“There is just one thing,” said the judge, as he wound up his watch that
night, “that makes me a little uneasy still.”
Mrs. Kenton, already in her bed turned her face upon him with a
despairing “Tchk! Dear! What is it? I thought we had talked over
everything.”
“We haven’t got Lottie’s consent yet.”
“Well, I think I see myself asking Lottie!” Mrs. Kenton began, before
she realized her husband’s irony. She added, “How could you give me such
a start?”
“Well, Lottie has bossed us so long that I couldn’t help mentioning it,”
said the judge.
It was a lame excuse, and in its most potential implication his
suggestion proved without reason. If Lottie never gave her explicit
approval to Ellen’s engagement, she never openly opposed it. She treated
it, rather, with something like silent contempt, as a childish weakness
on Ellen’s part which was beneath her serious consideration. Towards
Breckon, her behavior hardly changed in the severity which she had
assumed from the moment she first ceased to have any use for him. “I
suppose I will have to kiss him,” she said, gloomily, when her mother
told her that he was to be her brother, and she performed the rite with
as much coldness as was ever put in that form of affectionate welcome.
It is doubtful if Breckon perfectly realized its coldness; he never
knew how much he enraged her by acting as if she were a little girl,
and saying lightly, almost trivially, “I’m so glad you’re going to be a
sister to me.”
With Ellen, Lottie now considered herself quits, and from the first hour
of Ellen’s happiness she threw off all the care with all the apparent
kindness which she had used towards her when she was a morbid invalid.
Here again, if Lottie had minded such a thing, she might have been as
much vexed by Ellen’s attitude as by Breckon’s. Ellen never once noticed
the withdrawal of her anxious oversight, or seemed in the least to miss
it. As much as her meek nature would allow, she arrogated to herself
the privileges and prerogatives of an elder sister, and if it had been
possible to make Lottie ever feel like a chit, there were moments when
Ellen’s behavior would have made her feel like a chit. It was not till
after their return to Tuskingum that Lottie took her true place in
relation to the affair, and in the preparations for the wedding, which
she appointed to be in the First Universalist Church, overruling both
her mother’s and sister’s preferences for a home wedding, that Lottie
rose in due authority. Mrs. Kenton had not ceased to feel quelled
whenever her younger daughter called her mother instead of momma, and
Ellen seemed not really to care. She submitted the matter to Breckon,
who said, “Oh yes, if Lottie wishes,” and he laughed when Ellen
confessed, “Well, I said we would.”
With the lifting of his great anxiety, he had got back to that lightness
which was most like him, and he could not always conceal from Lottie
herself that he regarded her as a joke. She did not mind it, she said,
from such a mere sop as, in the vast content of his love, he was.
This was some months after Lottie had got at Scheveningen from Mr.
Plumpton that letter which decided her that she had no use for him.
There came the same day, and by the same post with it, a letter from one
of her young men in Tuskingum, who had faithfully written to her all
the winter before, and had not intermitted his letters after she went
abroad. To Kenton he had always seemed too wise if not too good for
Lottie, but Mrs. Kenton, who had her own doubts of Lottie, would not
allow this when it came to the question, and said, woundedly, that she
did not see why Lottie was not fully his equal in every way.
“Well,” the judge suggested, “she isn’t the first young lawyer at the
Tuskingum bar.”
“Well, I wouldn’t wish her to be,” said Mrs. Kenton, who did not often
make jokes.
“Well, I don’t know that I would,” her husband assented, and he added,
“Pretty good, Sarah.”
“Lottie,” her mother summed up, “is practical, and she is very neat. She
won’t let Mr. Elroy go around looking so slovenly. I hope she will make
him have his hair cut, and not look as if it were bitten off. And I
don’t believe he’s had his boots blacked since--”
“He was born,” the judge proposed, and she assented.
“Yes. She is very saving, and he is wasteful. It will be a very good
match. You can let them build on the other corner of the lot, if Ellen
is going to be in New York. I would miss Lottie more than Ellen about
the housekeeping, though the dear knows I will miss them both badly
enough.”
“Well, you can break off their engagements,” said the judge.
As yet, and until Ellen was off her hands, Lottie would not allow Mr.
Elroy to consider himself engaged to her. His conditional devotion did
not debar him from a lover’s rights, and, until Breckon came on from
New York to be married, there was much more courtship of Lottie than
of Ellen in the house. But Lottie saved herself in the form if not the
fact, and as far as verbal terms were concerned, she was justified by
them in declaring that she would not have another sop hanging round.
