It was late, almost dark, that evening when Cannon left his office. He had sat on after Berny’s departure, sunk in a reverie, which was not compounded of those gentle thoughts that are usually associated with that state of being. In the past, when he had been struggling up from poverty, he had had his fierce fights, and his mortifying defeats. He had risen from them tougher and more combative than ever, filled with the lust of vengeance which in the course of time was assuaged. But of late years few (and these antagonists of his own measure) had had the temerity to cross swords with him.
Now he had been defied in his stronghold and by the sort of person that he looked upon as a worm in the path—the kind of worm a man did not even tread on but simply brushed aside. It was incredible in its audacity, its bold insolence. As he walked down Montgomery Street to the car, he pondered on Berny, wonderingly and with a sort of begrudging, astonished admission of a courage that he could not but admire. What a nerve the woman had to dare to threaten him! To threaten Bill Cannon! There was something wild, uncanny, preposterous in it that was almost sublime, had the large, elemental quality of a lofty indifference to danger, that seemed to belong more to heroic legend than to modern life in the West. But his admiration was tempered by his alarm at the thought of his daughter’s learning of the sordid intrigue. The bare idea of Rose’s censuring him—and he knew she would if she ever learned of his part in the plot—was enough to make him decide that some particularly heavy punishment would be meted out to the woman who dared shatter the only ideal of him known to exist.
But he did not for a moment believe that Berny would tell. She was angry and was talking blusteringly, as angry women talk. He did not know why she was in such a state of ill temper, but at this stage of the proceedings he did not bother his head about that. For the third time she had refused the money—that was the only thing that concerned him. If she refused three hundred thousand dollars, she would refuse anything. It was as much to her as a million would be. She would know it was as large a sum as she could expect. If that would not buy her, nothing would. Her threats were nonsense, bluff and bluster; the important thing was, she had determined, for some reason of her own, to stick to Dominick Ryan.
How she had found out about Rose he could not imagine, only it was very enraging that she should have done so. It was the last, and most detestable fact in the whole disagreeable business. Brooding on the subject as the car swept him up the hill, he decided that she had guessed it. She was as sharp as a needle and she had put this and that together, the way women do, and had guessed the rest. Pure ugliness might be actuating her present line of conduct, and that state of mind was rarely of long duration. The jealous passions of women soon burn themselves out. Those shallow vessels could not long contain feelings of such a fiery potency, especially when harboring the feeling was so inconvenient and expensive. No one knew better than Berny how well worth her while it would be to cultivate a sweet reasonableness. This was the only gleam of hope left. Her power to endure the present conditions of her life might give out.
That was all the consolation the Bonanza King could extract from the situation, and it did not greatly mitigate his uneasiness and bad humor. This latter condition of being had other matter to feed it, matter which in the interview of the afternoon had been pushed into the background, but which now once again obtruded itself upon his attention. It was the first of May. By the morning’s mail he had received a letter from Gene announcing, with the playful blitheness which marked all the young man’s allusions to the transfer of the Santa Trinidad Ranch, that the year of probation was up and he would shortly arrive in San Francisco to claim his own.
Gene’s father had read this missive in grim-visaged silence. The sense of self-approval that he might have experienced was not his; he only felt that he had been “done”. Two months before, thinking that the ranch was slipping too easily from his grasp, that he was making too little effort to retain his own, he had hired a detective to go to San Luis Obispo and watch the career of Gene for signs of his old waywardness. On the thirtieth of April the man had reported that Gene’s course had been marked by an abstinence as genuine and complete as the most exacting father could wish.
The old man crumpled up the letter and threw it into the waste-paper basket, muttering balefully, like a cloud charged with thunder. It was not that he wished Gene to drink again; it was that he hated most bitterly giving him the finest piece of ranch land in California. It was not that he did not wish his son to be prosperous and respectable, only he wished that this happy condition had been achieved at some one else’s expense.
His mood was unusually black when he entered the house. The servant, who came forward to help him off with his coat, knew it the moment he saw the heavy, scowling face. The piece of intelligence the man had to convey—that Mr. Gene Cannon had arrived half an hour earlier from San Luis Obispo—was not calculated to abate the Bonanza King’s irritation. He received it with the expressionless grunt he reserved for displeasing information, and, without further comment or inquiry, went up the stairs to his own rooms. From these he did not emerge till dinner was announced, when he greeted Gene with a bovine glance of inspection and the briefest sentence of welcome.
Gene, however, was not at all abashed by any lack of cordiality. At the best of times, he was not a sensitive person, and as this had been his portion since his early manhood, he was now used to it. Moreover, to-night he was in high spirits. In his year of exile he had learned to love the outdoor life for which he was fitted, and had conceived a passionate desire to own the splendid tract of land for which he felt the love and pride of a proprietor. Now it was his without let or hindrance. He was the owner of a principality, the lord of thousands of teeming acres, watered by crystal streams and shadowed by ancient oaks. He glowed with the joy of possession, and if anything was needed to complete his father’s discomfiture, it was Gene’s naïve and bridling triumph.
Always a loquacious person, a stream of talk flowed from him to which the old man offered no interruption, and in which even Rose found it difficult to insert an occasional, arresting question. Gene had any number of new plans. His head was fuller than it had been for years with ideas for the improvement of his land, the development of his irrigating system, the planting of new orchards, the erecting of necessary buildings. He used the possessive pronoun continually, rolled it unctuously on his tongue with a new, rich delight. He directed most of his conversation toward Rose, but every now and then he turned on his father, enthusiastically dilating on a projected improvement certain to increase the ranch’s revenues by many thousands per annum.
The old man listened without speaking, his chin on his collar, his eyes fixed in a wide, dull stare on his happy boy. At intervals—Gene almost clamoring for a response—he emitted one of those inarticulate sounds with which it was his custom to greet information that he did not like or the exact purport of which he did not fathom.
The only thing which would have sweetened his mood would have been a conversation, peaceful and uninterrupted, with his daughter. He had not seen as much of her as usual during the last few days, as she had been confined to her room with a cold. This was the first evening she had been at dinner for four days, and the old man had looked forward to one of their slow, enjoyable meals together, with a long, comfortable chat over the black coffee, as was their wont. Even if Rose did not know of his distractions and schemes, she soothed him. She never, like this chattering jackass from San Luis Obispo—and he looked sulkily at his son—rubbed him the wrong way. And he had hardly had a word with her, hardly, in fact, had heard her voice during the whole meal.
When it was over, and she rose from her seat, he asked her to play on the piano in the sitting-room near by.
“Give us some music,” he said, “I want to hear something pleasant. The whole day I’ve been listening to jays and knaves and fools, and I want to hear something different that doesn’t make me mad or make me sick.”
Rose left the room and presently the sound of her playing came softly from the sitting-room across the hall. Neither of the men spoke for a space, and the old man, casting a side look at Gene, was maliciously gratified by the thought that his son was offended. But he had reckoned without his offspring’s amiable imperviousness to the brutalities of the parental manner, wrought to-night to a condition of absolute invulnerability by the young man’s unclouded gladness. Gene, his eyes on his coffee-cup, was in anything but a state of insulted sullenness, as was proved by his presently looking up and remarking, with innocent brightness,
“You didn’t expect I’d get it, did you, Pop? I knew from the start you were sure I’d slip up before the year was out.”
His father eyed him without replying, a blank, stony stare, before which Gene did not show the slightest sign of quailing. He went on jubilantly in his high, throaty voice.
“I wasn’t dead certain of it myself at the start. You know it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to break off drinking habits that have had you as long as mine had me. But when I went down there and lived right on the land, when I used to get up in the morning and look out of my window across the hills and see the cattle dotted all over them, and the oaks thick and big and bushy, and feel the air just as soft as silk, I said to myself, ‘By gum, Gene Cannon, you’ve got to have this ranch if you die for want of whisky.’”
“Well, you’ve got it!” said his father in a loud, pugnacious tone. “You’ve got it, haven’t you?”
“Well, I guess I have,” said Gene, his triumph tempered by an air of modesty, “and I guess I earned it fair. I stuck to the bargain and there were times when I can tell you it was a struggle. I never once slipped up. If you don’t believe my word, I can bring you men from down there that know me well, and they’ll testify that I speak the truth.”
The father raised his eyebrows but said nothing. If there was anything further needed to show him what a complete, consistent fool his son was, it was the young man’s evident impression that the Santa Trinidad Ranch had been relinquished upon his own unsupported testimony. That was just like Gene. For weeks the detective had trotted at his heels, an entirely unsuspected shadow.
“It was Rose who really put me up to it,” he went on. “She’d say to me I could do it, I only had to try; any one could do anything they really made their minds up to. If you said you couldn’t do a thing, why, then you couldn’t, but if you said you could, you got your mind into that attitude, and it wasn’t hard any more. And she was right. When I got my mind round to looking at it that way, it came quite easily. Rose’s always right.”
This, the first statement of his son’s to which the Bonanza King could subscribe, did not placate the old man. On the contrary, it still further inflamed his sense of angry grievance. It was bad enough to have Gene stealing the ranch—that’s all it was—but to have him chuckling and grinning over it, when that very day Rose’s chances of happiness had come to a deadlock, was just what you might expect of such a fool. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth spoke, growled rather,
“I was just waiting to hear you give some credit to Rose. Here you are talking all through dinner like a megaphone all about yourself and your affairs, and not giving a thought to your sister.”
Gene stared at his parent in ingenuous, concerned amaze.
“Not a thought to Rose?” he repeated, in a high, surprised key. “Oh, yes I have—lots of thoughts. I was just telling you now about how she braced me up.”
“Braced you up! Of course she braced you up. Hasn’t she been doing it all her life? But you can’t think of anything but yourself. Don’t you ever look at your sister and think about her and how she feels?”
“Yes,” said Gene, giving his head a confirmatory wag, “I do, I do whenever I’m in town. You see, being away on the ranch so much——”
The old man leaned back in his chair, emitting a loud, interrupting groan. Gene stared at him with a dawning uneasiness. He had begun to grasp the fact that his father was in a state of mind which had complications that included more than the old familiar contemptuousness of his every-day mood. He decided to advance more gingerly, for even Gene’s imperviousness to snubs did not make him proof against the Bonanza King’s roused displeasure.
“I’m sure,” he said mildly, “no man ever had a more unselfish sister than I have, or was more devoted to her than I am.”
“Then, why the hell,” said the old man, “do you go on talking about yourself and your damned concerns, bothering the life out of her when she’s got troubles of her own?”
The look of foolish amaze on Gene’s face deepened into one of genuine concern.
“Troubles of her own? What troubles has she got?”
One of the most aggravating features of the situation was that Gene could not be told why Rose was troubled and his father was cross. While they were bent under unaccustomed cares, he went happy and free, with nothing to think of except the ranch he had stolen. If he had been any other kind of person, he could have been taken into the secret and might have helped them out. The Bonanza King had thought of ways in which a young and intelligent man could have been of assistance in inducing Mrs. Dominick Ryan to listen to reason. Gene, if he’d had any ability, if he’d had the brains of a mouse, could have made love to her, induced her to run away with him, and then they could have given her the money and got rid of her without any more fuss. He could have been of incalculable value and here he was, perfectly useless, too much of a fool even to be told the position, moved by the mere gross weight of his stupidity into an outside place of tranquil ignorance. That his father could not force him to be a sharer in the family troubles made the old man still more angry, and it was a poignant pain to him that the only way he could show his rage was by roaring wrathfully.
“Yes, Rose has troubles. Of course she has, but what have they got to do with you, who don’t care about a thing but your damned ranch?”
“What’s the matter with her?” said Gene, roused into active uneasiness and quite oblivious to his father’s insults. “I didn’t know anything was wrong. She didn’t tell me.”
“No, and she won’t,” said the father. “And let me tell you if I catch you asking her any questions or giving her any hints that I’ve said anything to you, you can stay on your ranch and never come back into this house. I won’t have Rose worried and upset by every fool that comes along.”
“Well, but how am I to find out what’s the matter with her,” said the altogether baffled brother, “if you won’t tell me, and I’m not to ask her?”
“You needn’t find out. It’s her affair—hers and mine. Don’t you go poking your nose in and trying to find out. I don’t want you butting into Rose’s affairs.”
“Just now,” said Gene in an aggrieved tone, “you said I didn’t take any interest in anything but my ranch. Now, when I want to take an interest in Rose, you tell me not to butt in. I love my sister more than most men, and I’d like to know if anything’s wrong with her.”
“She’s got a cold,” said Cannon.
He spoke sharply and looked at Gene with a sidelong eye full of observant malice. The young man gazed back at him, confused, for a moment half inclined to laugh, thinking his father, in a sudden unaccustomed playfulness, was joking with him.
“Well, if it’s only a cold,” he stammered, “it’s nothing to tear up the ground about. I thought it was something serious, that Rose was unhappy about something. But a cold——”
He was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Rose herself, her hand drawing back the portière that veiled the doorway. She, who knew her father so well, had decided that in his present mood it was better to curtail his after-dinner chat with Gene. Her quick eye took in their two faces, and she felt that her brother had probably had a trying half-hour.
“I’m tired of making music,” she said. “I’ve played my whole repertoire. Now I want Gene to come back into the sitting-room with me and tell me about the linen and the furniture I’m to send down to the ranch. We’ll talk it over to-night and make a list and arrange for the packing to-morrow.”
The young man rose, very glad to go with her, still uneasy and puzzled.
“How’s your cold, Rosey?” he said. “I didn’t know it was bad or I’d have asked more about it.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said carelessly. “It was never really bad, but I stayed in my room for a few days to be safe.” Her eye caught her father’s, half-shut and full of brooding scorn, shot through with a gleam of sardonic humor. Gene’s half-hour must have been even more trying than she had at first thought.
“Come along, Gene,” she said, holding out her hand to him, “we’ll leave the old man to his dreams. I know he never listened to a note of my music and only told me to play as an excuse to get rid of me.”
She threw a laughing look at her father, who answered it with a lazy, fond cast of his eye in her direction. Taking Gene’s hand, she drew him into the hall and dropped the portière. The father could hear their voices diminishing and growing muffled as they passed up the hall to the sitting-room.
He sat on as they had left him in his favorite crumpled-up attitude. After all, it was a good thing the boy did not know, was of the kind who could not be trusted with any information of importance. He did not want Gene or anybody else to interfere. He, Rose’s father, and he alone, without any outside assistance, would reach up and pick out for her any star that sparkled in the heavens, any moon for which she might choose to cry. She wanted Dominick Ryan for her husband. She should have him and it would be her father who would get him for her. He would give her Dominick Ryan, as he would a pearl necklace or a new automobile to which she had taken a fancy.
It whetted the old man’s lust of battle that Dominick was so hard to get. Sitting fallen together in his chair he thought about new ways of approaching Berny, new ways of bribing, or wheedling, or terrifying her into giving up her husband. He was not at the end of his rope yet, by any means. And it lent an added zest to the game that he had an adversary of so much spirit. He was beginning to respect her. Even if he had not been fighting for Rose, he would have gone on with the struggle for its own sake. It was not Bill Cannon’s way to enter a contest, and then be beaten—a contest with a spitfire woman at that.
