On the second Sunday after their return from Antelope, Bill Cannon resolved to dedicate the afternoon to paying calls. This, at least, was what he told his daughter at luncheon as he, she, and Gene sat over the end of the meal. To pay calls was not one of the Bonanza King’s customs, and in answer to Rose’s query as to whom he was going to honor thus, he responded that he thought he’d “start in with Delia Ryan.”
Rose made no comment on this intelligence. The sharp glance he cast at her discovered no suggestion of consciousness in the peach-like placidity of her face. It gratified him to see her thus unsuspecting, and in the mellowing warmth of his satisfaction he turned and addressed a polite query to Gene as to how he intended spending the afternoon. Gene and Rose, it appeared, were going to the park to hear the band. Gene loved a good band, and the one that played in the park Sunday afternoons was especially good. The Sunday before, Gene had heard it play Poet and Peasant and the Overture of William Tell, and it was great! That was one of the worst things about living on a ranch, Gene complained, you didn’t have any music except at the men’s house at night when one of the Mexicans played on an accordion.
The old man, with his elbow on the table, and a short, blunt-fingered hand stroking his beard, looked at his son with narrowed eyes full of veiled amusement. When he did not find Gene disagreeably aggravating as his only failure, he could, as it were, stand away from him and realize how humorous he was if you took him in a certain way.
“What’s the Mexican play?” he growled without removing his hand.
“La Paloma,” answered Gene, pleased to be questioned thus amicably by his autocratic sire, “generally La Paloma, but he can play The Heart Bowed Down and the Toreador song from Carmen. I want him to learn the Miserere from Trovatore. It’s nice to sit on the porch after dinner and listen while you smoke.”
“Sort of Court Minstrel,” said his father, thumping down his napkin with his hand spread flat on it. “Don Eugenio Cannon, with his minstrel playing to him in the gloaming! It’s very picturesque. Did you ever think of having a Court Fool too, or perhaps you don’t feel as if you needed one?”
He arose from his chair before Gene, who never quite understood the somewhat ferocious humor of his parent, had time to reply.
“Well, so long,” said the old man; “be good children and don’t get into mischief, and Rose, see that your brother doesn’t get lost or so carried away by the Poet and the Peasant that he forgets the dinner hour. Adios, girlie.”
A half-hour later he walked down the flight of marble steps that led in dignified sweep from the front door to the street. It was a wonderful day and for a moment he paused, looking with observing eyes at the prospect of hill and bay which seemed to glitter in the extreme clearness of the atmosphere. Like all Californians he had a strong, natural appreciation of scenic and climatic beauty. Preoccupied with thoughts and schemes which were anything but uplifting, he yet was sensitively responsive to the splendors of the view before him, to the unclouded, pure blue of the vault above, to the balmy softness of the air against his face. Some one had once asked him why he did not live in Paris as the ideal home of the man of great wealth and small scruples. His answer had been that he preferred San Francisco because there were more fine days in the year there than anywhere else he knew of.
Now he paused, sniffing the air with distended nostril and inhaling it in deep, grateful inspirations. His eye moved slowly over the noble prospect, noted the deep sapphire tint of the bay, the horizon, violet dark against a pale sky, and the gem-like blues and amethysts of the distant hills. He turned his glance in the other direction and looked down the gray expanse of the street, the wide, clear, stately street, with its air of clean spaciousness, sun-bathed, silent, almost empty, in the calm quietude of the Sabbath afternoon. The bustling thoroughfares of greater cities, with their dark, sordid crowds, their unlovely, vulgar hurry, their distracting noise, were offensive to him. The wonder crossed his mind, as it had done before, how men who could escape from such surroundings chose to remain in them.
He walked forward slowly, a thick-set, powerful figure, his frock-coat buttoned tight about the barrel-like roundness of his torso, a soft, black felt hat pulled well down on his head. His feet were broad and blunt like his hands, and in their square-toed shoes he planted them firmly on the pavement with a tread of solid, deliberate authority. His forward progress had something in it of an invincible, resistless march. He was thinking deeply as he walked, arranging and planning, and there was nothing in his figure, or movements, or the expression of his face, which suggested the sauntering aimlessness of an afternoon stroll.
When he turned into Van Ness Avenue the Ryan house was one block beyond him, a conglomerate white mass, like a crumbling wedding cake slowly settling on a green lawn. He surveyed it as he approached, noting its ugliness with a musing satisfaction. Its size and the bright summery perfection of surrounding grass and flower beds lent it impressiveness and redeemed it from the position of a colossal blight on the prospect to which architect and builder had done their best to relegate it. Prosperity, a complacent, overwhelming prosperity, was suggested not only by its bulk but by the state of studied finish and neatness that marked mansion and grounds. There did not seem to be a wilting flower bed or withered leaf left on a single stalk in the garden borders. Every window-pane gleamed like a mirror innocent of dust or blemishing spot. The marble steps up which Cannon mounted were as snowily unsullied as though no foot had passed over them since their last ablution.
The door was opened by a Chinaman, who, taking the visitor’s card, left him standing in the hall, and, deaf to his queries as to where he should go, serenely mounted the stairs. Cannon hesitated a moment, then hearing a sound of voices to his right, entered the anteroom that gave on that suite of apartments into which Dominick had walked on the night of the ball. They were softly lit by the afternoon sun filtering through thin draperies, and extended in pale, gilt-touched vista to the shining emptiness of the ball-room. The old man was advancing toward the voices when he suddenly saw whence they proceeded, and stopped. In the room just beyond him Cornelia Ryan and a young man were sitting on a small, empire sofa, their figures thrown out in high relief against the background of silk-covered wall. Cornelia’s red head was in close proximity to that of her companion, which the intruder saw to be clothed with a thatch of sleek black hair, and which he recognized as appertaining to a young man whose father had once been shift boss on the Rey del Monte, and who bore the patronymic of Duffy.
Cornelia and Jack Duffy had the appearance of being completely engrossed in each other’s society. In his moment of unobserved survey, Cannon had time to note the young woman’s air of bashful, pleased embarrassment and the gentleman’s expression of that tense, unsmiling earnestness which attends the delivery of sentimental passages. Cornelia was looking down, and her flaming hair and the rosy tones of her face, shading from the faintest of pearly pinks to deepening degrees of coral, were luminously vivid against the flat surface of cream-colored wall behind her, and beside the black poll and thin, dark cheek of her companion. That something very tender was afoot was quickly seen by the visitor, who softly withdrew, stepping gingerly over the fur rugs, and gaining the entrance to the hall with a sensation of flurried alarm.
An open door just opposite offered a refuge, and, passing through it with a forward questing glance alert for other occupants who might resent intrusion, the old man entered a small reception-room lit by the glow of a hard coal fire. The room was different in furnishings and style from those he had left. It had the austere bleakness of aspect resultant from a combination of bare white walls and large pieces of furniture of a black wood upon which gold lines were traced in ornamental squares. An old-fashioned carpet was on the floor, and several tufted arm-chairs, begirt with dangling fringes, were drawn up sociably before the fire. This burned cheerily, a red focus of heat barred by the stripes of a grate, and surmounted by a chastely severe white marble mantelpiece. He had been in the room often before and knew it for Mrs. Ryan’s own particular sanctum. When a celebrated decorator had been sent out from New York to furnish the lower floor of the house, she had insisted on retaining in this apartment the pieces of furniture and the works of art which she approved, and which the decorator wished to banish to the garret. Mrs. Ryan had her way as she always did, and the first fine “soote” of furniture which she and Con had bought in the days of their early affluence, and various oil paintings also collected in the same era of their evolution, went to the decking of the room she used for her own and oftenest sat in.
Cannon approached the fire, and stood there looking up at the life-size portrait in oils of the late Cornelius Ryan, which hung over the chimneypiece. The artist had portrayed him as a thickly-whiskered man with the complexion of a healthy infant and eyes of baby blue. A watch chain, given him by his colleagues in the old days at Shasta, and formed of squares of quartz set in native gold, was painted with a finished carefulness which had pleased Mrs. Ryan even more than the likeness had done. In showing the picture, she was wont to say proudly, “Just look at the watch chain! Seems as if you could almost hear the ticking of the watch.”
Cannon was speculating as to the merits of the likeness when he heard the silken rustling of skirts, and turned to greet his old friend. She came in smiling, with extended hand, richly clad, the gleam of a fastening jewel at her neck. Her hair was dressed with a shining, smooth elaboration, drawn up tightly at the sides and arranged over her forehead in careful curls. As she and her visitor exchanged the first sentences of greeting he noticed that she looked much older and more worn than she had done the last time he had seen her, but her face was as full of pugnacious force as ever. While Delia Ryan’s body lived her spirit would hold its dominion. She had ruled all her life and would do so to the end.
They sat down on either side of the fire and the old man said,
“I don’t know whether I ought to be in here. The Chinaman left me to my fate, and I had to nose about myself and find out where I belonged.”
“Oh, that’s Lee,” she answered with a short laugh. “He waits on the door every other Sunday. We’ve had him ten years and no one’s ever been able to make him show people into the parlor. He thinks it better to leave them standing in the hall till one of us sees the card. Then he’ll go down and tell them as sociably as you please ‘to go right in and sit down.’ I asked him why he didn’t do it at first, and he said ‘they might steal something.’”
Cannon looked into the fire with an amused eye.
“I guess he thought I was after the spoons. It’s a dangerous habit, for I took the first turning to the right and butted into Cornelia and a young man who gave me to understand I’d come the wrong way around.”
“What did they say?” said the mother, her face stiffening with sudden disapproving surprise.
“They didn’t say anything. That was just it. They didn’t even see me. But they certainly led me to believe that I’d got somewhere where I wasn’t wanted. I may not be smart, but a hint doesn’t have to be much harder than the kick of a mule for me to see it.”
Mrs. Ryan looked at him consideringly.
“Yes,” she said, nodding, “it’s a case, I guess.”
“It ought to be satisfactory,” he answered. “Pat Duffy, the father of those boys, was one of the finest fellers I ever knew. He was shift boss on the Rey del Monte in seventy-one when I was the superintendent. He got out of Virginia with his pile, didn’t lose it like the others. He had an easy three million when he came down here and bought the Bristed house on Pine Street. And Jack’s the best of his children. Maggie, who married the English baronet, was a nice sort of girl, but she’s never come back, and Terry’s smart enough, but not the kind you can bank on. Jack’s a good, straight boy. Cornelia couldn’t do better.”
“That’s what I think,” said the mother, who, however, looked grave and worried. “Cornelia’s thirty. It’s time for her to settle, and she’ll make a good wife. They’ll live here, too. There’ll be no kicking up of their heels and going off to Europe or New York and thinking themselves too good to come back to California, like Maggie Duffy and her baronet. I want them here. I want to see some grandchildren round this house before I die. I want to know where Con’s money is going to.”
She sighed, and it was obvious that her heart was heavy.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s a good marriage and I’m pleased at it. Jack’s a Roman Catholic but you can’t have everything down here in this world.”
The Ryans were Protestants, almost the only prominent Irish-American family in San Francisco which belonged to that church. Cornelius Ryan had been a North-country man, and went out with the Orange men when they paraded. He had been firm in his faith and so had his wife, and with the Hibernian’s violent devotion to creed they had made public their antipathy to the Church of Rome and their hopes that their children would not make alliances with its members.
“Oh well,” said Cannon with a shrug of vague tolerance, “a man’s beliefs don’t matter. With a woman it’s a different thing. She brings up the children and takes her religion hard. Jack won’t interfere with Cornelia that way.”
“Perhaps not,” said the mother. There was a slight pause and then she said with a sigh,
“Well, thank God, one of my children’s going to marry as I want.”
She was gazing into the fire and did not notice the quick look, sly and piercing, that her companion shot at her. The conversation had suddenly, without any effort of his, fallen upon the subject to which he had intended directing it.
“Yes,” he said, looking away from her, “you’ve had one disappointment. That’s enough.”
“Disappointment!” she echoed in a loud voice. “Disappointment? I’ve lost my son; lost him as if he was dead—worse than if he was dead, for then I’d know he was happy and safe somewhere.”
It was a cry of pain, Rachel mourning for her child. The note of feeling in it checked the remark on Cannon’s lips. He understood what her suffering was and respected it.
“Why, Bill Cannon,” she went on, turning the perturbed fierceness of her face on him, “how often do you think I see my boy? What ties do you think he has with his home? He came up here after he’d got back from Antelope, but before that I’d only seen him once in six weeks.”
“That’s pretty hard,” he commented, his elbow on the arm of the chair, his chin sunk in the cup of his up-curled hand. “That’s pretty tough. I didn’t know it was as bad as that.”
“Nobody knows anything about him. He won’t let them. He won’t let me. He’s proud, and trying to hide it all. That’s the reason he comes up here so seldom. He knows I can see into him, see through him, clear through him, and he don’t want me to see how miserable he is.”
“Oh!” said the old man, moving slightly and raising his eyes to look at her. The interjection was full of significance, pregnant with understanding, appreciation and enlightenment. He was surprised himself. He had thought, and had understood from Dominick, that no one, especially no one of his own people, knew of the young man’s domestic infelicities. Neither of them was shrewd enough to realize that the mother would guess, would know by instinct.
“And what do you suppose he came up for that once?” pursued Mrs. Ryan. “You could guess a lot of times but you’d never strike it. He came up here the night of my ball to ask me to give him an invitation for his wife!”
She stared at her visitor with her face set in a stony hardness, a hardness reminiscent of that which had marked it when Dominick had asked for the invitation. Cannon saw it and checked the remark that rose to his lips. He was going to say “Why didn’t you give it to him?” and he saw that it was too light a comment for what had been a tragic occasion. All he did was to utter a grunt that might have meant anything and was consequently safe.
“That’s what his marriage has done for him, and that’s the state that woman has ground him down to. She’d worked on him till she’d got him to come up here and ask for it a few minutes before the people began to arrive! That’s what she made him do.”
“And you wouldn’t give it?” he inquired mildly, inwardly surprised, as he had been often before, at the rancor displayed by women in their quarrels.
“Give it?” she exclaimed, “well, I guess not. It would have been my surrender. I’d have thrown up the fight for ever when I did that.” And then as if she had read his thoughts: “It’s not natural meanness either. There’s only one hope for me—for me and for Dominick, too. Divorce.”
He did not move his chin from its resting-place in his up-curled hand, but made a slight assenting motion with his head, and said,
“I suppose that’s the only thing.”
“That’s been my hope since the day when I first saw her. I didn’t know then she’d been anything to Dominick before the marriage, but I knew the first look I had at her what she was. That long, mean nose and those sly eyes, and seven years older than the boy if she was a day. You didn’t have to tell me any more. I saw then just like a flash in the dark what my son had let himself in for. And then, not a month after, I heard the rest about her, and I knew that Dominick had started in to ruin his life about the best way he knew how.”
Cannon gave another grunt, and this time it contained a recognizable note of sympathy. She went on, absorbed in her recital, anxious to pour out her griefs, now that she had begun.
“Right there from the start I thought of divorce. I knew it was the only way out and was bound to come in time. The woman had married Dominick for money and position. I knew that, saw it in her face along with other things. There was no love in that face, just calculation, hard and sharp as a meat ax. I shut down on the money right there and then. Dominick had three thousand a year, so I knew he couldn’t starve, but three thousand a year wasn’t what she’d married him for.”
“She’s got along on it for over two years.”
“That’s it. She’s beaten me so far. I’m the keeper of Con Ryan’s fortune and I just closed my hand on it and said to her in so many words, ‘Not a cent of this for you.’ I thought she’d tire of struggling along in a flat with one Chinaman and not a soul to come near her. But she’s stood it and she’s going to go on standing it. Where she’s concerned, I did something the smartest men and women sometimes do—underrated the brains of my enemy.”
“She’s pretty smart, I guess,” said Cannon, raising a gravely-commenting eye to his companion’s face.
“That’s what she is,—smart and long-headed. She’s more far-sighted than women of her kind usually are and she’s got her eye on the future. She’s not going to give us a chance for divorce. She’s not going to make any breaks or mistakes. There’s not a more respectable woman in San Francisco. She doesn’t go with any one but her husband and her own sisters, two decent women that you can’t believe have the same blood in them. She’s the quietest, most domestic kind of a wife. It don’t matter, and nobody knows, that she’s making her husband the most miserable man in the country. That doesn’t cut any ice. What does is that there’s no ground for divorce against her. If she had the kind of husband that wouldn’t put up with anything from a woman, all he could do would be to leave her and she’d go round then getting everybody’s sympathies as a virtuous, deserted wife.”
The old man gave his head an appreciative jerk, and murmured,
“A pretty smart woman, all right.”
“She’s all that—that and more. It’s the future that she’s banking on. I’m nearly seventy years of age, Bill Cannon, and this has broken me up more than anything that’s gone before. I’m not the woman I was before my boy married. And what’s going to happen when I die? I’ve only got two living children. Outside them there’s nobody but some distant relations that Con made settlements on before he died. If I left all I’ve got to Cornelia, or divided it up between Cornelia and charity, cutting off my son because he’d made a marriage I didn’t like, would such a will as that stand? Why had I left nothing to my only son? Because he’d married a woman I didn’t think good enough? And what was there against her? She’d been a typewriter and her husband’s mistress for six months before he married her. The mistress part of it had been condoned by marriage and good conduct—and after all, how many families in San Francisco and other places were founded on just those beginnings? As for her being a typewriter, Delia Ryan herself had been a washerwoman, washed for the miners with these hands;”—she held out her blunt, beringed hands with one of those dramatic gestures natural to the Irish—“when Con was working underground with his pick I was at the wash-tub, and I made money that way for him to run the mine. Where’s the California jury that would hesitate to award Dominick, and through him, his wife her part of the fortune that Con and I made?”
“Well, that’s all possible,” Cannon said slowly, “but it’s so far off. It’s all surmise. You may live twenty years yet. I fancy she’d find a twenty-years’ wait under the present conditions rather wearying.”
The old woman shook her head, looking very sad.
“I’m not the woman I was,” she repeated, “this last thing’s broken me more than anything that went before. I lost three children by death, and it wasn’t as hard as losing my youngest boy the way I have.”
“Have you any idea whether Dominick has ever thought of divorce?” he asked.
“I’ve the clearest kind of an idea that he hasn’t. You don’t know Dominick. He’s the best boy in the world. He’ll blame himself for everything that’s gone wrong, not that woman. She’s smart enough to let him, too. And suppose he was a different kind and did think of it? That’s all the good it would do him. Men don’t sue women for divorce except under the greatest provocation, and Dominick’s got no provocation at all. My hopes were that the woman herself would sue—that we’d freeze her out with small means and cold shoulders—and you see that’s just what she’s determined not to do!”
Cannon dropped his supporting hand on the chair-arm and began to caress gently a large tassel that hung there.
“She could be approached in another way,” he said with a suggestion of pondering deliberation.
“What way?”
“You say she married Dominick for money. Have you never thought of buying her off?”
He looked at Mrs. Ryan and met her eyes staring anxiously and, in a sort of way, shyly into his.
“Yes,” she said in a low voice, “I have.”
“Have you tried it?”
“No,—I—I—I don’t think I dared,” she said almost desperately. “It was my last trump.”
He realized, and, though he was unmoved by it, felt the pathos of this admission from the proud and combative woman who had so long and so successfully domineered over her world.
“I suppose it is a sort of death-bed remedy,” he said, “but it seems to me it’s about time to try it. Your idea that she’s going to wait till you die and then claim part of the estate as Dominick’s wife is all very well, but she’s not the kind of woman to be willing to wait patiently through the rolling years on three thousand dollars per annum. She’s a good bit older than he is and it isn’t making her any happier to see her best days passing with nothing doing. I should think you stood a pretty good chance of getting her to listen to reason.”
“Offering her a sum down to leave him?” she said, looking at the fire, her brows knit.
“Exactly. Offer her a good sum on the stipulation that she leaves him and goes away to New York or Europe. Then in the course of time she can write him asking him to grant her a divorce on some such technical grounds as desertion, or incompatibility, or anything else that’s respectable. He’ll have to give it to her. He can’t do anything else. And there you are!”
“What if she refuses?” she said in a low voice, and he saw she was afraid of this refusal which would shatter her last hope.
“Raise your offer,” he answered briskly. “She probably will refuse the first time.”
She pondered, eying the fire with heavy immobility.
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “It sounds reasonable. It’s about the only thing left.”
“If I can be of any assistance to you,” he said, “you just call on me. I’m willing to help in this thing all I can. It goes against me to see Dominick caught in a trap this way just at the beginning of his life.”
“A boy,” said his mother, “that would have made some good girl so happy.”
Cannon rose from his chair.
“That’s just it!” he said, “and there are not so many of ’em round that we can afford to lose one of the best. I’ve always liked Dominick and getting to know him so well up at Antelope I grew downright fond of him. He’s a fine boy.”
He smiled at her with his most genial air, beaming with disinterested affection for Dominick and the desire to be helpful in a grievous strait. Mrs. Ryan looked brighter and more hopeful than she had done at the beginning of the interview.
“It’s very good of you,” she said, “to come and listen to an old woman’s complaints. But as we get on, we seem to take them harder. And you know what my boy was to me?”
“About the same thing that my girl is to me,” Cannon answered as he turned away to look on the table for his hat.
There was a little more talk, and then the set phrases of farewell brought the interview to a close. Though momentous, it had not lasted long. As he left the room, Cannon heard the single note of half-past three chime from the clock on the mantelpiece.
Outside he stood for a moment on the top of the marble steps, looking downward with absent eyes. He was completely engrossed with the just-ended conversation, parts of which repeated themselves in his mind as he stared unseeingly down the wide, unencumbered vista of the street.
Carriages flashed past through strips of sunshine; automobiles whirred by, leaving dust and gasoline in their wake. On the sidewalks there were many foot passengers: lazily sauntering couples, lovers, family parties, and little groups bound for the cars which would whisk them over the dunes to the park. As he slowly began to descend, one of these groups, formed of three women, a man, and a child, approached the bottom of the steps. They were walking down the avenue in a close, talkative bunch. The descending magnate was apprised of their proximity by the high, cackling sound of the women’s voices and an aura of perfume which extended from them into the surrounding ether. He paid no attention to them, his eye, with its look of inward brooding, passing indifferently over the faces turned eagerly toward him.
They were not so unmoved. Their glances were trained full on him, their eyes wide in the unblinking intensity of their scrutiny. Even the child, who was skipping along beside the eldest of the women, inspected him with solemn care. Brushing by in their gay Sunday raiment they drew together to discuss him, their heads in a cluster, their voices lowered. He was so used to being the object of such interest that he did not bother to look at them, and was therefore unaware that one of the women, quite pretty, with reddish hair and dark eyes, had turned as she moved away and surveyed him over her shoulder.
It was near eleven o’clock on that same Sunday morning, when Berny, wrappered and heavy-eyed, emerged from her room. She shuffled down the passage to the dining-room, sending her voice before her in a shrill summons to the Chinaman. The morning papers were scattered over the table as Dominick had left them and she gathered them up, sitting sidewise in her chair and running her eye down their columns, while the servant set out her breakfast. She was still sleepy, and frequent yawns interrupted her perusal of the lines of print which interested her above all written matter. A kimono clothed her slim form and from beneath its hem her foot protruded, thrust bare into a furred slipper. She folded the paper over to bring the society column into a prominence easy of access, and, propping it up against a bowl of fruit, read as she ate her breakfast.
