A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 10

Lord! I wouldn't want to, and I ain't his father nor yet his girl. Would you?"

"Hardly," said Thane. "Still, if you felt about it as Mr. Withers does, you'd put yourself in the place of the dead, not the living; and he has a reason for coming, besides. I haven't spoken of it, because I doubt if the thing is feasible. He wants to see whether the water, of the spring can be brought into the hollow here--piped, to feed a permanent drinking trough and fountain. Good for evil, you see--the soft answer."

"Well, that's business! That gits down where a man lives. His cattle kin come in on that, too. There's more in that, to my mind, than in a bare wooden cross. Pity there won't be more teamin' on this road. Now the stage has hauled off, I don't expect as many as three outfits a year will water at that fountain, excusin' the sheep, and they'll walk over it and into it, and gorm up the whole place."

"Well, the idea has been a great comfort to Mr. Withers, but it's not likely anything more will ever come of it. From all we hear, the spring would have to run up hill to reach this hollow; but you won't speak of it, will you, till we know?"

"Gosh, no! But water might be struck higher up the gulch--might sink a trench and cut off the spring."

"That would depend on the source," said Thane, "and on how much the old gentleman is willing to stand; the fountain alone, by the time you haul the stone here, will foot up pretty well into the thousands. But we'll see."

"Hadn't you better stay round here with them till I git back?" Kinney suggested; for Thane had taken the empty canteens from the wagon, and was preparing to go with him to the spring. "You kin do your prospectin'

later."

"They would rather be by themselves, I think," said Thane. But seeing Mr.

Withers coming towards him, as if to speak, he turned back to meet him.

"You are going now to look for the spring, are you not?" the old gentleman asked, in his courteous, dependent manner.

"Yes, Mr. Withers. Is there anything I can do for you first?"

"Nothing, I thank you." The old gentleman looked at him half expectantly, but Thane was not equal, in words, to the occasion. "This is the place, Mr.

Thane," he cadenced, in his measured, clerical tones. "This is the spot that last saw my dear boy alive,--that witnessed his agony and death."

He extended a white, thin, and now shaking hand, which Thane grasped, uncovering his head. Mr. Withers raised his left hand; his pale eyes blinked in the sunlight; they were dim with tears.

"In memory of John Withers," he p.r.o.nounced, "foully robbed of life in this lonely spot, we three are gathered here,--his friend, his father, and his bride that should have been." Thane's eyes were on the ground, but he silently renewed his grasp of the old man's hand. "May G.o.d be our Guide as we go hence to finish our separate journeys! May He help us to forgive as we hope to be forgiven! May He teach us submission! But, O Lord! Thou knowest it is hard."

"Mr. Withers is a parson, ain't he?" Kinney inquired, as he and Thane, each leading one of the team horses, and with an empty canteen swinging by its strap from his shoulder, filed down the little stony gulch that puckers the first rising ground to riverward of the hollow. "Thought he seemed to be makin' a prayer or askin' a blessin' or somethin', when he had holt of you there by the flipper; kind of embarra.s.sin', wa'n't it?"

"That's as one looks at it," said Thane. "Mr. Withers is a clergyman; his manner may be partly professional, but he strikes one as always sincere.

And he hasn't a particle of self-consciousness where his grief for his son is concerned. I don't know that he has about anything. He calls on his Maker just as naturally as you and I, perhaps, might take his name in vain."

"No, sir! I've quit that," Mr. Kinney objected. "I drawed the line there some years ago, on account of my wife, the way she felt about it, and the children growin' up. I quit when I was workin' round home, and now I don't seem to miss it none. I git along jest as well. Course I have to cuss a little sometimes. But I liked the way you listened to the old man's warblin'. Because talkin' is a man's trade, it ain't to say he hasn't got his feelin's."

As the hill cut off sounds of retreating voices and horseshoes clinking on the stones, a stillness that was a distinct sensation brooded upon the hollow. Daphne sighed as if she were in pain. She had taken off her veil, and now she was peeling the gloves from her white wrists and warm, unsteady hands. Her face, exposed, hardly sustained the promise of the veiled suggestion; but no man was ever known to find fault with it so long as he had hopes; afterwards--but even then it was a matter of temperament. There were those who remembered it all the more keenly for its daring deviations and provoking shortcomings.