That night it was Berny’s turn to be wakeful. In the silence of the sleeping house and the warm darkness of her curtained room, she lay tossing on her bed, hearing the clear, musical striking of the parlor clock as it marked the hours. When the first thin streak of gray painted a pale line between the window curtains she rose and took a sleeping powder and soon after fell into a heavy slumber.
This held her in the dead, motionless unconsciousness that a drug brings, through the long morning hours. Dominick’s noiseless departure hardly disturbed the hushed quiet of the little flat. The Chinaman, trained by his exacting mistress to make no sound while she slept, went about his work with a stealthy step and cautious touch, even in the kitchen, shut off by space and muffling doors, continuing his care. He had had more than one experience with the wrath of Mrs. Ryan when she had been roused from late slumbers by a banged door or a dropped pan.
It was nearly lunch-time when she awoke, slowly emerging from the black, unbroken deadness of her sleep to a momentarily augmenting sense of depression. She rose, her body seeming to participate in the oppressed discomfort of her mind, and, going to the bedroom window, drew the curtain and looked out.
The day promised little in the way of cheering influences. Fog hung heavy in the air, a gray veil depending from a gray haze of sky. That portion of her neighbor’s garden which the window commanded was drenched with it, the flowers drooping moistly as if it weighed on them like a heavy substance under the pressure of which they bent and dripped. The stretch of wall that she could see gleamed with dampness. A corner of stone, on which a drop regularly formed, hung and then fell, held her eyes for a few vacantly-staring moments. Then she turned away, muttering to herself,
“Good Lord, what a day!”
She was at her lunch when the telephone bell rang. She dropped her napkin and ran to the instrument which was in the hall. She did not know what she expected—or rather she did not expect anything in particular—but she was in that state of feverish tension when she seemed the focus of portentous happenings, the point upon which events of sinister menace might, at any moment, bear down. Bill Cannon might be calling her up, for what purpose she could not guess, only for something that would be disagreeable and perturbing.
It was, however, her husband’s voice that answered her. He spoke quickly, as if in a hurry, telling her that he would not be home to dinner, as a college friend of his from New York had just arrived and he would dine and go to the theater with him that evening. Berny’s ear, ready to discover, in the most alien subjects, matter bearing on her husband’s interest in Rose Cannon, listened intently for the man’s name. As Dominick did not give it she asked for it, and to her strained and waiting attention it seemed to come with an intentional indistinctness.
“What is his name?” she called again, her voice hard and high. “I didn’t catch it.”
It was repeated and for the second time she did not hear it. Before she could demand it once more, Dominick’s “Good-by” hummed along the wire and the connection was cut.
She did not want any more lunch and went into the parlor, where she sat down on the cushioned window-seat and looked out on the vaporous transparencies of the fog. She had waked with the sense of weight and apprehension heavy on her. As she dressed she had thought of the interview of yesterday with anger and also with something as much like fear as she was capable of feeling. She realized the folly of the rage she had shown, the folly and the futility of it, and she realized the danger of an open declaration of war with the fierce and unscrupulous old man who was her adversary. This, with her customary bold courage, she now tried to push from her mind. After all, he couldn’t kill her, and that was about the only other way he could get rid of her. Even Bill Cannon would hardly dare, in the present day in San Francisco, cold-bloodedly to murder a woman. The thought caused a slight, sarcastic smile to touch her lips. Fortunately for her, the lawless days of California were passed.
With the curtain caught between her finger-tips, her figure bent forward and motionless, she looked out into the street as if she saw something there of absorbing interest. But she saw nothing. All her mental activity was bent on the problem of Dominick’s telephone message. She did not believe it. She was in that state where trifles light as air all point one way, and to have Dominick stay out to dinner with a sudden and unexpected “friend from New York” was more than a trifle. She assured herself with slow, cold reiteration that he was dining with Rose Cannon in the big house on California Street. If they walked together on Sunday mornings, why shouldn’t they dine together on week-day nights? They were careful of appearances and they would never let themselves be seen together in any public place till they were formally engaged. The man from New York was a fiction. She—that immaculate, perfect girl—had invented him. Dominick could not invent anything. He was not that kind of man. But Berny knew that all women can lie when the occasion demands, and Rose Cannon could thus supply her lover’s deficiencies.
With her blankly-staring eyes fixed on the white outside world, her mental vision conjured up a picture of them at dinner that night, sitting opposite each other at a table glistening with the richest of glass and silver, while soft-footed menials waited obsequiously upon them. Bill Cannon was not in the picture. Berny’s imagination had excluded him, pushing him out of the romance into some unseen, uninteresting region where people who were not lovers dined dully by themselves. She could not imagine Rose and Dominick otherwise than alone, exchanging tender glances over the newest form of champagne glasses filled with the choicest brand of champagne.
A sound escaped her, a sound of pain, as if forced from her by the grinding of jealous passions within. She dropped the curtain and rose to her feet. If they married it would be always that way with them. They would have everything in the world, everything that to Berny made life worth while. Even Paris, with her three hundred thousand dollars to open all its doors, would be a savorless place to her if Rose and Dominick were to be left to the enjoyment of all the pleasures and luxuries of life back in California.
Unable to rest, fretted by jealousy, tormented by her longing for the offered money, oppressed by uneasiness as to Cannon’s next move, the thought of the long afternoon in the house was unendurable to her. She could not remain unemployed and passive while her mind was in this state of disturbance. Though the day was bad and there was nothing to do down town, she determined to go out. She might find some distraction in watching the passers-by and looking at the shop windows.
By the time she was dressed, it was four o’clock. The fog was thicker than ever, hanging over the city in an even, motionless pall of vapor. Its breath had a keen, penetrating chill, like that exhaled by the mouth of a cavern. Coming down the steps into it she seemed to be entering a white, still sea, off which an air came that was pleasant on the heated dryness of her face. She had no place to go to, no engagement to keep, but instinctively turned her steps in the down-town direction. Walking would pass more time than going on the car, and she started down the street which slanted to a level and then climbed a long, dim reach of hill beyond. Its emptiness—a characteristic feature of San Francisco streets—struck upon her observation with a sense of griping, bleak dreariness. She could look along the two lines of sidewalk till they were lost in the gradual milky thickening of the fog, and at intervals see a figure, faint and dreamlike, either emerging from space in slow approach, or melting into it in phantasmal withdrawal.
It was a melancholy, depressing vista. She had not reached the top of the long hill before she decided that she would walk no farther. Walking was only bearable when there was something to see. But she did not know what else to do or where to go. Indecision was not usually a feature of her character. To-day, however, the unaccustomed strain of temptation and worry seemed to have weakened her resourcefulness and resolution. The one point on which she felt determined was that she would not go home.
The advancing front of a car, looming suddenly through the mist, decided her. She hailed it, climbed on board, and sank into a seat on the inside. There was no one else there. It smelt of dampness, of wet woolens and rubber overshoes, and its closed windows, filmed with fog, showed semicircular streaks across them where passengers had rubbed them clean to look out. The conductor, an unkempt man, with an unshaven chin and dirty collar, slouched in for her fare, extending a grimy paw toward her. As he took the money and punched the tag, he hummed a tune to himself, seeming to convey in that harmless act a slighting opinion of his passenger. Berny looked at him severely, which made him hum still louder, and lounge indifferently out to the back platform where he leaned on the brake and spat scornfully into the street.
Berny felt that sitting there was worse than walking. There was no one to look at, there was nothing to be seen from the windows. The car dipped over the edge of an incline, slid with an even, skimming swiftness down the face of the hill, and then, with a series of small jouncings, crossed the rails of another line. Not knowing or caring where she was, she signaled the conductor to stop, and alighted. She looked round her for an uncertain moment, and then recognized the locality. She was close to the old union Street plaza on which the Greek Church fronted. Here in the days before her marriage, when she and Hazel had been known as “the pretty Iverson girls,” she had been wont to come on sunny Sunday mornings and sit on the benches with such beaux as brightened the monotony of that unaspiring period.
She felt tired now and thought it would not be a bad idea to cross to the plaza and rest there for a space. She was warmly dressed and her clothes would not be hurt by the damp. Threading her way down the street, she came out on the opening where the little park lies like an unrolled green cloth round which the shabby, gray city crowds.
She sank down on the first empty bench, and looking round she saw other dark shapes, having a vague, huddled appearance, lounging in bunched-up attitudes on the adjacent seats. They seemed preoccupied. It struck her that they, like herself, were plunged in meditation on matters which they had sought this damp seclusion silently to ponder. The only region of activity in the dim, still scene was where some boys were playing under the faintly-defined outline of a large willow tree. They were bending close to the ground in the performance of a game over which periods of quietness fell to be broken by sudden disrupting cries. As Berny took her seat their imp-like shapes, dark and without detail, danced about under the tree in what appeared a fantastic ecstasy, while their cries broke through the woolly thickness of the air with an intimate clearness, strangely at variance with the remote effect of their figures.
The fact that no one noticed her, or could clearly see her, affected her as it seemed to have done the other occupants of the benches. She relaxed from her alert sprightliness of pose, and sank against the back of the seat in the limpness of unobserved indifference. Sitting thus, her eyes on the ground, she heard, at first unheeding, then with a growing sense of attention, footsteps approaching on the gravel walk. They were the short, quick footsteps of a woman. Berny looked up and saw the woman, a little darker than the atmosphere, emerging from the surrounding grayness, as if she were slowly rising to the surface through water.
Her form detached itself gradually from the fog, the effect of deliberation being due to the fact that she was dressed in gray, a long, loose coat and a round hat with a film of veil about it. She would have been a study in monochrome but for the color in the cheek turned to Berny, a glowing, rose-tinted cheek into which the damp had called a pink brighter than any rouge. Berny looked at it with reluctant admiration, and the woman turned and presented her full face, blooming as a flower, to the watcher’s eye. It was Rose Cannon.
If in these wan and dripping surroundings the young girl had not looked so freshly fair and comely, Berny might have let her pass unchecked. But upon the elder woman’s sore and bitter mood the vision of this rosy youthfulness, triumphant where all the rest of the world sank unprotesting under the weight of a common ugliness, came with a sense of unbearable wrong and grievance. As Rose passed, Berny, with a sudden blinding up-rush of excitement, leaned forward and rose.
“Miss Cannon,” she said loudly. “Oh, Miss Cannon,—just a moment.”
Rose turned quickly, looking inquiringly at the owner of the voice. She had had a vague impression of a figure on the bench but had not looked at it. Now, though the face she saw was unfamiliar, she smiled and said,
“Did you want to speak to me?”
The ingratiating amiability of her expression added to Berny’s swelling sense of injury and injustice. Thus did this siren smile upon Dominick, and it was a smile that was very sweet. The excitement that had seized upon the older woman made her tremble, but she was glad, fiercely, burningly glad, that she had stopped Miss Cannon.
“Yes,” she said, “just for a moment, if you don’t mind.”
Rose had never seen the woman before, and at the first glance supposed her to be some form of peddler or a person selling tickets. The daughter of Bill Cannon was eagerly sought by members of her own sex who had wares for sale, and it did not strike her as odd that she should be stopped in the plaza on a foggy afternoon. But a second glance showed her that the woman before her was better dressed, more assured in manner than the female vender, and she felt puzzled and interested.
“You had something to say to me?” she queried again, the questioning inflection a little more marked.
“Yes, but not much. I won’t keep you more than a few moments. Won’t you sit down?”
Berny designated the bench and they sat on it, a space between them. Rose sat forward on the edge of the seat, looking at the strange woman whose business with her she could not guess.
“You’ve never seen me before, have you, Miss Cannon?” said Berny. “You don’t know who I am?”
The young girl shook her head with an air of embarrassed admission.
“I’m afraid I don’t,” she said. “If I’ve ever met you before, it must have been a long time ago.”
“You’ve never met me,” said Berny, “but I guess you’ve heard of me. I am the wife of Dominick Ryan.”
She said the words easily, but her eyes were lit with devouring fires as they fastened on the young woman’s face. Upon this, signs of perturbation immediately displayed themselves. For a moment Rose was shaken beyond speech. She flushed to her hair, and her eyes dropped. To a jealous observation, she looked confused, trapped, guilty.
“Really,” she said after the first moment of shock, “I—I—I really don’t think I ever did meet you.” With her face crimson she raised her eyes and looked at her companion. “If I have, I must have forgotten it.”
“You haven’t,” said Berny, “but you’ve met my husband.”
Rose’s color did not fade, but this time she did not avert her eyes. Pride and social training had come to her aid. She answered quietly and with something of dignity.
“Yes, I met Mr. Ryan at Antelope when we were snowed up there. I suppose he’s told you all about it?”
“No,” said Berny, her voice beginning to vibrate, “he hasn’t told me all about it. He’s told me just as much as he thought I ought to know.”
Her glance, riveted on Rose’s face, contained a fierce antagonism that was like an illumination of hatred shining through her speech. “He didn’t think it was necessary to tell me everything that happened up there, Miss Cannon.”
Rose turned half from her without answering. The action was like that of a child which shrinks from the angry face of punishment. Berny leaned forward that she might still see her and went on.
“He couldn’t tell me all that happened up at Antelope. There are some things that it wouldn’t have done for him to tell me. A man doesn’t tell his wife about his affairs with other women. But sometimes, Miss Cannon, she finds them out.”
Rose turned suddenly upon her.
“Mrs. Ryan,” she said in a cold, authoritative voice, “what do you want to say to me? You stopped me just now to say something. Whatever it is, say it and say it out.”
Berny’s rages invariably worked themselves out on the same lines. With battle boiling within her, she could preserve up to a certain point a specious, outward calm. Then suddenly, at some slight, harmless word, some touch as light as the pressure on the electric button that sets off the dynamite explosion, the bonds of her wrath were broken and it burst into expression. Now her enforced restraint was torn into shreds, and she cried, her voice quavering with passion, shaken with breathlessness:
“What do you suppose I want to say? I want to ask you what right you’ve got to try and steal my husband?”
“I have no right,” said Rose.
Berny was, for the moment, so taken aback, that she said nothing but stared with her whole face set in a rigidity of fierce attention. After a moment’s quivering amaze she burst out,
“Then what are you doing it for?”
“I am not doing it.”
“You’re a liar,” she cried furiously. “You’re worse than a liar. You’re a thief. You’re trying to get him every way you know how. You sit there looking at me with a face like a little innocent, and you know there’s not a thing you can do to get him away from me you’re not doing. If a common chippy, a gutter girl, acted that way they’d call her some pretty dirty names, names that would make you sit up if you thought any one would use them to you. But I don’t see where there’s any difference. You think because you’re rich and on top of the heap that you can do anything. Just let me tell you, Miss Rose Cannon, you can’t steal Dominick Ryan from me. You may be Bill Cannon’s daughter, with all the mines of the Comstock behind you, but you can’t buy my husband.”
