RICH MEN’S CHILDREN

[Illustration: “Oh, Rose, if I could see you now and then--only for a
  moment like this”      _Page 282_]




  RICH MEN’S CHILDREN

  _By_
  GERALDINE BONNER

  Author of
  The Pioneer, Tomorrow’s Tangle, etc.

  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
  C. M. RELYEA

  INDIANAPOLIS
  THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS




  COPYRIGHT 1906

  THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

  OCTOBER


  PRESS OF
  BRAUNWORTH & CO.
  BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
  BROOKLYN, N. Y.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                                    PAGE

      I THE BONANZA KING                        1

     II A YOUNG MAN MARRIED                    17

    III THE DAUGHTER OF HETH                   28

     IV OUT OF NIGHT AND STORM                 44

      V NURSE AND PATIENT                      64

     VI IN WHICH BERNY WRITES A LETTER         83

    VII SNOW-BOUND                            109

   VIII THE UNKNOWN EROS                      125

     IX THE SONS OF THEIR FATHERS             146

      X DOMINICK COMES HOME                   172

     XI THE GODS IN THE MACHINE               192

    XII BERNY MAKES A DISCOVERY               214

   XIII THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL                  236

    XIV THE GOD DESCENDS                      248

     XV THE MOONLIGHT NIGHT                   270

    XVI FAMILY AFFAIRS                        284

   XVII A CUT AND A CONFESSION                300

  XVIII BUFORD’S GOOD LUCK                    324

    XIX ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW                  334

     XX THE LITTLE SPIDER                     354

    XXI THE LION’S WHELP                      376

   XXII OUT OF THE FULLNESS OF THE HEART      391

  XXIII THE WALL ACROSS THE WAY               413

   XXIV FRIEND OR FOE                         432

    XXV THE ACTOR’S STORY                     447

   XXVI THE LAST INTERVIEW                    465

  XXVII THE STORM CENTER MOVES                486




RICH MEN’S CHILDREN




RICH MEN’S CHILDREN




CHAPTER I

THE BONANZA KING


The cold of foot-hill California in the month of January held the
night. The occupants of the surrey were too cramped and stiffened by
it, and too uncomfortably enwrapped against it, to speak. Silence
as complete as that which lay like a spell on the landscape brooded
over them. At the last stopping place, Chinese Gulch, a scattering of
houses six miles behind them on the mountain road, they had halted at
the main saloon, and whisky and water had been passed to the driver
and to the burlier figure on the back seat. The watchers that thronged
to the saloon door had eyed the third occupant of the carriage with
the intent, sheepish curiosity of the isolated man in presence of the
stranger female. Afterward, each one was voluble in his impressions of
her face, pale in the smoky lamplight, and the hand that slid, small
and white, out of its loose glove when the warming glass was offered
her.

Since then both she and her companion had leaned back in their several
corners and preserved an unbroken silence. Even the driver’s tongue had
showed the benumbing effects of the darkness and cold, and the flow of
conversation with which, earlier in the day, he had entertained his
fares, gradually languished and died.

The surrey sped swiftly along the road which wound in spectral pallor
over the shoulder of the foot-hill, now dipping into the blackness
of a ravine, then creeping up a bare slope, where the horses’ hoofs
dug in laboriously amid loosened stones. The solemn loneliness of
the landscape, faintly revealed by the light of large, clear stars,
seemed to find appropriate expression in this frosty, smoke-breathing
stillness. There was not a sign of human life. The gray patches of
fields melted into the clouded darkness of trees. The domes of the
live-oaks were like cairns of funereal rock in the open spaces.
Steep, woody slopes swept upward, in the daytime shivering coppices
of wintry leafage pierced by spires of fir and pine, now densely
black and mysterious under the transforming magic of the night. Over
all an expanse of sky arched, the vast, calm sky of mountain regions
and Nature’s undesecrated places, crystal-clear and velvet-dark, the
light of its stars seeming to come, tapping messages in an unknown
telegraphy, from illimitable distances.

The larger figure on the back seat moved, and turned a face, all of
which was hidden save the eyes, toward its companion.

“Hungry?” queried a deep bass voice; the inquiring polysyllable shot
out suddenly over an upturned bulwark of collars.

“Fearfully,” came the answer in a muffled feminine treble, that suited
the more diminutive bulk.

“Get a move on, Jake,” to the driver. “This girl’s most famished.”

“Hold your horses,” growled the other man; “we’re just about there.”

At these words the woman pricked up her ears, and, leaning forward,
peered ahead. As they rounded a protruding angle of hill, a huddle of
roofs and walls spotted with lights came into view, and the sight drew
her hand forward with an eagerly-pointing finger.

“So that’s Rocky Bar!” she cried. “Have we really got there at last?”

The driver chuckled.

“That’s Rocky Bar all right. Now get your appetite good and ready.”

“No need,” she responded gaily; “it’s been ready and waiting for hours.
I was beginning to think that you’d lost your way.”

“Me!” with an accent of incredulous scorn. “Ah, get out! How does it
come, Governor, that Bill Cannon’s girl don’t know no more about these
parts than a young lady from New York?”

“She’s never been up here before,” said the man on the back seat,
beginning to untangle himself from his enfolding rugs. “I’ve brought
her up with me this time to show her some of the places where her pa
used to work round with the boys, long before _she_ was ever thought
of.”

A loud barking of dogs broke out as they approached the first detached
houses of the settlement. Shapes appeared at the lighted doorways,
and as the surrey drew up at the hotel balcony a crowding of heads
was seen in the windows. The entire population of Rocky Bar spent its
evenings at this hospitable resort, in summer on the balcony under the
shade of the locust trees, in winter round the office stove, spitting
and smoking in cheery sociability. But at this hour the great event of
Rocky Bar’s day was over. The eight stages, the passengers of which
dined at the hotel, had long passed onward on their various routes up
and down the “mother lode” and into the camps of the Sierra. That the
nightly excitement of the “victualing up” was to be supplemented by a
late arrival in a surrey, driven by Jake McVeigh, the proprietor of
the San Jacinto stables, and accompanied by a woman, was a sensational
event not often awarded to Rocky Bar, even in the heyday of
summer-time.

The occupants of the office crowded into the doorway and pressed
themselves against the windows. They saw that the man who alighted was
a thick-set, portly figure, with a short, gray beard and a suggestion
of gray hair below the brim of a black wide-awake. Of the lady, shown
but dimly by the light of the open door, only a slim, cloaked outline
and a glint of fair hair were discernible. But, anyway, it was a woman,
and of a kind unusual in Rocky Bar, and the men stared, sunk in bashful
appreciation of a beauty that they felt must exist, if it were only to
be in keeping with the hour, the circumstances, and their own hopeful
admiration.

The hotel proprietor, an ancient man with a loosened vest, and trousers
tucked into long boots, dispersed them as he ushered the strangers into
the office. That they were travelers of distinction was obvious, as
much from their own appearance as from the fact that Jake McVeigh was
driving them himself, in his best surrey and with his finest team. But
just how important they were no one guessed till McVeigh followed them
in, and into ears stretched for the information dropped the sentence,
half-heard, like a stage aside:

“It’s Bill Cannon and his daughter Rose.”

Upon the proprietor it had an electric effect. He sped from the room
with the alertness of youth, promising “a cold lunch” in a minute. To
the others it came as a piece of intelligence that added awe to the
lighter emotions of the occasion. By common consent their eyes focused
on the great man who stood warming his hands at the stove. Even the
rare, unusual woman, revealed now as sufficiently pretty to be an
object of future dreams, was interesting only to the younger and more
impressionable members of the throng. All but these gazed absorbed,
unblinking, at Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King.

He was used to it. It had been a part of his life for years. Eying
his admirers with a genial good humor, he entered into conversation
with them, his manner marked by an easy familiarity, which swept away
all shades of embarrassment, and drew the men around the stove, eager
to respond to his questions as to the condition and prospects of the
locality. The talk was becoming general and animated, when the ancient
man returned and announced that the “cold lunch” was ready and to
please “step after him into the dining-room.”

This gaunt apartment, grimly unadorned and faintly illumined, an
occasional lantern backed by a tin reflector projecting a feeble
light into its echoing emptiness, was swept of all intruders, and
showed a barn-like bareness of wall and loftiness of roof. Lines of
tables, uncovered between flanking wooden benches, were arranged
down its length. Across the end of one of these a white cloth was
spread and three places set. Jake McVeigh, less innocently democratic
than the hotel proprietor, was about to withdraw from the society of
his distinguished patron and seat himself in seemly loneliness at an
adjacent table, when Bill Cannon’s voice arrested him.

“What are you going off there for, sonny, as if you were a leper? Come
over here and sit side of us.”

The driver, greatly pleased, not only to enjoy the companionship of
the richest man in California but to let the peeping heads in the
doorway see him in this moment of proud apotheosis, took the third seat
with modest complacence. Like most of his kind, the sense of social
inferiority was unknown to him. He was simply and naturally himself as
he would be anywhere in any company. Even the proximity of Miss Cannon
did not abash him, and he dexterously propelled the potatoes into his
mouth with his knife and cut fiercely at his meat with a sawing motion,
talking the while with all the freedom and more than the pleasure with
which he talked to his wife in the kitchen at San Jacinto.

Cannon, his overcoat removed, was seen to be a powerful, thick-set man,
with a bulkiness that was more a matter of broad build and muscular
development than fat. His coat set ill upon him and strained at the
buttons. It had the effect of having worked up toward the shoulders,
noticeable in the clothes of men who are deep-chested and sit bunchily.
He had a short neck which he accommodated with a turn-down collar, a
gray beard, clipped close to his cheeks and square on the chin, and
gray hair, worn rather long and combed sleekly and without parting back
from his forehead. In age he was close to seventy, but the alertness
and intelligence of a conquering energy and vitality were in his
glance, and showed in his movements, deliberate, but sure and full
of precision. He spoke little as he ate his dinner, leaning over his
plate and responding to the remarks of his daughter with an occasional
monosyllable that might have sounded curt, had it not been accompanied
with a lazy cast of his eye upon her that was as full of affection as a
caress.

The young lady, who had also put off her outer wraps, still wore her
hat, which was wide-brimmed and cast a shadow over the upper part of
her face. Below it her hair showed a fine, bright blonde, giving forth
silky gleams in the lamplight. To the peeping heads in the doorway she
seemed a creature instinct with romantic charm, which was expressed
in such delicacies of appearance as a pearl-white throat, a rounded
chin, and lips that smiled readily. These graces, eagerly deciphered
through dimness and distance, had the attraction of the semi-seen,
and imagination, thus given an encouraging fillip, invested Bill
Cannon’s girl with a haunting beauty. It was remarked that she bore no
resemblance to her father in coloring, features, or build. In talking
it over later, Rocky Bar decided that she must favor her mother, who,
as all California knew, had been a waitress in the Yuba Hotel at
Marysville, when Bill Cannon, then a miner in the Freeze-Out, had wooed
and won her.

The conversation between the diners was desultory. They were beyond
doubt hungry. Even the young lady was seen to consume the viands set
before her with more gusto than a restraining sense of romantic fitness
would have dictated. Once or twice, as she bit a semicircle out of a
round of buttered bread, her eye, questing sidewise full of sly humor,
caught McVeigh’s, and a sputter of laughter left her with humped-up
shoulders, her lips lightly compressed on the mouthful.

It was toward the end of the meal, that, looking at the opposite wall,
her glance was caught by a large clock to which she drew her father’s
attention:

“Half-past nine! How fashionable we are! And when are you going to get
us up to Antelope, Mr. McVeigh?”

McVeigh studied the clock ponderingly as he felt in his breast pocket
for his toothpick.

“Well,” he said, “if we leave here at ten and make good time the hull
way--it’s up hill pretty much without a break--I’ll get you there about
midnight.”

She made a little grimace.

“And it will be much colder, won’t it?”

“Colder ’n’ colder. You’ll be goin’ higher with every step. Antelope’s
on the slope of the Sierra, and you can’t expect to be warm up there in
the end of January.”

“If you hadn’t wanted to come,” said her father, “you’d have been just
about getting ready for Mrs. Ryan’s ball. Isn’t this about the magic
hour when you begin to lay on the first layer of war-paint?”

The girl looked at the clock, nodding with a faint, reminiscent smile.

“Just about,” she said. “I’d have been probably looking at my dress
laid out on the bed and saying to myself, ‘Now I wonder if it’s worth
while getting into that thing and having all the bother of going to
this ball.’ On the evenings when I go out, there’s always a stage when
that happens.”

McVeigh, with his toothpick in full operation, looked at her, admiring
and half comprehending, for the first time feeling himself an outsider.
She caught his eye, read its meaning, and with the quick tact of a
delicate nature, said:

“It’s Mrs. Cornelius Ryan in San Francisco. She has a ball to-night
and I was going, but I came up here with papa instead. I don’t care for
balls.”

“Sort of late to be primping up for a ball,” said McVeigh, restoring
the toothpick to his pocket and pushing back his chair. “I’ll go and
have a look at the horses. And, Governor, if you’ll be ready in fifteen
minutes I’ll be round at the porch waiting.”

Cannon nodded, and, as the driver clumped off over the board floor,
said to his daughter,

“I wonder if Dominick Ryan’ll be there--at the ball, I mean. His
mother’s made up her mind not to recognize the woman he’s married, and
to freeze her out, but I wonder if she’ll have the nerve not to ask her
to-night.”

“I don’t see how she could do that,” said the girl. “This is one of the
largest balls ever given in San Francisco. She can’t leave her son out,
and she couldn’t ask him without his wife.”

“Couldn’t she?” said the old man, with a narrowing of his eyes and a
knowing wag of his head. “You don’t know Delia Ryan. I do. I’ve known
her forty years, ever since she was first married and did washing on
the back porch of her shanty in Virginia City. She was a good deal of
a woman then, a strong, brainy woman, and she’s the same to-day, but
hard as nails. I’ll bet a hat she hasn’t asked Dominick’s wife to that
ball.”

“What do you suppose he’ll do?” asked the daughter, somewhat aghast at
this glimpse of the Ryan family skeleton.

“Don’t ask me such conundrums. I’m glad I’m not in it, that’s all I
know. When two women lock horns I’m ready to step quietly down and out.
I never to my knowledge saw Dominick’s wife, but I’ve heard about her,
and take it she’s a pretty hard kind of a proposition. They say she
married the boy for money and position, and hasn’t got either. Delia,
who has the money, hasn’t given them a cent since the marriage; made up
her mind, people say, to force Mrs. Dominick out. She doesn’t seem to
have done it, and I guess it’s been sort of aggravating to her. Just
the same I’d like to know if she’s had the nerve not to send the woman
an invitation to the ball. That would be pretty tough.”

“I’ve never seen either Dominick or his wife,” said the girl. “It seems
odd when I know Mrs. Ryan and Cornelia so well. But he married the
year I came back from Europe, and he’s never been anywhere since. I
don’t believe he ever goes to his mother’s. There’s Mr. McVeigh in the
doorway; we’d better be going.”

Once again in the carriage they were soon clear of the last straggling
shanty, and speeding along the pale, ascending road. The silence
that held the trio before their arrival at Rocky Bar again fell
on them. Wrapped in overcoats and rugs, Bill Cannon appeared to
slumber, every now and then--as the wheels jolted over a piece of
rough road-bed--shaken into growling wakefulness. McVeigh also rolled
sleepily in his seat, occasionally leaning sidewise to spit over the
wheel. Only the girl seemed alert and wide-awake, her face craning out
from the shadowed back seat, her eyes strained to pierce the obscurity
and see for the first time the landscape of foot-hill California, of
which her father had so often told her.

Now it was all a dark, formless background of broken blacknesses, where
the light, open spaces of fields alternated with blotches of woods and
trees. At intervals they passed a lone cabin, solitary in its pale
clearing, the red eye of a stove sending a gleam through an uncurtained
pane. Once they woke the echoes in the single street of a tiny town,
sleeping behind its shuttered windows. Dogs barked, the shout of a
belated reveler rose from a congeries of gaudily-bright doorways, and
over all, imposing its mighty voice on the silence, came the roar
of the stamp-mill on the hill above. It rose into the night like a
fortress, a black mass looming from the slant of vast dumps, lines of
lit windows puncturing its sides. The thunder of its stamps was loud on
the night, fierce and insistent, like the roar of a monster round whose
feet the little town cowered.

McVeigh looked back over his shoulder, saw the bright eyes under the
hat-brim, and said softly,

“The Silver Crescent stamp-mill. The last big mine we’ll see.”

It was the last town they passed; even the groups of buildings that
marked embryo mines grew rare. The dimly-seen country became wilder,
seemed to shake off the signs of man’s encroachment and to be sweeping
up into mountain majesty. The ascending road crept along the edges of
ravines whence the sound of running water came in a clear clinking,
dived down into black caverns of trees unlighted by the feeblest ray of
star-shine, and then climbed in slow, laborious loops the bare bulwarks
of the mountain. Had the girl been able to see plainly she would have
noticed the change in the foliage, the disappearance of the smaller
shrubs and delicate interlacement of naked boughs, and the mightier
growth of the pines, soaring shafts devoid of branches to a great
height. Boulders appeared among their roots, straight falls of rock
edged the road like the walls of a fort.

McVeigh turned again, and again caught the bright eye.

“Seems like your paw must think a lot of what he’s heard about the new
strike at Greenhide to come all this way,” he whispered.

“I guess he does,” came the response in the same key.

“It sort of stumps me to know why you came along with him,” he
continued, his eyes on the horses, but leaning back to catch her answer.

“Mightn’t I just want to see the country?”

“Well, mebbe you might, but it don’t seem to me that you’re seein’ much
of it to-night.”

He heard her smothered laugh, shot his glance back to see her face, and
laughed himself, turning to his horses, and then turning back to her.

“You’re a lively girl, ain’t you?” he said.

“I don’t feel very lively just at this minute. I’m a cold girl, the
coldest in California, I think.”

That made him laugh, too, but he turned back to his horses, saying with
quick consideration:

“I guess you are. Come boys,” to the horses, “we’ve got to get a move
on. We can’t let this young lady catch cold.”

The horses quickened their pace and there was no more talk. An hour
later the first broken lights of Antelope sparkled along the road. The
old mining camp, in a hollow between two buttresses of the Sierra, lay
shuttered and dreaming under the starlight. A lamp-lit window, here and
there, showed the course of its straggling main street, and where the
hotel stood, welcoming rays winked between the boughs of leafless trees.

As the thud of the approaching hoof-beats woke the echoes a sudden
violent barking of dogs broke out. Antelope was evidently not as
sound asleep as it looked. At the hotel, especially, there was life
and movement. The bar disgorged a throng of men, and Perley, the
proprietor, had to push his way through them to welcome his midnight
guests. Antelope, though remote, was in telegraphic communication
with the world, and the operator at Rocky Bar had wired Perley to be
ready for the distinguished arrivals,--news that in a half-hour was
known throughout the town and had brought most of the unattached male
population into the hotel.

Jake McVeigh was pulling the luggage from under the seats and Cannon
was interchanging the first greetings with his landlord, when the
girl, who had gone to the balcony railing and was looking out into the
darkness, cried:

“Why, papa, snow!”

The information seemed to startle every one. The men crowded from
the doorway and balcony into the street. McVeigh set down the bags,
and, turning his weather-beaten face to the sky, uttered a smothered
ejaculation of a profane character. Cannon came forward to where his
daughter stood and looked into the blackness beyond. The girl had drawn
off her glove and held her bare hand out, then stepping back to the
light of the window, she showed it to her father. The white skin was
sprinkled with snow crystals.

“Sure enough,” he said in a thoughtful voice. “Well, it won’t be the
first time I’ve been snowed up at Antelope.”




CHAPTER II

A YOUNG MAN MARRIED


That same evening, at the hour when Bill Cannon and his daughter were
setting out from Rocky Bar, Dominick Ryan was walking up Van Ness
Avenue toward his mother’s house.

Dominick did not know at what hours balls of the kind Mrs. Ryan was
giving that evening were supposed to begin. It was nearly three years
since he had been a participant in such festal gatherings. He had not
been at a dance, or a dinner, or a theater party since his marriage.
He had heard that these “functions,” as people now called them, began
later than they did in his day. Stopping by a lamp he drew out his
watch--ten o’clock. It was later than he expected. In truth, as he had
seen the house looming massively from its less imposing neighbors, his
foot had lagged, his approach had grown slower and slower. It was his
mother’s home, once his own, and as he drew nearer to it his reluctance
to enter grew stronger, more overpoweringly oppressive.

In the clear, lamp-dotted night it looked much larger and more splendid
than by day. When Cornelius Ryan had built it he had wanted to have
the finest house in San Francisco, and he certainly had achieved the
most spacious and ornate. Its florid ornamentation was now hidden by
the beautifying dark, and on its vast façade numerous windows broke the
blackness with squares of light. In the lower ones the curtains were
drawn, but slivers and cracks of radiance slipped out and penetrated
the dusk of a garden, where they encountered the glossy surfaces of
leaves and struck into whispering darknesses of shrubbery.

The stimulating unquiet of festival was in the air. Round the mouth
of the canvas tunnel that stretched from the door a dingy crowd was
assembled, staring in at nothing more inspiring than the blank visage
of the closed portal. At every passing footstep each face turned to the
street, hopefully expectant of the first guest. The whining of catgut
strings, swept by tentative bows, struck on Dominick’s ear as he pushed
his way through the throng and passed up the tunnel. Before he touched
the bell the door swung back and a man-servant he had never seen before
murmured in politely low tones,

“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right.”

Dominick stood uncertain. He was only a rare, occasional visitor at
his mother’s house, and to-night the hall stripped for revelry looked
strangely unfamiliar. The unexpectedness of a great, new mirror,
surmounted by gold heraldic devices, confused him. The hall chairs were
different. The music, loud now and beginning to develop from broken
chords and phrases into the languorous rhythm of a waltz measure,
came from behind a grove of palms that stood back under the stairs,
where the organ was built into the wall. Both to the right and left,
wide, unencumbered rooms opened, brilliantly lighted, with flowers
banked in masses on the mantels and in the corners. The scent of these
blossoms was rich on the air and seemed to blend naturally--like
another expression of the same sensuous delightfulness--with the dreamy
sweetness of the music.

“Gentlemen’s dressing-room first floor to the right,” repeated the
servant, and Dominick became aware of the man’s eyes, fixed on him with
a gleam of uneasy scrutiny shining through cultivated obsequiousness.

“Where is my----” he was going to say “mother,” but checked himself,
amending it with, “Where is Mrs. Ryan?”

The servant indicated the open doorway to the right and Dominick
passed in. Through the vista of two rooms, their connecting archways
uncurtained, he saw the shining spaciousness of the ball-room, the
room his mother had added to the house when Cornelia, his sister, had
“come out.” It seemed empty and he walked toward it, stepping softly on
rugs of tiger skin and polar bear. He noticed the ice-like polish of
the oak floor, the lines of gilt chairs, and a thick, fat garland of
roses--leaves and blossoms combined--that was festooned along the wall
and caught up at each sconce.

As he entered he saw his mother and Cornelia. They had been standing
in one corner, Cornelia adjusting the shade of an electric light. One
white arm was raised, and her skirt of lace was reflected clearly in
the parquet. The light shone along her bare shoulders, having a gloss
like old marble. From the nape of her neck her hair, a bright, coarse
red, was drawn up. She seemed all melting shades of cream color and
ivory, but for this flaming crest of copper color.

Her mother was standing beside her watching the arranging hand. She was
sixty-eight years of age and very stout, but her great wealth made it
possible for her to employ dressmakers who were artists and experts,
and her Parisian costume made her look almost shapely. It fell about
her in dignified black folds, sparkling discreetly with some jetted
garnishings. With their shifting gleam the glint of diamonds mingled.
She also wore pearls round her neck and some diamond ornaments in her
elaborately-dressed gray hair.

The coarseness of her early beginnings could not be hidden by the most
proficient artificers in millinery or jewels. Delia Ryan had come from
what are vulgarly called “the lower orders,” having, in her ragged
childhood, crossed the plains at the tail-board of an ox cart, and
in her girlhood been a general servant in a miners’ boarding-house
at Sonora. Now, as she stood watching her daughter’s moving hand,
her face, set in a frowning rigidity of observation, was strong but
unbeautiful. Her small eyes, shrewd and sharp, were set high in her
head under brows almost rubbed away. The nose was short, with an
undeveloped bridge and keen, open nostrils. Her mouth had grown thinner
with years; the lips shut with a significant firmness. They had never
been full, but what redness and ripeness they had had in youth were now
entirely gone. They were pale, strong lips, the under one a little more
prominent than the upper.

“There!” said Cornelia. “Now they’re all even,” and she wheeled slowly,
her glance slipping along the veiled lights of the sconces. In its
circuit it encountered Dominick’s figure in the doorway.

“Dominick!” she cried, and stood staring, naïvely astonished and
dismayed.

Mrs. Ryan turned with a start, her face suffused with color. The
one word seemed to have an electrifying effect upon her, joyous,
perturbing--unquestionably exciting.

“My boy!” she said, and she rustled across the room with her hands out.

Dominick walked toward her. He was grave, pale, and looked thoroughly
miserable. He had his cane in one hand, his hat in the other. As he
approached her he moved the hat to his left hand and took hers.

“You’ve come!” she said fondly, “I knew you would. That’s my boy. I
knew you’d come when your mother asked you.”

“Yes, I’ve come,” he said slowly, and looking down as if desiring to
avoid her eyes. “Yes, I’ve come, but----”

He stopped.

His mother’s glance fell from his face to his figure and saw under
the loose fronts of his overcoat that he wore his business suit. Her
countenance instantly, with almost electric suddenness, stiffened into
antagonism. Her eye lost its love, and hardened into a stony look of
defiant indignation. She pulled her hand from his and jerked back the
front of his coat with it.

“What’s this mean?” she said sharply. “Why aren’t you dressed? The
people will be here in a minute. You can’t come this way.”

“I was going home to dress,” he said. “I am not sure yet that I can
come.”

“Why?” she demanded.

His face grew red. The mission on which he had come was more difficult,
more detestable, than he had supposed it would be. He looked down at
the shining strip of floor between them and said, trying to make his
voice sound easy and plausible:

“I came to ask you for an invitation for Berny.”

“Hah!” said his mother, expelling her breath in an angry ejaculation of
confirmed suspicion. “That’s it, is it? I thought as much!”

“Mama!” said the girl who had been standing by, uneasily listening.
“Mama dear----”

Her voice was soft and sweet, a placating woman’s voice. And as she
drew nearer to them, her figure seeming to float over the shining
parquet in its pale spread of gauzy draperies, her tone, her face, and
her bearing were instinct with a pleading, feminine desire to soothe.

“Keep quiet, Cornie,” said her mother, “you’re not in this”--turning to
Dominick. “And so your wife sent you up here to beg for an invitation?
She’s got you under her thumb to that extent? Well, go back to her and
tell her that she can send you forty times and you’ll not get it. She
can make you crawl here and you’ll not get it--not while this is my
house. When I’m dead you can do what you like.”

She turned away from him, her face dark with stirred blood, her body
quivering. Anger was not the only passion that shook her. Deeper than
this went outraged pride, love turned to gall, impotent fury that the
woman her son had married had power over him so to reduce his pride and
humble his manhood--her only son, the joy and glory of her old age, her
Benjamin.

He looked after her, uncertain, frowning, desperate.

“It’s not right,” he protested. “It’s not fair. You’re unjust to her
and to me.”

The old woman moved across the room to the corner where she had been
standing when he entered. She did not turn, and he continued:

“You’re asking people to this ball that you hardly know. Everybody in
San Francisco’s going. What harm has Berny done that you should leave
her out this way?”

“I don’t want women with that kind of record in my house. I don’t
ask decent people here to meet that sort,” said his mother over her
shoulder.

He gave a suppressed exclamation, the meaning of which it was difficult
to read, then said,

“Are you never going to forget the past, mother?”

She wheeled round toward him almost shouting,

“No--no--no! Never! Never! Make your mind up to that.”

They looked at each other across the open space, the angry defiance
in their faces not hiding the love and appeal that spoke in their
eyes. The mother longed to take her son in her arms; the son longed
to lay his head on her shoulder and forget the wretchedness and
humiliations of the last two years. But they were held apart, not
only by the specter of the absent woman, but on the one side by a
fierce, unbendable pride, and on the other by an unforgettable sense of
obligation and duty.

“Oh, mother!” he exclaimed, half-turning away with a movement of
despair.

His mother looked at him from under her lowered brows, her under lip
thrust out, her face unrelenting.

“Come here whenever you like,” she said, “as often as you want.
It’s your home, Dominick, mine and yours. But it’s not your wife’s.
Understand that.”

She turned away and again moved slowly toward the corner, her rich
skirts trailing fanwise over the parquet. He stood, sick at heart,
looking at the tip of his cane as it rested on the floor.

“Dominick,” said his sister’s voice beside him, “go; that’s the only
thing to do. You see it’s no use.” She made a backward jerk of her
head toward their mother, and then, struck by the misery of the eyes
he lifted to her face, said tenderly, “I’m so sorry. You know I’d have
sent it if I could. But it’s no use. It’s just the same old fight over
again and nothing gained. Tell your wife it’s hopeless. Make her give
it up.”

He turned slowly, his head hanging.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll tell her. Good-night, mother.”

“Good-night, Dominick,” came the answer.

“Good-night, Cornie,” he said in a muffled voice and left the room.

He passed through the brilliantly bright, flower-scented parlors and
was shown out by the strange man-servant. The crowd at the mouth of the
canvas tunnel had increased. Clumps of staring white faces edged the
opening and presented themselves to his eye, not like reality, but like
a painting of pale visages executed on the background of the night.
They drew away as he approached them, making a lane of egress for him,
then turned and eyed him--a deserter from the realms of joy--as he
stopped by a lamp-post to look at his watch. A quarter past ten. He had
been in the house only fifteen minutes. He did not need to go home for
a while yet. He could walk about and think and arrange how he would
tell Berny.

He was a man in the full vigor of his youth, strong and brave, yet at
this moment he feared, feared as a child or a timid woman might fear,
the thought of his wife. He dreaded to meet her; he shrank from it, and
to put it off he wandered about the familiar streets, up one and down
the other, trying to overcome his sick reluctance, trying to make up
his mind to go to her, trying to conquer his fear.




CHAPTER III

THE DAUGHTER OF HETH


He walked for nearly an hour, along quiet, lamp-lit streets where large
houses fronted on gardens that exhaled moist earth scents and the
breaths of sweet, unseen blossoms, up hills so steep that it seemed
as if an earthquake might have heaved up the city’s crust and bent it
crisply like a piece of cardboard. From these high places he looked
down on the expanse of the bay, a stretch of ink surrounded by black
hills, here and there spangled with the clustered sparklings of little
towns. In the hollows below him he saw the lights of the city swimming
on its darkness, winking and trembling on receding depths of blackness,
like golden bubbles seething on the surface of thick, dense wine.

He looked down unseeing, thinking of the last three years.

When he had first met Bernice Iverson, she had been a typewriter
and stenographer in the office of the Merchants and Mechanics Trust
Company. He was twenty-four at the time, the only son of Cornelius
Ryan, one of the financial magnates of the far West. The career of Con
Ryan, as he was familiarly called, had been as varied as the heart of
a public, who loves to dwell on the sensational fortunes of its great
men, could have wished. In the early days of Virginia City, Con Ryan
had been a miner there, had a claim of his own and lost all he had in
it before the first Crown Point excitement, had run a grocery store in
Shasta, moved to Sacramento, speculated successfully in mining stock
and real estate, and in the bonanza days had had money to play the
great game which made millionaires of the few and beggars of the many.
He had played it daringly and with profit. When he died he left his
widow complete control of a fortune of ten millions.

She had been a sturdy helpmeet--it was generally said that she was
the best man of the two--and would keep the fortune safe for the two
children, Dominick and Cornelia. Neither she nor Con believed in young
men having control of large fortunes. They had seen what came of it in
the sons of their bonanza friends. Dominick was sent to the East to
college, and on his return, being then twenty-three years of age, was
placed in the Oregon and California Bank, of which his father had been
one of the founders. He was soon promoted to a position where he earned
a salary of three thousand a year. This was all he had when he met
Bernice Iverson.

She was seven years older than he, but told him they were the same
age. It was not a wasted lie, as she undoubtedly looked much younger
than she was, being a slight, trimly-made woman who had retained a
girlish elasticity of figure and sprightliness of manner. She came of
respectable, hard-working people, her father, Danny Iverson, having
been a contractor in a small way of business, and her two sisters
being, one a teacher in the primary school department, the other a
saleswoman in a fashionable millinery. She herself was an expert in
her work, in office hours quiet, capable and businesslike, afterward
lively, easy-going and companionable. The entrapping of young Ryan
was a simple matter. He had never loved and knew little of women. He
did not love her, but she made him think he did, threw herself at
him, led him quickly to the point she wished to reach, and secretly,
without a suspicion on the part of her family, became his mistress. Six
months later, having driven him to the step by her upbraidings and her
apparent sufferings of conscience under the sense of wrong-doing, she
persuaded him to marry her.

The marriage was a bombshell to the world in which young Ryan was a
planet of magnitude. His previous connection with her--though afterward
discovered by his mother--was at the time unknown. Bernice had induced
him to keep the marriage secret till its hour of accomplishment, for
she knew Mrs. Ryan would try to break it off and feared that she might
succeed. Once Dominick’s wife she thought that the objections and
resentment of the elder woman could be overcome. But she underrated the
force and obstinacy of her adversary and the depth of the wound that
had been given her. Old Mrs. Ryan had been stricken in her tenderest
spot. Her son was her idol, born in her middle-age, the last of four
boys, three of whom had died in childhood. In his babyhood she had
hoarded money and worked late and early that he might be rich. Now she
held the great estate of her husband in trust for him, and dreamed of
the time when he should marry some sweet and virtuous girl and she
would have grandchildren to love and spoil and plan for. When the news
of his marriage reached her and she saw the woman he had made his wife,
she understood everything. She knew her boy through and through and she
knew just how he had been duped and entangled.

She was of that race of pioneer Californians who had entered an
uninhabited country, swept aside Indian and Spaniard, and made it their
own. They were isolated figures in a huge landscape, their characters,
uncramped and bold, developing unrestricted in an atmosphere of
physical and moral liberty. They grew as their instincts dictated;
the bough was not bent into convenient forms by expediency or pressure
from without. Public opinion had little or no weight with them, for
there was none. It was the pleasure of this remote group in this rich
and exuberant land to do away with tradition and be a law and precept
unto themselves. What other people thought and did did not influence
them. They had one fixed, dominating idea in a fluctuating code of
morals--they knew what they wanted and they were determined to get
it. They were powerful individualities whether for good or evil, and
they resented with a passion any thwarting of their plans or desires,
whether by the interposition of man or the hand of God.

Delia Ryan’s life had been a long, ascending series of hardly-won
triumphs. She had surmounted what would have seemed to a less bold
spirit unsurmountable obstacles; gone over them, not around them. She
had acquired the habit of success, of getting what she wanted. Failure
or defiance of her plans amazed her as they might have amazed the
confident, all-conquering, pagan gods. The center of her life was her
family; for them she had labored, for them she would have died. Right
and wrong in her mind were clearly defined till it came to her husband
or children, and then they were transmuted into what benefited the
Ryans and what did not. Rigidly fair and honorable in her dealings with
the outside world, let a member of that world menace the happiness
of one of her own, and she would sacrifice it, grind the ax without
qualms, like a priestess grimly doing her duty.

The marriage of her son was the bitterest blow of her life. It came
when she was old, stiffened into habits of dominance and dictatorship,
when her ambitions for her boy were gaining daily in scope and
splendor. A blind rage and determination to crush the woman were her
first feelings, and remained with her but slightly mitigated by the
softening passage of time. She was a partizan, a fighter, and she
instituted a war against her daughter-in-law which she conducted with
all the malignant bitterness that marks the quarrels of women.

Dominick had not been married a month when she discovered the previous
connection between him and his wife, and published it to the winds. A
social power, feared and obeyed, she let it be known that to any one
who received Mrs. Dominick Ryan her doors would be for ever closed.
Without withdrawing her friendship from her son she refused ever to
meet or to receive his wife. In this attitude she was absolutely
implacable. She imposed her will upon the less strong spirits about
her, and young Mrs. Ryan was as completely shut off from her husband’s
world as though her skirts carried contamination. With masculine
largeness of view in other matters, in this one the elder woman
exhibited a singular, unworthy smallness. The carelessly large checks
she had previously given Dominick on his birthday and anniversaries
ceased to appear, and masculine gifts, such as pipes, walking-sticks,
and cigar-cases, in which his wife could have no participating
enjoyment, took their place. She had established a policy of exclusion,
and maintained it rigidly.

Young Mrs. Ryan had at first believed that this rancor would melt away
with the flight of time. But she did not know the elder woman. She was
as unmeltable as a granite rock. The separation from her son, now with
age growing on her, ate like an acid into the mother’s heart. She saw
him at intervals, and the change in him, the growth of discouragement,
the dejection of spirit that he hid from all the world, but that her
eye, clairvoyant from love, detected, tore her with helpless wrath and
grief. She punished herself and punished him, sacrificed them both, in
permitting herself the indulgence of her implacable indignation.

Bernice, who had expected to gain all from her connection with the
all-powerful Ryans, at the end of two years found that she was an
ostracized outsider from the world she had hoped to enter, and that the
riches she had expected to enjoy were represented by the three thousand
a year her husband earned in the bank. Her attempts to force her way
into the life and surroundings where she had hoped her marriage would
place her had invariably failed. If her feelings were not of the same
nature as those of the elder Mrs. Ryan, they were fully as poignant and
bitter.

The effort to get an invitation to the ball had been the most daring
the young woman had yet made. Neither she nor Dominick had thought
it possible that Mrs. Ryan would leave her out. So confident was she
that she would be asked that she had ordered a dress for the occasion.
But when Dominick’s invitation came without her name on the envelope,
then fear that she was to be excluded rose clamorous in her. For days
she talked and complained to her husband as to the injustice of this
course and his power to secure the invitation for her if he would. By
the evening of the ball she had brought him to the point where he had
agreed to go forth and demand it.

It was a hateful mission. He had never in his life done anything so
humiliating. In his shame and distress he had hoped that his mother
would give it to him without urging, and Bernice, placated, would be
restored to good humor and leave him at peace. She could not have
gained such power over him, or so bent him to her bidding, had she not
had in him a fulcrum of guilty obligation to work on. She continually
reminded him of “the wrong” he had done her, and how, through him, she
had lost the respect of her fellows and her place among them. All
these slights, snubs and insults were his fault, and he felt that this
was true. To-night he had gone forth in dogged desperation. Now in
fear, frank fear of her, he went home, slowly, with reluctant feet, his
heart getting heavier, his dread colder as he neared the house.

It was one of those wooden structures on Sacramento Street not far
from Van Ness Avenue where the well-to-do and socially-aspiring crowd
themselves into a floor of seven rooms, and derive satisfaction from
the proximity of their distinguished neighbors who refuse to know them.
It contained four flats, each with a parlor bay-window and a front
door, all four doors in neighborly juxtaposition at the top of a flight
of six marble steps.

Dominick’s was the top flat; he had to ascend a long, carpeted stairway
with a turn half-way up to get to it. Now, looking at the bay-window,
he saw lights gleaming from below the drawn blinds. Berny was still up.
A lingering hope that she might have gone to bed died, and his sense
of reluctance gained in force and made him feel slightly sick. He was
there, however, and he had to go up. Fitting his key into the lock he
opened the hall door.

It was very quiet as he mounted the long stairs, but, as he drew near
the top, he became aware of a windy, whistling noise and looking into
the room near the stair-head saw that all the gas-jets were lit and
turned on full cock, and that the gas, rushing out from the burner in a
ragged banner of flame, made the sound. He was about to enter and lower
it when he heard his wife’s voice coming from the open door of her room.

“Is that you, Dominick?” she called.

Her voice was steady and high. Though it was hard, with a sort of
precise clearness of utterance, it was not conspicuously wrathful.

“Yes,” he answered, “it’s I,” and he forgot the gas-jets and walked up
the hall. He did not notice that in the other rooms he passed the gas
was turned on in the same manner. The whistling rush of its escape made
a noise like an excited, unresting wind in the confined limits of the
little flat.

The door of Berny’s room was open, and under a blaze of light from
the chandelier and the side lights by the bureau she was sitting in
a rocking-chair facing the foot of the bed. She held in her hand a
walking-stick of Dominick’s and with this she had been making long
scratches across the foot-board, which was of walnut and was seamed
back and forth, like a rock scraped by the passage of a glacier. As
Dominick entered, she desisted, ceased rocking, and turned to look at
him. She had an air of taut, sprightly impudence, and was smiling a
little.

“Well, Dominick,” she said jauntily, “you’re late.”

“Yes, I believe I am,” he answered. “I did not come straight back. I
walked about for a while.”

He slowly crossed the room to the fireplace and stood there looking
down. There were some silk draperies on the mantel matched by those
which were festooned over the room’s single window. He fastened his
eyes on the pattern stamped on the looped-up folds, and was silent. He
thought Berny would realize from the fact that he had not come directly
home that the invitation had been denied. This was his bungling,
masculine way of breaking the news.

“Took a walk,” she said, turning to the bed and beginning to rock.
“It’s a queer sort of hour to choose for walking,” and lifting the
cane she recommenced her occupation of scratching the foot-board with
it, tracing long, parabolic curves across the entire expanse, watching
the cane’s tip with her head tilted to one side. Dominick, who was not
looking at her, did not notice the noise.

“I thought,” she said, tracing a great arc from one side to the other,
“that you were with your loving family--opening the ball, probably.”

He did not move, but said quietly,

“It was impossible to get the invitation, Berny. I tried to do it and
was refused. I want you to understand that as long as I live I’ll
never do a thing like that again.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” she said, laughing and shaking her head like an
amused child. “Oh, yes, you will.” She threw her head back and, looking
at the ceiling, laughed still louder with a note of fierceness in the
sound. “You’ll do it and lots more things like it. You’ll do it if I
want you to, Dominick Ryan.”

He did not answer. She hitched her chair closer to the bed as if
to return to an engrossing pastime, and, leaning back luxuriously,
resumed her play with the cane. This time Dominick noticed the noise
and turned. She was conscious that he was looking at her, and began to
scratch with an appearance of charmed absorption, such as an artist
might display in his work. He watched her for a moment in silent
astonishment and then broke out sharply,

“What are you doing?”

“Scratching the bed,” she responded calmly.

“You must be mad,” he said, striding angrily toward her and stretching
a hand for the cane. “You’re ruining it.”

She whipped the cane to the other side, out of his reach.

“Am I?” she said, turning an eye of fiery menace on him. “Maybe I am,
and what’s that matter?” Then, turning back to the bed, “Too bad, isn’t
it, and the set not paid for yet.”

“Not paid for!” he exclaimed, so amazed by the statement that he forgot
everything else. “Why, I’ve given you the money for it twice!”

“Three times,” she amended coolly, “and I spent it on things I liked
better. I bought clothes, and jewelry with it, and little fixings I
wanted. Yes, the bedroom set isn’t all paid for yet and we’ve had it
nearly two years. Who would have thought that the son of Con Ryan
didn’t pay his bills!”

She rose, threw the cane into the corner, and, turning toward him,
leaned back, half-sitting on the foot-board, her hands, palm downward,
pressed on its rounded top. The chandelier was directly over her head
and cast a powerful light on her face. This was small, pointed, and
of that sallow hue which is often noticeable in the skins of brunette
women who are no longer in their first youth. She had a nose that
drooped a little at the tip and an upper lip which was long and closed
firmly and secretively on the lower one. Her dark eyes, large and
brilliant, had the slightest tendency toward a slanting setting, the
outer corners being higher than the inner ones. Under the shower of
light from above, her thick hair, bleached to a reddish auburn and worn
in a loose knot on top of her head, cast a shadow over her forehead,
and below this her eyes blazed on her husband. Many men would have
thought her an unusually pretty woman, but no man, save one of her own
sort, could have faced her at this moment without quailing.

Dominick and she had had many quarrels, ignominious and repulsive, but
he had never before seen her in so savage a mood. Even yet he had not
lost the feeling of responsibility and remorse he felt toward her. As
he moved from the mantelpiece his eye had fallen on the ball-dress that
lay, a sweep of lace and silver, across the bed, and on the bureau he
had seen jewels and hair ornaments laid out among the powder boxes and
scent bottles. The pathos of these futile preparations appealed to him
and he made an effort to be patient and just.

“It’s been a disappointment,” he said, “and I’m sorry about it. But
I’ve done all I could and there’s no use doing any more. You’ve got to
give it up. There’s no use trying to make my mother give in. She won’t.”

“Won’t she?” she cried, her voice suddenly loud and shaken with rage.
“We’ll see! We’ll see! We’ll see if I’ve married into the Ryan family
for nothing.”

Her wrath at last loosened, her control was instantly swept away. In a
moment she was that appalling sight, a violent and vulgar woman in a
raging passion. She ran round the bed and, seizing the dress, threw it
on the floor and stamped on it, grinding the delicate fabric into the
carpet with her heels.

“There!” she cried. “That’s what I feel about it! That’s the way I’ll
treat the things and the people I don’t like! That dress--it isn’t paid
for, but I don’t want it. I’ll get another when I do. Have I married
Con Ryan’s son to need money and bother about bills? Not on your life!
Did you notice the gas? Every burner turned on. Well, I did it just
to have a nice bright house for you when you came home without the
invitation. We haven’t paid the bill for two months--but what does that
matter? We’re related to the Ryans. _We_ don’t have to trouble about
bills.”

He saw that she was beyond arguing with and turned to leave the room.
She sprang after him and caught him by the arm, pouring out only
too coherent streams of rage and abuse. It was the old story of the
“wrongs” she had suffered at his hands, and his “ruin” of her. To-night
it had no power to move him and he shook her off and left the room. She
ran to the door behind him and leaning out, cried it after him.

He literally fled from her, down the hallway, with the open doorways
sending their lurid light and hissing noise across his passage. As he
reached the dining-room he heard her bang the door and with aggressive
noise turn the key in the lock and shoot the bolt. Even at that moment
the lack of necessity for such a precaution caused a bitter smile to
move his lips.

[Illustration: Her wrath at last loosened, her control was instantly
  swept away      _Page 41_]

He entered the dining-room and sat down by the table, his head on
his hands. It was very quiet; no noise came from the street outside,
sinking into the deep restfulness of midnight, and from within there
was only the tearing sound of the flaring gases and an occasional cool
dropping from the filter in the pantry. He sat thus for some hours,
trying to think what he should do. He found it impossible to come to
any definite conclusion for the future; all he could decide upon now
was the necessity of leaving his wife, getting a respite from her,
withdrawing himself from the sight of her. He had never loved her, but
to-night the pity and responsibility he had felt seemed to be torn from
his life as a morning wind tears a cobweb from the grass.

The dawn was whitening the window-panes when he finally got pen and
paper and wrote a few lines. These, without prefix or signature, stated
that he would leave the city for a short time and not to make any
effort to find where he had gone or communicate with him. He wrote her
name on the folded paper and placed it in front of the clock. Then he
stole into his bedroom--they had occupied separate rooms for over six
months--and packed a valise with his oldest and roughest clothes. After
this he waited in the dining-room till the light was bright and the
traffic of the day loud on the pavement, before he crept down the long
stairway and went out into the crystal freshness of the morning.




CHAPTER IV

OUT OF NIGHT AND STORM


When Rose Cannon woke on the morning after her arrival at Antelope, a
memory of the snowflakes of the evening before made her jump out of
bed and patter barefooted to the window. It seemed to her it would be
“lots of fun” to be snowed up at Antelope, and when she saw only a thin
covering of white on the hotel garden and the diminishing perspective
of roofs, she drew her mouth into a grimace of disappointment.

With hunched-up shoulders, her hands tucked under her arms, she stood
looking out, her breath blurring the pane in a dissolving film of
smoke. It was a cold little world. Below her the garden--the summer
pride of Perley’s Hotel--lay a sere, withered waste, its shrubs stiff
in the grip of the cold. The powdering of snow on its frost-bitten
leaves and grizzled grass added to its air of bleakness. Beyond rose
the shingled roofs of Antelope’s main street. From their white-coated
slopes black stovepipes sent aloft spirals of smoke, a thinner,
fainter gray than the air into which they ascended. The sky lowered,
low-hanging and full of menace. The snowflakes that now and then idly
circled down were dark against its stormy pallor. Rose, standing gazing
up, wondered if her father would go on to Greenhide, the new camp
twenty miles from Antelope, where an important strike had recently been
made.

Half an hour later when they met at breakfast he told her he would not
leave for Greenhide that morning. Perley had warned him not to attempt
it, and he for his part knew the country well enough to realize that
it would be foolhardy to start under such a threatening sky. It would
be all right to stop over at Antelope till the weather made up its
mind what it meant to do. It might not be fun for her, but then he had
warned her before they left San Francisco that she would have to put up
with rough accommodations and unaccustomed discomforts.

Rose laughed. Her father did not understand that the roughness and
novelty of it all was what she enjoyed. He was already a man of means
when she was born, and she had known nothing of the hardships and
privations through which he and her mother had struggled up to fortune.
Rocky Bar the night before and Antelope this morning were her first
glimpses of the mining region over which the pioneers had swarmed in
’49, Bill Cannon, only a lad in his teens, among them.

Now she sat sidewise in her chair, sweeping with animated eyes the
primitive dining-room, its walls whitewashed, its low ceiling hung
with strands of pinked-out, colored paper, its board floor here and
there crossed by strips of cocoanut matting. At one end a hole in the
wall communicated with the kitchen and through this the naked arms of
the Chinaman, brown against the uprolled ends of his white sleeves,
protruded, offering dishes to the single waitress who was not always
there to receive them.

