Chapter 3

"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.

"'That is not a book for a _jeune fille_,' she said.

"I was in a rapture of excitement; the interruption made me wild. 'All the books are for me,' I told her. 'I will read what I please.'

"'You will go mad!'

"I went on reading.

"'You have no way to work it off. You will not study, you cannot sing, you write no letters, the mother does not believe'--

"'Do go away!' I cried.

"'--in the duty to the neighbor. Ach! what will you do with the whole of Tolstoi and Turgenieff shut up within you?'

"'I can ride,' I said. 'If you don't want me to go mad, leave me in the evenings to myself. Take my place in the carriage with Aunt Isabel, and let me ride alone.'

"Fräulein had lived in bonds herself, and she had the soul of an artist. She knew what it is, for days together, to have barely an hour to one's own thoughts; never to step out alone of a summer night, after a long, hot, feverish day. She let me go with old Manuel, the head groom, as my escort. He was no more hindrance to solitude than a pine-tree or a post.

"The reading and the music and the heat went on. I was in a fever of emotion such as I had never known. Fräulein perceived it. She recommended 'My Religion' as an antidote to the romances. I did not want his religion. I wanted his men and women, his reading of the human soul, the largeness of incident, the sense of time and space, the intricacy of family life, the problems of race, the march of nations across the great world-canvas.

"I rode--not alone, but with the high-strung beings that lived between the pages of my books: men and women who knew no curb, who stopped at nothing, and who paid the price of their passionate mistakes. Old Manuel, standing by the horses, looked strange to me. I spoke to him dramatically, as the women I read of would have spoken. Nothing could have added to or detracted from his own manner. He was of the old Spanish stock, but for the first time I saw his picturesqueness. I liked him to call me 'the Niña,' and address me in the third person with his eyes upon the ground.

"All this was preparatory. It is part of my defense; but do not forget the heat, the imprisonment, the sense of relief when the sun went down, the wild, bounding rapture of those night rides.

"One evening it was not Manuel who stood by the horses in the white track between the laurels. It was a figure as statuesque as his, but younger, and the pose was not that of a servant. It was the stand-at-ease of a soldier, or of an Indian wrapped in his blanket in the city square. This man was conscious of being looked at, but his training, of whatever sort, would not permit him to show it. Plainly the training had not been that of a groom. I was obliged to send him to the stables for his coat, and remind him that his place was behind. He took the hint good-humoredly, with the nonchalance of a big boy condescending to be taught the rules of some childish game. As we were riding through the woods later, I caught the scent of tobacco. It was my groom smoking. I told him he could not smoke and ride with me. He threw away his cigarette and straightened himself in the saddle with such a smile as he might have bestowed on the whims of a child. He obeyed me exactly in everything, with an exaggerated ironical precision, and seemed to find amusement in it. I questioned him about Manuel. He had gone to one of the lower ranches, would not be back for weeks. By whose orders was he attending me? By Manuel's, he said. He must then have had qualifications.

"'What is one to call you?' I asked him.

"He hesitated an instant. 'Jim is what I answer to around here,' said he.

"'What is your _name_?' I repeated.

"'The lady can call me anything she likes,'--he spoke in a low, lazy voice,--'but Dick Malaby is my name.'

"We have better heroes now than the Cheyenne cowboys, but I felt as a girl to-day would feel if she discovered she had been telling one of the men of the Merrimac to ride behind!"

"They would not need to be told," Mrs. Thorne interjected.

"No, that is the difference; but discipline did not appeal to me then; recklessness did. Every man on the place had taken sides on the Wyoming question; feeling ran high. Some of them had friends and relatives among the victims. Yet this man in hiding had tossed me his name to play with, not even asking for my silence, though it was the price of his life, and all in a light-hearted contempt for the curious ways of the 'tony set,' as he would have called us.

"I signed to him one evening to ride up. 'I want you to talk to me,' I said. 'Tell me about the cattle war.'

"'Miss Benedet forgets--my place is behind.' He touched his hat and fell back again. Lesson for lesson--we were quits. I made no further attempt to corrupt my own pupil.

"We rode in silence after that, but I was never without the sense of his ironical presence. I was conscious of showing off before him. I wished him to see that I could ride. Fences and ditches, rough or smooth, he never interfered with my wildest pace. I could not extract from him a look of surprise, far less the admiration that I wanted. What was a girl's riding to him? He knew a pace--all the paces--that I could never follow. I felt the absurdity of our mutual position, its utter artificiality, and how it must strike him.