Toward the end of the meal she inquired of the servant at what time her husband had gone out, and received the reply that Mr. Ryan had had his breakfast and left the flat two hours earlier. There was nothing disconcerting or unusual about this, as Dominick always went for a walk on fine Sunday mornings, but her mind was far from easy and she immediately fell to wondering why he had departed so early, and the slight ferment of disquietude that was always with her stirred again and made her forget the society column and let her Spanish omelet grow cold.
There was something strange about Dominick since he had come back, something that intrigued her, that she could not satisfactorily explain. She assured herself that he was still angry, but in the deeper places of her understanding the voice that whispers the truth and will not be gainsaid told her it was not that. Neither was it exactly antagonism. In a way he had been studiously kind and polite to her, a sort of consciously-guarded politeness, such as one might practise to a guest with whom one was intimate without being friendly. She tried to explain to herself just what this change was, and when it came to putting the matter in words she could not find the right ones. It was a coldness, a coldness that was not harsh and did not express itself in actions or phrases. It went deeper; it was exhaled from the inner places of his being.
Sometimes as she talked to him she would meet his eyes fixed on her with a deep, vacant glance, which she suddenly realized was unseeing and unheeding. In the evening as he sat reading in the cramped confines of the den she surreptitiously watched him and saw that a moment often came when he dropped his book, and with his long body limp in the arm-chair, his chin sunk on his breast, would sit with a brooding gaze fixed on nothing. Once, as he was dreaming this way, she said suddenly,
“What are you thinking of, Dominick? Antelope?”
He started and turned upon her a face that had reddened consciously.
“Why should I think of Antelope?” he said, and she was aware that her remark had startled him and made him uncomfortable.
“For no particular reason,” she answered lightly; “you just looked as if you were thinking of something a long way off.”
She tried to reassure herself that it all rose from the quarrel. To believe that comforted her and gave her confidence, but it was hard to think it, for not only did her own instinct proclaim against it, but Dominick’s manner and attitude were in distinct refutation of any such theory. He was not sullen, he was absent; he was not resentful, he was indifferent. And in small outward ways he tried to please her, which was not after the manner of a sore and angry man. On this very Sunday he had agreed to meet her and her family in the park at the band stand at four. She always dined with her sisters on Sunday and if the weather was fine they went to the park and listened to the music. It was nearly a year now since Dominick had joined these family parties, preferring to walk on the Presidio hills and the Cliff House beach with a friend from the bank. But on the evening before he had promised to meet them; been quite agreeable about it, Berny had thought, when her pleadings and importunities had finally extorted from him a promise to join them there.
She left the dining-room and walked up the hallway to the parlor, her head drooped, anxieties gnawing at her. The little room was flooded with sunshine, and she parted the lace curtains and, throwing up the window, leaned out. The rich, enveloping warmth surrounded her, clasped her, seemed to sink deep into her and thaw the apprehensions that were so cold at her heart. She drew in the sweet, still air, that did not stimulate but that had in it something of a crystalline youth and freshness, like the air of an untainted world, concerned with nothing but the joy of living. The scents of flowers were in it; the mellowness of the earth and its fruits. Peace was the message of this tranquil Sunday morning, peace was in the sunshine, in the sound of bells with which the air was full, in the fall of feet—light, joyous feet—on the pavement, in the voices of passers-by and the laughter, sweet and broken, of children. It was not right for any one to harbor cankering cares on such a day. The earth was happy, abandoned to the sunshine, irresponsible, care free, rejoicing in the perfect moment. The woman felt the restoring processes that Nature, in its tireless generosity, offers to all who will take them. She felt eased of her troubles, soothed and cheered, as though the enwrapping radiance that bathed her held an opiate for jangled nerves. Blinking in the brightness she leaned on the window-sill, immovable, quieted, feeling the warmth suffuse her and dissipate those alarms that half an hour earlier had been so chill and heavy.
As she dressed, the sense of well-being and confidence increased. She looked very well this morning. Since Dominick’s return she had looked haggard and thin. Sometimes she had seemed to see, showing shadowy through her reflected face in the mirror, the lines and hollows of that face when time should have put a stamp on it that neither massage nor pigments would efface. A sudden moment of revelation showed her herself as an old woman, her nose pointed, her mouth a thin, tight line. This morning the glass gave her back none of these disconcerting hints. She was at her best, and as she dressed carefully and slowly, she had the satisfaction of seeing that each added article of apparel increased her good looks. When she finally put on her new hat—the one she had bought in celebration of Dominick’s return—and over it tied a white and black dotted veil, she was so gratified with the picture she presented that she was reluctant to leave it and pirouetted slowly before the glass, surveying her back and side views, and finally lifting her skirt that she might see the full effect of her lilac petticoat as it burst into sight in an ebullition of pleats and frills.
Walking up the avenue she was bridlingly conscious that her brilliant appearance drew its tribute of glances. Many people looked at her, and their sidelong admiration was an even more exhilarating tonic than the sunshine. She walked with a light, elastic step, spreading perfume on the air, her progress accompanied by a rich, seductive rustle. Once or twice she passed members of that exclusive world from which she had stolen Dominick. She swept by them, languidly indifferent, her eyes looking with glacial hauteur over their heads. The sound made by her brushing silk petticoats was gratifyingly aggressive. She imparted to them a slight disdainful swing, and lifted her dress skirt daintily higher, conscious of the impeccable amplitude of her emerging lilac frills.
The habit of dining with her own people on Sunday had been one she had never abandoned, even in the first aspiring days of her marriage. It was a sort of family reunion and at first Dominick had been a not unwilling participant in its domestic festivities. The solid bourgeois respectability of his wife’s relations appealed to him. For all his advantages in money and education he was of the same class himself, and while Berny was, if not a beloved spouse, a yet endurable one, he had found the Sunday gatherings and subsequent hejira to the park not entirely objectionable. For over a year now he had escaped from it, pleading the need of open air and exercise, and his sisters-in-law, who had at first protested, had grown used to his absence and accepted it as something to bear uncomplainingly.
The day was so fine that they hurried through their dinner, a hearty and lavish meal, the chef-d’œuvre of Hannah’s housekeeping, and, loath to lose a moment of the sunshine, determined to walk down to Van Ness Avenue and there catch an outgoing car to the park. It was the middle of the afternoon and the great thoroughfare lay still and idle in the slanting light. There was something foreign, almost tropical in its vista, in the scene that hung like a drop curtain at the limit of sight—pale blue hills dotted with ochre-colored houses—in the background of sky deep in tint, the foliage dark against it as if printed upon its intense glaring blue, in the sharp lines of palms and spiky leaves crossing stuccoed walls. The people that moved slowly along the sidewalks fitted into this high-colored exotic setting. There was no hurry or crowding among them. They progressed with an un-American deliberation, tasting the delicate sweetness of the air, rejoicing in the sky and the sun, pausing to look at the dark bushiness of a dracæna against a wash of blue, the skeleton blossom of a Century plant, the pool of thick scarlet made by a parterre of geranium.
The three sisters—Hannah and Pearl leading, Berny and Hazel walking behind with Josh—fared buoyantly down the street. As they passed, they commented on the houses and their inmates. They had plenty of stories of the dwellers in those solemn palaces, many of whom were people whose humble beginnings they knew by heart, and whose rapid rise had been watched almost awe-stricken by an admiring and envious community.
As the Ryan house loomed into view their chatter ceased and their eyes, serious with staring attention, were fixed on the mansion which had so stubbornly closed its doors on one of them. Sensations of varying degrees of animosity stirred in each of them, except the child, still too young to be tainted by the corroding sense of worldly injustice. She skipped along sidewise, her warm, soft hand clasped in her Aunt Hannah’s decently-gloved palm. Some wave or vibration of the intense feelings of her elders passed to her, and as they drew nearer the house she, too, began to grow grave, and her skipping quieted down into a sober walk.
“That’s Uncle Dominick’s house, isn’t it?” she said to Hannah.
Hannah nodded. By far the most amiable and wide-minded of the sisters, she could not rise above the sense of rankling indignation that she felt against the Ryans for their treatment of Berny.
“That’s the biggest house in San Francisco,” said Pearl over her shoulder to her parents. “Ain’t it, Popper?”
“I guess it is,” answered Josh, giving his head a confirmatory wag, “and even if it ain’t, it’s big enough, the Lord knows!”
“I can’t see what a private family wants with all that room,” said Hannah with a condemnatory air. “There must be whole sootes of rooms on that upper floor that nobody lives in.”
“Don’t you fret. They’re all occupied,” said Berny. “Each one of them has their own particular soote. Cornie has three rooms all of her own, and even the housekeeper has a private bath!”
“And there’s twelve indoor servants,” said Hazel. “They want a lot of space for them. Twelve servants, just think of it!”
“Twelve servants!” ejaculated Hannah almost with a groan. “Well, that don’t seem to me right.”
They were close to the house now and silence fell on them, as though the antagonism of its owners was exhaled upon them from the mansion’s aggressive bulk, like an unspoken curse. They felt overawed, and at the same time proud that one of their number should have even the most distant affiliations with a family too exclusive to know her. The women with their more responsive and sensitive natures felt it more delicately than Josh, who blunderingly expressed one of the thoughts of the moment by remarking,
“Some day you’ll live in there, Berny, and boss the twelve servants.”
“Rats!” said Berny, giving her head an angry toss. “I’d rather live in my flat and boss Sing.”
Josh’s whistle of facetious incredulity died away incomplete, for at that moment the hall door opened and a portly masculine shape emerged upon the porch. Berny, at the first glance, was not sure of its identity, but her doubts were dispelled by her brother-in-law’s quick sentence, delivered on the rise of a surprised breath.
“Bill Cannon, by gum! What’s he doing there?”
This name, as powerful to conjure with in the city as in the mining-camps, cast its instantaneous spell upon the sisters, who stared avid-eyed upon the great man. He for his part seemed oblivious to their glances and to their presence. He stood on the top step for a musing moment, looking down with that sort of filmy fixity of gaze which is noticeable in the glance of the resting eagle. His appearance was a last crowning touch to the proud, unapproachable distinction of the Ryans.
“Don’t he look as if he was thinking?” said Hazel in a whisper. “I wonder what’s on his mind.”
“Probably that Monday’s pay-day and he don’t know whether he can scratch through,” said the jocose Josh.
Berny did not say anything. She felt the interest in Cannon that she did in all conquering, successful people, and in her heart it gave her a sense of added importance to think that the family she had married into and who refused to know her was on friendly terms with the Bonanza King.
A half-hour later they had found seats in front of the band stand in the park, and, settling themselves with a great rustling and preening of plumage, prepared to enjoy the music. Hannah and Pearl were given two chairs at the end of a row, and Hazel and Berny, with Josh as escort, secured four on the line immediately behind. Dominick had not yet appeared, so the sisters spread their skirts over a vacant seat between them, and Berny, in the intervals of inspecting the people around her, sent exploring glances about for the tall figure of her husband.
She was very fond of the park and band stand on such Sunday afternoons. To go there had been one of the great diversions of her girlhood. She loved to look at this holiday gathering of all types, among which her own class was largely represented. The outdoor amphitheater of filled benches was to her what the ball-room and the glittering horseshoe at the opera are to the woman of society. She saw many old friends among the throng, girls who had been contemporaries of hers when she had first “gone to work,” and had long since married in their own world and now dragged children by the hand. She looked them over with an almost passionate curiosity, discomfited to see the fresh youth of some, and pleased to note that others looked weighed down with maternal cares. Berny regarded women who had children as fools, and the children grouped about these mothers of her own age—three and four sometimes, with the husband carrying a baby—were to her only annoying, burdensome creatures that made the party seem a little ridiculous, and had not half the impressiveness or style of her elegant costume and lilac frills.
The magnificent afternoon had brought out a throng of people. Every seat in the lines of benches was full and foot passengers kept constantly coming up, standing for a few measures,and then moving on. They were of all kinds. The beauty of the day had even tempted the more fashionable element out, and the two sisters saw many elegantly-dressed ladies of the sort on whom Hazel fitted hats all day, and that evoked in Berny a deep and respectful curiosity. Both women, sitting high in their chairs, craned their necks this way and that, spying through breaks in the crowd, and following attractive figures with dodging movements of their heads. When either one saw anything she liked or thought interesting she laid a hand on the other’s knee, giving it a slight dig, and designated the object of her attention in a few broken words, detached and disconnected like notes for a sentence.
They were thus engaged when Hazel saw Dominick and, rising, hailed him with a beckoning hand. He made his way toward them, moving deliberately, once or twice pausing to greet acquaintances. He was taller than any man in the surrounding throng and Berny, watching him, felt a sense of proprietary pride swelling in her when she noted his superiority. The son of an Irish laborer and a girl who had begun life as the general servant in a miner’s boarding-house, he looked as if his forebears might have been the flower of the nation. He wore a loose-fitting suit of gray tweed, a wide, gray felt sombrero, and round his waist a belt of yellow leather. His collar turning back from his neck exposed the brown strength of his throat, and on lifting his hat in a passing salutation, his head with its cropped curly hair, the ears growing close against it, showed golden brown in the sunlight.
With a phrase of greeting he joined them, and then as they swept their skirts off the chair they had been hiding, slipped in front of Berny and sat down. Hazel began to talk to him. Her conversation was of a rallying, joking sort, at which she was quite proficient. Berny heard him laugh and knew by the tone of his voice that he was pretending and was not really amused. She had nothing particular to say to him, feeling that she had accomplished enough in inducing him to join them, and, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, continued to watch the people. A blonde coiffure some rows in front caught her eye and she was studying its intricacies through the interstices that came and went between the moving heads, when the sudden emergence into view of an unusually striking female figure diverted her attention. The woman had come up from behind and, temporarily stopped by the crowd, had come to a standstill a few rows in front of where the sisters sat. She was accompanied by a young man dressed in the Sunday dignity of frock-coat and silk hat. As he turned to survey the lines of filled chairs, Berny saw that he had a pale skin, a small black mustache, and dark eyes.
But her interest in him was of the slightest. Her attention was immediately riveted upon the woman, who became the object of a glance which inspected her with a piercing eagerness from her hat to the hem of her shirt. Berny could not see her face, but her habiliments were of the latest mode and of an unusual and subdued elegance which bespoke an origin in a more sophisticated center than San Francisco. Berny, all agog with curiosity, stared at the lady’s back, noting not only her clothes but a certain carelessness in the way they were put on. Her hat was not quite straight. The comb, which crossed the back of her head and kept her hair smooth, was crooked, and blonde wisps hung from it over her collar. The hand that held up her skirt in a loose perfunctory manner, as though these rich encasings were possessions of no moment, was covered by a not particularly clean white glove.
Such unconsciousness added the distinction of indifference to the already marked figure. Berny wondered more than ever who it was and longed to see the averted face. She was about to lean across Dominick and attract Hazel’s attention by a poking finger directed against her knee, when the woman, with a word to her companion, moved her head and let a slow glance sweep over the rows of faces.
“Hazel,” Berny hissed across Dominick, “look at that girl. Who is she?”
She did not divert her eyes from the woman’s face, which she now saw in profile. It was pretty, she thought, more from a rich, unmingled purity of coloring than from any particular beauty of feature. The head with its gravely-traveling glance continued to turn till Berny had the satisfaction of seeing the face in three-quarters. A moment later the moving eyes lighted indifferently on Hazel, then ceased to progress, suddenly, bruskly, as though checked by the imperative stoppage of regulating machinery.
Only a person watching closely would have noticed it, but Berny was watching with the most vigilant closeness. She saw the infusion of a new and keener interest transform the glance, concentrate its lazy, diffused attention into something that had the sharpness and suddenness of a leaping flame. The next moment a flood of color rose clearly pink over the face, and then, most surprising of all, the lady bent her head in a grave, deliberate bow.
Berny turned, startled—and in a vague, undefined way, disturbed, too—to see who had been the object of this salutation. To her astonishment it was Dominick. As she looked at him, he replaced his hat and she saw—to the augmentation of that vague sense of disturbance—that he was as pale as the bowing woman was pink.
“Dominick,” she exclaimed, “who’s that?”
“Miss Cannon,” he said in a low tone.
“Rose Cannon?” hissed Hazel on the other side of him, her face thrust forward, and tense in the interest of the moment, “Bill Cannon’s daughter?”
“Yes. I met her at Antelope.”
“Berny, did you see her dress?” Hazel hung over her brother-in-law in her excitement. “That’s straight from Paris, I’ll bet you a dollar.”
“Yes, I saw it,” said Berny in a voice that did not sound particularly exhilarated; “maybe it is.”
She looked back at Miss Cannon who had turned away and was moving off through the crowd with her escort. Then she leaned toward Dominick. His voice had not sounded natural; as she placed her arm against his she could feel that he trembled.
She said nothing but settled back in her chair, dryly swallowing. In those few past moments her whole world had undergone a revolution that left her feeling dazed and a little sick. It was as if the earth had suddenly whirled around and she had come up panting and clutching among familiar things reversed and upset. In an instantaneous flash of illumination she saw everything—the look in the woman’s eyes, her rush of color, Dominick’s voice, his expression, the trembling of his arm—it was all perfectly plain! This was the girl he had been shut in Antelope with for three weeks. Now she knew what the change was, the inexplicable, mysterious change that had so puzzled her.
She felt bewildered, and under her bewilderment a pain, a fierce, unfamiliar pain, gripped her. She did not for the moment say anything or want to speak, and she felt as a child does who is dazed and stupefied by an unexpected assault of ill treatment. The slight sensation of inward sinking, that made her feel a little sick, continued and she sat in a chilled and drooping silence, all her bridling conceit in herself and her fine clothes stricken suddenly out of her.
She heard Hazel asking Dominick questions about Miss Cannon, and she heard Dominick’s answers, brief and given with a reticent doggedness. Then Hazel asked him for the time and she was conscious of his elbow pressing against her arm as he felt for his watch. As he drew it out and held it toward the questioner, Berny suddenly leaned forward, and, catching his hand with the watch in it, turned its face toward her. The hand beneath hers was cold, and shook. She let it go and again sank back in her chair. The feeling of sickness grew stronger and was augmented by a sense of physical feebleness, of being tremulous and cold deep down in her bones.
Hazel rose to her feet, shaking her skirts into place.
“Let’s go on,” she said, “it’s getting chilly. Come along, Josh. I suppose if you were let alone, you’d sit here till sundown listening to the music in a trance.”
Dominick and Josh rose and there was an adjusting and putting-on of wraps. Berny still sat motionless, her hands, stiff in their tight gloves, lying open on her lap.
“Come along, Berny,” said Hazel. “It’s too cold to sit here any longer. Why, how funny you look, all pale and shriveled up! You’re as bad as Josh. You and he ought to have married each other. You’d have been a prize couple.”
Josh laughed loudly at this sally, leaning round the figure of his wife to present his foolish, good-humored face, creased with a grin, to Berny.
“Are you willing, Berny?” he cried gaily. “I can get a divorce whenever you say. It will be dead easy; brutal and inhuman treatment. Just say the word!”
“There’ll be brutal and inhuman treatment if you don’t move on and stop blocking the way, Josh McCrae,” said Hazel severely. “I want to go out that side and there you are right in the path, trying to be funny.”
The cheerful Josh, still laughing, turned and moved onward between the seats, the others following him. The mass of the crowd was not yet leaving, and as the little group moved forward in a straggling line toward the drive, the exciting opening of the William Tell Overture boomed out from the sounding board. It was a favorite piece, and they left lingeringly, Hazel and Josh particularly fascinated, with heads turned and ears trained on the band. Josh’s hand, passed through his wife’s arm, affectionately pressed her against his side, for despite the sharpness of their recriminations they were the most loving of couples.
Berny was the last of the line. In the flurry of departure her silence had passed unnoticed, and that she should thus lag at the tail of the procession was not in any way remarkable, as, at the best of times, she was not much of a walker and in her high-heeled Sunday shoes her progress was always deliberate.
Looking ahead of her, she saw the landscape still as a picture under the slanting, lurid sunlight. It seemed to be painted with unnaturally glaring tints, to be soaked in color. The grass, crossed with long shadows, was of the greenness of an aniline dye. The massed foliage of tree groups showed a melting richness of shades, no one clearly defined, all fused in a thick, opaque lusciousness of greens. The air was motionless and very clear. Where a passing carriage stirred the dust the powdery cloud rose, spreading a tarnishing blur on the crystalline clarity of the scene. The sun injected these dust films with gold, and they settled slowly, as if it made them heavy like ground-up particles of metal.
Yet, to Berny, this hectic prospect looked gray; all color seemed sucked from it. It appeared pale and alien, its comfortable intimacy gone. She was like a stranger walking in a strange place, a forlorn, remote land, where she felt miserable and homesick. The sense of being dazed was passing from her. Walking forward with short, careful steps, she was slowly coming to the meaning of her discovery—adjusting herself to it, realizing its significance. She had an uncomfortable sensation of not being able to control the muscles round her mouth, so that if spoken to she would have had difficulty in answering, and would have been quite unable to smile.
An open carriage passed her, and she drew aside, then mechanically looked after it as it rolled forward. There was a single figure in it—a woman. Berny could see her head over the lowered hood, and the little parasol she held, white with a black lace cover and having a joint in the handle. Her eyes followed this receding head, moving so evenly against the background of trees. It soared along without sinking or rising, with the even, forward flight of a bird, passed Hannah and Josh and Hazel, turning to drop on them quick looks, which seemed, from its elevated position and the shortness of the inspection, to have something of disdain in them.
As the carriage drew near Dominick, who walked at the head of the line with Pearl by the hand, Berny saw the head move, lean forward, and then, as the vehicle overhauled and passed the young man, turn at right angles and bow to him. The wheel almost brushed his shoulder. He drew back from it with a start and lifted his hat. Hazel, who was walking just in front of Berny, turned and projecting her lips so that they stood out from her face in a red circle, hissed through them,
“Old Lady Ryan!” and then in a slightly louder key,
“You take a hatchet and I’ll take a saw,
And we’ll cut off the head of my mother-in-law.”
The conversation with her old friend had upset Mrs. Ryan. These were grievances she did not talk of to all the world, and the luxury of such plain speaking was paid for by a re-awakened smart. The numb ache of a sorrow was always with her, but her consciousness of it was dulled in the diversion of every day’s occupations. Bringing it to the surface this way gave it a new vitality, and when the conversation was over and the visitor gone it refused to subside into its old place.
She went slowly up stairs, hearing the low murmur of voices from the sitting-room where Cornelia and Jack Duffy were still secluded. Even the thought of that satisfactorily-budding romance did not cheer her as it had done earlier in the day. As she had told Cannon, she was not the woman she had been. Old age was coming on her and with it a softening of her iron nature. She wanted her son, her Benjamin, dearly beloved with all the forces of her maturity as his father had been with all the glow of her youth.
In her own room she threw aside the lace curtains, and looking out on the splendor of the afternoon, determined to seek cheer in the open air. Like all Californians she had a belief in the healing beneficence of air and sunlight. As the sun had soothed Berny of her sense of care so now it wooed her enemy also to seek solace in its balm. She rang for the servant and ordered the carriage. A few minutes later, clad in rich enshrouding black, a small and fashionable bonnet perched on her head, she slowly made her way down stairs and out to the sidewalk where the victoria, glittering in the trim perfection of its appointments and drawn by a pair of well-matched chestnuts, stood at the curb.
