In his exile from his kindred, for it came practically to that, Boyne
was able to add a fine gloom to the state which he commonly observed
with himself when he was not giving way to his morbid fancies or his
morbid fears, and breaking down in helpless subjection to the nearest
member of his household. Lottie was so taken up with her student that
she scarcely quarrelled with him any more, and they had no longer those
moments of union in which they stood together against the world. His
mother had cast him off, as he felt, very heartlessly, though it was
really because she could not give his absurdities due thought in view of
the hopeful seriousness of Ellen’s affair, and Boyne was aware that
his father at the best of times was ignorant of him when he was not
impatient of him. These were not the best of times with Judge Kenton,
and Boyne was not the first object of his impatience. In the last
analysis he was living until he could get home, and so largely in the
hope of this that his wife at times could scarcely keep him from taking
some step that would decide the matter between Ellen and Breckon at
once. They were tacitly agreed that they were waiting for nothing else,
and, without making their agreement explicit, she was able to quell him
by asking what he expected to do in case there was nothing between them?
Was he going to take the child back to Tuskingum, which was the same
as taking her back to Bittridge? it hurt her to confront him with this
question, and she tried other devices for staying and appeasing him.
She begged him now, seeing Boyne so forlorn, and hanging about the hotel
alone, or moping over those ridiculous books of his, to go off with the
boy somewhere and see the interesting places within such easy reach,
like Leyden and Delft if he cared nothing for the place where William
the Silent was shot, he ought to see the place that the Pilgrims started
from. She had counted upon doing those places herself, with her husband,
and it was in a sacrifice of her ideal that she now urged him to go
with Boyne. But her preoccupation with Ellen’s affair forbade her
self-abandon to those high historical interests to which she urged his
devotion. She might have gone with him and Boyne, but then she must have
left the larger half of her divided mind with Ellen, not to speak of
Lottie, who refused to be a party to any such excursion. Mrs. Kenton
felt the disappointment and grieved at it, but not without hope of
repairing it later, and she did not cease from entreating the judge to
do what he could at once towards fulfilling the desires she postponed.
Once she prevailed with him, and really got him and Boyne off for a
day, but they came back early, with signs of having bored each other
intolerably, and after that it was Boyne, as much as his father, who
relucted from joint expeditions. Boyne did not so much object to going
alone, and his father said it was best to let him, though his mother
had her fears for her youngest. He spent a good deal of his time on the
trams between Scheveningen and The Hague, and he was understood to have
explored the capital pretty thoroughly. In fact, he did go about with a
valet de place, whom he got at a cheap rate, and with whom he conversed
upon the state of the country and its political affairs. The valet said
that the only enemy that Holland could fear was Germany, but an invasion
from that quarter could be easily repulsed by cutting the dikes and
drowning the invaders. The sea, he taught Boyne, was the great defence
of Holland, and it was a waste of money to keep such an army as the
Dutch had; but neither the sea nor the sword could drive out the Germans
if once they insidiously married a Prussian prince to the Dutch Queen.
There seemed to be no getting away from the Queen, for Boyne. The valet
not only talked about her, as the pleasantest subject which he could
find, but he insisted upon showing Boyne all her palaces. He took
him into the Parliament house, and showed him where she sat while the
queen-mother read the address from the throne. He introduced him at a
bazar where the shop-girl who spoke English better than Boyne, or at
least without the central Ohio accent, wanted to sell him a miniature of
the Queen on porcelain. She said the Queen was such a nice girl, and she
was herself such a nice girl that Boyne blushed a little in looking at
her. He bought the miniature, and then he did not know what to do with
it; if any of the family, if Lottie, found out that he had it, or that
Trannel, he should have no peace any more. He put it in his pocket,
provisionally, and when he came giddily out of the shop he felt himself
taken by the elbow and placed against the wall by the valet, who said
the queens were coming. They drove down slowly through the crowded,
narrow street, bowing right and left to the people flattened against the
shops, and again Boyne saw her so near that he could have reached out
his hand and almost touched hers.