It could not have been said of Daphne that her grief was without self-consciousness. Still, much of her constraint and unevenness of manner might have been set down to the circ.u.mstances of her present position. Why she should have placed herself, or have allowed her friends to place her, in an att.i.tude of such unhappy publicity Thane had asked himself many times, and the question angered him as often as it came up. He could only refer it to the singularly unprogressive ideas of the Far West peculiar to Far Eastern people. Apparently they had thought that, barring a friend or two of Jack's, they would be as much alone with their tragic memories in the capital city of Idaho as at this abandoned stage-station in the desert where their pilgrimage had ended. They had not found it quite the same.

Daphne could, and probably did, read of herself in the "Silver Standard,"

Sunday edition, which treats of social events, heralded among the prominent arrivals as "Jack Withers's maiden widow." This was a poetical flight of the city reporter. Thane had smiled at the phrase, but that was before he had seen Daphne; since then, whenever he thought of it, he pined for a suitable occasion for punching the reporter's head. There had been more of his language; the paper had given liberally of its s.p.a.ce to celebrate this interesting advent of the maiden widow with her uncle, "the Rev. Withers,"

as the reporter styled him, "father of the lamented young man whose shocking murder, two years ago, at Pilgrim Station, on the eve of his return to home and happiness, cast such a gloom over our community, in which the victim of the barbarous deed had none but devoted friends and admirers. It is to be hoped that the reverend gentleman and the bereaved young lady, his companion on this sad journey, will meet with every mark of attention and respect which it is in the power of our citizens to bestow, during their stay among us."

Now, in the dead, hot stillness, they two alone at last, Daphne sat beside her uncle in the place of their solemn tryst; and more than ever her excitement and unrest were manifest, in contrast to his mild and chastened melancholy. She started violently as his voice broke the silence in a measured, musing monotone:

"'Drink, weary pilgrim, drink and pray For the poor soul of Sibyl Grey, Who built this cross and well.'

"These lines," he continued in his ordinary prose accent, "gave me my first suggestion of a cross and well at Pilgrim Station, aided, perhaps, by the name itself, so singularly appropriate; not at all consistent, Mr. Thane tells me, with the usual haphazard nomenclature of this region. However, this is the old Oregon emigrant trail, and in the early forties men of education and Christian sentiment were pioneers on this road. But now that I see the place and the country round it, I find the Middle Ages are not old enough to borrow from. We must go back, away back of chivalry and monkish superst.i.tion, to the life-giving pools of that country where the story of man began; where water, in the language of its people, was justly made the symbol of their highest spiritual as well as physical needs and cravings. 'And David longed, and said, Oh, that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Beth-lehem, that is at the gate!' It is a far cry here to any gate but the gate of sunset, which we have been traveling against from morning to evening since our journey began, yet never approaching any nearer. But this, nevertheless, is the country of David's well,--a dry, elevated plain, surrounded by mountains strangely gashed and riven and written all over in Nature's characters, but except for the speech of a wandering, unlettered people, dumb as to the deeds of man. Mr.

Thane tells me that if the wells on this road were as many as the deaths by violence have been, we might be pasturing our horses in green fields at night, instead of increasing their load with the weight of their food as well as our own. Yes, it is a 'desolate land and lone;' and if we build our fountain, according to my first intention, in the form of a cross, blessing and shadowing the water, it must be a rude and ma.s.sive one, such as humble shepherds or herdsmen might accidentally have fashioned in the dark days before its power and significance were known. It will be all the more enduring, and the text shall be"--

"Uncle," cried Daphne in a smothered voice, "never mind the text! _I_ am your text! Listen to me! If your cross stood there now, here is the one who should be in the dust before it!" She pressed her open hand upon her breast.

The gesture, her emphasis, the extreme figure of speech she had used, were repellent to Mr. Withers over and above his amazement at her words. As he had not been observing her, he was totally unprepared for such an outburst.

