A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 2

"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 tw.a.n.ged 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 a.n.a.lysis.

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 w.i.l.l.y," 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 pa.s.s 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 silence, but he did not obtrude 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 ash.o.r.e; 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 d.i.c.k 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 a.s.sociated 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.