第32章 X.(1)

When they left the breakfast table the first morning of the rough weather, Breckon offered to go on deck with Miss Kenton, and put her where she could see the waves. That had been her shapeless ambition, dreamily expressed with reference to some time, as they rose. Breckon asked, "Why not now?" and he promised to place her chair on deck where she could enjoy the spectacle safe from any seas the boat might ship.

Then she recoiled, and she recoiled the further upon her father's urgence. At the foot of the gangway she looked wistfully up the reeling stairs, and said that she saw her shawl and Lottie's among the others solemnly swaying from the top railing. "Oh, then," Breckon pressed her, "you could be made comfortable without the least trouble.""I ought to go and see how Lottie is getting along," she murmured.

Her father said he would see for her, and on this she explicitly renounced her ambition of going up. "You couldn't do anything," she said, coldly.

"If Miss Lottie is very sea-sick she's beyond all earthly aid," Breckon ventured. "She'd better be left to the vain ministrations of the stewardess."Ellen looked at him in apparent distrust of his piety, if not of his wisdom. "I don't believe I could get up the stairs," she said.

"Well," he admitted, "they're not as steady as land--going stairs." Her father discreetly kept silence, and, as no one offered to help her, she began to climb the crazy steps, with Breckon close behind her in latent readiness for her fall.

From the top she called down to the judge, "Tell momma I will only stay a minute." But later, tucked into her chair on the lee of the bulkhead, with Breckon bracing himself against it beside her, she showed no impatience to return. "Are they never higher than that" she required of him, with her wan eyes critically on the infinite procession of the surges.

"They must be," Breckon answered, "if there's any truth in common report.

I've heard of their running mountains high. Perhaps they used rather low mountains to measure them by. Or the measurements may not have been very exact. But common report never leaves much to the imagination.""That was the way at Niagara," the girl assented; and Breckon obligingly regretted that he had never been there. He thought it in good taste that she should not tell him he ought to go. She merely said, "I was there once with poppa," and did not press her advantage. "Do they think," she asked, " that it's going to be a very long voyage?""I haven't been to the smoking-room--that's where most of the thinking is done on such points; the ship's officers never seem to know about it--since the weather changed. Should you mind it greatly?""I wouldn't care if it never ended," said the girl, with such a note of dire sincerity that Breckon instantly changed his first mind as to her words implying a pose. She took any deeper implication from them in adding, "I didn't know I should like being at sea.""Well, if you're not sea-sick," be assented, "there are not many pleasanter things in life."She suggested, "I suppose I'm not well enough to be sea-sick." Then she seemed to become aware of something provisional in his attendance, and she said, "You mustn't stay on my account. I can get down when I want to.""Do let me stay," he entreated, "unless you'd really rather not," and as there was no chair immediately attainable, he crouched on the deck beside hers.

"It makes me think," she said, and he perceived that she meant the sea, "of the cold-white, heavy plunging foam in 'The Dream of Fair Women.'

The words always seemed drenched!"

"Ah, Tennyson, yes," said Breckon, with a disposition to smile at the simple-heartedness of the literary allusion. "Do young ladies read poetry much in Ohio?""I don't believe they do," she answered. "Do they anywhere?""That's one of the things I should like to know. Is Tennyson your favorite poet?""I don't believe I have any," said Ellen. "I used to like Whither, and Emerson; aid Longfellow, too.""Used to! Don't you now?"

"I don't read them so much now," and she made a pause, behind which he fancied her secret lurked. But he shrank from knowing it if he might.

"You're all great readers in your family," he suggested, as a polite diversion.

"Lottie isn't," she answered, dreamily. "She hates it.""Ah, I referred more particularly to the others," said Breckon, and he began to laugh, and then checked himself. "Your mother, and the judge--and your brother--"

"Boyne reads about insects," she admitted.

"He told me of his collection of cocoons. He seems to be afraid it has suffered in his absence.""I'm afraid it has," said Ellen, and then remained silent.

"There!" the young man broke out, pointing seaward. "That's rather a fine one. Doesn't that realize your idea of something mountains high?

Unless your mountains are very high in Ohio!""It is grand. And the gulf between! But we haven't any in our part.

It's all level. Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?""Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to begin counting.""Yes," said the girl, and she added, vaguely: "I suppose it's like everything else in that. We have to make-believe before we can believe anything.""Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary," Breckon assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. "We shouldn't have the atomic theory without it." She did not say anything, and he decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading.

He tried to be more concrete. "We have to make-believe in ourselves before we can believe, don't we? And then we sometimes find we are wrong!" He laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:

"And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in yourself?""That's what I'm trying to decide," he replied. "Sometimes I feel like renouncing myself altogether; but usually I give myself another chance.

I dare say if I hadn't been so forbearing I might have agreed with your sister about my unfitness for the ministry.""With Lottie?"

"She thinks I laugh too much!"