A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 12

This iron apology which some late scruple had ground out of Thane seemed to command Daphne's deepest attention. She gave it a moment's silence, then she said, "There is nothing that hurts one, I think, like being unable to feel as people take for granted one must and ought to feel." But her home application of it gave a slight deflection to Thane's meaning which he firmly corrected.

"I felt all right; so did he, I dare say, but we never let each other know how we felt. Men don't, as a rule. Your uncle takes for granted that I knew a lot about him,--his thoughts and feelings; that we were immensely sympathetic. Perhaps we were, but we didn't know it. We knew nothing of each other intimately. He never spoke to me of his private affairs but once, the night before he started. It was at Wood River. Some of us gave him a little supper. Afterwards we had some business to settle and I was alone with him in his room. It was then I made my break; and--well, it ended as I say: we quarreled. It has hurt me since, especially as I was wrong."

"What can men quarrel about when they don't know each other well? Politics, perhaps?" Daphne endeavored to give her words a general application.

"It was not politics with us," Thane replied curtly. Changing the subject, he said, "I wish you could see the valley from that hogback over to the west." He pointed towards the spine of the main divide, which they would cross on their next day's journey. "Will you come up there this evening and take a look at the country? The wind will die down at sunset, I think."

There was a studied commonplaceness in his manner; his eyes avoided hers.

"Thanks; I should like to," she answered in the same defensive tone.

"To go back to what we were saying," Daphne began, when they were seated, that evening, on the hilltop. All around them the view of the world rose to meet the sky, glowing in the west, purple in the east, while the pale planets shone, and below them the river gla.s.sed and gleamed in its crooked bed. "I ask you seriously," she said. "What was the trouble between you?"

Doubtless she had a reason for asking, but it was not the one that she proceeded to give. "Had you--have you, perhaps--any claims in a business way against him? Because, if you had, it would be most unfair to his father"--The words gave her difficulty; but her meaning, as forced meanings are apt to be, was more than plain.

Thane was not deceived: a woman who yields to curiosity, under however pious an excuse, is, to say the least, normal. Her thoughts are neither in the heavens above nor in the grave beneath. His black eyes flashed with the provocation of the moment. It was instinct that bade him not to spare her.

"We quarreled," he said, "in the orthodox way,--about a woman."

"Indeed!" said Daphne. "Then you must pardon me."

"And her name," he continued calmly.

"I did not ask you her name."

"Still, since we have gone so far"--

"There is no need of our going any farther."

"We may as well,--a little farther. We quarreled, strangely enough, about you,--the first time he ever spoke of you. He would not have spoken then, I think, but he was a little excited, as well he might have been. Excuse me?"

He waited.

"Nothing!" said Daphne. She had made an involuntary protesting sound.

"He said he hoped to bring you back with him. I asked how long since he had seen you; and when he told me five years, I remarked that he had better not be too sure. 'But you don't know her,' he said; 'she is truth itself, and courage. By as many times as she has refused to listen to me, I am sure of her now.' I did not gather somehow that you were--engaged to him, else I hope I should not have gone so far. As it was, I kept on persisting--like a cynic who has no one of his own to be sure of--that he had better not be too sure! He might have seen, I thought then, that it was half chaff and half envy with me; but it was a nervous time, and I was less than sympathetic, less than a friend to him. And now I am loaded with friends.h.i.+p's honors, and you have come yourself to prove me in the wrong.

You punish me by converting me to the truth."

"What truth?" asked Daphne, so low that Thane had to guess her question.

"Have you not proved to me that some women do have memories?"

Daphne could not meet his eyes; but she suspected him of something like sarcasm. She could not be sure, for his tone was agitating in its tenderness.

"All things considered," she said slowly, "does it not strike you as rather a costly conversion?"

"I don't say I was worth it, nor do I see just how it benefits me personally to have learned my lesson."

He rose, and stood where he could look at her,--an unfair advantage, for his dark face, strong in its immobility, was in silhouette against the flush of twilight which illumined hers, so transparent in its sensitiveness.

"Is it not a good thing to believe, on any terms?" she tried to answer lightly.

"For some persons, perhaps. But my hopes, if I had any, would lie in the direction of disbelief."

"Disbelief?" she repeated confusedly. His keen eyes beat hers down.

"In woman's memory, constancy,--her constancy in youth, say? I am not talking of seasoned timber. I don't deserve to be happy, you see, and I look for no more than my deserts."

If he were mocking her now, only to test her! And if she should answer with a humble, blissful disclaimer? But she answered nothing, disclaimed nothing; suffered his suspicion,--his contempt, perhaps, for she felt that he read her through and through.

A widow is well, and a maid is well; but a maiden widow who trembles and looks down--in G.o.d's creation, what is she?

On the north side of the Snake, after climbing out of the canon at Decker's Ferry, the cross-roads branch as per sign-post: "Thirty miles to Shoshone Falls, one mile to Decker's Ferry. Good road." This last a.s.sertion must be true, as we have it on no less authority than that of Decker himself.

