A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 4

"May he bring me a gla.s.s 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 w.i.l.l.y'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 gra.s.s. 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, a.s.suming her to be a neighbor. Miss Benedet stepped back without speaking.

"G.o.d 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 w.i.l.l.y."

"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 w.i.l.l.y'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