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A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories

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"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 Dick 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 associated 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.

"It was announced a few days later that Mrs. Benedet and her daughter Helen
had gone East on their way to Europe. As Mr. Benedet's health was very
bad,--this was only six months before he died,--society wondered; but it
has been accustomed to wondering about the Benedets.

"Mrs. Benedet came home at the time of her husband's death and remained for
a few months, but Helen was kept away. You know they have continually been
abroad for the last seven years, and Helen has never been seen in society
here. When you spoke of 'Miss Benedet' I no more thought of her than if
she had not been living. Aunt Frances met them last winter at Cannes, and
Mrs. Benedet said positively that they had no intention of coming back to
California ever to live. Aunt Frances wondered why, with their beautiful
homes empty and going to destruction. I have told you the probable reason.
Whether it still exists, God knows--or what they have done with that man
and his dreadful knowledge.

"Helen Benedet may have changed her spiritual identity since she made that
fatal journey, but she can hardly have forgotten what she did. She must
know there is a man who, if he lives, holds her reputation at the mercy of
his silence. Money can do a great deal, but it cannot do everything.

"I am tempted to wish that we--your father and I--could share your
ignorance, could trust as you do. Better a common awakening for us all,
than that I should be the one necessity has chosen to apply the torture to
my son.

"The misery of this will make you hate my handwriting forever. But why do I
babble? You do not hear me. God help you, my dear!"

* * * * *

These words, descriptive of her own emotions, Mrs. Thorne on re-reading
scored out, and copied the last page.

She did not weep. She ached from the impossibility of weeping. She stumbled
away from her desk, tripping in her long robes, and stretched herself out
at full length on the floor, like a girl in the first embrace of sorrow.
But hearing Ito's footsteps, she rose ashamed, and took an attitude
befitting her years.

The letter was absently sealed and addressed; there was no reason why the
shaft should not go home. Yet she hesitated. It were better that she should
read it to her husband first.

The sun dropped below the piazza roof and pierced the bamboo lattices with
lines and slits of fervid light.

"From heat to heat the day declined."

The gardener came with wet sacking and swathed the black-glazed
jardinières, in which the earth was steaming. The mine whistle blared, and
a rattle of miners' carts followed, as the day-shift dispersed to town. The
mine did not board its proletariate. At his usual hour the watchman braved
the blinding path, and left the evening paper on the piazza floor. There it
lay unopened. Mrs. Thorne fanned herself and looked at it. There must be
fighting in Cuba; she did not move to see. Other mothers' sons were dying;
what was death to such squalor as hers? Sorrow is a queen, as the poet
says, and sits enthroned; but Trouble is a slave. Mothers with griefs like
hers must suffer in the fetters of silence.

When dinner was over, Ito made his nightly pilgrimage through the house,
opening bedroom shutters, fastening curtains back. He drew up the
piazza-blinds, and like a stage-scene, framed in post and balustrade, and
bordered with a tracery of rose-vines, the valley burst upon the view.
Its cool twilight colors, its river-bed of mist, added to the depth of
distance. Against it the white roses looked whiter, and the pink ones
caught fire from the intense, great afterglow.

The silent couple, drinking their coffee outside, drew a long mutual sigh.

"Every day," said Mrs. Thorne, "we wonder why we stay in such a place, and
every evening we are cajoled into thinking there never can be such
another day. And the beauty is just as fresh every night as the heat is
preposterous by day."

"It's a great strain on the men," said Mr. Thorne. "We lost two of our best
hands this week--threw down their tools and quit, for some tomfoolery they
wouldn't have noticed a month ago. The bosses irritate the men, and the
men get fighting mad in a minute. Not one of them will bear the weight of
a word, and I don't blame them. The work is hard enough in decent weather;
they are dropping off sick every day. The night-shift boys can't sleep in
their hot little houses---they look as if they'd all been on a two weeks'
tear. The next improvement we make I shall build a rest-house where the
night-shift can turn in and sleep inside of stone walls, without crying
babies and scolding wives clattering around. This heat every summer
costs us thousands of dollars in delays, from wear and tear and extra
strain--tempers and nerves giving out, men getting frantic and jerking
things. I believe it breeds a form of acute mania when it keeps on like
this."