The girl, Cora by name, was particularly delinquent this morning.
Several times the Chinaman was forced to remove his arms and substitute
his face in the opening while he projected an enraged yell of “Corla!”
among the hotel guests. Her dereliction of duty was caused by an
overpowering interest in the Cannons, round whom she hovered in
enchanted observation. On ordinary occasions Cora was content to wait
on the group of men, local bachelors whose lonely state made it more
convenient for them “to eat” at the hotel, and who sat--two bending
lines of masculine backs--at either side of a long table. Cora’s usual
method was to set the viands before them and then seat herself at the
end of the table and enliven the meal with light conversation. To-day,
however, they were neglected. She scarcely answered their salutations,
but, banging the dishes down, hasted away to the Cannon table, where
she stood fixedly regarding the strange young lady.

Perley’s warnings of bad weather were soon verified. Early in the
afternoon the idle, occasional snowflakes had begun to fall thickly,
with a soft, persistent steadiness of purpose. The icy stillness of the
morning gave place to a wind, uncertain and whispering at first, but,
as the day advanced, gathering volume and speed. The office and bar
filled with men, some of them--snow powdered as if a huge sugar-sifter
had been shaken over them--having tramped in from small camps in the
vicinity. Clamor and vociferations, mixed with the smell of strong
drinks and damp woolens, rose from the bar. Constant gusts of cold air
swept the lower passages, and snow was tramped into the matting round
the hall stove.

At four o’clock, Willoughby, the Englishman who had charge of the
shut-down Bella K. mine, came, butting head down against the wind, a
group of dogs at his heels, to claim the hospitality of the hotel. His
watchman, an old timer, had advised him to seek a shelter better stored
with provisions than the office building of the Bella K. Willoughby,
whose accent and manner had proclaimed him as one of high distinction
before it was known in Antelope that he was “some relation to a lord,”
was made welcome in the bar. His four red setter dogs, shut out from
that hospitable retreat by the swing door, grouped around it and
stared expectantly, each shout from within being answered by them with
plaintive and ingratiating whines.

The afternoon was still young when the day began to darken. Rose
Cannon, who had been sitting in the parlor, dreaming over a fire of
logs, went to the window, wondering at the growing gloom. The wind had
risen to a wild, sweeping speed, that tore the snow fine as a mist.
There were no lazy, woolly flakes now. They had turned into an opaque,
slanting veil which here and there curled into snowy mounds and in
other places left the ground bare. It seemed as if a giant paint-brush,
soaked in white, had been swept over the outlook. Now and then a
figure, head down, hands in pockets, the front of the body looking as
though the paint-brush had been slapped across it, came into view,
shadowy and unsubstantial in the mist-like density.

Rose looked out on it with an interest that was a little soberer than
the debonair blitheness of her morning mood. If it kept up they might
be snowed in for days, Perley had said. That being the case, this room,
the hotel’s one parlor, would be her retreat, her abiding place--for
her bedroom was as cold as an ice-chest--until they were liberated.
With the light, half-whimsical smile that came so readily to her lips,
she turned from the window and surveyed it judicially.

Truly it was not bad. Seen by the light of the flaming logs pulsing
on the obscurity already lurking in the corners, it had the charm of
the fire-warmed interior, tight-closed against outer storm. A twilight
room lit only by a fire, with wind and snow outside, is the coziest
habitation in the world. It seemed to Rose it would make a misanthrope
feel friendly, prone to sociable chat and confidence. When the day grew
still dimmer she would draw the curtains (they were of a faded green
rep) and pull up the old horsehair arm-chairs that were set back so
demurely in the corners. Her eyes strayed to the melodeon and then to
the wall above it, where hung a picture of a mining millionaire, once
of the neighborhood, recently deceased, a circlet of wax flowers from
his bier surrounding his head, and the whole neatly incased in glass.
Washington crossing the Delaware made a pendent on the opposite wall.
On the center-table there were many books in various stages of unrepair
and in all forms of bindings. These were the literary aftermath left
by the mining men, who, since the early sixties, had been stopping at
Antelope on their hopeful journeys up and down the mineral belt.

She was leaving the window to return to her seat by the fire when the
complete silence that seemed to hold the outside world in a spell was
broken by sudden sounds. Voices, the crack of a whip, then a grinding
thump against the hotel porch, caught her ear and whirled her back
to the pane. A large covered vehicle, with the whitened shapes of
a smoking team drooping before it, had just drawn up at the steps.
Two masculine figures, carrying bags, emerged from the interior, and
from the driver’s seat a muffled shape--a cylinder of wrappings which
appeared to have a lively human core--gave forth much loud and profane
language. The isolation and remoteness of her surroundings had already
begun to affect the town-bred young lady. She ran to the door of the
parlor, as ingenuously curious to see the new arrivals and find out who
they were as though she had lived in Antelope for a year.

Looking down the hall she saw the front door open violently inward
and two men hastily enter. The wind seemed to blow them in and before
Perley’s boy could press the door shut the snow had whitened the damp
matting. No stage passed through Antelope in these days of its decline,
and the curiosity felt by Rose was shared by the whole hotel. The
swing door to the bar opened and men pressed into the aperture. Mrs.
Perley came up from the kitchen, wiping a dish. Cora appeared in the
dining-room doorway, and in answer to Miss Cannon’s inquiringly-lifted
eyebrows, called across the hall:

“It’s the Murphysville stage on the down-trip to Rocky Bar. I guess
they thought they couldn’t make it. The driver don’t like to run no
risks and so he’s brought ’em round this way and dumped ’em here. There
ain’t but two passengers. That’s them.”

She indicated the two men who, standing by the hall stove, were
divesting themselves of their wraps. One of them was a tall upright old
man with a sweep of grizzled beard covering his chest, and gray hair
falling from the dome of a bald head.

The other was much younger, tall also, and spare to leanness. He wore a
gray fedora hat, and against its chill, unbecoming tint, his face, its
prominent, bony surfaces nipped by the cold to a raw redness, looked
sallow and unhealthy. With an air of solicitude he laid his overcoat
across a chair, brushing off the snow with a careful hand. Buttoned
tight in a black cutaway with the collar turned up about his neck, he
had an appearance of being uncomfortably compressed into garments too
small for him. His shiny-knuckled, purplish hands, pinching up the
shoulders of his coat over the chair-back, were in keeping with his
general suggestion of a large-boned meagerly-covered lankness. The
fact that he was smooth-shaven, combined with the unusual length of
dark hair that appeared below his hat-brim, lent him a suggestion of
something interestingly unconventional, almost artistic. In the region
where he now found himself he would have been variously set down as
a gambler, a traveling clergyman, an actor, or perhaps only a vender
of patent medicines who had some odd, attractive way of advertising
himself, such as drawing teeth with an electric appliance, or playing
the guitar from the tail-board of his showman’s cart.

Now, having arranged his coat to its best advantage, he turned to
Perley and said with a curiously deep and resonant voice,

“And, mine host, a stove in my bedroom, a stove in my bedroom or I
perish.”

Cora giggled and threw across the hall to Miss Cannon a delighted
murmur of,

“Oh, say, ain’t he just the richest thing?”

“You’ve got us trapped and caged here for a spell, I guess,” said the
older man. “Any one else in the same box?”

“Oh, you’ll not want for company,” said Perley, pride at the importance
of the announcement vibrating in his tone. “We’ve got Willoughby here
from the Bella K. with his four setter dogs, and Bill Cannon and his
daughter up from the coast.”

“Bill Cannon!”--the two men stared and the younger one said,

“Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King from San Francisco?”

“That’s him all right,” nodded Perley. “Up here to see the diggings at
Greenhide and snowed in same as you.”

Here, Rose, fearing the conversation might turn upon herself, slipped
from the doorway into the passage and up the stairs to her own room.

An hour later as she stood before the glass making her toilet for
supper, a knock at the door ushered in Cora, already curled, powdered
and beribboned for that occasion, a small kerosene lamp in her hand.
In the bare room, its gloom only partly dispelled by the light from
a similar lamp on the bureau and the red gleam from the stove,
Miss Cannon was revealed in the becoming half-dusk made by these
imperfectly-blending illuminations, a pink silk dressing-gown loosely
enfolding her, a lightly brushed-in suggestion of fair hair behind her
ears and on her shoulders. Her comb was in her hand and Cora realized
with an uplifting thrill that she had timed her visit correctly and was
about to learn the mysteries of Miss Cannon’s coiffure.

“I brung you another lamp,” she said affably, setting her offering
down on the bureau. “One ain’t enough light to dress decently by. I
have three,” and she sank down on the side of the bed with the air of
having established an intimacy, woman to woman, by this act of generous
consideration.

“Them gentlemen,” she continued, “are along on this hall with you and
your pa. The old one’s Judge Washburne, of Colusa, a pioneer that used
to know Mrs. Perley’s mother way back in Sacramento in the fifties, and
knew your pa real well when he was poor. It’s sort of encouraging to
think _your_ pa was ever poor.”

Rose laughed and turned sidewise, looking at the speaker under the arch
of her uplifted arm. There were hair-pins in her mouth and an upwhirled
end of blond hair protruded in a gleaming scattering of yellow over her
forehead. She mumbled a comment on her father’s early poverty, her lips
showing red against the hair-pins nipped between her teeth.

“And the other one,” went on Cora, her eyes riveted on the
hair-dressing, her subconscious mind making notes of the disposition of
every coil, “his name’s J. D. Buford. And I’d like you to guess what
he is! An actor, a stage player. He’s been playing all up the state
from Los Angeles and was going down to Sacramento to keep an engagement
there. It just tickles me to death to have an actor in the house. I
ain’t never seen one close to before.”

The last hair-pin was adjusted and Miss Cannon studied the effect with
a hand-glass.

“An actor,” she commented, running a smoothing palm up the back of her
head, “that’s just what he looked like, now I think of it. Perhaps
he’ll act for us. I think it’s going to be lots of fun being snowed up
at Antelope.”

The sound of a voice crying “Cora” here rose from the hallway and that
young woman, with a languid deliberation of movement, as of one who
obeys a vulgar summons at her own elegant leisure, rose and departed,
apologizing for having to go so soon. A few minutes later, the hour of
supper being at hand, Rose followed her.

She was descending the stairs when a commotion from below, a sound
of voices loud, argumentative, rising and falling in excited chorus,
hurried her steps. The lower hall, lit with lamps and the glow of its
stove, heated to a translucent red, was full of men. A current of cold
could be felt in the hot atmosphere and fresh snow was melting on the
floor. Standing by the stove was a man who had evidently just entered.
Ridges of white lay caught in the folds of his garments; a silver hoar
was on his beard. He held his hands out to the heat and as Rose reached
the foot of the stairs she heard him say,

“Well, I tell you that any man that started to walk up here from Rocky
Bar this afternoon must have been plumb crazy. Why, John L. Sullivan
couldn’t do it in such a storm.”

To which the well-bred voice of Willoughby answered,

“But according to the message he started at two and the snow was hardly
falling then. He must have got a good way, past the Silver Crescent
even, when the storm caught him.”

A hubbub of voices broke out here, and, seeing her father on the edge
of the crowd, Rose went to him and plucked his sleeve, murmuring,

“What’s happened? What’s going on?”

He took his cigar out of his mouth and turned toward her, speaking low
and keeping his eyes on the men by the stove.

“The telegraph operator’s just had a message sent from Rocky Bar that a
man started from there this afternoon to walk up here. They don’t think
he could make it and are afraid he’s lost somewhere. Perley and some of
the boys are going out to look for him.”

“What a dreadful thing! In such a storm! Do you think they’ll ever find
him?”

He shrugged, and replaced his cigar in his mouth.

“Oh, I guess so. If he was strong enough to get on near here they ought
to. But it’s just what the operator says. The feller must have been
plumb crazy to attempt such a thing. Looks as if he was a stranger in
the country.”

“It’s a sort of quiet, respectable way of committing suicide,” said the
voice of the actor behind them.

Rose looked over her shoulder and saw his thin, large-featured face, no
longer nipped and reddened with cold, but wreathed in an obsequious and
friendly smile which furrowed it with deep lines. Her father answered
him and she turned away, being more interested in the preparations for
the search party. As she watched these she could hear the desultory
conversation behind her, the actor’s comments delivered with an
unctuous, elaborate politeness which, contrasted with her father’s
gruff brevity, made her smile furtively to herself.

A jingle of sleigh bells from without threw the party into the sudden
bustle of departure. Men shrugged themselves into their coats and tied
comforters over their ears. Perley emerged from the bar, shrouded in
outer wrappings, and crowding a whisky flask into his pocket. The
hall door was thrown open, and through the powdery thickness of the
atmosphere the sleigh with its restive horses could be seen drawn up
at the porch steps. Those left behind pressed into the doorway to
speed the departure. Shouted instructions, last suggestions as to the
best methods for conducting the search filled the air, drowning the
despairing whines that Willoughby’s dogs, shut in the bar, sent after
their master. With a broken jingle of bells the sleigh started and in a
moment was swallowed up in the blackness of the storm.

Supper was an animated meal that evening. The suddenly tragic interest
that had developed drew the little group of guests together with the
strands of a common sympathy. The judge and the actor moved their seats
to the Cannons’ table. Cora was sent to request the doctor--a young
man fresh from his graduation in San Francisco who took his meals
at the bachelor’s table--to join them and add the weight of medical
opinion to their surmises as to the traveler’s chances of survival.
These, the doctor thought, depended as much upon the man’s age and
physical condition, as upon the search party’s success in finding him.
And then they speculated as to the man himself, drawing inferences from
the one thing they knew of him, building up his character from this
single fact, deducing from it what manner of man he should be, and why
he should have done so strangely foolhardy a thing.

After supper they retired to the parlor, piled the fire high and sat
grouped before it, the smoke of cigars and cigarettes lying about their
heads in white layers. It was but natural that the conversation should
turn on stories of the great storms of the past. Rose had heard many
such before, but to-night, with the wind rocking the old hotel and the
thought of the lost man heavy at her heart, she listened, held in a
cold clutch of fascinated attention, to tales of the emigrants caught
in the passes of the Sierra, of pioneer mining-camps relieved by mule
trains which broke through the snow blockade as the miners lay dying
in their huts, of men risking their lives to carry succor to comrades
lost in their passage from camp to camp on just such a night as this.
Now and then one of Willoughby’s dogs, long since broken from the
confinement of the bar, came to the door and put in an inquiring head,
the ears pricked, the eyes full of hopeful inquiry, a feathered tail
wagging in deprecating friendliness. But its master was not there and
it turned away, disappointed, to run up the hall, sniffing under closed
doors and whimpering in uneasy loneliness.

Rose sat crouched over the fire, and as the fund of stories became
exhausted and silence gradually settled on the group, her thoughts
turned again to the traveler. She had been shocked at first, as the
others were, by the thought of a fellow creature lost in the storm; but
as the evening advanced, and the talk threw round his vague, undefined
figure the investiture of an identity and a character, she began to see
him less as a nebulous, menaced shape than as a known individuality. He
seemed to be advancing out of the swirling blackness of the night into
extending circles of the acquainted and the intimate. He was drawing
near, drawing out of the limbo of darkness and mystery, into the light
of their friendly fire, the grasp of their welcoming hands. He took
shape in her imagination; she began to see his outline forming and
taking color. With every tick of the clock she felt more keenly that he
was some one who needed her help, and whom she must rescue. By ten she
was in a ferment of anguished expectancy. The lost traveler was to her
a man who had once been her friend, now threatened by death.

The clock hand passed ten, and the periods of silence that at intervals
had fallen on the watchers grew longer and more frequent, and finally
merged into a stillness where all sat motionless, listening to the
storm. It had increased with the coming of the dark and now filled the
night with wildness and tumult. The wind made human sounds about the
angles of the house, which rocked and creaked to its buffets. The gale
was fitful. It died away almost to silence, seeming to recuperate its
forces for a new attack, and then came back full of fresh energies. It
struck blows on the doors and windows, like those of a fist demanding
entrance. Billowing rushes of sound circled round the building, and
then a rustling passage of sleet swept across the curtained pane.

It was nearly eleven, and for fifteen minutes no one had spoken a word.
Two of the dogs had come in and lain down on the hearth-rug, their
noses on their paws, their eyes fixed brightly and ponderingly on the
fire. In the midst of the motionless semicircle one of them suddenly
raised its head, its ears pricked. With its muzzle elevated, its eyes
full of awakened intelligence, it gave a low, uneasy whimper. Almost
simultaneously Rose started and drew herself up, exclaiming, “Listen!”
The sound of sleigh bells, faint as a noise in a dream, came through
the night.

In a moment the lower floor was shaken with movement and noise. The bar
emptied itself on to the porch and the hall doors were thrown wide. The
sleigh had been close to the hotel before its bells were heard, and
almost immediately its shape emerged from the swirling whiteness and
drew up at the steps. Rose, standing back in the parlor doorway, heard
a clamor of voices, a rising surge of sound from which no intelligible
sentence detached itself, and a thumping and stamping of feet as the
searchers staggered in with the lost traveler. The crowd separated
before them and they entered slowly, four men carrying a fifth, their
bodies incrusted with snow, the man they bore an unseen shape covered
with whitened rugs from which an arm hung, a limp hand touching the
floor. Questions and answers, now clear and sharp, followed them, like
notes upon the text of the inert form:

“Where’d you get him?”

“About five miles below on the main road. One of the horses almost
stepped on him. He was right in the path, but he was all sprinkled over
with snow.”

“He’s not dead, is he?”

“Pretty near, I guess. We’ve pumped whisky into him, but he ain’t shown
a sign of life.”

“Who is he?”

“Search me. I ain’t seen him good myself yet. Just as we got him the
lantern went out.”

There was a sofa in the hall and they laid their burden there, the
crowd edging in on them, horrified, interested, hungrily peering. Rose
could see their bent, expressive backs and the craning napes of their
necks. Then a sharp order from the doctor drove them back, sheepish,
tramping on one another’s toes, bunched against the wall and still
avidly staring. As their ranks broke, the young girl had a sudden,
vivid glimpse of the man, his head and part of his chest uncovered. Her
heart gave a leap of pity and she made a movement from the doorway,
then stopped. The lost traveler, that an hour before had almost assumed
the features of a friend, was a complete stranger that she had never
seen before.

He looked like a dead man. His face, the chin up, the lips parted under
the fringe of a brown mustache, was marble white, and showed a gray
shadow in the cheek. The hair on his forehead, thawed by the heat, was
lying in damp half-curled semicircles, dark against the pallid skin.
There was a ring on the hand that still hung limp on the floor. The
doctor, muttering to himself, pulled open the shirt and was feeling
the heart, when Perley, who had flown into the bar for more whisky,
emerged, a glass in his hand. As his eye fell upon the man, he stopped,
stared, and then exclaimed in loud-voiced amaze:

“My God--why, it’s Dominick Ryan! Look here, Governor”--to Cannon who
was standing by his daughter in the parlor doorway, “come and see for
yourself. If this ain’t young Ryan I’m a Dutchman!”

Cannon pushed between the intervening men and bent over the prostrate
figure.

“That’s who it is,” he said slowly and unemotionally. “It’s Dominick
Ryan, all right. Well, by ginger!” and he turned and looked at the
amazed innkeeper, “that’s the queerest thing I ever saw. What’s brought
him up here?”

Perley, his glass snatched from him by the doctor who seemed entirely
indifferent to their recognition of his patient, shrugged helplessly.

“Blest if I know,” he said, staring aimlessly about him. “He was here
last summer fishing. But there ain’t no fishing now. God, ain’t it a
good thing that operator at Rocky Bar had the sense to telegraph up!”




CHAPTER V

NURSE AND PATIENT


When Dominick returned to consciousness he lay for a space looking
directly in front of him, then moved his head and let his eyes sweep
the walls. They were alien walls of white plaster, naked of all
adornment. The light from a shaded lamp lay across one of them in a
soft yet clear wash of yellow, so clear that he could see that the
plaster was coarse.

There were few pieces of furniture in the room, and all new to him. A
bureau of the old-fashioned marble-topped kind stood against the wall
opposite. The lamp that cast the yellow light was on this bureau; its
globe, a translucent gold reflection revealed in liquid clearness in
the mirror just behind. It was not his own room nor Berny’s. He turned
his head farther on the pillow very slowly, for he seemed sunk in an
abyss of suffering and feebleness. On the table by the bed’s head was
another lamp, a folded newspaper shutting its light from his face, and
here his eyes stopped.

A woman was sitting by the foot of the bed, her head bent as if
reading. He stared at her with even more intentness than he had at the
room. The glow of the lamp on the bureau was behind her--he saw her
against it without color or detail, like a shadow thrown on a sheet.
Her outlines were sharply defined against the illumined stretch of
plaster,--the arch of her head, which was broken by the coils of hair
on top, her rather short neck, with some sort of collar binding it,
the curve of her shoulders, rounded and broad, not the shoulders of a
thin woman. He did not think she was his wife, but she might be, and he
moved and said suddenly in a husky voice,

“What time is it?”

The woman started, laid her book down, and rose. She came forward and
stood beside him, looking down, the filaments of hair round her head
blurring the sharpness of its outline. He stared up at her, haggard
and intent, and saw it was not his wife. It was a strange woman with
a pleasant, smiling face. He felt immensely relieved and said with a
hoarse carefulness of utterance,

“What time did you say it is?”

“A few minutes past five,” she answered. “You’ve been asleep.”

“Have I?” he said, gazing immovably at her. “What day is it?”

“Thursday,” she replied. “You came here last night from Rocky Bar.
Perhaps you don’t remember.”

“Rocky Bar!” he repeated vaguely, groping through a haze of memory.
“Was it only yesterday? Was it only yesterday I left San Francisco?”

“I don’t know when you left San Francisco--” the newspaper shade
cracked and bent a little, letting a band of light fall across the
pillow. She leaned down, arranging it with careful hands, looking from
the light to him to see if it were correctly adjusted.

“Whenever you left San Francisco,” she said, “you got here last night.
They brought you here, Perley and some other men in the sleigh. They
found you in the road. You were half-frozen.”

He looked at her moving hands, then when they had satisfactorily
arranged the shade and dropped to her sides, he looked at her face. Her
eyes were soft and friendly and had a gentle, kind expression. He liked
to look at them. The only woman’s eyes he had looked into lately had
been full of wrathful lightenings. There seemed no need to be polite or
do the things that people did when they were well and sitting talking
in chairs, so he did not speak for what seemed to him a long time. Then
he said,

“What is this place?”

“Antelope,” said the woman. “Perley’s Hotel at Antelope.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered with an air of weary recollection, “I was going
to walk there from Rocky Bar, but the snow came down too hard, and
the wind--you could hardly stand against it! It was a terrible pull.
Perley’s Hotel at Antelope. Of course, I know all about it. I was here
last summer for two weeks fishing.”

She stretched out her hand for a glass, across the top of which a book
rested. He followed the movement with a mute fixity.

“This is your medicine,” she said, taking the book off the glass. “You
were to take it at five but I didn’t like to wake you.”

She dipped a spoon into the glass and held it out to him. But the young
man felt too ill to bother with medicine and, as the spoon touched his
lips, he gave his head a slight jerk and the liquid was spilt on the
counterpane. She looked at it for a rueful moment, then said, as if
with gathering determination,

“But you _must_ take it. I think perhaps I gave it wrong. I ought to
have lifted you up. It’s easier that way,” and before he could answer
she slipped her arm under his head and raised it, with the other
hand setting the rim of the glass against his lips. He swallowed a
mouthful and felt her arm sliding from behind his head. He had a hazy
consciousness that a perfume came from her dress, and for the first
time he wondered who she was. Wondering thus, his eyes again followed
her hand putting back the glass, and watched it, white in the gush of
lamplight, carefully replacing the book. Then she turned toward him
with the same slight, soft smile.

“Who are _you_?” he said, keeping his hollowed eyes hard on her.

“I’m Rose Cannon,” she answered. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco.”

“Oh, yes,” with a movement of comprehension, the name striking a chord
of memory. “Rose Cannon from San Francisco, daughter of Bill Cannon. Of
course I know.”

He was silent again, overwhelmed by indifference and lassitude. She
made a step backward from the bedside. Her dress rustled and the same
faint perfume he had noticed came delicately to him. He turned his head
away from her and said dryly and without interest,

“I thought it was some one else.”

The words seemed to arrest her. She came back and stood close beside
him. Looking up he could see her head against the light that ran up
from the shaded lamps along the ceiling. She bent down and said,
speaking slowly and clearly as though to a child,

“The storm has broken the wires but as soon as they are up, papa will
send your mother word, so you needn’t worry about that. But we don’t
either of us know your wife’s address. If you could tell us----”

She stopped. He had begun to frown and then shut his eyes with an
expression of weariness.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Don’t bother about it. Let her alone.”

Again there was one of those pauses which seemed to him so long. He
gave a sigh and moved restlessly, and she said,

“Are your feet very painful?”

“Yes, pretty bad,” he answered. “What’s the matter with them?”

“They were frost-bitten, one partly frozen.”

“Oh--” he did not seem profoundly interested. It was as if they were
some one else’s feet, only they hurt violently enough to obtrude
themselves upon his attention. “Thank you very much,” he added. “I’ll
be all right to-morrow.”

He felt very tired and heard, as in a dream, the rustle of her dress
as she moved again. She said something about “supper” and “Mrs. Perley
coming,” and the dark, enveloping sense of stupor from which he had
come to life closed on him again.

Some time later on he emerged from it and saw another woman, stout and
matronly, with sleekly-parted hair, and an apron girt about her. He
asked her, too, who she was, for the fear that he might wake and find
his wife by his bedside mingled with the pain of his feet, to torment
him and break the vast, dead restfulness of the torpor in which he lay.

It broke into gleams of interest and returning consciousness during
the next two days. He experienced an acuter sense of illness and
pain, the burning anguish of his feet and fevered misery of his body,
bitten through with cold, brought him back to a realization of his own
identity. He heard the doctor murmuring in the corner of “threatened
pneumonia” and understood that he was the object threatened. He began
to know and separate the strange faces that seemed continually to be
bending over him, asking him how he felt. There was the doctor, Perley,
Bill Cannon, and the old judge and three different women, whom he had
some difficulty in keeping from merging into one composite being who
was sometimes “Miss Cannon,” and sometimes “Mrs. Perley,” and then
again “Cora.”

When on the fourth day the doctor told him that he thought he would
“pull through” with no worse ailment than a frozen foot, he had
regained enough of his original vigor and impatience under restraint
to express a determination to rise and “go on.” He was in pain, mental
and physical, and the ministrations and attentions of the satellites
that so persistently revolved round his bed rasped him into irritable
moodiness. He did not know that all Antelope was waiting for the latest
bulletins from Mrs. Perley or Cora. The glamour attaching to his
sensational entry into their midst had been intensified by the stories
of the wealth and position that had been his till he had married a poor
girl, contrary to his mother’s wishes. He was talked of in the bar,
discussed in the kitchen, and Cora dreamed of him at night. The very
name of Ryan carried its weight, and Antelope, a broken congeries of
white roofs and black smoke-stacks emerging from giant drifts, throbbed
with pride at the thought that the two greatest names of California
finance were snow-bound in Perley’s Hotel.

The doctor laughed at his desire to “move on.” The storm was still
raging and Antelope was as completely cut off from the rest of the
world as if it were an uncharted island in the unknown reaches of the
Pacific. Propping the invalid up among his pillows he drew back the
curtain and let him look out through a frost-painted pane on a world
all sweeping lines and skurrying eddies of white. The drifts curled
crisp edges over the angles of roofs, like the lips of breaking waves.
The glimpse of the little town that the window afforded showed it
cowering under a snow blanket, almost lost to sight in its folds.

“Even if your feet were all right, you’re tied here for two weeks
anyway,” said the doctor, dropping the curtain. “It’s the biggest storm
_I_ ever saw, and there’s an old timer that hangs round the bar who
says it’s as bad as the one that caught the Donner party in forty-six.”

The next day it stopped and the world lay gleaming and still under
a frosty crust. The sky was a cold, sullen gray, brooding and
cloud-hung, and the roofs and tree-tops stood out against it as
though executed in thick white enamel. The drifts lay in suave curves,
softly undulating like the outlines of a woman’s body, sometimes
sweeping smoothly up to second stories, here and there curdled into an
eddy, frozen as it twisted. A miner came in from an outlying camp on
skees and reported the cold as intense, the air clear as crystal and
perfectly still. On the path as he came numerous fir boughs had broken
under the weight of snow, with reports like pistol shots. There was
a rumor that men, short of provisions, were snowed up at the Yaller
Dog mine just beyond the shoulder of the mountain. This gave rise to
much consultation and loud talking in the bar, and the lower floor of
Perley’s was as full of people, noise and stir, as though a party were
in progress.

That afternoon Dominick, clothed in an old bath-robe of the doctor’s,
his swathed feet hidden under a red rug drawn from Mrs. Perley’s
stores, was promoted to an easy chair by the window. The doctor, who
had helped him dress, having disposed the rug over his knees and tucked
a pillow behind his back, stood off and looked critically at the effect.

“I’ve got to have you look your best,” he said, “and you’ve got to act
your prettiest this afternoon. The young lady’s coming in to take care
of you while I go my rounds.”

“Young lady!” exclaimed Dominick in a tone that indicated anything but
pleasurable anticipation. “What young lady?”

“_Our_ young lady,” answered the doctor. “Miss Cannon, the Young Lady
of Perley’s Hotel. Don’t you know that that’s the nicest girl in the
world? Maybe you don’t, but that’s because your powers of appreciation
have been dormant for the last few days. The people here were most
scared to death of her at first. They didn’t know how she was going to
get along, used to the finest, the way she’s always been. But, bless
your heart, she’s less trouble than anybody in the place. There’s
twelve extra people eating here, besides you to be looked after, and
Mrs. Perley and Cora are pretty near run to death trying to do it. Miss
Cannon wanted to turn in and help them. They wouldn’t have it, but they
had to let her do her turn here taking care of you.”

“It’s very kind of her,” said the invalid without enthusiasm. “I
noticed her here several times.”

“And as easy as an old shoe,” said the doctor. “Just as nice to
Perley’s boy, who’s a waif that the Perleys picked up in the streets
of Stockton, as if he was the Prince of Wales. I tell you heredity’s
a queer thing. How did Bill Cannon come to have a girl like that? Of
course there’s the mother to take into account, but--”

A knock on the door interrupted him. To his cry of “Come in,” Rose
entered, a white shawl over her shoulders, a book in her hand. While
she and Dominick were exchanging greetings, the doctor began thrusting
his medicines into his bag, alleging the necessity of an immediate
departure, as two cases of bronchitis and three of pneumonia awaited
him.

“You didn’t know there were that many people in Antelope,” he said as
he snapped the clasp of the bag and picked up his hat. “Well, I’ll
swear to it, even if it does seem the prejudiced estimate of an old
inhabitant. So long. I’ll be back by five and I hope to hear a good
report from the nurse.”

The door closed behind him and Dominick and the young girl were left
looking rather blankly at each other. It was the first time he had seen
her when he had not been presented to her observation as a prostrate
and fever-stricken sufferer of whom nothing was expected but a docile
attitude in the matter of medicines. Now he felt the subjugating power
of clothes. It did not seem possible that the doctor’s bath-robe and
Mrs. Perley’s red rug could cast such a blighting weight of constraint
and consciousness upon him. But with the donning of them his invalid
irresponsibility seemed gone for ever. He had a hunted, helpless
feeling that he ought to talk to this young woman as gentlemen did who
were not burdened by the pain of frozen feet and marital troubles.
Moreover, he felt the annoyance of being thus thrust upon the care of
a lady whom he hardly knew.

“I’m very sorry that they bothered you this way,” he said awkwardly.
“I--I--don’t think I need any one with me. I’m quite comfortable here
by myself,” and then he stopped, conscious of the ungraciousness of his
words, and reddening uncomfortably.

“I dare say you don’t want me here,” said Rose with an air of meekness
which had the effect of being assumed. “But you really have been too
sick to be left alone. Besides, there’s your medicine, you must take
that regularly.”

The invalid gave an indifferent cast of his eye toward the glass on the
bureau, guarded by the familiar book and spoon. Then he looked back at
her. She was regarding him deprecatingly.

“Couldn’t I take it myself?” he said.

“I don’t think I’d trust you,” she answered.

His sunken glance was held by hers, and he saw, under the deprecation
of her look, humor struggling to keep itself in seemly suppression. He
was faintly surprised. There did not seem to him anything comic in the
fact of her distrust. But as he looked at her he saw the humor rising
past control. She dropped her eyes to hide it and bit her under lip.
This did strike him as funny and a slow grin broke the melancholy of
his face. She stole a stealthy look at him, her gravity vanished at
the first glimpse of the grin, and she began to laugh, holding her
head down and making the stifled, chuckling sounds of controlled mirth
suddenly liberated. He was amused and a little puzzled and, with his
grin more pronounced than before, said,

“What are you laughing at?”

She lifted her head and looked at him with eyes narrowed to slits,
murmuring,

“You, trying to get rid of me and being so polite and helpless. It’s
too pathetic for words.”

“If it’s pathetic, why do you laugh?” he said, laughing himself, he did
not know why.

She made no immediate reply and he looked at her, languidly interested
and admiring. For the first time he realized that she was a pretty
girl, with her glistening coils of blond hair and a pearl-white skin,
just now suffused with pink.

“Why did you think I wanted to get rid of you?” he asked.

“You’ve almost said so,” she answered. “And then--well, I can see you
do.”

“How? What have I done that you’ve seen?”

“Not any especial thing, but--I _think_ you do.”

He felt too weak and indifferent to tell polite falsehoods. Leaning his
head on the pillow that stood up at his back, he said,

“Perhaps I did at first. But now I’m glad you came.”

She smiled indulgently at him as though he were a sick child.

“I should think you wouldn’t have wanted me. You must be so tired of
people coming in and out. Those days when you were so bad the doctor
had the greatest difficulty in keeping men out who didn’t know you and
had never seen you. Everybody in the hotel wanted to crowd in.”

“What did they want to do that for?”

“To see you. _We_ were the sensation of Antelope first. But then you
came and put us completely in the shade. Antelope hasn’t had such an
excitement as your appearance since the death of Jim Granger, whose
picture is down stairs in the parlor and who comes from here.”

“I don’t see why I should be an excitement. When I was up here fishing
last summer nobody was in the least excited.”

“It was the way you came--half-dead out of the night as if the sea had
thrown you up. Then everybody wanted to know why you did it, why you, a
Californian, attempted such a dangerous thing.”

“There wasn’t anything so desperately dangerous about it,” he said,
almost in a tone of sulky protest.

“The men down stairs seemed to think so. They say nobody could have got
up here in such a storm.”

“Oh, rubbish! Besides, it wasn’t storming when I left Rocky Bar. It was
gray and threatening, but there wasn’t a flake falling. The first snow
came down when I was passing the Silver Crescent. It came very fast
after that.”

“Why did you do it--attempt to walk such a distance in such uncertain
weather?”

Dominick smoothed the rug over his knees. His face, looking down, had a
curious expression of cold, enforced patience.

“I was tired,” he said slowly. “I’d worked too hard and I thought the
mountains would do me good. I can get time off at the bank when I want
and I thought I’d take a holiday and come up here where I was last
summer. I knew the place and liked the hotel. I wanted to get a good
way off, out of the city and away from my work. As for walking up here
that afternoon--I’m very strong and I never thought for a moment such a
blizzard was coming down.”

He lifted his head and turned toward the window, then raising one hand
rubbed it across his forehead and eyes. There was something in the
gesture that silenced the young girl. She thought he felt tired and had
been talking too much and she was guiltily conscious of her laughter
and loquacity.

They sat without speaking for some moments. Dominick made no attempt to
break the silence when she moved noiselessly to the stove and pushed in
more wood. His face was turned from her and she thought he had fallen
asleep when he suddenly moved and said,

“Isn’t it strange that I have never met you before?”

She was relieved. His tone showed neither feebleness nor fatigue, in
fact it had the fresh alertness of a return to congenial topics. She
determined, however, to be less talkative, less encouraging to the
weakening exertions of general conversation. So she spoke with demure
brevity.

“Yes, very. But you were at college for four years, and the year you
came back I was in Europe.”

He looked at her ruminatingly, and nodded.

“But I’ve seen you,” he said, “at the theater. I was too sick at first
to recognize you, but afterward I knew I’d seen you, with your father
and your brother Gene.”

It was her turn to nod. She thought it best to say nothing, and waited.
But his eyes bent inquiringly upon her, and the waiting silence seemed
to demand a comment. She made the first one that occurred to her:

“Whom were _you_ with?”

“My wife,” said the young man.

Rose felt that an indefinite silence would have been better than this.
All she knew of Dominick Ryan’s wife was that she was a person who had
not been respectable and whose union with Dominick had estranged him
from his people. Certainly, whatever else she was, young Mrs. Ryan
was not calculated to be an agreeable subject of converse with the man
who in marrying her had sacrificed wealth, family, and friends. The
doctor’s chief injunction to Rose had been to keep the invalid in a
state of tranquillity. Oppressed by a heavy sense of failure she felt
that nursing was not her forte.

She murmured a vague sentence of comment and this time determined not
to speak, no matter how embarrassing the pause became. She even thought
of taking up her book and was about to stretch her hand for it, when he
said,

“But it seems so queer when our parents have been friends for years,
and I know Gene, and you know my sister Cornelia so well.”

She drew her hand back and leaned forward, frowning and staring in
front of her, as she sent her memory backward groping for data.

“Well, you see a sort of series of events prevented it. When we were
little our parents lived in different places. Ages ago when we first
came down from Virginia City you were living somewhere else, in
Sacramento, wasn’t it? Then you were at school, and after that you went
East to college for four years, and when you got back from college I
was in Europe. And when I came back from Europe--that’s over two years
ago now--why then----”

She had again brought up against his marriage, this time with a shock
that was of a somewhat shattering nature.

“Why, then,” she repeated falteringly, realizing where she was--“why,
then--let’s see--?”

“Then I had married,” he said quietly.

“Oh, yes, of course,” she assented, trying to impart a suggestion of
sudden innocent remembrance to her tone. “You had married. Why, of
course.”

He vouchsafed no reply. She was distressed and mortified, her face
red with anger at her own stupidity. In her embarrassment she looked
down, smoothing her lace cuffs, and waiting for him to say something
as he had done before. But this time he made no attempt to resume the
conversation. Stealing a sidelong glance at him she saw that he had
turned to the window and was gazing out. There was an expression of
brooding gloom on his profile, his eyebrows drawn low, his lips close
set. She judged rightly that he did not intend to speak again, and she
took up her book and opened it.

Half an hour later, rising to give him his medicine, she saw that
he had fallen asleep. She was at his side before she discovered it,
thinking his eyes were drooped in thought. Standing with the glass
in her hand she looked at him with something of a child’s shrinking
curiosity and a woman’s pity for a strong creature weakened and brought
low. The light in the room was growing gray and in it she saw his
face, with the shadows in its hollows, looking thin and haggard in
the abandonment of sleep. For the first time, seeing him clothed and
upright, she realized that he was a personable man, a splendid man, and
also for the first time she thought of him outside this room and this
house, and a sort of proud resentment stirred in her at the memory of
the marriage he had made--the marriage with the woman who was not good.

An hour later when the doctor came back she was kneeling on the
floor by the open stove door, softly building up the fire. From the
orifice--a circle of brilliance in the dim room--a red glow painted
her serious, down-bent face with a hectic color, and touched with a
bright, palpitating glaze the curves of her figure. At the sound of the
opening door she looked up quickly, and, her hands being occupied, gave
a silencing jerk of her head toward the sleeping man.

The doctor looked at them both. The scene was like a picture of some
primitive domestic interior where youth and beauty had made a nest,
warmed by that symbol of life, a fire, which one replenished while the
other slept.




CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH BERNY WRITES A LETTER


The morning after the quarrel Bernice woke late. She had not fallen
asleep till the night was well spent, the heated seething of her rage
keeping the peace of repose far from her. It was only as the dawn paled
the square of the window that she fell into a heavy slumber, disturbed
by dreams full of stress and strife.

She looked up at the clock; it was nearly ten. Dominick would have left
for the bank before this, so the wretched constraint of a meeting with
him was postponed. Sallow and heavy-eyed, her head aching, oppressed by
a sense of the unbearable unpleasantness of the situation, she threw on
her wrapper, and going to the window drew the curtain and looked out.

The bedroom had but one window, wedged into an angle of wall, and
affording a glimpse of the green lawn and clipped rose trees of the
house next door. There was a fog this morning and even this curtailed
prospect was obliterated. She stood yawning drearily, and gazing out
with eyes to which her yawns had brought tears. Her hair made a wild
bush round her head, her face looked pinched and old. She was one of
those women whose good looks are dependent on animation and millinery.
In this fixity of inward thought, unobserved in unbecoming disarray,
one could realize that she had attained the thirty-four years she could
so successfully deny under the rejuvenating influences of full dress
and high spirits.

During her toilet her thoughts refused to leave the subject of last
night’s quarrel. She and her husband had had disagreements before--many
in the last year when they had virtually separated, though the world
did not know it--but nothing so ignominiously repulsive as the scene of
last evening had yet degraded their companionship. Bernice was ashamed.
In the gray light of the dim, disillusioning morning she realized that
she had gone too far. She knew Dominick to be long-suffering, she knew
that the hold she had upon him was a powerful one, but the most patient
creatures sometimes rebel, the most compelling sense of honor would
sometimes break under too severe a strain. As she trailed down the long
passage to the dining-room she made up her mind that she would make
the first overture toward reconciliation that evening. It would be
difficult but she would do it.

She was speculating as to how she would begin, in what manner she would
greet him when he came home, when her eyes fell on the folded note
against the clock. Apprehension clutched her as she opened it. The few
lines within frightened her still more. He had gone--where? She turned
the note over, looking at the back, in a sudden tremble of fearfulness.
He had never done anything like this before, left her, suddenly cut
loose from her in proud disgust. She stood by the clock, staring at
the paper, her face fallen into scared blankness, the artificial
hopefulness that she had been fostering since she awoke giving place to
a down-drop into an abyss of alarm.

The door into the kitchen creaked and the Chinaman entered with the
second part of the dainty breakfast cooked especially for her.

“What time did Mr. Ryan leave this morning?” she said without turning,
throwing the question over her shoulder.

“I dunno,” the man returned, with the expressionless brevity of his
race particularly accentuated in this case, as he did not like his
mistress. “He no take blickfuss here. He no stay here last night.”

She faced round on him, her eyes full of a sudden fierce intentness
which marked them in moments of angry surprise.

“Wasn’t here last night?” she demanded. “What do you mean?”

He arranged the dishes with careful precision, not troubling himself
to look up, and speaking with the same dry indifference.

“He not here for blickfuss. No one sleep in his bed. I go make bed--all
made. I think he not here all night.”

His work being accomplished he turned without more words and passed
into the kitchen. Berny stood for a moment thinking, then, with a shrug
of defiance, left her buckwheat cakes untasted and walked into the
hall. She went directly to her husband’s room and looked about with
sharp glances. She opened drawers and peered into the wardrobes. She
was a woman who had a curiously keen memory for small domestic details,
and a few moments’ investigation proved to her that he had taken some
of his oldest clothes, but had left behind all the better ones, and
that the silver box of jewelry on the bureau--filled with relics of the
days when he had been the idolized son of his parents--lacked none of
its contents.

More alarmed than she had been in the course of her married life she
left the room and passed up the hall to the parlor. The brilliant,
over-furnished apartment in which she had crowded every fashion in
interior decoration that had pleased her fancy and been within the
compass of her purse, looked slovenly and unattractive in the gray
light of the morning. The smell of smoke was strong in it and the butts
and ashes of cigars Dominick had been smoking the evening before lay
in a tray on the center-table. She noticed none of these things, which
under ordinary circumstances would have been ground for scolding, for
she was a woman of fastidious personal daintiness. A cushioned seat
was built round the curve of the bay-window, and on this she sat down,
drawing back the fall of thick écru lace that veiled the pane. Her
eyes were fastened with an unwinking fixity on the fog-drenched street
without; her figure was motionless.

Her outward rigidity of body concealed an intense inward energy of
thought. It suddenly appeared to her as if her hold on Dominick, which
till yesterday had seemed so strong that nothing but death could break
it, was weak, was nothing. It had been rooted in his sense of honor,
the sense that she fostered in him and by means of which she had been
able to make him marry her. Was this sense not so powerful as she
believed, or--dreadful thought!--was it weakening under the friction of
their life together? Had she played on it too much and worn it out? She
had been so sure of Dominick, so secure in his blind, plodding devotion
to his duty! She had secretly wondered at it, as a queer characteristic
that it was fortunate he possessed. Deep in her heart she had a slight,
amused contempt for it, a contempt that had extended to other things.
She had felt it for him in those early days of their marriage when he
had looked forward to children and wanted to live quietly, without
society, in his own home. It grew stronger later when she realized he
had accepted his exclusion from his world and was too proud to ask his
mother for money.

And now! Suppose he had gone back to his people? A low ejaculation
escaped her, and she dropped the curtain and pressed her hand, clenched
to the hardness of a stone, against her breast.

The mere thought of such a thing was intolerable. She did not see how
she could support the idea of his mother and sister winning him from
her. She hated them. They were the ones who had wronged her, who had
excluded her from the home and the riches and the position that her
marriage should have given her. Her retaliation had been her unwavering
grip on Dominick and the careful discretion with which she had
comported herself as his wife. There was no ground of complaint against
her. She had been as quiet, home-keeping and dutiful a woman as any in
California. She had been a good housekeeper, a skilful manager of her
husband’s small means. It was only within the last year that she had,
in angry spite, run into the debts with which she had taunted him. No
wife could have lived more rigorously up to the letter of her marriage
contract. It was easy for her to do it. She was not a woman whom light
living and license attracted. She had sacrificed her honor to win
Dominick, grudgingly, unwillingly, as close-fisted men part with money
in the hope of rich returns. She did not want to be his mistress, but
she knew of no other means by which she could reach the position of his
wife.

Now suppose he had gone back to his people! It was an insupportable, a
maddening thought. It plunged her into agitation that made her rise and
move about the room with an aimless restlessness, like some soft-footed
feline animal. Suppose he had gone home and told them about last night,
and they had prevailed upon him not to come back!

Well, even if they had, hers was still the strong position. The
sympathy of the disinterested outsider would always be with her. If she
had been quarrelsome and ugly, those were small matters. In the great
essentials she had not failed. Suppose she and the Ryans ever did come
to an open crossing of swords, would not her story be _the_ story of
the two? The world’s sympathy would certainly not go to the rich women,
trampling on the poor little typewriter, the honest working-girl, who
for one slip, righted by subsequent marriage, had been the object of
their implacable antagonism and persecution.

She said this opposite the mirror, extending her hands as she had seen
an actress do in a recent play. As she saw her pointed, pale face, her
expression of worry gave way to one of pleased complacence. She looked
pathetic, and her position was pathetic. Who would have the heart to
condemn her when they saw her and heard her side of the story? Her
spirits began to rise. With the first gleam of returning confidence she
shook off her apprehensions. A struggle of sunshine pierced the fog,
and going to the window she drew the curtains and looked out on the
veil of mist every moment growing brighter and thinner. The sun finally
pierced it, a patch of blue shone above, and dropping the curtains she
turned and looked at the clock. It was after eleven. She decided she
would go out and take lunch with her sisters, who were always ready to
listen and to sympathize with her.

These sisters were the only intimate friends and companions Bernice
had, their home the one house to which she was a constant visitor. With
all her peculiarities and faults she possessed a strong sense of kin.
In her rise to fairer fortune, if not greater happiness, her old home
had never lost its hold upon her, nor had she weakened in a sort of
cross-grained, patronizing loyalty to her two sisters. This may have
been accounted for by the fact that they were exceedingly amiable and
affectionate, proud to regard Bernice as the flower of the family,
whose dizzy translation to unexpected heights they had watched with
unenvious admiration.

Hannah, the oldest of the family, was the daughter of a first
marriage. She was now a spinster of forty-five, and had taught school
for twenty years. Hazel was the youngest of the three, she and Bernice
having been the offspring of Danny Iverson’s second alliance with a
woman of romantic tendencies, which had no way of expressing themselves
except in the naming of her children. Hazel, while yet in her teens,
had married a clerk in a jewelry store, called Josh McCrae. It had been
a happy marriage. After the birth of a daughter, Hazel had returned to
her work as saleslady in a fashionable millinery. Both sisters, Josh,
and the child, had continued to live together in domestic harmony, in
the house which Hannah, with the savings of a quarter of a century,
had finally cleared of all mortgages and now owned. No household could
have been more simply decent and honest; no family more unaspiringly
content. In such an environment Bernice, with her daring ambitions and
bold unscrupulousness, was like that unaccounted-for blossom which in
the floral world is known as a “sport.”

But it did not appear that she regarded herself as such. With the
exception of a year spent in Los Angeles and Chicago she had been
a member of the household from her childhood till the day of her
marriage. The year of absence had been the result of a sudden revolt
against the monotony of her life and surroundings, an upwelling of
the restless ambitions that preyed upon her. A good position had been
offered her in Los Angeles and she had accepted it with eagerness,
thankful for the opportunity to see the world, and break away, so she
said, from the tameness of her situation, the narrowness of her circle.
The spirit of adventure carried her farther afield, and she penetrated
as far across the continent as Chicago, where she was employed in
one of the most prosperous business houses, earning a large salary.
But, like many Californians, homesickness seized her, and before the
year was out she was back, inveighing against the eastern manners,
character, and climate, and glad to shake down again into the family
nest. Her sisters were satisfied with her account of her wanderings,
not knowing that Bernice was as much of an adept at telling half a
story as she was at taking down a dictation in typewriting. She was too
clever to be found out in a lie; they were altogether too simple to
suspect her apparent frankness.

After the excursion she remained at home until her marriage. Her
liaison with Dominick was conducted with the utmost secrecy. Her
sisters had not a suspicion of it, knew nothing but that the young man
was attentive to her, till she told them of her approaching marriage.
This took place in the parlor of Hannah’s house, and the amazed
sisters, bewildered by Berny’s glories, had waited to see her burst
into the inner circles of fashion and wealth with a tiara of diamonds
on her head and ropes of pearls about her throat. That no tiara was
forthcoming, no pearls graced her bridal parure, and no Ryan ever
crossed the threshold of her door, seemed to the loyal Hannah and Hazel
the most unmerited and inexplicable injustice that had ever come within
their experience.

