A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 15

In Elsie's voice there was an edge of resistance, hearing which her mother, when she was wise, would let speech die and silence do its work. Her influence with the girl was strongest when least insisted upon. She was not wiser than usual that morning, but the noise of the train made niceties of statement impossible. She abandoned the argument perforce, and Elsie, left with her retort unanswered, acknowledged its cheapness in her own quick, strong, wordless way.

The dining-car would not be attached to the train until they reached Ogden. At twilight they stopped "twenty minutes for refreshment," and the Valentins took the refreshment they needed most by pacing the platform up and down,--the tall daughter, in her severely cut clothes, shortening her boyish stride to match her mother's step; the mother, looking older than she need, in a light-gray traveling-cap, with Elsie's golf cape thrown over her silk waist.

The Eastern travelers were walking too. They had their tea out of an English tea-basket, and bread and b.u.t.ter from the buffet, and were independent of supper stations. With the Valentins it was sheer improvidence and want of appet.i.te.

"Please notice that girl's step," said Mrs. Valentin, pressing Elsie's arm.

"'Art is to conceal art.' It has taken years of the best of everything, and eternal vigilance besides, to create such a walk as that; but _c'est fait_.

You don't see the entire sole of her foot every time she takes a step."

"Having a certain other person's soles in view, mammy?"

"I'm afraid I should have them in full view if you came to meet me. Not the heel quite so p.r.o.nounced, dearest."

"Oh, mother, please leave that to Mrs. Barrington! Let us be comrades for these few days."

"Dearest, it would be the happiness of my life to be never anything but a comrade. But who is to nag a girl if not her mother? I very much doubt if Mrs. Barrington will condescend to speak of your boot-soles. She will expect all that to have been attended to long ago."

"It has been--a thousand years ago. Sometimes I feel that I'm all boot-soles."

"The moment I see some result, dear, I shall be satisfied. One doesn't speak of such things for their own sake."

"Can't we get a paper?" asked Elsie. "What is that they are shouting?"

"I don't think it can be anything new. We brought these papers with us on the train. But we can see. No; it's just what we had this morning. They are preparing for a general a.s.sault. There will be heavy fighting to-morrow.

Why, that is to-day!" Mrs. Valentin held the newspaper at arm's length.

"Is there anything more? I can read only the head-lines."

The girl took the paper and looked at it with a certain reluctance, narrowing her eyelids.

"Mother, there was something else in Gladys's letter. Billy Castant has enlisted with the Rough Riders. He was in that fight at Las Guasimas, while we were packing our trunks. He did badly again in his exams, and he--he didn't go home; he just enlisted."

"The foolish fellow!" Mrs. Valentin exclaimed. A sharp intuition told her there was trouble in the wind, and defensively she turned upon the presumptive cause. "The foolish boy! What he needs is an education. But he won't work for it. It's easier to go off mad and be a Rough Rider."

"I don't think it was easy at Las Guasimas," Elsie said, with a strained little laugh. "You remember the last war, mother; did you belittle your volunteers?"

Mrs. Valentin listened with a catch in her breath. What did this portend?

So slight a sign as that in Elsie meant tears and confessions from another girl.

"And did you hear of this only just now, from Gladys's letter?"

"Yes, mother."

"You extraordinary child--your father all over again! I might have known by the way you laughed over that letter that you had bad news to tell--or keep to yourself."

"I don't call that bad news, do you, mother? He does need an education, but he will never get it out of books."

"Well, it's a pretty severe sort of education for his parents--nineteen, an only son, and to go without seeing them again. He might at least have come home and enlisted from his own State."

They were at the far end of the platform, facing the dark of the pine-clad ravines. Deep, odorous breaths of night wind came sighing up the slopes.

"Mother, there was something happened last winter that I never told you,"

Elsie began again, with pauses. "It was so silly, and there seemed no need to speak of it. But I can't bear not to speak now. I don't know if it has made any difference--with Billy's plans. It seems disloyal to tell you. But you must forget it: he's forgotten, I am sure. He said--those silly things, you know! I couldn't have told you then; it was too silly. And I said that I didn't think it was for him or for me to talk about such things. It was for men and women, not boys who couldn't even get their lessons."

"Elsie!" Mrs. Valentin gave a little choked laugh. "Did you say that? The poor boy! Why, I thought you were such good friends!"

"He wasn't talking friendship, mother, and I was furious with him for flunking his exams. He pa.s.sed in only five out of seven. He ought to have done better than that. He's not stupid; it's that fatal popularity. He's captain of this and manager of that, and they give him such a lot of money.

And they pet him, too; they make excuses for him all the time. I told him he must _do_ something before he began to have feelings. The only feeling he had any right to have was shame for his miserable record."

"And that was all the encouragement you gave him?"

"If you call that 'encouragement,'" said Elsie.

"You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given him the right to come back to you with it."

"He will never come back to me without it," said the girl. "But it was nothing--nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper that went to his head."

"I hope it was nothing more than"--Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. "Well, I see nothing to be ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a girl in spite of herself. And the boys--they simply forget. The rebuke does them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It's just one of those things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!"

Elsie slipped her hand under her mother's cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed her own down hard upon it.

"We must get aboard, dear. But I'm so glad you told me! And I didn't mean quite what I said about Billy's 'going off mad.' He has given all he had to give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair."

"I hope--what I told you--has made no difference about his coming home.

It's stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don't they, mother? Hard words--to an old friend!"

"Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with him! 'For to be wroth with one we'"--Mrs. Valentin had another of her narrow escapes. "Come, there is the porter waiting for us."

"Mother," said Elsie sternly, "please don't misunderstand. I should never have spoken of this if I had been 'wroth' with him--in that way."

"Of course not, dear; I understand. And it would never do, anyway, for father doesn't like the blood."

"Father doesn't like the--what, mother?"

Elsie asked the question half an hour later, as they sat in an adjoining section, waiting for their berths to be made up.

"What, dear?"

"What did you say father doesn't like--in the Castants?"

"Oh, the blood, the family. This generation is all right--apparently. But blood will tell. You are too young to know all the old histories that fathers and mothers read young people by."

"I think we are what we are," said Elsie; "we are not our great-grandfathers."

"In a measure we are, and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect of that ancestry," and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) "The fountain can rise no higher than its source."

"I thought there was supposed to be a source a little higher than the ground--unless we are no more than earth-born fountains."