Rose was aghast. The words of Berny’s outburst were nothing to her, sound and fury, the madness of a jealous woman. That this was a loving wife fighting for the husband whose heart she had lost was all she understood and heard. That was the tragic, the appalling thought. The weight of her own guilty conscience seemed dragging her down into sickened silence. The only thing it seemed to her she could honestly say was to refute the woman’s accusations that Dominick was being stolen from her.
“Mrs. Ryan,” she implored, “whatever else you may think, do please understand that I am not trying to take your husband away from you. You’re making a mistake. I don’t know what you’ve heard or guessed, but you’re distracting yourself without any necessity. How could I ever do that? I never meet him. I never see him.”
She leaned forward in her eagerness. Berny cast a biting, sidelong look at her.
“How about Sunday morning on Telegraph Hill?” she said.
“I did meet him there, that’s true,”—a memory of the conversation augmented the young girl’s sense of guilt. If half this woman said was madness, half was fact. Dominick loved Rose Cannon, not his wife, and to Rose that was the whole tragedy. Meetings, words, renouncements were nothing. She stammered in her misery.
“Yes,—but—but—you must believe me when I tell you that that time and once before—one evening in the moonlight on the steps of our house—were the only times I’ve seen your husband since I came back from Antelope.”
“Well, I don’t,” said Berny, “I don’t for a moment believe you. You must take me for the easiest fruit that ever grew on the tree if you think I’ll swallow a fairy tale like that. If you met once on Telegraph Hill, and once in the moonlight, what’s to prevent your meeting at other times, and other places? You haven’t mentioned the visits up at your house and the dinner to-night.”
Rose drew back, frowning, uncomprehending.
“What dinner to-night?” she said.
“The one you’re going to take with my husband.”
For the first time in the interview, the young girl was lifted from the sense of dishonesty that crushed her by a rising flood of angry pride.
“I take dinner with my father to-night in our house on California Street,” she said coldly.
“Bosh!” said Berny, giving her head a furious jerk. “You needn’t bother wasting time on lies like that to me. I’m not a complete fool.”
“Mrs. Ryan,” said Rose, “I think we’d better end this talk. We can’t have any rational conversation when you keep telling me what I say is a lie. I am sorry you feel so badly, and I wish I could say something to you that you’d believe. All I can do to ease your mind is to assure you that I never, except on those two occasions, have seen your husband since his return from the country and I certainly never intend to see him again.”
She rose from the bench and, as she did so, Berny cried,
“Then how do you account for the money that was offered me yesterday?”
“Money?” said the young girl, pausing as she stood. “What money?”
“The three hundred thousand dollars that your father offered me yesterday afternoon to leave my husband and let him get a divorce from me.”
Rose sat down on the bench and turned a startled face on the speaker.
“Tell me that again,” she said. “I don’t quite understand it.”
Berny gave a little, dry laugh.
“Oh, as many times as you like,” she said with her most ironical air of politeness, “only, I should think it would be rather stale news to you by this time. Yesterday afternoon your father made me his third offer to desert my husband and force him to divorce me at the end of a year. The offers have gone up from fifty thousand dollars—that was the first one, and, all things considered, I thought it was pretty mean—to the three hundred thousand they tried me with yesterday. Mrs. Ryan was supposed to have made the first offer, but your father did the offering. This last time he had to come out and show his hand and admit that one-third of the money was from him.” She turned and looked at Rose with a cool, imperturbable impudence. “It’s good to have rich parents, isn’t it?”
Rose stared back without answering. She had become very pale.
“That,” said Berny, giving her head a judicial nod, and delivering her words with a sort of impersonal suaveness, “is the way it was managed; you were kept carefully out. I wasn’t supposed to know there was a lady in the case, but of course I did. You can’t negotiate the sale of a husband as you do that of a piece of real estate, especially when his wife objects. That, Miss Cannon, was the difficulty. While all you people were so anxious to buy, I was not willing to sell. It takes two to make a bargain.”
Rose, pale now to her lips, said in a low voice,
“I don’t believe it. It’s not true.”
Berny laughed again.
“Well, that’s only fair,” she said with an air of debonair large-mindedness. “I’ve been telling you what you say is lies and now you tell me what I say is lies. It’s not, and you know it’s not. How would I have found out about all this? Do you think Dominick told me? Men don’t tell their wives when they want to get rid of them. They’re stupid, but they’re not that stupid.”
Rose gave a low exclamation and turned her head away. Berny was waiting for a second denial of her statements, when the young girl rose to her feet, saying in a horrified murmur,
“How awful! How perfectly awful!”
“Of course,” Berny continued, addressing her back, “I was to understand you didn’t know anything about it. I had my own opinions on that. Fathers don’t go round buying husbands for their daughters unless they know their daughters are dead set on having the husbands. Bill Cannon was not trying to get Dominick away from me just because he wanted to be philanthropic. Neither was Mrs. Ryan. You’re the kind of wife she wanted for her boy, just as Dominick’s the husband your father’d like for you. So you stood back and let the old people do the dirty work. You——”
Rose turned quickly, sat down on the edge of the bench, and leaned toward the speaker. Her face was full of a quivering intensity of concern.
“You poor, unfortunate woman!” she said in a shaken voice, and laid her hand on Berny’s knee.
Berny was so astonished that for the moment she had no words, but stared uncomprehending, still alertly suspicious.
“You poor soul!” Rose went on. “If I’d known or guessed for a moment I’d have spoken differently. I can’t say anything. I didn’t know. I couldn’t have guessed. It’s the most horrible thing I ever heard of. It’s—too—too——”
She stopped, biting her lip. Berny saw that she was unable to command her voice, though she had no appearance of tears. Her face looked quite different from what it had at the beginning of the interview. All its amiable, rosy softness was gone. The elder woman was too astounded to say anything. She had a feeling that, just for that moment, nothing could be said. She was silenced by something that she did not understand. Like an amazed child she stared at Rose, baffled, confused, a little awed. After a minute of silence, the young girl went on.
“I can’t talk about it. I don’t altogether understand. Other people—they must explain. I’ve been—no, not deceived—but kept in the dark. But be sure of one thing, yesterday was the end of it. They’ll never—no one that I have any power over—will ever make you such offers again. I’ll promise you that. I don’t know how it could have happened. There’s been a mistake, a horrible, unforgivable mistake. You’ve been wronged and insulted, and I’m sorry, sorry and humiliated and ashamed. There are no words——”
She stopped again with a gesture of helpless indignation and disgust, and rose to her feet. Berny, through the darkness of her stunned astonishment, realized that she was shaken by feelings she could not express.
“You didn’t know anything about it then?” the wife said sullenly, wanting still to be defiant and finding all her defiance overwhelmed by an invading sensation of feeling small, mean and contemptible.
“Know it?” said the girl, letting a glance of scorn touch the questioner. “Know it and let it go on? But I suppose you’ve a right to ask me such a question.”
“I guess I have,” said Berny, but her voice did not have any assurance of her conviction on the subject. It sounded flat and spiritless.
“You have. You seem to me to have a right to say anything savage and angry and insulting. And I can only say to you I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I ask your pardon—for me and for the others. And that doesn’t make it any easier for you to bear, or do you any good.”
Berny swallowed dryly and said,
“No, it doesn’t.”
“All I can do now is to promise you that it stops to-day and for ever. You’ll never be bothered again by anything of the kind. You can go back to your home and feel that never again will any one belonging to me try to come between you and your husband. I can’t say any more. I can’t talk about it. Good-by.”
She turned away as she spoke and without a backward look walked rapidly down the gravel walk to the street. With an immovable, unwinking gaze, Berny followed her figure as it melted into the fog. It seemed only a moment before it was gone, appearing to dissolve into the curd-like currents that surrounded it.
Berny sat without moving on the bench, staring in the direction in which it had disappeared. Her hands lay limp in her lap, the fog beaded in a crystal hoar on her clothes. She did not notice its growing chill nor the rapid downcoming of the dark. Her body was as motionless as a statue, but her mind was like a still, rankly-overgrown lake, suddenly churned into activity by unexpected gales of wind.
It was dark when Rose reached home. She had walked rapidly, mechanically taking familiar turns, cresting the long slope of the hill at a panting speed, rounding corners where gushes of light revealed her as a dark, flitting figure hurrying by almost at a run.
She was as oblivious to her surroundings as Berny, left motionless on the park bench. Never before in her life had anything like this touched her. Such few troubles as she had known had been those of a sheltered domestic life—the life of a cherished child whose dainty self-respect had never been blurred by a coarse breath. Now had come this horrible revelation. It shook the pretty world she had lived in like an earthquake. Idols lay broken in the dust. She had often seen her father rough and brutal as he was to Gene, but that was a different thing to her father’s buying that wretched woman’s husband, buying him for her. Berny’s face rose upon the darkness with its pitiful assumption of jaunty bravado, its mean shrewishness under the coating of powder and rouge.
“How could they do it?” the girl panted to herself. “How could they ever do such a thing?”
She did not suspect Dominick. She could not have believed he was party to such an action unless he had told her so with his own lips. As she hurried on the thought that this was the woman he had bound himself to for the rest of his life mingled with the other more poignantly-hateful thoughts, with a last sickening sense of wretchedness. The sudden, aghast consciousness of chaos, of an abrupt demolishing of the pleasant, familiar settings of a life that never comes to some, came to Rose that evening as she ran home through the fog.
She entered the house noiselessly and sped up to her room. It was time to dress for dinner, and an old woman-servant who had once been her nurse was waiting to help her. The mistress and maid were on terms of affectionate intimacy and the progress of the toilet was generally enlivened by gossip and laughter. To-night the girl was singularly silent, responding with monosyllables and sometimes not at all to the remarks of her assistant. As the woman drew the fastenings of the dress together, she could feel that the body the gown clipped so closely quivered, like the casing of machinery, vibrating to powerful concussions within.
The silence that continued to hold her throughout dinner passed unnoticed, as Gene was there and enlivened the passage of the meal by contributing an almost unbroken stream of talk. The night before he had been to a play, the plot of which, and its development in four acts, he now related with a fullness of detail which testified to the closeness of his attention and the accuracy of his memory. As each course was removed from the table, and the young man could once more give his undivided attention to the matter of discourse, he leaned back in his chair and took up the dropped thread with a fresh zest and some such remarks as:
“In the beginning of the next act, the hero comes in with his hat on, and first he says”—and so on.
With each of these renewals of the narrative the Bonanza King subsided against his chair-back in a limp attitude, staring with gloomy fixity at his boy, and expelling his breath in a long audible rush of air, which was sometimes a sigh and sometimes approached the proportions of a groan.
At the end of dinner, when Gene announced his intention of leaving as he was to attend a vaudeville performance, the old man began to show signs of reviving animation, going so far as politely to ask his son where he was going and with whom. His manner was marked by a warm, hearty encouragement, as he said,
“Get the whole vaudeville program down by heart, Gene, and you can tell it to us to-morrow night. There’ll be about twelve parts to it, and Rose can order two extra courses for dinner, and we might hire some men with stringed instruments for an accompaniment.”
Gene, with innocent good-humor, responded gaily.
“All right, father, I’ll give it my best attention, and if there’s anything especially good, I’ll report to you. You and Rose might like to go some night.”
His father, disappointed that his shaft had made no impression upon the young man’s invulnerable amiability, emitted a scornful snort, and made no further response to Gene’s cheery “Good night.”
“There,” he said, in tones expressing his relief, as the portière dropped behind his son’s departing figure, “he’s gone! Now, Rosey, you and I can have a talk.”
“Yes,” said his daughter, looking at her coffee-cup, “that’s what I wanted. I want to have a long talk with you to-night, papa.”
“Fire away,” said the old man. “I’ve had to listen to that fool for an hour, and it’s broken my spirit. You can say anything you like.”
“Not here,” said his daughter; “in the sitting-room. I’ll go in there and wait for you.”
“Why not here? What’s the matter with here? I like it better than the sitting-room. I’m more comfortable.”
“No, the servants will want to clear the things away, and I don’t want them to hear what I say.”
“Tell the servants to go to hell,” said the old man, who, relieved by Gene’s departure, was becoming more cheerful.
“No, this is something—something serious. I’ll go into the sitting-room and wait for you. When you’ve finished your coffee, come in.”
She rose from her chair and walked to the door. He noticed that she was unusually unsmiling and it occurred to him that she had been so all through dinner.
“What is it, honey,” he said, extending his hand toward her, “short on your allowance?”
“Oh, no, it’s just—just something,” she said, lifting the portière. “Come when you’re ready, I’ll be there.”
She walked up the hall to the sitting-room and there sat down in a low chair before the chimneypiece. The chill of the fog had penetrated the house and a fire had been kindled in the grate. On its quivering fluctuation of flame she fixed her eyes. With her hands pressed between her knees she sat immovable, thinking of what she was going to say, and so nervous that the blood sang in her ears and the palms of her hands, clasped tight together, were damp. She had never in her life shrunk so before an allotted task. It sickened her and she was determined to do it, to thresh it out to the end. When she heard her father’s step in the passage her heart began to beat like a woman’s waiting for her lover. She straightened herself and drew an inspiration from the bottom of her lungs to try to give herself breath wherewith to speak.
The old man flung himself into an arm-chair at one side of the fireplace, jerked a small table to his elbow, reached creakingly for an ash tray, and, having made himself comfortable, took his cigar from his mouth and said,
“Well, let’s hear about this serious matter that’s making you look like a tragedy queen.”
“It is serious,” she said slowly. “It’s something that you won’t like to hear about.”
“Hit me with it,” he said, wondering a little what it could be. “Gene’s gone and a child could eat out of my hand now.”
Looking into the fire, Rose said,
“I was out walking this afternoon and down in the union Street plaza a woman stopped me. I’d never seen her before. She was Mrs. Dominick Ryan.”
The old man’s face became a study. A certain whimsical tenderness that was generally in it when he spoke to his daughter vanished as if by magic. It was as if a light had gone out. He continued to look at her with something of blankness in his countenance, as if, for the first moment of shock, every faculty was held in suspense, waiting for the next words. He held his cigar, nipped between a pair of stumpy fingers, out away from him over the arm of the chair.
“Well,” he said quietly, “and what had she to say to you?”
“The most disagreeable things I think any one ever said to me in my life. If they’re true, they’re just too dreadful——” she stopped, balking from the final disclosure.
“Suppose you tell me what they were?” he said with the same almost hushed quietness.
“She said that you and Mrs. Ryan were offering her money—a good deal of money, three hundred thousand dollars was the amount, I think—to leave her husband so that he could get a divorce from her, and then—” she swallowed as if to swallow down this last unbearable indignity,—“and then be free to marry me.”
So Berny had told all. If deep, unspoken curses could have killed her, she would have died that moment.
“Is it true?” Rose asked.
