BERNY MAKES A DISCOVERY
It was near eleven o’clock on that same Sunday morning, when Berny,
wrappered and heavy-eyed, emerged from her room. She shuffled down the
passage to the dining-room, sending her voice before her in a shrill
summons to the Chinaman. The morning papers were scattered over the
table as Dominick had left them and she gathered them up, sitting
sidewise in her chair and running her eye down their columns, while
the servant set out her breakfast. She was still sleepy, and frequent
yawns interrupted her perusal of the lines of print which interested
her above all written matter. A kimono clothed her slim form and from
beneath its hem her foot protruded, thrust bare into a furred slipper.
She folded the paper over to bring the society column into a prominence
easy of access, and, propping it up against a bowl of fruit, read as
she ate her breakfast.
Toward the end of the meal she inquired of the servant at what time her
husband had gone out, and received the reply that Mr. Ryan had had
his breakfast and left the flat two hours earlier. There was nothing
disconcerting or unusual about this, as Dominick always went for a
walk on fine Sunday mornings, but her mind was far from easy and she
immediately fell to wondering why he had departed so early, and the
slight ferment of disquietude that was always with her stirred again
and made her forget the society column and let her Spanish omelet grow
cold.
There was something strange about Dominick since he had come back,
something that intrigued her, that she could not satisfactorily
explain. She assured herself that he was still angry, but in the deeper
places of her understanding the voice that whispers the truth and
will not be gainsaid told her it was not that. Neither was it exactly
antagonism. In a way he had been studiously kind and polite to her, a
sort of consciously-guarded politeness, such as one might practise to
a guest with whom one was intimate without being friendly. She tried
to explain to herself just what this change was, and when it came to
putting the matter in words she could not find the right ones. It was
a coldness, a coldness that was not harsh and did not express itself
in actions or phrases. It went deeper; it was exhaled from the inner
places of his being.
Sometimes as she talked to him she would meet his eyes fixed on her
with a deep, vacant glance, which she suddenly realized was unseeing
and unheeding. In the evening as he sat reading in the cramped confines
of the den she surreptitiously watched him and saw that a moment often
came when he dropped his book, and with his long body limp in the
arm-chair, his chin sunk on his breast, would sit with a brooding gaze
fixed on nothing. Once, as he was dreaming this way, she said suddenly,
“What are you thinking of, Dominick? Antelope?”
He started and turned upon her a face that had reddened consciously.
“Why should I think of Antelope?” he said, and she was aware that her
remark had startled him and made him uncomfortable.
“For no particular reason,” she answered lightly; “you just looked as
if you were thinking of something a long way off.”
She tried to reassure herself that it all rose from the quarrel. To
believe that comforted her and gave her confidence, but it was hard to
think it, for not only did her own instinct proclaim against it, but
Dominick’s manner and attitude were in distinct refutation of any such
theory. He was not sullen, he was absent; he was not resentful, he was
indifferent. And in small outward ways he tried to please her, which
was not after the manner of a sore and angry man. On this very Sunday
he had agreed to meet her and her family in the park at the band stand
at four. She always dined with her sisters on Sunday and if the weather
was fine they went to the park and listened to the music. It was nearly
a year now since Dominick had joined these family parties, preferring
to walk on the Presidio hills and the Cliff House beach with a friend
from the bank. But on the evening before he had promised to meet them;
been quite agreeable about it, Berny had thought, when her pleadings
and importunities had finally extorted from him a promise to join them
there.