"Yes, the point of view changes the instant the sun goes down," said Mrs.
Thorne. "I am glad I did not send my letter. Will you let me read it to
you, Henry?"

"Not now; let us enjoy the peace of God while it lasts." He stretched
himself on his back on the rattan lounge, and folded his hands on that
part of his person which illustrated, geographically speaking, the great
Continental Divide. The locked hands rose softly up and down. His wife
fanned him in silence.

He turned his head and looked at her; her tired eyes, the dragged lines
about her mouth, disturbed his sense of rest. He took the fan from her and
returned her attention vigorously. "Please don't!" she said with a little
teased laugh. She rearranged the lock he had blown across her forehead. His
larger help she needed, but he had seldom known how to pet her in little
ways.

"I think you ought to let me read it to you," she said. "There is nothing
so difficult as telling the truth, even about one's self, and when it's
another person"--

"That's what I claim; she is the only one who can tell it."

"This is a case of first aid to the injured," she sighed. "I may not be a
surgeon, but I must do what I can for my son."

Then there was silence; the valley grew dimmer, the sky nearer and more
intense.

"Yes, the night forgives the day," after a while she said; "it even
forgets. And we forget what we were, and what we did, when we were young.
What is the use of growing old if we can't learn to forgive?" she vaguely
pleaded; and suddenly she began to weep.

The rattle of a miner's cart broke in upon them; it stopped at the gate.
Mr. Thorne half rose and looked out; a man was hurrying up the walk. He
waved with his cane for him to stop where he was. Messengers at this hour
were usually bearers of bad news, and he did not choose that his wife
should know all the troubles of the mines.

The two men conversed together at the gate; then Mr. Thorne returned to
explain.

"I must go over to the office a moment, and I may have to go to the
power-house."

"Is anybody hurt?"

"Only a pump. Don't think of things, dear. Just keep cool while you can."

"For pity's sake, there is a carriage!" Mrs. Thorne exclaimed. "We are
going to have a visitor. Fancy making calls after such a day as this!"

Mr. Thorne hurried away with manlike promptitude in the face of a social
obligation. The mistress stepped inside and gave an order to Ito.

As she returned, a lady was coming up the walk. She was young and tall, and
had a distant effect of great elegance. She held herself very erect, and
moved with the rapid, swimming step peculiar to women who are accustomed to
the eyes of critical assemblages. Her thin black dress was too elaborate
for a country drive; it was a concession to the heat which yet permitted
the wearing of a hat, a filmy creation supporting a pair of wings that
started up from her beautiful head like white flames. But Mrs. Thorne
chiefly observed the look of tense preparation in the face that met hers.
She retreated a little from what she felt to be a crisis of some sort, and
her heart beat hard with acute agitation.

"Mrs. Thorne?" said the visitor. "Do I need to tell you who I am? Has any
one forewarned you of such a person as Helen Benedet?"

The two women clasped hands hurriedly. The worn eyes of the elder, strained
by night-watchings, drooped under the young, dark ones, reinforced by their
splendor of brows and lashes.

"It was very sweet of you to come," she said in a lifeless voice.

"Without an invitation! You did not expect me to be quite so sweet as
that?"

Mrs. Thorne did not reply to this challenge. "You are not alone?" she asked
gently.

"I am alone, dear Mrs. Thorne. I am everything I ought not to be. But you
will not mind for an hour or two? It's a great deal to ask of you, this hot
night, I know."

"You must not think of going back to-night." Mrs. Thorne glanced at the
hired carriage from town. "Did you come on purpose, this dreadful weather,
my dear? I am very stupid, but I've only just come myself."

"Oh, you are angelic! I heard at Colfax, as we were coming up, that
you were at the mine. I came--by main strength. But I should have come
somehow. Have you people staying with you? You look so very gay with your
lights--you look like a whole community."

"We have no lights here, you see; we are anything but gay. We were talking
of you only just now," Mrs. Thorne added infelicitously.

The other did not seem to hear her. She let her eyes rove down the lengths
of empty piazza. The close-reefed awnings revealed the stars above the
trees, dark and breezeless on the lawn. The matted rose-vines clung to the
pillars motionless.

