The cold of foot-hill California in the month of January held the night. The occupants of the surrey were too cramped and stiffened by it, and too uncomfortably enwrapped against it, to speak. Silence as complete as that which lay like a spell on the landscape brooded over them. At the last stopping place, Chinese Gulch, a scattering of houses six miles behind them on the mountain road, they had halted at the main saloon, and whisky and water had been passed to the driver and to the burlier figure on the back seat. The watchers that thronged to the saloon door had eyed the third occupant of the carriage with the intent, sheepish curiosity of the isolated man in presence of the stranger female. Afterward, each one was voluble in his impressions of her face, pale in the smoky lamplight, and the hand that slid, small and white, out of its loose glove when the warming glass was offered her.
Since then both she and her companion had leaned back in their several corners and preserved an unbroken silence. Even the driver’s tongue had showed the benumbing effects of the darkness and cold, and the flow of conversation with which, earlier in the day, he had entertained his fares, gradually languished and died.
The surrey sped swiftly along the road which wound in spectral pallor over the shoulder of the foot-hill, now dipping into the blackness of a ravine, then creeping up a bare slope, where the horses’ hoofs dug in laboriously amid loosened stones. The solemn loneliness of the landscape, faintly revealed by the light of large, clear stars, seemed to find appropriate expression in this frosty, smoke-breathing stillness. There was not a sign of human life. The gray patches of fields melted into the clouded darkness of trees. The domes of the live-oaks were like cairns of funereal rock in the open spaces. Steep, woody slopes swept upward, in the daytime shivering coppices of wintry leafage pierced by spires of fir and pine, now densely black and mysterious under the transforming magic of the night. Over all an expanse of sky arched, the vast, calm sky of mountain regions and Nature’s undesecrated places, crystal-clear and velvet-dark, the light of its stars seeming to come, tapping messages in an unknown telegraphy, from illimitable distances.
The larger figure on the back seat moved, and turned a face, all of which was hidden save the eyes, toward its companion.
“Hungry?” queried a deep bass voice; the inquiring polysyllable shot out suddenly over an upturned bulwark of collars.
“Fearfully,” came the answer in a muffled feminine treble, that suited the more diminutive bulk.
“Get a move on, Jake,” to the driver. “This girl’s most famished.”
“Hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.”
At these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward, peered ahead. As they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger.
“So that’s Rocky Bar!” she cried. “Have we really got there at last?”
The driver chuckled.
“That’s Rocky Bar all right. Now get your appetite good and ready.”
“No need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours. I was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.”
“Me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “Ah, get out! How does it come, Governor, that Bill Cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these parts than a young lady from New York?”
“She’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat, beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “I’ve brought her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa used to work round with the boys, long before she was ever thought of.”
A loud barking of dogs broke out as they approached the first detached houses of the settlement. Shapes appeared at the lighted doorways, and as the surrey drew up at the hotel balcony a crowding of heads was seen in the windows. The entire population of Rocky Bar spent its evenings at this hospitable resort, in summer on the balcony under the shade of the locust trees, in winter round the office stove, spitting and smoking in cheery sociability. But at this hour the great event of Rocky Bar’s day was over. The eight stages, the passengers of which dined at the hotel, had long passed onward on their various routes up and down the “mother lode” and into the camps of the Sierra. That the nightly excitement of the “victualing up” was to be supplemented by a late arrival in a surrey, driven by Jake McVeigh, the proprietor of the San Jacinto stables, and accompanied by a woman, was a sensational event not often awarded to Rocky Bar, even in the heyday of summer-time.
The occupants of the office crowded into the doorway and pressed themselves against the windows. They saw that the man who alighted was a thick-set, portly figure, with a short, gray beard and a suggestion of gray hair below the brim of a black wide-awake. Of the lady, shown but dimly by the light of the open door, only a slim, cloaked outline and a glint of fair hair were discernible. But, anyway, it was a woman, and of a kind unusual in Rocky Bar, and the men stared, sunk in bashful appreciation of a beauty that they felt must exist, if it were only to be in keeping with the hour, the circumstances, and their own hopeful admiration.
The hotel proprietor, an ancient man with a loosened vest, and trousers tucked into long boots, dispersed them as he ushered the strangers into the office. That they were travelers of distinction was obvious, as much from their own appearance as from the fact that Jake McVeigh was driving them himself, in his best surrey and with his finest team. But just how important they were no one guessed till McVeigh followed them in, and into ears stretched for the information dropped the sentence, half-heard, like a stage aside:
“It’s Bill Cannon and his daughter Rose.”
Upon the proprietor it had an electric effect. He sped from the room with the alertness of youth, promising “a cold lunch” in a minute. To the others it came as a piece of intelligence that added awe to the lighter emotions of the occasion. By common consent their eyes focused on the great man who stood warming his hands at the stove. Even the rare, unusual woman, revealed now as sufficiently pretty to be an object of future dreams, was interesting only to the younger and more impressionable members of the throng. All but these gazed absorbed, unblinking, at Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King.
He was used to it. It had been a part of his life for years. Eying his admirers with a genial good humor, he entered into conversation with them, his manner marked by an easy familiarity, which swept away all shades of embarrassment, and drew the men around the stove, eager to respond to his questions as to the condition and prospects of the locality. The talk was becoming general and animated, when the ancient man returned and announced that the “cold lunch” was ready and to please “step after him into the dining-room.”
This gaunt apartment, grimly unadorned and faintly illumined, an occasional lantern backed by a tin reflector projecting a feeble light into its echoing emptiness, was swept of all intruders, and showed a barn-like bareness of wall and loftiness of roof. Lines of tables, uncovered between flanking wooden benches, were arranged down its length. Across the end of one of these a white cloth was spread and three places set. Jake McVeigh, less innocently democratic than the hotel proprietor, was about to withdraw from the society of his distinguished patron and seat himself in seemly loneliness at an adjacent table, when Bill Cannon’s voice arrested him.
“What are you going off there for, sonny, as if you were a leper? Come over here and sit side of us.”
The driver, greatly pleased, not only to enjoy the companionship of the richest man in California but to let the peeping heads in the doorway see him in this moment of proud apotheosis, took the third seat with modest complacence. Like most of his kind, the sense of social inferiority was unknown to him. He was simply and naturally himself as he would be anywhere in any company. Even the proximity of Miss Cannon did not abash him, and he dexterously propelled the potatoes into his mouth with his knife and cut fiercely at his meat with a sawing motion, talking the while with all the freedom and more than the pleasure with which he talked to his wife in the kitchen at San Jacinto.
Cannon, his overcoat removed, was seen to be a powerful, thick-set man, with a bulkiness that was more a matter of broad build and muscular development than fat. His coat set ill upon him and strained at the buttons. It had the effect of having worked up toward the shoulders, noticeable in the clothes of men who are deep-chested and sit bunchily. He had a short neck which he accommodated with a turn-down collar, a gray beard, clipped close to his cheeks and square on the chin, and gray hair, worn rather long and combed sleekly and without parting back from his forehead. In age he was close to seventy, but the alertness and intelligence of a conquering energy and vitality were in his glance, and showed in his movements, deliberate, but sure and full of precision. He spoke little as he ate his dinner, leaning over his plate and responding to the remarks of his daughter with an occasional monosyllable that might have sounded curt, had it not been accompanied with a lazy cast of his eye upon her that was as full of affection as a caress.
The young lady, who had also put off her outer wraps, still wore her hat, which was wide-brimmed and cast a shadow over the upper part of her face. Below it her hair showed a fine, bright blonde, giving forth silky gleams in the lamplight. To the peeping heads in the doorway she seemed a creature instinct with romantic charm, which was expressed in such delicacies of appearance as a pearl-white throat, a rounded chin, and lips that smiled readily. These graces, eagerly deciphered through dimness and distance, had the attraction of the semi-seen, and imagination, thus given an encouraging fillip, invested Bill Cannon’s girl with a haunting beauty. It was remarked that she bore no resemblance to her father in coloring, features, or build. In talking it over later, Rocky Bar decided that she must favor her mother, who, as all California knew, had been a waitress in the Yuba Hotel at Marysville, when Bill Cannon, then a miner in the Freeze-Out, had wooed and won her.
The conversation between the diners was desultory. They were beyond doubt hungry. Even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness would have dictated. Once or twice, as she bit a semicircle out of a round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor, caught McVeigh’s, and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful.
It was toward the end of the meal, that, looking at the opposite wall, her glance was caught by a large clock to which she drew her father’s attention:
“Half-past nine! How fashionable we are! And when are you going to get us up to Antelope, Mr. McVeigh?”
McVeigh studied the clock ponderingly as he felt in his breast pocket for his toothpick.
“Well,” he said, “if we leave here at ten and make good time the hull way—it’s up hill pretty much without a break—I’ll get you there about midnight.”
She made a little grimace.
“And it will be much colder, won’t it?”
“Colder ’n’ colder. You’ll be goin’ higher with every step. Antelope’s on the slope of the Sierra, and you can’t expect to be warm up there in the end of January.”
“If you hadn’t wanted to come,” said her father, “you’d have been just about getting ready for Mrs. Ryan’s ball. Isn’t this about the magic hour when you begin to lay on the first layer of war-paint?”
The girl looked at the clock, nodding with a faint, reminiscent smile.
“Just about,” she said. “I’d have been probably looking at my dress laid out on the bed and saying to myself, ‘Now I wonder if it’s worth while getting into that thing and having all the bother of going to this ball.’ On the evenings when I go out, there’s always a stage when that happens.”
McVeigh, with his toothpick in full operation, looked at her, admiring and half comprehending, for the first time feeling himself an outsider. She caught his eye, read its meaning, and with the quick tact of a delicate nature, said:
“It’s Mrs. Cornelius Ryan in San Francisco. She has a ball to-night and I was going, but I came up here with papa instead. I don’t care for balls.”
“Sort of late to be primping up for a ball,” said McVeigh, restoring the toothpick to his pocket and pushing back his chair. “I’ll go and have a look at the horses. And, Governor, if you’ll be ready in fifteen minutes I’ll be round at the porch waiting.”
Cannon nodded, and, as the driver clumped off over the board floor, said to his daughter,
“I wonder if Dominick Ryan’ll be there—at the ball, I mean. His mother’s made up her mind not to recognize the woman he’s married, and to freeze her out, but I wonder if she’ll have the nerve not to ask her to-night.”
“I don’t see how she could do that,” said the girl. “This is one of the largest balls ever given in San Francisco. She can’t leave her son out, and she couldn’t ask him without his wife.”
“Couldn’t she?” said the old man, with a narrowing of his eyes and a knowing wag of his head. “You don’t know Delia Ryan. I do. I’ve known her forty years, ever since she was first married and did washing on the back porch of her shanty in Virginia City. She was a good deal of a woman then, a strong, brainy woman, and she’s the same to-day, but hard as nails. I’ll bet a hat she hasn’t asked Dominick’s wife to that ball.”
“What do you suppose he’ll do?” asked the daughter, somewhat aghast at this glimpse of the Ryan family skeleton.
“Don’t ask me such conundrums. I’m glad I’m not in it, that’s all I know. When two women lock horns I’m ready to step quietly down and out. I never to my knowledge saw Dominick’s wife, but I’ve heard about her, and take it she’s a pretty hard kind of a proposition. They say she married the boy for money and position, and hasn’t got either. Delia, who has the money, hasn’t given them a cent since the marriage; made up her mind, people say, to force Mrs. Dominick out. She doesn’t seem to have done it, and I guess it’s been sort of aggravating to her. Just the same I’d like to know if she’s had the nerve not to send the woman an invitation to the ball. That would be pretty tough.”
“I’ve never seen either Dominick or his wife,” said the girl. “It seems odd when I know Mrs. Ryan and Cornelia so well. But he married the year I came back from Europe, and he’s never been anywhere since. I don’t believe he ever goes to his mother’s. There’s Mr. McVeigh in the doorway; we’d better be going.”
Once again in the carriage they were soon clear of the last straggling shanty, and speeding along the pale, ascending road. The silence that held the trio before their arrival at Rocky Bar again fell on them. Wrapped in overcoats and rugs, Bill Cannon appeared to slumber, every now and then—as the wheels jolted over a piece of rough road-bed—shaken into growling wakefulness. McVeigh also rolled sleepily in his seat, occasionally leaning sidewise to spit over the wheel. Only the girl seemed alert and wide-awake, her face craning out from the shadowed back seat, her eyes strained to pierce the obscurity and see for the first time the landscape of foot-hill California, of which her father had so often told her.
Now it was all a dark, formless background of broken blacknesses, where the light, open spaces of fields alternated with blotches of woods and trees. At intervals they passed a lone cabin, solitary in its pale clearing, the red eye of a stove sending a gleam through an uncurtained pane. Once they woke the echoes in the single street of a tiny town, sleeping behind its shuttered windows. Dogs barked, the shout of a belated reveler rose from a congeries of gaudily-bright doorways, and over all, imposing its mighty voice on the silence, came the roar of the stamp-mill on the hill above. It rose into the night like a fortress, a black mass looming from the slant of vast dumps, lines of lit windows puncturing its sides. The thunder of its stamps was loud on the night, fierce and insistent, like the roar of a monster round whose feet the little town cowered.
McVeigh looked back over his shoulder, saw the bright eyes under the hat-brim, and said softly,
“The Silver Crescent stamp-mill. The last big mine we’ll see.”
It was the last town they passed; even the groups of buildings that marked embryo mines grew rare. The dimly-seen country became wilder, seemed to shake off the signs of man’s encroachment and to be sweeping up into mountain majesty. The ascending road crept along the edges of ravines whence the sound of running water came in a clear clinking, dived down into black caverns of trees unlighted by the feeblest ray of star-shine, and then climbed in slow, laborious loops the bare bulwarks of the mountain. Had the girl been able to see plainly she would have noticed the change in the foliage, the disappearance of the smaller shrubs and delicate interlacement of naked boughs, and the mightier growth of the pines, soaring shafts devoid of branches to a great height. Boulders appeared among their roots, straight falls of rock edged the road like the walls of a fort.
McVeigh turned again, and again caught the bright eye.
“Seems like your paw must think a lot of what he’s heard about the new strike at Greenhide to come all this way,” he whispered.
“I guess he does,” came the response in the same key.
“It sort of stumps me to know why you came along with him,” he continued, his eyes on the horses, but leaning back to catch her answer.
“Mightn’t I just want to see the country?”
“Well, mebbe you might, but it don’t seem to me that you’re seein’ much of it to-night.”
He heard her smothered laugh, shot his glance back to see her face, and laughed himself, turning to his horses, and then turning back to her.
“You’re a lively girl, ain’t you?” he said.
“I don’t feel very lively just at this minute. I’m a cold girl, the coldest in California, I think.”
That made him laugh, too, but he turned back to his horses, saying with quick consideration:
“I guess you are. Come boys,” to the horses, “we’ve got to get a move on. We can’t let this young lady catch cold.”
The horses quickened their pace and there was no more talk. An hour later the first broken lights of Antelope sparkled along the road. The old mining camp, in a hollow between two buttresses of the Sierra, lay shuttered and dreaming under the starlight. A lamp-lit window, here and there, showed the course of its straggling main street, and where the hotel stood, welcoming rays winked between the boughs of leafless trees.
As the thud of the approaching hoof-beats woke the echoes a sudden violent barking of dogs broke out. Antelope was evidently not as sound asleep as it looked. At the hotel, especially, there was life and movement. The bar disgorged a throng of men, and Perley, the proprietor, had to push his way through them to welcome his midnight guests. Antelope, though remote, was in telegraphic communication with the world, and the operator at Rocky Bar had wired Perley to be ready for the distinguished arrivals,—news that in a half-hour was known throughout the town and had brought most of the unattached male population into the hotel.
Jake McVeigh was pulling the luggage from under the seats and Cannon was interchanging the first greetings with his landlord, when the girl, who had gone to the balcony railing and was looking out into the darkness, cried:
“Why, papa, snow!”
The information seemed to startle every one. The men crowded from the doorway and balcony into the street. McVeigh set down the bags, and, turning his weather-beaten face to the sky, uttered a smothered ejaculation of a profane character. Cannon came forward to where his daughter stood and looked into the blackness beyond. The girl had drawn off her glove and held her bare hand out, then stepping back to the light of the window, she showed it to her father. The white skin was sprinkled with snow crystals.
“Sure enough,” he said in a thoughtful voice. “Well, it won’t be the first time I’ve been snowed up at Antelope.”
That same evening, at the hour when Bill Cannon and his daughter were setting out from Rocky Bar, Dominick Ryan was walking up Van Ness Avenue toward his mother’s house.
Dominick did not know at what hours balls of the kind Mrs. Ryan was giving that evening were supposed to begin. It was nearly three years since he had been a participant in such festal gatherings. He had not been at a dance, or a dinner, or a theater party since his marriage. He had heard that these “functions,” as people now called them, began later than they did in his day. Stopping by a lamp he drew out his watch—ten o’clock. It was later than he expected. In truth, as he had seen the house looming massively from its less imposing neighbors, his foot had lagged, his approach had grown slower and slower. It was his mother’s home, once his own, and as he drew nearer to it his reluctance to enter grew stronger, more overpoweringly oppressive.
In the clear, lamp-dotted night it looked much larger and more splendid than by day. When Cornelius Ryan had built it he had wanted to have the finest house in San Francisco, and he certainly had achieved the most spacious and ornate. Its florid ornamentation was now hidden by the beautifying dark, and on its vast façade numerous windows broke the blackness with squares of light. In the lower ones the curtains were drawn, but slivers and cracks of radiance slipped out and penetrated the dusk of a garden, where they encountered the glossy surfaces of leaves and struck into whispering darknesses of shrubbery.
The stimulating unquiet of festival was in the air. Round the mouth of the canvas tunnel that stretched from the door a dingy crowd was assembled, staring in at nothing more inspiring than the blank visage of the closed portal. At every passing footstep each face turned to the street, hopefully expectant of the first guest. The whining of catgut strings, swept by tentative bows, struck on Dominick’s ear as he pushed his way through the throng and passed up the tunnel. Before he touched the bell the door swung back and a man-servant he had never seen before murmured in politely low tones,
“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right.”
Dominick stood uncertain. He was only a rare, occasional visitor at his mother’s house, and to-night the hall stripped for revelry looked strangely unfamiliar. The unexpectedness of a great, new mirror, surmounted by gold heraldic devices, confused him. The hall chairs were different. The music, loud now and beginning to develop from broken chords and phrases into the languorous rhythm of a waltz measure, came from behind a grove of palms that stood back under the stairs, where the organ was built into the wall. Both to the right and left, wide, unencumbered rooms opened, brilliantly lighted, with flowers banked in masses on the mantels and in the corners. The scent of these blossoms was rich on the air and seemed to blend naturally—like another expression of the same sensuous delightfulness—with the dreamy sweetness of the music.
“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right,” repeated the servant, and Dominick became aware of the man’s eyes, fixed on him with a gleam of uneasy scrutiny shining through cultivated obsequiousness.
“Where is my——” he was going to say “mother,” but checked himself, amending it with, “Where is Mrs. Ryan?”
The servant indicated the open doorway to the right and Dominick passed in. Through the vista of two rooms, their connecting archways uncurtained, he saw the shining spaciousness of the ball-room, the room his mother had added to the house when Cornelia, his sister, had “come out.” It seemed empty and he walked toward it, stepping softly on rugs of tiger skin and polar bear. He noticed the ice-like polish of the oak floor, the lines of gilt chairs, and a thick, fat garland of roses—leaves and blossoms combined—that was festooned along the wall and caught up at each sconce.
As he entered he saw his mother and Cornelia. They had been standing in one corner, Cornelia adjusting the shade of an electric light. One white arm was raised, and her skirt of lace was reflected clearly in the parquet. The light shone along her bare shoulders, having a gloss like old marble. From the nape of her neck her hair, a bright, coarse red, was drawn up. She seemed all melting shades of cream color and ivory, but for this flaming crest of copper color.
Her mother was standing beside her watching the arranging hand. She was sixty-eight years of age and very stout, but her great wealth made it possible for her to employ dressmakers who were artists and experts, and her Parisian costume made her look almost shapely. It fell about her in dignified black folds, sparkling discreetly with some jetted garnishings. With their shifting gleam the glint of diamonds mingled. She also wore pearls round her neck and some diamond ornaments in her elaborately-dressed gray hair.
The coarseness of her early beginnings could not be hidden by the most proficient artificers in millinery or jewels. Delia Ryan had come from what are vulgarly called “the lower orders,” having, in her ragged childhood, crossed the plains at the tail-board of an ox cart, and in her girlhood been a general servant in a miners’ boarding-house at Sonora. Now, as she stood watching her daughter’s moving hand, her face, set in a frowning rigidity of observation, was strong but unbeautiful. Her small eyes, shrewd and sharp, were set high in her head under brows almost rubbed away. The nose was short, with an undeveloped bridge and keen, open nostrils. Her mouth had grown thinner with years; the lips shut with a significant firmness. They had never been full, but what redness and ripeness they had had in youth were now entirely gone. They were pale, strong lips, the under one a little more prominent than the upper.
“There!” said Cornelia. “Now they’re all even,” and she wheeled slowly, her glance slipping along the veiled lights of the sconces. In its circuit it encountered Dominick’s figure in the doorway.
“Dominick!” she cried, and stood staring, naïvely astonished and dismayed.
Mrs. Ryan turned with a start, her face suffused with color. The one word seemed to have an electrifying effect upon her, joyous, perturbing—unquestionably exciting.
“My boy!” she said, and she rustled across the room with her hands out.
Dominick walked toward her. He was grave, pale, and looked thoroughly miserable. He had his cane in one hand, his hat in the other. As he approached her he moved the hat to his left hand and took hers.
“You’ve come!” she said fondly, “I knew you would. That’s my boy. I knew you’d come when your mother asked you.”
“Yes, I’ve come,” he said slowly, and looking down as if desiring to avoid her eyes. “Yes, I’ve come, but——”
He stopped.
His mother’s glance fell from his face to his figure and saw under the loose fronts of his overcoat that he wore his business suit. Her countenance instantly, with almost electric suddenness, stiffened into antagonism. Her eye lost its love, and hardened into a stony look of defiant indignation. She pulled her hand from his and jerked back the front of his coat with it.
“What’s this mean?” she said sharply. “Why aren’t you dressed? The people will be here in a minute. You can’t come this way.”
“I was going home to dress,” he said. “I am not sure yet that I can come.”
“Why?” she demanded.
His face grew red. The mission on which he had come was more difficult, more detestable, than he had supposed it would be. He looked down at the shining strip of floor between them and said, trying to make his voice sound easy and plausible:
“I came to ask you for an invitation for Berny.”
“Hah!” said his mother, expelling her breath in an angry ejaculation of confirmed suspicion. “That’s it, is it? I thought as much!”
“Mama!” said the girl who had been standing by, uneasily listening. “Mama dear——”
Her voice was soft and sweet, a placating woman’s voice. And as she drew nearer to them, her figure seeming to float over the shining parquet in its pale spread of gauzy draperies, her tone, her face, and her bearing were instinct with a pleading, feminine desire to soothe.
“Keep quiet, Cornie,” said her mother, “you’re not in this”—turning to Dominick. “And so your wife sent you up here to beg for an invitation? She’s got you under her thumb to that extent? Well, go back to her and tell her that she can send you forty times and you’ll not get it. She can make you crawl here and you’ll not get it—not while this is my house. When I’m dead you can do what you like.”
She turned away from him, her face dark with stirred blood, her body quivering. Anger was not the only passion that shook her. Deeper than this went outraged pride, love turned to gall, impotent fury that the woman her son had married had power over him so to reduce his pride and humble his manhood—her only son, the joy and glory of her old age, her Benjamin.
He looked after her, uncertain, frowning, desperate.
“It’s not right,” he protested. “It’s not fair. You’re unjust to her and to me.”
The old woman moved across the room to the corner where she had been standing when he entered. She did not turn, and he continued:
“You’re asking people to this ball that you hardly know. Everybody in San Francisco’s going. What harm has Berny done that you should leave her out this way?”
“I don’t want women with that kind of record in my house. I don’t ask decent people here to meet that sort,” said his mother over her shoulder.
He gave a suppressed exclamation, the meaning of which it was difficult to read, then said,
“Are you never going to forget the past, mother?”
She wheeled round toward him almost shouting,
“No—no—no! Never! Never! Make your mind up to that.”