She left the dining-room and walked up the hallway to the parlor, her
head drooped, anxieties gnawing at her. The little room was flooded
with sunshine, and she parted the lace curtains and, throwing up the
window, leaned out. The rich, enveloping warmth surrounded her, clasped
her, seemed to sink deep into her and thaw the apprehensions that
were so cold at her heart. She drew in the sweet, still air, that did
not stimulate but that had in it something of a crystalline youth and
freshness, like the air of an untainted world, concerned with nothing
but the joy of living. The scents of flowers were in it; the mellowness
of the earth and its fruits. Peace was the message of this tranquil
Sunday morning, peace was in the sunshine, in the sound of bells with
which the air was full, in the fall of feet--light, joyous feet--on
the pavement, in the voices of passers-by and the laughter, sweet and
broken, of children. It was not right for any one to harbor cankering
cares on such a day. The earth was happy, abandoned to the sunshine,
irresponsible, care free, rejoicing in the perfect moment. The woman
felt the restoring processes that Nature, in its tireless generosity,
offers to all who will take them. She felt eased of her troubles,
soothed and cheered, as though the enwrapping radiance that bathed
her held an opiate for jangled nerves. Blinking in the brightness she
leaned on the window-sill, immovable, quieted, feeling the warmth
suffuse her and dissipate those alarms that half an hour earlier had
been so chill and heavy.
As she dressed, the sense of well-being and confidence increased. She
looked very well this morning. Since Dominick’s return she had looked
haggard and thin. Sometimes she had seemed to see, showing shadowy
through her reflected face in the mirror, the lines and hollows of
that face when time should have put a stamp on it that neither massage
nor pigments would efface. A sudden moment of revelation showed her
herself as an old woman, her nose pointed, her mouth a thin, tight
line. This morning the glass gave her back none of these disconcerting
hints. She was at her best, and as she dressed carefully and slowly,
she had the satisfaction of seeing that each added article of apparel
increased her good looks. When she finally put on her new hat--the one
she had bought in celebration of Dominick’s return--and over it tied
a white and black dotted veil, she was so gratified with the picture
she presented that she was reluctant to leave it and pirouetted slowly
before the glass, surveying her back and side views, and finally
lifting her skirt that she might see the full effect of her lilac
petticoat as it burst into sight in an ebullition of pleats and frills.
Walking up the avenue she was bridlingly conscious that her brilliant
appearance drew its tribute of glances. Many people looked at her, and
their sidelong admiration was an even more exhilarating tonic than the
sunshine. She walked with a light, elastic step, spreading perfume on
the air, her progress accompanied by a rich, seductive rustle. Once or
twice she passed members of that exclusive world from which she had
stolen Dominick. She swept by them, languidly indifferent, her eyes
looking with glacial hauteur over their heads. The sound made by her
brushing silk petticoats was gratifyingly aggressive. She imparted to
them a slight disdainful swing, and lifted her dress skirt daintily
higher, conscious of the impeccable amplitude of her emerging lilac
frills.
The habit of dining with her own people on Sunday had been one she had
never abandoned, even in the first aspiring days of her marriage.
It was a sort of family reunion and at first Dominick had been a not
unwilling participant in its domestic festivities. The solid bourgeois
respectability of his wife’s relations appealed to him. For all his
advantages in money and education he was of the same class himself,
and while Berny was, if not a beloved spouse, a yet endurable one, he
had found the Sunday gatherings and subsequent hejira to the park not
entirely objectionable. For over a year now he had escaped from it,
pleading the need of open air and exercise, and his sisters-in-law, who
had at first protested, had grown used to his absence and accepted it
as something to bear uncomplainingly.
The day was so fine that they hurried through their dinner, a hearty
and lavish meal, the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Hannah’s housekeeping, and,
loath to lose a moment of the sunshine, determined to walk down to Van
Ness Avenue and there catch an outgoing car to the park. It was the
middle of the afternoon and the great thoroughfare lay still and idle
in the slanting light. There was something foreign, almost tropical
in its vista, in the scene that hung like a drop curtain at the limit
of sight--pale blue hills dotted with ochre-colored houses--in the
background of sky deep in tint, the foliage dark against it as if
printed upon its intense glaring blue, in the sharp lines of palms
and spiky leaves crossing stuccoed walls. The people that moved slowly
along the sidewalks fitted into this high-colored exotic setting.
There was no hurry or crowding among them. They progressed with an
un-American deliberation, tasting the delicate sweetness of the air,
rejoicing in the sky and the sun, pausing to look at the dark bushiness
of a dracæna against a wash of blue, the skeleton blossom of a Century
plant, the pool of thick scarlet made by a parterre of geranium.