“Well, yes,” said the old man in a perfectly natural tone of dubious consideration, “it’s a fairly accurate statement.”
“Oh, papa,” cried his daughter, “how could you have done it? How could you have done such a thing? Such a hateful, horrible thing.”
“Horrible thing?” he repeated with an air of almost naïve astonishment. “What’s horrible about it?”
“You know. I don’t have to tell you; you know. Don’t say to me that you don’t think it’s horrible. Don’t make me feel as if we were suddenly thousands of miles apart.”
The Bonanza King knew that in many matters, in most matters involving questions of ethics, they were more thousands of miles apart than she even now suspected. That was one of the reasons why he would have liked to kill Berny, who, for the first time, had brought this dissimilarity in their points of view to his daughter’s unwilling consideration. He spoke slowly and vaguely to gain time. He knew it was a critical moment in the relations between himself and the one creature in the world he loved.
“I don’t want you to feel that way, dearie,” he said easily. “Maybe there are things in this matter you don’t know about or understand. And, anyway, what’s there so horrible in trying to separate a man and woman who are unhappily married and can’t bear the sight of each other?”
“You were separating them for me,” she said in a low voice.
“Well, now,” he answered with a slight rocking movement of his shoulders and a manner of almost bluff deprecation, “I can say that I wasn’t, but suppose I was?”
She paid no attention to the last part of the sentence, and replied,
“The woman said you were.”
He did not answer for a minute, the truth being that he did not know what it was best to say, and wanted to wait and let her make statements that he could either contradict or seek to justify.
“What made you think I wanted to marry Dominick Ryan?” she said slowly, her eyes on the fire.
This was a question that went to the core of the subject. He knew now that he could not put her off, or slip from the responsibilities of the occasion. Drawing himself to the edge of his chair, he leaned forward and spoke with a sincerity and feeling that made his words very impressive.
“One evening when I was at Antelope, I came into the sitting-room and saw my daughter in the arms of Dominick Ryan. I knew that my girl wasn’t the woman to let a man do that unless she loved him. That was how I came to know.”
“Oh,” said Rose in a faint tone.
“Afterward I heard from Dominick of what his marriage was. I heard from his mother, too. Then I saw his wife and I got a better idea from her what it was than I did from either of the others. That fellow, the man my daughter cared for, was tied up in a marriage that was hell. He was bound to a woman who could only be managed with a club, and Dominick was not the kind that uses a club to a woman. What liking he’d had for her was gone. She stuck to him like a barnacle because she wanted to get money, was ready to hang on, feet and hands, till Delia Ryan was dead and then put up a claim for a share of the estate. Do you think a man’s doing such a horrible thing to break up a marriage like that?”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I do. It was a marriage. They’d taken each other for better or for worse. They’d made the most solemn promises to each other. Neither you nor any one else had a right to interfere.”
She spoke with a hard determination, with something of an inflexible, unrelenting positiveness, that was very unusual in her, which surprised and, for the moment, silenced her father. It rose from a source of conviction deeper than the surface emotions of likes and dislikes, of loves and hates, of personal satisfactions and disappointments. At the core of her being, with roots extending through all the ramifications of her mental and moral nature, was a belief in the inviolability of the marriage tie. It was a conviction founded on neither tradition, nor reason, nor expediency, a thing of impulse, of sex, an hereditary instinct inherited from generations of virtuous women, who, in the days of their defenselessness, as in the days of their supremacy, knew that the most sacred possessions of their lives—their husbands, their children, their homes—rested on its stability. All the small, individual preoccupations of her love for Dominick, her pity for his sufferings, were swept aside by this greater feeling that she did not understand or reason about. She obeyed an instinct, elemental as the instinct of motherhood, when she refused to admit his right to break the bond he had contracted.
Her father stared at her for the moment, chilled by a sense of unfamiliarity in her sudden assumption of an attitude of challenge and authority. He had often heard her inveigh against the divorces so lightly obtained in the world about them. He had thought it one of those pretty ornamental prejudices of hers, that so gracefully adorned her youth and that he liked her to have when they did not interfere with anything of importance. Now, set up like a barrier in the path, he stopped before this one particular prejudice, perplexed at its sudden intrusion, unwilling to believe that it was not a frail, temporary obstruction to be put gently aside.
“Now listen, honey,” said he persuasively, “that’s all very well. I’ve got no right to interfere, and neither, we’ll admit, has anybody. But sometimes you have to push away these little rights and polite customs. They’re very nice for every-day use, but they’re not for big occasions. I suppose the Good Samaritan didn’t really have any right to stop and bind up the wounds of the man he found by the wayside. But I guess the feller he bound up was almighty glad that the Samaritan didn’t have such a respect for etiquette and wait till he’d found somebody to introduce them.”
“Oh, papa, that was different. Don’t confuse me and make me seem a fool. I can’t talk like you. I can’t express it all clearly and shortly. I only know it’s wrong; it’s a sin. I wouldn’t marry Dominick Ryan if he was divorced that way if it killed me to give him up.”
“So if the woman voluntarily took the money and went away and got Dominick to grant her the divorce, Dominick being, as we know, a man of good record and spotless honor, you’d refuse to marry him?”
“I would, certainly I would. It would be perfectly impossible for me to marry him under those circumstances. I should consider I was committing a sin, a particularly horrible and unforgivable sin.”
“See here now, Rosey, just listen to me for a minute. Do you know what Dominick Ryan’s marriage is? I don’t suppose you do. But you do know that he married his mistress, a woman who lived with him eight months before he made her his wife. She wasn’t an innocent young girl by any means. She knew all right where she was going. She established that relation with him with the intention of marrying him. She’s a darned smart woman, and a darned unscrupulous one. That’s not the kind of woman a man feels any particular respect for, or that a girl like you’d give a lot of sympathy to, is it?”
“I don’t see that that would make any difference,” she said. “I’m not thinking of her character, I’m thinking of her rights.”
“And don’t her character and her rights sort of dovetail into each other?”
“No, I don’t see that they do. The law’s above the character or the person. It’s the law, without any question of the man or the woman.”
“Oh Rosey, dear, you’re talking like a book, not like a girl who’s got to live in a world with ordinary people in modern times. This woman, that you’re arguing about as if she was the mother of the Gracchi, hasn’t got any more morality or principle than you could put on the point of a pin.”
“She’s been quite good and proper since her marriage.”
“Well, now, let’s leave her and look at Dominick’s side. He marries her honorably and lives with her for nearly three years. Every semblance of affection that he had for her gets rubbed off in those three years, every illusion goes. He’s tied to a woman that he can’t stand. He went up to Antelope that time because they’d had some sort of a scrap and he felt he couldn’t breathe in the same house with her. He told me himself that they’d not lived as man and wife for nearly a year. Now, I don’t know what you’re going to say, but I think to keep on living in that state is all wrong. I’ll borrow your expression, I think it’s a sin.”
She answered doggedly:
“It’s awful, but she’s his wife. Oh, if you’d seen her face when she talked to me, her thin, mean, common face, all painted and powdered and so miserable!”
He thought she was wavering, that he saw in this unreasonable, illogical dodging of the point at issue a sign of defeat, and he pushed his advantage.
“And you—a girl of heart and feeling like you—would condemn that man and woman to go on living that lie, that useless, purposeless lie? I can’t understand it. What good comes of it? What’s the necessity for it? Do you realize what a man Dominick might be if he was married to the right woman, and had a decent home where he could live like a Christian? Why, he’d be a different creature. He’d have a future. He’d make his place in the community. All the world would be before him, and he’d mount up to where he belongs. And what is he now? Nothing. All the best in him’s paralyzed by this hell of a box he’s got himself into. The man’s just withering up with despair.”
It was almost too much. For a moment she did not answer, then said in a small voice like a child’s,
“You’re making this very hard for me, papa.”
“My God, Rosey!” he cried, exasperated, “you’re making it hard for yourself. It’s you with your cast-iron prejudices, and your obstinacy, who are making it hard.”
“Well, I’ve got them,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’ve got them, and they’ll stay with me till I die. Nothing’s going to change me in this. I can’t argue and reason about them. They’re part of me.”
She approached the mantelpiece, and, leaning a hand on it, looked down at the fire. The light gilded the front of her dress and played on her face, down-drooped and full of stern decision.
“It’s quite true,” she said slowly, “that I love Dominick. I love him with the best I’ve got. It’s true that I would like to be his wife. It would be a wonderful happiness. But I can’t have it, and so there’s no good thinking about it, or trying to bring it about. It can’t be, and we—you too, papa—must give it up.”
He pressed himself back in his chair, looking at her with lowering, somber disapprobation—a look he had seldom had cause to level at his daughter.
“So you’re going to condemn this poor devil, who loves you and whom you say you love, to a future that’s going to kill any hope in him? You’re going to say to him, ‘You can be free, and make something of your life, and have the woman you want for your wife, but I forbid all that, and I’m going to send you back to prison.’ I can’t seem to believe that it’s my Rosey who’s saying that, and who’s so hard and inhuman.”
Rose turned from the fire. He noted an expression almost of austerity on her face that was as new to him as the revelation of obstinacy and indifference to his will she had shown to-night.
“Papa, you don’t understand what I feel. It’s not what you want, or what I want, or what Dominick wants. It’s not what’s going to please us and make us comfortable and happy. It’s something that’s much more important than that. I can’t make Dominick happy and let him make his life a success at the expense of that woman. I can’t take him out of prison, as you call it, because he’s got a responsibility in the prison, that he voluntarily took on himself, and that he’s got to stand by. A man can’t stay by his marriage only as long as it’s pleasant. He can’t throw down the woman he’s made his wife just because he finds he doesn’t like her. If she’s been disagreeable that’s a misfortune, but it doesn’t liberate him from the promises he’s made.”
“Then you think when a man like Dominick Ryan, hardly more than a boy, makes a mistake that ruins his life, he’s got to stay by it?”
“Yes, he must. He’s given a solemn promise. He must keep it. Mistake or sin doesn’t matter.”
The old man was silent. He had presented his case as strongly and persuasively as he knew how, and he had lost it. There was no longer any use in arguing with that unshakable feminine obstinacy, rooted, not in reason but in something rock-like, off which the arguments of reason harmlessly glanced. He had a dim, realizing sense that at the bottom of the woman’s illogical, whim-driven nature, there was that indestructible foundation of blind, governing instincts, and that in them lay her power.
“I guess that lets me out,” he said, turning to knock off the long ash on his cigar. “I guess there’s no use, Rosey, for you and me to try to come to an agreement on this matter.”
“No, there isn’t. And don’t let’s talk about it any more.” She turned from the fire and came toward him. “But you must promise me one thing—that that woman is to be let alone, that no one—you or any one you have any control over—makes any more offers of money to her.”
She came to a stand beside his chair. He wanted to hold out his hand to her as was his custom when she stood near him, but he was afraid that she might not take it.
“Yes, I can promise that,” he said. “I’ll not offer her any more money. I don’t want to see her again, God knows.”
It was an easier promise to make than Rose guessed. The old man, under an air of mild concurrence in her demands, experienced a sensation of cynical amusement at the thought that the first move for a reopening of negotiations must come from Berny.
“Oh, yes, I’ll promise that,” he said amicably. “You needn’t be afraid that I’m going to go on offering her a fortune. The thing’s been done, the woman’s refused it, and there it stands. I’ve no desire to open it again.”
She leaned down to take his hand. He relinquished it to her with an immense lightening of his heart, and peace fell on him as he felt her rub her cheek against his knuckles.
“So you’re not mad at the old man, after all?” he said almost shyly.
“No,” she murmured, “not at him. I was angry at what he was doing.”
It was a subtly feminine way of getting round the delicate points of the situation—that inconsistently feminine way which separates judgment of the individual from judgment of his acts. But it relieved the Bonanza King of the heaviest weight that had lain upon him for many years, and, for once, he gave thanks for the irrationalness of women.
“Well, good-night, honey,” he said, “no matter what crazy notions you’ve got you’re the old man’s girl all right.”
She kissed him.
“And you won’t forget your promise?” she murmured.
“Of course not,” he said stoutly, not sure just what she was alluding to. “Any promise I make to you stands put till the Day of Judgment. Good night.”
When she left him, he lit another cigar, sank lower in his chair and stared at the fire.
It was a deadlock. In his helplessness, the enraged helplessness of the man who had ridden triumphantly over all obstacles that fate had set in his path, his prevailing thought was how much he would like to kill Berny. She had done all this. This viper of a woman, the kind to tread on if she raised her head, had baffled and beaten them all. He could not murder her, but he thought with grim lips of how he could crush and grind her down and let her feel how heavy Bill Cannon’s hand could be.
It seemed for the moment as if everything were over. They had reached a place where a blank wall stretched across the road. Berny’s refusing the money had been a serious obstacle, but not an unconquerable one. Rose to-night had given the whole plot its death blow. With lowering brows he puffed at his cigar, groping in his mind for some way that might yet be tried. He could not brook the thought of defeat. And yet the more he meditated the more impregnable and unscalable appeared the wall that stretched across the way.
For some time after Rose had left her, Berny remained on the bench, not moving, her glance resting on that part of the path whence the young girl’s figure had faded from view.
The night slowly deepened, impregnating the gray atmosphere with a velvety depth of shadow that oozed through it like an infusion of a darker, denser element. Lights came out. First sporadically, here and there blooming through the opaque dusk, not suddenly, but with an effect of gradualness, as though the air was so thick it took some time to break through it. Then came more. Rows of windows appeared in long, magnified sputters. All round the plaza there was a suggestion of effaced brightness, as of a painting which had once been sharply outlined and brilliant but was now rubbed into a formless, impressionist study of shadows and undefined, yellow blurs. The golden halos of lamps blotted the dark at intervals, and now and then the figures, which had occupied the benches, passed into the circles of vaporous illumination, and passed out of them, as if they had been crossing the stage of a theater.
Berny did not move and did not notice the increasing chill of the hour or the moisture beading on her clothes like wintry rime. She was sunk in an abyss of thought, a suspended trance of contemplation, of receptivity to new ideas. In one hour her basic estimate of human nature, her accepted measurement of motives and standards, had been suddenly upset. Her point of view was like a kaleidoscope, which is unexpectedly turned. Sitting motionless on the bench she saw the familiar aspect of life fallen into new shapes, taking on alien forms.
She realized that Dominick had never been happy with her, and, for the first time, she understood the gulf between them. She saw what the life was that he had wanted to lead, and that he could have led with the other woman. It would have been that very form of existence which Berny had always derided, and thought an outward expression of the inward dullness of people who had children, looked shabby, and did not care for money. Now she felt unsure as to whether her scorn of it was not foolish and unenlightened. As in a sudden forward shoot of a search-light, she saw them—Dominick and Rose—happy in a way she had never dreamed of being happy, in a world so far from hers that she had never before had a clear look at it, a man and woman concentrated upon the piece of life that belonged to them, living passionately for each other, indifferent to all that seemed to her of value.