They looked at each other across the open space, the angry defiance in their faces not hiding the love and appeal that spoke in their eyes. The mother longed to take her son in her arms; the son longed to lay his head on her shoulder and forget the wretchedness and humiliations of the last two years. But they were held apart, not only by the specter of the absent woman, but on the one side by a fierce, unbendable pride, and on the other by an unforgettable sense of obligation and duty.
“Oh, mother!” he exclaimed, half-turning away with a movement of despair.
His mother looked at him from under her lowered brows, her under lip thrust out, her face unrelenting.
“Come here whenever you like,” she said, “as often as you want. It’s your home, Dominick, mine and yours. But it’s not your wife’s. Understand that.”
She turned away and again moved slowly toward the corner, her rich skirts trailing fanwise over the parquet. He stood, sick at heart, looking at the tip of his cane as it rested on the floor.
“Dominick,” said his sister’s voice beside him, “go; that’s the only thing to do. You see it’s no use.” She made a backward jerk of her head toward their mother, and then, struck by the misery of the eyes he lifted to her face, said tenderly, “I’m so sorry. You know I’d have sent it if I could. But it’s no use. It’s just the same old fight over again and nothing gained. Tell your wife it’s hopeless. Make her give it up.”
He turned slowly, his head hanging.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell her. Good-night, mother.”
“Good-night, Dominick,” came the answer.
“Good-night, Cornie,” he said in a muffled voice and left the room.
He passed through the brilliantly bright, flower-scented parlors and was shown out by the strange man-servant. The crowd at the mouth of the canvas tunnel had increased. Clumps of staring white faces edged the opening and presented themselves to his eye, not like reality, but like a painting of pale visages executed on the background of the night. They drew away as he approached them, making a lane of egress for him, then turned and eyed him—a deserter from the realms of joy—as he stopped by a lamp-post to look at his watch. A quarter past ten. He had been in the house only fifteen minutes. He did not need to go home for a while yet. He could walk about and think and arrange how he would tell Berny.
He was a man in the full vigor of his youth, strong and brave, yet at this moment he feared, feared as a child or a timid woman might fear, the thought of his wife. He dreaded to meet her; he shrank from it, and to put it off he wandered about the familiar streets, up one and down the other, trying to overcome his sick reluctance, trying to make up his mind to go to her, trying to conquer his fear.
He walked for nearly an hour, along quiet, lamp-lit streets where large houses fronted on gardens that exhaled moist earth scents and the breaths of sweet, unseen blossoms, up hills so steep that it seemed as if an earthquake might have heaved up the city’s crust and bent it crisply like a piece of cardboard. From these high places he looked down on the expanse of the bay, a stretch of ink surrounded by black hills, here and there spangled with the clustered sparklings of little towns. In the hollows below him he saw the lights of the city swimming on its darkness, winking and trembling on receding depths of blackness, like golden bubbles seething on the surface of thick, dense wine.
He looked down unseeing, thinking of the last three years.
When he had first met Bernice Iverson, she had been a typewriter and stenographer in the office of the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company. He was twenty-four at the time, the only son of Cornelius Ryan, one of the financial magnates of the far West. The career of Con Ryan, as he was familiarly called, had been as varied as the heart of a public, who loves to dwell on the sensational fortunes of its great men, could have wished. In the early days of Virginia City, Con Ryan had been a miner there, had a claim of his own and lost all he had in it before the first Crown Point excitement, had run a grocery store in Shasta, moved to Sacramento, speculated successfully in mining stock and real estate, and in the bonanza days had had money to play the great game which made millionaires of the few and beggars of the many. He had played it daringly and with profit. When he died he left his widow complete control of a fortune of ten millions.
She had been a sturdy helpmeet—it was generally said that she was the best man of the two—and would keep the fortune safe for the two children, Dominick and Cornelia. Neither she nor Con believed in young men having control of large fortunes. They had seen what came of it in the sons of their bonanza friends. Dominick was sent to the East to college, and on his return, being then twenty-three years of age, was placed in the Oregon and California Bank, of which his father had been one of the founders. He was soon promoted to a position where he earned a salary of three thousand a year. This was all he had when he met Bernice Iverson.
She was seven years older than he, but told him they were the same age. It was not a wasted lie, as she undoubtedly looked much younger than she was, being a slight, trimly-made woman who had retained a girlish elasticity of figure and sprightliness of manner. She came of respectable, hard-working people, her father, Danny Iverson, having been a contractor in a small way of business, and her two sisters being, one a teacher in the primary school department, the other a saleswoman in a fashionable millinery. She herself was an expert in her work, in office hours quiet, capable and businesslike, afterward lively, easy-going and companionable. The entrapping of young Ryan was a simple matter. He had never loved and knew little of women. He did not love her, but she made him think he did, threw herself at him, led him quickly to the point she wished to reach, and secretly, without a suspicion on the part of her family, became his mistress. Six months later, having driven him to the step by her upbraidings and her apparent sufferings of conscience under the sense of wrong-doing, she persuaded him to marry her.
The marriage was a bombshell to the world in which young Ryan was a planet of magnitude. His previous connection with her—though afterward discovered by his mother—was at the time unknown. Bernice had induced him to keep the marriage secret till its hour of accomplishment, for she knew Mrs. Ryan would try to break it off and feared that she might succeed. Once Dominick’s wife she thought that the objections and resentment of the elder woman could be overcome. But she underrated the force and obstinacy of her adversary and the depth of the wound that had been given her. Old Mrs. Ryan had been stricken in her tenderest spot. Her son was her idol, born in her middle-age, the last of four boys, three of whom had died in childhood. In his babyhood she had hoarded money and worked late and early that he might be rich. Now she held the great estate of her husband in trust for him, and dreamed of the time when he should marry some sweet and virtuous girl and she would have grandchildren to love and spoil and plan for. When the news of his marriage reached her and she saw the woman he had made his wife, she understood everything. She knew her boy through and through and she knew just how he had been duped and entangled.
She was of that race of pioneer Californians who had entered an uninhabited country, swept aside Indian and Spaniard, and made it their own. They were isolated figures in a huge landscape, their characters, uncramped and bold, developing unrestricted in an atmosphere of physical and moral liberty. They grew as their instincts dictated; the bough was not bent into convenient forms by expediency or pressure from without. Public opinion had little or no weight with them, for there was none. It was the pleasure of this remote group in this rich and exuberant land to do away with tradition and be a law and precept unto themselves. What other people thought and did did not influence them. They had one fixed, dominating idea in a fluctuating code of morals—they knew what they wanted and they were determined to get it. They were powerful individualities whether for good or evil, and they resented with a passion any thwarting of their plans or desires, whether by the interposition of man or the hand of God.
Delia Ryan’s life had been a long, ascending series of hardly-won triumphs. She had surmounted what would have seemed to a less bold spirit unsurmountable obstacles; gone over them, not around them. She had acquired the habit of success, of getting what she wanted. Failure or defiance of her plans amazed her as they might have amazed the confident, all-conquering, pagan gods. The center of her life was her family; for them she had labored, for them she would have died. Right and wrong in her mind were clearly defined till it came to her husband or children, and then they were transmuted into what benefited the Ryans and what did not. Rigidly fair and honorable in her dealings with the outside world, let a member of that world menace the happiness of one of her own, and she would sacrifice it, grind the ax without qualms, like a priestess grimly doing her duty.
The marriage of her son was the bitterest blow of her life. It came when she was old, stiffened into habits of dominance and dictatorship, when her ambitions for her boy were gaining daily in scope and splendor. A blind rage and determination to crush the woman were her first feelings, and remained with her but slightly mitigated by the softening passage of time. She was a partizan, a fighter, and she instituted a war against her daughter-in-law which she conducted with all the malignant bitterness that marks the quarrels of women.
Dominick had not been married a month when she discovered the previous connection between him and his wife, and published it to the winds. A social power, feared and obeyed, she let it be known that to any one who received Mrs. Dominick Ryan her doors would be for ever closed. Without withdrawing her friendship from her son she refused ever to meet or to receive his wife. In this attitude she was absolutely implacable. She imposed her will upon the less strong spirits about her, and young Mrs. Ryan was as completely shut off from her husband’s world as though her skirts carried contamination. With masculine largeness of view in other matters, in this one the elder woman exhibited a singular, unworthy smallness. The carelessly large checks she had previously given Dominick on his birthday and anniversaries ceased to appear, and masculine gifts, such as pipes, walking-sticks, and cigar-cases, in which his wife could have no participating enjoyment, took their place. She had established a policy of exclusion, and maintained it rigidly.
Young Mrs. Ryan had at first believed that this rancor would melt away with the flight of time. But she did not know the elder woman. She was as unmeltable as a granite rock. The separation from her son, now with age growing on her, ate like an acid into the mother’s heart. She saw him at intervals, and the change in him, the growth of discouragement, the dejection of spirit that he hid from all the world, but that her eye, clairvoyant from love, detected, tore her with helpless wrath and grief. She punished herself and punished him, sacrificed them both, in permitting herself the indulgence of her implacable indignation.
Bernice, who had expected to gain all from her connection with the all-powerful Ryans, at the end of two years found that she was an ostracized outsider from the world she had hoped to enter, and that the riches she had expected to enjoy were represented by the three thousand a year her husband earned in the bank. Her attempts to force her way into the life and surroundings where she had hoped her marriage would place her had invariably failed. If her feelings were not of the same nature as those of the elder Mrs. Ryan, they were fully as poignant and bitter.
The effort to get an invitation to the ball had been the most daring the young woman had yet made. Neither she nor Dominick had thought it possible that Mrs. Ryan would leave her out. So confident was she that she would be asked that she had ordered a dress for the occasion. But when Dominick’s invitation came without her name on the envelope, then fear that she was to be excluded rose clamorous in her. For days she talked and complained to her husband as to the injustice of this course and his power to secure the invitation for her if he would. By the evening of the ball she had brought him to the point where he had agreed to go forth and demand it.
It was a hateful mission. He had never in his life done anything so humiliating. In his shame and distress he had hoped that his mother would give it to him without urging, and Bernice, placated, would be restored to good humor and leave him at peace. She could not have gained such power over him, or so bent him to her bidding, had she not had in him a fulcrum of guilty obligation to work on. She continually reminded him of “the wrong” he had done her, and how, through him, she had lost the respect of herfellows and her place among them. All these slights, snubs and insults were his fault, and he felt that this was true. To-night he had gone forth in dogged desperation. Now in fear, frank fear of her, he went home, slowly, with reluctant feet, his heart getting heavier, his dread colder as he neared the house.
It was one of those wooden structures on Sacramento Street not far from Van Ness Avenue where the well-to-do and socially-aspiring crowd themselves into a floor of seven rooms, and derive satisfaction from the proximity of their distinguished neighbors who refuse to know them. It contained four flats, each with a parlor bay-window and a front door, all four doors in neighborly juxtaposition at the top of a flight of six marble steps.
Dominick’s was the top flat; he had to ascend a long, carpeted stairway with a turn half-way up to get to it. Now, looking at the bay-window, he saw lights gleaming from below the drawn blinds. Berny was still up. A lingering hope that she might have gone to bed died, and his sense of reluctance gained in force and made him feel slightly sick. He was there, however, and he had to go up. Fitting his key into the lock he opened the hall door.
It was very quiet as he mounted the long stairs, but, as he drew near the top, he became aware of a windy, whistling noise and looking into the room near the stair-head saw that all the gas-jets were lit and turned on full cock, and that the gas, rushing out from the burner in a ragged banner of flame, made the sound. He was about to enter and lower it when he heard his wife’s voice coming from the open door of her room.
“Is that you, Dominick?” she called.
Her voice was steady and high. Though it was hard, with a sort of precise clearness of utterance, it was not conspicuously wrathful.
“Yes,” he answered, “it’s I,” and he forgot the gas-jets and walked up the hall. He did not notice that in the other rooms he passed the gas was turned on in the same manner. The whistling rush of its escape made a noise like an excited, unresting wind in the confined limits of the little flat.
The door of Berny’s room was open, and under a blaze of light from the chandelier and the side lights by the bureau she was sitting in a rocking-chair facing the foot of the bed. She held in her hand a walking-stick of Dominick’s and with this she had been making long scratches across the foot-board, which was of walnut and was seamed back and forth, like a rock scraped by the passage of a glacier. As Dominick entered, she desisted, ceased rocking, and turned to look at him. She had an air of taut, sprightly impudence, and was smiling a little.
“Well, Dominick,” she said jauntily, “you’re late.”
“Yes, I believe I am,” he answered. “I did not come straight back. I walked about for a while.”
He slowly crossed the room to the fireplace and stood there looking down. There were some silk draperies on the mantel matched by those which were festooned over the room’s single window. He fastened his eyes on the pattern stamped on the looped-up folds, and was silent. He thought Berny would realize from the fact that he had not come directly home that the invitation had been denied. This was his bungling, masculine way of breaking the news.
“Took a walk,” she said, turning to the bed and beginning to rock. “It’s a queer sort of hour to choose for walking,” and lifting the cane she recommenced her occupation of scratching the foot-board with it, tracing long, parabolic curves across the entire expanse, watching the cane’s tip with her head tilted to one side. Dominick, who was not looking at her, did not notice the noise.
“I thought,” she said, tracing a great arc from one side to the other, “that you were with your loving family—opening the ball, probably.”
He did not move, but said quietly,
“It was impossible to get the invitation, Berny. I tried to do it and was refused. I want you to understand that as long as I live I’ll never do a thing like that again.”
“Oh, yes, you will,” she said, laughing and shaking her head like an amused child. “Oh, yes, you will.” She threw her head back and, looking at the ceiling, laughed still louder with a note of fierceness in the sound. “You’ll do it and lots more things like it. You’ll do it if I want you to, Dominick Ryan.”
He did not answer. She hitched her chair closer to the bed as if to return to an engrossing pastime, and, leaning back luxuriously, resumed her play with the cane. This time Dominick noticed the noise and turned. She was conscious that he was looking at her, and began to scratch with an appearance of charmed absorption, such as an artist might display in his work. He watched her for a moment in silent astonishment and then broke out sharply,
“What are you doing?”
“Scratching the bed,” she responded calmly.
“You must be mad,” he said, striding angrily toward her and stretching a hand for the cane. “You’re ruining it.”
She whipped the cane to the other side, out of his reach.
“Am I?” she said, turning an eye of fiery menace on him. “Maybe I am, and what’s that matter?” Then, turning back to the bed, “Too bad, isn’t it, and the set not paid for yet.”
“Not paid for!” he exclaimed, so amazed by the statement that he forgot everything else. “Why, I’ve given you the money for it twice!”
“Three times,” she amended coolly, “and I spent it on things I liked better. I bought clothes, and jewelry with it, and little fixings I wanted. Yes, the bedroom set isn’t all paid for yet and we’ve had it nearly two years. Who would have thought that the son of Con Ryan didn’t pay his bills!”
She rose, threw the cane into the corner, and, turning toward him, leaned back, half-sitting on the foot-board, her hands, palm downward, pressed on its rounded top. The chandelier was directly over her head and cast a powerful light on her face. This was small, pointed, and of that sallow hue which is often noticeable in the skins of brunette women who are no longer in their first youth. She had a nose that drooped a little at the tip and an upper lip which was long and closed firmly and secretively on the lower one. Her dark eyes, large and brilliant, had the slightest tendency toward a slanting setting, the outer corners being higher than the inner ones. Under the shower of light from above, her thick hair, bleached to a reddish auburn and worn in a loose knot on top of her head, cast a shadow over her forehead, and below this her eyes blazed on her husband. Many men would have thought her an unusually pretty woman, but no man, save one of her own sort, could have faced her at this moment without quailing.
Dominick and she had had many quarrels, ignominious and repulsive, but he had never before seen her in so savage a mood. Even yet he had not lost the feeling of responsibility and remorse he felt toward her. As he moved from the mantelpiece his eye had fallen on the ball-dress that lay, a sweep of lace and silver, across the bed, and on the bureau he had seen jewels and hair ornaments laid out among the powder boxes and scent bottles. The pathos of these futile preparations appealed to him and he made an effort to be patient and just.
“It’s been a disappointment,” he said, “and I’m sorry about it. But I’ve done all I could and there’s no use doing any more. You’ve got to give it up. There’s no use trying to make my mother give in. She won’t.”
“Won’t she?” she cried, her voice suddenly loud and shaken with rage. “We’ll see! We’ll see! We’ll see if I’ve married into the Ryan family for nothing.”
Her wrath at last loosened, her control was instantly swept away. In a moment she was that appalling sight, a violent and vulgar woman in a raging passion. She ran round the bed and, seizing the dress, threw it on the floor and stamped on it, grinding the delicate fabric into the carpet with her heels.
“There!” she cried. “That’s what I feel about it! That’s the way I’ll treat the things and the people I don’t like! That dress—it isn’t paid for, but I don’t want it. I’ll get another when I do. Have I married Con Ryan’s son to need money and bother about bills? Not on your life! Did you notice the gas? Every burner turned on. Well, I did it just to have a nice bright house for you when you came home without the invitation. We haven’t paid the bill for two months—but what does that matter? We’re related to the Ryans. We don’t have to trouble about bills.”
He saw that she was beyond arguing with and turned to leave the room. She sprang after him and caught him by the arm, pouring out only too coherent streams of rage and abuse. It was the old story of the “wrongs” she had suffered at his hands, and his “ruin” of her. To-night it had no power to move him and he shook her off and left the room. She ran to the door behind him and leaning out, cried it after him.
He literally fled from her, down the hallway, with the open doorways sending their lurid light and hissing noise across his passage. As he reached the dining-room he heard her bang the door and with aggressive noise turn the key in the lock and shoot the bolt. Even at that moment the lack of necessity for such a precaution caused a bitter smile to move his lips.
He entered the dining-room and sat down by the table, his head on his hands. It was very quiet; no noise came from the street outside, sinking into the deep restfulness of midnight, and from within there was only the tearing sound of the flaring gases and an occasional cool dropping from the filter in the pantry. He sat thus for some hours, trying to think what he should do. He found it impossible to come to any definite conclusion for the future; all he could decide upon now was the necessity of leaving his wife, getting a respite from her, withdrawing himself from the sight of her. He had never loved her, but to-night the pity and responsibility he had felt seemed to be torn from his life as a morning wind tears a cobweb from the grass.
The dawn was whitening the window-panes when he finally got pen and paper and wrote a few lines. These, without prefix or signature, stated that he would leave the city for a short time and not to make any effort to find where he had gone or communicate with him. He wrote her name on the folded paper and placed it in front of the clock. Then he stole into his bedroom—they had occupied separate rooms for over six months—and packed a valise with his oldest and roughest clothes. After this he waited in the dining-room till the light was bright and the traffic of the day loud on the pavement, before he crept down the long stairway and went out into the crystal freshness of the morning.
When Rose Cannon woke on the morning after her arrival at Antelope, a memory of the snowflakes of the evening before made her jump out of bed and patter barefooted to the window. It seemed to her it would be “lots of fun” to be snowed up at Antelope, and when she saw only a thin covering of white on the hotel garden and the diminishing perspective of roofs, she drew her mouth into a grimace of disappointment.
With hunched-up shoulders, her hands tucked under her arms, she stood looking out, her breath blurring the pane in a dissolving film of smoke. It was a cold little world. Below her the garden—the summer pride of Perley’s Hotel—lay a sere, withered waste, its shrubs stiff in the grip of the cold. The powdering of snow on its frost-bitten leaves and grizzled grass added to its air of bleakness. Beyond rose the shingled roofs of Antelope’s main street. From their white-coated slopes black stovepipes sent aloft spirals of smoke, a thinner, fainter gray than the air into which they ascended. The sky lowered, low-hanging and full of menace. The snowflakes that now and then idly circled down were dark against its stormy pallor. Rose, standing gazing up, wondered if her father would go on to Greenhide, the new camp twenty miles from Antelope, where an important strike had recently been made.
Half an hour later when they met at breakfast he told her he would not leave for Greenhide that morning. Perley had warned him not to attempt it, and he for his part knew the country well enough to realize that it would be foolhardy to start under such a threatening sky. It would be all right to stop over at Antelope till the weather made up its mind what it meant to do. It might not be fun for her, but then he had warned her before they left San Francisco that she would have to put up with rough accommodations and unaccustomed discomforts.
Rose laughed. Her father did not understand that the roughness and novelty of it all was what she enjoyed. He was already a man of means when she was born, and she had known nothing of the hardships and privations through which he and her mother had struggled up to fortune. Rocky Bar the night before and Antelope this morning were her first glimpses of the mining region over which the pioneers had swarmed in ’49, Bill Cannon, only a lad in his teens, among them.
Now she sat sidewise in her chair, sweeping with animated eyes the primitive dining-room, its walls whitewashed, its low ceiling hung with strands of pinked-out, colored paper, its board floor here and there crossed by strips of cocoanut matting. At one end a hole in the wall communicated with the kitchen and through this the naked arms of the Chinaman, brown against the uprolled ends of his white sleeves, protruded, offering dishes to the single waitress who was not always there to receive them.
The girl, Cora by name, was particularly delinquent this morning. Several times the Chinaman was forced to remove his arms and substitute his face in the opening while he projected an enraged yell of “Corla!” among the hotel guests. Her dereliction of duty was caused by an overpowering interest in the Cannons, round whom she hovered in enchanted observation. On ordinary occasions Cora was content to wait on the group of men, local bachelors whose lonely state made it more convenient for them “to eat” at the hotel, and who sat—two bending lines of masculine backs—at either side of a long table. Cora’s usual method was to set the viands before them and then seat herself at the end of the table and enliven the meal with light conversation. To-day, however, they were neglected. She scarcely answered their salutations, but, banging the dishes down, hasted away to the Cannon table, where she stood fixedly regarding the strange young lady.
Perley’s warnings of bad weather were soon verified. Early in the afternoon the idle, occasional snowflakes had begun to fall thickly, with a soft, persistent steadiness of purpose. The icy stillness of the morning gave place to a wind, uncertain and whispering at first, but, as the day advanced, gathering volume and speed. The office and bar filled with men, some of them—snow powdered as if a huge sugar-sifter had been shaken over them—having tramped in from small camps in the vicinity. Clamor and vociferations, mixed with the smell of strong drinks and damp woolens, rose from the bar. Constant gusts of cold air swept the lower passages, and snow was tramped into the matting round the hall stove.
At four o’clock, Willoughby, the Englishman who had charge of the shut-down Bella K. mine, came, butting head down against the wind, a group of dogs at his heels, to claim the hospitality of the hotel. His watchman, an old timer, had advised him to seek a shelter better stored with provisions than the office building of the Bella K. Willoughby, whose accent and manner had proclaimed him as one of high distinction before it was known in Antelope that he was “some relation to a lord,” was made welcome in the bar. His four red setter dogs, shut out from that hospitable retreat by the swing door, grouped around it and stared expectantly, each shout from within being answered by them with plaintive and ingratiating whines.
The afternoon was still young when the day began to darken. Rose Cannon, who had been sitting in the parlor, dreaming over a fire of logs, went to the window, wondering at the growing gloom. The wind had risen to a wild, sweeping speed, that tore the snow fine as a mist. There were no lazy, woolly flakes now. They had turned into an opaque, slanting veil which here and there curled into snowy mounds and in other places left the ground bare. It seemed as if a giant paint-brush, soaked in white, had been swept over the outlook. Now and then a figure, head down, hands in pockets, the front of the body looking as though the paint-brush had been slapped across it, came into view, shadowy and unsubstantial in the mist-like density.
Rose looked out on it with an interest that was a little soberer than the debonair blitheness of her morning mood. If it kept up they might be snowed in for days, Perley had said. That being the case, this room, the hotel’s one parlor, would be her retreat, her abiding place—for her bedroom was as cold as an ice-chest—until they were liberated. With the light, half-whimsical smile that came so readily to her lips, she turned from the window and surveyed it judicially.
Truly it was not bad. Seen by the light of the flaming logs pulsing on the obscurity already lurking in the corners, it had the charm of the fire-warmed interior, tight-closed against outer storm. A twilight room lit only by a fire, with wind and snow outside, is the coziest habitation in the world. It seemed to Rose it would make a misanthrope feel friendly, prone to sociable chat and confidence. When the day grew still dimmer she would draw the curtains (they were of a faded green rep) and pull up the old horsehair arm-chairs that were set back so demurely in the corners. Her eyes strayed to the melodeon and then to the wall above it, where hung a picture of a mining millionaire, once of the neighborhood, recently deceased, a circlet of wax flowers from his bier surrounding his head, and the whole neatly incased in glass. Washington crossing the Delaware made a pendent on the opposite wall. On the center-table there were many books in various stages of unrepair and in all forms of bindings. These were the literary aftermath left by the mining men, who, since the early sixties, had been stopping at Antelope on their hopeful journeys up and down the mineral belt.
