"But couldn"t you SEE," the girl reproached her, and she began to cry, and turned her face into the pillow again and lay sobbing.
"Well," said her mother, after she had given her a little time, "you needn"t be troubled. Your father can easily get the ticket again; he can telephone down for it. Nothing has been done yet. But didn"t you really want to stay, then?"
"It isn"t whether I want to stay or not," Ellen spoke into her pillow.
"You know that. You know that I have got to go. You know that if I saw him--Oh, why do you make me talk?"
"Yes, I understand, child." Then, in the imperious necessity of blaming some one, Mrs. Kenton added: "You know how it is with your father. He is always so precipitate; and when he heard what you said, last night, it cut him to the heart. He felt as if he were dragging you away, and this morning he could hardly wait to get through his breakfast before he rushed down to the steamship office. But now it"s all right again, and if you want to go, we"ll go, and your father will only be too glad."
"I don"t want father to go against his will. You said he never wanted to go to Europe." The girl had turned her face upon her mother again; and fixed her with her tearful, accusing eyes.
"The doctors say he ought to go. He needs the change, and I think we should all be the better far getting away."
"I shall not," said Ellen. "But if I don"t--"
"Yes," said her mother, soothingly.
"You know that nothing has changed. He hasn"t changed and I haven"t. If he was bad, he"s as bad as ever, and I"m just as silly. Oh, it"s like a drunkard! I suppose they know it"s killing them, but they can"t give it up! Don"t you think it"s very strange, momma? I don"t see why I should be so. It seems as if I had no character at all, and I despise myself so! Do you believe I shall ever get over it? Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go into an asylum."
"Oh yes, dear; you"ll get over it, and forget it all. As soon as you see others--other scenes--and get interested--"
"And you don"t you don"t think I"d better let him come, and--"
"Ellen!"
Ellen began to sob again, and toss her head upon the pillow. "What shall I do? What shall I do?" she wailed. "He hasn"t ever done anything bad to me, and if I can overlook his--his flirting--with that horrid thing, I don"t know what the rest of you have got to say. And he says he can explain everything. Why shouldn"t I give him the chance, momma? I do think it is acting very cruel not to let him even say a word."
"You can see him if you wish, Ellen," said her mother, gravely. "Your father and I have always said that. And perhaps it would be the best thing, after all."
"Oh, you say that because you think that if I did see him, I should be so disgusted with him that I"d never want to speak to him again. But what if I shouldn"t?"
"Then we should wish you to do whatever you thought was for your happiness, Ellen. We can"t believe it would be for your good; but if it would be for your happiness, we are willing. Or, if you don"t think it"s for your happiness, but only for his, and you wish to do it, still we shall be willing, and you know that as far as your father and I are concerned, there will never be a word of reproach--not a whisper."
"Lottie would despise me; and what would Richard say?"
"Richard would never say anything to wound you, dear, and if you don"t despise yourself, you needn"t mind Lottie."
"But I should, momma; that"s the worst of it! I should despise myself, and he would despise me too. No, if I see him, I am going to do it because I am selfish and wicked, and wish to have my own way, no matter who is harmed by it, or--anything; and I"m not going to have it put on any other ground. I could see him," she said, as if to herself, "just once more--only once more--and then if I didn"t believe in him, I could start right off to Europe."
Her mother made no answer to this, and Ellen lay awhile apparently forgetful of her presence, inwardly dramatizing a pa.s.sionate scene of dismissal between herself and her false lover. She roused herself from the reverie with a long sigh, and her mother said, "Won"t you have some breakfast, now; Ellen?"
"Yes; and I will get up. You needn"t be troubled any more about me, momma. I will write to him not to come, and poppa must go back and get his ticket again."
"Not unless you are doing this of your own free will, child. I can"t have you feeling that we are putting any pressure upon you."
"You"re not. I"m doing it of my own will. If it isn"t my free will, that isn"t your fault. I wonder whose fault it is? Mine, or what made me so silly and weak?"
"You are not silly and weak," said her mother, fondly, and she bent over the girl and would have kissed her, but Ellen averted her face with a piteous "Don"t!" and Mrs. Kenton went out and ordered her breakfast brought back.
She did not go in to make her eat it, as she would have done in the beginning of the girl"s trouble; they had all learned how much better she was for being left to fight her battles with herself singlehanded.
Mrs. Kenton waited in the parlor till her husband same in, looking gloomy and tired. He put his hat down and sank into a chair without speaking. "Well?" she said.
"We have got to lose the price of the ticket, if we give it back. I thought I had better talk with you first," said Kenton, and he explained the situation.