The three sisters--Hannah and Pearl leading, Berny and Hazel walking
behind with Josh--fared buoyantly down the street. As they passed, they
commented on the houses and their inmates. They had plenty of stories
of the dwellers in those solemn palaces, many of whom were people whose
humble beginnings they knew by heart, and whose rapid rise had been
watched almost awe-stricken by an admiring and envious community.
As the Ryan house loomed into view their chatter ceased and their eyes,
serious with staring attention, were fixed on the mansion which had
so stubbornly closed its doors on one of them. Sensations of varying
degrees of animosity stirred in each of them, except the child, still
too young to be tainted by the corroding sense of worldly injustice.
She skipped along sidewise, her warm, soft hand clasped in her Aunt
Hannah’s decently-gloved palm. Some wave or vibration of the intense
feelings of her elders passed to her, and as they drew nearer the house
she, too, began to grow grave, and her skipping quieted down into a
sober walk.
“That’s Uncle Dominick’s house, isn’t it?” she said to Hannah.
Hannah nodded. By far the most amiable and wide-minded of the sisters,
she could not rise above the sense of rankling indignation that she
felt against the Ryans for their treatment of Berny.
“That’s the biggest house in San Francisco,” said Pearl over her
shoulder to her parents. “Ain’t it, Popper?”
“I guess it is,” answered Josh, giving his head a confirmatory wag,
“and even if it ain’t, it’s big enough, the Lord knows!”
“I can’t see what a private family wants with all that room,” said
Hannah with a condemnatory air. “There must be whole sootes of rooms on
that upper floor that nobody lives in.”
“Don’t you fret. They’re all occupied,” said Berny. “Each one of them
has their own particular soote. Cornie has three rooms all of her own,
and even the housekeeper has a private bath!”
“And there’s twelve indoor servants,” said Hazel. “They want a lot of
space for them. Twelve servants, just think of it!”
“Twelve servants!” ejaculated Hannah almost with a groan. “Well, that
don’t seem to me right.”
They were close to the house now and silence fell on them, as though
the antagonism of its owners was exhaled upon them from the mansion’s
aggressive bulk, like an unspoken curse. They felt overawed, and at
the same time proud that one of their number should have even the most
distant affiliations with a family too exclusive to know her. The
women with their more responsive and sensitive natures felt it more
delicately than Josh, who blunderingly expressed one of the thoughts of
the moment by remarking,
“Some day you’ll live in there, Berny, and boss the twelve servants.”
“Rats!” said Berny, giving her head an angry toss. “I’d rather live in
my flat and boss Sing.”
Josh’s whistle of facetious incredulity died away incomplete, for at
that moment the hall door opened and a portly masculine shape emerged
upon the porch. Berny, at the first glance, was not sure of its
identity, but her doubts were dispelled by her brother-in-law’s quick
sentence, delivered on the rise of a surprised breath.
“Bill Cannon, by gum! What’s he doing there?”
This name, as powerful to conjure with in the city as in the
mining-camps, cast its instantaneous spell upon the sisters, who stared
avid-eyed upon the great man. He for his part seemed oblivious to
their glances and to their presence. He stood on the top step for a
musing moment, looking down with that sort of filmy fixity of gaze
which is noticeable in the glance of the resting eagle. His appearance
was a last crowning touch to the proud, unapproachable distinction of
the Ryans.
“Don’t he look as if he was thinking?” said Hazel in a whisper. “I
wonder what’s on his mind.”
“Probably that Monday’s pay-day and he don’t know whether he can
scratch through,” said the jocose Josh.
Berny did not say anything. She felt the interest in Cannon that she
did in all conquering, successful people, and in her heart it gave her
a sense of added importance to think that the family she had married
into and who refused to know her was on friendly terms with the Bonanza
King.
A half-hour later they had found seats in front of the band stand in
the park, and, settling themselves with a great rustling and preening
of plumage, prepared to enjoy the music. Hannah and Pearl were given
two chairs at the end of a row, and Hazel and Berny, with Josh as
escort, secured four on the line immediately behind. Dominick had not
yet appeared, so the sisters spread their skirts over a vacant seat
between them, and Berny, in the intervals of inspecting the people
around her, sent exploring glances about for the tall figure of her
husband.