The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether
he had not tried to do so. If he had he would have been arrested--he
knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it. He knew that he
imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he
imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic. At
the same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and
she became aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the
anarchist from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been
meant for her. Perhaps it was a pistol.
He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to
Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before
him. They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter
there, and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the
other spectators and wait for the queens to appear and get into their
carriage. The young Queen’s looks were stamped in Boyne’s consciousness,
so that he saw her wherever he turned, like the sun when one has gazed
at it. He thought how that Trannel had said he ought to hand her into
her carriage, and he shrank away for fear he should try to do so, but he
could not leave the place till she had come out with the queen--mother
and driven off. Then he went slowly and breathlessly into the hotel,
feeling the Queen’s miniature in his pocket. It made his heart stand
still, and then bound forward. He wondered again what he should do with
it. If he kept it, Lottie would be sure to find it, and he could not
bring himself to the sacrilege of destroying it. He thought he would
walk out on the breakwater as far as he could and throw it into the sea,
but when he got to the end of the mole he could not do so. He decided
that he would give it to Ellen to keep for him, and not let Lottie see
it; or perhaps he might pretend he had bought it for her. He could not
do that, though, for it would not be true, and if he did he could not
ask her to keep it from Lottie.
At dinner Mr. Trannel told him he ought to have been there to see the
Queen; that she had asked especially for him, and wanted to know if they
had not sent up her card to him. Boyne meditated an apt answer through
all the courses, but he had not thought of one when they had come to
the ‘corbeille de fruits’, and he was forced to go to bed without having
avenged himself.
In taking rooms for her family at the hotel, Lottie had arranged for her
emancipation from the thraldom of rooming with Ellen. She said that had
gone on long enough; if she was grown up at all, she was grown up enough
to have a room of her own, and her mother had yielded to reasoning which
began and ended with this position. She would have interfered so far as
to put Lottie into the room next her, but Lottie said that if Boyne was
the baby he ought to be next his mother; Ellen might come next him, but
she was going to have the room that was furthest from any implication
of the dependence in which she had languished; and her mother submitted
again. Boyne was not sorry; there had always been hours of the night
when he felt the need of getting at his mother for reassurance as to
forebodings which his fancy conjured up to trouble him in the wakeful
dark. It was understood that he might freely do this, and though the
judge inwardly fretted, he could not deny the boy the comfort of his
mother’s encouraging love. Boyne’s visits woke him, but he slept the
better for indulging in the young nerves that tremor from impressions
against which the old nerves are proof. But now, in the strange fatality
which seemed to involve him, Boyne could not go to his mother. It was
too weirdly intimate, even for her; besides, when he had already tried
to seek her counsel she had ignorantly repelled him.
The night after his day in The Hague, when he could bear it no longer,
he put on his dressing-gown and softly opened Ellen’s door, “awake,
Ellen?” he whispered.
“Yes, What is it, Boyne” her gentle voice asked.
“He came and sat down by her bed and stole his hand into hers, which she
put out to him. The watery moonlight dripped into the room at the edges
of the shades, and the long wash of the sea made itself regularly heard
on the sands.
“Can’t you sleep?” Ellen asked again. “Are you homesick?”
“Not exactly that. But it does seem rather strange for us to be off here
so far, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, I don’t see how I can forgive myself for making you come,” said
Ellen, but her voice did not sound as if she were very unhappy.
“You couldn’t help it,” said Boyne, and the words suggested a question
to him. “Do you believe that such things are ordered, Ellen?”
“Everything is ordered, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so. And if they are, we’re not, to blame for what happens.”
“Not if we try to do right.”
“Of course. The Kentons always do that,” said Boyne, with the faith in
his family that did not fail him in the darkest hour. “But what I mean
is that if anything comes on you that you can’t foresee and you can’t
get out of--” The next step was not clear, and Boyne paused. He asked,
“Do you think that we can control our feelings, Ellen?”
“About what?”
