PAGE 12
A Touch Of Sun
by
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.