She was leaving the window to return to her seat by the fire when the complete silence that seemed to hold the outside world in a spell was broken by sudden sounds. Voices, the crack of a whip, then a grinding thump against the hotel porch, caught her ear and whirled her back to the pane. A large covered vehicle, with the whitened shapes of a smoking team drooping before it, had just drawn up at the steps. Two masculine figures, carrying bags, emerged from the interior, and from the driver’s seat a muffled shape—a cylinder of wrappings which appeared to have a lively human core—gave forth much loud and profane language. The isolation and remoteness of her surroundings had already begun to affect the town-bred young lady. She ran to the door of the parlor, as ingenuously curious to see the new arrivals and find out who they were as though she had lived in Antelope for a year.
Looking down the hall she saw the front door open violently inward and two men hastily enter. The wind seemed to blow them in and before Perley’s boy could press the door shut the snow had whitened the damp matting. No stage passed through Antelope in these days of its decline, and the curiosity felt by Rose was shared by the whole hotel. The swing door to the bar opened and men pressed into the aperture. Mrs. Perley came up from the kitchen, wiping a dish. Cora appeared in the dining-room doorway, and in answer to Miss Cannon’s inquiringly-lifted eyebrows, called across the hall:
“It’s the Murphysville stage on the down-trip to Rocky Bar. I guess they thought they couldn’t make it. The driver don’t like to run no risks and so he’s brought ’em round this way and dumped ’em here. There ain’t but two passengers. That’s them.”
She indicated the two men who, standing by the hall stove, were divesting themselves of their wraps. One of them was a tall upright old man with a sweep of grizzled beard covering his chest, and gray hair falling from the dome of a bald head.
The other was much younger, tall also, and spare to leanness. He wore a gray fedora hat, and against its chill, unbecoming tint, his face, its prominent, bony surfaces nipped by the cold to a raw redness, looked sallow and unhealthy. With an air of solicitude he laid his overcoat across a chair, brushing off the snow with a careful hand. Buttoned tight in a black cutaway with the collar turned up about his neck, he had an appearance of being uncomfortably compressed into garments too small for him. His shiny-knuckled, purplish hands, pinching up the shoulders of his coat over the chair-back, were in keeping with his general suggestion of a large-boned meagerly-covered lankness. The fact that he was smooth-shaven, combined with the unusual length of dark hair that appeared below his hat-brim, lent him a suggestion of something interestingly unconventional, almost artistic. In the region where he now found himself he would have been variously set down as a gambler, a traveling clergyman, an actor, or perhaps only a vender of patent medicines who had some odd, attractive way of advertising himself, such as drawing teeth with an electric appliance, or playing the guitar from the tail-board of his showman’s cart.
Now, having arranged his coat to its best advantage, he turned to Perley and said with a curiously deep and resonant voice,
“And, mine host, a stove in my bedroom, a stove in my bedroom or I perish.”
Cora giggled and threw across the hall to Miss Cannon a delighted murmur of,
“Oh, say, ain’t he just the richest thing?”
“You’ve got us trapped and caged here for a spell, I guess,” said the older man. “Any one else in the same box?”
“Oh, you’ll not want for company,” said Perley, pride at the importance of the announcement vibrating in his tone. “We’ve got Willoughby here from the Bella K. with his four setter dogs, and Bill Cannon and his daughter up from the coast.”
“Bill Cannon!”—the two men stared and the younger one said,
“Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King from San Francisco?”
“That’s him all right,” nodded Perley. “Up here to see the diggings at Greenhide and snowed in same as you.”
Here, Rose, fearing the conversation might turn upon herself, slipped from the doorway into the passage and up the stairs to her own room.
An hour later as she stood before the glass making her toilet for supper, a knock at the door ushered in Cora, already curled, powdered and beribboned for that occasion, a small kerosene lamp in her hand. In the bare room, its gloom only partly dispelled by the light from a similar lamp on the bureau and the red gleam from the stove, Miss Cannon was revealed in the becoming half-dusk made by these imperfectly-blending illuminations, a pink silk dressing-gown loosely enfolding her, a lightly brushed-in suggestion of fair hair behind her ears and on her shoulders. Her comb was in her hand and Cora realized with an uplifting thrill that she had timed her visit correctly and was about to learn the mysteries of Miss Cannon’s coiffure.
“I brung you another lamp,” she said affably, setting her offering down on the bureau. “One ain’t enough light to dress decently by. I have three,” and she sank down on the side of the bed with the air of having established an intimacy, woman to woman, by this act of generous consideration.
“Them gentlemen,” she continued, “are along on this hall with you and your pa. The oldone’s Judge Washburne, of Colusa, a pioneer that used to know Mrs. Perley’s mother way back in Sacramento in the fifties, and knew your pa real well when he was poor. It’s sort of encouraging to think your pa was ever poor.”
Rose laughed and turned sidewise, looking at the speaker under the arch of her uplifted arm. There were hair-pins in her mouth and an upwhirled end of blond hair protruded in a gleaming scattering of yellow over her forehead. She mumbled a comment on her father’s early poverty, her lips showing red against the hair-pins nipped between her teeth.
“And the other one,” went on Cora, her eyes riveted on the hair-dressing, her subconscious mind making notes of the disposition of every coil, “his name’s J. D. Buford. And I’d like you to guess what he is! An actor, a stage player. He’s been playing all up the state from Los Angeles and was going down to Sacramento to keep an engagement there. It just tickles me to death to have an actor in the house. I ain’t never seen one close to before.”
The last hair-pin was adjusted and Miss Cannon studied the effect with a hand-glass.
“An actor,” she commented, running a smoothing palm up the back of her head, “that’s just what he looked like, now I think of it. Perhaps he’ll act for us. I think it’s going to be lots of fun being snowed up at Antelope.”
The sound of a voice crying “Cora” here rose from the hallway and that young woman, with a languid deliberation of movement, as of one who obeys a vulgar summons at her own elegant leisure, rose and departed, apologizing for having to go so soon. A few minutes later, the hour of supper being at hand, Rose followed her.
She was descending the stairs when a commotion from below, a sound of voices loud, argumentative, rising and falling in excited chorus, hurried her steps. The lower hall, lit with lamps and the glow of its stove, heated to a translucent red, was full of men. A current of cold could be felt in the hot atmosphere and fresh snow was melting on the floor. Standing by the stove was a man who had evidently just entered. Ridges of white lay caught in the folds of his garments; a silver hoar was on his beard. He held his hands out to the heat and as Rose reached the foot of the stairs she heard him say,
“Well, I tell you that any man that started to walk up here from Rocky Bar this afternoon must have been plumb crazy. Why, John L. Sullivan couldn’t do it in such a storm.”
To which the well-bred voice of Willoughby answered,
“But according to the message he started at two and the snow was hardly falling then. He must have got a good way, past the Silver Crescent even, when the storm caught him.”
A hubbub of voices broke out here, and, seeing her father on the edge of the crowd, Rose went to him and plucked his sleeve, murmuring,
“What’s happened? What’s going on?”
He took his cigar out of his mouth and turned toward her, speaking low and keeping his eyes on the men by the stove.
“The telegraph operator’s just had a message sent from Rocky Bar that a man started from there this afternoon to walk up here. They don’t think he could make it and are afraid he’s lost somewhere. Perley and some of the boys are going out to look for him.”
“What a dreadful thing! In such a storm! Do you think they’ll ever find him?”
He shrugged, and replaced his cigar in his mouth.
“Oh, I guess so. If he was strong enough to get on near here they ought to. But it’s just what the operator says. The feller must have been plumb crazy to attempt such a thing. Looks as if he was a stranger in the country.”
“It’s a sort of quiet, respectable way of committing suicide,” said the voice of the actor behind them.
Rose looked over her shoulder and saw his thin, large-featured face, no longer nipped and reddened with cold, but wreathed in an obsequious and friendly smile which furrowed it with deep lines. Her father answered him and she turned away, being more interested in the preparations for the search party. As she watched these she could hear the desultory conversation behind her, the actor’s comments delivered with an unctuous, elaborate politeness which, contrasted with her father’s gruff brevity, made her smile furtively to herself.
A jingle of sleigh bells from without threw the party into the sudden bustle of departure. Men shrugged themselves into their coats and tied comforters over their ears. Perley emerged from the bar, shrouded in outer wrappings, and crowding a whisky flask into his pocket. The hall door was thrown open, and through the powdery thickness of the atmosphere the sleigh with its restive horses could be seen drawn up at the porch steps. Those left behind pressed into the doorway to speed the departure. Shouted instructions, last suggestions as to the best methods for conducting the search filled the air, drowning the despairing whines that Willoughby’s dogs, shut in the bar, sent after their master. With a broken jingle of bells the sleigh started and in a moment was swallowed up in the blackness of the storm.
Supper was an animated meal that evening. The suddenly tragic interest that had developed drew the little group of guests together with the strands of a common sympathy. The judge and the actor moved their seats to the Cannons’ table. Cora was sent to request the doctor—a young man fresh from his graduation in San Francisco who took his meals at the bachelor’s table—to join them and add the weight of medical opinion to their surmises as to the traveler’s chances of survival. These, the doctor thought, depended as much upon the man’s age and physical condition, as upon the search party’s success in finding him. And then they speculated as to the man himself, drawing inferences from the one thing they knew of him, building up his character from this single fact, deducing from it what manner of man he should be, and why he should have done so strangely foolhardy a thing.
After supper they retired to the parlor, piled the fire high and sat grouped before it, the smoke of cigars and cigarettes lying about their heads in white layers. It was but natural that the conversation should turn on stories of the great storms of the past. Rose had heard many such before, but to-night, with the wind rocking the old hotel and the thought of the lost man heavy at her heart, she listened, held in a cold clutch of fascinated attention, to tales of the emigrants caught in the passes of the Sierra, of pioneer mining-camps relieved by mule trains which broke through the snow blockade as the miners lay dying in their huts, of men risking their lives to carry succor to comrades lost in their passage from camp to camp on just such a night as this. Now and then one of Willoughby’s dogs, long since broken from the confinement of the bar, came to the door and put in an inquiring head, the ears pricked, the eyes full of hopeful inquiry, a feathered tail wagging in deprecating friendliness. But its master was not there and it turned away, disappointed, to run up the hall, sniffing under closed doors and whimpering in uneasy loneliness.
Rose sat crouched over the fire, and as the fund of stories became exhausted and silence gradually settled on the group, her thoughts turned again to the traveler. She had been shocked at first, as the others were, by the thought of a fellow creature lost in the storm; but as the evening advanced, and the talk threw round his vague, undefined figure the investiture of an identity and a character, she began to see him less as a nebulous, menaced shape than as a known individuality. He seemed to be advancing out of the swirling blackness of the night into extending circles of the acquainted and the intimate. He was drawing near, drawing out of the limbo of darkness and mystery, into the light of their friendly fire, the grasp of their welcoming hands. He took shape in her imagination; she began to see his outline forming and taking color. With every tick of the clock she felt more keenly that he was some one who needed her help, and whom she must rescue. By ten she was in a ferment of anguished expectancy. The lost traveler was to her a man who had once been her friend, now threatened by death.
The clock hand passed ten, and the periods of silence that at intervals had fallen on the watchers grew longer and more frequent, and finally merged into a stillness where all sat motionless, listening to the storm. It had increased with the coming of the dark and now filled the night with wildness and tumult. The wind made human sounds about the angles of the house, which rocked and creaked to its buffets. The gale was fitful. It died away almost to silence, seeming to recuperate its forces for a new attack, and then came back full of fresh energies. It struck blows on the doors and windows, like those of a fist demanding entrance. Billowing rushes of sound circled round the building, and then a rustling passage of sleet swept across the curtained pane.
It was nearly eleven, and for fifteen minutes no one had spoken a word. Two of the dogs had come in and lain down on the hearth-rug, their noses on their paws, their eyes fixed brightly and ponderingly on the fire. In the midst of the motionless semicircle one of them suddenly raised its head, its ears pricked. With its muzzle elevated, its eyes full of awakened intelligence, it gave a low, uneasy whimper. Almost simultaneously Rose started and drew herself up, exclaiming, “Listen!” The sound of sleigh bells,faint as a noise in a dream, came through the night.
In a moment the lower floor was shaken with movement and noise. The bar emptied itself on to the porch and the hall doors were thrown wide. The sleigh had been close to the hotel before its bells were heard, and almost immediately its shape emerged from the swirling whiteness and drew up at the steps. Rose, standing back in the parlor doorway, heard a clamor of voices, a rising surge of sound from which no intelligible sentence detached itself, and a thumping and stamping of feet as the searchers staggered in with the lost traveler. The crowd separated before them and they entered slowly, four men carrying a fifth, their bodies incrusted with snow, the man they bore an unseen shape covered with whitened rugs from which an arm hung, a limp hand touching the floor. Questions and answers, now clear and sharp, followed them, like notes upon the text of the inert form:
“Where’d you get him?”
“About five miles below on the main road. One of the horses almost stepped on him. He was right in the path, but he was all sprinkled over with snow.”
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“Pretty near, I guess. We’ve pumped whisky into him, but he ain’t shown a sign of life.”
“Who is he?”
“Search me. I ain’t seen him good myself yet. Just as we got him the lantern went out.”
There was a sofa in the hall and they laid their burden there, the crowd edging in on them, horrified, interested, hungrily peering. Rose could see their bent, expressive backs and the craning napes of their necks. Then a sharp order from the doctor drove them back, sheepish, tramping on one another’s toes, bunched against the wall and still avidly staring. As their ranks broke, the young girl had a sudden, vivid glimpse of the man, his head and part of his chest uncovered. Her heart gave a leap of pity and she made a movement from the doorway, then stopped. The lost traveler, that an hour before had almost assumed the features of a friend, was a complete stranger that she had never seen before.
He looked like a dead man. His face, the chin up, the lips parted under the fringe of a brown mustache, was marble white, and showed a gray shadow in the cheek. The hair on his forehead, thawed by the heat, was lying in damp half-curled semicircles, dark against the pallid skin. There was a ring on the hand that still hung limp on the floor. The doctor, muttering to himself, pulled open the shirt and was feeling the heart, when Perley, who had flown into the bar for more whisky, emerged, a glass in his hand. As his eye fell upon the man, he stopped, stared, and then exclaimed in loud-voiced amaze:
“My God—why, it’s Dominick Ryan! Look here, Governor”—to Cannon who was standing by his daughter in the parlor doorway, “come and see for yourself. If this ain’t young Ryan I’m a Dutchman!”
Cannon pushed between the intervening men and bent over the prostrate figure.
“That’s who it is,” he said slowly and unemotionally. “It’s Dominick Ryan, all right. Well, by ginger!” and he turned and looked at the amazed innkeeper, “that’s the queerest thing I ever saw. What’s brought him up here?”
Perley, his glass snatched from him by the doctor who seemed entirely indifferent to their recognition of his patient, shrugged helplessly.
“Blest if I know,” he said, staring aimlessly about him. “He was here last summer fishing. But there ain’t no fishing now. God, ain’t it a good thing that operator at Rocky Bar had the sense to telegraph up!”
When Dominick returned to consciousness he lay for a space looking directly in front of him, then moved his head and let his eyes sweep the walls. They were alien walls of white plaster, naked of all adornment. The light from a shaded lamp lay across one of them in a soft yet clear wash of yellow, so clear that he could see that the plaster was coarse.
There were few pieces of furniture in the room, and all new to him. A bureau of the old-fashioned marble-topped kind stood against the wall opposite. The lamp that cast the yellow light was on this bureau; its globe, a translucent gold reflection revealed in liquid clearness in the mirror just behind. It was not his own room nor Berny’s. He turned his head farther on the pillow very slowly, for he seemed sunk in an abyss of suffering and feebleness. On the table by the bed’s head was another lamp, a folded newspaper shutting its light from his face, and here his eyes stopped.
A woman was sitting by the foot of the bed,her head bent as if reading. He stared at her with even more intentness than he had at the room. The glow of the lamp on the bureau was behind her—he saw her against it without color or detail, like a shadow thrown on a sheet. Her outlines were sharply defined against the illumined stretch of plaster,—the arch of her head, which was broken by the coils of hair on top, her rather short neck, with some sort of collar binding it, the curve of her shoulders, rounded and broad, not the shoulders of a thin woman. He did not think she was his wife, but she might be, and he moved and said suddenly in a husky voice,
“What time is it?”
The woman started, laid her book down, and rose. She came forward and stood beside him, looking down, the filaments of hair round her head blurring the sharpness of its outline. He stared up at her, haggard and intent, and saw it was not his wife. It was a strange woman with a pleasant, smiling face. He felt immensely relieved and said with a hoarse carefulness of utterance,
“What time did you say it is?”
“A few minutes past five,” she answered. “You’ve been asleep.”
“Have I?” he said, gazing immovably at her. “What day is it?”
“Thursday,” she replied. “You came here last night from Rocky Bar. Perhaps you don’t remember.”
“Rocky Bar!” he repeated vaguely, groping through a haze of memory. “Was it only yesterday? Was it only yesterday I left San Francisco?”
“I don’t know when you left San Francisco—” the newspaper shade cracked and bent a little, letting a band of light fall across the pillow. She leaned down, arranging it with careful hands, looking from the light to him to see if it were correctly adjusted.
“Whenever you left San Francisco,” she said, “you got here last night. They brought you here, Perley and some other men in the sleigh. They found you in the road. You were half-frozen.”
He looked at her moving hands, then when they had satisfactorily arranged the shade and dropped to her sides, he looked at her face. Her eyes were soft and friendly and had a gentle, kind expression. He liked to look at them. The only woman’s eyes he had looked into lately had been full of wrathful lightenings. There seemed no need to be polite or do the things that people did when they were well and sitting talking in chairs, so he did not speak for what seemed to him a long time. Then he said,
“What is this place?”
“Antelope,” said the woman. “Perley’s Hotel at Antelope.”
“Oh, yes,” he answered with an air of weary recollection, “I was going to walk there from Rocky Bar, but the snow came down too hard, and the wind—you could hardly stand against it! It was a terrible pull. Perley’s Hotel at Antelope. Of course, I know all about it. I was here last summer for two weeks fishing.”
She stretched out her hand for a glass, across the top of which a book rested. He followed the movement with a mute fixity.
“This is your medicine,” she said, taking the book off the glass. “You were to take it at five but I didn’t like to wake you.”
She dipped a spoon into the glass and held it out to him. But the young man felt too ill to bother with medicine and, as the spoon touched his lips, he gave his head a slight jerk and the liquid was spilt on the counterpane. She looked at it for a rueful moment, then said, as if with gathering determination,
“But you must take it. I think perhaps I gave it wrong. I ought to have lifted you up. It’s easier that way,” and before he could answer she slipped her arm under his head and raised it, with the other hand setting the rim of the glass against his lips. He swallowed a mouthful and felt her arm sliding from behind his head. He had a hazy consciousness that a perfume came from her dress, and for the first time he wondered who she was. Wondering thus, his eyes again followed her hand putting back the glass, and watched it, white in the gush of lamplight, carefully replacing the book. Then she turned toward him with the same slight, soft smile.
“Who are you?” he said, keeping his hollowed eyes hard on her.
“I’m Rose Cannon,” she answered. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco.”
“Oh, yes,” with a movement of comprehension, the name striking a chord of memory. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco, daughter of Bill Cannon. Of course I know.”
He was silent again, overwhelmed by indifference and lassitude. She made a step backward from the bedside. Her dress rustled and the same faint perfume he had noticed came delicately to him. He turned his head away from her and said dryly and without interest,
“I thought it was some one else.”
The words seemed to arrest her. She came back and stood close beside him. Looking up he could see her head against the light that ran up from the shaded lamps along the ceiling. She bent down and said, speaking slowly and clearly as though to a child,
“The storm has broken the wires but as soon as they are up, papa will send your mother word, so you needn’t worry about that. But we don’t either of us know your wife’s address. If you could tell us——”
She stopped. He had begun to frown and then shut his eyes with an expression of weariness.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Don’t bother about it. Let her alone.”
Again there was one of those pauses which seemed to him so long. He gave a sigh and moved restlessly, and she said,
“Are your feet very painful?”
“Yes, pretty bad,” he answered. “What’s the matter with them?”
“They were frost-bitten, one partly frozen.”
“Oh—” he did not seem profoundly interested. It was as if they were some one else’s feet, only they hurt violently enough to obtrude themselves upon his attention. “Thank you very much,” he added. “I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
He felt very tired and heard, as in a dream, the rustle of her dress as she moved again. She said something about “supper” and “Mrs. Perley coming,” and the dark, enveloping sense of stupor from which he had come to life closed on him again.
Some time later on he emerged from it and saw another woman, stout and matronly, with sleekly-parted hair, and an apron girt about her. He asked her, too, who she was, for the fear that he might wake and find his wife by his bedside mingled with the pain of his feet, to torment him and break the vast, dead restfulness of the torpor in which he lay.
It broke into gleams of interest and returning consciousness during the next two days. He experienced an acuter sense of illness and pain, the burning anguish of his feet and fevered misery of his body, bitten through with cold, brought him back to a realization of his own identity. He heard the doctor murmuring in the corner of “threatened pneumonia” and understood that he was the object threatened. He began to know and separate the strange faces that seemed continually to be bending over him, asking him how he felt. There was the doctor, Perley, Bill Cannon, and the old judge and three different women, whom he had some difficulty in keeping from merging into one composite being who was sometimes “Miss Cannon,” and sometimes “Mrs. Perley,” and then again “Cora.”
When on the fourth day the doctor told him that he thought he would “pull through” with no worse ailment than a frozen foot, he had regained enough of his original vigor and impatience under restraint to express a determination to rise and “go on.” He was in pain, mental and physical, and the ministrations and attentions of the satellites that so persistently revolved round his bed rasped him into irritable moodiness. He did not know that all Antelope was waiting for the latest bulletins from Mrs. Perley or Cora. The glamour attaching to his sensational entry into their midst had been intensified by the stories of the wealth and position that had been his till he had married a poor girl, contrary to his mother’s wishes. He was talked of in the bar, discussed in the kitchen, and Cora dreamed of him at night. The very name of Ryan carried its weight, and Antelope, a broken congeries of white roofs and black smoke-stacks emerging from giant drifts, throbbed with pride at the thought that the two greatest names of California finance were snow-bound in Perley’s Hotel.
The doctor laughed at his desire to “move on.” The storm was still raging and Antelope was as completely cut off from the rest of the world as if it were an uncharted island in the unknown reaches of the Pacific. Propping the invalid up among his pillows he drew back the curtain and let him look out through a frost-painted pane on a world all sweeping lines and skurrying eddies of white. The drifts curled crisp edges over the angles of roofs, like the lips of breaking waves. The glimpse of the little town that the window afforded showed it cowering under a snow blanket, almost lost to sight in its folds.
“Even if your feet were all right, you’re tied here for two weeks anyway,” said the doctor, dropping the curtain. “It’s the biggest storm I ever saw, and there’s an old timer that hangs round the bar who says it’s as bad as the one that caught the Donner party in forty-six.”
The next day it stopped and the world lay gleaming and still under a frosty crust. The sky was a cold, sullen gray, brooding and cloud-hung, and the roofs and tree-tops stood out against it as though executed in thick white enamel. The drifts lay in suave curves, softly undulating like the outlines of a woman’s body, sometimes sweeping smoothly up to second stories, here and there curdled into an eddy, frozen as it twisted. A miner came in from an outlying camp on skees and reported the cold as intense, the air clear as crystal and perfectly still. On the path as he came numerous fir boughs had broken under the weight of snow, with reports like pistol shots. There was a rumor that men, short of provisions, were snowed up at the Yaller Dog mine just beyond the shoulder of the mountain. This gave rise to much consultation and loud talking in the bar, and the lower floor of Perley’s was as full of people, noise and stir, as though a party were in progress.
That afternoon Dominick, clothed in an old bath-robe of the doctor’s, his swathed feet hidden under a red rug drawn from Mrs. Perley’s stores, was promoted to an easy chair by the window. The doctor, who had helped him dress, having disposed the rug over his knees and tucked a pillow behind his back, stood off and looked critically at the effect.
“I’ve got to have you look your best,” he said, “and you’ve got to act your prettiest this afternoon. The young lady’s coming in to take care of you while I go my rounds.”