The man on the box touched his hat with respectful greeting and the Chinese butler, who had accompanied her down the steps, arranged the rug over her knees and stepped back with the friendly “good-by,” which is the politeness of his race. They respected, feared, and liked her. Every domestic who had ever worked in Delia Ryan’s service from the first “hired girl” of her early Shasta days to the staff that now knew the rigors of her dominion, had found her a just and generous if exacting mistress. She had never been unfair, she had never been unkind. She was one of themselves and she knew how to manage them, how to make them understand that she was master, and that no drones were permitted in her hive; how to make them feel that she had a heart that sympathized with them, not as creatures of an alien class remotely removed from her own, but as fellow beings, having the same passions, griefs and hopes as herself.
As the carriage rolled forward she settled back against the cushioned seat and let her eyes roam over the prospect. It was the heart of the afternoon, still untouched by chill, not a breath stirring. Passing up the long drive which leads to the park, the dust raised by wheels hung ruddy in the air. The long shadows of trees striped the roadway in an irregular black pattern, picked out with spatterings of sunshine, like a spilled, gold liquid. Belts of fragrance, the breaths of flowering shrubs, extended from bushy coppices, and sometimes the keen, acrid odor of the eucalyptus rose on the air. From this lane of entrance the park spread fan-like into a still, gracious pleasance. The rich, golden light slept on level stretches of turf and thick mound-shaped groups of trees. The throb of music—the thin, ethereal music of out-of-doors—swelled and sank; the voices of children rose clear and fine from complicated distances, and once the raucous cry of a peacock split the quietness, seeming to break through the pictorial serenity of the lovely, dreamy scene.
Mrs. Ryan sat without movement, her face set in a sphinx-like profundity of expression. People in passing carriages bowed to her but she did not see them and their salutes went unreturned. Her vision was bent back on scenes of her past, so far removed from what made up the present, so different and remote from her life to-day, that it did not seem as if the same perspective could include two such extremes. Even her children were not links of connection between those old dead times and now. They had been born when Con’s fortunes were in the ascendant. They had known none of the privations of the brave days when she and her man had faced life together, young, and loving, and full of hope.
The carriage ascended a slight rise, and the sea, a glittering plain, lay in full view. It met the sky in a white dazzle of light. All its expanse coruscated as if each wave was crested with tinsel, and where they receded from the beach it was as though a web of white and shining tissue was drawn back, torn and glistening, from the restraining clutch of the sand. The smooth bareness of fawn-colored dunes swept back from the shore. They rose and fell in undulations, describing outlines of a suave, fluid grace, lovely as the forms of drifting snow, or the swell of waves. Ocean and dunes, for all the splendor of sky and sun that overarched and warmed them, suggested a gaunt, primeval desolation. They had the loneliness of the naked earth and the unconquerable sea—were a bit of the primordial world before man had tamed and softened it.
Mrs. Ryan swept them with a narrow, inward gaze which saw neither, but, in their place, the house in Virginia City, where she and Con had lived when they were first married in the early sixties. It was of “frame”—raw, yellow boards with narrow strips of wood nailed over every seam to keep the wind out. There had been a rough porch on one side where her wash-tub had stood. Out-of-doors there in the summer weather she had bent over the wash-board most of the day. She had made enough money to furnish the prospect hole that Con was working, with tools and miner’s supplies. Little Dick was born there; he had died afterward in Shasta. He used to lie in a wash-basket on the soiled linen in the sun. He would have been forty-five now, sixteen years older than Dominick.
She gave an order to the coachman who, drawing up, turned the horses, and the carriage started on its return trip. The sun was behind it, painting with level, orange rays the thick foliage of trees and the backs of foot passengers. Whatever it touched had the appearance of being overlaid with a gilded glaze through which its natural colors shone, deepened and brilliant.
Mrs. Ryan’s memories had leaped from Virginia City to Shasta. After Con’s prospect at Gold Hill had “petered” they had moved to California, been members of that discouraged route which poured, impoverished in pocket and enfeebled in health, from the wreck of the gutted Nevada camp back to their own Golden State and its beguiling promises. They had opened a grocery in Shasta in sixty-eight, first a little place where Con and she waited behind the counter, then, when they began to prosper, a big store on the corner. “Ryan’s” was written over the entrance in the beginning, when they had no money to spend, in black on a strip of canvas, after that in gold letters on a handsome sign. She had kept the books there while Con had managed the business, and they had done well. It was the beginning of their prosperity and how they had worked for it! Night after night up till midnight and the next morning awake before the birds. Two children had died there and three had been born. It had been a full life, a splendid life, the best a woman could know, working for her own, making them a place in the world, fighting her way up, shoulder to shoulder with her man.
Money had been her goal. She had not wanted to hoard it; of itself it meant nothing to her. She had wanted it for her children: to educate them better than she had been educated, to give them the advantages she had never known, to buy pleasures and position and consideration for them. She had felt the insignificance of poverty, and she was determined that they should never feel it. They should have the power that it seemed to Delia Ryan money alone gave, the thing she had none of, when, in her ragged girlhood, she winced and chafed under the dominance of those she felt to be her inferiors. She was a materialist by nature, and life had made her more of one. Money conquered, money broke the trail that led everywhere, money paid the gate entrance to all paradises. That was what she had always thought. And now when she was close on seventy, and her strength to fight for the old standards and ward off the creeping chill of age was weakened, she had come to realize that perhaps it was not the world-ruling power she had thought it. She had come to see it could turn upon one in strange ways. It carried power and it carried a curse. Dominick, whose life it was to have made brilliant, whose career it was to have crowned, Dominick had lost all through it.
She was thinking this as the carriage swept into the wider reach of the drive near the band stand. Though the music was still throbbing on the air, people were already leaving. Broken lines were detaching themselves from the seated mass in the chairs, disappearing among the trees, and straggling out into the road. The wheels of the victoria almost brushed the shoulders of a little party that moved in irregular file between the grass edge and the drive. Mrs. Ryan let her uninterested glance touch the hatted heads of the women and then move forward to the man who headed the column. He held by the hand a pretty, fair-haired child, who, leaning out from his restraining grasp, walked a little before him, looking back laughingly into his face. Mrs. Ryan’s eyes, alighting on his back, became suddenly charged with a fierce fixity of attention. The carriage overhauled him and before he looked up she leaned forward and saw his profile, the brow marked by a frown, the child’s gay prattle causing no responsive smile to break the brooding gravity that held his features.
As he felt the vibration of the wheel at his shoulder he started aside and looked up. When he recognized his mother his face reddened, and, with a quick smile, he lifted his hat. Her returning salute was serious, almost tragically somber. Then the victoria swept on, and he and the child, neither for a moment speaking, looked after the bonneted head that soared away before them with a level, forward vibration, like a floating bird, the little parasol held stiffly erect on its jointed handle.
As Mrs. Ryan passed down the long park entrance she thought no more of the past. The sight of her son, heading the file of his wife’s relations, his face set in an expression of heavy dejection, scattered her dreams of retrospect with a shattering impact. She had never seen him look so frankly wretched; and to intensify the effect of his wretchedness was the sprawling line of Iversons which surrounded him. They seemed, to her furious indignation, like a guard cutting him off from his kind, imprisoning him, keeping him for themselves. They were publicly dragging him at their chariot wheels for all the world to see. His wife instead of getting less was getting more power over him. She had made him ask for the invitation to the ball and now she made him escort herself and her sisters about on holidays.
The old woman’s face was dark with passion, her pale lips set into a tight line. Money! Money might make trouble and bring disappointment, but it would talk to those people. Money was all they were after. Well, they could have it!
She let three days go by before she made the move she had determined on ten minutes after she had passed Dominick. The Wednesday morning following that Sunday—apparently a day of innocuous and simple happenings, really so fraught with Fate—she put on her outdoor things and, dispensing with the carriage, went down town on the car to see Bill Cannon.
The Bonanza King’s office was on the first floor of a building owned by himself on one of the finest Montgomery Street corners. It had been built in the flush times of the Comstock and belonged to that epoch of San Francisco architecture where long lines of windows were separated by short columns and overarched by ornate embellishments in wood. As Mrs. Ryan approached, the gold letters on these windows gleamed bravely in the sun. They glittered even on the top-story casements, and her eye, traveling over them, saw that they spelled names of worth, good tenants who would add to the dignity and revenues of such an edifice. She owned the corner opposite, and it gave her a pang of emulative envy to notice how shabby her building looked, a relic of the sixties which showed its antiquity in walls of brick, painted brown, and a restrained meagerness of decoration in the matter of cornices. For some time she had been thinking of tearing it down and raising a new, up-to-date structure on the site. It would yield a fine interest on the investment and be a good wedding jointure for Cornelia.
With her approach heralded by a rustling of rich stuffs and a subdued panting, she entered the office. A long partition down one side of the room shut off an inner sanctum of clerks. Through circular openings she could see their faces, raised expectantly from ledgers as their ears caught the frou-frou of skirts and a step, which, though heavy, was undoubtedly feminine. She stopped at one of the circular openings where the raised face looked older and graver than its fellows, and inquired for Mr. Cannon, giving her name. In a moment the clerk was beside her, knocking at a door which gave egress to still more sacred inner precincts. Opening this, he bowed her into the dimly-lit solemnity of the Bonanza King’s private office. Back in the outer room among the clerks he relieved the strained curiosity of their faces with the remark,
“Greek’s meeting Greek in there. It’s Mrs. Con Ryan.”
The private office looked out on an alley shut in a perpetual twilight by the towering walls of surrounding buildings. The long windows that ran from the floor to the ceiling could not let in enough light ever to make it a bright room, and the something of dimness seemed appropriate to the few massive pieces of furniture and the great safe in the corner, with its lock glimmering from the dusk of continual shadow. Men from windows across the alley could look into the office and see to whom Bill Cannon was talking, and it was known that, for this reason, he had another suite of rooms on one of the upper floors. But that that most competent of business women, Con Ryan’s widow, should come to his lair to parley with him was natural enough, and if the watchers across the alley saw her it only added to their sober respect for the man who was visited in his office by the richest woman in California.
She did not waste time beating about the bush. Sitting beside the desk, facing the pale light from the long windows, she very quickly plunged into the matter of her errand. It was a renewal of the conversation of the previous Sunday. Cannon sat in his swivel chair, looking meditatively at her. He had expected her, but not so soon, and as he watched her his face showed a mild friendly surprise breaking through its observant attention. It would have been difficult for any one, even so astute a woman as Mrs. Ryan, to guess that her request for his assistance in severing Dominick’s marriage bonds was affording the old man the keenest gratification.
Their talk lasted nearly an hour. Before the interview ended they had threshed out every aspect of the matter under discussion. There would be no loose ends or slighted details in any piece of work which engaged the attention of this bold and energetic pair of conspirators. The men on the other side of the alley looked down on them, wondering what business was afoot between Mrs. Con Ryan and Bill Cannon, that they talked so long in the big dim office with its gloomy mahogany furniture and the great black safe looming up in the corner.
Two days after this momentous combination of her enemies, Berny was sitting in the parlor of her flat, writing a letter. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and she had just dressed herself for her daily jaunt down town, where she spent an hour or two looking into the shop windows, pricing articles of apparel, taking a glass of soda water, and stopping for chats with acquaintances under awnings and in open doorways. Her life was exceedingly barren of occupation and companionship. When she had married, she had dropped all work save such as seemed to her fitting for the wife of a rich man. Outside her sisters she had no friends. She knew the wives of several of the bank officials and to them, as representing a rise in the social scale, she clung hopefully. The letter she was now writing was to one of them who had taken a sick child to the country.
She had finished it, and was inscribing her signature, when a ring at the bell caught her ear. She raised her head listening, and then bent it again over the letter. Visitors were too rare at the Sacramento Street flat for her to cherish any delusive hopes. Writing the address in her best hand, she did not hear a foot ascending the stairs, nor know that it actually was a visitor, till a tap on the door-post of the room made her turn and ejaculate a startled “Come in!” The door that led from the parlor to the hall had been removed, and a bamboo portière hung in the opening. A large masculine hand thrust apart the hanging strands, and Bill Cannon, hat in hand, confident and yet apologetic, entered the room.
He had been surprised when he had seen how small and unpretentious was the home of Con Ryan’s only son. He was more than ever surprised when the Chinaman, with the unveiled impudence of those domestics when the employes of masters they do not like, had waved his proffered card aside, and with a jerk of his head motioned him forward to a doorway at the end of the passage. Now, on entering, he took in, in an impressionistic sweep, the overcrowded, vulgar garishness of the little room, saturated with the perfume of scents and sachets, and seeming to be the fitting frame for the woman who rose from a seat by the desk.
She looked at him inquiringly with something of wariness and distrust in her face. She was the last of the ascending scale of surprises he had encountered, for she was altogether better-looking, more a person to be reckoned with, than he had expected. His quick eye, trained to read human nature, recognized the steely determination of this woman before she spoke, saw it in the level scrutiny of her eyes, in the decision of her close mouth. He felt a sensation, oft experienced and keenly pleasurable, of gathering himself together for effort. It was the instinct of an old warrior who loves the fray.
Berny, on her side, knew him at the first glance, and her sensations were those of disturbance and uneasiness. She remembered him to be a friend of the Ryans’, and she had arrived at the stage when any friend of the Ryans’ was an enemy of hers. She was instantly in arms and on the defensive. Rose had not yet taken shape in her mind as a new, menacing force conniving against her. Besides, she had no idea that Rose reciprocated the sentiment that Dominick cherished for her. Her discovery had only made her certain that Dominick loved another woman. But this had shaken her confidence in everything, and she looked at the old man guardedly, ready for an attack and bracing herself to meet it.
“You’ll pardon this intrusion, won’t you?” he said in a deep, friendly voice, and with a manner of cordial urbanity. “I tried to do it correctly, but the Chinaman had other designs. It was he who frustrated me. Here’s the card I wanted him to take to you.”
He approached her, holding out a card which she took, still unsmiling, and glanced at. Her instinct of dissimulation was strong, and, uneasy as she was, she pretended to read the name, not wanting him to see that she already knew him.
“Mr. William G. Cannon,” she read, and then looked up at him and made a slight inclination of her head as she had seen actresses do on the stage. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Cannon?” she added, and completed the impressiveness of her greeting by a gesture, which also suggested a histrionic origin, toward an adjacent chair.
He backed toward the chair, pulling it out into the unencumbered space in the middle of the floor, his movements deliberate and full of design, as if he felt comfortably at home. Subsiding into the seat, which had arms and was rather cramped for his large bulk, he laid his hat among the knick-knacks of a near-by table and said smilingly,
“Now, let me make my apologies for coming. In the first place, I’m an old man. We’ve got a few privileges to compensate us for the loss of so much that’s good. Don’t you think that’s fair, Mrs. Ryan?”
Berny liked him. There was something so easy and affable in his manner, something that made her feel he would never censure her for her past, or, in fact, think about it at all. But she was still on her guard, though the embarrassment she had felt on his entrance disappeared.
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why an old man should have more privileges than a young one.”
“But you do know,” he said quickly, and giving a short, jolly laugh, “that an old man who’s known your husband all his life can have the privilege of calling on you without an introduction. You’ll admit that, won’t you?”
He leaned out of the narrow chair, his broad face creased with a good-humored smile, and his eyes, keen and light-colored, sharp on hers. Berny felt doubtful as to whether she liked him so much. She, too, had a large experience of men, and the hard intelligence of the eyes in the laughing face made her more than ever on the defensive.
“I’m sure I’m very glad you came,” she said politely; “any friend of Dominick’s is welcome here.”
“I’ve been that for a good many years. My friendship with the Ryans goes back to the days before Dominick was born. I knew Con and Delia well in the old times in Virginia when we were all young there together, all young, and strong, and poor. I’ve known Dominick since he was a baby, though I haven’t seen much of him of late years.”
“Nor of his wife either,” Berny was going to say, but she checked herself and substituted, “Is that so?” a comment which seemed to her to have the advantages of being at once dignified and elegantly non-committal.
“Yes, I knew Con when he was working on a prospect of his own called the Mamie R at Gold Hill. I was a miner on the Royal Charles close by on steady wages. Con was in for himself. He was playing it in pretty hard luck. If it hadn’t been for his wife he couldn’t have hung on as long as he did. She was a fine, husky, Irish girl, strong as a man; and the washing she used to do on the back porch of the shanty kept them.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Berny, much interested, and hoping that her visitor would continue to indulge in further reminiscences of Mrs. Ryan’s lowly beginnings.
“That was forty-five years ago,” he went on, “and the fellows that were on top then are underneath now, and vice versa. But Delia Ryan’s just about the same. There’s no shifting, or changing, or not knowing her own mind about her. She’s one of the strongest women in California; one of the biggest women anywhere.”
This was not what Berny had expected, and was more than she could subscribe to. The distinguished position of her guest made her want to be polite, but there was a limit to her powers of diplomatic agreement. A silver blotter stood on the desk, and she took it up and began absently rolling it back and forth over her letter.
“She seems to be a great friend of yours?” she said, watching the blotter with lowered eyes.
“She’s all that,” he answered heartily. “One of the greatest. She is to any one who knows her well. She’s a big nature; nothing picayune or small about her. A true friend and a fair enemy. She’s the most generous woman I ever knew.”
“We haven’t seen much of her generosity,” said Berny. Her words did not come with suddenness, but slowly, with a measured and biting deliberation.
“You’ve got your chance to see it now,” answered the old man.
Berny looked at him, a side glance from the corner of one long, dark eye. Her face was perfectly grave and the eyes fixed on him were imbued with a considering, apprehensive expectancy. He looked very large, squeezed into the small chair, but he seemed oblivious to the fact that there was anything ridiculous in his appearance, as well as to his own discomfort. The easy good-humor had gone from his face. It was alert, shrewd, and eagerly interested. Berny knew now that he had not come to pay his respects to Dominick’s wife. A sensation of internal trembling began to possess her and the color deepened in her face.
“How have I got my chance?” she said. “I guess if you know the Ryans so well you must know that they won’t have anything to do with me.”
“They’ll have a good deal to do with you if you’ll let them,” he answered.
There was a momentary pause, during which—now conscious of battle and menace—Berny strove to control her rising excitement and keep her head cool. He watched her with a glance which had the boring penetration of a gimlet.
“That’s funny,” she said, “not wanting to speak to me for two years and then all of a sudden wanting to have a good deal to do with me. It’s a sort of lightning-change act, like you see at the Orpheum. I guess I’d understand it better if I knew more about it.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Will you let me speak frankly, Mrs. Ryan? Have I got your permission to go right ahead and talk the plain talk that’s the only way a plain man knows?”
“Yes,” said Berny. “Go right ahead.”
He looked at the carpet for a considering moment, then raised his eyes and, gazing into hers with steady directness, said,
“It wouldn’t be fair if I pretended not to know that you and your husband’s family are unfriendly. I know it, and that they have, as you say, refused to know you. They’ve not liked the marriage; that’s the long and the short of it.”
“And what right have they got—” began Berny, raising her head with a movement of war, and staring belligerently at him. He silenced her with a lifted hand:
“Don’t let’s go into that. Don’t let’s bother ourselves with the rights and wrongs of the matter. We could talk all afternoon and be just where we were at the beginning. Let’s have it understood that our attitude in this is businesslike and impersonal. They don’t like the marriage—that’s admitted. They’ve refused to know you—that’s admitted. And let us admit, for the sake of the argument, that they’ve put you in a damned disagreeable position.”
Berny, sitting stiffly erect, all in a quiver of nerves, anger, and uncertainty, had her eyes fixed on him in a glare of questioning.
“That’s all true,” she said grimly. “That’s a statement I’ll not challenge.”
“Then we’ll agree that your position is disagreeable, and that it’s been made so by the antagonism of your husband’s family. Now, Mrs. Ryan, let me tell you something that maybe you don’t understand. You’re never going to conquer or soften your mother-in-law. I don’t know anything about it, but perhaps I can make a guess. You’ve thought you’d win her over, that you’d married her son and made him a good wife and that some day she’d acknowledge that and open her doors and invite you in. My dear young lady, just give up building those castles in the air. There’s nothing in them. You don’t know Delia Ryan. She’ll never bend and the one thing that’ll break her is death. She’s got no hard feelings against you except as her son’s wife. That’s the thing she’ll never forgive you for. I’m not saying it’s not pretty tough on you. I’m just stating a fact. What I do say is that she’s never going to be any different about it. She’s started on her course, and she’s going to go straight along on the same route till she comes to the place where we’ve all got to jump off.”
At the commencement of this speech, a surge of words had boiled up within Berny. Now as he stopped she leaned toward him and the words burst out of her lips.
“And what right has she got to act that way, I’d like to know? What’s she got against me? What’s wrong with me? Dominick Ryan married me of his own free will. He chose me and he was of age. I’d been a typewriter in the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company, honestly earning my living. Is that what she don’t like about me? I might have got my living another way, a good sight easier and pleasanter, but I wasn’t that kind. Maybe she didn’t like a decent working-girl for her son’s wife? And what was she to kick? Didn’t you just say now she washed for the miners in Virginia? Didn’t she used to keep a two-room grocery at Shasta? I don’t see that there’s anything so darned aristocratic about that. There were no more diamond tiaras and crests on the harness in her early days than there are in mine. She’s forgetting old times. You can just tell her I’m not.”
She came to a breathless close, her body bent forward, her dark eyes burning with rage and excitement. This suddenly sank down, chilled, and, as it were, abashed by the aspect of her listener, who was sitting motionless in his chair, his hands clasped over the curving front of his torso, his chin sunk on his collar, and his eyes fixed upon her with a look of calm, ruminating attention. Her words had not only failed to heat him to controversy, but he had the air of patiently waiting for them to cease, when he could resume the matter under discussion.
“It’s natural enough that you should feel that way about it,” he said, “but let’s put out of the argument these purely personal questions. You think one way and Mrs. Ryan thinks another. We recognize that and assume that it is so. We’re not passing judgment. I’d be the last one to do that between two ladies. What I came to talk of to-day was not the past but the present; not the wrongs you’ve suffered from the Ryans, but the way they can be righted.”
“There’s only one way they can be righted,” she said.
“Well now, let’s see,” persuasively. “We’re both agreed that your position in San Francisco is hard. Here you are in the town where you were born and raised, leading a lonely life in what, considering your marriage, we might call reduced circumstances. You have—you’ll excuse my plain talking—little or no social position. Your life is monotonous and dull, when, at your age, it should be all brightness and pleasure. In the height of your youth and beauty you’re cramped in a small flat, deprived of the amusements of your age, ostracized from society, and pinched by lack of money. That seems to me a pretty mean position for a woman of your years and appearance.”
Berny made no answer. She was confused by his thus espousing her cause, using almost the words she herself would have used in describing her unmerited trials. She was one of those women who, with an almost unbreakable nerve, when attacked or enraged, tremble. She was seized now with this trembling and to control it clasped her hands tight in her lap and tried to hold her body stiff by will power.
“It is from this situation,” he went on, his voice slightly lowered, “that Mrs. Ryan offers to release you.”
A gleam of light zigzagged through the woman’s uncomprehension, and the trembling seemed to concentrate in her knees and stomach.
“To release me?” she repeated with a rising inflection.
“Yes. She’ll make it possible for you to escape from all this, to live in the way you ought to live, and to have the position and amusements you are entitled to. As I said to you before, she’s got no ill feeling toward you except as her son’s wife. She wishes you well, and to prove it she is ready to make you the most generous offer.”