"Daphne, my dear! Do I understand you? I cannot conceive"--

But Daphne could not wait for her meaning to sink in. "Uncle John," she interrupted, taking a quick breath of resolution, "I have read somewhere that if a woman is dishonest, deep down, deliberately a hypocrite, she ought to be gently and mercifully killed; a woman not honest had better not be alive. Uncle, I have something to say to you about myself. Gently and mercifully listen to me, for it ought to kill me to say it!"

Mr. Withers turned apprehensively, and was startled by the expression of Daphne's face. She was undoubtedly in earnest. He grew quite pale. "Not here, my dear," he entreated; "not now. Let our thoughts be single for this one hour that we shall be alone together. Let it wait for a little, this woeful confession. I think you probably exaggerate your need of it, as young souls are apt to who have not learned to bear the pain of self-knowledge, or self-reproach without knowledge. Let us forget ourselves, and think of our beloved dead."

"Uncle, it must be here and now. I cannot go away from this place a liar, as I came. Let me leave it here,--my cowardly, contemptible falsehood,--in this place of your cross. I am longing, like David, for that water they have gone to find, but I will not drink at Pilgrim Station, except with clean lips that have confessed and told you all."

Mr. Withers shrank from these unrestrained and to him indecorous statements of feeling; they shocked him almost as much as would the spectacle of Daphne mutilating her beautiful hair, casting dust upon her head, and rending her garments before him. He believed that her trouble of soul was genuine, but his Puritan reserve in matters of conscience, his scholarly taste, his jealousy for the occasion which had brought them to that spot, all combined to make this unrestrained expression of it offensive to him.

However, he no longer tried to repress her.

"Uncle, you don't believe me," she said; "but you must. I am quite myself."

"Except for the prolonged nervous strain you have been suffering; and I am afraid I have not known how to spare you as I might the fatigue, the alt.i.tude perhaps, the long journey face to face with these cruel memories.

But I will not press it, I will not press it," he concluded hastily, seeing that his words distressed her.

"Press it all you can," she said. "I wish you could press it hard enough for me to feel it; but I feel nothing--I am a stone. At this moment," she reiterated, "I have no feeling of any kind but shame for myself that I should be here at all. Oh, if you only knew what I am!"

"It is not what you are, it is who you are, that brings you here, Daphne."

"Yes, who I am! Who am I? What right had I to come here? I never loved him.

I never was engaged to him, but I let you think so. When you wrote me that sweet letter and called me your daughter, why didn't I tell you the truth?

Because in that same letter you offered me his money--and--and I wanted the money. I lied to you then, when you were in the first of your grief, to get his money! I have been trying to live up to that He ever since. It has almost killed me; it has killed every bit of truth and decent womanly pride in me. I want you to save me from it before I grow any worse. You must take back the money. It did one good thing: it paid those selfish debts of mine, and it made mother well. What has been spent I will work for and pay back as I can. But I love _you_, uncle John; there has been no falsehood there."

"This is the language of sheer insanity, Daphne, of mental excitement that pa.s.ses reason." Mr. Withers spoke in a carefully controlled but quivering voice--as a man who has been struck an unexpected and staggering blow, but considering the quarter it came from, is prepared to treat it as an accident. "The facts, John's own words in his last letter to me, cannot be gainsaid. 'I am coming home to you, dad, and to whom else I need not say.

You know that I have never changed, but she has changed, G.o.d bless her!

How well He made them, to be our thorn, our spur, our punishment, our prevention, and sometimes our cure! I am coming home to be cured,' he said.

You have not forgotten the words of that letter, dear? I sent it to you, but first--I thought you would not mind--I copied those, his last words.

They were words of such happiness; and they implied a thought, at least, of his Creator, if not that grounded faith"--

"They were hopes, only hopes!" the girl remorsefully disclaimed. "I allowed him to have them because I wanted time to make up my wretched, selfish mind. I had never made him a single promise, never said one word that could give me the right to pose as I did afterwards, to let myself be grieved over as if I had lost my last hope on earth. I had his money all safe enough."