"In the absence of words between us, externals spoke with greater force. He had the Greek line of head and throat, and he sat his horse with a dare-devil repose. The eloquence of his mute attitudes, his physical mastery of the conditions, his strength repressed, tied to my silly freaks and subject to my commands, while his thoughts roamed free! That was the beginning. It lasted through a week of starlight and a week of moonlight--lyric nights with the hot, close days between; and each night an increasing interest attached to the moment when he was to put me on my horse. I make no apology for myself after that.

"One evening we approached a gate at the farther end of our longest course, and the gate stood open. He rode on to close it. I stopped him. 'I am going out,' I said. It was a resolution taken that moment. He held up his watch to the light, which made me angry.

"'Go back to the stables,' I said, 'if you are due there. _I_ don't want to know the time.'

"He brought his horse alongside. 'Where is Miss Benedet going, please?'

"'Anywhere,' I said, 'where it will be cool in the morning.'

"'Miss Benedet will have a long ride. Does she wish for company?'

"I did not answer. Something drove me forward, though I was afraid.

"'Outside that gate,' he went on quietly, '_I_ shall set the pace, and I do not ride behind.' Still I did not answer. 'Is that the understanding?'

"'Ride where you please,' I said.

"After that he took command, not roughly or familiarly, but he no longer used the third person, as I had instructed him, in speaking to me. The first time he said 'you' it sent the blood to my face. We were far up the mountain then, and morning was upon us.

"I wish to be definite here. From the moment I saw him plainly face to face the illusion was gone. Before, I had seen him by every light but daylight, and generally in profile. The profile is not the man. It is the plan in outline, but the eyes, the mouth, tell what he has made of himself. So attitude is not speech. As a shape in the moonlight he had been eloquent, but once at my side, talking with me naturally--I need not go on! From that moment our journey was to me a dream of horror, a series of frantic plans for escape.

"All fugitives on the coast must put to sea. The Oakland ferry would have answered my purpose. I would never have been seen with him in the city--alive.

"But at Colfax we met your husband. He knows--you know--the rest."

* * * * *

In thinking of the one who had first pitied her, pity for herself overcame her, and the proud penitent broke down.

Mr. and Mrs. Thorne sat in the shy silence of older persons who are past the age of demonstrative sympathy. The girl rose, and as she passed her hostess she put out her hand. Mrs. Thorne took it quickly and followed her. They found a seat by themselves in a dark corner of the porch.

"Your poor, good husband--how tired he is! How patiently you have listened, and what does it all come to?"

"Think of yourself, not of us," said Mrs. Thorne.

"Oh, it's all over for me. I have had my fight. But you have _him_ to grieve for."

"Shall you not grieve for him yourself a little?"

The girl sat up quickly.

"If you mean do I give him up without a struggle--I do not. But you need not say that to him. I told him that it was all a mistake; I did not--do not love him."

"How could you say that"--

"It was necessary. Without that I should have been leaving it to his generosity. Now it remains only to show him how little he has lost."

"But could you not have done that without belying yourself? You do--surely you still care for him a little?"

"Insatiate mother! Is there any other proof I can give?"

"Your hand is icy cold."

"And my face is burning hot. Good-night. May I say, 'Now let thy servant depart in peace'?"

"I shall not know how to let you go to-morrow, and I do not see, myself, why you should go."

"You will--after I am gone."

"My dear, are you crying? I cannot see you. How cruel we have been, to sit and let you turn your life out for our inspection!"

"It was a free exhibition! No one asked me, and I did not even come prepared, more than seven years' study of my own case has prepared me.

"I was a child; but the fault was mine. I should have been allowed to suffer for it in the natural way. No good ever comes of skulking. But they hurried me off to Europe, and began a cowardly system of concealment. They made me almost forget my own misconduct in shame for the things they did by way of covering it up. My mother never took me in her arms and cried over my disgrace. She would not speak of it, or allow me to speak. Not a word nor an admission; the thing must be as though it had never been!

"They ruined Dick Malaby with their hush-money. They might better have shot him, but that would have made talk. My father died with only servants around him. Mama could not go to him. She was too busy covering my retreat. Oh, she kept a gallant front! I admired her, I pitied her, but I loathed her policy. Does not every girl know when she has been dedicated to the great god Success, and what the end of success must be?

