PAGE 19
A Touch Of Sun
by
“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.”
She saw her husband go forth into the heat again, and blamed herself, according to her wont of a morning after the night’s mistakes, for robbing him of his rest and heaping her self-imposed burdens upon him. He laughed at the remorse tenderly, and brushed away the burdens, and faced the day’s actualities with the not too fine remark, “I must go and see what’s loose outside.”
Everything was “loose” apparently. Something about a “hoist” had broken in the night, and the men were still at work without breakfast, an eighteen-hour shift. The order came for Ito to send out coffee and bread and fruit to the famished gang. Ito was in the lowest of spirits; had just given his mistress warning that he could not stay. The affair of the letter had wounded his susceptibilities; he must go where he would be better understood. All this in a soft, respectful undertone, his mistress trying to comfort him, and incidentally hasten his response to the requisition from outside. At eleven o’clock Mr. Thorne sent in a pencil message on a card: “I shall not be home to lunch. Does she want to get the 12:30 train?” Mrs. Thorne replied in the same manner, by bearer: “She did, but she is asleep. I don’t like to wake her.”
The darkened house preserved its silence, a restless endurance of the growing heat. Mrs. Thorne, in the thinnest of morning gowns, her damp hair brushed back from her powdered temples, sat alone at luncheon. Ito had put a melancholy perfection into his last salad. It was his valedictory.
She was about to rise when Miss Benedet came silently into the room with her long, even step. Her dark eyes were full of sleep. Mrs. Thorne rang, and began to fuss a little over her guest to cover the shyness each felt at the beginning of a new day. They had parted at too high a pitch of expression to meet again in the same emotional key.