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withdrawn their affection and belief as from a beguiling woman, once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.