A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

Perhaps nothing could have lowered the girl in her own eyes more than this humility of the gentle old man in the face of his own self-exposed weakness, his pathetic jealousy for that self above self,—-the child one can do no more than grieve for this side the grave. She had come to herself only to face the consciousness of a secret motive which robbed her confession of all moral value. Repentance, that would annul her base bargain now that the costs began to outweigh the advantages, was gilt edged, was a luxury; she was ashamed to buy back her freedom on such terms.

"Let it be as you say," she assented; "but only because you ask it. It will not be wrong, will it, if I do it for you?"

"I hope not," returned Mr. Withers. "The motive, in a silence of this kind that can harm no one, must make a difference, I should say."

So it was settled; and Daphne felt the weight of her promise, which the irony of justice had fastened upon her, as a millstone round her neck for life; she was still young enough to think that whatever is must last forever. They sat in silence, but neither felt that the other was satisfied. Mr. Withers knew that Daphne was not lightened of her trouble, nor was he in his heart content with the point he had gained. The unwonted touch of self-assertion it had called for rested uneasily on him; and he could not but own that he had made himself Daphne's apologist, which no confessor ought to be, in this disguise by which he named the deception he was now helping her to maintain.

After a time, when Daphne had called his attention to the fact, he agreed that it was indeed strange their companions did not return; they had been gone an hour or more to find a spring said to be not half a mile away.

Daphne proposed to climb the grade and see if they were yet in sight, Mr. Withers consenting. Indeed, under the stress of his thoughts, her absence was a sensible relief.

From the hilltop looking down she could see the way they had gone; the crooked gulch, a garment's crease in the great lap of the table-land, sinking to the river. She saw no one, heard no sound but the senseless hurry and bluster of the winds,—coming from no one knew where, going none cared whither. It blew a gale in the bright sunlight, mocking her efforts to listen. She waved her hand to her uncle's lone figure in the hollow, to signify that she was going down on the other side. He assented, supposing she had seen their fellow travelers returning.

She had been out of sight some moments, long enough for Mr. Withers to have lapsed into his habit of absent musing, when Thane came rattling down the slope of the opposite hill, surprised to see the old gentleman alone. His long, black eyes went searching everywhere while he reported a fruitless quest for the spring. Kinney and he had followed the gulch, which showed nowhere a vestige of water, save in the path of the spring freshets, until they had come in sight of the river; and Kinney had taken the horses on down to drink, riding one and leading the other. It would be nearly three miles to the river from where Thane had left him, but that was where all the deceptive cattle trails were tending. Thane, returning, had made a loop of his track around the hollow, but had failed to round up any spring. Hence, as he informed Mr. Withers, this could not be Pilgrim Station. He made no attempt to express his chagrin at this cruel and unseemly blunder. The old gentleman accepted it with his usual uncomplaining deference to circumstances; still, it was jarring to nerves overstrained and bruised by the home thrust of Daphne's defection. He fell silent and drew within himself, not reproachfully, but sensitively. Thane rightly surmised that no second invocation would be offered when they should come to the true Pilgrim Station; the old gentleman would keep his threnodies to himself after this.

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!"