A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 17

But Mrs. Barrington offers her young ladies those exceptional social opportunities which Western girls are supposed to need. If you want Elsie to be with Eastern girls of the East, let her go to a good Boston Latin school. Did you not go to one yourself, Mrs. Valentin?"

Mrs. Valentin laughed. "That was ages ago, and I was at home. I had the environment--an education in itself. Won't you dine with us, Bishop? We shall have dinner in half an hour."

"In half an hour I must be on the limited express. You seem to have made different connections."

"'The error was, we started wrong,'" said Mrs. Valentin lightly. "We took the morning instead of the evening train. But I was convinced we should be left, and I preferred to get left by the wrong train and have the right one to fall back on." She ceased her babble, as vain words die when there is a sense of no one listening.

Elsie stood at the window looking back into the room. She thought, "Mother doesn't know what she is saying. What is she worried about?"

The bishop was writing with a gold pencil on the margin of the newspaper.

He folded it with the writing on top.

"If you had consulted me about that child,"--he looked at Elsie,--"I should have said, 'Do not hurry her--do not hurry her. Her education will come as G.o.d sends it.' With experience, as with death, it is the prematureness that hurts."

His beautiful voice and perfect accent filled the silence with heart-warmed cadences.

"Well, good-by, Mrs. Valentin. Remember me to that busy husband."

Mrs. Valentin rose; the bishop took her hand. "Elsie will see me to the elevator. This is the evening paper."

He offered it with the writing toward her. Mrs. Valentin read what he had written: "Billy Castant was killed in the charge at San Juan. Every man in that fight deserves the thanks of the nation."

"Come, Elsie, see me to my carriage," the bishop was saying. He placed the girl's hand on his arm and led her out of the room. At the elevator grating they waited a moment; the cold draft up the shaft fanned the hair back from Elsie's forehead as she stood looking down, watching the ascent of the cage.

"It would be a happy thing," said the bishop, "if parents could always go with their children on these long roads of experience; but there are some roads the boys and the girls will have to take alone. We shall all meet at the other end, though--we shall all meet at the end."

Elsie walked up and down the hall awhile, dreading to go back to the room.

A band in the street below was playing an old war-song of the sixties, revived this battle summer of '98,--a song that was sung when the cost of that war was beginning to tell, "We shall meet, but we shall miss him."

Elsie knew the music; she had not yet learned the words.

Next morning Mr. Valentin received one of his wife's vague but thrifty telegrams, dated at Chicago, on Sunday night, July 3:

"We cannot go through with it. Expect us home Wednesday."

Mrs. Valentin had spent hours, years, in explaining to Elsie's father the many cogent and crying reasons for taking her East to be finished. It needed not quite five minutes to explain why she had brought her back.

Strangely, none of the friends of the family asked for an explanation of this sudden change of plan. But Elsie envies Gladys her black clothes, and the privilege of crying in public when the bands play and the troops go by.

"Such children--such mere children!" Mrs. Valentin sighs.

But she no longer speaks to Elsie about wrinkling her forehead or showing her boot-soles. It is eye to eye and heart to heart, and only straight talk between them now, as between women who know.

THE HARSHAW BRIDE

[Mrs. Tom Daly, of Bisuka in the Northwest, writes to her invalid sister spending the summer on the coast of Southern California.]

I

You know I am always ready to sacrifice truth to politeness, if the truth is of that poor, stingy upstart variety everybody is familiar with and if the occasion warrants the expense. We all know politeness is not cheap, any more than honesty is politic. But surely I mistook my occasion, one day last winter--and now behold the price!

We are to have a bride on our hands, or a bride-elect, for she isn't married yet. The happy man to be is rustling for a home out here in the wilds of Idaho while she is waiting in the old country for success to crown his efforts. How much success in her case is demanded one does not know.

She is a little English girl, upper middle cla.s.s, which Mrs. Percifer a.s.sures us is _the_ cla.s.s to belong to in England at the present day,--from which we infer that it's her cla.s.s; and the interesting reunion is to take place at our house--the young woman never having seen us in her life before.

She sailed, poor thing, this day week and will be forwarded to us by her confiding friends in New York as soon as she arrives. Meantime she will have heard from us from the Percifers: that is something.

Really they were very nice to us in New York, last winter, the Percifers--though one must not plume one's self too much. It began as a business flirtation down town between the husbands, and then Tom confidingly mentioned that he had a wife at his hotel. We unfortunate women were dragged into it forthwith, and more or less forced to live up to it.

I cannot say there was anything riotous in the way she sustained her part.

She was so very impersonal in fact, when we said good-by, that my natural tendency to invite people to come and stay with us, on the spur of any moment, was strangled in my throat.