It took Bernice some time to dress, for she attached the greatest
importance to all matters of personal adornment, and the lunch hour
was at hand when she alighted from the Hyde Street car and walked
toward the house. It was on one of those streets which cross Hyde near
the slope of Russian Hill, and are devoted to the habitats of small,
thrifty householders. A staring, bright cleanliness is the prevailing
characteristic of the neighborhood, the cement sidewalks always swept,
the houses standing back in tiny squares of garden, clipped and trimmed
to a precise shortness of grass and straightness of border. The sun
was now broadly out and the house-fronts engarlanded with vines, their
cream-colored faces spotless in fresh coats of paint, presented a line
of uniform bay-windows to its ingratiating warmth. Hannah’s was the
third, and its gleaming clearness of window-pane and the stainless
purity of its front steps were points of domestic decency that its
proprietor insisted on as she did on the servant girl’s apron being
clean and the parlor free from dust.

Berny had retained her latch-key, and letting herself in passed
into the dustless parlor which connected by folding doors with the
dining-room beyond. Nothing had been changed in it since the days
of her tenancy. The upright piano, draped with a China silk scarf,
stood in the old corner. The solar print of her father hung over the
mantelpiece on which a gilt clock and a pair of China dogs stood at
accurately-measured distances. The tufted arm-chairs were placed far
from each other, severely isolated in the corners, as though the room
were too remote and sacred even to suggest the cheerful amenities of
social intercourse. A curious, musty smell hung in the air. It recalled
the past in which Dominick had figured as her admirer. The few times
that he had been to her home she had received him in this solemn,
unaired apartment in which the chandelier was lit for the occasion,
and Hannah and Hazel had sat in the kitchen, breathless with curiosity
as to what such a call might portend. She had been married here, in
the bay-window, under a wedding bell of white roses. The musty smell
brought it all back, even her sense of almost breathless elation, when
the seal was set on her daring schemes.

From beyond the folding doors a sound of conversation and smitten
crockery arose, also a strong odor of cooking. The family were already
at lunch, and opening the door Berny entered in upon the midday meal
which was being partaken of by her two sisters, Josh, and Hazel’s
daughter Pearl, a pretty child of eight.

Neither of her sisters resembled her in the least. Hannah was a
woman who looked more than her age, with a large, calm face, and
gentle, near-sighted eyes which blinked at the world behind a pair of
steel-rimmed glasses. Her quarter-century of school teaching had not
dried or stiffened her. She was fuller of the milk of human kindness,
of the ideals and enthusiasms of youth, than either of her sisters. All
the love of her kindly, maternal nature was given to Pearl, whom she
was bringing up carefully to be what seemed to Hannah best in woman.

Hazel was very pretty and still young. She had the fresh, even bloom
of a Californian woman, a round, graceful figure, and glossy brown
hair, rippled and arranged in an elaborate coiffure as though done by
a hair-dresser. She could do this herself as she could make her own
clothes, earn a fair salary at the milliner’s, and sing to the guitar
in a small piping voice. Her husband was ravished by her good looks
and accomplishments, and thought her the most wonderful woman in the
world. He was a thin, tall, young man with stooping shoulders, a long,
lean neck, and an amiable, insignificant face. But he seemed to please
Hazel, who had married him when she was nineteen, being haunted by the
nightmare thought that if she did not take what chances offered, she
might become an old maid like Hannah.

Berny sat down next to the child, conscious that under the pleasant
friendliness of their greetings a violent curiosity as to whether she
had been to the ball burned in each breast. She had talked over her
chances of going with them, and Hazel, whose taste in all such matters
was excellent, had helped her order the dress. Now, drawing her plate
toward her and shaking out her napkin, she began to eat her lunch, at
once too sore and too perverse to begin the subject. The others endured
their condition of ignorance for some minutes, and then Hazel, finding
that to wait was useless, approached the vital topic.

“Well, Berny, we’ve been looking over the list of guests at the ball in
the morning papers and your name don’t seem to be down.”

“I don’t see why it should,” said Berny without looking up,
“considering I wasn’t there.”

“You weren’t there!” ejaculated Hannah. “They didn’t ask you?”

“That’s right,” said Berny, breaking a piece of bread. “They didn’t ask
me.”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” exclaimed Josh. “That beats the Dutch!”

“I didn’t believe Mrs. Ryan would do that,” said Hannah, so pained that
her generally observant eye took no note of the fact that Pearl was
putting her fingers in her plate. “You’re as good as her own flesh and
blood, too,--her son’s wife. It’s not Christian, and I don’t understand
it.”

“It’s tough,” said Josh, “that’s what it is, tough!”

“If I were you,” said Hazel with spirit, “husband or no husband, I’d
never want to go inside that house or have any dealings with that crowd
again. If they were down on their knees to me I’d never go near them.
Just think what it would be if Josh’s mother thought herself too good
to know me! I’d like to know what I’d feel about it.”

“But she wouldn’t, dearie,” said Josh placatingly. “She’d be proud to
have you related to her.”

“I guess she’d better be,” said Hazel, fixing an indignant glare on her
spouse. “She’d find she’d barked up the wrong tree if she wasn’t.”

Considering that Josh’s mother had been dead for twelve years and in
her lifetime had been a meek and unassuming woman who let lodgings,
Hazel’s proud repudiation at her possible scorn seemed a profitless
wasting of fires, and Josh forthwith turned the conversation back to
the ball.

“Perhaps they did send you an invitation,” he said to Berny, “and it
got lost in the mails. That does happen, you know.”

Berny’s cheeks, under the faint bloom of rouge that covered them,
flamed a sudden, dusky red. She had never been open with these simple
relations of hers and she was not going to begin now. But she felt
shame as she thought of Dominick’s humiliating quest for the invitation
that was refused.

“Oh, no,” she said hurriedly. “It wasn’t sent, that’s all. Mrs. Ryan
won’t have me in the house. That’s the fact and there’s no use trying
to get round it. Well, she can do without me. I seem able to support my
existence without her.”

Her tone and manner, marked by a sort of hard bravado, did not deceive
her sisters, who had that extreme naïveté in expressing their intimate
feelings which is peculiar to Californians. They looked at her with
commiserating sympathy, not quite comprehending her attitude of
independence, but feeling sorry for her, whatever pose she adopted.

“And your dress,” said Hazel, “what will you do with that? When will
you ever wear it--a regular ball-dress like that?”

“Oh, I’ll wear it,” said Berny with an air of having quantities of
social opportunities not known by her sisters. “It won’t be a loss.”

“You could put a guimpe in and have sleeves to the elbow and wear it
to the theater. With a white hat with plumes it would be a dead swell
costume. And if you met any of the Ryans they’d see you were holding up
your end of the line and not _quite_ ready yet to go to the alms-house.”

Hannah shook her head.

“I don’t see how she could do that--transparent neck and all. I don’t
think that’s the kind of dress to wear in a theater. It’s too sort of
conspicuous.”

“I think Hannah’s right,” said Josh solemnly, nodding at Berny. “It
don’t seem to me the right thing for a lady. Looks fast.”

“What do you know about it, Josh McCrae?” said Hazel pugnaciously.
“You’re a clerk in a jewelry store.”

“Maybe I am,” retorted Josh, “but I guess that don’t prevent me from
knowing when a thing looks fast. Clerks in jewelry stores ain’t such
gummers as you might think. And, anyway, I don’t see that being a clerk
in any kind of a store has anything to do with it.”

Hazel was saved the effort of making a crushing repartee, by Pearl, who
had been silently eating her lunch, now suddenly launching a remark
into the momentary pause.

“Did Uncle Dominick go to the ball?” she asked, raising a pair of
limpid blue eyes to Berny’s face.

An instantaneous, significant silence fell on the others, and all eyes
turned inquiringly to Berny. Her air of cool control became slightly
exaggerated.

“No, he stayed at home with me,” she replied, picking daintily at the
meat on her plate.

“But I suppose he felt real hurt and annoyed,” said Hannah. “He
couldn’t have helped it.”

Berny did not reply. She knew that she must sooner or later tell
her sisters of Dominick’s strange departure. They would find it out
otherwise and suspect more than she wanted them to know. They, like the
rest of the world, had no idea that Berny’s brilliant marriage was not
the domestic success it appeared on the surface. She moved her knife
and fork with an arranging hand, and, as Hazel started to speak, said
with as careless an air as she could assume,

“Dominick’s gone. He left this morning.”

The news had even more of an effect than she had expected. Her four
companions stared at her in wonderment. A return of the dread and
depression of the morning came upon her when she saw their surprise.
She felt her heart sink as it had done when she read his note.

“Gone where?” exclaimed Hazel. This was the test question and Berny had
schooled herself in an answer in the car coming up.

“Oh, up into the country,” she said nonchalantly. “He’s worn out. They
work the life out of him in that horrible bank. He’s getting insomnia
and thought he’d better take a change now before he got run completely
down, so he left this morning and I’m a gay grass widow.”

She laughed and drank some water. Her laugh did not sound to her own
ears convincing and she was aware that, while Hannah was evidently
satisfied by her explanation, Hazel was eying her ponderingly.

“Well, if he’s got insomnia,” said Hannah, “he’d better take his
holiday right now. That’s the best thing to do. Take it in the
beginning. Before father took ill----”

Here Josh interrupted her, as Hannah’s reminiscences of the late
contractor’s last illness were long and exhaustive.

“Where’d you say he’d gone?” he queried.

“I can’t remember the name,” Berny answered with skilfully-assumed
indifference; “somewhere down toward Santa Cruz and Monterey, some new
place. And he may not stay there. If he doesn’t like it, he’ll just
move around from place to place.”

“Why didn’t you go, too?” said Pearl.

This was the second question Berny had dreaded. Now suddenly she felt
her throat contract and her lips quiver. Her usually iron nerve had
been shaken by her passion of the night before and the shock of the
morning. The unwonted sensations of gloom and apprehension closed in on
her again, and this time made her feel weak and tearful.

“I didn’t want to. I hate moving round,” she said, pushing her chair
back from the table. Her voice was a little hoarse, and suddenly
feeling the sting of tears under her eyelids she raised her hands to
her hat and began to fumble with her veil. “Why should I leave my
comfortable flat to go trailing round in a lot of half-built hotels?
That sort of thing doesn’t appeal to me at all. I like my own cook, and
my own bed, and my own bath-tub. I’m more of an old maid than Hannah.
Well, so long, people. I must be traveling.”

She laid her napkin on the table and jumped up with an assumption
of brisk liveliness. She paid no attention to the expostulations
of her relatives, but going to the glass arranged her hat and put
on her gloves. When she turned back to the table she had regained
possession of herself. Her veil was down and through it her cheeks
looked unusually flushed, and her dark eyes, with their slanting
outer corners, brighter and harder than ever. She hurried through her
good-bys on the plea that she had shopping to do, and almost ran out of
the house, leaving a trail of perfumery and high, artificial laughter
behind her.

For the next week she waited for news from Dominick and none came.
It was a trying seven days. Added to her harassment of mind, the
loneliness of the flat was almost unendurable. There was no one to
speak to, no one to share her anxieties. Her position was unusually
friendless. When her marriage had lifted her from the ranks of working
women she had shown so cold a face to her old companions that they had
dropped away from her, realizing that she wished to cut all ties with
the world of her humble beginnings. New friends had been hard to make.
The wives of some of the bank officials, and odd, aspiring applicants
for such honors as would accrue from even this remote connection with
the august name of Ryan, were all she had found wherewith to make a
circle and a visiting list.

But she was intimate with none of them and was now too worried to
seek the society of mere acquaintances. She ate her solitary meals
in oppressive silence, feeling the Chinaman’s eyes fixed upon her
in ironic disbelief of the story she had told him to account for
Dominick’s absence. Eat as slowly as she would, her dinner could not be
made to occupy more than twenty minutes, and after that there was the
long evening, the interminable evening, to be passed. She was a great
reader of newspapers, and when she returned from her afternoon shopping
she brought a bundle of evening papers home in her hand. She would
read these slowly, at first the important items, then go over them for
matters of less moment, and finally scan the advertisements. But even
with this occupation the evenings were of a vast, oppressive emptiness,
and her worries crowded in upon her, when, the papers lying round her
feet in a sea of billowing, half-folded sheets, she sat motionless,
the stillness of the empty flat and the deserted street lying round her
like an expression of her own blank depression.

At the end of the week she felt that she must find out something,
and went to the bank. It was her intention to cash a small check and
over this transaction see if the paying teller would vouchsafe any
information about Dominick. She pushed the check through the opening
and, as the man counted out the money, said glibly,

“Do you hear anything of my wandering husband?”

The teller pushed the little pile of silver and gold through the window
toward her and leaning forward, said, with the air of one who intends
to have a leisurely moment of talk,

“No, we haven’t. Isn’t it our place to come to you for that? We were
wondering where he’d gone at such a season.”

Berny’s delicately-gloved fingers made sudden haste to gather up the
coins.

“Oh, he’s just loafing about,” she said as easily as was consistent
with the disappointment and alarm that gripped her. “He’s just
wandering round from place to place. He was getting insomnia and wanted
a change of scene.”

She snapped the clasp of her purse before the man could ask her further
questions, nodded her good-bys, and turned from the window. Her face
changed as she emerged on the wide, stone steps that led to the street.
It was pinched and pale, two lines drawn between the eyebrows. She
descended the steps slowly, the flood of magnificent sunshine having
no warming influence upon the chill that had seized upon her. Many
of the passing throng of men looked at her--a pretty woman in her
modishly-made dress of tan-colored cloth and her close-fitting brown
turban with a bunch of white paradise feathers at one side. Under her
dotted veil her carefully made-up complexion looked naturally clear and
rosy, and her eyes, accentuated by a dark line beneath them, were in
attractive contrast to her reddened hair. But she was not thinking of
herself or the admiration she evoked, a subject which was generally of
overpowering interest. Matters of more poignant moment had crowded all
else from her mind.

The next week began and advanced and still no news from Dominick. He
had been gone fourteen days, when one evening in her perusal of the
paper she saw his name. Her trembling hands pressed the sheet down on
the table, and her eyes devoured the printed lines. It was one of the
many short despatches that had come from the foot-hill mining towns on
the recent storms in the Sierra. It was headed Rocky Bar and contained
a description of the situation at Antelope and the snow-bound colony
there. Its chief item of information was that Bill Cannon and his
daughter were among the prisoners in Perley’s Hotel. A mention was
made, only a line or two, of Dominick’s walk from Rocky Bar, but it was
treated lightly and gave no idea of the real seriousness of that almost
fatal excursion.

Berny read the two short paragraphs many times, and her spirits went up
like the needle of a thermometer when the quicksilver is grasped in a
warm hand. Her relief was intense, easeful and relaxing, as the sudden
cessation of a pain. Not only was Dominick at last found, but he was
found in a place as far removed from his own family and its influences
as he was from her. And best of all he was shut up, incarcerated, with
Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King. What might not come of it? Berny was
not glad of the quarrel, but it seemed a wonderful piece of luck that
that unpleasant episode should have sent him into the very arms of the
man that she had always wanted him to cultivate and who was the best
person in the world for him to impress favorably. If Bill Cannon, who
had been a friend of his father’s, took a fancy to Dominick, there was
no knowing what might happen. In a sudden reaction of relief and hope
Berny saw them almost adopted children of the Bonanza King, flouting
the Ryans in the pride of their new-found honors.

It made her feel lenient to Dominick, whose indifference and neglect
had put her to the torments of the last fortnight. After all, he could
not have let her know his whereabouts. The wires were only just up,
and the rural mail-carrier had not yet been able to effect an entrance
into the snow-bound town. Why Dominick had chosen to go in this
direction and had attempted an impossible walk in a heavy snowstorm
Berny did not know, nor just now care much. A sensation as near remorse
and tenderness as she could feel possessed her. Under its softening
influence--spurred to generosity and magnanimity by the lifting of the
weight of anxiety--she decided that she would write to him. She would
write him a letter which would smooth out the difficulties between them
and bring him home ready to forgive and be once more his old self,
kind, quiet, and indulgent, as he had been in the first year of their
marriage.

Then and there, without further waiting, she wrote the letter. It ran
as follows:

  “MY DEAR HUSBAND:--I have only just seen in the paper where you
  are, and, oh, the relief! For two weeks now I have been half crazy,
  wondering about you, waiting to hear from you. And nothing ever
  came. Dominick, dear, if you had seen me sitting here alone in the
  den every evening, thinking and waiting, looking at the clock and
  listening all the time, even when I was trying to read--listening
  for your footsteps which never came--you would have felt very sorry
  for me; even you, who were so angry that you left me without a word.
  It’s just been hell this last two weeks. You may not think by the
  way I acted that I would have cared, but I did, I do. If I didn’t
  love you would I mind how your people treated me? That’s what makes
  it so hard, because I love you and want you to be happy with me,
  and it’s dreadful for me to see them always getting in between us,
  till sometimes lately I have felt they were going to separate us
  altogether.

  “Oh, my dear husband, don’t let that happen! Don’t let them drive me
  away from you! If I have been bad-humored and unreasonable, I have
  had to bear a lot. I am sorry for the past. I am sorry for what I
  said to you that night, and for turning on the gas and scratching
  the bed. I am ready to acknowledge that I was wrong, and was mean
  and hateful. And now you ought to be ready to forgive me and forget
  it all. Come back to me. Please come back. Don’t be angry with me. I
  am your wife. You chose me of your own free will. That I loved you
  so that I forgot honor and public opinion and had no will but yours,
  you know better than any one else in the world. It isn’t every man,
  Dominick, that gets that kind of love. I gave it then and I’ve never
  stopped giving it, though I’ve often been so put upon and enraged
  that I’ve said things I didn’t mean and done things I’ve been ready
  to kill myself for. Here I am now, waiting for you, longing for you.
  Come back to me.
                                              Your loving wife,

                                                                 BERNY.”

She read the letter over several times and it pleased her greatly. So
anxious was she to have it go as soon as possible that, though it was
past ten, she took it out herself and posted it in the letter-box at
the corner.




CHAPTER VII

SNOW-BOUND


While the world went about its affairs, attended to its business, read
its papers, sent its telegrams and wrote its letters, the little group
at Antelope was as completely cut off from it as though marooned on
a strip of sand in an unknown sea. A second storm had followed the
original one, and the end of the first week saw them snowed in deeper
than ever, Antelope a trickle of roofs and smoke-stacks, in a white,
crystal-clear wilderness, solemn in its stillness and loneliness as the
primeval world.

The wires were down; the letter-carrier could not break his way in to
them. They heard no news and received no mail. Confined in a group
of rude buildings, crouched in a hollow of the Sierra’s flank, they
felt for the first time what it was to be outside that circle of busy
activity in which their lives had heretofore passed. They were face
to face with the nature they thought they had conquered and which
now in its quiet grandeur awed them with a sense of their own small
helplessness. Pressed upon by that enormous silent indifference they
drew nearer together, each individual unit gaining in importance
from the contrasting immensity without, each character unconsciously
declaring itself, emerging from acquired reticences and becoming bolder
and more open.

They accepted their captivity in a spirit of gay good humor. The only
two members of the party to whom it seemed irksome were Bill Cannon
and the actor, both girding against a confinement which kept them
from their several spheres of action. The others abandoned themselves
to a childish, almost fantastic enjoyment of a situation unique in
their experience. It was soon to end, it would never be repeated. It
was an adventure charged with romance, accidental, unsought, as all
true adventures are. The world was forgotten for these few days of
imprisonment against the mountain’s mighty heart. It did not exist for
them. All that was real was their own little party, the whitewashed
passages and walls of Perley’s, the dining-room with its board floor
and homely fare, and the parlor at night with a semicircle of faces
round the blazing logs.

On the afternoon of the sixth day Dominick made his first appearance
down stairs. He achieved the descent with slow painfulness, hobbling
between Perley and the doctor. The former’s bath-robe had been cast
aside for a dignified dark-brown dressing-gown, contributed to his
wardrobe by Cannon, and which, cut to fit the burly proportions of
the Bonanza King, hung around the long, lank form of the young man in
enveloping folds.

The parlor was empty, save for Miss Cannon sitting before the fire.
Dominick had ceased to feel bashfulness and constraint in the presence
of this girl, who had been pushed--against his will if not against
her own--into the position of his head attendant. The afternoon when
they had sat together in his room seemed to have brushed away all
his shyness and self-consciousness. He thought now that it would be
difficult to retain either in intercourse with a being who was so
candid, so spontaneous, so freshly natural. He found himself treating
her as if she were a young boy with whom he had been placed on a sudden
footing of careless, cheery intimacy. But her outward seeming--what she
presented to the eye--was not in the least boyish. Her pale, opaque
blondness, her fine, rich outlines, her softness of mien, were things
as completely and graciously feminine as the most epicurean admirer of
women could have wished.

Now, at the sight of her bending over the fire, he experienced a
sensation of pleasure which vaguely surprised him. He was hardly
conscious that all the time he had been dressing and while he came down
stairs he had been hoping that she would be there. He sent a quick
glance ahead of him, saw her, and looked away. The pain of his feet
was violent, and without again regarding her he knew that while he was
gaining his chair and his attendants were settling him, she had not
turned from her contemplation of the fire. He already knew her well
enough to have a comfortable assurance of her invariable quick tact. It
was not till the two men were leaving the room that she turned to him
and said, as if resuming an interrupted conversation,

“Well, how do you like the parlor? Speak nicely of it for I feel as if
it belonged to me.”

“It’s a first-rate parlor,” he answered, looking about him. “Never saw
a better one. Who’s the gentleman with the wreath of wax flowers round
his head?”

“That’s Jim Granger. He comes from here, you know; and you mustn’t
laugh at those flowers, they came off his coffin.”

“My father knew him,” said the young man indifferently. “There were
lots of queer stories about Jim Granger. He killed a man once up at
Bodie. You’ve a fine fire here, haven’t you?”

“Fine. It’s never allowed to go out. What do you think I intend to do
this afternoon? I’ve a plan for amusing and instructing you.”

“What is it?” he said somewhat uneasily. “I don’t feel in the least as
if I wanted to be instructed.”

She rose and moved to the center-table which was covered with an
irregular scattering of books.

“Before you came down I was looking over these books. There are lots of
them. Mrs. Perley says they’ve been accumulating for years. Mining men
have left them and some of them have the names of people I know written
in them. I thought perhaps you might like to read some of them.”

Dominick sent a lazily disparaging glance over the books. He was not
much of a reader at the best of times.

“What are they,” he said, “novels?”

“Mostly.” She sat down by the table and took up the volume nearest to
her. “Here’s _Tale of Two Cities_. That’s a fine one.”

“I’ve read it. Yes, it’s splendid. It’s all about the French
Revolution. The hero’s like a real person and heroes in books hardly
ever are, only I’d have liked him better if he’d stopped drinking and
married his girl.”

“I thought perhaps you might like me to read to you,” she said, turning
a tentative glance on him. “That’s how I was going to amuse and
instruct you.”

“I’m sure it would be much more amusing and probably just as
instructive if you talked to me.”

“You’ve got to stay down here two hours. How could I talk and be
amusing and instructive for two hours? You’d probably have a relapse
and I’m quite sure the doctor’d find me in a dead faint on the hearth
when he came in.”

“All right. Let’s try the books. Don’t let’s risk relapses and dead
faints.”

“Very well, then, that’s understood. We’ll go through the library now.
I’ll read the titles and you say if you like any of them.”

“Suppose I don’t?”

“You’ll surely have a preference.”

“All right. I’ll try to. Go on.”

“Here’s _Foul Play_, by Charles Reade. It seems to have been a good
deal read. Some of the paragraphs are marked with a pencil.”

“I think I’ve read it, but I’m not sure. It sounds like a murder story.
No, let’s pass on that.”

“Well, here’s _Mrs. Skaggs’ Husbands_, by Bret Harte. Does that sound
as if you’d like it?”

“‘Husbands!’ No. We don’t want to read about a woman who has husbands.
Pass on that, too.”

“The next is very nicely bound and looks quite fresh and new, as if
nobody had read it much. It’s called _The Amazing Marriage_.”

“Oh, pass on that! I had it once and stuck in the third chapter. The
last time I went East somebody gave it to me to read on the train. I
read three chapters and I was more amazed than anybody in sight. The
porter was a fresh coon and I gave it to him as my revenge. I’ll bet
it amazed him.”

“You don’t seem to have anything in the nature of a preference, so far.
I wonder how this will suit you. _Notre Dame de Paris_, by Victor Hugo.”

“I don’t understand French.”

“It’s in English and it’s quite worn out, as if it had been read over
and over. Several of the pages are falling out.”

“Oh, I’ve read that. I just remember. It’s a rattling good story, too.
About the hunchback and the gipsy girl who tells fortunes and has a pet
goat. The priest, who’s a villain, falls off the steeple and clings
to a gutter by his finger nails with his enemy watching him. It’s the
finest kind of a story.”

“What a pity that you’ve read it! Oh, here’s one that’s evidently
been a great favorite. It’s in paper and it’s all thumbed and torn.
Somebody’s written across the top, ‘Of all the damned fool people----’.
Oh, I beg your pardon, I read it before I realized. The name is _Wife
in Name Only_. It doesn’t seem the kind of title that makes you want to
read the book, does it?”

“‘Wife in Name Only!’” he gave a short laugh. “It certainly isn’t the
kind of name that would make _me_ want to read a book.”

“Nor me,” said a deep voice behind them.

They both turned to see Buford, the actor, standing back of the table,
his tall, angular figure silhouetted against the pale oblong of the
uncurtained window. He was smiling suavely, but at the same time with
a sort of uneasy, assumed assurance, which suggested that he was not
unused to rebuffs.

“That, certainly,” he said, “is not a name to recommend a book to any
man--any man, that is, who has or ever had a wife.”

He advanced into the circle of the firelight, blandly beaming at the
young man, who, leaning back in his chair, was eying him with surprised
inquiry, never having seen him before. The look did not chill the
friendly effusion of the actor who, approaching Dominick, said with the
full, deep resonance of his remarkable voice,

“Congratulations, my dear sir, congratulations. Not alone on your
recovery, but on the fact that you are here with us at all.” He held
out his large hand, the skin chapped and red with the cold, and the
long fingers closed with a wrenching grip on Dominick’s. “We were not
sure, when you arrived among us a few nights ago, that we would have
the felicity of seeing you so soon up and around--in fact, we were
doubtful whether we would _ever_ see you up and around.”

“Thanks, very kind of you. Oh, I’m all right now.” Dominick pressed the
hand in return and then, bending a little forward, sent a glance of
imploring query round the stranger’s shoulder at Rose.

She caught the eye, read its behest, and presented the new-comer:

“Mr. Ryan, this is Mr. Buford who is snowed in here with us. Mr. Buford
came here the same day as you, only he came on the Murphysville stage.”

Buford sat down between them on one of the horsehair chairs that were
sociably arranged round the table. The firelight threw into prominence
the bony angles of his thin face and glazed the backward sweep of his
hair, dark-brown, and worn combed away from his forehead, where a
pair of heavy, flexible eyebrows moved up and down like an animated
commentary on the conversation. When anything surprising was said they
went up, anything puzzling or painful they were drawn down. He rested
one hand on his knee, the fingers turned in, and, sitting bolt upright,
buttoned tight into his worn frock-coat, turned a glance of somewhat
deprecating amiability upon the invalid.

“You had a pretty close call, _a-pretty-close-call_,” he said. “If the
operator at Rocky Bar hadn’t had the sense to wire up here, that would
have been the end of _your_ life story.”

Dominick had heard this from every member of the snowed-in party.
Repetition was not making it any more agreeable, and there was an
effect of abrupt ungraciousness in his short answer which was merely a
word of comment.

“Didn’t the people at the Rocky Bar Hotel try to dissuade you from
starting?” said Buford. “They must have known it was dangerous. They
must have been worried about you or they wouldn’t have telegraphed up.”

“Oh, I believe they did.” The young man tried to hide the annoyance the
questions gave him under a dry brevity of speech. “They did all that
they ought to have done. I’ll see them again on my way down.”

“And yet you persisted!” The actor turned to Rose with whom, as he
sat beside her at table, he had become quite friendly. “The blind
confidence of youth, Miss Cannon, isn’t it a grand, inspiring thing?”

Dominick shifted his aching feet under the rug. He was becoming
exceedingly irritated and impatient, and wondered how much longer he
would be able to respond politely to the conversational assiduities of
the stranger.

“Now,” continued Buford, “kindly satisfy my curiosity on one point.
Why, when you were told of the danger of the enterprise, did you start?”

“Perhaps I liked the danger, wanted it to tone me up. I’m a bank clerk,
Mr. Buford, and my life’s monotonous. Danger’s a change.”

He raised his voice and spoke with sudden rude defiance. Buford looked
quickly at him, while his eyebrows went up nearly to his hair.

“A bank clerk, oh!” he said with a falling inflection of
disappointment, much chagrined to discover that the child of millions
occupied such a humble niche. “I--I--was not aware of that.”

“An assistant cashier,” continued Dominick in the same key of
exasperation, “and I managed to get a holiday at this season because my
father was one of the founders of the bank and they allow me certain
privileges. If you would like to know anything else ask me and I’ll
answer as well as I know how.”

His manner and tone so plainly indicated his resentment of the
other’s curiosity that the actor flushed and shrank. He was evidently
well-meaning and sensitive, and the young man’s rudeness hurt rather
than angered him. For a moment nothing was said, Buford making no
response other than to clear his throat, while he stretched out one arm
and pulled down his cuff with a jerking movement. There was constraint
in the air, and Rose, feeling that he had been treated with unnecessary
harshness, sought to palliate it by lifting the book on her lap and
saying to him,

“This is the book we were talking about when you came in, Mr. Buford,
_Wife in Name Only_. Have you read it?”

She handed him the ragged volume, and holding it off he eyed it with
a scrutiny all the more marked by the way he drew his heavy brows down
till they hung like bushy eaves over his eyes.

“No, my dear young lady. I have not. Nor do I feel disposed to do so.
‘Wife in Name Only!’ That tells a whole story without reading a word.
Were _you_ going to read it?”

“No; Mr. Ryan and I were just looking over them. We were thinking about
reading one of them aloud. This one happened to be on the pile.”

“To me,” continued Buford, “the name is repelling because it suggests
sorrows of my own.”

There was a pause. He evidently expected a question which undoubtedly
was not going to come from Dominick, who sat fallen together in the
arm-chair looking at him with moody ill-humor. There was more hope from
Rose, who gazed at the floor but said nothing. Buford was forced to
repeat with an unctuous depth of tone, “Suggests sorrows of my own,”
and fasten his glance on her, so that, as she raised her eyes, they
encountered the commanding encouragement of his.

“Sorrows of your own?” she repeated timidly, but with the expected
questioning inflection.

“Yes, my dear Miss Cannon,” returned the actor with a melancholy which
was full of a rich, dark enjoyment. “_My_ wife is one in name only.”

There was another pause, and neither of the listeners showing any
intention of breaking it, Buford remarked,

“_That_ sorrow is mine.”

“_What_ sorrow?” said Dominick bruskly.

“The sorrow of a deserted man,” returned the actor with now, for the
first time, something of the dignity of real feeling in his manner.

“Oh,” the monosyllable was extremely non-committal, but it had an air
of finality as though Dominick intended to say no more.

“Has she--er--left you?” said the girl in a low and rather awe-stricken
voice.

The actor inclined his head in an acquiescent bow:

“She has.”

Again there was a pause. Unless Buford chose to be more biographical,
the conversation appeared to have come to a deadlock. Neither of the
listeners could at this stage break into his reserve with questions and
yet to switch off on a new subject was not to be thought of at a moment
of such emotional intensity. The actor evidently felt this, for he said
suddenly, with a relapse into a lighter tone and letting his eyebrows
escape from an overshadowing closeness to his eyes,

“But why should I trouble you with the sorrows that have cast their
shadow on me? Why should my matrimonial troubles be allowed to darken
the brightness of two young lives which have not yet known the joys and
the perils of the wedded state?”

The pause that followed this remark was the most portentous that had
yet fallen on the trio. Rose cast a surreptitious glance at the dark
figure of young Ryan, lying back in the shadows of the arm-chair. As
she looked he stirred and said with the abrupt, hard dryness which had
marked his manner since Buford’s entrance,

“Don’t take too much for granted, Mr. Buford. I’ve known some of the
joys and perils of the wedded state myself.”

The actor stared at him in open-eyed surprise.

“Do I rightly understand,” he said, “that you are a married man?”

“You do,” returned Dominick.

“Really now, I never would have guessed it! Pardon me for not having
given you the full dues of your position. Your wife, I take it, has no
knowledge of the risk she recently ran of losing her husband?”

“I hope not.”

“Well,” he replied with a manner of sudden cheery playfulness, “we’ll
take good care that she doesn’t learn. When the wires are up we’ll
concoct a telegram that shall be a masterpiece of diplomatic lying.
Lucky young man to have a loving wife at home. Of all of us _you_ are
the one who can best realize the meaning of the line, ‘’Tis sweet to
know there is an eye to mark our coming and----’”

Dominick threw the rug off and rose to his feet.

“If you can get Perley to help me I’ll go up stairs again. I’m tired
and I’ll go back to my room.”

He tried to step forward, but the pain of his unhealed foot was
unbearable, and he caught the edge of the table and held it, his face
paling with sudden anguish. The actor, startled by the abruptness of
his uprising, approached him with a vague proffer of assistance and was
arrested by his sharp command:

“Go and get Perley! He’s in the bar probably. I can’t stand this way
for long. Hurry up!”

Buford ran out of the room, and Rose somewhat timidly drew near the
young man, braced against the table, his eyes down-bent, his face hard
in the struggle with sudden and unfamiliar pain.

“Can’t I help you?” she said. “Perley may not be there. Mr. Buford and
I can get you up stairs.”

“Oh, no,” he answered, his words short but his tone more conciliatory.
“It’s nothing to bother about. I’d have wrung that man’s neck if I’d
had to listen to him five minutes longer.”

Here Perley and Buford entered, and the former, offering his support to
the invalid, led him hobbling out of the door and into the hall. The
actor looked after them for a moment and then came back to the fire
where Miss Cannon was standing, thoughtfully regarding the burning logs.

“I’ve no doubt,” he said, “that young Mr. Ryan is an estimable
gentleman, but he certainly appears to be possessed by a very
impatient and ugly temper.”

Buford had found Miss Cannon one of the most amiable and charming
ladies he had ever met, and it was therefore a good deal of a surprise
to have her turn upon him a face of cold, reproving disagreement, and
remark in a voice that matched it:

“I don’t agree with you at all, Mr. Buford, and you seem quite to
forget that Mr. Ryan has been very sick and is still in great pain.”

Buford was exceedingly abashed. He would not have offended Miss Cannon
for anything in the world, and it seemed to him that a being so compact
of graciousness and consideration would be the first to censure an
exhibition of ill-humor such as young Ryan had just made. He stammered
an apologetic sentence and it did not add to his comfort to see that
she was not entirely mollified by it and to feel that she exhaled a
slight, disapproving coldness that put him at a great distance and made
him feel mortified and ill at ease.




CHAPTER VIII

THE UNKNOWN EROS


The ten days that followed were among the most important of Dominick
Ryan’s life. Looking back at them he wondered that he had been so
blind to the transformation of his being which was taking place. Great
emotional crises are often not any more recognized, by the individuals,
than great transitional epochs are known by the nations experiencing
them. Dominick did not realize that the most engrossing, compelling
passion he had ever felt was slowly invading him. He did not argue that
he was falling in love with a woman he could never own and of whom it
was a sin to think. He did not argue or think about anything. He was as
a vessel gradually filling with elemental forces, and like the vessel
he was passive till some jar would shake it and the forces would run
over. Meantime he was held by a determination, mutinous and unreasoning
as the determination of a child, to live in the present. He had the
feeling of the desert traveler who has found the oasis. The desert lay
behind him, burning and sinister with the agony of his transit, and
the desert lay before him with its horrors to be faced, but for the
moment he could lie still and rest and forget by the fountain under the
cool of the trees.

He did not consciously think of Rose. But if she were not there he was
uneasy till she came again. His secret exhilaration at her approach,
the dead blankness of his lack of her when she was absent, told him
nothing. These were the feelings he had, and they filled him and left
no cool residue of reason wherewith to watch and guard. He was taken
unawares, so drearily confident of his allegiance to his particular
private tragedy that he did not admit the possibility of a defection.
A sense of rest was on him and he set it down--if he ever thought of
it at all--to the relief of a temporary respite. Poor Dominick, with
his inexperience of sweet things, did not argue that respite from pain
should be a quiescent, contented condition of being, far removed from
that state of secret, troubled gladness that thrilled him at the sound
of a woman’s footstep.

No situation could have been invented better suited for the fostering
of sentiment. His helpless state demanded her constant attention. The
attitude of nurse to patient, the solicitude of the consoling woman
for the disabled, suffering man, have been, since time immemorial,
recognized aids to romance. Rose, if an unawakened woman, was enough
of one to enjoy richly this maternal office of alternate cossetting
and ruling one, who, in the natural order of things, should have stood
alone in his strength, dictating the law. Perhaps the human female so
delights in this particular opportunity for tyranny because it is one
of her few chances for indulging her passion for authority.

Rose, if she did not quite revel in it, discreetly enjoyed her period
of dominance. In the beginning Dominick had been not a man but a
patient--about the same to her as the doll is to the little girl. Then
when he began to get better, and the man rose, tingling with renewed
life, from the ashes of the patient, she quickly fell back into the
old position. With the inherited, dainty deceptiveness of generations
of women, who, while they were virtuous, were also charming, she
relinquished her dominion and retreated into that enfolded maidenly
reserve and docility which we feel quite sure was the manner adopted by
the ladies of the Stone Age when they felt it necessary to manage their
lords.

She was as unconscious of all this as Dominick was of his growing
absorption in her. If he was troubled she was not. The days saw her
growing gayer, more blithe and light-hearted. She sang about the
corridors, her smile grew more radiant, and every man in the hotel
felt the power of her awakening womanhood. Her boyish frankness of
demeanor was still undimmed by the first blurring breath of passion.
If Dominick was not in the parlor her disappointment was as candid as
a child’s whose mother has forgotten to bring home candy. All that she
showed of consciousness was that when he was there and there was no
disappointment, she concealed her satisfaction, wrapped herself in a
sudden, shy quietness, as completely extinguishing of all beneath as a
nun’s habit.

The continued, enforced intimacy into which their restricted quarters
and indoor life threw them could not have been more effectual in
fanning the growing flame if designed by a malicious Fate. There was
only one sitting-room, and, unable to go out, they sat side by side in
it all day. They read together, they talked, they played cards. They
were seldom alone, but the presence of Bill Cannon, groaning over the
fire with a three-weeks-old newspaper for company, was not one that
diverted their attention from each other; and Cora and Willoughby,
as opponents in a game of euchre, only helped to accentuate the
comradeship which leagued them together in defensive alliance.

The days that were so long to others were to them of a bright,
surprising shortness. Playing solitaire against each other on either
side of the fireplace was a pastime at which hours slipped by. Quite
unexpectedly it would be midday, with Cora putting her head round
the door-post and calling them to dinner. In the euchre games of the
afternoon the darkness crept upon them with the stealthy swiftness of
an enemy. It would gather in the corners of the room while Cora was
still heated and flushed from her efforts to instruct Willoughby in
the intricacies of the game, and yet preserve that respectful attitude
which she felt should be assumed in one’s relations with a lord.

The twilight hour that followed was to Dominick’s mind the most
delightful of these days of fleeting enchantment. The curtains were
drawn, a new log rolled on the fire, and the lamp lit. Then their
fellow prisoners began dropping in--the old judge stowing himself away
in one of the horsehair arm-chairs, Willoughby and Buford lounging in
from the bar, Mrs. Perley with a basket of the family mending, and the
doctor all snowy from his rounds. The audience for Rose’s readings had
expanded from the original listener to this choice circle of Antelope’s
elect. The book chosen had been _Great Expectations_, and the spell of
that greatest tale of a great romancer fell on the snow-bound group and
held them entranced and motionless round the friendly hearth.

The young man’s eyes passed from face to face, avoiding only that of
the reader bent over the lamp-illumined page. The old judge, sunk
comfortably into the depths of his arm-chair, listened, and cracked the
joints of his lean, dry fingers. Willoughby, his dogs crouched about
his feet, looked into the fire, his attentive gravity broken now and
then by a slow smile. Mrs. Perley, after hearing the chapter which
describes Mrs. Gargery’s methods of bringing up Pip “by hand,” attended
regularly with the remark that “it was a queer sort of book, but some
way or other she liked it.” When Cora was forced to leave to attend to
her duties in the dining-room, she tore herself away with murmurous
reluctance. The doctor slipped in at the third reading and asked Rose
if she would lend him the book in the morning “to read up what he had
missed.” Even Perley’s boy, in his worn corduroys, his dirty, chapped
hands rubbing his cap against his nose, was wont to sidle noiselessly
in and slip into a seat near the door.

The climax of the day was the long evening round the fire. There was no
reading then. It was the men’s hour, and the smoke of their pipes and
cigars lay thick in the air. Cut off from the world in this cranny of
the mountains, with the hotel shaking to the buffets of the wind and
the snow blanket pressing on the pane, their memories swept back to the
wild days of their youth, to the epic times of frontiersman and pioneer.

The judge told of his crossing of the plains in forty-seven and the
first Mormon settlement on the barren shores of Salt Lake. He had
had encounters with the Indians, had heard the story of Olive Oatman
from one who had known her, and listened to the sinister tale of the
Donner party from a survivor. Bill Cannon had “come by the Isthmus”
in forty-eight, a half-starved, ragged lad who had run away from
uncongenial drudgery on a New York farm. His reminiscences went back
to the San Francisco that started up around Portsmouth Square, to the
days when the banks of the American River swarmed with miners, and the
gold lay yellow in the prospector’s pan. He had worked there shoulder
to shoulder with men who afterwards made the history of the state and
men who died with their names unknown. He had been an eye witness of
that blackest of Californian tragedies, the lynching of a Spanish girl
at Downieville, had stood pallid and sick under a pine tree and watched
her boldly face her murderers and meet her death.

The younger men, warmed to emulation, contributed their stories. Perley
had reminiscences bequeathed to him by his father who had been an
alcalde in that transition year, when California was neither state nor
territory and stood in unadministered neglect, waiting for Congress
to take some notice of her. Buford had stories of the vicissitudes
of a strolling player’s life. He had been in the Klondike during the
first gold rush and told tales of mining in the North to match those
of mining on the “mother lode.” Willoughby, thawed out of his original
shyness, added to the nights’ entertainments stories of the Australian
bush, grim legends of the days of the penal settlements at Botany
Bay. Young Ryan was the only man of the group who contributed nothing
to these Sierran Nights’ Entertainments. He sat silent in his chair,
apparently listening, and, under the shadow of the hand arched over his
eyes, looking at the girl opposite.

But the idyl had to end. Their captivity passed into its third week,
and signs that release was at hand cheered them. They could go out. The
streets of Antelope were beaten into footpaths, and the prisoners, with
the enthusiasm of children liberated from school, rushed into open-air
diversions and athletic exercise. The first word from the outside world
came by restored telegraphic communication. Consolatory messages poured
in from San Francisco. Mrs. Ryan, the elder, sent telegrams as long
as letters and showered them with the prodigality of an impassioned
gratitude on the camp. Perley had one that he could not speak of
without growing husky. Willoughby had one that made him blush. Dominick
had several. None, however, had come from his wife and he guessed that
none had been sent her, his remark to Rose to “let her alone” having
been taken as a wish to spare her anxiety. It was thought that the mail
would be in now in a day or two. That would be the end of the fairy
tale. They sat about the fire on these last evenings discussing their
letters, what they expected, and whom they would be from. No one told
any more stories; the thought of news from “outside” was too absorbing.

It came in the early dusk of an afternoon near the end of the third
week. Dominick, who was still unable to walk, was standing by the
parlor window, when he saw Rose Cannon run past outside. She looked in
at him as she ran by, her face full of a joyous excitement, and held up
to his gaze a small white packet. A moment later the hall door banged,
her foot sounded in the passage, and she entered the room with a rush
of cold air and a triumphant cry of:

“The mail’s come!”

He limped forward to meet her and take from her hand the letter she
held toward him. For the first moment he looked at her, not at the
letter, which dwindled to a thing of no importance when their eyes met
over it. Her face was nipped by the keen outside air into a bright,
beaming rosiness. She wore on her head a man’s fur cap which was pulled
well down, and pressed wisps of fair hair against her forehead and
cheeks. A loose fur-lined coat enveloped her to her feet, and after she
had handed him his letter she pulled off the mittens she wore and began
unfastening the clasps of the coat, with fingers that were purplish and
cramped from the cold.

“There’s only one for you,” she said. “I waited till the postmaster
looked all through them twice. Then I made him give it to me and
ran back here with it. The entire population of Antelope’s in the
post-office and there’s the greatest excitement.”

Her coat was unfastened and she threw back its long fronts, her figure
outlined against the gray fur lining. She snatched off her cap and
tossed it to an adjacent chair and with a quick hand brushed away the
hair it had pressed down on her forehead.

“I got seven,” she said, turning to the fire, “and papa a whole bunch,
and the judge, quantities, and Willoughby, three. But only one for
you--poor, neglected man!”

Spreading her hands wide to the blaze she looked at him over her
shoulder, laughing teasingly. He had the letter in his hands still
unopened.

“Why,” she cried, “what an extraordinary sight! You haven’t opened it!”

“No,” he answered, turning it over, “I haven’t.”

“I’ve always heard that curiosity was a feminine weakness but I never
knew it till now,” she said. “Please go on and read it, because if you
don’t I’ll feel that I’m preventing you and I’ll have to go up stairs
to my own room, which is as cold as a refrigerator. Don’t make me
polite and considerate against my will.”

Without answering her he tore open the letter and, moving to the light
of the window, held the sheet up and began to read.

There was silence for some minutes. The fire sputtered and snapped, and
once or twice the crisp paper rustled in Dominick’s hands. Rose held
her fingers out to the warmth, studying them with her head on one side
as if she had never seen them before. Presently she slid noiselessly
out of her coat, and dropped it, a heap of silky fur, on a chair beside
her. The movement made it convenient to steal a glance at the young
man. He was reading the letter, his body close against the window-pane,
his face full of frowning, almost fierce concentration. She turned
back to the fire and made small, surreptitious smoothings and jerks of
arrangement at her collar, her belt, her skirt. Dominick turned the
paper and there was something aggressive in the crackling of the thin,
dry sheet.

“Perley got a letter from your mother,” she said suddenly, “that he was
reading in a corner of the post-office, and it nearly made him cry.”

There was no answer. She waited for a space and then said, projecting
the remark into the heart of the fire,

“Yours must be a most _interesting_ letter.”

She heard him move and looked quickly back at him, her face all gay
challenge. It was met by a look so somber that her expression changed
as if she had received a check to her gaiety as unexpected and
effectual as a blow. She shrank a little as he came toward her, the
letter in his hand.

“It _is_ an interesting letter,” he said. “It’s from my wife.”

Since those first days of his illness, his wife’s name had been rarely
mentioned. Rose thought it was because young Mrs. Ryan was a delicate
subject best left alone; Dominick, because anything that reminded him
of Berny was painful. But the truth was that, from the first, the
wife had loomed before them as a figure of dread, a specter whose
presence congealed the something exquisite and uplifting each felt
in the other’s heart. Now, love awakened, forcing itself upon their
recognition, her name came up between them, chilling and grim as the
image of death intruding suddenly into the joyous presence of the
living.

The change that had come over the interview all in a moment was
startling. Suddenly it seemed lifted from the plane of every-day
converse to a level where the truth was an obligation and the language
of polite subterfuge could not exist. But the woman, who hides and
protects herself with these shields, made an effort to keep it in the
old accustomed place.

“Is--is--she well?” she stammered, framing the regulation words almost
unconsciously.

“She’s well,” he answered, “she’s very well. She wants me to come home.”

He suddenly looked away from her and, turning to the chimneypiece,
rested one hand upon it and gazed down at the logs. A charred end
projected and he pushed it in with his slippered foot, his down-bent
face, the lips set and brows wrinkled, looking like the face of a
sullen boy who has been unjustly punished. An icy, invading chill of
depression made Rose’s heart sink down into bottomless depths. She
faltered in faint tones,

“Well, you’ll be there soon now.”

“I don’t know,” he answered without moving. “I don’t know whether I
shall.”

“You don’t know whether you’ll be home soon? The roads are open; the
postman has come in.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll go home,” he repeated.

The snapping of the fire sounded loud upon the silence that followed.
The thrill of strong emotions rising toward expression held them in a
breathless, immovable quietude.

“Don’t you want to go home?” said the young girl. Her voice was low and
she cleared her throat. In this interchange of commonplace sentences
her heart had begun to beat so violently that it interfered with the
ease of her speech.

Dominick leaned forward and dropped the crumpled letter into the fire.

“No, I don’t want to. I hate to.”

To this she did not reply at all, and after a moment he continued:
“My home is unbearable to me. It isn’t a home. It’s a place where I
eat and sleep, and I’d prefer doing that anywhere else, in any dirty
boarding-house or fourth-rate hotel--I’d rather----”

He stopped abruptly and pushed the log farther in. The letter was
caught up the chimney in a swirl of blackened scraps.

“But your wife?” said Rose.

This time her voice was hoarse but she did not know it. She had lost
the consciousness of herself. It was a profound moment, the deepest she
had so far known, and all the forces of her being were concentrated
upon it. The young man answered with deliberation, still not moving.

“I don’t want to see my wife. We are--we are--uncongenial. There is
nothing but unhappiness between us.”

“Don’t you love her?” said the girl.

“No. I never did,” he answered.

For a moment neither dared speak. They did not look at each other
or stir. They hardly seemed to breathe. A movement, a touch, would
have rent the last thin crust of reserve that covered what were no
longer unsuspected fires. Dominick knew it, but the girl did not. She
was seized by what to her was a sudden, inexplicable fear, and the
increased, suffocating beating of her heart made her feel dizzy. She
suddenly wished to fly, to escape from the room, and him, and herself.
She turned to go and was arrested by Cora’s voice in the hall:

“Say, you folks, are you in there?”