Berny’s rigidity relaxed and she leaned against the chair-back. She said nothing, but her eyes remained fixed on his face.
“I told you she was generous and see if I am not right,” he continued. “She will make you a rich woman, independent of any one, the money yours to do with as you like, if you’ll consent to the few conditions she exacts.”
“What are they?”
“That you will leave your husband for a year and at the end of that time ask him to give you your liberty, he suing you for divorce on the ground of desertion.”
There was a pause. Berny had moved her eyes from the old man’s face, and was looking at the blotter upon which her hand had again closed. The cheek turned to him was a deep rose pink. He looked at her unembarrassed and inquiring, as though he had made an ordinary business proposition.
“It’s a bribe,” she said slowly, “a bribe to leave my husband.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he answered with a deprecating shrug. “Call it a deal, a settlement. The terms are easy and favorable. You’ll not find one of them unjust or unfair. You’re to leave the city, going preferably to Chicago or New York and staying there for the period of desertion. Seven thousand dollars will be set aside for your expenses. At the end of the year you are to write to Dominick telling him you no longer want to live with him and asking him to give you your freedom. After the divorce is granted the sum of fifty thousand dollars will be handed over to you, the one condition being that you will leave the country and go to Europe. It is also understood, of course, that the matter’s to be kept a secret from Dominick. He must think that you are acting entirely from your own free will. He mustn’t guess his mother’s had any part in it.”
“She’s not ashamed to try to buy me off, but she’s ashamed to have her precious boy know it!”
The old man looked at her with a slight, indulgent smile, inwardly wondering how Dominick Ryan had endured life with this woman.
“Oh, it’s best not to have Dominick know,” he said easily; “not because there’s anything to be ashamed of, but on general principles it’s best to have as few complications as possible in the way of other people’s butting in. What good would there be in Dominick’s knowing?”
She rolled the blotter back and forth for a moment without answering, then said,
“So Mrs. Ryan offers me fifty thousand dollars to desert my husband?”
“With one condition—that you leave the country. Just look what that’s going to mean!” He rose from the narrow, upholstered seat, took a light chair that stood near by and, setting it close to her, sat sidewise on it, one hand extended toward her. “Fifty thousand dollars is a good bit of money over here, but over there it’s a fortune. You’d be a rich woman with that amount in your own right. You could take an apartment in Paris, or a slice of some prince-feller’s palace down in Rome. On the income of that capital, safely invested, you could live in a style that only a millionaire can manage over here—have your own carriage, dress like a queen, go to the opera. They like Americans, especially when they’ve got money. First thing you know you’d be right in it, knowing everybody, and going everywhere. You’re nobody here, worse than nobody. Over there you’d be one of the people everybody was talking about and wanted to know. You’re not only a pretty woman, you’re a smart woman; you could get on top in no time, marry into the nobility if you wanted.”
Berny, her eyes on the blotter, said nothing.
“And what’s the alternative over here?” the tempter continued. “Staying on as an outsider, being in a position where, though you’re lawfully married and are living decently with your husband, you’re ostracized as completely as if you weren’t married at all; where you’ve hardly got enough to pay your way, cramped up in a corner like this, never going anywhere or seeing anybody. Does that kind of life appeal to you? Not if I know anything.”
Berny lifted her head and looked at him. The color was now burning in her cheeks and her eyes seemed to hold all the vitality of her rigid face.
“You tell Mrs. Ryan,” she said slowly, “that I’ll lie dead in my coffin before I’ll take her money and leave my husband.”
They looked at each other for a silent moment, two strong and determined antagonists. Then the old man said mildly and pleasantly,
“Now don’t be too hasty; don’t jump at a decision in the heat of the moment. Just at the first glimpse this way, you may feel surprised—may take it as sort of out of the way and interfering. But when you’ve thought it over, it will look different. Take time. You don’t have to make your mind up now, or to-morrow, or the day after. Turn it over, look at the other side, sleep on it for a few nights. Think a bit of the things I’ve said. You don’t want to be hasty about it. It’s not the kind of offer you get every day.”
“No, it’s not!” said Berny fiercely. “It’s too dirty for most people. It’s too dirty for any one but Mrs. Ryan, and you can tell her I said so.”
She rose to her feet, still clenching the blotter in her hand. He rose too, interested, annoyed and disappointed, for he knew with a cynical certainty just about what she was going to say.
“Yes,” she cried, stiff and quivering like a leaf, “go and tell her! Tell her just what I said. I’ll see her in hell before I’ll take a cent of her money, or budge an inch out of this house. She’s a fine one to give herself such airs, and think herself too good to know me and then offer to buy me off like a kept woman. Tell her I’m her son’s wife, and I’ll stay so till she’s good and dead, and Dominick’s got his share of his father’s estate. Tell her I’m here to stay, right here, here in this flat, just round the corner from where she lives, and that I’m Mrs. Ryan as well as she is, and that I’m going to stay so. This is my home, here in San Francisco, where she’s tried to ruin me and freeze me out, and here I stick.”
She glared at him as he stood, one hand on the back of his chair, his eyes thoughtfully fixed on her.
“I wouldn’t be too hasty if I were you,” he said pacifically. “Things done in a hurry are rarely satisfactory. It’s a bad way to do business. You’re apt to let good chances slip by.”“Don’t be afraid,” she said with grim significance. “I’m not going to let mine slip by. I’ve married Dominick Ryan and I’m going to stay by him.”
He turned to the table and picked up his hat, which was a soft, black felt wide-awake. As he dented it into shape, he said,
“You’re sort of heated up and excited now, and a person’s brain don’t work well in that state. You don’t want to come to any important conclusions when you’re not cool and able to think. Sleep on this thing for one night, anyway. You can call me up on the telephone to-morrow, or probably it would be better to send a line by a messenger.”
“You’re very much interested in this affair, aren’t you?” she said with sudden malicious meaning.
For the first time in the interview he was slightly taken aback. Her face held a reserve of knowledge with which she seemed to be silently taunting him.
“Naturally,” he said with an air of simple frankness, “as an old family friend would be.”
“And that’s the only reason?”
“What other could there be?”
“Oh, I don’t know”—she turned and dropped the blotter on the desk with a nonchalant movement—“I was just wondering.”
He eyed her for a second without speaking, and in this one moment of scrutiny allowed a look of dislike and menace to creep into his face. Then he said genially,
“Well, I guess this brings our interview to an end. It’s not been just what you’d call a pleasant one, but I for one can say it’s left no hard feelings. I hope you’ll admit as much.”
She shrugged her shoulders and turned to the desk.
“I’m not a good one at lies,” she said. “I leave that to the Ryans and their old family friends.”
He laughed good-humoredly and answered,
“That’s all right. You never can hurt me by plain speaking. That’s the only kind I know. I guess we’re neither of us great at guff. Remember that I’ll expect a visit or a letter from you.”
“You’ll have to wait a long time for either,” she said without moving.
“Well, I’m a patient man, and everything comes to him who waits.”
She looked over her shoulder with a slight acid smile.
“Not everything,” she said.
“So long,” he answered, giving his hat a farewell wave at her. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you and hope we’ll soon meet again in a more friendly way. Hasta Manana, Señora!”
She wheeled so that she faced him and gave a short nod, then watched him as he walked to the door. Here he turned, bowed deeply and respectfully, and passed out into the hall, the bamboo strands of the portière clashing together behind him. A moment later she heard the bang of the street door.
She stood motionless in the middle of the room, her face deeply flushed, her eyes fixed on the swaying curtain. For the first few moments a blind excitement held her, and then from the welter of this, her thoughts separated themselves and took definite directions. Rage, triumph, bewilderment, alarm, surged to the surface of her mind. Shaken by one after another she stood rigid in the intensity of her preoccupation, not noticing the shaking of her knees or the thumping of her heart.
Her two predominant sensations were rage and triumph. The insult of the bribe burned in her—this flinging money at her as it might be flung at a cast-off mistress. It deepened her detestation of the Ryans, and at the same time gave her a sense of intimacy with them. It made them more on a par with her, drew them down from the lofty heights whence they had scornfully ignored her, to a place beside her, a place where they, as well as she, did underhand, disreputable things they did not want known.
And it showed her her power. Standing in the middle of the room with her eyes still staring at the now motionless portière strands, she saw, stretching away into a limitless gilded distance, her negotiations with her husband’s family. If their desire to rupture the marriage took them thus far, where might it not take them? She stared into a future where she saw herself extracting money in vast amounts from them. It was fortune—twice, three times this first paltry sum—waiting for her when she chose to stretch her hand and take it. She could be rich, as the old man said; she could go abroad, see the world, have all the joys that riches give, when she chose to let Mrs. Ryan humbly pay her such a sum as she would accept.
With a quick catch of her breath, she turned and moved to the window, stirred to her depth with the exultation of unexpected power. And standing there, the thought of the old man suddenly swept across her, and with it, transfixing her in an attitude of frozen, inward contemplation, the memory of his daughter. New vistas, extending away through the abruptly-illuminated dimness of her previous ignorance, suddenly opened before her, and she sent her startled vision exploring down them. At the end of them, waiting for Dominick in an attitude of welcome, was the pink and white girl she had seen in the park.
The discovery was made so quickly, came upon her flushed complacency with such a shock of unexpectedness, that even her sharp, suspicious mind could not for the moment take it in. Then Miss Cannon’s face, as she had seen it in that moment of recognition in the park, rose with confirming clearness on her memory, and she saw straight to the heart of the plot. It was not the Ryans alone who wanted to buy her off. It was the Cannons as well. They not only wanted Dominick to get rid of her; they wanted him to get rid of her so that he could marry Rose Cannon. The other girl was behind it all, accounted for the participation of the Bonanza King, accounted probably for the whole move—the pink and white girl in the French clothes who had all her life had everything and now wanted Berny Iverson’s husband.
Poor Dominick, whom Berny had held contemptuously as a disappointing and aggravating appurtenance of hers, suddenly rose in her estimation into a valuable possession whose worth she had not before realized. It was enough that another woman wanted him, was, through underhand channels, trying to get him. All in a minute, Berny had changed from the negligent proprietor of a valueless and lightly-held object, to the possessor of an article of rare worth, which she was prepared jealously to guard. With a sort of proud challenge she felt that she stood valiantly facing the marauders, protecting her treasure against their predatory advances. And her hatred against Mrs. Ryan began to extend toward Bill Cannon, and beyond him toward the fair-faced girl, who grew red to her forehead when she accidentally encountered Dominick Ryan.
A few nights after this, there was a full moon. Dominick, walking home from the bank, saw it at the end of the street’s vista, a large, yellowish-pink disk floating up into the twilight. The air about it was suffused with a misty radiance, and its wide glowing face, having a thin look like a transparency of paper with a light behind it, seemed, though not yet clear of the housetops, already to dominate the sky. The evening was warm, like the early summer in other climates; and Dominick, walking slowly and watching the great yellow sphere deepening in color as it swam majestically upward, thought of evenings like this in the past when he had been full of the joy of life and had gone forth in the spirit of love and adventure.
The sight of his home dispelled these memories and brought upon him the sense of his daily environment and its distastefulness. The determination to accept his fate which had been with him on his return from Antelope had of late been shaken by stirrings of rebellion. Uplifted by the thought of his love for a woman hopelessly removed from him, but who would always be a lodestar to worship reverently and to guide him up difficult paths, he had been able to face his domestic tragedy with the high resolution of the martyr. But this exalted condition was hard to maintain in the friction of daily life with Berny. Before, she had merely been a disagreeable companion of whom he had to make the best. Now, she was that, intensified by a comparison which threw out her every fault and petty vulgarity into glaring prominence. And more than that—she was the angel with the flaming sword, the self-incurred, invited, domesticated angel—the angel come to stay—who barred the way to Paradise.
She seemed to him to have changed within the last week. When he had first come home from Antelope she had been Berny in one of her less familiar but recognizable moods—Berny trying to be agreeable, wearing her best clothes every day, ordering the things for dinner he liked, talking loudly and incessantly. Then, quite suddenly, he became aware of a change in her. She grew silent, absent-minded, morose. He had tried to make their lives easier by always being polite and carefully considerate of her and she had responded to it. For the last few days she had made no effort to assist him in this laudable design. Instead, she had been unresponsive, preoccupied, uninvitingly snappish in her replies. Several times he had been forced into the novel position of “making conversation” throughout dinner, exerting his wits for subjects to talk about that he might lift the gloom and elicit some response from the mute, scowling woman opposite.
To-night, the period of ill-humor seemed over. Berny was not only once again her animated self, she was almost feverishly garrulous. Dinner had not progressed past the fish when she began to question him on his recent experiences at Antelope. The subject had come up several times since his return, but for the last few days he had had a respite from it, and hoped its interest had worn away. She had many queries to make about Bill Cannon, and from the father it was but a natural transition to the daughter, so much the more attractive of the pair. Dominick was soon inwardly writhing under an exceedingly ingenious and searching catechism.
Had he been less preoccupied by his own acute discomfort, he might have noticed that Berny herself gave evidence of disturbance. As she prodded him with her questions, her face was suffused with unusual color, and the eagerness of her curiosity shone through the carelessness with which she sought to veil it. Certain queries she accompanied with a piercing glance of investigation, watching with hungry sharpness the countenance of the persecuted man. Fearful of angering her, or, still worse, of arousing her suspicions, Dominick bore the examination with all the fortitude he had, but he rose from the table with every nerve tingling, rasped and galled to the limit of endurance.
He did not come into the den immediately but roamed about, into the parlor, down the passage, and into his own room. He spread the scent of his cigar and its accompanying films of smoke all through the flat, a thing that Berny would never have ordinarily allowed. To-night she was too occupied in listening to his prowling steps to bother about minor rules and regulations. She saw in his restlessness a disturbance evoked by her questionings.
“Aren’t you coming into the den?” she called, as she heard him pacing steadily along the passageway.
“No,” he called back. “The moonlight’s shining in at every window. It makes me restless. I don’t feel like sitting still.”
She sat on the divan, a paper spread before her face, but her eyes were slanted sidewise, unblinking in the absorption of her attention. Suddenly she heard a rattling sound which she knew to be from the canes and umbrellas in the hat-rack. She cast away the paper, and, drawing herself to the edge of the divan, peered down the passage. Dominick was standing by the hat-rack, his hat on the back of his head, his hand feeling among the canes.
“You’ve got your hat on,” she called in a high key of surprise. “You’re not going out?”
“Yes, I am,” he answered, drawing out the cane he wanted. “It’s a fine night, and I’m going for a walk.”
“For a walk?”—there was hesitancy in her tone, and for a horrible moment, he thought she was going to suggest coming with him. “Where are you going to?”
“Oh, I don’t know, just prowl about. I want some exercise.”
“Are you going to your mother’s?” she ventured, not without some timidity.
“No,” he said, “I’m not going anywhere in particular. Good night.”
She sat forward, listening to his descending feet and the bang of the hall door. A glance at the window showed her it was, as he said, a fine night, deluged with the radiance of the moon. Probably he was just going out for a walk and not to see anybody. He was always doing queer things like that. But,—Berny sat staring in front of her, biting her nails and thinking. Uneasiness had been planted in her by Dominick’s flight to Antelope. More poignant uneasiness had followed that first attack. Now the bitter corrosive of jealousy began to grow and expand in her. Sitting huddled on the divan, she thought of Dominick, walking through the moonlight to Rose Cannon, and another new and griping pang laid hold upon her.
Outside, Dominick walked slowly, keeping to the smaller and less frequented streets. It was a wonderful night, as still as though the moon had exerted some mesmeric influence upon the earth. Everything was held motionless and without sound in a trance-like quietude. In the gardens not a blossom stirred. Where leaves extended from undefined darknesses of foliage, they stood out, stem and fiber, with a carven distinctness, their shadows painted on the asphalt walks in inky silhouette. There was no lamplight to warm the clear, still pallor of the street’s vista. It stretched between the fronts of houses, a river of light, white and mysterious, like a path in a dream.
It was a night for lovers, for trysts, and for whispered vows. Dominick walked slowly, feeling himself an outsider in its passionate enchantment. The scents that the gardens gave out, and through which he passed as through zones of sweetness, were part of it. So were the sounds that rose from the blotted vagueness of white figures on a porch, from impenetrable depths of shadow—laughter, low voices, little cries. In the distance people were singing snatches of a song that rose and fell, breaking out suddenly and as suddenly dropping into silence.
His course was not aimless, and took him by a slow upward ascent to that high point of the city, whence the watcher can look down on the bay, the rugged, engirdling hills, and the hollow of North Beach. Here he stood, resting on his cane, and gazing on the far-flung panorama, with the white moon sailing high and its reflection glittering across the water. Along the bases of the hills the clotted lights of little towns shone in faintly-glimmering agglomerations. At his feet the hollow lay like a black hole specked with hundreds of sparks. Each spark was the light of a home, symbol of the fire of a hearth. He stood looking down on them, thinking of what they represented, that cherished center round which a man’s life revolves, and which he, by his own sin and folly, had lost for ever.
He walked on, skirting the hollow, and moving forward through streets where old houses brooded in overgrown gardens. The thin music of strings rose on the night, and two men passed him playing on the mandolin and guitar. They walked with quick, elastic steps, their playing accurately in accord, their bodies swaying slightly to its rhythm. They swung by him, and the vibrating harmonies, that sounded so frail and attenuated in the suave largeness of the night, grew faint and fainter, as if weighed upon and gradually extinguished by the dense saturation of the moonlight.
Music was evidently a mode of expression that found favor on this evening of still brilliance. A few moments later a sound of singing rose on the air and a youthful couple came into view, walking close together, their arms twined about each other, caroling in serene indifference to such wayfarers as they might meet. They passed him, their faces uplifted to the light, their mouths open in the abandon of their song. Unconscious of his presence, with upraised eyes and clasping arms, they paced on, filling the night with their voices—a boy and girl in love, singing in the moonlight. Dominick quickened his steps, hastening from the sound.
The moon was now high in the sky and the town lay dreaming under its spell. Below him he could see the expanse of flat roofs, shining surfaces between inlayings of shadow, with the clefts of the streets cut through at regular intervals like slices made by a giant knife. Now and then he looked up at the dome above, clear and solemn, the great disk floating in solitary majesty across the vast and thoughtful heaven.
That part of California Street which crested the hill was but a few blocks beyond him, and before his mind would acknowledge it, his feet had borne him that way. He thought only to pass the Cannon house, to look at its windows, and see their lights. As it rose before him, a huge, pale mass checkered with shadows, the longing to see it—the outer shell that hid his heart’s desire—passed into a keener, concentrated agitation that seemed to press out from his soul like a cry to her.
The porch yawned black behind pillars that in the daytime were painted wood and now looked like temple columns wrought in marble. Dominick’s glance, sweeping the lines of yellowed windows, finally rested on this cavern of shadow, and he approached stealthily, as a robber might, his body close to the iron fence. Almost before his eyes had told him, he knew that a woman was standing there, leaning against the balustrade that stretched between the columns. A climbing rose spread, in a mottling of darkness, over the wall beside her. Here and there it was starred with the small white faces of blossoms. As the young man drew near she leaned over the balustrade, plucked one of the blossoms, and, slowly shredding the leaves from the stem, stretched out her hand and let them fall, like a languid shower of silver drops, to the grass.
Dominick halted below her, leaning against the fence and looking up. She did not see him and stretched out her hand again for another blossom. The petals of this one fell through her fingers, one by one, and lay, a scattering of white dots, on the darkness of the grass. She bent over the balustrade to look at them, and in doing so, her eyes encountered the man below.
For a moment they looked at each other without speaking, then she said, her voice at the lowest note that would reach him,
“What are you doing there?”
“Watching you.”
“Have you been standing there long?”
“No, only a few minutes. Why are you pulling the roses to pieces?”
She gave a little laugh and said something that sounded like “I don’t know,” and moved back from the balustrade.
He thought she was going, and clutched the iron spikes of the fence, calling up to her in a voice of urgent feeling, curiously out of keeping with the words, the first remark that came into his head:
“This is very different from Antelope, isn’t it?”
She came forward again and looked out and up at the sky.
“Yes,” she said gravely, “we had no moonlight there, nothing but storms and gray clouds.”
“But it was lovely,” he answered in the same key. “The clouds and the storms didn’t matter. Those were three—three great weeks.”
He ended lamely but they were the best words he could get, trying to say something that would keep her there, trying to see her through the vaporous light. She bent over the railing looking for another rose, but there were no more within her reach and she gave the short, nervous laugh she had given before and turned her eyes on him again. Then he realized that she was agitated. The knowledge augmented his own perturbation and for a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He gazed at her fixedly, the look of a lover, and was not conscious that she wavered under it, till she suddenly drew a quick breath, turned her head sidewise, and said, with an effort at naturalness,
“Well, I must go in. The roses are all picked and papa’ll be wondering where I am.”
It seemed to Dominick just then that he could not lose her. She must stay a moment longer. Urgency that was imploring was in his voice as he said,
“Don’t go! don’t go! Stay just one moment longer! Can’t you come down and talk for a minute? Come part of the way down. I want to speak to you for a little bit longer. It may be months before I see you again.”
She listened, wavered, and was won over. Without answer she turned from the shadow of the porch into the light on the top of the steps, and from there slowly descended, her skirt gathered in one hand, and the other touching the baluster. She was in black and from its dead density her arms, bare to the elbow, shone as white as the arms of a marble woman. The baluster ended in a lion crouching in sleep on a slab of stone, and she paused here and Dominick went up the few steps from the street to meet her. With the sleeping lion between them they looked at each other with troubled eyes.
The moonlight seemed to have drawn from the meeting the artificialities of worldly expression, which in the sensible, familiar daylight would have placed it on the footing of a casual, to-be-expected encounter. The sun beating down on lovers beats some of their sentimental transports out of them. Now in this mystic, beautifying luminosity, the acquired point of view, the regard for the accepted conventions of every-day seemed to have receded to a great distance, to be thin, forgotten things that had nothing to do with real life. For a moment Berny ceased to be a living presence, standing with a flaming sword between them. They almost forgot her. The memory that pressed upon them was that of their last meeting. It shone in their eyes and trembled on their lips. The sleeping lion that separated them was a singularly appropriate symbol.
Low-voiced and half-spoken sentences belonged to this romantic moment. The moonlit night around them was still and empty, but Dominick spoke as though other ears than hers were listening:
“I’ve wanted so to see you. I came by to-night hoping that perhaps I could catch a glimpse of your shadow on the curtain. I didn’t expect anything like this.”
He stopped, looking at her, and not listening to the few words of her answer.
“I think I wanted you so that my will called you out,” he said in an impassioned whisper.
She said nothing and suddenly his hand sought hers, clasped it tight on the head of the lion, and he whispered again,
“Oh, Rose, if I could see you now and then—only for a moment like this.”
He felt her hand, small and cold, crush softly inside his, and almost immediately was conscious of her effort to withdraw it. He instantly loosened his fingers, let hers slide from his grasp, and drew back.
“Good night,” she said hurriedly, and without looking at him turned and went up the steps.
“Good night,” he called after her, following her ascending figure with his eyes.
When she reached the shadow at the top of the steps, she called “Good-by,” passed into the engulfing blackness, and was gone. He waited till he heard the door bang behind her, then descended the steps and walked slowly home, his eyes on the pavement.