"I told mama at last that if she would bring men to propose to me I should tell them the truth. Does Lord So-and-so wish to marry a girl who ran away with her father's groom? That was the breach between us. She has thrown herself into it. She is going to marry a title herself, not to let it go out of the family. Have you not heard of the engagement? She is to be a countess, and the property is controlled by her, so now I have an excuse for doing something."

"My dear!" Mrs. Thorne took the girl's cold hands in hers. "Do you mean that you are not your father's heiress?"

"Only by mama's last will and testament. We know what that would be if she made it now!"

"It was _then_ you came home?"

"It was then, when I learned that one of my rejected suitors was to become my father. He might be my grandfather. But let us not be vulgar!"

"Aren't you girls going to bed to-night?" Mr. Thorne inquired, with his usual leaning toward peace and quietness. "You can't settle everything at one sitting."

"Everything is settled, Mr. Thorne, and I am going to bed," said Miss Benedet.

Mrs. Thorne did not release her hands. "I want to ask you one more question."

"I know exactly what it is, and I will tell you to-morrow."

"Tell me now; it is perfectly useless going to your room; the temperature over your bed is ninety-nine."

"The question, then! Why did I allow your son to commit himself in ignorance?"

"No, _no_!" Mrs. Thorne protested.

"Yes, yes! You have asked that question, you must have. You are an angel, but you are a mother, too."

"I have asked no questions since you began to tell your story; but I have wondered how Willy could have found courage, in one week, to offer himself to such gifts and possessions as yours."

"A mother, and a worldly mother!" Miss Benedet apostrophized. "I did not look for such considerations from you. And you are troubled for the modesty of your son?"

"My dear, he has nothing, and he is--of course we think him everything he should be--but he is not a handsome boy."

"Thank Heaven he is not."

"And he does not talk"--

"About himself. No."

"Ah, you do care for him! You understand him. You would"--

Miss Benedet rose to her feet with decision.

"You have not answered my question," the unconscionable mother pursued. "Does he know--is it known that you are not the great heiress your name would imply?"

"Everything is known," said the girl. "You do not read your society column, I see. Six weeks ago you might have learned the fate of my father's millions."

She stood by the balustrade and leaned out under the stars, taking a deep breath of the night's growing coolness. A rose-spray touched her face. She put it back, and a shower of dry, scented petals fell upon her breast and sleeve.

"There is always one point in every true story," she said in a tired voice, "where explanations cease to explain. The mysteries claim their share in us, deny them as we will. I don't know why it was, but from the time I threw off all that bondage to society and struck out for myself, I felt made over. Life began again with life's realities. I came home to earn my bread, and on that footing I felt sane and clean and honest. The question became not what I am or was, but what could I do? I discussed the question with your son."

"You discussed!"

"We did, indeed. We went over the whole field. East and west we tested my accomplishments by the standards of those who want teachers for their children. I have gone rather further in music than anything else. Even Fräulein would hardly say now I lacked an outlet. I was working things off one evening on the piano--many things beyond the power of speech--the help of prayer, I might say. There were whispers about me already in the house."

"What _do_ you mean?"

"People talking--my mother's old friends. It was rather serious, as I had been thinking of their daughters for pupils. I thought I was alone, but your son--the 'boy' as you call him--was listening. He came and stood beside me. For a person who does not talk, he can make himself quite well understood. I tried to go on playing. My blinded eyes, the wrong notes, told him all. I lay and thought all night, and asked myself, why might I not be happy and give happiness, like other women of my age. I denied to my conscience that I was bound to tell him, since I was not, never had been, what that story in words would report me. Why should I affect a lie in order literally, vainly to be honest? So a day passed, and another sleepless night. And now I had his image of me to battle with. Then it became impossible, and yet more necessary, and each day's silence buried me deeper beyond the hope of speech. So I gave it up. Why should he have in his wife less than I would ask for in my husband? I want none of your experienced men. Such a record as his, such a look in the eyes, the expression unawares of a life of sustained effort--always in one direction"--

A white arm in a black sleeve pointed upward in silence.

"And you would rob him of his reward?" said the mother, in a choked voice.

"Mrs. Thorne! Do you not understand me? I am not talking for effect. But this is what happens if one begins to explain. I did not come here to talk to you for the rest of my life! It was your sweetness that undid me. I will never again say what I think of parents in general."