Cora’s visage followed her voice. She thrust it round the door-post,
beamingly smiling under a recently-applied coat of powder.

“Do you want to tackle a game of euchre? Mr. Willoughby and I’ll lay
you out cold unless that British memory of his has gone back on him and
he’s forgot all I taught him last time.”

They were too bewildered to make any response. Rose gathered up her
coat and dropped it again, looking stupidly from it to the intruder.
Cora turned back to the passage, calling,

“Here they are, Mr. Willoughby, all ready and waiting for us. Now we’ll
show them how to play euchre.”

Before Willoughby appeared, responsive to this cheerful hail, Cora had
pulled the chairs round the table and brought out the cards. A few
moments later, they were seated and the game had begun. Cora and her
partner were soon jubilant. Not only did they hold the cards, but their
adversaries played so badly that the tale of many old scores was wiped
off.

The next day the first movements of departure began. Early in the
afternoon Buford and Judge Washburne started for Rocky Bar in Perley’s
sleigh. The road had been broken by the mail-carrier, but was still
so deeply drifted that the drive was reckoned a toilsome undertaking
not without danger. Perley’s two powerful horses were harnessed in
tandem, and Perley himself, a mere pillar of wrappings, drove them,
squatted on a soap box in front of the two passengers. There were cries
of farewell from the porch and tappings on the windows as the sleigh
started and sped away to the diminishing jingle of bells. A sadness
fell on those who watched it. The little idyl of isolation was over.

On the following day Bill Cannon and his daughter were to leave. A
telegram had been sent to Rocky Bar for a sleigh and horses of the
proper excellence to be the equipage of a Bonanza Princess. Rose had
spent the morning packing the valises, and late in the afternoon began
a down-stairs search for possessions left in the parlor.

The dusk was gathering as she entered the room, the corners of which
were already full of darkness, the fire playing on them with a warm,
varying light. Waves of radiance quivered and ran up the ceiling, here
and there touching the glaze on a picture glass or china ornament. The
crude ugliness of the place was hidden in this unsteady, transforming
combination of shadow and glow. It seemed a rich, romantic spot,
flushed with fire that pulsed on an outer edge of mysterious obscurity,
a center of familiar, intimate life, round which coldness and the dark
pressed.

She thought the room was unoccupied and advanced toward the table, then
started before the uprising of Dominick’s tall figure from a chair
in a shadowed corner. It was the first time they had seen each other
alone since their conversation of the day before. Rose was startled
and agitated, and her brusk backward movement showed it. Her voice,
however, was natural, almost easy to casualness as she said,

“I thought there was no one here, you’ve hidden yourself in such a dark
corner. I came to gather up my books and things.”

He advanced into the light, looking somberly at her.

“It’s true that you’re going to-morrow?” he said almost gruffly.

“Oh, yes, we’re really going. Everything’s been arranged. Horses and a
sleigh are expected any moment now from Rocky Bar. They rest here all
night and take us down in the afternoon. I think papa’d go crazy if we
had to stay twenty-four hours longer.”

“I’ll follow in a day or two,” he said, “probably go down on Tuesday,
the doctor says.”

She began gathering up the books, reading the titles, and putting aside
those that were not hers.

“I’m so sorry it’s over,” she said in a preoccupied voice without any
particular regret in it. “_The Mill on the Floss_ is Mrs. Perley’s, I
think.”

“I’m sorry, too,” he commented, very low.

She made no reply, selected another book, and as she held it up looking
at the back, said,

“But it’s not like a regular good-by. It’s not as if you were going
in one direction and we in another. We’ll see you in San Francisco, of
course.”

“I don’t think so,” he answered.

She laid the book on the table and turned her face toward him. He stood
looking into the fire, not seeing the face, but conscious of it, of its
expression, of its every line.

“Do you mean that we’re not going to see you down there at all?”

“Yes, that’s just about what I meant,” he replied.

“Mr. Ryan!” It was hardly more than a breath of protest, but it was as
stirring to the man as the whisper of love.

He made no comment on it, and she said, with a little more of
insistence and volume,

“But why?”

“It’s best not,” he answered, and turned toward her.

His shoulders were squared and he held his head as a man does who
prepares himself for a blow. His eyes, looking straight into hers,
enveloped her in a glance soft and burning, not a savage glance, but
the enfolding, possessive glance, caressing and ardent, pleading and
masterful, of a lover.

The books that she was holding fell to the table, and they looked at
each other while the clock ticked.

“It’s best for me not to come,” he said huskily, “never to come.”

“Very well,” she faltered.

He came a little nearer to her and said,

“You know what I mean.”

She turned away, very pale, her lips trembling.

“And you’d like me to come if I could--if I were free?”

He was close to her and looked down to see her face, his own hard, the
bones of the jaw showing through the thin cheeks.

“You’d like me to?” he urged.

She nodded, her lips too dry to speak.

“O Rose!” he whispered, a whisper that seemed to melt the strength
of her heart and make her unvanquished, maiden pride dissolve into
feebleness.

He leaned nearer and, taking her by the arms just above the elbows,
drew her to himself, into an embrace, close and impassioned, that
crushed her against him. She submitted passively, in a dizzy dream that
was neither joy nor pain, but was like a moment of drugged unreality,
fearful and beautiful. She was unconscious of his lips pressed on her
hair, but she felt the beating of his heart beneath her cheek.

They stood thus for a moment, rising above time and space. They seemed
to have been caught up to a pinnacle of life where the familiar world
lay far beneath them. A joy, divine and dreamy, held them clasped
together, motionless and mute, for a single point of time beyond and
outside the limitations that had heretofore bound them.

Bill Cannon had a question to ask his daughter and he came down stairs
to the parlor where she had told him she was going. He had dressed
himself for supper, the most important item of his toilet being a
pair of brown leather slippers. They were soft and made no sound, and
stepping briskly in them he advanced to the half-open parlor door,
pushed it open and entered the quiet room. On the hearth-rug before the
fire stood a woman clasped in the arms of Dominick Ryan.

Though the face was hidden, the first glance told him it was his
daughter. The young man’s head was bowed on hers, his brown hair rising
above the gleaming blondness of hers. They were absolutely motionless
and silent. For an amazed moment the father stared at them, then turned
and tiptoed out of the room.

He mounted several steps of the staircase and then descended, stepping
as heavily as he could, and, as he advanced on the parlor, coughed
with aggressive loudness. He was on the threshold when he encountered
his daughter, her head lowered, her gait quick, almost a run. Without
a word he stepped aside and let her pass, the rustling of her skirt
diminishing as she ran up the hall and mounted the stairs.

[Illustration: They stood thus for a moment, rising above time and
  space      _Page 143_]

Dominick was standing on the hearth-rug, his head raised like a stag’s;
his eyes, wide and gleaming, on the doorway through which she had
passed. Cannon stopped directly in front of him and fixed a stony,
menacing glare on him.

“Well, Dominick Ryan,” he said in a low voice, “I saw that. I came in
here a moment ago and saw that. What have you got to say about it?”

The young man turned his eyes slowly from vacancy to the angry face
before him. For a moment he looked slightly dazed, staring blankly at
Cannon. Then wrath gathered thunderously on his brow.

“Let me alone!” he said fiercely, thrusting him aside. “Get out of my
way and let me alone! I can’t talk to you now.”

He swept the elder man out of his path, and, lurching and staggering on
his wounded feet, hurled himself out of the room.




CHAPTER IX

THE SONS OF THEIR FATHERS


It was at the end of the Bonanza times, that period of startling
upheavals and downfalls, when miners had suddenly become millionaires,
and rich men found themselves paupers, that Bill Cannon built his
mansion in San Francisco. He had made his fortune in Virginia City,
not in a few meteoric years, as the public, who loves picturesque
histories, was wont to recount relishingly, but in a series of broken
periods of plenty with lean years in between. The Crown Point and
Belcher rise made him a man of means, and its collapse was said to
have ruined him. Afterward, wiseacres shook their heads and there were
rumors that it was not Bill Cannon who was ruined. In the dead period
which followed this disastrous cataclysm of fortune and confidence, he
was surreptitiously loyal to the capricious town from which men had
withdrawn their affection and belief as from a beguiling woman, once
loved and trusted, now finally proved false.

In those short years of mourning and lost faith between the downfall of
Crown Point and the rise of the Con. Virginia and the Rey del Monte,
Bill Cannon “lay low.” His growing reputation as an expert mining man
and a rising financier had suffered. Men had disbelieved in him as they
did in Virginia, and he knew the sweetness of revenge when he and the
great camp rose together in titanic partnership and defied them. His
detractors had hardly done murmuring together over the significant fact
that Crown Point “had not scooped every dollar he had” when the great
ore-body was struck on the thousand-foot level of the Rey del Monte,
and Bill Cannon became a Bonanza King.

That was in seventy-four. The same year he bought the land in San
Francisco and laid the foundation for the mansion on Nob Hill. His wife
was still living then, and his son and daughter--the last of seven
children, five of whom had died in infancy--were as yet babies. A year
later the house was completed and the Cannon family, surrounded by an
aura of high-colored, accumulating anecdote, moved down from Nevada and
took possession.

Mrs. Cannon, who in her girlhood had been the prettiest waitress in
the Yuba Hotel at Marysville and had married Bill Cannon when he was
an underground miner, was the subject of much gossip in the little
group which at that time made up San Francisco’s fashionable world.
They laughed at her and went to her entertainments. They told stories
of her small social mistakes, and fawned on her husband for positions
for their sons. He understood them, treated them with an open cynical
contempt, and used them. He was big enough to realize his wife’s
superiority, and it amused him to punish them for their patronizing
airs by savage impertinences that they winced under but did not dare
resent. She was a silent, sensitive, loving woman, who never quite
fitted into the frame his wealth had given her. She did her best to
fill the new rôle, but it bewildered her and she did not feel at ease
in it. In her heart she yearned for the days when her home had been
a miner’s cabin in the foot-hills, her babies had known no nurse but
herself, and her husband had been all hers. Those were her _beaux
jours_.

She died some twelve years after the installation in San Francisco.
Bill Cannon had loved her after his fashion and always respected her,
and the withdrawal of her quiet, sympathetic presence left a void
behind it that astonished, almost awed him. The two children, Eugene
and Rose, were eighteen and thirteen at the time. She had adored
them, lived for them, been a mother at once tender and intelligent,
and they mourned her with passion. It was to dull the ache left by
her death, that Gene, a weak and characterless changeling in this
vigorous breed, sought solace in drink. And it was then that Rose,
assuming her mother’s place as head of the establishment, began to show
that capacity for management, that combination of executive power and
gentle force--bequests from both parents--that added admiration to the
idolizing love the Bonanza King had always given her.

The house in which this pampered princess ruled was one of those
enormous structures which a wealth that sought extravagant ways of
expending itself reared upon that protuberance in the city’s outline
called by San Franciscans Nob Hill. The suddenly-enriched miners of the
Comstock Lode and the magnates of the railway had money waiting for
investment, and the building of huge houses seemed as good a one as any
other.

Here, from their front steps, they could see the city sweeping up from
its low center on to the slopes of girdling hills. It was a gray city,
crowding down to the edge of the bay, which, viewed from this height,
extended far up into the sky. In summer, under an arch of remote, cold
blue, its outlines blurred by clouds of blown dust, it looked a bleak,
unfriendly place, a town in which the stranger felt a depressing,
nostalgic chill. In winter, when the sun shone warm and tender as a
caress, and the bay and hills were like a mosaic in blue and purple
gems, it was a panorama over which the passer-by was wont to linger.
The copings of walls offered a convenient resting-place, and he could
lean on them, still as a lizard in the bath of sun.

Bill Cannon’s house had unbroken command of this view. It fronted on
it in irregular, massive majesty, with something in its commanding
bulkiness that reminded one of its owner. It was of that epoch when
men built their dwellings of wood; and numerous bay-windows and a
sweep of marble steps flanked by sleeping stone lions were considered
indispensable adjuncts to the home of the rich man who knew how
to do things correctly. Round it spread a green carpet of lawns,
close-cropped and even as velvet, and against its lower story deep
borders of geraniums were banked in slopes of graduated scarlet and
crimson. The general impression left by it was that of a splendor that
would have been ostentatious and vulgar had not the studied elegance of
the grounds and the outflung glories of sea, sky and hills imparted to
it some of their own distinction and dignity.

On the day following their departure from Antelope, Cannon and his
daughter reached home at nightfall. The obsequiously-welcoming
butler--an importation from the East that the Bonanza King confided to
Rose he found it difficult to refrain from kicking--acquainted them
with the fact that “Mr. Gene had been up from San Luis Obispo” for two
days, waiting for their arrival. Even as he spoke a masculine voice
uttered a hail from the floor above and a man’s figure appeared on the
stairway and ran quickly down. Cannon gave a careless look upward.

“Ah there, Gene,” he observed, turning to the servant who was helping
him off with his coat. “Come up to town for a spell?”

The young man did not seem to notice anything especially ungracious in
the greeting or probably was used to it.

“Yes, just up for a look around and to see how you and Rosey were. Got
snowed in, didn’t you?” he said, looking at his sister.

She kissed him affectionately and drew him to the light where she
subjected him to a sharp, exploring scrutiny. Evidently the survey was
satisfactory, for she gave him a little slap on the shoulder and said,

“Good boy, Gene, San Luis is agreeing with you. Yes, we were snowed in
for nearly three weeks. Papa’s been half crazy. And you’ve been in town
two days, Prescott says. It must have been dull here all alone.”

“Oh, I haven’t been dull. I’ve been going round seeing the boys
and”--his sister’s sudden, uneasy look checked him and he answered
it with quick reassurance of glance and tone. “Everything strictly
temperance. Don’t you get uneasy. I’ve lived up to my promises. The
ranch is mine all right, father.”

He had a high, rather throaty voice, which, without seeing his face,
would have suggested weakness and lack of purpose. Now as he looked at
his father with a slight and somewhat foolish air of triumph, the old
man responded to his remark with a sound which resembled a grunt of
scornful incredulity.

“Really, Gene,” said his sister, her manner of fond gratification in
marked contrast to her father’s roughness, “that’s the best news I’ve
heard for a year. It’s worth being snowed up to hear that when you come
out. Of course you’ll get the ranch. I always knew you would. I always
knew you could pull up and be as straight as anybody if you tried.”

The old man, who had been kicking off his rubbers, here raised his head
with a bull-like movement, and suddenly roared at the retreating butler
who was vanishing toward the dining-room.

“My cigars. Where in hell are they? Why doesn’t somebody attend here?”

The servant, with a start of alarm and a murmured excuse, disappeared
for a moment, to reappear, hurrying breathlessly with a box of cigars.
Cannon selected one and turned to the stairway.

“How long are you down for?” he said to his son as he began ascending.

“I thought a week, perhaps two,” answered the young man. “A feller gets
darned lonely, down there in the country.”

There was something apologetic, almost pleading in his words and way
of speech. He looked after his father’s receding figure as if quite
oblivious to the rudeness of the large, retiring back and the manner of
careless scorn.

“Make it three,” said the Bonanza King, turning his head slightly and
throwing the sentence over his shoulder.

Gene Cannon was now twenty-nine years of age and had drunk since his
eighteenth year. His mother had died in ignorance of his vice. When
his father discovered it, it simply augmented the old man’s impatience
against the feeble youth who would carry on his name and be one of
the inheritors of his fortune. Bill Cannon had never cared much for
his only son. He had early seen the stuff of which the boy was made.
“Doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” he would say, throwing the words
at his wife over the bitten end of his cigar. He could have forgiven
the drinking, as he could other vices, if Gene had had some of his own
force, some of that driving power which had carried him triumphant over
friend and foe. But the boy had no initiative, no brains, no energy.
“How did _I_ ever come to have such a son?” he queried sometimes in an
access of disgust in which the surprise was stronger than the disgust.
The question possessed a sort of scientific interest for him which was
deeper than the personal and over which the disappointed magnate would
ponder.

As Gene grew older and his intemperance assumed more serious
proportions, the father’s scorn grew more open and was augmented by
a sort of exasperated dislike. The Bonanza King had no patience with
those who failed from ill-health or the persistent persecutions of
bad luck. His contention was that they should not have been ill, and
they should have conquered their bad luck. He had no excuses for those
who were beaten back against the wall--only death should be able to
do that. But when it came to a useless, hampering vice, a weakness
that in itself was harmless enough, but that was allowed to gain
paralyzing proportions, his original contempt was intensified into a
fierce intolerance which would have been terrifying if it had not been
tempered with an indifferent disdain.

Rose’s attitude toward her brother was a source of secret wonder to
him. She loved the feeble youth; a tie of the deepest affection existed
between them, upon which Gene’s intemperance seemed to have no effect.
The Bonanza King had always admitted that the ways of the gentler sex
were beyond his comprehension, but that the two women he had known
best--his wife and his daughter--should have lavished the tenderest
love upon an intemperate, incompetent, useless weakling was to him one
of the fathomless mysteries of life.

It was Rose’s suggestion that Gene should be withdrawn from temptation
by sending him to the country. As the only son of Bill Cannon he was
the object of a variety of attentions and allurements in the city to
which a stronger-willed man might have succumbed. The father readily
agreed to the plan. He could graciously subscribe to all Rose said, as
the removal of Gene’s amiable visage and uninspired conversation would
not cause him any particular distress or sense of loss.

But when Rose unfolded the whole of her scheme he was not so
enthusiastically in accord with her. It was that Gene should be put on
his father’s ranch--the historic Rancho of the Santa Trinidad near San
Luis Obispo--as manager, that all responsibility should be placed in
his hands, and that if, during one year’s probation, he should remain
sober and maintain a record of quiet conduct and general good behavior,
the ranch should be turned over to him as his own property, to be
developed on such lines as he thought best.

The Rancho of the Santa Trinidad was one of the finest pieces of
agricultural property in California. The Bonanza King visited it once
a year, and at intervals received crates of fruit and spring chickens
raised upon it. This was about all he got out of it, but when he heard
Rose calmly arranging to have it become Gene’s property, he felt like
a man who suddenly finds himself being robbed. He had difficulty in
restraining a roar of refusal. Had it been any one but Rose he would
not have restrained it.

Of course he gave way to her, as he always did. He even gave way
gracefully with an effect of a generosity too large to bother over
trifles, not because he felt it but because he did not want Rose to
guess how it “went against him.” Under the genial blandness of his
demeanor he reconciled himself to the situation by the thought that
Gene would certainly never keep sober for a year, and that there was
therefore no fear of the richest piece of ranch land in the state
passing into the hands of that dull and incapable young man.

The year was nearly up now. It had but three months to run and Gene’s
record had been exemplary. He had come to the city only twice, when
his father noticed with a jealously-watchful eye that he had been
resolutely abstemious in the matter of liquor and that his interest
in the great property he managed had been the strongest he had so far
evinced in anything. The thought that Gene might possibly live up
to his side of the bargain and win the ranch caused the old man to
experience that feeling of blank chagrin which is the state of mind of
the unexpectedly swindled. He felt like a king who has been daringly
and successfully robbed by a slave.

At dinner that evening Gene was very talkative. He told of his life on
the ranch, of its methodical monotony, of its seclusion, for he saw
little of his neighbors and seldom went in to the town. Rose listened
with eager interest, and the old man with a sulky, glowering attention.
At intervals he shot a piercing look at his boy, eying him sidewise
with a cogitating intentness of observation. His remarks were few, but
Gene was so loquacious that there was little opportunity for another
voice to be heard. He prattled on like a happy child, recounting the
minutest details of his life after the fashion of those who live much
alone.

In the light of the crystal lamp that spread a ruffled shade of yellow
silk over the center of the table, he was seen to be quite unlike his
father or sister. His jet-black hair and uniformly pale skin resembled
his mother’s, but his face in its full, rounded contours, slightly
turned-up nose, and eyebrows as thick as strips of fur, had a heaviness
hers had lacked. Some people thought him good-looking, and there was
a sort of unusual, Latin picturesqueness in the combination of his
curly black hair, which he wore rising up in a bulwark of waves from
his forehead, his white skin, and the small, dark mustache, delicate
as an eyebrow, that shaded his upper lip. It was one of his father’s
grievances against him that he would have made a pretty girl, and that
his soft, affectionate character would have been quite charming in
a woman. Now, listening to him, it seemed to the older man as if it
were just the kind of talk one might expect from Gene. The father had
difficulty in suppressing a snort of derision when he heard the young
man recounting to Rose his troubles with his Chinese cook.

Before dinner was over Gene excused himself on the plea that he was
going to the theater.

“I’m such a hayseed now,” he said as he rose, “that I don’t want to
miss a thing. Haven’t seen a play for six months and I’m just crazy to
see anything, _Monte Cristo_, _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, _East Lynne_. I’m
not proud, anything’ll suit me.”

“Don’t you ever go into San Luis?” growled his father sulkily. “They
have plays there sometimes, I suppose.”

“Oh yes, but I’m keeping out of harm’s way. The boys in San Luis don’t
know how it is with me. They don’t understand and I’m not going to put
myself in the way of temptation. You know, father, I _want that ranch_.”

He turned a laughing glance on his father; and the old man, with a
sheepishly-discomfited expression, grunted an unintelligible reply and
bent over his plate.

He did not raise his head till Gene had left the room, when, looking
up, he leaned back in his chair and said with a plaintive sigh,

“What a damned fool that boy is!”

Rose was up in arms at once.

“Why, papa, how can you say that! Especially when you see how he’s
improved. It’s wonderful. He’s another man. You can tell in a minute
he’s not been drinking, he takes such an interest in everything and is
so full of work and plans.”

“Is he?” said her father dryly. “Maybe so, but that don’t prevent him
from being a damned fool.”

“You’re unjust to Gene. Why do you think he’s a fool?”

“Just because he happens to be one. You might as well ask me why I
think the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That’s what it
does, and when I say it does, I’m not criticizing or complaining, I’m
only stating the plain facts.”

Rose made a murmur of protest and he went on.

“You’re queer cattle, you women. I suppose a feller could live in the
world a hundred years and not understand you. There’s Delia Ryan, for
example, the brainiest woman I know, could give most men cards and
spades and beat ’em hands down. Last night at Rocky Bar they were
telling me that she’s written to the operator there and told him she’ll
get him a position here in the Atlantic and Pacific Cable Company,
in which she’s a large stock-holder, that’ll double his salary and
give him a chance he’d never have got in this world. She wants to pay
off a mortgage on a ranch Perley has in the Sacramento Valley and
she’s sent Mrs. Perley a check for five hundred dollars. She’s offered
Willoughby a first-rate job on the Red Calumet group of mines near
Sonora in which Con had a controlling interest, and she’s written to
the doctor to come down and become one of the house physicians of the
St. Filomena Hospital, which she practically runs. She’s ready to do
all this because of what they did for Dominick, and yet she, his own
mother, won’t give the boy a cent and keeps him on starvation wages,
just because she wants to spite his wife.”

He looked at his daughter across the table with narrowed eyes. “What
have you got to say for yourself after that, young woman?” he demanded.

Rose had evidently nothing to say. She raised her eyebrows and shook
her head by way of reply. Her face, in the flood of lamplight, looked
pale and tired. She was evidently distrait and depressed; a very
different-looking Rose from the girl he had taken away with him four
weeks earlier. He regarded her for an anxiously-contemplative moment
and then said,

“What’s the matter? Seems to me you look sort’er peaked.”

“I?” she queried with a surprised start. “Why, I’m quite well.”

“Well’s you were before you went up to the mines?”

A color came into her cheeks and she lowered her eyes:

“I’m a little tired, I think, and that always makes me look pale. It
was a hard sort of trip, all those hours in the sleigh, and that hotel
at Rocky Bar was a dreadful place. I couldn’t sleep. There was a cow
somewhere near--it sounded as if it were in the next room--and the
roosters all began to crow in the middle of the night. I’ll be all
right to-morrow.”

Her father drew his coffee-cup toward him and dropped in a lump of
sugar. No word had passed between him and his daughter as to the scene
he had witnessed two days before in the parlor of Perley’s Hotel. She
was ignorant of the fact that he had seen it and he intended that
she should remain ignorant of it. But the next morning he had had
an interview with Dominick Ryan, in which the young man, confronted
with angry questions and goaded past reserve by shame and pain, had
confessed the misery of his marriage and the love that in an unguarded
moment had slipped beyond his control.

Cannon had said little to him. Beyond telling him that he must not see
Miss Cannon again, his comments on Dominick’s confessions had been
brief and non-committal. It was not his business to preach to Delia
Ryan’s boy, and a large experience of men had given him a practically
limitless tolerance of any and all lapses of which the human animal
is capable. They only concerned him as they bore on his own affairs.
In this particular case they did bear on his affairs, closely and
importantly, on the affair of all others dearest and nearest to
him--the happiness of his daughter. He knew that in this three weeks of
imprisonment she had come to feel for Dominick Ryan a sentiment she had
never before felt for any man. He had seen her in the young man’s arms,
and, knowing Rose as he knew her, that was enough.

Driving down from Antelope in the sleigh he thought about it hard,
harder than he had ever before in his life thought of any sentimental
complication. He was enraged--coldly and grimly enraged--that his girl
should have stumbled into such a pitfall. But it was not his habit to
waste time and force in the indulgence of profitless anger. The thing
had happened. Rose, who had been courted many times and never warmed
to more than pity for her unsuccessful suitors, had suddenly, by a
fateful, unpremeditated chance, met her mate--the man she loved. And
the most maddening part of it was that he was the man of all others her
father would have chosen for her had such a choice been possible.

He bit on his cigar, turning it over between his teeth, and looked
sidewise at her as she sat silent in the sleigh beside him. She
was unquestionably pale, pale and listless, her body wrapped in
enveloping furs, sunk in an attitude of weariness, her eyes full of
dejected reverie. Even to his blindly-groping, masculine perceptions
her distrait looks, her dispirited silence, told of melancholy
preoccupation. She was not happy--his Rose, who, if she had wanted it
and he could have bought, begged or stolen it, would have had the moon.

To-night, in her white dress, the mellow radiance of the lamp throwing
out her figure against the shadowy richness of the dining-room walls,
she bore the same appearance of despondency. Her luster was dimmed, her
delicate skin had lost its dazzling, separated bloom of pink and white,
her glance was absent and unresponsive. Never, since the death of her
mother, now ten years back, had he seen her when it was so obvious that
she harbored an inner, unexpressed sense of trouble.

“I guess the city’s the best place for you,” he said. “Roughing
it don’t seem to suit you if cows and chickens keep you awake all
night. I’ve seen the time when the hotel at Rocky Bar would have been
considered the top notch of luxury. I wish you could see the places
your mother lived in when I first took her up there. You’re a spoiled
girl, Rose Cannon.”

“Who spoiled me, I wonder?” she said, looking at him with a gleam of
humor in her eyes.

“We’re not calling names to-night,” he answered, “anyway, not since
Gene’s gone. All my desire to throw things and be ugly vanishes when
that boy gets out. So the noises at Rocky Bar kept you awake?”

“Yes, and I was wakeful, anyway.”

She looked down at her cup, stirring her coffee. He thought she
appeared conscious and said,

“What made you wakeful, guilty conscience?”

“Guilty conscience!” she repeated in a tone that was full of indignant
surprise. “Why should I have a guilty conscience?”

“Lord knows! Don’t fire off these conundrums at me. I don’t know all
your secrets, honey.”

She did not answer. He glanced furtively at her and saw that her face
had flushed. He took a cigar from the box the butler had set at his
elbow and bit off the end:

“How should I know the secrets of a young lady like you? A long time
ago, perhaps, I used to, after your mother died and you were my little
Rosey, fourteen years old. Lord, how cunning you were then! Just
beginning to lengthen out, a little woman and a little girl, both in
one. You didn’t have secrets in those days or wakeful nights either.”

He applied a match to the end of the cigar and drew at it, his ears
strained for his daughter’s reply. She again made none and he shot a
quick glance at her. She was still stirring her coffee, her eyebrows
drawn together, her eyes on the swirl of brown in the cup. He settled
himself in his chair, a bulky figure, his clothes ribbed with creases,
his head low between his shoulders, and a reek of cigar smoke issuing
from his lips.

“How’d you like it up there, anyway?”

“Up where?”

“Up at Antelope. It was a sort of strange, new experience for you.”

“Oh, I liked it so much--I loved part of it. I liked the people much
better than the people down here, Mrs. Perley, and Cora, and Perley,
and Willoughby--did you ever know a nicer man than Willoughby?--and
Judge Washburne. _He_ was a real gentleman, not only in his manners but
down in his heart. And even Perley’s boy, he was so natural and awkward
and honest. I felt different from what I do here, more myself, less as
if outside things were influencing me to do things I didn’t always like
to do or mean to do. I felt as if I were doing just what I ought to
do--it’s hard to express it--as if I were being true.”

“Oh,” said her father with a falling inflection which had a sound of
significant comprehension.

“Do you know what I mean?” she asked.

“I can make a sort of guess at it.”

He puffed at his cigar for a moment, then took it from his mouth, eyed
the lit end, and said,

“How’d you like Dominick Ryan? You haven’t said anything about him.”

Her voice, in answering, sounded low and careful. She spoke slowly, as
if considering her words:

“I thought he was very nice, and good-looking, too. He’s not a bit like
Cornelia Ryan, or his mother, either. Cornelia has such red hair.”

“No, looks like the old man. Good deal like him in character, too.
Con Ryan was the best feller in the world, but not hard enough, not
enough grit. His wife had it though, had enough for both. If it hadn’t
been for her, Con would never have amounted to anything--too soft and
good-natured, and the boy’s like him.”

“How?” She raised her head and looked directly at him, her lips
slightly parted.

“Soft, too, just the same way, soft-hearted. An easy mark for any one
with a hard-luck story and not too many scruples. Why did he marry that
woman? I don’t know anything about it, but I’d like to bet she saw the
stuff he was made of and cried and teased and nagged till she got him
to do it.”

“I don’t see that he could have done anything else.”

“That’s a woman’s--a young girl’s view. That’s the view Dominick
himself probably took. It’s the sort of idea you might expect him to
have, something ornamental and impractical, that’s all right to keep in
the cupboard and take out and dust, but that don’t do for every-day
use. That sort of thing is all very well for a girl, but it doesn’t
do for a man. It’s not for this world and our times. Maybe it was all
right when a feller went round in armor, fighting for unknown damsels,
but it won’t go in California to-day. The woman was a working woman,
she wasn’t any green girl. She earned her living in an office full of
men, and I guess there wasn’t much she didn’t know. She saw through
Dominick and gathered him in. It’s all very well to be chivalrous, but
you don’t want to be a confounded fool.”

“Are you a ‘confounded fool’ when you’re doing what you think right?”

“It depends on what you think right, honey. If it’s going to break up
your life, cut you off from your kind, make an outcast of you from your
own folks, and a poverty-stricken outcast at that, you’re a confounded
fool to think it’s right. You oughtn’t to let yourself think so. That
kind of a moral attitude is a luxury. Women can cultivate it because
they don’t have to get out in the world and fight. They keep indoors
and get taken care of, and the queer ideas they have don’t hurt
anybody. But men----”

He stopped, realizing that perhaps he was talking too frankly. He
had long known that Rose harbored these Utopian theories on duty and
honor, which he thought very nice and pretty for her and which went
gracefully with her character as a sheltered, cherished, and unworldly
maiden. It was his desire to see what effect the conversation was
having on her that made him deal so unceremoniously with ideals of
conduct which were all very well for Bill Cannon’s daughter but were
ruinous for Dominick Ryan.

“If you live in the world you’ve got to cut your cloth by its measure,”
he continued. “Look at that poor devil, tied to a woman that’s not
going to let him go if she can help it, that he doesn’t care for----”

“How do you know he doesn’t care for her?” The interruption came in a
tone of startled surprise and Rose stared at him, her eyes wide with it.

For a moment the old man was at a loss. He would have told any lie
rather than have let her guess his knowledge of the situation and the
information given him by Dominick. He realized that his zeal had made
him imprudently garrulous, and, gazing at her with a slightly stupid
expression, said in a slow tone of self-justification,

“Well, that’s my idea. I guessed it. I’ve heard one thing and another
here and there and I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no love
lost between them. It’s the natural outcome of the situation, anyway.”

“Yes, perhaps,” she murmured. She placed her elbow on the table and
pressed the tips of her fingers against her cheek. Her hand and arm,
revealed by her loose lace sleeve, looked as if cut out of ivory.

“And then,” went on her father remorselessly, “the results of being a
confounded fool don’t stop right there. That’s one of the worst things
of allowing yourself the luxury of foolishness. They go on--roll right
along like a wheel started on a down-hill grade. Some day that boy’ll
meet the right woman--the one he really wants, the one that belongs
to him. He’ll be able to stand it all right till then. And then he’ll
realize just what he’s done and what he’s up against, and things may
happen.”

The smoke wreaths were thick in front of his face, and peering through
them he saw the young girl move her fingers from her cheek to her
forehead, where she gently rubbed them up and down.

“Isn’t that about the size of it?” he queried, when she did not answer.

“Yes, maybe,” she said in a voice that sounded muffled.

“It’ll be a pretty tough proposition and it’s bound to happen. A decent
feller like that is just the man to fall in love. And he’d be good to
a woman, he’d make her happy. He’s a good husband lost for some nice
girl.”

Rose’s fingers ceased moving across her forehead. Her hand rested
there, shading her eyes. For a moment the old man--his vision
precipitated into the half-understood wretchedness of Dominick Ryan’s
position--forgot her, and he said in a hushed voice of feeling,

“By God, I’m sorry for the poor boy!”

His daughter rose suddenly with a rustling of crushed silks. The sound
brought him back in an instant and he leaned over the arm of his chair,
his cigar in his left hand, his right waving the smoke wreaths from
before his face. Rose’s hand, pressing her crumpled napkin on the
table, shone pink in the lamplight, her shoulder gleamed white through
its lace covering, but her face was averted.

“Going up now?” he asked, leaning still farther over the chair-arm to
see her beyond the lamp’s wide shade.

She appeared not to hear and moved toward the door.

“Going to bed already, Rosey?” he asked in a louder key.

“Yes, I’m tired,” her voice came a little hoarse and she did not
look at him. At the doorway she stopped, her hand on the edge of the
portière, and without turning, cleared her throat and said, “The cow
and the chickens were too much for me. I’m too sleepy to talk any more.
Good night, papa.”

“Good-night, Rosey,” he answered.

The portière fell softly behind her, and her footfall was lost in the
thickness of the carpets. Though he had not seen her face, her father
had an alarming, an almost terrifying idea, that his darling had left
the table in tears.

He sat on for some time, stonily motionless, save for the movement of
his lips as he puffed out clouds of smoke. The soft-footed servants,
coming to clear the table, fled before his growled command to “get out
and let him alone.” As he smoked he looked straight before him with
fixed, unwinking eyes, his face set in furrows of thought. At long
intervals he stirred in his chair, ponderously, like an inert, heavy
animal, and now and then he emitted a short sound, like a grunted
comment on some thought, which, by its biting suddenness, seemed to
force an ejaculation out of him.




CHAPTER X

DOMINICK COMES HOME


Three days after the return of the Cannons, Dominick Ryan also came
home. He had answered Berny’s letter the day the Cannons left, a few
hours after that interview with the Bonanza King, in which, driven to
bay by the old man’s questions, he had torn the veil from his married
life.

After that there was a period of several hours when he sat in his room
thinking over what had happened. It seemed to him that he had played
a dastardly part. He saw himself a creature of monumental, gross
selfishness, who had cajoled a young girl, in a moment of softness
and sentiment, into an action which had done nothing but distress and
humiliate her. He, who should have been the strong one, had been weak.
It was he who should have seen how things were going; he, the married
man, who had allowed himself to feel and to yield to a love that ought
to have been hidden for ever in his own heart.

He felt that it would be a sort of expiation to go back to his wife.
That was where he belonged. Rose must never again cross his path, have
a place in his thoughts, or float, a soft beguiling image, in his
memory. He had a wife. No matter what Berny was, she was the woman he
had married. She had not deceived him. It was he who had done her a
wrong, and he owed her a reparation.

In his raw state, his nerves still thrilling with the memory of that
moment’s embrace, he saw Berny from her own point of view. He lost
the memory of the complacent mistress in the picture of the unloved
wife, on whose side there was much to be said. Morbidness colored his
vision and exaggerated his sense of culpability. If she had an ugly
temper, had it not been excited, fed and aggravated by the treatment
she had received from his family? If they had maintained a different
attitude toward her, the poor girl might have been quite a pleasant,
easy-going person. In all other ways she had been a good wife. Since
their marriage, no other man had ever won a glance from her. She had
often enough assured Dominick of that fact, and he, for his part, knew
it to be true. She had struggled to keep a comfortable home on their
small income. If she was not congenial to him--if her companionship was
growing daily more disagreeable--was it all her fault? He had known her
well before he married her, six months of the closest intimacy had
made him acquainted with every foible of her character. It was no story
of a youth beguiled and deceived by a mature woman in the unequal duel
of a drawing-room courtship.

Her letter intensified his condition of self-accusation, chafed and
irritated his soreness of shame till it became a weight of guilt. It
also stirred afresh the pity, which was the strongest feeling he had
for her. It was the tenderest, the most womanly letter, Berny had
ever written him. A note of real appeal sounded through it. She had
humiliated herself, asked his pardon, besought of him to return. As he
thought of it, the vision of her alone in the flat, bereft of friends,
dully devoid of any occupation, scornful of her old companions,
fawningly desirous of making new ones who refused to know her, smote
him with an almost sickening sense of its pitifulness. He felt sorry
for her not alone because of her position, but because of what she was,
what her own disposition had made her. She would never change, her
limitations were fixed. She would go on longing for the same flesh-pots
to the end, believing that they represented the highest and best.

Berny had realized that her letter was a skilful and moving production,
but she did not know that it was to gain a hundredfold in persuasive
power by falling on a guilty conscience. It put an end to Dominick’s
revolt, it quenched the last sparks of the mutinous rage which had
taken him to Antelope. That same afternoon in his frigid bedroom at
the hotel, he answered it. His reply was short, only a few lines. In
these he stated that he would be back on the following Saturday, the
tenderness of his injured foot making an earlier move impossible.

The letter reached Berny Friday and threw her into a state of febrile
excitement. Her deadly dread of Dominick’s returning to his family had
never quite died out. It kept recurring, sweeping in upon her in moods
of depression, and making her feel chilled and frightened. Now she knew
he was coming back to her, evidently not lovingly disposed--the letter
was too terse and cold for that--but, at any rate, he was coming home.
Once there, she would set all her wits to work, use every art of which
she was mistress, to make him forget the quarrel and enter in upon a
new era of sweet reasonableness and mutual consideration.

She set about this by cleaning the house and buying new curtains for
the sitting-room. Such purifications and garnishments would have
agreeably impressed her on a home-coming and she thought they would
Dominick. In the past year she had become much more extravagant than
she had been formerly, a characteristic which had arisen in her from a
state of rasped irritation against the restricted means to which Mrs.
Ryan’s rancor condemned her. She was quite heavily in debt to various
tradespeople; and to dressmakers and milliners she owed sums that
would have astounded her husband had he known of them. This did not
prevent her from still further celebrating his return by ordering a new
dress in which to greet him and a new hat to wear the first time they
went out together. How she was to pay for these adornments, she did
not know nor care. The occasion was so important that it excused any
extravagance, and Berny, in whose pinched, dry nature love of dress was
a predominant passion, was glad to have a reason for adding new glories
to her wardrobe.

On the Saturday morning she went out betimes. Inquiry at the railway
office told her that the train which connected with the branch line
to Rocky Bar did not reach the city till six in the evening. She
ordered a dinner of the choicest viands and spent part of the morning
passing from stall to stall in the market on Powell Street spying about
for dainties that might add a last elaborating touch to the lengthy
menu. The afternoon was dedicated to the solemn rites of massaging,
manicuring, and hair-waving at a beauty doctor’s. On an ordinary
occasion these unwonted exertions in the pursuit of good looks would
have tired her, but to-day she was keyed to a pitch where she did not
notice small outside discomforts.

Long before six she was dressed, and standing before the mirror in her
room she laid on the last perfecting touches with a short stick of
hard red substance and a circular piece of mossy-looking white stuff,
which she rubbed with a rotary motion round and round her face. Her new
dress of raspberry pink crape betrayed the hand of an expert in its
gracefully-falling folds and the elegance with which it outlined her
slim, long-waisted shape. Her artificially-reddened hair waved back
from her forehead in glossy ripples; her face, all lines and hollows
rubbed from it, looked fresh and youthful. With the subdued light
falling on her through the silk and paper lamp shades, she looked a
very pretty woman, the darkness of her long brilliant eyes thrown into
higher relief by the whiteness of her powdered face.

She was tremulously nervous. Every sound caused her to start and
move to that part of the parlor whence she could look down the long
passageway to the stair-head. Large bunches of greenery were massed
here in the angles of the hall and stood in the corners of the
sitting-room. Bowls filled with violets and roses were set on the table
and mantelpiece, and the scent of these flowers, sweet and delicate,
mingled with the crude, powerful perfume that the woman’s draperies
exhaled with every movement. At intervals she ran into her bedroom,
seized the little, round, soft wad of white and rubbed it over her
face with a quick concentric movement, drawing her upper lip down as
she did so, which gave to her countenance with its anxious eyes an
exceedingly comical expression.

It was nearly seven o’clock when the bell rang. With a last hasty look
in the glass, she ran down the passageway to the stair-head. It was
necessary to descend a few steps to a turn on the stairs from whence
the lever that opened the door could be worked. As she stood on the
small landing, thrown out in bright relief by a mass of dark leafage
that stood in the angle of the wall, the door opened and Dominick
entered. He looked up and saw her standing there, gaily dressed, a
brilliant, animated figure, smiling down at him.

“Ah, Berny,” he said in a quiet, unemotional voice, “is that you?”

It was certainly not an enthusiastic greeting. A sensitive woman
would have been shriveled by it, but Berny was not sensitive. She had
realized from the start that she would probably have to combat the
lingering surliness left by the quarrel. As Dominick ascended, her
air of smiling welcome was marked by a bland cheery unconsciousness
of any past unpleasantness. She was not, however, as unconscious as
she looked. She noted his heaviness of demeanor, the tired expression
of his lifted face. He came up the stairs slowly, not yet being
completely recovered, and it added to the suggestion of reluctance, of
difficult and spiritless approach, that seemed to encompass him in an
unseen yet distinctly-felt aura.

As he rose on a level with her, she stretched out her hands and, laying
them on his shoulders, drew him toward her and kissed him. The coldness
of his cheek, damp with the foggy night air, chilled the caress and she
drew back from him, not so securely confident in her debonair, smiling
assurance. He patted her lightly on the shoulder by way of greeting and
said,

“How are you? All right?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” she answered with brisk, determined sprightliness.
“You’re the one to ask about. You walk stiff, still. How are your feet?”

She was glad to turn her eyes away from his face. It looked very tired,
and the slight smile with which he had greeted her stayed only on his
lips and did not extend to his fatigued eyes. He was evidently angry
still, angry and unforgiving, and that he should be so, when she was
so anxious to forget the ugly episode of the quarrel and be gay and
friendly again, dashed her spirits and made her feel unsure of herself
and upset. She was determined, however, to show him that she had
forgotten all about it, and as he turned the angle of the stairway she
thrust her hand inside his arm and walked up beside him. They might
have been a happy married couple, reunited after an absence, slowly
coming up the stairs together arm in arm.

A few minutes later they were seated opposite each other at dinner.
The little table glowed and gleamed, all Berny’s bravery of silver and
glass mustered for its adornment. The choice and delicate dinner began
with a soup that Dominick especially liked, a fact which Berny hoped
he would notice and mention. She was one of those women who have an
unfailing memory for what people like to eat; a single expression of
preference would remain in her mind for years. Dominick and she had not
lived together for a month before she knew everything in the way of
food he liked or disliked. When she was annoyed with him, or especially
bitter against his mother, she would order nothing but dishes that
he did not care for, and when she was in a more friendly mood, as
to-night, she would take pains and time to arrange a menu composed
of those he preferred. He usually did not notice these rewards and
punishments, but Berny always thought he did and was “too stubborn,” as
she expressed it to herself, to show that he was affected by them.

She observed to-night that he neither remarked, nor seemed to relish
his food, but she made no comment, talking on in a breathless, lively
way, asking questions of his trip, his accident, and the condition of
his feet, as though there were no mortifying recollections connected
with the cause of his sudden departure. Her only indication of
embarrassment was a tendency to avoid anything like a moment of silence
and to fly from one subject to another. Dominick answered her questions
and told her of his wanderings with a slow, careful exactness. Save in
the freezing of his feet, which matter he treated more lightly than it
deserved, he was open with her in recounting the small happenings of
what he called “his holiday,” from the time of his walk from Rocky Bar
to the day of his departure from Antelope.

They had progressed through the fish to the entrée when her questions
passed from his personal wanderings and adventures to his associates.
She had been very anxious to get to this point, as she wanted to know
what degree of intimacy he had reached with the Bonanza King. Several
times already she had tried to divert the conversation toward that
subject, but it had been deflected by the young man, who seemed to
find less personal topics more to his taste. Now she was advancing
openly upon it, inquiring about the snow-bound group at Perley’s, and
awarding to any but the august name for which her ears were pricked
a perfunctory attention. It was part of the natural perversity of
man that Dominick should shy from it and expend valuable time on
descriptions of the other prisoners.

“There was an actor there,” he said, “snowed in on his way to
Sacramento, a queer-looking chap, but not bad.”

“An actor?” said Berny, trying to look interested. “What did he act?”

“Melodrama, I think. He told me he played all through the northwest and
east as far as Denver. The poor chap was caught up there and was afraid
he was going to lose a Sacramento engagement that I guess meant a good
deal to him. He was quite interesting, been in the Klondike in the
first rush and had some queer stories about the early days up there.”

Berny’s indifferent glance became bright and fixed under the steadying
effect of sudden interest.

“Been in the Klondike?” she repeated. “What was his name?”

“Buford, James Defay Buford. He’d been an actor at the opera house at
Dawson.”

“Buford,” said Berny, turning to place a helping of pease on the plate
the Chinaman held toward her. “I never heard of him. I thought perhaps
it might have been some actor I’d seen play. I’d like to know an actor
in private life. They must be so different.”

She ladled a second spoonful of pease on to her own plate, and as she
began to eat them, said,

“It must have been interesting having the Cannons up there. When I read
in the paper that they were up at Antelope too, I was awfully glad
because I thought it would be such a good thing for you to get to know
the old man well, as you would, snowed in that way together.”

“I knew him before. My father and mother have been friends of his for
years.”

“I know that. You’ve often told me. But that’s a different thing. I
thought if he got to know you intimately and liked you, as he probably
would”--she glanced at him with a coquettish smile, but his face was
bent over his plate--“why, then, something might come of it, something
in a business way.” She again looked at him, quickly, with sidelong
investigation, to see how he took the remark. She did not want to
irritate him by alluding to his small means, anyway on this night of
reconciliation.

“It would be so useful for you to get solid with a man like Bill
Cannon,” she concluded with something of timidity in her manner.

Despite her caution, Dominick seemed annoyed. He frowned and gave his
head an impatient jerk.

“Oh, there was nothing of that kind,” he said hurriedly. “We were just
snowed in at the same hotel. There was no question of intimacy or
friendship about it, any more than there was between Judge Washburne
and me, or even the actor.”

Berny was exceedingly disappointed. Had the occasion been a less
momentous one she would have expressed herself freely. In her mind she
thought it was “just like Dominick” to have such an opportunity and let
it go. A slight color deepened the artificial rose of her cheeks and
for a moment she had to exert some control to maintain the silence that
was wisdom. She picked daintily at her food while she wrestled with her
irritation. Dominick showed no desire to resume the conversation, and a
silence of some minutes’ duration rested over them, until she broke it
by saying with a resolute cheerfulness of tone,

“Rose Cannon was there too, the paper said. I suppose you got to know
her quite well?”

“I don’t know. I saw a good deal of her. There was only one
sitting-room and we all sat there. She was there with the others.”

“What’s she like?” said Berny, her curiosity on the subject of this
spoiled child of fortune overcoming her recent annoyance.

“You’ve seen her,” he answered, “you know what she looks like.”

“I’ve never seen her to know who she was. I suppose I’ve passed her on
the streets and at the theaters. Is she cordial and pleasant, or does
she give herself airs because she’s Bill Cannon’s daughter?”

Dominick moved his feet under the table. It was difficult for him to
answer Berny’s questions politely.

“She doesn’t give herself the least airs. She’s perfectly simple and
natural and kind.”

“That’s just what I’ve heard,” his wife said, giving her head an
agreeing wag. “They say she’s just as easy and unassuming as can be.
Did you think she was pretty when you saw her close to?”

“Really, Berny, I don’t know,” answered the victim in a tone of goaded
patience. “She looks just the same close to as she does at a distance.
I don’t notice people’s looks much. Yes, I suppose she’s pretty.”

“She has blonde hair,” said Berny, leaning forward over her plate
in the eagerness of her interest. “Did it look to you as if it was
bleached?”

He raised his eyes, and his wife encountered an unexpected look of
anger in them. She shrank a little, being totally unprepared for it.

“How should I know whether her hair was bleached or not?” he said
sharply. “That’s a very silly question.”

Berny was quite taken aback.

“I don’t see that it is,” she said with unusual and somewhat stammering
mildness. “Most blonde-haired women, even if they haven’t bleached
their hair, have had it ‘restored.’”

Dominick did not answer her. The servant presented a dish at his elbow
and he motioned it away with an impatient gesture.

Berny, who was not looking at him, went on.

“What kind of clothes did she wear? They say she’s an elegant dresser,
gets almost everything from Paris, even her underwear. I suppose she
didn’t have her best things up there. But she must have had something,
because the papers said they’d gone prepared for a two weeks’ trip.”

“I never noticed anything she wore.”

“Well, isn’t that just like you, Dominick Ryan!” exclaimed his wife,
unable, at this unmerited disappointment, to refrain from some
expression of her feelings. “And you might know I’d be anxious to hear
what she had on.”