Berny was in her own room ready for bed when she heard his ascending footsteps. She was occupied in rubbing a skin-food into her face, with careful circular motions and pinchings of her finger-tips. It was a task that required deep attention and which she performed three nights in the week with conscientious regularity. With her face gleaming with grease she crept to her door and listened, heard his cane slide into the umbrella holder, and the door of his room shut with a softness which told her that he thought her asleep. She walked back to the glass and resumed her manipulations, but with diminished zeal. The clock on the bureau marked the hour at half-past ten. Dominick had been out two hours. Would a man walk round a city—even a crank like her husband—all by himself for two hours?
Every summer afternoon the trade winds blow through San Francisco, winging their way across miles of chill, salt sea, and striking the bulwarked city with a boisterous impact. The long streets seem as paths, lines of least resistance, and the winds press themselves into the narrow limits and whoop buoyantly along, carrying before them dust, rags, scraps of paper—sometimes hats.
Their period of highest recognized activity is from May till September, but before that, vagrant breezes, skirmishers sent out in advance, assault the city. They follow on still, sunny mornings, which show not the slightest warning symptom of the riotous forces which are designing to seize upon and disrupt the tranquillity of the afternoon. Eleven sees them up and stirring; by midday they have begun the attack. The city, in a state of complete unpreparedness, is at their mercy and they sweep through it in arrogant triumph, veiled in a flying scud of dust. Unsuspecting wayfarers meet them at corners, and stand, helpless victims of a playfulness, fierce and disconcerting as that of tigers. Hats, cleverly running on one rim, career along the sidewalk. Ladies have difficulties with parasols, heretofore docile and well-behaved. Articles of dress, accustomed to hang decorously, show sudden ambitions to rise and ride the elements. And those very people who in winter speak gratefully of the winds as “the scavengers of San Francisco” may be heard calling curses down on them.
Such a wind, the first of the season, was abroad on a bright morning in early April, and Cornelia Ryan was out in it. It was a great morning for Cornelia. Even the wind could not ruffle her joyousness. She was engaged. Two evenings before, Jack Duffy, who had been hovering round the subject for a month, poised above it, as a hawk above delightful prey, had at last descended and Cornelia’s anxieties were at an end. She had been so relieved, elated, and flustered that she had not been able to pretend the proper surprise, but had accepted blushing, stammering and radiant. She had been blushing, stammering and radiant when she told her mother that night, and to-day, forty-eight hours later, she was still blushing, stammering, and radiant.
It was not alone that she was honestly in love with Jack, but Cornelia, like most maidens in California and elsewhere, was in love with being admired, deferred to, and desired. And despite her great expectations and her prominent position, she had had rather less of this kind of delightful flattery than most girls. Walking down town in the clear, sun-lit morning, she was, if not handsome, of a fresh and blooming wholesomeness, which is almost as attractive and generally wears better. The passers-by might readily have set her down as a charming woman, for whom men sighed, and in this surmise been far from the mark. She had had few lovers before Jack Duffy. That matter-of-fact sturdiness, that absence of softness and mystery so noticeable in Californian women, was particularly accentuated in her case, and had robbed her of the poetic charm of which beauty and wealth can never take the place.
But to-day she was radiant, a sublimated, exultant Cornelia, loved at last and by a man of whom she could completely and unreservedly approve. There were times when Cornelia—she was thirty—had feared that she might have to go abroad and acquire a foreign husband, or, worse still, move to New York and make her selection from such relics of decayed Knickerbocker families as were in the market. She was woman enough to refuse to die unwed. Now these dark possibilities were dispelled. In her own state, in her own town, she had found her mate, Jack Duffy, whose father had known her father and been shift boss under Bill Cannon in the roaring days of Virginia City. It was like royalty marrying into its own order, the royalty of Far Western millions, knowing its own ramifications having its own unprinted Almanach de Gotha—deep calling unto deep!
The wind was not yet out in force; its full, steady sweep would not be inaugurated till early in the afternoon. It came now in gusts which fell upon Cornelia from the back and accelerated her forward progress, throwing out on either side of her a flapping sail of skirt. Cornelia, who was neat and precise, usually resented this rough handling, but to-day she only laughed, leaning back, with one hand holding her hat. In the shops where she stopped to execute various commissions she had difficulty in suppressing her smiles. She would have liked to delay over her purchases and chat with the saleswomen, and ask them about their families, and send those who looked tired off for a month into the country.
It was after midday when she found herself approaching that particular block, along the edge of which the flower-venders place their baskets and display their wares. In brilliantly-colored mounds the flowers stood stacked along the outer rim of the sidewalk, a line of them, a man behind each basket vociferating the excellence of the bouquet he held forward to the passer’s inspection. In the blaze of sun that overlaid them, the piled-up blossoms showed high-colored and variegated as a strip of carpeting.
Cornelia never bought flowers at the street corners. The town house was daily supplied from the greenhouses at the country place at Menlo. When sick friends, anniversaries, or entertainment called for special offerings they were ordered from expensive florists and came in made-up bunches, decorated with sashes of ribbon. But to-day she hesitated before the line of laden baskets. Some of the faces behind them looked so dreary, and Cornelia could not brook the sight of a dreary face on this day of joy. The dark, wistful eyes of an Italian boy holding out a bunch of faded jack roses, stiffly set in a fringe of fern, made a sudden appeal to her and she bought the roses. Then the old man who was selling carnations looked so lean and grizzled that he must be cheered, and two bunches of the carnations were added to the roses. The boys and men, seeing that the brilliant lady was in a generous mood, collected about her, shouting out the excellences of their particular blossoms, and pressing sample bunches on her attention.
Cornelia, amused and somewhat bewildered, looked at the faces and bought recklessly. She was stretching out her hand to beckon to the small boy with the wilted pansies, who was not big enough to press through the throng, when a man’s voice behind her caught her ear.
“Well, Cornelia, are you trying to corner the curb-stone market?”
She wheeled swiftly and saw her brother, laughing and looking at the stacked flowers in the crook of her arm.
“Dominick!” she exclaimed, “you’re just the person I want to see. I was going to write to you. I’ve got lots to tell you.”
“Come along then and take lunch with me. I was on my way up to Bertrand’s when I saw you. They’ll give us a good lunch there and you can tell me all your secrets.”
The flower sellers, who had been listening with unabashed eagerness, realized that their prey was about to be ravished from them, and raised their voices in a chorus of wailing appeal. As Cornelia moved forward they moved round her, thrusting bouquets under her eyes in a last hope, the boy with the wilted pansies, on the brink of tears, hanging on the outskirts of the crowd. Cornelia might have forgotten him, but her eye, sweeping back for an absent moment, saw his face, bereft of all hope—a face of childish despair above his drooping pansies.
“Here, boy with the pansies,” she called, and sent a silver dollar through the air toward him, “that’s for you. Keep it and the flowers, too. I’ve too many now and can’t carry any more. Maybe he’ll sell them to some one else,” she said to Dominick, as they crossed the street. “He’s such a little boy to be earning his bread!”
They walked up the street toward Bertrand’s, a French restaurant which for years had enjoyed the esteem of the city’s gourmets. The wind was now very high. It tore at Cornelia’s clothes and made it necessary for Dominick to hold his hat on, his hand spread flat on the crown. A trail of blossoms, torn from the flowers each carried, sprinkled the pavement behind them. Cornelia, with her head down and her face toward her brother, shouted remarks at him, every now and then pausing in a stifle of laughter to struggle with her draperies, which at one moment rose rebellious, and at the next were wound about her in an umbrella-like sheath.
They had often met this way in the past, when the elder Mrs. Ryan’s wrath had been in its first, untameable freshness, and her son had seen her seldom. In those days of estrangement, Cornelia had been the tie between Dominick and his home. She loved her brother and was sorry for him, and had felt the bitterness of the separation, not alone as a family misfortune, but as a scandal over which mean people talked. Had it rested with her, she would long ago have overlooked the past and have opened the door to her sister-in-law. Not that she felt any regard or interest in Berny Iverson; her feeling for her was now, and always would be, largely composed of that undying unfriendliness and repugnance that the naturally virtuous woman feels for her sister with the tache. But Cornelia was of a younger and milder generation than her mother. She had not fought hard for what she had and, like Dominick, there was more of the sunny-tempered, soft-hearted Con Ryan in her than of the strong and valiant woman who had made him and given him his place in the world.
In the restaurant they found a vacant table in a corner, and Cornelia had to bottle up her good news while Dominick pondered over the bill of fare. She was impatient and drummed on the table with her fingers, while her eyes roamed about the room. Once or twice, she bowed to people that she knew, then let her glance pass in an uninterested survey over the bare walls and the long line of windows that gave on the street. The place had an austerely severe, unadorned air. Its bleakness of naked wall and uncovered stone floor added to the foreignness that was contributed by the strong French accent of the waiters, and the arrangement of a cashier’s desk near the door, where a pleasant-faced woman sat between a large bouquet of roses and a drowsy gray cat.
The orders given and the first stages of lunch appearing, Cornelia could at last claim her brother’s full attention. Planting her elbows on the table and staring at him, she said,
“I told you how awfully anxious I was to see you, and how I was going to write to you, didn’t I?”
Dominick nodded. He was buttering a piece of bread and showed no particular acceleration of curiosity at this query.
“Well, now, what do you suppose I was going to write about?” asked his sister, already beginning to show a heightened color.
“Can’t imagine. Nothing wrong with mother, I hope?”
Since his marriage Cornelia had been in the habit of communicating frequently with her brother by letter. It was the best way of keeping him informed of family affairs. The telephone at the senior Ryan house was sufficiently secluded to make it a useful medium of private communication, but the telephone at the junior Ryan house did not share this peculiarity, and Dominick discouraged his sister’s using it.
“No, mother’s all right,” said Cornelia. “And it’s nothing wrong about anybody. Quite the other way; it’s something about me, and it’s something cheerful. Guess!”
Her brother looked up and his eye was caught by her rosily-blushing cheeks.
“Dear me, Cornie,” he said with a look of slowly-dawning comprehension, “it really isn’t—it really can’t be——?”
The waiter here interrupted further confidence by setting forth the lunch with many attentive bowings and murmurings. By the time he had presented one dish for Cornelia’s approval, removed it with a flourish and presented another, her impatience broke out in an imploring,
“Yes, Etienne, it’s all perfectly lovely. Do put it on the table and let’s eat it. That’s what it’s for, not to hand round and be stared at, as if it were a diamond necklace that I was thinking of buying.”
Etienne, thus appealed to, put the viands on the table, and Dominick, deeply interested, leaned forward and said,
“What is it? Go ahead. I’m burning up with curiosity.”
“Guess,” said his sister, bending over her plate.
“Is it that you’re going to be married? Oh, Cornie, it can’t be.”
“And why can’t it be?” looking very much hurt. “What’s there so queer about that?”
“Nothing, only I meant that I hadn’t heard any rumors about it. Is it that?”
“Yes, it is, Dominick Ryan, and I don’t see why you should be so surprised.”
“Surprised! I’m more than surprised. I’m delighted—haven’t been so pleased for years. Who is it?”
“Jack Duffy.”
“Oh, Cornie, that’s the best yet! That’s great! It’s splendid. I wish I could kiss you, but I can’t here in the open restaurant. Why didn’t you tell me somewhere where we would be alone? I’d just like to give you a good hug.”
Cornelia, who had been a little hurt at her brother’s incredulity, was now entirely mollified and once again became bashfully complacent.
“I thought you’d like it,” she said. “I thought you’d think that was just about right. Any girl would be proud of him.”
“He’s one of the best fellows in the state—one of the best anywhere. He’ll make you a first-rate husband. You’re a lucky girl.”
“I know I am. You needn’t tell me. There are not many men anywhere like Jack Duffy. I’ve always said I wouldn’t marry the tag, rag and bobtail other girls are satisfied with. My husband was going to be a gentleman, and if Jack’s anything, he’s that.”
“You’re right there. He’s one of Nature’s gentlemen—the real kind.”
Cornelia thought this savored of condescension, and said, rallying to the defense of her future lord,
“Well, that’s all right, but he’s educated too. He’s not one of those men who have good hearts and noble yearnings but look like anarchists or sewing-machine agents. Jack graduated high at Harvard. He went there when he was only eighteen. There’s no one’s had a better education or done better by it. His father may have been Irish and worked as shift boss on the Rey del Monte, but Jack’s quite different. He’s just as much of a gentleman as anybody in this country.”
Cornelia’s attitude on matters of genealogy was modern and Californian. Ireland was far behind her and Jack, as were also those great days in Nevada of which her mother and Bill Cannon spoke, as the returned Ulysses might have spoken of the ten years before Troy. She and Jack would eventually regard them as a period of unsophistication and social ferment which it were wisest to touch on lightly, and of which they would teach their children nothing.
“And then,” Cornelia went on, determined not to slight any detail of her fiance’s worthiness, “there’s never been anything fast or wild about Jack. He’s always been straight. There’s been no scandalous stories about him, as there have about Terence.”
“Never. Terence committed all the scandals for the family.”
“Well, Terence is in New York, thank Heaven!” said Cornelia with pious fervor, “and we won’t have to have anything to do with him or his wife either. Even if we go to Europe, we need only stay there a few days.”
The irregular career of Terence had been a thorn in the side of the respectable Duffys, he, some years earlier, having married his mistress, a chorus girl in a local theater, and attempted to force her upon the exclusive circles in which his people moved. It was not the least galling feature of Terence’s unconventional course that, having doubled his fortune by successful speculations, he had removed to New York where, after several spirited assaults and vigorous rebuffs, his wife had reached social heights toward which other Californians of spotless record and irreproachable character had clambered in vain.
“Well,” said Dominick, “mother ought to be satisfied with this marriage. It’s a good thing one of her children is going to settle down the way she likes.”
“Oh, she’s delighted. She’s not been in such good spirits for a long time, and she’s as interested as I am in arranging everything. We want to have a large house wedding; the two families and all their connections, and all our intimate friends, and all the people who’ve entertained us,—and—and—the whole crowd. Of course, it’ll be a lot of people. Mommer said she didn’t see how we could cut it down to less than five or six hundred. But I don’t see why we need to, the house is big enough.”
“Plenty,” said Dominick. He set down his knife and fork and looked at his sister. “Our family don’t take up much room. There’s just three of us.”
“Then you’re coming?” she said quickly, her anxiety flashing out into an almost pained intensity of eagerness. “You’ll come? You must, Dominick. You’ve got to give me away.”
He looked away from her in moody discomfort. The eternal discussions created by his marriage were becoming more and more hateful to him. Why should his unloved and unloving wife perpetually stand between him and his own people—his mother and sister—women to whom he owed allegiance, even as he did to her? The call of his home and the binding ties of kin were growing stronger as the obligation of his marriage had weakened and lost its hold.
Cornelia leaned across the table and spoke with low-toned, almost tremulous earnestness:
“You know that if it were I, I’d ask your wife. You know that all the hard feelings I may once have had against her have gone. If it were for me to say, I’d have received her from the start. What I’ve always said is, ‘What’s the good of keeping up these fights? No one gets anything by them. They don’t do any one any good.’ But you know mommer. The first thing she said when we talked about the house wedding, and I said you’d give me away, was, ‘If he’ll come without his wife.’ Those were her very words, and you know when she says a thing she means it. And, Dominick, you will come? You’re the only brother I’ve got. You’re the only man representative of the family. You can’t turn me down on my wedding day.”
There were tears in her eyes and Dominick saw them and looked down at his plate.
“All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll come. When is it to be?”
“Oh, Dominick,” his sister breathed in an ecstasy of relief and gratitude. “I knew you would. And I’ll do anything for you I can. If mommer wouldn’t get so dreadfully angry, I’d call on your wife, but you know I can’t offend her. She’s my mother, and I can’t stand up against her. But some day I’ll pay you back—I will indeed.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Cornie,” he said, turning to summon the waiter. “I can’t let my sister get married without me. Tell mother I’ll come. You haven’t yet told me when it’s to be.”
“June,” said the prospective bride, once more beginning to blush and beam, “early in June. The roses are so fine then, and we can have the house so beautifully decorated. We’ve already begun to plan the trousseau. It’s going to be just stunning, I tell you; the dresses from New York and all the lingerie and things like that from Paris. Mommer says she’ll give me fifteen thousand dollars for it. And she’s going to give me, besides, a string of pearls that hangs down to here”—Cornelia indicated a point on her person with a proud finger—“or else a house and lot anywhere in town that I like. Which would you take?”
Dominick was saved from the responsibility of stating a preference on this important point by Etienne, the waiter, presenting his hat to him with the low bow of the well-tipped garçon. With a scraping of chair legs, they rose and, threading their way among the now crowded tables, passed out into the wind-swept streets. Here they separated, Cornelia, with her armful of wilting flowers, going home, and Dominick back to the bank.
He was entering the building when he met Bill Cannon, also returning to his office from a restaurant lunch at a small Montgomery Street chop-house, where, every day at one, he drank a glass of milk and ate a sandwich. The Bonanza King stopped and spoke to the young man, his greeting marked by a simple friendliness. Their conversation lasted a few minutes, and then Dominick entered the bank.
Two hours later, while he was still bending over his books, in the hushed seclusion of the closed building, Bill Cannon was talking to Berny in the parlor of the Sacramento Street flat. This interview was neither so long, and (on Berny’s part) did not show the self-restraint which had marked the first one. The offer of one hundred thousand dollars which the old man made her was refused with more scorn and less courtesy than had been displayed in her manner on the former occasion.
Berny was extremely unsettled. She had never been in such a condition of worry and indecision. She was at once depressed and elated, triumphant and cast down, all in a bubble of excitement and uncertainty. A combination of violent feelings, hostile to one another, had possession of her and used her as a battle-ground for shattering encounters.
She loved money with the full power of her nature—it was her strongest, her predominating passion—and now for the first time in her life it was within her grasp. She could at any moment become possessed of a fortune, undisputedly her own, to do with as she liked. She lay awake at night thinking of it. She made calculations on bits of paper as she footed up the bills at her desk.
But then on the other hand, there was Dominick, Dominick suddenly become valuable. He was like a piece of jewelry held in slight esteem as a trifling imitation and suddenly discovered to be real and of rich worth. Insignificant and strange are the happenings which determine the course of events. The sage had told her that one more inch in the length of Cleopatra’s nose would have altered the face of the world and changed the course of history. Had Berny not gone to the park on that Sunday afternoon, and seen a woman’s face change color at the sight of her husband, she might have come to terms with Mrs. Ryan and now have been on her way to Chicago in the first stage of the plan of desertion.
It was another woman’s wanting Dominick that made Berny more determined to cling to him than if he had been the Prince Charming of her dreams. She carried about with her a continual feeling of self-congratulation that she had discovered the full significance of the plot in time. Her attitude was that of the quarreling husband and wife who fight furiously for the possession of a child for which neither cares. To herself she kept saying, “They want my husband, do they? Well, I’ll take mighty good care, no matter how much they want him and he wants to go, they don’t get him.”
It made her boil with rage to think of them all, with Dominick at their head, getting everything they wanted and sending her off to Paris, even though Paris might be delightful, and she have a great deal better time there than she ever had in San Francisco.
All these thoughts were in her mind as she walked down town one afternoon for her usual diversion of shopping and promenading. Of late she had not been sleeping well and the fear that this would react upon her looks had spurred her to the unwonted exertion of walking. The route she had chosen was one of those thoroughfares which radiate from Market Street, and though not yet slums, are far removed from the calm, wide gentility of the city’s more dignified highways. With all her cleverness, she had never shaken off the tastes and instincts of the class she had come from. She felt more at home in this noisy byway, where children played on the pavements and there were the house-to-house intimacies, the lack of privacy, of the little town, than she did on the big, clean-swept streets where the houses presented a blank exterior to the gaze, and most of the people were transported in cars or carriages. Even the fact that the Tenderloin was in close proximity did not modify her interest with a counteracting disgust; though she was not one of the women who have a lively curiosity as to that dark side of life, it did not, on the other hand, particularly repel her. She viewed it with the same practical utilitarianism with which she regarded her own virtue. That possession had been precious to her for what she could gain with it. When she had sacrificed it to her ambition, she had not liked giving it up at all, but had reconciled herself to doing so because of the importance of the stake involved.
Walking loiteringly forward she crossed Powell Street, and approached the entrance of that home of vaudeville, the Granada Theater. This was a place of amusement that she much favored, and of which she was a frequent patron. Dominick did not like it, so she generally went to the matinée with one of her sisters. There had been a recent change of bill, and as she drew near she looked over the posters standing by the entrance on which the program for the coming week was printed in large letters. Midway down one of these, her eye was caught by a name and she paused and stood reading the words:
“JAMES DEFAY BUFORD
The Witty, Brilliant and Incomparable
Monologist
In His Unrivaled Monologue
Entitled
KLONDIKE MEMORIES”
She remembered at once that this was the actor Dominick had spoken of as having been snowed in with them at Antelope. Dominick had evidently not expected he would come to San Francisco. He had said the man had been going to act in Sacramento. After standing for some moments looking at the words, she moved on again with the short, mincing step that was habitual to her, and which always made walking a slow and undesirable mode of progression. She seemed more thoughtful than she had been before she saw the program, and for some blocks her face wore an absent and somewhat pensive air of musing.
Her preoccupation lasted up Grant Avenue and down Post Street till it was finally dispelled by the sight of that attractive show-window in which a large dry-goods establishment exhibits the marvels of new millinery. It was April, and the spring fashions were just in from Paris, filling the window with a brilliant display of the newest revolutionary modes of which San Francisco had so far only heard. Women stood staring, some dismayed at the introduction of styles which they felt would have a blighting, not to say obliterating effect on their own beauty. Others, of practical inclinations, studied the new gowns with an eye to discoveries whereby their wardrobes might be induced to assume a deceptive air of second youth.
Berny elbowed her way in among them and pressed herself close to the glass, exploring, with a strained glance, the intricacies of back draperies turned from view. She wished Hazel was there with her. Hazel was wonderfully sharp at seeing how things were put together, and could carry complications of trimming and design in her head without forgetting them or getting them mixed. The discovery that skirts were being cut in a new way gave Berny a shock of painful surprise, especially when she thought of her raspberry crape, still sufficiently new to be kept in its own box between layers of tissue paper, and yet at the stage when the necessity of paying for it was at a comfortable, unvexing distance.
She was standing with her back to the street when a woman next her gave a low exclamation and uttered the name of Mrs. Con Ryan. Berny wheeled about just as the exceedingly smart victoria of Mrs. Cornelius Ryan drew up at the curb and that august matron prepared to descend from it. In these afternoon shopping excursions she had often met her mother-in-law, often met her and invariably seen her turn her head and fix her eyes in the opposite direction. Now, however, matters were on another footing. If Mrs. Ryan had not recognized Berny, or spoken to her, or received her, she had at least opened negotiations with her, negotiations which presupposed a knowledge of her existence if not a desire for her acquaintance. Berny did not go so far as to anticipate a verbal greeting, but she thought, in consideration of recent developments, she was warranted in expecting a bow.
She moved forward almost in Mrs. Ryan’s path, paused, and then looked at the large figure moving toward her with a certain massive stateliness. This time Mrs. Ryan did not turn her head away. Instead, she looked at the young woman directly and steadily, looked at her full in the eye with her own face void of all recognition, impassive and stonily unmoved as the marble mask of a statue. Berny, her half-made bow checked as if by magic, her face deeply flushed, walked on. She moved down the street rapidly, her head held high, trembling with indignation.