“Young lady!” exclaimed Dominick in a tone that indicated anything but pleasurable anticipation. “What young lady?”
“Our young lady,” answered the doctor. “Miss Cannon, the Young Lady of Perley’s Hotel. Don’t you know that that’s the nicest girl in the world? Maybe you don’t, but that’s because your powers of appreciation have been dormant for the last few days. The people here were most scared to death of her at first. They didn’t know how she was going to get along, used to the finest, the way she’s always been. But, bless your heart, she’s less trouble than anybody in the place. There’s twelve extra people eating here, besides you to be looked after, and Mrs. Perley and Cora are pretty near run to death trying to do it. Miss Cannon wanted to turn in and help them. They wouldn’t have it, but they had to let her do her turn here taking care of you.”
“It’s very kind of her,” said the invalid without enthusiasm. “I noticed her here several times.”
“And as easy as an old shoe,” said the doctor. “Just as nice to Perley’s boy, who’s a waif that the Perleys picked up in the streets of Stockton, as if he was the Prince of Wales. I tell you heredity’s a queer thing. How did Bill Cannon come to have a girl like that? Of course there’s the mother to take into account, but—”
A knock on the door interrupted him. To his cry of “Come in,” Rose entered, a white shawl over her shoulders, a book in her hand. While she and Dominick were exchanging greetings, the doctor began thrusting his medicines into his bag, alleging the necessity of an immediate departure, as two cases of bronchitis and three of pneumonia awaited him.
“You didn’t know there were that many people in Antelope,” he said as he snapped the clasp of the bag and picked up his hat. “Well, I’ll swear to it, even if it does seem the prejudiced estimate of an old inhabitant. So long. I’ll be back by five and I hope to hear a good report from the nurse.”
The door closed behind him and Dominick and the young girl were left looking rather blankly at each other. It was the first time he had seen her when he had not been presented to her observation as a prostrate and fever-stricken sufferer of whom nothing was expected but a docile attitude in the matter of medicines. Now he felt the subjugating power of clothes. It did not seem possible that the doctor’s bath-robe and Mrs. Perley’s red rug could cast such a blighting weight of constraint and consciousness upon him. But with the donning of them his invalid irresponsibility seemed gone for ever. He had a hunted, helpless feeling that he ought to talk to this young woman as gentlemen did who were not burdened by the pain of frozen feet and marital troubles. Moreover, he felt the annoyance of being thus thrust upon the care of a lady whom he hardly knew.
“I’m very sorry that they bothered you this way,” he said awkwardly. “I—I—don’t think I need any one with me. I’m quite comfortable here by myself,” and then he stopped, conscious of the ungraciousness of his words, and reddening uncomfortably.
“I dare say you don’t want me here,” said Rose with an air of meekness which had the effect of being assumed. “But you really have been too sick to be left alone. Besides, there’s your medicine, you must take that regularly.”
The invalid gave an indifferent cast of his eye toward the glass on the bureau, guarded by the familiar book and spoon. Then he looked back at her. She was regarding him deprecatingly.
“Couldn’t I take it myself?” he said.
“I don’t think I’d trust you,” she answered.
His sunken glance was held by hers, and he saw, under the deprecation of her look, humor struggling to keep itself in seemly suppression. He was faintly surprised. There did not seem to him anything comic in the fact of her distrust. But as he looked at her he saw the humor rising past control. She dropped her eyes to hide it and bit her under lip. This did strike him as funny and a slow grin broke the melancholy of his face. She stole a stealthy look at him, her gravity vanished at the first glimpse of the grin, and she began to laugh, holding her head down and making the stifled, chuckling sounds of controlled mirth suddenly liberated. He was amused and a little puzzled and, with his grin more pronounced than before, said,
“What are you laughing at?”
She lifted her head and looked at him with eyes narrowed to slits, murmuring,
“You, trying to get rid of me and being so polite and helpless. It’s too pathetic for words.”
“If it’s pathetic, why do you laugh?” he said, laughing himself, he did not know why.
She made no immediate reply and he looked at her, languidly interested and admiring. For the first time he realized that she was a pretty girl, with her glistening coils of blond hair and a pearl-white skin, just now suffused with pink.
“Why did you think I wanted to get rid of you?” he asked.
“You’ve almost said so,” she answered. “And then—well, I can see you do.”
“How? What have I done that you’ve seen?”
“Not any especial thing, but—I think you do.”
He felt too weak and indifferent to tell polite falsehoods. Leaning his head on the pillow that stood up at his back, he said,
“Perhaps I did at first. But now I’m glad you came.”
She smiled indulgently at him as though he were a sick child.
“I should think you wouldn’t have wanted me. You must be so tired of people coming in and out. Those days when you were so bad the doctor had the greatest difficulty in keeping men out who didn’t know you and had never seen you. Everybody in the hotel wanted to crowd in.”
“What did they want to do that for?”
“To see you. We were the sensation of Antelope first. But then you came and put us completely in the shade. Antelope hasn’t had such an excitement as your appearance since the death of Jim Granger, whose picture is down stairs in the parlor and who comes from here.”
“I don’t see why I should be an excitement. When I was up here fishing last summer nobody was in the least excited.”
“It was the way you came—half-dead out of the night as if the sea had thrown you up. Then everybody wanted to know why you did it, why you, a Californian, attempted such a dangerous thing.”
“There wasn’t anything so desperately dangerous about it,” he said, almost in a tone of sulky protest.
“The men down stairs seemed to think so. They say nobody could have got up here in such a storm.”
“Oh, rubbish! Besides, it wasn’t storming when I left Rocky Bar. It was gray and threatening, but there wasn’t a flake falling. The first snow came down when I was passing the Silver Crescent. It came very fast after that.”
“Why did you do it—attempt to walk such a distance in such uncertain weather?”
Dominick smoothed the rug over his knees. His face, looking down, had a curious expression of cold, enforced patience.
“I was tired,” he said slowly. “I’d worked too hard and I thought the mountains would do me good. I can get time off at the bank when I want and I thought I’d take a holiday and come up here where I was last summer. I knew the place and liked the hotel. I wanted to get a good way off, out of the city and away from my work. As for walking up here that afternoon—I’m very strong and I never thought for a moment such a blizzard was coming down.”
He lifted his head and turned toward the window, then raising one hand rubbed it across his forehead and eyes. There was something in the gesture that silenced the young girl. She thought he felt tired and had been talking too much and she was guiltily conscious of her laughter and loquacity.
They sat without speaking for some moments. Dominick made no attempt to break the silence when she moved noiselessly to the stove and pushed in more wood. His face was turned from her and she thought he had fallen asleep when he suddenly moved and said,
“Isn’t it strange that I have never met you before?”
She was relieved. His tone showed neither feebleness nor fatigue, in fact it had the fresh alertness of a return to congenial topics. She determined, however, to be less talkative, less encouraging to the weakening exertions of general conversation. So she spoke with demure brevity.
“Yes, very. But you were at college for four years, and the year you came back I was in Europe.”
He looked at her ruminatingly, and nodded.
“But I’ve seen you,” he said, “at the theater. I was too sick at first to recognize you, but afterward I knew I’d seen you, with your father and your brother Gene.”
It was her turn to nod. She thought it best to say nothing, and waited. But his eyes bent inquiringly upon her, and the waiting silence seemed to demand a comment. She made the first one that occurred to her:
“Whom were you with?”
“My wife,” said the young man.
Rose felt that an indefinite silence would have been better than this. All she knew of Dominick Ryan’s wife was that she was a person who had not been respectable and whose union with Dominick had estranged him from his people. Certainly, whatever else she was, young Mrs. Ryan was not calculated to be an agreeable subject of converse with the man who in marrying her had sacrificed wealth, family, and friends. The doctor’s chief injunction to Rose had been to keep the invalid in a state of tranquillity. Oppressed by a heavy sense of failure she felt that nursing was not her forte.
She murmured a vague sentence of comment and this time determined not to speak, no matter how embarrassing the pause became. She even thought of taking up her book and was about to stretch her hand for it, when he said,
“But it seems so queer when our parents have been friends for years, and I know Gene, and you know my sister Cornelia so well.”
She drew her hand back and leaned forward, frowning and staring in front of her, as she sent her memory backward groping for data.
“Well, you see a sort of series of events prevented it. When we were little our parents lived in different places. Ages ago when we first came down from Virginia City you were living somewhere else, in Sacramento, wasn’t it? Then you were at school, and after that you went East to college for four years, and when you got back from college I was in Europe. And when I came back from Europe—that’s over two years ago now—why then——”
She had again brought up against his marriage, this time with a shock that was of a somewhat shattering nature.
“Why, then,” she repeated falteringly, realizing where she was—“why, then—let’s see—?”
“Then I had married,” he said quietly.
“Oh, yes, of course,” she assented, trying to impart a suggestion of sudden innocent remembrance to her tone. “You had married. Why, of course.”
He vouchsafed no reply. She was distressed and mortified, her face red with anger at her own stupidity. In her embarrassment she looked down, smoothing her lace cuffs, and waiting for him to say something as he had done before. But this time he made no attempt to resume the conversation. Stealing a sidelong glance at him she saw that he had turned to the window and was gazing out. There was an expression of brooding gloom on his profile, his eyebrows drawn low, his lips close set. She judged rightly that he did not intend to speak again, and she took up her book and opened it.
Half an hour later, rising to give him his medicine, she saw that he had fallen asleep. She was at his side before she discovered it, thinking his eyes were drooped in thought. Standing with the glass in her hand she looked at him with something of a child’s shrinking curiosity and a woman’s pity for a strong creature weakened and brought low. The light in the room was growing gray and in it she saw his face, with the shadows in its hollows, looking thin and haggard in the abandonment of sleep. For the first time, seeing him clothed and upright, she realized that he was a personable man, a splendid man, and also for the first time she thought of him outside this room and this house, and a sort of proud resentment stirred in her at the memory of the marriage he had made—the marriage with the woman who was not good.
An hour later when the doctor came back she was kneeling on the floor by the open stove door, softly building up the fire. From the orifice—a circle of brilliance in the dim room—a red glow painted her serious, down-bent face with a hectic color, and touched with a bright, palpitating glaze the curves of her figure. At the sound of the opening door she looked up quickly, and, her hands being occupied, gave a silencing jerk of her head toward the sleeping man.
The doctor looked at them both. The scene was like a picture of some primitive domestic interior where youth and beauty had made a nest, warmed by that symbol of life, a fire, which one replenished while the other slept.
The morning after the quarrel Bernice woke late. She had not fallen asleep till the night was well spent, the heated seething of her rage keeping the peace of repose far from her. It was only as the dawn paled the square of the window that she fell into a heavy slumber, disturbed by dreams full of stress and strife.
She looked up at the clock; it was nearly ten. Dominick would have left for the bank before this, so the wretched constraint of a meeting with him was postponed. Sallow and heavy-eyed, her head aching, oppressed by a sense of the unbearable unpleasantness of the situation, she threw on her wrapper, and going to the window drew the curtain and looked out.
The bedroom had but one window, wedged into an angle of wall, and affording a glimpse of the green lawn and clipped rose trees of the house next door. There was a fog this morning and even this curtailed prospect was obliterated. She stood yawning drearily, and gazing out with eyes to which her yawns had brought tears. Her hair made a wild bush round her head, her face looked pinched and old. She was one of those women whose good looks are dependent on animation and millinery. In this fixity of inward thought, unobserved in unbecoming disarray, one could realize that she had attained the thirty-four years she could so successfully deny under the rejuvenating influences of full dress and high spirits.
During her toilet her thoughts refused to leave the subject of last night’s quarrel. She and her husband had had disagreements before—many in the last year when they had virtually separated, though the world did not know it—but nothing so ignominiously repulsive as the scene of last evening had yet degraded their companionship. Bernice was ashamed. In the gray light of the dim, disillusioning morning she realized that she had gone too far. She knew Dominick to be long-suffering, she knew that the hold she had upon him was a powerful one, but the most patient creatures sometimes rebel, the most compelling sense of honor would sometimes break under too severe a strain. As she trailed down the long passage to the dining-room she made up her mind that she would make the first overture toward reconciliation that evening. It would be difficult but she would do it.
She was speculating as to how she would begin, in what manner she would greet him when he came home, when her eyes fell on the folded note against the clock. Apprehension clutched her as she opened it. The few lines within frightened her still more. He had gone—where? She turned the note over, looking at the back, in a sudden tremble of fearfulness. He had never done anything like this before, left her, suddenly cut loose from her in proud disgust. She stood by the clock, staring at the paper, her face fallen into scared blankness, the artificial hopefulness that she had been fostering since she awoke giving place to a down-drop into an abyss of alarm.
The door into the kitchen creaked and the Chinaman entered with the second part of the dainty breakfast cooked especially for her.
“What time did Mr. Ryan leave this morning?” she said without turning, throwing the question over her shoulder.
“I dunno,” the man returned, with the expressionless brevity of his race particularly accentuated in this case, as he did not like his mistress. “He no take blickfuss here. He no stay here last night.”
She faced round on him, her eyes full of a sudden fierce intentness which marked them in moments of angry surprise.
“Wasn’t here last night?” she demanded. “What do you mean?”
He arranged the dishes with careful precision, not troubling himself to look up, and speaking with the same dry indifference.
“He not here for blickfuss. No one sleep in his bed. I go make bed—all made. I think he not here all night.”
His work being accomplished he turned without more words and passed into the kitchen. Berny stood for a moment thinking, then, with a shrug of defiance, left her buckwheat cakes untasted and walked into the hall. She went directly to her husband’s room and looked about with sharp glances. She opened drawers and peered into the wardrobes. She was a woman who had a curiously keen memory for small domestic details, and a few moments’ investigation proved to her that he had taken some of his oldest clothes, but had left behind all the better ones, and that the silver box of jewelry on the bureau—filled with relics of the days when he had been the idolized son of his parents—lacked none of its contents.
More alarmed than she had been in the course of her married life she left the room and passed up the hall to the parlor. The brilliant, over-furnished apartment in which she had crowded every fashion in interior decoration that had pleased her fancy and been within the compass of her purse, looked slovenly and unattractive in the gray light of the morning. The smell of smoke was strong in it and the butts and ashes of cigars Dominick had been smoking the evening before lay in a tray on the center-table. She noticed none of these things, which under ordinary circumstances would have been ground for scolding, for she was a woman of fastidious personal daintiness. A cushioned seat was built round the curve of the bay-window, and on this she sat down, drawing back the fall of thick écru lace that veiled the pane. Her eyes were fastened with an unwinking fixity on the fog-drenched street without; her figure was motionless.
Her outward rigidity of body concealed an intense inward energy of thought. It suddenly appeared to her as if her hold on Dominick, which till yesterday had seemed so strong that nothing but death could break it, was weak, was nothing. It had been rooted in his sense of honor, the sense that she fostered in him and by means of which she had been able to make him marry her. Was this sense not so powerful as she believed, or—dreadful thought!—was it weakening under the friction of their life together? Had she played on it too much and worn it out? She had been so sure of Dominick, so secure in his blind, plodding devotion to his duty! She had secretly wondered at it, as a queer characteristic that it was fortunate he possessed. Deep in her heart she had a slight, amused contempt for it, a contempt that had extended to other things. She had felt it for him in those early days of their marriage when he had looked forward to children and wanted to live quietly, without society, in his own home. It grew stronger later when she realized he had accepted his exclusion from his world and was too proud to ask his mother for money.
And now! Suppose he had gone back to his people? A low ejaculation escaped her, and she dropped the curtain and pressed her hand, clenched to the hardness of a stone, against her breast.
The mere thought of such a thing was intolerable. She did not see how she could support the idea of his mother and sister winning him from her. She hated them. They were the ones who had wronged her, who had excluded her from the home and the riches and the position that her marriage should have given her. Her retaliation had been her unwavering grip on Dominick and the careful discretion with which she had comported herself as his wife. There was no ground of complaint against her. She had been as quiet, home-keeping and dutiful a woman as any in California. She had been a good housekeeper, a skilful manager of her husband’s small means. It was only within the last year that she had, in angry spite, run into the debts with which she had taunted him. No wife could have lived more rigorously up to the letter of her marriage contract. It was easy for her to do it. She was not a woman whom light living and license attracted. She had sacrificed her honor to win Dominick, grudgingly, unwillingly, as close-fisted men part with money in the hope of rich returns. She did not want to be his mistress, but she knew of no other means by which she could reach the position of his wife.
Now suppose he had gone back to his people! It was an insupportable, a maddening thought. It plunged her into agitation that made her rise and move about the room with an aimless restlessness, like some soft-footed feline animal. Suppose he had gone home and told them about last night, and they had prevailed upon him not to come back!
Well, even if they had, hers was still the strong position. The sympathy of the disinterested outsider would always be with her. If she had been quarrelsome and ugly, those were small matters. In the great essentials she had not failed. Suppose she and the Ryans ever did come to an open crossing of swords, would not her story be the story of the two? The world’s sympathy would certainly not go to the rich women, trampling on the poor little typewriter, the honest working-girl, who for one slip, righted by subsequent marriage, had been the object of their implacable antagonism and persecution.
She said this opposite the mirror, extending her hands as she had seen an actress do in a recent play. As she saw her pointed, pale face, her expression of worry gave way to one of pleased complacence. She looked pathetic, and her position was pathetic. Who would have the heart to condemn her when they saw her and heard her side of the story? Her spirits began to rise. With the first gleam of returning confidence she shook off her apprehensions. A struggle of sunshine pierced the fog, and going to the window she drew the curtains and looked out on the veil of mist every moment growing brighter and thinner. The sun finally pierced it, a patch of blue shone above, and dropping the curtains she turned and looked at the clock. It was after eleven. She decided she would go out and take lunch with her sisters, who were always ready to listen and to sympathize with her.
These sisters were the only intimate friends and companions Bernice had, their home the one house to which she was a constant visitor. With all her peculiarities and faults she possessed a strong sense of kin. In her rise to fairer fortune, if not greater happiness, her old home had never lost its hold upon her, nor had she weakened in a sort of cross-grained, patronizing loyalty to her two sisters. This may have been accounted for by the fact that they were exceedingly amiable and affectionate, proud to regard Bernice as the flower of the family, whose dizzy translation to unexpected heights they had watched with unenvious admiration.
Hannah, the oldest of the family, was the daughter of a first marriage. She was now a spinster of forty-five, and had taught school for twenty years. Hazel was the youngest of the three, she and Bernice having been the offspring of Danny Iverson’s second alliance with a woman of romantic tendencies, which had no way of expressing themselves except in the naming of her children. Hazel, while yet in her teens, had married a clerk in a jewelry store, called Josh McCrae. It had been a happy marriage. After the birth of a daughter, Hazel had returned to her work as saleslady in a fashionable millinery. Both sisters, Josh, and the child, had continued to live together in domestic harmony, in the house which Hannah, with the savings of a quarter of a century, had finally cleared of all mortgages and now owned. No household could have been more simply decent and honest; no family more unaspiringly content. In such an environment Bernice, with her daring ambitions and bold unscrupulousness, was like that unaccounted-for blossom which in the floral world is known as a “sport.”
But it did not appear that she regarded herself as such. With the exception of a year spent in Los Angeles and Chicago she had been a member of the household from her childhood till the day of her marriage. The year of absence had been the result of a sudden revolt against the monotony of her life and surroundings, an upwelling of the restless ambitions that preyed upon her. A good position had been offered her in Los Angeles and she had accepted it with eagerness, thankful for the opportunity to see the world, and break away, so she said, from the tameness of her situation, the narrowness of her circle. The spirit of adventure carried her farther afield, and she penetrated as far across the continent as Chicago, where she was employed in one of the most prosperous business houses, earning a large salary. But, like many Californians, homesickness seized her, and before the year was out she was back, inveighing against the eastern manners, character, and climate, and glad to shake down again into the family nest. Her sisters were satisfied with her account of her wanderings, not knowing that Bernice was as much of an adept at telling half a story as she was at taking down a dictation in typewriting. She was too clever to be found out in a lie; they were altogether too simple to suspect her apparent frankness.
After the excursion she remained at home until her marriage. Her liaison with Dominick was conducted with the utmost secrecy. Her sisters had not a suspicion of it, knew nothing but that the young man was attentive to her, till she told them of her approaching marriage. This took place in the parlor of Hannah’s house, and the amazed sisters, bewildered by Berny’s glories, had waited to see her burst into the inner circles of fashion and wealth with a tiara of diamonds on her head and ropes of pearls about her throat. That no tiara was forthcoming, no pearls graced her bridal parure, and no Ryan ever crossed the threshold of her door, seemed to the loyal Hannah and Hazel the most unmerited and inexplicable injustice that had ever come within their experience.
It took Bernice some time to dress, for she attached the greatest importance to all matters of personal adornment, and the lunch hour was at hand when she alighted from the Hyde Street car and walked toward the house. It was on one of those streets which cross Hyde near the slope of Russian Hill, and are devoted to the habitats of small, thrifty householders. A staring, bright cleanliness is the prevailing characteristic of the neighborhood, the cement sidewalks always swept, the houses standing back in tiny squares of garden, clipped and trimmed to a precise shortness of grass and straightness of border. The sun was now broadly out and the house-fronts engarlanded with vines, their cream-colored faces spotless in fresh coats of paint, presented a line of uniform bay-windows to its ingratiating warmth. Hannah’s was the third, and its gleaming clearness of window-pane and the stainless purity of its front steps were points of domestic decency that its proprietor insisted on as she did on the servant girl’s apron being clean and the parlor free from dust.
Berny had retained her latch-key, and letting herself in passed into the dustless parlor which connected by folding doors with the dining-room beyond. Nothing had been changed in it since the days of her tenancy. The upright piano, draped with a China silk scarf, stood in the old corner. The solar print of her father hung over the mantelpiece on which a gilt clock and a pair of China dogs stood at accurately-measured distances. The tufted arm-chairs were placed far from each other, severely isolated in the corners, as though the room were too remote and sacred even to suggest the cheerful amenities of social intercourse. A curious, musty smell hung in the air. It recalled the past in which Dominick had figured as her admirer. The few times that he had been to her home she had received him in this solemn, unaired apartment in which the chandelier was lit for the occasion, and Hannah and Hazel had sat in the kitchen, breathless with curiosity as to what such a call might portend. She had been married here, in the bay-window, under a wedding bell of white roses. The musty smell brought it all back, even her sense of almost breathless elation, when the seal was set on her daring schemes.
From beyond the folding doors a sound of conversation and smitten crockery arose, also a strong odor of cooking. The family were already at lunch, and opening the door Berny entered in upon the midday meal which was being partaken of by her two sisters, Josh, and Hazel’s daughter Pearl, a pretty child of eight.
Neither of her sisters resembled her in the least. Hannah was a woman who looked more than her age, with a large, calm face, and gentle, near-sighted eyes which blinked at the world behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. Her quarter-century of school teaching had not dried or stiffened her. She was fuller of the milk of human kindness, of the ideals and enthusiasms of youth, than either of her sisters. All the love of her kindly, maternal nature was given to Pearl, whom she was bringing up carefully to be what seemed to Hannah best in woman.
Hazel was very pretty and still young. She had the fresh, even bloom of a Californian woman, a round, graceful figure, and glossy brown hair, rippled and arranged in an elaborate coiffure as though done by a hair-dresser. She could do this herself as she could make her own clothes, earn a fair salary at the milliner’s, and sing to the guitar in a small piping voice. Her husband was ravished by her good looks and accomplishments, and thought her the most wonderful woman in the world. He was a thin, tall, young man with stooping shoulders, a long, lean neck, and an amiable, insignificant face. But he seemed to please Hazel, who had married him when she was nineteen, being haunted by the nightmare thought that if she did not take what chances offered, she might become an old maid like Hannah.
Berny sat down next to the child, conscious that under the pleasant friendliness of their greetings a violent curiosity as to whether she had been to the ball burned in each breast. She had talked over her chances of going with them, and Hazel, whose taste in all such matters was excellent, had helped her order the dress. Now, drawing her plate toward her and shaking out her napkin, she began to eat her lunch, at once too sore and too perverse to begin the subject. The others endured their condition of ignorance for some minutes, and then Hazel, finding that to wait was useless, approached the vital topic.
“Well, Berny, we’ve been looking over the list of guests at the ball in the morning papers and your name don’t seem to be down.”
“I don’t see why it should,” said Berny without looking up, “considering I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t there!” ejaculated Hannah. “They didn’t ask you?”
“That’s right,” said Berny, breaking a piece of bread. “They didn’t ask me.”
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” exclaimed Josh. “That beats the Dutch!”
