Breckon had not seen the former interest between himself and Ellen
lapse to commonplace acquaintance without due sense of loss. He suffered
justly, but he did not suffer passively, or without several attempts
to regain the higher ground. In spite of these he was aware of being
distinctly kept to the level which he accused himself of having chosen,
by a gentle acquiescence in his choice more fatal than snubbing. The
advances that he made across the table, while he still met Miss Kenton
alone there, did not carry beyond the rack supporting her plate. She
talked on whatever subject he started with that angelic sincerity which
now seemed so far from him, but she started none herself; she did not
appeal to him for his opinion upon any question more psychological than
the barometer; and,
“In a tumultuous privacy of storm,”
he found himself as much estranged from her as if a fair-weather crowd
had surrounded them. He did not believe that she resented the levity he
had shown; but he had reason to fear that she had finally accepted it as
his normal mood, and in her efforts to meet him in it, as if he had no
other, he read a tolerance that was worse than contempt. When he tried
to make her think differently, if that was what she thought of him,
he fancied her rising to the notion he wished to give her, and then
shrinking from it, as if it must bring her the disappointment of some
trivial joke.
It was what he had taught her to expect of him, and he had himself to
blame. Now that he had thrown that precious chance away, he might well
have overvalued it. She had certain provincialisms which he could not
ignore. She did not know the right use of will and shall, and would and
should, and she pronounced the letter ‘r’ with a hard mid-Western twist.
Her voice was weak and thin, and she could not govern it from being at
times a gasp and at times a drawl. She did not dress with the authority
of women who know more of their clothes than the people they buy them
of; she did not carry herself like a pretty girl; she had not the
definite stamp of young-ladyism. Yet she was undoubtedly a lady in every
instinct; she wore with pensive grace the clothes which she had not
subjected to her personal taste; and if she did not carry herself like a
pretty girl, she had a beauty which touched and entreated.
More and more Breckon found himself studying her beauty--her soft, brown
brows, her gentle, dark eyes, a little sunken, and with the lids pinched
by suffering; the cheeks somewhat thin, but not colorless; the long
chin, the clear forehead, and the massed brown hair, that seemed too
heavy for the drooping neck. It was not the modern athletic type; it
was rather of the earlier period, when beauty was associated with the
fragility despised by a tanned and golfing generation. Ellen Kenton’s
wrists were thin, and her hands long and narrow. As he looked at her
across the racks during those two days of storm, he had sometimes the
wish to take her long, narrow hands in his, and beg her to believe that
he was worthier her serious friendship than he had shown himself. What
he was sure of at all times now was that he wished to know the secret
of that patient pathos of hers. She was not merely, or primarily, an
invalid. Her family had treated her as an invalid, but, except Lottie,
whose rigor might have been meant sanatively, they treated her more with
the tenderness people use with a wounded spirit; and Breckon fancied
moments of something like humility in her, when she seemed to cower from
his notice. These were not so imaginable after her family took to their
berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a
sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child
might show at some incomprehensible harm. It was this grief which he had
refused not merely to know--he still doubted his right to know it--but
to share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and
had exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with
the fair weather, he felt himself farther from her than before their
acquaintance began.
He had made an overture to its renewal in the book he lent her, and then
Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter had appeared on deck, and borne down
upon him when he was walking with Lottie Kenton and trying to begin his
self-retrieval through her. She had left him; but they had not, and in
the bonds of a prophet and his followers he found himself bound with
them for much more conversation than he had often held with them ashore.
The parochial duties of an ethical teacher were not strenuous, and
Breckon had not been made to feel them so definitely before. Mrs.
Rasmith held that they now included promising to sit at her table for
the rest of the voyage; but her daughter succeeded in releasing him from
the obligation; and it was she who smilingly detached the clinging
hold of the elder lady. “We mustn’t keep Mr. Breckon from his friends,
mother,” she said, brightly, and then he said he should like the
pleasure of introducing them, and both of the ladies declared that they
would be delighted.
He bowed himself off, and half the ship’s-length away he was aware, from
meeting Lottie with her little Englishman, that it was she and not Ellen
whom he was seeking. As the couple paused in whirring past Breckon long
enough to let Lottie make her hat fast against the wind, he heard the
Englishman shout:
“I say, that sister of yours is a fine girl, isn’t she?”
“She’s a pretty good--looker,” Lottie answered back. “What’s the matter
with HER sister?”
“Oh, I say!” her companion returned, in a transport with her slangy
pertness, which Breckon could not altogether refuse to share.
He thought that he ought to condemn it, and he did condemn Mrs. Kenton
for allowing it in one of her daughters, when he came up to her sitting
beside another whom he felt inexpressibly incapable of it. Mrs. Kenton
could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters,
like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made
them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he
saw. She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had
the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen,
with her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest
spirit in her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable
to his sex as he could. But this bold defence was as far from the poor
lady as any spoken reproach was from him. Her daughter had to check in
her a mechanical offer to rise, as if to give Breckon her place, the
theory and practice of Tuskingum being that their elders ought to leave
young people alone together.
“Don’t go, momma,” Ellen whispered. “I don’t want you to go.”
