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.