It was Boyne, and Boyne alone, who had any misgivings in regard to
Ellen’s engagement, and these were of a nature so recondite that when
he came to impart them to his mother, before they left Scheveningen, and
while there was yet time for that conclusion which his father suggested
to Mrs. Kenton too late, Boyne had an almost hopeless difficulty in
stating them. His approaches, even, were so mystical that his mother was
forced to bring him to book sharply.
“Boyne, if you don’t tell me right off just what you mean, I don’t know
what I will do to you! What are you driving at, for pity’s sake? Are you
saying that she oughtn’t to be engaged to Mr. Breckon?”
“No, I’m not saying that, momma,” said Boyne, in a distress that caused
his mother to take a reef in her impatience.
“Well, what are you saying, then?”
“Why, you know how Ellen is, momma. You know how conscientious
and--and--sensitive. Or, I don’t mean sensitive, exactly.”
“Well?”
“Well, I don’t think she ought to be engaged to Mr. Breckon out
of--gratitude.”
“Gratitude?”
“Yes. I just know that she thinks--or it would be just like her--that he
saved me that day. But he only met me about a second before we came
to her and poppa, and the officers were taking me right along towards
them.” Mrs. Kenton held herself stormily in, and he continued: “I know
that he translated for us before the magistrate, but the magistrate
could speak a little English, and when he saw poppa he saw that it was
all right, anyway. I don’t want to say anything against Mr. Breckon, and
I think he behaved as well any one could; but if Ellen is going to marry
him out of gratitude for saving me--”
Mrs. Kenton could hold in no longer. “And is this what you’ve been
bothering the life half out of me for, for the last hour?”
“Well, I thought you ought to look at it in that light, momma.”
“Well, Boyne,” said his mother, “sometimes I think you’re almost a
fool!” and she turned her back upon her son and left him.
Boyne’s place in the Kenton family, for which he continued to have
the highest regard, became a little less difficult, a little less
incompatible with his self-respect as time went on. His spirit, which
had lagged a little after his body in stature, began, as his father
said, to catch up. He no longer nourished it so exclusively upon
heroical romance as he had during the past year, and after his return
to Tuskingum he went into his brother Richard’s once, and manifested a
certain curiosity in the study of the law. He read Blackstone, and could
give a fair account of his impressions of English law to his father.
He had quite outlived the period of entomological research, and he
presented his collections of insects (somewhat moth-eaten) to his
nephew, on whom he also bestowed his postage-stamp album; Mary Kenton
accepted them in trust, the nephew being of yet too tender years for
their care. In the preoccupations of his immediate family with Ellen’s
engagement, Boyne became rather close friends with his sister-in-law,
and there were times when he was tempted to submit to her judgment the
question whether the young Queen of Holland did not really beckon to him
that day. But pending the hour when he foresaw that Lottie should come
out with the whole story, in some instant of excitement, Boyne had not
quite the heart to speak of his experience. It assumed more and more
respectability with him, and lost that squalor which had once put him to
shame while it was yet new. He thought that Mary might be reasoned into
regarding him as the hero of an adventure, but he is still hesitating
whether to confide in her. In the meantime she knows all about it. Mary
and Richard both approved of Ellen’s choice, though they are somewhat
puzzled to make out just what Mr. Breckon’s religion is, and what his
relations to his charge in New York may be. These do not seem to them
quite pastoral, and he himself shares their uncertainty. But since his
flock does not include Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter, he is content to
let the question remain in abeyance. The Rasmiths are settled in Rome
with an apparent permanency which they have not known elsewhere for a
long time, and they have both joined in the friendliest kind of letter
on his marriage to their former pastor, if that was what Breckon was.
They have professed to know from the first that he was in love with
Ellen, and that he is in love with her now is the strong present belief
of his flock, if they are a flock, and if they may be said to have
anything so positive as a belief in regard to anything.
Judge Kenton has given the Elroys the other corner of the lot, and
has supplied them the means of building on it. Mary and Lottie run
diagonally into the home-house every day, and nothing keeps either from
coming into authority over the old people except the fear of each other
in which they stand. The Kentons no longer make any summer journeys, but
in the winter they take Boyne and go to see Ellen in New York. They do
not stay so long as Mrs. Kenton would like. As soon as they have fairly
seen the Breckons, and have settled comfortably down in their pleasant
house on West Seventy-fourth Street, she detects him in a secret habit
of sighing, which she recognizes as the worst symptom of homesickness,
and then she confides to Ellen that she supposes Mr. Kenton will
make her go home with him before long. Ellen knows it is useless
to interfere. She even encourages her father’s longings, so far as
indulging his clandestine visits to the seedsman’s, and she goes with
him to pick up second-hand books about Ohio in the War at the dealers’,
who remember the judge very flatteringly.