Such are the strange, unaccountable contradictions of the female character that she felt more incensed by this cut than by any previous affront or slight the elder woman had offered her. The anticipated bow, neither thought of nor hoped for till she had seen Mrs. Ryan alighting from the carriage, was suddenly a factor of paramount importance in the struggle between the two. So small a matter as a nod of the elder woman’s head would have made the younger woman more pliable, more tractable and easily managed, than almost any other action on her mother-in-law’s part. Berny, bowed to, would have been a more docile, reasonable person than either Mrs. Ryan or Bill Cannon had had yet to deal with; while Berny, cut, flamed up into a blaze of mutinous fury that, had they known it, would have planted dismay in the breasts of those bold conspirators.
As she walked down the street she was at first too angry to know where she was going, but after a few moments of rapid progress she saw that she was approaching the car line which passed close to her old home. In the excitement of her wrath, the thought of her sisters—the only human beings who could be relied on unquestioningly and ungrudgingly to offer her sympathy—came to her with a sense of consolation and relief. A clock in a window showed her it was nearly five. Hannah would have been home for some time, and Hazel might be expected within an hour. Without more thought she hailed an up-town car.
As the car whisked her up the long hill from Kearney Street she thought what she would say to her sisters. Several times of late she had contemplated letting them into the secrets—or some of the secrets—of her married life and its present complications. She wanted their sympathy, for they were the only people she knew who were interested in her through affection, and did not blame her when she did things that were wrong. She also wanted to surprise them and to impress them. She wanted to see their eyes grow round, and their faces more and more startled, as she told of what Mrs. Ryan was trying to do, and how the sum of one hundred thousand dollars was hers—their sister’s—when she chose to take it. They were good people, the best people for her to tell it to. They did not know too much. They could be relied upon for a blind, uninquiring loyalty, and she could now (as she had before) tell them, not all—just enough—suppressing, as women do, those facts in the story which it were best for her to keep to herself.
She found them both at home, Hazel having been allowed to leave her work an hour earlier than usual. Sitting in a small room in the back of the house, they were surrounded by the outward signs of dressmaking. Yards of material lay over the chairs, and on a small wooden table, which fitted close to her body and upon which portions of the material lay neatly smoothed out, Hannah was cutting with a large pair of shears.
Hazel sat near by trimming a hat, a wide, flat leghorn, round which she twined a wreath of brier roses. Black velvet bows held the wreath in place, and Hazel skewered these down with long black pins, several of which she held in her mouth. Berny knew of old this outburst of millinery activity which always marked the month of April. It was the semi-annual rehabilitation of Pearl’s wardrobe, and was a ceremonial to which all the females of the family were supposed to contribute. In her own day she herself had given time and thought to it. She had even been in sympathy with the idea of the family’s rise and increase of distinction through Pearl, who was going to be many steps farther up the social ladder than her mother and her aunt, if those devoted women could possibly accomplish it.
Now, watching her sisters bent over their tasks after the heat and burden of their own day’s work, she felt a deep, heartfelt sense of gratitude that she had escaped from this humble, domestic sphere in which they seemed so content. Whether Pearl’s summer hat should be trimmed with pink or blue had once been a question which she had thought worthy of serious consideration. How far she had traveled from the world of her childhood could not have been more plainly shown her than by the complete indifference she now felt to Pearl, her hat, and its trimmings.
She had come prepared to surprise her sisters, and to shake out of them, by her revelations, the amazed and shocked sympathy she felt would ease her of her present wrath and pain. She was too overwrought to be diplomatic or to approach the point by preparatory gradations. Thrown back in the one arm-chair in the room, her head so pressed against its back that her hat was thrust forward over her forehead, she told them of her meeting with Mrs. Ryan, and the cut which she had received.
Neither Hannah nor Hazel expressed the outraged astonishment at this insult that Berny had anticipated. In fact, they took it with a tranquillity which savored of indifference. For the moment, she forgot that they knew nothing of her reason for expecting Mrs. Ryan to recognize her, and to her quivering indignation was added a last wounding sense of disappointment. The sight of Hazel, holding the leghorn hat off at arm’s length and studying it with a preoccupied, narrowed eye, was even more irritating than her remark, made mumblingly because of the pins in her mouth:
“I don’t see why you should feel so bad about that. I should think you’d have got sort of used to it by this time. She’s been cutting you for over two years now.”
“Do you think that makes it any better?” said Berny in a belligerent tone, not moving her head, but shifting her eyes to stare angrily at Hazel from under her projecting hat-brim. “Do you think you’d get used to it if Josh’s mother cut you on the street?”
It was hard to compass the idea of Josh’s deceased parent, who had left behind her a memory of almost unique meekness, cutting anybody. It made Hazel laugh and she had to bend her head down and take the pins out of her mouth before she could answer.
“Well, if she’d been doing it for over two years, I think I’d have got sort of broken to it by now,” she said. “What makes you so mad about it all of a sudden?”
“Maybe things aren’t just the same as they’ve been for the last two years,” said Berny darkly. “Maybe there’s a reason for Mrs. Ryan’s bowing to me.”
These words had the effect that the victim of the cut desired. Her sisters paused in their work and looked at her. There had been times lately when Hannah had felt uneasy about Berny’s fine marriage, and she now eyed the younger woman with sober intentness over the glasses pushed down toward the tip of her nose.
“Reason?” said Hazel. “What reason? Have you and she been trying to make up?”
“I don’t know whether you’d call it that or not,” said Berny.
“Have things really changed between you and her, Berny?” she asked gravely.
Hannah put down the shears and laid her hands on the table. She felt the coming revelations.
“Well, yes, I guess you’d say they have,” said Berny slowly, letting every word make its impression. “She’s trying to buy me off to leave Dominick. I suppose you’d call that a change.”
If Berny wanted to surprise her sisters, she certainly now had the satisfaction of realizing her hopes. For a moment they stared at her, too amazed to speak, even Hannah, who had scented difficulties, being completely unprepared—after the way of human nature—for the particular difficulty that had cropped up. It was Hazel who first spoke.
“Buy you off to leave Dominick? Give you money to go away from him, do you mean?”
“That’s what I said,” returned her sister with dry grimness. “She’s made me two offers to leave my husband, wants me to get out and, after I’ve gone for a year, ask him to bring suit for desertion.”
“My Lord!” murmured Hannah in a hushed voice of horror.
“Well, that beats anything I’ve ever heard!” exclaimed Hazel. “That beats the ball, and not speaking to you, and all the rest. It’s the worst yet! What’s made her do it? What’s the matter with her?”
“The same thing that’s always been the matter with her—she doesn’t like me, she wants to get rid of me. She tried to freeze me out first by not speaking to me, and leaving us to scramble along the best way we could on Dominick’s salary. Now, she’s seen that that won’t work, and she’s gone off on a new tack. She’s a woman of resources. If she finds the way blocked in one direction, she tries another.”
“She’s actually offered you money to leave Dominick?” asked Hannah. “Said she’d give it to you if you’d desert him and let him get a divorce?”
“That’s it,” returned her sister, in the same hard tone, tapping with her finger-tips on the arms of the chair. “That’s the flattering offer she’s made me twice now.”
“How much did she offer you?” said Hazel.
This was a crucial question. Berny knew its importance and sat up, pushing back her disarranged hat.
“One hundred thousand dollars,” she said calmly.
There was a second pause which seemed charged with astonishment, as with electrical forces. The sisters, their hands fallen in their laps, fastened their eyes on the speaker in a stare of glassy amaze.
“A hundred thousand dollars!” gasped Hazel. “Why—why—Berny!”
She stopped, almost trembling in the excitement of her stunned incredulity.
“A hundred thousand dollars!” Hannah echoed, each word pronounced with slow, aghast unbelief. “Oh, it can’t be that much!”
“It’s that much now,” said Berny, her calmness accentuated to the point of nonchalance, “and if I want I can make them double it, raise it to a quarter of a million. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t so much when you’ve got millions in trunks. What’s that to the Ryans?”
She looked at her sisters with a cool, dispassionate glance, feeling that it had been worth while to tell them. Hannah’s face was a pale, uninteresting mask of shocked surprise—the kind of face with which one would imagine Hannah’s greeting such intelligence. But through the astonishment of Hazel’s a close and intimate understanding of the possibilities of the situation, an eagerness of rising respect for it and for the recipient of such honors, was discernible and appealed to Berny’s vanity and assuaged her more uncomfortable sensations.
“You could get a quarter of a million?” Hazel persisted. “How do you know that?”
Berny looked at her with disdain which was softened by a slight, indulgent smile.
“My dear, if they want it bad enough to offer one hundred thousand, they want it bad enough to offer two. The money is nothing to them, and I’m a good deal. I shouldn’t be surprised if I could get more.” She thought of Bill Cannon’s participation in the matter, and let an expression of sly, knowing mysteriousness cross her face. But Bill Cannon’s participation was a fact she did not intend to mention. He was a part of the story that she had decided to suppress.
“But two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” said Hazel. “Why, it’s a fortune! The interest on it alone would make you rich. You could go to Europe. You could have a house on Pacific Avenue. Just fancy! And three years ago you were working for twenty a week in the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company. Do you remember when they agreed to give you that you thought you were on velvet? Twenty dollars a week! That looks pretty small now, doesn’t it?”
“But she doesn’t intend to take it, Hazel McCrae!” said Hannah in a deep voice of shocked disapproval. “You talk as if she was going to accept their outrageous offer.”
Hazel’s face, which, as her fancy ranged over these attractive possibilities, had shown varying stages of flushed and exhilarated excitement, now suddenly fell. Conscious that she had exhibited a condition of mind that was low and sordid, she hastily sought to obliterate the effect of her words by saying sharply,
“Of course, I knew she wasn’t going to accept. I never had such an idea. I’d be the first one to turn it down. I was just thinking what she could do if she did.”
“Oh, there’s any amount of things I could do,” said Berny. “They want me to go abroad and live there. That was”—she was going to say “one of the conditions,” but this, too, she decided to suppress, and said instead—“one of the things they suggested. They told me the income of the money would go twice as far there. Then the year while I was deserting Dominick—I was to go to Chicago, or New York, and desert him that way—I’d have seven thousand dollars for my expenses. They weren’t mean about it, I’ll say that much for them.”
“And then laying it all out like that!” said Hannah. “It’s just the most scandalous thing I’ve ever heard of. I’ve never had much opinion of Mrs. Ryan, but I really didn’t believe she’d go that far.”
“But Dominick?” said Hazel suddenly; “what about Dominick? What did he say?”
The matter of Dominick was the difficult part of the revelation. Berny felt the necessity of a certain amount of dissembling, and it helped to chill the excitement and heat that had carried her up to her sisters and on to this point. Dominick’s part of the story was one of the subjects upon which she had decided to let her remarks be as notes about the text, and expurgated notes at that. Now, she realized it was a complicated matter of which to tell only half, and looking on the floor pricked the carpet with the tip of her parasol, and tried to maintain her tone of airy indifference.
“Dominick doesn’t know anything about it,” she said. “He’s never to know. They were pretty decided on that point. He’s to be deserted without his own knowledge or consent.”
“But to take his wife away from him!” Hannah cried. “To rob him of her! They must be crazy.”
“Dominick can get along all right without me,” said Dominick’s wife, looking at the tip of her parasol as she prodded the carpet.
Hazel, the married sister, heard something in these words that the spinster did not recognize. A newly-wakened intelligence, startled and suspicious, dawned on her face.
“Dominick’s not so dead in love with me,” continued Berny, with her eyes following the parasol tip. “He could manage to bear his life without me. He—” she paused, and then said, enraged to hear that her voice was husky—“doesn’t care a button whether I live or die.”
The pause that greeted this statement was entirely different from its predecessors. There was amazement in it, and there was pain. Neither listener could for a moment speak; then Hannah said with a solemnity full of dignity,
“I can’t believe that, Berny.”
“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” returned Berny, still not looking up. “If you like to keep on believing lies, it’s all the same to me. But I guess I know more about Dominick Ryan, and what he feels, than you do, and I tell you he doesn’t care a hang for me. He gave up caring”—she paused, a memory of the ball, the quarrel, and the fatal visit to Antelope flashing through her mind—“over a year ago. I guess,” she raised her head and looked coolly at her sisters, “he won’t lay awake nights at the thought of losing me.”
They looked at her without speaking, their faces curiously different in expression from what they had been after her first confessions. All excitement had gone from them. They looked more wounded and hurt than she did. They were women, dashed and mortified, by a piece of news that had abashed them in its admitted failure and humiliation of another woman.
“I—I—can’t believe it,” faltered Hannah. “Dominick’s always so kind, so attentive, so——”
She came to a stop, checked by an illuminating memory of the Sundays on which Dominick now never came to dinner, of his absence from their excursions to the park, of his mysterious mid-winter holiday to the Sierra.
“Have you had a row?” said Hazel. “Everybody has them some time and then you make up again, and it’s just the same as it was before. Fighting with your husband’s different from other fighting. It doesn’t matter much, or last.”
Berny looked down at the parasol tip. Her lips suddenly began to quiver, and tears, the rare burning tears of her kind, pricked into her eyes.
“We haven’t lived together for over eight months,” she said.
The silence that greeted this remark was the heaviest of all the silences.
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” said Hazel, in a low, awed voice.
For a moment, Berny could not answer. She was ashamed and angry at the unexpected emotion which made it impossible for her to command her voice, and made things shine before her eyes, brokenly, as through crystal. She was afraid her sisters would think she was fond of Dominick, or would guess the real source of the trouble.
“I was afraid something was wrong,” said Hannah, mechanically picking up the shears, her face pale and furrowed with new anxieties.
The concern in her tone soothed Berny. It was something not only to have astonished her family, but to have disturbed their peace by a forced participation in her woes. It had been enraging to think of them light-heartedly going their way while she struggled under such a load of care.
“It was all right till last autumn,” she said in a stifled voice, “and then it all got wrong—and—and—now it’s all gone to pieces.”
“But what made Dominick change?” said Hazel, with avid, anxious eagerness. “Everything was happy and peaceful a year ago. What got hold of him to change him?”
Berny felt that she had told enough. It had been harder telling, too, than she had imagined. The last and greatest secret that she had determined to keep from her sisters was that of Dominick’s love for another woman—what she regarded as his transfer of affection, not yet having guessed that his heart had never been hers. Now she raised her head and looked at the two solemn-faced women, angrily and bitterly, through the tears that her eyes still held.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care what’s changed him,” she said defiantly. “I stood by my side of the bargain, and that’s all I know. I’ve made him a good wife, as good a one as I knew how. I’ve been bright and pleasant when his family treated me like dirt. I’ve not complained and I’ve made the best of it, staying indoors and going nowhere, when any other woman would have been getting some sort of fun out of her life. I’ve managed that miserable little flat on not half enough money, and tried to keep out of debt, when any one else in the world would have run up bills all over for Mrs. Ryan to pay. Nobody can say I haven’t done my part all right. Maybe I’ve got my faults—most of us have—but I haven’t neglected my duty this time.”
She rose abruptly from her seat, pushing it back and feeling that she had better go before she said too much. She realized that in her hysterical and overwrought state she might become too loquacious and afterward regret it. For the moment she believed all she said. Her sisters, full of sincere sympathy for her, believed it too, though in periods of cooler reflection they would probably question some of her grievances; notably that one as to the small income, three thousand a year, representing to them complete comfort, not to say affluence.
As she rose, Hazel rose too, her face full of suspicious concern.
“It’s not another woman, is it, Berny?” she almost whispered.
Berny had told so many lies that she did not bother about a few more. Moreover, she was determined not to let her sisters know about Rose Cannon—not yet, anyway.
“No,” she said with short scorn, turning to pick up her feather boa. “Of course it’s not. He’s not that kind of a man. He’s too much of a sissy. Another woman! I’d like to tell him that.”
She gave a sardonic laugh and turned to the glass, disposing her boa becomingly and adjusting her hat. Hannah, shaking herself loose from the encircling embrace of the cutting table, rose too, exclaiming,
“Don’t go yet. You must tell us more of this. I’ve not heard anything for years that’s upset me so. If Dominick’s not in love with somebody else, what’s got into him? Why doesn’t he care for you any more? A man doesn’t stop loving his wife for no cause whatever. It isn’t in human nature.”
“Well, it’s in Dominick’s nature,” said Dominick’s wife, pulling on her gloves. “Maybe that isn’t human nature, but it’s the nature of the man I’m married to and that’s all that concerns me. Remember, you’re not to say a word about this. It’s all a secret.”
“Why should we talk about it?” said the practical Hazel. “It’s bad enough to have had it happen. You don’t want to go round gossiping about a member of your family getting thrown down.”
To their pressing invitations to remain longer, Berny was deaf. She had said her say and wanted to go. The interview had undoubtedly eased her of some of the choking exasperation that had followed Mrs. Ryan’s cut; and it was a source of comfort to think that she had now broken the ice and could continue to come and pour out her wrongs and sorrows into the ever-attentive ears of her sisters. But now she wanted to get away from them, from their penetrative questions, and their frank curiosity, the curiosity of normal, healthy-minded women, whose lives had lacked the change and color of which hers had been full. She cut her good-bys short and left them to their own distracted speculations, staring blankly at each other, amid the scattered millinery of the disordered room.
When she reached home, she found on the hall table a note which the Chinaman told her had been left by a messenger. It was from Bill Cannon and contained but a few lines. These, of a businesslike brevity, expressed the writer’s desire to see her again, and politely suggested that, if she could come to his office on any one of the three specified afternoons, between the hours of two and four, he would be deeply honored and obliged.
Berny, frowning and abstracted, was standing with the note in her hand when Dominick opened the hall door and came up the stairs. His eye casually fell on the square of paper, but he asked no question about it, hardly seemed to see it. Yet her state of suspicion was so sensitively active that his lack of interest seemed fraught with meaning, and pushing the letter back into its envelope she remarked that it was a note from her dressmaker. Even the fact that his answer was an indifferent, barely-articulated sound seemed significant to her, and she took the letter into her bedroom and hid it in her handkerchief box, as though her husband, instead of being the least, was the most curious and jealous of men.
In his “Klondike Monologue” at the Orpheum, Buford, the actor, made a sudden and unexpected hit. The morning after his first appearance, both Dominick and Berny read in the paper eulogistic notices of the new star. Dominick was particularly interested. He remembered Buford’s state of worry while at Antelope and was glad to see that the unlucky player was, in the parlance of his own world, “making good.”
The evening papers contained more laudatory paragraphs. Buford’s act was spoken of with an enthusiasm which taxed the vocabulary of the writers who found that the phrases they had been using to describe the regular vaudeville performances were not adequate for so sparkling an occasion.
It was a rambling monologue of mining-camp anecdotes, recollections, and experiences, delivered with confidential, simple seriousness. Buford’s appearance in an immense, fur-lined overcoat with buttons made of gold nuggets and a voluminous fur cap on his head, was given the last touch of grotesqueness by a tiny tinsel spangle fastened on the end of his nose. This adornment, on his entrance hardly noticeable, was soon the focusing point of every eye. It looked as if it grew on its prominent perch, and as he spoke, a slight, vibrating movement, which he imparted to that portion of his visage, made the tinsel send out continuous, uneasy gleams. The more serious his discourse was and the more portentously solemn his face, the more glimmeringly active was the spangle, and the more hysterically unrestrained became the laughter of the audience. Altogether, Buford had made a success. Three days after his first appearance, people were talking about “The Klondike Monologue” as a few weeks before they had been talking about the last play of Pinero’s as presented by a New York company.
From what Buford had told him, Dominick knew that the actor’s luck had been bad, and that the period of imprisonment at Antelope was a last, crowning misfortune. Through it he feared that he had forfeited his Sacramento engagement, and the young man had a painful memory of the long jeremiad that Buford, in his anxiety and affliction, had poured out to himself and Rose Cannon. That the actor was evidently emerging from his ill fortune was gratifying to Dominick, who, in the close propinquity forced upon them by the restricted quarters of Perley’s Hotel, had grown to like and pity the kindly, foolish and impractical man.
Now, from what he heard, Buford’s hard times should be at an end. Such a hit as he had made should give him the required upward impetus. Men Dominick knew, who had theatrical affiliations, told him that Buford was “made.” The actor could now command a good salary on any of the vaudeville circuits in the country, and if “he had it in him” he might ascend the ladder toward the heights of legitimate comedy. His humorous talent was unique and brilliant. It was odd, considering his age, that it had not been discovered sooner.
Berny was very anxious to see him. Hazel and Josh had seen him on one of the first evenings and pronounced him “simply great.” She extorted a promise from Dominick that, at the earliest opportunity, he would buy tickets for her, and, if he could not accompany her himself, she could go with one of her sisters. Dominick did not want to go. He had no desire to see Buford and be reminded of the three weeks’ dream which had interrupted the waking miseries of his life, and more than that he hated, secretly and intensely, sitting beside Berny, talking to her and listening to her talk, during the three hours of the performance. The horrible falseness of it, the appearance of intimacy with a woman toward whom he only felt a cold aversion, the close proximity of her body which he disliked, even accidentally, to brush against, made him shrink from the thought as from the perpetration of some mean and repulsive deception.
He stopped to buy the tickets one midday on his way to lunch. He made up his mind to buy three, then Berny could either take her two sisters, or Hazel and Josh, whose craving for the theater was an unassuageable passion. The good seats were sold out for days ahead and he had to be content with three orchestra chairs for an evening at the end of the following week. He was turning from the ticket office window when a sonorous voice at his elbow arrested him:
“Mr. Ryan,” it boomed out, “do I see you at last? Ever since my arrival in the city I have hoped for the opportunity of renewing our acquaintance.”
It was Buford, but a rejuvenated and prosperous Buford, the reflection of his good fortune shining from his beaming face and fashionable figure. The red rasped look had left his features and the hollows beneath his high cheek-bones were filled out. He was dressed in gray with an almost foppish nicety, a fedora hat of a paler tint on his head, and a cravat of a dull red rising in a rich puffed effect below his collar. His shoes shone with the glassy polish of new patent leather; the red-brown kid gloves that he carried exhaled an attractive odor of russia-leather. He held out his hand to Dominick, and the young man grasped it with real heartiness.
“Glad to see you, Buford,” he said, “and glad to hear you’ve made such a success of it. I haven’t seen it myself, but I hear it’s a great show.”
Buford, who had seen him buying the tickets, said blandly,
“But you’re going? You’ve been buying tickets, haven’t you? Oh, I’ve got to have your opinion—nobody’s I’d think more of than Mr. Dominick Ryan’s.”
Dominick, with the consciousness that he had just been planning not to go reddening his face, stammered with embarrassed evasiveness,
“I’ve just been buying tickets and couldn’t get them before the end of next week. You’re such a confounded success that everything’s sold out days ahead. My wife wants to see you, and that’s the best I could do for her. Her sister went on the second night and says you’re the hit of the program. And then the papers! You’ll soon be one of the stars of the nation.”
Buford acknowledged these compliments with cool, acquiescent complacence.
“I have struck my gait,” he said, nodding his head in condescending acceptance. “I have at last won my spurs.”
“But you didn’t expect to come down here when you were at Antelope. Didn’t you tell me your engagement was for two weeks in Sacramento, and that you were afraid you’d forfeited it by being snowed in there? How was it you came down after all?”