“Well, about persons that we like.” He added, for safety, “Or dislike.”
“I’m afraid not,” said Ellen, sadly, “We ought to like persons and
dislike them for some good reason, but we don’t.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Borne, with a long breath. “Sometimes it
seems like a kind of possession, doesn’t it?”
“It seems more like that when we like them,” Ellen said.
“Yes, that’s what I mean. If a person was to take a fancy to some one
that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn’t be to blame
for it, would he?”
“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?”
Borne hesitated. “Yes” he said. He was in for it now.
Ellen had not noticed Boyne’s absorption with Miss Rasmith on the ship,
but she vaguely remembered hearing Lottie tease him about her, and she
said now, “He wouldn’t be to blame for it if he couldn’t help it, but if
the person was much older it would be a pity!”
“Uh, she isn’t so very much older,” said Borne, more cheerfully than he
had spoken before.
“Is it somebody that you have taken a fancy to Borne?”
“I don’t know, Ellen. That’s what makes it so kind of awful. I can’t
tell whether it’s a real fancy, or I only think it is. Sometimes I think
it is, and sometimes I think that I think so because I am afraid to
believe it. Do you under Ellen?”
“It seems to me that I do. But you oughtn’t to let your fancy run away
with you, Boyne. What a queer boy!”
“It’s a kind of fascination, I suppose. But whether it’s a real fancy or
an unreal one, I can’t get away from it.”
“Poor boy!” said his sister.
“Perhaps it’s those books. Sometimes I think it is, and I laugh at the
whole idea; and then again it’s so strong that I can’t get away from it.
Ellen!”
“Well, Boyne?”
“I could tell you who it is, if you think that would do any good--if you
think it would help me to see it in the true light, or you could help me
more by knowing who it is than you can now.”
“I hope it isn’t anybody that you can’t respect, Boyne?”
“No, indeed! It’s somebody you would never dream of.”
“Well?” Ellen was waiting for him to speak, but he could not get the
words out, even to her.
“I guess I’ll tell you some other time. Maybe I can get over it myself.”
“It would be the best way if you could.”
He rose and left her bedside, and then he came back. “Ellen, I’ve got
something that I wish you would keep for me.”
“What is it? Of course I will.”
“Well, it’s--something I don’t want you to let Lottie know I’ve got. She
tells that Mr. Trannel everything, and then he wants to make fun. Do you
think he’s so very witty?”
“I can’t help laughing at some things he says.”
“I suppose he is,” Boyne ruefully admitted. “But that doesn’t make you
like him any better. Well, if you won’t tell Lottie, I’ll give it to you
now.”
“I won’t tell anything that you don’t want me to, Boyne.”
“It’s nothing. It’s just-a picture of the Queen on porcelain, that I got
in The Hague. The guide took me into the store, and I thought I ought to
get something.”
“Oh, that’s very nice, Boyne. I do like the Queen so much. She’s so
sweet!”
“Yes, isn’t she?” said Boyne, glad of Ellen’s approval. So far, at
least, he was not wrong. “Here it is now.”
He put the miniature in Ellen’s hand. She lifted herself on her elbow.
“Light the candle and let me see it.”
“No, no!” he entreated. “It might wake Lottie, and--and--Good-night,
Ellen.”
“Can you go to sleep now, Boyne?”
“Oh yes. I’m all right. Good-night.”
“Good-night, then.”
Borne stooped over and kissed her, and went to the door. He came back
and asked, “You don’t think it was silly, or anything, for me to get
it?”
“No, indeed! It’s just what you will like to have when you get home.
We’ve all seen her so often. I’ll put it in my trunk, and nobody shall
know about it till we’re safely back in Tuskingum.”
Boyne sighed deeply. “Yes, that’s what I meant. Good-night.”
“Good-night, Boyne.”
“I hope I haven’t waked you up too much?”
“Oh no. I can get to sleep easily again.”
“Well, good-night.” Boyne sighed again, but not so deeply, and this time
he went out.