“I’m very sorry, but I haven’t an idea about any of her clothes. I
think they were always dark, mostly black or brown.”

“Did you notice,” almost pleadingly, “what she wore when she went out?
Mrs. Whiting, the forelady at Hazel’s millinery, says she imported a
set of sables, muff, wrap and hat, for her this autumn. Hazel says it
was just the finest thing of its kind you ever laid your eyes on. Did
she have them up there?”

“I couldn’t possibly tell you. I don’t know what sables are. I saw
her once with a fur cap on, but I think it belonged to Willoughby, an
Englishman who was staying there, and used to have his cap hanging on
the pegs in the hall. It’s quite useless asking me these questions. I
don’t know anything about the subject. Did you wind the clock while I
was away?”

He looked at the clock, a possession of his own, given him in the days
when his mother and sister delighted to ornament his rooms with costly
gifts and in which he had never before evinced the slightest interest.

“Of course, I wound it,” Berny said with an air of hurt protest.
“Haven’t I wound it regularly for nearly three years?”

This brought the subject of Rose Cannon to an end and she was not
alluded to again during the dinner. The conversation reverted to such
happenings in the city as Berny thought might interest her husband,
and it seemed to her that he was more pleased to sit and listen to her
chatter of her sisters, the bank, the theaters, and the shops, than to
dilate any further on his adventures in the snow-bound Sierra.

When the dinner was over, they returned to the front of the flat,
where next to the parlor there was a tiny hall-room fitted up as
a smoking-room and den. It was merely a continuation of the hall,
and “the cozy corner” which Berny had had a Polk Street upholsterer
construct in it, occupied most of the available space, and crowded such
visitors as entered it into the corners. It had been Berny’s idea to
have this room “lined with books” as she expressed it, but their joint
possessions in this line consisting of some twenty-five volumes, and
the fact that the contracted space made it impossible to accommodate
both the books and the cozy corner, Berny had decided in favor of the
latter. She now seated herself on the divan that formed the integral
part of this construction, and, piling the pillows behind her, leaned
luxuriously back under the canopy of variegated stuffs which was
supported by two formidable-looking lances.

Dominick sat in his easy chair. He always smoked in this room and read
the papers, and presently he picked them up from the table and began
to look them over. The conversation languished, became spasmodic, and
finally died away. Berny, leaning back on the cushions, tried several
times to revive it, but her husband from among the spread sheets of
the evening press answered her with the inarticulate sounds of mental
preoccupation, and sometimes with no sound at all, till she abandoned
the attempt and leaned back under the canopy in a silence that was not
by any means the somnolent quietude of after-dinner torpor.

The clock hands were pointing to half-past nine when a ring at the bell
was followed by the appearance of the Chinaman at the door, stating
that the expressman had come with Mr. Ryan’s valises. Dominick threw
down his papers and left the room. As Berny sat silent, she could hear
the expressman’s gruff deep voice in the hall and the thuds of the
valises as he thumped them down at the stair-head. Dominick answered
him and there were a few more remarks, followed by the retreating
sound of the man’s heavy feet on the stairs and the bang of the hall
door. She sat looking at the clock, waiting for her husband to return,
and then as he did not come and the hall seemed singularly quiet she
leaned forward and sent an exploring glance down its dim length.
Dominick was not there, but a square of light fell out from the open
doorway of his room.

“Dominick,” she called, “what are you doing?”

He came to the door of the room in his shirt-sleeves, a tall figure
looking lean and powerful in this closer-fitting and lighter garb.

“I’m unpacking my things, and then I’m going to bed.”

“Oh!” she answered with a falling inflection, leaning forward, with her
elbows planted on her knees, craning her neck to see more plainly down
the narrow passageway. “It’s only half-past nine; why do you want to go
to bed so early?”

“I’m tired, and it will take me some time to get these things put away.”

“Can I help you?” she asked without moving.

“No, thanks. There’s nothing much to bother about. Good night, Berny,”
and he stepped back into the room and shut the door.

Berny sat as he had left her for a space, and then drew back upon the
divan and leaned against the mound of pillows. She made the movement
charily and slowly, her face set in a rigidity of thought to which
her body seemed fixed and obedient. She sat thus for an hour without
moving, her eyes staring before her, two straight lines folded in the
skin between her brows.

So he was still angry, angry and unforgiving. That was the way she
read his behavior. The coldness that he exhaled--that penetrated even
her unsensitive outer shell--she took to be the coldness of unappeased
indignation. He had never before been just like this. There was a
something of acquired forbearance and patience about him--a cultivated
thing, not a spontaneous outward indication of an inner condition of
being--which was new to her observation. He was not sulky or cross; he
was simply withdrawn from her and trying to hide it under a manner of
careful, guarded civility. It was different from any state she had yet
seen him in, but it never crossed her mind that it might be caused by
the influence of another woman.

He was still angry--that was what Berny thought; and sitting on the
divan under the canopy with its fiercely-poised lances she meditated on
the subject. His winning back was far from accomplished. He was not as
“easy” as she had always thought. A feeling of respect for him entered
into her musings, a feeling that was novel, for in her regard for her
husband there had previously been a careless, slighting tolerance
which was not far removed from contempt. But if he had pride enough
to keep her thus coldly at arm’s length, to withstand her attempts at
forgiveness and reconciliation, he was more of a man than she thought,
and she had a harder task to handle than she had guessed. She did not
melt into anything like self-pity at the futility of her efforts,
which, had Dominick known of them, would have seemed to him extremely
pathetic. That they had not succeeded gave her a new impetus of force
and purpose, made her think, and scheme with a hard, cool resolution.
To “make up” and gain ascendancy over Dominick, independent and proudly
indifferent, was much more worth while than to bully Dominick, patient,
enduring, and ruled by a sense of duty.




CHAPTER XI

THE GODS IN THE MACHINE


On the second Sunday after their return from Antelope, Bill Cannon
resolved to dedicate the afternoon to paying calls. This, at least, was
what he told his daughter at luncheon as he, she, and Gene sat over
the end of the meal. To pay calls was not one of the Bonanza King’s
customs, and in answer to Rose’s query as to whom he was going to honor
thus, he responded that he thought he’d “start in with Delia Ryan.”

Rose made no comment on this intelligence. The sharp glance he cast
at her discovered no suggestion of consciousness in the peach-like
placidity of her face. It gratified him to see her thus unsuspecting,
and in the mellowing warmth of his satisfaction he turned and addressed
a polite query to Gene as to how he intended spending the afternoon.
Gene and Rose, it appeared, were going to the park to hear the band.
Gene loved a good band, and the one that played in the park Sunday
afternoons was especially good. The Sunday before, Gene had heard it
play _Poet and Peasant_ and the _Overture of William Tell_, and it
was great! That was one of the worst things about living on a ranch,
Gene complained, you didn’t have any music except at the men’s house at
night when one of the Mexicans played on an accordion.

The old man, with his elbow on the table, and a short, blunt-fingered
hand stroking his beard, looked at his son with narrowed eyes full of
veiled amusement. When he did not find Gene disagreeably aggravating as
his only failure, he could, as it were, stand away from him and realize
how humorous he was if you took him in a certain way.

“What’s the Mexican play?” he growled without removing his hand.

“_La Paloma_,” answered Gene, pleased to be questioned thus amicably
by his autocratic sire, “generally _La Paloma_, but he _can_ play _The
Heart Bowed Down_ and the Toreador song from _Carmen_. I want him to
learn the _Miserere_ from _Trovatore_. It’s nice to sit on the porch
after dinner and listen while you smoke.”

“Sort of Court Minstrel,” said his father, thumping down his napkin
with his hand spread flat on it. “Don Eugenio Cannon, with his minstrel
playing to him in the gloaming! It’s very picturesque. Did you ever
think of having a Court Fool too, or perhaps you don’t feel as if you
needed one?”

He arose from his chair before Gene, who never quite understood the
somewhat ferocious humor of his parent, had time to reply.

“Well, so long,” said the old man; “be good children and don’t get
into mischief, and Rose, see that your brother doesn’t get lost or so
carried away by the _Poet and the Peasant_ that he forgets the dinner
hour. _Adios_, girlie.”

A half-hour later he walked down the flight of marble steps that
led in dignified sweep from the front door to the street. It was a
wonderful day and for a moment he paused, looking with observing eyes
at the prospect of hill and bay which seemed to glitter in the extreme
clearness of the atmosphere. Like all Californians he had a strong,
natural appreciation of scenic and climatic beauty. Preoccupied with
thoughts and schemes which were anything but uplifting, he yet was
sensitively responsive to the splendors of the view before him, to
the unclouded, pure blue of the vault above, to the balmy softness of
the air against his face. Some one had once asked him why he did not
live in Paris as the ideal home of the man of great wealth and small
scruples. His answer had been that he preferred San Francisco because
there were more fine days in the year there than anywhere else he knew
of.

Now he paused, sniffing the air with distended nostril and inhaling
it in deep, grateful inspirations. His eye moved slowly over the
noble prospect, noted the deep sapphire tint of the bay, the horizon,
violet dark against a pale sky, and the gem-like blues and amethysts
of the distant hills. He turned his glance in the other direction and
looked down the gray expanse of the street, the wide, clear, stately
street, with its air of clean spaciousness, sun-bathed, silent, almost
empty, in the calm quietude of the Sabbath afternoon. The bustling
thoroughfares of greater cities, with their dark, sordid crowds, their
unlovely, vulgar hurry, their distracting noise, were offensive to him.
The wonder crossed his mind, as it had done before, how men who could
escape from such surroundings chose to remain in them.

He walked forward slowly, a thick-set, powerful figure, his frock-coat
buttoned tight about the barrel-like roundness of his torso, a soft,
black felt hat pulled well down on his head. His feet were broad and
blunt like his hands, and in their square-toed shoes he planted them
firmly on the pavement with a tread of solid, deliberate authority.
His forward progress had something in it of an invincible, resistless
march. He was thinking deeply as he walked, arranging and planning, and
there was nothing in his figure, or movements, or the expression of his
face, which suggested the sauntering aimlessness of an afternoon stroll.

When he turned into Van Ness Avenue the Ryan house was one block
beyond him, a conglomerate white mass, like a crumbling wedding cake
slowly settling on a green lawn. He surveyed it as he approached,
noting its ugliness with a musing satisfaction. Its size and the
bright summery perfection of surrounding grass and flower beds lent it
impressiveness and redeemed it from the position of a colossal blight
on the prospect to which architect and builder had done their best to
relegate it. Prosperity, a complacent, overwhelming prosperity, was
suggested not only by its bulk but by the state of studied finish and
neatness that marked mansion and grounds. There did not seem to be
a wilting flower bed or withered leaf left on a single stalk in the
garden borders. Every window-pane gleamed like a mirror innocent of
dust or blemishing spot. The marble steps up which Cannon mounted were
as snowily unsullied as though no foot had passed over them since their
last ablution.

The door was opened by a Chinaman, who, taking the visitor’s card,
left him standing in the hall, and, deaf to his queries as to where
he should go, serenely mounted the stairs. Cannon hesitated a moment,
then hearing a sound of voices to his right, entered the anteroom that
gave on that suite of apartments into which Dominick had walked on the
night of the ball. They were softly lit by the afternoon sun filtering
through thin draperies, and extended in pale, gilt-touched vista to
the shining emptiness of the ball-room. The old man was advancing
toward the voices when he suddenly saw whence they proceeded, and
stopped. In the room just beyond him Cornelia Ryan and a young man
were sitting on a small, empire sofa, their figures thrown out in high
relief against the background of silk-covered wall. Cornelia’s red head
was in close proximity to that of her companion, which the intruder
saw to be clothed with a thatch of sleek black hair, and which he
recognized as appertaining to a young man whose father had once been
shift boss on the Rey del Monte, and who bore the patronymic of Duffy.

Cornelia and Jack Duffy had the appearance of being completely
engrossed in each other’s society. In his moment of unobserved survey,
Cannon had time to note the young woman’s air of bashful, pleased
embarrassment and the gentleman’s expression of that tense, unsmiling
earnestness which attends the delivery of sentimental passages.
Cornelia was looking down, and her flaming hair and the rosy tones
of her face, shading from the faintest of pearly pinks to deepening
degrees of coral, were luminously vivid against the flat surface of
cream-colored wall behind her, and beside the black poll and thin,
dark cheek of her companion. That something very tender was afoot was
quickly seen by the visitor, who softly withdrew, stepping gingerly
over the fur rugs, and gaining the entrance to the hall with a
sensation of flurried alarm.

An open door just opposite offered a refuge, and, passing through it
with a forward questing glance alert for other occupants who might
resent intrusion, the old man entered a small reception-room lit by
the glow of a hard coal fire. The room was different in furnishings
and style from those he had left. It had the austere bleakness of
aspect resultant from a combination of bare white walls and large
pieces of furniture of a black wood upon which gold lines were traced
in ornamental squares. An old-fashioned carpet was on the floor, and
several tufted arm-chairs, begirt with dangling fringes, were drawn
up sociably before the fire. This burned cheerily, a red focus of
heat barred by the stripes of a grate, and surmounted by a chastely
severe white marble mantelpiece. He had been in the room often before
and knew it for Mrs. Ryan’s own particular sanctum. When a celebrated
decorator had been sent out from New York to furnish the lower floor of
the house, she had insisted on retaining in this apartment the pieces
of furniture and the works of art which she approved, and which the
decorator wished to banish to the garret. Mrs. Ryan had her way as
she always did, and the first fine “soote” of furniture which she and
Con had bought in the days of their early affluence, and various oil
paintings also collected in the same era of their evolution, went to
the decking of the room she used for her own and oftenest sat in.

Cannon approached the fire, and stood there looking up at the life-size
portrait in oils of the late Cornelius Ryan, which hung over the
chimneypiece. The artist had portrayed him as a thickly-whiskered
man with the complexion of a healthy infant and eyes of baby blue. A
watch chain, given him by his colleagues in the old days at Shasta,
and formed of squares of quartz set in native gold, was painted with
a finished carefulness which had pleased Mrs. Ryan even more than the
likeness had done. In showing the picture, she was wont to say proudly,
“Just look at the watch chain! Seems as if you could almost hear the
ticking of the watch.”

Cannon was speculating as to the merits of the likeness when he heard
the silken rustling of skirts, and turned to greet his old friend.
She came in smiling, with extended hand, richly clad, the gleam of
a fastening jewel at her neck. Her hair was dressed with a shining,
smooth elaboration, drawn up tightly at the sides and arranged over her
forehead in careful curls. As she and her visitor exchanged the first
sentences of greeting he noticed that she looked much older and more
worn than she had done the last time he had seen her, but her face was
as full of pugnacious force as ever. While Delia Ryan’s body lived her
spirit would hold its dominion. She had ruled all her life and would do
so to the end.

They sat down on either side of the fire and the old man said,

“I don’t know whether I ought to be in here. The Chinaman left me to my
fate, and I had to nose about myself and find out where I belonged.”

“Oh, that’s Lee,” she answered with a short laugh. “He waits on the
door every other Sunday. We’ve had him ten years and no one’s ever
been able to make him show people into the parlor. He thinks it better
to leave them standing in the hall till one of us sees the card. Then
he’ll go down and tell them as sociably as you please ‘to go right in
and sit down.’ I asked him why he didn’t do it at first, and he said
‘they might steal something.’”

Cannon looked into the fire with an amused eye.

“I guess he thought I was after the spoons. It’s a dangerous habit, for
I took the first turning to the right and butted into Cornelia and a
young man who gave me to understand I’d come the wrong way around.”

“What did they say?” said the mother, her face stiffening with sudden
disapproving surprise.

“They didn’t say anything. That was just it. They didn’t even see me.
But they certainly led me to believe that I’d got somewhere where I
wasn’t wanted. I may not be smart, but a hint doesn’t have to be much
harder than the kick of a mule for me to see it.”

Mrs. Ryan looked at him consideringly.

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “it’s a case, I guess.”

“It ought to be satisfactory,” he answered. “Pat Duffy, the father of
those boys, was one of the finest fellers I ever knew. He was shift
boss on the Rey del Monte in seventy-one when I was the superintendent.
He got out of Virginia with his pile, didn’t lose it like the others.
He had an easy three million when he came down here and bought the
Bristed house on Pine Street. And Jack’s the best of his children.
Maggie, who married the English baronet, was a nice sort of girl, but
she’s never come back, and Terry’s smart enough, but not the kind you
can bank on. Jack’s a good, straight boy. Cornelia couldn’t do better.”

“That’s what I think,” said the mother, who, however, looked grave and
worried. “Cornelia’s thirty. It’s time for her to settle, and she’ll
make a good wife. They’ll live here, too. There’ll be no kicking up of
their heels and going off to Europe or New York and thinking themselves
too good to come back to California, like Maggie Duffy and her baronet.
I want them here. I want to see some grandchildren round this house
before I die. I want to know where Con’s money is going to.”

She sighed, and it was obvious that her heart was heavy.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s a good marriage and I’m pleased at it. Jack’s a
Roman Catholic but you can’t have everything down here in this world.”

The Ryans were Protestants, almost the only prominent Irish-American
family in San Francisco which belonged to that church. Cornelius Ryan
had been a North-country man, and went out with the Orange men when
they paraded. He had been firm in his faith and so had his wife, and
with the Hibernian’s violent devotion to creed they had made public
their antipathy to the Church of Rome and their hopes that their
children would not make alliances with its members.

“Oh well,” said Cannon with a shrug of vague tolerance, “a man’s
beliefs don’t matter. With a woman it’s a different thing. She brings
up the children and takes her religion hard. Jack won’t interfere with
Cornelia that way.”

“Perhaps not,” said the mother. There was a slight pause and then she
said with a sigh,

“Well, thank God, one of my children’s going to marry as I want.”

She was gazing into the fire and did not notice the quick look, sly
and piercing, that her companion shot at her. The conversation had
suddenly, without any effort of his, fallen upon the subject to which
he had intended directing it.

“Yes,” he said, looking away from her, “you’ve had one disappointment.
That’s enough.”

“Disappointment!” she echoed in a loud voice. “Disappointment? I’ve
lost my son; lost him as if he was dead--worse than if he was dead, for
then I’d know he was happy and safe somewhere.”

It was a cry of pain, Rachel mourning for her child. The note of
feeling in it checked the remark on Cannon’s lips. He understood what
her suffering was and respected it.

“Why, Bill Cannon,” she went on, turning the perturbed fierceness of
her face on him, “how often do you think I see my boy? What ties do you
think he has with his home? He came up here after he’d got back from
Antelope, but before that I’d only seen him once in six weeks.”

“That’s pretty hard,” he commented, his elbow on the arm of the chair,
his chin sunk in the cup of his up-curled hand. “That’s pretty tough. I
didn’t know it was as bad as that.”

“Nobody knows anything about him. He won’t let them. He won’t let me.
He’s proud, and trying to hide it all. That’s the reason he comes up
here so seldom. He knows I can see into him, see through him, clear
through him, and he don’t want me to see how miserable he is.”

“Oh!” said the old man, moving slightly and raising his eyes to look
at her. The interjection was full of significance, pregnant with
understanding, appreciation and enlightenment. He was surprised
himself. He had thought, and had understood from Dominick, that no
one, especially no one of his own people, knew of the young man’s
domestic infelicities. Neither of them was shrewd enough to realize
that the mother would guess, would know by instinct.

“And what do you suppose he came up for that once?” pursued Mrs. Ryan.
“You could guess a lot of times but you’d never strike it. He came up
here the night of my ball to ask me to give him an invitation for his
wife!”

She stared at her visitor with her face set in a stony hardness, a
hardness reminiscent of that which had marked it when Dominick had
asked for the invitation. Cannon saw it and checked the remark that
rose to his lips. He was going to say “Why didn’t you give it to
him?” and he saw that it was too light a comment for what had been a
tragic occasion. All he did was to utter a grunt that might have meant
anything and was consequently safe.

“That’s what his marriage has done for him, and that’s the state that
woman has ground him down to. She’d worked on him till she’d got him to
come up here and ask for it a few minutes before the people began to
arrive! That’s what she made him do.”

“And you wouldn’t give it?” he inquired mildly, inwardly surprised, as
he had been often before, at the rancor displayed by women in their
quarrels.

“Give it?” she exclaimed, “well, I guess not. It would have been my
surrender. I’d have thrown up the fight for ever when I did that.”
And then as if she had read his thoughts: “It’s not natural meanness
either. There’s only one hope for me--for me and for Dominick, too.
Divorce.”

He did not move his chin from its resting-place in his up-curled hand,
but made a slight assenting motion with his head, and said,

“I suppose that’s the only thing.”

“That’s been my hope since the day when I first saw her. I didn’t know
then she’d been anything to Dominick before the marriage, but I knew
the first look I had at her what she was. That long, mean nose and
those sly eyes, and seven years older than the boy if she was a day.
You didn’t have to tell me any more. I saw then just like a flash in
the dark what my son had let himself in for. And then, not a month
after, I heard the rest about her, and I knew that Dominick had started
in to ruin his life about the best way he knew how.”

Cannon gave another grunt, and this time it contained a recognizable
note of sympathy. She went on, absorbed in her recital, anxious to pour
out her griefs, now that she had begun.

“Right there from the start I thought of divorce. I knew it was the
only way out and was bound to come in time. The woman had married
Dominick for money and position. I knew that, saw it in her face along
with other things. There was no love in that face, just calculation,
hard and sharp as a meat ax. I shut down on the money right there and
then. Dominick had three thousand a year, so I knew he couldn’t starve,
but three thousand a year wasn’t what she’d married him for.”

“She’s got along on it for over two years.”

“That’s it. She’s beaten me so far. I’m the keeper of Con Ryan’s
fortune and I just closed my hand on it and said to her in so many
words, ‘Not a cent of this for you.’ I thought she’d tire of struggling
along in a flat with one Chinaman and not a soul to come near her.
But she’s stood it and she’s going to go on standing it. Where she’s
concerned, I did something the smartest men and women sometimes
do--underrated the brains of my enemy.”

“She’s pretty smart, I guess,” said Cannon, raising a gravely-commenting
eye to his companion’s face.

“That’s what she is,--smart and long-headed. She’s more far-sighted
than women of her kind usually are and she’s got her eye on the future.
She’s not going to give us a chance for divorce. She’s not going to
make any breaks or mistakes. There’s not a more respectable woman in
San Francisco. She doesn’t go with any one but her husband and her
own sisters, two decent women that you can’t believe have the same
blood in them. She’s the quietest, most domestic kind of a wife. It
don’t matter, and nobody knows, that she’s making her husband the most
miserable man in the country. That doesn’t cut any ice. What does is
that there’s no ground for divorce against her. If she had the kind of
husband that wouldn’t put up with anything from a woman, all he could
do would be to leave her and she’d go round then getting everybody’s
sympathies as a virtuous, deserted wife.”

The old man gave his head an appreciative jerk, and murmured,

“A pretty smart woman, all right.”

“She’s all that--that and more. It’s the future that she’s banking
on. I’m nearly seventy years of age, Bill Cannon, and this has broken
me up more than anything that’s gone before. I’m not the woman I was
before my boy married. And what’s going to happen when I die? I’ve only
got two living children. Outside them there’s nobody but some distant
relations that Con made settlements on before he died. If I left all
I’ve got to Cornelia, or divided it up between Cornelia and charity,
cutting off my son because he’d made a marriage I didn’t like, would
such a will as that stand? Why had I left nothing to my only son?
Because he’d married a woman I didn’t think good enough? And what was
there against her? She’d been a typewriter and her husband’s mistress
for six months before he married her. The mistress part of it had
been condoned by marriage and good conduct--and after all, how many
families in San Francisco and other places were founded on just those
beginnings? As for her being a typewriter, Delia Ryan herself had been
a washerwoman, washed for the miners with these hands;”--she held out
her blunt, beringed hands with one of those dramatic gestures natural
to the Irish--“when Con was working underground with his pick I was
at the wash-tub, and I made money that way for him to run the mine.
Where’s the California jury that would hesitate to award Dominick, and
through him, his wife her part of the fortune that Con and I made?”

“Well, that’s all possible,” Cannon said slowly, “but it’s so far off.
It’s all surmise. You may live twenty years yet. I fancy she’d find a
twenty-years’ wait under the present conditions rather wearying.”

The old woman shook her head, looking very sad.

“I’m not the woman I was,” she repeated, “this last thing’s broken me
more than anything that went before. I lost three children by death,
and it wasn’t as hard as losing my youngest boy the way I have.”

“Have you any idea whether Dominick has ever thought of divorce?” he
asked.

“I’ve the clearest kind of an idea that he hasn’t. You don’t know
Dominick. He’s the best boy in the world. He’ll blame himself for
everything that’s gone wrong, not that woman. She’s smart enough to
let him, too. And suppose he was a different kind and did think of
it? That’s all the good it would do him. Men don’t sue women for
divorce except under the greatest provocation, and Dominick’s got
no provocation at all. My hopes were that the woman herself would
sue--that we’d freeze her out with small means and cold shoulders--and
you see that’s just what she’s determined not to do!”

Cannon dropped his supporting hand on the chair-arm and began to caress
gently a large tassel that hung there.

“She could be approached in another way,” he said with a suggestion of
pondering deliberation.

“What way?”

“You say she married Dominick for money. Have you never thought of
buying her off?”

He looked at Mrs. Ryan and met her eyes staring anxiously and, in a
sort of way, shyly into his.

“Yes,” she said in a low voice, “I have.”

“Have you tried it?”

“No,--I--I--I don’t think I dared,” she said almost desperately. “It
was my last trump.”

He realized, and, though he was unmoved by it, felt the pathos of this
admission from the proud and combative woman who had so long and so
successfully domineered over her world.

“I suppose it _is_ a sort of death-bed remedy,” he said, “but it seems
to me it’s about time to try it. Your idea that she’s going to wait
till you die and then claim part of the estate as Dominick’s wife is
all very well, but she’s not the kind of woman to be willing to wait
patiently through the rolling years on three thousand dollars per
annum. She’s a good bit older than he is and it isn’t making her any
happier to see her best days passing with nothing doing. I should think
you stood a pretty good chance of getting her to listen to reason.”

“Offering her a sum down to leave him?” she said, looking at the fire,
her brows knit.

“Exactly. Offer her a good sum on the stipulation that she leaves him
and goes away to New York or Europe. Then in the course of time she
can write him asking him to grant her a divorce on some such technical
grounds as desertion, or incompatibility, or anything else that’s
respectable. He’ll have to give it to her. He can’t do anything else.
And there you are!”

“What if she refuses?” she said in a low voice, and he saw she was
afraid of this refusal which would shatter her last hope.

“Raise your offer,” he answered briskly. “She probably will refuse the
first time.”

She pondered, eying the fire with heavy immobility.

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “It sounds reasonable. It’s about the only
thing left.”

“If I can be of any assistance to you,” he said, “you just call on me.
I’m willing to help in this thing all I can. It goes against me to see
Dominick caught in a trap this way just at the beginning of his life.”

“A boy,” said his mother, “that would have made some good girl so
happy.”

Cannon rose from his chair.

“That’s just it!” he said, “and there are not so many of ’em round that
we can afford to lose one of the best. I’ve always liked Dominick and
getting to know him so well up at Antelope I grew downright fond of
him. He’s a fine boy.”

He smiled at her with his most genial air, beaming with disinterested
affection for Dominick and the desire to be helpful in a grievous
strait. Mrs. Ryan looked brighter and more hopeful than she had done at
the beginning of the interview.

“It’s very good of you,” she said, “to come and listen to an old
woman’s complaints. But as we get on, we seem to take them harder. And
you know what my boy was to me?”

“About the same thing that my girl is to me,” Cannon answered as he
turned away to look on the table for his hat.

There was a little more talk, and then the set phrases of farewell
brought the interview to a close. Though momentous, it had not lasted
long. As he left the room, Cannon heard the single note of half-past
three chime from the clock on the mantelpiece.

Outside he stood for a moment on the top of the marble steps, looking
downward with absent eyes. He was completely engrossed with the
just-ended conversation, parts of which repeated themselves in his mind
as he stared unseeingly down the wide, unencumbered vista of the street.

Carriages flashed past through strips of sunshine; automobiles whirred
by, leaving dust and gasoline in their wake. On the sidewalks there
were many foot passengers: lazily sauntering couples, lovers, family
parties, and little groups bound for the cars which would whisk them
over the dunes to the park. As he slowly began to descend, one of
these groups, formed of three women, a man, and a child, approached
the bottom of the steps. They were walking down the avenue in a close,
talkative bunch. The descending magnate was apprised of their proximity
by the high, cackling sound of the women’s voices and an aura of
perfume which extended from them into the surrounding ether. He paid no
attention to them, his eye, with its look of inward brooding, passing
indifferently over the faces turned eagerly toward him.

They were not so unmoved. Their glances were trained full on him, their
eyes wide in the unblinking intensity of their scrutiny. Even the
child, who was skipping along beside the eldest of the women, inspected
him with solemn care. Brushing by in their gay Sunday raiment they
drew together to discuss him, their heads in a cluster, their voices
lowered. He was so used to being the object of such interest that he
did not bother to look at them, and was therefore unaware that one of
the women, quite pretty, with reddish hair and dark eyes, had turned as
she moved away and surveyed him over her shoulder.




CHAPTER XII

BERNY MAKES A DISCOVERY


It was near eleven o’clock on that same Sunday morning, when Berny,
wrappered and heavy-eyed, emerged from her room. She shuffled down the
passage to the dining-room, sending her voice before her in a shrill
summons to the Chinaman. The morning papers were scattered over the
table as Dominick had left them and she gathered them up, sitting
sidewise in her chair and running her eye down their columns, while
the servant set out her breakfast. She was still sleepy, and frequent
yawns interrupted her perusal of the lines of print which interested
her above all written matter. A kimono clothed her slim form and from
beneath its hem her foot protruded, thrust bare into a furred slipper.
She folded the paper over to bring the society column into a prominence
easy of access, and, propping it up against a bowl of fruit, read as
she ate her breakfast.

Toward the end of the meal she inquired of the servant at what time her
husband had gone out, and received the reply that Mr. Ryan had had
his breakfast and left the flat two hours earlier. There was nothing
disconcerting or unusual about this, as Dominick always went for a
walk on fine Sunday mornings, but her mind was far from easy and she
immediately fell to wondering why he had departed so early, and the
slight ferment of disquietude that was always with her stirred again
and made her forget the society column and let her Spanish omelet grow
cold.

There was something strange about Dominick since he had come back,
something that intrigued her, that she could not satisfactorily
explain. She assured herself that he was still angry, but in the deeper
places of her understanding the voice that whispers the truth and
will not be gainsaid told her it was not that. Neither was it exactly
antagonism. In a way he had been studiously kind and polite to her, a
sort of consciously-guarded politeness, such as one might practise to
a guest with whom one was intimate without being friendly. She tried
to explain to herself just what this change was, and when it came to
putting the matter in words she could not find the right ones. It was
a coldness, a coldness that was not harsh and did not express itself
in actions or phrases. It went deeper; it was exhaled from the inner
places of his being.

Sometimes as she talked to him she would meet his eyes fixed on her
with a deep, vacant glance, which she suddenly realized was unseeing
and unheeding. In the evening as he sat reading in the cramped confines
of the den she surreptitiously watched him and saw that a moment often
came when he dropped his book, and with his long body limp in the
arm-chair, his chin sunk on his breast, would sit with a brooding gaze
fixed on nothing. Once, as he was dreaming this way, she said suddenly,

“What are you thinking of, Dominick? Antelope?”

He started and turned upon her a face that had reddened consciously.

“Why should I think of Antelope?” he said, and she was aware that her
remark had startled him and made him uncomfortable.

“For no particular reason,” she answered lightly; “you just looked as
if you were thinking of something a long way off.”

She tried to reassure herself that it all rose from the quarrel. To
believe that comforted her and gave her confidence, but it was hard to
think it, for not only did her own instinct proclaim against it, but
Dominick’s manner and attitude were in distinct refutation of any such
theory. He was not sullen, he was absent; he was not resentful, he was
indifferent. And in small outward ways he tried to please her, which
was not after the manner of a sore and angry man. On this very Sunday
he had agreed to meet her and her family in the park at the band stand
at four. She always dined with her sisters on Sunday and if the weather
was fine they went to the park and listened to the music. It was nearly
a year now since Dominick had joined these family parties, preferring
to walk on the Presidio hills and the Cliff House beach with a friend
from the bank. But on the evening before he had promised to meet them;
been quite agreeable about it, Berny had thought, when her pleadings
and importunities had finally extorted from him a promise to join them
there.

She left the dining-room and walked up the hallway to the parlor, her
head drooped, anxieties gnawing at her. The little room was flooded
with sunshine, and she parted the lace curtains and, throwing up the
window, leaned out. The rich, enveloping warmth surrounded her, clasped
her, seemed to sink deep into her and thaw the apprehensions that
were so cold at her heart. She drew in the sweet, still air, that did
not stimulate but that had in it something of a crystalline youth and
freshness, like the air of an untainted world, concerned with nothing
but the joy of living. The scents of flowers were in it; the mellowness
of the earth and its fruits. Peace was the message of this tranquil
Sunday morning, peace was in the sunshine, in the sound of bells with
which the air was full, in the fall of feet--light, joyous feet--on
the pavement, in the voices of passers-by and the laughter, sweet and
broken, of children. It was not right for any one to harbor cankering
cares on such a day. The earth was happy, abandoned to the sunshine,
irresponsible, care free, rejoicing in the perfect moment. The woman
felt the restoring processes that Nature, in its tireless generosity,
offers to all who will take them. She felt eased of her troubles,
soothed and cheered, as though the enwrapping radiance that bathed
her held an opiate for jangled nerves. Blinking in the brightness she
leaned on the window-sill, immovable, quieted, feeling the warmth
suffuse her and dissipate those alarms that half an hour earlier had
been so chill and heavy.

As she dressed, the sense of well-being and confidence increased. She
looked very well this morning. Since Dominick’s return she had looked
haggard and thin. Sometimes she had seemed to see, showing shadowy
through her reflected face in the mirror, the lines and hollows of
that face when time should have put a stamp on it that neither massage
nor pigments would efface. A sudden moment of revelation showed her
herself as an old woman, her nose pointed, her mouth a thin, tight
line. This morning the glass gave her back none of these disconcerting
hints. She was at her best, and as she dressed carefully and slowly,
she had the satisfaction of seeing that each added article of apparel
increased her good looks. When she finally put on her new hat--the one
she had bought in celebration of Dominick’s return--and over it tied
a white and black dotted veil, she was so gratified with the picture
she presented that she was reluctant to leave it and pirouetted slowly
before the glass, surveying her back and side views, and finally
lifting her skirt that she might see the full effect of her lilac
petticoat as it burst into sight in an ebullition of pleats and frills.

Walking up the avenue she was bridlingly conscious that her brilliant
appearance drew its tribute of glances. Many people looked at her, and
their sidelong admiration was an even more exhilarating tonic than the
sunshine. She walked with a light, elastic step, spreading perfume on
the air, her progress accompanied by a rich, seductive rustle. Once or
twice she passed members of that exclusive world from which she had
stolen Dominick. She swept by them, languidly indifferent, her eyes
looking with glacial hauteur over their heads. The sound made by her
brushing silk petticoats was gratifyingly aggressive. She imparted to
them a slight disdainful swing, and lifted her dress skirt daintily
higher, conscious of the impeccable amplitude of her emerging lilac
frills.

The habit of dining with her own people on Sunday had been one she had
never abandoned, even in the first aspiring days of her marriage.
It was a sort of family reunion and at first Dominick had been a not
unwilling participant in its domestic festivities. The solid bourgeois
respectability of his wife’s relations appealed to him. For all his
advantages in money and education he was of the same class himself,
and while Berny was, if not a beloved spouse, a yet endurable one, he
had found the Sunday gatherings and subsequent hejira to the park not
entirely objectionable. For over a year now he had escaped from it,
pleading the need of open air and exercise, and his sisters-in-law, who
had at first protested, had grown used to his absence and accepted it
as something to bear uncomplainingly.

The day was so fine that they hurried through their dinner, a hearty
and lavish meal, the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Hannah’s housekeeping, and,
loath to lose a moment of the sunshine, determined to walk down to Van
Ness Avenue and there catch an outgoing car to the park. It was the
middle of the afternoon and the great thoroughfare lay still and idle
in the slanting light. There was something foreign, almost tropical
in its vista, in the scene that hung like a drop curtain at the limit
of sight--pale blue hills dotted with ochre-colored houses--in the
background of sky deep in tint, the foliage dark against it as if
printed upon its intense glaring blue, in the sharp lines of palms
and spiky leaves crossing stuccoed walls. The people that moved slowly
along the sidewalks fitted into this high-colored exotic setting.
There was no hurry or crowding among them. They progressed with an
un-American deliberation, tasting the delicate sweetness of the air,
rejoicing in the sky and the sun, pausing to look at the dark bushiness
of a dracæna against a wash of blue, the skeleton blossom of a Century
plant, the pool of thick scarlet made by a parterre of geranium.

The three sisters--Hannah and Pearl leading, Berny and Hazel walking
behind with Josh--fared buoyantly down the street. As they passed, they
commented on the houses and their inmates. They had plenty of stories
of the dwellers in those solemn palaces, many of whom were people whose
humble beginnings they knew by heart, and whose rapid rise had been
watched almost awe-stricken by an admiring and envious community.

As the Ryan house loomed into view their chatter ceased and their eyes,
serious with staring attention, were fixed on the mansion which had
so stubbornly closed its doors on one of them. Sensations of varying
degrees of animosity stirred in each of them, except the child, still
too young to be tainted by the corroding sense of worldly injustice.
She skipped along sidewise, her warm, soft hand clasped in her Aunt
Hannah’s decently-gloved palm. Some wave or vibration of the intense
feelings of her elders passed to her, and as they drew nearer the house
she, too, began to grow grave, and her skipping quieted down into a
sober walk.

“That’s Uncle Dominick’s house, isn’t it?” she said to Hannah.

Hannah nodded. By far the most amiable and wide-minded of the sisters,
she could not rise above the sense of rankling indignation that she
felt against the Ryans for their treatment of Berny.

“That’s the biggest house in San Francisco,” said Pearl over her
shoulder to her parents. “Ain’t it, Popper?”

“I guess it is,” answered Josh, giving his head a confirmatory wag,
“and even if it ain’t, it’s big enough, the Lord knows!”

“I can’t see what a private family wants with all that room,” said
Hannah with a condemnatory air. “There must be whole sootes of rooms on
that upper floor that nobody lives in.”

“Don’t you fret. They’re all occupied,” said Berny. “Each one of them
has their own particular soote. Cornie has three rooms all of her own,
and even the housekeeper has a private bath!”

“And there’s twelve indoor servants,” said Hazel. “They want a lot of
space for them. Twelve servants, just think of it!”

“Twelve servants!” ejaculated Hannah almost with a groan. “Well, that
don’t seem to me right.”

They were close to the house now and silence fell on them, as though
the antagonism of its owners was exhaled upon them from the mansion’s
aggressive bulk, like an unspoken curse. They felt overawed, and at
the same time proud that one of their number should have even the most
distant affiliations with a family too exclusive to know her. The
women with their more responsive and sensitive natures felt it more
delicately than Josh, who blunderingly expressed one of the thoughts of
the moment by remarking,

“Some day you’ll live in there, Berny, and boss the twelve servants.”

“Rats!” said Berny, giving her head an angry toss. “I’d rather live in
my flat and boss Sing.”

Josh’s whistle of facetious incredulity died away incomplete, for at
that moment the hall door opened and a portly masculine shape emerged
upon the porch. Berny, at the first glance, was not sure of its
identity, but her doubts were dispelled by her brother-in-law’s quick
sentence, delivered on the rise of a surprised breath.

“Bill Cannon, by gum! What’s he doing there?”

This name, as powerful to conjure with in the city as in the
mining-camps, cast its instantaneous spell upon the sisters, who stared
avid-eyed upon the great man. He for his part seemed oblivious to
their glances and to their presence. He stood on the top step for a
musing moment, looking down with that sort of filmy fixity of gaze
which is noticeable in the glance of the resting eagle. His appearance
was a last crowning touch to the proud, unapproachable distinction of
the Ryans.

“Don’t he look as if he was thinking?” said Hazel in a whisper. “I
wonder what’s on his mind.”

“Probably that Monday’s pay-day and he don’t know whether he can
scratch through,” said the jocose Josh.

Berny did not say anything. She felt the interest in Cannon that she
did in all conquering, successful people, and in her heart it gave her
a sense of added importance to think that the family she had married
into and who refused to know her was on friendly terms with the Bonanza
King.

A half-hour later they had found seats in front of the band stand in
the park, and, settling themselves with a great rustling and preening
of plumage, prepared to enjoy the music. Hannah and Pearl were given
two chairs at the end of a row, and Hazel and Berny, with Josh as
escort, secured four on the line immediately behind. Dominick had not
yet appeared, so the sisters spread their skirts over a vacant seat
between them, and Berny, in the intervals of inspecting the people
around her, sent exploring glances about for the tall figure of her
husband.

She was very fond of the park and band stand on such Sunday afternoons.
To go there had been one of the great diversions of her girlhood. She
loved to look at this holiday gathering of all types, among which her
own class was largely represented. The outdoor amphitheater of filled
benches was to her what the ball-room and the glittering horseshoe at
the opera are to the woman of society. She saw many old friends among
the throng, girls who had been contemporaries of hers when she had
first “gone to work,” and had long since married in their own world and
now dragged children by the hand. She looked them over with an almost
passionate curiosity, discomfited to see the fresh youth of some, and
pleased to note that others looked weighed down with maternal cares.
Berny regarded women who had children as fools, and the children
grouped about these mothers of her own age--three and four sometimes,
with the husband carrying a baby--were to her only annoying, burdensome
creatures that made the party seem a little ridiculous, and had not
half the impressiveness or style of her elegant costume and lilac
frills.

The magnificent afternoon had brought out a throng of people. Every
seat in the lines of benches was full and foot passengers kept
constantly coming up, standing for a few measures, and then moving on.
They were of all kinds. The beauty of the day had even tempted the more
fashionable element out, and the two sisters saw many elegantly-dressed
ladies of the sort on whom Hazel fitted hats all day, and that evoked
in Berny a deep and respectful curiosity. Both women, sitting high in
their chairs, craned their necks this way and that, spying through
breaks in the crowd, and following attractive figures with dodging
movements of their heads. When either one saw anything she liked or
thought interesting she laid a hand on the other’s knee, giving it a
slight dig, and designated the object of her attention in a few broken
words, detached and disconnected like notes for a sentence.

They were thus engaged when Hazel saw Dominick and, rising, hailed
him with a beckoning hand. He made his way toward them, moving
deliberately, once or twice pausing to greet acquaintances. He was
taller than any man in the surrounding throng and Berny, watching
him, felt a sense of proprietary pride swelling in her when she noted
his superiority. The son of an Irish laborer and a girl who had begun
life as the general servant in a miner’s boarding-house, he looked as
if his forebears might have been the flower of the nation. He wore a
loose-fitting suit of gray tweed, a wide, gray felt sombrero, and round
his waist a belt of yellow leather. His collar turning back from his
neck exposed the brown strength of his throat, and on lifting his hat
in a passing salutation, his head with its cropped curly hair, the ears
growing close against it, showed golden brown in the sunlight.

With a phrase of greeting he joined them, and then as they swept their
skirts off the chair they had been hiding, slipped in front of Berny
and sat down. Hazel began to talk to him. Her conversation was of a
rallying, joking sort, at which she was quite proficient. Berny heard
him laugh and knew by the tone of his voice that he was pretending
and was not really amused. She had nothing particular to say to him,
feeling that she had accomplished enough in inducing him to join them,
and, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, continued to watch the
people. A blonde coiffure some rows in front caught her eye and she was
studying its intricacies through the interstices that came and went
between the moving heads, when the sudden emergence into view of an
unusually striking female figure diverted her attention. The woman had
come up from behind and, temporarily stopped by the crowd, had come
to a standstill a few rows in front of where the sisters sat. She was
accompanied by a young man dressed in the Sunday dignity of frock-coat
and silk hat. As he turned to survey the lines of filled chairs, Berny
saw that he had a pale skin, a small black mustache, and dark eyes.

But her interest in him was of the slightest. Her attention was
immediately riveted upon the woman, who became the object of a glance
which inspected her with a piercing eagerness from her hat to the hem
of her shirt. Berny could not see her face, but her habiliments were of
the latest mode and of an unusual and subdued elegance which bespoke an
origin in a more sophisticated center than San Francisco. Berny, all
agog with curiosity, stared at the lady’s back, noting not only her
clothes but a certain carelessness in the way they were put on. Her hat
was not quite straight. The comb, which crossed the back of her head
and kept her hair smooth, was crooked, and blonde wisps hung from it
over her collar. The hand that held up her skirt in a loose perfunctory
manner, as though these rich encasings were possessions of no moment,
was covered by a not particularly clean white glove.

Such unconsciousness added the distinction of indifference to the
already marked figure. Berny wondered more than ever who it was and
longed to see the averted face. She was about to lean across Dominick
and attract Hazel’s attention by a poking finger directed against her
knee, when the woman, with a word to her companion, moved her head and
let a slow glance sweep over the rows of faces.

“Hazel,” Berny hissed across Dominick, “look at that girl. Who is she?”

She did not divert her eyes from the woman’s face, which she now saw
in profile. It was pretty, she thought, more from a rich, unmingled
purity of coloring than from any particular beauty of feature. The head
with its gravely-traveling glance continued to turn till Berny had the
satisfaction of seeing the face in three-quarters. A moment later the
moving eyes lighted indifferently on Hazel, then ceased to progress,
suddenly, bruskly, as though checked by the imperative stoppage of
regulating machinery.

Only a person watching closely would have noticed it, but Berny was
watching with the most vigilant closeness. She saw the infusion of a
new and keener interest transform the glance, concentrate its lazy,
diffused attention into something that had the sharpness and suddenness
of a leaping flame. The next moment a flood of color rose clearly pink
over the face, and then, most surprising of all, the lady bent her head
in a grave, deliberate bow.

Berny turned, startled--and in a vague, undefined way, disturbed,
too--to see who had been the object of this salutation. To her
astonishment it was Dominick. As she looked at him, he replaced
his hat and she saw--to the augmentation of that vague sense of
disturbance--that he was as pale as the bowing woman was pink.

“Dominick,” she exclaimed, “who’s that?”

“Miss Cannon,” he said in a low tone.

“Rose Cannon?” hissed Hazel on the other side of him, her face thrust
forward, and tense in the interest of the moment, “Bill Cannon’s
daughter?”

“Yes. I met her at Antelope.”

“Berny, did you see her dress?” Hazel hung over her brother-in-law in
her excitement. “That’s straight from Paris, I’ll bet you a dollar.”

“Yes, I saw it,” said Berny in a voice that did not sound particularly
exhilarated; “maybe it is.”

She looked back at Miss Cannon who had turned away and was moving off
through the crowd with her escort. Then she leaned toward Dominick. His
voice had not sounded natural; as she placed her arm against his she
could feel that he trembled.

She said nothing but settled back in her chair, dryly swallowing. In
those few past moments her whole world had undergone a revolution
that left her feeling dazed and a little sick. It was as if the earth
had suddenly whirled around and she had come up panting and clutching
among familiar things reversed and upset. In an instantaneous flash
of illumination she saw everything--the look in the woman’s eyes, her
rush of color, Dominick’s voice, his expression, the trembling of his
arm--it was all perfectly plain! This was the girl he had been shut in
Antelope with for three weeks. Now she knew what the change was, the
inexplicable, mysterious change that had so puzzled her.

She felt bewildered, and under her bewilderment a pain, a fierce,
unfamiliar pain, gripped her. She did not for the moment say anything
or want to speak, and she felt as a child does who is dazed and
stupefied by an unexpected assault of ill treatment. The slight
sensation of inward sinking, that made her feel a little sick,
continued and she sat in a chilled and drooping silence, all her
bridling conceit in herself and her fine clothes stricken suddenly out
of her.

She heard Hazel asking Dominick questions about Miss Cannon, and she
heard Dominick’s answers, brief and given with a reticent doggedness.
Then Hazel asked him for the time and she was conscious of his elbow
pressing against her arm as he felt for his watch. As he drew it out
and held it toward the questioner, Berny suddenly leaned forward, and,
catching his hand with the watch in it, turned its face toward her.
The hand beneath hers was cold, and shook. She let it go and again
sank back in her chair. The feeling of sickness grew stronger and was
augmented by a sense of physical feebleness, of being tremulous and
cold deep down in her bones.

Hazel rose to her feet, shaking her skirts into place.

“Let’s go on,” she said, “it’s getting chilly. Come along, Josh. I
suppose if you were let alone, you’d sit here till sundown listening to
the music in a trance.”

Dominick and Josh rose and there was an adjusting and putting-on of
wraps. Berny still sat motionless, her hands, stiff in their tight
gloves, lying open on her lap.

“Come along, Berny,” said Hazel. “It’s too cold to sit here any longer.
Why, how funny you look, all pale and shriveled up! You’re as bad as
Josh. You and he ought to have married each other. You’d have been a
prize couple.”

Josh laughed loudly at this sally, leaning round the figure of his wife
to present his foolish, good-humored face, creased with a grin, to
Berny.

“Are you willing, Berny?” he cried gaily. “I can get a divorce whenever
you say. It will be dead easy; brutal and inhuman treatment. Just say
the word!”

“There’ll be brutal and inhuman treatment if you don’t move on and stop
blocking the way, Josh McCrae,” said Hazel severely. “I want to go out
that side and there you are right in the path, trying to be funny.”

The cheerful Josh, still laughing, turned and moved onward between the
seats, the others following him. The mass of the crowd was not yet
leaving, and as the little group moved forward in a straggling line
toward the drive, the exciting opening of the _William Tell Overture_
boomed out from the sounding board. It was a favorite piece, and they
left lingeringly, Hazel and Josh particularly fascinated, with heads
turned and ears trained on the band. Josh’s hand, passed through his
wife’s arm, affectionately pressed her against his side, for despite
the sharpness of their recriminations they were the most loving of
couples.

