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."