Breckon, when he arrived before them, remained talking on foot, and,
unlike Lottie’s company, he talked to the mother. This had happened
before from him, but she had not got used to it, and now she deprecated
in everything but words his polite questions about her sufferings from
the rough weather, and his rejoicing that the worst was probably over.
She ventured the hope that it was so, for she said that Mr. Kenton had
about decided to keep on to Holland, and it seemed to her that they had
had enough of storms. He said he was glad that they were going right on;
and then she modestly recurred to the earlier opinion he had given
her husband that it would be better to spend the rest of the summer in
Holland than to go to Italy, as if she wished to conform herself in the
wisdom of Mr. Kenton’s decision. He repeated his conviction, and he said
that if he were in their place he should go to The Hague as soon as they
had seen Rotterdam, and make it their headquarters for the exploration
of the whole country.
“You can’t realize how little it is; you can get anywhere in an hour;
the difficulty is to keep inside of Holland when you leave any given
point. I envy you going there.”
Mrs. Kenton inferred that he was going to stop in France, but if it were
part of his closeness not to tell, it was part of her pride not to ask.
She relented when he asked if he might get a map of his and prove the
littleness of Holland from it, and in his absence she could not well
avoid saying to Ellen, “He seems very pleasant.”
“Yes; why not?” the girl asked.
“I don’t know. Lottie is so against him.”
“He was very kind when you were all sick.”
“Well, you ought to know better than Lottie; you’ve seen him so much
more.” Ellen was silent, and her mother advanced cautiously, “I suppose
he is very cultivated.”
“How can I tell? I’m not.”
“Why, Ellen, I think you are. Very few girls have read so much.”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t care if I were cultivated, Ha is like all the
rest. He would like to joke and laugh. Well, I think that is nice, too,
and I wish I could do it. But I never could, and now I can’t try. I
suppose he wonders what makes me such a dead weight on you all.”
“You know you’re not that, Ellen! You musn’t let yourself be morbid. It
hurts me to have you say such things.”
“Well, I should like to tell him why, and see what he would say.”
“Ellen!”
“Why not? If he is a minister he must have thought about all kinds
of things. Do you suppose he ever knew of a girl before who had been
through what I have? Yes, I would like to know what he would really
say.”
“I know what he ought to say! If he knew, he would say that no girl had
ever behaved more angelically.”
“Do you think he would? Perhaps he would say that if I hadn’t been so
proud and silly--Here he comes! Shall we ask him?”
Breckon approached with his map, and her mother gasped, thinking how
terrible such a thing would be if it could be; Ellen smiled brightly up
at him. “Will you take my chair? And then you can show momma your map. I
am going down,” and while he was still protesting she was gone.
“Miss Kenton seems so much better than she did the first day,” he said,
as he spread the map out on his knees, and gave Mrs. Kenton one end to
hold.
“Yes,” the mother assented, as she bent over to look at it.
She followed his explanation with a surface sense, while her nether mind
was full of the worry of the question which Ellen had planted in it.
What would such a man think of what she had been through? Or, rather,
how would he say to her the only things that in Mrs. Kenton’s belief he
could say? How could the poor child ever be made to see it in the
light of some mind not colored with her family’s affection for her? An
immense, an impossible longing possessed itself of the mother’s heart,
which became the more insistent the more frantic it appeared. She
uttered “Yes” and “No” and “Indeed” to what he was saying, but all the
time she was rehearsing Ellen’s story in her inner sense. In the end she
remembered so little what had actually passed that her dramatic reverie
seemed the reality, and when she left him she got herself down to
her state-room, giddy with the shame and fear of her imaginary
self-betrayal. She wished to test the enormity, and yet not find it so
monstrous, by submitting the case to her husband, and she could scarcely
keep back her impatience at seeing Ellen instead of her father.
“Momma, what have you been saying to Mr. Breckon about me?”
“Nothing,” said Mrs. Kenton, aghast at first, and then astonished to
realize that she was speaking the simple truth. “He said how much better
you were looking; but I don’t believe I spoke a single word. We were
looking at the map.”
“Very well,” Ellen resumed. “I have been thinking it all over, and now I
have made up my mind.”
She paused, and her mother asked, tremulously, “About what, Ellen?”
“You know, momma. I see all now. You needn’t be afraid that I care
anything about him now,” and her mother knew that she meant Bittridge,
“or that I ever shall. That’s gone forever. But it’s gone,” she added,
and her mother quaked inwardly to hear her reason, “because the wrong
and the shame was all for me--for us. That’s why I can forgive it,
and forget. If we had done anything, the least thing in the world, to
revenge ourselves, or to hurt him, then--Don’t you see, momma?”
“I think I see, Ellen.”
“Then I should have to keep thinking about it, and what we had made him
suffer, and whether we hadn’t given him some claim. I don’t wish ever
to think of him again. You and poppa were so patient and forbearing, all
through; and I thank goodness now for everything you put up with; only I
wish I could have borne everything myself.”
“You had enough to bear,” Mrs. Kenton said, in tender evasion.
“I’m glad that I had to bear so much, for bearing it is what makes me
free now.” She went up to her mother and kissed her, and gazed into her
face with joyful, tearful looks that made her heart sink.