“The luck turned. The tide that comes in the affairs of men came in mine. I must say it had got down to about the lowest ebb. You’re right about forfeiting my engagement. Got to Sacramento three weeks behind time and found they’d procured a substitute, and all I had for my pains was a blackguarding because the Lord had seen fit to snow me in in the Sierras.”
Dominick laughed, and the actor allowed a slight, sour smile to disturb the professional gravity of his face.
“Yes,” he nodded, “that’s the way of the transgressor, especially when his transgressions ain’t of his own doing. After I’d been there two weeks, I hadn’t a V between me and starvation. I looked for jobs with the water squelching in my boots, and finally I had to do a turn in a fifth-rate variety performance that showed in a sort of cellar down a flight of stairs. That’s where the ‘Klondike Monologue’ was born. Like lots of other good things, it had a pretty mean beginning. I just pieced it together from bits and scraps that were the tailings of the two years I had spent in that Arctic mill up there. It caught on from the start—let the public alone to recognize a good thing when they see one! That dirty cellar was pretty well sprinkled the first week, and the second they had the standing room signs out. I didn’t introduce the spangle till the end of the engagement. Some people think it a great touch.”
He looked with sober questioning at Dominick, who said apologetically,
“So I hear, but I haven’t seen it.”
Buford raised his flexible brows with an air of stimulated, excusing memory.
“True, true,” he replied, “I had forgotten. Two nights after I had introduced the spangle, one of the ‘Granada’ people saw me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I am a true artist; whatever my audience, I give it of my best, and, in that instance, it was only one more case of bread cast upon the waters. There’d been a vacancy here. Estradilla, the Spanish Snake Dancer, was taken suddenly sick, collapsed after her third performance, tied her intestines up in a knot with her act, they say, and the wonder was she hadn’t done it before. Anyhow, they had to substitute in a hurry, heard of my Klondike act and sent a man up to see if I’d do to fill in. The next week I was here and—you know the rest.”
“They say every man has his chance. You didn’t suppose the snowstorm that caught you at Antelope was going to be the foundation of yours?”
Buford raised his brows till they about touched his hair, and said with his most magisterial sonority of tone,
“No, no indeed. The ways of Fate—or let me say Providence—are truly inscrutable. I thought that lock-up in the Sierras would be my undoing, and I’m sure I never imagined the two years I spent in that accursed Arctic were going to return to roost as blessings. I turned my face to the North in a bitter hour, and it was in a bitter hour that I adopted the stage.”
Dominick was exceedingly surprised. He had supposed Buford always to have been an actor, to have been born to it. If he had heard that the man had made his debut as an infant prodigy or even in his mother’s arms in swaddling clothes, he would have felt it was in keeping with Buford’s character, and just what he suggested. Now, in a tone expressing his surprise, the young man queried,
“Then you went on the stage up there? You’ve only been on a few years?”
“Nearly four,” said the actor. He looked down at his shoe for a moment as if considering, and repeated without looking up, “It will be four next September. Trouble drove me to those far distant lands and hard luck drove me on the stage. I’d never had anything to do with it till then; I hadn’t a stage game about me. There’d even been a time when I had a strong prejudice against the theater and never went to one. But a man must live and——”
He stopped, his attention arrested by a hand laid softly on his sleeve. A youth of Hebraic countenance had issued from a door behind him, and, touching his arm with a hesitating, unclean finger, began to speak in a low tone. Buford turned to the boy. Dominick backed away from them toward the box-office window. As they conferred he took a card out of his wallet, and hastily traced the address of the flat below his name. He had it ready to offer Buford, when the actor, his conference over, came toward him.
“Duty calls,” said Buford. “I am sorry, but they want me inside. But this is not going to be our only meeting. I’m booked for two weeks longer here, and I’m hoping to see something more of you.”
Dominick gave him the card, with assurances that he would be glad to see him, and that his own home was a better meeting-place than the bank. At this mark of friendship, the actor was openly gratified. He looked at the card with a smile and said,
“Most certainly I’ll avail myself of this privilege. I hope later to be able to place a box at your disposal. Madame, you say, is very desirous of seeing me. Well, I’ll see to it that she does so under the most favorable conditions. Though I have never met her, I think I may ask you to convey my respects to her.”
He bowed impressively as though saluting Berny in person, and then, with a last dignified farewell to Dominick, turned toward the door which opened at his approach, disclosing the waiting Jew boy. As the actor drew near, Dominick heard the boy break into low-toned remonstrances, and then the door closed upon Buford’s sonorous and patronizing notes of reproval.
The following Sunday, at ten o’clock in the morning, Dominick noiselessly descended the stairs of the flat and let himself out into the street. He had had a sleepless night, and as he stood in the dazzling sunshine, debating which way he should go, his face showed the hollows and lines left by hours of worried wakefulness.
His day—the holiday of his week of steady work—was without engagement. The friend with whom he usually walked over the suburban hills had moved to the country. His rest from labor would take the form of a day spent away from his home in the open air. As he had eaten his breakfast he had planned his itinerary, carefully considering the best distribution of these twelve treasured hours of liberty. He would spend the morning walking, anywhere—the direction did not matter much—anywhere where there was quiet and a view. He would take his lunch at any little joint—country hotel, city chop-house—he happened to pass, and in the afternoon he would walk again, on for hours, probably over the Presidio Hills where the poppies were beginning to gild the slopes, or along the beach where there were unfrequented nooks in which a man could lie and look at the water, and think. A whole day away from Berny and the flat, in the healing balm of the sunshine and the clean, untroubled air, was the best way to renew the fund of philosophy and patience that of late he had felt was almost exhausted.
The ferment of his wakeful night was still in his blood as he walked across the city, aiming for the eminence of Telegraph Hill. He walked slowly without looking up; his eyes on the tip of his cane as it struck the pavement. It was a superb day, calm, still, breathing peace, like that other Sunday when he had gone to the park with the Iversons and seen Rose Cannon. But the splendors of the morning did not divert his mind from its heavy musings. With down-drooped head, watching the striking tip of the cane as though in it there lay some mystic solution of his difficulties, he walked on, a slow-moving figure, a man wrestling with his own particular world-problem, facing his fate and repudiating it.
There had been times lately when he had felt he could no longer endure the present conditions of his life. As he had lain thinking in the darkness of the previous night, it had come upon him, with the clearness of conviction, that he could not stand it. The future with Berny had loomed before him, crushing, unbearable, and he had seen no end to it, and repeated to himself that he must be free of it. It had been awful as a nightmare, and turning on his bed he had wondered how he had endured the situation so long.
Now, as he walked through the sweet, gay morning he felt a renewal of courage and reasoned with himself, using the old arguments with which for two years he had been subduing his rebellion and curbing the passion and impatience of his youth. Because a man had married an uncongenial woman, was that an excuse for him to leave her, to put her away from him when she had honestly tried to live up to her marriage contract? Summing it all up in a sentence—his wife had a bad temper and he had ceased to care for her, was that a reason for him to separate from her?
Last night he had used none of these arguments. He had felt too strongly to reason about the righteousness of moral obligation. Lying in the dark, listening to the striking of the clocks, he had said to himself that he could not stand Berny any longer—he could not live in the house with her. He did not hate her, it was far from that. He wished her well; to hear that she was happy and prosperous somewhere where he did not have to dine with her and sit in the den with her every evening, would have given him the greatest satisfaction. He felt that the sight of her was daily growing more unbearably and unnaturally obnoxious to him. Little personal traits of hers had a strange, maddening power of exciting his dislike. In the evening the rustling of the sheets of the newspaper as she turned and folded them filled him with a secret anger. He would sit silent, pretending to read, waiting for that regular insistent rustling, and controlling himself with an effort. As they sat opposite each other at breakfast, the sound she made as she crunched the toast seemed to contain something of her own hard, aggressive personality in it, and he hated to hear it. In the dead depression of the night, he had felt that to listen to that rustling of newspapers every night and that crunching of toast every morning was a torment he could no longer bear.
In the clear light of the morning, patience had come and the old standards of restraint and forbearance reasserted themselves. The familiar pains, to which he had thought himself broken, had lost much of their midnight ghoulishness. The old ideals of honor and obligation, with which he had been schooling himself for two years, came back to his mind with the unerring directness of homing pigeons. He went over the tale of Berny’s worthiness and his own responsibility in the misfortunes of her life and disposition. It was a circular process of thought that always returned to the starting place: what right had he to complain of her? Had not most of the disappointments that had soured and spoiled her come from his doing, his fault, his people?
He breathed a heavy sigh and looked up. To this question and its humbly acquiescing answer these reflections always brought him. But to-day it was hard to be acquiescent. The rebellion of the night was not all subdued. The splendor of the morning, the pure arch of sky, the softness of the air, called to him to rejoice in his strength, to be glad, and young. He raised his head, breathing in the sweet freshness, and took off his hat, letting the sun pour its benediction on his head. His spirit rose to meet this inspiring, beneficent nature, not in exhilaration, but in revolt. The thought of Rose gripped him, and in the strength of his manhood he longed for her.
He ascended the hill by one of the streets on its southern slope, violently steep, the upward leaps of its sidewalk here and there bridged by flights of steps. Every little house was disgorging its inmates, garbed in the light Sunday attire of the Californian on pleasure bent. The magnificent day was calling them, not to prayer and the church, but to festival. Families stood on the sidewalks, grouped round the Sunday symbol of worship, a picnic-basket. Lovers went by in smiling pairs, arm linked in arm. A pagan joy in life was calling from every side, from the country clothed in its robe of saffron poppies, from the sky pledged to twelve hours of undimmed blue, from the air mellowed to a warmth that never burns, from the laughter of light hearts, the smiles of lovers, the eyes of children.
Dominick went up the hill in the clear, golden sunlight, and in his revolt he pushed Berny from his mind, and let Rose come in her place. His thoughts, always held from her, sprang at her, encircled her, seemed to draw her toward him as once his arms had done. She was a sacred thing, the Madonna of his soul’s worship, but to-day she seemed to bend down from her niche with less of the reverenced saint than of the loving woman in the face his fancy conjured up.
Standing on the summit of the hill, where the wall of the quarry drops down to the water front and the wharves, he relinquished himself to his dream of her. The bay lay at his feet, a blue floor, level between rusty, rugged hills. There was an island in it, red-brown, incrusted with buildings, that seemed to clutch their rocky perch with long strips and angles of wall. In the reach of water just below there was little shipping, only a schooner beating its way to sea. The wind was stiffer down there than on the sheltered side of the hill. The schooner, with sails white as curds against the blue, was tacking, a long, slantwise flight across the ruffled water. She left a thin, creamy line behind her which drifted sidewise into eddying curves like a wind-lashed ribbon. Dominick, his eyes absently on her, wondered if she were bound for the South Seas, those waters of enchantment where islands, mirrored in motionless lagoons, lie scattered over plains of blue.
A memory crossed his mind of a description of some of these islands given him by a trader he had once met. They were asylums, lotus-eating lands of oblivion, for law-breakers. Those who had stepped outside the pale, who had dared defy the world’s standards, found in them a haven, an elysian retreat. They rose before his mental vision, palm-shaded, lagoon-encircled, played upon by tropic breezes, with glassy waves sliding up a golden beach. There man lived as his heart dictated, a real life, a true life, not a bitter tale of days in protesting obedience to an immutable, heart-breaking law. There he and Rose might live, lost to the places they had once filled, hidden from the world and its hard judgments.
The thought seized upon his mind like a drug, and he stood in a tranced stillness of fascinated imagination, his eyes on the ship, his inner vision seeing himself and Rose standing on the deck. He was so held under the spell of his exquisite, enthralling dream, that he did not see a figure round the corner of the rough path, nor notice its slow approach. But he felt it, when its casual, roaming glance fell on him. As if called, he turned sharply and saw Rose standing a few yards away from him, looking at him with an expression of affrighted indecision. As his glance met hers, the dream broke and scattered, and he seemed to emerge out of a darkness that had in it something beautiful and baleful, into the healthy, pure daylight.
The alarm in Rose’s face died away, too. For a moment she stood motionless, then moved toward him slowly, with something of reluctance about her approach. She seemed to be coming against her will, as if obeying a summons in his eyes.
“I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “And then when I saw it was, I was going to steal away before you saw me. But you turned suddenly as if you heard me.”
“I felt you were there,” he answered.
It was natural that with Rose he should need to make no further explanation. She understood as she would always understand everything that was closely associated with him. He would never have to explain things to her, as he never, from their first meeting, felt that he needed to talk small talk or make conversation.
She came to a stop beside him, and they stood for a silent moment, looking down the bare wall of the quarry, a raw wound in the hill’s flank, to the docks below where the masts of ships rose in a forest, and their lean bowsprits were thrust over the wharves.
“You came just in time,” he said. “I walked up here this morning to have a think. I don’t know where the think was going to take me when you came round that corner and stopped it. What brought you here?”
“Nothing in particular. It was such a fine morning I thought I’d just ramble about, and I came this way without thinking. My feet brought me without my knowledge.”
“My think brought you,” he said. “That’s the second time it’s happened. It was a revolutionary sort of think, and there was a lot about you in it.”
He looked down at her, standing by his shoulder, and met her eyes. They were singularly pellucid, the clearest, quietest eyes he thought he had ever looked into. His own dropped before them to the bay below, touched and then quickly left the schooner which was beating its way toward them on the return tack.
“If you could only always come this way when I want you, everything would be so different, so much easier,” he said in a low tone. “I was surrounded by devils and they were getting tight hold of me when you came round that corner.”
He glanced at her sidewise with a slight, quizzical smile.
This time she did not answer his look, but with her eyes on the bay, her brows drawn together, asked,
“New devils or old ones?”
“The old ones, but they’ve grown bigger and twice as hard to manage lately. They——” he broke off, his voice suddenly roughened, and said, “I don’t seem to know how to live my life.”
He turned his face away from her. The demons she had exorcised had left him weakened. In the bright sunshine, with the woman he loved beside him, he felt broken and beaten down by the hardships of his fate.
“Sit down and talk to me,” she said quietly. “No one can hear you. It’s like being all alone in the world up here on the hilltop. We can sit on this stone.”
There was a broken boulder behind them, close to the narrow foot-way, and she sat on it, motioning him to a flat piece of rock beside her. Her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her loose gray coat, the wisps of fair hair that escaped below the rim of her hat fanning up and down in faint breaths of air, like delicate threads of seaweed in ocean currents.
“Tell me the whole thing,” she said. “You and I have never talked much about your affairs. And what concerns you concerns me.”
He pricked at the earth with the tip of his cane, ashamed of his moment of weakness, and yet fearing if he told her of his cares it might return.
“It’s just what you know,” he began slowly. “Only as every day goes by it seems to get worse. I’ve never told you much about my marriage. I’ve never told anybody. Many men make mistakes in choosing a wife and find out, and say to themselves early in the game, that they have made a mistake and must abide by it. I don’t think I’m weaker than they are, but somehow——”
He stopped and looked at the moving tip of his cane. She said nothing, and after taking a deep breath he went on.
“I knew all about her when I married her. I was young, but I wasn’t a green fool. Only I didn’t seem to realize, I didn’t guess, I didn’t dream, that she was going to stay the way she was. I seemed to be at the beginning of a sort of experiment that I was sure was going to turn out well. I didn’t love her, but I liked her well enough, and I was going to try my best to have things go smoothly and make her happy. When she was my wife, when I’d try to make everything as comfortable and pleasant as I could, then I expected she’d—she’d—be more like the women men love, and even if they don’t love, manage to get on with. But it didn’t seem to go well even in the beginning, and now it’s got worse and worse. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’m not one of those fellows who can read a woman like a book. When a person tells me a thing, I think they mean it; I’m not looking into them to see if they mean just the opposite.”
He stopped again and struck lightly at a lump of earth with his cane. He had pushed his hat back from his forehead and his face bore an expression of affected, boyish nonchalance which was extremely pathetic to Rose.
“Maybe there are men who could stand it all right. She’s very nice part of the time. She’s a first-class housekeeper. I give her two hundred dollars a month, and on that little bit she runs the flat beautifully. And she’s quiet. She doesn’t want to be out all the time, the way some women do. She’s as domestic as possible, and she’s been very decent and pleasant since I came back. The way she was treated over the ball would have r’iled any woman. I didn’t tell you about that—it’s a mean story—but she got no invitation and was angry and flared up. We had a sort of an uncomfortable interview, and—and—that was the reason I went to Antelope. I didn’t think I’d ever go back to her then. I was pretty sore over it. But—” he paused, knocking the lump of clay into dust, “I thought afterward it was the right thing to do. I’d married her, you see.”
Rose did not speak, and after a moment he said in a low voice,
“But it’s—it’s—awfully hard to live with a person you don’t get on with. And it’s the sort of thing that goes on and on and on. There isn’t any end; there isn’t any way out.”
Once more he stopped, this time clearing his throat. He cleared it twice, and then said,
“I oughtn’t to say this. I oughtn’t to complain. I know I’m a chump and a coward to talk this way to you, but—” he dropped his voice to a note of low, inward communing, and said, “it’s so hopeless. I can’t see what to do.”
He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the head of his cane, hiding his face from her. The silence between them vibrated with the huskiness of his voice, the man’s voice, the voice of power and protection, roughened with the pain he was unused to and did not know how to bear.
Rose sat looking at him, her soul wrung with sympathy. Her instinct was to take the bowed head in her arms and clasp it to her bosom, not as a woman in love, but as a woman torn by pity for a suffering she could not alleviate. She made no movement, however, but kept both hands deep in her pockets, as she said,
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t talk this way to me. I think I’m the one person in the world that you ought to speak to about it.”
“I can’t talk to anybody else, not to any friend, not to my own mother. It’s my affair. No one else had any responsibility in it. I brought it on myself and I’ve got to stand by it myself. But you—you’re different.”
He drew himself up, and, staring out into the great wash of sun and air before him, went on in a louder voice, as if taking a new start.
“I was thinking last night about it, looking it in the face. The dark’s the best time for that, you seem to see things clearer, more truthfully. And I came to the conclusion it would be better if I ended it. I didn’t see that I had any obligation to go on martyrizing myself for ever. I didn’t see that anybody was benefiting by it. I thought we’d be happier and make something better of our lives if we were apart, in different houses, in different towns.”
“Does she want to leave you?”
The question seemed to touch a nerve that startled and then stiffened him. He answered it with his head turned half toward her, the eyebrows lifted, a combative note in his voice:
“I don’t know whether she does or not.” He stopped and then said, with his face flushing, “No, I don’t think she does.”
“How can you leave her then?”
“Well, I can—” he turned on her almost angrily and met her clear eyes. “Oh, I can’t go into particulars,” he said sharply, looking away again. “It’s not a thing for you and me to discuss. Incompatibility is a recognized ground of separation.”
He fell to striking the lump of clay again, and Rose said, as if offering the remark with a sort of tentative timidity,
“You said just now you had nothing to complain of against her. It doesn’t seem fair to leave a woman—a wife—just because she’s hard to live with and you no longer like her.”
“Would you,” he said with a manner so full of irritated disagreement as to be almost hectoring, “advocate two people living on together in a semblance of friendship, who are entirely uncongenial, rub each other the wrong way so that the sight of one is unpleasant to the other?”
“Are you sure that’s the way she feels about you?”
He again looked away from her, and answered in a sullen tone, as though against his will,
“I don’t know.”
They were silent for a space, and he went on.
“Doesn’t it strike you as wrong, cowardly, mean, for a man and woman to tear their lives to pieces out of respect for what the world says and thinks? Every semblance of love and mutual interest has gone from our companionship. Isn’t it all wrong that we should make ourselves miserable to preserve the outward forms of it? We’re just lying to the world because we haven’t got the sand to tell the truth. You ask me if my views on this matter are hers. I don’t know, that’s the truth.” A memory of Berny’s futile and pathetic efforts to make friends with him on his return swept over him and forced him to say, “Honestly, I don’t think she wants to leave me. I think the situation doesn’t drive her crazy the way it does me. I think she doesn’t mind it. I don’t know why, but she doesn’t seem to. But surely, any woman living would rather be free of a man she no longer cared for, than forced to live on in a false relation with him, one irritating the other, the two of them every day growing more antagonistic.”
“She would not want to be free if she loved him.”
“Loved him!” he ejaculated, with angry scorn. “She never loved me or anybody else. Love is not in her. Oh, you don’t know! I thought last night I’d offer her all I had, the flat, the furniture, my salary, everything I could rake and scrape together, and then I’d tell her I was going to leave her, that I couldn’t stand living that way any longer. I was going to take a room somewhere and give her everything I could. I was going to be as generous to her as I knew how. I’d not say one word against her to anybody. That was what I thought I’d do last night.”
“But this morning you think differently.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because those are not your real thoughts—they’re the dark, exaggerated ones that come when a person lies awake at night. It’s as if, because you couldn’t see your surroundings, you were in another sort of world where the proportions are different. You couldn’t do that to your wife. You couldn’t treat her that way. You say in many ways she’s been a good wife. It isn’t she that’s stopped caring, or finds her life with you disagreeable.”
“Then, am I to suffer this way for ever—see my life ruined for a fault man after man commits and goes scott free?”
“Your life isn’t ruined. Things don’t last at such a pressure. Something will change it. By and by, you’ll look back on this and it’ll seem hundreds of miles away and you’ll wonder that you were so discouraged and hopeless.”
“Yes,” he said bitterly, “maybe when I’m fifty. It’s a long time between then and now, a long time to be patient.”
Manlike, he was wounded that the woman of his heart should not side with him in everything, even against his own conscience. Had Rose been something closer to him, a sister, a wife, this would have been one of the occasions on which he would have found fault with her and accused her of disloyalty.
“I thought you’d understand,” he said, “I thought you’d see how impossible it is. You make me feel that I’m a whining coward who has come yelping round like a kicked dog for sympathy.”
“I care so much that I do more than sympathize,” she said in a low voice.
This time he did not answer, feeling ashamed at his petulance.
“With any one else it would be just sympathy,” she said, “but with you there’s more than that. It’s because I care, that I expect more and demand more. Other men can do the small, cowardly, mean things that people do, and find excuses for, but not you. I could make excuses for them too, but I must never have to make excuses for you. You’re better than that, you’re yourself, and you do what’s true to yourself and stand on that. You’ve got to do and be the best. Maybe it won’t be what you want or what’s most comfortable, but that mustn’t matter to you. If you’re not to be happy that mustn’t matter either. What pleases you and me mustn’t matter if it’s not the thing for a man like you to do. You can’t shirk your responsibilities. You can’t stick to something you’ve done just while it’s pleasant and then, when it’s hard, throw it up. Lots of people do that, thousands of them. Just as you said now—hundreds of men do what you have done and go scott free. That’s for them to do if they want to, but not for you. Let them drop down if they want, that’s no reason why you should. Let them go on living any way that’s agreeable to them, you know what you ought to do and you must do it. It doesn’t matter about them, or the world, or what anybody says. The only thing that matters is that the thing you know in your heart is the thing that’s true for you.”
“You expect too much of weak human nature,” he said.
“No,” she answered, “I don’t. I only expect what you can do.”
He turned and looked at her.
“Then I’m to live for the rest of my life with a wife I don’t care for, separated from the woman I love? What is there in that to keep a man’s heart alive?”
“The knowledge that we love each other. That’s a good deal, I think.”
It was the first time she had said in words that she loved him. There was no trace of embarrassment or consciousness on her face; instead she seemed singularly calm and steadfast, much less moved than he. Her words shook him to the soul. He turned his eyes from her face and grasping for her hand, clasped it, and pressed it to his heart, and to his lips, then loosed it and rose to his feet, saying, as if to himself,
“Yes, that’s a good deal.”