As February draws on towards March it becomes impossible to detain
Kenton. His wife and son return with him to Tuskingum, where Lottie
has seen to the kindling of a good fire in the furnace against their
arrival, and has nearly come to blows with Mary about provisioning them
for the first dinner. Then Mrs. Kenton owns, with a comfort which she
will not let her husband see, that there is no place like home, and they
take up their life in the place where they have been so happy and so
unhappy. He reads to her a good deal at night, and they play a game
of checkers usually before they go to bed; she still cheats without
scruple, for, as she justly says, he knows very well that she cannot
bear to be beaten.
The colonel, as he is still invariably known to his veterans, works
pretty faithfully at the regimental autobiography, and drives round the
country, picking up material among them, in a buggy plastered with
mud. He has imagined, since his last visit to Breckon, who dictates his
sermons, if they are sermons, taking a stenographer with him, and the
young lady, who is in deadly terror of the colonel’s driving, is of the
greatest use to him, in the case of veterans who will not or cannot
give down (as they say in their dairy-country parlance), and has already
rescued many reminiscences from perishing in their faltering memories.
She writes them out in the judge’s library when the colonel gets home,
and his wife sometimes surprises Mr. Kenton correcting them there at
night after she supposes he has gone to bed.
Since it has all turned out for the best concerning Bittridge, she no
longer has those pangs of self-reproach for Richard’s treatment of
him which she suffered while afraid that if the fact came to Ellen’s
knowledge it might make her refuse Breckon. She does not find her
daughter’s behavior in the matter so anomalous as it appears to the
judge.
He is willing to account for it on the ground of that inconsistency
which he has observed in all human behavior, but Mrs. Kenton is not
inclined to admit that it is so very inconsistent. She contends that
Ellen had simply lived through that hateful episode of her psychological
history, as she was sure to do sooner or later and as she was destined
to do as soon as some other person arrived to take her fancy.
If this is the crude, common-sense view of the matter, Ellen herself is
able to offer no finer explanation, which shall at the same time be more
thorough. She and her husband have not failed to talk the affair over,
with that fulness of treatment which young married people give their
past when they have nothing to conceal from each other. She has
attempted to solve the mystery by blaming herself for a certain
essential levity of nature which, under all her appearance of gravity,
sympathized with levity in others, and, for what she knows to the
contrary, with something ignoble and unworthy in them. Breckon, of
course, does not admit this, but he has suggested that she was first
attracted to him by a certain unseriousness which reminded her of
Bittridge, in enabling him to take her seriousness lightly. This is the
logical inference which he makes from her theory of herself, but she
insists that it does not follow; and she contends that she was moved to
love him by an instant sense of his goodness, which she never lost, and
in which she was trying to equal herself with him by even the desperate
measure of renouncing her happiness, if that should ever seem her duty,
to his perfection. He says this is not very clear, though it is awfully
gratifying, and he does not quite understand why Mrs. Bittridge’s letter
should have liberated Ellen from her fancied obligations to the past.
Ellen can only say that it did so by making her so ashamed ever to have
had anything to do with such people, and making her see how much she had
tried her father and mother by her folly. This again Breckon contends
is not clear, but he says we live in a universe of problems in which
another, more or less, does not much matter. He is always expecting
that some chance shall confront him with Bittridge, and that the man’s
presence will explain everything; for, like so many Ohio people who
leave their native State, the Bittridges have come East instead of going
West, in quitting the neighborhood of Tuskingum. He is settled with his
idolized mother in New York, where he is obscurely attached to one of
the newspapers. That he has as yet failed to rise from the ranks in
the great army of assignment men may be because moral quality tells
everywhere, and to be a clever blackguard is not so well as to be simply
clever. If ever Breckon has met his alter ego, as he amuses himself in
calling him, he has not known it, though Bittridge may have been wiser
in the case of a man of Breckon’s publicity, not to call it distinction.
There was a time, immediately after the Breckons heard from Tuskingum
that the Bittridges were in New York, when Ellen’s husband consulted her
as to what might be his duty towards her late suitor in the event which
has not taken place, and when he suggested, not too seriously, that
Richard’s course might be the solution. To his suggestion Ellen
answered: “Oh no, dear! That was wrong,” and this remains also Richard’s
opinion.