Nothing is said of the road to Bliss,--not even that there is such a Bliss only sixteen miles away. Being a station on the Oregon Short Line, Bliss can take care of itself.

At these cross-roads, on a bright, windy September morning, our travelers had halted for reasons, the chief of which was to say good-by. They had slept over night at the ferry, parted their baggage in the morning, and now in separate wagons by divergent roads were setting forth on the last stage of their journey.

Daphne had left some necessary of her toilet at the ferry, and the driver of Mr. Withers's team had gone back to ask the people at the ferry-house to find it. This was the cause of their waiting at the cross-roads. Mr.

Withers and Daphne were on their devoted way like conscientious tourists, though both were deadly weary, to prostrate themselves before the stupendous beauty of the great lone falls at Shoshone. Thane, with Kinney's team, was prosaically bound down the river to examine and report on a placer-mine. But before his business would be finished Mr. Withers and his niece would have returned by railroad via Bliss to Boise, and have left that city for the East; so this was likely to be a long good-by.

If anything could have come of Mr. Withers's project of a memorial fountain at Pilgrim Station, there might have been a future to the acquaintance, for Thane was to have had charge of the execution of the design; but nature had lightly frustrated that fond, beneficent dream.

Mr. Kinney had offered the practical suggestion that the road should go to the fountain, since the fountain could not come to the road. Its course was a mere accident of the way the first wagon-wheels had gone. The wheels were few now, and with such an inducement might well afford to cross the gulch in a new place lower down. But Mr. Withers would have none of this dislocation of the unities. There was but one place--the dismal hollow itself, the scene of his heart's tragedy--where his acknowledgment to G.o.d should stand; his mute "Thy will be done!"

Perhaps the whole conception had lost something of its hold on his mind by contact with such harsh realities as Daphne's disavowals and his own consequent struggle with a father's weakness. He had not in his inmost conscience quite done with that question yet.

Thane was touched by the meekness with which the old gentleman resigned his dream. The journey, he suspected, had been a disappointment in other ways,--had failed in impressiveness, in personal significance; had fallen at times below the level of the occasion, at others had overpowered it and swept it out of sight. Thane could have told him that it must be so. There was room for too many mourners in that primeval waste. Whose small special grief could make itself heard in that vast arid silence, the voice of which was G.o.d? G.o.d in nature, awful, inscrutable, alone, had gained a new meaning for Mr. Withers. Miles of desert, days of desert, like waves of brute oblivion had swept over him. Never before had he felt the oppression of purely natural causes, the force of the physical in conflict with the spiritual law. And now he was to submit to a final ill.u.s.tration of it, perhaps the simplest and most natural one of all.

Daphne was seated at a little distance on her camp-stool, making a drawing of the desert cross-roads with the twin sign-posts pointing separate ways, as an appropriate finish to her Snake River sketch-book. The sun was tremendous, the usual Snake River zephyr was blowing forty miles an hour, and the flinty ground refused to take the bra.s.s-shod point of her umbrella-staff. Mr. Kinney, therefore, sat beside her, gallantly steadying her heavy sketching-umbrella against the wind.

Mr. Withers, while awaiting the return of his own team from the ferry, had accepted a seat in Thane's wagon. (It was a bag containing a curling-iron, lamp, and other implements appertaining to "wimples and crisping-pins,"

that Daphne had forgotten, but she had not described its contents. One bag is as innocent as another, on the outside; it might have held her Prayer Book.)

Thane was metaphorically "kicking himself" because time was pa.s.sing and he could not find words delicate enough in which to clothe an indelicate request,--one outrageous in its present connection, yet from some points of view, definitively his own, a most urgent and natural one.

"For one shall grasp, and one resign, And G.o.d shall make the balance good."

To grasp is a simple act enough; but to do so delicately, reverently, without forcing one's preferences on those of another, may not always be so simple. Thane was not a Goth nor a Vandal; by choice he would have sought to preserve the amenities of life; but a meek man he was not, and the thing he now desired was, he considered, well worth the sacrifice of such small pretensions as his in the direction of unselfishness.

The founding of a family in its earliest stages is essentially an egoistic and ungenerous proceeding. Even Mr. Withers must have been self-seeking once or twice in his life, else had he never had a son to mourn. So, since life in this world is for the living, and his own life was likely to go on many years after Mr. Withers had been gathered to the reward of the righteous, Thane worked himself up to the grasping-point at last.

He was never able to reflect with any pride on the way in which he did it, and perhaps it is hardly fair to report him in a conversation that would have had its difficulties for almost any man; but his way of putting his case was something like the following,--Mr. Withers guilelessly opening the way by asking, "You will be coming East, I hope, before long, Mr. Thane?"

"Possibly," said Thane, "I may run on to New York next winter."

"If you should, I trust you will find time to come a little further East and visit me? I could add my niece's invitation to my own, but she and her mother will probably have gone South for her mother's health. However, I will welcome you for us both,--I and my books, which are all my household now."