"Then you had better simply have it put off till the next steamer. I have been talking with Ellen, and she doesn"t want to stay. She wants to go." His wife took advantage of Kenton"s mute amaze (in the nervous vagaries even of the women nearest him a man learns nothing from experience) to put her own interpretation on the case, which, as it was creditable to the girl"s sense and principle, he found acceptable if not imaginable. "And if you will take my advice," she ended, "you will go quietly back to the steamship office and exchange your ticket for the next steamer, or the one after that, if you can"t get good rooms, and give Ellen time to get over this before she leaves. It will be much better for her to conquer herself than to run away, for that would always give her a feeling of shame, and if she decides before she goes, it will strengthen her pride and self-respect, and there will be less danger--when we come back."
"Do you think he"s going to keep after her!"
"How can I tell? He will if he thinks it"s to his interest, or he can make anybody miserable by it."
Kenton said nothing to this, but after a while he suggested, rather timorously, as if it were something he could not expect her to approve, and was himself half ashamed of, "I believe if I do put it off, I"ll run out to Tuskingum before we sail, and look after a little matter of business that I don"t think d.i.c.k can attend to so well."
His wife knew why he wanted to go, and in her own mind she had already decided that if he should ever propose to go, she should not gainsay him. She had, in fact, been rather surprised that he had not proposed it before this, and now she a.s.sented, without taxing him with his real motive, and bringing him to open disgrace before her. She even went further in saying: "Very well, then you had better go. I can get on very well here, and I think it will leave Ellen freer to act for herself if you are away. And there are some things in the house that I want, and that Richard would be sure to send his wife to get if I asked him, and I won"t have her rummaging around in my closets. I suppose you will want to go into the house?"
"I suppose so," said Renton, who had not let a day pa.s.s, since he left his house, without spending half his homesick time in it. His wife suffered his affected indifference to go without exposure, and trumped up a commission for him, which would take him intimately into the house.
IV
The piety of his son Richard had maintained the place at Tuskingum in perfect order outwardly, and Kenton"s heart ached with tender pain as he pa.s.sed up the neatly kept walk from the gate, between the blooming ranks of syringas and s...o...b..a.l.l.s, to his door, and witnessed the faithful care that Richard"s hired man had bestowed upon every detail. The gra.s.s between the banks of roses and rhododendrons had been as scrupulously lawn-mowered and as sedulously garden-hosed as if Kenton himself had been there to look after its welfare, or had tended the shrubbery as he used to do in earlier days with his own hand. The oaks which he had planted shook out their glossy green in the morning gale, and in the tulip-trees, which had snowed their petals on the ground in wide circles defined by the reach of their branches, he heard the squirrels barking; a red-bird from the woody depths behind the house mocked the cat-birds in the quince-trees. The June rose was red along the trellis of the veranda, where Lottie ought to be sitting to receive the morning calls of the young men who were sometimes quite as early as Kenton"s present visit in their devotions, and the sound of Ellen"s piano, played fitfully and absently in her fashion, ought to be coming out irrespective of the hour. It seemed to him that his wife must open the door as his steps and his son"s made themselves heard on the walk between the box borders in their upper orchard, and he faltered a little.
"Look here, father," said his son, detecting his hesitation. "Why don"t you let Mary come in with you, and help you find those things?"
"No, no," said Kenton, sinking into one of the wooden seats that flanked the door-way. "I promised your mother that I would get them myself. You know women don"t like to have other women going through their houses."
"Yes, but Mary!" his son urged.
"Ah! It"s just Mary, with her perfect housekeeping, that your mother wouldn"t like to have see the way she left things," said Kenton, and he smiled at the notion of any one being housekeeper enough to find a flaw in his wife"s. "My, but this is pleasant!" he added. He took off his hat and let the breeze play through the lank, thin hair which was still black on his fine, high forehead. He was a very handsome old man, with a delicate aquiline profile, of the perfect Roman type which is perhaps oftener found in America than ever it was in Rome. "You"ve kept it very nice, d.i.c.k," he said, with a generalizing wave of his hat.
"Well, I couldn"t tell whether you would be coming back or not, and I thought I had better be ready for you."
"I wish we were," said the old man, "and we shall be, in the fall, or the latter part of the summer. But it"s better now that we should go--on Ellen"s account."
"Oh, you"ll enjoy it," his son evaded him.
"You haven"t seen anything of him lately?" Kenton suggested.
"He wasn"t likely to let me see anything of him," returned the son.
"No," said the father. "Well!" He rose to put the key into the door, and his son stepped down from the little porch to the brick walk.
"Mary will have dinner early, father; and when you"ve got through here, you"d better come over and lie down a while beforehand."
Kenton had been dropped at eight o"clock from a sleeper on the Great Three, and had refused breakfast at his son"s house, upon the plea that the porter had given him a Southern cantaloupe and a cup of coffee on the train, and he was no longer hungry.
"All right," he said. "I won"t be longer than I can help." He had got the door open and was going to close it again.
His son laughed. "Better not shut it, father. It will let the fresh air in."