She was very fond of the park and band stand on such Sunday afternoons.
To go there had been one of the great diversions of her girlhood. She
loved to look at this holiday gathering of all types, among which her
own class was largely represented. The outdoor amphitheater of filled
benches was to her what the ball-room and the glittering horseshoe at
the opera are to the woman of society. She saw many old friends among
the throng, girls who had been contemporaries of hers when she had
first “gone to work,” and had long since married in their own world and
now dragged children by the hand. She looked them over with an almost
passionate curiosity, discomfited to see the fresh youth of some, and
pleased to note that others looked weighed down with maternal cares.
Berny regarded women who had children as fools, and the children
grouped about these mothers of her own age--three and four sometimes,
with the husband carrying a baby--were to her only annoying, burdensome
creatures that made the party seem a little ridiculous, and had not
half the impressiveness or style of her elegant costume and lilac
frills.
The magnificent afternoon had brought out a throng of people. Every
seat in the lines of benches was full and foot passengers kept
constantly coming up, standing for a few measures, and then moving on.
They were of all kinds. The beauty of the day had even tempted the more
fashionable element out, and the two sisters saw many elegantly-dressed
ladies of the sort on whom Hazel fitted hats all day, and that evoked
in Berny a deep and respectful curiosity. Both women, sitting high in
their chairs, craned their necks this way and that, spying through
breaks in the crowd, and following attractive figures with dodging
movements of their heads. When either one saw anything she liked or
thought interesting she laid a hand on the other’s knee, giving it a
slight dig, and designated the object of her attention in a few broken
words, detached and disconnected like notes for a sentence.
They were thus engaged when Hazel saw Dominick and, rising, hailed
him with a beckoning hand. He made his way toward them, moving
deliberately, once or twice pausing to greet acquaintances. He was
taller than any man in the surrounding throng and Berny, watching
him, felt a sense of proprietary pride swelling in her when she noted
his superiority. The son of an Irish laborer and a girl who had begun
life as the general servant in a miner’s boarding-house, he looked as
if his forebears might have been the flower of the nation. He wore a
loose-fitting suit of gray tweed, a wide, gray felt sombrero, and round
his waist a belt of yellow leather. His collar turning back from his
neck exposed the brown strength of his throat, and on lifting his hat
in a passing salutation, his head with its cropped curly hair, the ears
growing close against it, showed golden brown in the sunlight.
With a phrase of greeting he joined them, and then as they swept their
skirts off the chair they had been hiding, slipped in front of Berny
and sat down. Hazel began to talk to him. Her conversation was of a
rallying, joking sort, at which she was quite proficient. Berny heard
him laugh and knew by the tone of his voice that he was pretending
and was not really amused. She had nothing particular to say to him,
feeling that she had accomplished enough in inducing him to join them,
and, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, continued to watch the
people. A blonde coiffure some rows in front caught her eye and she was
studying its intricacies through the interstices that came and went
between the moving heads, when the sudden emergence into view of an
unusually striking female figure diverted her attention. The woman had
come up from behind and, temporarily stopped by the crowd, had come
to a standstill a few rows in front of where the sisters sat. She was
accompanied by a young man dressed in the Sunday dignity of frock-coat
and silk hat. As he turned to survey the lines of filled chairs, Berny
saw that he had a pale skin, a small black mustache, and dark eyes.
But her interest in him was of the slightest. Her attention was
immediately riveted upon the woman, who became the object of a glance
which inspected her with a piercing eagerness from her hat to the hem
of her shirt. Berny could not see her face, but her habiliments were of
the latest mode and of an unusual and subdued elegance which bespoke an
origin in a more sophisticated center than San Francisco. Berny, all
agog with curiosity, stared at the lady’s back, noting not only her
clothes but a certain carelessness in the way they were put on. Her hat
was not quite straight. The comb, which crossed the back of her head
and kept her hair smooth, was crooked, and blonde wisps hung from it
over her collar. The hand that held up her skirt in a loose perfunctory
manner, as though these rich encasings were possessions of no moment,
was covered by a not particularly clean white glove.