Berny was the last of the line. In the flurry of departure her silence
had passed unnoticed, and that she should thus lag at the tail of the
procession was not in any way remarkable, as, at the best of times,
she was not much of a walker and in her high-heeled Sunday shoes her
progress was always deliberate.

Looking ahead of her, she saw the landscape still as a picture under
the slanting, lurid sunlight. It seemed to be painted with unnaturally
glaring tints, to be soaked in color. The grass, crossed with long
shadows, was of the greenness of an aniline dye. The massed foliage
of tree groups showed a melting richness of shades, no one clearly
defined, all fused in a thick, opaque lusciousness of greens. The
air was motionless and very clear. Where a passing carriage stirred
the dust the powdery cloud rose, spreading a tarnishing blur on the
crystalline clarity of the scene. The sun injected these dust films
with gold, and they settled slowly, as if it made them heavy like
ground-up particles of metal.

Yet, to Berny, this hectic prospect looked gray; all color seemed
sucked from it. It appeared pale and alien, its comfortable intimacy
gone. She was like a stranger walking in a strange place, a forlorn,
remote land, where she felt miserable and homesick. The sense of being
dazed was passing from her. Walking forward with short, careful steps,
she was slowly coming to the meaning of her discovery--adjusting
herself to it, realizing its significance. She had an uncomfortable
sensation of not being able to control the muscles round her mouth, so
that if spoken to she would have had difficulty in answering, and would
have been quite unable to smile.

An open carriage passed her, and she drew aside, then mechanically
looked after it as it rolled forward. There was a single figure in
it--a woman. Berny could see her head over the lowered hood, and the
little parasol she held, white with a black lace cover and having a
joint in the handle. Her eyes followed this receding head, moving so
evenly against the background of trees. It soared along without sinking
or rising, with the even, forward flight of a bird, passed Hannah and
Josh and Hazel, turning to drop on them quick looks, which seemed, from
its elevated position and the shortness of the inspection, to have
something of disdain in them.

As the carriage drew near Dominick, who walked at the head of the line
with Pearl by the hand, Berny saw the head move, lean forward, and
then, as the vehicle overhauled and passed the young man, turn at right
angles and bow to him. The wheel almost brushed his shoulder. He drew
back from it with a start and lifted his hat. Hazel, who was walking
just in front of Berny, turned and projecting her lips so that they
stood out from her face in a red circle, hissed through them,

“Old Lady Ryan!” and then in a slightly louder key,

  “You take a hatchet and I’ll take a saw,
  And we’ll cut off the head of my mother-in-law.”




CHAPTER XIII

THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL


The conversation with her old friend had upset Mrs. Ryan. These were
grievances she did not talk of to all the world, and the luxury of such
plain speaking was paid for by a re-awakened smart. The numb ache of a
sorrow was always with her, but her consciousness of it was dulled in
the diversion of every day’s occupations. Bringing it to the surface
this way gave it a new vitality, and when the conversation was over and
the visitor gone it refused to subside into its old place.

She went slowly up stairs, hearing the low murmur of voices from the
sitting-room where Cornelia and Jack Duffy were still secluded. Even
the thought of that satisfactorily-budding romance did not cheer her as
it had done earlier in the day. As she had told Cannon, she was not the
woman she had been. Old age was coming on her and with it a softening
of her iron nature. She wanted her son, her Benjamin, dearly beloved
with all the forces of her maturity as his father had been with all
the glow of her youth.

In her own room she threw aside the lace curtains, and looking out on
the splendor of the afternoon, determined to seek cheer in the open
air. Like all Californians she had a belief in the healing beneficence
of air and sunlight. As the sun had soothed Berny of her sense of care
so now it wooed her enemy also to seek solace in its balm. She rang for
the servant and ordered the carriage. A few minutes later, clad in rich
enshrouding black, a small and fashionable bonnet perched on her head,
she slowly made her way down stairs and out to the sidewalk where the
victoria, glittering in the trim perfection of its appointments and
drawn by a pair of well-matched chestnuts, stood at the curb.

The man on the box touched his hat with respectful greeting and the
Chinese butler, who had accompanied her down the steps, arranged the
rug over her knees and stepped back with the friendly “good-by,” which
is the politeness of his race. They respected, feared, and liked her.
Every domestic who had ever worked in Delia Ryan’s service from the
first “hired girl” of her early Shasta days to the staff that now
knew the rigors of her dominion, had found her a just and generous
if exacting mistress. She had never been unfair, she had never been
unkind. She was one of themselves and she knew how to manage them,
how to make them understand that she was master, and that no drones
were permitted in her hive; how to make them feel that she had a heart
that sympathized with them, not as creatures of an alien class remotely
removed from her own, but as fellow beings, having the same passions,
griefs and hopes as herself.

As the carriage rolled forward she settled back against the cushioned
seat and let her eyes roam over the prospect. It was the heart of the
afternoon, still untouched by chill, not a breath stirring. Passing up
the long drive which leads to the park, the dust raised by wheels hung
ruddy in the air. The long shadows of trees striped the roadway in an
irregular black pattern, picked out with spatterings of sunshine, like
a spilled, gold liquid. Belts of fragrance, the breaths of flowering
shrubs, extended from bushy coppices, and sometimes the keen, acrid
odor of the eucalyptus rose on the air. From this lane of entrance
the park spread fan-like into a still, gracious pleasance. The rich,
golden light slept on level stretches of turf and thick mound-shaped
groups of trees. The throb of music--the thin, ethereal music of
out-of-doors--swelled and sank; the voices of children rose clear and
fine from complicated distances, and once the raucous cry of a peacock
split the quietness, seeming to break through the pictorial serenity of
the lovely, dreamy scene.

Mrs. Ryan sat without movement, her face set in a sphinx-like
profundity of expression. People in passing carriages bowed to her but
she did not see them and their salutes went unreturned. Her vision was
bent back on scenes of her past, so far removed from what made up the
present, so different and remote from her life to-day, that it did not
seem as if the same perspective could include two such extremes. Even
her children were not links of connection between those old dead times
and now. They had been born when Con’s fortunes were in the ascendant.
They had known none of the privations of the brave days when she and
her man had faced life together, young, and loving, and full of hope.

The carriage ascended a slight rise, and the sea, a glittering plain,
lay in full view. It met the sky in a white dazzle of light. All its
expanse coruscated as if each wave was crested with tinsel, and where
they receded from the beach it was as though a web of white and shining
tissue was drawn back, torn and glistening, from the restraining clutch
of the sand. The smooth bareness of fawn-colored dunes swept back from
the shore. They rose and fell in undulations, describing outlines of a
suave, fluid grace, lovely as the forms of drifting snow, or the swell
of waves. Ocean and dunes, for all the splendor of sky and sun that
overarched and warmed them, suggested a gaunt, primeval desolation.
They had the loneliness of the naked earth and the unconquerable
sea--were a bit of the primordial world before man had tamed and
softened it.

Mrs. Ryan swept them with a narrow, inward gaze which saw neither,
but, in their place, the house in Virginia City, where she and Con
had lived when they were first married in the early sixties. It was
of “frame”--raw, yellow boards with narrow strips of wood nailed over
every seam to keep the wind out. There had been a rough porch on one
side where her wash-tub had stood. Out-of-doors there in the summer
weather she had bent over the wash-board most of the day. She had made
enough money to furnish the prospect hole that Con was working, with
tools and miner’s supplies. Little Dick was born there; he had died
afterward in Shasta. He used to lie in a wash-basket on the soiled
linen in the sun. He would have been forty-five now, sixteen years
older than Dominick.

She gave an order to the coachman who, drawing up, turned the horses,
and the carriage started on its return trip. The sun was behind it,
painting with level, orange rays the thick foliage of trees and the
backs of foot passengers. Whatever it touched had the appearance of
being overlaid with a gilded glaze through which its natural colors
shone, deepened and brilliant.

Mrs. Ryan’s memories had leaped from Virginia City to Shasta.
After Con’s prospect at Gold Hill had “petered” they had moved to
California, been members of that discouraged route which poured,
impoverished in pocket and enfeebled in health, from the wreck of the
gutted Nevada camp back to their own Golden State and its beguiling
promises. They had opened a grocery in Shasta in sixty-eight, first a
little place where Con and she waited behind the counter, then, when
they began to prosper, a big store on the corner. “Ryan’s” was written
over the entrance in the beginning, when they had no money to spend, in
black on a strip of canvas, after that in gold letters on a handsome
sign. She had kept the books there while Con had managed the business,
and they had done well. It was the beginning of their prosperity and
how they had worked for it! Night after night up till midnight and the
next morning awake before the birds. Two children had died there and
three had been born. It had been a full life, a splendid life, the best
a woman could know, working for her own, making them a place in the
world, fighting her way up, shoulder to shoulder with her man.

Money had been her goal. She had not wanted to hoard it; of itself it
meant nothing to her. She had wanted it for her children: to educate
them better than she had been educated, to give them the advantages
she had never known, to buy pleasures and position and consideration
for them. She had felt the insignificance of poverty, and she was
determined that they should never feel it. They should have the power
that it seemed to Delia Ryan money alone gave, the thing she had none
of, when, in her ragged girlhood, she winced and chafed under the
dominance of those she felt to be her inferiors. She was a materialist
by nature, and life had made her more of one. Money conquered, money
broke the trail that led everywhere, money paid the gate entrance to
all paradises. That was what she had always thought. And now when she
was close on seventy, and her strength to fight for the old standards
and ward off the creeping chill of age was weakened, she had come to
realize that perhaps it was not the world-ruling power she had thought
it. She had come to see it could turn upon one in strange ways. It
carried power and it carried a curse. Dominick, whose life it was to
have made brilliant, whose career it was to have crowned, Dominick had
lost all through it.

She was thinking this as the carriage swept into the wider reach of
the drive near the band stand. Though the music was still throbbing
on the air, people were already leaving. Broken lines were detaching
themselves from the seated mass in the chairs, disappearing among
the trees, and straggling out into the road. The wheels of the
victoria almost brushed the shoulders of a little party that moved
in irregular file between the grass edge and the drive. Mrs. Ryan let
her uninterested glance touch the hatted heads of the women and then
move forward to the man who headed the column. He held by the hand a
pretty, fair-haired child, who, leaning out from his restraining grasp,
walked a little before him, looking back laughingly into his face. Mrs.
Ryan’s eyes, alighting on his back, became suddenly charged with a
fierce fixity of attention. The carriage overhauled him and before he
looked up she leaned forward and saw his profile, the brow marked by a
frown, the child’s gay prattle causing no responsive smile to break the
brooding gravity that held his features.

As he felt the vibration of the wheel at his shoulder he started
aside and looked up. When he recognized his mother his face reddened,
and, with a quick smile, he lifted his hat. Her returning salute was
serious, almost tragically somber. Then the victoria swept on, and he
and the child, neither for a moment speaking, looked after the bonneted
head that soared away before them with a level, forward vibration, like
a floating bird, the little parasol held stiffly erect on its jointed
handle.

As Mrs. Ryan passed down the long park entrance she thought no more
of the past. The sight of her son, heading the file of his wife’s
relations, his face set in an expression of heavy dejection, scattered
her dreams of retrospect with a shattering impact. She had never seen
him look so frankly wretched; and to intensify the effect of his
wretchedness was the sprawling line of Iversons which surrounded him.
They seemed, to her furious indignation, like a guard cutting him off
from his kind, imprisoning him, keeping him for themselves. They were
publicly dragging him at their chariot wheels for all the world to see.
His wife instead of getting less was getting more power over him. She
had made him ask for the invitation to the ball and now she made him
escort herself and her sisters about on holidays.

The old woman’s face was dark with passion, her pale lips set into a
tight line. Money! Money might make trouble and bring disappointment,
but it would talk to those people. Money was all they were after. Well,
they could have it!

She let three days go by before she made the move she had determined
on ten minutes after she had passed Dominick. The Wednesday morning
following that Sunday--apparently a day of innocuous and simple
happenings, really so fraught with Fate--she put on her outdoor things
and, dispensing with the carriage, went down town on the car to see
Bill Cannon.

The Bonanza King’s office was on the first floor of a building owned
by himself on one of the finest Montgomery Street corners. It had been
built in the flush times of the Comstock and belonged to that epoch of
San Francisco architecture where long lines of windows were separated
by short columns and overarched by ornate embellishments in wood. As
Mrs. Ryan approached, the gold letters on these windows gleamed bravely
in the sun. They glittered even on the top-story casements, and her
eye, traveling over them, saw that they spelled names of worth, good
tenants who would add to the dignity and revenues of such an edifice.
She owned the corner opposite, and it gave her a pang of emulative envy
to notice how shabby her building looked, a relic of the sixties which
showed its antiquity in walls of brick, painted brown, and a restrained
meagerness of decoration in the matter of cornices. For some time she
had been thinking of tearing it down and raising a new, up-to-date
structure on the site. It would yield a fine interest on the investment
and be a good wedding jointure for Cornelia.

With her approach heralded by a rustling of rich stuffs and a subdued
panting, she entered the office. A long partition down one side of the
room shut off an inner sanctum of clerks. Through circular openings she
could see their faces, raised expectantly from ledgers as their ears
caught the frou-frou of skirts and a step, which, though heavy, was
undoubtedly feminine. She stopped at one of the circular openings where
the raised face looked older and graver than its fellows, and inquired
for Mr. Cannon, giving her name. In a moment the clerk was beside
her, knocking at a door which gave egress to still more sacred inner
precincts. Opening this, he bowed her into the dimly-lit solemnity
of the Bonanza King’s private office. Back in the outer room among
the clerks he relieved the strained curiosity of their faces with the
remark,

“Greek’s meeting Greek in there. It’s Mrs. Con Ryan.”

The private office looked out on an alley shut in a perpetual twilight
by the towering walls of surrounding buildings. The long windows that
ran from the floor to the ceiling could not let in enough light ever to
make it a bright room, and the something of dimness seemed appropriate
to the few massive pieces of furniture and the great safe in the
corner, with its lock glimmering from the dusk of continual shadow. Men
from windows across the alley could look into the office and see to
whom Bill Cannon was talking, and it was known that, for this reason,
he had another suite of rooms on one of the upper floors. But that that
most competent of business women, Con Ryan’s widow, should come to his
lair to parley with him was natural enough, and if the watchers across
the alley saw her it only added to their sober respect for the man who
was visited in his office by the richest woman in California.

She did not waste time beating about the bush. Sitting beside the desk,
facing the pale light from the long windows, she very quickly plunged
into the matter of her errand. It was a renewal of the conversation
of the previous Sunday. Cannon sat in his swivel chair, looking
meditatively at her. He had expected her, but not so soon, and as he
watched her his face showed a mild friendly surprise breaking through
its observant attention. It would have been difficult for any one,
even so astute a woman as Mrs. Ryan, to guess that her request for his
assistance in severing Dominick’s marriage bonds was affording the old
man the keenest gratification.

Their talk lasted nearly an hour. Before the interview ended they had
threshed out every aspect of the matter under discussion. There would
be no loose ends or slighted details in any piece of work which engaged
the attention of this bold and energetic pair of conspirators. The men
on the other side of the alley looked down on them, wondering what
business was afoot between Mrs. Con Ryan and Bill Cannon, that they
talked so long in the big dim office with its gloomy mahogany furniture
and the great black safe looming up in the corner.




CHAPTER XIV

THE GOD DESCENDS


Two days after this momentous combination of her enemies, Berny was
sitting in the parlor of her flat, writing a letter. It was three
o’clock in the afternoon and she had just dressed herself for her
daily jaunt down town, where she spent an hour or two looking into
the shop windows, pricing articles of apparel, taking a glass of soda
water, and stopping for chats with acquaintances under awnings and
in open doorways. Her life was exceedingly barren of occupation and
companionship. When she had married, she had dropped all work save
such as seemed to her fitting for the wife of a rich man. Outside her
sisters she had no friends. She knew the wives of several of the bank
officials and to them, as representing a rise in the social scale, she
clung hopefully. The letter she was now writing was to one of them who
had taken a sick child to the country.

She had finished it, and was inscribing her signature, when a ring at
the bell caught her ear. She raised her head listening, and then bent
it again over the letter. Visitors were too rare at the Sacramento
Street flat for her to cherish any delusive hopes. Writing the address
in her best hand, she did not hear a foot ascending the stairs, nor
know that it actually was a visitor, till a tap on the door-post of the
room made her turn and ejaculate a startled “Come in!” The door that
led from the parlor to the hall had been removed, and a bamboo portière
hung in the opening. A large masculine hand thrust apart the hanging
strands, and Bill Cannon, hat in hand, confident and yet apologetic,
entered the room.

He had been surprised when he had seen how small and unpretentious
was the home of Con Ryan’s only son. He was more than ever surprised
when the Chinaman, with the unveiled impudence of those domestics when
the employes of masters they do not like, had waved his proffered
card aside, and with a jerk of his head motioned him forward to a
doorway at the end of the passage. Now, on entering, he took in, in an
impressionistic sweep, the overcrowded, vulgar garishness of the little
room, saturated with the perfume of scents and sachets, and seeming to
be the fitting frame for the woman who rose from a seat by the desk.

She looked at him inquiringly with something of wariness and distrust
in her face. She was the last of the ascending scale of surprises he
had encountered, for she was altogether better-looking, more a person
to be reckoned with, than he had expected. His quick eye, trained to
read human nature, recognized the steely determination of this woman
before she spoke, saw it in the level scrutiny of her eyes, in the
decision of her close mouth. He felt a sensation, oft experienced and
keenly pleasurable, of gathering himself together for effort. It was
the instinct of an old warrior who loves the fray.

Berny, on her side, knew him at the first glance, and her sensations
were those of disturbance and uneasiness. She remembered him to be a
friend of the Ryans’, and she had arrived at the stage when any friend
of the Ryans’ was an enemy of hers. She was instantly in arms and on
the defensive. Rose had not yet taken shape in her mind as a new,
menacing force conniving against her. Besides, she had no idea that
Rose reciprocated the sentiment that Dominick cherished for her. Her
discovery had only made her certain that Dominick loved another woman.
But this had shaken her confidence in everything, and she looked at the
old man guardedly, ready for an attack and bracing herself to meet it.

“You’ll pardon this intrusion, won’t you?” he said in a deep,
friendly voice, and with a manner of cordial urbanity. “I tried to
do it correctly, but the Chinaman had other designs. It was he who
frustrated me. Here’s the card I wanted him to take to you.”

He approached her, holding out a card which she took, still unsmiling,
and glanced at. Her instinct of dissimulation was strong, and, uneasy
as she was, she pretended to read the name, not wanting him to see that
she already knew him.

“Mr. William G. Cannon,” she read, and then looked up at him and made
a slight inclination of her head as she had seen actresses do on the
stage. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Cannon?” she added, and completed the
impressiveness of her greeting by a gesture, which also suggested a
histrionic origin, toward an adjacent chair.

He backed toward the chair, pulling it out into the unencumbered space
in the middle of the floor, his movements deliberate and full of
design, as if he felt comfortably at home. Subsiding into the seat,
which had arms and was rather cramped for his large bulk, he laid his
hat among the knick-knacks of a near-by table and said smilingly,

“Now, let me make my apologies for coming. In the first place, I’m an
old man. We’ve got a few privileges to compensate us for the loss of so
much that’s good. Don’t you think that’s fair, Mrs. Ryan?”

Berny liked him. There was something so easy and affable in his manner,
something that made her feel he would never censure her for her past,
or, in fact, think about it at all. But she was still on her guard,
though the embarrassment she had felt on his entrance disappeared.

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why an old man should
have more privileges than a young one.”

“But you do know,” he said quickly, and giving a short, jolly laugh,
“that an old man who’s known your husband all his life can have the
privilege of calling on you without an introduction. You’ll admit that,
won’t you?”

He leaned out of the narrow chair, his broad face creased with a
good-humored smile, and his eyes, keen and light-colored, sharp on
hers. Berny felt doubtful as to whether she liked him so much. She,
too, had a large experience of men, and the hard intelligence of the
eyes in the laughing face made her more than ever on the defensive.

“I’m sure I’m very glad you came,” she said politely; “any friend of
Dominick’s is welcome here.”

“I’ve been that for a good many years. My friendship with the Ryans
goes back to the days before Dominick was born. I knew Con and Delia
well in the old times in Virginia when we were all young there
together, all young, and strong, and poor. I’ve known Dominick since he
was a baby, though I haven’t seen much of him of late years.”

“Nor of his wife either,” Berny was going to say, but she checked
herself and substituted, “Is that so?” a comment which seemed to
her to have the advantages of being at once dignified and elegantly
non-committal.

“Yes, I knew Con when he was working on a prospect of his own called
the Mamie R at Gold Hill. I was a miner on the Royal Charles close by
on steady wages. Con was in for himself. He was playing it in pretty
hard luck. If it hadn’t been for his wife he couldn’t have hung on as
long as he did. She was a fine, husky, Irish girl, strong as a man; and
the washing she used to do on the back porch of the shanty kept them.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Berny, much interested, and hoping that
her visitor would continue to indulge in further reminiscences of Mrs.
Ryan’s lowly beginnings.

“That was forty-five years ago,” he went on, “and the fellows that were
on top then are underneath now, and vice versa. But Delia Ryan’s just
about the same. There’s no shifting, or changing, or not knowing her
own mind about her. She’s one of the strongest women in California; one
of the biggest women anywhere.”

This was not what Berny had expected, and was more than she could
subscribe to. The distinguished position of her guest made her want to
be polite, but there was a limit to her powers of diplomatic agreement.
A silver blotter stood on the desk, and she took it up and began
absently rolling it back and forth over her letter.

“She seems to be a great friend of yours?” she said, watching the
blotter with lowered eyes.

“She’s all that,” he answered heartily. “One of the greatest. She is
to any one who knows her well. She’s a big nature; nothing picayune
or small about her. A true friend and a fair enemy. She’s the most
generous woman I ever knew.”

“We haven’t seen much of her generosity,” said Berny. Her words did
not come with suddenness, but slowly, with a measured and biting
deliberation.

“You’ve got your chance to see it now,” answered the old man.

Berny looked at him, a side glance from the corner of one long, dark
eye. Her face was perfectly grave and the eyes fixed on him were imbued
with a considering, apprehensive expectancy. He looked very large,
squeezed into the small chair, but he seemed oblivious to the fact that
there was anything ridiculous in his appearance, as well as to his own
discomfort. The easy good-humor had gone from his face. It was alert,
shrewd, and eagerly interested. Berny knew now that he had not come to
pay his respects to Dominick’s wife. A sensation of internal trembling
began to possess her and the color deepened in her face.

“How have I got my chance?” she said. “I guess if you know the Ryans
so well you must know that they won’t have anything to do with me.”

“They’ll have a good deal to do with you if you’ll let them,” he
answered.

There was a momentary pause, during which--now conscious of battle and
menace--Berny strove to control her rising excitement and keep her head
cool. He watched her with a glance which had the boring penetration of
a gimlet.

“That’s funny,” she said, “not wanting to speak to me for two years and
then all of a sudden wanting to have a good deal to do with me. It’s a
sort of lightning-change act, like you see at the Orpheum. I guess I’d
understand it better if I knew more about it.”

“Then I’ll tell you. Will you let me speak frankly, Mrs. Ryan? Have I
got your permission to go right ahead and talk the plain talk that’s
the only way a plain man knows?”

“Yes,” said Berny. “Go right ahead.”

He looked at the carpet for a considering moment, then raised his eyes
and, gazing into hers with steady directness, said,

“It wouldn’t be fair if I pretended not to know that you and your
husband’s family are unfriendly. I know it, and that they have, as you
say, refused to know you. They’ve not liked the marriage; that’s the
long and the short of it.”

“And what right have they got--” began Berny, raising her head with a
movement of war, and staring belligerently at him. He silenced her with
a lifted hand:

“Don’t let’s go into that. Don’t let’s bother ourselves with the
rights and wrongs of the matter. We could talk all afternoon and be
just where we were at the beginning. Let’s have it understood that
our attitude in this is businesslike and impersonal. They don’t like
the marriage--that’s admitted. They’ve refused to know you--that’s
admitted. And let us admit, for the sake of the argument, that they’ve
put you in a damned disagreeable position.”

Berny, sitting stiffly erect, all in a quiver of nerves, anger, and
uncertainty, had her eyes fixed on him in a glare of questioning.

“That’s all true,” she said grimly. “That’s a statement I’ll not
challenge.”

“Then we’ll agree that your position is disagreeable, and that it’s
been made so by the antagonism of your husband’s family. Now, Mrs.
Ryan, let me tell you something that maybe you don’t understand. You’re
never going to conquer or soften your mother-in-law. I don’t know
anything about it, but perhaps I can make a guess. You’ve thought you’d
win her over, that you’d married her son and made him a good wife and
that some day she’d acknowledge that and open her doors and invite you
in. My dear young lady, just give up building those castles in the
air. There’s nothing in them. You don’t know Delia Ryan. She’ll never
bend and the one thing that’ll break her is death. She’s got no hard
feelings against you except as her son’s wife. That’s the thing she’ll
never forgive you for. I’m not saying it’s not pretty tough on you. I’m
just stating a fact. What I do say is that she’s never going to be any
different about it. She’s started on her course, and she’s going to
go straight along on the same route till she comes to the place where
we’ve all got to jump off.”

At the commencement of this speech, a surge of words had boiled up
within Berny. Now as he stopped she leaned toward him and the words
burst out of her lips.

“And what right has she got to act that way, I’d like to know? What’s
she got against me? What’s wrong with me? Dominick Ryan married me of
his own free will. He chose me and he was of age. I’d been a typewriter
in the Merchants and Mechanics Trust Company, honestly earning my
living. Is that what she don’t like about me? I might have got my
living another way, a good sight easier and pleasanter, but I wasn’t
that kind. Maybe she didn’t like a decent working-girl for her son’s
wife? And what was she to kick? Didn’t you just say now she washed for
the miners in Virginia? Didn’t she used to keep a two-room grocery at
Shasta? I don’t see that there’s anything so darned aristocratic about
that. There were no more diamond tiaras and crests on the harness in
her early days than there are in mine. She’s forgetting old times. You
can just tell her I’m not.”

She came to a breathless close, her body bent forward, her dark eyes
burning with rage and excitement. This suddenly sank down, chilled,
and, as it were, abashed by the aspect of her listener, who was sitting
motionless in his chair, his hands clasped over the curving front of
his torso, his chin sunk on his collar, and his eyes fixed upon her
with a look of calm, ruminating attention. Her words had not only
failed to heat him to controversy, but he had the air of patiently
waiting for them to cease, when he could resume the matter under
discussion.

“It’s natural enough that you should feel that way about it,” he said,
“but let’s put out of the argument these purely personal questions.
You think one way and Mrs. Ryan thinks another. We recognize that and
assume that it is so. We’re not passing judgment. I’d be the last one
to do that between two ladies. What I came to talk of to-day was not
the past but the present; not the wrongs you’ve suffered from the
Ryans, but the way they can be righted.”

“There’s only one way they can be righted,” she said.

“Well now, let’s see,” persuasively. “We’re both agreed that your
position in San Francisco is hard. Here you are in the town where you
were born and raised, leading a lonely life in what, considering your
marriage, we might call reduced circumstances. You have--you’ll excuse
my plain talking--little or no social position. Your life is monotonous
and dull, when, at your age, it should be all brightness and pleasure.
In the height of your youth and beauty you’re cramped in a small flat,
deprived of the amusements of your age, ostracized from society, and
pinched by lack of money. That seems to me a pretty mean position for a
woman of your years and appearance.”

Berny made no answer. She was confused by his thus espousing her cause,
using almost the words she herself would have used in describing her
unmerited trials. She was one of those women who, with an almost
unbreakable nerve, when attacked or enraged, tremble. She was seized
now with this trembling and to control it clasped her hands tight in
her lap and tried to hold her body stiff by will power.

“It is from this situation,” he went on, his voice slightly lowered,
“that Mrs. Ryan offers to release you.”

A gleam of light zigzagged through the woman’s uncomprehension, and the
trembling seemed to concentrate in her knees and stomach.

“To release me?” she repeated with a rising inflection.

“Yes. She’ll make it possible for you to escape from all this, to live
in the way you ought to live, and to have the position and amusements
you are entitled to. As I said to you before, she’s got no ill feeling
toward you except as her son’s wife. She wishes you well, and to prove
it she is ready to make you the most generous offer.”

Berny’s rigidity relaxed and she leaned against the chair-back. She
said nothing, but her eyes remained fixed on his face.

“I told you she was generous and see if I am not right,” he continued.
“She will make you a rich woman, independent of any one, the money
yours to do with as you like, if you’ll consent to the few conditions
she exacts.”

“What are they?”

“That you will leave your husband for a year and at the end of that
time ask him to give you your liberty, he suing you for divorce on the
ground of desertion.”

There was a pause. Berny had moved her eyes from the old man’s face,
and was looking at the blotter upon which her hand had again closed.
The cheek turned to him was a deep rose pink. He looked at her
unembarrassed and inquiring, as though he had made an ordinary business
proposition.

“It’s a bribe,” she said slowly, “a bribe to leave my husband.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say _that_,” he answered with a deprecating shrug.
“Call it a deal, a settlement. The terms are easy and favorable. You’ll
not find one of them unjust or unfair. You’re to leave the city, going
preferably to Chicago or New York and staying there for the period of
desertion. Seven thousand dollars will be set aside for your expenses.
At the end of the year you are to write to Dominick telling him you no
longer want to live with him and asking him to give you your freedom.
After the divorce is granted the sum of fifty thousand dollars will be
handed over to you, the one condition being that you will leave the
country and go to Europe. It is also understood, of course, that the
matter’s to be kept a secret from Dominick. He must think that you are
acting entirely from your own free will. He mustn’t guess his mother’s
had any part in it.”

“She’s not ashamed to try to buy me off, but she’s ashamed to have her
precious boy know it!”

The old man looked at her with a slight, indulgent smile, inwardly
wondering how Dominick Ryan had endured life with this woman.

“Oh, it’s best not to have Dominick know,” he said easily; “not because
there’s anything to be ashamed of, but on general principles it’s best
to have as few complications as possible in the way of other people’s
butting in. What good would there be in Dominick’s knowing?”

She rolled the blotter back and forth for a moment without answering,
then said,

“So Mrs. Ryan offers me fifty thousand dollars to desert my husband?”

“With one condition--that you leave the country. Just look what that’s
going to mean!” He rose from the narrow, upholstered seat, took a light
chair that stood near by and, setting it close to her, sat sidewise on
it, one hand extended toward her. “Fifty thousand dollars is a good
bit of money over here, but over there it’s a fortune. You’d be a rich
woman with that amount in your own right. You could take an apartment
in Paris, or a slice of some prince-feller’s palace down in Rome. On
the income of that capital, safely invested, you could live in a style
that only a millionaire can manage over here--have your own carriage,
dress like a queen, go to the opera. They like Americans, especially
when they’ve got money. First thing you know you’d be right in it,
knowing everybody, and going everywhere. You’re nobody here, worse than
nobody. Over there you’d be one of the people everybody was talking
about and wanted to know. You’re not only a pretty woman, you’re a
smart woman; you could get on top in no time, marry into the nobility
if you wanted.”

Berny, her eyes on the blotter, said nothing.

“And what’s the alternative over here?” the tempter continued. “Staying
on as an outsider, being in a position where, though you’re lawfully
married and are living decently with your husband, you’re ostracized as
completely as if you weren’t married at all; where you’ve hardly got
enough to pay your way, cramped up in a corner like this, never going
anywhere or seeing anybody. Does that kind of life appeal to you? Not
if _I_ know anything.”

Berny lifted her head and looked at him. The color was now burning in
her cheeks and her eyes seemed to hold all the vitality of her rigid
face.

“You tell Mrs. Ryan,” she said slowly, “that I’ll lie dead in my coffin
before I’ll take her money and leave my husband.”

They looked at each other for a silent moment, two strong and
determined antagonists. Then the old man said mildly and pleasantly,

“Now don’t be too hasty; don’t jump at a decision in the heat of the
moment. Just at the first glimpse this way, you may feel surprised--may
take it as sort of out of the way and interfering. But when you’ve
thought it over, it will look different. Take time. You don’t have to
make your mind up now, or to-morrow, or the day after. Turn it over,
look at the other side, sleep on it for a few nights. Think a bit of
the things I’ve said. You don’t want to be hasty about it. It’s not the
kind of offer you get every day.”

“No, it’s not!” said Berny fiercely. “It’s too dirty for most people.
It’s too dirty for any one but Mrs. Ryan, and you can tell her I said
so.”

She rose to her feet, still clenching the blotter in her hand. He rose
too, interested, annoyed and disappointed, for he knew with a cynical
certainty just about what she was going to say.

“Yes,” she cried, stiff and quivering like a leaf, “go and tell her!
Tell her just what I said. I’ll see her in hell before I’ll take a cent
of her money, or budge an inch out of this house. She’s a fine one to
give herself such airs, and think herself too good to know me and then
offer to buy me off like a kept woman. Tell her I’m her son’s wife, and
I’ll stay so till she’s good and dead, and Dominick’s got his share of
his father’s estate. Tell her I’m here to stay, right here, here in
this flat, just round the corner from where she lives, and that I’m
Mrs. Ryan as well as she is, and that I’m going to stay so. This is my
home, here in San Francisco, where she’s tried to ruin me and freeze me
out, and here I stick.”

She glared at him as he stood, one hand on the back of his chair, his
eyes thoughtfully fixed on her.

“I wouldn’t be too hasty if I were you,” he said pacifically. “Things
done in a hurry are rarely satisfactory. It’s a bad way to do business.
You’re apt to let good chances slip by.”

[Illustration: “I’ll lie dead in my coffin before I’ll take her
  money”          _Page 263_]

“Don’t be afraid,” she said with grim significance. “I’m not going
to let mine slip by. I’ve married Dominick Ryan and I’m going to stay
by him.”

He turned to the table and picked up his hat, which was a soft, black
felt wide-awake. As he dented it into shape, he said,

“You’re sort of heated up and excited now, and a person’s brain don’t
work well in that state. You don’t want to come to any important
conclusions when you’re not cool and able to think. Sleep on this thing
for one night, anyway. You can call me up on the telephone to-morrow,
or probably it would be better to send a line by a messenger.”

“You’re very much interested in this affair, aren’t you?” she said with
sudden malicious meaning.

For the first time in the interview he was slightly taken aback. Her
face held a reserve of knowledge with which she seemed to be silently
taunting him.

“Naturally,” he said with an air of simple frankness, “as an old family
friend would be.”

“And that’s the only reason?”

“What other could there be?”

“Oh, I don’t know”--she turned and dropped the blotter on the desk with
a nonchalant movement--“I was just wondering.”

He eyed her for a second without speaking, and in this one moment of
scrutiny allowed a look of dislike and menace to creep into his face.
Then he said genially,

“Well, I guess this brings our interview to an end. It’s not been just
what you’d call a pleasant one, but I for one can say it’s left no hard
feelings. I hope you’ll admit as much.”

She shrugged her shoulders and turned to the desk.

“I’m not a good one at lies,” she said. “I leave that to the Ryans and
their old family friends.”

He laughed good-humoredly and answered,

“That’s all right. You never can hurt me by plain speaking. That’s the
only kind I know. I guess we’re neither of us great at guff. Remember
that I’ll expect a visit or a letter from you.”

“You’ll have to wait a long time for either,” she said without moving.

“Well, I’m a patient man, and everything comes to him who waits.”

She looked over her shoulder with a slight acid smile.

“Not _everything_,” she said.

“So long,” he answered, giving his hat a farewell wave at her. “I’ve
enjoyed meeting you and hope we’ll soon meet again in a more friendly
way. _Hasta Manana, Señora!_”

She wheeled so that she faced him and gave a short nod, then watched
him as he walked to the door. Here he turned, bowed deeply and
respectfully, and passed out into the hall, the bamboo strands of the
portière clashing together behind him. A moment later she heard the
bang of the street door.

She stood motionless in the middle of the room, her face deeply
flushed, her eyes fixed on the swaying curtain. For the first few
moments a blind excitement held her, and then from the welter of this,
her thoughts separated themselves and took definite directions. Rage,
triumph, bewilderment, alarm, surged to the surface of her mind.
Shaken by one after another she stood rigid in the intensity of her
preoccupation, not noticing the shaking of her knees or the thumping of
her heart.

Her two predominant sensations were rage and triumph. The insult of the
bribe burned in her--this flinging money at her as it might be flung at
a cast-off mistress. It deepened her detestation of the Ryans, and at
the same time gave her a sense of intimacy with them. It made them more
on a par with her, drew them down from the lofty heights whence they
had scornfully ignored her, to a place beside her, a place where they,
as well as she, did underhand, disreputable things they did not want
known.

And it showed her her power. Standing in the middle of the room with
her eyes still staring at the now motionless portière strands, she saw,
stretching away into a limitless gilded distance, her negotiations
with her husband’s family. If their desire to rupture the marriage took
them thus far, where might it not take them? She stared into a future
where she saw herself extracting money in vast amounts from them. It
was fortune--twice, three times this first paltry sum--waiting for her
when she chose to stretch her hand and take it. She could be rich, as
the old man said; she could go abroad, see the world, have all the joys
that riches give, when she chose to let Mrs. Ryan humbly pay her such a
sum as she would accept.

With a quick catch of her breath, she turned and moved to the window,
stirred to her depth with the exultation of unexpected power. And
standing there, the thought of the old man suddenly swept across
her, and with it, transfixing her in an attitude of frozen, inward
contemplation, the memory of his daughter. New vistas, extending away
through the abruptly-illuminated dimness of her previous ignorance,
suddenly opened before her, and she sent her startled vision exploring
down them. At the end of them, waiting for Dominick in an attitude of
welcome, was the pink and white girl she had seen in the park.

The discovery was made so quickly, came upon her flushed complacency
with such a shock of unexpectedness, that even her sharp, suspicious
mind could not for the moment take it in. Then Miss Cannon’s face,
as she had seen it in that moment of recognition in the park, rose
with confirming clearness on her memory, and she saw straight to the
heart of the plot. It was not the Ryans alone who wanted to buy her
off. It was the Cannons as well. They not only wanted Dominick to get
rid of her; they wanted him to get rid of her so that he could marry
Rose Cannon. The other girl was behind it all, accounted for the
participation of the Bonanza King, accounted probably for the whole
move--the pink and white girl in the French clothes who had all her
life had everything and now wanted Berny Iverson’s husband.

Poor Dominick, whom Berny had held contemptuously as a disappointing
and aggravating appurtenance of hers, suddenly rose in her estimation
into a valuable possession whose worth she had not before realized.
It was enough that another woman wanted him, was, through underhand
channels, trying to get him. All in a minute, Berny had changed from
the negligent proprietor of a valueless and lightly-held object, to the
possessor of an article of rare worth, which she was prepared jealously
to guard. With a sort of proud challenge she felt that she stood
valiantly facing the marauders, protecting her treasure against their
predatory advances. And her hatred against Mrs. Ryan began to extend
toward Bill Cannon, and beyond him toward the fair-faced girl, who grew
red to her forehead when she accidentally encountered Dominick Ryan.




CHAPTER XV

THE MOONLIGHT NIGHT


A few nights after this, there was a full moon. Dominick, walking
home from the bank, saw it at the end of the street’s vista, a large,
yellowish-pink disk floating up into the twilight. The air about it was
suffused with a misty radiance, and its wide glowing face, having a
thin look like a transparency of paper with a light behind it, seemed,
though not yet clear of the housetops, already to dominate the sky.
The evening was warm, like the early summer in other climates; and
Dominick, walking slowly and watching the great yellow sphere deepening
in color as it swam majestically upward, thought of evenings like this
in the past when he had been full of the joy of life and had gone forth
in the spirit of love and adventure.

The sight of his home dispelled these memories and brought upon him
the sense of his daily environment and its distastefulness. The
determination to accept his fate which had been with him on his return
from Antelope had of late been shaken by stirrings of rebellion.
Uplifted by the thought of his love for a woman hopelessly removed from
him, but who would always be a lodestar to worship reverently and to
guide him up difficult paths, he had been able to face his domestic
tragedy with the high resolution of the martyr. But this exalted
condition was hard to maintain in the friction of daily life with
Berny. Before, she had merely been a disagreeable companion of whom he
had to make the best. Now, she was that, intensified by a comparison
which threw out her every fault and petty vulgarity into glaring
prominence. And more than that--she was the angel with the flaming
sword, the self-incurred, invited, domesticated angel--the angel come
to stay--who barred the way to Paradise.

She seemed to him to have changed within the last week. When he had
first come home from Antelope she had been Berny in one of her less
familiar but recognizable moods--Berny trying to be agreeable, wearing
her best clothes every day, ordering the things for dinner he liked,
talking loudly and incessantly. Then, quite suddenly, he became aware
of a change in her. She grew silent, absent-minded, morose. He had
tried to make their lives easier by always being polite and carefully
considerate of her and she had responded to it. For the last few days
she had made no effort to assist him in this laudable design. Instead,
she had been unresponsive, preoccupied, uninvitingly snappish in her
replies. Several times he had been forced into the novel position of
“making conversation” throughout dinner, exerting his wits for subjects
to talk about that he might lift the gloom and elicit some response
from the mute, scowling woman opposite.

To-night, the period of ill-humor seemed over. Berny was not only once
again her animated self, she was almost feverishly garrulous. Dinner
had not progressed past the fish when she began to question him on his
recent experiences at Antelope. The subject had come up several times
since his return, but for the last few days he had had a respite from
it, and hoped its interest had worn away. She had many queries to make
about Bill Cannon, and from the father it was but a natural transition
to the daughter, so much the more attractive of the pair. Dominick was
soon inwardly writhing under an exceedingly ingenious and searching
catechism.

Had he been less preoccupied by his own acute discomfort, he might have
noticed that Berny herself gave evidence of disturbance. As she prodded
him with her questions, her face was suffused with unusual color, and
the eagerness of her curiosity shone through the carelessness with
which she sought to veil it. Certain queries she accompanied with a
piercing glance of investigation, watching with hungry sharpness the
countenance of the persecuted man. Fearful of angering her, or, still
worse, of arousing her suspicions, Dominick bore the examination with
all the fortitude he had, but he rose from the table with every nerve
tingling, rasped and galled to the limit of endurance.

He did not come into the den immediately but roamed about, into the
parlor, down the passage, and into his own room. He spread the scent of
his cigar and its accompanying films of smoke all through the flat, a
thing that Berny would never have ordinarily allowed. To-night she was
too occupied in listening to his prowling steps to bother about minor
rules and regulations. She saw in his restlessness a disturbance evoked
by her questionings.

“Aren’t you coming into the den?” she called, as she heard him pacing
steadily along the passageway.

“No,” he called back. “The moonlight’s shining in at every window. It
makes me restless. I don’t feel like sitting still.”

She sat on the divan, a paper spread before her face, but her eyes
were slanted sidewise, unblinking in the absorption of her attention.
Suddenly she heard a rattling sound which she knew to be from the canes
and umbrellas in the hat-rack. She cast away the paper, and, drawing
herself to the edge of the divan, peered down the passage. Dominick was
standing by the hat-rack, his hat on the back of his head, his hand
feeling among the canes.

“You’ve got your hat on,” she called in a high key of surprise. “You’re
not going out?”

“Yes, I am,” he answered, drawing out the cane he wanted. “It’s a fine
night, and I’m going for a walk.”

“For a walk?”--there was hesitancy in her tone, and for a horrible
moment, he thought she was going to suggest coming with him. “Where are
you going to?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just prowl about. I want some exercise.”

“Are you going to your mother’s?” she ventured, not without some
timidity.

“No,” he said, “I’m not going anywhere in particular. Good night.”

She sat forward, listening to his descending feet and the bang of the
hall door. A glance at the window showed her it was, as he said, a fine
night, deluged with the radiance of the moon. Probably he _was_ just
going out for a walk and not to see anybody. He was always doing queer
things like that. But,--Berny sat staring in front of her, biting her
nails and thinking. Uneasiness had been planted in her by Dominick’s
flight to Antelope. More poignant uneasiness had followed that first
attack. Now the bitter corrosive of jealousy began to grow and expand
in her. Sitting huddled on the divan, she thought of Dominick, walking
through the moonlight to Rose Cannon, and another new and griping pang
laid hold upon her.

Outside, Dominick walked slowly, keeping to the smaller and less
frequented streets. It was a wonderful night, as still as though the
moon had exerted some mesmeric influence upon the earth. Everything was
held motionless and without sound in a trance-like quietude. In the
gardens not a blossom stirred. Where leaves extended from undefined
darknesses of foliage, they stood out, stem and fiber, with a carven
distinctness, their shadows painted on the asphalt walks in inky
silhouette. There was no lamplight to warm the clear, still pallor of
the street’s vista. It stretched between the fronts of houses, a river
of light, white and mysterious, like a path in a dream.

It was a night for lovers, for trysts, and for whispered vows.
Dominick walked slowly, feeling himself an outsider in its passionate
enchantment. The scents that the gardens gave out, and through which
he passed as through zones of sweetness, were part of it. So were the
sounds that rose from the blotted vagueness of white figures on a
porch, from impenetrable depths of shadow--laughter, low voices, little
cries. In the distance people were singing snatches of a song that rose
and fell, breaking out suddenly and as suddenly dropping into silence.

His course was not aimless, and took him by a slow upward ascent to
that high point of the city, whence the watcher can look down on the
bay, the rugged, engirdling hills, and the hollow of North Beach. Here
he stood, resting on his cane, and gazing on the far-flung panorama,
with the white moon sailing high and its reflection glittering across
the water. Along the bases of the hills the clotted lights of little
towns shone in faintly-glimmering agglomerations. At his feet the
hollow lay like a black hole specked with hundreds of sparks. Each
spark was the light of a home, symbol of the fire of a hearth. He stood
looking down on them, thinking of what they represented, that cherished
center round which a man’s life revolves, and which he, by his own sin
and folly, had lost for ever.

He walked on, skirting the hollow, and moving forward through streets
where old houses brooded in overgrown gardens. The thin music of
strings rose on the night, and two men passed him playing on the
mandolin and guitar. They walked with quick, elastic steps, their
playing accurately in accord, their bodies swaying slightly to its
rhythm. They swung by him, and the vibrating harmonies, that sounded so
frail and attenuated in the suave largeness of the night, grew faint
and fainter, as if weighed upon and gradually extinguished by the dense
saturation of the moonlight.

Music was evidently a mode of expression that found favor on this
evening of still brilliance. A few moments later a sound of singing
rose on the air and a youthful couple came into view, walking close
together, their arms twined about each other, caroling in serene
indifference to such wayfarers as they might meet. They passed him,
their faces uplifted to the light, their mouths open in the abandon
of their song. Unconscious of his presence, with upraised eyes and
clasping arms, they paced on, filling the night with their voices--a
boy and girl in love, singing in the moonlight. Dominick quickened his
steps, hastening from the sound.

The moon was now high in the sky and the town lay dreaming under its
spell. Below him he could see the expanse of flat roofs, shining
surfaces between inlayings of shadow, with the clefts of the streets
cut through at regular intervals like slices made by a giant knife. Now
and then he looked up at the dome above, clear and solemn, the great
disk floating in solitary majesty across the vast and thoughtful heaven.

That part of California Street which crested the hill was but a few
blocks beyond him, and before his mind would acknowledge it, his feet
had borne him that way. He thought only to pass the Cannon house, to
look at its windows, and see their lights. As it rose before him, a
huge, pale mass checkered with shadows, the longing to see it--the
outer shell that hid his heart’s desire--passed into a keener,
concentrated agitation that seemed to press out from his soul like a
cry to her.

The porch yawned black behind pillars that in the daytime were painted
wood and now looked like temple columns wrought in marble. Dominick’s
glance, sweeping the lines of yellowed windows, finally rested on this
cavern of shadow, and he approached stealthily, as a robber might, his
body close to the iron fence. Almost before his eyes had told him, he
knew that a woman was standing there, leaning against the balustrade
that stretched between the columns. A climbing rose spread, in a
mottling of darkness, over the wall beside her. Here and there it was
starred with the small white faces of blossoms. As the young man drew
near she leaned over the balustrade, plucked one of the blossoms, and,
slowly shredding the leaves from the stem, stretched out her hand and
let them fall, like a languid shower of silver drops, to the grass.

Dominick halted below her, leaning against the fence and looking up.
She did not see him and stretched out her hand again for another
blossom. The petals of this one fell through her fingers, one by one,
and lay, a scattering of white dots, on the darkness of the grass. She
bent over the balustrade to look at them, and in doing so, her eyes
encountered the man below.

For a moment they looked at each other without speaking, then she
said, her voice at the lowest note that would reach him,

“What are you doing there?”

“Watching you.”

“Have you been standing there long?”

“No, only a few minutes. Why are you pulling the roses to pieces?”

She gave a little laugh and said something that sounded like “I don’t
know,” and moved back from the balustrade.

He thought she was going, and clutched the iron spikes of the fence,
calling up to her in a voice of urgent feeling, curiously out of
keeping with the words, the first remark that came into his head:

“This is very different from Antelope, isn’t it?”

She came forward again and looked out and up at the sky.

“Yes,” she said gravely, “we had no moonlight there, nothing but storms
and gray clouds.”

“But it was lovely,” he answered in the same key. “The clouds and the
storms didn’t matter. Those were three--three great weeks.”

He ended lamely but they were the best words he could get, trying to
say something that would keep her there, trying to see her through the
vaporous light. She bent over the railing looking for another rose, but
there were no more within her reach and she gave the short, nervous
laugh she had given before and turned her eyes on him again. Then
he realized that she was agitated. The knowledge augmented his own
perturbation and for a moment he did not trust himself to speak. He
gazed at her fixedly, the look of a lover, and was not conscious that
she wavered under it, till she suddenly drew a quick breath, turned her
head sidewise, and said, with an effort at naturalness,

“Well, I must go in. The roses are all picked and papa’ll be wondering
where I am.”

It seemed to Dominick just then that he could not lose her. She must
stay a moment longer. Urgency that was imploring was in his voice as he
said,

“Don’t go! don’t go! Stay just one moment longer! Can’t you come down
and talk for a minute? Come part of the way down. I want to speak to
you for a little bit longer. It may be months before I see you again.”

