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A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories

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A Touch of Sun and Other Stories

by

Mary Hallock Foote







CONTENTS


A TOUCH OF SUN

THE MAID'S PROGRESS

PILGRIMS TO MECCA

THE HARSHAW BRIDE




A TOUCH OF SUN


I

The five-o'clock whistle droned through the heat. Its deep, consequential
chest-note belonged by right to the oldest and best paying member of the
Asgard group, a famous mining property of northern California.

The Asgard Company owned a square league of prehistoric titles on the
western slope of the foot-hills,--land enough for the preservation of a
natural park within its own boundaries where fire-lines were cleared,
forest-trees respected, and roads kept up. Wherever the company erected a
board fence, gate, or building, the same was methodically painted a color
known as "monopoly brown." The most conspicuous of these objects cropped
out on the sunset dip of the property where the woods for twenty years
had been cut, and the Sacramento valley surges up in heat and glare, with
yearly visitations of malaria.

Higher than the buildings in brown, a gray-shingled bungalow ranged itself
on the lap of its broad lawns against a slope of orchard tops climbing to
the dark environment of the forest. Not the original forest: of that only
three stark pines were left, which rose one hundred feet out of a gulch
below the house and lent their ancient majesty to the modern uses of
electric wires and telephone lines. Their dreaming tops were in the sky;
their feet were in the sluicings of the stamp-mill that reared its long
brown back in a semi-recumbent posture, resting one elbow on the hill; and
beneath the valley smouldered, a pale mirage by day, by night a vision of
color transcendent and rich as the gates of the Eternal City.

At half past five the night watchman, on his way from town, stopped at
the superintendent's gate, ran up the blazing path, and thrust a newspaper
between the dark blue canvas curtains that shaded the entrance of the
porch. For hours the house had slept behind its heat defenses, every
shutter closed, yards of piazza blind and canvas awning fastened down. The
sun, a ball of fire, went slowly down the west. Rose-vines drooped against
the hanging lattices, printing their watery lines of split bamboo with
a shadow-pattern of leaf and flower. The whole house-front was decked
with dead roses, or roses blasted in full bloom, as if to celebrate with
appropriate insignia the passing of the hottest day of the year.

Half-way down the steps the watchman stopped, surprised by a voice from
behind the curtains. He came back in answer to his name.

A thin white hand parted the curtain an inch or two. There was the flicker
of a fan held against the light.

"Oh, Hughson, will you tell Mr. Thorne that I am here? He doesn't know I
have come."

"Tell him that Mrs. Thorne is home?" the man translated slowly.

"Yes. He does not expect me. You will tell him at once, please?"

"Yes, ma'am."

The curtain was fastened again from inside. A woman's step went restlessly
up and down, up and down the long piazza floors, now muffled on a rug, now
light on a matting, or distinct on the bare boards.

Later a soft Oriental voice inquired, "Wha' time Missa Tho'ne wanta dinna?"

"The usual time, Ito," came the answer; "make no difference for me."

"Lika tea--coffee--after dinna?"

"Tea--iced. Have you some now? Oh, bring it, please!"

After an interval: "Has Mr. Thorne been pretty well?"

"I think."

"It is very hot. How is your kitchen--any better than it was?"

"Missa Tho'ne fixa more screen; all open now, thank you."

"Take these things into my dressing-room. No; there will be no trunk. I
shall go back in a few days."

The gate clashed to. A stout man in a blaze of white duck came up the
path, lifting his cork helmet slightly to air the top of his head. As he
approached it could be seen that his duck was of a modified whiteness, and
that his beard, even in that forcing weather, could not be less than a two
days' growth. He threw his entire weight on the steps one by one, as he
mounted them slowly. The curtains were parted for him from within.

"Well, Margaret?"

"Well, dear old man! How hot you look! _Why_ do you not carry an umbrella?"

"Because I haven't got you here to make me. What brought you back in such
weather? Where is your telegram?"

"I did not telegraph. There was no need. I simply had to speak to you at
once--about something that could not be written."

"Well, it's good to have a look at you again. But you are going straight
back, you know. Can't take any chances on such weather as this."

Mr. Thorne sank copiously into a piazza chair, and pulled forward another
for his wife.

She sat on the edge of it, smiling at him with wistful satisfaction. Her
profile had a delicate, bird-like slant. Pale, crisped auburn hair powdered
with gray, hair that looked like burnt-out ashes, she wore swept back from
a small, tense face, full of fine lines and fleeting expressions. She had
taken off her high, close neckwear, and the wanness of her throat showed
above a collarless shirt-waist.

"Don't look at me; I am a wreck!" she implored, with a little exhausted
laugh. "I wonder where my keys are? I must get on something cool before
dinner."