"What a strange, dear place!" she murmured. "And there is no one here?"

"No one at all. We are quite alone. We really must have you."

"I will stay, then. It's perfectly fearful, all I have to say to you. I
shall tire you to death."

Ito, appearing, was ordered to send away the lady's carriage.

"May he bring me a glass of water? Just water, please." The tall girl, in
her long black dress, moved to and fro, making a pretense of the view to
escape observation.

"What is that sloping house that roars so? It sounds like a house of
beasts. Oh, the stamps, of course! There goes one on the bare metal. Did
anything break then?"

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Thorne; "things do not break so easily as that in a
stamp-mill. Only the rock gets broken."

Ito returned with a tray of iced soda, and was spoken to aside by his
mistress.

"It's quite a farce," she said, "preparing beds for our friends in this
weather. No one sleeps until after two, and then it is morning; and though
we shut out the heat, it beats on the walls and burns up the air inside,
and we wake more tired than ever."

"Let us not think of sleep! I need all the night to talk in. I have to tell
you impossible things."

"Is Willy's father to be included in this talk?" Mrs. Thorne inquired;
"because he is coming--he is there, at the gate."

She rose uneasily. Her visitor rose, too, and together they watched the
man's unconscious figure approaching. An electric lamp above the gate threw
long shadows, like spokes of a wheel, across the grass. Mr. Thorne's face
was invisible till he had reached the steps.

"Henry," said his wife, "you do not see we have a visitor."

He took off his hat, and perceiving a young lady, waved her a gallant and
playful greeting, assuming her to be a neighbor. Miss Benedet stepped back
without speaking.

"God bless me!" said Thorne simply, when his wife had named their guest,
and so left the matter, for Miss Benedet to acknowledge or deny their
earlier meeting.

Mrs. Thorne gave her little coughing laugh.

"Well, you two!" she said with ghastly gayety. "Must I repeat, Henry, that
this is"--

"He is trying to think where he has seen me before," said Helen Benedet.
There was a ring in her voice like that of the stamp-heads on the bare
steel.

"I am wondering if you remember where you saw me before," Thorne
retorted. He did not like the young lady's presence there. He thought it
extraordinary and rather brazen. And he liked still less to be drawn into a
woman's parlance.

Mrs. Thorne sat still, trembling. "Henry, tell her! Speak to her!"

Miss Benedet turned from husband to wife. Her face was very pale. "Ah," she
said, "you knew about me all the time! He has told you everything--and you
called me 'my dear'! Is it easy for you to say such things?"

"Never mind, never mind! What did you wish to say to me? What was it?"

"Give me a moment, please! This alters everything. I must get accustomed to
this before we go any further."

She reached out her white arm with the thin sleeve wrinkled over it, and
helped herself again to water. In every gesture there was the poise and
distinction of perfect self-command, a highly wrought self-consciousness,
as far removed from pose as from Nature's simplicity. Natural she could
never be again. No woman is natural who has a secret experience to guard,
whether of grief or shame, her own or of any belonging to her.

"You are the very man," she said, "the one who would not promise. And you
kept your word and told your wife. And how long have you known of--of this
engagement?"

Mr. Thorne looked at his wife.

"Only a few days," she said.

"Still, there has been time," the girl reflected. She let her voice fall
from its high society pitch. "I did not dream there was so much mercy in
the world--among parents! You both knew, and you have not told him. You
deserve to have Willy for your son!"

Mrs. Thorne leaned forward to speak. Her husband, guessing what trouble her
conscience would be making her, forestalled the effort with a warning look.
"There was no mercy in the case," he bluntly said; "we do not know your
story."

