Chapter 6

It would have been noticeable to any less celestial-minded observer than Mr. Withers the diffidence with which Thane, in asking after Miss Daphne Lewis, pronounced that young person's name. He did not wait for the old gentleman to finish his explanation of her absence, but having learned the way she had gone, dropped himself at a great pace down the gulch and came upon her unawares, where she had been sitting, overcome by nameless fears and a creeping horror of the place. She started to her feet, for Thane's was no furtive tread that crashed through the thorny greasewood and planted itself, a yard at a bound, amongst the stones. The horror vanished and a flush of life, a light of joy, returned to her speaking face. He had never seen her so completely off her guard. He checked himself suddenly and caught his hat from his head; and without thinking, before he replaced it, he drew the back of his soft leather glove across his dripping forehead. The unconventional action touched her keenly. She was sensitively subject to outward impressions, and "the plastic" had long been her delight, her ambition, and her despair.

"Oh, if I could only have done something simple like that!" the defeated, unsatisfied artist soul within her cried. "That free, arrested stride, how splendid! and the hat crumpled in his hand, and his bare head and strong brows in the sunlight, and the damp points of hair clinging to his temples! No, he is _not_ bald,--that was only a tonsure of white light on the top of his head; still, he must be hard on forty. It is the end of summer with him, too; and here he comes for water, thirsting, to satisfy himself where water was plentiful in spring, and he finds a dry bed of stones. Call it The End of Summer; it is enough. Ah, if I could ever have thought out an action as simple and direct as that--and drawn it! But how can one draw what one has never seen!"

Not all this, but something else, something more that Daphne could not have put into words, spoke in the look which Thane surprised. It was but a flash between long lashes that fell instantly and put it out; but no woman whose heart was in the grave ever looked at a living man in that way, and the living man could not help but know it. It took away his self-possession for a moment; he stood speechless, gazing into her face with a question in his eyes which five minutes before he would have declared an insult to her.

Daphne struggled to regain her mask, but the secret had escaped: shameless Nature had seized her opportunity.

"How did I miss you?" she asked with forced coolness, as they turned up the gulch together. For the moment she had forgotten about the spring.

Thane briefly explained the mistake that had been made, adding, "You will have to put up with another day of us, now,--perhaps two."

"And where do you leave us, then?" asked Daphne stupidly.

"At the same place,--Decker's Ferry, you know." He smiled, indulgent to her crass ignorance of roads and localities. "Only we shall be a day longer getting there. We are still on the south side of the river, you remember?"

"Oh, of course!" said Daphne, who remembered nothing of the kind.

"It was a brutal fake, our springing this place on you for Pilgrim Station," he murmured.

"It has all been a mistake,--our coming, I mean; at least I think so."

It was some comfort to Thane to hear her say it,--he had been so forcibly of that opinion himself all along; but he allowed the admission to pass.

"It must have been a hard journey for you," he exerted himself to say, speaking in a surface voice, while his thoughts were sinking test-pits through layers of crusted consciousness into depths of fiery nature underneath.

She answered in the same perfunctory way: "You have been very kind; uncle has depended on you so much. Your advice and help have been everything to him."

He took her up with needless probity: "Whatever you do, don't thank me! It's bad enough to have Mr. Withers heaping coals of fire on my head. He gives me the place always, in regard to his son, of an intimate friend; which I never was, and God knows I never claimed to be! He took it for granted, somehow,--perhaps because of my letters at first, though any brute would have done as much at a time like that! Afterwards I would have set him right, but I was afraid of thrusting back the friendly imputation in his face. He credits me with having been this and that of a godsend to his son, when as a fact we parted, that last time, not even good friends. Perhaps you can forgive me for saying it? You see how I am placed!"

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 glassed 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 friendship'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 God's creation, what is she?

* * * * *

On the north side of the Snake, after climbing out of the cañon 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 assertion 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 God 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 God? God 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 illustration 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 brass-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 passing 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 God 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."

"Thanks, sir, I should be very glad to come; though your books, I'm afraid, are the sort that would not have much to say to me."

"Come and see, come and see," Mr. Withers pressed him warmly. "A ripe farewell should always hold the seeds of a future meeting."

"That is very kindly said," Thane responded quickly; "and if you don't mind, I will plant one of those seeds right now."

"So do, so do," the old gentleman urged unsuspiciously.

"Your niece"--Thane began, but could see his way no further in that direction without too much precipitancy. Then he backed down on a line of argument,--"I need not point out the fact," etc.,--and abandoned that as beset with too many pitfalls of logic, for one of his limited powers of analysis. Fewest words and simplest would serve him best. "It is hardly likely," then he said, "that your niece's present state of feeling will be respected as long as it lasts; there will be others with feelings of their own. Her loss will hardly protect her all her life from--she will have suitors, of course! Nature is a brute, and most men, young men, are natural in that respect,--in regard to women, I mean. I don't want to be the first fool who rushes in, but there will be a first. When he arrives, sir, will you let me know? If any man is to be heard, I claim the right to speak to her myself; the right, you understand, of one who loves her, who will make any sacrifice on earth to win her."

