“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 Dick 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 assented, 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 pass, 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 passed up the neatly kept walk from the gate, between the blooming ranks of syringas and snowballs, to his door, and witnessed the faithful care that Richard’s hired man had bestowed upon every detail. The grass 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.”