A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories. Mary Hallock Foote
you write me about this terrible heat?"
"Why didn't you write me that you were not well?"
"I am well."
"You don't look it—anything but."
"I am always ghastly after a journey. It isn't a question of health that brought me. But—never mind. Ring for Ito, will you? I want my keys."
At dinner she looked ten years younger, sitting opposite him in her summery lawns and laces. She tasted the cold wine soup, but ate nothing, watching her husband's appetite with the mixed wonder and concern that thirty years' knowledge of its capacities had not diminished. He studied her face meanwhile; he was accustomed to reading faces, and hers he knew by line and precept. He listened to her choked little laughs and hurried speeches. All her talk was mere postponement; she was fighting for time. Hence he argued that the trouble which had sent her flying home to him from the mountains was not fancy-bred. Of her imaginary troubles she was ready enough to speak.
The moon had risen, a red, dry-weather moon, when they walked out into the garden and climbed the slope under low orchard boughs. The trees were young, too quickly grown; like child mothers, they had lost their natural symmetry, overburdened with hasty fruition. Each slender parent trunk was the centre of a host of artificial props, which saved the sinking boughs from breaking. Under one of these low green tents they stopped and handled the great fruit that fell at a touch.
"How everything rushes to maturity here! The roses blossom and wither the same hour. The peaches burst before they ripen. Don't you think it oppresses one, all this waste fertility, such an excess of life and good living, one season crowding upon another? How shall we get rid of all these kindly fruits of the earth?"
She did not wait for an answer to her morbid questions. They moved on up a path between hedges of sweet peas going to seed, and blackberry-vines covered with knots of fruit dried in their own juices. A wall of gigantic Southern cane hid the boundary fence, and above it the night-black pines of the forest towered, their breezy monotone answering the roar of the hundred stamps below the hill.
A few young pines stood apart on a knoll, a later extension of the garden, ungraded and covered with pine-needles. In the hollow places native shrubs, surprised by irrigation, had made an unwonted summer's growth.
Here, in the blanching moon, stood a tent with both flaps thrown back. A wind of coolness drew across the hill; it lifted one of the tent-curtains mysteriously; its touch was sad and searching.
Mrs. Thorne put back the canvas and stepped inside. She saw a folding camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the edge of the cot and picked up a discarded necktie, sawing it across her knee mechanically to free it from the dust. Her husband placed himself beside her. His weight brought down the mattress and rocked her against his shoulder; he put his arm around her, and she gave way to a little sob.
"When has he written to you?" she asked. "Since he went down?"
"I think so. Let me see! When did you hear last?"
"I have brought his last letter with me. I wondered if he had told you."
"I have heard nothing—nothing in particular. What is it?"
"The inevitable woman."
"She has come at last, has she? Come to stay?"
"He is engaged to her."
Mr. Thorne breathed his astonishment in a low whistle. "You don't like it?" he surmised at once.
"Like it! If it were merely a question of liking! She is impossible. She knows it, her people know it, and they have not told him. It remains"—
"What is the girl's name?"
"Henry, she is not a girl! That is, she is a girl forced into premature womanhood, like all the fruits of this hotbed climate. She is that Miss Benedet whom you helped, whom you saved—how many years ago? When Willy was a schoolboy."
"Well, she was saved, presumably."
"Saved from what, and by a total stranger!"
"She made no mistake in selecting the stranger. I can testify to that; and she was as young as he, my dear."
"A girl is never as young as a boy of the same age. She is a woman now, and she has taken his all—everything a man can give to his first—and told him nothing!"
"Are you sure it's the same girl? There are other Benedets."
"She is the one. His letter fixes it beyond a question—so innocently he fastens her past upon her! And he says, 'She is "a woman like a dewdrop."' I wonder if he knows what he is quoting, and what had happened to that woman!"
"Dewdrops don't linger long in the sun of California. But she was undeniably the most beautiful creature this or any other sun ever shone on."
"And he is the sweetest, sanest, cleanest-hearted boy, and the most innocent of what a woman may go through and still be fair outside!"
"Why, that is why she likes him. It speaks well for her, I think, that she hankers after that kind of a boy."
"It speaks volumes for what she lacks herself! Don't misunderstand me. I hope I am not without charity for what is done and never can be undone—though charity is hardly the virtue one would hope to need in welcoming a son's wife. It is her ghastly silence now that condemns her."
Mr. Thorne heaved a sigh, and changed his feet on the gritty tent floor. He stooped and picked up some small object on which he had stepped, a collar-stud trodden flat. He rolled it in his fingers musingly.
"She may be getting up her courage to tell him in her own time and way."
"The time has gone by when she could have told him honorably. She should have stopped the very first word on his lips."
"She couldn't do that, you know, and be human. She couldn't be expected to spare him at such a cost as that. Mighty few men would be worth it."
"If he wasn't worth it she could have let him go. And the family! Think of their accepting his proposal in silence. Why, can they even be married, Henry, without some process of law?"
"Heaven knows! I don't know how far the other thing had gone—far enough to make questions awkward."
Husband and wife remained seated side by side on the son's deserted bed. The shape of each was disconsolately outlined to the other against the tent's illumined walls. Now a wind-swayed branch of manzanita rasped the canvas, and cast upon it shadows of its moving leaves.
"It's pretty rough on quiet old folks like us, with no money to get us into trouble," said Mr. Thorne. "The boy is not a beauty, he's not a swell. He is just a plain, honest boy with a good working education. If you judge a woman, as some say you can, by her choice of men, she shouldn't be very far out of the way."
"It is very certain you cannot judge a man by his choice of women."
"You cannot judge a boy by the women that get hold of him. But Willy is not such a babe as you think. He's a deuced quiet sort, but he's not been knocking around by himself these ten years, at school and college and vacations, without picking up an idea or two—possibly about women. Experience, I grant, he probably lacks; but he has the true-bred instinct. We always have trusted him so far; I'm willing to trust him now. If there are things he ought to know about this woman, leave him to find them out for himself."
"After he has married her! And you don't even know whether a marriage is possible without some sort of shuffling or concealment; do you?"
"I don't, but they probably do. Her family aren't going to get themselves into that kind of a scrape."
"I have no opinion whatever of the family. I think they would accept any kind of a compromise that money can buy."
"Very likely, and so would we if we had a daughter"—
"Why,