The Kentons. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let them know he was in town, and then he was hurt that they ignored him. He kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought that it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New York, and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the indifference of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his local distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the pleasant younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up at one, he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had outlived the period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city as he world once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except the basements of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and picked up copies of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he read them, he sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away with the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see, with compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by these means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently proposed to go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.

      He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the winter wore away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute instructions for getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the book-stalls by conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife could see that he had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find from one as from the other.

      She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope, for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with a kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six weeks before he left his room.

      He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and he was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that when his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for him he submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. Her heart smote her for her guilty joy in his sentence, and she punished herself by asking if it would not do him more good to get back to the comfort and quiet of their own house. She went to the length of saying that she believed his attack had been brought on more by homesickness than anything else. But the doctor agreed rather with her wish than her word, and held out that his melancholy was not the cause but the effect of his disorder. Then she took courage and began getting ready to go. She did not flag even in the dark hours when Kenton got back his courage with his returning strength, and scoffed at the notion of Europe, and insisted that as soon as they were in Tuskingum he should be all right again.

      She felt the ingratitude, not to say the perfidy, of his behavior, and she fortified herself indignantly against it; but it was not her constant purpose, or the doctor’s inflexible opinion, that prevailed with Kenton at last a letter came one day for Ellen which she showed to her mother, and which her mother, with her distress obscurely relieved by a sense of its powerful instrumentality, brought to the girl’s father. It was from that fellow, as they always called him, and it asked of the girl a hearing upon a certain point in which, it had just come to his knowledge, she had misjudged him. He made no claim upon her, and only urged his wish to right himself with her because she was the one person in the whole world, after his mother, for whose good opinion he cared. With some tawdriness of sentiment, the letter was well worded; it was professedly written for the sole purpose of knowing whether, when she came back to Tuskingum, she would see him, and let him prove to her that he was not wholly unworthy of the kindness she had shown him when he was without other friends.

      “What does she say?” the judge demanded.

      “What do you suppose?” his wife retorted. “She thinks she ought to see him.”

      “Very well, then. We will go to Europe.”

      “Not on my account!” Mrs. Kenton consciously protested.

      “No; not on your account, or mine, either. On Nelly’s account. Where is she? I want to talk with her.”

      “And I want to talk with you. She’s out, with Lottie; and when she comes back I will tell her what you say. But I want to know what you think, first.”

III.

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      It was some time before they arrived at a common agreement as to what Kenton thought, and when they reached it they decided that they must leave the matter altogether to Ellen, as they had done before. They would never force her to anything, and if, after all that her mother could say, she still wished to see the fellow, they would not deny her.

      When it came to this, Ellen was a long time silent, so long a time that her mother was beginning restively to doubt whether she was going to speak at all. Then she drew a long, silent breath. “I suppose I ought to despise myself, momma, for caring for him, when he’s never really said that he cared for me.”

      “No, no,” her mother faltered.

      “But I do, I do!” she gave way piteously. “I can’t help it! He doesn’t say so, even now.”

      “No, he doesn’t.” It hurt her mother to own the fact that alone gave her hope.

      The girl was a long time silent again before she asked, “Has poppa got the tickets?”

      “Why, he wouldn’t, Ellen, child, till he knew how you felt,” her mother tenderly reproached her.

      “He’d better not wait!” The tears ran silently down Ellen’s cheeks, and her lips twitched a little between these words and the next; she spoke as if it were still of her father, but her mother understood. “If he ever does say so, don’t you speak a word to me, momma; and don’t you let poppa.”

      “No; indeed I won’t,” her mother promised. “Have we ever interfered, Ellen? Have we ever tried to control you?”

      “He WOULD have said so, if he hadn’t seen that everybody was against him.” The mother bore without reply the ingratitude and injustice that she knew were from the child’s pain and not from her will. “Where is his letter? Give me his letter!” She nervously twitched it from her mother’s hand and ran it into her pocket. She turned away to go and put off her hat, which she still wore from coming in with Lottie; but she stopped and looked over her shoulder at her mother. “I’m going to answer it, and I don’t want you ever to ask me what I’ve said. Will you?”

      “No, I won’t, Nelly.”

      “Well, then!”

      The next night she went with Boyne and Lottie to the apartment overhead to spend their last evening with the young people there, who were going into the country the next day. She came back without the others, who wished to stay a little longer, as she said, with a look of gay excitement in her eyes, which her mother knew was not happiness. Mrs. Kenton had an impulse to sweep into her lap the lithograph plans of the steamer, and the passage ticket which lay open on the table before herself and her husband. But it was too late to hide them from Ellen. She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down again. “Oh, I didn’t think you would do it!” she burst out; and she ran away to her room, where СКАЧАТЬ