She listened, wavered, and was won over. Without answer she turned from
the shadow of the porch into the light on the top of the steps, and
from there slowly descended, her skirt gathered in one hand, and the
other touching the baluster. She was in black and from its dead density
her arms, bare to the elbow, shone as white as the arms of a marble
woman. The baluster ended in a lion crouching in sleep on a slab of
stone, and she paused here and Dominick went up the few steps from the
street to meet her. With the sleeping lion between them they looked at
each other with troubled eyes.

The moonlight seemed to have drawn from the meeting the artificialities
of worldly expression, which in the sensible, familiar daylight would
have placed it on the footing of a casual, to-be-expected encounter.
The sun beating down on lovers beats some of their sentimental
transports out of them. Now in this mystic, beautifying luminosity,
the acquired point of view, the regard for the accepted conventions
of every-day seemed to have receded to a great distance, to be thin,
forgotten things that had nothing to do with real life. For a moment
Berny ceased to be a living presence, standing with a flaming sword
between them. They almost forgot her. The memory that pressed upon them
was that of their last meeting. It shone in their eyes and trembled
on their lips. The sleeping lion that separated them was a singularly
appropriate symbol.

Low-voiced and half-spoken sentences belonged to this romantic moment.
The moonlit night around them was still and empty, but Dominick spoke
as though other ears than hers were listening:

“I’ve wanted so to see you. I came by to-night hoping that perhaps I
could catch a glimpse of your shadow on the curtain. I didn’t expect
anything like this.”

He stopped, looking at her, and not listening to the few words of her
answer.

“I think I wanted you so that my will called you out,” he said in an
impassioned whisper.

She said nothing and suddenly his hand sought hers, clasped it tight on
the head of the lion, and he whispered again,

“Oh, Rose, if I could see you now and then--only for a moment like
this.”

He felt her hand, small and cold, crush softly inside his, and almost
immediately was conscious of her effort to withdraw it. He instantly
loosened his fingers, let hers slide from his grasp, and drew back.

“Good night,” she said hurriedly, and without looking at him turned and
went up the steps.

“Good night,” he called after her, following her ascending figure with
his eyes.

When she reached the shadow at the top of the steps, she called
“Good-by,” passed into the engulfing blackness, and was gone. He waited
till he heard the door bang behind her, then descended the steps and
walked slowly home, his eyes on the pavement.

Berny was in her own room ready for bed when she heard his ascending
footsteps. She was occupied in rubbing a skin-food into her face, with
careful circular motions and pinchings of her finger-tips. It was a
task that required deep attention and which she performed three nights
in the week with conscientious regularity. With her face gleaming with
grease she crept to her door and listened, heard his cane slide into
the umbrella holder, and the door of his room shut with a softness
which told her that he thought her asleep. She walked back to the glass
and resumed her manipulations, but with diminished zeal. The clock
on the bureau marked the hour at half-past ten. Dominick had been
out two hours. Would a man walk round a city--even a crank like her
husband--all by himself for two hours?




CHAPTER XVI

FAMILY AFFAIRS


Every summer afternoon the trade winds blow through San Francisco,
winging their way across miles of chill, salt sea, and striking the
bulwarked city with a boisterous impact. The long streets seem as
paths, lines of least resistance, and the winds press themselves into
the narrow limits and whoop buoyantly along, carrying before them dust,
rags, scraps of paper--sometimes hats.

Their period of highest recognized activity is from May till September,
but before that, vagrant breezes, skirmishers sent out in advance,
assault the city. They follow on still, sunny mornings, which show not
the slightest warning symptom of the riotous forces which are designing
to seize upon and disrupt the tranquillity of the afternoon. Eleven
sees them up and stirring; by midday they have begun the attack. The
city, in a state of complete unpreparedness, is at their mercy and
they sweep through it in arrogant triumph, veiled in a flying scud of
dust. Unsuspecting wayfarers meet them at corners, and stand, helpless
victims of a playfulness, fierce and disconcerting as that of tigers.
Hats, cleverly running on one rim, career along the sidewalk. Ladies
have difficulties with parasols, heretofore docile and well-behaved.
Articles of dress, accustomed to hang decorously, show sudden ambitions
to rise and ride the elements. And those very people who in winter
speak gratefully of the winds as “the scavengers of San Francisco” may
be heard calling curses down on them.

Such a wind, the first of the season, was abroad on a bright morning in
early April, and Cornelia Ryan was out in it. It was a great morning
for Cornelia. Even the wind could not ruffle her joyousness. She was
engaged. Two evenings before, Jack Duffy, who had been hovering round
the subject for a month, poised above it, as a hawk above delightful
prey, had at last descended and Cornelia’s anxieties were at an end.
She had been so relieved, elated, and flustered that she had not
been able to pretend the proper surprise, but had accepted blushing,
stammering and radiant. She had been blushing, stammering and radiant
when she told her mother that night, and to-day, forty-eight hours
later, she was still blushing, stammering, and radiant.

It was not alone that she was honestly in love with Jack, but Cornelia,
like most maidens in California and elsewhere, was in love with being
admired, deferred to, and desired. And despite her great expectations
and her prominent position, she had had rather less of this kind of
delightful flattery than most girls. Walking down town in the clear,
sun-lit morning, she was, if not handsome, of a fresh and blooming
wholesomeness, which is almost as attractive and generally wears
better. The passers-by might readily have set her down as a charming
woman, for whom men sighed, and in this surmise been far from the
mark. She had had few lovers before Jack Duffy. That matter-of-fact
sturdiness, that absence of softness and mystery so noticeable in
Californian women, was particularly accentuated in her case, and had
robbed her of the poetic charm of which beauty and wealth can never
take the place.

But to-day she was radiant, a sublimated, exultant Cornelia, loved
at last and by a man of whom she could completely and unreservedly
approve. There were times when Cornelia--she was thirty--had feared
that she might have to go abroad and acquire a foreign husband, or,
worse still, move to New York and make her selection from such relics
of decayed Knickerbocker families as were in the market. She was woman
enough to refuse to die unwed. Now these dark possibilities were
dispelled. In her own state, in her own town, she had found her mate,
Jack Duffy, whose father had known her father and been shift boss under
Bill Cannon in the roaring days of Virginia City. It was like royalty
marrying into its own order, the royalty of Far Western millions,
knowing its own ramifications having its own unprinted Almanach de
Gotha--deep calling unto deep!

The wind was not yet out in force; its full, steady sweep would not be
inaugurated till early in the afternoon. It came now in gusts which
fell upon Cornelia from the back and accelerated her forward progress,
throwing out on either side of her a flapping sail of skirt. Cornelia,
who was neat and precise, usually resented this rough handling, but
to-day she only laughed, leaning back, with one hand holding her hat.
In the shops where she stopped to execute various commissions she had
difficulty in suppressing her smiles. She would have liked to delay
over her purchases and chat with the saleswomen, and ask them about
their families, and send those who looked tired off for a month into
the country.

It was after midday when she found herself approaching that particular
block, along the edge of which the flower-venders place their baskets
and display their wares. In brilliantly-colored mounds the flowers
stood stacked along the outer rim of the sidewalk, a line of them,
a man behind each basket vociferating the excellence of the bouquet
he held forward to the passer’s inspection. In the blaze of sun that
overlaid them, the piled-up blossoms showed high-colored and variegated
as a strip of carpeting.

Cornelia never bought flowers at the street corners. The town house
was daily supplied from the greenhouses at the country place at Menlo.
When sick friends, anniversaries, or entertainment called for special
offerings they were ordered from expensive florists and came in made-up
bunches, decorated with sashes of ribbon. But to-day she hesitated
before the line of laden baskets. Some of the faces behind them looked
so dreary, and Cornelia could not brook the sight of a dreary face on
this day of joy. The dark, wistful eyes of an Italian boy holding out
a bunch of faded jack roses, stiffly set in a fringe of fern, made a
sudden appeal to her and she bought the roses. Then the old man who was
selling carnations looked so lean and grizzled that he must be cheered,
and two bunches of the carnations were added to the roses. The boys and
men, seeing that the brilliant lady was in a generous mood, collected
about her, shouting out the excellences of their particular blossoms,
and pressing sample bunches on her attention.

Cornelia, amused and somewhat bewildered, looked at the faces and
bought recklessly. She was stretching out her hand to beckon to the
small boy with the wilted pansies, who was not big enough to press
through the throng, when a man’s voice behind her caught her ear.

“Well, Cornelia, are you trying to corner the curb-stone market?”

She wheeled swiftly and saw her brother, laughing and looking at the
stacked flowers in the crook of her arm.

“Dominick!” she exclaimed, “you’re just the person I want to see. I was
going to write to you. I’ve got lots to tell you.”

“Come along then and take lunch with me. I was on my way up to
Bertrand’s when I saw you. They’ll give us a good lunch there and you
can tell me all your secrets.”

The flower sellers, who had been listening with unabashed eagerness,
realized that their prey was about to be ravished from them, and raised
their voices in a chorus of wailing appeal. As Cornelia moved forward
they moved round her, thrusting bouquets under her eyes in a last hope,
the boy with the wilted pansies, on the brink of tears, hanging on the
outskirts of the crowd. Cornelia might have forgotten him, but her eye,
sweeping back for an absent moment, saw his face, bereft of all hope--a
face of childish despair above his drooping pansies.

“Here, boy with the pansies,” she called, and sent a silver dollar
through the air toward him, “that’s for you. Keep it and the flowers,
too. I’ve too many now and can’t carry any more. Maybe he’ll sell them
to some one else,” she said to Dominick, as they crossed the street.
“He’s such a little boy to be earning his bread!”

They walked up the street toward Bertrand’s, a French restaurant which
for years had enjoyed the esteem of the city’s gourmets. The wind was
now very high. It tore at Cornelia’s clothes and made it necessary for
Dominick to hold his hat on, his hand spread flat on the crown. A trail
of blossoms, torn from the flowers each carried, sprinkled the pavement
behind them. Cornelia, with her head down and her face toward her
brother, shouted remarks at him, every now and then pausing in a stifle
of laughter to struggle with her draperies, which at one moment rose
rebellious, and at the next were wound about her in an umbrella-like
sheath.

They had often met this way in the past, when the elder Mrs. Ryan’s
wrath had been in its first, untameable freshness, and her son had
seen her seldom. In those days of estrangement, Cornelia had been the
tie between Dominick and his home. She loved her brother and was sorry
for him, and had felt the bitterness of the separation, not alone as
a family misfortune, but as a scandal over which mean people talked.
Had it rested with her, she would long ago have overlooked the past
and have opened the door to her sister-in-law. Not that she felt any
regard or interest in Berny Iverson; her feeling for her was now, and
always would be, largely composed of that undying unfriendliness and
repugnance that the naturally virtuous woman feels for her sister with
the _tache_. But Cornelia was of a younger and milder generation
than her mother. She had not fought hard for what she had and, like
Dominick, there was more of the sunny-tempered, soft-hearted Con Ryan
in her than of the strong and valiant woman who had made him and given
him his place in the world.

In the restaurant they found a vacant table in a corner, and Cornelia
had to bottle up her good news while Dominick pondered over the bill
of fare. She was impatient and drummed on the table with her fingers,
while her eyes roamed about the room. Once or twice, she bowed to
people that she knew, then let her glance pass in an uninterested
survey over the bare walls and the long line of windows that gave
on the street. The place had an austerely severe, unadorned air.
Its bleakness of naked wall and uncovered stone floor added to the
foreignness that was contributed by the strong French accent of the
waiters, and the arrangement of a cashier’s desk near the door, where a
pleasant-faced woman sat between a large bouquet of roses and a drowsy
gray cat.

The orders given and the first stages of lunch appearing, Cornelia
could at last claim her brother’s full attention. Planting her elbows
on the table and staring at him, she said,

“I told you how awfully anxious I was to see you, and how I was going
to write to you, didn’t I?”

Dominick nodded. He was buttering a piece of bread and showed no
particular acceleration of curiosity at this query.

“Well, now, what do you suppose I was going to write about?” asked his
sister, already beginning to show a heightened color.

“Can’t imagine. Nothing wrong with mother, I hope?”

Since his marriage Cornelia had been in the habit of communicating
frequently with her brother by letter. It was the best way of keeping
him informed of family affairs. The telephone at the senior Ryan
house was sufficiently secluded to make it a useful medium of private
communication, but the telephone at the junior Ryan house did not share
this peculiarity, and Dominick discouraged his sister’s using it.

“No, mother’s all right,” said Cornelia. “And it’s nothing wrong
about anybody. Quite the other way; it’s something about me, and it’s
something cheerful. Guess!”

Her brother looked up and his eye was caught by her rosily-blushing
cheeks.

“Dear me, Cornie,” he said with a look of slowly-dawning comprehension,
“it really isn’t--it really can’t be----?”

The waiter here interrupted further confidence by setting forth the
lunch with many attentive bowings and murmurings. By the time he had
presented one dish for Cornelia’s approval, removed it with a flourish
and presented another, her impatience broke out in an imploring,

“Yes, Etienne, it’s all _perfectly_ lovely. _Do_ put it on the table
and let’s eat it. That’s what it’s for, not to hand round and be stared
at, as if it were a diamond necklace that I was thinking of buying.”

Etienne, thus appealed to, put the viands on the table, and Dominick,
deeply interested, leaned forward and said,

“What is it? Go ahead. I’m burning up with curiosity.”

“Guess,” said his sister, bending over her plate.

“Is it that you’re going to be married? Oh, Cornie, it can’t be.”

“And why can’t it be?” looking very much hurt. “What’s there so queer
about that?”

“Nothing, only I meant that I hadn’t heard any rumors about it. _Is_ it
_that_?”

“Yes, it is, Dominick Ryan, and I don’t see why you should be so
surprised.”

“Surprised! I’m more than surprised. I’m delighted--haven’t been so
pleased for years. Who is it?”

“Jack Duffy.”

“Oh, Cornie, that’s the best yet! That’s great! It’s splendid. I wish I
could kiss you, but I can’t here in the open restaurant. Why didn’t you
tell me somewhere where we would be alone? I’d just like to give you a
good hug.”

Cornelia, who had been a little hurt at her brother’s incredulity, was
now entirely mollified and once again became bashfully complacent.

“I thought you’d like it,” she said. “I thought you’d think that was
just about right. Any girl would be proud of _him_.”

“He’s one of the best fellows in the state--one of the best anywhere.
He’ll make you a first-rate husband. You’re a lucky girl.”

“I know I am. You needn’t tell me. There are not many men anywhere
like Jack Duffy. I’ve always said I wouldn’t marry the tag, rag and
bobtail other girls are satisfied with. _My_ husband was going to be a
gentleman, and if Jack’s anything, he’s that.”

“You’re right there. He’s one of Nature’s gentlemen--the real kind.”

Cornelia thought this savored of condescension, and said, rallying to
the defense of her future lord,

“Well, that’s all right, but he’s educated too. He’s not one of those
men who have good hearts and noble yearnings but look like anarchists
or sewing-machine agents. Jack graduated high at Harvard. He went there
when he was only eighteen. There’s no one’s had a better education or
done better by it. His father may have been Irish and worked as shift
boss on the Rey del Monte, but Jack’s quite different. He’s just as
much of a gentleman as anybody in this country.”

Cornelia’s attitude on matters of genealogy was modern and
Californian. Ireland was far behind her and Jack, as were also those
great days in Nevada of which her mother and Bill Cannon spoke, as the
returned Ulysses might have spoken of the ten years before Troy. She
and Jack would eventually regard them as a period of unsophistication
and social ferment which it were wisest to touch on lightly, and of
which they would teach their children nothing.

“And then,” Cornelia went on, determined not to slight any detail of
her fiance’s worthiness, “there’s never been anything fast or wild
about Jack. He’s always been straight. There’s been no scandalous
stories about him, as there have about Terence.”

“Never. Terence committed all the scandals for the family.”

“Well, Terence is in New York, thank Heaven!” said Cornelia with pious
fervor, “and we won’t have to have anything to do with him or his wife
either. Even if we go to Europe, we need only stay there a few days.”

The irregular career of Terence had been a thorn in the side of
the respectable Duffys, he, some years earlier, having married his
mistress, a chorus girl in a local theater, and attempted to force her
upon the exclusive circles in which his people moved. It was not the
least galling feature of Terence’s unconventional course that, having
doubled his fortune by successful speculations, he had removed to New
York where, after several spirited assaults and vigorous rebuffs, his
wife had reached social heights toward which other Californians of
spotless record and irreproachable character had clambered in vain.

“Well,” said Dominick, “mother ought to be satisfied with _this_
marriage. It’s a good thing one of her children is going to settle down
the way she likes.”

“Oh, she’s delighted. She’s not been in such good spirits for a long
time, and she’s as interested as I am in arranging everything. We
want to have a large house wedding; the two families and all their
connections, and all our intimate friends, and all the people who’ve
entertained us,--and--and--the whole crowd. Of course, it’ll be a lot
of people. Mommer said she didn’t see how we could cut it down to less
than five or six hundred. But I don’t see why we need to, the house is
big enough.”

“Plenty,” said Dominick. He set down his knife and fork and looked at
his sister. “Our family don’t take up much room. There’s just three of
us.”

“Then you’re coming?” she said quickly, her anxiety flashing out into
an almost pained intensity of eagerness. “You’ll come? You must,
Dominick. You’ve got to give me away.”

He looked away from her in moody discomfort. The eternal discussions
created by his marriage were becoming more and more hateful to him.
Why should his unloved and unloving wife perpetually stand between
him and his own people--his mother and sister--women to whom he owed
allegiance, even as he did to her? The call of his home and the binding
ties of kin were growing stronger as the obligation of his marriage had
weakened and lost its hold.

Cornelia leaned across the table and spoke with low-toned, almost
tremulous earnestness:

“You know that if it were I, I’d ask your wife. You know that all the
hard feelings I may once have had against her have gone. If it were for
me to say, I’d have received her from the start. What I’ve always said
is, ‘What’s the good of keeping up these fights? No one gets anything
by them. They don’t do any one any good.’ But you know mommer. The
first thing she said when we talked about the house wedding, and I said
you’d give me away, was, ‘If he’ll come without his wife.’ Those were
her very words, and you know when she says a thing she means it. And,
Dominick, you _will_ come? You’re the only brother I’ve got. You’re the
only man representative of the family. You can’t turn me down on my
wedding day.”

There were tears in her eyes and Dominick saw them and looked down at
his plate.

“All right,” he said quietly. “I’ll come. When is it to be?”

“Oh, Dominick,” his sister breathed in an ecstasy of relief and
gratitude. “I knew you would. And I’ll do anything for you I can. If
mommer wouldn’t get so dreadfully angry, I’d call on your wife, but you
know I can’t offend her. She’s my mother, and I can’t stand up against
her. But some day I’ll pay you back--I will indeed.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Cornie,” he said, turning to summon the waiter.
“I can’t let my sister get married without me. Tell mother I’ll come.
You haven’t yet told me when it’s to be.”

“June,” said the prospective bride, once more beginning to blush and
beam, “early in June. The roses are so fine then, and we can have
the house so beautifully decorated. We’ve already begun to plan the
trousseau. It’s going to be just stunning, I tell you; the dresses from
New York and all the lingerie and things like that from Paris. Mommer
says she’ll give me fifteen thousand dollars for it. And she’s going to
give me, besides, a string of pearls that hangs down to here”--Cornelia
indicated a point on her person with a proud finger--“or else a house
and lot anywhere in town that I like. Which would you take?”

Dominick was saved from the responsibility of stating a preference on
this important point by Etienne, the waiter, presenting his hat to him
with the low bow of the well-tipped garçon. With a scraping of chair
legs, they rose and, threading their way among the now crowded tables,
passed out into the wind-swept streets. Here they separated, Cornelia,
with her armful of wilting flowers, going home, and Dominick back to
the bank.

He was entering the building when he met Bill Cannon, also returning
to his office from a restaurant lunch at a small Montgomery Street
chop-house, where, every day at one, he drank a glass of milk and ate
a sandwich. The Bonanza King stopped and spoke to the young man, his
greeting marked by a simple friendliness. Their conversation lasted a
few minutes, and then Dominick entered the bank.

Two hours later, while he was still bending over his books, in the
hushed seclusion of the closed building, Bill Cannon was talking to
Berny in the parlor of the Sacramento Street flat. This interview was
neither so long, and (on Berny’s part) did not show the self-restraint
which had marked the first one. The offer of one hundred thousand
dollars which the old man made her was refused with more scorn and less
courtesy than had been displayed in her manner on the former occasion.




CHAPTER XVII

A CUT AND A CONFESSION


Berny was extremely unsettled. She had never been in such a
condition of worry and indecision. She was at once depressed and
elated, triumphant and cast down, all in a bubble of excitement and
uncertainty. A combination of violent feelings, hostile to one another,
had possession of her and used her as a battle-ground for shattering
encounters.

She loved money with the full power of her nature--it was her
strongest, her predominating passion--and now for the first time in her
life it was within her grasp. She could at any moment become possessed
of a fortune, undisputedly her own, to do with as she liked. She lay
awake at night thinking of it. She made calculations on bits of paper
as she footed up the bills at her desk.

But then on the other hand, there was Dominick, Dominick suddenly
become valuable. He was like a piece of jewelry held in slight esteem
as a trifling imitation and suddenly discovered to be real and of rich
worth. Insignificant and strange are the happenings which determine
the course of events. The sage had told her that one more inch in the
length of Cleopatra’s nose would have altered the face of the world and
changed the course of history. Had Berny not gone to the park on that
Sunday afternoon, and seen a woman’s face change color at the sight of
her husband, she might have come to terms with Mrs. Ryan and now have
been on her way to Chicago in the first stage of the plan of desertion.

It was another woman’s wanting Dominick that made Berny more determined
to cling to him than if he had been the Prince Charming of her dreams.
She carried about with her a continual feeling of self-congratulation
that she had discovered the full significance of the plot in time.
Her attitude was that of the quarreling husband and wife who fight
furiously for the possession of a child for which neither cares. To
herself she kept saying, “They want my husband, do they? Well, I’ll
take mighty good care, no matter how much they want him and he wants to
go, they don’t get him.”

It made her boil with rage to think of them all, with Dominick at their
head, getting everything they wanted and sending her off to Paris, even
though Paris might be delightful, and she have a great deal better time
there than she ever had in San Francisco.

All these thoughts were in her mind as she walked down town one
afternoon for her usual diversion of shopping and promenading. Of late
she had not been sleeping well and the fear that this would react
upon her looks had spurred her to the unwonted exertion of walking.
The route she had chosen was one of those thoroughfares which radiate
from Market Street, and though not yet slums, are far removed from
the calm, wide gentility of the city’s more dignified highways. With
all her cleverness, she had never shaken off the tastes and instincts
of the class she had come from. She felt more at home in this noisy
byway, where children played on the pavements and there were the
house-to-house intimacies, the lack of privacy, of the little town,
than she did on the big, clean-swept streets where the houses presented
a blank exterior to the gaze, and most of the people were transported
in cars or carriages. Even the fact that the Tenderloin was in close
proximity did not modify her interest with a counteracting disgust;
though she was not one of the women who have a lively curiosity as to
that dark side of life, it did not, on the other hand, particularly
repel her. She viewed it with the same practical utilitarianism with
which she regarded her own virtue. That possession had been precious to
her for what she could gain with it. When she had sacrificed it to her
ambition, she had not liked giving it up at all, but had reconciled
herself to doing so because of the importance of the stake involved.

Walking loiteringly forward she crossed Powell Street, and approached
the entrance of that home of vaudeville, the Granada Theater. This
was a place of amusement that she much favored, and of which she was
a frequent patron. Dominick did not like it, so she generally went to
the matinée with one of her sisters. There had been a recent change of
bill, and as she drew near she looked over the posters standing by the
entrance on which the program for the coming week was printed in large
letters. Midway down one of these, her eye was caught by a name and she
paused and stood reading the words:

          “JAMES DEFAY BUFORD
  _The Witty, Brilliant and Incomparable_
              MONOLOGIST
      _In His Unrivaled Monologue
              Entitled_
          KLONDIKE MEMORIES”

She remembered at once that this was the actor Dominick had spoken of
as having been snowed in with them at Antelope. Dominick had evidently
not expected he would come to San Francisco. He had said the man had
been going to act in Sacramento. After standing for some moments
looking at the words, she moved on again with the short, mincing step
that was habitual to her, and which always made walking a slow and
undesirable mode of progression. She seemed more thoughtful than she
had been before she saw the program, and for some blocks her face wore
an absent and somewhat pensive air of musing.

Her preoccupation lasted up Grant Avenue and down Post Street till
it was finally dispelled by the sight of that attractive show-window
in which a large dry-goods establishment exhibits the marvels of new
millinery. It was April, and the spring fashions were just in from
Paris, filling the window with a brilliant display of the newest
revolutionary modes of which San Francisco had so far only heard. Women
stood staring, some dismayed at the introduction of styles which they
felt would have a blighting, not to say obliterating effect on their
own beauty. Others, of practical inclinations, studied the new gowns
with an eye to discoveries whereby their wardrobes might be induced to
assume a deceptive air of second youth.

Berny elbowed her way in among them and pressed herself close to the
glass, exploring, with a strained glance, the intricacies of back
draperies turned from view. She wished Hazel was there with her. Hazel
was wonderfully sharp at seeing how things were put together, and
could carry complications of trimming and design in her head without
forgetting them or getting them mixed. The discovery that skirts
were being cut in a new way gave Berny a shock of painful surprise,
especially when she thought of her raspberry crape, still sufficiently
new to be kept in its own box between layers of tissue paper, and yet
at the stage when the necessity of paying for it was at a comfortable,
unvexing distance.

She was standing with her back to the street when a woman next her
gave a low exclamation and uttered the name of Mrs. Con Ryan. Berny
wheeled about just as the exceedingly smart victoria of Mrs. Cornelius
Ryan drew up at the curb and that august matron prepared to descend
from it. In these afternoon shopping excursions she had often met her
mother-in-law, often met her and invariably seen her turn her head and
fix her eyes in the opposite direction. Now, however, matters were on
another footing. If Mrs. Ryan had not recognized Berny, or spoken to
her, or received her, she had at least opened negotiations with her,
negotiations which presupposed a knowledge of her existence if not a
desire for her acquaintance. Berny did not go so far as to anticipate
a verbal greeting, but she thought, in consideration of recent
developments, she was warranted in expecting a bow.

She moved forward almost in Mrs. Ryan’s path, paused, and then
looked at the large figure moving toward her with a certain massive
stateliness. This time Mrs. Ryan did not turn her head away. Instead,
she looked at the young woman directly and steadily, looked at her full
in the eye with her own face void of all recognition, impassive and
stonily unmoved as the marble mask of a statue. Berny, her half-made
bow checked as if by magic, her face deeply flushed, walked on. She
moved down the street rapidly, her head held high, trembling with
indignation.

Such are the strange, unaccountable contradictions of the female
character that she felt more incensed by this cut than by any previous
affront or slight the elder woman had offered her. The anticipated bow,
neither thought of nor hoped for till she had seen Mrs. Ryan alighting
from the carriage, was suddenly a factor of paramount importance in
the struggle between the two. So small a matter as a nod of the elder
woman’s head would have made the younger woman more pliable, more
tractable and easily managed, than almost any other action on her
mother-in-law’s part. Berny, bowed to, would have been a more docile,
reasonable person than either Mrs. Ryan or Bill Cannon had had yet to
deal with; while Berny, cut, flamed up into a blaze of mutinous fury
that, had they known it, would have planted dismay in the breasts of
those bold conspirators.

As she walked down the street she was at first too angry to know where
she was going, but after a few moments of rapid progress she saw that
she was approaching the car line which passed close to her old home.
In the excitement of her wrath, the thought of her sisters--the only
human beings who could be relied on unquestioningly and ungrudgingly to
offer her sympathy--came to her with a sense of consolation and relief.
A clock in a window showed her it was nearly five. Hannah would have
been home for some time, and Hazel might be expected within an hour.
Without more thought she hailed an up-town car.

As the car whisked her up the long hill from Kearney Street she thought
what she would say to her sisters. Several times of late she had
contemplated letting them into the secrets--or some of the secrets--of
her married life and its present complications. She wanted their
sympathy, for they were the only people she knew who were interested
in her through affection, and did not blame her when she did things
that were wrong. She also wanted to surprise them and to impress them.
She wanted to see their eyes grow round, and their faces more and more
startled, as she told of what Mrs. Ryan was trying to do, and how the
sum of one hundred thousand dollars was hers--their sister’s--when she
chose to take it. They were good people, the best people for her to
tell it to. They did not know too much. They could be relied upon for a
blind, uninquiring loyalty, and she could now (as she had before) tell
them, not all--just enough--suppressing, as women do, those facts in
the story which it were best for her to keep to herself.

She found them both at home, Hazel having been allowed to leave her
work an hour earlier than usual. Sitting in a small room in the back of
the house, they were surrounded by the outward signs of dressmaking.
Yards of material lay over the chairs, and on a small wooden table,
which fitted close to her body and upon which portions of the material
lay neatly smoothed out, Hannah was cutting with a large pair of shears.

Hazel sat near by trimming a hat, a wide, flat leghorn, round which
she twined a wreath of brier roses. Black velvet bows held the wreath
in place, and Hazel skewered these down with long black pins, several
of which she held in her mouth. Berny knew of old this outburst of
millinery activity which always marked the month of April. It was the
semi-annual rehabilitation of Pearl’s wardrobe, and was a ceremonial
to which all the females of the family were supposed to contribute. In
her own day she herself had given time and thought to it. She had even
been in sympathy with the idea of the family’s rise and increase of
distinction through Pearl, who was going to be many steps farther up
the social ladder than her mother and her aunt, if those devoted women
could possibly accomplish it.

Now, watching her sisters bent over their tasks after the heat and
burden of their own day’s work, she felt a deep, heartfelt sense
of gratitude that she had escaped from this humble, domestic sphere
in which they seemed so content. Whether Pearl’s summer hat should
be trimmed with pink or blue had once been a question which she had
thought worthy of serious consideration. How far she had traveled from
the world of her childhood could not have been more plainly shown her
than by the complete indifference she now felt to Pearl, her hat, and
its trimmings.

She had come prepared to surprise her sisters, and to shake out of
them, by her revelations, the amazed and shocked sympathy she felt
would ease her of her present wrath and pain. She was too overwrought
to be diplomatic or to approach the point by preparatory gradations.
Thrown back in the one arm-chair in the room, her head so pressed
against its back that her hat was thrust forward over her forehead,
she told them of her meeting with Mrs. Ryan, and the cut which she had
received.

Neither Hannah nor Hazel expressed the outraged astonishment at
this insult that Berny had anticipated. In fact, they took it with
a tranquillity which savored of indifference. For the moment, she
forgot that they knew nothing of her reason for expecting Mrs. Ryan
to recognize her, and to her quivering indignation was added a last
wounding sense of disappointment. The sight of Hazel, holding the
leghorn hat off at arm’s length and studying it with a preoccupied,
narrowed eye, was even more irritating than her remark, made mumblingly
because of the pins in her mouth:

“I don’t see why you should feel so bad about that. I should think
you’d have got sort of used to it by this time. She’s been cutting you
for over two years now.”

“Do you think that makes it any better?” said Berny in a belligerent
tone, not moving her head, but shifting her eyes to stare angrily at
Hazel from under her projecting hat-brim. “Do you think you’d get used
to it if Josh’s mother cut you on the street?”

It was hard to compass the idea of Josh’s deceased parent, who had left
behind her a memory of almost unique meekness, cutting anybody. It made
Hazel laugh and she had to bend her head down and take the pins out of
her mouth before she could answer.

“Well, if she’d been doing it for over two years, I think I’d have got
sort of broken to it by now,” she said. “What makes you so mad about it
all of a sudden?”

“Maybe things aren’t just the same as they’ve been for the last two
years,” said Berny darkly. “Maybe there’s a reason for Mrs. Ryan’s
bowing to me.”

These words had the effect that the victim of the cut desired. Her
sisters paused in their work and looked at her. There had been times
lately when Hannah had felt uneasy about Berny’s fine marriage, and
she now eyed the younger woman with sober intentness over the glasses
pushed down toward the tip of her nose.

“Reason?” said Hazel. “What reason? Have you and she been trying to
make up?”

“I don’t know whether you’d call it that or not,” said Berny.

“Have things really changed between you and her, Berny?” she asked
gravely.

Hannah put down the shears and laid her hands on the table. She felt
the coming revelations.

“Well, yes, I guess you’d say they have,” said Berny slowly, letting
every word make its impression. “She’s trying to buy me off to leave
Dominick. I suppose you’d call that a change.”

If Berny wanted to surprise her sisters, she certainly now had the
satisfaction of realizing her hopes. For a moment they stared at
her, too amazed to speak, even Hannah, who had scented difficulties,
being completely unprepared--after the way of human nature--for the
particular difficulty that had cropped up. It was Hazel who first spoke.

“Buy you off to leave Dominick? Give you money to go away from him, do
you mean?”

“That’s what I said,” returned her sister with dry grimness. “She’s
made me two offers to leave my husband, wants me to get out and, after
I’ve gone for a year, ask him to bring suit for desertion.”

“My Lord!” murmured Hannah in a hushed voice of horror.

“Well, that beats anything I’ve ever heard!” exclaimed Hazel. “That
beats the ball, and not speaking to you, and all the rest. It’s the
worst yet! What’s made her do it? What’s the matter with her?”

“The same thing that’s always been the matter with her--she doesn’t
like me, she wants to get rid of me. She tried to freeze me out first
by not speaking to me, and leaving us to scramble along the best way we
could on Dominick’s salary. Now, she’s seen that that won’t work, and
she’s gone off on a new tack. She’s a woman of resources. If she finds
the way blocked in one direction, she tries another.”

“She’s actually offered you money to leave Dominick?” asked Hannah.
“Said she’d give it to you if you’d desert him and let him get a
divorce?”

“That’s it,” returned her sister, in the same hard tone, tapping with
her finger-tips on the arms of the chair. “That’s the flattering offer
she’s made me twice now.”

“How much did she offer you?” said Hazel.

This was a crucial question. Berny knew its importance and sat up,
pushing back her disarranged hat.

“One hundred thousand dollars,” she said calmly.

There was a second pause which seemed charged with astonishment, as
with electrical forces. The sisters, their hands fallen in their laps,
fastened their eyes on the speaker in a stare of glassy amaze.

“A hundred thousand dollars!” gasped Hazel. “Why--why--Berny!”

She stopped, almost trembling in the excitement of her stunned
incredulity.

“_A hundred thousand dollars!_” Hannah echoed, each word pronounced
with slow, aghast unbelief. “Oh, it _can’t_ be that much!”

“It’s that much now,” said Berny, her calmness accentuated to the point
of nonchalance, “and if I want I can make them double it, raise it to a
quarter of a million. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars isn’t so
much when you’ve got millions in trunks. What’s that to the Ryans?”

She looked at her sisters with a cool, dispassionate glance, feeling
that it had been worth while to tell them. Hannah’s face was a pale,
uninteresting mask of shocked surprise--the kind of face with which
one would imagine Hannah’s greeting such intelligence. But through
the astonishment of Hazel’s a close and intimate understanding of the
possibilities of the situation, an eagerness of rising respect for it
and for the recipient of such honors, was discernible and appealed to
Berny’s vanity and assuaged her more uncomfortable sensations.

“You could get a quarter of a million?” Hazel persisted. “How do you
know that?”

Berny looked at her with disdain which was softened by a slight,
indulgent smile.

“My dear, if they want it bad enough to offer one hundred thousand,
they want it bad enough to offer two. The money is nothing to them,
and I’m a good deal. I shouldn’t be surprised if I could get more.”
She thought of Bill Cannon’s participation in the matter, and let an
expression of sly, knowing mysteriousness cross her face. But Bill
Cannon’s participation was a fact she did not intend to mention. He was
a part of the story that she had decided to suppress.

“But two hundred and fifty thousand dollars!” said Hazel. “Why, it’s
a fortune! The interest on it alone would make you rich. You could go
to Europe. You could have a house on Pacific Avenue. Just fancy! And
three years ago you were working for twenty a week in the Merchants and
Mechanics Trust Company. Do you remember when they agreed to give you
that you thought you were on velvet? Twenty dollars a week! That looks
pretty small now, doesn’t it?”

“But she doesn’t intend to take it, Hazel McCrae!” said Hannah in a
deep voice of shocked disapproval. “You talk as if she was going to
accept their outrageous offer.”

Hazel’s face, which, as her fancy ranged over these attractive
possibilities, had shown varying stages of flushed and exhilarated
excitement, now suddenly fell. Conscious that she had exhibited a
condition of mind that was low and sordid, she hastily sought to
obliterate the effect of her words by saying sharply,

“Of course, I knew she wasn’t going to accept. I never had such an
idea. I’d be the first one to turn it down. I was just thinking what
she _could_ do if she _did_.”

“Oh, there’s any amount of things I could do,” said Berny. “They want
me to go abroad and live there. That was”--she was going to say “one
of the conditions,” but this, too, she decided to suppress, and said
instead--“one of the things they suggested. They told me the income
of the money would go twice as far there. Then the year while I was
deserting Dominick--I was to go to Chicago, or New York, and desert him
that way--I’d have seven thousand dollars for my expenses. They weren’t
mean about it, I’ll say that much for them.”

“And then laying it all out like that!” said Hannah. “It’s just the
most scandalous thing I’ve ever heard of. I’ve never had much opinion
of Mrs. Ryan, but I really didn’t believe she’d go that far.”

“But Dominick?” said Hazel suddenly; “what about Dominick? What did he
say?”

The matter of Dominick was the difficult part of the revelation. Berny
felt the necessity of a certain amount of dissembling, and it helped to
chill the excitement and heat that had carried her up to her sisters
and on to this point. Dominick’s part of the story was one of the
subjects upon which she had decided to let her remarks be as notes
about the text, and expurgated notes at that. Now, she realized it was
a complicated matter of which to tell only half, and looking on the
floor pricked the carpet with the tip of her parasol, and tried to
maintain her tone of airy indifference.

“Dominick doesn’t know anything about it,” she said. “He’s never to
know. They were pretty decided on that point. He’s to be deserted
without his own knowledge or consent.”

“But to take his wife away from him!” Hannah cried. “To rob him of her!
They must be crazy.”

“Dominick can get along all right without me,” said Dominick’s wife,
looking at the tip of her parasol as she prodded the carpet.

Hazel, the married sister, heard something in these words that the
spinster did not recognize. A newly-wakened intelligence, startled and
suspicious, dawned on her face.

“Dominick’s not so dead in love with me,” continued Berny, with her
eyes following the parasol tip. “He could manage to bear his life
without me. He--” she paused, and then said, enraged to hear that her
voice was husky--“doesn’t care a button whether I live or die.”

The pause that greeted this statement was entirely different from its
predecessors. There was amazement in it, and there was pain. Neither
listener could for a moment speak; then Hannah said with a solemnity
full of dignity,

“I can’t believe that, Berny.”

“You needn’t if you don’t want to,” returned Berny, still not looking
up. “If you like to keep on believing lies, it’s all the same to
me. But I guess I know more about Dominick Ryan, and what he feels,
than you do, and I tell you he doesn’t care a hang for me. He gave
up caring”--she paused, a memory of the ball, the quarrel, and the
fatal visit to Antelope flashing through her mind--“over a year ago. I
guess,” she raised her head and looked coolly at her sisters, “he won’t
lay awake nights at the thought of losing me.”

They looked at her without speaking, their faces curiously different
in expression from what they had been after her first confessions. All
excitement had gone from them. They looked more wounded and hurt than
she did. They were women, dashed and mortified, by a piece of news that
had abashed them in its admitted failure and humiliation of another
woman.

“I--I--can’t believe it,” faltered Hannah. “Dominick’s always so kind,
so attentive, so----”

She came to a stop, checked by an illuminating memory of the Sundays
on which Dominick now never came to dinner, of his absence from their
excursions to the park, of his mysterious mid-winter holiday to the
Sierra.

“Have you had a row?” said Hazel. “Everybody has them some time and
then you make up again, and it’s just the same as it was before.
Fighting with your husband’s different from other fighting. It doesn’t
matter much, or last.”

Berny looked down at the parasol tip. Her lips suddenly began to
quiver, and tears, the rare burning tears of her kind, pricked into her
eyes.

“We haven’t lived together for over eight months,” she said.

The silence that greeted this remark was the heaviest of all the
silences.

“Why didn’t you tell us before?” said Hazel, in a low, awed voice.

For a moment, Berny could not answer. She was ashamed and angry at the
unexpected emotion which made it impossible for her to command her
voice, and made things shine before her eyes, brokenly, as through
crystal. She was afraid her sisters would think she was fond of
Dominick, or would guess the real source of the trouble.

“I was afraid something was wrong,” said Hannah, mechanically picking
up the shears, her face pale and furrowed with new anxieties.

The concern in her tone soothed Berny. It was something not only to
have astonished her family, but to have disturbed their peace by a
forced participation in her woes. It had been enraging to think of them
light-heartedly going their way while she struggled under such a load
of care.

“It was all right till last autumn,” she said in a stifled voice, “and
then it all got wrong--and--and--now it’s all gone to pieces.”

“But what made Dominick change?” said Hazel, with avid, anxious
eagerness. “Everything was happy and peaceful a year ago. What got hold
of him to change him?”

Berny felt that she had told enough. It had been harder telling, too,
than she had imagined. The last and greatest secret that she had
determined to keep from her sisters was that of Dominick’s love for
another woman--what she regarded as his transfer of affection, not yet
having guessed that his heart had never been hers. Now she raised her
head and looked at the two solemn-faced women, angrily and bitterly,
through the tears that her eyes still held.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care what’s changed him,” she said
defiantly. “I stood by my side of the bargain, and that’s all I know.
I’ve made him a good wife, as good a one as I knew how. I’ve been
bright and pleasant when his family treated me like dirt. I’ve not
complained and I’ve made the best of it, staying indoors and going
nowhere, when any other woman would have been getting some sort of fun
out of her life. I’ve managed that miserable little flat on not half
enough money, and tried to keep out of debt, when any one else in the
world would have run up bills all over for Mrs. Ryan to pay. Nobody can
say I haven’t done my part all right. Maybe I’ve got my faults--most of
us have--but I haven’t neglected my duty this time.”

She rose abruptly from her seat, pushing it back and feeling that
she had better go before she said too much. She realized that in her
hysterical and overwrought state she might become too loquacious and
afterward regret it. For the moment she believed all she said. Her
sisters, full of sincere sympathy for her, believed it too, though in
periods of cooler reflection they would probably question some of her
grievances; notably that one as to the small income, three thousand a
year, representing to them complete comfort, not to say affluence.

As she rose, Hazel rose too, her face full of suspicious concern.

“It’s not another woman, is it, Berny?” she almost whispered.

Berny had told so many lies that she did not bother about a few more.
Moreover, she was determined not to let her sisters know about Rose
Cannon--not yet, anyway.

“No,” she said with short scorn, turning to pick up her feather boa.
“Of course it’s not. He’s not that kind of a man. He’s too much of a
sissy. Another woman! I’d like to tell him that.”

She gave a sardonic laugh and turned to the glass, disposing her boa
becomingly and adjusting her hat. Hannah, shaking herself loose from
the encircling embrace of the cutting table, rose too, exclaiming,

“Don’t go yet. You must tell us more of this. I’ve not heard anything
for years that’s upset me so. If Dominick’s not in love with somebody
else, what’s got into him? Why doesn’t he care for you any more? A man
doesn’t stop loving his wife for no cause whatever. It isn’t in human
nature.”

“Well, it’s in Dominick’s nature,” said Dominick’s wife, pulling on her
gloves. “Maybe that isn’t human nature, but it’s the nature of the man
I’m married to and that’s all that concerns me. Remember, you’re not to
say a word about this. It’s all a secret.”

“Why should we talk about it?” said the practical Hazel. “It’s bad
enough to have had it happen. You don’t want to go round gossiping
about a member of your family getting thrown down.”

To their pressing invitations to remain longer, Berny was deaf. She had
said her say and wanted to go. The interview had undoubtedly eased her
of some of the choking exasperation that had followed Mrs. Ryan’s cut;
and it was a source of comfort to think that she had now broken the ice
and could continue to come and pour out her wrongs and sorrows into
the ever-attentive ears of her sisters. But now she wanted to get away
from them, from their penetrative questions, and their frank curiosity,
the curiosity of normal, healthy-minded women, whose lives had lacked
the change and color of which hers had been full. She cut her good-bys
short and left them to their own distracted speculations, staring
blankly at each other, amid the scattered millinery of the disordered
room.

When she reached home, she found on the hall table a note which the
Chinaman told her had been left by a messenger. It was from Bill Cannon
and contained but a few lines. These, of a businesslike brevity,
expressed the writer’s desire to see her again, and politely suggested
that, if she could come to his office on any one of the three specified
afternoons, between the hours of two and four, he would be deeply
honored and obliged.

Berny, frowning and abstracted, was standing with the note in her
hand when Dominick opened the hall door and came up the stairs. His
eye casually fell on the square of paper, but he asked no question
about it, hardly seemed to see it. Yet her state of suspicion was so
sensitively active that his lack of interest seemed fraught with
meaning, and pushing the letter back into its envelope she remarked
that it was a note from her dressmaker. Even the fact that his answer
was an indifferent, barely-articulated sound seemed significant to her,
and she took the letter into her bedroom and hid it in her handkerchief
box, as though her husband, instead of being the least, was the most
curious and jealous of men.




CHAPTER XVIII

BUFORD’S GOOD LUCK


In his “Klondike Monologue” at the Orpheum, Buford, the actor, made
a sudden and unexpected hit. The morning after his first appearance,
both Dominick and Berny read in the paper eulogistic notices of the
new star. Dominick was particularly interested. He remembered Buford’s
state of worry while at Antelope and was glad to see that the unlucky
player was, in the parlance of his own world, “making good.”

The evening papers contained more laudatory paragraphs. Buford’s act
was spoken of with an enthusiasm which taxed the vocabulary of the
writers who found that the phrases they had been using to describe the
regular vaudeville performances were not adequate for so sparkling an
occasion.

It was a rambling monologue of mining-camp anecdotes, recollections,
and experiences, delivered with confidential, simple seriousness.
Buford’s appearance in an immense, fur-lined overcoat with buttons made
of gold nuggets and a voluminous fur cap on his head, was given the
last touch of grotesqueness by a tiny tinsel spangle fastened on the
end of his nose. This adornment, on his entrance hardly noticeable, was
soon the focusing point of every eye. It looked as if it grew on its
prominent perch, and as he spoke, a slight, vibrating movement, which
he imparted to that portion of his visage, made the tinsel send out
continuous, uneasy gleams. The more serious his discourse was and the
more portentously solemn his face, the more glimmeringly active was the
spangle, and the more hysterically unrestrained became the laughter
of the audience. Altogether, Buford had made a success. Three days
after his first appearance, people were talking about “The Klondike
Monologue” as a few weeks before they had been talking about the last
play of Pinero’s as presented by a New York company.

From what Buford had told him, Dominick knew that the actor’s luck had
been bad, and that the period of imprisonment at Antelope was a last,
crowning misfortune. Through it he feared that he had forfeited his
Sacramento engagement, and the young man had a painful memory of the
long jeremiad that Buford, in his anxiety and affliction, had poured
out to himself and Rose Cannon. That the actor was evidently emerging
from his ill fortune was gratifying to Dominick, who, in the close
propinquity forced upon them by the restricted quarters of Perley’s
Hotel, had grown to like and pity the kindly, foolish and impractical
man.

Now, from what he heard, Buford’s hard times should be at an end. Such
a hit as he had made should give him the required upward impetus. Men
Dominick knew, who had theatrical affiliations, told him that Buford
was “made.” The actor could now command a good salary on any of the
vaudeville circuits in the country, and if “he had it in him” he might
ascend the ladder toward the heights of legitimate comedy. His humorous
talent was unique and brilliant. It was odd, considering his age, that
it had not been discovered sooner.

Berny was very anxious to see him. Hazel and Josh had seen him on one
of the first evenings and pronounced him “simply great.” She extorted
a promise from Dominick that, at the earliest opportunity, he would
buy tickets for her, and, if he could not accompany her himself, she
could go with one of her sisters. Dominick did not want to go. He had
no desire to see Buford and be reminded of the three weeks’ dream which
had interrupted the waking miseries of his life, and more than that he
hated, secretly and intensely, sitting beside Berny, talking to her
and listening to her talk, during the three hours of the performance.
The horrible falseness of it, the appearance of intimacy with a woman
toward whom he only felt a cold aversion, the close proximity of her
body which he disliked, even accidentally, to brush against, made him
shrink from the thought as from the perpetration of some mean and
repulsive deception.

He stopped to buy the tickets one midday on his way to lunch. He made
up his mind to buy three, then Berny could either take her two sisters,
or Hazel and Josh, whose craving for the theater was an unassuageable
passion. The good seats were sold out for days ahead and he had to be
content with three orchestra chairs for an evening at the end of the
following week. He was turning from the ticket office window when a
sonorous voice at his elbow arrested him:

“Mr. Ryan,” it boomed out, “do I see you at last? Ever since my
arrival in the city I have hoped for the opportunity of renewing our
acquaintance.”

It was Buford, but a rejuvenated and prosperous Buford, the reflection
of his good fortune shining from his beaming face and fashionable
figure. The red rasped look had left his features and the hollows
beneath his high cheek-bones were filled out. He was dressed in
gray with an almost foppish nicety, a fedora hat of a paler tint on
his head, and a cravat of a dull red rising in a rich puffed effect
below his collar. His shoes shone with the glassy polish of new
patent leather; the red-brown kid gloves that he carried exhaled an
attractive odor of russia-leather. He held out his hand to Dominick,
and the young man grasped it with real heartiness.

“Glad to see you, Buford,” he said, “and glad to hear you’ve made such
a success of it. I haven’t seen it myself, but I hear it’s a great
show.”

Buford, who had seen him buying the tickets, said blandly,

“But you’re going? You’ve been buying tickets, haven’t you? Oh, I’ve
got to have your opinion--nobody’s I’d think more of than Mr. Dominick
Ryan’s.”

