The Kentons. William Dean Howells
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excuse, in the hope that his father might change his mind and ask him to come into the house with him; he felt it so forlorn for him to be going through those lifeless rooms alone. When he looked round, and saw his father holding the door ajar, as if impatiently waiting for him to be gone, he laughed and waved his hand to him. “All right, father? I’m going now.” But though he treated the matter so lightly with his father, he said grimly to his wife, as he passed her on their own porch, on his way to his once, “I don’t like to think of father being driven out of house and home this way.”
“Neither do I, Dick. But it can’t be helped, can it?”
“I think I could help it, if I got my hands on that fellow once.”
“No, you couldn’t, Dick. It’s not he that’s doing it. It’s Ellen; you know that well enough; and you’ve just got to stand it.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Richard Kenton.
“Of course, my heart aches for your poor old father, but so it would if Ellen had some kind of awful sickness. It is a kind of sickness, and you can’t fight it any more than if she really was sick.”
“No,” said the husband, dejectedly. “You just slip over there, after a while, Mary, if father’s gone too long, will you? I don’t like to have him there alone.”
“‘Deed and ‘deed I won’t, Dick. He wouldn’t like it at all, my spying round. Nothing can happen to him, and I believe your mother’s just made an excuse to send him after something, so that he can be in there alone, and realize that the house isn’t home any more. It will be easier for him to go to Europe when he finds that out. I believe in my heart that was her idea in not wanting me to find the things for him, and I’m not going to meddle myself.”
With the fatuity of a man in such things, and with the fatuity of age regarding all the things of the past, Kenton had thought in his homesickness of his house as he used to be in it, and had never been able to picture it without the family life. As he now walked through the empty rooms, and up and down the stairs, his pulse beat low as if in the presence of death. Everything was as they had left it, when they went out of the house, and it appeared to Kenton that nothing had been touched there since, though when he afterwards reported to his wife that there was not a speck of dust anywhere she knew that Mary had been going through the house, in their absence, not once only, but often, and she felt a pang of grateful jealousy. He got together the things that Mrs. Kenton had pretended to want, and after glancing in at the different rooms, which seemed to be lying stealthily in wait for him, with their emptiness and silence, he went down-stairs with the bundle he had made, and turned into his library. He had some thought of looking at the collections for his history, but, after pulling open one of the drawers in which they were stored, he pushed it to again, and sank listlessly into his leather-covered swivel-chair, which stood in its place before the wide writing-table, and seemed to have had him in it before he sat down. The table was bare, except for the books and documents which he had sent home from time to time during the winter, and which Richard or his wife had neatly arranged there without breaking their wraps. He let fall his bundle at his feet, and sat staring at the ranks of books against the wall, mechanically relating them to the different epochs of the past in which he or his wife or his children had been interested in them, and aching with tender pain. He had always supposed himself a happy and strong and successful man, but what a dreary ruin his life had fallen into! Was it to be finally so helpless and powerless (for with all the defences about him that a man can have, he felt himself fatally vulnerable) that he had fought so many years? Why, at his age, should he be going into exile, away from everything that could make his days bright and sweet? Why could not he come back there, where he was now more solitary than he could be anywhere else on earth, and reanimate the dead body of his home with his old life? He knew why, in an immediate sort, but his quest was for the cause behind the cause. What had he done, or left undone? He had tried to be a just man, and fulfil all his duties both to his family and to his neighbors; he had wished to be kind, and not to harm any one; he reflected how, as he had grown older, the dread of doing any unkindness had grown upon him, and how he had tried not to be proud, but to walk meekly and humbly. Why should he be punished as he was, stricken in a place so sacred that the effort to defend himself had seemed a kind of sacrilege? He could not make it out, and he was not aware of the tears of self-pity that stole slowly down his face, though from time to time he wiped them away.
He heard steps in the hall without, advancing and pausing, which must be those of his son coming back for him, and with these advances and pauses giving him notice of his approach; but he did not move, and at first he did not look up when the steps arrived at the threshold of the room where he sat. When he lifted his eyes at last he saw Bittridge lounging in the door-way, with one shoulder supported against the door-jamb, his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed well back on his forehead. In an instant all Kenton’s humility and soft repining were gone. “Well, what is it?” he called.
“Oh,” said Bittridge, coming forward. He laughed and explained, “Didn’t know if you recognized me.”
“I recognized you,” said Kenton, fiercely. “What is it you want?”
“Well, I happened to be passing, and I saw the door open, and I thought maybe Dick was here.”
It was on Kenton’s tongue to say that it was a good thing for him Dick was not there. But partly the sense that this would be unbecoming bluster, and partly the suffocating resentment of the fellow’s impudence, limited his response to a formless gasp, and Bittridge went on: “But I’m glad to find you here, judge. I didn’t know that you were in town. Family all well in New York?” He was not quelled by the silence of the judge on this point, but, as if he had not expected any definite reply to what might well pass for formal civility, he now looked aslant into his breast-pocket from which he drew a folded paper. “I just got hold of a document this morning that I think will interest you. I was bringing it round to Dick’s wife for you.” The intolerable familiarity of all this was fast working Kenton to a violent explosion, but he contained himself, and Bittridge stepped forward to lay the paper on the table before him. “It’s the original roster of Company C, in your regiment, and—”
“Take it away!” shouted Kenton, “and take yourself away with it!” and he grasped the stick that shook in his hand.
A wicked light came into Bittridge’s eye as he drawled, in lazy scorn, “Oh, I don’t know.” Then his truculence broke in a malicious amusement. “Why, judge, what’s the matter?” He put on a face of mock gravity, and Kenton knew with helpless fury that he was enjoying his vantage. He could fall upon him and beat him with his stick, leaving the situation otherwise undefined, but a moment’s reflection convinced Kenton that this would not do. It made him sick to think of striking the fellow, as if in that act he should be striking Ellen, too. It did not occur to him that he could be physically worsted, or that his vehement age would be no match for the other’s vigorous youth. All he thought was that it would not avail, except to make known to every one what none but her dearest could now conjecture. Bittridge could then publicly say, and doubtless would say, that he had never made love to Ellen; that if there had been any love-making it was all on her side; and that he had only paid her the attentions which any young man might blamelessly pay a pretty girl. This would be true to the facts in the case, though it was true also that he had used every tacit art to make her believe him in love with her. But how could this truth be urged, and to whom? So far the affair had been quite in the hands of Ellen’s family, and they had all acted for the best, up to the present time. They had given Bittridge no grievance in making him feel that he was unwelcome in their house, and they were quite within their rights in going away, and making it impossible for him to see her again anywhere in Tuskingum. As for his seeing her in New York, Ellen had but to say that she did not wish it, and that would end it. Now, however, by treating him rudely, Kenton was aware that he had bound himself to render Bittridge some account of his behavior throughout, if the fellow insisted upon it.
“I want nothing to do with you, sir,” he said, less violently, but, as he felt, not more effectually. “You are in my house without my invitation, and against my wish!”
“I didn’t expect to find you here.