“I didn’t believe Mrs. Ryan would do that,” said Hannah, so pained that her generally observant eye took no note of the fact that Pearl was putting her fingers in her plate. “You’re as good as her own flesh and blood, too,—her son’s wife. It’s not Christian, and I don’t understand it.”
“It’s tough,” said Josh, “that’s what it is, tough!”
“If I were you,” said Hazel with spirit, “husband or no husband, I’d never want to go inside that house or have any dealings with that crowd again. If they were down on their knees to me I’d never go near them. Just think what it would be if Josh’s mother thought herself too good to know me! I’d like to know what I’d feel about it.”
“But she wouldn’t, dearie,” said Josh placatingly. “She’d be proud to have you related to her.”
“I guess she’d better be,” said Hazel, fixing an indignant glare on her spouse. “She’d find she’d barked up the wrong tree if she wasn’t.”
Considering that Josh’s mother had been dead for twelve years and in her lifetime had been a meek and unassuming woman who let lodgings, Hazel’s proud repudiation at her possible scorn seemed a profitless wasting of fires, and Josh forthwith turned the conversation back to the ball.
“Perhaps they did send you an invitation,” he said to Berny, “and it got lost in the mails. That does happen, you know.”
Berny’s cheeks, under the faint bloom of rouge that covered them, flamed a sudden, dusky red. She had never been open with these simple relations of hers and she was not going to begin now. But she felt shame as she thought of Dominick’s humiliating quest for the invitation that was refused.
“Oh, no,” she said hurriedly. “It wasn’t sent, that’s all. Mrs. Ryan won’t have me in the house. That’s the fact and there’s no use trying to get round it. Well, she can do without me. I seem able to support my existence without her.”
Her tone and manner, marked by a sort of hard bravado, did not deceive her sisters, who had that extreme naïveté in expressing their intimate feelings which is peculiar to Californians. They looked at her with commiserating sympathy, not quite comprehending her attitude of independence, but feeling sorry for her, whatever pose she adopted.
“And your dress,” said Hazel, “what will you do with that? When will you ever wear it—a regular ball-dress like that?”
“Oh, I’ll wear it,” said Berny with an air of having quantities of social opportunities not known by her sisters. “It won’t be a loss.”
“You could put a guimpe in and have sleeves to the elbow and wear it to the theater. With a white hat with plumes it would be a dead swell costume. And if you met any of the Ryans they’d see you were holding up your end of the line and not quite ready yet to go to the alms-house.”
Hannah shook her head.
“I don’t see how she could do that—transparent neck and all. I don’t think that’s the kind of dress to wear in a theater. It’s too sort of conspicuous.”
“I think Hannah’s right,” said Josh solemnly, nodding at Berny. “It don’t seem to me the right thing for a lady. Looks fast.”
“What do you know about it, Josh McCrae?” said Hazel pugnaciously. “You’re a clerk in a jewelry store.”
“Maybe I am,” retorted Josh, “but I guess that don’t prevent me from knowing when a thing looks fast. Clerks in jewelry stores ain’t such gummers as you might think. And, anyway, I don’t see that being a clerk in any kind of a store has anything to do with it.”
Hazel was saved the effort of making a crushing repartee, by Pearl, who had been silently eating her lunch, now suddenly launching a remark into the momentary pause.
“Did Uncle Dominick go to the ball?” she asked, raising a pair of limpid blue eyes to Berny’s face.
An instantaneous, significant silence fell on the others, and all eyes turned inquiringly to Berny. Her air of cool control became slightly exaggerated.
“No, he stayed at home with me,” she replied, picking daintily at the meat on her plate.
“But I suppose he felt real hurt and annoyed,” said Hannah. “He couldn’t have helped it.”
Berny did not reply. She knew that she must sooner or later tell her sisters of Dominick’s strange departure. They would find it out otherwise and suspect more than she wanted them to know. They, like the rest of the world, had no idea that Berny’s brilliant marriage was not the domestic success it appeared on the surface. She moved her knife and fork with an arranging hand, and, as Hazel started to speak, said with as careless an air as she could assume,
“Dominick’s gone. He left this morning.”
The news had even more of an effect than she had expected. Her four companions stared at her in wonderment. A return of the dread and depression of the morning came upon her when she saw their surprise. She felt her heart sink as it had done when she read his note.
“Gone where?” exclaimed Hazel. This was the test question and Berny had schooled herself in an answer in the car coming up.
“Oh, up into the country,” she said nonchalantly. “He’s worn out. They work the life out of him in that horrible bank. He’s getting insomnia and thought he’d better take a change now before he got run completely down, so he left this morning and I’m a gay grass widow.”
She laughed and drank some water. Her laugh did not sound to her own ears convincing and she was aware that, while Hannah was evidently satisfied by her explanation, Hazel was eying her ponderingly.
“Well, if he’s got insomnia,” said Hannah, “he’d better take his holiday right now. That’s the best thing to do. Take it in the beginning. Before father took ill——”
Here Josh interrupted her, as Hannah’s reminiscences of the late contractor’s last illness were long and exhaustive.
“Where’d you say he’d gone?” he queried.
“I can’t remember the name,” Berny answered with skilfully-assumed indifference; “somewhere down toward Santa Cruz and Monterey, some new place. And he may not stay there. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll just move around from place to place.”
“Why didn’t you go, too?” said Pearl.
This was the second question Berny had dreaded. Now suddenly she felt her throat contract and her lips quiver. Her usually iron nerve had been shaken by her passion of the night before and the shock of the morning. The unwonted sensations of gloom and apprehension closed in on her again, and this time made her feel weak and tearful.
“I didn’t want to. I hate moving round,” she said, pushing her chair back from the table. Her voice was a little hoarse, and suddenly feeling the sting of tears under her eyelids she raised her hands to her hat and began to fumble with her veil. “Why should I leave my comfortable flat to go trailing round in a lot of half-built hotels? That sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me at all. I like my own cook, and my own bed, and my own bath-tub. I’m more of an old maid than Hannah. Well, so long, people. I must be traveling.”
She laid her napkin on the table and jumped up with an assumption of brisk liveliness. She paid no attention to the expostulations of her relatives, but going to the glass arranged her hat and put on her gloves. When she turned back to the table she had regained possession of herself. Her veil was down and through it her cheeks looked unusually flushed, and her dark eyes, with their slanting outer corners, brighter and harder than ever. She hurried through her good-bys on the plea that she had shopping to do, and almost ran out of the house, leaving a trail of perfumery and high, artificial laughter behind her.
For the next week she waited for news from Dominick and none came. It was a trying seven days. Added to her harassment of mind, the loneliness of the flat was almost unendurable. There was no one to speak to, no one to share her anxieties. Her position was unusually friendless. When her marriage had lifted her from the ranks of working women she had shown so cold a face to her old companions that they had dropped away from her, realizing that she wished to cut all ties with the world of her humble beginnings. New friends had been hard to make. The wives of some of the bank officials, and odd, aspiring applicants for such honors as would accrue from even this remote connection with the august name of Ryan, were all she had found wherewith to make a circle and a visiting list.
But she was intimate with none of them and was now too worried to seek the society of mere acquaintances. She ate her solitary meals in oppressive silence, feeling the Chinaman’s eyes fixed upon her in ironic disbelief of the story she had told him to account for Dominick’s absence. Eat as slowly as she would, her dinner could not be made to occupy more than twenty minutes, and after that there was the long evening, the interminable evening, to be passed. She was a great reader of newspapers, and when she returned from her afternoon shopping she brought a bundle of evening papers home in her hand. She would read these slowly, at first the important items, then go over them for matters of less moment, and finally scan the advertisements. But even with this occupation the evenings were of a vast, oppressive emptiness, and her worries crowded in upon her, when, the papers lying round her feet in a sea of billowing, half-folded sheets, she sat motionless, the stillness of the empty flat and the deserted street lying round her like an expression of her own blank depression.
At the end of the week she felt that she must find out something, and went to the bank. It was her intention to cash a small check and over this transaction see if the paying teller would vouchsafe any information about Dominick. She pushed the check through the opening and, as the man counted out the money, said glibly,
“Do you hear anything of my wandering husband?”
The teller pushed the little pile of silver and gold through the window toward her and leaning forward, said, with the air of one who intends to have a leisurely moment of talk,
“No, we haven’t. Isn’t it our place to come to you for that? We were wondering where he’d gone at such a season.”
Berny’s delicately-gloved fingers made sudden haste to gather up the coins.
“Oh, he’s just loafing about,” she said as easily as was consistent with the disappointment and alarm that gripped her. “He’s just wandering round from place to place. He was getting insomnia and wanted a change of scene.”
She snapped the clasp of her purse before the man could ask her further questions, nodded her good-bys, and turned from the window. Her face changed as she emerged on the wide, stone steps that led to the street. It was pinched and pale, two lines drawn between the eyebrows. She descended the steps slowly, the flood of magnificent sunshine having no warming influence upon the chill that had seized upon her. Many of the passing throng of men looked at her—a pretty woman in her modishly-made dress of tan-colored cloth and her close-fitting brown turban with a bunch of white paradise feathers at one side. Under her dotted veil her carefully made-up complexion looked naturally clear and rosy, and her eyes, accentuated by a dark line beneath them, were in attractive contrast to her reddened hair. But she was not thinking of herself or the admiration she evoked, a subject which was generally of overpowering interest. Matters of more poignant moment had crowded all else from her mind.
The next week began and advanced and still no news from Dominick. He had been gone fourteen days, when one evening in her perusal of the paper she saw his name. Her trembling hands pressed the sheet down on the table, and her eyes devoured the printed lines. It was one of the many short despatches that had come from the foot-hill mining towns on the recent storms in the Sierra. It was headed Rocky Bar and contained a description of the situation at Antelope and the snow-bound colony there. Its chief item of information was that Bill Cannon and his daughter were among the prisoners in Perley’s Hotel. A mention was made, only a line or two, of Dominick’s walk from Rocky Bar, but it was treated lightly and gave no idea of the real seriousness of that almost fatal excursion.
Berny read the two short paragraphs many times, and her spirits went up like the needle of a thermometer when the quicksilver is grasped in a warm hand. Her relief was intense, easeful and relaxing, as the sudden cessation of a pain. Not only was Dominick at last found, but he was found in a place as far removed from his own family and its influences as he was from her. And best of all he was shut up, incarcerated, with Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King. What might not come of it? Berny was not glad of the quarrel, but it seemed a wonderful piece of luck that that unpleasant episode should have sent him into the very arms of the man that she had always wanted him to cultivate and who was the best person in the world for him to impress favorably. If Bill Cannon, who had been a friend of his father’s, took a fancy to Dominick, there was no knowing what might happen. In a sudden reaction of relief and hope Berny saw them almost adopted children of the Bonanza King, flouting the Ryans in the pride of their new-found honors.
It made her feel lenient to Dominick, whose indifference and neglect had put her to the torments of the last fortnight. After all, he could not have let her know his whereabouts. The wires were only just up, and the rural mail-carrier had not yet been able to effect an entrance into the snow-bound town. Why Dominick had chosen to go in this direction and had attempted an impossible walk in a heavy snowstorm Berny did not know, nor just now care much. A sensation as near remorse and tenderness as she could feel possessed her. Under its softening influence—spurred to generosity and magnanimity by the lifting of the weight of anxiety—she decided that she would write to him. She would write him a letter which would smooth out the difficulties between them and bring him home ready to forgive and be once more his old self, kind, quiet, and indulgent, as he had been in the first year of their marriage.
Then and there, without further waiting, she wrote the letter. It ran as follows:
“My Dear Husband:—I have only just seen in the paper where you are, and, oh, the relief! For two weeks now I have been half crazy, wondering about you, waiting to hear from you. And nothing ever came. Dominick, dear, if you had seen me sitting here alone in the den every evening, thinking and waiting, looking at the clock and listening all the time, even when I was trying to read—listening for your footsteps which never came—you would have felt very sorry for me; even you, who were so angry that you left me without a word. It’s just been hell this last two weeks. You may not think by the way I acted that I would have cared, but I did, I do. If I didn’t love you would I mind how your people treated me? That’s what makes it so hard, because I love you and want you to be happy with me, and it’s dreadful for me to see them always getting in between us, till sometimes lately I have felt they were going to separate us altogether.
“Oh, my dear husband, don’t let that happen! Don’t let them drive me away from you! If I have been bad-humored and unreasonable, I have had to bear a lot. I am sorry for the past. I am sorry for what I said to you that night, and for turning on the gas and scratching the bed. I am ready to acknowledge that I was wrong, and was mean and hateful. And now you ought to be ready to forgive me and forget it all. Come back to me. Please come back. Don’t be angry with me. I am your wife. You chose me of your own free will. That I loved you so that I forgot honor and public opinion and had no will but yours, you know better than any one else in the world. It isn’t every man, Dominick, that gets that kind of love. I gave it then and I’ve never stopped giving it, though I’ve often been so put upon and enraged that I’ve said things I didn’t mean and done things I’ve been ready to kill myself for. Here I am now, waiting for you, longing for you. Come back to me.
Your loving wife,
Berny.”
She read the letter over several times and it pleased her greatly. So anxious was she to have it go as soon as possible that, though it was past ten, she took it out herself and posted it in the letter-box at the corner.
While the world went about its affairs, attended to its business, read its papers, sent its telegrams and wrote its letters, the little group at Antelope was as completely cut off from it as though marooned on a strip of sand in an unknown sea. A second storm had followed the original one, and the end of the first week saw them snowed in deeper than ever, Antelope a trickle of roofs and smoke-stacks, in a white, crystal-clear wilderness, solemn in its stillness and loneliness as the primeval world.
The wires were down; the letter-carrier could not break his way in to them. They heard no news and received no mail. Confined in a group of rude buildings, crouched in a hollow of the Sierra’s flank, they felt for the first time what it was to be outside that circle of busy activity in which their lives had heretofore passed. They were face to face with the nature they thought they had conquered and which now in its quiet grandeur awed them with a sense of their own small helplessness. Pressed upon by that enormous silent indifference they drew nearer together, each individual unit gaining in importance from the contrasting immensity without, each character unconsciously declaring itself, emerging from acquired reticences and becoming bolder and more open.
They accepted their captivity in a spirit of gay good humor. The only two members of the party to whom it seemed irksome were Bill Cannon and the actor, both girding against a confinement which kept them from their several spheres of action. The others abandoned themselves to a childish, almost fantastic enjoyment of a situation unique in their experience. It was soon to end, it would never be repeated. It was an adventure charged with romance, accidental, unsought, as all true adventures are. The world was forgotten for these few days of imprisonment against the mountain’s mighty heart. It did not exist for them. All that was real was their own little party, the whitewashed passages and walls of Perley’s, the dining-room with its board floor and homely fare, and the parlor at night with a semicircle of faces round the blazing logs.
On the afternoon of the sixth day Dominick made his first appearance down stairs. He achieved the descent with slow painfulness, hobbling between Perley and the doctor. The former’s bath-robe had been cast aside for a dignified dark-brown dressing-gown, contributed to his wardrobe by Cannon, and which, cut to fit the burly proportions of the Bonanza King, hung around the long, lank form of the young man in enveloping folds.
The parlor was empty, save for Miss Cannon sitting before the fire. Dominick had ceased to feel bashfulness and constraint in the presence of this girl, who had been pushed—against his will if not against her own—into the position of his head attendant. The afternoon when they had sat together in his room seemed to have brushed away all his shyness and self-consciousness. He thought now that it would be difficult to retain either in intercourse with a being who was so candid, so spontaneous, so freshly natural. He found himself treating her as if she were a young boy with whom he had been placed on a sudden footing of careless, cheery intimacy. But her outward seeming—what she presented to the eye—was not in the least boyish. Her pale, opaque blondness, her fine, rich outlines, her softness of mien, were things as completely and graciously feminine as the most epicurean admirer of women could have wished.
Now, at the sight of her bending over the fire, he experienced a sensation of pleasure which vaguely surprised him. He was hardly conscious that all the time he had been dressing and while he came down stairs he had been hoping that she would be there. He sent a quick glance ahead of him, saw her, and looked away. The pain of his feet was violent, and without again regarding her he knew that while he was gaining his chair and his attendants were settling him, she had not turned from her contemplation of the fire. He already knew her well enough to have a comfortable assurance of her invariable quick tact. It was not till the two men were leaving the room that she turned to him and said, as if resuming an interrupted conversation,
“Well, how do you like the parlor? Speak nicely of it for I feel as if it belonged to me.”
“It’s a first-rate parlor,” he answered, looking about him. “Never saw a better one. Who’s the gentleman with the wreath of wax flowers round his head?”
“That’s Jim Granger. He comes from here, you know; and you mustn’t laugh at those flowers, they came off his coffin.”
“My father knew him,” said the young man indifferently. “There were lots of queer stories about Jim Granger. He killed a man once up at Bodie. You’ve a fine fire here, haven’t you?”
“Fine. It’s never allowed to go out. What do you think I intend to do this afternoon? I’ve a plan for amusing and instructing you.”
“What is it?” he said somewhat uneasily. “I don’t feel in the least as if I wanted to be instructed.”
She rose and moved to the center-table which was covered with an irregular scattering of books.
“Before you came down I was looking over these books. There are lots of them. Mrs. Perley says they’ve been accumulating for years. Mining men have left them and some of them have the names of people I know written in them. I thought perhaps you might like to read some of them.”
Dominick sent a lazily disparaging glance over the books. He was not much of a reader at the best of times.
“What are they,” he said, “novels?”
“Mostly.” She sat down by the table and took up the volume nearest to her. “Here’s Tale of Two Cities. That’s a fine one.”
“I’ve read it. Yes, it’s splendid. It’s all about the French Revolution. The hero’s like a real person and heroes in books hardly ever are, only I’d have liked him better if he’d stopped drinking and married his girl.”
“I thought perhaps you might like me to read to you,” she said, turning a tentative glance on him. “That’s how I was going to amuse and instruct you.”
“I’m sure it would be much more amusing and probably just as instructive if you talked to me.”
“You’ve got to stay down here two hours. How could I talk and be amusing and instructive for two hours? You’d probably have a relapse and I’m quite sure the doctor’d find me in a dead faint on the hearth when he came in.”
“All right. Let’s try the books. Don’t let’s risk relapses and dead faints.”
“Very well, then, that’s understood. We’ll go through the library now. I’ll read the titles and you say if you like any of them.”
“Suppose I don’t?”
“You’ll surely have a preference.”
“All right. I’ll try to. Go on.”
“Here’s Foul Play, by Charles Reade. It seems to have been a good deal read. Some of the paragraphs are marked with a pencil.”
“I think I’ve read it, but I’m not sure. It sounds like a murder story. No, let’s pass on that.”
“Well, here’s Mrs. Skaggs’ Husbands, by Bret Harte. Does that sound as if you’d like it?”
“‘Husbands!’ No. We don’t want to read about a woman who has husbands. Pass on that, too.”
“The next is very nicely bound and looks quite fresh and new, as if nobody had read it much. It’s called The Amazing Marriage.”
“Oh, pass on that! I had it once and stuck in the third chapter. The last time I went East somebody gave it to me to read on the train. I read three chapters and I was more amazed than anybody in sight. The porter was a fresh coon and I gave it to him as my revenge. I’ll bet it amazed him.”
“You don’t seem to have anything in the nature of a preference, so far. I wonder how this will suit you. Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo.”
“I don’t understand French.”
“It’s in English and it’s quite worn out, as if it had been read over and over. Several of the pages are falling out.”
“Oh, I’ve read that. I just remember. It’s a rattling good story, too. About the hunchback and the gipsy girl who tells fortunes and has a pet goat. The priest, who’s a villain, falls off the steeple and clings to a gutter by his finger nails with his enemy watching him. It’s the finest kind of a story.”
“What a pity that you’ve read it! Oh, here’s one that’s evidently been a great favorite. It’s in paper and it’s all thumbed and torn. Somebody’s written across the top, ‘Of all the damned fool people——’. Oh, I beg your pardon, I read it before I realized. The name is Wife in Name Only. It doesn’t seem the kind of title that makes you want to read the book, does it?”
“‘Wife in Name Only!’” he gave a short laugh. “It certainly isn’t the kind of name that would make me want to read a book.”
“Nor me,” said a deep voice behind them.
They both turned to see Buford, the actor, standing back of the table, his tall, angular figure silhouetted against the pale oblong of the uncurtained window. He was smiling suavely, but at the same time with a sort of uneasy, assumed assurance, which suggested that he was not unused to rebuffs.
“That, certainly,” he said, “is not a name to recommend a book to any man—any man, that is, who has or ever had a wife.”
He advanced into the circle of the firelight, blandly beaming at the young man, who, leaning back in his chair, was eying him with surprised inquiry, never having seen him before. The look did not chill the friendly effusion of the actor who, approaching Dominick, said with the full, deep resonance of his remarkable voice,
“Congratulations, my dear sir, congratulations. Not alone on your recovery, but on the fact that you are here with us at all.” He held out his large hand, the skin chapped and red with the cold, and the long fingers closed with a wrenching grip on Dominick’s. “We were not sure, when you arrived among us a few nights ago, that we would have the felicity of seeing you so soon up and around—in fact, we were doubtful whether we would ever see you up and around.”
“Thanks, very kind of you. Oh, I’m all right now.” Dominick pressed the hand in return and then, bending a little forward, sent a glance of imploring query round the stranger’s shoulder at Rose.
She caught the eye, read its behest, and presented the new-comer:
“Mr. Ryan, this is Mr. Buford who is snowed in here with us. Mr. Buford came here the same day as you, only he came on the Murphysville stage.”
Buford sat down between them on one of the horsehair chairs that were sociably arranged round the table. The firelight threw into prominence the bony angles of his thin face and glazed the backward sweep of his hair, dark-brown, and worn combed away from his forehead, where a pair of heavy, flexible eyebrows moved up and down like an animated commentary on the conversation. When anything surprising was said they went up, anything puzzling or painful they were drawn down. He rested one hand on his knee, the fingers turned in, and, sitting bolt upright, buttoned tight into his worn frock-coat, turned a glance of somewhat deprecating amiability upon the invalid.
“You had a pretty close call, a-pretty-close-call,” he said. “If the operator at Rocky Bar hadn’t had the sense to wire up here, that would have been the end of your life story.”
Dominick had heard this from every member of the snowed-in party. Repetition was not making it any more agreeable, and there was an effect of abrupt ungraciousness in his short answer which was merely a word of comment.
“Didn’t the people at the Rocky Bar Hotel try to dissuade you from starting?” said Buford. “They must have known it was dangerous. They must have been worried about you or they wouldn’t have telegraphed up.”
“Oh, I believe they did.” The young man tried to hide the annoyance the questions gave him under a dry brevity of speech. “They did all that they ought to have done. I’ll see them again on my way down.”
“And yet you persisted!” The actor turned to Rose with whom, as he sat beside her at table, he had become quite friendly. “The blind confidence of youth, Miss Cannon, isn’t it a grand, inspiring thing?”
Dominick shifted his aching feet under the rug. He was becoming exceedingly irritated and impatient, and wondered how much longer he would be able to respond politely to the conversational assiduities of the stranger.
“Now,” continued Buford, “kindly satisfy my curiosity on one point. Why, when you were told of the danger of the enterprise, did you start?”
“Perhaps I liked the danger, wanted it to tone me up. I’m a bank clerk, Mr. Buford, and my life’s monotonous. Danger’s a change.”
He raised his voice and spoke with sudden rude defiance. Buford looked quickly at him, while his eyebrows went up nearly to his hair.
“A bank clerk, oh!” he said with a falling inflection of disappointment, much chagrined to discover that the child of millions occupied such a humble niche. “I—I—was not aware of that.”
“An assistant cashier,” continued Dominick in the same key of exasperation, “and I managed to get a holiday at this season because my father was one of the founders of the bank and they allow me certain privileges. If you would like to know anything else ask me and I’ll answer as well as I know how.”
His manner and tone so plainly indicated his resentment of the other’s curiosity that the actor flushed and shrank. He was evidently well-meaning and sensitive, and the young man’s rudeness hurt rather than angered him. For a moment nothing was said, Buford making no response other than to clear his throat, while he stretched out one arm and pulled down his cuff with a jerking movement. There was constraint in the air, and Rose, feeling that he had been treated with unnecessary harshness, sought to palliate it by lifting the book on her lap and saying to him,
“This is the book we were talking about when you came in, Mr. Buford, Wife in Name Only. Have you read it?”