Dominick, with the consciousness that he had just been planning not to
go reddening his face, stammered with embarrassed evasiveness,

“I’ve just been buying tickets and couldn’t get them before the end of
next week. You’re such a confounded success that everything’s sold out
days ahead. My wife wants to see you, and that’s the best I could do
for her. Her sister went on the second night and says you’re the hit of
the program. And then the papers! You’ll soon be one of the stars of
the nation.”

Buford acknowledged these compliments with cool, acquiescent
complacence.

“I have struck my gait,” he said, nodding his head in condescending
acceptance. “I have at last won my spurs.”

“But you didn’t expect to come down here when you were at Antelope.
Didn’t you tell me your engagement was for two weeks in Sacramento, and
that you were afraid you’d forfeited it by being snowed in there? How
was it you came down after all?”

“The luck turned. The tide that comes in the affairs of men came in
mine. I must say it had got down to about the lowest ebb. You’re right
about forfeiting my engagement. Got to Sacramento three weeks behind
time and found they’d procured a substitute, and all I had for my pains
was a blackguarding because the Lord had seen fit to snow me in in the
Sierras.”

Dominick laughed, and the actor allowed a slight, sour smile to disturb
the professional gravity of his face.

“Yes,” he nodded, “that’s the way of the transgressor, especially when
his transgressions ain’t of his own doing. After I’d been there two
weeks, I hadn’t a V between me and starvation. I looked for jobs with
the water squelching in my boots, and finally I had to do a turn in a
fifth-rate variety performance that showed in a sort of cellar down
a flight of stairs. That’s where the ‘Klondike Monologue’ was born.
Like lots of other good things, it had a pretty mean beginning. I just
pieced it together from bits and scraps that were the tailings of the
two years I had spent in that Arctic mill up there. It caught on from
the start--let the public alone to recognize a good thing when they
see one! That dirty cellar was pretty well sprinkled the first week,
and the second they had the standing room signs out. I didn’t introduce
the spangle till the end of the engagement. Some people think it a
great touch.”

He looked with sober questioning at Dominick, who said apologetically,

“So I hear, but I haven’t seen it.”

Buford raised his flexible brows with an air of stimulated, excusing
memory.

“True, true,” he replied, “I had forgotten. Two nights after I had
introduced the spangle, one of the ‘Granada’ people saw me. I didn’t
know it at the time, but I am a true artist; whatever my audience, I
give it of my best, and, in that instance, it was only one more case of
bread cast upon the waters. There’d been a vacancy here. Estradilla,
the Spanish Snake Dancer, was taken suddenly sick, collapsed after her
third performance, tied her intestines up in a knot with her act, they
say, and the wonder was she hadn’t done it before. Anyhow, they had to
substitute in a hurry, heard of my Klondike act and sent a man up to
see if I’d do to fill in. The next week I was here and--you know the
rest.”

“They say every man has his chance. You didn’t suppose the snowstorm
that caught you at Antelope was going to be the foundation of yours?”

Buford raised his brows till they about touched his hair, and said with
his most magisterial sonority of tone,

“No, no indeed. The ways of Fate--or let me say Providence--are truly
inscrutable. I thought that lock-up in the Sierras would be my undoing,
and I’m sure I never imagined the two years I spent in that accursed
Arctic were going to return to roost as blessings. I turned my face to
the North in a bitter hour, and it was in a bitter hour that I adopted
the stage.”

Dominick was exceedingly surprised. He had supposed Buford always to
have been an actor, to have been born to it. If he had heard that the
man had made his debut as an infant prodigy or even in his mother’s
arms in swaddling clothes, he would have felt it was in keeping
with Buford’s character, and just what he suggested. Now, in a tone
expressing his surprise, the young man queried,

“Then you went on the stage up there? You’ve only been on a few years?”

“Nearly four,” said the actor. He looked down at his shoe for a moment
as if considering, and repeated without looking up, “It will be four
next September. Trouble drove me to those far distant lands and hard
luck drove me on the stage. I’d never had anything to do with it till
then; I hadn’t a stage game about me. There’d even been a time when I
had a strong prejudice against the theater and never went to one. But
a man must live and----”

He stopped, his attention arrested by a hand laid softly on his sleeve.
A youth of Hebraic countenance had issued from a door behind him, and,
touching his arm with a hesitating, unclean finger, began to speak in
a low tone. Buford turned to the boy. Dominick backed away from them
toward the box-office window. As they conferred he took a card out of
his wallet, and hastily traced the address of the flat below his name.
He had it ready to offer Buford, when the actor, his conference over,
came toward him.

“Duty calls,” said Buford. “I am sorry, but they want me inside. But
this is not going to be our only meeting. I’m booked for two weeks
longer here, and I’m hoping to see something more of you.”

Dominick gave him the card, with assurances that he would be glad to
see him, and that his own home was a better meeting-place than the
bank. At this mark of friendship, the actor was openly gratified. He
looked at the card with a smile and said,

“Most certainly I’ll avail myself of this privilege. I hope later to be
able to place a box at your disposal. Madame, you say, is very desirous
of seeing me. Well, I’ll see to it that she does so under the most
favorable conditions. Though I have never met her, I think I may ask
you to convey my respects to her.”

He bowed impressively as though saluting Berny in person, and then,
with a last dignified farewell to Dominick, turned toward the door
which opened at his approach, disclosing the waiting Jew boy. As
the actor drew near, Dominick heard the boy break into low-toned
remonstrances, and then the door closed upon Buford’s sonorous and
patronizing notes of reproval.




CHAPTER XIX

ROSE’S POINT OF VIEW


The following Sunday, at ten o’clock in the morning, Dominick
noiselessly descended the stairs of the flat and let himself out into
the street. He had had a sleepless night, and as he stood in the
dazzling sunshine, debating which way he should go, his face showed the
hollows and lines left by hours of worried wakefulness.

His day--the holiday of his week of steady work--was without
engagement. The friend with whom he usually walked over the suburban
hills had moved to the country. His rest from labor would take the form
of a day spent away from his home in the open air. As he had eaten
his breakfast he had planned his itinerary, carefully considering the
best distribution of these twelve treasured hours of liberty. He would
spend the morning walking, anywhere--the direction did not matter
much--anywhere where there was quiet and a view. He would take his
lunch at any little joint--country hotel, city chop-house--he happened
to pass, and in the afternoon he would walk again, on for hours,
probably over the Presidio Hills where the poppies were beginning to
gild the slopes, or along the beach where there were unfrequented nooks
in which a man could lie and look at the water, and think. A whole
day away from Berny and the flat, in the healing balm of the sunshine
and the clean, untroubled air, was the best way to renew the fund of
philosophy and patience that of late he had felt was almost exhausted.

The ferment of his wakeful night was still in his blood as he walked
across the city, aiming for the eminence of Telegraph Hill. He walked
slowly without looking up; his eyes on the tip of his cane as it struck
the pavement. It was a superb day, calm, still, breathing peace, like
that other Sunday when he had gone to the park with the Iversons and
seen Rose Cannon. But the splendors of the morning did not divert
his mind from its heavy musings. With down-drooped head, watching
the striking tip of the cane as though in it there lay some mystic
solution of his difficulties, he walked on, a slow-moving figure, a man
wrestling with his own particular world-problem, facing his fate and
repudiating it.

There had been times lately when he had felt he could no longer
endure the present conditions of his life. As he had lain thinking in
the darkness of the previous night, it had come upon him, with the
clearness of conviction, that he could not stand it. The future with
Berny had loomed before him, crushing, unbearable, and he had seen no
end to it, and repeated to himself that he must be free of it. It had
been awful as a nightmare, and turning on his bed he had wondered how
he had endured the situation so long.

Now, as he walked through the sweet, gay morning he felt a renewal
of courage and reasoned with himself, using the old arguments with
which for two years he had been subduing his rebellion and curbing
the passion and impatience of his youth. Because a man had married
an uncongenial woman, was that an excuse for him to leave her, to
put her away from him when she had honestly tried to live up to her
marriage contract? Summing it all up in a sentence--his wife had a bad
temper and he had ceased to care for her, was that a reason for him to
separate from her?

Last night he had used none of these arguments. He had felt too
strongly to reason about the righteousness of moral obligation. Lying
in the dark, listening to the striking of the clocks, he had said to
himself that he could not stand Berny any longer--he could not live
in the house with her. He did not hate her, it was far from that. He
wished her well; to hear that she was happy and prosperous somewhere
where he did not have to dine with her and sit in the den with her
every evening, would have given him the greatest satisfaction. He felt
that the sight of her was daily growing more unbearably and unnaturally
obnoxious to him. Little personal traits of hers had a strange,
maddening power of exciting his dislike. In the evening the rustling of
the sheets of the newspaper as she turned and folded them filled him
with a secret anger. He would sit silent, pretending to read, waiting
for that regular insistent rustling, and controlling himself with an
effort. As they sat opposite each other at breakfast, the sound she
made as she crunched the toast seemed to contain something of her
own hard, aggressive personality in it, and he hated to hear it. In
the dead depression of the night, he had felt that to listen to that
rustling of newspapers every night and that crunching of toast every
morning was a torment he could no longer bear.

In the clear light of the morning, patience had come and the old
standards of restraint and forbearance reasserted themselves. The
familiar pains, to which he had thought himself broken, had lost much
of their midnight ghoulishness. The old ideals of honor and obligation,
with which he had been schooling himself for two years, came back
to his mind with the unerring directness of homing pigeons. He went
over the tale of Berny’s worthiness and his own responsibility in the
misfortunes of her life and disposition. It was a circular process of
thought that always returned to the starting place: what right had he
to complain of her? Had not most of the disappointments that had soured
and spoiled her come from his doing, his fault, his people?

He breathed a heavy sigh and looked up. To this question and its humbly
acquiescing answer these reflections always brought him. But to-day
it was hard to be acquiescent. The rebellion of the night was not
all subdued. The splendor of the morning, the pure arch of sky, the
softness of the air, called to him to rejoice in his strength, to be
glad, and young. He raised his head, breathing in the sweet freshness,
and took off his hat, letting the sun pour its benediction on his head.
His spirit rose to meet this inspiring, beneficent nature, not in
exhilaration, but in revolt. The thought of Rose gripped him, and in
the strength of his manhood he longed for her.

He ascended the hill by one of the streets on its southern slope,
violently steep, the upward leaps of its sidewalk here and there
bridged by flights of steps. Every little house was disgorging its
inmates, garbed in the light Sunday attire of the Californian on
pleasure bent. The magnificent day was calling them, not to prayer and
the church, but to festival. Families stood on the sidewalks, grouped
round the Sunday symbol of worship, a picnic-basket. Lovers went by in
smiling pairs, arm linked in arm. A pagan joy in life was calling from
every side, from the country clothed in its robe of saffron poppies,
from the sky pledged to twelve hours of undimmed blue, from the air
mellowed to a warmth that never burns, from the laughter of light
hearts, the smiles of lovers, the eyes of children.

Dominick went up the hill in the clear, golden sunlight, and in his
revolt he pushed Berny from his mind, and let Rose come in her place.
His thoughts, always held from her, sprang at her, encircled her,
seemed to draw her toward him as once his arms had done. She was a
sacred thing, the Madonna of his soul’s worship, but to-day she seemed
to bend down from her niche with less of the reverenced saint than of
the loving woman in the face his fancy conjured up.

Standing on the summit of the hill, where the wall of the quarry drops
down to the water front and the wharves, he relinquished himself to
his dream of her. The bay lay at his feet, a blue floor, level between
rusty, rugged hills. There was an island in it, red-brown, incrusted
with buildings, that seemed to clutch their rocky perch with long
strips and angles of wall. In the reach of water just below there was
little shipping, only a schooner beating its way to sea. The wind
was stiffer down there than on the sheltered side of the hill. The
schooner, with sails white as curds against the blue, was tacking, a
long, slantwise flight across the ruffled water. She left a thin,
creamy line behind her which drifted sidewise into eddying curves like
a wind-lashed ribbon. Dominick, his eyes absently on her, wondered if
she were bound for the South Seas, those waters of enchantment where
islands, mirrored in motionless lagoons, lie scattered over plains of
blue.

A memory crossed his mind of a description of some of these islands
given him by a trader he had once met. They were asylums, lotus-eating
lands of oblivion, for law-breakers. Those who had stepped outside the
pale, who had dared defy the world’s standards, found in them a haven,
an elysian retreat. They rose before his mental vision, palm-shaded,
lagoon-encircled, played upon by tropic breezes, with glassy waves
sliding up a golden beach. There man lived as his heart dictated,
a real life, a true life, not a bitter tale of days in protesting
obedience to an immutable, heart-breaking law. There he and Rose might
live, lost to the places they had once filled, hidden from the world
and its hard judgments.

The thought seized upon his mind like a drug, and he stood in a tranced
stillness of fascinated imagination, his eyes on the ship, his inner
vision seeing himself and Rose standing on the deck. He was so held
under the spell of his exquisite, enthralling dream, that he did not
see a figure round the corner of the rough path, nor notice its slow
approach. But he felt it, when its casual, roaming glance fell on him.
As if called, he turned sharply and saw Rose standing a few yards away
from him, looking at him with an expression of affrighted indecision.
As his glance met hers, the dream broke and scattered, and he seemed
to emerge out of a darkness that had in it something beautiful and
baleful, into the healthy, pure daylight.

The alarm in Rose’s face died away, too. For a moment she stood
motionless, then moved toward him slowly, with something of reluctance
about her approach. She seemed to be coming against her will, as if
obeying a summons in his eyes.

“I wasn’t sure it was you,” she said. “And then when I saw it was, I
was going to steal away before you saw me. But you turned suddenly as
if you heard me.”

“I felt you were there,” he answered.

It was natural that with Rose he should need to make no further
explanation. She understood as she would always understand everything
that was closely associated with him. He would never have to explain
things to her, as he never, from their first meeting, felt that he
needed to talk small talk or make conversation.

She came to a stop beside him, and they stood for a silent moment,
looking down the bare wall of the quarry, a raw wound in the hill’s
flank, to the docks below where the masts of ships rose in a forest,
and their lean bowsprits were thrust over the wharves.

“You came just in time,” he said. “I walked up here this morning to
have a think. I don’t know where the think was going to take me when
you came round that corner and stopped it. What brought you here?”

“Nothing in particular. It was such a fine morning I thought I’d just
ramble about, and I came this way without thinking. My feet brought me
without my knowledge.”

“My think brought you,” he said. “That’s the second time it’s happened.
It was a revolutionary sort of think, and there was a lot about you in
it.”

He looked down at her, standing by his shoulder, and met her eyes. They
were singularly pellucid, the clearest, quietest eyes he thought he had
ever looked into. His own dropped before them to the bay below, touched
and then quickly left the schooner which was beating its way toward
them on the return tack.

“If you could only always come this way when I want you, everything
would be so different, so much easier,” he said in a low tone. “I was
surrounded by devils and they were getting tight hold of me when you
came round that corner.”

He glanced at her sidewise with a slight, quizzical smile.

This time she did not answer his look, but with her eyes on the bay,
her brows drawn together, asked,

“New devils or old ones?”

“The old ones, but they’ve grown bigger and twice as hard to manage
lately. They----” he broke off, his voice suddenly roughened, and said,
“I don’t seem to know how to live my life.”

He turned his face away from her. The demons she had exorcised had left
him weakened. In the bright sunshine, with the woman he loved beside
him, he felt broken and beaten down by the hardships of his fate.

“Sit down and talk to me,” she said quietly. “No one can hear you. It’s
like being all alone in the world up here on the hilltop. We can sit on
this stone.”

There was a broken boulder behind them, close to the narrow foot-way,
and she sat on it, motioning him to a flat piece of rock beside her.
Her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her loose gray coat, the
wisps of fair hair that escaped below the rim of her hat fanning up and
down in faint breaths of air, like delicate threads of seaweed in ocean
currents.

“Tell me the whole thing,” she said. “You and I have never talked much
about your affairs. And what concerns you concerns me.”

He pricked at the earth with the tip of his cane, ashamed of his moment
of weakness, and yet fearing if he told her of his cares it might
return.

“It’s just what you know,” he began slowly. “Only as every day goes by
it seems to get worse. I’ve never told you much about my marriage. I’ve
never told anybody. Many men make mistakes in choosing a wife and find
out, and say to themselves early in the game, that they _have_ made a
mistake and must abide by it. I don’t think I’m weaker than they are,
but somehow----”

He stopped and looked at the moving tip of his cane. She said nothing,
and after taking a deep breath he went on.

“I knew all about her when I married her. I was young, but I wasn’t a
green fool. Only I didn’t seem to realize, I didn’t guess, I didn’t
dream, that she was going to stay the way she was. I seemed to be at
the beginning of a sort of experiment that I was sure was going to turn
out well. I didn’t love her, but I liked her well enough, and I was
going to try my best to have things go smoothly and make her happy.
When she was my wife, when I’d try to make everything as comfortable
and pleasant as I could, then I expected she’d--she’d--be more like the
women men love, and even if they don’t love, manage to get on with. But
it didn’t seem to go well even in the beginning, and now it’s got worse
and worse. Perhaps it’s my fault. I’m not one of those fellows who
can read a woman like a book. When a person tells me a thing, I think
they mean it; I’m not looking into them to see if they mean just the
opposite.”

He stopped again and struck lightly at a lump of earth with his cane.
He had pushed his hat back from his forehead and his face bore an
expression of affected, boyish nonchalance which was extremely pathetic
to Rose.

“Maybe there are men who could stand it all right. She’s very nice part
of the time. She’s a first-class housekeeper. I give her two hundred
dollars a month, and on that little bit she runs the flat beautifully.
And she’s quiet. She doesn’t want to be out all the time, the way some
women do. She’s as domestic as possible, and she’s been very decent
and pleasant since I came back. The way she was treated over the ball
would have r’iled any woman. I didn’t tell you about that--it’s a mean
story--but she got no invitation and was angry and flared up. We had
a sort of an uncomfortable interview, and--and--that was the reason I
went to Antelope. I didn’t think I’d ever go back to her then. I was
pretty sore over it. But--” he paused, knocking the lump of clay into
dust, “I thought afterward it was the right thing to do. I’d married
her, you see.”

Rose did not speak, and after a moment he said in a low voice,

“But it’s--it’s--awfully hard to live with a person you don’t get on
with. And it’s the sort of thing that goes on and on and on. There
isn’t any end; there isn’t any way out.”

Once more he stopped, this time clearing his throat. He cleared it
twice, and then said,

“I oughtn’t to say this. I oughtn’t to complain. I know I’m a chump and
a coward to talk this way to you, but--” he dropped his voice to a note
of low, inward communing, and said, “it’s so hopeless. I can’t see what
to do.”

He leaned forward and rested his forehead on the head of his cane,
hiding his face from her. The silence between them vibrated with
the huskiness of his voice, the man’s voice, the voice of power and
protection, roughened with the pain he was unused to and did not know
how to bear.

Rose sat looking at him, her soul wrung with sympathy. Her instinct was
to take the bowed head in her arms and clasp it to her bosom, not as a
woman in love, but as a woman torn by pity for a suffering she could
not alleviate. She made no movement, however, but kept both hands deep
in her pockets, as she said,

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t talk this way to me. I think I’m the one
person in the world that you ought to speak to about it.”

“I can’t talk to anybody else, not to any friend, not to my own mother.
It’s my affair. No one else had any responsibility in it. I brought
it on myself and I’ve got to stand by it myself. But you--you’re
different.”

He drew himself up, and, staring out into the great wash of sun and air
before him, went on in a louder voice, as if taking a new start.

“I was thinking last night about it, looking it in the face. The
dark’s the best time for that, you seem to see things clearer, more
truthfully. And I came to the conclusion it would be better if I ended
it. I didn’t see that I had any obligation to go on martyrizing myself
for ever. I didn’t see that anybody was benefiting by it. I thought
we’d be happier and make something better of our lives if we were
apart, in different houses, in different towns.”

“Does she want to leave you?”

The question seemed to touch a nerve that startled and then stiffened
him. He answered it with his head turned half toward her, the eyebrows
lifted, a combative note in his voice:

“I don’t know whether she does or not.” He stopped and then said, with
his face flushing, “No, I don’t think she does.”

“How can you leave her then?”

“Well, I can--” he turned on her almost angrily and met her clear eyes.
“Oh, I can’t go into particulars,” he said sharply, looking away again.
“It’s not a thing for you and me to discuss. Incompatibility is a
recognized ground of separation.”

He fell to striking the lump of clay again, and Rose said, as if
offering the remark with a sort of tentative timidity,

“You said just now you had nothing to complain of against her. It
doesn’t seem fair to leave a woman--a wife--just because she’s hard to
live with and you no longer like her.”

“Would you,” he said with a manner so full of irritated disagreement as
to be almost hectoring, “advocate two people living on together in a
semblance of friendship, who are entirely uncongenial, rub each other
the wrong way so that the sight of one is unpleasant to the other?”

“Are you sure that’s the way she feels about you?”

He again looked away from her, and answered in a sullen tone, as though
against his will,

“I don’t know.”

They were silent for a space, and he went on.

“Doesn’t it strike you as wrong, cowardly, mean, for a man and woman
to tear their lives to pieces out of respect for what the world says
and thinks? Every semblance of love and mutual interest has gone from
our companionship. Isn’t it all wrong that we should make ourselves
miserable to preserve the outward forms of it? We’re just lying to the
world because we haven’t got the sand to tell the truth. You ask me if
my views on this matter are hers. I don’t know, that’s the truth.” A
memory of Berny’s futile and pathetic efforts to make friends with him
on his return swept over him and forced him to say, “Honestly, I don’t
think she wants to leave me. I think the situation doesn’t drive her
crazy the way it does me. I think she doesn’t mind it. I don’t know
why, but she doesn’t seem to. But surely, any woman living would rather
be free of a man she no longer cared for, than forced to live on in
a false relation with him, one irritating the other, the two of them
every day growing more antagonistic.”

“She would not want to be free if she loved him.”

“Loved him!” he ejaculated, with angry scorn. “She never loved me or
anybody else. Love is not in her. Oh, you don’t know! I thought last
night I’d offer her all I had, the flat, the furniture, my salary,
everything I could rake and scrape together, and then I’d tell her
I was going to leave her, that I couldn’t stand living that way any
longer. I was going to take a room somewhere and give her everything I
could. I was going to be as generous to her as I knew how. I’d not say
one word against her to anybody. That was what I thought I’d do last
night.”

“But this morning you think differently.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because those are not your real thoughts--they’re the dark,
exaggerated ones that come when a person lies awake at night. It’s as
if, because you couldn’t see your surroundings, you were in another
sort of world where the proportions are different. You couldn’t do that
to your wife. You couldn’t treat her that way. You say in many ways
she’s been a good wife. It isn’t she that’s stopped caring, or finds
her life with you disagreeable.”

“Then, am I to suffer this way for ever--see my life ruined for a fault
man after man commits and goes scott free?”

“Your life isn’t ruined. Things don’t last at such a pressure.
Something will change it. By and by, you’ll look back on this and
it’ll seem hundreds of miles away and you’ll wonder that you were so
discouraged and hopeless.”

“Yes,” he said bitterly, “maybe when I’m fifty. It’s a long time
between then and now, a long time to be patient.”

Manlike, he was wounded that the woman of his heart should not side
with him in everything, even against his own conscience. Had Rose been
something closer to him, a sister, a wife, this would have been one of
the occasions on which he would have found fault with her and accused
her of disloyalty.

“I thought you’d understand,” he said, “I thought you’d see how
impossible it is. You make me feel that I’m a whining coward who has
come yelping round like a kicked dog for sympathy.”

“I care so much that I do more than sympathize,” she said in a low
voice.

This time he did not answer, feeling ashamed at his petulance.

“With any one else it would be just sympathy,” she said, “but with you
there’s more than that. It’s because I care, that I expect more and
demand more. Other men can do the small, cowardly, mean things that
people do, and find excuses for, but not you. I could make excuses for
them too, but I must never have to make excuses for you. You’re better
than that, you’re yourself, and you do what’s true to yourself and
stand on that. You’ve got to do and be the best. Maybe it won’t be what
you want or what’s most comfortable, but that mustn’t matter to you.
If you’re not to be happy that mustn’t matter either. What pleases you
and me mustn’t matter if it’s not the thing for a man like you to do.
You can’t shirk your responsibilities. You can’t stick to something
you’ve done just while it’s pleasant and then, when it’s hard, throw
it up. Lots of people do that, thousands of them. Just as you said
now--hundreds of men do what you have done and go scott free. That’s
for them to do if they want to, but not for you. Let them drop down if
they want, that’s no reason why you should. Let them go on living any
way that’s agreeable to them, _you_ know what you ought to do and you
must do it. It doesn’t matter about them, or the world, or what anybody
says. The only thing that matters is that the thing you know in your
heart is the thing that’s true for you.”

“You expect too much of weak human nature,” he said.

“No,” she answered, “I don’t. I only expect what you can do.”

He turned and looked at her.

“Then I’m to live for the rest of my life with a wife I don’t care for,
separated from the woman I love? What is there in that to keep a man’s
heart alive?”

“The knowledge that we love each other. That’s a good deal, I think.”

It was the first time she had said in words that she loved him. There
was no trace of embarrassment or consciousness on her face; instead
she seemed singularly calm and steadfast, much less moved than he.
Her words shook him to the soul. He turned his eyes from her face and
grasping for her hand, clasped it, and pressed it to his heart, and to
his lips, then loosed it and rose to his feet, saying, as if to himself,

“Yes, that’s a good deal.”

There was silence between them for some minutes, neither moving, both
looking out at the hills and water. From the city below, sounds of
church bells came up, mellow and tranquil, ringing lazily and without
effort. Other sounds mingled with them, refined and made delicate by
distance. It was like being on an island floating in the air above the
town. Rose got up and shook the dust from her coat.

“The churches are coming out, it must be nearly one. It will be
lunch-time before I get home.”

He did not turn or answer, but stood with his hand on the metal rope
that protected the quarry’s ledge, looking down. Her eyes followed his,
and then brought up on the schooner bearing away on its long tack,
strained and careening in the breeze that, down there in the open, blew
fresh and strong from the great Pacific.

“It’s a schooner,” she said absently. “Where do you suppose it’s going?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere a long way off, I hope. My devils are sailing
away on it.”

They stood side by side, gazing down at it till she moved away with a
sudden “Good-by.”

“Good-by,” he answered, and stretched out his hand.

But she was already some feet in advance and had begun to move quickly.

“Good-by, Rose,” he cried after her, with something in his voice of the
wistful urgency in a child’s when it is left behind.

“Good-by,” she called over her shoulder without looking back. “Good-by.”

He followed her with his eyes till she disappeared round the bend of
the path, then turned back and again dropped his glance to the schooner.

He stood watching it till it passed out of sight beneath the shoulder
of the hill, straining and striving like a wild, free creature in its
forward rush for the sea.




CHAPTER XX

THE LITTLE SPIDER


Berny had been turning over in her mind the advantages of accepting the
money--had been letting herself dwell upon the delights of possible
possession--when at the Sunday dinner that afternoon Josh McCrae threw
her back into the state of incensed rejection with which she had
met the first offer. With his face wreathed in joyous grins, he had
apprised her of the fact that only an hour earlier, while walking on
Telegraph Hill, he had seen Dominick there talking with Miss Cannon.

A good deal of query followed Josh’s statement. There was quite an
outburst of animated interrogations rising from the curiosity the
Iversons felt concerning Bill Cannon’s daughter, and under cover
of it Berny controlled her face and managed to throw in a question
or two on her own account. There had been a minute--that one when
Josh’s statement had struck with a shocking unexpectedness on her
consciousness--when she had felt and looked her wrath and amaze.
Then she had gripped her glass and drunk some water and, swallowing
gulpingly, had heard her sister’s rapid fire of questions, and Josh,
proud to have imparted such interesting information, answering
importantly. Putting down her glass, she said quite naturally,

“Where did you say you saw them--near the quarry?”

“Just by the edge, talking together. I was going to walk along and join
them, and then I thought they looked so sort of sociable, I’d better
not butt in. Dominick got to know her real well up in the Sierra,
didn’t he?”

“Yes, of course,” she said hurriedly. “They grew to be quite friends.
They must have met by accident on the hill. Dominick’s always walking
in those queer, deserted places.”

“You haven’t got acquainted with her yet, have you?” said the simple
Josh, whose touch was not of the lightest. “It would be a sort of grind
on the Ryans if you get really solid with her.”

“Oh, I can know her whenever I want,” Berny answered airily, above a
discomfort of growing revelation that was almost as sharp as a pain.
“Dominick’s several times asked me if I wanted to meet her, but it
always was at times when I’d other things to do. We’re going to ask her
to the flat to tea some time.”

On ordinary occasions, Berny would never have gone to this length of
romantic invention, for she was a judicious liar and believed, with
the sage, that a lie was too valuable a thing to waste. But just now
she was too upset, too preyed upon by shock and suspicion, to exercise
an artistic restraint, and she lied recklessly, unmindful of a future
when her listeners would expect to see her drafts on the bank of truth
cashed.

She was quiet for the rest of the afternoon, but it was not till she
had reached her own home, silent in its untenanted desertion, that she
had an opportunity to turn the full vigor of her mind on what she had
heard.

She had been jealous of Rose since that fatal Sunday when she had
discovered why Dominick was changed. It was not the jealousy of
disprized love, it was not the jealousy of thwarted passion. It
was a subtle compound of many ingredients, the main one a sense of
bursting indignation that two people--one of them a possession of
her own--should dare to seek for happiness where she had found only
dullness and disappointment. She had an enraging premonition that Rose
would probably succeed where she had failed. It made her not only
jealous of Rose, it made her hate her.

Josh’s words increased this, and caused her suspicions, which, if not
sleeping, had of late been dormant, to wake into excited activity.
Dominick’s lonely Sunday walks she now saw shared by the girl
who was trying to buy his freedom. Incidents that before she had
taken at their face value now were suddenly fraught with disturbing
significance. Why did Dominick go out so often in the evening? Since
the moonlight night, he had been out twice, once not coming back till
eleven. The confirmation of sight could hardly have made her more
confident that he must spend these stolen hours with Rose Cannon in
the palatial residence on Nob Hill. And it was not the most soothing
feature in the case that Berny should picture them in one of the
artistically-furnished parlors of which she had heard so much and seen
nothing but the linings of the window curtains. Here, amid glories of
upholstery, from the sight of which she was for ever debarred, Rose and
Dominick talked of the time when he should be free. Berny, like the
tiger lashing itself to fury with its own tail, thought of what they
said, till she became sure her imaginings were facts; and the more she
imagined, the more enraged and convinced she became.

She put from her mind all intention of ever taking the money. She
wanted it desperately, terribly; she wanted it so much that when she
thought of it it made her feel sick, but the joys of its possession
were at the unrealizable distance of dreams, while the fact of her
husband’s being enticed away by another woman was a thing of close,
immediate concern, a matter of the moment, as if some one were trying
to pick her pocket. As an appurtenance of hers, Dominick might not have
been a source of happiness, but that was no reason why he should be a
source of happiness to some one else.

Berny did not argue with any such compact clearness. She was less
lucid, less defined and formulated in her ideas and desires than she
had been when Bill Cannon made the first offer. Anger had thickened and
obscured her clarity of vision. Suspicions, harbored and stimulated
by a mind which wished for confirmation of the most extravagant, had
destroyed the firm and well-outlined conception of what she wanted and
was willing to fight for. In fact, she had passed the stage in the
controversy when she was formidable because she stood with the strength
of sincerity in her position, her demands, and refusals. Now the
integrity of her defiance was gone. She wanted the money. She wanted
to take it, and her refusal to do so was false to herself and to her
standards.

She knew that the interview for which Bill Cannon had asked was for a
last, deciding conversation. He was to make his final offer. It was a
moment of torture to her when she wondered what it would be, and her
mind hovered in distracted temptation over the certain two hundred
thousand dollars and the possible quarter of a million. It was then
that she whipped up her wrath, obscured for the moment by the mounting
dizziness of cupidity, and thought of Rose and Dominick in the Japanese
room, or the Turkish room, or the Persian room, into which she had
never been admitted. The thought that they were making love received a
last, corrosive bitterness from the fact that Berny could not see the
beautiful and expensive surroundings of these sentimental passages.

She was in this state of feverish distractedness when she went to
Bill Cannon’s office. She had chosen the last of the three days he
had specified in his note, and had left the flat at the time he had
mentioned as the latest hour at which he would be there. She had
chosen the last day as a manner of indicating her languid interest in
the matter to be discussed, and had also decided to be about fifteen
minutes late, as it looked more indifferent, less eager. Bill Cannon
would never know that she was dressed and ready half an hour before
she started, and had lounged about the flat, watching the clocks, and
starting at every unrecognized sound.

She was received with a flattering deference. As her footstep sounded
on the sill of the outer office, a face was advanced toward one of the
circular openings in the long partition, immediately disappeared, and
then a door was thrown back to admit to her presence a good-looking,
well-dressed young man. His manner was all deferential politeness.
A murmur of her name, just touched with the delicately-questioning
quality imparted by the faintest of rising inflections, accompanied
his welcoming bow. Mr. Cannon was expecting her in the private office.
Special instructions had been left that she should be at once admitted.
Would she be kind enough to step this way?

Berny followed him down the long strip of outer office where it flanked
the partition in which the regularly-recurring holes afforded glimpses
of smooth bent heads. She walked lightly, and had an alert, wary air
as though it might be a good thing to be prepared for an ambush. She
had been rehearsing her part of the interview for days; and like
other artists, now that the moment of her appearance was at hand,
felt extremely nervous, and had a sense of girding herself up against
unforeseen movements on the part of the foe.

Nothing, however, could have been more disarmingly friendly than the
old man’s greeting. As the door opened and the clerk pronounced her
name, he rose from his seat and welcomed her in a manner which was a
subtle compound of simple cordiality and a sort of masonic, unexpressed
understanding, as between two comrades bound together by a common
interest. Sitting opposite him in one of the big leather chairs, she
could not but feel some of her resentment melting away, and her
stiffly-antagonistic pose losing something of its rigidity as he smiled
indulgently on her, asking about herself, about Dominick, finally about
her sisters, with whose names and positions he appeared flatteringly
familiar.

Berny answered him cautiously. She made a grip at her receding anger,
conscious that she needed all her sense of wrong to hold her own
against this crafty enemy. Even when he told her he had heard with
admiration and wonder of Hannah’s fine record in the primary school
department, her smile was guarded, her answer one of brief and watchful
reserve. She wished he would get to the point of the interview. Her
mind could not comfortably contain two subjects at once, and it was
crammed and running over with the all-important one of the money. Her
eyes, fixed on him, did not stray to the furnishings of the room or the
long windows that reached to the ceiling and through the dimmed panes
of which men on the other side of the alley stood looking curiously
down on her.

“Well,” he said, when he had disposed of Hannah’s worthiness and even
celebrated the merits of Josh in a sentence of appreciation, “it’s
something to have such a good sterling set of relations. They’re
what make the ‘good families’ in our new West out here. And they’re
beginning to understand that in Europe. When they see your people in
Paris, they’ll recognize them as the right kind of Americans. The
French ain’t as effete as you’d think from what you hear. They know
the real from the imitation every time. They’ve had their fill of Coal
Oil Johnnys and spectacular spenders. What they’re looking for is the
strong man and woman who have carved out their own path.”

Berny’s eyes snapped into an even closer concentration of attention.

“Maybe that’s so,” she said, “but I don’t see when my sisters are ever
going to get to Paris.”

“They’ll go over to see you,” he answered. “I guess I could manage now
and then to get ’em passes across the continent.”

He rested one elbow on the desk against which he was sitting, and with
his hand caressing his short, stubby beard, he looked at Berny with
eyes of twinkling good nature.

“Come to think of it,” he added, “I guess I could manage the
transportation across the ocean, too. It oughtn’t to cost ’em, all
told, more’n fifty dollars. It seems hard luck that Miss Hannah, after
a lifetime of work, shouldn’t see Paris, and----”

“What makes you think I’m going to be there?” said Berny sharply. She
found any deviation from the subject in hand extremely irritating, and
her manner and voice showed it.

“Oh, of course you are,” he said, with a little impatient, deprecating
jerk of his head. “You can’t be going to persist in a policy that’s
simply cutting your own throat.”

“I rather fancy I am,” she answered in a cool, hard tone. To lend
emphasis to her words, she unbent from her upright attitude and leaned
against the chair-back in a sudden assumption of indifference. Her
eyes, meeting his, were full of languid insolence.

“I don’t feel that I’ll go to Paris at all,” she said. “I think little
old San Francisco’s good enough for me.”

He looked away from her at the papers on the desk, eyed them for a
thoughtful moment, and then said,

“I didn’t think you were as short-sighted as that. I’ll tell you fair
and square that up to this I’ve thought you were a pretty smart woman.”

“Well, I guess from this on, you’ll have to put me down a fool.”

She laughed, a short, sardonic laugh, and her adversary smiled politely
in somewhat absent response. With his eyes still on the papers, he said,

“No, no--I can’t agree to that. Short-sighted is the word. You’re not
looking into the future, you’re not calculating on your own powers of
endurance. How much longer do you think you can stand this battle with
your husband and the Ryans?”

In the dead watches of the night, Berny had asked herself this
question, and found no answer to it. She tried to laugh again, but it
was harder and less mirthful than before.

The old man leaned forward, shaking an admonitory forefinger at her.

“Don’t you know, young woman, that’s a pretty wearing situation?
Don’t you know to live in a state of perpetual strife will break down
the strongest spirit? The dropping of water will wear away a stone.
You _can’t_ stand the state of siege and warfare you’ve got yourself
into much longer. Your rage is carrying you along now. You’re mad as
a whole hive full of hornets and the heat of it’s keeping you going,
furnishing fuel to the engines, so to speak. But you can’t keep up such
a clip. You’ll break to pieces and you’ll break suddenly. Then what’ll
happen? Why, the Ryans’ll come with a big broom and sweep the pieces
out. They won’t leave one little scrap behind. That flat on Sacramento
Street will be swept as clean of you as if you’d never had your dresses
hanging in the cupboard or your toothbrush on the wash-stand. Old
Delia’s a great housekeeper. When she gets going with a broom there’s
not a speck escapes her.”

His narrowed eyes looked into hers with that boring steadiness that
she was beginning to know. He was not smiling now, rather he looked a
man who knew he was talking of very momentous things and wanted his
companion to know it too.

“That’s all talk,” Berny snapped. “If that’s all you’ve got to say to
me, I’d better be going.”

“No, no,” he stretched out an opened hand and with it made a
down-pressing gesture that was full of command. “Don’t move yet. These
are just suggestions of mine, suggestions I was making for your good.
Of course, if you don’t care to follow them, it’s your affair, not
mine. I’ve done my duty, and, after all, that’s what concerns me most.
What I asked you to come here for to-day was to talk about this matter,
to talk further, to thresh it out some more. I’ve seen Mrs. Ryan since
our last meeting.”

He paused, and Berny sat upright, her eyes on him in a fixity of
listening that was almost a glare. She was tremulously anxious and yet
afraid to hear the coming words.

“What did she say?” she asked with the same irritation she had shown
before.

“She doubles her offer to you. She’ll give you two hundred thousand
dollars to leave her son.”

“Well, I won’t,” said Berny, drawing herself to the edge of the chair.
“She can keep her two hundred thousand dollars.”

“That two hundred thousand dollars, well invested, would give an income
of from twelve to fifteen thousand a year. On that, in Paris, you’d be
a rich woman.”

“I guess I’ll stay a poor one in San Francisco.”

He eyed her ponderingly over the hand that stroked his beard.

“I wonder,” he said slowly, “what’s making you act like this? You stump
me. Here you are, poor, treated like dirt, ostracized as if you were a
leper, with the most powerful family in California your open enemy, and
you won’t take a fortune that’s offered you without a condition, and go
to a place where you’d be honored and courted and could make yourself
anything you’d like. I can’t make it out. You beat me.”

Berny was flattered. Even through the almost sickening sense of longing
that the thought of the lost two hundred thousand dollars created in
her, she was conscious of the gratified conceit of the woman who is
successfully mysterious.

“Don’t bother your head about it,” she said as lightly as she could.
“Think I’m crazy, if that makes it any easier for you.”

“I can’t think _that_,” he answered, conveying in the accented
monosyllable his inability to think lightly of her mental equipment.
“There’s something underneath it all I don’t know. You’ve not been
quite open, quite as open as I think _my_ frankness deserves. But, of
course, a man can’t force a lady’s confidence. If you don’t want to
give me yours, I’ve got to be content without it.”

Berny emitted a vague sound of agreement. She once more drew herself to
the edge of the chair, taking the renewed, arranging grip of departure
on her purse. She wanted to go.

“Well,” she said with the cheerful lengthening of the word, which is
the precursor of the preliminary sentence of farewell, “I guess----”
but he stopped her again with the outspread, authoritative hand.

“Don’t be in such a hurry; I’ve not finished yet. There’s more to be
said, and it’s worth losing a few moments over.” His face was so much
more commanding than his words that she made no attempt to move, though
each minute deepened her desire to leave.

“This is just between you and me,” he went on slowly, his voice
lowered, dropped to the key of confidences. “It’s a little matter
between us that no one else needs to know anything about. My part of
it just comes from the fact that I want to do a good turn not only to
Delia Ryan, but to you. I’m sorry for you, young woman, and I think
you’re up against it. Now, here’s my proposition; I’ll add something
to that money myself. I’ll give you another hundred thousand. I’ll put
it with Mrs. Ryan’s pile, and it’ll run your fortune up well past a
quarter of a million.”

His eyes fixed upon her were hard in his benevolently-smiling face.

“What do you think about it?” he asked, as she was speechless. “Three
hundred thousand dollars in a lump’s a goodish bit of money.”

Berny felt dizzy. As her rancor had seemed slipping from her in the
earlier part of the interview, now she felt as if her resolution was
suddenly melting. She was confused between the strangling up-rush of
greed and the passion that once again rose in her against the old man,
who showed such a bold determination to sweep her from his daughter’s
path. She was no longer mistress of herself. Inward excitement, the
unfamiliar struggle with temptation, had upset and unnerved her. But
she did not yet know it, and she answered slowly, with a sort of
sullenness, that might have passed as the heaviness of indifference.

“What do you want to give it to me for?”

“Because I’m sorry for you. Because I want you to get out of this hole
you’re in, and go and make something of your life.”

Before she knew it, Berny said low, but with a biting incisiveness,

“Oh, you liar!”

Cannon was surprised. He looked for a staring moment at her pale face,
stiff over its strained muscles, and said in a tone of cheerful amaze,

“Now, what do you mean by that?”

“Just what I say,” she said. “You’re a liar and you know it. Every word
you’ve said to me’s been a lie. Why, Mrs. Ryan’s better than you. She
don’t come covering me with oily stories about wanting me to be happy.
You think that I don’t know why you’re offering me this money. Well,
old man, I do. You want to get my husband for your own daughter, Rose
Cannon.”

It was Cannon’s turn to be speechless. He had not for years received so
unexpected and violent a blow. He sat in the same attitude, not moving
or uttering a sound, and looking at Berny with a pair of eyes that each
second grew colder and more steely. Berny, drawn to the edge of her
chair, leaned toward him, speaking with the stinging quickness of an
angry wasp.

“You thought I didn’t know it. Well, I do. I know the whole thing. I’ve
just sat back and watched you two old thieves thinking everything was
hidden, like a pair of ostriches. And you being so free with your glad
hand and being sorry for me and wanting me to make the most of my life!
You said I was a smart woman. Well, I’m evidently a lot smarter than
you thought I was.”

“So it seems,” he said. “Smart enough to do some very neat inventing.”

“Inventing!” she cried, “I wish there was some inventing about it. _I_
don’t take any pleasure in thinking that another woman’s trying to buy
my husband.”

He dropped his hand from his chin, and moved a little impatiently in
his chair.

“Come,” he said with sudden authority, “I can’t waste my time this
way. Are you going to take the money or not?”

His manner, as if by magic, had changed. Every suggestion of deference,
or consideration had gone from it. The respect, with which he had been
careful to treat her, had suddenly vanished; there was something subtly
brutal in his tone, in the very movement of impatience he made. It was
as if the real man were at last showing himself.

She uttered a furious phrase of denial and sprang to her feet. His
manner was the last unbearable touch on the sore helplessness of her
futile rage. His chair had been standing sidewise toward the desk, and
now, with a jerk of his body, he swept it back into position.

“All right, then go!” he said, without looking at her.

Berny had intended going, rushing out of the place. Now at these words
of dismissal, flung at her as a bone to a dog, she suddenly was rooted
to the spot. All her reason, balance, and common sense were swept away
in the flood of her quivering, blind anger.

“I will _not_ go,” she cried, at the pitch of folly, “I will _not_ till
I’m good and ready. Who are you to order me out? Who are you to tell
me what I’m to do? A man who tries to buy another woman’s husband for
his daughter, and then pretends he and she are such a sweet, innocent
pair! Wouldn’t people be surprised if they knew that Miss Rose Cannon
wanted my husband, was getting her father to make bids for him, and was
meeting him every Sunday!”

“Stop!” thundered the old man, bringing his open hand down on the table
with a bang.

The tone of his voice was bull-like, and the blow of his hand so
violent that the fittings of the heavy desk rattled. Berny, though not
frightened, was startled and drew back. For a moment she thought he
was going to rise and forcibly put her out. Then she looked sidewise
and saw two men at a window on the other side of the alley gazing
interestedly down at them. Cannon was conscious of the observers at the
same time. He restrained the impulse to spring to his feet which had
made her shrink, and rose slowly.

“Look here,” he said quietly, “you don’t seem to understand that this
interview’s at an end.”

“No,” she said with a stubborn shake of her head, “I’m not through yet.”

“There’s nothing more for you to say unless you want to accept Mrs.
Ryan’s offer.”

“Yes, there is, there’s lots more for me to say, but since you seem in
such a hurry to get rid of me, I’ll have to wait and say it to your
daughter next time I see her.”

She paused, daring and impudently bold. She was a woman of remarkable
physical courage, and the old man’s aspect, which might have affrighted
a less audacious spirit, had no terrors for her. He stood by the desk,
his hands on his hips, the fingers turned toward his back, and his
face, the chin drawn in, fronting her with a glowering fixity of menace.

“When do _you_ ever see my daughter?” he asked, the accented pronoun
pregnant with scorn.

“Oh, on the streets, in the stores, walking round town. I often meet
her. I’ve wanted several times lately to stop and tell her what I think
of the way she’s acting. She doesn’t think that I know all about what
she’s doing. She’ll be surprised when she hears that I do and what _I_
think about it.”

She faced the old man’s motionless visage with an almost debonair
audacity.

“You can offer me money,” she said, “but you can’t muzzle me.”

Cannon, without changing his attitude, replied,

“I can do a good many things you don’t think of. Take my advice, young
woman, and muzzle yourself. Don’t leave it for me to do. I’ve had
nothing but friendly feelings for you up to this, and I’d hate to have
you see what a damned ugly enemy I can be.”

He gave his head a nod, dropped his hands and turned from her. As he
moved, a small spider that had been hidden among the papers on the
desk started to scuttle over the yellow blotting pad. It caught his eye.

“Look there,” he said, indicating it, “that little spider thinks it can
have things all its own way on my desk. But--” and he laid his great
thumb on it, crushing it to a black smudge--“that’s what happens to it.
Now, Mrs. Dominick Ryan, that’s not the first little spider that’s come
to grief trying to run amuck through my affairs. And it don’t seem, as
things look now, as if it was going to be the last. It’s not a healthy
thing for little spiders to think they can run Bill Cannon.”

He rubbed his soiled thumb on the edge of the blotter, and Berny looked
at the stain that had been the spider.

“Best not butt into places where little spiders are not wanted,” he
said, and then looking at her sidewise, “Well, is it good-by?”

Something in the complete obliteration of the adventurous insect--or
the words that had accompanied its execution--chilled Berny. She
was not frightened, nor less determined, but the first ardor of her
defiance was as though a cold breath had blown on it. Still she did not
intend to leave, ignominiously withdrawing before defeat. She wanted to
say more, rub it in that she knew the reason for his action, and let
him see still plainer in how slight esteem she held his daughter. But
the interlude of the spider had been such a check that she did not know
exactly how to begin again. She stood for a moment uncertain, and he
said,

“Will you take the money?”

“No!” she said loudly. “Don’t ask me that again!”

“All right,” he answered quietly, “that ends our business. Do you know
your way out, or shall I ring for Granger to see you to the door?”

There was a bell on the desk and he extended his hand toward it. She
guessed that Granger was the polished and deferential young man who had
greeted her on her entrance, and the ignominy of being escorted out
under a cloud--literally shown the door by the same youth, probably no
longer polished or deferential, was more than she could bear.

“I’m going,” she said fiercely. “Don’t dare to touch that bell! But
just be sure of one thing, Bill Cannon, this is not the last you or
your daughter will hear of me.”

He bowed with an air of irony that was so slight it might not have been
noticed.

“Any messages from you will be received by me with pleasure. But when
it comes to other things”--her hand was on the door-knob but she had to
listen--“remember the little spider.”

“Rats!” she said furiously, and tore open the door.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ryan,” he cried. “Good afternoon!”

She did not answer, but even in her excitement was conscious that the
clerks behind the partition might be listening, and so shut the door,
not with the bang her state of mind made natural, but with a soft,
ladylike gentleness. Then she walked, with a tapping of little heels
and a rustle of silken linings, down the long, narrow office and out
into the street.




CHAPTER XXI

THE LION’S WHELP


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.




CHAPTER XXII

OUT OF THE FULLNESS OF THE HEART


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.

[Illustration: “Then how do you account for the money that was offered
  me yesterday?”      _Page 407_]

“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.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE WALL ACROSS THE WAY


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.




CHAPTER XXIV

FRIEND OR FOE


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.




CHAPTER XXV

THE ACTOR’S STORY


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.

[Illustration: “Mr. Ryan,” the actor cried, “_this_ is my wife”
  _Page 463_]




CHAPTER XXVI

THE LAST INTERVIEW


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.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE STORM CENTER MOVES


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.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.