Such unconsciousness added the distinction of indifference to the
already marked figure. Berny wondered more than ever who it was and
longed to see the averted face. She was about to lean across Dominick
and attract Hazel’s attention by a poking finger directed against her
knee, when the woman, with a word to her companion, moved her head and
let a slow glance sweep over the rows of faces.
“Hazel,” Berny hissed across Dominick, “look at that girl. Who is she?”
She did not divert her eyes from the woman’s face, which she now saw
in profile. It was pretty, she thought, more from a rich, unmingled
purity of coloring than from any particular beauty of feature. The head
with its gravely-traveling glance continued to turn till Berny had the
satisfaction of seeing the face in three-quarters. A moment later the
moving eyes lighted indifferently on Hazel, then ceased to progress,
suddenly, bruskly, as though checked by the imperative stoppage of
regulating machinery.
Only a person watching closely would have noticed it, but Berny was
watching with the most vigilant closeness. She saw the infusion of a
new and keener interest transform the glance, concentrate its lazy,
diffused attention into something that had the sharpness and suddenness
of a leaping flame. The next moment a flood of color rose clearly pink
over the face, and then, most surprising of all, the lady bent her head
in a grave, deliberate bow.
Berny turned, startled--and in a vague, undefined way, disturbed,
too--to see who had been the object of this salutation. To her
astonishment it was Dominick. As she looked at him, he replaced
his hat and she saw--to the augmentation of that vague sense of
disturbance--that he was as pale as the bowing woman was pink.
“Dominick,” she exclaimed, “who’s that?”
“Miss Cannon,” he said in a low tone.
“Rose Cannon?” hissed Hazel on the other side of him, her face thrust
forward, and tense in the interest of the moment, “Bill Cannon’s
daughter?”
“Yes. I met her at Antelope.”
“Berny, did you see her dress?” Hazel hung over her brother-in-law in
her excitement. “That’s straight from Paris, I’ll bet you a dollar.”
“Yes, I saw it,” said Berny in a voice that did not sound particularly
exhilarated; “maybe it is.”
She looked back at Miss Cannon who had turned away and was moving off
through the crowd with her escort. Then she leaned toward Dominick. His
voice had not sounded natural; as she placed her arm against his she
could feel that he trembled.
She said nothing but settled back in her chair, dryly swallowing. In
those few past moments her whole world had undergone a revolution
that left her feeling dazed and a little sick. It was as if the earth
had suddenly whirled around and she had come up panting and clutching
among familiar things reversed and upset. In an instantaneous flash
of illumination she saw everything--the look in the woman’s eyes, her
rush of color, Dominick’s voice, his expression, the trembling of his
arm--it was all perfectly plain! This was the girl he had been shut in
Antelope with for three weeks. Now she knew what the change was, the
inexplicable, mysterious change that had so puzzled her.
She felt bewildered, and under her bewilderment a pain, a fierce,
unfamiliar pain, gripped her. She did not for the moment say anything
or want to speak, and she felt as a child does who is dazed and
stupefied by an unexpected assault of ill treatment. The slight
sensation of inward sinking, that made her feel a little sick,
continued and she sat in a chilled and drooping silence, all her
bridling conceit in herself and her fine clothes stricken suddenly out
of her.
She heard Hazel asking Dominick questions about Miss Cannon, and she
heard Dominick’s answers, brief and given with a reticent doggedness.
Then Hazel asked him for the time and she was conscious of his elbow
pressing against her arm as he felt for his watch. As he drew it out
and held it toward the questioner, Berny suddenly leaned forward, and,
catching his hand with the watch in it, turned its face toward her.
The hand beneath hers was cold, and shook. She let it go and again
sank back in her chair. The feeling of sickness grew stronger and was
augmented by a sense of physical feebleness, of being tremulous and
cold deep down in her bones.
Hazel rose to her feet, shaking her skirts into place.
