A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories. Mary Hallock Foote
himself. She appeared to have a certain power over him, even in her helplessness, but it was slipping from her. In her eyes, as they rested upon him in the hot daylight, your father believed that he saw a wild and gathering repulsion. So he kept near them.
"The train was late, having waited at Colfax two hours for the Eastern Overland, else they would have been left, those two, and your father—but such is fate!
"It was ten o'clock when they reached Oakland. He lost the pair for a moment in the crowd going aboard the boat, but saw the girl again far forward, standing alone by the rail. He strolled across the deck, not appearing to have seen her. She moved a trifle nearer; with her eyes on the water, speaking low as if to herself, she said:—
"'I am in great danger. Will you help me? If you will, listen, but do not speak or come any nearer. Be first, if you can, to go ashore; have a carriage ready, and wait until you see me. There will be a moment, perhaps—only a moment. Do not lose it. You understand? He, too, will have to get a carriage. When he comes for me I shall be gone. Tell the driver to take me to—' she gave the number of a well-known residence on Van Ness Avenue.
"He looked at her then, and said quietly, 'The Benedet house is closed for the summer.'
"She hung her head at the name. 'Promise me your silence!' she implored in the same low, careful voice.
"'I will protect you in every way consistent with common sense,' your father answered, 'but I make no promises.'
"'I am at your mercy,' she said, and added, 'but not more than at his.'
"'Is this a case of conspiracy or violence?' your father asked.
"She shook her head. 'I cannot accuse him. I came of my own free will. That is why I am helpless now.'
"'I do not see how I can help you,' said father.
"'You can help me to gain time. One hour is all I ask. Will you or not?' she said. 'Be quick! He is coming.'
"'I must go with you, then,' your father answered, 'I will take you to this address, but I need not tell you the house is empty.'
"'There are people in the coachman's lodge,' she answered. Then her companion approached, and no more was said.
"But the counter-elopement was accomplished as only your father could manage such a matter on the spur of the moment—consequences accepted with his usual philosophy and bonhomie. If he could have foreseen all the consequences, he would not, I think, have refused to give her his name.
"He left her at the side entrance, where she rang and was admitted by an oldish, respectable looking man, who recognized her evidently with the greatest surprise. Then your father carried out her final order to wire Norwood Benedet, Jr., at Burlingame, to come home that night to the house address and save—she did not say whom or what; there she broke off, demanding that your father compose a message that should bring him as sure as life and death, but tell no tales. I do not know how she may have put it—these are my own words.
"There was a paragraph in one newspaper, next morning, which gave the girl's full name, and a fancy sketch of her elopement with the famous range-rider Dick Malaby. This was just after the close of the cattlemen's war in Wyoming. Malaby had fought for one of the ruined English companies. (The big owners lost everything, as you know. The country was up in arms against them; they could not protect their own men.) Malaby's employers were friends of the Benedets, and had asked a place with them for their liegeman. He was a desperado with a dozen lives upon his head, but men like Norwood Benedet and his set would have been sure to make a pet of him. One could see how it all had come about, and what a terrible publicity such a name associated with hers would give a girl for the rest of her life.
"But money can do a great deal. Society was out of town; the newspapers that society reads were silent.
"It was announced a few days later that Mrs. Benedet and her daughter Helen had gone East on their way to Europe. As Mr. Benedet's health was very bad—this was only six months before he died—society wondered; but it has been accustomed to wondering about the Benedets.
"Mrs. Benedet came home at the time of her husband's death and remained for a few months, but Helen was kept away. You know they have continually been abroad for the last seven years, and Helen has never been seen in society here. When you spoke of 'Miss Benedet' I no more thought of her than if she had not been living. Aunt Frances met them last winter at Cannes, and Mrs. Benedet said positively that they had no intention of coming back to California ever to live. Aunt Frances wondered why, with their beautiful homes empty and going to destruction. I have told you the probable reason. Whether it still exists, God knows—or what they have done with that man and his dreadful knowledge.
"Helen Benedet may have changed her spiritual identity since she made that fatal journey, but she can hardly have forgotten what she did. She must know there is a man who, if he lives, holds her reputation at the mercy of his silence. Money can do a great deal, but it cannot do everything.
"I am tempted to wish that we—your father and I—could share your ignorance, could trust as you do. Better a common awakening for us all, than that I should be the one necessity has chosen to apply the torture to my son.
"The misery of this will make you hate my handwriting forever. But why do I babble? You do not hear me. God help you, my dear!"
* * * * *
These words, descriptive of her own emotions, Mrs. Thorne on re-reading scored out, and copied the last page.
She did not weep. She ached from the impossibility of weeping. She stumbled away from her desk, tripping in her long robes, and stretched herself out at full length on the floor, like a girl in the first embrace of sorrow. But hearing Ito's footsteps, she rose ashamed, and took an attitude befitting her years.
The letter was absently sealed and addressed; there was no reason why the shaft should not go home. Yet she hesitated. It were better that she should read it to her husband first.
The sun dropped below the piazza roof and pierced the bamboo lattices with lines and slits of fervid light.
"From heat to heat the day declined."
The gardener came with wet sacking and swathed the black-glazed jardinières, in which the earth was steaming. The mine whistle blared, and a rattle of miners' carts followed, as the day-shift dispersed to town. The mine did not board its proletariate. At his usual hour the watchman braved the blinding path, and left the evening paper on the piazza floor. There it lay unopened. Mrs. Thorne fanned herself and looked at it. There must be fighting in Cuba; she did not move to see. Other mothers' sons were dying; what was death to such squalor as hers? Sorrow is a queen, as the poet says, and sits enthroned; but Trouble is a slave. Mothers with griefs like hers must suffer in the fetters of silence.
When dinner was over, Ito made his nightly pilgrimage through the house, opening bedroom shutters, fastening curtains back. He drew up the piazza-blinds, and like a stage-scene, framed in post and balustrade, and bordered with a tracery of rose-vines, the valley burst upon the view. Its cool twilight colors, its river-bed of mist, added to the depth of distance. Against it the white roses looked whiter, and the pink ones caught fire from the intense, great afterglow.
The silent couple, drinking their coffee outside, drew a long mutual sigh.
"Every day," said Mrs. Thorne, "we wonder why we stay in such a place, and every evening we are cajoled into thinking there never can be such another day. And the beauty is just as fresh every night as the heat is preposterous by day."
"It's a great strain on the men," said Mr. Thorne. "We lost two of our best hands this week—threw down their tools and quit, for some tomfoolery they wouldn't have noticed a month ago. The bosses irritate the men, and the men get fighting mad in a minute. Not one of them will bear the weight of a word, and I don't blame them. The work is hard enough in decent weather; they are dropping off sick every day. The night-shift boys can't sleep in their hot little houses—they look as if they'd all been on a two weeks' tear. The next improvement we make I shall build a rest-house where the night-shift can turn in and sleep inside of stone walls, without crying babies and