She brought her mental vision back from this upon herself and felt shaken and slightly sick. Seeing beyond the circle of her own experience and sensation for the first time, she would have said to any companion who might have shared her thoughts, “No wonder Dominick didn’t get on with me!” For a dispassionately-contemplative moment she saw herself in Dominick’s eyes; she saw their married life as it had been to him. She felt sorry for both of them—for him in his forced acquiescence with the conditions around him, for herself because of her ignorance of all he had wanted and expected.
“I couldn’t be any different,” she whispered to herself, “that’s the way I am.”
She never could be any different. She was one kind of woman and Rose Cannon was another, and Dominick belonged to Rose Cannon’s kind. She did not know that it was so much better than her kind but it was different. They made her feel like an outsider in a distant world, and the feeling gave her a sensation of deadly depression. The burning heat of resentment that had made her speak to Rose was gone. All the burning heats and angers of the last two months seemed to belong to the past. An icy, nostalgic ache of loneliness had hold of her. The accustomed sense of intimacy and warm, enjoying interest in the world—what we mean when we talk of “living”—had been completely drawn out of her.
The cold, biting in to her marrow, at last woke her to a realization of her surroundings, and she sat upright, looking blinkingly to the right and left. The half-lit plaza lay like a lake of shadow surrounded by a circlet of light and girdled by noise. It was like the brightness and animation of the world flowing round her but not touching her, as she sat alone in the darkness.
She rose suddenly, determined to escape from her gloomy thoughts, and walked toward the upper end of the square, directing her steps to the Spanish and Italian section of the city which is called the Latin Quarter. She walked slowly, not knowing where to go, only determined that she would not go home. She thought for a moment of her sisters’, where she could have dinner and find the cheer of congenial society. But on consideration she felt that this, too, was more than she could just now bear. They would torment her with questions and she felt in no mood to put them off or to be confidential. Finally she remembered a Mexican restaurant, to visit which had at one time been a fashion. She had been there with Hazel and Josh, and once in a party with some of the bank people. She knew where the place was and felt that she could dine there with no fear of encountering any one she knew.
With an objective point in view, her step gained decision, and she moved forward briskly, leaving the plaza and plunging into the congeries of picturesque streets which harbor a swarming foreign population. The lights of shops and open stalls fell out into the fog, transforming it into thick, churning currents of smoky pallor. Wet walls and sidewalks showed a gold veneer, and lingering drops, trembling on cornices, hung like tiny globes of thin yellow glass.
People and things looked magnified and sometimes horrible seen through this mysterious, obscuring medium. Once behind a pane of glass she saw lines of detached, staring eyes, fastened glaringly on her as she advanced. It was the display in an optician’s show-window, where glass eyes were disposed in fanciful lines, like a decoration. She looked at them askance, feeling that there was something sinister in their wide, unwinking scrutiny. She hurried by the market stalls, where the shawled figures of women stood huddled round the butcher’s block. They looked as if they might be grouped round a point of interest, bending to stare at something lying there, something dreadful, like a corpse, Berny thought.
When she saw the Mexican restaurant she felt relieved. The strange atmospheric conditions seemed to have played upon her nerves and she was glad to get somewhere where she could find warmth and light and people. The place, a little shabby house dating from the era of the projecting shingle roof and encircling balcony, stood on a corner with windows on two streets. It was built upon a slope so sharp that the balcony, which in front skirted the second story, in the back was on a level with the sidewalk. The bright light of gas-jets, under shades of fluted white china, fell over the contents of the show-window. They were not attractive. A dish of old and shriveled oranges stood between a plate of tamales and another of red and green peppers. There were many flies in the window, and, chilled by the cold, they stood along the inside of the glass in a state of torpor.
Berny pushed open the door and entered. The front part of the place was used as a grocery store and had a short counter at one side, behind which stood shelves piled high with the wares demanded by the Mexican and Spanish population. Back of this were the tables of the restaurant. The powerful, aromatic odors of the groceries blended with the even more powerful ones of the Mexican menu. The room was close and hot. In a corner, his back braced against the wall, a Spaniard, with inky hair and a large expanse of white shirt bosom, was languidly picking at a guitar.
Berny knew that there was an inner sanctum for the guests that preferred more secluded quarters, and walked past the counter and between the tables. An arched opening connected with this room. Coarse, dirty, lace curtains hung in the archway and, looped back against gilt hooks, left a space through which a glimpse of the interior was vouchsafed to the diners without. It was smaller than the restaurant proper, and was fitted up with an attempt at elegance. Lace curtains—also coarse and dirty—veiled the windows, and two large mirrors, with tarnished and fly-spotted gilt frames, hung on the wall opposite the entrance.
Just now it was sparsely patronized. In one corner two women in mourning and a child were sitting. They glanced at Berny with languid curiosity and then resumed a loud and voluble conversation in Spanish. A party of three Jews, an over-dressed woman and two young men—evidently visitors from another part of town—sat near them. On the opposite side there was no one. Berny slipped noiselessly into a chair at the corner table, her back against the partition that shut off the rest of the dining-room. She felt sheltered in this unoccupied angle, despite the fact that the mirror hanging opposite gave a reflection of her to any one standing in the archway.
The cloth was dirty and here and there showed a hole. Her ineradicable fastidiousness was strong in her even at this hour, when everything that was a manifestation of her own personality seemed weak and devitalized. She was disgustedly clearing away the crumbs of the last occupant with daintily-brushing movements of her finger-tips, when the waiter drew up beside her and demanded her order. It was part of this weird evening, when natural surroundings seemed to combine with her own overwrought condition to create an effect of strangeness and terror, that the waiter should have been an old, shriveled man of shabby and dejected mien, with a defect in one eye, which rendered it abnormally large and prominent under a drooping, reddened lid. In order to see well it was necessary for him to hold his head at a certain angle and bring the eye, staring with alarming wildness, upon the object of his attention. His aspect added still further to Berny’s dissatisfaction. She resolved to eat little and leave the place as soon as possible.
When her soup came, a thin yellow liquid in which dark bits of leaves and herbs floated, she tasted it hesitatingly, and, after a mouthful or two, put down her spoon and leaned back against the wall. She felt very tired and incapable of any more concentration of mind. Her thoughts seemed to float, disconnectedly and indifferently, this way and that, like a cobweb stirred by air currents and half held by a restraining thread. To her dulled sense of observation the laughter of the Jewish party came mingled with the tinkling of the guitar outside, and the loud, continuous talk from the Spanish women in the corner.
The waiter brought fish—a fried smelt—and she roused herself and picked up her fork. She did not notice that a man was standing near her in the archway, the edge of the lace curtain in his hand, looking about the room. He threw a side glance at her which swept her shoulders, her hat, and her down-bent profile, and looked away. Then, as if something in this glimpse had suddenly touched a spring of curiosity, he looked back again. His second survey was longer. The glance he bent upon her was sharp and grew in intensity. He made no attempt to enter or to move nearer her, but any one watching him would have seen that his interest increased with the prolongation of his scrutiny.
As if afraid of being observed he cast a quick surreptitious look over the room, which in its circuit crossed the mirror. Here, reflected from a different point of view, Berny was shown in full face, her eyes lowered, her hands moving over her plate. The man scanned the reflection with immovable intentness. Berny laid down her fork and pushed the fish away with a petulant movement, and the watcher drew back behind the lace curtain. Through its meshes he continued to stare at the mirror, his lips tightly shut, his face becoming rigid in the fixity of his observation.
The waiter entered, his arms piled with dishes, and she made a beckoning gesture to him. He answered with a jerk of his head, and, going to the table where the Spanish women sat, unloaded his cargo there, as he set it out exchanging remarks with the women in their own language and showing no haste to answer Berny’s summons. She moved in her chair and muttered angrily. The man behind the lace curtain advanced his head and through the interstices of the drapery tried to look directly at her. In this position he could only catch a glimpse of her, but he saw her hand stretched forward to take one of the red beans from the glass saucer in the middle of the table. It was an elegant hand, the skin smooth and white, the fingers covered with rings. She again beckoned, this time peremptorily, and the waiter came. The listener could hear her voice distinctly as he watched her reflection in the glass.
“Why didn’t you come when I beckoned?” she said sharply.
“Because I had other people to wait on,” said the waiter with equal asperity. “They was here before you.”
“What’s the matter with the dinner to-night? It’s all bad.”
“I ain’t cooked it,” retorted the man, growing red with indignation, his swollen eye glaring fiercely at her. “And no one else’s complained. I guess it’s what’s the matter with you?”
Berny made an angry movement—sometimes alluded to as “flouncing”—and turned her head away from him.
“Get me an enchilada,” she said peremptorily, “and after that some frijoles. I don’t want anything else.”
The waiter moved away and the man behind the curtain, as if satisfied by his long survey, also turned back into the general room. Close to the opening there was an unoccupied table, and at this he sat down, laid his hat on the chair beside him, and unfastened his coat. To the servant who came for his order, he asked for a cup of black coffee and a liqueur glass of brandy. He also requested an evening paper. With the sheet open before him he sat sipping the coffee, the slightest noise from the inner room causing him to start and lift the paper before his face.
He sat thus for some fifteen minutes. The Spanish women and the child emerged from the archway and left the restaurant, and a few moments later he heard the scraping of chair legs and Berny’s voice as she asked for her bill. He lifted the paper and appeared buried in its contents, not moving as Berny brushed back the lace curtain and passed him. Her eyes absently fell on him and she had a vague impression of the dark dome of a head emerging from above the opened sheets of the journal. As she rustled by he lowered the paper and followed her with a keen watchful glance. He did not move till the street door closed behind her, when he threw the paper aside, snatched up his hat and flicked a silver dollar on to the cloth.
“No change,” he said to the waiter, who came forward.
The surprised servant, unaccustomed to such tips, stared astonished after him as he hurried down the passage between the tables, quickly opened the door and disappeared into the darkness of the street.
Berny was only a few rods away, moving forward with a slow, loitering step. It was an easy night to follow without being observed. Walking at a prudent distance behind her, he kept her in sight as she passed from the smaller streets of the Latin Quarter into the glare and discord of the more populous highways, along Kearney Street, past the lower boundary of Portsmouth Square. He noticed that she walked without haste, now and then glancing at a window or a passer-by. She was like a person who has no objective point in view, or at least is in no hurry to reach it.
But this did not seem to be the case, for when she reached the square she took her stand on the corner where the Sacramento Street cars stop. The man drew back into a doorway opposite. They were the only passengers who boarded the car at that corner, Berny entering the closed interior, the man taking a seat on the outside. He had it to himself here, and chose the end seat by the window. Muttering imprecations at the cold, he turned up his overcoat collar and drew his soft felt hat down over his ears. By turning his head he could see between the bars that cross the end windows, the interior of the car shining with light, its polished yellow woodwork throwing back the white glare of the electricity. There were only three passengers, two depressed-looking women in dingy black, and Berny on a line with himself in the corner by the door. He could see her even better here than in the restaurant. She sat, a small dark figure, pressed into the angle of the seat, her hands clasped in her lap, her eyes down. Her hat cast a shadow over the upper part of her face, and below this the end of her nose, her mouth and chin were revealed as pale and sharply-cut as an ivory carving. She seemed to be sunk in thought and sat motionless; the half of her face he could see, looking very white against her black fur collar.
He was furtively surveying her, when she started, glanced out of the window and signed to the conductor to stop. The man on the front dropped to the ground and stole lightly round the car, so that its moving body hid him from her. Emptiness and silence held the street, and he could easily follow her as she walked upward along the damp and deserted sidewalk. Halfway up the block a building larger than those surrounding it rose into the night. A mounting file of bay-windows broke its façade, and, a few steps above the level of the pavement, a line of doors with numbers showing black on illuminated transoms revealed it to the man opposite as a flat building. Here Berny stopped and without hesitation, evidently as one who was familiar with the place, mounted the steps and walked to the last of the doors.
The man, with soft and careful footsteps, crossed the street. As he drew nearer he saw that she was not using a latch-key, but was waiting to be admitted, leaning as if tired against the wall. He had reached the sidewalk when the door opened, vouchsafing him a bright, unimpeded view of a long flight of stairs carpeted in green. Berny entered and for a moment, before the door closed, he saw her mounting the stairs. She had not asked for any one, or indeed made a sound of greeting or inquiry. She was therefore either expected or an habitué of the place. When the door was shut he, too, mounted the porch steps and read the number on the transom. He whispered it over several times, the light falling out on his thin, aquiline face with a sweep of dark hair drooping downward toward his collar.
Satisfied with his investigation, he left the porch and walked rapidly down the street to the corner. Here there was a lamp, and halting under its light he drew from his pocket a leather wallet and took therefrom Dominick Ryan’s card with an address written on it. The penciled numbers were the same as those on the door he had just left, and he stood looking fixedly at the card, an expression of excitement and exultation growing on his face.
The afternoon of the next day Dominick came home earlier than usual. His New York friend, who was en route to Japan, had but a couple of days in San Francisco, and again claimed his company for dinner. The theater was to follow and Dominick had come home to change his clothes, and incidentally either to see Berny and explain his absence or to leave a message for her with the Chinaman.
He felt rather guilty where she was concerned. He had seen nothing of her for two days. The only time they met was in the evening after business hours, the only meal they took together was dinner. With every spark of affection dead between them, their married life the hollowest sham, she had so long and so sternly trained him to be considerate of her and keep her on his mind, that he still instinctively followed the acquired habit of thinking of her comfort and arranging for it. He knew she would be annoyed at the two lonely dinners, and hoped to see her before he left and suggest to her that she telephone for one of her sisters to join her.
The flat was very quiet when he entered, and after looking into one or two rooms for her he called the Chinaman, who said Mrs. Ryan had gone out early in the afternoon, leaving no message except that she would be home to dinner. Dominick nodded a dismissal and walked into the den. He carried the evening papers in his hand, and looking at the clock he saw that he had an hour before it would be necessary for him to dress and leave the house. Berny would undoubtedly be home before then; she was rarely out after six. Meantime, the thought that she was not in and that he could read the papers in unmolested, uninterrupted silence caused a slight sense of relief to lighten the weight that was now always with him.
He had hardly opened the first sheet when a ring at the bell dispelled his hopes. It was one of his wife’s habits never to carry a latch-key, which she looked upon as a symbol of that bourgeois, middle-class helpfulness that she had shaken off with her other working-girl manners and customs. Dominick dropped the paper, waiting for her entrance, and framing the words with which he would acquaint her with the fact that he was to be absent again. Instead, however, of the rustle of feminine skirts, he heard the Chinaman’s padding steps, and the servant entered and presented him with a card. Traced on it in a sprawling handwriting was the name “James Defay Buford.” Dominick remembered his invitation to the man to call, and realized that this probably was the only time that the actor could conveniently do so. There was an hour yet before dinner would be served, and turning to the servant Dominick told him to show the gentleman up.