But one must say something by way of retaliation for hospitality one cannot reject. So I put it off on any friends of theirs who might have occasion to command us in the West. We should be so happy, and so forth. And, my dear, she has taken me up on it! She's not impersonal now. She is so glad--for dear Kitty's sake--that we are here, and she is sure we will be very good to her--such a sweet girl, no one could help being--which rather cuts down the margin for our goodness. The poor child--I am quoting Mrs.

Percifer--knows absolutely no one in the West but the man she is coming to marry (?)and can have no conception of the journey she has before her.

She will be _so_ comforted to find us at the end of it. And if anything unforeseen should occur to delay Mr. Harshaw, the fiance, and prevent his meeting her train, it will be a vast relief to Kitty's friends to know that the dear brave little girl is in good hands--ours, if you can conceive it!

Please observe the coolness with which she treats his _not_ meeting that train, after the girl has traversed half the globe to compa.s.s her share of their meeting.

Well, it's not the American way; but perhaps it will be when bad times have humbled us a little more, and the question is whether we can marry our daughters at all unless we can give them dowries, or professions to support their husbands on, and "feelings" are a luxury only the rich can afford.

I hope "Kitty" won't have any; but still more I hope that her young man will arrive on schedule time, and that they can trot round the corner and be married, with Tom and me for witnesses, as speedily as possible.

I've had such a blow! Tom, with an effort, has succeeded in remembering this Mr. Harshaw who is poor Kitty's fate. He must have been years in this country,--long enough to have citizenized himself and become a member of our first Idaho legislature (I don't believe you even know that we are a State!). Tom was on the supper committee of the ball the city gave them.

They were a deplorable set of men; it was easy enough to remember the nice ones. Tom says he is a "chump," if you know what that means. I tell him that every man, married or single, is const.i.tutionally horrid to any other man who has had the luck to be chosen of a charming girl. But I'm afraid Harshaw wasn't one of the nice ones, or I should have remembered him myself; we had them to dinner--all who were at all worth while.

Poor Kitty! There is so little here to come for _but_ the man.

Well, my dear, here's a pretty kettle of fish! Kitty has arrived, and _one_ Mr. Harshaw. Where _the_ Mr. Harshaw is, _quien sabe_! It's awfully late.

Poor Kitty has gone to bed, and has cried herself to sleep, I dare say, if sleep she can. I never have heard of a girl being treated so.

Tom and the other Mr. Harshaw are smoking in the dining-room, and Tom is talking endlessly--what about I can't imagine, unless he is giving this young record-breaker his opinion of his extraordinary conduct. But I must begin at the beginning.

Mrs. Percifer wired us from New York the day the bride-elect started, and _she_ was to wire us from Ogden, which she did. I went to the train to meet her, and I told Tom to be on the watch for the bridegroom, who would come in from his ranch on the Snake River, by wagon or on horseback, across country from Ten Mile. To come by rail he'd have had to go round a hundred miles or so, by Mountain Home. An American would have done it, of course, and have come in with her on the train; but the Percifers plainly expected no such wild burst of enthusiasm from him.

The train was late. I walked and walked the platform; some of the people who were waiting went away, but I dared not leave my post. I fell to watching a spurt of dust away off across the river toward the mesa. It rolled up fast, and presently I saw a man on horseback; then I didn't see him; then he had crossed the bridge and was pounding down the track-side toward the depot. He pulled up and spoke to a trainman, and after that he walked his horse as if he was satisfied.

This is Harshaw, I thought, and a very pretty fellow, but not in the least like an Idaho legislator. I can't say that I care for the sort of Englishman who is so prompt to swear allegiance to our flag; they never do unless they want to go in for government land, or politics, or something that has nothing to do with any flag. But this youngster looked ridiculously young. I simply knew he was coming for that girl, and that he had no ulterior motives whatever. He was ashy-white with dust--hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and his fair little mustache all powdered with it; his corduroys, leggings, and hat all of a color. I saw no baggage, and I wondered what he expected to be married in. He leaned on his horse dizzily a moment when he first got out of the saddle, and the poor beast stretched his fore legs, and rocked with the gusts of his panting, his sides going in and out like a pair of bellows. The young fellow handed him over to a man to take to the stables, and I saw him give him a regular bridegroom's tip. He's all right, I said to myself, and Tom _was_ horrid to call him a "chump." He beat himself off a bit, and went in and talked to the ticket-agent. They looked at their watches.

"I don't think you'll have time to go uptown," said the ticket-man.

Harshaw came out then, and _he_ began to walk the platform, and to stare down the track toward Nampa; so I sat down. Presently he stopped, and raised his hat, and asked if I was Mrs. Daly, a friend of Mrs. Percifer of London and New York.

Not to be boastful, I said that I knew Mrs. Percifer.

"Then," said he, "we are here on the same errand, I think."