Mr. Withers remained silent. He had a sense of suffocation, as of waves of heat and darkness going over him. The wind sang in his ears, shouted and hooted at him. He was stunned. Presently he gasped, "Mr. Thane! you have not surely profaned this solemn journey with such thoughts as these?"

"A man cannot always help his thoughts, Mr. Withers. I have not profaned my thoughts by putting them into words, till now. I cannot do them justice, but I have made them plain. This is not a question of taste or propriety with me, or even decency. It is my life,--all of it I shall ever place at the disposal of any woman. I am not a boy; I know what I want and how much I want it. The secret of success is to be in the right place at the right time: here is where I ask your help."

"I do not question that you know what you want," said Mr. Withers mildly,--"it is quite a characteristic of the men of this region, I infer,--nor do I deny that you may know the way of success in getting it; but that I should open the door to you--be your--I might say accomplice, in this design upon the affections of my niece--why, I don't know how it strikes you, but"--

"It strikes me precisely as it does you,--my part of it," said Thane impatiently. "But her part is different, as I see it. If she were sick, you would not put off the day of her recovery because neither you nor yours could cure her? Whoever can make her forget this shipwreck of her youth, heal her unhappiness, let him do so. Isn't that right? Give him the chance to try. A man's power in these things does not lie in his deserts. All I ask is, when other men come forward I want the same privilege. But I shall not be on the ground. When that time comes, sir, will you remember me?"

For once Mr. Withers seized the occasion for a retort; he advanced upon the enemy's exposed position. "Yes, Mr. Thane, I will remember you,--better than you remember your friends when they are gone."

Thane accepted the reproach as meekly as if his friendship for John Withers had been of the indubitable stuff originally that Mr. Withers had credited him with. He rather welcomed than otherwise an unmerited rebuke from that long-suffering quarter.

But though Thane was silenced as well as answered, there was conscience yet to deal with. Mr. Withers sat and meditated sorely, while the wind buffeted his gray hairs. Conscience demanded that he give up the secret of Daphne's false mourning, which he would have defended with his life. "A silence that can harm no one." "So long as we defraud no living person who might claim a right to know your heart." The condition was plain; it provided for just such cases as the present. Then how could he hesitate? But he was human, and he did.

"I have gone too far, I see. Well, say no more about it," said Thane. "Your generosity tempted me. From those who give easily much shall be asked. Forget it, sir, please. I will look out for myself, or lose her."

"Stop a bit!" exclaimed Mr. Withers. He turned to Thane, placing his hand above his faded eyes to shade them from the glare, and looked his companion earnestly in the face. Thane sought for an umbrella, and raised it over the old gentleman's head; it was not an easy thing to hold it steady in that wind.

"Thanks, thanks! Now I can look at you. Yes, I can look you in the eye, in more senses than one. Listen to me, Mr. Thane, and don't mind if I am not very lucid. In speaking of the affairs of another, and a young woman, I can only deal in outlines. You will be able to surmise and hope the rest. I feel in duty bound to tell you that at the time of my son's death there was a misunderstanding on my part which forced Miss Lewis into a false position in respect to her relations to my son. Too much was assumed by me on insufficient evidence,--a case where the wish, perhaps, was father to the thought. She hesitated at that sore time to rob me of an illusion which she saw was precious to me; she allowed me to retain my erroneous belief that my son, had he lived, would have enjoyed the blessing of her affection. As a fact, she had not given it to him,--could not have given it,--though she owns that her mind, not her heart, was wavering. Had she married him, other motives than love would have influenced her choice. So death has saved my dear boy from a cruel disappointment or a worse mistake, and her from a great danger. Had he lived, he must have had many hours of wretchedness, either with or without that dearest wish of his heart fulfilled.

"This she confessed to me not many days ago, after a long period of remorseful questioning; and I deem it my duty now, in view of what you have just told me, to acquaint you with the truth. I am the only one who knows that she was not engaged to my son, and never really loved him. The fact cut me so deeply, when I learned it first, that I persuaded her, most selfishly, to continue in the disguise she had permitted, sustained so long,--to rest in it, that my boy's memory might be honored through this sacrifice of the truth. Weak, fond old man that I was, and worse! But now you have my confession. As soon as I can speak with her alone I will release her from that promise. She was fain to be free before all the world,--our little part of it,--but I fastened it on her. I see now that I could not have invented a crueler punishment; but it was never my purpose to punish her. I will also tell her that I have opened the true state of the case to you."

"Would you not stop just short of that, Mr. Withers? To know she is free to listen to him,--that is all any man could ask."

"Perhaps you are right; yes, she need not know that I have possessed you with her secret,--all of it that has any bearing on your hopes. I only thought it might save you, in her mind, from any possible imputation of--of want of respect for her supposed condition, akin to widowhood; but no doubt you will wait a suitable time."