"Ito has all the keys somewhere. Ito's a gentleman. He takes beautiful care
of me, only he won't let me drink as much _shasta_ as I want. What is that?
Iced tea? Bad, bad before dinner! I'm going to watch _you_ now. You are not
looking a bit well. Is there any of that decoction left? Well, it is bad;
gets on the nerves, too much of it. The problem of existence here is, What
shall we drink, and how much of it _can_ we drink?"

Mrs. Thorne laughed out a little sigh. "I have brought you a problem. But
we will talk when it is cooler. Don't you--don't you shave but twice a week
when I am away, Henry?"

"I shave every day, when I think of it. I never go anywhere, and I don't
have anybody here if I can possibly avoid it. It is all a man can do to
live and be up to his work."

"I know; it's frightful to work in such weather. How the mill roars! It
starts the blood to hear it. Last spring it sounded like a cataract; now it
roars like heat behind furnace doors. Which is your room now?"

"O Lord! I sleep anywhere; begin in my bed generally and end of the piazza
floor. It will be the grass if this keeps on."

"Mrs. Thorne continued to laugh spasmodically at her husband's careless
speeches, not at what he said so much as through content in his familiar
way of saying things. Under their light household talk, graver, questioning
looks were exchanged, the unappeased glances of friends long separated, who
realize on meeting again that letters have told them nothing.

"Why didn't you write me about this terrible heat?"

"Why didn't you write _me_ that you were not well?"

"I am well."

"You don't look it--anything but."

"I am always ghastly after a journey. It isn't a question of health that
brought me. But--never mind. Ring for Ito, will you? I want my keys."

At dinner she looked ten years younger, sitting opposite him in her summery
lawns and laces. She tasted the cold wine soup, but ate nothing, watching
her husband's appetite with the mixed wonder and concern that thirty
years' knowledge of its capacities had not diminished. He studied her face
meanwhile; he was accustomed to reading faces, and hers he knew by line and
precept. He listened to her choked little laughs and hurried speeches. All
her talk was mere postponement; she was fighting for time. Hence he argued
that the trouble which had sent her flying home to him from the mountains
was not fancy-bred. Of her imaginary troubles she was ready enough to
speak.

The moon had risen, a red, dry-weather moon, when they walked out into
the garden and climbed the slope under low orchard boughs. The trees were
young, too quickly grown; like child mothers, they had lost their natural
symmetry, overburdened with hasty fruition. Each slender parent trunk was
the centre of a host of artificial props, which saved the sinking boughs
from breaking. Under one of these low green tents they stopped and handled
the great fruit that fell at a touch.

"How everything rushes to maturity here! The roses blossom and wither
the same hour. The peaches burst before they ripen. Don't you think it
oppresses one, all this waste fertility, such an excess of life and good
living, one season crowding upon another? How shall we get rid of all these
kindly fruits of the earth?"

She did not wait for an answer to her morbid questions. They moved on up
a path between hedges of sweet peas going to seed, and blackberry-vines
covered with knots of fruit dried in their own juices. A wall of gigantic
Southern cane hid the boundary fence, and above it the night-black pines of
the forest towered, their breezy monotone answering the roar of the hundred
stamps below the hill.

A few young pines stood apart on a knoll, a later extension of the garden,
ungraded and covered with pine-needles. In the hollow places native shrubs,
surprised by irrigation, had made an unwonted summer's growth.

Here, in the blanching moon, stood a tent with both flaps thrown back. A
wind of coolness drew across the hill; it lifted one of the tent-curtains
mysteriously; its touch was sad and searching.

Mrs. Thorne put back the canvas and stepped inside. She saw a folding
camp-cot stripped of bedding, a dresser with half-open drawers that
disclosed emptiness, a dusty book-rack standing on the floor. The little
mirror on the tent-pole, hung too high for her own reflection, held a
darkling picture of a pine-bough against a patch of stars. She sat on the
edge of the cot and picked up a discarded necktie, sawing it across her
knee mechanically to free it from the dust. Her husband placed himself
beside her. His weight brought down the mattress and rocked her against his
shoulder; he put his arm around her, and she gave way to a little sob.

"When has he written to you?" she asked. "Since he went down?"

"I think so. Let me see! When did you hear last?"

"I have brought his last letter with me. I wondered if he had told you."

"I have heard nothing--nothing in particular. What is it?"

"The inevitable woman."

"She has come at last, has she? Come to stay?"

"He is engaged to her."

Mr. Thorne breathed his astonishment in a low whistle. "You don't like it?"
he surmised at once.

"Like it! If it were merely a question of liking! She is impossible. She
knows it, her people know it, and they have not told him. It remains"--

"What is the girl's name?"