Miss Benedet continued, as if thinking aloud: "Yet you gave me that supreme
trust, that I would tell him myself! I have not, and now it is too late.
Now I can never know how he would have taken it had he known in time. I
do not want his forgiveness, you may be sure, or his toleration. I must
be what I was to him or nothing. You will tell him, and then he will
understand the letter I wrote him last night, breaking the engagement.
We may be honest with each other now; there is no peace of the family to
provide for. This night's talk, and I leave myself, my whole self, with
you, to do with as you think best for him. If you think better to have it
over at one blow, tell him the worst. The facts are enough if you leave
out the excuses. But if you want to soften it for the sake of his faith
in general,--isn't there some such idea, that men lose their faith in all
women through the fault of one?--why, soften it all you like. Make me the
victim of circumstances. I can show you how. I had forgiven myself, you
know. I thought I was as good as new. I had forgotten I had a flaw. And I
was so tired of being on the defensive. Now at last, I said, I shall have a
friend! You know--_do_ you know what a restful, impersonal manner your son
has? What quiet eyes! We rode and talked together like two young men. It
seems a pleasure common enough with some girls, but I never had it; lads of
my own age were debarred when I was a girl. I had neither girls nor boys to
play with. Girl friends were dealt out to me to fit my supposed needs, but
taken that way as medicine I didn't find them very interesting. If I clung
to one more than another, that one was not asked soon again for fear of
inordinate affections and unbalanced enthusiasms. I was to be an all-around
young woman; so they built a wall all around me. It fitted tight at last,
and then I broke through one night and emptied my heart on the ground. My
plea, you see, is always ready. Could I have lived and kept on scorning
myself as I did that night? Do you remember?" She bent her imperative,
clears gaze upon Thorne. "I told you the truth when you gave me a chance
to lie. Heaven knows what it cost to say, 'I came with him of my own free
will!'"

Mrs. Thorne put her hand in her husband's. He pressed it absently, with his
eyes on the ground.

"It is such a mercy that I need not begin at the beginning. You know the
worst already, and your divine hesitation before judgment almost demands
that I should try to justify it. I _may_ excuse myself to you. I will not
be too proud to meet you half-way; but remember, when you tell the story to
him, everything is to be sacrificed to his cure."

"When we really love them," Mrs. Thorne unexpectedly argued, "do we want
them to be cured?"

The defendant looked at her in astonishment, "Do I understand you?" she
asked. "You must be careful. I have not told you my story. Of course I want
to influence you, but nothing can alter the facts."

There was no reply, and she took up her theme again with visible and
painful effort. A sickening familiarity, a weariness of it all before she
had begun, showed in her voice and in her pale, reluctant smile.

"Seven years is a long time," she said, looking at Thorne. "Are you sure
you have forgotten nothing? You saw what the man was?" she demanded. "He
was precisely what he looked to be--one of the men about the stables. I was
not supposed to know one from another.

"It is a mistake to talk of a girl having fallen. She has crawled down in
her thoughts, a step at a time--unless she fell in the dark; and I declare
that before this happened it was almost dark with me!

"My mother is a very clever woman; she has had the means to carry out her
theories, and I am her only child (Norwood Benedet is my half-brother). I
was not allowed to play with ordinary children; they might have spoiled my
accent or told me stories that would have made me afraid of the dark; and
while the perfect child was waited for, I had only my nurses. I was not
allowed to go to school, of course. Schools are for ordinary children. When
I was past the governess age I had tutors, exceptional beings, imported
like my frocks. They were too clever for the work of teaching one ignorant,
spoiled child. They wore me out with their dissertations, their excess of
personality, their overflow of acquirements, all bearing upon poor, stupid
me, who could absorb so little. And mama would not allow me to be pushed,
so I never actually worked or played. These persons were in the house,
holidays and all, and there was a perpetual little dribble of instruction
going on. Oh, how I wearied of the deadly deliberation of it all!

"As a family we have always been in a way notorious; I am aware of that:
but my mother's ideals are far different from those that held in father's
young days, when he made his money and a highly ineligible circle of
acquaintances. Nordy inherited all the fun and the friends, and he spent
the money like a prince. Once or twice a year he would come down to the
ranch, and the place would be filled with his company, and their horses and
jockeys and servants. Then mama would fly with me till the reign of sport
was over. It was a terrible grief to have to go at the only time when the
ranch was not a prison. I grew up nursing a crop of smothered rebellions
and longings which I was ashamed to confess. At sixteen mama was to take me
abroad for two years; I was to be presented and brought home in triumph,
unless Europe refused to part with a pearl of such price. All pearls have
their price. I was not left in absolute ignorance of my own. Of all who
suffered through that night's madness of mine, poor mama is most to be
pitied. There was no limit to her pride in me, and she has never made the
least pretense that religion or philosophy could comfort her.