She handed him the ragged volume, and holding it off he eyed it with a scrutiny all the more marked by the way he drew his heavy brows down till they hung like bushy eaves over his eyes.
“No, my dear young lady. I have not. Nor do I feel disposed to do so. ‘Wife in Name Only!’ That tells a whole story without reading a word. Were you going to read it?”
“No; Mr. Ryan and I were just looking over them. We were thinking about reading one of them aloud. This one happened to be on the pile.”
“To me,” continued Buford, “the name is repelling because it suggests sorrows of my own.”
There was a pause. He evidently expected a question which undoubtedly was not going to come from Dominick, who sat fallen together in the arm-chair looking at him with moody ill-humor. There was more hope from Rose, who gazed at the floor but said nothing. Buford was forced to repeat with an unctuous depth of tone, “Suggests sorrows of my own,” and fasten his glance on her, so that, as she raised her eyes, they encountered the commanding encouragement of his.
“Sorrows of your own?” she repeated timidly, but with the expected questioning inflection.
“Yes, my dear Miss Cannon,” returned the actor with a melancholy which was full of a rich, dark enjoyment. “My wife is one in name only.”
There was another pause, and neither of the listeners showing any intention of breaking it, Buford remarked,
“That sorrow is mine.”
“What sorrow?” said Dominick bruskly.
“The sorrow of a deserted man,” returned the actor with now, for the first time, something of the dignity of real feeling in his manner.
“Oh,” the monosyllable was extremely non-committal, but it had an air of finality as though Dominick intended to say no more.
“Has she—er—left you?” said the girl in a low and rather awe-stricken voice.
The actor inclined his head in an acquiescent bow:
“She has.”
Again there was a pause. Unless Buford chose to be more biographical, the conversation appeared to have come to a deadlock. Neither of the listeners could at this stage break into his reserve with questions and yet to switch off on a new subject was not to be thought of at a moment of such emotional intensity. The actor evidently felt this, for he said suddenly, with a relapse into a lighter tone and letting his eyebrows escape from an overshadowing closeness to his eyes,
“But why should I trouble you with the sorrows that have cast their shadow on me? Why should my matrimonial troubles be allowed to darken the brightness of two young lives which have not yet known the joys and the perils of the wedded state?”
The pause that followed this remark was the most portentous that had yet fallen on the trio. Rose cast a surreptitious glance at the dark figure of young Ryan, lying back in the shadows of the arm-chair. As she looked he stirred and said with the abrupt, hard dryness which had marked his manner since Buford’s entrance,
“Don’t take too much for granted, Mr. Buford. I’ve known some of the joys and perils of the wedded state myself.”
The actor stared at him in open-eyed surprise.
“Do I rightly understand,” he said, “that you are a married man?”
“You do,” returned Dominick.
“Really now, I never would have guessed it! Pardon me for not having given you the full dues of your position. Your wife, I take it, has no knowledge of the risk she recently ran of losing her husband?”
“I hope not.”
“Well,” he replied with a manner of sudden cheery playfulness, “we’ll take good care that she doesn’t learn. When the wires are up we’ll concoct a telegram that shall be a masterpiece of diplomatic lying. Lucky young man to have a loving wife at home. Of all of us you are the one who can best realize the meaning of the line, ‘’Tis sweet to know there is an eye to mark our coming and——’”
Dominick threw the rug off and rose to his feet.
“If you can get Perley to help me I’ll go up stairs again. I’m tired and I’ll go back to my room.”
He tried to step forward, but the pain of his unhealed foot was unbearable, and he caught the edge of the table and held it, his face paling with sudden anguish. The actor, startled by the abruptness of his uprising, approached him with a vague proffer of assistance and was arrested by his sharp command:
“Go and get Perley! He’s in the bar probably. I can’t stand this way for long. Hurry up!”
Buford ran out of the room, and Rose somewhat timidly drew near the young man, braced against the table, his eyes down-bent, his face hard in the struggle with sudden and unfamiliar pain.
“Can’t I help you?” she said. “Perley may not be there. Mr. Buford and I can get you up stairs.”
“Oh, no,” he answered, his words short but his tone more conciliatory. “It’s nothing to bother about. I’d have wrung that man’s neck if I’d had to listen to him five minutes longer.”
Here Perley and Buford entered, and the former, offering his support to the invalid, led him hobbling out of the door and into the hall. The actor looked after them for a moment and then came back to the fire where Miss Cannon was standing, thoughtfully regarding the burning logs.
“I’ve no doubt,” he said, “that young Mr. Ryan is an estimable gentleman, but he certainly appears to be possessed by a very impatient and ugly temper.”
Buford had found Miss Cannon one of the most amiable and charming ladies he had ever met, and it was therefore a good deal of a surprise to have her turn upon him a face of cold, reproving disagreement, and remark in a voice that matched it:
“I don’t agree with you at all, Mr. Buford, and you seem quite to forget that Mr. Ryan has been very sick and is still in great pain.”
Buford was exceedingly abashed. He would not have offended Miss Cannon for anything in the world, and it seemed to him that a being so compact of graciousness and consideration would be the first to censure an exhibition of ill-humor such as young Ryan had just made. He stammered an apologetic sentence and it did not add to his comfort to see that she was not entirely mollified by it and to feel that she exhaled a slight, disapproving coldness that put him at a great distance and made him feel mortified and ill at ease.
The ten days that followed were among the most important of Dominick Ryan’s life. Looking back at them he wondered that he had been so blind to the transformation of his being which was taking place. Great emotional crises are often not any more recognized, by the individuals, than great transitional epochs are known by the nations experiencing them. Dominick did not realize that the most engrossing, compelling passion he had ever felt was slowly invading him. He did not argue that he was falling in love with a woman he could never own and of whom it was a sin to think. He did not argue or think about anything. He was as a vessel gradually filling with elemental forces, and like the vessel he was passive till some jar would shake it and the forces would run over. Meantime he was held by a determination, mutinous and unreasoning as the determination of a child, to live in the present. He had the feeling of the desert traveler who has found the oasis. The desert lay behind him, burning and sinister with the agony of his transit, and the desert lay before him with its horrors to be faced, but for the moment he could lie still and rest and forget by the fountain under the cool of the trees.
He did not consciously think of Rose. But if she were not there he was uneasy till she came again. His secret exhilaration at her approach, the dead blankness of his lack of her when she was absent, told him nothing. These were the feelings he had, and they filled him and left no cool residue of reason wherewith to watch and guard. He was taken unawares, so drearily confident of his allegiance to his particular private tragedy that he did not admit the possibility of a defection. A sense of rest was on him and he set it down—if he ever thought of it at all—to the relief of a temporary respite. Poor Dominick, with his inexperience of sweet things, did not argue that respite from pain should be a quiescent, contented condition of being, far removed from that state of secret, troubled gladness that thrilled him at the sound of a woman’s footstep.
No situation could have been invented better suited for the fostering of sentiment. His helpless state demanded her constant attention. The attitude of nurse to patient, the solicitude of the consoling woman for the disabled, suffering man, have been, since time immemorial, recognized aids to romance. Rose, if an unawakened woman, was enough of one to enjoy richly this maternal office of alternate cossetting and ruling one, who, in the natural order of things, should have stood alone in his strength, dictating the law. Perhaps the human female so delights in this particular opportunity for tyranny because it is one of her few chances for indulging her passion for authority.
Rose, if she did not quite revel in it, discreetly enjoyed her period of dominance. In the beginning Dominick had been not a man but a patient—about the same to her as the doll is to the little girl. Then when he began to get better, and the man rose, tingling with renewed life, from the ashes of the patient, she quickly fell back into the old position. With the inherited, dainty deceptiveness of generations of women, who, while they were virtuous, were also charming, she relinquished her dominion and retreated into that enfolded maidenly reserve and docility which we feel quite sure was the manner adopted by the ladies of the Stone Age when they felt it necessary to manage their lords.
She was as unconscious of all this as Dominick was of his growing absorption in her. If he was troubled she was not. The days saw her growing gayer, more blithe and light-hearted. She sang about the corridors, her smile grew more radiant, and every man in the hotel felt the power of her awakening womanhood. Her boyish frankness of demeanor was still undimmed by the first blurring breath of passion. If Dominick was not in the parlor her disappointment was as candid as a child’s whose mother has forgotten to bring home candy. All that she showed of consciousness was that when he was there and there was no disappointment, she concealed her satisfaction, wrapped herself in a sudden, shy quietness, as completely extinguishing of all beneath as a nun’s habit.
The continued, enforced intimacy into which their restricted quarters and indoor life threw them could not have been more effectual in fanning the growing flame if designed by a malicious Fate. There was only one sitting-room, and, unable to go out, they sat side by side in it all day. They read together, they talked, they played cards. They were seldom alone, but the presence of Bill Cannon, groaning over the fire with a three-weeks-old newspaper for company, was not one that diverted their attention from each other; and Cora and Willoughby, as opponents in a game of euchre, only helped to accentuate the comradeship which leagued them together in defensive alliance.
The days that were so long to others were to them of a bright, surprising shortness. Playing solitaire against each other on either side of the fireplace was a pastime at which hours slipped by. Quite unexpectedly it would be midday, with Cora putting her head round the door-post and calling them to dinner. In the euchre games of the afternoon the darkness crept upon them with the stealthy swiftness of an enemy. It would gather in the corners of the room while Cora was still heated and flushed from her efforts to instruct Willoughby in the intricacies of the game, and yet preserve that respectful attitude which she felt should be assumed in one’s relations with a lord.
The twilight hour that followed was to Dominick’s mind the most delightful of these days of fleeting enchantment. The curtains were drawn, a new log rolled on the fire, and the lamp lit. Then their fellow prisoners began dropping in—the old judge stowing himself away in one of the horsehair arm-chairs, Willoughby and Buford lounging in from the bar, Mrs. Perley with a basket of the family mending, and the doctor all snowy from his rounds. The audience for Rose’s readings had expanded from the original listener to this choice circle of Antelope’s elect. The book chosen had been Great Expectations, and the spell of that greatest tale of a great romancer fell on the snow-bound group and held them entranced and motionless round the friendly hearth.
The young man’s eyes passed from face to face, avoiding only that of the reader bent over the lamp-illumined page. The old judge, sunk comfortably into the depths of his arm-chair, listened, and cracked the joints of his lean, dry fingers. Willoughby, his dogs crouched about his feet, looked into the fire, his attentive gravity broken now and then by a slow smile. Mrs. Perley, after hearing the chapter which describes Mrs. Gargery’s methods of bringing up Pip “by hand,” attended regularly with the remark that “it was a queer sort of book, but some way or other she liked it.” When Cora was forced to leave to attend to her duties in the dining-room, she tore herself away with murmurous reluctance. The doctor slipped in at the third reading and asked Rose if she would lend him the book in the morning “to read up what he had missed.” Even Perley’s boy, in his worn corduroys, his dirty, chapped hands rubbing his cap against his nose, was wont to sidle noiselessly in and slip into a seat near the door.
The climax of the day was the long evening round the fire. There was no reading then. It was the men’s hour, and the smoke of their pipes and cigars lay thick in the air. Cut off from the world in this cranny of the mountains, with the hotel shaking to the buffets of the wind and the snow blanket pressing on the pane, their memories swept back to the wild days of their youth, to the epic times of frontiersman and pioneer.
The judge told of his crossing of the plains in forty-seven and the first Mormon settlement on the barren shores of Salt Lake. He had had encounters with the Indians, had heard the story of Olive Oatman from one who had known her, and listened to the sinister tale of the Donner party from a survivor. Bill Cannon had “come by the Isthmus” in forty-eight, a half-starved, ragged lad who had run away from uncongenial drudgery on a New York farm. His reminiscences went back to the San Francisco that started up around Portsmouth Square, to the days when the banks of the American River swarmed with miners, and the gold lay yellow in the prospector’s pan. He had worked there shoulder to shoulder with men who afterwards made the history of the state and men who died with their names unknown. He had been an eye witness of that blackest of Californian tragedies, the lynching of a Spanish girl at Downieville, had stood pallid and sick under a pine tree and watched her boldly face her murderers and meet her death.
The younger men, warmed to emulation, contributed their stories. Perley had reminiscences bequeathed to him by his father who had been an alcalde in that transition year, when California was neither state nor territory and stood in unadministered neglect, waiting for Congress to take some notice of her. Buford had stories of the vicissitudes of a strolling player’s life. He had been in the Klondike during the first gold rush and told tales of mining in the North to match those of mining on the “mother lode.” Willoughby, thawed out of his original shyness, added to the nights’ entertainments stories of the Australian bush, grim legends of the days of the penal settlements at Botany Bay. Young Ryan was the only man of the group who contributed nothing to these Sierran Nights’ Entertainments. He sat silent in his chair, apparently listening, and, under the shadow of the hand arched over his eyes, looking at the girl opposite.
But the idyl had to end. Their captivity passed into its third week, and signs that release was at hand cheered them. They could go out. The streets of Antelope were beaten into footpaths, and the prisoners, with the enthusiasm of children liberated from school, rushed into open-air diversions and athletic exercise. The first word from the outside world came by restored telegraphic communication. Consolatory messages poured in from San Francisco. Mrs. Ryan, the elder, sent telegrams as long as letters and showered them with the prodigality of an impassioned gratitude on the camp. Perley had one that he could not speak of without growing husky. Willoughby had one that made him blush. Dominick had several. None, however, had come from his wife and he guessed that none had been sent her, his remark to Rose to “let her alone” having been taken as a wish to spare her anxiety. It was thought that the mail would be in now in a day or two. That would be the end of the fairy tale. They sat about the fire on these last evenings discussing their letters, what they expected, and whom they would be from. No one told any more stories; the thought of news from “outside” was too absorbing.
It came in the early dusk of an afternoon near the end of the third week. Dominick, who was still unable to walk, was standing by the parlor window, when he saw Rose Cannon run past outside. She looked in at him as she ran by, her face full of a joyous excitement, and held up to his gaze a small white packet. A moment later the hall door banged, her foot sounded in the passage, and she entered the room with a rush of cold air and a triumphant cry of:
“The mail’s come!”
He limped forward to meet her and take from her hand the letter she held toward him. For the first moment he looked at her, not at the letter, which dwindled to a thing of no importance when their eyes met over it. Her face was nipped by the keen outside air into a bright, beaming rosiness. She wore on her head a man’s fur cap which was pulled well down, and pressed wisps of fair hair against her forehead and cheeks. A loose fur-lined coat enveloped her to her feet, and after she had handed him his letter she pulled off the mittens she wore and began unfastening the clasps of the coat, with fingers that were purplish and cramped from the cold.
“There’s only one for you,” she said. “I waited till the postmaster looked all through them twice. Then I made him give it to me and ran back here with it. The entire population of Antelope’s in the post-office and there’s the greatest excitement.”
Her coat was unfastened and she threw back its long fronts, her figure outlined against the gray fur lining. She snatched off her cap and tossed it to an adjacent chair and with a quick hand brushed away the hair it had pressed down on her forehead.
“I got seven,” she said, turning to the fire, “and papa a whole bunch, and the judge, quantities, and Willoughby, three. But only one for you—poor, neglected man!”
Spreading her hands wide to the blaze she looked at him over her shoulder, laughing teasingly. He had the letter in his hands still unopened.
“Why,” she cried, “what an extraordinary sight! You haven’t opened it!”
“No,” he answered, turning it over, “I haven’t.”
“I’ve always heard that curiosity was a feminine weakness but I never knew it till now,” she said. “Please go on and read it, because if you don’t I’ll feel that I’m preventing you and I’ll have to go up stairs to my own room, which is as cold as a refrigerator. Don’t make me polite and considerate against my will.”
Without answering her he tore open the letter and, moving to the light of the window, held the sheet up and began to read.
There was silence for some minutes. The fire sputtered and snapped, and once or twice the crisp paper rustled in Dominick’s hands. Rose held her fingers out to the warmth, studying them with her head on one side as if she had never seen them before. Presently she slid noiselessly out of her coat, and dropped it, a heap of silky fur, on a chair beside her. The movement made it convenient to steal a glance at the young man. He was reading the letter, his body close against the window-pane, his face full of frowning, almost fierce concentration. She turned back to the fire and made small, surreptitious smoothings and jerks of arrangement at her collar, her belt, her skirt. Dominick turned the paper and there was something aggressive in the crackling of the thin, dry sheet.
“Perley got a letter from your mother,” she said suddenly, “that he was reading in a corner of the post-office, and it nearly made him cry.”
There was no answer. She waited for a space and then said, projecting the remark into the heart of the fire,
“Yours must be a most interesting letter.”
She heard him move and looked quickly back at him, her face all gay challenge. It was met by a look so somber that her expression changed as if she had received a check to her gaiety as unexpected and effectual as a blow. She shrank a little as he came toward her, the letter in his hand.
“It is an interesting letter,” he said. “It’s from my wife.”
Since those first days of his illness, his wife’s name had been rarely mentioned. Rose thought it was because young Mrs. Ryan was a delicate subject best left alone; Dominick, because anything that reminded him of Berny was painful. But the truth was that, from the first, the wife had loomed before them as a figure of dread, a specter whose presence congealed the something exquisite and uplifting each felt in the other’s heart. Now, love awakened, forcing itself upon their recognition, her name came up between them, chilling and grim as the image of death intruding suddenly into the joyous presence of the living.
The change that had come over the interview all in a moment was startling. Suddenly it seemed lifted from the plane of every-day converse to a level where the truth was an obligation and the language of polite subterfuge could not exist. But the woman, who hides and protects herself with these shields, made an effort to keep it in the old accustomed place.
“Is—is—she well?” she stammered, framing the regulation words almost unconsciously.
“She’s well,” he answered, “she’s very well. She wants me to come home.”
He suddenly looked away from her and, turning to the chimneypiece, rested one hand upon it and gazed down at the logs. A charred end projected and he pushed it in with his slippered foot, his down-bent face, the lips set and brows wrinkled, looking like the face of a sullen boy who has been unjustly punished. An icy, invading chill of depression made Rose’s heart sink down into bottomless depths. She faltered in faint tones,
“Well, you’ll be there soon now.”
“I don’t know,” he answered without moving. “I don’t know whether I shall.”
“You don’t know whether you’ll be home soon? The roads are open; the postman has come in.”
“I don’t know whether I’ll go home,” he repeated.
The snapping of the fire sounded loud upon the silence that followed. The thrill of strong emotions rising toward expression held them in a breathless, immovable quietude.
“Don’t you want to go home?” said the young girl. Her voice was low and she cleared her throat. In this interchange of commonplace sentences her heart had begun to beat so violently that it interfered with the ease of her speech.
Dominick leaned forward and dropped the crumpled letter into the fire.
“No, I don’t want to. I hate to.”
To this she did not reply at all, and after a moment he continued: “My home is unbearable to me. It isn’t a home. It’s a place where I eat and sleep, and I’d prefer doing that anywhere else, in any dirty boarding-house or fourth-rate hotel—I’d rather——”
He stopped abruptly and pushed the log farther in. The letter was caught up the chimney in a swirl of blackened scraps.
“But your wife?” said Rose.
This time her voice was hoarse but she did not know it. She had lost the consciousness of herself. It was a profound moment, the deepest she had so far known, and all the forces of her being were concentrated upon it. The young man answered with deliberation, still not moving.
“I don’t want to see my wife. We are—we are—uncongenial. There is nothing but unhappiness between us.”
“Don’t you love her?” said the girl.
“No. I never did,” he answered.
For a moment neither dared speak. They did not look at each other or stir. They hardly seemed to breathe. A movement, a touch, would have rent the last thin crust of reserve that covered what were no longer unsuspected fires. Dominick knew it, but the girl did not. She was seized by what to her was a sudden, inexplicable fear, and the increased, suffocating beating of her heart made her feel dizzy. She suddenly wished to fly, to escape from the room, and him, and herself. She turned to go and was arrested by Cora’s voice in the hall:
“Say, you folks, are you in there?”
Cora’s visage followed her voice. She thrust it round the door-post, beamingly smiling under a recently-applied coat of powder.
“Do you want to tackle a game of euchre? Mr. Willoughby and I’ll lay you out cold unless that British memory of his has gone back on him and he’s forgot all I taught him last time.”
They were too bewildered to make any response. Rose gathered up her coat and dropped it again, looking stupidly from it to the intruder. Cora turned back to the passage, calling,
“Here they are, Mr. Willoughby, all ready and waiting for us. Now we’ll show them how to play euchre.”
Before Willoughby appeared, responsive to this cheerful hail, Cora had pulled the chairs round the table and brought out the cards. A few moments later, they were seated and the game had begun. Cora and her partner were soon jubilant. Not only did they hold the cards, but their adversaries played so badly that the tale of many old scores was wiped off.
The next day the first movements of departure began. Early in the afternoon Buford and Judge Washburne started for Rocky Bar in Perley’s sleigh. The road had been broken by the mail-carrier, but was still so deeply drifted that the drive was reckoned a toilsome undertaking not without danger. Perley’s two powerful horses were harnessed in tandem, and Perley himself, a mere pillar of wrappings, drove them, squatted on a soap box in front of the two passengers. There were cries of farewell from the porch and tappings on the windows as the sleigh started and sped away to the diminishing jingle of bells. A sadness fell on those who watched it. The little idyl of isolation was over.
On the following day Bill Cannon and his daughter were to leave. A telegram had been sent to Rocky Bar for a sleigh and horses of the proper excellence to be the equipage of a Bonanza Princess. Rose had spent the morning packing the valises, and late in the afternoon began a down-stairs search for possessions left in the parlor.
The dusk was gathering as she entered the room, the corners of which were already full of darkness, the fire playing on them with a warm, varying light. Waves of radiance quivered and ran up the ceiling, here and there touching the glaze on a picture glass or china ornament. The crude ugliness of the place was hidden in this unsteady, transforming combination of shadow and glow. It seemed a rich, romantic spot, flushed with fire that pulsed on an outer edge of mysterious obscurity, a center of familiar, intimate life, round which coldness and the dark pressed.
She thought the room was unoccupied and advanced toward the table, then started before the uprising of Dominick’s tall figure from a chair in a shadowed corner. It was the first time they had seen each other alone since their conversation of the day before. Rose was startled and agitated, and her brusk backward movement showed it. Her voice, however, was natural, almost easy to casualness as she said,
“I thought there was no one here, you’ve hidden yourself in such a dark corner. I came to gather up my books and things.”
He advanced into the light, looking somberly at her.
“It’s true that you’re going to-morrow?” he said almost gruffly.
“Oh, yes, we’re really going. Everything’s been arranged. Horses and a sleigh are expected any moment now from Rocky Bar. They rest here all night and take us down in the afternoon. I think papa’d go crazy if we had to stay twenty-four hours longer.”
“I’ll follow in a day or two,” he said, “probably go down on Tuesday, the doctor says.”
She began gathering up the books, reading the titles, and putting aside those that were not hers.
“I’m so sorry it’s over,” she said in a preoccupied voice without any particular regret in it. “The Mill on the Floss is Mrs. Perley’s, I think.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he commented, very low.
She made no reply, selected another book, and as she held it up looking at the back, said,
“But it’s not like a regular good-by. It’s not as if you were going in one direction and we in another. We’ll see you in San Francisco, of course.”
“I don’t think so,” he answered.
She laid the book on the table and turned her face toward him. He stood looking into the fire, not seeing the face, but conscious of it, of its expression, of its every line.
“Do you mean that we’re not going to see you down there at all?”
“Yes, that’s just about what I meant,” he replied.
“Mr. Ryan!” It was hardly more than a breath of protest, but it was as stirring to the man as the whisper of love.
He made no comment on it, and she said, with a little more of insistence and volume,
“But why?”
“It’s best not,” he answered, and turned toward her.
His shoulders were squared and he held his head as a man does who prepares himself for a blow. His eyes, looking straight into hers, enveloped her in a glance soft and burning, not a savage glance, but the enfolding, possessive glance, caressing and ardent, pleading and masterful, of a lover.
The books that she was holding fell to the table, and they looked at each other while the clock ticked.
“It’s best for me not to come,” he said huskily, “never to come.”
“Very well,” she faltered.
He came a little nearer to her and said,
“You know what I mean.”
She turned away, very pale, her lips trembling.
“And you’d like me to come if I could—if I were free?”
He was close to her and looked down to see her face, his own hard, the bones of the jaw showing through the thin cheeks.
“You’d like me to?” he urged.
She nodded, her lips too dry to speak.
“O Rose!” he whispered, a whisper that seemed to melt the strength of her heart and make her unvanquished, maiden pride dissolve into feebleness.