A moment later, Buford entered, smiling, almost patronizingly urbane and benign. He was dressed with a rich and careful elegance which gave him a somewhat dandified air. After bestowing upon Dominick greetings that sounded as unctuous as a benediction, he took his seat at the end of the cozy corner facing the door which led into the hall. From here he looked at the young man with a close, attentive scrutiny, very friendly and yet holding, under its enfolding blandness, something of absence, of inattention, as though his mind were not in the intimate customary connection with the words that issued from his lips. This suggestion of absence deepened, showed more plainly in an eye that wandered to the door, or, as Dominick spoke, fell to the carpet and remained there, hidden by a down-drawn bush of eyebrow. Dominick was in the middle of a query as to the continued success of the “Klondike Monologue” when the actor raised his head and said politely, but with a politeness that contained a note of haste and eagerness beneath it,
“Is Madame at home?”
“No, she’s not at home,” said Madame’s husband. “But she may be in any moment now. She generally goes out for the afternoon and gets back about this time.”
“Perhaps you can tell me,” said Buford, looking sidewise at his gloves and cane as they lay on the end of the divan, “who—you’ll pardon my seeming curiosity, but I’ll explain it presently—who was the lady that came in here last night at about half-past seven?”
He looked up and Dominick was suddenly aware that his face was charged with the tensest, the most vital interest. Thrust forward, it showed a hungriness of anticipation that was almost passionate. The young man was not only surprised at the expression but at the question.
“I haven’t an idea,” he said. “I wasn’t home to dinner last night, and didn’t get in till late. Why do you want to know?”
“For many reasons, or for one, perhaps—for one exceedingly important reason.”
He paused, his eyes again turned slantingly on the stick and gloves, his lips tight-pressed, one against the other.
“How did you know any woman came in here last night at that hour? Did you come up to call?” asked Dominick.
“No—no—” the other spoke with quick impatience evidently from the surface of his mind, “no, it was—at first, anyway—purely accidental. I saw the woman—and—and—afterward I saw her enter here. Mr. Ryan,” he said suddenly, looking at his vis-à-vis with piercing directness and speaking with an intensity of urgency that was almost a command, “can you give me half an hour of your time and your full attention? I want to speak to you of a matter, that to me, at least, is of great—the greatest—importance. You can help me; at least you can, I hope, throw some light on what is a dark subject. Have I your permission to talk freely to you, freely and at length?”
Dominick, who was beginning to feel as if he were in a play, and was exceedingly surprised and intrigued, nodded, remarking,
“Why, certainly, go on. If I can be of any help to you or explain anything for you, nothing would give me greater pleasure. Let me hear what it is.”
The actor dropped his glance to the floor for what seemed an anxiously-considering moment, then he raised his head and, looking directly at his host, said,
“You may remember that, while at Antelope, I once spoke to you of having been married—of having, in fact, been unfortunate enough to lose my wife.”
Dominick remembered, but it seemed imperfectly, for he said in a doubtful tone, which had more than a suggestion of questioning,
“She—er—she died?”
“No,” said the other, “she did not die. I lost her in a way that I think was more painful than death. She left me, voluntarily, of her own free will.”
“Oh, of course,” said the young man hastily. “I remember perfectly, one day by the sitting-room fire. I remember it all as clearly as possible now.”
“That was the time—the only time I mentioned the subject to you. On another occasion I spoke to that lovely and agreeable young lady, Miss Cannon, on the matter, and told her more fully of my domestic sorrows. But to you I made but that one allusion. May I now, more at length, tell you of the misfortunes—I may say tragedy—of my married life?”
Dominick, mystified, nodded his head. He could not imagine why Buford should come to him at this particular moment and in this particularly theatrical manner with the history of his domestic troubles. But he was undeniably interested, and feeling himself more than ever like a character in a play, said,
“Go on. Tell me anything you like. And if in any way I can be of use to you, I’ll be only too happy to do it.”
Looking at the carpet, a heat of inward excitement showing through the professional pomposity of his manner, Buford began slowly and solemnly:
“I’ll go back to seven years ago, when I was in Chicago. Previous to that, Mr. Ryan, I will tell you in confidence I had been a preacher, a Methodist, of good reputation, though, I am fain to confess, of small standing in the church. I left that esteemed body as I felt there were certain tenets of the faith I could not hold to. I am nothing if not honest, and I was too honest to preach doctrines with all of which I could not agree. I left the church as a pastor though I have never deserted it as a disciple, and have striven to live up to its standards.”
He paused, and Dominick, feeling that he spoke sincerely, said,
“That was the only thing to do.”
“So it seemed to me. I left the town where I was living and moved to Chicago where, through the influences of a friend, I obtained a position in a school of acting and elocution. I instructed the pupils in voice production. You may have noticed that I have an unusually deep and resonant voice. Through that, I obtained this work and received the stipend of thirty-five dollars a week. It was fairly good pay, the hours were not too long, there was no demand made of a sacrifice of conscience, and I confess that I felt much freer and more contented than I had in the church.
“It was at this stage of my career that I met the lady who became my wife. We lived at the same boarding-house—Mrs. Heeney’s, a most elegant, well-kept place, and Mrs. Heeney a lovely woman of one of the best southern families. It was at her table that I met the girl who was destined to have such a fatal influence on my life. She was a stenographer and typewriter in one of the largest firms in the city, earning her twenty dollars a week, as she was an expert and not to be beaten in the state. She was very pretty, the brunette type of beauty, black-eyed, and as smart as a steel trap. She was as dainty as a pink, always well-dressed and up-to-date, never anything sloppy or slouchy about her. Ask her to go to the theater and there wouldn’t be a woman in the house who could beat her for looks and style. Besides that, she was a fine conversationalist, could talk as easily as a book on any subject. If I brought her a novel, she’d read it and have the whole plot at her finger-ends, and be able to talk it all over, have her own opinions about every character. Oh, she was an accomplished, fascinating woman, if I say it myself! Any man might have taken to her. She was for ever telling me about California, and how she wanted to get back there—”
“California?” interrupted Dominick. “Did she come from California?”
“From here—from San Francisco. She was a native daughter of the state and the town. I was interested in California myself at that time, though I’d never seen it, and we’d talk of that and other things till, bit by bit, we drifted nearer and nearer together and the day came when we were engaged. I thought that was the happiest day of my life, and it would have been if she’d stayed true to her promises.”
The clock struck the single silvery note of the half-hour and Dominick heard it. He was interested in the story, but he had only another half-hour to give, and said as Buford paused,
“Go on. It’s very interesting. Don’t stop.”
“The first step in our married life that seemed to me strange, that cast, not what you’d call a cloud, but a shadow, over my happiness, was that she insisted on keeping the marriage secret. She had several reasons, all of which seemed good and sufficient to her. She said her people would not like her marrying a stranger away from home, and that they’d cut up very ugly when they heard it. Her principal reason, and the only one that seemed to me to have any force, was that she feared she’d lose her job. She had it on good authority that the firm where she worked wouldn’t employ married women, and if they knew she’d got a husband who was making a fair salary, they’d give her the sack. Whether it was for all the reasons together, or for just this one I don’t know, but she’d only marry me if I’d solemnly promise to keep the matter secret. I’d have promised her anything. She’d out and out bewitched me.
“So we were married and went to housekeeping in a little flat in a suburb. We had our mail sent to our old address at Mrs. Heeney’s. She was in our secret, the only person who was. We had to let her know because of the letters, and inquiries that might have been made for us from time to time. We were married in the winter, and that winter was the happiest time of my life. I’ll never forget it. That little flat, and that little black-eyed woman,—they were just Paradise and the angel in it for me. Not but what she had her faults; she was hot-tempered, quick to flare up, and sharp with her tongue. But I never cared—just let her sputter and fizz till she’d worked it all off and then I’d take things up where they were before the eruption began. It was a happy time—a man in love and a woman that keeps him loving—you can’t beat it this side of Heaven.”
Dominick made no answer. The actor for a moment was silent and then with a sigh went on.
“I suppose it was too good to last. Anyway, it ended. We’d lived that way for six months when in the beginning of June the Dramatic School failed and I lost my job. It came on us with almost no warning, and it sort of knocked us out for a bit. I wasn’t as upset by it as Mrs. Carter was, but she—”
“Who’s Mrs. Carter?” said Dominick.
“My wife. That’s my name, Junius Carter. Of course the name I use on the stage is not my own. I took that in the Klondike, made it up from my mother’s and the name of a pard I had who died. Well, as I was saying, Mrs. Carter took it hard. She couldn’t seem to get reconciled to it. I tried to brace her up and told her it would only be temporary, and I’d get another place soon, but she was terribly upset. We’d lived well, not saved a cent, furnished the flat nicely and kept a servant. There was nothing for it but to live on what she made. It was hard on her, but I’ve often thought she might have been easier on me. I didn’t want to be idle or eat the bread she paid for, the Lord knows! I tried hard enough to get work. I tramped those streets in sun and rain till the shoes were falling off my feet. But the times were hard, money was tight, and good jobs were not to be had for the asking. One of the worst features of the case was that I hadn’t any regular line of work or profession. The kind of thing I’d been doing don’t fit a man for any kind of job. If I couldn’t do my own kind of stunt I’d have to be just a general handy-man or stevedore, and I’m not what you’d call rugged.
“It was an awful summer! The heat was fierce. Our little flat was like an oven and, after my long day’s tramp after work, I used to go home just dead beat and lie on the lounge and not say a word. My wife was worn out. She wasn’t accustomed to warm weather, and that and the worry and the hard work sort of wore on her, and there were evenings when she’d slash round so with her tongue that I’d get up, half-dead as I was, and go out and sit on the door-step till she’d gone to bed. I’m not blaming her. She had enough to try her. Working at her machine all day in that weather would wear anybody’s temper to a frazzle. But she said some things to me that bit pretty deep. It seemed impossible it could be the same woman I’d got to know so well at Mrs. Heeney’s. We were both just about used up, thin as fiddle-strings, and like fiddle-strings ready to snap at a touch. Seems queer to think that thirty-five dollars a week could make such a difference! With it we were in Paradise; without it we were as near the other place as people can get, I guess.
“Well, it was too much for her. She was one of those women who can’t stand hardships and she couldn’t make out in the position she was in. Love wasn’t enough for her, there had to be luxury and comfort, too. One day I came home and she was gone. No,” in answer to a look of inquiry on Dominick’s face, “there was no other man. She wasn’t that kind, always as straight as a string. No, she just couldn’t stand the grind any longer. She left a letter in which she said some pretty hard things to me, but I’ve tried to forget and not bear malice. It was a woman half crazy with heat and nerves and overwork that wrote them. The gist of it was that she’d gone back to California, to her sisters who lived there, and she was not coming back. She didn’t like it,—marriage, or me, or Chicago. She was just going to throw the whole business overboard. She told me if I followed her, or tried to hold her, she’d disappear, hinted that she’d kill herself. That was enough for me. God knows if she didn’t want me I wasn’t going to force myself upon her. And, anyway, she knew fast enough I couldn’t follow her. I hadn’t money to have my shoes patched, much less buy a ticket to California.
“After that there were some dark days for me. Deserted, with no money, with no work, and no prospects—I tell you that’s the time the iron goes down into a man’s soul. I didn’t know what was going to become of me, and I didn’t care. One day on the street I met an old chum of mine, a fellow called Defay, that I hadn’t seen for years. He was going to the Klondike, and when he heard my hard-luck story, he proposed to me to join forces and go along with him. I jumped at it, anything to get away from that town and state that was haunted with memories of her.
“It was just the beginning of the gold rush and we went up there and stayed for two years. Defay was one of the finest men I ever knew. Life’s all extremes and contrasts; there’s a sort of balance to it if you come to look close into it. I’d had an experience with the kind of woman that breaks a man’s heart as you might a pipe-stem, then I ran up against the kind of man that gives you back your belief in human nature. He died of typhoid a year and a half after we got there. I had it first and nearly died; in fact, the rumor went out that it was I that was dead and not Defay. As I changed my name and went on the stage soon afterward, it was natural enough for people to say Junius Carter was dead.
“I was pretty near starving when I drifted on the stage. I had learned some conjuring tricks, and that and my voice took me there. I just about made a living for a year, and then I floated back down here. I never played in San Francisco till now. I acted on the western circuits, used to go as far East as Denver and Kansas City, and then swing round the circle through the northwestern cities and Salt Lake. I managed to make a living and no more. I was cast in parts that didn’t suit me. The ‘Klondike Monologue’ was the first thing I did that was in my line.”
“Did you never see or hear of your wife?”
“Not a word. I didn’t know whether she was dead or living till last night.”
Buford raised his eyes and looked piercingly into the young man’s face. Dominick forgot the time, his engagement, Berny’s anticipated entrance. He drew himself up in his chair and said in a loud, astonished voice,
“Last night? Then the woman you saw here last night was your wife?”
The actor gravely inclined his head.
“I saw my wife,” he said solemnly, “last night at Deledda’s restaurant. It was entirely by accident. I liked the Mexican cooking and had been more than once to that place. Last night I was about to enter the back part of the restaurant when I saw her sitting there alone in the corner. For a moment I could not believe my eyes. I got behind a lace curtain and watched her. She was changed but it was she. I heard her speak to the waiter and if I’d never seen her face I’d have known the voice among a thousand. She’d grown stouter and I think even prettier, and she looked as if she were prosperous. She was well-dressed and her hands were covered with rings. When she went out I followed her and she came straight here from the restaurant and rang the bell and came in.”
“Are you sure she didn’t go into one of the other flats? There are four in the building.”
“No, she came in here. I compared the number on the transom with the address you’d given me on the card.”
“What an extraordinary thing!” said Dominick. “It’s evidently some one my wife knows who came to see her that evening, probably to keep her company while I was out. But I can’t think who it could be.”
He tried to run over in his mind which one of Berny’s acquaintances the description might fit and could think of no one. Probably it was some friend of her working-girl days, who had dropped out of her life and now, guided by Fate had unexpectedly reappeared.
“It’s certainly a remarkable coincidence,” he went on, “that she should have come to this flat, one of the few places in the city where you know the people. If she’d gone to any of the others——”
A ring at the bell stopped him.
“There!” he said, “that’s Mrs. Ryan. Now we’ll hear who it was.”
For a moment they both sat silent, listening, the actor with his face looking sharp and pale in the suspense of the moment, the muscles of his lean cheeks working. The rustle of Berny’s dress sounded from the stairway and grew in volume as she slowly ascended. The two men rose to their feet.
“Come in the den for a moment, Berny,” Dominick called. “There’s a gentleman here who wants to see you.”
The rustle advanced up the hall, and the portière was drawn back. Bernice, brilliantly dressed, a mauve orchid pinned on her bosom, stood in the aperture, smiling.
Buford’s back was against the light, and, for the first moment she only saw him as a tall masculine outline and her smile was frank and natural. But he saw her plain as a picture and before Dominick could frame the words of introduction, started forward, crying,
“Bernice Iverson!”