"Henry, she is not a girl! That is, she is a girl forced into premature
womanhood, like all the fruits of this hotbed climate. She is that Miss
Benedet whom you helped, whom you saved--how many years ago? When Willy was
a schoolboy."

"Well, she _was_ saved, presumably."

"Saved from what, and by a total stranger!"

"She made no mistake in selecting the stranger. I can testify to that; and
she was as young as he, my dear."

"A girl is never as young as a boy of the same age. She is a woman now, and
she has taken his all--everything a man can give to his first--and told him
nothing!"

"Are you sure it's the same girl? There are other Benedets."

"She is the one. His letter fixes it beyond a question--so innocently he
fastens her past upon her! And he says, 'She is "a woman like a dewdrop."'
I wonder if he knows what he is quoting, and what had happened to _that_
woman!"

"Dewdrops don't linger long in the sun of California. But she was
undeniably the most beautiful creature this or any other sun ever shone
on."

"And he is the sweetest, sanest, cleanest-hearted boy, and the most
innocent of what a woman may go through and still be fair outside!"

"Why, that is why she likes him. It speaks well for her, I think, that she
hankers after that kind of a boy."

"It speaks volumes for what she lacks herself! Don't misunderstand me.
I hope I am not without charity for what is done and never can be
undone,--though charity is hardly the virtue one would hope to need in
welcoming a son's wife. It is her ghastly silence now that condemns her."

Mr. Thorne heaved a sigh, and changed his feet on the gritty tent floor.
He stooped and picked up some small object on which he had stepped, a
collar-stud trodden flat. He rolled it in his fingers musingly.

"She may be getting up her courage to tell him in her own time and way."

"The time has gone by when she could have told him honorably. She should
have stopped the very first word on his lips."

"She couldn't do that, you know, and be human. She couldn't be expected to
spare him at such a cost as that. Mighty few men would be worth it."

"If he wasn't worth it she could have let him go. And the family! Think of
their accepting his proposal in silence. Why, can they even be married,
Henry, without some process of law?"

"Heaven knows! I don't know how far the other thing had gone--far enough to
make questions awkward."

Husband and wife remained seated side by side on the son's deserted bed.
The shape of each was disconsolately outlined to the other against the
tent's illumined walls. Now a wind-swayed branch of manzanita rasped the
canvas, and cast upon it shadows of its moving leaves.

"It's pretty rough on quiet old folks like us, with no money to get us into
trouble," said Mr. Thorne. "The boy is not a beauty, he's not a swell. He
is just a plain, honest boy with a good working education. If you judge a
woman, as some say you can, by her choice of men, she shouldn't be very far
out of the way."

"It is very certain you cannot judge a man by his choice of women."

"You cannot judge a boy by the women that get hold of him. But Willy is
not such a babe as you think. He's a deuced quiet sort, but he's not
been knocking around by himself these ten years, at school and college
and vacations, without picking up an idea or two--possibly about women.
Experience, I grant, be probably lacks; but he has the true-bred instinct.
We always have trusted him so far; I'm willing to trust him now. If there
are things he ought to know about this woman, leave him to find them out
for himself."

"After he has married her! And you don't even know whether a marriage is
possible without some sort of shuffling or concealment; do you?"

"I don't, but they probably do. Her family aren't going to get themselves
into that kind of a scrape."

"I have no opinion whatever of the family. I think they would accept any
kind of a compromise that money can buy."

"Very likely, and so would we if we had a daughter"--

"Why, we _have_ a daughter! It is our daughter, all the daughter we shall
ever call ours, that you are talking about. And to think of the girls and
girls he might have had! Lovely girls, without a flaw--a flaw! She will
fall to pieces in his hand. She is like a broken vase put together and set
on the shelf to look at."

"Now we are losing our sense of proportion. We must sleep on this, or it
will blot out the whole universe for us."

"It has already for me. I haven't a shadow of faith in anything left."

"And I haven't read the paper. Suppose the boy were in Cuba now!"

"I wish he were! It is a judgment on me for wanting to save him up, for
insisting that the call was not for him."

"That's just it, you see. You have to trust a man to know his own call.
Whether it's love or war, he is the one who has got to answer."

"But you will write to him to-morrow, Henry? He must be saved, if the truth
can save him. Think of the awakening!"

"My dear, if he loves her there will be no awakening. If there is, he will
have to take his dose like other men. There is nothing in the truth that
can save him, though I agree with you that he ought to know it--from her."

"If you had only told her your name, Henry! Then she would have had a
fingerpost to warn her off our ground. To think what you did for her, and
how you are repaid!"

"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 twanged 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
circumstance, 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 analysis.

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 WILLY," 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 pass 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 horsemen 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 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.

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