"Now, before I really begin, shall we not speak of something else for a
while? I do not want to be quite without mercy."

"I think you had better go on," said Mrs. Thorne gently; "but take off your
bonnet, my dear."

"Still 'my dear'?" sighed the girl. "Is so much kindness quite consistent
with your duty? Will you leave _all_ the plain speaking to me?"

"Forgive me," said the mother humbly; "but I cannot call you 'Miss
Benedet.' We seem to have got beyond that."

"Oh, we have got beyond everything! There is no precedent for us in the
past"--she felt for her hat pins--"and no hope in the future." She put off
the winged circlet that crowned her hair, and Mrs. Thorne took it from her.
Almost shyly the middle-aged woman, who had never herself been even pretty,
looked at the sad young beauty, sitting uncovered in the moonlight.

"You should never wear anything on your head. It is desecration."

"Is it? I always conform, you know. I wear anything, do anything, that is
demanded."

"Ah, but the head--such hair! I wonder that I do not hate you when I think
of my poor Willy."

"You will hate me when I am gone," said the beautiful one wearily; "you
may count on the same revulsion in him. I know it. I have been through it.
There is nothing so loathsome in the bitter end as mere good looks."

"Ah, but why"--the mother checked herself. Was she groveling already for
Willy's sake? She had stifled the truth, and accepted thanks not her due,
and listened to praise of her own magnanimity. Where were the night's
surprises to leave her?


II

Mr. Thorne had changed his seat, and the sound of a fresh chair creaking
under his comfortable weight was a touch of commonplace welcomed by his
wife with her usual laugh, half amused and half apologetic.

"Why do you go off there, Henry? Do you expect us to follow you?"

"There's a breeze around the corner of the house!" he ejaculated fervently.

"Go and find it, then; we do not need you. Do we?"

"_I_ need him," said the girl in her sweetest tones. "He helped me once,
without a word. It helps me now to have him sitting there"--

"Without a word!" Mrs. Thorne irrepressibly supplied.

"Why can't we let her finish?" Thorne demanded, hitching his chair into an
attitude of attention.

It was impossible for Miss Benedet to take up her story in the key in which
she had left off. She began again rather flatly, allowing for the chill of
interruptions:--

"To go back to that summer; I was in my sixteenth year, and the policy
of expansion was to have begun. But father's health broke, and mama was
traveling with him and a cortège of nurses, trying one change after
another. It was duller than ever at the ranch. We sat down three at table
in a dining-room forty feet long, Aunt Isabel Dwight, Fräulein Henschel,
and myself. Fräulein was the resident governess. She was a great,
soft-hearted, injudicious creature, a mass of German interjections, but
she had the grand style on the piano. There had been weeks of such weather
as we are having now. Exercise was impossible till after sundown. I had
dreamed of a breath of freedom, but instead of the open door I was in
straiter bonds than ever.

"I revolted first against keeping hours. I would not get up to breakfast,
I refused to study, it was too hot to practice. I took my own head about
books, and had my first great orgy of the Russians. I used to lie beside
a chink of light in the darkened library and read while Fräulein in the
music-room held orgies of her own. She had just missed being a great
singer; but she was a master of her instrument, and her accompaniments were
divine. What voice she had was managed with feeling and a pure method, and
where voice failed her the piano thrilled and sobbed, and broke in chords
like the sea.

"I can give you no idea of the effect that Tolstoi, combined with
Fräulein's music, had upon me. My heart hung upon the pauses in her
song; it beat, as I read, as if I had been running. I would forget to
breathe between the pages. One day Fräulein came in and found me in the
back chapters of 'Anna Karénina.' She had been playing one of Lizst's
rhapsodies--the twelfth. Waves of storm and passion had been thundering
through the house, with keen little rifts of melody between, too sweet
almost to be endured. She was very negligée, as the weather obliged us to
be. Her great white arms were bare above the elbow, and as wet as if she
had been over the wash-tub.

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