"Daphne, I forbid you to speak in that tone! There are bounds even to confession. If you think well to degrade yourself by such allusions, do not degrade me by forcing me to listen to you. This is a subject too sacred to be discussed in its mercenary bearings; settle that question with yourself as you will, but let me hear no more of it."

Daphne was silenced; for the first time in her remembrance of him she had seen her uncle driven to positive severity, to anger even, in opposition to the truth which his heart refused to accept. When he was calmer he began to reason with her, to uphold her in the true faith, against her seeming self, in these profane and ruthless disclosures.

"You are morbid," he declared, "oversensitive, from dwelling too long on this painful chapter of your life. No one knows better than myself what disorders of the imagination may result from a mood of the soul, a pa.s.sing mood,--the pains of growth, perhaps. You are a woman now; but let the woman not be too hard upon the girl that she was. After what you have been through quite lately, and for two years past, I p.r.o.nounce you mentally unfit to cope with your own condition. Say that you did not promise him in words; the promise was given no less in spirit. How else could he have been so exaltedly sure? He never was before. You had never before, I think, given him any grounds for hope?"

"No; I was always honest before," said Daphne humbly. "When I first refused him, when we were both such children, and he went away, I promised to answer his letters if he would let _that_ subject rest. And so I did. But every now and then he would try me again, to see if I had changed, and that letter I would not answer; and presently he would write again, in his usual way. As often as he brought up the old question, just so often I stopped writing; silence was always my answer, till that last winter, when I made my final attempt to do something with my painting and failed so miserably.

You don't know, uncle, how hard I have worked, or what it cost me to fail,--to have to own that all had been wasted: my three expensive winters in Boston, my cutting loose from all the little home duties, in the hope of doing something great that would pay for all. And that last winter I did not make my expenses, even. After borrowing every cent that mother could spare (more than she ought to have spared; it was doing without a girl that broke her down) and denying myself, or denying her, my home visit at Christmas; and setting up in a studio of my own, and taking pains to have all the surroundings that are said to bring success,--and then, after all, to fail, and fail, and fail! And spring came, and mother looked so ill, and the doctor said she must have rest, total rest and change; and he looked at me as if he would like to say, 'You did it!' Well, the 'rest' I brought her was my debts and my failure and remorse; and I wasn't even in good health, I was so used up with my winter's struggle. It was then, in the midst of all that trouble and shame and horror at myself, his sweet letter came. No, not sweet, but manly and generous,--utterly generous, as he always was. I ought to have loved him, uncle dear; I always knew it, and I did try very hard! He did not feel his way this time, but just poured out his whole heart once for all; I knew he would never ask me again. And then the fatal word; he said he had grown rich. He could give me the opportunities my nature demanded. You know how he would talk. He believed in me, if n.o.body else ever did; I could not have convinced him that I was a failure.

"It was very soothing to my wounds. I was absolutely shaken by the temptation. It meant so much; such a refuge from self-contempt and poverty and blame, and such rest and comfort it would bring to mother! I hope that had something to do with it. You see I am looking for a loophole to crawl out of; I haven't strength of mind to face it without some excuse. Well, I answered that letter; and I think the evil one himself must have helped me, for I wrote it, my first careful, deliberate piece of double-dealing, just as easily as if I had been practicing for it all my life. It was such a letter as any man would have thought meant everything; yet if I had wanted, I could have proved by the words themselves that it meant nothing that couldn't be taken back.

"I said to myself, If I can stand it, if I can hold out as I feel now, I will marry him; then let come what may. I knew that some things would come, some things that I wanted very much.

"Then came the strange delay, the silence, the wretched telegrams and letters back and forth. Ah, dear, do I make you cry? Don't cry for him; you have not lost him. Cry for me, the girl you thought was good and pure and true! You know what I did then, when your dear letter came, giving me all he had, calling me your daughter, all that was left you of John! I deceived you in your grief, hating myself and loving you all the time. And here I am, in this place! Do you wonder I had to speak?"