He leaned nearer and, taking her by the arms just above the elbows, drew her to himself, into an embrace, close and impassioned, that crushed her against him. She submitted passively, in a dizzy dream that was neither joy nor pain, but was like a moment of drugged unreality, fearful and beautiful. She was unconscious of his lips pressed on her hair, but she felt the beating of his heart beneath her cheek.
They stood thus for a moment, rising above time and space. They seemed to have been caught up to a pinnacle of life where the familiar world lay far beneath them. A joy, divine and dreamy, held them clasped together, motionless and mute, for a single point of time beyond and outside the limitations that had heretofore bound them.
Bill Cannon had a question to ask his daughter and he came down stairs to the parlor where she had told him she was going. He had dressed himself for supper, the most important item of his toilet being a pair of brown leather slippers. They were soft and made no sound, and stepping briskly in them he advanced to the half-open parlor door, pushed it open and entered the quiet room. On the hearth-rug before the fire stood a woman clasped in the arms of Dominick Ryan.
Though the face was hidden, the first glance told him it was his daughter. The young man’s head was bowed on hers, his brown hair rising above the gleaming blondness of hers. They were absolutely motionless and silent. For an amazed moment the father stared at them, then turned and tiptoed out of the room.
He mounted several steps of the staircase and then descended, stepping as heavily as he could, and, as he advanced on the parlor, coughed with aggressive loudness. He was on the threshold when he encountered his daughter, her head lowered, her gait quick, almost a run. Without a word he stepped aside and let her pass, the rustling of her skirt diminishing as she ran up the hall and mounted the stairs.
Dominick was standing on the hearth-rug, his head raised like a stag’s; his eyes, wide and gleaming, on the doorway through which she had passed. Cannon stopped directly in front of him and fixed a stony, menacing glare on him.
“Well, Dominick Ryan,” he said in a low voice, “I saw that. I came in here a moment ago and saw that. What have you got to say about it?”
The young man turned his eyes slowly from vacancy to the angry face before him. For a moment he looked slightly dazed, staring blankly at Cannon. Then wrath gathered thunderously on his brow.
“Let me alone!” he said fiercely, thrusting him aside. “Get out of my way and let me alone! I can’t talk to you now.”
He swept the elder man out of his path, and, lurching and staggering on his wounded feet, hurled himself out of the room.
It was at the end of the Bonanza times, that period of startling upheavals and downfalls, when miners had suddenly become millionaires, and rich men found themselves paupers, that Bill Cannon built his mansion in San Francisco. He had made his fortune in Virginia City, not in a few meteoric years, as the public, who loves picturesque histories, was wont to recount relishingly, but in a series of broken periods of plenty with lean years in between. The Crown Point and Belcher rise made him a man of means, and its collapse was said to have ruined him. Afterward, wiseacres shook their heads and there were rumors that it was not Bill Cannon who was ruined. In the dead period which followed this disastrous cataclysm of fortune and confidence, he was surreptitiously loyal to the capricious town from which men had withdrawn their affection and belief as from a beguiling woman, once loved and trusted, now finally proved false.
In those short years of mourning and lost faith between the downfall of Crown Point and the rise of the Con. Virginia and the Rey del Monte, Bill Cannon “lay low.” His growing reputation as an expert mining man and a rising financier had suffered. Men had disbelieved in him as they did in Virginia, and he knew the sweetness of revenge when he and the great camp rose together in titanic partnership and defied them. His detractors had hardly done murmuring together over the significant fact that Crown Point “had not scooped every dollar he had” when the great ore-body was struck on the thousand-foot level of the Rey del Monte, and Bill Cannon became a Bonanza King.
That was in seventy-four. The same year he bought the land in San Francisco and laid the foundation for the mansion on Nob Hill. His wife was still living then, and his son and daughter—the last of seven children, five of whom had died in infancy—were as yet babies. A year later the house was completed and the Cannon family, surrounded by an aura of high-colored, accumulating anecdote, moved down from Nevada and took possession.
Mrs. Cannon, who in her girlhood had been the prettiest waitress in the Yuba Hotel at Marysville and had married Bill Cannon when he was an underground miner, was the subject of much gossip in the little group which at that time made up San Francisco’s fashionable world. They laughed at her and went to her entertainments. They told stories of her small social mistakes, and fawned on her husband for positions for their sons. He understood them, treated them with an open cynical contempt, and used them. He was big enough to realize his wife’s superiority, and it amused him to punish them for their patronizing airs by savage impertinences that they winced under but did not dare resent. She was a silent, sensitive, loving woman, who never quite fitted into the frame his wealth had given her. She did her best to fill the new rôle, but it bewildered her and she did not feel at ease in it. In her heart she yearned for the days when her home had been a miner’s cabin in the foot-hills, her babies had known no nurse but herself, and her husband had been all hers. Those were her beaux jours.
She died some twelve years after the installation in San Francisco. Bill Cannon had loved her after his fashion and always respected her, and the withdrawal of her quiet, sympathetic presence left a void behind it that astonished, almost awed him. The two children, Eugene and Rose, were eighteen and thirteen at the time. She had adored them, lived for them, been a mother at once tender and intelligent, and they mourned her with passion. It was to dull the ache left by her death, that Gene, a weak and characterless changeling in this vigorous breed, sought solace in drink. And it was then that Rose, assuming her mother’s place as head of the establishment, began to show that capacity for management, that combination of executive power and gentle force—bequests from both parents—that added admiration to the idolizing love the Bonanza King had always given her.
The house in which this pampered princess ruled was one of those enormous structures which a wealth that sought extravagant ways of expending itself reared upon that protuberance in the city’s outline called by San Franciscans Nob Hill. The suddenly-enriched miners of the Comstock Lode and the magnates of the railway had money waiting for investment, and the building of huge houses seemed as good a one as any other.
Here, from their front steps, they could see the city sweeping up from its low center on to the slopes of girdling hills. It was a gray city, crowding down to the edge of the bay, which, viewed from this height, extended far up into the sky. In summer, under an arch of remote, cold blue, its outlines blurred by clouds of blown dust, it looked a bleak, unfriendly place, a town in which the stranger felt a depressing, nostalgic chill. In winter, when the sun shone warm and tender as a caress, and the bay and hills were like a mosaic in blue and purple gems, it was a panorama over which the passer-by was wont to linger. The copings of walls offered a convenient resting-place, and he could lean on them, still as a lizard in the bath of sun.
Bill Cannon’s house had unbroken command of this view. It fronted on it in irregular, massive majesty, with something in its commanding bulkiness that reminded one of its owner. It was of that epoch when men built their dwellings of wood; and numerous bay-windows and a sweep of marble steps flanked by sleeping stone lions were considered indispensable adjuncts to the home of the rich man who knew how to do things correctly. Round it spread a green carpet of lawns, close-cropped and even as velvet, and against its lower story deep borders of geraniums were banked in slopes of graduated scarlet and crimson. The general impression left by it was that of a splendor that would have been ostentatious and vulgar had not the studied elegance of the grounds and the outflung glories of sea, sky and hills imparted to it some of their own distinction and dignity.
On the day following their departure from Antelope, Cannon and his daughter reached home at nightfall. The obsequiously-welcoming butler—an importation from the East that the Bonanza King confided to Rose he found it difficult to refrain from kicking—acquainted them with the fact that “Mr. Gene had been up from San Luis Obispo” for two days, waiting for their arrival. Even as he spoke a masculine voice uttered a hail from the floor above and a man’s figure appeared on the stairway and ran quickly down. Cannon gave a careless look upward.
“Ah there, Gene,” he observed, turning to the servant who was helping him off with his coat. “Come up to town for a spell?”
The young man did not seem to notice anything especially ungracious in the greeting or probably was used to it.
“Yes, just up for a look around and to see how you and Rosey were. Got snowed in, didn’t you?” he said, looking at his sister.
She kissed him affectionately and drew him to the light where she subjected him to a sharp, exploring scrutiny. Evidently the survey was satisfactory, for she gave him a little slap on the shoulder and said,
“Good boy, Gene, San Luis is agreeing with you. Yes, we were snowed in for nearly three weeks. Papa’s been half crazy. And you’ve been in town two days, Prescott says. It must have been dull here all alone.”
“Oh, I haven’t been dull. I’ve been going round seeing the boys and”—his sister’s sudden, uneasy look checked him and he answered it with quick reassurance of glance and tone. “Everything strictly temperance. Don’t you get uneasy. I’ve lived up to my promises. The ranch is mine all right, father.”
He had a high, rather throaty voice, which, without seeing his face, would have suggested weakness and lack of purpose. Now as he looked at his father with a slight and somewhat foolish air of triumph, the old man responded to his remark with a sound which resembled a grunt of scornful incredulity.
“Really, Gene,” said his sister, her manner of fond gratification in marked contrast to her father’s roughness, “that’s the best news I’ve heard for a year. It’s worth being snowed up to hear that when you come out. Of course you’ll get the ranch. I always knew you would. I always knew you could pull up and be as straight as anybody if you tried.”
The old man, who had been kicking off his rubbers, here raised his head with a bull-like movement, and suddenly roared at the retreating butler who was vanishing toward the dining-room.
“My cigars. Where in hell are they? Why doesn’t somebody attend here?”
The servant, with a start of alarm and a murmured excuse, disappeared for a moment, to reappear, hurrying breathlessly with a box of cigars. Cannon selected one and turned to the stairway.
“How long are you down for?” he said to his son as he began ascending.
“I thought a week, perhaps two,” answered the young man. “A feller gets darned lonely, down there in the country.”
There was something apologetic, almost pleading in his words and way of speech. He looked after his father’s receding figure as if quite oblivious to the rudeness of the large, retiring back and the manner of careless scorn.
“Make it three,” said the Bonanza King, turning his head slightly and throwing the sentence over his shoulder.
Gene Cannon was now twenty-nine years of age and had drunk since his eighteenth year. His mother had died in ignorance of his vice. When his father discovered it, it simply augmented the old man’s impatience against the feeble youth who would carry on his name and be one of the inheritors of his fortune. Bill Cannon had never cared much for his only son. He had early seen the stuff of which the boy was made. “Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” he would say, throwing the words at his wife over the bitten end of his cigar. He could have forgiven the drinking, as he could other vices, if Gene had had some of his own force, some of that driving power which had carried him triumphant over friend and foe. But the boy had no initiative, no brains, no energy. “How did I ever come to have such a son?” he queried sometimes in an access of disgust in which the surprise was stronger than the disgust. The question possessed a sort of scientific interest for him which was deeper than the personal and over which the disappointed magnate would ponder.
As Gene grew older and his intemperance assumed more serious proportions, the father’s scorn grew more open and was augmented by a sort of exasperated dislike. The Bonanza King had no patience with those who failed from ill-health or the persistent persecutions of bad luck. His contention was that they should not have been ill, and they should have conquered their bad luck. He had no excuses for those who were beaten back against the wall—only death should be able to do that. But when it came to a useless, hampering vice, a weakness that in itself was harmless enough, but that was allowed to gain paralyzing proportions, his original contempt was intensified into a fierce intolerance which would have been terrifying if it had not been tempered with an indifferent disdain.
Rose’s attitude toward her brother was a source of secret wonder to him. She loved the feeble youth; a tie of the deepest affection existed between them, upon which Gene’s intemperance seemed to have no effect. The Bonanza King had always admitted that the ways of the gentler sex were beyond his comprehension, but that the two women he had known best—his wife and his daughter—should have lavished the tenderest love upon an intemperate, incompetent, useless weakling was to him one of the fathomless mysteries of life.
It was Rose’s suggestion that Gene should be withdrawn from temptation by sending him to the country. As the only son of Bill Cannon he was the object of a variety of attentions and allurements in the city to which a stronger-willed man might have succumbed. The father readily agreed to the plan. He could graciously subscribe to all Rose said, as the removal of Gene’s amiable visage and uninspired conversation would not cause him any particular distress or sense of loss.
But when Rose unfolded the whole of her scheme he was not so enthusiastically in accord with her. It was that Gene should be put on his father’s ranch—the historic Rancho of the Santa Trinidad near San Luis Obispo—as manager, that all responsibility should be placed in his hands, and that if, during one year’s probation, he should remain sober and maintain a record of quiet conduct and general good behavior, the ranch should be turned over to him as his own property, to be developed on such lines as he thought best.
The Rancho of the Santa Trinidad was one of the finest pieces of agricultural property in California. The Bonanza King visited it once a year, and at intervals received crates of fruit and spring chickens raised upon it. This was about all he got out of it, but when he heard Rose calmly arranging to have it become Gene’s property, he felt like a man who suddenly finds himself being robbed. He had difficulty in restraining a roar of refusal. Had it been any one but Rose he would not have restrained it.
Of course he gave way to her, as he always did. He even gave way gracefully with an effect of a generosity too large to bother over trifles, not because he felt it but because he did not want Rose to guess how it “went against him.” Under the genial blandness of his demeanor he reconciled himself to the situation by the thought that Gene would certainly never keep sober for a year, and that there was therefore no fear of the richest piece of ranch land in the state passing into the hands of that dull and incapable young man.
The year was nearly up now. It had but three months to run and Gene’s record had been exemplary. He had come to the city only twice, when his father noticed with a jealously-watchful eye that he had been resolutely abstemious in the matter of liquor and that his interest in the great property he managed had been the strongest he had so far evinced in anything. The thought that Gene might possibly live up to his side of the bargain and win the ranch caused the old man to experience that feeling of blank chagrin which is the state of mind of the unexpectedly swindled. He felt like a king who has been daringly and successfully robbed by a slave.
At dinner that evening Gene was very talkative. He told of his life on the ranch, of its methodical monotony, of its seclusion, for he saw little of his neighbors and seldom went in to the town. Rose listened with eager interest, and the old man with a sulky, glowering attention. At intervals he shot a piercing look at his boy, eying him sidewise with a cogitating intentness of observation. His remarks were few, but Gene was so loquacious that there was little opportunity for another voice to be heard. He prattled on like a happy child, recounting the minutest details of his life after the fashion of those who live much alone.
In the light of the crystal lamp that spread a ruffled shade of yellow silk over the center of the table, he was seen to be quite unlike his father or sister. His jet-black hair and uniformly pale skin resembled his mother’s, but his face in its full, rounded contours, slightly turned-up nose, and eyebrows as thick as strips of fur, had a heaviness hers had lacked. Some people thought him good-looking, and there was a sort of unusual, Latin picturesqueness in the combination of his curly black hair, which he wore rising up in a bulwark of waves from his forehead, his white skin, and the small, dark mustache, delicate as an eyebrow, that shaded his upper lip. It was one of his father’s grievances against him that he would have made a pretty girl, and that his soft, affectionate character would have been quite charming in a woman. Now, listening to him, it seemed to the older man as if it were just the kind of talk one might expect from Gene. The father had difficulty in suppressing a snort of derision when he heard the young man recounting to Rose his troubles with his Chinese cook.
Before dinner was over Gene excused himself on the plea that he was going to the theater.
“I’m such a hayseed now,” he said as he rose, “that I don’t want to miss a thing. Haven’t seen a play for six months and I’m just crazy to see anything, Monte Cristo, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, East Lynne. I’m not proud, anything’ll suit me.”
“Don’t you ever go into San Luis?” growled his father sulkily. “They have plays there sometimes, I suppose.”
“Oh yes, but I’m keeping out of harm’s way. The boys in San Luis don’t know how it is with me. They don’t understand and I’m not going to put myself in the way of temptation. You know, father, I want that ranch.”
He turned a laughing glance on his father; and the old man, with a sheepishly-discomfited expression, grunted an unintelligible reply and bent over his plate.
He did not raise his head till Gene had left the room, when, looking up, he leaned back in his chair and said with a plaintive sigh,
“What a damned fool that boy is!”
Rose was up in arms at once.
“Why, papa, how can you say that! Especially when you see how he’s improved. It’s wonderful. He’s another man. You can tell in a minute he’s not been drinking, he takes such an interest in everything and is so full of work and plans.”
“Is he?” said her father dryly. “Maybe so, but that don’t prevent him from being a damned fool.”
“You’re unjust to Gene. Why do you think he’s a fool?”
“Just because he happens to be one. You might as well ask me why I think the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That’s what it does, and when I say it does, I’m not criticizing or complaining, I’m only stating the plain facts.”
Rose made a murmur of protest and he went on.
“You’re queer cattle, you women. I suppose a feller could live in the world a hundred years and not understand you. There’s Delia Ryan, for example, the brainiest woman I know, could give most men cards and spades and beat ’em hands down. Last night at Rocky Bar they were telling me that she’s written to the operator there and told him she’ll get him a position here in the Atlantic and Pacific Cable Company, in which she’s a large stock-holder, that’ll double his salary and give him a chance he’d never have got in this world. She wants to pay off a mortgage on a ranch Perley has in the Sacramento Valley and she’s sent Mrs. Perley a check for five hundred dollars. She’s offered Willoughby a first-rate job on the Red Calumet group of mines near Sonora in which Con had a controlling interest, and she’s written to the doctor to come down and become one of the house physicians of the St. Filomena Hospital, which she practically runs. She’s ready to do all this because of what they did for Dominick, and yet she, his own mother, won’t give the boy a cent and keeps him on starvation wages, just because she wants to spite his wife.”
He looked at his daughter across the table with narrowed eyes. “What have you got to say for yourself after that, young woman?” he demanded.
Rose had evidently nothing to say. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head by way of reply. Her face, in the flood of lamplight, looked pale and tired. She was evidently distrait and depressed; a very different-looking Rose from the girl he had taken away with him four weeks earlier. He regarded her for an anxiously-contemplative moment and then said,
“What’s the matter? Seems to me you look sort’er peaked.”
“I?” she queried with a surprised start. “Why, I’m quite well.”
“Well’s you were before you went up to the mines?”
A color came into her cheeks and she lowered her eyes:
“I’m a little tired, I think, and that always makes me look pale. It was a hard sort of trip, all those hours in the sleigh, and that hotel at Rocky Bar was a dreadful place. I couldn’t sleep. There was a cow somewhere near—it sounded as if it were in the next room—and the roosters all began to crow in the middle of the night. I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
Her father drew his coffee-cup toward him and dropped in a lump of sugar. No word had passed between him and his daughter as to the scene he had witnessed two days before in the parlor of Perley’s Hotel. She was ignorant of the fact that he had seen it and he intended that she should remain ignorant of it. But the next morning he had had an interview with Dominick Ryan, in which the young man, confronted with angry questions and goaded past reserve by shame and pain, had confessed the misery of his marriage and the love that in an unguarded moment had slipped beyond his control.
Cannon had said little to him. Beyond telling him that he must not see Miss Cannon again, his comments on Dominick’s confessions had been brief and non-committal. It was not his business to preach to Delia Ryan’s boy, and a large experience of men had given him a practically limitless tolerance of any and all lapses of which the human animal is capable. They only concerned him as they bore on his own affairs. In this particular case they did bear on his affairs, closely and importantly, on the affair of all others dearest and nearest to him—the happiness of his daughter. He knew that in this three weeks of imprisonment she had come to feel for Dominick Ryan a sentiment she had never before felt for any man. He had seen her in the young man’s arms, and, knowing Rose as he knew her, that was enough.
Driving down from Antelope in the sleigh he thought about it hard, harder than he had ever before in his life thought of any sentimental complication. He was enraged—coldly and grimly enraged—that his girl should have stumbled into such a pitfall. But it was not his habit to waste time and force in the indulgence of profitless anger. The thing had happened. Rose, who had been courted many times and never warmed to more than pity for her unsuccessful suitors, had suddenly, by a fateful, unpremeditated chance, met her mate—the man she loved. And the most maddening part of it was that he was the man of all others her father would have chosen for her had such a choice been possible.
He bit on his cigar, turning it over between his teeth, and looked sidewise at her as she sat silent in the sleigh beside him. She was unquestionably pale, pale and listless, her body wrapped in enveloping furs, sunk in an attitude of weariness, her eyes full of dejected reverie. Even to his blindly-groping, masculine perceptions her distrait looks, her dispirited silence, told of melancholy preoccupation. She was not happy—his Rose, who, if she had wanted it and he could have bought, begged or stolen it, would have had the moon.
To-night, in her white dress, the mellow radiance of the lamp throwing out her figure against the shadowy richness of the dining-room walls, she bore the same appearance of despondency. Her luster was dimmed, her delicate skin had lost its dazzling, separated bloom of pink and white, her glance was absent and unresponsive. Never, since the death of her mother, now ten years back, had he seen her when it was so obvious that she harbored an inner, unexpressed sense of trouble.
“I guess the city’s the best place for you,” he said. “Roughing it don’t seem to suit you if cows and chickens keep you awake all night. I’ve seen the time when the hotel at Rocky Bar would have been considered the top notch of luxury. I wish you could see the places your mother lived in when I first took her up there. You’re a spoiled girl, Rose Cannon.”
“Who spoiled me, I wonder?” she said, looking at him with a gleam of humor in her eyes.
“We’re not calling names to-night,” he answered, “anyway, not since Gene’s gone. All my desire to throw things and be ugly vanishes when that boy gets out. So the noises at Rocky Bar kept you awake?”
“Yes, and I was wakeful, anyway.”
She looked down at her cup, stirring her coffee. He thought she appeared conscious and said,
“What made you wakeful, guilty conscience?”
“Guilty conscience!” she repeated in a tone that was full of indignant surprise. “Why should I have a guilty conscience?”
“Lord knows! Don’t fire off these conundrums at me. I don’t know all your secrets, honey.”
She did not answer. He glanced furtively at her and saw that her face had flushed. He took a cigar from the box the butler had set at his elbow and bit off the end:
“How should I know the secrets of a young lady like you? A long time ago, perhaps, I used to, after your mother died and you were my little Rosey, fourteen years old. Lord, how cunning you were then! Just beginning to lengthen out, a little woman and a little girl, both in one. You didn’t have secrets in those days or wakeful nights either.”
He applied a match to the end of the cigar and drew at it, his ears strained for his daughter’s reply. She again made none and he shot a quick glance at her. She was still stirring her coffee, her eyebrows drawn together, her eyes on the swirl of brown in the cup. He settled himself in his chair, a bulky figure, his clothes ribbed with creases, his head low between his shoulders, and a reek of cigar smoke issuing from his lips.
“How’d you like it up there, anyway?”
“Up where?”
“Up at Antelope. It was a sort of strange, new experience for you.”
“Oh, I liked it so much—I loved part of it. I liked the people much better than the people down here, Mrs. Perley, and Cora, and Perley, and Willoughby—did you ever know a nicer man than Willoughby?—and Judge Washburne. He was a real gentleman, not only in his manners but down in his heart. And even Perley’s boy, he was so natural and awkward and honest. I felt different from what I do here, more myself, less as if outside things were influencing me to do things I didn’t always like to do or mean to do. I felt as if I were doing just what I ought to do—it’s hard to express it—as if I were being true.”
“Oh,” said her father with a falling inflection which had a sound of significant comprehension.
“Do you know what I mean?” she asked.
“I can make a sort of guess at it.”
He puffed at his cigar for a moment, then took it from his mouth, eyed the lit end, and said,
“How’d you like Dominick Ryan? You haven’t said anything about him.”
Her voice, in answering, sounded low and careful. She spoke slowly, as if considering her words:
“I thought he was very nice, and good-looking, too. He’s not a bit like Cornelia Ryan, or his mother, either. Cornelia has such red hair.”
“No, looks like the old man. Good deal like him in character, too. Con Ryan was the best feller in the world, but not hard enough, not enough grit. His wife had it though, had enough for both. If it hadn’t been for her, Con would never have amounted to anything—too soft and good-natured, and the boy’s like him.”
“How?” She raised her head and looked directly at him, her lips slightly parted.
“Soft, too, just the same way, soft-hearted. An easy mark for any one with a hard-luck story and not too many scruples. Why did he marry that woman? I don’t know anything about it, but I’d like to bet she saw the stuff he was made of and cried and teased and nagged till she got him to do it.”
“I don’t see that he could have done anything else.”
“That’s a woman’s—a young girl’s view. That’s the view Dominick himself probably took. It’s the sort of idea you might expect him to have, something ornamental and impractical, that’s all right to keep in the cupboard and take out and dust, but that don’t do for every-day use. That sort of thing is all very well for a girl, but it doesn’t do for a man. It’s not for this world and our times. Maybe it was all right when a feller went round in armor, fighting for unknown damsels, but it won’t go in California to-day. The woman was a working woman, she wasn’t any green girl. She earned her living in an office full of men, and I guess there wasn’t much she didn’t know. She saw through Dominick and gathered him in. It’s all very well to be chivalrous, but you don’t want to be a confounded fool.”
