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.