A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories. Mary Hallock Foote
we have a daughter! It is our daughter, all the daughter we shall ever call ours, that you are talking about. And to think of the girls and girls he might have had! Lovely girls, without a flaw—a flaw! She will fall to pieces in his hand. She is like a broken vase put together and set on the shelf to look at."
"Now we are losing our sense of proportion. We must sleep on this, or it will blot out the whole universe for us."
"It has already for me. I haven't a shadow of faith in anything left."
"And I haven't read the paper. Suppose the boy were in Cuba now!"
"I wish he were! It is a judgment on me for wanting to save him up, for insisting that the call was not for him."
"That's just it, you see. You have to trust a man to know his own call. Whether it's love or war, he is the one who has got to answer."
"But you will write to him to-morrow, Henry? He must be saved, if the truth can save him. Think of the awakening!"
"My dear, if he loves her there will be no awakening. If there is, he will have to take his dose like other men. There is nothing in the truth that can save him, though I agree with you that he ought to know it—from her."
"If you had only told her your name, Henry! Then she would have had a fingerpost to warn her off our ground. To think what you did for her, and how you are repaid!"
"It was a very foolish thing I did for her; I wasn't proud of it. That was one reason why I did not tell her my name."
Mr. Thorne removed his weight from the cot. The warped wires twanged back into place.
"Come, Maggie, we are too old not to trust in the Lord—or something. Anyhow, it's cooler. I believe we shall sleep to-night."
"And haven't I murdered sleep for you, you poor old man? What a thing it is to have nerve and no nerves! I know you feel just as wrecked as I do. I wish you would say so. I want it said to the uttermost. If I could but—our only boy—our boy of 'highest hopes'! You remember the dear old Latin words in his first 'testimonials'?"
"They must have been badly disappointed in their girl, and I suppose they had their 'hopes,' too."
"They should not drag another into the pit, one too innocent to have imagined such treachery."
"I wouldn't make too much of his innocence. He is all right so far as we know; he's got precious little excuse for not being: but there is no such gulf between any two young humans; there can't be, especially when one is a man. Take my hand. There's a step there."
Two shapes in white, with shadows preposterously lengthening, went down the hill. The long, dark house was open now to the night.
* * * * *
There is no night in the "stilly" sense at a mine.
The mill glared through all its windows from the gulch. Sentinel lights kept watch on top. The hundred stamps pounded on. If they ceased a moment, there followed the sob of the pump, or the clang of a truck-load of drills dumped on the floor of the hoisting-works, or the thunder of rock in the iron-bound ore-bins. All was silence on the hill; but a wakeful figure wrapped in white went up and down the empty porches, light as a dead leaf on the wind. It was the mother, wasting her night in grievous thinking, sighing with weariness, pining for sleep, dreading the day. How should they presume to tell that woman's story, knowing her only through one morbid chapter of her earliest youth, which they had stumbled upon without the key to it, or any knowledge of its sequel? She longed to feel that they might be merciful and not tell it. She coveted happiness for her son, and in her heart was prepared for almost any surrender that would purchase it for him. If the lure were not so great! If the woman were not so blinding fair, why, then one might find a virtue in excusing her, in condoning her silence, even. But, clothed in that power, to have pretended innocence as well!
The roar of the stamp-heads deadened her hearing of the night's subtler noises. Her thoughts went grinding on, crushing the hard rock of circumstance, but incapable of picking out the grains of gold therein. Later siftings might discover them, but she was reasoning now under too great human pressure for delicate analysis.
She saw the planets set and the night-mist cloak the valley. By four o'clock daybreak had put out the stars. She went to her room then and fell asleep, awakening after the heat had begun, when the house was again darkened for the day's siege.
She was still postponing, wandering through the darkened rooms, peering into closets and bureau drawers to see, from force of habit, how Ito discharged his trust.
At luncheon she asked her husband if he had written. He made a gesture expressing his sense of the hopelessness of the situation in general.
"You know how I came by my knowledge, and how little it amounts to as a question of facts."
"Henry, how can you trifle so! You believe, just as I do, that such facts would wreck any marriage. And you are not the only one who knows them. I think your knowledge was providentially given you for the saving of your son."
"My son is a man. I can't save him. And take my word for it, he will go all lengths now before he will be saved."
"Let him go, then, with his eyes open, not blindfold, in jeopardy of other men's tongues."
Mr. Thorne rose uneasily.
"Do as you think you must; but it rather seems to me that I am bound to respect that woman's secret."
"You wish that you had not told me."
"Well, I have, and I suppose that was part of the providence. It is in your hands now; be as easy on her as you can."
With a view to being "easy," Mrs. Thorne resolved not to expatiate, but to give the story on plain lines. The result was hardly as merciful as might have been expected.
* * * * *
"DEAR WILLY," she wrote: "Prepare yourself for a most unhappy letter [what woman can forego her preface?]—unhappy mother that I am, to have such a message laid upon me. But you will understand when you have read why the cup may not pass from us. If ever again a father or a mother can help you, my son, you have us always here, poor in comfort though we are. It seems that the comforters of our childhood have little power over those hurts that come with strength of years.
"Seven years ago this summer your father went to the city on one of his usual trips. Everything was usual, except that at Colfax he noticed a pair of beautiful thoroughbred horses being worked over by the stablemen, and a young fellow standing by giving directions. The horses had been overridden in the heat. It was such weather as we are having now. The young man, who appeared to have everything to say about them, was of the country sporting type, distinctly not the gentleman. In a cattle country he would have been a cowboy simply. Your father thought he might have been employed on some of the horse-breeding ranches below Auburn as a trainer of young stock. He even wondered if he could have stolen the animals.
"But as the train moved out it appeared he had appropriated something of greater value—a young girl, also a thoroughbred.
"It did not need the gossip of the train-hands to suggest that this was an elopement of a highly sensational kind. Father was indignant at the jokes. You know it is a saying with the common sort of people that in California elopements become epidemic at certain seasons of the year—like earthquake shocks or malaria. The man was handsome in a primitive way—worlds beneath the girl, who was simply and tragically a lady. Father sat in the same car with them, opposite their section. It grew upon him by degrees that she was slowly awakening, as one who has been drugged, to a stupefied consciousness of her situation. He thought there might still be room for help at the crisis of her return to reason (I mean all this in a spiritual sense), and so he kept near them. They talked but little together. The girl seemed stunned, as I say, by physical exhaustion or that dawning comprehension in which your father fancied he recognized the tragic element of the situation.
"The young man was outwardly self-possessed, as horsemen are, but he seemed constrained with the girl. They had no conversation, no topics in common. He kept his place beside her, often watching her in