“Are you a ‘confounded fool’ when you’re doing what you think right?”
“It depends on what you think right, honey. If it’s going to break up your life, cut you off from your kind, make an outcast of you from your own folks, and a poverty-stricken outcast at that, you’re a confounded fool to think it’s right. You oughtn’t to let yourself think so. That kind of a moral attitude is a luxury. Women can cultivate it because they don’t have to get out in the world and fight. They keep indoors and get taken care of, and the queer ideas they have don’t hurt anybody. But men——”
He stopped, realizing that perhaps he was talking too frankly. He had long known that Rose harbored these Utopian theories on duty and honor, which he thought very nice and pretty for her and which went gracefully with her character as a sheltered, cherished, and unworldly maiden. It was his desire to see what effect the conversation was having on her that made him deal so unceremoniously with ideals of conduct which were all very well for Bill Cannon’s daughter but were ruinous for Dominick Ryan.
“If you live in the world you’ve got to cut your cloth by its measure,” he continued. “Look at that poor devil, tied to a woman that’s not going to let him go if she can help it, that he doesn’t care for——”
“How do you know he doesn’t care for her?” The interruption came in a tone of startled surprise and Rose stared at him, her eyes wide with it.
For a moment the old man was at a loss. He would have told any lie rather than have let her guess his knowledge of the situation and the information given him by Dominick. He realized that his zeal had made him imprudently garrulous, and, gazing at her with a slightly stupid expression, said in a slow tone of self-justification,
“Well, that’s my idea. I guessed it. I’ve heard one thing and another here and there and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no love lost between them. It’s the natural outcome of the situation, anyway.”
“Yes, perhaps,” she murmured. She placed her elbow on the table and pressed the tips of her fingers against her cheek. Her hand and arm, revealed by her loose lace sleeve, looked as if cut out of ivory.
“And then,” went on her father remorselessly, “the results of being a confounded fool don’t stop right there. That’s one of the worst things of allowing yourself the luxury of foolishness. They go on—roll right along like a wheel started on a down-hill grade. Some day that boy’ll meet the right woman—the one he really wants, the one that belongs to him. He’ll be able to stand it all right till then. And then he’ll realize just what he’s done and what he’s up against, and things may happen.”
The smoke wreaths were thick in front of his face, and peering through them he saw the young girl move her fingers from her cheek to her forehead, where she gently rubbed them up and down.
“Isn’t that about the size of it?” he queried, when she did not answer.
“Yes, maybe,” she said in a voice that sounded muffled.
“It’ll be a pretty tough proposition and it’s bound to happen. A decent feller like that is just the man to fall in love. And he’d be good to a woman, he’d make her happy. He’s a good husband lost for some nice girl.”
Rose’s fingers ceased moving across her forehead. Her hand rested there, shading her eyes. For a moment the old man—his vision precipitated into the half-understood wretchedness of Dominick Ryan’s position—forgot her, and he said in a hushed voice of feeling,
“By God, I’m sorry for the poor boy!”
His daughter rose suddenly with a rustling of crushed silks. The sound brought him back in an instant and he leaned over the arm of his chair, his cigar in his left hand, his right waving the smoke wreaths from before his face. Rose’s hand, pressing her crumpled napkin on the table, shone pink in the lamplight, her shoulder gleamed white through its lace covering, but her face was averted.
“Going up now?” he asked, leaning still farther over the chair-arm to see her beyond the lamp’s wide shade.
She appeared not to hear and moved toward the door.
“Going to bed already, Rosey?” he asked in a louder key.
“Yes, I’m tired,” her voice came a little hoarse and she did not look at him. At the doorway she stopped, her hand on the edge of the portière, and without turning, cleared her throat and said, “The cow and the chickens were too much for me. I’m too sleepy to talk any more. Good night, papa.”
“Good-night, Rosey,” he answered.
The portière fell softly behind her, and her footfall was lost in the thickness of the carpets. Though he had not seen her face, her father had an alarming, an almost terrifying idea, that his darling had left the table in tears.
He sat on for some time, stonily motionless, save for the movement of his lips as he puffed out clouds of smoke. The soft-footed servants, coming to clear the table, fled before his growled command to “get out and let him alone.” As he smoked he looked straight before him with fixed, unwinking eyes, his face set in furrows of thought. At long intervals he stirred in his chair, ponderously, like an inert, heavy animal, and now and then he emitted a short sound, like a grunted comment on some thought, which, by its biting suddenness, seemed to force an ejaculation out of him.
Three days after the return of the Cannons, Dominick Ryan also came home. He had answered Berny’s letter the day the Cannons left, a few hours after that interview with the Bonanza King, in which, driven to bay by the old man’s questions, he had torn the veil from his married life.
After that there was a period of several hours when he sat in his room thinking over what had happened. It seemed to him that he had played a dastardly part. He saw himself a creature of monumental, gross selfishness, who had cajoled a young girl, in a moment of softness and sentiment, into an action which had done nothing but distress and humiliate her. He, who should have been the strong one, had been weak. It was he who should have seen how things were going; he, the married man, who had allowed himself to feel and to yield to a love that ought to have been hidden for ever in his own heart.
He felt that it would be a sort of expiation to go back to his wife. That was where he belonged. Rose must never again cross his path, have a place in his thoughts, or float, a soft beguiling image, in his memory. He had a wife. No matter what Berny was, she was the woman he had married. She had not deceived him. It was he who had done her a wrong, and he owed her a reparation.
In his raw state, his nerves still thrilling with the memory of that moment’s embrace, he saw Berny from her own point of view. He lost the memory of the complacent mistress in the picture of the unloved wife, on whose side there was much to be said. Morbidness colored his vision and exaggerated his sense of culpability. If she had an ugly temper, had it not been excited, fed and aggravated by the treatment she had received from his family? If they had maintained a different attitude toward her, the poor girl might have been quite a pleasant, easy-going person. In all other ways she had been a good wife. Since their marriage, no other man had ever won a glance from her. She had often enough assured Dominick of that fact, and he, for his part, knew it to be true. She had struggled to keep a comfortable home on their small income. If she was not congenial to him—if her companionship was growing daily more disagreeable—was it all her fault? He had known her well before he married her, six months of the closest intimacy had made him acquainted with every foible of her character. It was no story of a youth beguiled and deceived by a mature woman in the unequal duel of a drawing-room courtship.
Her letter intensified his condition of self-accusation, chafed and irritated his soreness of shame till it became a weight of guilt. It also stirred afresh the pity, which was the strongest feeling he had for her. It was the tenderest, the most womanly letter, Berny had ever written him. A note of real appeal sounded through it. She had humiliated herself, asked his pardon, besought of him to return. As he thought of it, the vision of her alone in the flat, bereft of friends, dully devoid of any occupation, scornful of her old companions, fawningly desirous of making new ones who refused to know her, smote him with an almost sickening sense of its pitifulness. He felt sorry for her not alone because of her position, but because of what she was, what her own disposition had made her. She would never change, her limitations were fixed. She would go on longing for the same flesh-pots to the end, believing that they represented the highest and best.
Berny had realized that her letter was a skilful and moving production, but she did not know that it was to gain a hundredfold in persuasive power by falling on a guilty conscience. It put an end to Dominick’s revolt, it quenched the last sparks of the mutinous rage which had taken him to Antelope. That same afternoon in his frigid bedroom at the hotel, he answered it. His reply was short, only a few lines. In these he stated that he would be back on the following Saturday, the tenderness of his injured foot making an earlier move impossible.
The letter reached Berny Friday and threw her into a state of febrile excitement. Her deadly dread of Dominick’s returning to his family had never quite died out. It kept recurring, sweeping in upon her in moods of depression, and making her feel chilled and frightened. Now she knew he was coming back to her, evidently not lovingly disposed—the letter was too terse and cold for that—but, at any rate, he was coming home. Once there, she would set all her wits to work, use every art of which she was mistress, to make him forget the quarrel and enter in upon a new era of sweet reasonableness and mutual consideration.
She set about this by cleaning the house and buying new curtains for the sitting-room. Such purifications and garnishments would have agreeably impressed her on a home-coming and she thought they would Dominick. In the past year she had become much more extravagant than she had been formerly, a characteristic which had arisen in her from a state of rasped irritation against the restricted means to which Mrs. Ryan’srancor condemned her. She was quite heavily in debt to various tradespeople; and to dressmakers and milliners she owed sums that would have astounded her husband had he known of them. This did not prevent her from still further celebrating his return by ordering a new dress in which to greet him and a new hat to wear the first time they went out together. How she was to pay for these adornments, she did not know nor care. The occasion was so important that it excused any extravagance, and Berny, in whose pinched, dry nature love of dress was a predominant passion, was glad to have a reason for adding new glories to her wardrobe.
On the Saturday morning she went out betimes. Inquiry at the railway office told her that the train which connected with the branch line to Rocky Bar did not reach the city till six in the evening. She ordered a dinner of the choicest viands and spent part of the morning passing from stall to stall in the market on Powell Street spying about for dainties that might add a last elaborating touch to the lengthy menu. The afternoon was dedicated to the solemn rites of massaging, manicuring, and hair-waving at a beauty doctor’s. On an ordinary occasion these unwonted exertions in the pursuit of good looks would have tired her, but to-day she was keyed to a pitch where she did not notice small outside discomforts.
Long before six she was dressed, and standing before the mirror in her room she laid on the last perfecting touches with a short stick of hard red substance and a circular piece of mossy-looking white stuff, which she rubbed with a rotary motion round and round her face. Her new dress of raspberry pink crape betrayed the hand of an expert in its gracefully-falling folds and the elegance with which it outlined her slim, long-waisted shape. Her artificially-reddened hair waved back from her forehead in glossy ripples; her face, all lines and hollows rubbed from it, looked fresh and youthful. With the subdued light falling on her through the silk and paper lamp shades, she looked a very pretty woman, the darkness of her long brilliant eyes thrown into higher relief by the whiteness of her powdered face.
She was tremulously nervous. Every sound caused her to start and move to that part of the parlor whence she could look down the long passageway to the stair-head. Large bunches of greenery were massed here in the angles of the hall and stood in the corners of the sitting-room. Bowls filled with violets and roses were set on the table and mantelpiece, and the scent of these flowers, sweet and delicate, mingled with the crude, powerful perfume that the woman’s draperies exhaled with every movement. At intervals she ran into her bedroom, seized the little, round, soft wad of white and rubbed it over her face with a quick concentric movement, drawing her upper lip down as she did so, which gave to her countenance with its anxious eyes an exceedingly comical expression.
It was nearly seven o’clock when the bell rang. With a last hasty look in the glass, she ran down the passageway to the stair-head. It was necessary to descend a few steps to a turn on the stairs from whence the lever that opened the door could be worked. As she stood on the small landing, thrown out in bright relief by a mass of dark leafage that stood in the angle of the wall, the door opened and Dominick entered. He looked up and saw her standing there, gaily dressed, a brilliant, animated figure, smiling down at him.
“Ah, Berny,” he said in a quiet, unemotional voice, “is that you?”
It was certainly not an enthusiastic greeting. A sensitive woman would have been shriveled by it, but Berny was not sensitive. She had realized from the start that she would probably have to combat the lingering surliness left by the quarrel. As Dominick ascended, her air of smiling welcome was marked by a bland cheery unconsciousness of any past unpleasantness. She was not, however, as unconscious as she looked. She noted his heaviness of demeanor, the tired expression of his lifted face. He came up the stairs slowly, not yet being completely recovered, and it added to the suggestion of reluctance, of difficult and spiritless approach, that seemed to encompass him in an unseen yet distinctly-felt aura.
As he rose on a level with her, she stretched out her hands and, laying them on his shoulders, drew him toward her and kissed him. The coldness of his cheek, damp with the foggy night air, chilled the caress and she drew back from him, not so securely confident in her debonair, smiling assurance. He patted her lightly on the shoulder by way of greeting and said,
“How are you? All right?”
“Oh, I’m all right,” she answered with brisk, determined sprightliness. “You’re the one to ask about. You walk stiff, still. How are your feet?”
She was glad to turn her eyes away from his face. It looked very tired, and the slight smile with which he had greeted her stayed only on his lips and did not extend to his fatigued eyes. He was evidently angry still, angry and unforgiving, and that he should be so, when she was so anxious to forget the ugly episode of the quarrel and be gay and friendly again, dashed her spirits and made her feel unsure of herself and upset. She was determined, however, to show him that she had forgotten all about it, and as he turned the angle of the stairway she thrust her hand inside his arm and walked up beside him. They might have been a happy married couple, reunited after an absence, slowly coming up the stairs together arm in arm.
A few minutes later they were seated opposite each other at dinner. The little table glowed and gleamed, all Berny’s bravery of silver and glass mustered for its adornment. The choice and delicate dinner began with a soup that Dominick especially liked, a fact which Berny hoped he would notice and mention. She was one of those women who have an unfailing memory for what people like to eat; a single expression of preference would remain in her mind for years. Dominick and she had not lived together for a month before she knew everything in the way of food he liked or disliked. When she was annoyed with him, or especially bitter against his mother, she would order nothing but dishes that he did not care for, and when she was in a more friendly mood, as to-night, she would take pains and time to arrange a menu composed of those he preferred. He usually did not notice these rewards and punishments, but Berny always thought he did and was “too stubborn,” as she expressed it to herself, to show that he was affected by them.
She observed to-night that he neither remarked, nor seemed to relish his food, but she made no comment, talking on in a breathless, lively way,asking questions of his trip, his accident, and the condition of his feet, as though there were no mortifying recollections connected with the cause of his sudden departure. Her only indication of embarrassment was a tendency to avoid anything like a moment of silence and to fly from one subject to another. Dominick answered her questions and told her of his wanderings with a slow, careful exactness. Save in the freezing of his feet, which matter he treated more lightly than it deserved, he was open with her in recounting the small happenings of what he called “his holiday,” from the time of his walk from Rocky Bar to the day of his departure from Antelope.
They had progressed through the fish to the entrée when her questions passed from his personal wanderings and adventures to his associates. She had been very anxious to get to this point, as she wanted to know what degree of intimacy he had reached with the Bonanza King. Several times already she had tried to divert the conversation toward that subject, but it had been deflected by the young man, who seemed to find less personal topics more to his taste. Now she was advancing openly upon it, inquiring about the snow-bound group at Perley’s, and awarding to any but the august name for which her ears were pricked a perfunctory attention. It was part of the natural perversity of man that Dominick should shy from it and expend valuable time on descriptions of the other prisoners.
“There was an actor there,” he said, “snowed in on his way to Sacramento, a queer-looking chap, but not bad.”
“An actor?” said Berny, trying to look interested. “What did he act?”
“Melodrama, I think. He told me he played all through the northwest and east as far as Denver. The poor chap was caught up there and was afraid he was going to lose a Sacramento engagement that I guess meant a good deal to him. He was quite interesting, been in the Klondike in the first rush and had some queer stories about the early days up there.”
Berny’s indifferent glance became bright and fixed under the steadying effect of sudden interest.
“Been in the Klondike?” she repeated. “What was his name?”
“Buford, James Defay Buford. He’d been an actor at the opera house at Dawson.”
“Buford,” said Berny, turning to place a helping of pease on the plate the Chinaman held toward her. “I never heard of him. I thought perhaps it might have been some actor I’d seen play. I’d like to know an actor in private life. They must be so different.”
She ladled a second spoonful of pease on to her own plate, and as she began to eat them, said,
“It must have been interesting having the Cannons up there. When I read in the paper that they were up at Antelope too, I was awfully glad because I thought it would be such a good thing for you to get to know the old man well, as you would, snowed in that way together.”
“I knew him before. My father and mother have been friends of his for years.”
“I know that. You’ve often told me. But that’s a different thing. I thought if he got to know you intimately and liked you, as he probably would”—she glanced at him with a coquettish smile, but his face was bent over his plate—“why, then, something might come of it, something in a business way.” She again looked at him, quickly, with sidelong investigation, to see how he took the remark. She did not want to irritate him by alluding to his small means, anyway on this night of reconciliation.
“It would be so useful for you to get solid with a man like Bill Cannon,” she concluded with something of timidity in her manner.
Despite her caution, Dominick seemed annoyed. He frowned and gave his head an impatient jerk.
“Oh, there was nothing of that kind,” he said hurriedly. “We were just snowed in at the same hotel. There was no question of intimacy or friendship about it, any more than there was between Judge Washburne and me, or even the actor.”
Berny was exceedingly disappointed. Had the occasion been a less momentous one she would have expressed herself freely. In her mind she thought it was “just like Dominick” to have such an opportunity and let it go. A slight color deepened the artificial rose of her cheeks and for a moment she had to exert some control to maintain the silence that was wisdom. She picked daintily at her food while she wrestled with her irritation. Dominick showed no desire to resume the conversation, and a silence of some minutes’ duration rested over them, until she broke it by saying with a resolute cheerfulness of tone,
“Rose Cannon was there too, the paper said. I suppose you got to know her quite well?”
“I don’t know. I saw a good deal of her. There was only one sitting-room and we all sat there. She was there with the others.”
“What’s she like?” said Berny, her curiosity on the subject of this spoiled child of fortune overcoming her recent annoyance.
“You’ve seen her,” he answered, “you know what she looks like.”
“I’ve never seen her to know who she was. I suppose I’ve passed her on the streets and at the theaters. Is she cordial and pleasant, or does she give herself airs because she’s Bill Cannon’s daughter?”
Dominick moved his feet under the table. It was difficult for him to answer Berny’s questions politely.
“She doesn’t give herself the least airs. She’s perfectly simple and natural and kind.”
“That’s just what I’ve heard,” his wife said, giving her head an agreeing wag. “They say she’s just as easy and unassuming as can be. Did you think she was pretty when you saw her close to?”
“Really, Berny, I don’t know,” answered the victim in a tone of goaded patience. “She looks just the same close to as she does at a distance. I don’t notice people’s looks much. Yes, I suppose she’s pretty.”
“She has blonde hair,” said Berny, leaning forward over her plate in the eagerness of her interest. “Did it look to you as if it was bleached?”
He raised his eyes, and his wife encountered an unexpected look of anger in them. She shrank a little, being totally unprepared for it.
“How should I know whether her hair was bleached or not?” he said sharply. “That’s a very silly question.”
Berny was quite taken aback.
“I don’t see that it is,” she said with unusual and somewhat stammering mildness. “Most blonde-haired women, even if they haven’t bleached their hair, have had it ‘restored.’”
Dominick did not answer her. The servant presented a dish at his elbow and he motioned it away with an impatient gesture.
Berny, who was not looking at him, went on.
“What kind of clothes did she wear? They say she’s an elegant dresser, gets almost everything from Paris, even her underwear. I suppose she didn’t have her best things up there. But she must have had something, because the papers said they’d gone prepared for a two weeks’ trip.”
“I never noticed anything she wore.”
“Well, isn’t that just like you, Dominick Ryan!” exclaimed his wife, unable, at this unmerited disappointment, to refrain from some expression of her feelings. “And you might know I’d be anxious to hear what she had on.”
“I’m very sorry, but I haven’t an idea about any of her clothes. I think they were always dark, mostly black or brown.”
“Did you notice,” almost pleadingly, “what she wore when she went out? Mrs. Whiting, the forelady at Hazel’s millinery, says she imported a set of sables, muff, wrap and hat, for her this autumn. Hazel says it was just the finest thing of its kind you ever laid your eyes on. Did she have them up there?”
“I couldn’t possibly tell you. I don’t know what sables are. I saw her once with a fur cap on, but I think it belonged to Willoughby, an Englishman who was staying there, and used to have his cap hanging on the pegs in the hall. It’s quite useless asking me these questions. I don’t know anything about the subject. Did you wind the clock while I was away?”
He looked at the clock, a possession of his own, given him in the days when his mother and sister delighted to ornament his rooms with costly gifts and in which he had never before evinced the slightest interest.
“Of course, I wound it,” Berny said with an air of hurt protest. “Haven’t I wound it regularly for nearly three years?”
This brought the subject of Rose Cannon to an end and she was not alluded to again during the dinner. The conversation reverted to such happenings in the city as Berny thought might interest her husband, and it seemed to her that he was more pleased to sit and listen to her chatter of her sisters, the bank, the theaters, and the shops, than to dilate any further on his adventures in the snow-bound Sierra.
When the dinner was over, they returned to the front of the flat, where next to the parlor there was a tiny hall-room fitted up as a smoking-room and den. It was merely a continuation of the hall, and “the cozy corner” which Berny had had a Polk Street upholsterer construct in it, occupied most of the available space, and crowded such visitors as entered it into the corners. It had been Berny’s idea to have this room “lined with books” as she expressed it, but their joint possessions in this line consisting of some twenty-five volumes, and the fact that the contracted space made it impossible to accommodate both the books and the cozy corner, Berny had decided in favor of the latter. She now seated herself on the divan that formed the integral part of this construction, and, piling the pillows behind her, leaned luxuriously back under the canopy of variegated stuffs which was supported by two formidable-looking lances.
Dominick sat in his easy chair. He always smoked in this room and read the papers, and presently he picked them up from the table and began to look them over. The conversation languished, became spasmodic, and finally died away. Berny, leaning back on the cushions, tried several times to revive it, but her husband from among the spread sheets of the evening press answered her with the inarticulate sounds of mental preoccupation, and sometimes with no sound at all, till she abandoned the attempt and leaned back under the canopy in a silence that was not by any means the somnolent quietude of after-dinner torpor.
The clock hands were pointing to half-past nine when a ring at the bell was followed by the appearance of the Chinaman at the door, stating that the expressman had come with Mr. Ryan’s valises. Dominick threw down his papers and left the room. As Berny sat silent, she could hear the expressman’s gruff deep voice in the hall and the thuds of the valises as he thumped them down at the stair-head. Dominick answered him and there were a few more remarks, followed by the retreating sound of the man’s heavy feet on the stairs and the bang of the hall door. She sat looking at the clock, waiting for her husband to return, and then as he did not come and the hall seemed singularly quiet she leaned forward and sent an exploring glance down its dim length. Dominick was not there, but a square of light fell out from the open doorway of his room.
“Dominick,” she called, “what are you doing?”
He came to the door of the room in his shirt-sleeves, a tall figure looking lean and powerful in this closer-fitting and lighter garb.
“I’m unpacking my things, and then I’m going to bed.”
“Oh!” she answered with a falling inflection, leaning forward, with her elbows planted on her knees, craning her neck to see more plainly down the narrow passageway. “It’s only half-past nine; why do you want to go to bed so early?”
“I’m tired, and it will take me some time to get these things put away.”
“Can I help you?” she asked without moving.
“No, thanks. There’s nothing much to bother about. Good night, Berny,” and he stepped back into the room and shut the door.
Berny sat as he had left her for a space, and then drew back upon the divan and leaned against the mound of pillows. She made the movement charily and slowly, her face set in a rigidity of thought to which her body seemed fixed and obedient. She sat thus for an hour without moving, her eyes staring before her, two straight lines folded in the skin between her brows.
So he was still angry, angry and unforgiving. That was the way she read his behavior. The coldness that he exhaled—that penetrated even her unsensitive outer shell—she took to be the coldness of unappeased indignation. He had never before been just like this. There was a something of acquired forbearance and patience about him—a cultivated thing, not a spontaneous outward indication of an inner condition of being—which was new to her observation. He was not sulky or cross; he was simply withdrawn from her and trying to hide it under a manner of careful, guarded civility. It was different from any state she had yet seen him in, but it never crossed her mind that it might be caused by the influence of another woman.
He was still angry—that was what Berny thought; and sitting on the divan under the canopy with its fiercely-poised lances she meditated on the subject. His winning back was far from accomplished. He was not as “easy” as she had always thought. A feeling of respect for him entered into her musings, a feeling that was novel, for in her regard for her husband there had previously been a careless, slighting tolerance which was not far removed from contempt. But ifhe had pride enough to keep her thus coldly at arm’s length, to withstand her attempts at forgiveness and reconciliation, he was more of a man than she thought, and she had a harder task to handle than she had guessed. She did not melt into anything like self-pity at the futility of her efforts, which, had Dominick known of them, would have seemed to him extremely pathetic. That they had not succeeded gave her a new impetus of force and purpose, made her think, and scheme with a hard, cool resolution. To “make up” and gain ascendancy over Dominick, independent and proudly indifferent, was much more worth while than to bully Dominick, patient, enduring, and ruled by a sense of duty.