you are,” said Boyne, hotly.
“Oh! I saw him associating with you, and I thought he was a boy, too.
Pardon me!” Lottie turned from giving Boyne his coup-de-grace, to plant
a little stab in Ellen’s breast. “To be sure, now Mr. Breckon has found
those friends of his, I suppose he won’t want to flirt with Ellen any
more.”
“Ah, ha, ha!” Boyne broke in. “Lottie is mad because he stopped to speak
to some ladies he knew. Women, I suppose she’d call them.”
“Well, I shouldn’t call him a gentleman, anyway,” said Lottie.
The pretty, smooth-faced, fresh-faced young fellow whom their varying
debate had kept in abeyance, looked round at them over his shoulder as
he leaned on the rail, and seemed to discover Boyne for the first time.
He came promptly towards the Kentons.
“Now,” said Lottie, rapidly, “you’ll just HAVE to.”
The young fellow touched his cap to the whole group, but he ventured to
address only Boyne.
“Every one seems to be about this morning,” he said, with the cheery
English-rising infection.
“Yes,” answered Boyne, with such snubbing coldness that Ellen’s heart
was touched.
“It’s so pleasant,” she said, “after that dark weather.”
“Isn’t it?” cried the young fellow, gratefully. “One doesn’t often get
such sunshine as this at sea, you know.”
“My sister, Miss Kenton, Mr. Pogis,” Boyne solemnly intervened. “And
Miss Lottie Kenton.”
The pretty boy bowed to each in turn, but he made no pretence of
being there to talk with Ellen. “Have you been ill, too?” he actively
addressed himself to Lottie.
“No, just mad,” she said. “I wasn’t very sick, and that made it all the
worse being down in a poky state-room when I wanted to walk.”
“And I suppose you’ve been making up for lost time this morning?”
“Not half,” said Lottie.
“Oh, do finish the half with me!”
Lottie instantly rose, and flung her sister the wrap she had been
holding ready to shed from the moment the young man had come up. “Keep
that for me, Nell. Are you good at catching?” she asked him.
“Catching?”
“Yes! People,” she explained, and at a sudden twist of the ship she made
a clutch at his shoulder.
“Oh! I think I can catch you.”
As they moved off together, Boyne said, “Well, upon my word!” but Ellen
did not say anything in comment on Lottie. After a while she asked, “Who
were the ladies that Mr. Breckon met?”
“I didn’t hear their names. They were somebody he hadn’t seen before
since the ship started. They looked like a young lady and her mother.
It made Lottie mad when he stopped to speak with them, and she wouldn’t
wait till he could get through. Ran right away, and made me come, too.”