There was silence between them for some minutes, neither moving, both looking out at the hills and water. From the city below, sounds of church bells came up, mellow and tranquil, ringing lazily and without effort. Other sounds mingled with them, refined and made delicate by distance. It was like being on an island floating in the air above the town. Rose got up and shook the dust from her coat.
“The churches are coming out, it must be nearly one. It will be lunch-time before I get home.”
He did not turn or answer, but stood with his hand on the metal rope that protected the quarry’s ledge, looking down. Her eyes followed his, and then brought up on the schooner bearing away on its long tack, strained and careening in the breeze that, down there in the open, blew fresh and strong from the great Pacific.
“It’s a schooner,” she said absently. “Where do you suppose it’s going?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere a long way off, I hope. My devils are sailing away on it.”
They stood side by side, gazing down at it till she moved away with a sudden “Good-by.”
“Good-by,” he answered, and stretched out his hand.
But she was already some feet in advance and had begun to move quickly.
“Good-by, Rose,” he cried after her, with something in his voice of the wistful urgency in a child’s when it is left behind.
“Good-by,” she called over her shoulder without looking back. “Good-by.”
He followed her with his eyes till she disappeared round the bend of the path, then turned back and again dropped his glance to the schooner.
He stood watching it till it passed out of sight beneath the shoulder of the hill, straining and striving like a wild, free creature in its forward rush for the sea.
Berny had been turning over in her mind the advantages of accepting the money—had been letting herself dwell upon the delights of possible possession—when at the Sunday dinner that afternoon Josh McCrae threw her back into the state of incensed rejection with which she had met the first offer. With his face wreathed in joyous grins, he had apprised her of the fact that only an hour earlier, while walking on Telegraph Hill, he had seen Dominick there talking with Miss Cannon.
A good deal of query followed Josh’s statement. There was quite an outburst of animated interrogations rising from the curiosity the Iversons felt concerning Bill Cannon’s daughter, and under cover of it Berny controlled her face and managed to throw in a question or two on her own account. There had been a minute—that one when Josh’s statement had struck with a shocking unexpectedness on her consciousness—when she had felt and looked her wrath and amaze. Then she had gripped her glass and drunk some water and, swallowing gulpingly, had heard her sister’s rapid fire of questions, and Josh, proud to have imparted such interesting information, answering importantly. Putting down her glass, she said quite naturally,
“Where did you say you saw them—near the quarry?”
“Just by the edge, talking together. I was going to walk along and join them, and then I thought they looked so sort of sociable, I’d better not butt in. Dominick got to know her real well up in the Sierra, didn’t he?”
“Yes, of course,” she said hurriedly. “They grew to be quite friends. They must have met by accident on the hill. Dominick’s always walking in those queer, deserted places.”
“You haven’t got acquainted with her yet, have you?” said the simple Josh, whose touch was not of the lightest. “It would be a sort of grind on the Ryans if you get really solid with her.”
“Oh, I can know her whenever I want,” Berny answered airily, above a discomfort of growing revelation that was almost as sharp as a pain. “Dominick’s several times asked me if I wanted to meet her, but it always was at times when I’d other things to do. We’re going to ask her to the flat to tea some time.”
On ordinary occasions, Berny would never have gone to this length of romantic invention, for she was a judicious liar and believed, with the sage, that a lie was too valuable a thing to waste. But just now she was too upset, too preyed upon by shock and suspicion, to exercise an artistic restraint, and she lied recklessly, unmindful of a future when her listeners would expect to see her drafts on the bank of truth cashed.
She was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, but it was not till she had reached her own home, silent in its untenanted desertion, that she had an opportunity to turn the full vigor of her mind on what she had heard.
She had been jealous of Rose since that fatal Sunday when she had discovered why Dominick was changed. It was not the jealousy of disprized love, it was not the jealousy of thwarted passion. It was a subtle compound of many ingredients, the main one a sense of bursting indignation that two people—one of them a possession of her own—should dare to seek for happiness where she had found only dullness and disappointment. She had an enraging premonition that Rose would probably succeed where she had failed. It made her not only jealous of Rose, it made her hate her.
Josh’s words increased this, and caused her suspicions, which, if not sleeping, had of late been dormant, to wake into excited activity. Dominick’s lonely Sunday walks she now saw shared by the girl who was trying to buy his freedom. Incidents that before she had taken at their face value now were suddenly fraught with disturbing significance. Why did Dominick go out so often in the evening? Since the moonlight night, he had been out twice, once not coming back till eleven. The confirmation of sight could hardly have made her more confident that he must spend these stolen hours with Rose Cannon in the palatial residence on Nob Hill. And it was not the most soothing feature in the case that Berny should picture them in one of the artistically-furnished parlors of which she had heard so much and seen nothing but the linings of the window curtains. Here, amid glories of upholstery, from the sight of which she was for ever debarred, Rose and Dominick talked of the time when he should be free. Berny, like the tiger lashing itself to fury with its own tail, thought of what they said, till she became sure her imaginings were facts; and the more she imagined, the more enraged and convinced she became.
She put from her mind all intention of ever taking the money. She wanted it desperately, terribly; she wanted it so much that when she thought of it it made her feel sick, but the joys of its possession were at the unrealizable distance of dreams, while the fact of her husband’s being enticed away by another woman was a thing of close, immediate concern, a matter of the moment, as if some one were trying to pick her pocket. As an appurtenance of hers, Dominick might not have been a source of happiness, but that was no reason why he should be a source of happiness to some one else.
Berny did not argue with any such compact clearness. She was less lucid, less defined and formulated in her ideas and desires than she had been when Bill Cannon made the first offer. Anger had thickened and obscured her clarity of vision. Suspicions, harbored and stimulated by a mind which wished for confirmation of the most extravagant, had destroyed the firm and well-outlined conception of what she wanted and was willing to fight for. In fact, she had passed the stage in the controversy when she was formidable because she stood with the strength of sincerity in her position, her demands, and refusals. Now the integrity of her defiance was gone. She wanted the money. She wanted to take it, and her refusal to do so was false to herself and to her standards.
She knew that the interview for which Bill Cannon had asked was for a last, deciding conversation. He was to make his final offer. It was a moment of torture to her when she wondered what it would be, and her mind hovered in distracted temptation over the certain two hundred thousand dollars and the possible quarter of a million. It was then that she whipped up her wrath, obscured for the moment by the mounting dizziness of cupidity, and thought of Rose and Dominick in the Japanese room, or the Turkish room, or the Persian room, into which she had never been admitted. The thought that they were making love received a last, corrosive bitterness from the fact that Berny could not see the beautiful and expensive surroundings of these sentimental passages.
She was in this state of feverish distractedness when she went to Bill Cannon’s office. She had chosen the last of the three days he had specified in his note, and had left the flat at the time he had mentioned as the latest hour at which he would be there. She had chosen the last day as a manner of indicating her languid interest in the matter to be discussed, and had also decided to be about fifteen minutes late, as it looked more indifferent, less eager. Bill Cannon would never know that she was dressed and ready half an hour before she started, and had lounged about the flat, watching the clocks, and starting at every unrecognized sound.
She was received with a flattering deference. As her footstep sounded on the sill of the outer office, a face was advanced toward one of the circular openings in the long partition, immediately disappeared, and then a door was thrown back to admit to her presence a good-looking, well-dressed young man. His manner was all deferential politeness. A murmur of her name, just touched with the delicately-questioning quality imparted by the faintest of rising inflections, accompanied his welcoming bow. Mr. Cannon was expecting her in the private office. Special instructions had been left that she should be at once admitted. Would she be kind enough to step this way?
Berny followed him down the long strip of outer office where it flanked the partition in which the regularly-recurring holes afforded glimpses of smooth bent heads. She walked lightly, and had an alert, wary air as though it might be a good thing to be prepared for an ambush. She had been rehearsing her part of the interview for days; and like other artists, now that the moment of her appearance was at hand, felt extremely nervous, and had a sense of girding herself up against unforeseen movements on the part of the foe.
Nothing, however, could have been more disarmingly friendly than the old man’s greeting. As the door opened and the clerk pronounced her name, he rose from his seat and welcomed her in a manner which was a subtle compound of simple cordiality and a sort of masonic, unexpressed understanding, as between two comrades bound together by a common interest. Sitting opposite him in one of the big leather chairs, she could not but feel some of her resentment melting away, and her stiffly-antagonistic pose losing something of its rigidity as he smiled indulgently on her, asking about herself, about Dominick, finally about her sisters, with whose names and positions he appeared flatteringly familiar.
Berny answered him cautiously. She made a grip at her receding anger, conscious that she needed all her sense of wrong to hold her own against this crafty enemy. Even when he told her he had heard with admiration and wonder of Hannah’s fine record in the primary school department, her smile was guarded, her answer one of brief and watchful reserve. She wished he would get to the point of the interview. Her mind could not comfortably contain two subjects at once, and it was crammed and running over with the all-important one of the money. Her eyes, fixed on him, did not stray to the furnishings of the room or the long windows that reached to the ceiling and through the dimmed panes of which men on the other side of the alley stood looking curiously down on her.
“Well,” he said, when he had disposed of Hannah’s worthiness and even celebrated the merits of Josh in a sentence of appreciation, “it’s something to have such a good sterling set of relations. They’re what make the ‘good families’ in our new West out here. And they’re beginning to understand that in Europe. When they see your people in Paris, they’ll recognize them as the right kind of Americans. The French ain’t as effete as you’d think from what you hear. They know the real from the imitation every time. They’ve had their fill of Coal Oil Johnnys and spectacular spenders. What they’re looking for is the strong man and woman who have carved out their own path.”
Berny’s eyes snapped into an even closer concentration of attention.
“Maybe that’s so,” she said, “but I don’t see when my sisters are ever going to get to Paris.”
“They’ll go over to see you,” he answered. “I guess I could manage now and then to get ’em passes across the continent.”
He rested one elbow on the desk against which he was sitting, and with his hand caressing his short, stubby beard, he looked at Berny with eyes of twinkling good nature.
“Come to think of it,” he added, “I guess I could manage the transportation across the ocean, too. It oughtn’t to cost ’em, all told, more’n fifty dollars. It seems hard luck that Miss Hannah, after a lifetime of work, shouldn’t see Paris, and——”
“What makes you think I’m going to be there?” said Berny sharply. She found any deviation from the subject in hand extremely irritating, and her manner and voice showed it.
“Oh, of course you are,” he said, with a little impatient, deprecating jerk of his head. “You can’t be going to persist in a policy that’s simply cutting your own throat.”
“I rather fancy I am,” she answered in a cool, hard tone. To lend emphasis to her words, she unbent from her upright attitude and leaned against the chair-back in a sudden assumption of indifference. Her eyes, meeting his, were full of languid insolence.
“I don’t feel that I’ll go to Paris at all,” she said. “I think little old San Francisco’s good enough for me.”
He looked away from her at the papers on the desk, eyed them for a thoughtful moment, and then said,
“I didn’t think you were as short-sighted as that. I’ll tell you fair and square that up to this I’ve thought you were a pretty smart woman.”
“Well, I guess from this on, you’ll have to put me down a fool.”
She laughed, a short, sardonic laugh, and her adversary smiled politely in somewhat absent response. With his eyes still on the papers, he said,
“No, no—I can’t agree to that. Short-sighted is the word. You’re not looking into the future, you’re not calculating on your own powers of endurance. How much longer do you think you can stand this battle with your husband and the Ryans?”
In the dead watches of the night, Berny had asked herself this question, and found no answer to it. She tried to laugh again, but it was harder and less mirthful than before.
The old man leaned forward, shaking an admonitory forefinger at her.
“Don’t you know, young woman, that’s a pretty wearing situation? Don’t you know to live in a state of perpetual strife will break down the strongest spirit? The dropping of water will wear away a stone. You can’t stand the state of siege and warfare you’ve got yourself into much longer. Your rage is carrying you along now. You’re mad as a whole hive full of hornets and the heat of it’s keeping you going, furnishing fuel to the engines, so to speak. But you can’t keep up such a clip. You’ll break to pieces and you’ll break suddenly. Then what’ll happen? Why, the Ryans’ll come with a big broom and sweep the pieces out. They won’t leave one little scrap behind. That flat on Sacramento Street will be swept as clean of you as if you’d never had your dresses hanging in the cupboard or your toothbrush on the wash-stand. Old Delia’s a great housekeeper. When she gets going with a broom there’s not a speck escapes her.”
His narrowed eyes looked into hers with that boring steadiness that she was beginning to know. He was not smiling now, rather he looked a man who knew he was talking of very momentous things and wanted his companion to know it too.
“That’s all talk,” Berny snapped. “If that’s all you’ve got to say to me, I’d better be going.”
“No, no,” he stretched out an opened hand and with it made a down-pressing gesture that was full of command. “Don’t move yet. These are just suggestions of mine, suggestions I was making for your good. Of course, if you don’t care to follow them, it’s your affair, not mine. I’ve done my duty, and, after all, that’s what concerns me most. What I asked you to come here for to-day was to talk about this matter, to talk further, to thresh it out some more. I’ve seen Mrs. Ryan since our last meeting.”
He paused, and Berny sat upright, her eyes on him in a fixity of listening that was almost a glare. She was tremulously anxious and yet afraid to hear the coming words.
“What did she say?” she asked with the same irritation she had shown before.
“She doubles her offer to you. She’ll give you two hundred thousand dollars to leave her son.”
“Well, I won’t,” said Berny, drawing herself to the edge of the chair. “She can keep her two hundred thousand dollars.”
“That two hundred thousand dollars, well invested, would give an income of from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. On that, in Paris, you’d be a rich woman.”
“I guess I’ll stay a poor one in San Francisco.”
He eyed her ponderingly over the hand that stroked his beard.
“I wonder,” he said slowly, “what’s making you act like this? You stump me. Here you are, poor, treated like dirt, ostracized as if you were a leper, with the most powerful family in California your open enemy, and you won’t take a fortune that’s offered you without a condition, and go to a place where you’d be honored and courted and could make yourself anything you’d like. I can’t make it out. You beat me.”
Berny was flattered. Even through the almost sickening sense of longing that the thought of the lost two hundred thousand dollars created in her, she was conscious of the gratified conceit of the woman who is successfully mysterious.
“Don’t bother your head about it,” she said as lightly as she could. “Think I’m crazy, if that makes it any easier for you.”
“I can’t think that,” he answered, conveying in the accented monosyllable his inability to think lightly of her mental equipment. “There’s something underneath it all I don’t know. You’ve not been quite open, quite as open as I think my frankness deserves. But, of course, a man can’t force a lady’s confidence. If you don’t want to give me yours, I’ve got to be content without it.”
Berny emitted a vague sound of agreement. She once more drew herself to the edge of the chair, taking the renewed, arranging grip of departure on her purse. She wanted to go.
“Well,” she said with the cheerful lengthening of the word, which is the precursor of the preliminary sentence of farewell, “I guess——” but he stopped her again with the outspread, authoritative hand.
“Don’t be in such a hurry; I’ve not finished yet. There’s more to be said, and it’s worth losing a few moments over.” His face was so much more commanding than his words that she made no attempt to move, though each minute deepened her desire to leave.
“This is just between you and me,” he went on slowly, his voice lowered, dropped to the key of confidences. “It’s a little matter between us that no one else needs to know anything about. My part of it just comes from the fact that I want to do a good turn not only to Delia Ryan, but to you. I’m sorry for you, young woman, and I think you’re up against it. Now, here’s my proposition; I’ll add something to that money myself. I’ll give you another hundred thousand. I’ll put it with Mrs. Ryan’s pile, and it’ll run your fortune up well past a quarter of a million.”
His eyes fixed upon her were hard in his benevolently-smiling face.
“What do you think about it?” he asked, as she was speechless. “Three hundred thousand dollars in a lump’s a goodish bit of money.”
Berny felt dizzy. As her rancor had seemed slipping from her in the earlier part of the interview, now she felt as if her resolution was suddenly melting. She was confused between the strangling up-rush of greed and the passion that once again rose in her against the old man, who showed such a bold determination to sweep her from his daughter’s path. She was no longer mistress of herself. Inward excitement, the unfamiliar struggle with temptation, had upset and unnerved her. But she did not yet know it, and she answered slowly, with a sort of sullenness, that might have passed as the heaviness of indifference.
“What do you want to give it to me for?”
“Because I’m sorry for you. Because I want you to get out of this hole you’re in, and go and make something of your life.”
Before she knew it, Berny said low, but with a biting incisiveness,
“Oh, you liar!”
Cannon was surprised. He looked for a staring moment at her pale face, stiff over its strained muscles, and said in a tone of cheerful amaze,
“Now, what do you mean by that?”
“Just what I say,” she said. “You’re a liar and you know it. Every word you’ve said to me’s been a lie. Why, Mrs. Ryan’s better than you. She don’t come covering me with oily stories about wanting me to be happy. You think that I don’t know why you’re offering me this money. Well, old man, I do. You want to get my husband for your own daughter, Rose Cannon.”
It was Cannon’s turn to be speechless. He had not for years received so unexpected and violent a blow. He sat in the same attitude, not moving or uttering a sound, and looking at Berny with a pair of eyes that each second grew colder and more steely. Berny, drawn to the edge of her chair, leaned toward him, speaking with the stinging quickness of an angry wasp.
“You thought I didn’t know it. Well, I do. I know the whole thing. I’ve just sat back and watched you two old thieves thinking everything was hidden, like a pair of ostriches. And you being so free with your glad hand and being sorry for me and wanting me to make the most of my life! You said I was a smart woman. Well, I’m evidently a lot smarter than you thought I was.”
“So it seems,” he said. “Smart enough to do some very neat inventing.”
“Inventing!” she cried, “I wish there was some inventing about it. I don’t take any pleasure in thinking that another woman’s trying to buy my husband.”
He dropped his hand from his chin, and moved a little impatiently in his chair.
“Come,” he said with sudden authority, “I can’t waste my time this way. Are you going to take the money or not?”
His manner, as if by magic, had changed. Every suggestion of deference, or consideration had gone from it. The respect, with which he had been careful to treat her, had suddenly vanished; there was something subtly brutal in his tone, in the very movement of impatience he made. It was as if the real man were at last showing himself.
She uttered a furious phrase of denial and sprang to her feet. His manner was the last unbearable touch on the sore helplessness of her futile rage. His chair had been standing sidewise toward the desk, and now, with a jerk of his body, he swept it back into position.
“All right, then go!” he said, without looking at her.
Berny had intended going, rushing out of the place. Now at these words of dismissal, flung at her as a bone to a dog, she suddenly was rooted to the spot. All her reason, balance, and common sense were swept away in the flood of her quivering, blind anger.
“I will not go,” she cried, at the pitch of folly, “I will not till I’m good and ready. Who are you to order me out? Who are you to tell me what I’m to do? A man who tries to buy another woman’s husband for his daughter, and then pretends he and she are such a sweet, innocent pair! Wouldn’t people be surprised if they knew that Miss Rose Cannon wanted my husband, was getting her father to make bids for him, and was meeting him every Sunday!”
“Stop!” thundered the old man, bringing his open hand down on the table with a bang.
The tone of his voice was bull-like, and the blow of his hand so violent that the fittings of the heavy desk rattled. Berny, though not frightened, was startled and drew back. For a moment she thought he was going to rise and forcibly put her out. Then she looked sidewise and saw two men at a window on the other side of the alley gazing interestedly down at them. Cannon was conscious of the observers at the same time. He restrained the impulse to spring to his feet which had made her shrink, and rose slowly.
“Look here,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand that this interview’s at an end.”
“No,” she said with a stubborn shake of her head, “I’m not through yet.”
“There’s nothing more for you to say unless you want to accept Mrs. Ryan’s offer.”
“Yes, there is, there’s lots more for me to say, but since you seem in such a hurry to get rid of me, I’ll have to wait and say it to your daughter next time I see her.”
She paused, daring and impudently bold. She was a woman of remarkable physical courage, and the old man’s aspect, which might have affrighted a less audacious spirit, had no terrors for her. He stood by the desk, his hands on his hips, the fingers turned toward his back, and his face, the chin drawn in, fronting her with a glowering fixity of menace.
“When do you ever see my daughter?” he asked, the accented pronoun pregnant with scorn.
“Oh, on the streets, in the stores, walking round town. I often meet her. I’ve wanted several times lately to stop and tell her what I think of the way she’s acting. She doesn’t think that I know all about what she’s doing. She’ll be surprised when she hears that I do and what I think about it.”
She faced the old man’s motionless visage with an almost debonair audacity.
“You can offer me money,” she said, “but you can’t muzzle me.”
Cannon, without changing his attitude, replied,
“I can do a good many things you don’t think of. Take my advice, young woman, and muzzle yourself. Don’t leave it for me to do. I’ve had nothing but friendly feelings for you up to this, and I’d hate to have you see what a damned ugly enemy I can be.”
He gave his head a nod, dropped his hands and turned from her. As he moved, a small spider that had been hidden among the papers on the desk started to scuttle over the yellow blotting pad. It caught his eye.
“Look there,” he said, indicating it, “that little spider thinks it can have things all its own way on my desk. But—” and he laid his great thumb on it, crushing it to a black smudge—“that’s what happens to it. Now, Mrs. Dominick Ryan, that’s not the first little spider that’s come to grief trying to run amuck through my affairs. And it don’t seem, as things look now, as if it was going to be the last. It’s not a healthy thing for little spiders to think they can run Bill Cannon.”
He rubbed his soiled thumb on the edge of the blotter, and Berny looked at the stain that had been the spider.
“Best not butt into places where little spiders are not wanted,” he said, and then looking at her sidewise, “Well, is it good-by?”
Something in the complete obliteration of the adventurous insect—or the words that had accompanied its execution—chilled Berny. She was not frightened, nor less determined, but the first ardor of her defiance was as though a cold breath had blown on it. Still she did not intend to leave, ignominiously withdrawing before defeat. She wanted to say more, rub it in that she knew the reason for his action, and let him see still plainer in how slight esteem she held his daughter. But the interlude of the spider had been such a check that she did not know exactly how to begin again. She stood for a moment uncertain, and he said,
“Will you take the money?”
“No!” she said loudly. “Don’t ask me that again!”
“All right,” he answered quietly, “that ends our business. Do you know your way out, or shall I ring for Granger to see you to the door?”
There was a bell on the desk and he extended his hand toward it. She guessed that Granger was the polished and deferential young man who had greeted her on her entrance, and the ignominy of being escorted out under a cloud—literally shown the door by the same youth, probably no longer polished or deferential, was more than she could bear.
“I’m going,” she said fiercely. “Don’t dare to touch that bell! But just be sure of one thing, Bill Cannon, this is not the last you or your daughter will hear of me.”
He bowed with an air of irony that was so slight it might not have been noticed.
“Any messages from you will be received by me with pleasure. But when it comes to other things”—her hand was on the door-knob but she had to listen—“remember the little spider.”
“Rats!” she said furiously, and tore open the door.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ryan,” he cried. “Good afternoon!”
She did not answer, but even in her excitement was conscious that the clerks behind the partition might be listening, and so shut the door, not with the bang her state of mind made natural, but with a soft, ladylike gentleness. Then she walked, with a tapping of little heels and a rustle of silken linings, down the long, narrow office and out into the street.