“Let’s go on,” she said, “it’s getting chilly. Come along, Josh. I
suppose if you were let alone, you’d sit here till sundown listening to
the music in a trance.”
Dominick and Josh rose and there was an adjusting and putting-on of
wraps. Berny still sat motionless, her hands, stiff in their tight
gloves, lying open on her lap.
“Come along, Berny,” said Hazel. “It’s too cold to sit here any longer.
Why, how funny you look, all pale and shriveled up! You’re as bad as
Josh. You and he ought to have married each other. You’d have been a
prize couple.”
Josh laughed loudly at this sally, leaning round the figure of his wife
to present his foolish, good-humored face, creased with a grin, to
Berny.
“Are you willing, Berny?” he cried gaily. “I can get a divorce whenever
you say. It will be dead easy; brutal and inhuman treatment. Just say
the word!”
“There’ll be brutal and inhuman treatment if you don’t move on and stop
blocking the way, Josh McCrae,” said Hazel severely. “I want to go out
that side and there you are right in the path, trying to be funny.”
The cheerful Josh, still laughing, turned and moved onward between the
seats, the others following him. The mass of the crowd was not yet
leaving, and as the little group moved forward in a straggling line
toward the drive, the exciting opening of the _William Tell Overture_
boomed out from the sounding board. It was a favorite piece, and they
left lingeringly, Hazel and Josh particularly fascinated, with heads
turned and ears trained on the band. Josh’s hand, passed through his
wife’s arm, affectionately pressed her against his side, for despite
the sharpness of their recriminations they were the most loving of
couples.
Berny was the last of the line. In the flurry of departure her silence
had passed unnoticed, and that she should thus lag at the tail of the
procession was not in any way remarkable, as, at the best of times,
she was not much of a walker and in her high-heeled Sunday shoes her
progress was always deliberate.
Looking ahead of her, she saw the landscape still as a picture under
the slanting, lurid sunlight. It seemed to be painted with unnaturally
glaring tints, to be soaked in color. The grass, crossed with long
shadows, was of the greenness of an aniline dye. The massed foliage
of tree groups showed a melting richness of shades, no one clearly
defined, all fused in a thick, opaque lusciousness of greens. The
air was motionless and very clear. Where a passing carriage stirred
the dust the powdery cloud rose, spreading a tarnishing blur on the
crystalline clarity of the scene. The sun injected these dust films
with gold, and they settled slowly, as if it made them heavy like
ground-up particles of metal.
Yet, to Berny, this hectic prospect looked gray; all color seemed
sucked from it. It appeared pale and alien, its comfortable intimacy
gone. She was like a stranger walking in a strange place, a forlorn,
remote land, where she felt miserable and homesick. The sense of being
dazed was passing from her. Walking forward with short, careful steps,
she was slowly coming to the meaning of her discovery--adjusting
herself to it, realizing its significance. She had an uncomfortable
sensation of not being able to control the muscles round her mouth, so
that if spoken to she would have had difficulty in answering, and would
have been quite unable to smile.
An open carriage passed her, and she drew aside, then mechanically
looked after it as it rolled forward. There was a single figure in
it--a woman. Berny could see her head over the lowered hood, and the
little parasol she held, white with a black lace cover and having a
joint in the handle. Her eyes followed this receding head, moving so
evenly against the background of trees. It soared along without sinking
or rising, with the even, forward flight of a bird, passed Hannah and
Josh and Hazel, turning to drop on them quick looks, which seemed, from
its elevated position and the shortness of the inspection, to have
something of disdain in them.
As the carriage drew near Dominick, who walked at the head of the line
with Pearl by the hand, Berny saw the head move, lean forward, and
then, as the vehicle overhauled and passed the young man, turn at right
angles and bow to him. The wheel almost brushed his shoulder. He drew
back from it with a start and lifted his hat. Hazel, who was walking
just in front of Berny, turned and projecting her lips so that they
stood out from her face in a red circle, hissed through them,
“Old Lady Ryan!” and then in a slightly louder key,
“You take a hatchet and I’ll take a saw,
And we’ll cut off the head of my mother-in-law.”