* * * * *

"Maggie, do you know what time it is?" a suppressed voice issued an hour later from that part of the house supposed to be dedicated to sleep. "Are you going to sit up till morning?"

"I am looking for my letter," came the answer, in a tragic whisper.

"What letter?"

"My letter to Willy, that you wouldn't let me read to you last night."

"You don't want to read it to me now, do you?"

There was no reply. A careful step kept moving about the inner rooms, newspapers rustled, and small objects were lifted and set down.

"Maggie, do come to bed! You can't mail your letter to-night."

"I don't want to mail it. I want to burn it. I will not have it on my conscience a moment longer"--

"I wish you'd have me on your conscience! It's after one o'clock." The voices were close together now, only an open door between the speakers.

"Won't you put something on and come out here, Henry? There is a light in Ito's house. I suppose you wouldn't let me go out and ask him?"

"I suppose not!"

"Then won't you go and ask if he saw a letter on my desk, sealed and addressed?"

Mr. Thorne sat up in bed disgustedly. "What is Ito doing with a light this time of night?"

"Hush, dear; don't speak so loud. He's studying. He's preparing himself to go into the Japanese navy."

"He is, is he! And that's why he can't get us our breakfast before half-past eight. I'll see about that light!"

"The letter, the letter!" Mrs. Thorne prompted in a ghostly--whisper. "Ask him if he saw it on my desk--a square blue envelope, thin paper."

The studious little cook was seated by a hot kerosene-lamp, at a table covered with picture-papers, soft Japanese books, and writing-materials. He was in his stocking-feet and shirt-sleeves, and his mental efforts appeared to have had a confusing effect on his usually sleek black hair, which stood all ways distractedly, while his sleepy eyes blinked under Mr. Thorne's brusque examination.

"I care fo' everything," he repeated, eliminating the consonants as he slid along. "Missa Tho'ne letta--all a-ready fo' mail--I putta pos'age-stamp, gifa to shif'-boss. I think Sa' F'a'cisco in a mo'ning. I care fo' everything!"

"Ito cares for everything," Mr. Thorne quoted, in answer to his wife's haggard inquiries. "He stamped your letter and sent it to town yesterday by one of the day-shift men."

"Now what shall be done!" Mrs. Thorne exclaimed tragically.

"I know what _I_ shall do!" Mr. Thorne wrapped his toga around him with an air of duty done. But a husband cannot escape so easily as that. His ministering angel sat beside his bed for half an hour longer, brooding aloud over the day's disaster, with a rigid eye upon the question of personal accountability.

"If you had not stopped me, Henry, when I tried to confess about my letter! There's no time for the truth like the present."

"My dear, when a person is telling a story you don't want to interrupt with quibbles of conscience; if it made it any easier for her to think us a little better than we are, why rob her of the delusion?"

"I shall have to rob her of it to-morrow. To think of my sitting there, a whited sepulchre, and being called generous and forbearing and merciful, with that letter lying on my desk all the time!"

"It would be lying there still except for an accident. She will see how you feel about it. Give her something to forgive in you. Depend upon it, she'll rise to the occasion."

* * * * *

As the mother passed her guest's room next morning she paused and looked remorsefully at the closed door.

"I ought to have told her that we never shut our doors. She must be smothered. I wonder if she can be asleep."

Mr. Thorne went on into the dining-room. Mrs. Thorne knocked, in a whisper as it were. There was no answer. She softly unlatched the door, and a draft of air crept through, widening it with a prolonged and wistful creak. The sleeper did not stir. She had changed her pillows to the foot of the bed, and was lying in the full light, with her window-curtains drawn. In all the room there was an air of abandonment, an exhausted memory of the night's despairing heat. Mrs. Thorne stepped across the matting, and noiselessly bowed the shutters. A dash of spray from the lawn-sprinkler was spattering the sill, threatening to dampen a pile of dainty clothing laid upon a chair. She moved the chair, looked once more at the lovely dark-lashed sleeper, and left her again in peace.

Beside her plate at the breakfast-table there was a great heap of roses, gathered that morning, her husband's usual greeting. She praised them as she always did, and then began to finger them over, choosing the finest to save for her guest. Rare as they were in kind, and opened that morning, there was not a perfect rose among them. Each one showed the touch of blight in bloom. Every petal, just unclosed and dewy at the core, was curled along the edges, scorched in the bud. It was not mildew or canker or disease, only "a touch of sun."

"I won't give them to her," said the mother; "they are too like herself."