She drew back as if struck and made a movement to drag the portière over her. Her face went white to the lips, the patches of rouge standing out on her cheeks like rose-leaves pasted on the sickly skin.
“Who—who’s that?” she stammered, turning a wild eye on Dominick.
“Mr. Ryan,” the actor cried, beside himself with excitement, “this is my wife! This is the woman I’ve been talking of! Bernice, don’t you know me? Junius Carter?”
“He’s crazy,” she faltered, her lips so loose and tremulous they could hardly form the words. “I never saw him before. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Who’s Junius Carter?”
“This is my wife, Mr. Buford,” said Dominick, who had been staring from one to the other in blank astonishment. “We’ve been married nearly three years. I don’t understand——”
“It’s Bernice Iverson, the girl I married in Chicago, that I’ve just been telling you about, that I saw last night at the Mexican restaurant. Why, she can’t deny it. She can’t look at me and say she doesn’t know me—Junius Carter, the man she married in the Methodist chapel, seven years ago, in Chicago. Bernice——”
He approached her and she shrank back.
“Keep away from me,” she cried hoarsely, stretching out a trembling hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re crazy. Junius Carter’s dead—” then suddenly turning on Dominick with a blazing look of fury—“It’s you that have done this! It’s you, you snake! I’ll be even with you yet!”
She tore herself out of the folds of the portière which she had clutched to her and rushed into the hall and into her own room. The banging of the door behind her shook the house.
The two men stood as she had left them, staring at each other, not knowing what to say, speechless and aghast.
The night was falling when Buford left. He and Dominick had sat on in the den, talking together in low voices, going over past events in the concatenation of circumstances that had led up to the extraordinary situation in which they now found themselves. Both listened with strained ears for the opening of Bernice’s door, but not a sound came from her room. Each silently, without expressing his thoughts to the other, wondered what she would do, what sensational move might now be expected of her. While they talked, it was evident she intended to make no sign of life.
After Buford had left, Dominick called up his friend on the telephone telling him that he would be unable to meet him at dinner. He knew that Berny could hear every word he uttered, and with indescribable dread he expected that she would open her door and accost him. But again she preserved an inviolate invisibility, though beneath her portal he could see a crack of light and could hear her moving about in the room.
He went into his own room, lit the gas, and began packing his trunks. He was dazed and stupefied by what had occurred, and almost the only clearly-defined idea he had was to leave the house and get far from the presence of the woman who had so ruthlessly poisoned his life. He was in the midst of his packing when the Chinaman summoned him to dinner, but he told the man he cared for nothing and would want no breakfast on the following morning. The servant, who by this time was well aware that the household was a strange one, shrugged his shoulders without comment and passed on to the door of his mistress’ room, upon which he knocked with the low, deferential rap of the Chinese domestic. Berny’s voice sounded shrilly, through the silence of the flat:
“Go away! Let me alone! If that’s dinner I don’t want any.”
The sound of her voice pierced Dominick with a sense of loathing and horror. He stopped in his packing, suddenly deciding to leave everything and go, go from the house and from her as soon as he could get away. He thrust into a valise such articles as he would want for the night and set the bag by the stair-head while he went into the parlor to find some bills and letters of his that he remembered to have left in the desk. As he passed Berny’s door, it flew open and she appeared in the aperture. The room behind her was a blaze of light, every gas-jet lit and pouring a flood of radiance over the clothes outspread on the bed, the chairs, and the floor. She, herself, in a lace-trimmed petticoat and loose silk dressing-sack, stood in the doorway staring at Dominick, her face pinched, white, and fierce.
“What are you doing?” she said abruptly. “Going away?”
“Yes,” he answered, stopping at the sight of the dreaded apparition. “That’s my intention.”
“Where are you going?” she demanded.
He gave her a cold look and made no answer.
“Are you going to your mother’s?” she cried.
He moved forward toward the parlor door and she came out into the passage, looking after him and repeating with a tremulous, hoarse persistence, “Dominick, answer me. Are you going to your mother’s?”
“Yes, I am,” he said over his shoulder.
He had an unutterable dread that she would begin to speak of the situation, of Buford, of her past life; that she would try to explain and exonerate herself and they would be plunged into a long and profitless discussion of all the sickening, irremediable wretchedness of the past. He could not bear the thought of it; he would have done anything to avoid it. He wanted to escape from her, from the house where she had tortured him, where he seemed to have laid down his manhood, his honor, his faith, and seen her trample on them. The natural supposition that he would want to confront her with her deception and hear her explanation was the last thing he desired doing.
“Don’t go to your mother’s,” she cried, following him up the hall, “for to-night, Dominick, please. And don’t tell her. I beg, I pray of you, don’t tell her till to-morrow.”
Her manner was so pleadingly, so imploringly insistent, that he turned and looked somberly at her. She was evidently deeply in earnest, her face lined with anxiety.
“This is the last thing I’ll ever ask of you. I know I’ve got no right to ask anything, but you’re generous, you’ve been kind to me in the past, and it’ll not cost you much to be kind just once again. Go to a hotel, or the club, or anywhere you like, but not to your mother’s and don’t tell her till to-morrow afternoon.”
He stared at her without speaking, wishing she would be silent and leave him.
“I’ll not trouble you after to-morrow. I’ll go, I’ll get out. You’ll never be bothered by me any more.”
“All right,” he said, “I’ll go to the club. Let me alone, that’s all, and let me go.”
“And—and,” she persisted, “you won’t tell her till to-morrow, to-morrow afternoon?”
He had entered the parlor in which the Chinaman had lit the lamps, and opening the desk began hunting for his papers. To her last words he returned no answer, and she crept in after him and stood in the doorway, leaning against the woodwork of the door-frame.
“You won’t tell her till to-morrow—to-morrow, say, after three?”
He found the letters and drew them out of their pigeonhole.
“All right,” he almost shouted. “I won’t tell her. But, for God’s sake, leave me alone and let me go. If you keep on following me round this way I won’t answer for what I’ll do.”
“You promise then,” she said, ignoring his heat. “You promise you’ll not tell her till after three?”
He turned from the desk, gave her a look of restrained passion, and said, “I promise,” then passed by her as she stood in the doorway and walked to the stair-head. Here his valise stood, and snatching it up he ran down the stairs and out of the house.
Bernice, hearing the door shut, returned to her room and went on with the work of sorting her wardrobe and packing her trunks. She did it deliberately and carefully, looking over each garment, and folding the choicer articles between sheets of tissue paper. At midnight she had not yet finished, and under the blaze of the gases, looking very tired, she went on smoothing skirts and pinching up the lace on bodices as she laid them tenderly on the trays that stood on the bed, the table, and the sofa. The night was far spent before everything was arranged to her satisfaction and she went to bed.
She was up betimes in the morning. Eight o’clock had not struck when she was making a last tour of the parlor, picking up small articles of silver and glass that she crowded down into cracks in the tightly-packed trunks. At breakfast the Chinaman, an oblique, observant eye on her, asked her what he should prepare for lunch. Conscious that if she told him she would not be back he might become alarmed at the general desertion and demand his wages, she ordered an even more elaborate menu than usual, telling him she would bring home a friend.
She breakfasted in her wrapper and after the meal finished her toilet with the extremest solicitude. Never had she taken more pains with herself. Though anxiety and strain had thinned and sharpened her, the fever of excitement which burnt in her temporarily repaired these ravages. Her eyes were brilliant without artificial aid; her cheeks a hot dry crimson that needed no rouge. The innate practicality of her character asserted itself even in this harassed hour. Last night she had put the purple orchid in a glass of water on the bureau. Now, as she pinned it on her breast, she congratulated herself for her foresight, the pale lavender petals of the rare blossom toning altogether harmoniously with her dress of dark purple cloth.
Before she left the room she locked the trunks and left beside them a dress suit-case packed for a journey. Standing in the doorway she took a hurried look about the apartment—a last, farewell survey, not of sentiment but of investigation, to see if she had forgotten anything. A silver photograph frame set in rhinestones caught her eye and she went back and took it up, weighing it uncertainly in her hand. Some of the rhinestones had fallen out, and she finally decided it was not worth while opening the trunks to put in such a damaged article.
It was only a quarter past nine when she emerged from the flat. She took the down-town car and twenty minutes later was mounting the steps to Bill Cannon’s office. She had been motionless and rigidly preoccupied on the car, but, as she approached the office, a change was visible in her gait and mien. She moved with a light, perky assurance, a motion as of a delicate, triumphant buoyancy seeming to impart itself to her whole body from her shoulders to her feet. A slight, mild smile settled on her lips, suggesting gaiety tempered with good humor. Her eye was charged with the same expression rendered more piquant by a gleam—the merest suggestion—of coquettish challenge.
The Bonanza King was already in his office. The same obsequious clerk who had shown her in on a former occasion took her card in to the inner sanctum where the great man, even at this early hour, was shut away with the business which occupied his crowded days. In a moment the young man returned smiling and quite as murmurously polite as he had been on her former visit, and Berny was once again ushered into the presence of the enemy.
The old man had read the name on the card with a lowering glance. His command to admit the visitor had been hardly more than an inarticulate growl which the well-trained clerk understood, as those about deaf mutes can read their half-made signs. Cannon was not entirely surprised at her reappearance, and mingled feelings stirred in him as he turned his swivel chair away from the table, and sat hunched in it, his elbows on its arms, his hands clasped over his stomach.
She came in with an effect of dash, confidence, and brilliancy that astonished him. He had expected her almost to sidle in in obvious, guilty fear of him, her resistance broken, humbly coming to sue for the money. Instead, a rustling, scented apparition appeared in the doorway, more gracious, handsome, and smiling than he had ever thought she could be. She stood for a moment, as if waiting for his invitation to enter, the whole effect of her rich costume, her feverishly high coloring, and her debonair and self-confident demeanor, surprising him into silence. A long white feather on her hat made a background for her darkly-flushed face and auburn hair. There were some amethysts round her neck, their purple lights harmonizing richly with the superb flower pinned on her breast. Her eyes looked very black, laughing, and provocative through her spotted veil.
“Well,” she said in a gay voice, “here I am again! Is it a surprise?”
She advanced into the room, and the old man, almost unconsciously, rose from his chair.
“Yes, sort of,” he said dryly.
She stopped by the desk, looked at him sidewise, and said,
“Do we shake hands?”
His glance on her was hard and cold. Berny met it and could not restrain a sinking of the courage that was her most admirable characteristic and that she had screwed far past its ordinary sticking-point that morning. She sank down into the same arm-chair that she had occupied on her former visit and said, with a little languid effect of indifference,
“Oh, well, never mind. We don’t have to waste time being polite. That’s one of the most convenient things about our interviews. We just say what we really think and there’s no need bothering about humbug.”
“So glad to hear it,” said the old man with his most ironical air. “Suppose then you let me know what you’ve come down to say.”
“Can’t you guess?” she answered, with an expression that was almost one of flirtatious interrogation.
“Nup,” he answered, looking steadily at her. “I have to have it said in that plain style with no politeness that you say is the way we always talk.”
“All right,” she answered briskly. “Here it is as plain as A B C. I’ve decided to accept your offer and take the money.”
She looked up at him, smiling gallantly. But as her eye caught his her smile, try as she would to keep it, died. He suddenly realized that she was extremely nervous, that her lips were dry, and the hand she put up to adjust her veil, and thus hide her intractable mouth, was shaking. The admiration he had of late felt for her insolent fearlessness increased, also he began to feel that now, at last, he was rising to the position of master of the situation. He leaned back in the swivel chair and glowered at her.
“You know,” he said slowly, “you’ve a gall that beats anything I’ve ever seen. Two days ago you busted this business higher than a kite by stopping my daughter on the public street and telling her the whole story. You did the one thing you knew I’d never forgive; and you ended the affair, hammered the nails in its coffin and buried it. Now you come flourishing into my office as if nothing had happened and say you’ll take the money. It beats me how you’ve got the nerve to dare to show your face in here.”
Berny listened with the hand holding the veil pressed against her mouth and her eyes staring over it.
“It’s all straight enough,” she burst out, “what you say about telling your daughter. I did it and I was crazy. I’ll admit that. But you’ll have to admit on your side that it was pretty rough the way I was treated here, ordered out like a peddler. I was sore, and it was you that made me so. And I’ll not deny that I wanted to hit you back. But you brought it on yourself. And, anyway, what does it matter if I go? Maybe your daughter’s mad and disgusted now, but women don’t stay that way for ever. If I get out, drop out of sight, the way I intend to do, give Dominick his freedom, isn’t she going to forget all about what I said? Wouldn’t any woman?”
The Bonanza King made no answer. He had no intention of talking with this objectionable woman about his daughter. But in his heart hope sprang at the words. They were an echo of his own desires and opinions. If this woman took the money and went, would not Rose, in the course of time, relent in her attitude of iron disapproval, and smile on the man she loved? Could any woman hold out for ever in such a position?
“See here,” Berny went on, “I’ll leave a statement. I’ll put it in your hands that I changed my mind and voluntarily left. I’ll draw it up before a notary if you want. And it’s true. She needn’t think that I’m being forced out to make a place for her. I’m glad to go.”
She had leaned nearer to him from the chair, one finger tapping the corner of the desk to emphasize her words. Scrutinizing her as she spoke, he became more than ever impressed with the conviction that she was held in a tremor of febrile excitement. Her voice had an under note of vibration in it, like the voice of one who breathes quickly. The orchid on her breast trembled with the trembling of her frame.
“Look here,” he said quietly, “I want to understand this thing. What’s made you change your mind so suddenly? A few days ago you were all up on fiddle-strings at the suggestion of taking that money. Here, this morning, in you pop, and you’re all of a tremble to get it. What’s the meaning of it?”
“I can’t stand it any more,” she said. “When you said I couldn’t the other day, that I’d break down, you were right. I can’t stand it. Nobody could. It’s broken me to pieces. I want to get away from it all. I want to go somewhere where I’m at peace, where the people don’t hate me and hound me——”
Her voice suddenly grew hoarse and she stopped. He looked at her in surprise. She bent her face down, biting her under lip, and picked tremulously at the leaves of the purple orchid as if arranging them.
“You’ve beaten me,” she said in a suddenly strangled voice, “you’ve beaten me. I can’t fight any longer. Give me some money and let me go. I’m beaten.”
She lowered her head still farther and burst into tears. So unexpected were they that she had no preparations for them. Her handkerchief was in the bead purse that hung on her wrist, and, blinded by tears, she could not find the clasp. Her fumbling hand tried for a possible reserve supply in her belt, and then in despair went up to her face and lifted her veil trying to brush away the falling drops. The Bonanza King stared at her amazed, as much surprised as if he had seen a man weep. Finally he felt in his own pocket, produced a crisply-laundered square of white linen and handed it to her, observing soothingly,
“Here, take mine. You’re all broke up, aren’t you?”
She seized his offering and mopped her cheeks with it, sniffing and gasping, while he watched her in genuine solicitude.
“What’s wore you down to this state?” he said. “You’re the nerviest woman I ever saw.”
“It’s—it’s—all this thing,” she answered in a stifled voice. “I’m just worn out. I haven’t slept for nights,”—a memory of those miserable nights of perturbation and uncertainty swept over her and submerged her in a wave of self-pity. The tears gushed out again, and she held the old man’s large handkerchief against her eyes, uttering small, sobbing noises, sunk in abandoned despondence in the hollow of the chair.
The Bonanza King was moved. The facile tears of women did not affect him, but the tears of this bold, hard, unbreakable creature, whom he had regarded only as an antagonist to be vanquished, stirred him to a sort of abashed sympathy. There was something singularly pathetic about the completeness of her breakdown. She, who had been so audacious an adversary, now in all her crumpled finery weeping into his handkerchief, was so entirely and utterly a feeble, crushable thing.
“Come, brace up,” he said cheeringly. “We can’t do any talking while you’re acting this way. What’s the proposition again?”
“I want some money and I want to go.” She raised her head and lowered the handkerchief, speaking with a strained, throaty insistence like a child. “I can’t live here any more. I can’t bear it. It would give a prize fighter nervous prostration. I can’t bear it.” Her voice grew small and high. “Really I can’t,” she managed to articulate, and then dissolved into another flood.
The old man, high in his swivel chair, sat with his hands in his pockets, his lips pursed and his eyes on the floor. Once or twice he whirled the chair slightly from one side to the other. After a pause of some minutes he said,
“Are you prepared to agree to everything Mrs. Ryan and I demanded?”
After the last outbreak she had completely abandoned herself to the hysterical condition that was beyond her control. Now she made an effort to recover herself, sat up, swallowing and gasping, while she wiped her eyes.
“I’m ready to do it all,” she sniffed, “only—only—” she paused on the verge of another collapse, suppressed it, and said with some show of returning animation, “only I must have some money now—a guarantee.”
“Oh,” he said with the descending note of comprehension. “As I remember, we agreed to pay you seven thousand dollars for the first year, the year of desertion.”
She lowered the handkerchief entirely, presenting to him a disfigured face, all its good looks gone, but showing distinct signs of attention.
“I don’t want the seven thousand. I’ll waive it. I want a sum down, a guarantee, an advance. You offered me at first fifty thousand dollars. Give me that down and I’ll go this afternoon.”
“That wasn’t our original arrangement,” he said to gain time.
“Deduct it from the rest. I must have it. I can’t go without it. If you give me the check now I’ll leave for New York to-night.”
Her reviving interest and force seemed to have quenched the sources of her tears as suddenly as her exhausted nerves had made them flow. But her disfigured face, her figure which seemed to have shrunken in its fine clothes, were extremely pathetic.
“If you don’t trust me send one of your clerks with me to buy my ticket, send one to see me off. I’ve left my husband for good, for ever. I can’t live here any longer. Give me the money and let me go.”
“I don’t see that I’m going to have any security that you’re going to carry out the whole plan. How do I know that you’re not going to New York to have a good time and then, when you’ve spent the money, come back here?”
She sat up and sent a despairing look about the room as if in a wild search for something that would convince him of her sincerity.
“I swear, I promise,” she cried with almost frantic emphasis, “that I’ll never come back. I’m going for good and I’m going to set Dominick free. Oh, do believe me. Please. I’m telling the truth.”
He was impressed by her manner, as he had been by her tears. Something undoubtedly had happened which had suddenly caused her to change her mind and decide to leave her husband. He did not think that it was what she had told him. Her excitement, her overwrought condition suggested a cause less gradual, more like a shock. He ran over in his mind the advantages of giving her the money. Nothing would be jeopardized by it. It would simply be an advance made on the sum they had agreed upon.
“Fifty thousand’s too much,” he said slowly. “But I’ll be square to you and I’ll split the difference and give you twenty-five. I’ll give you the check now and you can take it and go to-night.”
She shook her head obstinately.
“It won’t do,” she said. “What difference does it make to you whether you give it to me now or next year? I’ll give you a receipt for it. There won’t be any trouble about it. It’s as broad as it’s long. It’s simply an advance on the main sum.”
He looked moodily at her and then down. Her demand seemed reasonable enough, but he distrusted her.
“If you don’t believe me,” she insisted, “send out that clerk of yours to buy my ticket to New York. Tell him to go up to the flat and he’ll see my trunks all packed and ready. I tell you you’ve beaten me. You and Mrs. Ryan are one too many for me.”
He again looked at her, his lips pressed together, his eye coldly considering.
“I’ll give you thirty thousand dollars and it’s understood that you’re to leave the city to-night.”
She demurred, but with less show of vigor, and, for a space, they haggled over the sum till they finally agreed upon thirty-five thousand dollars.
As the old man drew the check she watched him with avid eagerness, restraining by force the hand that trembled in its anxiety to become possessed of the slip of paper. He noticed, as she bent over the desk to sign the receipt, that her fingers shook so they could hardly direct the pen. She remarked it herself, setting it down to her upset nerves, and laughing at the sprawling signature.
With the check in her hand she rose, something of the airy buoyancy of demeanor that had marked her on her entrance returning to her.
“Well,” she said, opening her purse, “this is the real beginning of our business relations. I feel as if we were partners.”
The old man gave a short, dry laugh. He could not rid his mind of suspicions of her and the whole proceeding, though he did not see just how she could be deceiving him.
“Wait till next year,” he said. “When I see the divorce papers I’ll feel a lot surer of the partnership.”
She snapped the clasp of her purse, laughing and moving to the door. She was wild to get away, to escape from the dark room that held such unpleasant memories, and the old man, whose steely penetrating eye, fastened on her, was full of unsatisfied query.
“Well, so long!” she cried, opening the door. “Next time we meet it will be more sociable, I hope. We really ought to be old friends by this time.”
She hardly knew what she was saying, but she laughed with a natural gaiety, and in the doorway turned and bowed her jaunty good-bys to him. He stood back and nodded good-humoredly at her, his face showing puzzlement under its slight, ironic smile.
Once in the street her demeanor again changed. Her step became sharp and quick, her expression keenly absorbed and concentrated. A clock showed her that it was nearly half-past ten, and she walked, with a speed that was as rapid a mode of progression as it could be without attracting attention, to the great bank on which the check was drawn. On the way down on the car she had thought out all her movements, just what she would do, and where she would go. Her mind was as clear, her movements as systematic as though she were moved by mechanism.
She ran up the steps to the bank and presented the check at the paying teller’s window.
“In one-thousand dollar bills, if you please,” she said, trying not to speak breathlessly, “all but five hundred, and you can give me that in one-hundreds.”
The man knew her, made some vaguely-polite remark, and took the slip of paper back into unseen regions. Berny stood waiting, throbbing from head to foot with excitement. She was not afraid they would refuse to cash the check. Her sole fear was that Cannon, as soon as she was gone, might have regretted his action and telephoned from his office to stop the payment on it. She knew that once the money was hers he would not make any attempt to get it back. His own reputation and that of his daughter were too inextricably bound up with the transaction for him to dare to apprehend or punish Berny for her deception.
Her heart gave a wild leap as she saw the teller returning, and then pause behind the netting of his golden cage while he counted out the bills. She tried to speak lightly to him as he laid them one by one on the glass slab. She was hardly conscious of what she said; all she realized was that the crisp roll of paper in her fingers was her possession, if not of great fortune, at least of something to stand between her and the world.
When she left the bank she walked forward slowly, the excitement which had carried her on to this point having suddenly left her feeling weak and tired. She entered the railway office and bought her ticket for New York for that evening’s train. Then once more emerging into the sunshine she directed her steps to the car which would take her to her sisters. She had decided to spend her last day in San Francisco with them. As the car whisked her up the hills she carefully pondered on how much she would tell them, where truth was advisable and where fiction would serve a better purpose.
As soon as Berny had left his office Bill Cannon wrote a note to Mrs. Ryan, telling her of the interview he had just had with her daughter-in-law. He did not mention the check, simply stating Berny’s decision to accept their proposal and leave her husband. The matter was of too intimate a nature to trust to the telephone and he sent the note by one of his own clerks, who had instructions to wait for an answer, as the old man did not know what Mrs. Ryan might already have heard from Dominick.
It threw its recipient into a state of agitated, quivering exultation. Mrs. Ryan had heard nothing from her son, and her hopes of the separation had sunk to the lowest ebb. Not so prudent as Cannon, she called up Dominick at the bank, asking him if it were true that his wife had left him, and beseeching him simply to tell her “yes” or “no.” The young man, hampered by the publicity of his surroundings and his promise to Berny, answered her with the utmost brevity, telling her that there had been a change in his domestic life but that he could not enter into details now. He begged her to ask him no further questions as he would be at home at three o’clock that afternoon, when he would explain the whole matter to her.
She wrote this to the Bonanza King and sent it by his waiting messenger. The old man felt relieved when he read the letter. He was confident now that Berny had not deceived him. She had told the truth, and was leaving the town and her husband, for what reason he could not yet be sure, but there seemed no doubt that she was going. They would ignore the subject before Rose, and, in the course of time, Dominick would break down the unflinching resistance she had threatened to make to his suit. The old man felt buoyant and exhilarated. It looked as if things were at last going their way.
He sent a message to Mrs. Ryan, asking her to let him know as soon as possible what Dominick said, and waited in his office in a state of tension very foreign to his usual iron stolidity. It was four o’clock before word came from her in the form of a telephone message, demanding his presence at her house at the earliest possible moment. He responded to it at once, and in the sitting-room of the Ryan mansion heard from Dominick’s own lips the story of his false and tragic marriage.
The old man listened, unwinking, speechless, immovable. It was the one thing he had never thought of, a solution of the situation that was as completely unexpected to him as death would have been. He said nothing to Dominick about the money he had given Berny, did not mention having seen her. A sharp observer might have noticed that he looked a little blank, that, the first shock of surprise over, there was a slight expression of wandering attention in his eye, a suggestion of mental faculties inwardly focusing on an unseen point, about his manner.
He walked home, deeply thinking, abashed a little by the ease with which Fate unties the knots that man’s clumsy fingers work over in vain. And it was untied. They were free—the boy and girl he loved—to realize his and their own dreams. It would need no years of wooing to melt Rose from stony resistance. Nobody had been sacrificed.
He felt a sense of gratitude toward Berny. Down in his heart he was conscious of a stirring of something that was kindly, almost affectionate, toward her. It did not require a great stretch of imagination to see himself and her as two knowing, world-battered rogues who had combined to let youth and innocence have their happiness. He could almost feel the partnership with her she had spoken of, a sort of bond of Masonic understanding, a kindred attitude in matters of ethics. They had a mutually low estimate of human nature, a bold, cool unscrupulousness, a daring courage that never faltered. In fact, he was sorry he had not given Berny the whole fifty thousand dollars.
“She could have got it out of me,” he said to himself, pondering pensively. “If she’d stuck out for it I’d have given it to her. And she might just as well have had it.”
That evening for the first time in nearly three years Dominick Ryan dined with his mother in the great dining-room of the Ryan mansion. Cornelia was out with Jack Duffy, so Mrs. Ryan had her boy all to herself and she beamed and glowed and gloated on him as he sat opposite her, the reddened light of the candles falling on his beloved, familiar face.
After dinner they went into the sitting-room, the sanctum with the ebonized cherry furniture where the family always retired when important matters were afoot. Here, side by side, they sat before the fireplace with the portrait of the late Cornelius Ryan looking benignly down on them. They did not talk much. The subject of the young man’s marriage had been thoroughly gone over in the afternoon. Later on, his mother would extract from him further particulars, till she would be as conversant with that miserable chapter of his life as if she had lived it herself.
To-night they were both in the quiescent state that follows turmoil and strife. They sat close together, staring into space, now and then dropping one of the short disconnected sentences that indicate a fused, understanding intimacy. The young man’s body was limp in his chair, his mind lulled in the restorative lethargy, the suspension of activities, that follows a struggle. His thoughts shrank shudderingly from the past, and did not seek to penetrate the future. He rested in a torpor of relief through which a dreamy sense of happiness came dimly, as if in the faintest, most delicate whispers.
His mother’s musings were definite and practical. She could now make that settlement, share and share alike, on both children that she had long desired—Cornelia’s would be a dowry on her wedding day and Dominick’s—well, Dominick had had hard times enough. She would go down to-morrow morning and see her lawyer about it.
At the same hour, in the house of the other rich man, the Bonanza King, having driven the servants from the room with violent words that did not indicate bad humor so much as high spirits, told his daughter the story. He told it shortly, hardly more than the main facts, and when it was concluded, forbore to make comments or, in fact, to look at her. It was a great deliverance, but he was not quite sure that his darling would experience the frank, unadulterated joy that had possessed both himself and Mrs. Ryan without restraining qualms. He did not know what to say to Rose. There were mysterious complexities in her character that made him decide to confine his statement to a recital of facts, eliminating those candid expressions of feeling which he could permit himself when talking to Mrs. Ryan or Berny.
As soon as he had told it all he rose from his chair as if ending the interview. His daughter rose too, pale and silent, and he put his arm round her shoulders and pressed her against his chest in a good-night hug. She kissed him and went up stairs to her own rooms, and he returned to his arm-chair at the end of the dining-table. Here, as was his wont, he sat smoking and pondering, turning over in his head the various aspects of the curious story and its unexpected outcome. Once, as the memory of Berny weeping into his handkerchief recurred to him, he stirred uneasily and muttered to himself,
“Why didn’t the damned fool stick out for the whole fifty thousand? I’d have given it to her as soon as not.”
Meantime the storm center, the focus round which the hopes and angers and fears of this little group had circled, was speeding eastward in the darkness of the early night. Berny sat in the corner of her section with her luggage piled high on the seat before her, a pillow behind her head. In the brightly clear light, intensified by reflections from glazed woodwork and the surfaces of mirrors, she looked less haggard, calmer and steadier, than she had looked for many weeks. Relief was at her heart. Now that she had turned her back on it she realized how she had hated it all—the flat, the isolation, the unsuccessful struggle, Dominick and his superior ways.
The excitement of change, the desire of the new, the unfamiliar, the untried, which had taken her far afield once before, sang in her blood and whispered its siren song in her ear. She had missed a fortune, but still she had something. She was not plunging penniless into the great outside world, and she pressed her hand against her chest where the thirty-five thousand dollars was sewed into the lining of her bodice. Thirty-five thousand dollars! It was a good deal if it wasn’t three hundred thousand.
As the train thundered on through the darkness she saw before her the lights of great cities, and heard the call of liberty, the call of the nomad and the social vagabond, the call of the noisy thoroughfare, of the bright places, of the tumult and the crowd. The roving passion of the wanderer, to whom the spell of home is faint as a whisper in the night, passed into her veins like the invigorating heat of wine. She exulted in the sense of her freedom, in the magic of adventure, in the wild independence of the unknown.